ON THE RODENT

This morning, as Neqa’el bounded across our windowsill during the pre-dawn interlude when we allow our shades and panes to be lifted to the air prior to the glaring solar intrusion of the morn, we were delighted to hear her make a series of rumbling, predatory throat trills as she stared sharply at the potential prey bounding from branch to branch on the other side of the screen. It was a rodent – not the ubiquitous ratus urbanus, but a stranger creature altogether: the common squirrel. What made Neqa’el’s show of bravado all the more adorable was the fact that, millennia ago, the ancestors of these bushy-tailed scavengers could have brutally savaged any creature alive today.

The previous Ice Age is known to many mammalogists as the Age of Mammals, or, more formally, the Age of Massive Versions of the Mammals We Have Today. Everybody knows about mammoths, woolly rhinoceri, flying sloths, and whaleruses (eight times larger than today’s walruses), but one of the best-kept secrets of the bones of the past is the sciurus sacremerdus, or the “Holy Shit Squirrel,” as it is known to those in the field. A mature specimen, with tail, was longer than many of today’s most indulgent yachts (see photo), and all the other beasts quaked in fear of its gnashing Nosferatu-like front teeth. The main channels of science have hidden skeletons of this species from most of the world’s museums to avoid being sued for abject terror.

For you see, the sciurus sacremerdus was not an acornivore, like today’s smaller, sleeker models. It was alpha beast of its ecosystem (which was roughly the entire temperate world), the top of the food chain, the carnivorous king of beasts that would gnaw the head off any animal that it managed to scoop up into its pointy little clutches. These behemoths would often bury huge piles of dead animals for the winter, giving rise to the modern myth of “elephant graveyards.” The earth would shake as they bounded from gigantic prehistoric tree to gigantic prehistoric tree in search of live flesh.

Their uncontested dominance of the natural world was not to last, however. As mankind began developing the necessary intelligence to realize that these juggernauts couldn’t chase them if they hid inside tiny caves, the squirrel generations began rapidly to shrink in order to fit inside these caverns and terrorize those dwelling within. However, in one of those cosmic ironies that occur so often they might as well not be called be called ironies since everyone expects them by now, the formerly subservient feline populations began growing long teeth at this time, and these growing cat species soon wreaked havoc on the shrinking rodent species, until their sizes were reversed to their current states. Modern squirrels, mice, rats, hamsters, gerbils, guinea pigs, and bunnies all emerged from this weakened stock.

So consider all of those Mutt and Jerry cartoons with the cat chasing the mouse as evolutionary revenge for several thousand years’ worth of rodential domination. But be warned – evolution is cyclical, and the rodents might well rise again – in which case building the better mousetrap won’t only be a novel pastime, but the key to the survival of mankind.

MURDER, WE WROTE

We would like to hear from any of our readers who have been murdered recently. We are aware that being a murder victim is a serious condition that hampers one’s ability to participate in mainstream society, but we encourage those who have suffered from this ailment to sweep aside their shame and confusion and tell the world how they really feel. Life as a corpse is difficult under any circumstance, but when that corpse has been slain through the evil intentions of another – especially in a particularly gruesome or imaginative way, in which case we encourage you to share every last detail – it only magnifies the pain. Murder may be the silent killer, but let’s use this opportunity to give it a voice.

EXPL(ETIVE)ANATION

Let us briefly draw your attention to this amusing trifle, courtesy of fontmeisters Hoefler & Frere-Jones at Typography.com, in which Jonathan Hoefler reveals to the world the use of the term “grawlix” to denote the lineup of symbols used as expletives by our leading cartoon characters. Though we are indebted to Herr Hoefler for bringing this concept wider attention, we take issue with his description of the term’s origin.

Though credited to Morton Walker, the creator of mop-top comic-strip soldier Beatle Bailey, the word is actually an eponym. Its true originator is a late 18th-century Philadelphia typesetter by the name of Hogarth Grawlick. As the legend goes, the poor boy was illiterate, hired by Fenworth Boggert, the editor of the short-lived Philadelphia Requirer as a favor to Grawlick’s father, one of the city’s richest, stupidest citizens. Faced each morning with the task of having to arrange the press’s movable type to reflect the stories given to him by Boggert, young Grawlick could do nothing more than arrange the slugs in random patterns, often eschewing letters altogether for the prettier, more exotic typographic fringes. Each morning, upon examining the tyro’s handiwork, Boggert would (sources assure us) quite literally foam at the mouth as he expelled into the world a remarkable pageant of indecent invective aimed squarely at “Grawlick’s bullshittery.” And thus the immortal phrase was born, and later shortened by excessive use to its current abbreviated form.

Herr Hoefler’s article also cites an editor-at-large of the Oxford English Dictionary named Jesse Sheidlower, who has produced a book populated solely with variations on a well-known cursing-word that begins with an “F” and rhymes with “fluck.” Let Sheidlower hereby be challenged: we are in possession of many, many words that are not currently ensconced within the OED, a number of which have yet to see the light of day, and we would kindly like to offer our services in sharing them, for a small (if sizable) fee. We might as well start with “fluck.” Please contact us directly for definition and etymology.

BEST-TRIED GLORY

That The Apocryphist is a fan of musical theater should be a surprise to no one who understands the unexpected ways the levers and pulleys of this world are manipulated. The Broadway musical is an occult thermometer of Western civilization’s internal temperature, stuck right up the keister of show business. As such, it is with nearly shrieking gleefulness that we regard today’s announcement of a major Broadway revival of West Side Story, performed in the original Spanish.

In this election year, no musical could possibly present itself as a better illustration of the riven state of our electorate. An updating of Pedro Calderon de la Barca’s Romeo y Julietta (which also served as the inspiration for a popular line of smokeables), it follows the doomed love of Antonio, a dark-skinned barrio resident, for Mary, a fair-haired bastion of a conservative family with the reputation for being a “maverick.” Their urban affair, which unfolds across the boulevards of western Los Angeles, involves the shooting of more dark-skinned people, and much debate about when and how to stop said shooting. The show’s finale climaxes in an epic escape in which Mary, an escaped prisoner of the enemy gang, is airlifted off the stage by a live helicopter effect while the noble Antonio remains below, fighting off both gangs simultaneously. This ambiguous ending may not sway people’s votes, but it is certainly a sign of the times, much as it was during the musical’s premiere during the Vietnam Era of the early 1970’s.

The creators’ decision to stage the show in its native language is a bold one, especially since so many of the show’s classic tunes (including “Proud Mary,” “Pretty in Pink,” and “(They’re Coming to) America”) have been radio hits in English. But it’s long been rumored that Spanish-speaking people (albeit very few from Spain) will be voting in the upcoming election, and it’s probably good to keep them entertained by the mainstream theater establishment, lest they grow restless and waste their votes on a third-party candidate. Hats off to you, Broadway (top hats!) for once again having your fabulous, gaunt, near-dessicated finger on the pulse of America!

TERM OF ENDEARMENT

We would find it utterly endearing if our friends and colleagues were to begin employing the nickname “Pocky” in reference to us. Possible echoes of the scarred tissue reminders of a past plague diagnosis aside, it reminds us of a certain delightful Japanese coated-biscuit snack, which is available in a variety of flavors, including: chocolate, strawberry, almond, kiwi, honey, grape, melon, salmon, green tea, sweet potato, ash, pineapple, pumpkin, disinfectant, pizza, and goulash.

ROUND EARTH SOCIETY

There’s an old saw that, if you stood all the people in the world shoulder to shoulder and back to belly, they would take up a space no bigger than the Six Flags Great Adventure amusement park, making the waits for rides only slightly longer than they are currently. This thought experiment has never been executed, primarily because of the temptations it poses for marauding aliens bent on the conquest of earth. But in light of the recent Obesity Epidemic scourging the developed world, we need to ask ourselves: is Six Flags big enough? Or do we now need Disney to bail us out?

Morbidly, comically, spherically fat people are nothing new to society – ancient, crudely sculpted earth-goddess idols illustrate the lack of gym facilities in the pre-civilized world, and those damn Romans with their vomitoria proved that even bulimia couldn’t stop decadent, fiddling emperors such as Nemo and Dracligula from expanding their bodies to the same bloated extreme as their untenable empires. But with all the current head-wagging and finger-shaking about the Obesity Epidemic, we’ve seen a level of awareness and judgment that surpasses all previous historical benchmarks.

First, a clarification: yes, obesity is communicable, but it’s not nearly as easy to catch as most pundits would have you believe. The obesity virus is only transferable via human saliva, especially saliva involved in the eating process. For this reason, you should be very careful about sharing a Snickers bar or French kissing with an obese person, or, heaven forfend, both at the same time. If you keep your tongue in your mouth and your fingers off other people’s food, you’ll most likely be safe.

Secondly, an elucidation: obese people and overweight people are two entirely separate categories. Overweight people are those who, for glandular, genetic, or nutritional reasons, happen to have a lot of body mass. The true medical description of an obese person, however, is “a person who is afflicted with the obesity virus.” But according to epidemiologist Dr. Alfred Yankovic (who recovered from the affliction himself), there are some less tautological ways of determining whether a person is obese:

• They are wider than they are tall
• They are the same height lying down as they are standing up
• Their hands cannot touch each other without mechanical aid
• Their earlobes touch their shoulder padding
• Their feet are only visible from the knees down
• They need a map to find their own ass
• They have their own zip codes
• When they sit around the house, they really sit around the house

Thirdly, an explication: obesity can be cured. This is not a chronic illness, and the means to defeat it are similar to those required to simply lose weight. This is because the obesity virus lodges itself in the pores; by preventing the escape of toxins through the skin, the virus causes a massive buildup. The main way to expel the virus is therefore to sweat profusely, dislodging as many of the virus’s clones as possible. But we’re not talking about the regular, workaday sweat of walking up stairs or lifting one’s hand to point the remote at the TV – when the sweat is merely a trickle, the virus can easily dodge its flow. No, sufferers from obesity must make their sweat pour from their corpuses in cascading torrents of salty release, positive geysers of perspiration, capable of knocking a hat from the head of an unsuspecting bystander. Only then will the virus be expelled and destroyed.

If a proper sweat regimen can be followed, we’ll find the world’s obesity epidemic will fade to a distant, unpleasant memory (much like the Boer War). Only then will mankind be able to take its proper place, en masse, at Six Flags. Once there, however, we highly recommend the population of earth lay off the communal corndogs, lest the whole cycle begin anew…

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.