Showing posts with label news. Show all posts
Showing posts with label news. Show all posts

Friday, June 27, 2008

Coming To A Tesco Near You Soon: Martian Asparagus

Yes, apparently it's official - you could probably grow pretty good asparagus on Mars. See the article on Reuters here.

Phew.

I for one, am greatly relieved now that I know our asparagus stocks are safe well into the next century and beyond. If we can now just crack deploying a sustainable greenhouse on Mars, and of course a small branch of B & Q, we could move on to cucumbers and from there sort out all the worlds food problems.

A Martian War Machine, seen here wielding an asparagus-tip Doomsday device. The prophetic nature of H.G. Wells' writing continues to astonish even today.

Despite the deeply profound implications of discovering both water (in ice form) and alkaline soil - two key scientific finds which greatly increase the probability of indigenous lifeforms existing on our closest neighbouring planet; NASA decide to break the news gently through the use of fruit and veg metaphors.

Early test flights of the Beagle 2 probe gave no hint or indication as to the abject and dismal failure that was to come.

The decision by the NASA publicity department to let some veg-obsessed "wet chemist" (check his department name) to talk to anyone about this makes even the Beagle 2 team look like sophisticated urbanites.

Dr. Colin Pillinger, chief Mekon behind the Beagle 2 mission. Seen here with a giant George Forman grill, bought for him by his team last Chrimbo as a commiseration prize for crashing his brain-child into the Red Planet.

Wednesday, June 25, 2008

UFO Across The Mersey

I've just clocked this post on the BBC web-site: BBC NEWS | England | Close encounters over Mersey which contains some rather dubious footage of some "mysterious" lights in the sky over the Mersey last night.

Not in itself particularly interesting thought I, until I watched the Flash vid associated with it and caught the snippet taken from de-classified MoD report regarding some blokes apparent contact with an alien life-form called Algar.

I for one, would like to be the first to offer my condolences for his great loss, with Algar being killed by another race of beings. Let's hope this doesn't cause some kind of inter-galactic war.

BTW, if you're interested in tracking down the original Algar report and other completely bonkers reports of lights in the sky, space cows, ray umbrellas and erm...visitations, then check out the National Archives page here.