“Fuck off”, I reply.

Believe in the Lord Jesus Christ and you will be saved, the sign continues, undeterred.

I pass by, angered by the rudeness of an unknown evangelist interrupting my train of thought with a crude threat during what is otherwise a fairly calm and relaxing drive. Whatever became of this announced crackdown on motorway advertising?

Later, I stop at Moto services. What with food price rises and the bursting of the housing bubble, a unappetising bite at motorway services can set you back nearly 27% of the value of the average home, so I decide just to make use of the facilities. Whilst doing so, I read the advert above the urinal. It informs me that the coffee shop doesn’t just serve coffee, but that “frappés” are also available. There is a photo of an iced strawberry drink. So far, so dull. But the disclaimer that intrigues me: “Photo for illustration purposes only”. I wonder what other purpose a photo would serve, and what legal protection the advertisers think the disclaimer affords them. I am not about to mistake a photo for the real thing. This is quite clearly not a frappé, but a picture of a frappé (and come to think of it, I wouldn’t drink from a frappé I found above a urinal in the gents anyway). Of course the photo is for illustration purposes. And presumably saying so does not negate the requirement for it to be an accurate illustration. So why the disclaimer?

When I return to my car, I wonder if a disclaimer could be added to the Christian hoarding. “Implicit threat for rhetorical purposes only”, perhaps.

But now I’m confused, because today they ran a “story” on somebody called Dakota Fanning, which basically amounted to “Look at this really fit 14 year-old girl!”

Don’t feel dirty, it’s not your fault, they seem to say. She “looked mature beyond her 14 years”. And besides, she’s not really a child any more, she has “passed the awkward stage” (with flying colours, no less!).

It’s almost up there with the notorious Daily Star which ran an outraged story on the Brass Eye “Paedogeddon” special directly opposite a picture of a 15 year-old Charlotte Church to show how big her tits had gotten.

I left a comment on the Daily Mail story mentioning something about mixed messages, but it won’t get through their comment moderation policy.

UPDATE:
Facetious snipes here, or a proper argument from septicisle? I know which I prefer.

I’ve never understood why it is necessary, in a modern society, to have a 24 hour day. Now, you may think that these things are pretty much decided by astronomical phenomena, but think about it. Electric lights and blackout curtains were both invented years ago; there’s no real need for us to be awake at daytime and asleep during the night. And no-one likes getting up in the mornings, so why not just make the day 20 minutes longer? It would mean a 20 minutes lie-in every morning! And it wouldn’t be completely without precedent. We mess about with British Summer time every year, and that’s far more annoying. At least if it happened every day nobody would forget.

Alas, we have to deal with the world as it is, not as it could be, and these days I don’t have the freedom to get up whenever I like. But my extended circadian rhythm still causes me to be bright eyed and bushy tailed at some funny times, especially at weekends and during holidays. Now on the one hand I love the night. It’s quieter, less crowded and more mysterious than daytime, which has always been a little in-your-face. But the night can sometimes be, well, boring. I like to imagine that in big cities, there are bars and cafés where fellow creatures of the night gather to drink, read and - I dunno - listen to Gordon Haskell’s How Wonderful You Are on loop. In my town, there’s just Tesco (handy, but restockers clanging cage trolleys together is not really a pleasant sound, and the place isn’t exactly mood-lit) and, on Fridays and Saturdays only, late showings of films at an out-of-town Showcase cinema. Is there nowhere else I can go?

There’s always the internet, of course.

Perhaps you don’t understand the meaning of the word “meal”? You were thinking of food, weren’t you? Fool. A meal is not food. A meal is the lack of food. It’s the absence of something to eat. It’s a problem.

Thankfully, like most problems in life, the meal problem goes away if you pay someone enough. In this case you pay Tesco, and in return you get one of these.

Or if you’re feeling a little mediterranean, you could go for

Commonly known by human beings as pizza, or, if you want to be particularly vague in order to include pasta with a stir-in sauce, italian meals.

It’s time to put a stop to this sort of thing. I’m perfectly happy for corporate and marketing types to smarm on to each other about “filing solutions” or “payroll solutions” in their special tossy language, but when it starts impacting my customer meal solution selection and purchasing experience, I think it’s time for action.

A blog post it is then.

It’ll be the first time I’ve got to help choose a cat, and something is bothering me. We’ll be going to look at rescued ones, because that seems like the right thing to do. But how exactly do you choose a cat? I mean, do you go for one most in need? Because that’s surely going to be the scarred, disfigured and deeply troubled creature on death row that everybody else ignores. Or do you go for the adorable fluffy kitten you really want? I mean, is it true compassion if it’s only offered to cute animals who promise to entertain you by playing amusingly with bits of string? Anyway, you know the kitten doesn’t actually need rescuing at all because any person with half a heart and space for a litter tray would jump at the chance to welcome it into their family.

And that’s the thing. In this country we do have this demented notion that pets are family. And since I’m not an American celebrity it doesn’t seem right to just go on a trip with the intention of coming home with a new family member. Normally, you get to choose one member of your family at most — and that’s only because you’ve got to have sex with that one.

Yeah, I’m back. What of it?

Thinking of cats, have you seen the youtube video of a cat that can say “hello”? See below for weirdness.

Back soon.

—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.