Quite Random

My name is Yu Ming

A great short film, thought I’d add it here in case you hadn’t seen it…

A poem for National Poetry Day

Yesterday Thursday 9 October was National Poetry Day in the UK, with the theme of work. So I wrote my own:

Communing Underground today I fell in love again
Tanned back and scent of body butter drove me round the bend

Don’t freak out or worry that there’s stalkers on the Tube,
Most folks are quite happy just to read their books
But behind the Metros and the Harry Potters
Lie thoughts of sweaty nakedness behind the sneaky looks.

The Tube’s a den of lustiness
Affairs they happen every day
Mental love-making on the escalator
With the person going the other way.

Favourite foods

Butternut squash soup

Isn’t food brilliant? Can’t get enough of it. It’s a damn good job that eating, something you have to do so you don’t die, is also something that can be so pleasurable. Other than overcooked liver in school, the time I mistook taramasalata for strawberry ice cream, and the times when my mother deceitfully tried to sneak parsnips into my dinner when I was a child by disguising them as chips, eating has been a favourite hobby for most of my life.

Some favourite foods, and where I might get them:

• English sausages, buttery mashed potato and thick caramelised onion gravy with peas (home)
• Roast pork, apple sauce, roast and mashed potatoes, veg (home or the Funky Munky, Siem Reap)
• Chicken nuggets (Soria Moria, Siem Reap)
• Double bacon and guacamole burger, coleslaw, chips and onion rings (Wilde’s, York)
• Khmer fish amok or curry with big chunks of potato and carrot (Paper Tiger or Khmer Kitchen, Siem Reap)
• Rotisserie chicken in a crisp baguette with lashings of mayonnaise (Sainsbury’s then home)
• Vietnamese barbecued wild boar and venison eaten with whole lemon grass, salad, and lime pepper dip (small unnamed restaurant in Kon Tum, Vietnam)
• Roasted butternut squash soup with parmesan baked parsnip wedges topped with creme fraiche (home)
• Corn on the cob dripping with butter (home)
• Moules mariniere (home or Belgo)
• Proper fish and chips (Elmsett chip van, Petergate Fisheries in York)
• Risotto (home)
• Argentinian steak with everything (Las Tanjeras, Mendoza)
• Patatas bravas (anywhere they speak Spanish)
• Salt and pepper squid with garlic mayo (practically anywhere)
• Aloo baigan masala (practically anywhere)
• Ben and Jerry’s Caramel Chew Chew ice cream (the shops then home)
• Apple crumble with custard (home)

OK, I have to stop. All I have is an eccles cake and instant coffee.

Fishy stink

When John McCain appeared on this news this morning talking about how he had suspended his presidential campaign to tackle the financial crisis, and that he had asked Barack Obama to do the same, something smelt fishy and therefore ruined my breakfast cereal. When it turned out that Obama had in fact already called McCain suggesting a bipartisan approach to the financial crisis, the fishy stink became overwhelming. McCain’s move is low, low, low. Steal Obama’s thunder by putting on a presidential voice and making out like you’re the one with all the good ideas at the first chance you get, because your campaign is in the shit and your running mate is a gun-toting, anti-abortion-and-witchcraft moron whose idea of foreign policy experience is that she can see Russia from her house.

And the hyprocrisy reaches new, stunning heights. Sarah Palin appears at a dinner in New York, with Gordon Brown’s wife, asking the UN to renew their commitment to reduce maternal mortality in developing countries. This is the woman who would deny all women their reproductive rights.

Voting for McCain / Palin in the US Election seems like such insanity that you couldn’t entertain the idea of them even getting in to the White House, were it not for the fact that George W Bush got in. Twice.

Look at where we could be in only a few years time - McCain in the White House, Palin poised to take the presidency when the old fart drops, and David Cameron at No.10. Stop the world, I want to get off.

Me versus a crowd of hundreds

The throng exited the train this morning at London Bridge at the same time as hundreds of other people, and that whole ‘wall of people’ thing got going, the one where your steps get short and fast as if you’re all moving a phalanx into formation, and the station attendents open the gates to prevent chaos happening when someone’s travelcard doesn’t work. One person was going the other way. Crowd-manoeuvring etiquette might suggest that you shift your body sideways and walk almost crab-like, cutting through the crowd as unobtrusively as possible but it wasn’t for him. He marched forward, shoulders squared, bashing into everyone and anyone to get where he was going, wearing a facial expression that looked half like he was ready for a barney with the first person that tutted at him, and half like the one my cat wears on the litter tray.

Idiot.

You can’t watch TV any more

I have to get a TV recorder thing. It dawned on me last night without the benefit of a TV recorder thing that TV really is shite. Whole hours pass with nothing good to watch, making watching without a TV recorder thing unfeasible now. I have Freeview, because I like the idea that you don’t have to pay to get more channels of rubbish. Paying for extra TV is such a phenomenally bad idea because the vast, vast majority of what’s on Sky or cable is utter, utter tripe. When I have had cable, I got to like Mythbusters on Discovery, and a lot of the National Geographic stuff, but that isn’t enough to justify shelling out a lot more money every month. Pay TV is a cavalcade of mediocrity and brainless tosh that makes ITV look like quality broadcasting.

It’s fair to say that not only is a lot of it rubbish, but a lot of it is evil, nasty, and should be purged from the Earth. Like Fox News, shopping channels, Christian channels, endless repeats of Star Trek, fat bored-looking slappers shaking their back-ends at the camera while on the phone to fat curry-stained masturbaters, and Jeremy Bloody Clarkson smugging it up left right and centre. People really will watch any old dross, but paying for it just seems like the equivalent of actually asking someone to stand on top of your television and defecate on your carpet, and then handing them a wad of notes by way of thanks.

Watching TV with a TV recorder thing is brilliant for several reasons - entire series of programs build up and let you binge for hours on whatever your favourite is, you can skip through commercial breaks in 3 seconds flat (which in itself is a beautiful middle finger up to all of the effort and expense spent by advertising people to patronise you and sell you shit you don’t need), you can pause TV while you go make a cup of tea, and you can watch exactly what you want when you want rather than just watching the last ten minutes of Vernon Kay’s gormless mug on Celebrity Family Fortunes because there’s actually something you want to watch next. You can actually enjoy TV again. I can’t watch TV the old way any more.

Anyone who thinks the LHC will destroy the world is a twat.

Scientists working on the world’s biggest machine are being besieged by phone calls and emails from people who fear the world will end next Wednesday, when the gigantic atom smasher starts up.

Such is the angst that the American Nobel prize winning physicist Frank Wilczek of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology has even had death threats, said Prof Brian Cox of Manchester University, adding: “Anyone who thinks the LHC will destroy the world is a twat.”

The head of public relations, James Gillies, says he gets tearful phone calls, pleading for the £4.5 billion machine to stop.

“They phone me and say: “I am seriously worried. Please tell me that my children are safe,” said Gillies.

Scientists get death threats over Large Hadron Collider - Telegraph.

How many people who phoned the CERN scientists in tears, or making death threats, or sending abusive emails, or even resorting to legal action to try and stop the experiment, even bothered to look at the information on the LHC? That miniscule particles will be collided in a space less than the width of a human hair? That the whole test environment is chilled to cooler than the ambient temperature of space, 100 meters underground, surrounded by an awe-inspiring arsenal of instruments that will be able to study the experiment at the atomic level? That what CERN is doing next Wednesday has happened several hundred thousand times already with the bombardment of Earth by high energy particles from space, without any black holes appearing?

No. Looking at the information is too much to expect. These idiots have seen a video of the Earth imploding into itself on YouTube, maybe just watched Bruce Willis in Armageddon, and decided that the LHC is some kind of Doomsday machine. It’s not. It’s a bold, expensive, fascinating piece of research, the result of the collaboration of hundreds of scientists from over 80 countries over the last 20 years, and it could, just could, give humanity new information on the very beginnings of our existence, our creation – not unlike having a genetic blue print for the universe.

I should be sympathetic towards these people and their fears, but no. These fears are the product of deliberate, cultivated ignorance.

Humans have been wiped out in their millions for years by wars, religions, diseases and natural disasters, and most of these were the result of human ignorance, not human curiosity, and sure as hell not cosmic rays. Galileo was kept under house arrest by the Inquisition for the last years of his life by the Catholic church for suggesting that the Earth revolved around the Sun and not the other way around, and you can bet that the CERN scientists would experience a worse fate at the hands of a band of lunatics who possibly believe the Earth is six thousand years old, and really believe that the LHC will destroy us all.

Get a grip.