Exploding Toilets and Open Toilets

The month of practical jokes has arrived (OK then, half a day) once more! This being so, we offer absolutely no excuses for lowering the tone of this publication (and we are ignoring those of you who are saying ‘the only way is up’) to bring you some pieces about 'being excused' that we have managed to flush out from the great internet cistern.

However, these are not bog standard stories in our view. Let’s pull the chain and explain…. From San Francisco (where else?) comes the news that a reward of $5,000 (oh, who knows what that is in Euros now?) is being offered by Clorox, the cleaning company for information regarding the phantom arsonist who has been setting fire to several Portaloos around the city (Miss Marple tip - try looking for a discontented construction worker?). The job of patrolling the toilets in the look-out for this inventive criminal has been described by a company spokesperson as “A crappy job but someone’s got to do it”.

Back across the pond, we turn to London which is in the country where according to the ancient proverb “If you are careful how you spend your pennies, the pounds will take care of themselves” (for our international readers, ‘spending a penny’ is a euphemism for a ‘call of nature’, probably dating back to the times when that was how much it cost (in olde worlde money involving shillings and guineas) to use public toilets, before they were made free. Yes, I know, too much information). In an inspired bid to increase the number of tourists to the city in these cash-strapped times Mayor Boris Johnson has just launched the all new ‘London is an Open Toilet’ publicity drive. This is an attempt to try and tackle the pressing problem of ‘London falling short for those who get caught short’ - or to put it another way, the fact that there are not enough public facilities for the city. Department stores etc. are being asked to open their toilet doors to anyone for free, without the need for people to buy anything. ‘Please come and use our loo because we’re lonely’ stickers (in several languages) are now being distributed at a variety of commercial premises around town.

Look out for those re-vamped bus tours: First stop: Bank of England! Next stop: Tate Modern! Third stop: Harrods!

Aliens and Moon (not) Rockets

Ground control to Major Tom. Recent files released from the UK Ministry of Defence have revealed some interesting findings about UFOs and aliens. We make absolutely no judgements, but we thought that a couple of these were worth sharing. According to the BBC, one of the logged reports concerned a woman from Suffolk who in 1989 had an encounter with a man with a Scandinavian accent walking his dog who claimed to be an ‘alien’ (translation issues, possibly - ‘alien’ and ‘foreigner’?). Later, in 1992, several reports of a UFO sighting in Romford, Essex turned out to be an illuminated airship advertising the Ford Mondeo car (the jokes for this one are way too easy).

Almost as good as the ‘flying pink pig’ spotted over Battersea power station years ago which turned out to be a Pink Floyd stunt advertising their album ‘Animals’. Back to Tate Modern….

The global recession has now apparently gone intergalactic. Estate agents selling ‘moon plots’ are now finding that they are being sucked into a black hole, too. Property prices for ‘bijou bits of the moon with Earth view’ are sinking as fast as a falling star. Whilst no country here on Terra not-so-firma has been able to claim ownership of the moon, a loophole in UN legislation (oh, yes, it has to be true!) enabled several companies across the globe to set up self styled Lunar Embassies that up until now were doing pretty good business flogging ‘prime locations’ from the dark side (Pink Floyd, pigs and Tate Modern, yet again) to all and sundry. But now this enterprise has gone pear shaped and moon prices have tumbled. Investment Advice: Buy more green cheese and balloons instead.

Chimps Like Honey….

In a last ditch attempt to salvage our reputation as being faintly serious journalists (somewhat of a lost cause we admit!) we bring you this great ‘Here comes the science bit’ story that we found about chimpanzees and honey. We all know that bears like honey…. In fact, some of you may recall that in our April edition last year we highlighted the case of the bear in FYROM who had been taken to court by a local beekeeper for pillaging his hives - this despite the tactic of trying to scare the bear (sorry!) away by surrounding the area with bright lights and playing Serbian ‘Turbo Folk’ at maximum volume. Anyway, Winnie the Pooh and Jungle Book aside, back to the chimpanzees.

Researchers in the Goulalougo Triangle in the Republic of Congo have recently found that chimpanzees in that region will go to quite extraordinary lengths to get at honey in beehives. Now for primatologists the fact that chimpanzees like honey as much as bears is no great surprise - despite the fact that honey has apparently no particular nutritional value for these animals. However, what is surprising is just how motivated this sweet-toothed bunch are at getting at the stuff, and how they are going about it.

Chimpanzees are well known for their tool making abilities and have often been observed making sticks in order to prise honey out of hives. However, this specific group in Central Africa seem to be unusually inventive in that they have made elaborate toolkits (absolutely no jokes about local builders here!) in order to get at honey in difficult locations. The tools they have made include hammers, clubs, chisels and probes. In their determination to get at the nectar they will apparently pound nests up to a hundred times to break them open. And these creatures are so clever that they only attack nests belonging to the ‘non-stinging’ type of bees.

The team of researchers headed by Crickette Sanz (now there’s a name a Freudian might have something to say about, particularly when it comes to explaining why Crickette chose to study chimps rather than insects) from the Max Planck Institute have also found that this particular group are great at making fishing rods to get at termites. Somehow makes the phrase “If you pay peanuts you’ll only get monkeys” redundant….