You can spend all day, or even a lifetime, marvelling at the meaningless ways of digital bower birds.
Take Tim Blair, a bird of dowdy plumage, always picking up little trinkets ... why he would have had a field day back when milk bottles came with gaudy coloured tops.
Naturally the typo seen above titillated the readership, and logical conclusions were drawn:
Might explain where the IPCC has been going wrong for years.
Of course, of course.
Now let's ramp that up to 11.
If you follow the link to Texas, you land on a climate science denialist blog.
Naturally scientific conclusions are drawn, and epic results reached on the basis of a single figure.
Yes, this one figure reveals that the data is wrong, the models are in error, computers are stuffed, climate scientists are deluded clowns, a conspiracy is at work, climate science is fatally flawed - why I've been collecting temperature data for three months just to show their data is exaggerated - and it's time to quote Dr. Strangelove, and ... and ... watch out the black helicopters are coming to get you ...
It would be farcical if it wasn't so comical, or perhaps vice versa ...
Suddenly with one click you leap into a seething snake pit of comments which shows the American 'can do' mentality at work.
Can you pick apart global climate science on the basis of a single reading in Texas?
Can do!
Can you pick apart the Darwinian theory of evolution on the basis of a single flagellum?
Can do! (and more on that fuss here).
Can do!
Oh yes, it's a can do country.
Meanwhile, bowerbird Blair goes about his recycling business, a slow drip of inconsequential, meaningless trivia, in lieu of doing the hard yards, more revealing of the nature of the sites that he visits for his garbage-gathering than for the quality of the anodised foil caps he finds ...
Everybody twittering together in an air tight echo chamber, such that it reminded the pond of a Matson cartoon that has been given fresh currency thanks to the meltdown in the United States that cost the country that cool 24 billion smackeroos:
Ah yes, never leave home without the global warming deflectors.
More Matson cartoons here.
(Below: meanwhile, speaking of trivia, it was the mention of milk bottles that got to the pond. Click to enlarge, and you can find the originals and more milk bottle sightings here).
Oh that reminds the pond of some banana flavoured milk that went off in the noon day sun in Tamworth,
But we're not doing it for nostalgia alone.
You see, this:
Can easily be turned into this:
Bring back milk bottles, if only for the sake of Tim Blair ...
The picture of the school milk brought back some vivid memories, a little like your own. I can also proudly admit to having been a Milk Monitor in only my fifth year of schooling. And those tops made great Frisbees in an era which didn't have real Frisbees.
ReplyDeleteOh yeah, the great 'two-finger flick' mini frisbees. Talk about memories.
DeleteDP, which kid are you in that pic?
ReplyDeletethat's very cheeky of you Ian, the pond has never worn an apron.
DeleteOh wait, you mean the milk snorters? Well the pond doesn't feature, but it's good of you to point out the way that the photo only features boys and milk and straws. It turns out that these are kids at a school in the ACT in 1965, but that was also the way it was at Tamworth Primary, what with the patriarchy at work.
Always the boys in the photos, always the boys doing this and that playing marbles and thugby league, and never a thought for the girls.
But while we're down memory lane, the straws reminded the pond of a drinking option favoured by girls, which was to score the plain milk and use flavoured straws to get a more sophisticated drink. And what do you know, flavoured straws have now made a comeback:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sipahh
Russ - milk monitors! You have taken me back. And Dot, you have brought back the smell of souring milk with crusts of curdled cream. The lucky kids had straws striped with chemical strawberry or chocolate. When immersed in the little bottles of bacteria the chemicals would leach into the liquid and turn it pink or brown. The nuns made sure our tops were saved 'for the missions'. They must have been sold to a recycler I suppose.
ReplyDelete