When we were Farmed

I wrote before about whales wearing corsets made out of human bones to make their krill bloated bodies look fetishistically attractive.

When the animal revolution comes, they will not be the only ones.

Cows will farm humans for all manner of reasons. Not meat, obviously, cows know that meat farming is a massive waste of land resources. But they will keep men for leather, and endlessly force woman to be pregnant in order to hook their breasts up to weighty, painful machines, and use their milk for human cheese. And powder to feed to their calves in human milk formula, and thus get sanctions from Pig Nestle.

Pigs are…pigane…while the goats are cruel. The humans kept on goat owned farms suffer greatly, their living stomachs endless scraped for rennet with rusty wire down a hosepipe, their skins scraped off them to make shoes while they live and breathe still.

Snakes do the same. A designer human handbag sells for upwards of a thousand mice on the reptile markets of the Serengeti. Boomslangs and mambas sometimes euthanize the flayed skin donators with a swift bite, but most don’t.

Birds fly humans as kites, and make delicacies such as “Human Duvet Soup” and chickens harvest living embryos and foetuses for food like in “The Gestapo’s Last Orgy” – an avian Gestapo obviously, cockerels dressed in long black leather coats and trilbies, putting their beaks under the toenails of human female resistance workers.

And the tigers, and no-one criticised them for this, ground up children to make medicines, and as for badgers, they attacked us with dogs for spreading the common cold, and hung our bodies proudly from barbed wire fences.

They all would if they could, you know. The way we carry o.

Copyright Bloody Mulberry 30.09.2013

CONCEPT - The Multi Eyed Organic Telescope

We have telescopes, optical and otherwise, that massively multiply the aperture of the individual telescopes concerned by combining their light slash information, into one focal point, or place.

Probably the original design of this type was the Multiple Mirror Telescope in Arizona, where 6 1.8 metre mirrors operated in combination to produce the light gathering capacity of a 4.5 metre one, in a revolutionary design like a football, on an altazimuth mount.

The Multiple Mirror Telescope

The concept was used in radio astronomy, such as the Very Large Array, where it resulted in a radio telescope with an effective diameter of 27 miles or so.

The Very Large Array

So, as I patrolled the racking in my workplace, letting my brain escape from the confines of the stifling warehouse, and uncomfortable polyester uniform, I thought of replicating a similar instrument, but with the human eye...

What would you see, I wondered, if you were to somehow network every pair of fully operational eyes on the planet, and get them to all look at the same thing in the sky? Collating the information at a single nexus  - presumably done by scientists with non networked eyes, because that would get freaky - what would be the result. If you got half a billion eyes to look up at the Andromeda galaxy, would you get a superior result from one pair of eyes looking alone? 

And then, on a smaller scale, get a hundred folk to stand round a statue and look at it, to get a really good three dimensional image of it? If lots of people look at a fly, would you see it in great detail?

Or really, is this just an excuse to come out with a fantastic way of giving everyone the mega-willies? People walking around with 3g slats in the backs of their heads, wifi ariels installed in their spleens...non-concensual installation of eyeball CCDs on people's retinas as they beg for mercy?

CINEMA - Super 8 Scores a 7. And a Bit

Finally got to watch Super 8, having bought it originally as a present for the folks and having had to wait for a discretely decent interval before spiriting it back to my place alongside some onions.

After about half an hour, it was pretty obvious I was watching Super Close Encounters of the Extra Terrestrial Cloverfield Kind - there were so many Spielberg identifiers in there it was hard to see where JJ Abrams could have put his own imprint on the movie. Cute child - check. Cute child who lost their mother to an unfortunate crushing incident - check. Cute child gets kidnapped by alien - check. Lashings of sentimentality - check check check check.

Finally, Abrams own DNA gets a look in. A monster that looks pretty much the same as the Cloverfield one. But for all the movie's obvious derivations, it has a lot of charm. The framing device, the kids of the cast shooting their own zombie apocalypse movie on the titular Super 8 camera, is a fantastic one and it also bears noting that the finished product you see over the end credits is better than Planet Terror by a mile.

The young cast - Joel Courtney, Riley Griffiths and the tons-better-than-her-sister Elle Fanning - are great too, and the fact that the creature is given more depth than either a building crushing giant prawn, or a finger glowing be-good moralist, adds a dimension to the film other creature flicks lack.

In short, it's not amazing, but it is a highly watchable film, and I whiled away a happy sofa bound couple of hours watching it.

Copyright Bloody Mulberry 25/08/2013

Who Gives a Bloody Pissing Fuck About Batman?

The economy is ghastly, people are suffering horrendous deaths from nerve gas in Syria, and millions upon millions of folk around the world are wondering where on earth they are going to get food for their families tomorrow.

So thank all the stars that I've been given a sense of perspective by the news that Ben Affleck is going to play Batman in some fanboy trouser stirring Superman versus Batman twattery. Twitter is in meltdown - most of the top ten trends all day have involved the words "Batman" and "Ben Affleck" in various combinations.

Stoked by SF mags wishing to keep a high hit count on their advert sodden webpages, the fires of this utterly unimportant debate have blazed all day.

Batman, I think, is a favourite superhero of the middle classes, as they empathise with his pseudo-troubled personality. As they struggle with where to buy quinoa, the independent coffee shop patronisers empathise with a man who struggled to be brought up among endless money and toys to play with.

While people immerse themselves in the privileged backstory of the bat, I have steadfastly refused to give a toss until now, an article written in 5 minutes while I watch a documentary about World Music on BBC4. How can anyone give a monkeys?

Me, I will read and enjoy proper sci fi, as more endless comic books get re-digested and recycled like the water in the International Space Station, and a real world rotates around the sun royally fucking itself up. Thank you and goodnight!

STORY - The Moth Man

The moth man stands overlooking the village from the hill by the garden centre, past the swollen brook and the sheltered home for mentally vulnerale adults. He had been a moth for several years, furry and nocturnal, hair unkempt and done in two long spikes at the front to act like antennae as he bumped about in the dark.

Every day he spent sleeping in a bush up on the hill, dappled by sunset shining through the privet leaves, and maintained by sweeet nectar squeezed from summer flowers and fruits. Then, as the sun began to set, he became more active, stirring from his shrubby slumbers and feeling the daily attraction to the settlement beneath him.

As the last sliver of the sun dropped below the horizon, flashing emerald green it it was a lucky day, he set off along the brook as it bubbled along happily down a meadow, the turbulent patches of water acting as a luminescent guide as he danced down the slope shaking his head, twitching.

The brook met a small river as the hillside flattened out. The lights of the village glowed softly behind curtains, but it was not these that drew the moth man, these luminosities were not compelling enough for his vastly altered cortex. It was those who had neglected to pull their curtains or lower their blinds, that were the irresistible candles that dragged him onwards.

And when he found such a window, all he could do was bang his head upon it until his forehead bled and his craked through the glass, and his stomach and chest were cut to ribbons. The only mercy he received were when the incredulous homeowner became aware of what he was, and mercifully turned the light out to bring him temporary relief, before he was driven on to another house.

And women screamed at him, especially the prettier one as his naked form flayed his lepidopteric self to shreds on the tasteless double glazing and UPVC surrounds, but he could never walk away.

For as everyone knows, they are drawn to pretty women as a moth is drawn to a flame. And his shattered body spent every night burning.

Copyright Bloody Mulberry 18/08/2013

The Anti-Carbon Ghosts of Warminster

This is not a post about inhabitants of the spirit world who have an inexplicable hatred of element number 6 in the Periodic Table, but rather, it is based on a conversation I had with a strange man from Warminster I met last week.

He was an elderly fellow, just about turned 70 give or take, but his hair was only lightly streaked with grey and his face relatively young looking, but he walked with a stick and his eyes were such a pale blue I thought initially he had cataracts.

Anyway, we were sat waiting in the Betjeman at St Pancras station, and talk turned to his Wiltshire hometown. Warminster has long been famous as a strange sort of place, and in 1964-1965 had been the home of the Warminster "Thing"  - a bizarre series of UFO sightings and strange  happenings - men in balaclavas wandering country roads late at night, that sort of thing. Anyway he told me of what was really going on, as we both drank JD and cokes while waiting for a delayed Brighton train.

It wasn't Aliens. It was far stranger than that.

Apparently, Warminster is historically located around various nexuses (nexi?) of ley lines. This old guy - a former maths professor -  believed rather than being rooted in organic hippy dippy lore, the ley lines are dimensional rifts, less than a quark in width, that are so narrow they don't normally affect our space time.

However, at Warminster, at a hub where several of these rifts intersected, there is a larger interdimensional intersect, where matter from dimensions 8 and 11 is able to find its way into our universe. The stuff from the 8th Dimension is an irrelevant mess of random open superstrings that don't correspond to any of our standard theory particles, and thus don't interact a whole lot of bugger all with anything.

But the 11th dimensional matter is different (He explained to me over another drink)  - it's anti matter carbon, atomic number -6, valency 4(1+i). To put it simply, as he was eventually able to after a fifth drink as rain shorted out the rails, it's ghost carbon. Reverse carbon. Graphite hard as diamond, diamond you could write with.

A carbon that in our world has negative mass, yet thanks to the positron complex root 1 valency, it can actually covalent bond with our hydrogen. And its low energy state means it can substitute out native carbon atoms from the organic chemicals found in such things as...living matter.

This was a lot to take in. He himself didn't believe it until he saw the effects on night in Warminster in 1965, where a farmer, his two sons and flock of sheep suddenly glowed black, and vanished from the field in which they were working. Three days later they re-appeared, the sheep unshorn, and the farmer wild with tales of "some other place" he had visited that he could not describe, but was wonderful.

He was sedated and locked in a padded cell, from which he disappeared three weeks later, this time permanently. 167 pupils and 9 teachers were sucked out of a Warminster primary school the next month, and neer seen again apart from eerie imprints certain short sighted people could see, ghosts on the landscape, apparently smiling, but as insubstantial as the wind.

And it wasn't just organic forms disappearing from our world. We had visitors from the 11th dimension too, velvet soft trees you couldn't see, but you could bump into, and climb, before their trunks swept back into the dimensional rift from which they came.

Clouds came too, from worlds as indescribable as love, and it was these, sailing high in the sky, inverse-gravity lensing their background, that were mistaken for UFOs. And it were MOD spooks, confused but excited by the goings on, that were running around on Norton motorcycles in black in the middle of the night, chasing the shadow people that had fallen foul of the leaking ghost-carbon as they flitted between states of being no one had ever been able to comprehend.

And as he told me this, the fellow's eyes twinkled, and I wondered if he had been one of the chasers, or one of those sprites that could flit between our world and the eleventh. And as I looked into those odd eyes of his, I barely noticed his hand pass straight through his own glass, before it picked mine up. And then as his hand reformed, it seemed, that glass of his shattered, and began to bleed pure molten silicon while his own flesh was whitely untouched.

And then, after draining my drink, he winked and left the bar, heading in entirely the opposite direction from where the Brighton train was shceduled to leave, if indeed it ever arrived.

Copyright Bloody Mulberry 17/08/13

Splice - A Cronenberg Movie Like Cronenberg Used to Make

Although I have it on DVD, I haven't seen Splice in a while, so it was a pleasure to watch science out of control versus people, interspersed with watching out of control people versus science.

The documentary about the woman who tried to block life saving radiotherapy for her son "Neon" because she wanted to use crazed alternative therapies instead, was on Channel 4 and was equally compelling viewing.

Splice itself, directed by Vicenzo Natali who had showed what could be done with a one room set and a ton of imagination in "Cube" is another spin on the Frankenstein story, with scientists starting off with good intentions corrupted by the scope of their breakthrough. Their creation in this case being a doe eyed, model faced, bunny legged creature called "Dren".

Which always makes me giggle, "dren" meaning "crap" in Farscape speak.

Dren's creators, an ambitious and ever watchable Sarah Polley, and a geeky Adrian Brody, are forced to take their creation to a remote farm after the launch of a previous gene splicing experiment goes bloodily wrong at a media event. And here their attempts to get to Dren to express her human, feminine side over the rest of her varied animal componentry go disastrously wrong after when she seduces Brody, and kills her pet cat to boot.

And after that, things get seriously weird when we throw some transgendering into the ring, and a rape scene that disturbs more than Straw Dogs ever did.

"Splice" is essentially a Cronenberg body horror type movie, taking elements from "The Fly" and mixing in some "Jurassic Park" as well as Dren's genetics fly out of the control of her maker's. Some of the music is even reminiscent of Howard Shore's Cronenberg scores. It ought to be a B movie, by a director who has never really made it to the A's, but the performances of Polley, Brody, and in particular that of Delphine Chaneac as the disturbingly attractive Dren, make it rather more than that.

And it's a story which in a world where our drive for genetically improved food, drugs, and indeed children becomes more urgent, really resonates.

Copyright Bloody Mulberry 14/08/2013

The Most Sci Fi and Retro of Videos - "Tonight Tonight"

The Smashing Pumpkins, or rather Billy Corgan for the "they" of the band is actually the "he" of he, are mainly snotty, childish, bratty, whiney and annoying.

They can also be lush, melodic, moving and beautiful. None of their work epitomises this more than their string driven masterpiece "Tonight, Tonight" and the promo video that goes with it.

Taken directly from the first science fiction film ever made, Georges Melies 1902 silent work "A Trip to the Moon" - which itself was inspired by Jules Verne's "From the Earth to the Moon" - the video is an overwhelming retro-steampunk joy, with comet maidens, moon men and a selection of vintage style clothes I would die to be able to wear. Sound and image marries perfectly as our intrepid adventurers take humanity's first ever steps on another world as violins soar above the man in the moon's sinister face.

It is a world I still wish existed somewhere.

Along with "1979", a promo that reminds me of an all to brief period of typical teenage behaviour in my life, this represents the highpoint of The Smashing Pumpkin's creative output, and shows that for all Billy Corgan's greater-than-moon-sized ego, there was a time when he did indeed have "it".

Watch and enjoy, time and again.

Copyright Bloody Mulberry 11/08/2013

The Television of the Apocalypse

Watching films like "Deep Impact", where humanity is looking directly into the dark abyss of extinction, always makes me wonder.

Aside from solemn Presidential broadcasts telling us to keep our faith in God as humanity prepares to be squashed flat by an asteroid God himself could have stopped if He so chose, what is on television or the radio when the event occurs?

I'm sure plenty of people would just swarm out of their houses and choke the roads heading for the high ground while continuously screaming, but plenty of folk, perhaps the older ones without young familes facing immolation, would stay home. Surely caring, sharing governments (ha) with advance warning of the earth's destruction, would arrange for there to be media to entertain us in humanity's death throes?

No doubt, religious programming would take up a fair amount of scheduling; can you imagine the number of death bed conversions the various deities would be dealing with as firebrand preachers sounded their joy at the last trump being sounded at last?

Other programming would be more contemplative; gentle pastoral sounds on classical radio, scenes of cloud and sea on television, perhaps overlayed with a ticker of dedications to friends and families scrolling along the bottom, a veritable requiem of tweets as the St Matthew Passion gently poured from the speakers.

Perhaps some channels would just think "fuck it" and decide to broadcast the dirtiest pornography imaginable, figuring no-one would be bothered about hairy palmed deviant onanists as the sun set on life itself forever. No doubt ITV2 and BBC3 would broadcast the usual "100 Worst" type clips or rolling film of Del Boy Trotter falling through the bar to give mankind a smile on its face as it met icy cometary death from above.

Or, as is so common in our current age, would people decided to watch rolling news coverage of Armageddon? I'm thinking they would. Even in the darkest hours, there would be plenty of broadcasters willing set their egos above their families and the prospect of death, and see who could get the highest ratings - and who could go on the longest as the oceans boiled and lava sprayed from the fractured crust onto the sweet land of ours. And no doubt, folk would want to see how long they could go on watching. I know I would, if I was watching.

But I wouldn't be. I'd be outside, with a rum and coke and Radio 4, waiting with joy for the hammer blow from space. God bless it, and all it would bring.

Copyright Bloody Mulberry 10/08/2013