Heard in a pub: Traveller

"They done something to Abbot Ale so it travels further"

Star Trek stone sold

William Shatner has sold a kidney stone he ejected in October 2005 to the Golden Palace casino for $25K. The money will be donated to the Habitat for Humanity charity, which will be enough to build 1/2 a house for a homeless tsunami or hurricane victim.

His years as Captain Kirk showed as his superior negotiating skills enabled him to get $10K more from the casino than was first offered. Unfortunately, his years of conversation with Mr Spock didn't educate him - he claimed that "If you subjected it to extreme heat, it might turn out to be a diamond." If he really believed that he should have stuck in the oven and turned up the gas to 1000 C. He could then have sold the toasted kidney stone and built a whole village with it.

If he had listened to Spock, he might have learnt that diamond is a form of pure carbon and forms naturally when there is both high temperature and high pressure (at least 50x atmospheric pressure). Kidney stones are crystals comprised of one of the following: calcium phosphate, calcium oxalate, or magnesium ammonium phosphate,

You can see photos of the stone and listen to Shatner talking about it on the Live with Regis and Kelly TV programme.

After Shatner's stone sale, I look forward to seeing, on sale, celebrity toilet liquid & solid wastes nasal products & gametes.

Golden Palace's unique guerilla & viral marketing campaign includes the buying of increasingly bizarre curios on eBay, including

• Paying $530 for a jar of Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie's breath , "captured" at the Mr & Mrs Smith Premiere in LA
• Paying $28K for a 10-year old grilled cheese sandwich which is one bite short of a picnic, which its maker says has the face of the Virgin Mary
• Paying $650K for the right to name a new species of Bolivian titi monkey, GoldenPalace.com Monkey

In its defence, Golden Palace claims over $200K has gone to charity from its purchases.

Super Detox You

Following on from my last posting earlier tonight, I discovered that Alex Jamieson, Morgan Spurlock's girlfriend, featured in Super Size Me, is promoting her Vegan detox diet, as featured in the film.

Walk in Porn

I went down to my local branch of the regal burger chain to celebrate my newly-non-hirsute self when I noticed that instead of drive-in food, walk in porn had been added to the menu.

Whilst waiting for my mixed-meat sandwich on special to be irradiated from the freezer, I clocked a sitting well-built middle-aged white guy pointing at a standing scrawny & pale 30-something oriental woman at my 6. She flashed open her jacket and whipped out a handful of DVDs. Turning on Bond mode, I attempted to view the proceedings, by turning my head slowly round, for you blog-edification. I couldn't read the titles but I don't think it mattered what they were called. Somehow, I did manage to see the scantily-clad ladies in a variety of poses on the front covers of the cases.

Someone else's multi-cow mince arrived. A woman got up from a table and asked for more ketchup. According to Morgan Spurlock, who ate McDonalds only, for a month, to make Super Size Me, in his book of the film, with its typically-American legal caveat as a title, Don't Eat this Book, a single burger could contain meat from 100s of animals!! I looked away.

When I looked back, even though I couldn't hear a word, I could see the odd couple were haggling about the price. After a minute of this, the man handed over a note, folded over several times and the woman took out 4 DVDs from her sports bag and gave them to him. She zipped up her bag quickly.

As she was about to leave, she noticed the ketchup addict on her own and attempted another sale. I predicted young lone women don't buy porn over lunch - and I was right. The vendor was sent into the cold, grey & rainy street with a flea in her ear.

Video wars: round 2

Toshiba to Sell HD-DVD players in USA first (my italics) according to the Washington Post. It's ironic that a Japanese company is selling these new players in March, abroad. Apparently the Japanese will only get them when a "copy protection issue" is sorted out.

Normally the Japanese get new technology before anyone else e.g. video game consoles as shown by this BBC News article about the Playstation 3, " "We think September could be the right time for Sony in the US and November in Europe,"...., "Japan a bit earlier, say June or July" "

Anyway, it sounds like HD-DVD will be getting to market first - ahead of Blue Ray. With the techies beating the marketeers with an obvious acronym, it should get the edge as consumers will quickly realise the new disc is a DVD and wrongly assume it is for High Definition TV (HD is actually High Density).

Who the hell is going to work out what "Blu-Ray" is? Punters will assume it's something to see when diving the Great Barrier Reef.

Needless to say, even though both formats use blue lasers (rather than the red lasers for CDs & DVDs), Blue Ray is more advanced. It can store 25 GB in a single layer versus only 15 GB in a single HD-DVD layer. Dual layer recordings will also be available, offering 2x the data stored.

It sounds like the Betamax vs VHS wars all over again.

Of course, some think both formats will be annhilated by HVD, according to Softpedia, which will offer 1000 GB of storage using both blue and red lasers in a single ray. Alas, it won't be backwards compatible with DVDs, unlike the other 2 formats.

Confessions of an armed robber

I was listening to Nick Ferrari on LBC Radio a few minutes ago and Lawrence phoned in claiming to be a newly-released armed robber. He said he had been sentenced to 20 years and let out after 15. It was not his first offence:

NF: "Have you ever shot anyone?"
L: "I'm not going to answer that."
NF: "Clearly you have."

NF gave him a sermon on how crime is wrong but the caller was not unrepentant. So, NF asked him what he would do if NF was working in a bank that the caller planned to rob:

L: "Give me the money or I'll kill you."
NF: "No."
L: "Give me the money or I'll shoot you."
NF: "No."
L: "I'll shoot you in the arm."
NF:"Then what?"
L: "Give me the money."
NF: "No."
L: "I'll shoot you in the other arm. Give me the money."
NF: "No. What are you going do now?"
AR: "I don't know. I don't have a rule for if you do this or that."

NF then asked the caller how far he would go.

NF: "Would you shoot women or children?"
AR: "What do you think I am - an animal?. There are rules in our business."

NF then asked L about his family:

NF: "What are you kids doing?"
L: "2 of them are working in the family business. I've got one boy who has let the family down."
NF:"He's gone straight and sits around doing a normal job."
NF:"What do you want him to do?"
NF:"I want him to work in the family business. It is a good business if you get away with it."