🦆
No, it wasn't a goal. No, no, no, no, no.
As everyone knows, rule 27, sub-clause 14 of the Rules of Association Football clearly states:
Should the home team at Old Trafford concede the goal within the last 10 minutes of normal play to put them one goal behind, that goal shall be disallowed immediately.
The rules are perfectly clear, you see.
The following advice might be of some use if you are planning a surprise meal (namely Chick Pea Curry and Tuna Curry) for your partner:
Et voila!
This morning, I crept downstairs and discovered that Santa had left me a cliché for Christmas.
It was exactly what I'd been dreaming of.
Perfect.
Merry Christmas.
Today saw my seventeenth annual Christmas Eve ascent of Moel Famau in North Wales. This time, I was accompanied by my favourite scarlethead, the delightfully fragrant Stense.
Hitchin, if you're reading this, remember how back in 1986 I told you that I had seen a raven flying upside-down while grunting like a pig (the raven, that is)? Remember how you told me to stop being silly? Well, while I was on top of the hill this morning, I saw a couple more ravens doing exactly the same thing—and this time I had a witness. I hope you're not going to call Stense a liar too. That would make her a fragrant liar.
See also:
BBC: Contraceptive pill advert pulled
An advert for a contraceptive pill has been withdrawn after Catholics and other groups complained to the advertising watchdog. The poster for morning-after pill Levonelle One Step used the phrase "immaculate contraception"…The ASA upheld the complaints, including from the National Association of Catholic Families and the Catholic Truth Society, saying that the headline was "likely to cause serious or widespread offence".
I can't help feeling that these people seriously need to re-examine their sense of moral outrage. I mean, which is more offensive:
Bonkers, in both senses of the word.
See also: Letter to His Holiness the Pope (Julian Date)
Sir,
Putting aside the questionable reliability of IQ tests as a measure of intelligence ("Smoking is bad for your brain", New Scientist, 11-Dec-04), and ignoring the reverse cause-effect argument that less intelligent people are more likely to take up smoking in the first place (and less likely to give it up afterwards), has anyone considered the impact of a smoking-induced 1% loss in intelligence on the 64-year-olds in question? By my back-of-a-fag-packet calculation, I reckon this gives them the same mental age as young whippersnappers of 63 years and four months.
Don't forget the aluminium foil.
There's an interesting article by Charles Nicholl in the latest London Review of Books, entitled Sneezing, Yawning, Falling. It's about Leonardo da Vincis note books, and books bound together by other people from da Vinci's papers. Some wit at the LRB decided to dub the piece The Da Vinci Codices (geddit?).
The article finishes with a few jokes taken from da Vinci's note books. Here's one of them:
A woman was washing clothes, and her feet were very red with cold. A priest who was passing by was amazed by this, and asked her where the redness came from, to which the woman replied that it was caused by a fire underneath her. Then the priest took in hand that part of him which made him more priest than nun, and drawing near to her, asked her very politely if she would be kind enough to light up his candle.
This from the chap who gave us the Mona Lisa, the Last Supper, and (some would say) the helicopter.
There's hope for me yet.
This week's least surprising headline:
New Scientist: Magnetic bracelet pain relief probably placebo effect
…and this week's most surprising headline:
Guardian: Krankie hurt in fall from beanstalk
This is the Gruts website's 100th link to: The New Scientist website. I only know this nerdy fact because New Scientist have just revamped their website and, in the process, have moved all of their archive pages. So, suddenly, my 99 previous links were all broken.
That really was very naughty of them. So I went to their contact page and chastised them thuswise:
Aaaaagggghhhhh! You've moved all your pages! How irresponsible is that? Haven't you heard URLs are supposed to last forever? Now I'm going to have to work my way through all my own (permanent) web pages and correct (or more likely remove) every link to articles in New Scientist. Thanks a bunch! This really is extremely annoying.
...Oh yes, and while I'm at it, kill the popup windows, will you?
But I needn't have worried: WildEdit to the rescue!
WildEdit lets you search and replace text across multiple folders in the blink of an eye. It is, therefore, EXTREMELY DANGEROUS—but it works a treat. I bought it a few months back when upgrading WildEdit's sister product, the totally brilliant TextPad text editor (without which, this website would not exist).
If you do a lot of text editing in Windows, do yourself a favour and buy these two excellent tools.