BBC: Hendrix ‘quit army with gay lie’
Jimi Hendrix pretended to be gay so he would be discharged from the army, according to claims in a biography that has used his military medical records.
Excuse me while I kiss this guy
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Monthly Archives: July 2005
Do I look German?
Why has everyone suddenly started calling me ‘Hun’?
The Germans found it offensive, so, in the interests of international relations, we quite rightly stopped.
So why is it suddenly OK to start calling me a Hun?
ANSWER ME THAT!
2003 UB313
BBC: Astronomers detect ’10th planet’
Astronomers in the United States have announced the discovery of the 10th planet to orbit our Sun…
Designated 2003 UB313, it is about 3,000km across, a world of rock and ice and somewhat larger than Pluto.
This in the same week that an amazing ice lake was found on Mars. A fantastic discovery!
I do hope they don’t name it Goofy, or Edna, or anything stupid like that.
I suppose the discovery of a new planet is going to force all those astrologers into a major rethink. If you think about it, it’s strange they’ve been so uncannily accurate all these years, when they’ve unwittingly been leaving an entire planet out of their calculations.
Mind you, it’s the late Gustav Holst I feel most sorry for: as if being dead wasn’t bad enough, his most famous work is now hopelessly out of date.
Rixology
I’ve decided it’s time to invent my own alternative therapy. It seems to me that, if people can get away with rubbish like homeopathy, reflexology, aromatherapy, crystal healing, acupuncture, Fraudulent psychoanalysis, and faith healing, why shouldn’t I?
I’m going to call my alternative therapy Rixology, in honour of myself.
Rixology works by refocussing entropy. It harmonises imbalance brought about by chaotic flux and channels it back into the energy centres of the patient’s aura. In layman’s terms, it’s a bit like recharging a battery, only it’s far, far more complicated than that. In fact, it’s nothing at all like recharging a battery.
Basically, Rixology counteracts the entropic effects of the Second Law of Thermodynamics by intercepting dissipating energy, reconcentrating it, and reflecting it back into the affected energy centre. This is achieved using a technique known as whisking. Whisking involves moving your hands rapidly back and forth over the affected area of the body while you emit medium- to high-pitched whistles in time with your hand movements. The pitch of the whistle is tuned to the natural frequency of the affected energy centre.
Rixology is, therefore, non-invasive, non-toxic, and every bit as effective as other alternative therapies (provided you don’t admit it’s total bollocks to your patients).
I reckon I’m on to a real winner.
Conversation with Vodafone Customer Services
V: …Right, that’s your password verified, Mr Carter. How can I help?
R: I’ve just received my latest bill. It’s a bit higher than I was expecting. It’s usually around £25-30. This month, it’s £275.74.
V: Wow!
R: I haven’t used the phone any more than usual this month, but I might have sent one or two more text messages.
V: Where to, the moon?
R: I know exactly what’s happened. I got a new phone last month, and I ordered a car-kit for £250. Vodafone took my card details, but then discovered the car-kit wasn’t available yet and said they’d refund my money. My bill shows several in- and out-transactions of £250 as someone has tried to sort out the mess, but they’ve got their calculations wrong somewhere.
V: That’s exactly what’s happened. I’ll sort it out immediately.
R: No wonder you lot can afford to sponsor Manchester United.
Bad Blair Day
BBC: Blair’s make-up bill tops £1,800
Prime Minister Tony Blair has spent more than £1,800 of taxpayers’ money on cosmetics and make-up artists since coming into office, it has emerged. Between 1999 and 2005 Downing Street paid £1,050.22 for cosmetics for Mr Blair’s media appearances. Another £791.20 was spent over the past two years on make-up artists.
Is this a total non-story or what?
It is an established fact that anyone who goes on telly without wearing make-up looks like a total dog’s breakfast. Yes, even Natalie Imbrulgia and Elizabeth Hurley. I don’t want our Prime Minister to look like a dog’s breakfast; I want him to look smart and be the part.
Did the British taxpayers moan about all that mascara they had to buy for Clement Attlee? They did not. Did they complain about having to stump up for Lloyd George‘s rouge? Not a murmur. Did they grumble about Thatcher the Milk-Snatcher‘s grouting subsidy? No way, Pedro.
I call £1,050 over six years a total bargain. That’s only £175 per year. We probably pay for Tony’s haircuts too. I don’t care: the Prime Minister is a busy man—he has terrorists to distinguish between, Faith Schools to defend, and civil liberties to infringe—he doesn’t have time to nip down the barber’s for a bit off the sides. Mind you, he could save a few more precious minutes if he stopped desecrating his face each morning and grew a beard. A No. 1½ trim once a fortnight is all you need to keep a beard in perfect shape, Prime Minister.
Hey, yeah, there’s a point: when did we last have a Prime Minister who sported a beard?
Apart from Thatcher, I mean.
The Man with the Golden Pun
BoingBoing: Mugshot of man arrested for inhaling spray paint propellant
From The Smoking Gun. This guy was arrested after attempting to buy spray paint at a hardware store. A sharp-eyed employee noticed the guy’s face was covered with gold paint and called the cops.
Apparently, the police said his face was covered with gilt.
I raft in your general direction
BBC: Raft trip link to London attacks
Police are examining a possible link between those involved in Thursday’s attacks and a whitewater rafting trip…
Photographs showed Khan, who carried out the Edgware Road bombing, raising a two-fingered peace sign, and Tanweer, who bombed Aldgate East, leaning forward and appearing to laugh.
Oh no they bloody don’t!
The above photograph quite clearly shows Khan trying to give Tanweer some bunny ears, but Tanweer has realised what Khan is up to and has leant out of the way.
But I suppose peace signs from bombers make better copy.
Pretentious
Conversation with Jen, twenty minutes into the film Layer Cake on DVD last night:
J: Are you following this?
R: No.
J: It’s totally disjointed. I can’t figure out what’s going on.
R: I think they’re trying some pretentious, arty-farty editing. They’ve chopped up the storyline and reassembled it in non-chronological order. I suppose it will all make sense in the end.
J: I bloody well hope so.
R: The sound quality’s terrible, though. It’s all over the place. They haven’t levelled it properly. And the fade out to black and fade back in again between scenes is all very clever, but the novelty wears off after a couple of minutes.
J: What’s happening? Why have we gone back to the menu?
R: Erm… I think you’ll find we’ve just watched the deleted scenes track.
As easy as pi
Conversation with someone you don’t know earlier this week:
R: Did you know that, if you write each of the first three odd numbers down twice like this, 113355, and then move the second three above the first three to get a fraction, you get 355÷113?
X: So what?
R: Work it out on your calculator. What do you get?
X: 3
R: No, don’t round it down. Read it out in full.
X: 3.1415929
R: Isn’t that cool?
X: What the hell are you talking about?
R: Doesn’t that number ring a bell?
X: Nope. Should it?
R: It’s a very close approximation to the number pi. It’s miles better than 22÷7.
X: What the hell is pi?
R: WHAT?! You must have heard of pi, it’s one of the most important numbers in mathematics!
X: Oh, I’ve heard of it all right, but I don’t know what it means. I was never any good at maths at school. Why is pi so important, then?
R: It’s the number you get when you divide the circumference of a circle by its diameter.
X: Why the HELL would I need to know that?
R: Well, it’s really important. Suppose you were going to paint a circular door, for example…
X: Where would I get a circular door?
R: It doesn’t matter. Just suppose you were going to paint one. How would you know how much paint to buy?
X: I’d just buy five litres. That would be plenty.
R: …Ok, bad example, forget about the door. Imagine that teapot over there was a perfect sphere two feet across…
X: Can’t I imagine a cube instead? They’re easier.
R: But you don’t need pi for cubes. Pi is for circular stuff.
X: Oh, I see, pi doesn’t work on cubes—IT’S JUST A BIG CHEAT!
R: No it isn’t. Pi makes it easier to do calculations with circles. That’s the whole point! So imagine you’ve got this sphere two feet across and you wanted to fill it with water. How much water would you need?
X: I wouldn’t need to work it out. I’d just fill it from the tap.
R: Yes, but if you did need to work it out, how many cubic feet of water would you need?
X: I suppose you’re going to say pi.
R: Well, almost. You’d actually need four-thirds pi cubic feet.
X: ARE YOU HAVING ME ON?
R: NO! That’s the volume of a sphere: four-thirds pi times the cube of its radius.
X: YOU SAID IT DOESN’T WORK ON CUBES!
X is right of course. I have never needed to use pi outside my school maths homework—even though I can still recite it to 22 decimal places (nerdish schoolboy’s trick).
Mind you, did you hear about that Japanese bloke the other week who recited pi to 83,431 decimal places?
WHAT THE HELL WAS THAT ABOUT?
Postscript:
HOLY CRAP!!! I PROMISE I didn’t fix this… I just read on Wikipedia that today (22/7 in British date format, geddit?) is Pi Approximation Day.
Of course, you realise this proves that the paranormal is real, and there really is a god.
[Actually, there are two Pi Approximation Days (see Wikipedia article), so the odds of my publishing this particular item on one of them is 2 in 365 (or 1 in 182½). Hardly amazing, if you think about it—but still rather pleasing.]
Of or pertaining to the rhinoceros
For reasons I won’t go into, I was wondering what the adjectival form of the word rhinoceros is this morning. I thought it might be something like rhinoceroid, or rhinoceristic, or (my favourite) rhinocerous.
I looked it up in the Concise Oxford English Dictionary and was, quite frankly, astonished. The correct answer is:
Rhinocerotic
Well, I suppose they are pretty damn horny.
See also: Uncanny
No shit? You really don’t say!
BBC: Prayer ‘no aid to heart patients’
Praying for patients undergoing heart operations does not improve their outcomes, a US study suggests.
A study found those who were prayed for were as likely to have a setback in hospital, be re-admitted, or die within six months as those not prayed for…
Heart experts said patients could benefit from feeling more optimistic.
That’s right, a positive mental attitude really does seem to help you get better—unlike being prayed for against your knowledge. (For positive mental attitude, read placebo.)
Therapies such as prayer and homeopathy are widely used, although past studies looking at the impact of care on patients’ health have had mixed results.
Prayer, homeopathy, faith healing, acupuncture, that weird shit they do by rubbing your feet, crystal healing, tai chi, blahdy-blahdy-blah…
All of them placebos.
See also: Getting beyond a joke
Third time lucky?
BBC: Former PM Sir Edward Heath dies
Former Conservative Prime Minister Sir Edward Heath has died at the age of 89.
Earlier this year, we lost another former Prime Minister, Jim Callaghan.
Come on, Maggie, we’re on for the hat trick!
Everybody say Aaah!
Oooooh! Look!! BUNNIES!!!
Jack Nicklaus bows out
Jack Nicklaus, gentleman, ambassador and would-be assassin.
Jack Nicklaus, the greatest golfer in the history of the game, played his final round in a major tournament on Friday. Appropriately, it was at the Open Championship at St Andrews, the home of golf, and the scene of two of Jack Nicklaus’s three Open Championship wins.
He even managed to finish with a birdie.
I’ll bet my dad was on his feet in front of the telly, applauding with the crowd, as Jack walked down the 18th. Dad is a total golf nut, and tends to do embarrassing stuff like that.
My dad and his brother met Jack Nicklaus once. It was at Royal Birkdale during the 1969 Ryder Cup. They had gone into the club house to change out of their golf shoes after watching that day’s competition, when Jack Nicklaus walked into the room to change his shoes. They went over and had a chat, and my dad got Jack’s autograph (which he has since somehow managed to lose). Dad finished off the brief conversation by saying that he hoped Jack Nicklaus wouldn’t mind if he didn’t wish him good luck against the British team for the following day’s play. Jack said he quite understood.
Later that week, Jack Nicklaus famously conceded the final putt of the tournament to Tony Jacklin, causing the competition’s first ever tied result, with the words, “I don’t think you would have missed that Tony, but I didn’t want to give you the chance.”
What a gentleman!
So much of a gentleman, in fact, that I have long since forgiven Jack Nicklaus for trying to kill me on the same course two years later:
I was six years old at the time, and my dad had taken me to watch one of the practice days of the 100th Open Championship. We were standing at a crowd control fence to the right of the 18th fairway, when my dad suggested that I step back a bit as the golfers tended to drive down the right-hand side to get a better line into the green for their second shots. I stepped back, and about three seconds later, a golf ball thudded into the fence post I had been leaning against. Up walked Jack Nicklaus, making jokes with the crowd who were moving the fence out of the way for him. He had a tricky lie in the rough. He shook his head, grabbed a man from out of the crowd, stood him behind the ball, and asked, “Well, what would you do?” The man said something along the lines of, “I’d probably just knock it into the middle of the green.” Jack took out an iron, made a few practice swings, and struck the ball a couple of feet from the flag.
Retirement my arse! I don’t think we’ve seen the last of Jack Nicklaus.
Institutionalised homophobia?
Carolynism
Overheard by my spies at Carolyn‘s house:
Howard: I’m going in for a shower now.
Carolyn: Well don’t wake the children up, they haven’t got to sleep yet.
Not too impressed, to beetrootful
Ann and Bill visited us the other week. We took them to the local cheese shop. Do we know how to show our guests a good time, or what?
As well as cheese, the cheese shop stocks a fine selection of unusual, specialists foodstuffs—special pastas, chocolates, preserves, oils, etc. Which is how I came to talk Ann into buying a packet of beetroot crisps. We’d been to the pub; it seemed like a really good idea at the time.
Anyway, Ann got her own back by buggering off home and leaving her beetroot crisps behind.
Last weekend, after a couple of glasses of wine, I got the munchies. I wanted something savoury, and the only thing I could find in the cupboard was Ann’s packet of beetroot crisps. So I gave them a taste test. Here are my findings:
- beetroot crisps are extremely nasty
- if you don’t like beetroot, you are definitely not going to like beetroot crisps: they taste just like beetroot, but have the added disadvantage of being hard and crispy
- some surprising food combinations (jam and cheese, black pepper and strawberry) work; beetroot and crisps does not
- beetroot crisps dye the inside of your mouth purple
I ate the whole packet, of course. There was a principle involved—although I forget what it was.
Ann, I’ll let you know how I get on with the roasted broad beans fritas.
Kosher
Conversation with Jen this morning:
R I couldn’t get any lamb mince for our burgers at Tesco yesterday. I’ll try to get some this morning.
J If you can’t get any, minced beef will do.
R How about pork?
J I don’t think so.
R … I wonder why you can’t get chicken mince.
J You probably can. You just haven’t looked for it.
R I’ll bet you can get it in the Jewish section at Tesco.
J Why?
R Well, they’re supposed to eat a lot of chicken, by all accounts—because it’s kosher, I suppose.
J How about beef? Is that kosher?
R I don’t think so… Oh, hand on a minute, yes it is, because cattle chew the cud and have cloven hooves.
J So why aren’t pigs kosher, then? They have cloven hooves.
R Yes, but they don’t chew the cud. The rule is you mustn’t eat animals with cloven hooves unless they chew the cud. The way I look at it, the chewing of the cud cancels out the cloven-hoofedness.
J … Someone’s put a lot of thought into this, haven’t they?
R Yes, it was God apparently. I told you He was fucking nuts!
What’s bred in the bone
People often ask me, “Richard, where did you get your sophisticated sense of humour?”
I believe the following snippet from a post card I received this morning from my mum, who is on holiday with my dad and sister, goes some way to answering that question:
Greetings from Anglesey again. Weather not too bad, lots of wind, especially from Gill’s direction.
That’s my mum!
(I’m her favourite child, you know.)