Saturday 22 November 2008

Perpetual Motion Invention

I think I may have accidentally invented a perpetual motion machine.

I was testing the veracity of various rules of Sod's Law, specifically the contentions that cats always land on their feet and that toast always lands buttered side down.

Experiment to test Sod's First and Second Laws of Motion

1 Take a slice of buttered toast.


















2 Take a cat (male or female).

















3 Strap the toast, buttered side up, to the back of the cat.


















4 Drop the cat from a two-metre height.



















The opposing Sod's Law forces suspended the cat and toast one metre from the ground in perpetual rotation.

Now, all I have to do is find a way of harnessing the energy created and I'm quids in. I suspect after they read this, Exxon, BP and Shell will be getting into the cat and toast market. This may push the price of thick-sliced bread and cat food up a bit, but you can't have everything.

Wednesday 19 November 2008

Lettuce Spray

Who actually likes lettuce? Who sees lettuce on their plate and thinks, "Ooh, lettuce! ... I'm saving that till last?"

Or "Ooh, I just fancy a bit of lettuce. I haven't had any lettuce for ages?"

Or "I used to love the way my mum did lettuce ... on a plate, on its own. Cold?"

Lettuce is just there to make you feel better when you go to McDonald's. That's all it's for. To make you think you're having a balanced diet. "I'm balancing a quarter-pound of beef, processed cheese, bacon, ketchup and mayonnaise with a bit of lettuce. And a slice of gherkin."

Robert Mugabe is a despot responsible directly and indirectly for the deaths of thousands of people. He balances that with the ability to make a nice cup of tea. That's the sort of balance we're talking about here.

Did you know McDonald's invented the chicken nugget? Well, they also invented lettuce, back in 1956. Look it up on Wikipedia, it's true. You find any book from before then and you'll find no mention of lettuce. After 1956, it's another story.

It's not always tasteless, though. That's because the boffins were sitting in their lab one day, scoffing some smokey bacon crisps, and one of them thought, "I know - flavoured lettuce."

So they tried lots of different flavours - prawn cocktail, Worcestershire sauce, pickled onion... And what did they pick in the end? Earwax.

Friday 14 November 2008

Dark And Lovely

Do you know, Graham Bandage's Lovely World is so lovely that he seldom manages to post here these days. Personally, I think he's letting down the blogosphere.

But today, he has been stung into action. And here he is, acting. And speaking of himself in the third person, unable to think of a good way to shift into the first person. He'll probably have to talk about himself for the entire post.

Bandage had occasion to buy a newspaper in WH Smith's. "Would you like a bag?" asked the nice lady behind the till.

"No," said Bandage. "I'll be all right."

"Yeah," said the lady, "Save a tree."

Can anybody explain where the flip one can find a plastic bag tree? Bandage thought he saw one once in Greenbank Park, but all that had happened was a discarded plastic bag had been blown up there by a gust of wind. Perhaps the lady in WH Smith's had had a similar experience, but had failed to investigate. We will never know.

On the subject of trees, can anybody tell Bandage what the worst tree is? The answer is below*.

Tree bark, that's nice. And brown. A friend of a friend contends that brown is a horrible colour, but Bandage thinks he's wrong. Lots of nice things are brown. Just because poo is brown, it doesn't mean that brown is bad.


A List of Nice Things That Are Brown


  1. Tree bark

  2. Onion gravy

  3. Chocolate

  4. Conkers

  5. Hair (some varieties)

  6. A polished bookcase

  7. Beyonce Knowles.

Bandage dares say he could come up with many more examples, but they'd probably be much of a muchness.



* Purgatory