Underblog.co.uk

5000 words left. One and a half days left.

Back soon.

Earlier this week, BBC News 24 accidently interviewed Guy Kewney’s cab driver about the Apple vs. Apple verdict instead of Guy Kewney. Watch the cabbie’s face as he realises what’s happened, and witness his admirable effort to ramble and bullshit his way to the end of the interview. The Daily Mail tracked down the video.

—Update: Now uploaded to YouTube. You really have to see it.

—Update 2: Click on the thumbnail on the left for that reaction again, and again, and again. He really is a star. This GIF was produced by someone called mojoworkin.

The BBC now has a story on this. It clarifies that the man they interviewed was not, in fact, a taxi driver, but Guy Goma — an economics and business studies graduate from the Congo. Guy was at the BBC for a job interview.

Behold the atheist’s worst nightmare. But what about coconuts?

Some banana facts which that Ned Flanders guy might not know:

The banana plant is not a tree, but actually classed as a giant herb, because it does not have a woody stem.

Wild bananas, native to the jungles of south-east asia, have less pulp than cultivated varieties and are full of large seeds. Between 7000 and 10,000 years ago, rare triploid mutants were discovered and cultivated by hunter-gatherers.

In normal diploid species the sex cells get one of the two copies that are present of each chromosome. A triploid plant has three of each chromosome instead of the normal two, and so seldom produce eggs or sperm with balanced numbers. This makes the bananas sterile and lacking in seeds. The odd one occurs very occasionally, but the dark coloured bits down the centre of the fleshy part of the fruit are all that normally is evident of the vestigial seeds. After bearing fruit the banana plant produces side-shoots at the base of the stalk, called suckers, which must be removed and planted to propagate the variety.

Because the bananas we eat cannot have sex (umm, not with each other anyway - stop sniggering at the back), there is little genetic diversity within a variety. Being unable use sexual reproduction as a way of shuffling the genetic deck makes bananas extremely vulnerable to disease. The Gros Michel variety was the major exported variety of banana until about 1950. It is no longer grown commercially due to susceptability to Panama disease, which is caused by a soil fungus. Today it has been replaced by the Cavendish, which many say is neither as sweet nor as rich as the Gros Michel.

The banana is in serious danger. The Cavendish, and most other varieties, some used as staple crops in much of Africa, are vulnerable to another fungal disease called black Sigatoka. Fungicides are relied on more and more, and are having a decreasing effect against the disease. Panama disease has also reappeared in a new and virulent form which attacks the Cavendish. Because the disease is spread by a soil fungus, rather than attacking the leaves like black Sigatoka, fungicides cannot control it. The Cavendish has been wiped out in several Asian countries, but the disease has not yet spread to the Americas. What if it does? Yes, in the future we may have no bananas.

Banana breeders are in a race against time. And banana breeding is not fun. You have to hand-pollinate hectares of banana plantation, and then seive through hundreds of tonnes of banana just to find single digit numbers of seeds. A new resistant hybrid has been developed, but neither western supermarkets nor peasant farmers like it much. It is said to taste more like an apple than a banana. Only Cuba, which cannot afford expensive fungicides, grows it on a large scale.

The other option is genetic engineering. A project to sequence the genome of a wild banana species was announced in 2001, and the first phase completed last year. Many of the wild, sexually reproducing banana species are resistant to the fungal diseases and 20 genes have been identified which may help in creating new resistant species of seedless banana. But the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation has recently warned that many Indian species of wild banana are becoming extinct due to loss of habitat, and with them we might be losing genes that could save the edible varieties.

So to summerise, perhaps the banana is an atheists nightmare. It will greatly please our Ned Flanders to learn the bananas he admires so much have probably not evolved much for thousands of years, because they do not get involved in all that sinful sexual reproduction malarky. Unfortunately the funguses do evolve, and the vast monocultures planted world-wide have been devastated by the diseases they cause. If we want to continue to eat bananas, we may have to play God ourselves, and intelligently design a new GM variety.

Even the man whose “opinion” (but not his “advice”, remember) was used as the legal justication of the Iraq invasion has decided to speak out against the Guantánamo Bay detention centre.

It is time, in my view, that it should close. Not only would it, in my personal opinion, be right to close Guantánamo as a matter of principle, I believe it would also help to remove what has become a symbol to many - right or wrong - of injustice. — Lord Goldsmith, Attorney General, 10th May 2006

Here’s what some other people think:

I have said this before, I think it is an anomaly and you cannot maintain it forever. It is obviously a difficult situation. I think most people recognise at some point this has got to be brought to an end.—Tony Blair, PM, 22nd November 2005

I would prefer that it wasn’t there. I would prefer it was closed, yes. —Peter Hain, Northern Ireland secretary, 16th February 2006

I am absolutely clear that the US has no intention of maintaining a Gulag in Guantánamo Bay. They want to see the situation resolved and they would like it other than it is. However, that is the situation that they have. —Jack Straw, foreign secretary, 21st February 2006

After Hain’s comment earlier this year, Blair was invited to agree. He declined to go further than his already stated position that Guantanamo was an “anomaly” that would have to end “sooner or later”. So why has Goldsmith decided that “it is time” to speak up now, and what will be Blair’s response to his latest proffered opinion? Is it a sign of Blair’s weakness, or is Goldsmith acting on orders? Perhaps we shall see tomorrow.

I very much would like to end Guantánamo; I very much would like to get people to a court. —George Bush, U.S. President, 7th May 2006

Seems everyone wants Guantánamo closed these days. And yet it remains…

Jack Straw is a lying bastard. However, for some time he has at least been offering reassurance to those concerned about the possibility of us plunging into another doomed war in the middle east:

“I don’t see any circumstances in which military action would be justified against Iran, full stop.” — Straw, November 2004

He repeatedly said that that a military attack on Iran would be “inconceivable”, something which Blair will not endorse with quite the same emphasis. So what will Margaret Beckett’s position be on Iran? It seems unlikely that the new foreign secretary will be quite as categorical as Straw. David Frum, the neo-con and former Bush speechwriter credited as the originator of the term “axis of evil”, gloats:

Straw was a prominent figure in the Labour party; Beckett owes her rise entirely to Tony Blair. The prime minister is replacing a foreign secretary whose weak words impeded successfully coercive negotiations with Iran with one much more beholden to him.

Incidentally, Frum is even more delighted about the demise of Clarke who, apparently, “tried to keep social peace with an alarming series of concessions to sharia and British Islamism”.

Of course, if Blair goes soon, there will be another shuffle of the ministerial deck by the new leader. It would be rather nice, wouldn’t it, if Brown’s cabinet were to wipe the smile from Frum’s face.

Hi, first post for months, but I intend to revive this blog over the next few weeks.

Latest news is that Charles Clarke has been replaced at the home office by John Reid. This may therefore be the last excuse for me to post these two remarkably similar pictures. Can you tell which is which?

I don’t want to fall into the trap that Backing Blair outlined earlier this morning of being distracted by a reshuffle when the real story is of Labour’s disasterous local election results. But here’s just one prediction: after a couple of months of John Reid, we’ll be clamouring for Pob Charles Clarke’s return. Reid will be even more contemptuous of civil liberties (except for the freedom from getting blown up, of course) than Clarke.