Hyphenation: Not just for double-barrelled English surnames

No surprises there. There is little point in courting pacifist ones.

Via.

Round its funeral pyre the flames will churn

It is just like antibiotics. "Burn it with fire," the customers demand, so the pest exterminators oblige, never stopping to think that their indiscriminate flame-related treatments are hastening the evolution of a new generation of fire-resistant invertebrates.

Now it is just the letters "A", "B" and "C" that are undergoing predation from two graphotrophic phyla of Ecdysozoa and one Lophotrochozoa phylum, but if fire-resistance spreads then soon the entire alphabet will be at threat. It will be a shame when we have no other options than to nuke the entire site from orbit.

Halfway through the project, Mole realised that he did not have enough room in his burrow for the top half of a bent-ply Dalek,

and wished that he had stuck to his original idea of constructing Aalto plywood furniture.

Are you telling me that it's illegal to imitate the Skyclad monks of Jainism?

Apparently it is contrary to Catholicism for men to wear gowns or robes:*

Before the show began, Luzon stood outside the building in which the theater is located, and where several San Diego news station cameras rolled. He donned a cherry-red kimono-styled dress and Asian-inspired make-up and laughed and chatted with students.

[...]

“A drag show is not consistent with Catholic teaching,” student protestor and sophomore Ailsa Tirado, 20, said in an interview with The College Fix. “Why call yourself a Catholic school? It’s in direct contradiction with explicit Catholic moral teaching.”

As is so often the case, a passage comes to mind from Gravity's Rainbow. In this case, Pynchon's thundering denunciation of Cross-dressing transsectuals:

... a transsectite, a Lutheran named Mausmacher who likes to dress up in Roman regalia. This Mausmacher, not content with standing in front of his own mirror making papal crosses, thinks it will be a really bizarre kick to go out to the Zeppelin field to a Nazi torchlight rally in full drag, and walk around blessing people at random. Green torches flaring, red swastikas, twinkling brasses and Father Mausmacher, checking out tits 'n' asses, waistlines 'n' baskets, humming a clerical little tune, some Bach riff, smiling as he moves through the Sieg Heils and choruses of "Die Fahne Hoch."

One can only call it a blessing in disguise.

* H/t a more substantial blog.

"They migrate to new places and particularize, whereupon languages mutate, costumes and conventions elaborate, aesthetic symbols take on fresh meanings."

To celebrate "Act Like a Jack Vance Character" Day we kicked it Nolde-school as we say at Riddled (thereby revealing an unhealthy preoccupation with Danish-German expressionist painters) and sought inspiration from the Rhodomontades or Purple Mountains of Pampas, the second incontinent of Buriden 4337, where the Salamanders and Salamogyns stack up their dwellings in curious, ramshackle congeries.

Owing to a lapse or lacuna in stocking the colony ship which settled Buriden 4337, the on-board library consisted of one single book, and generations of colonists spent the voyage reading and re-reading the battered copy of Frog & Friends. It was inevitable that amphibians would come to occupy a crucial role in their culture. No doubt you are all familiar with Baron Bodissey's monograph on the place of the newt in the Salamandrin world-view, numbered as one of the Appendices to Volume Eight of his slight and by no means comprehensive Life.

Perhaps now Evangeline van Holsterin's idiot boyfriend will learn not to trust advice from Swearing Bob about proper Rhodomontane etiquette. Here he is shown greeting his paramour with the aid of his batrachian buddy "Hoppy", but the gestures are all wrong so it amounts to a crude invitation to amplexus. He has been pwned, or pignorated as we say at Riddled. I do not think there will be toad-in-the-hole tonight. He will be dealing to his tadpole by himself.


Tradition demanded that the regulars at the Old Entomologist defend Evangeline's honour by pelting him with rambutans and hairballs IN ACCORDANCE WITH THE PROPHECY. But the alternative is sodomy by mulletfish so he didn't complain.

Never mind, he didn't miss much: Salamandrin amplexus is not as much fun as it looks.

Afterwards it was the two-for-one special on Spiced Parsnip Porter and Sphinx Purge. I'm sure that Another Kiwi and Space-Time Eddie just rested their eyes momentarily, and shame on whoever it was who seized that brief opportunity to doodle on their faces with a felt-pen. The embarrassment of a square on the forehead has caused Eddie to regress to his two-year-old state (it's quite disconcerting when he does that). AK is chortling quietly at the stripling's discomfiture but HA HA he has no idea that he is himself similarly bedizened with a backward 'D'; I have to admit that's funny.

Eye of newt

Obamas funnin' on the press so far, so normal. Real aficionados should fast forward to 6.53 for a look at Newt and Callista.
He looks like he has some prime ass DC weed in him, she doesn't quite understand who all these people are and why are they laughing at the black man who is not even dancing?

Straw-Man, likes walks on the beach, red herrings and Shifting Goalposts, seeks like-minded True Scotsman

This is the sort of thing we have to deal with in the Riddled Classified Personals Department.

Also too, don't forget Act Like a Jack Vance Character Day.