Gruts

According to a passing visitor, gruts is Kiwi slang for underpants. Cool.

Conversation with Carolyn while removing a splinter from her finger with a tiny pair of tweezers:

BBC: Duck cull ruffles feathers
The [UK] government is planning a nationwide cull of ruddy ducks to protect another species from extinction.

Forget the ruddy ducks, when are we going to cull some ruddy cats?

BBC: 'Secret of Life' Discovery Turns 50
Fifty years ago, on 28 February 1953, Francis Crick walked into the Eagle pub in Cambridge, UK, and announced something for which he would later share a Nobel Prize. "We have found the secret of life," his collaborator and subsequent fellow Nobel laureate James Watson later quoted him as saying.

When I was at university, one of my archaeology tutors confessed to being completely in awe of 'you scientists'. He explained how he had been at Cambridge in 1953, and often used to hear Crick and Watson talking in the pub about something called DNA. He said he hadn't been able to understand a word they were saying.

In celebration of this very significant anniversary, I should like to take this opportunity to publish a poem I composed in a different public house several years ago. (Fitz reckons he wrote it, but, as usual, he's wrong.)

Deoxyribonucleic acid
Cannot be passed on if your penis is flaccid.

I thank you.

New entry on my list of items I would like to see consigned to Room 101: Having your clutch cable snap on a motorway approach-road roundabout.

The entrance to the Liverpool Tate Gallery has twin revolving doors, one marked IN, the other marked OUT. Doesn't that kind of defeat the whole point of having revolving doors in the first place?

One drawback of running a Charles Darwin website is that you occasionally get pestered by religious loonies. Such a problem did it become at one stage that I went so far as to publish a polite note on the site, explaining why I won't be wasting any more of my time crossing swords with them - but still they keep writing. Here's the start of the latest offering, which is nuttier than a tit feeder:

This discovery has been published in the "Turkish Daily News" and in 18 others publications, including "Shekulli", the most important daily of Albania. The authorities are reluctant to its publication, but I hope that your editorial staff will be not afraid of it and that your news agency is independent.

Of the Truth of Paradise and the Flood: Of the End of Christianity

Replace the legend of the flood with the perspective of a Deucalion, a Pyrrha, a Noah that is a fetus and not yet adult, and everything is illuminated: The diluvial waters are the memory in the fetus of the flow of the uterine water which precedes all birth 'I will make disappear all life on earth': The flow of uterine waters from the mother's womb constitutes a cataclysmic change for the fetus: Its entire universe disappears. The fetus has no other choice but to advance. He has to be born or die According to Christian theology, which is to say according to the explanation of the world by the Christians, man was created as an immortal in the beginning. He lost this dignity by a fault of the first man, Adam, against God.

So there you have it.