If you’re a fan of the Portal games then you should, no, you WILL, like the video below. Seriously though, prepare yourself; maybe sit down, have a strong drink nearby, maybe some sturdy pants, because it’s pretty impressive.

Failure to like and/or enjoy it will result in immediate test failure.

(link here for those unfortunate souls who can’t see the embedded goodness)

Brilliant.

I went to an ordinary school. It had an ordinary shape. It was, all in all, pretty boring.

But imagine being at a school that looks like… The Millennium Falcon!

OK nerds at the back (you know who you are), calm down. Take a look at this imagery here and geek out to your heart’s content:

Apparently the school is in Pennsylvania and has become a bit of a short-lived phenomenon. The full story is here on the excellent Digital Spy.

Incidentally, I’d rather go to this space school:

I’d forgotten how fit Aimee was, that green space-leotard, phwoar. I mean, er… look over there, a dying kitten!

*runs away*

As regular readers will know, we here at Randomlinkage are huge fans of Freddo the frog, the small chocolate frog with the delicious chocolate taste. Freddo is our chocolate treat of choice, just enough to satisfy those chocolate cravings without adding too much onto your waistline.

Unless like me you eat ten at a time but that’s besides the point.

The point is that Freddo the frog is indeed a tasty chocolate delight, but one that is also affordable. Kids can save up their pocket money and buy themselves a few Freddos, grown-ups can buy many Freddos and treat their friends and family with a choc surprise, the elderly can save up their pension money and then slowly but carefully count out the exact change to buy a Freddo.

That’s because Freddos cost 10p. That is their natural price, the price that the world intended. Affordable, cheap, bargain-tastic.

But the world of bankers and economists and men in suits are changing this. A while back we reported that Freddos were 17p. Unfortunately the situation has become even more grave. If you are of a nervous disposition, please sit down and brace yourselves.

Freddos are now… 20p.

Now stop, stop, put down the burning torches and the pitchforks and call off the march to bring down the Government. We’ll only do that as a last resort. To start with, we shall do this the Government’s way, the official way: the petition way.

A petition has been set up to demand the price of Freddo be reduced, perhaps even back to it’s original price of 10p. Click on this Government approved link to view the petition.

Granted, the petition isn’t particularly clear on it’s exact demands, nor is it very well written, but the message is there. Place your signature on this petition and reduce the price of Freddos. It is the right thing to do. Freddo is a chocolate frog of the people, not of the suits, the financiers and the corporations! The line is drawn and we shall make our stand here, today!

Sign up today. Signing guarantees citizenship.

Hurrah and hurray readers, Mr Trench has crept out of his lair for a second and has communicated with me, albeit in an electronic fashion. His muse? The globe-trotting sport of Formula One.

In the true slacker spirit of Randomlinkage, I received this e-mail from Mr Trench before the recent Bahrain Grand Prix but forgot to post it. So imagine that the Bahrain Grand Prix hasn’t happened and read Mr Trench’s musings…

————

Dear FIA,

Please distribute whatever drugs were handed out to the drivers prior to the Chinese GP at the beginning of each forthcoming race. I myself watched the 1hr highlight programme and felt like I had taken speed, LSD & ecstasy simultaneously such was the frantic pace of activity.

I look forward to the next stop off at the BENEVOLENT AND PEACE LOVING NATION of Bahrain, where summary beatings for civil disobedience are NOUGHT BUT A DISTANT DREAM SUCH IS THE BLISS OF RESIDENCE.

Mr Trench

PS. Found this site which summarises the commentary highlights from the beeb and sky teams. Well, I enjoyed it anyway…

http://brundleandfriends.blogspot.co.uk

Both myself and The Minster proved that we were indeed at one with nature today.

I threw some orange peel into a tree.

The Minster did not run over a squirrel.

Planet Earth: You owe us.

Whilst at the seaside in the delightful town of Brighton, I happened upon the poster below and it made me smile. See if you can see why.

A bargain at £2/£4/£5.

The Feisty Kim and I were pacing the nighttime London streets in search of our hotel. We were tired and weary; our day had started in Brighton, where we had wandered the pier and strolled the streets and looked uneasy at the amount of topless men who shouldn’t have been topless.

After the train journey from Brighton to London village and the battle through the tube, we were both looking forward to just parking our backsides on a bed and relaxing. I checked the day. It was Tuesday, CSI would be on, that’d be nice to sit and watch, a lovely bit of CSI to calm us down before a good night’s sleep.

After some wanderage, we found ourselves on the right street. Then we saw our hotel. Myself and the Feisty Kim stared at the hotel. We furrowed our brows.
“Is that… ours?” I said, in a slightly breathless voice.
“I think so.” Was the reply.

We stared a bit more, unbelieving. Before us was a big, impressive, resplendent hotel, bathed in exciting coloured uplights and bearing flags of many nations. There was even a Brazilian flag, that’s how multi-cultural it was.
“Are you sure? It looks so… expensive.” A quick check of the paperwork proved that we were indeed at the right hotel. The hotel that we’d booked a cheap room in using a fairly standard unexciting website only a few days before.

We approached the lovely front doors to the hotel. Outside was a Bentley. A posh, expensive, shiny Bentley, all gleaming in the artificial light. As I walked past I thought I saw a rich man inside the Bentley extinguish his cigar on his butlers face. A rich man! A cigar! A butler! What world were we entering in to?

We entered the lobby, which was large and fancy and decorated with many fine things. A fountain was to the right of the door and helpful attentive foreign staff awaited us at the check-in desk.

Immediately I felt wrong. I looked down at my jeans and t-shirt and felt like I was somehow sullying the reputation of the place. My t-shirt had a large Mexican Legoman on it! And I was wearing a backpack! Jeans, silly t-shirt, backpack, big red tired face. There was a Bentley outside with a rich cigar-smoking man in it! What would they think of us?

I half expected the reception staff to either turf us out or send us to the laundry room to start our shifts, but they did their job and started to book us in. Immediately I felt possessed to act differently, in a more upper-class fashion. I put my arms behind my back. I sniffed loudly as the receptionist sorted out the room key. I looked around the place and nodded appreciatively at a small statue of a cherub.

I did think about mentioning the Brazilian flag, perhaps saying something about how the Brazilian arm of my business was flourishing, but I resisted. I needed a servant, a lackey, some willing employee who I could stub out various burning nicotine sticks on to prove my worth to these people! Unfortunately I lacked both the staff and the items to be extinguished, so I continued to look aloof.

The polite receptionist gave us our key and directed us to our room. Instead of saying “OK, that’s great, cheers.” or “Brilliant, thanks.” like I would normally, I found myself saying just “Excellent. Thank you.” in a marginally pompous tone.

We walked to our room, feeling the eyes of the receptionist on our backpacks. We made our way through some nice corridors, with old maps of London on the walls and big pots of costly looking twigs dotted here and there.

Then we reached the lift. A small, knackered looking lift. It looked like the staff lift. We entered the lift, went down a little way, exited the lift and entered a different world. A cheaper, less glamorous world. Where were the old maps? And the expensive twigs? A man of my stature couldn’t be seen down here!
“They’ve accidentally sent us down to steerage!” I commented loudly.

We found our room. Entered the room. The illusion was shattered.

The room was small, hot and in a basement. The carpets were monstrous, the furniture was bland and the bathroom was minimalistic. The small window opened out onto a tiny outside area facing a maintenance cupboard filled with brooms. There was nowhere to hang my non-existent expensive suit jacket, no hat-stand upon which to stand my as-yet unpurchased hat, no lodgings for the imaginary butler to stay in.

I sighed, all hopes of grandeur, pomp and ceremony now fully extinguished. In this fine hotel, with all it’s finery and extravagance and rich men with Bentleys, we were in the servant’s quarters. We were the commoners in the cheap rooms, buried deep under the ground, away from the ‘proper’ clientèle who pay full price for their rooms instead of getting cheap deals on the internet. Our true position on the social ladder was restored.

We sat on the bed and watched CSI. It was good.

Rejoice folks, rejoice and party and put out some bunting and spill out into the streets to look warily at the neighbours you always try to avoid speaking to, for Randomlinkage Towers has some great news.

After much shenaniganery and tomfoolery, The Feisty Kim and I are to be rewarded with… a child! Soon the hallowed halls of Randomlinkage Towers will be filled with the wails of a small baby. What’s more, this baby-creature is to be a boy so the line of succession for the Towers is safe.

Of course, this leads onto the question of what to name this small person. There have been various suggestions, such as:

• Leroy
• Pench
• Trenge
• Stormageddon
• Keith

We shall mull over the name for a while longer and, when the time arrives, give the offspring a suitably heroic, bold, dashing name, which immediately rules out Keith.

Inspiration for some extravagant names comes from two chaps in Nottingham, who have changed their names to some extremely lengthy monikers which reflect their love of comics, sci-fi and gaming. Their names are…

Baron Venom Balrog Sabretooth Vader Megatron Vegeta Robotnik Magneto Bison Sephiroth Lex Luthor Skeletor Joker Grind

and

Emperor Spiderman Gandalf Wolverine Skywalker Optimus Prime Goku Sonic Xavier Ryu Cloud Superman HeMan Batman Thrash.

If you don’t believe me, and to be fair the names do seem somewhat mental, then here’s a link to a page on the Internet, which therefore proves that it is true.

So the next few months we shall be mulling over names, perhaps similar to those above, which will suit the newborn ruler of the Randomlinkage Estate. If you have any suggestions then please let us know.

I’m off to learn how to change nappies, Mr Trench has kindly let me use him as a practice subject.

I have recently stumbled across a phenomena that has disturbed me. Whilst spending some quality time on YouTube, I have discovered something which I had previously thought wasn’t allowed:

YouTube clips that are over an hour long.

The first video I found like this was ten hours long. Ten actual full standard Earth hours. YouTube videos that last a full five twelfths of a day. Already I was concerned; my attention is readily grabbed by YouTube videos, what if I got trapped watching a ten hour clip?

Then I found more videos, longer videos. One was 100 hours long. Another was a completely incomprehensible 596 hours long! That’s nearly 25 full days of YouTube clippage. TWENTY-FIVE days!

But surely these videos, these lengthy clips, are to the benefit of mankind, imparting invaluable knowledge passed down throughout the ages to enrich the soul?

No, of course they aren’t. Invariably, these mammoth videos are smaller clips, say a minute long, repeated over and over and over and over again for many full insanity-causing hours.

Imagine hours of this!

Or this!

Forget waterboarding and other physical tortures, just subject someone to three or four of these uber-clips on full volume and they’ll break down and sell you their own family just to make the madness stop.

If you dare, and if you have lots of spare time, I dare you to see if you can watch ten hours of this next clip, just ten hours, without going mad and ending up sitting in the corner of your room thinking you’re a fantastical space feline.

Right, does anyone have any idea where they’re taking the Hobbits?

For the past few days I’ve been down in the tiny village, perhaps even hamlet, called London. You’ve probably not heard of it. No matter.

Whilst in one of the local taverns there, the excess of alcohol led me to require a visit to the Gentlemen’s convenience. The norm in such places is to see things scrawled on the wall like “Want a gud time? Call Slaggy Sarah on 01234 567890″ or “Stroke my beard for a fiver. Call Trench on 09876 543210″.

Not so this particular boozer I was in. No, their lavvy wall graffiti was of a higher caliber. It went thusly:

• If you dont know Hardys theorem then you ARE GAY

I’d like to point out that the apostrophe’s are missing intentionally; this is exactly how the message appeared on the wall.

My initial thought was “Where are the apostrophes?” Secondly, I thought “I wonder what Hardy’s theorem is?” Thirdly I thought “I’m gay!”

Of course, with this I was intrigued. What was the theorem? Why was it on the wall in a pub toilet? Why would not knowing it result in my being gay?

A quick look on the interwebs showed Hardy’s Theorem to be a result in complex analysis describing the behavior of holomorphic functions. More specifically…

“Let f be a holomorphic function on the open ball centered at zero and radius R in the complex plane, and assume that f is not a constant function. If one defines

for 0 < r < R, then this function is strictly increasing and logarithmically convex.” (thanks Wikipedia!)

I have no idea what that means. At all. I couldn’t even hazard a guess at even a tiny bit of it. Is it measuring the size of something? Or the speed? And what the hell is that big sort of towering giraffe symbol next to the 0 and the two pie?

But does my lack of understanding of Hardy’s Theorem mean I am gay? Unlikely. If the statement were true then I imagine quite a substantial portion of humanity would be gay and the species would suddenly find itself in trouble.

Finally, how did it end up on a wall in a pub? Maybe it was the scribbled rantings of a drunk maths student, or the frustrated doodles of a sexually confused mathematical genius. I would like to meet whoever did it though, just to see if they mix cleverness with crudeness in other situations, as in “Your dual X chromosomes span more than 153 million base pairs and I like YOUR ARSE”.

Be honest readers and let us all know if you knew of Hardy’s Theorem. If you did then you are a clever person and are obviously straight indeed, whereas if you didn’t has your lack of understanding of this seemingly obscure mathematical principle has left you confused about your sexuality?

Still, Mr or Mrs Maths person, with your clever theorem lah-de-dah, at least I can use apostrophe’s correctly eh? So whos the clever one now? Eh?

Still you then. Fair enough.

Go on then EA and BioWare, take everything I have.

Take my money.

Take my time.

Take my freedom.

Damn you Shepard you sexy heroic bastard! Damn you!

Claim: “It’s too cold to snow.”

Objectives: To see if it is too cold to snow.

Apparatus: Antarctica.

Evidence of temperature: From Wikipedia: “The climate of Antarctica is the coldest on the whole of Earth. The mean annual temperature of the interior is −57°C (−70°F).”

Evidence of snowfall: From Wikipedia: The total precipitation in Antarctica, averaged over the entire continent, is about 166 mm (6.5 in) per year. Almost all Antarctic precipitation falls as snow.

Conclusion: It cannot be ‘too cold’ to snow.

Recommended courses of action: If someone is heard to say “It’s too cold to snow” or a variant of that phrase then it is recommended that you either a) blind them with the high level science provided above and belittle their pathetic intellect, or b) punch them about the face very hard until they realise that what they said is total and utter nonsense.

Please come with us next time across the bumpy fields of falsehoods, around the roundabout of ruses and onward to the sparkling city of Truth.

In order to spice up your clearly drab, boring, perhaps even pathetic lives, us devilishly handsome folk at Randomlinkage Towers have come up with a mission for you to carry out this week.

Your mission, which you will accept because we said so, is to repeat the actions of the video below:

By which we mean:

• Spot a character befitting the description of a ‘Nerd’
• Suddenly pull up your method of conveyance, be it a car, bike or even a tricycle
• Yell ‘NNNEERRDDDD!’ at the previously identified nerd
• Exit the area post-haste

If you do this you will win many Randomlinkage Points, which you’ll be able to trade in for super-special prizes and merchandise!* Let us know how you get on. Please be aware that if you come to personal harm then we aren’t to blame.

Incidentally, that ‘NNEERRDDD!’ clip never fails to make me laugh.

* Subject to status. Conditions apply. Some waffle about APR.

Observe the valuable life-lesson below, presented in glorious technicolour, then proceed to answer the four questions. Show your working where possible. You may use a calculator.

The Clip – Courtesy of The Lonely Island (link to the clip here)

The Questions

1. Does Mr Trench look at explosions? [5 marks]
2. Does Mr Penge look at explosions? [5 marks]
3. In the clip, who was wearing a hat? [89 marks]
4. What’s your favourite website? [1 mark]

Great news readers! Joyous news! Mr Trench has reminded of the kid’s televisual trip-fest Wizbit! I was sat in my chambers when Mr Trench meanded in, wearing nought but a small yellow cone over his nethers. After a little discussion it transpired that Mr Trench had been partaking of the Scotch and playing Hide-And-Seek with some of the more nubile female members of the kitchen staff, whereupon his drunken state had caused him to misunderstand the rules about what exactly was being ‘hidden’.

With Mr Trench shoo’d away into the Randomlinkage Ice-Bath to calm down, I began to recall Wizbit and how bizarre and freakish the whole show was. Of course the father of the show Paul Daniels was in it, casting spells and doing magic tricks like there was no tomorrow, and the odd sort of triangle/cone of Wizbit did some stuff and there was a big rabbit too, but it’s the theme tune that everyone remembers. So with little delay, let’s dissect that very theme now…

Opening Theme:

Ha ha this-a-way, ha ha that-a-way, ha ha this-a-way, my oh my
Ha ha this-a-way, ha ha that-a-way, ha ha this-a-way, my oh my

Immediate confusion. Listeners are immediately pulled this-a-way and then that-away, only to return back this-a-way again. The ha-ha-ing only adds to the confusion; are they ha-ha’s of enjoyment or ha-ha’s of an evil cackle? The my oh my is also confusing, as it seems quite a polite phrase to use after such this-a-way and that-a-way-ing.

What do we know about Wizbit
Now he comes from the planet of WOW

I’m unaware of the planet of WOW, but if it produces characters like Wizbit I imagine we’ll carpet bomb the crap out of it from space before we ever set foot there.

Once he was a little bit, little bit, little bit
A little bit of magic in his Daddy’s eye

A curiously sexual comment here, presumably referring to the old phrase “A glint in the milkman’s eye” or similar. Or was he literally a small piece of magic in his Dad’s eye, making his poor Dad feel uncomfortable and itchy about the ocular region?

Time came grow a bit, grow a bit, grow a bit
Wizbit grew about three feet high

These are very imprecise measurements; grow ‘a bit’ and ‘about’ three feet high? I think the watchers of Wizbit deserve to know exactly how much he grew at each growth spurt and his exact height upon reaching maturity. Still, at around three feet high he’s a bit of a short-arse.

Ha ha this-a-way, ha ha that-a-way, ha ha this-a-way, my oh my
Ha ha this-a-way, ha ha that-a-way, ha ha this-a-way, my oh my

Having told us nothing much about Wizbit, except that he lives on planet WOW and that he grew a bit, more baffling to-ing and fro-ing goes on. With such deception and subterfuge being deployed in these early lyrics, I am forced to conclude that Wizbit is a Communist.

Ending Theme:

Ha ha this-a-way, ha ha that-a-way, ha ha this-a-way, my oh my
Ha ha this-a-way, ha ha that-a-way, ha ha this-a-way, my oh my

Again, further entrapment and sinister bamboozling tactics. As if a show about a magical conical yellow freak and his spaced-out giant rabbit friend wasn’t enough, children are then plunged further into madness by the lyrics.

Ostagazuzulum, that was the magic word
Ostagazuzulum, my oh my

The magic word is revealed! And it’s pretty rubbish! Ostagazuzulum just doesn’t have the same impact as Abra-cadabra. It sounds more like the noise someone might make when they have a particularly mucus-heavy sneeze.

He can do magic, magic, magic!
Magic a rabbit, eight feet high

Exactly what use is an eight-feet high rabbit? And is that all the magic that Wizbit can do? If so, his career in magic is going to be spectacular but short-lived, though he could always take up a new trade as a butcher with a speciality in cuts of rabbit.

Ha ha this-a-way, ha ha that-a-way, ha ha this-a-way, my oh my
Ha ha this-a-way, ha ha that-a-way, ha ha this-a-way, my oh my

With images of massive rabbits towering over little midget Wizbit and wizards shouting Ostagazuzulum into our bewildered faces, we’re quickly pitched back into the catchy-but-meaningless ha ha segment of the song again. Presumably this leaves the viewers, the poor innocent child fans of Wizbit, susceptible to whatever comes on after it, which might well have been Commy propaganda disguised as harmless children’s television.

I hope you enjoyed this in-depth critique of the lyrical abomination that is the Wizbit theme and that I have not crushed your happy childhood memories of the same. Now you must excuse me, for I have forgotten to release Mr Trench from the Ice-Bath and must do so before his already withered man-bits drop off from the chill.

For those of you desperate to gorge yourselves on the lyrics further, here’s a clip. It isn’t the best quality, but it’s better than nowt. (NOTE: Watch to the end for the rabbit dancing. Deranged, truly deranged.)

(link for the Facebook crowd)

p