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An old one, but still amusing if you've managed to forget most of it
since last reading it, as I seem to have;
The Top 100 Things I'd Do If I Ever Became An Evil Overlord:-
My Legions of Terror will have helmets with clear plexiglass visors, not face-concealing ones.
Despite its proven stress-relieving effect, I will not indulge in maniacal laughter. When so occupied, it's too easy to miss unexpected developments that a more attentive individual could adjust to accordingly.
If it becomes necessary to escape, I will never stop to pose dramatically and toss off a one-liner.
I will not grow a goatee. In the old days they made you look diabolic. Now they just make you look like a disaffected member of Generation X.
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| Kodo;
a strange meta-conversational game from Tyrethali. A downright superb typo in the
rules, too:- "...whoever ahs the most when the game ends wins."
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"That reminds me of the time when I was lucky enough to find
something worth writing about, not as though that's ever stopped me
smoking."
Extract from a blog entry, Foldover-style.
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| Hm, just when I thought this job was getting dull, I'm assigned to debug the
GayBrighton.com purity test. Testing
the thing (it being a fairly generic set of questions, although I may have
skewed my result by sleeping with women), it turns out that I'm merely 9%
impure. It's probably working alright, then.
| I managed an online game of
Settlers of Catan against
him and
him last night. A fine game, which I'd managed to
avoid thus far despite various earnest recommendations - the
strategic, competing colonisation of a small island, with land hexagons
producing various resources at the roll of a die, and plenty of
careful trading. Extremely simple to play, but with much scope for
elegant strategy. I'm impressed.
The expansion
games look intriguing, too.
I may have to invest.
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| "This programme contains strong language from the outset." has
always seemed a bit of an odd thing to warn people about - would they
sit and watch the first ten minutes of a programme that contained
unspecifically-timed swearing, if naughty words were that upsetting
to them?
The BBC's producer's
guidelines for programme content make for fairly interesting reading, anyway,
most notably the statistic that "seventy per cent of homes do not contain
children and many viewers expect a full range of subject matter throughout
the day".
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| A mildly
amusing fake Tube poster,
although it's not as good as the proper fake posters they've got
dotted around the Underground at the moment, saying things like
"9th February 2000 - Nothing Happened" and going on to
explain how some hypothetical disaster was averted through the
actions of alert staff. Amusing.
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| Valentine's songs, you say?
I'd go for Strangelove's Beautiful Alone, My Life Story's
Silently Screaming, Morrissey's I'd Love To, The
Divine Comedy's Tonight We Fly, the Bonzo Dogs' Fresh
Wound, Devant's I Think About You (I quite agree) and
the Dandys' Dirty Weekend. And loads more Smiths and
Morrissey, naturally, such as Back to the Old House and
Alma Matters. But I'll shut up.
| "3 Valentine's cards for the price of 2", in some shop I passed
earlier, which seemed quite, quite wrong. I think
these
chaps probably had the right idea. In a quote which seems to have been removed from
the page, unless I read it somewhere else, Indian students were complaining
about such assaults being tantamount to "culture police". I'm not sure, myself - I'm
all for societies evolving by themselves, but when it's something as crass as the
commercialised homogenisation of world culture, I can't help but feel the need for
Thought Police.
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| The CIA World Factbook lists "World"
as a country (although, disappointingly, not
"Universe"),
and it makes for some intriguing statistics. I'm impressed
that Earth manages $5.6 trillion of imports and exports every year,
particularly. We must know some very scrupulous alien traders. [via
Momblog UK]
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| More than just a throwaway comedy sketch - the mighty Armstrong and
Miller have actually registered and put some content up on
milk-online.co.uk.
They've also got a mockingly cutting-edge
site
of their own, written in the personae of Martin Bain-Jones and Craig
Children; "Well - yes, Martin... but that's the beauty of the internet - it's
a fluid medium - you can always update things later... that's what the man at
the design consultancy said..."
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An article in today's NewScientist
about house-cleaning and lawn-mowing robots followed on from a thought that struck me
on my way into work this morning, as I gazed out onto hedgerows
littered with drink cans, cigarette packets and even the odd AOL
CD - that it'd be impressive to have an army of tiny robots
unleashed on the countryside, programmed to shred and collect
discarded cardboard, plastic and metal, taking it all back to
central depots for recycling. They'd get hit by cars a lot, no doubt, but any
debris would just be detected as litter and gathered by the next
drone that passed by.
I daresay it'd be more achievable than trying to teach people not to
instinctively throw things away the second they've finished
with them. And hunting down the robots that had gone rogue after a
non-fatal car smash, raging around the countryside assaulting
road-signs and wildlife, could well be a new and fashionable
replacement for fox-hunting.
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I was raging at some
spectacularly
ill-informed journalism in the Observer
yesterday, reporting on the news that humankind has rather fewer genes
than we once suspected, and how - contrary to what we all thought
yesterday - we aren't soulless genetic automata, living in a world
on the brink of letting criminals off for having a naughty genetic structure,
after all. Or something.
"Take the example of colon cancer. People say there is a gene that
predisposes us to the disease. [...] But that gene is found in cells in
every part of the body. However, it is only the colon where we find all
sorts of toxins and bacteria that provides the harsh circumstances that
final causes that gene to finally break down and for cancer to spread."
In short, it is not a colon cancer gene but a gene that affects our
ability to respond to the environment.
So it's a gene that causes cancer only in the colon, but it's not a colon
cancer gene. Any gene that has an effect on our bodies is by
definition something that affects our ability to respond to our
environment. Bah.
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