User:Alan
Alan Cameron Caum (3 September 1983 - ) is a KGB member known for his thickly packed prose style, his fast, badly articulated, and reference-packed manner of speech, his near-pathological fondness for designing flyers, and his habit of bursting randomly into song in languages he does not actually speak.
In the popular imagination, Alan possesses a strangely self-contradictory, dualistic status: on the one hand, he is often assumed to be a CMU student, while on the other, he is often assumed to be around the same age as Shawn Knight. In fact, he is not a CMU student, and his status vis-a-vis CMU is a unique and ill-defined beast, and he is ten years younger than Shawn.
Alan is, to the best of his knowledge, the only non-student ever to serve as clerk of CMU's Student Senate, and would have stood for election to KGB's Exec last year had he been eligible, though even he admits that he doesn't really know what he would have run for.
His knowledge of arcane and obscure subjects in history, art, language, and literary theory is extraordinarily broad, but in most places not especially deep. Higher mathematics, logic, and theories of category, set, and information are utterly beyond his capacity to grasp, but he firmly believes (in the absence of any evidence) that, given the opportunity, he could write circles around nearly everyone he knows, and as he has always placed a fetishistically high value on linguistic intelligence, this is quite enough for him.
Alan may be seen weekly at KGB meetings, generally rising during committee reports to spiel out some unlikely adventure of the Time Travel Committee; at Exec meetings on Wednesdays offering input on upcoming events and projects, or in syndication (check your local listings).
He is considered in some circles to be a kind of spiritual successor to Shawn Knight, which means he is some sort of weird spiritual half-sibling or demi-cousin to Ed Ryan. Considering this for too long can result in blindness, sterility, or death, and has already driven the author of this page to despairing thoughts of Pine-Sol, just in the process of writing it.
