This World of Ours

Sometimes, when I check my work email, I’ll find a message that says “Talk Announcement: Vertex-based Elliptic Cryptography on N-way Bojangle Spaces.” I’ll look at the abstract for the talk, and it will say something like this: “It is well-known that five-way secret sharing has been illegal since the Protestant Reformation [Luther1517]. However, using recent advances in polynomial-time Bojangle projections, we demonstrate how a set of peers who are frenemies can exchange up to five snide remarks that are robust to Bojangle-chosen plaintext attacks.” I feel like these emails start in the middle of a tragic but unlikely-to-be-interesting opera. Why, exactly, have we been thrust into an elliptical world? Who, exactly, is Bojangle, and why do we care about the text that he chooses? If we care about him because he has abducted our families, can I at least exchange messages with those family members, and if so, do those messages have to be snide?