Feverish with conspiracies

The bedroom ceiling was speckled with fly poo. You notice these things when you've been staring at it for three days.

I was fighting a case of Ostrich Flu. I don't belittle Swine Flu, but it's so "last month", and the preserve of the Great Unwashed now. Besides, we all know it's a myth created by the drug companies to line their pockets.

Ostrich announced its arrival on Sunday by draining all my energy, leaving me a wizened husk. The thought that I was falling sick in my own time compounded the misery.

I checked the fridge to see if we had the recommended 10 days of food. It was empty save for "used-by" yoghurts that were pushing the envelope even for us. We run a lean fridge because it's easier to spot what you haven't got. The policy had come back to bite us. I donned a scarf and dragged myself down to the supermarket.

Who should I spy in the Breakfast Foods section but Michael Jackson, fingering a box of Fruitful Lite. No surprise there. His "death" always smelled like a pre-tour publicity stunt to me. When I shuffled up to confront him he retreated as if gliding on ice, heel-toeing it round the corner to the Baking Needs.

Back home, two Panadol made little dent in the flu. I awoke next day with a furry mouth and a conviction that the CIA had killed Marilyn Monroe. She needed to be silenced because she knew they had bumped off JFK. But she let it slip in pillow-talk to Bobby, which meant his days were numbered too. He mentioned it to John Lennon, who told Princess Di ... the agency had a fair amount of "housekeeping" to do.

I rang the media to give them the scoop, but an inflammed throat made speaking difficult. The story of the century had to be tapped out to a chatroom of fellow Ostrich Flu sufferers. That afternoon my body felt like it had been on the bottom of a ruck of rugby commentators spouting cliches.

I rang the doctor and she diagnosed me over the phone, emailed a chit for work and said that from the timbre of my voice my prostate didn't sound too chipper either. Take two Panadol and call her back in the spring.

It was a dark and snotty night. At 3am I awoke in a cold sweat with the realisation that the CIA had faked the moon landing. Well, not personally. They contracted it to Gerry and Sylvia Anderson of Thunderbirds fame who must have priced the job too cheaply because it's not their best work.

The puppets are gawky and I've seen better spaceship models out of a Cornflakes packet. If you look at the footage the so-called lunar flag flutters when some clueless stagehand opened the studio door. But the real giveaway is the number of stars on the flag 50. Add that to the stated ages of the "astronauts", multiply it by 12, take away the number you first thought of and you get 666. Say no more. Yes, I will say more because the unpardonable sin is it's badly written.

The lead character is a two-dimensional Wasp stereotype with the improbable name of "Neil Armstrong" who delivers a cheesy line about taking a "giant leap for mankind". That's a straight crib from Flash Gordon, 1954, episode 8, when Flash, Dale and Dr Zardov first land on the planet Mongo.

Day Three of the Ostrich dawned with what clinicians call the hypertrophic phase. My gullibility gland was dangerously enlarged. "Wake up world," I groaned out the window through swollen tongue. "The CIA ordered a submarine to tow that iceberg into the path of the Titanic. They also orchestrated the 9/11 attacks and invented basketballers' shorts. Is there no end to their atrocities?"

Towards evening I was seized by an epiphany climate change is a global concoction of the scientific community. This is the biggie. What they do is put the temperature gauges in the warmest part of town (as they've always done in Blenheim).

The icecaps aren't melting at all, they are downsizing sensibly in response to the current economic climate. And these 99 per cent of the world's boffins who are thumping the climate change drum, they've all got shares in wind turbine companies or are aiming to buy up cheap beachside properties once their pernicious lies take root. The sheer scale of this conspiracy caused me to pass out.

When I came to the fever had broken. I celebrated my rapid return to health by climbing on a chair and scrubbing the ceiling.

Ostrich Flu's a nasty bug. (Mind you, I had Elephant Flu last year and that's one you never forget.) If you catch this one, stay home. Listen to the advice of the experts and then ignore it. What do they know? Next they'll be telling us the Earth isn't flat.

- © Fairfax NZ News