The cosmo-archaeologists' craft makes landing from far beyond the universe's black stump courtesy of a nano-second's time/space warp. The spacecraft's point of entry on planet Earth just happens to be in what we know as a dentist's surgery.
In paper suits and caps, so as not to contaminate evidence, they start probing. In one room, they perceive an array of sophisticated instruments, most of which end in a sharp point. Most of these sharp points seem to be capable of being connected to high-powered drilling apparatuses capable of inflicting serious inconveniences on a person's person.
Clearly, this chamber is a place of torture geared to eliciting vital information from reluctant informants who may or may not have been extraordinarily renditioned.
Intrigued, the team moves on to an adjoining room - the one we know today as the waiting room. The room is stark, characterised by an array of not particularly comfortable seats, bad posters, and a stack of dog-eared magazines of various titles.
On closer inspection, the magazines seem to mainly adhere to a common theme - the buttocks of what appears to be the female of the species. Much space is given to how much space particular individual buttocks are taking up.
The accompanying photographs invariably depict their subjects disporting in tropical beach or luxury poolside locations - clearly hothouse environments conducive to vigorous buttock growth. Strangely, though, the generous extent to which a particular female's buttocks are consuming space seems to be mainly remarked on in disparaging and admonitory tones.
But the converse seems to apply to the considerable space-consuming properties of another set of buttocks belonging to an individual titled Kardashian (surely the name of a fellow alien if ever there was one).
These particular extremities are celebrated in inflated, not to say effulgent terms. And perhaps an even more pressing issue, the article suggests, is what on earth is the colour of that dress that she's not wearing.
Clearly these Earthlings were in the grip of a Cult of the Buttocks. And the adjoining room with all the foreboding instruments was obviously designed to elicit - forcibly if necessary - the information that would enable the authorities to apprehend the figurehead behind this seditious cult.
It was a cult that heretically worshipped not one, but two gods - the Left and the Right, buttockily speaking - when, as everyone knows, there is but only one true Buttock.
Butt enough ... it's a crazy world, and sometimes you've got to wonder about the priorities we contrive to get immersed in.
Given the horrendous array of indignities and inhumanities that we seem intent on inflicting on one another on both the domestic and international stage, when life can be already tough enough thank-you-very-much just taking care of the groceries and the rent and the school lunches, then no wonder it sometimes makes you wonder.
-Frank Greenall has a Master's degree in adult literacy and managed Far North Adult Literacy before moving to Wanganui.
