alastair's heart monitor

To give me something to do while I'm waiting for and then recovering from heart surgery, and to keep friends, relatives and colleagues in touch with the state of my head

Monday, May 22, 2006

A Heart Monitor That Isn't Mine

Right, I lifted this from another web-site, sangsara.net - click on the heading to go there. It just seems so perfect after my piece about Poe a couple of days ago - this article joins Poe and a Heart Monitor together so perfectly that it might have been designed deliberately for this blog. The author points out that this is an advert for a heart monitor, but written in the precise style of Poe and adapting the title of one of his stories :- The Tell-Tale Heart Monitor Finally you did it. You killed the old man. He was not an evil man – most thought him kind, despite a galling inability to prevent his Pekingese from voiding its bowels upon your basil plants. But O! his monstrous eye! Knowing that he looked upon you through that clouded and diseased orb…it could have driven one of lesser mettle to distraction, even to madness. But now the eye lies beneath the very boards you tread, with the head, the limbs, the trunk, and all the rest. In pace requiescat! But hark! What was that? That low, dull, quick sound— A passing constable approaches your dooryard, inquiring about your new wrist-watch. You laugh! “Does a mere wrist-watch chronicle systolic pressure, diastolic pressure, and pulse-rate? Show me the common timepiece that can store up to 30 readings for two different people! Where, pray tell, runs a wrist-watch with the endorsement of the German Hypertension League? ‘Pon my wrist dwells none but the Mark of Fitness WS-820Q Wrist-Mounted Blood Pressure Monitor – no mundane wrist-watch, sir! And I certainly did not kill a guy and stuff his body under my floorboards, if that’s what you’re getting at!” How queerly now the constable regards you. Has he not ears? Has he not eyes? See how the old man’s heart skips – it skips, perhaps, in fear — and the Mark of Fitness WS-820Q Wrist-Mounted Blood Pressure Monitor testifies of the irregularity! How keen your hearing! The fool does not hear, but you hear — and now you see as well! It is as close as your wrist! There, on the screen — the beating of his hideous heart!

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