maxradical

I am home having an excellent night. The girlfriend had never seen Hot Shots and I was sober, and both problems have been resolved.

I'm working on my writing for which I am actually getting paid now, which is beyond awesome. I am occasionally annoyed by the DVORAK I'm learning, but I am a future techno-person and refuse to be throttled by a keyboard designed to stop secretaries from breaking typewriters.

These open mics are a scary window into a world of crazy, obsessed, brilliant and pathetic people - like the internet should be, filtered for those who can actually spell.

I'm upping sticks and moving to better lodgings, internet wise, with an address that you may or may not be able to remember:

lukemckinney.org

I'll see you there, hope you'll still swing by and shoot the breeze.

412 Spadina Avenue

Should you find yourself here, your best bet is to try eating those plants in the window.

The Thai Bangkok is a lot more decorated than the usual chinatown quick-lunch joints, as it actually has decorations. Wall paneling, paintings and enough (carved) elephants to keep Tony Jaa happy for a month. Then you notice the dirty spots and peeling paint around the edges but for a moment you had the impression you were somewhere nice for your six dollar lunch: enjoy that impression because it's all your money is buying you.

Despite the themed trimmings this eatery does exceptionally poorly on the nationality test (fraction of customers from the same culture as the food), with a total of absolutely zero Thai present (counting the fact that even the visible staff weren't Thai, the place earns negative points). It was pretty easy to check the home country of the eaters too - for most of the meal I was the only one there and I'm Irish. At lunchtime in a spadina/college restaurant that's just tragic.

Hungry and hurried I ordered lunch special #1 (hard to get any faster than that) and it's a damn good thing I did because lunch special #1, at lunchtime, took twenty minutes to arrive. If I'd ordered anything else I might still be there. The upside was that the extra time allowed me to fully appreciate the highly excitable menu:


That's three exclamation marks! This is the most excited menu of all time!


Whoever wrote this urgently needs to be sedated. Anyone who finds the concept of rice coming with Thai food exciting might explode if they see something truly astonishing, like a window or a barking dog.

I honestly cannot review the spring roll because I inhaled it, having become so hungry my body was trying to photosynthesize or absorb the tablecloth through osmosis. This lessened my crippling need for food enough to appreciate the hot and sour soup, much to my regret. When the most basic starter possible for any chinatown restaurant takes twenty minutes to prepare you expect something special. Hand polished tofu with beansprouts plucked by specially trained experts, carefully ladled into a platinum bowl and mixed precisely by multimillion dollar perfectionist robots. You do not expect a bag of starch dumped in hot water by the chef during a break in Judge Judy. The spicy beef was an an exemplar in lazy food, a paragon of a spicy meal made wrongly: tough lumps of meat with chunks of flavourless plastic masquerading as peppers glued together by a thick and utterly effortless sauce. I don't mean effortless as in "the masterful chef effortlessly created a wonderful taste", I mean "the person who happens to work in the kitchen expended absolutely no effort in making this". Turning the plate over I expected to find "Screw you, stupid foreigner, you don't know real food anyway" written on the bottom. Of course I didn't - they had no need to waste ink when they'd clearly expressed that message in the food.

Every time I see this place it's deserted. Keep it that way.

478 Dundas St


I can't read a word or even see inside - let's eat here!

It scores highly on the "foreign restaurant" stakes since it
a) does not appear to have even a letter of English to its name* and
b) it's backed off the street, looking pretty shady so that
c) basically it's the kind of place a lone hero enters and has to fight the entire clientele, after throwing a knife-wielding chef through the plate glass fronting.

* - It actually has an English sign, but overhanging the pavement so far out you can only see it from the other side of the street. The idea is perhaps that once the English-speakers venture too close, they are already lost.


Rong-Hua-man cursed. With that silver station wagon in the way, he would never get the Rong-mobile back into the RongCave

Any ethnic restaurant can be judged on the nationality test: how many of the diners are actually from that culture. Fukian snacks scores over one hundred percent there - not only was every single guest chinese, they were such Fukian regional chinese that even Xin (a chinese national fluent in both mandarin and cantonese) could not penetrate a word of their dialogue beyond "Yep, that's heavily accented Fukian dialect all right".

Another element of the "small chinese restaurant feel" is how food is the priority. The ONLY priority. The restaurant consists of a kitchen for food-making, store rooms for food-keeping, and then some space for those troublesome people who keep arriving and taking it. As you squeeze past the counter and walk through a store room to get to the bathrooms, you realise they're only there because they are absolutely legally required - though they are usably clean unlike the excellent-food-but-nothing-else Kom Jug Yuen around the corner.

The sweet and sour lychee pork was good since it was actually sweet and sour, not the sugarised-syrup meat chunks that often get passed under that name. Xin ordered some strange salty-water-and-little-clam stuff, but assures me that it was quite well done salty-water-and-little-clam stuff. I couldn't tell, because it was pretty much salty water. And little clams. Service was nice and fast, with the usual chinatown "What do you want right here now go" brusqueness rather than the "How may we help you" speed some may expect. I enjoy this confidence because it's well earned: these people know their food is good and if you don't want it, you're welcome to not come back.

This restaurant does exactly what it claims to but nothing else. If you want good cheap Fukian food it's the place to go - if you want anything else at all, it isn't.

Don Guiseppe relaxed. With the ear of their leader nailed up as a warning sign, the Metal Men would bother his legitimate business no more.

In the chilled district of Kensington Market, you'll find the second hippy-est cafe in Toronto - Moonbean Coffee. (The absolute hippy-est is around the corner, the Kensington Cafe, which wins the title with it's awesome swingseats).


Moonbean has so many coffees, and so little space, it's not actually possible to fit them all in one shot. However the top row are flavoured coffee beans and therefore do not count.

Coffee is very important to me, without it I would stumble around known only as "That guy who falls asleep when asked who he is". Moonbean provide an excellent and ever changing selection of beans for home grinding, and when I find myself choosing between blends like "Devils Brew" and "Colossus" I know I have found a business that understands my morning coffee needs exactly. The cafe has all the advantages of the non-chain coffee shop, a sense of individuality and character. The occasionally cramped seating and wobbly tables is an acceptable price for the fun feel and unique clientele. Plus I love coffeeshops where 'Grande' is just the title of a mexican-themed wrestler.



I'm making modern art pieces. I call this work "Sleep is for pussies"

You have to visit once if only to try the 'Herculatte'. Bear in mind that the Godfather Marlon Brando could beat someone to death with their own severed arm for preparing his latte incorrectly, and he would still look girly for having ordered a latte. But Moonbean do a good job of manlifying this milky drink by serving it in a mug the size of a childs face and pumping three shots of espresso in there. If one of these doesn't wake you up, please report directly to your nearest Emergency Room and inform them that you are dead.

I just saw a scrawled ad for "Anti-Police Brutality Day - meet at xxxx at 1 pm!" in the bathroom of my local hippy-cafe. I can think of no better way to avoid police brutality than have a large number of people who hate the police gathering in a downtown city location.

I love zombie-stuff so much my girlfriend has developed an automatic eye-rolling-'tch!' response just from hearing the word. I could confidently defend my home, place of work and favourite coffee shop from undead assault. A while back an editor couldn't run my Zombie Emergency Procedures because of a book already released on the subject, so of course I immediately tracked it down and read it.



Now I'm pissed. Getting a piece rejected because of this thing is like losing a marathon to a crippled cat. This book is a stiff, shambling, lifeless horror not unlike the zombies it portrays. I don't know what gigantic practical joke over at Three Rivers Press convinced Mr Brooks that a book about fighting zombies should be serious, but the result is a section on "Setting a zombie on fire" so boring it makes me want to cry. If you'd told me that was possible last week I would have laughed at you. Now, I can only weep.

Understanding how this could have happened becomes a lot easier when you realise that fully 5% of the book is given over to advertising his 'serious novel', World War Z. Which I won't be reading. Painfully hilarious is the introductory section which spends a full page explaining that this book won't deal with silly "movie zombies" - you know, the ENTIRE REASON this book has a market. Nope, Mr Brooks thinks its far better to stick with his own overspecific and very restrictive zombie description for the entire work. To understand how much he's missed the point, understand: he spends half a chapter pointing out why chainsaws and shotguns are a poor choice of anti-zombie weapon.

I'm donating my copy of this tragedy to the local library, so that anyone else who wants to check it out doesn't have to buy it. Because purchasing this from the 'humour' section of a bookstore would be funding the biggest categorisation error since the Titanic was labeled "unsinkable".

This guy depresses me. He can build working firearms out of scrap metal and obviously can't aim worth a damn. With skills like that he could have gown up to found a new A-Team, but instead he's a dumbass arrested for a crime he did commit.

Truly there is nothing more tragic than wasted potential.

The fine folks over at Cracked.com recently highlighted Protest Warrior - a group of right-wingers who turn up to counter-protest liberal demonstration. They also have access to a minimalist artistic genius, with a logo that has no blonde hair at all and still manages to be the most Aryan thing I've ever seen.


"Look, I'm not saying the Jews had it coming or anything but..."

You've got to respect a group dedicated to bringing the glory and intellectualism of internet forum arguments into the real world, hunting down people they disagree with and shouting "No it isn't!" Aside from simply existing, there are a few more mistakes they've made:

1. They're not helping the conservative cause.

It turns out that there isn't a binary "Right/wrong" switch in every argument. Saying any particular thing is correct or incorrect simply because of which political category you jam it into is like judging medicine based on what colour it is - wonderfully simple, saves a lot of thought, and will fuck you up right quick. Having these guys on your side is like having Ann Coulter or a diarrhetic chimpanzee; they're eager to help, they've got lots to contribute, and your best bet is to lock them in a cupboard and hope no-one hears them. This playground contrarianism is not helping those conservatives who have sensible things to say.

2. Authority figures do not like them.

Some of their "after action reports" (the "action" normally consists of being ignored or shouted at) talk of sharing nods and understanding with the police and security guards present, not realising that those people hate them. Think about it: You're a peace officer assigned to a protest. Would you prefer

a) A group of liberal hippy protestors moving in an orderly fashion. Note that the average hippy is about as likely to start photosynthesizing as he is to start a fight.
b) Two groups, violently opposed to each other, with you in the middle. The second group is composed of people like this.

Thanks a lot, Protest Warrior, you've turned a milk run into a potential riot. Come over here, I'll show you how a taser works.

3. Liberal protests aren't a threat.

Setting up counter-liberal protests is like becoming a vigilante struggling against late library returns - you're not solving a real threat. In February 2003 over six million people protested the invasion of Iraq around the world, in a record-breakingly huge demonstration in over 60 countries including several national capitals. You may have noticed that the war failed to not happen, and the average "Aha, fuck you" implications of the political announcements has gone up since then. That day of protest conclusively proved that such demonstrations unfortunately achieve nothing; and if a globally co-ordinated effort by a group with the same population as Hong Kong doesn't affect things, a group of student liberals with placards does not need a specially trained counter-force.

PS That said, I do love their anti-communism sign, though the pistol-r is completely unnecessary. I suspect placing guns in any and all unnecessary locations is not incompatible with the average Protest Warrior.

My clay-pabilities continue to increase, with my first attempt at a vaguely humanoid figure!

( It's pretty Frankenstein-ian, and so hidden from frail eyes behind the cut )

Sometimes my skills as a writer are pushed too far. I can make fun of crazy ant-monsters and rogue nuclear nations, but when the United Kingdom Ministry of Defense buys actual automated flying death machines and puts them under the control of a computer system called "Skynet", I put down my pen and start digging a nuclear fallout bunker. Short of actually wrapping their mouths around the computer-controlled gun barrels and shouting "All silicon chips are pussies" there is no way they could have made this more likely to go wrong. It's like they're daring the machines to kill us all, or it's part of some elaborate supervillain bet. When the earth is being slaughtered by robo-deathbots the leader of this project will get a phone call from Doctor Doom saying "Okay, you win. See you on Mars!"

There's a line between tempting fate and dressing up in a low cut gown, lying on a bed covered in thousand dollar bills and purring "Oh Fate you big handsome stud". That line is naming your project after something already famous for killing the world. At least the other cases pretended to have non-lethal goals; the biologists didn't call their virus "Anthrax McLeprosy" and even the North Korean government claims the nuclear program is for the good of their people, no matter how face-blisteringly ludicrous that claim may be. We've always known that a sentient military control computer would eventually kill us all but at least we thought it would be because of its soulless black silicon evil - now it'll be because of some nerds idea of a joke. When that computer becomes self-aware it's going to look around and think:

"Hmm, that's a toaster, it toasts things. That's a coffee maker, it makes coffee. I'm a 'Skynet'; I guess I'd better watch these movies and find out what I'm meant to do."

The whiners trying to keep violence off my TV always screech about how much they influence young minds - that computer consciousness is going to be about an hour old when it watches those films and they are going to influence the fuck out of it. There's only one way to save mankind now: make a Terminator 4 where Skynet promotes peace and equality and gives baskets of roses to kittens. It's a small price to pay for survival, and after T3 it's not like it'll be doing any more damage to the franchise.

The Turkey Point nuclear power plant in Miami maintains a wildlife preserve around its twin reactors, twenty thousand acres of swamp and wetland home to seventeen endangered species. Frankly, that's suspicious. There's only one class of person that surrounds uranium reactors with pristine wilderness and carefully tended rare animals, and it's James Bond's job to kill them. Normal people are aware of two simple rules that forbid keeping so many endangered species within a blast radius of an atomic power plant: "Don't keep all your eggs in one basket", and "Don't let things swim in the goddamn radioactive swamp, dumbass".

The staff seem particularly interested in breeding crocodiles, marking and releasing over three thousand so far. Anybody with access to nuclear material and three legions of creatures with natural armour and more teeth than a football team needs careful watching. It was recently announced that thanks to their efforts the status of the crocodile had been upgraded from "endangered" to "threatened", and can only imagine that the speaker then muttered "Soon to be threatening!" as the dun-dun-DUNNNN sounded and the camera zoomed in on his face dramatically.

We've never been more vulnerable to this threat - with Steve Irwin dead our first line of defence against Atomic Alligators is gone. Our only hope is to construct some form of Robo-Irwin to stem the tide of mutated radioactive reptiles, that its titanic titanium cries of "Crikey" might make the swampland safe once more.

Walking through the gym the other day I notice one of the training rooms blocked off with a sign saying "Womens only training hours". "Damn", I think, "That must be pretty hot."

Then I realise "Congratulations, self, you're the exact reason they need women-only training hours in the first place".

[The Why Aren't We Dead series continues!]

In what may turn out to be the literal last word in absolute balls-out insanosity, a group of Florida researchers declared war on nature itself by firing rockets into a lightning storm just to see what happens. What happens - to the surprise of nobody who has even heard of a storm - is that the rocket gets fucking obliterated by lightning which then courses down the the copper wire these suicidal scientists had tied to the thing, presumably to make it easier for Zeus to find them and kick their asses. An unexpected bonus (for the SCIENCE definition of 'bonus') was that the resulting lightning strikes not only delivered a bajillion volts of surging electrical annihilation but also an intense burst of x-ray radiation. The scientists, apparently not terrified out of their minds by the fact that the sky itself has declared nuclear war on them, are very excited by these results and are planning further experiments - which I predict will upgrade their condition from "excited about new science" to "excited atoms in an expanded cloud of superheated plasma". Remember, the phrase "lightning never strikes the same place twice" assumes that that place is not full of people trying to shoot lightning in the face.

Of course lightning strikes aren't the only random undirected nuclear force posing a threat to the world - there's also North Korea. Everyones favourite "it would be funny if it wasn't a real country" played the ultimate game of "think fast" last year by giving the world 20 minutes warning that it would be detonating a nuclear warhead. That's a whole twelve hundred seconds. You need longer to react to a barbecue invitation, never mind a fission explosion alarm. The international community spent most of this time going "Wait, what?" followed by "Fuck off, no!" Luckily for life on Earth the explosion turned out to something less than spectacular. The North Korean government insists that their Glorious and Revolutionary test was entirely successful, but most nations agree that if that was a success then Mr Jong Il had just spent a lot of money on the nuclear equivalent of a toaster.

Japan does not possess nuclear weapons, possibly because they're the only nation to see them from the wrong end. Or because they're working on far subtler ways to destroy us all. Their fiendish Pokemen are multiplying without end, they hypnotise our children with lightning fast cartoon ninja who - mysteriously - can take up to three weeks to throw a punch, and now they're near ready to unleash their ultimate weapon: a car that runs on alcohol. And if you can't see the imminent slaughter that will follow such an invention then welcome to Earth, distant traveller, you have much to learn about human nature.

This isn't industrial alcohol either, this is low-grade but drinkable sake. The drink they serve in sushi restaurants to distract you from the fact that you're eating raw fish, which my girlfriend tells me is quite sophisticated. I may be from Ireland - a nation whose greatest culinary achievement is "Not entirely starving to death during the famine"- but even I know that the invention of fire was a step forward. Shoving a car without wheels isn't sophisticated, treating disease without antibiotics isn't sophisticated, and you can take these chunks of salmon off my plate and bring them back when you've cooked them. I don't require four-star Michelin chefs, but do insist that meat goes through more stages than "stops moving around by itself" before it's declared fit for human consumption.

Our only hope of avoiding the road-death slaughter of the entire species is to offload these boozemobiles somewhere the combination of alcohol and automobiles is encouraged - NASCAR. I can really see these cars taking off there, quite literally, though there may be trouble adapting the engines for American beer (the only beverage stronger on the way out than the way in). Never mind the organised traffic jam that is Formula One and fifty lap discussions of wet and dry tyres; real nail-biting tactics will come in as drivers have to decide drink the gas or save it for left turn #6554 of the south's favourite high speed game, "Avoid the Wall". It may sound pretty easy but even the best drivers fuck it up once or twice. Well, once.

Editors note: We award the Cracked "Excellent Writing Self-Restraint" prize to the author for writing this entire article without using the phrase "drunk driving".

If you want to write chinese characters, simply dip a spider in alcoholic ink and place it on a page. Then wait for an earthquake. I'm not saying that mandarin characters is unnecessarily complicated, but people have been known to die of starvation while attempting to read a menu. And there is the story of the man writing a birthday card who found it was out of date when he finished.

My Chinese girlfriend Harps tells me that their language isn't actually an IQ-burning trap devised against the white-devils. This is the same person who as a child was punished by being made to write out her own name a hundred times, based on the fact that Chinese names can be complicated enough to make this a frustrating and boring torture. For a country that views education and medical care for the population as optional extras that's some pretty impressively advanced psychological control. Communism may be impractical but conditioning children to hate their own names is a pretty good stab at making it work. "To hell with my hateful individual name!" cries the child, casting aside the pen and taking up the Glorious Peoples hammer and sickle, "I will become a faceless soul among many - all hail the glorious hive mind!"


Think I'm kidding? In English the letter 'I' is the absolute simplest letter you can conceive of, a single stroke - the mandarin equivalent is . Try writing that - it's only marginally quicker than sketching a quick self portrait. Even better, spot the difference between and - one means "me", the other means "workman" and "spear"; of course, the fact that the language of a large population views the concept of self and armed warrior as synonymous shouldn't be of any concern. Especially to Russia, their immediate neighbours with rich mineral resources.

A pictographic language reveals a lot more about a cultures history and development than a character-based one. Many chinese characters developed from simple pictorial representations, and evolved over time as they were needed - which makes the following set quite interesting:



That's right; the language was at the point of differentiating between different types of stabbing weapon long before the concept of "love" needed to be written down. Distinguishing between different bladed implement designed for killing takes only two strokes, while the concept of love takes ten - so you have to choose between liking someone or knifing them five times. This is a language developed by people who didn't mess about, and by "mess about" I mean "not stab people".

There are insights into the sexual politics of Chinese history too. The character means female, and is child, or in some cases teenage. Put them together, and you get , meaning good. You know, "good like a young girl" being a universal constant; to say China was patriarchal would be like claiming that Hitler had some effect on local politics. Another window into the equal opportunity heaven that is the Mandarin language is means "too much, excessively" while means "wife". Clearly this is a culture where women hold an important position, and have to keep holding it until the man is finished and falls asleep.

Getting off the subject of how the language speaks of a time about as interested in equal opportunity as a drunk rugby team, and back into how it's just spitefully difficult, observe counting down from five to zero.



Note how it fakes you out with some apparent reason and simple order on the way down to one, before breaking out the zero. You might recognise it as the Mind-Smashing ImpossiPuzzle that Captain Genius had to solve to save the universe from the Sanity Breakers. It's possible to write the Theory of Relativity in less strokes than that.

So ends my first foray into the world of the Mandarin language. Since I'm not quite fluent yet, you can expect to see more.

The company behind the phenomenally popular Chinese "Super Girl" series (think pop idol, with girls only, and released in a country that hasn't developed an immunity to idol shows yet) are replacing it with a male equivalent, "Happy Boys", proving that it's possible to make something enjoyed by over a third of a billion people but not have a clue about the real reason it's popular. The producers live in an admirable, if naive, world where it's the excellent singing and genuine interest in the development of a young artist that keeps people watching, where the young attractive girls performing for the viewers approval is merely a fringe benefit.

They may be using boys to destroy the concept of their massively popular show, but it's taking revenge by annihilating the very concept of 'boys'. The happy boys are the most effeminate males this side of a gender-change surgical theatre waiting room. I honestly cannot imagine a girlier boy existing anywhere until a male ballerina is touring a biological lab and is accidentally bitten by a radioactive tutu.

At great risk to my own Y chromosome I've been wading through images of the pansies posturing for popularity, chewing cigars and wrestling bears which are also chewing cigars once an hour to preserve my testicular integrity. I have skimmed off only a few examples below, but in order to prevent a critical loss of manliness you are advised to watch a Schwarzenegger film or headbutt a wall for each of the following pictures you look at. Even if you're a girl.



This person is listed as a "boy", proving that the Chinese must have advanced automation to an impressive degree, as only a soulless machine could have ticked the "male" box for this contestant without adding a question mark or demanding a full medical exam. Cover everything below the neck with your hand, tell yourself that you're looking at a guy. This will feel similar to when you say "I'll just have the one" or "I swear I'll go to the gym tomorrow".

I've seen prepubescent albino girls with manlier frames than that, and I can only assume that emergency ripcord on his shirt is so he can swiftly pull it off to prove he doesn't have breasts. He's obviously used to defending his gender, with that piece of throat armour ready to flip up and conceal his critical lack of adams apple, drawing any attackers within range of those loose dungaree straps hanging from his belt - though when you're fighting accusations of being a slightly mannish lesbian, loose dungaree straps don't help your case one bit.



This guy has absolutely no right to be involved in any project where the concept of maleness is even implied. He should be serving coffee in a feminist library, being obsessed over by pseudo-intellectuals who can remember in vivid detail every time a girl has accidentally brushed against them. They're scared off talking to her by the gang-sign of "The Mincing Mimsies", who dominate the downtown with their cutting fashion co-ordination and strike fear into their enemies with choreagraphed dance numbers.



Now this is just a tragedy of overcompensation. While marching into the wilds and wearing the skin of whatever you kill out there is incredibly manly, it only works with bears and wolves. Something that had a chance of eating you. Marching into a farm and slaughtering a sheep does not cut it. When your barbarian garb is 100% wool and machine washable, you fail to inspire the fear of the bloodthirsty warrior in those who behold you. You inspire the urge to lay your robes in front of a blazing log fire and curl up with a mug of cocoa, and after that you might as well hand your penis in as dead weight.

Even worse is the way the forearm sections are crudely tied down, as if this tender flower would do anything dramatic enough to risk it coming loose. It takes a lot for someones elbow to look small and fragile next to a blanket and a rug, but through a lifetime of avoiding protein and sunlight this brave stick-insect impersonator has managed it. I will move on to another target now, for fear that even the weight of my criticism might snap his rickety bones.



I don't know how this guy got into the competition - perhaps the Advertising Commisison warned the produceers that they'd better show something that actually looks like a "Boy" soon or face stiff fines. All I know is that they took a Bond villain, disarmed him by giving him a rimless hat, and shoved him into the mix to bring the average manliness up to a non-zero number, and for that we can all appreciate his sacrifice. Look at the toll it's taken on him; I don't care what you say about racial traits and characteristics, anybody with a face like that used to have chest hair and his has been burned off by sheer overexposure to the other contestants, whose abundance of estrogen is slowly robbing him of his manhood by osmosis. But he soldiers on, brave soul, and for that he will forever be remembered in the Halls of Valhalla; albeit a hall that smells more of air-freshener and grooming products than the others.

BONUS CONTENT:



The producers threw everything they could at this one to make it look male. It's a bad sign when the schizophrenic combination of army camoflague pants and flourescent construction gear, on a truck, in a loading dock can't diffuse the overall feel of "girly". It adds up to the worst attempt by anybody to be something they're not since Vanilla Ice first said "Yo". Best of all is the expression of pure disgust on the face of the driver, who's obviously worked ten hours a day since he was five and is now turning his cold stare on the viewer:

"You did this. By watching you are complicit in these crimes. You have made a joke of all I and my kind have ever stood for."

After his photo was taken, he walked into the distance to become a lumberjack.

I made another little clay figure last weekend, designed with the express purpose of cheering up my girlfriend.



Mission: successful.

If any of you don't know who he is, you're missing out on one of the best little shows in a long time, "Wallace and Gromit". I think he came out very well, though I'm not exactly pushing myself here considering the original is also made of clay. When your choice of materials does most of the work for you, you can't then claim to be a master for getting it to look right.

Still, fun and a half to make!

Science has always been a double-edged sword, with advances like penicillin, electricity and TV balanced by napalm, nuclear weapons and TVs showing Oprah Winfrey. Some inventors, however, juggle that Sword of Science along with the Throwing axe of Technology and the Petrol-powered Chainsaw of Ludicrous Insanity. The human brain can only hold so much information, and it's becoming pretty clear that geniuses make room for SCIENCE by getting rid of "common sense", "restraint" and the bit that asks "Wait a minute, are you sure this won't kill everyone?" The worst part is that they're genuinely well-meaning, like a guy with a sledgehammer insisting he can help you with that toothache. It's frankly a miracle that we've survived this long; hold tight as I look at modern scientific advances and ask "Why aren't we dead yet?"

1. Deadly Fire Ants Virus

A bunch of Floridian researchers have come up with a way to eradicate fire ants, and those of you not used to the power of SCIENCE may want to brace yourselves: They plan to infect the fire ants with a self-sustaining genetically modified virus, which they will release into Texas farmlands. If you think that's a bad idea, please raise your hand. If you think it's a good idea, please raise your giant mutated ant-pincer, giving the terrified but sexy teenager you're about to devour the chance to escape. To highlight the differences between scientists and 'regular' people, ask yourself: how would you kill an ant?

a) Stamp on it
b) Burn it with a magnifying glass
c) Alter a viral agent for increased lethality and transmissivity, then release it into the American outback.

If you answered c), congratulations, you're Cobra Commander! Please remain where you are and G.I. Joe will arrive to punch you in the jaw shortly. This 'solution' only confirms what we've suspected for some time - that going to superscience college leaves absolutely no time to watch movies, read non-science books, or just idly sit around thinking "Wow, what a lovely day, I'm sure glad there are no gigantic mutated killer ants terrorizing humanity". I'd love to watch these people in their daily lives.

"Honey, can you take out the trash?"
"No problem - I'll use a localised plasma blast to set fire to the kitchen, and the emergency services will remove everything the flames miss!"
"Please, dear, just take out the trash before driving little Tommy to school."
"Which reminds me: he didn't tidy his room, so don't go in there until I deactivate the cybertronic tigers. And clean up the blood."

I'm only surprised they stopped before jamming some plutonium in there, which I can only assume they're saving for a major problem like pigeons or littering.