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What a whopper

Windows 7 is launched, and (in Japan at least) there is the most unusual tie-in to an operating system that I've ever seen. 

The world has gone bananas

Reading an article on the BBC website;

A concerned father-of-two plans to hand-deliver bunches of bananas to pupils after Wigan Council took them off the menu because of "expense".
Councillor Gary Wilkes, who lives in Bryn with his two daughters, said some of the young pupils have been deprived of their favourite foods...

Full article

Now this is how to complain...

A letter from a miffed customer of Virgin Atlantic, concerned at the food they were presented with...

Dear Mr Branson
REF: Mumbai to Heathrow 7th December 2008

I love the Virgin brand, I really do, which is why I continue to use it despite a series of unfortunate incidents over the last few years. This latest incident takes the biscuit.
Ironically, by the end of the flight I would have gladly paid over a thousand rupees for a single biscuit following the culinary journey of hell I was subjected to at the hands of your corporation.
Look at this Richard. Just look at it: [image]
I imagine the same questions are racing through your brilliant mind as were racing through mine on that fateful day.
What is this? Why have I been given it? What have I done to deserve this? And which one is the starter, which one is the dessert?
You don’t get to a position like yours, Richard, with anything less than a generous sprinkling of observational power, so I KNOW you will have spotted the tomato next to the two yellow shafts of sponge on the left.
Yes, it’s next to the sponge shaft without the green paste. That’s got to be the clue, hasn’t it?
No sane person would serve a dessert with a tomato, would they?
Well, answer me this Richard: What sort of animal would serve a dessert with peas in?
I know it looks like a bhaji but it’s in custard, Richard. Custard. It must be the pudding.
Well, you’ll be fascinated to hear that it wasn’t custard. It was a sour gel with a clear oil on top.
Its only redeeming feature was that it managed to be so alien to my palette that it took away the taste of the curry emanating from our miscellaneous central cuboid of beige matter.
Perhaps the meal on the left might be the dessert after all.
Anyway, this is all irrelevant at the moment.
I was raised strictly but neatly by my parents, and if they knew I had started dessert before the main course, a sponge shaft would be the least of my worries.
So let’s peel back the tin-foil on the main dish and see what’s on offer. [image]
I’ll try to explain how this felt. Imagine being a 12-year-old boy, Richard.
Now imagine it’s Christmas morning and you’re sitting there with your final present to open. It’s a big one, and you know what it is.
It’s that Goodmans stereo you picked out from the catalogue and wrote to Santa about.
Only you open the present and it’s not in there.
It’s your hamster, Richard. It’s your hamster in the box and it’s not breathing. That’s how I felt when I peeled back the foil and saw this: [image]
Now I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking it’s more of that bhaji custard.
I admit I thought the same too, but no. It’s mustard, Richard. MUSTARD.
More mustard than any man could consume in a month.
On the left we have a piece of broccoli and some peppers in a brown, glue-like oil, and on the right the chef had prepared some mashed potato.
The potato masher had obviously broken and so it was decided the next best thing would be to pass the potatoes through the digestive tract of a bird.
Once it was regurgitated, it was clearly then blended and mixed with a bit of mustard. Everybody likes a bit of mustard, Richard.
By now, I was actually starting to feel a little hypoglycaemic. I needed a sugar hit.
Luckily, there was a small cookie provided. It had caught my eye earlier because of its baffling presentation: [image]
It appears to be in an evidence bag from the scene of a crime. A CRIME AGAINST BLOODY COOKING.
Either that or some sort of backstreet, underground cookie, purchased off a gun-toting maniac high on his own supply of yeast.
You certainly wouldn’t want to be caught carrying one of these through Customs.
Imagine biting into a piece of brass, Richard.
That would be softer on the teeth than the specimen above.
I was exhausted. All I wanted to do was relax. But obviously I had to sit with that mess in front of me for half an hour.
I swear the sponge shafts moved at one point.
Once cleared, I decided to relax with a bit of your world-famous onboard entertainment.

I switched it on:
I apologise for the quality of the photo, it’s just it was incredibly hard to capture Boris Johnson’s face through the flickering white lines running up and down the screen.
Perhaps it would be better on another channel:
Is that Ray Liotta?
A question I found myself asking over and over again throughout the gruelling half-hour I attempted to watch the film like this.
After that I switched off.
I’d had enough.
I was the hungriest I’d been in my adult life and I had a splitting headache from squinting at a crackling screen.
My only option was to simply stare at the seat in front and wait for either food or sleep.
Neither came for an incredibly long time. But when it did it surpassed my wildest expectations:
Yes! It’s another crime-scene cookie.
Only this time you dunk it in the white stuff.
Richard, what is that white stuff?
It looked like it was going to be yoghurt.
It finally dawned on me what it was after staring at it. It was a mixture between the bhaji custard and the mustard sauce.
It reminded me of my first week at university. I had overheard that you could make a drink by mixing vodka and Refreshers.
I lied to my new friends and told them I’d done it loads of times.
When I attempted to make the drink in a big bowl it formed a cheese, Richard – a cheese. That cheese looked a lot like your bhaji mustard.
So that was that, Richard. I didn’t eat a bloody thing.
My only question is: How can you live like this?
I can’t imagine what dinner round your house is like. It must be like something out of a nature documentary.
As I said at the start, I love your brand. I really do. It’s just a shame such a simple thing could bring it crashing to its knees and begging for sustenance.

Absolutely brilliant. I loved it :-)

You were only supposed to work out the problem...

Michael Cane uttered the memorables line "Hang on a minute lads, I've got a great idea" at the end of the classic 60's movie The Italian Job (not that half arsed US remake recently), as his coach of gold bars rocked precariously over the edge of a large cliff.

Annoyingly the film then ended, and that was it. There was no sequel and we were left wondering what his idea was. Fortunately the Royal Society of Chemisty invited the public to suggest what the idea was, and there were some crackers.

The best one I read about was that the gang sing, get frogs in their throats, let the frogs jump up and down to rock the bus and use the rocks to weigh down the bus. A brilliant piece of lateral thinking from a 12 year old!!

Gnome and Away

When you lose a garden ornament, you kind of expect not to see it again. You really don't expect it to reappear 7 months later, complete with a photo album of where it's been.

Watch the extraordinary journey that Murphy the Gnome went on.

Brilliant - whoever did this is a genius! OK, maybe not a genius because they stole the Gnome to begin with, but in the end the Gnome went back home, and the result is fantastic!!

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Pringles - the good and the bad

Great news! Pringles are not crisps. It's official. A judge has said so because they don't have enough potato in them.
Why great news? Because not being a crisp, they are now not subject to VAT - so that means that their price should be dropping in the shops. :-)

Homer bad, Baywatch good

I see that in Venezuela 'The Simpsons' has been taken off their TV screens because it has been deemed "inappropriate".

Nothing that funny about that I hear you say. Well no, there isn't. It's what's been put on in its place that makes me laugh.

- Baywatch!

So, no more cartoon yellow guy, just a bunch of swimsuit clad females running in slow motion along beaches instead.

And yes I can see how that would be much more suitable now.

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B.A. lose Olympic torch?

So the Olympic torch is on its way to London as it makes it way to China ready for the games. However, there seems to be a bit of a problem with the clash of politics and sport. I read with interest that the French President is considering boycotting the games opening ceremony, and that many of the torch bearers are wondering whether they should carry the torch or not.

Well, there's no need to worry because this problem is going to go away itself. How do I know this? Simple really, the torch is making it's away across London towards the O2 arena. At the end of this journey, just send it to Heathrow and into the new joke that is Terminal 5. It will never be seen again. It will disappear into the bowels of the luggage sorting area and just vanish like everything else has before it.

Problem solved!

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Fooled you?

Have you seen the one about the penguins that can fly? Saw it on the news this morning and had to do a double take. It looked so real until they were soaring through the air.

Mind you, on the day when you take everything with a pinch of salt, this webpage lists ten new stories that you would have sworn were hoaxes, but worryingly they're true!

Time for a laugh

Oh dear! I didn't hear this when it happened, but I was fortunate enough to hear a replay later on.

Hundreds of listeners have contacted BBC Radio 4 after newsreader Charlotte Green dissolved into giggles while reading a bulletin on Today.

She lost control after playing a clip of the oldest known recording of the human voice.

"I'm afraid I just lost it, I was completely ambushed by the giggles," said Green.

I heard that recorded clip too, and I was reduced to hysterics too. What a garbled, incomprehensible sound it was. It could have been anything that you wanted it to have been!  Listen to her reporting.

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Be a code breaker

First there was the book, then came the film, then it seems like the entire world wanted to go explore the places themselves. Of course I'm talking about Dan Brown's work of fiction, the Da Vinci code. Now another researcher has gone one better with the painting of the last supper.

Computer technician Giovanni Maria Pala found that by drawing the five lines of a musical staff across the painting, the loaves of bread on the table and the hands of Jesus and the Apostles could each represent a musical note.

"The notes make sense musically when the resulting score is read from right to left, following Da Vinci's own writing style, Mr Pala said in his book La Musica Celata (The Hidden Music)" he claims. Full report here.

Oh, and whilst on the theme of Da Vinci's painting, have you tried the 16billion pixel online version that you can zoom into and pan around?

Now that's healthcare!

Australian doctors have kept an Italian tourist alive by feeding him vodka through a drip for three days, medical staff in Queensland say. The 24-year-old man, who had swallowed a poison in an apparent suicide attempt, was treated while in a coma. Doctors set up the drip after running out of medicinal alcohol, used as an antidote to the poison. Medical staff said the patient had made a full recovery, and the hangover had worn off by the time he woke up. He had been taken to hospital in the northern Queensland town of Mackay after swallowing ethylene glycol - a poison contained in anti-freeze.

"The patient was drip-fed about three standard drinks an hour for three days in the intensive care unit," Dr Todd Fraser said in a statement. Fortunately for him he was in a medically induced coma for a good portion of that. By the time he woke up I think his hangover would have well and truly gone."

He spent 20 days in hospital before being discharged.