And, behold, that star that they had seen in the East went before them, until it came just above where the child was.
When they saw the star they were exceedingly overjoyed.
And they entered the house and saw the child with his mother Mary, and they fell down, worshipped him and opened their treasures and offered him gifts, gold and myrrh and…
18 not out
If it's Christmas Eve, it must be time for my annual ascent of Moel Famau. That makes it 18 years on the trot.
This year, I had six first-time companions: Carolyn, her partner Howard, their three sprogs, and their dog, Daisy. The weather was unseasonally clement, but extremely moist.
The last time I went up Moel Famau with Carolyn was in November 1991. We gabbed so much that we climbed over the wrong stile near the summit on our way down and got hopelessly lost in the woods. We were lost for hours, and didn't manage to get back to the car until well after nightfall.
So, of course, we told Carolyn's children the story of the time we got lost, and they thought it was really cool. So, of course, we then had to pretend that we had somehow got ourselves hopelessly lost again today. I think her son was quite taken with my suggestion that we might have to build a shelter and spend the night on the hill (although he wrinkled up his nose when I said we might have to eat Daisy).
But, when I pointed out that it was Christmas Eve, and Father Christmas wouldn't know where to deliver his presents if he was camped out in the woods, he decided that maybe it would be a good idea if we found the cars after all. Which we eventually did.
See also:
Berks and hare-brains
And the winner of the December 2005 bizarrest headline of the month award goes to:
Although a special commendation for humorous effort goes to:
Stiff upper crust
Regular email correspondent and fellow Charles Darwin groupie, the normally perceptive Peter McGrath, couldn't be more wrong:
The best thing she did was die, and as she expired wetly (literally and dramatically) I found myself cheering and shouting at the screen for someone to bury her fast and cheap… [S]he was the only fly in an otherwise wonderful ointment. Her work permit should be revoked immediately and she sent back to make more trash TV for gullible American youth to quote in their essays.
The she in question is none other than Agent Dana Scully from out of the BBC's magnificent new adaptation of Bleak House, which finished last week.
Peter and I are otherwise in total agreement as to the general wonderfulness of the series, and, in particular, the acting ability of Agent Scully's bastard daughter (born out of Dedlock), the alliteratively named Anna Maxwell Martin. But in describing Agent Scully's acting technique as running the whole range of emotions from A to… well… A minus, Peter misses the point: Agent Scully's character is supposed to be a stiff-upper-lip, not-in-front-of-the-middle-classes, show-no-emotion, poker-up-her-backside (oo-er, missus!), Victorian aristo. She has no friends, nobody to confide in, and knows that she will be ruined when—as surely it must be—her dark secret is revealed. In an attempt to avoid scandal, she becomes detatched, and bottles up her emotions until A and A minus are all that are left for her to work with. A uniquely British solution, if I might say so, and one not entirely dissimilar to the scandal-avoiding tactics successfully employed for over 20 years by a certain Charles Robert Darwin, who was, quite frankly, terrified of the public reaction, were he ever to publish his (r)evolutionary theory on the secret of life.
But, when Agent Scully's secret was eventually revealed in a slightly-too-pacey climax, her aloof, detatched persona immediately crumbled, and she finally got the chance to act her socks off by going TOTALLY MENTAL. I'm not kidding, she looked for all the world like one of those demented, paranormal creatures we are so used to seeing her chasing late at night through atmospherically lit, North American pine forests.
"Look at her eyes, she's totally lost it now," I observed to an equally spellbound Jen, as the distraught Agent Scully looked about to bite the working-class girl who was trying to help her. And then, the next thing we knew, she was dead—killed by some unspecified, melodramatic, Dickensian ailment. I suspect she had simply lost the will to live (whatever the hell that means), the poor, tragic creature. And in the rain as well: the indignity of it all.
Agent Scully, if you're reading this, please ignore Peter so-called McGrath: you can do both totally repressed and TOTALLY MENTAL extremely well. In my book, that's a full A to Z of emotions. I confidently predict a BAFTA nomination for you—although I expect the award will go to your talented daughter.
Postscript: See also Vindicated!
Sweet memories
Hands up who remembers sweet cigarettes. For those of you who don't, the name is a bit of a give-away: sweet cigarettes were sweets which resembled cigarettes. They tasted rather nice, but were a total bugger to light.
Anyway, it has only just occurred to me what sweet cigarettes actually tasted of: they tasted of over-ripe bananas. I made this discovery last week, while I was eating an over-ripe banana. It took me ages to retrieve the vaguely familiar taste from the dark recesses of my memory: sweet cigarettes, mmmm!
The Powers That Be banned sweet cigarettes decades ago—apparently, they might encourage children to smoke (in exactly the same way that toy guns and computer games might turn them into homicidal maniacs). Well, I have eaten quite a few sweet cigarettes in my time, and I never took up smoking.
Mind you, I am on twenty over-ripe bananas a day.
Result
BBC: 'Intelligent design' teaching ban
A court in the US has ruled against the teaching of the theory of "intelligent design" alongside Darwinian evolution…
Judge Jones said he had determined that ID was not science and "cannot uncouple itself from its creationist, and thus religious, antecedents".
A judicial and judicious judgement.
Jab
On Wednesday night, I dreamt that a female colleague of mine had become my dentist. As she tried to inject my gums with anaesthetic, I fought her off with words to the effect of, "Get Off! You don't know anything about dentistry!"
Yesterday, I bumped into the same colleague and told her about my dream. It freaked her out a bit. Not, as you might suppose, because some weird bloke she hardly knows was having dreams about her, but because, for many years, it turns out, she was absolutely fascinated by dentistry and wanted to be a dentist.
Coincidence? I think so.
Abstraction
This is stupid in so many ways:
BBC: Ramp creates power as cars pass
A road ramp that uses passing cars to generate power has been developed.
Dorset inventor Peter Hughes' Electro-Kinetic Road Ramp creates around 10kW of power each time a car drives over its metal plates.
More than 200 local authorities had expressed an interest in ordering the £25,000 ramps to power their traffic lights and road signs, Mr Hughes said.
In other words, these people want to steal your petrol:
These ramps work by converting some of your car's kinetic energy into electrical energy. In other words, they slow down your car to make electricity. You will then have to put your foot down for a few seconds to restore your car to its former speed, wasting petrol in the process. And that's not to mention the wear and tear on your car as it goes over these unnecessary humps.
This is an extremely inefficient and environmentally hostile way of powering traffic lights, but your local authority will love it, because it will cut down on its electricity bills, and because it is anti-car. It's even more anti-bike.
The electro-kinetic road ramp website claims that it generates free electrical energy. Another way to achieve this is to bypass your electricity meter and power your house directly from the National Grid. This is known as abstracting electricity, which is a criminal offence under section 13 of the 1968 Theft Act, and is punishable by up to five years' imprisonment and/or fines of up to £5,000. In what way are these stupid ramps any different? They are stealing somebody else's energy.
Time to write to the Ladyman.
Animal attraction
Seed Magazine: Girls Gone Wild… for Monkeys
Pornography studios might do well to take a tip from the Discovery Channel. According to a recent study, women are aroused by watching monkey sex.
The dirty bastards!
(But nowhere near as dirty as the so-called scientists who dream up these studies.)
See also:
Boom, boom: out go the lights
Someone up there doesn't like me (the feeling's mutual): what are the odds, do you reckon, of both of a car's headlamp bulbs blowing independently in the course of the same nine-mile journey? And no, it wasn't due to an electrical fault: the lamps in question are on separate circuits, with separate fuses.
Thank goodness for fog-lights.