So They Think They Can Dance

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.