Out of print

The entire print-run of the first edition of Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species sold out on its very first day. If you are lucky enough to own an original, it's worth an awful lot of money.

But imagine how much more valuable your original copy of On the Origin of Species would be if the print-run had been not of 1,250 books, but of just two? Priceless is the word you're looking for. Utterly priceless!

Which got me thinking. There's money to be made here, if one can lay one's hands on the entire print-run of a future classic book on the day that it first comes out.

But how? How does one purchase an entire print-run?

And then it dawned on me! You disintermediate and publish the book yourself:

The Little Book of Stense

Happy birthday, Stense! Look after your present: it's one of only two copies in existence.

(We'll both be able to retire on this, mark my words.)

The gloves are off

Gruts's ongoing war against Murdoch's media empire continues unabated. There can be only one winner. The gloves are off. Keeping hitting them while they're down, that's my motto.

On Tuesday, I phoned Sky TV:

Man from Sky: Hello. How can I help?
Me: Hello, I'd like to cancel my Sky subscription please.
Man from Sky: Which modules?
Me: All of them.
Man from Sky: Can I ask why you think you want to cancel your subscription?
Me: I think Rupert Murdoch is bugging my phone.
Man from Sky: [Stifles laugh.]
Me: That one's not on your script, is it?
Man from Sky: Erm… No.

(Always try to get them off script, that's the trick.)

Murdoch must be shitting his pants. Now, all we need to do is get every other Sky subscriber to follow my magnificent example.

Pass it on!

Math debate

Remember that video of the Miss USA contestants' trying to justify why evolution either should or should not be taught in schools? Well, now there's a rather wonderful piss-take parody:

God Bless America! (Even though they don't know how to spell Maths.)

Withering review

After ten years living a few miles over the moors from the place that supposedly inspired Wuthering Heights, I thought it was about time that I read it.

Virginia Woolf said:

It is as if Emily Brontë could tear up all that we know human beings by, and fill these unrecognizable transparencies with such a gust of life that they transcend reality.

Kate Bush said:

Sylvia Plath (buried just across the valley from here) said:

There is no life higher than the grasstops
Or the hearts of sheep, and the wind
Pours by like destiny, bending
Everything in one direction.
I can feel it trying
To funnel my heat away.
If I pay the roots of the heather
Too close attention, they will invite me
To whiten my bones among them.

I say:

Heathcliff: what a total arsehole!

Sizzler

Regular Gruts commenter Keith sent me this photo, which he took recently at the Sizzler restaurant on International Drive near Orlando, Florida:

Sizzler

Well spotted, Keith. My secret is out. There are many irons to my bow, and many strings in my fire. I have, indeed, opened a chain of restaurants in the United States

I particularly recommend the peppered steak.

A decade at Gruts Central

Ten years ago today, Jen and I picked up the keys to the house where we intend to live until the end of our days.

Thusfar, we're still on track.

If it's good enough for badgers…

Guardian: Cat parasite linked to brain cancer

An infectious parasite spread by cats may be a cause of brain cancer in humans, research suggests.

The single-celled organism Toxoplasma gondii infects about a third of the world's population. Often it causes no symptoms, but the parasite can be fatal to unborn babies and damage the nerve systems of people with weak immune systems.

The new study shows a positive correlation between rates of infection by T. gondii and brain cancer incidence around the world.

That's quite enough evidence for me.

Time for a cull!

Brain-fodder

It's official: I am a member of this great nation's Intelligentsia (with a capital 'I'). I have had a letter published in the London Review of Books (my butler doesn't read it):

Darwin's Flatulence

Steven Shapin writes that Darwin's uncontrollable retching and farting seriously limited his public life (LRB, 30 June). Some years ago, to my delight, I worked out that the great man's full name, Charles Robert Darwin, is an anagram of 'rectal winds abhorrer'. Unfortunately for my anagram, the meanings of words, like species, can evolve. On the rare occasions that Darwin mentioned his problems to friends, he always used the word 'flatulence'. Nowadays, we think of flatulence as being synonymous with farting, but in Darwin's day it meant (as it technically still does) an accumulation of gases in the alimentary canal. While I'm sure that Darwin must have vented his excess gas one way or the other, there's no reason to believe that his farts were uncontrollable.

Richard Carter
Hebden Bridge, West Yorkshire

And, if that were not proof enough of the enormousness of my intellectual magnitude, my letter has also been reproduced in full by that other British bastion of clotted nonsense brain-fodder, Hooting Yard.

[Note how I cleverly avoided the common mistake of using the word enormity to signify something very enormous in that last sentence. As a member of the Intelligentsia, I would never commit such a faux pas. If you'll pardon my French.]

See also: Previous intellectual Gruts pieces about farts »

Googie

Guardian: Googie Withers obituary

A striking presence on stage and in the great days of British film, she played the prison governor of TV's Within These Walls.

I suppose, from now on, she'll be referred to as Googie 'No Longer' Withers.