1. There will be no wedding bells for Bert and Ernie, according to those in charge. "Even though they are identified as male characters and possess many human traits and characteristics (as most Sesame Street Muppets™ do), they remain puppets, and do not have a sexual orientation." Muppetsexual, perhaps? Seriously, though, why would you do it? It'd be like Snoopy finally shooting down the Red Baron or Charlie Brown's team winning the baseball game - once it's done, where do you go from there? Besides, anyone with half a brain knows that the canon pairings are Ernie/Rubber Ducky and Bert/pigeons...

2. With friends like these, who needs enemies? UNRELEASED music and personal belongings were stolen from singer Amy Winehouse's home in the days after her death. The star's father, Mitch Winehouse, believes one of her acquaintances took copies of unreleased tracks, lyric books and letters. And he has vowed to root out the culprits when he returns from a family holiday taken to come to terms with his loss, The Sun reports. Filthy little grubs.

3. Whether or not they are actual one-hit wonders, some bands will always be remembered for one song. Sometimes this is a good thing, and sometimes not. THE lead singer of 80s glam rockers Warrant was found dead at a Los Angeles hotel late today, TMZ reported. The body of 47-year-old Jani Lane - who wrote the band's hit Cherry Pie and also had a solo career - was discovered at the Comfort Inn hotel in Woodland Hills.

But did he die with a smile on his face ten miles wide? It's disturbing to think that this could actually be the case.

...we have this.

Hurry and watch it before copyright issues get it taken down like all the others!

Or maybe not:







(Post title references this song.)

This is how Italians are supposed to fight...

Two Germans needed hospital treatment after they fought a pitched battle in a supermarket with salamis used as clubs and a chunk of Parmesan cheese brandished like a dagger.

The fight took place in the western city of Aachen when a 74-year-old man and a 35-year-old woman both laid claim to a shopping trolley on Saturday.

As the pensioner wrestled the cart from the hands of his rival, her 24-year-old brother stepped forward and floored him with a punch.

Together with their 53-year-old mother, the brother and sister then took the trolley into the supermarket. But the OAP came round and followed them to the cheese counter.

He clubbed the younger man with a salami as his mother tried to fend him off with a sharp 4lbs piece of Parmesan.

The pensioner then pushed the woman down on to a glass countertop on which she cracked her head.

Police arrived to break up the melee. Two of those involved were treated in hospital for minor injuries.

The trolley was undamaged.

A police spokesman said a sudden rush of shoppers on the last-but-one Saturday before Christmas had depleted the supermarket's trolley reserves and "raised tensions" between the would-be customers.

Dear beloved,

You're not my beloved!

I know that this letter may be a very big surprise to you, I came across your email contact from my personal search and I instructed the doctor here in this hospital to help me email you and I believe that you will be honest to fulfill my final wish before I will die.

To call the Peelers on you?

I am Mrs. Gloria Caldwell from LONDON, I am 58 years old, I am deaf and suffering from a long time cancer of the breast, which also affected my brain.

Obviously, or you wouldn't be pulling a 419 scam. You scum, milking sympathy from the gullible and well-meaning in this fashion.

From all indication my condition is really deteriorating, and my doctors have courageously advised me that I may not live beyond the next two months, this is because the cancer stage has reached a critical stage. I was brought up in a motherless baby's home, and was married to my late husband for twenty years without a child.

Somewhere there's a violin playing, but a Stradivarius would be wasted on you.

My husband and I are true Christians, but quite unfortunately, he died in a fatal motor accident.

Pray tell, Mrs Caldwell; why do your garden secateurs have traces of rubber and dry brake fluid on the blades?

Since his death I decided not to re-marry, I sold all my inherited belongings and deposited all the sum of $3.2million dollars with a BANK.

You do mean pounds sterling, don't you?

Presently, this money is still in their custody,

And why would it not be?

and the management just wrote me as the Legitimate beneficiary

I believe the term is "account holder".

to come forward to receive the money after keeping it for so long or rather issue a letter of authorization to somebody to receive it on my behalf since I can not come over as a result of my illness, or they get it confiscated.

And return it to the people you scammed it from?

Presently, I'm with my laptop in a hospital where I have been undergoing treatment. I have since lost my ability to talk

"You have the right to remain silent. Anything you say can and will be used against you in a court of law."

and my doctors have told me that I have only a few months to live.

"I should spend the money quickly, Commander Bond."

It is my last wish to see that this money is invested in any organization of your choice and distributed each year among the charity organization, the poor

What? All of them?

and the motherless baby's home where I come from.

$3.2 million divided by, say, not less than 3200 million poor and hungry people in the world is... gee, not much!

I want your good humanitarian, to also use this money to fund churches, orphanages and widows around.

Um... between the charity of my choice, the poor - all of them - and your former orphanage, there's not that much left. You wouldn't have a spare few billion on hand, would you?

I must let you know that this was a very hard decision, but I had to take a bold step towards this issue because I have no further option.

The forensic accountants and the tax office were closing in, were they?

I hope you will help see my last wishes come true.

This is what a lawyer is for. But then, you probably need a different sort of lawyer right now.

As soon as I receive your reply I shall give you the contact of the BANK.

And I shall direct the bank to INTERPOL's website, just like I did with your colleague. *Checks recent bookmarks*

I will also issue you a letter of authority, which will prove that you are the new beneficiary of my funds. Please assure me that you will act accordingly as I stated herein. Hope to hear from you soonest.

Hope in vain.

Awaiting your reply

Yours in Christ,

Wait till He sees you've been serving Mammon. Hope you've got fireproof knickers for the afterlife; you're going to need them.

Mrs. Gloria Caldwell

Who probably doesn't exist as such, any more than Big Brother, or Emanuel Goldstein, or Miss Joanna Morrison do.

Slide Rules

These are a lot of fun to play with, but they have one big downside when doing trig as the markings get sort of crowded up near the Sin x = 90 end of the scale. This is a nuisance when you are trying to work out cos x (on a general purpose slide that doesn't cater for it) and its equivalent, sin (90-x), is in an area of the scale where whole degrees have to be interpolated.

Down at the other end of the rule, where x is between 6 and 20-something degrees, things are much easier - fractions of tenths of a degree are easily interpolated and likewise for the tan x scale beneath it. Now of course you can always rearrange sin²x + cos²x = 1, but that involves doing more steps than one can sometimes reliably keep in one's head or on the rule.

Last night it hit me, as it should have long ago - cos x is simply sin x / tan x, isn't it? So if I align the C and D scales, select the relevant sin x, put the cursor on that and then drag tan x under the hairline, the right C index will show me cos x directly as a decimal fraction. Easy!

Next problem - it's all up the 0.9 end of the scale, where interpolation is king and error is rife. And so after a night of sleep on the problem, I had a really bright idea. Divide by three. That brings the cursor down to an area of the D scale where the divisions are clearer, and where the second and third decimal places can then themselves be multiplied by three if the answer isn't easy to reconvert. For example, cos 10.5 degrees...

1) Align C and D scales.
2) Cursor to sin 10.5 degrees; you could read the answer on the D scale, but it's easier just to...
3) Pull 10.5 degrees on the tan scale under the cursor. The right index of the C scale is now at about 985 (i.e. 0.985). Slide the cursor to it, remembering that the exact answer lies at the C scale position, not what your imperfect eye is reading on the D scale.
4) Pull the slide to bring 3 under the cursor (division by 3 on the slide rule); answer is 0.328.
5) Ignore the 0.3; perform 28x3 on the slide rule to reconvert the 0.028 back to its 'original value' ---> 84; i.e. 0.084. Now add the 0.9 (i.e. 0.3 x 3) back in.

Answer is 0.984

The scientific calculator built into Windows returns...

0.98325490756395458455463205643051

I have converted a 0.002 difference to a 0.001 difference, halving the inaccuracy. This is about as good as you can hope to do with a hand held slide rule, and good enough for most day to day applications. In the old days, when there were no computers to cross-check, you'd have gone to a book of tables that some poor bastard had spent his life calculating, or if you had ongoing calculations to do then there were huge slide rules two metres long, fitted with microscopes to read the finest graduations on the scale. A Steampunk techno-geek's wet dream.

I'm sure someone else has come up with this trick before. But I have yet to see it in any of the slide rule manuals I've read online.


The Table Rappers
This is the title of a book my beloved left here when she went back to Canada after visiting last year. It's basically about the séance scene in Victorian Britain. This afternoon, as I was walking to get my lunch, a couple of entirely different interpretations came to mind.

The first was born out of the existence of badly written rape-fics. You know, the sort of dreadfully written Harry Potter dross churned out by barely-literate kids who disdain proof-checking or dictionaries and in which "Draco captured Hermione and rapped her all night long." Well, with that sort of "rapping" translated to tables, I'd be watching out for splinters. You've heard of virtue being its own reward - here's an example where depravity is its own punishment! Although given how dangerous even books can be in the HP universe, forcing sex upon a table in that fanon might be the last thing you'd want to try.

Then of course there's the other sort of table rapping...

Yo. My. Furniture here that you see is the best
'cos it's motherfuckin' sanded smoother than all the rest,
I construct it with love and I varnish with care
And my antique dealer buddies in amazement do stare
'cos the eye cannot see that the stuff is a fake
I can give you Louis Fourteen and your money I'll take
Even Chippendale or Georgian, yeah I know it's a stunt
But my conscience is clear if the look's all you want.

I only wish my carpentry skills were that good. :)

1. The premier of the State of New South Wales, here in Oz, is on record as having uttered the words: "If you think you're in love, you're in love. If you think you're [caught] in traffic, you're in traffic" when confronted with the commuter nightmare many of his constituents face.

Now one might think that one could while away one's gridlocked hours in traffic by imagining oneself in love, but a whole lot of frogs in Victoria, to the south of NSW, are not finding this to be the case. A Melbourne University study has found that the mating calls of male frogs in city ponds are being drowned out by traffic noise, and this is hindering these amphibian Romeos' chances of attracting and breeding with female frogs. All I can say is this.

2. You're a boy, you're eight years old, and you're looking to kill some time. You've tried billycarts, you've tried rollerblades, you've even tried motocross; and still you're looking for something new to capture your imagination. Why not try wing-walking? Of course it helps if you have a grandfather who's an expert and a mother who (through being said grandfather's daughter) trusts him implicitly, but you're bound to have one hell of a time... and you might even set a record.

Please excuse me while I channel my inner eight-year old. Wow; that's cool. *Wants.*

3. Have you ever been setting up a portrait shot with your camera on a timer and tripod, and some glory-seeking idiot steps in and ruins the shot? A pair of visitors to Canada had that experience, but little did they realise at the time that the intruder in their photo would go on to be world famous. You can have him crash your photo here.

When you're cute, you can get away with anything. Anything.

4. We've all heard of the Octo-mum, the lady who had IVF octuplets. You know, to go with the six she already had. One woman in Tunisia was looking strong to break that record, and snare herself an even dozen. Alas, it was all a hoax. For which the woman should, I suspect, be thankful...

5. If you love something, set it free; if it comes back to you, it's yours. I'm not sure whether my wife would forgive me if I lost my wedding ring so soon into the marriage, but perhaps this man's determination was what impressed his Other Half.

A New Zealand man who promised his wife he would find his wedding ring after it fell into the capital's murky harbour has been successful, 16 months later.

Ecologist Aleki Taumoepeau was checking Wellington harbour for invasive plant species in March last year when the ring fell into three metres of water.

He's lucky he wasn't working on the Mariana Trench!

In Tim Blair's blog in Australia's Daily Telegraph, one of Blair's opponents takes umbrage:

I always take consolation from the fact that this blog has absolutely no influence over policy anywhere because every issue is treated as religion. Just ignore all facts, subtlety and uncertainty and think abuse and screaming about the end of the world due to communist takeovers of democracy will somehow convince the 99% of sensible people to listen to your arm flapping ranting. All issues are simplified according to the Book of Tim as you prostate yourselves before your little idol. And the pseudo-tough guy act fools no-one. Ohhh no!!!! I am apostate and not welcome in your little cult. Woe is me. bwahahahaha

Do you think it's time he had his health checked? ;-)

Was just checking my email, and the ISP was showing an ad for Westmead Children's Hospital's "Bear Cottage", obviously a decorporatized, morally clean version of Ronald McDonald House, advertising it as "Where life is for living".

Really? I thought Bear Cottage was a place where naughty little girls broke in, ate others' food, broke their furniture, smeared their muddy little feet all over their beds, and then decamped when discovered without so much as a by-your-leave.* :p



* Yes, I realize there are takes on the story where the bears get a meat dinner that evening, of which the best and wittiest IMO is still Roald Dahl's. But you know what I mean.