Underblog.co.uk

My room-mate, Tommy, is disgusting. (I shall refer to Tommy as “he”, although to be honest it’s hard to be certain of “his” sex). Firstly, although he doesn’t like tap water because it contains too many “chemicals”, he is perfectly happy to drink rain-water. Normally though, he drinks mineral water, which really annoys me. Bottled water is probably the biggest con in the history of the world. Has no-one else noticed what evian spells backwards? It is hundreds of times more expensive than tap water and not really any better for you. In transporting the stuff around the world, tonnes and tonnes of CO₂ are released into the atmosphere, and yet the same product is available from a tap in the next room. I suspect Tommy actually quite likes the idea of more CO₂.

I’ve never seen Tommy go for a wash. In fact he hardly ever moves at all except to eat. His odour is so strong that he attracts flies (seriously!). Now this is the really filthy bit: I’ve actually seen him catch one of the flies and eat it. Now I’m normally quite open-minded and tolerant, but I think it’s fair to say that Tommy belongs in a swamp.

I did ask if I could take a photo of him for my blog, but he didn’t respond. I took it anyway.

Underblog here bringing you the latest MonkeyNews. The Tokyo Galley is now showing paintings by Asuka, a three year old chimpanzee.

The chimp’s painting style is seldom subtle. She attacks the canvas, whacking it with a stiff brush, but usually keeps her strokes within its boundaries. Asuka seems to favor yellow and red — the colors of her favorite foods, bananas and apples. Her minders say she seems to draw satisfaction from her work.

Pakistan’s Daily Times has the full story.

Another great ape, who goes by the moniker “underblog”, is returning to university at the weekend. I hope to be able to continue blogging but if it comes down to a choice of either pissing around on the internet or getting a degree, I hope I shall have the will-power to make the correct one.

Finally, check out the surreal antics of UKIP “star” Robert Kilroy-Silk, aka the orange slimey creep off the telly. (Requires flash, NSFW)

–Update: You can see some photos of Asuka painting here. To be honest, she’s rubbish.

“If you look at our conference agenda here, there is a lot of technical-speak that still comes through in our motions”
– Charles Kennedy, at the Liberal Democrat party conference yesterday.

“Well, it is well known that politicians talk through their arses”
– My Mum, who, as a nurse often required to perform enemas, has a rather scatological sense of humour.

All things bright and beautiful, all creatures great and small, all things wise and wonderful: the Lord God made them all. If that’s so, the Big Guy (God used to be a woman, but she changed her mind) was obviously not on form when he came up with the Tipulidae family, also known as crane fly or daddy longlegs.

Some animals (and for some reason monkeys come to mind at this point) are absolutely first rate. Others, such as pigeons, are middling at best. I should imagine that occasionally the Almighty felt like having a bit of a laugh. Hence the duck, penguin and hamster: all quite obviously joke animals. Now I know he’s omniscient and everything, but I cannot imagine what was going through the creator’s mind when he came up with the crane fly.

The crane fly as a piece of engineering is piss-poor. If you breathe on one it will, more often than not, fall apart. They have smallish wings which barely carry the weight of their dangly legs, so you’ll often see them bouncing along the floor or lawn, not quite able to get airbourne.

They are, like a few other insects, annoyingly stupid when it comes to bright lights. There must have been an executive crane fly commitee some point that decided they were overwhelmingly in favour of them. That decision has caused the needless deaths of countless daddy longlegs. I’ve known rooms that have attracted over 30 individuals in one evening through one very small window. That’s 30 creatures that finished their lives in a hoover. Now, it seems obvious to me that if you like light then you probably shouldn’t be nocturnal. Such reasoning is clearly beyond the crane fly’s mental abilities.

I could overlook all these shortfalls if the things didn’t look so bloody stupid. Limbs of that length are, by any sensible definition, ridiculously out of proportion. I find myself getting angry at just how rubbish they are. As adults, they live for such a short time that most of them don’t even eat anything past the larval stage. I just don’t see the point.

Now here’s the killer: There are around 300 species of crane fly in the British Isles. In the world, There Are Over Fourteen Thousand. To create one crane fly species is forgivable; to create 14,000 is just careless. Welcome to autumn.

Has it really been a whole week since I posted? I guess I’ve been busy filling in forms and playing Weboggle. (No link this time because Hads will get annoyed. Anyway, all the form-filling is over for the time being, so I thought I’d bring you this from a recent news article:

The thief threatened children with bricks and ripped the buttons off shirts. He stole tomatoes from one home and snatched bread from another. Down the street, he briefly fled with a differential equations book and beat a calculator with his fist.

But this isn’t any old news, it’s MonkeyNews! That’s right, this week the Chicago Tribune brought us the story of a monkey jail in India, although the article can now be read (without the hassle of the Tribune’s cumpulsary registration) at the Kansas City Star.

It is illegal to kill monkeys in India, because they are considered sacred by Hindus.

A couple of flash games are taking up far too much of my time at the moment: Zookeeper and Weboggle.

Other than that, I’ve just started reading Project Orion, which is the true account of a group of serious scientists who, funded by the US government, worked from 1957 to 1964 to design a spaceship powered by Nuclear pulse propulsion. This is rather more dramatic than it might sound. Some of the details are still classified, but essentially the idea was to take 4000 tons of ship, carrying perhaps 50 people, and propel it around the solar system using nuclear explosions. It was to have carried thousands of atomic bombs to be fired out the back of the ship and detonated, and the force of the explosions on the back of the ship would have thrust it forwards. The crew would have been shielded from radiation by a massive “pusher plate” mounted on shock absorbers at the rear of the spacecraft. Apparently, the technology to build such a ship is probably available today. Please God, nobody tell George Bush!

The book is written by George Dyson, the son of Freeman Dyson who was one of the main scientists working on the project. On the cover there is a comment by Arthur C. Clarke:

One of the most awesome might-have-beens (and might-yet-bes!) of the Space Age.