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The Sporadic Chronicle
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31 Mar 2006
RadioLovers.com has audio files of old radio programmes so you can listen to ancient broadcasts of Frankenstein, Philip Marlowe, Batman, Flash Gordon, Bulldog Drummond and many many more.

Be sure to tune in for next week's thrilling installment!
31 Mar 2006
What happens when a coal mine catches fire? Nothing good, as the town of Centralia, Pennsylvania discovered.
31 Mar 2006
After banging on about people driving while talking on mobile phones, eating, drinking or putting on makeup, now they're saying it's "unsafe" to drive with a snake wrapped around your neck.
From the same source, I see it's been a bad week for the Collier County Sheriff's Office.
28 Mar 2006
It's not just those crazy yanks who are building Noah's Arks:
Dutchman Johan Huibers is building a working replica of Noah's Ark as a testament to his Christian faith.
The 47-year-old from Schagen, 30 miles north of Amsterdam, plans to set sail in September through the interior waters of the Netherlands.
Johan's Ark is a fifth of the size of Noah's and will carry farmyard animals.
It's costing a million Euro. Should be worth it though:
This will speak very much to children... they'll hear the creak of the wood, smell the smell of the dung.
An essential day out for all the family.
28 Mar 2006
People across the land reel in amazement on hearing the epoch-defining news that the film 'The Great Escape' was not entirely accurate:
"The second half [of the film] was just Hollywood fantasy. It was an excuse for Steve McQueen to ride his motorbike. There was no motorbike. Nobody pinched a plane either. And the forger didn't go blind afterwards. He was shot."
Who knew? I'm... shocked! And stunned! Next thing we know they'll be telling us 'Kelly's Heroes' is fiction.
27 Mar 2006
Spying on the world with Google maps:
26 Mar 2006
There's an entertaining catfight going on between 'Nature' and the Encyclopaedia Britannica about the accuracy of Wikipedia entries. They both seem to have overlooked whether Wikipedia might be an element of (drumroll...) the Global Jewish Conspiracy™. That website's almost up to the standards of the unlamented late Joe Vialls. Other articles include claims that the Entebbe rescue was a hoax and almost every bad thing that's happened in the world is Mossad's fault. There's also something very odd about toilets.
23 Mar 2006
Important breaking news:
TV chef Jamie Oliver should encourage schoolchildren to eat grey squirrels in an effort to save the endangered red species, a Conservative peer says. ...
Not as daft as they look, these Conservative peers:
[Grey squirrels] are sweet and succulent. You need four per person - not because they are particularly small, but because they are surpassingly delicious ...
Meanwhile, thanks are due to 'The Australian' for providing us with the headlines "Gangsters smuggling 100,000 puppies a year into Germany" and "Teacher sues school over over 'farting' chair"
20 Mar 2006
Ice axes
I've just got back from another stint in the Cairngorms. Will post more pictures later. Very tired now. Going for a snooze.
16 Mar 2006
Our lords and masters are changing what our new shiny ID cards are supposed to do. Now they're going to incorporate credit card-style PIN numbers:
[Minister] Andy Burnham told a London conference that the chip and pin system could be used as an 'intermediate' measure by shops, banks and other organisations to confirm people's identity. It had been previously suggested that verification would be done by scanning the biometric information also encoded in the card giving details of cardholders' fingerprints, face and iris.
While not claiming to be any expert either in this technology or security I do take an interest in such matters, and this announcement sounds like a hopelessly confused afterthought. That someone can type in the correct PIN shows only that they know the card's PIN - not that they're the same person the card was issued to or that the card hasn't been tampered with to print a different name or photo on it. If lots of other things are done properly then comparing, say, an iris pattern stored on the card with the iris of the person standing in front of you can confirm that person's identity, but PIN numbers don't prove a damned thing in this context.

I find this addition of a new technical trick to ID cards immensely encouraging. Muddled requirements and uncertainty about what exactly a system's supposed to do are the leading cause of IT projects suffering delay, cost increase and eventual collapse.
16 Mar 2006
Memo to self - if ever I end up in hospital to have anything amputated, excised, drilled, filled and made good, take an indelible marker pen with me to clearly write on myself which parts are to be removed and which are not:
A man had a healthy kidney removed in error in an operation at Ayr Hospital. ...
NHS Ayrshire and Arran confirmed the mistake with "deep regret" and said it has apologised to the patient and his family for "this tragic error".
Very sorry, deep regret, shame you'll probably die like that other guy a few years ago when the surgeon got the x-rays back to front.

"Once a decade", heh?
15 Mar 2006
I was so so wrong, it didn't take days for "Milosevic was murdered" theories to sprout. Reader 'Bob' e-mailed to point out that mere hours after the death was announced Neil Clark was writing at 2:53 PM that his death "really was the only way out for them wasn't it?". It is possible a LewRockwell.com blog posting at 08:35 AM saying that the death "bares the bloody fangs of the New World Order, a totalitarian construct of the United States and allies to fill in the post Cold War void" might have beaten him to the finish line - sadly I don't know which time zone that was in so it could have been either before or after Neil's 2:53PM GMT posting.

Bonus points to Neil for sheer unrelenting tenacity and dogged stamina, though. That's enough about him: a man prepared to sue for libel over criticism of a book review he wrote might do anything.
15 Mar 2006
Milosevic kicked the bucket on the 11th, the conspiracy theories surface on the 13th:
Why Milosevic Was Murdered. Paul Joseph Watson/Prison Planet.com
Slobodan Milosevic was a distasteful man with authoritarian Communist ideals. But the reasons for his obvious murder revolve around his evergreen willingness to blow the whistle on the global criminal masterminds who had made the mistake of giving 'Slobo' a speaking platform in the first place. ...
Milan Babic, a former Croatian Serb leader who testified against Milosevic was "suicided" just six days before Milosevic's death. ... Another Hague detainee, Slavko Dokmanovic, supposedly killed himself in 1998. ...
The Globalists have wanted to eliminate Milosevic for a long time. Former MI6 agent Richard Tomlinson said he saw documents in 1992 that discussed assassinating Milosevic by means of a staged car accident, where the driver would be blinded by a flash of light and remote controlled brake failure enacted to cause the crash. This exact same technique was utilized for real in the murder of Princess Diana.
Milosevic was a loose cannon with intimate knowledge of the criminality of the Globalists after the IMF/Bilderberg coup de 'etat in Serbia in the 1990's.
For further entertainment, you can listen as Paul Joseph Watson and shouty Texan Alex Jones "run through the evidence that the Reagan assassination attempt was an inside job run by the Bush family."
12 Mar 2006
Excellent news: the British porridge industry is booming.
11 Mar 2006
In the old days crazy people were restricted to shouting from soap boxes or handing out crudely printed pamphlets, but nowadays they're harnessing the power of the Internet. For example, this guy exposing the truth on subjects such as how Jesus lived at Glastonbury ("Historical records show that Mary the mother of Jesus was a member of the British royal family"), the British are Israelites and the Queen isn't really the Queen. He needs your help in petitioning the Irish government to let him dig up the Ark of the Covenant, and is looking for someone to publish his booklets - one of which has amazing revelations about the film 'Star Wars':
George Lucas quite naturally believes that he wrote "Starwars", when, in reality, he was told telepathically what to write in the original first three Episodes (4-6), by the very "Force" to which the films refer, and was "forced" to make only episodes 4-6, first, as a very important step in the preparation of mankind for the long-awaited TRUTH, about the real reasons for human life on Earth ("what on earth am I doing here?"), the meaning of life and its purpose, contained in "The Way home or face The Fire", from which episodes 1-3 should have been made, as I did my best, frequently, to tell him.

Unfortunately George Lucas has exercised his "Free-will"; ignored me and made Episode 1 - "The Phantom Menace"; with arrogant actors who publicly ridicule the real message ... This is Satan's standard-practice and very predictable.
And Darth Vader is the Pope, or something.
11 Mar 2006
Enjoy the subtle and nuanced artwork of U.S. Political Prisoner Ana Lucia Gelabert. By "political prisoner" they mean she was convicted on 2 counts of something called "attempted capital murder" (confirmable via the Texas Department of Criminal Justice's very poor search facility for TDCJ Number 00384484 or SID Number 03408119).

They'll throw you in jail for anything, as fellow political prisoner David Gilbert explains:
On October 20, 1981, I was captured when a unit of the Black Liberation Army and allied white revolutionaries attempted to take funds from a Brinks truck, with the unfortunate result of a shoot-out in which a guard and two policemen were killed.
Yes, that's very... political.
11 Mar 2006
As Milosevic pops his clogs, I'm starting the clock to see how long it takes for loony conspiracy theories about his demise to start.
[Update: it took two days a matter of hours.]
08 Mar 2006
This guy thinks various US government agencies have been attacking him with "sound wave holographic energy beams" to make his eyes change colour and his hair go curly, among other things.
In just a few months time in late 1997 my face changed from picture 19 above to that of picture 20 below due to gas holograms of another older person placed over my face puffing up my face and eyes. Artificial holographic energy beams are directed into pressure points near the ear lobes and other pressure points in my body...
The US government controlled all of my conversations since my birth with a computer program, beam weapons, and subliminal messages that went back in time to control us, so that I have been isolated most of my life from the rest of society. ...
I am meant to look not like my parents created as images of Hitler created by Bush's US government's time travel holograms, but like my great great grand father's who all had fair hair from the United Kingdom(Scottland, England, and Ireland) and Europe (Germany and France) and from the USA constitution, as if I received my spirit from the romantic age in Europe and the USA and the future, and my parents received theirs from Bush's southern government's time travel holograms taking over my family line by means of time travel back in time to assassinate my founding father's spirit and romantic noble European spirit and genetic lines, and replace it with a southern Texan and Mexican Nazi spirit placed in my sister and parents by the US governments time travel holograms, and also placed in my sister's children when some Mexicans where forced to have children with my sister by the US southern Texan US government.
Those same Mexicans were used and controlled by the US government's remote sensors to frame me and throw me in jail, and attack my northern Aryan girl friends to assassinate my potential future and children, and take over my family. ...
Don't know about you, but I'm certainly convinced.

You'll be glad to know he's not just sitting around being a victim. He's written a sternly worded letter to the Attorney General of Michigan, sent a petition to the UN, tried to sue the government, been ruled against, taken his appeals all the way to the Supreme Court and even invented a "force field hat".
08 Mar 2006
Old and Interesting Gas Stations, including the particularly good Magnolia Gasoline and a funny little octagonal one. The site has lots of other things, including lighthouses and big stuff.
02 Mar 2006
There is, or so we are told, anger and upset that 10 years after the Dunblane school massacre there still isn't a "national gun register". I fail to see what such a register would achieve. The police already know who they've licenced to own and keep firearms, and the only weapons entered on any register will be ones which people tell the police they've got. I can think of absolutely no conceivable crime which could be prevented by the police or public having a more detailed knowledge of the firearms which registered owners admit to having. It will, though, satisfy some vague desire to regulate and make people obey pointless rules so I have little doubt it's a top government priority.

"Ah, but" I hear a reader say to themselves, "As Anne Cryer MP says - until it is possible for police forces to do proper checks on people before giving a gun license there's always the potential for another Dunblane." That is true, but is a completely separate issue. How would any system of record-keeping flag up the sort of information about Thomas Hamilton - basically amounting to "quite a few people think he's a bit weird" - which might have rung alarm bells at the time he applied for a gun license? To do that you'd have to keep a file of every bit of hearsay about everyone in the country, just in case they ever apply for a gun license. Such a thing might be possible, but it would be too intrusive and prone to abuse.
02 Mar 2006
The Scottish Parliament cost 10 times as much and took 3 years longer than expected to build, but the ceiling's falling down only 18 months after it opened. Bloody marvellous.
A 12ft-long wooden beam came loose [then] swung free and came to a halt just inches from a glass panel. The beam then hung swinging over the seats of Conservative MSPs. ...
The building was officially opened by the Queen in October 2004 and has won a number of architectural awards.
Well, of course it won architectural awards.
28 Feb 2006
George Monbiot, environmental campaigner and author, devotes his Guardian column this week to reminding us bluntly ("Flying kills.") that commercial aviation will doom us all to a future of catastrophic global warming in which millions are put at risk of starvation. People must be stopped from flying to save the planet, but people keep flying despite the damage they know they cause:
When I challenge my friends about their planned weekend in Rome or their holiday in Florida, they respond with a strange, distant smile and avert their eyes. They just want to enjoy themselves. Who am I to spoil their fun? The moral dissonance is deafening.
This is the same George Monbiot who went to South Africa in October 2004 to give a keynote speech at an environmental journalism conference and promote his book. Wonder how he got there.

This isn't the first time Mr Monbiot has devoted a newspaper column to the evils of powered flight. In December 2003 - well before his South Africa trip - he very eloquently explained that "the airliner remains a weapon of mass destruction. ... Every time we fly, we help to kill someone." This was shortly after he'd returned from Australia, where he'd been promoting his book.

Of course, none of this is George's fault. He just wants to give speeches and plug his book, and who am I to spoil his fun? The moral dissonance is deafening.
28 Feb 2006
David Irving, who is a revolting man but shouldn't be in jail, has decided to dig himself into an even deeper hole in a telephone interview from prison:
"Given the ruthless efficiency of the Germans, if there was an extermination programme to kill all the Jews, how come so many survived?" he said.
This new standard of proof and logic opens many exciting avenues of research which have until now been sadly neglected, such as... What a very silly and creepy man Mr Irving is.
26 Feb 2006
Just in case anyone thought the president's ranting was a one-off, the Iranian foreign ministry spells it out:
“We see the hand of the U.S. ambassador and the Zionist regime in the blasts,” Foreign Ministry spokesman Hamid-Reza Asefi told a regular news briefing. ... “With such actions they (Americans) intend to justify and prolong the occupation of Iraq.” ...
The article then goes on to mention diplomacy surrounding their attempts to build nuclear weapons.
26 Feb 2006
Three photos of no special importance, from the ever-expanding collection:
No vampires. Foolish creature. The wheel on the Thames goes round and round...
26 Feb 2006
I was up in Scotland again last weekend, and here are the photos.
24 Feb 2006
While I'm on a "crazy tyrant" theme, I may as well mention that North Korea celebrated Kim Jong Il's birthday in grand style:
Marking the day, all the soldiers and people offered the greatest glory to the leader who defends the destiny of the nation and upholds the dignity of socialist Korea.
Celebrations were held worldwide, and a meeting of the Three-Revolution Red Flag Movement opened amid calls for a more dynamic Three-Revolution Red Flag Movement. So there.
24 Feb 2006
Another tragedy, another opportunity for the President of Iran to peddle lunatic conspiracy theories blaming America and Israel:
"Today, a group of defeated and evil Zionists and occupiers carried out this barbaric act to create a barrier in the face of a justice-seeking wave of Islamic nations", Ahmadinejad said at a rally in the town of Ardel, south-western Iran, the official state news agency reported.
Erm, right. Because it would clearly be a stategic bodyblow for America and Israel if Iraq were peaceful and harmonious. An opinion piece in the Tehran Times continues the theme:
Undoubtedly, it is a new plot which first of all can be considered as the continuation of the disrespectful move of the European newspapers’ that published cartoons of the Prophet of Islam. ... "This is a political crime and its roots have to be traced in the intelligence organizations of the Iraqi occupiers and the Zionists."...
Ah yes of course, it's a continuation of the Danish Cartoon Assault. Sorry, did I say "Danish cartoons"? Not according to another Tehran Times opinion piece, which sees the cartoons as a cunning zionist Jewish plot plotted by cunning Jewish zionists:
The mainstream media coverage of the anti-Islamic cartoons ignores the fact that the publication of the images was a "calculated offense" commissioned by a Jewish "Danish" colleague of the Jewish neocon ideologue Daniel Pipes and was meant to incite violence and promote the Jewish "clash of civilizations" between Muslims and Christians. ... the Jewish-controlled press overlooked the important fact that the offensive images were commissioned and published by a Jewish "Danish" colleague of the Jewish neoconservative extremist Daniel Pipes. ... Pipes, the son of the Polish-born Jewish Zionist neocon professor Richard E. Pipes, is a Zionist of the most extreme sort ... There is also a clear connection between the publication of the anti-Muslim cartoons and the secretive Jewish power. Anders Fogh Rasmussen, the "Danish" prime minister and frequent Jewish power attendee, for example, has refused to issue a formal apology ...
Gosh, it's all there isn't it - the Jewish-controlled press, secretive Jewish power, even a Jewish Zionist neocon (surely no greater monster can exist!). I especially like the sneer quotes around "Danish" when referring to the Danish prime minister: as if he's just pretending to be Danish while pursuing his secret Jewish agenda.
12 Feb 2006
When religion meets quackery we get Rose Grail Elixir:
This is a proprietary formula that can not be duplicated. ... most sacred formula was given to an Ordained Priestess of The Holy Rose Grail in a vision by Mother Mary ... begins the re-encoding of the two physical DNA strands with the complete Divine Template of the Adam Kadmon. When this happens, it is the beginning of complete transmutation/metamorphosis into a Luminous Ascended Being reflecting the Golden Flame of the Christ.
Testimonials proclaim remarkable effects including "energy surging through me exploding into golden particles that shone like a starburst filling me and my auric field with an intense brightness that I had never seen or felt before…..a truly remarkable experience!" Now available at only $33 + shipping for a small bottle.
08 Feb 2006
Surreal tragedy of the day: "Four Die In Afghan Cartoon Riot". Of all the things to die over.
08 Feb 2006
In an article sadly plagued by the word "boffin", up pops a tired old stereotype of technical people:
Mumbling, avoiding eye contact, talking to their shoes - [their] biggest challenge can often be talking to another human being.
They can decipher the most complicated equation but trying to work out the social etiquette required to converse with someone else leaves them baffled - and making small talk can be plain scary. ...
Ridiculous. It's ages since I've had to figure out a complicated equation.
05 Feb 2006
Some accidents are stranger than others. For example, Boston's great molasses flood and the London beer flood were fairly strange. But neither was quite as strange as the unfortunate incident of the oil drillers, the lake, and the salt mine:
As the freshwater poured in through the original 14-inch-wide hole, it quickly dissolved the salt away, making the hole grow bigger by the second. The water pouring into the mine also dissolved the huge salt pillars which supported the ceilings, and the shafts began to collapse. ...
Meanwhile, up on the surface, the tremendous sucking power of the whirlpool was causing violent destruction. It swallowed another nearby drilling platform whole, as well as a barge loading dock, 70 acres of soil from Jefferson Island, trucks, trees, structures, and a parking lot. ...
Within two days, what had previously been an eleven-foot-deep freshwater body was replaced with a 1,300-foot-deep saltwater lake.
Whoops. Fortunately - unlike in the beer and molasses floods - nobody was killed, so I'm sure everyone involved can look back on it today and laugh.
03 Feb 2006
Another news story shaking the country today is the shock revelation that the US and UK had made really quite detailed plans to invade Iraq as much as 7 weeks before actually doing it. Astounding, I know!
But the dastardly plottings didn't stop there. Oh no, not by a long way. The bellicose Texan had other plans afoot, including "flying U2 reconnaissance aircraft planes with fighter cover over Iraq, painted in UN colours". Mr Bush added: "If Saddam fired on them, he would be in breach [of UN resolutions]". If "painting a U2 in UN colours" means providing the UN with a U2 - and I don't see what else it can realistically mean - then firing on such a flight would indeed be a breach of UN resolutions, as Security Council resolution 1441 makes clear:
UNMOVIC and the IAEA shall have the free and unrestricted use and landing of fixed- and rotary-winged aircraft, including manned and unmanned reconnaissance vehicles...
...while the covering letter from Hans Blix and Mohamed ElBaradei says "On the question of aerial imagery, UNMOVIC may wish to resume the use of U-2 or Mirage overflights". Hmmm... U2 overflights the maverick cowboy warmonger was almost too keen to help with. Is there no tactic to which Bush will not stoop?
Expect this scandal to be headline news for weeks.
03 Feb 2006
One of the concerns of those opposed to the publication of the Danish cartoons is that depicting Mohammed with a bomb-shaped turban reinforces a "crazed Muslim terrorist" sterotype. Given signs brandished by some of the demonstrators outside the Danish and French embassies in London today, I suggest that Danish cartoonists should be the least of Muslims' worries about creating impressions of violent zealotry: I don't doubt that many or most protestors were expressing disapproval quite legitimately, but clearly some were inciting and threatening severe violence. Meanwhile, a leading terrorism law expert warns that "Further suicide bombings in the UK must be expected". Gosh, that's a shock - thank goodness for expert insight.
03 Feb 2006
The Cartoon Affair gets ever more heated - now even Mandy's sticking his oar in. Newspapers in Germany, Italy, Holland Spain and France join the Scandanavians but so far the British media seems to be avoiding the subject: even the "Cartoon row in pictures" thing on the BBC website studiously avoids showing us what the fuss is all about. Here, so you can judge for yourselves, are the 12 cartoons (source - Brussels Journal).
[Please note I am an Equal Opportunities Blasphemer, in which capacity I also present to you the balloon Jesus, gory Jesus and fatty Jesus from 'Jesus Of The Week', the somewhat rubbish 'Jesus - The Teenage Years', and not forgetting 'Piss Christ' - a 20 year old depiction of Jesus submerged in human urine.]
The Jyllands-Posten cartoons
So now you know. Oh, and it's a sad reflection on the standard of journalism that some of the best background to this whole business is to be found on the amateur Wikipedia:
Jyllands-Posten commissioned and published the cartoons in response to the inability of Danish writer Kåre Bluitgen to find artists to illustrate his children's book about Muhammad, for fear of violent attacks by extremist Muslims.
Point made.
01 Feb 2006
Do you have alien implants in your ears? Features readers' tales of alien implants, including the classic lines "I had an implant come out of my left nostril a few years ago", and "In the holistic healing circles that I move in, [alien] ear implants seem to be pretty common."
01 Feb 2006
The loons at The Truth Seeker explain how Tony Blair stifles dissent by using "subliminal messages passed through cellular and digital phones, assisted by networks of towers used for bio-neurological invasive techniques and mind control, in preparation of police state manipulation programmes, so mental castration is compulsory, and there will be no crime or desire for change."

That's certainly a constant worry.
31 Jan 2006
Libya's shutting its embassy and gunmen are raiding offices, while the Saudis are recalling their ambassador and starting a boycott, all because a man was portrayed in cartoon format:
there had been calls for boycotting Danish products in Friday prayers and on Saudi television and in newspapers.
What do the Danes sell to Saudi Arabia in boycottable quantities anyway... bacon???

So it's boycotts is it? In that case I shall buy Danish products wherever possible as an anti-silliness measure. For that matter, I'll try to get round to posting some cack-handed cartoons of prophets and deities to see if I can draw some fire from the plucky Danes.
29 Jan 2006
According to assorted crazy people, the Earth is variously hollow, is not moving or is getting bigger.
29 Jan 2006
As Google decides to censor itself to please the Chinese government, compare and contrast a Google UK search for images of Tiananmen Square, versus a Google China search for images of Tiananmen Square.

How do they put it in the Google philosophy: "You can make money without doing evil. ... The need for information crosses all borders"

Quite.
26 Jan 2006
Seen on DVD: 'The Sea Hawk'. Possibly the first Errol Flynn film I've seen, and it was wonderful - I haven't enjoyed a film quite so much in years. It's got pretty much everything anyone could want in a film: swordfights, people swinging from ship to ship on the rigging, a boo-hiss baddy, swordfights, intrigue, a monkey, and more swordfights. At one point Errol's crossing swords with four soldiers in a corridor. It was all looking a bit dicey for him until he stabbed one and knocked the others over by throwing a chair at them.
Take that! Hero and villain, locked in mortal combat.
The outcome, of course, is never in any doubt: Errol Flynn singlehandedly saves England from the Armada. Now that's what I call great cinema.
26 Jan 2006
Yesterday evening I went to see Kevin Warwick talk at Hatfield. You may remember Kevin Warwick - or "Captain Cyborg" - as that guy who stuck an RFID chip in his arm, plugged some electrodes in his nerves, claimed to the "the world's first cyborg" and announced that watching 'Richard and Judy' makes you cleverer.

Now some people say that Kevin is a headline-grabbing publicity-junky whose work is not as groundbreaking as he makes it appear. They point out that the RFID chip he put in his arm was no different from the ones which had been implanted in cats and dogs for years, that his brief nerve-electrode study pales in comparison to widely deployed and permanently embedded heart pacemakers and cochlear implants for the deaf, and that his claim to be able to implant children with tracking devices was technically impossible and ethically dubious.

Kevin's supporters say that he is a genius visionary (for example, here's Kevin doing some serious cybernetics research), he's often on television, and Warner Brothers trusted him to write a puff piece for 'The Matrix' describing it as a plausible scenario. And the man himself points out that no lesser authority than the X-File's Gillian Anderson described him as "Britain's leading prophet of the Robot Age", which ought to settle it.

Clearly, seeing him talk was not an unintentional comic goldmine I could afford to miss.

The talk was a strange mixture. It told me nothing about his own implants I didn't already know from reading the news at the time, briefly mentioned some serious and interesting therapeutic work other people have done connecting electronics to the human nervous system, and veered into wild speculation about the future. The future according to Kevin will be ruled by cyborgs, with plain old ordinary humans relegated to a subordinate subspecies. He revealed that as a cyborg with your brain connected - in some totally unspecified way - to the network, your mind could be "wherever the internet takes it". Among the benefits of this, he said you would be able to: Also he showed lots of 'Kevin meets celebrities' TV clips, including one of him on CNN asking Will Smith - star of 'I, Robot' - how he'd like to be cybernetically enhanced. Clearly, this establishes his expertise and eminence in this domain.

Oh, and he said the government phoned him the other day asking about the possibility of giving people RFID chip implants instead of passports. But he told us not to tell anyone he said that, because he'll "just deny all knowledge".

The man really is quite potty.

* I have no idea what he meant by this. He explained that when physicists want to solve a 10-dimensional problem they get a computer to do it. This means computers understand more dimensions than humans do, so when you become a cyborg you can harness this power to think in more dimensions. I am deeply unconvinced by this for a whole sackful of reasons, but mainly just puzzled why he stopped at "thinking in five dimensions". Why not 6, or 8, or 10? Possibly he's done some rigorous study which reveals 5 to be an upper limit on the dimensional understanding of cyborgs. Yes, that's probably it - either that or he just wildly plucked a number out of mid-air.
24 Jan 2006
Crazy man Greg Szymanski has been deep within the bowels of the Vatican looking for the devious plans, lies and mind control of the secret world government.
I remember sneaking around the Vatican, on one occasion taking a flight of stairs down to the basement level in search of the secret room and the catacombs. ... "One night alone in this place and I know I could break the biggest story in my lifetime," I thought to myself... That particular day after trying to uncover the exact location of the Illuminati's secret induction ceremonies, I stopped for cheese and a glass of white wine...
There's nothing more refreshing than cheese and wine after a hard day of trying to locate the Illuminati's secret room.
24 Jan 2006
Finally the government acts to protect children from the haggis menace.
19 Jan 2006
FleshEatingBacteria.net: the tale of one man and his necrotising fasciitis.
Warning: don't click on his picture links if you're squeamish.
18 Jan 2006
Having covered the "William Shatner to sell his kidney stone" story, I feel morally obliged to mention that William Shatner has sold his kidney stone:
Star Trek actor William Shatner has sold his kidney stone for $25,000 (£14,000) to an online casino, to raise money for a housing charity.
£14,000 for a piece of bodily waste. That's the mark of a true legend.
the auction price includes the surgical stint and string used to permit passage of the stone.
<Expression of blank incomprehending horror>
16 Jan 2006
There's confrontation and shenanigans in Antarctica with Greenpeace members getting themselves knocked overboard:
"We were out defending the whales. We have been out there for about an hour. I was driving our boat and we were in a good position and the whaler fired its harpoon” ... As the harpoon line tightened, the boat's driver, Canadian activist Texas Joe Constantine was thrown overboard. ...
"We were in a good position": directly between the harpoon gun and its target is a good position? No - it's a stupid position. Just consider that statement applied to other situations: If you go out of your way to put yourself in front of harpoon guns you are going to get harpooned, and you'll have only yourself to blame when it happens.

Note that though Greenpeace and others describe Japan's whaling as "illegal", this isn't true:
Neither [the Australian nor New Zealand] government has legal grounds to stop the whaling ...
New Zealand's commissioner to the International Whaling Commission, former prime minister Geoffrey Palmer, said the annual slaughter of whales, although reprehensible, was not illegal. "We have been looking at the legal theories that are available against the Japanese for some months ... and there is no legal theory that is available that can prevent, in our view, the Japanese from doing what they are doing," Sir Geoffrey said.
Some people, when threatening to ram whalers, ought to remember that those ships are armed. Otherwise this could all get extremely ugly.
14 Jan 2006
For some reason I seem to be in the address book of William Shatner's PR agent. Josh Silberstein of Fullturn Media e-mailed me on Wednesday to let me know that William Shatner will be hosting the Golden Groundhog Awards on the 2nd of February, so I thought I'd better let you all know:
this year Hollywood is gearing up for what promises to be a momentous date. That's because on February 2nd, the highly coveted Golden Groundhog will be awarded to the Best Underground Movie of 2005. The Golden Groundhog Awards were established to recognize genuinely outstanding films that lacked the distribution and marketing support needed to become the blockbuster hits they deserved to be. It was announced today that the awards ceremony will be hosted by William Shatner, an actor who has enjoyed tremendous success on the silver screen, but who also knows from firsthand experience that great films can fall through the cracks.
I swear I'm not making this up.
12 Jan 2006
At long last, someone gets round to tackling the world's fluorescent pig shortage:
Taiwan, home to the world's first transgenic glowing fish, has successfully bred fluorescent green pigs that researchers hope will boost the island's stem cell research ... "There are partially fluorescent green pigs elsewhere, but ours are the only ones in the world that are green from inside out. Even their hearts and internal organs are green," [Professor] Wu said.
I wonder if they can work out a way to make them flash on and off? That would be cool. Creepy and wrong, but cool.
11 Jan 2006
Anthony is running an effort to send medical and pharmacy books to Iraq, which you may wish to consider supporting.
11 Jan 2006
Schoolchildren's drawings provide an inspirational message of international harmony and peace.
09 Jan 2006
The Lumberjack World Championships feature events such as women’s underhand chop, springboard chopping, the 60 foot traditional climb and boom run.
09 Jan 2006
I can't quite believe someone invented these:
Meet the Bible Bar – This fantastic-tasting, all natural whole food bar contains the seven foods which the Lord calls good in Deuteronomy 8:8 - Wheat, Barley, Honey, Figs, Olive Oil, Grapes, and Pomegranates.
It's natural, it's raw, it's theologically pure:
The Bible Bar bar is unbaked and contains no additives or artificial ingredients. ... Each bar is bursting with God-given nutrients...
It's an ideal sin-free pick-me-up between meals:
The Bible Bar is a great way to control hunger pangs while still providing your body with the highest level of biblical nutrition.
And they should keep you biblically regular, too.
08 Jan 2006
How to cook a turkey in a steel dustbin. You never know when that sort of information might come in handy.
Via the Meatriarchy.
08 Jan 2006
The Principality Of Camside seems to be the invention of a disaffected Australian who's declared war on the government of Australia. He's also launched a couple of constitutional court cases which have failed in spectacular fashion. For a fee you can register your business and apply for citizenship in his funny little made-up country.
Psychic chanelling and aliens are also mentioned.
07 Jan 2006
Horsham District Council has a "recurrent problem of some of the red bins [for dog poo] being filled to overflowing", allegedly because of people scooping up dog poo in their gardens, then carrying it all the way to the poo bin instead of just putting it in their own bins. This might warrant the deployment of CCTV to identify persistent offenders because, as the spokesman explains...
"We don't want overflowing bins because it messes up the emptying schedules. We have to do extra runs to take the waste away, and it's costing us time and resources. It's not the biggest issue but it's one of those niggly little things that causes operational difficulties."
Now, if I were in charge and some bins were overflowing I'd install larger bins. It must take years spent at Council Training School to learn that the correct response is the installation of CCTV to identify offenders - assuming such offenders even exist, and the bins in question don't happen to be on a popular route for walking lots of especially well-fed dogs.
04 Jan 2006
Cat calls the police, saves the day. Top quote:
"I know it sounds kind of weird," Officer Patrick Daugherty said, unsuccessfully searching for some other explanation.
Via the invaluable Fortean Times Breaking News.
03 Jan 2006
Wonderful picture from Saturn at Astronomy Picture Of The Day.
03 Jan 2006
I really can't believe someone actually invented this:
The RailDriver desktop cab controller replaces the keyboard for Train Simulator and gives players the tactile feedback that prototype engineers so heavily depend on when operating real locomotives. Let's take a look at the RailDriver and see how it might affect your Train Simulator experience.
The "Train Simulator experience"? That's just the beginning. A truly devoted player can get an entire cab.
02 Jan 2006
Ben Goldacre's Bad Science is full of good stuff at the moment including a couple of corkers about newspaper science reporting and wine magnetisers. On a different "Bad Science" note, there's Bad Science Projects ("The Scientific Method Gone Horribly Wrong").
02 Jan 2006
Umbrellas, umbrellas, umbrellas, lots and lots of umbrellas everywhere.
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