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Sunday, April 22nd, 2012
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10:42 pm - Oh, my! Get out of the way, please!
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"One Pontipine, two Pontipines, three Pontipines, four Pontipines, five Pontipines, six Pontipines, seven Pontipines, eight Pontipines, nine Pontipines, ten Pontipines. The bodies of ten Pontipines were laid out all in a row this morning after the Pinky Ponk caught fire and was destroyed when it attempted to dock with its mooring mast at Lakehurst Naval Station, New Jersey.
"Several senior Nazi Party officials were also among the dead."
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| Saturday, April 21st, 2012
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10:58 pm - Look at my nail
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Look at my nail! It has split nearly in twain:
Actually, don't look, it's disgusting.
I don't actually know how it happened. The crack just came up with the nail as it grew, which means it happened inside whatever biological factory nails get made in. But how?
SABOTAGE?
Is this the sort of thing that would be on House? I never saw House. But anyway, I think House is finishing so my nail will remain a mystery of medicine.
Apparently, according to the doctor,* it's fine, but now all I can do is queasily stare at, wondering if a wasp is going to lay its eggs in my nail bed, until the crack grows off the end. But how long will that be? I reckon if I eat enough gelatine I can get it down to four days.
This is the worst medical thing that could happen that doesn't involve eyes.
*Don't worry, I didn't just go to the doctor for this, I had a cough as well.
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| Saturday, April 7th, 2012
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9:58 pm - Mysteries of the toy box
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Having a child means your house fills up with some very strange artifacts. This, for instance, is a sort of cube within a cube:
As you can see, somehow a cow's head as gotten jammed into the geometrical madness as well. I really don't know what it is, but my fear is that when my daughter solves it, the Cenobites will come.
Equally enigmatic is... this:
My theory is this is the herald probe of an alien race, launched aeons ago from a far-distant star to spread news of intelligent life across the galaxy. Encased in rock and exotic metals, these devices fell to Earth as meteorites, where they were totally misunderstood by an Early Learning Centre buyer and sold for £10 a piece.
Look, this is a map of the origin star system:
Pretty sure it's Epsilon Eridani.
Idealised representations of the Episilonian female (left) and male (right):
And the intergalactic symbols for carbon (top) and table salt (bottom):
This can only be a specialist gynaecological instrument:
A specialist gynaecological instrument belonging to Upsy Daisy:
And as you can see, few people are more in need of gynaecology than Upsy Daisy:
Derek Jacobi may be a national treasure, but that really isn't somewhere from which you want to hear his famous voice emanate.
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| Thursday, March 8th, 2012
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10:22 pm
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Is this the most pointless telephone helpline ever?
"Jeff speaking."
"Hello, is that Jeff?"
"Yes it is."
"I just wanted to check on the status of Jesus Christ."
"OK, yes, well, he's the same as he was yesterday."
"Thanks, that's good to know, Jeff."
"My pleasure."
"Jeff - what do you think the status of Jesus Christ will be tomorrow?"
"Well, I think he'll be the same as he was yesterday and as he is today. In fact, I'd go as far as to say he'll be the same for ever."
"OK, that's great, Jeff, thanks."
"Not a problem."
"But I think I'll call you again tomorrow, just to be sure."
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| Sunday, February 26th, 2012
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12:06 pm - Is this what we want our children to be reading?
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Look! Look! What do we see?
We see a pig.
It has an eye... where's the eye?
There's the eye!
(Touch baby's hand to the eye in the picture.)
-What Does Baby See? Anonymous.
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| Tuesday, February 7th, 2012
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11:39 pm
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| Sunday, January 22nd, 2012
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10:58 pm
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I was very pleased to receive, on behalf of my ungrateful daughter, a copy of Peekaboo Jungle! by Emily Bolam from my child's mentor DJ Apple..
It's the audaciously short tale of three animals who (uncharacteristically for two of them) live in the titular Peekaboo Jungle, where they literally hide from the reader (and I think from a mouse, though that's not quite made clear) behind big flaps of cardboard.
The tragedy of these shy animals is that they can never fully hide themselves from the scrutiny of the reader because of the noises they are unable to stop making - namely stomping, roaring and snapping.
But lest the reader feel too smug at her effortless unmasking of these creatures, the book has a sting in its tail: as the noisy elephant, stripy tiger and sleepy crocodile chorus 'Peekaboo! Who are you?' an actual mirror stares mercilessly out of the page. 'You're a bouncy baby!' crow the noisy elephant, stripy tiger and sleepy crocodile.
That we can never disguise our true nature from others is a lesson we are never too young to learn.
Peekaboo Jungle! trumpets its narrative innovations - 'Big flaps and a mirror surprise' - on its front cover, and who can blame it? And indeed, who can think of a book that wouldn't be improved by big flaps and a mirror suprise?
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| Friday, December 30th, 2011
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12:17 am - Its antorbital fenestra is too flappy
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What dinosaur is this (in the book)?
It seems closest to an ankylosaurus, though rather than the rounded tail club, this specimen seems to have a sort of whale tail.
The tail is fuzzy to the touch, if that helps. (I wouldn't agree that it's 'too fuzzy' - I think it's just right - but then I'm not a dinosaur-owning mouse.)
I do hope Fiona Watt, the author of That's Not My Dinosaur, hasn't just gone and made one up. It would be shame, as the rest of the examples are all recognisable and paleobiologically accurate. The tyrannosaur's teeth are 'too bumpy' - as you can well imagine. The triceratops' horns 'too rough' horns are literally rendered in sandpaper. Youch! Imagine getting one of those up your cloaca! And the narrator's dinosaur, which turns out to be a
**SPOILER ALERT**
stegosaurus, has spines which are 'so soft' - bang up to date with the latest scientific thinking, as gideondefoe has pointed out. And he did arch & anth, which I think covers cavemen times and all that. I wonder if the That's Not My... series is peer-reviewed.
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| Thursday, December 1st, 2011
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11:17 pm - Horror Beneath The Crest
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Meet the latest frightening hen in my accidental frightening hen collection, a thoughtful gift from @richmurkin:
At first glance this hen may look less threatening than Mechahen or that flapping ceramic effort - it's certainly more BSI compliant. But don your beak guard and look closer - you'll see that its smooth plastic exterior masks the tiny, wicked brain of a peck-happy pyschopath.
It lays eggs, too, raising the spectre of of further generations of curdled deparavity.
Why not get to know him better in this short video?
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| Tuesday, November 22nd, 2011
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10:46 pm - Could have been ancient, COULD HAVE BEEN MYSTICAL
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In 1988, I bought - and frequently listened to - this album with a straight face:
What is your favourite exploding shard? I can't decide between the gloating NBC pigeon and the disappointed Anglo-Saxon robot stuck in a web.
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| Saturday, November 5th, 2011
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11:13 pm - Toward dignity in infant hygeine
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I am writing* to complain about Pampers Newborn nappies.
They are just way too small for me.
BUT SERIOUSLY, I am writing to complain about the picture of a cartoon elephant which adorns the ventral 'buckle' quadrant of every Pampers Newborn nappy:
As a responsible nappy-changing parent, I spend a lot of time looking at this cartoon elephant - more so since now I'm not distracted by a rope of adorable atrophied gristle swinging about. And one has to ask, for whose benefit is this cartoon elephant? It can't be for the child's. She can't see it from her vantage point, and even if she could, I'm not sure it would make any sense to her. This is someone who is frequently sick in her own ear; she doesn't care about art.
So it must be for the benefit of parents. But why do Pampers think we want to look at a cartoon of an elephant wearing a nappy? For one thing, it raises an annoying question. Just why is the elephant wearing a
nappy? If it has 'an accident', it can just hose itself down, using its trunk as a sort of flexibile bidet. Surely that's one of the chief benefits of being an elephant? I wish my child could clean herself with a trunk. It would save a lot of time and effort. Why, Pampers, are you rubbing my nose in this vision of unattainable anatomical convenience?
Aside from that, it's kind of childish. I'm a father! I haven't got time for frivolous nonsense!
Pampers badly needs to reposition the imagery on its nappies into a more adult-facing aesthetic space. If their nappies must carry pictures, let them be pictures of things in which adults are interested. I have created a few concept designs to get them started:
Cheeseboard
Hanbury Hall, Worcestershire
Channel 4 News political editor Gary Gibbon
You're welcome, Pampers, YOU ARE WELCOME.
*To the internet.
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| Sunday, October 23rd, 2011
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10:44 pm - Things that fell off my baby
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Part One in a series of, hopefully, one.
When it comes to babies, everyone seems to agree that they're 100% adorable. From their squidgy, mallow-soft fontanelles to their toes that really, are so pointlessly small we might as well wait another year before bothering to grow them, everything about a newborn child is CUTE with a capital 'coo' (ie coo-ute).
But there is one bit of baby anatomy that is unaccountably absent from the Hallmark paens. I really don't know why. All babies have them in their first couple of weeks and all parents can't keep their eyes of them as they change those blissful first nappies. Really, there is no more charming piece of mammalian biology. To correct this oversight, I have made this card for you to print out and send to any new parents you know:
Did you know?
The gelatinous substance which fills the umbilical cord is known as Wharton's jelly.
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| Saturday, October 22nd, 2011
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10:06 pm - Next stop, Antiques Roadshow
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Please hum 'Hail To The Chief' while enjoying this animated gif.
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(comment on this)
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| Friday, October 21st, 2011
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6:26 pm - Meet Internets Baby
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We have a new addition to our household - Internets Baby. (You might hear ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif?v=91.7) drummygirl refer to a 'Drummy Baby' - I don't know what she's talking about. There might be another baby around here somewhere but I've seen no sign of it.)
Babies, as you might have heard, are quite different from normal humans in many ways. Famously, for instance, they are a very different size. It's difficult to get an idea of just how different a size they are unless you've actually met a baby, so to try and give you some kind of impression of scale, here's a photograph of Internets Baby next to a London bus:
Incredible, isn't it?
But in other ways, babies are identical to regular people. For instance, Internets Baby is already fully emotionally mature, exhibiting all of the human emotions - hungry and sleepy - in various sophisticated blends.
I wonder what Internets Baby is thinking?
That's my girl.
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| Sunday, August 28th, 2011
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3:28 pm - Mein Harnblase!
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In Berlin recently, I got this excellent book, Wie funktioniert das? Die Umwelt des Menschen:
I don't know German, but I guess this translates as something like What's The Deal With The Human Environment?.
I got it because of its wonderful isotypes. I don't fully know what they mean but I can glean that the Umwelt - at least in Germany in 1975 - was perilous.
For instance, power stations would pump strontium 90 directly into rivers, fish would drink the strontium 90, people would eat the fish and get bad hips:
And nowadays, of course, nuclear explosions are perfectly safe. But in the 70s, if you set off a nuclear explosion on a windy day, some radiation might get into some clouds, which would rain onto some grass, a cow would eat the grass and get radioactive udders, then its milk would get radioactive and a human might drink it and a tiny cancerous uterus would grow in his or her throat:
Not sure what's going on here, but it's unlikely to work out very well for those rats:
Smoking an oversized cigarette can cause tiny explosions in many internal organs, including the Harnblase:
And thinking about hexagons may cause 'negative Rückkopplung' (literally, 'arm fire'):
Even the pie charts are deadly:
I'm glad I don't live in the Umwelt.
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| Saturday, August 27th, 2011
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6:10 pm - Gehen Sie voran und ziehen Sie die Bären ein! Sie essen alles.
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I get the impression that, in Berlin Zoo in the 1950s, the rules about feeding the animals were less strict:
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| Monday, August 22nd, 2011
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10:52 pm - No more mess! No more sleep!
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Some of you will be aware of the delights contained within the Betterware catalogue (which was established in 1928, apparently; it was where TS Eliot got his slankets). But amongst the delights lurk unguessed horrors:
Meet the ceramic chick egg white separator. You simply crack an egg on the lip of the gaping wound where the top of the ceramic chick egg white separator's skull has been removed and tip the shell's contents into its body. Sickened by this forced cannibalism, the ceramic chick egg white separator vomits the egg white through its beak. What could be more charming?
You can use the emetastized egg white as an ingredient in mergingues, mousses and souffles. The yolk, of course, is poison.
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(4 comments | comment on this)
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| Thursday, July 28th, 2011
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12:10 am - The Paperback Putsch
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| Thursday, July 21st, 2011
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10:17 pm
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God knows, I've known some terrifying hens in my time. For example:
And of course:
Lest we forget, both these hideous creatures are still at large in my flat.
But hens tin and ceramic are given a run for their money* by this monochromatic monstrosity:
This preening beast appeared, almost subliminally, in the titles of Border Television's Cock O' The Border, just before some low-tech psychedelic titles.**
You can see for yourself, if you can bare it, at 40'50" in Regional TV: Life Through a Local Lens, an interesting and otherwise hen-free documentary.
It doesn't even have proper legs, for Christ's sake! Just a stick, like some nightmarish feathered lolly.
*Do hens use money? I imagine in shops they probably just dribble a bit of grain mush onto the counter and the sickened assistant gives them whatever it takes to get rid.
**The titles would be nearly as alarming as the hen, but in this context they come as a welcome respite.
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(comment on this)
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| Saturday, July 16th, 2011
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11:20 pm
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Quisling food mascots are a commonplace marketing stupidity - animals who cheerfully promote products made out of their own brethren. Pigs dressed as butchers, the Ribena berries, the M&M's M&Ms, the Kia Ora crows... the list is endless.
So it's refreshing to see a more realistic, less treacherous mascot representing Chicken Hut:
I don't know what kind of bird that's meant to be, but it's not a fucking hen.
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