The Debatable Land

Earth vs Moon

Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin were defenders.

What's this, you ask? Just a map of the pair's wanderings on the moon, superimposed onto a football (soccer) pitch. As best one can tell the Moon XI liked to attack down the right-wing, forcing the intrepid astronauts to play a rugged, hoofing, defensive game. Aldrin never made it out of the Earthlings' half, while Armstrong only ventured a single foray towards the opposition penalty area. Of course, we were playing away from home and it always takes some time to acclimatise to, let alone deal with, the intimidating atmosphere at Moon Park.

James Hamilton - who, for reasons that remain a mystery, is still not writing about football for "Big Media"  - draws the correct conclusion from the fact that NASA created this map.

Arise, Sir Nils!

Really, can Friday stories get much better than this?

A penguin who was previously made a Colonel-in-Chief of the Norwegian Army has been knighted at Edinburgh Zoo.

Penguin Nils Olav has been an honorary member and mascot of the Norwegian King's Guard since the 1972.

Over the years, he has been promoted through the ranks after being adopted by Royal Guard who visited the zoo.

During the ceremony, Nils had a sword dubbed on each side of his head, where his shoulders should be, to confirm his regimental knighthood.

A crowd of several hundred people joined the 130 guardsmen at the zoo. A citation from King Harald the Fifth of Norway was read out, which described Nils as a penguin "in every way qualified to receive the honour and dignity of knighthood".

The guardsmen come to see Nils every few years while they are in Edinburgh performing at the city's Military Tattoo.

Department of Correction

I may have been too harsh recently. I scoffed at the idea of a lettuce "bolting" and made merry with the New York Times leader writer who suggested that, now that summer is (allegedly) here, lettuces were prone to do this. Now, rather inconveniently, my sister, who in addition to being a very fine artist whose paintings any sensible chap of means would buy, is also a budding horticulturalist, pipes up with this:

"Bolting" is the term used by all gardeners on this, and seemingly that, side of the Atlantic for a plant that is running to seed (which generally means it's past being useful for eating). Lettuces are quite notorious for this. Spinach too. My leeks bolted last month. This is not therefore a desperate writer grasping for dramatic effect. He's just a thwarted gardener like the rest of us...

My apologies all round. But, notwithstanding all of that it is still a rubbish leader...

Tom Waits is Magnificent

Ben Smith is right: more press conferences should be like this...

Giant Carnivorous Mice!

Seriously:

For tens of thousands of years, the birds of Gough Island lived unmolested, without predators on a remote outcrop in the south Atlantic.

Today, the British-owned island, described as the home of the most important seabird colony in the world, still hosts 22 breeding species and is a world heritage site.

But as a terrible consequence of the first whalers making landfall there 150 years ago, Gough has become the stage for one of nature's great horror shows. Mice stowed away on the whaling boats jumped ship and have since multiplied to 700,000 or more on an island of about 25 square miles.

What is horrifying ornithologists is that the British house mouse has somehow evolved, growing to up to three times the size of ordinary domestic house mice, and instead of surviving on a diet of insects and seeds, has adapted itself to become a carnivore, eating albatross, petrel and shearwater chicks alive in their nests.

Irn Bru For Me And You

Irn Bru - the fabled amber nectar of the glens, the monarch of the fizzy pop world - has always been distinguished by the quality of its advertisements. Happily, this latest one, a take on Kipling's If, is just as quirky and oddly charming as we've come to expect. Top stuff.

It used to be said - with pride! - that Scotland was one of the few countries in the world in which both Coca-Cola and Pepsi had to give way to a market-leading indigenous pop. If memory serves this disconcerted the bosses in Atlanta, stinging them into setting up a scottish task force to topple Irn Bru. Clearly, this sort of soft drink imperialism must be resisted and it remains every Scots' duty to sacrifice their teeth to further the cause of the other national drink...

Like MTV but with music you enjoy

Speaking of country music, I'm going to guess that this is the sort of thing that's not news to anyone but me. But did you know that you can create your own music TV station? If you have a lastfm account*, just enter your user name here and, by the magic of youtube, you'll get a stream of music videos chosen to fit your lastfm preferences. That's too cool for me really.

*Even if you don't, just enter a band name and you'll get all their youtube goodness delivered straight to your screen.

Happy Birthday Willie!

I'm indebted to Rod Dreher for the reminder that Willie Nelson celebrates his 75th birthday today. And there was me thinking he'd been around for longer than that. Here he is with that other great survivor Merle Haggard, singing the classic Pancho and Lefty:

In 2003 Reason named Willie one of its 35 Heroes of Freedom.

Boris and Ken and George and Zippy. Plus Bungle of course.

Saturday Entertainment: the London mayoral candidates' Newsnight debate synched to, of all things, Rainbow. It all makes more sense now...

Hat-tip: Iain Martin

When Charlie Rose Met Sam Beckett

Filmmaker Andrew Filippone Jr imagines a pseudo-Beckettian edition of The Charlie Rose Show:

What Goes Up Should Come Down

A splendid piece on elevators - yes, lifts - in this week's New Yorker.

Two things make tall buildings possible: the steel frame and the safety elevator. The elevator, underrated and overlooked, is to the city what paper is to reading and gunpowder is to war. Without the elevator, there would be no verticality, no density, and, without these, none of the urban advantages of energy efficiency, economic productivity, and cultural ferment. The population of the earth would ooze out over its surface, like an oil slick, and we would spend even more time stuck in traffic or on trains, traversing a vast carapace of concrete. And the elevator is energy-efficient—the counterweight does a great deal of the work, and the new systems these days regenerate electricity. The elevator is a hybrid, by design.

While anthems have been written to jet travel, locomotives, and the lure of the open road, the poetry of vertical transportation is scant. What is there to say, besides that it goes up and down?

Actually, as Nick Paumgarten discovers, there's quite a lot more to say... Highly recommended.

By Liverpool Street Station, I Stood Up And Sang

You might not be permitted to dance at the Jefferson Memorial in Washington, but London's Liverpool Street Station is definitely flashmob-friendly. The world's first-ever RickMob gathered there on Saturday... Groovy, baby:

According to the BBC: A British Transport Police spokeswoman said: "We monitored the incident. There were no problems, no arrests. They did what they had to do and then left."

[Hat-tip: Banditry]

Department of Radio

You don't have to be an Anglican or even especially religious to think that this Oxford Evensong set to jazz is very cool. Beautiful. (You can listen to it again for the next five days by clicking on "Choral Evensong" at the link.)

Nightmare in Hamilton

Attention cricket fans: this is the best video you will have seen in ages. Left Arm Chinaman reconstructs the miserable first test between England and New Zealand... using blu-tack. Genius.

[Via Will at The Corridor]

I am Wolfgang Schauble! I am Jacqui Smith!

Ha! Those canny Germans!

they published the fingerprint of German Secretary of the Interior Wolfgang Schäuble (link is to a Google translation of the German original). The club has been active in opposition to Germany's increasing push to use biometrics in, for example, e-passports. Someone friendly to the club's aims captured Schäuble's fingerprint from a glass he drank from at a panel discussion. The club published 4,000 copies of their magazine Die Datenschleuder including a plastic foil reproducing the minister's fingerprint — ready to glue to someone else's finger to provide a false biometric reading. The CCC has a page on their site detailing how to make such a fake fingerprint.

Of course resisting the state's desire to catalogue our every movement means the terrorists will win...

[Hat-tip: Samizdata, via Guido]