Rankin file

Happy-go-lucky New Zilders usually manage to blunder through their lives without killing anybody and on the whole, aside from buggering up the environment, not doing too much damage. Occasionally, of course, one or two of them will go off the rails or "up the boohoi"  as local peasantry put it and then there is a lot of shouting and hitting and blood.
The esteemed "Riddled" readership is at this stage saying "But surely in the Socialamist Republic of Kiwistan there are government agencies who bring hope and caring and money to help folks whose boohoi has been well and truly got up". And, indeed, in days of old such worthy institutions may have existed briefly their fine efforts snuffed out by the next Area District Oberleutnant who wandered past and thought "Woah, new carpet in the waiting room!".
In these days of changing ways, so called liberated days (Gaak, Rod Stewart timeslip, turn off the flux capacitor Smut!). In these modern days we have a group of folks called the Families Commission 
who, one imagines, look after families and the like and hardly ever go home early.
But, for the porpoises of this look at teh whirling dervish that is NZ politics we merely note that the Families Commission was set up as a deal between the then labour government and everybody's favourite flunky MP, Peter Dunne. As the renowned political scientist Herr Dr. Bimler has stated of P. Dunne "would-be Eminence Gris of NZ politics who somehow ended up as Eminence Grease instead. Recognised as the hagfish of the  party-political ecology, not just for the slime production, but also for his ability to batten onto other minor parties, merge with them, suck out their votes, and then move on when the host dies." Mr Dunne has very famous hair, just sayin'.
One of the Commissioners of the Fambly is well known amongst those of us who can manage to stay awake in front of TV news in New Zild, a Ms. Christine Rankin.
Rankin became a Family Commissar in circumstances that were thought odd at the time but are becoming more familiar to us all here in the Shaky Isles as the National government pays off real and imagined political debts and tries to stack whatever vacancies occur, anywhere, with the 'right' people.
Ms. Rankin is assuredly of the right people and has never met a Right-Wing talking point she did not want to take home, love and squeeze and call George.
A fairly thorough backgrounder on Rankin is behind this HTML. It is terribly bad form to say 'here' and 'here' according to the Jonah Gludgeberg Big Book of Internetz.
Now, Rankin had an awful childhood and got terrible treatment from the NZ Government when she was fired, IMO.
However she has overcompensated for that since then and seems to be about as polarising as your average Quasar. She has remained active in conservative circles and blurts out the usual RW line on occasion to remind everyone who will listen.
Still, there she was commissioning families and the like slowly disappearing under paperwork and generally we were all better off for it.
She had a run at getting on the Auckland City Council and managed to con 12,000 or so people into voting for her promise to ...er...well.. look after old buildings, I think.
This, of course, did not assuage her longing for politically powered meddling in other folks lives without all that legal mumbo-jumbo holdin' decent folks back. Now she is off tilting at non-existent moral decay and wanting to impose conservatism on unsuspecting New Zilders.
She is now the CEO of the Conservative Party of New Zealand.It was announced in the perkiest Press Release you may ever  see that begins

 "Hi Everyone, I am so delighted to be here at headquarters as the Chief Executive of The Conservative Party."

The Secret Headquarters? It would be irresponsible to speculate.
An interesting part of the CNZ wackyloonapedia page states

although Ms Rankin is a Soka Gakkai Buddhist and not an evangelical Christian.

Now why that be in there? Well, the CNZ is largely based in the fundamentalist milieu and spends a lot of time banging on about family values whilst proving that they are true conservatives and know the worth of nothing and the value of nothing also, too. How these family values are going to travel with Ms. Rankin who is in her 4th marriage we can only pop corn in anticipation of. The latest marriage had a whiff of scandal about it .

New Families Commissioner Christine Rankin is facing fresh criticism after revelations she married a Wellington man just months after his previous wife took her own life. 

A bit suspect but actually pretty average in the Conservative world-view. 
 There you are Americans we are getting as populated with weirdos and as dodgy in government appointees as you are. 
It's a brave New world citizens!!

One.Billion.Dollars.

That is how much the lawyer-shaped entity acting for OMICS Publishing Group is demanding from mild-mannered librarian Jeffrey Beall, for describing that company's business practices in such a manner as to damage it, i.e. honestly.

Srinubabu Gedela, OMICS owner [right]

Now the Riddled Library Pixies may be capricious, and unreliable, and capable of Jesuit casuistry when it comes to interpreting the small-print clauses in their contract, while their performance in areas such as "retrieving back issues of Miss Busty Monthly* from the double-secret-probation-uncataloged archives" leaves much to be desired... but they do not lack for collegiality or professional loyalty. So they have suggested that Riddled join the serried ranks of bloggerhood rallying to Mr Beall's defense. And we do not cavil or resist, especially after they turned Another Kiwi into a previously-unknown variety of pinniped.

AK does not appear perturbed and is happily playing with his Airfix HO-scale toy soldiers military models. Still, it would be good to get him back, what with it being not my turn to restock the tea-room with chocolate hobnobs. Also I am worried that the pixies -- lovable little scamps that they are -- may be working up to a joke about "Seal of Approval". Tigris and mikey are better than me at negotiating with them but they have conveniently chosen this occasion to go back travelling in the Riddled time machine to the Cretaceous era (apparently with the mission of teaching hadrosaurs how to protect themselves from time-travelling big-game hunters by disguising themselves as creatures who do not look like hadrosaurs).

Riddled has previously covered the egregious band of shysters known as OMICS Publishers. That was a while ago in interduct years, however, and their business model has evolved; now they look to eke out the meagre income they make from dunning researchers for fraudulent publication charges, with dunning researchers for fraudulent conference-attendance charges. Since the practice worked so well with junk journals, to lend verisimilitude to these spurious conferences they pad out the Organising Committees with the names of authorities in the field, without necessarily consulting the owners of those names. It is not clear whether they have added names from fictional characters yet.

We are impressed by the language of the lawyer's threatening missive, which proves to be pungent -- if not particularly coherent -- and may well provide the new Riddled masthead:

All the allegation that you have mentioned in your blog are nothing more than fantastic figment of your imagination by you and the purpose of writing this blog seems to be a deliberate attempt to defame our client [...] Our client perceive the blog as mindless rattle of a incoherent person and please be assured that our client has taken a very serious note of the language, tone, and tenure adopted by you as well as the criminal acts of putting the same on the Internet.

It may be that the OMICS group purloined the lawyer himself from a fictional character, in the same way that the Indian legal system was borrowed in its entirety from Bleak House.

As it happens, inspired by the news that the Royal Horticultural Society has relaxed its hitherto-unbending policies and will now allow the presence of garden gnomes "brightly coloured mythical creatures" in the Chelsea Garden Show, we are launching a new journal, gnOMICS. So far the only member of the Editorial Board is Srinubabu Gedela (MD) of Hyderabad. We're sure he won't mind that to save time we didn't consult him before adding his name.

* Truth be known, we're not really so interested in the backs.

UPDATED with Bonus OMICShenanigans. "Dinosaurs: Extinct or Traumatised?"

Did I fool you? I didn't mean to fool you

May the 19th in the rightside up section of the world today. We know WHOSE birthday that is don't we?? There will be no chocolate fish awarded for this competition since that would detract from the solemnity of the occasion.

It's a good read too.

Ancient belief #1: "Humans are friendly and helpful."

No wonder dragons went extinct. Serves them right for not upgrading their beliefs to the latest release Belief 6.2.
Sentimentality in dragons is correlated with dentistry skills but not with long-term survival.

New Zealand politicians are unaware of all internet traditions

From here.

"When I said 'Balls' it was in the way of an expostulation rather than a request."

"Balls in horror movies are inherently scary," sez I, led astray on a tangent by a second pint of Gleamhound's Sobering Syrup. "If they are not bouncing downstairs of their own volition, they are in the hands of evil creepy children, or even the chief embodiment of evils."

"It is type-casting," Another Kiwi vouchsafed in slightly muffled tones on account of being face-down on the table. "How often do you see a ball in a positive role?"

The primary subject of discussion had been our application to the NZ Film Commission for funding. In support we have supplied them with sketches and storyboards. There had been secondary subjects of discussion as well but they had remained in the Indoors Voice because head barmaid Evangeline van Holsterin has been known to repossess glasses even before they are completely finished, if she judges that customers are verging upon rowdiness and lack of decorum.

The "evil creepy child" in the storyboard did not come out looking quite as intended. We have not heard back from the Film Commission for a while and I am worried that they are going to steal all our work and use it as a cover story to repatriate a group of diplomats who are hiding from a post-revolutionary regime in some distant country.

"Perhaps the plot is not sufficiently horrific," I persevered. "It follows through a process of geometrical and imeluct -- inelumpt -- unavoidable logic, that if we put lots and lots of balls into the plot, it will be even scarier."

A more cynical suspicion would be that someone has taken the script back in the Riddled Time Machine and sold it to some previous director. However, my colleagues refudiate the suggestion and there is no indication of such activity in the remaining pages of the Time Machine log-book. It is probably just coincidence that 1980 was a high point for balls in cinema, featuring as they did in The Shining and in Changeling.

I have always been impressed in the latter movie by the bravery of the red-and-white striped ball which is dropped in the river, after bouncing downstairs and freaking out George C. Scott's character... only for it reappear a few frames later. The ball's performance was so memorable that nine years later it was lured out of semi-retirement to reprise its role, in slightly different make-up, in the 1989 version of The Woman in Black.

Imagine my disappointment to discover that for that scene the film-makers used a stunt ball.

Seven years of labour on the instruments of time

That is how long the fell beings from the Unseelie Court honed their invasion plans.
For seven years the nightmare vanguard worked to mask the loathly truth of their appearance -- all teratomous polyostomous abomination and POOP -- behind a seductive glamour. Even as they wore away at the frayed fabric where realities come closest, where the membrane is thinnest separating their dimension from the fictional realm, where the barrier is unguarded and unfortified.

And then the stars were right for the conquest of the realm of narrative!
But the Unseelie Court had not reckoned with Lilliputian hallucinations and the Charles Bonnet syndrome, and the radical effect they wreak on scale, especially in fiction...

...so the cat got them.

So they tried again. Again, a tradition (or old charter) took its toll on scale...

And the cat got them.

Mrs Spat and Detritis Doodleberry Fairypoo Cupcake III would like everyone to know that Lilliputian hallucinations are tasty and fun to play with, but they are not at all filling -- especially for a growing cat -- and 20 minutes later it's time for dinner again.

Inside sources warn that the next time the Unseelie Court attempt to invade, they will shift their target to the realm of visual fiction. We are confident that the scale distortion will thwart them again and the incursion will be quickly detected.