Hostage

Something unpleasant has occurred. I will be unable to write entries in this electronic diary for, I would estimate, at least one week. I am taken hostage and I greatly fear that my life may be forfeit. One whom I can only name B____ has orchestrated this perverse and terrible stunt, but has granted me permission to quickly explain my forthcoming absence to my readers whom I prize most dearly. I am sure that these will be dark and trying days for me, dear readers. Pray for me. I hope to survive my ordeal and retain sufficient digits upon my return to allow me to type a full update.

Try not to weep too copiously while I am taken off to be brutalized, for it is not my wish that my readers suffer agonies along with me. I suggest you amuse yourselves by playing some type of racket sport or by experimenting with traybakes - something fun to distract you from the excrutiating, interminable days of anxiously awaiting my return, and begging the Fates that it will be a safe one...

I am urged by B____ to hurry. Farewell.

Dreaming of the Schoolboy Cubemaster

Last night I had a powerfully vivid dream that has left me feeling shaken and undernourished. In my dream, I was serving cocktails to the elite with the quiet dignity of one who is fully resigned to his lot in life, when I noticed that all the assembled party were on fire. Oddly beautiful, their molten skin frothed and bubbled from their skulls in a grossly accelerated parody of natural human decomposition that gave me cause to ponder sadly on the transience of mortal life. It was a bit like that scene in Indiana Jones where the faces of the bad Nazis melt because they let all the ghosts out of that box or something.

The cause of the fire quickly became apparent - Patrick Bossert had emerged behind me from some sort of an alcove, his human body now replaced by a series of Rubik's Cubes. I briefly pitied this twisted mockery, this creature more cube than man, but he spewed flame from his mouth at me, so I decided to fear him instead. He snatched me up in his cubic fingers and his cube of a body at once began to swivel and rotate as though some unseen hand was trying to solve him. I rapidly became caught among his cubes and was dragged into his multifaceted body bruised and bloody.

At this point I woke up. At no point thus far in my life have I had a suitable excuse to sit bolt upright in my bed and scream aloud. I permitted myself this small luxury this morning. I have spent today attempting to replicate the Bossert Beast of my nightmares using Microsoft Paint so that my readers may share in my horror. I do not know what, if anything, the dream might signify.

Researching Patrick Bossert

None of the gods have bothered to reply to my kind letters, either by divine vision or by First Class Recorded, so I have now become an atheist to teach them a lesson. Since Sunday I have worn an atheist hat to make plain my feelings to any gods viewing from above.

It is of a similar design to the one depicted here, except that my hat is black with no stripes and is conical in shape with no bottom hat ring:

Obviously I feel slighted, but I will retain my dignity and complain publically no more. I must update you on the situation regarding the ants. Although I have scuppered the General's secret deal to sacrifice 10,000 ant souls to Patrick Bossert in return for the secret of the Rubik's Cube, I still remain at risk because an additional clause of that deal specified a human soul as part of the bargain.

The General made a tentative first move to kill me on Monday by running swiftly around my feet as if to dizzy me into collapsing and splitting my head on the corner of a radiator. I admired his fighting spirit, but I easily countered this ludicrous move by closing tight my eyes and refusing to allow my gaze to follow him. After an hour or so, I had a sort of epiphany and had to retire to my room to change my trousers. While I was there I had a sudden moment of glorious clarity where it occurred to me that my nemesis was only some 3mm in length and would be relatively easy for an eleven and a half stone man to destroy. I stormed through to the hall with the intent to bring my foot down heavily upon the General but his running around in circles distracted me so that I became dizzy and fell over, allowing him time to escape.

Feeling sheepish, I retired to my room to reassess the situation. I searched the internet for information about Patrick Bossert, reasoning that if I knew more about the man, I might gain some insight into his strategies and aims. I found a brief biography of Bossert in which it was revealed that after he solved the Cube he sunk into a deep depression, finding no human puzzles sufficient to engage him. Mathematicians approached him with famous unsolved theorums and problems, which Bossert would idly solve while waiting for the kettle to boil for his endless cups of tea.

Nothing could approach the Cube in terms of challenge, and Bossert turned to snuff and ether to alleviate boredom with a life devoid of puzzles. The article claimed that Bossert retired from public appearances in 1994, becoming a recluse. Some believe he has devoted the last ten years to designing a puzzle that will be so fiendishly difficult that it will take even him several decades to complete. Readers, I now believe that I have somehow become embroiled in Bossert's repugnant scheme. I will have to rethink my tactics.

I also bought a copy of Bossert's book You Can Do The Cube! from Ebay, which has just arrived. Unfortunately, I appear to have made an error because what has arrived is not a 'how-to' guide penned by the Schoolboy Cubemaster, but a copy of a record by 'Ice Cube' called You Can Do It. I have tried listening to it and I conclude it is Rap music like that of Jazzy Jeff and the Fresh Prince.

Spare a Thought for your God

For those of you who would play God, take note: it is not as easy as it looks. I am left with no ants of my own thanks to my over-zealous smiting. I now realise that the various gods of this world work long, hard hours for very little thanks (apart from hymns telling of their glory). Now that I have walked a mile in their shoes and realise what they have to put up with, I have made an effort to write to them and tell them how much I appreciate their efforts. I encourage my readers to do likewise.

I started off by writing to Allah, the god of the Muslims, and thanked him for all his hard work taking care of the world. I even took a bit of time to draw a lovely picture of the prophet Mohammed, which I'm sure will go down well. The newspapers tell me that certain followers of Allah are becoming a bit rowdy of late, so I expect he's having a rough time of it and getting a lot of unfair bad press. Please, gentle readers, write to him and cheer him up. I wouldn't recommend you post it via airmail though, as there is currently some sort of delay with the airports.

I then wrote to Brahman, the god of the Hindus, and thanked him for overseeing and embodying the cosmic balance of the universe. I hope when he receives it that he has taken the form of Ganesha the elephant, because I drew some succulent peanuts at the foot of the page as a sort of gift to him, which will become meaningless if he has taken the form of Shiva, the octopus woman. My gesture will go down especially well if he is Ganesha because I have drawn enough nuts for his sons, Babar and Dumbo, too.

Next, I wrote to Buddha, and wished him well. I do not know if he is a god or just a spiritual leader like Alan Sugar, so I thought I'd better hedge my bets and write to him anyway. I told him I was grateful for the concept of Nirvana and for incense sticks and tie-dyed blankets, which I believe is the sort of thing he goes in for.

I wrote to the Christian god next, thanking him for all the fancy churches and cathedrals, which provide many tourist pounds to many cities. I thanked him for lending the human race his sons, Jesus H. Christ and David Icke, and for providing filmmakers and storytellers with useful biblical imagery to enliven drab tales.

I then penned a few words to the god of the Jews, thanking him for not sending his son down to Earth, which caused so much trouble for the Christians. I also thanked him for the work he has done to preserve the pig and clam populations by forbidding his followers from eating them. I kept quiet about the compulsory circumcision business.

I decided I'd better write to the goddess of the wiccans too. I thanked her for giving 'goth' teenagers something other than 'Atheist' to write under 'religion' on their myspace webpages, and for saving the livelihoods of candlemakers in this modern world of electrical lights.

I gathered all these letters together, uttered a short prayer to Hermes the messenger of the gods, then committed them to the flames. The words will now ascend into the various heavens to be read by the gods.

Again, I encourage you all to write to your gods and tell them that you appreciate their efforts. They do it all for you, remember. If you are an atheist, perhaps you could write to Richard Dawkins and thank him for his efforts in bullying the other gods.

Ganesha the elephant god

Smote

I am weary. I have now smitten all but one of my ants - my thumbs are aching with the strain of crushing thousands of them and my carpet is stained with their seepage. It sounds needlessly wrathful, but I was just. None would obey my commands. On Thursday, I tired of their laziness in failing to lay me a patio, so I bade them smite themselves. Only a few obeyed, and I let those ones off with a smiting, but those that disobeyed I was obliged to smite with great vengeance.

I spared a single ant because I did not want to fully deplete my army. I understand that ants are like worms - if you cut them in two, both halves survive and live healthy independent lives. This evening I have split the remaining ant in half and await the regeneration process. I will then cut each of those ants in half and then those ants in half too. I will go on doubling my army until I have 34,359,738,368 ants or an Er2 message on my calculator, depending on what comes first. While I wait for the doubling process to begin, I am sipping tepid Tizer to revive my strength.

Smiting

Today I have had to smite yet more of my worshippers, this time for their indiscipline. To test their faith and endurance and to get them used to hardship, I declared than none of them would be permitted to eat anything for the day while they continued their strenuous exercise regimes. Around late afternoon many of the baby ants began to tire with exhaustion, collapsing under the weight of the pebbles I bade them carry.

I became wrathful and ordered these ants to stop being exhausted, but they did not obey so I was left with no option but to smite them with a rolled up newspaper. Many adult ants became discouraged at seeing their young pulped beneath The Evening Telegraph but I ordered them to stop feeling grief and dismay. Those that disobeyed, I set aflame.

Many ants watched in horror as their kin burned before their compound eyes, and were momentarily stunned and unable to move. I ordered them to stop being horrorstruck and continue working. Those that disobeyed, I sprayed with aerosol deodorant until they expired, encrusted with powdery residue.

I am tired with all this smiting and not a little annoyed with my ants for making me resort to such barbaric practises. They are intolerably selfish in this regard.

War on the Horizon

I have been unable to persuade the three hundred ants that still remain with Bossert to join my ranks. I tried reading to them selected passages from Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse 5 so that they would become enraptured by the playful anti-war metafiction and I might capture them for later indoctrination while they were awestruck by the limitless possibilities inherent to postmodern literature. Sadly, the hardcore crew that are loyal to Bossert can find literary nourishment only in You Can Do The Cube and were untouched by Vonnegut's gamesome uses of analepsis and prolepsis. So it goes.

Although I am a pacifist and wholly against any resort to violence, regardless of the reasons behind it, I now believe that I must initiate a war against Bossert's ants. Great casualties will undoubtedly befall but it is the only way. When I announced the necessity of war to my own ants, certain among them looked nervous and began to back away, horrified by the grim realisation that they would soon be called upon to kill their fellow ants in senseless conflict. I quickly smote those cowards.

To train my ants for the upcoming slaughter, I bade them each take grip of a hair on my head and tug for all their worth. This exercise I designed as a miniature tug o' war allowing thousands of ants to build up their muscles simultaneously. I believed that no ant would be strong enough to pluck out a hair from its follicle socket, so I was not unduly anxious of baldness. My surmise proved largely correct save for a select few ants, who after hours of training improved the capacity of their muscles to such an extent that they managed to pull out some of my hairs. This really hurt me, so I smote those vicious ants as punishment.

With further training, I am confident that my ants will be fully ready and prepared for battle.

I Gain Further Followers.

Yet more ants have been persuaded to join my religion. When I described the heaven that my religion offers, I immediately converted a great many non-believers. When members of my religion die, they first go to a judgement room, where an enormous ant called Adam Ant McPartlin measures their spiritual worth. If they are judged to have been good in life, their souls go to a wonderful afterlife where giant human heads made of mechanically-separated pressed meat project from the ground. The souls of ants can then spend eternity consuming these heads, which are constantly replenished. If they momentarily tire of this treat, they may relax with a massage. Ants judged to have been wicked are sent to the same afterlife, but they are the ones who must administer the massages.

This afterlife clearly offered more than the one Bossert was peddling, as the ants flocked in droves to my church. As he still retained two or three hundred ants in his religion, I invented the concept of Duel-Heaven, which allows very good ants to have a cloned soul which goes to a different heaven when they die. In this heaven, the ants get to bathe in thimbles full of buttermilk while dusky Queen ants read to them tales of brave Ulysses. Thus, very good ants get two heavens to experience simultaneously for all of eternity. When they heard of this concept, one hundred of Bossert's ants promptly joined me. I have made it something of a tradition now to smite a few members of each new group as a small punishment for their tardiness in joining my religion. This keeps them on their toes, and entertains the more devout followers.

Bossert now has but two hundred ants under his thrall - I think I should be able to persuade them to join me when I go on to expound my various doctrines.

The Ants Begin to Worship Me

Over the last few days I have succeeded in coaxing a large faction of the ants into my religion. Bossert will no doubt be feeling the sting of reduced ranks. I began my task by creating a small temple out of old maths textbooks. The algebraic formulae therein appeared as arcane runes to the ants, who are not well versed in advanced mathematics, and lent a suitable air of mysticism to my place of worship. Several ants were immediately impressed and rushed over to be welcomed to my flock. I dubbed these 'the Elect' and rewarded them with bran.

With a church in place, I was then obliged to drum up business. I mocked up several 'miracles' to impress the younger insects (in actuality, these were no more than tawdry card tricks, widely available at Woolworths around the country). This convinced a large quantity of ants, as well as a spider who got swept along in the outpouring of spontaneous devotion. These followers I called 'the Brethren of Deegh'. I smote the spider with a slipper.

I next turned to bribery - I laid out a trail of sugarelly water along my carpet from ant city into the bowels of my church. Well, another schism promptly broke off and was drawn to the sweet, sweet scent of the sugarelly. Once they entered the church, I kept them further satiated with liquified Maltesers and cider pap dulcified with molasses. I told these new additions to my congregation that they would thereafter be known as 'the Devoted Followers of Kelk'.

At this point, Bossert still kept the lion's share of the ants in his thrall, so I decided to turn to fear in order to persuade further ants to worship me. I sent out the Elect to do my dirty bidding, and sure enough, they seemed to cajole and bully many more ants into my temple. These I called 'The Unwilling Friars of Tope' and I smote a few of them just to show I was serious.

I now have a larger proporation of the ants prepared to worship me than does Bossert, so I consider it a job well done. Since then, I have told them my Commandments, which I have purposely kept as easy to follow as possible, and told them what my religion can offer over Bossert's.

I promised them not just one afterlife, but two, and set up a system of morality which is very relaxed and allows them to eat pork and shellfish should they crave it, and requires them to regularly drink Cointreau. They are also permitted to covet their neighbour's ass every second Friday, if they fancy it.

I would dearly like to get the remaining ants on side, but if I should fail at this there is no other option but to set my ants upon the poor unsaved ants of Bossert's and unleash a war not seen since the days of Big Trouble in Little China.

On the Subject of the Ants' Faith

On Sunday I was forced to endure the unwelcome scrutiny of vulgar spectators as the day saw me venturing out-of-doors to visit shops. I sought to purchase some ant powder that I might use to finally destroy the vermin, a task which unfortunately would necessitate some conversation with people. Luckily I did not have to go far because a helpful infant sold me a small bag of powder at the first street corner I reached.

Returning home, I scattered the powder over ant city. I felt a bit like the wrathful deity in The Bible: The Old Testament, who throws things at mortals then calls for fatted calves. When the powder failed to smite the ants and actually seemed to enliven them and instigate happiness, I felt a little more like the deity in the sequel called The Bible: The New Testament, who treats his mortals to candies and kisses when they are down.

Further observation, however, showed me that no one could usurp Patrick Bossert as the ants' deity of choice. They are devoted to the schoolboy cubemaster to an extent that defies reason. Their mindless bowing and prostration sickens me - they are slaves to this perverse mockery of Faith.

I know they aim to sacrifice me, and I know the ant General seeks to kill all the ants save himself as an offering to Bossert in exchange for the secret of the Cube. I have taken it upon myself to convert these ants to an alternative religion, one devised by myself, to save them from sacrificial death, and to ultimately save myself from a similar fate - if I can but get them on my side, all will be well and Bossert will be foiled.

Thus far I have come up with 4 commandments tailored to the mindset of ants. These are:

1. Thou Shalt Scurry Around.
2. Thou Shalt Have Mandibles.
3. Thou Shalt Flee Buckets Of Boiling Water If Poured Onto Your Nest By A Disgruntled Housewife.
4. Thou Shalt Tentatively Examine Discarded Crumbs of Food And If Thou Decide They Looketh Tasty, Then Thou Shalt Carry Them Back To The Nest For Later Consumption.

It is my hope that the ants will be drawn to my religion, finding it undemanding and easy to follow.