âLovebirdâ commits murder on right-wing blog
A READER who doesnât want to receive a barrage of hate mail from right-wing loonies asks us to preserve his anonymity and use his preferred pseudonym, Jim. He tells us about his participation in an American blog by Lew Waters called âRight in a Left Worldâ.
The blog, at , features a sequence of six photos of two birds, one described as an injured female and one as a male who âbrought her food and attended to her with love and compassionâ. Alas, he is too late and, heartbreakingly, the female dies. The other bird, âaware that his sweetheart is dead and will never come back to him again⌠cried with adoring loveâ and âstood beside her body with sadness and sorrowâ.
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The notes with the photos claim that âmillions of people criedâ after seeing these pictures. Waters goes on to assert that it is âtragic⌠that many of these same people so saddened by the above chain of events wonât shed a tear over some 50,000,000 million unborn humans denied their right to life by being sucked out of their mothers wombs in abortion mills set up across America.â
Jim was also moved by these pictures, so much so that he felt impelled to add a comment on the blog.
âSorry to rain on your parade,â he tells Waters, âbut these are two male barn swallows (Hirundo rustica) engaged in a territorial battle⌠If you check the literature about this species you will find that males have been observed fighting for nest space, sometimes even going as far as one killing the other. Thatâs whatâs happening here.â
âClick to order your snow for just ÂŁ4.95 plus shipping and handling,â concluded an email received by Richard Searne. Before the typo it had merely seemed to be offering him a USB stickâ
Jim goes on to puncture another claim by Waters: âOh⌠and where do you get the figure of 50,000,000 million embryos being aborted from? Letâs get that right, 50,000,000 million, all in digits, is 50,000,000,000,000. Thatâs approximately 10,000 times the current population of the entire Earth. Iâve come across some wildly inflated alarmist statistics before, but this one must take the prize.â
Waters has since attempted to bluff his way out of his boob with the numbers, but remains strangely silent about his erstwhile âlovebirdsâ.
More of Microsoftâs inscrutable ways. At Mark Bennisonâs workplace, they use a collaborative tool called Microsoft Windows Sharepoint Server. According to Mark, this is a typical piece of software, âboth useful and irritating in equal measureâ. It seems, however, that âthereâs more going on under the hoodâ than he first expected.
One feature of the software is a sidebar that tells users who is or is not online within the userâs work group. This sidebar recently told Mark âOnline: None of the members are online. Not Online: None of the members are offlineâ.
Mark is himself a member of the group, of course. He feels uncomfortable about the state of indeterminacy that Microsoft has condemned him to. Will his online or offline state only be revealed when someone opens some kind of an invisible box that he is in? âPerhaps I should change my screen name to SchrĂśdingerâs cat,â he muses.
Did whatever happened really happen?
COMMENTING on the appearance of a bright fireball in the sky above Texas on 15 February, Detective John Foster of the sheriffâs department in Williamson County stated: âWe are fairly certain that whatever happened, happened.â
Our colleague Stephen Battersby, who spotted this in an Associated Press report entitled âTexas fireball probably a meteor, not a UFOâ, suggests that the deductive powers of the sheriffâs department revealed here probably wonât have the local criminals quaking in their cowboy boots.
On the other hand, he concedes that Foster is displaying in his statement a reluctance to jump to conclusions that is commendable in an officer of the law.
âHis inclusion of the word âfairlyâ is especially restrained,â says Stephen, âas it leaves open the possibility that whatever happened, didnât happen. Or vice versa.â Quite so.
Airline consigns panda to extinction
WHEN Mark Ahern was flying to Morocco with Easyjet, the cabin staff came round selling various things from their trolley including a cuddly bear. The chief attendant announced over the tannoy: âAll the profits from the sale of our cuddly bear go towards the World Wildlife Fund who help pandas and other extinct animals.â Mark wonders what exactly WWF intends to do with his donation if the animals are already extinct. He is also concerned that Easyjet apparently knows something about pandas that WWF doesnât.
FINALLY, the âperfect hand sanitiserâ spray Tony Woolf found in his local pharmacy proclaimed that it âcontains 200 per cent less alcohol than other sanitisersâ. Tony wants to know if the negative alcohol in this product would counteract the effects of consuming too much ordinary alcohol â or would the ordinary alcohol and the negative alcohol annihilate each other in a dangerous explosion if they happened to meet?