Our nanny government seems to enjoy nothing more than protecting us from ourselves by banning stuff, so doesn't it do something useful this time and ban amplified music in pubs?
Times: The louder the music in venues, the faster you drink
Loud pop music in bars makes people drink more and down it more quickly, a study in France has shown…
The results, published online in Alcoholism: Clinical & Experimental Research, show that the louder the music, the more swiftly the drinkers finished their beer, ordered more—or left.
It is entirely possible, Professor [Nicolas Guéguen, Professor of Behavioural sciences at the Université de Bretagne-Sud] admits, that they just found the atmosphere uncongenial, so accelerated their drinking and left.
Remember when you could actually hold a conversation in a pub? It's getting increasingly harder to do so. It's time to reclaim our bars from the alco-pop-sipping teenagers who only go there to get blind drunk. An amplified music ban would help achieve this—and protect us from ourselves by decreasing our alcohol intake.
Come on, Gordon, you know you want to!
And, in related news:
Liverpool Echo: Cains owners: We'll fight to save our beer
… The Toxteth [Cains] brewery yesterday admitted its future as a going concern was in jeopardy after a "perfect storm" conspired against the 158-year-old business…
[Y]esterday their six monthly figures made for painful reading: £4.6m losses; higher raw material and energy costs; and the effects of the smoking ban all took their toll.
My emphasis added. Let it not be said we didn't see this coming. For the record, Cains is one of my favourite pints.
BBC: Salt shakers 'to cut salt intake'
Salt shakers with fewer holes have been sent to fish and chip shops in an attempt to curb salt consumption.
West Norfolk Council spent about £450 sending 200 shakers, which have only four holes, to 39 shops in the area.
Jen made us sesame prawn toasts yesterday. It's one of our favourite meals. It's supposed to be a starter dish, but we tend to make a lot of them and eat them as a main course. They're far nicer than any you will eat in your local Chinese restaurant. Seriously, try them!
Oh, and I made lemonade. Fantastic!
Howlin' Wolf, Smokestack Lightning:
Guardian: Scotty's ashes fail to reach final frontier
The ashes of actor James Doohan, who played Montgomery "Scotty" Scott in Star Trek, were lost on the way to space on Sunday morning, when the rocket carrying them malfunctioned minutes after take-off.
BBC: Author and playwright Gray dies
English playwright and diarist Simon Gray has died aged 71.
The author penned more than 30 plays for stage and TV, including Butley, Quartermaine's Terms, Melon and The Common Pursuit, as well as five novels.
Gray recently gained in notoriety for his series of witty memoirs, The Smoking Diaries and The Last Cigarette.
I can't speak about his plays, but Gray's three volumes of diaries (The Smoking Diaries, The Year of the Jouncer, and The Last Cigarette) are modern masterpieces in the genre: moving and, at the same time, laugh-out-loud funny. Gray developed a unique voice in his diaries. It's sad to think there will be no more.
You've heard the sordid rumours, but now all can be revealed:
Telegraph: Strange sex life of melons exposed
I had a major senior moment at work the other week. Actually, it was more than a moment really; it lasted several days.
Whenever I went to make a cup of tea in the kitchen, or popped to the loo, or headed off to a meeting somewhere, I kept bumping into this young woman in the corridor outside my office. Metaphorically bumping into, that is—it wasn't that kind of senior moment. It was uncanny: almost every time I had cause to walk down the corridor, there she was coming the other way. I had no idea who she was; a new face from another department, no doubt.
After a while, our bumping into each other became something of a private joke: I would nod at her, or share a conspiratorial smirk we walked past each other.
Until a week last Thursday, that is, when I finally realised that she was two totally different women. I know this for a fact, because I saw them talking with each other. Apart from their blonde hair, petite builds, and stylish suits, they looked absolutely nothing like each other. Not even remotely.
I'll bet they were talking about the nutter down the corridor who keeps smirking at them.
Ah-ha! This might explain the legendary long-arm of the law!
BBC: Eat kangaroo to 'save the planet'
Switching from beef to kangaroo burgers could significantly help to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, says an Australian scientist…
He said: "It tastes excellent, not unlike venison - only a different flavour."
In other words, it tastes unlike venison.
I ate kangaroo once, in Cairns, Australia. Not a whole one, obviously. The waitress was intrigued to know what I thought.
"I didn't like it," I said. "I kept thinking of Skippy."
She seemed delighted that I knew who Skippy was.
I was just thinking about God.
Assuming, for the sake of argument, that an omnipotent God exists—which He doesn't, obviously, but just assuming…
Presumably an omnipotent God would be perfectly capable of creating an exact, equally omnipotent copy of Himself. No point in being omnipotent if You can't do something like that, is there? I mean, if You couldn't, it would rather cast doubt on Your omnipotence, wouldn't it?
So, setting aside the rather massive issue of where a God Who is, after all, also supposed to be omnipresent would manage to find space to put an exact copy of Himself (Jen pointed out that God is also supposed to be omniscient, so He should easily be able to work that one out—and I suppose two omniscient minds would be better than one), here's my question:
What if the two omnipotent Gods then decided to have a fight? Who would win?
They really haven't thought this one through, have they?
This Nationwide item is a legend in my family. I well remember watching it live, aged 9, back in 1974 (Christ!):
(Via BoingBoing)
In celebration of the return of Association Football to our television sets (has it really only been 3.4 nanoseconds?), we give you the timeless Kicker Conspiracy by the equally timeless The Fall:
(Come on you Reds!)
Do you know where the word plagiarise comes from? I do, and it's very interesting:
plagiarize or plagiarise
v. take (the work or an idea of someone else) and pass it off as one's own.
- DERIVATIVES plagiarism n. plagiarist n. plagiaristic adj. plagiarizer n.
- ORIGIN C18 (earlier (C17) as plagiarism): from L. plagiarius 'kidnapper'.
I wrote that definition myself.
Anonymous emailer Ken Keenes writes:
I am mightily impressed by gruts which I stumbled upon quite by chance whilst researching fart related material via google. Actually, that is not strictly correct as I was looking for 'trapped wind' which I suppose is quite the opposite of fart. Nevertheless, your site is wondrous to behold because of the grammatical clarity and, in my opinion, proper use of punctuation.
I despair at some of the inane ramblings which appear on the internet which are clearly written by someone a) drunk, b) on drugs, c) both, but more importantly who did not pay full attention to English lessons while at school.
Glad to see all those hours of grammatical hell in Messrs Harrison's and Stephens' English lessons weren't a complete waste of time, Ken. I rather pride myself on my punctuation: I think it's important. I make a point of methodically punctuating all of my text messages, and pretending not to be able understand anyone who uses those silly SMS abbreviations. It drives my sister up the wall.
Now all I need is some content to match the quality of the punctuation. Not much chance of that, I'm afraid.
Still, at least they're agreed on one thing: Great Britain came a magnificent fourth.
That's above Australia.
Got that, Bruce?
Driving into Hebden Bridge for The Sunday Times this morning (our butler reads it), I turned a corner and came face-to-face with an elderly chap driving his car the wrong way down a one-way street. I slammed on my brakes, flashed my lights, and held a finger in the air, mouthing thing the words "ONE WAY!!"
The old chap mounted the pavement and squeezed past me, staring at me as if it was me who was the total fucking idiot.
BBC: Rome's battle of the bells
In Rome, the capital of Christendom, which has some 600 churches with over 1,500 bells in their bell towers, the ancient art of bell-ringing has almost died out.
I'm sure there must be a good many Christians out there who would object to Rome's being described as the capital of Christendom. Just do a Google search of 'pope' + 'antichrist', if you don't believe me. On second thoughts, don't: life's too short.
As a non-Christian, I take great exception to the area I live in being described as part of Christendom. I also take great exception when news reporters use phrases such as a Moslem area of the city or a Jewish area of the city or a gay area of the city. As far as I'm aware, we don't reserve specific areas of cities for people of specific religions, races or sexual orientations: it's a genuinely offensive idea.
If journalists must describe areas in such ways, they should at least use a qualifier such as predominantly to indicate that the current demographic situation has emerged as a result of the contingencies of history, and should not be taken to endorse exclusivity.
Now, I'm going to get off my hobby-horse and pop down into the Lesbian Capital of Britain for a newspaper.
New Scientist: Wind turbines make bat lungs explode
… A new study shows that the moving blades [of wind turbines] cause a drop in pressure that makes the delicate lungs of bats suddenly expand, bursting the tissue's blood vessels. This is known as a barotrauma, and is well-known to scuba divers…
[Scientists] collected 188 dead bats from wind farms across southern Alberta, and determined their cause of death. They found that 90% of the bats had signs of internal haemorrhaging, but only half showed any signs of direct contact with the windmill blades. Only 8% had signs of external injuries but no internal injuries.
The movement of wind-turbine blades creates a vortex of lower air pressure around the blade tips similar to the vortex at the tip of aeroplane wings. Others have suggested that this could be lethal to bats, but until now no-one had carried out necropsies to verify the theory.
BBC: Arrow fired through family's cat
A family cat is expected to survive after its body was pierced by an 18-inch aluminium arrow.
I'd have had backup, just to make sure.
(And, at the risk of being pedantic, the arrow wasn't fired through the cat; it was fired into it—as the X-ray photograph accompanying the article quite clearly shows.)
