Birtherday Treats

"Oh" people will say "has that no-good Another Kiwi forgotten his birthday and left us with no birthday treats."
Do not fear, dear friends, one has arisen from one's chaise longue and scruntled around in the interwebs for some birtherday moving pictures with music.

                                     Fig. 1 Empty Chaise Longue





So What's your problem?!?!?!
Not making you sleepy is it?

Michael Franti from back in the day:

Michael Franti a bit further on

Deer friends

Riddled Enterprises latest product achieves a long hoped for combination of historical theme and sausages. Now your children can learn about the fascinating, mysterious and economically important world of the Salted Pineapple Trade while enjoying a hearty (or harty) meal of venison sausages.

"Mmmm, history!" your kids will say.
Actual product my differ from that shown, may even be in a tin that was accidentally labelled "Tropicana Cat Fud with Pineapple"
 

Lost or Stolen:One Pantomime Horse costume

The performance is not quite the same without it.

We may have to go all meta and write a new script, for "The Emperor's New Pantomime Horse Costume".

UPDATED: B⁴ in comments raises the topic of "erotic pony artist".
This in turn raises the question, "In the search for traffic and unusual search term combinations, how far will the Riddled staff go in their willingness to pander to the full range of sexual perversions proclivities?"

At least this far: Chelonian erotic cosplay.

BONUS Man-on-box-turtle action.

As the water come rushing overAs the water come rushing in

Our enthusiasm for this new deluge-related approach to local-government protests knows no bounds:

WHEELING - Opponents of a proposed natural gas frack water recycling plant in Warwood inundated City Council Chambers Tuesday in hopes of keeping the facility out of their neighborhood.

(H/t Balloon Juice)

Sadly, the article omits details as to how the inundation was achieved (e.g. bucket brigade or broken fire hydrant). Readers are therefore invited to vote for:

1. River diverted to run through the Corridors of Power.


2. Giant crying eye in the sky.

3. Lady's glove endowed with hydrogogic powers.

Ah, memories of Kennington in 1988 with Cathy and Kerry and Stu and the rest of the crowd:

UPDATE: Changed title because. Also, BONUS 7th-Century painting of "Flood Scene near Hundertwasser-designed Council Chambers".

Look, the plastic dome is empty

The Cerebrozoid Overlord must be occupied at its feeding station! Here is our chance to board the Arachnobot, master the controls, and make our escape!

Bugs Bunnies with pancakes
water drops on their heads

UPDATE: It turned out to be a trap: the Cerebrozoid was actually present but had used lipid / hydrogel replacement to make itself transparent.

Oops, dead now.

Directing traffic

We are a sturdy and stalwart self-reliant crowd in New Zealand. At the Old Entomologist we are accustomed to making our own entertainment during the long dreary nights between one season of Doctor Who and the next.

For this week's meeting of the Direct Like Ed Woods Society, Another Kiwi has put together a very serviceable Tardis from bits-and-pieces he found in the Props Room and Public-Key Registry. I am not besotted with the rusticated style but AK assures us that this will be a re-imagined Renaissance version of Dr Who and as long as everyone wears their doublet and hose then all will be well. "You can even use the garden sprinkler for a codpiece," says tigris whom I suspect is not taking the costume issue entirely seriously.

Here is the Doctor's robot pet. No, it is not one of the peacocks from the Riddled gardens pignorated with a cardboard mask; appearances can be deceiving.

It was somehow decided while I was out of the room that I will be get to wear the Scary Cyberman costume thoughtfully provided by the City Council Parking Enforcement division. Still, this will be an asset if Evangeline van Holsterin's gran is in the audience as she is known to throw beer-jugs when the action moves too slowly for her tastes.

Now the pigs are having a ride on a rollercoaster to celebrate their rescue from alien servitude.

A shower of dicks

A useful metaphor for so many occasions.

A banner with a strange device

Ground Zero Man warns us that feeding too many equations into the right side of the experimental subject's head can cause his left ear to turn into a cauliflower. The story is loosely based on a Magritte painting, as emphasised by the cover artist when the book was re-issued with a different title.*

An extract:

The theory of Morphic Resonance predicts that once one author has imagined a device for which the circuit schematic is as effective as your actual hardware wire-and-capacitors circuit, it becomes easier for other authors to invent devices of their own. Especially when the resonance is enhanced by reckless and hubristic experiments bordering on scientific malpractice with the Morphogenic Field Flux Intensifier, such as anyone might commit after a few pints of the Winterstipple Scrumpy with Nightshade for Vitamin C. Sure enough, here are Pratchett and Baxter with the Stepper:

To be all scholarly with the attributions and precedents, Shaw was not first either and Ground Zero Man was only possible because John W. Campbell Jr. had earlier dreamed up the Symbolically Functioning Hieronymus Machine.

See how it works! Eloptic energy cannot be detected by mere electrical contrivances; but when it flows along the printed ink or graphite on paper, modulated and filtered by the symbols, it achieves the designer's purpose by interacting with the consciousness of the human operator, whom we shall call the 'reader'.

It is not known how Campbell felt about the cargo cults springing up across Melanesia in the wake of WWII troop movements... he might have dismissed them as superstitions of ignorant magical-thinking tribes, or recognised that a bamboo scaffolding can channel eloptic energy and become a symbolic machine as fit for purpose as a physical flight tower. Libertarian, after all.

Results not guaranteed for on-screen versions

Complete circuit schematics and assembly instructions for the Morphogenic Field Flux Intensifier are available in the Riddled Gifte Shoppe, in illuminated and non-illuminated formats. They are printed in conductive ink and therefore work in their own right without the need for actual construction. The price may seem high but remember that when purchasers can memorise and visualise the diagram, they no longer need it and can on-sell it to some other sucker one else.

Sadly, wearing a tattoo of a transistor ladder filter on one's arm does not turn one into a Moog Synthesiser. Still it was worth a try. If this cycle of morphic facilitation continues, eventually I will be able to have a tattoo of the circuit diagram for a tattooing machine and it will be able to copy itself onto other people's skin.**

Also it will be possible to draw a flow chart on a screen, and that will be equivalent to writing an actual computer program.

* Bonus Ground Zero.

** All my tattoos are in invisible ink, so they will only show up (briefly) in the crematorium.

We remind all staff that when a slot in the control panel is labelled "Taq Polymerase Replenishment Only", it is not intended for the disposal of ham-sandwich crusts

It remains to be seen whether the market for gourmet pork ice-cream onna stick really exists. However, when a minor contamination issue in the Vat-grown Godmeat facility results in a glut of tissue-cultured pig muscle, one does the best one can to dispose of it.

The initial plan was to sell the product under the name "Pink Ham Frozen Dairy Dessert", until Riddled's legal advisors Messrs Trahison and Clerisy (Solicitors and Commissioners for Oaths) pointed out at their usual hourly rate that this was a misnomer since a ham contains a bone which is absent from the cultured product. To avoid misleading consumers we have marked them as Champagne hams instead. This should spare us the usual prying and impertinent inquiries from the Trades Descriptions Board.

Oh the huge manatee: Just one of our secret weapons

Scenes from this North Korean documentary reveal the secret American plan to invade them with warships and rockets that look like Jimmy Durante.


Evidently someone in the American military is convinced that North Koreans are mortally scared of dead big-nosed comedians -- or perhaps they revere them as godlike figures -- so dressing up weapon systems and assault vessels in this way would demoralise the peace-loving people of the DPRK and scatter all resistance before them like leaves.

They didn't get it from reading Linebarger, is all I'm saying... but these are the master tacticians who decided that The Arab Mind was the best guide for a peaceful occupation of Afghanistan and Iraq, so anything is possible.

Blowing the whistle

These reports led to a veritable spate of investigative journalism (better known as "Look busy, tigris is coming") among the fearless Riddled newshounds. And now we are in a position to blow the whistle and announce that the American running-dog imperialists are preparing 6250 paintings of Jimmy Durante ready to air-drop into the latest victim of their aggression in a crushing blow against morale! What's worse, they are recruiting innocent children to paint them! It sounds unbelievable but here is PHOTOGRAPHIC PROOF.

We say this at great risk to our safety but at Riddled we will not be silenced or intimidated or hardly ever bribed.

To be charitable, this is better than air-dropping incendiary bats. As for air-drops of pigeon burritos, those have been condemned by the World Association of Taco Dealers.

Further examples of poor taste: Waging aggressive war and creating pretexts to take part in pillage-related invasions

Tony Blair has criticised people who held parties to "celebrate" the death of Baroness Thatcher, saying they were in "pretty poor taste".