Episode Thirteen

http://www.ndbag.com/story/comic/13.html

There are many questions that have long plagued humanity; some of them meaningless, others unanswerable. Solutions have been offered to most of these questions, but those answers have inevitably proved to be wrong; sometimes dangerously so. Who can forget the pandemonium that resulted from the attempts to find out how many chickens it took to change a lightbulb? One question, though, has vexed humanity's greatest thinkers since ancient times more than any other: what do you get when you cross a panda with a boogeyman?

To many students of ancient Chinese mythology, the question was irrelevant, and prompted no response other than pandiculation. To the more astute students, though, the question is a profound one, and one that's deserving of the closest study. Though first framed during the Zhou dynasty, the question dispanded far and wide centuries before the advent of the advent of the silk road, and it caused a pandemic of headaches in philosophers the world over.

The ancient Greeks were the first to consider the three-dimensional form of such an amalgamation; the pandermite statues of Macedonia, long thought to be creatures of some forgotten mythology, are now recognised as attempts to reconcile the twin facets of such a hybrid. The question was thought to be so important that when Dracon codified the laws of Athens, that great pandectist made answering it a priority in the constitution.


Later Greek philosophers were convinced that such a hybrid could not be conceived by nature, and that like an apandrous flower, was doomed to extinction. However, Pythagoras proved using nothing but triangles and a rock that even a sterile flower can be a source of aesthetics; his famous quotation, adapted by Shakespeare, is still inscribed on a boulder in Athens' agora; "A Pandanus by any other name would smell as sweet".


Despite Pythagoras' best efforts, though, the question languished in obscurity until the Translation Movement of Islamic Spain brought it once more to the attention of the world's thinkers. However, the efforts of those scholars came to naught, and the question remained unanswered and, according to most, unanswerable.


Until now.


It may have taken nearly four thousand years, but the answer is finally with us. The twenty-first century will surely be known as the century when humanity could at last say "The answer is Pandbag."