Alien Spaceship discovered in Tipton




Artist's impression of the Alien space ship



  

Breaking news from the sleepy hamlet of Tipton

Today, it was announced that an alien space craft had been unearthed in the used car lot of 'Mr Mugumbo’s Used Car Lot Emporium'. In Mr Mugumbo's own words: “I had occasion to be rewinding a particularly recalcitrant speedometer when I espied an extra-terrestrial craft residing on a pile of bricks in the corner of my used car lot. On further inspection I perceived that the object was made of a peculiarly tinted, non-terrestrial, eerily glinting, metal- clearly not of this world. Scorch marks surrounded the craft; bleak testament to its violent pyrotechnic landing. Indeed, as I advanced, with caution, I could make out eldritch markings, no doubt carved by outré beings from an advanced alien civilisation hailing from a distant galaxy far, far away……(steady, Mugumbo). In the failing light I saw etched in base relief: 'Ford Tipex'. What could these alien preternatural glyphs purport and reveal? It suddenly occurred to my racing, febrile, pyretic imagination: what if the alien being was resident, clutching the controls of this highly advanced interplanetary craft? I peeked within and was startled to observe a hideous alien creature. Not only was the alien present, but he had taken on the rubicund form of the local, itinerant (tis surely an oxymoron), homeless inebriate, ‘Filthy Eric’. Mayhap this transformation was an attempt to allay our mortal fears and to clothe their alien countenance in familiar garb in order not to evoke consternation and loathing (too late). Perhaps their original form was so bizarre, so outlandish, that it would elicit paroxysms of terror in mere earthlings?

A loud Parrrrrp! emanated from the spacecraft and a strange unearthly odour pervaded, prevailed and assailed my nostrils. Could it be that the alien life form was trying to communicate through the medium of olfaction? Sensing my confusion, the advanced being (for it is it) modified its approach and began to speak in a slurred metallic monotone: “Ya me bessie mate, I love ya. Go on gissus 20 quid for a pack of Special Brew and 20 fags.”  What could this mean? I confess I struggled with the alien utterance. The alien then offered up a cunningly fashioned flask and beckoned for me to imbibe the elixir contained therein. Could it confer eternal life? I drank deep of the draught. My head began to spin and my senses began to cloud. Later that day I awoke totally naked draped upon the alien vessel. My head throbbed abominably and my arse ached as if a thousand gypos were ensconced and encamped in my lower colon (arse, big sore arse). I could only infer that I had been ‘anally probed’. The extra-terrestrial creature was nowhere to be seen.  I could only surmise that he had returned to his distant planet many thousands of light years away. Would he ever return one day, with my wallet? Only time will tell………..”        



Alien in the guise of 'Filthy Eric'

Japanese sniper found on Mars

A slope with his rifle at a slope

Whilst viewing Mars with his 20 inch reflecting telescope, Mr Iphone Mugumbo made a startling discovery. Standing clearly on the Martian landscape was a distinct figure of a Japanese sniper carrying his rifle at a slope. In Mr Mugumbos own words:

"I was completely dumbfounded and disconbobulated. Here, clearly before my eyes, I could see a sniper of his 'Majesties Imperial Army'. Even though the soldier was of small stature, I could easily pick out his buck teeth and thick pebble glasses. Later that day I watched as he re-enacted the 'Rape of Nanking', thereafter he seemed to take great delight in ceremoniously beheading a rock with his Samurai sword."

Speculation has been rife about how a Japanese sniper could have travelled to Mars considering the technology of the 1940s. However, Professor Nintendo of Modern Nip and Slope studies thinks it highly plausible considering the advanced state of wok technology in the Imperial Japan of 1942. "Essentially the technology enabling wok design and building is no different from building a space craft capable of inter-planetary flight"' When asked to expand on his thesis, the good professor feigned a grand mal and bit his tongue clean orf in a fit of pique.   

Conjecture to why the filthy dirty Japs would send a sniper to Mars has revealed a set of highly plausible scenarios as outlined below:

Plausible Scenario 1. The sniper could have been on a routine flight to Tokyo but got lost.

Plausible Scenario 2. It could have been planned as pre-emptive strike to prevent the  Americans from colonising Mars. If and when they arrived they would be confronted with an appropriately armed Japanese sniper ready and willing to dispense mayhem and consternation amongst the colonists.

But how could a Japanese sniper subsist on a cold, almost airless, waterless, planet without expiring? Apparently Mars is not as forbidding as originally thought. Water not only exists in the arid polar regions but is also present just under the surface thus allowing our Nip to cultivate a rather hardy variety of rice. Furthermore, an extensive KFC franchise has just opened up in the 'Argyre Basin'.

On hearing that a Japanese sniper was ensconced in number 23, Tharsis Rise, the world leader, Mr Ras Putin, vowed to send a space ship sporting a 40 megaton nuclear warhead to obliterate the nasty nip.   

God speed, Soyuz 97! 

An artist's impression of the Nip's space craft. Note the aerodynamic lines and handles for booster rockets

         

  

Flaxen Saxon's Inspirational Quote of the Day

 Give a man a match, and he'll be warm for a minute, but set him on fire, and he'll be warm for the rest of his life   

Gravity

Who is the greater, now that's a thought

Gravity, we take it for granted, we really do- but was is it, really? The concept was first given a sound rational and mathematical basis by Sir Isaac Newton in his Magnus Opus, ‘Principia’, 1687. But it was not always this way.

The ancient Greeks had their own ideas of why objects moved. The Greek/Macedonian philosopher, Aristotle of the 4th century BC, had worked out a system based on pure thought and a little empirical observation. Aristotle had some very strange ideas, many of which were not questioned for nearly two thousand years- such was the authority of this Great Man. Aristotle's concept of motion is very odd to the modern mind and follows naturally on from 'Aristotelian metaphysics'. To fully understand the concept of motion in Aristotelian terms requires a thorough drenching in Aristotelian metaphysics, a chore I have no intention of attempting here, so a brief summary concerning Aristotle's 'notions on motions' will have to do. According to Aristotle, motion on earth was due to the application of force- not an unreasonable and a correct supposition. Without an applied force there can be no motion. Why an object continued to move after the applied force was removed bothered the ancient Greeks. The concept of inertia did not occur to them. Aristotle believed that everything was composed of four basic elements: earth, water, air and fire. Amongst these elements like attracted like. Thus if you held out a rock and dropped it, the rock would fall because it was attracted to 'like', the bigger rock, the earth. His next class of explanation concerned the movement of the 'heavenly bodies.' Remember, Aristotle, like most ancients, thought the earth remained stationary and that the sun and other heavenly bodies moved around the earth in perfect circle. The movement of these objects was caused by the 'Prime Mover', the ultimate artificer, which we would equate with a deity. As the 'Prime Mover' was by definition, perfect, the motion was perfect and the perfect geometric conception for the Greeks was a circle. I will not delve into the ancient concept of motion any longer, except to say it was extraordinary wrong but extraordinary influential for many centuries.     

Isaac Newton worked out the laws and concept of motion which lay folk recognise as modern and it was he who proposed gravitational force to explain motion on earth and in the heavens. Newton's concepts did not arise from an intellectual vacuum and his work was influenced by eminent antecedents such as Kepler, Copernicus and Galileo. Simply stated, gravity is an attractive ‘force’ between two bodies dependant on relative mass and the distance between the two bodies. As mass increases so does the gravitational force of that mass. The attractive force between two bodies decreases as the distance between the bodies increases. Newton deduced that the decrease in attraction follows the inverse square rule. Or in other words, doubling the distance decreases the force by a factor of four. Gravity keeps us firmly planted and explains the motions of the moon, planets and even the sun with a high degree of predictability. Gravity is considered one of the four, fundamental physical forces in nature. We feel gravity on earth as a primary force because in relation to us feeble humans, the earth is very large.

Using his concept of gravity, Newton was able to provide an explanation for the motions of the planetary bodies which proved astonishingly accurate. But there was a problem which puzzled Newton and his learned contemporaries. How could two bodies separated by a great distance experience attraction? What was the mechanism involved? How could the sun 'detect' the earth and 'pull' it toward itself? Although Newton was able to describe the effects of gravity, he failed to understand it and never proposed a mechanism of action.

According to Newton, the laws governing motion and gravity were universal and applied to all bodies of mass regardless where they sat in the cosmos. The forces acting on an apple falling from a tree were essentially the same for the moon orbiting the earth. Newton was able to describe motion with the precision of a Swiss watch, or so he thought.

The Newtonian world view was shattered by an unassuming patent office clerk in the 1900s. Einstein's theory, of 'General Relativity' proposes that gravity is not a force at all but the consequence of mass warping space-time. Mass causes space to bend and the 'bent space' determines how mass moves. The greater the mass, the greater space is bent. This is not an intuitive concept, especially as most folk envisage space as not having any discernable  properties. Space is supposedly empty, isn't it? And to make things more interesting, mass also affects time as well. Thus mass, time and space are interrelated phenomena. Space consists of three dimensions and time simply adds a further, fourth dimension. Although, difficult to contemplate, Einstein's 'Theory of Relativity' has proven the best model we have to explain reality. The best analogy is represented in the 'rubber sheet' model represented below. As you can see, a large round object is placed in the centre of a tethered rubber sheet. This object causes the sheet to bend. Another object placed on the sheet will fall toward the dip in the sheet and therefore be 'attracted' to the large object.

a

Is this reality? Not really

Of course this simple illustration only utilises two dimensions. In the real situation we have to factor in at least two further dimensions and perhaps more. An explanation of why mass causes space-time to warp requires a consideration of the concept of 'stress-energy tensor'. A discussion of the physics and sadly, mathematics, is beyond the remit of a simple blog post. For those endowed with an adventurous intellectual spirit, I advise a Google search.

So there you have it, gravity is both subtle and weird, just like this blog.

    

The Ballad of Lugless Douglas

The Ballad of Lugless Douglas

 by Oscar Smiled



Can you hear me, Dougie?

 

              He wore his scarlet shell suit,
              Stained with beer and food,
              And nicotine stained his hands
              When they found him in the road,
              The poor man had lost an ear,
              And the bloody stump did exude.

              He tottered amongst the drunken men,
              An earhole rent and tore;  
              A knotted hanky was on his head,
              An orifice spewing gore;
              But I never saw a man
              Spewing forth such bright red ichor.

              I never saw a man who bled
             With such wistful aplomb
             Upon the street that night
             And nowhere a soothing balm,
             Yet at every pump of blood that vent
             A bloody mess did he become.

             He walked, with staggered step,
             Within a world of pain,
             And wondered where his ear had gone                                                                             
             It had disappeared down the drain,
             When a low voice whispered so,
            ‘Dougie will never hear again.’

             Dear me! the poor man
             Suddenly began to reel,
            And Dougie’s ear had been struck orf
            With the finest burnished steel;
            And through the red mist,                
            The stump appeared like fresh cut veal.

            Don’t feel sorry for Dougie       
            For Dougie has been a sinner
            Penance did not abide in him
           And thus his ear became a rat’s dinner,
           A fate he truly deserved,
           The fate of a severed pinna.

"There is only one thing worse than having a big fat arse and that is having no arse at all"

Flaxen the Estate Agent tackles a difficult encounter with characteristic aplomb

In the office of the 'Head Estate Agent', Mr Ferrettamer III.

Mr Ferrettamer III, in repose

"Well Flaxen, I think you have a had a good start, a few minor quibbles aside. On the positive side, most vendors like your no nonsense practical approach to problem solving and your negotiating skills are second to none. On the debit side, not all the people viewing your properties get to go home. It appears that up to 1in 3 of the 'viewers' completely vanish off the face of the earth. Your explanation that they have simply fallen through a rent in the space-time continuum seems plausible. Miss Scrotybottom says she is enjoying her recently acquired 2 bed bijou basenette type feature property with engaging views across the adjacent sewerage works which you sold to her last Friday but is completely nonplussed by the locked room with runes scraped in blood on the door. I engaged Professor Mugumbo from the University of West Tipton and he had this to say, and I quote: "We have a very interesting series of West Saxon runes. Although they seem subject to insular affectation, the meaning is very clear to me. In essence it reads- "None shall enter here. This room contains the remains of two score of my fallen enemy, not including the succulent bits devoured by my trusty wolf, Loki". Well Flaxen, can you throw any light on the situation. An explanation relying on esoteric physics will simply not do".   

Flaxen, resplendent in his byrnie of brass and iron regarded Mr Ferrettamer with his single, baleful, blue eye and retorted thusly: "Who dares question the affairs of Flaxen, king of the Tipton Saxons. Impudent wretch! I will gather my war band and burn his garth to the ground. All shall perish by the sword, Arse, big Fat Arse, Biter. None shall escape my wrath!"

"Or perhaps you could go round to the house and furnish Miss Scrotybottom with a key to the room."

"I'll pop down there later today after reviewing the contract for Mr Pindleberry's property and after my 3 o'clock viewing of 2 Winston Terrace......" 

At that moment, Loki the Maltese Terrier, emitted a low growl and pounced on Ferrettamer's ankles. He tried to shake off the tenacious terrier, but to no avail. Finally, in frank despair and desperation he reached for the marble paperweight ubiquitously poised upon his leatherette feature desk. He raised the figurine, a tasteful rendition of Michelangelo's David, although some critics gave it a severe panning for not bringing out the quintessential boldness of the original piece, difficulties of working with the medium and the problem of blending texture and light, notwithstanding. Also the cock was deemed overlarge, rampant and inconsistent with the original due to the absence of a prepuce. I've digressed. Ferrettamer was poised to bring down the aforementioned paperweight upon the skull of the persistent beast, when......As if in a drunken reverie, Flaxen reached for his Danish double headed war axe, Twat Cruncher and with one mighty blow, split Ferrettamer in twain, from breastbone to coccyx. The pieces toppled to the floor and Loki immediately grasped the lighter of the two supine torsos and began to crunch on an exposed lumbar vertebrae with unrestrained relish.    

Next week, Flaxen loses his car keys and has to catch the bus.

The Elixir of Life

Do you want to live forever? Be careful what you wish for. Henrietta Lack has immortality, of sorts. Pieces of this unremarkable lady can be found growing in labs all over the globe. In 1951 Henrietta was dying from ovarian cancer when an enterprising physician removed cells from the tumour and placed them in a flask where they continued to grow and grow. In fact they have never stopped growing. Her cells were rebranded as He La and exported everywhere, for profit.  What is remarkable about cells growing you may ask? Aren’t cells supposed to grow? Well yes, cells grow. If they are sensible they mature and then stop growing. Eventually cells senesce and die- cells are programmed to die. Each cell has an internal clock which counts the number of divisions it undergoes. With each division, a new cell is born and after a while, and after a regulated number of divisions, the mother cell dies. He La cells (for it is none other) have a clock with a broken main spring. As long as we provide the necessary nutrients and conditions, these cells will continue to replicate. Like all cancer cells, Henrietta’s cells are non-compliant to normal regulatory processes and represent the first ever immortalised cell lineage.

He La cells have become the cornerstone of biological research and have contributed to a number of breakthroughs including the successful search for a polio vaccine. It is estimated that He La cells have been cited in more than 70,000 research papers.

Why we age and subsequently die is a great biological mystery. Over the past few decades researchers have diligently applied their skills to uncover the ‘last great mystery’. Imagine the rewards and riches which await success. Could the Alchemist’s dream of producing the ‘elixir of eternal life’ be within our grubby, grasping mitt? Probably not. Tis an extremely complex conundrum and we are no closer to producing an answer to the question why we age and die than we have of manufacturing gold from lead. The fundamental mechanisms underpinning cell obsolescence and death are poorly enumerated and those mechanisms that have been identified are understood, poorly, if at all. Of course we could apply the engineer’s maxim: ‘Don’t understand, just fix’. A great approach when considering mechanical devices. When applied to highly complex biological systems the consequences are highly unpredictable. Mrs Shelley should have known better.

The He La story has taken another turn, unrelated to complex biology. When the immortal cells were removed from the moribund Henrietta and grown in a dish 60 decades ago it was done so without the dying woman’s permission. Her family have fought a long battle over the years for acknowledgement and recognition of Henrietta’s important contribution to science. A whole raft of ethical and legal issues are involved. This is not a topic I would like to become enmeshed in- tis a very tangled weave indeed. In this instance a voluntary code of practice has been worked out which is acceptable to surviving family members and the scientific community, although no one bothered to consult me. There is nothing binding in the legal sense and Henrietta’s family have never received money for their dead relative’s legacy.

In Greek mythology, the Dawn goddess, Eos, becomes infatuated with the mortal Tithonus. She asks Zeus to confer the gift of immortality on Tithonus so she can enjoy his beauty, forever. However, foolish Eos, perhaps distracted and infatuated with love, forgets to ask Zeus to bestow eternal youth on the young man. Tithonus ages but never dies, succumbing to the ailments of old age, but never its fulfilment. Eos becomes bored with the boorish senilic (is this a real word?) old man and locks him in a room to pass an eternal declining dotage until the end of time. He begs for death but eventually his cries become a whisper and are heard, no more......  

The woods decay, the woods decay and fall,
The vapours weep their burthen to the ground,
Man comes and tills the field and lies beneath,
And after many a summer dies the swan.
Me only cruel immortality
Consumes: I wither slowly in thine arms,
Here at the quiet limit of the world,
A white-haired shadow roaming like a dream
The ever-silent spaces of the East,
Far-folded mists, and gleaming halls of morn.

Yet hold me not for ever in thine East:
How can my nature longer mix with thine?
Coldly thy rosy shadows bathe me, cold
Are all thy lights, and cold my wrinkled feet
Upon thy glimmering thresholds, when the steam
Floats up from those dim fields about the homes
Of happy men that have the power to die,
And grassy barrows of the happier dead.
Release me, and restore me to the ground;
Thou seest all things, thou wilt see my grave:
Thou wilt renew thy beauty morn by morn;
I earth in earth forget these empty courts,
And thee returning on thy silver wheels.

                                                                Tithonus- Lord Tennyson