I'm damaged, and I like it It made me what I am

When I vouchsafed to Another Kiwi that "We need a stalker", what I had in mind was someone to venture into the Forbidden Zone and bring back more incomprehensible artifacts of alien technology. Someone to take the place of Louis Carthorse, who has not been much use for anything since his last foray into the Zone.

This is not what I had in mind. The Riddled Research Laboratory and Power-Pylon Insulator Museaum is a have for tranquillity and contemplation, it is no place for Drama. But here is Mr 'BrutalAttackOnScientists', overdosing on Melodramine, paying homage to Derpsichore the Muse of Intertube Excitement:

What is going on here is an outgrowth or appendage to the Nano Alchemy story a few weeks ago, which culminated in a couple of Indian professors taking penumbrage (which is one stage away from umbrage) to the level of scrutiny that their publications were incurring from the stickybeaks and data-integrity blackboard monitors at PubPeer. Helpful inquiries had been met with threatened libel suits to seek $50,000 Butthurt Compensation; the Cyber Police would be called in, to bring the miscreants to justice.

And Lo, an image did circulate on the Twittle, purporting to be the complaint in question.... but enlivened by fresh dramatic plot twists, with International Cyber-Criminals. Also an Extortion Attempt, with menacing phone-calls demanding moneys; I like to imagine that a thick East-European accent was used, although this crucial detail is absent from the ostensible Complaint.



This version of events allows the negative PubPeer reviews to be reframed as coordinated retribution, for the failure to pay the blackmailers' ransom (and nothing to do with actual image duplication and crayon-scribbled fabrication, spanning an oeuvre of papers). Indeed the narrative depicts an attack not so much on a team of Indian academics, but on Indian science and Indian culture themselves. This appeal to nationalistic defensiveness could gain some traction with the team's core constituency (i.e. academic / political patrons) and discourage them from reading the PubPeer critiques.

However, "BrutalAttackOnScientists" -- the circulator of the document -- is not necessarily moved by sympathy for Drs Sharma & Madhuri. His (or her) concern is centred more on their occasional co-author, one Ashutosh Tiwari. Tiwari had been employed for a few years in a Nanotechnology Centre at Linköping University in Sweden, but more of his energies went into his predatory-publishing company, and his parasitical journal (in which his Linköping students were encouraged to publish their work), and in his cruise-ship mockademic scamferences, and in the Research Institute he maintained at home in India... which appears to be a heavily-photoshopped version of a private diploma-mill, his father's "Dr Ganesh Prasad Law College".

All that came under scrutiny in turn. Then toys were flung, and trolleys lost their wheels, and the @StopBlackmailer twitter-egg sprang into existence, like grey-eyed Athene, Goddess of quantum-vacuum fluctuations, birthed from the head of Zeus.

Most notably, he (or she) has been lashing out at innocent bystanders in Swedish academia, looking for potential rivals who might have been behind Tiwari's unwanted exposure... Interspersed with allegations that Ulf Nilsson of Linköping U. is involved in the conspiracy and therefore should recuse himself from the LiU inquiry he's conducting into Mr Tiwari's business activities. The plot-line has elaborated to the point where Dan Brown would find it risible. Personally I think that anyone stuck in Umeå has suffered enough and should be left alone.

The twitstorms have acquired Trumpian proportions, with umpteen dozen copies of each denunciation blasted out in an hour to nearly 6000 followers who were acquired en masse from a Bot-broker.

Just saying, dude, when you are so over-wrought and loosely duct-taped together as to make the Riddled staff look like paragons of well-compensating high-functioning rationality, then it's time to put down the crack-pipe. Do not let that @SmutClyde troll encourage you, HE IS NOT YOUR FRIEND.


Meanwhile, the collective attention of the PubPeer commentariat has moved on to a different Indian nanotech / material-science researcher. Though Ashutosh Tiwari need not feel neglected.

The wrong kind of bees

Inspired by Tony Fisher and his functioning Rubik Ice-Cube, here at Riddled Research Laboratory we are making good progress with our plan to create the first Rubik Cube constructed out of bee-hives. Like the freezy version, it will provide the hobbyist with strong incentive to solve it as quickly as possible

Staff retention remains a problem.

Zen cones

A reader is inspired to reminiscense:

I was hired by the local government to cut costs on emergency equipment by standing by the side of the road and warning drivers about upcoming roadwork.

Roadcone cosplay is not recommended in New Zealand, where the Kea is the Roadcone's main natural predator, for Keas are bitey little buggers.


The other natural predator of roadcones -- in Christchurch at least -- is the Mitsubishi sedan.

Cones have evolved a number of ways to disguise themselves from their enemies.

They masquerade with equal ease as flower-pots, as a giraffe and as the Duke of Wellington's head.

In groups they can disguise themselves as a chessboard or a sea-urchin.

HA HA that one is not a camouflaged roadcone; it is a pink flamingo in the middle of the Polhill Reserve, possibly placed there as part of a guerilla marketing campaign to promote a theatrical reenactment of a John Waters movie.

The orange colouration comes from caretenoid pigments concentrated in the roadcone's outer layers to demonstrate its fitness to potential mates and thereby improve its reproductive success. Except in Japan, where they come in all colours (including black and white) because Japan.

I for one am concerned that these chromatic aberrations are introduced to other countries, they will out-compete the orange variety, in the manner of grey skwirls. One can only hope that they only look like road cones and are in fact a variety of Kasa-obake.

http://www.contractormag.co.nz/contractor/feature/road-cones/

Beet degeneration

The discovery of traditional recipes for Mangel-Wurzel beer made the choice of ingredients for this year's Christmas Ale so much easier.

The Interlattice further informs us that other uses for Mangelwurzels include hollowing them out to make space for a candle as part of harvest festivities; and hurling them, in the West County equivalent of bowls or boules. If one were to combine that with the tradition of trebuchet-themed pumpkin-chuckin', I suppose the appropriate siege machinery would be a Mangonel-Wurzel.

It must be time for some Scrumpy-&-Western music!

What fresh hell is this? (Farnham Freehold edition)

Holistic specialist and Cancer researcher left for Dead on Vacation

"Wait, what?" we exclaimed. "Not another torture-porn horror movie hoeing the well-rutted row of Hostel and Turistas!?"

Words cannot express our relief to discover that the histrionic headline actually adorns a blogpost from one Amanda Mary Jewell, autodidact Senior Cancer Researcher... she is on a working holiday in Dominica but is sensing a mood of hostility among the Dominicans, who unfairly suspect her to be an exploitative grifter. Through her blog she pleads with the UK authorities for declarations of her non-grifterhood, which would greatly increase the comfort of her sojourn in Dominica while she scopes out locations for an Alt-Health cancer clinic there, safe from UK and US regulatory busybodies.

All this might come as news to those of us who last heard of Amanda and Doug Jewell only 6 weeks ago when UK Trading Standards officials dropped in on a multilevel-marketing seminar at their manor-house in Farnham, Surrey. Which may not be the buckle of the Stockbroker Belt but is at least the third hole. The visit attracted more than the usual amount of media attention as the seminar was devoted not to tupperware, nor Avon cosmetics, but rather to promoting industrial-bleach enema kits, for treating cancer or autism by burning out the intestines of the patient. Also it was held under the auspices of the Genesis II Church... this being an organisation that was founded in the hope of bringing industrial bleach under the aegis of Religious Freedom with the enema as its sacrament.

Reports of the investigation in the UK tabloid press -- with their predictably prurient focus on the whole 'enema' aspect -- are evidently what inflamed the imaginations of the child-like, easily-led Dominicans, so if Ms Jewell dies in a native uprising or is sacrificed to their giant ape deity then it will all be the fault of Trading Standards, first for the Surrey investigation, and then for not proclaiming her to be innocent of everything.

It emerges that in the interim Ms Jewell has experienced a Road-to-Meniscus conversion, and left the Church and its clyster communion behind her. In its place she has discovered (and this is what brings the whole hairball of a story into the purview of Riddled) the panaceal properties of GcMAF (You would not believe the paperwork involved in changing every "MMS" reference in the website replacing a ".com" website with one at Wordpress). Hence the move to Dominica and the plan to spread the gospel of the healing protein with a chain of clinics across the Caribbean.

Jewell noted she will be in Dominica probably until mid August and then go on to Antigua where she is also working on a project similar to the one she is hoping to set up in Dominica.

Amanda is greatly concerned about the Great Culling of GcMAF grifters. Will she become the next victim?

One thing we know about dystopian future gubblements is that they  broadcast 'killing as an organised sport' as a Reality-TV series, as panem-et-circenses to distract the masses. This always happens. It must be a tradition, or an old charter or something. Just saying, if it becomes GcMAF-dealers versus Big Pharma wet-teams, I will watch the hell out of that series.

Though if someone wants to re-make The 10th Victim they might need someone younger than Ursula Andress to play the part of Ms Jewell.

Anyways... the Bulgarian hotel / spa 'Pearl Lodge' -- where formerly the Jewells hosted dying guests on package tours where they experienced a restorative health regimen of skiing, exercise, waters and underground-bunker survivalism (and bleach enemas) -- now serves as an entry point for importing "second generation GcMAF" from the Saisei-Mirai manufactory in Japan* and distributing it across Europe. See, all above board! Though Amanda is loath to supply UK customers with the Saisei-Mirai product, instead referring them to 1stProEngineering.com. Perhaps this is a matter of professional courtesy. Readers may remember 1stProEngineering as being one of the tangled skein of companies set up by Trevor Banks and Lesley Hutchings, to on-sell versions of GcMAF-labelled products -- sourced from FirstImmune but diluted or homeopathic but enhanced with colloidal silver or Emu oil.

Meanwhile Ms Jewell is intent on convincing the Dominicans that industrial bleach is no longer part of her artistic practice business model (although she will not go so far in her apostasy as to condemn the Genesis Church outright, for it does good work in the area of forcing bleach into children's intestines). Also:

• Her only association with the Church's activities was to provide a room in the Farnham mansion for the use of Arch-Bishop Mark Grenon to exercise his Bishopric.
• It wasn't even her mansion, but someone else's, where she and Doug were merely visitors themselves.
• The investigation of the seinar by authorities was totally not a raid with all the negative connotations of that word; in fact she personally invited the inspectors in for a friendly chat.

The comment threads of the Dominica News Online reportage are a thing to behold, as lively as maggot-ridden meat, with a swarm of new commenters leaping to Ms Jewell's defense and vouching for her sterling work with orphans. I am not making this up.

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

* The Saisei-Mirai chain of cancer clinics in Japan offer an eclectic, non-judgemental portfolio of long-abandoned pre-chemotherapy treatments including Laetrile, Ukrain and Coley Toxins, as well as cutting-edge woo and their own special patented GcMAF-labelled product. They make enough money to buy a 2012 special issue of Nature, with 5 pages of advertorial for the chain's therapeutic options  though the issue seems to have been recently unpublished from the Nature website.

Making Cockade

It was 4.20 in the Riddled office, which had relocated for convenience to the Wigglesworth lounge at the Old Entomologist, where we were trying to watch "Inanimate Objects Cage Match" on the Sports TV, despite the stream of interruptions.

First it was an albatross carrying a dildo in its beak, tapping at the window to ask directions to the 15th Century, where it was supposed to appear in a production of "Horology -- the 13 Clocks & the Wonderful O" (an early Renaissance farce, Twain Thumbes Upp from the Nuremberg Chronicle, Ye Banquette Skene was one laughfe one minuet). We gave it directions and the perfidious albatross was on its way. Not much had happened in the TV sports; neither pen nor sword had made a move despite the high expectations for the former.

Then tigris turned up in a huff which she left parked outside. "Did either of you happen to read the comment from Rurritable in last week's Arachnophobia thread?" she asked, accusative and tense.

"Oh no," Another Kiwi vouchsafed. "We never read comments. That's a job for Little Tim the intern."

"Then he writes witty comments in our names," I said, "while we sit under the trees in the garden bar quaffing Roggen-Wolfen-Dunkel-Weizen-Spezial. The duties are strictly demarcated, it is only fair."

This crane JUST CANNOT
with the knots in its neck

"You should read it," tigris explained, so we obeyed. The comment links to a Rawstory post which simply echoes a post at some Medical clickbait site which in turn quoted a video in which an Australian evolutionary biologist opened his facehole and let the stupid out. And I was all "I don't even" and AK was all "Finish your Roggen-Wolfen-Dunkel-Weizen-Spezial, you'll feel better."

I am not making this up:

The environment in which humans live in also factors in penis size. Early humans had to endure freezing temperatures that were more tolerable due to large penises, which release heat. The human penis helped regulate body temperature keeping it warm and cool.

It warms and it cools, penes are magic! I am the satyr in the painting, suspicious of the blowing on things to warm them and to cool them, breath is magic too! It is a pity that 50% of our early human ancestors did not have large penes so they never survived the icy conditions of equatorial Africa.

"I can only surmise," AK vouchsafed, "that Curnoe was influenced by Alex Werth's discovery that bowhead whales have a 12-foot organ of erectile spongiform tissue inside their mouths which they use to dump excess body heat."

"I remember that story," I said. "Didn't we put Greenish Hugh in the Evolvamat to trigger his dormant genes and see where he would develop erectile spongiform tissue, and with what function?" We shared a chuckle over the memory of Evangeline van Holsterin's reaction when Greenish Hugh tried to drink a beer after the experiment. The full implications of Werth's observation for the field of cetacean asphyxiation porn and auto-erotic bondage remain to be seen.

Anyway, back to the clickbait article:

Whether you’re a couple of inches more or less than the average penis size, chances are you’re a lot larger than your primate cousins.

"I should have thought," I said, "that at most 50% of readers would have larger penes than non-human primates."

"Rawstory and Medical Daily don't have female readers," AK explained; "they all died of poor body-temperature control."

"Buggrit -- we missed the end of Pen vs. Sword. Now they've moved on to Egg vs. Chicken. Egg seems to have the advantage."

"Switch channels," AK suggested. "They should be setting up the nets for Piscine Tennis about now on the other channel."

"Sea-horses are shite tennis-players," I opined.