I know what you're thinking: what a Shi'ite idea for a blog meme.

I had an idea for a new meme blog:

(Just in case you're unaware of what I'm getting at Fail Blog)

My Nan died yesterday morning. She was eighty two. My Granddad is still alive, he is eighty three.

When I found out I was in Bristol. I had stayed at my friends place as I'd flown into Bristol Airport on my way home from a trip to the Dordogne. When I found out about my Nan I decided to get the train back to Portsmouth, to see my Mum and my Granddad and all the other assembled relatives. When I was in the train station queuing for tickets I noticed a bloke I’d met in France. I’d only met him because his Grandmother had a house near my friends Grandmother’s house and she had popped over to see my friend’s new baby with him in tow. We’d hardly met for more than ten minutes and hardly said two words to one another. He was in a different queue to me, about ten feet away. I caught his eye and we said hi to one another then I announced to him and half the ticket hall of Bristol Temple Meads train station “My Nan died last night”. He said he was sorry and moved on in the queue. I could tell he was a little put off, what more can you say? I wasn't just telling him, I was telling all those people queuing around me. He was the tool I used to shout out, my Nan's died, I'm sad.

I should just be able to shout it out walking down the road, but I haven't even been able to cry in public yet. I've cried on my own and when I went for a walk when no one could see me. It's stupid really, it's like I don't want to inflict my mourning on anyone else. Just because I'm confronted with the harsh reality of mortality why should anyone else be? Perhaps because we're all going to die so we'd better start getting used to it.

Perversely everyone is really looking forward to the funeral. A time when it is easier to openly mourn. It's socially acceptable. In fact, it's expected. The only problem is, despite my Nan having had a series of small strokes over the last year, the coroner has classified her death as sudden or unexpected and we have to wait up to seven days for the result of a medical examination. (Which will probably only take fifteen minutes and just requires the appropriate tick in a box). My Nan was Irish, in Ireland a funeral usually happens within two days. This is really hard on my Granddad especially, to him we should be having the funeral today. I've told my Mum to ring the coroner and pull the race card. They should be sensitive to our religious and cultural sensitivities, but again, we don't want to make a fuss. So until we get our tick in a box we're in a limbo that I'm calling the Tea Factory. Litres upon liters of tea has been made and drunk.

She is survived by twenty eight direct descendants: eight children, nineteen grandchildren and one great grandchild. If her descendants continue to reproduce at the same rate as the last generation, my parents, in 500 years she will have had enough descendants to fill a football stadium well over 30 thousand. In a thousand years she'll have had close to 2 million direct descendants and in 2500 years she will have had around 1.1 billion descendants, though only around 210 million of those people would still be alive in 4508, so that's alot of funerals to go to, imagine the number of cups of tea.

The Dordogne by the way was absolutely gorgeous and in stark contrast to the distinctly autumnal UK, still bristling with life. The weather was gorgeous. There were figs, walnuts and apples on the trees, the fields were full of grapes and corn. The place seemed alive. We even thought that humming birds were flitting around the Honeysuckle. It turned out they were Humming Bird Hawk moths, but who ever heard of a moth that comes out in the day and drinks nectar. I also spent alot of time with my friends baby, he's four months old. I'm really looking forward to seeing my brother's kid. He should give us hope for the future billions and remind us all that there's more to life than death.

Mineral Water into Eco Wine:

I found this in my cupboard, I don't know who bought it but it looks yummy doesn't it.Cock Soup, let me just say that one more time Cock Soup. Welcome lost Google visitor - back to image search for you, this wasn't the cock you were looking for.

I rode my new bike into work for the first time today; I only picked it up yesterday. I flew in. The thing rides like a dream. I start on a hill which isn’t too tiring and then it’s a gentle slope all the way in. I may be less keen on cycling once I’ve ridden home again, but for the mornings this is the only way to travel.

I thought I was going to be really intimidated by all the traffic. I wasn’t. There are so many riders on the road. I was following three or four guys weaving through the traffic at the bottom of Upper Street, when turned round I realised there were another five riders behind me and already waiting at the lights were another four or five people sitting in the cyclist’s box. There were almost twenty of us there. The traffic snarled with buses blocking the junction, so we just weaved across. I thought it would be a while before I was going to be running red lights like a proper London cyclist but I ran at least five with my little pack.

It’s the fastest way to travel in London. I’ve known this for some time, but it wasn’t until I was actually doing it that I realised just how ridiculous driving a car is in London. Cars can overtake you occasionally, but you’ll get them while their sitting at the next lights and while they’re waiting for it to change you’re already through and heading towards the next set. You can’t go above third gear in a car in London, red lights, speed bumps, one way streets, no stop zones, traffic calming, speed cameras, pedestrian crossings, congestion charge. There are a just a few reasons to ride a bike and that’s without mentioning oil prices.

My bike was £250 and I thought I was being a bit extravagant. Right now I’m thinking it might be one of the best buys I’ve ever made. (As long as it doesn’t get knicked, or kill me).

Why are the pigeons round here starting to resemble miniature tarred and feathered Amy Winehouses? They look impoverished, like they’ve lost their benefits and have hit rock bottom. ‘Please sir can you spare a salt and vinegar, I haven’t eaten since Wednesday.’ Said the crack eyed pigeon with one leg and serious aversion to feather conditioning products.

The feathers on their heads are all spiky looking, like Jonny Rotten after a stretch in Auschwitz. This lunch time I saw one pecking another one in the head. They’ve turned cannibal, I think, that or they actually are zombies, which is a serious possibility. General Mankyness, red eyes, missing limbs, all the hall marks are there.

These creatures can fly too, it’s a shame really that they don’t do more with their skills; it’s a travesty what the internet has done to the carrier pigeon business. Putting all those pigeons out on the street like that. The only alternative tehy have to a life begging Walkers from City Dicks is living in some old mans shed and driving to Rotherham every Sunday just so you can fly back again like some kind of perverse reverse abduction.

If I was a pigeon I wouldn’t be scrabbling round in the gutter trying to eat a fag butt over and over and over again until I eventually work-out it’s inedible, no I’d be in the Sat-Nav business. I’d be in some guys Lexus, on the air con grill, giving him directions to a conference in Dusseldorf on industrial filtration units.

These guys have God given, innate, navigation powers, but still the GPS people are cornering the market. I’m gonna start a pigeon recruitment agency, all I’ll need is an old coat and loads of bread. I go to the park every day, throw bread and tell my feathered friends about all the money we’re going to make. Then when I’m covered in zombie pigeons I’ll try and get them to sign contracts.

I gain pride from the fact that I can point at a map and name the various countries on it. I can do this even when the name of the country is not printed on the map! To some this might appear to be telepathic witchery but were I come from it’s known as Geography, a rather amorphous subject which also includes learning about mini roundabouts and landscape painters.

Have you seen the Youtube clip of an Aussie who takes a map of the world on to the streets of an American city and asks the locals to name a country that isn’t the USA and they’re all like ‘duuuuuh, The Moon, Timmy-Flob-Junior went to the Moon once, or was that Florida’ and I’m sitting there snickering and drawing a map of the middle east blindfolded? That’s my favourite clip that is. (here and here) I dream about the day the Aussie with a map and a TV camera accosts me on the street, of course they won't actually use me in the final cut because of the anti Semitic tattoo on my forehead.

Obviously being smug about my Geography skills brings me great satisfaction however it does have very few practical applications other than impressing Australian television audiences. If you were to be abducted by aliens and they asked you for directions to Tajikistan from the viewing platform in their spaceship, map knowledge would be all but useless, those border lines aren’t actually drawn on the world, they’re made up, and you're talking to an alien, so first you're going to have to explain the concept of the nation state. They’re going to have evolved way beyond such primitive tribalism; their political system is controlled entirely by the smell of each others pheromones, so the only aspect of international politics they’ll be able to understand is that we all hate the French because they smell of cheese.

As well as this skill being all but useless, it is also bollocks. What I mean is that much of what I know is lies. They lie to you in school. The names of the countries on the map, they’re not the real names! At some point in history for a very great number of the world's countries the British have been told the correct name used by the inhabitants to refer to their land only, like some kind of autistic child, to start calling them something completely different. Something like this:

Britain: Hello what’s your name?

Jonny Foreigner: Abdul

Britain: Nice to meet you Brian – France have you met Brian? By the way Brian you work for me now, we’re going to build a railway (btw France smells of cheese).

Here are just a few examples I pulled off Wikipedia:

Croatia: Hrvatska
Germany: Deutschland
Japan: Nippon - koku
Burma: Pyi-daung-zu Myan-ma Naing-ngan-daw
Ireland: Éire
Greece: Hellenic Republic
Spain: España

So the little incident in Caucasia that's so widely reported in the news. Well Russia invaded a country called Sakartvelo, except they call it Gruzia and we call it Georgia. The Russians did it because the Kartveli as the people from Sakartvelo or Gruzia or Georgia call themselves invaded Khussar Iryston, or as they call it Samkhreti Oseti or as we call it South Ossetia, but they did that because they consider Khussar Iryston, or as they call it Samkhreti Oseti or as we call it South Ossetia to be part of Sakartvelo or Gruzia or Georgia . Complicated isn't it. Moral of the story: what is in a name? That which we call Georgia by any other name would still be a bit of a shithole with an oil pipeline running through it.

Thanks to my mate Ben for emailing me this picture. Apparently this is from an English non league footie game, Welling Utd v Maidstone. Here the fans are deriding the goalies failure to stop a rather soft goal. The two teams last played each other on the 26th July, so I’m assuming it was taken then. Welling won 4-0 on the day, so the unfortunate keeper must play for Maidstone, and unless the Welling support have taken a serious dislike to their own keeper at a very early stage of the season the kudos for this display of synchronised swearing should go to Welling.

I realised today I haven’t come across a pencil sharpened at both ends since I left school.

Sharpening a pencil at both ends is a typically Kid thing to do. Because of course two ends must be better than one. You could draw two pictures at once.

Yer if you were able to construct a contraption to hold the paper at exactly the right height above the other sheet, which would have to be adjustable, don't forget the pencil is going to wear twice as fast. How am I going to construct such a contraption? It can't be done you STUPID kid! One of the points of your pencil is pointless, like you, what a coincidence!

*Thrusts tongue under lower lip and makes DURRR sound*

I should have been a teacher.

The Independent has printed a list of their 50 best jokes from the Edinburgh Fringe. (Just this year’s I think). I picked my top five:

"Whenever I see a man with a beard, moustache and glasses, I think, 'There's a man who has taken every precaution to avoid people doodling on photographs of him" – Carey Marx

"'What's a couple?' I asked my mum. She said, 'Two or three'. Which probably explains why her marriage collapsed" – Josie Long

"I once buggered a man unconscious. I'm lying, he was already unconscious when I found him" – Tom Deacon

"My boyfriend likes role play. He likes to pretend we're married. He waits until I go to bed, then he looks at porn and has a wank" – Joanna Neary

"If Britons were left to tax themselves, there would be no schools, no hospitals, just a 500-mile-high statue of Diana, Princess of Wales" – Andy Zaltzman

"I like David Beckham. Most of us have skeletons in our closet. But he takes his out in public" – Andrew Lawrence

Link

Have you heard the one about the giant inflatable dog turd that escaped from a Swiss museum and damaged a power line and an orphanage? Would you like to? How about the video of the evangelical Christians dancing to drum and base, or a lightning strike in super slow mo. All this and much more in my Del.icio.us stream, it lives in the side bar.

The last post was a little heavy on the politics. Not to belittle the politics, I’m 100% for my opinion, probably of all the opinions I’ve come across I’d say mine was top five at least, mainly because I so rarely disagree with it. If I ever do it’s remarkable how quickly we synchronise with the help of just a few beta blockers.

So without further a do a, return to form:

Man caught having sex with park bench – Hong Kong.

Previously on Mg Fg Tg

Man has sex with picnic table.
Man has sex with bike.

On Saturday I went to the Climate Camp's day of mass action at the Kingsnorth power station in North East Kent. It was my first ever experience of a protest of any kind. The protest was split into three groups. I joined the march part as it was billed as family friendly and sufficiently tame for a first timer. The hardcore sailed in on rafts while guerrilla protesters were attempting to breach the fence through the undergrowth (not actual gorillas).

The marchers were made up of a really broad spectrum of the public. They were predominantly young alternatives types, grubby and jobless looking, (I saw two people with dreadlocks and facial tattoos. There is no more succinct way of saying ‘I’m long term unemployed’ than the facial tattoo.) But there were plenty of washed people, a couple of young families, local and from afar, and I even met a guy who confessed to being a stockbroker.

The biggest group in attendance were the police. According to the press there were 1500 of them, this included helicopters, mounted units, dogs, police on scrambler motorbikes and the coastguard. Before I arrived at the protest I'd read reports that the Police were being heavy handed and using stop-and-search indiscriminately. Two MPs and an MEP have even asked questions, suggesting that they may have been abusing their powers. My experience of the police was two fold. Face to face they were universally pleasant except for one minor bit of argy bargy, a protester snapped a piece of their plastic ‘Police Line Do Not Cross’ tape (worse things have happened at school sports days, in terms of violence and tape breaking). But as a force, for all their good manners, the Police still managed to intimidate by weight of numbers alone. They flanked us on all sides, they had air cover and mounted cavalry; this combined with a surveillance operation, photo and video, presumably for inclusion in some kind of dossier, or file, it was intimidating. (Except for the contingent from the Met, they tried a bit hard with matching sun glasses, crossed arms and a don't mess look which transformed them into Hale and Pace doing the Two Rons.)

The Police presence seemed like a statement, a show of force, and the conspiracy theorist inside me decided that their aim was to test our resolve, intimidate us, scare people off and essentially nip the movement in the bud, which would have gone beyond their peace keeping remit. Trying to extinguish a legitimate protest movement is political I thought before I calmed down. On reflection I think the most likely explanation for the disproportionate level of policing is classic bureaucratic arse covering. Blame the ubiquitous risk assessment, they took every spurious threat by the organisers and added it to the official list of reasons to panic. The rhetoric put out by the organisers in the run up to the protest was inflammatory. It was billed as a day of civil disobedience we were going to invade the power station and shut it down, so a multi million pound overreaction from the Police was all too predictable.

Of course no one came close to shutting the power station down; they never were. There is no big red ‘off’ switch inside their base; it’s not a game of capture the flag. Some people did get over the fence, they were arrested immediately. If they hadn’t been, I assume they would have just wandered about looking a bit lost, but that’s not the point, this is a PR game. This is less about us making a statement through our presence on the ground and more about making a statement in the media. The measure of success is column inches and the Police with their huge presence, their cost and their injunctions provided just as many column inches as the protester’s statements, banners and rhetoric, so if the Police were playing politics it could easily be argued they were working for us, or at the very least they were our patsy. Regardless I’d still like to know who gave the Police a blank cheque and whether there was any political motivation for that decision; however misguided it might have turned out to be.

After the police tape incident was resolved the march continued at a leisurely pace for a couple of hours. We arrived at the gates of the power station, whether they were the front gates I don’t know, but we cheered triumphantly regardless. Banners were erected, police dogs, safe behind fences, were goaded and we settled in for a spot of soap boxing. (Political speeches, not a clean version of mud wrestling.) There was a whole raft of speakers form disparate political groups, clearly all you had to do to get your two minutes worth was go up and impose yourself on whoever was holding the microphone, which to be honest was a bit of a shame. The speakers even managed to contradict one another, the chap from the Green Party did a particularly good line in calling people liars. They also strayed wildly off subject. As far as I was concerned I was there to stop the government from building a new generation of coal fired power stations, it transpires to do this we need to bring down the entire international banking system. We also need to stop economic growth and, as one old hippy warned us, we need to avoid the corporatisation of our movement, be warned, it happened to the hippies.

I’d rather they just stuck to the power station stuff. Coal is bad for the environment. Any new coal fired power station will release tons of Co2 into the environment and will make meeting the governments own Co2 emission targets almost impossible. There is no existing effective carbon capture technology and if it were to be developed then there is no obligation in the current plans on Eon to install it, which means they won’t because not installing it means more profit (assuming they are able to develop it at all).

The bank stuff and the growth stuff I’ve heard before and to be honest I pretty much agree (I challenged by banker brother to tell me it was wrong and he couldn't) but it’s out of place at this rally. If this movement is to gain any political momentum it needs to appeal more to the mainstream. This kind of radical politics marginalises the whole movement. There were 600 people at the protest. 600 people are not going to bring down the multi trillion dollar international banking system regardless of how unjust it is. It’s worth noting that on the same day 3000 people travelled from Swansea to Charlton, a rather unremarkable suburb of South East London just to watch their football team get beat 2-0. That’s how marginal this movement is, a minor city can muster up 5 times more people to travel all the way across the country for ninety minutes of football than this movement can attract from the entire country and abroad for their big event of 2008.

The anomaly is that this issue is not marginal. It is in every newspaper on a daily basis, it’s mentioned in hundreds of television programs, it gets talked about every single night in thousands of pubs. This issue is huge, but still this issue has been unable to find a political focal point. The reason I went to Kingsnorth is I felt it had the potential of becoming a line in the sand issue, a focal point for the silent majority to rally around and I think it still has that possibility, but the climate change movement needs to get rid of their hippy baggage and appeal to the mainstream. To the woman who told us to avoid corporations, who is going to pay for the research and development costs of these wind, wave, and solar alternatives that we’re touting? To the person who wants to halt all economic growth, don’t you want growth in the renewable zero carbon portion of the economy? To the person that told us all sternly that we live on a finite planet, aren’t we touting the sun as a source of renewable, infinite, energy?

Revolutionaries throughout history have consistently thrown the baby out with the bathwater, they’re mistrusted for a reason, there is no need to tear down the old only to replace it with something fundamentally incapable of achieving your stated aims and end up in a worse place than when you started out. There is plenty of room for change within the existing government framework in this country. The Green movement has been around for decades and has failed to make any serious political headway, we are currently faced with the frightening prospect of David Cameron winning Green votes for want of a viable alternative. That must be considered a failure on the part of the Green movement. They just don't seem to be capable of moving beyond media stunts.

I hope the green movement does manage to expand it's appeal and I hope they succeed in their aims to close Kingsnorth for ever, but I get the distinct feeling that this isn't the last we've heard of Kingsnorth and to be honest I'm not upset about that fact. I still believe this power station has the potential to become an effective lens for focusing public opinion on this issue. I think the government are going to fight on this one and a fight, managed well, may be just what this movement needs, it needs something pretty urgently.

This ship is rusting in a ship graveyard in Mauritania. The word on the side was added by this chap Filippo Minelli. A couple of days later his ‘statement’ took on much greater significance as there was a coup in the country (story from the BBC). Perhaps the ship eventually gave up and sank. Now for the ultimate irony the new junta will commandeer the ship for their navy.

Via Wooster Collective

I was drinking these last night, Campari and Soda. Looks tasty doesn’t it, a bit like a classy old school alco-Tizer, so I was surprised to discover that it actually tastes like a blend of bile, olives and amphetamines.

I still had two, but one of those was my friend Laura's, she couldn't stomach it.

We only bought them because we were told that Clement Freud used to be paid by Campari to go round London bars ordering them as part of a marketing campaign. Presumably this was some time ago. Quite a testament to Clement’s powers of promotion that he is still selling the stuff so many years later, despite the fact that it tastes a little bit like sick.

I'm about to become politically active people! Can you feel the establishment quaking, no that wasn’t a truck driving past that was the fear of the ruling classes. I’m off to the Climate Camp 2008. We’re going to be protesting about plans to replace the Kingsnorth Coal Fired Power Station with . . . a Coal Fired Power Station and I am firmly against this kind of thing.

This is a link to the Climate Camp website.
This is a link to comment in today’s Guardian.
Here is some balanced coverage from the BBC.

And for my part I’ve created a new character, introducing Climate Christ.

He’s crucified on a windmill. I'm a little disappointed with the scanning, but it's late and the time for action is now. Come to the protest and Climate Christ will lead you and his chosen people to the zero-carbon Promised Land, a land of organic milk and honey where we'll all have jobs among other things, so milky honey all round!

Climate Christ's First Parable:

I saw this short little video clip today and it kind of summed it up for me, just watch it. It's not even about the environment. It is about living responsibly and planning for the future in the present. We could do worse than following this example. LINK.

And low he had spoken - and included a hypertext link.

xkcd

There are questions that I have that I kind of know I will never get an answer to. What came first the chicken or the egg? How can there be a God if there is so much evil in the world? What is real nothingness? But I carry on because I have to. I tell myself 'there are certain things you'll never be able to comprehend, the universe is so complicated and you are but so very small and insignificant'. And then one of the answers to one of the really big questions just falls into my lap:

Q. Why does Will Smith get a taxi all the way from Philadelphia to Los Angles in The Fresh Prince of Bell Air title sequence? He gets in one little fight and his Mum gets scared, the next thing you know, he's whistling for a cab. That's a whole continent. It would have taken days and costs hundreds maybe thousands of dollars, it just doesn't make sense.

A. There are two additional verses in the full version of the title sequence, one in which his Mum gives him the ticket, the other in which he is on the plane. The truth is he flew to L.A. they just edited it out. As far as I know the full sequence was only ever used in the UK on the pilot.

Watch the full song on youtube.

So there you go. Maybe I'm not so insignificant after all.

This is a web page review of cakefarts.com:

Cake Farts is what is known as a single serving site. It has no links, no archive, no other content at all other than the front page, which focuses on a video clip. The site's concept is in hindsight straightforward. The name, the url, all of the content, the video, is about cake farts, but what is a cake fart? Well a Cake Fart is farting on a cake. Yer, that's it. Farting on a cake. Not farting near a cake, actually getting naked, pressing your arse into a freshly baked chocolate sponge and farting, then showing the world your cream covered arsehole and farting into the camera so the whole world can see your chocolate covered ring piece winking while it plays it's sticky stink horn. Not to mention the fact that you have cake all over your lady bits, which incidentally we can all see, not that we'll remember that. No the image which is indelibly imprinted into my mind is that of your sugary sphincter rasping away while pieces of chocolate sponge cake work their way loose from your sticky bum cheeks. This site has certainly answered the question: is there anything more weird the internet can come up with? The answer is a clear, resounding yes. Now all I'm waiting for is for someone on the internet to articulate that very sentence with their arsehole while riding a unicycle and firing tits out of a cannon and I'll be satisfied. Do not ask why the internet has done this, ask what you can do for the internet and get to work straight away.

Cake Farts can be found by putting cake farts into google – it contains images of bumhole and cakey vag,so you've been warned.

Do you remember when I made my end of the world predictions about the Large Hadron Collider, (LHC) in CERN. They were due to turn it on in May, now they’re saying that they’ll do it in August, it was nice of them to let us have the summer.

The Big Picture blog has some amazing images from inside the experiment, which have just served to further my belief in an Event Horizon scenario where we all end up dead.

Hey if George Orwell had written Even Horizon you guys would be totally with me!

They have a secret under ground laboratory (OK it’s not a secret, but I bet they won't let you walk in there without your own Special Forces squadron). They drive around on little scooters. Look at this video they even have different coloured overalls! How Doctor evil do you need to get and, the irony is we already gave them 10 billion dollars!

CERN Rap from Will Barras on Vimeo

Actually this video is really quite informative. I’ll be honest with you here I, like most of the people that have come up with the Armageddon scenarios involving CERN, only have a very tenuous grasp on what the bollocks they’re up to, so I’m glad they have spent some of their billions of funding on producing a rap to try and reach-out to the plebs. I still think we’re all going to die though.

For a better idea of how the LHC operates try here.

The date I will become older than my Father on the day that I was born.

And no less significant, though rather shamefully an afterthought, the date of the same for my Mother: 27th August 2008.

I often wish I was a rich crazy old man with loads of money. I’d live in a tumble down house and have crazy schemes going on. That’s why I need all the money, so I have carte blanche to follow up my crazy whims. I’m not a very practical person, so I’d probably have an assistant to help with the details. Let’s call him Igor.

One of my role models in this regard is my dissertation tutor from my university days. He was a professor of genetics, I don’t think he taught classes, but I was lucky enough to get him as my dissertation tutor. When we were getting to know each other he took me to see his lab where he grew his mutant fish. He had these big tanks full of Tilapia. Tilapia is actually the name of a family of fish rather than an individual species, but they’re all fast growing freshwater fish native to the rift valley in Africa. They’re extensively farmed; the problem is that they often cause damage to native populations when they get into the water-ways and start taking over. So the professor was mutating them so that they could only have female babies, or male babies, I forget, but the idea was that they wouldn’t be able to breed effectively. (You’ve seen the beginning of Jurassic Park right). The professor was Russian or Serbian, or something like that (his name ended in ski) and when he showed me round he got handfuls of fish feed and feed his mutant creations by hand, the fish would put their heads out of the water and take the food straight from his hand, some of them where huge, he was giggling like a child the whole time in a funny Russian accent, and I thought ‘that is so cool, I want my own lab with tanks of mutant fish!’ I’ve wanted it ever since.

Today’s crazy ass scheme is based around the Garra Rufa, or doctor fish, they would live in my reed bed, which would go in the conservatory with the orchids. Boy it’ll be hot in there. Igor’s gonna be sweating! Gara Rufa are fish used to treat skin conditions, predominantly Psoriasis, but also Eczema, they frequent hot springs and nibble the dead and diseased skin of people that bathe there. A doctor once told me in Austria that if I was his patient he would send me to Turkey free of charge to be nibbled by them, though my eczema has cleared up recently, that doesn’t mean I shouldn’t have my own pond full of doctor fish. I’ve always wanted this experience and for a couple of weeks I even contemplated moving to Austria. Too easy, no I’ll just wait until I’m an old eccentric man with a tumble-down Victorian mansion and get Igor to breed them for me.

The reason I am reminded of this is that Garra Rufa are in the news today. A Spa in Virginia are using the tiny fish to perform pedicures. (Though the pedicures are reportedly carried out by Garra Rufa, the pictures don’t look like them).

(vai Boing Boing)

If someone strikes you on the right cheek, turn to him the other also and when you turn around, just give them a little flash of that semi automatic assault rifle you’re packing, the one you won at the Windsor Hills Baptist Church’s youth conference, and hey presto Christ’s work is done.

LINK

(Via:Clusterflock)

My friend Phill lost his phone a while back on a tequilla fueled night out. Luckily he had the foresight to insure himself knowing that just this kind of thing was fairly likely, but before he could claim on his insurance he needed to report the phone lost to the police. Check out the form he had to fill in. If he didn't know getting drunk and loosing your possesions isn't cool before, well he does now.

(OK I may have done something similiar recently myself)

I just stumbled across this and it's wonderful. The Youtube screening room is showing, I think for a limited time only, the 2007 Oscar Winning Animation The Danish Poet. I'd never seen it before and I just loved it.

Watch it here.

The bank my brother works for is sending him to Chicago to work in their repossessions department. All hands to the pumps apparently. You’ve gotta go where the work is.

I said to him, “you can’t go without the Economy Giraffe! He was right about the credit crunch.”

He left it behind, idiot! Who else is going to rescue their economy? George Bush? Not likely mate.