OMFSM it's a Giant Blemmys Pursuing Ann Althouse!

How many other sites offer you Blemmyes in TWO SPEEDS?



Dear 'Nuremburg Chronicle' Editor
Today I saw the first farting tap-dancing alien of Spring. He was wearing a Scramble Suit and chasing Ann Althouse. Then the dough boiling in oil suddenly shot out of kitchen pots.
Yours
Horace Arbuthnot-Cholmondeley (Col.) (ret.)


This Blemmyes is waiting patiently for Substance McGravitas to give him a jetpack. PATIENTLY I say.

As their leader Swoops from the clouds

Everyone is sad that "Batesian or Müllerian mimicry?" Night at the Old Entomologist only comes a month.

Q; Where does a Sopworth Camel land? A: On an aerodromedary

"You would be surprised at the number of people in these parts who nearly are half people and half camel," the Sergeant remarked. "As one rides a camel across the rocky roadsteads of the desert, the fierce repeated wallops between the humph of the camel and the human organ pressed into it with promiscuous propinquity causes agitation of the little shining adams comprehending them both, and it is inevitable that mollycules of one should change places with mollycules of the other. That camel's humph is over seventy percent nates and there is very little hope of ever getting his number below fifty again."

"Not Bactrian but Buttrian," said Joe.

UPDATE: I for one prefer not to speculate about the molecular-interchanging activities that resulted in Half Man Half Biscuit.

Later, scientists at Area 51, working with fragments of the crashed spaceship, were able to reverse-engineer the technology for scramble suits

Certain of our regular readers have issues with unipeds. Unauthorised investigations of the individual's psyche using the Riddled Dream Machine reveal the roots of the obsession.
It is evidently an ancestral memory that can be traced back to the alien encounter of 1512 that subsequently became known in Ufological circles as the 'Ravenna incident'. As evidence of the potency of this suppressed engram, we note that several centuries after the event it inspired Mr Vitilgo Bracefumble of Eketahuna to invent the first parking meter, or "one-legged bandit" as it was known at the time, on account of this pre-dating legal casinos and on-line gambling so gamblers had to take their fun where they could find it.

In fact the spaceship contained two aliens. According to contemporary broadsheets, the second one "did converse by Fartes and ye Dancing in Tappes"... this was seen in the eyes of the public as a sign of divine displeasure with the corrupt Papacy of Julius II. The two separate entities became confused in eyewitness accounts and in popular memory, which is why the Dream Machine display differs in so many respects from an accurate description of a Tralmafadorian.

Eyewitness testimony is notoriously unreliable, as I was saying to the court just the other day.

UPDATED with bonus farting & tapdancing.

The second letter of the Name of God has been spoken

Through a fault of our designing We are lost among the windings Of these metal ways

We were expecting a night of relaxation from our responsibilities, for it was Convergent-Evolution-of-Malpighian-Tubules Trivia and Welding-Plastic-Tea-spoons-into-Sculptures-with-a-Cigarette-Lighter Evening at the Old Entomologist. But there is no respite for we horny-handed tons of soil who labour in the gardens of Academe... for tigris was wanting to know, is there any progress with the planarian-based cloning technique that we were heralding two years ago just the other day with drum and fife?

As you can see, the process is out of the laboratory now and into production. The Beta testers are encountering a peculiar side-effect... something to do with the flatworms concentrating metal ions from the environment. Another Kiwi is inclined to blame this on the Mollycule Theory, and on bringing the flatworms into repeated violent contact with jokes that are an iron. If the problem persists we will simply re-brand the process as a tool for Superfund bio-remediation.


Also certain poor losers individuals should have known better than try to weld plastic tea-spoons with iPhones, which may be the same size as a cigarette lighter but are NO SUBSTITUTE.

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

What with one thing and another

Real life has been intruding a bit and this has caused me to neglect the blogging. Smut has carried the burden like the trooper what he is. And not the funny ones on Facebook, neither.
Prominent in the things that have happened is the discovery, by me, that the laptop does not bounce much and really it's quite bad for it. The screen display was quite interesting with a large gash in the front bit allowing one to see the E qwations and the low cations zanting about. 
Then a poem came along, when I least expected and it got published.
And , of course, the blooming Olympics were everywhere that one looked. There was a sad lack of Synchronised Swimming on our Teevee but since it is the funniest thing on the planet, this is probably good for my lungs.
Then I got more part-time work involving testing of human poo samples. I know, lucky guy. However it is not too bad and so far not very gross, compared to changing the little kiwi's nappies, it's actually better. The carrot chunks in the sample incident was a little off-putting but gave the lab staff a bit of a laugh. Also, ha ha, when the centrifuge made that screeching noise, that wasn't actually me. Just sayin'
And now... it appears that disabling the anti-tracking thingo I can see the side bars on "Riddled" just like me mum can, which is nice.
But anyway, back to the blancmange.

 

Today we choose faces

Decisions, decisions.

An unscrupulous, opportunistic attempt to use the "Novelty Teapots" tag

In an earlier post we touched briefly on the manifold commercial activities of Dr Sin Hang Lee, wart-virus researcher and entrepreneur. It appears that the list was incomplete. We regret the omissions, which are here corrected. The author was a very naughty boy and he needs to be punished by a strict disciplinarian.

(1) This invention introduces a container in the form of a mug with a lid or in the form of an enclosed vessel of any size and shape for tea steeping wherein the dried tea leaves are extracted with hot water neither in contact with oxygen in the free air nor in contact with oxygen in a pocket of free air in order to maximize the preservation of the antioxidants in the aqueous tea extract to be used as a health-promoting beverage.


In my experience, dogs are reluctant to drink green tea, unless they are nervous little dogs trying to cut down on their espresso consumption. Nevertheless, claims for the Patent include

[0074] Tea Extract Prepared Anaerobically as a Supplement for Controlling Canine Lymphoma
[...] in this illustrative case of canine lymphoma, green tea extract prepared according to this invention has extended the remission induced by prednisone from about 30 days to at least 150 days, and probably longer. [...] This invention has introduced a standardized method of preparing tea extract, as an example, to be used as a potentially effective non-toxic combination therapeutic agent for the treatment of canine lymphoma.

It may be that the claim has been phrased in canine form to avoid the unwelcome attention from the FDA often attracted by claims to cure human cancer, while hoping that customers will make the implied extension. A dog whistle, as it were.

Great Failures of History #19: First Dog Whistle

Wait what I don't even

(2) This invention involves a new device and method for treating hemorrhoids. The device has a substantially cylindrical shape and, at least at one portion, has a diameter of between about 5 mm and about 30 mm. The device is inserted into an anal canal so that it is positioned against at least one displaced anal cushion, and is maintained there for a sufficient time to achieve reduction of the displaced anal cushion.

(3) Dr Lee's short-target DNA-sequencing nested-PCA test -- which can detect the aluminium / rDNA ligands purportedly contaminating the HPV vaccine Gardasil, within blood samples, months after a few millilitres of vaccine were diluted within four or five litres of bloodstream -- is not yet at the commercial stage. The IP rights for the test -- and for results thereof -- appear to lie with the anti-vaccine lobby group SaneVax. It cannot be far from the market, however, for

(4) SaneVax include Lee on their list of practitioners who will treat people who believe they suffer from post-vaccination injuries.

(5) Genotyping your wart tissue samples. Evidently the officially approved HPV-genotype test is not reliable, for the virology specialists at the NCI have only singled out two strains of the virus as common and potentially carcinogenic. Thus their test could lull you into a false sense of security -- for the versatile Dr Lee has identified “13 high-risk HPV genotypes”. But fret no longer, you can send a tissue sample plus $50 (“Most health insurance companies will reimburse this cost”) to SaneVax and Lee, and they will tell you whether you in danger!

Dog-whistle FAIL: 1912 edition

Dog-whistle FAIL: Covent Garden edition

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UPDATED with bonus copy-pasta from a comment at BioBlogs [copy-pasta is a Bad Thing but WE.ARE.RIDDLED]:

Going further into the Google, it does look as if Dr Sin Hang Lee's genotype test for the different genital-warts / HPV strains is a pivotal part of the backstory behind his issues with the virology mainstream that has failed to recognise his genius.

In 2008 he was suing the FDA (through his company HiFi DNA Tech) because they refused to endorse his test. The FDA argued that Lee had showed them no evidence that his test was any more specific or reliable than existing ones, what with extravagant claims on their own being insufficient. Evidently their argument was convincing because we find Lee appealing to the 2nd Circuit Court in 2009, amid a flurry of accusations about conspiracies and conflicts-of-interest between FDA officials and the suppliers of tests that are endorsed.

Conspiracy is also involved in the NEJM declining to publish a manuscript from Lee on the economics of HPV screening (and how much better it would be with his test). We find him harassing the editorial board here, and appealing to a professional group that he believes can over-rule them.

There was a Dr Sin Hang Lee, of Connecticut, sacked from a shared pathology practice in 2003. In 2006-2010 he was (unsuccessfully) suing the employment lawyers of that practice for allowing him to sign a revised employment agreement. Of course there might be multiple pathologists of that name in CT with the habit of employment-loss-related litigation.

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There is a Riddled prize for the best palindrome involving "straw-man" and "nam-warts", first prize being one of Mrs Miggens' possum-and-comfrey pies.

What's the frequency, Kenneth?

Pay no attention to this man. He is merely trying to show off his third nipple.

He will tell you that he can tune into the frequency for Radio Riga's "Hits of the Eurovision Song Contest" retrospective, but in fact it's his mates performing in the background.