Welcome Back to Land Mass

April 05, 2016 by FP Jerome

If you're a business currently located in "Mississippi," you're probably deeply embarrassed by the state deciding that there are only three religious beliefs, and all of them are worth defending, constitution, common sense, and decency be damned.

Well, I've got good news for you. We're bringing back an old meme.

Welcome to Land Mass. Specifically, the Land Mass Between New Orleans and Mobile. Why come to Land Mass, you may ask?

Land Mass Features:

Low cost of living!

Free pollen!

The ability to eat your weight in mosquitoes daily! (Bats love it)

Huge corporate tax breaks!

Poorly educated, gullible population!

The ability to discriminate against anyone infringing on one of your three religious beliefs! (Others do not count)

Swamps!

Churches on every corner!

Home base of Pearl River Flow, which employs trillions of bacteria!

A great climate for mildew and transmissible disease!

Separate but "equal" public accommodations. No more wasting taxes on pesky public schools!

A host of great historical vestiges, such as Original Flavor Segregation Academies!

Now, you may be asking yourself "well, that sounds a lot like Mississippi, which is kind of universally reviled at the moment, why would I move my business there?"

It's true. Mississippi is a national pariah, and has been for approximately 500 years, when a native told Hernando DeSoto that the name of the river he was attempting to cross was "Mississippi," which meant "great river," when in fact it meant "one whose stream empties into their own mouth. "

But "Land Mass" occupies the same space-time coordinates as Mississippi, allowing it to take in the hellish climate and mental morass that defines the State-That-Shall-Not-Be-Named. And while many state and local officials have forbidden their employees from officially traveling to Mississippi on business, there's no such injunction against Land Mass.

In fact, despite the fact that "Land Mass" and "Mississippi" share all known laws, tax codes, space-time boundaries, population, and culture, "Random Land Mass" is a far more socially acceptable home for YOUR business or non-profit organization (Prophet-Based organizations should move to Mississippi) - so move today!

In fact, Pearl River Flow is now moving from Jackson, Mississippi, to Jackson, Land Mass. This relocation should impact about 30 trillion employees (all microbiotic employees are paid a daily living wage). This is our firm religious belief, and as Land Mass shares laws with Mississippi, that gives us religious privileges*.

Welcome back to Land Mass, everyone!

*We have been informed that there are only three religious beliefs defined by Mississippi House Bill 1523, which leads us to believe (but not religiously, as that is forbidden by law) that there are only three religious beliefs.

Rare Gulf Seashells in their Natural Habitat

September 25, 2015 by FP Jerome

Pictured: The Orange Shoreside Flanged Seaspazzler

After one of our crack investigatatory team-units disappeared from the known universe, we decided to take a beach vacation. Not to the same haunted beach they went to. We're not stupid.
On this entirely normal beach we found beach hobo and sand-person FPJEROME, who showed us beautiful and rare Gulf of Mexico seashells, whilst walking on semi-pristine beaches.

The Orange Shoreside Flanged Seaspazzler, pictured above, is a parasite with an interesting life cycle. It attaches itself to a passing bottle, capping it tightly, by growing a series of concentric shelled rings, that fit better and better with each growth cycle. The seaspazzler excretes a delicious sugary drug, addictive in the extreme, into the bottle, while allowing it's calcium carbonate to leak down the outsides of the bottle, coating it in a pattern, or "logo" that the next victim will find attractive.

When grasped by humans, in whom the parasite relies on as a host, the seaspazzler squirts millions of eggs into the sugary water, which gives it the appearance of fizz. The unwitting human drinks this delicious "beach beverage" and becomes host to the next generation of seaspazzlers, discarding both bottle and "cap," returning them to their natural cycle. The young form fatty deposits around the waist and stomach of the host, eventually sloughing off and crawling back to the sea as an amoeboid form.

The Alabama Stabcrab, while not only found in Alabama, is centered around the Mobile bay, and the surrounding beaches and estuaries. While many crabs fight for mates and territory using their deadly natural claws, the Alabama Stabcrab fights with tiny chitinous sabers, with a string-grip, jousting and fencing on beaches and on the ocean floor. While many animal behavior scientists assume that only apes, crows, elephants, dolphins, dogs, bears, sea otters, mongooses, finches, badgers, warbles, vultures, parrots, nuthatches, gulls, owls, crocodiles, alligators, octopi, several types of fish, wasps, ants, and slime molds are truly able to use tools, the behavior of the Alabama Stabcrab is highly unusual in the crustacean subphylum.

The vivid dances, with their back-and-forth to-and stab, is both a remarkable display and an incredible feat. They fight over things as varied as stalks of grass, mates, good holes in the sand, pieces of fancy seashells, and the use of certain pheromones.

Oftentimes, they lose their tiny chitinous sabers, which are a great find for the sharp-eyed beachcomber. In this case, a new sword will grow from specialized glands behind their "Scabbard Organ," which can secrete a new sword within a few days.

Pictured: Banded Circle Crested Birdblaster, with remains of last meal.

The Banded Circle Crested Birdblaster is a common sight on southern beaches. This wily mollusk is not content to merely filter feed, or go after small annelid worms like most of it's kin. No, the BCCB (as it is known in seashell circles) is known for going after bigger prey. Unlike such land-based bird-eaters as the Goliath tarantula, the BCCB needs no nest nor entrapment mechanism. Instead, it merely breaks apart in sunlight and fills birds with it's seed. The seed fills the birds, who must eat more and more to gain sustenance, even as the bits of the BCCB grow. Finally, the birds explode mid-air, raining down green seashells such as the one pictured above.

Pictured: The Brown Tubular Burnswaggler

The Brown Tubular Burnswaggler requires human foot traffic on it's beaches in order to survive and reproduce. After mating, the males store the fertilized eggs in their reproductive organ, which violently detaches. The mechanism for this is a chemical reaction so intense that it chars one end of the penis, explosively launching it to the surface, where it can wash ashore.

There, it mimics a cigar. Decades of turbocharged evolution have given the tail end of the detached penis a hint of flavor, mainly regret and the sea. A wandering beachcomber will take the tip of the brown tubular burnswaggler, and attempt to smoke it, and then throw it down onto the beach, where nothing will touch it, assuming it to be a gross old cigar, letting the Brown Tubular Burnswaggler reproduce in safety.

Milk. From cows. Nobody likes drinking it, yet we all must pretend we do, at the behest of the powerful COW LOBBY. Butter, chalk dust, and water, minus the flavor, that's what it is. Some loudly proclaim that only REAL milk (directly from the teat of the cow) is tasty, that humans are not, in fact, cattle, and therefore should not drink their milk, but all these claims fall to the wayside when you consider the life cycle of the Red Chalk Floater.

Not technically a marine species, this parasite lives in bottles of milk, taking nourishment from the oily helldrink within. It creates a plastic-like circle out of the plastic taste of milk, slowly migrating to the top of the jug as the liquid is never refrigerated properly, and then eating and replacing the lid when the milk comes out of the dank storage unit it haunts, and into the harsh radioactive light of the grocery store.

There, it waits for someone to touch it. The sides are sharp, and microscopically serrated. Each tiny edge contains millions of spores, launching into the victim at the slightest touch.

The victim, or host, will then crawl into the nearest patch of cattle pasture and die, the larvae of the Red Chalk Floater take to the cattle, and the cycle begins anew.

Deeper Into the Cubes

August 03, 2015 by FP Jerome

The cube has reproduced. There are more of them now. They are changing, evolving.

Center For Cube Studies: Pearl River Flow HQ

Time and date unknown

Following the incident evidenced after our original research, we have delved deeper into the question of THE CUBE. The existence of these artifacts, or, perhaps, artifact, has been dealt with by the paranormal research team at PRF.

[END TRANSMISSION]

Date Unknown

HEAD RESEARCHER: Garry Blatherskite.

It's possible that I was brought back from the dead just for this. But that doesn't seem right. I was only ten years old. I AM only ten years old, but the cubes change time. I have been doing this for decades. I am yet to begin.

Everyone thought the cube was just one entity, eternal, forever, unchanging, a Platonic form left to weather in the swamp of the Real. We did not think it could be broken. We did not know how many there were, how many there are, how many there will be.

Wrong, wrong wrong! We knew we were wrong, but we - I - just now discovered we were wrong. They don't even know yet. I haven't read the words I am about to type, I have not written them yet, but I have read them on an ancient terminal after the end of the world. They are written in the language of the cubes long after we are all gone.

They change. They multiply. Or divide. It depends on how you view the cubes, or how time views them while you view time.

Back to their mundane substance. Mineralogy escapes us, laser beams and chromatographs spout nonsense, give lines for nonexistent compounds. Hardness seems off the charts, but yet when the time comes for them to... reproduce...

There cannot be another word for it, for what these hexahedrons accomplish with the split shards, cracking along lines only visible in ancient photographs. They reproduce, like bacteria or yeast, each one a multitude dividing, and like these invisible architects, the sole actors on the stage of life for three of the four billion year history of the world, they have a way to... exchange information, a crystalline genetics unhinged by time, alien to the teeming forms of life on earth.

None of life is like them. All of life is like them. Was like them. We changed, became algae and mushrooms and ants and trees and plankton. They did not change. They waited.

Reports have come in. We can see inside the cubes, if we wish to go mad. Many members of the research team did just that, willingly peered into the stone stomata. In an instant born before they were, something was transferred into them, plasmid bridges bringing unfolding sheets and shapes. They saw inside, and they told me of vestigial things, symbiotic organs, impossible matter.

Their words turned into a song of screams, each one desired to have inorganic bones, they argued, not knowing if they always had crystalline fibers for hairs, if the iridescent colors of their skin were becoming more or less pronounced as the cubes rebuilt them, each geometric parasitic egg as flawed and alive as the human beings they had replaced.

I know the cubes will hatch. I know they have hatched. I am not old enough to have seen them in every backyard, appearing next to barbeque grills and water tanks, I know I have never watched curious children point to them at the zoo next to the stained glass panda, eating twitching leaves from the trough formed on top.

I am just a child. I lived and died and came back and I have died again, I see the statues of my coworkers frozen in delight, the joy overwhelming, and yet I see them wish for their crystalline fate. They want to be glass.

They are so beautiful, and I am transfixed by what they will become.

I will look inside. The statues that were my friends, the eggs that were my family, they tell me that I already have looked, I have heard the song of the cubes and it is beautiful. I have always heard it, in my mind, in those quiet moments at 3 AM when the noises of the world are all that is left. My mind is wind over broken time, carving canyons formed by our obsolescence. The cubes have always been here. The cubes will always be here. The only way forward is in stone.

The first cube was in the swamp. We are the last cube.

I am coming home. We all become.

[BEGIN TRANSMISSION]

- This strange transmission was found on a disused IBM 5100 in the PRF facility basement. It should be noted that Pearl River Flow has no "Paranormal Research Team," nor a "Center for Cube Studies." The owner of the computer, one "John Titor," was unavailable for comment, though one of the interns swears he was a reporter here. Whatever the case, we are on the lookout for any further developments of THE CUBE.

-FPJEROME

The Mortar The Pestle

July 06, 2014 by FP Jerome

"The glochidia get into the gills of fish. In this case, it's gar..."