The Word of Ward

Dear reader,
In case you are wondering why I haven’t replied to your messages, answered your calls,let the milk pile up, and generally not write much recently, it is because I am in Thailand. I was worried about letting you know this too much in advance because of the resentment this seemed to cause in my fellow shivering snow-bound Londoners when I mentioned it to them while huddled round a pub fire. ‘You prick’, seemed to be the general consensus if I happened to mention the over 30 Celsius weather conditions I was soon going to have to endure.
To give everyone credit, the people here in Bangkok do seem a lot happier than they did back home. Maybe it is the balmy warmth of the tropics, maybe it is the food, or maybe it issimply the fact that you can see their faces which are blissfully free of scarves and hats.
So I suppose I should apologise. Sorry for not writing and sorry for where I am. Let’s just pretend I am in London shall we?  Trembling and frozen in my broken-heatered flat. (I’ll turn the air-conditioning up.) Man it sucks here doesn’t it? All that cold and stuff! Brrr.
Anyway, I will write more imminently. I’m off for nice spicy er, pie.
Speak soon,

The Wordofward

This is the stuff of classic Science Fiction. Except it’s real. 13,000 feet below the Antarctic ice sheets lies Lake Vostok – the third largest lake by volume on the entire planet. It has been buried down there for 20 million years. Russian scientists, (one of them undoubtedly a beautiful woman unless science fiction has steered me wrong,) have finally, probably, drilled to its surface through all that ice in the culmination of a 20 year project. This sort of thing is unbelievably awesome.

Weird deep sea creatures

So far we have found life everywhere there has been liquid water. Even places it was previously deemed impossible. It was assumed for ages that nothing could live at the bottom at sea but they finally went there and discovered a brilliant array of truly, utterly, weird and cool looking fish. If we can find life in Lake Vostok after it has been sealed below stunningly thick sheets of ice for 20 million years, then it seems pretty damn likely that we will find life inside Jupiter’s moon Europa and Saturn’s moon Enceladus. Aliens!

As you can tell, I am pretty damned excited about this. What can be down there? Most likely it will be a lot of weird looking fish. Which will be fascinating. I am hoping that there is a whole civilisation down there like at the end ofThe Abyss
. Which is not so likely. Or possibly a giant sentient creature that feeds off all the fish and has lived there for millions of years. Or a frozen UFO with creatures inside like in The Thing
. Or, or… There are so many possibilities and cool possible story plots my mind is being boggled.

Who knows? It’s going to be cool finding out though.

Cthulu anyone?

Cthulu

I wrote recently about some pranksters reprogramming an iPhone 4s in a shop so that it swore at a kid. It was pretty damn funny. I then talked about Siri in general and how how it seems genuinely handy and can even help you find a place to bury a dead body or get a blowjob. More monthly events than daily, but still pretty cool.

My Scottish mate then informed me that it isn’t quite so helpful in Scotland. Apparently Siri, like the rest of the world, finds it hard to understand the Scottish accent. It doesn’t understand simple phrases like ‘Hoots! Hoots! Och aye the noo’ at all! (Apologies to any Scottish readers, I’m just having a laugh.) In case you don’t believe me, just watch this funny video.