Hi folks. Sorry about the lack of blogging today. Work was busy, and the world was boring. A bad combo.

As a small gesture of regret, please accept this video of two guys with accents playing Blitzkrieg Bop on ukuleles:

Hey ho, let’s go! Via Boing Boing

Man, the Congo has had a run of bad luck lately, but this takes the cake.

Police in Kinshasa have arrested a number of men accused of being sorcerers. Or more specifically, sorcerers who steal penises. A number of men have come forward claiming their cash & prizes have been rendered tiny, impotent or even invisible by evil magicians. Local men, justifiably angry at having their units spirited away, have attempted to lynch several of the alleged penis-snatchers.

This is a new one on me. I’ve heard people make excuses for their endowments- or lack thereof- before. But this is the first time I’ve ever heard someone claim “A sorcerer took it.”

“Seriously baby…normally I’d rock your world but, you know, black magic.”

In other news, Kinshasa has formally applied to have its name changed to ‘Crazytown’.

Yes, that great maybe-existed, maybe-didn’t simultaneous example both human ingenuity and total stupidity, the Trojan Horse, got its day in the sun way back on April 24, 1184BC. Wired has a great post on how the TH, while perhaps historically dubious, has become a cultural touchstone. There’s also something in there about network security, but I kind of glossed over it.

Some lessons:

Cassandra was a Trojan prophet who warned against accepting the gift. Today, her name means a person whose warnings are ignored. Another skeptic was Laocoon, who Virgil says first uttered, “Beware of Greeks bearing gifts.”

I’m a bit dubious of the last one. I lived with a Greek roommate for a while, and his gifts were always thoughtful and of high quality, rarely containing hidden soldiers who waited until night before sacking my bedroom. I also wonder why ‘Trojan’ became a brand name for condoms. As the Horse-full-of-Greeks episode demonstrates, Trojans aren’t particularly adept at keeping anything out of anything else. I’ll leave it up to you to draw the obvious analogy.

I’m such a sucker for father/son stories. Field of Dreams still makes me weep like a little girl. But this is definitely the sweetest/saddest/sweetest again thing I’ve found on the Interwebs in weeks.

When Jack Hammond, an 88 year-old British WWII vet, moved into a retirement home some 40Km from his old ‘hood, he had trouble finding suitable pub companions. And darn it if that didn’t make him lonely. So his son, 56-yearl-old Mike Hammond, put an ad in the post office for two blokes to accompany his dad to the local twice a week, for 7 quid a go. The response was overwhelming:

He was so inundated with offers – including one from a 16-year-old – that he interviewed candidates by phone before asking a shortlist of three to join him and Jack for a trial drink. The successful pair, Trevor Pugh, 78, a retired kitchen fitter from Southampton with a military background, and Henry Rosenvinge, 58, a former doctor, will now spend several nights a week with Jack chatting about military history and current affairs.

Pugh will pocket the money to supplement his pension, but won’t charge expenses. Rosenvinge is working Pro Bono:

“He has a lot of stories and we are both from Lancashire so we have a lot we can argue about. I’m looking to come once a week for a couple of hours but we will be careful – we know what our limits are with alcohol.”

Hammond’s son will continue taking his dad to the pub twice a week.

At first pass, this is a weird story. Nobody wants to have ‘paid friends’. But its a sad truth that as people age in our society, they can get increasingly isolated and alone. Fortunately, Jack Hammond has a son that cares enough to do something about it, even if his solution is a little unorthodox. And in the end, he may have found his father some new buddies.  I’m not exactly sure why, but I find this story oddly touching. As Kurt Vonnegut once said, we were put on this earth to fart around. And nobody wants to do that alone.

So, somebody, for some reason, has put out a Blog Cuss-O-Meter, which ostensibly measure the amount of profanity on your site. In the interest of science, I ran Nunc Scio through, and came back with a 7.1 per cent, or ‘medium’, cuss rating. Aren’t I nice.

Created by OnePlusYou

Kinda makes me think I should drop a few more F-Bombs around here. But then I get all giddy.

Oh man, there is so much awesome in this story I had to lie down for an hour before I could write it.

Awesome thing #1: Man from Holyhead, Wales drinks a 10 litre box of wine.

Awesome thing #2: Man takes garbage bag, cuts a hole in it, puts it on.

Awesome thing #3: Man hurdles garden fence, repeatedly screams “DARTH VADER”, and assaults two teenagers with a metal crutch

Awesome thing #4: One of the teens recently started a local Jedi Church in Holyhead.

Awesome thing #5: The two had been filming a ‘lightsaber battle’ in the backyard immediately before the attack.

Awesome thing #6: Man claims he has no memory of the event, and only realized he had dressed up like Darth Vader and attacked two kids when he read about it in the paper.

So what have we learned? Boxes of wine and Star Wars don’t mix. Crutch trumps lightsaber. And the two assaulted teens are TOTALLY virgins. Thanks to AB for the link.

The piddling human lifespan affords mankind a unique sense of security. Since we’re only around for about 80 years or so, its hard to comprehend the churning death-box of chaos that is the universe.

Take our Solar System. Seems pretty static: everything is out there, just doing laps with comforting regularity of a ninth grade gym class.

Or so it would seem.

Turns out, Ol’ Lady Gravity is constantly at work, making subtle changes as the planets exert little tugs on each other. A lot of little tugs eventually add up to some spectacular changes, like Earth colliding with Mars or Mercury. D’oh.

Such a collision would be a game-ender:

In the case of a smash-up with Mars, for example, “all life gets extinguished immediately, and Earth glows at the temperature of a red giant star for about 1000 years”, says Gregory Laughlin, a co-author of one of the studies at the University of California in Santa Cruz, US.

The good news is that this probably won’t happen for at least 40 million years. Which is bound to irritate the Sun, which was all set to burn Earth to a cinder in 5 billion years. Stupid uppity and/or drunken planets.