Recursion

'I decided to myself,' said MacCruiskeen, ' that the only sole correct thing to contain in the chest was another chest of the same make but littler in cubic dimension.'

Possibly overdoing it now.

Poem- The Safety net

A safety net would be a good thing,
for when we walk the highly wired life.
Woven by friends, families, neighbours,
artist, writers and maybe even poets.
It is odd that a quality we aspire to,
down-to-earthness,
is so feared.
The earth is not forgiving when
we slip up, up there.
Yet it is the slip down that does
the damage.
A cricketer  told me
Modern players are too
careless against
head high bowling,
because they have helmets.
And I wonder if a safety net
might make us careless about
failure.
But cricket balls are not
like the knives of self-contempt
we lacerate
ourselves with.
A safety net will not blunt those,
It might just slow you as you fall.

Concept of Proof

Updated: I prefer the wider wedges.

The Gun is Good: Hunting update

Rural grandmother sort-of admits that her 15-year-old grandson probably shot a pet goat in order to win $100 in a hunting contest; mentions in passing that they've also been helping themselves to the neighbours' geese and ducks; argues that "Captain Stinky" was roaming outside the neighbours' land at the time, so no crime was committed. The police are not convinced.

1. It does not reflect well upon the educational attainment and perceptual acuity of New Zealanders when the 1st Prize in the Rimutaka Sports Bar Labour-Day pig-hunting competition is awarded for a goat.

2. This is going to be the best episode EVAH of "Body Count: New Zealand's Most Violent Neighbourhood Feuds".

"They turned Colonel Stinky
into a sculpture?!"

UPDATE: Bonus New Zealand News.

All Blacks not expecting ping pong from England

This is a novel strategy from the English team but at least it has the element of surprise.

Smarter than the average type bear?

Scientists have found bears skulls, underwater. I mean, really, did they not realise about the very altered nature of oxygen uptake without gills. Have they never seen Inconvenient Truth with the poor brave drowning polar bears? Al Gore is fat, apparently.
Even more embarrassing is the presence of human skulls down there. "Mum, Dad, lookit the bears. Glub glub"
This means that people around today are descendants of people smart enough to not go and see  aquatic bears

One year of Riddled

Thanks to all.

Proof of concept

Contents to come later. When I get around to it.
(sourced from Sub McG).
Also UPDATED with improved version from Substance, using GIMP to encode the GIF more efficiently with deltas, and thereby fitting more colours into a smaller file.

The pills that Mother gives you

A more sensible blog has apprised me of the existence of homeopathic immunisation. The list of contractable diseases that can be prevented with a homeopathic vaccine is a long one, but surprisingly it does not include rabies.

This is a pity. People who have been bitten by a rabid animal, and face the prospect of an agonising death through convulsions and dementia and eventual respiratory failure, should definitely have the option of a homeopathic vaccine and homeopathic immunoglobulin as an alternative to the mainstream-medicine versions.

As yet there is no homeopathic replacement for the only other clinically-proven preventative treatment for rabies:

amputation of the affected limb might thwart rabies, if the bite or exposure was on an arm or leg

Also, remember what the dormouse said.

Same ole same ole

Apologies to the bull fighters amongst us. I know that you are all trained enhanced interrogation specialists.
Firstly we had this glorious anouncement in 2009. And then the milk and honey began to flow and such in November 2009 .
And today we have the scintillating follow up. and the results are astounding in that the top 3 things we should do are:

• Cutting both government spending and tax rates
• Government withdrawal from most commercial activity to allow the private sector to drive value for money and innovation in those areas – including health and education services
• Proper cost-benefit analyses of government infrastructure projects

Ho ho Proper cost benefit analyses  and Gubblement withdrawl (a method even the Catholic church is not so hot on ).
Can I get a job where I say the same thing every year and get 100K to do it, safe in the knowledge that no one except a  rabid badger would try out my ideas.
Even the Prime Mincer can guess what is in the report and came out to preemptively have a chuckle about it (notice "it's ideas", grammar zombie)

John Key says the report makes some fair points, but given the nature of its authors, it also has a fairly austere agenda.
He says some of the recommendations are on issues his party has campaigned against and won't be implementing, such as changing superannuation eligibility, canceling Working For Families, and reintroducing interest on student loans. (3/11)

Right wing welfare? I think not, one of the members of this committee is a former labour Party cabinet minister.
Hmmmm

Good panels shame about the dialogue

An early example of the Fantastic Four Comic series has been found in a old shoe box in Southern Transnitria. The series was not very popular in this incarnation and I think that we see that the lack of speech bubbles and any discernible action are the problems.
There may be a proto- speech bubble in the second-to-last panel but it has been artfully turned into an orb that Rexius Willow and his wife Bobbit have defeated (I think). Or maybe they are at the beach and it is a beach ball.
Whatever the story is about it is obvious that it ends with a good old multi-party hanging which was the preferred ending for most stories of the time.

Their eyes have turned the color of frozen meat

Six years after the fact was first mentioned by the BBC, it has recently come to the attention of UK tabloid newspapers that "More than 70 per cent of the New Zealand beef and lamb sold in Britain comes from Cybele slaughterhouses without the fact being declared on the label."

To meet the high standards required before meat can gain Cybele certification, all the slaughtermen must be members of the Cult of the Phrygian Great Mother, Magna Mater. The bull or lamb must be magnificent with flowers and gold, and is slain by a cut across the throat, above a grating. The priest of the Great Mother stands in a trench below the grating, clad in a silk toga worn cinctu Gabino, with golden crown and fillets on his head, and receives the animal's blood on his face, and even on his tongue and palate.

The New Zealand meat industry has taken this step to ensure its lamb can be sold in Phrygian and Roman markets round the world.

The trade body Beef & Lamb New Zealand said the form of Cybele slaughter approved for use in New Zealand involves stunning the animals beforehand, with an electric shock through the brain.

About 10% of New Zealand meat exports are slaughtered to meet a different standard, to ensure that they will be acceptable to the equally-lucrative Mithras market. To gain Mithras certification, the animals must be killed by sword-thrust to the neck or shoulder administered by an embodiment of the legionary god Mithras, while a dog and a serpent leap up towards the wound and a scorpion attacks the animal's scrotum. If nothing else, this provides work for otherwise-unemployable ex-All Blacks.

Meat-eating Christian consumers in the UK are outraged that the food on their plates might meet higher standards of hygiene and animal welfare than they were expecting, and that they might have been subjected without their permission to prayers for their welfare from a source that they regard as meaningless superstition. It is not known whether any of them have promised to pray for the welfare of the New Zealand meat exporters.

UPDATE: If his contribution to the comments are any guide, the only way of slaughtering meat that is acceptable to B⁴'s religious beliefs is for the animals to be torn apart by Maenads, maddened by the blood-red wine of Lesbos and the cold clear water of the Hippocrene.

Rest assured that the people of the Beef & Lamb Export Council are working towards obtaining Bacchantic certification for a NZ slaughterhouse, with a way of stunning or anaesthetising the animals that is acceptable to both our animal-welfare laws and the Bacchantic purity code .

Looks like the Council Chairman is on his way home from another all-night session of the Working Group. The latest experiment was a failure: Donkeys will not drink enough wine to pass out.

Dumber than Anne Althouse

A newspaper columnist writes that she would turn vegetarian rather than kill her own food, and indeed she finds the thought of killing animals for food so repellent that she thinks other people should not do it either.

Hunting is unnecessary, since supermarkets exist.

This is not a shorter.

UPDATE: Artist's impression of Rosemary McLeod saving a wild bull from nasty flying garland-waving hunters.