Tadpoles of Tindalos. Considerably less known and even more poorly understood than their compadres, the notorious Hounds, the Tadpoles of Tindalos are some of the most enigmatic denizens of that most inscrutable of meta-dimensional layers. Like their canine counterparts they are keen on angles, but unlike the Cagnolitos they have a certain elastic tolerance of curves. This flexibility makes them rather more mobile and therefore much more dangerous.-  Here they can be seen contemplating the alluring possibility of an American-Influence-Free planet. The little Flamenco-Singing Creetchah is belting out an inspirational Alegrí­a, accompanied on the hyper guitar by her chum, Gamal of the Egyptians, elder Hyper Rat. The little F.S.C. learned her trade personally and directly from the wandering spirit of La Niña de los Peines, so she’s damned good, she is.- And here’s a spiffingly clever practical application for these admirable creatures: bribe them with a few juicy angles and run any of them as a candidate in the impending US election.- Wake up, America! Why persist in riding this hideously entropic downward spiral engendered by decades of voting for the lesser evil? Why not have the moxie to go the whole hog and vote for a bona fide monstrosity? Forget Donald, the Dumper plastic duck. Renounce the Hilarious Hellary harpy. Never mind Noam Chomsky’s advice -what the fuck does he know about real horror, after all? Go on. Be bold. Be radical. L’audace! Toujours l’audace! Throw wishy-washy caution to the howling night winds and embrace a genuine nightmare. If you can’t bring yourselves to vote for groovy Great Cthulhu or the ineffable Shub-Niggurath, consider the equally deadly option: vote for a Tadpole of Tindalos and be completely and unambiguously damned! And give the rest of this wretched planet a break, there’s a dear.- Let it never be said I didn’t try to give wise counsel :-)- Note for my good crony Mr. D.C. alias “the Dude..  It’s too late for us, your Especial Limeyous Friends across the Pond. We’re so far gone down the Sickly Yellow Freak Road to Crapitalist Perdition, moronified beyond reclamation or redemption by decade upon decade of successive Thatcheright Crap, New Laboured Bollocks, Putty-Faced Tory Crud and sundry Talentless Assholes Regimes, that we could no longer tell real evil from a sinkhole in the subsoil if it were slapping us in the face with a wet mercury-riddled mutant kipper and singing a Dies Irae. Thus we strain the periphrases, lionize the hyperballs, ratchet up the hysteria and mix our metaphors until we’re so befuddled that we hallucinate with every breath and imagine that George Galloway is the last of the red hot reddies and not the self-serving toxic git that aligned himself with Nigel Farage, be it only for a fleeting opportunistic moment, to campaign for an entirely futile Brexit.  ‘ere, ‘ave a B&W version and some music:

Doing One’s Best. Sometimes she doubts her ability to do her very best and she thinks “If this isn’t It, it will have to do until the real thing comes along.” She needn’t worry. The little flaming cyclops are thoroughly delighted with their new playmates.

Causality for Parasites. Forged in the debating furnaces of Ms Frumpette Fiddlesticks Dialectic Salon, Herminia, the Polemic Chicken, can be seen here trying to persuade a couple of itinerant parasites to leave her bloodstream alone, laying great emphasis in the consequences of not following her advice. The small but perfectly formed Webbed Worm has no idea what she’s on about, nor does he care. He’s totally smitten by the ranting fowl and thinks that he wants to marry her, whatever that means. Herminia has passion, presence and oodles of chutzpah and that’s what gets the little one. Just my type, he muses. Chronicler’s Note. I wonder whether Herminia’s trenchant logic could be used to persuade ATOS to get their filthy mitts off the sponsorship of the Paralympics. Just a thought. PD. This is the first of a mini-series called Foundations of Philosophy for Very Lowly Life-Forms.

Update 21/08/16 Kabbalah for Worms. For W.K. gone from my ecosystem but not forgotten. This completes, for the time being, the mini-series Foundation Philosophy for Very Simple Life-Forms. I can’t see why lowly organisms should miss on the agonies and the delights of unbridled intellectual speculation and similar fun & games just because they spring from the demotic mudflats of evolution. There.

There is archaeology and then there’s paleo-archaeology. This is it. This is so ancient, so remote, so far-far-and-away that I suspect it never happened and it was all a dream I had, once, sometime, somewhere, caused by some outlandish mind-food I ate. I can’t believe I was ever that young, that naive and that blissfully ill-informed. Ergo it was a dream. It was a spiffing dream, though, I’ll say that for it. The original drawings were made on a cheap school pad with a Rotring pen -which I still have and still works.  I’ve left them pretty much as they were, except for some minimal sprucing and interfering and/or additions (the birds and the extra sea serpent) plus a bit of comtemp’ry techno fiddling and the adding of various textures and things. Because I like texture and things. Especially things.

Spare a thought for young Ms FlatFish and her spawn. Female, black, destitute, homeless and single mother of two strapping fishlets, her home has been flattened by some crappy BP-type Mafiosi drilling for oil in her neck of the underwater woods. She’s been on the march for a new home for the longest time. Hungry, tired, despised, insulted by all & sundry and blamed for her circumstances to boot, she’s finally landed on her fins, it would seem. The Websters will take her in, give her a nice comfy cave and spoil her offspring rotten with Smarties. Alegrí­a! Alegrí­a!

Brief Encounter V. Make up your own stories, do. The Tree-Dwelling Fuzzy and his pal, the Cutting-Edge Tadpole refused to tell me what the (clearly-doomed-to-fail) transaction was all about. That’s all right with me. I have a lively imagination and I know fascist crap when I see it. 

Shoggdala. Say hello to the Shoggdala. Meditate on the many facets of the Shoggdala. Address your Ooooooms to the fractal protoplasm of the Shoggdala. Sing it songs. It likes that. NB. The alien eyes in the middle of the Shoggothic mass are the eyes that grace my favourite Nepali stupa. They’ve been with me, ingrained in my brain cells for the longest time. Here’s to you, me old china!

My First Cthulhu. Much as I like teddy bears, I can’t remember how and when I got my first one (‘though I remember what it looked like). But I can remember when, where and how I did what is now been reincarnated into this intensely blue mess. It was so much another time, and another place, and that particular wench I then was is so dead, that makes my head spin. Still. A Cthulhu is a Cthulhu. Never turn your nose at a Cthulhu. I say.

‘ere, ‘ave a panoramic. I’ve been wanting to do one for yonks. Next: a tryptic? There’s no end to my ambition, obviously. Warning: There might be more of this sort of nonsense soon, I suspect.

Update 18/07/16 Not quite the tryptic I was hoping for and pretty frivolous to boot, but I’ve just “discovered. a new font/text app and I could never resist doing something with text just for the sake of it. On the right corner we have the ineffable Black Goat of the Woods with Far Too Many Young doing a Robert de Niro, an attitude that suits Milady to a T. On the left, a public notice on behalf of young Erwin Oriol and the Library of Upper Leng. He’s lost his book .“or maybe it has been nicked by the Forces of Reaction, who disapprove of educating children .“or anyone else for that matter. The poor child is distraught and the little worm Chief Librarian thoroughly pissed off. The book is a cheap quarto paperback edition of Thomas Ligotti’s The Conspiracy Against the Human Race. New Atlantis University Press. 2001. Any intelligence, information, rumour, gossip, or even third hand hearsay as to the whereabouts of the damned thing most welcome. On the customary postcard, please.

Criminal Minds, the Reality Show. There, never say I don’t do my best to keep you posted on the latest entertainment trends. This one is co-produced by Ogle Inc., Pox News and MI50. Enjoy. And in case you though (oh, so wrongly!) that I’d support Hilarious Hillary just because “she’s a woman”, think again. She’s toxic, she is. Once, in an unguardedly insensitive moment of great anger against her, I compared her to a hyena (as female hyenas have nearly as much testosterone as the males). Next day I had a large delegation of the darling Feliformiae picketing my doorstep and complaining loudly about the insult. I apologized promptly and profusely to the admirable creatures, offered tons of Smarties as reparation and signed an official document declaring my devotion to their hygiene-conscious kin. After that we got along famoulsy and they even let me play with the cubs they had brought along (-a PR stunt, no doubt). I’ve still got the selfie somewhere in my hard drive…:-)

Not that there’s all that much to rejoice about. The weather is crap and the Brexit hysteria is hitting the fan like the proverbial shit. Still, be brazen, be defiant, be toujours gai! Raise two fingers at life itself, si le cÅ“ur vous en dit.

Update 23/06/16. To celebrate Vote To Remain A Slave In Any Case Day, here’s a wee bit of early history of things wot are intrinsically good and groovy. So…that’s how it all began. Next thing you know, the peasants are storming the Winter Palace. Of course, the results never seem to last very long. But who knows… Perhaps one day…one day… Hope MUST spring eternal.