Gruts

🦆

They tried to make me go to detox. I said, 'No, no, no!'

The delightfully named Dr Andrew Wadge sounds like a very sensible man:

Guardian: News in brief

Forget detox diets, says food standards chief

The Food Standards Agency's chief scientist has urged consumers to ditch detox diets and supplements. Drinking water, taking exercise and eating home-cooked food can all help tackle festive excess, Dr Andrew Wadge says on his FSA website blog. "There's a lot of nonsense talked about 'detoxing' and most people seem to forget that we are born with a built-in detox mechanism. It's called the liver. My advice would be to ditch the detox diets and supplements and buy yourself something nice with the money you've saved. Personally, I would recommend the new Neil Young and Steve Earle albums."

Mythinformation

London Review of Books: Gloomy/Cheerful

Norse myths are probably more familiar than classical ones in the modern world, perhaps even more familiar than the Old Testament stories Europeans were once brought up on.

I'm sorry, but that is just utter bollocks.

I say this as one who is probably more well-informed than your average member of the public when it comes to matters Norse. I don't claim to be an expert or anything, but I did used to (and, to some extend still do) have a big thing about so-called Dark Age history, I studied archaeology as one of my subjects at university, and I even took part in an archaeological dig at a supposed Viking settlement in Shetland. So I've picked up a thing or two in my time about Norse mythology.

But to claim that Norse myths might be more familiar than Old Testament ones is pure hogwash. Remember Adam and Eve and that bloody snake? Noah and his infeasible boat? Gideon and the walls of Jericho? Lot's wife? The bloke in the whale? That nutter who wanted to cut the kid in half? Samson and Delilah? David and Goliath? Sodom and Begorrah? The Queen of Sheba? Bathsheba in her bath. God saying to Abraham, 'Kill me a son!'? God being a total bastard to Job? Moses and all those 'Thou shalt not's? All that begetting? The Hittites and the Ammonites? The list goes on…

And on the Norse side of the equation? Ragnarok, Valhalla, the Valkyries, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday, and that's about it!

Like I said, utter bollocks! Why do otherwise intelligent people come out with nonsense like that?

Compare & Contrast

Back in October, Nite Owl commented on one of my posts that he likes to think of me as the Terry Wogan on the Internet. By this, I assumed he meant that I rely on my audience to provide the best content. Clever stuff if you can carry it off, but Terry is a real pro at that game, and I'm a rank amateur by comparison. But Nite Owl might have a point…

Reader-cum-lurker Jon Wright writes:

On my way home to Wallasey for Xmas when I chanced upon a confutation you may find amusing… or more likely depressing.

Good/Bad Year

Excellent stuff! Inconsistency in chesty models: now that's exactly the sort of thing Gruts is supposed to be all about! Thanks, Jon.

But hold on! There's more…

Coming soon: Stense's nurses' uniform photos. No bullshit: after literally years of pathetic entreaties and occasional attempts at blackmail by yours truly, she has finally sent me some! Watch this space!

Local news

Guardian: New plaque tells truth of Peterloo killings 188 years on

The uncomfortable truth about a defining moment in the history of democracy in Britain has finally been recorded—188 years after the event—on a red plaque fixed to a wall in the centre of Manchester.

The 1819 Peterloo massacre, which followed a rally where thousands had gathered at St Peter's Fields to demand that the new industrial cities should have the right to elect MPs, has for years been commemorated only by a blue plaque on the Free Trade Hall, now converted to a hotel.

But the plaque made no mention of those cut down and killed when the local volunteer yeomanry was ordered to charge and break up the meeting, whose principal speaker was the famed orator Henry Hunt…

Now Manchester city council has fixed a permanent red plaque to the wall and updated the death toll in line with the latest research. It reads: "On August 16 1819 a peaceful rally of 60,000 pro-democracy reformers, men, women and children, was attacked by armed cavalry resulting in 15 deaths and over 600 injuries."

The above story only managed to make page 10 of the [formerly Manchester] Guardian. A Google News search indicates that this was the only coverage the story received in the UK national press.

Meanwhile, in other news (from the Newspaper of Record):

Times: Small but classy

Tips to help a petite woman look good.

Goodness gracious! Great balls of fire?!

While Jen and I were watching the Doctor Who Christmas Special on Christmas Day, I couldn't help pointing out that the meteoroids currently bearing down on spaceship Titanic orbiting Planet Earth would not, in actual fact, be massive fireballs, as they were still in space. Meteoroids only start to burn after they enter a planet's atmosphere, when they are known as meteors. Any parts of them which survive the passage through the atmosphere and the subsequent collision with the planet are known as meteorites.

I also pointed out that magnetising a spaceship's hull seemed like an unlikely strategy to attract passing meteoroids: the magnetic field required to do this would need to be inconceivably immense, especially as we had already seen that the meteoroids' original trajectories came nowhere near the ship's.

Then it occurred to me that it was rather odd of me to complain about minor scientific inaccuracies like these, when I was quite happy to accept that our hero was a double-hearted Time Lord from Planet Gallifrey who regenerates every time he dies, and who travels the universe in a box which is bigger on the inside than on the outside. So I shut up.

If you can't suspend disbelief on Christmas Day of all days, when can you?

Top Secret Santa

"The ridiculous things I have to do for your daughter!" I complained to Carolyn's mum, showing her the text message Carolyn had sent me five minutes earlier:

Do you fancy bringing the mice with you? Secretly of course!

Carolyn's mum, being Carolyn's mum, is used to this sort of thing. She handed over the cage containing the three white mice that Carolyn's kids are getting for Christmas and wished me good luck.

How to smuggle a cage of mice into Carolyn's house without any of her extremely observant children noticing? Answer: Transfer them from the boot of my car to the boot of Carolyn's car, then go into Carolyn's house and create a distraction while Carolyn transfers the mice from the boot of her car into some hidey-hole inside the house. It worked like a dream.

So I can now add rodent smuggling to the lenghy list of ridiculous tasks Carolyn has set me over the years.

Merry Christmas!

Previous stories involving Carolyn and rodents:

20 not out

It's Christmas Eve. That must mean I went up Moel Famau again, right?

Well, yes. But I very nearly didn't make it this year. I made the mistake of going for a practice walk with Irish Mick and his mate Geoff the day before (photos here). It was a great walk, but it reignited an old Achilles' tendon injury which I had been under the mistaken impression was finally healed (no pun intended). As a result, today's ascent wasn't so much a walk as a hobble. In the pouring rain. On my own.

But I had to do it because this year was the big two-oh: twenty consecutive Christmas Eve ascents of Moel Famau.

As I've said before, it's the closest thing I have to regular exercise.

See also:

Maciej Dakowicz

Remember the name—even if you don't know how to pronounce it. He'll be very famous one day.

I came across Maciej Dakowicz's photographs on Flickr earlier this week, and was frankly stunned. His Cardiff at Night photoset is amazing. If this fantastic shot doesn't grace the cover of the next Arctic Monkeys album, there really is no justice in this world.

I am green with envy.

Curse those pesky Poles, coming over here with all their raw talent!

What in non-existant God's holy name is 'atheistic fundamentalism'?

BBC: 'Atheistic fundamentalism' fears

The Archbishop of Wales, Dr Barry Morgan, has described a rise in "fundamentalism" as one of the great problems facing the world.

He focused on what he described as "atheistic fundamentalism".

It seems to me you're either an atheist or you're not. It's not the sort of thing you can be by degrees. Atheists don't tend to get into arguments with each other about which gods they don't believe in, or about how their unbelief is better than anyone else's. There is only one rule as far as atheists are concerned: there are no gods. I suppose that's pretty fundamental, but I don't think it's quite what the archbishop has in mind.

The word fundamentalism usually means opposition to liberalism and secularism, and insisting in the unerring accuracy of scripture. That seems a very strange adjective to apply to atheism. We're in serious oxymoron territory here—with the emphasis on the moron.

However, the Archbishop of Wales is reported as saying that atheistic fundamentalism:

[advocates] that religion in general and Christianity in particular have no substance, and that some [atheists] view the faith as "superstitious nonsense".

Erm… Well… Yes and no.

Unless I'm very much mistaken, all atheists would advocate that religions in general—but not Christianity in particular—have no substance (if, by substance, we mean real, actual deities backing them up). And all atheists would, almost by definition, view any religious faith—not just Christian—as "superstitious nonsense".

It seems that, when the archbishop uses the phrase atheistic fundamentalism, what he actually means is atheism. But cop a load of these examples he cites of atheistic fundamentalism:

situations such as councils calling Christmas "Winterval", schools refusing to put on nativity plays and crosses removed from chapels

Those aren't examples of atheism (fundamental or otherwise); those are examples of urban mythical political correctness.

The archbishop is clearly a very confused and paranoid man.

See also: Motes and Planks

What in God's holy name is egg-nog?

That's a rhetorical question, by the way—I know exactly what egg-nog is.

The dirty bastards — The dirty, dirty bastards!

Nog is one of those stupid made-up words you only ever get to hear at Christmas, like swaddling, manger, figgy and myrrh.

Someone is definitely taking the piss.