December 2005 Archives

The BBC is reporting that fruit bats might finally have been confirmed as the reservoir for Ebola. It's been a suspicion for a long time among many virologists that bats were carriers of Ebola (and potentially other filoviruses), so it's good news all round if it's true: we can now work on ways to contain the disease. If we don't, there a good chance that most of the great apes of Africa are going to get wiped out very soon as Ebola makes its way westwards.

Working on an article for the IT trade press, but stuck for an article plan? Look no farther, for I have one here. Use it sparingly or else people will begin to notice.

Just spotted this headline on the BBC:

What exactly has doubled here? Are you thinking what I'm thinking?

That's right: I'm thinking they really do need some good subs at the Beeb.

Perk up journalists everywhere. No longer do you have to worry that your next article is going to suck: the bar has just been lowered.

The worst story ever written has seen the light of day.

It's over here on the Christian Examiner. Bookmark it now. In the future, whenever you face self-doubt, just return to that story and feel all your worries fall away. Whatever you're writing will never be as bad.

Remember Mr Yous(a|o)ff? Seems someone with similar thoughts to mine also lives in Lewisham and has referred him to the Advertising Standards Authority! Excellent organisation that they are, they do clamp down on offenders.

First off, my congratulations to Mr Richard Sanderson for having the foresight and the community spirit to do such a generous thing.

Secondly, I'm now feeling a bit rubbish for not having done the same. Do you think the fact that I recycle all the paper people leave by the mailbox, turn off the lights in the bin room when no one's using them and generally channel my efforts into "green" things compensates? I hope so.

Still with Year of the Volunteer under way and the RSPCA in urgent needs of people to stroke cats and rabbits (according to Radio 1), maybe I should find other ways to boost my karma as well?

As regular readers may know, I'm working my way slowly through Teach Yourself Instant Spanish. I'm on week five now (flash cards will be going up on the site soon, once they've had a thorough testing) so that's only a week to go and then some revision to consolidate.

The big question is: does it work? Is this all for nothing? Now, I had good results with Teach Yourself Instant Greek, so I was willing to assume the same of Instant Spanish. And I've been having relatively good results with the occasional bits of Spanish I've heard on the tele: I even managed to cope without the subtitles during Lost's Ana-Lucia flashback last week.

So I decided to do a written test today and I was pleasantly surprised.

If you happen to like Christopher Hitchens, here are some excellent sites:

• Outside the Whale: Understanding Christopher Hitchens, which pretty much sums up my thoughts on the reasons for Hitchens' defence of the Iraq war


• Hitchens web, which lists all of Hitch's recent writings and appearances


• When Christopher met Peter, a transcript of the last time Hitch met his weirdo Mail-columnist brother Peter, following a four year silence over a joke about Stalin

They're all worth having a read of and I urge you in their direction immediately.

If you haven't heard that Living Marxism (I know, I know...) has transformed itself into Spiked, now's a good time to have a gander. There's very little hint of Marxism and there's some good writing there. In common with New Statesman, there's also some appalling writing there, but that can't be helped. As an example, there's a vaguely interesting but badly written article on mental illness in children there.

Sorry I haven't been posting for a few days: work and my birthday both got in the way. Enjoyed my day off, but now I'm straight back into the slog of things.

The good old Amazon wish list proved useful this year, yielding Teach Yourself Instant Italian and Is It Just Me or Is Everything Shit?: The Encyclopedia of Modern Life, both of which I'll be writing about later. Sarah also decided that I needed support in my rash promise to make a new Gordon Ramsay recipe every week (I made “Sublime scrambled eggs” yesterday) by buying me a blow torch. Crèmes Brûlées all round then.

My lovely wife is also taking me to the theatre on Saturday to see Otherwise Engaged, which should be fun: I'll be posting a review of that on my media blog once I've seen it.

But as a celebration party for the day, we did a tour of Greenwich, taking in The Mitre pub and Café Sol. The latter is a reasonable TexMex, although we encountered the strangest waitress there. She spoke fluent, accentless English, but couldn't understand a word of it. Very strange. Wished she'd had a label on her saying “I'm from...” so that we could have used our combined French, German, Spanish, Russian, Welsh and Greek to have a stab at helping her out. She was probably from Poland though, so we'd almost certainly have been stuck on a certain river without either a paddle or one of our main courses all the same.

I'm a big fan of Ben Goldacre's Bad Science column in The Guardian. I've also started reading Spiked, the magazine formerly known as Living Marxism but still not known for good writing.

Today, I had a sense of déjà vu come over me. An article debunking a recent study into homeopathy just appeared on Spiked. Yet, looky here. What's this over in Bad Science? It's an article debunking homeopathy that appeared a few weeks ago, that used more or less exactly the same arguments and ammunition.

They're not exactly identical so it's quite possible that two people independently came to the same conclusion. Yet Bad Science has become almost compulsory reading for science journalists and science readers, so it seems odd to me that Spiked's author wouldn't have read the piece.

Just as an aside, is Timandra really a name? Either poshest parents ever or pseudonym of the year...

UPDATE: Judging by her web site, I'm going for poshest parents ever.