Invasion of the parchment worm

Idea for a horror movie: New Zealand is invaded by bioluminescent parchment-tube worms Chaetopterus variopedatus. Or is that too implausible?

According to the description from Ruppert et al. (7^th edition):
To close the mandibles and keep silent, littermate of drones! To remove the beam from one's inadequate supply of eyes before criticising others! The equal weirdness of chordate anatomy. A hill in the pleasure pits awaiting the calumnious terries.

No offense intended. I just wanted to say that if any part of my body is soft, pale and fragile because it is adapted to a protected tube environment, it is not an internal organ, but SHUT UP SMUT

Spiders are our friends!

But would you want Spider web in your nerves!!!

Now though, surgeons from Germany have made what could be a significant advance in nerve tissue engineering. They have developed artificial nerve grafts made from hollowed-out pig veins filled with spider silk fibres and, in a series of animal experiments, showed that the grafts can enhance the regeneration of peripheral nerves over distances of up to 6cm.

as one of the commentators rightly points out:

Yeah, just wait till the spiders come asking for their favor.

Despite the upsidedownie way of spelling favour, one can see their point!!!
Also the work was done on sheep which, as you know, New zilders have a special relationship with and here they are putting spider webs in them. I hope they'll be happy when the sheep start to grow fangs, spin webs and laugh maniacally.

SMUTDATE: 65,916 Mazda sedans recalled due to spider infestation. Be very afraid.

The Tortured Metaphor

On Saturday, Cairo time, protesters broke into the headquarters of the Egyptian State Security, the SSI, (Motto:  "No secret too big or too small")  and stole files on various persons of interest. It must be a moment of purest OMG to find your own file, but anyway.
They have made some discoveries about the SSI including the fact that Casual Friday definitions varied from branch to branch and sometimes was not very casual. But the discovery that has caused the most consternation is that the SSI practised torture (although they seem to have had the kind of guys who didn't need much practise).
In a completely imaginary statement John Bolton said "Fucking A!" just before his moustache disappeared up his nose and tried to disable him from inside his head. However the internal killing lasers did their job.
George W Bush opening a Wal Mart in Reykjavik, Iceland in a completely fictive moment noted "Throw the damn ball, you bum, hah hah, hah"
Similarly, Condaleeza Rice would only slam the lid of her piano and glare at this reporter, when questioned at her Fortress of Solitude in Antarctica.
But in a marginally more tangible world this sets up one of the type of foreign diplomacy moments known as a Schrödinger's cat moment  in the Political Science and Dwarf Throwing bar of the Old Entomologist.
To whit: When Egypt was torturing their folks, they were our friends, then in the recent ructions when they were torturing their folks they were not our friends and should just move on. It would've been nice if they could have left a tin opener behind when they went, but we all know how difficult moving is.
Thus the state of Egypt is dependent upon when you look at it, and the mere act of looking at it changes the state. And, like a stone tossed into the trousers of time, the ripples have spread outwards and even unto the blogosphere where hardened keyboard commandos have been seen weeping over the self imposed contradictions.
Like water seeping into their parent's basement they are slowly beginning to see a glimmer of the problems of being BFF with arseholes as well as learning a lesson about reading packets before you eat what is in them.
Who should they declare to be Mubarak in Wisconsin and why have Nabisco changed the flavour of cheetos? Could it be that the daddy men were wrong about Our Partners in The War on Terror?
 And could it be that the Sheep Poo for Citrus Trees packet is too, too similar.

Deselbiana: Intimidations of Mortality edition

Received opinion (pace Bassett's negative assessment) would have it that de Selby was no expert in child-rearing and child psychology. He notoriously dismissed infancy in The Layman's Atlas as "a form of malingering" and no more necessary than the conditions and events that characterise the other end of life's parabolic trajectory. Hatchjaw, however, in his commentary on the Country Album, calls attention to the presence there – leavening the savant's customary abstractions and ex cathedra declamations – of observations into infantile cognition that would establish de Selby's priority over Piaget's later research, except that for some reason he chose to couch his remarks in the form of a discussion of immigration policy.

De Selby's objective, it seems, was to reconstruct the conditions experienced by infants before they are inveigled into an existence in this present plane of reality. A process of reverse-engineering convinced him that those conditions are almost unimaginably alien from the physical laws that function here, accounting for the new-born child's habitual expression of gobsmacked stupefaction.

He observed, for instance, that no amount of repetition of the experiment will accustom infants to the way an object reappears after it has vanished behind a visual barrier. Each demonstration of object permanence is as flabbergasting as the first. Evidently the mode of existence from which they recently arrived was one of oneiric, Heraclitean flux and transformation, in which objects lack permanence and the very concept of 'object' is moot.

It is not clear how de Selby came by opportunities for this observation. One struggles to imagine the austere philosopher divesting himself of his dignity so far as to play Peekaboo with a toddler; still harder to conceive of parents who would willingly entrust their child to a man noted more for his otherworldliness than for his pedagogy. Hatchjaw accepts without question that the first draft of the Country Album was written during the poorly-documented phase of de Selby’s career in which he taught elementary school in rural Austria. In contrast, du Garbandier implies that the savant’s nephew may have served as an experimental subject – a Baby Albert to de Selby’s Watson, as it were – but the only evidence to bolster this calumnious speculation is the sense of responsibility and obligation that de Selby displayed when discharging the debts accrued by his reprobate relative in later life.

You call that a screwdriver?
Needs more vodka, ya wowser!

Nor is quantity constant in that previous existence, but rather is a function of physical conformation. In our world, the amount of material stays the same when a sheet of plasticine is rolled into a ball, or a tall glass of juice is decanted into a wider glass, or two cylinders of ²³⁵U are telescoped into one, but this constancy is a perpetual source of surprise to infants. There is merit to Bassett’s description (in Appendix IV of his De Selby Compendium) of de Selby's experiments in household hydraulics: that they read like attempts to recreate those primal conditions by breaking down the conservation of quantity, somehow disposing in the process of up to 80,000 gallons of water in one week. In this interpretation the celebrated Water-box is the equivalent of the Large Hadron Accelerator.

Some of the practical inferences built by de Selby on this empirical foundation seem unexceptional, even anodyne. He expresses his confidence that "these new arrivals in our midst" are capable of overcoming their origins and assimilating into society as model citizens, assuming an effort on their part to learn the dominant language and relinquish any sentimental attachment to their previous environment. Other remarks may raise the eyebrows of contemporary readers, as for instance his call for an attitude of greater suspicion and heightened surveillance, given the uncertain nature of their loyalties and intentions. It is easy for the savant to point out how little we know about why infants have migrated – whether they are refugees, or driven by more sinister motives – but there are ethical dimensions to the harsher interrogation he promotes. Most probably this represents a resurgence of de Selby's long-standing gastric complaint, with concomitant clouding of his mental acuity.

Coming soon from the Riddled Amateur Dramatic Society

Nihilist: Ve vant ze money, Lebowski.
Nihilist #2: Ja, uzzervize ve kill ze girl.

My big hands, keep my big hand to myself

There is a reason why people stopped playing authentic Baroque bowls with the 15-kg balls made from carved trichobezoars and changed to the modern bowling balls instead. It's the same as why people play Mozart and Haydn symphonies on modern instruments instead of authentic Baroque krummhorns and theorbos and violas da gamba*... the old instruments were a load of pants.

But you try arguing with the revivalists and purists. In particular, try arguing with Another Kiwi when he's all "Let's have a night of Baroque Bowls at the Old Entomologist to raise money for the Christchurch Earthquake Fund!"

The idea is to roll the bowls into the giant beehive naturally labelled B, which is also known as a Ni-Hill and mentioned in many bowling songs. A rat with a big-smile emoticon is guarding the entrance. But here I am with both hands firmly wedged, and hello, will no-one help the widow's son? A pint of beer to the lips would be nice. No, everyone is either juggling balls and 'E's in the background, or joining a rousing chorus of 'Nihill'.

Tiny Tim is sewing threads through the cards again. Do not accept his invitation to a "friendly game" of canasta.

* Da Gamba was a man of honour in the Venetian lutenist mafia around 1680, one of the original "Gentlemen of Verona", notorious for causing his enemies' bowels to sound like an harp for Moab and their inward parts for Kirharesh.

And then we laughed because the room sailed away

This week's edition of Gardening for Lazy Feckers is all about the indoor shrubbery. It is only bare twigs and besoms at the moment, sprouting from the living-room floor, but be patient, the foliage will arrive later, possibly in the form of small green fishes.

This is what happens in a Level IV Surreality event (on the Prague scale). Note also that the walls have turned into crumbling distemper. This is a prodromic sign that heralds the imminent appearance of naked ladies. There are no cups or saucers; they all sprouted fur and ran away when the event reached Level III.

Bonus indoor shrubbery

By now we are used to the grand piano exploding.