Tactical Nuclear Penguin

I read in the telegraph that a Scottish brewery, BrewDog, has introduced a stout which is 32% proof. It is matured in whiskey barrels for 14 months, and then subjected to repeated freezing so that the alcohol, which freezes at a different temperature from water, can be isolated, and concentrated.  This is where the 'penguin' comes in. I can't help but feel that this is one breakthrough which Scotland - already the  drunkest nation in Europe - can do without.
I was speaking recently to a chap who has both family and a job north of the border, and he enlightened me regarding Caledonian drinking habits. Their favourite tipple - after the traditional tumbler of whisky, of course - is Buckfast Abbey Tonic wine, itself 15% proof ( and hopped up with huge amounts of caffeine).  The entire bottle is customarily swallowed in one go. This has the same effect on Scottish youths that firewater used to have on Indian braves - it sends them bonkers. It is affectionately known as 'Commotion Lotion' or 'Wreck the Hoose Juice'.
When a Scotsman wishes to sober up after such an alcoholic blitz, he scorns black coffee.  His nostrum of choice- universally believed to cool the head - is Scotland's favourite fizzy drink, Irn Bru.


Perhaps it is time for Scotland to drop the 'c' from its name.

Are they by any chance related?

The creature below is a specimen of the pink handfish. It belongs to a species found off the coast of Tasmania, and may possibly be extinct (more precisely, no-one has seen one since 1999).

Something about it seemed familiar.I puzzled over it for a few minutes, until the magic carpet of memory whisked me back to the sixties, and to a science fiction series called The Outer Limits. One of the episodes featured a species of intelligent fish. A quick search of Google images produced this fifty-year old lookalike:

An astonishing case of Nature imitating Art.

Sea Eagles over East Anglia?

They are the fourth largest eagle on earth, with an awe-inspiring wingspan of nine feet. They feed on fish, carrion, and small game. They have already been re-introduced into the Scottish highlands, and  Natural England has been given £600,00 to introduce them into eastern England. Yes, flat-as-a- pancake East Anglia could soon have this giant raptor nesting among its lofty crags. However, the naturalists are facing stiff opposition, from those  asking a simple question: what are they going to eat? Crofters in Scotland are claiming that half their lambs are being guzzled up by the birds. Farmers in England are also worried. Pet lovers are concerned for dogs and cats.  Birdwatchers are  apprehensive that threatened species like bitterns, avocets, and cranes may end up on the eagles' lunch menu. Sea Eagles in the Baltic are reported to be feeding on cormorants.
Conservationists counter with the usual arguments: Sea Eagles must have been found in East Anglia in Roman times (although there is no actual evidence of this) so they are therefore a 'native species'.
In Roman times the fen country was a vast, virtually uninhabited swamp. Now, it is drained and cultivated.  Isn't this one of those occasions when the 'precautionary principle' so popular among climate alarmists, should be adhered to?

Eager beavers drown Poles

Above: The european beaver (castor fiber ) and its distribution.

Massive floods in Poland have claimed the lives of 15 people - and beavers are partly to blame. The  rodents live in large populations along the river Vistula, and have tunneled through flood defences.
Beavers have been reintroduced into mainland Europe since the 1920's, and British evironmentalists

are eager to introduce them into Britain, arguing that as they have previously existed here, they are a natural part of the British scene.

Time for Eco-cuts

The government is to implement around six billion pounds worth of spending cuts. These will be made initially in the public sector.Among other things, civil service perks will be restricted.
This may well be a praiseworthy objective, but it pales into insignificance compared to the cuts which could be made simply by chopping some of our planned 'environmental' projects.
Take the the plan to generate a third of Britain's energy from massive wind parks. The cost of this is estimated to be a hundred billion pounds. The turbines only work 40% of the time, and will be quite unnecessary if a proposed expansion of nuclear energy goes ahead. We are not building these because there is any need, or demand, for them, but because the faceless ones at the EU demand that a certain proportion of our energy should be from 'renewable' sources. Otherwise, they will punish us with massive fines. There can hardly be a better illustration of the damage which the Greens and the EU have inflicted upon the British economy.

Pull the Other One

If ever I saw a 'news' item with snow on its boots, it is the above, which was found, or invented, by the Sunday Express.
In the first place, producing a run of new currency involves thousands of people, whose wagging tongues would soon produce something more solid than a mere rumour.
In the second, Deutschland would hardly shoot itself so painfully in the foot at a time when its leaders are desperately trying to prop up the moribund euro.
In the third, should the Mark come back into circulation,the Germans would face no task more onerous than simply over-stamping the existing euro note with the new value, much as they continually did during the past (and future?) Weimar republic.

20WV/39513A/10

The number above is a police crime number. The victim of the crime was me.
It happened yesterday afternoon. I had stopped at an ATM (above) to withdraw a tenner. No sooner had I finished pressing the buttons than a Middle-Eastern type pushed in front of me, obscuring the screen with a couple of printed forms.
"Don't use this one!" he shouted. "Broken down! Use next one!" And then he was gone.
After a second the machine disgorged a ten pound note. It looked like the stranger was wrong.So I waited for my debit card to be returned.
And waited.
No card!
Fortunately the bank involved was open, with a skeleton staff on duty to answer queries. I explained that the cash machine had apparently retained my card. The guy on duty very obligingly opened the machine, and produced two debit cards which had been retained. Neither of them was mine. It was then that I realised that I had been suckered. The supposedly interested party who had created the fuss outside had watched me key my pin number in, and then, under cover of his pieces of paper, grabbed my card as it was ejected. By the time I rang my bank from my mobile to cancel the card - only ten minutes later - my Middle-Eastern friend had already withdrawn £200 from my account.

I spent most of the rest of the afternoon in the police station, waiting for someone to take my statement. They told me, in passing, that I was the second one that day to be scammed in that fashion.
I'll be watching out for that one next time. I hope that you will be too.

The Independent Strikes Again.

I knew that the Independent was prone to print any old balderdash on 'green' topics, but it seems the rot has spread more widely. Zoe Margolis,(above) who authors a blog called Girl With A One-Track Mind, has scooped hefty libel damages from the IoS after they described her, in a headline, as a 'Hooker Who Became an Agony Aunt'. Ms Margolis, needless to say, has never followed the oldest profession.
I am reminded of the tale - possibly anecdotal, but too good to miss - of the female gynaecologist, who after giving an interview to a Canadian newspaper, was appalled to find the subsequent article introducing her as 'One of Toronto's leading abortionists'. Following her furious letter to the editor, the paper apologised and withdrew the statement. She later received a hand-written letter of apology from the editor, in which he explained that the writer had thought that 'gynaecologist' meant the same thing as 'abortionist', but that he had been unable to spell 'gynaecologist".

R.I.P. Pamela Green

Pamela Green, Britain's top glamour model in the 1950s,has passed away. She was 81, and had been suffering from leukaemia for some time. For those of us of a certain age she will be unforgettable; a reminder of an age which now seems as remote as the Victorian era.It was a time when men in raincoats queued outside dingy cinemas to see Naked as Nature Intended , her only starring vehicle, shot by her then partner Harrison Marks. It was a largely plotless film, its only raison d'etre being the inclusion of a few shots of Pam and a few other girls in the nude for the final ten minutes. Besides this, she left behind a suprising body of work on 8mm film, and countless photo sets. None of this was even remotely pornographic, but relied solely on her statuesque charms to keep the buyers happy.Nostaglic old goof that I am, I cannot resist posting a more characteristic shot of Pam in her working clothes (so to speak).

More Custard

After that short piece on Bird's Custard in yesterday's post, I came upon several examples of Bird's ads over the decades. So here, without apologies, I present "The Custard Gallery"













.. and believe me, I could have posted more!

A Stroll in the Cemetery

Through the insignificant looking alleyway above lies the path from Birmingham's historic jewellery quarter to one of the city's oldest, and least visited landmarks: Key Hill cemetery, which opened in 1836. Often, throughout the past winter, I have found myself looking down on it from the elevated track of the metro tram as it pulls up at the jewellery quarter stop. It was, invariably, deserted; bleak and lonely looking under the dripping trees.It looked so desolate I made a resolution to visit it once the weather improved, and a couple of days ago I finally made it.
It was a sunny day, though little of the light made it through the overarching canopy of trees: but above the countless graves hundreds of thousands of bluebells had bloomed,floating above the ground like a layer of azure mist. Over everything brooded a great silence, which even the brawl of traffic along Icknield Road failed to penetrate.


At intervals in the wall bounding the cemetery are stone doorways, now blocked with concrete; these were originallly the entrances to a system of catacombs (a leakage of 'noxious effluvia' from which, in Victorian times, lead to a tightening of municipal byelaws covering the sealing of coffins).

I had hoped to spot the graves of some of Birmingham's Victorian worthies,but the graves are so many, and so thickly stubbled together, that I had no hope.
Somewhere here, for example, is Harriet Martineau, that formidable nineteenth-century bluestocking considered the first woman sociologist. Here, too, is Alfred Bird. Who? I hear you ask. Well, Alfred was a chemist whose wife suffered from an allergy to eggs and yeast. He therefore invented a custard which contained neither, purely for his wife's use. Only when the stuff was accidentally fed to guests did he realise that it had a wider appeal. Yes, Alfred was the Bird in Bird's Custard.

More on that spill

I've just read an interesting article on the oil spill, which once again underlines the fact that little is really known, or predictable, about oil spills on this scale. A computer model developed by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association suggests that more than a third of the oil may already be out of the water.It also suggests that most of the benzene - a major component of oil - will rapidly vapourise. Others predict that much of the oil will sink to the bottom in the form of sediment (see image below).What many articles fail to mention is the fact that nature herself helps in the cleaning up; bacteria love crude oil and will digest much of it, leaving a tarry residue.






A bit of good news about the coalition; Cameron has appointed Frank Field MP to oversee cleaning up the benefits mess. Field is one of the few intelligent men in the House of Commons, but was sidelined by Labour because his ideas were too radical. It will be interesting to see what he comes up with.

Putting the spill in proportion

I couldn't help wincing when Tony Hayward, the beleaguered BP boss, attempted to put the current Gulf leakage into proportion. Not because he was wrong (he wasn't) but because he has handed the green lobby a sizeable stick to beat him with.
"The Gulf of Mexico is a very big ocean" he said. "The volume of oil and dispersant we are putting into it is tiny in relation to the total water volume."
If anything, he was understating. Few of us realise that natural oil spills - from undersea vents - put more petroleum into the oceans than any human activity. The biggest human disaster in recent years was the Exxon Valdez spill off Alaska, which tipped 10.8 million gallons of oil into Prince William Sound. Sounds frightful; but natural seeps in the Gulf of Mexico dump twice that amount into the sea every year, and seabed sediments off California indicate that natural submarine leakage has produced the equivalent of eight 'Exxon Valdez' spills. The diagram below - from the US National Research Council-shows the actual sources of oceanic petroleum by metric tonnes.

Watch this

I could have written about the newly announced coalition between the Conservatives and the Lib Dems, but I won't. One, because I have made my opinion of these mediocrities clear in a previous post, and two- well, it's just boring. So, from the sublime to the ridiculous:

What are you wearing on your wrist? Could it be a Rolex, a Tag Heuer timepiece or perhaps a Breitling? If so, prepare to blush.Prepare to embrace a new concept of style. Prepare for - The Sasqwatch! In case you wondered, this ad is from Cryptomundo, a site which features the latest news on yetis, sea serpents and other bizarre beasties.

R.I.P. Frank Frazetta

The death has occurred of Frank Frazetta, the renowned fantasy artist. He was 82. He died in hospital following a severe stroke at his home, and a whole world vanished with him; the world of Conan, and Tarzan; of John Carter of Mars, and Vampirella.



I first became aware of Frazetta when I was a small boy in the Fifties. He was the artist who drew Thun'da, a comic which really gripped my fickle attention. His draughtmanship was good (though not nearly as good it was to become) but what really gripped was the sense of drama he managed to infuse into every panel. All his subsequent work, even as it grew more polished, was to retain this lurid, operatic quality. He was the ideal illustrator for Robert E. Howard's Conan, and the revitalisation in the 1970s of this 1930's franchise was largely due, in my opinion, to Frazetta's spirited paperback covers. He had many imitators, but no equals.
He will be missed.

The Future Lies Ahead

Well, it's a chilly morning in mid-May, and I feel the urge to prophesy - so here goes:

1. Gordon Brown is on the way out. Admittedly, that one didn't put too great a strain on the crystal ball.
2. David Cameron is on the way out. Even if he patches up some shameful deal to stay in power, he won't last for more than a few months. The tories will never forgive him for the dog's breakfast he made of the election.
3. The EU is heading for economic breakdown. You can't get people out of debt by lending them more money. The euro is headed for parity with the chocolate button.
4. 'Global Warming' is on the way out. Shifting weather patterns will mean a cold, wet summer, this year and for years to come. The solarists were right, the carbonists were wrong.
5. Another financial crunch is imminent. The bail-outs haven't changed the underlying problems. See prediction 3, above.
6. Obama is on the way out. See prediction 5.

And with that lot off my chest, I shall return to bed, until the sun rises. If it does.

X marks the spot

Well, the election is over - and nobody won! Being a cynic (and UKIP voter) I'm not surprised it ended up as a shambles.
Quite a few acres of newsprint today are devoted to the plight of those who, in several areas, were unable to vote because they didn't turn up in time.My first thought was well, if 7.00 am until 10 pm isn't enough time for you to struggle to the polling station, you have only yourself to blame. Then I thought again. What caused this phenomenon? Why hasn't it happened in previous elections? Here is my guess, for what it's worth. I suspect that millions of people, right up to the closing moments, were determined not to vote for any of the Three Unwise Monkeys. Finally, their consciences got the better of them and out they rushed - to join a queue behind all the others who had done the same.

Having fun with wind power

Well, here goes the first(experimental) post. It's a clip from YouTube showing a wind turbine doing what wind turbines do best - breaking down! Apparently the braking device which is supposed to keep the turbine's speed down during high winds failed.