The Day The Night Went Dark.

Once upon a time, when the sun shined all day and night and the moon was never cold, a weasel and a badger argued over who should vacuum up all the squirrels.

"I think it should be the dogs," protested the weasel, "Who, but their mortal enemy should be the one to exterminate their species?"

"Ahhh, but the squirrel is not the only enemy of the dog. The dog has many enemies. Cats, rabbits…other dogs…" the badger trailed off in thought. "No" he said. "...It should be the cuttlefish."

"The what?!?" exclaimed the weasel.

"The cuttlefish. you know… cephalopods… sort of like squid but with really short stubby tentacles?"

"Oh" exclaimed the weasel.

The weasel, who was well warmed and ready to retort and deny, to exhort and back up his postulate with factual and reasonable knowledge, to argue based on sane and logical criteria sat there stunned with a look of contemplative brain suicide. The simple exclaimation had caused almost all of the gears in his brain to lockup. The workers who looked over that mental machinery had simply said "Christ!" and walked out of the building for a break. The building was quiet.

There is quiet. And there is QUIET. In a space filled with the cacophony of a perpetual clanking of heavy metal parts day after day after day, the noise becomes alive. It fills the space like an ambient being, like a heavy fog of some non-lethal but-just-thick-enough-to-strain-your-beathing gas. In the instant when it is suddenly removed, the silence is filled with the sound of things you would otherwise never notice. The sound of air flowing outside a window, the sound of a mouse scurrying across a rafter overhead, the sound of a drop of water from the leaky coffee maker.

In the back of the weasel's mind was the sound of a small manual typewriter still clicking away.

"Cuttlefish." the small machine typed on its own. "Cephalopod."
"Squirrel."

Clearly this was far too difficult a puzzle for a typewriter. "Whuzzbuhh..huh?" Said the weasel.

"This post should be about illumination, as in 'the day that people became intelligent'", said the writer of this post, abandoning it altogether.