Random: August 2008 Archives

Chilli-loving horses fail drug test.

on August 21, 2008 11:40 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I'm really not following the Olympics, except for heroic stadium-saving cyclists, the occasional bit of table tennis, and of course the beach volleyball.

However, this caught my eye. Four horses were caught taking capsaicin, and will be banned. Capsaicin is one of my favourite things, being the active ingredient in chilli peppers. If you're not a horse, or at least not a horse at the Olympics, may I recommend the chipotle tabasco?

Lost in space.

James

on August 15, 2008 5:29 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Gristmill note that the most recent American government figures on driving show a substantial drop: a 4.7% reduction in mileage, motivated by the increase in oil prices (154Kb pdf).

A 4.7% drop amounts to a staggering 12.2 billion miles. In other words, one year's reduction in U.S. driving is equivalent to 489,940 fewer car trips around the world, a standard unit of mega-distance.

Looking at the bigger picture, the total American mileage over the last year is 2,954,326,000,000 miles, roughly. That's a little more than half a light year, the next largest such unit. Now, the nearest star system to our own is, as everyone knows, Alpha Centauri, which is 4.37 light years away.

Over George Bush's term of office, therefore, Americans will have collectively driven as far as Alpha Centauri, more than 25 trillion miles, and all at about 24.6 miles per gallon. Other sci-fi dorks may find this as shocking as I do.

Blood on the streets.

James

on August 11, 2008 12:06 PM | Permalink | Comments (5)

Despite the ascent of Salmond to power as the "new king of Scotland" (and I think we can all agree that he's better than the "last king of Scotland"), the cybernats remain full to bursting with bile and bad puns. I think everyone else has left the Scotsman and Herald discussion boards to them, now they're such polluted spaces.

Scottish Unionist (formerly known as AM2 on those same discussion boards) has done sterling work keeping track of some of these loons (Gordon Girvan, Jay Kay etc). A few more just caught my eye in a piece about the Council Tax.

Vivas, first of all, subtly suggests there's something wrong with Gordon Brown. I don't think this is one of the SNP's key messages.

Persuasive, as this fellow is, he's not in the same league as Iainbroch, who I think must work in PR. The way they use "Liebour" gets funnier and funnier, and I think if I hear it one more time I'll join the SNP. Not.

The most striking of all, though, was from someone trading as "Vote for Scotlands Future, Vote for the SNP on". Yes, it just ends like that. And is devoid of the apostrophe. But these are minor linguistic misdemeanors compared to the true evils of this comment.

This disgrace to Scotland explicitly says he would like a Scot to be denied healthcare in England, and then to die, so we could have a bloody separation from England, presumably along the lines of the end of Yugoslavia. I thought initially that this person must be an agent provocateur, but he or, I suppose, she has a bit of a history, some mad, some not so.

I've been telling the SNP for a long while now they need to pull their cybernat forces back, because these comments are not exactly helping their cause. Perhaps I shouldn't have: it's better that people know what lurks on the fringes.

« Random: July 2008 | Main Index | Archives | Random: September 2008 »