The term Freedonia was popularized by the 1933 Marx Brothers movie Duck Soup, as a fictional country. Over time, however, the word has come to have a more generic meaning. Because the Marx Brothers’ Freedonia had so many qualities—autocracy, diminutiveness, and obscurity, to name but a few — a place can be described as “Freedonian” for having any one of these qualities.
Ladies and gentlemen, I am here to tell you that I spent June 19th-June 21st as the undisputed King of Freedonia. That’s right. How many of you have ever been the #1 author in Jewish Fiction Free e-books? That’s what I thought. I can’t blame you for being jealous of all the perks I garnered from my lofty throne. It was sweet, I won’t lie. What can compare with spending three days glued to one’s computer screen while watching downloads accrue, taking short snack breaks only to analyze the per/hour download rate? Unlike the rest of you, I got to bask in the indescribable joy of seeing 200 hundred people snap up my work for free in a sixty minute time period, while my head throbbed and eyes went buggy. After a boffo first night, I went to bed with a 3100 downloads and a massive headache, then woke up the next morning with 3600 downloads and the same headache. By the second day, as I glided past the 4 and 5000 marks, all my muscles cramped and I became so tense and irritable that I was unfit for human interaction. Cruising into Day Three at a cool 6100, I stopped speaking to people, having come to the conclusion that my best friends were numbers. And then, when I woke up on Day Four, the free download offer had ended. I was forced to surrender my bejeweled crown and my kingdom, and go back to seeking renumeration for my services. On the upside, like Rufus T. Firefly, I’ll always have Freedonia.
