PREFACE - HOW "CANDIDN'T" CAME TO BE
It is a little known fact that the mighty Voltaire had an even mightier cousin, who went by the name of Voltage (primarily because he wanted a more electrifying name than that given him by his uninspired mother, namely Bernard). Voltage was so superior a philosopher to his puny cousin that all his philosophy was seen as simple common sense, and he never got proper credit for it from anyone.
Voltage was also able to travel through time, though only in a flickering sort of way, popping in and out of centuries only long enough to get the wrong idea about each. Thus he came to glimpse our own age (one of them, at least) and decided to one-up his cousin by creating an even more picaresque tale than that nasty bit of fluff, Candide, the work that Leonard Bernstein, at least, best remembered the man for writing.
Voltage set his tale in the age he had glimpsed (one of them, at least), but as usual got many things wrong. He forgot to back up his work, so only the accompanying fragment remains. And he relied on an online translation service to translate his original manuscript into a language that civilized people can read (having written the original in that soon-to-be dead language known as French), so these poor glimpses into his brilliance seem paltry in comparison to Voltaire's work. Nonetheless, here are some glimpses at Voltage's masterpiece.
CHAPTER 1 - HOW CANDIDN'T WAS BROUGHT UP IN WEALTH AND ROYALTY, AND HOW HE SCREWED HIMSELF OUT OF ALL THAT
In the country of Malibu, in the palatial beach house of American royalty, hiphop/terrorist Sheikh Babycake, there lived a little bastard. Bastard he might be, but he was such a cutie patootie that the whole world loved him anyway, and his name was Candidn't, the second d and n being silent, and the whole pronounced with an appropriately ethnic waggle. The fact that he was whiter than the Sheikh's plaster peeing-boy fountai...