Death by Tory 21:07

So Gordon's gone. Gone with dignity by all accounts, but still gone. That's means while Gordon Brown heads off to join the queue at his local job centre in the morning, perhaps developing a nasty Buckfast habit by late afternoon, our new illustrious leader will be getting his posh slippers under the bed at Number 10. Thanks to massive indecision by the British public we're now doomed to face the prospect of death-by-posh. This is not the kind of 'posh' that Victoria Beckham made a career out of - with her Louis Vuitton luggage and preposterous heels; This is the posh of David William Donald Cameron - The Etonian, baby-faced descendent of King William IV (which makes him a distant relative of Her Majesty), and pot-smoking Gordon Brown usurper.

The Tories are certainly bang up for a fight, we all know that, just look what happened when some Argie called Leopoldo stepped on Maggie's toes over the Falklands. But despite Cameron's insistence on renewing Britain's Trident defence programme, it's not the nukes that we need to fear. As the sun sets on Gordon Brown's career, tomorrow is the start of a new regime in Downing Street. Suddenly we're back to the familiar blue of the Conservative Party, a colour that still represents the epitome of evil for a lot of people in the UK, especially those with accents that you don't often hear on Newsnight. A Tory government for "them folk" is like the coming of Satan. Too many will remember it as the same blue that strangled entire communities in mining towns, introduced the poll tax and its subsequent riots, and basically managed to piss off everyone and his whippet with their highfalutin, poor-bashin' arse bandit brand of fuck you politics.

Give it a couple of months and parts of the UK may turn into a scene from that M. Night Shyamalan film The Happening, as ordinary people with no acting skill whatsoever begin topping themselves in the wake of toxic conservatism sweeping the land. The hapless plebs of Britain's downtrodden masses, who can't even get the hell out of the country because of a massive ash cloud hovering over our heads like a giant lid on a massive barrel of shit, will drive their cars into the sea, mouths agape at the hideousness of the scene. The last thing they will see as water fills their lungs and the life slowly fades from their eyes, is the gaping mouth of Gordon Brown muttering about how he told us so. Oh the humanity!

Less Keystrokes, More Bonbons 17:56

Good news from those whizzkids at Google. It seems their email service in the UK is once again going to have the suffix "@gmail" at the end of all email addresses. This is after it went on hiatus during a legal dispute and became the irritatingly elongated "@googlemail", thanks to some pedants that claimed they already had an Internet postal service called Gmail. Splitters! But of course anyone with the foresight to realise Google were going to take over the entire world and ultimately destroy it by creating an all powerful world-superbrain made from millions of PC 'synapses' that will eventually subdue and enslave the human race, forcing us all to have the word "beta" stamped onto our foreheads and exist in a state of servile obedience, feeding it's ever growing omniscience of our every waking moment via Twitter and Facebook updates - anyone with THAT kind of foresight, would have already been in on the Gmail bandwagon in the early days and would therefore have an @gmail address anyway (if you ain't with us, you're ag'n us).

Still, as we hurl our individuality into the void and accept that we're all doomed to be nothing but constituent parts of a larger 'person', henceforth known as Google, we can still celebrate the fact that at least we'll be doing something for the planet. Once our entire lives are absorbed into the Googlenet we'll hardly need to go outside at all, so all those cars will just sit on the driveway, harmlessly rusting. Farmers will have no need for real cows, they can just milk their virtu-cows on Farmville, which means a lot less methane going skyward. Yup, Google is our friend, and should we ever need to communicate with other human-synapses elsewhere in the UK, we can now do so with greater ease thanks to a significant saving of five whole keystrokes for every @googlemail that has been shortened to @gmail. The boffins at Google HQ said: "we estimate this name change will save approximately 60 million keystrokes a day. At about 217 microjoules per keystroke, that's about the energy of 20 bonbons saved every day!" Since there will be no cows to eat after the Goo-pocalypse, bonbons may indeed be the energy source of the future. Savour every one dear friend, you will need the energy.

Pigs Might Flu 19:43

Well it seems swine flu is back on the agenda. Not that it ever really went away of course, but since it now seems the media dictates the seriousness of these things more than any medical professional, it's fair to say that when it's back on the front pages, it's time to panic.

So with news of the first UK death from the disease it is most definitely time to throw your hands up and start running around like a headless chicken. Oh my god, did someone mention a chicken! Was it coughing? Did it look ill? Tell me about the chicken!!! Don't worry, this is swine flu, we've forgotten about bird flu now. Rule of thumb is this; if you happen to be down old Macdonald's farm and something goes oink-oink-cough, oink-oink-cough, you'll do best to steer well clear.

A Radio 2 news discussion yesterday took calls from members of the public, many of whom expressed their fears and concerns in the wake of Britain's first swine flu fatality. While some offered their sympathies to the victim's family, others took a more objective - you might even say obtuse - stance on the situation.

One gentleman in particular took what might be described as the 'old school' approach to the latest swine flu news reports. His opinion was very much that we're all completely overreacting and that one death does not constitute the pandemic that we were warned about when swine flu first appeared. Of course, in his day they ate a bowl of botulism for breakfast and bathed bi-weekly in rat's urine to get the coal dust out of their hair. Never did him any harm.

In one respect, you've got to agree that the man has a point. Swine flu is not wiping us out in anything like the sort of numbers we might have initially feared. And even the media was getting a bit bored with it until that poor lady fell victim to a severe case. However, the man's argument was so lacking in actual facts that I had to cringe as his rant continued.

It’s true, we're not all dropping like dominoes as the Daily Mail said we would, but at the same time we can't just ignore it. Old school guy tried to argue that people die every year from ordinary flu, and that doesn't draw media attention. But what he completely failed to realise, despite efforts from the show’s presenter, is that swine flu is different. It is a new strain, to which no one has a natural immunity, precisely the reason the WHO is taking it so seriously, just as it did with bird flu.

But what this latest flu outbreak demonstrates more than anything is that people are generally terrible at choosing where to get their information, and armed with a little bit of it, they stumble haphazardly through a minefield of fiction to arrive at a fact. Putting trust in the media to correctly interpret and report on a complicated medical issue is probably our first big mistake, the one that opens the can of ham. The people that fill these column inches have no more idea what swine flu is than any other average Joe. They’re not doctors, they’re journalists, and they’re paid to report the problem not to treat it.

And therein lies the real threat that we face. We gather our ‘facts’ from people that don’t know what they’re talking about and pass them around like a virus, from mouth to mouth, tongue to swollen tongue. There has to be a certain twisted irony in the fact that our ignorance may be as malignant and dangerous as our mucus. As Orwell’s Napoleon might have said, all animals are viral, but some are more viral than others.

Can I Get a Witness!? 19:53

Just as I was beginning to think that my unhealthy obsession with the end of the world (or more specifically, the end of my world!) was a little narcissistic or self-obsessed, a nice man in a hat knocked on my door to give me a leaflet. The elderly grey haired gentleman said softly as he passed the sheet of paper, "I just wanted to give you this, that is all, thank you and have a good day". I replied politely in a similarly vein as I took the leaflet and closed the door.

Expecting the usual double glazing sales patter or political hair-splitting propaganda, I was pleasantly surprised to see a document entitled, "How can you survive the end of the world?". Wow, good question I thought! I'd been wondering about that myself.

On reading it, I was heartened to find that loads of other people had also been thinking about questions like, how, when and where they might meet their end, but from a slightly different perspective. You see, these particular folk are called Jehovah's witnesses, and there's surprisingly quite a lot of them. Surprising, because one of their core beliefs is that heaven only has room for 144,000 people. You would think that they'd stop the recruitment drive?

I didn't have the opportunity to ask the grey haired gentleman why there's only room for 144,000 but I'm sure Jehovah had his reasons. I suppose if he made it any bigger he'd have to think about upgrading the sanitation systems, road access, housing etc. etc., he'd just be making more work for himself in the long run.

On closer examination I noticed the really creepy picture on the front, depicting a queue of families moving in a long line across a field of yellow and red flowers. They're shown heading off to the right of the picture, away from dark clouds in the distant left, which I assumed represented the apocalypse. The family at the front is a young white couple, with each parent holding the hand of an Arian child, who is grinning like an ape with a cup of PG Tips (a bit weird on judgement day, wouldn't you think?).

This got me thinking about the entrance to Jehovah's heaven. That big queue must be there for a reason. I mean let's face it, if fire and brimstone are raining down from the heavens, even us Brits - who think queuing is a form of leisure activity - aren't just going to form an orderly queue when there's a big white sign saying 'This Way to Exit Shitsville'. No way, it's every sinner for himself!

I can only assume that there's some sort of turnstile access at the gates to heaven, in order to stem the inevitable influx of recently reformed heathens. Of course if you haven't got a ticket, you're not getting in, so these Jehovah people have got a serious advantage on your average Tom, Dick or Adolf.

You've got to think though, the numbers just don't add up. There's going to be a lot more than 144,000 people looking for the pearly gates when they open for the main event. So is it first come - first served, or is there some sort of triage system? I can just imagine the queue jumpers on that day, but how ironic if some poor sap invalidated his ticket for cheating.

Well I'm just pleased to know I'm not the only one thinking about these things. When it comes to the crunch, I think this post alone may have invalidated my ticket to the big party in the sky. Shame, these people seem like such fun. In the end I never did accept that warm invitation to hear the answer to "How can you survive the end of the world?", but I'm sure it was very enlightening.

Plastic Bottle Death Shocker! 13:14

Great news! I've just heard about a new way that we might suddenly shuffle off our mortal coil, especially if you happen to be a girl and you happen to have boobies. Yes, I said boobies. I suppose that could potentially affect certain males as well, but that's a separate issue. I'm don't think anyone has ever died of moobs.

OK, this one involves plastic water bottles. It has nothing to do with being hit by them at high velocity, swallowing them whole, sitting on them (*!?$), or even any long term environmental affects caused by producing them, no this one is about drinking from them. Yes, the very purpose that they were, well ya know, created for.

Truth be told, I've actually heard this one before. I worked in the chemical industry for a time making plasticy things, so I got to hear about it, but anyway, I mentioned this to my grandmother once and she developed a suspicious fear of plastic bottles that probably stayed with her for the rest of her days, so let's just be careful how we use this information.

The problem is - at least as I understand it from my stint as a lab monkey and the sketchy details I got from the alarmist email I received this morning - that plastic bottles leach a sort of chemical called 'dioxin' into the water stored in them, particularly when they are kept at higher temperatures, such as in a car.

Dioxin it seems is a toxic substance that has been found to have links with breast cancer. According the email, Sheryl Crow (the singer) was told by her oncologist that women should not drink from plastic water bottles that had been stored in the car. The email also said that Sheryl Crow had told Ellen (DeGeneres I presume?) that this had caused her breast cancer! Shocking news indeed. A medical revelation one might even say!

Now I'm no medical expert, but I fairly sure that identifying a substance found in cancerous breast tissue as being the same as a substance found in bottled water is NOT the same thing as identifying a link between the two, and certainly not grounds for claiming a causal relationship. But in this case I'll forgive the lovely Miss Crow (who probably didn't say that anyway) because she is after all the victim in all this.

What cannot be forgiven is the ridiculous alarmist emails that are threatening us with death, just from drinking the very substance that keeps us alive! Where are the facts for pity's sake!? What level of toxin is leached into water, over what period of time? What levels of dioxin are actually dangerous to humans anyway?

At one point the email stated "Bottled water in your car is very dangerous!". It didn't say "...potentially risky" or "...possibly unwise" or even "...tastes like piss because it's warm!", no no, it is VERY dangerous. OK then, a challenge to whoever wrote that tosh in the first place. You and I sit in a hot car for two days with nothing but plastic bottles of waters. Let's see who dies first sucker!

Immanentize the Eschaton? 00:48

Answering the question, "How long have I got?" is pretty straightforward for most people. You'll be dead in less than one hundred years unless you're either extremely lucky (or perhaps that's unlucky?), or you're some sort of reptile.

For the most part there's no point dwelling on this fact, death comes to us all in the end, it's a perfectly natural part of living, but how exactly we come to that end is not always in our hands.

The complex political and social tides of this world can wash over us as individuals, families, groups, nations and even the whole of humanity, so a healthy interest in events that could dramatically affect you and your bretheren could make all the difference when the social tsunami hits or the latest war reaches your doorstep.

If it comes to World War III I'm afraid you've had it, but the next big flu epidemic, financial meltdown, environmental disaster or zombie outbreak is much more likely to scythe through the weak and unprepared like a fat kid through chocolate, leaving those in the know to benefit from the sudden surge in quieter roads, cheaper housing and slave labour.

If you don't get bombed in your home by friendly fire, or freeze to death on the way home from the pub due to some freak weather conditions caused by man's interference in the environmental stability of the planet, you'll probably starve to death when you lose your job or become another victim of violent street crime.

So don't get caught napping or you'll be among the forgotten victims of life's great tapestry. Worse still, you could become an undead slave labourer in a horrific mutant work camp of death! Anything's possible.