September, 2008:

As the American presidential race hots up it gets increasingly difficult for us Brits to follow what’s going on.

As far as I can make out you’ve got Obama Biden Laden on one side and John McClane from Die Hard and Michael Palin on the other.

You see what I did there? I deliberately confused the names of the candidates with those of other prominent people from popular culture. I bet that has never been done before by anyone! And it only took me about two months to come up with it.

I’m such a comic genius.

And speaking of comic geniuses; in my extensive research for this post I discovered a community of YouTubers dedicated to “swedeing’ movies. Behold:

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A new deal has been struck. A deal that heralds a glorious golden age for the Hughes household. Well, for me anyway.

This week, after about a year of requesting, negotiating, and groveling on my knees my employers have finally allowed me to go part time.

For three days a week I shall be saving lives on the front line of mental health services (ahem), and for the remaining four I will be sitting around the house in my underwear eating doritos and watching Columbo reruns.

Ok, maybe there will be a bit of childcare and housework involved too. But underwear, doritos, and Columbo: that’s my main plan.

Hurrah!

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The strange thing about dieting is you either find yourself eating completely natural and unprocessed stuff like fruit, vegetables, and fresh herbs; or you’re eating artificial chemical ridden products like sweeteners, low carb bread, and low fat margarine. I’ve found myself wondering recently how low in calories something has to go before it officially switches from a foodstuff to a plastic.

And Quorn. What the hell is Quorn? Well, according to the mighty wikipedia it is a processed mycoprotein made from the soil mould Fusarium venenatum. Mmmmmmm sounds tasty.

Actually the development of Quorn is quite interesting. In the 1950′s it was predicted that there would be a huge world famine in the 80′s. It was feared that there would be an international shortage of protein rich foods and Quorn was created in order to feed the starving masses. A bit like soylent green, but with fungus instead of people (or so they tell us).

However, the eighties didn’t see mass starvation. At least not in the Western world. They did however see some horrific fashion disasters and some pretty awful music, but there is very little a mold based foodstuff can do about that. So instead of feeding the world’s hungry the manufacturers of Quorn had to settle for just feeding the world’s vegetarians instead.

But not just vegetarians. Oh no. It also feeds vegetarians’ long suffering spouses. We poor innocent souls who are forced into a life devoid of dead animal flesh just because we chose to marry someone with principles. Oh sure, we could make our own meat filled meals. But that would mean we would have to make our own meat filled meals*. That’s a sacrifice many of us just aren’t willing to make.

But Quorn is a pretty good compromise. It looks like chicken. It feels like chicken. Of course it doesn’t taste like chicken, in fact it doesn’t actually taste of anything, but you can’t have everything. And as a bonus it has very little saturated fat, so it’s a pretty good diet food too.

Not bad for a chunk of soil mold eh?

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I’m guest posting over at A Family Runs Through It today. Feel free to head over there and throw metaphorical rotten tomatoes at me.

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Scientists (or to give them their tabloid newspaper name: “Boffins”) at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, are going to switch on their Large Hadron Collider tomorrow.

ITN report that the Collider is designed to:

smash particle beams together at close to the speed of light to create mini-versions of the explosion believed to have triggered the birth of the cosmos.

The BBC website go into much greater detail, talking about protons and Higgs bostons and dark matter. But after a while my brain started to go all fuzzy and I had to go for a lie down.

According to ITN (who are clearly a news provider of merit and distinction and would never go for a cheap sensationalist angle) the physicists in charge are “ignoring” critics who warn:

the experiment will create “black holes” of intense gravity that could implode the Earth, or that it will open the way for beings from another universe to invade through a “worm hole” in space-time.

Blimey!

On Radio Four this morning they reported that CERN made a statement saying that the chances of this happening were “very low”.

Very low? I think I would have preferred something like “non-existent” personally, but you can’t have everything.

Still, I think it’s worth the risk. Not because the experiment might uncover the secrets of the universe or anything like that. No, to be honest all that stuff makes my head swim. I think it’s worthwhile because this is just the kind of thing that is almost guaranteed to produce Earth’s first superhero.

Lets face it, with all those energy beams and black holes flying around all over the place one of them is bound to hit some mild mannered scientist and transform him into The Amazing Proton Man or something like that. I only hope they are vetting their employees properly. Knowing our luck it will be some bitter psychopath called Victor Von Death that gets hit instead.

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• It is a lot less stressful getting your children to nursery where it does not matter what time you arrive, than getting them to school where it does.
• Evan is a very slow walker.
• Evan is getting too heavy to carry any significant distance.
• Amy fluctuates between being either a very fast runner or a completely immovable object depending on which will make your life the most difficult at the time.
• Halfway to school is not a good time to realize that you have forgotten the dinner money.
• You should always keep enough cash in the house to cover emergencies.
• Raiding your daughter’s piggybank is not necessarily an immoral act given the right circumstances.
• At a flat out sprint, dragging one child along by the hand and carrying the other one under my arm I can get to the school in around ten minutes. It normally takes me eleven.
• I really need to do something about my levels of fitness.
• Homeschooling might not be such a bad idea after all.

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So we’ve seen what team UK can do, now it’s the turn of team USA. If you don’t know what I’m talking about see yesterday’s post.

Name the TV show to go with the following theme tunes.

As I said before, there is a way to cheat on this quiz (not your iTunes version Phil, I fixed that). If you do know how to cheat, please don’t as it spoils the fun for everyone. We may be at war, but we still have to play fair.

These are all theme tunes from US TV shows. Well, one of them is from Canada, but let’s face it it’s the same thing really.

Tune 1

Tune 2

Tune 3

Tune 4

Tune 5

Tune 6

Tune 7

Tune 8

Tune 9

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