Today in Viking News

It's going to get cold in the Shaky Isles

Gales in exposed coastal areas may create blizzard-like conditions in some places, and forecasters say the conditions could be record-breaking.

Hordur Thordarson of the MetService says the weather system is likely to last several days longer than the wintry blast in July, and may bring heavier snow

It is not mentioned as to whether or not Mr. Thordarson is one of the fat Vikings and thus will not be so affected by the cold.

Important news for Jean M. Auel*

One thing I learned from those old Time-Life books on The Emergence of Man (are they still in print, or have they been replaced by a Human Creation library?) was that our distant paleolithic ancestors lived in a state of primitive egalitarianism. All sharing the labour; no marks of rank except maybe the tribal elders get sticks; everyone wearing the same animal hides except slipping down on the nubile women umm that's all I remember.



But now we learn that even 45000 years ago, disparities of wealth were large enough to support a hereditary elite who could devote their lives to leisure and acquiring frivolous luxuries to advertise their status. Nothing else can explain the existence of specially-bred miniature mammoths with poodle-cut fur.**

I do not rate for Professor MacGonigal's absurd theory that the painting depicts a mythical mammoth that always eludes the hunters because of its special bouncy footwear.

* Alternative title: Bury me near the Secret Cave.
** Also fur bikinis.

Important news for mikey

I remember my father trying this approach back on the family farm in Tutira but eventually he admitted that the cows responded more productively to a herringbone-design milking shed.*

* Invented by Ron Sharp in 1952.

Our advice is to seek more experienced advisors

Seen at TPM. Further comment has been declared redundant and has registered for the Unemployment Benefit.

They would make the wrong sort of honey

With Colony Collapse Disorder continuing to ravage honey-bee populations in New Zealand,* bee-keepers are resorting to more radical ways of controlling its spread from infected colonies to healthy ones. Here an apiarist has painted her hives in camouflage patterns to conceal them from the diseased bees.

Field tests are also underway with luring infected bees into traps, using the fact that zombie social insects are attracted to brain-shaped balloons. No-one knows why.

This affinity was already known to E. H. Shepard in 1926:

Isn't it strange how zom-bees like brains?
Buzz buzz buzz, I wonder why they does.

Note how Shepard has also employed the idea that thought bubbles are shaped as brain cross-sections, and are more buoyant than speech balloons, thoughts being lighter than words.

Here at Riddled we are committed to bringing you the Customer the very latest in Speech Bubble Scholarship. In fact this goal is written into the corporate mission statement as a codicil (just after the sections about "coffee... tinned tomatoes... catfood" and "$25 on Vaginal Watering Can at 3:1 in the 11.30 at Trentham"), coming as a surprise to those of us who understood 'codicil' to be a brand of soothing antibiotic cream.

Sadly, we have not lavished the same level of attention on the evolution of thought-bubble conventions in the graphic arts, mainly because John Ptak hasn't delved into it we are slack tits.

* There in Vancouver, there in montreal, We are connected

UPDATED: Bonus Speech Balloon.
Archangel Uriel, Messenger of the Lord, insisted on having towel-shaped speech balloons so he could roll them up and flick them like a whip. Suffice to say that none of the other angels liked to share a shower with him in the lockers after work.

T' good auld Daze

I think we can agree that the England riots are not a good development and far from solving anything, beyond getting a new Teevee, it will make things worse as the Tories leap on the chance to stick it to the poor brown folks.
But here on the edge of the Empyre we have persons of the right stuff.
To whit veteran New Zild gabbler Paul Holmes.
He thinks Churchill would be appalled, and that things were better when women have to have four changes of dress a day, oh and

perhaps the old ways were the right ways. Perhaps they should shoot the thugs in the city streets.

because that has always worked in the past.
With so much flailing around it inevitable that some fleeting contact with reality would be made and here it is:

I mean, it is so catastrophically un-British. Or is it? They've lived for a long time with soccer hooliganism and lager louts in the UK.

Yes, the English have a long and glorious history of rioting and Churchill's own history had it's far share disorder and shootings.
All of which goes to show that Paul Holmes is an idiot who gets paid quite a lot for this drivel to bolster the sad lives of other people who don't know anything. I guess everyone has a purpose in this life.

Third Uncle

As a child, Jesus saw little of Joseph after the "irreconcilable differences" separation from Mary. He consoled himself that at least his mother had a large family, including a veritable cavalcade of briefly-encountered uncles.

Making the Baby Jesus Cry; examining the acoustical properties

The opportunity to hold the Isabella Rossellini Film Festival came at short notice, when Evangeline van Holsteren (chief barmaid at the Old Entomologist) let us use the big sports screen one night when the televised Monkey Butler Curling championships were cancelled.* The screening ignited an interest in the cinema across the Riddled Research Laboratory. In particular, an interest in cinema soundtracks.

We thought how much a horror-movie director might pay to have scary / horrible sounds synthesised to order, and rubbed our hands. Of course it helps that some of the staff have research experience in the acoustical properties of sounds designed by evolution to be as aversive and unendurable as possible.
It turns out that anonymous visitors to Riddled are willing to elicit 'pain cries' from their infants** and e-mail us the sound file, so long as we wear the White Labcoat of Authority and carry the Clipboard of Conviction and use the Explaining Voice to tell them "The experiment requires that you continue".

Standard protocol for eliciting pain cries:

But it hasn't been all jitter index and stridulation and subharmonics here in the laboratory. We also inveigled Ms. Galah Johnston from Tasmania into the Evolvamat. With the dormant DNA within her genome reactivated, she emitted a truly disturbing reptilian scrawk before flying out an unopened window. She was only drinking Lion Red so no-one would miss her.

It would be terrible to be gazumped with our research so far advanced, so imagine our concern to come across this paper:
Also the title of a lesser-known Hawkwind live album. The sounds tested for horribleness include "baby cry", "multiple baby"(3rd equal!), "cat spitting and howling", "fingers scraping down a blackboard", and "whoopee cushion". On reading it, thank FSM, the author has not seen the cinematographic money applications of his work.

He does refer to R. Blake's [1986] theory that baby cries are aversive because they resemble the warning calls of monkeys, a theory that makes more sense when you realise that R. Blake was in fact a cotton-top tamarin.

The automatic 'Related Articles' feature at the Applied Acoustics site came up with eclectic suggestions.


* On account of frozen yarbles and an outbreak of "calling a spayed a spayed" jokes.

** Dr Jan Raes gave a presentation to the 1992 Cry Workshop, explaining his standardised rubberband snapper -- a kind of calibrated slingshot -- to remove variability from the baby pain infliction.

Stealing from http://thatispriceless.blogspot.com/ again

Danaë using all the hot water in the house with another of her hour-long showers.

Widows Medium Flavour

Yes this is a code title for a certain well known media player which went doo lally on me yesterday. Hah! say the tech savvy amongst us, tell us something we do not know, grandad!
And yet, one would hope that a media player could "rip" (ATYFS) music from a CD and stick it inna file allowing old coots to listen to it when they liked. And it did that no problem, until yesterday when it decided by itself to store the ripped music somewhere and it wasn't telling where, so there. It may have added "millennium hand and shrimp."
But of course when you try and keep oldies from listening to their Joni Mitchell they will get all cranky on it and consult the Googacle. Which lead one to a whole slew, yes A SLEW, of pages about Winsome Medical Slayer and it's various ills and poo flingings.
On a whim I checked the tools tab for Wallows Medium Plonker and found that it seemed to have started redirecting ripped music into Where-The-Fuck, Ohio.dll for kicks. With short purposeful clicks I unclicked the box and this appeared to have worked until this morning when I loaded up dearest Joni but imagine my surprise when I turned on the computer later in the day and found a complete absence of Mitchells in the m's.
Aghast I searched for new fixes and found one which involved clearing a corrupt database. Obviously it had been paid to kick out Canuckistan music because of all the healthcare and such.
But the most interesting thing is that the whole BIG set of pages exist for fuck-ups that Willows Median Flayer makes and they are still embedding it in their operating system or whatever the kids call it these days.
It's almost like they don't care. Which would cast doubt on alla that corporate citizenship stuff, I guess.

Shoes that no man would want to wear

You can tell this painting was copied from a scene in an Edward Gorey story. Mistaken identity, tragic death... and look at the dogs in the background...

Pixies: Otherwise engaged

I was shaken out of my well-earned post-prandial power nap in the emergency back-up broom closet with the news that the rift in the temporal / spatial continuum had opened up again. And one might well respond that according to their employment contracts, it was the library pixies' job to maintain chronological consistency within the ambit of the Riddled Archives, but a fat lot of attention they pay attention to one.

So it was all hands to the tachyon pump, for values of "all hands" that consist of "mine", owing to Another Kiwi resting his eyes in the #1 Broom Closet (it locks from the inside) while tigris was engaged in vital research that involved shopping for two-way shoes.*

Our first edition of Gorey's 'Sopping Thursday' slipped through the rift -- evidently all the way back to 1495 -- before I could rectify the tachyon imbalance. That's my story, anyway, and I am confident that the insurance company will believe it.


* Advantages are (a) No-one can tell from the footprints which way you're going; (b) When one end wears through the sole you turn them around and keep walking; and (3) No-one knows if your feet face the wrong way.
Two-way shoe FAIL

Gardening with AK -springing into action

Now that the winter is getting settled in moving on. It is time to think of the garden. At first glance the prospects are grim:

But the keen florealist is not put off and girds their lions, puts on the bamboo armour with wings and sallies forth.

The first task should be the lawn and this is where the family's help is needed. Little Timmy drives the mower whilst sister Rowena clears the path of any large pets or drunken relatives and father carefully supervises from the Train Station game on facebook (fecking Diner cars, how do they work).

Of course, since it is Spring time, some plants are feeling the sap rise and it worthwhile to go equipped so as to avoid this sort of catastrophe.

That really spoiled the Old Entomologist "Bladderworts are our special friends and favourite character from Robinson Crusoe" outing, I can tell you.
But of course not all gardening activity ends in screaming death, sometimes it is a slow gurgling noise

But in the end it is about a job well done and who knows what magical kingdoms may be uncovered by your work?

Fecking Pixie infestation, I shall get the Roundup.

Repeal Gravity

An offshoot of the South Florida Tea Party called "Tea Party In Space" is looking to break apart the government's socialist takeover of the final frontier.

Andrew L. Gasser [...] explained that the group aims to bring the free markets into the space program, because right now, he say, there is only the government -- which amounts to socialism. "It is socialism when you have the government coming down and saying, 'this is what we want to build, and this is how we want you to build it,'" he said.

Evidently he has heard rumours of South Bay on Venus where the blanket trees and ham bushes and soap roots grow freely, and is angry at the government regulations that stop him migrating to a colony there.

Suckers Surprised by Unevenness of Break

So here in the Shire the foolish hobbitses have discovered that the Official All-Black mithril-mail Jersey, sold to them at $220 to show their support for the Great Patriotic Struggle, can be bought on-line in distant lands and shipped to the Shire for only $90.
Initially the dwarvish chthonic artisans of Adidas explained the discrepancy as the outcome of rate-of-exchange fluctuations. On sober reflection (and on receiving e-mails saying "Fluct you Germans too!" from Mr Patel at the corner dairy), they have reverted to the more sustainable explanation of "Shut up that's why" and informed the hobbits that a sincere patriot would willingly pay the higher price, meanwhile amending their on-line shops to remove the Shire from the list of shipping destinations. The Rugby Union, anticipating their slice of that unearned 140% extra profit, have lingered in the background while hoping the whole affair will blow over.

OK, so a multinational corporation -- having paid for its monopoly, and eager to maximise its profits -- is fostering "totemic attachment to a group of professional athletes" as the norm and as a reason for paying silly money for tokens of that attachment. That's what they do. But the hobbits are rancid and ropable due to Adidas thinking they are stupid enough to let themselves be exploited by a spurious sense of nationalism. They really are not clear on the concept of 'sports industry'.
Never mind; something shiny will soon distract them and they will forget about it until next time.

Who are you backing for the Wolves vs. Fulham on Sunday week, AK?

The play's the thing.

This year's Riddled Amateur Dramatic play in support of Mental health week is the "Spanish Tragedy or Heronimo is Mad Again" the madcap school farce. I Kidd you not, it is hard work.

My role is mainly hanging about as can be seen here where Smut and Tigris and Greenish Hugh have burst in on the scene when my character Horatio has been put up on the coat hooks by the evil Jones Minor.
Note the use of speech bubbles we are pioneering for the hard of hearing. Some old folks have been known to come to our performances just because it's warm and there are pies at 10am but Mrs Miggin's last Artichoke, carrot and cockle pies has mostly seen them off.

Competitive Brewing is Serious Work

I warned Evangeline van Holsteren that her idiot boy friend shouldn't be talking to those "journalists", but did she listen to Grandad Smut? Does anyone ever listen? Do they bogroll. Now the opposition have stolen our recipes.
But that's all water under the stable door. I think we still have a chance to win the Sir O'Ciss Trophy for Best Novelty Hangover with our special Borscht Beer... not to mention the Catas Trophy for "Least time to dissolve a cocktail umbrella". There is no way the other brewers will guess the secret ingredient.

Remember, drinkers, if you're not seeing wind-up crocodiles then it's not Riddled Ale!

E.T.I. (Eggstraterrestrial Intelligence)

Evolution at work! New Zealand birds are evolving protective camouflage.


They thought they were being so smart, constructing nests to look like sweetcorn tins and boxes of cheese, even down to the labels! Well it might fool predators but the ornithologists from the Biodiversity Museum were not so easily deceived.

Speaking of birds'-nests, US dollar notes are not completely valueless...