Sleeping Dogs

When is a BBC booklist not a BBC booklist?

noreply@blogger.com (Wildaker) — Thu, 25 Nov 2010 10:10:00 +0000

So. It's all over Facebook again:

Have you read more than 6 of these books? The BBC believes most people will have read only 6 of the 100 books listed here. Instructions: Copy this into your NOTES. Bold those books you've read in their entirety, italicize the ones you started but didn't finish or read an excerpt.

Only the BBC doesn't "believe" any such thing. And the list itself doesn't have anything to do with the BBC, come to that.

The BBC does do lists of books, and the nearest one to the memetic "BBC booklist" can be found here, which is a list of "the nation's best-loved" novels. Being best-loved, you can imagine that "most people" may well have read rather a lot of them, rather than “only 6”. But it's not the list being touted as the BBC booklist anyway, so it really doesn’t matter.

The list of books actually comes from a poll for World Book Day in 2007, published in The Guardian newspaper, and can be found here. As the accompanying news story explains, this was made up of 2,000 readers’ lists of ten books they “could not live without”. Once again, no mention of “only 6” (or the BBC, although it also covered the story). And, once again, the nature of the poll makes it reasonable that “most people” may well have read quite a few of them.

Interestingly, the version of the list that appears across Facebook (and elsewhere on the social media landscape) appears to have been copy-typed at some point, introducing errors – for example: the list at The Guardian correctly uses a lower case “d” before the apostrophe in Tess of the d’Urbervilles and gives author Louis de Bernières the grave accent that is rightly his.

So how did it get everywhere, and why’s it doing so again? Like a lot of these things, it’s much easier to disprove what it claims to be than to prove what it actually is. It’s really unclear when the meme began. although it was clearly kicking around in early 2009. And I’ve no idea what gave it its new lease of life...

Of course, the real reason for its existence is to help people feel good that they’ve read more of these than “most people”. It probably wouldn’t have had the same legs if the inventor had written: The BBC believes most people will have read only 62 of the 100 books listed here.

YouTube’s vuvuzela button doesn’t always enhance the videos it graces…

noreply@blogger.com (Wildaker) — Thu, 24 Jun 2010 12:13:00 +0000

E minor and vuvuzelas do not like each other.

Although, if you get the key right (B♭), it’s not so bad…

Sax appeal

noreply@blogger.com (Wildaker) — Tue, 22 Jun 2010 11:48:00 +0000

Just about everything is wrong with this photograph, taken during a gig by Bill Wyman’s Rhythm Kings in St-Paul-de-Vence on 6 June 2010 (Wyman’s nose is just poking in to the right of the shot), but I love it.

I don't take care of my person. Not like that, anyway.

noreply@blogger.com (Wildaker) — Wed, 09 Jun 2010 13:28:00 +0000

I have just visited Amazon UK, only to find my "personalised" front page dominated by a "Most Wished For in Personal Care" section featuring items such as a Philips HP6517 Satinelle Ice Rechargeable Epilator and a ghd Precious Limited Edition Mark 4 Styler Straightener & Hair Dryer Gift Set (price slashed to £127.93).

What, in my buying history, could possibly make Amazon think I might be in the market for a Wahl Heat Resistant Pouch for Straighteners or Tongs ZX497? Is this some kind of weird post-modern attempt at irony, perhaps? If so, I'm not sure I like it. I'll put up with a lot in order to enjoy the convenience of online shopping, but irony may be pushing me a bit far.

I was actually looking for a URL for Harold McGee's magisterial On Food and Cooking, which is even better than Alan Davidson's Mediterranean Seafood, itself a book so magnificent as to inspire Auberon Waugh's not even slightly hyperbolic description: the best book written on this (or possibly any other) subject. It's a much more inspiring way of spending money than on "personal care", and a much better way of taking care of one's person, come to that.

And now I see McGee has a new book, available for pre-order. I expect that Keys to Good Cooking will be an essential read. I'll find out as soon as it's published, anyway. In October…

"Roman gladiator cemetery found in England". Well, sort of… Maybe…

noreply@blogger.com (Wildaker) — Mon, 07 Jun 2010 15:54:00 +0000

CNN's headline says it all: Roman gladiator cemetery found in England.

Well, actually, it says a bit more than it probably should.

While the article itself contains plenty of may and might, the completely unequivocal nature of the headline leads the reader to think that the doubts are over the archaeological site's uniqueness, not the nature of those who are buried in it. Like this fellow, who is obviously a gladiator, no?

Well, a trip to the York Archaeological Trust's own website's news page suggests that things may be rather more nuanced:

A Channel 4 documentary, which will be aired on 14 June, reignites the debate about the skeletons’ origins and follows the lead theory that the remains are those of Roman gladiators. But, as Kurt Hunter Mann, who is leading the research at York Archaeological Trust explains, there is evidence to support other theories, too…

So the real story is that a TV programme is going to push the claims of one (albeit the lead) possibility regarding the occupants of a Roman cemetery found quite a few years ago. Which isn't that much of a story is it?

An honest headline would read:

Roman cemetery found in England nearly a decade ago may possibly contain the remains of gladiators, as has been surmised for some time (as one of several credible options)

but that's, admittedly, a little less snappy than CNN's choice.

If you can't say something nice, don't say anything at all

noreply@blogger.com (Wildaker) — Tue, 11 May 2010 12:45:00 +0000

Well, that's what I was told as a kid - although I suspect this astonishingly minimalist BBC News page has been set live by mistake and doesn't really express, fully and clearly, Auntie's view of the United Kingdom's current Prime Minister (and will probably be full of stuff very soon, er, I expect...).

It could be worse: it could be in print

noreply@blogger.com (Wildaker) — Fri, 19 Mar 2010 16:23:00 +0000

Who’d be a sub-editor? To the Telegraph’s credit it fixed this minor typo about an impressive bit of physics pretty quickly – just not quickly enough to stop me grabbing this screenshot…

CERN’s Large Hadron Collider works fine, honestly

noreply@blogger.com (Wildaker) — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 13:56:00 +0000

The BBC is making rather a fuss about the news that the world’s most mind-boggling particle accelerator will have to close down for a year at the end of 2011, for upgrades (or to rectify "faults" if you're a BBC hack). Considering all the publicity there was when the Large Hadron Collider didn’t exactly work right “out of the box” (having to be shut down, rather embarrassingly. just nine days after it was first fired up), does this mean that the whole thing’s just a colossal waste of time and money?

Not according to Rock-Star Physicist™ (and occasional BBC presenter) Brian Cox, tweeting furiously on what he sees as a non-story. All particle accelerators have scheduled shutdowns of this sort, he has posted to Twitter. The LHC “will run for 12 - 18 months now. It will then shut down, AS ACCELERATORS DO, for maintenance and upgrades.” This is, he stresses how “ENGINEERING” works. And if you weren’t quite convinced, he makes it clear that he considers the BBC story to be “a pile of merde, as we say at CERN”. “Scheduled maintenance stops,” he concludes, “Are not bloody news!”

So there.

Hoemopathy – what is it good for?

noreply@blogger.com (Wildaker) — Sat, 27 Feb 2010 13:03:00 +0000

An interesting question about the current fashion for attacking homeopathy was posted on Thursday to the website of the British newspaper the Guardian, in a piece by columnist Zoe Williams. Unfortunately, it was in a rambling, rather incoherent article that said more about its author’s prejudices than those it was apparently targeting. Even more unfortunately, for a question that really deserves a serious, considered answer, it was published in the odious “Comment is free” section, pretty much guaranteeing that no such answer would be forthcoming.

The question – once a bunch of irrelevant and inaccurate cultural stereotypes have been stripped away – is this: why is the subject of homeopathy receiving attention that is, when you step back a bit, really quite disproportionate to its (economic and, arguably, other) importance?

The answer, I think, is quite simple – homeopathy manages to be intellectually offensive on so many levels that it makes an ideal poster-child for rationalism.

It is pseudo-science at its most ludicrous, yet it receives government funding in many developed countries (Williams seems to see the world’s only interesting intellectual battlegrounds to be those of the UK and the US, but things are actually rather more nuanced). It is “medicine” at its most woo-woo yet peddled by people we are supposed to trust with our health – doctors and pharmacists. And that medico-governmental imprimatur has meant that homeopathy has made its way into the mainstream: it’s not the preserve of “hippies”, as Williams seems to think, perhaps confusing homeopathy with herbal remedies (which, unlike homeopathic ones can – and often do – deliver some medical benefit beyond the placebo effect).

Finally, homeopathic treatments don’t even have the decency to fortify themselves with a hefty slug of alcohol or some of the more interesting South American-derived alkaloids to give you a decent buzz like old-school snake oil used to – they’re just water, for goodness’ sake!

Homeopathy is therefore a target that is, if not exactly “soft”, certainly pretty straightforward and comprehensible – and that’s not always the case with pseudo-science. It has also turned out to be perfect for humour, whether it’s the stand-up brilliance of Dara Ó Briain, or the activist wit of the 10:23 campaign. Other recent newsworthy offences to reason, such as the utterly reprehensible bomb dowsers, are just less obviously funny.

Also, the blatant absurdity of homeopathy’s acceptance acts as a spur to challenge other received wisdom: if members of the medical establishment are stupid enough to take homeopathy’s utterly unscientific claims seriously, what other aspects of stupidity may they exhibit? Aspects which may actually be of substantially greater importance, perhaps (as seen in Ben Goldacre’s excellent piece coincidentally written for the grown-ups’ bit of the Guardian on unjustifiable claims made for many “real” medicines)?

There are clearly “more important” things to worry about than homeopathy, and the current flurry of interest in it may well be out of proportion to its actual ability to damage the fabric of society. However, that doesn’t mean it’s wrong to take an interest in – and, yes, to attack – it. That there is always something more important to worry about is never a reason to stop worrying about items of lesser – but not trivial – importance.

Homeopathy is bogus, its practitioners contemptible and its apologists, at best, misguided. And it is a great stalking horse for taking on things that are far, far worse than it. For that alone, the world’s skeptics and rationalists should be grateful.

Windows ReadyBoost is "hidden in plain sight", but really rather good

noreply@blogger.com (Wildaker) — Sun, 21 Feb 2010 08:36:00 +0000

There was a time when I actually used to know quite a lot about Microsoft Windows. I wrote millions of words about various aspects of it for magazines and newspapers in three continents; I wrote whole books about its inner workings (my December 1991 Pocket Guide to Windows Secrets, as seen here, remains an essential read for, erm, nobody, although it's nice to remember that I was a "Windows guru" back then, at least for marketing purposes).

But that was then. For the last decade or so I've been an active user of Windows in various forms, but have only cared about those bits that directly affected my needs as a user. I've left it to others to discover - and document - such things as the GodMode feature of Windows 7 (and Vista), things which I then generally ignore because they're not terribly relevant to my day-to-day existence.

And then I came across ReadyBoost, which has been around for quite a while but which I had completely failed to notice, despite it coming out in 2006. Essentially, this lets you use some solid state flash storage as a disk cache.

It's described in some detail here and here, but what it means in practice is that you plug a USB key or an SD Card (or similar) into your Windows PC and it, generally speaking, goes faster.

Actually, it doesn't really matter that I didn't know about it in 2006, because it's only recently become genuinely useful. There are two reasons for this: flash storage is now substantially cheaper than it was, and PCs can accept it in more convenient ways.

While it's not a problem to stick a USB key in the back of a desktop PC and just leave it here, it is somewhat intrusive on the average laptop or netbook (for a start, you can't get the machine into its case while the thing is plugged in). However, most modern portable - and, indeed, desktop - computers now have a slot for an SD Card - and that means you can just plug in and forget. The price factor is also important. The more cache you have (subject to the limitations of your specific flavour of Windows), the greater benefit you see. Something like 4GB is really worthwhile, and, while 4GB of flash storage used to cost quite a bit, I picked up a suitable 4GB SD Card for €11 (under $15 or £10) or at my local supermarket a couple of days ago, and I could probably have saved a little had I shopped around.

So ReadyBoost - I didn't know about it before but probably wouldn't have bothered with it if I had known. However, cost and convenience have now converged at a point where it's really a very smart thing to use if you have Windows 7 or Windows Vista.

Why me and Hitler don’t want iPads, but you possibly will

noreply@blogger.com (Wildaker) — Fri, 29 Jan 2010 21:49:00 +0000

The announcement of Apple's iPad has generated a lot of garbage (if, perhaps, not quite as much as the anticipation of it did) and the odd gem. The oddest – and possibly gemmiest – of the lot is this wonderful video:

I think it’s brilliant for a number of reasons. For a start, the subtitles (added to the final scene from the movie Downfall – a YouTube/Dailymotion favourite for this purpose) are technically superb. However, the real brilliance lies in the way the pastiche manages to reach across multiple audiences: those who think the iPad is silly, flawed or simply underwhelming will be nodding in agreement with Hitler while the hardcore Apple fanboys - the sort that will applaud anything Cupertino does simply because Cupertino did it - will be laughing: “But Hitler doesn’t get it!”

And they’ll both be right. Me, I’m in the Hitler camp (and you have no idea how discomfiting that was to type…), but that doesn’t make me right or wrong, it just defines me as a certain sort of user.

The key moment is where Hitler says: “I wanted a computer!” Well, the iPad isn’t a computer; it’s a piece of consumer electronics (at least that’s what it is primarily, for now – read on for how I think that may change).

It’s a mistake to think of it as Apple’s answer to Tablet PCs. It’s better to think of it as Apple taking a typically Appley approach to devices such as Archos’s personal media players: take someone else’s good-ish idea and do it properly.

I’ve actually got one of those Archos devices, a 604 WiFi. I bought it because it seemed to do a better job of what I want than the iPods available at the time – this was pre-iPhone, pre-iPod Touch. Crucially, I wanted to use the Archos as my primary music vault, copying only the music that I want on my computer to my computer. This, of course, is exactly the reverse of the Apple approach where the iPod is very much a peripheral of a “mother ship” Mac or PC. And it had a bigger screen, more suitable for watching video. Finally, the Archos had WiFi, and a built-in Web browser, and I fancied the idea of having an unobtrusive device lying around the lounge that I could use for a bit of ad hoc browsing. If it weren’t for a couple of details (a user interface that is sluggish and utterly counter-intuitive, negligible battery life, a Flash-free browser on a screen that wasn’t quite high-res enough to be useful, no ability to add new applications…), the Archos would have been an utterly brilliant buy.

It makes quite a lot of sense to look at the iPad as doing much the same job, but rather better. We know that Apple does interfaces well, performance is said to be brisk and battery life is quoted as being 10 hours (although we’ll see what that really means in due course). True, there’s no Flash support, although HTML 5 may make that less relevant in some contexts. But there’s Apple’s App Store, preloaded with a gazillion compatible iPhone apps and with the promise of many new apps to come. Plus a few extra goodies such as iWork and the iBook Store – neither of which I personally see as “killer applications” but which add richness, certainly.

Some of those apps may have very serious business uses. Although I doubt the iPad will – at least in its current configuration – ever be a piece of mainstream business technology, I can think of loads of vertical and niche markets where the combination of the tablet form-factor, Multi-Touch and the familiar Apple development environment will have programmers (and potential users) licking their lips. So, although I think it’s best to think of the iPad as a chunk of consumer electronics, people will find plenty of ways for using it in business.

That doesn’t mean that I think the iPad is perfection, however. I think the failure to include Flash support (despite my many misgivings regarding Flash) is a mistake. I wonder at a 4x3 format screen with a maximum resolution of 1024x768 pixels in a widescreen world (and an HD market). I think the lack of a USB port and a memory card reader is an error – a particularly serious one because I can think of a lot of people for whom an iPad would mean they had no need for a computer at home at all. The biggest mistake that I think Apple has made is, perhaps surprisingly, to be under-ambitious – it clearly sees the iPad as a peripheral rather than a device that can operate without the mother ship. But to people who only use a computer for the Web and e-mail that’s just what it could be.

Of course, I’m not one of those people. A story from the past may help to explain. Many years ago, the long-defunct weekly newspaper New Computer Express sent a sort of zeitgeist questionnaire around all the journalists working for Future Publishing, the company that produced it and several other computer magazines, mostly aimed at the gaming market. One of the questions was “What is your favourite piece of leisure software?” My editor on the non-gamer-focused PC Plus, Paul Stephens, replied “dBase IV Developer’s Edition”, and he wasn’t trying to be funny. Well, knowing Paul, he probably was, but he wasn’t being in any way dishonest.

I’ve got a netbook that I use as – among other things – my home computer and there’s no way that an iPad is going to replace it. That’s because, although it has iTunes and Spotify on it (for which the iPad may well be a better platform), I also use it for a lot of typing, designing and developing websites, for programming databases, remotely administering Windows and Linux servers and other such tasks. You know what? There simply isn’t an app (or not good ones) for that kind of thing, however much Apple tries to persuade me that there’s one for “just about everything”, and I don’t see there being one in the near future. (And since the netbook is perfectly adequate for my relatively straightforward media playing needs, the iPad probably isn’t going to be added to it either.)

There’s a classic scene in The Rocky Horror Show where the sculpted form of Rocky the man-made-man is first unveiled and Janet, asked for an opinion, comments that she doesn’t like men with too many muscles. His creator, Dr. Frank-N-Furter snarls back, “I didn’t make him for you.”

Well, Apple hasn’t – at least at first glance – made the iPad for me. I’m fine with that, and I kind of expected it anyway. However, for some of those devoted Apple fanboys who have similar needs to me, people who desperately wanted a tablet computer, the realisation that Apple didn’t make the iPad for them, that Steve hasn’t focused on their specific needs, is clearly quite distressing. People like, you know, Hitler.

Cats like plain crisps

noreply@blogger.com (Wildaker) — Sat, 16 Jan 2010 16:53:00 +0000

It was 1973, maybe 1974. I was driving through Richmond with my father when we both saw it – a piece of graffiti by the Kew roundabout that has stuck with me ever since. It looked like this (only in colour):

(photo: Roger Perry, The Writing on the Wall: the Graffiti of London, Elm Tree Books 1976)
At the time – and we’re talking long before the taggers and Banksies redefined the art-form – this was quite remarkable graffiti. It wasn’t obscene, it didn’t demean a minority and it expressed neither support nor contempt for a political issue, a musician or a sports team. It didn’t want anyone in, out, up, down or to win the Cup. It wasn’t obviously trying to be funny (although it made me laugh, and still does). It just was.
Over the next few years it cropped up in other parts of South and West London. You could be driving, walking, or looking out the window of a railway carriage when suddenly, around a corner, you’d see it again: Cats like plain crisps. Once – and only once – I saw a variant, a jazzy riff on the simple elegance of the original (yet an acknowledgement of it, a homage of sorts): Cats like salt and vinegar crisps too.
Then after it had been around for just the right amount of time, it sort of went away. Or maybe I did; I can’t remember.
It now turns out that the phrase was originally coined by a guy called Weed, at the famous Grosvener Road squat in Twickenham, allegedly as the result of a cat, a bag of Ready Salted crisps… well, you can imagine the rest. It seems to have started out indoors, in a kitchen (in which guise it has earned a passing mention in the Tony Parsons novel, Stories We Could Tell), and ended up being the semi-official slogan of the whole Grosvener Road crowd (and no, it has nothing to do with Mods and Rockers, an explanation that is quite preposterous; if anything, it has to do with cats, and crisps).
It seems unclear when it first ventured outside, but it still pops up from time to time as this 2006 revival in St Margarets shows…
Later, there was a band named Cats Like Plain Crisps, connected somehow to Grosvener Road. Some people make the mistake of thinking that the graffiti – some of which survived well into that decade – referred to the band when it was the other way around – although, to be fair, both are really part of the same general meme.

Pyramid builders "came from top families"

noreply@blogger.com (Wildaker) — Mon, 11 Jan 2010 07:00:00 +0000

Like millions of other people, Egypt's pyramids have had a hold on me from an early age. And like, I guess, millions of other people I had a very clear picture of how they were built (give or take a few unsolved mysteries). And that is a picture of very long lines of slaves dragging very big rocks under the command of a very nasty, whip-wielding slave-driver. With everyone standing very side-on, naturally. And it's a picture that is clearly very wrong.

It was in the 1980s that I read an article in Scientific American about the economics of pyramid-building (and the societal implications of those economics), a piece that definitively knocked it on the head for me. Since then, there's been plenty more stuff in print, on TV and online. But now it seems that we need to go further.

According to a press release on the website of "real-life Indiana Jones" (as the inevitable journalese goes) Dr. Zawi Hawass, new tombs found at Giza show that the pyramid builders:

came from top families of the Delta and Upper Egypt. Workers rotated every three months, and those who were buried there died during the construction process.

Also, he asserts, they numbered no more than 10,000, one-tenth of the number given by Herodotus (who, to be fair, wasn't there at the time and was just repeating what he was told, centuries after the fact).

So, the pyramids weren't built by millions of slaves. The pyramids were built by a handful of toffs.

Is the book dead? Not yet, but it is starting to smell funny

noreply@blogger.com (Wildaker) — Sun, 10 Jan 2010 16:57:00 +0000

This year is being touted as the year of the electronic book, but the gadget won't change people's passion for the printed page, writes Lisa Jardine.

So begins Page-turning passion, a Point of View in the BBC News website's Magazine section. The article that follows is the sort of article that gets me really quite snarky. So, let the snark begin:

I genuinely believe, looking at the evidence, there is every possibility of the e-reader (for the temporary lack of a better term) replacing the printed page for practically all purposes. I'd go so far as to say it's probable. And that's despite "people's passion" for it - a passion I, incidentally, share.

Why? Because the vast majority of reading done by most people most of the time is essentially functional. And an e-something - I'll get to the "something" bit in a paragraph or so - is a much better piece of hardware for delivering the software (words, and so on) we actually need. History's patterns make it seem pretty likely that most people will use the same technology for the non-functional reading that they do for the functional bulk. That doesn't mean that everyone will do so at all times, but the printed page is likely to become as irrelevant to the day-to-day reading habits of normal people as the horse is to their personal transportation.

The hardware platform they use may be an e-reader such as the Kindle; it may be a multi-function tablet such as Apple's much-hyped forthcoming iSlab (or whatever it's going to be called); it may be a whole load of different, interconnected devices - we already read a raft of stuff that used to be in books and magazines on desktop, notebook and netbook PCs, on telephones, on TVs, on games consoles. It isn't really relevant: what counts is the shift away from the printed page and towards digital delivery. And that seems inexorable.

More is required to satisfy the dedicated reader than replicating the content and appearance of a printed book, or emulating the action of "turning pages" using a tap on a touch-sensitive screen.

This is probably true, which is why the faux-book aspect of the Kindle's interface may condemn it to being nothing more than a transitional device. However, Jardine fails to note that the impending demise of large sections of the printed press is due to online content delivery proving to be better than the printed page for delivering what readers want. It's probably the "form factor" (as geeks like to put it) of books that have kept them pretty safe up to now, but hardware advances - portability, screen clarity and battery performance, in the main - mean that electronic devices have a lot more to offer now. I suspect, that as e-books get to look and feel less like printed ones over time, even more benefits of the digital approach will become apparent.

According to Amazon Kindle's vice-president, Ian Freed, the success of the Kindle signals the end of physical books: "The only question is does it take three years, five years or 20 years?"

Actually, I think Freed is overly bigging-up both the success of the Kindle and its influence - it's just one aspect of a shift towards the digitisation of our lives and may, like pre-iPod personal media players, turn out to be one of those "remember the..?" products. However, his conclusion is probably sound enough, as long as it means "the end of physical books as a mainstream, mass-market tool".

Frank Zappa once sang: "Jazz is not dead, it just smells funny". Within 20 years I really do expect the actual "funny smell" of books to be one of the elements that makes them seem as wildly anachronistic in a room as trafficators on a car.

So: I think the article's fundamentally wrong. But is that a reason for setting the Snark-O-Meter™ on 10? Not really, but what got my goat was a sense (possibly wrong, but strongly-felt) that the author deeply objects to the books being taken out of the hands of the priesthood and democratised in the way that will be, I believe, inevitable in an increasingly digital world. Although (perhaps because!) I'm no stranger to snobbery I caught a whiff of snobbery about the piece that didn't appeal. Hence the snark, which I now end.

Smearing toxic chemicals on dead trees is not the future of reading.

Sports stars to help SA Police "get fit"

noreply@blogger.com (Wildaker) — Thu, 31 Dec 2009 13:01:00 +0000

According to the BBC, sports stars "such as ex-footballer Lucas Radebe"* are going to help the South African Police's officers get fit in time for the 2010 World Cup. In a bout of remarkable frankness, Police Commissioner Bheki Cele confessed that:

some serving officers are overweight and even obese

Goodness... Nevertheless:

"All members of the South African police must be fit, must be healthy, must be ready for a tough year ahead."

Indeed.
* #pedantry - pleased to see the BBC using "such as" rather than "like" here

Great headlines of 2009

noreply@blogger.com (Wildaker) — Wed, 30 Dec 2009 15:40:00 +0000

"Diarrhoea vaccine guinea pigs wanted for free holidays"

(nothing to add to that)