Otto von Jizzmark

Well he certainly made physical contact with me many times, but it wasn't very enjoyable! Still not as bad as when Terry O'Neill did it, though...

Blimey. I used to train with this guy back in the day, and all I can say is he never touched my winky. Not that that's saying much - an officer at a male prison once told me that I was the first bloke they'd had in the place who didn't get whistled at by the inmates. It really comes to something when even incarcerated homosexuals can't be bothered to make the effort... Anyway, what an ignominious end to a career. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c103zgpr4pjo

I was going to say ‘No’, but then…

Well I expect David Bailey must be shitting himself right now…

‘Potching’ - that’s one I’d not heard before. I like it!

@Buckster - I realise that I'm a miserable little atheist shit, but if while you're communing with The Almighty in the morning you could possibly ask Him to stop fucking up my experiments I'd be very grateful.

Whenever I saw cars at the side of the road I half expected someone to jump out and flag me down.

Hideous, isn’t it?

I was hunting for something on an old memory stick this afternoon and came across this photo of the Electra Glide I hired in California about 8 years ago. It was taken somewhere along Highway 1 on my pilgrimage from San Francisco to the MusicMan factory in San Luis Obispo, whose basses (among others) I’ve played for donkey’s years. I stopped off at Monterey (still my favourite aquarium) and Big Sur on the way down, and then stopped in Carmel-by-the-Sea for a brew on my way back. The only thing I really remember about the place was that the second I found a nice quiet corner by a window to sit and drink my tea some vapid airhead plonked herself down in front of me and proceeded to tell me all about the meditation retreat she had just been on and – quelle surprise - her beautiful relationship with Jesus. I sipped my tea and nodded in mock interest whilst thinking big thoughts, like how many tigers it would take to overpower a tiger shark, before finally deciding that the time had come to unleash my patented dingbat repellent. She asked me how long I had been married, and I said that we’d been together for 20 years. She said “Oh my! I hope someday I meet someone I can spend that long with. She must have a real special energy – a magical aura that drew you into her orbit and totally captivated you.” “Yeah, I guess” I said. “I think it was mostly her tits and arse, though...” Twenty seconds later it was as if she had never been there. Job done.

They wouldn't be worse than some of the places I've stayed! I once got booked into somewhere called 'The Floatel' which was a prefab floating hotel built on a slack bit of river near Macclesfield. It had already started sinking when I stayed there, which caused some interesting problems with the plumbing: you could sit by the window at breakfast and watch the other guests turds floating past. It got demolished not long after that.

Got my kennel cough vaccine this morning. It was supposed to be for the dog, but she bucked so hard when the vet tried to get it up her nose that I got the lot right across my face and in my mouth.

Not if I was looking at a Harley I wouldn’t.

I don't think we'd be anywhere near the tool-handling stage after only three days, @Buckster: after three weeks you'll still be telling me that you know more about mechanics than the Institute of Mechanical Engineers whilst pointing at the lawnmower and insisting it's a motorbike.

I should also add that he wants to study biology, chemistry and geography at A level and has been revising his biology all week, so that might not have been totally fair to Buckster…

So @Buckster, I gave this one to my 15 year old this morning: "Evolution requires a change of type for it to be proven, that’s what it claims after all." His exact words were "Umm... what's a 'change of type' supposed to mean? Evolution is just random mutations leading to beneficial adaptations that get concentrated in the population. I think they're confusing evolution with speciation." BOOM! Schooled by a teenager. I knew my boy wouldn't let me down. Here endeth the lesson.

And then there’s his old man…

Well if nothing else, somebody’s weekend is suddenly looking a lot more exciting than it was when he got up this morning…

If you’re bored of listening to me @Buckster I can always hand this one over to my 15 year old when he’s here later today. He’s revising for his GCSEs at the moment, and he’ll be able to straighten out your remedial grasp of evolutionary theory for you without any difficulty whatsoever.

While we wait…

Speaking as someone with more than a passing interest in the mechanisms by which bacteria evade antibiotic intervention, this is pure gibberish. When you say “Evolution requires a change of type for it to be proven, that’s what it claims after all” what exactly do you mean? Perhaps it would help if you started by clearly defining what you mean by ‘type’.

What I find funny is that despite the obvious contempt they have for each other, Zzzak and Buckster are absolutely two of a kind. They both believe patent absurdities, they are both hopelessly scientifically illiterate but lack the basic intelligence or even the self-awareness to realise it, both of them believe that self-educating from the most painfully imbecilic sources is not only a sufficient surrogate for genuine expertise but is actually superior to it, neither of them shows any capacity to learn or adapt their thinking, and the positions adopted by both of them not only requires every genuine scientist working in every academic and scientific research institution around the world to be wrong, but to either be blissfully unaware of the fact that they are wrong or be colluding in an international conspiracy of silence. And none of this causes either of them any cognitive dissonance whatsoever. The pair of them are Dunning-Kruger personified: boundless confidence in limitless ignorance.

Are these the same anomalies you were referring to earlier, where you seemed to think that a radiometric technique with a standard error of +/- 2 million years failing to accurately date a sample from the 1980s constituted a cast-iron refutation of the entire field of radiometric dating?

If you want evidence of transitional fossils, go to the palaeontology department of any sizeable natural history museum and ask them to show you the transitional fossils. I can't really make it any easier than that for you, Buckster. If you go armed with your current understanding of what a transitional fossil is you're likely to be disappointed though - there are no lactating fish or hexapod chickens, I'm afraid.