"Jarthen Foundation Keeps Mum About Missing President"

"Jarthen Foundation Keeps Mum About Missing President"
The New York Times
January 23, 2009

VIENNA -- The world's most influential mega-corporation, the Jarthen Foundation, has continued to deny rumors that its eccentric president, Jon 'Nigel' Seid, has been missing for as long as the last four months.

Seid, whose flamboyant personality and often outlandishly offensive remarks have landed the billionaire in conflicts with such disparate individuals as dictator Mummar Khadafi and physicist Stephen Hawking, has not appeared in public since a brief encounter with reporters after disembarking from his company zeppelin in August 2008. At that time the usually well-coifed dandy-come-president appeared haggard and agitated, his ascot askew and shirt tails conspiculously untucked. Additionally, Mr. Seid behaved more erratically than usual at this appearance, lashing out at reporters who asked him questions with a wild-eyed vitriol that left Wolf Blitzer in tears.

Since the August encounter, Seid has not produced any video messages, attended press conferences, or written public memos, with the exception of a holiday letter at the end of 2008. However, some observers of the mysterious Jarthen Foundation have asserted that this most recent publication may in fact be a forgery released by the corporation in an attempt to maintain some semblance of normalcy. Although the general tone and rambling prose are in keeping with Seid's previous communications, there was a suspiciously outdated reference to a 'baseball team in Montreal.'

A number of explanations have been posited for Mr. Seid's unusually long period of silence, ranging from the benignly mundane to the unbelievably malevolent. Some sources close to members of the secretive Seid family have hinted that the president might have suffered a relapse in his widely rumored addiction to methamphetamine.¹ Some leading members of the CIA who spoke on the condition of anonymity speculate that Seid has either been kidnapped or assassinated by the FARC rebels in Columbia, after the president's failed attempt to collude with them in the overthrow of the current government of Alvaro Uribe.

In the face of the mounting speculation surrounding Mr. Seid, the Jarthen Foundation has sought to evince calm and continuity in its actions. The foundation has released several statements claiming that the president has been dutifully working from a secluded location that he wishes to keep undisclosed out of a desire to "avoid the maddening throngs of reporters that plague him at every turn."²

Despite the Jarthen Foundation's best efforts to soldier on, it is clear that without some appearance by the president the public will continue to lose faith in the company, ultimately throwing its long term viability into question.

¹It is generally believed, in spite of protestations from the president and his associates to the contrary, that Mr. Seid spent 6 months of 1999 hunkered down in a secret bunker in the Yukon in a near constant state of speed induced psychosis, maniacally preparing for the Y2K apocalypse.

²Jarthen Foundation Press Release #42856, 10/15/2008.