Terry Pratchett has Alzheimers.

Dunblane Hydro is very swish and you have to tack up the hill to the front door if you’re riding a 70″ fixed.

Fly-tipping costs the taxpayer an estimated £11m/annum in Scotland alone BARE MINIMUM. Fly-tippers should be shot on sight, in my personal opinion. 78% of the wastes dumped are of the household domestic variety. I just don’t get it. They can take their rubbish to Civic Amenity sites for free. Why dump it? They still have to get in their cars and drive it out to their chosen dump site. In the middle of the night, mostly. Surely it would be easier just to take it somewhere appropriate.

My Pompino is distinctive enough that total strangers know where I work just cos they’ve seen my bike in the bike shed.

The girlie who had the trembling lip at Stirling a couple of weeks ago rode up to Bridge of Allan and got the next train. She rides a Raleigh, not a Claude Butler.

The coffee from the stall on Platform 2 at Haymarket tastes like shit all the time. It wasn’t a one-off. I will not buy from there again. I will go to the ATM just outside the station or across to Bean Scene.

And, totally unrelated, I have tomorrow and Monday off. Woohoo!

Something for your bathroom, perhaps?

Or maybe a Christmas present for Four-Handled Moss-Covered Family Gradunza?

In case you were wondering, cos I know at least one of you has been, aye it’s bloody Baltic up here.

This is my first winter bike commuting in Scotland. I’m riding the fixed because it’s got better control on slippy surfaces. Last time I moved Fingal I got the “Where have you been?!” message. I even missed his annual birthday cake 🙁

What I’m noticing most of all is the CRUNCH. At first I thought it was ice but then realised that they salt the roads so much it looks like granular snow some mornings. As I leave the house at half six, I’m out there when it’s still really cold. Down in Devon I was overheating even in winter. Up here I’m layered to buggery and really grateful for the buff. When I was riding down south the restriction on my breathing was too much of an irritation. It’s so cold here at the moment that the cold on my lungs is enough to leave me wheezing and gasping like I’ve just done a 10 mile TT at full sprint even after the quick hike to the station.

Today and tomorrow I’m commuting to our office in Perth for a training course, and I’ll be sticking with the fixed despite the long climb up Glasgow Road, because of the ice.

If it gets much worse I’ll have to consider putting the ice tyres on…

A while back I got into an argument on Munky’s LJ about humans being apes. Every so often someone rants about how stupid people are, and their inability to comprehend that we live on a closed system; or their capacity for being infected by dumbass memes like the Holocaust denial. On this particular occasion the provocation was the Oxford Union playing host to Nick Griffin of the BNP; and David Irving, proponent of aforementioned Holocaust denial.

It has been my long-held opinion, probably as a result of immersing myself in the philosophy of the sadly missed Robert Anton Wilson, that humans are just great apes.

Yes. Just great apes. I say that quite deliberately. Sure we’ve got art and science and culture, but then our particular evolutionary trick has been to develop a brain that gives us the capacity to change our environment rather than, say, being restricted to one particular niche. Everything that humans claim sets us apart from the animals is a result of that evolutionary gambit. If we fall into the trap of believing that humans are anything other than great apes, we immediately start thinking that somehow we are separate from our biology and a whole pile of shit ceases to make sense. Memes don’t exist in a vacuum: they exist in our monkey brains. Monkey brains are biological and subject to both localised current biochemical process and the neurological structure that has resulted from evolution.

Many things can be explained to at least some degree by the fact that humans are apes: from road rage to religious war to gang culture to Bush being so damn slow on the uptake with climate change. Humans are not some sort of higher spiritual being driving around in a vehicle made of meat from which they are somehow separated by virtue of their intelligence. They are apes.

To me this seems self-evident, however most people would disagree to a greater or lesser extent. Presumably they have not experienced the mood swings that come from blood sugar crash when one hits the wall, or even the slightly more prosaic post-prandial torpor that results from blood being diverted from their ape brains in order to deal with a heavy meal.

I’m not the only one to think along these lines, however. Luckily for me David Wong has addressed this with far more verve and humour than I’ve ever been arsed to over at Cracked. I seriously recommend it. Next time you find yourself wondering why in the hell that driver cut you up apparently without a second thought, just remember you’re not part of his monkeysphere.

I found Wong’s article, incidentally, after being directed by Greg Smith to the 9 Most Badass Bible Verses. I’m still chuckling over the idea of the earth saying “OM NOM NOM”.

An advert comes on the telly offering a subscription service for people who can’t work their technology. It has a guy pretending to be Mick Jagger and some wifey and they are both complaining about not being able to work their DVD player. Frood’s response:

“Give us some money because you’re stupid. We are a subscription service for stupid people. ‘I can’t get out of my flat. Please help!’ Well, see that round knob in front of you? Turn it anticlockwise. ‘Help! My toilet is full of poo!’ See that lever there? Press it down and the poo will go away.”

Thanks to Munky for pointing me in the vague direction of this.

It’s only 32 seconds. And I expect it’s doing the rounds. But the look on that polar bear’s face when the little girl wearing a hat in the shape of a seal peeks round the pillar at him is worth the price of entry.

We’ve got a stuffed seal who looks like that. He’s called Stick The Kettle On. He’s a lot smaller and is missing a flipper cos one of our hamsters et it. Hamster’s dead now. Not as a result of that, I might add. Considering that hamsters aren’t the natural predators of seals, those stuffed seals must look pretty tasty. Polar bears do eat seals, however. He probably thought someone had brought him lunch to give him a break from the mindless routine of incarceration.

That’s a bigger bear than we’ve managed to roll up in the Katamari cowbear challenge. Even so, I think the little girl’s reaction is a tad over the top. There’s plate glass in the way, you silly moo! Must have been for telly.

The vortex tube.

I have no use for one. No reason to have one. But WANT! It’s just so cool!

Say kids, engineering can be fun. Pump in compressed air and you get cold air from one side and hot air from the other. Just from air! And engineering!

Shackleton seems to have got it into his little head that I like having chunks taken out of my fingers.

I haven’t tightened his chain or sorted that front wheel alignment yet. I’m not sure I can afford to lose any more skin.

Still. At least he’s clean. Ish.

Who stopped to see if I needed help when I was fixing my loose chain on the way into East Wemyss this afternoon: thank you for stopping. I really was quite all right. Even though I am a girl, I know to carry the requisite tools for making minor repairs and I know how to use them.

I has Surly wrench!

Just as well I ride prepared for such things, really, or the valve failure I had 10 miles later would have been a bitch.

I shall kindly assume that your bogglement on seeing it was a fixed gear had nothing to do with the fact that I’m a girl, because everyone knows girls fix too, right? Besides, I’m fed up with that particular conversation. I’d have caught your ass too, if it weren’t for the traffic lights on the roadworks on the other side of town. The light turned red just as your bright yellow jacket was sailing up the rise into Buckhaven.

I love the way cyclists stop to see if you need a hand. It’s so sweet. It makes the world seem a nicer place.