THE IDIOT ENGINE

A woman is walking through a station concourse with her child when she asks a passer-by for the easiest way to Euston Station in London. The passer-by, a seemingly normal gentleman in a suit, proceeds to shout about eustachian tubes before blabbering on about something else that results in his doing an impression of a monkey. Several other people on the concourse join in.

Now, this is apparently how searching the internet had been until bing.com came along. Really, this is their current television advert. You would ask for the best route to Euston and every internet search engine in the world ever would reply with a medical examination of your eustachian tubes followed by an impression of a monkey flinging feces at your face. Or so the bing.com people would have us believe.

So I tried it. I went to a popular search engine (rhymes with poogle, other search engines are available) and typed in "Euston Station". Lo and behold, "poogle" gave me a page full of information about... Euston Station, all of which was relevant. Ta-da!

So, I'm not quite getting the bing.com advert's point. All I can get out of this advert is that if I search for "Euston Station" on their search engine they'll end up flinging feces at me until I go elsewhere. Which seems to be unnecessary.

THE FLAME ON

If you take a step back, cooking food seems a pretty random thing to come up with. I know there are benefits to cooking - killing bacteria, etc. - but even so, it just seems such an odd thing to think of in the first place, doesn't it?

Y'see, someone must have started with something edible (or, if they were Japanese, something exceptionally fatal to human beings) and then figured "I'll stick it in the fire for a while and see what that does." It's already edible, you're a caveman, why would you decide to cook it? Because it's going to keep you warm, perhaps? No, that doesn't make sense, you have a fire right there - the one you're using to cook the food with. To get any hotter, you're retiring to Florida... there are few other options left once you have the fire going.

No matter what way you look at it, it seems like it was your honest-to-gosh "moment of madness" that spawned the whole industry of cooking, without which we wouldn't have such great inventions as the oven (great!), the toaster (okay) and celebrity chefs (Eurgh! move on, people, nothing to see here).

The inevitable conclusion is cooking stuff was all down to inventing fire. Because fire's a seductive mistress, my friend, once you've got a fire burning you really have to fight to resist that primal urge to burn something just to see what happens. So, it seems to me that we eat cooked meals today because some distant ancestor was basically a pyromaniac who got lucky.

THE OBESITY CATHEDRAL

In today's Metro, collector doyen Dave Valentine tells us how he has amassed 500 empty crisp packets over the years, dating back all the way to his first packet in 1984. That means he's collected over 19 empty crisp packets a year - that's about one every three weeks! Quite a feat.

But alarm bells ring when Dave explains that "the designs are so retro and cool". Waitaminute! Designs from 1984 are "retro"? Aren't they just "old"? "Retro" would be something that is intentionally harking back to another era, not something actually from it.

See, this kind of misuse of terminology is helping no one, even the crisp guys find it tasteless.

MY GREAT BAND NAME

Have you ever wondered where rock bands get their names from? Because I keep worrying they're going to run out now, there have just been too many artists with wacky names. Already, music artists are twisting the spelling in on itself - Dizzee Rascal, Def Leppard - or making up words that simply don't make any sense outside of Tellytubby land - Tinchy Stryder, anyone?

Meanwhile, on the internet, people are wont to say "Hey, that would make a great band name" at an innocuous turn of phrase. "I almost lost my gatorade"... "Hey, 'Lost My Gatorade' would be a great band name*, dude." (*actually, it would, but that's not the point)

Wouldn't it be easier if we just named music artists the same way they name legal firms? McCartney, Lennon, Harrison & Starkey. Morrissey, Marr and Associates. Tony Hadley and Partners. That would work out fine and save on all the Lady GaGas and Lynyrd Skynyrds we're coping manfully to file in our music collections just now.

Of course, Hall & Oates are ahead of the curve on this one. They could switch from being musicians to lawyers without missing a beat.

"I'm out of touch, you're out... in 8-10 with good behaviour. Case closed."