Bathysphere II: Bazamba

She built a bathysphere.

"See: it goes underwater in the bath."

"No, no, ha ha, you've got the wrong idea. I know it's a bathysphere, but you see, the word means --"

But she was already underwater.

"I saw a deep sea trench!" she said when she resurfaced. "And a dozen species unknown to science. Molten lava steaming from the rock!"

"You are disembarking in the soap dish."

"It's the only way!"

A plastic duck bobbed by in a frenzy.

"She has disturbed the monster of the deep! Bazamba comes! Fly, fly, you fools!"

Bazamba emerged from the deep. A giant baby. Thrown out with the bathwater once, and forgotten.

"Gwar! Roar!"

Moral: Don't mess with nature.

Ausum

"Please don't be vulgar," her mother pleaded. "Don't call the child any of those silly modern names, like Bylynda with a y, or Lateesha-Camille with a hyphen. Call it something nice. Give it one of those old-fashioned names like Hope or Charity, some quality that you'd like the baby to aspire to."

"Very well," the daughter said, and she named the baby 1337.

The pain

"I carried on downwards ... it was a dark place ... pain, horrible pain ... and the weight of the water over my head ... a chasm! ... and the fishes ... each one representing a separate failure ..."

"Shut up."

"Now I try to return ... I am misunderstood ..."

"Shut up!"

"Now am I silenced ..."

"Shut! Up!" they said to the emoceanographer. "Go cut yourself or something."

"The pain ... the ignorance ..."

Cultural appropriation

The Ghanian hiplife musician Tic Tac recorded a song called "Kangaroo". In the video you can see people dancing to this song by tucking up their imaginary paws and jumping first to the right and then to the left.

The indigenous people of Australia, the Kulin in particular, took exception. "Dancing like a kangaroo is our tradition. This man has stolen it. Culture-thief!"

Then the kangaroos themselves spoke up. "Actually, to be perfectly honest, we prefer the Ghanian version." They addressed the Kulin, "When you imitate us you are fairly faithful. You let your paws hang limply, you pick at the ground, you hop as if you have fat bottoms. But these Ghanians -- they make us look sexy. Listen to the lyrics --

No matter how high I go, I never fall
Cos I am a son of a kangaroo
No matter how high I jump, I never fall
Cos I am a son of a kangaroo.

It's so much more flattering! Who wants to be a fat-bummed old dirt-picker when you can be a superstar who never falls down?"

They began freestyling.

"Funny boy, them try imitate me
Look them
Tell them say dem a masters them a rate me
Me too fast, them can't ever chase me
Who want rock me
Come and face me."

Eyesight

"The lines on my hands are huge. I'm so old. I'm falling apart."

"Nonsense! Your eyes are getting better with age. That's all it is. That's why the lines look bigger to you, it's because you're seeing them more keenly."

It was true. Everything was getting larger and clearer as she aged. The skins of babies resembled the hides of scarred mountains or other pieces of violent scenery. Where other people saw a calm surface, "smooth as a baby's bottom," she saw pits and cliffs.

"I'll climb these new mountains. I'll adventure."

But the baby-climbing expedition was not the success she'd hoped for.

Small crows

There was a bonsai tree in Japan. A cockroach climbed the trunk and sat on one of the branches looking as black as a crow.

Then it climbed back down again, went outside, and got into the branches of a fully-sized tree, saying, "I have looked like a crow in one tree, why not another?" The cockroach's charisma was so persuasive that the universe adjusted itself to suit its beliefs, and it grew to the size of a crow.

Flying around, it tormented the real crows, who, to escape its teasing, shrank to the size of cockroaches and made nests in bonsai trees.

Bathysphere

She built a bathysphere.

"See: it goes underwater in the bath."

"No, no, ha ha, you've got the wrong idea. I know it's a bathysphere, but you see, the word means --"

But she was already underwater.

"I saw a deep sea trench!" she said when she resurfaced. "And a dozen species unknown to science. Molten lava steaming from the rock!"

"Let me see."

He went down in the bathysphere and returned disappointed and suspicious, saying, "All I saw was a plastic duck and the plughole."

She smiled a little.

"Yes, I thought you would."

Hatters

A group of contemporary pirates sat together watching a pirated copy of Pirates of the Caribbean. Most of them were African, some were from South-East Asia.

"We are underrepresented in Hollywood," one of them pointed out. "All of the pirates in this film are white."

"I disagree. There's this scene in the third movie ..."

"No, man, I mean we need to be main characters, real characters, ones the audience care about, not some black man standing in the background in part three. I mean like, what's her name, Keira Knightly. Do I look like Keira Knightly?"

They agreed that he did not look like Keira Knightly and never would.

"Exactly my point."

"So what do we do?"

"Hats."

"Beg yours?"

"We can't be white, we can't be Keira Knightly, we don't have any influence on Hollywood, we can't storm the place because it's inland, although I hear they might be shooting something in Hawaii next week," said the first pirate, who maintained a habit of multilingual fluency by following worldwide film industry gossip in books and magazines, "but we can wear awesome hats."

One of them leapt to his feet.

"I shall kidnap a hatter."

"Excellent."

"Good man."

"Problem solved."

They settled down to watch part two.

Modern inconveniences: greedy griots

The woman gave a griot money and in exchange he sang a song in her honour, telling her that she was wonderful, that her husband was handsome, and that her son would one day be rich and take care of his mother in her old age.

So it came to pass.

The griot, hearing that his song had come true, returned to the woman and said: Give me twice as much money again or I'll sing the opposite.

No.

So the griot sang the opposite. Then the son lost all of his money in an email scam, the husband fell into a vat of boiling beer, and the woman woke one day to discover that she was not wonderful after all.

Arrest that griot! she told the authorities.

But the authorities backed away, saying, No, thank you, no, he might put that curse on us as well, no.

The woman roared.

You modern men! How can you believe in that superstitious rubbish!

Here!

She gave the griot his money.

Now piss off!

He did.

I'll never believe in the authorities again!

She never did.

The History of Polar Bears

1500
There was a polar bear.

1600
There was a polar bear.

1700
There was a polar bear

1800
There was a polar bear

1900
There was a polar bear.

2000
There was a polar bear

Neptune's Son returns

The job had been dragging on for weeks and Neptune's Son was tired of it.

"Too much plaster. Plaster's a dry medium ..."

"What's wrong with that?"

But he couldn't articulate it. When his friends tried to press an answer out of him he began to howl.

"It drains! It dries! It absorbs! It sucks at the soul of the world!"

"Calm down mate. Eat your cheeseburger."

"I'll drink my Coke first," he shouted. "I'll drain this milkshake dry. Excelsior!"

Wrenched with tempestuous emotions he shook his fist at the Golden Arches.

"Damn you! Damn you!"



-----
Neptune's Son's earlier post.

Heathrow

He told a joke.

"Three holes filled with water!"

They waited for the punchline.

He put the punchline on a bicycle and told it to ride there.

"But they are in Somalia."

A boat then.

"No, it'll take too long. Give me a plane ticket."

The man sighed and bought the punchline a plane ticket. But Terminal 5 was in trouble. Flights had been cancelled. The punchline slept across a pair of chairs in the passenger area. It felt strangely ashamed. Its luggage went missing. Depression set in. The punchline bought a small plastic bag of peanuts from a shop and ate them slowly.

"Well well well," it mused. "Well well well."

Eyak, 2008

The last person in the world who understood the Eyak language died in January. Nobody else knew this, but the common cockroach had its precise, true name spoken in only that language. On that day, all of its other names perished in sympathy.

Householders around the world stared at the oval insects in their kitchens and murmured uncertainly, "What are those?"

The people who manufactured the sprays that are used to exterminate cockroaches woke in their beds and found that their purpose in life had been cosmically mislaid.

"What did we do with ourselves before today? Something, but what?" It was impossible to remember.

"What will we do now?"

"Poisoning ourselves seems somehow natural."

"What will we use?"

"I don't know."

They crawled under the sink and hid behind the oven.

Dynamite

There is a Nobel Prize for Modesty but no one ever knows who wins it.

Modern inconveniences: Neptune's son

Neptune had a mortal son who became a tradesman. He left the water running through toilets for hours, he stepped on a garden tap to reach the top of a shed and snapped the head off so that water spouted out in a flood. When he went home there was a storm, and the people who lived in the house didn't notice the sound of flowing tap water in the onslaught of the rain. It was days before they found out what had happened.

He cleared asbestos, which gave him a reason to spray water around indoors, dampening the dangerous fibres into mulch. Unaware of his father's identity, he never knew why this largesse gave him so much pleasure. "It must be necessary to the continuation of the world," he said to himself. "Otherwise why would I like it so much?"

The Modern Mariners

It was an age of accessorising liquids. Some you smeared on you, some you drank, some cleaned you, some concealed blemishes, some made your hair stick up. Scientists looked for more efficient ways to apply liquid. They hunted for more effective and concentrated solutions.

"Deep sea fish. Living at the bottom of the sea, they concentrate liquid wonderfully within their bodies. Deep sea fish are the way forward."

People bound deep sea fish to their sores and put deep sea fish in their sparse hair to promote luscious growth. Seabirds inhaled the wonderful new smell and began to appear in cities more often. Soon there was a flock of pelicans in every town square. Albatrosses soared over railway stations and other places where people congregated. They swooped down over the crowds at rock concerts. Security guards tried to remove them, but the people tied the security guards to anchors and threw them overboard, chanting, "Bad luck, bad luck!"

Ancient wonders: birth control

A documentarian from Hawai'i went to Bhutan to record cultural marvels.

"This is a dance to banish demons."

"Wonderful. Magnificent."

When she got home she found she was infertile.

A million rectangular windows

In every Thai house there is a picture of the good king Bhumibol Adulyadej. It is as if he is looking indoors through a million rectangular windows.

Sometimes at night all of the portraits will sigh or sneeze simultaneously.

Medicinal Properties

"Bread, too," wrote Pliny the Elder, "which forms our ordinary nutriment, possesses medicinal properties almost without number."

A modern Italian tested one of the remedies he described. She soaked bread in wine, added myrtle, and applied it to a pustule on her head. "It doesn't work," she said. "Why doesn't it work?"

She considered the problem.

"Of course. Bread must have changed over hundreds of years. It has lost its medicinal properties."

So she researched ancient bread and sold it as a medicine. It was so good that it cured everything. Rich international drug companies sent assassins after her. They shot her, but she applied bread to the wound and it healed; they poisoned her with the undetectable extracts of plants but she swallowed some bread and was cured.

At that the assassins gave up and she employed them as bakers. They changed their black shirts for white aprons and sang as they worked.



For the full translation of the passage from Pliny, go here.

The History of Transylvania and Hungary.

In 1003, Stephen of Hungary defeated Gyula the Young of Transylvania, and Transylvania was absorbed into Hungary.

In 2008, the American Kellie Pickler said that she had never heard of Hungary.

The Transylvanians laughed.