Mr Mackerel is now on Facebook. You can friend him by searching for Jack Mackerel.

We haven’t checked to see whether extradimensional beings are allowed on Facebook, but we’ll just assume that such outright racism is alien to Facebook.

Bugs are cool. There is at all times a weirder one than the weirdest one you’ve ever seen.

A couple of thousand years ago, or in the Spring of ‘92, I caught a large caterpillar with a horn on his back. It was a single, large horn curved backwards at the end of his body. It wasn’t very much of a defensive mechanism, as shaking his butt didn’t do much to shake the horn. I had no trouble at all picking him up.

I think the horn was more of a message, and in that respect it is quite effective. Caterpillars do not speak bird language, and even if they did they couldn’t have conveyed a complicated message so quickly and accurately as with the horn. A bird seeing this horn immediately knows what the caterpillar is trying to say:

“Okay, listen up, beakface. There’s two ways we can play this. Either you can fly off now and go make a ruckus somewhere else, or you can taste the pointy wrath of my horn in your pecker. You think I can’t handle this thing? You think it’s just aimlessly trailing along on my back? Think again, buddy. Other caterpillars come right out with their trick. They’re prickly all over their body, but a few good pecks and you’ve got your midday snack, am I right? Now, this is different. Think about this. Why would a caterpillar only have 1 unpleasant extremity, large but which he cannot wield? Want to come and find out? Or have you figured it out yet? That’s right. I’m keeping it still until you’re close enough. Come. Come closer. You’ll see. Want to find out? Take a chance. Look at that bloody big horn back there. How fast can I swing that around and shove it up your bird butt, do you think? Pretty darn fast, I think. Pretty darn fast.”

Today gleefulsincerity.com has welcomed over 10,000 visitors, mostly through StumbleUpon. Here are a few suggestions for further browsing beyond the most viewed posts:

Trailer for the Great Big Stew in the Sky
The Great Big Stew in the Sky
Conversation between Mr Mackerel and a bell pepper
Ode to Johnny Thorn

For those more interested in the surge of visitors, this was due to an article I wrote on the 19th of September (as one of the very first posts on here). It’s called Tongue-Eating Bug Found In Humans and is a satirical news article I wrote after reading the original article about the actual existence of that parasite in fish. I imagined it spreading to humans and how sometimes it seems that people have already lost control of their tongue. That’s the kind of daydreaming that has lead to most articles on this website.

Fake news is not Mr Mackerel’s trade, however. It has been just the one article. The rest of the website is a diverse range of posts, gleeful branching out and pruning. You can use the Contact page if you’d like to tell Mr Mackerel what he’s doing wrong or right. You can also add comments to individual posts.

p.s. A smart commenter linked to the original article, so you can compare it to what’s on here.

Mr Mackerel predicts world events (political, cultural, technological, spiritual, chicken-related, ALL that jazz) as far as 2052. He has based these predictions on an overdose of chocolate.

2010
Another small war erupts around the Caspian Sea. The Security Council condemns the aggression, but is ignored. A new online-only newspaper reveals documents that suggest the leaders of several large countries including Russia and China do not put much value in the United Nations. Other countries do not respond strongly or at all. The news site closes as quickly as it launched. It re-appears months later with a click-to-unmute 9-way video news site, losing the in-depth reporting, vast scope and personalised presentation of the original version.

2012
Sarah America wins the 2012 US elections shortly after revealing her official name change. Polls had already swung in her favour due to the crippling economic void which President Obama had to spend his entire term turning back into a flourishing state at the expense of other concerns, as well as due to Sarah America’s adoption of an African child and a popular belief that with the new economic boom and urban food riots, there is a need for a tough Christian mother, family values and howdy-neighbour-here’s-a-cabbage.

2014
China introduces chicken cloning factories. Cross-dressing becomes a wildly popular and almost global trend.

2016
Brazil hosts the 2016 Summer Olympics. A heatwave ruins the spectacle, but it is nevertheless followed by massive immigration from North America, Europe and Japan. The Winter Olympics are so rife with scandals and badly-watched that discussion arises about whether to end the tradition. Sarah America is re-elected. Australia becomes world’s largest exporter of environmental technologies and experts. Epidemic in England, suspicions raised about cause. The A-Team make their come-back on television.

2022
Dating website for disaster victims opens. E-paper quickly replaces paper publications and revolutionises advertising. Richest countries invest increasingly in the Third World, in a race to its resources.

2027
Most loved celebrity is a 14-year-old Polish kid who is filmed by a friend on hundreds of occasions where, at first, he shoots sticky plasma at obese women’s hindquarters with his ‘bumbuster’, but amazes the world when he manages to manipulate bio-implants from a distance, eliciting hilarious results. Rumours are that the pro-nature lobby is behind his exploits.

2033
A spiritual figure by the name of ‘Frolic’ gains popularity all over the Western world with his simple teachings. In the hands of the public his ideas turn into a New Religion For The People. Frolic changes to giving only comedic performances. From the sarcastic theatre and profanity of his shows emerges a plea for people to cut the noise and explore the silence.

2034
First clunky prototype of a cerebral wireless implant for family/business networks and the internet arouses customers. Googlesoft’s management problems still unresolved, but assumed too big to fail, with annual profits higher than the GDP of India.

2039
After three years of global crisis and conflicts, the United Nations finally declares that this has become World War III. No one aggressor can be pinpointed, but riots and fighting have escalated on all continents. The few relatively safe countries are closing themselves off entirely. Nuclear weapons are not used on the ground, but numerous high energy bombs are detonated in the atmosphere. Most of Earth’s population is reduced to having survival as their only priority. Food is scarce, and fuel only available to the military.

2051
Hostilities cease in most regions. Diseases and famine are still a major issue. An insane Scotsman claims that he has spent the entire war in caves and added tunnels and underground dwellings, with 130 other individuals. He publishes the livefeeds of 130 reasonably healthy-looking people.

2052
“Star Wars kid” is elected 52nd President of the United States.

Combine the overwhelming sensory input and hidden psychodramas of a modern metropolis with the haunting trappings of a serial-killer thriller, then add a feisty and flirtatious anti-heroine and a range of within-their-walls intellectuals and artists, and you have the ingredients of Surya Dour’s larger-than-life debut novel, “The Girl With The Sucker Lips,” a huge promise in a saturated market.

It’s the plot that makes this novel more than your run-of-the-mill mystery: the protagonist – a twentysomething American student of journalism identified by no other name than Leah – is voracious in her hunt for love, but after every of her short-lived relationships she emulates what was special about the person she desired and devoured. More and more she becomes a best-off of her lovers, but leaving those lovers broken and exhausted.

What happens next is an example of the human insight and narrative skill that Mr. Dour offers. I will not give it away, except to say that the story takes a chronological leap and gives us a different understanding of the shocking events and psychological exploration the reader has absorbed so far.

Mr. Dour – who died in 2006, shortly after publishing this novel – was a guru of digital design with a wide circle of smart and creative friends, and his instinctual understanding of the emotional life of others enabled him to do an incredible job of recounting Leah’s efforts to redefine herself after every turbulent exploit and of depicting the distinct passing lives of her victims.

At the same time, Mr. Dour uses his repertoire of indulgently farcical metaphors and evocative sense of mood to create a chameleonesque picture of London and her people, all on their own paths within the same limited grounds. When it comes to character progression, however, Mr. Dour fails to convince, taking us further and further along the endless cycles of Leah’s ambiguous maturing without allowing her to see what the reader is seeing. Leah muses endlessly about her identity, but as if she’s looking at pictures she took of herself rather than looking in the mirror.

Like its protagonist, The Girl With The Sucker Lips is an emotional, shocking ride, but at the same time a book to fall in love with and make part of yourself.

(Also, it’s completely fake. There is no such book or author, though maybe there should be. Sorry to do this to you. Mr Mackerel had a story idea he didn’t want to execute, so he wrote the review instead.)

3 Most Interesting Search Queries That Brought People To This Website:

1. Terror in mackerel
2. Melting chicken
3. Tongue-eating

More Interesting Search Queries That Brought People To This Website:

4. Horny demons
5. Female hygiene smell
6. Maggots in sheep

And Yet More Interesting Search Queries That Brought People To This Website:

7. Flaming pancakes
8. Cat playing bongos
9. Real monster demons

Patience. Many fruit and vegetables have given their short lives to act in this story.

The downtime was caused by a different domain on the same server using a corrupt PHP script, which destabilised the rest of the server. Unfortunately this included this blog, just as we ran a story on Digg (about tongue-eating parasites) and prepared for the release of The Great Big Stew in the Sky.

The problem has been resolved (permanently, we hope). You’re here now! Enjoy your stay.

Click Great Big Stew in the Sky in the horizontal menu bar to see the first teaser for the upcoming photographic tale of a vegetable family and their epic quest to become one with the Gods through the medium of being eaten by them in a stew.

Expect a few more of these teasers in the near future. Final release date of the full story is still speculative, but likely to be about two weeks from now.