Slipping on cow shit while walking down a cobbled farmyard in the pitch dark carrying an exercise bike, and landing flat on your back/arse in the aforementioned cow shit with the exercise bike on top of you.

(Don’t ask.)

The following conversation took place between my mum and me this Tuesday evening, while mum was dismantling a cauliflower for dinner:

R: Did you know that cauliflowers, cabbages, sprouts and broccoli are all members of the same species?
M: Yes, they’re all related; they’re all part of the same family.
R: No, they’re more closely related than that: they’re actually varieties of the same species. You know how every human being on the planet belongs to a single species? Well it’s the same for cauliflowers and cabbages and stuff: they all belong to a single species.
M: I know—they’re all vegetables!

BBC: Final send-off for John Peel
Everyone at the funeral of John Robert Parker Ravenscroft knew it was coming. John Peel – as he was known to millions – had often spoken of Teenage Kicks, by The Undertones, as being the song he wanted played at his funeral. As the opening bars resonated around the 500-year-old St Edmundsbury Cathedral, in Suffolk, it was an emotional end for the family, friends and admirers of the legendary DJ.

A fitting send-off.

For some years now, Jen and I have maintained a tongue-in-cheek list of songs we would like played at our funerals. These incluse:

• Come On Baby, Light My Fire (The Doors)
• Smoke Gets In Your Eyes (The Platters)
• Knock On Wood (Otis Redding)
• Living in a Box (Living in a Box)
• Going Underground (The Jam)
• Down Down (Status Quo)
• Great Balls of Fire (Jerry Lee Lewis)
• You and Me in Paradise (Phil Collins)—over my dead body!
• Good and Gone (The Screaming Blue Messiahs)
• Down in the Ground Where the Dead Men Go (The Pogues)
• Living in the Past (Jethro Tull)
• The Only Way is Up (Yazz)
• I’m On Fire (Bruce Springsteen)
• There She Goes (The La’s)

…I could go on, but you get the general idea.

I wonder what song was played at the recently departed Howard Keel‘s private funeral this week. Oh What a Beautiful Mourning, perhaps?

New Scientist: Weather hots up under wind farms
Wind farms can change the weather, according to a model of how these forests of giant turbines interact with the local atmosphere. And the idea is backed up by observations from real wind farms. Somnath Baidya Roy from Princeton University, and his colleagues modelled a hypothetical wind farm consisting of a 100 by 100 array of wind turbines, each 100 metres tall and set 1 kilometre apart. They placed the virtual farm in the Great Plains region of the US, an area suitable for large wind farms, and modelled the climate using data from Oklahoma.…

At 3 am the average wind speed in Oklahoma is 3.5 metres per second, but it increased to around 5 m/s in the model wind farm. The model also suggested that the temperature would increase by around 2°C underneath the 10,000 turbines. Over the course of a day this averages out to an increase in ground-level wind speed of around 0.6 m/s and a rise in temperature of around 0.7°C.

Yes, that’s right, so-called wind farms affect the climate. It’s basic thermodynamics. You never get something for nothing. Entropy increases. Wind farms powerstations, like everything else, have an impact on the planet. And anyone who thinks wind powerstations are the answer hasn’t understood the question.

It turns out Don Quixote wasn’t so stupid after all.

• Tilting at windmills
• Tories have admirable policy shock!
• Making us have it

The following poem appears in the latest edition of the London Review of Books. I’ve read it four times. If anyone has the barest inkling of a baldy clue what the hell this bloke’s going on about, please leave an explanation in the comments.

More Feedback by John Ashbery

The passionate are immobilised.
The case-hardened undulate over walls
of the library, in more or less expressive poses.
The equinox again, not knowing
whether to put the car in reverse
or slam on the brakes at the entrance
to the little alley. Seasons belong
to others than us. Our work keeps us
up late nights; there is no more joy
or sorrow than in what work gives.
A little boy thought the raven on the bluff
was a winged instrument; there is so little
that gives and says it gives. Others
felt themselves ostracised by the moon.
The pure joy of daily living became impacted
with the blood of fate and battles.
There’s no turning back the man says,
the one waiting to take tickets at the top
of the gangplank. Still, in the past
we could always wait a little. Indeed,
we are waiting now. That’s what happens.

See also: How to write poetry

First John Peel and now this:

BBC: Kerry admits US election defeat
Democratic challenger John Kerry has admitted defeat in the US election, giving President George W Bush a second term in office.

Which just goes to show that you only need to fool some of the people some of the time.

Arse!

Scripting News: Richard Carter via email: “I think you should stop sitting on the fence and tell us which candidate Scripting News endorses.”…

Today, Dave Winer’s weblog; tomorrow, the world!

BBC: Cats suffer stress, experts say
Cats can suffer from stress-related illness like humans, a study by animal experts suggests.

Good.

Guardian: Ali, Beckham and Thatcher sketch and scribble for charity

…The drawings are part of a project masterminded by Mr Greig [editor of Tatler magazine] to raise money for a London charity for the homeless, the 999 Club. He sent a number of artists, politicians, writers and sportsmen a miniature leather-bound book, a couple of centimetres tall, and asked them to fill it. The results will be auctioned, with proceeds going to the charity, on Monday.

Lady Thatcher wrote out her “lady’s not for turning” speech. Paul McCartney was sent a vegetarian-friendly book, with a binding of acrylic-coated cloth, in which he wrote out the lyrics to Hey Jude, and provided a cheery scribble of a grateful cow, captioned with the word “Ta”.

…Mr Greig said: “The biggest surprise is that everyone did it. The most popular British artists, the greatest American pop icon, the greatest and only surviving Beatle…”

Ahem. I think you’ll find Paul McCartney isn’t the only surviving Beatle, Mr Greig. Are you sure you’re not confusing Ringo Starr with Yasser Arafat (who’s not been looking too well recently)?

BBC: Town pardons executed “witches”
Dozens of “witches” executed in a Scottish town more than 400 years ago are to be pardoned to mark Halloween. Prestonpans, in East Lothian, will grant the pardons under ancient feudal powers which are about to disappear. Descendants and namesakes of the 81 people executed are expected to attend Sunday’s ceremony. More than 3,500 Scots, mainly women, were executed during the Reformation, for crimes such as owning a black cat and brewing up home-made remedies.

Or, to put it another way, innocent people tried, sentenced and executed on trumped-up charges are to be forgiven by the descendents of their persecutors.

Has anyone else noticed it’s the 21st Century?

(Mind you, I’m all for executing cat-owners.)

OK, now I’m totally confused:

BBC: Cup of tea may help boost memory
Drinking regular cups of tea could help improve your memory, research suggests. A team from Newcastle University found green and black tea inhibited the activity of key enzymes in the brain associated with memory. The researchers hope their findings, published in Phytotherapy Research, may lead to the development of a new treatment for Alzheimer’s Disease.

What on Earth is going on? I thought tea was supposed to increase my chances of getting Altzheimer’s Disease, not help me fight it. I distinctly remember them saying so a couple of years ago (about the same time they were harping on about mercury in my dental fillings, and fluoride in my tap water). Something to do with aluminium, if memory serves. Yes, that’s right, it was aluminium from my kettle that was going to make me go senile. I remember thinking, why are they picking on tea, when I also use my kettle to make coffee? But apparently some tea already had aluminium in it, making it a far greater threat to my mind than other hot beverages.

But now tea is good for you, apparently. I reckon these scientists have been drinking a bit too much of the stuff (or maybe not enough, according to which scientist you choose to listen to).

It’s like potatoes. Remember when potatoes were an absolute no-no? I certainly do. And the people who said so weren’t just talking about chips; they meant potatoes in any form. Full of nasty carbohydrates that would make you go fat, you see… But now potatoes are good for us, and everyone is going on high-carb’ diets to lose weight!

And let’s not forget the alcohol. Alcohol is bad for us, right? But now they’re telling us beer and red wine (and whisky, I hope) are actually quite good for us ‘in moderation’ (whatever the hell that means). Which, come to think of it, is exactly what my grandmother used to tell me: “Everything in moderation, Derek!” she used to say, as she poured herself another sweet sherry.

Mind you, Grandma also used to tell me that eating toast crusts would make my hair grow curly (even though I didn’t particularly want to have curly hair). She also warned me that, if I carried on pulling that face, and the wind changed direction, it would stick like that. Which just goes to show that, when it comes to scientific matters, Grandmas are not always the most reliable pundits.

And what about masturbation? Admittedly, Grandma never broached that particular subject, but others used to say it would make you go blind and send your soul spiralling into the fiery furnace. But now so-called experts claim it protects you against cancer.

They’ll be telling us cigarettes are bad for us next.

Jen and I spent yesterday morning helping our farmer friend bring some cattle down from the moors for the winter.

Even though cows are fairly big, the moors in question are considerably bigger, so it took us over two hours just to find the cattle. They had split into two groups, so, while Jen and the farmer drove the larger group two miles back through the bogs to the farm, I decided to go after the smaller group on my own. But when I returned to the hilltop where I had seen them grazing about half an hour earlier, they had buggered off. I couldn’t find them anywhere.

Then I remembered a Ray Mears TV programme from a couple of weeks back, and I had a cunning plan: I decided to return to the spot where the cattle had been grazing and try to follow their tracks. And you’ll never guess: it only bloody worked! There were hundreds of hoof-prints on the hillside, but I reasoned that the freshest ones would be the ones that hadn’t filled with water, so I followed the tracks about a quarter of a mile and found the cattle hiding below a ridge. Tonto, eat your heart out!

Then there was only the small matter of getting the nine cattle to walk the two miles or so to the farm. As I was doing this, I decided to invent some names for what I had now started to think of as my cows. Here are the rather clever names I came up with (with apologies to Peter McGrath):

• Black Bastard
• Other Black Bastard
• Brown Bastard
• Brown-and-White Bastard
• Black Bastard’s Calf
• Other Black Bastard’s Calf
• Brown Bastard’s Calf
• Brown-and-White Bastard’s Calf
• Lame Bastard

The way I saw it, these cattle are closely related, so they should all have the same surname.

Q: What do you call a bird with a tedious job?
A: A drudgerigar.

Ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha!

One of my pet gripes is something I call soundbite science: so-called scientific studies whose sole purpose is to generate a bit of cheap publicity for someone. Soundbite science is easy to spot, as it typically displays a number of the following characteristics:

• the studies appear as ‘fun’ news items towards the end of news broadcasts
• they are carried out by people described with the generic word ‘scientists’ (as opposed to physicists, biochemists, etc.)
• the ‘scientists’ are usually from a famous university
• the study is sponsored by a company or organisation that has something vaguely to do with the subject of the study
• …but the study is really “just a bit of fun”
• the subject of the study is one of perpetual fascination to the public (men v women, beer v wine, Britain v the rest of the world, tea, biscuits, sex, genes, television, music, food, sport, etc.)
• the studies are often published at the start of a special national ‘week’ invented by the sponsors (National Sausage Week, National Biscuit Week, etc.)
• the study has no real scientific merit whatsoever

Here’s the latest little gem:

BBC: Formula found for film chemistry
Scientists say they have discovered a formula for creating sexual chemistry on the movie screen. The experts, from King’s College in London, watched romantic films to come up with the right formula. They said voice, eye contact, body language and excitement could be used to measure sexual chemistry…

Chemistry couples

• 10/10 – When Harry Met Sally
  (Meg Ryan/Billy Crystal)
• 9.5/10 – Casablanca
  (Ingrid Bergman/Humphrey Bogart)
• 9/10 – Breakfast at Tiffany’s
  (Audrey Hepburn/George Peppard)
• 9/10 – Lost in Translation
  (Scarlett Johansson/Bill Murray)
• 7/10 – Pretty Woman
  (Julia Roberts/Richard Gere)

…The research was carried for Sky Movies.

Yes, that’s right: the ‘formula’ for sexual chemistry on screen is… eye contact, body language and excitement.

Wow!

• Race Equality
• It’s Good to Gossip
• In Odds We Trust?
• Lying
• Scientists sketch out life after mankind