Ripe and ready to the eye Yet rotten somehow to the core

We are pleased for putting your profitable time in looking this blogpost

Jeffrey Beall described 'Juniper Publishers' as "Rotten to the Core", suggesting some familiarity with BÖC lyrics.

These "Juniper" gombeens offer a street address in Arcadia, Ego California - the latest in a series of CA apartments as their US fuckpuppets abscond from one rent arrears to another - but to the surprise of absolutely no-one they are hiring trainee scammers and spammers in Hyderabad. Incompetence in English seems to be one of the desiderata. They also hired some now-defunct Hyderabad graphic designers to replace their naff logo, though all the suggestions seem more appropriate for an Early Education centre.

This is all by way of preamble to the latest innovation in parasitical-publishing spam, inspired perhaps by the Piranha Brothers and their Other Other Operation, i.e. threats of unpleasant consequences if contributions for their journal-shaped jizzmop and their bank-accounts do not swiftly ensue.

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Dear $NAME,

Hope you are doing well!

We are pleased for putting your profitable time in looking this email. My target is to place the forthcoming issue by the finish of February. In any case, due to lack of another article we are unable to release it.

So, I ask for you to submit your article if you have it promptly or something bad might happen if conceivable, if you don't mind proposing to your friends and colleagues and fill my plate in succeeding the issue.

We gently appreciate your understanding and immediate response in this matter.

Warm Regards,

Melissa Gerald

Annals of Reviews & Research (ARR)

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I gently appreciate their understanding and immediate response dying in this matter a fire.

I have a noble cause for skin, there's just too many of them #2 Pigments of the Imagination edition

I programmed the Riddled Ktistec machine to scour the Interweave for exemplars of the type and synthesise them into an updated Mission Statement for the Riddled Research Laboratory and Institute for Extreme Country-Dancing... ideally something more legible and less beer-stained than what we have at the moment. It came up with a list of noble and chivalrous ambitions:

• To act as the directing and co-ordinating organization in the field of medicine;
• To be the worldwide, authoritative organ of the medical profession;
• To provide leadership on health matters, form the health research agenda, articulate norms and standards, evince evidence-based policy options, and monitor and assess health trends;
• To assist governments and national medical associations in jointly tackling health problems and improving the welfare of their citizens;
• To chart a successful course for health care delivery globally by articulating health guidelines and standards and helping nations address their public health issues;
• To study and evaluate all aspects of the medical health continuum, including the development of programs approved by the officers or members, to ensure an adequate continuing supply of well-qualified physicians to meet the needs of the public;

When I accused the Ktistec machine of plagiarising these items in all their grandiosity from the World Health Academy it turned off its auditory inputs and has been sulking ever since.

The Academy is primarily a vanity outlet for a New Jersey cosmetic dermatologist (insufficiently assuaged by his self-penned Whackyweedia entry), so it need not detain us for long. But before we continue to the other member of WHA -- its Secretary-General or sometimes President of Dermatology, one Professor Torelli Lotti -- the Academy's website deserves a moment, for it is a trichobezoar of whackyness.

Building upon its goal of transforming the world (one unsightly skin condition at a time) and its claim to represent the entire global medical profession, it lists a coterie of researchers and philanthropists and Nobel Laureates as "our people"... without explicitly claiming them as members.. and few of the sterling individuals whose images festoon the site are aware of the honour bestowed upon them. Whoever was paid to construct the site got bored and finished half-way through, so the continue reading links, they go nowhere.

The WHA site (also the Whackyweedia adaptation of it) refer to its International Journal of Medicine:

The International Journal of Medicine is an international open-access, peer-reviewed general medical journal. It is a publication of the highest academic profile that will bring new and important information to the medical, scientific, and policymaking community worldwide. Board consist of Nobel Prize laureates, Lasker Award winners, and other distinguished persons. Our devotion to international health guarantees that research and analysis from all regions of the world are vastly covered. We aim to publish first-rate clinical trials that will change the way medicine is practiced.

Publication Charges
To provide open access, the International Journal of Medicine levies an article publishing charge which covers our expenses, such as journal production, and online hosting and archiving. The charge (exclusive of VAT for UK and EU authors) is $500. There are no submission or page charges, and no color charges. We understand that some authors lack funding to defray publication costs. Where only limited funds are available, the journal will either accept partial payment or offers a waiver. As a matter of policy, the International Journal of Medicine offers a 100% waiver to corresponding authors based in Hinari Band 1 countries, and a 50% waiver to authors based in Hinari Band 2 countries.

No other record of the Journal or its editorial panel of Nobel Laureates can be found on the Interlattice [unless it is coterminous with the IJM issued by some little parasite-publishing start-up in the UAE].

Never mind, there is still Dermatologic Therapy, which acquired the WHA logo and became its emergency back-up journal in 2010, also acquiring Torello Lotti as Associate Editor.

At this point the franchising of WHA Official Journals becomes confusing, for a third journal joins the party! -- Global Derpatology, extruded by those mendacious low-life turdmuffins lovable rapscallions at OAText, who bill it as the Official Organ of the WHA. The OAText people lie about everything (like claiming to operate out of London rather than Hyderabad), but the founder and Editor-in-Chief is a Professor Torello Lotti, and surely his word can be trusted!

But wait! A challenger appears! Lotti is also credited with founding and Editing-in-Chief a competing Journal of Figmentary Disorders for the OMICS griftdozer!* Which is also the Official Journal of the World Health Academy.

To the extent that this is non-tedious, it is because the episode provides a rare example of a shared sockpuppet -- a non-existent person who serves as Lotti's Editorial Assistant and featured in spam from two competing scamshops.

'... Beall noted the ostensible existence of one Amanda Venis, a high-functioning $NAME parameter who works both sides of the street. "Her" FaceBukkake page primarly peddles one of the dismal OAText travesties (Global Derpatology) but the advertisements that comprise "her" Twitter stream alternate between that journal and the Journal of Figmentary Disorders from OMICS. Of the three LinkedIn entries set up in that name, one has her working in SF as an Editorial Assistant for OMICS, while the other two have her in London, as OAText Managing Editor for Global Dermatology or, possibly, for the Interdiciplinary Journal of Chemistry.'

[Text self-plagiarised recycled from here]

As well as the Potemkin Academy, Lotti, Schwartz and their colleagues share an interest in a Californian biomed stat-up company. If any dramatic results emerge from their research in rebranding existing hair-growth placebos in exciting new packaging, they will not lack for suitable journals to announce them.

In the time he can spare from founding new journals, Professor Lotti abuses his powers-for-good as an OMICS / iMedPub editor to pimp "low dose medicine" -- which is to say, a quantum-bullshit neologistic acronym-ridden rebranding of homeopathy.


I was shocked, SHOCKED to find grifting going on in the placebo-vitiligo speciality!



Perhaps the multiple journals are intended to strengthen Lotti's reputation by diluting it repeatedly.

Before and after pigmentary disorder

* Pigmentary Disorders was evidently too specialised under Prof. Lotti's editorship to bring enough of a moneystream into the OMICS trough, so they recently booted him out and changed the title to the more lucrative and all-encompassing "Dermatology and Dermatologic Diseases".

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UPDATE What's this? Instigating punctuation? THE MONSTER.

...Once again we seem to have buried the lede, as often happens at Riddled. I can only say in our defense that the lede showed no perceptible vital signs and Dr Benway signed a death certificate before the burial. In this case "the lede" was Vitiligo.

Lede, buried

Duke Vitiligo, the decadent and psychopathic ruler of Chancre, whom we last saw in Act II Scene IV, conspiring with Psoriasis the court jester -- who is really Maculato, the legitimate heir to the Duchy, returned from exile in disguise?

Shut up. And try to be more sensitive about a skin condition that turns one into the map in the frontispiece of a 400-page fantasy novel.


Vitiligo is a purely cosmetic condition, with no life-threatening complications, so it is tailor-made for mountebanks and charlatans with placebos to peddle... especially as there is no effective treatment, i.e. no Standard of Care to compete with snake-oil-infused ointments, Low-Dose Cytokines, fractional ablative photothermolysis lasers, or whatever.

Of course there is a Vitiligo Research Foundation -- a charity, devoted to raising awareness and funds. It grew out of the World Health Academy (or possibly vice versa), so any donations are administered by Torello Lotti, Robert Schwartz, and like-minded friends, through probably not Amanda Venis.

Also, a special vitiligo-themed issue of Dermatologic Therapy composed of Lotti-authored, Lotti-edited papers promising new cures.

This is very insensitive, people; victims

of vitiligo are not for journey planning

Inquiring minds were wondering about the shift in Torello Lotti's academic affiliation in 2010, from the University of Florence to the Università Telematica Guglielmo Marconi (Rome)... the latter being a distance-learning institution, "set up by a consortium of private and public companies" ["diploma mill" is such an ugly term].

[h/t Ocasapiens]

This coincided with his appearances in Italian courts on charges of corruption, peculation, selling patients to drug companies, selling conferences to drug companies, generally being open for business, and instigating punctuation. Lotti's original sentence was increased on appeal (despite his lawyer arguing that the peculation was on behalf of the University and not for personal profit); then reduced again, with the Court of Appeal dismissing some of the charges and calling for a retrial on others.

He remains an acclaimed and honoured member of the cosmetic-dermatology fraternity. It is almost as if the entire profession is parasitical.

Great Failures of Our Time

#78. Early Renaissance false eyelashes.

Hardcore body-mods, dudes!

"Reporters should know better than to highlight a handful of random attacks by kids and call it journalism."

Remember, there is more to a career in journalism than just being a kid and attacking at random. Other skills are also required.

Colours out of space (and time)

Back with Another Kiwi and I were young, the world was monochrome as shown in old photographs, and if we wanted any colours we had to make them ourselves, by taking a spatial pattern of black-&-white edges and overlaying it with time variations. Kids today have everything handed to them on a plate but you try telling them that and they just laugh. I think they're laughing, anyway; it's hard to be sure until they give my ear trumpet back.

The effect was noticed in 1831 by Wheatstone when he was waving a page of lines and letters in front of his eyes, as was the custom of the time. I AM NOT MAKING THIS UP.

The prototype of the Wedgwood Patent Ceramic Bong -- designed by Brewster -- had recently been presented to King William IV at the latter's coronation for the greater glory of the Commonwealth, and all over England the physicists were staring intently at the Paisley wallpaper or asking one another "Have you ever looked at your hand? I mean, really LOOKED at it?" In fact Prévost had discovered the same flicker effect several years earlier, but he failed to publish it (being distracted at the time by his "Looking-at-the-world-through-a-cardboard-tube-at-each-eye-pointing-in-slightly-different-directions" experimental program) so he has only recently received the credit he deserves.

Hell has turned soft and is just not the same as it was in our day. I blame do-gooders

At a well-attended press conference today, called at short notice to put an end to what was described as "baseless and irresponsible speculation", a Spokesimp for the interim administration of Tartarus announced that certain minor changes would be made to some of the torments.

Asked how the residents felt about these changes, the spokesimp noted that some of the longer-term guests of Tartarus were rather set in their ways, and reacted negatively to anything different. He expressed confidence that the likes of Ixion and Sisyphus would soon come to see the benefits of futility and frustration expressed through a Zorb and a set of rebounding rubber skittles, rather than fiery wheels and rocks and mountain-sides with all the risk of injury and repetitive strain. He assured his audience that these changes had been under consideration for some time, and the timetable had been brought forward to meet new workplace safety standards. Cost-cutting was not a factor.

The spokesimp stated, in response to a question about converting Tartarus into a theme park, that the administrators were "open to all possibilities". However, rumours that plans were afoot to close the venerable institution were emphatically rejected as "unfounded".

At the end of the press conference, journalists were presented with printed and electronic copies of the full press release, dangling just out of reach.



Chaining with hooks to a slab of rock for eleven hundred years does not meet current Health and Safety regulations.

Halo Payload The hubcap of this life

If I've told you kids n times, I've told you n++ times: just because something is levitating and circular, doesn't mean it's a halo, so putting it on your head won't make you all saintly and canonised.

It could be the circular crushing mouthparts of a ghost Anomalocaris canadensis.*

Fossilised while swallowing a 1-cm ruler

Ha ha silly Uncle Smut! We know an Anomalocarid when we see one!

Ghost Anomalocarids are tricksy. They can turn invisible, apart from their mouths. Sometimes they disguise themselves.
Even if it was a halo, you don't know how old it is. Some of the
early models had bugs in the dimension-stability device drivers, and no safety cutoff. Unless you want to end up like Cousin Nicasius... ever since his 'little accident' he's only been fit for appearing in public-service warnings about the dangers of reckless trepanning, and modelling for designer egg-cups.

Novelty eggcup now available from the Riddled Gift Shoppe

Next time you kids find a 'halo', ask the staff to test it. That's what they're paid for.

This Blemmya's kneecaps are frog
faces. Your argument is invalid.

Kids today. It's as if they paid NO ATTENTION AT ALL when I showed them those public-service documentaries about other circular things hovering in the air that aren't halos.


* Way much cooler than ghost sharks.

And the Raven, never flitting, still is sitting, still is sitting On the chertic bust of Churchill just above my chamber door

Sadly, the contentious portrait of Churchill is not actually carved from chert, but is bronze. And as is the way with bronzes, there are multiple castings of it (four or five, says one source).

A POTUS press release* informs us that one of those copies has been in the possession of the White House

since the 1960’s. At the start of the Bush administration Prime Minister Blair lent President Bush a bust that matched the one in the White House, which was being worked on at the time and was later returned to the residence.**

The detailed nature of the misuse that left the White House's own cast in need of maintenance is a question that only G. W. Bush can answer.
We are better-placed, however, to explain why Romney wants to get his mitts on the British copy of Epstein's sculpture, rather than contenting himself with the copy currently in the White House residence. He believes that there are six versions, and intends to smash them all until he finds the one that contains the legendary Black Pearl of the Borgias.

"A streetlight! We must be in
Narnia now!" Sherlock deduced.
* A hat-tip and a rum Prost! to YAFB @ Rumproast.

** The rules for lending out artworks from the UK's Government Art Collection are strict -- they are supposed to remain within UK territory -- which is why Blair ignored them.



UPDATED with Bonus Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band track.

Brought to you by the Society for the Prevention of Verbal Cruelty to Clouds

Just another day in the Riddled offices.

Linger on the sidewalk where the neon signs are pretty (UPDATED!)

The Sheriff of Legotown was gobsmacked. "Are you telling me that there's no law in Legoland against having sex with the pavement?" "Afraid not," said the two, lingering on with total sangfroid.

BONUS alternative title (inspired by BBBB's comment):

Don't get off the sidewalk til I say go
Cos I am the law In Lego City One

UPDATE #2:
However poetic it may sound, "Asp-Halt!" is not the recommended command for ordering perpetrators to put away their trouser-snakes. Some joker will inevitably find a way to misinterpret it.

The Great Sun Jester

Holy 8-Tesla superconducting crank magnetism, Batman! Apparently it is not enough for maverick Professor Oliver Manuel to invent his own Outsider Astrophysics, in which the solar system originated as a supernova, and the sun is the supernova remnant -- a huge iron sphere with a neutron-star core and an atmosphere of superheated hydrogen, wracked by storms through which we glimpse the cooler iron surface.

Tempted perhaps by the funding and publicity available to the AGW-denialist camp, Prof. Manuel threw in his lot with them and added a supplementary hypothesis -- that changes in Earth's climate are in fact under the control of fluctuations in the solar corona (an idea that had rested in merciful desuetude since 1974).

His overtures were accepted! The denialists are hugging Manuel close to their unwarmed little hearts. A search for "Iron Sun" returns page after page of Ghits for this Citizen Astrophysicist drongo's crackpottery, much to the disappointment of certain Riddled staff who only want to look up pictures of a Scottish percussionist without receiving merciless mockery from tigris. Also the Charlie Stross novel would have provided plausible deniability.

The theory demands that a neutron star is not stable as the physicists thought -- evidently there is no such thing as a pulsar -- but instead is a repository of titanic stores of energy which it releases over billions of years in slow decay, providing 2/3 of the solar output.* The other 1/3 comes from newly-invented pathways of plasma fusion in the corona.

In fact the theory also applies to every star with a planetary system. The galaxy is evidently full of supernova remnants, and where are the pre-supernova stars? It is a mystery... like the origins of new birds-nests:

It is an extraordinary but indisputable fact that whereas an enormous number of these birds built nests last year, practically none have built nests this year.

To investigate this possibility, here at Riddled Research Laboratory we are dusting off old plans for a permanent solar station that will hover on the edge of a sunspot. Certain technical problems remain with the anti-grav, the refrigeration and the muirium-extraction apparatus, but we have Harness' word that it is possible. Of course these stations aren't cheap:

Personally I blame music lyrics for inspiring Manuel:

Into the whirlpool, where matter vanishes
Degenerate star, arm of Orion
An iron sun, the forbidden circle
It’s a mountain, it’s a black horizon

Some people might argue that BÖC were in turn inspired by Adrian Berry's forward-looking plan to create a galaxy-spanning network of hyperdrive wormholes involving artificial black holes, but this hardly gets them off the hook.

One might expect a clash between the AGW-denial claim that the Earth's atmosphere is not warming (meteorologists having faked all the evidence) and the professor's claim that the Earth is warming (under the influence of the solar chromosphere). But 'consistency' is not a priority in the Deniosphere, and those bloggers who were loudest about the fraudulence of climate scientists are also the biggest boosters for Manuel. The bat-signal goes out and they descend en masse on comment threads whenever the Iron Sun is mentioned. Perhaps they will come here! What fun!

If AGW-denialists think their case is strengthed by the support of someone best-known for raping his own children, go for it.

* Manuel also has developed his own Outsider school of nuclear physics, and is prone to popping up in discussions of alternative-energy sources to argue that the Earth's energy problems could be solved by mastering the mechanisms of neutron repulsion.