Once more dyed the rich red colour of sockeye salmon

real outfits for the lads: Smug Mountie is drunk with lemonade and power
real outfits for the lads: future redneck rancher is two seconds away from whuppin' you
real outfits for the lads: you can't see it, but this kid's wearing chaps.
Flashy Gene Autry sling style holster, with artificial firearm and Curse of Gene Autry
Real outfits for the panicked Home Front

Vitals

Written by the guy who hums to himself as he paws through the dumpster

Fueled by rage and fresh roasted peanuts

Design by
Die Schmutz

Worthwhile Palinode Pages:
Humpty's Menu:
one - two - three - four - five - six - seven - eight - nine - ten - eleven - twelve - thirteen - fourteen

Can't Stop the Link:
palinode's bloggier blog
The Modern Word
open brackets
smartypants
friday-films
luvabeans
buzzflash
new world disorder
sex & guts!
the memory hole
national pist
Milkmoney or Not
mirabile visu
The Web Revolution!

Fueled by rage and fresh roasted peanuts

spam - tachyons - apes

DAILY USEFUL THOUGHT-PROVOKING SPAM, THANK YOU, THANK YOU SO MUCH

Today's spam comes from Nikita Raymond, who asks: R U Sure U No Need to Increaase Your Bro's Size? cercopidae feefawfum almanach. At first I was tempted to dismiss her question, but Nikita's got a point. Not about the cercopidae feefawfum almanach - you won't find the answer in that book - but about my younger brother. He isn't a dwarf or anything, but he can't be any taller than 5'6", and in this primitive height-obsessed society of ours I figure he needs whatever help I can give him. My options are limited by the low budget I'm assigning to the project ($0.00) and my physical distance from my brother (I'm in one room, he's in another, but our rooms are 1070 miles apart). The three best methods I can come up with in a pinch are:

1) Smash his legs and keep the limbs stretched while the bones knit back together. This falls into the crude-but-effective category of height management.
Materials: hammer, ropes, weights, pulleys - everything you'd need to get a day's work done in the eighteenth century.
Benefits: cheap, quick, element of surprise.
Drawbacks: limited height gain. Will it be enough to give him that edge?

2) Promote growth of a brain tumor that will press on the pineal gland and cause him to grow outlandishly tall, alter his personality and possibly give him the power to see through the veil of the material world.
Materials: radioactive and/or chemical waste, luck.
Benefits: dusting the tops of bookshelves no longer a problem. No more pants-hemming for my mother.
Drawbacks: May use enhanced powers for selfish gain. May come to view the rest of the human species as ants that he can raise up or destroy at will. Also possible Flowers-for-Algernon situation if the tumor is removed.

3) Shoot him with a localized stream of zero-energy tachyons which will transmit his consciousness as an information gestalt back though time along his lifeline. As pure info-quanta he will witness the the many wrong choices he has made over his life, such as overconsumption of coffee, which stunts the growth. If we introduce energy into the stream the tachyons will decelerate, and hopefully my brother will be reinserted into the temporal stream at an earlier point in his life before the onset of adolescence. Then he can adopt better, more positive habits to promote growth. Not just outer growth, but genuine inner growth as well. Not only that, but he could then incorporate method 1 and break his legs, which will probably be more effective on a still-maturing body. I should probably send myself a note back through time as well to let me know to do that.
Materials: tachyons, some big contraption which will get the job done, animals for testing purposes, pamphlets on the dangers of caffeine, hammer and weights (optional).
Benefits: a feeling of pride in being able to give my brother back over ten years of his life. Geek points.
Drawbacks: slim chance that the field will expand out of control and drag us all back to the start of adolescence. Lack of any guarantee that he won't rebel and drink lots of coffee anyway. Possible awkward explanations to my parents if things go wrong and my brother becomes a point of consciousness unmoored in the continuum, manifesting occasionally as a voice lost in the static between radio stations or inexplicable reflections in windows. Also, he may inhabit Defense Department computers and launch a nuclear war if we can't convince him of the folly of Mutually Assured Destruction. That'd be a chilling cautionary techno-fable, hey?
Most likely drawback: the tachyon displacement causes him to confuse causes with effects, leading him to join a cargo cult on some Polynesian island and starve slowly to death, watching the sky with ever-dimming vision for the planes to come and spill forth their goods. Or he fails his first year Logic course because he keeps on arguing that the post hoc ergo prompter hoc fallacy is actually true.
One possible problem: Given the tricky nature of time travel, I have to conclude that since my brother isn't already taller, then he hasn't travelled back through time and therefore never will, and if I do send him back through time then he'll already be taller and I won't need to do it in the first place, so I should just smash his legs now and get it over with.

APES OF SPACE, FAREWELL. WE LOVED YOU.

According to the latest news, the Great Apes are running out of time. Soon they will have to pack up their belongings and journey back to the stars where they came from. I know I speak for all of us when I say I'll miss those apes, and I'm sure that they in turn will think fondly of us when they're giving their report on our planet to the Galactic Council. Even though our insignicant blue-green planet must appear primitive by their standards, I know in my heart that the apes will have been moved by the accomplishments of our great artists - our Beethoven, our Rembrandt - and scientists - our Einstein, our guy with the wheelchair and the keyboard - and taken back to the Council a detailed description of those quaintly human concepts of "democracy" and "free will". In fact, I feel certain that one their ape brethren, a rebel with the flame of humanity in his heart, will campaign vigorously for the introduction of free will into their stagnant Federation of Planets. He will be persecuted and reviled until everyone comes round to his way of thinking, whereupon they can set about destroying their own worlds with the efficiency and gusto that we humans apply to the task.

Retracted on 2004-05-05::6:05 p.m.


parode - exode


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