2006 — Day 24 - Flushed away, with success
Lest you wonder, today's title refers to the new Aardman animation. Melvyn Bragg's South Bank Show featured an interview with the delightful Nick Park yesterday evening (or half an hour ago from my current point of view). Must remember to download the interview... (Alas! It necessitates iTunes, which I've long since expunged.)
Just for a change, I think I'll get a night's sleep before I add to this. Who knows? It may finish off my cold. If not, hot toddies beckon invitingly.
Making your eyes water
According to the Guardian's Media Monkey Diary we should be tuning into BBC Radio Humberside to assure ourselves that Auntie deserves an above-inflation boost to her licence1 fee. (So do I, of course, but that's a different story.) It seems the Paul Hartley show invited its listeners to put questions to "relationship expert" [their quotation marks, not mine] Dawn Porter. A listener complaint was read out; he said that having sex with a woman he met at a holiday camp (Good Heavens, what do they get up to there?) was "like putting the old lad in a bucket. It was like making love to a Wellington boot." [So we may have identified the listener's line of agribusiness, perhaps. Or is that putting the boot in?]
Anyway, the expert sympathised, and said she would not be having any children so as not to "lose my elasticity for anybody". But she helpfully added "If he was frustrated he could also go for the rear entry".
Between that and the main headline Revealed: rise of creationism in UK schools I think the non-working week is off to a good start.
Delayed gratification department
Those Web standards books have yet to arrive, and now threaten to be overtaken by both the new Michael Frayn and the new Paul ("Concrete") Chadwick. These seem to be
slightly less far up the Amazon, as it were.
Wrong! The package showed up synchronised with the plaice and chips this evening. The Amazon Home Delivery network had a puncture, it seems.
Just when I was feeling happy department
I really should stay off this Interweb thingy. Boys' Toys:
"Given the size and scope of America's military advantage, it is doubtful that any country will mount a full-spectrum challenge to U.S. military capabilities in the foreseeable future. The entry barriers are simply too high, especially for air, sea, and space systems. Virginia-class nuclear submarines cost $2.4 billion, Nimitz-class aircraft carriers go for $6 billion, and the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter program will cost at least $245 billion. The U.S. spends around $500 billion a year on its military, almost as much as the rest of the world combined. In fact, the U.S. spends more simply on the research, development, testing, and evaluation of new weapons—$71 billion in 2006—than any other country spends on its entire armed forces.
(By way of comparison, the top three spenders after the U.S. are Russia, whose defense budget in 2003 was estimated at $65 billion; China, at $56 billion; France, at $45 billion; and Japan and the United Kingdom, at $42 billion. These are only estimates; the figures for Russia and China may be considerably higher.)"
The author of this depressing text is Max Boot — recall that "nominative determinism".