Independent: Ban anti-Catholic books in schools, says bishop
Makes a change from burning them, I suppose.
Libri Prohibiti
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Monthly Archives: March 2008
A New Day Has Come
Tapir alert
For reasons I won’t go into, I know for a fact that at least one Gruts reader out there has more than a passing interest in tapirs. To that particular individual (plus anyone else with more than a passing interest in tapirs), I address the following remark: you might find this recent post on the Laelaps weblog rather interesting.
See also: Compare and contrast
I am kurious… orang?
How’s this for a spooky coincidence? Orang-utans are orange in colour, but the orang bit of their name has absolutely nothing to do with the colour orange.
The word orang-utan derives from the Malay/Indonesian words orang, meaning person, and hutan meaning forest; orang-utans were people of the forest. Years before Darwin, the wise folks of the Malay Archepelago knew a close relative when they saw one.
The word orange, on the other hand, has a very complex derivation, given on Answers.com as follows:
Middle English, from Old French pume orenge, translation and alteration (influenced by Orenge, Orange, a town in France) of Old Italian melarancio: mela, fruit + arancio, orange tree (alteration of Arabic naranj, from Persian narang, from Sanskrit narangah?, possibly of Dravidian origin).
In other words, absolutely nothing to do with orang-utans. Like I said, spooky coincidence.
I worry about this sort of thing a lot.
Feminist plot
They’re trying to do us out of a job, lads!
Observer: MPs back artificial sperm for childless
MPs are planning a change in the law to allow babies to be conceived from artificial sperm, a move described by opponents as playing God with human DNA.
This is clearly a feminist plot to make us chaps totally superfluous. Ensure all of the offspring are female, and they could half the world’s population through natural wastage within a century. It would probably also curtail nearly all global conflict.
Actually, I’m struggling to come up with a reason why this is a bad idea.
Stupid genetics!
Googled
Lorks-a-lordy and ruddy heck! Carolyn’s niece did a Google search for her own name the other week, found nothing, then searched for her parents’ names—still nothing—then searched for Carolyn’s name and hit the Gruts motherlode (or should that be auntielode?). Carolyn’s niece was mortified.
She didn’t mention it to Carolyn right away, though. No, she waited until the entire Farthing Clan had gathered for a meal, then announced to the world that Auntie Carolyn was on the internet and it was “ABSOLUTELY DISGUSTING!”
So the whole family (apart from Carolyn) rushed upstairs to the computer to have a gawp.
Stupid internet!
I wish I had a pair of bongos…
Bongo fury!
Nobel Physics Laureate, Richard P. Feynman (one of my heroes) plays the bongos:
Believe it or not, I have this track on CD—bought, legitimately, through the post from the other chap in the video, Ralph Leyton. It’s called Orange Juice.
Hat tip to Sean at Cosmic Variance for the link. Sean is a physicist who sits at Feynman’s old desk.
See also: Books – Don’t You Have Time to Think?
Phew!
BBC: Peers vote to scrap blasphemy
The government has got its controversial plan to scrap the blasphemy law through the House of Lords… The amendment [to the Criminal Justice Bill] will abolish the offences of blasphemy and blasphemous libel in England and Wales.
Interesting use of the word controversial, I thought, bearing in mind the last three prosecutions for blasphemy were in 1922, 1841 and 1676. Routine housekeeping is how I would have described this amendment to the law.
But, as of last Thursday, I have been sleeping just a little bit more soundly in my bed.
The bag’s out of the cat
Times: Series of blunders turned the plastic bag into global villain
Scientists and environmentalists have attacked a global campaign to ban plastic bags which they say is based on flawed science and exaggerated claims.
The widely stated accusation that the bags kill 100,000 animals and a million seabirds every year are false, experts have told The Times. They pose only a minimal threat to most marine species, including seals, whales, dolphins and seabirds…
The central claim of campaigners is that the bags kill more than 100,000 marine mammals and one million seabirds every year. However, this figure is based on a misinterpretation of a 1987 Canadian study in Newfoundland, which found that, between 1981 and 1984, more than 100,000 marine mammals, including birds, were killed by discarded nets. The Canadian study did not mention plastic bags.
Fifteen years later in 2002, when the Australian Government commissioned a report into the effects of plastic bags, its authors misquoted the Newfoundland study, mistakenly attributing the deaths to “plastic bags”.
This is not to say that we shouldn’t try to use fewer plastic bags—I understand they’re pretty disastrous for marine turtles, which eat them, mistaking them for jellyfish—but it is an interesting example of far too much being read into a single, flawed scientific study. Remember MMR?
Still think spinach is good for you because it’s full of iron? Think again.
Cue the side-splitting shell-suit jokes
Brainwashing
And people who take their children to church are brainwashing them. Just one of the many choices you are entitled to make as a parent, I guess.
But why complain about one and not the other?
Slam-dunk!
Congratulations to my golf-mad dad for getting his third ever hole-in-one last week. This one was particularly pleasing as it pitched straight into the hole: no superfluous, namby-pamby bounces for Dad!
Hot date
As you might have gathered, Stense and I went out on a hot date on Tuesday night (photos here). Stense spent the whole evening mentally undressing me. Don’t you just hate it when they do that? WHAT AM I: A PIECE OF MEAT?!
My social life is one crazy whirl at the moment: we went to the same pub that I had taken Carolyn to just four nights earlier. The landlady gave me a funny look as she came to collect our glasses. I don’t think she was mentally undressing me. Well, I bloody well hope not.
“Be honest now,” I asked the landlady, nodding at Stense, “which do you prefer, this one, or the other one? I can’t make up my mind.”
The landlady was too polite to venture an opinion.
“Your son has been totally out of order this evening,” Stense informed my dad when he came to collect us.
“He gets it from his mother,” said Dad.
Life imitates art
Compare and contrast:
Scary Stense card.
Stense making eyes at me.
I tell you, sometimes, I scare impress even myself.
Flat Earth News
John Lanchester (London Review of Books): Riots, Terrorism etc
Nick Davies’s Flat Earth News [...] is a genuinely important book, one which is likely to change, permanently, the way anyone who reads it looks at the British newspaper industry.
A really interesting piece. It sounds like a great book. I’ll certainly be buying it.
Postscript: I did indeed buy it. Review here.
Maverick?
Guardian: ‘Enjoy life while you can’
[James] Lovelock has been dispensing predictions from his one-man laboratory in an old mill in Cornwall since the mid-1960s, the consistent accuracy of which have earned him a reputation as one of Britain’s most respected – if maverick – independent scientists…
For decades, his advocacy of nuclear power appalled fellow environmentalists – but recently increasing numbers of them have come around to his way of thinking…
“You’re never going to get enough energy from wind to run a society such as ours,” he says. “Windmills! Oh no. No way of doing it. You can cover the whole country with the blasted things, millions of them. Waste of time.”
(My emphasis added.)
All quiet on the Preston front
From an online chat with Carolyn last week (edited slightly for brevity, with typos corrected):
Carolyn: We’re going to get about 3 Black Rock chicks in a couple of weeks. The farmer is a right Yorkshire man. He was very put out when I asked for day old chicks and asked if they had to be exactly 1 day old. When I asked him what age he was thinking of, he said ‘Well, they’re only day-old for 1 day – would you mind if they were 3 day old?’ – When he said that, I could see his point. He also informed me, obviously having decided that I was a bit naive, that the chicks would be the size of an egg when they hatched and therefore I wouldn’t need a giant box full of hay and sawdust for just 3 of them! He’s going to sell me ‘eater’ [heater] and as long as I’ve got ‘eater’ I can have as many as I want! He wasn’t impressed with my idea of taking a hot-water bottle for the car journey. I’m looking forward to meeting him – he sounds great fun – a bit like those farmers on the old James ‘erriot programmes.
Me: Where does he live?
Carolyn: eeee, ee’s a long way… Up near Preston in a place called Much Moor or something. I’ve forgotten now. In fact someone from t’Wirral ‘ad just phoned ‘im before I did and they though it was too far to go.
Me: If he’s from near Preston, then he’s Lancashire, not Yorkshire!
Carolyn: Well, they sound very similar. It did say Lancashire on the address somewhere. Maybe he moved when he got married about 40 years ago and retained the accent.
As usual, you can’t fault Carolyn’s logic.
Prince of Farts
BBC: Charles proud of returning Harry
Prince Charles has spoken of his “great relief” at the safe return of his son Harry, after 10 weeks with his regiment on the frontline in Afghanistan.
That’s as may be. But he’s still a nasty little ginger shit who bears an uncanny resemblance to Major James Hewitt (rtd).
Wonder if any of our rare harriers have been downed in Helmand Province recently. Cherchez le prince!
White rabbits
Carolyn and I went out for a meal and a drink last night. It was 29th February, but she forgot to seize the opportunity. Her loss.
There was a big birthday party at the table next to ours, with balloons saying 60 and 15. It took us about three hours to realise that they referred to the same chap, who was in the process of receiving an inflated-fairy-gram.
Don’t ask.