Text Messaging Chin

There's this girl that's been bugging me. I pass her every afternoon on my way to the bus-stop, always in the same place. At first I thought that she had no chin, which is not attractive on a girl. Sorry, all you chinless girls out there. It's just not.

Anyway, I soon figured out that she did in fact have a chin and suffered from a terrible affliction known (by me, anyway) as text messaging chin. The symptoms of this terrible condition include the dissapearance of the chin into the neck as the sufferer looks down at her phone. Other synmptoms include bruises incurred when the sufferer walks into walls and people because she's unable to look where she's going whilst texting.

This is becoming a serious societal problem. It's not just the one girl, you see. There are hundreds of them wandering round Bristol and goodness knows how many up and dowen the country. We need to organise chin transplants for them. Or if that's too radical, maybe we should just take their damn phones away!

Dead Man's Chest

Shiver me timbers. Tis time to talk all piratey as the new Pirates of the Carribbean movie came out at the weekend! And grand it were, too.

Yarrr. Although tweren't quite as good as the first un, Dead Man's Chest was mightily entertainin'; Depp camped it up as you'd expect and Bill Nighy as Davy Jones was fantastic. Obviously Orlando Bloom played his part in the style of a wooden plank, however Keira Knightly, who I didn't particularly rate in the first one, was much, much better and really rather fanciable. Not that I conveyed this nugget of info to the the young lady I went to see it with. That would just be rude (see how I gave up talkin' like a pirate there?).

The only criticism of the movie that I could really make was that the crew of the Flying Dutchman were overly CGI-ed. While the effects were very good, I thought that part of the winning appeal of the first movie was that the special effects were only glimpsed now and again until the finale. This time, you had barnacled pirates and pirates with starfish on their faces and that one with the hammerhead shark head all the way through the movie. That said, Davy Jones looked simply magnificent!

Goat

Hmm.
Here's a rather dull article about a naughty goat:

Goat demoted for parade incident
LONDON, England (AP) -- A British army regiment's ceremonial pet goat was demoted in disgrace after it marched out of line before a host of international dignitaries during a parade to mark Queen's Elizabeth II's birthday, a military spokesman said Saturday.
The military mascot, a 6-year-old male goat called Billy, was downgraded from the rank of lance corporal to fusilier -- the same status as a private -- after army chiefs ruled his poor display had ruined the ceremony June 16 at a British army base in Episkopi, western Cyprus.
Lance Cpl. Dai Davies, 22, the goat's handler, was unable to keep control during the march earlier this month, as the mascot darted from side to side, throwing soldiers off their stride...

There's a load of somewhat uninspiring stuff about the naughty, naughty goat after that, but then it gets down to a few mildly interesting facts:

A total of 11 ceremonial pets -- including a ferret, an Indian black buck and a ram -- are kept by the British Army, but regiments do not take the mascots on tours to combat zones. British legislators were told last month that keeping the pets costs £30,000 ($55,000; €44,000) per year...
..."He is not a grazing goat and has food flown in from Wales. Billy also has an allowance of two cigarettes a day -- both of which he eats," said [a] spokeswoman...

It's a bloody goat. It will eat grass and bits of wood and spoons and pretty much anything else you stick in front of it. Why the hell do that have to be Welsh grass and bits of wood and spoons? And what's with the fags? I'm tempted to send him a copy of Allen Carr's book. Do you think the goat gets grumpy if he doesn't get his two ciggies a day?

Ants with Legs

I've always been one for odd little scientific snippets. Particularly stories about scientists who perform important research into importanat things which enrich our lives. Such as the following (edited) story from the BBC Website:

Ants 'use an internal pedometer'

Desert ants use an internal "pedometer" to measure exact marching distances, according to a study.

Researchers knew foraging insects could navigate using light from the sky, but were puzzled by the animals' ability to gauge the length of ground covered.
By manipulating the ants' leg lengths to give them longer and shorter strides, a Swiss/German team found the ants "counted" steps to judge distance.

To investigate, scientists from the University of Ulm, Germany, and the University of Zurich, Switzerland, set some ants off on a foraging trip along a straight tunnel, but once they had reached the food their legs were manipulated to either make them longer by adding stilts, or shorter by partially amputating them.
The ants were then returned to the same spot to begin their homeward-bound journey. However, the researchers discovered the ants with longer legs overshot the nest entrance, while those with the shortened legs undershot it.

Aren't you glad they've cleared that up for us. Aren't you? Now what's concerning me, in retrospect is the distance between Ulm and Zurich.

Anyways... I'm off to see if there's a market for ant sized prosthetic limbs...