BBC: Brain-damaged Terri Schiavo dies
Terri Schiavo, the brain-damaged Florida woman at the heart of a bitter legal dispute, has died. Mrs Schiavo's feeding tube was disconnected on 18 March, following a seven-year battle through the courts…
The Vatican also denounced the death. "An attack against life is an attack against God, who is the author of life," Cardinal Jose Saraiva Martins, head of the Vatican's office for sainthood, was quoted as saying by the Associated Press news agency.
BBC: Pope John Paul II clings to life
Pope John Paul II's poor health has become even worse, the Vatican said. His breathing is shallow, his blood pressure is low and he is having difficulties with both his heart and his kidneys, a spokesman said.
I suppose, to be entirely consistent, the Vatican will be hooking His Holiness up to the mains as I type, in a pro-life attempt to keep him "alive" for the next 15 years or so.
Or would that seem a little undignified?
On this day in 1865, in one of the last actions of the American Civil War, Union troops captured the trenches around Petersburg, Virginia, thereby breaking the 10-month siege of the city, and forcing Confederate General Robert E. Lee to retreat.
Exactly one-hundred years later, on this day in 1965, early in the morning, four young women went into labour pretty-much simultaneously in a Victorian, brick-built maternity home in Bromborough, England. The maternity home only had three birthing beds, so the fourth young woman was ushered into a bathroom, where the staff improvised an additional birthing bed, using a cast-iron bath and a large slab of wood.
There, at a-quarter-to-nine in the morning (just in time for breakfast, as she was later to observe), the young woman delivered into this world, her first-born child.
The nurses and midwife gathered round, looked down at the serene new-born baby, shook their heads, and tut-tutted.
"You have a very ugly son, Mrs Carter," they observed. "He has an abnormally large head."
Still, his mother loved him.
Holy crap, I'm 40!
BBC: Pope John Paul II dies in Vatican
How are we going to know what's right and what's wrong now?
If you take the first letters of the current top-five soccer teams in the English Premiership in order, they spell the word CAMEL:
C helsea
A rsenal
M anchester United
E verton
L iverpool
Kind of makes you think.
I'm hoping the final positions at the end of the season will spell LECAM—which is an acronym for the Leukocyte/Endothelial Cell Adhesion Molecule, a cause of mutant mice—but I'm not exactly holding my breath.
Guardian: Battle begins for soul of churchThe conservative wing of the Roman Catholic hierarchy yesterday launched a pre-emptive strike, aimed at blocking any swing towards a more progressive stance following the death of Pope John Paul II.
The Vatican's "prime minister", Cardinal Angelo Sodano, surprised church observers by describing the late pope as John Paul "the Great", a title only previously accorded to three of his 263 predecessors, all from the Dark Ages and all canonised…
His attempt to raise the late pontiff to the status of a saint within 24 hours of his death appeared to represent an effort to put Karol Wojtyla's profoundly conservative legacy beyond dispute and freeze the terms of debate on the next pope, signalling the start of what is likely to be a battle for the soul of the world's largest Christian denomination.
Scrap at the Vatican! Scrap at the Vatican! Scrap! Scrap! Scrap! Scrap!…
The Roman Catholic conservatives have little to fear. Karol Wojtyla made pretty sure the ideological battle for his successor was won many years ago by appointing bucketfuls of right-thinking cardinals. Indeed, he appointed 114 of the 117 cardinals who will elect the next pope.
I suppose you could call it Pole rigging.
While we were having breakfast this morning, Jen pointed out that our packet of Alpen still bears a By appointment to HM Queen Elizabeth, the Queen Mother logo.
The Queen Mother died over three years ago, for Pete's sake! Stop flogging a dead granny!
I worked from home yesterday. Just as I was starting on a spot of lunch, I received a call on my mobile phone. The young woman at the other end explained that she worked for a telephone survey company. I explained that I have registered with the Telephone Preference Service because I don't want to receive unsolicited calls. She explained that, because the company she works for only does surveys, and does not try to sell people anything, they are not obliged to check my number via the TPS before calling.
So I decided to play The Telephone Survey Game:
The Telephone Survey Game involves responding to a telephone survey with a pack of jokes/lies. The lies should be totally blatant. The way I see it, if everyone responded in this way, telephone surveys would lose whatever credibility they have left, and companies would stop paying other companies to pester me.
Another aim of The Telephone Survey Game is to keep the caller on the phone for as long as possible. If it's OK for them to waste your time, it should be equally OK for you to waste theirs. I managed to keep this poor young woman on the phone for 48 minutes and 17 seconds.
Clearly, I can't give a word-for-word transcript of our entire conversation, but here's a paraphrased pastiche to give you a feel for it:
"Please could you tell me how many adults there are living at your home address who own mobile phones?"
"One-thousand, eight-hundred and seventeen."
"How many?!"
"One-thousand, eight-hundred and seventeen. Our family prides itself on its fertility."
"Oh dear! My computer won't accept a number that big. The most people usually say is about five."
"Put 'about five' then."
"Are you sure? I'll be asking for all their details in a moment. It might be easier to say 'one'."
"Five it is then."
"Right. Please can you tell me their names so that I can refer to them by name later on in the survey? We won't retain their details afterwards."
"Mr Simpkins… Aristotle… Tony Blair… Gordon Brown, and erm… George Bush!"
"And which one of those are you?"
"I'm not any of those. My name is Charles Darwin."
"[Sighs] I'll change it to 'six' then, should I?"
"If you like."
[… At around this point, the call was cut off. The young woman phoned me straight back.]
"Did you just hang up on me, Mr Darwin?"
"No. I thought you'd hung up on me! I wouldn't have blamed you."
"Perhaps you lost coverage for a moment."
"That's a pretty ironic thing to happen during a satisfaction survey about mobile phones, isn't it?"
"Yes it is. Do you mind if we continue?"
"Not if you don't."
"Hey, I get paid the same no matter what answers you give me."
"That is so immoral! You're taking money from your clients, even though you know I'm lying through my teeth. It's damn unscientific as well!"
"This survey takes so long to complete, most people are making up the answers by the end."
"How do you sleep at night? It's dishonest!"
"I don't care… What make of mobile phone do you use?"
"The fourth one on your list."
"And which carrier do you use?"
"HMS Ark Royal."
"Oh, I get it [laughs]. Which carrier do you really use?"
"Hedgehog."
"Really?"
"No, not really. I meant Rabbit."
"There isn't a carrier named Rabbit."
"There used to be."
"Really?"
"Yes, really—but it never caught on. Tell you what, on fourth thoughts put 'Vodafone'. I'll bet they're on your list."
"They are indeed. OK, on a scale of 1 to 10, how would you rate Vodafone…"
"One!"
"I haven't finished asking the question yet!"
"I don't care. They get a 'one' for everything. They sponsor Manchester United, for Pete's sake!"
"Which team do you support?"
"Liverpool."
"That figures. I'm saying nothing… On a scale of 1 to 10, how would you rate the legibility of your mobile phone's display screen?"
"I'd have to give it a one. It's totally illegible… In fact, I can't even see it!"
"You can't see it?"
"No. It's pressed to the side of my head, you see…"
"Roughly how many mobile phone calls do you make a month?"
"None, to within two orders of magnitude?"
"What does that mean?"
"Don't worry, just put 'none'."
"OK. And how many text messages do you send per month?"
"None."
"And what is your typical monthly bill?"
"Eighty-three million pounds."
"Oh dear…"
"Doesn't your computer like that either?"
"No."
"Put nine-hundred and ninety-nine pounds then."
"OK. Thanks. And how many emails do you send a week?"
"A couple of hundred."
"I'll put '200'."
"…on my computer, I mean."
"I meant on your phone."
"Oh, got you! None."
"Do you use your mobile phone to take photographs?"
"Do I what?!"
"Do you take photographs using your mobile phone?"
"How the hell would I do that?"
"Most mobile phones have cameras built into them these days."
"Jesus! That's clever! What will they think of next?"
[…]
"We're getting near the end now! What is your current occupation?"
"I'm walking round and round the coffee table, dealing with an unsolicited phone call."
"Do you want me to put that down?"
"Yes please!"
"And would it be OK for us to call you again in future to take part in other surveys?"
"What do you think?"
"I'll put 'no'."
Bring on the Jehovah's Witnesses!
BBC: Charles and Camilla wedding joy
Prince Charles and Camilla Parker Bowles have married at Windsor's Guildhall.
I remember the last time Prince Charles got married like it was 24 years ago. They said it was a match made in heaven, but, sadly, only one of the happy couple has managed to make the return journey.
To avoid all the sycophantic press coverage at the time, my vertigo-suffering dad and I climbed Snowdon. We didn't visit the café at the summit just in case.
Charles and Camilla reportedly wanted a low-key wedding. No photo-call on the Buckingham Palace balcony for them. I can't say I blame them: it would be unseemly for the royal family to outnumber the crowd.
BBC: Malaria row inspired homeopathy…This weekend, supporters of homeopathy are celebrating the 250th anniversary of the birth of Samuel Hahnemann—the man widely accepted as the founder of homeopathy…
In the UK today there are five NHS homeopathic hospitals and the global sale of homeopathic medicines represents more than £1bn globally. But the very concept might never have been discovered had it not been for Dr Hahnemann, who was born in Meissen, Germany, in 1755.
Let's make one thing very clear: Samuel Hahnemann did not discover the concept of homeopathy; he invented it.
So-called homeopathic medicine has no scientific basis whatsoever. While homeopathic treatment doesn't do any harm (other than ripping off vulnerable people, wasting medical budgets, and prolonging belief in quackery into the 21st Century), it doesn't do any good either.
Shame on the NHS for offering placebos as an alternative to real medicine.
(She loves this photo!)
HOLY CRAP!! Get this: Stense is thirteen-THOUSAND days old today!
To celebrate this momentous event, here is a photograph of the buxom babe, taken when she and I were considerably younger.
The photograph is 130 pixels wide by 100 pixels high. That's one pixel for every day of Stense's life.
That's a hell of a lot of pixels!
The grass is riz. Four weekends ago, I mowed the lawn for the first time this year, and noticed in passing that lapwings had resumed their manic flights above the moors. Three weekends ago, the equinox having passed, European clocks were turned forward, marking the official start of 'summertime'. Two weekends ago, I saw my first swallow of 2005. Last weekend, curlews returned to the field at the side of the house.
Blue tits moved into the nest box is our Scots pine yonks ago. The snowdrops in the garden are long-gone. The daffodils and early blossoms are on their way out. In the last month, I have made four trips to the local tip with garden waste. The year's first ill-faited slugs have emerged from their winter hideaways. Last weekend, after a long afternoon's graft in the garden, Jen and I sat on our sunny patio and drank a few well-earned Guinnesses.
Yes, spring is here all right.
Which goes some way to explaining how we managed to get two inches of sodding snow last night.
BBC: Cardinals begin electing new pope
Roman Catholic cardinals have been locked into the Sistine Chapel, beginning their secret election conclave to vote for the new pope.
In the course of the next few days or weeks, a previously fallible human being will, as if by magic, suddenly become infallible. That's one hell of a trick if you think about it. It must be nice to be infallible.
In theory, any one of 115 men could become the next pope. At this early stage in the running, however, the clever money is on Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, Dean of the College of Cardinals, and erstwhile member of the Bavarian Hitler Youth.
The Roman Catholic Church apparently sees nothing incongruous in the prospect of a man who was once a member of the Hitlerjugend becoming pope. In Ratzinger's justifiable defence, membership of the Hitler Youth was compulsory in Bavaria at the time. I'm sure young Joseph made a point of following those Heil Hitlers with a few Hail Marys.
But an ex-Hitler Youth as pope? Could they really be that crazy?
BBC: Britain's Catholics at a crossroads
As cardinals gather in Rome to elect a new pope, the Catholic Church in Britain is riding a wave as lapsed members return to the fold…
Lapsed catholics—didn't they used to be known as protestants?
What in god's name is the phrase kind regards supposed to mean? I'd never heard it until a year ago, and now everyone seems to be signing off their emails with it.
I'm all for pleasantries and crap like that, but think about it for a moment: how can you send regards that are kind? It doesn't make sense. You can send warm regards, and you can send affectionate regards, but kind regards? I don't think so.
And even if it were possible to send your regards kindly, who the hell are you to point it out? Surely whether you're being kind or not is down to the recipient or a third-party to decide. Would you dream of signing off an email with the phrase welcome regards? Well then.
But the worst thing about the phrase kind regards is that it's so bloody trite. The sort of people who write kind regards are the sort of people who buy Phil Collins albums. If they can't be arsed to sign off with an original or, at the very least, appropriate valediction, well, quite frankly, sod them!
Come on, folks, you're emailing real people out there. Don't insult them with platitudes. If you need to keep it formal, plain old regards is good enough. If you're on good (or even bad) terms with the individual concerned, however, why not show an ounce of imagination and sign off with something a bit more personal or humorous? Here are some examples you might like to consider:
- Kind of regards,
- Haughty regards,
- Naughty regards,
- Punctilious regards,
- (Insert random adjective here) regards,
- Graders (anag.)
- Moustache! [must dash, geddit?]
- Let's do brunch!
- Let's make babies next time!
- Fingers-crossed re. your clinic results!
- I think I'm in love with your wife. There, I've said it!
- We'll always have Cleckheaton.
- Be there or wear flares.
- Don't worry, I'm sure it will clear up. They have some wonderful ointments these days.
- LOOK OUT! LOOK OUT BEHIND YOU!
- Must go—Natalie Imbruglia has just called round. I wish she'd leave me alone, she's turning into a real nuisance!
- I could go on like this all day, but I'll be damned if I'm going to.
- Let's just leave it at that, should we?
- Toops!
- Nooby-poots!
- Wooooooooooooop!!
- I take it the 'Princess Anne' situation is resolved.
- It's your round.
- On second thoughts, forget it.
- What's that smell?
- SEND PHOTOS, DAMMIT!
(I fully appreciate I'm asking for trouble here.)
Scotsman Holy smoke! Why heat was on the cardinals…The truth behind the confusing smoke signals from the Vatican chimney has been revealed by one of the 115 cardinals who helped choose a successor to Pope John Paul II.
Adrianus Simonis, from Holland, said: "We needed two goes to get the white smoke going because the chimney just wouldn’t draw. At one point the entire Sistine Chapel filled with smoke."
Simonis’s comments revealed why there had been uncertainty and confusion, when the first puffs of smoke last week appeared to be black. Then, after several minutes, it turned grey and, finally, white.
It seems to me, what the vatican needs is a simple garden incinerator.
- dry paper—white smoke
- dry garden waste—white smoke
- damp garden waste—copious white smoke
- soaking wet garden waste—no smoke
- smelly old rug—black smoke
- oily rag—black smoke
- christmas tree—whooooooosh!
- petrol—VOOOOOOOOM! No eyebrows
It isn't exactly rocket science.
Overheard at the security desk at work:
"Sorry, what did you say your surname was again?"
"Newton."
"As in Isaac?"
"[Sigh] Yes, as in Isaac."
I'm sure this one must have been doing the rounds for weeks, but I only heard it yesterday:
Q: What's brown and half-eaten?
A: John Paul II's Easter egg.
Oh-ho!
Talking of popes (as I have been doing far too much of late):
BBC: Benedict prayed 'not to be Pope'
Pope Benedict XVI has revealed at an audience with pilgrims that he prayed to God during conclave to spare him the "destiny" of becoming Pope.
Does the phrase pants on fire spring to mind?
What a shame he didn't think to pray a little louder: I'm sure the other cardinals would have taken the hint.
