Hello darkness, my old friend

The predatory-publisher spam is coming from inside my head!!

Huen uill dzi týčr kem? Hev jú finišd júr uork?

Oh teachers are my lessons done? I cannot do another one.

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!

World Cup of Goodness.

Ronny Raydon: Good evening and welcome to "Sports and Politics Should Not Mix" with the goalkeeper of Nottingham Forest and Chavdar Etropole football teams, Dimitar Evtimov!

D.E.: Thanks Raymondo, well it's a bumper programme tonight with talk of the Australian political goalmouth scramble and the imminent Cricket World Cup of Cricket in New Zealand. And who better to tell us about this from the Sofa of Truth than Another Kiwi!!

A.K. (snoring noise)

D.E. Ha hah, wake up Kiwi!

A.K. (mumbling) Is that you mother?

D.E. No it is not your mother it is Dimitar Evtimov at "Sport and Politics Should Not Mix" You are on the Sofa of Truth to talk about Australian politics and the Cricket World Cup of Cricket.

A.K. Righto, Dimitar, the Sofa of Truth should be called the Sofa of Snoozing.

D.E Ok, now, what happened in Australia?

A.K. Captain Cook discovered it Dimit, he was in a boat.

D.E. Ah yes, maybe we could move on to more recent events concerning the Prime Minister, Mr Abbott

A.K Ah ha Mr Bloody Abbott and his reneging on his promise to outlaw Global Warming! A promise is a promise in my book Dennis.

D.E. He promised to outlaw Global warming or the research that proved it?

A.K. Same thing Demist, same thing. And he didn't do it, so the people in Australia said they wanted a change but the Liberal party couldn't get their act together to roll him. They are all about efficiency in government so they didn't have the time to get the coup organised.

D.E It seems that it is popular result with the opposition, though.

A.K. The Labor Party seems to think that Abbott is good for their side!! Ha Ha it's no secret that he's on the other side of them. Ha ha. He's not like that Julia Gillard who had 1/3 of her own caucus against her!

D.E. Yes, Abbott got 39 votes against and 61 for. But moving on to the Cricket World Cup of Cricket.

A.K Yeah, bring it on NZ is ready!

D.E. Yes they had a very good game against Zimbabwe. Sadly the weather robbed the NZ team of bowling out the Zimbs for 120 runs after the kiwis had plundered the bowling. Bit of a comedown after the 350 they got against Pakistan. They aren't choking are they?

A.K. No Demitri they are not, it was a speed wobble as the momentum builds to a great tournament!

D.E. Goodness, are you getting paid by them?

A.K. Only in sponsors products Demerit. Pillows and umbrellas mainly.

D.E They have had some good results, do you think they can springboard off them?

A.K (Snoring)

D.E. Phew

(A Walk in The Black Forest plays)

Light the blue touchpaper and stand well clear.

Life continues to be a trial for Evangaline van Holsterin's owl, Destroyer of Worlds Raining of Carnage or, as he is known in the hootery, Gimpy. Firstly Evangelines idiot boyfriend tried to get Gimpy interested in point-to-point races for dogs. Despite protests and detailed explanations as to the actual non caninicity of Gimpy, the idiot boyfriend entered him in the 2kms Widdlepuke Street to Cockchafers Avenue (Wire Haired Terrier section). Here they are at Tubesock Road and as you can see Gimpy is hard out to win. Riddled is a family blog so we cannot show you the horrible wounds suffered by the idiot boyfriend but as Evangeline said "It has put some shine into Gimpy's feathers."
Then the Vietnamese chickens turned up.

They are lovely peaceful birds and do not wish to cause any trouble for anyone but, sadly for them, they taste nice to owls. This has caused trouble not the least for Mr Ho who lent the chickens to Evangeline's vile nephew Throgmorton for a Farmyard Pageant  he was involved in up at the hospital. Apparently the presence of hens and chickens calms the old folks there. Or would have if the fowlicidal hootery led by blood crazed Gimpy had not turned up
An artists inpression of the scene follows:

Gimpy was confined to the hootery and had his Ovaltine privileges removed after that.
However the Vietnamese chickens may have had the last laugh as Gimpy contracted an infestation of Binh Thnan ticks.

Fumigating the hootery did not go well as Greenish Hugh does not have good discrimination between "smoking nicely" and "We're all going to die!!!"

However by cunning application of mice marinated in ex-hospital brandy we managed to get Gimpy into a receptive mood for fumigating. Even though he appeared to be in the owl equivalent of  a "Hey pal, giz us a song, will ye!" mood, no one really felt like putting the fumigation bomb which had been activated and  was fast counting down, next to Gimpy. 
We were in a timing tick bomb situation.

The Spring of discontent has it's water pooped in by more discontented poopers.

"Oh" people will be saying "that New Zild is a stand-up-for-truth-justice-and-the-Macaroon-way sort of place". And so we are except in an actually doing that sort of way as opposed to a saying that sort of way.
Our Pry Mincer (Hoban 1982) leads the way, of course, in the being transparent and accountable and such like, going on about it at the drop of a hat or the suggestion of the possibility of hat dropping occurring

Mr. Key about to drop a hat

.
      He is currently embroiled in a brouhaha, yes a brouhaha, about his texting with reptilian blogger Cameron Slater.

Artists Impression of Mr Slater

 Mr Key has variously claimed to not know Mr. Slater, to know Mr.Slater, to be Mr. Slaters godparent and finally, after several glasses of Old Rasmussens Gold Fire Rum to have had 3 children by Mr. Slater. All of this has been denied, repeated and then announced on radio after inhaling Helium.
This has all been overshadowed by the affair of Mr Slater texting Mr Key and revealing that the opposition Labour party had tried to have Mr. Slater killed.

What gun has he been smoking?

All of this is to say that politics in New Zild has taken a very healthy Watusi out towards the fruitbat section of popular democracies and certain unkind persons, who usually go by the name Old Entomologists Zoonotic Disease Appreciation Group, are positing that this may be a diversion created by the Pry Mincer for the express purpose of taking the populace's minds (thems that  may have one) off the Tyrell Corporation endorsed changes to the Security and Citizen Harrasment Laws being rammed down our throats this very week. No longer will swarthy types be able to launch themselves upon an unsuspecting world from the very centrally placed New Zild. No longer will carnage rain down upon the world from lovingly restored Beehcraft SD 17S Staggerwing Floatplanes. And there will be no watching of "Get Smart" re-runs either because it is disrespectful to security services.

Vote Tyrell, people and semi-peoples

Beechcraft SD17S Staggerwing floatplane being used for peaceful purposes,  just flying around, what's your problem, man?

Which brings us, in a masterful example of randomised writing, to the latest outrage (furrows brow, looks up inrage, only finds enrage and picture of Sarah Palin wearing Stars and Stripes bikini and firing AR15) which again takes the human form of a government minister, Mr Chris Finlayson. In a twist of fate more twistier than a very twisty thing, Finlayson has very recently been made the Minister of the very folks whose arms the new laws  are made to strengthen.
He was asked a question while he was in Parliament doing that thing called "Question Time" when the opposition gets to ask questions of the government out loud, where everyone can see and hear. Which is how, unfortunately, they did actually hear Mr Finlayson call the asker of the question "A filthy creature". Oops, not really a stellar start to ones new job an hour into it, and all.
One could hope for an early dissolution of Parliament but as Smut Cyde vouchsafed to me the other night at Radiolabeling of DNA with 3' terminal transferase and button soccer night "It's a funny old game".

In Lexington they're going to burnThe Library of Congress for charity

We apologise for the inactivity at Riddled. Another Kiwi and I have been busy all week, manning the security checkpoints and devising ever more bodily-intrusive forms of scrutiny for visitors to the Research Library. All in response to a request from the library pixies, who asked our assistance in keeping out the book-smugglers, on a totally voluntary basis, no pressure, no implied threats if we didn't help.

Delegation of pixies

First we said no... and the next thing I knew, there was a colony of tribbles infesting the top of my hat. While AK was afflicted with a curse whereby all the relevant-to-his-interests back-issues of Miss Busty books he requisitioned from the Archives arrived on his desk with the pages in the wrong order -- starting at the end and counting down -- while the words themselves on the pages were all upside-down. So we changed our minds and agreed to help.

Resourceful book accessionists attempting to
gain library access using (left) belts and
a trained snake; (right) salami and skewers

Why are people so determined to smuggle books into the Library, anyway, and conceal them among the shelves? It is a mystery. Perhaps some books are too dangerous for the original owners, or too expensive to maintain. Some books are sensitive and require a temperature-controlled environment, less than 451°F.

Pixies evict unwanted book

At any rate, the Library pixies will not be having with this, for there is only so much concealment to go around, and every unauthorised book lost forever in the shelvage in the manner of Aleph a leaf in a forest is a hindrance to their own authorised misplacing of volumes and hypervolumes by way of Alexandrian Indexing -- this being the classification system they prefer. There is an index to the Alexandrian system, by the way, which no-one has been able to find ever since it was duly shelved according to its own classificatory code.

Many of these renegade acts of accession are copycat crimes. The perpetrators, when apprehended and questioned, claim to have been inspired by a precedent:
From the description of the Book of Sand --

The number of pages in this book is no more or less than infinite. None is the first page, none the last. I don't know why they're numbered in this arbitrary way. Perhaps to suggest that the terms of an infinite series admit any number.

-- it appears to be a malfunctioning Kindle or such as. But I digress.

Then there are the Encyclopaedia-of-Tlön salesmen... convinced that once Vol. XI (Hlaer to Jangr) is placed within a collection, the others will inevitably follow.

It turns out that automatic killer-robot defenses against book-concealing visitors are easily fooled by the "Living Mist" weapon, i.e. millions of fast-multiplying micro-organisms:

In related news, here is a story which culminates in the smuggling of a book of poems by J. L. Borges into the Argentine National Library: not identical to the specific copy of that edition of poems catalogued in the library's collection, but a replacement for that copy.

The second paragraph of the story is a demonstration that the life of antiquarian book-dealers is always intense:

A few months ago, Casares was offered a seventeenth-century original edition of Don Quixote for one million euros. He recognized it as a well-known forgery from the nineteenth century, worth no more than €200,000. The seller took it away, determined to find a more unsuspecting client, and Casares was left alone with the melancholy of having lost something that was never his to own. 

Sadly, the essayist cannot bring himself to identify Pierre Menard as the author of that forged edition.

Right: A view of the Library

Left: Not renegade accessionists at all, but Another Kiwi trying to climb to the roof for a better view of the firework display. HA HA he has been fooled by the trick ladder

Your set, do not adjust it

Triple Day-of-the-Dead from Garage Project. 11.5% liquid mole, aged in a tequila barrel.

Normal blogging will be resumed as soon as possible.

No, halfwit Fairfax journalist,

Homœopathy is not "A therapy aimed at improving a person's physical, mental and emotional state through natural medicines." You could have looked it up. Instead you went to the website of NZ Naturopaths and accepted their tendentious bafflegab bullshit.

This is a sidebar to a story about quackery, in which an iridologist let someone die when they could have sought real treatment for skin cancer... and for background on homœopathy you went to the website of NZ Naturopaths.

I may have improved the image slightly but that was only to redress the cosmic balance.

Word Verification -- How it works

You are in a well-lit room of indeterminate size, surrounded by various objects -- animals, statues and body parts -- drifting in mid-air as if suspended on threads in a mobile.

Take pigeon

You have a pigeon.

Eat pigeon

The pigeon is raw. Why you speak pigeon inglish?

Take fire

Ouch ouch burny!!

Drop fire. Take mobile. Don't call me Bernie

You now have a cellphone.

Call home

Cellphone is locked. It is Bernie's.

Guess password

You hear a voice, "Prove that you are a robot. Type in the Word Verification."

Type ESOPVS EDINBVRGH

You hear a voice, "That is correct. You have failed the Turing test and are not a robot. Now you must comment at Riddled or be eaten by a GRVE".

Fling cellphone

Becoz I loves youse all

  In this FREE one-hour program, Sound Opinions marks the 35th anniversary of one of the most significant years in rock and roll history. 1977’s punk explosion energized young musicians, scandalized their parents, and changed the music industry forever. Hosts Jim DeRogatis and Greg Kot introduce listeners to the personalities, bands, and landmark records of this game-changing year, from The Ramones’ "Rocket to Russia," to The Talking Heads’ "77," to the Sex Pistols’ "Never Mind the Bollocks."

Programme is here

Donor Kebabs

Lived in the UK - can I donate blood if I have lived in the UK, France or the Republic of Ireland?

If you lived in the UK, France or the Republic of Ireland for a total of six months or more between 1980 and 1996 then unfortunately you will be permanently deferred from donating blood in New Zealand.
This is because of CJD and vCJD – the human form of “mad cow disease”. We simply do not know enough about these conditions and how they are spread. At present there are no tests available to detect these conditions in blood donations.

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

You would think that if the NZ Blood Service were really worried about prion diseases, they would start by excluding prospective donors who have consumed either or both parents' forebrains as part of the Analeptic Alzebo ritual feast to ensure the unbroken chain of transmission of ancestral memories.

I am not convinced that they have thought this out thoroughly.

Giving the readership what they want

It's bronies of course.  4 hooves out of 4.

SMUTDATE:

7. 3/4 horseshoes

14. 4/4 horseshoes

"Horseshoe"??! That is Caput Draconis, the Head of the Dragon, the sign of the Ascending node. Or an Omega.

2.5/4 horseshoes — he thought
it could have been better

That is Cauda Draconis, the Descending node.

Don't kids these days learn anything about elementary necromancy?

Enquiring mind how you go.

Many readers have enquired as to the whereabouts of Evangeline van Holsterin's owl, Gimpy. Life was not kind to Gimpy and he slipped into a dissolute life eventually emerging as spokesowl for Nottola an organistion that "Just says NO to birdseed soaked in Port". These days he is philisophical about his life. "I don't give a hoot about that stuff. That'll be $10, thanks" he says reflecting the new harder edged side of his personality.   

Still more readers have been asking about the Christmas Ale Bacon project.* There have been a few technical issues with production. As can be seen from photos taken at the piggery this morning the magical properties of the Christmas Ale have produced unforeseen consequences. For instance, the flying pig Pope. Of course, those of us who are godless heathens have no problem with nomming the nuncio but some amongst us have expressed disquiet with curing the cardinal. Also it is a bugger to catch a winged pig. For a start you have to have a blooming big net.
Also it keeps banging on about peace and love and that.

   Some readers have asked about enrolling in Riddled Rapid Learning School. It is recommended that applicants should have a tertiary qualification and be used to long hours of scholarly work. Uniquely among modern online based education institutions, Riddled has "iLearn" immersion capsules designed for each student to enable the knowledge to get into your brain sharpish like. Made of modern papyrus based materials the iLearn system channels education vibrations into the cerebral cortex and has been extensively tested on rats who have been proven to have increased their knowledge of medieval crop rotation systems by 64%.

 Warning: use of the iLearn system may result in loss of legs.

 
* SMUTDATE: Hey AK, the labels are ready for the bottles now!

Multiple Choices

Welcome to the newest recruit to the Riddled staff.
Magic Robot ALWAYS gives the RIGHT answer (answers vouchsafed by Arthur Mee's Children's Encyclopedia). Sometimes it will even be the same answer as was provided in a previous interview. Judges' decisions are final; no correspondence will be entered into; note that Magic Robot carries the Rod of Incentive to Wisdom and takes not kindly to vexation nor litigation.

Also, questions must be written in Enochian script

Some of the most urgent questions e.g. "Who ate the last of the Chocolate Hobnobs from the staff tea-room?" are unaccountably missing from the list of options, but nevertheless, send in your queries and we'll see what Magic Robot has to say.

Magic Robot has given us written assurances that its world-domination intentions will remain in abeyance during the full period of its Riddled tenure.

The Renaissance version of Magic Robot was perfected by Athanasius Kircher, following sketchy blueprints drawn up by Roger Bacon in the course of the ill-fated 'Brazen Head' project. It was of limited use, for whatever the question the answer was always either "Time Was", "Time Is" or "Time Will Be".

The same design paradigm appears to have been used in designing the User Interface Module in the autopilot of the Riddled Time Machine.

... Needs moar Animated Renaissance Magic Robot.

Searching for Celine

This week's top search terms:
The Riddled staff will not enable or pander to your vile degraded tastes by providing pokemon hentai tentacle porn. Or Bracelli. Do your own search for stills from Possession.


At least the flurry of visitors we had last week searching for Russian buttplug have dropped off the bottom of the list.

H/t to the House of Substance for linking to Monica Cook

Olympics we haz a disappoint

The Riddled Underwater Formation Bellringers return  empty-handed from the Olympic Games. Team Captain Swearing Bob vouchsafed that the game was rigged. A family news source such as this can only report him as saying "The ... with a melon... and his donkey"
Several observers observed that the complete lack of an Underwater bell ringing competition probably had the most effect on the team.
 "..." commented Swearing Bob.
Replicas of the team uniforms are available from the Riddled Gift Shop and Delicatessen

Service at the Old Entomologist

Much faster after we noticed the architect's blunder and turned the bar through 90°.

SMUTDATED with bonus playing-field irregularity inspired by AK's comment.

Background: The New Zealand Rugby Union is accused of favouritism toward the Otago Rugby team -- disadvantaging other teams -- after the Otago team managed to lose a few $million in the middle of the World Cup rugby boom and went tits-up into receivership.

At Riddled we do not rate for the literal use of figures of speech, for throwing-under-bus-related activities are traumatic for the drivers and lead to delays on the #1 route when some of us might be trying to get home from the pub.

An Extremely Stolen Idea.

1) What are you reading at the moment?  Peter Green. "The Greco-Persian Wars" .300 was such bollocks, the real story is way better.
2) As a child, what did you read under the covers? I don't remember ever doing this. Probably "William" books would have been addictive enough for me to do it.
3) Has a book ever made you cry, and if so which one? No I don't think so. English writer Alan Coren has made me cry with laughter, however.
4) You are about to be put into solitary confinement for a year and allowed to take three books. What would you choose? One of Shelby Footes History of the American Civil war, Michael King's History of New Zealand and Don Quixote
5) Which literary character would you most like to sleep with? Kerry Greenwood's Phryne Fisher. Never a dull moment and plenty of Champagne
6) If you could write a self-help book, what would you call it? _Procrastinate your way to somewhere or other_
7) Which book, which play, and which poem would you make compulsory reading in high school English classes?
Book: Riddley Walker
Play: Henry IV part one
Poem: The Turnip Snedder- Seamus Heaney
8) Which party from literature would you most like to have attended? All's Well That Ends Well" party
9) What would you title your memoirs? "What I really meant was..."
10) If you were an actor, which literary character do you dream of playing? Sebastian Flyte from Brideshead,


And you?

Health alert

New study with Brazilian subjects identifies Southwest Airlines as a cancer risk!

Methods.  A questionnaire about personal and sexual habits was completed in interviews of 118 PC patients and 374 controls (healthy men) recruited between 2009 and 2010 from 16 urology and oncology centers.
Main Outcome Measures.  SWA rates, geographic distribution, duration, frequency, animals involved, and behavioral habits were investigated and used to estimate the odds of SWA as a PC risk factor.
Results. SWA was reported by 171 (34.8%) subjects, 44.9% of PC patients and 31.6% of controls (P < 0.008). [...]
Conclusion.  SWA is a risk factor for PC and may be associated with venereal diseases. New studies are required in other populations to test other possible nosological links with SWA.

CBS goes for a more alarmist headline:

Sex with animals tied to penile cancer

Speaking here as a farmboy, if the animals are tied then one's penis is not the part of the body most at risk.

The authors report that Southwest Airlines is also associated with venereal diseases, sex with prostitutes, and having numerous sexual partners, suggesting that what we are seeing here -- and what might underlie the cancer risk -- is a constellation of behaviours technically known as the "horndog syndrome".

Instead, the lead author preferred to ascribe the risk to "micro-traumas in the human penile tissue [...] Perhaps animal tissues are less soft than ours". Meanwhile a Dr Köhler

speculates that the friction during SWA causes micro-lesions. "The vagina in humans has moisturizing properties, which prevent penile injury."

An anonymous Herr Doktor authority pointed out to Riddled reporters that if rough unlubricated stimulation of a teenaged male's penis caused dickrot then the human race would have died out a long time ago.

For readers who crave details, Riddled is here to help:
"The number of animals involved per individual ranged from 1 to 7. The animal types most often cited were mares (N = 80), followed by donkeys (N = 73), mules (N = 57), goats (N = 54), chickens (N = 27), calves (N = 18), cows (N = 13), dogs (N = 10), sheep (N = 10), pigs (N = 6), and other species (N = 3). Chickens were more frequently involved in the south and southeast of the country, with only three reports in the northeast, where donkeys dominated the reports."

This is IMPORTANT INFORMATION if you need to know the market segmentation for a new range of specialised greetings cards.

UPDATED with suitable image on insistence of ITTDGY.
UPDATE² is brought to us by the letter B, and by a Swedish anthropology blogger.