Never mind that other site, this is where it is all really happening

Some more news from These Crazy Motherfuckers.

I am sorry to use such coarse language – I would prefer my website to be entirely family friendly, and encourage young visitors (a Miss Trellis of North Wales) to come here and expand their minds – but it just sounds so good. Neither should I pretend that such usage is uncommon at Scurra House. Mrs S and I enjoy nothing more than a free and frank exchange of views.

From my pals at LiveScience:

Scientists at the Sandia National Labs in Albuquerque, New Mexico have accelerated a small plate from zero to 76,000 mph in less than a second. The speed of the thrust was a new record for Sandia’s "Z Machine" – not only the fastest gun in the West, but in the world too.

The Z Machine is now able to propel small plates at 34 kilometers a second, faster than the 30 kilometers per second that Earth travels through space in its orbit about the Sun. That’s 50 times faster than a rifle bullet, and three times the velocity needed to escape Earth’s gravitational field.

The ultra-tiny aluminum plates, just 850 microns thick, are accelerated at 10¹⁰ g. One g is the force of Earth’s gravity. Doing so without vaporizing the plates was possible because of the finer control now achievable of the magnetic field pulse that drives the flight.

So, here we have it. Millions of years of evolution, and we have learned how to throw plates, really fast. What beats me is that these scientists do not know that this art has been developed to a much finer degree by the housewives of Gujarat over many centuries. Visitors to a traditional North West Indian household will be treated to food the like of which is unknown anywhere else in the galaxy (and this explains why the government discourages me from visiting the coast, lest the country develops a tilt), one of the highlights of which is the plate of chapatis.

As an aside, the compilers of Mr Gate’s dictionary seem to think that chapati should be spelt chapatti. They are wrong, and I can reveal that this is part of Mr Gates’ conspiracy to introduce superfluous letter ‘t’s into words. It stems from his having t at the centre of his surname, and thinks that increased use of this letter will increase his power. It also explains why, when using MS Word, it is almost impossible to use the phrase “President Bush”, without the adjunct “utter tit” mysteriously appearing alongside it. The clever chaps at Google know about this, if you enter the word ‘chapatti’ into their search engine, they say ‘do you mean “chapati”’, and I swear that I can hear the sneer in their little voices.

Anyway, back to the good ladies of Porbandar. Those with keen eyesight will have noticed that all chapatis at any mealtime are exactly the same size and weight, and are always perfectly round. This is achieved by Mrs Patel or Mistry or Desai exploiting scientific phenomena rather than manual dexterity. But actually, the skill they have developed is far more impressive than the ability to accurately roll dough. The dough is vigorously prepared (as a by-product causing exceptional wrist muscles to develop), rolled lightly, and then propelled at enormous speed around the kitchen. The speeds reached are such that the chapati attains optimum shape in order to avoid distintegration.

Sometimes, alas, things get out of hand. The last four visits from our friendly neighbours of the galaxy Brandreth have been wiped out by showers of supersonic chapatis that have escaped from the earth’s gravitational field.

So, bollocks to you, pathetic plate tossers of New Mexico. My missus can outfling you any day. I suppose we can take solace from the fact that they are not wasting their time trying to teach the principle of ‘one man one vote’ to the inhabitants of Florida, or trying to find a cure for malaria.