Glob-a-log

(Out, Damned Spot, Out, I Say…!)

It is a small step for man…:

“Britain’s pavements could soon be free from the “unsightly stain” of chewing gum, which costs the taxpayer £150m a year to remove. Pioneering Flintshire-based company Revolymer has come up with a gum which can be removed from the streets using only water.”

Which really is good news.

It’s funny though how so many typos go unspotted. It’s desperately easy to make them, of course. On many keyboards, for instance, the ‘y’ is cozying up to the ‘t’ – as it must do on the machines used at the Telegraph…

… which explains the typo in the name of this Flintshire-based company.

A company dealing with a loathsome substance like chewing gum must obviously be spelled with a ‘t’ and not a ‘y’.

Anyway, yes, it’s a welcome first step, this – be it a small one.

What we now really need is some incredibly clever invention that makes the people chewing gum look like moderately intelligent humans instead of the aggressively bored looking, mentally challenged cows that litter up our societies.

That would be one giant leap indeed but probably much harder to achieve than simply putting a man on the moon.

One of the things most people don’t think about all that often is what happens on the outside of the earth’s atmosphere. I don’t mean the moon and the stars and all that but the stuff that’s circling much, much closer around our planet. All those manmade satellites and bits & pieces of other space craft. It’s quite a scrap-yard out there, though that’s not what I wanted to talk about either.

No, apart from all the non-organic litter, there’s also rather a lot of human waste out there. As cruise ships pollute the seas with their passengers’ crap, so do space shuttles and space stations empty their slop-filled buckets into space (so to speak.) Like the old alchemists said, ‘As above, so below.’

Anyway, so there’s this enormous veil of organic matter circling our planet – which inspired the late SF writer Arthur C Clarke to write a story about how life on planet Earth evolved from the emptied slop buckets belonging to some alien spaceship.

Me, I don’t think life on earth started with alien poo.

Having just read the following article, I’m quite convinced it must have been vomit:

“Tony Blair has been awarded the $100,000 Liberty Medal for “relentless pursuit” of peace in Northern Ireland and the Middle East. The Medal is a prize given annually by the National Constitution Centre in Philadelphia.”

(When England was the whore of George Bush, Tony was her madam…)

(Of course, it might have been an other daddy…)

Now, here’s a bit of alarming news for you:

“Men and shopping really are a toxic mix, claim scientists who have discovered that a spot of retail therapy could make them impotent.”

Which makes this almost as bad a bad letter day as that other awful occasion when a horrified world learned that eating peanut butter could make women infertile – though it did seem to have quite the opposite effect on Elvis.

Still, forewarned is forearmed and all that, so now we know what kind of things we need to avoid if we want to sign up for the old diaper tour of duty.

Mind you, if you’re a guy and your girlfriend sends you to the shop to buy her a jumbo size tub of peanut butter, she might just want to tell you, ever so subtly, that she’s simply not that into you…

… especially if she’s humming Marilyn Monroe’s ‘My heart belongs to daddy’, while she hands you the shopping list.

(More Marilyn HERE & HERE & HERE & HERE)

I don’t know why but I feel like a Tyrannosaurus Rex that’s just dying to chase the Web for sites about herb gardens – or like Brutus, who’s drawn his knife to viciously attack a Ceasar salad.

Okay, I do know why. It’s all because of some stupid news story I read.

I mean, I always thought that I was heterosexual but now that I’ve read the following article I’m not so sure:

“Yawning can be a sign of sexual attraction rather than a desire to sleep, scientists have claimed.”

So, there I was, watching the (0-0) England–Algeria match, thinking I’d never seen anything more tedious in my whole damn life…

… yawning, as I thought, like a satyr who’s stuck in traffic with a flock of Tupperware-talking nuns – bored out of his horny little skull, that is…

… but now, if we can believe these scientists, it would seem that I was secretly harbouring the wish, nay, the burning desire, to kiss John Terry on the mouth, eat whipped cream from Ashley Cole’s naked torso or even lick the hairy buttocks of Wayne Rooney.

You know how they say, “I can smell a rat!”

Now, would it truly be an improvement if those with a nose for ‘Eau de Rodent’, also got an eyeful of the critters?

In other words, I’m not really sure about this one:

“A French eyeglass designer has come out with a new line of glasses frames, and each comes with one of four signature scents on the earpieces. The frames are offered in “Chocolate”; the “sweet and spicy” “Adriana”; the floral “Coquette”; and the ‘Isle of Kisses,’ which is a fruity mango scent.””

As with those smelly rats I mentioned earlier, we have to ask, “Do we truly need this stuff?”

I don’t know. Would you like to watch a football match on TV and be able to smell Wayne Rooney? Or get all olfactory during Prime Minister’s Question Time?

Smelling glasses? On the whole, I think rather not. You can smell the desperation in the sales pitch but I can’t say I see any real future in it.

(And another damn thing that gets right up your nose…)

Today, I read that the the Welsh examining board OCR Cymru decided to let school pupils study the words of the singer and TV presenter Charlotte Church

No, I hadn’t heard about her either but a short Google search revealed she’s yet another child star who ended up doing what almost all of them do – or, as some interview had it:

“Smoking, swearing and slugging back Cheeky Vimtos, the teenage Charlotte was forever stumbling out of pubs.”

Though I’m convinced most kids would rather read about Charlotte and her Cheeky Vimtos (whatever the Hell they are) than about Shakespeare’s arch-bore Juliet, I’m equally sure that loads of people will see this as more evidence of the dumbing down of our education system (and culture.)

I’m not so sure about that, though.

Me, I think it’s just another case of the Welsh sticking two fingers up at the English language.

Which doesn’t make me the equivalent of a Global Warming denier or 9/11 Truther, because I do believe the West is dumbing down faster than BP spills oil but I also think it’s silly to try and see evidence of it in every leaf falling from the tree of life.

Take the following story. I mean, is this really a case of dumbing down?

“Five women, between the ages of 16 and 50, took a six-week class in how to walk in high heels at a college in south London. “It was part of a range of extra-curricular ‘enrichment’ activities we offer,” says a spokesperson for the South Thames College.”

Okay, it is.

On the other hand, it may be silly to design shoes that need this kind of extra-curricular enrichment in order to use them properly…

… but just ask Neda Agha-Solta if she wouldn’t have preferred this kind of dumbing down over the crack down policies of her own government.

Which you can’t, of course, since the government of Iran is quite prepared to shoot women for simply walking the street, even if they do so in sensible shoes.

(The kind of problem Iranian women would die to have…)

I’m reading Richard P. Feynmann’s book ‘The meaning of it all: Thoughts of a citizen-scientist’. It’s basically a transcript of a series of three lectures he gave at the University of Washington in 1963 – which is the best way to read Feynmann: As if you listen to the man himself. Anyone who’s had the pleasure to hear him speak, live or on television, will know what I mean.

Anyway, it’s always a joy to ‘listen’ to Feynmann, so I’m thoroughly enjoying this book as well. I just finished reading the second chapter/lecture, called ‘The Uncertainty of Values’ and I realized how nothing of what Feynmann says seems in any way outdated, though almost half a century has passed since then.

Then, the big conflict ‘du jour’ was the Cold War. Now, we have this perceived clash of civilisations between the West and Islam. Whether these struggles were and are anything more than humanity’s need to name and fear its painted devils is not what concerns me today.

Right now I just want to listen to Feynmann’s voice and add my more feeble amen to his words. Here goes – enjoy:

“No government has the right to decide on the truth of scientific principles, nor to prescribe in any way the character of the questions investigated. Neither may a government determine the aesthetic value of artistic creations, nor limit the forms of literary or artistic expressions. Nor should it pronounce on the validity of economic, historic, religious, or philosophical doctrines. Instead it has a duty to its citizens to maintain the freedom, to let those citizens contribute to the further adventure and the development of the human race. Thank you.”

(Been there, done it, got the T-shirt…)

I’ve been thinking about Craig Venter. Yeah, the God guy. Hell, he even has a beard, be it a rather small one – but then he worked on his Creation fourteen years and 359 days longer than the Big Beard did and where BB managed to create a whole universe in those six days, CV just glued some bits of DNA to a rather obscure goat’s disease in order to create something as overwhelmingly powerful and impressive as a microbe’s hard-on – or, in Charlie Brooker’s words:

“Here’s what happened: the scientists created a computer simulation of the goat bug thingy, then fed the code into a genetic synthesizer. You know, a genetic synthesizer. It looks like a George Foreman grill, but in white, and with twice as many winking lights on the top. They fed it into that. Probably using a USB stick. Anyway, the DNA grill heated up and went beep and “produced short strands of the bug’s DNA”, which I imagine were an absolute bugger to pick up with tweezers. Said strands were then “stitched together” by some bits of yeast and E coli, which eventually knitted the strand into a complete million-letter-long DNA sequence, which you’re probably incorrectly picturing right now.”

Indeed. I’m sure that microbe’s hard-on I mentioned isn’t picture perfect – but then I don’t really care about that.

What I was thinking about is something else I read about this Creation: that its Creator had gone and done a bit of spliced graffiti, leaving this James Joyce quote somewhere on that hard-on: “To live, to err, to fall, to triumph, to recreate life out of life.”

Which is rather cute…

… but it mostly had me wondering what message the Big Beard may have left somewhere in our DNA.

If you look at the state of the earth I’d say it would probably be something like, ‘Bugger this. I’m off to the pub.”

(You really can’t beat the Big Guy at this Creation game…)

I’m really not sure about this one.

Okay, it’s not quite as bad as that other one with Lisa and Bart but still.

God knows I’m nobody’s Falwell and I’ve nothing against the colour purple, or handbags, or those Teletubbies as such…

… but I’m not sure I would have chosen two of the latter as Olympic mascots…

… and certainly not ones sporting heads that are vaguely shaped like 1950s TV sets…

… with both screens showing something that looks suspiciously like a single tit…

… which, of course, makes the two of them (and their designers) look like a right set of tits.

The funny thing about Japan is that you can move from good old Donkey Kong nostalgia to Godzillah type replica Empire State Building projects…

… or go robot, of course:

“A Japanese wedding took place with a robot leading the ceremony for the first time.The wedding took place at a restaurant in Hibiya Park in central Tokyo, where the I-Fairy, a four foot robot, wore a wreath of flowers and directed a rooftop ceremony. Wires led out from beneath it to a black curtain a few feet away, where a man crouched and clicked commands into a computer.”

As always though, Japan followed where others led.

So, where Japan had someone crouching behind black curtains, the following was happening somewhere else, some six years ago: