And another excellent one. I’ve got a feeling I’m going to be spending far too much time looking at this stuff on You Tube.
Category: Articles
Parasitic Mind Control
jewel wasps
Parasites.
A couple of evenings back I watched an episode of QI, which often comes out with some interesting facts. This particular episode touched on something that’s been a fascination of mine for some years: parasites (and I don’t mean the human kind). Here’s the little darling they were talking about:
The Spotted Rose Snapper Fish, which lives off the coast of California, is oft victim to another freaky parasite. The Cymothoa exigua parasite, a type of crustacean, swims into the fish’s mouth and attaches itself at the base of the poor Snappers tongue. It leeches blood from its victim and as it grows, the tongue withers and dies due to lack of blood supply. Eventually when the tongue dies completely, either diminishing or falling off, the parasite then switches places with the stump and acts as a working replacement for the organ, allowing the fish to use it just like a normal tongue.
The parasite spends the rest of its life living off both the fish’s blood and bits of food that enter the fish’s mouth. The Cymothoa exigua is the only parasite known to effectively replace a body organ.
If any of you have read any of the interviews with me you’ll know that The Skinner and the ensuing Spatterjay books can all be traced back to one instance. I was loaned a book on helminthology (the study of parasitic worms) by a vet, and read through it with growing fascination. I think the thing that got me first was the sheer number of transformations in the lifecycles of various parasites when, before, the limit of my knowledge on such changes was egg-caterpillar-chrysalis-butterfly, and how some parasites actually change their host for their own benefit. Two of them stuck in my mind. One includes both ants and sheep in its life cycle. It interferes with the ant’s brain and makes it climb to the top of a stalk of grass and cling there, waiting for a grazing sheep. Another gets inside a snail to breed, but to protect itself, causes the snail to grow a thicker shell. Here, with Cymothoa exigua, are a few more.
This reading resulted in various short stories: The Thrake, The Gurnard, Out of the Leaflight, Choudapt, Spatterjay and Snairls. They then resulted in the novella no one can get hold of: The Parasite. Then I took two short stories, Spatterjay & Snairls, and on the basis of them wrote The Skinner. I definitely must read some more of this stuff.
The Aliens Are Here.
Y’know, there are lots of conspiracy theories running around the world – the moon landings were falsified, alien spacecraft in AREA 51 – but I’m here to tell you now that one of them is true: there are aliens amongst us. If you were to split open a particular shiny forehead that’s been prominent on your TVs and in your newspapers you would reveal the green lizard skin of glombulfrog from the planet Zaarg. Cameron is not alone, of course, glombulfrogs have taken control of all the parliaments and senates across the world, because nothing else could possibly explain their deep disconnect from real human beings.
It is a conspiracy to give us the worst possible rulers, to fuck up our financial systems, blow our money on complete rubbish, involve us in pointless wars, control and dictate, nanny and generally leave us so totally and utterly pissed off with them. The purpose of this is quite simple. When, in about ten years, the invasion arrives and the particle beams lash down, turning the House of Commons to rubble, the White House to a smoking ruin, the European Parliament to a bomb site snowed with the pages from burning accounts books, we’ll all cheer. When the glombulfrogs stride out of their massive space ships and tell us that they are now in charge, there will be a collective worldwide sigh of relief and cries of, ‘Thank fuck for that.’
The latest Cameroonism is a perfect example of how they work:
‘Hey, the country is in huge debt, people are worried about their finances, worried about the massive amounts of money we’re blowing, so how can we hack them off further?’ he asked at a recent glombulfrog focus group.
‘I know,’ a climber in the frog hierarchy answered, ‘let’s spend some money on something completely needless and pointless just like our agents in the previous government did. That always seemed to work.’
‘Ahah,’ said the Camerofrog, ‘let’s do a happiness consultation and spend, I dunno, a couple of million.’
‘Only a couple of million?’
‘Well, we can’t get too drastic – the main invasion fleet won’t arrive for another ten years.’
‘Very true – we do actually need something left to rule.’
New Office
New desks purchased and assembled. Layers of crap removed from the drawers and discarded, since I’m one of those annoying people who tends to keep stuff because ‘it might come in handy’ and have reached that point where the handy thing is so buried in other handy stuff that I can’t find it.
My old desk, which I bought second-hand and has followed me through four homes and at which I’ve written every book published by Macmillan, was getting rather wobbly and tired. With its metal back I also needed to extend a few of the USB cables to reach the computer underneath. It’s also the case that it was good when I worked a lot with that archaic paper stuff and when I needed the room for a bloody great screen, but is not necessary now. I thought I’d be sad to see it go, but I’m not.
The loft next. All those handy plastic containers, all that computer hardware no one will ever want, the boxes for things purchased years ago, a big container of rusty nails retained from when I used to do fencing and a load of door handles whose history I’m a little confused about. All down the dump.
Ban Dihydrogen Monoxide.
On Yer Bike
It’s very definitely been the case that since coming back from Crete I’ve been spending far too much time on the Internet, and the most exercise I’ve had is moving the furniture out of a bedroom ready for a new carpet. And, as is usual with me, I’ve started to get annoyed with how indolent and crappy I feel.
Time to get on my bike again.
My usual route has been from our house here over to my mother’s house, where I would have a cup of tea and a chat, before cycling back again – an eight mile round trip. Last winter, because it was so damned cold, I didn’t do it as much as I should have. My resolution this winter is that I will cycle this route three times a week. The only times I won’t do this is if there’s an actual blizzard, ice on the roads, or a torrential downpour. I’ve also resolved to throw in a bit of weight training too.
Today was the first day. Cycling to my mother’s house against a headwind left me absolutely knackered, but the trip back wasn’t so bad. Once I got back I collected a dustpan and brush so as to occupy myself, in the rest period between each weight-training set, sweeping up all the crap that had blown into our garage over the summer. The training itself was surprisingly easy, and only left me feeling a bit tired and shaky, however, the real effects won’t kick in until tomorrow.
Why such madness? I need it. You have to remember that before I got taken on by Macmillan I worked in a very physical job for 13 years. Maybe I need the endorphins. Anyway, if I don’t get some exercise I’ll end up looking like this:
’nuff said.
Iron Man
I picked up the DVD of Iron Man in the supermarket about a year ago and have only just got round to watching it. What can I say? It was great fun and, if you haven’t seen it, I recommend you do.
Of course the usual big hole was there: power supply. In this they got round it by ‘genius creates a palm-sized fusion reactor in a cave’. It’s the kind of thing we saw a lot in SF many decades ago but we’re too wise to go with now … or could it be that we’re too cynical and pessimistic? Thinking on this sort of thing let me to You Tube where I note that military exoskeletons are getting closer:
However, note the power cables. Power storage is always going to be a problem … unless of course you actually wear the battery?