PET FOOD NATION

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.

SIGN CITY

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.

STARASHES TO STARASHES...

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.

AN ITCHY, BURNING CRASH

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.