‮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.

This entry was originally posted at http://gominokouhai.dreamwidth.org/193517.html. Please comment there using OpenID.

The EHRC has requested that the BNP comply with the Race Relations Act. Well, I'm glad that's all been sorted out. What would we do without the EHRC to defeat fascism for us?

~

Following this moderately amusing exchange in recent Scotsman letters pages—which, for once, I had nothing to do with—comes the story of Larry W. Peterman, acquitted on pornography charges because of the records of what everyone else in the community was watching at the time. Further information in the New York Times. I love it when stuff like this happens: there are fewer dirty secrets, and the secrets that are left don't stay dirty when we know that everyone has a handful of harmless ones. The unbounded accessibility of information makes us all a bit more equal.

Related: via miss_s_b's random squeezings comes tyrell's insightful post: There is no more plausible deniability in the world. It's harrowing to hear of Neda Soltani's death, but the ray of hope is this: it can't be long before despots realise that they can't get away with this shit any more. If the state-sponsored murder of an Iranian woman doesn't hit your personal buttons, then remember Ian Tomlinson. That which affects Iran affects us all.

They've got guns and sticks, but we've got the Internet. The panopticon works both ways.

Next: find some way to empower the dissemination of information on tyranny such that that it will actually stop tyrants doing it.

~

I'm going to the Actor Expo tradeshow on Saturday. I'm not entirely sure what one's supposed to do there, but I've signed up for a couple of seminars, including How to make it big in Hollywood, from which I'm hoping that some generalized non-Hollywood-specific information can be extrapolated. If it turns out to be an hour on how to get a US visa I'm going to be disappointed.

Typically, neither my headshots nor my business cards are likely to be ready until after the expo. Oh well.

This entry was originally posted at http://gominokouhai.dreamwidth.org/191632.html. Please comment there using OpenID.

It's snowed a bit today. Naturally the South-East has ground to a halt, the newspapers are panicking in an apocalyptic frenzy, and Sainsburys is full of people stocking up on cans and bottled water. I expect the looting to start any minute now. Hordes of bondage-gear-clad barbarians will be clubbing each other over the head to get to the last packet of organic rocket. All because it's a bit nippy today.

I came to work in my boots and changed into my shoes once I got here. That was the total inconvenience suffered today. Other than that, the world is all pretty and white.

Jesus Christ, people, put on a jacket or something. Or you could move to the south of France, where you'll never have to worry about winter weather occurring during winter, and I won't have to listen to you.

In other news: I aten't dead. How are folks?

The entire blogosphere has erupted into a frenzy of adoration for Stanislav Petrov, who stopped the nukes form flying twenty-five years ago. Had he not done as he did, I would have grown up in a post-apocalyptic wasteland, eventually growing to become the leader of a mighty tribe. As it is, Western civilization was preserved, so what I get to do instead is sit around and make blog posts that nobody reads.

Oh well. Petrov never got any credit for saving the planet. I suppose I should learn when to cut my losses.

The Royal Society of Edinburgh recently released a report damning VisitScotland and calling for it to be scrapped. Or so the Scotsman tells me. Actually, the RSE's press release says nothing of the kind: it barely mentions VisitScotland at all, and merely recommends that they (for a suitably nebulous they) radically reform the support structures for tourism. I haven't read the report: perhaps the report has stronger language. Perhaps the Scotsman is just being sensationalist again.

It's true that VisitScotland are, often, a bunch of incompetent morons who seem to have difficulty in the important business field of arse/elbow distinction. I'm wildly in favour of sweeping reforms, or, on bad days, the tactical nuking of Livingston; nonetheless I think scrapped is a bit strong. First of all they need to decide whether or not they're working with, or against, the accommodation providers, and then I think we can work upwards from there.

However, the knives are out now. Apparently (so the Scotsman tells me) VisitScotland had to change their information on rail travel, because FirstScotrail complained that they were being OMGMEEEAN to them. This is ironic, because the bandwagon that FirstScotrail are jumping on is just about the only movement-related thing that's happening to wagons of any kind at the moment.

Laying aside for a moment the astounding fact that VisitScotland actually got something right for once—namely, that the state of the railways is woeful and unless you're travelling between Edinburgh and Glasgow you'd better get a car, and if you are travelling between Edinburgh and Glasgow it would be faster to walk—this presents me with a moral dilemma. I loathe both organizations, and now they're fighting, so which do I root for?

I have to come down on the side of VisitScotland, because, while it is bungling, inept, and sometimes belligerent, there have been occasions when they've sent us a guest and nothing has gone catastrophically wrong. With FirstScotrail, on the other hand, I've learned to take a massive dose of opiate-based painkillers before even setting foot in the station. There has been one single occasion that I can recall in the last eight years when I've got on a train and not wanted to kill everyone before it starts to move. (Notable example here, and there are many others that languish unblogged because they are too painful to recall.)

Besides, in this case VisitScotland were being entirely accurate and honest, and they were reporting unbiased facts that tourists should know. This is their job, and I wish they'd do it more often. They didn't describe the rail network as skeletal, they said that it was at its most skeletal in the Highlands [emphasis mine, exactitude-fans]—that's a comparative, and to my knowledge it's not libellous or legally actionable in any way. They also apparently had a picture of a sign that said Beware of the trains. This is good advice. Even if the rail network was marvellous, if you get hit by a train it's really going to put a crimp in your day. This is the sort of thing that, in my experience, a lot of tourists need to be told.

I see what's going on here. Not only is it open season on VisitScotland, but one of the most notable complaints in the RSE report (so the Scotsman tells me) is that VisitScotland focuses too much on the central areas, as opposed to the outlying ones that need support. The tourism industry in those areas is struggling for a number of reasons, but key to them is not that VisitScotland has abandoned them, it's that tourists can't bloody get to them in the first place. This is, of course, the fault of FirstScotrail, not VisitScotland^[0], and as a result FirstScotrail has noted that the best defence is a good offence, and that, conveniently, that VisitScotland is now fair game.

Actually, no, there's no moral dilemma here for me at all. I am still on the side of Right as always. Both of you are cretins and should learn to do your jobs. You, provide public transport to places that people want to go; and you, provide information for tourists. It shouldn't be that hard. It's what you're paid to do.

If that's too difficult for you, could you try not to be complete bastards while you're at it? That would be nice, thanks.

~

Holy damn, there were a lot of StudlyCaps in this post. Do businesses think that extra capital letters give them an extra competitive edge?

It doesn't. Even if Scotland's rail network is a bit dodgy is a controversial statement, this isn't: BiCapitalization makes you look like a wanker. This is Truth.

Apparently it's Scottish Food Fortnight. Nobody told me this, but I live in Scotland and I eat food, so every fortnight is Scottish Food Fortnight as far as I'm concerned. The BBC is putting some journalists on a week-long local diet to celebrate, and apparently the Scottish Government is doing likewise.

Regular readers may recall that I've attempted something similar to this before. And now the Scottish Government is copying me. The very concept of our legislators on a week-long blood-sugar crash fills me with dread. I suppose it's just lucky we don't have the power to declare war.

(The nice journalist informs me that it's not a very strict local diet, intended more as a showcase of excellent Scottish produce. That's all right then.)

Here's the journalists' first day, and here, for comparison, is mine.

With any luck, and focus-group permitting, Kamikaze Cookery should be out in about a month. I would just like to make sure everyone is aware that, despite the BBC's vast resources, we did it first.

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.

(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.

Remember that ridiculous three-strikes-and-you're-out legislation to ban filesharers from the internet? All you'd have to do is be accused, not convicted, of filesharing three times, and then your ISP would be compelled to cut you off. The EU sensibly voted against it.

Now they're trying to sneak the same legislation into an otherwise dull, sensible and bulky Telecoms Package.

This doesn't just affect filesharers: it means that your ISP is forced to monitor your connection at all times, and if somebody else uses your wi-fi or your kids use your connection wile you're not watching, you can be cut off without ever knowing what you did wrong.

And the bill is going through on a Monday—this Monday—while all the MEPs are preparing for summer break and have better things to do than meticulously pore over dull telecoms legislation to look for the creepy shit hidden within.

You know the drill by now. Write to your MEP, because your MEP works for you, and make this stop.

cairmen has an excellent form letter here, and there's another one on BoingBoing here.

Coming soon: machinima activism.

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?

Sunday Times columnist Rachel Johnson doesn't get blogging:

I don’t get blogging. It’s not only that I’m reluctant to write for nothing. There are all those people who ask, Do you blog? at parties (our own sad neutered version of the Do you swing? question), and who warble about wikis and web presence. Still, a few weeks ago I started to write one. It’s very easy - even a middle-aged woman can do it. I wrote about what I was making for supper that night. And food shopping in the Portobello market. Then I checked to see the global response to my debut. Nothing. On my next five posts? Zero comments.

I shall refrain from making any obvious comment, because that would be cheap of me, and after all I am writing for nothing here. It's important for we poor slovenly non-professionals to maintain some dignity.^[0]

Nonetheless, this leads me neatly on to something I actually wanted to talk about.

Saturday was the first Farmers' market since the Fife Diet week that I've had any money (the Fife Diet is expensive). stormsearch and I picked up a cheap gigot roast and a couple of packets of 40p bacon offcuts, and a bunch of organic vegetables. None of it was from Fife. As far as I know it was all from East Lothian, which actually has food in it.

It was a huge relief just to be able to go to stalls and not have to say are you from Fife?, but instead to simply look at produce and pick what I wanted to eat. Everything was still organic, locally-sourced and from small producers, but without any ridiculous artificial restrictions.

Likewise, whenI got into the kitchen it was a huge relief to be able to use stock cubes. I made a random soup with potato and parsnip, and I could add extra stuff like smoked garlic and nutmeg. The result was bloody marvellous, hearty and warming with texture and flavour. Hello, taste buds! Long time no see. You've had a nice holiday, now let's get you back to work.

~

stormsearch and I have been talking about getting a weekly organic box delivered, and doing something like this regularly on the cheap. Bloody hell, I think this might be getting serious afer five years.

~

I've been thinking about Bouvrage, the Fife Diet-approved raspberry drink that was pretty much all I was allowed last week. I don't actually like Bouvrage that much. I'll drink it if it's there, but it's always had this really harsh alkalinity to it that spoils any enjoyment I might otherwise have got.

Last week, though, I really started to develop a taste for it. After a few days with a choice between Bouvrage and tap water, it became delicious nectar, sweet and refreshing. I'd bought five bottles of it for the week, and had one left at the beginning of the post-Diet frenzy of consumption.

Frenzy completed, it's back to the status quo. I've got a bottle of this stuff left. Better drink it before it goes off. Good thing I like Bouvrage these days, huh? I raised the sweet elixir to my lips, and drank... harsh, brackish, regular old-fashioned Bouvrage from the bad old days before I'd learned the value of vegetables.

Hypothesis: my standard, non-Diet blood sugar is so high that Bouvrage doesn't register as sugary. My body chemistry is naturally sweet^[1].

This is because I naturally have a shitty diet high in sugar and saturated fats.

This raises Gastronomic Implications (wbaenfarb). If taste is dependent upon preexisting body chemisty, I won't taste the same things as someone who ordinarily eats a lot of vegetables or is on a different diet. The restaurant experience is partially determined by what I had to eat for the rest of that week.

It seems obvious, but this sort of thing becomes really significant when the tasting menu at the Fat Duck costs £125 a head.

--
[0] Although I should observe that the lassie's blog, rachelsjohnson, has a somewhat unfortunate title that could be read as Rachel S. Johnson or Rachel's Johnson. If it's the latter then I'm not surprised that she's not getting many comments, because that sounds like a really specialist type of blog. The Internet can be a complex place for the traditionally-minded, the mainstream, the professionals.
[1] Just like my personality, then.

Half of my friends page has erupted in an enraged frenzy about self-declared fattist and narcissistic, imperious, self-absorbed bitch Ruth Fowler's article in the Grauniad today. Good on you all.

This comes shortly after a post on British Dining about Jay Rayner's idiotic allergy sufferers are all attention-seeking whiners screed in that self-same organ. I think that the Graun's Comment Is Free section is becoming a refuge for all those wankers who have been booted off the BBC's odious Have Your Say section. It's best just to ignore them and hope they go away.

The current flap appears to have been kick-started by that eternal beacon of small-minded nastiness the Daily Hate, who have denounced the Miss England finalist as being fat. Much as I hate to link to the Hate, go and have a look. There are pictures. (There would have to be, knowing the intellectual capacity of the average Mail reader.)

That's Chloe Marshall, size 16, BMI 26.03. Yep, she's a wee bit chunky on the thighs there, but she's smiling, she's got a pretty face, she's comfortable with her body and so should you be. Furthermore, she probably knows how to string a sentence together without infuriating the entire western hemisphere. Ruth Fowler, the Graun's resident fattist, has none of these qualities—although, for an allegedly serious writer, she does have an awful lot of nudie pictures on her shitty frame-based website.

One of these women is a normal, happy person. The other is an attention-seeking, misogynist, hateful, tiny-breasted, mean-spirited cow. To be perfectly honest, I know which of the two I'd rather fuck, but that's only because, as a wise man once said, woman unable to talk bullshit with cock in mouth.

Never before has the phrase I'd hit it been so appropriate. Doubly so, in fact.^[0]

If I had to take one of them out for dinner, I'd take the one who looks like she knows how to enjoy food—or, indeed, enjoy anything at all. Chloe Marshall might not be the brightest button in the box either—she is, after all, seventeen years old and a Miss England contestant—but I've seen no evidence that she's quite so utterly stupid as the bitter hag with the Cambridge First^[1], and she is, at least, a human being.

~

To my knowledge, to date, no terrorists have been caught with the use of the new anti-terror provisions. The ones that have been caught have had a tendency to announce their intention to drive flaming jeeps into airports by, um, driving flaming jeeps into airports, which was illegal before the new laws were brought out anyway. If I recall correctly, blowing stuff up was also illegal before September 11th, which makes one wonder what all those new laws were for in the first place.

This is what the anti-terror laws are being used for instead. Anybody surprised?

I've never met a terrorist and I don't need protecting from them. But I do need protection from officious council scumbags. Can I get some laws? Thought not.

~

All should read cairmen's excellent post on the bloodspell blog, in which he points out just exactly how copyright laws are doing the opposite of protecting the artists. Speaking as an artist, I'm not being protected by a blanket refusal to allow the release of my work. Nor are Bioware being protected by preventing distribution of a work that uses some of their art in a manner which is, pretty much undeniably, non-infringing. This really is taking the use of the phrase derivative work to extremes.

I've never met a plagiarist and I don't need protecting from them. But I do need protection from officious lawyers. Can I get some laws? Maybe—cairmen's post outlines how to start.

--
[0] While we're on the subject: never has the phrase I'd hit it been quite so inappropriate.
[1] It's a First from New Hall, so it barely counts anyway. And once you get into Cambridge, it's relatively easy to get a First as long as you buckle down to studying and eschew all semblance of a social life. I suspect that wasn't much of a problem for the Sociopathic Narcissist, since with a personality like that I doubt she would have been in much demand at all those garden parties.

I just got a telemarketer to hang up on me. Ah, good times. Getting ragingly angry with morons for being moronic: it has its benefits. I'm thinking about writing a lifestyle course.

~

Rory Bremner is in the Scotsman today, lamenting the unsatirizable state of modern government. He's got a point: it was so damn easy with Blair. Ping-pong ball eyes and a creepy grin and everyone knew exactly who you were. Spitting Image even did a fair job with Major, but Brown seems to have no qualities worthy of caricature.

It's a bit like having an uncle who's been building something in the shed for the last ten years [quoth he]. You go down and see what he's up to, look through the window—and there's nothing there.

It's partly our own fault. When Blair turned into a crazed warmongering lunatic (on about Day 2, as I recall), we were all frantic to get him out. What's this about some secret deal struck over bruschetta in some London restaurant?... Blair is to hand over to Brown? fantastic! Brown for President! Brown for Pope!

We all latched onto the Granita deal and waited and prayed for that glorious day when Brown would lead us triumphant into a new era with Britain free from pop-eyed gurning self-important madmen. We all got exactly what we wished for, and now people are complaining that it somehow isn't sensational enough.

Brown so far has not introduced any interesting new police-state legislation or forced us into any more illegal wars. Nor, to my knowledge, has he spent ninety per cent of his time saying look at it from my perspective and what you must understand is this. He is, in fact, almost exactly like that last episode of Doctor Who: nothing happened in it, but at least it didn't have farting aliens and blowjob jokes and Peter Kay.

~

Also in the Scotsman today is a letter from D MacDonald of Edinburgh, whose woe is expressed thus:

With the 250th anniversary of the birth of Robert Burns on the near horizon, it seems pertinent to point out that Edinburgh does not have a street named in honour of our national poet. This is surely an appropriate time to consider remedying this anomaly.

D MacDonald neglects to mention that, while it is true that we have no street, you can't walk for ten yards in the Old Town without colliding with a plaque celebrating the fact that the quill-wielding hack once paused near here to tie his shoelaces.

I have never understood the point of Burns and I never will. The man sold out rich millennia of Scottish culture and history for personal gain, and he was successful to such an extent that we are known across the planet as a race of skirt-wearing offal-munchers who can't talk properly. Scots isn't even a language: it's a dialect, and since the one linguist on my friends list appears to have gone crazy-religious and dropped off the Internet, there's no one to debate me on this point.

No one, ever, has ever said fair fa' yer honest sonsie face unless they're reading that crappy poem on the night we have dedicated to the ink-slinging old fool. Sonsie isn't even a word.

The man's got a national holiday, a dozen statues, two sets of commemorative stamps, and a plaque on every street corner in the land. I'm quite happy that we name our streets instead after obese stocking-clad Germans and their retarded inbred offspring. Let's at least try to give the impression that there's a bit more to Scotland than tartan haggises and bagpipes, shall we?

With thanks to lady_rani here:

Doctor Who executive producer Russell T Davies has accused BBC1 of cocking up the scheduling of the show, claiming it will lose 1.5m viewers in its new timeslot.

He then goes on to whine and stamp his feet a lot. More so than I think JNT ever did when they buggered about with the scheduling on his watch, but possibly less than Toby Hadoke did. In any case it's somewhat unbecoming—isn't it?—for the BBC's darling to throw a tantrum in a trade journal instead of maybe doing something about it or getting on with his job.

And frankly, Auntie's new attempt to recapture the glory of Britain's Got Talentless Media Whores needs all the help it can get. Didn't everyone get sick of back-to-back talent shows about three years ago?

Bitching about a scheduling conflict is, like, so 2007, dude. The viewers don't care any more. In times gone past, the announcement of a new season would launch a flurry of panicked complaints about: shit! I'm at work then orbut I have to go to a paaaarty that night. This year, the entire Internet has proffered a collective shrug and said: I'll catch it on iPlayer.

The most common thing I hear about BBC iPlayer, in every case is almost exactly the same words: It has totally revolutionized the way I watch television. I don't make a habit of asking people their opinion of iPlayer, but it often comes up in conversation regardless, because it is a Remarkably Cool Thing.

I still don't own a television set or have TV reception in my flat. (We do pay the licence fee, though.) Over the last two months I have watched infinity per cent more television than ever before. Much of it has been good television, which has forced me to reassess my attitude towards the medium. And my BitTorrent usage has dropped right off.

This is LiveJournal, so everyone reading this is acutely aware that the Internet has made it a million times easier to whinge and prate. Sometimes, when done right, the Internet also removes the reasons for such grousery in the first place.

(Although, now I come to think about it, it would make much more sense than it really should for Auntie to continue to determine ratings figures the old way even when everyone in the country is using the newer, more convenient, niftier 21st-century system. As a result, the entire next commissioning round would be decided on the basis of the five people left in the country who think that Satan invented the Internet.)

Oh, one more thing:

I'll rewrite [scripts] 100% if I have to, [Rusty] said. With Steven Moffat's scripts, I don't touch a word, but anyone else's I do.

...is by far the smartest thing I've ever heard him say. And it shows, Russell, oh how it shows.

The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible.

Thanks for the memories, Arthur C Clarke. And thanks for the unquenchable sense of wonderment at the universe.

Oh, and communications satellites. Thanks for those, too.

(If you come back as a giant translucent space baby, please go easy on us.)

Blimey! There's a nuclear scare going on just round the corner from me, and nobody told me!

I just took a walk around the block on my break, to find Incident Response vans and police tape everywhere. Of course I had to come back into work and google to find out what was going on.

We're on the front page of BBC News!

(How do you get radioactive packages in a language school? Bonjour la classe. Repétéz, s'il vous plait: les matériaux nucléaires sont dans le compartiment de ma tante.)

The most dangerous thing I saw, naturally, was the camera the Reuters photographer was wielding. Careful, sonny, you could have someone's eye out with that thing.

anjylle: Get ouuut! Get out of there! Get ou—

...forgive me. I so rarely get a chance to impersonate Kruge in regular conversation.

UPDATE: took the scenic route home from work. There are now significantly fewer incident vans and fewer, but still some, firemen standing around on the pavement doing not a lot. It looks like somebody worked out that there weren't actually bombs hidden in a cleaning cupboard. Almost a shame, really.

This is fantastic.

In a new book to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the marmalade-loving bear's debut, entitled Paddington Here and Now, the eponymous hero is going to be arrested and interrogated over his immigration status.

(While they're at it, they should take a good close look at that Mr Gruber as well. I always thought he was a Nazi war criminal in hiding. Where was he getting all those valuable artworks?)

In related news:

Postman Pat has been convicted of animal cruelty for taking his black-and-white cat, Jess, along on his rounds. It never used to be a problem, said post-office worker Mrs Coggins, a long-time colleague of Mr Pat's, but recently he's been delivering to the new Greendale housing scheme, and the kids there keep throwing bricks at his bright red van.

Romeo and Juliet have staged Reggie Perrin-style disappearances, claimed off each other's life insurance policies, and were last seen living in Panama Mantua.

Caliban has failed his citizenship test and thus has been refused permission to work as Prospero's manservant. Would't have been done! said the mooncalf in a statement. Thou didst prevent me; I had peopl'd else \ This sweatshop with Calibans.

Beowulf has been accused of incitement to racial hatred following his scorched-earth policy against the descendants of Cain. First Grendel and now his mother, said a spokesperson for Amnesty. It's clear the man has some sort of sick personal vendetta. Initially, the warrior-hero claimed that, as a Geatish resident, British laws had no jurisdiction over him; but since no Consulate of Geatland could be found anywhere in the Greater London area, his claims were dismissed.

This is fun. What other classics can we ruin, er, update for the new-Labour generation?

(And yes, The Comic Strip got there before me, I know.)

Hain aims to cut incapacity claims

The Government has announced a new medical test aimed at cutting the number of people on sickness-related benefits by 20,000 a year.

Work and Pensions Secretary Peter Hain said individuals will in future be assessed on what they can do, rather than what they cannot.

Mr Hain said people legitimately off work will still receive their benefit, adding: We are not talking about closing a door - we are saying we will open the door to new skills, support and confidence building.

Currently, there are many people sitting at home in the belief that they are unemployable, with no life choices or long-term prospects because they do not think their illness or medical conditions can be catered for in the workplace. But this is just not the case - many people with such conditions are perfectly able to take up successful careers, if the right support is in place.

Is anybody fooled by this bullshit? Peter Hain is apparently fooling himself. He told BBC Breakfast: It is not about punishing people.... This is about giving people opportunities because you are better off in work; the evidence shows that.

Great. So we're going to encourage people back into work by... stopping their benefits. I can't see this going wrong ever, can you?

The new disability tests are going to be ability-based rather than disability-based. This sounds like a delightful New Labourish optimistic attitude until one thinks about it for a picosecond. For a start, we're trying to assess disabilities here, not unrelated things that one is coincidentally capable of. I've lost my arm! Oh, stop your whining. You've got another one, haven't you?

It won't take long for this to degenerate into Monty Python territory: Look, you stupid bastard, I've got no arms left! Yes you have! It's just a flesh wound!

Imagine the plight of a hypothetical, oh I don't know, a librarian, who suddently develops a chronic (and hypothetical) allergy to books. She is denied benefits because she can still build roads. Or the bricklayer who loses his arms but is encouraged to take up a career in psychotherapy. Or the nightclub bouncer who, after a vicious and debilitating beating, is pushed by the Government into a job in theoretical physics instead of claiming.

(That last one was a joke. The Government encouraging people to work in the sciences? Hah! I kill me.)

Or let's take the example of the lovely stormsearch, who in lieu of any actual support is undoubtedly going to be offered Government-backed opportunities in the vibrant and rewarding career of telemarketing. And when some snot-nosed bureaucrat suggests that she don the headset—that diadem of mediocrity—because she can't move her limbs, she will say: Fine, I shall take my Master's degree and my comprehensive knowledge of Sumerian literature, and I shall use them to ask people if they want double glazing this week. I'm sure that's the absolute optimal contribution I can make to society. And I'm sure that your mother is very proud of you.

My duties as carer now extend, it would seem, to assertiveness coaching.

Let's defeat benefit cheats by making it harder for anyone to claim benefits! Benefit cheats are apparently the new Terrrrrrists or asylum seekers; the terrifying underclass that we use to get Daily Mail-readers to vote for us. It's clearly naive to suggest that we could better target disability benefits by, for instance, categorizing and diagnosing illnesses. That would take work, wouldn't it?

Of course, the entire above rant is based on the somewhat naive assumption that any of the new system is intended to do what it claims to do, as opposed to what it's actually supposed to do, which is save tax revenue so that we can spend it on wars. And what better way to save money than by screwing cripples? What are they going to do about it, run after you and beat you up?

Stupid shit like this makes me want to start collecting smoke alarms.