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.