Life's too short

The Guardian newspaper (my butler reads it) has listed 1000 Novels Everyone Must Read. Note the imperative.

Let's see: setting ourselves the ambitious target of a novel a week, that should take us nineteen years and three months to complete. At that rate, we'll be finished by May 2028—by which time (touch-wood), I'll be 63.

That's 19 years to read 1,000 books, which, to put it bluntly, simply aren't true. They're novels, for Pete's sake. They're not real.

Wouldn't we be better off spending the all-too-few precious years we have left on this fantastic planet finding out about stuff that actually is true—you know science and history and shit like that—rather than frittering it away reading stories?

By all means read a novel now and again, but, quite frankly, reading 1,000 of them just shouldn't be a priority.

Not dead

Sorry there have been so few updates recently. I've been run off my feet—mostly with Darwin-related stuff. Pesky bicentennials!

Apologies in particular to the two people who sent me emails with pointers to news stories of a distinctly Grutsian nature. I will make use of them soon.

In the meantime, here's an advert for blackcurrant-flavoured Tango™.

Lor' blimey, guvna!

Guardian: Word 'school' is out for new £4.7m Sheffield primary

A new £4.7m primary school in Sheffield is facing criticism for dropping the word "school" from its title after governors decided the term had "negative connotations".

The headteacher of Sheffield's Watercliffe Meadow, Linda Kingdon, said the south Yorkshire school, which is due to open on Monday, will instead be called a "place for learning".

Words failurise me.

Actually, I think the word governors has very negative connotations. The phrase clueless twats seems far more appropriate.

Brrrrrrrr!!!

A happy and bloody freezing new year to you all!

Our garden thermometer bottomed at -5°C last night. Freezing fog has covered all of the trees in hoar frost, and Hebden Bridge looks like bloody Narnia this morning. I've just fed the birds (fat balls and seed: bread isn't much good when it's this cold), and offered some very anxious brass monkeys a blanket. Time to put the kettle on and settle down with a good book.

Unless your kettle is powered by wind-generated electricity, that is. Not much of that today, huh? Nor yesterday. Not a breath of wind. The scores of silly turbines defiling the local hillsides are doing sod all in this weather.

It was the same when I climbed Moel Famau on Christmas Eve. Dozens of wind turbines doing sweet fuck all in the Beaufort Scale zero non-wind.

And that's when it dawned on me. Do you know who's really behind the reckless, ill-advised push for wind powerstations? Vegetarians, that's who.

Just think: twenty years from now, we've neglected to replace our wonderfuel nuclear powerstations, coal and gas are a no-no, and all we've got to cook our Christmas turkeys in is our wind-powered electric ovens. Then we get a Christmas like the one just gone, and all us meat eaters are eating raw turkey and dropping dead of salmonella.

Vegetarians, I tell you.