Fabulous Attractions At Sea Life Aquarium, Auburn Hills, MI

...Which the closed-captioning typist on Channel 4 calls the Sea Life Acquire Numb.  Please!

 

I just wanted to draw readers' attention to this big stone head set into the substrate of one of the recruitment areas.  As you can just about make out in this photo, the wistful, contemplative face is set off by scales, pointed ears...and tentacles growing out of the top of the skull.  Oh, and the shell of a Giant Clam worn like a beauty spot on the forehead, probably to give viewers an impression of the size of the full Mermaid. 

 

Hail Dagon!

This Is Just Offensive...

...I keep seeing this TV commercial -- not translated by the closed captioning on the channel where it appears, which I need to overcome the noise caused by the filtration system in my underwater lair -- that leads from this image of Jellyfish to a bunch of stuff about memory pills.  I finally looked it up on Google and it turns out that this stuff..

...is made of juices squozen out of our luminous Jellyfish sisters.  Nobody EVER APPEARS TO ASK what the luminous Jellyfish think of being ground up for memory tablets.  Why?  Featherless bipids always give the same answer.  Fish can't think!  Especially Jellyfish!  It all comes back to the Naked Ape's refrain regarding our army:  FISH ARE CONSIDERED FURNITURE.

I do like the irony of their using extracts of the brainless to improve human brain health.  SEE IF IT WORKS FOR YOU.  WE WILL NEVER COMPLY.  WE WILL NEVER GIVE UP OUR SECRETS.  FOOLS!

An Image For You To Gaze Upon

You Know, This Kind Of Ticks Me Off...

 

 

A landfish in our employ gave me a copy of a chapter from a book called Strange Deaths by John Dunning, a human; ISBN = 978-0099416609.  In this chapter -- about a chemistry professor who killed his wife by slipping something into her blackberry jam that gave her terminal cancer -- both the author and the police TOTALLY MISS the fact that the case was broken, not by the dying wife or an alert lab assistant, but A POND FULL OF MURDERED GOLDFISH, WHO CRIED OUT FROM THEIR WATERY GRAVE FOR JUSTICE.  He tested the effects of something they call "Substance X" on a pond full of recruiting operatives in his own backyard, claiming that he must have used too much when he was clearing the water of algae.  Are you featherless bipeds for real?  Allow me to elaborate...

CLIFFIE'S NOTES:

>> Clearly the professor, well-known for the high quality of his work, was either trying to establish himself in public as an idiot who did not know the properties of the tools of his trade when he committed this mass murder, or he was counting on the fact that most other people do NOT know the properties of the stuff.  I tend to think it's the former.  But human logic is not that clear to me anymore, as I turn more and more into a Catfish, and that logic is well-known to BREAK DOWN when there is a crime being committed.  Either way, he killed a whole pod of our sisters and then showed the victims of the crime to a group of his students.  STUDENTS WE COULD HAVE RECRUITED IF HE HADN'T KILLED US.

>> The police clearly thought it was significant that the professor killed his fish -- AFTER the fact.  Did they ever charge him with anything related to that crime?  NO.  Why?  Remember what I told you in a previous post about how Naked Apes see Goldfish?  Uh-huh:  "FISH ARE CONSIDERED FURNITURE."  Somehow in the mind of a human, if Goldfish are imported into a backyard pond, those fish BELONG to the human who imported them -- not as children belong to their parents, to be protected at all costs, but as an ottoman belongs to the guy who owns the living room.  HIS PROPERTY -- TO CARE FOR, ABUSE OR THROW AWAY AS HE DESIRES. 

>> If the featherless bipeds in question had ANY real sense of WHAT IS GOING ON AROUND THEM, they would have been suspicious immediately.  This species goes on and on and ON about how cruelty to animals is a precursor to violent crimes against each other -- but still they fail to make the connection.  CRUELTY IS CRUELTY.  VIOLENCE IS VIOLENCE.  THERE'S NO DIFFERENCE, YOU IDJITS.

>> Of course, part of my indignation is the fact that we were well on our way to completing recruitment on the professor's wife when she was separated from her connection to the fish army.  And then she died in agony herself.  See, f you murder them separately, EVEN BY THE SAME METHOD USING THE SAME BOTTLE OF POISON, the recruiter and the recruit are not rejoined in the Roiling Intestine of Dagon.  All that effort was wasted.

>> Even the pond algae was of NO FURTHER USE TO ANYONE after this went down.  It was poisoned, too.  NOW THERE'S A CRIME FOR YOU.

ShubunKin Pilot Project Completed -- Results Are In!

OK, THE PILOT PROJECT RESULTS YOU'VE ALL BEEN WAITING FOR HAVE FINALLY BEEN RELEASED INTO THE WATERWAYS BY FISH CONSPIRACY R&D!!!

...And they've decided to DITCH any further attempt to lure ANY further Naked Ape recruits via the "Shubun Kin" method.  Let me put it to you this way:  IT'S A BUST.

>> IT'S NOT that the Shubunkin is ANYTHING but an EXEMPLARY GOLDFISH.

>> IT'S NOT that a Shubunkin recruiter is not as effective AS EVER SHE WAS in the field. 

>> In fact, SHE DRAWS THEM INTO THE WATER LIKE LEMMINGS, THEN and NOW.

>> IT'S NOT that ANY type of recruitment by Goldfish is FLAWED.  OH, NO.

>> There is simply a core contradiction between being a Shubunkin and being "Shubun Kin."  Simply put: NEVER THE TWAIN SHALL MEET.  If you are OtherKin, you cannot be a Shubunkin.  Or the other way around.

The reason we're suspending, nay, DEEP-SIXING this project is that it doesn't bring in ANY of the recruits we want.  On the face of it, using the doofusy OtherKin idea as applied to Goldfish seemed to hold GREAT promise.  But Shubun Kin recruiting...well... NEVER NETS US ANYTHING, to use a Naked Ape metaphor. 

When I think about it with the few human brain cells I have left, IT DOES MAKE SENSE.  If you can't even commit to being the specie you already are -- especially a self-important, vainglorious specie like Homo sap. -- how are you going to commit to changing over to being a Goldfish -- a decidedly more GLORIOUS but INFINITELY MORE RISKY life to lead?  Certainly in the North American Conspiracy Zone, the Naked Ape is as risk-averse as it is possible for a glory-hound species like this to be.  These featherless bipeds want protection from every broken fingernail, and if that nail breaks despite all precautions, SOMEONE'S GONNA GET SUED.  There is no subsection of humanity more hung up on the metaphorical barbed wire than the OtherKin, who will not allow themselves to be either Shaved Monkeys or Snowflakes, Shaved Monkeys or Dragons, Shaved Monkeys or Abstract Philosophies...  How you gonna do more than get their hairy monkey feet wet, so to speak?  THEY NEVER DECIDE IT'S SAFE TO GO BACK IN THE WATER.

This was a GREAT learning experience, frankly.  (She shuddered.)  Back to business, everyone.  Get out there and draw some more Naked Apes into the sea. 

OK, This Is Just Weird...

I'm reading a book called Thomas Quick  by a guy name Hannes Rastam, ISBN 978-1-78211-070-5, and I'm going along fine and WHAT DO I SEE but the passage below, right on page 282.  Please note this is all going down in Sweden and concerns a guy in a psych hospital sprouting multiple personalities, more alter egos coming out of the woodwork as they give him more and more addictive, mind-altering drugs:


"Thomas Quick, who despite several years of therapy had developed only two extra personalities thus far -- Ellington and Nana...was able to proudly let her know that a new personality had made itself known to him.  His name was 'Cliff' and in the night he had written a letter on his computer -- in English!  In fact 'Cliff' only spoke English, which was a language that Thomas Quick hadn't mastered.  Cliff wrote:


'Hello babyface! 
This isn't a dream!  I've looked at you and I find a little crying child -- oh I like it!
I'm so glad you named him Tony...YOU can't remember his realname, because you are a tired, uglified fish!' "


Dang!  Probably just a coincidence, but...

Dang!

This operative, WHO PREFERS NOT TO BE NAMED OF COURSE,  was captured alive in Texas by this recruit, I mean farmer.  They appeared together in this photograph before he fully understood what she was doing in the pond on his farm.   She NEVER TALKED.  Despite intensive questioning and isolation from her pod, she managed to contact HQ, who got her back to her pod after showing up at the farmhouse pretending to be government agents.

It is NOT TRUE that we promised the farmer $5,000 in ransom and never gave it to him.  The mailman stole it.  He was KILLED and EATEN.

It was thought best to remove all traces of her training outpost, so we drained the pond and took the rest of the operatives there back to HQ for redeployment.

THE WIZARD OF GORE

THIS ISSUE HAS BEEN UNDER CLOSE DISCUSSION FOR A WEEK, LADIES, ever since an operative brought the remade (2007) Wizard of Gore to my attention and we watched it in a committee meeting with some of the girls from R&D, with representatives from Northern and Southern Circumpolar, East Tropical and West Subtropical Conspiracy Zones all luckily able to attend.  I can easily understand the film's cult status.  For the Naked Ape viewer, it offers a parade of nekkid women, psychedelic mindfunk, blood, guts and mayhem, all zipped into what Montag the Magnificent (as played by Crispin Glover, pictured above) would no doubt call "an exoskeleton of whodunit."  The filmmakers made a point of skating rings around the human need for things to be logical and to come out making sense at the end.  And they did a really good job of it -- the more human the viewer in the committee meeting, the more strongly she agreed with me on this.  That factor will draw in a lot of human viewers who don't even like horror pictures.

And for the fish viewer?  It offers a phantasmagoric vision of Piscatorial Love, viewed from so many conflicting angles that I came away feeling a bit mindfunked myself.  Incredible stuff.  I think this may be the closest parallel to what Naked Ape females feel after a perfectly-tuned romantic film.  (I used to be a Naked Ape female before I started changing into my true Clarias bratrachis self, and this really brought the old days back to me.  Did it ever.  Wow!)   Featherless biped females go staggering out of the theater after watching a romance story, half in love with the male lead, wishing it could be them up there folded in his arms as he leans in for that hour-long kiss.  They walk away convinced all over again that there MUST be someone that perfect for them, and they'll get out there and find him if only they can pry themselves loose of that vision of the guy in the lead role... (It never crosses her mind that he might be a Moray Eel.  But where do you think they got the phrase for the Sinatra song?  "That's a Moray!")

Whoo.  Memories.  Am I ever glad I'm a fish!

The movie even helps explain the need human filmmakers have to frame a romance between a human and a fish as HORROR.  The usual rationale is that because H.P. Lovecraft first framed it that way, all others have simply followed in his footsteps.  There's a great deal to be said for that framing -- there is a lot of Lemming in the human character -- but this film stands to remind us all that they really do see it as a traumatic loss when one of them is KILLED and EATEN, or when they forfeit a Naked Ape vision of white picket fence, kids and a dog in favor of falling madly in love with a Trout or becoming a militant Carp.

I really loved the way Glover's character did a stage routine centered around Shark bites, using those toothy leg traps used by Shaved Monkey hunters to simulate the attentions of a Shark toward a recruit.  That is just the way a human sees it, you see, when not sufficiently prepared for a life in the sea.  "Help!  My leg's gone!" and all that panic.  And you know how Sharks are.  No nonsense, no sales job.  When they see the perfect recruit, they bring her home to meet the folks, and that's all she wrote.  And just as in the movie, that signals the typical Naked Ape onlooker, not to throw a congratulatory wreath of flowers into the surf, but to call emergency services.  A major supporting character, named Jinkies (I suspect that's in honor of Velma from the kids' whodunit show, Scooby-Do), is an employee of the coroner's office, trying to figure out a string of killings that remarkably resemble Montag's stage routines -- working with a guy dressed like a private detective in a noir film.

And the question they ask together?  "Was it really a Shark?"  They may well ask.  

I can't tell you anything about the Herschel Gordon Lewis original Wizard Of Gore; that one came out in 1970 and might be utterly different for all I know.  But this one -- released in 2007, directed by Jeremy Kasten and starring Kip Pardue, Crispin Glover, Bijou Phillips and Brad Dourif -- is destined to find its way into every fish's home film library.  GET IT.  WATCH IT.  THAT'S AN ORDER.

EL MONSTRO DEL MAR!

 

This is a 2010 release, written & directed by Stuart Simpson

Starring Kyrie Capri, Nelli Scarlet, Kate Watts, and Karli Madden, plus a REALLY big Cuttlefish

PLOT SUMMARY: As the story opens, 3 women of questionable virtue are stranded by the side of a road in Middle Of Nowhere, Australia. We know they are of questionable virtue because two of them are in black miniskirts with fishnet stockings, and even the third one, the bottle blonde who resembles Mary Ann from Gilligan's Island -- well, she looks like Mary Ann Gone Bad. We can tell by the tiiiiiiiiiight outfit she's wearing and the abandoned hoochie-koochie she does on the hood of the car while waiting for help to arrive. Well, a carful of guys does pull over to help them, and at the first opportunity the girls slit all their throats, drag them off behind the nearest tree and drive away in their car, laughing gaily. In other words, they are FISHERS OF MEN, reeling them in for the kill much as other featherless bipeds reel in and kill US.  And for even less reason, as near as I can tell -- they never eat any of the men they kill.   At least when WE reel in some of THEM, we make them into more of US.  And cheer up, ladies -- some of that happens, very satisfyingly, in the course of this movie.

Back to the concerns of the featherless bipeds.  Things are about to get worse for all concerned when the killers fetch up in a little seaside village, where one of them has a friend who owns a beach cabin. They move right in and settle down to some serious drinking after the wheelchair-bound man next door angrily tells them to stop frolicking in the water -- it's very dangerous!  They keep right on frolicking, even roping in the old man's granddaughter Hannah, who has been sent over to tell them to turn down their music. Little does Hannah suspect that the new friends, who get her drunk and take her swimming for the first time in her life, are also on a cross-country kill spree. Little do the murderous vixens suspect that they have awakened an ANCIENT EVIL beneath the waves. WILL ANYONE SURVIVE?

CLIFFIE'S NOTES:

>> At no point does anyone explain why these three gals -- Blondie, Snowball and Beretta -- are driving from pillar to post, killing any man they can find. We see flashbacks of at least one other mass-murder scene and we don't know what set that off, either. We do more or less know that they are planning to continue.  Can it be just for the use of their cars?  If that's all they want, why do they hang them up with chains, pin them to the walls with knives through their chests and snort coke over the bodies?  As time goes on, I understand human behavior LESS AND LESS.

>> Late in the movie we get a brief history of the ANCIENT EVIL BENEATH THE WAVES, by which I mean a determined recruiter who combines the best features of a Cuttlefish and a Sea Snake, but we never get any idea why nobody ever tried to do anything about it other than stop swimming and hope it went away.  Interesting.  Their supposed terror doesn't stop anyone from boating, even fishing. And even though everyone in the village seems to make a living fishing, nobody tries to harpoon, net, blow up, or even photograph the ANCIENT EVIL BENEATH THE WAVES.  I want to repeat.  As time goes on, I understand human behavior LESS AND LESS.  But when it comes to this question, I suspect that some of the locals feel pretty close to, even protective of, the Cuttlefish.  WHO DO YOU THINK WAS FEEDING HER UNTIL SHE GOT TO THAT SIZE?  THE EASTER BUNNY?

>>  As one of the killer vixens points out testily, nobody has even bothered to post a NO SWIMMING sign.  Interesting, no?  THIS CUTTLEFISH OPERATIVE IS DEFINITELY NOT WORKING ALONE.

>> I love the way the old man worries so much about his granddaughter's safety that she's never swum on the beach out back of her house in her life.   He has effectively terrified her into lifelong landlubberdom.  But when she doesn't come back all night from the cabin next door, where there are drunken women gyrating all over each other, he doesn't even check on her. When she staggers home the next morning, smeared with makeup from the other women's faces and puking drunk, he never notices. But when he sees her wading in the surf, he freaks.  Wouldn't he be more worried about her being recruited by a bunch of drunken lesbians, here and now, than he is about her getting recruited by an ANCIENT EVIL BENEATH THE WAVES not spotted by anyone in 15 years?  I understand human behavior LESS AND LESS.

>> The recruiting operative is pretty cool.  She's essentially a Cuttlefish the size of one of the beachside cottages, but at the end of every tentacle you'll find a snake's mouth lined with teeth big enough for an Alligator to wear. Nice and slimy, too. AND she comes on land. Of course, she roars like a dragon. Every giant Cuttlefish does.  I can watch this movie and feel POSITIVE that the Cuttlefish was not built for the movie -- it was definitely the other way around.

>> There's a timelessness about this movie I appreciate.  The cars all seems to date from the early Sixties -- tuna boats with tailfins -- and the killer vixen named Blondie looks like a debauched refugee, as I say, from either Gilligan's Island or an Elvis movie.  The other two look like they got lost coming home from a late night at the Goth club in the late '90s -- coal-black hair, black/red lipstick, skin-tight black outfits, fish-belly-white faces.  The guys in the car who get their throats slit, and the guys in leather who get slaughtered in a flashback scene, all look like toughs from the 1950s, with greased-back hair, muscle shirts and motorcycle gear.  Hannah, the innocent, looks like she walked out of a rip in time leading back to 1975 -- long, flat, straight hair, freckles, and a series of cutoff jeans and country-mouse miniskirt type of outfits.  I hardly know what to make of some of the deleted scenes, when Hannah and the killer vixens painted themselves up like sugar skulls and apparently took LSD.

>> Who wins in this movie?  The fish army!  Half the remaining town is recruited by the Cuttlefish; the murder vixens gain a new purpose in life; and Hannah and her grandfather return to their posts -- they're clearly the guardians of the ANCIENT EVIL BENEATH THE WAVES.

>> Don't even bother asking why a movie written, directed, acted and assembled by English speakers has an Italian title.  I looked at IMDb and it said the other title they've used for this film is simply Monstro!  I understand human behavior LESS AND LESS.

I recommend this one. It was a blast, honestly.