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.

BIGFOOT-IN-MOUTH

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.

HELLAS IN A HANDBASKET

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

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

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!

PRO-ANTIKYTHERA

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

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

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.

FRENCHED

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

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.

HERITAGE ON YOUR CHEST

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.

PAYBACK FOR APRIL SHOWERS

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.

THE REPRESS OF THE RETURNED

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.

EYE OF KNUT

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!

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

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.

HOUDINNIT?

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?

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

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.

MYTH MANAGEMENT

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

ARTHUR TOO: ON THE COCKS

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.