Multi skilling gone mad

Many of us are content to be good at one thing or, if you count falling over when drunk as a  skill, two things.Luckily Nile Gardiner is here to make us all feel inadequate. Revealed in his blog as a movie critic , a Hob Nobber with the intelligentsia and exposer of the Anti Churchill. Now Nile has shown that the murky depths and vicious currents of Economics are no match for his towering intellect.
See how he skims effortlessly across several conflicting tides of reason with statements like

 "the federal government has been recording the largest budget deficits, as a share of the economy, since the end of World War II”

He's quoting the Congressional Budget Office there

And here:

projects that federal debt will reach 62 percent of GDP by the end of this year—the highest percentage since shortly after World War II.

Then with trousers in full spate Nile quotes  

With significantly lower revenues and higher outlays, debt would reach 87 percent of GDP by 2020, CBO projects. ... Debt as a share of GDP would exceed its historical peak of 109 percent by 2025 and would reach 185 percent in 2035.

The column finishes with a pithy summary that lays it all out

With his reckless big government policies, Barack Obama threatens to run his country into the ground, with American decline the inevitable end result.

Two itsy bitsy points
1):The words "World War II" should have brought to mind the fact that 'Merca is in two wars and both are going swimmingly and I imagine Nile loves them both deeply.
2) The debt is not really Obama's unless you consider that it started when he took office in which case the nurses will be around with the Blue pills soon.
Remember folks Nile is a frequent apparition on Fox News and contributer to Mr. Squzzum's Make Believeland.

Birds Nest Boys

Smut said: "the Comments aren't working".
I said "Good, I am sick of penis jokes."
Smut said, "You had better go and fix it"
"What" I vouchsafed "is tigris doing aside from lying around eating grapes and sending merc down to the paint shop for a can of tartan paint?"
"I told her to make it polka-dot" said Smut "anyway, you should take the ladder and go and fix the comments"
"Righto" I said seeing the opportunity for an afternoon pretending to look for the comments box.
Smut said "It's on the lamppost outside Mrs Miggins shop near the traffic lights"
"I thought that that was a birds nest" I opined.
"It is that and all" said Smut.
Merc bought the instruction book and called up to me "it's a blue wire with silver striping"
"Righto" I said "Oooow fuck"
"Or maybe not" he said
"I  need to get down now" I said "The mother Sloth is waking up"
merc looked at his watch "Nearly opening time at the Old Entomologist, I'm just saying"
"I need to check their feed" I said.

The Revenge of Vera Gemini

New from Lego©:
Conjoined Twins kitsets.

I'm not entirely sure what market they're trying to appeal to here, but then I'm not a multi-million dollar Danish conglomerate, and apparently they are.

Just a tainted bird hurting their twisted nerve

Readers of the Doctor Thorndyke stories will recall that pigeons and rabbits can be used as a vehicle for administering poison, by arranging for them to eat belladonna before they arrive on the table (for they are not sensitive to the toxins therein and will happily accumulate atropine in their flesh).

DO NOT EAT the African Spur-winged goose.¹ It has been eating Blister Beetles under the impression that they are an aphrodisiac, for like all the Anatidae it is a randy little bugger. Now its meat is lethally perfused with cantharidin. Unaccountably, no-one has written a detective novel in which the murder weapon is one of Mrs Miggins' African-Spur-winged-Goose "Party Pies".

Hemlock

We further learn that quails can sometimes be toxic for a similar reason, if they have been eating hemlock in the course of their migration and soaking up the coniine [or possibly some other seeds; there is some dispute].³ Though coturnism is a rare diagnosis these days.

Riddled "Trends" Column
This season's fashionable diagnosis is Coturnism. It sounds exotic, and has a celebrity cachet because, you know, QUAIL. We know that many readers come to Riddled seeking fashion advice because of all the Google searches for "sloth poop".

¹ Described by Darren Naish as "One of the most dangerous birds in the world - I'm not kidding here".²

² Actually a sheldrake, so more closely related to the Paradise Duck.

³ In an hommage to the golden age of detection novels, in Full Dark House, a dancer is poisoned with a quail sandwich, though

**** SPOILER ALERT ****
**** MIXED-METAPHOR ALERT ****

the quail is a red herring and the coniine is actually contained in the hemlock garnishing the sandwich.

Blame Antoine Court de Gébelin

He's the Swiss clergyman who decided in 1781 that a traditional 5-suit deck of 78 cards, that had been used for centuries for playing the game Tarot, was actually a repository of arcane cabalistic symbolism passed down from the ancient Egyptians. The cards were in fact designed for divination (went the theory), with emblematic content that linked them to the underlying principles of the cosmos.

The theory took root, and people invented age-old esoteric techniques of Tarot divination which they were willing to teach to new initiates for a purely nominal fee, and now everyone takes it for granted that we have always been at war with Eastasia using Tarot cards for fortune-telling. Apparently The Waste Land is the first literary appearance of this use of the deck, followed in 1932 by Charles Williams' The Greater Trumps (which is the barking-maddest book of Christian neo-Platonist philosophy in a pulp-fiction plot-line that you're ever likely to encounter unless you read other Charles Williams books).

It could have been worse. Imagine the potential for harm if the fraudsters had picked on the 10 cards of the Rorschach deck instead, and announced that by shuffling them and dealing them and following some elaborate rules for exegesis, one could fathom the customer's psychological state and mental health. We dodged a bullet there.

Anyway, you can see how wires were crossed at the Old Entomologist the other night when Another Kiwi dealt out hands with his new deck of cards.

"A cow pooping coins into a chalice is a reference to wealth from the dairy economy if ever there was one," I said. "I assume that the left-hand card represents the Past since it also contains a giant raspberry, a man with a roll of toilet paper undergoing hypnotherapy, three cotton reels and a novelty tea-pot, which all in all is almost frighteningly accurate.

"So the right-hand card must reflect the Future, and the three-headed lute-playing pigeon from hell predicts that I will get to the Leonard Cohen concert after all, though fish-&-chips may be all there is for dinner that night."

"No," sez AK. "It predicts that you're paying for the next round, since my full house beats your crap hand."
I think he makes the rules up as he goes along.

He may also be in denial, hiding from what the cards foretell for what will happen next time he takes Mrs Cat to the vet for an injection.

UPDATE: Bonus irrelevant Steps in the Evolution of the Disembodied Dog Head
Left: 1507.

Right: 1948.

BONUS² irrelevant Steps in the Evolution of Little Men in Boats





Top: 1507

Bottom: 2002

Doing the Lambeth Walk

Ever since I was a young boy
I've done the Lambeth Walk
From Soho down to Brighton
I must have walked it all
But I ain't seen nothing like this
At any walking stall
Those competition striders
Sure do the Lambeth Walk.

Yes folks be the envy of the neighborhood with specially tailored legs for competition walking. We can remove those old so-called 'natural' legs and replace them with gleaming new pins that are precisely machined to perform the desired walk TO PROFESSIONAL STANDARDS.
Note the additional attachments available with the Lambeth walk model which enable the user to perform the Lambeth  Uphill and Drunken Lambeth  variants. This super flexible model comes complete with a reservoir of matured Donkey urine for spraying onto unsuspecting passers-by or noisy, small boys.

Mixed reception for Golf Opera

It has to be said that the reception for the Riddled Operatic Society production of "The Whole In Onne" is not quite what we had expected.
We are not sure what is the exact problem with the production. It may be the Jacobean jokes "Your ball is too big for my hole, Sir Lancelot" or the political comments which were pertinent at the time "Your honour has the consistency of a Widdicombe apple".
Some of the songs are a tad obtuse as well "The Hevring of the Good Knight" "The Legfine Soldier" and "Bonwangers Away!" .
Suffice it to say that I was never in favour of the production and voted for "Carry On Health and Safety Inspector". Critics have not been helpful, saying that "two chaps hacking each others balls about on stage is not what I call Opera". Philistines
Why I had to wear spurs is beyond me, as well.

We get mail

It's an entry for our Last Night's Weird Dream competition!

Ms 'X' of Geraldine dreamed that she was assailed by brassiere salesmen emerging from a tunnel under the world. They used pressure tactics and warned her of the pendulosity that would surely result if she did not buy their products.

Unconscionable tactics, we agree, but just what we have learned to associate with the Feckle Freezer company.Sadly, we cannot accept the entry. The competition rules were quite explicit -- for the dream to count you have to be wearing a bra.

Public-Health Posters of the Late 18th Century, #38

Zombie Peter Sellars reprises his role as Clouseau in Love Slaves of the Pink Panther. This is the scene where he disguises himself as a fountain in order to mingle with the conspirators gathering at Schloss Hellbrunn and overhear the details of the plot. Note the boobie-stilts to help support the weight of the costume.

HA HA had you going for a minute there. Of course this is yet another Industrial Safety poster. Grisly stuff, no punches pulled to make the point. A worker allowed his concentration to wander momentarily and was caught and dragged into the fountain-making machinery. Just look at him now. This is worse than the cautionary short films we had to watch at school where high-spirited kids accept a dare from their ne'er-do-well friends and learn the hard way about the consequences of fooling around with the milking machine.

UPDATE: Bonus alternative interpretation (thx tigris in comments). The picture could depict the standard uniform of an 18th-century pizza delivery boy, complete with allegorical scenes of being met at the door by naked customers, such as I never dreamed would happen to me.

The Conservative Mindset

Celebrity cook Jamie Oliver got very angry about the school dinners being fed to kids in the UK and started up a School Dinners Campaign. It has not been a big success but the reaction of Andrew Lansley, the Health Secretary, is interesting

"If we are constantly lecturing people and trying to tell them what to do, we will actually find that we undermine and are counterproductive in the results that we achieve"

In this happy land the Conservative government says that People should be healthy and jailtime is more of a worry because just shut up, that's why!

"They're probably fairly grizzly that they're in prison as well...I think if someone is going to be volatile it's going to be about more than giving up cigarettes."

I think we can see an essential Conservative mindset here.
1) Looking after folks is wrong
2) Having your life in downward spiral that you can't control is being a bit grizzley (whining)

In the same article a former womens prison governor, Celia Lashley, says:

"They've suddenly become very aware of being sued and they say they're aware of possibly being sued by prison staff but again I don't think that's the case at all or they would have moved before now...
"It's not about 'will it work?', it's about the bullshit, what the policy's really about."

She was on the radio the same day saying that it was symptomatic of this government that they like to whack the down-and-out.
I don't always agree with Lashley but it's an interesting thing to say, implying that it's not so much a policy as an ideology.

 It's only taken me fifty years but I think I am getting a handle on Conservative "thinking"

.

He pulls the spitting high tension wires down

We have heard a lot of talk lately about broadband infrastructure -- much of it in the Explaining Voice after a couple of beers, but the Frau Doktorin is used to that -- but also from the Government. Reinventing the economy, cutting edge of innovation, productivity gains through e-commerce, all that. I think this translates into "Not enough people are downloading bootlegged music and movies and porn, what with the shonky dial-up connection," which is impeding the gubblement's desire to clamp down on copyright violations like all the cool countries are doing, i.e. they need to facilitate the flow of information before they have an excuse to regulate it.

Anyway, this has exacerbated the rivalry among NZ telephony companies, vying for the lucrative contract to bring bit-torrents to every small town in the country and allow every isolated farm station to take its rightful place in the global bestiality-porn economy.
This is all very well and no skin off my nose to spite my face, but when those rival companies wake me up before noon with unseemly altercations out in the street, competing for the limited space available to install new cables while each trying to sabotage the other's overhead installations, then I have to say that the corporate-welfare market model has failed.

The Telecom team are at the left, trying to upgrade their existing copper cables to an ASDL x.616 protocol with old-fashioned lion-and-griffin-based poles. The Telstra-Saturn team are on the right, putting their faith in graphene-monolayer phonon conduction technology mounted on a state-of-the-art dragon hybrid pole.

The dragon was definitely making most noise.

Public-Health Posters of the Late 18th Century, #13

This widely-circulated poster warns against the pernicious habit of Tourneuring. It depicts the cautionary example of a young man who has only been doing 'tea' as the kids are calling it -- or "la The' in French -- for a month or two, and already he is mainlining ladders and chair-legs straight to the head.

Such was the scale of the Tourneur epidemic, carrying a spinning wheel in one's right hand escaped from being a token of drug-culture membership to become a general fashion item, much as carrying bottled water was once restricted to E-using party ravers before it entered the wider culture.

That first free taste is the thin edge of the white elephant, or the slippery slope down into the jelly-wrestling pool. Before he knows it the Tourneur abuser is reduced to the level of a human baluster, breathing fire and staring at leaves.

Rule 34 leads us ineluctably to the prediction that somewhere on the intertuba there will be balustrade porn.