"They migrate to new places and particularize, whereupon languages mutate, costumes and conventions elaborate, aesthetic symbols take on fresh meanings."

To celebrate "Act Like a Jack Vance Character" Day we kicked it Nolde-school as we say at Riddled (thereby revealing an unhealthy preoccupation with Danish-German expressionist painters) and sought inspiration from the Rhodomontades or Purple Mountains of Pampas, the second incontinent of Buriden 4337, where the Salamanders and Salamogyns stack up their dwellings in curious, ramshackle congeries.

Owing to a lapse or lacuna in stocking the colony ship which settled Buriden 4337, the on-board library consisted of one single book, and generations of colonists spent the voyage reading and re-reading the battered copy of Frog & Friends. It was inevitable that amphibians would come to occupy a crucial role in their culture. No doubt you are all familiar with Baron Bodissey's monograph on the place of the newt in the Salamandrin world-view, numbered as one of the Appendices to Volume Eight of his slight and by no means comprehensive Life.

Perhaps now Evangeline van Holsterin's idiot boyfriend will learn not to trust advice from Swearing Bob about proper Rhodomontane etiquette. Here he is shown greeting his paramour with the aid of his batrachian buddy "Hoppy", but the gestures are all wrong so it amounts to a crude invitation to amplexus. He has been pwned, or pignorated as we say at Riddled. I do not think there will be toad-in-the-hole tonight. He will be dealing to his tadpole by himself.


Tradition demanded that the regulars at the Old Entomologist defend Evangeline's honour by pelting him with rambutans and hairballs IN ACCORDANCE WITH THE PROPHECY. But the alternative is sodomy by mulletfish so he didn't complain.

Never mind, he didn't miss much: Salamandrin amplexus is not as much fun as it looks.

Afterwards it was the two-for-one special on Spiced Parsnip Porter and Sphinx Purge. I'm sure that Another Kiwi and Space-Time Eddie just rested their eyes momentarily, and shame on whoever it was who seized that brief opportunity to doodle on their faces with a felt-pen. The embarrassment of a square on the forehead has caused Eddie to regress to his two-year-old state (it's quite disconcerting when he does that). AK is chortling quietly at the stripling's discomfiture but HA HA he has no idea that he is himself similarly bedizened with a backward 'D'; I have to admit that's funny.