Stop Press!

The Korean Central News Agency reports the following earth shattering news:

Pyongyang, October 7 (KCNA)

Dermot Hudson, chairman of the British Group for the Study of the Juche Idea, arrived here by plane today.


Wow!

WW - Another Spider

This week's entry for the Tuesday and Wednesday edition of Wordless Wednesday.

Lhasa de Sela

A Pint of Plain

The famous poem by Myles na gCopaleen (aka Brian O'Nolan and of course Flann O'Brien) performed by Eamonn Morrisey. A belated birthday celebration of one of my favourite authors (5 October)

Wise words from an Australian comedian

"Worried about dry skin? Concerned about lines and wrinkles? Then visit a burns unit and get some perspective." Shaun Micallef

It's a shame the Micallef show was only ever shown on cable here in the UK

Scum

Given that humanity is capable of plumbing the depths of depravity I wonder why I am surprised by this BBC report but it just goes to show that you don't have to go far to see what pieces of shit some of our fellow humans are.

Shaun Dykes, 17, from Kilburn, fell to his death from the top of the Westfield Centre multi-storey in Derby on 27 September, as onlookers shouted "jump". The Chief Constable of the Derbyshire constabulary Mick Creedon said "It disgusts me to think of their motivation and their lack of compassion. While we are very used to dealing with incidents like this, this was unusual with members of the public videoing, taking photographs and even shouting for Shaun to jump. All my experience and belief in the good in people tells me that the vast majority of the crowd who watched the events unfold were wishing for the best result, hoping that Shaun remained safe and well. However, all of us associated with the force see the actions of that small minority who were encouraging Shaun to take his own life as totally abhorrent. It disgusts me to think of their motivation and their lack of compassion towards a fellow human being obviously in distress."

Police had spent three hours trying to coax the teenager down. Some onlookers even used phones to film the event. Mr Creedon explained that there had not been enough police officers available to arrest those onlookers urging the teenager to jump.

"I know people are asking why these irresponsible idiots weren't arrested at the time, but I ask the public to understand that the few available officers at the scene were doing their best to manage a difficult situation.

A shame that there weren’t a few more officers available. A number of people deserved to find out in a particularly degrading manner that calling for a disturbed person to jump is not a joke. I hope they choke on their videos and their memories.

My thoughts are with Shaun's family. To lose their son at such a young age and in such a way is terrible.

And now the ridiculous or should that just be dreadful

WErik Satie said "The musician is perhaps the most modest of animals, but he is also the proudest. It is he who invented the sublime art of ruining poetry". Erik is perhaps wrong. Many poets have shown they had that art in spades, including Georgina Bailey Parrington:


AN ELEGY TO A DISSECTED PUPPY

Sweet Dog! now cold and stiff in death,
What cruel hand enticed thee here?
Did toothsome crust of juicy bone
Allure to stretch on thy bier?

... ruthless hands of alien race
Are opening up thy quiet breast,
With prying eyes they peer within,
Explore the contents of thy chest.


I will admit that I have greater access to atrocious verse since the not-wife gave me a copy of Very Bad Poetry by Katherine and Ross Petras. It is a must-have book!

Souad Massi - Raoui

The sublime

Photo Hunt - Sad

The theme for this week's Photo Hunt is sad. I suppose I could have gone for one of our feline masters giving a baleful stare when no food is forthcoming but then again what is sadder than a seven-legged spider... or a photo hunter stretching the theme!

British triumph at the Ig Nobels

It is with great pleasure to report that two Britons have joined the august list of Ig Nobel Prize winners.

David Sims of the Cass Business School in London, whose paper You Bastard: A narrative exploration of the experience of indignation within organisations, won the literature prize, said: "I'm delighted. The whole ethos of the Ig Nobels is a wonderful way to make people think." The paper examines how people construct roles as clever bastards, devious bastards or bastard ex machina, and goes on to examine the mixture of joy and guilt of labelling someone as such.

Sims wrote the paper after puzzling how right-thinking people who often stressed the importance of appreciating others' arguments would give up and brand someone a bastard. "We are all novelists writing the next chapter of our life story and with bastards, we need to understand what kind of character they are trying to create," Sims said.

Charles Spence, professor of experimental psychology at Oxford University, was awarded the Ig for nutrition for his investigation into the gastronomical role of sound. In the study, volunteers ate crisps of varying freshness while wearing headphones. As they ate, the sound of the crisp breaking was modified by a computer and played back to see if it changed their perception of the crisp's freshness. By making the crunch sounds louder, or by boosting the high frequencies, Spence made people rate the crisps 15% fresher.

The work led to collaboration with Heston Blumenthal at the Fat Duck restaurant in Bray, Berkshire, who played diners the sound of crashing waves to improve the flavour of oysters, and sizzling bacon to enhance his egg and bacon ice cream. "I'm very happy to be receiving the award," said Spence, who is now testing why crisps come in such noisy packets.

The Igs have become an irreverent highlight of the academic calendar, an annual exercise to celebrate research that makes people laugh first and think later. They are timed to coincide with the rather more lucrative and legitimate Nobels, which are awarded in Stockholm next week. The ceremony is hosted by the tongue-in-cheek journal, Annals of Improbable Research, and is attended by real Nobel prize-winners and a 1,000-strong audience. This year's recipients were given 60 seconds to deliver their acceptance speech, a time limit enforced by an eight-year-old girl.

The Ig Nobel prize for medicine was awarded to Dan Ariely at Duke University in North Carolina for a landmark study proving that costly placebos are more effective than cheap ones. Ariely's team told volunteers they were being given a new kind of painkiller, with some receiving an expensive one and others a much cheaper version.

Even though all of them received the same sugar pills, those who thought their pills were more expensive reported less pain when they were given small electric shocks. Arierly said his work has serious implications for the medical industry, because many patients are told they can only have cheaper drugs, or have inexpensive-looking medication, which could undermine how effective the drugs are. While the active ingredients of the drug will help treat symptoms, often they work in tandem with the placebo effect, which triggers the body's own healing mechanisms.

Among other winners were the people of Switzerland who claimed the Ig Peace prize for adopting the legal principle that plants have dignity; Geoffrey Miller at the University of New Mexico who won the economics prize for showing lap dancers received more in tips when they were ovulating; and scientists in San Diego who showed that hair, string and almost anything else will become tangled given the chance, earning them the Ig award for physics. Spare a thought also for the Chemistry prize winners: to Sharee Umpierre at the University of Puerto Rico discovered that Coke is a spermicide, while Chuang-Ye Hong at Taipei Medical University showed that it is not. Meanwhile Astolfo Mello Araujo at the University of Sao Paulo in Brazil wone the Archaeology prize for measuring how the contents of an archaeological dig can be disrupted by the actions of an armadillo.

Not all of the winners understood why their work had made people laugh. Marie-Christine Cadiergues, who won the prize for biology by proving the fleas on dogs jump higher than those on cats, said: "Despite appearing funny and maybe crazy and useless to some people, this was part of a larger work on the biology of fleas ... A better knowledge of flea biology can provide a better control and therefore help vets, pet owners and overall our favourite pets."

Toshiyuki Nakagaki at Hokkaido University in Japan was similarly nonplussed about receiving the Ig award for cognitive neuroscience, after showing that slime mould could navigate a simple maze. "I was wondering which aspect of our research attracted the Ig Nobel prize. How does the prize evaluate our research? We are always serious and don't know why they laugh once before thinking," Nakagaki said.