There’s a fish in the Pacific ocean that actually eats its own brain. At the end of it’s breeding cycle, it attaches itself to rock and eats it’s, now redundant,  brain.  I think the DNA structure is somewhat similar to the ‘Politicious Europidous’,  a bottom feeder that destroys its own brain when taking office.

I have discovered that squirrels can not see the color red.  So I have constructed my own red cat suit, complete with red balaclava so the little bastards won’t see me coming.

As you may know, I’m not a big fan of beards; or any face-furniture for that matter. Foreigners and communists have them, ugh! Some great cultures have had a fondness for beards, though. The Egyptians believed that beards denoted wisdom and virile power. So much so, in fact, that their rulers, male or female, boy or girl wore false beards. Even the great Cleopatra wore a false beard, even when she captured the heart of the great Julius Caesar. Must have been confusing for him. Still, she was by all accounts a bit of a looker.

I heard,  the other day, that a group of scientists had done a study on dreams. Their idea was that people who were brought up with color TV dreamed in color and those who’ve been brought up with black and white TV dream in black and white. When I was growing up we didn’t have TV. we had to make do with simple pastimes; like catching a ball in a cup, running a hoop with a stick, or a game of shove-halfpenny. Maybe, thats when I dream, I dream of The BBC world service.

In medieval times powdered mummies, that is mummified corpses, were considered to be an incredibly efficacious cure for all number of illnesses, if taken orally. Unfortunately, real mummies were hard to come by; so physicians took to stealing corpses from the gallows, drying then in ovens and coating them in pitch to give them that authentic ‘mummified’ look.

Toast is one of my great loves. Toast with jam, marmalade or just butter. Toast, however, can be deadly.  Witness the case of Lord Castlereagh, a Tory statesman who’se  suicide, in 1822, created consternation at the time. Lord Castlereagh commited suicideon the 18th of August, 1822 in a fit of madness. The artist Benjamin Haydon (1786-1846) believed that the good Lord had died from an access of hot , buttered toast.

I was told the other day that the Barnacle has, relative to it’s size, the largest penis in the animal kingdom. It’s a coincidence really, as the good lady wife has often told me my penis is the size of a barnacle.

The ministry of Defense has never been open about the dangers of an invasion of Earth by extraterrestrials. My sources inside the Ministry tell me that on at least one occasion Earth was threatened with such a fate. The hostile aliens, the Squolag of M’foog IV, were only stopped by their genetic predisposition to clumsiness and being lethally accident prone. Apparently, the ‘Sub-Commander’ in charge of their battle fleet accidentally left the hand break off on their flagship; which sent it crashing back down onto their own planet wiping out about a third of the population. After this unhappy event, (I say unhappy, unhappy for them anyway), The Squolag gave up all thoughts of Galactic conquest and took basket weaving and other such harmless pursuits. Interestingly, The Squolag are distant relative of the Renaark of the Planet Bufwaa. The Renaark, however, are no threat to Earth at all. In fact, although highly intelligent, The Renaark have such a short term memory that whenever they make any kind of Scientific or cultural breakthrough they, almost immediately, forget its purpose or how to operate it or, indeed, what it is. So far, they have not advanced far beyond the equivalent of Earth’s Stone Age. One does wonder where the Ministry of Defense gets its information from to substantiate such claims. Probably from the same source as their information on weapons of mass destruction.

Tzar Alexander I of Russia believed that trousers were subversive. He was so worried about the spate of trouser wearing in Russia that he ordered trouser searches across Russia. His troops were ordered to search all the carriages in the country and, if anyone was found to be wearing trousers, they were to be cut off at the knees. (That’s their trousers,not their knees). Well, if I were Tzar of all the Russia’s  I would have ordered the banning of clothes by women under twenty-five.

‘Face furniture’, or beards and the like is not to be recommended.  In my day, no such thing was tolerated. In fact beards and moustaches were banned from most upmarket shops . Except Lloyd’s of London who just prohibited their staff from wearing moustaches or beards during working hours.