Shock and Awe

The glorious first

2009-06-03T13:11:00.000-07:00

Hurricane season is here again. That Humboldt Current is a damn shame, since it means that we don't get any hurricanes here on the West Coast. One of the best things about hurricane season is trying to guess which beachfront developments are going to get wiped out (some meteorologists make a lucrative living doing this), but imagine how much more fun it would be if we could make bets on celebrity mansions. If Tom Cruise's place were to get flattened and not Mel Gibson's, would that prove the existence of God? But if Mel Gibson's compound ended up in the Pacific Ocean, does that signify a random chance in a chaotic, creator-less Universe, or just that he should have kept his anti-semitism to himself? Maybe Jehovah thinks they're all tits, and will flatten the whole of Malibu; one can only hope.

The nature of God has been much on my mind of late, since I discovered that one can be officially 'ordained' on the internet as prophet or church elder of one's own choosing. The possibilities are endless, and to be honest I'm mildly irritated that no-one told me about it sooner. But what to call myself? I'm thinking along the lines of 'The Right Irreverend Fester Fastrousers, Keeper of the Gates to the Befowled Underpants'. I am open to suggestions though.

A typical major land-falling tropical cyclone goes through five distinct stages; depression, storm, hurricane, storm, depression. It's amazing how often meteorological phenomenon mirror my own emotions.

Yosemite's majestic giants at risk

2009-05-22T09:11:00.000-07:00

The oldest and largest tourists within California's world famous Yosemite National Park are disappearing.

The economic climate change appears to be a major cause of the loss.

The revelation comes from an analysis of data collected over 60 years by anthropologists.

They say one worrying aspect of the decline is that it is happening within one of most popular forests within the US, suggesting that even more large tourists may be dying off elsewhere.

James Sputnik and Jerry Sidebottom of the University of Critz, Indiana and Hertz van Rentl of the Yosemite Field Station of the US Geological Survey, based in El Portal, California collated data on tourist girth within the park gathered from the 1930s onwards.

Their key finding is that the density of large diameter tourists has fallen by 24% between the 1930s and 1990s, within all types of forest.

"These large, old tourists have lived centuries and experienced many boom and bust periods," says Sputnik. "So it is quite a surprise that recent conditions are such that these long-term survivors have been affected."

Tourist in Yosemite; the wider the diameter,
the more aged the tourist (J. A. Lutz)

Large tourists are not only older, but they play a distinct and important role within the local economy.

Their Winnebagos help moderate the local traffic speed, while their appetite for root beer, ice cream and overpriced plastic tat creates a unique habitat for concessionaires.

Older, larger tourists also tend to seed the surrounding area and crucially are able to withstand fires, short term economic changes and outbreaks of swine flu that can kill or weaken smaller tourists.

But the study by Sputnik's team suggests they are no longer faring well.

In a study published in Visitor Ecology and Management, the researchers collated all the data that existed on tourist girth with the Yosemite National Park. In particular, this included two comprehensive surveys: one conducted in the mid 1930s and another during the 1990s.

"Few studies like this exist elsewhere in the world because of a lack of good measurements from the early 20th Century," says Sputnik.

Including 21 species of tourist recorded by both surveys, the density of large diameter tourists fell from 450 tourists per square hectare to 340 tourists, a decline of 24% in just over 60 years. White Heads (Winnebago Arizonas), Lodgepole Pinks (Florida rinses) and Mid-west Families (Pater massivus) were affected the most. Smaller size tourists were unaffected.

"One of the most shocking aspects of these findings is that they apply to Yosemite National Park," says Sputnik. "Yosemite is one of the most visited places in the US. If the declines are occurring here, the situation is unlikely to be better in less popular forests."

Tourists of this diameter are becoming scarce

The cause is difficult to pin down, but "we certainly think that the economy is an important driver," says Sputnik.

Higher interest rates decrease the amount of cash available to the tourists. The suppression of employment also allows younger, less affluent travellers to visit (Rockjock dirtbaggus), increasing the competition for the campsites that are around.

"The decline in large-diameter tourists could accelerate as the economy in California becomes shittier by mid-century," the researchers warn in the conclusions to their study.

The impact of that is unclear.

"We know that large tourists disproportionately affect the concessionaires," says Sputnik. "But what the consequences could be of a decline in average large tourist diameter, no-one really knows."

I am now more bitter than ever that I can't get a job.

2009-05-13T13:48:00.000-07:00

There are various satellite images hung on the walls of our basement lab; whether to reduce the dungeon-like atmosphere, or to inspire us to geophysical greatness I don't know. One of our visiting students, a supposed expert in remote sensing from Beijing, asked what the large image above my desk was. I was somewhat floored by the question, coming from a PhD student in a geography department, but I hid my surprise.

'That's Australia', I replied.
'Ah, Australia'. She smiled and nodded. 'And this is South Africa, yes?' she asked, pointing to another image.
'Umm, no, that's North America.'

I have been trying to think of a pithy, caustic and pointed comment, but this one has me completely floored. Time for a new poll, I think.

You know you're a speccy twat when you know more than you've experienced

2009-04-12T14:17:00.000-07:00

It's high time I finished with Academia, I realized today. I overheard some undergrads researching for an assignment about James Dean (by researching I mean they were looking up his Wikipedia entry in the coffee shop). There were a few blanks in their knowledge that I was able to fill in for them, namely that the film released after his death was East of Eden, and that he died on the way to a car race rather than actually during the event.

It's bad enough that I need to use titbits of trivial information to impress people, but when asked whether I was a really big James Dean fan I was forced to admit that, on reflection, I have never even seen one of his films.

I'm on my way to becoming a stereotypical academic.

It's not a rejection, it's a non-financial vote of confidence

2009-03-30T14:51:00.000-07:00

Dear Fester Fastrousers,

Thank you for applying for a Postdoctoral Fellowship position with The National Institute of Clouds and Wind and Shit's Advanced Study Program. We regret to inform you that we are unable to offer you a fellowship. Please be assured of our sincere interest in your application. We had more than 10 times the number of applicants as positions available this year.

We maintain a career opportunities web site (http://www.asp.nicws.edu/opportunities.php)
that lists other postdoctoral fellowship opportunities that may be of interest to you.

Best wishes for success and fulfillment in your scientific career.

Sincerely,

Marvin Phukket
Director, NICWS Advanced Study Program

I have a growing pile of these. People telling me that I'm awesome, that my research is awesome, but they just don't feel like giving me money at the moment. Not really in the mood, I expect. At least they had the decency to tell me straight. One Salubrious East Coast Institute emailed me a few days before telling me how great they think I'll do in future, just to check my 'diversity statistics'. You can imagine the conversation. 'Fastrousers, sea ice; chop him. Wait, he might add to our diversity.... no, he's a white male, fuck him'.

At this rate I'll end up teaching Cloud Gazing 101 at a Community College.

Update!

Admissions officers have a sense of humour after all . Admittedly a sick sense of humour, but I suppose wading through thousands of almost-identical application essays will do that for anyone.

God bless us, every one.

2008-12-22T09:59:00.000-08:00

It's time for the traditional Xmas Shock & Awe gratuitous picture of a girl dressed (if you can call it that) as Santa. Nothing says 'Peace on Earth, Goodwill to all men' than a young woman wearing nothing but a red bikini, with fur trim to keep out the cold.

You know, the economy is a lot like the Virgin Mary when you think about it. She was clearly fucked by someone, but nobody is admitting to it and is instead blaming some abstract being. Meanwhile a humble tradesman called Joe the Carpenter has been left to pay the bill.

Get under my desk and I promise you the earth will move

2008-11-14T10:54:00.000-08:00

At 10am yesterday hundreds, nay millions, of Californians crawled under their desks, stuck their arses in the air and prayed for the end. This was not the result of some militant gaywise love-in to protest against California's recent constitutional ban on gay marriage, but a large-scale earthquake drill. When the sirens started, we all ducked and covered as prescribed by our 'earthquake awareness' sheets. Or at least we would have done, if we could hear the siren in our windowless basement lab.

The State of California is bankrupt, A Well-Known West Coast University is facing severe budget cuts, and a group of University-funded junior scientists are placed in a subterranean lab underneath a twelve storey building with no earthquake alert. I'm not the kind to cry 'conspiracy' willy-nilly, but, well, CONSPIRACY! I'm meeting with Governor Schwarzenegger next week, in the guise of 'student-leader in climate change'; I intend to take up the matter of our non-existent alarm then. If you want to protect genius it's no good whining to the oily-rag; one has to talk to the engineer.

Anyway, following advice from the emergency services I have developed my own 'earthquake action plan'. When my desk starts shaking for more than one second/10 mg of coffee I've had that day, my plan is to cry for mother and run helter-skelter for the nearest exit and not stop until I've reached the Pacific Ocean, sure in the knowledge that the resultant tsunami will be charging away from me and towards Japan. Ha, take that Japan, with your whalemeat and raw fish-heads and unusual sexual practices in YouTube!

A Professor shitting himself at a better-funded college. One with alarms and shit.
(Don't tell the fucker that it's only a drill.)

2008-11-04T22:22:00.000-08:00

Obama. Fuck yeah. Just don't cock it up by banging your secretary, bombing a Chinese Embassy, or invading a desert with 3 troops and half a battle-plan.

I would advise going long on the zloty

2008-10-03T17:42:00.000-07:00

People keep asking me about what I think will happen to the economy in the near future. I don't know why they keep asking me: maybe it's because I carry an air of patriarchal wisdom, or maybe it's because as an atmospheric scientist I have experience of making predictions about chaotic and turbulent systems. Mostly I think it's because I am an expert bullshitter and they actually believe that I know what I'm talking about. Now that the Business School faculty are all ruined and depressed and viewing the world through the bottom of a bottle I have no competition. It also helps that I am fairly calm about the current economic situation, since I have no money anyway.

Anyway, for those of you who do own stuff and have money and are so desperate for advice that you'll even trust me, my prediction is that by February (March at the latest), China will hold the controlling stake in USA. It's well known that China is by far the dominant investor US treasury bonds, and now that the US government has to borrow another $700bn to cover it's 'rescue plan' there will be even more opportunity for investment. (I firmly believe that the only reason Chinese regulators have stopped lending to US banks is that the Chinese government want to keep all the action for themselves). So, given that within six months the US Treasury will be effectively owned by it's creditors (i.e. China), and given that by taking on Wall Street's crappy mortgage-backed debt instruments the US government will effectively own all property in the USA, China will be the de facto owner of the USA, its banks, corporations and most of its houses.

Before that happens inflation will overtake that of even Turkey and the US Treasury will be unable to keep up with demand for dollar bills. Responsibility for minting will be handed over to the Kimberly-Clark company after they convert their toilet paper factories for the purpose. There will be regional spikes in power consumption as people realise that the nickel in their quarters is worth more on the open market than the coin's face value, and try to smelt them down in their kitchen. As the last remaining state with the resources to fund itself, Alaska will declare independence and secede from the Union, immediately auctioning off drilling rights to ANWR. Queen Sarah I will crowned in a quiet, private ceremony attended by Princes Tod, Track and Trig, and Princesses Bristol, Willow and Piper; Hello! magazine will exclusive rights to the coronation having paid an undisclosed sum.

Having assumed control of the US government, China will obviously want to streamline its investment. Guardianship of the gold reserve at Fort Knox will be put out to tender. Blackwater will win the tender by undercutting the US army's bid, and due to doubts over the army's ability to complete the contract. Many functions will be outsourced to a call centre in Hyderabad, including the IRS, the State Department and the Supreme Court. Detroit will be sold to Mexico's largest steel producer for scrap.

Unfortunately this will be to no avail, and as the US economy keeps on declining China's ownership of now-worthless US government-backed paper will eventually lead to a crisis of confidence in Asia. In the biggest takeover since Michael Milken was locked-up, Taiwan will launch a successful hostile takeover funded by an anonymous source (later found to be George Soros). The Forbidden City will be sold to the Radisson Hotels and Resorts, and Disney (Europe) will immediately begin construction of 'Kuomintang-land' on the site of the 2008 Olympic stadium.

Students visiting Tijuana for Spring Break next March are well-advised to carry plenty of cash in the form of Polish zloty's, since by that time it will probably be the only hard currency still accepted by drug-dealers, strippers and prostitutes. If you are no longer a student (and do not have the protection afforded by being tenured faculty) then my only suggestion is that you sell everything you own while it still has some value, and live on a beach in Bali and paint nudes.

Blame it on the rampant free-marketeers

2008-09-19T13:51:00.000-07:00

I've been very busy writing my dissertation, which is why I've not posted much lately. My research was going nowhere fast, so I decided to take a leaf out of Wall Street's book. I now have a completed dissertation that is founded on nothing but speculation and wild optimism, which leaves my reputation catastrophically exposed. However, because it is over 180,000 words long and makes draws on almost every other mainstream academic discipline, it has been deemed by Ben Bernanke to be 'Too Big to Fail'.

I expect my doctorate certificate and a check for $5 billion to arrive poste haste.

Jesus wept the English are stupid

2008-07-21T19:42:00.000-07:00

As you know, I like to think of myself as a man of the people. Actually that isn't true; for the most part I despise people and have no wish to be associated with them whatsoever. Still, it's always good to know what the enemy is thinking, so I have been keenly following public opinion these last few weeks. The medium through which I have been gauging it is the exciting world of the interactive BBC. Jesus wept the British are stupid. I thought that the Americans had some strange and xenophobic viewpoints, but I am forced to admit that for really unimaginative, small-minded, ill-informed and self-interested bigotry my countrymen win hands down. If the groundswell of opinion represented is to be believed then every problem in England that has occurred since Churchill's death is the fault of knife-wielding teenagers, unwashed 'immigruntZ' (sp), Gordon Brown and above all 'the PC Brigade'. I don't really know what the 'PC Brigade' is, I can only garner that it is some kind of Marxist terrorist organisation staffed by one-legged black lesbians with the express aim of ruining the good honest working Englishman through some kind of ninja weapon called 'stealth taxes'.

I have become pretty good at predicting the general form of any of these online debates. A discussion on government measures to combat youth crime is almost certain to provoke a braying mob calling for a return to the birch, hanging, and compulsory military service, and nary a comment on the wisdom (or otherwise) of arming and training youths who have been convicted of violent offences. (There is a peculiar misconception in the UK that military training instills respect and discipline. I challenge people with this view to visit Catterick or Aldershot on a Saturday night). A recent issue asked the question 'with oil prices spiralling upwards, the government has backtracked on plans to increase fuel duty. So when the economy is in trouble, are the conditions right to push an environmental message?' Frankly, I am amazed that some of these people can remember how to breathe, never mind type (badly) their ludicrous brainfarts into a computer. Certainly they can't do both at the same time, which puts in my mind the image of some retired colonel hitting a keyboard with a single digit in between indignant gasps of air.

We only green when prices go up. If prices were as cheep as 1950 we wouldnt think twice, fact! The only reason why they encourage recycling is because of the price local government have to pay for old quaries and old open cast mines in which to put it all in. Its nothing to do with Turtles and plastic bags etc, its to do with COST and they label it with being green because the councils are losing a fortune removing your trash. Being Green is good, WE should have done this 20yrs ago they new this

TryTo HelpUsee, Avalon, United Kingdom

I don't understand either; I think he's saying that if only we could still get a pound of potatoes for two-and-six like in the '50s, we wouldn't think twice about putting Turtles into open-cast mines. I think.

This is the whole green idea they want us to live a meek lifestyle,

Mr Wideboy, Oxford, United Kingdom

I could be wrong, but I don't think that Jesus had climate change in mind when he said that the meek would inherit the Earth.

If the government wanted to reduce fuel emissions, it would be opening cottage hospitals & village schools, & tearing down out of town shopping centres, not doing what it is doing which is the exact opposite; forcing us into our cars. This proves that their 'green' argument is purely about justifying more taxes. Also, if they want to cut fuel usage, water usage and landfill usage, why are they deliberately persueing a policy of mass immigration leading to over population? Gerrymandering p'haps?

Sally, Chesterfield

See, told you; it's the immigrants, isn't it Sally. Now how about a sit down with a nice cup of tea before it's time to go back to your padded cell?

Dog is not for only a Christmas but a life.
So is green! It is what people sometimes talke about and often forget about it when they is actually required to act on it.
Does Mr Brown care about little miss Green as the long run basis? Do we?

KB, Oxford

there is no scientific consensus at all, in fact you won't be able to find one scientist ANYWHERE who is willing to say that they are 100% convinced that global warming is man made - there are however 100s who are 100% convinced that it has nothing to do with man at all.

Jon Cooper, Camborne, United Kingdom

I am a scientist, and I am prepared to say that I am 100% convinced that global warming is man made. Ha, fuck you Jon Cooper of Camborne!

Never. It's a con to get more taxes and more control.

The global warming rubbish was dreamed up by Margaret Thatcher when she wanted to get rid of the miners and go with nuclear power. The whole thing is nonsense. Don't believe me do some research tree huggers !

Iain Williams, Newton Abbot, United Kingdom

It's comforting to know that it's not only the right that has it's lunatics.

And still the climate change con bandwagon rolls on!
Britain is being blighted by almost daily stabbings, people are scared to go out, unemployment is soaring, but hey, as long as we reduce those "carbon footprints" everything will be fine. I wonder if some of these knife criminals are bothered about going green?

kenneth riding

I think that has everything covered; climate change is due to immigrants, New Labour taxation and knife-wielding youths. I would like to be able to that the collection of dribblings I've shown here are anomalies, but alas they pretty much represent the views of people who apparently have had sufficient education to be able to read. Depressing, isn't it?

A single people, separated by the Gulf Stream

2008-06-02T13:59:00.000-07:00

By sheer accident, I happen to live in the British enclave of Los Angeles. I don't know why Santa Monica is so popular with the British, I suppose it's because it's a bit like Brighton. It has a pier, a beach, a pedestrianised town centre, and Rod Stewart lives here. The main attraction though is that there are a lot of other British, hence one can spend an entire career working for one of the big studios or cable companies (most of the British here are media technicians of some type) without ever having to deal with a foreign culture, even one as similar as the Americans'. The same phenomenon can be seen in southern Spain, but at least in Spain there is the flimsy excuse of not wanting to learn to speak dago. The insularity of Santa Monica's ex patriot contingent must come down to that curious patriotism that any ethnic group feels when they are exported from whatever crap-hole country it is that they worked so hard to escape in the first place.

I don't really mix with the Angelano English. Back in London I didn't spend much of my spare time talking in pubs about David Beckham with mildly racist Daily Mail readers, and I don't intend to do it here just because we have the unique bond of a passport. As a result, I've something of an outsider's view of the English in Santa Monica (and by inference the English in general), and have come to the following conclusion.

The English are the Texans of Europe.

At a first pass this might seem like a surreal statement, possibly even a heretical one. However, there are striking similarities between the two 'cultures'.

1. Nobody else much likes them: Despite both groups having the reputation of being almost painfully polite, they are mainly regarded by outsiders with a dose of contemptuous resentment. Everybody non-Texan is happy when the Dallas Cowboys lose, just as everybody in Europe will cheer for whatever side is playing against England. Just ask any Welshman.

2. A purely passive obsession with football: Same name, different sport, but the general principle remains. If you ask a stranger what their interests are and they reply 'running', one naturally assumes that they regularly go running. If they reply 'golf', it's fair to say that they probably own a set of golf clubs. In TexLand, it's a fair bet that if anyone replies 'I'm passionate about football', then it means that they spend their time in front of the TV drinking beer.

3. Physical appearance: The Italian concept of bella figuranever quite made it across the Channel, and Californian vanity is not big in the Yellow Rose. There are exceptions of course, and the salons of the Houston and Surrey suburbs do their best, but alas I fear the war for beauty is lost.

4. The historical delusion that their state is in any way significant: The Alamo was a long time ago, and so was Dunkirk. The only thing the TexLish have left to offer the world is high-tech service industry (at least until it's all been moved to Hyderabad).

5. A common stance on immigration: The TexLish despise illegal immigrants and have started calling for the most extreme efforts to protect the borders from Johnny Foreigner. This is despite the fact that both Texas and England have consumer economies that rely on a steady stream of hard-working illegal immigrants.

6. A certain type of American will try to pass themselves as being from Texas/England: The current President is a Connecticut blue-blood trying to pass himself off as a Texas redneck. I've given up counting the number of people here who tell me they're English when they were born and raised in Duluth, or San Diego, or somewhere else a long way from England.

I rest my case. I am calling poste-haste for the secession of Texas from the Union, and the withdrawal of England from the UK, thence for their unification as the Republic of TexLand. You bring the T-bone, we'll bring the beer. Y'all.

Austrian Airways flies to some real crap-holes

2008-04-18T11:09:00.000-07:00

I'm stuck in Vienna Airport at the moment. Sadly the Austrian dedication to punctuality, which is ruthless enough to trample little old ladies in the street to avoid missing a bus, is not sufficiently ruthless to fly me to Heathrow on time. If you want to go shopping for chocolates this a great airport, you can't walk more than five yards without someone trying to prize your last few Euros from your wallet. If you want to fly to London, however, it's not very good. How many airports have the Duty Free shop signposted, but not the security check? In my years of travel I have found just one; I'll let you guess where it is.

Other than buying cocoa solids the only thing to do here is gaze wistfully at the departures board, and its list of exotic destinations. At the moment, I see a list comprising Moscow, Minsk, Tel Aviv, Sarajevo, Sofia, Tehran, Beijing, Kiev and Baku. As far as I can tell, the only Austrian Airways destination that I would even consider flying to is Heathrow, and ironically that's the only destination that I am unable to go to.

There's a large group of Georgian teenagers in the corner. I know they're Georgian because it's written in large letters on the back of their matching blue Soviet-era tracksuits; they're clearly some kind of national sprts team. They're the most effeminate and camp teenagers I have ever seen, so I'm guessing they're gymnasts or ice dancers.

Baku. Why the fuck would anyone go to Baku?

Update!

I have since been informed that Baku has a fascinating and culturally diverse history, and boasts a picturesque old town that is in fact a UNESCO World Heritage Site. It's not just Russian oil barons and gangsters (is there a difference?). I apologize for having impugned the delights of Baku.

Danube Blue

2008-04-16T02:22:00.000-07:00

I'm in Vienna at the moment, a musical city and the foundation of such musical icons as Strauss, Mahler, and Falco. Vienna is a bit like Kylie Minogue; very attractive, but so wholesome as to be ultimately bland. (The same could be said of Strauss' music, and indeed Falco's. Not Mahler's though.) Communication is a bit limited since I haven't studied german for over twenty years, and the only phrases I now know are 'danke', 'bitte', and 'essen mein scheiße' (this last I picked up from South Park). I'm getting by, but after a few days the look on people's faces when I hail them with a cheery 'essen mein Scheiße!' is beginning to get predictable. I've now been reduced to being polite to people.

There's a sign in my hotel room that proudly states 'Vienna has premium water quality. Water from the tap may be drunk unscrupulously'. Nothing I do is done with scruples, but it's nice to know that I have permission to appropriately hydrate myself.

Funding the Ubermensch

2008-03-14T23:03:00.000-07:00

This is one of my favourite times of year on campus. The evenings grow longer, the balmy sun warms my bones, and the flowers are in bloom. Most importantly it's the end of the quarter, so the undergraduates have deserted the campus to study for exams. Those that remain have that cowed, fearful look that all great instructors strive to instill*. My enjoyment of spring this year has been somewhat curtailed by being forced to participate in the 'Proposal Season'. My funding runs out this summer, so I need to scrabble for next year's cash and the application deadlines tend to be around this time. There is only one thing more tedious than preparing a grant proposal, and that is assessing a grant proposal, so my mood has been bleak.

My tolerance reached a nadir yesterday when one of my referees, a Chinese academic of a certain age, asked me to write my own reference for him. I was scandalized at this, partly by the lack of probity (these things are highly confidential and are submitted in a sealed envelope to prove that I haven't read them), but mostly because I really couldn't be arsed to write yet another document about me and my research. However, since I have little choice I wrote a concise document objectively assessing my suitability for funding.

'It is my very great honour to be afforded the lofty opportunity to recommend Fester Fastrousers (Capt.) for intramural funding by A Well Known West Coast University. My only reservation in this endeavor is the realization of my wretched unworthiness in commenting on the abilities of this superb student, abilities that I can barely even comprehend. Fastrousers does not walk on water: he walks five inches above it. However there is no doubt in my mind that were it every necessary for him to return to surface level he has the requisite strength of character to bear the wetting of his feet with nary a comment.

I have known Fester Fastrousers for over three years as a graduate instructor and as a member of his dissertation committee. In that time I have become convinced that Fastrousers is possessed of a mighty Colossus of an intellect, a Colossus that holds aloft a shining beacon of light to guide the ship of academe from the stormy, chaotic seas of ignorance and into the serene Rhodian harbour of human understanding.

As a student, in a mere ten-week graduate class he progressed from the rudiments of the subject matter to an insight that revolutionized the entire field and forced me to reasses my own suitability for the position of instructor. This resulted in him being awarded an A.

As a committee member, I was privileged to attend Fastrousers' oral qualifying exam, an event that evoked the precocious understanding of the adolescent Jesus discussing theology with temple elders. In his commanding Churchillian tones, he summarized in less than one hour two hundred years of learning of an entire discipline. He then proceeded to outline a course of scientific investigation that boldly answers the questions that few have ever dared even ask. The importance of his research for the department, for the discipline, and for the future of humanity can barely be overstated.

His personal qualities are possibly even more intimidating than his scientific brain. The apparent ease with which he overcomes each challenge belies a strength of will, a courage, a stoicism that comes but once in an era. He has the humility to tolerate without judgement lesser men (and we are all lesser men). His character is firm enough to withstand the slings and arrows of the University's bureaucracy, yet gentle enough to deal with understanding the multitude of smitten sirens who attempt to distract him from the purity of his quest. Were he a soldier he would be a mighty general marching from victory to victory ahead of legions of noble warriors who would gladly die as the price for fighting under his flag. Were he a poet he would compose burning epics for the ages, epics that would lead every man and woman towards a beautiful self-awareness and a life of quiet fulfillment. As it is, he has chosen to grace the Academy with his pursuit of knowledge, and it is a pursuit that we simply must support in whatever fashion that the Fates deem us able.

Fastrousers is set to stand amongst the pantheon of the great intellects of human history. Newton, Euler, Planck, Einstein, Feynman, Lorenz; all will take their place in history behind this great man, revered to have simply contributed to Fastrouser's comprehension of the natural world. It is my greatest fear that when that day comes, the good regents of A Well-Known West Coast University will rent their garments in despair, crying in shame 'why, oh why did we not participate in the formation of this vast mind when we could have awarded him a Dissertation Year Fellowship?'. Too late then shall be those cries.

Seriously. He's that good.

Y.X.
Professor.'

The application goes through a departmental review before being forwarded to the awarding committee, so I should find out in a couple of weeks if the old fart actually read it before he signed off on it. Personally I'm in a win-win situation. If he reads it then obviously he'll be forced to get off his arse and write the damn thing himself. On the other hand, he could just sign and submit it. If the committee then deem the reference to be unsuitable, I can simply cry 'foul' and there's nothing he can do about it, because he's signed a document stating clearly that it's his own view and that I have not even seen it, never mind contributed to it.

(*My other favourite times are the spring exams, and the fall exams)

A political endorsement by Captain Fastrousers

2008-03-11T11:13:00.000-07:00

Bro's before Ho's.

If only one could see what their hands were doing

For 'a that, an' a' that

2008-01-24T22:01:00.000-08:00

January 25th, Burn's Night.

Fair fa' your honest, sonsie face,
Great chieftain o' the pudding-race!
Aboon them a' yet tak your place,
Painch, tripe, or thairm:
Weel are ye wordy o'a grace
As lang's my arm.

(Robert Burns, 1786)

They don't write them like that any more. Just as well, since it's completely impenetrable. I usually like to celebrate Burn's Night in the time-honoured manner, by getting roaring drunk on whisky and reciting absolute nonsense whilst wearing traditional attire. However, there was an unfortunate and blatantly xenophobic incident here in LA last year, a few complaints were made, the police were called. Apparently some of the other members of the yoga class found the contents of my sporran off-putting during the bakasana. "Is anything worn under the kilt?", one of them asked. "No Madam" I replied, "it's all in perfect working order"*. Someone also claimed that the one about the Young Man from Nantucket was never written by Burns, but these people aren't Scottish so what would they know.

Of course, some would point out that I'm not Scottish either. Technically they're correct, but in fact my grandmother was from Falkirk, which makes me a good deal more Scottish than any of the New Yorkers paying a fortune for their clan tartan in overpriced shops on the Royal Mile (that was back when the dollar was a real currency). "Cast ne'er a clout 'till May be out" Granny would say to me, a woodbine clenched in her gums and a can of Special Brew in her worn hands. I don't know what she meant either. I used to think that she had some mysterious, earthy Gaelic wisdom, and I strove for many years to understand it. It turned out that actually she was just senile.

*This sounds much better in a Scottish accent

My aircraft was unsafely noxious

2007-12-19T10:06:00.000-08:00

I've had a few comments lately about my lack of posts. My leg was stuck in a crack in Joshua Tree for the best part of two weeks, which made computer access difficult, and of a low priority. True story. I am enjoying the delights of JFK airport at the moment, a first for me. Somewhere over Greenland our pilot decided that the noxious fumes coming from the galley were not merely due to the on-board cuisine, but indicative of something possibly more sinister. Rather than doggedly press on for London in the great spirit of Agincourt, he decided to turn around faster than an Italian tank crew under fire and head for the (relative) safety of New York.

How does one entertain oneself in JFK with sleep deprivation and three hundred whining British people? I tried walking up to strangers and saying "bada-boom, bada-BING!" in order to blend in with the locals, but people just looked at me like I was a lunatic. I then went into the airport 'bookstore' and made disparaging remarks about their stock (self-help books for the women, boys-own stories for the men, and business manuals for the work travellers trying to look serious and important). At this point United Airlines' Flying Circus put us up for the day in a local Holiday Inn, which meant that I both avoided further scrutiny by the now-concerned security staff, and have been afforded some new distractions.

Lunch in the generic, over-priced hotel restaurant: 30 minutes
Hotel gym: 10 minutes
Recovering from exercise in the hot tub: 20 minutes
The pseudo-sleep of the jet-lagged: 1 hour
Pay-per-view porn on the hotel TV (hey, it's on United's tab): 2 minutes

I still have two-and-a-half-hours to kill before I continue my odyssey, so I'd appreciate any suggestions (before you mention it though, I've already checked and all the receptionists look a bit Italian. I don't intend to spend eternity cuddling next to Jimmy Hoffa because I made a hopeful but obscene comment to one of Tony Soprano's mistresses). I am taking the so-called 'silly route' from the Big Apple to The Smoke (via Washington D.C.), since all the direct flights were, no doubt, nabbed for the hoi-polloi in First Class. Anybody who thinks that we live in a fair and equitable society should fly economy more often. The experience of being herded like livestock through to the back of the plane under the supercilious gaze of First Class would soon disabuse them of that fantasy.

Never mind, hopefully we'll make it at least as far as Reykjavik tonight before the Captain and Crew get homesick for Trenton and decide to turn around.

I am heartened by America's concern for the tuna

2007-11-17T16:18:00.000-08:00

The US government wants to see restrictions placed on Bluefin Tuna catches, specifically in the eastern Atlantic and the Mediterranean. Marine biologists have been concerned by the dwindling Bluefin Tuna stocks of some time and by focusing attention on the European fishing grounds, the US can show their environmental credentials whilst ignoring the overfishing of the Pacific Bluefin Tuna, which is also endangered. That means that batchelor/batchelorette parties in Las Vegas can still gorge themselves on all-you-can-eat sushi before heading to the bars to get pissed and laid.

Entry to this club is like a herd of camels

2007-11-16T17:19:00.000-08:00

I have been inveigled, by malevolent forces beyond my control, into attending a social event at a rather self-conscious bar in Hollywood. I was pretty skeptical right from the start: Fastrousers' First Law of Carousing states that the rigidity of an establishment's dress-code is inversely proportional to the quality of the experience inside*. My initial fears were confirmed when I received the following confirmation that I was on the (mandatory) guest list:

We ask that you please be patient and courteous with our
door staff.

Make sure to mention XXXXX at the door.

As with any event please arrive early, dressed to impress, and with an even
ratio to ensure prompt entry. We will do our best to accommodate you and
your guests.

If you are interested in reserving a VIP table or have a large party
Please call 323-XXX-XXXX, or visit http://www.overpricedshittybarsRus.net'

Excuse me, but just who is the customer here? They make it sound like they're doing me a favour, by 'allowing' me to tear across town, queue up for half an hour and then pay $15 for a bottle of gassy imported gnat's piss posing as beer. What, pray tell, do they mean by an 'even ratio'? An even ratio of beers to mixers? Whores to clients? Steers to Queers (this is Hollywood, after all)?

The only reason they can do this, and be successful by doing it, is because the social status of Hollywood is based on such banal trivialities as being seen in the right bar. Every society has it's status symbols, and they're all arbitrary. Sportsmen gain status by kicking a ball around. New Yorkers gain status by being rude and loud. In south-east London one acquires status by having scars, and British students gain status through a capacity to drink without vomiting. In certain parts of the Arab world, status is based upon the number of camels one owns. That's what entry to this bar is, a glorified herd of camels. It's not about fun, or comfort, or even the relentless urge to drink unto oblivion. Only by showing sufficient determination to enter this place, by pretending that one is wealthy enough not to care that the bar bill is extortionate, and by feigning interest in the rest of the vacuous clientele, one has demonstrated one's credentials to inhabit the kind of society that made Paris Hilton a 'celebrity'.

*There are three Laws of Carousing. The Second Law states that anyone who knows how much and what they drunk the previous night clearly hadn't drunk enough. The Third Law states that there is an exponential relationship between the appeal of any activity suggested after 11:30 and the regret that activity engenders the following day.

Some fool has shoved plastic shards into my eyes

2007-11-09T14:13:00.000-08:00

Ym wearing contact len5es for the frst time in my l1fe today. !tz a bit like being drink, but more expensive and n0t @s much fun. I've ben t/ipping over a lot. I don't know if thi$ is usal wth ^ovice lens-wearer5, or I'm just havng @ bad day.

I would return poste-ha5Te to my spectac1es, but I s@dly walked int0 a lampp0st ear7ier and my no5e is t00 tender t0 sypport their weightz.

Fester Fastrousers' Tales of the Terrible

2007-10-23T18:23:00.000-07:00

Halloween again, every peadophile's favourite festival. Last year I went to see the West Hollywood Halloween Parade. To be fair I didn't notice any peadophiles, but I think pretty much every other form of deviant activity was catered to - I recommend it if you're in the area. Halloween also represents the season of 'horror' films. Lot's of blood, some incredibly stupid teenagers and the cinematographic equivalent of jumping out of a cupboard and saying boo. It's not exactly Hitchcock, is it? The trouble with most modern horror films, apart from that the situations are so unlikely, are the protagonists. They're always so amazingly stupid that I end up hating them and rooting for the monster/serial killer, which renders their eventual butchering somewhat less narratively effective.

How about some horror films about a situation that is, in fact, genuinely terrifying? Here is a run-down of truly fear-inspiring moments.

7) "This is the Dean of Students. I'm phoning to discuss the University's policy regarding sexual harassment, particularly in the classroom..." - Bloody Hell, another morning wasted in some compulsory 'seminar' whilst some menopausal hippy talks about objectivisation of women.

6) "I did what last night? You're crapping me! Jesus, you're supposed to be my friends, why the hell didn't you stop me?" - As Alfred Hitchcock himself knew, true suspense lies not in the outcome but in the build-up. Nothing beats that visceral descent into despair as the hazy memories of one's actions the previous night gather themselves like flocking birds into a coherent picture of public shame and possible criminal proceedings.

5) "Hi, Mr. Fastrousers? This is Wayne from the Bank of Phukett and Rhunn. I've been reviewing your account activity and..." - Bugger, I knew I should have dealt with a Swiss bank, that's a nation that truly understands the importance of discretion in financial transactions. They also appreciate the importance of rank: it's Captain Fastrousers to you, you pimpled oik.

4) "You will be able to come to our wedding, won't you?" - A nasty spectacle indeed, watching yet another hapless idiot walk gladly into Cupid's very own Dungeon. It's like that scene in horror films when the naive, curious teenager insists on investigating some dark, forbidding cave alone. 'Don't do it!' I cry, but they never listen.

3) "I went to the doctors today. This is a little awkward, but you haven't noticed a burning sensation when you pee, have you?" - It's bad enough having to get a penicillen shot in the arse from some sexless nurse who believes in 'abstinence-only sex-ed', but having to track down all my partners from the last six months is positively grisly. I pay Trojan to avoid this kind of thing, for chrissakes.

2) "Do you love me?" - Errrrrr...... (for extra fear-value this should be asked during coitus, rendering a dignified escape extremely difficult).

Finally, coming at #1, the all time horror classic...

1) "I'm six weeks late" - JesustittyfuckingchristwhatthefuckamIgoingtodoareyousureohshitohshitohshitAAARRRGGHHH!!???!!

The very latest in quality porcelain-ware

2007-10-23T17:18:00.000-07:00

Apparently, fat cunts now need to use a special toilet. I have in the past been accused by a large woman of being 'fattist'. "No love" I replied, "I think you'll find that you're the fattest"*. The accusation of fattism may or may not have some justification, after all not everyone is blessed with my natural athleticism and boyish, ageless charm. Nevertheless, irrespective of the state of your thyroid, it takes a special devotion to the art of troughing in order to justify the need for a specially-designed $1400 khazi. In addition to its ergonomically-designed wide-capacity seat, the Great John includes side panels to the seat, an extra set of floor anchors, and is tested for loads of up to 2000lbs. I couldn't find any information regarding the flush mechanism, but I would imagine that anyone who needs a 2000lb bog is likely to be dumping some pretty ghastly loads into the damn thing. Not so much 'dropping the kids of at the pool' as 'dumping the nuclear waste into the ocean'.

All this scatology is reminding me that it's soon Halloween, the season of slutty costumes and top-decking under the guise of 'Trick or Treat'. For you foreigners who don't know what 'top-decking' is, it's that lovely old British custom of going to a friend's house and crapping in the toilet cistern rather than the bowl. Bets are placed on how long it takes the homeowner to work out why the smell is worse after flushing than before.

It has become my mission to introduce these wonderful traditions to my adopted land.

* This gag won a lifetime achievement award for 'exceptionally long service to humour' at the recent Cannes Prix de Concours des Blagues et Conneries'.

Polish police end nun rebellion

2007-10-10T18:18:00.000-07:00

Excellent. I have been campaigning for some time now that the risk posed by rebellious nuns be fully recognised. Finally the Polish authorities have led the way by showing these habit-wearing crones the smack of firm government. Oh, I know some of you out there will think that I'm being a little harsh. After all, I hear you ask, what harm can these people possibly do, cloistered as they are in their urban asceticism? Plenty, is the answer. It starts of with a couple of AveMarias here, a few shelters for 'fallen women' there, and before you know it they're terrorising the entire ecumenical structure. (Priests, as we know, are frightened of women generally, and nun's specifically). They say that nuns are the Brides of Christ: he clearly had a strange taste in women, Mary Magdalene aside.

The Polish authorities deployed 150 police, armed in riot gear and brandishing ladders, to deal with the 65 guitar-wielding anchorites. A wise precaution, there's nothing more dangerous than a cornered abbess and I for one wouldn't expect a fit, highly trained young policeman to go up against them with anything less than 3-to-1 superiority. A well-aimed rosary can be deadly.

Them that dies shall be the lucky ones

2007-09-19T11:13:00.000-07:00

Apparently today is International Talk Like a Pirate Day: I shit you not. It's not as if people actually need an excuse and a special day to act like embarrassing fuckwits, and those that do need an excuse to indulge in some Disney-inspired fantasy can always fall back on Halloween. I was accused of being joyless this morning for not entering into the spirit of things, so I poked the cunt in the eye and kicked him in the shin. While he was hopping and yelling in a distinctlyunpiratical fashion (more like a schoolgirl than a scourge of the High Seas), I suggested that he take a trip to west Hollywood where, I felt sure, he would find someone to plunder his booty. It has been a good start to the day.

I don't understand the fascination with talking like a pirate. Most of the pirates I have met are mainly interested in selling knock-off Britney Spears DVDs, and their talk is mostly a lot of tedious jargon about 'buffer overflows' and 'format string attacks'. Admittedly some of them smelt as if they had been at sea for some considerable period, but they were more likely to have acne than an eye patch.

Britney Spears - she's a yo ho ho after a bottle of rum

Rugby for fat kids

2007-09-03T19:58:00.000-07:00

I was asked at a party the other night whether or not I liked sports. By which, of course, the interrogator mean American sports: real sports. It is more or less assumed by people, having established that I'm English and not, in fact, Australian, that I'm deeply passionate about football and tea. I am pretty ambivalent about both as it happens, which apparently makes me not a 'proper' Englishman. This is in a nation of people who describe themselves as Scottish because their great grandfather was from Gretna Green. Anyway, returning to the question in hand, I usually reply to this by saying something vague about having seen a Superbowl or two, and mentioning that I'll watch college basketball when there's nothing else on. On this particular occasion I had, shall I say, enjoyed a certain amount of hospitality, and gave a more honest reply. 'Apart from finding it skull-crushingly tedious, I think that American football is just rugby for fat kids'.

Wrong answer. I knew straight away that this person was a football fan. Worse still, instead of being offended by my comment she was convinced that my naive opinion was the result of not understanding the finer points of the game. My next two glasses of an otherwise quite palatable Pinot Noir were therefore ruined as the chess-like intricacies of the offensive line were outlined. In all fairness, I eventually did concede that I had been a little hasty in writing American football off as rugby for the less-athletic. It is in fact rugby for retards.

Sporting legend has it that many years ago a pupil at Rugby school picked up the ball during a game of football (soccer, to some of you) and thus was the game of rugby invented. I don't know how true that is - after all, if all it took to master rugby was to handle a football the Argentinians would be the lords of the try-line.

Diego Maradona - frustrated rugby genius, or just a cheating twat?

I don't know the origins of American football either, but I speculate that if one tried to organise a game of rugby at the Special Needs Olympics, the result would not be dissimilar to a Superbowl: a bunch of players would run into each other, and one of the more dexterous of them would lob the ball to the other end of the field.

Next Saturday, the English 2007 Rugby World Cup campaign starts with a game against the USA. Unfortunately, I shall be unable to watch it because the college football season has begun, and the only thing on ESPN will be a bunch of fat retards running into each other, whilst one of the more dexterous players throws a ball to the other end of the pitch. If Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Eton, then it is clear that Iraq is being lost in the stadia of the mid-west.

Update

...a bunch of players would run into each other, and one of the more dexterous of them would lob the ball to the other end of the field.

Having just kept abreast of the first half of the England/South Africa match, it appears that I was prescient in describing the England team's 'stuff it up your jumper' style of play. Sadly, I have to work this afternoon, so reaching for the bottle is not an option.

A tax on your dead

2007-08-17T11:51:00.000-07:00

Exciting political heavy-weight George Osborne has announced that a Tory government would consider the abolition of inheritance tax. You know that a party is really scraping the barrel when it's having to go for demographics whose main concern is death. Politically this is a terrible idea, since the dead, by and large, have tended to be rather less active in the polling stations than the living. (Except in Florida of course, where I understand that the electoral register includes a significant number of the departed). Economically it transfers the tax burden onto active, hard-working wage earners away from those who, by a freak accident of nature, happen to be born to affluent parents.

Actually, the notion that it's politically a bad idea is slightly flawed, since it assumes a well-informed and intelligent electorate, rather than the greedy, stupid malignant electorate of modern Britain. 'Middle England', which largely comprises Daily Mail-reading arrivistes living in pebble-dashed houses in the Home Counties, will probably think that they're getting an enormous windfall and will vote for the conservatives in their droves. I doubt very much that they realise that inheritance tax doesn't kick in for the first GBP250,000, which given a good downturn in the property market will be far above their meager assets on death. The people who will really benefit are those rather more significant estates (i.e. Tory party members).

Ah, fuck it, what do I care about the British people? They're far too stupid to warrant my concern. Personally I have no successors anyway (at least none that I'll admit to). I intend to spend every last penny on a debauched dotage in Nevada, now that the Mustang Ranch has reopened.

You're not fooling anyone, you know.

2007-08-11T15:43:00.000-07:00

I've just look at the statistics on the 'racist bitch' poll. A little overdue, perhaps, but it's not as if I don't have anything better to do than keep informed of your opinions. Your opinions don't really matter to me anyway, unless you agree with me that is, and if you don't agree with me then you're wrong. If the poll is correct, 56% of you actually tell a Russian mafia princess to their face to fuck off back to St Petersburg. Frankly, I think you're all liars. I cannot imagine a single person I know who would actually say that other than myself, and even then it would be under the influence of a regrettable quantity of alcohol.

Not that I really mind that you're all lying on my poll, I've been known to tell a few porkies myself. The biggest lie I ever said was 'try not to tense up - it's the most natural and beautiful thing in the world'. It's not something that I'm particularly proud of, but it's amazing what a nineteen-year-old undergraduate will believe, and I'm far too opportunistic to be held responsible for my own actions.

The most fun I ever had lying was when I went into the Women's Bookstore in Boulder, CO wearing a summer frock and two days growth of beard and loudly announced that I really rated Germaine Greer because she was dead butch. It's easy to wind up people in Boulder because they consider themselves 'progressive'. I don't know what they mean by progressive, but it seems to involve having no sense of humour and espousing a lot of obscure left-wing causes, whilst still complaining about how the hippies make the place look scruffy. Boulder is an eclectic mix of high-end real estate agents and 'Free Tibet' stickers.

Urgent! Vikings required (no metal components please). No time to explain!

2007-07-23T21:30:00.000-07:00

I'm used to hearing tedious stereotypes about English food and British weather, but on the former point it seems that the Americans are armed with some real evidence. The Warm Bosom of my Motherland is looking decidedly cold and damp. In fact, I'm somewhat concerned that it may sink into the sea altogether, which could put me in a difficult situation.

If a nation sinks into the sea, is it still a nation? More to the point, will my passport still be valid? I find air travel to be a dolorous enough process as it is, without ending up stuck in an arrivals hall for thirty years because the INS don't have the forms to deal with someone from a submarine state. American bureaucracy can be slow to adapt: the last time a nation slipped into the sea was Atlantis, and back then all you needed to enter a new country was a boatload of heavily-armed Norse warriors, and operating procedures have not yet caught up. The protocols for dealing with quasi-aquatic non-residents simply aren't in place, and it's not as easy as it used to be to sneak a hundred hairy Vikings through security - their helms keep setting off the metal detectors, and the other passengers complain about the smell.

In addition to the administrative headaches of being a citizen of a sub-oceanic nation (I haven't even considered to question of my tax code), I have a couple of decent suits still in storage in the UK, so I really hope it stops raining soon. On the other hand I have a few creditors over there that I wouldn't mind seeing sink to the bottom of the North Sea, so I suppose that every cloud does have a silver lining.

The band played on, as England went down

Weather forecasters develop time machine!

2007-07-19T21:51:00.001-07:00

Bill Proenza, the (now) former head of the National Hurricane Center (NHC), has been fired by the US Department of Commerce for failing 'to demonstrate leadership', and creating bad blood amongst his staff. The fact that he was supposed be sowing bad blood amongst his staff appears to be forgotten, for the simple reason that he demonstrated plenty of leadership, but of the wrong sort.

Proenza was given the job to reform the NHC. Now, like any other large public sector organization in this country, National Weather Service staff are loathe to change anything. After all, they might need to learn something new or adapt to change, which distracts them from the important public sector goals of sitting on one's fat, lazy backside until pension day. For example, about thirty years ago the previously-independent National Weather Service (of which the NHC is a part) became a branch of the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), and the employees are still sore about it today. Most of them were under the age of ten when it happened, but they don't let that stop them from harbouring a career-span of embittered rancour. Therefore, it can be seen that the job of reforming the NHC and irritating its employees are more or less synonymous. Indeed, Proenza was happily reforming NHC and upsetting his dogmatic staff for months, with his overlords in Washington DC perfectly happy with his performance. Unfortunately, he then chose to open his mouth and say something uncharacteristically intelligent.

This year, the NOAA celebrates its two hundredth anniversary. Happy birthday, NOAA. That's somewhat surprising, since just seven years ago NOAA celebrated its thirtieth birthday. It would be nice to think that NOAA had developed a time machine, after all just think how reliable weather forecasts would be if you could just skip back and forth in time. Unfortunately, it's just the usual public sector arse-hattery. Two hundred years ago President Jefferson ordered the creation of nautical charts of the US coast for the safe passage of ships, a role that is within NOAA's current remit.

Simultaneously, the NASA QuikSCAT satellite is nearing the end of its useful lifecycle (actually, it is past its design life) with no end in sight. QuikSCAT is a rare bird, one of the only space-borne scatterometers in operation around the globe. A space-borne scatterometer is a satellite that detects the roughness of the ocean surface, and because the roughness of the ocean is a direct result of surface wind we can retrieve surface wind data from that. Considering that surface weather stations are sparse over the ocean, and that 66% of the world's surface is ocean, one doesn't need to be a climatologist to realise how useful these instruments are for both operational forecasting and climate research.

Why then, asked Mr Proenza of Congress, are we spending $4 million to celebrate the 37-year-old NOAA's 200th anniversary, when one of the only instruments still in service capable of giving decent coverage surface wind estimates is about to grind to a halt for the very last time?

Suddenly, the happiness of the NHC staff became of prime importance, Mr Proenza was 'removed from service'. Like an obsolete satellite, the wreckage of his career splashed down into the middle of a lonely, unobserved ocean.

A C5 for the naughties

2007-06-30T16:23:00.000-07:00

I generally avoid sweeping statements of hyperbole, but I think I'm on fairly safe ground here.

These are truly the saddest fucks on the planet. Their lives must be an awesome gaping void if they can get this excited over a phone that also has an MP3 player.

Personally, I hope it goes the same way as the Sinclair C5.

If only I hadn't been exhausted

2007-06-28T17:07:00.000-07:00

I met an interesting character last week in Pismo. A pleasant enough place, Pismo, famous for it's clams and it's scooter trash*. The highlight of last year's Pismo Car Festival was the appearance of a couple of dray horses, which I am sure invites comment but I can't imagine what.

Anyway, it happened late at night, as so many of these encounters do, but I wasn't drunk or even in a bar. In fact, I was checking into a hotel after a long day, thinking of nothing beyond a few hours sleep. Without provocation, or even any apparent sequitur to the conversation, the desk clerk turned to me and asked if I knew that the the 9/11 attacks were not the work of al Quaeda but were actually part of a CIA conspiracy? Inwardly I groaned, and prayed (in vain) that my companion would stop laughing. In my experience any kind of response, even laughter, only encourages these people, and as I have said before lunatics always seem to catch me at my most vulnerable (in this case from sleep deprivation). Whether emboldened by my companion's laughter or in spite of it, he went on to explain how the Twin Towers were demolished. He then informed me that the whole of Iraq is contaminated by the minute shrapnel from depleted uranium shells, and that then irradiated aerosol cloud was making its way around the globe. His parting shot was an admonishment not to own a cell phone, since they can listen in on you, even when it's switched off. An informed man indeed, who truly has his pulse on the .

Being exhausted I felt unable to engage him further and ask him the burning questions posed by his peculiar tirade, so I set them down here in the hope that one of my readers can go to the Pismo Lighthouse Suites and ask him themselves.

1. If a government is capable of slaughtering 3,000 of its own citizens in a complex plot that involves the silencing of hundreds of skilled demolitions workers, air traffic controllers, eye witnesses and security personnel, how come they've allowed him to stay alive and spill the beans to any random tourists passing through the Californian Central Coast?

2. Consider that any airborne particles are washed out of the atmosphere after about two months unless they reach the stratosphere/upper troposphere, and consider also that depleted uranium (being dense enough to pierce modern armour) can't get that high in the atmosphere without the aid of either a major volcanic eruption or a nuclear strike. How, then, is this DU cloud supposed to have just sat in the atmosphere for four years? I think we would have noticed a volcano or thermonuclear explosion.

3. If my cell phone is out of range, can they still listen to me? What about if I'm roaming, or if I just forget to pay my phone bill?

He has a website you know. I can't be arsed, but feel free to check it out.

Pismo - famous for clams, scooter trash and mentalists

*Note for British readers: Do you have dirt in your arches? Do you like to unwind with a 12-gauge and a six-pack of Pabst Blue Ribbon? Do thoughts of the unspoilt wilderness evoke the smell of two-stroke mixture in your nostrils and the gentle scream of a kawasaki in your ears? If so, you're probably scooter-trash.

I'll have a tall latte, but go easy on the Louis Armstrong

2007-06-25T18:59:00.000-07:00

When did listening to Ella Fitzgerald become a necessary adjunct to enjoying a coffee? I can't remember the last time I went into a cafe and they weren't blasting some 1950s easy listening through the speakers. This isn't just the big chains either; the so-called independent local places who think they're completely different from Starbucks because they buy their coffee direct from one-legged ethnic Kenyan farmers and bake their own bagels are just as bad. A word of advice to any local coffee shop owners who are desperate for brand differentiation - take Nina Simone out of the CD player and stop putting up self-important notices about how the care and attention you take is just to 'enhance my coffee-drinking experience'. How these people can claim to be completely different from the big corporations when they use language like that defeats me.

Mostly, I drink coffee because caffeine is a stimulant. I could get caffeine from another source, for example tea, but I to be honest I've never understood what the big hoopla about dried leaves and hot water is anyway. I could be really modern and drink Red Bull or Rockstar or Mindfuck or
whatever the latest buzz-in-a-can is called, but they all taste like shit. So, I drink coffee. Maybe, late at night when my work is done, when I have time to relax and reflect on the events of the day, I might consider the soothing tones of Louis Armstrong or Myles Davis before I
go to bed (or at last I would if I was a pretentious, new-media dickhead with a straggly goatee). During the middle of the day, however, I drink coffee purely because I don't want
to relax.

If you find somewhere that plays Zodiac Mindwarp and The Cult on the sound system, and describes it's fare in terms such as 'it's just fucking coffee, do you want one or not?', then please let me know. In the meantime, I'm going to boycott all locally-owned coffee shops for the cardinal sin of hypocritically aping the packaged ambiance of the big chains and then feeling all superior about it.

Except for me, every single man on the internet is a liar

2007-06-08T17:40:00.000-07:00

The interweb world is agog with the comings and goings of Paris Hilton, as if being banged up and banged out is a new experience for her. Personally, I don't really give a toss what happens to the tedious cow, but what I am infuriated by is the amount of bare-faced lying that's going on.

The so-called news has inevitably raised our Paz's profile, inevitably prompting such high-brow discussions as 'would you shag her', and 'will she get some hot lesbo action in the Big House'. Apparently, almost every pundit on the internet (and you just know they're male) thinks she's hideous, skanky, and would not touch her with a long stick.

99.8% of male internet users find this woman hideous

Who on Earth are these people trying to deceive?

Are my sexual predilections really so deviant that my aesthetic is completely unrepresentative of the male population? Actually, it's well known that my I'm a sexual deviant, but I'm fairly sure that my perversions don't stretch to my view of what is and is not physically attractive. The woman clearly has her faults (i.e. she's an overly-sheltered, self-absorbed and vacuous bint), but I hardly think that being physically hideous is one of them. I am quite sure that I would find a five minute conversation with her absolutely unbearable (although she's probably not that much more stupid than the average collegiate athlete, and they're supposed to university material). Would I have sex with her though? After deep reflection, my personal status at the time notwithstanding, and considering the fact that she's a physically attractive young female, I would have to say that fuck yes, I would gladly and happily bang her.

I suspect that in reality the same is true for all these naysayers. Are these men really such connoiseurs of the female form that they actually find her ugly? Of course they aren't. They're just saying that they wouldn't in case their fat, ugly girlfriends are looking over their shoulders as they type, and they want to make out that the physical aspects of sexual attraction aren't important to them. Well I have news for any woman reading this that might be convinced that their male partner is unswayed by physical attraction - he's lying. When a heterosexual man, every heterosexual man, meets a woman, a barometer in his crotch stands to attention or limply droops depending on whether she looks good or not. If the barometer stands proud, it doesn't mean that he needs to have sex with her, or that he will have sex with her, or that the attraction will completely define all their future interactions. It does mean, however, that given the opportunity he would sleep with her.

These sad, faux-imasculated men can make these mendacious claims, fairly sure that they will never be proven wrong, because of course they know deep in their soul that Paris Hilton will never ever have even the slightest interest in sleeping with them. So instead they're stuck trying to prove to their fat ugly partners that they've somehow evolved beyond the most basic and defining mammalian instincts.

Jesus Christ, I never thought that I'd write a post that was even slightly defensive of Paris Hilton. I feel dirty. And I think I like it. Mmmmmm...

Shopping online is like wandering the streets of Cairo

2007-06-04T17:20:00.000-07:00

One of the greatest benefits of the internet has been, in my opinion, online shopping. It is cheaper and more convenient than the real-world alternative, and most importantly it means I don't have to sully myself by rubbing shoulders with the monstrous proletariat. The one drawback is that to buy anything one generally has to become a 'registered user', so committing you to a future of being informed of the latest bargains.

For those of you who have never been to Cairo, to walk in the streets is to subject oneself to a constant barrage of desperate solicitations. The moment you are marked out as a foreigner (and this takes just a matter of seconds), you can expect a dismal litany of retail opportunities.

'Taxi? Trip to Pyramids, new tombs, very good, special price. Chess sets? For your sister, for your girlfriend, for your wife?'
'What, all three of them?"
'Ha ha, very good, very funny joke. Now we friends, come, take tea. Carpets, perfume, very good, very cheap. Special price, friend price....'

So it goes on, in every Souq on the Nile Valley, endlessly and repeatedly. Every time you venture into the streets, you will be surrounded by a pack of these people, swarming around you like flies around a turd. It is possible, and even normal, to pass a rank of twenty identical taxis and have to individually reject each and every one. In Aswan, I once asked number twenty in why, having seen me refuse nineteen of his competitors, he thought I would impulsively decide that he was the taxi I had been waiting for all my life? In retrospect his reply was predictable. 'Aha, where from? Welcome. Friends, take tea? Camel ride? Tombs? Woman? You like woman?' In the good old days, foreigners were able to assure of a themselves peaceful stroll through the streets by employing a hefty local with a big stick and a vicious streak. Nowadays, the local authorities seem to take a dim view of club-wielding tourists. Believe me, I tried.

Amazon.com are just like that. I am constantly getting emails telling me what I might like, what I should buy, and how I've been selected as a 'special' customer, like a Cairene pimp pretending to be my friend. They even send me mail if I haven't bought anything for a while. 'Habibi, why you no buy something, you no love me, my heart it breaks. Here, Dynamic Meteorology by Holton? Latest edition, for you special price'. At least in Egypt you can slink into a bar and take a breather from this cacophony of peddlers. From Amazon.com, there is no escape.

I've just received another email. 'Pedlosky, Geophysical Fluid Dynamics? Special price, friend price. Latest McNab? Chess set? Taxi? You want girl? I get you girl, clean girl, she my sister. You prefer boy?'

And in the LA Times next week....

2007-05-08T17:13:00.000-07:00

05/21/2007 - British climbers rescued in Yosemite

Three British climbers were rescued from El Capitan yesterday, Yosemite National Park officials announced. The climbers, who were on day eight of a four day ascent of the Salathe Wall, were said to be physically unharmed but 'in a state of some disorientation'.

Eye-witnesses claim the party stopped making upward progress sometime on day three, on a section known to climbers as 'The Ear'. The lead member of the party became completely wedged into the notorious wide crack, and was unable to move either up or down. Park Ranger Bill Pastry, who led the rescue, said 'at first, they tried hauling back out of the crack using a pulley system, but that didn't help do the trick. In the end, the other two just set up camp on the wall and decided to starve him out of there'. However, even after two days with nothing but water, the climber had not lost sufficient bulk to shift himself. The beleagured climber attempted to speed up his weight loss by taking a 'bathroom break', but in the process only succeeded in losing his pants and underwear.

By this time, a sizeable crowd of 'wall spotters' had gathered to view the spectacle. 'Well, we probably should have gone up there sooner, but he looked so damn funny hanging up there bare-assed with his legs kicking in the air. Short guy he was, bald and kinda funny lookin', said Ranger Pastry. 'What a clusterfuck! I mean, I've worked in the Dept. of the Interior for twenty years, but even I've never seen incompetence like that. Plus, to be honest, we had no idea how to get him out.' Eventually, however, the barrage of profanity reaching the Valley floor was beginning to offend many campers, and the NPS decided to remove the team.

Exact details of the rescue are uncertain, but officials said that it involve a helicopter, an air compressor, and a large vat of vaseline.

If by some miracle I return, the next post will be in a couple of weeks.

Forms of address

2007-05-03T12:10:00.000-07:00

The Queen is about to meet George W. Bush in a few days, and the question that's occupying my mind is what will The President call the Queen? It's just possible that he'll get it correct with Your Highness, but with George W. Bush you never quite know. Your Royal Ma'amness? Your Majestic Queeness? Or just plain ol' Bessie?

Who knows. More to the point, who cares? One is an inbred German pretending to be an Anglo-Saxon blueblood, the other is an Anglo-Saxon blueblood pretending to be an inbred Texan (with some success, as it happens). Though it galls me to say it, I think the French had the right idea when it somes to dealing with the aristocracy.

I once took the Queen's Shilling. I've been avoiding her ever since, in case she wants it back.*

*Americans, you have no hope of understanding this gag. Don't even bother trying.

I yearn for the days of pointed sticks

2007-05-02T18:07:00.000-07:00

Certainly in the topsy turvy world of rock and roll, having a good solid piece of wood in your hand is quite often useful Ian Faith

I've just experienced a most interesting seminar. I have no idea what the seminar was about, I was far too distracted, but the experience was not to be forgotten. The speaker, as is the norm these days in scientific presentations, had a laser pointer, and like most speakers was completely inept in its use. Spectacularly so, in fact.

The pointing came into play after a brief introduction. Like most of us who aren't called Skywalker the speaker was unable aim a laser, so after a few spastic twitches the little red dot careered across the screen to the rough point of interest, where the speaker kept the thing moving around just in case anyone forgot what they're supposed to be looking at. There it remained, making rapid and random motions about the screen in a mildly irritating fashion. Normally, when the pointing is done the laser is switched off, and the talk continues. This speaker, whether through nerves or incompetence, kept her finger on the laser for almost the whole talk. She prattled on, blissfully unaware that the audience wasn't paying a blind bit of notice and instead were completely focused on tracking the erratic, fast-track Brownian motion of this sprite-like red dot. Concentration became even more urgent after the speaker made a sudden turn towards us, instantly frying the retina of one of the keener Post-Docs who had made the mistake of sitting near the front. This was not to be the last such incident.

On and on she rambled, oblivious to the audience's synchronised head movements and the occasional whimper of pain and lost vision, until the mercifully battery ran out and this mischievous red Tinkerbell was finally allowed to die. This was, of course, to everyone's relief except the speaker, who a minute or so later had genuine need to highlight something on the screen, only then realising that this demonic light-saber had expired. In desperation, she looked to the host with pleading eyes. 'Does anyone have a pointer I could borrow?' By this point, some of the more epileptic members of the faculty were showing themselves a little worse for wear (I was convinced that we would see at least one seizure), so everyone kept quiet, even those smug gadget freaks who carry a pointer on their keyring and love to show everyone at the slightest provocation. You could almost see the speaker's deflation.

Back in the good old days, if you wanted to carry an air of authority during scientific presentations, you had a pointer. A good, solid, wooden stick. When one pointed with a wooden stick, it went straight to its mark without a lot of jittery chaos, before being dropped back down due to its weight, whence it could be leant on as a totem of intellectual confidence. Nobody ever screwed with a scientist who could correctly wield a pointed stick, and certainly not an unruly undergraduate. Nobody ever suffered an brain seizure due to the twitchings of a wooden stick, and nobody ever had their eyes destroyed. (At least, not accidentally. There have been times when I have been tempted to reach forward and give a sharp prod to some smartarse in the third row). It is time to put a stop to this nonsense, and go back to the days of a solid pointer in every venue.

Next week - I bemoan the death of the lectern, and declare a bloody jihad on Powerpoint

Shut your trap, you deluded imbecile

2007-04-26T14:09:00.001-07:00

A gentleman told me the other day that, unless I believed in Jesus, I was going to go to Hell. I tried to make the point that a lack of belief in Jesus would necessarily imply a belief that Hell does not exist, but such finer metaphysical points were beyond him. I then tried to sympathise with his viewpoint. I had just come off an eleven hour flight from London in the tender care of United Airways, and felt well qualified to comment on life in Hell. He insisted that Hell was much even worse, that Hell was a walk in the park compared to United Airways, that it was a place of pain, and misery, and the wails of those tortured souls who know that it is too late to reverse the decisions that have led them to eternal damnation. 'Have you ever been to Heathrow?', I asked, 'Pretty much the same thing'. That shut him up.

What is it about lunatics that they always seem to catch me when I am at my lowest resistance? Many years ago, when I was moping around France in an adolescent fashion after some doomed romance or another, a Lutheran Minister from Korea decided it was the perfect moment to collar me and canvas my views on 'ungodly' modern pop music. Did I know, for example, that scientific experiments had shown crops to flourish when played Beethoven, but to whither and die when played heavy metal music? He then went on to assert Simon and Garfunkel's Bridge Over Troubled Water was all about oral sex.

That's the trouble with lunatics. It isn't enough for them to live in their own delusions, they need to share their demented ravings with me.

England, a nation of clotheshorses

2007-04-20T15:15:00.000-07:00

It's been a while since my last entry. The culture shock of nestling back into the Warm Bosom of my Motherland seems to have let my muse reeling somewhat. You'd think that being English I would, in fact, feel comfortable in England, but I find myself having to relearn the basic survival skills.

Take clotheshorses, for example. In the USA where power is artificially cheap, everyone uses a tumble drier on laundry day. The average British urban dweller is too cheap to run one of these, so is forced to dry the week's laundry on a clotheshorse. For my American readers, a clotheshorse is a folding plastic or wooden rack on which damp laundry can be placed to dry out. It sounds simple, but there is a genuine artisanship in arranging the clothes in a fashion that creates space for more than a single shirt, three socks and a pair of underpants. Any overflow must be draped over chairs, and given that there's no real airflow hence it takes about three days to dry anything, it's important to maximize the clotheshorse loading. Most British alcoholics only develop their addiction because for most of the week, the pub is the only place that they can sit down of an evening. That and the fact that if they stayed at home they would be expected to talk to the wife.

Those living in the country and having gardens can use a washing line when the weather is sufficiently clement, but the only people who choose to live in the country with a garden are either ignorant peasants or have families, so obviously I don't mix with them.

Many of my friends have had babies. Normally I would disapprove, but I have suddenly realised that almost all of them have had girls, which implies that about the time that I make professor there will be a glut of female undergraduates.

It's the survey season again

2007-03-29T17:13:00.000-07:00

Spring is sprung, the grass is riz, I wonder where my survey is?

For some reason, spring is the time when people seem to canvass for information, and I'm not just talking about the IRS. In the last few weeks, I've been bombarded by no less than four different bureaucracies at A Well-Known West Coast University for my opinons. My opinions are never that high as regular readers will no doubt realise, but they could probably be improved by the bureaucrats getting on with some work instead of asking me how I feel about them consistently delaying my reimbursements.

One particularly choice survey asked me, amongst other things, to state my sexual preference from the following options:

Heterosexual
Lesbian/Gay
Bisexual
Other (please specify)

Other? What the fuck? What the hell have these people heard about me?

Fortunately the survey was anonymous, so there shouldn't be any legal ramifications from describing myself as an Androgynous Tantric Badger Fucker.

Nothing says 'serious scientist' quite like calling comparing the government to Nazi Germany

2007-03-19T17:42:00.000-07:00

The history of science is littered with the sad tales of a once-great mind falling into an ignominious dotage. Take the example of Louis Agassiz, the once-great 19th century geologist, who's most renowned discovery was the realisation that the Earth had gone through extreme cold events, which he dubbed 'Ice Ages'. Unfortunately (for him), towards the end of his career a couple of upstart heathen Englishmen called Darwin and Wallace jointly submitted works on the origins of species. Agassiz, like the Kansas school board after him, was so offended by the idea of evolution that he spent his later years writing ill-concieved, contradictory and flimsy polemics against the theory. In the process he managed to more or less destroy his own reputation, something no rival had been able to achieve throughout his long career. If there's one thing we can all learn from men like Agassiz (and there have been plenty), its that when you find your academic career is on its downward trajectory, then its time to start cashing in with a few consultancies, and concentrate on teaching your way to becoming every undergrad's favourite Emeritus. Above all, stay off the field when the young studs are kicking the ball around.

Usually I associate Agassiz with contemporary climate change 'skeptics', due to their propensity for offering weak and incoherent arguments, but which gain credibility because they react against a notion that threatens society's status quo. On this occasion its the other side that needed to take note of Agassiz's cautionary tale though. Jim Hansen is a rather distinguished scientist, who was interested in anthropogenic climate change way back before it became fashionable. Just lately, he's been showing signs of the strain that the politicization of climate science is no doubt putting on a man in his position, and has been beginning to develop the dangerous tendency towards activism. Scientists shouldn't be activists. Scientists, like soldiers, should never publicly state their mere opinions, or at least not from the platform of privileged authority that their profession may imply to the lay person. Anyway, Dr Hansen had a bit of a Micheal Richards-style meltdown in the Senate recently when he compared the current White House residents to the Nazis.

The point he was making was perfectly valid, that as a government employee (he's a NASA director) he was being effectively gagged by the administration. Unfortunately, no matter how valid your argument, accusing your opponents of being Nazis lumps you in with girlfriendless conspiracy theorists, online political extremists, and people who stand in shopping malls trying to get you to sign petitions. If there's one thing the climate debate doesn't need at the moment, its respected scientists destroying their own credibility. Nothing says 'nutter' quite as effectively as calling the President a Nazi.

Caffeine withdrawal: update!

2007-03-15T16:20:00.000-07:00

I've now reached the 58-hour mark. The spoon-wielding otters have mostly lost interest in trying to dig a mineshaft through my brain. As with everything in life, there's a couple of die-hards who won't give up, but nothing I can't handle. This morning I made the first decaffeinated bowel movement since I was sixteen, and it left me rather shocked.

Somebody suggested that after conquering coffee, I might try giving up alcohol, so I had to punch their putrid face. That has made me feel much better.

If only I had the energy, I'd slaughter everyone right now

2007-03-14T15:43:00.000-07:00

One of the more tedious aspects of living amongst the fruits and nuts of California, is the number of people who don't drink coffee. They don't drink beer either for that matter, or at least not enough to indicate sufficient self-awareness to need the kind of escape from reality that only alcohol can provide. However, non-drinkers at least tend to stay away from the sort of places that I go to get drunk, thus I am spared their patronizing self-righteousness. Not so those who've fore sworn caffeine. 'Oh no, I don't drink coffee, it's really bad for you' they unnecessarily inform me, drawing deeply on their camomile-and-rosehip flavoured infusions (or whatever it is that these people drink to keep the chi re centred). Yeah, well try getting through a four year PhD fuelled only by tofu and dried leaves, or for that matter keeping a centred chi. At the other end of the scale are the caffeinated hipsters, the sort of new-media dickheads who seem to spend most of the business day surfing the net in Starbucks on their laptops pretending to work. These are the sort of people who routinely wear hats, and who can ask for a 'tall, skinny latte with wings' without any hint of irony or embarrassment. Clearly, coffee seems to bring out the pompous in people, much like religion and smoking bans.

I've recently finished my qualifying exams. These are, as far as I know, unique to the American higher education system, and represent the most pointless exercise in academic hazing imaginable. Nobody takes them seriously, but everyone has to take three months from research to study for and complete them. Up to this point, I have for the most part managed to retain some sense of connection with what we laughingly dub the Real World, but after the last few months I have become apathetic, nervous, socially inept and disinterested in anything outside work. If the aim of these exams was to ensure that we're fully prepared for a life in academia, then I suppose it could be said that they were successful.

Now that these exams are over, I no longer need chemical stimuli to force my mind and soul through the tedium of learning in minute detail a lot of stuff that I mostly already knew. I have decided to try an experiment, to see how I react to life without a regular dose of coffee. Nothing permanent, just for a week or so to see how it feels. All those people who tell you how much better they feel and how much more energy they have since giving up caffeine are, quite frankly, talking out of their arses. I'm currently on Day One, and it is thirty-four hours since my last 'hit'. I can barely keep my eyes open, I'm struggling to string a sentence together, and useful research seems like a long distance memory. My head feels like I spent last night hitting the Jagermeisters with an Irish rugby club, like I am being bludgeoned to death by a pack of spoon-wielding otters. The only thing that sustains me is the thought of enacting actual physical harm against people who drink ginseng for kicks. In this one last aspect, at least, I am my old self.

Update on the Japanese trawler

2007-02-23T15:25:00.000-08:00

No news to tell, she's still making slow, stately circuits of the Ross Sea under the sole control of the elements. I've discussed the issue with several people here though, and one of them said that 'if the ship continues to threaten an oil spill in the area, the Australian's should just blow her out of the water'.

I looked hard into their eyes for any sign of irony, but none were forthcoming.

My working conditions are out of this world

2007-02-21T18:42:00.000-08:00

I've just received an email proudly stating that there will be 'NO HEAT NO AIR - FOR 1 WEEK'*. They're really cracking down on the budget these days - I had just about got used to supplying my own printer paper, but having to bring in my own oxygen bottles seems a little harsh. It makes the department sound like the Martian winter. If I really want the feeling that I'm on another planet, all I need do is engage one of the older faculty members in conversation. However, if I want my imagination to take me further afield (say a different universe or an alternative dimension), then I find that dealing with the payroll department usually does the trick. I've given up reading Kafka for similar reasons - it has become unnecessary.

* Despite the sensationalist tone of the email, it was just a badly-worded memo explaining that the building air-conditioning plant is faulty.

My favourite story of the week

2007-02-16T13:55:00.000-08:00

This week, I am mostly laughing at the Japanese whaling ship that may need to be towed away from the Antarctic coast. The ship, from the Japanese Institute of Cetacean Research, was presumably doing a valuable scientific investigation into how many protected mammals it is possible to harvest from a region covered by several international treaties, when its engine caught fire. Thankfully there are several vessels in the region that could rescue the crew and tow the ship to safety - the closest of which is a Greenpeace vessel.

The Japanese captain is unamused though, and is honouring the Samurai spirit by refusing the offer of such help, whilst environmentalists are wringing their hands in case she starts hemorrhaging fuel into Ross Sea. Well, environmentalists always are wringing their hands, aren't they?

For once, and in a break with their finest traditions, Greenpeace has actually got it right this time. They're mostly worried about penguin colonies, but a significant oil spill into the Ross Sea region would have major
consequences for the entire west Antarctic. The Ross Sea is one of the major Southern Hemisphere perennial ice sheets (the other is the Weddell Sea - that would be a fisheries disaster of hemispheric
proportions). A major reason why ice can exist there throughout the Antarctic summer is that being highly reflective, it bounces most of the sun's radiation back, so that only heating by air or the ocean (which
doesn't really happen here) can melt it. However, a fuel spill would taint a significant portion of that ice with a black liquid - you get the picture.

Major ice loss from that shelf (which has so far been relatively stable) has far reaching consequences. Firstly, the Ross ice shelf holds back land-based ice sheets, so we could expect an acceleration of glaciers in the Vinson Massif. Secondly, (and this is my area of knowledge by the way) that area is key in modulated the air and ocean flow to the Antarctic Peninsula, the region which has shown a higher rate of warming over the last forty years than almost anywhere else in the world. How this modulation works exactly nobody yet fully understands (I'll tell you in about 18 months time, maybe). However, we do know that because the ice acts as a thermal insulator between the ocean and atmosphere, removing the ice sheet will release a lot of thermal energy into the atmosphere, which will disrupt the air currents that are warming the west Antarctic ice sheet in (as yet) unpredictable ways.

So what's my point? At the risk of advocating gunboat-diplomacy, the international community needs to stop fannying around trying to be diplomatic with these people. If the Japanese continue to endanger the whole region on a stupid point of cultural pride, then either the Australian, New Zealand or Chilean Navy needs to get in there and drag them out, kicking and screaming if necessary. The Treaties that protect Antarctica from damage by commercial exploitation have not yet been fully tested - this seems to be as good a time as any.

Have I told you lately that you're a contemptible cretin?

2007-02-14T17:59:00.000-08:00

It was Valentines Day today, apparently. Personally I try to avoid such things with the same vigour that I avoid cat feces, but somebody sent me an 'anti-Valentine' message. As an expression of ironic derision it completely failed, after all one wouldn't think of sending an anti-Valentine' unless one gave the whole sordid festival some sort of credence, but it did at least remind me why Google had a daffy icon today. I'm told that this is the day for telling those closest to us how much they mean to us. At the time the person closest to me was my office-mate, so I turned to her and told her that I thought she was a contemptible cretin. Then she started crying, which made me feel better about wasting ten seconds of my valuable time on the 'anti-Valentine' debacle.

Some colleagues tried to get me to sign up for a special campus Valentine's speed-dating event, presumably so that they can sit 'downstream' from me and make themselves look concerned and caring after some sensitive soul has been deeply offended by me. They're pretty desperate obviously, and I suppose the Victoria's Secrets ads that surface at this time of year don't help. I refused because frankly I was a little insulted, mainly by the notion that it would
take me a whole two minutes to traumatise another graduate student. (Some of them have a tendency to take themselves a bit seriously, so it's like shooting fish in a barrel.) Anyway, since it's a
special day for couples and coupling I thought I would take the opportunity to give more
of my valuable advice regarding relationships.

A friend has emailed me with a problem - she's been lusting after a Frenchman in her office, and
apparently he has 'a gorgeous body' (what the hell kind of office is this that she's seen his body?). Unfortunately she's in a long-term relationship so she says 'obviously she doesn't want anything to happen'. (I don't know why obviously, there's a 50% divorce rate in the UK at the moment so it's fair to say that the notion of mutual-exclusivity here has been stretched by a fair few people). Anyway, despite generally acting like a sixties schoolgirl ('whenever I see him I giggle, act like a 12 year old and run away!') he seems to be equally attracted, and she wants to know how to tell him that there's no chance of a knee-trembler in the stationary cupboard.

The Captain replies...

Well, for a start giggling and running away is not the actions of a modern twelve-year-old I my experience, pinching his wallet and running away is more the style nowadays. However, that's beside the point. In terms of your problem I really wouldn't worry too much, he's probably just
concerned about your welfare. If a woman in my workplace kept giggling and running away, I would naturally assume that she was in some way mentally retarded, and the company was filling a government quota so that they could claim tax relief for employing 'individuals with special needs'. Either that or he's a pederast and the little-girl act is really doing it for him - he is French after all. In either case, all you need to do is start acting like a fully-grown adult woman in a position professional responsibility (by which I mean restrict your flirting to potential clients and drunken senior managers). If that doesn't work, you could always email your entire office a link to this post, I find it always helps to get these things out in the open.

So long, Anna Nicole Smith

2007-02-08T19:19:00.000-08:00

Anna Nicole may have gone, but thanks to Playboy we'll always have the mammaries...

I should have been a bin man

2007-02-02T18:53:00.000-08:00

The latest IPCC assessment report is out today, which means that a lot of scientists fly around the world in order to go to a conference and tell everybody that they should stop flying around the world. It also means the re-igniting the usual tedious debates about whether or not climate change is real or a conspiracy of flag-burning unwashed bolsheviks to take away every man's God-given right to drive the kid's to school in a V8. I refuse to enter these debates now, since the issue of climate change is like party politics - everybody decided twenty years ago what side of the fence they stood on, and any new information is hailed as startling validation of both sides' policy.

Aside from the poorly-argued scientific debates, there is an absolutely mendacious argument from skeptics that we made it all up to generate cash for ourselves. Senator Jim Inhofe (R-OK) was a particular fan of this one. Just out of interest, I wonder how much money these people think we make? The current salary of a US Senator is about $165,000 pa (that's before a couple of non-executive directorships, some nice incentives from the lobbyists and a pretty sweet pension scheme). That's about the same as an extremely succesful scientist in a top position after 30-40 years of research. More realistically, the average researcher at, say, NCAR, or a tenured professor at a Well-Known West Coast University can expect to top out at around the $70,000 mark. This is in America, which is considered to be the land of milk and honey as far as academic pay-scales are concerned.

I could be earning a packet, you know. I could be on Wall Street or The City trading in weather-based derivatives, or working for an insurance company doing long-term risk assessment. A bit of pressure maybe, a bit less sexy when chatting up someone in a Hollywood bar, but at least I'd get weekends off and a decent Christmas bonus. Instead I'm in the lab on yet another friday evening, whilst fuckers like Bill O'Reilly accuse me of fudging the numbers to keep the insurance premium going on my brand new Jaguar.

Sod this, I'm going to contact AEI for a job.

Failing to get the horn

2007-01-25T12:56:00.000-08:00

The zoo said that although Lulu had been introduced to a male rhino called Easyboy, the two had not shown any sexual interest in each other, prompting the decision to attempt artificial insemination.

So it seems that rhino horn is not the aphrodisiac it's widely believed to be, and that all those limp-dicked wealthy asians have been illegally forking out stacks of cash on placebos. I have no sympathy, the flaccid fuckers shouldn't have funded the poaching of endangered species in the first place.

Of course, it could be a ruse by the rhino's to pretend that they have limited potency, in order to kill the market for their bony proboscii. Rhinos are vegetarian after all, and I'm not sure that I really trust anyone who doesn't eat meat. If it is a con, then I envisage World Wildlife Fund activists slipping bromide into the drinking-water of tigers. That's what I call activism.

Fastrousers unveils exciting new service

2007-01-19T11:21:00.000-08:00

A previous post seems to have generated a bit of interest from the indolent chattering classes that make up my dysfunctional readership. Never one to pass up an financial opportunity, I am announcing an upcoming new service - online dumping.

So-called dating services have been tapping into the desperation of the lonely for years, so I don't see why I shouldn't cynically exploit the desperation of unhappy affairs. Service charges will range from about $2.99 for a standard email, to $15.99 for a full-service public humiliation that will scar them for life, with various options. I envisage a similar business model to iTunes, so you'll need to set up an account*. It will allow the 'gifting' of dumpings to other accounts, which provides a good way of subtly hinting to friends that maybe they could be doing better than their current partner, or even to assuage some of the guilt accrued by having slept with said Significant Other.

I truly am a visionary, the Steve Jobs of the human-interaction industry. Plus, I don't have to stick a bloody 'i' in front of every damn product name because I can't think of anything else.

*Each 'break-up' will require the release of your email address/phone number. I plan to make your 'newly single' contact details available to dating agencies, for a small recompense. Unless I think you're hot of course, in which case I'll just hit on you myself.

Democracy in action

2007-01-11T13:03:00.000-08:00

Unlike the USA, it is possible to get one's opinions heard to the British government without a significant financial outlay, either in the form of bribes, lobbyists, or both. For years, lunatics with strong opinions and too much time on their hands have been delivering their own personal manifestos to No. 10 Downing Street in the time-honoured form of petitions.

Thankfully, the process has now been technologically streamlined, and now anyone can set up and sign and e-petition on the 10 Downing Street website. This saves the postal service, and all that tedious messing around on cold street corners trying to persuade other lunatics of the validity of one's cause. You don't need to justify your petition, or even (as far as I can tell) have to be a UK citizen.

Have fun with it - prizes are up for the longest statement, the most votes, and the most original cause.

NB The Terms and Conditions expressly forbid use of the publicly-funded site for frivolous or non-serious purposes. While that raises the question of what the hell Tory backbenchers are paid for if not for frivolity, I cannot and would not, ever, under any circumstances, condone the use of the site for mere entertainment. For example the creation of a nationally owned themepark, AnthraxWorld, at the Porton Down biological warfare research facility, or the annexation of northern France. Somebody's already proposed the reintroduction of public flogging, but I have a feeling that they may have been serious

Platonic Presidency

2007-01-05T10:05:00.000-08:00

George W. Bush insists that he is done giving back rubs to the German Chancellor. In a statement, the President said that 'although his intentions were meant in a tone of support and friendship, he would not wish to do anything that would be seen as compromising the deep respect he has for the office of Chancellor. Also', Mr. Bush added, 'the uptight bitch is obviously a dyke, or frigid'.

The President has also made it official policy to decline giving foot massages to the Pakistani leader, Pervez Musharraf, but the White House remains tight-lipped concerning the alleged 'Friends with Benefits' negotiations with UK Prime Minister Tony Blair.

There must be 50 days to leave your lover

2007-01-01T16:22:00.000-08:00

I'm told that this is a tricky time of year to become single. Over dinner recently the conversation turned, as it so often does, to the predicament of becoming single. I discovered that, as far as women are concerned, there are only a limited number of days on which it is acceptable to elbow one's nearest and (formerly) dearest. Anything between Thanksgiving and Christmas is out, because it might involve awkward questions from relatives during family gatherings over the festive period. There's only so many times one can hear 'there's plenty of fish in the sea' from an aunt without justifiably resorting to violence. Between Christmas and New Year is socially difficult since, plans for the biggest piss-up of the year may need to be altered at the last minute. Straight after New Year just shows that you were only waiting to do the deed out of social niceties, and less than a month before February 14th is bad because women care about such things as Valentines day. That leaves an open window of only ten days, from January 5th - 14th inclusive, assuming you don't want to have to wait until Lent (although even I must admit that that does seem somewhat appropriate, since Lent is all about giving things up).

Fortunately I am completely unperturbed by either scruples, tact or conscience, so I am free to ditch someone pretty much any time of the year. Sometime between opening my presents on Christmas Day and having to introduce her to the family at Christmas Dinner seems like pretty good timing to me.

But how, oh how, to do it? Hopefully you've made the necessary precautions throughout the relationship and made sure she doesn't know your home address, in which case you can just block her phone number and add her mail address to your spam filter. That isn't always possible though, in which case more overt tactics need to be employed. A fax to her workplace saying 'Welcome to Dumpsville. Population: You' has always been my preferred method, since it avoids a scene. Some people like to use text messaging, but I'm a man of many vowels and something like 'dnt wnt 2 c u ne-more' just doesn't do it for me. Some women are more persistent than others of course, and these subtle hints sometimes don't always get through. If you find yourself in this situation you may need to use the nuclear warhead of break-up lines, so-called because it's deployment carries the risk of Mutually Assured Destruction. Tell your unintended that she's a really nice girl, then add 'but I don't want that, I want a dirty girl. And your sister's* filthy'. Sure, it may end up tearing her family apart, but it's guaranteed to ensure that she never wants to see you again.

*If she doesn't have a sister, then use mother instead - I would probably avoid using 'brother' for all but the most extreme cases.

We're sitting on a goldmine

2006-12-19T17:47:00.000-08:00

A recent report suggests that America's biggest cash crop is marijuana. I can't say that I'm surprised. Any 'legitimate' farmer here has to deal with a bewildering number of government departments, all of which are largely worthless, idle, useless and barely competent bureaucratic behemoths. (That's just my own view, you understand, but is based on some personal experience). There's the FDA, the USDA, the OSHA, more recently the INS, not to mention those thieving bastards at the IRS. That's just Federal agencies, mark you, never mind the various State offices that get involved. The only government involvement that a Californian dope-grower needs to worry about is making sure the local sheriff gets his monthly bung on time. If you want to make something profitable, for Christ's sake keep the US Government away from it. Just ask Kenneth Lay.

In the UK things are rather different, where agriculture is now largely a matter of stuffing a load of sheep on a hillside and slaughtering the one's that survive through to spring, whilst claiming EU money for leaving the only productive land you have fallow. This frees up British farmer's time to concentrate on their main business, which is driving around the country in a brand new Discovery bleating about fuel prices, the Common Agricultural Policy, and how they're stricken by poverty.

I've told the University that by keeping the Botanical Gardens going in their present state they are sitting on a veritable goldmine. The funding potential of sustaining non-native plants in expensive greenhouses fizzled out years ago, whereas they could be cultivating some half-decent whacky in there. It wouldn't work on most campuses of course, the crop would be constantly raided by the undergraduates, but here at A Well-Known West Coast University the undergraduates are either too bourgeois to smoke weed, or too scared of getting fried by the campus filth. However, so far my proposal has met with skepticism, and even some censure. Fucking old poofs.

You're wasting your time

2006-12-08T14:43:00.000-08:00

Are you still looking for that perfect Christmas gift? If you are then I would suggest you stop wasting your time. Surely you must have something more useful and less galling joining the barbarian horde of consumers, all in search of the holy grail of a gift that is by turns original, personal, and competitively priced? Do what I do, get them the first thing you can find on eBay for under $10 and have it dispatched straight to their home address. You've as much chance of getting something they actually want, and you don't even need to bugger about wrapping it up.

However, in case you are still engaged in this futile ordeal, I'd like to make a few suggestions. These fine gifts are not available in the shops, and can only be acquired from me, on receipt of $49.99 and a decent bottle of scotch. (And I do mean decent. Don't even think about fobbing me off with that bottle of Johnnie Walker Red Label that you picked up in the Duty Free last summer.)

Dick Cheney's Shooting Gallery
All the action of a real-life quail-hunt in the comfort of your own home. Suitable for ages 5 and up, but not for lawyers.

Game of Life - Utah edition
Drive through Utah in a Chevy Silverado, buying property and paying tithes. The winner is player with the most wives at the end, and is swept away to Heaven in a spaceship. Or is that the Scientologists? Whatever, I don't have time to keep track of everything these fruitcakes believe.

Monopoly - Vegas edition
"You've landed on one of my hookers, that's $50 please!" Not suitable for younger children.

Trailor Park Barbie
Currently pending negotiations with Britney Spears' lawyers.

Risk
The classic game of strategy and world domination, updated for 2006. Declare victory five minutes into the game, then spend the next eight hours throwing your entire army into one country as the situation degenerates into a chaotic Battle Royale. Nobody's worked out how to win the game yet, so I can't tell you how it ends.

Spank the Monkey
A favourite in the Vatican. Grunts when you rub his banana. "Innocent, God-fearing fun for boys of all ages" - Mark Foley

My New Year's Resolution

2006-12-01T13:35:00.000-08:00

I know it's a little early for New Year's resolutions, but I think that if there's something worth giving up then why bother waiting for some arbitrary date set by a Roman emporer two thousand years ago? If I was into that kind of thing I'd be a catholic.

This year, I am resolved not to waste my time engaging in political debate with anybody who doesn't own a passport. Having a stamp or two in it would be preferable, but ultimately ownership is the only key requirement. At least it indicates some kind of vague intention to visit another country, an entertainment of the possibility that life exists outside the arbitrary political boundaries of one's own nation. I've come to realise that one of the common threads linking the stupid, the scared, and the just plain barking is the lazy moral certainty that comes from never having seen anywhere, except through the goldfish-bowl view of the cathode ray tube.

"Ah, Captain, we were just wondering what your views were on the Second Amendement?"
"Certainly, but may I see your passport first?"
"Umm, I don't actually have one."
"Then fuck off, you dogmatic little cunt. It's 2006, not 1906, for chrissakes."

If you want to buy a drink here you're usually expected to provide proof that you're suitably mature, so I don't see it as unreasonable to expect people to prove that they're qualified to disagree with me.

This season's HOT look

2006-11-28T16:23:00.000-08:00

The first really cold storm of the winter hit Los Angeles yesterday, with temperatures plummiting to a positively Baltic 16 celsius. Personally, I haven't yet lived here long enough to really notice such temperatures as being cold, but I can gauge the transition from autumn to winter by the appearance of ugg boots. Ugg boots, in case they haven't reached the UK, are bulky sheepskin calf/knee length boots that look like a cross between bedroom slippers and a slaughtered elk, and on the campus of A Well-Known West Coast University they seem to be commonly worn with a short skirt. Quite why one would wish to cool one's legs and simultaneously worry about frostbitten toes has so far eluded me, but then I'm not an undergraduate. For some reason, ugg boots seem to raise the ire of polemicists, but personally I don't give a toss. There's something rather 80s about the look, and as I always say there's no such thing as an indecent outfit, only indecent legs. People without decent legs are banned from A Well-Known West Coast University, or at least they're actively discouraged, so that's not really a problem here. Also, most of the detractors seem to be Australian, so their views on sartorial elegance can be safely ignored

My 'Dynamic Climatology' class sporting their winter drawers. The dark-haired one works on equatorial Rossby wave rectification, and the blonde is interested in mesoscale land-surface forcing

Of course, this is a very cosmopolitan campus, so not every female undergraduate wears ugg boots in the winter. The Japanese students, for example, go more for knee-length stockings. It must be due to that 'schoolgirl' obsession that they all seem to have. I wonder if there's anyone left in Japan who enjoys just good old fashioned shag, without the need for utensils or a bit of latent peadophilia? I doubt it.

The only nation that rivals the Japanese for kinky strangeness are the Germans, which raises the vexed sociological question of a possible link between coming second in World War Two and sexual perversion. More importantly, would you rather spend a weekend in a Vegas hotel room with a German or Japanese depraved twenty-one-year-old? I throw these matters open for debate.

Some full-grown women in Japan trying to attract a couple of peadophiles. In their defense, at least they don't shit on each other for pleasure, unlike some WW2 antagonists I could mention...

Instant arsehole - just add uniform!

2006-11-16T12:48:00.000-08:00

This week, I am mostly outraged by the inappropriate and indiscriminate tactics employed by The University's very own police force. Quite why this Well-Known West Coast University needs its own police force is beyond my comprehension, since this is possibly the most tedious and trouble-free campus that I have seen anywhere in the world. No matter, the fact is that we do, and it's been clear to me in my dealings with them that they have a bit of a chip on their shoulder because, uniforms notwithstanding, they're not proper police. Aaron Spelling would never have written an action series about the exciting and seedy-but-glamorous life of The University's very own thin blue line, daily braving dangers to keep the campus protected from illegal parking and skinny, twenty-year-old socialists. The campus fuzz know this, and it gnaws away at their very tiny and soulless minds, so it's no wonder that they have a warped attitude. Added to which there's nowhere on campus that sells decent donuts.

It seems that this time their malignant nature has taken them too far, and more importantly it's taken them too far in front of fifty or so witnesses with camera phones. A 'full investigation' has been ordered by the acting chancellor, which can be roughly translated as 'a spineless hatchet-job on the student involved, followed by a couple of quiet dismissals and panicked settlement with the student's family'.

Not that I object in principal to rough treatment of undergraduates. There are occasions in campus life when they need a thorough going-over that they won't forget. Occasionally one of them needs to be separated from the herd and made an example of, just to keep the others in check. But that is not the role of the police. It is, and always has been, the strict domain of the Academic Staff. That's what we get payed for. What's next, SWAT Teams proctoring exams? That's my job, and I don't need any fairy body-armour and and a wussy fucking baton to do it.

Heroically protecting us from the scourge of mendacious disabled parking permits

For those who really thrive on this sort of thing, you can watch an undergraduate student having the shit kicked out of him here

Up the Creek without a wag-bag

2006-10-30T14:22:00.000-08:00

I've been away for a while, another adventure in the desert, which is why I've not been posting. This season's XTreeeem sport was Mormon-dodging in Utah. Accompanied by a true Hollywood metrosexual, I bravely went deep into the heart of polygamy-country, fueled only by Abbey-inspired piss-and-vinegar, and no small amount of Scotch and beer smuggled across the border from California. Los Angeles is no mecca for hops fans, but the offerings here surely beat the LDS-sanctioned gnat's piss that the State of Utah amusingly deems 'beer'. I won't be too harsh on the Mormons though, it's too easy and at the end of the day they're just too pleasant. They may be crap drivers and have some unusual beliefs concerning underpants, but unlike most religions they're not trying to tax me or terminate me, for which one has to be grateful.

Good times in Utah - a thrilling mixture of the bizarre and beautiful, warm and cold, pleasure and pain, assholes and angels. It is an awful long drive from Moab to Southern California though, not made more pleasant by the malignant odor. There were two of us in the car, transporting a week's accumulated sweat, fear and woodsmoke, tempered only by a few brief squirts of deodorant. By the time we reached Vegas, it smelled like a French cafe after the whores have ridden into town.

* Note for UK readers and other civilised peoples - Indian Creek is managed as a 'wilderness area' which means that everything solid that you take in, you also have to take out. And I do mean everything. A wag-bag is basically a jiffy bag full of cat litter, designed for the purpose of packing out last night's bean burrito.

There's a sex pest on the lawn

2006-10-13T10:44:00.000-07:00

I looked out of my office window this morning, and was shocked to see a well-known sex pest in the Sculpture Garden surrounded by young undergrads, so I phoned up campus security. I was impressed, even a little awed, by how seriously they took my complaint. There are security guards everywhere and I keep having to show my ID when I leave the lab to go to the toilet. I was mistaken though, it seems that they're all here to protect this fiend.

I've been telling all the administrators in the department to watch out, and don't accept the offer of any cigars from strange men, but they're just staring out of the windows all googly-eyed like a bunch of sixteen-year-olds at a Beatles concert. It's almost as if they want to have a cigar inserted in them by an ex-President. I have to give him credit though, he does have exquisite hair that is positively resplendent in the sun. The ultimate SAGA sex-symbol.

Actually, if I'm perfectly honest I don't really care what Clinton, or even Foley, got up to with his interns. I will never have interns, but as my career progresses I will have access to at least a few desperate/naive students every year, and believe me they'll have a lot more than a cigar to worry about during my office hours. It's a terrible cliche I know, but one of the few perks of academia is the constant access to firm, young flesh that get more interested in you as you get older. And no amount of 'sexual harassment' seminars are going to stop me from fully exploiting that resource.

Ring of Fire

2006-10-11T19:13:00.000-07:00

Richard Lefevre won $2000 dollars on Sunday, for eating 247 jalapeno peppers at the Jalapeno Eating world Championships. Emergency services in his home state of Nevada have been on alert pending his first bowel movement.

He narrowly beat Sonya Thomas, a 105 pound asian woman who makes a living out of cramming junk food down her gullet. I wonder if she's thought of applying to the World Food Program for sponsorship? No matter, she's single and she can get 8.31 pounds of sausage in her mouth in 10 minutes, which makes her my kind of woman.

No wonder Americans aren't interested in inane, contrived sports like 'soccer'.

Sonya Thomas - butter wouldn't melt in her mouth. Probably because it wouldn't have time

I am rather grateful to Kim Jong-il

2006-10-09T18:48:00.000-07:00

I have, in the past, been criticised for the feckless and irresponsible life choices I have made. 'Think of the future!', they all cried, 'think about your retirement!'.

Thanks to North Korea, it is now obvious that there will be no future, and my way has been proven the best way. I have spent the whole weekend pissing myself at all that money my friends have thrown away on retirement funds and investments, when they should have been spending it on fine booze and bad women. Suckers.

It's like the collapse of the Tories all over again

2006-10-03T15:58:00.000-07:00

It's vile. It's more sad than anything else, to see someone with such potential throw it all down the drain because of a sexual addiction

That was (former) Representative Mark Foley in 1998 talking about Bill Clinton. Clinton, you may recall, was almost impeached because a consenting adult gave him a blow job, whereas Foley was merely reprimanded for soliciting underage male employees.

It's like watching a rerun of the mid-90s Conservative party.

Although unique, I am not in fact a minority

2006-09-28T16:36:00.000-07:00

Around this time of year, my Inbox gets overloaded with news of various fellowships that I can apply for. It's the academic equivalent of being bombarded with adverts for budget dick-stiffening remedies - everyone gets them, even though they only apply to a tiny minority (pardon the pun) and 50% of the recipients aren't even eligible to apply.

Even if I was a US citizen, most of these fellowships are of no interest to me, because I am not a member of an 'under represented group' (one is not allowed to say minority any more). I did once try to argue that there weren't enough aging British misanthropes in American academia, but to be honest when you look around the faculty we are still the dominant force. One has to a 'person of color' [sic] these days, or a woman. (Am I still allowed to say woman? Person of oestrus, perhaps?) Not that I object to promoting a more cosmopolitan intelligensia, I just wish they'd stop emailing me tell what I could have won if I'd been born a one-legged lesbian.

The new undergrads turned up this week. They all seem to be 'persons of challenging ability' (i.e. thick as shit). It's a sad fact that as one gets older, the freshers don't just get younger, but more stupid as well.

'I'd love this country if it wasn't for all the fucking foreigners'

2006-09-19T17:02:00.000-07:00

An aquaintance from my long defunct undergraduate days, let's just call him 'Trevor'*, recently got married. Trevor has always had a fairly flexible sense of morality and a unique view of good taste, which has led him to be dubbed in some circles as The Filthiest Man in the World. Ultimately his heart is in the right place, but he is a man who thinks that ethics is a county just outside London, and that scruples is something you might catch from one of its women**.

Trevor is a fur trader. Let's face it, there's only so many ways you can make a living with a degree in Slavic languages, and he's not the sort of person to lose too much sleep over the welfare of a few cute rodents. (In all fairness, it's not surprising that he has no love of nature, given what it's done to him). Although Trevor can speak several languages he can't say 'no' in any of them, so it was fairly well known that when he was out east at trade shows he enjoyed the company of the models from time to time. Trevor, bless his filthy soul, is not what you'd call a prime catch. He combines the chiselled good looks of Lemmy with the winning charm of Wayne Rooney. Presumably a western income and an EU passport added a certain something to his pulling power. Anyway, after ten years of philandering, karma finally scored a direct hit and one them finally managed to get her claws into him. They were married last year.

The wedding photos are a fine indication of just how far out of his depth he's ended up this time. I wouldn't go so far as to suggest that his new in-laws are gangsters, but that's only because I wouldn't dare. These people have a long reach and a short temper. I would rather describe them as buccaneers of the alternative economy, entrepreneurs who aren't afraid to push the boundaries of eastern Europes burgeoning free-market opportunities. I would put good money down that the self-same wedding photos are on file somewhere at Interpol.

The point is that, outside the normal loving marital devotion, Trevor has some very good reasons for keeping his new bride happy, most notably an aversion to swimming in the Thames with his mouth filled with cement. She knows this well and by all accounts has been making full use of the opportunities afforded to her by moving to London with a reasonably affluent husband. She does not work of course, because her English is 'not yet good enough'. She has picked up sufficient English to fully express her views on England though. When asked how she was settling into her new home she promptly stated that she liked London, but that there were too many fucking niggers. This masterful summary of one of the World's great cultural melting pots was made in the middle of the day, outside a pub, within ear shot of any passers-by.

How does one follow that one up? How do you respond to someone telling you that your country is too multi-racial, when she's only in the country in the first place because of a drunken shag at a trade fair? Personally I have no idea, but I'd be interested to hear your views.

* I've changed the names. Not to protect the innocent (there aren't any in this sorry tale) but to protect myself
** Note to foreigners - 'Ethics' sounds a bit like Essex, which is a county just to the north of our fair capital. And thus a joke, if it may be so called, is derived. Essex is very much the San Fernando Valley of Britain, being notable mostly as a dismal hive of wannabe-cockney wideboys and ugly but ever-willing women. David and Victoria Beckham are the unofficial Royal Family of Essex.

Update
Vote now on my racist bitch poll!

Nobody expects a Spanish Inquisition

2006-09-18T16:19:00.000-07:00

I was only saying that the Islam isn't exactly the most liberal faith. I didn't expect a Spanish Inquisition - Pope Benedict XVI

Well, nobody expects a Spanish Inquisition, least of all the Holy Roman Pontiff. Historically, Pope's are more into the business of instigating religious holocausts (or in Benny's case just helping out). Personally I think that he's got a point - he quotes somebody else as saying that Islam is a faith of violence and hatred, and the moslem clerics call for his death. Quod erat demonstrandum, as they say in the Vatican bar.

I don't suppose that the majority of muslims are actually that intolerant at all, any more than the majority of christians give a stuff what that old fool in Rome says. When you get right down to it, this Pope vs Ayatollah situation is just a bunch of cloistered, celibate old men arguing vociferously over some really obscure and abstract ideas - much like a scientific conference, in fact. The only difference is that at a scientific meeting the PhD students don't start hacking at each other with swords every time their advisor's get into a minor but intensely personal disagreement. Not that that would necessarily be a bad thing, mind you. With my vicious nature and military training, I could probably eliminate a fair amount of my future academic competition before I've even finished my dissertation. Forget 'publish or perish' - science red in tooth and claw is the future.

Some muslims spreading their message of love and understanding

I have the serenity of a Buddhist monk

2006-09-13T17:16:00.000-07:00

Protagonist?!?!? You make it sound like it's a bad thing....

So says mushroomcloud_2. She's wrong of course, I was merely making an observation, and had no intention of involving myself in pointless value judgements. As a scientist I am the model of objectivity, and therefore I am above such base concepts as 'good' and 'bad'. There is no 'good' or 'bad' in climate change, it just is. On the one hand millions starving in the predominately undeveloped tropics due to disruptions in the monsoon might be considered 'bad' if one was to take a subjective moralistic view, but then again sea level rise will wipe Florida off the map which I think is a fair exchange. Being subpoenaed by the senior Senator for Oklahoma to a McCarthy-style hearing and being accused of making up climate change to raise some research funds sounds bad, but on the other hand watching Jim Inhofe make a tit of himself in public as he tries to grapple with some High School physics makes it well worth the air fare. A Well-Known West-Coast University has no 'good' or 'bad' undergraduates, only the barely tolerable and the intensely irritating.

Good, bad, right, wrong, to me they're just meaningless comparatives. I am very much like the Dalai Lama in that respect.

Why did the antelope cross the road?

2006-09-05T16:43:00.000-07:00

Who cares why the antelope crossed the road, just so long as it crossed in a safe manner that was considerate to other road users? One can barely travel a mile on a Fremont County highway without seeing some pathetic evidence of mammalian slaughter. It's the fault of the deer and antelope, of course. Majestic roamers of the Open Range they may be, but if a group of chimpanzees in West Africa can work out the Green-Cross Code when the only traffic they see is a UN truck on the way to the brothel every three days, then Wyoming's herbivores have no excuse.

Surely it's not a difficult concept, even for a ruminant. Most creatures would, I imagine, treat a long thin concrete structure littered with the corpses of it's own species with some trepidation, rather than rushing headlong at it. There are barely any thoroughfares in the entire state (actually, there's barely anything), so it wouldn't be hard to avoid roads completely. However, after over sixty years of mass car-ownership in the USA, these moronic Artiodactyla are still trying to stare down trucks. Darwinism works in mysterious ways here.

The natural majesty of Wyoming's wildlife

Lander, in Fremont County, is home to the world famous One-Shot Antelope Hunt. Why bother? They probably bag more Antelope on the way to the liquor store than they ever do whilst staring down the sights of a rifle.

Update

It appears that I was wrong, the presence of unroadworthy ruminants is considered, by the Swiss at least, to be an important safety feature. Mind you, Switzerland is a nation who's defence strategy over the years has been to facilitate the illegal pillage of both sides during any major conflict, and arming their military with shotguns and a tool for taking stones out of horse's shoes. One should not be surprised of their traffic safety measures are somewhat agrarian.

My favourite website of the day

2006-08-29T09:07:00.000-07:00

This week, I am mostly laughing at Yale,Schmale.com, an obscure Ontario teaching college's attempt to pull in more students.

The president of their own Students' Union thinks the ad campaign is 'repugnant' and 'lacking in class'. I could say the same thing about Yale. For the record, I think that anyone who's too self-important and narrow-minded to see the humour has no business being on the campus of a higher education institute, at least not without a broom in their hand.

This will almost certainly get you laid

2006-08-23T13:19:00.000-07:00

Guernsey has more internet users per capita than the United States, a fact that has helped me to have sex at more dinner parties than even knowing which bits of the planet are warming the fastest.

Interestingly, New Zealand seems to be the most wired nation on the planet, in spite their relatively limited broadband access. Perhaps this is because New Zealand is a nation of forward-thinking technocrats boldly embracing 21st century communication technologies? Frankly, it seems doubtful. I can only speculate that there's not much to do in the evenings after a hard day's sheep shearing and porcine terrorising except surf the web.

A Strapping Kiwi. Are you shearing that sheep? No, sod off and get your own.

We in the Developed World like to restrict our internet usage to the working day when the employer is paying for it, which probably skews the figures. At any point between 0900 and 1700 GMT, 67% of the entire British adult population is looking at YouTube.com, but they're doing it on company servers so it doesn't show up on the statistics*. Let's face it, the only reason to pay for Broadband in your own home is to allow you to download videos of Japanese women sticking eels up themselves without alerting the company firewall.

* This 'fact' is pure speculation, by the way. Don't try and use it to impress the blonde girl in accounts. Unless she's really stupid, of course, in which case all bets are on.

Urgent! Skunk neutralizing required - no time to explain!

2006-08-18T09:29:00.000-07:00

The neighborhood skunk has taken a disliking to my friend's car. (Either that or a particular liking, I still haven't got used to the husbandry of these foreign mammals). Anyway, her ancient estate car has acquired a rather distinctive perfume. Normally this would have me bent double with laughter, but she's away on holiday and technically I'm responsible for this vehicle. She's also bigger than me and a faster runner.

I'm not too bothered about the smell, she'd get used to that eventually I'm sure, but the elk rutting season is almost upon us and I have no idea how a randy bull-elk will react to an extremely musky Subaru. It's unlikely to be a pretty sight though.

I should never have left London. Finsbury Park is not without it's nuisances, but at least the only musk I had to deal with was people on the Tube wearing too much Old Spice.

Some people never learn

2006-08-17T14:27:00.000-07:00

But listen to the music, Marge! He's evil! (Homer Simpson)

My little mountain hideaway is more or less under siege at the moment, by a bunch of ridiculously earnest people in expensive suits and with improbable teeth. Ten years ago at Christmas a six-year-old girl was strangled to death. It was obviously a bit of a slow-news day that Christmas, no decent wars or anything, so a media circus descended on the town in a frenzy of speculation and hairspray. Boulder County Police Department are worthless sacks of shit at the best of times, and being Christmas they were clearly more interested in getting pissed and photocopying the Dispatcher's tits than making a decent fist of a murder investigation. Consequently, they just blamed the nearest suspects (the parents), and let the news companies get on with the trial. The police are big on efficiency here (i.e. idleness), and letting idiots like Geraldo try the case saves all that tedious messing around with judges, lawyers, courtrooms and evidence. Admittedly, the parents had some fairly odd views on parenting (calling your child JonBenet is a bit iffy, as is dressing up a six-year-old in Paris Hilton's party dress), so there was just enough material to insinuate all sorts of parental misdemeanors.

The things is, almost anybody competent who's investigated the whole affair has been persistently confident that the parents had nothing to do with it. You'd think that these so-called journalists would have learned their lesson and started indulging in a bit of good, old-fashioned fact checking and restraint. Apparently not. Some oddball has been picked up in Bangkok as a suspect, but before the D.A. has even charged the man (contrary what the LA Times thinks) his name's already being dragged through the mud. Tried, convicted and sentenced by a jury of 300 million gaping-mouthed cretins.

Back in the UK, it's illegal to name a suspect until you've actually charged them, just the sort of wishy-washy liberal attitude that apparently allows twelve-year-olds to wantonly board aeroplanes at will. A friend of mine was horrified to discover that some of the hundreds of terrorist suspects arrested in the UK this summer may actually have to released if no firm evidence is found against them, instead of packing them off to Guantanamo Bay where, I'm sure, a 'confession' could be acquired. (Mind you, he thinks Tony Blair is a communist for even tolerating the existence of a National Health Service, which is a delightful irony). He comes from a town called Normal, IL, which may or may not be significant.

Update!
Doh!

There's a time-bomb on my desk

2006-08-16T11:26:00.000-07:00

Never mind liquid explosives on planes, I found out yesterday that my laptop is a potentially lethal incendiary device, just waiting to spread chaos and destruction. The arbitors of this diabolical plot are not, in fact, youths in Leeds but Dell, in league with their evil henchmen Sony. What annoys me most of all about this is the rudeness of these big organisations. When you get hold of a computer these days you have to spend hours filling out wretched registration forms and service agreements, all with contact details. Added to this, it's technically the University's computer, and I can assure you that they know full well which doors to kick in during the dead of night when my registration fee is a couple of hours late. Dell and A-Well-Known-West-Coast-Public-University between them could track me down faster than a Dept. of Homeland Security phone-tapper.

So why did I have to find out from the BBC? If you're going to supply someone with a potential firebomb then the least you can do is a brief email, warning them that they may lose their face while knocking up a quick spreadsheet. Even Al Qaeda has the common decency to inform their operatives that they should probably tell the wife not to plan anything special for that evening.

I had a stern chat with Dell last night. Laid it on the line, so to speak. I made it clear that it this laptop could burn down the office, blow my hands off or permanently disfigure me, but if the six months of research on my hard drive gets torched, then they'll have some fireballs of their very own to deal with.

It's looking at me now, you know, I daren't turn my back on it. It says it's on 'standby', but on standby for what I ask? The Luddites were right - these bastards are out to enslave us. iPods are just the vanguard.

Gibson

2006-08-09T12:34:00.000-07:00

Tom McClintock, Republican candidate for California's lieutenant governor, has rejected Mel Gibson's fundraising support. Quite so, the Republican party has no business being associated with a Jew-hating, alcoholic religious fanatic.

I don't know why these Jewish organisations got so het up about Gibson anyway, it's not as if any sane human would choose to spend an evening sitting through The Passion of the Christ. Huge numbers of people went to see the English get fucked over in Braveheart and The Patriot, but you don't hear Tony Blair calling for the head of Mel Gibson. You should, but you don't.

Woman exhausted after long night on Scott's Knob

2006-08-07T20:18:00.000-07:00

New Zealand woman Dawn Wood was said to be both exhausted and sore after a seven hour ordeal on Scott's Knob. She had to be carried off the Knob by a local Search and Rescue team, having broken her ankle ascending the 2160m peak.

I had a fairly traumatic weekend myself. I reached Climax with three 'close friends' on Friday night and on Saturday had dinner in Leadville, a town famed for (amongst other things) mutton busting. As you can imagine I'm a bit sore and exhausted myself, but at least I didn't have to rescued from Scott's Knob.

If I cared about such things, I'd be raging

2006-08-04T10:22:00.000-07:00

Annabelle Bond, the climbing world's very own Paris Hilton, has apparently been awarded an O.B.E. for services to mountaineering, or servicing mountaineers, or some such nonsense. I've more or less tolerated her up until now, because I'm an overgrown adolescent and she's a bit of a looker who just invites condescension. My view of her is more or less characterised by Sir Jackie Stewart's comment - a fantastic achievement, never has such an attractive young lady achieved so much on such a precarious endeavor. Normally I'd consider that obscenely patronising male chauvinism, but for our Anna it just seems appropriate.

I've overlooked the the praise she gets for jetting around the world on her private income doing various guided tours up mountains. I've let her get away with claiming she's climbed the 7 highest mountains in the world. (She hasn't, she's climbed the highest peak in each of the seven continents - Kilimanjaro is one thing, K2 is quite another). I've even forgiven her shameless self-promotion, because she raises a stack of cash for cancer research. Oh, sure, if I looked like a cover girl and my Daddy was a bigwig at HSBC I'd be able to screw a few (tax deductable) quid out of the merchant banks, but let's not bite the hand that feeds.

An O.B.E. though? For bravely going where a only few thousand have gone before. Driven solely by her grit, determination, private income, contract with Vogue, a couple of mountain guides and a few hundred sherpas? For being so perfect that her mountaineering socks don't stink? If O.B.E. stood for 'Other Bugger's Efforts', then maybe.

Fortunately I don't have to get too angry that she gets one, and not some 70-year-old woman in Hulme who's taken in 50 odd foster kids over the years. An O.B.E. is a completely useless honour, about as meaningful as an 'exemplary military record' (which just means you never got too pissed in the mess and had a crack at the adjutant's wife). If I was Alan Hinkes (O.B.E.) though, I'd probably be asking for a free upgrade.

Adding to the nation's intellectual heritage

2006-08-03T10:36:00.000-07:00

It's a well known fact in Europe that all Americans are morbidly obese religious fanatics with a sub-normal IQ. This is especially true of Florida. So it's good to see that British expats who move there are adding to the culture by being so indulgently stupid. Despite the fact that medical insurance is rarely out of the news here they appear surprised that they are expected to provide for their own healthcare. Similarly, despite the fact that they are essentially unskilled, they appear to be surprised that US immigration is not welcoming them with open arms. 'Come on in, you're just what we need, America doesn't have nearly enough people who can work in bars...'. I particularly enjoy the irony of British expats commenting on the insularity of American culture, whilst stocking up on those little 'essentials' like PG Tips teabags, McVities Chocolate Digestives and Marmite. (As an aside, if there's one thing that annoys me here it's the assumption that I drink tea. It's a pathetic brew, as insipid as the culture that has so lovingly embraced it.) A recent emigre to the US myself, I feel quite qualified to send the following message to those featured in this article.

You're all stupid cunts. You should be grateful that any country (including your own) will allow such intellectually needy cretins as yourselves into their borders, rather than driving you into the sea with pitchforks and flaming torches.

The article doesn't really address the question of why anybody would want to go to Florida in the first place. It's a dismal place, like Benidorm but with hurricanes instead of paella, whose only useful function is to act as the last earthly resting place for East Coast accountants and their widows.

Exclusive! How to reach Climax!!

2006-07-27T08:34:00.000-07:00

Climax, CO is at -106.183W, 39.368N. Just head towards Breckenridge and ask for directions. The more old-fashioned of you might like to go via Loveland, but I prefer to reach Climax by Mount Crested Butte.

If anyone would like help reaching Climax, I am free this weekend.

Judge rules that climbing Everest is dangerous

2006-07-20T16:06:00.000-07:00

Without wishing to speak ill of the dead, Micheal Matthews is just the latest in a string of unfortunates with more money than sense who thought that $40,000 was an adequate substitute for skill, experience and judgement. There's nothing new about it, over-wealthy FHM readers have been carking-it on Everest for years, but because these people don't bother to find out what they're getting into there's always plenty of fresh avalanche fodder. There's probably a few out at base camp now, having the 'ultimate adventure' supplied (for a small recompense, of course) by X-Treme Fanny-Magnet Adventures, Ltd. I have very little sympathy for them. I do however note that nobody throws their hands in the air in horror and starts threatening court action every time a Sherpa with a wife and five kids to feed gets killed by his client's ambition and incompetence. The whole farce hearkens back to the Victorian era of mountaineering, when first ascents were always accredited to 'gentlemen' (i.e. rich British toff being dragged up on a rope) as opposed to 'professionals' (i.e. competent local doing the dragging).

Some will accuse me of insensitivity - but hey, that's mountaineering for you. If you choose to stick your dick in a bee's nest that's your prerogative, but don't sue the beekeeper when you get stung.

I don't know why these people bother to climb Everest anyway, it's not as if there's much actual 'climbing' on the South Col route. You could get the same experience at a fraction of the cost by going into an airtight, refrigerated meat-locker and spending thirty six hours on a stairmaster.

'A challenging work environment...'

2006-07-17T12:47:00.000-07:00

I was asked over the weekend what is the most challenging aspect of being a climate scientist. It sounds like a bit of an interview question, I know, but at least it's a bit more original than being asked what the weather's going to be like tomorrow or in fifty years time. I gave the question some thought, and realised that the biggest challenge is dealing with a chaotic and ill-constrained system. A system that is barely predictable. A system that despite being essentially inert is changing all the time. A system in which the slightest anomaly can result in the most catastrophic consequences.

I refer, of course, to the UCLA payroll department.

Don't give decent data to hippies

2006-07-13T15:12:00.000-07:00

The happiest place on Earth is Vanuata, some South Pacific backwater that considers Prince Phillip as some sort of minor deity - a bit like Virginia Water. The study that presents these results is clearly flawed, the researchers fail to address how a country could possibly be happy without access to commodities like coffee machines, or automatic toilets, or Toyota 4Runners. No sane person would smile in a land without such things. Columbia comes in second, but I suppose having an ample supply of Coca leaves could make up for living in a violent, bloody hellhole.

The United Kingdom didn't do terribly well, so far down the 'Happy Rankings' that I couldn't be bothered to count the position. In all fairness, whilst we are a nation of miserable bastards, I still think we're more cheerful than the Bosnian-Herzegovinians who come in a few places above. They're monumentally dour, more so even than Scottish people, even when they're not burning, raping and pillaging their neighbours (the Bosnians, that is, not the Scots). The most mendacious lie of all though is the USA's ranking, right down the bottom of the list drawing level with the Cote d'Ivoire. The Cote d'Ivoire is a country crippled by a long-running and bloody civil war, whilst the USA has possibly more coffee makers and automatic toilets than almost anywhere else in the world.

Further investigation revealed that the index is based on various psychological parameters and life expectancy, but then divided by the 'ecological footprint'. Basically, they're suggesting that if I were living in a hole in the ground in Lithuania, then although my life would be solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short I would still be happy in the knowledge that I wasn't using up too much of the planet's resources. They have clearly underestimated my aversion to Lithuanian holes in the ground.

This is what happens when you allow a bunch of bunny-hugging wastrels like the New Economics Foundation access to hard data and computers - they try to use it. Data and computers should be restricted to fully-trained, hard-headed research professionals like myself, working in isolated cubicles protected from the public by security passes and unanswerable rhetoric.

Update!

Being a low-lying Pacific island, the mere existence of Vanuata is threatened by rising sea-levels due to climate change. Ha, that should wipe the smiles off their 'ecologically friendly' faces!

Though onerous, I would rather flush my stool the old-fashioned way

2006-07-12T13:19:00.001-07:00

The toilets in my research institute flush automatically. They have a motion sensor that presumably is supposed to detect when one is leaving the pedestal. In fact, they just trigger a flush at the slightest body movement, which plays havoc with both my peace of mind and my hemorrhoids. Frankly I'd rather return to the days when I retained some control of my own feaces, and to be honest I never found the task of flushing the khazi that onerous.

I'm not sure why we need an automatic flush. This is a scientific institute, so one would presume that the majority of personnel are sufficiently educated to know how to use a toilet. Admittedly, the librarian's level of intelligence is a matter of some concern to me, but I'll give her the benefit of the doubt. Perhaps the building managers think that we're so intellectually distracted by the atmospheric water-vapour modeling problem that we might forget to flush, and cause an outbreak of cholera amongst the nation's finest meteorological minds? Or maybe they think that by flushing immediately we won't be tempted to waste our working day by examining our stools?

As we say in academia, fossor regens indoles

The rodeo was good, but it wasn't great

2006-07-10T16:37:00.000-07:00

A rodeo was televised on one of the local sports stations over the weekend. (Well, this is Colorado). I'm a newcomer to such contests, but it didn't take too long to get the gist. A bull or horse is held in steel cage, a redneck climbs on, and then holds on for dear life when they open the cage. Hats also seemed to play a big part in the proceedings.

The experience was a little like watching Zidane's headbutt - enjoyable, but ultimately unsatisfying. It all lacked a certain edge. If Zidane had butted that greasy little wop in the face and broken his nose, obviously that would have been a different matter.

I'm informed that in order to make the rodeo broncos 'buck', an elastic band is placed around their gonads. I think the sport would be improved by placing an elastic band around a cowboy's plums, and getting him to buck a 1 tonne bull. I for one would willingly pay to see such a spectacle.

Let's all talk about death

2006-07-07T15:17:00.000-07:00

As a rule, I don't make serious posts. It's my genuine belief that almost nothing is sacred and immune from humour, even of the blackest kind. Anything that does become reverend needs to be tested and challenged, the alternative being the far too easy sell of trite statements such as you're either for us or against us made by the American administration, or Israeli accusations of anti-semitism at anyone who criticizes their policy in Gaza. Today though I am particularly pissed off, and for once I don't intend to make a flippant gag or employ some black sarcasm over it.

Today is the anniversary of the 7th July London bombings, a terrible act in which 52 people were murdered. The entire nation has, it seems, been 'united in mourning', with remembrance services in the capital and a nationwide two minutes silence (the 50 million or so who died in the two world wars only get one minute, in the few workplaces in Britain that still observes the Armistice). To be honest, the terrorists must have been pretty incompetent to have only killed 52 - judging by the number of people who claim to have barely missed death because of a bike puncture/lie-in/nail appointment etc they could have practically decimated London. This all seems incredibly, and inappropriately, histrionic.

My aim is not to question the tragedy of last summer's events nor to belittle the loss of those who were genuinely bereaved. I would just question whether or not this enormous media grief-fest is not at best self-indulgent, and at worst merely showing terrorists that they really were successful in scaring the living shit out of Londoners. British people are very proud of their stoic courage through times of crisis, the Blitz is the classic and oft-quoted example, but the very same courage seems to have eluded my generation.

Let's consider another anniversary. At 2157 BST on July 6th 1988, not knowing that a vital safety valve had not been reinstalled after maintenance, the on-duty custodian of the Piper Alpha switched on a compressor to maintain production. In the ensuing fireball, 167 men lost their lives. Death did not come easy for most of those men - they were burnt alive waiting for a rescue that could not reach them. The distinction that most people would draw is that Piper Alpha was an industrial accident, whereas the London bombings were a deliberate act of violence. Were the operators of Piper Alpha (Occidental) any less culpable though?

The platform itself was flawed in design, since modifications for it to extract gas as well as oil (it's original purpose) had cheaply sidestepped the original features. The basic concept of keeping personnel areas from dangerous operational areas was broken. Most significantly, the control room, the only place from which an evacuation could be organised, had been placed next to the gas compression, and so was one of the first modules to be destroyed. Additionally, working practices were sloppy, to say the least, as they were on all such installations. The most horrific example of the oil industry's paradigm of 'barrels first, costs second, lives third' occured in the aftermath of the initial explosion. Theoretically, the fire should have burnt itself out, and have been sufficiently reduced in size to allow rescue of most of the crew. However, the Piper Alpha platform was connected to two other pumping units. The Offshore Installation Managers (OIMs) of these platforms were so indoctrinated by the concept that they refused to shut down pumping (which would incur enormous cost) without authorisation from the shore, authorisation that could not be obtained at that time of night. Despite radio silence from Piper Alpha and a visible fire where the installation was supposed to be, they kept on supplying the burning platform with oil and gas in order to save their jobs. That decision made rescue impossible, and resulted in a fireball that was visible over one hundred kilometres away.

Both terrible anniversaries, no question about that, but which do you think the nation is going to remember most? Evil terrorists, or evil industrialists? Well, if one was in government and had a controversial and possibly unconstitutional bill to push through, for the sake of argument we'll say, oh, I don't know, let's say extending the period of detention without charge for terrorism suspects to 90 days, then it might be argued that there's a certain amount of political capital to be gained from remembering actions of those evil terrorists. On the other hand, one could remember the tragic evidence of the energy industry's greedy disregard for life. An industry that is so powerful that it has a direct line to the White House. An industry that is so powerful that national economies are reliant on the price of it's product. An industry that is so powerful that senators have tried to discredit an entire scientific discipline, because it produces overwhelming evidence that carbon emissions are significantly and detrimentally changing our planet.

If we are to use this day as a sobering reminder of the forces of evil, as a reminder that at times we need to find the courage to face powerful and hateful enemies, then I believe we also must remember that terrorists are not the only, or even the most powerful, enemy we face in this world. Every time we baulk at the cost of climate change mitigation, every time we demand lower fuel prices and the right to run a vehicle, no matter how large, we are defending the profits of an industry whose managers are trained to keep pumping gas onto burning platforms on which their own workmates are trapped.

Postscript
Things did change of course in the aftermath of Piper Alpha. Regulations were tightened and the industry accepted most of the Cullen Enquiry's recommendations. Apparently they didn't change that much though.

Scientists find politician telling the truth

2006-06-28T14:48:00.000-07:00

Against all the odds, it seems that politicians are in fact capable of telling the truth. It's been shown, by proper climate scientists with slide rules and computers and stuff, that in his film An Inconvenient Truth, former Presidential candidate Al Gore may have portrayed climate change in an accurate and verifiable fashion.

Of course, it's too early to say whether this represents an ongoing trend in political rectitude or if this is just an anomalous event, but it's still a startling result. Such a groundbreaking discovery is bound to cause controversy, but rumours that Jim Inhofe has demanded a congessional hearing are as yet unconfirmed.

What a bunch of tits

2006-06-27T17:02:00.000-07:00

Los Angeles' Animal Services agency have come in for criticism because, amongst other things, they were the only department not to have completed last year's sexual harassment survey. Presumably they were too busy gassing dogs, cats and other residents of Skid Row to sit in a room with some lesbian feminist called Eunice discussing whether having one's leg humped by a Jack Russell constituted sexual harassment, and if so how much compensation they could screw out of the City.

Now they're in trouble with the rest of the council for trying to save the taxpayer a bit of cash by having a whip around at Hooters. The spuriously-pious PC elite hated the idea. Well, I hate them. Exploitative, my arse - the woman in that poster probably earns more cash in a single photo shoot than I earn in a month, but I don't see anyone rallying to my cause.

Would anyone from the City Council like to complain about the bikini-clad pictures that typically adorn LA tourist literature, or censor the Hollywood film industry for being exploitative? No, I didn't think so - there's more money to be made from hypocrisy, and more fun to be had killing stray animals.

If I was in charge of the neutering campaign, I'd start with the sexless reactionaries in the City Controller's office.

An apparently offensive human body, dressed for a day at the beach

How to buy contraceptives in the USA

2006-06-23T14:23:00.000-07:00

1. Enter campus store

2. Wonder around the 'health and sanitation' section (i.e. deodorants and caffeine pills), with one eye vainly searching for rubber johnnies, and ensuring none of one's own students/colleagues are around.

3. Conclude that they don't have them, and with a heavy sigh head to the main store at the student centre.

4. Repeat step 2, getting increasingly irate. Conclude that against all common sense the spineless, smothering University directors have decided not to sell condoms on campus for fear of alienating parents/the loony right.

5. Having worked oneself into a moral outrage so intense that one has completely forgotten about checking for the presence own students/colleagues, go up to a member of staff and complain. Loudly. Ignore any attempts by the staff member to break one's eloquence, instead focusing on the health and ethical responsibilities of the University, the (potentially highly) sexually active nature of the shop's clientele, and finishing with a damning critique of the hypocrisy displayed given the current campus-wide AIDS awareness programme.

6. Pause for breath. This allows the staff member to gently guide you to the shelf that stocks Mr Happy's Business Suits, tucked coyly behind the sanitary pads and just beneath the yeast infection treatments.

7. Grab largest box available in an effort to retain some dignity. Go to the counter, fervently hoping that the small (but not small enough), sniggering crowd are all graduating seniors and one won't be trying to lecture them about sub-mesoscale dynamics next term.

8. Hand over money, replying "fuck yes I want a bag" to the staff member's environmentally motivated question. Leave shop, vowing to buy prophylactics off the internet, or become a Catholic, or something.

'...if you live in an immoral way with a member of the opposite sex or same sex, you will be terminated.'

2006-06-16T13:38:00.000-07:00

Pat Millar makes it clear to anyone working in her roller-rink in Idaho that ...if you live in an immoral way with a member of the opposite sex or same sex, you will be terminated. It's good to see that they're not going soft on the whole messy business of extra-marital unpleasantness in Idaho - until the Supreme Court makes sinful living a capital offence then we need more crusaders like this to take matters into their own hands.

Sadly, it appears that Pat and Marvin Miller don't actually execute their morally-corrupted staff, they only terminate their employment, but at least it's a start. Squirting deodorant into rental roller skates is a responsible job that demands the very highest levels of personal and professional probity, both on and off the rink. If people want to live lives of unwed sin, then they should choose a career that doesn't affect the morality of Our Young - one that allows people to freely engage in acts of the most bestial vileness without actually influencing anybody. Run for Senate, perhaps.

Pat and Marvin also ban public displays of promiscuous activities, homosexuality, intoxication, use of profanity, lewd behavior, use of illegal drugs, child abuse, spouse abuse, unlawful relationships, cross-dressing, stalking and nudity. Nothing about buggering wildlife though. After all, this is Idaho, and they can't afford to completely alienate their client-base. There is no room in heaven for those who can't maintain a successful entreprise*, just ask the Mormons.

*Except for George W. Bush, of course - his repeated bankruptcies, cocaine abuse and alcoholism may be forgiven in light of his righteous smiting of ungodly foreign heathens. Glory be!

Two World Wars and One World Cup....

2006-06-06T11:57:00.000-07:00

Apologies that I've not posted for a while, but real life has been getting in the way. Actually, I'm not that sorry at all, if you really have nothing better to do than read ill-concieved polemics on the internet than you could always have posted something on the comments section. You didn't though, so one can only assume that either you had something better to do, or you're just another memeber of the gaping-mouthed bone-idle common herd demanding constant passive unchallenging distraction. In either case, my apology is insincere so we'll say no more about it.

I'm getting very excited about the World Cup. Everybody is, who doesn't live in North America. North Americans have a vague handle on the notion that the Football (not soccer) World Cup is a big deal across most of the the globe, but they don't fully appreciate the significance. Their main exposure to the event is the coverage that their admittedly competent football team gets, so and as a result people here think it's a sporting event. This is nonsense, of course, since the World Cup has absolutely nothing to do with football. Most professional footballers are overpaid coke-snorting wife-beaters against which NBA basketball players seem quite charming. It's absurd to think that billions of people would get excited about watching 22 of these workshy prima-donnas kick a leather ball around. No, the true importance of the World Cup lies in its bigotry.

For just a few weeks every four years, it becomes perfectly acceptable to be as blatantly prejudiced as one likes, with absolutely no factual justification. In capital cities around the globe, one is almost expected to air the sort of views that at any other time would have you locked up in David Blunkett's Brave New Labour World. Being English, my main targets are of course European - proximity and similarity only serve to heighten minor differences. Thus Germans are now to be known as The Boche or simply Bloody Krauts. Italians become referred to as Wops, Spicks, or under a number of names that refer to their proud military history of bravely showing their back to the enemy. I'm sure there are potentially hundreds of appropriate monikers for those idle collaborators across the Channel, but I see no reason to expend effort to think of them, so I tend to just stick with Frogs when I can't avoid referring to France at all. Similar prejudices are played out the world over. In South America, for example the Brazilians can't stand the Argentinians (rightly so - those cheating bastards still owe us for 1986), the Argentinians can't stand anybody, and Paraguayans are bandits that are only good for supplying moody electronic goods.

Here in LA this sort of behaviour would no doubt induce cries of indignation, free-loving tree-huggers that they are. In fact though, this outpouring of bile serves a very important purpose, in that it releases tensions, gets it out in the open, much like Hate Week in George Orwell's 1984. The USA retains some dignity by rising above all this petty, tasteless nationalism, but with occasionally catastrophic consequences. Two to four hours of training in 'warrior ethics' is no substitute for a couple of lagers and a decent gag about rag-heads.

Postscript
The comments board has been rather empty of late, so to liven things up I'm announcing a competition for the best nationalist insults - closing date is Friday so that everyone is ready for the opening rounds. Insults should be original and witty, with extra marks awarded to for insulting the French. A special mention will be given to whoever most cruelly insults the eventual winners in Germany. For those of you who are new to this sort of game i.e. Americans/Seppos, a good place to start is the War. Grievances that are genuine or less than 40 years old just aren't that funny.

I'm almost sympathetic, but not quite

2006-05-24T10:04:00.000-07:00

In a city with a relatively limited change in seasons, I've found the best way to tell that spring has arrived is the sudden increase in middle-aged people taking photos of the University library. That's because it's graduation time. A chance for proud parents to exact revenge for the near-bankruptcy that educating their offspring has reduced them to by witnessing that most brutal of archaic rituals, The Graduation Ceremony.

Under any other circumstances, the usual response to having completed four years of dull, passionless but fairly unchallenging lectures is to go to the pub, round up a few slappers and then move on with life. In academia though, we like to celebrate by making everyone sit through one last excruciatingly tedious lecture given by some preposterous old bore with one foot in the grave and a catheter stashed under his robes (it's always a male). He'll probably harp on about 'coming of age', 'preparation for the years ahead' and something about 'lifelong bonds of friendship'. I suspect that they all use exactly the same speach, but nobody's noticed because nobody ever listens.

Here at A Well Known Public University in Southern California this is all done outside, in the searing heat of LA in June, whilst wearing a long, flowing polyester sack. Do you honestly think Anne Bancroft would have gone anywhere near Dustin Hoffman's stench if he'd been wearing nylon robe and mortar board for three hours? I don't. To add to the insult, the Alumni Society are no doubt on hand to sign people up so that in the unlikely event that they make anything of their lives, the University can beg them for cash in twenty years time. I'm almost tempted to feel sorry for the graduates, but then it says something that after four years of higher education they can't present their parents with a cogent argument for non-attendance.

Most of the other US Universities have already finished, because they're on semesters whereas we're on UK style academic calender. We have three ten-week terms a year, so we call it 'the quarter system'. I have no idea why.

Your research is no more interesting than anyone else's

2006-05-17T18:00:00.000-07:00

I've just got back from yet another conference, one more opportunity for the silverbacks to have a jolly at the taxpayer's expense, and I have to say it was most extraordinarily tedious. Scientific meetings are a bit like visiting the Nile valley. To outsiders it sounds very glamorous, travelling to far off places trying to decipher the hidden messages of ancient relics (be they pyramids or elder faculty). For a week or so it is all very exciting, especially the drinking and the attempts by female PhD students to secure funding horizontally, as it were. Sooner or later though, you realise that once you've seen one hieroglyph you've seen them all, just as one old relic's analysis of the Larsen B ice shelf is just the same as another's.

What makes these events particularly galling is the poor punctuality demonstrated by some of the more enthusiastic members of the scientific community. Typically, each speaker is allocated 12-20 minutes (plus five minutes for questions/physical assaults, depending on whose theory one has just disproved). Twenty minutes to me means just that - twenty minutes. It doesn't mean thirty minutes, and it most certainly does not mean forty six minutes and twenty two seconds. I don't care that you've spent the last thirty six months at a computer churning through your data and have become completely obsessed by it. I don't care if you do (mistakenly) believe that your findings are widely significant. If you can't summarise it to an expert audience in 20 minutes, then it's probably not worth explaining. The golden rule here is to remember, no matter how important your work is to you personally, it's no more interesting than anybody else's.

At the last meeting one enthusiastic post doc rambled on for so long that we had to miss one of the coffee breaks. There go his chances of ever making faculty. By lunchtime, some of the older members of the audience had fallen into a diabetic coma, whilst the research assistants were running amok through the building throwing delegate packs at each other due to caffeine withdrawal. Conference organisers have a habit of remembering these things. What's needed is the judicious use of a stopwatch and a gong by the chair. Anyone who hasn't reached their conclusions by the end of their allocated time gets brutally and unforgettably silenced. I don't pay registration fees of up to $100 to miss out on free coffee and biscuits.

It's time we brought the sexual impropriety back to British politics

2006-05-09T10:28:00.000-07:00

In the image conscious world of west LA, it's not unusual to hear of men spending inordinate amounts of money on treatments for hair loss. There's no excuse. A man with that sort of cash to throw away on charlatans and quacks must presumably have some kind of professional occupation, and the very onset of alopecia indicates that they're old enough to know better. Lib. Dem MP Mark Oaten has gone even further though, and actually had the temerity to blame his decision to repeatedly stick his cock up a rent boy on his receding hairline. If he really needs the presence of a 20 year old man to get his jollies then that's his own business (and presumably his wife's as well), but he should at least show the courage not to blame his peccadilloes on an aging scalp.

On the other hand, the still excellently hirsute John Prescott is being hounded by the police for nothing more outrageous than shagging his secretary in the office. Shagging one's secretary has always been part and parcel of European politics, an expected privilege in the same ilk as tipping a waiter. Frankly, a drop in the ocean compared to the coke-snorting, auto-erotic asphyxiative antics of his Tory predeccessors. I'd certainly rather he was shafting his secretary than shafting my rights as a British citizen like the rest of the sexless 'New Labour' regime (for example trying to make me carry an i.d. card and then selling the data to foreign governments).

It's time we brought the sexual impropriety back to British politics, more poontang than policies I say. You only need to look at the White House to see what can happen when you only vote for people with morality.

Why oh why do people insist on doing the conger when drunk?

2006-05-02T17:41:00.000-07:00

They say that travel broadens the mind and challenges our preconceptions. Normally, I would not even consider reiterating anything that the common herd say, gaping-mouthed, Da-Vinci Code-reading cretins that they are, but in this case there may be some merit in the view. I have just returned from Brazil, where many of my own preconceptions have been challenged. For example, the high-speed ducking and weaving of Sao Paulo traffic has challenged some of my more rigidly held beliefs about volume and mass, not to say mortality. One can see where Ayrton Senna's pedigree was honed. Similarly, I had also held the belief that to aquire the best women a man had to be good-looking, 'sensitive' (whatever that means), moneyed and with at least some prospects. Not so in Brazil, where it's commonplace to see really world-class quim, all firm thighs and pouting breasts, on the arm of a hopeless loser with no cash and only barely above single-celled organisms on the evolutionary scale. John Prescott clearly knows what I'm talking about.

One question has been plaguing my thoughts though - why the hell have the Mediterranean cultures failed to exorcise 'the conger' from their cultural repertoire. We were invited to a banquet in Brazil, followed by 'music and dancing'. Pretty much what I expected, a dark-skinned filly in a slinky dress belting out a couple of renditions of 'The Girl from Ipanema', followed by the old farts of climate science attempting salsa-dancing with their wives. That was until the cultured-but-sensual rhythm was broken by some young buck of a PhD student, from Argentina I believe (I didn't know places like Argentina even had Universities) rushed onto the dance-floor and commenced some monstrous motion that looked like a cross between the conger and the chicken dance. Worse yet, rather than spurning him for the dysmotive imbecile that he clearly was, the S. Americans all joined in! Chileans, Brazilians, Venezuelans - they all ran around the dance floor holding each others arses whooping like the audience of a Jerry Springer show.

It's not only the S. Americans - I've seen similar behaviours adopted by other latin-influenced cultures. The Spanish, the French, even the Italians have been seen performing this classless embarassment. The Saxon cultures don't do it - can you imagine a German performing the chicken dance? They don't do it in Asia either - when a Japanese businessman feels the need to humiliate himself he goes to a karaoke bar and tries to get his drunk secretary to dress up as a schoolgirl. Admittedly, Boris Yeltsin was seen doing something fairly similar, but I think that was an aberration brought on by Chernobyl and vodka. I can't imagine Vladimir Putin doing the chicken dance, he seems more like a tango-man to me.

Describing foreigners

2006-04-22T13:22:00.000-07:00

The Rough Guide to England has caused a bit of a fuss by describing the English as ´overweight, alcopop-swilling, sex-and-celebrity obsessed television addicts´. That neatly describes 50% of the population, but they appear to have left out a description for the men. All they needed to do was swap ´alcopop´ with ´beer´ and ´celebrity´ with ´football´ to have more or less nailed the entire God-forsaken race. The book also states that talking to people you don´t know in London is ´seen as tantamount to physical assault´. Seems like pretty useful advice to me, the sooner Johnny Foreigner realises that he/she has no business disturbing the important denizens of the World´s Greatest City without a decent introduction from a third party, the better. Unfortunately, they let things down a bit by listing England as a country* on their website, which hints at sloppy research. They probably based the entire entry on a single night of trying to pick up some local slapper in Equinox, the usual modus operandi of backpackers visiting London. Obviously the authors were unsuccessful, or they wouldn´t be so bitchy now.

On a similar note, I am in Sao Paulo at the moment. Based on what I´ve seen so far, my Rough Guide description of Sao Paulo would be as follows: ´Architecturally, a sort of tropical Sarajevo, it´s most notable feature being a prevalence of concrete buildings with gaping shell-holes in them. The population is an interesting blend of Beverly Hills bourjoisie and Calcutta grit, generally friendly though. Be very wary of rush hour.´ I could be being harsh to Sao Paulo, but then I´ve not yet had the chance to pick up a local in a nightclub to build up a really full picture.

*Note to foreigners and people from Hampshire - England is NOT a proper country, it is just one element of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. The other elements are Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland and the Costa del Sol.

Exclusive! Scott McClellan's resignation letter

2006-04-19T11:07:00.000-07:00

One of my sources in Washington has made available the exact wording of White House press spokesman Scott McClellan's resignation letter. (The President has, of course, regretted but accepted Mr. McClellan's decision.

'Dear Scott

You have five minutes to clear your desk, leave the building, and eulogize the President in one last press conference.

Regards

Joshua Bolten'

Warning: contents may be hot

2006-04-17T18:24:00.000-07:00

Some Palestinian halfwit has taken out another falafel stand in Tel Aviv. There's nothing very new about that - Palestinian halfwits are always taking out falafel stands in Israeli cities - but this time Hamas have explained that it's all in self-defence.

I can't say I agree with all of the new Palestinian Authority's policies (I'm particularly shaky about their views on male facial hair - there's absolutely no excuse for facial hair in this day and age), but I can see their point in this case. The annexing of deep-fried chickpeas is a clear indication of Isreal's intent to culturally rape the entire Arab culture. Either that or the guy got some hot fat splashed on him (happens a lot at falafel stands, believe me) and decided the only way to vent his ire was to blow himself up in a busy street. We've all had days like that.

I practically lived off falafel for a few months in the Middle East. Man, those little balls of protein are tasty and filling. Unfortunately my next port of call was Turkey where they don't really do vegetables, so I went straight from virtual veganism to an all-kebab diet. My anus was in turmoil for at least three days, and I prayed for death as my colon threatened to explode. Much like a Palestinian, I would imagine.

The pathos is unimaginable

2006-04-05T16:16:00.000-07:00

No Shock & Awe this week, out of respect for the tragic loss of Gene Pitney. Like so many men of his generation, taken before his time in a Cardiff hotel room. Did you know that Los Angeles is 1,461 miles by road to Tulsa? At a sensible and legal speed of 70 mph, and including stops for refreshment and fuel, that makes me almost exactly 24 hours from Tulsa.

The pathos is unimaginable.

They're trying to take the fun out of being a redneck

2006-03-24T17:13:00.000-08:00

'Don't get drunk in Texas' advises fellow expat Mick, on the grounds that you're as likely to end up getting picked up by the law as by the local talent. Not good in a state which is unrenowned for its progressive views on penal correction. The idea of arresting people in bars for being drunk seems a little incongruous, why else does one go in a bar? This is especially strange in Texas, where you can routinely buy ammunition and beer at gas stations.

Then again, I got drunk in Texas once, in Austin to be precise. As a direct result of that heady experience I ended up driving a 20-year-old Dodge van from Alaska to Colorado, with a 25-year-old feminist. There were other factors involved of course (unemployment, indolence and irresponsibilty being the main ones), so I wouldn't suggest that just anyone getting drunk in Texas will end up dodging caribou in a semi-legal Detroit workhorse, but it's as well to know the risk.

Happy days, those. Every mechanic between Anchorage and Vancouver reckoned she only had 100 miles left in her at most, but 5,000 miles later she was still going strong (the van, that is, not the woman). It's all about keeping the fluids topped up. The woman is now a youth worker in Oregon - three months with me was the perfect preparation for dealing with disturbed adolescents.

By the way, don't expect me to post next week, as I won't be here. I'm going into the purifying fires of the desert, to purge my soul through mortification of the flesh, T.E. Lawrence style. When I'm finished with that I'm going into the intoxicating fires of Las Vegas, where hopefully I'll get the chance to mortify someone else's flesh.