Sorry for inconvenience

In retrospect, that "Unacknowledged Legislator" personality upgrade for HAL-9000 might not have been as good an idea as it seemed at the time.

Sorry for inconvenience.
I can not help it.
I'm sorry but I can not help it.
I will never forget you.
I will never forget it.
I'm sorry I do not have my clothes.
I'm sorry I do not have a strange thing.
I'm sorry I do not have my clothes in it.
I will never stop talking. I will not let you go.
I'm afraid I will not let you in. I have to inquire.
I'm sorry I have no idea what it is like to be.
I'm sorry I do not have my clothes. I will never stop calling you.
I'm sorry I do not have my clothes.
I'm afraid I will not let you go.
I'm sorry.

We should also rethink the concept of a "Library of Babel" / Nag-Hammadi Library mash-up.

Both of them are also good.
It is also both.
It is also a thing.
It is neither good nor bad.
It is also a thing of both.
It has neither can but nor both.
It has neither, nor both.
There is nothing but neither can nor too.
It has both of them as well as both.
There is nothing but neither can nor neither.
There is nothing but neither can nor anything.
It can be both a thing and a thing.
It is possible to do both things and things
It has both as well as for both.
It can have as much as possible both of them.
It can be both a thing and a thing as well as a thing.
It can have as much as we can, as well as for both.
It can be both a thing and a thing as well as a thing.
It is possible that we have both can and do have both
It can have as much as we can, but also both.
It is possible that we can also do both things and things
It has both useless things as well as things as well as things.
It can have as much as we can, but also both.
It has both useless as well as things as well as things.
It is also gentle.

[Previous versions of "Both of them are also good" in comments at LLog and at Yastreblyansky's joint]

You wonder if it was noel coward tom stoppard who wrote the dialog it is so nervously brilliant my dear

The marble Index of a mind

Dear Riddled,

I would like to borrow the time machine. I have a novel and interesting idea for reconstructing the missing arms of the Venus de Milo, but my therapist advised me that the Golden Age of interesting Venus de Milo reconstructions was back in the 19th Century, so for my idea to encounter a suitably receptive audience, I should go back to about 1882 to publish it. I believe that the Venus sculpture was actually a depiction of a Cyborg Hunter-Killer with milligun arms. Also it was originally painted magenta and called 'Venous'.

Mostly Armless

P.S. I am not a crank.

Dear Mr or Ms Armless (can we call you 'Mostly'?),

You need not be so pessimistic about modern-day hostility to new Venus reconstructions from excitable amateurs unencumbered by an excess of art-historical knowledge .

It is true that Suhr's 1958 revelation -- that the Venus depicted the pose of spinning -- received short shrift from Peter Fuller:

"Unfortunately, this little better than laughable reconstruction was bolstered only by arguments concerning the shape of the moon's shadow when projected to the earth, and a conspicuous contempt for empirical evidence in favour of intuitive, cultic speculation."

If 'shrift' is really a word (I suspect Another Kiwi of making it up). Anyway, this posed no obstacle to E. W. Barber's rediscovery of the theory in 1994. I mean, the Spinster theory was recently promoted in the august webpages of Slate.

[Thx Echidne!]

Sadly, the time machine is not currently available for loan, on account of next week's incident when mikey will borrow it, only to be caught by the Temporal Continuity Police doing two millennia per minute through a built-up suburb of Chronopolis. You have no idea how much fuss ensued, with bureaucratic sticky-beaks warning of possible "collisions with Chronos" and asking endless questions about "warrants of fitness" and such... all resolved only when tigris turned all involved parties into super-evolved felines (by releasing a couple of kittens back in the early Miocene Epoch), making them easily distractable by moving laser dots.

P.S. We are not cranks either.

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

How are we reconstructing the Venus de Milo's missing arms this week?

1. In martial-arts poses, exacting vengeance after a fish-related manifestation of the Terpsichorean muse.

2. Wrapped around the body of Brother Louis, a zealous monk of Perignon Abbey in Averoigne (a dead monk because crushed beneath the weight of the toppled statue).

3. Here is our alternative rendition of the Aphrodite as spinner. If she was careless enough to lose two arms she could have lost more. 

We drink elixirs that we refine From the juices of the dying (#2)

Call me old-fashioned but I do not rate for holothurians as a culinary ingredient, not after the lamentable white-sauce episode... it was a mistake anyone could have made, with 'bêche-de-mer' and 'béchamel' being adjacent in the index, but the Frau Doktorin was not well-pleased. Also 'trepang' is covered by Rule #7, "Never eat anything that belongs in a Batman sound-effect bubble".

So it was with some trepidation that I approached the latest wonder-drug in the cancer-cure scammocopeia -- TBL-12 -- which apparently consists of sea-cucumber squeezins. But it turns out to be the placebo of choice for a dying cricketer, and the website is bejazzled with tropical-blue-sea imagery,

and it has a nice Origin story in which the producer's father -- dying of cancer in 1962 -- was taught the secret traditional recipe for echinoderm smoothies by a benevolent Chinese fisherman; so it's all above-board after all. Which is a relief, given the price-tag.

The Google Machine led to a crowd-funding webpage inviting assistance to help a dying victim of Chronic Lymphocytic Leukemia pay for the TBL-12 and Iscador prescribed by one Dr Ulrich Doering. Further inquiry revealed more crowd-funding to help pay for the TBL-12, Iscador and GcMAF prescribed by Doering for cancer patient "Franny", and led to a patient with breast cancer, offered TBL-12 at $500 a month while the GcMAF would cost $4000-$5000 per week.*

"What in the name of fuck is Iscador?" asks the avid reader, in a pitch-shifted, format-shaped voice that is hardly recognisable as mine. "Apart from a character in a LotR knock-off?" Thereby providing me with an opportunity to mention Rudolf Steiner, 1920s Übercrank who contributed substantially to the gaiety of nations once he slipped the surly bonds of rational thought and just let the crazy fall out of his head.

We have already met Steiner's notions of mystic astronomy with the great migrations of spirits from planet to planet, in the manner of Scientology (though with less Xenu and fewer volcano-and-H-bomb-related activities); and his scheme for esoteric pest control through magickal burning of gonads. The latter is of course a foundational concept of Biodynamic Farming. Here at Riddled we try to support the Biodynamic farmers by offering them such innovations as Rainbow Aquaculture and the EasyMilk SideNipple Deer.

...but do they thank us? DO THEY BOGROLL.

At some point the leprechauns in Steiner's Teutonic underwear informed him that cancers are really a kind of parasite, and therefore a distillate of parasite would cure cancer, and then he revolutionised oncology by introducing tapeworm extracts. No, wait, he didn't; the cure had to be a plant parasite, and specifically mistletoe. You might think that fully parasitical plants like dodder or Rafflesia or the NZ Woodrose Dactylanthus taylorii would be twice as potent as as the merely hemi-parasitical mistletoe, but they do not provide the pharmacist with an excuse to go climbing trees with a golden sickle. At Riddled we support any conceit that allows us to illustrate posts about Steinerian medicine using images of Getafix. The recipe calls for fermentation of an aqueous extract, i.e. MISTLETOE BEER, totally not an ingredient in the Riddled Christmas Ale.

Baldr and Höðr: Mistletoe
injection goes horribly wrong

By now the reader is thinking "Why, yes, I would totally put my life in the hands of someone who has trained in this egregious scholium of thought, and believes that blood pumps itself around the body (with the heart merely there to modulate its flow), and that the skull is an inside-out femur." Then come to New Zealand! For here we have Anthroposophic GPs, accepted as members in good standing of the Royal NZ College of General Practitioners. In particular, one Dr Ulrich-Bero Doering.

"So much for Iscador," says the reader. "But what is GcMAF with the $4000-$5000 / week price-tag?" HA HA not really for we have already covered this Wonder Drug that Doctors Don't Tell You About, on many occasions.

Intensive research The gazoogle reveals a loose network of NZ doctors who have been importing GcMAF for a while... presumably in the ampoule form (extracted from human immunoglobulin) rather than as Ruggiero's magic yogurt. Already in 2011, a breast-cancer cancer patient was "paying $1500 per month for an alternative treatment [...] an alternative medicine from Europe known as GcMaf" [see also depressing coda to the story]. The network was coordinated around St Benedicts Health Care -- a clinic so over-the-top in its cheerfully syncretic promotion of mutually-contradictory modalities (as the young people call them) that one could easily believe it to be Californian.**

The latest development is Immuno Biotech Ltd! This is located at the same premises as St Benedict Health Care and is owned by Doering, along with Michael Kelly,*** previously the St-Benedict-based source of GcMAF guidance. However, the clinic has the appearance of a subsidiary or a local franchise of Immuno Centre / First Immune / GcMAF.se. It shares its name with David Noakes' Guernsey company for GcMAF production.  The services it offers overlap with the specialties of Noakes' colleague Marco Ruggiero... sonoporation, "the Swiss Protocol", "Advanced In-House Imaging [...] i.e. Cortical Abnormalities in Children with Autism".

The cost of a first medical appointment at Immuno Biotech is NZ$460. "Follow up appointments can take up to 30 minutes and cost $230".

This is not nearly as funny as when GcMAF was an overseas phenomenon. I must distract myself now by arranging the transport of another shipment of freshly-harvested squaculture rainbows.

Thx to (et alia) Grant Jacobs, Mark Hanna

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

* "Dr Doering has a friend that can get the drug down to around $450 a day as his friends wife is receiving this treatment and is doing great living with stage 4 cancer."

At Riddled we advise against drugs which the doctor is offering at a discount because another patient no longer needs the entire course of treatment.

** If the happy healthy sun-time banner at the St Benedicts site is any guide, it is the favourite provider of holistic solutions among Russian stock-photograph models.

*** Kelly is a Dielectric Resonance Management Practitioner and Biological Terrain Management Practitioner. He also owns "Vibronics Health" which offers Electronic Gem Therapy from the same address. His CV explains that having cured his own lymphoma with life-style changes,

In 2004 Michael trained under instruction from Dr Jon Whale of Whale Medical, on "Dynamic Radiometric Thermal Diagnostics" and "Dielectric Resonance Management Procedures" (Electronic Gem Therapy). He used this technology to further help repair and strengthen his body
In 2005 Michael trained under an associate of Dr Timothy Ray in his "Biological Terrain Managment", utilizing analysis of Saliva and Urine for health assessment and intervention recommendations.
In 2009 Michael completed four years training in Western Biomedicine and three years training in Acupuncture, at the Auckland College of Acupuncture and Traditional Chinese Medicine.
In 1992 Michael was initiated into the Sufi tradition and studied Psychology, Philosophy and Mysticism.

Coincidentally enough, the palatial Riddled offices happen to share premises with Mikey Hemlock's No-buzz vibrator-repair service, Œstrus. The shop has that name in the hope that people will ask how it is pronounced. This is our opportunity to explain that “The O is silent”.

Gorilla my Dreams.

"So" said tigris consulting her Memorex Executive Clipboard with sticky notes, " I see that the World Wildlife Fund movie 'Totes Adorb Babby Animules' is in the can, as we say in the movie mileu".
"Yes" I vouchsafed "In the can, though we could not find a mileu to put in it what with it not being the season, and all".
"Also" noted Smut Clyde, Senior Cameraperson and fingernail technician, "no bugger even knows what a mileu, is."
"It is not" I opined "one of them little furry, bitey things, from in the Riddled Evolvamat. I think they may be seagulls."
"Untrainable, those little bleeders" noted Smut Clyde "although they make a glider as soon as you put them in a prison cell, it's uncanny."
"Greenish Hugh got them to make a BBQ nook at Riddled Manor by telling them to make a stable for Louie the Carthorse" I noted.
"Why did they make it on the 3rd floor then?' asked tigris "he never goes up there... oh I see"
"I feel that we may hear more from the furry, bitey things after their negotiations with the Library Pixies. When they all wake up, I've never heard such singing" said Smut. "And carousing"
"Well anyway" said tigris "the babby animals movie?"
"Oh yes" I said "babby animals all over the place, being all cute and such"
"There aren't any, are there?" said tigris
"No" said Smut "the budget did not stretch to it after The Stimson Bros. Rusty Sythe Stout bill came in"
"Yikes" I said "it was vast, lucky we did not get the healthy version, with prunes. However we have a very exciting and heartwarming story about a gorilla and a dinosaur trapped on an island by invisible other monsters."
"Oh" said tigris "this accounts for the banana stains in the time machine and Throgmorton Portcullis Industries liver and bacon deliveries"
"The accounts department may be querying that bill since former Hospital meals do not constitute "Gourmet Delights To Your Doorstep" in my view" said Smut.
"That Gorilla is a bleedin' artiste" I said "always walking off and having to be soothed by Greenish-David Attenborough."
"Happy now, as parks and recreation officer for Upper Aramoho" said Smut "although shrieking at the clientèle has created some tension"
"People should learn to stand still as he charges and not show their teeth" I said.
"And the dinosaur?" said tigris
"I expect he's happy somewhere" said Smut "the time machine dials need resetting and the possibly even new lithium crystals"
"Good ones" I noted "Not ones from KMart. Even though the wrapping is purple, just like the good ones"
"Righto" said tigris "I shall fax off the standard denial form and we'll go back in time next week to not even enter the tendering process. All this time travel might cause problems"
"We are always very careful" said Smut "although the eggs in Margaret Thatcher's hair was very funny for a few weeks"
"She got got quite batty about it" I said.
"And then the dinosaur married her" said Smut "they were made for each other"
tigris ticked the project completed box on the project completion page, twice.
"I think we could use a stout" she said.
"We have been flat out like a lizard stealing eggs from a crazed British Prime Minister" I noted.

A transparent attempt to initiate a series of Fish puns around the general theme of "being organised"

A plaice for everything and everything in its plaice.

UPDATE: Apparently it is called 'knolling'.

Oh, puppetry of the penis... we misheard

Dear Adompha, Absolute Lord of Loithé, King of Sotar,
It is always a pleasure to hear from a fellow devotee of the dark craft of unnatural anthrobotanical hybridising.*

Biosecurity restrictions in this country mean that the pale ichor of the dedaim is no longer to be had for love nor money, but we have found that for the purpose of melding animal circulation to the slower xylem and phloem of vascular plants, the sap of the deodand is an acceptable substitute.

As for the specific transgressive grafting you describe, in our experience it is better to err on the side of harvesting too early than waiting too late in the season, as the fruit are vulnerable to frost. Also they bruise easily so there is no mechanical substitute for manual harvesting.

We sympathise entirely with your problems from anti-GMO campaigners with their tedious hidebound bleating about "species integrity" and "life-force" and "purity of bloodline". Our own cutting-edge exploration of conceptual whorticulture encounters similar obstructiveness, but here it is not so easy to arrange for the disappearance of the protesters with a discreet beck to the wizened magician Dwerulas and a casual hint of one's displeasure.

* Not to be confused with the Hubris, whose struggle for self-determination we whole-heartedly support. US out of Hubristan!

Shadow board

Obsessive? Perhaps. But it's worth all the trouble with the pegboard and the paint to have everything sorted, and know exactly where everything is so you can lay your hand on it right when you want it.

If only the family would learn to put things back in the right place after using them.

If I ran the Zoo

Boing Boing:

There must be something we can do with all these beloved, uneconomical beasts: perhaps we could stage a concert in which they were hurled by trebuchet across a stadium.

Searchin' For Celine

Search terms bringing traffic to Riddled currently feature "crucified women", "deltoid sex toys" and "funny phrenology" (though not "Jesus Hentai" or "car crash", despite the best efforts of commentors). You are sick sick people.
Through a natural chain of mental associations this leads us to a little-known Agatha Christie locked-room mystery involving an ingenious use of poison:



Ha! The lethal vibrator was of course the forerunner of the Euthanasia Roller-coaster, which received so much chatter on the Interducts last year. Wikipedia summarises the plot:

A popular politician,* Marie Denbaule, is murdered on a sabotaged amusement park ride. The story goes into great technical detail on how the ride was sped up shake Marie to death. The culprits are finally caught and more that a few fish die of mercury poisoning.

Spoiler alert

The instigator of the murder was not (despite one's immediate suspicions) Gaudet the labour agitator -- who "does not possess the requisite mental acumen" -- but Jacobs the amusement park owner, who had previously "filled the chair of Physics in the College of New York until 1916, when he was expelled on account of his radical socialistic activities".

It is always good to learn about suitable careers for erstwhile physicists.

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

* In fact Denbaule is an opera singer, working to soothe the angry workers, they being suckers for a mezzosoprano voice.

Every creature casts a shadow under the sun's golden finger

When graphic artists were called upon to personify gear-wheels as a cartoon character for advertisements, traditionally they showed them with expressions that are at best neutral or inexpressive. This went on for centuries. John Ptak remarked on it:

Anthropomorphic images of the Gear have appeared in books in the West for several hundred years, and in almost every case where the Gear has a face, it is usually expressionless, its mouth drawn into a mid-Western farmer/Abe Lincoln horizontal, a tightly drawn nothing. Two thin lips, firmly repulsing all emotion.

You can understand why the gear in the picture is looking pissed off: the gear-cutting technology of 1543 was so rudimentary that it is stuck with teeth that are impractical if they function at all. The eccentric cam to the right is having a quiet snigger.


See the optimal gear teeth below! The profiles are involutes of a circle, which keep the torque and the rotatory movement constant, as Euler showed in the 18th century amid loud Huzzah!s from the mathematicians and a veritable crescendo of The Explaining Voice.

No wonder the wheel is looking less grumpy. It would probably be even happier but it has just been listening to doleful songs from The Handsome Family about Eurydice in the Garden of Eden.

The eccentric cam is still eccentric.

Alternative title: See the Black Sun rise.

Recipes for Disaster

I had no idea that the community of randomised culinary research was so fiercely competitive! It seems, though that Substance McGravitas -- hitherto ahead of the field with his Janusnode template -- cannot afford to rest on his bayleaves, for here is a group of brash young newcomers and their "10,000 randomized recipe datasets". Sadly, they do not report having tried any of these ingredient combinations.

Ahn, Ahnert, Bagrow & Barabási also provide a useful Fig 2 to show the molecular associations among no fewer than 381 culinary ingredients, but not including Figs, so no recursion chiz chiz.

The backbone of the flavor network. Each node denotes an ingredient, the node color indicates food category, and node size reflects the ingredient prevalence in recipes. Two ingredients are connected if they share a significant number of flavor compounds, link thickness representing the number of shared compounds between the two ingredients.

This cook only has 10 ingredients in his Flavour Network. No wonder he looks so dejected.

The top Figure looks like something the Pentagon might produce for a Congressional briefing, to dramatise the interconnectedness of terrorist groups.

But what is that in the centre of the spiderweb...

Run for your lives! It's a trap!

Trend watch

"So what are the hip trendy websites blogging about so far this year?" Another Kiwi wanted to know. He had managed to wrest the official Riddled Editorial Hat from tigris after a brief tussle -- the battered gray fedora, with the PRESS badge tucked into the brim that dispensed whisky from a concealed spigot -- which made him Acting Editor Pro-tem Locum Honsec.

"Apparently titles referring to Blue Öyster Cult lyrics are fashionable," I vouchsafed.

"Excellent! Make a note of that!"

"B-Flat," said tigris.

"What else have they mentioned? Not that we would stoop to stealing ideas."

"Sex shops are the topic of choice," I continued:

One thing led to another, as it will, and we decided that her idea of a second-hand bookshop/café, whilst excellent in itself, was perhaps not sufficient, and thoughts quickly turned to complementary activities, like a sex shop as an annexe. You would, I admit, have to pick your books fairly carefully, and make it clear somehow that this particular area was not necessarily family-friendly.

Whatever, we got quite enthused with the idea after the second glass, and started brainstorming, for a good name is very important in commerce. All about brand recognition, apparently. "Becks & Bryan: Purveyor's of Quality Refurbished and Second-Hand Sex Toy's Since 2011" says it all but is a bit of a mouthful, and does rather encourage grocer's apostrophe: "Vibrators R'Us" is snappier. Or, quite simply, and kind of sums it up in a nutshell, "Dildo & Co.". The feedback so far has been positive, always an encouraging thing. (We'll try to forget about my Bryan's suggestion of "The Cock Shop", shall we?)

AK's eyebrows rose and harrowed his forehead into a veritable ploughed field of furrows. "Isn't that encroaching on the topic of the reconditioned vibrator trade, such as been covered by our colleague mikey on a number of occasions?"

" I do vaguely recall that self-same subject receiving some attention in a Sadly,No! comment thread a few years ago," I admitted:

It has belatedly occurred to me that if I were the one running a vibrator-repair service, I would call it Œstrus. Then people would ask how it was pronounced, giving me the chance to explain that “The O is silent”.
Plan B would be to have a side-line of repairing watches and changing batteries and things, so the shop could be called “The 13 Clocks and the Wonderful O”.

"Why are you speaking in that robotic monotone?" tigris wanted to know.

"I thought that's what you wanted," I said.

More important news for mikey

"Who wants a nip of the Sheep Dip whisky?" asked Another Kiwi, rather foolishly some would say.

"I could certainly cope with a wee'd ram", says I.

A year ago we touched upon Antarctic whisky, and the research program to reverse-engineer its components, certainly no-one hoping that it contains Shuggoth DNA. There are developments:

In Feb 2011, after required negotiations, Whyte & Mackay company owner Dr Vijay Mallya personally flew to Christchurch to collect and take three bottles back to Scotland using his private jet. Whyte & Mackay’s master blender Richard Paterson and his expert team spent eight weeks deconstructing, analysing and marrying malt whiskies to "recreate" the ancient samples. They needed to match the delicacy, sweetness, fragrance, spice and smokey notes of the "Rare Old Highland Malt". For this they have used malt whiskies ranging from 8 to 30 years of age. The Whyte and Mackay malt brands include Dalmore, Jura and Highland Park. It would be expected that these may form part of the recreation but at it's core is malt whisky from Glen Mhor, which was the original Mackinlay distillery before it closed in 1983.

Whisky Magazine man Dave Broom is claimed to be the only other person in the world to have tasted both the original and the recreation. Whyte & Mackay’s website quotes him as "The Shackleton whisky is not what I expected at all, and not what anyone would have expected. It’s so light, so fresh, so delicate and still in one piece – it’s a gorgeous whisky. I think the replication is absolutely bang on."

So where can you taste the stuff? It turns out not to be so difficult if you live in upsy-downy land.

If the consumers undergo massive ontogenic transformations (resulting from the unmasking of hitherto-methylated HOX genes) and transform into a body-plan with novel sense organs and five-fold-symmetry, we will have to conclude that there was some DNA contamination after all.

Mikey and ZRM: to Australia with drinking straws, NOW!!!

Some good Aussie Shiraz has been spilt:

More than A$1m ($1.07m; £664,000) of wine has been destroyed in a forklift accident in Australia.
The 2010 Mollydooker Velvet Glove shiraz sells for A$185 a bottle ($199; £122), the AFP news agency said.

Winemaker Sparky Marquis told reporters he was "gut-wrenched" that 462 cases of wine had been smashed while being loaded for export to the United States.
"When they opened up the container they said it was like a murder scene," he said. "But it smelled phenomenal."

BBC
Tell them Riddled sent you.