Found Footage: Final Communication?

Posted on by Malcolm J. Brenner

Brooke Rollins, Secretary of Agriculture under King Donald the Last.

The following email, apparently from the late author Malcolm J. Brenner, was found on the computer of Dr. Randall Wells, co-founder and director of the Sarasota Dolphin Research Program.

Dear Randy, 

It’s been a while since we’ve corresponded, but in my ramblings in dark, dank corners of the Interweb, where even the brave dare not go but fools like me rush in, I found something is pending in the government of which I MUST make you, and hopefully through you every marine mammalogist and cognitive psychologist in the business, AWARE OF!

This shocking revelation will rattle dolphinology to its muddy, mucky foundations!

I have it on deep, deep — VERY deep! — background, from utterly trustworthy, irrefutable sources which must remain anonymous due to threats to their security — that Trump’s appointee to run the Department of Agriculture, Brooke Rollins, has decided that all the creatures hitherto known as Cetaceans are now going to be re-classified as Fish! And the scientific community, eager to keep their grants going, is apparently falling into line behind her! This in keeping with presidential re-naming the Gulf of Mexico (America), the Department of Defense (War), right and wrong, hot and cold, day and night, etc.


Justifying this radical decision, Ms. Rollins cited the great American author Herman Melville, who declared it so in his  Moby Dick. “Melville lived among cannibals so he could write this book,” Ms Rollins said. (She didn’t mention that he jumped off a whaling ship to live among the cannibals, and said he preferred their company to that of whalers!)

And if I remember the abridged version of that novel which I read at our beloved alma mater Riverview HS, Melville IS of the opinion that the whale IS a fish, and damn all those long-haired scientists who maintain that since it has lungs, breathes air, is warm-blooded, bears live young and suckles them, it’s a mammal! They’ve had their noses in erudite books all their lives, whereas Melville had his nose stuck in the guts of a whale, and if Melville said it, Trump & Ms. Rollins believe it, and THAT SETTLES IT!

I sincerely hope this doesn’t disturb you too much, but there’s more. I could tell you, but then something might… just a second, someone’s at the door… BRB…

i8t8yvfuyt98uy-polm’;lk[]o=-p[l,.;lpnh97tr58fvikjn[io-=0808hiutg7653ews5dxcrtf!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!AAARGH!

…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….

Thank you very much, Dr. Wells, for all you’ve done for those creatures formerly known as marine mammals. It’s been nice meeting you, even under such misfortunate circumstances as have apparently occurred to Mr. Brenner. It seems his iMac (! Was he asking for trouble or what?) burst into flames, consuming him, all his computer files, his residence, and all remaining copies of his works.

 
Let me assure you, ATF will conduct a full and thorough investigation into this matter and find the culprit, even unto the ends of the Earth! One theory, that Mr. Brenner was trying to run Windows on a Mac, has been discredited by members of his family. “Malcolm would never be THAT stupid,” they said, on guarantee of remaining deep background. (We trust you, so their names are Sally and Hugh.)


Peace be with you and the Chicago Zoological Society, Dr. Wells! Let me re-assure you, just go along with the reclassification of dolphins as fish, and all will be well for you and the Santaroga Dolphin Rehabilitation Project!


Sincerely yours, Ms. Brooke Rollins, Secretary of Agriculture and modern embodiment of the Goddess Ceres.

(Note: Dr. Wells’ mysterious disappearance is attributed to his reported abduction by a pod of dolphins after he fell out of his survey boat, their motives a total mystery. The search continues.)

Photo ©2010 Malcolm J. Brenner/All contents ©2025 Malcolm J. Brenner. No reproduction without written permission.

A Bit of History: 5 Peeps and a Tweet

Posted on by Malcolm J. Brenner

In an effort to log some history, and also to chronicle my own exploits, I present this article from an old, old issue of the slick, slightly left-of-center magazine NEWSWEEK, which is still hanging around in digital format! This was the first article I’d ever seen, at the tender age of 11.5, that mentioned dolphins in connection with extraterrestrial aliens — which, in essence, is what the dolphins are, living in our own oceans instead of those of Jupiter, Uranus or Xagramorfagel (if you haven’t heard of the last one, don’t worry, it’s going viral any day now!). My favorite novel at the time being Robert A. Heinlein’s Star Beast, about a pet alien and his boy, I was, of course, extremely eager to make a dolphin’s acquaintance, as I was sure they had nothing better to do than hang around, waiting for me to show up! Here, then, although I do not know the author’s name, I present the first article I encountered to mention dolphins in connection with ET aliens!

Newsweek: Space & The Atom
Oct. 22, 1962, pg. 51

FIVE PEEPS AND A TWEET

Man’s first contact with extraterrestrials may never come — or it may be only a beat in history away; his giant radio telescopes could pick up a message from space tomorrow (July 22, 1960). But when it comes to working out a system of interspecies communication with a species that may not even exist, man is still in kindergarten. This lack has long worried space scientists, who think that the parties at each end of the “telephone” might have everything to say to each other and no common way to say it.

One suggested way of surmounting this embarrassment is to practice communications with other species on man’s own planet, but which species? In answer, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration has made its choice, and not surprisingly it is the bottlenose dolphin. Under an $80,700, one-year grant from NASA, communication with the brainy mammal will be explored by the dolphins’ old friend, Florida neurophysiologist Dr. John Lilly, who has been studying them since 1955.

Dr. Lilly, who is convinced that “man will communicate with another species in a decade or two,” has long considered the dolphin the most likely possibility. His reasons: Dolphins’ brains are larger and more complex than man’s; they talk to each other in a high-speed language of whistles, click, squawks and blats; and they can produce an eerie mimicry of the human voice, even copying subtle inflections (one recently mimicked the Southern drawl of Lilly’s assistant). Dr. Lilly is now feeding tapes of dolphin sounds to a computer, which will sift them for a meaningful pattern. “It is possible that their intelligence is comparable with ours, though in a very strange fashion,” he has said. “They may be a group with whom we can learn basic techniques of communicating with really alien intelligent life forms.”

Say It With Shapes: Such technologies would obviously be of vast assistance to space scientists. Although few expect that man will ever drop in on the residents of another solar system (the trip could take centuries), they haven’t given up on earthbound communication. Before the advent of radio, all suggestions for signaling extraterrestrials were optical in nature: Flashing messages with large mirrors and searchlights, or cutting vast geometric patterns out of forests and farmlands. [Italics added for emphasis, this seemingly suggests “crop circles” a full decade before they were first reported by UFO investigators!]

Far more practical schemes accompanied the development of powerful radio transmitters. The problem is what to translate. One of the most elaborate schemes is that of Hans Freudenthal, a Dutch mathematics professor writing in English. Called Lincos (for Cosmic Language), it depends upon the supposedly universal concepts of mathematics. First Freudenthal would teach the extraterrestrials the idea of “greater than” by sending five peeps, followed by a different signal—perhaps a tweet—and then three peeps. This would be repeated, using several combinations of peeps, until the listeners had equated “greater than” with the peep signal. Similarly, the concepts of “less than,” “equals,” “plus,” and “minus” could be taught. Eventually, Freudenthal hopes to transmit an elaborate mathematics language, then go on to the tasks of sending lessons in physics, physiology, and even ethics.

TV Images: A simpler sounding plan—the transmission of TV images—has been suggested by Dr. Frank Drake of the National Radio Astronomy Observatory in Greenbank, W. Wa. It is based on the principle that television pictures can be broken down into tiny dots of light. The different intensities if the dots can be translated into correspondingly differentiated such as dots and dashes, frequencies, or numbers, and sent as radio signals. Drake hopes the aliens would understand this principle and reconstruct our television pictures from the signals.

Yet both these ingenious plans, and many like them, rest on the fragile assumption that the extraterrestrials think as we do. Perhaps they do: then again it is conceivable that mathematics and inductive reasoning may be as foreign to them as their worlds and bodies might appear to us. Here lies the potential value of the dolphin—a creature operating in an environment perhaps as alien to humans as that of Mars. Even the slightest clue to how such a creature thinks could eventually lead to radically different approach to placing interstellar “telephone calls”—or a new method of analyzing space static to discover is someone is trying to call us.

But this is a long way off. “Right now we don’t expect any dolphins to teach us how to talk to Martian ants,” a NASA official cracked last week. “We’re simply trying to decode their own talk.” What happens after that, of course, depends on what they have to say.

###

Analysis: This article, and several others like it in LIFE, Look and other popular publications opened my eyes (and ears, don’t forget the ears) to the possibility of communicating with dolphins! As an avid science fiction reader, I was delighted with the idea that our seas might contain a comparable form of non-human intelligence. I eventually got much more than I expected, by about 2 or 3 orders of magnitude, with Dolly!

The last paragraph of the article is particularly telling, and sad. The famous anthropologists Dr. Gregory Bateson & his wife Lois Cammack had joined Lilly in the Virgin Islands to see what was going on, and, a year later, “See if you’re smart enough to decode their talk before you try to teach them ours” was Bateson’s parting shot. He later wrote “Steps to an Ecology of Mind,” a book which I tried three times to read, and failed miserably each time.

And this is what Lilly’s most vociferous critics complained about his research, quite properly: HE NEVER PROVED THAT DOLPHINS EITHER USE OR COMPREHEND LANGUAGE BEFORE HIRING MARGARET HOWE (LOVATT) TO TEACH THEM ENGLISH! In scientific terms, this is serious cart-before the horse-putting, and it is an obvious no-no! Why, then, did Lilly pursue it so devotedly?

It strikes me, from both reading his writings and my personal experiences with him, that Lilly had to some degree an obsessive-compulsive disorder. This is common in scientists who strive under pressure for a high degree of accuracy, often to several decimal points. It’s also indicated in Lilly’s own autobiographical novel, “The Scientist,” in his descriptions of his lonely, rather isolated upbringing and childhood.

I can’t really say how Lilly handled major disappointments, because I never observed him doing so. But one of the privileges of whiteness, wealth (which Lilly had in relative degree) and education is that you’re insulated, to some degree, from failure. It may be that, as the evidence that he was on the wrong path accumulated, Lilly stuck more and more strongly to his abortive theories because he had to, to support his rather expansive ego. To admit he was wrong would be uncharacteristic of him, until much later in life.

There was also the practical aspect that Lilly had, with the establishment of the Dolphin Communications Laboratory, taken on the care and feeding of three, 400-lb. (180-kg.) adolescents who could smack you through a concrete wall, if they wanted to. It’s a big responsibility, and I don’t think people are going to give you much money just to study dolphins to see if they maybe, possibly, HAVE a language!

Finally… finally, sometimes a scientist, like everyone else, has a strong hunch that things are heading the right way, that they can disregard everybody else, that they can break the rules and still win! Such feelings are hard for a logical, rational mind to resist, precisely because they are not rational nor logical. But neither having a strong hunch, nor following it to the bitter end, makes one automatically right! Appearances can be deceiving, and as often as not, it is ourselves we deceive.

What matters to me is, I found something I wanted to pursue, and I have pursued it all my life. Maybe not as a scientist, but that doesn’t mean I haven’t made remarkable discoveries, such as this: WE HAVE HAD LIVING BESIDE US, UNNOTICED, FOR MILLIONS OF YEARS, ANOTHER SPECIES OF LIFE THAT ROUTINELY ENGAGES IN MANY OF THE SAME HIGHER-ORDER FUNCTIONS THAT WE HUMANS DO: COMPLEX PROBLEM-SOLVING, SOCIAL AWARENESS, INDIVIDUAL AND GROUP IDENTITIES, ETHICS, THEORY OF MIND, and has enough imagination to realize that in some ways this odd, upright ape with the clever fingers IS RATHER LIKE ITSELF, in that our minds have strange and significant similarities!

We humans, as the dominant species on Planet Earth, need to acknowledge that a non-technological species, which cannot even open a can of beans or unfold a Swiss Army knife, is Number 2, and in the ocean, they are, and always will be, Number 1! Due to their 12-million year head start on us in the Large Brains Department, and their incredible record of sheer SURVIVAL over that time, we should be approaching them as older and wiser beings, with the respect and deliberation they deserve. Let what nature writer Loren Eisley called “our long human loneliness” finally be over, as we are re-admitted to the order of Nature by our old friends, the dolphins!

The author as he appeared in the 1970’s, eavesdropping on a chat between a dolphin and a Martian ant, whose appearance is thanks to NASA. Biden’s going to announce it next week, no, REALLY!

All contents & illustrations ©2023 Malcolm J. Brenner. All rights reserved.

GENTLY USED E-BOOKS, CHEAP!

Posted on by Malcolm J. Brenner
The author as evil genius. Photo by Keithen Martinez.
The author as an evil genius. Photo by Keithen Martinez.

Hey, gang, here I go again! Only I lied when I wrote that headline, because these babies are brand new bargains and rarin’ to go! Drive ’em off the lot for up to 1/2 price, no trade-in required and no tiresome negotiations! I just didn’t think you’d believe me if I said that in the headline!

Yes, it’s the annual Summer/Winter Sale at Smashwords, my favorite purveyor of e-literature. Why? Because, with exquisite taste, they published me, when all other e-book distributors gave me either derisive scorn, or mocking laughter, at the thought of publishing a human-dolphin romance novel!

Well I’ve shown them, haven’t I? Since 2010, over 2,150 copies of Wet Goddess: Recollections of a Dolphin Lover sold in 18 countries, not including South Korea, which for some reason has a ban on Western books going even to U.S. service personnel, but a psychiatric institute in Beijing did order a copy to complete their collection on decadent, imperialistic Western sexual perversions, I guess. Got to keep up with trends in mental illness, after all, and delphinophilia is one of the latest!

(When looking for my books in Smashwords, be sure to set Filtering in the blue bar at the top of the page to Include all Erotica, otherwise you’ll never see them!)

To get a 25% discount on Wet Goddess regular price of $6.99, use this code: WE48B.

Not only that, but the memoir that rips wide-open the weird, creepy, seamy side of my childhood, and exposes New Age psychiatrist Dr. Wilhelm Reich for the idiotic fraud he was, Growing Up in the Orgone Box: Secrets of a Reichian Childhood, is on sale for 50% off!

What’s it like to be only 5 years old and lying on a couch, butt naked, with a dark, bitter man staring at you, who is going to hurt you, molest you and cause you only pain? And soundproof walls and a locked door stand between him and your father?

This book tells that story, reveals my mother’s callous indifference to my welfare, and exposes the dangers of believing in pseudo-science, or any unwarranted belief system whether religious or not, rather than your own child.

To get a 50% discount on Orgone Box regular price of $6.99, use this code: BJ25B

The Smashwords Summer/Winter Sale lasts from July 1-July 31, and they call it that because when it’s summer in this hemisphere it’s winter Down Under, right? Right!

And, maybe, I will get out an e-book copy of my straight, heterosexual sex-with-an-alien science-fiction novel Mel-Khyor: An Interstellar Affair in time for the sale. I’ve had some people who don’t like the audio book asking for it, and it’s time I did it, because it sure is gathering dust in paperback! Stranger things have happened, pigs have flown.

But basically you should buy my books for 2 reasons:

1) They are supremely entertaining, if weird, stories that happen to be true, and

2) I need to increase my gross income, so I can support my writing habit. And I’m Jonesing bad, man, bad!

Well, what are you waiting for?

Why dolphins really ARE “little people in wet suits,” Part 1: Feelings, Ooohh Feelings…

Posted on by Malcolm J. Brenner
From the Sunday comic strip “Mark Trail” many years ago. I don’t know if it’s still going or not. It wouldn’t be a great loss, because nobody read the daily strips about a park ranger, but this one on a weekend caught my attention.

I think it can be safely said that I do know what anthropomorphism is. In its simplest form, it is endowing non-human entities, be they animals, plants, objects or just natural forces, with human traits, like awareness, reason, and emotions.

Especially emotions. We are long past the point of imagining a god is mad at us personally or collectively because a storm passes over… but a tornado, typhoon or hurricane may elicit that response, because the damage is more severe, or widespread, or fatal. Legally, we still refer to things that are foreseeable but unlikely and unavoidable as “acts of God,” a term that shows the piety of our lawyers, if not their wits.

We must thus be very careful in our dealings with other animals, who do not share our human ways, not to anthropomorphise them; we do so at our own risk! For instance, that grinning chimpanzee isn’t happy with you, it’s about to rip your face off!

PIC BY M WATSON / ARDEA / CATERS NEWS – (PICTURED: A Chimpanzee laughing) – These comical creatures are clearly up FUR a laugh in these sidesplitting images which show a variety of ecstatic animals enjoying a good old chuckle. The hilarious snaps, taken by a whole host of photographers from around the globe, prove life in the jungle is most definitely jolly, as creatures from an orangutan to a elephant seal are pictured mid-laugh. A cheery chimpanzee can be seen sporting a toothy grin as he enjoys life at Chimfunshi Wildlife Orphanage in Zambia. And a pot-bellied pig is clearly tickled pink at his home in Lower Saxony, Germany. In another image an Icelandic horse appears to crack up when he spots a photographers camera, while a chuckling cheetah creases up in Kenya. SEE CATERS COPY

Exposing your canine teeth (fangs) is a sign of aggression in chimps, even though grinning among us humans is a sign of pleasure. Moral? Just give that chimp a nice, close-lipped smile, and retain your face a while longer.

From the brilliant Japanese Manga comic strip Beastars, one season available as a fantastic anime on Netflix. After a llama student is horribly murdered one dark night, it’s the predators vs. the herbivores at Cherryton Academy, where a bunch of neurotic students ranging from a shy wolf who doubts his killer instincts to a dwarf rabbit with nymphomania and a young buck — literally — maneuvering himself into a place of esteem and power are being educated… but not in reading, writing and arithmetic!

Same with a dog that humps your leg; this often comes up in discussions about how Dolly the dolphin used to rub against me. She was definitely masturbating, but chances are about 90% that your dog doesn’t have sex on its mind when it humps you, it has dominance.

I say that because I saw it in action. Long-time readers will remember that before I acquired Epic I had two other dogs from Grants, N.M., Pixel and Pugsley. Pugsley was a neutered Husky bitch, one of the smaller dogs that Husky enthusiasts tell me do most of the actual sled-pulling.

So that was Pugsley’s raison d’être. Then Cay came to stay at my place and brought with her Keiko, an utterly untrainable (to Cay, anyhow) 80 lb./36 kg. male pit bull mix.

The mixed-breed Keiko in a quiet moment.

When the dogs had settled into a predictable dominance hierarchy, with Keiko uncomplainingly on the bottom, every night, after they ate, Pugsley would hump him. Keiko pretended she wasn’t there. For the two dogs, this served a dual purpose: for Pugsley, reassurance of her dominant position over Keiko, and for him, the ability to completely blow her off, because she was fixed, whereas Pixel, who was my mate at the time, wasn’t, and Keiko got her pregnant when… well, that’s another, sad story.

But the point here isn’t to make you any more sorry for me than you already are, it’s to explain that humping for dogs, and many other quadrupeds, is not only sexual activity but a crude form of dominance behavior, expressed by both males and females, and should be interpreted thus in non-sexual situations. The “obvious” betrays us because we are conditioned to think of humping as involving sex. Not always!

I think it can also be safely said that many, if not most, scientists familiar with marine mammals will accuse me of anthropomorphism in allowing my relationship with Dolly to develop to the degree that it did, but this isn’t true either. In fact, I can safely say that, because of my experience, few other humans are as aware of the differences between humans and dolphins as I am!

So what do I make of the late Drs. David and Melba Caldwell, co-authors of many scientific papers and the popular, anti-revisionist, pro-U.S. Navy book The World of the Bottlenose Dolphin, when they say, as they do in the book,

“Dolphins are not little people in wet suits.”

By this, I take it the really mean,

“DON’T FUCKING ANTHROPOMORPHIZE DOLPHINS!”

but they were much too polite to put it that way, at least in print.

(David & Melba chart the auditory damage done to dolphin hearing by attending orca death-metal concerts featuring extended humpback whale solos.)
  • The Caldwells’ “true” book about bottlenose dolphins, which are quite wonderful enough as occasionally clever mammals, never mind the ravings of crazy neurophsychologists who take LSD trips in sensory isolation tanks and come back raving about becoming one with God! Ha! We all know that only Roman Catholic priests have THAT long-distance number!
(The Caldwell’s layperson’s book on dolphins, written to dispel all then-currently circulating myths about them being anything other than very bright, and occasionally clever, animals.)

On the surface, this homily seems like a foregone conclusion. As a species, bottlenose dolphins are vastly older than us, having retained their current form, including the large, 3.3 lb./1.5 kg. brain, much more convoluted than our 3 lb./1.36 kg. model, for the past 12,000,000 (that’s 12 million, for the numerically-challenged) years. We have had our current, erect primate form only since Homo Erectus about 2 million years ago, and our current level of physical and cultural evolution, Homo sapiens, for about 250,000 (one-quarter million) years at longest. Obviously, these creatures who exist without tools, weapons, protective clothing or even manipulative appendages (aside from their mouths) could teach our species a thing or two about SURVIVAL SKILLS!

What I found really surprising about Dolly’s behavior was how much it WAS similar to human behavior, and I don’t think this just my interpretation. For instance, consider the situation when I brought “Elaine,” a young woman (just turned 18, not that it should interest you) I wanted to have a serious (read sexual) relationship with, to meet Dolly, “the gentlest of all the dolphins,” her trainer and the woman who coaxed me to shoot photos for her never-written book claimed.

Dolly towing my wannabe girlfriend about 30 seconds before the next photo was taken.

Dolly, of course, had her own damned ideas!

You don’t want this to happen on a date. Trust me, you don’t.

Am I wrong when I label this behavior “jealousy”? It caught me totally unawares! I had never imagined that a creature like a dolphin could regard me as her exclusive property, to be defended against all interlopers for their attentions, whether her own species or not!

How did Dolly know, sense, or figure out, that Elaine was my girlfriend, a rival for her affections, and not my sister, or niece, or daughter? I remember that day there was absolutely no feeling that I had any type of “contact,” or mental communication, with her at all. And not for lack of trying! I was sending her my thoughts — she just wasn’t letting me know she was receiving them!

Years later, when I read David Holroyd’s account of a similar experience with a captive dolphin in Great Britain, I knew my analysis was correct. When dolphins don’t want to communicate with you, they shut down ALL the channels! That’s how you know you’re fucking up.

I could run this post a lot further, but I’ve already published 2 today, and I need some time to make these points, can’t do it willy-nilly. Bare with me, and I’ll get around to telling you why dolphins ARE sometimes “little humans in wet suits”!

(End Part 1)

Wake up, Dr. Irvine, wake up!

Posted on by Malcolm J. Brenner

by Malcolm J. Brenner

Above: Portrait of Dr. Blair Irvine, courtesy GulfBase. I think he has the eyes of a sociopath, but hey, what the fuck do I know? I’m just some guy he used one morning as a TOXIC WASTE DUMP, and he thought he’d never hear from again. Wrong bet, Dr. Irvine, wrong bet. And yes, karma IS a bitch!

(Overnight, Dr. Blair Irvine, former director of the Sarasota Dolphin Research Project, changed his email address, so he couldn’t get any more emails from me like the one he received yesterday! Since this is the address at which the SDRP has received its donations, your next donation to them, if you make one [and I heartily endorse the SDRP, in spite of my personal feelings about Blair], don’t be surprised if it bounces back to your account. Unless you change it, which is troublesome, I admit. But hey, I didn’t tell him to change his freaking email address! I must have really gotten to him if he went to all that trouble! Well, as B. F. Skinner said, any acknowledgement, positive OR negative, can be perceived as a reward by the subject! It would have been better to DO NOTHING, but then again, I shouldn’t have to tell Dr. Irvine, who I am sure is a confirmed behaviorist, something that well-known and simple. Another chink in the armor of a “great scientist.” Yeah, right.)

WAKE UP, DR. IRVINE, WAKE UP!


IT’S TIME TO WAKE UP AND SMELL THE COFFEE! MR. BRENNER HAS POSTED HIS LETTER TO YOU ON malcolmbrenner.com/news, HIS WEB SITE! SO THE WHOLE WORLD NOW KNOWS HOW RUDE YOU WERE TO HIM, WHAT POOR CONTROL YOU HAVE OVER YOUR ANGER, AND HOW IMMATURE YOU SECRETLY ARE UNDER THAT FAÇADE OF EMOTIONAL CONTROL YOU SO PROUDLY SHOW THE WORLD! WASN’T IT NICE OF HIM TO WARN YOU? YOU SHOULD THANK HIM FOR BEING SO THOUGHTFUL, THERE WAS NO WARNING FROM YOU WHEN YOU TURNED ON HIM AND VERBALLY MUGGED HIM BECAUSE HE MENTIONED dr. Lilly’s DREAD NAME!


I HATE TO BE THE ONE TO TELL YOU, BUT MR. BRENNER SAYS HE IS PREPARED TO DO THIS EVERY MORNING, UNTIL YOU ANSWER HIS VERY REASONABLE QUESTION ABOUT WHY YOU TREATED RANDY WELLS SO NICELY, AND TREATED HIM LIKE SHIT. LIKE SOMETHING SCRAPED OFF YOUR SHOE, AFTER YOU WALKED AWAY.


YOU WERE VERY UNSCIENTIFIC, WHEN YOU LET YOUR PERSONAL FEELINGS ABOUT DR. LILLY OVERCOME WHATEVER TRIVIAL RESPECT YOU MAY HAVE HAD FOR MALCOLM AS A PERSON. YOUR INTEREST IN HIS WORK WAS VERY SHALLOW, AND MALCOLM SUSPECTS YOU ARE A SOCIOPATH, AND WONDERS HOW YOU COULD HAVE KEPT IT SECRET FOR SO LONG, IF YOU ARE. HE ALSO WONDERS HOW MANY OTHER UNHEARD-FROM PEOPLE ARE IN THE SAME POSITION HE IS, HAVING BECOME YOUR VICTIMS ON YOUR WAY TO THE TOP OF THE DOLPHIN WORLD?


OH, AND BTW, MALCOLM SAYS, “HEY, DO YOU OR THE U.S. NAVY OWN THE FILM OF SIMO? WHY DON’T YOU PUT IT ON THE WEB, DR. IRVINE, AND SHOW US WHAT A FUN TIME SIMO HAD, BEING CHASED BY AN AGGRESSIVE BULL SHARK! IS IT TRUE HE JUMPED OUT OF THE TANK TO AVOID IT?”

PUT THE FILMS ON THE WEB, AND LET US SEE FOR OURSELVES! I’LL BET YOU’VE STILL GOT A PRINT IN THE SDRP ARCHIVES, DON’T YOU? WHAT ARE YOU WAITING FOR? LET US BE THE ONES TO JUDGE WHAT A BRILLIANT SCIENTIST YOU ARE!


AND HERE’S A “VALID SCIENTIFIC EXPERIMENT” FOR YOU: WE PUT YOU, NAKED, IN A CIRCULAR TRACK YOU CAN’T GET OUT OF, AND WE RELEASE A 500-LB. (that’s 228.6 kilos, Malcolm knows you scientists like to do things in metric) TIGER INTO THE TRACK WITH YOU. BUT DON’T WORRY! WE’RE GOING TO GIVE YOU A ROCK TO THROW AT THE TIGER AS IT LEAPS ON YOU, AND IF YOU’RE A DEAD SHOT AND HIT THE TIGER RIGHT BETWEEN THE EYES, YOU’LL KILL IT! AND A BELL WILL GO OFF, AND YOU’LL GET A LOVELY FOOD PELLET AS A REWARD… THIS IS THE POSITION YOU PUT SIMO IN, ASSHOLE!


WHAT DO YOU LEARN ABOUT THE BEHAVIOR OF REAL DOLPHINS IN THE WILD WHEN YOU PUT A DOLPHIN IN A CIRCULAR TANK IT CAN’T ESCAPE FROM AND RELEASE A DOLPHIN-EATING SPECIES OF SHARK WITH IT?

NOTHING! YOU LEARN NOTHING ABOUT HOW A DOLPHIN BEHAVES IN THE WILD, WHERE IT HAS ROOM TO MANEUVER, TO GET UNDER THE SHARK, TO GET OUT OF ITS WAY, TO PROTECT ITS MATES AND YOUNG, OR REQUEST AID FROM ITS FELLOWS. BUT HEY, IT LOOKED GOOD TO THE O.N.R., AND GOT YOU A GENEROUS GRANT TO LIVE OFF OF! SO MALCOLM PAID FOR YOUR RESEARCH WITH HIS TAXES, TOO, ASSWIPE!


YOUR EXPERIMENT WAS A WORTHLESS PIECE OF SHIT, ALL IT TOLD THE U.S. NAVY IS HOW DOLPHINS BEHAVE IN A DONUT TANK, AND IF I AM NOT MISTAKEN, SUCH TANKS RARELY EXIST IN THE OPEN OCEAN. RELEASE THE FILMS AND PROVE MALCOLM WRONG!

LIKE I SAY, MALCOLM PLANS TO DO THIS EVERY MORNING, UNTIL YOU ANSWER HIS VERY, VERY REASONABLE AND RATIONAL QUESTION. MALCOLM SAYS HE CAN HOLD OUT LONGER THAN YOU CAN, OR UNTIL YOU CHANGE YOUR EMAIL ADDRESS, WHICH EVER COMES FIRST. AND MALCOLM WOULD HATE TO SEE YOU CHANGE IT, IT’S SUCH A BOTHER, YOU KNOW?


HAVE A FUCKED-UP DAY, DR. BLAIR! THIS HAS BEEN A WAKE-UP CALL FROM YOUR CONSCIENCE, AND IF IT’S HARD FOR YOU TO HEAR, DON’T BLAME ME, TURN UP YOUR HEARING AID YOU IDIOT, I’M SHOUTING AS LOUD AS I CAN! — dr. Blair Irvine’s conscience

Another Interview: Extra Funk Sauce, Please!

Posted on by Malcolm J. Brenner

“Debuting Friday, September 18th 2020
The 1-800-Funk-Sauce.com Show
Runtime: 11.5 minutes
It’s an animated “late night” talk show!“

WARNING: 1-800-FUNK-SAUCE is not a working number!

Do not call it, expecting any kind of an answer! I do not know what would happen if somebody actually picked up that phone, but I suspect you’d be worse off than if they hadn’t.

“With new episodes appearing on www.1-800-Funk-Sauce.com every Friday night, starting 9/18, The 1-800-Funk-Sauce.com Show will feature interviews with guests from all walks of life, musical performances from bands from all over the country/world, and various other adult comedy elements. 
The pilot episode will feature an interview with Malcolm J. Brenner and his former lover, Dolly the dolphin, to discuss their love affair. Musical guest Billy Summer will perform afterwards.
“Find your comfortable spot, relax, get into the zone, and tune into The 1-800-Funk-Sauce.com Show, on Fridays starting on 9/18, on 1-800-Funk-Sauce.com.” — Press Release, Joe Seul

Let me explain. Joe Seul is a good guy I met through a bad public-relations contact. At the time, about mid-2017, he was a New College student majoring in music who proved very friendly and helpful in getting the audio book of Mel-Khyor: An Interstellar Affair ready for publication by equalizing the sound and adding a little reverb to my flat, nasal voice, so I sound less like Boris Karloff and more like Morgan Freeman. And it worked out really well, so I was grateful to him, because he didn’t ask for any payment.

“What a swell guy!” I thought. Little did I know what EVIL lurks in the hearts of men!

Well, a couple of years went by when I didn’t hear a lot from Joe. He finished up his work at New College, moved out of the roach-infested hovel that passed for off-campus student housing there and upward and onward to better things in St. Petersburg (the Florida one, not the one in Russia, you know). And then came The Great Covid-19 Lockdown of 2020, and, like a lot of musicians, poor Joe didn’t know what to do with himself.

Not having anybody to jam with drove young Joe nearly insane (am I hitting too hard on this, Joe?) and he began experimenting with new programs, new apps. One of them, he told me, was a rudimentary computer graphics app that allowed him to make 3D animation that looked like an Amiga game in 1990, only not quite that good.

And then, like the skilled lurker, he is, he sprang the question: “I’m using it to do a short interview podcast, a different topic each week and some music, and I’d like you to be the first guest. What do you say?”

What could I say? Joe had me eating out of the palm of his paw, er, hand. I agreed, and since I haven’t had much success lately giving a recording of an interview that’s worth listening to, I was glad hear it would be recorded on regular old cell phone (I’m sure I’ll be able to get that Blue Yeti from my daughter to work right the next time).

It was late on a July afternoon, I think, when the westering sun shines into the house and the central AC struggles to keep it at 83ºF/28ºC against the greater heat outside, but I turned the fan off so the background noise wouldn’t interfere with Joe’s recording. A little hasty, I called him up, but there was some glitch and he called me back a little after 5 p.m.

There were a lot of things I want to talk about. The two other books I’ve written. My telepathic experiences with Dolly, which ended up on the floor of the Dolphin Lover cutting room (except these days they’d be taking up space in your Trash). My thoughts about the venerable age of the bottlenose dolphin species, 12 million years as compared to our +/- 250,000 years. What that means to the evolution of their sonic communications. How their predictive theory of mind abilities, which let them second-guess other dolphins and ourselves, evolved. And so on.

But Joe just launched right in. After a brief introduction, he said “Tell me what happened with you and Dolly at Floridaland.”

Well…

Ya know, Joe, it’s like this: You have an extraordinary experience, and you decide to let others know about it, so you spend 37 years writing, editing, printing and publishing a book about it so you won’t have to repeat it over and over and over. And then you go to distribute the book, and what do interviewers ask you?

“Tell me what happened!”

But, gentle reader, I didn’t do that. Instead I sat back and I spent the next little while telling Joe the story of my experience with Dolly, but this time trying to work in as much of my non-dolphin experience, and recent conclusions regarding us, the dolphins and whatever the fuck causes the UFOs as I could while still threading back to the occasional sweaty-palms narrative.

Forty-five heatstroked minutes later, Joe finished up by asking a few questions. “How did you get consent from the dolphin?” was the one I remember.

I didn’t give him my flip answer, either, which is “When was the last time you got a pig’s consent to turn it into a ham sandwich?” That’s flip because most of us do it without giving it a second thought, and also because it begs the question, Why is getting consent from a non-human partner only important when the human’s sexual pleasure is involved?

Because, not to put too fine a point on it, animals are chattel under most laws, and I can do what I want with chattel, provided if it’s an animal covered under the law (I don’t think many of us are going to lose a lot of sleep about the fates of mosquitoes, bedbugs or fire ants) I treat it humanely, even to the point of killing it humanely. And the law spells out how you do this.

I can breed that animal to another animal that may not be its natural choice, and I can, if necessary, hobble an unwilling female animal so that she cannot injure an unwanted male who rapes her. So it’s not whether the female animal (and, BTW, I submit that, in the eyes of the public, ONLY female animals can be the true “victims” of a bestialist) is enjoying it, or really even whether her body is her own, she is going to be used by her owner as a reproductive vehicle! The choice of a mate isn’t hers and her owner’s interest in her pleasure from the act can be accurately measured in micro-give-a-shits.

But suddenly, if I want to step in, and, knowing what I know about the animal’s species, characteristics and habits, not harm the animal, not hurt the animal, not even rape the animal, but just have sex with the animal — “normal” interspecies sex, for want of a better term, you know, the old in-and-out — for our mutual pleasure, THAT IS A HORRENDOUS, UNSPEAKABLE “CRIME AGAINST NATURE” AND WE MUST DO EVERYTHING IN OUR POWER TO PREVENT IT, OR PUNISH THE BESTIALIST IF IT HAPPENS!

To which I answer, “Where’s the harm?”

Harm. The concept of injury or damage, usually to someone else. Remember that? HARM? In Harm’s Way, famous WWII book & movie? “Evidence of harm,” legal concept? Self-harm, disturbing behavior? Armie Hammer, star of the disastrous 2013 Lone Ranger remake?

But I digress.

Joe did ask one memorable question, which was “How did you get consent from her?”

To which I answered, “Are you kidding? She had to get consent from me!” Which is true, and she spent most of the preceding five months figuring out how to do it! Was there a need to elaborate? Maybe another time.

We concluded the interview and Joe went back to his lair for a couple of weeks to edit. Then he sent me an email with a Vimeo address and a password. And what to my wondering eyes should appear…

I don’t want to spoil it for you, so just let me say that Joe has honored my request to revive Dolly the dolphin in animated form, and chosen to portray us in a highly… COMPROMISED SITUATION.

Let it never be said (by me anyway) that I lack a sense of humor about myself. I acknowledge the many funny actualities in my relationship with Dolly, and point some of them out in the novel, including a photo of her mashing her snout into my would-be girlfriend’s face, while staring straight into the camera. It’s a wonderfully funny picture now, 50 years later, and I’m glad I still have it!

In this regard, let me say that I think Joe has exploited the humorous aspects of my relationship with Dolly in a way that nobody else has done before, and for this I congratulate him! He has also speeded up my voice by about 15-20% to make more of my interview available but doesn’t advise you of this before the interview begins, so I sound a little bit like a lost member of the band Alvin & The Chipmunks, but I mean, hell, Brenner, what do you expect for free? I didn’t really mean to insinuate that Joe was EVIL, just that I was a little… uh… SURPRISED by his… IMAGINATIVE PORTRAIT of myself and the dolphin together, VERY together, in the altogether.

Please check out the 1-800-FUNK-SAUCE.com website starting Friday evening, September 18 and let Joe and me know what you think, if you choose to. Thanks!

E-book prices slashed!

Posted on by Malcolm J. Brenner

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From March 1 until March 7, you, Dear Reader, can buy my two ebooks from Smashwords for half price! Why, that’s almost 50% off! 🙂 Both titles temporarily marked down from $6.99 to $3.50 in honor of nothing in particular, just that Smashwords gives all their authors a chance to do this every year, and I’d be a sucker if I didn’t take advantage of it!

The titles are, the novel Wet Goddess: Recollections of a Dolphin Lover and the childhood memoir Growing Up in the Orgone Box.

Smashwords Global Coupon Code: ZJ74D

Why Smashwords? Well, when I published Wet Goddess in 2010, they were the only ebooks publishing site that would accept “bestiality” — provided it was between consenting adults of both species, of course.

Nevertheless I’m in their debt, because the publisher fought hard to prevent the major distributor of ebooks from dropping the entire Smashwords lineup. So he got my second book as well, and a third ebook of Mel-Khyor: An Interstellar Affair is in the offing!

I think a lot of my critic’s problem lies in their not believing that a creature like a dolphin can exercise free will, or, being female, can experience libido, or can change her behavior on the apprehension of a thought. But they can do and feel all these things.

I’m looking into new ways of exploring the dolphins’ world without getting wet, specifically Remote Viewing, the information-gathering technique used by the U.S. military and the CIA in the 1980’s to spy on Soviet military objectives, allegedly without the Soviets being aware of it. Scientists are, of course, skeptical of any kind of out-of-body experience, but I’ll perform some tests and judge for myself, thanks.

So hurry, get out your charge card — er, your cell phone — and get two of my books for the price of one! They won’t last long at this price!

WARNING!

Both of these books contain unusual sexual situations which some people may find objectionable, and Orgone Box in particular contains scenes of adults committing physical, sexual and emotional abuse on a child (me). I don’t believe in “being triggered,” because people are not Colt .45s who walk around half-cocked, as my father, a GI in WWII, used to say, but Godz forbid somebody should accuse me of doing that because of the content these books! You have been warned, okay? If you’re easily offended, don’t buy them and then complain about the subject matter. You have been warned!

Thought For The Day

“One of the great challenges in life is knowing enough to think you’re right, but not enough to know you’re wrong.” — Nick GT on The Joe Rogan Show.

The Bleeding “Edge”: End of a Saga?

Posted on by Malcolm J. Brenner

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Press Release: For Immediate Release, 11/19/2019

Eyes Open Media, XXXX Easy St., Port Charlotte, FL 33952

malcolmb2@centurylink.net    (415) XXX-XXXX

Zoophile American Author Wins Case Against New Zealand Radio Station, Gets Nothing In Return

PORT CHARLOTTE, FL – Writer, publisher and self-described zoophile Malcolm J. Brenner has won a case against MediaWorks, Inc., a New Zealand broadcaster, for airing a distorted interview with him – where one member of the trio of interviewers insulted him, cursed him, and then left the studio.

“The interview lasted about 20 minutes, but that four-minute segment was all they used,” Brenner said, “and they lied to me about that.”

However, he’ll get nothing for his troubles, not even an on-air apology.

The ruling came from the Broadcast Standards Authority, New Zealand’s equivalent of the U.S. Federal Communications Commission, which found that a program on the station The Edge had deliberately edited an interview with Brenner to present an unflattering portrait of him.

“That’s disgusting! You’re sick! Dolphins cannot give consent,” said Meg Annear during a March 30 interview with the author of the controversial novel Wet Goddess: Recollections of a Dolphin Lover.She then got up from her microphone on The Dom, Meg and Randell Show, removed her headphones and, over the protests of her partners Clint Randell and Dom Harvey, walked out of the studio.

“I’ve had this happen before,” Brenner said. “Some people, particularly certain women, are ‘triggered’ when I begin to describe the dolphin’s uninhibited courtship behavior toward me, and they react as if I was describing my own behavior.” When this happened at a radio station in Australia several years ago, the station opted not to air the interview.

The Dom, Meg and Randell Show, however, took a different course – one that involved the station’s lawyers, management, deception and eventually brought in the BSA itself.

“I went ahead and finished the interview with just the two guys, Dom and Randell, and it was okay and about 20 minutes long,” Brenner explained. “Then Dom and I exchanged some mail about when the clip was going to air. Finally, several days later, he emailed me a 10-minute edit of the interview and told me it would air in a few days.”

Brenner tuned in the podcast, but heard nothing. By now suspicious, he went back into the show’s archives and discovered, to his horror, that not only had Dom sent him a decoy audio file, the material that they did air was the most inflammatory part of the interview, where Meg curses at Brenner on her way out the door.

“Once I realized what the station had done to me, I was astonished and outraged,” Brenner recalled. “Nobody has acted with such contempt for me since junior high school, where I was an unpopular student. It was like getting mugged in the hallway, and they didn’t have to do it. It was malicious, it was intentional, and they thought they could get away with it because I’m a foreigner and an admitted zoophile.”

Bestiality has been illegal in New Zealand since the adoption of the constitution in 1963, by nation-wide law. Brenner’s interlude with the dolphin, named Dolly (Ruby in the novel), occurred over six months in 1971, but bestiality wasn’t made illegal in Florida until 2011.

“I did nothing illegal, not in Florida and certainly not in New Zealand, and yet Dom saw fit to deceive me, lie to me, lie about me and defame me,” Brenner said. “He did this solely based on the idea that I had the experience with Dolly 48 years ago and therefore I must be a non-person with no rights under New Zealand law.”

Worse yet, Brenner suspects the station’s attorney, Tom Turton, conspired with the rogue DJ’s plans.

“A couple of days after we wrapped the interview I inquired about when it would air, and Dom said it was being considered by the station’s lawyers, for content, because zoophilia is illegal in New Zealand,” Brenner said. “By that time the edited, four-minute clip of Meg leaving the studio had already aired!”

Was Dom advised by Turton to deceive Brenner?

“If so, I’d find a new attorney,” the writer half-joked. “When Dom told me he had to run it by the lawyers I had a bad feeling, but I decided to say nothing so as not to ‘bad vibe’ the situation. If Turton collaborated, he should be reported to the New Zealand Bar Association for misconduct.

“I learned it doesn’t matter if you voice your suspicions or not, by the time you’re aware of them the bird has flown,” Brenner said. He asked the BSA to order the station to apologize to him on-air, place the full interview in its archive, and to pay him whatever amount the BSA thought would prevent the station from running similar slanderous stories in the future. The Administration can impose up to a $5,000 NZ ($3,600 US) fine.

However, the BSA decided not to place any orders on the station, thus giving it only an symbolic “slap on the wrist,” Brenner said.

“MediaWorks advise that its processes have been reviewed with respect to how it responds to audience feedback on challenging topics. Taking into account the above factors and the action taken by MediaWorks, the Authority considers that the publication of this decision is sufficient to censure MediaWorks conduct and clarify our expectations of broadcasters under the fairness standard. Accordingly, we do not make any orders,”the BSA’s decision, signed by its chair Judge Bill Hastings, reads.

“I’m appalled at the lack accountability,” Brenner said. “This decision leaves MediaWorks free to practice this kind of slander on anyone who comes along, anyone they feel is ‘different’ or vulnerable.

“I don’t even get a formal apology from the people who lied to me, lied about me, defamed me, sent me a false file and tried to bury the truth afterward. MediaWorks said they had no problem making an apology and archiving the show, but the BSA doesn’t require it, so they won’t do it. It’s absolutely disgusting.”

Brenner is filing an appeal of the decision, citing the lack of any orders. He is also the author of a memoir, Growing Up in the Orgone Box: Secrets of a Reichian Childhood,and a science-fiction novel, Mel-Khyor: An Interstellar Affair.

For a copy of the complete decision by the BSA (15 pgs.), please contact Brenner at

malcolmb2@centurylink.net or at (415) 640-5013. He is on Miami time.

Website: malcolmbrenner.com

 

 

The “Road Soda” Interview: Good News/Bad News.

Posted on by Malcolm J. Brenner

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WHAT IS YOUR STORY? $$ (Sarasota)

Compensation: $35

What is your story? Do you have an interesting life story, event that happened to you, or anything in-between? I will pay you for an interview to learn about your story and your interview will be put in a podcast. Please email for more info.
The above advertisement appeared in the Sarasota Craigslist on Oct. 16, but I didn’t notice it until Oct. 26. I don’t know why I was looking at “Gigs, Creative” — well, yes I do, I desperately needed money, but why in Sarasota, my old stomping grounds about 45 minutes north of here? I don’t know, but I read the above and immediately sent them the following message:
Yeah, I have an interesting story that ought to make a good podcast.
In 1971, while attending New College, I fell in love with a female dolphin who worked at an amusement park in Nokomis, Floridaland. And we made love. And then I lost her.
And I wrote and published a book about it, “Wet Goddess: Recollections of a Dolphin Lover,” which got made into a award-winning short film, “Dolphin Lover.”
If you’ve gotten this far, we might talk. Call me, (415) 640-****. I live in Port Charlotte.
The response was very rapid, a couple of hours:
Malcolm,

I have heard about your story and would love to interview you for the cast.
The show is called Road Soda and has been running a few years. We are small and have a small but loyal listener base. The show has a wide variety of topics and always aims to entertain.
We do our interviews over the phone using skype or whatsapp and usually run about an hour. When the interview is all done we will send you 35 dollars through venmo, paypal, zelle, what ever is best for you, as a thank you for your time.
Interview times are M-F evenings 7pm-9pm
If weekends are your only free time, we can work something out.
Let me know what day you are free this following week and we will schedule ASAP.

looking forward to your response!

Thank you for reaching out. 
I still didn’t have a name, but I had an interview!
The interviewer was Isaiah Cooper, who turned out to be a welcome change from the interviewers of the past. He wasn’t out to question my morality, he didn’t try to defame me or insult me, he’d actually watched Dolphin Lover like I suggested and he let me tell my tale my own way, asking questions that illuminated things. (His regular sidekick, Peter Something-or-other, wasn’t there for the interview.) Our talk lasted an hour, which is plenty long enough to discuss things, and I ended up want to meet him in person (although I haven’t). Altogether, a nice, straight-up kind of guy!
That’s the good news.
What’s the bad news? Well, here’s the interview: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/road-soda/id1028616849?ign-mpt=uo%3D4
I come on about 54 minutes in.
I defy you to listen to it and UNDERSTAND MORE THAN HALF OF WHAT I’M SAYING.
In other words, the audio is shit. I had a pair of earbuds with a built-in microphone, which I bought for $9.99 when my Apple earbuds crapped out, and I was using them for sound, never suspecting that it sounded like I was talking on a tin can and a string. I wish to hell Isaiah had enough technical expertise to tell me I didn’t sound good and ask if I had another microphone (I do, the Radio Shack shotgun mic I used to record Mel-Khyor with, but it’s a little trouble to set up… how much? Oh, about 45 seconds), but no, he just let me ramble on, so the interview is very difficult to listen to.
Well, I was expressing this problem to my daughter, who is knowledgeable about such things, and she said “I’ve got a Yeti mic here I bought for an interview and don’t use anymore, would you like it?” So she’s going to bring it out here next time she comes. And until then, I will use the Radio Shack shotgun mic, as it’s impedance almost exactly matches that of the computer, for any other interviews I may do.
Problem solved, I guess… except that you have to listen to this utterly crappy-sounding interview. If you want to. (BTW, Isaiah has paid me my $35, so we are cool there. I bought  a cup of coffee at Starbuck’s and left the change for the baristas to fight over.)

Falling Off “The Edge”

Posted on by Malcolm J. Brenner

 

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If you’ve been following my disappointment with The Edge, a New Zealand radio station-podcast that deceived and defamed me, then you know I made a complaint to the Broadcast Standards Authority, their equivalent of our FCC. Here it is.

Discrimination and Defamation: I believe I am the victim of a set-up. DJ Dom Harvey emailed me on March 28, 2019 (my time, all dates same year) and asked if I would do the interview for what he described as “a radio music show.” I said yes, and the interview took place on Monday, March 31.

I was one minute into my story and describing how the dolphin presented me with her genital slit for rubbing, when Meg had what I can only describe as a total freak-out. (The station has bleeped “genital slit” since they archived the program. This term is used by marine biologists to describe the organ and is values-neutral, but the bleep gives the unwarranted impression that I used a vulgarity or slang.)

Meg then declares “That’s disgusting” several times, and I will grant her her opinion, what I’m complaining about is that the station never gave me the opportunity to present mine. Meg states “This is a non-consensual situation. A dolphin cannot consensually choose to have sex with a human. You absolutely took advantage of that.”

That is a tangible falsehood. Dolly, the dolphin in question, was released into open water several times a day to perform tricks with a riverboat. She had the option to leave many times. Furthermore, dolphins are famous for having homosexual sex, lesbian sex, sex with oars, sex with sharks, and even human beings. The late Dr. Ken Norris, a USC professor of marine biology and an expert on dolphins, said “Dolphins have sex the way human beings shake hands.”

Meg left the studio, ending any chance of answering her accusations, but the interview proceeded with Dom and Randell for about 20 minutes. At no time was there any suggestion that the material would not be used. I expected it to be edited for length and content, but I was not expecting what happened.

Dom emailed me that the show would air “in the next couple of days.” I expected him to inform me when, as all other radio and podcast hosts have done. When I hadn’t heard a date by April 4 I emailed him to inquire. In response, he sent me an edited, 10 minute version of the interview, which I thought was for my approval. I told him it was fine, but there was still no air date from him, so I looked in the program’s archives. There was an April 3 program, but the only part that was used was Meg’s freak out! No other parts of my interview made it to the air! Not only that, but the 10 minute file Dom Harvey sent me was a decoy, intended to placate me and hoping I wouldn’t find out how they butchered my interview.

As a result, I was placed in a very severely negative light. The station maintains that I wasn’t because Dom et al. had discussed the topic on previous shows and had given listeners the “facts” of the situation, in spite of the fact that one of the “facts,” that I was fired from the dolphin show, is a lie he made up. I was never fired because I never worked for them. I was a freelance student photographer given free access to the property to produce photos for a book about dolphins.

The station responds “…we are aware (this) is not the case, but do not think this is material…” In other words, The Edge is OK with their DJs lying, as long as they do it about unpopular people.

This is the most egregious censorship I have ever encountered. I was not only discriminated against, I was lied to and given a fake file that was never intended to be used. And I am being given no recourse by the station.

As the letter I received says, “The Dom, Meg and Randell show is not a news, current affairs or factual programme… Listeners expect light-hearted chat and laughs, but do not expect it to be ‘authoratative or truthful,’ which is the defining characteristic of a factual program according to the commentary on the Standards.”

In other words, it’s OK to lie as long as you call it entertainment and not news.

Had I known the terms of the interview — that my interview would not be treated as news or history but as a basis for the hosts to make up defamatory things about me — I would have not done the interview. My permission was granted under false pretenses, and the falsehoods continued through the broadcast of the show without informing me and Dom giving me the decoy file.

Another producer encountered this while interviewing me, and didn’t use the interview at all: https://www.news.com.au/entertainment/tv/radio/kyle-and-jackie-o-forced-to-dump-interview-with-a-man-who-had-sex-with-a-dolphin/news-story/49fde32f995ab26ed9c83cae7a7b2d18

I do not see why the station didn’t do this, instead of voluntarily defaming me and defaming me.

Balance

The Edge claims that their “hosts criticised behavior which is unlawful in New Zealand under section 143 of the Crimes Act 1961. We consider this was appropriate, and there is no breach of this Standard.”

However, I contend that absolutely no efforts, much less reasonable efforts, were made to present my competing viewpoint. Indeed, Dom Harvey and cohorts appear to have gone out of their way, by a considerable amount, to denigrate and defame me. I do not advocate bestiality or any criminal behavior, just for legal, if not social, tolerance of harmless practices.

Accuracy

MediaWorks writes, “…the Standard applies only to news, current affairs and factual programming, which this was not… Therefore, there cannot be a breach of this Standard.”

Look, you can’t have it both ways: If the story isn’t factual, it can’t be accurate, now can it? They’ve admitted that the version of the story they’re promoting and using as an excuse to stay out of trouble with the BSA isn’t factual, and therefore, it is inaccurate.

Fairness

MediaWorks itself notes, “There are serious issues with how Dom, Meg and Randell dealt with you and your contribution during the Broadcast. In particular the Committee is concerned about the way the interview was edited and broadcast on 3 April, and the information which Dom Harvey provided to you after the interview, which was misleading and incomplete. …However overall we are satisfied that the storyline or (sic) the 3 April were not unfair to you, and fairly reflects your position in relation to your interactions with Dolly.”

Do I need to say that I manifestly disagree?

MediaWorks then proceeds to list all the considerations for what is fair, which I should not need to repeat here. But they refuse to take responsibility for the deception and treachery they used, saying instead “…we do not accept that this impression was caused by the Broadcast. In the Committee’s view, any negative impression was a result of pre-existing perceptions of bestiality and those who engage in it.”

Gentlepersons, what we are dealing with here is a STEREOTYPE of bestiality. I am college-educated, do not drag my knuckles, and have had sex with women hundreds of times, versus once with a dolphin; I have a biological daughter who designs my book’s covers. MediaWorks has chosen to inflame a rampant and potentially dangerous stereotype of the zoophile; indeed, the law banning bestiality in New Zealand, going back almost six decades, makes us second-class citizens, apparently without the rights granted to everyone else.

Why is this, I wonder?

“We consider that prior to the broadcast you were adequately informed of the intended nature of your participation,” MediaWorks writes. When audience feedback proved overwhelmingly negative to this subject, no word was provided to me. “We would have expected them (the producers) to communicate their decision to you,” MediaWorks notes dryly.

Gentlepersons, I know my story is radical and not popular with some people, and I expect them to oppose me. What I am not prepared for is sabotage, and that is what has been executed here. Perhaps the producers shouldn’t have used the interview at all! “A better decision would have been not to play any part of your interview, rather than playing only the portions of the interview in which Meg reacted to your behavior,” MediaWorks writes, admitting they made a serious goof.

However, it is apparently OK to defame me this way, because Dom, Meg, and Randell spent a couple of minutes discussing the subject on a prior show. How can I agree with their hosts, who don’t even bother with the impression of impartiality? The way MediaWorks allowed its hosts to portray me is like letting a member of the Ku Klux Klan deal with the concerns of the Negro.

The audience never got to hear it “from the horse’s mouth,” as we say here in the States. My experiences and words were interpreted by a hostile crew,  ignored and disparaged, and I was lied to and given false information by MediaWorks and its employees.

MediaWorks admits to this! “The Committee does not approve of the way your interview was edited, and we understand why you might feel you had not been given a reasonable opportunity to comment,” they wrote. Do I need to say more?

Their argument is that, because of a label, zoophile, I should have no rights under New Zealand law. May I point out that I am a human being? Does that stand for something in New Zealand?

The presentation of me on the show was grossly, manifestly unfair. Even MediaWorks agrees.

In short, MediaWorks went out its way to abuse me on the April 3, 2019 Dom, Meg and Randell program; violated its own broadcast guidelines; lied to me about it; failed to keep me informed of developments that affected me; and finally, gave me misleading information, the edited interview, which they never intended to use.

I hope you will demonstrate to the people of New Zealand that such unethical conduct doesn’t pay by condemning what MediaWorks has done, what the producers of the Dom, Meg and Randell show have done, and in particular, what Dom, Meg and Randell have done to me.

Thank you for considering the evidence objectively. – Malcolm J. Brenner