All creatures...

All creatures, great or small…

Avoid confrontations with the infamous Giga-beasts of lore and yore, of course, but also beware of their many and various tiny cousins, which can infest your homes or workplaces, and wreck even greater domestic or industrial havoc than mischievous imps and gremlins.

 

Often mistaken for innocuous playthings, homunculi are very fast-breeding little monsters. They are vicious killers. They are destroyers of calm and order in all human affairs. They are receptacles for purest evil, eagerly providing a physical expression or predatory aspect for long–festering vengeance. As homunculi–phobia extends its clammy grip across Europe from Prague, all British citizens are being warned against ignoring the horrific threats from such insidious creepy-crawlies, which are genuinely alarming in their fierce proficiency for mayhem, and pose a more substantial menace to civilisation than any empire’s darth, or mythically hellish demon, you can name.

shredded wheat homonculus

Beware of the formidable shredded wheat homunculus at breakfast! These crispy spry critters are cereal killers that dodge your spoon, escape from bowls of milk, and can ruin your morning repast. Never, ever, try to eat three of these fibrous ghouls at one sitting. Watch out also for chocophile ‘pod–people’, especially the bubbly aero blob (genus: cocoa nestle series), which crushes all meaning from a TV aerobics workout. It appears to be sweet and edible, yet they are really calorie monsters that eke out a confectionary existence, while accelerating your sugar dependency to addiction via quasi-supernatural means.

aero blob

In the political sphere’s draughty corridors of power, a familiar Penfield homunculus has been spotted causing a ruckus amongst bean brains in UK.gov domains, wherein tactical counter-homunculus strategies are currently subject to parliamentary debate. Several unconfirmed reports of appalling new hybrids without any hubris include the dreadful hovisunculus. This particularly nasty brown loafer scatters breadcrumbs in its wake. The general public are cautioned to be very careful never to step barefoot in any messy crusty fragments - which may be poisonous on contact with bare skin, or follow its toxic trail of half–baked horrors to your mortal doom. 

  

Penfield homunculus makes havoc in HoP

Many of you will recall the grisly true story behind the ‘mannikins of horror’ segment of 1972’s docudrama known as Asylum, where Dr Byron is portrayed by Herbert Lom in the anthology of dark tales. It’s a further warning, should any be needed again, that Czech madmen locked up in British loony bins are particularly likely to create robotic homunculi for nefarious purposes!   

Afterlife proof!

“Be seein’ ya’ll, real soon!” is the first coherent message received and decoded from the great beyond.

It began with an exhibition of historical photographs from the pioneering days of country & western railroads, selected from the archives of Dischman & Crombie, Inc. Reviews of art galleries hosting the ‘how they won the west’ touring show, sponsored by the Kubrickian Institute (NYC), had conflicting reports of where a particular figure was standing in a certain picture. Was he on the left or right of the centre..? “It was as if he was uncertain of his place in the tableau,” remarked one prescient commentator about this story of the century.

Boffins at LabCentral ‘fringe division’ examined the photograph (Warwick PX#17) in question, finding that it was taken by self-styled 19th century alchemist, Paedverton Morningside III, an experimenter and part-time dentist who was renowned amongst photography historians for adding “a few drops” of his own patent-pending ‘snake oil restorative’ (ingredients unknown!) to his developing chemicals. Time-lapse studies revealed that a figure, later dubbed ‘Survivor #1’, opened and closed his eyes over a period of 42 hours. Verification of the LC observations suggested this was ‘blinking’ but only viewed in extreme slow-motion!

The photograph was then digitally scanned, and the ‘motile’ figure used to provide an avatar for Mega-Dynamics’ VR matrix ‘Second Spin’, where a mod (accelerator plug-in) permitted LabCentral experts to match temporal velocities with Survivor #1, and so make an historic ‘first contact’ in 2Spin virtuality with “a deceased personage, now residing on the other side.”

Amongst many lucrative offers, from interested parties, global media pundits and assorted opportunists, that have been pouring in for ‘contactee’ Survivor #1… there’s an open-ended contract to appear on new reality-TV show Get Me Out Of Here, I’m Dead.

Bark odes

Forget about the so-called bible codes, feast your eyes on ring sonnets and bark odes! 

Every schoolchild knows how bees invented television, and ants conceived telepathy, but new advanced research by the Royale Botanical Association has discovered that common trees, like the easily recognisable horse chestnut (which spawned a whole human infantile subculture of conkers), or the fast-growing walnut, have secretly been composing poetry for millennia. In forest and copse, timeless wood-wordsmiths etch lyrical prose with epochal variations, often discussing nature and entropy with a matchstick profundity that mere mortals like us could never hope to equal.  

Diatribes..? Well, yes, certainly – the focus of political and social commentaries by trees is particularly fascinating. Despite the usual pacifism of trees, their virulent polemical rants about several varieties parasitical fungi are very probably more fascistically objectionable than most forms of human racism. And let’s not forget the infamous troubles of colonial ‘oppression’ between American oaks and Canadian maples (as immortalised in rock music by that Rush song), which first led curious researchers on the trail of so-called ‘vegetable panic attacks’ - detected as a subtle, almost psychically attuned, infrared mottling on bark (see picture: ‘new proverbs for old’ - translated from Aramaic), and in false colour imaging of seasonal ring patterns (pictured: ‘this is what the Romans did for us’ - abridged version).

Terror felt by trees has increased dramatically ever since humanity’s industrial revolution forever changed agricultural practices regarding forestry, so trees that once feared campfires, and felling by mankind’s primitive axes, nowadays have to contend with chainsaws and mechanical up-rooters. Dendrochronology studies, finding disturbing patterns of climate change, prompted further investigations into extraordinary upheavals in the social history of trees. Although quite immobile, the lividly roving rage of activist-poet trees is found in their classic agitprop protest anthem, ‘timber is murder’. You don’t want to know what noble pines think about humankind’s ritual barbarism of Christmastime! And yet, preliminary evidence suggests that many trees maintain a somewhat contrary respect for the supposedly civilising influence of the ‘book publishing’ industry upon homo sapiens’ typically callous banditry.

Shunned by naturally endowed trees, the forced-evolutionary leapfrog of their gene-mod vegetable cousins - the unwholesomely motile and wholly dangerous, so-called ‘triffids’; is another twig of contention between species. It’s a deep-rooted sourness (epitomised by the silent seething specificity of a standard ‘walk on by’ rejection) that resulted in triffids’ irreversible expulsion from the big society of trees, after redwood parliamentary debates, and even disbarment from regular autumnal leaf-dropping parties. Unfortunately, some of the recent ‘scientific’ discoveries concerning poetry by trees are entirely spurious, at best. There is no compelling data whatsoever that any modern trees send ‘txt’ messages.  

 Activity is very slow in this gym for trees...

As reported elsewhere (see inter-world wire services) FAX 21's exclusive interview with the guru master of tantric hibernation has been postponed.

The infamous guru stayed in one position too long, and so - regrettably - his mind has retreated to an 'ice cave' located somewhere in his back-brain region.

Apparently, the renowned guru of TH will - presumably, at least - remain incommunicado while in deepest meditation, until springtime...

We must wait for the next seasonal thaw.