The boys in brown

You have to hand it to the Beige Brigade, they're the least fashionable sporting fans out there. Well, after ice hockey fans, anyway.

Bringing on the youth

The australians have long mocked England for their elderly team, now they have a debutant at 30, following Mike Hussey recently making his test debut at the age of 74-ish.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport1/hi/cricket/4808186.stm

There was a fat fellow from Blighty...

who's limericks were somewhat mighty...

http://www.thegoogly.com/2006/03/cricket_limeric.html

Perfect pitch

George W Bush gets hit by a cricket pitch?

As my colleague stemmo commented 'A whole pitch?'

Painful. In so many ways.

Beyond our Ken

Ken Livingstone has been suspended for four weeks from office for making a 'concentration camp guard' jibe to a Jewish reporter. From what I recall Livingstone made the comment to a reporter that had been dogging him for a long time, and suggested that he was 'just obeying orders' and that he was like a concentration camp guard. The reporter complained that he was offended, and Livingstone was unrepentant.

Quite honestly, this is bollocks. Whether it offends some people or not, the phrases 'like a concentration camp guard' and 'just obeying orders' are part of the vernacular these days. The idea that Livingstone should be removed from office, for whatever time, for a spat with a journalist is preposterous. Livingstone hasn't done himself any particular favours with the comments but he's absolutely right not to apologise.

Climate change hots up

There was a pretty good programme on the BBC last night supporting the climate prediction project. The science was pretty flimsy, but on balance they hit the right note. Unfortunately if you're sceptical about human effects on global climate then you'd have been able to drive a bus through the gaps in their analysis. If, like me, you're sure that we're not doing ourselves any favours, then it did at least explore other explanations for the highly unusual trends in global climate over the past 150 years. I hope they go into a little more detail in future programmes.

Mustafa lot of time on their hands

The UK 'adult shop' chain Ann Summers reports that it's oh-so-amusing sex doll 'Mustafa Shag' is offending muslims.

I think we're all getting a bit sick of this. I'm all for people being free to believe what they want, but where it starts to impact on the freedom of others to do exactly the same, then that's where it ends.

Save the world the easy way

The BBC are helping out a new distributed computing experiment from Oxford University which will, according to the blurb, provide a horrendously accurate climate model with which to prove our spiral into certain death. Or something like that. Anyway, I ran the SETI screensaver for years, and I'm sure that saving this planet is more important than peering into the sky to find our alternate selves on some distant other planet. They're probably too busy saving their own arses to look for us, too.

If this application turns my computer into a sandcastle or renames every file on my HDD to farty.bin I'll let you know.

Most Popular Myths in science

What? Chickens can't live without a head?
http://www.livescience.com/bestimg/result.php?back=&cat=myths