Underblog.co.uk

OK, I’m getting scared now — not of animal rights activists, but of activist animals. Just a few days after reports surface of terrorist monkeys in India, we learn from the Guardian that there have been repeated breakouts of sheep from a field in Marsden, a town in the Pennines. According to a vigilant local councillor, the sheep have become expert at crossing the cattle grids that are meant to contain them:

I’ve seen them doing it and they’re clever. They lie down on their side, or sometimes their back, and roll over the metal grids until they are clear.

It is thought that the sheep have set up training camps to teach the commando roll tactic. The councillor, a Ms Dorothy Lindly, claims that it’s a “serious problem”. “What are they doing once they escape?”, I hear you ask. Attacking old ladies? Stealing our jobs? Planning suicide attacks?“They make a mess of people’s gardens.”
Shocker.

This is becoming a worrying trend: there are growing concerns of similar threats from cows with guns (flash video)

He mooed we must fight, escape or we’ll die
Cows gathered around, cause the steaks were so high.

and sinister ducks (mp3 by Alan Moore, hosted legally by Neil Gaiman).

Look closer and you may recoil in surprise
at web-footed fascists with mad little eyes!

Am I perhaps the last person in the world to see JibJab’s This Land? I heard about it on Channel 4 news for god’s sake. I’m so not with it. Still, it’s bloody good.

More monkey news today: The Times of India reports that residents in some areas of the Indian state of Uttar Pradesh are coming under increasingly violent attack from thuggish simians. Many people have been bitten and others have taken to carrying sticks and stones around with them with which to defend themselves in case of attack.

The problem that was a simple nuisance a couple of months ago, has now turned into an ever-looming horror for them as the battalion now charges at the residents even inside their flats and very often inflict severe injury

Underblog can only speculate as to the cause of the increase in aggressive behaviour, but a couple of years ago several chimpanzee populations became agitated by suggested similarities between the facial features of chimps and George Bush.

Also, The Guardian reports that recently released documents from the British National Archives reveal Winston Churchill’s wartime concern over the population size of the Barbary Apes of Gibraltar, which are actually a type of tail-less monkey rather than ape. Superstition held that were the monkeys to leave the rock the British Empire would fall. The Barbary Apes have had a more recent role in global politics: When the government of Morocco offered the US 2000 landmine-detecting monkeys to help in the war in Iraq, it was Barbary Apes who would have been drafted.

I’ve written of my thoughts on monkeys before. There’s a story in the news at the moment about a macaque in an Israeli zoo who has abandoned walking on all fours in favour of a bipedal gait after recovering from a severe illness. Monkeys usually alternate between the two walking styles. It is thought the change in behaviour may be a result of brain damage.

In other primate news, the New Scientist reports that, like humans, chimps suffer from “contagious” yawning. Here’s a pic of a yawning chimp.

Tim Ireland, the man who got the first MP blogging, successfully campaigned for email access to the prime minister and all-round good egg has officially returned to blogdom, if not yet to activism.

I have of late, wherefore I know not, been enjoying listening to xfm’s Ricky Gervais and Steve Merchant archives. The pair, who wrote The Office, used to have a weekly slot on the station and many of the shows have been made available online.

If you’re between the ages of 12 and 25 and want to grow taller, this company claims to have just the thing. It is a “all-natural combination of vitamin, minerals and amino acids” that will make you grow 10-25% faster than you otherwise would. Oh, and it’s complete bollocks, of course. If you’re going to set up a scam, you could at least make it convincing.

This product works for adolescents and young adults between the ages of 12 and 25 only. We could easily say that this product is for everyone in an attempt to sell more of it, but that would be a disservice to you, and tarnish our outstanding reputation.

Well, Heightmax, that outstanding reputation of yours might be slightly compromised by your answers on the FAQ page:

Yes, you can take HeightMax if you are under 12 years old. You will simply take half the dosages required for adults and you will be fine.
Some of our customers have used HeightMax well past their 26th or 27th birthdays. HeightMax has proven to be very effective in keeping their body in good shape and some even reported mild height increases in those years.

Finally, I read in a Simon Hoggart sketch, that David Blunkett (the British home secretary, who happens to be blind) said something slightly bizarre in the house of commons on Monday:

I’ve almost forgotten what he looks like.
—Blunkett, of David Davis, who had been away for two weeks

Last week the family and I spent a few days in the Lake District. I didn’t have as miserable a time as I was expecting. Anyway, in Keswick, I was flicking through a guide book in a tourist-ey shop and noticed a note about Castlerigg stone circle, apparently only a short drive away. So off we went.

The site was fairly simple. There was a little road-side parking space and a gate in the hedge on the other side of the country lane. Just through the gate there was a small National Trust sign with a little information and donation box. About fifty metres into the field, surrounded by sheep, there were 38 stones, forming a circle about 10 metres in diameter. They blew my mind.

The circle isn’t actually very circular, and some of the stones mark out an inner rectangle jutting into the squashed circle from one side. (There was a ram mounting a sheep a short distance away.) The flat top of the low hill where the circle stands is surrounded on most sides by magnificent fells, and the horizon all around appears to mirror the stone circle. I felt I knew why that place might have been considered significant by the people who made it. (On closer inspection the ram was actually two lambs, and they were suckling rather than shagging — I’d make a pretty bad farmer.)

Stone circles are unique to the British Isles and northern France. I’d only really heard of Stonehenge before, but there are actually hundreds of the bloody things (although the horizontal lintels placed atop the vertical pillars are unique to Stonehenge and, amazingly, the Stonehenge stones were mined 150 miles from the monument) . They were all built in neolithic times, between 3000BC and 1200BC, by the predecessors of the Celts. They predate european written history (although chinese writing dates back to around 2200BC). So for almost two thousand years, while the chinese were scribbling away on papyrus, our ancestors felt the need to drag massive rocks around the country and arrange them into circles. Frankly, I don’t know whether to be proud or embarrassed. We Brits have spent over a third of our history since 3000BC building these things. The circle-builders weren’t heavy-browed club-wielding cavemen, they were modern human farmers, only 160 generations ago, who had the strength, determination and sheer bloody-mindedness to make them. Some of them are almost certainly related to me, but personally, I probably couldn’t have been arsed.