Gruntelope

Disastrous fortune! Damn our luck!
We spied the gruntelope
Heaving monstrous, muddy breaths
Rolling slumb’rous on the slope

Guide and giver, Yuptet raised
A twig-like hand up to his brow
And pointing with the other, lowed
“Alack, there goes the sow.”

“Level not thine eyes to theirs
lest they fix us adversaries,
a threat to mate and wat’ring hole.
They’d reduce us to our cherries.”

Back we wove our path to camp
Through sun and scrubby brush
Grateful still to be upright Gjeunse
And not wild, steaming mush

– sourced from Glijmo Yoll’s Goon Scrolls which were discovered in 1966 along the Côte Sauvage, Poitou-Charentes in France. Translated from Goonspeak to English by Aamer Belkins-Dunjhab. 

 

Brain Burner Disease

A highly contagious illness found throughout the Known Universe but wholly alien in the Goonscape.

Brain Burners Disease is thought to have first emerged sometime in the 19th century in Western Europe. Sufferers have installed dozens and dozens of back burners to their conscious mind, resulting in an overly concave memory recess and insufficient attention to items on brain front burners..

Symptoms include forgetting words, names of actors or entertainers, along with sudden and complete disorientation in familiar spaces. More positive traits can also be a sign of the disease: an above average retention of useless knowledge (trivia, facts, podcast recaps) and a naive willingness to join new projects.

Sufferers tend to be ages 22 – 65. The disease is not thought to have congenital components but research is still thin.

World Glossary: The Hydra’s Leash

The Hydra’s Leash

Metaphorical An unsubstantiated tool used by Zeus to tame the many heads of the hydra. Mentioned only once in a torn fragment of Eumenides’s The Secret Voyage:

A leash with many collars. A thousand. A million. One hundred days in length. I guess we’ll see where we are once we get there.

In Psychology The liminal space shared by group of common thinkers when the mood and cloud of despair rides hard upon them all.

Goonscoptic Physics

Goonscoptic Physics is the astrophysical study of the theory of the Goonscape. The field is studied largely by extremist members of Godsbeam who believe in the tenet of pilgrimage*. In 2040, 2 in every 3 goonscoptic physicists was a follower of Godsbeam. The Institute for Goonscoptic Science was founded in 2033 by 14 members of Godsbeam.

* Fringe believers of Godsbeam desire pilgrimage into the Goonscape because it is believed that their holy book, The Broken Soil originated there. Pilgrimage is not an official tenet of Godsbeam and many Pilgrims are excommunicated from the Church.

 

Old Spirits Day Gooning

On old spirits day

Rub your face with red clay

And go out for a full night of gooning

As you wander and stray

You should howl, growl and bray

Making sure that your voice is a booming

But as the sky starts to gloam

You must return home

Don’t get too wrapped up in your funs

Your goonaunties have combed

All the scabs from their domes

And the first child home gets the sweet ones

– sourced from Glijmo Yoll’s Goon Scrolls which were discovered in 1966 along the Côte Sauvage, Poitou-Charentes in France. Translated from Goonspeak to English by Aamer Belkins-Dunjhab. 

The Broken Soil

The Broken Soil (Hib-ai Klinjustuh gra) is a goontext that fell out of the Goonscape and into the known universe in the 1980 Black Sabbath and Blue Oyster Cult tour, “Black and Blue” while they were performing in Uniondale, New York. It was discovered by Julian “Jose” Cantor who kept it in his personal library until his death in 2002. It was then passed along to the Brookline pubic library where it was immeditately identified as a goonartifact and sent to this author’s personal address.

The Broken Soil describes the Goonscapes relation to the Known Universe, implying that Goons themselves are aware of our alternate existence and histories.

The text deals primarily with the soul or “the interior,” peace among nations, and the orientation of divinity in the universe. A full translation is available in the library of congress.

Goonbarrowing

Goonbarrowing (variant: goonborrowing)– To borrow something that was originally yours but has been taken away.  The meaning comes from a poem from Glijmo Yoll’s Goon Scrolls describing a protagonist Hirreli who takes back the silk stockings she was swindled out of during a crooked game of Pilly-Snigg (a combination of poker and cups). She hides them at the bottom of a wheelbarrow full of potatoes.

The Atheist Mission

The Atheist Mission is the first irreligious world religion. As of this publishing in 2041, there are roughly 1.3 million members of the Atheist Mission.

Atheist Missionism was born out of an online chat community called the Atheist Scientific & Social Engineers Society (ASSES) which was first proposed and founded by <blaaahbarf59> in the “F**k Jesus” section of reddit. <blaaahbarf59> is now a member of the High Critics bar, a group of prestigious Missions who dictate the Atheist Mission rules and behavioral codes.

“It is, of course, an individuals choice if they want to follow our guidelines,” said High Critic Leroy Mason (<bitchesloveme99>), “but we dedicate a lot of time and research into these rules for our followers to observe. In the fight against god-fearing idiots, we have to stick together.”

In the About section of AtheistMission.com the High Critics explain that Atheist Missionism is essentially a fight against idolatry: “Idolatry not only refers to the worship of a God. Man commits idolatry whenever he honours and reveres a creature in place of God, whether this be gods, or demons (for example: satanism), power, pleasure, race, ancestors, the state, money etc.”

Atheist Missions tend to be white, English-speaking males between the ages 16-30.

The Atheist Mission is often conflated with The Internet Mission, another outgrowth of reddit’s atheism chapter. Devotees to The Internet Mission tend to be hermetic, dedicating their lives to printing out sections of the internet and binding them into manuscripts that are kept in a secret vault known only to the inner circle of The Internet Mission. The aim is to create a complete analog compendium of all digital human knowledge so that it is preserved in case of permanent interruption to the internet. This group has been nicknamed “the printernets.”

 

New Goonyear

As your calendar starts to go sheer*

Don’t let your face go all a-sneer

You’ve grown a bit older

So climb a new boulder

Can you see an approaching new year?

*Gooncalendars are made of translucent materials (plastics, sheer paper products, woven fabrics, etc) and the peeling of months results in new shades. There are no picture-calendars in the Goonscape.

Sourced from Glijmo Yoll’s Goon Scrolls which were discovered in 1966 along the Côte Sauvage, Poitou-Charentes in France. Translated from Goonspeak to English by Aamer Belkins-Dunjhab.

iPatch

The iPatch 1.0 was Apple’s compatibility patch released in 2030 for all non-apple technology. The iPatch was a three pronged approach to simplifying the chaotic proliferation of personalized digital technology.  The three major components of iPatch 1.0, Phase I were:

1. Install the compatibility application iWork on all devices feeding into SkyHook.

2. Sync all devices owned by an individual and upload that individual’s Pertinent User Information to a single account on SkyHook.

3. Automatically connect users based on computer analyzed communication information between accounts.

Launch Failure

The iPatch plan was controversial at best so Apple was compelled by the United States Congress to do an preliminary damage analyses to show that the iPatch would not endanger national security, economic structures, or users’ privacy. The report contained extremely detailed and fine-tuned technical information but the statistic that gained the most publicity was the “3% of robotics” that were not expected to integrate. Roughly translated, Apple anticipated that 3% of all devices communicating with Skyhook to be rendered inoperable by the iPatch, either by scrambling the device’s internal processors or the device would fail to mount the program and thereafter becoming unreadable by SkyHook.

As it turned out, the compatibility failure was actually closer to 8% and disproportionately targeted the elderly, the U.S. lower middle class, the U.S. poor, and heavy industry in poor nations. None of these groups were researched in the initial preliminary damage report and Apple has become embroiled in a series of international and domestic lawsuits since 2034, all still pending.

After the Launch Failure, the upgrade schedules for Phases II and III were postponed several times and finally vaulted as they became obsolete.

The Goonscape

The Goonscape is a sympathetic history that exists just beyond the Known Universe.

There is no known way of contacting the inhabitants of the Goonscape directly. Its existence has been discovered only through those objects that have fallen out of the Goonscape and into the Known Universe.

The best theory for how artifacts transmit from one dimension to the other is the SusyGoon Pivot Hypothesis which states as follows: The Goonscape and the Known Universe pivot laterally parallel to one another at different rates. If points of analogous quantum symmetry meet, then artifacts “drop” through.

It is indeed fortunate that some of the objects that have dropped out of the Goonscape and into the known universe during modern times were history books themselves. Notably,  The Broken Soil (ancient texts) and The Goon Scrolls (a collection of humorous goonchidren’s poetry). Both have been translated and treated in detail by this author in other publications.

It is suspected that items or lost people from our world may still exist in the Goonscape.

Goon Cultures: Yhomtoppa Goons

Yhomtoppa goons live in a Guldwoh desert oasis called Yhomtoppa. As a culture the Yhomtoppa are a secluded people. They do not have much interaction with other gooncultures or goongovernments. This is probably due to the fact that they use butterflies as currency.

The Yhomtoppa have been using this curious specie as early as 400 g.C. They themselves acknowledge that this is terribly inefficient but stress that it has made their society hardier and more harmonious. All members of the community are invested in the breeding of butterflies regardless of age, social status, or gender. They are some of the most beautiful and rare species of butterflies in the entirety of the goonscape and the known universe.

Due to the amount of time, energy and knowledge it takes to create large quantities of valuable butterflies, the wealthiest Yhomtoppa goons are almost all secluded intellectuals who have little to no interest in cashing in their menageries. They are compelled, however, to periodically re-infuse the local economy with common breeds and this economic balance is closely monitored by Yhomtoppa elders.

The wealthiest and most experienced breeders have developed ways of genetically enhancing butterfly health, life spans and can also manipulate the size of butterflies. Some have wingspans as small as 5 centimeters while others can sport wingspans measuring 46 centimeters.

Most Yhomtoppa families farm butterflies in their homes or gardens but many have learned to survive solely on butterflies they catch in the wild.

A simple-breed brown petal butterfly is worth approximately 2$US.

Doomsday(s)

Holiday

May 9: Bank holiday observed in Norway, Czech Republic, and Germany. Instituted first in Germany in 2013 to stave off total implosion of the German national economy during the second world depression. Now celebrated with frying of traditional pancakes and the exchange of small gifts such as fruits or household objects.

Apocalyptic Predictions

1.God’s Beam: The religious cult God’s Beam, founded by Jeff Goldblum predicts the end of the world on 9.20.11073. The date reflects the extrapolated time from Jeff Goldblum’s exact moment of death added to the amount of time it would take for his energy to reach the Godspot in the center of the universe, assuming that his soul is traveling at the speed of light.

2. Visionary Prairie Dog: VPD worshipers are a small segment of MidAtlantic Protestants in the United States who broke with traditional doctrine to worship the feed of Twitter handle “VisionaryPrairieDog.” The computer that runs the algorithms for VPD feed operates out of a small home in Bloomington, Indiana. The VPD feed periodically makes End of World (EOW) predictions and the VPD Church in Tampa, Florida updates religious calendars with this information. Secular members of the religion say that the doomsday component of their worship is not taken that seriously.

3. Earth Stewards: The Earth Stewards have several cascading dates earmarked for humanity’s End of Days as they systematically exhaust all of the Earth’s resources. The group keeps most of these dates secret but has released this rough outline for general review:

2063   Exhaustion of oil
2101    Exhaustion of lumber
2105    Permanent structures no longer feasible due to extreme weather and climate change
2117     Over 75% of fresh water becomes poisonous
2200    Surface habitation no longer possible

4. Goondoomsday predicted by Vikfael Oosaigin: The discovery of Oosaigin’s private letters is arguably the most exciting development in Goonarchaeology since the discovery of Yoll’s Goon Scrolls in southern France. Oosaigin was an administrative counselor to a number of Goon principalities in the Lim provinces in southeastern quadrant of the Goonscape. In a remarkable letter that he addresses to an unknown friend he writes,

Epochs will come
Epochs will go
But a Goonscholar’s task
Is to be In The Know

A sky will break
Into fiery snow
Upon each and all of us
Foreign, friend and foe

From whence we came
From whence we go
We all wind up
As heavenly glow

5. The Clock Machine (disputed): The Clock Machine was invented by Rafael “Bananas” Iñez as a tool for comparing times on different planets, regions of space and parallel universes. However, just 15 months after it was installed at a NASA facility in Kippy, New Mexico, the device began to malfunction. Despite countless diagnostic tests and rebuilds The Clock Machine rendered 16:08:001 for all times zones. Many began to speculate that The Clock Machine was interpreting a time or date associated with the end of all things.

Iñez always asserted that this was not a endtimes prediction but either an error in The Clock’s engineering or failure to integrate correctly with the 2030 iPatch. Toward the end of his life, he voiced regret that he had not designed an analog version.

Appendix: Grammatical Notes: Goon

Goon [ɡuːn]
      noun

  1. (International) English transliteration for a member of or the culture of Goons (Gjeunse).
  2. A hoodlum or ne’erdowell (obsolete).

       compound usage

1. The noun “Goon” is also used as a prefix. †
Examples: goonscape, goonopolis and goonfoods.

slang

1. Since 2030, the gerund “Gooning” has begun to supplant expletive infixation.
Examples: in/’goon-ing/cred-ible

2. Goon has also begun to morph into a lexeme forming certain indivisible compound words such as goonbears (adj. favorable, exciting) , goonchin (noun a smug person), goonover (noun take over), and pergoon (adv. both: diagonally and randomly)

 

† The affix “goon” is appended to words without aid of hyphenation or spacing. This grammatical rule was determined by The Viennese Grammatical Institute for ExtraHuman Language with both The Paris New Century Linguists Bar and Beijing School for Universal Language Precision concurring.

 

Gooningtonshire

A fat, jolly squire

From Gooningtonshire

Desired himself a young wife

So his friends all conspired

They searched and inquired

To find him a good match for life

Swains well-admired

Dressed up to inspire

But he pictured none as a bride

No one knew he desired

And only perspired

F0r goodmaidens sufficiently wide

– sourced from Glijmo Yoll’s Goon Scrolls which were discovered in 1966 along the Côte Sauvage, Poitou-Charentes in France. Translated from Goonspeak to English by Aamer Belkins-Dunjhab. 

The Oracle

‘The Oracle’ is the nickname given to the blog Sweaty Pony Weekly Check-Ups written in 2012 by Patricia Swiss and Nancy Nataglia. It ran from September 2012 to December 2017, updating bi-weekly. The content of The Oracle was a melange of satirical postings on topics including news from the future, celebrity gossip and a famous spread on 50 incidents of undiscovered buried treasure. The Oracle became noteworthy when one of its posts describing the death of environmentalist Sean Morris became one of the top three search results a few hours after Morris’s actual death on October 9, 2030. Many of the details in the fictitious post mirrored details from police and coroner’s reports.

The Oracle also predicted the invention of toe ball, vulcanized drum sets, and the destruction of the Hallmark Greeting Card corporate headquarters in Kansas City, MO by a meteor.

Sweaty Pony Weekly Check-Ups ceased updating after co-author Nataglia died in a car accident in 2017. She never lived to see any of the postings take on prognostic significance.

Swiss went on to write for Saturday Night Live and a hit television show called The Barracks. She also published a slim volume of poetry in 2039 called Figs: A cycle of poetry on child rearing. As of this re-issuing of World Glossary in 2041, none of Swiss’s later writings predicted events in the future whereas 17% of the posting from Sweaty Pony Weekly Check-Ups describe, in detail, events that have happened in the relative-future.

Meaning and Speculation

Reaction to The Oracle has been vociferous. This is a guide to some of the more popular theories.

Literary Cryptology:  A coterie of Literary Cryptologists at Cornell University have published on the idea that Nataglia and Swiss did, in fact, predict the future. They hypothesize that this was only possible for them as a team and Nataglia’s death ended their powers of prediction.

Nuclear Physics, Nano-Psychology and Izzle-Accusation Theory:  Prominent individuals from each of these three fields have expressed belief that Nancy Nataglia was influenced by izzles. This presupposes the notion that izzles create the future or know the future. Further discussion of izzle knowledge is treated in my book, Interpreting and Interpolating Izzles published by Pelican-Sweeney.

Visionary Prairie Dog: Worshipers of the Visionary Prairie Dog are perhaps the single most opinionated group on the subject of The Oracle because of its implicit rivalry with the VPD Twitter Feed. They are summarized as follows:

1.  The Oracle was actually a node of  trans-temporal backwash, and not written by the two women at all.
2. The Oracle was written in the future but was programmed to update in the past.
3. Nancy Nataglia was a time traveler visiting Swiss from the future.

Artificial Intelligence and other Skeptic luminaries: Skeptics and members of the A.I. Collective claim that the close resemblance between these postings and real life events is pure coincidence. Alan Rickman, a leading Skeptic writer, said of the The Oracle “[It] is irrefutable proof that when it comes to monkey-and-typewriting technology, bloggers of the 21st century were peerless innovators.”

Goonberry pies

Goonberry pies

Don’t taste very nice

If you like pastries that are fruity or sweet

They’re made with a spice

That can only entice

Goonuncles who eat with their feet

But when goonmother makes

Yucky goonberry cakes

Be a well-behaved, foul little brat

Find something that slakes

And fight your siblings for takes

Maybe next course will be roasted rat!

Translator’s notes: Goonberry cakes and pies are common dishes served during the Goon holiday of Blibberderth which is approximately the first week after spring begins. It celebrates flowers and fertility. Goonberries themselves are sour and sticky and, stereo-typically  goonchildren will not eat them. 

– sourced from Glijmo Yoll’s Goon Scrolls which were discovered in 1966 along the Côte Sauvage, Poitou-Charentes in France. Translated from Goonspeak to English by Aamer Belkins-Dunjhab. 

God’s Beam

God’s Beam is a religious cult founded by Jeff Goldblum and his nurse Marist Libby toward the end of Goldblum’s life. Followers of God’s Beam refer to themselves as “rays of light.”

God’s Beam teaches that Goldblum was a prophet whose religious genius was never  awakened. Because his divinity remained untapped at the time of his death, Goldblum’s soul is an enormous positive energy that is heading toward the “God Spot” at the center of the universe where all souls come to rest. However, the “God Spot” is a place of  negative energy and when the prophet’s soul reaches this place,  it will combine unfavorably with the negative forces of oblivion, unleashing a neutralizing wave that will destroy the universe on 9.20.11073.

Followers of God’s Beam presuppose a coming destruction  by neutralization and therefore all rays of light are expected to condition their souls with neutralizing ablutions so that they might survive the Destroyer Wave when it emanates back from the God Spot. The following are descriptions of the three major pillars of God’s Beam:

1. Oral Hygiene: One of the chief concerns of rays of light. The mouth is seen as a place of both immeasurable good and evil. Therefore, keeping it clean is neutralizing.

2. Shifting Good Deeds: Rays of light do not perform good deeds for other rays of light unless it is to counteract a bad deed. It is encouraged, however, to render good deeds unto non-believers since they are predisposed to having negative energies.

3. Avoiding Extreme Temperatures: This goes for food, climes or locations, and bathing. Physical exertion is cited  as an exception.

From the outset, the Goldblum family and estate have sought to distance themselves from God’s Beam, claiming that Libby took advantage of the actor in his old age. The family successfully brought civil suit against Libby and the GB church in 2039 to recover $485,000 that had been allocated to them in Goldblum’s will.

The Origin of Dark Matter

Dark matter, which fills 94% of this universe, is the waste produced by multi-cellular, anaerobic “Polluter” organisms that existed approximately 700 billion years ago. Each Polluter was comprised of 5 specialized cells and a single, flat flagella that was used like a solar sail to pilot through the vastness of space. These creatures evolved with the ability to consume practically everything that they came into contact with and convert it into energy.

Based on the total mass of dark matter in the universe (correcting for the rate at which the universe expands and the reproductive rate of these Polluter organisms) it is believed that this highly successful species existed for about 300 years at which point they became totally extinct over a very short period of time due to lack of food.

Markfel Joon the Godhead Goon

Markfel Joon

The Godhead goon

Brought us religion from heaven’s own spring

And your teachers will croon

Of Joon’s sacred boon

But they seem to have forgotten one thing

Joon’s berth is in glory*

Handsome and hoary

The soldier who studied the arts

We all know his story

Noble, pious and gory

But what of his great holy farts?

– sourced from Glijmo Yoll’s Goon Scrolls which were discovered in 1966 along the Côte Sauvage, Poitou-Charentes in France. Translated from Goonspeak to English by Aamer Belkins-Dunjhab. 

 *Translator’s notes: “Markfel Joon’s berth is in glory,” is from a Goon historical text called The Broken Soil (Hib-ai Klinjustuh gra). This text has not been recovered in its entirety but the phrase used in Yoll’s poem was found in sec. 9 par. 17. We can only assume it was a widespread text that even goonchildren would be familiar with.