Needled

I have to applaud Doug on his latest Star Wars salvo. Most impressive. Almost too good. In fact, could this be you Doug?

Animal Baths

An oft-posited cause for the First World War was the mental state of the Kaiser. By all accounts he was a vain man with a real inferiority complex, especially with regards to the British. Hence his building of a fleet of Dreadnoughts to rival our navy's own, causing an arms race and adding to the unbearable tension of the pre-war years.

Well, given the fact the Kaiser was as a child forced regularly to endure something called an animal bath who can blame him? The Kaiser had a difficult birth and, as such, suffered nerve damage to his arm. He was forced to immerse aforesaid arm into a freshly slaughtered hare in the medieval belief that it would somehow cure him.

Helpfully, I've drawn a graph to chart the potential effect of animal baths on renowned people as a warning to physicians. As the Kaiser is the only famous person I know to actually undergo the animal bath procedure there is, admittedly, some conjecture in the individuals chosen.

Subjects were selected using guesswork, the Delphic pronouncements of nearby birds and bits of the Evening Standard read out randomly by candlelight in a pentagram until the individual was named, and their souls dedicated to Asmodeus. Mostly the first one, though.

Terrifying dummies

Inspired by Antonia's experiments I came across this rather disturbing item.

What gets me is that it has 'As seen on TV' writ large across the packaging. On what programme? Presumably the US equivalent of Dispatches.

iPhone

States within a State

I read with interest today that the sleepy, vaguely hippy dippy town of Totnes is adopting its own currency.

On that note I'm thinking of declaring my own house an independent state. The fun part is deciding what form of government to adopt. A republic is too boring (everyone's a republic nowadays) and so is a constitutional monarchy (who wants to sit around signing off other people's laws, ffs?). An empire, unfortunately, is too grandiose (I'm talking about a house in York after all). Which is a shame, as being an emperor would be cool.

So, I'm left with some kind of grand duchy (which has a pleasant sound to it) or maybe a militant theocracy (which would probably and amusingly annoy the Anglicans. They're quite the thing in York y'know. But despite this, I'm not really fired up with any kind of maniacal religious zeal as, perhaps, the infrequency of my blog postings might indicate).

I've also considered some form of ancien regime absolutist monarchy but I think the survival chances of my new state-within-a-state hinge on a cordial relationship with my erstwhile ruler, Queen Elizabeth II, and I figure her government may not be as tolerant of an absolutist king living in one of her archbishoprics than a less controversial ruler, like a margrave or something.

So, lacking marches to be a grave over, I have decided on Landgrave of South Bank. Now to convince the wife to live under my benign munificence. Maybe I'll do the washing up first (that often helps with things like this).

Navman

I have a Navman. It's an ingenious invention for the directionally challenged (i.e. me) as it helps me find where I'm going to. Or it least it should.

Travelling to Warwick from York yesterday I noticed that, rather than driving along the road as my primary senses were telling me I was, according to the Navman console, drifting eerily across fields and rivers, lakes and woodland near to, but not on, my supposed route. A strangely liberating but wholly inaccurate reflection of the true sequence of events unfurling on the M1. Puzzled, I let the matter pass once it seemed to right itself.

I was trying to get to IBM which is, allegedly, on Warwick’s Birmingham Road. Except Navman questions the existence of a Birmingham Road in Warwick. It doesn't even accept there could be one (the German word 'Unbestimmtheit' or 'Uncertainty' in quantum physics terms would have been reasonable and I would have reluctantly nodded in compromise). But no. Point blank, categorical refusal. I eventually ended up in an industrial estate nearby and found my way to my true destination by good old fashioned aimless driving.

And then on my return journey human error came into play. I was exorcising troubling memories of the morning’s Navman weirdness by listening to the radio turned up very high and I couldn't hear the lilting, ethereal commands emanating from my computerised navigator. So I missed a turning. Ok- my fault. But that soon set Schrödinger’s Cat amongst the pigeons. I had, according to Navman, ceased to be. I was an ex-car. My Citroen was drifting, like so many dark matter particles, amongst the vastness of space. Well, I wasn't on an M40 tributary at any rate, or anywhere else according to Navman’s understanding of the UK road network.

I solved this existential crisis through the expedience of turning the thing off and on again, which saw me abruptly de-cloak, apparently driving towards some form of sports complex near Leamington Spa. Soon, my newly conscious Navman was able to calculate my route again pretending coyly the whole incident had never happened.

This brush with the space-time continuum has not destroyed my faith in my Navman. Without it I would never have even got there at all and would be still driving forlornly around Coventry, screaming my frustration hoarsely though several days of beard growth, given up for lost by kith and kin. Rather, this Damascene experience has highlighted that one should never entirely place one's metaphorical John Thomas in the hands of a gadget as it could be periodically and utterly deranged.

Rabid Monkeys

If Death has a monkey suit then who has his robe?