The Truth About Northern Lights by Christine Hume

I'm not right. I'm interfered with
and bent as light. I tried to use the spots,
for months I tried with rings.
Only now I'm thinking in cracks
that keep a modern light
lunged. I keep the porch light on
to burn you off in ghosted purls,
the licks of which filament me.
My Day-Glo tongue's cutthroat.
Though I'm not clear,
I'm a sight whose star stares back:
it's a new kind of dead;
it hides its death in my cinched
testicle. That bright burr makes me
unreal and itch. By the time
I'm something else, you're making weather
with so-and-so. Drama tenants you;
it wades in queasy waves,
mottled to the marrow.
My mean streak beams neon
so I won't be refracted
or led to reflections. My eyes
trick god's and kick the careless reversals
of radio cure-alls. Rays suffer
until they clench the damaged night in me:
where I go out, gone as done
in a mood of black moving through.
Darkness sits there, pleased.
An iridescent ire could not go unaired,
my limbs wicking at the window.
Look out the window.
I've outened the world
to show you real barrenness:
a void a light
warps into want and then wants
until it warps all it glances.

Circus Capers

Bitzer the Dog, 'Fetching'

Shaun and moles....

Humps, and Lady Lumps...

To fully appreciate this parody by Alanis Morrisette, you would have to be familiar with the Black Eyed Peas' "My Humps".
Now, to me, listening to the Black Eyed Peas is something I would need to be forced to do, And, sadly, I was, because I was working in a building with other worky sort of blokes, and unfortunately the sparkies had got there first. An unfortunate, unwritten rule of construction site etiquette is that the first team to get there in the morning get their choice of radio..............
These sparkies were single-celled animals. They started well.... by 9 a.m., they'd shorted out a 600 volt supply, because they thought it was switched off... The guy who was supposed to have isolated the live supply had gone to get the bacon sandwiches, and forgotten the switching....
Luckily, Sparky no.1 only flew backwards and suffered bruises and ridicule.
His hacksaw, however, became instantly molten in places, and glowed nicely for a while after the main fuse blew.
Where was I? Oh yes, stuck in a half built office block with a group of cable-muppets. And they were listening to some rhythmic moronic chant, that I am told is The Black Eyed Peas... And that they're supposedly quite popular... At this, I looked up... "Popular? As in people... Um... pay? to see them? to hear this stuff?"
Yes, apparently they do. All over the globe.
If you must, go HERE briefly.... But I warn you, it's not a life enhancing experience... Don't linger, you'll be permanently scarred. Although over a million people have watched the clip...
If you enjoy it, there is no hope for you.

Having watched, listened, to the Peas' example of bad things that afflict the planet, then click on Ms Morrissette's version.. Same words, about a third of the speed.

If you arrived here via a search engine, looking for peas with black eyes, then I apologise. I could not bring myself to put them on this page...
I loathe what they do.

It All Started Next Week........

(Probably makes more sense if you read this first!(link))
It all started next week. I was feeling guilty that Red Dirt Girl's internet birthday party had sparked off so much fun and originality, and.... I'd only sent her a picture or two.
What, I thought, could I have done to bring a big smile to her face?
What might she want and not get?
Well, she keeps coming back to her fascination with the Aurora, the Northern Lights.
Could I by some cunning internet trickery, take her to see them. Or OH WOW! -Could I bring them to her, and light up the party?.....last week....Oh Dear.
Once I get a crazy idea, I'm a demon... So, next week I started on a long trek, of learning, travelling, making and doing.
First I had to learn how the Aurora works. Then I had to get myself up to speed on physics, theoretical stuff, mathematics, all those funny symbols...
It took ages.
Until 2012 in fact, by which time RDG had partied through five more birthdays.
The breakthrough came after the banning, totally, of all chemical additives to food and water in 2010.
My IQ surged to almost normal.
Some damage had been done, but I managed the first clumsy draft concept of the clockwork-heart-anti-matter-enfrictionator. By 2012, I had a rough prototype up and running, discovering, by the way, that rust is a potentiator for space/time warping.
Having learned by then to make a, though I say it myself, rather good aurora, in any place of my choosing, the next task was to control the space/time warpingnipraw emit\ecaps eht lortnoc............
Argh
Sorry
Time slippage.
Hold on whilst I rosin the drive belts.
There. That should hold it.
I watched all the versions of back to the future, to see if I could find any clues.
But
It all seems so complex. Speed, Clocks, Flux Capacitors etcetera.
So I turned to Jules Verne, H.G.Wells and their ilk.
Ha! burnished ivory, gutta percha, and brass?
no thank you.
But
By chance
I found the clockwork heart antimatter enfrictionator, when close-linked to an embiggener, and fuelled with dark matter, or, in a pinch, molasses, seemed to do timeshifting quite well.
Calibration was tricky at first. I burned out several calendars.
But I discovered that pulling the handle as far as the knot on the wood of the side-frame, took me into Elizabethan England.
Wherever I travel, I take a few books and time travel takes a surprising amount of time. So I'd taken my mother's old edition of the Complete Works of Shakespeare. Spotting an opportunity, I sought out the struggling bard, cursing and swearing, writers block... And an opening night but days away.
I copied a few verses in longhand, quill-penned scrawl.
slipped them under his door.
Offered him Henry the fourth, part one, act by act, scene by scene....
For cash. Soul not required... Told him my name was Marlowe, Christopher Marlowe...
Oh what a jolly jape.
Meanwhile, I was investing his coins in some new fangled ideas. With the aid of my history book, I was able to pick the winners, my investments bore fruit, and I purchased gold leaf, this being far better at auroreal regeneration than the cooking foil I had hitherto used.
Then... Forward again into last month. Because I really needed antimatter......
Hence the trip to the Cyclotron, and all that fuss at CERN.
I left a few more plays for Shakespeare, including The Tempest.
I think it will set him on the right track again, having Shakespeare to learn from.
So.
From Cern
Antimatter powered, in backwards time.
To the Party
And to set up the Aurora Generator. -I overpowered it by accident.
2000 miles wide.... I only meant for about twenty.
Still, it gave Mexico a party too.
Backtiming, again, I arrived at the party just before, five miles to the north, I set the aurora off.
Dylan was singing "To dance beneath a diamond sky, with one hand waving free" as overhead, a coruscating curtain of ruby red light burst across the star-sprinkled night sky.
Perfect.
Well.
I remember drinking margaritas... someone fell off an elephant onto my cake, and giggled uncontrollably...
The morning after, my head hurt terribly, as I woke here in my own little bit of England.
To the sound of hammering on the door.
"Police! Open the door!"
Yes. Chief Inspector T.Runcheon had sent the boys round to arrest me for breaking into Cern, and the theft of antimatter.
I pointed out, that the television cameras in Texas showed me, quite clearly, stepping out of the limo at Red Dirt Girls party bash, five minutes before they claim to have surrounded the lab at Cern.
Ergo, they'd got the wrong guy....
And besides? Theft of what, exactly?
Theft refers to stealing... Things. But antimatter is not just the absence of a thing, it's an antithing. How could I steal something which has a negative existence?
Argue that, Copper.
Eventually they let me go.
I'm so tired. But I might just nip back to the party....
And arrive a moment before myself on those cameras... Just for fun.

Having trouble with the drains...

Soubriquet Missing!

14th April 2007
Punk Poet and sometime blogger Ersatz Soubriquet was yesterday reported missing. Police searches, and exhaustive investigation of his recent computer records indicate that in recent weeks he has been concerning himself deeply with the mechanisms of the Aurora Borealis.

In his kitchen, beneath vegetable peelings and bread crusts, was found a notebook filled with jottings, most of which were so mathematically advanced that Doctor Steven Hawking was called upon to interpret them.
"My God!" he cried, "This is incredible! Soubriquet is positing an 'n' dimension fractal warp of space/time, to be driven by an antimatter-energised clockwork motor- yes, I think this could work...." Chief Inspector T. Runcheon, of the British Blogger Police, then asked Doctor Hawking, what the point of such an activity might be.

"It seems that a friend of his has never seen the Aurora Borealis, nor for that matter, the Aurora Australis, and it is her birthday today.
Soubriquet indicates in his notes that he is seeking to build a machine, so small it could be posted anywhere in the world. Running from a tiny clockwork motor he calls 'the heart', it would enfrictionate antimatter particles, setting up a highly charged magnetic flux, similar to the field at the planet's poles. This would be directed, by reflective foil mirrors, made using origami techniques, into the sky, and would extend thousands of miles above the earth."
"If he can do this, if it can be achieved, it would attract the solar wind, causing molecules of gases in the most outer reaches of the atmosphere to glow, oh, like a glowstick, over hundreds of miles across the sky, centred above his device."
"There is only one place he can be, only one place in the world where antimatter is being generated by science, Inspector, You must follow him to Cern, the vast Cyclotron beneath the Alps"

The hunt moved rapidly to CERN, where Interpol and Swiss special forces sealed off the vast physics complex.
This newspaper's reporter, on site, CERN, Switzerland, has been told that no person could possibly survive venturing into the antimatter chamber with a small glass jar, as Soubriquet appears to have done.
The immense forces and magnetic fields involved would rip a human body apart, into a mist of whirling molecules, accelerating almost to the speed of light.
Although a strong combined force of police and soldiers surrounds the control complex, it seems there is little chance of Soubriquet ever being seen again.

STOP PRESS: SOUBRIQUET SIGHTED IN TEXAS!!!

STOP PRESS: TEXAS SKY LIGHTS UP! "IMPOSSIBLE!" SAY SCIENTISTS AS NORTHERN LIGHTS APPEAR AS FAR SOUTH AS GULF OF MEXICO. INCREDIBLE SWIRLING SKIES BRING PARTY ATMOSPHERE TO SOUTHERN STATES!