In an alternative reality, the denizens of 100-Aker Wood were a team of crime-fighting superheroes

"Lend us the Riddled time machine!" they begged. "Promise we will not use it to meddle with important historical events!"
This never ends well.

Workshop of the Telescopes #2: Irritation of Christ

A NZ bishop knows what it is like to suffer crucifixion. Apparently it was a brutal form of execution favoured by the Romans, in which numpties who opened their pieholes and let the stupid out became the recipients of other people's mockery. It was a combination of Kristallnacht, the Spanish Inquisition, the Gestapo and a high-tech lynching.

I bet he's kicking himself flaying himself in the manner of Saint Bartholomew now, that he never thought of comparing himself to Galileo (who famously joined the honoured ranks of "denialist" when the church officials refused to look at the moon through his telescope).

UPDATE: If you believe the rest of the Anglican hierarchy, John Gray has been stood down and a Vicar-General -- which is the spiritual counterpart of a Lieutenant-General -- has been appointed to his episcopal responsibilities. Gray himself rejects the hierarchy's power to censure him and insists that he retains his rank for he ANSWERS TO NO-ONE BUT GOD. Perhaps there will be a Great Schism and an Avignon Bishopric with rival silly hats.

Left: Great Schism

Chocolate Bunnies go punk

Packed for shipping:

If the Doktorling has any sense she will save the packaging for re-use next Crossmas.

...additional seasonal imagery recycled from two years ago because lazy.

Bears do not shit in the woods. Bears have never shat in the woods

Right up to 10 days ago the Republican Party's bloggers and ideologues seemed to be a lock for the 2015 IgNobel Prize in Theology, with their critiques of the Pope for propounding an insufficiently authoritarian and indeed borderline-heretical variety of Catholicism. Not to mention the attacks on American Jews for their treasonous disloyalty to one faction of Israeli politics. But suddenly the Chinese Communist Party are looking like strong contenders with their new-found insights and exegeses into the doctrines of Tibetan Buddhism.

The Dalai Lama has mooted the possibility of leaving his next death as his final one, and not returning to the Karmic Wheel for a 15th incarnation. Rolling their eyes in vicarious embarrassment at his ignorance of his religion, Party duckspeakers were obliged to assplain the non-optional nature of reincarnation:

Mr. Zhu accused the Dalai Lama of trampling on sacred traditions.

It was not entirely clear how they intend to drag Tenzin Gyatso back from Nirvana and incarnate him against his will. It may involve यम Death-God's waveguide technology for abstracting an atman psychic soliton resonance from the Bridge of Heaven. Failing that, perhaps the 15th Dalai Lama will be an AI.

Tenzin Gyatso has previously set the fox amid the hen-house by conceding that his next incarnation could be female.

Can't see the baby for the bathwater

The post corresponding to this title appears to have been thrown out with the forest.

Black planet hanging over the highway

There will aggressive drinking and shouting at clouds if those miniature planets do not get out of my face soon, for they are annoying and distracting beyond endurance as they weave around in a complex Douglas-Ouyang dance, as if fooled by the two meanings of 'orbit'.

And are the helpdesk team at IxCorp actually any help? ARE THEY BOGROLL. "Small vision-occluding planets are not covered by the warranty of Tleilaxu artificial eyes, for the feature is mentioned in the small print of the documentation and the User License Agreement." I certainly hope that "conversations may be recorded for the purposes of performance evaluation"; so record this!

Miniature planets are more fun when they are a few orders of magnitude larger and you can poke them right in the eye of the hurricane. HUR HUR your storm is a goatse!

IgNobel Prize Nominations: Cell Biology

Atanas Todorov Atanasov's interesting and challenging theory that cells have their own central nervous systems are inspired by Ulam's noöcyte research, and by James Blish's observations of paramecium language skills.

It is a good question. Are the centrioles sensory centres, which integrate internal-milieu signals from the microtubules with external information acquired from the cilia, allowing the cell to respond intelligently to its environment?

Why ask me?

Because you're a cell.

No, I am a Shmoo! Or a character from a Magritte painting! I forget which.

These attempts by the cells to conceal their sentience is suspicious and hints at some form of hidden agenda. What are they up to?

Belated UPDATE. Atanasov's theory accounts for cancer, as a kind of cellular psychopathy that happens when centriole malfunction robs a cell of its sense of rationality and decorum: Things go pear-shaped. This is why the theory featured in the proceedings of the 9th International Conference of Anticancer Research, as published in Anticancer Research journal* [warning, 494 pages].

For completeness it also behooves us to mention Dumitru Pavel's etiology, in which cancer is a kind of protest action provoked by breathing wrong or heartbeating wrong. The unsatisfactory milieu distresses the cells so much that they morph into cancer cells to express their discontent (except when they morph into TB bacteria or HIV virions). Misused heart-muscle cells degenerate into leukemia; chewing wrong provokes epithelial cells into becoming stomach or esophagal cancers; lactating wrong causes breast cancer; not flaring one's nostrils properly while breathing turns cells into lung cancer.

Pavel's publication of his theory-shaped hairball was published, and then retracted from a bottom-feeding mockademic journal (on account of the AIDS denial and TB denial).** Pavel further promotes it in comment threads whenever there is a high-profile cancer death, and it has also been pulled from the trash pile and printed as a 17-page letter-to-the-editor in a marginally less skeevy journal faced with a surplus of empty pages (here).

* Both journal and conferences are not-entirely-mainstream affairs edited and organised by the enthusiastic John G. Delinasios.

** No longer accessible through the Gazoogle Cache, and the publishers deleted the original to cover their trail of slime, but here is a saved copy as my gift to the world. Read it and marvel for it is as mad as a barrel of green squirrels dancing a jig on a giant blue flower.

Competition for the IgNobel Awards is heating up early this year

Garbage In, Garbage Out:

Abstract The impact of the insecticide chlorpyrifos (CPF) on the mammalian digestive system has been poorly described. The present study aimed at evaluating the effect of chronic, low-dose exposure to CPF on the composition of the gut microbiota in a Simulator of the Human Intestinal Microbial Ecosystem: the SHIME® and in rats. The SHIME® comprises six reactor vessels (stomach to colon). The colonic segments were inoculated with feces from healthy humans. Then, the simulator was exposed to a daily dose of 1 mg of CPF for 30 days.

Wim Delvoye's Cloaca machines were a joke, people.

But perhaps the human race is not yet completely obsolete, for the accuracy of this nutrient-to-poop simulation remains to be properly tested. I for one would like to know how it reacts to 5 pints of Fullers ESB and a hot Lamb Vindaloo.

I drink your milkshake

I am not making this up:

"Your immune and neurological systems need to be fed with the right amino acids, trace metals and lipids if GcMAF is to rebuild them:

You need the original human caveman diet without red meat or fruits, ie white meat, fish vegetables, and the lipids provided by butter, cream, chicken liver, salmon, nuts coconut milk, offal. (Unfortunately the fastest place to get lipids from is canned (prion free) pigs brain ! Turn it in to a Pina Colada mix below.)

We soon expect to have specific powders containing the right amino acids and trace metals for the 6 cancer groups.

Neurofood recipe – pina colada taste

Mix In a blender:
220gm (half a pound) of piglet brain, preferably canned.
A whole peeled seedless orange
2 bananas,
the juice of one lime,
2-3 spoons of orange marmalade
200ml coconut milk
100ml vanilla
20 ml Malibu rum liqueur
20ml Cointreau liqueur"

H/t Dora @ HIVforum.info

Let us hope that McConnell and Ungar were wrong about memory transfer through cannibalism.
 

Bottles of blackness, the blacker the spare

When you visit Riddled Alternative Health Clinic and Noxious Weed Extirpation Specialists, our trained clinicians will select the personalised, color-coded medication specific to your condition.

Do not be alarmed if consumption of Christmas Ale Personalised Medication causes beach towels and blank speech bubbles to fall out of an empty sky. This is a common side-effect and perfectly benign.

Doctors S. Clyde and A. Kiwi have the best qualifications money can buy, and many years of experience in staring at bottles of murky totally-non-cactus-based fluids.

While you await your turn in our busy but well-appointed waiting rooms,our intern and part-time beggar-of-the-month Little Tim will ensure that your pet snakes are fed and entertained.

Observe the contrast with MacGravitas Laboratories, where the dispensing staff and bottle-starers feel obliged to conceal their identities behind a Scramble Suit. Does this instil confidence in their training and trustworthiness? DOES IT BOGROLL.

He who controls the GcMAF controls the universe

The first thing we teach at Mad Science School is "Don't blow up anyone's head by tinkering randomly with their intra-cranial blood pressure and the permeability of their blood-brain barrier". It creates work for the cleaners and they are wont to demand time-and-a-half.

So imagine our concern when this poster came to our attention, with its gross neglect of the basic tenets of Mad Science, not to mention its colour scheme inspired by a tequila hangover.

Branca, Pacini & Ruggiero blithely report using an off-the-shelf ultrasound scanner to go insane in the membraine. This never ends well:

The limited permeability of the blood brain barrier (BBB), however, is an obstacle to its widespread use in primary brain tumours, as well as in brain metastases. In order to overcome this limitation, we developed a procedure involving the use of focussed ultrasounds that allow selective permeabilisation of the BBB and targeted delivery of OA-GcMAF.

The poster does not say whether the three authors used their scanner to chase each other around the clinic after therapy sessions going PEW PEW PEW.

The second thing we teach at Mad Science School is "Don't create cells that are capable of editing their own DNA". For then they are only one step away from becoming Turing machines, every cell its own computational unit of unlimited capacity, able to emulate any algorithm, and we are in the territory of a CODE BLOOD MUSIC apocalypse scenario. Yet further down the poster we find Branca et al. doing just that, for GcMAF is not only a Macrocyte Activating Factor; it cures cancer by locating and suppressing the genes of canceriness:

the selective interaction between OA-GcMAF and the major oncogenes involved in human cancer.

The third thing we teach is that "Vox Sanguinis" is not 
(a) a stop in a pipe organ; nor
(b) the love interest of a Paranormal Romance teen novel; but in fact
(c) a well-regarded journal of haematology and transfusion science and the broader blood economy, and with a name like that, don't you want to publish there?

One puzzling aspect of the "Swiss Protocol ®" described in the poster is the dual sourcing of GcMAF (the wonder drug that Doctors Don't Tell You About). For purposes of injection it comes from Macro Innovations Ltd, where Dr Rodney Smith uses high-affinity chromatography to extract it from plasma concentrate obtained from the American Red Cross. Dr Smith previously brewed real ales in a Cambridge garage as one half of Meridian Brewery.

That first source is experiencing compliance issues with the fascist bully-boys of the safety regulation authority. But by serendipitous coincidence, a designer yoghurt proves to contain the same human protein, fermented by probiotic bacteria!* This yoghurt-based version is suitable for oral ingestion, or suppositories, or inhaling as an aerosol in the manner of Chanel #5,** or for applying directly to the forehead. Below (left) is our artist's depiction of Dr Marco Ruggiero -- GcMAF impresario -- inspecting a dose in its distinctive round-bodied bottle or 'fiasco'.

Right: Three weeks' supply

So far the fascist bully-boys of safety regulation authorities have not intervened against this second source, forcing its producers to become fugitives from justice, fermenting yoghurt in basements and attics. The Dairy of Anne Frank as it were. The GcMAF must flow!***

We cannot confirm the speculation that a third source of GcMAF exists in the form of giant diseased sheep on Norstrilia.

Here is a second colour scheme inspired by a tequila hangover.

It is in fact the first 21 pages of J.J.V. Branca's Graduation thesis ("New Insights into the Role of HIV in the Aetiology and Pathogenesis of AIDS") -- colour-coded by another, funnier blogger to indicate the original source of each copy-pasted paragraph ("blue for wikipedia, red for Ruggiero, brown for Crupi, green for Bauer, purple for Duesberg...").

The very first paragraph of the Foreword begins with a promise to conduct "thorough, careful, sensitive, and yet transformational readings of [texts] to determine what aspects of those texts run counter to their apparent systematicity (structural unity) or intended sense (authorial genesis)". No doubt you have recognised the passage from the Whackyweedia entry on Derrida. "But who" (you ask) "who was the Supervisor for this exercise in creative appropriation and collage, worthy of Kathy Ackers at her most irritating? Who were the Examiners?"

-------------------------------------------

* "Bravo Probiotic" products are distributed by the company Les Alpes Ltd, owned in Lugano Switzerland by Ruggiero's business associate Fulvia Gianetta Allio, but for administrative convenience it is domiciled in Wellington and operates out of a mailbox on Victoria Street.

** Grimbledon Down cartoon stuck in memory from forty years ago:

*** Effects of long-term GcMAF consumption include blue-within-blue Eyes-of-Ibad; also bodily transformations.

Postcard #40 - Bristol Brass Band bus accident

We continue our historical series of "Tragic Accidents involving Brass Bands and Horn Instruments". This week, a postcard in the archives of Bristol, Connecticut.

"A bus which was used to transport the Bristol Brass Band, crashed through the railing on Riverside Avenue. The hood of the bus is in the Pequabuck River. The gas plant of the Bristol & Plainville Tramway Company can be seen on the right. The Down Street Bridge is visible on the left in the rear of the picture."

Clearly that upstream gas plant contributed to a powerful morphogenic field to attract or even compel the bus ineluctably into the mire of the river-bed. Let the Whackyweedia explain the Pequabuck River's unhygienic nature:

The river's lower drainage basin consists of industrial and urban areas, effluents from these areas pollute the river's water

"What are you on about?" Another Kiwi vouchsafed.

"Where there's muck there's brass," I explained.

I was sad because I had no mouth until I met a man who needed to scream

In what ways have our First Amendment rights been infringed this week?

Great Failures of Our Time

#78. Early Renaissance false eyelashes.

Hardcore body-mods, dudes!

What the hell is he building in there?

Riddled has already apprised readers of the mysterious Black Orbs. Visible they are, but impalpable and intangible, and not for lack of palping and tanging.

Now there are fresh sightings! Whence come they? What do they seek?

We were mulling over the question last night at a special meeting of the Unsolved Mysteries and Cockroach Racing Working Group (convened in honour of the late Leonard Nimoy), resulting in large quantities of hot spiced red wine which it would have been a shame not to drink. In the process, the answer came to us... Black Orbs are Cultural Arks from another plane of existence -- the Unseelie Court perhaps, or the Fictive Realm -- seeking refuge from their cultural decadence and collapse (and those motherfuckin' snakes) until it is safe for them to return to their own reality.

Here are more cultural arks, all sorts of shapes but they all seem to be space-going. It must be a tradition, or an old charter or something. Safe in interplanetary orbit* they will survive the Collapse, to return to Earth when the stars are right after a millennium to re-seed a new civilisation with arts and re-art it with seeds.

But we are not slavishly bound to tradition, and the Riddled Cultural Ark (even now taking shape on its cradle in our Experimental Literature Workshop) will use captured Black Orb technology to transfer itself into the abstract domain of Jungian archetypes, where it will blend in with all the mandala symbols. To endure the crushing pressure of Depth Psychology it is spherical in the manner of a pathysphere.

Soon the highest products of human ingenuity will begin to board!

Meanwhile at the New World Supermarket they are unclear on the concept of "ark", with their "hand-rafts". We question the suitability of hands as construction material; we can only suppose that the managers were misled by Bellmer's use of hands for millinery purposes. As for the cargo capacity of a raft compared with...

...mmm, sausages.

* Hence Alternative Title:

The Ark of the Moral Universe, bending