Training | 2009.09.01
Esther Addley's diary
Stubborn nuke stains on your worktops? Reach for the Cillit Bang. What could possibly go wrong?
Great news from Dounreay Site Restoration Ltd , the company charged with "delivering the safe clean-up and demolition of the UK\'s former centre of fast reactor research". Finding that their cleaning products were not terrifically efficient in removing those pesky plutonium stains, one of the 15-strong clean-up team, who wear plastic body suits and five layers of gloves to protect them from radiation while carrying their own oxygen supply (fun job, no?), recalled a TV advert in which the household cleaning spray Cillit Bang polished up a 2p coin like new. Tests on the £1.99 cleaner revealed it was remarkably effective, the company notes on its website, and it has become a key part of the £2.6bn cleanup and demolishing programme. Tomorrow: around Bikini Atoll with a bottle of vinegar and a J Cloth.
Correction of the day, from foreign news service Reuters. "Visitors to a tourist attraction in Berlin have been making off with an unusual memento," reads a story filed at 10.41am yesterday "– the 30cm-long penis of a Lego giraffe. "It\'s a popular souvenir," a spokeswoman [said]. "It\'s been stolen four times now...". The penis is made out of 15,000 Lego bricks. It takes model workers about one week to restore the long-necked animal\'s manhood at a cost of 3,000 euros ($4,300), the spokeswoman said." And so on. At 2.23pm a second, correct, version of the story drops: "Visitors ... have been making off with an unusual memento – the 30cm-long tail of a Lego giraffe..." Something to do with a mistranslation of the German word " schwanz ", we are told. We love the idea of an attraction that would repeatedly spend thousands on a model of a giraffe willy. Mind you, you can\'t put anything past those continentals.
Well, tiddly hee. The distinguished New Zealand poet Alistair Te Ariki Campbell dies , occasioning profound national mourning in his home country, where he was deeply admired, and profoundly silly sniggering in the UK, where he had a name a little bit like the guy who used to be Tony Blair\'s spin doctor. "Very much enjoyed Alistair Campbell\'s obituary in the Guardian," Twitter-titters Armando Iannucci, and a nation, despite itself, does a little snort. Our own Ali C (pictured), as lobby correspondents know, has a wonderful sense of humour, so we can be confident that he too is laughing heartily at his Mark Twain moment. He will have been particularly tickled, not to mention flattered, by the Portuguese daily Correio da Manha, which – yep – used a picture of bounding marathon-enthusiast Campbell, 52, to illustrate its story on the death of the poet. Te Ariki Campbell, as the Portuguese obit noted, was 84 years old.
It\'s a formula so well-worn you\'d think they\'d have spotted it by now: politician plus pop-culture reference equals oopsy. And so, it is perhaps inevitable that shadow home secretary Chris Grayling has found himself somewhat bum-bitten following his suggestion that "broken" Britain – gotta love an alliterative crisis – is as bad as the Baltimore of The Wire . The gleeful sneers from his opposite number that he was trying to sound "cool" may have been inevitable (heaven forbid a Labour politician would ever try that), but oh, Chris! You could at least have watched it. "Yes I\'ve seen a number of … I\'ve seen most of the first series. I have seen a number of the other episodes, yes. I have," he admitted when pressed yesterday. Poor show, Grayling. Get thee to Hamsterdam.
And finally... it was, perhaps, inevitable, but snaps all the same to the PR whizz behind this little corker. A holiday company emails to say it has observed a rise in those honeymooning in the UK, otherwise known as – dear Reader, can you guess? – the staycationmoon. Got any good tales from your own staycationmoons, if you\'ve been staycationmooning this summer? Or tips for other staycationmooners? (Work with me, people. I\'m thinking if we use this enough we can get this into the OED and bequeath it to future generations! Call it a neologistical nightmare. A neologimare, if you will.)
For more information, please visit
http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2009/[...]air-campbell-alistair-te-ariki
