[Narrator's voice]: Later, Johnston insulted the neighbours while taking out the rubbish, and tried to fuck the bin

I do not envy his future neighbours at #12.

Oddly enough, "Accidental Cat Filter" is also the name of my Al Stewart covers band

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/jun/17/accidental-cat-filter-appears-on-pakistan-officials-briefing

Because the world was not stupid enough already

CHIZ CHIZ the January 20/21 lunar eclipse will not be visible from this side of the world. But this has the consolation that we are spared all the media bollocks about WOLF MOON.

Journamalists are no longer content with the frisson of excitement that comes from flirting with the End-of-Days Revelation-fanfic rhetoric preferred by US Talibangelists, and writing "Blood Moon" headlines instead of boring old "lunar eclipses". They have found a stronger hit of drama (dressed up with faux-tribal Spirit Animal trappings) to enmoronise their audience.

Evidently there is an ancient Native American tradition of using "Wolf Moon" to label the first full moon of the year (Julian calendar), going all the way back to the 1990s.

This is why we can't have nice things.

"It was the sort of thing one did at the turn of the century"

The news items do not say whether the acid was subsequently neutralised with an alkaline buffer, and then mixed with cheap red wine, while the consular staff were herded under a large ornate table in the Audience Hall and provided with glasses. I presume that this was the case, so that Saudi officials could smugly announce that "We drank Jamal Khashoggi under the table."

In fact all the cool kids these days are using alkaline hydrolysis for body disposal (Victor the Cleaner is not a reliable source on these matters) but the kleptocratic savages in charge of Saudi Arabia are not really au fait with anything more recent that the Merovingian period.

"Sausage Cartel" is the name of my Throbbing Gristle tribute band

What the news item doesn't explain is how the cartel drove up prices by engineering artificial scarcities. They would promise a shipment of sausages, then delay delivery with a series of excuses.

Always promising that "The wurst is yet to come".

Tell me, sister Morphine, how long have I been lying here? What am I doing in this place? Why does the doctor have no face?

Life continues to imitate Agatha Christie plot-lines:



A Christchurch medical researcher has died in a suspected suicide as police investigated claims she poisoned her partner last year and also whether she fatally poisoned her husband nine years ago.
...
Before her May 9 death, police had approached her about her partner collapsing at home three times last year. The partner, who Stuff has decided not to name, was rushed to hospital in June, July and August after falling unconscious. Tests eventually revealed his blood contained five different types of prescription medicine. 
...
The partner grew suspicious when he woke in his hospital room to find Dawson wearing gloves and administering what appeared to be a yellow substance to his IV line through a needle.

She claimed she wore the gloves because he was infectious and that he had seen a yellow pen.

Whenever I wake up from a drugged stupor and find the Frau Doktorin by the bedside holding a syringe, she explains that she needs to practice taking samples for work, so that's OK.

Disturbingly, this is probably only the second- or third-most bizarre medical-researcher-related tale of devious murder to come out of Christchurch.

Had enough of humans today

According to our local Com-Post, mass murder to inspire terror and advance a cause does not count as "terrorism" if the cause is merely misogyny and male entitlement.

James Tiptree Jnr. looks more prescient every day.

Worst Ray Harryhausen stop-action movie EVAH

[source]

I would still pay many quatloos to watch it.

Worst Fear-&-Loathing-in-Las-Vegas hommage EVAH

We can't stop here, this is wind-turbine toilet-block country!

[h/t Brisbane Times, RW]

Journalists far more sympathetic towards Worst US Mass-Murderer Until Next One after discovery that he was not only white, but also Economically Insecure

No, really.



In other news, the local sheriff has incontrovertible conclusive truth that Paddock was crazy, and therefore not a true Scotsman representative of American Heartland Gunlicker Values.

The Pink Knight rises

"A fleeing dairy robber has been stopped in his tracks by a man wearing a pink crop top, tutu, fishnets and fairy wings on a Napier street."

There is no doubt an Origin Story to this crime-busting superhero on our streets but I DON'T NEED TO KNOW.
Nor do I care to speculate what the equivalent of the Bat-Signal will be when his assistance is needed.

The report does not provide details of the fairy-suit fabric. I am going to pretend that it was made with a lustrous, sheeny textile with filament fibres and a high float ratio, just so as to joke about "Knights in Pink Satin".

Unwanted mental image #487

One at a time, or collectively?

New band name!

Here are some chickens being therapised into aversion to torpedos.

Chickens Scared by Torpedo from seriousFilm on Vimeo.

Bonus Chicken Aversion:

Police did not report at what point the burglars realised what they were eating

If this does not eventually feature in a Jemaine Clement movie I shall be very disappointed.

Really, WashPost?

Karen DeYoung, Washington Post, two days ago:

[Nikki Haley] said the United States had no plans to decrease its military exercises with North Korea, despite calls from China and Russia to do so, in exchange for gradual deescalation of its prohibited weapons activities.

On-line version was quietly though belatedly edited and now reads

She said the United States had no plans to decrease its military exercises with South Korea, despite calls from China and Russia to do so. 

The correction has not reached the various newspappers who trustingly syndicate WashPost stories. The two words have the same number of letters so it is an easy mistake to make.

Reassuring: White House contains fewer than three preschoolers

John Decker: The President announced on Twitter that there's no chaos at the White House. How would you describe what has happened over the course of the past ten days?

Sanders: I have said it before, if you want to see chaos, come to my house with three preschoolers. This doesn’t hold a candle to that.

Black swan event: Best 'Top Gear' episode EVAH.

It is reassuring to know that Volvo autonomous vehicles can identify and avoid elk. Møøse bites Kan be pretti nasti.

The "baffling part" was when

the kangaroos reappeared from behind a hill and launched a barrage of stinger missiles* at the hapless helicopter self-driving vehicle. (Apparently the programmers had forgotten the remove “that” part of the infantry coding).

And we would have got away with it, too, if it weren't for those interfering black swans.

UPDATE: B^4 questions in comments whether "small animal detection" is the appropriate term for Macropus rufus. He is clearly unacquainted with the challenging Scandiwegian environment in which Volvo vehicles are designed to navigate: by those standards, kangaroos are indeed small.

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

* Or some other surrealer ordinance:

“[S]ince we were not at that stage interested in weapons, we had not set any weapon or projectile types, so what the kangaroos fired at us was in fact the default object for the simulation, which happened to be large multicoloured beachballs.”

Shock testimony: "Old age" ruled out as cause of death

Pro-tip: Highly-effective politicians only write dirty limericks

Here at Riddled we are aware of all Terms-of-venery traditions and we cannot condone the use of "bevy" as a collective term for bad poetry. "Bevy" can apply to quail, roe-deer or pulchritudinous ladies.

Judges would have accepted the terms "anthology" or "slim volume".

The culprit for this terminological turpitude was one Harrison Christian, who writes at more length here, with a paragraph break to finish each sentence in the standard journamalistic style of punctuation:

Rachel MacGregor has told a court she was horrified by former Conservative Party leader Colin Craig's "really bad poetry," and felt trapped while she was working for him.
On Monday, MacGregor - Craig's former press secretary - gave evidence in the Auckland High Court, where Craig is suing Whaleoil blogger Cameron Slater.
Slater's lawyer Brian Henry cross-examined MacGregor, asking her reaction to a letter Craig wrote to her on Christmas Eve in 2014, which included two love poems.
"I remember feeling really offended, because we agreed that there were going to be boundaries and he had even written them himself, and now he's writing me really bad poetry," she said.
"It was awful actually, especially because he was going really into detail about me physically."
One of the poems, titled Beautiful, which Craig has admitted was inappropriate, featured lines like, "You are beautiful because your skin is so soft."
It was part of a bevy of letters and poetry Craig sent MacGregor while he employed her as his press secretary.

...There is more, but it descends into a critique of dorky couture.

[Stoled from Oglaf]

Cameron Slater is a "high-functioning Youtube comment" [MMMM, 2017], whose niche in the political ecosystem rests on his eagerness to dirty himself with work that National Party politicians themselves are too fastidious to touch. He claims to be a journalist, and therefore immune from defamation lawsuits; and also a blogger, and therefore exempt from putative fact-based journalistic restrictions. Colin Craig is just another libertarian / theocrat gobshite, whom the National Party was courting for a while as a possible coalition partner when he was playing with political-party-shaped sockpuppets. And now they are suing each other.

The usual advice against mud-wrestling with pigs does not extend to watching two pigs mud-wrestle.

...Dramatis personae of the news report also includes a lawyer, previously friendly with both sides, not so much now.

Justice Kit Toogood asked Slater: "You say you felt betrayed, but did you not betray her express injunction that this [conversation] cannot go anywhere else?"
"I did dance around on that but I guess technically I did," Slater said.

Whatever Justice Toogood is paid to put up with the crap from these fucksticks, it is not enough.

Australians continue to live down to our expectations

This appears to be an Australian re-make of 'Ruthless People", but with unrequited explosions:

About 1am on February 1, 2015, Yarnton woke in the passenger seat and heard a "hissing sound" coming from an open gas bottle in the car, and found his socks soaked with petrol.

Haven't we all woken up like that after date night?
I am just puzzled that the accused Mrs Yarnton -- a "high-ranking police officer" -- could not find more competent criminals than "Married couple Monique Hayes, 25, and Fady Houda, 24" to dispose of her husband.