THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, December 3, 1995 TAG: 9512020111
SECTION: VIRGINIA BEACH BEACON PAGE: 07 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: Bill Reed
LENGTH: Medium: 60 lines
The Great Tortellini's nose is severely out of joint.
He has just learned from a local newspaper that the U.S. Government has been using psychics for years in its worldwide spy operations.
Hunkering down in a secret laboratory at Fort Meade, Md., they attempted to find out what was going on in dark and forbidding corners of the world by using the unknown to ascertain the unknowable for the benefit of Uncle Sam.
Using their extra-sensory talents, the cadre of psychics had been on the payroll for quite a while, trying to track down Moammar Gadhafi in Libya, a plutonium stockpile in North Korea, elusive drug lords in Colombia and kidnapped American Brig. Gen. James L. Dozier in Italy.
They bombed, of course, because they were a bunch of rank amateurs, sniffs Tortellini.
As the world's premier prognosticator, seer and dabbler in the occult, he knows he could have done the job standing on his conical hat, the one with the unicorn hair tassel and the little zodiac symbols stitched on it.
Tortellini was further chagrined to learn that he had not even been considered for such an auspicious assignment - code named ``Stargate'' - for which $20 million in good U.S. taxpayers' money has been blown. Indeed, not even the slightest nod was made in his direction!
Such humiliation cannot long be endured by a man who has confounded the crowned heads of Europe, dazzled potentates of the Near East, stupefied the barons of industry and astounded learned scholars of academe with his feats of legerdemain and abstract powers.
Why, with a Ouija Board, some tea leaves and crystal ball - not to mention a dash of fairy dust - Tortellini has predicted such disasters as the Mount Pinatubo eruption in the Philippines, the birth of Hurricane Camille and the Exxon Valdez oil spill in Alaska. Mere child's play, really.
And, at the insistence of a few paying customers, Tortellini has reached beyond the ``great beyond'' to contact and even chitchat with the likes of Winston Churchill, Elvis, Napoleon and King Tut.
Winston misses his cigars and brandy, Tortellini has revealed in his memoirs. Elvis misses those fried peanut butter sandwiches. Elba was a real drag, Napoleon told him. No night life there at all.
As for King Tut, those darned bandage wraps have itched for several thousand years. Another thing, he's sick and tired of all those pointy-headed scholars with Coke bottle glasses and bad breath poking around his tomb.
On the local front, Tortellini went on to predict - and this was back in 1992 - that the Virginia Beach school operating budget would come up short by at least $12.1 million last year and that the school superintendent would skeedaddle out of town before the roof fell in.
For a few bucks, or maybe just for the recognition it would bring him, Tortellini says he would be willing to use his extra-sensory skills to help a special grand jury find out how it all happened and who was responsible.
Surely, such a feat would show those boneheaded CIA bureaucrats that they had overlooked a formidable weapon in the world of psychic espionage when they failed to consider the Great Tortellini for Operation Stargate. by CNB