The Apocryphist

So They Think They Can Dance

2008-11-10T10:32:00.002-08:00

Apparently it's not enough that robots are stealing our jobs and visiting Mars and plotting bloody insurrection beneath our very (still organic, unlike theirs) noses. No, they have to go and usurp our recreational activities as well. Is there nothing on which these terrible automatons do not have nefarious designs?

AT WAR WITH THE MYSTICS

2008-11-07T12:53:00.000-08:00

At a press conference today, President-Elect Barack Obama expressed a reluctance to evoke dead Presidents past for advice, stating that "I didn’t want to get into a Nancy Reagan thing about, you know, doing any seances." The blogosphere is already yapping about whether or not this is disrespectful to the ailing former First Lady (who fell off a ladder while painting zodiacal constellations on her ceiling earlier this year), but to do this is to miss the entire point. Obama doesn't need to hire a medium because HE CAN ALREADY SPEAK WITH THE DEAD.

As we stated the other day, this powerful entity who just won the popular vote and has inspired an epidemic of newsprint larceny is possessed of a wide, deep range of uncanny supernatural powers that will only reveal themselves gradually, lest the electorate emigrate en masse to America's Beard, Mexico. That he is human is clear, but after that, you're on your own. And with the tools of the federal government at his fingertips, he will be like Will Jones and Tommy Lee Smith in The Men Who Wear Black - COMBINED. Let us pray that he uses his powers to aid the forces of Efficacy instead of embracing the Ugly/Fat/Lazy/Stupid Side. That is, if we're praying types. Which we're not - "pray" is just a metaphor for something more secular that we don't really have a name for. Oh wait - HOPE. Yeah, that's it.

FAR CRICHTON

2008-11-06T10:42:00.001-08:00

Hard-hitting investigative journalist Michael Crichton has passed away. He opened the modern world's eyes to the variegated threats of reanimated dinosaurs, nano-terrorists, and foxy female bosses in works such as The Jurassic Strain, Congosphere, and Rising Prey. Though some of his claims would prove to be far-fetched (such as global warming being caused by time-traveling medieval knights), he was a principled voice against the rigorous lies of the everyday. Sources tell us his body is going to be rocketed into outer space, where he will serve as an orbiting beacon to young journalists everywhere.

TAKE ON MEDIA

2008-11-06T06:32:00.000-08:00

Much election-wise chatter has been spilled about the Cable Newsworthiness Network's so-called "magic wall," which ostensibly displays the revolutionary ability to change the course of history through clever applications of graphic interactibility. The Turner Broadcasting Concern saddens us with their low regard for our collective memory. The use of "magic frame" technology has been concretizing graphic images for over 23 years, as this promotional 1985 music video from the Norwegian engineering firm A-Ha Electrosolutions Ltd. will attest. Seriously, Turner, have you less shame than none?

This rebuke having been delivered, we stand staunchly opposed to the mainstream adoption of magic frame technology. It is only due to highly expensive containment systems that anthropomorphic representations of regional districts didn't spring from the screen to do bloody battle against each other on the CNN studio floor, dramatizing the returns in the most gruesome fashion imaginable.

And furthermore, what would happen to these newly three-dimensional entities once they had been unleashed onto the world? Would they be required to acquire citizenship in the geographic area they resemble, or, as unaccountable aliens, would they be sent to Guantamananomomo Bay-like detention facilities, where they would become meta-political cause celebres? "States' rights" indeed.

THE CONSPIRACY SUCCEEDS

2008-11-05T13:56:00.000-08:00

The American people have elected to the Presidency of the United States a crypto-Muslim, who is in reality a crypto-Satanist, which crypto-identity that may in turn mask, Russian doll-like, a nigh-infinitude of other crypto-identities. But one thing is certain: America has its first federal leader with ties to the underworld - by which we mean not the Mafia, but the powers of Hell itself. Whether this is better or worse for a nation battered by eight years of incompetence remains to be seen. Reports of Obama as a potential Antichrist are premature at this juncture, and in any event may be just another slippery counter-counterintuitive ploy.

QUANTUM OF MENACE

2008-09-10T12:22:00.000-07:00

It was only a matter of time before a real live mad-scientist doomsday device was invented - but who would have expected it to be in Switzerland? The Apocryphist, that's who. Ever since reports began to surface about the genesis of the Large Hadron Collider - a super-cyclotron created for ostensibly peaceful "study" purposes by CERN (Center for Europeans Researching Nuclearity) that runs a 17-mile circuit beneath the Swiss countryside - we knew that there was more to the project than its maddeningly neutral proponents were letting on. And, despite the naively positive press the endeavor is receiving today, its opening day, we stand uncorrected.

First, a little subterranean geopolitical primer: until the 17th century, a race of cave-dwelling troglodytic peoples lived relatively unmolested in a series of caves beneath the Alps. In order to protect their peaceful existence against the coming onslaught of Modernity, they signed a treaty with the Swiss government in 1647, essentially declaring the underground stratum of the area a separate nation from its surface. Rather uninspiringly known as Subterranea, this nation survived and even flourished despite its occasionally cruel attitudes towards its own citizens. (Proto-anthropologist Dante Aligheri published an early ethnography of these people's quaint practices in his 14th-century monograph Inferno.)

Fast-forward to the 1940s. Previously unaware of the existence of Subterranea (which, in stark contrast to its upper counterpart, secretly and somewhat quixotically fought against both the Allies and Axis powers during WWII), former Nazi war criminals looking for hideouts that did not involve long ocean voyages or having to learn Spanish found its craggy confines to be a comforting alternative to execution. Within a generation, Subterranea became the most popular tax haven and libertarian skulking-ground the world had never heard of. That it soon attracted a new class of megalomaniacal supercriminals should come as no surprise.

This burgeoning breed of masterminds were no mere Nazis - rather than simply taking over the world, they wanted to hold it ransom for vast sums and/or sell its citizens as food to passing extraterrestrial warships and/or just destroy it outright for private, psychotic reasons. The vast majority of these projects were doomed to failure before they even made it to the drawing board - but with the creation of the Large Hadron Collider, a new chapter has been opened in the book of mega-evil.

By hiding its activities under the believable-sounding acronym CERN (unlike its risible predecessors SMERSH, SLUDGE, EEEEVIL), the criminal conglomerate was able to enlist the aid of scientists and national governments worldwide under the aegis of its stated goal: to advance quantum physics by throwing molecules into each other at unbelievable speeds in order to approximate the conditions of the world at the time of the Big Bang. That otherwise respectable people were drawn in by what is obviously a horrible threat thinly veiled by scientific jargon (you know what happened at the time of the Big Bang? THE MOST UNBELIEVABLY GIGANTIC EXPLOSION THE UNIVERSE HAS EVER SEEN) is a testament to the insidious intelligence of these evildoers.

Among the other stated goals of this project is to create a theoretical particle known as a Higgs Boson - but anyone remotely literate should be aware that this is not an actual scientific concept, but rather a sly reference to Bos'n Higgs, the demented leader of the pirate mutiny in Robert Louis Stevenson's classic tale of maritime adventure, Pirate Mutiny. In reality, as many mainstream scientists have declared in recent months, the Large Hadron Collider is liable to do nothing more than create tiny black holes, which can either be inserted as ammo into black-hole ray-guns (which can be shot at Fort Knox security guards in order to warp them into another dimension during a daring robbery) or else destroy the world outright.

Only time will tell if CERN's nefarious scheming will pay off - the Collider is going to take several months just to warm up. In the meantime, let us declare that we are not proclaiming a judgment - either positive or negative - on this mind-blowingly insane project. Just as evil can sometimes come of good, good can occasionally come of evil. If one of the side effects of this horrifying endeavor is, say, extreme human mutation of the wing-growing/x-ray vision variety, or the return of Atlantis to the surface of the ocean, or the awakening ofthe hibernating Cthulhu deep within Antarctica - well, let's just say we won't altogether mind.

INSECTS AND VIOLENCE

2008-09-05T12:24:00.000-07:00

Nothing twists the spine into Escher-esque loops of impossibility quite like the prospect of giant animals. No, not blue whales and elephants, but shockingly enlarged versions of more pedestrian animals. In fact, the smaller the original animal, the more face-crushingly terrifying the giant version will be. So, like, giant cat? Deadly, but not scary. Giant rat? Way worse. Giant cockroach? WAY worse. Let's not even discuss giant amoebae, paramecia, and hydrae - you wouldn't be able to manage your bowels when confronted by a CGI re-creation, let alone the real thing.

We have recently had the grim pleasure of uncovering this 1930 article from Modern Mechanics magazine, which was recently uncovered by the grimly pleasant people at the Modern Mechanix blog (presumably some form of ebonics spelling or the like). It details the havoc that would be wreaked on mid-20th-century America by the advent of giant insects.

What the Mechanix entry isn't brave enough to fess up to is the fact that this article, though ostensibly intended as a speculative lark, was actually a carefully placed piece of government propaganda. Attempting to address Middle America's locust crisis, Department of the Interior scientists had the brilliant idea of engineering a mega-locust, injected it with the notorious cannibal gene of the common praying mantis to induce it to devour its tinier brethren. The experiment, as such experiments tend to do, went horribly wrong, and resulted in a bunch of mega-locusts eating American crops and then each other, leaving nary a trace of their brief, freakish existence. Thus, the dust bowl was born.

The article, of course, was designed to remove government culpability. "See?" the text seems to plead, "It wasn't us - it was the evil doctrine of EVOLUTION. Maybe if we pray on it real hard, it'll go away."

And for all intents and purposes, it did. Proof of god? Or just another case of the U.S. government being too incompetent to go all the way with the world-domination thing? You decide. And please keep it to yourself.

MICHAEL PHELPS: SASQUATCH

2008-08-18T11:35:00.001-07:00

Could anything be more obvious? Apropos of our previous post, Bigfeet walk the world in the guise of regular humans, exhibiting certain glaring traits that make it clear that they're not all they seem. In the case of Olympic water-splasher Michael Phelps, who this past weekend won the world record for most gold medals at a single Olympics (answer: eight or so), the signs could not be clearer. The freakish metabolism, the lanky, newly clean-shaven frame, the outsized ears that could give someone a black eye if they're standing next to him when he removes his swim cap: these are all telltale signs of the Sasquatch. The so-called corpse touted by Georgian crackpots may have been a hoax, but the living thing was more triumphant than ever before as it was broadcast via every possible medium to a worldwide audience.

If the physical characteristics are not enough to convince a hardened skeptic, we would merely like to point out the savage beating administered by Phelps to the former world's record holder, Marc Spits, during a celebratory U.S. Swim Team event in Beijing on Sunday. While most commentators used the occasion to refer to Phelps as a "sore winner," they were merely ignorant of the ancient Sasquatch tradition of respectfully bloodying a vanquished enemy in honor of a nobly fought battle. Though most latter-day Bigfeet find private or largely symbolic ways to embody this ritual, some occasionally fail to keep their ancestral spirit under wraps - just witness Edward R. Murrow's berserk 1954 attack on Joseph McCarthy, in which the Senator from Wisconsin fractured a leg, lost part of his left ear, and had his appendix forcibly removed by Murrow's subtly clawed hand.

This of course begs a question that has haunted Apocryphists for many generations: what if Bigfeet were to rise up as one to overthrow the governments of the world? On this front we are happy to set the reader's mind at ease - unlike their evil counterparts in hidden pervasiveness, the Vikings, Bigfeet are largely peaceful creatures who want nothing more than to excel in a human's world. They are not leaders by nature, but rather mavericks that prefer using their free time to retreat into the nature from which they arose and uprooting trees for use as backscratchers, rather than planning any kind of power grab or coup.

However, this brings up a far more intriguing possibility: what if the Bigfeet were to rise up against the Vikings in a subterranean war of strange proportions? Could this secret battle be waged beneath our noses even today, in the guise of world political events? Were there any Vikings working behind the scenes in Beijing to undermine Phelps' record streak of wins? And will Phelps and his fellow Sasquatches band together to enact bloody revenge for this attempted slight?

Only time will tell. But until then, the answer is: almost certainly yes.

BIGFOOT-IN-MOUTH

2008-08-15T13:24:00.001-07:00

The latest kerfuffling about a so-called Bigfoot corpse has us closing our eyes and sighing in a way that better befits a parent who has just been informed that their misbehaving child has set yet another neighborhood dog on fire. This is a road we've traveled before, and we know that it leads only to disappointment, reprimand, and the grim certainty that we'll be traveling it again before long.

Alleged Bigfoot corpses have been touted and debunked more or less weekly since the signing of the Constitution of Independence. Without exception these have been hoaxes, frauds, and misidentifications by really stupid people who don't have the wherewithal to recognize a dead bear. But the main reason the whole Bigfoot-corpse game deserves to be chucked into the folly bin is that Bigfeet are not remotely rare at all. Unlike its unfortunate cousin the Neanderthal, destroyed by early homo sapiens over misunderstandings about interspecies dating etiquette, the Bigfoot aka the Sasquatch aka the Western Yeti aka the Northern Ape aka the Cryptohuman has managed to maintain a robust existence in the modern industrialized world by joining civilization rather than attempting to beat it. They walk among us, with swollen shoe sizes and shaven faces

Being native to the North American continent, Bigfeet do not figure in Asian or European history. (For an essay on the Yetis of the Himilayas, please refer to this future post [link not yet enabled]). Seeing how the native Indian population was being slaughtered by the smiling genocidists of Manifest Destiny, 19th-century Bigfeet thought fast, created fictional European ancestries, bought some smart suits, and hit the pavement in search of a living wage. No bloviating about "the sacred land of our people" for them! Plus, being pretty pale under the fur, it wasn't too difficult to pass for white.

Herefore is a list describing Notable Individuals Who Have Secretly Been Bigfeet:

Benjamin Harrison, President of the United States, 1889-1893
Jimmy Kimmel, comedic badboy and Late-Night Talk Host
Chyna, once-popular WWF wrestling pinup
Harrison Ford, Hollywood actor (Bigfeet like the name "Harrison")
Andrew Carnegie, steel tycoon and namer of Halls, Delis, and Mellons
Edward R. Murrow, hard-hitting TV chain-smoker
Jane Addams, founder of Hull House, an urban settlement for Secret Sasquatch Women
Two-thirds of the folk-singing trio Peter, Paul and Mary
Ernest Hemingway, author who popularized the use of terse Bigfoot patois in high literature

There are, of course, many, many, many, many, many, many, many, many, many, many, many, many other Bigfeet currently at large in the United States and beyond. It is best not to make fun of them in public, because they will hear you, and they will say mean things about you behind your back. What's more, you will provoke the ire of the weblog Cryptomundo, which is not considered wise under any circumstance.

DANGEROUS HOOKY

2008-08-14T12:11:00.000-07:00

It's shocking to see the lengths to which truant officers will go to make sure the children under their thumbs have appeared on time for school. This footage of a Pittsburgh elementary school shows that extraterrestrial technology is being employed to take a DNA scan of all students, parents, and teachers entering the building before classes. Will the government's increasingly baroque invasions of our privacy ever come to an end?

Let it be stated that The Apocryphist is a product of neither the public school system nor the nefarious underground network of private schools that dot the educational landscape like so many measles on a sickly child's face. Our stunning insightfulness and savage independence of spirit stem from the fact that we were home-schooled. By whom (or what) we are not naive enough to say out loud on the Labyrosphere (which, if you need reminding, is our preferred neologism for the Internet). Suffice it to say, saying what we've said should suffice.

HELLAS IN A HANDBASKET

2008-08-13T13:10:00.000-07:00

If you start digging a hole through the earth, and dig it super-fast, and avoid any magma creatures intent on disrupting your journey, and avoid making a right turn at Albuquerque, and successfully make it to the other side, chances are you'll break through in Peking's Bird's Nest Stadium, named after the popular Chinese soup of the same name. But be careful: your newly emerged head will probably be crushed by the cleats of a passing javelinist, for the Olympics will be in full swing.

Like many other important inventions - the catheter, the toaster oven, the League of Nations - the Olympic Games are of ancient Greek provenance. Though in their modern incarnation the Olympics are a regularly recurring opportunity for the nations of the world to come together in a paper-thin display of temporary bohomie, affixed to the restless machinery of geopolitics by the tenuous clear-drying glue of sports, it was not always thus. During the height of classical Hellenic civilization, the Olympics were a chaotic, anarchic bloodbath, to be feared rather than televised.

Like the Marathon, so called after a soldier of the same name who ran 26.whatever miles to deliver a message to the king of Sparta, only to have his head chopped off for his effort, the Olympics are named after actual figures from Greek history. Most of the time they were normal men who walked the streets of Athens and Corinth pursuing their humble careers - milking goats, writing tragedies, forging the science of philosophy and so forth. At intervals, however, these men were afflicted with a disease unique to polytheistic cultures: with little or no warning they suddenly believed themselves to be gods, and ran amok throwing things at people, chasing them as fast as they could, doing flips over them, and embarking upon all manner of exertions in order to prove their divine provenance.

These so-called Olympiacs played havoc on the emerging city-states of the Peloponnesian peninsula until a young go-getter by the name of Plato, annoyed at being constantly interrupted in his wine-drinking and boy-shtupping by this form of mass calisthenic hysteria, developed a plan. He told the city leaders of Athens to build a giant holding pen on the outskirts of the city, which would eventually be called a "stadium" (from the Greek "sta-" or "stay," and "deus" or "god"). Happy for any opportunity to get Plato to shut up, the city leaders immediately complied.

Once all the spear-chucking, ball-swinging, back-stroking loonies were quarantined, however, a strange thing began to happen. Over a period of a few weeks, they would begin to organize into groups and compete directly with each other in order to prove who was the most godlike. The losers would be bludgeoned to death by the winners with cudgels made of whatever mineral was near at hand - in the case of the wealthy city of Athens, this tended to be gold, silver, and bronze. The victors would wear their cudgels around their necks as trophies. Once all of the losers were extinguished, the remaining competitors would become placid and docile, and long to return to their goat-milking or socratic dialoguing or what have you. Until, of course, about four years later, when the competitive spirit, pent up in common life, would return for another outbreak of this strange mental illness. The four-year schedule on which this happens was discovered by Archimedes, with the help of his Antikytheras Mechanism.

The popular Olympic delusion still exists, but for the most part it is sublimated within the strictures of the modern Games themselves. Every once in a while, though, a flavor of the ancient spirit sneaks through. After witnessing a crowd of Chinese dancers riding roughshod over a scale model of the earth, is it any surprise that a jealous Russian government sent tanks into the peach-growing nation of Georgia to make a big noise over the pisspot backwater of South Ossuary? Nowadays it's not the individuals but the nations who believe that they're gods.

NEVER TRUST A NUMBER THAT LOOKS THE SAME UPSIDE-DOWN AS IT DOES RIGHT-SIDE-UP

2008-08-08T08:32:00.000-07:00

On June 6, 2006, the world trembled in fear as it awaited for the Lord of Darkness to make a horrifying reappearance on the world stage, possibly as a guest judge on the American Idol program. Less weeping and shrieking accompanied July 7, 2007, the luckiest day of the millennium, and even less has accompanied today, August 8, 2008. Why, we ask, is mankind not filled with dread at the possibility of a giant octopus rising from the sea and crushing civilization with slimy, suctionful tentacles? For if 666 is the Mark of the Beast, then 888 is the Mark of the Mollusk.

It's no accident that today is the opening ceremony of the Olympics, which are being held in the seafood-loving country of China. It's hoped that, if such a sick-making behemoth were to attack this mass gathering of people (because such behemoths rarely use secluded beaches in Alaska or Tierra del Fuego for their dramatic entrances), the billion-plus Chinese population would pounce as one, chopsticks at the ready, atop such a tasty beast, devouring it in a matter of minutes.

But is such cephalopodian savagery the only thing we have to worry about today? The number Eight, after all, is infinity lying down. Here are eight other eights for us to watch out for on this strange, topsy-turvy day.

CRAZY EIGHTS - Invented in the 19th Century by physicians at London's squalid Bedlam asylum as a method of keeping inmates insane enough to stick around and keep paying the exorbitant rents, this card game has been known to make normal men mad if they play it for 72 hours at a stretch without sleeping. Don't let it happen to you!

OCTOROON - In early Americana, an octoroon was an individual that had one great-grandparent of African descent, thereby making their blood one eighth African. As a racist term it was flung around as an insult to people who considered their bloodlines to be pure; a short-lived later attempt to use it as a compliment implying that you are not a completely inbred redneck was met with much head-scratching. If you attempt to use the term today, few people will understand what you mean, and confusion can be dangerous - especially when the confused person is a pilot steering a jet plane full of innocent people at a deadly height.

OCTOMAROON - An octomaroon is an octoroon of less than average intelligence. People of less than average intelligence are to be avoided.

EIGHT IS ENOUGH - A short-lived 1970s sitcom starring aging musical-comedy star Dick Van Powell as the father of three boys, who married another aging musical-comedy star, Ruby Buckley, who had three daughters of her own, creating a family that fit the title. Teen heartthrob Scott Baio got his start in this show as the family's pool flunky, Chichi, and that is reason enough to consider it inauspicious.

STOP SIGNS - It's a little-known fact that stop signs are octagonal, meaning they have eight sides. But don't try to count them or you'll get a lineup of impatient automobiles honking behind you, and nobody needs that!

OCTOBER - When Augustus Caesar was planning his famous war against the Gauls, he decided to play a trick on them by completely reconfiguring the Roman calendar. He told the Gauls his army would show up for the war in October (literally, "eighth month"), but then changed the calendar around so October was actually the TENTH month. The Gauls were already to fight in the month of August (the etymology of which is shrouded in mystery), and so when Augustus didn't show up after a while, they were like, fucking Romans, let's just go home and eat a primitive version of cheese. And so come October, when the Gauls were all snug in their huts, Augustus led his army to Gaulia and slaughtered them. This is also one of the origins of Halloween.

"EIGHT DAYS A WEEK" - If you listen to this 1964 Beetles hit on an eight-track player today, your hair will set on fire and your heart will explode and you'll lose all your money and you'll come down with diabetes and you'll get a toothache and your spouse will leave you and you'll crash your car and a tree will fall on your house and the world will end and you'll die.

V8 - This exotic blend of tomato juice and Colonel Sanders' special blend of seven herbs and spices was named after the V8 engine, which was originally designed to run on a similar organic blend before being shut down by Big Oil. If you drink V8 while listening to "Eight Days a Week" on eight-track while watching Eight is Enough on DVD and playing Crazy Eights with an Octoroon (and/or Octomaroon) while sitting in a car at a stop sign, and your birthday is in October, strangely, nothing is likely to happen, because all of these elements will cancel themselves out. If you are an octopus, however, you will grow to massive proportions and attempt to conquer the world. Just to be safe, though, you shouldn't do it.

FROM BAD TO NORSE

2008-08-06T06:57:00.001-07:00

The dearth of recent news stories on the subject of Vikings is a troubling trend that we feel obligated to address. Most people consider Vikings to be little more than a bygone race of Scandinavian sea pirates that roamed Western Europe a thousand or so years ago before their reign of sack and pillage was brought to an end by the mass embrace of Christianity in their home region. These people are dangerously deluded, in dire need of being smacked around, shouted at, and quite possibly spat upon.

One of the primary misconceptions of the modern world is that the Viking menace is past. The truth is that there is a direct line of descent between Vikings and modern terrorists. Bereft of their dragon-hulled battleships, many of them migrated inland. Some wound up in Middle East, where they have stoked havoc for nearly a millennium. Others sat around in Central Europe scratching their asses until the circumstances were promising for Fascism. Still others wrote operas about Vikings, in which Viking stories were sung in Viking costume by Viking singers. But despite the fatness and femininity of some of these performers, their singing did not spell the end of the Viking era. In fact, Vikings continue, in their guises of regular, everyday people, to have a profound impact on the workings of recent history.

As such, please study, memorize, and tremble in fear of this list of "Five Events in Recent History That Were Actually Caused By Vikings - Yes, Vikings!"

1. THE BOER WAR - When a group of Edwardian Vikings decided that they wanted to terrorize the Southern Hemisphere for a change, they went straight to South Africa and subjugate the British, who were in turn subjugating the Dutch Boers, who were in turn subjugating the Zulus, who were in turn subjugating the lions, who were in turn subjugating the giraffes, who were in turn subjugating the the mimosa trees, who were in turn pretty much screwed. There were no victors.

2. COMMUNISM - Originally a shiny, happy philosophical system of shared resources and equality devised by the world's first hippie, Carl Marks, Communism could very well have served as a solution to the world's ills were it not for the Vikings who secretly overthrew the Russian Revolution and decided that it would be a lot more fun to kill millions of people and turn the verdant greenlands of Siberia into a crappy prison camp.

3. THE TEAPOT DOME SCANDAL - Vikings have a known propensity to disguise themselves as corrupt politicians and sabotage the system from within. During the reign of President Harden G. Warning, whose cabinet was lousy with them, Vikings accepted millions of dollars in kickbacks from the tea lobby in exchange for the promise to affix a giant handle and spout to the Capitol building in Washington, DC. (In a planned double-cross, these accoutrements would, at the final moment, be replaced with classic Viking horns that would cast their pointy shadows across the Mall for generations to come.) When the scheme was discovered, the Vikings were unceremoniously kicked out of Washington until the next President was sworn in.

4. ISHTAR - Unhappy about their portrayal in such historical films as Erik the Red-Faced, Kill All the Vikings! and Wild Strawberries, the Vikings decided to strike Hollywood in its most tender part: the money. Infiltrating the studio establishment, secret Viking producers created a bizarre proposal for a buddy comedy starring the aging comedy duo of Mike Nichols and Elaine May, who play songwriters at the ancient temple of the Babylonian Goddess of Love and War, Ishtar. Though the film fared poorly at the box office, it failed to destroy the entertainment-industrial complex of the United States, as originally intended.

5. 9/11 - What were those deadly airplanes if not Viking vessels of fearmongering and attempted conquerment? Sure, they didn't have dragons emblazoned on the front, but that was merely practical - the Viking-descended members of Al-Qaeda would have loved nothing more than to paint some scary teeth onto the noses of those jets, only by doing so they would have been caught before liftoff.

And what are they up to right now? It is believed that a group of Vikings has joined the Steampunkerism movement's attempts to revive the corpse of Queen Victoria, in the hopes that a new British Empire would give them something more interesting to conquer than the amateur crap being thrown down by the current United States government. Of course, the Viking scourge has grown so diffuse in the generations since its acme that it is difficult to imagine them banding together and traumatizing the world en masse. Still, Viking sleeper cells are present in every nation of the world, and it is only a matter of time before one of them dons their ceremonial helmets, drinks an assload of grog, and starts swinging a battle-axe at your friends and relations. Look sharp!

MONSTER OUR ASS

2008-08-01T13:32:00.001-07:00

One word for the so-called Montauk Monster (okay, a word and a skeptical inflection.) : seriously? (And repeated for good measure: ) Seriously? Of all the different entertaining, amusing, terrifying, serpentine, slime-ridden, scale-infested, befanged, paradoxical, prehistoric, reptilian, cetacean, romantical, eye-popping forms a sea monster could take, you chose this one? Who do you think you’re impressing, Montauk Monster (pictured here as the dork it is)?

We suppose this is what one should expect from a sea monster washing up on the prosaic shores of Long Island. Yes, Montauk may be known for its mansion culture, nautical past and late-night beachside blood rituals, but it represents the dullest America has to offer – it’s only a stone’s throw from Rhode Island, for christ’s sake. And what would a Rhode Island sea monster look like – a fish? With, like, a weird tooth or something?

We encourage the populace to return its attention to the more hellacious sea monsters that still roam our oceans with sinister freedom. We mean, of course, the scyllas, the charibdae, the humpacked hydras, the zombie sirens, the baleened leviathans, the were- turtles, the saltwater Nessies, the great white pleiosaurs, the vampire dolphins, the house-sized electric clams, the seahorses-of-hell, the superintelligent Portuguese Men o’ War, the Moby-Dicks that shoot lasers from their eyes, the flying eels, the maimrays, the krakens – the bloody krakens!!! We must kill them before they kill us – and have a thoroughly awesome maritime adventure in the bargain.

Dear readers, please share with us information about your ideal sea monster. Pull no punches – the grotesquer the better. We want to hear about things that will make us shit our pants the next time we see an oil painting of a lighthouse.

PRO-ANTIKYTHERA

2008-07-31T11:52:00.000-07:00

The tabloids are at it again, whapping their porcine tails wildly into the mud so as to splash up a thick brown splatter of lies and mistruths. This time the target of the Old Gray Ho is - no surprise - the Antikythera Mechanism. For those unfamiliar with this remarkable apparatus, it is an ancient Greek contraption discovered in a shipwreck in 1899 by some Mediterranean pearl divers, who used it as a doorstop until a visiting archaeologist stubbed his toe on it during a dirty weekend with one of the divers' wives the following year.

Though it has stymied researchers for more than a century, most agree that the Mechanism is a calculating device, an analog precursor to the modern computer. Supposedly constructed by the great Greek astronomer Archimedes (inventor of the Pythagorean Theorem), it is believed to have been used as a calendar to predict solar eclipses as well as regular outbreaks of Olympic Syndrome, a little-known form of star-influenced mass hysteria originating in classical times, in which entire nations drain their physical strength in displays of athletic bravado and jingoism at four-year intervals.

All of which, of course, is barely two-fifths of the story. We had the rare privilege of handling the mechanism during a surgical midnight research raid on the Mechanism's Cardiff laboratory some few years ago (for which we sported a cute mask and a smart black turtleneck), and are thus, as usual, way ahead of the game. Here are some findings about the device that the researchers DON'T want you to know:

Its calculating properties were used to create many of the world's most useful inventions, such as the hourglass, the sextant, and the mule.

It contains primitive clockwork porn, expressed metaphorically as the meshing of gears.

Despite its avowed status as a proto-computer, it employed not the well-known binary system, but a more primitive "singulary" system.

It could be used for purposes of identity theft, for instance, by clocking someone on the head with it and stealing their clothes. (Needless to say, this is how the phrase "clocking someone on the head" was inspired.)

Its original power source was a live cobra.

Earlier versions of the Antikythera Mechanism were so large that they filled up an entire room!

A small slot dispensed strips of papyrus containing the latest stock-forum quotes.

It was capable of communicating with other Antikythera Mechanisms across long distances; unfortunately, no other Antikythera Mechanisms were manufactured.

Archimedes was civilization's first Dungeon Master.

It had the capability of solving world hunger and curing all disease, but no, man had to go and fuck it up as usual.

It has Solitaire.

CONFUSION OF STATE

2008-07-30T07:41:00.000-07:00

Last week, notorious Manhattan tabloid The New York Times published a profile of the once- possible state of Absaroka, an unholy amalgam of Wyoming, Montana, and South Dakota that attempted to secede from the Union in the late 1930s in protest over wheelchair-bound president Professor Franklin X. Roosevelt’s abuse of his mutant psychic powers in pre-WWII espionage. Though it represents a colorful chapter of our national history, Absaroka is far from the only state to have made a failed bid for the majors. Here are some of our personal favorites:

PAINE – In 1887, the territorial assembly of the nascent state of Washington batted around a bunch of different names. Though “Washington” won by a nose (setting into motion a fierce rivalry with the District of Columbia, which claimed to own the copyright), the second-runner up was a tribute to influential colonial-era pamphleteer Thomas Paine. It’s true that the radical nature of Paine’s politics fell out of favor post-Revolution, but even more than that, people simply didn’t want to live out the rest of their lives under the auspices of an execrable pun. (A similar state befell Montana, which was originally to be named after Lewis and Clark’s cook Emmet DeNile.)

NEW IOWA – A territory comprising much of what is now eastern Nebraska and northern Kansas was once loosely confederated under the name “New Iowa,” until its founders found the concept too depressing and moved back to Missouri.

SAN FRANCISCONIA – Before there was California, there was San Francisco, a city-state based on the democratic ideals of ancient Athens, populated by gentleman-fortyniners whose love of gold was surpassed only by a lust for classical learning and a fine appreciation for the arts. Of course, their adoption of Greek practices extended to the interpersonal – not too many lady-fortyniners, after all – and the U.S. government cracked down and annexed the area as a state in order to remove this perceived blemish on the continent. Fat lot of good it did.

TEXAS – After its short-lived secession as a sovereign nation, North Mexico was, for a brief period in the 19th Century, a member of the United States of America, under the name “Texas.” It reverted back to the Mexicans when President Zacherley Taylor was debriefed by then-governor Matthew Houston about what a pain in the ass it would eventually become.

NERDOLINA – In 1998, a bunch of computer geeks formed an online “state” and tried to lobby Congress for its recognition. It still exists somewhere, but it’s only had five visitors in the past three years (a 500% increase over the previous three).

Fret not, friends – there are many more where this came from, but since secret knowledge is the 180-proof spirits of the mind, we must hold revelations in abeyance for future tippling.

CRUEL BRITANNIA

2008-07-24T08:51:00.001-07:00

It was with great interest that we stumbled upon yesterday’s posting on the Observer of Design web-oriented logging unit: a take-down by one Randy Nakamura of the so-called “steampunkery” movement. As with many commentators on the article, we believe that M. Nakamura seems to have missed the point entirely. We don’t, however, share their reasons for this belief.

For those in the don’t-know, steampunkism is a movement in which people with a fair amount of disposable income and jobs that don’t require excessive overtime create a kind of fantasy world that clings to the skirts of the past, a world that hearkens back to the heady early days of H.G. Vernian discovery, when the strangeness of the world was still new. They are Victoriana obsessives who limn a once-possible post-Tesla present that slipped through the fingers of our ancestors. They are dreamers. They are nerds.

Why, M. Nakamura asks, would anyone in their right mind be interested in turning the clock back to the grimmest days of the Industrious Revolution, during which entire families were forced to live inside toxin-spewing factory smokestacks (utilizing a unique bunking system) and class prejudice made it nearly impossible for anyone lacking a peerage to find decent toilet facilities? What romance can be wrung from a time in which provincialism was stuffed into East India crates and marketed to the world as imperialism?

First of all, the world was newer then, and a much larger place – literally, a few hundred extra miles around the equator. But this doesn’t fully explain the steampunkers’ forward-thinking nostalgia. In fact, all begloved fingers point to the stocky profile that loomed above the entire ill-conceived era, who lent her name to all forms of oppression, unchecked environmental degradation, and all-around haughtiness, the Doyenne of Devilry herself: Queen Victoria.

A little-reported phenomenon is that the majority of steampunkists worship HRH as a goddess – a sort of puffy, potato-like, impeccably mannered incarnation of H. Ryder Haggard’s tropical “She.” And like all goddesses, she refuses to remain dead. The fact is, the original claque of steampunkophytes congregated soon before her death and devised a plan. Knowing they would be unable to prevent her death and, with it, the flow of temporal progress, they plotted an eventual return to the world of their times, a world that would be heralded by the resurrection of Victoria herself. This hideous junta was led by William Jennings Darwin, the inventor of DNA. By injecting this new genetic chemical into the dying Queen’s bloodstream, he was able to extract a few parcels of her life-essence, which would be stored in formaldehyde until the technology was available to build a new Queen from these paltry remains.

As the recent wave of quaint, 19th-centuryesque gadgets and paraphernalia attest, those close to the project feel that the future (in the form of the past) is almost upon us. They want their newly revived Queen to see a world that she would recognize, abetted by progress that would make her proud. Whether their mission will prove, in the end, to be a genuine success, or yet another aborted eschaton, remains to be seen. In the meantime, we can admire the aesthetics of their brass-lined baubles and leathery laptops, but let us not fool ourselves: steampunkophiles are not harmless hobbyists, but the exponents of a dangerous cult, and should be approached with appropriate caution.

PLEASED TO EAT YOU

2008-07-22T07:48:00.001-07:00

Imagine the toe-curling, hand-waving, shrill-squeaking glee we experienced upon discovering that one of our favoritest web-based logs, entitled Strange Maps, had posted a “Cannibal Map of the World” in yesterday’s edition. But then imagine our head-dropping, sigh-inducing, shoulder-sloughing disappointment upon discovering that, as always in manners cannibalistic, this 1893 delineation of anthropophagical strongholds throughout the known world was studded with amateur errors.

First, a disclaimer: we do not condone cannibalism as a lifestyle choice. We don’t think people should engage in cannibalistic behavior for any reason (with the possible exception of Uruguayan soccer teams who have crash-landed in the Andes), because it is wrong and weird and gross and probably doesn’t taste nearly as good as you might expect. But that being said, is it possible not to be curious about all of the horrible, grim, bloody details?

A side note: our favorite bit of cannibal hypocrisy is the fact that, after battles, many cannibal tribes would eat their enemies in order to absorb their strength. But what kind of strength can they possibly have had? They lost. By eating the conquered cannibals actually absorbed their weakness, which is why the enterprise was doomed from the start. If the losers were to eat the winners, on the other hand, we’d see much more cannibalism in the modern world.

That being said, onward to the map! We notice at least three cannibalistic groups missing from its roster:

The Yipps of the Kamchatkan Peninsula. Members of this rugged Northeast Asian tribe hunted and slayed each other in the wild for centuries, until discovering that most of the people they killed were actually bears. Realizing their mistake, they surrendered their cannibal status and became bear-hunters instead.
19th-century Londoners. After Sir Sweeney Todd was elected to the House of Commons in 1878, it was revealed in the popular press that the pie empire upon which his fortune was based was built upon the bones of the dead. Shrugging with Dickensian callousness, Londoners returned to their suppers.
The Antarctic proto-human slaves of the Old Ones. Faced with the option of eating either Cthulhu cuisine or each other, they opted for the latter. Apparently they were all very gentlemanly about it.

And we’d like to defend one group that has obviously received a bad rap: the Aztecs. Sure, they sacrificed humans, and yes, fine, it was bad and they shouldn’t have done it. But when, oh when, will modern science finally come clean and admit the presence in pre-Colombian Mexico of the alien life forms known as Tzitzimimeh? It was this small group of extraterrestrial assholes who did the actual people-eating, and the Mexican government has their freeze-dried DNA to prove it – the only reason it’s remained hidden is because they don’t want to piss off Quetzalcoatl.

But being afraid of Quetzalcoatl is just as absurd as accusing Catholics of cannibalism simply because the doctrine of transubstantiation states that the Holy Communion actually turns into the body and blood of Jesus Christ upon ingestion. And this is because Quetzalcoatl, like Jesus, is a fictional character – in this case, one invented by Tzitzimimeh in order to keep the Aztecs in line. Wake up, Mexico! They can’t eat you anymore!

Still, nice try, anonymous 19th-century mapmaker. You did as well as your provincial, paranoid, imperialistic culture would allow. Better luck next time.

FACING THE BOOK

2008-07-21T07:16:00.001-07:00

The very phrase “social networking,” fills us with dread so deep that one cannot see its bottom, and is thus forced to imagine the sort of fanged, eyeless creatures that scrabble about far down in the unprobed abyss. However, just as we struggled for years over the decision to share our riches with the world by producing a web-based log, we have spent long, candle-lit hours debating with ourselves over the decision to join the Facebook, a tool noted for its “social networking” abilities. Our message won the day over our comfort – truth requires exposure, and so we have deemed it necessary to poke another breathing-hole from within the solace of our bushel to let our light shine better on the world outside.

And it’s been a smashing success! We have 86 friends! That’s more people than we’ve spoken to in person for over a decade! And the best part is, we don’t need to speak to them! We’ve also started a group, entitled “Friends and/or Enemies of The Apocryphist,” and this group has garnered 24 committed, enthusiastic readers of this web-based log! Why only about a quarter of our 86 "friends" want to be considered members of our "group" is difficult to understand – we would think the ratio would be removed, since “friend” is such a loaded word/concept, whereas most people hold little stock in the word/concept “group” – we’re all part of the “group” of vertebrates, for instance, but you don’t see anyone lending a komodo dragon twenty dollars simply because of shared membership.

Anywhy, it is our firm belief that the Book of Face and its related applications are destined to revolutionize the dissemination of important crap from here to eternity. This because of the true kernel of genius lying at its core: though it may be “networking,” there is absolutely nothing "social" about it! We can now all be friends without having to lend each other twenty dollars, ever. This is the true evolution of the species!

ON THE RODENT

2008-07-18T13:41:00.000-07:00

This morning, as Neqa’el bounded across our windowsill during the pre-dawn interlude when we allow our shades and panes to be lifted to the air prior to the glaring solar intrusion of the morn, we were delighted to hear her make a series of rumbling, predatory throat trills as she stared sharply at the potential prey bounding from branch to branch on the other side of the screen. It was a rodent – not the ubiquitous ratus urbanus, but a stranger creature altogether: the common squirrel. What made Neqa’el’s show of bravado all the more adorable was the fact that, millennia ago, the ancestors of these bushy-tailed scavengers could have brutally savaged any creature alive today.

The previous Ice Age is known to many mammalogists as the Age of Mammals, or, more formally, the Age of Massive Versions of the Mammals We Have Today. Everybody knows about mammoths, woolly rhinoceri, flying sloths, and whaleruses (eight times larger than today’s walruses), but one of the best-kept secrets of the bones of the past is the sciurus sacremerdus, or the “Holy Shit Squirrel,” as it is known to those in the field. A mature specimen, with tail, was longer than many of today’s most indulgent yachts (see photo), and all the other beasts quaked in fear of its gnashing Nosferatu-like front teeth. The main channels of science have hidden skeletons of this species from most of the world’s museums to avoid being sued for abject terror.

For you see, the sciurus sacremerdus was not an acornivore, like today’s smaller, sleeker models. It was alpha beast of its ecosystem (which was roughly the entire temperate world), the top of the food chain, the carnivorous king of beasts that would gnaw the head off any animal that it managed to scoop up into its pointy little clutches. These behemoths would often bury huge piles of dead animals for the winter, giving rise to the modern myth of “elephant graveyards.” The earth would shake as they bounded from gigantic prehistoric tree to gigantic prehistoric tree in search of live flesh.

Their uncontested dominance of the natural world was not to last, however. As mankind began developing the necessary intelligence to realize that these juggernauts couldn’t chase them if they hid inside tiny caves, the squirrel generations began rapidly to shrink in order to fit inside these caverns and terrorize those dwelling within. However, in one of those cosmic ironies that occur so often they might as well not be called be called ironies since everyone expects them by now, the formerly subservient feline populations began growing long teeth at this time, and these growing cat species soon wreaked havoc on the shrinking rodent species, until their sizes were reversed to their current states. Modern squirrels, mice, rats, hamsters, gerbils, guinea pigs, and bunnies all emerged from this weakened stock.

So consider all of those Mutt and Jerry cartoons with the cat chasing the mouse as evolutionary revenge for several thousand years’ worth of rodential domination. But be warned – evolution is cyclical, and the rodents might well rise again – in which case building the better mousetrap won’t only be a novel pastime, but the key to the survival of mankind.

MURDER, WE WROTE

2008-07-18T07:42:00.000-07:00

We would like to hear from any of our readers who have been murdered recently. We are aware that being a murder victim is a serious condition that hampers one’s ability to participate in mainstream society, but we encourage those who have suffered from this ailment to sweep aside their shame and confusion and tell the world how they really feel. Life as a corpse is difficult under any circumstance, but when that corpse has been slain through the evil intentions of another – especially in a particularly gruesome or imaginative way, in which case we encourage you to share every last detail – it only magnifies the pain. Murder may be the silent killer, but let’s use this opportunity to give it a voice.

EXPL(ETIVE)ANATION

2008-07-17T12:34:00.001-07:00

Let us briefly draw your attention to this amusing trifle, courtesy of fontmeisters Hoefler & Frere-Jones at Typography.com, in which Jonathan Hoefler reveals to the world the use of the term “grawlix” to denote the lineup of symbols used as expletives by our leading cartoon characters. Though we are indebted to Herr Hoefler for bringing this concept wider attention, we take issue with his description of the term’s origin.

Though credited to Morton Walker, the creator of mop-top comic-strip soldier Beatle Bailey, the word is actually an eponym. Its true originator is a late 18th-century Philadelphia typesetter by the name of Hogarth Grawlick. As the legend goes, the poor boy was illiterate, hired by Fenworth Boggert, the editor of the short-lived Philadelphia Requirer as a favor to Grawlick’s father, one of the city’s richest, stupidest citizens. Faced each morning with the task of having to arrange the press’s movable type to reflect the stories given to him by Boggert, young Grawlick could do nothing more than arrange the slugs in random patterns, often eschewing letters altogether for the prettier, more exotic typographic fringes. Each morning, upon examining the tyro’s handiwork, Boggert would (sources assure us) quite literally foam at the mouth as he expelled into the world a remarkable pageant of indecent invective aimed squarely at “Grawlick’s bullshittery.” And thus the immortal phrase was born, and later shortened by excessive use to its current abbreviated form.

Herr Hoefler’s article also cites an editor-at-large of the Oxford English Dictionary named Jesse Sheidlower, who has produced a book populated solely with variations on a well-known cursing-word that begins with an “F” and rhymes with “fluck.” Let Sheidlower hereby be challenged: we are in possession of many, many words that are not currently ensconced within the OED, a number of which have yet to see the light of day, and we would kindly like to offer our services in sharing them, for a small (if sizable) fee. We might as well start with “fluck.” Please contact us directly for definition and etymology.

BEST-TRIED GLORY

2008-07-17T06:47:00.000-07:00

That The Apocryphist is a fan of musical theater should be a surprise to no one who understands the unexpected ways the levers and pulleys of this world are manipulated. The Broadway musical is an occult thermometer of Western civilization’s internal temperature, stuck right up the keister of show business. As such, it is with nearly shrieking gleefulness that we regard today’s announcement of a major Broadway revival of West Side Story, performed in the original Spanish.

In this election year, no musical could possibly present itself as a better illustration of the riven state of our electorate. An updating of Pedro Calderon de la Barca’s Romeo y Julietta (which also served as the inspiration for a popular line of smokeables), it follows the doomed love of Antonio, a dark-skinned barrio resident, for Mary, a fair-haired bastion of a conservative family with the reputation for being a “maverick.” Their urban affair, which unfolds across the boulevards of western Los Angeles, involves the shooting of more dark-skinned people, and much debate about when and how to stop said shooting. The show’s finale climaxes in an epic escape in which Mary, an escaped prisoner of the enemy gang, is airlifted off the stage by a live helicopter effect while the noble Antonio remains below, fighting off both gangs simultaneously. This ambiguous ending may not sway people’s votes, but it is certainly a sign of the times, much as it was during the musical’s premiere during the Vietnam Era of the early 1970’s.

The creators’ decision to stage the show in its native language is a bold one, especially since so many of the show’s classic tunes (including “Proud Mary,” “Pretty in Pink,” and “(They’re Coming to) America”) have been radio hits in English. But it’s long been rumored that Spanish-speaking people (albeit very few from Spain) will be voting in the upcoming election, and it’s probably good to keep them entertained by the mainstream theater establishment, lest they grow restless and waste their votes on a third-party candidate. Hats off to you, Broadway (top hats!) for once again having your fabulous, gaunt, near-dessicated finger on the pulse of America!

TERM OF ENDEARMENT

2008-07-16T11:34:00.001-07:00

We would find it utterly endearing if our friends and colleagues were to begin employing the nickname “Pocky” in reference to us. Possible echoes of the scarred tissue reminders of a past plague diagnosis aside, it reminds us of a certain delightful Japanese coated-biscuit snack, which is available in a variety of flavors, including: chocolate, strawberry, almond, kiwi, honey, grape, melon, salmon, green tea, sweet potato, ash, pineapple, pumpkin, disinfectant, pizza, and goulash.

ROUND EARTH SOCIETY

2008-07-16T10:46:00.001-07:00

There’s an old saw that, if you stood all the people in the world shoulder to shoulder and back to belly, they would take up a space no bigger than the Six Flags Great Adventure amusement park, making the waits for rides only slightly longer than they are currently. This thought experiment has never been executed, primarily because of the temptations it poses for marauding aliens bent on the conquest of earth. But in light of the recent Obesity Epidemic scourging the developed world, we need to ask ourselves: is Six Flags big enough? Or do we now need Disney to bail us out?

Morbidly, comically, spherically fat people are nothing new to society – ancient, crudely sculpted earth-goddess idols illustrate the lack of gym facilities in the pre-civilized world, and those damn Romans with their vomitoria proved that even bulimia couldn’t stop decadent, fiddling emperors such as Nemo and Dracligula from expanding their bodies to the same bloated extreme as their untenable empires. But with all the current head-wagging and finger-shaking about the Obesity Epidemic, we’ve seen a level of awareness and judgment that surpasses all previous historical benchmarks.

First, a clarification: yes, obesity is communicable, but it’s not nearly as easy to catch as most pundits would have you believe. The obesity virus is only transferable via human saliva, especially saliva involved in the eating process. For this reason, you should be very careful about sharing a Snickers bar or French kissing with an obese person, or, heaven forfend, both at the same time. If you keep your tongue in your mouth and your fingers off other people’s food, you’ll most likely be safe.

Secondly, an elucidation: obese people and overweight people are two entirely separate categories. Overweight people are those who, for glandular, genetic, or nutritional reasons, happen to have a lot of body mass. The true medical description of an obese person, however, is “a person who is afflicted with the obesity virus.” But according to epidemiologist Dr. Alfred Yankovic (who recovered from the affliction himself), there are some less tautological ways of determining whether a person is obese:

They are wider than they are tall
They are the same height lying down as they are standing up
Their hands cannot touch each other without mechanical aid
Their earlobes touch their shoulder padding
Their feet are only visible from the knees down
They need a map to find their own ass
They have their own zip codes
When they sit around the house, they really sit around the house

Thirdly, an explication: obesity can be cured. This is not a chronic illness, and the means to defeat it are similar to those required to simply lose weight. This is because the obesity virus lodges itself in the pores; by preventing the escape of toxins through the skin, the virus causes a massive buildup. The main way to expel the virus is therefore to sweat profusely, dislodging as many of the virus’s clones as possible. But we’re not talking about the regular, workaday sweat of walking up stairs or lifting one’s hand to point the remote at the TV – when the sweat is merely a trickle, the virus can easily dodge its flow. No, sufferers from obesity must make their sweat pour from their corpuses in cascading torrents of salty release, positive geysers of perspiration, capable of knocking a hat from the head of an unsuspecting bystander. Only then will the virus be expelled and destroyed.

If a proper sweat regimen can be followed, we’ll find the world’s obesity epidemic will fade to a distant, unpleasant memory (much like the Boer War). Only then will mankind be able to take its proper place, en masse, at Six Flags. Once there, however, we highly recommend the population of earth lay off the communal corndogs, lest the whole cycle begin anew…

FRENCHED

2008-07-14T08:10:00.000-07:00

This rare, hand-tinted early daguerreotype of French revolutionaries blowing up the original Eiffel Tower can only mean one thing: Bastille Day is here again.

Americans – along with the British, other Europeans, denizens of former Communist Bloc nations, citizens of the Third World, Canadians, and the majority of the French – nurse many misconceptions about the 18th-century Gallic struggle for liberté, égalité, and fraternité (roughly translated: “libraries, eagles, and fraternities,” otherwise known as the Holy Trinity of Universal Literacy, Nature Conservation, and Limitless Booze, the age-old earmarks of Liberal Education). As always, we are prepared to jump into the breach with some straight talk.

King Louis XIV, the self-styled “King of the Sun,” fancied that the French royal line were the descendents of solar aliens, the same race that ostensibly constructed the Pyramids, Stonehenge, and China. He decided that he needed an earthly construction to define his glory and compete with his supposed ancestors’ finest achievements, and so he called upon the royal engineer Alec Eiffel (who previously designed the haunted underground grottoes of Versailles) to create the world’s tallest structure – a 324-meter high wooden throne that would allow the entire world to view Louis in all his glory.

In order to fund this edifice, the peasants were forced to preemptively sign over the income of their next twelve generations of progeny to the French court. This worked for a while, but by the time the third sou-less generation came of age, during the reign of Louis XVII, the deal no longer held its former appeal. When Benjamin Franklin visited the nation in 1787, his fiery, demagogic speaking style and bloody rhetoric whipped the peasantry into a frenzy, and the French decided to join their American cousins in revolution.

For the Tennis Court Oath (which was actually sworn on a badminton green, which the proletariat found too faggy to identify as such), selected members of the French underclass dressed as Indians in order to disrupt the decadent games of the aristocracy and have their sporting equipment thrown into the Seine. As birdies, lacrosse sticks, and frilly knee-pads floated through the city, the anger they spawned pointed in one direction: the Tower.

In the decades following its erection, the Tower had been nicknamed “Bastille” (a French diminutive of “Bastarde”) by Parisians. This symbol of monarchy gone phallically awry represented all of the grievances of the People, and so, on July 14, 1789, they stormed it, rigged it up with a bunch of firecrackers, and watched it burn to the ground.

The years that followed were full of blood, both metaphorically and physically. Robespierre’s Reign of Terribleness began when Revolutionary leaders held a contest to devise the most fucked-up way of killing people – and thus the guillotine was born. The killing only ended when Louis XVII’s bastard son, Napoleon Bonaparte, reminded the people that there was no more Tower or racquet sports, and therefore the monarchy was dead. He then named himself Emperor.

It wasn’t until the reign of Napoleon’s grandson, Napoleon III, that everyone remembered how cool the Tower was, and plans were instantly drafted to rebuild it in iron, so the rabble couldn’t burn it down. Instead, they could pretend to burn it down every year, in a ritual similar to the Wicker Man ceremonies of ancient pagans and horror geeks. And so to this day the French enjoy having an excuse to make a lot of noise and set off fireworks in emulation of the July 4th holiday of their older post-Revolutionary siblings, the Americans. They’re like children that way.

UNDERGROUND FILM-FLAM

2008-07-11T11:52:00.001-07:00

It is with dismay that we note the premiere of Hollywoodland’s adaptation of H.G. Verne’s natural history text Journey to the Center of the Earth in 80 Days. Ever since the dawn of cinema, in such films as The Island of Dr. Caligari, the Show-Me Business has displayed a poor track record when it comes to adapting non-fiction books to the screen. These so called Dream Manufacturers would do much better to stick with such escapist, popping-corn fantasy fare as The Greatest Story Ever Told, Fahrenheit 911, or Munich.

That being said, one of the things that makes the Center of Earth such an unpromising setting for a feature film is that it is, in a word, boringasallhell. This is partly because most people expect the Center of the Earth to actually BE Hell, and this expectation is dead set on disappointment. Not only is Hell itself, yes, boring, it isn’t even located at the Center of the Earth: the historical basis for the Christian vision of the sinners’ afterlife is actually the Saturnian moon Enceladus, which originally orbited around the earth until it was pushed out by our current moon during a celestial 372 A.D. power grab.

The actual Center of the Earth, as we doubt many people need to be told, consists of little more than white-hot, slug-like creatures known collectively as magma. Retaining much of the heat of the explosion that downgraded the Sun to its current, dwarfish size – in the process expelling the mineral nuggets that would later accrue into the planets – magma don’t really have much to offer the world above. They tend to stick to their own kind, and, when they’re not huddling close to their fellows for extra, redundant warmth (they’re addicted to the stuff), they have a reputation as cruel practical jokers. They find nothing funnier than to cut a trick a hole in the floor (aka the Earth’s Crust) and watch their unsuspecting friends cascade down it and harden in the cold air outside – a phenomena known to English-speaking humans (among others) as the Volcano.

So if you’re going to use your hard-earned guilders to see any film this weekend, make it the biopic Hellboy II, starring one of our most distinguished actors, Sir Ron Coleman. More entertaining, and more historically accurate to boot.

BELIEVING ISN'T SEEING

2008-07-10T12:00:00.000-07:00

We’ve been asked on more than one occasion (like, at least two), “Apocryphist, have you ever actually SEEN a demon?” This is a ludicrous question. It’s like asking if you’ve ever seen a proton or a quark. And protons and quarks are, after all, merely physics propaganda, cooked up by scientists to justify the hefty research fees they receive from unsuspecting taxpayers. The true building blocks of matter were discovered by the alchemists of the 16th century in the midst of their quixotic attempts to create gold. Try sniffing that out in the snot-stained index of your average high-school history textbook!

Where were we? Oh yes, demons. So asking if someone has ever SEEN a demon is ludicrous, because demons were not created to appeal to the sense of sight – if you could see them, they’d be way too easy to kill, and that’s bad evolution. It would be like, oh great, there’s a demon in the closet again, call the exterminator. It would be like, we love going camping, except for all these damn demons. It would be like, here’s my pet demon, Otis – he’s housebroken.

If you plan on being a terrifying entity, the first rule is that you should keep out of sight. What’s the use of setting your sights on freezing the blood in the hearts of men when men can catch you picking your noses during an unguarded moment? Sight is the least frightening of human senses. Scary sounds are certainly acceptable – in fact, they’re inevitable. If it weren’t for scary touch, we’d have no incubi or succubi or tarantulas. Scary smells have been appropriated by many of our current society’s chemical treatment plants. And as for scary taste – well, very few people have experienced a truly horrifying flavor and lived to tell the tale, and if they have, their tongues tend to be corroded beyond the ability to speak. Pursue all of these options if your intent is fear, but for Ba’al’s sake, don’t show yourself!

Not that there’s anything supernatural about demons. They’re flesh and blood creatures, distant relatives to the poltergeist, which is itself a rare species of bird, originally native to central Europe, that fly so fast as to render themselves invisible to the naked eye. Obviously if you fly around that fast in someone’s house you’re going to knock crap off the walls and be all-around nuisance. After frightening humans from their nests, these poltergeists settle in and adapt the newly abandoned spaces into their own habitats, giving rise to myths and legends of ghosts and haunted edifices.

Demons move incredibly quickly too, but they’re not really birds anymore – they’re, you know, demons. Their other main divergence from poltergeists is that they don’t endeavor to remain rooted to a single breeding ground; they’re just nigh-invisible peripatetic pains in the ass. Our great early naturalists, such as Hieronymus Bosch and Dante Alighieri, provide some of the most compelling depictions of these misunderstood creatures, and we urge you to pore over their works for an eyeful of real science.

HERITAGE ON YOUR CHEST

2008-07-09T12:42:00.000-07:00

Again, we’re not the sort to advocate the stewardship of rare natural or cultural treasures by earthly bureaucracies – if something ancient and precious is going to get blown up, knocked down, or winnowed away to nothing by the fierce and remorseless desert winds, there’s often a damn good reason for it. Likewise, those landmarks and artifacts that are truly important to mankind’s progress upon earth are more than capable of taking a few lumps for the team. (We’re lookin’ at you, Sphinx.)

That being said, the World Heritage Centrrer (a division of UNICEF) has just released its new annual list of “Inscribed Properties” earmarked to be the subject of increased vigilance and protection over the coming years (though exactly how chiseling one’s organization’s name across the face of a “property” is tantamount to “protecting” it is beyond us). It serves as an interesting matrix of what mainstream humanity considers significant and amusing, a litmus of how little the League of Nations understands the true workings of the world it claims to represent.

This year’s list reads as a rogue’s gallery of history’s also-rans: Vanuatu, Mauritius, San Marino, Kenya, Slovakia – sure, each of these locations houses important populations of relict Lemurian descendants, but can we please let it go? Lemuria was a failed continent, and it failed for a reason. The very powerlessness of the League of Nations stems from its secret history as an epicenter of the Lemurian diaspora – and look where it’s gotten them. They’re starting to get as tiresome as the so-called Atlanteans, who are actually just a bunch of ancient Welsh fishermen who got lost and needed some kind of story to explain why they were missing for a thousand years. Put it to bed, people – we’re bored.

However, even more notable than the list’s inclusions are its omissions. Where are the Antarctic Mountains of Madness? Amityville, NY’s Portal to Hell? The Bedrock City of the Dakotas? Surely these sites are worthy of the care and attention of a few dozen drunken, incestuous Lemurians?

The most intriguing entry on the new list, however, is Sturtsey, the volcanic island currently growing off the coast of Iceland. It is clearly a bald attempt to breed a new lost continent that will be the subject of myth and rumor for many generations after it has finally disappeared from the face of the earth, and for this boldness of vision we salute its architects. Sure, we can think of about thirty million more opportune locations for the advance of a mysterious civilization (the North Atlantic? Right near a populated island? Come on, guys!), but the very unlikelihood of its position might prove to be an unmistakable asset. The very fact that the Lemurians are recognizing it in this way is evidence that they are quaking in their stupid little boots. Rugged Sturseyans of the future, let us be among the first to preemptively invite you to your eventual mastery of the human race. We’re proud to say we'll have known you when.

THE SECOND MOST DANGEROUS GAME

2008-07-08T13:58:00.000-07:00

It is time for us to lob some words of sympathy at an institution that is dear to our wee, shriveled, walnut-resembling heart. No, we speak not of our Cabal, which, though integral to the concealed workings of the hidden world you are unable to recognize as lying behind your own, exists well beyond the ken of this weblog. Instead, we refer to the International Cryptozoology Museum.

Unlike the so-called “mainstream” scientific institutes that do little more than plash messily in slopping-over vats of semi-liquefied lies, the International Cryptozoology Museum is devoted to the only fauna worth considering: that which we do not readily see. Derived from the Latin prefix “crypto-,” or, “devoted to the art of breaking the secret codes of reality,” the Greek word “zoo,” meaning “zoo,” and the Olde English suffix “-ology,” which roughly translates to “fierce devotion bordering on the eccentric,” “cryptozoology” is a hybrid word, much like the hybrid beasts it studies along with garden variety Bigfeet, Abominable Snowpersons, and Loch Ness Monstroids.

Our first experience with cryptozoology occurred when we were quite young, and strange creatures would wander to our bedside as we attempted in vain to sleep. Childhood is not the province of innocence, but rather of truth – the things that we saw then may remain hidden to most conscious eyes, but their invisibility makes them no less real. It is a perverse comfort to know that roaming the earth somewhere are stink owls, headless dogs, and killer whales that walk like men, and it is cryptozoology that translates this occult knowledge into the truth few people can dare to face without a few stiff drinks ahead of time.

Of course, the Powers That Are don’t look kindly upon this kind of truth-gleaning, and so have conspired through its super-secret assassination task force – the IRS – to shut its doors. The Museum’s proprietress, the lovely Lauren Coleman, is struggling to keep its mighty iron doors – festooned with minotaur skulls – from closing around the bright flames of glory within. We normally don’t take up Causes, but this one is an exception. Please consider donating a guilder or two in order to keep the Museum afloat. Tell them the Apocryphist sent you. Or on second though, no, don’t.

LIE IN THE SKY

2008-07-07T14:03:00.000-07:00

Some people have utterly sick senses of humor. Look at this story from the distastefully named website "Boing[sic]-Boing[sic]":

Police in South Wales, UK, were dispatched to respond to a 999 emergency call to investigate a "bright stationary object" in the sky above a concerned citizen's home. The BBC News posted a recording and transcript of the conversation between the control room, the caller, and the police:
Control: "Alpha Zulu 20, this object in the sky, did anyone have a look at it?"

Officer: "Yes, it's the moon. Over."

When we have lost sight of the fact that the moon might actually be the largest, most advanced alien spaceship in the history of large, advanced alien spaceships, then we have lost our way as a species, and we deserve whatever eyeball-frying, liver-whipping, blood-congealing radio waves its crew decides to send down upon our sad, narrow-visioned race.

USA PATRIOT TRACT

2008-07-02T13:13:00.000-07:00

As the 232nd anniversary of our nation’s declaration of independence creeps towards us at a speed more befitting a drunken slug than a rocket-powered locomotive of patriotism (yes, we are having a long week), this is a suitable time to ruminate upon the qualities that make this country such an unlikely success in affairs both domestic and international. As such, here is our list of the Top Ten Super-Secret Things That Make America Endure Despite Its Ruling Powers’ Efforts to the Contrary.

10. The Underground Railroad
Many consider it a historical novelty, but the system used for delivering runaway slaves to more desirable locales than those from which they ran still endures, though for entirely different purposes. Purposes that you are too weak to understand.

9. Bigfoot
As our closest living simian ancestor, the Sasquatch offers a bounty of insights about mankind’s role on the earth – and we’ve got ‘em! Sure, there are a few tooling around in Canada, but for taxonomical purposes these are not considered true Sasquatches, but have rather been relegated to the category of Lesser Sasquatch - shyer, more complacent, and nicer than their U.S. counterparts. Wilier, more aggressive American Sasquatches can be seen across our nation, as local aldermen, Dunkin Donuts clerks, and masseurs. If you can track one down, study it closely – it just might be your uncle.

8. Facebook
Why didn’t someone tell us sooner about this clever social networking tool? Over the past few months we’ve spent countless hours trolling its depths, digging up as much dirt as we possibly can about our multifarious enemies and gleaning new and novel ways to destroy them. ("Favorite Film: Strictly Ballroom." Hmm…) We haven’t signed up for a profile ourselves, of course (even this weblog is severely compromising our inaccessibility), but as believers in the unexpected yet retrospectively inevitable phenomena known to superstitious folks as “miracles,” there’s always a chance that might change…

7. The Lack of Nationalized Universal Health Care
Many view this as one of America’s drawbacks, but in a free market economy it’s a simple fact that you can’t lug around your dead weight like so much feverish, crippled, bleeding, concussed, diabetic, pustule-ridden, feeble, frail, decrepit, incontinent, armless, immune-deficient, consumptive, sneezing, wheezing, pallid, nauseous, quadriplegic, morbidly obese, stroke-wracked, artery-clogged, tumoriffic dead weight. We don’t cart our corpses around with us everywhere we go, so why should we do the same with our sick and injured? If they can’t take care of themselves, they’re part of the problem.

6. Neqa’el
The cutest little itty-bitty kitty cat in the world. Yes, she is. Yes, she is.

5. The National Weather Service
As many of you no doubt remember from a past post, the National Weather Service is responsible for regulating the weather worldwide – or, to state it more accurately, regulating people’s perception of the weather. As a largely psychological phenomenon, weather is infinitely manipulatable by a trickster’s array of cons and sleights – moves at which the U.S. government has proven only too adept.

4. Attractive, Up-and-Coming Starlets
One thing that America will always be able to give to the world – and exhibit a skill for importing – is the peculiar combination female pulchritude, talent, youth and pluck that characterizes our most precious natural resource: starlets. Though some go on to squander their nearly unlimited potential (did you really need to take that demeaning secretary role in Sex and the City, Jennifer?), even the laziest amongst them will grow up to helm an obscure charity or run for local office. But more importantly, while in their prime they are the fuel of the world’s Dream Engine, and little would get accomplished without them.

3. Libertium
A rare mineral, found only in the soil of certain parts of North America, that ensures political freedom. Sub-microscopic dust particles of Libertium act chemically upon the brain when inhaled in certain quantities. Interestingly, the biochemistry of the Caucasian race results in deeper, more rapid breathing than is normally found in other ethnicities, which explains much of our early history.

2. The Stupidity and Pettiness of the Rest of the World
We’re not saying that everyone else in the world is naturally inferior to us, we’re just saying that, given all of the other advantages listed here, we’re able to crawl ever so slightly further out of the rancid heap of humanity into the glaring, stink-inducing sunlight above.

1. The Apocryphist
If not for us, you wouldn’t even be aware of all of this.

Happy Interpendence Day, everyone! Don’t let the fireworks hypnotize you – that’s how the local municipalities steal your money.

AQUAPOLITICS

2008-06-26T12:51:00.000-07:00

For more than a year now, we have been deeply enmeshed in issues beyond the ability of most sentient beings to comprehend – but what else is new. As a result, our binary-based dabbling in the little things that make the world worth living in for most so-called “regular” people was put on indefinite hiatus. But time, spirit and June twilights move one to a state of generosity that oft overcomes the prickly vagaries of the sort of things we’re not inclined to tell you we’re involved with. As such, for as long as the world can stand it, we are pleased to announce the RETURN of THE APOCRYPHIST.

Yes, you’re welcome.

So onto the first bit of news: the U.S. government’s decision to take North Korea off its list of terrorist groups, a development that augurs great changes for the future of mankind. Because seriously, how many of you think you know the real truth about North Korea? How could a country so shrouded in secrecy contain other than secrets upon secrets, sewed up inside little secrets that you can’t really see because they’re surrounded by so many other goddamn secrets? (Answer: it’s a secret.)

That North Korea is a cesspit of human degradation is not to be denied. But the question of WHY it has been engineered to become said cesspit is one that is not often asked. Geopolitics, the spread and decline of communist thought, the individual ego of the strange little man who runs the place – these are all contributing factors, no doubt. But they have coalesced around a situation so bizarre, so dangerous, that it is in the best interest of all the world’s powers to refrain from blowing the ruling regime from the face of the planet and thereby revealing it in all its horror.

Remember World War II? Of course not – if you were born then you probably wouldn’t be reading a blog. Suffice to say it was a global armed conflict that occurred between 1939 and 1952 (more on that in a future post). By the time the war began, Korea had been under Japanese rule for many years due to the insatiable taste of the Japanese for a rare variety of freshwater eel (the anguilla esculentus or “Happy Taste Bud Snake-Fish”) that could only be found in Korean waters. During the late 1930s, Japanese scientists began conducting what can only be described as “weird” experiments to breed a super-eel, a full order of magnitude larger than those found in nature, that could be used to goad and reward the increasingly belligerent Japanese troops.

Anybody who’s ever conducted “weird” experiments knows damn well how they usually turn out. A race of giant, lethally delicious eels was soon developed, and the scientists working on the project became paranoid about allowing them to leak into the greater world and thus leave fewer for themselves. The outbreak of war, unfortunately, allowed looser security measures, and several eels escaped into a network of lakes in the central part of what would later become North Korea, where they reproduced prodigiously. This region endured as a kind of eely prefecture unto itself until it was discovered by Soviet troops in 1945. Starved, these Russian troops turned to the eels as their only available food source, and became more addicted than the Japanese could have imagined. This predilection grew and mutated not unlike the eels themselves, until Stalin himself insisted that a Happy Taste Bud Snake-Fish be delivered to his chambers for breakfast each morning before facing an angry world. Hence the Russian insistence on controlling Korea above the 38^th Parallel, which has led to so much geopolitical grief over the years.

With the fall of Communism, knowledge of these eels spread throughout the ruling classes of the reigning world powers (China and the U.S. primary among them). As Russia scrambled to make amends for eighty-odd years of back-asswardness, an inebriated Boris Yeltsin made the mistake of inviting President Bill Clinton to sample one of the eels during one of their frequent “diplomatic drink-offs.” Overcome by the same eellust that had felled so many others, Clinton made a secret backdoor deal to import this delicacy to the White House. Once other staffers and Washington insiders became hooked, it was a matter of policy to keep their habit a secret from the rest of the world, and so the deadly North Korean regime was propped up by policy, even inspiring a phony nuclear scare to ensure that it would remain in a diplomatic limbo, the tasty eels safe within their shroud of mystery.

Sources inform us that the reason for today’s rapprochement is that the current President simply doesn’t have a taste for these slimy creatures. “Yuppie food,” he’s been known to call them to his close circle of advisors. The diplomatic cartwheels the U.S. has been forced to endure on behalf of this situation have strained Washington’s resources, and so Bush has, in what will no doubt stand as his last significant policy decision, allowed the potential for the whole world to be informed of these really quite scrumptious North Korean eels.

The future of North Korea now depends on the outcome of the upcoming Presidential elections. Senator Obama is known to be an eel teetotaler, while his erstwhile competitor, Senator Clinton, is known to have inherited her husband’s passion. Senator McCain remains inscrutable on the issue.

What will happen if open channels of trade allow the secret to be revealed? There are a number of scenarios, each one doomsday-ier than the last. Our guess is that, if North Korea’s ruthless dictator is allowed by the international community to leverage the addictive delectability of these creatures to his country’s advantage, North Korea will become the world’s next Great Power, outstripping both China and the U.S. in sheer flavor. Whether he will manage to turn all the peoples of the earth into an oppressed concatenation of desperate peasants, military insiders, and stunningly talented acrobats will remain to be seen.

MUSICAL MYSTERY TOUR

2007-05-17T08:02:00.000-07:00

Normally our free-floating yet rigorous imagination prefers not to be hamstrung by redundant explorations of the same topic (especially because we utterly exhaust each topic’s essence in the few short paragraphs we devote to it), but on occasion a subject is so deeply relevant and rich in possibility that it requires a more in-depth meditation. Such a subject is the Tony awards.

As we hinted on Monday, few art forms say more about life as it is currently lived than the Broadway musical, and there is no more succinct and reliable snapshot of our times than its yearly ceremony of honors. (Straight plays remain and will always be little more than half-baked musicals, lacking in the essential fabulousness – comparable to reportage without facts, or cheese without milk.) We’ve already analyzed the nominees in the pivotal category of Best New Musical; now let us turn our attention to one that is arguably even more important, judging from Broadway’s defiantly retrograde tendencies: Best Revival of a Musical. The nominees are as follows:

110 in the Shade
The Apple Tree
A Chorus Line
Company

First of all, let us point out how telling it is that, alphabetically speaking, none of these titles go past the letter C. The C is for “conservative”; these are deeply reactionary times that find Broadway holding back at the essentials – the ABC’s, as it were – thereby reflecting the national mood as a whole.

It’s also no accident that all of the nominated shows reflect Biblical themes. The most obvious is The Apple Tree, which takes the tale of Adam and Even as the starting point for a whimsical exploration of original sin. Less obvious, however, is 110 in the Shade, an encrypted retelling of the Deluge myth, in which a formerly repressed woman causes a massive flood by sinfully embracing the life of the body.

There are also secret evangelical overtones in A Chorus Line, with its group of wannabe dancers representing the population of the world, only a small number of which will be “raptured” away to musical-comedy success by an all-powerful director/deity. Rounding out the list is Company, Stephen Sondheim’s allegory for the life of Christ, in which the Messiah (played in this production by a mesmerizing Raul Julia) proves himself all too human by sleeping with and/or being jealous of his various disciples. To gather all of these semi-scriptural events under the rubric of “Revival” is merely the unpopped cherry on top.

It will be fascinating to see which aspect of Judeo-Christian legend the Tony committee will choose to designate as the zeitgeist. However, the die is essentially already cast – by favoring this particular worldview over all others, any winner will serve to support the status quo. And this is simply how the system works. In a sense, the Broadway musical represents a utopian eden, a mythological past during which mankind sang instead of speaking and danced instead of dying. The immense and epoch-making importance of this art form only confirms this primal dream of plenty.

Bearing all of this in mind, one should perhaps not be surprised that the Apocryphist’s heart belongs to the stage. We are only human, after all.

TONY TONY TONY

2007-05-15T10:13:00.000-07:00

It is time for us to take a break from our work-imposed exile from the blogosphere to weigh in on one of the most salient reflections of contemporary culture available to those without a PhD. We refer, of course, to the Tony nominations.

Named for Marie “Antoinette” Perry, the nation’s first hard-nosed female theatre producer (whose penchant for firing artists at the drop of a hat led to the misplaced decapitatory overtones of her nickname), the Tonys are a yearly tradition in which Broadway congratulates itself for being so fabulous. The nominations for the 2007 awards were announced this year by actors Jane Krakowski and Taye Diggs as they skydived from a plane above Manhattan before a stunt parachute landing in the middle of Times Square.

Broadway babies have been predicting the nominees since well before any of the shows opened, meaning the result will have come as no surprise to those in the know. For the rest of the world, however, the list presents a fascinating matrix of the state of the world (at least the musicals do; nobody pays attention to the plays). Let us examine the shows that are in the running for Best Musical.

Curtains
In this musical adaptation of the hit television sitcom Frasier, David Hyde Pierce (playing, in a typical piece of Broadway stunt casting, the title role originated by Kelsey Grammar) goes from radio shrink to private eye to musical-theatre star and finally back to radio shrink when the whole thing turns out to be a dream. It is the final collaboration of Kander and Hammerstein, the duo responsible for such hits as South Chicago, The Cabaret and I, and The Sound of the Spider Woman. This show represents old people.
Mary Poppins
Remember how everybody loves movies and nobody loves theatre? Mary Poppins does, and she’s going to use a “spoonful of sugar” to make sure that people forget that truism while forking over $100 a ticket instead of slapping the film onto the end of the Netflix queue. For some reason things that happen right in front of you are more expensive than things that happened in the past that someone pointed a camera at. Anyway, this show represents children.
Grey Gardens
Another movie show, but this one based on an obscure documentary. The original film posits the theory that JFK was murdered by arrangement of his wife, Jackie O, and that she tried to frame her relatives, a couple of crazy old women on Long Island, for the crime. In this version, the crazy old women don’t actually kill JFK, but instead sit around their crumbling house singing about food and clothes. This show represents gay people.

Spring Awakening
Based on August Strindberg’s controversial play of the same name, this show is about how rock-and-roll originally emerged in late 19th-century Germany, only to be repressed by the Powers That Be for another sixty years. As with any show about of rock-and-roll, there is sex between underaged people, and power ballads. This show represents older people who wish they were still younger people.

As you can see, the entire span of humanity is represented by these four choices. If we feel like it, we’ll weigh in tomorrow on how the nominees for Best Revival of a Musical do the same thing, only in an even more cutting-edge fashion.

SCHIRRA, PRINCE OF POWER

2007-05-03T12:29:00.000-07:00

Continuing the aviation theme of this week’s posts, we regret to announce the passing away of Apollo astronaut Walter Schirra. Though he never technically flew in space (all pre-shuttle U.S. space missions were executed by robot facsimiles implanted with the astronauts’ brains while their bodies were kept frozen in suspended animation at the National Cooling Chamber in Los Aburres, NV), he will always remain a beloved historical figure, portrayed by Lance “Pumpkinhead” Henrikson in the immortal 1983 astronaut film, All the Right Moves.

There is nothing more to add about Schirra that hasn’t been stated in any of the official obituaries (except for that bit about the robots). With his passing, only two astronauts from the historic Mercury Seven flight remain – John Glenn and Scott Carpenter. With the final survivor standing to take possession of the wives and property of all of his deceased fellows (in addition to the indisputable title of Best Astronaut Ever), you can expect some brutal, Renaissance-style backstabbing between these elderly American flyboys over the coming months.

Throughout this melancholy moment, it is important to remember that outer space will never be out of style. It’s where we came from, after all, and it’s where we’ll be going when the earth explodes in a fiery, psychedelic blast. We salute Wally Schirra, a true hero of the brief period in human history where space travel was actually a novelty.

PAYBACK FOR APRIL SHOWERS

2007-05-01T08:18:00.000-07:00

Today is May Day – the holiday in which we celebrate the Bolshevik invention of the maypole, an ideological community-building device designed to empower the proletariat by educating them in three-dimensional weaving skills. It’s also a phrase employed in World War II films to denote the malfunction of aircraft. What do these two concepts have in common?

Answer: they were both created by the same man. And who was this man? No less than Orville Wright, co-inventor of the airplane and secret leftist (pictured above left, with ectoplasm).

Orville and his brother Wilbur stand as case studies in the political history of the Twentieth Century. Orville, a Communist sympathizer who later defected to the nascent Soviet Union, was less outspoken than Wilbur, an arch-conservative who inspired the younger Charles Lindbergh in the fields of both aviation and reactionary politics. But despite his lack of bombast, his beliefs were no less deeply held.

Though their epoch-making initial flight at Kitty Hawk on December 17, 1903 is the one immortalized in the history books, we’re concerned today with a lesser-known event the following year. On May 1, 1904, the Wright Brothers returned to Kitty Hawk to try out a second-generation prototype. This new version of the airplane, however, proved even more recalcitrant than the first, and flew straight up into the air several times before landing propellor-first in the dunes. Orville, the pilot, giddy with the repetitive dizziness and savage brush with death, attempted to joke with his brother about how the first day of May would go down in history as the antithesis of their original flight, but the only words he could get out of his bruised, bloodied mouth were “May day… May day…” The phrase went on to become shorthand for aviatory disaster.

It wasn’t until 20 years later that Orville, living in Moscow since the death of his brother, was asked by Lenin himself, on his deathbed, to create a spring diversion to inspire Russian air workers. He originally conceived a gigantic ballet in the sky, in which airplanes with long ribbons connecting them would draw out beautiful, Spirograph-style patterns upon the sky. In the event, the choreography was poorly planned, and the ribbons became entrapped in the propellers, causing them to crash into each other and the surrounding countryside. Chastened by this experience, Orville brought the procession to earth, taking the added precaution of attaching the ribbons to a pole to lessen the chances of strangulation. And thus our modern May Day celebrations were born.

PET FOOD NATION

2007-04-30T12:05:00.000-07:00

Much has been written about the recent pet food recall, in which Chinese manufacturers added melamine (a lethal combination of cyanide, human fingernails, slag, and Wild Irish Rose) to dog and cat feed destined for American markets. We’re incredibly fortunate that our beloved kitty Neqa’el did not run afoul of this deadly chow, but the question remains: how did such a thing come to pass, and on such a wide scale?

It’s no secret that China has evolved into a kind of quasi-capitalistic Wild Wild East over the past few years. Under the secret leadership of Dr. Jonathan “Fu” Manchu, a half-British Ivy League graduate who is the occult force behind much of the nation’s perverse liberalization, China has embraced increasingly strange initiatives in its attempts to cut costs and inundate the world with its products.

Chinese culture has long celebrated quantity above all else. By maintaining the world’s oldest civilization, it has a greater number of years under its belt than anything the West can offer. Likewise, with the highest population in the world, there is no doubt that this nation puts great confidence in numbers. But far more sinister than either of these facts is Manchu’s covert plan to ensure that every piece of merchandise bought, sold, or consumed on the planet earth is a product of China.

It is not economic power that Manchu seeks in pursuing this insanely ambitious goal; rather, it is merely the pride of having the most impressive figures. If China can put more pet food on the market than any other nation in the world, it will be pleased; but only when China’s pet-food column has all the digits, and the rest of the world’s columns total zero, will Manchu be truly happy.

Of course, being a finite nation, China has only a finite number of resources, and so is forced to be creative. The age-old pet food mines of Szechuan can only yield so much kibble per year. The sad result of this inevitability is that Chinese pet food manufacturers are including more foreign additives, such as melamine, into the mix in order to pad the results. This is good news for Chinese accountants, but bad news for pets.

Luckily, signs are surfacing that Manchu is temporarily pulling back on his plans in a signal of appeasement towards dog and cat lovers the world over. In addition to slowing its pet food output, and hiring inspectors to insure that only the pure, uncut product of the mines will be distributed across international borders, two giant skyscrapers – one shaped like a cat, one like a dog – can be expected to appear in the Beijing skyline within a matter of weeks. It remains to be seen whether this is a sign of rapprochement, or merely another manipulative gesture designed to put us off the scent, as it were.

THE REPRESS OF THE RETURNED

2007-04-27T13:43:00.001-07:00

Our correspondents may be asking questions concerning our recent whereabouts.

Answer #1: None of your freaking beeswax.

Answer #2: Refer to this past post.

Answer #3: Aliens.

Though the veritable inundation of support we have received over the past two weeks is nearly embarrassing in its profusiveness, we must assure you that we are well – in fact, we are quite possibly even more filled with fiendish desire and burning arcana than previously. Though any sharing that we do must remain carefully modulated, rest assured that it will continue in due time.

Many of you may have heard that historian David Halberstam, famous for authoring the secret protocol of the 1950s, passed away recently. We hasten to tell you with that this had nothing – NOTHING – NOTHING – to do with us. True, we exposed his youthful secrets to the world in our peninaugural post, but we can offer no evidence that these revelations set off any kind of grotesque chain of circumstances that led from the CIA through Cuba, the Eisenhower Mafia, the DAR, Hasbro Inc., the Dramatists Guild, the Village Green Preservation Society, Eschaton Resorts, the New Mickey Mouse Club, General Electric, the House Sub-Committee on Soon-To-Be Deceased Historians, the CIA again, and on to Mr. Halberstam’s unfortunate accident. His anarchic brand of speculative absurdity will be missed.

GONNEGUT

2007-04-13T12:46:00.000-07:00

Yesterday newspapers and websites around the globe reported the sad news of the passing of one of the finest investigative journalists of the Twentieth Century, Kurt Vonnegut. Though he never won the Pulitzer Prize, his insightful reporting about the curious byways of the postmodern world shaped the minds and thoughts of a generation, and then some.

A humble Indiana farmboy, he was an undistinguished Pontiac dealer until he was taken prisoner as an American soldier in Germany during World War II, at which time he was forced to aid Werner Heisenberg in his time-travel experiments for the Third Reich. Though ultimately aborted as “too freaky and evil even for Nazis,” the experiments left an indelible mark on young Vonnegut, who returned to America determined to write about the world’s weirder ills.

Following in the footsteps of Sinclair Lewis’s The Jungle, Vonnegut blazed forth on the literary scene with his unblinking expose on the meatpacking industry, Slaughterhouse-Five. But important work both preceded and followed this achievement, including his coverage of the invention of ice-nine, his interviews with literature Nobelist Kilgore Trout, and a biography of WWII-era double agent Howard W. Campbell, Jr.

Though many refer to his books as “novels,” this is merely a matter of style – it’s difficult to deny the bedrock of cold, hard fact upon which they were built. Even when his subjects were as outré as Tralfamadorian race, the fringe religion of Bokononism, or the mythical islands of the Galapagos, he applied the same wry wit and humanist viewpoint that made him a star of the counterculture and a bane of the mainstream media. Though his output slowed in later years, his fiercely independent viewpoint remained strong, even as he began to focus his talents on such fiction offerings as his final book, 2005’s Man Without a Country.

Few voices today dare to tell the truth in terms as brisk and bold as those employed by Vonnegut. Without him, reality will be much harder to come by.

PERPETUAL WINTER FOR PERPETUAL SPRING

2007-04-12T10:05:00.000-07:00

If there’s one thing we have in abundance here at The Apocryphist, it’s hunches. Our nose twitches at the scent of the possible; we are highly susceptible to cool draughts emanating from the as-yet-unknown. And lately we’ve been smacked upside the head by a cold draught indeed: the extended chill in the air outside, suspiciously prominent in its mid-April freakishness.

Many people go around and indiscriminately accuse the government of being responsible for every trivial ill. But not us: we only accuse for the big stuff. And nothing is bigger than the weather.

We’ve written previously about the perceptual causes of global warming, but this particular weather pattern we’re experiencing in the United States right now – unseasonably frigid, barely any sun, lacerating rains – is of a different class altogether. However, it is similar to global warming in that it has everything to do with politics.

No one, from the top to bottom of our nation’s vast beaureaucracy, denies that the war in Iraq is not going well. The question is, what is to be done about it? Congress has one idea; the executive branch has another; and this dichotomy is being played out in every corner of our 52.5 states.

The National Weather Service – the agency responsible for the nation’s weather, duh – is a part of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which is in turn subsidiary to the U.S. Department of Commerce – an agency answerable to the White House. All the pieces are now in place. President Bush – at the advice of Karl Rove – has ordered his lackeys to lengthen winter, causing citizens to spend so much time bitching about the cold that they don’t have time to concern themselves with politics. After the full manufacture this artificial crisis, he will command the National Weather Service to embark upon a late spring, for which the people will be so grateful that thoughts of war will be even further from their minds.

This is far from the first time that such a policy has been adopted. FDR initiated particularly cold winters during the Great Depression to encourage unemployed workers to pull themselves up by the bootstraps and enlist in New Deal programs. More recently, Richard Nixon issued a gorgeous summer in the midst of the Watergate controversy, but a fat lot of good it did him.

Our hunch is that our hunch about this is correct. Just when things feel at their worst – this morning, say – the skies will begin to clear and we’ll all be grateful for the sun and warmth. Too bad the weather report is forecasting more of the same for the foreseeable future.

EYE OF KNUT

2007-04-11T09:52:00.000-07:00

We wish we could pretend to be immune to cute things. Fawning over baby animals does nothing to buttress our image as a bare-knuckle truth-teller of the obscure and unpalatable, but there are powers in this cosmos, loathe as we are to admit it, that cannot be contested.

Some of you might have heard by now of the tiny polar bear named Knut, who was rejected by his mother at the Berlin Zoo and, against the protests of animal rights activists, not allowed to die but instead raised by a lowly zookeeper under the fawning eyes of the masses. Exciting and heart-pummelling as this story is, however, it is not the first time a baby polar bear has attracted international attention and controversy.

During the right of Queen Elizabeth I, rivalry was fierce between England and Spain. The Spanish started the whole thing by giving the royal court the world’s largest wheel of manchego cheese – a wheel that was intentionally laced with bubonic plague. Considered a harmless joke by the Spaniards – who it turns out were genetically immune to the disease except in that it turned their tongues black like gag ice cubes – the English were not at all pleased. (They disposed of the offending wheel by in turn giving it to the Irish.)

As a retaliation, Sir Francis Drake, recently returned from his world-spanning tour, came up with a clever plan. While searching for the Northwest Passage, his crew picked up a female polar bear as a gift for the Queen, a gift that, unbeknownst to them at the time, was pregnant. The mother died soon after being installed as one of Elizabeth’s ladies in waiting, but not before giving birth to a tiny cub affectionately named Beowulf by the Queen. It was Drake’s idea to train this adorable creature to be a deadly assassin.

Months passed, and Beowulf was offered to the Spaniards as a conciliatory gift to mend relations after the manchego incident. The bear was trained to use a knife, the plan being to kill Spain’s King Philip II in the deep of the night. The plot was foiled, however, when Beowulf – to whom all Spaniards looked the same – accidentally killed playwright Lope de Vega (creator of the famous windmill-tilter Don Juan) at a court masque. This event prompted the ill-fated Spanish Armada, about which William Shakespeare wrote so skillfully in The Spanish Play (aka Hamlet). Beowulf, meanwhile, was turned into a rug, and can still be viewed at Madrid’s Prada museum.

We hope that tiny Knut’s fate will prove less controversial than that of his foreBEAR. (Yes, we wrote that.) Unless he is an agent of German Neo-Nazis hoping to restore the Third Reich, in which case, look out world!

CRUCIFIXIONAL CHARACTER

2007-04-09T09:18:00.000-07:00

We’ve stated previously our belief that Jesus Christ was created by Christian priests as a myth to justify their religious hegemony. The ensuing chicken/egg-style question of priority is therefore highly germane for a holiday that has appropriated similar imagery in its stated purpose of selling chocolate to the world. Yes, we’re talking about Easter: Halloween of the Spring.

Personally, we prefer Good Friday: any holiday that celebrates the execution of a nettlesome fantasy is fine by us. But the underpinnings of Easter are more troubling than even we would like to admit. By killing off a fabrication only to resurrect it, the Christians created a scenario in which they expected us to believe about anything, including but not limited to an eternal afterlife based on occult justice; the appearance of holy figures on billboards and foodstuffs; and the self-imposed celibacy of priests.

We walked the streets yesterday, and saw firsthand how unmoved modern humans were by thoughts of resurrection. It was a normal Sunday, all told – despite the occasional inflatable rabbit bouncing in the wind atop a front stoop, there was no wide-eyed rejoicing, no “hosanna”-hurling, no wearing of outlandish bonnets. To our knowledge, no Jews were persecuted. Instead, folks were shopping, eating a strange hybrid of breakfast and lunch, and following other such earthly pursuits. (We didn’t see much else, because we don’t like to be outside for that long.)

Shouldn’t we just let Easter go once and for all? The candy oligarchy will raise holy hell, sure, but aren’t there more interesting things to commemorate? On April 8, 1766, the first fire escape was patented (a wicker basket at the end of a pulley). On April 8, 1946, the League of Nations assembled for the last time. On April 8, 1972, the official nickname of Firth, Michigan was changed from “Outpost of the Mundane” to “America’s Arthritis Capital.” Wouldn’t any of these events make for a more wholesome, invigorating feast than what we saw yesterday? We could keep the basket motif, and instead of bunnies, we could have chocolate diplomats, and gnarled marzipan hands – kids won’t know the difference once they’ve put them in their mouths.

Of course, the Catholic Church has a trick up its sleeve. By changing the date of Easter each year, it spawns a system of stealth attacks on less well-fortified holidays. As soon as a new celebration begins to arise, the Easter behemoth waits until it lands on a Sunday, and BAM! – the poor thing is in tatters. Turn the other cheek indeed.

IN NO WAY INTENDED TO BE ALLEGORICAL

2007-04-06T09:38:00.000-07:00

We have been hesitant to write at too great a length about one of the tinier denizens of our home, as we are deeply wary of falling into the practice of personal feline reportage known colloquially as “catblogging” – particularly on Fridays. However, our little Neqa’el has been so adorable recently that we simply couldn’t allow her behavior to pass without comment.

As many of you no doubt recall, Neqa’el has been veritably mummified as a result of injuries sustained during the ill-fated Sexy Robot Experiment of March 2007. Now that her bones are beginning to knit (extremely quickly, might we add!), she is walking around the apartment some, and we no longer have to bring her tiny bedpans filled with litter.

Yesterday evening, however, she topped even the sight of her little Michelin-Man body hobbling comically in chase of a loose-floating feather from one of our collection of African blow darts. Hers is a feisty spirit, as you can imagine, and even an injury that would have long since killed most normal cats doesn’t prevent her from following her charming little whims.

Well, due to a set of circumstances that I won’t go too deeply into, it transpired that a white dove broke loose in our apartment and started flying around the room. (Neqa’el normally wouldn’t stand for our keeping birds, but this was an isolated incident involving a particular project and it was made very clear to her that it would not be a regular occurrence.) Needless to say she tried to chase the thing, which in itself was nearly enough to hideously maim one with cuteness.

But the end of the story is its most precious part. The bird alit on the sofa at one point, and Neqa’el, on dainty paws and incredibly slow-moving, was able to sneak up near it without its notice. Her bandages were coming a bit unraveled from all the horseplay, such that after a brief tussle a stray end of the wrapping became tightly wrapped around the poor bird’s neck. The bird attempted to fly, but Neqa’el’s weight was such that it only lifted her about an inch off the ground, its wings working furiously, before its neck snapped, causing them both to fall to the ground. Oh, the look on Neqa’el’s face was most priceless!

We regret that we’re unable to provide photos of this adorable occurrence, as displaying Nequa’el’s distinguishing characteristics to the world will make our own identity that much more identifiable, and our cabal would skin us alive and then force us to eat our own skin while we bled there, skinless. This pains us, because we have the most adorable photos of Neqa’el as a kitten peering out from within a grinning human skull, and no one will be able to look at them.

THE NEXT OF AN OCCASIONAL SERIES IN WHICH WE REVEAL THE REMARKABLE ORIGINS OF COMMON OBJECTS, AND THEN MAKE GOOD ON OUR CLAIMS BY REMARKING UPON THEM

2007-04-05T10:06:00.000-07:00

Shampoo. We would look like crusty fools without it. But did you know that this astringent ooze is the very substance upon which civilization was erected? Of course you didn’t; keep reading.

In prehistoric times, men would strain leaves, dust and feces from his hair by rubbing their heads violently against large boulders and cliffs. Though the friction was generally enough to dislodge foreign objects, it also removed much of the hair and scalp. In the days before sharp tools, baldness was a luxury afforded only by those who had the time to scrape their domes long enough to purge all distracting roughage, and thus tribal hierarchy was created.

It was in Mesopotamia, circa 3000 BC, that an unnamed toiler put together the first alchemical aggregate of herbs, roots, and soothing river mud that would later bear the name Shampoo (from the Sumerian “sha’am empo,” literally “sexy-maker”). Once the clean, bouncy condition of his hair brought him the attention of local landowners’ wives, a turn of events that nearly resulted in a delightfully ironic public decapitation, the case came to the attention of the shaman class, who were looking for an easier way to get laid than all the hooting and the prognosticating and whatnot. The secret of shampoo became a priestly prerogative for generations, before leaking out into the general public.

As more and more common people used this wonder elixir to freshen their tresses, the differences between social classes lessened, and prosperity reigned such that the development of a mercantile society became possible. Spurred by the desire to look better than other men of the same social class (and to please their nagging wives), early merchants and craftsmen devoted more time to making their coiffures and those of their families appear less matted with dung. Upon these foundations the ancient Babylonian, Greek and Roman Empires were created.

After the downfall of Rome at the hands of the (literally) unwashed barbarians to the north, the secret of shampoo disappeared from the West for nearly a thousand years. It wasn’t until Renaissance scholars rediscovered lore kept in practice by the cleanly Arabs (who also had those big beards to contend with) that proper follicular hygiene was reserved anew, and European civilization got back on track.

Today, nearly everybody uses shampoo, from the lowly ditchcrafter to the highly billionairist. Nonetheless, our society has finally evolved to the point where shampoo is no longer strictly necessary to cement the bonds between us and our fellow human players. Additionally, dozens of other products (conditioner; pomade; mousse; hair spray; styling paste; gel; grease; oil; shortening; Vaseline; spit; spermicidal jelly; llama mucous) have arrived on the market to encourage alternate cosmetic approaches. Baldness has even re-emerged as a harmless fashion statement. Early humans would no longer recognize us as being of the same species, but once they did, they would all be agreement about one thing: they’d LOVE what we’ve done with our hair.

GETTING HOT IN HERE, OR ME? (ANSWER: YOU)

2007-04-03T09:43:00.000-07:00

The papers tell us that the Supreme Court decided yesterday to make a landmark decision involving the Environmental Protection Agency’s need to regulate greenhouse gases. We’re all like, sure, whatever. It’s not like it’s going to do a damn spot of good.

There are conflicting theories as to the causes of global warming. Some believe it involves the trapping of manmade carbon dioxide in the earth’s atmosphere, absorbing heat without releasing it. Those fundamentalist Christians who are willing to acknowledge the phenomenon aver that it is caused by the fires of Hell, leaking out of the earth’s crust in a calculated bid on the part of Satan to take the underworld mainstream. Still others think it’s a dragon.

Compelling though these theories are (and leaving quite aside the distasteful “farting cow” hypothesis), they are all distractions from the main issue at hand. You see, it is simply not true that the atmosphere is heating up. On the contrary – the earth itself is cooling down.

Pretty much everyone (except those fundamentalist Christians again) believes that the universe was created in a fiery blast of matter a handful of billennia ago. Fair enough. Consequently, it should be stressed that this fiery blast of matter was HOT – stars needed to be made out of it after all, as well as tropical beaches, Thermador convection ovens, and lust.

So imagine a hot little earth spinning through a cold universe. What’s it going to do? Cool off, of course. Sure it has a molten core that still holds the original warmth of the Big Bang, but there are all sorts of little cracks and wrinkles and zits across the earth’s surface that slowly release this primal torridity into the cosmos. As the ground beneath our feet chills even as we walk upon it, the air around us feels warmer. And it’s not just a matter of human perception – the conflicting pull of the earth and its atmosphere makes all of our equipment go all farblonjet, resulting in the popular illusion of global warming.

So why didn’t this effect make itself clear in previous generations? Easy: there was greater moisture surrounding the earth previously. Every time a rocket or satellite is launched, it takes a little bit of the atmosphere’s moisture along with it, drying the world ever so slightly. In other words, one could say that, in the past, it wasn’t so much the heat as (wait for it) the humidity.

Mainstream scientists will not look kindly upon these conclusions, and that only stands to reason; this is not a very lucrative theory, after all. We apologize if this posting puts Al Gore out of a job, but truth will out.

OPERATION SHREWD EUPHEMISM

2007-04-02T13:19:00.000-07:00

If we were not above apology, we would offer regrets for our recent absence from the blogosphere. Suffice it to say, we are deeply embroiled in a project that will be taking up more and more of our time over the coming months. It would not behoove us to share with you the goal of this project, but since you, faithful Reader, have been such a faithful reader, we will bestow upon you a series of hints that will enable your imaginations to catch fire. This new project involves:

A jarful of mosquitos
The home telephone numbers of all members of the United States House of Representatives
A carefully drawn map of the Paris sewer system
Three syringes of pure oxyglutamine
23 signed headshots of Jennifer Hudson
A dozen Lascar strongmen, primed for adventure
Two rocks
A Rembrandt painting entitled “The Conspiratorial Blessing of Isaac Firkkens,” which is believed to be a fake but is actually a Rembrandt painting entitled “Christ Oversees the Swineherds”
Three Charles Darwin beard hairs
An incriminating Betamax cassette of Jimmy Carter cavorting with Roy Cohn
A cyborg giraffe
Deep love for our craft

Anybody who can guess the object of our scheme will get a free signed first edition copy of our book. When we write it.

HOUDINNIT?

2007-03-29T12:24:00.000-07:00

This could hardly be more fascinating: plans are afoot to exhume the earthly remains of the famed illusionist and international spy Harry Houdini.

But why? Why? Why? Also, why? Could it have something to do with his bitter, lifelong rivalry with fellow magician (and former lover) Harry Blackstone, during which 33 individuals were killed or injured in the crossfire? Or his stint as a shape-shifting triple agent in the Balkan region during the years leading up to WWI, when he stood in for the already-murdered Archduke Franz Ferdinand at the sham assassination that started it all? Or his reputation as a notoriously clumsy man, and the persistent rumors that in actuality he tripped and stumbled off San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge, his corpse never recovered?

The answer, despite certain theories that his death was caused by poison or injury or something, is most likely an amalgam of all these factors. A man as multifaceted as Houdini – performer, espionage agent, oaf – is not likely to have one single explanation for his death. In fact, he is not like to have one single death. Catlike, is it not possible that Houdini still lives on, in a seventh or eighth incarnation? (And no, we’re not talking about that dickwad David Blaine.) It’s only too possible that digging up his grave will only create more mysteries which, when solved, will then create further mysteries, stemming out to strangle the future in a hydra-esque tangle of unknownness.

It will come as a shock to some of you to hear us say this, but perhaps Houdini’s final resting place should remain unblemished. And this is NOT because we would like to take advantage of the lull to dig it up ourselves, thank you very much. Despite his bumbling demeanor, Houdini was, after all, a master escape artist. If it turns out that he escaped death itself, what else do we common mortals have to live for? What need will you, Dear Reader, have for a poor Apocryphist?

MANIMAL PLANET

2007-03-28T08:31:00.000-07:00

Thomas Edison once said that agriculture was 15% inspiration and 85% perspiration. This equation lines up eerily well with the result of a new scientific experiment, in which scientists at the University of Nevada (the Mystery State) have created a sheep that is 85% sheep and 15% human.

Do you remember The Island of Dr. Moreau, the science-fiction picture in which mafia don Marlon Brando creates an army of animal-human hybrids to fight against a corrupt dockworkers’ union in steamy New Orleans? (There’s even a scene in which he tries to impregnate a cow, using butter as lube.) Well this is like that, only with a smaller budget. We have long predicted out loud to fellow cabal members and telephone sex workers that the Age of Composite Fauna is approaching. From here on out, we should consider it upon us.

Unlike many shrill evangelists of pure humanity, we approach this new era with open arms (or even better, wings; maybe tentacles). Those who have nothing but fear and loathing for extrahuman phenomena (we’re looking at you, H.P. Lovecraft) will simply be left in the dust as those of us with mighty centaur legs gallop ever faster down the highway of progress.

There is some concern that harvesting the organs of these new man-sheep, or “sheeple,” will create so-called “silent viruses” as collateral effects of the mucking-about with newly formed organic entities. This is crapulent thinking. First of all, every virus is silent – have you ever heard a virus pundit pontificate on television, or a virus a cappella group perform on a college campus, or a virus call-girl fake an orgasm? Seriously, shut up. Secondly, the woolly coats of sheep protect them from the cold, and therefore significantly reduce the risk of disease. It’s not like we’re harvesting the organs of maggots or slime-monsters here; sheep are warm, healthy creatures. Why else do we wear wool sweaters in the wintertime? Because they look nice?

Finally, there are the moral questions.

Yup. There they are.

So let us offer a warm embrace to the returning mongrel animals of old: the pegasi, the manticores, the minotaurs, the sphinxes, mermaids, harpies, lamia, lobster apes, mollusk-crustaceans, flagellephants, giraffghan hounds, kangarhinos, birdfish, cogs, dats, wuzzles, platypuses, horsealioninjaardvarkapis and griffins. (But not chimeras. Chimeras are a myth.) Long may them mingle, and intermingle, and extramingle, and like that.

HEAVEN’S GREAT (We Hope, For Their Sakes)

2007-03-27T12:17:00.000-07:00

Today marks the tenth anniversary of the Heaven’s Gate cult mass suicide. When the Halley’s Bop comet appeared over American skies in 1997, the members of this fringe religion shocked the nation by chewing on jellied Chuckles candies poisoned with arsenic, believing that by leaving their human shells they would join the crew of the spaceship they claimed was hiding either inside or behind the comet (no one was ever terribly clear on that point). Now that a decade has passed, is there anything new to be learned from the cultists’ foolish example?

After being cruelly disappointed by a major film flop so severe that it changed the face of Hollywood bureaucracy, director Michael Cimino went into a period of self-imposed exile in the California desert. He emerged with a new name, Marshall Applewhite, and a vision far stranger than any mere three-and-a-half hour cinematic trifle. Convinced that human beings could join a superior race of interstellar beings by embracing technology and castrating themselves, Applewhite joined forces with Senator Al Gore to invent the Internet, without the Senator fully understanding his partner’s dark intent.

Applewhite used this new communication medium to attract various nerds interested in meeting aliens, much the way it is still used today. Additionally, inventing the Internet created a demand for web design, which allowed the Heaven’s Gate community to make money while not having to deal too directly with other people who might find their lack of genitals off-putting. (To throw people off the scent, they invented Internet porn for good measure.) When the comet appeared in Spring 1997, it seemed as good an omen as any. Breaking into their vast reserve of quarters (the only currency by which the cult would accept payment for their web design), they raided the nation’s vending machines to liberate the precious sugar-sprinkled confections that would be the vessels of their mortal coil-shedding.

We dated a member of the cult once, about a year or two before the incident. Accustomed to potential mates with a greater-than-average interest in extraterrestrials and self-immolation, we thought little of it at the time. Upon hearing of her community’s having gone all Jonestown on itself, we were retrospectively thankful that the action never progressed further than second base; if the cult’s male members were known for, well, removing their male members, we shudder to think what the women did in kind.

Perhaps, though, it is those of us who remain that missed our chance at graceful, satisfying lives. Perhaps the denizens of Heaven’s Gate are speeding around now in their souped-up, custom-fitted comet, making merry with a group of otherworldly beings far sexier and more awesome than anything our inadequate brains and hearts can currently visualize. If we are still alive when the comet returns in the year 4380, maybe we too will hop on and join the party for its next go-round.

IN WHICH WE FINALLY SUCCUMB TO THE INEVITABLE

2007-03-26T09:29:00.000-07:00

This morning, Broward County Medical Examiner Josh Perper declared the death of golddigger, spokesmodel and sometime Avatar of Our Times Anna Nicole Smith to be “accidental.” We have refrained from joining the media circus surrounding Ms. Smith’s untimely demise out of delicacy and respect, but our long-held belief that there are no “accidents” in this world compels us to break our silence. Besides, her boobs were just so big!

There is very little about Ms. Smith’s life that has not already been said before, so we will merely skip to the details that nobody has ever heard. She had a deathly phobia of frogs. She was one of the few people on earth who learned how to ride a bicycle but then forgot. She offered to sleep with Count Dracula, but he was afraid he would accidentally bite her and make her immortal. Her favorite cheese was asiago. Her favorite book was Dune.

Speculations about the true cause of Ms. Smith’s death have been flying around like the prize pancakes of an acrobatic short-order cook. Was it murder? Was it suicide? Was it murder by somebody else? There was a lot of money at stake: $3.7 billion in gold bullion, millions of barrels of crude oil, about three-quarters of the planet Neptune, and an old treasure map. There are more motives afoot than Chinese people, and very few have been able to dodge suspicion. (Even the Apocryphist is a minor suspect, the result of an incident that will not be recounted unless we decide some night to post while very, very drunk.)

However, the disingenuousness of the Broward County Medical Examiner’s Office in declaring the death “accidental” is the most suspicious maneuver to date. It is worth noting that the Hard Rock Rock ‘n’ Roll Casino and Rockin’ Hotel where she died is located on tribal land, and that the case is being investigated by the Seminole Police Department. Is it not feasible that there is another angle to this incident? When the blond buxom, nigh-Teutonic symbol of postmodern America is killed on property owned by the aggrieved Native Americans who have been raped, pillaged and marginalized by the very nation Ms. Smith is purported to symbolize, could there not be graver sociopolitical issues at play? Could this be a sign that the Red Man is ready to rise again?

Also, we must remain wary of any Medical Examiner whose last name begins with “perp.”

We refrain from drawing conclusions at this time, other than to say that the Broward County Medical Examiner’s Office is either stupid or nefarious or some combination of the two. Let us hope that this case is resolved with swiftness and integrity, if for no other reason than for the sake of Ms. Smith’s sole survivor, the two-headed freak child Danielynn.

AN IMPLICIT INVITATION MADE EMBARRASSINGLY PLICIT

2007-03-23T12:25:00.000-07:00

It has been five full weeks since we began disseminating classified, semi-classified, quasi-classified, pseudo-classified and crypto-classified information to the likes of you, the Reader, in the weblog format you see before you. The echo of our voice within the void of the digital canyons surrounding us is satisfying, sure, but occasionally we find ourselves wishing to determine better what type of walls this form of virtual sonar is bouncing back to us from.

Now, we understand full well the risks inherent in being seen fraternizing with us – if our own cabal found out about this site they would KILL us (most likely by hypnotizing us into killing ourselves). This is why we must point out that – and we apologize if you find this shocking – “The Apocryphist” is not our real name. At the risk of making things even more complicated, and of bursting the delicate illusion we’ve been so painstaking in the preparation of, we are not even actually more than one person, but rather, an individual entity exercising a common stylistic conceit not dissimilar to the Royal We, but only without all the corruption and inbredness endemic to blood monarchy.

Our goal in revealing this anonymity is that we wish to persuade you, the Reader (and yes, we’re pretty sure we’re being accurate in using the singular form) to likewise cloak yourself in the incognititude available to members of a fake community such as the Labyrosphere (this is our one of our new words for the Internet – we’re working on others as well). We wish to encourage you, with honeyed words and persuasive gestures, to sign up for a free gmail account under the assumed name of your choice, and to engage in fierce debate with us, free from the stress and turmoil caused by the prying eyes of overlords and co-cabalists. The comment section of this and many other entries fairly cries out with the pregnantly trembling tears of solitude – and though we enjoy that about three-quarters of the time, the last fourth could stand to be filled up with your opinions, refutations, rebuttals, denials, professions of brotherhood, and, in their proper place, ejaculations.

We await your move, Reader. Or, shall we say, “Joe.”

SPRING FORSAKENING

2007-03-22T13:55:00.000-07:00

We were so stymied by our recent trip to America’s Floor Show that we nearly neglected an important solar occasion: the Vernal Equinox. On Wednesday morning at 12:07am (UTC time), the sun lined up directly with the equator for the first time since September 23, 2006, adding one more notch to the earth’s still-unbroken streak of doing the same exact thing year after year after year. (The equator, for those of you who may be unfamiliar with this conceit, is the less fashionable companion of the better known Tropics of Cancer and Capricorn.)

Though lacking the breathless pagan appeal of the far sexier Solstices, there’s nothing like a good Equinox to remind you what it’s like to be at the exact middle of something. We spend so much of our lives slightly to the right or left of the middle that we forget just how boring it can be when you’re flush up against the real thing. During Vernal and Autumnal Equonices (the plural of "Equinox"), the brain’s level of oxyglutamine reaches a steady equilibrium, resulting in most people not caring much one way or another – only much more so than is the norm. The upshot is that the Vernal Equinox is one of the two most staggeringly mundane days of the year.

It’s well-known that eggs can be balanced on the earth during an Equinox. It’s less well known that you can also balance almost anything else from almost any angle on such a day, provided you have the patience to spend a REALLY long time doing it (any more than 24 hours, though, and it’s no longer the Equinox now is it?) You can balance a bull on the horns, a skyscraper on its spire, or (most dazzlingly) a spinning plate on the end of a stick. Fascinating pornography has been filmed on the Equinox, though the difficulty of getting camera equipment to work properly under such conditions makes the result one of the rarest, most sought-after sights in recorded titillation. We’ve never seen any of this special footage ourselves, but as always, any hot tips can be forwarded directly to theapocryphist@gmail.com.

SIGN CITY

2007-03-21T08:46:00.000-07:00

Las Vegas is nothing if not a city of signifiers. How could we play cards without recognizing the suits? How could we choose the proper drink without being able to read the illuminating labels? How could we be titillated by an erotic dancer without understanding what a boobie looks like?

However, Las Vegas is also a city where the signifiers are intentionally jumbled to send conflicting messages to confused tourists, thereby making them more vulnerable and willing to divest their assets on anything that remotely promises to harness the crushing powers of fate. Here are a few such examples. (Clicking on the images will bestow their true import.)

Amidst a jumble of messages, one of above all rings true: "What the hell is this message?" Obviously there is gold and jewelry being advertised, but where? And to what end? The mangled digital display encourages people to seek such purposes anywhere they can find them - even, perhaps in the pocket of a golf shirt or beneath the whirling waters of a day spa.

This yellow billboard imparts a chilling message: "TH YOANIOR I-J FOING USIELF GROW" Ignore it at your own risk.

The barbaric pracice of ritual shopper decapitation is illustrated in this display, fronting a construction site. The bag-holding hand is often kept by the attacker as a trophy.

It's very cute how this Rousseau-esque painting features a trompe l'oeil portrait of an actual tiger near the bottom. For a split second, it almost seems real!

Even an empty sign is capable of communicating content.

Finally, the most depressing sign on earth. $44.95 rooms? $1.99 margaritas? Anything that cheap must be full to brimming with botulism. (The part about nightly mud wrestling is hidden in this view.) The only thing worthwhile thing about this sign is the animated neon image of The Bull. That part's awesome.

Well, this concludes our coverage of our journey to Las Vegas. If we told you anything more, we would have to marry you and then strangle you for the insurance money. That's how things (i.e. dice) roll in this town.

STARDUST (natch) MEMORIES

2007-03-20T07:46:00.000-07:00

We have returned to the Eastern Seaboard, several days older and wiser than when we left. The trip home was a disaster, and we were so depressed by all the acid snow we discovered upon our return that we couldn’t bring ourselves to address our legion of admirers yesterday. Of course, much of the morning was also spent with Neqa’el at the vet – the less said about the attempted robot mating the better. Suffice to say, Neqa’el will resemble one of her mummified forebears for the next month or year or so.

Of course, the lacerating question on the lips of the teeming dozens has surely been: what about the Stardust? Has the mystery of the diminishing nugget, as so exhaustively chronicled on this page last week, been solved to the satisfaction of posterity? The answer lies in rubble. Literally, the answer both is and is contained within rubble. Just look at this:

(Click on each photo to reveal its full beauty.) That is the approach to demolished hotel/casino across the no-doubt-soon-to-be-renamed “Stardust Boulevard.” Here is a closer view of the construction site:

(Note the misspelling of the word “Eschaton.”) Now peep through the break in the fence with us, won’t you?

Check out those twisted sheets of gold near the front of the pile. We would have taken a closer look, but the sign clearly said “No Loitering.” We went around the corner and viewed the wreckage through a fence-hole directly fronting the Strip.

That fallen white box-like structure is the Tomb of Sammy Davis, Jr. The bastards were in such a hurry to blow the place up that they didn’t even bother to disinter his one-eyed corpse.

Look at the famous Stardust sign. So empty! So artistically framed by the talented amateur photographer! Here is a closer shot. The very sky has darkened with sadness:

O, sweet Stardust of yore! Your post-deco de-luxe mysteries remain unpenetrated by the gentle hands of an Apocryphist! It will never be known whether the legendary Vegas Nugget remains deep within thy sub-sub-sub-basement! We would have taken a closer look, but it was daytime, and the fence was high, and we think we saw an angry dog inside. Sleep well, resort of cosmic sparkle! Sleep through an eternity of stylish, drunken peace! You revolve upon the $500K Chip of the Divine now. Sleep!

THERE IS NO PUN OR CLEVER REFERENCE TO AIR TRAVEL THAT HAS NOT BEEN USED A MILLION TIMES BEFORE

2007-03-15T09:13:00.000-07:00

This afternoon we set foot on an airplane that is flying to Las Vegas. Unless this flight or the return one gets lost in the Arkansas Triangle, we will be back at our keyboard on Monday morning, sharing uploaded photos of ambiguous sights experienced around the perimeters of the Greater Cabal Convetion (GreCabCon for short).

As excited as we are, we cannot help but feel some misgivings about leaving town. In particular, we are not pleased about having to leave Neqa’el behind for so long, especially after her confidential-cryogenic-report-induced vomiting spell this past weekend. There are so many things around the apartment to sicken a cat when gnawed on, and we don’t trust her self-restraint in a situation during which we are not around to snap our fingers ineffectually at her when she strays too close to forbidden secrets.

It has been difficult to procure someone to feed Nequa’el and scoop out her litterbox during our absence. The landlady? Like, no way. It’s bad enough that she paces the hallway complaining about the smell of our incense and chemicals when we’re in the midst of a truly invigorating bout of research – one can only imagine what she would think of our Cabinet of Medical Curiosities or our Mayan stone altar (which was a bitch to get up the stairs, believe you me). We could have asked Gregoire, our agoraphobic cabal member who has opted to teleconference GreCabCon rather than expose himself to sunlight, but, well, he’s agoraphobic. And we briefly considered hiring an intern, but we have had poor luck in the past w/r/t interns and spontaneous combustion.

No, only one option remained: to hire a robot caretaker. The expense is regrettable, certainly, but Neqa’el is surely worth the pursestrain. In addition to which, we have been able to take advantage of the rental to conduct some robot experiments we’ve been meaning to get to for some time. Some time back we built a simplistic android capable of conducting the human business of lying around the house and watching television with uncanny verisimilitude. For the purposes of tending to Neqa’el we have procured the services of an attractive female robot, whose charms our layabout model cannot help but be receptive to. If our webcam manages not to break down like it does every damn time we try to use it, perhaps we will have some enlightening results to share with you next week…

Well, the time has come to finish packing. It’s never easy to pack for GreCabCon, because one never knows what to wear. The whole point of a secret society is not to be noticed, but then how do you recognize each other when you need to have a meeting? Anyway, wish us luck. We’ll try not to gamble too much – it’s never wise to tempt fate.

3.1415926535897932384-eva

2007-03-14T08:05:00.000-07:00

The decorative displays in storefront windows have been setting the mood for weeks now, the radios have all the relevant songs in heavy rotation, and the media coverage is little short of overwhelming. Still, we can’t help but feel that unmistakable, childlike thrill: International Pi Day is here!

Started in 1988 by San Francisco nuclear research facility and conservative think tank The Exploratorium, Pi Day was created to coincide with the birthday of Albert Einstein, inventor of the circle. Scientists around the globe come together on Pi Day, regardless of race, color, ethnicity, and genetic determinants, in order to add a billion new digits to the end of pi each year. If we took all the decimal points in the current rendering of pi, laid them end to end around the equator, and multiplied them by the diameter in order to calculate the earth’s circumference, it would make a perfect circle.

Many Egyptian, Greek, Chinese and Indian mathematicians of ancient times predicted the existence of pi, but nobody listened to them because they didn’t know the language. It wasn’t until Albert Einstein, hard at work forging the atomic bomb in his home laboratory at Los Alamos, found the need to insert a cylindrical plutonium rod into a traditionally square slot that the circle was truly invented. Though there had long been a folk tradition of “smooth shapes without corners” and so-called “slick squares,” these were dismissed as legend until Einstein’s groundbreaking work.

Bay Area celebrations of International Pi Day will include a parade, pizza specials around town, and the systematic lopping off of SF’s extraneous appendages to make it a perfect circle (rain date: March 15). We here in New York do not celebrate International Pi Day to the same extent, since this city of grids has yet to appoint the circle a municipally recognized shape, despite the unanimous ratification of the oval in 1993. Still, International Pi Day cheer is palpable in the air. When you pass a stranger on the street, make his or her day by rattling off a few dozen decimal places. But remember: if you make a mistake, International Pi Day etiquette dictates that you must be hit in the face at your own expense with a pie chosen by the hearer – even if it’s a sharp one, like pecan.

STARASHES TO STARASHES...

2007-03-13T08:27:00.000-07:00

This morning’s sudden, unannounced demolition of the Stardust Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas does not bode well for the Apocryphist’s upcoming travels. The Greater Cabal Convention will not be affected – it’s being held in an underground resort called the Ravenlocke, twenty stories beneath the Vegas Strip – but some of our own extracurricular investigations have been compromised (intentionally, of course) by this unfortunate implosion.

At fifty years old the Stardust was, in Vegas terms, wizened, long-bearded and seething with liver spots. The Rat Pack called it home, often literally – there were no fewer than five separate penthouses, all connected by secret passageways, each passageway housing a fully stocked bar. It was also the birthplace of the martini, named for Ol’ Blue Eyes himself, Dean Martin. But these details barely hint at the true depth of the Stardust’s bewildering secrets.

Every schoolboy knows that sixty years ago Nevada was visited by nobody but military scientists and senior citizens looking to take advantage of the supposed healing qualities of the regions lush radiation baths. But all of that changed, of course, when a solid gold meteorite the size of a mobile home landed on a stretch of little-used road right outside the sleepy hamlet of Las Vegas. As soon as the citizenry grew bored of chipping off small chunks of it to pay for beer, they decided that they could make even more money by inviting tourists to come and pay for the privilege of doing so themselves. The practice became so popular that people began to raffle off their spots in line for easy cash, and thus the Las Vegas gambling industry was born.

Over time, the meteorite dwindled to the size of a prize-winning pumpkin, and was largely forgotten in the flurry of borderline-legal sexual and monetary transactions that it helped to spawn. During the ensuing decades, it would be spotted now and again, always a bit smaller, stowed in the forlorn corner of a busy casino floor, or sitting alone on a barstool at 3 in the morning, ignored by everybody, an untouched Tom Collins on the bar in front of it. The last known sighting of the meteorite, now nugget-sized, was in the audience of a Wayne Newton matinee at the Stardust in June 1989. During Newton’s second encore, a redheaded woman in a green-spangled dress was seen picking the nugget up from its seat and placing it within her purse. She had been noticed in the company of the nugget before, so nobody thought it out of the ordinary. But neither of them was ever seen again.

We intended to swing by the Stardust while in Vegas in order to investigate this strange disappearance. But after announcing our trip to the Greater Cabal Convention in yesterday’s entry, Stardust management quickly decided to destroy the casino and begin building a new $4 billion complex called the Eschaton in its place. This is too coincidental to be overlooked. We are much less likely to find clues to the fate of the Vegas meteorite in a pile of dust and rubble than we would in a fully functioning hotel-casino of the city’s golden age. But that doesn’t mean we won’t still try.

MYTH MANAGEMENT

2007-03-09T09:07:00.000-08:00

We’ve decided that it was a bit unfair to devote multiple posts in a single week to revealing the nonexistence of various notable figures. In order to prevent us from pulling another such nasty trick in the future, we would like to clear the air by offering a complete list of Individuals Who Most People Assume Are Real But Actually Were Completely Made Up. If you receive leads about any other such figures that we may have missed, please inform us immediately.

PEOPLE THAT DON’T EXIST
Jesus
Jean Baudrillard
Jacques Derrida
Michel Foucault
Charles Dickens
Aristophanes
Chef Boy-ar-Dee
Grover Cleveland
Lee Harvey Oswald (duh)
Sidney Poitier
Charlie McCarthy
Alexander Graham Bell
King Henry III
Enrico Caruso
Mamie Eisenhower
Ponce de Leon
Sid Vicious
Susan B. Anthony
Hercules (but not Herakles)
Spike Jonze (but not Spike Jones)
Dave Thomas (the Wendy’s guy, not the SCTV star)
John D. Rockefeller
Ho Chi Minh
Phillip K. Dick
Lillian Gish
The Pope (any)
Cavemen
Mr. Snuffleupagus
Whoever invented Tupperware
That rich aunt you’re expecting to inherit money from
Jesus’s clone
All who disbelieve the arcane wisdom of The Apocryphist
Bob Hope

Bonus List:

PEOPLE WE CAN’T GET ENOUGH OF
Jennifer Hudson

POST MO(DERN)RTEM

2007-03-08T09:19:00.000-08:00

The possibility exists that at least one person out there had some form of thought, sentiment, opinion, position or brief, peripheral moment of awareness regarding the death Tuesday of French philosopher Jean Baudrillard. However, since “French” and “philosopher” have been voted the two words most likely to put an American citizen to sleep immediately upon utterance, it’s unlikely that many have taken the time and effort to untangle the various ontological knots that are his legacy.

Best known for devising the concept of the simulacrum and inventing the geodesic dome, Baudrillard spent years building a reputation as one of the densest and most paradoxical of modern thinkers. His theory that the world as we know it has been replaced with a false reality of manufactured image was simplified and adopted by such popular science-fiction films as Soylent Green and The Wedding Singer. But by far the most surprising detail about this man’s life and work is the fact that, like Jesus, he never actually walked the earth.

It’s long been known in the most concentric of literary circles that Baudrillard was a fictional character created by French deconstructionist Jacques Derrida (1930-2004), as the result of a drunken bet that he couldn’t come up with a writer capable of spewing even more garbled theory than himself. This would ordinarily be nothing more than an amusing anecdote in the history of bullshit, but for that the fact that Derrida himself was an invention of French post-structuralist Michel Foucault (1926-1984). As no one else during his lifetime was capable of following his circuitous prose, Foucault concocted Derrida as an imaginary friend, colleague, and occasional gay lover. The conceit stuck, however, and Derrida – like Baudrillard after him – became a notable public figure in his own right.

Foucault himself was the great-grandson of the Marquis de Follard, a 19th-century pedant who appeared throughout the French countryside dispensing phrases of mock wisdom filled with English malapropisms. Little biographical information exists concerning the Marquis, since he was a minor character in Charles Dickens’s little-read 1852 novel A Common Whimmletucket, which followed the adventures of young Horace Whimmletucket as he traversed the Continent pursuing the secret of his mysterious parentage. And since Dickens himself was a speculative creation of the ancient Athenian playwright Aristophanes, well, there you have it.

All of this was not so much predicted by Baudrillard's corpus of learned obfuscation as accurately described after the fact. It takes a simulacrum to know a simulacrum, as the saying may or may not go, and Baudrillard was definitely maybe or maybe not one of them. Rest in peace, man who never was.

SYCOPHANTIC PUPPET FOUND GUILTY

2007-03-07T09:34:00.000-08:00

The nation is abuzz with the news that former Dick Cheney aide I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby has been convicted on four counts of being a federal jackass. The only surprise here is that Cheney’s greasy monkey wrench wasn’t potent enough to gum up the gears of justice. How did things come to this pass?

It all started when Libby was accused of outing CIA agent Valerie Plame as a lesbian. Because the Bush administration had publicly accused the gays of hiding weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, any such allegation had the effect of political botulism – and not the good kind. Plame’s career in tatters, Libby went on to accuse Meet the Press host Randy Quaid of making the whole thing up. After framing reporter Judith Regan for soliciting incriminating evidence in the form of a murder confession by beloved Naked Gun actor O.J. Simpson, Libby’s machinations began to be perceived as serving no purpose other than his own entertainment. This is when the anthropomorphic vultures began to pull out their silverware, tie napkins around their necks, and greedily lick their chops.

The question of the hour is: where was Cheney during all this? The answer is disarmingly simple: the bathroom. It’s still unclear what he was doing in there, but he failed to emerge for a full three years (a Washington record surpassed only by President William Howard Taft, who spent his entire 1909-1913 term in the bathtub). The next step in the investigation will no doubt involve trying to determine whether Cheney had a cell phone with him. If he did, the whole house of cards can be expected to fall like so many dominos.

Nicknamed for the way that, during potty training, he would wipe his behind by dragging it across the ground like a dog, “Scooter” Libby leaves behind a rich legacy of governmental malfeasance. As a State Department employee in the 1980s, he was charged with accelerating the fall of the USSR by making demeaning crank calls to top Communist Party officials. Working for the Pentagon in the early 1990s, he argued against intervention in Bosnia on the grounds that Balkan people “smell like hamsters.” More recently, as Cheney’s Chief of Staff, he chose a screaming chartreuse for the color of the Vice President’s bed linens.

Libby’s lawyers have already declared that they’re going to appeal the ruling. Meanwhile, Cheney’s press secretary recently announced that the VP “has to take a whiz,” which most likely means a further period of self-imposed exile. However, just because the cookie jar snapped closed on his hand, severing it, doesn’t mean that Libby won’t keep busy: his autobiography – I, Lewis “Scooter” Libby – will be released by HarperCollins this fall.

OURS IS PURPLE

2007-03-06T08:28:00.000-08:00

We are almost as tired of hearing about the fact that Jesus was a real human being as we were formerly tired of hearing about his status as the Son of God. Have 2000 years of this bullshit really taught you nothing? THERE’S NO SUCH THING AS A JESUS. Now, we know how difficult it is to prove a negative, but damned if we’re not going to try. (Also damned if we are, depending on what you subscribe to.)

A compelling piece of evidence for the case of there never having been a Jesus of any kind ever can be found in the following interview with a Wisconsin snow-plow driver named Morris Berkman. In 1973, Berkman received a visitation from the Angel Gabriel, who went on to tell him that Jesus did not exist before he was created by Christians. The below is excerpted from a 1977 pamphlet entitled Does God Know Your Favorite Color? It is, as we hope you have guessed by now, so far out of print that there is no record of it ever having been. (Much like Jesus! Except that in this case it’s real, whereas Jesus is not.)

INTERVIEWER: Tell us about your visitation.

MORRIS BERKMAN: Well, it was January 17, 1973. We had a blizzard the night before, and I had been working for about eleven hours. It was getting to be sunset, and I was on a back road, when my plow just stopped. Stalled out.

INTERVIEWER: Was there anything unusual about that?

MB: It was a pain in the ass.

INTERVIEWER: What happened next?

MB: Well, I was sitting in the cab there, about to radio back to the B and R -- that's Buildings and Roads -- when a raccoon started walking across the snow in front of me.

INTERVIEWER: Was it a normal raccoon?

MB: At first. But when it got in front of my plow, it turned and looked right at me. Into my soul, you know? I hate it when animals do that.

INTERVIEWER: What happened next?

MB: Well, it jumped onto the hood of the vehicle and started pawing at my windshield.

INTERVIEWER: Did you let it in?

MB: No sir! Those things have rabies!

INTERVIEWER: So how did you know it was an avatar of the Angel Gabriel?

MB: Well, it pointed at me with one of those sharp claws it had, and when I shook my head no, it cut out a perfect circle on the windshield and hopped in. It sat on the passenger seat.

INTERVIEWER: Did it speak to you?

MB: Yeah. But kind of in my mind, you know? It didn’t have a larynx.

INTERVIEWER: Uh-huh. What did it say?

MB: I’ll be honest, I didn’t understand the half of it. But it told me that it was the Angel Gabriel, and that it was visiting me because I had to be a prophet of truth.

INTERVIEWER: Did it say anything about Jesus?

MB: I’m getting there! God… So it told me there was no such person as Jesus. He was just a myth, that the priests created in order to make up Christianity and oppress people and crap.

INTERVIEWER: Did it tell you why the priests did this?

MB: It said a lot of stuff about free will and Providence and some Bible names that I couldn’t keep straight. But by this point, though, I was thinking, there’s a goddamn raccoon talking into my mind in the passenger seat of a snow-plow in the middle of Nowhere, Wisconsin. Why should I trust it?

INTERVIEWER: But you felt compelled to come out and tell your story.

MB: Hell yes. It told me if I didn’t, it would come into my house and give me rabies. But worse rabies than normal rabies, some kind of God rabies. And that it would bite me on my balls to do it.

INTERVIEWER: Did you ever stop to ask why a supposed agent of God would be trying to argue against the existence of Jesus, the belief in whom has been a major source of religious faith for millennia?

MB: No.

INTERVIEWER: Why not?

MB: I didn’t understand the question.

If anybody runs into a copy of Does God Know Your Favorite Color?, please write to us at theapocrpyhist@gmail.com. We will trade an uncut page of Series 1 Wacky Packages for it.

OBLIGATORY PERSONAL POST

2007-03-05T07:38:00.000-08:00

A funny thing happened at our cabal meeting this weekend. Unfortunately, we can’t tell you anything about it, because doing so could endanger the lives of yourself and all those close to you. It was really funny, though.

PROVE YOUR WORTH

2007-03-02T09:18:00.000-08:00

The time is ripe for the inceptive edition of the Apocryphist Quiz. Over the past two weeks we have given you may thoughts and ideas to masticate, cudlike, at your leisure – prodded tongue-wise from one side of your mental mouth the other as they slowly dissolve in saliva, grinded betwixt molar and canine, streaking in microscopic bits down the sides of your cogitative gullet. As such, we’ll keep it simple.

What is this a picture of?

A) A Indian teacher giving students a science lesson involving the spread of malaria

B) A rare taxidermied specimen of the Giant Mosquito of Uttar Pradesh

C) A rare congregation of the Indian Pygmies of Uttar Pradesh (pictured with normal-sized mosquito)

D) A devotional session in honor of Grashnush, the pointy, annoying Hindu god of children

E) A little-seen Max Ernst collage

F) Something involving LSD

Please post comments containing the explanations behind your preferred theory. The most accurate, comprehensive post will be chosen on Monday to receive a SPECIAL PRIZE. Do not insult us both by asking to know what this prize is.

ARTHUR TOO: ON THE COCKS

2007-03-01T09:17:00.000-08:00

That the mainstream obituaries for Presidential historian Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. have consistently and shamelessly bollocksed up the facts should come as no surprise. This is because these facts have been largely unavailable, kept under lock and key for decades by the notoriously paranoid, secretive man himself.

In his writings and his life he presented the perfect profile of the genial liberal intellectual, citing the New Deal and John F. Kennedy as avatars of ideal government. But in reality, Schlesinger had no interest in politics whatsoever. His prolific literary and journalistic output was little more than a smokescreen obscuring his true passion: cockfighting.

Now that he is deceased, his story can finally be told – the story of a good farm boy from Indiana who loved nothing more than to watch roosters with blades attached to their feet fight each other to the bloody death. Though on the plains of Indiana such activity was considered socially acceptable, even mandatory in certain parishes, young Schlesinger’s aptitude for raising and training avian carnage machines was so pronounced that wider pastures awaited him. Unfortunately, this activity being illegal, he needed something else to fall back on; this something turned out to be American history.

Rising in the morning, Schlesinger would knock off 5,000 words of whatever historical text he was working on before breakfast, which generally consisted of eggs laid by the hens of defeated roosters. In private interviews with friends, he claimed that writing incisive reportage and analysis was as easy and boring as breathing – though approximately a million times more lucrative. Whether the subject was Andrew Jackson, the rise of multiculturalism in America, or his good friend Kennedy (with whom he shared the bond of bloodlust), his effortlessly analytical left brain did all the work, freeing his right brain for contemplation of the day’s more substantial matter.

In the shadow world of cockfighting, there was no name more respected than that of “El Historiador,” as he was known to his foes. His charges rose through the ranks of the American Bellicose Poultry Association, taking in Top Three titles every year from 1947 through 2002, when he retired from the sport to write a pseudonymous history of its parallel development with American governance. But despite his success, he was no sore winner; among other philanthropical efforts, he anonymously endowed a permanent Cock Bed at Beth Israel Veterinary Center, for the recuperation of his rivals.

The cockfighting world mourns its unsung patriarch equally as much as the three or four people who have read his books. The beak of history has finally impaled Schlesinger and called him home.

BONUS APOCRYPHA: Schlesinger and his son, filmmaker John Schlesinger, fought a pistol duel in 1977 over John’s outspoken repugnance towards his father’s life’s work. They both lost an eye.

AN ITCHY, BURNING CRASH

2007-02-28T09:19:00.000-08:00

So the U.S. economy was inches away from landing ass-first in the fecal, rat-infested depths of a Greater Depression yesterday. Some blame China, and its nefarious secret leader, Dr. Jonathan "Fu" Manchu (the Westernized grandson of the fictional pulp villain). But the fact of the matter is that economies, like the human beings subservient to them, are capable of catching bugs and viruses, and Tuesday's drop in the market was merely the financial equivalent of a nasty head cold.

Most people assume that disease far predated currency as a scourge of mankind. The truth, hard as it is to believe, is that money actually introduced sickness into the world. The fossil record shows that in the Paleosticene Era, humans first began picking fruit and trading it for other fruit or, more often, sex. Engorged on sweet treats, the homunculi located in the sperm grew corrupt and ornery, thereby initiating the world’s first STD. Other diseases followed. The Christian story of the Garden of Eden is simply an allegory for this primal monetary transaction.

Of course, if economies are able to spread illness to humans, the same is true of the reverse. Tuesday’s crash was not the result of a vast, interconnected web of socioeconomic factors; rather, it can be traced to one man, a 33-year old stockbroker in Shanghai named Chang Eng, who accidentally sneezed on the economy while walking to the rest room. The economy (which, as shares of citrus sales this quarter reveal, has not been taking its Vitamin C) thereby developed a fever, and an excess of mucous in the form widespread journalistic analysis. It was only one of those 24-hour things, though, so it’s feeling much better now, even though it’s still blowing its nose quite a bit.

The Stock Market Crash of the 1930s can similarly be attributed to biological causes. The freewheeling spirit of the Jazz Age encouraged massive amounts of binge drinking, and, due to excessive optimism levels in the bloodstreams of most flappers and dandies, the effects were deferred to the cash in their pockets, which soaked up the alcoholic residue sweated out of its hosts during novelty dance crazes. As such, what we consider the Great Depression was actually the Goddamn Hangover.

It’s best to consider events like yesterday’s as economic cold sores, painfully flaring up at annoying and embarrassing times to ooze information about our unhealthy past. Yes, this is gross, but so is licking a dollar bill.

THE DEVIL WORE A VARIETY OF TOP DESIGNERS

2007-02-27T08:11:00.000-08:00

As promised, today we will examine the hidden meanings behind some of Sunday’s Oscar fashions. It is not our intention to frighten you with our findings, merely to make you aware that, when matters of global significance are at stake, no detail is accidental.

Let’s start with Penelope Cruz (who is NOT Mexican, as Ellen Degeneres mistakenly implied, but Ecuadorian). You can immediately discern that her flesh-colored Versace gown resembles nothing more nor less than a feather duster (turn your monitor upside-down for the full effect). This optical illusion represents a subtle piece of stereotype-enforcing, implying as it does that Latin American women are suited for few jobs other than that of housekeeper and Oscar-nominated actress. It’s common knowledge that the House of Versace doubles as a white slavery ring (which is the reason behind founder Giovanni Versace’s FBI assassination in 1997). This explains why illegal immigrant Cruz, a Versace minion presented as a symbol of dashed hopes, was so desperate to win the award (see yesterday’s post).

Nicole Kidman’s Oscar gown (by Balenciaga) does not telegraph its intentions quite as readily. Those familiar with Ms. Kidman’s personal life are aware that she is incapable of feeling love for another human being. As such, she commissioned a dress with a prehensile bow that she could manipulate, Dr. Octopus-style, to forcibly snare a suitable mate. (Regrettably, the dress was not put into action because no one in attendance could live up to her alabaster standards.) The accompanying purse (constructed from baby phalanges) underlines her desire to establish a family, even if she must kill to do so. It contains a crystal vial holding ex-hubbie Tom Cruise’s only strand of pubic hair, as a talisman to ward him off were he to try and approach her on the carpet.

It was the belief of the aboriginal Hmstngmfti peoples of Mauritius that the soul is a black butterfly that perches on your bosom when you die. It is unclear whether Anne Hathaway's Valentino gown is a tribute to this ancient race, a sign that she is dead herself, or simply dumb-ass.

Rounding out our analysis is Jennifer Hudson (in Oscar de la Renta). Isn’t she just a peach? The metallic mini-cape was a poor choice, but probably inevitable when your personal stylist is Blacula. Luckily, she ditched it for the ceremony itself, when she charmed us all by bringing home a well-deserved statue. (We love you, Jennifer!) And pockets – who would have thought? It’s inspired us to have pockets installed in all of our pants – a trend that we believe will be taking off in 07.

WE'VE GOT OSCAR STOMACH FLU!

2007-02-26T09:23:00.000-08:00

It’s a little-known piece of Oscar trivia that the physical awards themselves can be used to pass through international borders in lieu of valid passports – the United Nations recognizes an Academy Award as a carte blanche surpassing all national sovereignty, catapulting winners of this honor into a cosmopolitan netherworld of unfettered access. However, as a check to the nigh-unlimited power the wielders of these golden statues would possess, Oscars are not allowed on airplanes. The result is that it’s unlikely for a terrorist go through the trouble of developing sufficient acting, writing, directing, producing or (more feasibly) technical chops to work his or her way up the Hollywood ranks in hopes of gaining a coveted nomination. It was briefly feared this year that Pan’s Labyrinth director Guillermo del Toro might secretly be an al-Qaeda operative (he has a beard), but any panic was laid to rest by the Academy’s unwillingness to nominate this shadowy, ethnic figure for an award. However, the overall preponderance of Mexicans in this year's nominations testifies to the willingness of our friends to the South to do whatever it takes to cross the U.S. border unmolested.

All of this is by way of prelude to the Apocryphist’s analysis of last night’s Academy Awards ceremony. It’s no secret that the results of this ostensibly entertainment-oriented contest have grave sociopolitical implications, and it is our goal today to uncover a bit of this secret knowledge for your delectation.

First of all, a clear message was being sent by the fact that the winners of the two leading performance awards – Dame Helen Mirren and Forrest Whitaker– portrayed world leaders going through a period of crisis. Not only that, but in their polar opposition – female vs. male, white vs. black, good vs. evil, skinny vs. fat, hairy vs. bald, etc. – further crucial details were being communicated to those with the savvy to detect them.

The technical explanation could keep us occupied for a full month of posts, but the pith of the matter is that the Academy believes the Antichrist will be elected U.S President in 2008. However, the interpretation leaves unresolved whether this will turn out to be Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama. They represent the dual forces at play in the presentation of last night’s major acting Awards – except one of them needs to gain some weight between now and next November. Whichever of the two breaks the scales during the next eighteen months could very well usher us into the End Times.

On a lighter note, wasn’t Jennifer Hudson fabulous? Imagine having to sing that show-stopping tune after losing the Award! Luckily the predictions were correct, and she was able to turn in a triumphant performance that simply blew away the crowd.

Finally, a word about Pilobolus, the dance company whose shadow-puppet antics delighted the restless crowd. The idea was for the shapes they created to be projected through the scrim onto Jack Nicholson’s bald pate, which would then reflect them through a skylight in the Kodak Theatre’s roof and project them onto the moon as a worldwide celebration of cinema magic (this is why Nicholson was always bathed in a blinding corona of light whenever he was on camera). Unfortunately, host Ellen Degeneres sabotaged the affair, believing that it would detract from the planned announcement of her Presidential candidacy. However, our inside correspondent tell us that Degeneres was scared straight when, in an unanticipated move, Pilobolus attacked and engulfed her behind the scrim, and threatened to snap her neck with their athletic thighs if she went through with her plan. Though the Nicholson-spotlight display was still unable to proceed, neither were Degeneres’ Presidential aspirations, leaving Hillary Clinton the sole lesbian candidate for the Democratic nomination.

TOMORROW: A semiological analysis of this year’s Oscar fashions.

OUR GREATEST EMANCIPATOR

2007-02-22T19:07:00.000-08:00

Amidst yesterday's dudgeon, we completely forgot about Washington's Birthday. Happy 314th, George!

CONDOM NATION

2007-02-22T11:20:00.000-08:00

We are not impressed with the recent decision by New York City to authorize the release of branded condoms free of charge to the populace.

In the first place, we believe that citizens need to EARN their right to birth control; if someone is wastrel enough that they either cannot or will not purchase their own contraceptives, being forced to raise a child is fit punishment. Besides which, certain cretins, upon hearing the phrase “city condoms,” will conjure a very different picture than that intended. But even beyond these quibbles, studies provide strong evidence that condoms just don’t work.

It’s not that we object to condoms in general – they have many exciting uses, but these have little to do with semen wrangling. Pregnancy and disease cannot be prevented with a condom, just as an oncoming asteroid cannot be deflected by covering the earth with gift wrap.

In the 18th Century, it was posited by Dutch reproductivologist Nicolas Suepersoeker that human sperm consisted of homunculi, tiny human beings that ran through the uterus with little pickaxes to break through the shell of the female egg to feast upon the yolky goodness within. The last surviving homunculus grew up to be the fetus. This hypothesis has proven to be not as far from the truth as modern medicine would have you believe. Human sperm are far more sharp and angular than current depictions imply, and they can break through a flimsy substance such as rubber with admirable ease. They also have minds of their own (albeit incredibly small ones), and well-suited to adapt to whatever rigors full-sized humans may put in their way.

How then, you ask, have condoms developed such a stalwart reputation as hygienic protectors? The answer is simple: television. The rise of condoms has coincided with the implementation of large, radioactive boxes in the homes of millions, entertaining hurdy-gurdies that, unbeknownst to most, are the cause of mass sterility. As men sit and enjoy their favorite programs, the waves coming from the screen are slowly murdering their homunculi, usually by stabbing or strangling. The condom is merely taking credit for the good work of the, ahem, boob tube.

This also goes a long way towards explaining the population boom and spread of disease prevalent in many third-world countries. Lacking TV, the sperm are bound to play havoc. Yes, a flat-screen, wall-mounted HD screen in every mud hut is an expensive foreign policy proposition, but every mass sterilization has to start somewhere. At the very least we should give all those poor Africans something truly useful, like vasectomies, or 60-hour work weeks and long, unstimulating marriages.

Of course, there is enough television in New York City to render an entire nation impotent. Handing out free condoms is at the very least redundant. For citizens too poor or busy to afford their own sets, Mayor Bloomberg should make it mandatory to spend one hour a week standing in the middle of Times Square – the concentrated rays of all those giant screens will make those little homunculi wish they were never born, and ensure that they’ll never be the cause of birth in others.

SOPHISTRY'S CHOICE

2007-02-21T08:47:00.000-08:00

You know how some people believe that “the more we learn, the less we know”?

This is totally incorrect.

Seriously, flip it around: “The less we learn, the more we know.” That doesn’t make sense either, which merely exposes this syllogism for what it is: Sophistry.

Sophistry is a disease of the brain that can be linked to excessively high levels of oxyglutamine, the chemical that causes Sophistry. Discovered in 1962 by someone whose name we won’t bother telling you because you’ll forget it soon anyway, oxyglutamine is a neurotransmitter that is identical in composition to partially hydrogenated corn syrup. In fact, in undeveloped countries oxyglutamine is often drained from the skulls of dead prisoners as an inexpensive substitute for this wonder sweetener.

Unfortunately, this poses an ethical question: if it tastes so good, then how can it be good for you? The answer will shock you like a licked battery: it can’t.

Soon after the discovery of oxyglutamine, when the chemical's neurological function was still unclear, studies showed that very little of it actually exists in the human brain: about as much as would fit in a raindrop-sized thimble. Protests arose from the usual assortment of cranks, crackpots, and the government: America’s oxyglutamine levels had to be brought up to snuff if we were to compete with the wily Japanese, and the even wilier Nipponese. Despite the fact that nobody knew why we needed more of this chemical than anyone else, a wide variety of procedures were initiated, and abandoned, and then initiated again before being abandoned twice more.

Baby food manufacturers attempted to address the crisis by including jacked up levels of oxyglutamine in their strained yam gravy. Public schools initiated mandatory spinal injections, and oxyglutamine tests became de rigeur for executive corporate positions. Also, they made it taste better.

But it soon became clear that the brain rebels against being told what to do – like a disobedient teen in a trampy outfit, it would rather make its own mistakes. Excessive levels of oxyglutamine causes synapses to “clear the way,” as it were, rearranging themselves all in a line to avoid contamination by the interloping compound. With the synapses all queued up, the brain can only make the most general of sequential connections - and the result, in the end, has been an epidemic of Sophistry.

Sophistry can most accurately be described as a condition in which things that sound true are assumed to be true; or, alternately, that things that are assumed to be true sound true. Though the condition dates back to caveman times, it is only today, when we are surrounded on all sides by teetering towers of verbiage in all spheres of our lives, that the condition has became more than a horsefly-level inconvenience.

To avoid Sophistry, simply don’t believe any cause/effect or if/then or and/or statement. When reading a sentence, analyze every word for possible “Trojan horse”-style deceptions. Shun your friends and neighbors. And above all, avoid oxyglutamine. If you see oxyglutamine walking down the street, cross to the other side, or shoot it right between the eyes. If you don’t have a gun, break a bottle over its head. If you don’t have a bottle then you’re screwed. Sorry.

THE FIRST OF AN OCCASIONAL SERIES IN WHICH WE REVEAL THE REMARKABLE ORIGINS OF COMMON OBJECTS, AND THEN MAKE GOOD ON OUR CLAIMS BY REMARKING UPON THEM

2007-02-20T09:29:00.000-08:00

Many people know that “Wite-Out” (aka “Verblot,” “Shit-Scrub,” “Reversible Jizz,” etc.) was invented by the father of ex-Monkee Micky Dolenz. Fewer, however, understand the circuitous, often dark, frequently amusing and eventually rather predictable history of Post-It brand stickie notes.

The story, like most stories, began in 1517. Divinity student Martin Luthor (cited by the Simon and Shuster, Catholic creators of the comic-book Superman as the inspiration for their hero’s arch-nemesis Lex) was a young overachiever in the city of Wittgenstein, Germany. Having somehow been accepted into 95 separate graduate programs at the local University, he found himself needing to produce a separate thesis for each one. Citing the futility of exerting all that strenuous academic labor merely to have it perused and discarded by the handful of tenured individuals on his thesis panel, Luthor decided to post his work on the door of the local church so as to have it read by all – hence the famous “95 Thesises.”

Luthor experimented with a number of different mediums for attaching his document to the door, including honeypap, boiled hogshead, and tongue-of-marrow-bark-resin-of-swamp-bog- of-syrup-bog-swamp. These various methods proving unsatisfactory, Luthor eventually decided simply to affix the heretical paper using Satanic magic, along with a nail for good measure. Nonetheless, for these early efforts Luthor is generally considered the Father of Self-Adhesive Stationery.

When Luthor was burned at the stake in 1578, his notebooks and correspondence inevitably fell into the hands of the Illaminati, a secret society that made a practice of going to as many estate sales as possible during the Reformation. Its leader, one Gracchus Bluto, discovered an alternate use for one of Luthor’s compounds, and soon wrote the Illaminati Manifesto, detailing how monarchies could be toppled by stealing all of their important documents and covering them entirely in a thin layer of shellac, thereby rendering them incapable of revision. Though Bluto was executed soon after ruining the original Magna Carta by covering it with improperly brewed paste, his process and organization gave its name to the modern process of “illamination” (literally, “being made sick by contact with a llama”).

It wasn’t until the late 19th Century that Luthor and Bluto’s research once again reared its gummy head. After having his legs chopped off in the Franco-Prussian war, retarded French aristocrat Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec decided that he might as well design posters for local cabarets and dance halls, because seriously, what else was he cut out for? He needed some kind of method with which to hang the posters on walls, since otherwise they would fall to the ground and get covered in mud and feces (pavement not having yet been invented). Being legless, Toulouse-Lautrec had commissioned local scientist Marie Curie to develop a legless horse so he could ride in relative comfort. The horses kept dying, however, and Marie Curie, in possession of a rare copy of the Illaminati Manifesto, used the recipes contained within to create a new adhesive out of dead horse, which she christened “glue” after the past participle of the French “gluer” – “to kill horses for a crippled aristocrat.”

From here, it was only a short leap to the modern Post-It. Leave it to that bastion of modern ingenuity, Adolf Hitler, to bring this journey to its “final solution.” After inventing the reclining armchair, the electric guitar, and genocidal anti-Semitism, Hitler was looking for a new challenge. Hoisting Marie Curie out of her deathbed during the lead-up to World War II, Hitler demanded from her information on how to create a radium-controlled toaster oven (which could eventually be dropped from airplanes onto the British). Curie, a French patriot to the last, misled Hitler with a false equation that was actually an altered version of her formula for glue. In that it was only a recipe for a very small amount of glue, Hitler didn’t know what to do with the results, and so tried to wipe it from his finger onto a small sheet of blotting paper nearby. When he subsequently went out onto his balcony to salute the teeming masses before his famous Nuremberg Rally, the crowd was delighted to see a flapping piece of paper affixed to his extended right hand, believing it to be a butterfly. A local craftsman by the name of Herbert 3mhoff, however, was able to see this “miracle paper” for the cash cow that it was. Fleeing to America, he founded an eponymous office supply empire, which to this day operates out of the same Yorktown tenement in which it began – and thus, the Post-It note was born.

Bonus Fact: a malfunctioning Post-It was the cause of the tragic Challenger space shuttle explosion in 1986.

I HAVE POSITIVE FEELINGS FOR IKE

2007-02-16T14:25:00.000-08:00

These days, President Dwight D. “Honest Ike” Eisenhower is generally considered little more than a relic from the Eisenhower era. Aside from his having coined the phrase “military-industrial complex” (which we are tired of having archly pointed out to us at parties and cabal meetings), little exists in the public sphere to distinguish our nation’s 34th Commander-in-Chief from a moderately intelligent potato, or sack of potatoes.

A trip to the President Dwight D. Eisenhower Presidential Library, in Abilene, Kansas, however, reveals some shockingly unexpected data on the man who, as you may or may not have known, coined the phrase “military-industrial complex.”

Most visitors to the Library are lured by the big-ticket items: Eisenhower’s prize-winning collection of vintage goiter photographs, his autographed first-edition copy of P.D. Eastman’s paean to canine locomotion, Go, Dog, Go!, and the Ark of the Covenant.
But the true treasures of the Library are to be found much deeper within, in a secret chamber that can only be broached with stalwart academic credentials, or crudely forged facsimiles thereof.

In this hidden sanctum, next to Eisenhower’s mummified corpse (and no, we weren’t supposed to take pictures, so ssh!), is an item that threatens to topple popular views of this former snooker champion’s Presidency, and, indeed, the entire decade in which it unfolded.

Popular historian David Halberstam’s chronicle of the postwar years was released to the public in 1993. Eisenhower’s dog-eared copy, however, proves that this book was not a saga of hindsight, but, in fact, a work of speculative fiction penned in 1947. Thoroughly digested by the President-to-Be, who became fascinated – nay, obsessed – with the strange revelations found within, it became not a retrospective analysis of, but, in fact, the very template by which the following ten years were forged. The concept behind the hydrogen bomb was mere fantasy before Halberstam (a mere boy of 13 when he wrote the book) anticipated its design in his book. Enamored, Eisenhower made one of his first priorities as President the assignment of chief designers Edward Teller and Stanislaw Ulam to make manifest what had already been written about them. The same pattern resulted in the creation of Elvis, hula hoops, and the Korean War (which technically began before Eisenhower was sworn in, but we know enough about Washington politics not to be surprised by this).

Word of this so-called “paradox” began to leak sometime during the 1970s, when Eisenhower’s former Vice President, Richard Nixon, was looking for a way to evade the scrutiny being leveled against him as a result of the Whitewater Scandal. Halberstam, a notoriously slow writer (he’d been working on The Fifties since 1939), decided to make a few revisions, and would have kept at it for much longer if the Republican Party, enraged by the election of Communist Party candidate Hilary Clinton to the Presidencey in 1992, hadn’t just jerked the thing out of his hands and brought it to press.

We had some excellent photos of some of Eisenhower’s notes and suggestions in the margins of the original manuscript (re: television – “Hey, wouldn’t it be neat if we kept making the screens bigger? And invented subliminal advertising?”), but alas, it turns out there was a video camera installed in the mummy’s empty eye sockets, and we were kicked out, had our camera destroyed before our eyes, and were told never to darken the door of a Presidential Library for as long as we lived. This is why we now wear a fake moustache whenever we go to a Presidential Library.

THE APOCRYPHIST'S CREED

2007-02-16T09:50:00.000-08:00

Welcome to The Apocryphist. Starting Monday, we will be presenting our readers with only the finest in hazy, poorly understood, and generally unconfirmed reports from all fields of human endeavor (except for sports; we neither enjoy nor comprehend sports).

THE APOCRYPHIST’S CREED

If it’s questionable:
print it.

If it’s in poor taste:
print it.

If it further befuddles an already incomprehensible world:
print it.

If it encourages the reader to believe that there is more than meets the eye – even (ESPECIALLY) if the truth is likely that there’s less:
print it.

If it casts unfair aspersions on those individuals past and present who had the good or bad fortune to be framed long enough in fame’s aggrandizing lens that we can recognize their names:
print it.

If, in doing all of these things, it bestows upon our minds the sense of innocent mystery that we experienced as children, when there was a troll under every rock and a dragon behind every cloud; if it allows a bit more wiggle room in the confining closet of reason; if it, even for the briefest moment, throws the space-time continuum a mere nanometer out of whack:
for G-d's sake, PRINT IT.