Not sure what we'll do for the coming production of The Vagina Monologs

It's a stroke of genius, as they said when Albert Einstein took the gold medal in the Men's 100-m Freestyle event. Sell novelty Ice-cream cones from the Riddled Amateur Dramatic Society refreshment stall, that have been tailored to match the particulars of the production!

Right: Equus

Left: Revival of Ionescu's Rhinoceros

Initial sales of the customised cones were not promising. In retrospect it may have been a mistake to introduce the new policy during the run of Foreskin's Lament.

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

"What the Refreshment concession really needs to promote ice-cones," I announced, "is an advertising campaign involving a jolly anthropomorphic cartoon character."

"No thanks," they said. "We can't afford advertising."

"That's what the Dream Machine is for," Another Kiwi vouchsafed.

If the Italo Calvino novel is any guide, a similar mutation has the same effect in Vauxhall Viscounts

The story of the DMRT3 gene does not end with the discovery that it controls left / right synchronisation of locomotion in mammals, by signalling the development of spinal commisural interneurons. Extending that work at Riddled Research Laboratories, we have found that a counterpart to DMRT3 is present in the genome of Honda Z hatchbacks!



Knocking out that gene with antisense DNA has dramatic results!
Anti-sense technology is a speciality of the Riddled laboratory.

Locating the Honda gene involved the extraction and PCR-amplification of large quantities of the DMRT3 gene from Icelandic horses. I trust this will explain the sudden absence of Taq polymerase from the lab, and will put an end to all the palaver about Requisition Form 43-166/b. Paperwork, we hates it, yes precious we hates it forever.

A pity about the wee horses. Enjoy the soup.

Pig is on the roof.

I was sitting at my desk reading the latest reports on the mail service when there was a knock at the door.
"Come in" I said in a tone of seriosity, yet welcoming, a kind of Mitt Romney on Prozac voice.
In came young Smut Clyde, chief researcher of Riddled Mail Corporation ("Putting our stamp on history") and a person whose jib, we in management , had liked the cut of.
I gestured with my quill,  "The jib, Smut".
He adjusted his lab coat "Sorry" he said "but we have great news on the Pigeon post"
"Oh good " I said, trying vainly to remember what he was talking about.
"Yes" he said, "we have trained the pigeons to return home after delivering letters. It was very hard to get them to carry the envelopes in their little paws"
I raised an eyebrow at him.
"What's wrong with your eye?" he asked.
"I was asking a question, non-verbally" I said.
"That's a good idea" he said "then I don't know what the question is and I can't answer."
"I thought that they carried little messages in leg bands" I opined.
He scoffed "Old technology, boss. The modern postal system is personalised, fast and guaranteed to not be undelivered in an ongoing sense."
"That is a good mission statement " I said admiringly "I suppose it means something?"
"I expect so" said Smut.
I remembered something that Mrs. Miggins had told me when she had brought in the "Tea and Sardines In One Cake"  last week.
"What is the deal with the masks they wear?" I asked.
"Personalised" explained Smut "And helpful when the receipts from the sender is put into the voucher safe."
"The masks are all the same" I noted .
"Yeah, well Evangeline von Holsterin's vile nephew, Throgmorton, got them cheap from a V for Vendetta place, they shrunk in the moulder, he said" he said.
"Well young Smut, we look forward to a long and fruitful time in the mail business. In this case it will be good when the chickens come home to roost, eh"
"Oh yes, ha ha" said Smut and then looked fearful "Come home to roost. 'Scuse me!!" He ran outside and I heard him shouting to Greenish Hugh about "the bungee cords!"
 Well, back to the grindstone. Mrs Kiwi's dressage Corgi dog  was performing on the weekend and someone had to go and shine its collar.     

I love it when a plan punchline comes together

A little background here: I am co-author of a would-be paper, currently in Peer Review Limbo at a journal which shall remain nameless in order to protect the innocent and comfort the Affleck or however it goes. Reviewer #1 reckons it's a solid paper but wonders why we waste so much space reanalysing the data with these newfangled 'Maximum Likelihood" algorithms when everyone is familiar with the tried-and-true least-squares equivalents. Reviewer #2 sees the manuscript as a missed opportunity, concerning itself with clinical aspects of neurotoxicology when it should be exploring the possibilities of Maximum Likelihood methods at more length, e.g. the chance to calculate confidence contours around the values of parameters using Akaike's Information Criterion, and to compare nested models with differing degrees of freedom.

To count our blessings, at least there is no Reviewer #3. IT'S ALWAYS THE THIRD GODDAMN REVIEWER THAT SCREWS US OVER!

The slow, soul-destroying cycle of revise and resubmit, revise and resubmit is probably inevitable. For a journal specialising in applications the manuscript is top-heavy with abstruse questions of modelling, while it's overloaded with tedious clinical details for a journal about general methodology.

"We are falling between two stools," my co-author lamented in an e-mail.

"Even worse," I wrote back, confident in the knowledge that she cannot thump me all the way from Liverpool. "We are stalling between two fools."

A scream and a thud mate.

Please,  Poltics Australia , never change. 
There's some true blue gold here. Firstly notice that it is local body politics as Merrylands is  25 kilometres west of downtown Sydney
and

Cr Sarkis and another councillor, Mark Pigram, missed the scheduled council meeting after calling in sick.

But:

Other councillors were tipped off that Cr Sarkis was not sick but was holding a $900-a-head fundraiser which was being attended by developers. Donations from developers have been banned.

Then another councillor  turned up and it all went biffo.

''It escalated into the big rumble,'' reporter Isabell Petrinic said. ''While Gregg was yelling out 'I am being assaulted', Eddy was yelling out 'I am making a citizen's arrest.' ''

She then heard a scream and a thud as someone fell down the stairs. The police were notified but neither councillor wished to press charges

''The fat lard of something landed on top of me,'' complained Gregg Ritchie of fellow councillor Eddy Sarkis. Both men are disendorsed Liberals who are running as independents in Saturday's local elections.

"Disendorsed Liberal" is quite an achievement as the New South Wales Liberals are the Conservative party and not known for selfless devotion to public service IYKWIMAITTYD.
And just remember that anyone who turns up at Riddled Enterprises fund-raising dinners will be arrested citizenally and thrown down stairs with lard on them.

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.

Gnireenigne

It follows from Rule 34 that given "porn of it", one should be able to work backwards and reverse-engineer the original, inspirational "it".

The logic is geometric and unassailable... yet in this case the only output from the software is the 'Divide by Zero' warning.

Viking Health Care: Veterinary edition

It was noted many years ago by an astute naturalist that when a horse is bisected by the rapid descent of a portcullis, the sudden absence of its hindquarters may not immediately register with the beast's dim little brain (for horses are not the brightest of foodstuffs our animule friends), with the compensatory changes of balance and fine limb-movement timing required to remain upright and in motion being handled at the level of the shoulders.

Naturally bipedal horse, or double amputee? Only the "My Little Pony" apotemnophila fetishists know for sure

There is a broader lesson here about the extent of self-organisation and local autonomy involved in mammal locomotion, from swimming to galloping. The precise sequences of muscle contractions to produce a stable, periodic gait arise spontaneously among neural networks in the spinal cord rather than being sent down from the brain. At this point it behooves you** to read about central pattern generators. Come back when you've done that.

It transpires that many Icelandic horses are homozygous for a mutation on the DMRT3 gene, which controls the development of spinal neurons. The results are TOTALLY PREDICTABLE -- they have fewer of the commissural interneurons involved in cross-lateral coordination; their left hooves are less aware of what their right hooves are doing. This makes it possible for them to override the usual left / right timing constraints and perform the skeið or flugskeið (also known as 'pacing' among horses that don't speak Icelandic), not to mention the tölt, a kind of amble.

The mutation is not necessarily an advantageous one; it carries the downside that Icelandic ponies are not as adept at the more conventional equine gaits (Supplementary Table 5). This explains why Iceland has never won an Olympic Gold medal in dressage.

Grettir's Saga relates how Grettir attempted to produce these extra gaits by rewiring the spinal circuitry of Kengala the weatherwise mare,*** using the primitive equipment available to Viking neuroscientists.

Sadly, this pioneering line of research was not pursued further due to the hostile response from Ásmundr (father of Grettir, owner of Kengala and probably a climate-change alarmist). A millennium later and Icelanders are still speaking of how Ásmundr slammed the stable gait after the horse had bolted.

Bonus Keats-&-Chapman punchline: * Below: Unintelligence of horses proven by their failure to learn to count up to 4, even when the numbers are fastened to cages strapped over the subjects' heads. ** I didn't hear a laugh from that man over there.

*** Kengala was "so wise about the weather and the rain that a storm invariably follows when she refuses to go out to graze".

Q. What do you say after blasting "Insane in the Membrane" through the axons of a squid to stimulate its chromatophores?

A. "It's all plaid!"

Details here. The researchers neglected to make the obvious "cephaliPod" joke.

"How many Jews know that their god was originally amphibious?"

The Riddled Time Machine has brought back the first film clips of two aliens from a planet in the double- or triple-star Sirius system who came to Mesopotamia 7000 years ago. Temple identifies them with the Nommo water-spirits that appear in Dogon folklore.

Here are two priests of the Oannes cult worshipping those aliens, whom they have mistaken for a divinity. Or perhaps they are a pair of 'finnies' who like to dress up in fish costumes and get their kink on, using the shield of Religious Freedom to deflect the wave of public disgust that would descend upon them otherwise.
Extant fragments of Berossus' History tell us how Oannes taught the Chaldæans the skills of farming and social organisation. Then there was Annedotus, very like to Oannes; later a further four double-shaped personages came out of the sea to land, whose names were Euedocus, Eneugamus, Eneuboulus, and Anementus. Between them these advisers set humankind off along the pathway to today's urbanised, technological world.

No wonder the aliens are wearing Scramble Suits to conceal their identities.

Teachers of the Heart Update:

In Temple's theory, these diagrams from Dogon tradition show that the Nommo water-spirit taught Advanced Astronomical Knowledge to the Dogons' ancestors, e.g. about the four main moons of Jupiter.* Therefore Nommo was the same as the Sumerian Oannes, and therefore the Dogons originally lived in Mesopotamia (later choosing to migrate from there to the neighbourhood of Timbucktoo in search of lower tax rates or something).

To my mind, he does not give sufficient shrift to the theory that they are actually iridology diagrams, and that the Nommo was trying to explain the basic principles of naturopathy. Or they could simply be an early version of Goatse.**

* Dogon tribespeople themselves reject any wisdom-imparting role for this Nommo folklore figure, but what do they know about their culture? Who are you going to believe -- tribal informants, or one enthusiastic anthropologist from the 1940s?? Or New-age crystal explanations that the six-fold split of the original Nommo is an expression of the 12-stranded nature of human DNA?

** The rationale behind iridology is that (a) the left and right human irides are easily examined, and (b) they must have zones reflecting the condition of every bodily organ (the hermetic principle of "as above, so below") because they are circular -- oooh mandala symbolism! See here for iridology in New Zealand.

My colleague Michelle noted a while ago that there is one other muscle in the body with the same key pair of properties. However, her attempts to introduce 'Anusology' to the armamentarium of naturopathy has not met with the success she had hoped for.