Quirk Strangeness and Charm

So yesterday was the mandatory refresher course in "Social Responsibility for Mad Scientists". None of the speakers specifically singled out the alarums and excursions with the vat-grown godmeat and the giant telekinetic vat-grown brain, but they certainly seemed to be giving us more than our fair share of glances. Not to mention the Riddled Participle Accelerator, which fortunately no-one mentioned.*

So they were all "Remember the time when Borges hybridised stag and eagle conceptual DNA in the laboratory, and then Perytons escaped from the cognitive containment facility into the fictive realm, and people accepted them as figures from genuine classical mythology as opposed to modern fakelaw myths?"

Yeah, yeah, we rounded most of them up in the end. Now there are only radio astronomers using "peryton" to label a kind of spurious burst which are emitted by mis-operated microwave ovens (and are totally not signals from the alien overlords instructing the radio astronomers as to the next stage in the master-plan)... which is kind of cool.

"Remember the time when Francesco Colonna managed to cross-breed insectile and proboscid archetypes, and suddenly the noösphere was awash with half-ant half-elephant imagery?"

"The episode was vastly exaggerated," said Colonna.

"Shut up," we explained. "You're not supposed to be here, everyone thinks you died in 1527."

"Remember the time when Another Kiwi went back in the Riddled time machine and revised the Declaration of Independence so that it encouragedthe Fur-suit of Happiness?"

Of course no-one remembers that because it was all promptly un-happened again. The Chronocontinuity Police were not well-pleased with all the extra work, although I happen to think that the resulting version of America was more fun than the one we have now.
* The goal is to accelerate articles and participles and bang them together at high energies to restore the broken symmetry between strong and weak verbs, in the hope of creating new parts of speech. The possibility of a general syntactic collapse into grammar-free LOLpidgin are ENORMOUS EXAGGERATE.

Don't forget, tomorrow is International Talk Like a Jack Vance Character Day! I hope you have all booked costumes ahead of time.