You know, the good folks of my adoptive county are so full of themselves sometimes…'Appen today is Yorkshire Day.
A happy and bloody freezing new year to you all!
Our garden thermometer bottomed at -5°C last night. Freezing fog has covered all of the trees in hoar frost, and Hebden Bridge looks like bloody Narnia this morning. I've just fed the birds (fat balls and seed: bread isn't much good when it's this cold), and offered some very anxious brass monkeys a blanket. Time to put the kettle on and settle down with a good book.
Unless your kettle is powered by wind-generated electricity, that is. Not much of that today, huh? Nor yesterday. Not a breath of wind. The scores of silly turbines defiling the local hillsides are doing sod all in this weather.
It was the same when I climbed Moel Famau on Christmas Eve. Dozens of wind turbines doing sweet fuck all in the Beaufort Scale zero non-wind.
And that's when it dawned on me. Do you know who's really behind the reckless, ill-advised push for wind powerstations? Vegetarians, that's who.
Just think: twenty years from now, we've neglected to replace our wonderfuel nuclear powerstations, coal and gas are a no-no, and all we've got to cook our Christmas turkeys in is our wind-powered electric ovens. Then we get a Christmas like the one just gone, and all us meat eaters are eating raw turkey and dropping dead of salmonella.
Vegetarians, I tell you.
…than by showing a scientifically accurate and not at all gratuitous video of the evolution of a sexy, German robo-chick?
[via The Dispersal of Darwin]
Talking of humanoid robots, compare and contrast:
Physicist
We have a right to know.
Guardian: Word 'school' is out for new £4.7m Sheffield primary
A new £4.7m primary school in Sheffield is facing criticism for dropping the word "school" from its title after governors decided the term had "negative connotations".
The headteacher of Sheffield's Watercliffe Meadow, Linda Kingdon, said the south Yorkshire school, which is due to open on Monday, will instead be called a "place for learning".
Words failurise me.
Actually, I think the word governors has very negative connotations. The phrase clueless twats seems far more appropriate.
Ten bonus points to the best police-related fish pun in the comments.
Sorry there have been so few updates recently. I've been run off my feet—mostly with Darwin-related stuff. Pesky bicentennials!
Apologies in particular to the two people who sent me emails with pointers to news stories of a distinctly Grutsian nature. I will make use of them soon.
In the meantime, here's an advert for blackcurrant-flavoured Tango™.
Regular Gruts readers (there are such creatures, apparently) will know that I occasionally like to point out logical fallacies in people's arguments. Sometimes, however, the people in question take all the skill out of it.
[Hat-tip to Pharyngula.]
In celebration of the Good Captain's 68th birthday, here he is bellowing Nowadays a Woman's Gotta Hit a Man:
Accept no pale immitations.
Jim Hodgson reviews the last three or four minutes of 'The Hills Have Eyes II'.
So, Kate Winslet has got a pair of golden globes.
Tell us something we didn't know already, eh, lads.
The Guardian newspaper (my butler reads it) has listed 1000 Novels Everyone Must Read. Note the imperative.
Let's see: setting ourselves the ambitious target of a novel a week, that should take us nineteen years and three months to complete. At that rate, we'll be finished by May 2028—by which time (touch-wood), I'll be 63.
That's 19 years to read 1,000 books, which, to put it bluntly, simply aren't true. They're novels, for Pete's sake. They're not real.
Wouldn't we be better off spending the all-too-few precious years we have left on this fantastic planet finding out about stuff that actually is true—you know science and history and shit like that—rather than frittering it away reading stories?
By all means read a novel now and again, but, quite frankly, reading 1,000 of them just shouldn't be a priority.
"Oh, that's sad," I remarked: "it says here that a native American language went extinct this week, when the last man who could speak it died."
"I wonder what his last words were," said Jen. "Mind you, so did everyone else."
I receive email:
David's genitals yesterday.Dear Mr. Carter
I am a designer working for very small (and very new) publisher in Copenhagen Denmark.
I am interested in a photo you took of Michelangelo's David in Firenza [Florence] that features a sharp detail of the sculpture's genitals, which I saw at »Flickr«. The image is located at the following address: <http://www.flickr.com/photos/
gruts/442314069/in/set- 72157600040809215/> I am interested in reproducing this image (with reimbursement, of course) as a cover illustration for a Danish publication, a book detailing the pros and cons of male circumcision. As Denmark is a small country, print-runs are usually quite limited and this book is expected to have max. print run of 2000 copies.
If interested, we will be needing a high resolution image (min. 300 dpi) @ apprx. 250 mm in height.
Look forward to hearing from you.
All the best from Copenhagen
[Name and address supplied]
I said yes, obviously. Any proceeds to the Beagle Project.
