Penis Injury Shock Horror...

A report on the Reuters Health Information site highlights a terrifying new trend in toilet seat dynamics, the Heavy Toilet Seat. These socially irresponsible seats are reportedly causing a rise in penile crush injuries in young boys who fail to stay out of the way as the heavy seat descends and lands on their tender little todgers. This 'report' has arisen because a team of doctors from the Leighton Hospital in Crewe have reported four such injuries in the past several months, an effective doubling of this devastating event.
Now forgive me for rising to the bait but one just can't help it really which I suppose is the whole point. There are several issues evident here.
1.Perhaps evolution has just decided that those too stupid, even at such a young age, to move out of the way should have the instrument of their genetic perpetuation curtailed as it were.
2. Perhaps the residents of the Crewe area are producing toddlers so monstrously well endowed that toilet seat manufacturers will have to develop a special Crewe bog seat to allow for their enormous endowments.
3. Or maybe, just maybe the youngsters of the Crewe area have thought to themselves, in an idle moment, 'I wonder what would happen if I just put that there and....
Whatever is the reason for this quasi-epidemic it certainly gave me a laugh.

Melamine Again

When I was a kid we were not well off. Not dirt poor, just working class making do. I had a couple of maiden aunts with their own business who were better off and I used to spend some time in my holidays helping them out in their work in rural Oxfordshire. To me they were rolling in it and one of my sharpest memories was their new melamine dinner set. Cups, saucers, plates all in vibrant colours and virtually unbreakable. It was the latest thing. To someone whose crockery was thick weekly-market bought remainders this was bling of the highest order. They were almost royalty.
Little did I realise that fifty years down the track this wonder substance would be making a spectacular reappearance only this time I wouldn't be eating off it so much as eating of it.

The melamine scandal just wont go away and it now seems as if several Chinese individuals will be gracing the docks of the Chinese legal system early in the New Year charged with adding melamine to all manner of foodstuffs from pet food (who cares they're only dogs) to baby milk powder ( who care they're only babies) to sweets ( who cares they're only kids) to seafood (who cares they're only consumers). Of course, we can all pat ourselves smugly on the backs and scoff at the lax regulation of the Chinese food industry. But perhaps our self-satisfaction should be tempered but the thought that our own food industry has had so much longer to learn the ropes and cover up their adulterations much better.

Back to my mantra - only eat food with one ingredient.

Have The Coolest Yule and a Fine '09

Just past the hour and the day is upon us. Christmas 2008 is here and the Sales have already started. Rampant commerce has finally invaded the last small space from which it was traditionally excluded. It's the Credit Crunch you know. The catch-all justification for every frowned on practice to be dusted off, dragged out and tried again 'in these straightened times'.

Happy Holidays people.

Who Says Americans Don't Do Irony

You have to chuckle. Kenneth Starr, the bespectacled attorney with the mouth like a hens arse who harrassed Bill Clinton and ploughed through the Presidential muck to highlight Billy the Kid's extracurricular activities with one Monica Lewinsky, has been hired to make sure all the gay couples married under the Californian law permitting gay marriage are now un-married since Proposition 8 has been passed through the legislature. Proposition 8, in case you didn't know and if you're from the UK you probably don't (it hasn't had a lot of coverage this side of the Pond), was the proposition reversing the state permission for gay marriage.
So the pecksniff who formerly made great capital out of extramarital hanky panky is now tasked with ensuring bonking out of wedlock.
It's enough to give you a hernia and yes Alanis, that is ironic.

Whoopee Cushion For The Digital Age

Nothing, it seems, can dent the public's propensity for potty humour. There is, apparently, a rash of fart applications for the iPhone which seem dedicated to little more than making your shiny phaser-like multi-function computer-in-a-cigarette packet into nothing more than a £300 whoopee cushion. The Jesus phone which packs oodles of computing power into it's slim form, can pinpoint your position to within a few feet, post to your blog, text blah, blah, blah is also an amazing flatulence device and has 'em rolling in the aisles. Adolescence, it seems, does last forever.

I went to a Staus Quo concert last night and apart from the relentless volume of the Quo which, to be honest, I find difficult to bear these days (my ears are still ringing this morning which I suppose would be classed by the group as a result of sorts) the one sensual memory that remains is the periodic smell of flatulence from one anonymous audience member who let one go with monotonous regularity. At least the iPhone app hasn't yet achieved the goal of an aromatic application. If it ever does I for one will be staying away from public places forever in case phasers are, indeed, set to stun.

It may seem from the above post that I did not enjoy the Quo or their support act Manfred Mann's Earth Band. Nothing could be further from the truth. MMEBs vocalist, Noel McCalla,  is amazing and the Quo rocked... I could just have done without the aromatic accompaniment.

Pope On A Rope

Not going to get into the whole 'homosexuals as bad as an ecological disaster' thing but it has undoubtedly produced my favourite headline since the last favourite headline. Virgin Male In A Dress Chastises Gay People For Their Confused Sexuality.

Nothing like a good old spat to get the creative juices flowing.

Not Just Defendant That's Going Down Then

It's all going on in St Louis apparently where a convicted murderer is demanding a retrial because of alleged rumpy pumpy amongst jurors and sheriff's deputies who had been put up in a hotel during the trial. Two of the jurors were reported by another member of the same jury for horizontal jogging and two deputies also allegedly had sex whilst on duty. 

I don't know what they're using for air freshener in the courtroom but I can't wait till it reaches the UK.  

How Fast Can These Things Move?

Caught this today and thought 'It's not going to be a good 2009'. 

Why? a) Just look at the size of that thing. b) Anything with triangular eyes is going to have a whole different value system to us - you just know it. c) It's going to have the Isopod equivalent of Spidey-sense and it's going to spookily know that I'm an inveterate consumer of crustacea which must, if family resemblances are anything to go by, be very, very closely related even if only on the distaff side. d)You also just know that at least one of these monsters is going to go over the wire in the not too distant future. I mean how are they going to keep them in? It's not like they're going to need tools to break out. Even if he doesn't need the bolt cutters under his nose, he's carrying his own set of lock picks right there up front bold as brass. This cat is seriously tooled up. He just needs a cape and a Podmobile and it's 'Beware Gotham!' 

Now Weymouth is just down the road and I want to know how much of a head start I've got given that it's going to take the Sea Life Centre anything up to 24 hours to realise one has escaped because the others will be moving around deceptively and hey... you can't tell 'em apart, can you? So probably within a day or two one of these babies could be tap, tap tapping on my front door asking, in the most innocuous way of course, if I've got any spare dead fish and, since spare dead fish is kind of unusual in the Rico household things are, as they say, going to get ugly. These little beauties seem to be the binmen of the ocean floor and you know what happens if you're not nice to your binmen. The terrestrial ones tip your detritus on your door step. I suspect one of these guys will just sever a limb and carry it off to sustain him on his search for dead fish. 

Why couldn't they just have left them where they were? Photos would've fine. Honestly.

Run, Run For Your Lives!

I knew there was something I didn't like about those slimy amorphous gits. Read this and be afraid. Be very afraid

Sam Pepys for the Geek Generation

I will be the first to admit that since his appearance in QI on telly, my view of Mr Fry has been somewhat jaundiced. QI always seemed to me to be just a vehicle for Fry to appear to demonstrate his enormous intellect and personally I found the format indescribably tiresome. Having been a huge fan of his work in his Fry & Laurie and Blackadder days I was sad to turn my face from Stephen but hey, it's only television. What the hell there more enjoyable tripe on other channels. 

Imagine my surprise then, to discover not only his excellent series on America in which he travelled round that enormous continent in a London Black Cab exploring in words and pictures some of America's more arcane crevices, but also that he is a gadget Geek of the most informed and intelligent kind. 

The American show was a delight made all the more so by Stephen Fry's self-deprecating erudition and his abstention from the all-too-easy descent into mockery that parts of American culture seems to invite. The series was an exploration of a diverse country with huge amounts of admirable qualities almost childlike in their enthusiasm. It would have been simple to mock their excesses with a soi-distant British intellectual cynicism and Stephen, to his immense credit, resisted the temptation.

Next I come across this. One of the most sensible, accurate and balanced articles I've read about the smartphone revolution. It should be required reading for anyone interested in the technological evolution and it's effect on society. 

The Curse of Jobs - Part 1

No sooner do I read that the Simpsons are taking a tilt at the behemoth that is Apple and the slow but inexorable rise of the Mac in all its various guises but I see this where Bart, Homer et al. have been implicated in an internet child porn scandal down under. Pshaw! What a world we live in!

Home Secretary gets an ass-kicking from Europe

You really do have to wonder what is going on when the rights of UK citizens are protected by the European Court of Human Rights(ECHR) in direct contradiction to the views held by UK Law Enforcement agencies. But, dear readers, that is exactly what has just happened as the ECHR has ruled that the retention of fingerprints and DNA samples and information on individuals who have not been charged with or convicted of a crime. This inevitably means that the UK own Human Rights regulation must be being breached by the holding of such information and is a small blow for civil liberties in the UK which seem to be under constant from a Government you'd expect to be broadly in favour of our freedoms. It remains to be seen what wriggling the authorities will perform to circumvent this ruling. Watch this space.

On Ennui, Befuddlement - Shit, Piss & Wind - Part 2

So many thoughts, so little brain. 

As property prices continue to plummet at significantly higher rates than even the big lenders are prepared to admit, we have yet to see anyone in the financial sector brought to task for the major cock-up that is the credit crunch. But hey, we now own a bank or two but, if a recent BBC programme is to be believed the levels of repossession have not even hesitated, indeed mortgage holders who have had the misfortune to default are being turfed out of their homes in double quick time. So the innocent loose their homes while the perpetrators of this nonsense smugly count their money. Twas ever thus.

New Labour is dead? As more and more of business is taken into public or part public ownership we see the spectacle of nationalisation by crisis - probably not the kind of private finance initiative the Goverment was hoping for. Whilst Gordon was busily hiving off Government spending to the private sector to get his spending plans 'off the books', the private sector was indulging in the kind of financial legerdemain that would make a street shell game artist blush. And here we are at bottom of the heap paying for the midemeanours of those at the top - plus ca change.

On Ennui, Befuddlement - Shit, Piss & Wind

Long time no post but the baffled mind still struggles with the ridiculous stupidity of the human race which is both terrifying and hilarious in almost equal measure.

Nutters with guns shoot people at random in Mumbai (which I notice some locals interviewed still called Bombay). I don't know when the human race will realise that killing people is a BAD IDEA if you want to be taken seriously in the 'ideas for saving the world' forum. Still, it's been going on since time began and I doubt it's going to stop any time soon. It's unutterably depressing all the same.

Next we have Wacky Jaqui again changing the law on prostitution in the UK with the stated aim of ending the practice. Though the main text is the prevention of trafficking of women and all the abuse and misery that goes with it, the sub-text is undoubtedly the ending of prostitution completely. I wonder what part of the phrase 'oldest profession' our well-meaning Home Secretary doesn't understand and, since clients are to be responsible for ensuring that the women they are hiring aren't trafficked, how she feels about seconding 'johns' into the police force? We have a whole new branch of law enforcement folks, in which the purchasers of women's favours are tasked with determining their employment and immigration status. Since the Home Office can't seem to do this effectively with all the resources at their disposal, I'm not sure how Joe Public, or John Public, is expected to vet their prospective partner with any degree of accuracy. But then it's obviously a way for goverment to outlaw prostitution by the back door if you'll pardon the expression. Good luck with that one.

Oh and the 'Wacky Jaqui reclassifies Wacky Baccy' saga continues with the Government determined to reclassify cannabis despite all advice to the contrary. Advice from experts they themselves employed to advise on the re-classification. Even the members of the House of Lords, not renowned for their rampant drug taking or stoner-support, think this is a bad idea. Jaqui appears to have received her instructions from ACPO and is determined to do all in her power to keep them sweet. 

There have also been warnings from prominent academics that 24-hour rolling news and the speed thereof is bad for our society. Oh really? The recent tea-cup tempest kicked up by Her Majesty's Opposition about whether Gordon and Alastair were considering a rise to 18.5% for VAT is just one example of the kind of nonsense we have to endure daily in order to fill the bottomless cup that is rolling news. Perhaps chamber pot would be a more appropriate metaphor since it more accurately describes the kind of shit, piss and wind with which we are provided daily. For goodness sake, surely any Government has to consider all possibilities and permutations. Are we to be assailed with an infinite number of potential solutions some of which will be so far out of the park as to be rejected out of hand by even the most reactionary administrations. Ho hum, so it goes.

Signage and Tattoo Removal in the Vanguard of the New Economy

Just what we need - more signs. A coroner has called for signs on beaches warning the public of the risk of sand tunnels caving in and suffocating diggers TO DEATH. I live in a wood in Dorset and when I came here ten years ago the few vertical objects that existed had branches on them and pine needles. Now, since the Health and Safety Executive got it's act together we have signs, lots of signs - signs to tell us to stop, signs to tell us to go, signs to tell us how the stop/go thingy works to wit: when the red light shows wait here - WTF? I have lived almost sixty years and never, in all that time, has anyone, ever had to explain to me how a traffic light works but now apparently they do. I even managed, without attending courses, to work out what the red lights flashing over the street junctions in my childhood Dublin(the affectionately known Winking Willies), were about at the age of six. What next - a sign telling me how to read the signs perhaps or regularly spaced signs all round our coastline reading 'Warning! Risk of Drowning'. Still on the positive side this may be just what's needed to prevent coastal erosion.

What about tattoo removal?

What?

You said something about tattoo removal.

Oh yeah that. Well, with all the individuals around proving their individuality by having myriad bits of their bodies drawn on by people with vibrating pencils, there's going to be a HUGE market in tattoo removal techniques when they all wake up and realise how repulsive they all look as their skin begins to sag and their bulges begin to expand with advancing age.

So the Brown/Darling axis need not worry. The economy will be kickstarted by the twin prongs of the booming signage industry and the flowering of the de-flowering business.

Ooo er missus!

STFU!!

Oh Boy, Sparks Are Gonna Fly

If this report is correct and the new prez is trying to control the price of drugs in the USA we should be prepared for a huge fight. Already, as this report suggests, Big Pharma is marshalling its forces to lobby for a free market in health care i.e. the power to charge what they like for their snake oil. This presidencay is shaping up to be one of the most interesting for many a year but if I was the Presidents body guards I'd be increasing my life insurance many-fold. 

God Does Not Exist - What To Believe

Christians, Muslims, Hindus all have a readily identifiable belief system to which, rightly or wrongly, they adhere. Richard Dawkins has made an industry of debunking those beliefs and leveraged himself into the public consciousness by writing extensively, rightly or wrongly, about the delusional nature of religious belief. It would appear very much as if the collaspe of a far more secular delusional belief system, the financial system, is resulting in some very real hardships in the population as a whole and more specifically in the lower strata of the population. It seems we meddle with belief systems at our peril. Prof Dawkins take note.

Natural Foods Not So Natural

Tyson Foods, the worlds largest meat processor and the United States second largest producer of chickens, has been ordered to stop using the labelling stating that their chicken is raised without antibiotics. Why? Well get this. In order to be able to use this labelling, and presumably benefit from additional sales to shoppers who are increasingly concerned about what is being done to ur food and when and where, Tyson foods have been injecting antibiotics into their chickens in ovio, in the egg, before they are hatched. So 'Raised Without Antibiotics' becomes applicable because they haven't hatched yet! WTF? It obviously affects their sales significant;y because they're fighting hard to get the order thrown out and the labelling regs rescinded.
But hey, you know you can trust these people right?

Oh Hello - Not So Perfect After All

It seems that a significant amount of the plastic equipment used in biological research can leach bioactive  substances into the liquids contained therein, or transferred thereby, that can alter the action of those liquids and bastardise the experimental results. Interesting, when the thought police have been loudly proclaiming that Science is the only way forward, that bad science is responsible for the end of the world as we know it. Perhaps they'll accept that the mainstream can be just as fucked up as the whack-jobs quoted in the hatchet job articles published to counteract some of the undoubted rubbish published in the press and elsewhere but I doubt they will. Some day we'll stop car crash journalism and examine interesting anomalies together in a spirit of cooperation but I doubt I'll live to see it. My lucky energy pendant has passed its sell by date.

Ann Nixon Cooper or Joe The Plumber

Nothing could illustrate the differences between the two campaigns in the United States of America better than the citizens chosen by the respective candidates to illustrate Joe Public. While McCain picked Joe The Plumber who was quickly tracked down and turned out not only to have no plumbing qualifications but also to owe the taxman several thousand dollars, Obama picked a 106-year old black woman whose dignity and longevity were evident in equal measure. The contrast could not have been more stark. 

There seems little doubt that, if dignified statesmanship is what's required in a President, then America has made the right choice.

Canvassing the Veggie Vote... Or Not?

This just in via Pharyngula. Roy Brown is appaled at being called a... vegetarian! What a foul calumny to describe this fine upstanding candidate as that most derided of Montana residents, the dreaded Vegetarian.

I was surprised by this story until I recalled the tale of the British TV producer person who, whilst studying the menu, asked a roadside diner waitress in Montana, 'What do you recommend for a vegetarian?' To which said serving wench replied through her gum, 'I recommend you get out of Montana'.

Seems there are worse things than being black.

Settled Dust?

Now the Brand/Ross brouhaha is calming down and Mr Brand has departed the Beeb and Mr Ross is in detention it's time to re-visit to try to work out just what the hell happened. As far as I can gather the show itself only garnered two quite mild complaints. It was the Mail what done it! After an article appeared in the Mail on Sunday a positive a positive tsunami of complaints welled up and consumed the message boards, blogs, emails, listeners forums etc. My own small contribution was just one such. So how to explain this swell of righteous indignation. My assumption is that, like me, many people have been turning away from the Brand/Ross axis of 'humour' largely put off by the presenters' own tendency to go way over the top. As far a Russell Brand is concerned I never listened to him much anyway not because I dislike his stuff but because he was just on at the wrong time and time-shifting by podcast is not yet in my lexicon of available options. Anytime I did listen to him I found him zanily entertaining and only mildly offensive never enough to raise a protest or to switch off. Jonathan Ross on the other hand overstepped the mark so often and with such puerile innuendo that I made a positive decision not to watch or listen to him again but like, I suspect, many others I didn't protest just voted with my off switch. It now appears that there were quite a few of us because the woodwork yielded the tidal wave of approbation that was visited on the BBC post-Sachs. So the Andrew Sachs affair was just the catalyst that released the pent up torrent of dissatisfaction with JRs childishly smutty technique. Sadly Russell Brand and Lesley Duncan have born the brunt of the listening public's disapproval and Mr Ross seems to have suffered a mild wrist slap. Personally I would have reversed the penalties but that's not the world we live in. Jonathan Ross is the senior presenter, is probably paid more, I suspect is more intelligent, knows better, and is much much older. He should know better. He is undoubtedly clever and, I believe, doesn't need to descend to the levels which he has plumbed so regularly.

Enough about the main protagonists and on to the BBC whose inability to have nipped this furore in the bud is simply staggering. Not to have a senior figure in place to be able to head this kind of outcry off at an early stage with the relevant apology and promises of rolling heads etc. etc. is extraordinary. Hopefully they'll learn some lessons from this and we wont see a repeat of this level of ineptitude from our public broadcaster again.

Shock Jocks? Time To Grow Up?

So the BBC has been forced to apologise for lewd messages left on Andrew Sachs' mobile messaging service. I think lewd is a fairly mild term for saying that you had 'fucked' Mr Sachs granddaughter. I've long since stopped listening to or watching Jonathan Ross because of his mysogynistic innuendo which I personally find tediously juvenile and frankly pretty insulting to his guests. It came to a head, if you'll pardon the pun, when he suggested to Katie Price that he was going to go home and 'crack one off' having interviewed her. Jordan, to her credit laughed it off but I found it fairly gratuitously insulting and ceased watching to Ross from that moment onward. Now I don't think that my embargo is going to cause Mr Ross to loose much sleep but I feel better and less 'unclean' for my decision. 

Unfortunately not enough people seem to hold my view so we've now been exposed to the awful synergy of Ross and Brand seemingly stoking each other up to an unacceptable level - unacceptable to at lest 500 listeners and the BBCs subsequent apology. Quite apart from the utter rudeness and lack of consideration of this so-called 'prank', it's the kind of thing most boys grew out of before the age of twenty, the abuse of their respective positions just sticks in the gullet. As far as I'm aware the propagation of obscene messages over the public communications network is an offence so why aren't the boys in blue charging these morons pour encouragé les autres? 

More annoying still is the fact that both of these presenters are really bright people who could be using their talents in amazingly creative ways instead of taking the easy option. I'm not holding my breath.

Prezza Punches His Weight

Huzzah for Prezza. This morning on Radio 4, usually known for it's ambushing of politicians, inviting them onto the programme to discuss one issue then asking them for off the cuff comments on another, John Prescott remained calm and gave Radio 4s new economic skinhead, Evan Davis, a verbal thumping for his cheeky bushwack. Asked onto the Today programme to discuss his TV show on Class in British Society, Davis began to ask Prezza about the Mandelson/Deripaska business. It's obvious that Prescott has taken some ducking and diving lesson in the local gym since his straight left to the electorate of yore because he handled Davis in consummate style deflecting the question adroitly and with not a little humour. JP really is a joy for commentators and not for the same reasons that Mandelson is. He is straightforward and often unintelligible but always worth listening to. I, for one, am going to miss him

Passing It Forward

An article this morning give just praise to Alan Bennett for donating all his works to the Bodlean Library that Oxford institution that houses copies of most of the world's literary heritage. Mr Bennett is reported to have told of his relief as the notes, manuscripts and jottings of a lifetime disappeared off down the road. His rationale seems to have been, partly at least, that his education was State funded so he felt that this selfless donation was almost a duty to give back. Bravo Bennett and more power to your literary elbow, may we be reading many many more of you gems in the future.

Fresh from that uplifting moment I come across this item via Digg, in which some anonymous stranger has bought, at auction, a repossessed house in the States only to give it back to the owner from whom it was repossessed. How cool is that?

It just goes to show that perhaps that sixties idealism didn't die out after all; that a seed of it still survives and is just now ready for germination in this financially turbulent time. Now that the ethos of unfettered greed is being reappraised perhaps the idea of community and collective responsibility is an idea whose time had come.

Presidential or What?

Who looks the most Presidential - Barak Obama or John McCain? Or perhaps Sarah Palin should be up there in the choice because, frankly, McCain ain't looking so hot health-wise. Three times cancer survivor is three times cancer getter n'est-ce pas? So his record on cancer is not to be envied. Does the USA want Sarah Palin as President? Perhaps they do. I heard a lady on Radio 4 this morning saying that we, the British more specifically the British Press, were being superciliously nasty to Ms Palin and that we had misjudged her appeal to the American people. Well dang my britches if that ain't the darndest accusation I ever heeard! Is it too much to ask that a Vice-President, possibly a President, can speak in joined up sentences and knows a little, just a little, whereof she speaks. I know we've all been conditioned to low expectations by eight years of W but maybe we might not be in the shit heap we're currently in if we'd had a President who could read without moving his lips. To replace him with another one who's definitely short on international experience is, to say the least, dangerous. Ms Palin is undoubtedly smart, a cute as a pet fox some might say, but is Alaskan native cunning enough on the international stage. I suspect not.

If You've Done Nothing Wrong...

Did I miss something? Did Bjork and Sigur Ros plant bombs in the London Underground while I was asleep and kill and maim dozens of voters. Because that's the only reason I can think of that Gordon's barmy army of legal eagles could have sanctioned the use of anti-terrorist legislation to freeze Iceland's assets in the UK. It's kinda like your local council nuking your vehicle for illegal parking instead of just giving it a ticket like any normal joe. Admittedly Iceland didn't seem to be handling their own personal financial meltdown very well but holy crap why not just go the whole nine yards and invade. Surely those smoking geysers are hiding places for all kinds of WMDs?
Remember folks, this is the administration that says their uberdatabase, all your information, is safe in their hands. If they're prepared to cripple the economy of an ally using the terrorist legislation what are they going to do to you, you're only a voter. Remind me again. Is this a Labour Government?

Help stop this lunacy now. Check this out and sign the petition. This folks, is not what the anti-terrorist legislation was meant for. But this is the way it starts.

Headline Spotting - Part 1

Newsfeed readers are quite useful but they do throw up some really strange headlines. My first encounter with one of these was the headline 'Gunshot victim critical' and I thought 'well you would be wouldn't you', you're not likely to be complementary. 

Today I come across 'Cemetery owner denies murder plot' and I'm wondering whether he has a special space for murder victims. 

Perhaps it's just me...

Australia - Land of the Bizarre

Via Boing Boing. Anytime you think you'd like to emigrate perhaps you should check out these extraordinary tales from the outback. Not only could you be assaulted in an olfactory manner by fish-lady but you could be chased by hearse-man. God's own country no doubt, who else would want to live there?

Joining the Mobile Revolution

Well, here I am blogging from an iPhone on the move. So now waiting world, you can be kept up to speed with my every trivial hiccup. You lucky people. Moving trash.


-- Post From My iPhone

Winston Smith, Mind Your Back

It comes to something when Big Brother's big brother warns about Big Brother. Wacky Jacqui Smith's proposals to monitor every communication in the UK and store this information on, what the press are calling, an uberdatabase have come under fire from one of the people you'd expect to be right behind such a move. Sir Ken Macdonald, the Director of Public Prosecutions, has issued a warning to the Government not to create irreversible powers that could be misused to spy on individual citizens. It just goes to show how far Ms Smith has travelled down the road to 1984. Do you think, perhaps, Jacqui Smith may be related to Winston Smith who must've been a terrorist given his inexplicable fear of rats who as we all know are nice cuddly animals not the voracious, disease ridden, faithless, sewer-dwelling quadrupeds of fable . Link.

KYC Extends UK Paranoia

Jesus H Christ it's getting worse by the day in the cradle of democracy. Has the whole world gone stark raving mad? Timesonline is reporting news that you will need to present a passport to obtain a mobile phone in future. So that's great. Now as well as having to present two (or is it three now) forms of identification to a person who's been taking my bank deposits for nearly ten years in case I'm money laundering, parroting some laughable excuse for a security check every, repeat every, time I want to discuss my meagre pension with some call-center exotic, being told that my call may be recorded for 'training and security purposes', I now have to produce a passport if I want get a mobile phone which is not much more than a glorified radio tag anyway. Well I've had about enough of this bollocks. Jaqui 'if you've done nothing wrong you've got nothing to fear' Smith has gone too far this time and this worm is ready for turning. I'm about as likely to vote Conservative as I am to stick a loofa up my arse and fart the Marseillaise but David Cameron is looking ever more appealing as the New Labour machine moves into Wermacht territory with Ms Smith as Goebbels goose stepping to the tune of the far right. What the hell happened to the Labour Party? Did someone scoop out their principles and replace them with those of the tin pot ruler of some banana republic. How did we let this happen and how can we reverse it? If Osmam Bin Laden had designed the best possible outcome for his personal jihad he couldn't, in his wildest dreams, have thought that all his desires would have been enacted voluntarily by the free society he so vehemently opposes. Game, set and match Osama Bin L. say I.

Flash Gordon Saves The World

I am gobsmacked by Gordon Brown's chutzpah. Not only is he claiming credit for saving the planet from the results of a financial disaster which has happened partly as a result of the so-called 'light touch regulation' for which his government was responsible but he now has the unmittigated gall to stand in front of a British electorate and claim that unfettered capitalism is responsible for the disaster and that greater regulation is the answer. This is like an arsonist throwing water on a fire he himself stared and then claiming credit for putting it out. 

Un-f**king-believable. Link.

On Size and Why It Matters

When I first saw this I thought someone had unearthed some more gen on the Rolling Stones/Marianne Faithful tale, a modern urban myth with much to recommend it. Or that maybe there had been a 21st century parallel that had passed me by in my webside trawlings. But then I realised that the modern Mars confection was way to small for even the most modest popshot and on further investigation (i.e. reading the blog) that the actual story was far more mundane. Shame.

Flann O'Brien - Years Ahead of His Time

This item via Make about photographs of a jeans distressing factory in Kentucky made me realise what a true visionary the Irish writer and satirist Flann O'Brien really was. O'Brien, whose Myles na gCopaleen column in the Irish Times raised titters at Dublin breakfast tables from the 1940s for some decades, observed in one of his myriad flights of fancy, that many owners of newly commissioned mansion houses ordered, as part of the decor, books by the yard and that the observant visitor might deduce, by the obvious lack of use of said books, the owner's Philistine nature. He proposed to fill an evident gap in the market with a Book Distressing Service in which, for varying reward, he and a team of carefully trained distressers would punish the books in as an artistic fashion the owner could afford so that they might be spared the embarrassment of a virgin tome adorning their carefully tasteful libraries. The stages of distressing ran from the basic (worrying by small but determined terriers specially trained for the job) to erudite dedications by the author in the flyleaves to the current owner of the book complete with wine stains and railway tickets from exotic locations placed as 'forgotten' bookmarks. I've no doubt that he has a wry smile on whatever passes for a face now and is at this moment perparing a law suit claiming copyright on his brilliant idea.

Annals of NSS Vol.1

In the No Shit Sherlock awards October 2008 special mention must surely go to the piece of research published in Clin. J. Sports Medicine, September 2008 in which it was noted that sliding head first down a water slide could, mind you could, result in devastating spinal chord injuries. Who'd have guessed?

You Can Take A Pitbull out of Alaska...

There's been great fun had at the selection of Sarah Palin as Vice Presidential candidate for the Republican Party and her seeming inability to string together a sentence without a folksy wink or a 'you betcha!' Quite what the McCain team thought would be the up-side of their selection is anyone's guess but as the McCain campaign staggers and lurches from one indecisive statement to the next you can't help but remember that pitbulls are generally rather loyal mutts with an ineffable good humour. These don't seem to be qualities that Ms Palin has in a superabundance so the term may well be misplaced. However, they do have a very high pain threshold, a very thick skin and an unfortunate propensity for turning on their owners with somewhat painful results. So perhaps not so misplaced then and McCain would do well to keep his particular attack dog on a very short chain.

Horses For Courses

So Katie Price, our very own silicone valley doll, is fighting for the masses to subue the rampant class prejudice in the horsey world. I don't think so. Katie is doing what she does so very well, keeping herself in the headlines of the twittering tabloids who seem to have a never ending appetite for the minutiae of her glittering lifestyle. I happen to think that Jordan, for it is she, is a genius at manipulating the media and, frankly, deserves every reward that ensues from satiating the great British public's need for gossip/sleaze/drivel. What I wont stand for, however, is that she's engaged in some sort of class war in which she represents Joe Public in an uphill struggle against the aristocratic equestrian set who would like to ostracise her on the grounds that she's 'not one of us'. Having worked in the horse world for the thick end of thirty-five years, I know that it's peopled by everyone from our own dear Queen to those who are just one generation from the travelling community, indeed the travelling community have a reverance for good horse flesh that would make the Queen envious. So Jordan's class war is just what it is a PR exercise. Let's not paint her as anything other than what she is - a damn fine business woman with considerable assets not least of which is her sharp brain and PR genius.

Child Pornographers Really?

It seem that a fifteen year old from Newark, Ohio might be labelled as a sex-offender for sending naked cellphone pictures of herself to other minors (presumably her friends). If convicted all sorts of doom and destruction will be visitied on her for at least ten years and she'll be branded as a child pornographer. For goodness sake, we all had our naked moments in childhood and early adolescence didn't we? No? That's just me then.
I'll get me coat. Link

Gordon's Sticky Fingers

Yeah, yeah I know it's not spelled the same but how the hell would I get the headline if accuracy was my main concern? Michael Douglas' role in Wall Street seems likely to have little in common with the green lizards you see walking up walls in your cheap Spanish condo apart from the reptilian stare, but gekkos are some cool little dudes with amazingly sticky fingers (not so unlike Wall Streets finest after all then) and now, it seems, scientists have used the secret of the tacky lizards to formulate a substance that is three times stickier than any other glue. That is some sticky shit!
I might just have to blag some of this stuff so that I can hang onto what little money I'll have left after paying for our bankers bonuses. Link

More Power to the Whipmeister

So Max Mosley is taking the fight to the gutter press by way of the European Court of Human Rights. Well good on him. It's about time the disingenuous dickwads at the News of the World and similar sleazoid trash got themselves hosed by someone and if that someone needs to wield the big stick why should it not be Max who enjoys a bit of stick-wielding. Mosley's family have been put through the wringer simply so the reptiles could embarrass him and as he pointed out this is a weekly event in which some poor sod's life is microscopically disected in public with little or no thought given to the effect it has. It's a sad comment on Britain that these comics sift through the septic tank of our sad little world and see how many of the big lumps they can get on the front page. However, parasitic as they may be hooked on in the large intestines of society, it's the buyers of these papers who are the real coprophagics.

Singer and Songwriters Myopic? Discuss

Every week some smug troubador dribbles on about how hard life is for a struggling artist and how they're going to sell straight to their fanbase and cut out the Big Bad Wolf of the music industry. Burbles on about how the record company don't understand them and don't increase their revenues despite the fact that digital distribution must have reduced costs significantly. So they're going to fire up a website and sell their 'art' to the fans direct. Well how the fuck do they think they got the fans in the first place. They got 'em because some music industry type bunged a five of six figure advertising and PR budget at a fledgling popster or popstrelle and propelled them, by the power of money, into the public's consciousness. Last week it was Kate Nash and some other johnny/jackie-come-latelys who frankly wouldn't have been given the time of day without some PR person pumping their story to the heavens. There is no doubt that the music industry as a colony (bit like slime molds but with less integrity) is oozing about trying to plot a path through the new paradigm or even trying to define the paradigm which is still shifting on a weekly, if not daily, basis but there's still things they do quite well and blowing up the skirts of the press in general and the music press in particular is one of them. Selling the back story to infiltrate the artist into a jaded buyers short little span of attention is one thing they do very well indeed. They've kept the interest in Coldplay going while they whined their way through three cloned albums before making a reasonably interesting fourth. They've miraculously maintained radio interest in Dido, whose lastest single is getting amazing amounts of airplay despite sounding identical to virtually all of her first album. (Jesus H Christ talk about music to knit entrails to). So before these mediocre talents throw themselves at the mercy of the internet downloader they should consider just how it was their moderate accomplishments clawed their respective ways to the top of the playlists cos it sure as hell wasn't entirely on merit

From the Annals of 'Ya Couldn't Make It Up'

It seems that the Welsh and their sheep antics just wont go away. Now comes a report of the North Wales Police Force tasering a runaway ram on the A55 near Bodelwyddan last week. Since most of the traffic seems to have stopped and some of the onlookers, showing a deal more sense than the local plod, had tried to herd said ovine off the road and back to the safety of his paddock there wasn't much, if any, danger to the public. Tasering the poor beast seems significantly OTT. But you know boys and their toys. Once they've got 'em they just can't resist playing with 'em.

High Profile Victim of The Parasites of Fleet Street

There's nothing the public seems to love more than watching a high profile talent implode in public. Recent reports suggest that Amy Winehouse is in a suicidal state and threateneing to end it all. Anyone who believes that this girl is not a major talent need only listen to her recorded output. Anyone who believes that she is not seriously disturbed need only watch one of her recent live performances. The contrast tells its own story.

What her handlers think they are doing shoving her on stage in the state she's been in on her last few outings is anybody's guess but they're certainly not looking after her welfare. This is a huge shame and I can only hope she has finally reached a tipping point from whence the only way is up. We can't afford to loose talent like this through carelessness.

World Ends Tomorrow - Part 2

Part 1 was the firing up of the Large Hadron Collider and was an anticlimax of giant proportions but Part 2 tomorrow, tomorrow may well be different as a 5m asteroid is due to augur in somewhere in Northern Sudan at 2:47UT. A 5m asteroid might not seem like a whole hell of a lot but I'd rather not be too near the thing when it hits though Southern Europe and Northern Africa will see a spectecular re-entry. It may be that all our financial worries will be over by 2:50. It's been fun. 

Warning - Eat Food With One Ingredient Only

More evidence, if more were needed, that much of the food industry's priority is profit and that customer's health and long-term welfare is lower on it's list than its balance sheet. The scandals of pet food adulteration and the crap that some processing companies added to pet food formulae to bring it up to 'spec' seems to have passed inevitably to the human food industry. So we have the spectacle of children being diagnosed with kidney stones because some bright spark thought melamine was a protein additive with which they could safely bulk up their product undetected. They'd have probably got away with it except they got the proportions wrong and overdosed hundreds of children and it all blew up in their faces. But it goes to show the old adage that 'the more they f**k about with it, the less you want to eat it' is a survival technique for the 21st century. They will scarf up your food and sh*t all over it if it makes an extra few pence. Link.

Just Another Manic Monday

Credit crunch blah blah, Sub-Prime blah blah, Robert Peston blah blah, Iceland bust blah blah, house prices down blah blah, Bradford & Bingley blah blah, Angele Merkel blah blah, FTSE down blah blah, banks worried blah blah etc etc etc ad infinitum. Apart from that nothing much is happening.

Snodland Big Cat - No, Not a Joke

Here in Dorset, big cat sightings are reported regularly but there is no known photographic evidence to back up the reports. Now from Snodland in Kent comes this. Now that's a pretty big cat. I'm not sure how big but I wouldn't like to have to worm it. 
So is it possible that this guy/girl comes the Dorset on holiday or is just part of a government big cat job relocation programme. I think we should be told.

Boris The Spider

The blonde bombshell whose bufoonery, I am reliably informed, hides a sharp intellect has called time on the beleagured Sir Ian Blair. Weaving his web around London Boris has effectively removed his support for the Metropolitan police commisioner who is already under attack from shadowy forces within the force. 

The Force is obvously not strong in Sir Ian Obi Wan. 

I can no longer feel his presence. 

Gone he is.

Poacher Turned Gamekeeper - Almost Literally

The Johnny Rotten butter commercial is now in the wild and Mr Rotten's clarion call for Country Life butter has him looking like a naughty child who's found the squire's jumble sale box. Still it could be worse. At least the antichrist wont have any trouble getting his bread toasted or they could have altered the spelling of Country. Link.

Joan As Spokeswoman

I was reminded last night of things as they used to be before we all got smug and self-satisfied and started to trust 'the man'. Watching Joan Baez at the Royal Albert Hall was like being transported back to those heady days in the sixties when we all thought that the world was going to change because the brokers and the sharks knew we were onto them and they had nowhere to run and nowhere to hide. It was all so heady and idealistic and then somewhere along the line their representatives put on their best squaline smile and invited Joe Public to join them at the trough and we fell for it. Not all of us took the bait and, I suspect, Joan Baez was one of the few that remained clear about the threat from naked economic greed. Last night at the RAH she cycled back through a 50 year career in the protest business and proved that she still has what it takes. But Joan does it in such an extraordinary way that it almost defies description. She is like the still point at the centre of events that seeth around her, a gentle but immovable fulcrum providing the focus of the leverage needed to effect change. As we watched her performance it was impossible to think of her as anything but one of the worlds permanent features. An elemental treasure that we are not likely to see repeated given the self-centred self-satisfaction of most of our music industry figures. You could count on the fingers of one hand the voices that stand up for the kind of values that Joan has espoused over a lifetime. They sing and they shout those few, but nobody's listening.

Surveillance Society - What Me Worry?

The Open Right Group is proceeding to a massive mosaic illustrating Britain's steady slide in to a database state. Do your bit. Link.

New Metaphor for a New Century

I am proud to announce, in these formative years of the oughties, a new, fresh, appropriate metaphor for the new millennium. A metaphor brought to you by my very own genus Rattus. Ladies and gentlemen may I present to you 'rarer than rat vomit'. 

What's wrong with the traditional rocking horse shit/hens teeth metaphor? I hear you cry.

Well that's just so 20th century is my swift response.

What's so rare about rat vomit? Surely they eat all sort of crap, ergo they must vomit.

Not so. See here. They regurgitate but that's not the same. It does not achieve the projectile nature of the vomit and is mechanically quite different. Regurgitation is a vomit manque, a mere shadow of your projectile hurl. 

So, my rodent millennial metaphor - I thank you.

World May End with a Toot Rather than a Bang or a Whimper

Latest doomsday scenario comes to us via the Grauniad where we are told that some scientists believe that an expellation of methane from the Siberian seabed - a sort of global fart if you like. Now methane is 21 times more potent as a heat trap than carbon dioxide so the end result, if you'll pardon the phrase, could be a rapid early onset of extreme global warming. Methane released from the seabed is, according to the article, mostly consumed by micro-organisms but a major trump could make it into the atmosphere where it could precipitate a rapid acceleration of atmospheric warming. As apocalyptic visions go this is one of the best. The idea that this noble endeavour we call a planet could terminate with one gloriously all-enveloping fart just goes to prove my suspicion that the Supreme Being has a truly galactic sense of humour.

As a footnote it also proves that the West Virginian police who charged an individual for farting with extreme prejudice were so obviously ahead of the curve on this one.

As a verruca-note (below footnote) that charged has been er... dropped on instructions from the assistant prosecutor. Probably for lack of tangible evidence.

Ya couldn't make it up!

New Labour(Conservative Lite) Introducing Orwell for the Rest of Us

Cory Doctrow over on Boing Boing has written a scary piece on how he, as a non-British resident will have to carry one of the new biometric ID cards. Remember folks, this brave new world is being brought to you by the Association of Chief Police Officers centre-fold pin-up lickspittle Jaqui Smith our beloved Home Secretary. ACPO says, 'Jump!' Jaqui says 'How high?'

George Orwell would have been proud of her dedication to making the people of Britain into the most spied upon, most tracked, most databased population on the planet. But hey, if you've done nothing wrong, you've got nothing to fear. Tell that to Jean Charles De Menezes or Stefan Kizko or any of the numerous other victims of the miscarriage of justice in this fine and pleasant land.

To paraphrase Neil Kinnock, we are being treated to the spectacle of a Labour Government, a Labour Government, scuttling round slicing huge raw lumps off our liberties in the name of security. Seems that they only have to scare us shitless to gain themselves carte blanche to massacre the very society hundreds of our dedicated forbears worked so hard to achieve.

That these abominations should be foisted on us by a governmet purporting to be left-wing is all the more ironic.

Good Job No One Told 'Em About Bangers

I dunno, one incident and the whole of North America goes batshit crazy. Post 11 September (no I wont call it that!) the law enforcement bods in the good old US of A seem to have developed what can only be described as pre-emptive trigger finger syndrome (PTF). This manifests itself in a ludicrously over the top reaction to mudane occurrences. Clocked this on Digg and wondered what would have happened if a cockney had called this in reporting a package of 'bangers' lost and alone in Philly. True there was some duct tape in evidence and as we all know duct tape is dangerous stuff but to overcook these delicacies with an explosion, however controlled, must rank as slightly OTT. Link.

Accentuate the Positive, Eliminate the Negative and...Fish!

I love this triumph of the human spirit in the face of disaster. No, not famine, flood or pestilence but the sad loss of one of lifes little gems - an iPhone. Having accidentally dropped his iPhone into a river this guy has turned his bricked phone into fishing lures in an attempt to hook another species on the Jesus phone. Nice one. Link.

Laugh and the World Laughs With You, Fart.....

This small hiatus via Boing Boing shows that flatulence will get you charged and I don't mean in a good way.
If odour is to be regarded as the use of deadly force then there are certain individuas of my acquaintance who should be locked up now to prevent deeds of extreme violence roaming our streets. It's not just your gat that you keep under your arm.

Milk of Human Kind

Publicity whores PETA are suggesting that Ben & Jerrys, ice cream makers to the stars, should use only human milk in their confections. WTF? People complain when mothers breast feed in public. If we can't even let people feed their own children their own milk what chance has Ben & Jerrys got feeding it to the masses?

Reaction so far has pointed out that there will be drug pollution and possible disease issues if this radical policy is pursued. What, they think cows milk is free from such risks? Link

There's One Born Every Minute - No.956

I make no comment, no judgement. Just read this.

This person could be teaching your kids or flying your plane. I don't know which of these two scenarios is the more frightening.

What A Difference a Few Thousand Miles Make

UK/USA - CEO screws up and bank/investment house/hedge fund, looses millions/goes titsup/melts down. CEO 'leaves' with £millions golden handshake/parachute, a fond farewell and a wry smile.
India, Uttar Pradesh - CEO screws up industrial relations, sacks employees and 125 of them break in and beat him to death with iron bars (via The Register).

Perhaps the FSA could convene a focus group in Uttar Pradesh and learn a few things? Might concentrate the minds of the money boys a bit.

Something Rotten in the Milk Churn

This just in via the Guardian's Media Monkey. Squire of all that's punk and scourge of mini-Welsh popstrelle Duffy and the Queen (not necessarily in that order), John Lydon, aka Johnny Rotten, is to appear in an advertisment for Diary Crest Country Life Butter. How punk is that? Never mind Flogging a Dead Horse how about the solidified juice of a live cow?

Tasteless Comments Section the First

I see that The Zombies will be doing a commemorative tour in 2009 signalling the 40th anniversary of their now recognised album Odessey & Oracle which BTW is fantastic. Unfortunately one of the original group, Paul Atkinson, has departed and gone to that great gig in the sky. So, should he appear on stage during this tour you'll know where they got their name from.

LHC Leaking Helium and Dodgy Transformers

According to news recently the Large Hadron Collider has been shut down by a helium leak and a transformer glitch. I can't help it but I get this enduring image of Optimus Prime with the voice of Minnie Mouse exclaiming 'Smack my glitch up!' 
Help me! My reference points are melting!

How Fast Are Your Reflexes?

I notice today that our esteemed Chancellor of the Exchequer has ruled out a kneejerk response to the regulation of the piggies whose greed has been a major contributing factor to the current financial chaos. Kneejerk? If my reflexes were as slow as the FSAs responses I'd be six feet under. They make tectonic plates look positively frenetic.

Home On the Range

I know who Paris Hilton is. I wish I could say I didn't but I do because she's all over the news every time you open a paper. Now it seems that two of her dogs have been eaten by coyotes. Her mutts are left outside at night, an open invitation, evidently, for the boys in the 'hood to mosey on over and get down. Given that they are presumably handbagged sized canines they make great coyote canapes for the Hollywood Dog Pack mob. What her 'pack' needs is a large empty enclosed space and I'd like to propose the one between her ears. 

But perhaps I'm being unkind.

Spit and Polish or Maybe Vice Versa

Exciting news from Dorset where the Cerne Abbas giant, currently a shadow of his former self, is to get a makeover to spruce up his image. Volunteers will re-chalk his well-endowed outline to afford sightseers with a view of his, er, gigantic majesty. No doubt there will be much sniggering on the hillside as this ancient monument gets his outline polished. Ooo err missus.

Post script: a famed Dorset biscuit is known as the Dorset Knob. Can't think where the name came from. 

Oh do stoppit, now!

Serious Narcotic Dandruff Situation

This just in via BBC. Two women from Derby have been arrested in Jamaica whilst trying to board a plane heading for London. Police suspect that they were trying to smuggle cocaine with a street value of £170k under their wigs or they have a really serious case of dandruff.
Now there's a thought maybe with a little judicious genetic engineering we could develop a narcotic dandruff and slash our drug-miles down to the short trip from head to nose. How green is that?

Literacy Proves Your Nefarious Purpose

File under 'World Gone Mad'. A 10-year old was suspended from school in NY, USA for bring the blade (3/4" x 1/4") from his broken pencil sharpener to school. The school principal involved the local police who had to write and file a report on the incident. 
One of the comments was probably the most sensible thing to come out of this whole mess when Maussist posted "I worry about the day grade school educators realise that the pen is mightier than the sword.
Literacy will become evidence of being skilled with a deadly weapon". 

In the words of one V Meldrew "I don't believe it!" Via Boing Boing

Baraknophobia - How to Engender Fear & Loathing in the American Electorate

TV conditioning is paying off for the GOP in the presidential brouhaha across the pond. Just the faintest suggestion that Obama has cast a sexist slur at the Palin person has been enough to provoke howls of faux anguish from Republicans across America. The five minute attention span of most voters means the far-right spin machine has only to make the accusation and the chattering classes heave themselves upright briefly on their nationwide sofas and bray their disgust on cue. It matters little that McCain himself used this attack in a blatantly sexist way against Hilary Clinton, Sarah Palin started the ball rolling by paraphrasing this old joke in a speech of her own or that Obama was not, in fact, referring to Palin at all, the mere suspicion of a sexist remark towards their new pin up has a significant percentage of the American right breaking out the sheets and the sisal and heading for the nearest tall tree. Ho hum we've got weeks of this shit to come and if it weren't so scary it'd be laughable. The merest hint that this wrinkled old scrotum and his bat-shit mad running mate might be occupying the White House is enough to make me want to find my own beam and perform my own rope trick.

Typo or Freudian Slip

A constant typo of the last few days has been the Large Hardon Collider which immediately raises images of upstanding members engaged in a sort of fleshy fencing tourney. But perhaps that's just me.

Die Another Day

As I travelled to work yesterday, listening to the breathless hyperbole of Andrew Marr on the firing up of the CERN death-ray, er Large Hadron Collider, I realised that the world was going to end as I was going to work and I was going to miss all the fun but then I reminded myself that I could always watch it again when I got home on the BBC iPlayer. Ain't technology brilliant!

Double Standards - Part the First

A constant and repeating pattern of criticism of the alternative/complementery/natural medicine field from the like of Edzard Ernst et al. is that it's largely based on anectdotal evidence and poor science. Leaving aside the fact the empiricism is, of itself, a valid theoretical model and that much of Ernst's work is based on anaylsis of the research of others( so-called meta-anylsis), not original work, have we not just spent upwards of $3 billion and 15-20 years to build the largest detector of a theorectical particle, the Higgs boson? Interestingly, even if they fail to find said miniscule item this will be considered money well spent. Absence of evidence is, as they say, not evidence of absence.

World Ends Wednesday. Put It In Your Diary

Isn't science brilliant! The finest brains of the human race never tire of smashing things up. Pulling them apart to see what happens. 

Pull the wings off flies in the classroom and you're sent to bed without your tea, do it in a laboratory and your liable to be lined up for a Nobel Prize or two. No wonder we're confused.

Tomorrow they fire up the Large Hadron Collider with the aim of discovering fundamental particles foremost of which is the Higgs boson. Some doom merchants are convinced that this will destroy the world as we know it and some cynics may say this would be no bad thing - bring it on.
See you tomorrow - maybe.

Arachnophobia Cure

Based on a psychological technique called flooding you could conceivably cure your fear of spiders here. Alternatively you could flee screaming into the night. Chose one.

Tough but not Exactly Cuddly

Tardigrades (stage name water bears) have been sent into space where they seem to have survived cosmic radiation, the vacuum conditions of deep space, starvation, extremes of temperature and everything that the versatile scientific minds studying them can dream up - and all without even wearing a vest.
I swear I've seen some of these guys staggering home from the pub in Newcastle. Link.

Who Knew?

So a Brit invented the iPod or rather the digital music player. Apparently Kane Kramer came up with the idea of a digital music player in 1979 but in typical British fashion let the patents slip through his fingers because of a lack of funding. His 'prior art' however has just been acknowledged and used by Apple to defend itself against a patent suit by Burst.com and it seems as if he might get a payout on his idea after all. Nice old Apple, though I'm sure it's enlightened self-interest I'm equally sure Mr Kramer doesn't care.

This is not the first time a Brit has rained on an American parade. The windsurfer patent was successfully challenged in the UK  thus breaking the patent in Europe and incidentally opening the way for a major amount of innovative development of the sailboard. Peter Chilvers, a 12-year old Chichester schoolboy was responsible for this spoiler as he'd fixed a sail to a board years before the American company Windsurfing International had filed its patents.

Britain, pissing on American bonfires since 1984

Island Life and Insanity

Living on the Isle of Purbeck is a Dorset idyll and for ten months of the year it's utter bliss. In July and August, however, Mr World + dog descends on this picturesque peninsula (not an island despite its title) and the peninsula wars begin. Like any war there are a series of battles. 

The Battle of Parking in which the year-long residents struggle to find a spot to rest their wheels. Personally I take to two wheels (motorised, I'm not a complete idiot) to avoid the nightmare of finding a parking space. 

The Battle for the Streets. For some reason holiday makers seem to thing that a) they are indestructible and b) the normal traffic regulations have been suspended for the duration of their visit. Since all these visits overlap in the high season months the towns in Purbeck seem to become pedestrianised by democratic vote at this time and the normal pavement-street delineation is put on hold. 

The Battle of the Beach where interesting territorial tribal rites take place and strange behaviour abounds. At what stage in our evolution did someone think 'Hey, here's a stretch of sand with people, some of them quite small people, sitting/lying/standing shoulder to shoulder, let's play football/frisbee/any activity involving hurling projectiles long distances to inept catchers'.

So the towns are invaded by people on foot and the countryside is invaded by people on bikes and people on foot and people in cars all with the view that Purbeck is a great big playground, and so it is. Much of the area's economy depends on this annual influx and its attendant cash deluge but things seem to be changing and not for the better. People are ruder, more aggressive, demand more consideration but offer less in return. What was once a minor but acceptable irritation is rapidly becoming unbearable. All this seem to be a function of an increasing population density in every sense of the word. Too many people to the square mile and too many thick people.

It's been know for some time that if you cram rats into smaller and smaller cages they eventually start to eat their own young and all sort of aberrant behaviour is initiated by overcrowding. My own young are too big to eat but some of the younger, tenderer offspring on the beach are beginning to look extremely appetising.

How Long Will It Take?

Oh boy. Nationwide Building Society has just been merged with two smaller building societies. How log will it be, I wonder, before there are calls for Nationwide to become a 'bank'. It's been tried before but, thankfully, resisted (one of the reasons I still have an account with the Nationwide). But the pressure will be on for all those funds to be accessible.

Blessed are the greedy for they shall remain insatiable.

iPhone, I Has One

I finally succumbed. I have put off my iPhone purchase and with an immense effort of will resisted buying the original version. Waited impatiently for the 3G version and snapped one up as soon as they hit the UK. 

I've been an Apple fan since 1987 when a magazine designer friend introduced me to a little ol' Macintosh SE and changed my computing experience for ever. Damn but they do just work. I've never wanted to tinker under the bonnet (hood) but I just wanted an easy access point to all that processing power and Apple has delivered that consistently for the last twenty years. (I left my new SE with my nine year-old daughter for twenty minutes and when I returned she was better with the GUI than I was. Today with eight self penned albums under her belt she's a confirmed Mac addict and all of her writing and most of her recording and production had been done on Macintosh computers. So neither of us needs much convincing when a new Apple product hits the streets.)

I'd toyed with the old iPhone in my local O2 store, loved the interface but put off and put off the purchase waiting for the 3G. I swore I wouldn't indulge in the kind of hysterical enthusiasm that greeted the original iteration in the US. No, I'm British, aloof, above all that early adopter stuff. Eventually when it arrived I could resist no longer. Now, a month and a half down the iPhone route and I couldn't be more pleased. Apple just seem to be able to make technology sexy. It's a beautifully simple interface which just does what you need it to do and then goes the extra distance to make the user experience a pleasure rather than a chore. The Apps Store is brilliant delivering apps to the phone quickly and automatically installing them and a good percentage of them are free. The phone connects and syncs with my desktop Mac seamlessly and without a hitch. The only issue I have at the moment is the battery life which only just lasts a day and I'm by no means a heavy user. But, hey, I'm an Apple fan and I can forgive the meagre battery life. For me the laid back user interface more than makes up for any shortcomings.

The only fly in my ointment is that Steve Jobs. He just too cool the bastard. He's about my age. He has squillions. He always looks relaxed (even if he isn't). He's been responsible for some of the most desirable techno products on the planet and to cap it all he has a more exotic illness than me. I'm just glad he lives on a different continent. I'd never get a shag.

Gadd Fly Not

The forlorn sight of Gary Glitter meandering round international airports in the Far East with his carrier bag, was a sad sight. It was all so unnecessary too if Jacqui Smith had resisted the temptation to shoot her mouth off to appease the press with a suitable soundbite. I don't blame Me Gadd for not wanting to set foot in a country whose Home Secretary has publicly announced that he would be effectively imprisoned again if and when he returned to the UK. Her statement that he wouldn't be allowed to leave the country if he returned was yet one more example of her pandering to the media. There are others, like the re-re-classification of cannabis, which seem to be designed more to appease the media than the electorate or the teams of experts she has to advise her.

Both statesmanship and humanity seem sadly lacking in New Labours new Britain.

Decluttering

I find myself increasingly selective about what I read on my newsfeeds. Using NetNewsWire makes subscribing to multiple feeds just so damn easy that I recently found I was trying to keep up with hundreds of feeds every day and was spending most of my time doing it. Apart from the fact that many articles are duplicated on multiple feeds some of the stuff is such unutterable crap that I suddenly wondered why I was letting it clog up my brain and take up my time. So I've been pruning it radically recently. Pairing the feeds to some essentials (news & current affairs), some technology & science and some whimsy. First to go, I have to say, was Digital Spy which seems so preoccupied with the vacuous garbage that is Big Brother that over 50% of its posts seem to have been devoted to regurgitating the minuitiae of a dozen brain dead publicity seekers competing for their fame filled 15 minutes. Why I even subscribed is anybody's guess. I suppose some brief flare of interest was aroused by the Winehouse train wreck that seems to have weekly epsiodes in their posts. I suddenly realised, as I tutt-tutted over her latest skeletal photo that I and others like me were part of her problem and that my absence was required and now.

Since then I've been slowly paring down my intake of 'news' and so, I hope, prolonging my dementia-free years by a few months since my brain is not filling up with useless trivia at nearly the same rate as it was.

I was struck some years ago by the Alexi Sayle theory of finite memory capacity which states that once that capacity is reached, one is in danger of forgetting some thing really important like how to breath or walk since this knowledge will be pushed out of memory by the latest FTSE index drop or the knowledge of a traffic jam on the M6. Since I'm approaching my sixth decade that overflow point must be close. I have no wish to rush to a dribbling dotage and the purge continues.

Synchronicity and Its Perils

Listening to Terry Pratchett tonight, an author incidentally who is as visionary as he is humorous and who has given me huge enjoyment, I heard him expressing the disquiet he felt when the plot of a story that he had written seemed to echo the tidal wave that had just engulfed vast areas of the world and admitting that he had held off from publishing the story in case it was seen as opportunism. My daughter is a singer-songwriter who, I believe, is immensely talented and had written a beautiful song called December in New York but the misfortune of her timing was that it appeared just before the awful events of the Twin Towers. Although her team wanted her to release it as a single she felt, at that time,  that it would have been entirely inappropriate and the song remains a beautiful, but unknown track, on one of her albums. This led me wonder how many other artists have had this problem.

BTW expect to hear more thoughts from me on the music industry, it's current shortcomings and the shifting paradigm brought about by the web thingy. They (my thoughts) wont be all that complimentary.

Extolling the Virtues of Your Own B(l)og

Have you ever been a house guest for the weekend and found it absolutely impossible to use the lavatory with any degree of relaxation. I don't mean number ones obviously, the attendant pitfalls of unwanted and thunderous gaseous noises don't accompany number ones. No, it's number twos that are the problem. The consequent sound effects of the bowel evacuation procedure are just too embarrassing even with the closest of friends and so you end up holding it in until you get home whereupon you have what Vic Reeves' straight man once referred to as 'a nice relaxing poo'. It must be some kind of territorial imperative. I suppose I wouldn't be nearly as coy if I were a grizzly bear and I might be smearing my faeces as high as I could reach up the bathroom wall. Probably wouldn't be asked back. Hmm, now there's a thought.

I only mention it now because this seems to be what's happening now in my own blog. Using other people's blogs isn't the same and I seem to be suffering from the relaxing poo syndrome and it seems to be pouring out of me, so to speak. 

Yes and so far it's shit, I hear you cry. 

But I hope it'll improve. 

So do we!

Write here, write now

Oh how derivative!

What?

Your title.

How so?

It's been done before.

So?

Don't you have any original thoughts?

Original in what way.

Well, stuff that hasn't been done before, new stuff, untouched by human mind.

But everything's been used before.

How so?

See those letters you just used in your querulous response to my title?

Yes.

Well they've all been used before numerous times.

Oh don't be so disingenuous, of course the letters have been used before but it's the order they're used in to form words and the arrangement of the words to form sentences and the order of the sentences etc. - you catch my drift?

Oh I catch your drift all right. Plagiarising other people's use of letters is OK, adaptation of four words is not. Stealing the combined letter utterings of generations of writers, scribes and men and women of letters is OK, but if I adapt four single syllable words it's not.

You're being deliberately obtuse.

Of course - it's what I do.

I'm beginning this blog which will be of indeterminate length with this minor internal dialogue to explain why I don't do blogs. It just takes too much time. By the time my multiple personalities have argued themselves to a writers block I'm just too exhausted to do anything other than languish on the sofa with a glass of wine and not watch Big Brother. Hence the indeterminate nature of this blog.

I may be back....or not.