giovanni more books?

If you read the Wikipedia page for Giovanni's Room you'll see that there is a reference to it appearing on a list of "100 best gay and lesbian novels" in 1999; that list can be found here with Giovanni's Room at number 2. By my calculations (and counting The Alexandria Quartet as one, as they do here) I've read just nine of these, the ones I haven't already mentioned being A Boy's Own Story, Myra Breckinridge, The Swimming Pool Library, Naked Lunch, Pale Fire, Moby-Dick and To Kill A Mockingbird. Now you might say, as I did upon reading the list: well, fair enough, A Boy's Own Story, for instance, is pretty explicitly a gay coming-of-age novel, but the elements in, say, Moby-Dick (i.e. the whole Ishmael-Queequeg thing), are at best hinted at and not necessarily central to the plot, and I honestly (with the caveat that it must be thirty years since I read it) can't remember any in To Kill A Mockingbird. Scout is a bit of a tomboy by the standards of the time so you might argue for some challenging of traditional gender roles, but it's a bit of a stretch, unless the original text included some ferocious lesbian frottage that my 1980s Pan paperback omitted for some reason.

Anyhoo, as it happens there's been another "100 best novels" list doing the rounds this week, and it's this one from the Guardian. "Never has such a list been more needed", says the accompanying article explaining the methodology, which is a fogeyish reference to how kids today don't read books any more because they're all too busy sexting and playing Roblox, but which I also think is a bit of a stretch given how many of these lists there are out there already. The methodology is of interest, though, because this one was from a poll of novelists; others are quite commonly compiled from a public vote, and the two methods always generate quite different lists. I could have predicted in advance, for instance, that a list of novelists' favourite novels would have Middlemarch at number 1 (full disclosure: I've never read it), because they always do. Anything compiled by polling Joe and Josephine Public, on the other hand, will always feature Harry Potter and Lord Of The Rings highly, among other things.

Anyway, my overall count from the Guardian list is, I think, thirty-two, of which nineteen have featured on this blog, and they are: Beloved, Pride And Prejudice, The Great Gatsby, Moby-Dick, Midnight's Children, The Remains Of The Day, Lolita, The God Of Small Things, Wolf Hall, Giovanni's Room, The Leopard, Never Let Me Go, Blood Meridian, My Antonia, Rebecca, The Talented Mr Ripley, Ragtime, Invisible Cities and The Road. 

There are a handful of novels which feature on the gay and lesbian list and the Guardian list; I can't be bothered to try and find them all but Giovanni's Room is certainly among them, as is Moby-Dick. One that significantly isn't is To Kill A Mockingbird, which is absent altogether from the Guardian list. I don't want to get into the game of critiquing the contents of either list (though you might have noted that I have done exactly that a couple of paragraphs above), but a measure of how surprising I find this is that I had to re-do the search a couple of times just to make sure I hadn't messed it up (it does appear on the two previous Guardian lists from 2003 and 2015 I linked to above). That's one where I would side with the public vote, which would undoubtedly have included it. 

under the bridge downtown, is where I drew some blood

This is some tremendously nerdy fun - you know those signs you get on low bridges to tell you that you, a lorry driver, are about to unzip the top of your vehicle like an old-fashioned can of sardines? Different countries have different signage to warn unsuspecting drivers of what's ahead - the yellow diamond in the photo on the right is from the USA, in particular the low railway bridge in Durham, North Carolina which is notorious enough to have its own website.

In Britain we operate a system of red signs, sometimes circles and sometimes triangles depending on some rather opaque rules, with clearance heights listed in both metric and imperial measurements. If you thought the rules governing sign shape were arcane, though, wait till you hear the rules governing the derivation of the clearance height figures. I mean, I won't go into it here but the end result is that - somewhat counter-intuitively - a single metric height can be associated with several different imperial heights, and vice versa. 

This opens up the possibility of a sort of sign-spotting subculture emerging, and, as you might imagine, this being the internet, it has. This page lists all the combinations of signs that eagle-eyed people (let's call them people, for the sake of argument) have spotted around the country.

Lest I get too snooty about others' intense weirdness and nerdery, though, I should disclose that the first thing I did, about half-way through watching Matt Parker's video, was think to myself: ooh, I bet I know where a good one is that might not be on the list. And it is in this interesting location near Bishton, just a few miles east of Newport, where a minor road crosses the South Wales Main Line via an interesting take-your-pick over/under arrangement. Head for the level crossing and you might have to wait for a train to pass; head under and you won't have to do that but beware if you've forgotten that you've got the bikes on the roof rack. I have been through the tunnel, a few years back; I can't remember which car it was in but I do remember stopping just in front of the entrance and getting out to visually inspect the clearance, just in case. I assume it can't have been the current family enormo-vehicle, a Seat Alhambra, because there's a good chance that might not have fitted under at all. Don't imagine that going over the top means you can take a fully-extended cherry-picker that way, by the way, as there is also a maximum height restriction of 5 metres to avoid getting entangled with some power lines. 

Anyway, it turns out this is already on the database as the type specimen for the 1.7m/5'6" height combination. Interestingly the type specimen for the 1.7m/5'9" height combination is only a handful of miles away in Caldicot, part of a similar choose-your-fighter under/over tunnel/level-crossing set-up. The lowest signed clearance on the list is, thankfully, not on a road but on the Bude Canal and would presumably require you to own a very low-profile boat (a punt, say) and lie down in it if you wanted to pass underneath. 

the year of blogging dangerously infrequently

Here's the annual blog stats roundup, including graphs, if you like that sort of thing. The main headline news here is that this year (well, last year now) squeaked past 2017 by a single post to avoid being the joint-least-blog-post-y year on record at a paltry 45 posts. However, since 2017 included an all-time-low of 13 book reviews, while 2022 included a pretty healthy 23, that means that 2022 featured a measly 22 non-book-review posts while 2017 featured 31. There being more book posts than non-book posts is also a first for a calendar year. I can't really put my finger on a specific reason apart from the one I've already mentioned a few times which is that a lot of things that might have once ended up being blog posts end up on Twitter instead; to put it another way now that I have three kids I no longer have the free time or energy for extended blog ranting about a topic that piques my interest and might just do a short but sweary quote tweet or something instead.

Anyway, graphs follow. Note that following my realisation that I'd done the sex balance graph in a really stupid way last year I've recalibrated the scale to just show the percentage of books that were by female authors.

A few statistical highlights: although I read fewer books and fewer aggregate pages in 2022 than in either 2020 or 2021 (maybe increased opportunity for non-housebound activity after two years of intermittent lockdowns?) each of those three years featured higher book and page counts than any year since the all-time high of 2011. Longest book of the year was The Hydrogen Sonata at 605 pages, shortest was The Thirty-Nine Steps at 119 pages. The average book length in 2022 was around 323 pages, down from the 2020 high of 384 but just above the overall historical average of around 309. The percentage of books by female authors was down a little on last year at a fraction over 26%; this is nonetheless still a little higher than the overall average of just under 25%.

One other book-related matter: I took the plunge and registered with Goodreads for reasons that are slightly opaque to me right now, but I am taking the trouble to keep the book list updated in parallel with the blog list. If anyone is thinking of doing the same thing themselves, the most important thing to be aware of is that there is a bulk import facility that saves you having to type the details for 300 books in one-by-one, assuming that you have some sort of personal database somewhere (yes, of course I do) that permits exporting to some sort of Excel file for subsequent massaging into the appropriate import format.

a short interval where I interpret the internet

Same as last time, just a few follow-up thoughts after the last book review: 

Firstly, I follow Flags Mashup Bot on Twitter because I have a nerdy fascination with flags (I follow a few map-related accounts for a similar reason). Basically that account produces flags of imaginary countries by combining the colours and names of two existing countries and their flags. Here's a thing they came up with a couple of days ago:

Special edition

Ul Qoma (The City & the City)
+
Zimbabwe Rhodesia
=
Ul Rhodesia: pic.twitter.com/CioD0p7Gok

— Flags Mashup Bot (@FlagsMashupBot) March 27, 2022

One for the coincidence OR IS IT files (the answer as always being: yes; yes it is). It turns out the Ul Qoma flag is a fairly regular featuree as an ingredient; presumably there's just a database of flags that the bot randomly chooses from. But (and I'm sure you're ahead of me here) in what sense is there actually a flag of Ul Qoma? 

Fortunately for the purposes of this post, and also for the theory that 90% of Twitter interaction is just bots interacting with and retweeting each other, there is a counterpart bot called Original Flags Bot which replies to each of the mashup tweets with images of the original flags. The Ul Qoma one is the one on the left. 

@FlagsMashupBot original images for Ul Qoma (The City & the City) + Zimbabwe Rhodesia pic.twitter.com/4pTKAbjfsR

— Original Flags Bot (@SourceFlag) March 27, 2022

A bit of Google image searching turns up this page which seems to suggest that the flags (there is a Besźel one as well, though it doesn't seem to be in the mashup database) were cooked up for the 2018 TV adaptation, which is the explanation that makes the most sense, on reflection.

Another thing I noticed from reading The City & The City was the regular use of the word "interstices"; it's a good word and describes the notion of unseen things lurking in unsuspected spaces pretty well, this being one of the novel's major themes. I think most people know how to pronounce "interstices"; emphasis on the second syllable, in-TERSE-tiss-eeze. What was less familiar to me was the use of the singular form of the noun. Challenge number one here is: what even is the singular form of "interstices"? I think if you'd asked me a couple of weeks ago I would have said: actually I dunno, is it one of those words ending in "x" that gets an "ices" in the plural form? Like, say, "matrix", or "index"? So maybe the singular form is "interstix" or "interstex" or something like that? Not a completely ridiculous thing to imagine, but, as it happens, wrong: the singular form is "interstice". But how are we saying that? Surely not in-TERSE-tiss-ee? But, equally, surely not IN-terst-ICE either?

Well, it turns out it's in-TERSE-tiss. I think this is counter-intuitive for a couple of reasons; firstly that I still have the residual sense of saying something like "matrice" or "indice" which would be obviously wrong, and secondly that most three-syllable words that start "inter-" have the emphasis on the first syllable rather than the second, like "interview", "internet", "interval", "intercom", and so on. "Interpret" is the only other obvious example I can think of of such a word where the emphasis falls on the second syllable.

not resting on my yannys

There are a couple of interesting things about the whole YANNY vs. LAUREL sound illusion thing that's been sweeping the internet lately, but before we can get to them it is The Law that I give you my opinion on the subject.

I suspect that if you first listen to the clip, as I did, on a mobile phone, then there's a higher likelihood that you'll hear "yanny", since that's the high-frequency bit and phones are generally rubbish at rendering lower-frequency sounds. Also, if you're on a phone, there's a higher chance you'll be somewhere with a bit of ambient noise going on, which may well swamp the low-frequency bits. That was certainly my experience, as I head "yanny" fairly clearly. Well, I suppose what I mean is I didn't hear any trace of "laurel"; I couldn't swear that what I did hear might not have been "yarry" or "yally" as it's weirdly rendered through some sort of speech synthesiser. Which specific version of the clip you listen to may have a bearing as well; mine was off Twitter so had very possibly had the Twitter upload algorithm compress the shit out of it.

Listen to the same sounds via a higher-quality link and on a laptop, though, and you may hear something different, The one near the top of this Guardian article seems about perfectly pitched to my ear, as I can hear either word depending on what I've preset my brain to listen for. If pressed to pick one I'd definitely lean towards "laurel", though. There are a couple of clips further down featuring some pitch-shifting which illustrate the nature of the illusion quite nicely.

BUT that's not the interesting bit. Too right it wasn't, you might say, at which point I would cordially invite you to - in the words of the great Lester Bangs - eat a bowl of fuck.

The first interesting thing is what this sort of thing - that is to say the laurel/yanny thing and the disagreement over what colour the dress was - reveals in terms of people's reactions to the disagreement. People more inclined to an authoritarian mindset get quite agitated by these things and tend to react with some variant of YOU ARE LITERALLY STUPID AND/OR INSANE AND/OR LYING IT'S OBVIOUSLY BLUE AND BLACK  HOW CAN YOU SAY ANYTHING ELSE, while those of a more analytical bent will say wow, that's really interesting, I wonder how that happens?

Colour perception in particular is a really interesting thing and another good antidote to inflexible thinking. It's important and healthy to realise that having colour boundaries going blue-green-yellow rather than, say, bleen-grellow is completely arbitrary and can vary between cultures, just as the convention that says we have a different name for "light red" (i.e. "pink") but not for "light blue" is completely arbitrary. Maybe it derives from the need to distinguish between things that are roughly the same colour as blood and things that aren't, just to avoid overlooking a medical emergency, but equally maybe that's just bollocks.

Anyway, personally I saw the dress as white and gold and continue to do so even though I know the dress is actually blue and black. Similarly I have never been able to see magic eye images even though I accept that they do exist, as tempting as it is to imagine that the whole thing is a conspiracy designed to waste my time by making me sit in front of swirly pictures making myself go boss-eyed. That one isn't down to colour perception so much, though, and I suppose my own known and medically-documented optical defects (I'm long-sighted) may have a bearing on it.

Now that we've got onto more general optical illusions I can throw in the one that prompted this blog post in the first place. I won't say anything about the specifics until the next paragraph, as it's so good I don't want to spoil it for you. Click here, read the article and look at the images IN ORDER and then come back.

As with all illusions, some will "see it" (although of course the trick here is "not seeing it", at least at first) and some won't. As the author says, though, the really interesting thing is to go back to the original image after "seeing it" and be unable to "unsee it", and, moreover, wonder how you failed to see it in the first place as the visual cues seem so obvious. I think that's one of the best illusions I've ever seen for precisely that reason: everything's there in plain sight.

An almost more interesting question, though, is: was the picture specifically taken to provide an illusion? Or was it just an accident? And given that the person taking it, and the person circulating it as an illusion (assuming they weren't the same person) could by definition "see" it, who was it that realised it'd make a good optical illusion, and how could they know, given the impossibility of "unseeing" it? Did they just say to a friend, look, here's a picture I took of a cigar sticking out of a wall, cool, huh? and have the friend go: hunh? WHAT cigar? Or, if it was specifically designed from the outset, who thought (and why) hey, I know what: if I take a picture of a cigar sticking out of a wall I bet people won't be able to see it? Wait, let me get my camera. And a cigar.

the great british lake-off

We had a week's family holiday in the Lake District last week. As you can imagine if you know me at all, this will have comprised lots of wholesome fun with the kids at various family-friendly locations, plus occasional escapes to go and conquer big spiky mountainous bits of rock. I'll get to the mountain stuff later, but here's a brief summary of the rest of the activities, including links for those who might be in a similar situation (i.e. young kids to keep entertained).

• We stayed in a couple of cottages at Low Briery, a self-catering holiday park on the north-eastern outskirts of Keswick. "Holiday park" makes it sound a lot more Butlins-y than it actually is, and the main buildings are actually the remnants of an old bobbin mill, with various static caravans and some cute "pods" having been added to increase the size of the accommodation available. There's precious little information about the site's former use on the Low Briery website, but there are some information boards at the site of the former railway halt on the old line that runs along the southern edge of the site, one of which yields the snippet that the mill ceased production in 1958.

• The railway path probably warrants a few words in its own right as it's a well-known and widely-used route that we've made use of on previous holidays to get to, among other places, the Horse & Farrier at Threlkeld. Anyone wanting to make use of it should be aware, though, that two of the bridges over the River Greta were washed away in some heavy flooding at the end of 2015, and have not yet been replaced, and that a third is structurally unsound and closed. This means quite a considerable detour to get anywhere east of Keswick by this route, though thankfully you can still get into Keswick from Low Briery down the path (it's just over a mile). Plans are afoot for renovations, including re-opening the tunnel buried under the A66 bridge whose bypassing currently adds a rather unsatisfactory hump in the otherwise nice friendly gradient. There is even a project afoot to try to lobby for the route to be re-opened as a proper railway, though (while I can see the argument that there'd be a market for it) it all sounds a bit pie-in-the-sky to me.
• Wray Castle - on the western shore of Windermere, England's longest and largest lake. This is really a Victorian house built in the style of a castle, and as such doesn't have all the exciting historical stuff that proper castles have - portcullis mechanisms, lots of old armour and halberds lying around, that sort of thing - and so has to work a bit harder to provide interest. They've made a reasonable job of it although you do get the impression that they've had to work to stretch the content they have been able to produce over the entire house. There's some stuff about the house's original female owner and the general shittiness of being a woman in early Victorian times, and a lot is made of the fact that Beatrix Potter stayed here while on a family holiday in the 1880s, including a whole section of the house given over to recreations of parts of the Peter Rabbit universe; Mr. MacGregor's garden, Peter's burrow and the like. We made use of the launches operated by Windermere Lake Cruises to get to and from the castle; these make a round trip from Ambleside via Brockhole on the eastern shore of the lake which has more kid-friendly outdoor fun stuff but which we didn't have time to stop off and visit. We did also get some good views from the lake of what is now the ritzy Pullwood Bay holiday apartment complex but which we used to know as Huyton Hill when it was a slightly more downmarket group of holiday lets which we used for several family holidays back in the 1970s and 1980s, though strictly Huyton Hill was the name of the preparatory school which occupied the site between 1939 and 1969. 
• Mirehouse - just out of Keswick on the shores of Bassenthwaite Lake (note: the only Lake District lake to legitimately include the word "lake" in its name, all the others having a "mere" or "water" instead which renders the addition of "lake" superfluous, nay indeed pleonasmic), this is a more orthodox country house with some grounds which include some woods and streams to keep the kids amused. I didn't actually go here as I was doing mountain stuff at the time; more on this later.
• Lakes Aquarium - this is down at Newby Bridge on the skinny southern tail of Windermere, so it was a convenient place to stop in on our way home. Is it the most amazing aquarium in the world, with a lavish selection of eye-poppingly astonishing wonders of the deep? Well, no, not really, but it's well-set-up and keeps the kids amused, even if most of the inhabitants are ducks and fish rather than giant squid and hippopotamuses. They haven't even got a megalodon! 

Tune in next time for some links to photos plus details of exciting mountain adventures. THRILL as I climb the two highest mountains in England IN A SINGLE DAY!!!! RECOIL in AWE as I GO UP some OTHER mountains!! CRINGE as I consume TWO SPICY PEPERAMIS and a PORK PIE!!! ET CETERA!

the early-21st-century blog post of raw sexual frenzy

A couple of brief follow-up points from the last book review: firstly I should have noted that The French Lieutenant's Woman won a couple of literary awards, notably the now-defunct WH Smith Literary Award in 1970. The Shooting Party was the other recipient of that award to appear on this list.

Secondly, my old second-hand early-1970s paperback edition of the book carries a fairly sombre black cover with a detail from Richard Redgrave's 1844 painting The Governess, currently on display in the Victoria & Albert Museum. Just in case that was a bit downbeat for you, though, the whole thing is jazzed up a bit by carrying the following legend:

You know, with the best will in the world I'm not sure that's really an accurate description of what the book's about, or, at least, that description would lead you to expect a bit more, y'know, action than the page or so that the reader actually gets. Just as the description of the protagonist of Algis Budrys' Who? in the film version (aka Roboman) as THE KILL MACHINE WITH THE MEGATON MIND seemed to be trying too hard to sell what was actually some quite cerebral source material, this seems to be trying to knock out a few copies to unsuspecting lovers of bog-standard Victorian bodice-rippers, most of whom would (I suspect) have been sorely disappointed.

Similarly I always thought the chosen tag-line for the excellent Serenity - "They aim to misbehave" - was a bit of a strange choice, since it conjures up a bit of an image of a band of wacky space loonies having zany adventures. And in a sense that's what does happen, but for all the humorous moments it's a film with some deadly serious points to make, and if you were led to expect Spaceballs, well, again, disappointment is the most likely outcome. Then again that's the most likely outcome if you actually watch Spaceballs, too, so maybe it doesn't matter.

Lastly, here's an interesting interview with John Fowles from the Paris Review in the mid-1980s. There's a lot of interesting material in the Paris Review's Art Of Fiction series available online, including similarly in-depth interviews with a number of authors who have featured on this blog, including Vladimir Nabokov, Jonathan Franzen, Stephen King, Kurt Vonnegut, Don DeLillo, Haruki Murakami, Jack Kerouac, Gabriel García Márquez, Salman Rushdie, Joan Didion, Joyce Carol Oates, Hilary Mantel, William Gibson and probably many others.

what are you waffling on about

I'll tell you what really grinds my gears: yeah, that's right, potato waffles. I know they may be waffly versatile and all, and moreover capable of being cooked in a toaster if you can't be arsed to use the oven, but there's still a problem.

Look (on the left) at how the individual waffles are arranged in the box - 3 stacks of 4 waffles each, arranged so that the long edges are facing you as you open the end of the box. That's only really a rational arrangement if everyone in the world eats waffles in groups of four, and no-one ever eats one, two or three waffles at a time. Since my elder daughter is the prime waffle consumer in the household - I never eat them, though I suspect my wife of being an occasional clandestine wafflist - and is a girl of fairly modest eating habits, one at a time tends to be how they get consumed. So you're left with one, two or three waffles flapping about loosely in the end of the box, threatening to fall out at any moment and restricting your ability to secure them by folding the end of the box over.

Aha, you're saying, but while all that's true, any revision to the stacking protocol would mean redesigning the box. Well, not so, as it happens. Observe (above right) how each waffle's width is exactly (or near enough, anyway) four times its thickness. So you could just as easily stack the waffles one by one in the box with their faces touching each other, like the slices in a sliced loaf. Then you could take as many as you liked out and immediately be able to fold the end of the box over to the required point to keep the rest from falling out. I am genuinely curious as to why they don't do it this way. And it's not just the cheapo unbranded ones we get from Aldi that do this; the posh Bird's Eye ones are the same, or at least they were back in the heady days when I had the disposable income to be able to buy them.

I was going to preface this brief rant with some sort of humorous crack about OCD, but I'm wary of doing that as it's become a bit of a humorous short-cut, and of course actual OCD (which 99.9% of people who refer unironically to "my OCD" don't have) is a very real and debilitating thing. So instead I'll just say that people who have a liking for things fitting perfectly into other things - and who doesn't? - (no, stop it, it's not what you're thinking), will find this collection particularly pleasing. No waffles, though.

you ain't seen me, right

A couple of brief supplementary bits after the last post:

• We went to a few pubs in Edinburgh, most notably the excellent Abbotsford on Rose Street, which we went to while we were on our way to Calton Hill to watch the fireworks. The firework display was actually happening at Meadowbank Stadium a mile or so up the road, but we (and a lot of other people) decided we were too lazy and/or tight to get tickets so we hung around on top of the hill and watched from there. Anyway, the Abbotsford has many interesting local (or at least Scottish) ales, most notably Avalanche from the Fyne Ales brewery which I had a couple of and was very good.
• If you followed the link to the Silent UK raid on the Forth Bridge you may have seen some of the other fascinating stuff on the site, most notably the infiltration of the now-defunct Mail Rail lines under London. The whole urban exploration thing is fascinating, I think - if you think so too then you will find much to enjoy at places like Forlorn Britain, Derelicte, Forbidden Places and PlaceHacking. If you're tempted to try and emulate any of their activities, just remember it's trespassing, almost certainly illegal and we never had this conversation.

you like that don't you

Always nice to see a bit of reciprocal linkage, particularly on sites I actually like; it's sort of like a cyberspatial reach-around. So it's pleasing to discover the mighty Language Log not only linking to one of my humble posts, but mentioning me by name as well. Aw, shucks. Yeah, I know it was back in January, but I've only just found it.

don't rolf my chakras, man

Here's a couple of interesting links. Firstly this New York Times article which starts off as a discussion of the Dunning-Kruger effect (as previously mentioned here) and then segues into some fascinating musings on anosognosia and similar forms of cognitive impairment.

You'll be wanting a bit of light relief after that, so here's a post from the excellent Crispian Jago's blog which presents a periodic table of irrational nonsense. While that's amusing in itself, arguably even more so is the highly humorous humourlessness of some of the commenters when their particular blind spot is mocked: I was with you through ouija boards and Nostradamus, but how dare you criticise ear candling, etc., etc.

jocularity

Time for a couple of additions to the blog sidebar - firstly let me commend to you the splendid and multifarious cornucopia of cartoon delights to be found within the ornate and bejewelled portals of David Malki's Wondermark.


Among the artistic wonders concealed within (examples of the artist's favourites among his own work can be found here) are such uncategorisable marvels as the genre fiction generator, an automated version of which can be found here. Here's the synopsis of my next novel:

The Psychopunks

In an ancient one-way spaceflight, a young idealistic revolutionary stumbles across an otherworldly portal which spurs him into conflict with a sneering wizard, with the help of a female who inexplicably becomes attracted to the damaged protagonist for unstated reasons and her wacky pet, culminating in a fistfight atop a tower.

Sounds great. Also great is chemist Derek Lowe's occasional series Things I Won't Work With, an entertaining account of some nasty reagents that the industrial chemist occasionally has to handle, and carefully too lest they flay his face off, turn his eyes inside out, boil his lungs to smoking tar or just vaporise the whole lab into a foul-smelling steaming crater of death.

Finally there's McSweeney's Open Letters, a slightly Onion-esque series of, erm, well, open letters to various people and things. Hard to explain, but check it out, it's quite amusing. Heck, let's put a link to The Onion up there as well (actually I thought I already had one, but apparently not).

commandment #11: thou shalt not take the piss

Firstly: no reading this until you've ploughed through the tedious ranting in my last post. Promise now? OK.

After all that you'll be wanting some entertainment - well, you'll be glad to hear there are plenty of amusing internet-based cartoons available that don't conflict with your unswerving and monomaniacal commitment to radical atheism.


There you go. That was pretty good, wasn't it? More in similar vein available here, including some from the brilliant Jesus And Mo, which is well worth a permanent sidebar link, I think. Try this one for size:

new links

A couple more sidebar additions for you: xkcd for all your geeky humour needs, and Weebl's Stuff for Weebl & Bob's latest adventures, as well as other cartoons such as the legendary badgers, and some frankly disturbing stuff involving cows.

time for my medication

Something of a surprise in the Independent today: an article by Dominic Lawson with which I find myself, near enough, in complete agreement. I expect there'll be some raving right-wing religiosity spliced to a bit of climate-change denialism on Monday, just to balance things up a bit.

Ludicroius!

You may remember my pointing out some of the truly alarming frothing arsewittery displayed on the BBC's Have Your Say forums following the death of pig-ignorant corpulent xenophobe Bernard Manning last year.

It really is all too easy to mine some comedy gold out of the slack-jawed goons who parade their ignorance on these forums; just to prove the point here's a couple of gems from this recent debate on "boot camps" for unemployed youths:

At last this is what we need. I am sick to death of funding these lazy, bone idle parasites. Next death penalty to all knife carrying thugs!! Conservatives you have sealed my vote

martin jones, london

Ludicroius.

Richard Buxton, Reading, United Kingdom

I think we can consider the world now put firmly to rights. There's some good stuff in the thread about recently-deceased film director Sydney Pollack as well:

Unlike birth, death creates huge curiosity as it occurs. In a nursery of plants, if one sapling withers, the gardener leaves the rest and probes the cause of the one dead. He feels lost in the benefit that would have been if the sapling were not dead. That is why governments seek protection to its people from even the authorities abroad. This is the basic tenet of the cost and worth of life.

Depth Sentence, India

Well, quite. You don't want to be trawling through all the bland duck-billed platitudes to find the loonies though, you want someone else to do it for you. And that's what spEak You’re bRanes is here for. Here's a couple of crackers from the recent debate about human-animal hybrid embryo research, for instance. I've stuck a permanent blog link in the sidebar too, as it's well worth regular visits.

insert male member A into foam ring B

You will of course remember the TravelJohn disposable piss pouch from a few months back. Maybe you've got one attached right now. And because you're a smart cookie, and you've got your eye firmly on the ball, you'll have been thinking, well, OK, but what if you're driving? Do you get the wife to attend to the deployment of the various attachments while you keep your eyes on the road? And what if you're on your own?

To which one answer is, of course, pull over, get out and have a slash in the hedge. Although the same argument could be applied to needing a wee while being a passenger, which does sort of throw the necessity of the whole piss-bag concept into question. However, one scenario where you certainly can't just park up for a minute as the mood takes you is when you're piloting a modern military jet aircraft. No, you're going to need something a bit more sophisticated. And here it is. Yes, the Advanced Mission Extender Device allows you to fly the most demanding of missions with no danger of, erm, emissions.

Frankly the whole electric pump attachment is a little alarming. And the consequences of having to eject while, if you will, ejecting don't bear thinking about.

What you do if you need a poo isn't adequately explained - and if a Russian MiG-29 suddenly appeared on my tail I'm pretty sure I would need one. Cavers and potholers have the same problem; they solve it by creating what they call a "cave burrito", as described here:

A bowel movement is a little more complicated underground and requires some specialized gear that is fondly known as a "cave burrito". This consists of an old Tupperware container with a lid, a plastic bag or saran wrap, aluminum foil and toilet paper. If you have to go, break your burrito fixings out. Lay out the plastic and go on that. You will want to be careful to keep the solid waste separate of the liquid waste. When done, drop all your toilet paper in with the solid waste, wrap it in plastic, than wrap the plastic in aluminum foil, double bag that and store the burrito in your Tupperware. An extra bag for the Tupperware may be a good idea. This is not a burrito you want to have come undone accidentally.

Wise words. Not sure you'd have the time or the space for that in an aerial combat situation though. Probably best just to shit yourself and tidy up later.

More poo-related stories can be found over at Andy's place.

waiting for Garfield

More internet genius for you: take Jim Davis' original Garfield strips, remove (via some sort of Photoshop wizardry, presumably) any trace of Garfield himself from them, and what you're left with is a series of brief vignettes of almost Beckettian emptiness and despair. Have a look at garfield minus garfield for some examples; here's a couple.

David Icke: still nuts

Properly nuts too. In other news: large ursine quadruped defecates in forested area. But only because the Illuminati told it to.

much funnel be had here......geddit?

I'm glad it's not just me who finds glory hole spillways and associated reservoir architecture fascinating - there's some more pictures (plus a reciprocal link back to my original post, which is nice) here. If, like mine, your Spanish is a bit ropey, try Google's auto-translated version.

Interestingly, one of the featured reservoirs is at Pontesei in Italy, and features a spillway that towers high and dry over the water level in the lake. This is because there was a landslide after it was built which necessitated lowering the water level well below the top of the dam - understandable paranoia since this reservoir is just round the corner from the notorious Vajont dam, and the authorities were understandably keen to avoid a repeat of that incident.