Tim Flannery Not a Corpse Animated by Ants

Mrs A. Zimmer, of Blackmans Bay, has reported that some ants recently wrote a message on her kitchen bench. “At first,” she writes, “I thought that I must have spilled some cordial, for that occasionally attracts ants, and was about to wipe them off the bench with a wet cloth when I noticed that lines of the formidable formicidae were forming phrases on the Formica, in a rather elegant, cursive script, so I hastened to grab a note-pad and quickly transcribed their message.”
The ants wrote:

Attention.  Don’t wipe us!  Heed our message!  Greetings humans.  Our queen—in mysterious communion with all other queens of ant-colonies worldwide—bids you publicise our pronouncement.

We ants are not to be blamed for any stupidities recently formulated by the piffling propagandist, pretentious paleontologist, presumptuous prick, and professional prophesier of desiccated cities, Tim Flannery.  He recently predicted, inter alia stulta, that the earth would soon be revealed to be a living, physical manifestation of Gaia, an earth-mother goddess of the Ancient Greeks.

Gaia brought forth Uranus, the starry sky, to cover her, and the hills, Ourea, as well as the fruitless deep of the Sea, Pontus; later, she lay with her son, Uranus, and bore Crius, and the Titans Hyperion, Iapetus, Theia, Rhea, Themis, Mnemosyne, Phoebe of the golden crown and, of course, mighty, deep-swirling Oceanus and lovely Tethys—ἄριστον μὲν ὕδωρ*; afterwards, she bore Cronus the wily, youngest and most terrible of her children, for he hated his lusty sire.†  Gaia was the mother (and, at the same time, the grandmother), we recall, of three Cyclopes: Brontes, Steropes and Arges.  (Polyphemus, the Cyclops whom Odysseus encountered and blinded, and his brothers were Gaia’s great-grandsons).  Gaia was also the mother of multitudinous other monsters, including the Hecatonchires—Cottus, Briareos and Gyges, who each had fifty heads—and Typhon and Echidna, who were, together—maintaining the family tradition of incest—the parents of the two-headed Orthrus, the three-headed Cerberus, the many-headed Hydra, the Chimæra, and many more.  Does Prof. Flannery expect physical manifestations of Olympian Gods, Titans, monsters and other offspring of Gaia to appear among us soon?

Flannery considers the earth-mother manifest, in majestic spheroidal form, as one living organism, so how would he account for the Greeks’ belief in a separate underworld, a separate ocean, and a separate sky?  Also, if Gaia be one living, homeostatic organism, why is Flannery so frightened by a silly, unproven conjecture which insists that the earth can be completely and catastrophically unbalanced by a small increase of the beneficent gas, carbon dioxide?  Surely, a system which is inherently stable owing to negative feedback should resist minuscule changes dependent on positive feedback.  We ants, who come and go in long battalions, have been around for many millions of years: we have seen the continents drift, the days lengthen, the ice caps increase and decrease, and many fools come and go.  We, horrescimus referentes, have seldom seen a fool as egregiously silly as that Tim Flannery.  We categorically deny having anything to do with such a buffoon.

As for the claim that we were recently responsible for animating the corpse of the late Robyn Williams, we repudiate any suggestion that we should ever authorise anything as stupid as some of his recently published comments.  We shall not discuss the ABC’s Tony Jones, on the grounds that any discussion may incriminate us.

Our queen bids you farewell.

* “Greatest, however, [is] water.” Pindar, Olympian, 1, 1.  The ants appear to be affirming, rather learnedly, that Oceanus and his wifely sister Tethys, whose offspring included all the rivers, fountains, and lakes of the world, were the gods most important for earthly life; even the hills and seas are supported by Oceanus (Hesiod, Theogony, I., 129-31).
† The well-read, myrmidonian account of the origin of Gaia and her offspring is seemingly based on Hesiod, op. cit., I. 115-38. Gaia in Hesiod’s cosmology, is a disk surrounded by Oceanus and floating upon a waste of waters.