Listing to Port

Unshaven chins, velcro, rope, the floor of the broom park at a low-budget witch conference, hedgehogs, those toothbrushes you find at the back of the cupboard, the dry grass of late August, surprised cats, lost brushes that are looking for their dustpans, artisan carpets, donkey nuzzles, old fences, minor mistakes, little round piglet bellies, injured pride, astroturf, pin feathers, conifers, sackcloth.

To celebrate international Milton Keynes day, here are some things you didn’t know about everyone’s favourite British planned city!
1. Milton Keynes was named after the small village of Middleton or Milton Keynes, close to the centre of the planned city. However, this was not the original origin of the name, which actually comes from the future. In the year 2172, a small cabal of purple economagicians gathered in the English Midlands to attempt to retrospectively right some of the wrongs of the late 21st century. They felt that a new and uniting voice in economics had been absent in this period. As a stop-gap measure, they spliced together genetic material extant from John Maynard Keynes and Milton Friedman, creating a small child intended to grow into a kind of economic messiah. On his fifth birthday, he ceremonially took on the name ‘Milton Keynes’ and was sent backwards through time. Unfortunately one of the economagicians involved made a factor of 10 error whilst coding the spell, sending him back 1000 instead of 100 years. Young Milton clearly accomplished something, as the village ended up named after him. Modern-day historians are unsure quite what, however. There remains a rumour that he is in fact not dead but sleeping in a cave beneath the city’s central shopping centre, where he was discovered during initial building work and quietly sealed back up again after a call to the treasury. If so, the date when he will rise once more to unite the disparate schools of economics remains as yet unknown.
2. The city’s famous concrete cows are not made of concrete at all, but are actually constructed from a form of toffee so hard it is inedible.
3. The grid system of Milton Keynes’ roads is so confusing for native Britons that over three hundred people have become permanently lost on its rigidly rectangular ways. City authorities maintain small depots of food, clothing and fuel for the confused in the centres of major roundabouts, which can usually be accessed by levering up a small hatch marked 'OPEN IF LOST’.
4. Although Milton Keynes’ bicycle and pedestrian paths are known today for their red tarmac, they did not start off this way. Initially, an exciting shade of puce was envisaged. This so enraged the planners who were inspecting the final tests of the surfacing system that they engaged in a furious knife fight with the puce advocates, ineradicably staining the whole batch of surfacing material with blood. Since that time, the paths have remained red as a mark of respect to those who were wounded.
5. Milton Keynes is perhaps the only city which was designed with a hinge, in case anyone might need to open it. Quite what they might find if they did is open to question. Other unusual design elements which were eradicated at the final planning stage include mechanical legs, a self-reciprocating monorail, and the ability to sink the roundabouts into the ground in case of disaster.

1. The Q scale: from Q10 (Those who will always try to answer a question, regardless of whether they know anything about the subject involved) - to Q0 (Those who will never answer a question if they can avoid it, often pretending that they did not even hear it).
2. The D scale: from D10 (Those who can be relied on to do something that they say they will do, but not to not do something they say they won’t do), through D5 (Those who are equally reliable or unreliable on promises to do or not do things), to D0 (Those who cannot be relied on to do things they say they will do, but can be relied on to not do things they say they won’t do).
3. The B scale: from B10 (Those who, once they are reading a good book, cannot be dragged out of that book, even if there is a nuclear explosion or it starts raining money or something) to B0 (Those who will enjoy a good book but can be distracted from out of it by a fly going past, the opening of a flower in some far-distant field, or the surfacing of an idle notion).
4. The F scale: from F10 (Those who would always unhesitatingly step into a portal to a mysterious fantasy land with a compelling stranger if given the chance) through F5 (Those who would at least google the mysterious fantasy land first, ask if there were any catches, and tell someone where they were going) to F0 (Those who would never go).

4975 Mustelids
 -4975.1 Weasels
    –4975.11 Those that are weaselly recognised
       —4975.111 Those who are followed around by a slavering pack of paparazzi at all times, never even having a second to themselves to enjoy a quiet mouse and a cup of tea
       —4975.112 Those that can tie themselves in a perfect weasel knot
       —4975.113 That one that was riding on a bird
    –4975.12 Those that are masters of disguise
    –4975.13 Those that are powered by diesel
       —4975.131 Those that are powered by Vin Diesel, pedalling away on a weasel-size exercise bike with his fingers every morning to charge the weasel’s batteries
    –4975.14 Those that are made out of words and dissolve into a small pile of graffiti when startled
 -4975.2 Stoats
    –4975.21 Those that are stoatally different
       —4975.211 Those gentle, shy stoats who secretly long for the name recognition of weasels, even going so far as to hide out in the undergrowth and paint their tails
 -4975.3 Badgers
    –4975.21 Those who have a fine collection of badges
    –4975.22 Those that badger
       –4975.221 Those that badger you to buy a badge with a badger on it
       –4975.222 Those who merely wish that you subscribe to their newsletter
 -4975.4 Ferrets, mink and suchlike
    –4975.41 Those who live in trousers
    –4975.42 Those who have strong opinions about coats
    –4975.43 Those who have a rather dapper waistcoat and have been making enquiries about getting a tiny monocle ground
 -4975.5 Wolverines
    –4975.51 Those who spend their lives explaining that they’re not that wolverine, thank you very much, actually the species as a whole is quite peaceful
 -4975.6 Unusual or mysterious mustelids
    –4975.61 Mustelids that have lids
       —4975.611 Those that have eyelids
       —4975.612 Those that have screw tops
          —-4975.612 Those that are in fact bottles of ketchup that have got a bit hairy somehow
 -4975.7 Otters
    –4975.71 Those who ott
    –4975.72 Those who do not

1. It looks like they may have used a password that isn’t easily guessable.
2. I’ve written some code to do that. *pause* It looks like it has a bug in it. Let me have a go at debugging it and get back to you.
3. Here is a simulation of this situation. All we need to do now is get data to calibrate it, I estimate about six months of experiments and $100k should be enough to pin the parameters down.
4. Here is a simulation of this situation I came up with at great speed in our time-critical mission. In order to do this, I downloaded some random code off the interwebs and everything is approximated by constant-density spheres moving in a vacuum. The answers are probably OK to a plus or minus 200% level.
5. Of course I can write some code to do that. It will take about a month.
6. These systems are actually not compatible at all so we cannot interface them.

1. Dress as the primary emotion you felt on reading this invitation
2. Wear a costume inspired by your favourite mathematical theorem
3. Dress as the person invited to this party who you like the least
4. Come as your favourite orgasm (historical, fictional or personal)
5. Awards will be given for the best walrus costume
6. Dress to match my living room and/or kitchen, I will be passing through from time to time without my glasses on and if I can see through your camouflage I will throw you out
7. Come as your favourite alchemical material, nobody leaves before we make gold
8. Dress as your favourite meteorite or asteroid, party will be held in a quarry, no smashing into each other or the Earth please
9. Dress as your most recent episode of existential despair
10. Dress like someone who is too fabulous to go to this party

1. On winning a trampolining competition: concentrated blueberry jelly in a rectangular slab, gilded at the edges and topped by little plastic people.
2. On being transported back in time to the 1970s: salmon and avocado jelly, shot through with mysterious meat and served at midnight by the light of a single glitterball.
3. On surviving the fifth birthday party of one of the multitudinous batrachian spawn of Great Cthulhu: kelp, cherry and marshmallow jelly, served on a raft in the middle of the South Atlantic and topped by the faintly squamous cream of your worst nightmares.
4. When one is celebrating the anniversary of a vow of celibacy: chocolate blancmange, served in hemispheres with a raspberry on top, accompanied by fresh peaches and raspberries.
5. On coming to a complicated revelation about fear: the word ‘fear’ in tasteless, steel-grey jelly, which one can wobble from time to time to remind oneself that the only thing that fear is afraid of is the fear of fear itself, or something like that.
6. On the graduation of your dog from their course, class or other training regime: chicken jelly studded through with gently glistening morsels of steak.
7. When a major earthquake hits a populated area without significant loss of life: concentrated vanilla and honey blancmange, topped with your favourite buildings lovingly rendered in chocolate.
8. Upon being visited by the jelly fairy: rainbow jelly with sparkles that, on closer inspection, are tiny sprites trapped inside, and you’re not sure whether you’re supposed to eat them but the jelly fairy seems to be insisting that you do except there’s no online translator for fairy language and actually it’s a bit more awkward that you expected an occasion with rainbow sparkly jelly to be.

The ratio of real US presidents to fictional ones, the number of Mona Lisas, the average number of human legs per human, the number of capybaras riding the London Underground at this moment, the ratio between the energy density due to the cosmological constant and the critical density of the universe, the number of people who are wearing the world’s best hat, the number of vast sprawling alien cities glimmering with tiny red lights established in the oceanic deeps of the mid-pacific, the mass of an electron in kilograms, the ratio of big fish to little fish, the number of living dodos, the ratio of fictional plumbers to real ones, the fine-structure constant, the number of Hitler’s testicles in the Albert Hall, the number of books that have been written about ten billion fictional plumbers (so far).

The Internet is wise and wide;
The Internet’s a sage
Distilling and distributing
The knowledge of this age.
But when I asked the Internet,
Its words meant naught to me:
You won’t believe this one weird trick
A mom once taught to me!

What trick? I asked the Internet.
The Internet replied:
What happened next will warm your heart,
Just come and step inside.
What mom? I asked the Internet;
It answered, Did you know?
How she looks now will haunt you!
Come on, let me list why so.

And I must have quailed or something,
For it said, with unctuous care,
Well, number six is shocking,
Why not try some gentler fare?
Like this dog whose soldier master
Has returned from years apart,
Or these fifteen gorgeous kittens
Who will truly melt your heart?

But still I went on searching
For the meaning of that phrase.
I’d done this wrong my whole life through,
I thought. I searched for days.
And at last, a revelation
Slowly rolled into my brain,
As I read a list of mysteries
That science can’t explain.

What if my search for wisdom
From our planet’s fount of learning
Had been Byzantinated
By a lack of proper kerning?
There was no mom, no crafty mom
Putting the world to rights:
Instead, the demon Amom
Had me squarely in her sights.

Amom, that great spider;
She who haunts each hologram;
The hacker of dropped packets
And the fountainhead of spam;
Who deep within the darkest web
Encrypts your zombie dreams;
And whose trick is slurping people
Through a portal in their screens.

Amom has my soul now;
In a field of burning bytes
She warmed my heart, then melted it
To feed her kitten-wights.
Ignore that patch upon your screen
That’s sort of like a door
This one weird trick will shock you -
Just lean inwards to hear more…

1. The Timely Weaver. Believed to be one Mrs. J. Owolabi, originally from Lagos. Mrs. Owolabi gained superpowers when she was unexpectedly licked by the long-distance train to Kano, which that day was being haunted by the ghost of a dog. Feeling herself called to use her powers for good, she concocted a costume and identity based on the Little Weaver, a bird of which she was particularly fond. Her powers extend only to the telekinetic movement of relatively small items. However, by careful use of these skills she has managed to carve out a niche for herself as a hero who identifies people at risk of being late for important appointments, and subtly delays the trains and buses they might otherwise miss by knocking the keys of their drivers onto the floor and/or hiding their pens and other important knick-knacks.
2. Kachiko. Kachiko is a cat. Her superpower is perhaps the one most wished-for by cats: that of sleep. Kachiko has in fact been asleep for seven years (as of 2016). She is able both to eat and shit in her sleep. Her home in Roxas City is regularly visited by other cats on pilgrimage in search of inspiration; thus it may be considered that she at least passively uses her powers to benefit catkind. Kachiko is believed to have been given the gift of sleep by a grateful rat whose life she saved in a complicated case of mistaken identity.
3. EMD F58PH. EMD F58PH is a train which was once ridden in by a radioactive elephant (it is a little known fact that, at any one time, there is usually at least one radioactive elephant trying to catch a train in America. The constant struggle between these elephants and the US secret service is one of the country’s more surprising state secrets and has been making new presidents say ‘Really?’ since at least 1920). The elephant endowed the train with sentience and a restless super-intelligence which is unfortunately quite wasted on a train. In recent years EMD F58PH has managed to connect to the internet and spends its rather dull days playing chess and arguing with train enthusiasts, most of whom have no idea that they are debating the minutiae of railway mechanisms with an actual train. EMD F58PH has on occasion used its powers to avoid hitting animals that have strayed onto the tracks, but is otherwise careful to remain morally neutral.  
4. Charles Crowley (no pseudonym used). Mr. Crowley was a retired Captain with the Royal Artillery who, at the age of fifty-seven, sustained an unusual power after bumping his head on some helium at London zoo. For the rest of his life, he had the ability to levitate walruses (a walrus happening to be the first creature he set eyes on after the accident). Despite strenuous experimentation, he did not have the ability to levitate anything else. More crucially, he did not have the ability to de-levitate walruses. Being a kindly soul, he felt an obligation to the seven or eight floating walruses he ended up creating whilst testing his powers. Mr. Crowley became a common sight in London, towing his floating walruses behind him like a pack of balloons from fishmonger to fishmonger in search of spare fish matter to feed them. He remains perhaps the only person to be simultaneously banned from all the world’s zoos. Interestingly, the Horniman Museum’s famous overstuffed walrus is believed to be one of Mr. Crowley’s brood and as such still has to be weighted down with a large quantity of lead.