Thank you very much for the World Wide Web

Twenty-five years. Is it really that long since Tim Berners-Lee jumped out of bed one fine morning with a figurative light bulb over his head?

Looking back at that momentous day in March 1989, Berners-Lee (now Sir Tim), explained things very simply: “I just had to take the hypertext idea and connect it to the Transmission Control Protocol and domain name system ideas and – ta-da! – the World Wide Web!”

Obvious, when you come to think of it. What’s amazing is that no one had thought of the World Wide Web before.

And what’s even more incredible is that Sir Tim later confessed that those two forward slashes we’ve been meticulously typing at the beginning of every web address are totally unnecessary. He put them in, he said, because “it seemed like a good idea at the time”.

Well, we’ve all done things like that, from painting our bedrooms mauve to sliding down a hill on a tea-tray.

But looking back over 25 years of trying to remember which computer key is a forward slash and which one’s a backslash, it’s hard to forgive Sir Tim for that particular boo-boo.

Let’s look on the bright side, though. Much has changed since Sir Tim wrote in his WWW User Guide: “When color [sic] comes along, we can use colour...”

Imagine a world in which you couldn’t click your mouse on the words Click Here! and find that nothing happens because the web designer meant you to click some graphic down at the bottom of the page.

Imagine a world in which you couldn’t find out, with another mouse click, why Dermatologists Hate This Woman For One Weird Trick. What weird trick could it possibly be? Laying the poor out dermatologists with a bunch of daffs? Creeping up behind them and giving them a wedgie? Must... just... click... that... link...

Imagine, too,  a world where you couldn’t watch videos of kittens doing cute, stupid or downright dangerous things when you should be concentrating on work.

Yes, dear reader. For those of us old enough to remember it, that was the World before Sir Tim stuck those two extra Ws on the end. Not to mention the /s. Or possibly the \s.

It was a dark and dreary place. A world without Facebook. A world without Twitter. A world where you didn’t have  to remember a 12-character password and the second, fourth and tenth characters of a nine-character phrase if you wanted to find out how much money you haven’t got.

A world in which casually mentioning your mother’s maiden name to some friendly stranger down the pub wasn’t a catastrophic breach of data security.

A world in which you had to use a proper encyclopaedia, with paper pages, to settle family arguments.

And a world in which you couldn’t check up on the progress of Lydia the great white shark, whose solitary meanderings have taken her across the Atlantic in the general direction of the UK where, we can exclusively reveal, she will swim up the Avon to Bath and take part in the Jane Austen Centre's  forthcoming all-singing, all-dancing tribute to the Bennet family.  

So anyway, thank WWW, Sir Tim Berners-Lee. The world would be a lot less fun without you.

Something nasty under the tundra

It is at times like this, with the world in crisis, nations rattling their sabres and the price of fuel going through the roof, that one thinks of the words of Boney M’s 1978 chartbuster Rasputin.

“Ohhh, those Russians.”

The late Bobby Farrell, lead singer with the top-selling Deutsche Disco act, must have known a thing or two about international relations. He was born in the Dutch Antilles and lived in Norway, Holland and Germany before dying, at a tragically early age, in a hotel room in St Petersburg. Russia.Now how spooky is that?
Well, not as spooky – or scary – as the news coming out of Russia right now.

And we’re not talking about the Ukraine here, or the imminent outbreak of World War Three. Or at least Crimean War Two.

No, this week’s really bad news from the land of the borscht and the balalaika got rather buried under all the macho Putinic posturing.

It came from far north and east of Sevastopol, and it concerned not mad monks but mad scientists.

French mad scientists, to boot.

They were poking around in the Siberian tundra and found what they describe as a “giant virus” – Pithovirus sibericum to its friends. 

It has been lying dormant for some 30,000 years, but with the defrosting of the not-so-permafrost it has warmed up, come back to life and started chomping on its prey: single-celled amoebae.

Killer: Pithovirus sibericum, yesterday 

(Pavel Hrdlička, Wikipedia)

Pithovirus, like Rasputin, is obviously very hard to kill.

Professor Jean-Michel Claverie and his colleague Dr Chantal Abergel, from the University of Aix-Marseille, are quick to reassure us that humanity has nothing to fear from the unpleasant little critter. 

“It comes into the cell, multiplies and finally kills the cell,” said Dr Abergel with more than a trace of Gallic glee. “It is able to kill the amoeba, but it won’t infect a human cell.”

Leaving aside the question of how she can be sure, what’s most worrying here is the thought that there might be something really nasty lurking under the semi-frozen plains of Siberia.

Picture the scene, if you will.The French boffins probe deeper into the squelchy half-frozen peat. Mais quel horreur! They reel back as a grey-green mass of sentient lichen pokes out a prehensile pseudopod, hauls itself up to the surface and fixes them with the three beadiest of its seven beady eyes.

“Hello,” it says. “My name is Dmitri. Please to take me where there is vodka.”

All of which goes to prove that just because you can do something (like re-animate a virus, or a lichen, or an Irish elk, or even Neanderthal Man) it doesn’t necessarily mean that you should.

From Icarus to Doctor Frankenstein, legend and literature are full of examples of those who flew in the face of nature, and fell. The Greeks had a word for it: hubris.

And when Vladimir Putin comes marching over the Russo-Ukrainian border, mounted on a prancing woolly mammoth and followed by troops of wild-eyed Orthodox monks, you can’t say that we haven’t been warned.

Chillies in a box

It’s a hard life being an amateur chilli grower, and February is the hardest month of all.

Because February, of course, is the month when the little darlings get planted. Or should it be March? Or even January? It depends a bit on which packet of seeds you read, but one thing’s for sure: chillies need both light and warmth.

Neither of which is much in evidence in the conservatory at Dixon Towers, which faces north west and lets in draughts like the Titanic let in water.

So what we need is a controlled environment. And that means a visit to IKEA to buy a chest, which we know before we set off is called an Apa. And it also means a conversation with a member of staff who isn’t keen to tell us where we might find said Apa in the flat-pack aisles at the end of the store, and who instead suggests we track it down in the children’s section.

Which, what with it being a Saturday afternoon, is knee-deep in tinies, hell-bent on obscuring the product from the paying customer.

So it’s back to the staff member, who is at last persuaded to look up the Apa on his terminal and divulge its hiding place among all the other flatpacks (what is it, some sort of trade secret?).

Home again to build the chest. Pause for  speculation about why IKEA Allen keys are never up to the job.

Finish chest with aid of electric screwdriver, stand back and admire.

OK, now for the heat. Place horticultural mat in bottom of chest. Drill hole for wire in end. Remove plug, pass wire through hole, re-attach plug.

Pause  to reminisce about the good old days when you had to buy a plug whenever you bought a new appliance.

Crack on with it, Dixon. We need light. Assemble fluorescent fitting and switch, in contravention of every wiring regulation known to man.

Fix gaffer tape to inside of lid. It doesn’t stick. Apply two coats of PVA glue to lid. Pause overnight while glue dries. Attach more gaffer tape to lid, fix light fitting to gaffer tape with double-sided tape. All seems well.

Place seed trays on mat, turn on mat and light, close lid and await results.

Important scientific discovery. Fluorescent light fittings give off heat. Seed trays give off water vapour. Gaffer tape does not stick to PVA-impregnated hardboard in warm damp environment.

Light fitting falls off, missing trays by a whisker.

Off to the DIY shop to buy industrial-strength pipe brackets. Drill holes in lid, attach brackets, dangle light fitting from same. Sorted.

By this stage the budget is so out of control that  if any chillies do emerge in August (or July, or October), the unit cost will be on a par with  expensive luxuries like saffron. Or even printer ink.

Then Mrs D  sucks her teeth judiciously and asks  “Don’t plants need air?”

Resist temptation to debate  transpiration with someone who clearly knows more about it than you do.

Open the lid a crack, leave the chillies to do their stuff.

They’ve had all the help they’re going to get.

Hot. Cool. Yours. It's Winter Olympic meltdown!

So there we are, sitting on the sofa and catching our breath between multiple sessions on Netflix (we’re proper binge-watchers these days) when it hits us: the Winter Olympics are on!

As we watch, the Dixon drawing room fills with a sense of wonder. 

“I wonder how they do it?” says Mrs D, as a 15-year-old elf nonchalantly throws a single Salchow, a double Axel and a triple toe loop with bells on before landing gracefully in the arms of her swooping swain.

“I wonder if they get dizzy?” says young Miss D, practical as ever.

“I wonder when we can watch Breaking Bad?” mutters young Mr D, terminally unimpressed.

Another source of wonder is the ability of the BBC commentators at Sochi to tell at a glance the difference between an ollie, a stalefish and a McTwist 540.

All of which are genuine snowboarding tricks, fact fans. You really could not make them up.

And that’s when those very same commentators aren’t stretching the English language to breaking point by pressing innocent nouns into service as verbs.

As in: “The English hopeful had a chance of medalling but it was the Russian veteran who podiumed.” Doctor Johnson must be spinning in his grave.

Even more wonderful (in the sense of making you wonder what it’s all about) is the Sochi slogan.

Hot. Cool. Yours.

According to the official Sochi website, this ringing phrase is “a universal solution successfully combining innovation and dynamism.”

According to yours truly, it’s even more daft than Wenlock and Mandeville. And who remembers them?

Moon. Jam. Varnish.

Clamp. Knee. Bedwear.

Take any three words, put them in a row and stick full stops after them. You know it makes sense, especially if you’re being paid for it.

Enough linguistic opprobrium, though. We’re off to the moguls (bumpy skiing to the uninitiated) where the commentary team are getting a teensy bit overwrought.

“The poles are working overtime!” screams one, somewhat ambiguously. “Those kneepads let the judges know exactly what’s going on below the waist!” yelps another, somewhat less ambiguously. “The British pair are going back to back!” yodels a third with as little ambiguity as it’s possible to muster before the 9pm watershed.

To be strictly accurate, the British pair were snowboarders. There wasn’t any room for us Brits on the moguls after the three Dufour-Lapointe sisters from Canada took to the slopes.

Which of course leads us to further wondering, this time about the quality of dinner-table conversation chez Dufour-Lapointe.

“Hi girls,” says Mum. “And what did you do today?” “Mogulling” says Chloé. “Mogulling” says Justine. “Mogulled” says Maxime, who is soon to join the BBC.

The real trouble with the Winter Olympics, though, is that so many of the so-called sports are subjective. If it takes a judge to decide the winner, then is it really a sport?

Still, while our British curlers enjoy their brush with destiny, those of us left at home do at least get to play Spot-The-German-With-The-Rudest-Sounding-Surname.

Andreas. Ski-jump. Google.

Bristol crocodile blocks last route out of Bath

Typical, isn’t it? No sooner does one news story of weird animals threatening humanity get put to rest (last week, remember, it was mutant cannibal rats on a 21st-century Marie Celeste death ship) than another rears its ugly head.

Or to be absolutely precise, its scaly head. Because yes, gentle reader, a six-foot crocodile has been spotted sploshing around in the river Avon in Bristol.

It was first reported by a bus driver on Bedminster Bridge, which immediately raises two questions: (a) what was he on? and (b) where can we get some?

But that would be uncharitable, and the story must be true, because it’s been in all the papers, and the croc itself has not one but two Twitter accounts, and it’s been posting some fairly gruesome selfies all over the internet.

Indeed, no less a personage than Nick Gargan, chief constable of Avon and Somerset Constabulary, also took to Twitter (as you do) to advise his followers not to go water-skiing in the river.

Which could actually be a bit awkward, because over the last couple of weeks the Avon has become pretty much the only reliable route out of Bath. If the roads aren’t shut by design, for the fettlement of the sewage system or the installation of super-fast broadband, then it’s by accident.

Fallen branches, collapsed walls, rising tides and people driving the wrong way along motorways have all conspired to thwart any sort of escape from this fair city. Not that you’d necessarily want to leave, but if you did, it looks like the river is currently the only way out.

Or at least it was, until Chris the Crocodile came along and blocked the aquatic route too.

Help is at hand, though, in the shape of a press release cunningly disguised as junk email, received earlier this week at Chronicle Towers, promoting the benefits of a thing called the JetCard.

This “ultimate gift for the man or woman who has everything” (it says here) “buys world-class travel by private jet for time-strapped executives and HNWI’s who want a sense of private jet ownership without the costs and responsibilities.”

What’s a HNWI? Have Not (got the) Wildest Idea. But it sounds like a lot of fun. All you need is an airstrip and one of those cards, which comes in its own black box and is made of aviation-grade titanium, and you’re away.

But the real point of this spam (sorry, marketing communication) is to remind readers that Valentine’s Day is only just round the corner, and that if you’re the sort of HNWI who wants to surprise their significant other with a romantic gift on February 14, then prices start at a mere 4,320 Euros per hour of private flight.

For those of us who are more HMRO – Help (my) Money’s Running Out – than HNWI, the traditional Valentine’s Day profferings of chocolates, smellies and inexpensive pieces of jewellery will probably have to suffice.

Oops, that’s given the game away. If Mrs D was expecting a romantic river cruise with a bit of reptile-spotting at end of it, then she’s going to be sorely disappointed.

Purple tomatoes, cannibal rats

It can hardly be a coincidence, in the week in which Mrs D sits down and starts to think seriously about ordering the entire contents of five separate seed catalogues, that the BBC should choose to stir up horticultural alarm and despondency.

“Genetically-modified purple tomatoes heading for shops,” screamed the headline, while the mind quietly boggled.

How much genetic modification are we talking about exactly? Have the Canadian growers bred sentience into these mauve solanaceae? Have they endowed them with little purple legs so they can trot their way to the shops? And little purple hands to hold their shopping bags?

Let's face it, we could be looking at a squirrel scenario here. You know how it goes: tough foreign breed is introduced to our shores and squeezes out native red variety, which only survives in niche habitats in the north of Scotland.

All right, our British red tomato isn’t really any more native than its Canadian GM clone. But it’s happened before, it could happen again. So why let the facts get in the way of a good scare story?

And speaking of scare stories, did you hear the one about the cannibal rat ghost ship? Now that really did make the skin prickle.

It started in the Sun, with a sobering headline: “SHIP OF GHOULS”; a well-balanced introduction: “A GHOST ship laden with cannibal RATS is sailing for our shores, experts fear — as nobody knows where it is!”; and a photo of the ill-starred cruise liner Lyubov Orlova looming out of a writhing mist of Photoshop.

Regional papers with circulation areas bordering on the Atlantic Ocean were quick to pick up on the tale. Step forward the Herald of Plymouth with “Ghost ship full of cannibal rats could be about to crash into Devon coast.” (Notice that phrase “could be”? Try replacing it with “not” and see if it changes the meaning.)

And it can only be a matter of time before our very own Bath Chronicle splashes (geddit?) on “DEATH ship packed to the GUNWALES with cannibal RATS with a taste for purple TOMATOES sighted at Saltford MARINA and heading up the Avon for BATH!!!”

PURPLE TOMATO MOLECULE: some anthocyanin, yesterday

At least it would make a change from all that fuss about bus gates.

In times of trouble, though, the BBC is quick to calm our fears. It pretty much ignored the cannibal rats, and instead concentrated (double geddit?) on the tomatoes.

It appears that they will be squished in their native Canada before embarking for our shores, and every last seed seived out to ensure there’s no chance of genetic contamination or cross-breeding.

And the purple pulp will contain enhanced levels of anthocyanin, which sounds nasty but is really an anti-oxidant that does all sorts of healthy things to you. Allegedly. You can get it from blueberries and cranberries too, but they don’t taste quite as good on pizza.

So mix yourself a stiff Bruised Mary and relax: when it comes to tomatoes, the boffins know best.

Yes, they have no bananas

Rather sad news reaches us from Bristol Zoo, where the monkeys are having bananas phased out of their diets.

The same thing is happening at Paignton Zoo, too. Recent research has shown that bananas grown for human consumption are too sugary for simians, and as a result the macaques,  marmosets and cherry-crowned mangabeys are becoming over-aggressive and prone to tooth decay and diabetes.

Instead, they’re being switched to a diet of fresh green vegetables and brown rice, as a result of which, according to the head keeper of mammals at Paignton, their coats are getting shinier and their outlook on life sunnier.

Now, skirting around the gloomy prospect for any living creature of a diet that could well include both broccoli and brussels sprouts, the main thing about all this no-bananas shenanigans is that it brings into sharp focus one of the biggest bugbears of modern life in January: the Enforced New Year’s Resolution.

Nobody asked the monkeys if they wanted to give up bananas. (Come to that, nobody asked them if they wanted to live in a zoo.)

And in the same way, no one asked if you wanted to give all the things that are bad for you and do a bit of exercise, on the flimsy pretext that it’s no longer 2013.

And you certainly didn’t ask a certain national newspaper to force-feed you a new supplement called Do Something. Because frankly there’s more than enough to do already, from cleaning the gunge off the bathroom tiles to rebuilding Mrs D’s raised beds, which have gone soggy in the rain.

Mind you, if you do fancy a new hobby, you could always start collecting partworks.

Back in the day these informative publications, which by some bizarre coincidence always seem to launch in early January, would help you learn carpentry, car maintenance, cross-stitch, egg-painting and any number of other useful household crafts, all for £1.99 for the first issue along with a free – yes FREE! – binder, then £4.99 each for the remaining 127 instalments as long as you place an advance order with your newsagent because it won’t be on the shelves come April.

Nowadays, as well as sharply priced instruction manuals, you can collect all the requisite bits for a Marvel Comics superhero-themed chess set (FREE board!), a Lancaster bomber (FREE Guy Gibson!) or even a Disney Pirates of the Caribbean Black Pearl Galleon™®© (FREE Johnny Depp!)

Although it’s hard to see the attraction of building up a model plane or sailing boat, rib by laborious rib, over the next two years of your already glamorous life. Or indeed of spending a sum not unadjacent to £250 on a chess set (£7.99 a pop), when you’ve got a perfectly good one already. Even if the Marvel variety is crafted from lead-free metallic resin, and yours is only made of plywood.

No, this year let’s stick to simple resolutions, like writing sentences with a proper verb. And not starting them with “And”.

Damn. That’s two broken already. Pass the bananas...