Announcement

In previous lifetimes in the intertuba I was a regular at a political website which appears to have died. *Dances jig then feels sad then dances jig*
At this site various other posters impressed me or made me think that there were Orcs in the world. One who consistently made me laugh has joined the Authors of Riddled. Despite his affection for Manchester United and negative stereotyping of Hobbits I am welcoming Brett to the building. I lied to him about there being no lawn mowing involved so his first missives will probably be a bit grass stained.
I think that we can all learn that time spent reading the fine print is time spent wisely.

Bare faced cheek beats science anyday

Gerrit van der Lingen, New Zealand Climate Science Coalition: "I hope no agreement will be reached. After all, there is no scientific evidence human greenhouse gas emissions are causing dangerous global warming. Actually, the planet has been cooling for the last 10 years while CO2 levels kept on increasing. I call it the greatest scam in human history."

Source
Actually the planet has been zarmeling fot ehr slegin altosah.
Remember the name New Zealand Climate Science Coalition, these bozos are quite active.
Desmog blog tells a bit more about van der Lingen here

No peer-reviewed research on climate change
According to a search of 22,000 academic journals, Van der Lingen has not published any research in a peer-reviewed journal on the subject of climate change. Google scholar shows two articles published in the 1970s. Van der Lingen describes himself as a geologist/paleoclimatologist and climate change consultant.

So the 'East Whangehu Biscuit Makers Monthly' doesn't show up in your search? Well whose fault is that

This does not mean anything about Australians

A Tasmanian man at the centre of a two-day missing persons search in New Zealand has been found drinking in a bar oblivious to the concern surrounding his whereabouts.

Pandering to the Zombie Agenda

A shamble of zombies came together at the end of October for the 2009 Wellington Zombie Walk.
Some were dressed for the Pride and Prejudice and Zombies Ball later in the evening -- who can refuse an invitation that includes Regency Dancing and fresh brains? -- hence the Jane Austen costumes in the top frame.

The Obeah-woman is presumably from one of the Caribbean slave plantations of the time. These are never explicitly mentioned in Austen's novels, but are present implicitly, providing the income that sustained her characters' life-styles of cotillions, casual violence, hard drinking and amphetamine-fuelled car chases. So it made perfect sense that a forerunner of vaudou among the slaves might somehow have been brought back to England to spark off the zombie epidemic. I was loath to ask the obeah-woman to confirm this, on account of her dilated pupils.

One of the products grown on these slave plantations was indigo. The indigo trade was perhaps of even greater interest than the salted pineapple trade, because like many other pre-industrial-chemistry dyestuffs (madder, 'whelk purple', woad), the word originally described not so much a colour as a SHUT UP SMUT

Life and art and SPIDER ALERT!!!

A favourite book of mine is Dairy of a Nobody about Mr. Charles Pooter. It's pretty gentle humour but I like it and sympathize with Mr. Pooter.
Now, I find that Pooter is not a nobody anymore.He has a spider transfer apparatus named after him. See it in action here. Or not, for those of the arachnophobic persuasion.

The spiders are collected using a contraption called a 'pooter' which sucks the spider up safely into a container.

BUT

Ten years ago, a team of archaeologists from the University of Bradford carried out a major survey of the nearby Chapel Fell cave.
At the end of each day, they took their equipment to a nearby house to store overnight.
In doing so, they accidently carried with them spiders hiding among the equipment.

One would have thought that the maniacal laughing of the spiders would have alerted the scientists. Possibly they were thinking of twin studies that they would like to be doing.

Weekly¹ Twin-study Blogging

A major landmark in the twin-study tradition was 1795, when noted perceptual psychologist Francisco José de Goya y Lucientes began his research. Specifically, he paid one twin of each pair to take her clothes off and allowed the other to stay dressed, then recorded their reactions.

On average, the bare member of each pair tended to score higher on the Wols Pertness Scale, which ranges from 0 (failed souflée) to 10 (you could put someone's eye out with that). In addition, they exhibited more of "shivering", "asking for clothes back", and "this place is like an ice-box, it might as well be Eastern Europe" (these are all technical terms). There is nothing remarkable about any of these, but that hardly matters since the real point of the exercise was to demonstrate what you can get away with when you don't have a sticky-beak Ethics Committee arsing around and getting in your hair the whole time.

The breakthrough occurred in 1797 when Goya recruited the Maja twins. In a lapse from his usual protocol of placing both twins in identical conditions (apart from the "stripping naked" business) to remove all confounding factors, he recorded one of the pair (Vestida) in the company of his well-proportioned assistant Asensio "Lovehammer" Juli² and the other (Desnuda) on his own, after Juli was called away unexpectedly to his other career as the male lead in pornographic tapestries. Comparing his laboratory records afterwards, Goya realised that Vestida had significantly larger pupils.

This was the beginning of a fruitful line of research into pupil dilation in social interaction as a signal of interest, sympathy, and sexual receptiveness. Some people think that her enlarged pupils make Vestida look hawter than Desnuda, outweighing the latter's greater display of skin, but let's face it, comparisons of this sort are really an excuse to hang out in the Prado looking at paintings.

All this, of course, is why a model's pupils are often retouched to make her pupils larger when her image is used to promote some product. Though I am shocked, shocked! to find that general hotness and inferred availability of the model are not always directly related to the functionality of the product.

Evidently market-research people know what appeals to New Zealand sheep farmers. Let's just say that you should look up "tupping" before accepting a farmer's invitation to a tupperware party.

I was going to link to some of this research, but when I googled for "sexy larger pupils", the search results were dominated by the strangest secondary-school-education sites I've ever seen. I can only hope that they have not triggered some alert at the national intertuba-monitoring authorities. Hang about, there's someone at the door, be right back.

¹ May not correspond to calendrical weeks, since here at Riddled we use Centaurian time, standard 37 hour day.

² Self-portrait here.

Crashing and Burning

Dismality reigns here

Considering there had been more goals at Upton Park than at any other Premier League ground this season, the first-half was a relatively subdued affair between two sides desperate for three points at opposite ends of the table.

Well that sums it all up in 25 words or less.

The National Gallery has a cluttered little basement where they store the really crap paintings in their collection, like this one: "Scenes from Tebaldeo's Eclogues", by Andrea Previtali (attrib.; about 1505).

At first I assumed that they'd acquired it as part of a bequest that they couldn't turn down because it also contained some decent art... but no, they actually paid real money for it.

I couldn't find out much about Andrea Previtali on the Intertuba, so I am free to imagine him as a Mafia Don who turned his hand to painting as part of an elaborate scheme to convince the 16th-century Florentine Justice Department that he was mentally as well as artistically incompetent and in no state to stand trial on the various charges brought against him, mostly involving contraband incunabula and Lucrezia Borgia. Nor is there a great deal of information available¹ about Tebaldeo's Eclogues.² But I digress.

This sinister absence of information is evidence of a conspiracy on the face of it, or prima facie as we say when we're playing at scientists. It is a COVER-UP. Someone has been flushing the FACTS down the memory hole, and inevitably an inconvenient fact gets blocked in the S-bend, and then there's dirty data backing up on the floor, and the earliest the memory-hole plumber can come is on next Tuesday and even then he charges $80 just for the call-out charge and you sit around all day waiting for him even though he might not turn up at all.

Exhibit B is this other painting, lodged at the New Tate on the other side of the Thames. The formal similarities make it clear that this is the same painter -- even though this one is dated to 1928. So there are two possibilities. Perhaps "Previtali" has managed to extend his lifespan far beyond the natural bounds, through some arcane process that has been lost in the contemporary world where artificial barriers now exist -- in contrast to the free-and-easy Renaissance mentality -- between the fields of biology, alchemy, tinkering with elaborate clockwork mechanisms, and inflicting gratuitous pain upon cute animals in the name of vivisection. The other possibility is that an artist of the 20th century had access to time-travel technology, but that's just silly.

Either way, all the ingredients are in place for a blockbuster novel, and I am confidently waiting for a positive response from the publishers to the plot outline I sent them. I am not at liberty to divulge further details, except to say that Sir Francis Walsingham makes a cameo appearance, and that I visualise Mads Mikkelsen -- or if he's unavailable, Udo Kier -- in the role of multi-talented perceptual psychologist "Smut Clyde" who is drawn into the whole century-spanning conspiracy.

UPDATE: The public no longer enjoy access to the National Gallery basement. This could be for security reasons, or because too many crap artists were smuggling in their crap art and surreptitiously mounting it on the walls where the curators don't notice it among all the other crap art, but I prefer to see it as part of the ongoing SUPPRESSION OF EVIDENCE.

¹ For values of "available" that include "Free and easily Googled".

² "E-clogue" was of course the name of a shoe-shopping web company set up in Yorkshire during the buoyant, optimistic days of the dot.com bubble, only to disappear in an acrimonious wrangle of lawsuits and countersuits when the company went tits-up and its safe-deposit boxes were discovered to contain a lot of muck but NO BRASS AT ALL.

You fucked up -- you trusted us! Hey, make the best of it!

[Sir David Manning, the Prime Minister's foreign policy adviser] was critical of the lack of planning for post-war Iraq in the US, where responsibility passed from the State Department to the Pentagon. "I think the assumption that the Americans would have a coherent plan which would be implemented after the war was obviously proved to be unfounded."

The Brits are running a kind of Truth-&-Reconciliation Hearing to explore the pattern of incompetence, venality, predetermined intentions in search of a rationale, and "sexed-up" intelligence reports that led up to the first British occupation of Iraq since the previous one. No-one seems to be denouncing the inquiry as a partisan witch-hunt set up to criminalise policy differences. Don't let the Americans know.

It's like so kewl

It seems that an invasion has occurred in NZ and not a good one.Tyra is HERE!!

However, managers deployed a scarved "decoy" of Tyra Banks, the presenter, to knock the waiting media pack off her scent.

Hah! would NZ journos be thrown off the scent by a fake Tyra, Hah11!
Interesting concept to have a fake host of such a fake show, it'll be like a 'spear carrier on a spear carrier' thing.

The Specials- Ghost Town

Missed Merchandising Opportunity

I am surprised that el Museo Nacional del Prado is not selling its own Teniers advent calendars.



UPDATE: Bonus Prado Blogging

Tired of her male contemporaries showing off how they could write their name in the snow, Hepzibah painstakingly taught herself to achieve even greater accuracy.

From the Help desk

There has not been any entries in the "Recent Comments" and "Recent Posts" columns for a while now. So I went to Blogger central and asked why in one of their forums about such things.
There has been a deafening silence about it. Possibly they are having a Zardoz marathon screening and the red leather man-kini has them overwhelmed.
Anyway you should be scouring Riddled for bon mots and not need a link to click on, I blame your parents.

Native Bird Blogging

Beattie, who worked in the Chathams for 15 years, said weka were delicious, and make chicken look bland and greasy by comparison.

If approved for commercial farming, Beattie planned to sell weka breeding pairs to farmers and lifestyle-land owners. He estimated the birds could return $2000 per hectare.

It turns out that this was all a misunderstanding -- he actually said weta, but the journalists misheard him.

Orchidacae

Smut said I had to so here is more Orchids chiz chiz. Aren't they (yawn) beautiful (yawn).
What is interesting, to me, is the concept that the state of Florida, the seat of the Bush Empire is divided up into "Vouchered' and "Non vouchered" even for fucking plants!!! Is there no end to Rovian evilocity.
The "L" shaped county on the left hand side of Florida, near a little inlet, is called Manatee. I hope they don't get no vouchers.

Cultural confusion

Over at a more substantial blog, someone points out that in the US, drugstores of all places are one outlet for Mr McGravitas' comic books.

For me, that's always been one of the eye-opening aspects of travelling. For all the cultural similarities in another country, one's implicit assumptions about the sort of shop where one should buy a given product are sometimes wrong [note to visitors to NZ: "Corner Dairies" are not as lactocentric as the name might suggest]. Hilarity ensues. One has to relearn the scripts.

When I was last in London a few months ago, all the sports bars had signs outside offering "Large Plasmas Inside". So I'd go in and order a large plasma, and suddenly the bar staff would be all "We don't serve your sort here".

Fake insects in sex

Is this how the aliens are outbreeding us??

Australia's sexually deceptive Cryptostylis Tongue Orchids lure pollinators by mimicking the signals of female insects. Male insects are convinced into mating with orchid flowers and they unwittingly collect & distribute the orchid pollinia (see pollination in action via YouTube). Cryptostylis orchids are so persuasive that pollinators ejaculate and waste copious sperm on the flowers

That's a little more information than we really needed.