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Shh! Spoilers!

The Issue

After one of your recent speeches included an accidental spoiler for the bestselling novel Hexicon, angry librarians, teenagers, and fantasy aficionados have completely surrounded your office in protest. After a hard day's work, you have agreed to meet with the protesters, if only so that you can get out of the building.

The Debate

"Speeches, not spoilers!" chants your teenage niece, who has been leading the protest. "Look, I'm trying to be a good citizen here, paying attention to what's going on around me, but if you're going to spoil something that I haven't even had chance to read, then I'm not going to bother! If you really need to talk about stuff that isn't politics in your speeches, at least warn us about it! Sure, it might look a bit silly, but who cares? This is almost as bad as when I was told that Planet of the Fairies was Yggdrasil all along!"

"Can't these people get a life?" asks your visibly tired speechwriter Virginia Han, who has been shredding hate mail all day. "Simply say something appeasing, then carry on your business as you normally would. Honestly, I wish I had the free time to read; then I'd finally find out why everyone keeps getting so upset about this Dumbledore business. Besides, wouldn't referencing pop culture make you 'cool' and 'with it', as the kids are saying these days?"

"Who cares what 'rosebud' meant, or who was the real Caesar So-say? There's more to life than fiction," observes your always serious Finance Minister Ali McKay, who is known around the office as a total buzzkill. "What's important here is that you've given a lot, and I mean a lot of publicity to that hack of an author, and he hasn't paid us a single cent! Maybe if people are going to care so much about what you talk about in those speeches of yours, we should be getting companies to pay for the privilege of being mentioned. Sure, some may call it 'bribery' and 'unethical', but there's no such thing as free advertising."

"Spoilers must be banned!" wails George JK Token, the beloved and bearded fantasy author of Hexicon and the popular A Play of Crowns series. "It's of no coincidence that mere days after you spoiled my book, it fell from its number one position on the Ÿivkåvkövkum Times best seller list. Spoilers greatly harm the publishing and entertainment industries. Nobody wants to bother with something if they know how it ends! I urge you to make it illegal to spoil. If you don't, well, then I just might have to kill off Aya Lark in the next Play of Crowns book, seeing how she's your favorite character."

I swear the issues I get just keep getting weirder and weirder.