Because as any fule kno people who look the same, act the same.
Tuesday, June 7, 2011
Ah,much is explained
Because as any fule kno people who look the same, act the same.
There's one on the right side and there's two on the left
Idea for a fantasy novel in the Jorkens / club-story genre:
The tame animals / familiars belonging to various cartoonish supervillains have their own club.* Their contracts allow them a night off once a month from perching on their employers' shoulders, which they spend instead at the Daimonion swapping stories of supervillainish incompetence.
Some chapters centre on the perennial grumbling about supervillains who pretend that their devilishly brilliant schemes for world domination and wealth beyond the dreams of avarice are their own inspirations, and that the tame animal on the shoulder is just there to provide ironic counterpoint to their brilliance (or to implore "Don't go! Don't go!" in the case of Haze-Gaunt's spectral tarsier). How the club members would like to set the record straight.
The typical animal-on-supervillain-shoulder is a primate. The club members are still arguing whether to relax the rules and admit strap-on electronic memory-augments that have advanced from merely reminding their owners of appointments to controlling their neurochemistry and running their entire lives. Inevitably there are supervillains who want to show off with more exotic, more expensive animals but the pet-rhinoceros-perching-on-the-shoulder experiment has not been repeated.
An animal on one side is enough. Going for a pair is generally regarded as try-hard.
* Idea completely unstolen from the Sidekick Lounge.
UPDATED with bonus Gogol the alien telepath, (a) to show that cats belonging to supervillains are welcome in the Daimonion Club as long as they meet the 'sitting on shoulders rule', and (b) as an excuse to add the 'helping tigris' tag.
The tame animals / familiars belonging to various cartoonish supervillains have their own club.* Their contracts allow them a night off once a month from perching on their employers' shoulders, which they spend instead at the Daimonion swapping stories of supervillainish incompetence.Accompanied by his Gaki, the Biwa mulls over his
plan to conquer the world with pentatonal music.
plan to conquer the world with pentatonal music.
Some chapters centre on the perennial grumbling about supervillains who pretend that their devilishly brilliant schemes for world domination and wealth beyond the dreams of avarice are their own inspirations, and that the tame animal on the shoulder is just there to provide ironic counterpoint to their brilliance (or to implore "Don't go! Don't go!" in the case of Haze-Gaunt's spectral tarsier). How the club members would like to set the record straight.The typical animal-on-supervillain-shoulder is a primate. The club members are still arguing whether to relax the rules and admit strap-on electronic memory-augments that have advanced from merely reminding their owners of appointments to controlling their neurochemistry and running their entire lives. Inevitably there are supervillains who want to show off with more exotic, more expensive animals but the pet-rhinoceros-perching-on-the-shoulder experiment has not been repeated.
An animal on one side is enough. Going for a pair is generally regarded as try-hard.* Idea completely unstolen from the Sidekick Lounge.
UPDATED with bonus Gogol the alien telepath, (a) to show that cats belonging to supervillains are welcome in the Daimonion Club as long as they meet the 'sitting on shoulders rule', and (b) as an excuse to add the 'helping tigris' tag.
What do you say when you've eaten all the butter?
In other news, a US politician explains that "somewhere down the line individuals have to make sacrifices" to make sure "we're in a position to finance the wars in which we engage". Conversely, clean water and decent housing are mentioned as manifestations of "the gluttony of the federal government".Guns or butter.
Monday, June 6, 2011
I know you am
From a forum I chanced across today:
Join the Discourse!The fact that you are unable to spell puts you automatically on my ignore list.
[redacted]
Oh and I will do what I want....it's none of you're business.
Escape the feasting and the hunger, Not the monsters in our minds
"What's this on the fridge door?" I called out from the tea-room, in a querulous voice on account of it covering up the helpful and instructive "Open This Side" sign."That's the new dietary guideline chart," said tigris, "just delivered this morning by Dr Benway the Riddled staff doctor -- 'Early retirement is not the same as deregistration' -- and purveyor of veterinary advice (ask about this week's special on Blue Magic). Each blotch is a different food source."
"I had expected more Soylent Green," I observed, examining it more closely, relieved that no-one had installed a new and complicated version of Windows Orifice on the fridge, as the logo had led me to suspect. "I assume that the brown and black squares indicate the minimum recommended intake of chocolate and black pudding respectively.""It is an homage to Matisse's decoupage The Snail," vouchsafed Another Kiwi.
"Please do not say 'An homage'", I begged him; "it gives me an headache. Also, what happened to the old guideline chart?"
"That was the 2005 version," AK explained, "and according to Dr Walter C. Willett, it 'basically conveys no useful information'. I have been reading an history of the subject."Oh how we laughed at the thought that the new version does convey any useful information. Then I gave up trying to open the fridge and made do with an unchilled bottle from the cupboard.
According to Dr Robert C. Post [deputy director of the Department of Agriculture’s Center for Nutrition Policy and Promotion], the logo is intended more to make consumers "a little more concerned about what [they] choose to build a healthy day’s diet.”Apparently people are not sufficiently anxious about food at the moment.
Dr. Post said the U.S.D.A. had spent about $2 million to develop and promote the logo, including conducting research and focus groups and creating a Web site.(1) If the Department of Agriculture is in charge of providing your nutritional advice, you're basically fucked. You might as well advertise for a cat to guard your henhouse while you're at it. Or a fox to guard the pigeons, something like that.
(2) If New Zealand had applied the same policy to tobacco then the media would still be full of well-funded advertising campaigns encouraging consumers to smoke themselves to death, but each packet of tobacco products would carry a little colour-coded logo on the side showing how a well-balanced regime of nicotine consumption would consist of 25% cigarettes, 25% pipes and cigars, 25% snuff and chewing tobacco and 25% nicotine patches & gum.
Sunday, June 5, 2011
Rambling on my mind
Today, in NZ, is The Queens Birthday holiday. We assume that this means that we take a moment to think about our sovereign in all her glory and the joy that being in the Commonwealth brings us. By and large, it is not so bad. We have an athletics meeting every 4 years when NZ can try to convince itself that we haven't gone backwards in world competitions and that focussed individuals can beat subsidized semi-professionals and professionals from other countries.
We get to feel that we belong to something bigger than just us, Australia ( who would rather not be associated with us) and assorted Pacific Islands (whom we would really rather not talk about) away down in a neglected corner of the Pacific Ocean.
The royals are an entertaining bunch, in the sense of "Neighbours From Hell" and really cannot be said to have all that much bearing on modern NZ, until we have a natural disaster when they always send a nice card and even have one of them come here. The current government, whilst not a natural disaster, should qualify us for a constant stream of cards, I'm just sayin'
But lately the empire that's dying on it's arse that has captured most of my attention is the US. I tread very carefully around the internet like a person in a custard pie minefield because a wrong step will expose one to the sort of deranged babbling that we would avoid in the street. And it's not as if the current administration is fixing any of the structural rottenness that has lead to the present malaise, if anything they encourage it whilst being decried for fixing it, which they are not doing. Meanwhile Colourful Krazies ping about the pin-ball machine of American politics re-arranging history, making shit up, trying to out crazy the opposition in the crazy stakes. I throws my hands up in horror!
New Zild, of course, has it's own band of loonies, buggerising everything they touch, tossing widows and orphans into the street from second story windows. Even if they lived on the ground floor they are taken upstairs to be thrown out. These people are proud of the damage that they have done to the economy and society and say that if they are elected they will do MOAR, because obviously we like it. Which is the worrying bit, because we do. The polls show that government support has decreased by only a marginal amount, New Zilders are taking it like the good strong folks they are and in fact bending over for more.
Never mind that Bhutanese refugees, here, are beginning to think fondly of the camps they lived in on the Nepalese border and that Mumbai entrepreneurs will be out sourcing their call centres to here in a few years.
Talkback hosts who are angrily obsessed by their own rectums exhort us to be meaner to each other and not to have tolerance for anything except Dominant White Male Culture.
Through the froth one can discern that dole bludgers (persons on unemployment benefit who do not really look for work) are still stealing valuable tax money that we could be giving to the Army or the Prison Service ( not that they do anything except "provide prisoners with a Holiday Camp"). Lotta anger out there and due to slick marketing it gets directed in precisely the wrong place.
While the population is distracted by sports and Lotteries from thinking about anything more complex than the weather, outside, right now.
SIGH.
If it weren't for poetry, cute robot kittens and the intertubes life would get pretty bleak really.
Thanks
We get to feel that we belong to something bigger than just us, Australia ( who would rather not be associated with us) and assorted Pacific Islands (whom we would really rather not talk about) away down in a neglected corner of the Pacific Ocean.
The royals are an entertaining bunch, in the sense of "Neighbours From Hell" and really cannot be said to have all that much bearing on modern NZ, until we have a natural disaster when they always send a nice card and even have one of them come here. The current government, whilst not a natural disaster, should qualify us for a constant stream of cards, I'm just sayin'
But lately the empire that's dying on it's arse that has captured most of my attention is the US. I tread very carefully around the internet like a person in a custard pie minefield because a wrong step will expose one to the sort of deranged babbling that we would avoid in the street. And it's not as if the current administration is fixing any of the structural rottenness that has lead to the present malaise, if anything they encourage it whilst being decried for fixing it, which they are not doing. Meanwhile Colourful Krazies ping about the pin-ball machine of American politics re-arranging history, making shit up, trying to out crazy the opposition in the crazy stakes. I throws my hands up in horror!
New Zild, of course, has it's own band of loonies, buggerising everything they touch, tossing widows and orphans into the street from second story windows. Even if they lived on the ground floor they are taken upstairs to be thrown out. These people are proud of the damage that they have done to the economy and society and say that if they are elected they will do MOAR, because obviously we like it. Which is the worrying bit, because we do. The polls show that government support has decreased by only a marginal amount, New Zilders are taking it like the good strong folks they are and in fact bending over for more.
Never mind that Bhutanese refugees, here, are beginning to think fondly of the camps they lived in on the Nepalese border and that Mumbai entrepreneurs will be out sourcing their call centres to here in a few years.
Talkback hosts who are angrily obsessed by their own rectums exhort us to be meaner to each other and not to have tolerance for anything except Dominant White Male Culture.
Through the froth one can discern that dole bludgers (persons on unemployment benefit who do not really look for work) are still stealing valuable tax money that we could be giving to the Army or the Prison Service ( not that they do anything except "provide prisoners with a Holiday Camp"). Lotta anger out there and due to slick marketing it gets directed in precisely the wrong place.
While the population is distracted by sports and Lotteries from thinking about anything more complex than the weather, outside, right now.
SIGH.
If it weren't for poetry, cute robot kittens and the intertubes life would get pretty bleak really.
Thanks
Friday, June 3, 2011
Skull-blogging: Broken-symmetry edition
Cranio-sacral therapists believe that the cranium is sacred. To express their spirituality they build more-or-less skull-shaped churches --
-- No wait that's not true. Cranio-sacral therapy turns out to be an outgrowth of osteopathy and is all about "the cyclic movement of inhalation and exhalation of the cranium". The cranial bones apparently flex in rhythmic pulsation, pumping fluid along the spine, with the sacrum at the other end flexing in syncopation to pump the fluid back.
This is all very well. The mirrored role of cranium and pelvis is relevant to J. G. Ballard's interests:
But Ballard's Pushmepullyou model of human evolution is not the only way of accounting for the symmetry. It could also be that the current human architecture is a degenerate, truncated form of an earlier repeating design -- capable of indefinite extension -- where the pelvis of one sub-unit serves as the skull of the next sub-unit in the chain (Smith, 1961).
Sub-units bud at the end and occasionally break off for reproductive purposes, like the epitokes of some polychaete worms.
-- No wait that's not true. Cranio-sacral therapy turns out to be an outgrowth of osteopathy and is all about "the cyclic movement of inhalation and exhalation of the cranium". The cranial bones apparently flex in rhythmic pulsation, pumping fluid along the spine, with the sacrum at the other end flexing in syncopation to pump the fluid back.
...the restrictions of nerve passages are said to be eased, the movement of cerebrospinal fluid through the spinal cord is said to be optimized, and misaligned bones are said to be restored to their proper position.Over at Respectful Insolence, a commenter wonders whether CST can help people who have managed to lodge their heads up their bums, but we will not be having with that at Riddled which is a family blog.
This is all very well. The mirrored role of cranium and pelvis is relevant to J. G. Ballard's interests:
But Ballard's Pushmepullyou model of human evolution is not the only way of accounting for the symmetry. It could also be that the current human architecture is a degenerate, truncated form of an earlier repeating design -- capable of indefinite extension -- where the pelvis of one sub-unit serves as the skull of the next sub-unit in the chain (Smith, 1961).
Sub-units bud at the end and occasionally break off for reproductive purposes, like the epitokes of some polychaete worms.At a certain point in your adulthood, you would notice a small version of yourself sprouting from your rear end. This individual would be your 'epitoke'. You would referred to as the 'atoke'.
You may have several epitokes joined in a line behind you.
The last time Zombie Ballard showed up in the Riddled tea-room to hang around the akvavit cooler, it didn't seem the right moment to engage him in conversation about this theory; he was too busy moaning for 'COLONNSSSS... COLONNSSSS...".
Thursday, June 2, 2011
Won't get fooled again
Buy us a few beers and try again.
I've seen too much, wipe away my eyes
Mere teething troubles
Attempts to perfect the Riddled Evolvamat fell into 
Not to mention the time Another Kiwi tried to conquer the world with his huge brain and his brainwashed Treen armies after an accident with the cruise control.** Mere teething troubles!However, the decision on the part of the World Health Organisation to place cellphones on the list of possible carcinogens to be treated with caution has inspired us afresh. "Well," we thought, beckoning to mikey's monkey butler for another round of cactustinis, "if microwaves can somehow target enough energy to the brain to flip molecules and disrupt DNA expression, then Hello new sensory organ!"
I am vague on the details of how the pineal gland is supposed to evolve into an image-forming microwave eye, or indeed how the focussing mechanism is supposed to work, though it may well involve a Fresnel zone plate on the forehead. Fortunately that is Evolution's job; now that the environment is rich with structured information at centimetre wavelengths, I am confident that Evolution will take advantage thereof, given a few million years, or 30 minutes in the Evolvamat.
There are great darknesses. Farther than time itself. And beyond the darkness... a light that glows, changes... and in the center of the universe... the eye that sees us all.
Second experimental subject Greenish Hugh was enticed into the apparatus with the promise of the mock-truffle lunchtime special from Mrs Miggins' Pie Cart. It transpired, however, that some of the settings must have been bumped during attempts to secure Mrs Cat within the apparatus as the first experimental subject, or the subsequent search for the first-aid kit.The worst part of his current condition is his annoying habit of perching on shoulders and repeating the two words left in his vocabulary, "Don't go! Don't go!"
* A beyance is that narrow space between the couch and the wall where all the cat toys get stuck, and you have to shift all the furniture to retrieve them.
** Just saying, do not put your foot down on the oscillator pedal.
UPDATED with bonus picture of Riddled two-seater Evolvamat.We should probably upgrade to the model with the Faraday cage to keep the orbs away.
Wednesday, June 1, 2011
All work and no play makes Sarah an angry bear
Tens of thousands of emails to and from Sarah Palin during her time as Alaska governor are to be released within the next week after more than two years of obstruction and delay.Woo hoo what juicy tid-bits await us??
Although 24,199 emails sent between Palin and her aides are to be released, 2,415 are being held back by the state law department on legal grounds. Some of the emails to be released will include redactions.So all the stuff about Grandpa McCain and banning books in the Wasilla library and how much Griftgeld she gets from the oil companies will be missing.
The reasons she gave for not giving the e-mails out when asked and the denouement are the highlight of the whole thing.
When the request for emails was initially made, the cost to each news organisation was initially put at $15m (£9.2m), by Palin's office, possibly to dissuade them. As it turns out, the cost is only $725.97 in copying fees, plus shipping costs.Will the new doco by her BFF have "Yackity Sax" in the soundtrack?
Source
Joanna Braithwaite, painter of orbs
The fact is that in other painting she glorifies the furry lifestyle. I am not saying that we should shun Ms Braithwaite but a certain degree of suspicion is justifiable.
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