Glob-a-log

So, it would seem that the tourist towns on both side of the English Channel have, in the nick of time, survived a very close shave indeed:

“Beaches along the English Channel have been reopened to swimmers amid reports that a suspected crocodile sighted close to busy beaches was in fact a piece of wood.”

Of course, if they’d used Ockham’s Razor, no journalist would ever have assumed that the Channel had suddenly started to channel the Nile, with its crocs dressed up as trees routine.

On the other hand, not many journalists (especially during the summer) are on speaking terms with the famous Barber of Ockham, even though his basic idea that ‘entities must not be multiplied beyond necessity’ could be the motto of every tabloid that ever boasted a pendulous pair of Page Three paps.

Ockham’s Principle – in a Razor for Dummies version: That, if something looks like a tree, swims like a tree and quacks like a tree, it might not necessarily mean that, Global Warming or not, we suddenly deal with a bloody crocodile – is but a slightly better dressed & educated relative of the Sun or Daily Mail and its insistence that it is simply calling a spade a spade.

Crocodiles sell more papers than trees, though.

In the same way that, if you run a tabloid, tits are bigger than sequoias.

The Sun: Putting the tit back into Titian…)

Proverbs and other old sayings are fun. Not always accurate – or even sane – but fun.

So, we know that apples don’t fall far from trees, although, thanks to Newton, we also know that one of them can take us a Hell of a long way, when it comes to the development of scientific ideas.

Still, it’s fair to say that that particular apple needed a helping hand to start this metaphysical journey.

There’s not much you can say in any reasonable form of defence about the old admonition not to compare apples to oranges, though.

I mean, why wouldn’t you, if you were so inclined? I can, for instance, easily compare a brick with a goose feather, so I don’t see why others wouldn’t be able to do the same to oranges and apples.

What was that? Oh, okay – I shall prove it, if you insist:

Stones are of as much use to a goose in aerodynamical terms as feathers are to cathedrals in a constructional sense.

So, there!

Anyway, talking of apples, and their overall usefulness:

“A new affordable skin cream that could provide women with the “elixir of youth” is about to go on sale on Britain’s high streets. The Optimum skin care range, which includes the anti-ageing benefits of the rare Swiss Uttwiler Spatlauber apple, is to go on sale at Superdrug from next month for less than £10.”

Which is very good news.

Not that this stuff will prove to be more useful than anything else on the market but it will be cheaper…

… which means that the people who go in for this kind of thing will save enough money to be able to buy more magazines, in which they will read about other newly developed miracle products.

Returning one last time to the subject of prudent proverbs and sage sayings, I think the above article does show that there would be room for a new variation, to wit:

“You can compare apples to peas.”

As the following article shows:

“A Massachusetts man who was rushed to hospital with a collapsed lung came home with an unusual diagnosis. Ron Sveden had been battling emphysema for months when his condition deteriorated. He was steeling himself for a cancer diagnosis when X-rays revealed a pea plant was growing in his lung. Doctors believe that Mr Sveden ate the pea at some point, but it “went down the wrong way” and sprouted.”

To paraphrase Samuel Johnson, ‘When a man suspects he is to die from cancer in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully’ – and when he finds out that he won’t, well…

… let’s just say that, while it is doubtful that any apple-based cream will prove to be a short-cut to the fountain of youth, one swallowed pea can make you see how shallow most of our magazine-inspired fixations truly are.

(And here’s more Apple worship for you…)

Let’s start with a simple question: Do you, like me, hate stupid products like tofuburgers? They’re a bit like those plastic flowers – as if the people who make & sell these products want to tell their prospective customers:

“I know you desperately want the real thing but since you can’t be trusted with that, I’ll sell you something that’s made in its pale (and rather shitty) image.”

As if the majority of vegetarians can only get their digestive juices flowing if they see something meat-shaped on their plates.

Anyway, hold that thought – or not, if you can’t be bothered – ’cause I’m going to take a slight detour now…

… starting here:

It is often said that one of the greatest things about the Internet is that it’s the biggest library in the world, taking up just a tiny bit of space in even the humblest one room apartment.

Which is true – but even more fun (to the curious & lazy likes of me) is the way you can get pleasurably lost inside this library.

Yes, you will find unexpected trifles & treasures in any reasonably stocked paper and mortar library but when you’re surfing – no, surfing is a much too macho and deliberate image: When you’re leisurely paddling in that vast but shallow digital sea, you’re always getting distracted by one shiny pebble here, an interesting bit of driftwood there – and there are no kids with boom boxes or German towel fetishists to annoy and distract you.

Anyway, yesterday I was looking for some information about orchids, when, via several diverting clicks, I came upon the following bit of info:

“Carnivorous plants grow in low-nutrient environments, so trapping and eating insects is how they obtain the nutritional elements that would otherwise come from organic matter in the soil. A large number of carnivorous plants live in bog ecosystems, where there is full sunlight due to lack of tree cover, and ample water, but thin soil with limited nutrient content. The plants secrete enzymes to digest their prey, and then absorb the nitrogen and other materials that are released.”

There’s an obvious (if convoluted) moral here.

As I started to say, I hate those gimmicky tofuburgers but, unlike some, I have nothing at all against vegetarians – and neither should anyone else, if they know what’s good for them.

In fact, it would be wise for the rest of us to make sure our supermarkets and restaurants are well-stocked with all manner of vegetarian goodies…

… since the above story shows that carnivorous plants are, in fact, just very frustrated and hungry herbivores…

… and I’m not sure I want to find out what happens when a bunch of dedicated animal lovers gets equally frustrated and hungry.

‘Night of the Living Dead’ would probably be – excuséz le mot – a picnic compared to that…

One of my favourite writers in The Times is Simon Barnes. He mostly writes about sports, and about wildlife, but everything his pen touches turns to gold.

He is both level-headed and passionate and has a good eye for the absurd.

He would probably make an excellent after dinner speaker but when you read him you also feel he would be perfectly comfortable being a silent and attentive guest at any table.

Anyway, yesterday I read another one of his ‘nature notes’ and, as always, it was a pleasure to spend time in his company.

You should read the whole article, of course. Birds feature heavily – as do bombs and grenades, including an atom bomb turned tourist attraction…

… and this is how he ends the piece:

“It’s a banal thought to end a really remarkable day, but someone’s got to have it. Think of all the money, and all those brilliant minds, working here in secrecy on this strangely lovely spot, giving the best we had to the ideal of killing as many people as efficiently as possible. What if — I mean really, just think — what if all those millions and all those minds had given themselves up to the task of looking after the planet rather than killing people? Life, not death?”

It’s a good question but not one that would enter the mind of a politician, bureaucrat or general.

Pete Seeger wrote the song and the voice of Marlene Dietrich turned it into a monument, made of indelible notes & tremors.

It’s not the title but it’s the one unforgettable line: “When will they ever learn?”

The answer: Most probably, never.

Simon Barnes chose another voice from the past, to make the same point – and since this post is more about him than about me, I will happily give him the final word:

“In Gulliver’s Travels, Gulliver, in the land of giants, boasts to the King of Brobdingnag about the advanced technology that humans have created for warfare. The King replies: “I cannot but conclude the bulk of your natives to be the most pernicious race of little odious vermin that nature ever suffered to crawl upon the surface of the earth.””

Ah yes, now to be a Shakespeare and to declare, with one hand on my heart and the other on my bulging, bald forehead…:

“We are such stuff
As dreams are made on”

… though in truth, the following line is more in the ‘As B-movies are made on’ category:

“Sir Winston Churchill is at the centre of a cover-up as the Ministry of Defence release new UFO files.”

So, what I want to say is, “Never mind those bleeding UFOs: You’re saying ole Winnie is alive and well – like Elvis…??!!”

Now, that would really be a ‘Stop the presses!’ moment.

It’s a pity he probably is still dead as a dodo wearing a Monty Python T-shirt, ’cause I would love to have heard what he might have to say about the current and quite recent incumbents of No. 10…

… or failing that, he would have looked truly magnificent on ‘Dancing with the Stars’ or, perhaps even better, ‘Dancing on Ice’…

… and yes, Elvis would have been a sight for sore eyes too, during those eating challenges on ‘I’m a celebrity, get me out of here’.

What…?

Oh, you want to know more about those UFOs?

Okay, but then I will have to bow out now and leave you to the tender care of the dead parrot – I beg your pardon: the immortal Sweet Swan of Avon:

“Our revels now are ended. These darn UFOs,
As I foretold you, were all spirits, and
Are melted into air, into thin air:
And like the baseless rumours of these visits,
To cloud-capp’d council flats, the gurgling sewers,
The solemn strip clubs, all over the great globe itself,
Yea, all these space ships shall dissolve,
And, like an insubstantial fantasy faded,
Leave not a taser behind. Little green men are such stuff
As dreams are made on; and the journos’ little lies
Must turn sensible folks to sleep.”

The problem with authoritarians is that they think everything revolves around them. In that sense, there is no real difference between the late and unlamented Chairman Mao and a minor bureaucrat working in any Health & Safety junta: They like to have things their anally articulated way and tend to throw their Fatwas out of the pram when things & subjects don’t.

Anyway, you know the story of king Canute, of course. That is, most people think they do. The story is often told as one about the arrogance of kings.

Which is rather a pity, because the king was actually trying to demonstrate to his sycophant courtiers that not even God-blessed monarchs could order the tides to behave as they saw fit.

Which won’t stop some modern despots from trying, of course, as the following story shows:

“Saudi Arabia and The United Arab Emirates have announced the bans on some functions of the Blackberry mobile phone, claiming security concerns.”

It would be nice if we had more Canutes around to teach the facts of life to those who think omnipotence comes with power the way manual labour comes with calluses.

Louis LlV, of France, would have agreed with these power junkies but then he wasn’t called the Sun King for nothing. In his mind he was the source of all radiance and all space was his space, allowing only for satellites, attracted and kept in place by his might & whim.

Which would probably – but without the wig – be a reasonably accurate description of Apple’s Worm King, Steve Jobs…

… who is fighting against a tide much more powerful than the one King Kanute was wrongly accused of challenging:

“Erotic fiction titles mysteriously disappeared from the iPad book chart yesterday after Apple became aware that pornographic novellas were dominating its bestseller list. Blonde and Wet, the Complete Story was ranked first in its e-book chart yesterday morning in a top ten that included three other erotic titles.”

Ah yes, Steve Jobs and his War on Porn. Cute but doomed…

… as are all efforts by the children of man to harness the powers of the sun and remake themselves in its glorious image…

… as the following story shows – sort of:

“Academics funded by the Medical Research Council say their findings explain why certain people find it difficult to get an even, consistent tan. The main problem, it seems, is people’s bottoms, which take a lot longer to go brown than other parts of their anatomy.”

(More about the book HERE…)

I’ve started reading Natasha Solomons’s quite wonderful novel, ‘Mr Rosenblum’s list’ and in one of the opening chapters I came upon the following sentence, which I will shamelessly copy here, as part of my ‘Thought for the day’ series:

“The only thing worse than remembering [is] starting to forget.”

I’ve nothing more to add to that – though I will leave you with a few YouTube clips.

The first one is Christopher Hitchens’s quite moving eulogy of Jerry Falwell – which you can find here.

The second one is a discussion between Jonathan Miller & Richard Dawkins about, among other things, the beauty of Darwin’s vision – which you can read if you follow this link…

… and the third is a short clip of QI quiz master Stephen Fry, explaining to his captive panel what The Great Disappointment was all about – and that’s here:

It’s Sunday – again…!

I swear, at times it seems those sumbitch Sundays come round like once a week or so.

Anyway, I’m not in the mood to read or write. Read newspapers, that is. I’m still not done with Justin Cronin’s ‘The Passage’ but I have made a solemn vow I will finish him off before night falls again (and before the leapers can come and get me…)

Anyway (part deux), I still need to write my daily blog post, which is what I’m doing now, by the way; I’m not just mumbling to myself here, you know, while trying to push my shopping trolley along the Information Highway.

Anyway (part drei), happily, one of the first stories I came upon whilst not pushing or going off said trolley, was something that really made me smile. The way I remember I did when I first saw Magritte’s ‘Ceci n’est pas une pipe‘ painting.

‘Ceci n’est pas une araignée peureuse’, perhaps?

Meh, who cares. Let’s just pay tribute to Jon Stewart and call it your Moment of Zen:

“A group of primary school children have been honoured by the Royal Society of Chemistry for disproving the theory that spiders are afraid of conkers.”

Lovely.

Now, all we need is a bunch of other primary school or senescent white-coats to go ask the spiders what type of bogeyman they’d like to take the place of those quite useless conkers…

… and perhaps Oprah could do some share-the-pain show and have an intimate conker to couch potato moment, when the former explains how it feels when your life suddenly loses all meaning (to an audience who never knew such a luxury, to begin with.)

Or, as the Good Book should have said somewhere: “All I got’s my spider web, keepin’ me alive”

I’ve often thought there was a simple solution to the age old question of which came first: the chicken or the egg.

I suspected the answer might have been related to the feeding patterns of either of its predators.

In other words, whether it was the chicken or the egg that first dared to show itself, might have depended on whether our forefathers were vegetarians or carnivores. Homelette Sapiens, if you like, or KFCavemen.

Now, it seems, some spoilsport scientists have disproved this rather elegant theory:

“British researchers say the chicken must have come first as the formation of eggs is only possible thanks to a protein found in the chicken’s ovaries. ‘It had long been suspected that the egg came first but now we have the scientific proof that shows that in fact the chicken came first,’ said Dr Colin Freeman, from Sheffield University, who worked with counterparts at Warwick University.”

Happily, this still leaves us with that other quite interesting and pleasantly useless question of which came earlier: The early bird or the insomniac worm.

(See where those hormones get you…?)

I’ve always been very fond of the nature versus nurture debate.

As a columnist/blogger you always enjoy those subjects that bring the nutters out on both sides of the argument – and badly understood science, treated as religion, will do that for you any time.

Same thing with Global Warming, of course, but the GW fanatics (on both sides) are less entertaining. They are more the party bores of the blogosphere – closely followed by those who are offended by terms like ‘blogosphere’, by the way.

Anyway, I was trying to talk about the nature/nurture debate and one thing that will always set the Internet alight is when it’s applied to sex – especially sexual preference.

So, I could just sit back and enjoy the predictable brouhaha, developing like a tropical storm (or spreading like an oil spill, if you want) and see all the loons come out to play when they’ve got a sniff of the following bit of news:

“Women are embracing lesbianism in their thirties, according to research indicating that shifts in sexual orientation may be more widespread than previously thought.”

On the other hand, you could make a very easy case for the nurture side of the argument here.

Or the lack of it, to be precise.

I mean, it’s all very well to follow your hormones for the first few years but if the only result is that you end up with people who, among other things,

- forget your birthday

- ‘forget’ to take the garbage out

- don’t notice new outfits & hairdos

- don’t cook, don’t do the dishes, don’t do the ironing

- talk about sports when they don’t watch it

- spout dubious nonsense about politics and what-not

- spout dubious body hair while demanding you do a full body wax

- snore…

Well, to be honest, I find it more surprising that, like a certain pop singer, not many more women demand to be known as ‘The Woman Formerly Known As Heterosexual But Fucking Tired Of It, Thank You Very Much’.

(Now give me one good reason why crossing that rift makes sense – to her…)