balls!

This Daily Mail story about Zoe Ball appears mainly to be a tie-in for her presenting gig on one of the Strictly Come Dancing spin-off shows, with the added bonus of this year's contestant line-up featuring (very briefly, as it turned out) her father Johnny. To be honest I'm a bit mystified about the inclusion of the baby element in the story, as her daughter was born in 2010, but I guess it makes it all sound more exciting. I do hope that the implication in the sidebar headline is just an unfortunate error of phrasing, though, otherwise it sounds as if something unsavoury may have been going on.

I'm sure that's not true, incidentally, though what certainly is true is that Johnny Ball's huge stock of goodwill among people of a certain age (myself very much included) who loved his science-based shows (principally Think Of A Number and Think Again) back in the early 1980s has been eroded fairly considerably in recent years by his idiocy on the subject of climate change. What is most amusing in his paranoid rantings is the suggestion that, because a Google search on his name came back with some pornographic images, essentially the Illuminati had sabotaged the entire internet in an attempt to discredit him, or something. As someone says in the comments to the Deltoid article:

Anyone who does a search for “Johnny Ball” and is surprised and alarmed by porn coming back as a result needs to be warned that they will continually find the internet confusing and alarming and may want to consider never using it.

I'm less concerned by David Bellamy's similar descent into denialism lunacy, as I always thought he was a bit of a pillock.