The three warning signs of merry minstrelsy

1. Merry din.
2. The bride, red as a rose.
3. The loud bassoon.

Contact the authorities immediately if two or more of these signs are evident. Merry minstrelsy is dangerous and should under no circumstances be approached.

Radix malorum est cupids

The Riddled Tabletop Cherubim Theatre goes from strength to strength. Our earlier cupid-only staging of Motel Hell drew sell-out crowds of the usual no-hopers at the Old Entomologist -- despite the mockery from scofflaws (or possibly vice versa) who swore that wild cupids lack the intelligence or temperament to be trained in these complex tasks. In fact they respond well to a combination of kindness, patience and electric shocks* so we are VINDICATED and TAKE THAT SCOFFLAWS and Mr McGravitas need not expect a free ticket to the new production...

... which, continuing the cult horror-movie theme, is an adaptation of Phantasm.

Come to think of it, it is downright uncanny how well the cupids take to horror movie roles, like a Myotis lucifugus to lead a duck to water. Creepy little feckers.

* Updated with BONUS Frederik Pohl, who taught us everything we need to know about training animals.

Nothing in his life became him like the leaving it

Tuba self-immolating to protest
Belgian atrocities in the Congo

According to tradition (or an old charter or something) the suicide method of choice for protesting against a colonial war or a foreign occupation is self-immolation. Partly this expresses the Buddhist concept that the cycle of reincarnation is a burning building from which one strives to escape; partly it recognises the importance of petroleum resources in motivating the wars and occupations; and partly it's an excuse to huff some fumes.

Escalating protests against 'Walloons'
and 'Phlegms' as names of nationalities

So far no convention has evolved about the appropriate exit method if, like Dominique Venner, the purpose is to complain about the legality of same-sex marriage. Given Venner's admiration for the Japanese fascist Mishima, seppuku would have been one option. But shooting yourself in the head at the altar in Notre-Dame Cathedral is just wrong. Quite apart from inconveniencing 1500 tourists and hunchback cos-players, people will not see it as a symbolic wedding between man and fire-arm. They will think that it's a Network homage, or is part of a sponsorship deal with the NRA.

Venner was a member of the OAS in his youth, a terrorist organisation sufficiently murderous as to be viewed by Al Qaeda with a mixture of admiration and awe. He moved on to writing tendentious far-right histories intended to rescue the reputations of WW-2 collaborators such as his father. What exercised him most -- before gay marriage became the final straw in the needle-stack that broke the camel's back when clutched after -- was the presence of too many French persons with North African ancestry. Apparently he had forgotten that the whole rationale of the OAS was to keep Algeria as part of the French state, i.e. to maximise the number of French persons with North African ancestry. In other words, Venner wasn't using his brains for anything constructive, and I can't dispute his decision to redecorate the Notre-Dame interior with them instead.

"Not many people know it," Chapman observed, "but special punishments are reserved for those who sully the sacred precincts of Notre-Dame with the vile crime of felo-de-se. To begin with, they forfeit their identities..."

"Becoming anonymous in death?" said Keats. "Fair enough."

Chapman continued despite the interruption. "For added ignominy, their bodies are hoisted up into the bell-tower, to swing head-down within the bells as human clappers."

"Ah," said Keats. "So you don’t know the name but the face rings a bell."

Must credit Gary Ruppert and subsequent discussion

BONUS John Sladek:

IOKIYC.R.

"The Commentariat are demanding the cutting-room out-takes from the Christine Rankin post," observed Chief Editor tigris, resplendent in the Chief Editorial Hat which is often mistaken for a salted pineapple.

"That was Another Kiwi's post," I pointed out, "so the disjecta are stored in his desk, along with slightly used chewing gum, uneaten sammiches, and other items too unsavoury to mention. Also we agreed never to speak of the cutting-room again since that episode with the emos."

But tigris would brook no dispute, nor vice versa, so it is just was well that all our streams and burns and rivulets are thoroughly documented. She vouchsafed that AK is currently hors de combat, and has taken up permanent residence upon the chaise longue ever since his traumatic encounter last night. Details are still sketchy but it appears that his assailant was a long-term Zorb abuser, at least 40% Zorb on account of the inevitable atomic exchange that transpires from riding along the rocky and unpaved roads of the county. Unless the assailant was a zorb who has become at least 40% zorber.

Examination of the fragments gathered within the Desk of Doom reveal the following:

1. New Zealand is lacking in arrangements comparable to Fox News such as might provide phoney-baloney jobs to people who are no longer employed as Chief Executive of the Work & Income Dept, and cannot be expected to find non-celebrity occupations, forcing the gubblement to find Ms Rankin a job as Family Commissar. Admittedly there are niches such as "Columnist for the Auckland Herald" or "Professional guest on chat shows with the execrable Paul Henry", but Rankin had a go at the latter and evidently was not particularly good at that either.

2. Braeburn apples do not need to be submerged full fathom five before they suffer a sea change into something rich and strange.

3. Christine Rankin is a fierce implacable foe of unjust dismissal and a believer that employment contracts should provide life-long tenure, at least in her own case. In 2000 the gubblement of the day decided against renewing her contract. It emerged in her ensuing Employment Court hearing that either (a) everyone involved in the case was so lacking in discretion as to take Ms Rankin aside in confidence and admit privately that a party-political witch-hunt had dispensed with her services, or (b) Christine Rankin is a fabulist.

4. Her concern does not extend to the TVNZ security guard whom she had sacked for disagreeing with her in 2007.

This came in the wake of an interview with the execrable Paul Henry, in the lead-up to the "Anti-Smacking" legislative change. Rankin was opposed to the new law, arguing that the change would only criminalise decent Pakeha families for responsible use of parental discipline, while having no effect on Maori families who beat their kids to death whatever the law might say. "We do have a problem with Maori in this country" and anything else is just POLITICAL CORRECTNESS.

5. Creatively flamboyant wardrobe choices are an expression of joie de vivre and outside-the-box-thinking for Chief Executives while a dress code is required for underlings.

6. Sudoku puzzles do not solve themselves no matter how many of them you cut out from the paper and file away in one's desk where one's colleagues can't get to them first.

7. You can Rankin Bass but you can't tuna fish.

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

UPDATE: AK has already vouchsafed Ms Rankin's chief qualification for the Family Commission and for her simultaneous role running the new fambly-values Conservative Party, i.e. her extensive experience with her own four families and those of other people. Apparently this is not a problem for our right-wingers and theocrats:

The national director of Families First, Bob McCoskrie, said he still saw Ms Rankin as a very positive appointment. [...]
"But if the definition of being a Families Commissioner is a perfect family life then you are not going to find any commissioners.
"We need somebody who is willing to rock the boat, who is willing to bring in a diversity of opinion and who has got the backbone to actually speak up on those issues."

Memo to self: Avoid sharing space on a life-raft with anyone who thinks "rocking the boat" is a good thing.

Can't these people all head over to join the other gnomes at the Chelsea Garden Show?

Rankin file

Happy-go-lucky New Zilders usually manage to blunder through their lives without killing anybody and on the whole, aside from buggering up the environment, not doing too much damage. Occasionally, of course, one or two of them will go off the rails or "up the boohoi"  as local peasantry put it and then there is a lot of shouting and hitting and blood.
The esteemed "Riddled" readership is at this stage saying "But surely in the Socialamist Republic of Kiwistan there are government agencies who bring hope and caring and money to help folks whose boohoi has been well and truly got up". And, indeed, in days of old such worthy institutions may have existed briefly their fine efforts snuffed out by the next Area District Oberleutnant who wandered past and thought "Woah, new carpet in the waiting room!".
In these days of changing ways, so called liberated days (Gaak, Rod Stewart timeslip, turn off the flux capacitor Smut!). In these modern days we have a group of folks called the Families Commission 
who, one imagines, look after families and the like and hardly ever go home early.
But, for the porpoises of this look at teh whirling dervish that is NZ politics we merely note that the Families Commission was set up as a deal between the then labour government and everybody's favourite flunky MP, Peter Dunne. As the renowned political scientist Herr Dr. Bimler has stated of P. Dunne "would-be Eminence Gris of NZ politics who somehow ended up as Eminence Grease instead. Recognised as the hagfish of the  party-political ecology, not just for the slime production, but also for his ability to batten onto other minor parties, merge with them, suck out their votes, and then move on when the host dies." Mr Dunne has very famous hair, just sayin'.
One of the Commissioners of the Fambly is well known amongst those of us who can manage to stay awake in front of TV news in New Zild, a Ms. Christine Rankin.
Rankin became a Family Commissar in circumstances that were thought odd at the time but are becoming more familiar to us all here in the Shaky Isles as the National government pays off real and imagined political debts and tries to stack whatever vacancies occur, anywhere, with the 'right' people.
Ms. Rankin is assuredly of the right people and has never met a Right-Wing talking point she did not want to take home, love and squeeze and call George.
A fairly thorough backgrounder on Rankin is behind this HTML. It is terribly bad form to say 'here' and 'here' according to the Jonah Gludgeberg Big Book of Internetz.
Now, Rankin had an awful childhood and got terrible treatment from the NZ Government when she was fired, IMO.
However she has overcompensated for that since then and seems to be about as polarising as your average Quasar. She has remained active in conservative circles and blurts out the usual RW line on occasion to remind everyone who will listen.
Still, there she was commissioning families and the like slowly disappearing under paperwork and generally we were all better off for it.
She had a run at getting on the Auckland City Council and managed to con 12,000 or so people into voting for her promise to ...er...well.. look after old buildings, I think.
This, of course, did not assuage her longing for politically powered meddling in other folks lives without all that legal mumbo-jumbo holdin' decent folks back. Now she is off tilting at non-existent moral decay and wanting to impose conservatism on unsuspecting New Zilders.
She is now the CEO of the Conservative Party of New Zealand.It was announced in the perkiest Press Release you may ever  see that begins

 "Hi Everyone, I am so delighted to be here at headquarters as the Chief Executive of The Conservative Party."

The Secret Headquarters? It would be irresponsible to speculate.
An interesting part of the CNZ wackyloonapedia page states

although Ms Rankin is a Soka Gakkai Buddhist and not an evangelical Christian.

Now why that be in there? Well, the CNZ is largely based in the fundamentalist milieu and spends a lot of time banging on about family values whilst proving that they are true conservatives and know the worth of nothing and the value of nothing also, too. How these family values are going to travel with Ms. Rankin who is in her 4th marriage we can only pop corn in anticipation of. The latest marriage had a whiff of scandal about it .

New Families Commissioner Christine Rankin is facing fresh criticism after revelations she married a Wellington man just months after his previous wife took her own life. 

A bit suspect but actually pretty average in the Conservative world-view. 
 There you are Americans we are getting as populated with weirdos and as dodgy in government appointees as you are. 
It's a brave New world citizens!!

One.Billion.Dollars.

That is how much the lawyer-shaped entity acting for OMICS Publishing Group is demanding from mild-mannered librarian Jeffrey Beall, for describing that company's business practices in such a manner as to damage it, i.e. honestly.

Srinubabu Gedela, OMICS owner [right]

Now the Riddled Library Pixies may be capricious, and unreliable, and capable of Jesuit casuistry when it comes to interpreting the small-print clauses in their contract, while their performance in areas such as "retrieving back issues of Miss Busty Monthly* from the double-secret-probation-uncataloged archives" leaves much to be desired... but they do not lack for collegiality or professional loyalty. So they have suggested that Riddled join the serried ranks of bloggerhood rallying to Mr Beall's defense. And we do not cavil or resist, especially after they turned Another Kiwi into a previously-unknown variety of pinniped.

AK does not appear perturbed and is happily playing with his Airfix HO-scale toy soldiers military models. Still, it would be good to get him back, what with it being not my turn to restock the tea-room with chocolate hobnobs. Also I am worried that the pixies -- lovable little scamps that they are -- may be working up to a joke about "Seal of Approval". Tigris and mikey are better than me at negotiating with them but they have conveniently chosen this occasion to go back travelling in the Riddled time machine to the Cretaceous era (apparently with the mission of teaching hadrosaurs how to protect themselves from time-travelling big-game hunters by disguising themselves as creatures who do not look like hadrosaurs).

Riddled has previously covered the egregious band of shysters known as OMICS Publishers. That was a while ago in interduct years, however, and their business model has evolved; now they look to eke out the meagre income they make from dunning researchers for fraudulent publication charges, with dunning researchers for fraudulent conference-attendance charges. Since the practice worked so well with junk journals, to lend verisimilitude to these spurious conferences they pad out the Organising Committees with the names of authorities in the field, without necessarily consulting the owners of those names. It is not clear whether they have added names from fictional characters yet.

We are impressed by the language of the lawyer's threatening missive, which proves to be pungent -- if not particularly coherent -- and may well provide the new Riddled masthead:

All the allegation that you have mentioned in your blog are nothing more than fantastic figment of your imagination by you and the purpose of writing this blog seems to be a deliberate attempt to defame our client [...] Our client perceive the blog as mindless rattle of a incoherent person and please be assured that our client has taken a very serious note of the language, tone, and tenure adopted by you as well as the criminal acts of putting the same on the Internet.

It may be that the OMICS group purloined the lawyer himself from a fictional character, in the same way that the Indian legal system was borrowed in its entirety from Bleak House.

As it happens, inspired by the news that the Royal Horticultural Society has relaxed its hitherto-unbending policies and will now allow the presence of garden gnomes "brightly coloured mythical creatures" in the Chelsea Garden Show, we are launching a new journal, gnOMICS. So far the only member of the Editorial Board is Srinubabu Gedela (MD) of Hyderabad. We're sure he won't mind that to save time we didn't consult him before adding his name.

* Truth be known, we're not really so interested in the backs.

UPDATED with Bonus OMICShenanigans. "Dinosaurs: Extinct or Traumatised?"