Ebay 1 Old Scrote 0

I just bought a chimney mushroom on ebay.

But I will never see it.

If I am lucky I might get a refund, but the steps I need to take to claim the refund make Scott's trek to the South Pole seem like a stroll up the pub.

Please don't ask me to explain: I am cast down enough as it is by my inability to master something so simple as ebay.

Ask me, instead, why I wanted to buy a chimney mushroom.

Better yet, ask me what a chimney mushroom is.

Better yet, let's pour a drink and forget the whole thing.
Bloody Jackdaws.

A profound sense of something or other

Talking of mysteries, have a look at this, not a hardship if you are as dazzled by the female form as I am, though in this case I would like you to stop looking at their lovely legs and concentrate on the following little puzzle:

Labelling them 1 to 6 from left to right, put them in order of their weight from lightest to heaviest.

Ok, ok, you're smart and you smell a trap, the sort that QI indulges in. And you are right: these splendid ladies, despite appearances, are all the same weight, 154 pounds imperial.

Does that amazing revelation not give you a profound sense of something or other? In my case, it's the other.

Chuck it in here

I used to recycle my stuff at the village recycling station in various bins: paper in one, glass in another, alicans in another, plastic bottles (please flatten them) in another. Then I started to make trips to the big recycling centre in the nearby town because they also had bins for other recyclables (wood, metal, rubble, etc).

But now I have a wheelie bin with a blue lid courtesy of the local district council. And EVERYTHING (except organic waste) goes into it: paper, cardboard, glass, alicans, plastic bottles (please flatten them), metal etc....

Now, dear reader, I don't mind dumping everything in a blue-lidded dumpster, but I can't shake off the question that keeps buzzing in my head: how do they separate all this stuff when they get it to their Separator Plant (or whatever they call it)? Metal with a magnet perhaps, but how about the rest?

I'll be honest with you: I will go on saving the planet, singlehandedly if I have to, but my heart just isn't in it any more. Mysteries demoralise me.

RIP Mikhail

"MIKHAIL KALASHNIKOV died on December 23rd, aged 94. But his 66-year-old invention, the Avtomat Kalashnikova, has plenty more shots left to fire. Developed in 1947 and first used by Soviet forces in 1949, the AK-47 assault rifle and its many derivatives are now used by the armed forces of more than 80 countries, and by freelancers in many more. No-one knows quite how many are in circulation: 100m is a reasonable guess. As a proportion of all the guns in the world—another number no-one can be quite sure about—Kalashnikovs probably make up more than one in ten of all firearms. Why does an ageing Soviet invention still dominate modern warfare?" [courtesy The Economist]

For an answer, go here. There's no doubt that it's the nastiest killer weapon since David slew Goliath, and not so different in that it is so basic that it can be, and is, used by children in African troublespots.

Paul-Félix Armand-Delille

He's the chap who deliberately infected rabbits on his French estate with the virus myxomotosis. And it worked. It wiped out ninety-something percent of his rabbits. Unfortunately for him and rabbits, the virus escaped and in a very short time devastated rabbit populations across northern Europe, including Britain. Poor old Paul-Felix, he's been hailed as a hero and vilified as a villain by turns ever since.
Poor old rabbits too. If you have seen a myxied rabbit, you will know what a pitiful sight it is. It seems that there is evidence that rabbits have developed a resistance to the virus, but there are still too many infected rabbits around for my taste. What seems to happen is that new bunnies are fine while they are above ground during the summer. But when they dive into the burrows in the autumn, they pick up the virus again.
One thing's for sure: we humans have no equals when it comes to buggering up the environment.

A load of you-know-what

Courtesy BTO Atlas

Here's a quote from an email sent to me recently asking me to sign a petition:

The barn owl used to be a common sight in the United
Kingdom, but now the birds have become increasingly
endangered. One of the biggest causes of barn owl deaths
is rat poison -- and the government isn't doing everything
it could to help them.

Before you rush out and shoot a farmer or your local MP, let me tell you that the above statement is inaccurate, unfounded and alarmist. In other words, it's a load of bollocks. I send Barn Owl corpses regularly to the Centre for Ecology and Hydrology in Lancaster, and receive the results of their analysis. Yes, they test for rodenticides; yes, traces are often found, but nowhere near lethal doses. I do not know of a single case where rodenticide poison was the declared cause of death. The largest proportion of Barn Owl fatalities are RTAs. The main reason for the decline of Barn Owls in the UK was loss of feeding habitat and loss of breeding sites. From a low of 2000 pairs, the population has grown to 5000 pairs or more, thanks to sustained programmes of nestbox erection and the establishment of food corridors by pioneers like Colin Shawyer.
Of course we should continue to monitor the presence of rodenticides in animal corpses, and of course we should insist that the rules governing the use of poisons are strictly enforced, and of course we should always be looking for alternative methods of control.
But the reason I get so angry about petitions like the one above is that they bring the conservation movement into disrepute. I will go to war for the environment as long as I have breath, but I have no intention of winning spurious battles and then losing the war, particularly as I have no wish to be seen as an alarmist doom-mongering lunatic.
So there.
Envoi: 1913 was overall a poor season, which the Guardian reported as the species being on the verge of extinction. Silly Grauniad, get your facts right.

What was that you s-s-said?

Watched the film "The King's Speech" last night. it's about George VI's speech impediment and how it was cured. It led me on to speculation about the difference between stuttering and stammering. According to most authorities, the terms are interchangeable. Many years ago, I read (In Fowler's English Usage, I think) that there are only two words in the English language which were true synonyms: gorse and furze. So, as I am not ready to gainsay the gorse/furze argument, I poked around in my cerebral attic and came up, as you do, with a Venn diagram to demonstrate that the two circles have a huge overlap, but that there ARE situations when stutter seems more appropriate than stammer, and vice versa. Machine gun fire, for example, can be described as stuttering, but not as stammering. Go on, find some more examples!
Checking later in my trusty Chambers, I found a clue in the definitions. They suggesti that stuttering is primarily about difficulty with initial consonants, leading to repetition: t-t-t-tell it to the m-m-marines; whereas stammering is primarily about hesitation before uttering a word.

You'd think I would have something better to do with my time. But it's better than vandalising er er er telephone kiosks or molesting dwarves on their b-b-b-birthdays.