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.

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.

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.

Idiot.

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.

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.

This is how screwed up everything is - the news bombards us with the credit crunch (which sounds like some of snack bar anyway), mortgage misery, knife nightmares, terror tactics and racist rants, while TV adverts talk about cosmetic products containing demattifying microspheres and pentapolypeptides. The closest mainstream media is getting to including science in daily life is when it sells us shampoo, and when it is supposed to be informing us about important stuff, it’s talking to us like we’re four.

Take today’s thesun.co.uk homepage - alliteration used in the following headlines:

• Dramatic First Pics of Massacre Mansion Blaze
• Megan Fox Gets Wet and Wild
• Whose saggy skin is this?
• Sugar fears for future of footy
• Brad is Burning hot in new role
• Cheryl chops Charlotte chapter (no, really)

And precisely one headline of any relevance to anyone. The Sun also has a headline, Lily Allen’s Kidnap Terror. I didn’t realise someone had kidnapped her so took a look. Oh. No one has kidnapped her. The story begins like this:

LILY ALLEN has revealed how she feared for her best friend’s life after he was kidnapped for almost a week.

The singer, who went out without her bra on again yesterday, was worried sick for her pal.

The story is accompanied by a photo of Allen, not wearing a bra, with the caption ‘Bit nippy out here… braless Lily Allen’. Nippy? Oh, clever. Nipples. Let’s try rewriting the article the way the Sun might as well be putting it:

LILY ALLEN’S TITS! WHAHEY!!! EH? EH? WHAHEY!!! TITS!!!! WE LOVE IT!! TITS!! WHAHEY!!!

Oh yeah and sumfink abaaat kidnapping… TIIIIIIIITS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

What does Lily Allen’s lack of underwear have to do with anything? Nothing. Other than the cretins that write this stuff seem to think everyone wants to know about the contents of Lily Allen’s shirt. Sat on the tube today I looked down the carriage to see dozens, dozens of people, all reading either London Lite (sic) or The London Paper. Headlines included something about… Lily Allen. For pity’s sake, this rubbish is given out free every day, nearly two million copies worth of it.

It’s not snobbish to expect better, because I’m pretty sure that people can understand more sophisticated language than you’d find on the side of a crisp packet. Can’t they?

Looking at it, it was never going to be possible to match the spectacle of the Chinese presentation, with thousands of performers moving in perfect unison, amazing costumes, towering towers, fireworks bigger than exploding Death Stars and everything else. It looked every billion of the however many billion dollars the Chinese spent on it. But it was weird. The CGI fireworks. The little girl who mimed the song because the girl that actually sang wasn’t pretty enough. The great big huge, cheesy, completely artificial grins on the faces of many of the performers. It was somewhere beyond stage-managed perfection and into Stepford Wives territory. It occasionally felt they like they should have done it all in CGI for the amount of ‘heart’ you felt in it.

Then the red double decker bus came trundling on when the flag was handed to Boris Johnson. Never mind that Boris looked like the head boy being given the flag to wave for his house at a swimming competition.

The girl who was selected by Blue Peter viewers to appear walked over the backs of, presumeably, some illegal immigrants. Why? Leona Lewis, perched like a budgie on a tiny plinth like David Blaine started singing ‘Gonna give you my love’. Eh? Someone was playing a violin next to David Beckham when he booted the football into the crowd. Whaaat? All this confused the hell out of the Chinese. And me. And then the Chinese press wrote about it as reported in the Independent, and it all made sense.

The Titan Sports Daily contrasted the “neatness” of the Chinese performers with the “outrageous outfits” worn by the Britons. Unlike the Chinese custom which tends not to reveal their weakness to the outsiders, “the British seem to like to laugh about their stupidity in a funny way”, it said.

Yep. Got us there.

“During the performance, when the London bus pulled over, all the passengers waiting for the bus rushed into the door at the same time, which truly damaged the British image,” it added.

I thought there were so many worse things damaging the British image, but this made me giggle.

It also complained that Lewis and Page were not A-list celebrities. “Unfortunately, the singer and Jimmy Page are absolutely not famous enough to be known or recognised by millions of the Chinese audiences. As for David Beckham, he was supposed to kick the football towards the red circle in the centre of the ‘Bird’s Nest’. In the end, just like any of his penalties at a football match, he totally missed it. He kicked the ball to the left and dropped in the crowd, then was picked up by a lucky Chinese volunteer who would not let go of the ball.”

I was under the impression that David Beckham’s penalty kicks were quite good. The Chinese may have been watching an imposter with a similarly uncharismatic wife.

And this is it. Someone organising the London 2012 presentation must have said at some point “We aren’t going to top anything the Chinese have done, so let’s embrace the crapness. Do you think we’d get away with a bus that’s a Transformer except it transforms into a privet hedge?”.

So I really hope the theme for London 2012 is comedy. One of the best suggestions I have heard so far is from my mother who reckons a winning number would be Boris Johnson tapdancing at the opening ceremony. Charlie Brooker’s got some great ideas including Bernie Clifton on his ostrich. Peter Kay could be hired to shout ‘wha-hey!’ every time a hurdler goes over a hurdle. Chas and Dave could sit in the middle of the stadium singing ‘yack yack rabbit rabbit yack yack rabbit rabbit’ while Will Young dodges javelins. The marathon should be a fun run. Let’s see how fast that Kenyan fellow moves dressed as a gigantic pirate.

London 2012 could be the greatest, richest vein yet of comedy gold. Gold I tells you.