Slipped in there, so quietly it will be easily overlooked and might later be deleted, is this line:

However, better eradication of a stomach bug called Helicobactor pylori may have inadvertently reduced its protective effect against this cancer.

Helicobacter pylori was linked to stomach ulcers quite some time ago, and getting rid of it is a true nightmare. The treatment involves some serious antibiotic and other chemical treatments – if you are getting stomach ulcers and have to have H. pylori deleted from your gut flora, expect weeks of feeling as if stomach ulcers might be a better option than the treatment. It does get better eventually, I am told.

Nobody mentioned any protective effect H. pylori might have had against any kind of disease, much less cancer. I don’t recall anyone having anything good to say about this little bacterium at all. The best it could expect to hear was ‘well it’s not causing you problems at the moment but…’

It doesn’t cause stomach ulcers on its own. It lives in loads of people who never get ulcers. Other factors trigger it but H. pylori makes it worse. Stress, diet, damage, genetics, all sorts of factors can start a stomach ulcer going but if you have the beginnings of one and also have H. pylori, it’s going to be a bad one.

So where does this ‘protective effect’ come from? Some research somewhere that’s been buried under a pile of ‘harrrumph’ by those with a vested interest in blaming every disease on their pet hate? Or maybe by the Pharmers who sell the drugs that just about kill it before they kill you?

There is a possible parallel with sickle cell anaemia here. If you have one gene for sickle cell anaemia, half your red blood cells will collapse if your blood goes acidic, as it does when you are exerting yourself. You’ll get a bit tired a bit too easily.

If you have two genes for it, you are worn out by the effort of standing up. So why does the gene persist when it has no obvious advantages?

If you get malaria, the parasite invades red blood cells and knackers you (I hope I’m not getting too technical). If you have one gene for sickle cell anaemia, half your red blood cells are parasite traps. The parasite produces acid, so in a sickle-cell it will cause the cell to collapse, and the  body will scrap it – with the parasite trapped inside.

So if you have one gene for sickle cell anaemia you are much more resistant to malaria than someone who has two perfectly normal genes for their red blood cells. That’s the advantage – but it comes with a downside in that anyone who gets both sickle-cell genes is screwed. Still, especially in malaria-rife parts of the world, the risk (as a species) is worth the protection.

Maybe the reason we still harbour H. pylori in our stomachs, a bug which will make any damage to the stomach lining into a flaming sore of an ulcer and maybe even end up perforating the stomach, is that it has a protective effect against throat cancer. Cancers can pop up at any time and throat cancer can kill very quickly. Ulcers tend to be initiated by something and generally take longer to kill you. Ulcers can also spontaneously heal, cancers rarely do that.

In that case, the risk posed by an ulcer is much lower than the risk posed by throat cancer. So those whose genetics favour the lower risk option will be better equipped to survive than those whose genetics favour the higher risk option.

Your internal bacteria are at least partly determined by your genes, because your genes define the construction of the lining of your gut. Specifically, they determine the molecular structure of the surface of gut cells.

An example: I once worked with probiotics designed to reduce the incidence of a pig pathogen, an Escherichia coli variant known as K88. Harmless to humans, but could make a piglet shit itself inside out. If the pig guts had none of the specific cell-surface structures that K88 attached to, then K88 could not infect. Those surface structures are determined by the pig’s genetics. As are many more of the conditions to be found inside guts, all of which determine how many of which kinds of bacteria will do well there. Of course, you can override all these genetics with ten lagers and a vindaloo but only temporarily. Unless you put your gut under constant assault it will fix itself.

Stress has real effects on your intestines. Very dramatic effects in some cases. Don’t worry about it, because worrying about it is what makes it happen.

Therefore it is not only possible, but actually likely, that there is a genetic component determining whether H. pylori lives in your stomach or not. I have no proof, only a hypothesis based on other research and I don’t, at the moment, know if anyone else has proof and this bottle of Glen Grant said ‘nah, stuff it’ when I suggested looking it up. Perhaps I should have splashed out on that Old Pulteney, it might have been more enthusiastic but payday is Friday so the bank account is on the last dregs for the week.

Incidentally, this does mean that Friday might produce something incoherent or nothing at all. I blame my genetic predisposition.

If you are plagued by stomach ulcers and have a high population of H. pylori, getting rid of it is probably the best option. Sure, it might increase your risk of throat cancer later but if you are getting a lot of really bad stomach ulcers now, you won’t live long enough to get any kind of cancer.

If you have a high population of H. pylori and have no stomach ulcer problems at all, leave it alone. Do not go through the horrible treatment to get it out on the tenuous basis that you might get ulcers in the future. You might never get one or you might get one anyway. You will be deleting something that might prevent throat cancer.

This is something that I definitely need to delve into further. I had no idea H. pylori could ever be cast as anything other than the Darth Vader of bacteria and yet here is a suggestion that it is in fact a somewhat flawed Superman.

How inconvenient to find the merest hint of a possibility that it might not be all down to disapproved-of lifestyles at all. That it might in fact be down to something else entirely.

Preventative medical intervention.

Whoops.

Stuart Hall was convicted of sexual abuse of 13 young girls over many years and was sentenced to 15 months in jail. The sentence is, quite rightly, under review but that is what a judge thought was a proper sentence for a serial sex offender.

Meanwhile, overgrown schoolboy Kristian Holmes was convicted of being a dick by spraying graffiti all over trains and buildings. He was sentenced to 36 months. Much is made of the cost of clearing up his childish daubings, but nobody was physically harmed.

Now, I would like to see Holmes given a good old-fashioned tarring and feathering at the end of his sentence. Then, when he had cleaned it off, soak him in honey and make him run through an apiary with his wrists tied to his ankles, and with someone in full protective gear going ahead of him and bashing each hive with a stick. Defacing historic railway stock is unforgivable. I would not suggest reducing his sentence at all.

But he didn’t harm anyone. He didn’t abuse or even insult anyone. He cost a lot of money in cleaning and repainting bills but it seems he didn’t actually cause permanent physical damage even to the trains and buildings he defaced. It could be cleaned up and it would be as if it had never been there.

That is not the case when a serial sex abuser is caught. Those he abused cannot simply forget what happened to them. There is no ‘clean-up and repair’. Even when the abuser is locked up, the memories will never go away.

To sentence someone who abused so many to half the time inside given to someone who inconvenienced the paintwork on inanimate objects is derisory. it seems that unless there is a quantifiable cash cost involved, the British judiciary cannot see a value.

Might I suggest, in line with the sentence suggested above for an immature idiot with a spray can, that serial sex offenders should spend a considerable number of years inside and once a day, every day, spend an hour having their testicles whipped with a nicely weighted six-hook mackerel trace? Followed by the bee run, which could become a standard means to exit prison for all offences and would, I believe, prove to be quite an effective deterrent. Some might even elect to stay in prison forever rather than take the only exit available. Bonus.

It would, of course, require taking silly offences such as telling the BBC to stick their licence where the sun don’t shine, or parking on a traffic warden, off the books. Although it should be noted that traffic wardens do have a yellow line around their hats so you can only park on them between 6 pm and 8 am.

That kind of sentencing, I humbly submit, would provide a much more proportionate response to the actual harm caused by crimes, since the only real harm can be to people. There can never be harm to money.

Money doesn’t even exist.

He’s doomed. The rest of Wastemonster won’t stand for it.

This means they might soon be two short. The point of this job for me was to be part time, earn enough to cover the bills and then have leisure time for writing and model making. I am doing nothing but work! So I’m looking for somewhere that has enough staff to allow days off and even holidays. Now I have experience in retail I can look for something that pays more per hour and therefore work fewer hours.

There is also plan B, which is stymied by working a 7-day week. Plan B involved buying the broken stuff on eBay, fixing it and reselling on eBay. I already have a good few things to fix up, unfortunately I don’t think I can part with the best ones yet and do not have what I would consider a massive surplus. Fifteen engines is nowhere near enough for a railway.

So now there is plan C.

A firm called Peco used to, maybe still do, make very cheap N gauge wagon kits. These were five-minute assembly jobs but were unpainted. Box vans in plain white, that sort of thing. I can still put them together (hell I could put one of these together blindfold) but no longer have the eyesight to detail them.

It occurs to me that since I have blank, printable A4 decal sheets, I don’t have to detail anything in a tiny scale. I can make the entire side of the wagon as a full screen image and print it to the right size. All the numbering and detailing on a single waterslide transfer.

A question for the rail geeks – if I advertised a set of ten wagons, all with different running numbers, then another set with another ten different numbers, how ballistic would you go on eBay?

I think I still have my old rail-geek books of coach numbers and maybe even wagon numbers somewhere in a dusty box. Let’s say there were a thousand box vans made in real life. Let’s say I could produce a thousand box vans and every one had a different running number, and every number was the correct one for that type of van. All I would have to do would be to change the number on the onscreen image and print another transfer. You can buy a wagon from me knowing that nobody else has one with that number on the side.

Suppose, rail geeks, you wanted a particular set of numbered wagons to model a specific train you had videoed. That is now possible. I can do that, even in N gauge, as long as I can get (or make) the wagons. Trains numbered to order. Liveried to order. Invent your own livery and numbers, I’ll make the wagons.

I have one Peco N gauge box van here. I didn’t sell this one because it’s just a blank white van so is worth pretty much nothing. Maybe it will be the rail version of Man with a Van. It’s a test article.

Oh hell, why don’t I just sell the transfers?

It could work. All I need is for the day job to slow down enough to let me get started.

As it is, I have to try to sleep at this abnormal time in order to go and knacker myself again tomorrow. Tomorrow afternoon I will investigate Plan C further.

It will work in any scale. All it takes is ‘edit image – resize’.

And it does not have to be confined to railgeekery. Anything can be transformed with decals. My only limit is the A4 size of the sheets. Fancy a big skull on the door of your car? Stick it on, a few layers of clear lacquer and there you go.

Right. Clear thoughts from head and try to sleep.

Fat chance. The horror of Earliness awaits me.

Notice anything about that winner, Dreadful and the Drones?

I didn’t have to be at work until the crack of noon so was mostly recovered by then, if a little hazy for the first couple of hours. Same time tomorrow for work. I should catch up on some sleep tonight.

Plastic Man, the other neighbour, I have not even seen for almost a year now. I saw his plastic wife and one of his plastic kids in Local Shop once and kept out of sight until they had gone. They normally go to Tesco, which undercuts Local Shop’s prices by quite a lot, so hopefully they won’t come back.

Tonight I have left a few comments around Blogland using my Blogger account. Some blogs only allow the Blogger account or OpenID for comments, and I have never yet managed to get OpenID to work properly. It’s the first time I’ve signed in to Blogger for a long time. That old place still gets over 300 hits a day even though nothing new has appeared there since February 2012.

If you notice that a comment I’ve left somewhere links back to the Blogger blog, that’ll be why. It’s because at some point I have left a comment as the Blogger version of me on a blog that has no ‘name/URL’ option and am too damn lazy to change it for other blogs I subsequently visit.

Anyway. The EU.

We were told, some years back ,that the EU banning bent bananas and cucumbers was a myth. Their drones parroted ‘No, no, no, that never happened’ over and over until the EU formally repealed the laws on banana bendiness and the drones went very quiet.

Incidentally, I have discovered something more disturbing than finding a banana in the bin in the ladies’ toilets. Today I found one in the gents’. {shudder}

It is true that the EU defined the degree of bendiness bananas were allowed to be. Since they are not grown in the EU but are shipped in from much warmer places, one can only wonder what happened to all the bendy ones. Did they ship them back? Was there a banana-bendiness executive at every port leaving every banana-producing country checking every banana in every bunch? How often was he replaced due to spider bites? Very often, I hope.

Was there an EU banana-straightening operative whose job was to steam and press them into the ruling template? Or were overbent ones simply put into the ‘leave to rot and let the taxpayer cover the cost’ pile? None of those scenarios would surprise me. They might all have happened.

The EU also banned oddly shaped carrots, thus putting Fester Rancid’s show – which made such an impression on me I can’t remember the name of it – and its dependency on carrots and parsnips that looked like two legs and a willie, right off the air. All carrots are now perfect. This means that carrots cost more because imperfect ones can’t be sold and also means that when drones try to grow their own carrots and they don’t look like Tesco ones and have dirt on them and aren’t in plastic bags, the drones won’t eat them.

I think it was Rose who mentioned, a while back, about someone asking whether garden-grown produce had to be processed before eating. I met one of those too, in the last few days, but was actually too gobsmacked to come up with a witty retort. “Can you use them just like the ones from supermarkets?” was, I believe, the question. I was actually speechless. Next time I won’t be. Next time I’ll make the stupid bastards soak them in bleach for a night and then two hours in a mix of Toilet Duck and crushed paracetamol before putting them in a net in the toilet and holding on through three full flushes. They will believe that that is what supermarkets do. You don’t believe it but trust me, the drones will believe anything.

These EU regulations have gone a long way towards making people extraordinarily stupid. It has a silver lining. I have noticed very little competition in recent years for wild fruit. If it’s not in packaging the drones won’t touch it. I can get bagfuls of wild raspberries and blackberries and go back in a few days for more. There is a quince bush beside the council offices. It is laden with fruit every year. As far as I can tell, nobody knows what it is. I’m not much interested in quince myself but if I can find a use for it, I’ll have the fruit. It can probably be made into some kind of booze. It can, it seems, but I question the nine months of fermentation. It cannot take that long! Nearly two years to make it drinkable? It had better be good.

What the hell, it’s nearly free. Certainly it will cost far less than the shop stuff, there will be no competition from the drones for the raw materials because they are scared of almost all of them and it is utterly unregulated and that, to me, is the biggest selling point of all. Nobody is telling me it’s safe for me to drink  Nobody is taking that responsibility away from me. If I get to the stage where I see unicorns and pixies and can shit through a sieve without touching the mesh then that will be my fault. Nobody else’s.

When I came home from Drinking Neighbour’s house at 3 a.m. and put as much effort into getting up the stairs as Sherpa Tensing did to get up Everest, that was my fault. Yes, he had loads of beer and yes, he kept handing me fresh ones but it was me who drank it. Nobody forced me. There was nobody with a clipboard saying ‘Your liver’s servicing light is now flashing and you must report to detox or you will fall asleep in your chair again’ and I don’t want that.

I have had this body, such as it is, for over half a century and it still has tonsils and appendix and all the bits I started with and they still work. Some are slower, eyes are less able to deal with fine detail, but this is not surprising. My eyes have looked at things for over fifty years and they can be forgiven for being sick of looking at things. I have made them look at some terribly small things over  the years. And made them look at some very horrible things. I’m surprised they still agree to open in the mornings. Well, maybe I don’t often ask them to open in the mornings which could explain their tolerance.

It has been a fun life and it’s not over yet. There are many more strange things to experience. I do not want a life prescribed by dull people in suits who have no lives of their own. I do not want to tell anyone at all how they should live their lives. I have a life, one life, one ticket to ride and when that ticket expires I can’t go back and try the rides I missed. I have one go at this. Yes, in some people’s minds I have already totally fucked it up. Well sod them. This is how I want to play the game and there is only one life in this game. I do not have time to worry about how anyone else is playing it. I’m just cramming all the things I want to do into my turn.

The EU and the dicks in the UK government don’t care about our lives. We are profit units to them, to be controlled until we are too old to be profitable and then terminated. I say, NO. I belong to nobody. I do not even have a god. If I screw up I answer to me, and I am less forgiving than any god.

The EU make rules. The drones accept and follow the rules. The sensible look for ways to follow the rules without following the rules.

So the EU plan to ban menthol cigarettes. Fine with me, it will make little difference. I have not bought a pack of UK cigarettes or tobacco this year and am fast moving to stuffing tubes with cured leaf and that’ll be me right off the radar. I plan to move next into wrapping baccy in leaves, cigar-style, and using my pipes more often and then for smoking record purposes I won’t even exist. No need even for tubes.

With all the antismoker activity, my smoking costs have gone way down. If not for the antismokers I would not now have tobacco plants. I would never have heard of tubing. I would not have a collection of fun Electrofags. The antis want to ban them but they would never have existed if not for the efforts of the antis!

Let them ban menthol cigarettes. They cannot ban bits of cellulose with menthol in them. The only difference it will make is that it will push more into growing their own or tubing foreign tobacco into menthol tubes. Les tax, less duty into Wastemonster and the best part is, they did it to themselves.

One day, Wastemonster will claim the EU did it. Well, they started it but Wastemonster made it worse.

So I get interested in things that have links. Then I get pissed off when the authors link to things that are not obviously linked to their findings.

I know two people with diabetes. One is a smoker, one is not. Both are non-drinkers, one used to be a heavy drinker of OVD rum which he suspects might be why he now has diabetes. I have not studied the subject sufficiently to make a comment on whether he might be right or wrong about that. The two are of very different ages: one is forty-something, the other in his twenties.

So it was interesting to me to see that a group of scientists are suggesting that diabetes – particularly type 1 diabetes where the body just stops producing insulin – might have an environmental trigger.

As I said, I have not studied the subject in detail. As I understand it, type 2 diabetes can be induced (and sometimes even reversed) by diet, type 1 is genetic. These scientists suggest that while type 1 involves a genetic predisposition, the actual onset of diabetes is triggered by an external factor.

This is not unheard of. There have been suggestions that arthritis might be similar. If you have the genes that make you likely to develop arthritis, you might or might not actually experience it. Long ago it was suggested that infection by particular bacteria might set that in motion. Basically, infection by certain bacteria sets your immune system to attack those bacteria and the cells in your joints (if you have the genes) have surface proteins that are similar to those on the bacteria. So the infection is gone but your immune system is still attacking those surface proteins and the only ones left are the ones in your joints. Your immune system, once activated, will never stop. The scientific term for this is ‘you’re fucked’.

It is therefore possible for a similar system to be involved in diabetes and indeed, the scientists found that the occurrence was not random. Something is causing it.

Scientists claim a new study of children with the autoimmune condition found distinct peaks in cases, suggesting they were triggered by environmental factors.

So far, so scientific.

The researchers studied cases of Type 1 diabetes in north-east England. They found that over a six-year cycle, there were clusters of cases, which peaked at certain times of the year.

Still scientific. There are danger-times of year and the peaks are every six years. So what do they suggest?

The team suggest one method of spread could be from rodents – such as rats and mice – who are carriers of the infection.

Why? How can they be carriers of the infection when nobody yet knows what the infection might be? What is the six-year cycle of rodent activity? What is the six-year cycle of the infection that nobody has yet identified?

It looked so promising as real science and then they go and spoil it all by saying something stupid like ‘It’s this cause’.

Modern housing has far less problems with rodents than in the old days and yet diabetes is on the rise. Why blame Mickey for this? There is no obvious link between diabetes and shitty housing, in fact many diabetes cases come from extraordinarily clean houses. The only two I know both live in very rat-free conditions. I have lived with rats (I recall fondly Roger the brown rat who had a tail broken in three places and was a right cheeky little sod) and I have never experienced diabetes.

Real science would step back and say ‘There is a six-year cycle. What other six-year cycles are there and which of them coincide with this one?’

That is what I would do. So, who knows of any six-year cycles of anything at all? I have none in mind. If there is one out there we can then look at whether it matches at all with the cycles in the original paper (we’ll worry about getting that if we have a cycle to work with).

Instead it’s just blamed on the rodents. As for this -

‘We don’t want to worry parents. It cannot pass from person to person

How do you know? If there are clusters of cases then it is quite possible that it does indeed spread outwards from one infected individual. If you don’t know what the infective agent is, how can you define its infective capacity?

Good science ruined, I think. If there is an infective agent that triggers type 1 diabetes then we should be looking for it and finding a way to stop it.

We should not be jumping to conclusions and making up scapegoats or even scaperats.

Real science, a thing of the past.

They would be complaining about a little bit of burning leaf while rebuilding a machine designed to burn tons of coal and emit massive amounts of smoke and steam.

I wonder if there are any such zealots, and whether they are delighted by the latest attack on vaping? I do hope so. To claim there are monsters in smoke and steam while rebuilding a machine that produces enormous quantities of both would leave them open to a quiet conversation with a certain writer of horror stories…

Tipped in comments by stopcpdotcom, and heard by myself on the radio at work, the moves to hand control of Electrofag over to big corporations have begun. Soon to be followed by taxes.

First they’ll push the boundaries of ‘safe’ to the point where only a big company can afford to pay for the testing. Then they will make them prescription-only so that big company profits are assured (and you’ll all be paying those profits whether you vape or not, courtesy of the National Hate Society). Then they will be taxed because ‘big companies are making too much profit’ and as always, the big companies will hike up the price so that the NHS is paying the tax and you are paying the NHS… You’re paying, is the short answer here.

I have accumulated a few Electrofags now. My latest is the Sonic Smokedriver model which has a big advantage over all the others I have – you can see how much juice is left. And it looks so gadgetry it’s positively menacing. You could convince a drone it’s a smoke-sabre. It’s a biggie at six inches long, with a battery that lasts for ages and the little blue light is on the side-button. I prefer the side-button versions to the puff-and-vape versions because I feel more in control. That’s a matter of personal preference only. Also, I like buttons.

The Sonic Smokedriver looks nothing like a cigarette. The Njoy looks exactly like a cigarette and is great fun for those times when a purple-faced harridan demands you stop smoking. Take one last puff, get the end to light up red and then drop it into your shirt pocket. It looks like a lit cigarette. Can’t find Njoy now but the seller has a similar one called Halo.

The Titan is still around but has developed somewhat. I have loads of juice stocked up and plenty of blank refillable cartridges so I’m already prepared for the Day of the Duty. Plus, extracting nicotine from leaves is as easy as soaking them in water. Literally. Getting the concentration right is trickier but the initial stage, getting it out, is easy.

You could probably even extract it from tomatoes. However, you would need a lot more tomatoes than tobacco leaves but at a pinch, it could be done. It’s probably more concentrated in the tomato leaves than in the fruit, and growing tomatoes is… well, is there anyone who hasn’t done that?

I also have an Electrocigar but I don’t like it. I have cigar flavour juice for the Titan and that’s much easier to use than the cigar. I do not have an Electropipe and probably won’t bother. My real pipes are irreplaceable as far as technology goes. Although an Electropipe wouldn’t set your pocket on fire even though the price might burn out your wallet..

The odd little one that looks like a USB stick with a tube on the end doesn’t seem to be available any more. Pity. You can easily pass that one off as a medical inhaler.

If you have fancied trying an Electrofag but have not yet had a go, now is the time. Find one you like and stock up. Really, all you need to stock is the e-juice. They cannot possibly claim that batteries and little heaters are medicines.

They can, once they have classed Electrofag as a medical product, then say that nicotine is a medical product and therefore so are cigarettes. The antis worked this trick on aeroplanes and on the shutters over the displays.

They concede that it is only fair to allow smoking on long flights while banning it on short ones. They concede that the display shutters cannot yet be applied to small shops. As soon as they have achieved stage one, they cry out about ‘the loophole in the law’ that allows smoking on long flights, open displays in petrol stations… and the politicians are too damn feeble to stand up to them and point out that they have what they asked for in the first place so they should just shut the fuck up now.

No, all politicians have less spine than a calcium-deficient jellyfish. They have to wear highly starched shirts to maintain some semblance of body shape and the older ones sometimes forget to add enough starch. Cyril Smith is the natural body shape of all of them.

They cave in at once to every demand by every shouty little shitbag and then they go home and have a little cry. How in Hell’s name dare they demand respect? These sad and desperate little people claim to have a right to rule over us and they think they are respected and loved but they have to have armed guards everywhere they go, even though none of us have guns, and it never occurs to them to ask ‘why?’.

If you voted for any of them, don’t do it again. You are making things worse. These are not lizards, these are slime in a suit. Icke didn’t go back far enough. These people-shaped blobs are not residual dinosaurs, they are primordial slime that has learned to shape itself into a vaguely human resemblance but which has not learned to think, so it relies on the spiteful whispers and snide hisses of the most detestable, profit-driven, hateful humans the gene pool has ever produced to guide it.

Hey, ASH, guess what I’m smoking now? I am smoking tubed cigs composed of two parts Burley leaf, one part Virginia leaf and one part Amber Leaf rolling baccy. The rolling baccy is in there as a sort of binder because I can’t yet shred the leaf well enough to use it pure. The finely shredded rolling baccy ensures I have no wide open spaces. Guess what, ASH? It costs me about a pound for 20 fags if I use UK-bought Amber Leaf. If I use non-UK rolling baccy it can drop to prices that would make the Chinese envious. Once I master the shredding I won’t need the shop-bought component at all. Also I am trying to make Three Nuns style whorls for my pipes. Nearly there. Burley inside, Virginia outside.

If ASH had not been so vociferous, if the politicians had not been so spineless, if the medicos had not been so pompous, I might not now have some rapidly-growing baccy plants in the greenhouse (late this year due to lost early crop but the little buggers have gone mad in the warm weather) and might still be buying from the tobacco counter. I have not yet bought anything from behind the doors and will not. I do not buy what I cannot see. Man with a Van will never have the doors.

The same will happen to Electrofag. You will have plain packaging, none of the brushed steel and shiny gold finishes you get now. Grey and ugly with warnings all over it even though they don’t apply. They will be even bigger lies than the ones on tobacco. As it stands, Electrofags can be on open display because they are NOT tobacco at all. Just watch how fast that will change.

Many vapers and pretty much all the Electrofag sellers despise those of us who still burn the leaf. We told you this was coming and you laughed, you told us we were stuck with a filthy stinking habit you had shed. You told us that your vaping was harmless (which is true and we already know this) and that we were horrible remnants of the past. Remember that? We do.

I like Electrofags, they are pretty neat gadgets and a lot of fun, but I still like the real thing too. The tobacco flavour Electrofag is still not quite right but is getting there, but that for me is not what they are for. I like all the weird flavours the Electrofags let me smoke, all of which will soon be banned. But hey, once you have extracted the nicotine and concentrated it and added propylene glycol to thicken the juice, flavouring is no trouble at all. The coming ban will not affect me too much since preparing stuff for my Electrofags will be far less difficult than preparing tobacco leaves for smoking. The only hurdle will be defining concentration and if I can do that for niacin I can do that for nicotine. It is essentially the same thing.

Still, I guess you vapers don’t want any help from us filthy smokers in this matter. We are beneath your contempt, aren’t we? Horrible smelly nicotine addicts whereas you are all sweet-smelling superior nicotine addicts (read the comments on the Grauniad article and see how the Righteous regard you).

Enjoy your denormalisation, vapers. If you have any sense you’ll positively revel in it. I have.

Morning shift does give me the chance to visit my lab without worrying about getting back in time. This was very useful yesterday. I needed something to store tobacco leaves long-term, something airtight, and it occurred to me that I have a load of anaerobic jars plus boxes of anaerobic generator packs that are running out of date. Mould can’t grow on my leaves anaerobically (this means ‘no oxygen’ – I have been a scientist for so long that I forget that non-scientists don’t always know the jargon). The anaerobic generator packs also produce moisture which will keep the leaves damp.

So I brought two 2.5-litre jars home. I will have to seriously disinfect them before use, considering the horrible things I have used them for in the past, but they should be ideal long-term baccy-leaf storage devices. I would recommend them but they are expensive and these days, buying microbiological equipment if you’re not a microbiologist will get you red-flagged for sure.

I have also been listing all my work-based internet expenditure for the tax form. I want this in early. My tax code was 0T last year, so I paid tax on all my cleaner-pay with no tax allowance and made bugger all outside that job. They owe me money this time round. Legitimate internet costs aren’t huge, they are the domain name registrations and associated trivial costs associated with real work and with writing (it’s taxable income so has legit expenses). One day I might earn enough from writing to actually pay tax on it. No hurry.

A pack of eBay stuff arrived today, all bargains from one seller. I overpaid postage but hell, I underpaid for the stuff so I do not begrudge the guy a few quid. Two LED-based OO gauge street lamps that, now I have one of each, I can easily replicate and a continental style signal made by Marklin (geeks will gasp, everyone else will say ‘Huh?’) which can easily be converted to a reasonable GWR style lower quadrant signal with a light behind the spectacle plate (okay, by now the non-geeks are thinking the science jargon was easier than this).

So, in the absence of anything sensible to say, I thought I’d bung up an entertainment post. Haven’t done that for a while. I have been re-reading my own books because they are obviously the best books available, especially ‘The Articles of Dume’ because I need to fire up the writing gland again. So, in lieu of a whisky-fuelled rant this evening since I am saving the proper drinking for later in the week, here is a sample of the output of one of my currently dormant alter egos.

I do, indeed, go by many names. This one is Dr. Dume.

 Slow and Steady Wins the Zombie Race.

Written for an article in Alienskin in June/July 2009

Browsing in the bargain bin at Tumbleguts McJoystick’s video and games shop, I came across a DVD called ‘Ghost Lake’. I bought it, played it and thought ‘Not great, not really very scary but not a bad premise’. The film concerns an artificial lake with a town sunk beneath its waters. Every thirteen years, someone disappears in the lake and the body is never found. Once thirteen of the cycles have passed, all the dead rise from the lake and claim a victim each. I won’t say what happens once that’s complete in case you get the chance to see it for yourself.

It reminded me of the ‘Jeepers Creepers’ films, in which the demon returns every twenty-three years, kills, and then goes dormant. The time-cycle needn’t be based on the superstition of thirteen, the magical numbers seven or eleven, or any number that has any kind of occult connection. It can be anything you choose. All you need is a regular cycle based on something you’ve made up. The age of the first victim, perhaps, the number associated with the date they died, even the number of buttons on their shirt. Just give your original victim some number to hang onto. It needn’t make sense to any other character but it should be possible for them to work out what the number is and allow them to anticipate their own involvement. Escaping is no fun if you don’t know something’s after you.

The twist in ‘Ghost Lake’ was that the number referred not only to a cycle, but to the number of cycles. The Terrible Thing happened every thirteen years and it was to happen thirteen times before the endgame arrived. That set the story apart because most of these cyclic tales have no end. The characters might survive an event but the ghosts or demons are going to do it all again when a certain number of years have passed. There is no final resolution because the dead can’t be killed. The dead are, in this film, a form of zombie, blended with a Cicada-style demonic recurrence but zombies all the same. Solid, moving corpses. The living dead.

Zombies are scary things but it’s hard to pin down why. It was also difficult to work out why these particular zombies weren’t all that scary. I think I might have a possible solution to both questions.

The traditional zombie is a slow, mindless drone with only one thought. Eat Brains. If they catch you they don’t use magical powers or special weapons. They rip you apart with their bare hands and their teeth. Zombies never chase after you in cars and helicopters. They never use guns or traps. They are completely mindless, driven only by food and you’re the dish of the day. Every day.

Since they are slow and with no weapons or powers, they are easy to avoid. Run. They can’t catch you. Easy, eh? How far can you run before you have to stop and rest? How far before you have to sleep? The zombies, you see, will travel at their shambling pace and they will not stop for a rest, nor will they sleep. Sunlight doesn’t kill them. Garlic and crosses won’t scare them away. Vampires rest, werewolves change back, demons hide from the sun but the zombie just keeps coming.

You can run but you can’t keep moving forever and the zombies, with their unrelenting plodding, will keep on following you. One day, you know they’ll catch up. You are the hare, the Zombie is the tortoise and we all know how that turned out.
When they do you have no options left. You can reason with Dracula. You can riddle and confuse a demon. You can even discuss scripture with Frankenstein’s monster. Werewolves? Pah. Throw a stick. Gets them every time.

The zombies are not interested in conversation. They cannot be reasoned with, confused, distracted or diverted. You might as well argue Newtonian physics with an approaching bullet. Nothing you say will stop the bullet, nor will it stop the zombie. The bullet, incidentally, won’t stop the zombie either. The only way is to blast them to bits, and even then, sometimes the bits will drag themselves after you.

That’s the basis of the zombie terror, I think. The monster that cannot be killed and cannot be reasoned with. It’s coming for you. It’s coming very slowly but nothing will stop it, and the slowness of its approach just makes it worse. It’s like watching the pendulum descend when you’re on the table. You might delay the inevitable but you can never win.
To add to the woe, every victim of this monster becomes another monster. It’s not just a horrible creature. It’s also a disease.

Why, then, were the living dead of ‘Ghost Lake’ not scary? Well, because some of them spoke. They reasoned, they argued and in the end they were defeated by reason and logic. That cannot happen with a standard zombie.

They were also inconsistent, ranging from the erudite to the standard moaning, shuffling corpse. Some were accomplished at speaking and at shape-shifting. Others were mere animated drones. Some wore their wounds for all to see. Others looked and sounded alive. There was no focus for the scare here. It was hard to tell who were the dead and who were alive. I’m sure that was a deliberate plot device but if so, it should have been applied consistently as in ‘The Others’. In that film, it worked well. In this one, it didn’t.

Having some traditional zombies and some who can pass for human formed by the same process simply doesn’t work. There was also an originator, a First Victim who appeared in the film but he wasn’t driving events at the end. What happened to him?

For your zombie tales, then, you want a completely unreasonable creature with one drive, and one only. To feed. It will never stop, rest or sleep. No argument will sway it. Nothing distracts it. It is not interested in sideshows, only the main event. It can be slowed but it cannot be killed because it’s already dead. Try having one that reassembles when blown up if it can find all its pieces. There’s no way to stop such a creature.

For all living-dead stories, consistency is the key. You can have a village populated by the dead and nobody would notice if they all looked and acted normally. ‘Death Becomes Her’ is a good source for ideas there.

Don’t mix up your living dead. If you have them formed by one process, then they must all be the same. There can be one ‘boss zombie’ if you like, one who controls the others, but don’t confuse your reader with a host of different types. If some are rotting and some are in rude health, some are groaning and some are quoting Shakespeare, your reader won’t have a clue what’s happening and might lose interest completely.

‘Ghost Lake’ had a lot of different types of dead and it was confusing. I still like the idea of a cyclic event with a finale though. I might try that myself.

Now, think ‘utterly unstoppable eating machine’ and try to find a way to stop it. Not permanently, of course. Just enough so your reader thinks it’s still out there, just waiting for lunch.

Because the really scary stories don’t kill the monster at the end. They just inconvenience it. At the end of the tale, it’s still out there.

Waiting for you.

I’ll probably catch-up on sleep tomorrow afternoon, and work gets to more civilised times on Wednesday.