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Today, nobody believes in reality. Fiction remains stronger than fact. All stories are true - satires in particular. Imaginary heroes are more dependable than the other kind, living or dead. Whatever you need is unavailable, so choose the brighter new tomorrows that you want instead. FAX 21 is a muse (news) blog-fest of science fiction concepts and fantasy ideas for genre enthusiasts. Paradox free since next year!


Monday 31 January 2011

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!   

Friday 28 January 2011

Why Noel Edmunds is more moral than the Pope!




WHY NOEL EDMUNDS IS
MORE MORAL THAN THE POPE!

Small incremental reasons why today is much better than yesterday! An attractive thirty-something lady contestant on TV’s ‘Deal No Deal’ is showing her personal photographs to the show’s host. ‘And who is this?’ asked Noel Edmunds, pointing to a lady in one photograph. ‘That’s my partner’ she says, ‘she’s there in the audience’. It seems they are a lesbian couple. Noel turns to the lady in the audience, waves and says ‘hello’, then continues with the more important business of the game. Imagine that happening on family-TV twenty, fifteen... even ten years ago? It wouldn’t happen. While the church agonises over the archaic scriptural conundrums of female ministers and gay clergy, mainstream society has long-since resolved such issues and moved on. That’s a small measure of how far we’ve come, and why today is more evolved than all our stupid yesterdays...!

ANDREW DARLINGTON

Moonfaced

Stella(r) Moon...
Silents is golden?

Wednesday 26 January 2011

DemDaleks

FAX 21’s on-going coverage of Dalek utopia

#2

Beeb announced further news TV-movie biopic about Democracy Of The Daleks, which sees British ‘actress’ Gemma Arterton (schooled at St Trinian’s; a former spy – codename: ‘Strawberry’, fresh from her Persian assignment), cast in key role of the hybrid dalek empress, who was the dethroned loser of internecine AI & ‘spare parts’ wars against a benevolent pure-machine intelligence, despite her cyber-enhancements (including android human features), and stealth dalek tech.

Tuesday 25 January 2011

Apathy


Apathy PR
  • Marketing strategy problems?
  • Unmanageable lists of clients?
  • Sold out of what they all want?
  • Sick and tired of helping people?
  • Office job becoming a real drag?
Who needs all that damn hassle at work every day?

If we take care of all your business research and promotional work... customers will stop bothering you!

Sorted! (But no guarantees.)

Say goodbye all to your publicity & public relations problems...

Saturday 22 January 2011

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.

Wednesday 19 January 2011

Giant Comet Sale



GIANT ‘COMET’ SALE

The advert says ‘Giant Comet Sale’
so I go in and say
‘I’d like Halley’s Comet please’
she says ‘of course sir, we have
one due in 28th July 2061’...
Now I hear that, across the retail park
Curry’s are holding a ‘Monster Sale’...

ANDREW DARLINGTON

Wednesday 12 January 2011

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...

Tuesday 11 January 2011

Merky

'Merky', the meerkat pornographer... full expose, coming soon to FAX 21. Wild kingdom goes wild!

Monday 10 January 2011


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.


Sunday 9 January 2011

Dalek-utopia

'Supporting our victorious invasion troops on the machine conquest of England!' - InfoManiac A.I.

Saturday 8 January 2011

Can of Wyrms


PRODUCT RECALL!

After various toxicology reports from the League of Nations’ medical advisors, and World Health Protection - LabCentral investigators, Queztacoatl & Ouroboros Ltd. have today issued an urgent recall notice for their canned wyrms. The reasoning for this recall is a matter of seasoning.

Harvested from high quality eggs on free range snake farms in the Republic of Texas and New Bangkok, the affected batch of canned wyrms carries these serial numerals: MDCCCLXVI to MDCCCLXIX.

The recall applies to products sold in many European states, and all English counties except Wessex. Price tag on affected tins or cans is 1/2 shilling. In all circumstances, the general public (including those ubiquitous citizens named Joe Bloggs), are urged to remain calm. There is no cause for panic. None, really! Oh, just behave yourselves.

A spokes-shaman for Q&O Ltd announced there are no reports of similar problems with the company’s specialist lines of venom-free canned serpent heads, in brine or bulls’ blood. Lucky charms made from serpents’ teeth were also cleared of problems by the LabCentral boffins. “They are functional and should be as sharp as usual, and just as bitter as the proverbial ungrateful child,” remarked Dr Lear Speare.

News Extra:

Membership of the Snake-Charmers Guild has been falling steadily since millennium-era legislation regulated international commerce of limbless vertebrate specimens or by-products.

Friday 7 January 2011

Cyber-yeti


A rare sighting of the Welsh cyber-yeti, popularly known as ‘Lonesome Loathsome’ or ‘Ye Olde Mournful’ was reported last night in Aberystwyth. The hairy ‘bionic beast’ is thought to have fled the mountain heights due to this winter’s severe weather. Earlier - unconfirmed - reports suggest this delightfully eccentric British techno-creature has been lurking around Cardigan Bay for a period of several months.