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Newly Discovered Malady Afflicts Radio Astronomers, Julian Jove reporting

It was reported at the recently convened Worldwide Congress on Phychiatry and Phychopathy (WCPP 2012) in Jujitsu, Rhodesia that radio astronomers are regularly afflicted by a chronic and debilitating disorder called Ionosfear. This horrible and highly contagious disease appears to be triggered by a process called by medical researchers luminosa scimmia, literally “monkeyshine”.

The triggering mechanism involves radiometric measurements of celestial phenomena. The disease in one reported case appeared during reverse drift-scan observations of the Monuchas Nebula in which the fading in and out of the received emissions appeared through the interaction of Fata Morgana and a combination of coherent and incoherent Hertzian waves resulting in Faraday Scintillations. The prognosis in all cases is extremely strong feelings of self-importance and greatness. This alone is not unusual among scientists, but the kicker is these feelings are compounded by a fear that someone else in the universe may be even greater.

The contagion spreads easily. In one particularly horrid case, the observer’s supervisor “discovered” fundamental flaws in both Albert Einstein’s Theory of General Relativity and Howard Hawks’ Unified Theory of Everything. In another, a co-worker of an infected scientist “discovered” variability in the speed of light. While such delusional behavior is common among scientists working in ivory tower environments, the Ionosfear infection is easily recognized: An infected person always looks down over their nose, which is stuck high in the air, during normal conversation. This is exactly opposite of the disease called agitated melencolia, and as-yet undefined malady that afflicts research workers who recently have taken a pay-cut.

Researchers are working feverishly to limit the disease’s spread within over-funded science facilities. The only cure known at this time for Ionosfear is a kick in the hind-end with a frozen mukluk; however, paraphysciatric research scientists from the Des Moines Institute at Shorts Bay near Long Island, New York, USA believe that watching endless television reruns of “Little House on the Prairy” or “Seventh Heaven” or even looped streams of “Mother’s Day on Walton’s Mountain” may work too. However, these cures are reported to have unpleasant side-effects – the recovering scientist starts to chant “Gooble Gobble, Gooble Gobble, We Accept Her, One of Us, Gooble, Gobble...” and so on for several minutes at a time and in the process disrupts normal conversations at parties and other “social” gatherings.