Not me, unfortunately, although I did hit the gym last night. Peddling away, next to some teenage pituitary freak who'd seemingly just necked the entire contents of an industrial catering pack of Creatine before thoughtfully choosing to sit alongside me to sweat urine out of every pore of his body.

Creatine . . . add an "a" and "e" to "cretin" and you have an entire new marketing phenomenon . . . and at the rate he was going, A&E will be where he lands up in a couple of years with kidney failure.

No, the title refers to the ongoing debate about Tony's nuke plants . . . seems Michael Meacher is saying Blair's chief scientist is a nuclear spin doctor and that renewable energy is the way forward - primarily solar power.

Now there may be some truth in this but solar? Where the fuck have you been living Meacher? Certainly not the UK, but perhaps he's referring to a property other than the 6 Mark Thomas found out he owned in the UK . . . somewhere where light itself isn't wet. (official response from Meacher's office - "the Minister owns the minimum amount of property". Thomas: "Hands up who's got six?")

If you consult any of the independent builders in the UK (those not contracted to put up endless vast estates of brick doll's houses laid out in roads named after all the trees that have been cut down in the first place), they'll tell you that photovoltaics are out . . . with the exception of the black-pipe water heating where you can get away with it . . . and to concentrate more on properly insulating your walls and roof. Which would, theoretically, save energy as you'd need less power to heat it.

However, this doesn't tally with Blair as it would involve spending lots of money that would not inevitably trickle back to him via a network of preferential contracts and favours. So it looks like more money goes after bad as the board of BNFooLs* (*credit to MSM) gets to build more reactors and spend more time shaving costs and safety margins for the shareholder's new mercs than worrying about the plant going critical.

For the record, unless we can suddenly re-programme George Bush (last seen failing to open a door), then we'll have to go nuclear and pay the price of contamination and congenital deformities or else we'll be underwater in thirty years. All hail another winning policy from the bunch of fucks who've run the country for the past decades. We salute you . .. glub glub glub.

Let's see if Blair's great scientific advisors can figure out a reprocessing strategy that's a little more evolved than "let's bury it in a fucking great concrete hole near the water table for a few hundred thousand years", or plan B "The Irish Sea".

I'm convinced Metro is on an Anti-Science crusade. There's the Thursday edition where they regurgitate the top bits from Wednesady's New Scientist of course, but Monday we have "The truth behind vampires" as someone unearths some graves in eastern Europe where the bodies have been decapitated and staked in the coffin, and now it's the great "Bird Flu Ebola Hybrid" scenario. "What if it [H5N1] combined with ebola first? That scenario doesn't bear thinking about" it agitates.

Hate to say it, but most flu victims will die from respiratory complications long before they haemorrhage to death and in the case of a widespread ebola outbreak, the death rates are likely to be comparable to "flupocalypse" anyway. The only reason ebola hasn't killed more people is that it starts in relatively isolated areas and the locals quarrantine the villages. In the one outbreak of the Retson strain, the mutation that rendered the virus airborne also altered its characteristics so that it was non-harmful to humans (but lethal in the same ratio as the Zaire strain to monkeys). It's not a class IV biohazard for the novelty value, y'know?

And the vampires? Well the sad truth of that is, before all our brain scans, ventilators and ECGs, many poor sods ended up being buried alive. Worried relatives disinterring the "deceased" would often find signs that the "body" had been up, about, trying to get out of its coffin and generally not looking like they'd enjoyed the experience of asphyxiating in a coffin very much. Hence the stakes and dismemberment which, if for an entirely different reason, at least made sure that anyone buried in error didn't have to suffer a prolonged end.

Even in the UK around the nineteenth century, there was a satirical poem in a leading medical journal encouraging doctors to actually check their patient was
dead before signing them over to the undertaker. Nowadays, it seems you can hardly stop some GP offing Auntie Flo without the family's go-ahead. I'm wondering if there's a secret memo from Tony circulating about "reducing the strain on the NHS".

Seems that instead of Ebolaflu we should be more worried about AIDS: 40 million now infected and our government showing a Thatcheresque mentality about saying fuck all (or even "try not to") about it. And that's not before we get into the perverse mentality of some the leaders where the infection rates are highest, in denying there's a problem . . . and the Catholic Church which still lies about the easiest method to prevent infection: condoms.

The 98th British serviceman dies in Basra after his jeep (lacking a detector to warn of remotely detonated IEDs) is blown up. Big nod of thanks to Geoff "buff" Hoon who didn't learn his lesson about shuffling off into anonymity and is now shoe-horning his way into the public again. How nice that the man who denied a pardon for a shell-shocked WW1 soldier executed by firing squad for "cowardice" starts mouthing off about policies during the remembrance period. Let's see Hoon go over the top armed with a can-opener and a pair of underpants, courtesy of his MOD supply strategy. I'll borrow China Mieville's summation of George Bush during the New Orleans flood as I can't do any better: you utter fuck.

The US machine guns a minivan and kills between 3-5 children after the vehicle allegedly didn't stop after warning shots. Because, if someone starts shooting at your vehicle in Iraq, the natural reaction woudl be to stop and climb out, I guess . . . not floor the gas and get the Fuck out of Dodge. An army spokesperson says "If Al-Zarqawi terrorists didn't keep driving suicide bomb cars, this wouldn't happen". Fair enough. And if we hadn't invaded another country for oil, we wouldn't be machinegunning carloads of civillians as we're paranoid about being terrorist targets.

A real chicken and egg situation, eh?