02.28.07
Darwin’s bulldog was a postmodernist?
Can this be right?
[Richard Sykes] says things are no different today from the 1850s, when TH Huxley, then dean of the Royal School of Mines, said science was a myth that was engendered by the malevolent to disturb the innocent.
TH Huxley? The science populariser who’d rather be the offspring of apes than a man afraid to face the truth? Weird.
02.26.07
I mean, that really got out of hand fast
02.25.07
Bless
Goldacre you evil bastard, Gillian McKeith is feeling bullied.
Now it may be ludicrously obvious to point out the irony here but, well, ludicrous obviousness is pretty much my stock in trade, so fuck it.
This is a woman who goes on TV and makes “an obese woman cry, in her own back garden, by showing her a tombstone with her own name on it, made out of chocolate”, who said to another “‘Do you want to see your daughter get married and have babies? Because the way things are going you’ll have a heart attack at 40″.
She’s made a career out of making fat people cry, so just let the satisfaction flow:
“I feel like I’m being bullied,” the 46-year-old told Closer magazine. “You’d think I was trying to perform brain surgery. I’ve never tried to pretend I’m medically qualified [ahahahahahahahahaha!]- I’m entitled to use ‘Dr’ because I have a PhD in Holistic Nutrition, which I studied for four years to get.”
Ahhhhhh.
(little update: ‘McKeith feels bullied’ link via Butterflies and Wheels.)
02.22.07
‘Chimps fashioning tools to jab at smaller primates’
A sentence bordering on poetry, that, and a cool discovery to boot. I’ve read about them using reeds to fish for termites and stones to break open nuts, but you can’t really call yourself a tool user until you’ve carefully selected a raw material, trimmed it and lovingly fashioned it, then used it to beat the crap out of a passing animal, can you?
02.19.07
Why I am no fun to be out with
Me and Anna went to see the Killers last night, who were very good and blundered but once: when you have two songs capable of bringing the place down – Somebody Told Me and Mr Brightside – surely common sense dictates that you save one for the encore?
Anyway, the band are doing their thing and Anna’s bopping away, and then it happens. I lean over to her and say:
“Look how many thousands of people are here just at this one gig. You could fit all the mountain gorillas left on the planet just into block bloody 6 over there.”
As I bought the tickets, she was paying for all the beer – this may or may not have had something to do with this little outburst.
02.16.07
Yes Wii do
*throttles self for making a Wii pun after solemnly swearing to never do such a thing*
02.14.07
Can it be?
Is the insightful Richard Littlejohn an even bigger prick than I thought possible? I’ve not read a single word of the muppet’s blitherings for ages now, and ah, it has been bliss. Then one random click (ok, not random -I saw his name on Chicken Yoghurt and couldn’t help myself) and my mind it is boggling:
“That doesn’t make it justifiable homicide, but in the scheme of things the deaths of these five women is no great loss.
They weren’t going to discover a cure for cancer or embark on missionary work in Darfur. The only kind of missionary position they undertook was in the back seat of a car.”
Dead prostitutes, who gives a shit, eh? You’ve got to cure cancer or, oh, say, write a load of mind-buggeringly feeble bias-confirming right-wing drivel on a weekly basis before your brutal murder is worth anything other than a shrug. And he follows up with a stack of bollocks straight out of the Religious Fundamentalist’s Guide to Not Feeling Bad About Anything:
“We are all capable of free will. At any time, one or all of them could have sought help from the police, or the church, or a charity, or a government agency specifically established to deal with heroin addicts. They chose not to.”
First the murders are tragic, then the victims are disgusting, they’re on the streets because they want to be, then the lefties have to realise that drugs ruin lives, one minute it’s moral outrage and the next it’s bloke-down-the-pub jokes about slappers and massage parlours, and ultimately, dontcherknow, what Littlejohn finds most objectionable about this whole thing is the attempt to make us all feel responsible for the murders, which I must have missed, but then I have been off the internet for a while. And it’s all in the aid of one of his piss-weak jokes about Blair reeled off in the last paragraph. It really is the most incoherent, disgusting, now-I-mean-it-now-I-don’t odious stack of shit I’ve read by him or possibly anyone.
02.12.07
Such fun
Easily the most entertaining thing I’ve read for a while – Ben Goldacre’s extensive takedown of Dr. Gillian McKeith. We occasionally rib my dad about the fact that he once bought something called ‘DNA Vitamins’ off t’internet (“well, perhaps he wasn’t getting enough DNA in his diet,” and such other sidesplitters) and it’s both amusing and depressing to see millionaire TV personalities saying similar with a straight face:
“She says DNA is an anti-ageing constituent: if you “do not have enough RNA/DNA”, in fact, you “may ultimately age prematurely”. Stress can deplete your DNA, but algae will increase it: and she reckons it’s only present in growing cells. Is my semen growing? Is a virus growing? Is chicken liver pate growing? All of these contain plenty of DNA.”
Satisfying though a carefully administered takedown is, you can’t beat good old-fashioned abuse, so here’s a tribute to McKeith from Charlie Brooker:
…she’s incapable of smiling naturally on camera (the rictus grin in her official photo makes her look like she’s trying to poo out a pine cone – which, given her diet, she probably is).
Oh, and unrelatedly, it’s Darwin Day. Act accordingly.
02.03.07
Sweet Relief
If I were to attempt to convey the frustration of relying on heavily surf-controlled office internet access (plus a few snatched moments at university) for 6 weeks whilst waiting for t’broadband to be installed at home, I wouldn’t have time to eat it (paraphrasing Zaphod Beeblebrox is not for the faint-hearted). Today, thankfully, we are a fully connected household and I can ditch all this bloody coursework and revision and start wasting time online again.
As an example of the sort of thing the absence of which has torn daily at my soul (please note in the comments whether or not that makes sense), here’s a top 25 Futurama moments, via Rory, that reminded me of what I think is my favourite line:
“While you were gone the Trotters held a news conference to announce that I was a jive sucker.”
Class.
