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| Survival
Research Laboratories and their robot that
launches 6-foot
wooden planks at 120mph - this is the sort of thing Robot
Wars should really be about; dramatic and violent mutual demolition
is the one thing that robots are insentiently ideal for. Monsters such as
this and
this
are far more worthwhile than clunky tin boxes rotary-sawing little scratches
on one another's casing.
Very hard to get venues, though. They're actually offering to stage
events for free, for anyone who can get one sorted out. Surely some
television people could arrange something?
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| Martin
challenges my sniping at Big Brother for being the Worst Thing In
The World - yes, lazy demonisation on my part, but it does seem the
depressing figurehead of cheap, meaningless, over-hyped television,
all the worse for the cynical tabloid enthusiasm. Having sat in
a living room with three silent, intelligent people watching
a group of childlike televisual strangers talk drivel, it's easy
to see Big Brother as an unworthwhile and ominous direction.
But this is far cry, I hope, from tarring its viewers. Dislike and
distrust particular thoughts or actions, but judge individual people
as a whole. I hate people who generalise. All of them.
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| It's easy to forget how astonishing fossils are, the unimaginably
vast time they've been waiting underground, and the fact that they're
not really as rare as you feel they should be. You can
buy a 550-million-year-old
trilobite online, for a tenner, and more besides. Quietly
astounding.
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| Strange - NTK
quote me on the subject of crunchy Twixes, but from an
email I sent them some six months ago. [via
Matt]
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Brass Eye
complaints top 1,500; applause remains unmeasured.
A refreshingly brave look at the hypocrisies and stupidities of the media's treatment
of paedophilia, and thoroughly important
destruction of meaningless
rent-a-quote celebrities. Some uncomfortable material, but all with
a very sharp point to make, and I appreciate television that provokes a
reaction from me, dammit. If the nation's only allowed to watch programmes which
1,500 people don't complain about, we should all get on the phone about
other
things.
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| "Shtop!" says the latest of those irritating and increasingly
less coherent beer adverts, "This bride isn't ready yet!" Not
because she's underage (not that I was expecting that, or
anything, Thought Police), but because she's a chimpanzee.
Because chimpanzees are fated to evolve into human beings, of
course. We are the inevitable pinnacle of evolution. Graagh. I
wonder if the ASA
heeds complaints on the basis of lazy, polluting ignorance.
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| Man
imprisoned for seven years for having impure thoughts and
writing them into a private journal. I trust the thought-police
officers who read the journal were good enough to turn themselves in,
as well. And so on. Moral: Don't write things down, and lie.
[via Raven]
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| Aha! The oven-shrunken plasticky technology I spoke of yesterday
is not lost to mankind; Ole has such
a keyring of his daughter's handprint, and Suzie
is able to give the dark art a name. Which also turns out to be the
URL of a cheery manufacturer Web site. My god.
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| Ech. Cook'd
and Bomb'd were fibbing when they said the new Brass Eye
special was about Internet rumour-mongering, the scamps. Today's
G2 had an
article revealing that it's about media paedo-hysteria after all,
with some gloriously unmakeupable celebrity feed-quotes to prove it:-
"Genetically, paedophiles have more genes in common with crabs than they do with you or me. Now that's scientific fact. There's no real evidence for it, but it is scientific fact."
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