Yes.

There was Superman, Spiderman, and now Rodent-Penis-Bite-Man.

The BBC webpage reports that ” ‘Rodent penis bite’ man may sue.”. What has he done to earn the title, I wonder. But I’m scared to look further, surely it can’t get better?

Here’s one line –

“The parties dispute whether the rodent was a mouse or a rat, whether Solomon was bitten or scratched, and the nature and extent of his injuries,” US District Judge Arthur Spatt wrote.

I’ve been trying to locate this graphic for sometime now; ever since I saw it on the BBC programme Q.I. (Quite Interesting) I’ve been meaning to blog about it.

It is a comparison by volume, where the small blue sphere on the left is all the water on Earth, and the pink sphere on the right is all the air on Earth.

The guy who designed this computer image, Adam Nieman, has really hit the spot in showing how finite resources both the Earth’s water and atmosphere are.

The Science Photo Library has this to say:- “The water sphere measures 1390 kilometres across and has a volume of 1.4 billion cubic kilometres. This includes all the water in the oceans, seas, ice caps, lakes and rivers as well as ground water, and that in the atmosphere. The air sphere measures 1999 kilometres across and weighs 5140 trillion tonnes. ”

a poem for the dreariness of short days and long nights.

Mean Time

The clocks slid back an hour
and stole light from my life
as I walked through the wrong part of town,
mourning our love.

And, of course, unmendable rain
fell to the bleak streets
where I felt my heart gnaw
at all our mistakes.

If the darkening sky could lift
more than one hour from this day
there are words I would never have said
nor have heard you say.

But we will be dead, as we know,
beyond all light.
These are the shortened days
and the endless nights.

-Carol Ann Duffy, Poet Laureate.

I have been terribly remiss about updating my blog, so here’s an attempt at setting things right.

Lots of stuff happening; I’ll talk about the hols though.

Spain.
Objective: Run with the bulls at the San Fermin festival, Pamplona
Present: Ioan, Jessy, Adam, Hannah, and me
We flew to Barcelona, drove to our apartment in San Sebastian.

France.
Objective: Laze around Hannah’s infinity pool. And practice French.
Present: Ioan, Jessy, Hannah, Lexi, and me
We flew to Nice, and drove to Seillance in the mountains.

—-work in progress—-

Went to see this Woody Allen (directing, not acting) and Scarlett Johansson (acting, not directing) movie yesterday at Spinningfields. They’ve put up a large screen in the open plaza and are showing free movies every Thursday from 8:30pm. Petra was up for the experience, and I expected to bump into some of the badminton group as well.

The BBC had predicted an onset of rain at around 10-ish, so we were prepared to abandon at first signs of precipitation. It turned out we both had seen the movie anyway, and the ‘British-Upper-Class’ acting was annoying to say the least (except you, dear Scarlett. As ever, you were fab!).

I had brought a sleeping bag as well as a picnic blanket to keep snug, so all was going well, lying against a grass knoll with dusk slowly descending. There was something very charming about being there that time of the evening, with good company, the smell of kebabs in the air, and the happy chatter of people around. And then the rain came down. Petra had a brolly, and there were Spinningfield staff handing out plastic macintoshes. To the credit of all the Mancunians, almost everybody braved it through to the end. It was quite a unique experience to sit huddled under a brolly under seige from the winds and rain, sitting through a movie we both knew the conclusion of.

So it begins, this story, like everything else – with a woman, and a city, and a little bit of luck.

-“Everything is allow no problem here. Except the fighting. Fighting is not good manners at India Guest House”.
-“You see? No problem”.
-“And dying”, Prabaker added, with a thoughtful wag of his round head. “Mr. Anand is not liking it, if the people are dying here”.

The past reflects eternally between two mirrors – the bright mirror of words and deeds, and the dark one, full of things we didn’t do or say.

I was tough, which is probably the saddest thing to say about a man.

“… You‘re a good listener. That‘s dangerous, because it’s so hard to resist. Being listened to – really listened to – is the second-best thing in the world”.

Leopold’s was a place to see, a place to be seen, and a place to see themselves in the act of being seen.

“Ah. This is a Bombay gold dealer‘s no. It is a no that means maybe, and the more passionate the no, the more definite the maybe”.

“I make ends meet, as they say, and when they meet I get a payment from both of the ends”.

“When you judge the power that is in a person, you must judge their capacities as both friend and as enemy”.

The truth is a bully we all pretend to like.

What we call cowardice is just another name for being taken by surprise, and courage is seldom any better than simply being well prepared.

Gradually, I realised that the wiggle of the head was a signal to others that carried an amiable and disarming message: I’m a peaceful man. I don’t mean any harm.

“And make sure he doesn‘t learn any bad words. Don‘t teach him any swearing. There are plenty of arseholes and bastards around who will teach him the wrong sisterfucking words. Keep him away from motherfuckers like that”.

It was a wild speech that called them cowards and invoked Mahatma Gandhi, Buddha, the god Krishna, Mother Teresa, and the Bollywood film star Amitabh Bachchan in the same sentence.

Life on the run puts a lie in the echo of every laugh, and at least a little larceny in every act of love.

Raju’s task was to determine whether I could live with them. Johnny’s task was to make sure they could live with me.

Didier once told me, in a rambling, midnight dissertation, that a dream is the place where a wish and a fear meet. When the wish and the fear are exactly the same, he said, we call the dream a nightmare.

It’s a fact of life on the run that you often love more people than you trust. For people in the safe world, of course, exactly the opposite is true.

If fate doesn’t make you laugh, Karla said, in one of my first conversations with her, then you just don’t get the joke.

A novel by Gregory David Roberts, an Australian armed robber, heroin addict and prison escapee. The story is about his life on the run, beginning when he lands in Bombay as a stranger and working through extraordinary adventures living in the slums, joining the mafia, acting in Bollywood and standing with the Mujahideen, living, loving, fighting, healing.

It is an exceptionally powerful story of life in Bombay’s underbelly, with a richness and truthfulness about it that is lyrical. The portrayal of characters is nothing but genius with a true love for India shining through.

Very few books come close to this.

I’ve started a new List of Things I’d Like to Do before I Meet the Great Tortoise in the Sky. It is a work in progress and I thought it would be nice to throw it open to suggestions from my wonderfully wise and well-wandered readers. And you.

Just leave a comment to this post and I will update the list if your dumb idea makes the cut.

No suggestion is too vague or precise. It could be something you have done or something you can comfortably lie about having done. It could be something you heard someone else doing or something you aspire to do in the future. We might even do it together!

I entertain the vague hope that this list will galvanise me into action and it might possibly even convince you to do something about your lazy-ass life!

I believe such a list is called a ‘Kick-The-Bucket List’.

Facts and figures.

Sights seen: British Museum, Kew Gardens. St. Paul’s Cathedral (in time for Sunday Mass). Hyde Park. Royal Albert Hall. Tate Modern. Hammersmith Apollo. Southbank. Regents Park. Covent Garden. Holland Park. Tower of London. Trafalgar Square. Big Ben. Marble Arch. The Burroughs. Piccadilly Circus. Leicester Square. Spitalfields. The Golden Hinde. Stag Beetles.

Distance covered: approx 60 miles.

Bridges crossed: Hammersmith, Putney, Westminster, Millennium, London, Tower.

Food and Drink: The Coach and Horses, Kew. Fuel, Covent Gardens. The Crispy Duck, Chinatown. The Slug and Lettuce, Soho. Nando’s, Southwark. The Pastry Shop, Euston Station. Various hot dogs, delicious and otherwise.

Celebrities spotted: Graham Norton, Johnny Vegas.

Highlights.

Has to be the Stag Beetle display at Kew Gardens. A bunch of tree trunks. Nothing else.

The Fuel balcony in Covent Garden is one heck of a cool place to be. Especially with pitchers of Long Islands.

And the Best-Burger-Ever Award goes to the Coach and Horses Hotel for a succcccculent burger and secret recipe mayo that was very memorable.

The celebs were like bookends to our visit; Graham Norton with two dogs at a Hyde Park hot dog stand by The Serpentine as we set out on a fine Saturday morning, and Johnny Vegas coming the opposite way in Euston Station as we were dashing with our bikes to get the train home to Manc.

p.s. we may have been in the presence of more celebs over the course of the weekend, but it’s fitting that I only recognised comedians.

For the first time in the UK an incumbent Prime Minister joined in live televised debate with the leaders of opposing parties.

Liberal Democrat Nick Clegg was always going to fare better than the other two as he was going in with nothing to lose and all to gain. With Labour’s Brown and Conservative Cameron pandering to him on the night (I suppose they were instructed not to publicly pick on the new kid) he grew a set of cojones and came out trumps. With the publicity he’s gained the Lib Dems have gone from long-standing laughing stock and also-rans to serious contenders. Betcha my Grannie to your old shoes they’ll try to shred him in the next two debates.

The performance of the other two? Brown looked stolid but tired and Cameron was patronisingly slimy as ever.

I guess what annoys me most about these so-called debates is that I, conceivably prematurely, foresee an inevitable decline of British politics towards the kind of show-boating and back-stabbing one-upmanship that will denigrate the almost faultless lives that our leading politicians lead.

Hah!

What really bothers me actually is the fact that we’ve now agreed, nay, demanded! as ‘The Public’, to be impressed by the person who’s most well-turned-out. Because that’s (pretty much) all that the televised debates will be able to highlight.

With record viewing figures (average 9.4 million, peak 9.9, which “beat even Coronation Street”) being quoted in the papers, it almost seemed as if they were competing against the other “talent” shows that abound nowadays.

Fair enough to say, the media is having its predictable field day with the ‘who-looked-at-whom, who-wore-what’ inane chatter.

I despair.