Glob-a-log

(Give it up, love: You’re well past it…)

Today’s broadcast is sponsored by hair colour brand Clairol Perfect 10, which is running a new campaign, with the somewhat surprising and more than a bit dubious slogan, ‘Over the hill and far away.’

Anyway, as I’ve stated a few times before, I like scientists. Not just the humble white coats who merely slog on, in pursuit of a better type of throw-away pen, a more convincing-looking toupee or a cure for AIDS but also - and maybe especially - the kind of scientist that has his or her eyes firmly on tomorrow’s headlines, like a heat-seeking missile in, well, in heat, I suppose.

Of course, the downside of trying to make the news with such religious fervour is that, occasionally, it makes you look like an utter prat:

“Researchers discovered women feel most confident and happy with their love life and body shape shortly before they reach 30. It is also the period in their life when they enjoy the best sex – but the happiness is relatively shortlived. Because by the time they have turned 30 they start worrying about growing old and developing grey hair and wrinkles.”

Yes, that great time just before you hit thirty. When everything is going ever so well for you…

Just ask Janis Joplin…

(Get it while you can, indeed…)

(Tear down the wall…?)

“Turn down that damn music: You’re killing me here!!!”

Lines that must be familiar to anyone who ever listened to music in his or her room, with parents screaming, praying and begging for quiet, on the outside.

A nice image, really. With kids playing the role of Joshua blowing his trumpet and the parents as the ancient city of Jericho.

In the eternal fight between the generations, walls are raised again and again - and, as often as not, they come tumbling down again like Wile E Coyote in an Isaac Newton panto.

Now though, scientists have discovered that music can be much more than a weapon of crass destruction in the generation war:

“Music may be used to treat heart attack and stroke victims after Italian scientists found it can affect blood pressure. Researchers found that music with faster tempos increased blood pressure and heart rate, whereas slower music reduced them. The same affect was also achieved by slowly changing the volume of the music. By combining slow and fast music it was possible to control the cardiovascular system and eventually help its rehabilitation.”

Which is all quite nice, of course but for one small detail.

Everyone who’s ever been put on hold and had some Mantovani vomited into his or her ear knows all about the link between apoplexy and certain types of noises.

So, though I wish these researchers and future operation theatre Djs all the best with this musical surgery, I can’t help but feel a bit miffed that I will be forced to carry yet another set of instructions with me.

Apart from that little card that says I am an organ donor who doesn’t want to be operated on when the brain no longer functions, I will now have to add a little list of bands that will probably carry me over the edge if played during surgery.

It would be quite a long list too.

Proudly headed, of course, by ABBA and finishing with ZOEgirl…

(Just one more reason to pull the plug…)

Dear Gods, can noone rid us of this terrible woman?

“A new history by Suzannah Lipscomb, a doctoral student at Balliol College, Oxford, and research curator at Hampton Court Palace, suggests that 1536 turned Henry VIII from a gifted, handsome and companionable king into the fat, wife-killing tyrant of popular imagination. In 12 months Henry suffered a riding accident, an alleged cuckolding, the death of his beloved illegitimate son and a rebellion. As he turned 45, then regarded as the beginning of old age, these separate traumas accumulated into a midlife crisis from which he never recovered.

“Looking at the events of Henry’s life, I had never noticed that so many of them coalesced in a single year. There was a considerable difference in the King before and after,” she said. “No one had written this before.””

Maybe because it’s a load of crap?

A traumatic year, a midlife crisis…

It all does sound terribly, depressingly familiar, doesn’t it?

By the way, when I misquoted another king in my first sentence, I wasn’t talking about getting rid of la Lipscomb. I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t like to run into her at any party but she’s probably quite harmless.

This is just one of those cases where a bored journo hears about some silly bit of business and decides it will make a nice filler article. You know the deal:

‘MAN WHO MURDERED TWO OF HIS WIVES CLAIMS HE IS THE VICTIM!’

A victim of the whips and scorns of time, no less.

Still, long after the Lipscomb woman will have returned to well-deserved obscurity, the rest of us will still have to suffer the slings and arrows of our outrageous blame game culture.

To paraphrase a certain prince, ‘Thus cop-outs do make cowards of us all.’

Hamlet, at least, was tormented by an honest to God Freudian ghost. We, on the other hand, are beset by the spirit of Oprah Winfrey – and there seems to be no getting away from that kind of shit.

It is ridiculously easy to imagine how, in a not too distant future, on the couch where Tom Cruise jumped, we will see the big O fawning on a very familiar, white-robed figure, who is stroking his recently trimmed, now mostly white beard and who, looking straight into the camera with big, soulful eyes, will blame everything on a riding incident, or the death of his pet bunny, or something…

All of which will be rewarded with a standing ovation by the public, a tearful hug from Oprah and a fading shot of Osama’s upcoming book, ‘Tora Bora: The road to inner peace and self-fulfilment’.

(Okay, here’s the whole of that monologue I took such liberties with…)

(”Characteristically thick…? Check…!”)

Now, before you get all excited, this is NOT what you think:

“For the first time ever, a fossil of a Neanderthal has been discovered in the Netherlands.”

No, it’s not him, I tell you.

First of all, we’re talking about a fossil here – and the man is simply not that old.

Or dead.

I know it’s a bit disappointing but believe it, it’s NOT him:

“The skull fragment, over 40,000 years old, with its characteristically thick Neanderthal eyebrow ridge, was found off the coast of Zeeland, dredged up from the bottom of the North Sea.”

Yes, I know, it would have been nice and, admittedly, ‘characteristically thick’ does tick the right box.

As I’m sure a lot of people wouldn’t mind to hear that he’d been dredged up from the bottom of the sea.

However, there is that inconvenient bit about the dredgee being 40,000 years’ old. Now, I know that it feels like he’s been around for even longer than that but still, I’m afraid that dog won’t hunt.

So, please get rid of those flags and balloons – and cancel the order for champagne and caviar, or beer and crisps.

Geert Wilders hasn’t done an Elvis yet.

(Pretty damn awful, yes, but still not him…)

(Said James Bond: “We hit it off so well, till we hit space…”)

You know, scientists can be such spoilsports…

Anyway, so, it’s still early June, which means that most of us will not have gone on our summer holidays yet.

I’m sure most will have planned and booked their trips well before today but for those who are still undecided I have one simple tip.

Don’t go into space.

Or, if you do, don’t expect to pull:

“Making long space journeys, like those envisaged in the future, will not be good for your looks or figure, claim scientists who believe they will leave astronauts looking short, fat and bald. Near zero gravity would leave humans stunted and cause their bones and muscles to be underdeveloped, said astrobiologist Dr Lewis Dartnell. They will also have bloated faces and lose their hair because fluid would pool in their skulls and there would be no need for insulation from the cold.”

(That’s a toupee, of course…)

(They’re playing our song - again…?!)

Let’s start with a question you probably won’t find in any kosher food guide (or medical handbook):

‘What is worse: Getting chickenpox or chickenpork?’

Staying with the topic of ’stuff you won’t find in…’, as far as I know, there isn’t yet an Oscar for the category ‘disgusting yet funny performances’ but if there was, the following news story could have high hopes of getting remade as a Hollywood blockbuster.

The story did remind me of the movie ‘Leon the Pig Farmer’, described by Wikipedia as ‘a 1993 comedy about a Jewish estate agent in London who discovers that thanks to an artificial insemination mishap, his real father is a swineherd from Yorkshire.’

Here’s the story, as presented in the Telegraph’s science section:

“Restaurants have been serving chicken secretly injected with beef and pork proteins, a study by the Food Standards Agency has revealed. The proteins have been used by food manufacturers as a method of bulking up chicken meat with water. The bovine and porcine protein powders allow the chicken to hold far more water, and gives unscrupulous manufacturers the opportunity to sell their meat at a higher price to wholesalers.”

‘Porcine protein powder’ has a nice ring to it, doesn’t it?

Especially, if followed by a ‘Rabid rabbi rips head off restaurateur’s romp’...

(Chickenpork: Not unlike Montezuma’s revenge…)

(Bored with boarding…?)

Science can be tough. ‘Rigorous’ is the word our boys and girls in the white coats prefer – and not just because it’s a ‘dog eat dog’ world out there, when it comes to getting juicy grants and that personal holy grail of each and every scientist: ‘Tenure.‘

No, the whole business of science is hard. You have to test theories to destruction and then do it over and over again. Scientists are a bit like Rambo: You barely survive killing one group of pajama wearing folks and then you’re sent out to do the same to a bunch of guys in turbans, after which some Slavic furry hats await, after which…

It just never ends.

Even worse, it’s not always a few nose-fulls of goo in a test tube or a bunch of mice that get tested to destruction.

Truly, forget about that ‘dog eat dog’ nonsense. It can be  a ’shark eat scientist’ world too:

“Sharks can be trained like dolphins to feed from keepers, roll over and enjoy cuddles, according to new research. In experiments carried out in the US some varieties of shark allowed themselves to be picked from the water and cuddled. Keepers at the UK’s Sea Life Centres will now use the training techniques in the hope that they will end up with hundreds of trained sharks.”

It does make you wonder how these US researchers got the necessary volunteers to ‘carry out experiments.’ Perhaps the CIA did a bit more than simply waterboard those captured terrorist suspects?

People are always claiming torture doesn’t work but I guess giving someone the option to either come up with the postal codes of their leaders or go cuddle a shark could be quite effective.

It’s also nice to hear that, if this CIA theory is true, the American Intelligence Community still shares both information and various information gathering techniques with its British counterparts.

Mind you, if MI5 would indeed start to use these same techniques on the same type of ‘volunteers’ in the UK, at those so-called Sea Life Centres, that truly would be a case of ‘extraordinary rendition’ indeed.

(AC/DC didn’t know the half of it…)

(Embracing the cold…)

You know what?

I’ll never say another unkind word about scientists, ever again.

It may be true that our planet would never have had its somewhat unfortunate blind dates with hydrogen bombs, Crazy Frog ring tones or Pamela Anderson’s tits without the various efforts of the white coat brigade…

… but, all in all, could anyone fail to adore a tribe that spends a significant amount of quality time working on the theory that one woman from the frozen North of Lapland is much hotter than a feverish float of Brazilian carnival queens?

“Researchers have found that birds sing more sweetly in colder climates than their laid-back cousins in the tropics because they have to try harder to attract a mate.”

In other words, forget about babe magnets: It’s the magnetic babes at the Poles that will send our male needles all aquiver.

(And this is about as cool as you can ever hope to get…)

(One man’s swill…)

It is often said that what doesn’t kill us makes us stronger. I’m not sure that’s always true. Any tabloid pundit who once called Mike Tyson a common rapist could, for instance, go the full twelve rounds with the boxer, have his ears and nose bitten off in the process and, somehow, still survive to mumble the tale through his broken teeth but I rather doubt that any ring side doctor would describe the condition of the victim as ’stronger.’

Still, it’s definitely true that some adversity does help you cope with things. Living a few years in London will help you to deal with the most dodgy umbrella operating systems around, while dodging the eye-catching tips of their feral cousins’ spokes, for instance.

Life in Sweden may very well prepare you for marauding IKEA furniture and make you immune to ABBA…

… and I, having been raised in the proud shadow of Hans Brinker’s raised finger, am living testimony to a truth, not quite universally acknowledged, that you can be subjected to wooden shoes, tulips, windmills and sadistic barrel organ grinders and still not have enough hard evidence brought against you in court to seriously risk conviction as a serial killer.

So, it should not come as a huge surprise that a steady national diet of drive-through, semi-solid shit and suspect fizzy drinks has prepared your average American to grin and bear and ignore all that boring advice about the yellow snow:

“At the international space station, it was one small sip for man and a giant gulp of recycled urine for mankind. A first for space was celebrated yesterday with ­astronauts drinking water recycled from their urine, sweat, and water condensed from exhaled air. “The taste is great,” said the US astronaut Michael Barratt.”

(Cheesy…? Moi…?!)

Now, this is one of those stories that make Internet browsing such fun.

No, I’m not talking about yet another celebrity divorce, fuck-up or cult.

What’s great about the Internet is all those stories that swim there, mostly unobserved, minding their own business, always being upstaged by the big, Paris Hilton type fish but not minding this one little bit.

Stories like the following, that pop up occasionally, like a modestly flying fish – not making that much of a splash in the process but always fun to catch sight of:

“For decades parents have warned their children not to have cheese before bedtime to prevent bad dreams. But researchers have disproved this old wife’s tale and found that cheese could actually aid sleep. The study by the British Cheese Board, involved 200 volunteers in a week-long experiment. The cheese-munching volunteers reported no nasty dreams after a late night snack. After eating a 20g piece of cheese 30 minutes before going to sleep, 72 per cent of the volunteers slept very well every night, just over two thirds remembered their dreams and none reported nightmares.”

‘Cui bono?’ is what the old Roman consul & censor Lucius Cassius Longinus Ravilla used to say – and God knows how many detective writers after him.

I suppose ‘What’s up, doc?’ would work as a translation – if you can complement that with a mental image of a nervous Elmer Fudd who’s guiltily stuffing his wallet with big dollar notes.

In other words, it would have been more convincing if this passionate defence of cheese had not come from the British Cheese Board…

I’m not saying our Cheese Boys cheated but it does sound a bit like a ‘The water is lovely’ campaign by the Australian Shark Board, or some such.

All of which idle chit chat brings us to the news story that caught my eye, a bit earlier today:

“Being a sun worshipper could make you cleverer in later life and ward off dementia, claim scientists. Researchers found that increased levels of vitamin D, obtained from exposure to sun or eating oily fish, could help keep our brains in top condition as we age.”

Which will come in very handy, of course – when you have to make an informed & intelligent decision about which type of skin cancer treatment you will go for.

Cui bono…?

Hell, I don’t know.

Just don’t blame me when you stuff your face with cheese, right before bedtime and then dream of a chorus line of malignant moles in sharkskin suits, doing the background vocals for the Dick Cheney Quintet, who are surfing their water boards, while singing ‘Skin flakes keep falling from my head.’