MOOSE AND SQUIRREL

More fun with Words-as-train-stations. Estonian-language data; may not generalise to all language communities.

To leap and fall around Soft and protected from this world of stone

When Max Ernst painted St. Cecilia (1923),* did he have Diderot's illustrations for "How to cast your own Equestrian Statue" (1771) in the back of his mind? It would be irresponsible not to speculate.

I am further prepared to argue that the "Cast of A-Mount-illado" was also an influence on Doré's 1857 illustrations for the Divine Comedy.**

I can't believe that I forgot the Safeword

Assiduous readers will be familiar with the drill, and will have prepared themselves for another manifestation of the non-casual workings of the Morphogenic Field. Every invocation of an artistic trope or motif weakens a seam in the fabric of reality and makes it more likely that similar invocations will occur to future artists (much as every blog that talks about the Morphogenic Field sends out emanations and lowers the threshold for other bloggers to spontaneously mention the Morphogenic Field). When Man Ray came to portray Sade in 1936, due to financial exigencies he couldn't acquire great blocks of stone or plaster to use in the drawing, yet the morphogenic flux was so strong that the portrait of Sade turned into its own masonry.

* Not many people know that the Ernst painting has "Invisible Piano" as alternative title, pre-empting the "Invisible X" style of LOLcat by 80 years or so.

** 1857 was a good year for titanic chains, unyielding as anything from the anvil of Aforgomon. I cannot exclude the possibility that Victorian photographer Robert Howlett used the same prop links as Doré's etcher, or even shared a studio.

[H/t Rosewind]

Stalking Matilda, Stalking Matilda She took out a restraining order on me And I sang as I sat there Watching how the bunny boiled Who'll place a restraining order on me?

The Lazy-Arse Mockademic- Spam Blogging* will continue until morale improves:

"SciRes Literature" have ambition, a CamelCase name and a slogan and a logo stolen from student-debt-relief scammers, and they have recruited a White-House-worthy roster of Administrative Chiefs... including a jewelry designer, an Internet-Famous troll-blogger, and some person with an implausible hyphenated name.

If the last is young Sharlene of the Essex Carneys then it is good to see that she married into a better family than we could ever have expected.

Also a Rom-Com character as Chief Associate... it is tempting but also otiose to ask "Associate What?"

But they need to buck their ideas up if they want to expand out of the spare room of Apartment 121C... Can anyone see what they are doing wrong with these attempts to scrounge a paper about the Riddled Dream Machine out of us?

Anyone? Space-Time Eddie? No, Swearing Bob, you can put your hand down, the class is sufficiently familiar with your opinions and vocabulary. Stop flapping, Greenish Hugh, no-one is trying to force an opinion out of you, there is not enough gin in the First-Aid supplies for that. Ah, Louie Carthorse. Yes?

Louie is correct, to an extent... It is true that contrary to the tradition, the publishers were somehow unable to sign up Drs Blum or Badgaiyan onto the Editorial Boards of any of their journal-shaped toxic-waste dumps. But that is not a dispositive failing. Rather than tuft-hunting for recognised names, many parasitical publishers these days are recruiting their Editors and the organisers of their scamferences from the inhabitants of heavy planets, all flattened and squat by the high gravity of their home-worlds (with a few etoliated low-gravity visitors for the sake of diversity).

No... It is not enough to update the deadline in the annoying repetitive spam and spoof a new sending address (to evade simple domain-based spam blocking). That is where SciResLit stepped back on their own kumara. Best Industry Practice nowdays is to adopt a tone of increasingly passive-aggressive belligerence about the lack of response to previous harassment, working up towards a spammogram in which the image of a boiled bunny accompanies the title "LOOK WHAT YOU MADE US DO BY IGNORING US". Written in Comic Sans.

So here are "Stella Sun" (or Edith, or Eva, or Maggie) and "Dora Dong" (or Anne) and "Ms. Rikky Han", three poorly-disguised socktoplasmic pseudopods of the BIT travel-agency scampire. They have penciled me into their programs as Keynote Speaker and are more saddened than angered by the inconvenience I am causing with my inconsiderate failure to confirm.

Do ya feel guilty, punk?

In other restraining-order developments: the creepy surveillance strategy of "Academic Star" is not news. Along with fellow Chinese fraudsters "David Publishing", they have been claiming American nationality and offering friendship to the subjects of their scrutiny for over five years, acquiring the programs of (genuine) conferences for the purpose of stalking attendees. In that time they have not altered the wording of their spam... perhaps in the belief that We wish to become your friends if necessary is something that a human might write.

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From: jmer@academicstar.us [mailto:jmer@academicstar.us]
Sent: Monday, July 17, 2017 3:17 PM
Subject: Call for papers and Invitation from Journal of Modern Education Review (ISSN 2155-7993), USA ICLC 2017

Dear ,

This is Journal of Modern Education Review (ISSN 2155-7993), a professional journal published worldwide by Academic Star Publishing Company, New York, NY, USA. We have learned your paper 

"[REDACTED]" at 

14th International Cognitive Linguistics Conference. We are very interested to publish your paper in the Journal of Modern Education Review. If you have the idea of making our journal a vehicle for your research interests, please send the electronic version of your paper to us through email in MS word format. All your original and unpublished papers are welcome. 

Hope to keep in touch by email and publish some papers or books from you and your friends in USA. As an American academic publishing group, we wish to become your friends if necessary. We also want to invite some people to be our reviewers or become our editorial board members. If you are interested in our journal, you can send your CV to us. You can find our sample paper in the attachment. Expect to get your reply soon. 

Best regards,

Anna
Journal of Modern Education Review
Academic Star Publishing Company
education@academicstar.us, teaching@academicstar.us
228 East 45th Street,Ground Floor, #CN00000267 New York NY 10017 USA
TEL: 347-566-2153, 347-566-2247  Fax: 646-619-4168

---

jmer@academicstar.us

Stealing from Oglaf is an
old tradition among my people

From: psychology@davidpublishing.com [mailto:psychology@davidpublishing.com]
Sent: Friday, June 02, 2017 2:48 PM
Subject: Invitation from a New Journal, the sample of PSYCHOLOGY RESEARCH is attached

From Knowledge to Wisdom

Psychology Research

International Standard Serial Number: 2159-5542; and online ISSN: 2159-5550

Frequency: monthly   DOI: 10.17265/2159-5542

Dear Mr/Ms, 

We have learned your paper abstract [REDACTED](PSYART) on The 11th Annual International Conference on Psychology, and we are interested in its research. Therefore, we invite you to submit this paper  if it is not published or other unpublished papers in psychology area to Psychology Research.

The new journal of Psychology Research, a peer-reviewed, multidisciplinary periodicals published by David Publishing Company, USA, since July, 2011, welcomes the submission of original manuscripts reporting innovations or investigations in the Psychology area. Successful general submission manuscripts may report interdisciplinary efforts or be of a sufficiently broad nature to be of interest to those centered in related disciplines. Manuscripts reporting innovations or collaborations leading to enhancements in Psychology are of particular interest to Psychology Research.

If you have the idea of making our journals as vehicles for your research interests, please send your WORD format manuscripts (papers or books) through e-mails/submission system (for more details refer journal Web page). We appreciate your support.

We also seek researchers who have deep research in and outstanding contribution to Psychology area to be our reviewers/editors. Good review board has insightful understanding in Psychology field, and can provide professional suggestions to authors. Anyone who is interested in our journals can send us CV. We are looking forward to your contribution!

Sincerely yours,

Lily, R.

Editor Office

Psychology Research, ISSN 2159-5542

David Publishing Company

E-mail:psychology@davidpublishing.org; psychology@davidpublishing.com; 

 psychology2159@yahoo.com; and psychology@davidpublisher.net

Welcome to visit our Website at: 

Tel: 1-323-984-7526, 323-410-1082; Fax: 1-323-984-7374, 323-908-0457

Psychology Research

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

So all the cool kids are contributing to the gaiety of nations by pwning the parasitical publishers with joke submissions; this costs nothing, and reassures prospective customers of these scholarly jizzrags that (Yes indeed) they will soak up anything, so everyone benefits. Some would say that "Breaking the ice with buxom grapefruits" and "Mitochondria" are no stupider than the material they publish without pwnish provocation --

With horsiness

Repot of Huge Primary Mediastinal Carcinoid Tumors with Horsiness

-- but I could not possibly comment. Anyway, your Riddled staff are feeling the peer-group pressure to get involved in the fun. Crowd-source the whole thing? Perhaps a conference presentation on "Somatotypes and the Editorial Personality: Adaptation to high- and low-gravity planets among parasitic conference organisers"? We are open to suggestions.

*

Parasite Conference OUTTAKE:
Until last year, 'Pulsus' was a niche publisher of Canadian specialist medical journals. But the proprietor wanted to retire, and in lieu of any other buyer he sold the concern to the OMICS griftdozer.

14th Annual

Pulsus was promptly gutted, re-stuffed and turned into a Conference Scam fuckpuppet, pimping dozens of freshly-minted mockademic pop-ups per month, such as the 22nd World Congress on Cognitive Behavioural Science and Therapy (there is no record of the earlier 21 prestigious congresses in the series). The same process of OMICS assimilation occurred to 'Allied Academies', previously a somewhat tawdry but obscure publisher, now a full-blast firehose of fraudulence with the same template of pox-parties that in terms of structure and content are unlikely to reach 1 on the Bristol Stool Scale.

These scabby little pop-ups often lack the frippery of a Program, which could be a sign of the new OMICS owners' need for the quick bucks, or it could be to save the attendees from the risk of being spammed by scamming chundermuffins. In fact, such is their haste, the grifters cannot even round up enough heavy-planet refugees to form Organising Committees.

Some of the people spending their own or their universities' dosh to attend these embarrassing events must be genuinely defrauded naïfs, but suckers alone would not provide enough of a money-stream to make the whole industry so attractive.

A Productive Cough

Now, of course, one is a happy little work unit, going about not asking difficult questions and NOT seeing quite a lot, while making the world safe for capitalism (Bragg 1990). And part of that is the, dare we say it, fetishisation, of something called productivity.
"AH HAH" I hear you Joanna and Johnny Socialist exclaim "THAT'S JUST ANOTHER NAME FOR EXPLOITATION!" I really think that there was no need for the exclamation mark there, but you young folks today with your fancy intertubes and smartphones.
 Anyway when we put your accusation through the "Milton Friedman Answer-matic to combat Socialists dogmas and such" we get "Maybe it is IVAN. Or maybe it's not, we'll have to have a faculty meeting in Davros to see."
Yes we in New Zild clung hopefully to the olive branch of productivity, hoping that the Dove of Rising Economics will alight and, presumably using super powers gained through eating a radioactive peanut, carry us back to a Noah-like figure who is actually a sort of boss person whose son has just had a traumatising experience in the NZ court and been sentenced to 3 hours cleaning the Prime Ministers golf cart.
 Immediately he offers us a job sweeping out the Ark and through olfactory deadening hard work and several mysterious deaths we rise to control the Ark and challenge God himself...If, like Mel Gibson is involved.
 But as is usual in these sceptred isles (Shakespeare, olden days) to maintain the proper respect and discipline that PRODUCTIVITY demands of us all, we have a commission of Productivity. That's right a group of people, might one hazard a guess and say predominately white, male people?, who ensure that the correct observances are made and the proper sacrifices sent to the ravenous maws of the True Gods. Extensive research finds that only 5/7ths of the commission are white males. Everyone is lily coloured, however.
But, there they were, sitting around, watching daytime TV, buying fartbombs via the internet, sending cat videos to each other and they thought "You know, we haven't buggered about with tertiary education for a good week or so, let's have another whack at them, eh". Being the government's japesters that they are the commissioners had to consider the fee-fees of the National Party BFF the ACT party, who are a bunch of cold eyed society stranglers have made a few appearances in the pages of Riddled.
So the usual Randian ideas were cut and pasted into a document which was duly released into the wilds. 
Have I mentioned that one of my contracts at the moment involves driving around taking swab samples from cow and sheep poo? I'm pretty good at this thing now and  get the swab into it's tube and back into the swab bag with no mess. In a strikingly similar exercise the Productivity Commission seems to done the job blindfolded and using swabs taped to their foreheads.
This "paper" advocates a "Shake-Up" of the tertiary system that seems to be modeled on the Shake-Up that the Fukushima nuclear plant underwent.
Government would no longer have to pay for debts that universities incur, there would be a loosening of regulations about what constitutes a university and post grad supervisors would no longer have to be involved in research! Brave days, my friends and a green light went on in the Riddled Institute tea-room.
These people's outdated and stupid ideas will blight us all if implemented. They have learned nothing from the last 30 years of NZ economic rationalism experiment and can't see the damage they do, even as they do it. Interesting to see that they all have degrees too, I wonder what their student loan levels were? Oh wait, we didn't have them in our day, did we? Fuck 'em (Stipe 1993)
But they have been productive.

How many other blogs pander to the bronies with Bach's "Trotatta & Fugue" and "Kaffeecanterta" arranged for 8 hooves on two invisible pianos?

None more. None more other blogs.

A wodge of it

"What is going on in the great water problem in NZ, the Watergate" I hopefully do not hear you ask. Well, me buckos, it can be summarised as bugger all.
Various people have gone on various media and said various things. The Prime Mincer (Hoban 1982) explained that the government was only the government and shouldn't be getting in the way of local government in dealing with all those sick people. "Ewww" he did not add.
The local gubblement people are all flappy hands about it still but good progress is being made in moving toward a scoping committee to look at various options for issuing a statement on the possibility of a statement being issued in the very near future. As soon as they get a handle on what the central government would like them to say.
However all is not lost for the denizens of Sickcity as the Central government has put some money where it's feeding orifice usually is and stumped up funds... for marketing... for businesses negatively impacted by the crisis (WHICH IS NOT A CRISIS BECAUSE WE DON'T HAVE CRISES IN THE HAPPIEST KINGDOM).
Yes, for those business people who can prove that they have had financial hardship, the G-men are gonna front up with $100,000 dollars...for the whole town... like the 100 businesses affected might get $1,000 each to buy a page in the local newspaper.
"Now with less Campylobacter" perhaps.
This was only announced yesterday (hmmm 5pm on a Friday night, what a funny time to announce such a thing) so there are no details available yet but I'm sure that the government who could not be arsed dealing with the NOT A CRISIS in the housing market of the largest city in NZ whose every action directly affects the whole country, will be pouring aid and advice into the area.
LOL
In Getting-Lost-In-The-Wilderness-News, a Polish woman has survived a month in the mountains of NZ after her partner fell off a cliff and died. She walked for two days through waist deep snow to find a mountain hut and after seeing that there was no food there, broke into the next door government workers hut where there was food and firewood. After a month her family contacted the NZ cops and within a day they had her back to safety. Good result. Except if you are an NZ conservative, of course. Readers of and scribblers to the National Party mouthpiece blog that says (HAHAHA)it is independent have been aghast at the money spent to rescue this person of a feminine disposition who had the affrontery to not be killed like her so-called partner was. Also, they have been full of how much better they would have handled it and why did she stay in the hut for a month? They would have cut down a  very large tree and built a snowplough which they would have used to fetch a doctor to bring her partner back to life since he had been in the snow, he wouldn't have been really dead argle blargle blargle. Dispiriting stuff, even from the crowd who would ban burkas but think young woman are asking for it.

The Proverbial Creek

One is, of course, fully aware of the great advantages and boosts to the New Zild economy that have been provided by the industry formerly known as farming. For many years we rode on the butter boxlid and came away from the cream bowl with what can only be described as a self-satisfied smirk.
"But do things not change?" I hear you ask in your wavering revisionist voice."Does not the tide of history go in and out like a whatsit and the like" you conclude somewhat lamely having exhausted your marine metaphors.
And, yes, is the answer, unlike the raisin and mackerel slices in Mrs Miggins Pie Shop and Tractor Museum things do move on and up in a ever greatening arc of getting more gooder. Except maybe for dairying in this fair land where I have it on good Facebook authority 1/2 of the country thinks farmers want to kill them. This was news to me and startled many of my acquaintances who were unprepared for my accusations of "playing the victim card." As described on Facebook.
But now comes news of the Farming Fightback as 4100 good people in the area of the town known as Havelock North have fallen sick due to foolishly drinking the water that comes out of their taps or faucets as some "cheerful in their own way" folks call them.
Now, aside from the pros and cons of drinking contaminated water when you live in Havelock North due it being only slightly more exciting than cheesecloth, it is a very bad look to have so many people poisoned by their municipality. Bad form, what.
Gradually the story has unfolded. There are three bores for Havelock North (those of us who have been there frankly exclaimed "Yeah, right" at that) and two of them have never had any trouble in the way of hidden extras. Bore no.3 is, of course, the troublemaker and has had two former E.coli reports in 2012 and 2014. After each report the bores were chlorinated and BAD No.3 was not even used. "What's that?" you say thumbing through "Water Quality of Southern Hawkes Bay Towns: Why you should stick to straight Whiskey, 2nd ed." "Chlorinated? Surely this water is chlorinated all the time". There follows a long, embarrassing, silence.
 Er, well, you see, there have never been any problems before, except for those two times and er, well. Is that a squirrel?
But those good folks of Havelock North who can venture more than 3 metres away from a toilet have been carefully and seriously advised of what is going on by their local government representatives. Well, basically, told to boil their drinking water and it's really tricky finding out who is to blame for the contamination of the water. So tricky, with two councils involved and there being no way of communicating between them beyond wandering puppet shows performing allegorical plays. Luckily the central Government leaped into the breach and the local MP went on National Radio to say that "Frankly, I am angry". Golly Moses that showed 'em.
How has the contamination occurred? You might well ask, since the aquifer is way down in the earth and has a hard sort of cap over the top of it. Scurrilous people have pointed out the explosion in population numbers for dairy cows in the region what with dairying being more profitable than cocaine, in Havelock North anyway. These people will be laughed out of decent society and told to get a flamin' life you Commies because a bit of cow poop never hurt no one and anyway, who's to say it came from cows??? Naughty old Microbiologists is who, they have confirmed that the most probable cause of the contamination are ruminant animals. Disturbingly, there are no camels in the Havelock North greater metropolitan area otherwise we could blame them and their nomad owners and feel all white victim privileged.
And here one puts on one's lab coat, turns to the camera and says "I think NZ should get prepared for more of this. Local governments are being disbanded by the central government which doesn't give a rat's arse about NZ, much of NZ is being turned into Cowshit Creek and we, collectively, have the brains of a flatworm".
Disclaimer removed on smack my head advice.

Ram Testicle Palpation Explained by Prime Minister.

Four Why? Men. Picture Stolen from Metro magazine

Warning to all citizens: If these men come to your house do not let them in. Do not sign any papers they may present. Put headphones on and sing along with the music until they are gone.

These folks are (left to right) NZ Attorney General Chris Finlayson, Minister of Bribes to Saudi Arabia Murray McCully, Prime Minister "What me, worry" John Key and Minister for Up Your Nose with a Garden Hose Gerry Brownlee.

Finlayson is doing his best to control his temper at being asked to be in the same room as these morons whose three combined brains do not equal 1/4 of his super-intellect and steely resolve. Disturbingly he has done some good work on Maori land negotiations but has the most vituperative language when questioned about anything.

"What's the time Mr. AG". "You would ask that, you worthless piece of slime. Can't you see I'm busy?"

McCully has done sterling work in getting rid of excess money in trying to placate Saudi businessmen who just revealed last week that 1) They hadn't been going to take the NZ government to court and 2) Come and take all these dead sheep and bones away WTF is wrong with you people?

McCully seems to have bravely taken on the project of pumping money and sheep at the Saudis with no help, or even knowledge about the jolly wheeze, from the rest of the government. Murray may survive the unseemliness as the twitter verse swirls around what sort of photos he has that make him invulnerable.

Dear Leader Key is doing one of his classic deflections (it is always misdirection) as, perhaps, a journalist asks him a question that has an answer that hasn't been focus groped to submission by his PR firm and his minders. Ha ha, silly old AK no one asks those questions any more. Mr Key has taken to blaming the banks for the housing Not-a-Crisis in NZ at the moment  in a plaintive "What can I do" sort of manner. He is a prisoner of cruel fate just like all of us and if he didn't have a house in Hawaii he would be forced to live in NZ and that would be just awful.

Mr. Brownlee is doing his best Easter Island moai impersonation because that is less trouble than when he talks and all them words come out and basically It Is Not Fair. A couple of weeks ago Mr Brownlee informed a breathless nation that the new Convention Centre that the government was going to build in Christchurch in a partnership with a private firm was actually going to be on their own after all. We were just silly to think that it was a going to be a partnership after years of being told it was going to be one because reasons.
The government is looking a little shaky at the moment due to various inept or, in McCully's case, actual breaking the law cases. But I'm sure that will not be reflected in the polls due to John Key's a good bloke you'd like to have a beer with.

In Ham's Way.

"Oh" you might think "It is that little old New Zild again with the sheeps and cows and mad Sir Mr Peter Jackson of Rivendell, innit"

But no, there is more to this green and peasant land than just nice things. We have a long and proud tradition of being killed or killing in other people's wars. To this end we have armed forces and they are of particular note to this blog when we are trying to flog off old jets to people called  Hoss. Sadly this did not go ahead and we got a "bad seller" rating on e-bay chiz, chiz.
In recent times, NZ has responded personfully to requests from Iraq for jolly good soldiers to go over and teach their jolly bad soldiers how to do the soldiering. This request is an "Operational Matter' of course and so the general public has not seen it and the fact that it came so soon after the Prime Mincer (Hoban 1982) was over in the US hanging around the White House is like, whatevs.
At this stage everyone thought  that there was only a short time to go until the teaching time was up and the summer holidays begin, yeahaar.
Until Mr Spoilsport Prime Minister said "Ah no, youse have to stay there because it is a seething hellhole and indications are that the seethiness is not going to go down anytime soon, so sucks to be you" in typical Key government fashion.
This brings into play one of the great characters of the administration Gerry Brownlee. Yes, Gerry "the Peacemaker" who nearly engineered an incident with Finland and respectful co-worker with the Christchurch mayor in the re-build i.e. "Parker a clown".
So we are dealing with one of nature's gentlemen here. Who is the Minister for Defence, because honestly he can't do too much there, eh?
So what did Gerry have to say about the extended education mission in Iraq? With his intellect turned all the way up to 11 Brownlee opined

“We’re not insulated from the sort of thing that we saw in Orlando.” – Gerry Brownlee, re NZ extension of troop deployment in Iraq

A truly memorable moment in NZ political history. Sadly, one of NZ's better radio journalists got to talk to Gerry and it was a bit of a slam dunk as the kids say:

Gerry Brownlee: "New Zealand is not immune to the sort of lone wolf attacks that you saw in Orlando a couple of weeks ago ... this is as much our war as it is anybody else's."

Susie Ferguson: " ... Are you saying that deploying New Zealand troops to Iraq makes New Zealand safer from homicidal homophobes?"

I imagine Gerry walking the streets of Wellington shouting at beggars for hours after this.  

Like a spine made of cornflakes

Continuing further into the exploration of the badly set jelly we call NZ society we come to the subject of infrastructure. I know, right, you had better grab a hot chocolate, with extra marshmallows and sit in the comfy chair.
One of the things that is pretty central to New Zild are rivers, all over the bleedin' place like they own it. Sluggishly galumping in the general direction of the ocean as the combined nutrient loads of the boom in dairying and century old sewerage systems ameliorate the wateriness of the water contained in them.
Of course Kiwis with their natural ingenuity and whatnot have found ways around these socialistic impediments to progress or even *dramatic piano chords in a manner reminiscent of Beethoven but not so much a copy as to have people saying "Oh, they've just nicked some Bate-whoven"* OVER the rivers!!
We call these bridges and they are much loved, until they fall down because bleedin' water scours away the supports and whatever magic holds them up. We love bridges so much we even have them over non-watery bits of the country because we are flexible like that. Our Minister for roads and bridges and whatever is even called Simon Bridges!! And he is a goat with floppy hair.

(Artist impression of Simon Bridges)

But now comes news that the steel used in four bridges on the Waikato expressway may be as structurally sound as Cornflakes. Interestingly enough, the expressway is to facilitate people driving into Auckland to not find a carpark and return in frustration and chagrin to Hamilton and prepare for another try the next day. The modern life we live!!
"But" you might ask in an entirely too sensible and non road company economics understanding, way, "surely this steel would have been tested?" Which shows how out-of-touch and old fashioned your ideas are because we don't do that asking and finding out stuff when we are the forefront of providing roads for Hamiltonians to get pissed off in Auckland. The Chinese steel companies that flogged   sold the steel to us in an completely up front and honest way, also had forms saying that This Steel is Actually Very Good, Actually"
 So what was the jolly old problem? Well it seems that the tests that were carried out were not so much as Internationally certified as they were A Bloke Ticked A Box Onna Form. This has alarmed the general citizenry not a jot because Mr Bridges has reassured us that:
 1) The bridges have not fallen down yet
 2)  The lack of testing happened in China not New Zealand
 3) It probably won't happen again.
 4) Has anyone got a box he could stand on?
Which is about par for the course for this spectator government. Standing around idly kicking the ground with their hands in their pockets, opening supermarkets, signing babies and kissing books.
While the Prime Minister seeks advice from his gut.

Engine Housing may become overheated.

"Oh" people might say "where is that Another Kiwi, with his wild stories of cheese theft?"
You may have read a comment by me on this very blog about not caring what happens to NZ now, "meant it, stand by it" (Scott Heron 1983). But, when the ape-like mutations who inherit this smoking crater of mine tailings are searching through the rubble maybe they will wonder "How did we get here, this is not my beautiful car" and then "Phwoar he's gotta big wanger, we should make him our leader." Then they will need more white middle class male rambling, there is always room for more.
We have had some major revelations in New Zild political circles. The first, and some might say, most alarming is that there are poor people in this sceptred isle. That's right! Actual poor folks, doing actual poverty and not living in leafy suburbs. This appears to have caught the politicals off guard and some sand has crept into the well-oiled spin gears.
Among reports of people living in cars and having a generally miserable time in Auckland, the Minister of Social Development  dispatched a "flying squad" of crack (with an 'r') bureaucrats to go around the cars offering help to people in cars. This was in conjunction with the Salvation army who do this week in, week out.
Except, of course, it didn't happen. The Sallies said that no one had come around with them and they don't go an knock on car windows, anyway.
The Prime Minister had, in an event that can only be described as a sad and feeble attempt at arse covering tragic misunderstanding, proclaimed loudly about how the people in the 8 cars knocked-up, as they say in the Social Work game, told the brave flying squad people they didn't want help. Imagine his disappointment when it turned out to be an imaginary load of monkey poo. Still, eh, Kiwis would like to have a beer with him, you betcha.
All of this occurred against the backdrop of a crisis, "What crisis?" in housing. People who may or may not be white, middle class New Zilders, are finding it difficult, if not actually hard, to find that Mi Casa we were all brought up to believe was your actual Nirvana. Without the drugs and shotgun suicide, although, maybe not.  This has occasioned some smart thinking from the aforementioned Minister of Soc. Del. who said "Give the poors $5K each to get out of Auckland".
This cheerful bribery to make Auckland housing numbers look better has only been over-shadowed by the frozen grin of terror on the face of the Minister for Finances as he heard the news for the first time and visions of empty biscuit tins in the tea-room fluttered across his mind. Apparently the MSD said that it was money just lying around and wasn't going to come out of her budget so stop hassling her, man.
The third prong in the multi-pronged attack on the NOT AN ACTUAL crisis has been the housing Minister Nick Smith who is an amiable prong of a chap, the sort that gets paraded around at family Christmas reunions as a warning about the dangers of too many concussions in rugby matches. Smith has taken to driving around the countryside  having press conferences in random fields which he claims the Government owns and has "lined up for housing". Predictably, he has gone to the wrong paddock on two occasions and the "lined up for housing" has turned out to be Kevin from Accounts saying that he thought that his grandparents lived near here.
I am beginning to have doubts about the competence of this government and wonder if it shrank itself down to a small enough size for a drowning 1) could it find the bathroom and 2)would it remember to put the plug in?  Possibly it would be living in a car telling MSD people to fuck off.
"But" you are saying "surely the tumbrels are rolling and the scaffolds are being constructed of properly tested materials to throw down these incompetent charlatans?" That would be where you are wrong as most Kiwis think that a charlatan is a type of French dessert in a funny shaped glass which their aunt used to like. On the contrary the PM is more popular than alcoholic chocolate drinks and the newspapers, talkback radio and comments sections of lesser quality blogs than this one are full of people castigating the poor because reasons that everyone knows.
And so it continues...

Things that seemed a good idea at the time

1. Giving tigris a copy of the Hawksbill Station Cookbook as birthday prezzie, with all the mouthwatering recipes for grilled, baked, pan-fried trilobite. However, the ensuing picnic-oriented expeditions in the Riddled time machine have brought home the fact that trilobites were wily anthropods, prepared for deception and not easily duped. Also, specialised lures must be designed for fly-fishing in an era long before flies.

So this is the Barbed Banana, that is what she said I call it. Just look at it! Trilobites can't resist it! The drag-&-drop Bad Ronald glasses are optional.

It is important to pack the caper butter with the rest of the pic-a-nic preparations, for certain people insist that a barbeque is simply not acceptable without it, and it is a long round-trip when you are sent from the Precambrian back to the Pleistocene to fetch some.

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2. Indeed, most ideas seem a good idea when they come up while we are down at the Old Entomologist, quality-controlling the Roggen-Wolfen-Dunkel-Berlinerweissen-Spezial (mit Nachtschatten), and lamenting the poor showing of Hot Needle of Inquiry in the 2.15 at the Tauherenikau Races.

The idea in this case being that horse levitation. With any number of paintings attesting to the bygone anti-gravitational equine capability. Somehow horses lost this ability late in the 19th Century in a simultaneous world-wide mutation.

With the corollary that it behooves us to reverse the change, because weightless horse racing is not against the rules, and what could go wrong?

It was a tight squeeze getting Evangeline van Holsterin's pony "Mr Kraken" into the Evolvamat (it is "an evil tempered beast given to rolling in swamps"). However, the effects were dramatically successful, as shown in this image captured by our surveillance engravers.

The problem remains of navigation, especially with Swearing Bob in the saddle. He is oblivious to the signals we are sending, via old-fashioned candle-and-billiard-cue code -- augmented with the Sherlock Holmes Dancing-Man Cipher -- to veer left before he and Mr Kraken collide with stately Riddled Manor. The library fairies may appear to be making fun of Another Kiwi's expressions but it is only that they think it is a game of Charades and they are signalling "Two syllables, rhymes with Phew".

Fortunately the giant inflatable Bobbitt Worm on the roof of Riddled Manor absorbed the impact, and no lasting damage was done, although Mr Kraken's mood was not improved.

3. The monochrome illustrations in Another Kiwi's guide to judging the ripeness of Orbs were perfectly clear [below, left].
Do they benefit from being colourised [right]? I THINK NOT.

Tell those men with horses for hearts

Presidential aspirant Carly Fiorina nominates equoid equine role model:

Secretariat also had what’s called the “x-factor,” a gene located on the X-chromosome that causes an unusually large heart.* Fiorina says she identifies with this. “It’s about the size of his figurative heart, too.” **

Q: What is the difference between Fiorina and a horse?

A: Incitatus did make it into the Senate.

* The "X-linked mutation" theory seems to be an article of faith among a small circle of horseflesh enthusiasts, largely unsupported by evidence. No gene has been identified and no-one is looking for one.

** Secretariat's "figurative heart"? I can't even.

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.

A million memories in the trees and sands, oh no How can I ever let them go?

After a marathon meeting in the Wigglesworth Lounge of the Old Entomologist, dominated by robust debate, consumption of Christmas Ale and flinging of crockery, the Riddled Amateur Dramatic Society agreed that the first production of 2015 will be an adaptation of "Shakespeare's Memory", the last work by Jorge Luis Borges.

Tigris noted that in the original text, the narrator (Hermann Sörgel) presents himself as an unassuming Shakespearean scholar. Also his account of being overlaid with a second memory makes no mention of a journey to Mars, let alone joining the Martian Resistance movement and finally fulfilling their objectives (though only after betraying them to the authorities), as is depicted in the script outline tabled by Another Kiwi. Also too she was skeptical whether Arnold Schwartzenegger would be available to play Sörgel.

AK suggested that Sörgel was just very modest about his accomplishments. He is known to have devoted his career to the idea of reclaiming vast areas of seabed for agriculture and habitation by draining the Mediterranean, Deep beneath the autumn lake, where only echoes penetrate; which the Borges story does not mention either.

Smut Clyde complained about leakage of lyrics from the Prog-Rock channel and asked about the long-promised flux shielding for the cryotanks.

Swearing Bob raised the issue of feckin' intellectual feckin' property and copyright gobshite.

AK reminded the meeting that the genre of "Secondary acquired memory sets" really began with J.B.S. Haldane's last, uncompleted novel, making Borges just a Johnny-come-lately plagiarist with no cause for complaint.

Smut Clyde took issue with the harsh term 'plagiarist', and opined that the thematic duplication was more likely a manifestation of the Morphogenetic Field -- a non-causal, unlocalised organising principle, which allows one person's actions to carve new ruts in Reality that steer other individuals to unwittingly repeat the same actions, Riding inter-city trains, dressed in European grey, riding out to Echo Beach.

Tigris inquired about progress with retraining the 'Replicating Shakespeare' team of monkey typists to work in the style of Haldane, in order to provide the unwritten concluding chapters of 'The Man with Two Memories'.

AK vouchsafed his optimistic assessment that a simian replacement for the missing chapters was not far away, and that he "would not be at all surprised" if it proved to involve underground drilling machinery at the Martian colony. Greenish Hugh countered that progress had been slow because the monkeys lacked motivation and could not be cajoled out of a negative attitude of "it's no use" and "what's the point?" and "why bother trying?" In retrospect he conceded that it might have been a mistake to hire the workforce from Seligman's Learned Helplessness experiments.

Evangeline van Holsterin visited the table to replenish the plenished glasses and to disentangle Space-Time Eddie from the overhead light fitting. She observed (to ensuing hilarity) that despite assistance from an infinite team of monkey butlers over a considerable passage of time, the Riddled directors were no closer to attaining good taste or colour coordination in their clothing.

Smut Clyde proposed that the monkey typists should begin with a simpler task to encourage them and 'ease them into the zone'. He tabled a 1928 passage from J.B.S. Haldane, dramatising the scale dependence of the effect of air resistance; and a 1931 passage in which H. G. Wells independently came up with the identical way of illustrating the point:
We know that the similarity of phrasing was unintentional because Wells' publishers never retracted The Science of Life for plagiarism... so it must be the Morphogenetic Field again. The double occurrence having deepened the ruts in reality, the ease with which words will fall again into the same combination borders on inevitability.

A motion that "We must not allow a mineshaft gap" was passed with acclamation, and the meeting was adjourned sine die, Somehow we drifted off too far, communicate like distant stars.

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1976 review:

This is my favourite J. B.S. Haldane story.