Only in America…

…can you become a millionaire by beating up a minor: BBC news story. Ridiculous.

Schnappi!

Schnappi is a hit phemonenon in Germany. Apparently he is a green crocodile (see below). It all started when a little girl recorded a copy of the theme, and her family posted it to their website. A radio station got hold of it, and the rest is history. Now there’s demos, covers and all sorts going on. It’s like the Star Wars kid all over again. It’s actually surprisingly catchy! The original is here.

Links: http://www.schnappi.dl.am/ – download all the various incarnations of it!

eBay Fraud

It’s no wonder that people are getting away with fraudulent activities when their attempts are actually pretty good. I got this:

http://147.202.36.70/~abikoahi/blg/no/login.php

which yeh, I realised it was clearly fake. But someone who’s not so clued up might not have done, and gone ahead and given away their username and password.

So a warning: be suspicious of any “official” emails you may get.

Want to feel depressed?

Try the salary timer! Put in how much you earn, pick a celebrity, and watch as they pile on the dosh as you sit there stagnating. Hah!

Search strings

I keep logs of all the visits to my site from various search engines. I get a lot of hits for the da Vinci Code, and recently I’m getting plenty for videos of the Tsunami disaster after I posted some links up to good sites. But, I have to admit, that I’m getting hits from some frankly weird and often quite disturbing search phrases.

10 of the best:

10. “Audi 80 Kangaroo”
9. “Sexy questions for truth or dare”
8. “Why do men stare at other women”
7. “Poo bum wee”
6. “Send me a two million dollar check”
5. “Middle age men blog”
4. “French people fucking”
3. “Pee pees together”
2. “Good boobs” (man would they have been pissed off when they saw Will Smith…)

and at #1:

“Geek test is my penis big enough”

Um.

Ag-agagag!

It’s probably mean to say this. In fact it is definitely mean to say this. But I heard something today that put a smile on my face. About a year ago, I bought my new motorcycle. She’s a beautiful Honda CBR600FX, and don’t get me wrong, I love it to pieces. But in order to arrange my financing so I could afford it, I had to do several things, one of which was selling my car. This was OK, because a mate of mine had a car he wasn’t using, and as he was moving to London, he let me have it FOC. It was an old Peugeot 405SRi, and whilst a bit knackered on the outside, was pristine inside and very low mileage. So with a bit of a bodywork, she ought to have a been a very cheap little car.

About £300 later, after new suspension, panels, lights, electrics and god knows what else had gone into it, it was still a heap of shit. I was getting increasingly frustrated at having no car, at constantly hearing the excuses from the garage as to why it wasn’t fixed and why it had failed the MOT again (my favourite was when it failed the MOT because they’d put the suspension in the wrong way round) and generally pouring money into a car which was way more hassle than it was worth.

So with no MOT, tax or insurance, I put it on the back of a recovery truch and dragged it down to a car dealer to see what I could do. I found a nice looking Audi 80 2.0 Sport, high mileage, the odd thing here and there, but generally “a nice little motor”. He was your average dealer, trying to rip me off, not budging a lot and knowing full well that at the time, the car was misfiring really badly. He assured me that he’d had a really good drive in it when he picked it up, and that it was probably just because it’d been sat for a little while.

We did a deal on the Peugeot. I got about £200 off the price of the Audi as a p/x. So I lost out a £100. But this bloke sold me a car, which in his mind, wasn’t mechanically fit (I think) . However, 4 spark plugs and £16 later, and I’ve got a perfectly running car again. So this guy tried to stitch me up. But didn’t get away with it.

Why not? I heard through a contact of mine, that the Peugeot (which, as it was was an old dog) has just been scrapped, after being condemned by the MOT station he tried to take it to. Apparently it had a fuel leak (amongst other things).

He got a tenner for it. Life is good.

The Main Event: Science vs. Religion

It’s a well lamented question. Often asked, never really answered. Can science honestly live side by side with religion (and to a certain extent, philosophy)? Maybe we’ll find out. Often the most explainable, or inexplicable scientific facts (or lack thereof) are nonsensed by bible bashers saying “Yes, but who was in control of that happening?”. Simply put, they can dismiss solid scientific fact by saying that it was all part of God’s plan.

I’m no atheist, but then again I’m not a devout Christian. I believe in what I understand. I can’t believe that a couple of hundred years of research into Darwin and his theory of Natural Selection is all complete nonsense, yet certain people “with faith” believe that evolution should not be taught as the only way. Instead, they insist that “Intelligent Design” (i.e. God created it) should be included. That might sound like a contradiction on my part. My explanation is simply that: I’m open minded enough to see that there are lots of different possible explanations for a single phenomenon. That’s fine. So evolution, or weird alien gip forcing things to mutate. But religion in a biology class has to be a no-no.

And there we have it. Scientists can dismiss certain theories of the basis of what they can prove. People with religion can dismiss all other theories on the basis of they have faith in a higher power. There’s no middle ground.

I don’t think there’s a simple resolution.