Dream big. Dream strong. Dream loud. Dream the kind of dream that will shake the ground beneath our feet and rouse the sheep and make the leeches scamper off in fear. Dream the songlines of a new world with the face it had before greed and intellectual laziness corroded it into its present unseemly sorry ass state. So says the Mother of Bumba and her associates. Rosie and Edwina sing semi-canonical Socialist Lullabies to the hatching dreamlets and double as backing group to the very famous boy band The Teddy Bear’s Picnic. Magdalena keeps the watch and her cub keeps the flame. Out there in the void, the Dancing Balloons have decided to fall in love right now rather than wait for a still distant and definitely unreliable spring, especially if the Hellary Harpy wins the election -which she will, the ghastly creature.

Update 29/10/16  Waiting for the GSV Ethics Gradient. Picture by Xavi Pagés, the best faux nephew that ever graced a prosthetic family. Even a devout atheist needs an object to pray to, sometimes. For me it’s either The Mother of Bumba or the good Culture ship Ethics Gradient. Each night I pray that it’ll come and make me an offer I couldn’t possibly refuse. It passes the time, you know!

 Update 06/11/16. The Tunnel. aka La ley del embudo. Here’s a little something for darling Xavi’s birthday: his very own space craft, the good starship Persiflage. May it help him navigate the hideously crappy times that will follow the enthronment of the Hellary Harpy, that fast friend of everything that’s wrong and vile and stupid and illegal and underhand and …………… (enter your atrocity of choice here). If you thought the Obama regime had narrowed the funnel’s neck beyond the practicable, let alone the tolerable, wait and see what she’ll do to the world. Mothers of America and its little British minion, start packing the wargames kit of your children, soon to be sent to the Baltic to fight the Red Devil and shed their expendable blood in yet another fraudulent conflict with an imaginary enemy. Oi, are we fucked…

Darling Declan, officially my favourite Pendejo of all times just got hitched. Best of luck to them. Here’s the Shoggies and Co. with their version of this strangest of human institutions. Salut!

Tides. As it says on the tin. Take your pick(s) and then avoid them like the plague. The pious BBC crap, or whatever piffle the Whitehouse claims, or anything The Guardian blathers on are always good candidates. You can never go wrong with them. Oh, and the fucking Daily Mail, that goes without saying, innit.

Maison Shogg Presents. Time again for some frivolity, so here’s the latest alien fashion news.     This autumn every discerning hexapod insectoid life-form in and around the Crab Nebula, who knows their Armani from a hole in the ground, will be wearing this fetching exoskeleton designed by those fashion demons, Rosie and BoomBoom of Maison Shogg. Made of clarified titanium (*) with a coating of sentient dilithium microgel, worked into the fabric in a brushed finish, it’s simple, stylishly, extremely comfortable, very strong and highly versatile. Inspired by ancient Japanese body armour and cut following the strictest principles laid down by Mademoiselle Coco Chanel, it combines macho chic with exquisite grace, so it will do nicely either for the Tripondian ambassador’s reception or in a pub brawl with a brace of Klingons on steroids.     The Battle Hummingbirds helmet is made of reinforced Mexican silver. The Birds are detachable and, when fully operational, can be used for impromptu aerobatics, berserker eye-pecking sorties and as message carriers; at a pinch they’ll mix the Martinis. They also sing beautifully, of course. Their repertoire of old Spanish Republican songs and reworkings of Gilbert & Sullivan is second to none .“they have just written a new version of the “Little List” from the Mikado that is most amusing and sure to offend practically everybody.     (*) Yes, I know it sounds most unlikely, but Rosie assures me that there is such thing as clarified titanium, and if Rosie says so then that’s good enough for me.     PS. The little proto-lizard on the left smokes Gauloises. Rosie sticks to Silk Cut in homage to that other supreme troublemaker and demon magnet extraordinaire, Mr. John Constantine of London Town (Jamie Delano canon).

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!