BBC: Parrot’s oratory stuns scientists (26-Jan-04)
The finding of a parrot with an almost unparalleled power to communicate with people has brought scientists up short. The bird, a captive African grey called N’kisi, has a vocabulary of 950 words, and shows signs of a sense of humour.

Oh good grief! Why do people insist on anthropomorphising pets like this?

Don’t get me wrong, I like talking parrots as much as the next person (who is currently Jen on the adjacent sofa), but let’s not go over the top. It’s an undoubtedly well-trained parrot, yes, but:

1. its “remarkable abilities” do not “include telepathy” [because telepathy is impossible]
2. it is not “one of the most advanced users of human language in the animal world” [because these are at least 6 billion other animals, myself included, who are considerably more advanced]
3. even though it “has a vocabulary of 950 words” and only “about 100 words are needed for half of all reading in English”, it simply does not follow that “if N’kisi could read he would be able to cope with a wide range of material” [because being able to use 950 words is not the same as being able to understand and parse them in different sentences and contexts—a skill which human beings are uniquely skilled at]
4. its owner uses “aromatherapy oils” [clearly demonstrating that they have no concept of reality]

Parrots and cheese shops in the same week. Think it’s time I went for a silly walk.

BBC: Mydoom creator hunt intensifies
The hunt for whoever was behind the Mydoom e-mail worm, and its sibling Mydoom.B, has intensified with a $250,000 reward offered by Microsoft.

Let’s hope they catch the tosser. I’ve received over 600 MyDoom emails since Tuesday, and have now had to batten down the hatches with my email filters. This isn’t what the internet is supposed to be about.

“Hello, I’ve been sent to buy some cheese.”
“Well, you’ve come to exactly the right place.”

While The Return of the King was clearing up at the Golden Globes last night, I was finally getting to see the film at the Hebden Bridge Picture House (the best little picture house in Yorkshire).

I must have read The Lord of the Rings at least 20 times in my formative years. I greatly enjoyed the film trilogy (despite several unnecessary changes to the plot), but it left me wondering the same old question:

Couldn’t they have saved themselves an awful lot of hassle if Frodo had caught a lift off the eagles in the first place?

Another thought then occurred to me:

Strange how those Mordor locations don’t appear in any New Zealand tourism advertisements.

Postscript: Oops! Probably should have said spoiler alert.

BBC: Dog driver in milk float drama
A milkman was injured after his dog “drove” his float away, dragging him with it… It is not thought to be facing any penalty points on its dog licence.

Who says BBC comedy ain’t what it used to be?

I took some shoes to be re-heeled this week. The receipt I was given proclaimed:

IF SHOES ARE GOOD ENOUGH TO WEAR
THEY’RE GOOD ENOUGH TO REPAIR

Not the snappiest of mottos maybe, but at least they were giving it a go.

Then I got to thinking: Richard, you’re a bit of an expert when it comes to thinking up clever marketing taglines. If you owned a shoe-repair business, what tagline would you use?

An excellent and typically perceptive question, if I might say so, raising as it does the opportunity for all sorts of puns of a shoe-related nature. Here’s what I came up with:

• Poorly shoes? We’ll soon heel them
• Re-iss-shoes
• We’ll save your sole
• We’ll nail your problem
• We’re at it hammer and tongues
• Professional to the last (geddit?)
• It won’t awl end in tears
• Rushing in where others fear to tread
• Our competitors are all cobblers
• Dirty Harry says, “Our soles are for personnel”
• Never knowingly under-soled (Ouch! That’s the one, I reckon.)

What? You think you could do any better? Suggestions in the comments section below, please.

Never one to be put off repeating a feeble joke, whenever I go out for a Chinese meal and drink some green tea, I like to claim that the two or three leaves at the bottom of the cup are actually mouse droppings—a Chinese delicacy. I once even managed to make the joke in Beijing in front of some American tourists, who, not at all appreciating my sense of humour, assumed I was being serious.

Anyway, I don’t think I’ll be making that particular joke any more—it’s a bit too close to the mark:

BBC: ‘Civet coffee’ sells – despite Sars
Fears that Chinese civet cats may help to spread Sars have lead to thousands of the animals being slaughtered, but they do not seem to have affected demand for a rare coffee harvested with the animals’ help in Indonesia. “Kopi Luwak” or “Civet Coffee” is made with beans that have been partially digested and then excreted by civets.

What gets me is that, at some point in the dim and distant past, some Indonesian has thought to themself (in Indonesian, no doubt), I wonder if this coffee would taste better if I ran it through a cat first. Then, to make matters worse, they actually went and tried it.

Sars via civet poo, eh? So that’s how you cat-shit.

BBC: Ancient roots of cream tea discovered
Historians in Devon have unearthed evidence which they claim proves the traditional cream tea originated in the county some 1,000 years ago.

Remarkable when you consider that tea only reached Europe in the 16th Century.

I’ve just been analysing the access logs for the Gruts website. The mind boggles at some of the things people were searching for when they encountered this site. So I’ve created a new page to record some of them. I’ve called it Odd Searches.

I was going to call it Strange Searches, but that took up too much space on the menu bar.

BBC: Mariah upsets Malaysian Muslims (16-Jan-04)
Malaysia’s Muslim opposition party has called for Mariah Carey to be barred from performing in the country.

You know, I’m beginning to suspect that these religious fundamentalists aren’t quite as barking mad as they seem. (Unlike certain entertainers I could mention.)

9.0 Flesh and the Devil
Antony Thomas’s feature-length documentary exploring all aspects of compulsory clerical celibacy in Catholicism…

Yeah, you try saying that after three Hail Marys and a couple of bottles of communion wine.

New Scientist: Robotic Segways play soccer with humans

Why can’t they play it with a ball like everyone else?

Text message from Carolyn:

I’m at Bidston now – got on the wrong train and didn’t realise. When I saw ‘Birkenhead Park’ I thought they’d just re-named ‘Birkenhead’ and I’d never noticed.

For reasons I needn’t go into, I spent several hours yesterday chasing cattle across the West Yorkshire hillsides.

This morning, I sent an SMS text message to my friend Carolyn in which, amongst other things, I intended to say, Spent several hours yesterday chasing cows.

Unfortunately, the predictive text input feature of my mobile phone guessed that I actually wanted to say, Spent several hours yesterday chasing boys.

Here rests the case for the defence.

Here is the phone number for Audi Customer Services UK: 0800 699888.

I spent 20 minutes on the Audi UK website yesterday, trying to find it. They would only reveal it to me after I registered my personal details with them. So I did so, got the number, then immediately un-registered.

It really shouldn’t be that difficult to obtain a so-called Customer Services phone number, so I publish it here in the hope that someone searching for it might come across this item via Google, etc.

BBC: Top UK dish ‘hooked French first’ (08-Jan-04)
It is thought to be the quintessential British meal, but new research claims the original idea for fish and chips came from Jewish and French dishes… Professor Panikos Panayi of Leicester’s De Montfort University has begun a £6,000 research project to investigate the global influence on British food. He said fish and chips mixed “French frites with Jewish fish dishes”.

De Montfort University, eh? Sounds suspiciously French to me!

Tell you what, François, you keep quiet about the fish & chips, and we won’t let on that it was us Brits who invented sparkling wine. That’s champagne to vous lot.

BBC: BBC halts Kilroy for race ‘rant’ (09-Jan-04)
The Kilroy programme will be taken off air immediately following comments made by Robert Kilroy-Silk in a newspaper article, the BBC has announced. The presenter branded Arabs “suicide bombers, limb amputators, women repressors” and asked what they had given to the world other than oil.

Of course, what Kilroy should have done was to slur Scousers instead: they’re used to it. For example, I just heard Simon Hoggart on BBC Radio 4′s News Quiz make an gratuitous joke—much to the London audience’s amusement—about how a Scouser’s idea of formal wedding attire is loose, comfy clothes and shorts. This unnecessary (and, let’s face it, unfunny) anti-Scouse jibe was made during a topical question (about Britney Spears’s recent short-lived marriage) that had absolutely nothing to do with Liverpool or Scousers. Will the BBC be taking Hoggart off the air, do you reckon—or do they see Scousers as fair game?

BBC: Rusedski fails drugs test
British tennis star Greg Rusedski has tested positive for the banned substance nandrolone.

British? Nope, I think you’ll find he was born in Canada. Not one of our lads. No siree, Bob.

Come on, Tim!

BBC: Another jail term for naked walker
A naked rambler has again been found guilty of breach of the peace and sentenced to a spell in a Scots jail.

Ignore him—he’s only trying to draw attention to himself. The magistrates should turn the other cheek.

What on earth is going on? The BBC News website maintains what it calls a Air Disaster Timeline: a list of air disasters going back to February, 1998.

Well, if that isn’t going to scare the shit out of anyone already scared of what is, after all, the safest mode of transport per mile travelled, I don’t know what is. It’s like Rain Man all over again.

But the worst thing about this morbid ambulance-chasing journalism is that, by describing its list as a timeline, the BBC could be seen to be implying that all these air crashes are somehow related. Now there’s a conspiracy theory if ever I heard one.