Here's Wishing Everyone An Unavoidably Wet New Year!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Quote Of the day -- Maybe Even The Whole Year!

"Breathes there a man with soul so dead that he's immune to the theatrical possibilities of a plate of fried calamari?  Even bank presidents and Presbyterian ministers have been known to put the tentacle parts up their noses and pretend the garlic bread is Captain Nemo's submarine..."

 

-- P.J. O'Rourke, in Modern Manners: An Etiquette Book For Rude People

CATEGORY 5: THE STORY OF CAMILLE

Well, WHAT AN UPLIFTING READ THIS WAS!  You can find it under International Standard Book Number 978-04722032402.  I loved every single page!!!  When I say this, I am speaking to you as the North American Conspiracy Zone Leader for the Fish Army. This read DID MY HEART GOOD.

This isn't just another bore-me-to-sleep Shaved Monkey scientific analysis of a fish recruiting festival.  For any landfish -- or any human who wants to become one -- this book is PACKED with enticements and hints about why, year after year, WE KEEP WINNING THIS WAR:

CLIFFIE'S NOTES:

>> On page 29, the authors point out that when humans started building levees around New Orleans, in a blame fool attempt to keep the city dry, they MADE IT WETTER.  When Katrina arrived and broke through the levee in 3 places along (chuckle) Canal Street, the "protection" given the city all this time had led the city to sink well below sea level, leading to OUR TRIUMPHANT ARRIVAL in 2005.  See, the drier they tried to be, the wetter they got. HUMANS CANNOT PREVAIL AGAINST FISH.  Finally, Dagon decided that it was TIME TO COME CALLING.

>> On page 119, they point out how many human churches were wiped off the map by Hurricane Camille. As they put it, "Camille put them to a test they would fail."  Naked Apes have long since forgotten that praying to a  sky god when they're living next to the water is a MISTAKE.  They used to know that instinctively, but like so much of their basic inborn wisdom, it's somehow gotten lost.  

>> The most important, central point of the book is spelled out on page 96:  They discuss why some people, even after receiving a clear warning that a hurricane is coming, stay put instead of evacuating.  They mention individual "risk thresholds" (which are incredibly low in North America, especially in the USA -- but not when a hurricane's heading their way), spending too long packing, refusal to leave pets behind, and an overwhelmingly popular failure to get far enough away to make any difference -- in fact, some of them left and put themselves ever closer to the deadly menace.  What nobody brought up is the fact that many people just want to stay and see the hurricane for themselves.  They figure they're home and that's where they're safest.  

>> Underneath that motivation is the other one:  THEY WANT TO BE RECRUITED.  THEY WANT TO BE FED TO THE FISH.  It seems safer to wait out the storm because they know the storm will bring them home.

>> They keep mentioning how desirable the real estate is along the Gulf Coast, too, but they never go any farther than that.  WHY do 50% of the Homo saps live as close to the water as they can get?  Think about that for a minute.  WHY, when the water comes ashore, and the weatherman is blaring that it wants to KILL THEM ALL, do they refuse to move?

Just take a look at that cover photo on the book.  I can't decide:  is the kid sitting in the rubble so dejected because his house is smashed up?  Or because he's disappointed that he wasn't WASHED OUT TO SEA like the rest of his family?

Reading this made 2016 the BEST SQUIDMAS EVER.

Carp Lives Matter In Poland

KLUB GAJA IS AT IT AGAIN.  Polish animal-rites protestors are dressing up as our Carp sisters to protest the yearly Carp Bathtub Massacre that occurs every year across Eastern and Southern Europe.  I first heard of this tradition as a young recruit when I watched Jeff Dahmer's favorite movie, Exorcist III.  Remember George C. Scott talking to Ed Flanders about the Carp swimming back and forth, back and forth in his bathtub until it nearly drove him out of his monkey mind?  At Squidmastime, when all of our operatives hope for PEACE and SERENITY, Shaved Monkeys distributed across the face of the earth are bringing home our Carp sisters and keeping them alive in their bathtubs "to clear the mud out of their systems."  Then someone comes along and HACKS THEIR HEADS OFF as they scream in terror, so the family can eat them.  It's pretty sickening, I agree.

The irony here is that whether you're the person EATING the Carp, or merely DRESSING UP AS A CARP to defend Carp rights, or maybe I mean protest Carp rites, YOU'RE ALL BEING ACTIVELY RECRUITED BY THE CARP WHO GIVE THEIR ALL FOR OUR GLORIOUS CAUSE.

YOU CANNOT ESCAPE.

Great Last-Minute Squidmas Gift Idea!

This "school of jellyfish" is made from the skeletons of our fallen Sea Biscuit sisters -- no, sorry, they call these operatives "Sea Urchins" -- stuffed with Tillandias, also known as "air plants," that only need spritzing with water and an occasional all-day SOAK to stay alive.  They can then be hung up on strings as shown.  You can make your own or buy them ready-made.

This is also a great excuse to keep the humidity HIGH in your dry-land living space, without exciting SUSPICION or generating unwanted QUESTIONS from the Shaved Monkeys you mean to recruit.

You can even skate right up to the edge of TELLING THEM EXACTLY WHAT YOU ARE ABOUT by using a different, more overtly Squidmasy design:

Don't you just love Squidmastime?

I Just Have One Question...

What exactly are the little blue-and-green fish doing in this picture?   If the tableau artist who whipped this up thinks we would have ANYTHING TO DO with this sort of clingfilm Santa's elf homicide scenario, he or she should really have used an Octopus.  Because it's supposed to be a Squidmas joke, right?  

They never learn.

The Things These Naked Apes Find Funny...

This is labelled online, "Feeding a Fish -- Level:  Serial Killer."  

Yeah, I know; that's what I said, too.

PREPARING THE GHOST

WELL, WHAT CAN I SAY ABOUT THIS LITTLE BOOK? Let's start at the shallow end by telling you that the International Standard Book Number for the hardcover edition is 978-0871402837.  As you can see by the jacket, this was written by a (100% human) author named Matthew Frank, and short of simply TELLING YOU TO READ IT, well, it's just...hard to describe.  He clearly set out at some point to tell us the story of the first man ever to photograph the mighty, and until that time UTTERLY MYSTERIOUS, Giant Squid.  He just lucked into the opportunity because one of our operatives (she had no human name) washed up on a beach near where he lived at the time, on the outcropping known to the featherless bipeds as Newfoundland.

Frank does, and doesn't, tell us the story.  He goes all over the place, telling us all about his enormously fat musician grandfather, the fact that his wife is from South Africa, speculating wildly on the colors of the Squid photographer's soap and washcloth, mentioning in passing that he himself has spina bifida, talking a lot about ice cream, and in general giving us a GREAT demonstration of the true power of this particular detachment of the Fish Army:  the Giant Squid has the power to drive Shaved Monkeys MAD.  The sentence structure in this book, all by itself, should tell you that the guy is COMING UNGLUED.  I'm not at all sure how Naked Ape readers would respond to this book, but speaking to you now as a Catfish, I have to say I caught only occasional flashes of the story he claims to be telling us.  He was too busy ranting to stick to the subject.

And I happen to know he left a lot of the story out.  The worldwide FRENZY created by the discovery of this unlucky operative is barely mentioned.  He glosses over the deep, powerful connection between the real-life operative and the Kraken of seafaring legend.  The DECADES of effort to find another operative of this type gets just a couple of sentences.  Why?  Clearly Frank, too, has GONE MAD.

WHY, you ask, would we want to drive sane monkeys mad?  For starters, some of them react to that situation by flinging themselves into the sea.  So, hey, MISSION ACCOMPLISHED!  Beyond that, it's ENDLESSLY FASCINATING to watch a member of another species doing something you yourself can never do -- like watching bats catching insects on the wing or watching a dog find something it can't see by following the smell it picked up from an old sock, watching a human go gaga is PRETTY COOL.  And -- let's be honest -- PRETTY FUNNY.  I got many laughs out of this book, and the closer you are to completing your transformation from human to fish, the funnier I would expect YOU to find it.  It may not make such a great Squidmas gift to a new recruit, though.  The reaction I've been seeing from that crowd is more or less "but they hardly ever talk about the Giant Squid at all in here!"  It may be that only a fish can see the reach of the tentacles through the text of this essay.

No, It's Not A Security Leak!

ALL THE TALK IN THE CHAPTER MEETINGS is about these beachside operatives RUNNING AMOK in the wet sands of Huntington Beach, California.  They've also been much in the human news, of course, which is where I got this photo of said operatives. 

NEVER FEAR!  EVERYTHING IS GOING ACCORDING TO PLAN.  As some of these ladies have given their lives in their task -- usually due to human exercise regimes that result in their being trampled underfoot -- they have simultaneously DRAWN ATTENTION AWAY from a critical operation being carried out elsewhere.  In that sense, they are PART of that critical operation; it could not be carried out safely without their assistance.  I've greatly enjoyed reading about how the Homo saps cannot seem to figure out whether these ladies are what they call Salps, or alien embryos, or some sort of burrowing Sea Cucumber, or (so help me) Baby Tremor Monsters.

The take-home message of this event is that sometimes an operative, simply by appearing in front of human eyes in her true form, can STILL be a concealment operative, without having to transform into a human.