Listing to Port

1. The Department for Cockups (DfC)
2. The Ministry for Folding Cats (MfFC)
3. The Department of Sitting Around In Chairs Looking Important (DoSAICLI)
4. The Department of Being Sincerely But Ineffectually Concerned about Things (DoBSBICaT)
5. The Department that has Big Impressive Corridors But No-one is Quite Sure What it Does (DthBICBNiQSWiD)
6. The Department for Carefully Gathering all the Scientific Evidence and then Ignoring It (DfCGatSEatII)
7. The Department of Hey Look it’s a Dancing Pony Pay No Attention to What’s Going On Behind You (DoHLiaDPPNAtWGOBY)
8. The Department for Doing Things Tomorrow (DfFTT)

1. Canaries in coal mines. Interestingly, although canaries in coal mines did serve as a warning of a problem in the mine, their presence was often unrelated to the release of carbon monoxide. Miners in the Victorian era often strayed into strata containing so-called ‘bird stones’ - large dark blue or purple slabs with the unfortunate property of slowly transforming the humans who came into contact with them into birds. Therefore the appearance of canaries in coal mines indicated that a bird stone had been uncovered, necessitating the cessation of all operations until the stone had been found and removed. In later years, mines instituted strict daily height checks and feather inspections to catch the problem at an earlier stage.
2. The time when a wren learned of a deadly peril to the King of All Cats. Being a gentle and naive soul, the wren risked its life to inform the King of the danger. Unfortunately, cats have an extreme aversion to anyone else knowing that they do not have everything under control. Although the King of All Cats is largely a ceremonial role, the insinuation their King might have been in trouble was taken as a grave embarrassment to the entire species - the equivalent of being seen to fall off a wall, miss a short jump or get their head stuck in a box. Since this time, cats have taken an especial pleasure in killing and eating birds.
3. The night before the Great Fire of Rome, five eagles appeared in the Circus Maximus; bystanders claimed that they appeared to be having an intense discussion, although other observers claimed that they were fighting. In any case it seems likely that the eagles had travelled backwards through time in the hope of sending some kind of warning to Rome. One theory is that they were the last remaining standards of the Roman Legions from a time when the Empire was well-decayed, brought to life by some rough magic and sent back through the history of Rome to try and avert major disasters in the hope of producing a more favourable historical outcome. Sadly, the eagles were chased off by some civic-minded shopkeepers before they could finish their plan, which seems to have been shitting out a message in inexpert Latin onto the stadium floor.
4. I have also heard tell that the hoopoes of Ashgabat can predict ill-fortune; although, the details of this having been highly classified during the Soviet era, it is difficult and potentially dangerous to try and find out more.
5. That time, shortly to come, when you woke up and the sky was full of birds, streaming from the East, and they came all day; millions of birds, as if the world out there was emptying out. The next morning they were still coming. The last few ragged fringes of the cloud passed over at noon, some of them raining down to land, squawking and dying, across the fields. You tried posting about it, but for some reason nothing would post properly. There was some dead celebrity and a political scandal on the news. Eventually a bored contractor came by in a van and took the dead birds away.

1. Postmodern pentathlon. This largely seated event consists of sub-contests in irony, self-referentiality, deconstruction, moral relativism and beard stroking. Contests are scored individually, with the overall competitor with the greatest overall combined score deemed the winner.
2. Shit put. Competitors in the Shit Put compete to throw a turd against a specified target, then turn round and sprint away in the shortest time. Points are also awarded for style and kick-ass haircuts.
3. Rowing. Unlike the more commonly-known Olympic rowing event, which confusingly still has the same official name, competitors in the alternate Olympic rowing event compete by having a massive argument. Points are awarded for volume, passion and persuasive arguments. Lying and landing blows on your opponent are cause for disqualification, although gesticulation is encouraged. The subject of the argument changes in each round and is set by the committee of judges beforehand.
4. Buy-a-thlon and Try-a-thlon. These two twinned events form the Olympic equivalent of the scavenger hunt. Competitors are only informed what a thlon is on the starting line. The first competitor to figure out how to purchase one and bring it back to the judging panel is deemed the winner. Subsequently the Try-a-thlon measures their ability to work out what the thlon actually does. Interestingly, because the definition of the thlon never changes and is a closely guarded secret, candidates can compete in these events only once and they cannot be televised, hence the sport’s comparatively low profile.
5. Modern High Jump. Perhaps the only sport you can be disqualified from by having a clean drug test. Competitors in the Modern High jump initially get high, then compete in jumping over a series of obstacles in the shortest time with the fewest faults. According to the International Modern High Jump Federation, the current mandated competition drug is marijuana, but there are a number of splinter modern high jump organisations using different intoxicants.
6. Major Hurdles. Unlike standard hurdles, which are up to 107cm in height, major hurdles are typically 480cm or higher. This makes a major hurdle race extremely hard to compete in and to date no medals have ever been awarded.

1. First you will need to choose your book. Although it is possible to get lost in a short book, it is much easier in a long one. Some people find it easier to get lost in a good book, whilst others relish the hypnotic tedium that comes from getting lost in the phone book or a detailed technical manual.
2. Obviously you cannot get lost in your book without going in. To do this, you will need to find the book’s emergency exit door. It is usually around page 32. Try turning the page on the ‘wrong’ side - if it opens, you have found the door.
3. To go in, you will need to get small. When you have got small, pack a bag with supplies for a few days - we recommend energy bars, bottles of water and a warm blanket - and enter the book.
4. You may want to leave your shoes by the way in. Some books are very particular about this.
5. Books differ, but you will generally have a choice of ways to go. Always remember that your primary aim is getting lost. Do not follow any routes that look like they will lead to the end of the book. In particular, you will want to avoid any resolution of plots, the revelation of secrets, deathbeds, the use of objects casually mentioned earlier on, weddings and journeys home.
6. Explore subplots. If you can find a subplot of a subplot, go there. If you can find a story within a story, go there. If you can find a circular plot or paradox, go there. Paradoxes are particularly good places for a picnic.
7. It is easier to get lost by going down than by going up*. If it feels like you might be about to get a good view of the plot, take another route. If the route starts to seem familiar to you - perhaps the first flowerings of a juicy trope - take another route. Some books only offer the option of navigating via familiar routes. You will have to work extra hard at forgetting to get lost in these books.
8. Do not explore too deeply in books that contain infinities, or mathematical texts concerning particularly large numbers, unless your goal is to be lost forever. If your goal is to be lost forever, bear in mind that the sort of book in which you can be lost forever often does not contain much in the way of food or drink. You will need to be resourceful, and perhaps bring a large knife.
9. If it all becomes too much, remember that you can generally find your way out of a book by always turning left.
10. Do not forget to pick up your shoes on the way out. It is very bad manners to leave shoes in a book.

*You should take care not to get stuck in a footnote when using this method, though.

1. Due to inflation, the financial outlay involved in purchasing the Thing will seem ridiculously tiny when you look back on it a few decades hence.
2. That Thing will bring you joy, which surely only the greyest and most solemn bureaucratic ranks would put a monetary value on.
3. That Thing looks a little sad where it is and you could probably give it a better life.
4. You probably will eventually so why not do it now?
5. It’s not every day that a Thing comes up for sale. If you don’t get that Thing now then you may never get the chance again.
6. Just look at that Thing’s little tentacle finger bits, aren’t they adorable?
7. Also by purchasing that Thing you may just be saving the casts of the 1982 and 2011 The Thing movies from a terrible fate.

4975 Fish
 -4975.1 The wet swimmy sort
    –4975.11 Small silvery fish
       —4975.111 Those of which there are plenty more in the sea
       —4975.112 Those that are fish singularities, darting in and out of existence, singing fish songs like no-one else in the ocean
       —4975.113 Those that hide between waterlilies
    –4975.12 Colourful ones
    –4975.13 Big fish
       —4975.131 Those in small ponds
          —4975.1311 Those who were only on holiday in the small pond but whose lift home has unaccountably failed to turn up
       —4975.132 Those who regard the reader as dinner
    –4975.14 Those that will nibble the toes of the living or the dead and do not care which
    –4975.15 Those that are in fact mammals and not fish
       —4975.151 Those who lurk by the shore, flirting with tourists and making extravagant eye-rolls at their ignorance when unobserved
 -4975.2 Those that are dead
    –4975.21 Those that are for dinner
    –4975.22 Those that are the first awful indicators of a Problem with Water
    –4975.23 Those that are haunted bones or haunted sand or haunted oil
 -4975.3 Fish of myth and story
    –4975.31 Those that have swallowed a magic ring
    –4975.32 Those who have eaten some human with a Destiny, and feel inclined to spit them out
    –4975.33 Those having a series of splotches corresponding to the exact location of the treasure, the true name of God, the location of a really great party or some other such useful information
    –4975.34 Those that have been kissed
 -4975.4 Curious and mysterious fish
    –4975.41 Air-breathing fish with two arms and two legs, indistinguishable from humans except for the suspicious way in which they drink
    –4975.42 Those with robotic exoskeletons
       —4975.421 Those that are martyrs to rust
 -4975.5 Fish of art and architecture
 -4975.6 Those that probably only exist in anecdote and metaphor
    –4975.61 Those who need a bicycle
       —4975.611 Those who came fifty-seventh in the Tour de France and are disgusted that the human-centric media refused to take on their story
    –4975.62 Those that are fuel for lazy surrealists

1. On nights when the moon shines through the windows, the books in the horticultural section may rise up on their ribbonlike stems and open up to the moonlight. The energy gained from moonlight powers the growth of new pages, often detailing highly unusual plants. Therefore it is worth your while as a librarian to site the horticultural books near a window with a good view of the sky. The opening of the books is often accompanied by a great swarm of b’s out from the other books in the library to sip at the illustrated nectar. By the morning they will be back in place, just a little fatter and shinier.
2. Gymnastics books like to slip from the shelves in the dark and practice bending and stretching. Often they can be observed (if one has set up a book hide in the library, that is) performing slow flips across the floor and back again. This is why books on gymnastics often have cracked spines.
3. Much of the nature section will be particularly quiet, for fear of waking up the animal books. Animal books hibernate for most of their lives, but can be induced to wake by a dark but noisy environment - for example if the library is situated next to a nightclub or main road. The other books dislike this and will sometimes sing book lullabies in the hope of stopping it happening. The consequence of a mass book waking is usually a vast and savage bookfight between works on predators and works on prey. Sometimes a book on both may even attempt to devour its own interior pages in a frenzy of curiosity. Needless to say this also wakes up the b’s, which will grumpily swarm around and may sting any stray librarians who have the misfortune to still be present.
4. Books for babies often wake up in the night and will sometimes fling themselves off the shelves or spit up pages onto the floor. Those without fluff or mirrored pages can be found poking those with these things. Books for slightly older children, usually shelved in an adjacent section, can sometimes be found jumping back and forth in an effort to rock the baby section back to sleep.
5. Needless to say, many of these happenings involve a fair bit of mess. Look out for those unusually conscientious books who clean up the mess, mend pages and poke the plant books back into their dust covers in the morning. It is difficult to say which books will take on the role of book shepherd - it varies by library - but often large print fiction, young adult novels and works of philosophy can be found helping out.

1. DogMail Pro. Designed both to simulate the experience of having a dog and to encourage extreme responsiveness to email, DogMail Pro accompanies the arrival of an email with a cheery animation of an item of post coming through a letterbox. Unless the user opens the letter, at some randomly-chosen point between one and ten minutes later, a cheery animation of a dog walks past and eats it, at which point the email is irretrievably deleted.
2. ClutterMaster Retro. Designed to replicate the feel of an old-school filing system, ClutterMaster Retro assigns each email coming in to a random folder. Each time you access a folder, the emails in it are randomly shuffled.
3. ButtleMail. An augmented-reality email client. To check for email in ButtleMail, you need to find the virtual-reality set of bells on one of the walls of your house and ring for the butler. A virtual-reality door will open and a butler will emerge (available settings include most major thesps, including Sir Ian McKellen and Brian Blessed). The butler will inform you if there have been any communications from the village and can send a return telegram on your request.
4. Paper pigeon. Paper pigeon prints out all your outgoing emails in an amusingly florid handwriting font and automatically chooses a delivery method for them based on the geolocation of the recipient: paper plane for short-distance emails (folding printer and launcher included) and carrier pigeon for longer-distance ones. The pigeons are all contractors and are paid peanuts. For transatlantic and other oceanic emails Paper pigeon contracts with Frigate Bird International.

1. The giant, indestructible umbrellas of children’s literature, usable as helicopters and boats and sails, always taking you somewhere exciting and absolute proof against gentle rain
2. Umbrellas with holes in as a cunning assassination strategy against foes who are water-soluble
3. Those umbrellas that are actually giant robotic craneflies in disguise, waiting for the windy autumn of their dreams so that they can fold back their wings, stretch their legs and leap from the umbrella stand to bat up against the windows and out of the house
4. Cocktail umbrellas that completely failed to keep your margarita dry in an unsuspecting tropical storm
5. Umbrellas living in the graveyard of lost umbrellas, those which were turned inside-out by the wind and perched on the lip of a damp bin, but have been rescued by something with clacking claws in the dead of night and taken to a creaking, scraping sanctuary somewhere underground
6. Umbrellas against rains of frogs, having on their upper surface a large pool for safe spalshdown and an escape valve for when one is passing a pond
7. Umbrellas for protection against things other than rain, sun, wind or frogs; for example: unwanted acquaintances, embarrassment, bullets or melancholy

1. Millions of tourists visit the Tower of London every year. But did you know that if you wade six steps into the Thames beside the Tower and reach down, you can find the Iron Chain of Spatial Instability which, if pulled, will suck your soul down into an alternative sewer dimension whilst a bored mud monster operates your body like a flesh puppet for the rest of your natural life?

2. Few experiences can match the excitement of arriving in Venice, ready for a wonder-packed few days exploring the canals and back streets of La Serenissima. If you’ve ever wished you could do nothing else but arrive in Venice, believe it or not, you’re in luck. Hidden away behind a snack machine in the Santa Lucia railway station is a time loop which activates every second Thursday in July. Well-informed travellers can spend a thousand years continually arriving in Venice in the space of a few minutes, before their dead-eyed and exhausted husk stumbles to the nearby Trattoria Il Vagone to sample the limoncello of existential despair.

3. Think that the best beaches are accessible only to the super-rich? Think again! By reciting the simple mantra ‘Sator arepo tenet opera rotas’ three hundred times, you too can gain access the Beach of Dessicated Souls, a pristine strand of pale gold sand made from the lightly crumbled souls of all who venture there, gently lapped by a turquoise sea of mermaids’ tears. Don’t worry, your body can go home any time it wants - and it’ll have a great tan, too!

4. One of the latest crazes to sweep the globe is the cat cafe. For a small fee, patrons can spend time with the world’s most adorable felines while nursing a much-needed coffee. If this is your mug of java, why not go back to the source of the craze, in Japan? For those who wish to try a new take on the trend, we recommend Neko ni kuwa in Osaka. The store’s expert baristas will, if asked, gently roll your soul from your body in the form of a small glowing ball, and give it to the cats to play with forever.

5. Do you long for the glitz and glamour of the Golden Age of Hollywood? Well, let us let you in on one of the closest-kept secrets of Tinseltown. There is a reason why stars walk down the red carpet with a spring in their step and a sparkle in their eye, and it’s not what you think - and you can be part of it too! For just two hundred dollars, you can join the magic circle of the Fae of Old Hollywood, giving you the right to attend their fabulous midnight ceremonies in which your soul is wound out from your body on long sticks and hand-woven into the area’s famous red carpets. Let your body go home and do all the dull stuff - your soul could be right there in underneath those famous feet. Go for it!