Reigning champion Victoria Pendleton missed out on gold in the final of the keirin at the Track Cycling World Championships in Manchester…
Pendleton adds the silver to her two golds from the sprints.
Sod of, Beeb! Two golds and a silver are a hell of an achievement. Especially when you consider she’d never actually seen a bike until a week last Tuesday. Or something like that.
I think she should change her name to Victoria Pedalton.
Those of you with long memories might remember that Carolyn and I have our own two-person lottery syndicate. I (very sensibly) choose random numbers each week; Carolyn (very foolishly) picks the same numbers each week. Carolyn’s numbers are based on our birthdays, our mutual age, and the numbers of the houses we were brought up in, three doors along from each other. So far, my numbers have won us a total of £80 (or there about). Carolyn’s have yet to win us a sausage.
After this evening’s draw, Carolyn sent me the following text message:
It’s your fault! If you’d been born two weeks earlier we’d have won £10. Typical!
How do you tell your oldest friend in the world that her gambling system is shite?
In the 1960s, the scientist and environmentalist James Lovelock (who is dead right about the relative merits of nuclear and wind power, by the way) proposed the Gaia Hypothesis in which he suggested that the Earth functions as a sort of superorganism, reacting via natural feedback loops to natural and man-made changes in environmental conditions.
It is far from clear whether Lovelock was talking metaphorically or literally when he spoke of the Earth as being an organism. If he was talking metaphorically, Gaia is an interesting and potentially useful hypothesis which might help us to look at environmental change from a different perspective. If he was talking literally, it is, of course, utter bollocks.
This morning, I took some cardboard boxes to compost in my magnificent compost bins. As I was tearing up the boxes, a sudden gust of wind snapped in half one of the pieces of cardboard, the corner of which nearly took my eye out. It smarted. It smarted A LOT.
So that’s what you get for trying to save the planet.
Sod you, Gaia! I’m off to buy an S.U.V!
Stop Press: You couldn’t make this crap up… Not 20 minutes after I had published the above, I went to crush my empty beer can in my trendy new save-the-planet can crusher. Half-way through the crushing process, the can—which was by now a mass of sharp metal edges—fired right out of the crusher and hit me square in the face.
Over in this neck of the woods, we are rightly proud of local lad Percy Shaw (1890–1976), the inventor of the catseye, which has saved untold lives on the nation’s roads.
It is said that Shaw’s invention was inspired by seeing light reflected off a cat’s retina at nighttime.
It turns out that Percy Shaw wasn’t the first man of science to investigate reflections from cats’ retinas. This from The Eye: a Natural History by Simon Ings (pp.184–5):
In 1703, [French anatomist Jean] Mery noted that a cat’s eyes shine much more brightly if you hold the cat underwater…
[W]ell over a century after Mery dunked his cat, [Swedish-born naturalist, Karl Asmund] Rudolphi turned his attention to the directionality of the shining eye. He was able to show that the reflecting eye will emit light along exactly the same line as the direction of the in-going rays. No chemical or biological process is taking place—a point he demonstrated by the simple expedient of shining lights into the eyes of a decapitated cat.
I thought he’d died years ago. For absolutely yonks, I’ve been saying that Kirk Douglas was the last remaining cowboy from the golden era of westerns*: the movies my dad was brought up on; the movies that my dad brought me up on.
But I was wrong: Kirk wasn’t the last. Richard Widmark was still around.
But I’m right now.
Take care of yourself, Kirk.
* My dad is always careful to make a distinction between ‘cowboy films’ and ‘westerns’. Cowboy films were set in a town (which was actually a film set) and usually starred Gary Cooper; westerns were set on location out in the Bad Lands. Cowboy films would do at a pinch, but westerns were the ones to go and see.
Vaughan Williams’s The Lark Ascending has been voted best classical piece of music by radio listeners for the second year running.
Look, I know diddly-squat about classical music, but I should imagine this sort of thing annoys the real classical music fan about as much as it infuriates me when one of the perennial best-ever pop song polls has seven boy bands in the top ten.
The Lark Ascending: great tune, quintessentially British, actually sounds like a lark, written by Charles Darwin’s great-nephew—what’s not to like? But best piece of classical music ever? Is that the best you can come up with, culture vultures?
Do us a favour!
Personally, I’d have gone for At the Castle Gate from Pelleas and Melisande by Sibelius (better known to UK readers as the theme tune to The Sky at Night). The first note alone wins if for me. Eat that, Beethoven! Crank it up to eleven. But, like I said, I know diddly-squat about classical music, so I’m not entitled to vote.
Someone calling themself Intentionally Blank left a comment the other day asking for a list of the podcasts I listen to. Well, Intentionally (if that is your real name), I am happy to oblige [seriously out-of-date list removed].
Britain and France are to sign a deal to construct a new generation of nuclear power stations and export the technology around the world in an effort to combat climate change…
Britain hopes to take advantage of French expertise to build the power stations that do not rely on fossil fuels. Nearly 79% of France’s electricity comes from its highly-developed nuclear power industry. The UK’s ageing nuclear plants are ready for decommissioning and supply 20% of its energy needs.
Brown hopes the partnership will create a skilled British labour force who would then work in partnership with France to sell nuclear power stations to other countries over the next 15 years.
Let’s hope this is more than just spin, and they have the guts to follow it through.
There’s a semi-tame male pheasant which has been visiting our garden for the last five years. For alliterative reasons, we have named him Philip.
Philip seems to think he owns our garden, and gets decidedly pissed off if other birds start eating the bread that we have quite clearly left out just for him. When we neglect to leave out any bread for him, Philip comes to the window and stares in at us in an intimidating manner. If we ignore him, he starts pecking at the glass. Philip has got a bit of an attitude. I like that in a pheasant.
You might wonder why I put up with such nonsense from a wild bird. To be honest, similar thoughts have crossed my own mind. Then, yesterday afternoon, I saw something which made me realise that pampering Philip had not gone unrewarded. It was a sight that cheered me up for the rest of the day: one of the neighbourhood cats running terrified from our garden, with a very pissed off pheasant in hot pursuit!
Jen and I are off work this week and next. The other day, we found ourselves in what I still insist on calling a record shop. Have you noticed how little music they sell in record shops these days? It’s all computer games and DVDs. Music is dead. I blame Steve Jobs.
Anyway, when I’m working, I spend about three hours a day commuting in my car. When you spend that much time in a car, the delights of radio soon begin to wear a bit thin. On my way into work, my main listening choice is between Sarah ‘Tory Girl’ Kennedy on Radio 2, and the Today Programme with the unbearable John Humphrys on Radio 4. Which is why, a few years ago, I bought an iPod. Thank you, Steve Jobs!
With an iPod in your car, you have the best music radio station in the world. Put the thing into shuffle mode, and you can listen to non-stop music entirely matching your own taste. Eat my iPod’s shorts, Radio 1!
But, with an iPod in your car, you also have the best talk radio station in the world, courtesy of the podcast. Thank you, Dave Winer! Over the last three or four years, I have become totally addicted to podcasts, be they ordinary BBC radio programmes available for downloading after the event, or programmes put together especially for the internet by talented amateurs. Thank you, Steve Gillmor! (Vanity feed still in good working order, Steve?)
BUT… What with having access to the best music station and the best talk radio station in the world on my iPod, I hardly ever need to listen to traditional radio any more. Buggles were wrong: it wasn’t video that killed the radio star; it was the podcast.
On the whole, this is fine, but it does mean that I no longer have my finger on the pulse when it comes to modern-day pop crooners.
Which is why, when I was in the record shop the other day and heard a rather fabulous new tune, I hadn’t a baldy clue who it was. Too embarrassed to ask the trendy, young whippersnapper behind the till, I scribbled down a couple of the lyrics for Googling later. It turns out that the song has been played to death on the radio and has been the UK number one for several weeks. Thank you, Duffy:
One of my Scottish moles has provided me with hi-definition photos from Stense’s Bafta triumph last Friday:
YAAAAY!!
She doesn’t like to boast, but I can vouch from personal experience that Stense also has a rather magnificent pair of golden globes. I’m doing my best to obtain photos, dammit!
You must have seen those silly pine-tree-shaped pine-scented air-fresheners they have in cars… Do you see what they’ve done there? They’ve made the air-freshener into the shape of the thing that it smells like. Clever marketing ploy, or what?
The other day, I couldn’t help noticing that a colleage had an air-freshener in the shape of a dolphin hanging from the rear-view mirror of their car. I have never smelt a dolphin, but I don’t imagine it’s the sort of smell I’d want wafting through my car. Rather fishy is how I imagine a dolphin would smell. But I could be wrong.
How about you lot? Have any of you ever smelt a dolphin? If so, what did it smell like? Is it the sort of smell you’d want wafting through your car?
An anti-smoking group in Liverpool is calling for all movies with smoking scenes to be given an 18 certificate.
The latest modest proposal from the anti-smoking bigots. Doesn’t it seem just a little bit over-the-top to you? Here’s a short list of films that would be given an 18 certificate if they had their way:
Casablanca
The Quiet Man
Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade
Blade Runner
The Full Monty
As Good As It Gets
The Lord of the Rings
101 Dalmatians
pretty much any film depicting the Second World War
Yes, we know smoking isn’t nice, but neither is being a criminal (not quite the same thing yet—although rapidly heading that way in the movies). Tell you what, while we’re at it, let’s slap an 18 certificate on every film with a bad guy in it too, just to make sure they don’t tempt children towards a life in crime.
Primary school children should be eligible for the DNA database if they exhibit behaviour indicating they may become criminals in later life, according to Britain’s most senior police forensics expert.
Gary Pugh, director of forensic sciences at Scotland Yard and the new DNA spokesman for the Association of Chief Police Officers (Acpo), said a debate was needed on how far Britain should go in identifying potential offenders, given that some experts believe it is possible to identify future offending traits in children as young as five.
‘If we have a primary means of identifying people before they offend, then in the long-term the benefits of targeting younger people are extremely large,’ said Pugh. ‘You could argue the younger the better. Criminologists say some people will grow out of crime; others won’t. We have to find who are possibly going to be the biggest threat to society.’
(My emphasis added.)
That is one hell of an if, if I may say so, Gary. But I suspect you already know that. Exactly what percentage of experts is ‘some experts’? How do you define an expert? When you say these experts ‘believe’, do you mean they have actual scientific proof, or do you mean that they believe in the same way that some people believe in Father Christmas, that there is a god, or that there are fairies at the bottom of their garden?
Why are you spouting this dangerous nonsense, Gary? Haven’t you read The Mismeasure of Man?
