Word of the day: “rendition”.

Link: Yahoo News - Mysterious jet tied to torture flights

Dr Voas said: “Barely 2% of people in Manchester make it to an Anglican church on Christmas Eve or Day, and practically all those who do go are regular worshippers. “Whatever people are doing about God, they don’t do it in church. “Urban culture encourages people who are doing their own thing.”

And Manchester also has a population packed full of muslims, jews, hindus, sikhs, catholics, atheists, methodists, even buddhists, who don’t tend to go to Church of England events…

Cities shun church at Christmas

Someone buys a pirated, cracked, fake Gameboy game, then complains to Disney about the crackers’ bad language! The Sun newspaper, well known for the quality of its journalism, seems to think Disney really does add “fuck off and die” text to it’s games. Something must be done. Think of the children.

Link: via Pocket Heaven

Medieval bestiaries have a fascinating mix of real but seemingly fantastic creatures, everyday creatures credited with bizarre behaviour (weasels give birth from their ears?) and things that were clearly made up in the pub.

Link: Medieval Bestiary: Sea-pig Gallery

Did he originally want “tuf (for tough), groop (for group) and tung (for tongue)” too?

Link: Topical Words: Sulphur

I can’t make up my mind if these are a good idea or not. Dogs’ feet weren’t designed* for pavements, broken glass, nasty chemicals, etc. On the other hand, doesn’t this muffle part of a dog’s experience of the world? I suppose I should ask a dog what it prefers.

Neo-Paws Dog Shoes

*’Designed’ in a strictly non-literal sense of course.

I can appreciate maths only by looking at the pretty pictures. This does look very Buddha-like. Neat.

Buddhabrot Gallery of Computation

I like the idea of the new ”Hungry Rats” public information campaign. Rats live off human rubbish - a clean city won’t be swarming with rats. Much as I like rats in general, I’d rather not be faced with packs of The Hungry Rats.

The trouble is, rats aren’t very scary. Most films now use CGI rats to make them look threatening. I think the video clip and ‘facts’ for the campaign are trying to make rats scarier than they really are. Why would rats be standing around all over the sleeping couple’s duvet? Is this a message to stop eating biscuits in bed?

The Chinese idea of tasty rat contraceptives might be worth trying too. A number of foods harmless to humans weaken or sterilise rats - tofu for instance.

Some general recommendations from my flat renovation project:

• New central heating: Aubrey Cornfoot. Excellent work, doing more than was in actually in the spec to make everything tidy.
• New windows: Jenkinson Glaziers. Nice windows, well fitted, and they organised scaffolding and exterior painting too. I signed off the job spec without noticing the bathroom fan was replaced by one in the kitchen though. Doh.
• Plumbing: Aquaflow. They properly unblocked the bath and replaced the kitchen plumbing
• Decorating: Jeff Campbell. Managed to turn a dirty old flat into something that looked so nice it looked nothing like my flat anymore. Took a while longer than I’d thought though.

I can’t say my time back in Newcastle recently was exactly fun: the decorators took about twice as long as I’d expected, making me start the final putting-down-the-laminate-flooring stage of the renovation very late. I spent much of the week in a dirty, dusty, almost empty flat, living on cold baked beans from the tin. No TV, Internet, radio, Internet, or Internet. My mobile phone’s battery broke too. In the end we almost finished the flat in time (with the help of the tenant-to-be) but it was close enough that he could move in.

The silver lining of this grim exile was that I finally got round to reading Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy. It’s absolutely superb, although not without minor flaws. Reviewers have often compared Pullman to Tolkien, but the only real similarity to Lord Of The Rings is that the action speeds up so much towards the end - by the end of the first book I got the feeling that there was enough material for dozens of novels, but the third book just rockets towards the conclusion. I’m a fan of Alan Garner and Michael Moorcock, and to me ‘His Dark Materials’ seemed like a strange hybrid of Garner and Moorcock at their best. The sheer heresy of the book was great fun, but best of all Pullman doesn’t patronise the reader, and doesn’t stop the story to explain things, he expects the reader to think, teases with snippets of information, and then rewards the reader with explanations later.