I’m old enough to have lived in a house with “outdoor plumbing”. That, by the way, is a euphemism for an outdoor toilet. In my case, it was a flush toilet with a tank on the wall near the ceiling and a chain-pull to flush, and it connected to the municipal sewer network. Many have lived with outhouses as their… Read more »
News item: Stink bugs threaten New Zealand car imports The background to this story is much more serious than you would suppose from the headline. But that’s what you get for calling an insect with a perfectly healthy Latin name (Halyomorpha halys) “stink bug”. (The seriousness of the story stems from the stink bug’s rapid global spread and its voracious… Read more »
News report: Camels banned from Saudi beauty contest over Botox The scene: an oasis in the desert, somewhere in the Middle East. At its edge, a group of lady dromedaries (camels with one hump) are grazing the scant vegetation. As they do so, a pair of Bactrian camels (two-humped camels)—tourists from Afghanistan—arrive at the oasis, stride over to the water’s… Read more »
News item: ‘Emotional support peacock’ barred from United Airlines plane Apparently, airlines around the world are beginning to suspect that people are abusing the airlines’ willingness to allow therapy animals to accompany anxious passengers. Peacocks and pigs are only two examples of therapy animals that might prompt a person to question the authenticity of passengers’ anxiety. The following is an… Read more »
So Punxsutawney Phil has performed his annual prognostication, and there are six more weeks of winter to go. Call me grumpy/cynical/party-pooper/whatever, but whoopdy flipping do! Who, outside of Gobbler’s Knob (a place that ranks up there with Bell End and Pratts Bottom for “need to change the name” attention) gives a rodent’s rectum about a grumpy rodent seeing his shadow… Read more »
Life in the south-west of England must be so exciting in the winter. Three incidents in that region caught my eye this week. Sheds News item: Driver caught with shed balanced on car in Newton Abbot The gene pool needs more chlorine, it seems. No. I take that back. Who was it said, “Don’t judge other people, or you might… Read more »
News item: Still Friends? The trouble with old sitcoms Reading the above article this week, I didn’t know whether to laugh, cry, be angry, gloat, shake my head, or just do a little sideways head-tilt that older people do when they want to do a generational comparison thing. It seems that those that grew up with “Friends” and who loved… Read more »
Apparently, we can be blinded by “science” if “science” throws some diagrams, graphs or charts in with the information being peddled. This probably isn’t surprising, if you stop to think about it. In fact, the degree of surprise decreases with the amount of time you think about it, as shown in this graph. This really is a thing, according to… Read more »
News report: Football ground street signs are wrong, says fan Folks in the UK were berating the people in charge of road signs last year for their depiction of a football (that’s the round one that people actually kick with their feet) on signs pointing to football (soccer) grounds. At the heart of the matter is the geometric impossibility of… Read more »
News headline: More people in the USA are killed by lawnmowers than by terrorists. The following are excerpts from a transcript of a speech (to be) given by future USA President Derek Benditt on New Year’s Day 2049, the eight thousandth day of his presidency. Benditt was (or more correctly, will be) a product of the Social Media age, where… Read more »