Islam empowers Skynet

Kudos to the Islamic faith for the great work it’s doing to bring about the extinction of mankind. Obviously there’s the whole Iran-initiated nuclear holocaust to hope for, but even if they don’t really have the balls for that, there’s Muslim women’s couture, which is a total Allah-send for genocidal machines from the future. Why bother developing robots that look and move exactly like people when all you need to do is get the eyes and the hands right and then cover the whole thing in a black cloth?

 Killing machines from the near-future?

Not only does it not arouse suspicion, it’ll actually benefit from cultural discrimination. Terminators could trundle down the street on tank tracks, bristling with all kinds of heavy ordinance, and people will actively ignore them.

The hijab: inviting death from the future since the 7th century.

Public health researchers are idiots

According to this story on blithering tech-bilge site The Register, a pair of geniuses from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine have worked out that fat people produce more carbon than thin people (presumably due to the cost of baking extra pies and all the CO2 produced by breathing twice as much as a normal person), and therefore suggest that the way to save the planet is for everybody to get thin.

Won’t work. If all the fat people became thin, they’d be attractive and start having more sex, and the resulting population explosion will accelerate the inevitable demise of life on this planet. Not that there’s anything wrong with that.

Lotto Rapist

It’s all in the news again. No real comment, I just love seeing “lotto rapist” headlines everywhere.

Anti-smoking campaign

Apparently the current “I’m not scared” anti-smoking ads are proving effective at making adults consider giving up (albeit at the price of upsetting children). “Three times more people than expected” called the NHS stop smoking help line. That’s three times more people than expected who are now going to pay less tax and live longer. How does that help, exactly?

Mad props to the fifth of UK adults who still smoke. Keep it up guys, you’re doing a great job.

“Michelle Obama’s G20 wardrobe”

Seriously, London free paper editor? You actually want that phrase in your product? You think it’s worth using even recycled paper to print a sidebar – on an actual news page, next to a story about the largest global economic summit in history – which begins “All eyes will be on Michelle Obama’s G20 wardrobe,” do you?

Anyone who doesn’t find that abhorrent should just give their opposable thumbs back.

No, I will not direct questions to yourself

Attention, illiterate executives. “Myself” is not a synonym for “me”. I know you think that if you use longer words you’ll sound cleverer, but you’re mistaken. What you’re actually doing is using wrong words and sounding stupid.

The actual explanation for this involves complicated concepts like “subject” and “object” and “reflexive pronoun”, but you haven’t got a hope in hell of understanding that, so I’ll try and make it simple:

• You do things to yourself
• I do things to myself

Since it’s a safe bet that nobody cares what you do to yourself, you have no reason at all to use “myself” in any emails or intranet posts or press releases you write.

Next time: why nobody cares at all about anything you do, and you should just kill yourself.

From today's Metro

"I'd snog Jodie Marsh, marry Chantelle Houghton and avoid Posh Spice. Upper-class birds like her are too much like hard work."

Wayne Mason, of Essex: you are a failure of evolution and almost certainly only kept alive day to day by the barriers that stop terminally stupid people wandering out into traffic. And yet, if you became ill, the NHS would spend my money trying to save your worthless life so that you may continue to generate carbon dioxide and precious little else. You are irrefutable evidence that humanity must die.