Captain Disillusion

The good Captain, as well as being a superhero, and having the top half of his face a peculiar colour, does a good John Cleese impression:



There's some excellent de-bunking here! Search for the rest of his stuff on YouTube, you won't be disappointed. He really needs a website to collect this stuff together.

Alternative energy

Personally I'd rather have a nuclear power station next door:

Sideways onto the runway

Now, those who know me are aware I'm pretty laid back about flying. Not much worries me. This would have worried me:



My mate Bryan would have enjoyed this.....

Disintegrator

A motorized cordless twin rubber band minigun, I dearly want one of these......



Forty rubber bands a second, it must be a bugger to load, though.

A motorbike moment

An Australian has broken the distance jumping record in Las Vegas.



He was flying for 322 feet, what I found more impressive was the height he got up to. Barking mad.......

Exorcism

Just when you think they can't get any dafter, you see this in The Telegraph: "The Roman Catholic Church has vowed to "fight the Devil head-on" by training hundreds of priests as exorcists."

As a footnote I see 'A Roman Catholic bishop has caused fury in Spain by claiming that some teenagers "want to be abused". Bishop Bernardo Alvarez of Tenerife told a newspaper: "There are 13-year-olds who are are in agreement and even want it; even, if you don't watch out, provoking you."'

Bernardo looks like one to watch.

Reformation

In 1517 Martin Luther nailed his 'Theses' to a church door in Wittenberg (it's a good trick if you can manage it!) and ultimately started the Protestant Reformation.

He was protesting, in the main, against the practice of selling indulgences and the Church's policy on purgatory. Some bloke called Johann Tetzel, a papal commissioner for indulgences, had been sent to Germany by the Roman Catholic Church to sell indulgences to raise money to rebuild St Peter's Basilica in Rome.

According to the Roman Catholic Church, sin-reduction is a two-step process. Guilt is absolved through confession and prayer, but punishment, on earth or in purgatory, can be avoided through indulgences. Now I think that Lourdes must be doing badly at the moment because the Pope (of Rome, do they still have one at Avignon?) has given a time limited offer: make a pilgrimage to Lourdes and receive, absolutely free, a papal indulgence.

These, of course, only let you off past sins, so be careful not to commit any more after receiving your indulgence, or you could still end up in purgatory.

There's a big pilgrimage industry to support here, people. Get it quick, the offer expires in December 2008. During the month of February a trip to any Lourdes related shrine is apparently good enough. It's a good job I've set up the Holy Shrine of Our Lady of Lourdes in the back garden, okay it's only a flowerpot with a plastic hedgehog perched on top of it, but I think it looks the business. Anybody is welcome to come over during February, and for a modest donation all your sins will be washed away.

Honestly, they would have thought that this was too far fetched in "Father Ted".

Ring Tones

Roger sent me this:

Railways

The recent cock-up on the West Coast Main Line (The Telegraph reports: "The investigation is one of two inquiries now under way into the performance of both Network Rail and its contractors after Rugby junction was effectively put out of action, resulting in delays and bus journeys for 60,000 passengers a day last week when engineering work overran by three days.")coincided with me reading a book on the Great Western Railway.

In 1892 the GWR decided to convert 213 miles of broad gauge track to standard gauge. 177 miles of this could not be readily converted by simply adding an extra rail as it ran on longitudinal sleepers. Fifteen miles of sidings were laid to accommodate the redundant broad gauge stock and 4200 men laboured to relay the track. The work commenced on 21st May and the first train ran over the new track on 23rd May. It arrived four minutes early at Paddington.

Of chairs and helicopters

At a time when every day seems to bring a new story of military equipment shortages, I was amazed to see 'The Telegraph' report that the MoD has been amusing itself by buying paintings and over 3000 chairs at £1000 a time.

Taken together with The Register's report on Chinook helicopters ".....even though British troops fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan are crying out for helicopter lift, eight big brand-new choppers have been sitting in storage in the UK, grounded by MoD idiocy, for six years" it makes you wonder.

This, of course, pales into financial insignificance when you read The Register's article on our latest destroyers (a mere billion pounds a pop). Oh, and they use MS Windows as well. So do I, but the consequences of the blue screen of death are not quite the same for me as for somebody with a missile coming at them.

The best quote from this is on the second page "Sea Dart did shoot down an antique Silkworm missile fired by the Iraqis in 1991. What's less commonly known about that engagement is that the Silkworm had already gone past the destroyer which fired the Sea Dart. Normally it's better to shoot the flying things down while inbound, rather than outbound; often they hit one of your ships while passing through.".