Clarence St and Butt St

Disappointed by the absence of a nearby Malmsey Road.

Go home, Google Translate. You are drunk

This is why Finland can't have nice things:

☊

Yeah! Shub-Niggurath!
Come on! Shub-Niggurath!
Come on! Shub-Niggurath!
YEARS! Shub-Niggurath!
Shub-Niggurath!
We have Shub-Niggurath!
THANK YOU NOW! Shub-Niggurath!
We have Shub-Niggurath!
THANK YOU NOW! Shub-Niggurath!
Shub-Niggurath!
Shub-Niggurath!
Shub-Niggurath, ever since!
Shub-Niggurath! All right now!
Shub-Niggurath! Everyday!
Shub-Niggurath ever had it!
Shub-Niggurath! Ever since!
Shub-Niggurath has ever been here!
Shub-Niggurath has always been here!
Shub-Niggurath has ever been here!
Shub-Niggurath has ever been here in all times!
Shub-Niggurath! Ever since, all around the world!
Shub-Niggurath! In the days of nowadays, all over the world!
Shub-Niggurath! EVERYTHING EVERYTHING ALWAYS ALLOWED!
Shub-Niggurath! Ever since, all over the world!
Shub-Niggurath! Ever since, all around the world!
EVERYTHING EVERYTHING IS HERE! Shub-Niggurath!
Shub-Niggurath! Ever since, all around the world!
Shub-Niggurath! EVERYTHING EVERYTHING ALWAYS ALLOWED!
Shub-Niggurath! Ever since, all around the USA!
Shub-Niggurath! EVERYTHING EVERYTHING ALWAYS HERE!
Shub-Niggurath! EVERYTHING EVERYTHING ALWAYS ALLOWED NOW!
Shub-Niggurath! Ever since, all around the world!
Shub-Niggurath! EVERYTHING EVERYTHING!
Shub-Niggurath! Ever since, all around the world!

☋

EVERYTHING EVERYTHING EVERYTHING HOW TO HAVE EVERYTHING
EVERY DAY THROUGHOUT ALL OF THE WEEK ALL OF THE WEEK
EVERYTHING EVERYTHING EVERYTHING ALWAYS ALLOWED
EVERY DAY THROUGHOUT ALL OF THE WEEK ALL
EVERYTHING EVERYTHING EVERYTHING
EVERYTHING EVERYTHING EVERYTHING EVERYTHING
EVERYTHING EVERYTHING ALWAYS ALLOWED
EVERYTHING EVERYTHING EVERYTHING
EVERYTHING EVERYTHING ALWAYS ALLOWED
EVERYTHING EVERYTHING ALWAYS HAVE EVERYTHING
EVERYTHING EVERYTHING ALWAYS HERE
EVERYTHING EVERYTHING ALWAYS HAVE EVERYTHING
EVERYTHING EVERYTHING ALWAYS HAVE EVERYTHING
EVERY DAY THROUGHOUT ALL THE WEEK
EVERYTHING EVERYTHING
EVERYTHING EVERYTHING
EVERYTHING EVERYTHING
HOW TO HAVE ALL OF THE YEARS
EVERYTHING EVERYTHING
EVERY DAY THEREOF
EVERY DAY THAT HAS BEEN HIMSELF
EVERYTHING IS HERE
EVERY DAY NOW
EVERYTHING IS HERE
EVERYONE THAT WE HAVE
All the time
EVERYONE
I've ever had time
In the past
In the evening
YES
Come on
Yeah

Coda

Yeah! Cthulhu!

I am! Cthulhu!

Do not you! Cthulhu!

Come on, I'm cthulhu!

Daddy Daddy Daddy Cthulhu!

Daddy Daddy Daddy Cumshot!
Daddy Daddy Daddy Daddy Cumshot!
I'm sorry I'm sorry!

 

How do you say "spam" in Lorem Ipsum?

This is a real arrival in the Riddled mailbox. Full marks to the Biovision Marketing Department!

------------------------- Original Message -------------------------
Subject: Metabolism, Apoptosis, Epigenetics Assays from BioVision
From:    "Biovision" [marketingl@biovision.com]
Date:    Tue, November 24, 2015 6:37 am
To:      [redacted]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
Intro title:
Title of Email
Hello [redacted],

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Phasellus sed lacinia nunc. Aliquam neque augue, mollis sit amet molestie quis, ullamcorper id nibh. Curabitur at volutpat erat. Nam in nisi eu augue varius lacinia sed varius ipsum. Morbi pretium est ut est rutrum eu tincidunt nisl congue. Fusce elementum dignissim mi, nec pulvinar libero faucibus ut.
Mktoweb, Inc. 100 Webster Street, Suite 404, City of Commerce, CA 99999

Contact Us <#>

Skull-blogging: "Death by Dreaming" edition

Jon Ewbank Manchip White is noted for being named after a mechanical carpet sweeper, and for writing a damned fine fantasy novel of the post-Dream Master visiting-someone-else's-dream genre:

What's that, BoingBoing?

Gallery show floor replaced with 100K miniature skulls you walk on with bare feet

Because a single page of the text is not enough:

People who should not stow thrones

One of the untold stories of Modernist literature was the film-script collaboration between Beckett, Borges and Flann O'Brien. The only surviving witness to the whole project is Dan "the Pro" Scenium, a fellow barfly with stagehand experience who advised the trio of Hollywood wannabees about the practicalities of their stagecraft ideas. Since then he has maintained professional stagehand confidentiality, until his lips were recently loosened by two pints of Old Carbuncle and one of Mrs Miggin's huhu-grub hotdogs.

Apparently O'Brien had chosen to work on the closing act of the script. So here's the version he eventually published in his Irish Times column in the early 1950s:

Disused meteorological station

Borges' 1949 version does not include the potentate's return to power, concentrating on issues of personal identity during his exile. The court is reduced to a lion and a Nubian slave, and although Borges considered the notion of locating it in London, he preferred to shift the action to the coastline of Cornwall. Also the "meteorological station" becomes a large circular building with a raised penthouse at the centre -- first in the cyclic architecture of circular ruins and Parsi Towers of Silence that furnish the Borgesphere.

Beckett's 1965 version stripped this labyrinth to its simplest form: a sealed rotunda 36 inches high containing two people.

White too the vault and the round wall eighteen inches high from which it springs. Go back out, a plain rotunda, all white in the whiteness, go back in, rap, solid throughout, a ring as in the imagination the ring of bone.

Beckett did not help much at all with the plot or the characterisation, and his co-authors did not think he was pulling his weight. Also he was nowhere to be found when it was his turn to buy the chocolate Tim-Tams.

Between them they drove Dan to distraction. One day Borges might have him building a giant labyrinth (painted scarlet) for the set; and just when it was complete he'd change his mind, and be all "No, O'Brien's endless beach between the sea and the cliffs is the superior labyrinth -- no stairways to climb, nor doors to force, nor unending galleries to wear one down, nor walls to block one's way."

Relevant to my interests.

In the ideal world, a journal with a name like Vox Sanguinis would ccupy its pages with Magritte paintings and fin-du-cycle symbolist / decadent poems entitled Fungi from Yuggoth or The Star-Treader or Negations. Instead there are enthralling forum reports on testing for rare blood antigens. World, be more funny!!

Any fule know that blood antigens are linked to personality types,* but do the editors do accept manuscripts on the subject? DO THEY BOGROLL.

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

* In the earlier Riddled report on the subject we touched on the Myers-Briggs personality typology as something even sillier than blood-group quackery. Then there is the Big-Five typology which is possibly sillier still. Blogging on the Big-Five model will ensue as soon as I think of an appropriate segue.

Not an appropriate segway. Nuns who spend most of their natural lives riding segways over the rocky roadsteads of the parish get their personalities mixed up with the personalities of their segways as a result of the interchanging of the mollycules of each of them, and you would be surprised at the number of nuns in country parts who are nearly half nun and half segway.

"What's a segway?" wondered Chapman.
"About 15 kilograms," Keats promptly replied.

Chapter Six

Haven't written anything for the Doktorling for a while but here's an episode from a few years ago.

“You can’t bring that into my pub!” Ed growled. He had changed T-shirts. The new one was marked out in lines which divided his chest into Chuck, Brisket, Blade, Thin Rib, Thick Rib, Sirloin, Skirt and Flanks.

“Bring what? Ai, ai, aiKIdo!” Coleridge was a sneezing picture of innocence.

“That dog. That long-haired scruffy thing stumbling around at the end of that piece of string.”

Porlock fumbled in a top pocket for his cigarette case. He had been seated at the bar for some time, watching Polly playing with a set of cuff-links. “You will have to be more specific than that,” he pointed out.

“The scruffy long-haired thing on the other end of the string from Coleridge.”

“Ah, that dog,” Coleridge admitted. “I will have you know that Lassi here is a Nepalese Curry Hound, of the finest pedigree, borrowed from an Indian restaurant. Kunggg…FU!”

“Let me remind you of the ‘No Dogs’ rule in my pub, a rule which I enforce with unbending severity, because otherwise people would bring in talking dogs. And that would lead inevitably to a veritable plague of talking animal jokes.”

Merry Crossmass from Mrs Cat

One of her ex's visited this morning and left in a cloud of ginger fur.
Merry Christmas my arse!

The following Sloka, which, as you have not heard, I will now proceed to relate

Melting landscape karst limestone
Red dust trousers once were clean
Potholes felt in every bone
Hairpin bends have turned me green
Counting down each milestone
All day spent on Route 13.

Somehow it is not as iconic as Highway 66.

Shooting shark

There was going to be a joke here about Skynet and cloud-computing going awry, but then I thought, why spoil a perfectly good display of shark-finned meteorology?

Rural Idyll, or Farm of Fear????

Rare Tiger Rabbit seen in Upper Aramoho.

Wanganui farmer Jess Michaelson has sent in this amazing photo of the fabled Wanganui Tiger Rabbit. Speaking from his rural idyll of Upper Aramoho under conditions of anonymity, Mr Michaelson confirmed that he had seen the rabbit after it had wantonly destroyed 7 cabbages that were in Mr Michaelson's garden. "Those were the kids Christmas cabbages" sobbed a tearful Mr Michaelson as, under conditions of anonymity, he talked by phone from his Waireka Road property. "And now the bloody Tiger Rabbit has eaten one and ruined the rest"
An understandably distraught Mr Michaelson said that messages of support on his cell phone (027) MICHAELSON"S BRASSICA FARM were helping him and his wife bear up. "The Tiger rabbit has ruined our Christmas" he repeated in a frankly nauseating display of self pity. "Well have to give the kids brussels sprouts, and we wanted to eat them all ourselves"
"Boo Hoo" he added
It thought that the Upper Aramoho Tiger Rabbit is a result of mating between an Aramoho Rabbit and a mascot Tiger loosed by American GI"s here in the Second World War. Whatever it is the result of, it has eaten all of the kids Christmas and added to misery of this family as they drive around in their Yellow 2005 Toyota Previa, CAB 721.

Rolling an idea onto the park and seeing who tries to bend it

"So" said Smut "our last production of The Mikado, was bit flat". He read the review
" This production is to a pancake like what a crepe is. More flatter".
"My brother wrote that. He's good inee?" said Evangaline Van Holsteren
"What this needs is some topical aspects" said tigris "Things happening now" she explained quickly to me.
"Must be the World Cup" I vouchsafed .
"'Cept it's over" said Evangaline Van Holsteren.
"Oh yes, it's over' I explained "Any fule knows that. But the memory of the gloriousness remains".
The gathered thespians looked out the windows.
"Also, it just needs a soccer ball" I explained "With a few jokes about Balls and such." The assembled actors did not approve of changes to the immortal script
"Yes" said Evangaline Van Holsteren "your jokes were a reel hit last time." She read the review "Another Kiwi's jokes are to jokes like what a rhinoceros is to a kitten. Not." She chuckled "That's good that is" she opined.
tigris and Evangeline Van Holsteren said that they would be the maids and Smut and Merc took the male leads leaving me to be the third maiden. "I shall wear a red hat. I explained "No one will know it's me." There were doubts expressed.
"The show must go on" I explained
"Not really" said Evangaline Van Holsteren

Birds Nest Boys

Smut said: "the Comments aren't working".
I said "Good, I am sick of penis jokes."
Smut said, "You had better go and fix it"
"What" I vouchsafed "is tigris doing aside from lying around eating grapes and sending merc down to the paint shop for a can of tartan paint?"
"I told her to make it polka-dot" said Smut "anyway, you should take the ladder and go and fix the comments"
"Righto" I said seeing the opportunity for an afternoon pretending to look for the comments box.
Smut said "It's on the lamppost outside Mrs Miggins shop near the traffic lights"
"I thought that that was a birds nest" I opined.
"It is that and all" said Smut.
Merc bought the instruction book and called up to me "it's a blue wire with silver striping"
"Righto" I said "Oooow fuck"
"Or maybe not" he said
"I  need to get down now" I said "The mother Sloth is waking up"
merc looked at his watch "Nearly opening time at the Old Entomologist, I'm just saying"
"I need to check their feed" I said.

Chapter Fifteen

Blake sipped his beer suspiciously. He had no memory of ordering it or idea of why he had done so. Beer is unknown in the Petropolis reality, but from what he had heard about hops and bitterness, something was missing from the flavour. He would have detected more taste if he’d tried licking the label instead. When he looked at the empty bottle for the name of the beer and the ingredients, it seemed smeared or out-of-focus. He lifted it from the bar for a closer look but somehow the printing hovered just outside the reach of legibility.

“You’re dreaming,” he heard Ed say. “None of this meets official minimum standards of reality.” Blake looked up from the bottle to see that the words and logos on the beer taps were equally blurred. The only readable words in sight were printed on Ed’s t-shirt: “There is no such thing as a Stupid Question,” they read. Apart from Ed N’Bro, the interior of the Old Entomologist stood strangely deserted.

“Not completely deserted,” Ed insisted. “There is also the bird.” He nodded in the direction of the birdcage at the end of the bar. Its usual occupant was missing, and had been replaced by some kind of swamp wading bird, tall and tapering, marked by a pattern of vertical streaks as if for hiding among reeds. The bars of the cage had acquired thorns, while rose buds were sprouting from the top. “It’s a bittern,” he explained. “A female of the species. That’s why you can’t taste your beer. Would you like a cola instead?”

Little of this made any sense to Blake, but he had started out with low expectations about the amount of logic that one might discover in a dream, so he was hardly disappointed. “I remember,” he said. “I’m due to contact my boss and deliver a progress report, since she hasn’t contacted me. So I went to sleep.”

NZ features in song by overseas person!!!

I know who I'll be seeing in New Zealand
If I ever return and I want to
I know who I'll be seeing in New Zealand
If I ever get back and I hope I'll do I'll see you.

Looking out the window at a blue New Zealand sky
Watching all the quiet gentle people going by
Far away from what they call the madding crowd
Dreaming in the land of the long white clouds. 

Etc.

This a song by Kentuckyian Tom T Hall.
One wonders where he actually went to report that he watched the "quiet gentle people". Obviously not outside the Old Entomologist on Frog Racing night.

Send "I Know Who I'll Be Seeing in New Zeland" ringtones to your cell

Chapter Nine

The good thing about writing for one's daughter is that she doesn't mind the reuse of very old jokes. Unless Terry Pratchett has used them as well (the barstidge).

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

Coleridge had decided to teach the parrot to talk. “Come on, Georgie,” he repeated. “You can say it. ‘Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must remain silent!’” The bird remained obstinately silent and glared at him through the bars of the cage with little red homicidal eyes. Traces of catfood plastered its feathers. Dispossessed from her cage, Polly the cat sat at the far end of the bar and licked her scratches.

Ed N’Bro saw no reason to inform his customers that the bird was not in fact a large partly-bald cockatoo. Actually it was a fledgling Aepyornis. When it reached adult size it would be three metres tall, like a giant carnivorous ostrich with a beak like a meat-cleaver, and he suspected that it would outgrow the cage before then.

He shrugged. Right now there were other customers to check on downstairs.

The Old Entomologist basement is long and narrow. As well as the beer-barrels and crates of bottles and glasses that you might expect, it is cluttered with all manner of theatrical props, left over from the days before the building became a pub. Flat plywood scenery, cardboard-and-tinfoil armour, a long pendulum ending in a glittering scythe-blade (left over from a stage version of ‘The Pit and the Pendulum’). Racks along one wall hold backdrops, rolled up like blinds. A long table occupies the only clear space in the middle of the room. The low ceiling is criss-crossed by a network of ducts and tubing – gurgling and flushing at erratic intervals – so that it could easily be used as a gymnasium for gibbons.

Chapter Fourteen (a)

Out of breath from climbing the stairs, Coleridge gazed longingly at the armchairs in Porlock’s lounge. They radiated a sense of comfort and contentment. There was something maternal about them, even though the buttons on their upholstery looked nothing like nipples. He could almost hear them calling out to him: ‘Sit in me, Coleridge! Hey big boy, why don’t you sink back into my depths? Rest and relax! No, sit in me! Shut up, you, I saw him first! He’s mine, you little bean-bag!’

But Porlock had invited Coleridge here for an unveiling of a secret, and he was too intent on the coming demonstration to care about the siren cries from his furniture, or his colleague’s need to catch his breath. “Behold the future of detective work!” he announced grandly, pausing at the door to the next room. “This database is the engine-room of my deductive juggernaut!”

Porlock would have preferred that the entrance to the room was through a pair of solid ceiling-high oak doors – embellished with ornate brass handles and hinges – that he could fling open with a satisfying flourish. Alternatively, a featureless slab of brushed aluminium that slid aside automagically and vanished into the wall with barely a whisper of sound. In practice the door was only wide enough for one person; had been painted a tragic shade of purple-yellow by some previous occupant of the house who had been equipped with more house-paint than good taste; and was pitted and scarred across its upper panel where a dartboard used to hang (until Porlock had become so embarrassed by his poor marksmanship that he had taken it down, leaving a clear circle of unpitted paint as a ghostly reminder of where it had been). Also his emergency back-up overcoat was hanging from the handle, and had to be removed and hurled into a corner before Porlock could open the door and usher Coleridge through. All this undermined the drama of the moment.

Chapter Five

Alone at the bar, Ed N’Bro was musing over the final spaces in his crossword. The current message written on his chest claimed that “My other T-shirt is a Designer Label”.

Two figures darkened the doorway in a partial eclipse. Ed looked up to greet them with a new slogan he was testing: “Welcome to The Old Entomologist, the most haunted pub in Christchurch!”

“Allow us to introduce ourselves,” said the left-hand figure – the taller of the two – in a voice you could spread on toast. “Knuckles and Kneebone, pollinctors. That is, we are expeditors of the metabolically challenged. Funeral directors.”

“We bury stiffs!” blurted out the right-hand figure – the wider of the two – in a voice as hoarse as a crow with rigor mortis. To emphasise his words point he pulled a folding army-surplus spade from a pocket. The effect was spoiled by the failure of the spade to stay unfolded, and the blade flapped limply on its hinge as he brandished it.

Chapter Twelve

Blake found himself in some sort of stadium, halfway along a ramp, walking down past endless rows of empty seats. “Where am I” was one of the questions that crossed his mind, along with “How did I get here?” and most important of all, “Which of these seats is mine?”

He realised that he was holding a small sheet of paper. Squinting, he tried to make sense of the words printed on it:

This dream has not yet been rated. Parental guidance advisory. May contain allegory, figures of speech, gratuitous word-play and heavy-handed symbolism. Then the words fell apart into individual pen-strokes which writhed briefly on the paper before assembling themselves into a new message, with only two letters now: 2B.

“That’s reassuring,” Blake said aloud. “I seem to have reserved a seat – or possibly a soft-lead pencil. What’s more, this place must be the Petropolis Clown Coliseum… but because this is only a dream, I don’t have to feel ashamed of myself for visiting a place which I disapprove of so strongly.”

Renovations are hell.

We are, like, so fed up. The ladder goes off into another dimension, there's a big melancholy sign on the sun, the cow has Rhindepest and a large piece of the roof has fallen off. Maybe some people SHOULD read instructions on the glue bottle, but it is no good carrying on about it now.
Luckily the home made burglar alarm stuff is still on the wall to keep us safe.
Where the feck does the stone ball fit into the stone feature that will add distinctiveness to our home in 27 easy to follow steps??
Also I think the boy is not happy with the building paper clothes, but I don't know where the fecking wardrobe has gone. There wasn't that much sea in the front yard when we started.