Bio-Robo Invasion of South America Begins

The horde of biometric robocops spawned out of the hijacked Google cloning base on Antarctica began spilling out of boats up the coasts of Argentina and Chile early Thursday morning in what many are calling a proper invasion of epic proportions. The broccoli headed plant organisms that run off photosynthesis were created through a DNA sequence put together by the resistance group GASP, who programmed the biometric robocops to replicate themselves after seizing control of the Google run cloning facility. Aerial surveillance of Antarctica has shown that while the invading force leaving has created a sizable hole in the number of bio-robos, the total number left on the continent is still estimated at around 2 million. Always quick to find a silver lining to put a panicking public at ease, Botany expert Ovaltine Goose-Shredder says surveillance shows that the biometric robocops have stopped their round-the-clock replication of themselves, so their numbers are no longer growing. What makes Goose-Shredder certain that no new bio-robos will be made is that the horde is mobile now, so the two million left on Antarctica will only concentrate on invading inhabited areas and make landfall as quickly as possible, causing experts to note that people who rely on facts for everything should never try to reassure anyone.

Upon hearing what he believed to be misinformation being distributed through the press, GASP leader Axel Hjalmar used a pirate TV signal to tell the world that the biometric robocop horde would never stop replicating themselves willingly, as numbers are the most important part of winning the war against technology. Hjalmar says that the bio-robos could only have stopped cloning themselves because of “a failure of the Google [cloning] apparatus,” and that it's a shame that the bio-robos are no longer multiplying because their use of photosynthesis provided great environmental benefits for the Earth. Hjalmar finished his transmission by saying he would welcome anyone who could lend him a spare cloning apparatus that they have lying around, because “unfortunately, GASP does not have the expertise to put together a cloning booth, or whatever people use to make clones.”

Panic is gripping the southern peninsula of South America as the bio-robo horde spreads inland from the coast destroying every piece of electronic technology they can get their hands on. “It's horrifying,” one eyewitness who lost a tablet and a digital clock said, “It's like they could smell [the electronics].” The Argentinian President has issued a warning to all citizens to put their electronics on the road in front of their house to prevent the green horde from kicking in doors and damaging their homes, and to surrender any electronics on their person when confronted by a biometric robocop, as the bio-robos are known to turn violent when they meet resistance. “Treat them like bees, bees who are trying to steal your cellphone. You leave them alone, and they'll leave you alone,” President Cristina Fernandez de Krichner said early Thursday. Once in control of an electronic device, a biometric robocop will hold the device above their head and run screaming like a banshee to the edge of the nearest body of water and pitch it in. Ovaltine Goose-Shredder has several theories as to why the bio-robos scream while in possession of electronics. “It could be an emergency siren, like 'hey get out of my way I've got bad stuff to destroy here' for other [biometric robocops], or the electronics could just be burning their hands, but that would be a glaring design flaw on what is proving to be a pretty well designed organism,” he said late Thursday, marking the first time Goose-Shredder has complimented Hjalmar.

With the number of bio-robos making landfall increasing every hour, the Argentinian military is reassuring citizens that they have a plan, and are scrambling troops to intercept the horde as quickly as possible. For citizens, the response cannot come fast enough. “There are at least thirty [biometric robocops] that I can see running around the street right now,” one eyewitness who asked not to be identified said, “I wish I could take a picture of this. I don't know how I'll remember it now.” The eyewitness then realized that he was talking to a journalist, and amended his statement, saying “I got mugged by a plant. Please don't tell anyone about this.”

Gravity Emanating from Rob Ford Scandal Shatters Everything

We're losing the field here!

How? How and why?

In this context how and why are the same question

Then how did it manage to trip you up and not answer it?

It's this Ford thing, it's making Canada's minds fold in on themselves

Like gravity fabric?

Exactly, his existence is taking our thoughts and spinning them backwards

So every thought is getting curtailed and mashed back into itself before it gets a chance to be anything?

Looks like it

Are we the same person?

I can see bits of Goose-Shredder, and bits of Betty, but I can't tell which is me

It's the same for me, this guy's thoughts must have crushed the characters together

This Rob Ford Gravity is potent stuff

At least we still have our sentience, that's a good sign

Can we stomp or jump up and down really hard? Can we get his attention? Would that help?

There's no way that would help. Let's do it

Hey!

Stop trying to figure out that clown!

Yeah! In two weeks he's just going to be a footnote in 'The Fuck-Up Handbook'

We will destroy your headspace with our feet!

Look for 'The Fuck-Up Handbook' on bookshelves Fall 2014!

[Something time-esque elapses]

I don't think it worked

How could we possibly know if it worked?

[the disembodied voices hang out on a burgundy backround for a bit]

I wish we had some cigarettes or something

I wish I could tell if I smoked or not

Yeah, now that we're mashed together, do both of us smoke, or is it still one smokes and the other doesn't like usual? Do we both kind-of smoke?

I don't know, nothing gets resolved in Rob Ford Gravity

Nothing useful happens in Rob Ford Gravity

Don't the Ford supporters remind you of someone crawling back to an abusive relationship right now?

Yeah, self respect is in short supply in that city

The story just keeps getting worse

I bet if we stop paying attention for two months, when we check back on what he's up to, Rob Ford will be biting your grandmother on the neck and taking meth as a suppository

That doesn't sound crazy enough. The pace the Rob Ford scandal is escalating at is outstanding. In two months Rob Ford will be crashing the International Space Station into a Mexican nursery school while giving Anders Breivik a high five

Holy shit, that's pretty out there

That's the trajectory of all this. It's just science

I'm glad I didn't say it

You kind of half did

If that's the trajectory of all this, we should probably stop Rob Ford

Yeah, he doesn't have anything good left for us

But it is kind of interesting, what he did to the blog

Stop it, that man is poison, this is poisoned. Hopefully things like the Toronto City Council and PAJ will be working in a way humans can tolerate next week

Well then this will be the last time I mention this guy to anyone. I'm forgetting him. Let's talk about something else, please

Okay

[awkward silence for eternity]

A Short History of Not That Long Ago: The Aftermath of Canada's Currency Crisis

Eight months ago, the Canadian dollar disappeared. Every cent in Canada was spent by people trying to win a lottery that never ended up having an outcome, making every ticket sold a loser and freezing the funds in an account that cannot be legally accessed by anyone. The lottery was run as a pool to pick the minute the Preacher Firestone would collapse and probably die, and the winners would split the prize pool without the Interprovincial Lottery Corporation taking a cut because the ILC figured the prize pool would be tiny, since Firestone's endurance would give out after a few days. As the weeks went on, more and more Canadians began pouring money into tickets, figuring that science said Firestone had to drop soon. The potential prize money was put into an account until a winner was decided, but that never happened, and Firestone still hasn't stopped his sermon. Everyone lost, with the exception of HSBC. With the money never to be claimed, the HSBC International Bank made out like a bandit who held up an entire country, and they were now free to invest all the money Canada had on the world's markets without having to worry about anyone coming to call for it. What the beginning of the crisis showed, aside from a harsh lesson in the gambler's fallacy, was that the Canadian Government wasn't willing to betray the trust put in the banking system by using the extraordinary circumstances to breach the account the winnings were stored in. Of course, by proving that they cared dearly for the stability of the banking system, the Canadian Government ended up tanking the economy that supported it, and ultimately ended up driving every bank in Canada out of the country.

While HSBC executives frolicked in the pile of money Canada willingly gave them, average citizens were faced with a very serious situation they had to quickly adapt to. Luckily one of the basic needs of human survival was already taken care of for many Canadians, as immediately before the currency crisis Canada's housing industry had been going the kind of manic that precedes a meltdown, so pretty much everyone who wanted a house had somewhere to live. With shelter taken care of, getting three squares became Canadians biggest priority in the new economy, particularly in regards to having enough food for a family to last the winter. “People had to learn what seasons are again,” local Recent-History expert Ovaltine Goose-Shredder says, “Suddenly people were losing their shit because it's November and you can't get peaches anymore, but that's what happens when your groceries are dependant on our local climate. It was amazing to realize how much local farming knowledge, how much natural, ancestral knowledge, had been spoiled by the fact that we were getting avocados shipped in for year round availability.” Despite Canadians being forced to scale back their groceries to the limits of their climate, people took to preserving with some vigour. With community leaders giving seminars on what keeps and what doesn't, experts are hopeful that a full famine will be avoided over the winter months.

In their death throes before the full on collapse, banks were screaming to find a way to collect mortgage payments. With a family in every house but without a currency, there was no way to quantify what a family could pay for their roof, and for six months after the currency crisis the banks tried every idea their executive boards could come up with. The first was to lobby the Canadian Government to replace the collapsed currency with anything official that could denote value, but the government rejected this idea, recognizing that since short term prospects were so horribly mangled that citizens were only focused on where their next meal was coming from, government economists could get away with taking the time for a measured response that would benefit the country in the long run. This was terrible news for the banks, who immediately went to the courts and tried to shoehorn some specious legal precedents into forcing the government to act, and when that failed, they tried to legally force delinquent debtors into indentured servitude, which also failed. At this point the banks would have sent collectors and assessors to jam their feet into people's doors like Jehova's, but over the months of legal battles they had been hemorrhaging employees because banks without currency produce absolutely nothing, and nothing don't pay the bills. When they finally accepted that everyone either gets by or they don't in the new economy, and there's no quantifying income beyond that, the banks did the last thing they could and tried to kick everyone in Canada out of their homes for non-payment of their mortgage. It turns out, trying to toss every homeowner out on the street is exactly what it takes to get under a country's bonnet, and there were protests. Big ones. Like too big for any earthbound institution to handle kind of big, and the government caved to the pressure from the citizens and told the banks to go fuck themselves, but before they could fuck themselves the banking system dissolved.

With many Canadians having difficulty raising themselves beyond a subsistence living, the thought of building a new house is completely out of the question for most citizens. A giddy supporter of Canada's new economic arrangement, Ovaltine Goose-Shredder is one of the few people living in a new house instead of squatting in an older one. Just trying to see if it could be done through barter, Goose-Shredder was able to get a house built because he is considered to be a wealthier citizen in the new economy. “My 8 part novel has really taken off,” Goose-Shredder explained, “It's a sexy supernatural thriller in the vein of Harry Potter and Twilight, and I combined the two with the Shopaholic series for a great twist. It's about a magic werewolf that really likes purses, and I've been trading copies for clothing, candles and foodstuffs. This freed me up to trade the bigger stuff I produce for things like bricks and lumber.” While he loves that he was able to complete the project, Goose-Shredder admitted that he had to scale back the size of his house to fit the new economy. “It's a 700 square foot house, which is a lot smaller than my last one, but there were a lot of challenges in getting this one built, and that's a lot more interesting to me than having enough space to never have to see my family.”

London Ontario Wants Rob Ford for Mayor

A group of citizens in London, Ontario calling themselves Non-Judgemental London have extended an invitation to scandalized Toronto mayor Rob Ford to be mayor of London, as current London mayor Joe Fontata will probably step down or go to prison soon. The group of citizens, who published their plea in a full page letter in the Toronto Star, say they would rather have a mayor that smoked crack and said stupid things than a mayor who stole from them and said stupid things. “It would be nice to have a mayor that only hurt himself,” the ad says. “Just claim you didn't inhale and we'll buy it, so come on over to friendly, Non-Judgemental London!”

Legal experts say that one thing friendly, Non-Judgemental London seems to be missing is that two of the people connected with the crack smoking video have been murdered since it's creation, which coupled with Ford's alleged attempt to pay a hacker $220 000 to delete the video, could potentially mean an evidence eradication attempt by Ford that had him deleting eyewitnesses to him hitting the pipe. While selling drugs is not a safe way to make money, the situation still raises speculation that Rob Ford took out contracts on human lives, a trait one does not usually want in a mayor. Another massive pitfall overlooked by Non-Judgemental London is that if you're 44 years old and still getting drunk enough to smoke crack, maybe smoking crack isn't your biggest problem. But let's go back to laughing at this again. All the murder and addiction talk is harshing the world's punchlines.

After the publishing of the open invitation for Rob Ford to run for mayor of London, local politics expert Ovaltine Goose-Shredder jumped on board with the idea, and was ecstatic about the potential for a real democratic revolution in local government. “Crack smokers are a statistically underrepresented demographic in municipal politics,” Goose-Shredder said in a press conference late Thursday, “they have different experiences than the rest of us norms, and could provide a valuable point of view on municipal issues.” Specifically, Goose-Shredder believes that with someone experienced in drug use guiding policy, London might actually have a hope of setting up Canada's second safer injection site. “It's odd that people would be against this measure, there are a lot of benefits for the community,” he said. According to scientists, benefits include a reduction in overdose deaths, addicts being around treatment literature immediately after dosing for the only minutes of clear thinking they'll get all day, and a reduction in the number of used needles found on front lawns and in parks. Local Outragee Sandra summed up people's opposition to safe injection sites, screeching “Drugs and crime go hand in hand, and I won't have it in my neighbourhood!” Ovaltine Goose-Shredder has an outrageously simply solution. “Put the safe injection site at Wellington and Horton. No one will notice a difference. Not that it would cause an increase in crime anyway, because the stats say it won't.”

On top of the progressive policy decisions a crack smoking mayor could bring about, Goose-Shredder also believes there could be fringe benefits for the city. “While other cities mayors are sleeping like mortals, a crack smoking mayor could stay up for 4 days scrubbing the gremlins out of the reservoir. Just think, our city would have the cleanest drinking water in the country, and this is just one potential fringe benefit. Who knows what else that crack addled brain could come up with. The sky is the limit people. It's time for some real radical democracy! It's time to jump on the Ford express!”

Hjalmar Accused of Loneliness, Vandalism

The Maritime provinces have seen a recent string of vandalism in coastal cities, as many public art installations created by the Firestone acolytes have been found spray-painted or otherwise disrupted after a call from GASP leader Axel Hjalmar to “Culture Jamm” the propaganda campaign that the Preacher Firestone asked his acolytes to begin weeks earlier, creating the first real confrontation in what has been a long war of words between the two groups. So far the war has mostly come in the form of chrome cubes being spray-painted with a foot smashing a tablet surrounded by green lightning bolts, but some observers fear that because the two groups have already escalated from a war of words to a war of symbols, violence can't be far off. With a following of millions, the Preacher Firestone has the human resources to mount a massive front in any battle, which makes his potential power a terrifying prospect. On the other side, experts have a happy theory that Axel Hjalmar is the sole perpetrator of the GASP Jamm Campaign, so a catastrophic confrontation wouldn't be much of a war.

Looking at the evidence in GASP's attacks, Forensic New Media expert Ovaltine Goose-Shredder says Hjalmar couldn't have the followers to pose a resistance to Firestone, so a violent confrontation is out of the question. “If you look at the order all these chromed cubes got sprayed, and a forensic analysis of the colours used, the chromed cubes are being targeted by a single person.” Goose-Shredder says. Hjalmar's last known location was Halifax, Nova Scotia, and he is known to use boats as a base of operations because the ocean is the only place Street-View can't touch. Geographically, the vandalism is consistent with one person travelling in a fairly straightforward direction from Prince Edward Island to Nova Scotia to New Brunswick by boat, and the colours can be traced from one cube to another as well. “You can see the spots where one can of paint ran out and another was opened,” Goose-Shredder explains, “On a later cube you can see where that can ran out, and another colour started. You can trace it across provinces. It's sequential, methodical, and it fits with Hjalmar's last known location.”

Other acts against the Firestone acolyte campaign also bear Hjalmar's personal touch of tediously explaining simple concepts into the ground. A theatre performance in St. John, New Brunswick that consisted of Firestone acolytes running back and forth and being really happy about being here to do that was disrupted when a flock of folding tables was placed in the public park where their performances took place, impeding the acolyte's ability to run. Spray-painted on the tables was a message that only Hjalmar could have wrote, “GASP was here and now you cannot run. Well, you can run, but you will hit a table. It is now your choice to do so or to not do so, I would recommend not doing so. Also, give up imitating electrons, because you are humans and allowing synecdoche to define you is a first step towards being supplanted. Submission before the Google is the last.”

In other news, the biometric robocops have escalated their spree of boat hijackings around South America, with several gaggles of bio-robos making landfall up and down the coast and commandeering boats to take to Antarctica. A high ranking member of the Argentinian Navy believes there to be at least 30 stolen vessels being used by the bio-robos, and that the fleet is growing exponentially. Asked why the Argentinian Navy doesn't just fire on the stolen vessels, the source admitted that the bio-robos are difficult to track because they use the sun, the moon and the stars to navigate, so they tend to flit like a moth across the ocean. The fishing industry around South America is also taking a beating, with many fishermen losing their lively-hood to hijackings, but the kick in the groin to the fishing industry has been a cause for celebration amongst Marine Biologists, who believe South America's coastal fish population could begin to recover as boats disappear from the waters. This, along with being a carbon sink and giving a 2% boost to the Earth's oxygen levels, is making the biometric robocop horde popular amongst environmentalists, who claim they have yet to see a drawback to having the horde on the planet. And if they destroy all the smart-phones, so much the better.