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.

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.

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.

THE SECOND MOST DANGEROUS GAME

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.

PERPETUAL WINTER FOR PERPETUAL SPRING

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.

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

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

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.

MANIMAL PLANET

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)

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.

SPRING FORSAKENING

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.

3.1415926535897932384-eva

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.

PROVE YOUR WORTH

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.

SOPHISTRY'S CHOICE

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.