New Zealand politicians are unaware of all internet traditions

From here.

"When I said 'Balls' it was in the way of an expostulation rather than a request."

"Balls in horror movies are inherently scary," sez I, led astray on a tangent by a second pint of Gleamhound's Sobering Syrup. "If they are not bouncing downstairs of their own volition, they are in the hands of evil creepy children, or even the chief embodiment of evils."

"It is type-casting," Another Kiwi vouchsafed in slightly muffled tones on account of being face-down on the table. "How often do you see a ball in a positive role?"

The primary subject of discussion had been our application to the NZ Film Commission for funding. In support we have supplied them with sketches and storyboards. There had been secondary subjects of discussion as well but they had remained in the Indoors Voice because head barmaid Evangeline van Holsterin has been known to repossess glasses even before they are completely finished, if she judges that customers are verging upon rowdiness and lack of decorum.

The "evil creepy child" in the storyboard did not come out looking quite as intended. We have not heard back from the Film Commission for a while and I am worried that they are going to steal all our work and use it as a cover story to repatriate a group of diplomats who are hiding from a post-revolutionary regime in some distant country.

"Perhaps the plot is not sufficiently horrific," I persevered. "It follows through a process of geometrical and imeluct -- inelumpt -- unavoidable logic, that if we put lots and lots of balls into the plot, it will be even scarier."

A more cynical suspicion would be that someone has taken the script back in the Riddled Time Machine and sold it to some previous director. However, my colleagues refudiate the suggestion and there is no indication of such activity in the remaining pages of the Time Machine log-book. It is probably just coincidence that 1980 was a high point for balls in cinema, featuring as they did in The Shining and in Changeling.

I have always been impressed in the latter movie by the bravery of the red-and-white striped ball which is dropped in the river, after bouncing downstairs and freaking out George C. Scott's character... only for it reappear a few frames later. The ball's performance was so memorable that nine years later it was lured out of semi-retirement to reprise its role, in slightly different make-up, in the 1989 version of The Woman in Black.

Imagine my disappointment to discover that for that scene the film-makers used a stunt ball.

Seven years of labour on the instruments of time

That is how long the fell beings from the Unseelie Court honed their invasion plans.
For seven years the nightmare vanguard worked to mask the loathly truth of their appearance -- all teratomous polyostomous abomination and POOP -- behind a seductive glamour. Even as they wore away at the frayed fabric where realities come closest, where the membrane is thinnest separating their dimension from the fictional realm, where the barrier is unguarded and unfortified.

And then the stars were right for the conquest of the realm of narrative!
But the Unseelie Court had not reckoned with Lilliputian hallucinations and the Charles Bonnet syndrome, and the radical effect they wreak on scale, especially in fiction...

...so the cat got them.

So they tried again. Again, a tradition (or old charter) took its toll on scale...

And the cat got them.

Mrs Spat and Detritis Doodleberry Fairypoo Cupcake III would like everyone to know that Lilliputian hallucinations are tasty and fun to play with, but they are not at all filling -- especially for a growing cat -- and 20 minutes later it's time for dinner again.

Inside sources warn that the next time the Unseelie Court attempt to invade, they will shift their target to the realm of visual fiction. We are confident that the scale distortion will thwart them again and the incursion will be quickly detected.

This tree is a Hallowe'en mask

Your argument is a segment violation.

I do not know why Jason Richwine has opted for the facial grooming of a date rapist; perhaps it is a condition of his parole *

Puppet with bad facial hair [right]

The wonderful Intertuba invention has brought Jason Richwine, PhD, C.M.S-p to the world's attention, competing unfairly with our own home-grown shitweasels. Richwine is an erstwhile employee of one Republican front Thought Tonk who moved to a second Thought Tonk for a change of intellectual milieu. There he laboured in the Boilerplate factory preparing material to be stove-piped to the usual pukefunnel recipients.

Attention has recently turned to the PhD Richwine acquired from Harvard University in his gap year between Thought Tonks. His thesis revives the century-old argument that non-Anglo immigration to the US is a Bad Thing because the immigrants are too stupid to feed themselves unsupervised... with a global replacement of the specific list of genetically-inferior mud-people so that it now reads "Hispanics" instead of the original "Eastern and Southern Europeans (and Jews and the Irish)".

Richwine's list of references includes 8 citations of the work of Borjas, his chief examiner, which was probably politic. Linda Gottfredson features five times, she being the co-instigator (with David Brooks) of an egregious 1994 exercise in lending academic respectability to racism.** Six references to the theoretical stylings of J. Philippe Rushton.*** The Herrnstein-Murray "Bell Curve" is there, and eight references to Richwine's mentor, an AEI senior fellow and cross-burner:

Evidently AEI also sponsored the PhD, and provided Richwine with four interns to do the actual research, while Murray is further credited with 'expert editing':

Two questions come to mind:
1. Should not Harvard have awarded the doctorate directly to the organ-grinder AEI, skipping over the figurehead?

2. Is "mentor" a strong enough term for Murray's contribution? Perhaps "ghostwriter" would be better.

Alas, Richwine no longer works for Heritage, who do not wish to be linked to the stink of an overt white supremacist, although they do stand by the white-supremacy reports he prepared for them. This has led the defenders of Academic Freedom to worry about a chilling effect. However, Heritage policy holds that "workforce mobility" and job insecurity are Good Things, so Richwine is no doubt grateful for the chance to experience them.

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* Title changed because kids these days don't recognise Patti Smith lyrics.

** Gottfredson's intellectual odyssey -- to IQ/race quackery from a background in Holland-hexagon employment-psych. quackery -- is worthy of a post in itself.

*** Rushton of black-dick-size fixation fame. He was convinced that black males are stupider than white males because they have larger penes, because dick size and brain size are mutually incompatible, according to a K/r reproductive strategy argument all of his own. I AM NOT MAKING THIS UP. This theory required him to peruse Penthouse Forum for evidence, which is the BEST EXCUSE EVAH, and to ask his students to rate their own appendages. Liberal scientists are not advised to try this.
The late Rushton never pursued the obvious corollary that women of any race are smarter than men; perhaps the possibility that breed-stock could be intelligent did not occur to him.

A veterinarian of a thousand psychic wars

I tried to enlist in the Fighting Philosophers but was rejected for having the wrong qualification. Also my ears and eyebrows do not have the same profile.

And the poison's in my heart and in my mind.

Alpine Sanatorium architecture

If there's one thing I learnt from reading The Magic Mountain for Riddled Book Club, it's that if you're a stolid engineer with a pedestrian but reliable career ahead of you, DO NOT GO to visit a tubercular relative at a mountain-top sanatorium. The rarefied air and the crystalline architecture will awaken the restless aesthetic spirit, symbolised by a slight but persistent bronchitic fever, obliging you to remain at the clinic for seven years of labour on the instruments of time.

Inimical mountains

There is a more general lesson here as well, i.e. that mountains are inimical to health (quite apart from the mental-health issue). From which we deduce that tuberculosis on its own is a minor, even benign infection, which only became a deadly scourge of workers and bohemians alike (and a sought-after accessory for Victorian-vintage Goths striving to look pale and frail and unworldly) when people took to staying at Swiss sanatoria to cure it. Also, avoid symbolism. If Illness can be Metaphor then Metaphor can become Illness.

A cursory search of the Riddled library reveals this to be a frequent theme in Alt-Med circles. It appears that the various bacterial and viral and protozoan guests within our bodies have been framed. The first-born-claiming plagues of a century ago should instead be ascribed to chemical exposures of a satanic-mill-related nature... if not administered as part of a misguided treatment for the infections in question.

I am not making this up. It turns out [dramatic chord] that 'polio' -- those epidemics of contagious nerve damage and muscle atrophy that plagued sufficiently-crowded urban populations -- is in fact a previously unrecognised symptom of arsenic poisoning, with the whole bad rap for poliovirus coinciding with the popularity of lead arsenate as a pesticide in the 1890s. True, polio persists in parts of the world where vaccination programs were turned back by human stupidity and religious fervour (BIRM), but no matter for the blame now shifts to natural arsenic in well-water. See useful maps of polio incidence and arsenical groundwater to emphasis the nigh-total lack of overlap. The evidence is all cherry-picked and the cherries are POISONED WITH PESTICIDE.

At Riddled we tend to think inside the box, except on Sunday afternoons when tigris lets us out for a few hours of sunlight if we have been productive. Still, we are trying hard to adopt this creative and contrarian way of thinking, in case it is the way of the future.

"Oh look!" I announced. [Another dramatic chord] "More revisionism, this time rehabilitating the reputation of Treponema pallidum!" For a century, General Paresis or GPI has been regarded as the final stage of neurosyphilis. But here are some health cranks to inform us that it is in fact a long-delayed form of mercury poisoning brought about by the mercury-based remedies applied decades earlier to the syphilitic lesions. If proven, this thesis will require major revisions to literary uses of the neurosyphilis / creativity trope.

We are not entirely sure why GPI did not go away after 1920 when Salvarsan replaced those mercurial treatments, except that Salvarsan is arsenic-based, and these heavy metals and light metalloids are ALL.ONE.TOXIN. Nor is it clear how the progress of GPI could be stopped by killing the T. pallidum spirochaete with penicillin (or with fever, in the earlier malarial therapy).

Malaria is itself a victim of Pathogen Libel! I think I'm getting the hang of this. It's not Plasmodium species that cause the fevers and shivering and anemia, but rather the quinine given to control the plasmodium. Quinine and tonic water should only be taken in homeopathic doses, diluted with as much gin as possible.

The point, anyway, is that the T. pallidum pallidum of syphilis is no worse than T. carateum or T. pallidum pertenue, the causative agents of Pinta and Yaws.

"What's Yaws?" Another Kiwi vouchsafed incautiously.

"That's very kind," I said; "I'll have a double Glenfarclas."