The medical attaché razzle — the object mailed, the recursive loop, the ward of the "pithed"

pivotal · 1-2 April YDAU (2009)

• When: the cartridge inserted at 1927h on 1 April YDAU; the attaché still viewing across 2010h, then 0015-0145h on 2 April; the household and bystanders found by mid-afternoon 2 April
• What: The Entertainment's lethality is first shown, not told. A Saudi-legation medical attaché in Boston, wife away at tennis, opens his mail and finds "a plain brown and irritatingly untitled cartridge-case" postmarked suburban Phoenix, return box reading only "HAPPY ANNIVERSARY!" with a crude smiling face, and bearing "another of these vapid U.S.A.-type circular smiling heads embossed upon it where the registration- and duration-codes are supposed to be." He plays it to preview, is still watching hours later having wet the recliner, rewinds and rigs it to a recursive loop; his wife returns at 0145h to find his rictus "very positive, ecstatic, even"; by mid-afternoon a household plus a personal physician, two embassy guards, and two Seventh Day Adventist pamphleteers stand watching the loop, "looking not one bit distressed or in any way displeased, even though the room smelled very bad indeed." This is the samizdat as pure object — anonymous, smiling-faced, arriving via ordinary physical mail, disabling everyone in line of sight. See the AFR thread (event 7) (the razzle as the A.F.R./B.S.S. incident); the James O. Incandenza thread.