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.