A Conversation We'll All End Up Having.

 Kids? Kids, could you come in here for a second...?
 Sit down. We need to talk. I know this is a little awkward, but we need to talk about the birds and the bees. We need to talk about sex.
 More importantly, you all have computers, and we need to talk about pornography.
 You don't fucking deserve it.
 Sure, we all know URLs for instant-access, high-definition hardcore pornography, but I don't think you should be allowed it.
 Men of my age - and our fathers before us - sacrificed much for pornography. Your easy-to-access filth is making a mockery of the things my long-distance eyesight fought and died for.
 When I was your age, we had to download our smut the old fashioned way; with Napster or Kazaa or that red one with the cream background whose name I don't recall.
 We had to sit there, expectantly erect, staring at a little bar that slowly chugged across the screen as a five minute clip took twenty minutes to download.
 Invariably, we'd get bored and start proceedings early, meaning that if anyone walked in on you it would appear you had some sort of weird tech fetish and be shipped off to St. Asimov's Home For the Criminally Inclined to Fuck Robots.
 In the days before THAT, archeologists have speculated that people would have to draw flip-books of women being sodomised for money, a process which took days and resulted in numerous accidents with pencil sharpeners.
  In the seedy theatres of the early 20th century, segregation meant that inter-racial porn had to be enacted by couples of the same racial background, with drastically under-hung white men in blackface (or suspiciously large-assed women in whiteface) forced to fuck each other whilst trying to act, something we now know from modern skin flicks is medically impossible. [Holmes' Law states that dong size is inversely proportionate to acting ability. Judging by his career choices, Robert DeNiro's penis apparently grew nine inches sometime shortly after Goodfellas. -LH]
 In prehistoric times - STOP SQUIRMING! You will sit and listen to this lecture, dammit! If you think this is dull and involves a lot of waiting, I fucking DARE you to download "Fiddle Her on the Roof" over a dial-up connection! ...Imesh! That was the red download program with the cream background. You kids don't remember ol' iMesh, do ya?
 ...Anyway, in prehistoric times, early man was forced to make pornography with a series of crudely-sketched images made with charcoal on cave walls, which they would run past quickly to create the illusion of movement. Extant examples have been found in Lascaux, in France, which is also the reason many French archeologists can run the hundred metres in eleven seconds.
 All of this has gone on before you, since time immemorial. Hidden magazines, forbidden tapes, long waits, hardship... all of it, gone, in the blink of an eye, thanks to you kids and your fucking broadband fucking.
 So lay off the porn, 'cause it's pissing off everyone who turned fourteen before 2010.


[NB: I was about to save everything I just wrote on my computer at home, and I came within a hair's breadth of saving the file as "Kids Porn."]

You Can't Teach an Old Dog New Games

 How modern computer games make for an odd experience for anyone old enough to have played "Sonic the Hedgehog."

 The trouble with getting older is that, at any given moment, you might start telling people what “the trouble with so-and-so” is. It’s the first sign of the ageing process.

 But as I’ve cleverly got that moment out of the way from the off, I’d like to begin in earnest.

 The trouble with computer games these days is that they’re at a sort of mid-point in terms of realism, and it leaves me unhappily fence-sitting.

 I didn’t play games for years. I had a Playstation in 1996, and pretty much wore the controller down to a nub, but by the time the Playstation 2 came along, I’d moved on and outgrown video games – realistically, I was fourteen and had taken up wearing other things down to a nub.

 Since then, video games have matured, too, and now me and modern gaming are on a pretty even footing. Games have deeper plots, more involved ideas and more believable characters, and none of this is a bad thing. I might, however, have to knock gaming on the head once again, because this time around, it's all too real.

 Modern games are massive. Truly, staggeringly vast. “Red Dead Redemption”, “Far Cry 2” and the Grand Theft Auto series all take place in landscapes that would take the better part of a day to traverse on foot. And that’s exactly what’s wrong.

 Games are going for absolute realism in a way that nobody has attempted since Penn & Teller made “Desert Bus.” In Red Dead Redemption, you can ride for miles upon miles to reach a destination. Granted, there’s an option to skip straight to the end of your journey, but you won’t, because then you might miss one of the randomly-generated side missions along the way. So instead, you spend fifteen minutes with a detailed rear view of yourself galloping along on a horse, until you undergo the slightly crushing realisation that you’re playing a game that would be better titled “Horse Proctologist – Old West Edition.”

 Same with “Far Cry 2.” As a mercenary in a stunningly detailed African setting, you have to work around computer generated characters that are, I’ll admit, twice as clever as I am.

 A typical assault on the enemy involves hunkering down into the bushes, then creeping forward through the brush with agonisingly delicate movements, your eyes fixed on a lone, oblivious sentry at the roadside. You bite your lip, fearing the slightest noise will give you away; the crack of a twig, the rustle of a palm frond. You’re so close to the sentry you can smell his cigarette, watch beads of sweat on his skin, see the fabric of his shirt billowing in the hot African breeze. Wincing, you slide your machete from it’s sheath, going for the silent kill, already anticipating the hot stink of fresh blood in the balmy night air.

 Then someone wanders into the living room and asks what you’re playing, and if you want some pizza. Then the sentry turns around and machine guns you in the face. Twice. And you start again.

 Realism, in short, is in danger of going way too far. Riding a horse for miles and sneaking through foliage for hours just doesn’t seem like much fun.

 On the other hand, maybe realism just hasn’t gone far enough yet. I was in Ikea the other day, getting some stuff for work. No big deal. Two or three items. I got as far as the checkout, and due to an inspired act of shortsighted corporate twatery, there was only one till that was taking cash.

 Cash was all I had.

 There was a long, long queue.

 Resigning myself to a wait, I stood around patiently as the line crawled forwards at about the rate of a growing fingernail, surrounded by crying children because – of course – it was half-term and the kids were off school.

 After fifteen minutes of this, the woman two places ahead of me in the queue paid for her items with a credit card.

 It bears reiterating that there were probably a dozen checkouts that would have taken cards, but only one that was dealing in cash.

 At this point, if I could have opened a little drop-down window in my life and scrolled through a list of weapons, then used one of them to shatter that lady’s kneecaps, I probably would have.

 This is what videogames need to do – recreate real life in absolute, minute detail, but with fictional options thrown in.

 On paper, a game called “Ikea Shopper” sounds about as much fun as “Extreme Farm Hand” or “Virtual Ombudsman,” but think about it. A completely immersive, hyper-real simulation of your average trip to Ikea, but with the option to actually react the way you want to, which, if you’re anything like me, involves the urge to dismember the other customers by the time you’re at the first escalator.

 You could even make it more of a challenge by insisting that your in-game character can only use the items in his or her trolley. Imagine a game where you start off shopping, and eventually go completely native and start hunting the customers with crying toddlers, crawling through the vent system, lying in wait to spring out at them like “Alien” and stove their heads in with a tastefully minimalist lamp.

 It’d be brilliant.

 Or I’m just a dangerously unhinged psycho.

 Either way, video games either need to stop being so realistic, or start being so realistic that I can act out my shopping/murder fantasies.

Unconsciousness for the Masses

[Another oldie that nobody read at the time]

 Although it may have been superceeded in recent years by more flashy forms of sporting entertainment such as football, basketball and international paint drying, the sport which I hold closest to my heart is one which has never truly been forgotten.
And although it may have faded somewhat since the glorious heyday of it's most famous competitors, International Championship Sleeping is still a surprisingly popular event in many countries.
Invented in 1736 by the Earl of Snooze and quickly adopted throughout the fledgling British Empire, competitive sleeping was soon picked up as a popular hobby by many simply because of it's universal nature. Indeed, throughout the 19th century, unlicensed sleeping matches took place throughout the slums of London's East End, resulting in many arrests and a great deal more snoring fines.
It is a sport, also, that is not without it's legends. In 1901, Charles "Snoozy" Truscott took the first officially recognised sleeping title off of Timothy Bleary. This was, of course, in the days of bare-knuckle sleeping before today's modern safety measures had been put into practise.
In thirties America, black snoozemen like "Sleepy" Joe Gainesville and "Walking" Jack Somnus became pioneers and minor celebrities in the then-segregated Negro sleeping leagues.
(Many years later, of course, it would be revealed that "Walking" Jack Somnus' legendary somnambulism was all an act and that he'd actually just been going about his day to day tasks with his eyes mostly closed. He was stripped of his titles by the W.S.F and died in shame in 1986.)
Sleeping is also not without it's celebrity fans. Sure, Jack Nicholson may be a basketball fanatic and Kevin Costner has his baseball, but did you know that Gerald Ford was asleep for his entire term in office, from 1974-1977, only to finally awake triumphantly in the mid nineties?
Attempts to coerce George W. Bush into repeating this feat have, sadly, fallen short.
Of course, as with many modern sports, professional training, big name sponsorship and the hyper-competitive way of the modern world have, unavoidably, altered the modern game. Whereas in the golden era of sleeping, Babe "In the wood" Rutherford wowed fans by pointing sagely to his bed and promptly falling asleep in it for 72 years and nine months, modern super-sleepers have raised the bar to almost superhuman feats. The current world sleeping record holder, Tommy "The Doormat" King, has been asleep since four months before he was born, and turns a hundred and two next year.
Illness has also begun to dog the "World's Favourite Sport", as many recent scholars call into question the achievements of some of the more legendary sleepers, pointing out that, in all likelihood, it was not competitive and there was something deeply wrong with them. Many have argued, for example, that "Stumbles" McGee, the light-napping champion from 1916-1922, was in fact just an unfortunate narcoleptic, given to shouting "where am I?!" and "Who are you?!" at waiting reporters who often gathered to watch his lightning-quick changes from sleep to wakefulness and then back to the land of nod. It was, at the time, assumed that McGee was simply showboating for the crowd, but his tragic suicide whilst suffering from what were diagnosed as paranoid delusions of persecution left many unanswered questions which science is only now shedding light on.
Inevitably, drugs, too, have blighted modern sleeping, as they have so many sports. Who can forget then 1992 Barcelona Olympics when female sleeping hopeful Tong Bak Yong was caught at customs with 400 bottles of NightNurse and a syringe full of Red Bull for later? Truly a dark day for sport.
Still, International Sleeping is still with us, and many see a bright future, and a look at the current league table only goes to show why, with George Morning, Pete Noonan, and John Nyttol all poised for a blistering 2006, fighting for the World #2 spot, left open by his Holiness, the late John Paul II. I'll keep you posted.

 [I didn't, obviously.]

Hannibal Tiring

[This is an old piece, dug out from a website that nobody ever saw.]


 I've long suspected that by the time I'm thirty, two people will become billionaires.
Well, this is inevitable, but two people whom I can specifically predict will become billionaires.
The first is Matt Groening, who created a family of yellow doodles in the late eighties and now slaps them on every conceivable product known to man. I'm looking forward to The Simpsons Home Pregnancy Testing Kit, Flame Thrower and Electron Microscope, which may or may not come as an all-in-one product.
The other is George Foreman, who had a fairly successful and well publicised career punching people in the skull for years before turning his (presumably battered and flat-knuckled) hand to making grills. He now makes grills, larger grills, smaller grills, steamers, crispers, barbecues and Christ-knows-what-else.
Presumably, microwaves, ovens, fridge freezers and anything else that can alter the temperature of flesh will soon follow. Can the George Foreman Napalm Delivery System and Toaster Oven be far behind? Time will tell.
Still, judging by recent posters, someone else may soon join the list; author Thomas Harris.
I have a mild dislike for Harris, simply because he shares a name with one of my many cousins, who isn't a stupidly rich author, or even old enough to legally have sex, as far as I recall. Which is annoying for me, as it means I can't mooch off of my well-off relatives. And annoying for him, because he can't legally have sex yet.
In 1981, Harris wrote an excellent crime thriller entitled "Red Dragon", in which a twitchy FBI agent must catch a serial killer, and is forced to enlist the help of the monstrous and intellectually brilliant psychiatrist, Hannibal Lecter.
This novel was subsequently filmed in 1986 as "Manhunter", with Brian Cox as the re-namd Lecktor.
Nobody cared.
Harris then wrote a pretty-good novel entitled "The Silence of the Lambs", in which a nervous young FBI agent must catch a serial killer, and is forced to enlist the help of the monstrous and intellectually brilliant psychiatrist, Hannibal Lecter.
Ignoring the fact that this is such lazy, derivative writing that it's akin to writing a civil war novel in which a turbulent romance blossoms between Charlotte O'Hara and Chet Butler, the novel did well and was soon filmed as a phenomenally successful movie.
After a while, everyone forgot about Harris, so he decided to write a critically panned novel, "Hannibal", dealing with the now-escaped Lecter, which was turned into a critically panned film almost immediately.
In his down-time, Harris whined about how hard it is to write these books.
I daresay it is hard to write whilst riding around in your solid gold limo eating roast dodo and swimming in your money like Scrooge McDuck, but then I'm cynical.
Not to be deterred by the fact that nobody was impressed with either version of "Hannibal", Harris is back again with the prequel novel "Hannibal Rising", which got such a critical kicking in every review I read I almost wanted to jump through the page and tell the reviewer "Alright, he's had enough, leave it!" and guide him gently to the other side of the room.
On my way home from work the other day, I noticed a movie poster. "Coming soon: Hannibal Rising."
Wondering if there could possibly be any barrel left to scrape, I checked into these things and we can expect at least one more Lecter novel, apparently.
I'm not sure if this is official, or whether Harris just stood naked on his desk and shouted "I WANT MORE MONEY!!" and that his press secretary took this to mean there would be another book due soon.
The sad thing is, the public will eat it up, because the public tends to let people get away with quite a lot when it comes to lazy writing.
The worst example I can remember is the cartoon "Super Mario Brothers", which I wasn't a particular fan of, but seemed to be on a lot during my childhood.
In every episode, Mario and his hangers on would travel to some dimension or another, find out that the evil King Koopa was behind some sort of bad plot (this isn't my memory being faulty, the storylines sometimes actually were this half-assed) and then they'd foil him and catch him. As far as I recall, Mario never did the logical thing and beat his enemies unconscious with a length of pipe, as would befit a plumber, but this is not my biggest gripe.
At the end of every episode, with his plot foiled, King Koopa would be held captive by Mario and his entourage. Then, without fail, one of our heroes would give a long soliloquy and Koopa would use this as ample time to escape. Without fail, someone would then shout "Oh no, he's escaping into a Warp Zone!" and the whole tedious process would begin again next week, with everyone arriving in yet another dimension. It was never adequately explained how Mario and co. followed Koopa through a warp zone within the space of about five seconds, and yet in the intervening time Koopa had already enslaved the next dimension.
Even as a child, I remember finding the whole thing patently ridiculous. I was baffled as to how the writing team - if there was one - could be allowed to be so slack.
Alright, maybe you can lose a captive tyrant once by delivering an impassioned speech and taking your eye off him, but surely by the time it's happened seventeen straight times in a row you'd learn to tie him up or something. Or at least not to all stand around with your backs turned and your thumbs up your arses while Mario gives a sermon.
Despite my continuing annoyance at a fifteen year old plot device in a kids show, I remain fairly certain that nobody made their fortunes from the Mario cartoon.
I like to imagine all the writers were taken outside and summarily shot after the first series ended, but I have no proof.
However, Thomas Harris will make millions because everyone out there will buy "Hannibal Rising", and see the movie, and then buy the next book, which will probably be called "Hannibal Lecter and the Author's New Mansion", or something similar.
And that's annoying, not least because Harris isn't actually my cousin.

The Latest News from "Vagrant's Quarterly."

Wednesday 09/02/2011
Tucson, A.Z.

Well known hobo Travelin' Jack Steinway died last night in Arizona. He was 79.
Although not traditionally the glitziest profession, Jack was truly one of the leading lights of vagrancy throughout his long career. Perhaps he is best known for his unusual choice of instrument. Whilst many favour the harmonica or occasionally the guitar, Jack was known to travel most of his life with an elegant Grand Piano on his back, which at times led to much playful ribbing on the part of his contemporaries.
Born in Tennessee to his own parents, Steinway and his family were forced to, in his own words, "bend over backwards to make ends meet." Whether this referred to their literally making their feet touch their heads like a human donut, or to simultaneous, more metaphorical monetary goals was never made clear, but one thing was certain: Bending over backwards was a poor way to earn a living. Jack and his family would often stand on street corners for hours, flexing and contorting for all they were worth, only to walk away with a few meagre pennies from disinterested and usually baffled passers by.
At the age of fourteen, increasingly disillusioned by the family trade (he could find no other boys who would agree to a "family trade" with a failed junior contortionist), Jack struck out on his own and took a job as a bar tender in a strip club. Due to his wandering eyes and resultant shaky hands, Jack was soon fired due to spilling more alcohol than he poured, but not before he learned rudimentary piano from the jazz pianist who often accompanied the acts, "Keys" Lockwell.
Unfortunately, bad luck seemed to follow Steinway around, and as a result of a largely semi-literate public, Lockwell himself was soon fired from his post as people were uncomfortable with the sound of a strip club that offered "girls with a pianist."
Down on their luck, Lockwell and Steinway made a daring midnight raid on the club and came away with a piano and some rather fetching feathered boas, a species of snake now long extinct.
Having sold the boas to the local zoo, Jack and Keys decided to ride the rails to California in the hopes of better luck. As the junior member of the duo, Jack was given the job of carrying the concert grand piano that they had stolen the previous night. He would later recall, with his astute sense of description, that it was "god-damned heavy."
However, carrying the piano had an unexpected bonus; having spent years walking at an un-naturally reclined angle due to his mis-spent childhood, stooping under three tons of excess weight soon resulted in a miraculous posture correction.
By the time they reached California, Steinway was well on his way to becoming an accomplished pianist, but Lockwell had loftier ambitions and tempers began to fray. After an altercation over a woman, the two parted ways, vowing never to speak again. Lockwell apparently committed suicide that night by dropping a piano on himself, although police were always suspicious of this explanation and many questions were left unanswered.
Without the guiding influence of Lockwell, Jack soon went off the rails. Also, "Keys" Lockwell had possessed far greater financial acumen than Steinway, who was at once foolish with money and also phenomenally unlucky. On August 5th, 1945, he invested the few savings he had mustered in a fledgling Japanese electronics company based in Hiroshima. A shrewd move, but one which backfired spectacularly with the bombing of the city into atomic dust the day afterwards.
Finally deciding that he had been happiest when riding the rails, Steinway set off on a permanent career in hoboism. Despite the urgings of his contemporaries, he point-blank refused to learn a more portable instrument and obstinately carried his piano around the American South West well into his advanced years.
Indeed, the legend of Travelin' Jack Steinway was always just big enough that he could show up in a town and trade off of it in order to bum a drink, or a smoke, or, on several occasions, a complete spine transplant to replace his ludicrously compacted vertebrae.
Still, age and injury could not crush his spirit. When Hobo Monthly caught up with him last year, his trademarked wit was on show for all to see as he curtly remarked "What the f*ck do you want?!" before beating the reporter soundly about the head and neck with a bottle of Jack Daniels.
With his passing, the great American road loses one of it's most colourful figures. Long may he be remembered.
Edit: Antique grand piano for sale. Well worn. Offers welcome.

I'm Not Convinced

Why Science Needs to Stop Telling Me Obscure Things.

 Many people in the scientific community are often concerned with the seeming inability of laypeople to understand science. This ranges from things like homeopathy to the difference between mass and weight (how many people you know can elucidate the difference between a kilogram and a Newton?).
 Recently, an article I was reading was bemoaning the deterioration of the "original" Kilogram.
 All metric measurements, at least initially, were based on something physically real. There was an actual, defined "meter" at one point in time; a brass bar that was... well, a meter long.
 Over the years, we've gotten rid of the physical artefacts for everything except the Kilogram, which is a small metal cylinder that sits in a jar in Paris, doing very little except weighing a set amount. I'm not sure what else it does, although it may well be on Twitter.
 ["Kilogram01: Still sat here. Can anyone else smell onions? LOL"]
 Due to complicated atmospheric reasons, there is now a discrepancy between this original, master Kilogram and some of the other kilograms minted at the same time. (Basically, as I understand it, every time they're touched by human hands, their mass alters very very slightly, and this is throwing off some calculations at the quantum level.)
 This brings me to my point: How can science expect the public to get on-side when we're dealing with something so abstract?
 Let's look at it chonologically: Somebody in a Victorian steel mill made a cylinder. That cylinder was defined as the "master" Kilogram, from which all other kilograms would be decided.
 How did they decide what it weighed?!
 If someone at the steel mill, or smelting plant, or whatever it was, was feeling fruity, how do we know he didn't change the weight slightly before pressing?
 How do we know a kilo isn't ten times heavier than we think it is, and that they pressed the wrong button on the day and then bluffed it to save face?! Nobody would know.
 Following this, the magic cylinder that we're assured is a kilogram "because someone in France said so" has started to imperceptibly change mass. According to the BBC, the amount of change is equivalent to a single grain in a bag of sugar.
 A bag of sugar that weighs a kilogram.
 Unless it doesn't. Because it might not be a kilogram, it might just weigh the same as a cylinder that someone made a hundred years ago and SAID was a kilogram and everyone believed them. Except it won't weigh the same as that, because that kilogram's different now anyway. But not by much.
 You could go crazy thinking about these things.
 This, in short, is why people have trouble with science. You can only ask so many questions before someone in a lab coat throws up his hands (and probably some test tubes or something) and shouts "because it just fucking IS, alright?!"
 The meter I have less trouble with - it's now defined as the distance light travels in a tiny sliver of a second. That's okay, I trust light, I see it all the time.
 But another distance really starts to agitate me. "Planck's Length", named after German physicist Max Planck, is the smallest known distance.
 That's just made up, isn't it?! That's not a thing. Some German gets to go down in history for naming "the smallest possible distance" ?! Fine, I'll have a go. I've invented a new distance, "Haines' Distance", it's half a Planck's length.
 See?! That was easy.
 How's it's defined, you ask?! Well, however you define a Planck Length, divided by two.
 It's the same as when someone tells me that the universe is meant to be shaped like a saddle.
 I have literally no use for this information. None. It would only prove important if I were somehow transformed into a colossal, Galactus-like entity whose form spanned a trillion galaxies, and I was looking for something to put on my space-horse.
 I'm not convinced it's real information at all. Someone could have just had a slow day editing "Science" or "Nature" and just decided to throw these things out there, safe in the knowledge that nobody would call bullshit.
 Science has fallen out of favour with the public in direct proportion to how much use we can see it being in day to day life. This is not to say it has no use in day-to-day life; hospitals, transport, TV, radio, internet, agricultural methods - all figured out by science. But, with the possible exception of medicine, all figured out a while back.
 A poster might tell you that the new Toyota has lower emissions than any previous model, but that's sort of hard to get excited about. The man on the street isn't getting excited about parts per million of carbon in the atmosphere; he's thinking "yeah, but it's 2011, shouldn't they be able to make it fly by now?!"
 Tiny, incremental advances in science are being made all the time, but none of it involves the big, showy stuff like putting a man on the moon. Of all the disciplines, only biology seems to have had the right idea in recent years, with some of the genetic stuff. Sticking an ear on the back of a mouse and cloning a sheep and whatnot. Admittedly, all sheep look alike, so this could have been another example of bluffing by someone at a press conference, but the mouse with the ear on it's back definitely got people talking. (The mouse itself could hear everything that was being said for sixty miles in any direction, and was apparently quite embarassed about it all.)
 Perhaps biology has it easier than the rest of the disciplines; physics is notoriously complicated, mathematics has no appeal to people who aren't good with numbers, both rely heavily on algebra, astronomy asks us to care about things that are ocurring unimaginable distances away, often millions of years ago, and so it goes on. Human beings are at least biological entities, so that one's a smidge easier to grasp.
 What science really needs to do with any discovery in any discipline is explain to people why it's important. The public has lost touch with science, and needs to be sat down and talked to honestly about it.
 Take the technological singularity -  the point in time where we hypothetically invent a machine that's as smart as a person, or smarter. From that point, computers can re-invent themselves, improving their own flaws, getting smarter with every generation, until within a staggeringly short space of time, machines are near-omniscient.
 That's exciting. And not just exciting. It's pants-shittingly terrifying.If we invent a human-level artificial intelligence in January, by summer we could have SKYNET on our hands. Household appliances would be much, much more intelligent than you are, and the worst part is, they'd know it.
 The public, by and large, don't care about this potential crisis because they're unaware.
 So the next time someone makes a breakthrough in logic gates or programming, and scientists gather round to congratulate one of their own, maybe it should be explained in different terms to the public.
 "SCIENTIST FINDS WAY TO STOP YOUR SUPER-INTELLIGENT TOASTER MURDERING YOU", for example. Then people would sit up and take notice, because it's immediately obvious how it can directly affect them, and to a lesser extent, toast. The little advances benefit us, we just don't appreciate how without being told.
 Every so often, wrong-headed attempts are made. Recently, a nano-guitar was produced; an infinitismally tiny guitar with moving strings, about the size of a single cell of human blood.
 This clearly served no purpose except to illustrate what can be done with nanotechnology these days, but nobody I know was impressed. It's a guitar. You can't play it, or hear it. Or even see it, because it's so small.
This isn't the way to get people excited about nanotech.
 Build a swarm of nanobots that can devour a horse like pirahna; then people will start talking. Doesn't even have to be a horse. Start small, with a bee or an ant or a wasp. Make it a wasp. Nobody likes wasps.
 Make a swarm of nanobots that can devour a wasp like a shoal of pirahna, and everyone will be a) impressed and b) thinking about how that could eliminate the need to run around flapping their arms when a wasp is nearby.
 I appreciate that science isn't supposed to be big and showy. It's staid and resolute and dogged, and that's what makes it work.
 But once in a while, how about showing people why it's important instead of discussing what are often perceived as hypotheticals?


[I looked up what makes a kilogram, incidentally. It's a thousand grams, a gram being defined as the weight of a cubic centimetre of water. Before you ask, a centimetre is one-hundredth of a metre, which is the distance light travels in a vacuum in 1/299,792,458 of a second.]

A Punch in the Face(book.)

 Well, I'm giving up on following boxing.
 Not for humanitarian reasons; I was never one who intellectualised sport very much. I like boxing because I like watching grown men beat the living piss out of each other, preferably in easy-to-watch, three-minute chunks.
 I'm also not giving up because of the depressing parade of ex-boxers I see on TV, although that's pretty off-putting. Evander Holyfield is so old, steroidal and mumbly that last time I saw him interviewed I thought Sly Stallone had started blacking up. Ricky Hatton, meanwhile, has ballooned so shockingly that I'm pretty sure he has Han Solo frozen in carbonite somewhere in his house.
 It's not even the baffling and frustrating plethora of titles; the WBA, the WBC, WBO, IBO, IBA and IBF all have different champions and different ways of picking them. These range from the fairly sensible (the Klitschko brothers hold the WBO, WBC, IBO and IBF heavyweight titles between them, having beaten all challengers so far) to the slightly surreal (David Haye scored a points victory over that big bloke from Mordor to win the WBA belt, presumably then allowing his opponent to return to his thousand-year slumber) to the totally-ignored. (The IBA top five Welterweight contenders are currently Barry "Cillit BANG" Scott, Jesse Owens, Tinky-Winky, George Burns and a wheelie bin. The sixth place contender is me.) Still, I love the sport and pound-for-pound and aggregate rankings help sort through these things.
 What finally put me off boxing, oddly, was social networking.
 For the last few weeks, I've been noticing a disturbing trend of suggestions on my facebook page.
 "Joe Calzaghe: Many people who like this also like The Chris Moyles Show."
 ...Really?!
 The Chris Moyles Show is, for me, more unpleasant than having convicted sex offenders rape my ears with sandpaper condoms on. It's the aural equivalent of being kicked in the balls by the Chief Punt-Master of the International Ball-Kicking Federation, Steel Toe Division.
 I'm not a fan, is what I'm saying.
 But somehow, by being a boxing fan, it seems to be at least tacitly implied that I enjoy the radio broadcasts of a talentless cunt-monkey who seems genetically designed to curb the population explosion. Listening to the Chris Moyles show depresses me to the point of impotence and also inspires bile-spitting, homicidal rage every time his team of blithering, shit-gobbling sycophants applaud his mind-numbing, desperate attempts at humour. There are people out there hunting for bigfoot who get closer to their quarry than Moyles does when he's looking for a punchline, or even anything to say that doesn't shred my nerves like a heard of pigs being slaughtered outside a home for the proufoundly disabled while the residents hold a gurning contest and scrape their nails down a blackboard en masse.
 Still, because I like Joe Calzaghe, someone out there assumed I was a fan.
 Then there's the aforementioned Ricky Hatton, one of the more exciting fighters of his generation. A brutal swarmer with a knack for piling constant pressure onto an opponent before breaking through with devastating knock-down power.
 Many who like him also like "YOU SHLAAAG."
 I don't even know that that is.
 Presumably, many people who like Ricky Hatton also like shouting things that aren't words in public. By implication, Ricky Hatton's biggest fans are not boxing fans, or native Mancunians, but tourettes sufferers with a slight lisp.
 This, in short, is why I'm turning my back on boxing. It's not that I don't like it, it's just that, according to Facebook, I can't be a true fan unless I'm shouting mysoginist abuse in a Sean Connery accent whilst listening to shit radio.
 And that all seems a bit much, frankly.