My friend Phil Endecott has released his latest app for the iPhone, which makes your beverage the envy of all other nearby beverages. How? By making it glow.
You need a rather dark environment, but it’s great fun. LagerLamp is available from iTunes for 59p. Which, when you think about it, wouldn’t buy you very much beer these days.
Use at your own risk!
…then avian ‘flu might become swine ‘flu.
Update: And when I made that observation, I hadn’t seen a Twitter post by my friend Aaron about ‘swine flew’… which is even better.
Blackwell’s in London have installed their first Espresso Book Machine. From the Guardian article:
It’s not elegant and it’s not sexy – it looks like a large photocopier – but the Espresso Book Machine is being billed as the biggest change for the literary world since Gutenberg invented the printing press more than 500 years ago and made the mass production of books possible. Launching today at Blackwell’s Charing Cross Road branch in London, the machine prints and binds books on demand in five minutes, while customers wait.
Which does make me wonder whether, before long, we won’t have coffee shops in bookstores. We’ll have bookstores in coffee shops…
Hap sent me a link to a couple of beautifully-staged performance ‘scenes’. This is my favourite, in an Antwerp train station:
Closer to home, this is in Picadilly Circus:
These were both corporate-sponsored, but it doesn’t stop them from being great.
They’re reminiscent of those staged by Improv Everywhere. I think the ‘Frozen Grand Central’ was my favourite of theirs so far:
From Christopher Hitchens:
What can be asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence.
which is, I suppose, a corollary of Carl Sagan’s classic: “Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence”.
John’s musings about his old cars, and Sean and Nicci’s post about double-declutching, reminded me of something my father taught me many years ago which few people probably know: that you can change gears without using the clutch, as long as you get the engine speeds right. You shift into neutral, rev the engine (or let it slow down) to the right point for your speed, and then shift into the next gear. It takes some practice, but if you know the car well enough, it is perfectly possible.
Since I’ve been married I’ve been driving automatics (which, I remember being horrified to first discover, you can’t even bump-start!) But growing up with a sequence of elderly second-hand cars, techniques like these were often of real practical use. I remember driving one of my first cars several miles back home after the clutch cable had broken.
There is a real problem, though, with this technique. Because it’s dependent on matching engine speed to road speed, the one thing you can’t do is to stop, or you’ll never get out of neutral again. Fortunately, I realised what had happened to the cable while I was still moving, and so could plan a route home that involved very few traffic lights and where the majority of other places I might have to stop were on downhill slopes…
There’s a post on Sean and Nicci’s site about the family Morris Traveller.
Well, the earliest car I can remember was also, I think, half-timbered. When when we first came back from Africa in 1970 my mother had a Mini Traveller. I was three years old at the time, but amazingly, I can remember its registration number: TBB 571G.
The brain works in mysterious ways…
This has been doing the rounds for a while but I’ve only just come across it (thanks to Jason Perlow). Wonderful stuff.
1. Cashtration (n.): The act of buying a house, which renders the subject financially impotent for an indefinite period of time.
2. Ignoranus: A person who is both stupid and an ass.
3. Intaxication: Euphoria at getting a tax refund, which lasts until you realize it was your money to start with.
4. Reintarnation: Coming back to life as a hillbilly.
5. Bozone (n.): The substance surrounding stupid people that stops bright ideas from penetrating. The bozone layer, unfortunately, shows little sign of breaking down in the near future.
6. Foreploy: Any misrepresentation about yourself for the purpose of having sex.
7. Giraffiti: Vandalism spray-painted very, very high
8.Sarchasm: The gulf between the author of sarcastic wit and the person who doesn’t get it.
9. Inoculatte: To take coffee intravenously when you are running late.
10. Osteopornosis: A degenerate disease.
11. Karmageddon: It’s like, when everybody is sending off all these really bad vibes, right? And then, like, the Earth explodes and it’s like, a serious bummer.
12. Decafalon (n.): The grueling event of getting through the day consuming only things that are good for you.
13. Glibido: All talk and no action.
14. Dopeler Effect: The tendency of stupid ideas to seem smarter when they come at you rapidly.
15. Arachnoleptic Fit (n.): The frantic dance performed just after you’ve accidentally walked through a spider web.
16. Beelzebug (n.): Satan in the form of a mosquito, that gets into your bedroom at three in the morning and cannot be cast out.
17. Caterpallor (n.): The color you turn after finding half a worm in the fruit you’re eating.
The Washington Post has also published the winning submissions to its yearly contest in which readers are asked to supply alternate meanings for common words. And the winners are:
1. Coffee, n. The person upon whom one coughs.
2. Flabbergasted, adj. Appalled by discovering how much weight one has gained.
3. Abdicate, v. To give up all hope of ever having a flat stomach.
4. Esplanade, v, To attempt an explanation while drunk.
5. Willy-nilly, adj. Impotent.
6. Negligent, adj. Absentmindedly answering the door when wearing only a nightgown.
7. Lymph, v. To walk with a lisp.
8. Gargoyle, n. Olive-flavored mouthwash.
9. Flatulence, n. Emergency vehicle that picks up someone who has been run over by a steamroller.
10. Balderdash, n. A rapidly receding hairline.
11. Testicle n. A humorous question on an exam.
12. Rectitude, n. The formal, dignified bearing adopted by proctologists.
13. Pokemon, n. A Rastafarian proctologist.
14. Oyster, n. A person who sprinkles his conversation with yiddishisms.
15. Frisbeetarianism, n. The belief that, after death, the soul flies up onto the roof and gets stuck there.
16. Circumvent, n. An opening in the front of boxer shorts worn by Jewish men.
Well, it should be, certainly for all science journalists, and probably for all science undergrads too. Ben Goldacre’s Bad Science is an enjoyable but very well-informed rant about how the media gets science stories wrong, and how to look for the real facts behind the reports.
Ben has a few chips on his shoulder – perhaps a few too many – but that doesn’t stop this from being a very important book. Recommended.
From yesterday’s walk…
Most of the paths I walked on obviously had more quadrapedal than bipedal traffic:
Do you think this notice shows concern about the mortal well-being of the animals, or is it a subtle threat?
…to discover that the Childwickbury goats’ cheese made by my step-sister Elizabeth was served as the vegetarian starter for the G20 leaders last night.
Glad to know Jamie approves of it…
We’re very proud too!…
On the Today program this morning, someone was saying that ISPs should be held partly responsible for movie and music piracy by their users, in the same way that a house owner should be responsible if the house was being used as a drug den.
But surely that’s the wrong analogy. People don’t in general upload the pirated material to the ISPs’ servers – they have it on their own PCs. Holding the ISP responsible is like blaming the local council because their roads were used to transport the drugs. Why not blame the electricity company that powers the PC?
The culpable ones, if any, are those who share material from their PCs. The media industries can’t sue all of them, though, so they have to find another scapegoat.
© Copyright Quentin Stafford-Fraser
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