Something for the man who has everything

With Christmas round the corner, why not get the man in your life something special. We all know how much men are obsessed by their penises, well now they can make their very own latex replica.

Is the man in your life too demanding in the bedroom? why not wait till he's asleep and give him a taste of his own medicine.

World's largest sleeping Buddha

The worlds largest statue of a sleeping buddha is being carved in China

The story taht will not die

Still more recounts going on, this time in New Hampshire, which may settle whether there is a recount demanded in florida

Disney try to catch some of that Pixar sparkle

Disney is reportedly setting up it's own digital animation house to develope Toy Story 3 - Obviously no one in Disney has cottoned on to the fact that endlessly throwing out inferior sequels to your past hits is no way to stay relevant or commercially successful

News from the Department of No Surprise

I was wondering how long it would be before we started hearing about things like this. Three Democratic members of the House of Representatives in the US are calling for an enquiry into irregularities with voting machines in the recent US election.

Reports from voters in Florida and Ohio also indicated that some of them had problems voting for the candidate of their choice. When they tried to vote for John Kerry, they said, the machine either wouldn't register the vote at all or would indicate on the review page that the vote was cast for Bush instead.

Does anyone believe Bush and his cronies hadn't rigged the election like they did last time??

Is there any reason not to suspect cheating?

With the result in the US election looking like it's going the way of giving us four more years of hell from George Bush, an article in wired which makes one wonder if there's any hope the election hasn't been rigged.

And still the idiots buy Windows

An article that is music to any Mac-head's ears - Mac OS X is the safest Operating system on the planet. As if we needed to know.

The most comprehensive study ever undertaken by the mi2g Intelligence Unit over 12 months reveals that the world's safest and most secure 24/7 online computing environment - operating system plus applications - is proving to be the Open Source platform of BSD (Berkley Software Distribution) and the Mac OS X based on Darwin. This is good news for Apple Computer whose shares have outperformed the benchmark NASDAQ, S&P and Dow indices as well as Microsoft by over 100% in the last six months on the back of revived sales and profits. The last twelve months have witnessed the deadliest annual period in terms of malware - virus, worm and trojan - proliferation targeting Windows based machines in which over 200 countries and tens of millions of computers worldwide have been infected month-in month-out.

One for the Doctor Who fans out there

Will just have to do till the return of the real thing

NO ONE DIED WHEN CLINTON LIED.......

A composite image of Bush composed of the American soldiers who have died fighting in Iraq. Just as well it doesn't use the images of the Iraqi people as the picture would be immense

England's orchards are in a bad way

Great piece from the Guardian about the decline of England's orchards. Supermarkets demand standardised apples and a change in EU subsidies mean that the few orchards that continue to grow older varieties of apples will be under greater pressure to burn the trees and turn to a more lucrative form of agriculture.

Then you see it. It's the names. The names of the fallen. Foxwhelp, Sheep's Snout, Hogshead, Duck's Bill, Black Wilding, Brown Cockle, Monstrous Pippin, Burr Knot, Broadtail, Hagloe Crab, Eggleton Styre, Peasgood's Nonesuch, Tom Putt, Bitter-scale, Slack-my-girdle, Bastard Rough Coat, Bloody Turk. The list runs into thousands. It is a history of rural England, a poem in pomology, rough and bitter and sad.

Sprouting from every name is a tree of knowledge. Before I read this book, I thought an apple was something you picked and ate some time around October. Now I know the best dessert apples are those that must be stored for a month or more. There are some that aren't ready to come off the tree until December; others that are unfit to eat unless they've been in the cellar from October to March. There is one variety, the Winter Greening (Shakespeare's Apple-John), that can be kept for two years. There are apples that taste of aniseed, banana, pineapple, caraway, and apples that can't be eaten in any state, but are grown for making cider. Some are the size of walnuts: the smaller they are, Hogg and Bull contend, the better the cider.

Common Ground is a charity dedicated to preserving orchards in the form of Community orchards with a series of events to increase awareness of the treat to orchards. Whole pile of links here