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.

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.

DANGEROUS HOOKY

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.

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.