Cereal, Obol, cartoons and Fortean times in Bournemouth

Hello, is that the BBC? it's Aliens I tells you, Aliens!

It’s a bit of a portmanteau posting today, frankly I'm mildly hungover and still a bit confused over the depth of thought my daughter has put into her view of the perfect milk-to-cereal ratio.

In fact it got so specific that I ended up shelling out a tenner for an Obol from Amazon to demonstrate a better way of working with breakfast than using two bowls and a tablespoon which was rather messy. If you are all that bothered, you can see what an Obol looks like here Obol @ Amazon. It's an elegant design and an excellent solution to the ice-cold milk and crispy cereal conundrum. Of course if I had a 3d printer I could have just made one of these, but I don’t have a printer (yet… hee hee) and the design, which looks like a lot of hard work, would have had to have been ripped off, as Amazon doesn’t sell 3d data artefacts yet and that’s unfair to the designer. Pirate Bay is ahead of the curve on this as reported in the Register here.

Once that debate was settled Daughter and I entered into another debate about the relative merits of power-rangers versus bakugan versus Ben-10 versus tidying her bedroom. So far this hasn’t been fully resolved but it does highlight a certain disparity in motivation on a Sunday morning between a forty year old consultant and an eight year old schoolgirl. This disparity explains much of the programming and advertising schedule on the weekend.

Finally a quick mystery in the style that only British regional reportage can generate. It appears that  resident of Bournemouth,  has discovered a scattering of pale blue spheres in his garden after rain. Concerned that aliens or perhaps someone under the age of seventy was having fun, he immediately contacted the BBC/local press to exclaim his mystery, you can read the BBC’s article here. Of course the BBC reporter sensing a genuine scoop in the style of so many other pieces of regional reporting slaps up some half baked copy which gets consumed by the BBC’s insatiable need for content to support the news website. 

Which is where I spot it. Coincidentally a mere five minutes after looking at this on Amazon. This is part of the endless proliferation of non lethal household weaponry which goes on in Chez Fowler, but has so far been confined to larger and larger nerf gun purchases punctuated with “oh that’s not FAIR!” when the next purchase arrives home. The Xploders range represents a serious escalation of course, since they are basically gel paintballs and can make a hell of a mess if you use them inside. Anyway the two items, the article and the play-tech just synced in my mind, probably due to the colour of the Xploders Ammo and the “gel sphere” from Bournemouth. I remembered what happens when you leave paintballs out in the damp/rain overnight. They swell up to about 5cm and look strange.

Since I'm a responsible blogger/consultant/idiot with too much time on his hands this Sunday, I immediately reached out to my friend who has one of these play-tech devices and asked. What do the look like on the lawn in the morning? "Why like little gel spheres, about an inch across" he resplies.

Mystery solved methinks. 

It does lead to a serious point though. How does this sort of poor reportage happen? It’ just leads to an atmosphere of unreason, of a laissez faire rejection of rationality in favour of some sort of cod “it must be a mystery” school of thought where spreading the news of your so called discovery is more important that figuring out what is going on. It might be a desire for fame, everyone looks at the bearer of news, even if just for a second. It might be a lack of practice with critical and analytical thinking (or even a lack of training in it) or it might be the simple synthesis of idiocy, a blank page and a tight deadline to meet. Hmmm. Pot, Kettle anyone?