Ben Goldacre, fearless exposer of the scientifically illiterate, had a meeting with some of the people the BBC employ to keep an eye on their loose cannons (how many do they need to keep track of Charlie Brooker, I wonder?). He asked them how much swearing was allowed, as you would, and was given an official BBC list of swear words, based on viewer research and sorted in order of offensiveness. They refused to let him leave the room with it, because it's a secret. He figured they were worried he'd scan it and put it on his website. Then he got a copy through another route, so of course he scanned it and put it on his website.

In places, it reads almost like dialog. "Shag whore twat!" "Piss off, spastic slag!" I briefly considered lifting the whole thing and dropping it into my next post wholesale. The thing that did shock me was that terms of racial abuse were scored as less offensive than 'cunt' or 'motherfucker'. I expect people identified them as 'not swearing' because they thought they were a different kind of offensive, not because they thought they weren't offensive at all. For instance, 'Jew' in everyday speech isn't a swear word, but if you heard someone saying 'stop being such a mean, selfish Jew' you'd take more offense than you would at any mere profanity.

That doesn't account for people who think such terms are mild swearing, though. Some people must have thought that 'Paki' or 'nigger' were soft swear words, about as bad as calling someone an arse. I suppose they may have been confused by the whole recuperation thing, where black or Asian people use those terms themselves to draw their sting.

Other responses just leave you baffled. As always with surveys, I find. A low but positive number of people thought that 'cunt' was "not swearing" at all. Meanwhile, 10% thought that 'arse' was "very severe". I suppose it might stand out in a nunnery, but not otherwise, surely. I wonder if any respondents thought both those things? You can just imagine someone hearing a bottom-based profanity in the street, turning on the culprit and screaming "stop saying arse, you cunt!" at their bemused face before flouncing off in a huff.

Thanks to Jeff for the link. I hope you're having a good holiday. If you're reading this sat in an Internet cafe in Ayia Napa, you got on the wrong bus at the airport. Unless your Dad decided what you all really needed was a few nights clubbing.

I'm sure you've all enjoyed my indepth coverage of the New Atheists. The media capitalise us, you know. We're kind of like the New Romantics without the eyeshadow, except when we wear eyeshadow.

It's kind of thematic for me, of course. Discover my themes here, if you dare.

And now we've got a lovely new campaign for you. It's the OUT Campaign. Yes, atheists are coming out of the closet, and calling out around the world. Are you ready for a brand new beat?

Now obviously in Britain closeting isn't such a problem, but we should all show solidarity with our secular siblings over the seas. Richard Dawkins has written us a rallying cry, and there's T-shirts and everything.

We've even got our own logo. Ironically for some of us, it's a big capital A.

I've added it to my profile, on that picture of me in the top right hand corner. Yes it is. I just happen to be the spitting image of Wittgenstein. You should check out Derek Jarman's film of his life, I did all the stunt scenes.

There's also a conference. It's in Washington DC, and it's already booked out, but I'm sure there'll be video coverage online. Like there was for the scientists' conference here.

Seriously, there is a political point to all this. Firstly, I know it's a joke in the UK, but in some countries atheists are under pressure to keep their views secret. In Muslim countries, people who abandon their religion can be and have been executed for it. In the US, whilst nothing quite like that happens, some states have laws banning atheists from elected office, and many people have lost child custody cases because their partner has promised to give the child a religious education, and they're an atheist. There's a handy summary of related issues here, on another excellent Science Blog.

What we need in the UK is a decent campaign to get our teeth into. Here are some ideas.

We should demand that every time they get some bishop on TV or radio to comment on an issue, instead of just adding a rabbi or an imam for balance, they add an atheist as well. Either a well-known face like Richard Dawkins, or someone from a humanist society or the like. If they argue that such figures don't represent all secularists, we can argue back that bishops, rabbis and imams don't represent every one they claim to either. We're 64% of the population, and we demand our say.

Never let people talk about Christian, Muslim or Jewish children. Or any other religion. You wouldn't talk about an atheist child just because their parents were atheists. Always refer to them as a child of Christian, Muslim or Jewish parents, and complain when other people don't.

Disestablishment. Why should the Church of England be officially our church? It's insulting to Catholics, Jews, Muslims, whatever. And, most importantly, to us. We're the majority, we are.

Faith schools. I think not. And they can damn well stop making the kids pray. Bastards. How many hours of my life did they steal?

I might have added a demand that they make religious education vaguer and less scriptural, but they already have.

I'm feeling much more enthusiastic about politics now it's got computers in it. Do you rmember the bad old days when you couldn't be political wthout getting dressed and leaving the house?

You wouldn't think they could, but they have. They've tarnished space.

First, astronaut Lisa Nowak tries to kidnap Colleen Shipman, another female astronaut, in a row over yet another astronaut, William Ofelein. All three parties have other spouses. Way to open new frontiers for women, Lisa. Apparently she drove hundreds of miles for her bunny boiling moment, wearing official astronaut diapers on the way so she wouldn't have to stop for a piss.

Now party or parties unknown have sabotaged a computer destined for the International Space Station. And most depressingly of all, it's emerged that astronauts have flown drunk. Yes, on the Space Shuttle. And NASA knew, and let them.

The word that leaps to mind for these shenanigans is 'earthbound'. In fact, it's so earthbound it's positively pedestrian. Short of finding out the "Win a seat on the space shuttle" phone-in was actually won by Dubya's second cousin, I'm really not sure how they could have disappointed us more.

The rest of us are all out here doing our bit, you know. Why I didn't even know how many n's there were in shenanigans, so I looked it up. I oculd have just winged it and hoped for the best, but no. I knew people were all counting on me, so I went the extra mile. And I'm stuck down here with all you peasants. These people get to orbit the Earth, for Christ's sake. Just lay off the firewater for a bit, and save the shagging for the rest of your life. You'll be spending it at the bottom of the gravity well, you'll need the distraction.

Elsewhere, there's been some floods, apparently. I do follow the normal news a bit, you might be surprised to learn. Although it might have shown up a bit more in my feeds if they'd come up with a headline like "Anti-flood nanobots deployed by atheist Mars rover". I was amused by the suggestion on NewsBiscuit that they should do a charity single, and call it "Do they know it's summertime at all?"

About ten days ago, I had the alien dream. I woke up, or actually didn't, to find that I was unable to move, due to a powerful force that was restraining me. While I was being restrained, I felt something very sharp, like a needle, being stuck into my side, just above the hips. Then, in the background, I saw the classic grey shapes.

So had I actually been visited by aliens with a yen for some deep probing? Of course not. There is another interesting possibility, though, which is that I experienced sleep paralysis.

I once saw a very interesting documentary on the subject of alien abduction. Subjects described experiences very similar to mine, and believed that the 'greys' were aliens. A psychologist said that sleep paralysis was the cause of their delusions, that alien abduction had supplanted demonic possession as the explanation our culture was most comfortable with, and that a temporal lobe malfunction similar to epilepsy was the real culprit.

So do I just have a short circuit in my temporal lobe? Again, no. Notice the first three words of the last paragraph - "I once saw". Having begun a dream with paralysis as a theme, a common experience, my brain filled in the gaps from a narrative it was familiar with. I actually woke up thinking about that same documentary, which had lingered in my mind when I watched it.

But suppose I'd forgotten I'd ever seen it. Suppose that for some reason I'd never learnt to be cautious before assuming my perceptions were real. I might be sat here typing up a piece about my alien abduction. Someone else who'd had a similar dream might leave a comment, and any doubts we had would be assuaged by the fact that the other guy had had the same experience. Before you know it there'd be a movement.

So always remember, boys and girls, that mind is a byproduct of meat. Everything you see, think and do, everything you are happens in a squidgy grey organ the size and consistency of a fresh cowpat. If your skull wasn't keeping it all in place, you'd be slumped down in that chair as all your fears and desires dripped down your shoulders. We may be stardust, but that just means we obey the laws of physics like stars do, not that our alien brothers are desperate to probe us.

Today is a sad day, for my friends have gone. They've moved from Bristol to Frome, which is about 18 miles away as the crow flies. I know to American readers that sounds like the distance from one gnat's wingtip to the other, but in Britain it's a psychogeographical mountain to climb. Or something.

That's as much as anything because of our railway system. I've just checked train times, and the very quickest train they can muster takes exactly one hour. The buses are even worse, requiring two journeys, Bristol to Bath and Bath to Frome, and taking about 3 hours in total. I wish I hadn't looked it up now.

It's spelt Frome, but pronounced Froom. Thus the pun in the title. Otherwise I'd have had "All roads lead to Frome", which would be just as poor, but without the local colour.

So what's the attraction? I looked for answers where they can always be found, on the Internet. Frome in Wikipedia seemed like a logical starting point. It is, it informs me, a medium sized town in Somerset, near the Mendip Hills. From AD950 to 1650 it was larger than Bath, thirteen miles to the north. This is a proud boast, I'm sure, but perhaps a little trivial to justify its position as the second sentence in the piece. The population is currently about 25,000, which makes my cruel jibe about them moving to Kenilworth eerily accurate.

Frome was first settled in Saxon times, when Saint Aldhelm set up a monastery there in 705. It was always a weaver's town, and weaver's cottages can still be found among the Georgian terraces from the age of its pomp. The main venue is the Cheese and Grain, whose upcoming attractions include Deeply Purple ("we faithfully reproduce every facet of Deep Purple's music"), Whole Lotta Led and the real Melanie.

It seems to be a liberal kind of place. It is a certified Fair Trade town, and this year's Frome Festival had a green theme. It's also really quite attractive, judging by the pictures of it I found by searching for Frome on Flickr. Here is a sloping street worthy of a Hovis ad, here is a house which is also a bridge over the river, here is the same river after a light shower, here is the fair and here is a viaduct. The good thing is that there will be Flickr people for Zombizi to play with.

Frome has many famous sons, and once Zombizi's child genius grows up at least one famous daughter. Jenson Button is from Frome, and so is Richard Vranch, improvisational pianist from Whose Line is it Anyway? and the Comedy Store. It has also produced Dr Stephen Vranch, past President of the Institute of Chemical Engineers. I wonder if by any chance the last two might be related?

Read more on the town guide.

This one's a right shocker. A homeopathic doctor in Arizona has been suspended after a patient died during a botched liposuction operation.

Certain questions arise. Firstly, why is a homeopath performing cosmetic surgery? I would have thought they would have treated obesity by taking a fat solution, diluting it to the n'th degree and then putting it in a tincture. Secondly, and rather more significantly, why is a homeopath being allowed to perform cosmetic surgery?

It gets weirder. The aforementioned homeopath, a Doctor Greg Page (Doctor? Of what? Dilution?), was assisted by his colleague Dr. Peter J. Normann. Normann's right to perform operations had been 'restricted by the state' in May after two other liposuction patients died of cardiac arrest on his operating table. To quote from the article, when Page was asked about this in the inquiry, he "told the board he believed Normann had been banned from performing liposuction using conscious sedation, but not all liposuctions."

Conscious sedation? He kept patients awake during liposuction? He loses one to a heart attack, then decides to carry on and kills another one?

To summarise, then, this guy loses two patients due to his quack theories, then he's told he can't do them any more, then he gets in a homeopath to help him with surgery, and loses another one. Neither of them face any criminal charges, they are just suspended.

And who carried out this inquiry? The Arizona Board of Homeopathic Medical Examiners. Let's quote again.

Under state law, homeopaths may do "minor surgery," and Dr. Bruce Shelton, president of the Arizona Homeopathic and Integrative Medical Association and former president of the Homeopathic Board, said whether liposuction can be considered minor surgery "is a huge gray area".

A gray area? Perhaps after this it might be seen as a little more black and white.

And what do the real doctors say?

Roger Downey, spokesman for the Arizona Medical Board, said one of the issues with the third fatality is that Normann allowed an unlicensed medical doctor to perform a procedure that only a licensed doctor may perform.

Well, duh-uh.

And while we're at it, phone mast allergies are in your mind. So go and do something about global warming or something, and leave the rest of us to text each other in peace.

For more evidence of why proper grown up science is better than Bozo the homepathic clown, here is a video with pretty pictures in. See what I mean?

You may not be entirely surprised to learn that I was the kind of kid who was fascinated by spiders. Do you remember the three main differences between spiders and insects?

Spiders have eight legs, eight eyes and two body sections (head and abdomen). Insects have six legs, two eyes and three body sections (head, thorax and abdomen). What's a thorax, you may well ask? It's the bit between an insect's head and its abdomen, obviously.

There's more to it than that, of course, and it's discussed in wonderful, wonderful detail at The Voltage Gate. This link goes to part four of the spider stuff, just search the blog for the other posts in the series.

They've got two main ways of retracing the history of life on Earth. Firstly, they reason from structure. For instance, fish have a backbone, elephants have a backbone, but worms don't, so it's reasonable to hypothesise that worms split from fish and elephants on the tree of life before backbones evolved. Except that in itself that's just guesswork, because one bit of data tells you bog all. Put millions of bits together, though, compare precise forms (for instance, birds and bats have very different wing structures, which implies that they evolved wings separately), consider all the data available from current forms, the fossil record, etc, and you can build up a picture.

In the last few decades they've come up with a second method. You can trace the history of life through molecular chemistry, by analysing the DNA. Certain very precise sequences occur in some species but not others, and by comparing them you can deduce lines of descent. Similarly, molecules such as haemoglobin change at a surprisingly predictable rate, and by comparing ours with say a seal's we can deduce the time we've been separated.

And the great thing is, the data matches. Not just with insects and spiders, but for life generally. So if anyone tells you evolution is just a theory, that there's no correlating data, so it's not falsifiable, you can now tell them to fuck off. And yes there is swearing in science.

When they put it all together, fascinating results emerge. You may have read that hippopotamuses are more closely related to whales than to horses. Well, that's how they know. By the same token, spiders are more closely related to horseshoe crabs than either are to insects.

You will have noticed, checking out The Voltage Gate as I'm sure you immediately did, that it's a part of the Science Blogs. I'm hesitant to send you into them in case you get lost in the labyrinth and never find your way out, but if you leave a trail of string behind you, hopefully you should be safe. Or you could just use the Back button.

More about spiders here and here.

I've left you high and dry all week, because I've been visiting my friend Mel in Tenby in Wales. It's a delightful place, but there's an air of tension hanging over it right now. This is because they're about to enter The Season, the period of summer school holidays when the population swells from 5,000 to 50,000. For six short weeks there's Plenty of Work, which means seventy hour weeks, then they enter the down side of the cycle, and by November the population has shrunk to 5,000 again.

These days, it shrinks even more, because so much of the housing has gone to second homes. In St Florence, a small village just outside where one of Mel's daughters lives, you can't buy a house unless you're a local, committed to living there full time. It would be a good policy for Tenby, but unfortunately the business people that dominate the local council wouldn't wear it.

I had a nightmare train journey back. It was only a little train, and it thought it could, but actually it couldn't. They must have borrowed it from Thames Water, because the pipes leaked so badly it ground to a halt after a couple of miles. The conductor begged a few kettlefuls from the bemused pensioners living next to the lines, hoping that it would get us to Carmarthen, but a few hundred yards later we had to stop again. There we sat until another engine could tow us in.

After that I got the rush hour journey I'd been trying to avoid. The carriage from Cardiff to Newport was particularly noisy, with one really annoying personal stereo and a guy with Tourettes who kept shouting out. I reflected on how difficult the journey must have been, and hoped that Pete from Big Brother might have made things easier for him, but then when he got off I realised the personal stereo was actually his. To be fair, maybe he thought it would cover his shouts.

So what's been happening while I've been away? Well, it was the 38th anniversary of the first moon landing, and as if in commemoration they found Saturn's sixtieth moon. While they were sorting things out, they solved the nagging, unresolved social problem which is draughts. I do like it when stuff gets definitively crossed off humanity's To Do list. And Science Daily says that new research has proved the single origin of humans in Africa. Apparently some people still thought we might have evolved from homo erectus to homo sapiens more than once in different places. It doesn't say why they might have imagained anything so transparently absurd, but now they can't any more. So there.

Still, draughts, the single origin theory and a new moon. Good for you, science. If it wasn't for Google Reader I might never have known. And social scientists haven't been entirely lazy either. A new study shows that the more stupid you are, the more likely you are to be too stupid to realise it.

More thematically for me, Marcus Brigstocke explains that religion isn't a very good thing. I knew it.

They've been polling Americans about God again. It must be impossible to walk down the streets of Des Moines or Albuquerque without clipboarded young people demanding to hear your take on the ineffable. This time it's the Pew Research Center, who are at least well named for the job.

Many years ago a friend of mine was approached in the street by an interviewer with a camera crew. He went over, assuming he was about to get a chance to sound off about graffitti or the drains or something, and was asked "Would you wear a top hat in a room with a low ceiling?" He instinctively denied that he would. "How about if it was a formal occasion? Would you then?" He mumbled something and walked away. And that interviewer, ladies and gentlemen, went on to become Chris Morris.

Nothing so off the wall for the Americans, though, who were just asked what religion they were, whether they thought their holy book was literally true, and a variety of political questions.

There was the usual strangeness you get from US polls. For instance, 9% of Americans identify themselves as 'secular', and 9% of these say their holy book is literally true. Which book? The Origin of Species? The God Delusion? The Naked Lunch? Oh, please let it be The Naked Lunch.

You do wonder, though, don't you? 9% of 9% is near enough 1% of the whole population of America. That's 3 million people who think the holy book they don't have is literally true. Obviously we mainly pay such close attention to them because of their global economic and cultural hegemony, but you'd have to say they're also genuinely quite interesting.

Another striking result was that 68% of black Protestants believe in the inerrant Bible. That white evangelists believe this comes as no surprise, and that 50% of Muslims believe literally sounds about right, but I often think we underestimate the reactionary nature of the black churches because of their role in the civil rights struggle.

It's also very striking that Protestants should be so much more literal than Catholics. I suppose Catholics have learnt to take a more nuanced view so they can cope with all their gay priests.

If you consider political leanings by religion, a more predictable picture emerges. Evangelicals are conservative, black Protestants and Muslims are liberal and most people seem to think they're moderate, although what that means in the context I shudder to think.

Once we bring up gayness, of course, Muslims scuttle back into the reactionary fold. An impressive 43% of black Protestants, though, refuse to toe the Biblical line. Yes, that does imply that at least 11% per cent of them believe both that gaying up America is fine and that the rabidly homophobic Bible is literally true, but we'll take inconsistency over logically precise cruelty any day. Catholics are so relaxed on the subject they might as well start dressing up in frocks and waving incense about. Oh yeah. No wonder they're called seminaries.

And if you're wondering where the Jews have gone, I checked it out and they've declined to 1.4% of the population (2001 figures). This was down from 1.8% in 1990, so there's clearly something going on. It could be that there's a lower birth rate, but I expect it's mainly the consequence of generations of marrying out. If you've got one Jewish parent you might have some sense of being Jewish, but if you've got one Jewish grandparent that must fade, and one Jewish great grandparent must seem like just another family fact.

They've also discovered the brilliant trick of having a Holy Land that's a long way away. Every time one of their kids grows up all pious and irritating, before you know it he's shipped himself off to persecute Palestinians for Yahweh, leaving the rest of them to run theatres and art galleries in peace. It must have been a bit like that in Babylon, just after Cyrus said all the Jews could leave their lovely cosmopolitan city and crawl off back to their hideous little backwater, if they really thought God wanted them to.

Maybe there's a lesson here for us all. I've often wondered whether future generations of atheists might make a home out in space, on some tinpot hunk of rock, but maybe that's the wrong tack. If we could just find some Biblical verse which might be taken to mean that space exploration was some kind of spiritual duty, they might all fuck off to the asteroid belt, leaving the rest of us in peace on Earth.

If you're one of the few people not wandering the streets quizzing each other about the numinous, you may have noticed that the sea is rising. London is sinking into it, and in a few decades will presumably secede to the Empire of the Recently Deluged along with Venice and New Orleans, and eventually Bristol. On the plus side, as half our centres of civilisation sink under the waves, it will at least open the Northwest Passage. If only Frobisher and all the other reckless adventurers had known. All they had to do was wait for a few centuries, and The Great Corporate Reckless Adventure With All Our Lives would have solved their problem.

Headline of the week is British blamed for Basra badgers, a wonderful piece of alliterative weirdness. It seems that honey badgers have returned to the area, and a rumour has spread that the British planted them to attack local people unattributably. UK military spokesman Major Mike Shearer said: "We can categorically state that we have not released man-eating badgers into the area", and for once I'm prepared to believe him.

You have to wonder about people's judgement sometimes. I know the Army complain they're poorly equipped, but I don't think they're quite reduced to attacking the civil population with badgers. I'm sure they're quite happy beating people to death behind closed doors without resorting to the surreal.

Oh, and one late item to put all humanity's grand aspirations in context - How wearing underwear led to increased medieval literacy. Yes, it seems that after the Black Death there was such a mountain of unused clothes lying around they got made into paper for the newly founded printing industry. Even pants. There's a picture of some medieval pants, but they look implausibly clean to my eye. There's something quite grounding about the idea of Chaucer and Rabelais spreading their bawdy verse across Europe on some ground-up stinky old plague-ridden pants from a dead person. I'm sure they'd both have got the joke.

More polls here, here and here.

You'd have thought they had enough gibberish with all the patron saints, but no, that notorious vaguely annoying background noise the Pope has been clarifying things again. It turns out Protestant churches aren't proper churches at all (link down - Ed), and are actually worse than the Eastern Orthodox ones. They spent most of World War Two burning those down right across the Balkans, and you have to wonder what's in store for us benighted northern Europeans this time.

So if you see any Swiss Guards wandering about looking zealous, I'd be keeping a close eye on their halberd. I don't know about you, but I definitely don't like it up me. Apparently Catholic theologians who have argued for a approach less reminiscent of the Thirty Years War are just being "erroneous or ambiguous", which in Ratzinger's world is the same thing.

Meanwhile, they've brought back the Latin mass. This is obviously an improvement over any religious service where you can understand what's being said, but I wonder where it leaves all the Catholics who were thrown out of the church for insisting on using it while it was banned.

Altogether now: "I know a church that'll get on your nerves, get on your nerves, get on your nerves ... (repeat for the rest of our lives)"

And yet they're still less annoying than this lot.

The Internet isn't just about showing off, apparently, it's also about sharing. Here then are last week's highlights from my various feeds.

There's been progress in the world of 'Frankenstein' foods (why do they think that name makes them sound less appealing?). Apparently the US may be about to approve clones as food, which must have given Dolly some anxious moments. Meanwhile, pasta is going to cost more, because they're turning half of it into biofuels. Frankly I don't see why they can't just liquidise clones and pour them into car engines, and leave our spaghetti in peace.

Talking of blood sucking corporate ghouls, Google have bought an email security firm. Presumably it's so they can stop Chinese people emailing each other about democracy as well. On the Godly side of the fence, meanwhile, Catholics are worried that Tony Blair's first confession may take a little time, and the new Creationist Museum in Kentucky turns out to have been built on the site of some of the world's most interesting fossils.

Non-surprise of the week goes to the Rutherford-Appleton Laboratory, who have shown that gobal warming isn't down to changes in the sun. In further shocking news, it turns out the sun didn't kill half a million Iraqis and steal their oil either.

Brilliant idea of the week, though, has to be this, again from the BBC website. Yes, it's vertical farms. Sometimes you come across an idea you know will never ever happen, but the sheer joy of the concept is almost enough in itself.

I spent the weekend camping in Wiltshire with friends, and a fine time was had by all, especially the insane psychotic harpies of the dawn chorus. People who know nothing will tell you how important it is to encourage a diversity of bird species in the urban environment, but they can only be robotic simulacra with no need of sleep. Anyone with any sense of history realises that cities first started when Chaldean peasants banded together to repel the chirruping avian bastards with arrows and fire brands, and accidentally discovered that if you set up a two hundred yard perimeter it was possible to have a lie in.

The pub where we were camping, the Barge Inn, is a centre for crop circle enthusiasts, and I can report that something rather wonderful has happened. Previously a focus point for alien fantasists and New Age delusionals, the whole thing has turned into a rather fine ephemeral art movement. Seriously, search for crop circles in Google Images, and you'll see some great stuff. As usual, it's the abandonment of mysticism that leads to any transcendence we may be capable of.

No such progress in the world of alternative medicine, which remains evidence-free. For more details here are the Bad Science entries on homeopathy. After a weekend spent in the company of people in the field, and in a field, their success becomes clear. It's because they're kind and decent people, who really believe that what they do is a form of medicine. If you booked an hour with them, of course you'd go away feeling better.

There's a process of self-selection going on. People who are unsuited to giving placebos are winnowed out by their failure to treat successfully, whilst people who are unsuited to receiving them, or who have conditions which aren't responsive to them, are winnowed out by their failure to be treated. Given that, it's hardly surprising if you get anecdotally impressive results, which can't be reproduced under laboratory conditions.

On the way home, Simon, Heather and I stopped off at Avebury, with mixed results. I got the usual buzz I get from any historic site (and did these feet, in ancient times, and all that), while Simon dubbed our walk round the stone circle The Great Avebury Pointless Trek. He wouldn't have it, but I thought the weekend made a historical point. After listening to homeopaths and the like all weekend, it was instructive to visit the stones and be reminded that people have been concocting pointless metaphysical gibberish in these parts for thousands of years.

Meanwhile, according to Chemistry and Industry Magazine, Fat can grow new breasts. I think some of us were already aware of that.

The whole is often better than the sum of its parts, and it's been an excellent time for good things being mixed together to make fine new metathings.

Firstly, we have the Spike Island open day. They show off their artworks, and they scatter bars liberally through their complex. Is it a pub, is it an art gallery, no, it's an artpub, and they even manage some decent beer.

Then, I find out you can put chicken with bacon. I can't be bothered with some kind of conjoined name, just try it. You know you want to.

Now, as if good metathings just had to come in threes, there's nano robot football. Thanks to Glenn for the link. All I need now is some chess pie.

But just to remind us that metathings have their dark side, we have the Spice Girls reunion. Frankly, it's bad enough when good bands do it, but are we really to suffer the reimagineering of every pop svengali's instant celebrity cloneset?

They were supposed to have been packaged so carefully, there'd be one for each of us, as I recall. Fat chance. No, I didn't. No, really. Oh all right, Sporty. Happy now? No, you don't need to know what she'd be wearing. There is such a thing as too much information you know.