The Medium is the Sausage

Marshal Dillon observed that when men in black hats rode into town they would head straight for the saloon, where they would cause a rumpus. Meanwhile their horses would rob the bank. He concluded that the message, or baddies, simply existed to draw attention away from the medium, or horses. He never told anybody of his discovery and died penniless in the arms of a Dutch prostitute-wrangler from Ohio, or China as it was known in those days.

His son inherited the idea and drop-kicked it into the 1960s where, in a garbled form, it arrived in the head of a fortune teller called Our Pam. She (it's always a she) bought a packet of Walls bangers and set out to discover that they could tell the future. She found, after five minutes' intensive investigation, that her opinion was that they could, so that proved it.

The sausages were a great success, telling the fortunes of many famous people of the time. They correctly predicted that Bernard Levin was a git and that the Beatles weren't square. They predicted that birds would catch cold thighs and that beehive hair-dos would look groovy. They had no opinion about the outcome of the Wrangle in the Quadrangle between C.P.Snow and F.R.Leavis because Our Pam, who acted as interpreter for the sausages, hadn't heard of either of them. In her spare time Our Pam watched On The Buses, which she thought was a documentary.

By 1970 the sausages, in spite of all efforts to preserve them, had begun to rot and were smelling quite pungent. Pam threw them in the bin and, since she was getting fed up with writing her autobiography, disappeared and was never seen again.