"they're only human," says leading chimponaut

"in hindsight, yes it was definitely specist. we inherited this trait from our great ancestor, the Darwin Ape. but we needed to know that it was safe for us to leave our planet, which was due to be swallowed by a huge cosmic gust, known to us as Hurricane H1-NO-1. we didn't know a lot about these creatures. but even though they seemed to be scared of their own shadows, at least in captivity, they were there for a reason & that reason was to save chimpkind. they did it for us all. to be honest, they fought each other quite a lot. so, in a way, we did many of them a great service by testing the limits of their suffering & survivability. we were good to them too. we bestowed honours such as handshakes & chocolate medals on those who survived the centrifuge. they were caged heroes, those humans, living on dog biscuits & free to run around screaming & pulling their hair out in approximately 1m x 2m of the best turf. the space flights were a bit cramped, it's true, but we had very little time & so much to achieve. we fed them scraps from our dinner plates, but only if they were quiet when we ate. we lost count of how many we actually used, but we had enough of them to make a difference. those surplus to inventory were given parts as extras in landing simulations, although they were certainly not given speaking parts. any extra who actually attempted to speak (although we did not understand their language) was given a jab containing avian contaminated viruses, formaldehyde & mercury. some of them were even tortured. only those who came into accidental contact with our bioweapons went on to develop unspeakable diseases. we conducted tests for as long as the dictates of our governing body deemed it necessary. it turned out that the hurricane missed our planet. in any case, we would like to congratulate all captive humans for their brave efforts. we are in the process of constructing a new disneyland paradise for them & their delightful, though slightly traumatised & mutated, offspring."

killer self-replicating tadbots discharge streams of extremist piss

a news link was banned from taking off in a personal flying chariot fuelled by 'extremophobe' lifeforms from mars. it was tracked by a huge commercial satellite, one big enough to be thought capable of taking on this self-replicating technology. "miniature 'virus batteries' are the driving force of these chariots," said a banned news report. "these batteries discharge dangerous suicidal aphids in their piss, so that aphids fall from the sky as these politically extremist chariots drive overhead." "radiation pollution hit me right in the guts," gasped an enormous blow-up doll. "as though i had been reproductively implicated in this dangerous landscape like a pornographic cropcircle reconstruction. i feel exposed. i will be seen from the moon & it will take an hour just to walk round one of my nipples. it's like gulliver's fucking world around here. they should have stuck to making tonka toys for badly abducted kids. that would have been more useful." overcooked sniffer dogs have also been unleashed to snap up the aphids. these creatures can smell the contagious scent of fear as far away as venus. "this," said a disgruntled, bluetoothed pensioner, "is what we pay our tv licence fees for. & the bloody tadbot 2 missile show was late. again."

Nigglers [link]

A fresh and vile little story by Bill Drennan is now up at The Hypologist.

remarkable crop 'circle' [link]

water bills charged with possession of melting souls

"don't call me anything. i'm not available. we took a snap of god on our way back from our pursuit of Moby Dick, during which time we had sold our souls to loan sharks for a mere $2000. by some quirk of fate some piratess kidnapped our ship while their comrades quickly laid pipelines to carry oil directly to the war machine. it is the same unashamed greed that will have consumers buy more electricity, even though they are already as warm as polar bears. we suspected that the water companies had something to do with all this since they had snooped on us while we rolled in the magnetising oceans, as evinced by the penalty charge letters we received at several stormy locations. when we reached land some bouncers, trained in the art of the coup & in possession of police uniforms, the same people who had arrested the UN on bioterrorism charges & waterboarded its members' heads in boiling duck soup, beat us to a pulp because we did not carry ID cards. we were then sentenced to an absurd term in jail with confused DNA & melting ice cream for the equally absurd crime of rebuilding nazi stealth fighter planes."

Luke Powerwalker detained indefinitely on the moon

Luke Powerwalker, wearing one of the very latest cybersuits & out for a walk with his very close friend, the teleprompter, is speech-training in dawn's early light. "to go where no cybersuit has strutted before ... maybe there's oil on mars ..." he speculates, "or gold in the martian soil ..." & goes off into a dream ... "... or depleted uranium in alien lifeforms ..." puts in his good friend, which is uncharacteristically honest & possibly a little rude. Luke Powerwalker notices that he has an audience in the sky: a swarm of UFOs on the lookout for phoney events. the swarm leaves a subliminal trail of floating light in the dusty sky, the frequencies of which have infiltrated & taken over the teleprompter: "ugh! ... fouling the atmosphere again with indigestible discharge & pretending to be warm ... and all those other fairy stories. if you want to rehearse the part of the nazi in yet another unnecessary skirmish, why not go to the moon & get some weightless goosesteps in? if you really want to keep the puppet show on the road, perhaps you should find yourself a possible audience on Enceladus. ha ha ha!" suddenly, the cybersuit tingles with corrupt bio-electricity & Luke Powerwalker takes off into the sky, lifted even higher by the momentum of his own wind. but his journey the moon is soon intercepted & Luke Powerwalker disappears into a blinding light, the kind you might see on your way out of office ... the UFO responsible for this abduction soon takes a wobbling fit. its lights play havoc with the dirty clouds as an obscene farting noise lets rips, loud enough to wake extinct animals. THWWWWWWPHHHP!!!! out he comes with all his hot air, an ejected Luke Powerwalker. but the cybersuit is missing. the cybersuit has been abducted. Luke Powerwalker has lost a good friend & he has also lost time. he now has a tag to keep him company. "we confiscated your cybersuit, for your own & everyone else's good," said the teleprompter. Luke Powerwalker is arrested by the energy police & held indefinitely & without trial as a terrorist. "you'd better start begging for forgiveness," said his ex-friend. "nobody trusts you any more ..."

bouncy castle to be shipped to the moon to celebrate World UFO Day

a lightning strike is anticipated on Mars to coincide with World UFO Day. to mark the event, the CIA has also sponsored free Scientology sessions for all troubled minds. "we want to cleanse your minds of deeply embedded psychodramas, such as atrocities, orchestrated unrest & alien abductions," said a leading scientologist. "just as these events were beaten into you, so we will beat them back out ..." the celebration will end with the magnificent spectacle of a 2 ton bomb being dropped on the moon; this will create a 5 mile wide crater that will be used in NASA's 'search for water'. an inflatable operating theatre is to be shipped to the moon & will be available in the event of microbial casualties or multiversal cataclysm. "these theatres also double as bouncy castles for possible survivors," announced a glossy brochure. a dark energy warp ship will be used to transport 900 plus superwealthy pathogens from a spaceport in New Mexico to the safety of a distant galaxy. "it will be a rare & heavenly sight," gasped an e-coli bug with an unspecifiable genetic condition.

leader of terracotta army bulldozes cropcircle

the hunt for the leader of the terracotta army has dug up some unexpected results: an alien lifeform was awakened after being dragged kicking & screaming from a recently discovered prehistoric complex spotted by a crop circle: "coo-eee! it's over he-ere!" called the cropcircle, "but you won't find any terracotta lifeforms!" it is conjectured that up to 90% of these terracotta soldiers were wiped out by a new strain of swine flu. a secret enquiry is underway & the missing terracotta leader has promised to show up in a leaked top secret document at some time in the near future. crooked cops & militia are in charge of site security. "it's back-up for the oil company, & back down for the protestors," said a baby bulldozer, keen to learn the art of brutalisation. "our bosses are wealthy enough to own the power to pull the plug on any government we like, or ... er ... dislike ..." said a malthusian archaeologist. "we simply pull the plug ... or turn those alien lifeforms into slaves or food ..." meanwhile, in an isolation glacier, a microbe laments, "some earthling thieves stole all our water & used it to tart up their own planet." an ex-president's brain was plugged back into a back-engineered propulsion system for the occasion & briefed on an exchange programme."hey! i'm awake! well, we took the water & gave the goddamm microbes a new home," said the brain, "or have i forgotten something inconvenient?"

displaced martian water managed to death in customer-related neurobotic warfare fiasco

running martian water molecules have disclosed a list of life-denying conspiracies on their home planet. earthling pre-colonial strategies have turned mars upside-down, persistently employing network-centric warfare methods based on corporate neurobotics. highly aggressive roaming terminator-like vacuum cleaners play an everyday role in the lives of martian water molecules. according to an asteroid microbe who decided after a million years not to make a home on the red planet, "the main problem for these martians was the deployment by the Martian Water Board of a group of customer performance managers, who glided in on the back of a rock, took over this beautiful planet & attempted to educate the molecules away from their natural flow. they introduced compulsory vaccinations as a means of liquidating their natural curiosity. in schools it was like an ice factory: young molecules were frozen into blocks so cold that they could, according to performance indicators, advance seven feet per day. once they graduated they were only good for simultaneously chilling & consuming alcoholic bingedrinks; meaning that, ultimately, when all other techniques failed, they were brainwashed into a state of self-consumption by these spy-teachers." another water molecule with a PhD in marine biology who now works as an illegal immigrant in a sewer reported that: "the first stop we made was on a tin can orbiting your earth planet; but it was so jam-packed with gargantuan flesh there was no oxygen to spare. we are now seeking refuge from the thug-riddled territories of 'unoccupied' mars." and another: "at first these manager creatures tried to irradiate us with solar power. that failed, because we were only ever good to them as reflections of themselves, that is as ice. then they sent in the rogue proteins to make further attempts to degenerate the purity of our thinking. they tried to 'classify' our souls, but could only come up with an 'alien' sticker, which didn't stick. so they began a fluoridation programme, even though we don't have teeth. this was an attempt to poison us out of our natural habitats." despite all this, many of the refugee molecules are already homesick & planning to hitch a ride home as stowaways in "the first shuttle out of this hole, subject to delays".

fortean tadpoles fall back to earth after escape plan gets inflated

"well," said a tadpole, exhausted after being tailed for such a long time by the pan-european secret psychiatric police. "they fired at us with puke-ray guns, making us sick enough to want to get off the planet. we puked the cops off & soon got round to putting our heads together. then we came up with the idea of making an inflatable tower that goes right to the edge of space. it's a bit like the Babel affair, without any of Wittgenstein's deep-space language abysses causing tragic misunderstandings & splitting us up like one of those cliched scenes used in horror movies. we needed to stick together & keep it fresh, you see ... so, our tower was almost inflated when, by some freak of nature or act of whatever, billions of dollar bills went up in a smokey haze of white noise, most of them disappearing into distant supernovas. all of which we watched as we inflated our escape plan. some of us thought that this was against the laws of physics. others that it was actually the natural state of things. anyway, some of the dollars didn't quite make it & latched on like ticks to our inflatable tower with morgellons fibres causing all our efforts to explode right in our faces. after being blown space-high, we landed like aliens, without having developed the good strong swimming apparatus that we need for our adventures in space. when we metamorphose fully, we're going to look at UFO propulsion systems. in the meantime, our new blimp will just have to do."

missing link fires deranged missiles for america

the 8 nations nuke league final is sure to blow all contest off the stage & send those phoney lunar missions floating out of your tv sets. unless, of course, an act of alien intervention sends the rockets into orbit on a world tour. "i wonder who pays for all those north korean fireworks?" asked an earthquake. "maybe all funds that leave the US should be fingerprinted before making any dodgy stop-offs in countries where leaders demonstrate all the negative qualities of the missing link," it continued. "oh it's just business as usual," said the memory of a very, very old chinese man that has collected more knowledge than all missing links joined together. "this is just too much noise for any one planet," said the earth, with a slightly depressed groan, having one too many monkeys on her back. "it's all so shallow. i don't need a global engagement directorate to oversee & deep-freeze my brain, thank you very much. take this missing link lark, for example: it's like a national treasure, as the old joke goes ... making us wonder who dug the whole idea up ... ha ha ha ha..." meanwhile, a serious & concerned scientist strokes the archaeological remains of his pet monkey & says: "these creatures are nowhere near as evolutionarily degenerate as their cousins. for example, they haven't yet learned how to threaten to escalate their stupidity to a point of no return." the pet monkey, in a CSI-Planet of the Apes scene, where the darwinian moment is captured in slow motion, breaks a huge gust of putrid, necrotic wind into its owner's face. it then gives itself the breath of life, morphs into homo correctus & kidnaps the scientist. "for experiments," it says, drooling a little. it is now 50 years since the first successful monkeys made a side-stepping, tap-dancing career-move all the way from another planet. in the latest visit, the chimps come back to earth in a rocket fuelled by laughing gas. a trail of laughter hangs there, all the way from the moon ... the landing is almost precisely timed with that small explosion in north korea. "to save the world from cancer," announces a dying tumour. "why else are there such acts of blatant hominidal cell-decay. those chimps'll save the world!" the kidnapped scientist is released by his old pal as a gesture of goodwill towards all minor explosions, & now works for Cyber Command. "why don't we just transfer our military experiments to murdered civilian populations?" he asks the tumour. he is distracted by his latest pet, & strokes it affectionately. "you know, they're just so cute, these marmosets, they're just asking for it ... they sure deserve to be given some kinda novelty value rather than cancer. why not sell them as pets? or use their luminescent cells to power up the go-faster stripes on the jackets of those who ape police-style authority." he looks at the dying tumour & says, "i want a business plan on my desk first thing in the morning!"

origins of life swept up on chilean beaches then tagged for dropping dead

in chile sardines, penguins & baby flamingoes are dropping like american bees (or bombs, for that matter). such an invasion of dead (& zombie) flesh has not been seen since World War II. "we will fight them on the beaches," said a monged-out soldier, armed to the teeth & under heavy medication. "it must be the hun ... i mean the hum," retorted a vicious bulldog, mistaking the corpses for the immune systems of recently vaccinated schoolgirls. "it's just another indication of viral colonialism," said a slab of soya, high on hexane. "& yet another glorious day for britocracy." a virtual judge, sworn in under laughing gas & under the scrutiny of Robocop, said "it's funny, but it wouldn't be the first time a comedian has entered politics. why don't we just tag all politicians so that we know where they really are & what they're really claiming for. their internet activities can easily be traced by their own employees. an MP in an online brothel, for example, will not be able to claim it as a second home, & if s/he does, s/he will be arrested & taken through the cybercourt process." a quad-core processor, a bit worn out after a hard shift, complained that it it was late in going to sleep after it had to geo-locate a motor cyclist who had been tagged for dropping high speed sweeties from a motorbike with intent to cause damage to an existing & soon-to-be-repaired pothole. "old fashioned scrambles are out of the question." said a gang of brainwashed 7 yr old snoopers from Lord of the Flies. "only common lablife would consider such a deplorable act," the young mobsters said. "free thinking is nothing but propaganda from another planet, like Russia, that dumps toxic waste in ghettos & then runs like hell from an international conspiracy to modify all forms of human nourishment in order to prevent crises such as beaches being littered with cutsie little zombie creatures."

Max Scullion's Telly Review is up at The Hypologist [link]

what would you say to an extraterrestrial citizen? [link]

can you hear the idiotic rattle of handcuffs?
can you hear mountains form or volcanoes yawn round the hollow earth theory?
can you hear about the secrecy of bunkers?
can you hear telepathy research signals?
can you hear killer RFID chips release poison?
can you hear my illegal mp3 collection?
can you hear the taxman supersnooping?
can you hear the unequal footfall of salaries?
can you hear the star trek bullshit?
can you hear the stolen blood of victory?
can you hear the missing H-bomb?
can you hear the single molecule resolution of the antimicrobial action of quantum dot-labeled sushi peptide on live bacteria?

fluorescent pitbull proteins put on disco show for marines

space junk critters have entered the earth's atmosphere & are thought to be responsible for various attacks on non-glowing lifeforms. they are thought, initially, to have landed in the arabian gulf. "at first we thought it was a swarm of bioluminescent plankton putting on an underwater cropcircle disco show for us," said a US marine yesterday. however, these pests are now land-bound & on the move at a pandemic rate. "i felt something sink its teeth in, like a thousand hot needles ... the little bastards drank all my vaccines," said a mutant junky corn-on-the-cob."i felt nothing, then i just collapsed into an overloaded curriculum ..." groaned a japanese android teacher: "even though they glow in the dark, they are too small for the naked lense to identify." lady cassandra, speaking on behalf of the World Who Organisation, said: "this will stretch emergency services worldwide to the limits of their capabilities. these dinky little creatures make vicious punctures in the skin & then stretch it on a medieval rack. they devour the loose stuff that would normally hang behind the ears ... they even digested two elements of my triple-barrelled name & now i'm just like any other common, shagged-out, nouveau riche trampoline." because they are so small, even the latest security equipment is unable to detect these proteins. "we are afraid that they might target our RFID phone chips & use this technology to transfer themselves more quickly around the globe," said a threatened flu sneeze."the only way to neutralise these entities," wheezed a top scientist, "is through a hormone treatment that will block the testosterone which is present at dangerously high levels. this will help us to eliminate the pitbull consciousness that is threatening to take over the planet."

art against machine

the hypologist - my new blog (link)

the hypologist will be used for miscellaneous writing. hope you enjoy.

ancient astronaut picked up by thermal scanner during scaremongering campaign

a thermal scanner spotted terror-heated humans in an unmanned aircraft system. it has been revealed that the invisible detainees of this particular aircraft were offered jobs as MI5 agents. one of the crew, a 200,000 year old angel from the moon said: "the scanner found clear proof that there was an actual moon landing at some point." the angel turned down the job with MI5, but accepted an astronaut role in the coming hollywood blockbuster 'terminal decline' - a movie about a plot to replace another failing government with ID cards purchased from pharmacies. "it's about a return to a safe democracy, where voters are once again mindless consumers instead of mindless statistics", said the angel. & continued, "these cards will keep consumers virtually terror-free for less than the cost of a good old-fashioned proxy war. it'll give our geriatric NATO outfit a chance to get some exercise instead of stinking in an old folks' home - been there since the cold war - or helping to roll out the war in pakistan on behalf of elitist directors". "it's simply not enough to instill fear into people", added the former voiceover of a scaremongering advertising campaign: "we must give them the power to do something about these issues. hence the freedom of choice that underpins the latest ID card scheme." the thermal scanner has been used in the past to spot terrorist DNA. wrongly accused DNA has been locked up for as much as 12 years. following a successful compensation claim - the first of its kind - where wrongly accused strands mutated in a database stuffed full with the criminal element, the wife of a former prisoner said, "he's changed after all that time locked up in a database. he can't love any more, he's cold & impotent, like a broken prick."

coughing afghan pig [link] isolated & subjected to enhanced interrogation techniques

& it doesn't squeal once, despite being 'guided' into smoking itself with 23 thousand cartons of cigarettes, being stopped every three minutes & quizzed by overly-judicious anti-terror squads, being ambushed by a crowd of rabid parents, being fired at with glow-in-the-dark superspeed guns trying to make a dash for the loo (subject to gun laws), being threatened with the big microwave by a tiny little nation with a midget complex, having its organic supplies raided ('raiding the real'), being assaulted by dengue fever mosquitoes, being forced to read fake journals, being forced to fart on more than one occasion to ease the flow of profit, being coerced into having faith in the mainstream media & kneeling before its images, & finally, being marketed as junk & slowly fed to the gullible & mysterious west.

parking meters turn nasty at malthusian convention

a convention of malthusians are thought to have taken combinations of tamiflu & lithium & ended up populating violent illusions. "we were merely socialising ... i mean we're the only ones fit to do so, right ...?" outside the swineflu convention centre, it was discovered that the same group had stolen parking time by installing telepathic dna sequences in their parking meters: "we are dreaming about the grandest population cull the planet has ever known. teeny boppers go on the rampage after taking tamiflu, becoming an ultra-aggressive gang of demolition squaddies; sharpened revolving doors become unhinged & go flying through the city slicing up anyone in their way; stop, search & destroy powers are employed by job centres; backfiring drones are withdrawn from pakistan & brought back home to entertain suburb dwellers; everyone & everything gets charged by our parking meter dictatorship ..." a pack of innocent DNA has initiated a support group to counter these illusions. a chorus of anonymous bank account details refused to give a statement in case they were charged with being stolen & abused. the richest third world country in the world dropped its megalomaniacal illusions & turned to charity. the distended belly of an unemployed, homeless, starving member of this particular illusion rumbled & said: "the wrong people are suffering here. we haven't done anything wrong ..." the stomach was later arrested & charged with harbouring heretical thoughts. a govt snooper said: "when all is said & done, we need to watch everything & everyone. you never know where the next illusion will come from ... but never fear, smith is everywhere ..." a dinosaur jaw crept from the corridors of power & snapped up her words up, saying: "you want monsters?" it blinked its camera eyes flirtingly at the reporter, & hissed "wanna riot baby?"

otoliths 13 has landed [link]

Otoliths enters its fourth year with an issue that's much more stimulating than any fiscal package yet put forward to counter the current GFC. It contains a variety of poetry including — as described by the creators — prose, concrete, list, visual, & minimalist; photography; digital & analog paintings; assemblages; a selection of quite outstanding fiction; & the occasional piece that defies classification.

In the issue are Peter Ciccariello, pd mallamo, Adam Fieled, F. J. Bergmann, Charles Freeland, Reed Altemus, Mark Cunningham, Bob Heman, Dorothee Lang & Jeff Crouch, Thomas Fink , Thomas Fink & Maya Diablo Mason, Kirk Marshall, Luca Penne, Francis Raven, Raymond Farr, Philip Byron Oakes, James Belflower & Anne Heide & J. Michael Martinez, Jeff Harrison, Zach Buscher, Michael K. White, Amelia Schmidt, Sheila E. Murphy, Jeff Encke, J. D. Nelson, Bill Drennan, Márton Koppány, John Moore Williams, Travis Macdonald, Geof Huth & Tom Beckett, Andy Martrich, Paul Siegell, Jane Joritz-Nakagawa, Joe Balaz, dan raphael, Glenn R. Frantz, Marcia Arrieta, Daniel f Bradley, Daniel f Bradley & Mike Cannell, Stephen Nelson, Adam Strauss, Tom Taylor, Angela Genusa, Martin Edmond, Carlyle Baker, Alex Gildzen, Tom Beckett interviewing Alex Gildzen, Marilyn R. Rosenberg, Alyson Torns, Sam Langer, John M. Bennett & C. Mehrl Bennett & Geof Huth, Michael Caylo-Baradi, Felino Soriano, Alexander Jorgensen, Michael Aanji Crowley, Anne Gorrick, Ashley Capes, Manas Bhattacharya, Manas Bhattacharya & Aria Abraham, Lars Palm, sean burn, Lisa Ciccarello, Obododimma Oha, Bobbi Lurie, Tray Drumhann, R L Swihart, & Ryan B. Richey.

& a reminder that print copies of the previous twelve issues are available from The Otoliths Storefront.

Enjoy!

Mark Young [ed.]

[p.s. my own contribution is here]

roamin in the gloamin [radioactive effinfluvia mix]

while the mouth of the Clyde gargles radioactive waste, a sunken stretch of sand near faslane speaks on its behalf: "we need a whole new river ... this one's full of radioactive discharge because some shithead left a nuclear toilet in a constant state of flush. "the best that can be done at this point is to poison the poison with fluoride," said a prestige second-hand nuclear sub salesman thought to be responsible for leaving the tap on drip & now in charge of a top secret project for a company that produces tinned soup variants: "we poison first, then rake in a fortune from the mass-inoculation programme," announced some spillage from a profit-polluted tin of soup. said an enlightened glasgow ned, "they scum'r sick enough tae put the fuckin flu intae fluoride. wan greedy inconsiderit wee bastart tinna soop's aw it takes tae ruin it fur ivry fuckin cunt." it has been proposed by a lobbyist group that certain companies are to rake in profits from cleaning up the mess. at the same time, the collective ectoplasm of a group of dead scientists demanded an investigation into numerous other anomalies sweeping the planet's waterways, & yet another evil corporation is thought to be responsible for the sun's missing sunspots. "it's just possible," argued the chair of the sunspot alliance, "that the sunspots have been stolen & their energy harnessed to dry up the world's fresh water supplies. this is a marketing ploy, a covert strategy to sell off billions of polluted bottles of water to an unsuspecting population. the bottled water is contaminated with rabies, which causes hydrophobia & then a horrible death. what need is there for consumers after all when there's nothing left to sell?" a new gamma ray burst dismissed this as "blatant conspiracy theory bullshit," adding: "your puny little world with it's vile & brutal capitalistic holography will soon learn who's in charge ... there can be no peace as long as your populations are controlled by this nasty cold."

natural antivirals (link)

the book is now officially extinct

i've just given my now extinct chapbook, flightpath resistor, a new sanctuary, here

skyhooks - horror movie (1975)