With bells on

Our alien overlords are jaded and they turn to ever more bloodthirsty diversions to ease their infinite ennui, forcing lesser species into scenes of gladiatorial conflict for their own entertainment. They wager vast stakes on the outcomes, winning or losing entire planetary systems as one slave species defeats another. As AK noted yesterday, the orbs are in the habit of abducting humans to take part in these intergalactic Morris-dancing contests.

Morris dancers endure a harsh exercise regime to keep them in condition for the arena. Here a trainee dancer is tossing Indian clubs into a spiderweb, under the tutelage of a robotic Terminator:


One can only speculate about the alternative roles that the alien civilisation might have found for the human race if the BBC had chosen a different topic for its pioneering TV broadcasts from Alexandra Palace in 1936. As it is, though, one cannot blame them for judging our usefulness from the first signals they saw that brought us to their attention.

The human abductees are secretly training and planning to turn their sticks and bells against the orb captors, rise up, and steal a starship back to Earth. This always happens. It must be an old tradition, or a charter or something.

I had envisaged Bruce Campbell for the key role of the leader of the morris dancers' revolt.

From the mailbox:Somebody loves us

Good Morning!

My name is a person and I’m part of the Promotions Team here at a not spam company. We have been seeking out high quality websites and blogs, gauging interest in doing a giveaway with one of our sites.
We love the look and feel of your blog and think that your US and Canadian readers might be interested in a giveaway with our sites.
I’d be happy to brainstorm some other ideas with you if you’re interested. Alternatively you could do a review of something from our site.
Please let me know if you have any questions for me. I hope to hear from you to further discuss the details of the giveaway.
Kind Regards,
Jubilation T. Cornpone
My Bolding and italics

Mmmmm Riddled Velour... plush...
The salesperson wishes to engage in Bar stool giveaways, which Mrs.Kiwi feels might "disrupt the special ambiance of The Olde Entomologist" and clash with the "sawdust on the floor". I dunno, we are pretty switched on hep cats and very fashionable.
Also, "brainstorm"?

Orbes Standde Revealed

There's been a lot of talk, maybe too much talk, about the orbs. There are some sites that have pages and pages of photos of orbs but always, mysteriously, these photos have no detail in them. Coincidence?

Well, we here at Riddled Investigative Detectives and Whatnot are not so easily dissuaded or bought off by Apricot and Lemming pies. No!
Upon leaving the Olde Entomologist after Monday night's "Annelida: Septate or Aseptate and Karaoke" meeting we were repairing to Riddled Manor. Loud and boisterous was the vouchsafery, only to be silenced by the sight captured in the picture below!!!
The purpose of the orbs is revealed and it is too horrible to comtemplate

INTERGALACTIC MORRIS DANCING!!!!

Flee while you still can, people!!111one

Ombudsmoose update

Good news! New Zealand is at the forefront at creating abnormal mutants that violate every natural law and transgress the inter-species barriers. WE'RE NUMBER 1!!!

Our scientists have been enthusiastically cross-breeding red deer (Cervus elaphus) with elk, sika (C. nippon), and even Père David's Deer (Elaphurus davidiensis). No-one could possibly have foreseen the tragic consequence... that the offspring would lose their sense of group membership, and fixate on inappropriate role-models. This mixed-ancestry elk, for instance -- labouring under the misapprehension that it is a flying squirrel -- has been reduced to the expedient of winding up its antlers attire like a toy helicopter.

This moose thinks it is an orange biped of some description, possibly a giant ground sloth.

The rationale for tinkering with the forces of nature is that the hybrids grow faster and provide larger premium-price-fetching roasts for the lucrative Northern Hemisphere venison-for-$mas market.

We note, however, that in the hope of gaining a competitive edge in a white-market meat that does not even exist yet, the Hawaiians have been cross-breeding dolphins and false orcas. This is no time for us to rest on Laurel.

Returning to the theme of deer-related news,

Reindeer are what Geist terms grotesque giants: species that exploit high-quality foods in cold climates, and are able to evolve luxury organs. The latter include large fat deposits, big and ornate antlers, tusks or horns, big brains, and manes or beards of long decorative hair.

Two out of four ain't bad.

Those who run like fuck away from Omelas to dodge the Organ Draft

From the Heatwarming $mas News department, we learn that the Daily Torygraph is in favour of creating children for the purpose of harvesting their internal organs. Year-old infants are volunteering for painful invasive non-risk-free surgery of no personal benefit:

Megan Matthews would have died but for tissue donated by her baby brother Max

It would be of scientific value to know the exact words or gestures used by Max in his self-sacrificing donation. Sadly, the Torygraph's contributor glosses over the details and goes on instead about "the most priceless present a child can give his sibling: the precious gift of life". Excuse me while I fantasise about Olga Craig waking up after a night of gigolos and blow to find herself in a bathtub full of ice-cubes, with freshly-sutured incisions across her torso, and a note stuck to the bathroom mirror that reads "Thank you for the Precious Gift of Life!"

Early bone-marrow donation:
Thor's goat Tanngnjóstr

The parents swear that their spare-part child will grow up feeling just as well-loved and as important to them as the pre-existing sibling. They may find it easier if they don't tell him that he was one of a dozen embryos fertilised in test-tubes at the same time, of which he was the one with a close-enough DNA match to be therapeutic while the others were flushed.

The Riddled Bioethics Panel informs me that it is still considered unethical to clone an individual so the clone can serve as a source of replacement organs, but this will probably change as the technology matures and suitable euphemisms are found.

Vulgar little mouse

Beatrix Potter's family went to a lot of effort to suppress her last unpublished story, "The Tale of the Foul-Mouthed Mouse that was Banned from the Pub after drinking Snakebites and reciting Dirty Limericks and All 18 Verses of the Ball of Kerrymuir". Quite a shame really since the illustrations show the same scrupulous attention to botanical detail as the rest of her work.

Toys bad golf day

The Riddled Toy Golf Open has not had a sparkling start to the year. The toys do their best but they are easily confused and bored. Here Mr. Bendi can be seen playing an approach shot to the 17th green while even a cursory glance shows the flag for the 17th hole, behind him. Possibly the toy seagull has distracted him as it flies around looking for God-knows-what. An interesting aspect of the Toys Golf Course is the blurred appearance of the buildings. They never come into focus no matter where one stands on the course, although, of course, real people are not allowed on the course. MR THUNDRA!!!
Sadly this may be the end of the Riddled Toy's Open as the cost of the hiring the toy camera crews has sky-rocketed and they are always moaning and leaving tiny empty tea cups all over the bleeding place.

A long day with all the bark on it

This Cryptozoology lark was piss-in-the-hand, Another Kiwi reckoned. All we had to do was find the "Lupus Marinus" or marinated wolf, and fame and fortune was ours, not to mention raising Riddled to the dizzy heights of blogging fame currently occupied by Tetrapod Zoology. And since Belon describes the Lupus Marinus as an amphibious animal that occupies the shoreline and lives on dead fish washed up on the beach, all we'd have to do was look for a beach where there aren't any dead fish, and we'd know that a Lupus Marinus had eaten them all and was probably still somewhere in the vicinity.

Three things were wrong with this sanguine vouchsafing:
(1) No-one warned me that the animal in question would sway like a desert mirage seen after three shots of tequila (or so I hear from a friend) and leave a blur on the surveillance cameras, ruby glistening from its navel, shimmering around the floor. Also, Belon's description has it that

The nose and teeth are like those of a dog, the muzzle is beset by strong whiskers. The fur is coarse, with fairly spiky shags, and marked all over by black spots (as is the entire body).

-- yet our photographs show stripes rather than spots. It could be a different animal, or it could simply be a Lupus Marinus that has run repeatedly into a zebra so as to cause interchanging of molecules.

(2) It turns out that any words starting "crypto-" trigger Evangeline van Holsteren into one of her episodes and she starts ranting about special-purpose boards and inverse discrete elliptical functions, not to mention getting the drinks order muddled. I'm sure I wasn't drinking the Patrón tequila; that stuff's expensive.

(3) You cannot talk about Sea Wolves in a pub without people overhearing and launching into long boring arguments about the relative virtues of the 1941 version with Edward G. Robinson versus the 1993 remake with Charles Bronson.

Also the Lupus Marinus is surrounded by a halo of letters flashing on and off, but I am not one to judge since the same thing seems to happen to me after a few pints.