Ghyll:Recollectiball

A recollectiball is a device for recording sound for later playback. They were invented by Phylostarus around -195 EC in his studies on the intestinal workings of pachyderms. Phylostarus figured that if you could get a pachyderm to retain more food, said pachyderm could courier packages much further over inhospitable terrains.

Phylostarus had been given a broken kettle by his wife for his birthday, and was determined to put it to good use. He therefore haphazardly fashioned it into the world's first ever recollectiball, and inserted it thoroughly into the rectum of his wife's pet pachyderm, Dullford. (His wife, upon seeing this act, divorced him for the fifth time. They remarried for the sixth time the following spring.) Through the research of which this was a part, we now understand very precisely the workings of a pachyderm's digestive system. (Some of the recordings of the understandably surprised Dullford's stomach are on display in the Audio Section of the Odlucian Library.)

The recording duration of recollectiballs is indefinite, possibly infinite. The original method through which Phylostarus achieved this is quite ingenious. He changed the function of the broken kettle from "boil water" to "stop recording", and then hooked up an internal optical device so that the recollectiball is constantly watching itself. Coupled with the old adage "a watched kettle never boils", and substituting the new function, he arrived at "a watched recollectiball never stops recording". And so they don't.

In -68 EC, recollectiballs were, somewhat surprisingly, found to grow freely as the fruit of a plant native to the Tíâgrídíg Valleys, west of the little northern village of Dŵplat. This is only the second known instance of a technological invention occurring also as a natural phenomenon, the other being Banter Scarves. Due to the continued relative inaccessibility of the Tíâgrídíg Valleys, the Recollectiball plant (the singleton member of the genus Stop-Recording-Me-I-Don't-Like-The-Sound-Of-My-Own-Voice) has not so far put commercial recollectiball producers out of business.

Recollectiballs are banned from most schools, inns, and orgies because of the possibility of misuse. The oldest party trick of all is to record a werewolf noise onto a recollectiball a few hours into the tape, rewind it, set it to play, and insert it into the anus of someone who is sleeping particularly drunk. If you've ever been woken by the sound of your own ass howling arrrRrorOOoOoOOooo!, you know you've had too much to drink the night before, and that your friends are bastards.

Citations: Backwards logic, Banter Scarves, Phylostarus.

--Sean B. Palmer 14:14, 20 Sep 2005 (EDT)