Before you start hatin’ on my amazing-like spelling powers, click to view. Otherwise both I and the Scottish falsetto sock puppets will make fun of you. And the Doctor will be very disappointed in you as well.
And nobody wants that to happen, do they?
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We know what it’s like. It’s two in the morning, your hand won’t let go of the remote, and your innate optimism is driving you to click past yet another NADs commercial, whispering there must be something good on, there must be something good on…and so dawn finds you, bleary yet hopeful, thumb numb, clicking onward in search of the one interesting show that has to be out there.
Allow me.
Ladies, gentlemen, and undecided, we present the one channel on which you can all depend. No, not the Yule Log.
Available 24/7, Cheddarvision never disappoints. Like Fox News or state channel of a banana republic, you always know what you’re going to get: a wheel of cheddar, slowly ageing on a shelf in realtime. If you’ve ever thought that Watch the Grass Grow cam was too fast-paced, if you’ve ever thought that watching slo-mo replays of golf got you too riled up before naptime, if you’re the kind who eschews cough syrup because you might get a wicked high, then this is the channel for you. Watching a wheel of cheddar age has got to be more interesting than the gossip around the canasta table in the ward lounge.
If not, email me. I love a good canasta tale.
Polly want an honorary degree, consulting fee and reality show?
Well it IS the Twenty-First Century. Even parrots have gone upscale.
It seems that there’s this kid Dylan, and he was, not unlike the great Tennyson, moving forward in age while showing no respect for some of the great milestones of childhood such as learning speech. Indeed, from our vantage spot somewhat farther along in space/time, we ourselves tend to think that such activities are highly overrated; all our alter personalities agree.
So language was all like, Dylan, learn me, and Dylan was all like, talk to the Lego and his parents were all like, OMG he’s autistic! Let’s get a parrot, and that solved things.
Dylan Hargreaves, four, has severe learning difficulties and had never uttered a single word.
But after listening to macaw Barney, he can now say “Night, night”, “Dad”, “Mum”, “Ta”, “Hello” and “Bye”.
And experts think he is close to his first two-syllable word…
…Michelle reckons her son’s first two-syllable word will be Barney, because he loves his pet so much.
Hell-O?
Okay, so it looks like the gene pool isn’t very deep here, but what is the excuse for A) these so-called “experts” and B) the hacks at the Sun who presumably know the meaning of the word syllable?
HELLO???
Dylan, boy, when you grow up to be Poet Laureate, please remember raincoaster was in your corner back in the early days. Good luck; with a team of supporters like this, you’re going to need it.
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Click on the picture to go to the Guardian‘s slideshow of images from The Big Dry, the worst drought in Australian history. They’re well into year ten, and to give you some perspective, the above image was taken at Wivenhoe Dam, which is now holding back nothing more than air when it was built to contain enough water for all of Brisbane.
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Click to enlarge: if only the actual book were so easy to read!
Here, ladies and gentlemen, with the permission of the publisher Robert Chaplin, is the entire text of the smallest book ever produced, Teeny Ted from Turnip Town. The book was produced in association with nanotechnologists Dr. Li Yang and Dr. Karen L. Kavanagh from Simon Fraser University, and is so small that when you look at the plain sheet of polished silicon on which it is carved, you cannot see anything but the scratches laid down by the point of a diamond so that the electron microscope can navigate. That is the huge rut in the image above; the finest scratch visible to the naked eye. The eye does not register this thirty-page book, even as a tiny speck. It is an invisibook, unless, that is, one happens to be carrying in one’s book bag a scanning electron microscope, which possibility we at the ol’ raincoaster blog are not prepared to deny on a categorical or any other basis. We know our readers are a tricksy bunch, yo.
Teeny Ted from Turnip Town is a tale of triumph, a story of success. Ted grows the biggest turnip; Ted wins the Biggest Turnip contest.
Ah, if only life were that simple.
Chaplin points out, rightly, that we do not know the mysterious Ted‘s back story; we don’t know if he poisoned the other turnips, if he’s obsessed with size because he’s so short, or if winning the prize won him the heart of his true love. Back story be damned! Ted grows the biggest turnip, Ted wins the contest.
End of story.
The book is available from the publisher (contact him here) in a limited edition of one hundred copies, for $20,000. As it can be read only by those who can afford to have a spare scanning electron microscope lying around, price should be no object.
Suggested additional reading: Leaf by Niggle, by JRR Tolkien.
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raincoaster 