You know what they say about books with big footnotes

A commontater at LGM points out that when it comes to human sexuality you can't tell the book from its cover.

If the digit-ratio theory is correct about finger length and sexual orientation, you can find out more by looking at the index.

"Pipes, philosophy, and aircraft-carrier toilets." "I'll take 'What things don't hold water?' for $200, Alex."

In a disappointing development, the forward-thinking legislators of Wyoming have dropped their intention of acquiring their own aircraft carrier. This proposal had been part of their contingency planning -- hatched after a marathon back-to-back screening of all three Mad Max movies -- for an apocalyptic future of social and economic collapse where federal power has unravelled and individual states must see to their own defense. Evidently it came to their notice that Wyoming is a landlocked region, lacking ports such as might accommodate and provision such a ship and its crew of 5000.

This news dovetails with some intriguing documents recovering during a recent expedition in the Riddled time machine. The following photograph appears to show Wyoming -- now calling itself Intersol -- hovering above the Mediterranean Sea, en route for Russia.


Additional records (right) show how the state legislators, to console themselves for their nautical shortcomings, will use Blish Graviton Polarity Generators to tear the entire state from the underlying mantle, turning it in its entirety into an airborne aircraft carrier.


Confusingly, Intersol will also become a name for the square hole left in the ground by the state's levitation. Apparently it will become a focus of iron mining.

This all came as an surprising revelation to the Riddled Research Laboratory, where we have considerable experience in the well-established field of airborne-aircraft-carrier technology. We would never have expected them to opt for a heavier-than-air design. These are superficially appealing...


... but they are vulnerable to Dalek attacks and temporal rifts breaking through to the end of the universe.
The smart money has always been on solar-powered Zeppelins.

Colour version is smaller, due
to extra weight of the paint

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This change in plan will also come as a blow to the US Navy, which had hoped to sell the USS Bush to Wyoming and saddle someone else with its problematical plumbing:

The Navy’s newest aircraft carrier has a messy problem. Since deploying in May, the Norfolk, Va.-based carrier George H.W. Bush has grappled with widespread toilet outages, at times rendering the entire ship without a single working head.

Now they are stuck with it. Unless it is caught in a mysterious time-storm and carried back to the neighbourhood of Pearl Harbour in 1941.

If the crew of one newly-launched ship are forced into bladder retention by its state-of-the-art vacuum-plumbing system -- fitted by an outside company that moved from cruise-liner design to the more lucrative world of Pentagon contracts -- it's likely that other ships coming down the slipway will suffer from the same problem. So Plan C is to design a Toilet-Ship to meet the entire fleet's hygiene needs:

When emptied of people, the interior is steel gray. When crowded, it's green, a comfortable acid green. Sunlight comes in through portholes in the higher of the bulkheads (the Rücksichtslos here lists at a permanent angle of 23° 27'), and steel washbowls line the lower bulkheads. At the end of each sub-latrine are coffee messes and hand-cranked peep shows. [...]

The Rücksichtslos itself is the issue of another kind of fanaticism: that of the specialist. This vessel here is a Toiletship, a triumph of the German mania for subdividing. “If the house is organic,” argued the crafty early Toiletship advocates, […] “Then the Toiletship is to the Kriegsmarine as the bathroom is to the house. Because the Navy is organic, we all know that, ha-hah!” [General, or maybe Admiral, laughter.] The Rücksichtslos was intended to be the flagship of a whole Geschwader of Toiletships. But the steel quotas were diverted clear out of the Navy over to the A4 rocket program.

Hey Wyoming, watch out for midair collisions with other square landlocked states that also have turned themselves into flying airfields! Especially Colorado!

UPDATE: Bonus phuture philately.
Further research reveals that the future independent Wyoming -- under its new name of Intersol -- will issue square stamps.



The idea that the shape of a nation's stamps should match the geographical outline of the nation itself was discussed at the Congress of Vaduz in 1892. The French and Spanish delegations were keen, but the proposal was vetoed by the Norwegians.

The rats fuck themselves

The perfect gift for someone who already has self-freuding schaden:
Santorum invites Democratic voters to gatecrash polls and support him in the Republican primary.

Here in upside-downy land, "I would be the Democrats' preferred opponent for the Presidential election" sounds a lot like "I have less chance than Romney of beating Obama". Maybe it's that American accent.

Their promises rust

In the olden days, Smut and I, after a day of embroidering lavender pillows for use at mouse orphanages, would sit around the fire talking of this and that. A topic that came up quite frequently in those far off days of ought 10, was that of the Maori party.
"I think" Smut would opine "that the emergence of a strong Maori middle class is a good thing and that the manifestation of political acumen in the shape of the Maori party will be a good influence on New Zealand political discourse"
"Ah ha" I would O'oak " I think that I have been sitting on a doughnut in my back pocket and it has mullocked my trousers."
Pausing briefly to consider the etymology of the word mullocked and ascertaining that it is somehow connected with the Norwegian practise of fermenting Herrings, we would consider the ramifications of the new political party, as it was then. 
You see, this was a different sort of political party...yes that light at the end of the tunnel is the 9.15 train from the Teherinikau Steel Works.
The ruling National Government needs the Maori party to get stuff done and one of the things they most, most, most wanted to do was to flog off the country,s infrastructure to rich mates overseas have an orderly process of selling state assets.
But the Maori Party said NO! from athwart the flow of history. They said "There is this treaty thing, which the whole country's history is been based on and if you sell of the state farm, you have to put in the ownership papers that the new owners will respect the treaty". This made the Nats a bit nervous and consultations were held. Pita Sharples, the co-leader of the Maori party stated it plain as plain.

"We do not support asset sales. I want to make that quite clear.
Dr Sharples also clarified comments about if asset sales were to proceed, what the proposed role of iwi should be.
"If privatisation of state owned assets occurs it must be managed in a manner that is consistent with Te Tiriti o Waitangi.

and:

“The Crown cannot act in a manner inconsistent with the principles of the Treaty of Waitangi.”
But the Maori Party says that is a total no-go.
“It’s a deal-breaker for Maori,” says Maori Party co-leader Pita Sharples.

 But wait! Careful consultations and re-considerings followed and the Maori Party rolled over and got it's tummy tickled. Because the single line that makes all the difference to what they were going to walk out over is here:

The treaty obligations will apply to the Crown only, not the private investors buying shares.

So, um, that thing we were going to walk out of government because of,  is not that important, really.
Which is business as usual, innit.

Also playing up:

The Riddled Dream Machine.
I warned everyone that it was a mistake to cross-wire it to the Facial-Muscle Faradiser. But did anyone listen?? DTB.

According to Another Kiwi, the Facial Processing Module in the fusiform gyrus needs a new foofoo valve, but that will cost enough $$$ to clean out the chocolate-bikky small-change jar in the tea-room.
I reckon that if we just grab whatever's on hand to cover up the parts in the dream where faces should be, no-one will ever notice the difference.

I'm sure I shall awaken soon.

There was this award...

Laura gave it to me as a friend award which was a very nice thing to do especially as I am such a bad person. Thankyou Laura.
Seven ranadom things about me:
I feel that I should give Brussels Sprouts a try. How bad can they be?
I helped find out why three kakapos died. I had nothing to do with it and can prove that I was in Guatamala
at the time.
My best score on Facebook scrabble is 150 for "Cowards". I never even knew that Noel had a brother.
I left home and went to live in Wellington at the age of 17. This did not go well due to immaturity and it needed effort. I will recover from this one day.
I have been reading "Alice in Sunderland" by Bryan Talbot. You should read it too. There is a story in the book that covers only one panel (it is a graphic novel and there are many many stories in it) about the English comedian Les Dawson being so scared by something that happened to him backstage at the Sunderland  Empire theatre, that he refused to ever work there again. Not that there was a lot of "ever again" left for Les, he died 18 months later. It is one of my favourite mysteries.
Another is The Lights over Kaikoura  from New Zild in 1978. Buggered if I know what they were. Radar and visual confusion exercises?
When I was 10 I wanted to be a Foreign Correspondent onna radio so that I could talk to my dad from a long way away for free. He was always offering advice to those people. I even applied for a job as a Radio New Zealand cadet but due to my total lack of talent I did not get the job. Also, this job might have required effort. 
I am not going to list the rules.
The awards I am making are:
Internet Friends: You. I am humbled by your wit, friendliness and your intelligence. One day I might be a better person.
Esteemed colleagues: Smut Clyde, tigris.
Best seasonal ale or ale product that may or may not contain nuts: Riddled Christmas Ale 2011. Described by Robert Parker as "Yowser! Sockerooni, baybeeeee!

Dlogging: Riding the Underground, swimming in sweat edition

As any fule kno, the Underground networks of the world are interconnected by the power of Narrativium so that one may travel anywhere if one knows the passwords. This is a great convenience for those times when the Riddled time-machine is out of action and Greenish Hugh reckons that no-one's making spare fan-belts for that model any more.

One also needs the timetables in your original Enochian, as recorded in the Metronomicon, the Book of Binding of the Tube. With luck the library pixies will be feeling cooperative and will let you borrow the Riddled copy of Abdul Al-Hazmat's blasphemous tome, or otherwise you will not be able to join us on the picnic expedition to Homeward.

For it happens that Homeward does have its own train network, and is therefore accessible.

We will visit the Crookball people, who live atop Lonely Tower (at the end of a great stone staircase with 2000 steps) and play the swallow-tub trumpet and are photosynthetic.

Homeward is hard to describe, but try to think of about a hundred skyscrapers all joined together and surrounded by a moat with a drawbridge over it, and you'll get some idea. The towers are of many colours, and there are bathing pools and gardens amongst them, also switchback railways running from tower to tower, and water-chutes from top to bottom.

The Black Orbs on the moat are a serious impediment to shipping.
Homeward is riddled with sliding panels, concealed doors and secret passageways and tunnels. These provide a never-ending succession of surprises to its owner, although they are entirely familiar to his adversaries, the Vodalarians Badfort gang.

These were constructed by Wizard Blenkinsop -- clearly a Cacogen or Hierodule -- much as Father Inire constructed a similar network of Ames-room-perspective corridors within the interstices of the Citadel of the Autarch:

“Oh, no. All these things [...] make up what we call the Second House. They are the work of Father Inire, who was called by the first Autarch to create a secret palace within the walls of the House Absolute. You or I, my son, would no doubt have built a mere suite of concealed rooms. He contrived that the hidden house should be everywhere coextensive with the public one.”

Perhaps Homeward and the Citadel are the same building. Only the library pixies know for sure. Clearly there is room for a cross-over novel in which Uncle and the Old Monkey are revealed to be Baldanders and Doctor Talos respectively.

Gridlogging

I have only now become aware that some kind person has uploaded PDF copies of four otherwise-unobtainable Uncle books to the grid.

Excellent question. In addition, what shall we dlog about?
When all else fails, food foraging is always a safe topic for a dlog-post.

Look, look, master, here come two religious caterpillars

Dietary supplement for the iron-deficient:

[h/t Boing Boing]

Non-dietary supplement for the irony-deficient

Here is a statement from the quondam leader of a church whose foundational raison d'etre was to allow a state leader to redefine the concepts of 'marriage' and 'divorce':

The state does not 'own' the institution of marriage. Nor does the church. The honourable estate of matrimony precedes both the state and the church, and neither of these institutions have the right to redefine it in such a fundamental way.

Here is a dire warning from the quondam leader of a religion with a holy book consisting largely of polygamous genealogies:

If marriage is redefined once, what is to stop it being redefined to allow polygamy?

For extra LOLZ, both FAILED statements are from the same person. We also learn that "Throughout history and in virtually all human societies marriage has always been the union of a man and a woman", which is true for definitions of "woman" that include "female child".

We look forward to future pronouncements in which the ex-Archbish reminds us that the honourable estate of 'priest' precedes both the state and the church, and neither of these institutions have the right to redefine it in such a fundamental way as to include women.

Sneak preview from the set of The Hobbit

Purists will cavil, but at Riddled we whole-heartedly support Peter Jackson's bold decision to reimagine hobbit architecture. Why must their culture be ossified? Why not allow them the flexibility to make room in their traditions for the influence of Isengardish methods and technologies?
Admittedly, the new concrete construction is missing a certain charm.


Purists may also be surprised by the umm earthy language that has been scripted for the characters, but with Billy Connolly playing Dáin Ironfoot, what the feck do they expect?

Quit your whining peons, do you think it's easy to go on an all expenses paid cruise?

The inestimable No Right Turn carries this story of the wonders of capitalism.

ANZ boss Mike Smith is taking his top staff on a $1.75 million cruise just weeks after axing 1000 workers to save money.
The exclusive Silver Shadow cruise of Malaysia's Langkawi islands boasts gourmet food, drinks and luxury suites. Each of the 200 passengers - 100 staff and their guests - will have a personal butler.
Just days after sacking 1000 staff - 600 from its Docklands (Melbourne) HQ - ANZ revealed a $1.48 billion quarterly profit.

Well, what are you looking at? D'you think it was easy to sign 1,000 "Fuckoffsky" letters? These are tough times, needing tough decisions made by the best and brightest tough folks.  Also do you realise the work that will have to be done to hide the profit so the jolly old tax department doesn't get it's legally mandated share? This will need many careful exploratory trips to the Cayman Islands.

"Spirit of the Age" blogging: Your android replica is playing up again;* when she comes she moans another's name

Who would win? Groin-kicking Galatea...

...or a malfunctioning deep-space companion?

My money is on Galatea. She's learned some wrestling moves along the way. Look at that neck-lock she has on Pygmalion!

* See also.

The Greeks have a word for it. Desperation.

What could go wrong?
There is another view.

 There is no historical precedent in the world for such breakneck privatisation. The closest parallel is the Treuhand disposal in East Germany after reunification, but that took 12 years, and the manager was "shot dead" by the Red Army Faction, Mr Mitropoulos said with a thin smile. 

But, is this going to stop the brave New Zild government from boldly going down the plughole? Shoot no!

Spelling error fixed with great idiocy.

"Spirit of the Age" blogging: I would've liked you to have been deep frozen too

The concept behind the Riddled cryogenics program is to activate the cryogenes that (as any fule kno) lie dormant within the uncharted folds of the human genome, waiting until they are needed to switch cell metabolism into the solid-state frozen-protoplasm mode. Contra Substance McGravitas, they have nothing to do with blubbing like a gurl.

Stealing pictures from Jennifer

Rlim Shaikorth

It is not clear what strange transformations will occur upon the demethylation of the cryogenes. One source informs us that only those puissant necromancers who have undergone the ice-change are fit to dwell with Rlim Shaikorth the Great White Worm upon the high ramparts of his iceberg / citadel Yikilth. There is some doubt whether their metabolism can be restored to the normal mode afterwards.*

For long months the experiments did not yield encouraging results, although Another Kiwi is adamant that the test animals are showing brain activity in fMRI scans. It may be that we are not freezing them fast enough. Thus there has been gnashing of teeth in the Riddled Research Laboratory, and lashing out in anger upon the innocent Mettler Balance, and thoughtful silences broken only by the squeak of chalk upon blackboard and the periodic splosh of gingernut in teacup.

But now the answer has arrived, in the form of a suggestion -- from another reliable source -- that extreme acceleration may operate in a similar transformative way to extreme sub-zero temperatures, if only it is high enough.

So our cunning plan now is to activate those pesky genes by imposing two abrupt environmental changes at once -- flash-freezing and deceleration. I hope this will mollify the casual visitors and the unsympathetic inspectors from the Animal Welfare Unit, and assuage their concerns when we are seen catapulting goldfish tanks from high windows to land in the nitrogen cryostat.

There have certainly been transformations. The goldfish undergoes changes. Radical changes.



So far the results have not been replicable from one test-run to the next.


Is it about a Fishcicle?

* "...no man could depart therefrom and live again in solar warmth and terrene air, having been habituated to the coldness and thin ether."

What's the unsafe-word?

Why we were forced to disable the Verification-Word feature.

What's the safe word?

A new form of Cricket BDSM has been unveiled at the sports desk of TVNZ, which is not where one might have looked, instinctively, for new directions in bondage.
In case some bright spark notices it we reproduce the headline here.

Sri Lanka punnel Australia in Sydney.

O'course now blogger thinks that all the post should be in super-size and bolded. ha ha ,bless.

Speaking on condition of anonymity, a member of the Sri Lankan team did not say that they had been "cruisin' the internets for some time lookin' for something new and one night, there it was!"
Punneling is new on the scene but is thought to consist of lewd sextional word play which cricket, with it's no balls, maiden overs and sticky wickets, lends itself to, quite readily.
Or maybe the gentle reader has a better idea of what punneling might entail?

Service announcement

I'm sorry, Blogger is being a fucknozzle. The word verification is hidden or I can't find it or something so it has to stay on. If tigris or Smut can find a way to turn it off, please do. I'm about 2 steps away from leaving the whole shitpile behind. It seems to be connected to the unwanted changes they made at the end of the last year. Fuck them.

As he rolls another number and he counts

People are complaining that Finance Minister Bill English has no idea how much money will accrue from privatising gubblement assets. Back during the election a figure may well have been promised for the balancing of budgets and the proving of fiscal responsibility... but now “It’s not our best guess, it’s just a guess. It’s just some numbers, and that might mean they look roughly right for forecasting purposes.”

So what is their best guess?HA HA such figures are reserved for subscribers to the Premium Service. You cannot expect English to give them away.

The important thing is that the numbers “look roughly right for forecasting purposes.”

Fill up the kindness cups

Isn't it always the same? All it takes is a rumour to circulate that the Riddled Amateur Film Society is thinking of remaking Kubrick's Clockwork Orange, and suddenly all the local bars are being redecorated along a Korova Milkbar theme, the publicans hoping that we will use them as locations.

Novelty serving taps are all very well but for some reason I have gone right off moloko with drencrom today.

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On other matters, to commenter wiley, a belated Happy Birthday / typical Antipodean Valentine.