Quiz night last night. It turns out I am the only person in my department who knew that Orson Wells' last acting role was as the voice of Unicron in the 1986 animated feature Transformers The Movie. I could see all the top brass looking, who is this guy, he's hot shit!

And today people I'm off skiing, via St Pancras and super fast trains - because I am concerned about my Carbon footprint *smug*.

"Good. Use your aggressive feelings, boy! Let the hate flow through you. Oh...I'm afraid the deflector shield will be quite operational when your friends arrive."

Yes I'm off to France! There is a great story about France in today's papers. It's about the back packer who wanted to walk from Bristol to India without any money, only the shirt on his back. According to the BBC news story, "Mr Boyle was hoping to prove the kindness of humanity". He turned back when he got to Calais. As soon as his feet touched French soil his faith in the kindness of humanity, built up over months of diligent psychotropic drug consumption, evaporated. Mr Doyle, who admits to struggling with the French language says the French saw them as "a bunch of freeloading backpackers", or in French "foutez le camp vous des chiens de porc Anglais" (fuck off you English pig dogs.)

I expect nothing less from the French. I can't wait to bask in their icy hosility while eating their overpriced Pomme Frites and drinking enough vino rouge to ski naked down the high street; rounding the night off with a sound thrashing from the local genderme. Vive La France!

I'll let Charlie Brooker finish with his estimation of skiiers or "the nation's braying upper-middle-class idiot quotient" :

But that's not the main reason I've never been tempted to go skiing: it's the people. The moment anyone tells me they're going skiing, I start to dislike them. This is because I've constructed my own imaginary version of a skiing holiday in my head: it involves a fistful of self-satisfied bastards called Dan and Izzy and Sam and Lucy sharing a chalet together, drinking wine while listening to Mark Ronson on Izzy's iPod speakers, taking 15,000 photos of each other guffawing and pulling silly faces, and occasionally venturing outside to slide down a hill on a pair of glorified planks, at which point with any luck they hurtle headlong into a tree, snapping at least three limbs in the process, and the holiday ends with them lying on their back, twitching like a half-crushed spider, exposed shards of shinbone gleaming in the winter sun as they scream for an air ambulance at the top of their idiot lungs.

Charlie Brooker in the Guardian.

I just hope the insurance from TravelSupermarket will stretch that far.

Update: I've just found out Euro is now worth nearly 80 pence! Balls, this time last year it was about 70 pence, which means my holiday will be about 15% more expensive! Aghhhhh.

Watch me ski on my last cheaper skiing holiday - video, yay.

Team building this Thursday pub quiz. I used the RAND function on Excel to select the teams so that everyone is mixed up randomly and there can be no accusations of favouritism or fixing. Then they changed them all around. I'm fine with this, they didn't want people who sit next to each other being in the same team so that we would all interact more. That's the name of the game after all, fine, but don't say, "it wasn't random enough". Because that would mean you've totally failed to understand the concept of random. Having no two team members that sit next to each other in the office is a pattern. What you meant to say: "it's too random". Get it right!

My latest game is commenting on MP Tom Watson's blog. Well I've commented twice. My first comment in response to his request for information: "I’m trying to find out how civil servants felt when they started working for the government." So I replied:

The minister paid just like all the others, he had to, because he knew I’d go to the papers if he didn’t. I walked out of that flat with 80 pounds in my hand, more money than I’d ever held, and a sense of shame that can never come off no matter how hard I scrub.

Tom's latest post is basically this picture:

The text:

This little character was hanging around our compost heap today. I’m assuming toad. Any idea what type it might be though?

Well my comment, a little snarky maybe, along these lines: that it is a frog of the type frog, and if it had been a toad it would of most likely have been of the type toad, (or for the pedantic common frog, or common toad). That would have been were it ended, but Tom deleted my comment!

I've never assassinated another blog before, but this guy is an MP. He presented the Organ Donation Bill, he steered the final stages of the Armed Forces Act through the Commons. He has sat on the Standing Committees of the Proceeds of Crime Bill, the Communications Bill, The Human Tissue Bill, the Civil Partnerships Bill and the Gambling Bill and he doesn't know a Frog when he sees one.

I'm not sure what kind of answers he was expecting, your average garden compost heap isn't usually marked out as an unparalleled reservoir of amphibian biodiversity, lucky he had a blog to spread the news of his remarkable discovery. I just hope they look after him properly in Whitehall, hold his hand when he's in the park and answer all his questions about all the wonderous new things he encounters. I can imagine the next PMQs "Can I enquire of my right honourable friend if the government is aware of these bushy tailed tree scramblers? I have recently had a close encounter with one in my own garden, I don't know where they come from, but I speak for my constituents when I say I'm concerned about the amount of peanuts they can eat".

Well Tom I hope you now realise you are indeed a dullard and your post is at best unremarkable, here is a little guide to identifying British amphibians for any future crisis of taxonomy you encounter during your work for the government.

This guy likes to ride motorbikes and, or set himself on fire. Watch him do his thing and hear what his Mother thinks about it. It doesn't matter where you are in the world Mothers are all the same - nag, nag, nag.

The guys MySpace.

. . at last.

It is amazing how quickly things can go wrong when you are a thirty nine year old man minding your own business wandering the streets of Tokyo dressed as a school girl.

Reuters Article

Reminds me of a time in Swansea when some friends dressed me up in their charity shop haul. Mainly day-glo stuff. Thin jacket, white with lurid splashes; truckers hat, day-glo green; massive white sun glasses. This was about 2002, so I had managed to pre-empt and mix up the look of New Rave pioneers Klaxons with a pair of Paris Hilton's sun glasses just five years too early. I looked like a total tit.

Everyone decided, much to their amusement that I looked blind. I did, I was so badly dressed the only possible explanation was that I had lost the power of sight. It was the glasses that sold it, they were defiantly blind man's glasses.

Next thing I know I'm leaving the pub clutching my mate Rob's arm doing my best impression of a blind man for anyone watching in the street, but that's not good enough because they don't know I'm not blind. I think that was when it was decided that I should try and drive Rob's car. I've got my eyes closed for realism, so I make a show of trying to find the door handle. The door handle on the drivers side.

I stalled the car in the middle of the street, I can't drive, much to the amusement of everyone watching and to the total credulity of a bunch of 'skater kids' hanging around on the wall next to the car who'd been watching the whole spectacle. A blind man with the worst dress sense ever seen, and this is Swansea, leaving a pub in the middle of the afternoon and trying to drive. I even got a round of applause. This was all in the days before Youtube and camera phones. Back in the days you'd make a tit out of yourself just for a good story. Nowadays people aren't satisfied until their on Reuters.

Italian scientists find the G Spot using ultrasound. British sniffer dog project called off.

Project leader admits: "we we're looking in the wrong type of box".

BBC Article

I just had my annual appraisal. It went better than I had feared. This year I have been praised for my team working! It struck me as slightly absurd to praise an individual for being part of a team, inherantly a collective achievement. I like most of the people I work with. Since last year a particular senior employee has left/got pushed out. He was the bain of my life. I did not like him, we did not work well together - we were a bad team.

If I had been surrounded by loathsome people I would have hated them all and sulked twenty four hours a day and, to add insult to injury, got a zero for my team working. I think in the interests of honesty and integrity, which is important in team working, (I should know), I will amend the wording from, 'works well as part of a team' to 'works well as part of a team of people that aren't total dicks'.

I saw the postman coming up the driveway this morning with a massive sack. It was ages before he went back to his van, then he came back with another sack.

I couldn’t get out the door on my way to work.

The bastard had poured half a ton of sand through my letterbox. I had to dig my way out.

Read Charlie Brooker on Relationships.

Sickboy’s Flckr Stream(via Londonist)

This artist is interested in Skin. She has a condition called dermatographia which is in her words:

a condition in which one’s immune system exhibits hypersensitivity, via skin, that releases excessive amounts of histamine, causing capillaries to dilate and welts to appear (lasting about thirty minutes) when the skin’s surface is lightly scratched. This allows me to painlessly draw patterns and words on my skin, which I then photograph.

She makes temporary tattoos and wallpaper out of her photographs, but the photos that really caught my attention are of the welts on her skin. I suffer from eczema, so I'm used to seeing welts like these on my skin, but for me they are the harbinger of something terrible. To see someone controlling the histamine reaction, the same reaction that has so often controlled me, and then creating something beautiful out of something which I have always considered so ugly is truly inspiring.

I wrote to Ariana and she wrote back:

I'm glad you're sharing your skin condition as well. It is something we have to embrace: the uniqueness of our skin.

I thought that was worth sharing too.

1 million people in the UK are watching Ross Kemp in Afghanistan, if the viewing figures for the first episode are to be believed. I wasn’t as I don’t have Sky, but then I looked it up on Youtube. I watched the first three episodes. You can watch them by following these links. They're on Youtube in 10-minute segments, but eventually they will be removed for copyright infringement. The first episode is prior to deployment, it doesn’t really hot up until the second one.

Ross Kemp in Afghanistan 1

Part 1-Part 2-Part 3-Part 4-Part 5

Ross Kemp in Afghanistan 2

Part 1-Part 2-Part 3-Part 4-Part 5

Ross Kemp in Afghanistan 3

Part 1-Part 2-Part 3 -Part 4-Part 5

I thought it was excellent, it told the story from the perspective of the British Soldier. This whole war is being overlooked certainly from the perspective of an average infantryman. I think Ross himself put it well in an interview for the Independent:

"Whatever one thinks about the rights and wrongs of sending the troops, it would be good if the public had an understanding of what it's like for the soldiers."

In this article the journalist criticises Kemp for not making any kind of political point in his program, I think this is one of the plus points of the series. We all know the background to this; we all have an opinion for all the good it does. Plus it's on Sky, it's paid for by Rupert Murdock, would you really believe any political message it contained?

If you’re still not sure if you should watch it, here is another article written by Ross himself. I thought this rather hard hitting quote on the potential psychological cost to the soldiers stood out.

One sniper I met shot at least 30 people while I was with the regiment. And when you’re a sniper you see their heads go. He’s 19. He still gets turned away from nightclubs because he looks too young. But he’s shot 30 people.

This morning I was browsing the internet when I came across this video on a Craig’s blog. Wow what a way to start the day, screw church (it’s a Sunday) I’ll celebrate the gift of creation in a much better way: 80s power ballads. Hallelujah I believe in Stardust, Nothing’s Gonna Stop Us Now baby.

The video has clips from the movie Mannequin (1987). This is a film about a man who falls in love with a Mannequin, played by Kim Cattrall from Sex & the City. Luckily the Mannequin comes to life and low and behold he loves her, he could tell they were soul mates because he had spent time getting to know her as an inanimate object. A film about a man falling for a woman made of plastic and this was considered a love story. How vacuous can a decade be? I wouldn't be surprised if surgeons didn't try and develop a tit so plastic and perky that it produced a hollow sound when you tapped it.

Vacuous it may be but at least we’ve made progress from the 50s. I digress, but in this coffee advert she actually calls her husband sir twice – LINK – and in this one (found at Cracked) the guy seems to be making a thinly veiled threat to sleep with his secretary unless she stops being such a useless fucking whore and makes better coffee - LINK.

They actually made a Mannequin 2, which it appears is a bit of a cross between Mannequin and California Man. They’re still milking the same power ballad and they’ve kept the incredibly camp black guy in what I’m guessing is a grab for the pink pound; that’s if being incredibly patronizing is how marketing to gay men is done. (Watch the trailer)

Interestingly you can actually pinpoint the moment the power ballad died. Mr Big’s 1992 hit ‘To Be With You’.

This is the moment that Rock passed the baton of the ballad to the boy band. You simply can’t be that earnest with hair like that in today’s world. See ‘More Than Words’ (1990) by Extreme for another example of long hair/earnestness gone wrong. The last remnants of a dying generation, quite an artifact.

In the tradition of "if you see something you like, steal it and copy it" I’ve taken an idea from a site I linked to at the end of my post about blue eyes and replicated it badly. Using MS Paint and a digital camera, photos taken by my housemate Pete while I stuck my fingers in my eyes so that they went all red, here are some pictures of my left and right irises. And here is a link to the site again. Imitation is the highest form of flattery. I’m hoping my irises being unique will bring something to the medium and this won't just get used by the security services to put me on their dam list.

Is anyone an optician out there? What is going on in my left eye (the blue bit at the bottom of the pupil) is that Glaucoma! Pete said it’s his shadow. Here’s hoping.

Update: Through the simple act of looking in a mirror I have assured myself that whatever that blue smudge is, it isn't there anymore. Perhaps it was a bit of crud from the finger that was wedged in my eye, ow.

(click picture for whole thing)

~water magnifier~

portrait of a red veined darter, which is full of dew

Have you ever wondered if the universe isn't simply in a beaker in a lab somewhere with a solution of molecules mixed up by a lab technician, a giant chemistry experiment with our solar system just one of the trillions of molecules? I have, I've even hypothesised that life itself could be some kind of catalyst sprinkled into the mix to cause some kind of reaction.

The theory goes that life always ends up at the same inevitable conclusion, the way it reacts with the universe is predictable. You can predict it as reliably as, ice melts when you heat it, or iron filings stick to a magnet. Take a solar system, add life, wait between five or ten billion years and capow! (Whatever your waiting for, that happens).

So every time I see that some particle physicists are getting ready to do some new enormous experiment I think is this it, is this us reaching boiling point, is this our turn to fizz?

The CERN particle accelerator 27 kilometres below the Swiss - French border is due to be switched on in May. The multi billion pound project is for the purpose of accelerating two beams of protons up to close to light speed and then colliding them at energies of 14 trillion electronvolts, whatever that means.

It begs the question why would anyone go to such great lengths to do this? One answer:

Physicists hope the LHC’s experiments will reveal new worlds of unknown particles and explain why those particles exist and behave as they do. Scientists will also search for the origins of mass, study the universe as it existed shortly after the big bang, and try to uncover hidden symmetries of the universe and extra dimensions of space.

Symmetry Magazine

A view from the Sun newspaper:

. . . this may tear the fabric of the universe and result in a “wormhole” linking our time with the future.

My hypothesise is that it is hard wired into us to do this. It's in our programming. The same answer to why to teenage boys and girls suddenly feel compelled to rub their genitals together in such a way that they end up with a rather inconvenient bundle of joy to leave round their Nan's house while they revise.

What bundle of joy this action will produce I don't know, but even if CERN doesn't do it in May you know we will, maybe not for a couple more million years, maybe it would be another species, but that's the thing about intelligent life, it just has to ask these questions.

Of course the bigger picture is: what exactly is the point of the guy with the lab coat and beaker who's mixing this whole thing up anyway, but asking questions like that can end you up with a 27 kilometer supercooled tube in the side of a Swiss mountain and that kind of thing should probably be avoided.

Did anyone ever tell you that Bob Holness played the Sax on Baker Street. Such a great image isn't it. It's just one of those things that should be true, like the readers letters in Porn mags. Unfortunately the harsh reality is that, like the letters, it's bollocks made up by a bored journalist. In this case Stuart Maconie writing for the NME. Stuart thought it was way too absurd for anyone to take seriously, but of course we all wanted to believe, and after all it was written down, so like God, Father Christmas and the Weapons of Mass Destruction we all put our critical minds on hold and believed.

Faith is a beautiful thing, so to reward your naive belief in a world that makes sense I bring you, with the magic of MS Paint, Bob Holness plays Baker Street.

Turn the speakers on, there should be a little box above Bob with an Mp3 file you can click and play.

Celebrity sex pest Paul Danan, Britain's answer to Britney Spears, is in trouble again. Magistrates banned him and fined him £250 for drink driving. Can a man this stupid be criminally responsible? Does this mean that he will be desperate enough to take me up on my job offer, the Monkey Butler suit is yours Paul, whenever you're ready.

I read a story in yesterday's Independent reporting on a study that claimed all people with blue eyes are most probably related to one person that lived around 10,000 years ago, somewhere near the Black Sea.

Men and women with blue eyes have almost exactly the same genetic sequence in the part of the DNA responsible for eye colour.

So should all blue-eyed types start calling each other bro and come to terms with the fact that for ten thousand years their parents have been rather incestuous?

No, we're all related anyway, they don't call it the brother/sisterhood of man/woman for nothing. The concept I like is the possibility that so many millions of people, including some of the most lovely occupants of Scandinavia, could all be the progeny of one person, a person who may very well have been considered a freak in their day. This got me thinking what unique, perhaps freakish, characteristics my genes hold that could become a gift to the future of the human race. Sadly I could think of nothing. I am not a mutant, dam! (My unusual propensity for flatulence is dietary rather than genetic).

I may have no obvious unique genetic contribution to humanity, but , in school, someone once told me I invented gayness and that turned out to be pretty popular, so I’m happy with that as my legacy.

Pictures of eyes.

Disclosure: I have blue eyes, bro?