TCM again

Regular readers (AMToNW) will be grateful to know that although I have not been publishing details of my research, I have been keeping a close watch on those people who enjoy the description ‘scientist’, and making sure that their machinations to mislead us continue to be as ridiculous and bizarre as ever.

I will briefly cover three items that are currently being paraded as the fruits of methodical research, but are actually little more the babblings of the deranged.

• In the Telegraph, some bright spark has been investigating why we have two nostrils instead of one. Pause for loyal reader to wrap their mind round that one. They have come to the bizarre conclusion that it is in order to produce a stereo effect, and therefore help us to trace the source of a smell, by doing some trigonometrical calculation. Bollocks. Had God, in His Infinite wisdom, wanted to imbue us with stereophonic ability (and bear in mind that most of us could only afford Dansette record players when we were growing up), he would have put an extra organ to detect smell on the end of our fingers. It would make the calculation far more straightforward, and would have helped us in the days before the power of the Intel chip. No, the real reason is as follows. Presuming that the combined size of the nostrils is about right (some of us are more prominently proboscisularly endowed than others), then to give us only one nostril would have meant that we would have been subject to invasion by unwanted visitors. Small colonies of chaffinches would be able to nest nasally. In order to prevent this, nose hair would have to be the consistency of barbed wire. So, sod off, Mr Scientist. God knew what he was doing.
• At livescience.com, they have been researching the properties of semen. They have chosen to measure it in terms of teaspoonfuls, a typical ejaculation being half a teaspoonful. Now, I recognise that is valid to present these data (if there is such a need) in terms of concepts that can be assimilated by the human brain. Even during the excesses of adolescence, to measure semen in terms of bathtubs full would be unhelpful. But why, in the name of buggery, the teaspoon? I can only counsel my readers to avoid taking repast at the home of a member of the scientific community, particularly if cutlery is involved.
• As I compose this little essay, the BBC is doing one of its Horizon programmes, in which various eccentrics are allowed airtime to propound their delusions. The proposal at the heart of this little entertainment is that 96% of the universe is missing. Yes indeed. Another pause called for, I suggest. And take as long as you like. The obvious question is, where are we going to put 96% when some fucker finds it? My house is already overflowing with stuff that I don’t need. The wailing and moaning of Mrs S can be heard as far afield as Shropshire when she goes off on one of her “When are you going to get rid of that pile of …… that you never use?” episodes. I know. I know that it is the nature of men to hoard things. I am too old and seasoned to alter my behaviour, even though I know that if I were to lose on of my CDs of Carl Stamitz clarinet concertos, I might never notice, even should I live to be 98. But even I could not cope with having 25 times as many books, DVDs, CDs, software packages, socks, remote control devices and whatevers as are already in my possession. So I say that if 96% of the universe is missing, GOOD! it means we don’t have to fucking clean it. I have been concentrating mainly on this composition, and have only picked up fragments of the utterances of the Horizoneers, but they have been soothsaying about “dark matter” (fuck off), “about to discover something that didn’t make sense” (I fucking told you), “the universe is speeding up” (fuck off), “this didn’t fit with the current physics” (I fucking told you). I am not a cruel man, but I do wonder whether we would have all been better off had it been the tree that had fallen on old Isaac, not just the apple.