Island Packet – Today we take a small detour away from the raw, unyielding, succulent news that usually appears in this space into the world of online governmental record keeping: The National Archives. Yes, those The National Archives! That dinging sound you just heard was the Excitement Meter hitting 11.
Sure, it may sound smotheringly boring, but for the few of you that haven’t already flipped over to Sports, I can assure you this Web site is a gold mine, except it has fewer cowboys and is much warmer. And it’s handy, too — just yesterday my Mom misplaced her copy of document RG 286: Records of the Agency for International Development, and I was all like, don’t sweat it, I got you covered. And then last week, my brother’s basement flooded, bewettening his entire collection of Related Lesson Plans for Postwar United States (1945 to the Early 1970s); luckily, they’re ALL ONLINE, with the obvious exceptions of the ones regarding the Illuminati, how the government killed Lennon and Bob Marley and most everything to do with the state of Idaho. Essentially, the Archives are pretty much like the Smoking Gun, except they’re a way less effective resource for figuring out, say, how many bottles of whiskey the cast of “High School Musical” demands at every live show (hint: It’s a LOT. Somewhere, Van Halen is saying, “Wow.”)
Anyway, what is the reason for that seemingly endless introductory portion, you might rightly wonder? Well, I have recently been made aware of a document from Foreign Service Despatch (their spelling, not mine, the correct spelling of “dispatch” was not recognized by the Archives until 1973), with the subject: REGULATIONS GOVERNING MOUNTAIN-CLIMBING EXPEDITIONS IN NEPAL — RELATING TO YETI.
The yeti, according to mythology and my grandfather, is the Abominable Snowman, and it has about as much use for regulations as it does a subscription to O Magazine. The document is very official-looking, dated 1959 and written in the damp, smudgy typewriter font that you’d expect from shady government documents from the ’50s about yeti. It’s extremely satisfying.
Anyway, the document says there are three regulations you need to keep in mind if you ever find yourself hunting yeti in Nepal in 1959:
1. “Indian Currency will have to be paid to His Majesty’s Government of Nepal for a permit to … search ‘yeti.’ ” Fair enough. They take PayPal, though.
2. “In case ‘yeti’ is traced it can be photographed or caught alive but it must not be killed or shot at except in an emergency arising out of self defense.” So, by order of the government of Nepal, no shooting the mythological man-beast. Just amuse him with impressions until help arrives.
3. Don’t cross the streams. Just kidding. It actually says: Don’t feed the Yeti after midnight. Hah! No, really, it says: Do not talk about Fight Club. I can do this all day, folks. All day.
Actually, No. 3 says that, in essence, if a yeti is found, Nepal gets it, which seems kind of needy on Nepal’s part, but whatever. But as near as I can tell and despite what you’ll probably hear from Dennis Kucinich, there has been no yeti discovery in Nepal or anywhere in the past 50 years. There has, however, been a load of postwar planning, and an absurd overabundance of International Development. All of which has been safely documented.
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