Saturday, December 09, 2006

NOTE 1: On "Question Time" this week, man-in-the-beige-shirt explained that global warming may by caused by the imminent onset of a new Ice Age, or by Cosmic Rays. (If the latter is correct, then I want to be the stretchy one, not the one with orange rocks.) Before they made him shut up, he referred to the "politically correct theory" that global warming was caused by carbon emissions.

NOTE 2: In "Metro" on Friday there was a puff-piece for a new book on urban myths called "That's all bollocks". It included a list of 15 "myths", including the one about Charlie Chaplin entering a Charlie Chaplin lookalike competition, and the one about the man who insured his cigars against arson. They asked us to select which were true and which were false. One of the ones labelled as "true" was the surprising fact that, when Titanic went down, the silent version of the movie the Poseidon Adventure was being shown on the ship's cinema. This is, of course, "bollocks": it is another fake urban myth invented by the Snopes website in order to demonstrate that if you say something in a sufficiently authoritative way, then people will believe you, however obviously stupid and absurd it is.

No comments:

Post a Comment

Comments from SK are automatically deleted, unread, so please don't waste your time.