Cue for the Visions: “The Knack... And How to Get It”

Mae’r caneuon y sêl ein atgofion fel cwyr ar yr is-haen o amser.

The flatwound strings thump at a leisurely but determined pace; a brisk 6/8 stroll with a skip of the heel, albeit one that is yet a step or two ahead of shoes trudging through the white drifts.
An exploded transformer, swaying cables and weeping Magnolia add to the foreboding and tension.
An eerie angelic chorus descends through the graupel as the sky turns from ash to dingy amber behind the blackened windows of the Lodge.

Cue for the Visions: “Telephone Your Mother”

Lagu yang segel kenangan kita seperti lilin di atas substrat waktu.

IV-V-I triumphant stabs of the Mellotron puncture the air.
An inefficient machine sputters and an old cog bounces out unceremoniously and skitters along the linoleum.
Pore through the fourth-floor tomes to sift for trivia.
Pass the time in the 36th stratum.
Browse the stacks and portals of the first-floor dayroom.
Pass the time.
The acute tattoo of the instrument signals not triumph, but finality.

Un Rinfresco al Verdi

Domanda del Tomo
e il ghiaccio fratture
le pupille arrivano
assorbito e ascoltando

Bloccare gli occhi con la luce
e il corpo si blocca
il leggero tremore delle farfalle
si muove dopo secoli dormienti

Assaporare il radience breve
come ricorda la vecchia quercia
come il semenzale feltro
quando il mondo era nuovo

Orville Corporation Sponsors Local Fútbol Club

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Meeting their community outreach obligations one rec sport at a time, the Orville Corporation is proud to announce its sponsorship of Las Estrellas, Heritageville’s favourite local club in the youth fútbol league.

“Youth, enthusiasm, and private funding will take the community to the next step... interfacing people and situational activities within a positive context, using Orville’s SetUp™ and LifeCoach™ programmes,” said Johnny Gutts, Regional Brand Manager for Orville.

To promote the “Orville brand,” opportunities beyond athletic relationships and methodologies will be offered, such as: international corporate sponsors, security/clone marketing and PsyOps programmes, instant notoriety, as well as comprehensive self-actualisation modules.

With this in mind, Orville has endeavoured to develop a fútbol organisational philosophy and methodology that serves two purposes: To support the fútbol methodology with specific-interest mental proxies used by Las Estrellas, and to support a programme that allows athletically expressive activities for youth fútbol clubs.

Johnny Gutts adds: “Las Estrellas is a fútbol club with global recognition and background which represents ‘the perfect date’ for us with respect to the sponsorship. We chose Las Estrellas because the institution’s characteristics fell in line with Orville’s philosophy of high performance and dynamic enhancement, along with the global impact of its image. We believe the emotive applications of the passion of Las Estrellas matches the synergy Orville puts into technological development and innovation. Through amusements and especially fútbol, Orville looks to reaffirm its corporate mission which centers on innovation, personal achievement through the establishment of psychological goals, market-attuned teamwork, and the definition of a single objective: to rule.”

“Amusement Is Fun.”

“Our ‘Amusement Is Fun’ tagline is more than just a slogan; it’s the foundation for the way our operatives and athletes interact with the global audience and with one another,” said Gutts.
“This new slogan reflects the importance of the club’s ultra-competent, experienced and fully-devoted athletes. Their commitment and desire to play as effectively as possible has led to the successful fun we all enjoy today.”

BubbaCabal time trip unsuccessful

Champagne Charley: Previous accusations of schizophrenia ‘must be ignored’

DATELINE: Heritageville • Tuesday, 2 Sept., 24th Stratum

It was neither the short circuits in his brain nor the bubbly in his tummy-tum that made Champagne Charley lurch and reel at an Orville Corporation Labour Day picnic. The tumult was of an unexpected temporal nature. Explosions rocked the small intestine as a time machine materialised in his tumescent gullet. The BubbaCabal was named on suspicion of involvement in botched weekend attempts at time travelling to pre-Civil Rights America in order to tailor history to their own diabolical ends.

“What the BubbaCabal is doing is not respecting the rights of pro-autonomy citizens,” said Orville spokesman Johnny Gutts.
“We are doing our best to quell this intestinal insurgency.”
The Cabal's time travel efforts appear to have been unsuccessful at this time.

Instead of teleporting to the United States of the mid-twentieth century, Cabal operatives found themselves in the midst of the Xarnaq Dominion of 2313 A.D., an extra-solar hegemony that governs the earth's brain farms. Needless to say, the time-travelling Pink Boys were not welcome, as their limited cerebral capacities were of little use in the twenty-fourth century, much less the twentieth. Xarg VI, heir to the throne of Grand Praetor, banished them back to the present after bearing repeated insults to His regime.

The time machine was built using data recently stolen from the Allied Pungeoning Front, sources say.
Champagne Charley, by the way, is still suffering from the trauma of the invasive mechanism, which disintegrated along with its passengers upon re-emergence into this dimension. Doctors note that the remaining intestinal detritus should exit naturally through the Nether Tracts with minimal discomfort.

As for the remaining stigma of schizophrenia that so doggedly haunts Champagne Charley, “It must be ignored, of course,” says Gutts.
“His troubles are borne of an outside agency -- most likely the BubbaCabal and their half-arsed psychological attempts at scapegoating honest citizens.”

L. Jack McGhee is a staff writer at the Heritageville Observer.

Vexilla et Dies

“Godwin” (half-Darwin, half-G_d) shrugs at the false dichotomies foisted upon the form to which he has been bestowed.
Still, he can unquerulently appreciate mankind’s sometimes irreverent catechising of Matters of Origin and Whither Thou Goest.
Meanwhile, he will bask silently under the bunting and the burnishing summer sun.
Si fueris Rōmae, carpe diem.

Pungle: What more could we ask for?

Pungling as wise, kind, thoughtful
The leisurely man is now depicted walking around the house in boxer shorts, scratching himself. Always getting crocked and passing out at the dinner table. Always hitting or shoving us around; always holding us down, spitting on us, and shooting us with a BB gun.

Pungle Initiative II
Always smoking cigarettes and drinking cheap wine. Always making prank calls and stealing people's silverware. Conspicuously present are beanbag chairs and cockroaches. The place reeks of vomitus and cannabis.

The perfect example?
The BubbaCabal. They were evil incarnate around other people. They especially relished tormenting us. We were on to them, seeing them as the gutless little punks they were. While the BubbaCabal was essentially morally bankrupt, they didn't have the stones to be held accountable for their actions.

The dissolution of sanity has taken its toll
Men are shacked up in a condo with their 25-year-old receptionists. Rocked by the BubbaCabal's actions, men are having mid-life crises. Men get a tattoo and an earring. Men now sport nose rings and shaved heads. Men drive Miatas.
The chaos of their lives has deadened the boys emotionally. They have taken to huffing lighter fluid. They now shuffle around your front yard with empty gazes — they've mellowed.

Hi-Five of Tiki Seven

an incompetent buffer.

Notions are easily swallowed by the apathetic. They accept as fact that any disgruntled citizen, no matter how brusquely burdened he or she may feel as a result of the increasing demands of a slackless society, must be a wacko, or at best a nut who deserves extermination by agents of the Con.

Ignore the incompetent buffer of apotheosis and haughtily forge ahead with your covenant of verity.

Chemo 4 Emo: Modern Solutions for Hipster Inadequacy Complexes

Squamous Scene Emonomas

Their rates have been increasing locally, possibly as a result of decreased exposure to rational upbringing, a broad global perspective, the arts, and pretty much, reality. Primary Care Pungalords can expect to diagnose six to seven cases per semester and one to two cases of Squamous Scene Rejectus each year. Attitudes may be plaque-like or nodular in a waxy, translucent manner, often with ulceric smarminess.

The upshot is that sufferers can be treated with Ego Excision, Emotherapy, Electrodesiccation, Proto-Dread Removal, or Pungedynamic Therapy (the latter is not approved for this purpose by the USDA), although pungeoning does result in the fewest recurrences.
Vapourous Meta-Excuses are amenable to any of the destructive techniques described above, with the exception of PdT.
Burned-Out Scene Personae arise from Scabid Dumpster Patches and Ego Ennui and become more erythematous with growth, sometimes resulting in Emo-Hypersensitivity, Gutter Slumming, Terminal Bourgeoisphobia, and Social Ulceration. Because Brooding Self-Dissatisfaction may again metastasise, sufferers often are treated with Excisional Psyopsy.

It’s really not as bad as one might anticipate. Most chemo patients say the worst thing was losing their taste. [“Like that of rancid wallpaper.”]

That should not be a problem here.

I ddeall y plentyn: To vault the Mending Wall or a descending pall?

It was sometime in the midst of the first stratum, in a portable outbuilding acting as a makeshift classroom. Class was not yet fully assembled and young scholars milled about in the bright morning.
Masters Capone and Stoddard stood in the back, listening intently to the agitated neophyte, Master Streeter. He had a smaller frame than his schoolmates, an anaemic hue, and tousled hair of ash topping his noggin.

“What is it, mate? What’s troubling you?” the two lads asked young Streeter. The boy’s slate-blue eyes had welled up, puffy underneath. His keening hung in the air like that of a forlorn calf. High-pitched blubbering interspersed with a mish-mash of words — all of it impenetrable.

He wasn’t getting through.

“Tell us what’s wrong, man.” Capone and Stoddard wondered if this impasse wasn’t exacerbating his distress.
He continued to weep, and by week’s end, Master Streeter was gone from the classroom.

Domestic issues? Emotional issues? A combination thereof?
Communicating across the globe is much taken for granted in this day.
But what about the little boy at your feet sobbing because he cannot connect?

“I have striven not to laugh at human actions, not to weep at them, nor to hate them, but to understand them.” — Spinoza

Bad Medicine: Slipped Mickeys and the Albatross of Free Will

"Thank you, Classic City... Good Night!"
Ian Stoddard stepped down from the stage and waded through the crowd to the bar to grab a pint. He took a sip and surveyed the sea of heads and shoulders, searching.
"Where did she go?"
He snaked his way through the boisterous club, squinting in the hazy, low light at every niche and table.
And there she was.
Sprawled on a bench, slumped against the wall, her head skewed crookedly like a broken doll.
She stirred slightly, eyelids leaden, and softly moaned.
Ian stared daggers, and after a clenched number of seconds blurted, "What the hell happened to you?"

Veronique was an otherwise bright and witty woman -- 'fun to be around' as one might say. Though she did have a penchant for blathering boilerplate phrases in the form of "All ____ are potential _____;" "I'm against ___-ism, ___-ism and people who are ____-ist;" "____ is a social construct," and so on. You can fill in the blanks.
Ian chalked up her spouting of de rigueur tropes as a vestige of days at Uni. He endured this because she was Basically a Good Person. And hoping that eventually, being in the Real World, she would outgrow the parroting of her professors from Navel Gazing Studies classes.

"What the hell happened to you?"
Again she stirred, unable to look Ian in the eye.
"I... had a shot."
"One shot?"
"Yesss..."
"What was it?"
"I don't... know..."
"What do you mean, 'You don't know'?"
"A man... gave it to me..."
"Who?"
"...I dunno."
"So some stranger offered you a Mickey Finn and it's just 'down the hatch' to you, is it? Did you want to be a victim?"
Veronique's shoulders slunk forward, as if she were collapsing upon herself.
"...Yes."
"A victim of your own stupidity!" Ian blared, furious.
He continued to read her the Riot Act until the bloody obvious settled into her thick skull, which took all of seconds flat.

What drives this mindset?
Intentionally putting oneself in a high-risk situation?
Having an external locus of control orientation? ['If I leap into a pool of sharks, it's still their fault for eating me.']
A cheap grasp at moral status through victimisation in the face of the cold, hard stare of Social Darwinism?

Ian took a deep breath, leaned close and hissed, "You're fond of pithy platitudes. Here's an old one for you that you've probably forgotten: Don't take sweets from strangers."

Metagnostic Moomba: The Sneaker-Set Parade

The lamplights are aglow
on the streets of Sheffield
and the evening dew has settled
on green blades underfoot

HOP-HOP-STOMP

Down the pavement comes the procession
batons awhirl and cymbals clatter
sneakers red and sneakers blue
hearts and smiles are on the march

HOP-HOP-STOMP

Charming the spirit of Nooralie
wives with spears in the air
Doppler drone of the thunner-spale
drifts through the ville, sonorous

HOP-HOP-STOMP

Clad in their modern-day lap-lap
the new stomp of a kapa haka
unbridled joy enthusiastic
with humble attire -- paper, not plastic