Happy Saint Patrick's Day

It's Saint Patrick's Day at Chez Szondy, so while I'm tucking into slow-cooked corned beef and cabbage and a few pints of Guinness, here is the late, great Dave Allen to take up the slack.

Enjoy.



And for you married-types; yes, I did have to put the slow cooker out in the garage.

Meet the "Pitbull"

Meet the British Army's replacement for the venerable Land Rover.

Just when you start to despair, the MOD shows flickers of competence after all.

The Fairey Rotodyne

Proto-Thunderbirds engineering at its best

Mile-High Madness

Popular Architecture proposes that the answer to Britain's housing problems is a block of flats a mile high. According to the authors,

The tower allows a massive intensification of the city without the need for dramatic alteration of London's existing fabric.

That's no "dramatic alteration" as in, "Driving a stake through the man's heart was not a dramatic alteration of his existing fabric."

Battle of the Worlds

Calculus!

Happy Pi Day

Happy
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Ken Adams, Call your Service

A proper lair.

The Al Qaeda figure who prepared Tora Bora and helped Bin Laden flee Coalition forces has been transfered to Guantanamo Bay.

Good thing, too. I've always said that his under-use of chrome and lack of rocket-sled escape pods in Bin Laden's number one lair let down Bond Villains everywhere.

Dogged Dutch

The Dutch have legalised gay sex and banned dogs running loose in public parks.

But what if the dog is... No, I'm not going there.

End of the Shires

According to the Shire Horse Society, the breed could be extinct in Britain in ten years.

This is a damn shame, if it turns out true. My uncle used shires on his farm and they were just as useful as and had a good deal more charm than any tractor.

In fact, one of my fondest boyhood memories was riding my uncle's shires bareback along the beach in Yorkshire, which generally ended up with getting chucked into the surf when they decided to gallop.

Imagine getting thrown from a hairy Challenger tank going at speed and you get the idea.

I-Spy Glasses

The Japanese have invented a pair of glasses that helps you find things.

Assuming that you don't lose your glasses, that is.

Green Cab

Seattle's mayor Greg Nickels has decreed announced that all of the city's taxi cabs must be high-mileage hybrids by 2013. This is despite the fact that it will cost a fortune, leave the city with taxis too small for extra passengers or luggage and will mean the inevitable rate hike.

The reason for this is to (all together now) combat global warming. According to Mr. Nickels,

In the era of global warming, it doesn't matter if our cabs are orange or yellow or gray. We think they should all be green.

Whether or not you operate under the misapprehension that CO² is a pollutant, buy into the whole global warming thing, or think that preventing a few hundred tons of carbon being cycled through the air will make a tinker's dam worth of difference to the climate, it might possibly be time to take Mr. Nickels aside and explain to him as one would to a little child that as a city mayor his job is to pick up the rubbish, fix the roads and have the drunks swept off the pavement in a timely manner.

It does not include Saving the Planet^tm.

Submachine Torch

At last someone has realised that the Agent Zero M Radio Rifle is more than just a dream.

White Wash Girl

I haven't had a chance to see White Girl, part of the BBC's "White Season", except in brief previews on the Web, but if the reviews in The Telegraph and Beaman's World are anything to go by, it is a drama that shows that in the eyes of the Beeb the white working class of Britain are a load of drunken, foul-mouthed, wife-beating, child-beating racists whose only salvation lies in embracing religion.

Provided, that is, the religion is Islam.

This is no reflection on Muslims qua Muslims, but from what I've been able to glean, the BBC's storyline of knuckle-dragging chavs being redeemed by blemish-less mosque-goers is as deserving of a double take as a 1943 Rank film showing how English dock workers would be so much more pleasant if they were more like those nice Germans.

Oath for the Gander

I'm not surprised that New Labour's plans to have schoolchildren swear an oath of allegiance to the Queen has the trajectory of a lead balloon.

Quite frankly, I have no intention of getting behind it until every Member of Parliament is required, without substitution, to place his hand on the King James Bible and swear (not "solemnly affirm") fealty to Her Majesty before being allowed to take his seat.

And yes, I am a hide-bound feudalist who regards the Civil War as a bad idea.

Death Star

Astronomers at the University of Sydney have discovered that,

A spectacular, rotating binary star system is a ticking time bomb, ready to throw out a searing beam of high-energy gamma rays – and Earth may be right in the line of fire.

Somehow it makes rototilling the garden a bit pointless.

One-Way to Mars

Mr. Jim McLane, a former NASA engineer, claims that the most cost-effective way of carrying out a manned Mars mission is to send one man on a one-way trip.

That's "one way" as in "not planning on bringing him back," not "no guarantee of bringing him back." According to Mr. Lane,

When we eliminate the need to launch off Mars, we remove the mission’s most daunting obstacle.

Some aeroplane engineers had the same idea about landing gear, but that never proved very popular except with certain circles in the Imperial Japanese Navy.

Mr. McLane says that this approach is in keeping with the spirit of Charles Lindbergh or Captain Scott, who both took tremendous risks, but he overlooks the fact that Lindbergh was attempting to reach Paris, which had a good return liner service and was inhabited, albeit by Frenchmen, and Captain Scott and his men had no intention of taking up permanent residence at the South Pole. Even immigrants to the New World who had no plans to return home went with the tacit understanding that two-way trade was the point of the entire enterprise, not a dumping into a prison without hope of reprieve.

Counter proposals that just shooting the volunteer in the head is even more cost effective were not received gracefully.

Wanted: Editor

Plastic bags: Environmental menace or typo victim?

Rocketship XM

Not a Destination Moon rip-off. Not at all. Don't even think it.

Priorities

From a story in The Herald on curbing cocaine in Columbia:

Ana Maria Caballero, adviser to the vice-president of Columbia, attended the conference to encourage those who take the drug to consider the impact on global warming.

"We have lost two million hectares of tropical rain forest as a result of the slash-and-burn techniques used by the drug growers," she said.

Something tells me that Miss Caballero has been indulging in another drug of her choice.

Charles Darwin, Call You Service

From the AP:

Padded lampposts are being trialled in a London street to protect inattentive pedestrians.

I would have thought that this is one of those problems that is self-correcting.