‮hjap‮

To: tycho@penny-arcade.com
From: [me]
Subject:Seasonal microbrews, brigand

Dear Jerry/Tycho

I've enjoyed reading PA for many years, but today's comic was a stroke of pure genius that struck a chord deep within my very soul.

I hereby unconditionally offer you my firstborn.

All the best,

pajh

~

They're my lungs [their title, not mine]

Sirs,

Sheila Duffy of ASH Scotland witters interminably about the already well-known dangers of smoking (Opinion, 23 September), with cherry-picked statistics about the cost of smoking to the NHS. She neglects to mention that tobacco tax revenue far outstrips this figure and provides plenty of extra money left over to pay for the generous government grants that make up her salary. [sources: http://tinyurl.com/lvbm37, http://tinyurl.com/m2z8pk]

The simple fact of the matter is this: at no time in the last fifty years has a rational human being in the western hemisphere, whether adult or child, ever read the Surgeon General's warning, smacked their forehead in despair and cried to the heavens that they should have been told before. We all know what smoking does to us and some of us still choose to do it, and the figures show clearly that we more than adequately cover the social costs of our choice. It is not within the Government's remit to tell us what we can do in the privacy of our own lungs, and is certainly not up to interfering busybodies like Sheila Duffy and ASH.

Fact is it's got precisely fuck-all to do with the dangers of smoking to the individual, and it's got even less to do with somebody please thinking of the chiiildrun. It's got everything to do with the fact that Sheila Duffy personally doesn't like the fact that some people smoke.

I am glad to live in a world in which Sheila Duffy doesn't get to tell me what to do.

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TRAPPED IN PEEBLES STOP SEND HELP STOP

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Random guy in queue in Scotmid: Thank you for the cookery.

I'm gonna live forever, I'm gonna learn how to fly.

This entry was originally posted at http://gominokouhai.dreamwidth.org/191856.html. Please comment there using OpenID.

Jason Rust, Scottish Conservative Candidate for Edinburgh South West, has sent me a nice letter indicating that he looks forward to working with me in the future. Bear in mind that the elections haven't happened yet. Say what you like about the Tories, but they're not backward about coming forward.

The letter includes a nice headshot of Jason Rust MP. Tell me: have these two men ever been seen together?

I know you're going to dig this.

Happy time_t = 1234567890, everybody!

Where's my flying car?

The Hotel usually closes for three days over Giftmas. This year we've got nobody staying on the day either side, so I'm getting a longer break than usual.

I've got very little to do, so I'm sitting here with a Festive Irn-Bru waiting for my shift to end. Then I can have five days off, and get some laundry done. I love the fact that other people's holidays mean that I get time off.

ION, a very pleasant evening was had at verdandiweaves' and draugluin's on Friday for the now-traditional reading of A Christmas Carol. I made mince pies and they apparently tasted like mince pies are supposed to taste. Then, on Saturday, the entirely non-traditional pub evening with fire_sermon, mindwanders, cairmen and xenophanean.

Exhausting. I think that's my sociability quota for the next year or so.

Hello to new readers that I've picked up during my sudden, and inevitably all-too-brief, period of Internet Fame. Hello to regular readers, too, while I'm at it. Hello, regular readers! We know each other already, sometimes even in person, and that's fantastic!

Regular readers will know that I’m a big Doctor Who fan. New readers should probably learn that, pretty damn quickly. Inspired by Emo-Doctor’s amusing whingeing in this comic (and partly by the Tam of Rassilon), I wondered today: what would Time Lords eat at a Time Lord pizza party?

This is the kind of philosophical quandary that plagues me on a frequent basis. I’m deep like that.

Behold: the Pizza of Rassilon.



More information, more glorious deathless pin-sharp prose, and more pictures, at the Kamikaze Cookery site. Those of you who are on Who fora, do feel free to link, blog, whatever. Go ahead.

I feel like I've crossed a nerd threshold of some kind.

It's a brand new day, and the sun is high. (I presume—this is Scotland, and I can't see it.)

The leader of the free world seems to be a reasonable chap, for the first time in years. And I have a nephew. 12.05am this morning, so he started annoying his mother at a very young age, and 8lb 2oz, which for the benefit of future generations is 3.69kg.

I plan to be a responsible uncle. What's an appropriate age for his first drum kit?

Right. I have had it with these motherfuckin' asterisks in this motherfuckin' textual medium.

If you're going to say fuck, then for fuck's sake, say fuck. Anything less, and you merely demonstrate that you lack the courage of your convictions.

It's like anything else. Either reword the sentence so that you don't have to say fuck, or, if you want to, just say fuck. This applies for other similar words, too.

Less pathetic bowdlerization of language. More saying fuck when the word fuck is required.

For those who haven't seen it yet: The Last I'm Sorry I Haven't A Clue Of All

(...or is it?)

(With thanks to figg, as often.)

The Large Hadron Collider will generate a tiny black hole tomorrow, and the entire Earth will be consumed and spat out into an alternate universe. The entire process will take less than Planck time and will be undetectable even by specialized instruments.

The new universe in which we find ourselves will be subtly different from the old one. I predict that it will be one in which everyone claims that their fear of the LHC was, in fact, merely ironic, and the media quickly forgets about it and moves on to the end of the Mayan calendar in 2012.

Tomorrow, if anyone's science officer suddenly gets a beard and starts killing people, please let me know.

If her profile is to be believed, this woman is 25 years old.

I weep for the state of education in Penicuik.

(WARNING: mosts of the following post will be composed of cheap digs at the Scotsman's abysmal science coverage. Since this is not exactly news to many of you, feel free to skip. Otherwise, feel free to immerse yourself in the deathless wit of my pin-sharp prose. 'Cos it's, like, pin-sharp.)

( Pin-sharp deathless prose follows )

Several members of my friends list may be interested in Five reasons not to visit the Edinburgh Festival. Specifically, many of you may be all too familiar with reason #5.

--
[0] Because I can. Also, because the Scotsman doesn't seem to have any qualms about doing the exact same thing to Guido's blog on the exact same page.

Somebody has left a pamphlet in the office about the evils of caffeine. I'm very glad they did. It reminded me that I have a cup of tea brewing. Mmm, tea.

~

Today's constitutional crisis, threatening to rock the very foundations of the Scottish establishment^[0], is that Our Eck reckons that the Stone of Scone is a fake. I'm not sure what constitutes fake when we're talking about rocks. Is it secretly made of plastic? Is it just rock veneer on a cardboard facsimile? Is it somehow less rocklike that we've been led to believe?

I've alway thought it was a pretty stupid national symbol in any case. Down south, they have the Crown Jewels in all their resplendent finery. Up here we have a chunk of rock, and we're proud of it.

Mind you, Edward I the Scots-Hammer went to the trouble, in 1296, to raise an army and come all the way up here in order to steal the same said chunk of rock. Who's looking foolish now?

And theories persist that instead of the historic throne of Scottish kings, he was given a toilet seat instead. Who's looking foolish now? I've often wondered how that would have worked. Let's imagine it together, in Braveheart-style glorious Technicolor™-o-vision:

( Lights! Camera! Irish Army Reservists! Action! )

From the article, Professor Ted Cowan says: How credible is it that you can just make a replica of something like that in five minutes because Edward I of England is coming to steal the real one? Actually, it's really very credible indeed. It's a rock. You can find them just lying around.

The Professor, we're told, is one of Scotland's most senior historians. And yet he doesn't seem to know the scarcity value of rocks. I think Edinburgh isn't what it used to be.

--
[0] Pun not intended, I swear.

More impressive even than the Firefox crop circle, reports are flooding in of the discovery of the snappily-monickered G1.9+0.3: an eighty trillion-mile-wide Firefox logo at the centre of the Galaxy.

God Himself uses Firefox. You can, too.

(Phil Plait, as always, has the scoop on the techie stuff.)

Someone on a `reality' TV show: I think Edinburgh isn't what it used to be.
The University of Edinburgh: Waaaah!
The Scotsman: Waaaah!
The blogosphere: Waaaah!

Nobody seems to have mentioned the fact that, possibly, it wasn't the responsibility of the Classics Department to teach this guy comparative religion. Particularly of his own religion. That stuff is really supposed to be covered in pre-tertiary education.

And of course, this same maligned institution is the one that deliberately, and with malicious intent, sent me crazy and ruined my life. About this, as I recall, there was not a whisper in the press.

~

Potatoes fight back! Alex, is this your doing? We will fight for tuberous freedom?

Today I was introduced to my new co-presenter on Kamikaze Cookery: Bunty, the Friesian cow.

I've worked with cows before, but that was back at school when I was Theseus to a particularly intransigent Hippolyta. I hear she's engaged now: I pity the guy, whoever he is. This, however, was an actual cow made of beef, and with udders and whatnot.

Fortunately, the fact that Bunty was female and a few years old meant that I didn't have to wrestle with terms like Buttercup is an individual unit of cattle or cattlebeast (but at least there actually is a non-gender-specific term). She was one of my more friendly and forgiving co-stars, but she did have something of a tendency to wander out of shot at inappropriate moments.

By about take four I was sounding impressively knowledgeable about where beef comes from and what you do with it, ably assisted from off-camera by Donna, who's been raising beef cattle since she was a wee slip of a lass and knows a hell of a lot more than I was able to get from Wikipedia. I'm not entirely sure Bunty knew what I was talking about, but she did have a tendency to swish her tail around with more obvious irritation whenever I was pointing out which bits on her were the most tasty.

And then there was the Clarkson Take, because there has to be.

I r srs documentary filmmaker. No, really.

I trust verdandiweaves is happy now that my position on vegetarianism has been made clear. In the pages of a national newspaper, no less.

I really wasn't expecting them to print this one, since it consists of a cheap joke and a vaguely jingoistic anti-French sentiment, but then, that's the Scotsman for you.

Su Taylor (Letters, 15 April) attempts to assert ownership of the term "vegetarian" on behalf of the Vegetarian Society. Sadly, language doesn't work that way, and there are several types of vegetarians that fall outside the society's narrow, 150-year-old definition.

To name but a few: there are lacto-vegetarians, who allow themselves milk; lacto-ovo-vegetarians, who have milk and eggs; baco-vegetarians, who eat bacon; felino-vegetarians, who are vegetarians except for kebabs on drunken Saturday nights; and the French, who make an exception for foie gras.

Unfortunately, there still seems to be no word for "sensible people who eat meat because it's tasty", but, then, there are so few of us left.

PAUL A J HAMILTON
Viewforth
Edinburgh

PS: figg, I stole your joke, then disguised it by going pretentious and Latin. Hope that's okay.

Hang on a minute, they edited me! The bastards! I said drunken kebabs on Saturday nights and they... actually improved it immeasurably. It makes a lot more sense that way around. Oh. Okay. Thanks, Scotsman editor-type people.

I forgot to put in the bit about Sue Taylor, who is so weak due to a lack of B-vitamins that she lacks the strength to press down the E key at the end of her first name, but that would perhaps have been a little cruel.

~

Stepping out of the Hotel yesterday in the cloak and the hat, I walked into an unexpectedly dramatic gust of wind. A child of five or six, who happened to be passing at the foot of the steps, dropped his jaw to the floor and declared: Who's that?!

His father gathered him close and bustled him away, beginning Ah, well. Who can say?...

I managed to restrain the maniacal laughter until I was about half a block away.

It's not quite as good as Who was that masked man?, but it's a shade better than Who was that masked halfwit?, so I'm going to consider this a success.

The Diet, she is over. After midnight last night I ate a pint of ice cream in under twenty minutes. This morning I had three mocha lattes, just because I could, and this afternoon I am relearning old lessons about overconsumption and the consequences thereof.

21st-century modern conveniences are available to me once again. After shooting at the Farmer's Market today, we went into a coffee shop, sat down and reviewed the footage. I was like a country yokel on his first trip to the big city, gawping wide-eyed at the pretty lights.

xenophanean's post here pretty much sums up my reaction to the Diet. But I'd like to add a few points:

1. It's impractical if you live in a city, or have a job, or don't own a car.
2. It's expensive.
3. It lacks seasonings, spices, and flavourings.
4. It lacks fibre, necessary fats, calcium, and nutrients necessary for moral stability.
5. It probably doesn't actually help save the planet at all.

On the other hand it's taught me a lot about how to be inventive with limited (and often bland) ingredients, how to avoid wastage, and the origins of our dinner. And I'm eating vegetables now, which is probably a good thing.

More details will be available in the episode, coming soon to an Internet near you.

Some of the Hotel guests have given me two slices of artichoke, olive and jalapeno pizza. And I've been nabbing the bar snacks, which have paprika on them. Dis is livin', I tell you. Aaapril in Pareee....