Gruts

Guardian: Odds on that God exists, says scientist (08-Mar-04)
A scientist has calculated that there is a 67% chance that God exists.

Unfortunately, I have calculated that there is a 100% chance that this so-called scientist is wrong.

Let's face it, either God exists or God doesn't exist. In other words, there is either a 100% chance or a 0% chance that God exists—and there's nothing that this scientist or anyone else can do to say which is right.

Mind you, I know which one I think satisfies Occam's Razor.

BBC: China ends Great Wall space myth (12-Mar-04)
China is changing official thinking about a common misconception relating to its best-known ancient site. For decades, elementary schoolbooks have maintained that the Great Wall of China could be seen from space - but now the books are being rewritten. The Wall, China now admits, cannot in fact be seen from the heavens - a fact proved by China's own astronaut Yang Liwei, who became the country's first person in space last year.

…Which is pretty odd, because, when I was on the Great Wall of China, I could definitely see space.

Pseud: Andrew O'Hagan (LRB: 04-Mar-04):

… D.J. Enright offered a nicely disgruntled definition of postmodernism in Injury Time, his posthumously published memoir: 'All it suggests,' he writes, 'if that isn't putting it too strongly, is that something comes after something else - as indeed most things do.' What Morrissey does as a lyric-writer and a singer is to make this coming-after a matter of homage and nostalgia, as well as a matter of self-revelation, for him and then for his audience.

Dude: Thomas Jones (LRB: 04-Mar-04):

I never was a boy scout. Not because I had anything against camping, making fires, tying knots, reading maps, climbing trees, playing at soldiers or pretending to be a spy, but because the idea of doing all those things in uniform, under the supervision of a middle-aged man in short trousers, threatened to take the fun out of them.

BBC: US showers praise on Saakashvili
US President George Bush has given a strong boost to the new president of Georgia by praising his drive to expand democracy and fight corruption. "I'm impressed by this leader, I'm impressed by his vision, I'm impressed by his courage," he said after meeting Mikhail Saakashvili in Washington… Mr Saakashvili, a 36-year-old US-educated lawyer, asked for more US help to achieve these aims.

Jumping Jesus! Do you realise what this means? I am older than the President of Georgia!

Have you any idea just how decrepit and inadequate that makes me feel?

(Mind you, Georgia is quite a small country.)

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Note: For more on Georgian politics, see the surprisingly interesting After the Revolution in the latest edition of the London Review of Books.

BBC: Young Turkmen face beard ban
Turkmenistan President Saparmurat Niyazov has passed a decree forbidding young men in the country to wear long hair or beards. The president said the Education Ministry should be in charge of checking people's hair as the issue was most pressing among the young.

Where Bill Gates, Walt Disney, Ronald McDonald, Adolf Hitler, and Maggie Thatcher lead, Saparmurat Niyazov follows.

BBC: Pint and prayer at the local pub
A pint, a sandwich and a cut and blow dry should all be on offer to help the local pub survive, according to a new guide. How To Save Your Local Pub, launched by the Prince of Wales on Wednesday, gives examples of how to keep this focus of village life going.

I'm all for finding new ways to help keep country pubs going, but this guide goes too far: pubs are not churches, they are not pharmacies, they are not dry cleaners nor hairdressers. But above all, pubs are not supposed to be bloody creches—despite the growing trend of selfish parents to treat them as such.

Read my lips… Pubs are places for the consumption of alcohol by grown-ups. Keep your bloody brats out!

At last someone tells it like it is:

BBC: Bid to save sparrows launched
Bird-lovers are being urged to help save the house sparrow, whose numbers have suffered a mysterious decline. The government minister leading the campaign to boost the sparrow population has blamed their disappearance on "trendy gardens" and an explosion in the number of pet cats.

Cat populations are being sustained at unnaturally high levels by selfish people who think Tiddles can do no harm.

String them up is what I say (the cats or their owners, I really don't mind which).

BBC: Women slate rivals to win a mate
Researchers at York University in Toronto, Canada, say women are prone to be at their cattiest when they are at their most fertile.

You mean they could actually tell the difference?

Observer: Evolution of radar points to HMS Beagle's resting place
One of the world's most enduring naval mysteries - the fate of HMS Beagle, the ship that carried Charles Darwin round the world and led him to develop his theory of natural selection - may finally have been solved. Advanced ground-penetrating radar could have located the ship, which disappeared more than a century ago, near Potton Island in Essex. The discovery has been made by one of the world's leading marine archaeologists, Robert Prescott of St Andrews University. 'I am quietly confident we have found the Beagle,' he said.