Well, answers to questions as follows:

1. From what Google-found info I've managed to squeeze into my tiny realm of understanding, you would indeed accelerate to the centre of the Earth. The momentum would then carry you up to the surface on the other side of the Earth (assuming, presuambly, that the diameter of the core to surface is the same on both sides of the globe) and you could step out onto Ozzie soil.

2. Language arrived for humans, which is better than plumage or size of air-sac for determining your future partner.

Xmas was good, New Years was really good (Eve that is. Actual day was spent in bed vomiting bile and crying with alchohol poisoning). Birthday was very good - went to www.ysp.co.uk to see the Andrew Goldsworthy exhibition and then into Leeds for shopping and dinner at 1920's themed Italian restaurant, Bibi's. Where Toby found a MontBlanc pen shoved down the back of one of the couches. It was only when we got home that I realised that it was a £170 pen. Now I have the dilemma that I should really call them to ask if anyone's reported a lost pen...

Oh the grand old Thom of Yorke, he found a great rock band
He marched them up to the top of the charts and he marched them down again
And when they were up they were up
And when they were down they were down
And when they were only half way up they were still the most innovative and influential rock band in the world.

Loving In Rainbows to tiny little coruscating bits :)

You knew this already; mute swans can't honk or squawk. Which is possibly how they developed such huge flapping wings - for getting other swan's attention.

Swan 1 thinks: [there's a crocodile!] FLAP! FLAP! FLAP!
Swan 2 thinks: [what's his probl...]
Crocodile: [crunch] Idiots

But, the powerful wing is certainly much more effective at keeping small chidren at bay. A kind of variation on the maxim, "speak softly and carry a big stick". ie. don't speak at all, but break a childs arm if he tries to lob a stale roll at your head.

Couple of co-incidences to kick things off, then a couple of questions which I might have a stab at answering later in the week. Note to self, if you're going to ask yourself a question, make sure you already know the answer or you'll appear disorganised. Further note to self, don't write notes to self in plain view of anyone not "self".

It's just a co-incidence 1:

Just finished reading Joseph O'Connors excellent Star of the Sea and I had earmarked Fast Food Nation as the next to be devoured. Went to Wallingford on Saturday and had a look in Sue Ryder at the books. Star of the Sea and Fast Food Nation were sat right next to each other on the top shelf. Sp-oo-oo-k.

It's just a co-incidence 2:

On Sunday I hit the Olympia Record Fair with a serious thirst for dusty vinyl (which seems a bit of an oxymoron), while Sarah and la familie went to the British Museum. Id asked Sarah to look out Albrecht Durer's rhinoceros woodcut print that I had read about in Mario Livio's book on the Golden Ratio, as I wanted to know how impressive it looked. When I got home that evening I decided that Fast Food Nation was a jump too far away from my current literary era (Dostoyevsky, Euclid, 19th Century Ireland etc), so I put it back and took out a Penguin collection of short stories by Guy de Maupassant. Looking for an indication of what the stories were about I flicked to the back page and found a diagram of....Albrecht Durer's rhinoceros woodcut print.Sp-ii-ii-ke.

OK, so:

Q1 - if you drilled a hole al the way through the Earth and out the other side, put on a protective suit impervious to everything, and then jumped in, what would happen? When you go to the centre of the Earth would you just stop? Because I can't imagine you flying out the other end, which in Australia would mean that you fell up a hole!

Q2 - in nature (red in tooth and claw and dangly bit under a turkey's neck), why is it the males that are colourful and make all the attempt to woo the females? Whereas in the human world (red in sunburn and tarty lipstick), on the whole, it's the females that, excuse the expression, go the whole hog and preen to attract the males. What happened?

OK, no guarantee of updates then; I might just fall again back into the blog-slumber I've been in for the past year or so and not return.

Music in my mind - Radiohead, Flying Lotus, A Mountain of One, Burial, BT

(This was written ages ago, but not posted)

My brain has not come out of hibernation from the Xmas period, despite many temptations. This was demonstrated last Thursday when we had a power cut at work. All the drinks machines were off and I wanted a cup of tea, damn. "Hang I though", I had a revelation, "I know someone that's got a kettle!".

Yes it has been a bit quiet on the blog. I have been secretly plotting the overthrow of the UK's theocracy, building my arsenal, honing my skills, amassing and galvanising my comrades in arms etc etc. More news on this as it comes.

"Taaa-aake a Break. It's fun to stay at the Taaa-aake a Bray-ey-ake". It goes something like that anyway. You haven't seen it? OK, so let me paint the luridly incongruous picture for you. The advertising simpletons charged with promoting the TV guide-cum-gossip mag, Take-a-Break, have come up with a TV ad featuring the Village People (lookalikes) dancing like gaydons in a school canteen to a molested cover version of YMCA. "Taaa-aake a Break. It's fun to bum at the Taaa-aake a Bray-ey-ake".

The concept doesn't make sense really, but luckily for the Village People (lookalikes) reality has been put on pause for 45 seconds and the dinner ladies are up for a bit of synchronised homosexual dancing disrupting their busiest time of the day. And the kids don't seem to mind either, which is even stranger. These kids are not at all typical of your usual secondary school chav-hoodies, text-bullying each other and throwing poison tipped flick knives at anyone in authority. No, completely the opposite in fact, they love the camp Red Indian (political correctness has no authority here) and the sinister, sunglassed, suntanned construction worker and even the police officer! (now we really are in the land of make believe). A mere 10 seconds into their song and dance routine and the kids are up there with the old biddies thrusting away before you can say Section 28.

It's a lazy kind of lowest common denominator attempt to appeal to the gossip rag's demographic and it won't mean anything to most of the UK population. Dinner lady types, however, like hunky men, even if they're gay apparently, so it goes down a storm and as a result they've found no better gay disco icon endorsed TV guide with which to pass the time. Dinner hags are happy, kids are happy, Village People are happy (well, they're gay, so by definition...), Take a Break execs are happy. Possibly. So, everyone's a winner babe. Oh no, that was the other lot wasn't it?

The Oxford Secularists meet at the Old Tom this Thursday by the way. You haven't heard of them? Oh, well, they're all over the net don't you know.

Actually I forgot. Toby had a mad co-incidence the other day. After supper he was allowed a Tunnock's Tea Cake (oh yes, the king of tea cakes. Also called a Mace Windu in our house after Samuel Jackson's character in the Star Wars films)



After he'd finished it he went into the sitting room and about 1 minute later returned with my Nice Cup Of Tea And A Sit Down book (check out their purple Digestive photo), opened at the page talking about the Tunnock's Tea Cake. "Look what I found" he said. Now this was quite odd as he has never been shown that book. It does have a very small picture of a jammy dodger, a round shortcake and a smiley face on the spine, but I don't know why he'd pick that book from the book case and flick through it to find the tea cake section. Anyway, it's almost certainly the work of some baked goods deity and so I should definitely follow the rules and regulations of the NCOTAASD book without question and murder anyone that disagrees with anything in it. Right? [Note to the humourless religious types: that is called sarcasm.]

Toby also saw a TV advert for Disneyland Paris that had the voiceover tagline of, "Where dreams come true". "I definitely don't want to go there!" he piped up. "I had a dream where a monster was trying to kill me and if I go there it will come true!". I think he was confusing the report that Tigger had tried to punch a kid at one of the Disneylands.

Also, last year at a friend's birthday party, the kids were tying wishes to balloons and letting them go in the back garden. Toby wrote his in secret (with Mum) and fifteen minutes later was in floods of tears. His wish to become a green Power Ranger hadn't come true. For days afterwards he kept saying, "I still haven't turned into a green Power Ranger dad".

I know it's nice to go, "Aaaah, sweet", but for him at the age of 4 and a half these type of things are quite traumatic and I'd prefer to just be honest with him. Better to have a shower of honest tears and clear the air than to foment a brooding thunderstorm of deception eh? What?!

Hey, you know how I've been working on getting my brain into gear this year? Well, I got a Nintendo DS with Dr Nagasaki's Brain Training, I've been following The Independent's Train Your Brain in 7 Days program, have promised to start production on my creative inspirations and I've been reading numerous books on thought processes, ethics, atheism, philosophy etc etc blahdi blahdi blah. Well I'm very pleased to report that it has really paid off. Today when I went to the toilet I discovered that I had put my pants on back to front this morning. 36 years old. Pants on back to front. Even Toby manages to get his pants on the right way round, most of the time, and he's 4.

What's more annoying is that my boots are such a massive pain in the arse to take off that I can't be bothered to get undressed in the toilet cubicle at work and so I'll probably have to wait until I get home to switch my pants round the right way. Now when I sit down I feel like the lower half of body is facing in the opposite direction to my head and torso. It is very confusing.

Nice break? Yes me too.

One little observation I made over the Winter Solstice (Christmas to you), was the prevalently incorrect usage of the word "literally" in common parlance. For example, a taxi driver on the telly who was commenting on a lack of heating in his cab, remarked "I'm literally freezing my nuts off here!".

Now, for this statement to be true, his testicles (test-icicles?) would need to have frozen solid and then been snapped from their glass-like vans deferens, broken through his brittle scrotum and rolled down his trouser legs out onto his shoes. I don't think that actually happened however, as he appeared far too calm and collected for one to have suffered such an icy castration. Maybe the shock really set in when he started to thaw out though. Ouch.

Another example, which I forget the origins of, was a man who exclaimed that he could, "literally eat a horse". Really? I think even a baby Shetland pony would probably be too much for even the hungriest of gluttons.

This is the incorrect use of the word "literally" when what it should really be used for is to clarify and state that the metaphor in question is actually true to itself. e.g homeowners living under the approach path to Heathrow, who often experience the brief, warm shower that accompanies the onboard sewage tanks being purged on landing, would be quite correct to state that it's, "literally pissing down".

Interestingly, those who often comment, "I literally haven't got a clue" are making an incorrect statement of another sort. Quite often the fact isn't that they don't have a clue, it's that they literally don't have any idea what the answer might be. They have plenty of clues, just not any ideas. I've just realised that I may have plagiarised this idea from Russell Brand. They're all my own words though!

Now, bed wetting nail bombers. It cheers me greatly to watch the type of program I saw last night on BBC1. The kind of documentary based on some murderous lowlife who is caught, imprisoned and then psychoanalysed as being a bedwetting mummy's boy. The London nail bomber who detonated devices in Brick Lane (aimed at Asians), Brixton (aimed at Blacks) and the Admiral Duncan pub (aimed at homosexuals) was described by his psychiatrist as,"someone with very poor hygiene", "an inconfident, weak and bullied child", "a bed wetter" and a "possible closet homosexual". I just hope that he was watching the program in prison with hoards of rough blokes laughing themselves stupid at this description of him. Small punishment, but it probably had more of an impression on him than the 6 life sentences he got for carrying out the horrendous attacks that he simply described as his, "duty".

Incontinent twat.

I had to go and watch the little boy in his first nativity play last Thursday. As a newly hardened atheist this was a fairly interesting experience. Having immersed myself in atheist literature, podcasts and watched countless movie files of lectures, debates and documentaries it was a real slap across the face to hear 70 young children singing, “Hallelujah to the Lord above” with all their hearts :-/

I had to flick my V’s at a Methodist church on the way home to make myself feel better.

One kid left the stage about halfway through with a teacher holding a box of tissues. I say “kid” in both senses of the word, as he was a boy playing a small goat (!). I didn’t really give that much thought to it, until the head teacher at the very end of the play revealed cryptically that the youngster had obviously got stage fright and had to leave. He shuffled onto the stage so he could get the chance to actually say his lines in the play. “Why would a king be born in a stable?” he sniffed, but this was after it had all finished and it just sounded stupid. How embarrassing for him; poor kid standing there in hisrubbish goat hat and white tights. I’d have preferred to get changed and just go home and excuse myself with a claim of partial amnesia or mild Ebola or something.

All in all I saw Toby for approximately 30 seconds at the very end of the performance. It was with literally about 5 minutes to go when I suddenly got a cold chill of realisation that I hadn’t actually seen him on stage or on the floor at all. I was thinking, “What if he’s been abducted? What if I’ve been standing here for 50 minutes like an idiot watching other people’s children fluff their lines and sing like castrated mice in a p*ss poor Nativity when he was actually abducted right at the very beginning and is now on a cargo freighter steaming towards North Africa?!”. Anyway, I saw him finally when he went up to take a bow for whatever it was that he did in the play. I have no idea.

Check this Jesus Christ action figure out.

Or, even better, OCD action figure!