March 17th, 2007

Irk of the morning to you

1. The fact that Eurostar is out of action today (along with other train services) merits not a mention on News 24, but is the 2nd headline on EuroNews, I would have thought it was worth a mention.

[Edit: it has been mentioned now, at 10:13 - the breakfast segment of News 24 is particularly news free ]

2. Heavy drinking is not binge drinking. Most of the concerns about 'binge drinking' are not about binge drinking, they are clearly about heavy drinking and, specifically, regular heavy drinking which is precisely the opposite of binge drinking. This misappropriation of a word is not going to help the cause of those who have appropriated it, as it confuses the message they are trying to get over. As well as being irksome.

Italian Car Soap Flakes

The three things that struck me about Luminox, wonderful as it was, were
i) It would be nice to have had some fire breathing dragons, industrial mahem on the lines of Survival Research Labs ( see http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L5JhQCJBYdQ ) or people juggling fire, preferably on unicycles or stilts. With masks. And a pony (better not set that alight). Yes, I know I am being unreasonable, but a weasel can dream.

ii) I had a nagging feeling that it should Mean Something. The end of spring. A comment on peak oil. On global warming. Culminating in David 'call me Dave' Cameron being burnt in the bamboo sculpture to appease the gods of global warming.

iii) There was a mad guy (of whom there is little evidence on the web, both cases being links to academic journals that you need to subscribe to) who wanted to think up non greco-latin names for technological things with, er, greco-latin names. The one that stuck in my mind was fireghost for electricity. With the electric street-lights turned off you can see why fireghost is a good name for electricity, a ghostly imitation of the real thing.


Also, overheard (and I am now obviously feeling slightly more self-conscious about my maunderings but here goes anyway)
Woman, answering a question I didn't hear: 'Oh no, we love them. We've tried. We've done the whole IVF thing.'
Less poignantly, mostly bald father to small child he was giving a piggy back to: 'Daddy's head isn't a drum.'