Apparently some maths nerds just found a 13 billion digit prime number. Good timing. The US government will probably need that to calculate the cost of the war in Iraq in a year or so.
Lost Vegas hint - If you meet one of the maths nerd who made the discovery and he starts telling you the story about this new mega prime number, don't let him draw it for you.
So me - a Kiwi slash Aussie is at a South American Restaurant in Abu Dhabi with some poms and a French chick and a Scottish bloke.
How fercken international is that? .. but that’s not what this dribble is about.
I wanna talk about fruit. Talking fruit. Well not actually talking. For the fruit to talk there would really have needed to be a vegetable in the mix… I’m thinking mushrooms. Small harmless looking ones boiled in a bit of water…
But I digress. Where was I?
Oh, that’s right talking fruit. Or, more accurately. What the fruit would have said if it could talk. Because we all know fruit can’t talk. Although, if there is anywhere in the world where they could afford to hire the scientists and linguists to devote the time and study to get fruit to talk, it’s here in Abu Dhabi. Richest city in the world don’t ya know. That’s why I’m here by the way. Whoring myself as an advertising slapper.
But I digress. Again. Sorry
So. We’re at this South American BarBQ restaurant where they bring you all this meat on big blades and if you want some they slice it off. Now it’s not only meat. There’s a salad bar and they bring you little bowls with your dose of carbs. Deep-fried polenta, hash browns… by the way, that’s weird eh. I always thought of hash browns as a breakfast food.
But it gets weirder. Also lurking in the bowl are these sections of banana. Deep-fried with a breadcrumb coating. Banana? With meat? What the hell?
I know. I was thinking that too. But it works.
So I got thinking about the concept of fruit with your main. The idea of promoting the food group from the back of the menu just before the special coffee. That’s when a guy turned up with a grilled pineapple on his giant blade and I realized that pineapple is a fruit that has always partied in the main section. Albeit as a partner to ham. So there you go, banana wasn’t the first, and that was comforting for the banana I thought, because you can imagine it out in the kitchen, lying there amongst the meat and veg. It’s a bit nervous, worrying about how it will be accepted by the punters. After all, it has only really ever featured in tandem with ice cream and cherries or on a platter with some of its relations and suddenly here it is. Going out with the first wave. Nice then that the pineapple is there to give some helpful words of encouragement. I imagine it would say something like, 'Don’t worry mate. They ‘re going to love you. I’ve been doing this since the 70’s. Cherries come with me sometimes, but to be honest I do most of the work. You’ll do fine kid. Just be the best banana you can be.’
What the pineapple is actually thinking is ‘Look at you with your breadcrumb covering for added appeal. I go out au natural. Just me. No dressing up. You’ve got props.’ But the pineapple wouldn’t say that. Not to the banana because he can see the little guy is shitting himself.
As a society we need rules. It’s just how we’re programmed. Rules and order bring stability to our lives and help us function. From the beginning of time we have felt the urge to bring order to our lives. For example. Cave men built walls of small pebbles at the entrances of their caves to mark in and out paths. This was so the guys dragging women back home by their hair to satisfy another urge, wouldn’t bump into the men dragging the woolly mammoth bones out to the trailer to take to the tip on clean up day (usually a Thursday, because there were no weekends in prehistoric times, so they could do chores like going to the tip and mowing the lawns whenever they wanted. Not mowing lawns so much because there wasn't much grass and what grass there was got eaten by the Wooly Mammoths. That was a bonus, but the downside was the Wooly Mammoths shit all over the place and so while the cavemen didn't have to mow lawns they did spend a lot of time cleaning up huge plies of shit. After a couple of thousand years of this the cavemen decided they would rather mow lawns than spend hours up to their elbows in poo, so they hunted the Wooly Mammoths to extinction.)
In the modern world some of our urges have to be suppressed. For example, we don’t drag women around by the hair anymore. That urge has been tucked away in the 'inactive projects' section of our brain, but the need for order in all things is still as strong as ever. It permeates every facet of our lives which is why it will come as no surprise that I saw large ripples across the normally still waters of the pond of order the other day, when I spied this very unorthodox footwear.
Is it a shoe? A quick glance may seed that impression with you. But look again…yes, those sides are disturbingly open. There are small holes that allow a view of the toes (in this case the white sock from the owners ’25 pairs of socks for 50 cents’ pack is covering them)
So our natural conclusion is to class this as a sandal yes? But no. There’s way too much fake leather for this to be classed as a sandal. How much is too much? I've sent one of these... things... to the Sandal Affairs Directorate headquarters in Guam for precise measurement by a team of Norwegian scientists using lasers and one of those rulers with the slidey things on it. But even to the untrained eye (by untrained I mean an eye that hasn’t been in the head of a person that has attended the Sandal Affairs 5 year Sandal Identification course) it is clear that this item of footwear exceeds the amount of covering that enables it to exist under the classification of sandal.
My friend Raphael, who has very little going on in his life, took the time most people would spend having a life, to consider the monstrosity you see before you and he came up with name SCHWANDAL.
Not a shoe, not a sandal. A freak. An outcast destined to inhabit that desolate wasteland between the two official and approved types of footwear. This is the child playing in the minefield out in no mans land people. This is unacceptable. This brings chaos where there was order and it goes against everything our forefathers set in motion when those first rocks were arranged like little stony motorway lane barriers at the entrance to their caves.
Slip on a shoe, pull on a sandal, but there is no room in our modern civilized society for a SCHWANDAL. They must be stamped out. The owner of this particular pair got a beating, caveman style and then we burned his Schwandals on a ceremonial funeral pyre. He’ll thank us later and I am pretty sure he’s going to tell the police that he doesn’t want to go ahead and press charges.
Running mate. Sounds very olympian so what a good time to announce his choice. And smart move to go for the white old guy. Their theme song should be that paula abdul classic 'We come together because opposites attract.'
I gotta say, the guy looks the part.
personally I thought my idea to get the guy who invented survivor to create a show called 'Americas next vice president' and hosted by Donald Trump was the way to go. Maybe next time.
But I feel sorry for the other contenders who Obama was considering for the role who have gone home empty handed.
David Hasselhoff
Danny Devito
Tom Cruise's chef
Donald Trump's hair
The guy who liked the razoor so much he bought the company
Hulk Hogan
The incredible Hulk
Ben & Jerry
The keyboard player from Hootie and the blowfish
Gladys Knight
one of the pips
The hamburgler
All great candidates and Obama was at pains to explain to them all, individually, that it was a really close thing. He was especially careful when he spoke to the incredible hulk. You don't want to piss that guy off. No matter how many secret service agents you got watching your back.
I know this all happened along long time ago in a galaxy far away but why did the guys in the firing room on the Death Star wear helmets? Was there a concern that they might bump their heads on something? The Death Star was still being built. It was technically a construction zone I guess. But how come the Admiral of the fleet didn’t get to wear a helmet. Him and his mates had to wear naff looking cloth caps that made them look like play mobil characters.
Perhaps there’s another reason behind the big black helmets. They look very similar to the ones worn by Olympic indoor cyclists. 
Could it be that the team in the firing room were sportsmen who worked on the death star part time, attracted by the flexible hours that allowed them to get out on the track? If so, this raises alarming questions about the standard of the people the dark side were hiring.
Mind you, I can see the thinking behind hiring cyclists. They shave their legs and that would have made slipping into the tight black pants that were standard Death Star Issue, a lot easier. But I wonder… when the little man on the left pushed the button that activated the beam that blew princess Leigh’s planet of Alderon to hell, was he thinking, ‘A thousand voices are about to cry out and then be suddenly silenced, and I’m the man.’ Or was he thinking about shaving a few seconds off his lap time at the velodrome, or, shaving his legs?
Hola! The word invented by U2 for their 2004 song vertigo and now adopted by the people of Spain.
I’ve come to Spain to look at cool buildings and drink their beer but I’m never one to miss the chance for a new tattoo. Found Voodoo Tattoo in Barcelona. I’m not familiar with Spanish tattooing traditions but as you can see from the pic they wont do tattoos of dogs, cigarettes or hamburgers… that was a blow because I was going to get a tat of a smoking dog but it will have wait till we are in a country where they are a little more open minded.
Also spotted another old lady with crazy hair for my ‘Old ladies with crazy hair’ collection. Bonus!
Arrived Madrid yesterday. We came by bullet train. I love traveling by train because unlike planes, you don’t have to put up your tray table 10 minutes before you arrive, you don’t have to wear a seat belt and your electronic devices don’t affect the navigation equipment. A much cooler way to travel.
Madrid is famous for being home to the Beckhams and to remind you of that there is a 50ft statue of David Beckham in the centre of town made out of posh’s unsold solo albums and jeans. 
If a teenager dyes her hair violet, shes ‘goin off the rails’ 'rebelling against society’ ‘falling in with the wrong crowd’.
BUT.
If Aunty Betty does it, shes just still only dear old Aunty Betty who still like a Sherry and the odd fluter on the horses.
That’s ageist.
Found these guys for sale. Like you I was instantly reminded of the lyrics from the hit song by Martika
'Step by step, heart to heart, left right left, We all fall down like toy soldiers.'
They seem really cheap. But i think that's because they're dead. 
Just a thought I wanted to get in before anyone else does. I think Obama will probably take out the election, unless the republicans have another voting machine trick up their sleeves.
BUT. If Obama misses out then the papers will need a headline to go with the day after the election. OR weeks after if it turns into a protracted legal battle.
I was thinking about this because I’m in London at the moment, home of the world’s best newspaper headlines. I’m talking magic like "Bananas in Pyjamas," that ran during the Michael Jackson trial.
Don’t know if there is any money in headline ideas for newspaper headlines but I humbly submit this little pearler.
O BUMMER 08
I’m no fan of that 80’s shop naming habit of replacing the s with a z. Hairdressers were especially guilty of this branding crime. Wavez, Cutz, Snipz. It wasn’t jazzy or clever. It looked retarded. As did calling something fast like a food or photocopying shop, Xpress.
BUT. I have to say I will make an exception for ChopstiX in portabello.
Why?
Because with the use of clever graphic design, they incorporated a pair of chopsticks into their logo. Which totally justifies the use of the X in the name.
Hats off.
If there’s an international competition for Chinese Takeaway names, then I smell GOLD.
Samir Kuntar, the Lebanese freedom fighter/terroist (depending on your point of view) who was jailed for 542 years at the age of16 has been freed by the Israelis. He went in in 79.
ABBA were still huge back then.
With the new Mamma Mia film in the headlines now as Samir comes out, I wonder if he thinks that ABBA is still huge and have been all this time. I think someone needs to explain to him that ABBA were hated during the 80’s and most of the 90’s. It would be embarrassing for us if he thinks we have been obsessed with them all this time.
You know that feeling when you buy something electronic and it comes with a really big, thick instruction book and you think ‘dam, I didn’t realise this glow in the dark X-Files themed toaster/fax machine was going to be so hard to learn to operate’ and then you open the book and it turns out there is only one page of instructions but it is translated into 85 other languages and that’s why it’s so thick…… I love that feeling.
