Tuesday 29 August 2017

A taxonomy of imaginary elephants

When people who've never seen an elephant try to draw one, the results can be ... interesting.

German artist Uli Westphal has created a family tree of imaginary elephants, based on old accounts and travellers' tales, as drafted by medieval European artists, then elaborated by subsequent copyists.

The resulting bestiary ranges from the conservative (tapier-like creatures, drawn by artists who presumably wanted to keep the reported trunk down to a plausible-looking size), to fanciful beasts sporting fanned-out ears, ribbed like fish fins, or bat wings.

Interestingly, it's some of the most conservative visions, with a modest trunk, or bodily proportions based on a known animal like a horse, that look the least like a real elephant.

The universe, as someone* once mused, is not only odder than we imagine, but probably odder than we can imagine. Although a few of these illustrators got pretty close to out-odding nature with elephants that wouldn't have been out of place in a Hieronymus Bosch painting.

Via

*Someone who could also have explained exactly why an animal the size of an elephant doesn't have the same proportions as a horse.

Monday 28 August 2017

Atypical British bank holiday weather

The River Great Ouse at Newport Pagnell. The weather's been scorching, we had a dip in the cool, inviting water and saw a grass snake swim across the river, coming out of those reeds and slithering into the undergrowth on the opposite bank.

A timely reminder that there's more to life than whingeing about the state of the world.

Thursday 24 August 2017

Hims ancient and modern

After carelessly mowing down and killing a mother of two by speeding along a busy street on a non-road-legal track bike with no front brakes, 20 year old Charlie Alliston has been convicted of causing bodily harm by “wanton and furious driving.” The wording of the offence sounds ancient, almost quaint, but the words "wanton" and "furious" are surprisingly appropriate here. If Alliston had shown some hint of empathy, remorse, or responsibility for his actions, this could have been *just* another tragic accident. But, instead, what we got was a wanton outburst of entitled fury aimed squarely at his victim:
Following the crash, Alliston posted a comment on an online news article claiming he had shouted out "to get out of the way" but she "ignored me", looked back at her phone then "stopped dead" in his path.

He wrote: "I feel bad due to the seriousness of her injuries but I can put my hands up and say this is not my fault."

On an internet forum for fixed bike enthusiasts, he later described how he twice warned her to "get the f*** outta my way".

He wrote: "We collided pretty hard, our heads hit together, hers went into the floor and ricocheted into mine. It is a pretty serious incident so I won't bother saying oh she deserved it, it's her fault. Yes it is her fault but no she did not deserve it.

"Hopefully, it is a lesson learned on her behalf, it shouldn't have happened like it did but what more can I say."

He complained: "Everyone is quick to judge and help the so-called victim but not the other person in the situation, ie me. It all happened so fast and even at a slow speed there was nothing I could do. I just wish people would stop making judgments. It's not my fault people either think they are invincible or have zero respect for cyclists." 
My emphasis.

What could be more zeitgeisty than an entitled, self-pitying man-baby wantonly and furiously running down any female who dares to impede his royal progress? I'm irresistibly reminded of some of the things Tim Squirrell found scuttling around when he looked under the rock of an alt-right Reddit community for his recent "Taxonomy of trolls", especially in the specific sub- communities of mens' rights activists and anti-progressive gamers. He describes the latter as:
Closely related to the above [i.e. men’s rights activists], these trolls were radicalized over the course of the #GamerGate hate movement. They really like video games, and they really hate social-justice warriors, gay people, and feminists, all of whom they’re pretty sure major movie and game studios are “pandering” to with things like all-female screenings of Wonder Woman. You’re likely to see them talking about the trans community a lot (and repeating the words “there are only two genders” constantly). Elsewhere on Reddit, you’ll find them in gaming subreddits, or /r/KotakuinAction, which was the home of GamerGate.
  • Most common words: SJW, snowflake, pandering, tumblr, feminist, triggering, GamerGate, virtue signalling 
 "Wanton and furious driving" may sound like a relic from a bygone age, but furious, self-obsessed male misfits yelling at everybody else to "get the f*** out of my way!" are, sadly, as much a product of the modern world as the latest video game release.

Wednesday 23 August 2017

"Look at my economist over here"

Remember this, from last year?
Donald Trump sought to tout his support among African-Americans on Friday by pointing out a black man in the crowd and calling him "my African-American.""Oh, look at my African-American over here. Look at him," Trump said. "Are you the greatest?"
These were, of course, the words of a known con-artist bigging up an almost non-existent group of supporters (in the subsequent elections just 8% "his" voters were black - 88% of African-Americans who voted came out for his opponent).

Times haven't changed much, as the British media, and in particular the BBC, proved when they looked at  an unimpressive array of practically bugger-all economists with a good word to say about Brexit, then pointed and shouted "Look over there" when a single rogue economist popped up with a shaky claim about a hard Brexit promising a "£135bn annual boost" to the UK economy.

Well, that headline lie has been round the world before the truth had got its boots on. The misleading headlines have been duly generated and the damage done but, for all that, it's still worth quoting Ben Chu in the Independent, at length, to get a sense of just how massively misleading this distraction was and how shamefully complicit the BBC has been in spreading the lie:
Imagine if a group of obscure scientists produced a piece of research which claimed to debunk the consensus of the profession.

Imagine if rather than making that research publicly available the group cobbled together a press release with some eye-catching headline figures, showing none of their methodology or data.

Imagine if that group of scientists had produced similar work in the past which had been shown to be deeply flawed by other scientists on multiple levels.

Now imagine if that press release was picked up by the national broadcaster of the country and presented to the public as an exciting and interesting new piece of research – with none of the above context mentioned.

Would you think that the broadcaster was doing a good job, fulfilling its mission to “educate and inform” the public?

Or would you wonder what they hell it was playing at?

This week, the BBC website “splashed” with the news that a group known as Economists for Free Trade had done some work suggesting that the UK economy could be £135bn larger if we forced through a hard Brexit. The next day the report’s author Patrick Minford was invited on to the BBC’s flagship morning radio programme, Today, to talk about his findings.

The programme did invite another economist on to contradict Minford’s views. But the non-specialist listener would have been left with the false impression that the economics profession was split on the issue, that the impact of Brexit is merely a matter of opinion. Leaving the EU’s single market might be good for trade, or it might be bad: the experts just can’t agree.
In fact, most experts are agreed - Minford is an outlier and an unreliable-sounding one at that:
He may not have released his methodology, but we can reliably guess how Minford generated his latest figures because he has in the past used a grossly unreliable economic model to show startlingly large gains from what has been termed “unilateral free trade” for the UK.

The principal and catastrophic flaw in this model is that it assumes that distance is no barrier to the international trade in goods – when all the empirical evidence of decades is that distance matters enormously, as countries do more trade with those who are geographically closer to them. Another fatal error is the assumption that price, rather than quality, is all that matters to consumers.

Numerous other reasons by other, more competent, trade economists have been identified as reasons to disbelieve Minford’s figures, not least the fact that his definition of hard Brexit, bizarrely, seems to assume closer regulatory harmonisation between Britain and the EU than exists at the moment within the single market. 
Isn't he the greatest?

In which I apologise for misrepresenting Donald J Trump

Yesterday I made a snide remark about "the special favours Trump's been doing for his rich buddies on Wall Street." On reflection, I think I was being inaccurate and unfair.

Sure, Trump's inner circle are all high net worth individuals (why would you hang out with a guy like that, if you respected anything other than money?), but they're not from Wall Street. As Bess Levin wrote in Vanity Fair a while back "Trump’s habit of reneging on contracts and suing his lenders meant that virtually nobody on Wall Street wanted to work with him."

Yep, it turns out out that bankers adore not being cheated out of their money even more than they love the mega-rich. So there was presumably no real love lost between The Donald and Squiddy McSquidface, even before that eclipse gag.

As Bess Levin's article notes, there is an exception that proves the rule, namely  Deutsche Bank, which has loaned Trump $4 billion over the last 20 years and kept his line of credit open despite being sued by Trump in 2008:
...when he fell behind on payments on the $640 million loan he was given to build Trump International Hotel & Tower in Chicago. Incredibly, in order to avoid paying the $40 million he had personally guaranteed, Trump and his lawyer argued that “Deutsche Bank is one of the banks primarily responsible for the economic dysfunction we are currently facing”—i.e. the global financial crisis—and therefore it should pay him $3 billion in damages under the extraordinary event clause in his contract. Naturally, the bank countersued, calling the real-estate developer’s claim “classic Trump.” In the end, after threatening to take his name off the building if he wasn’t granted more time to pay, the bank gave Trump extra time; when he did pay the money he owed to the firm’s real-estate lending division, it was with another loan he got from Deutsche’s wealth-management unit. Trump subsequently moved his business from the real estate group to the private wealth management group, where, according to the Times, “executives were more willing to deal with him.”
Trump's $3 billion damages claim was ridiculous, but the argument that “Deutsche Bank is one of the banks primarily responsible for the economic dysfunction we are currently facing”, is also just about the least misleading statement that Trump has ever made.

There's a possible Russia connection in Trump's dealings with Deutsche Bank, but even if there isn't, there's a very interesting story buried in all those loans, about how much, or little, Trump is really worth, once you subtract the money he owes to the creditors he's not managed to diddle. Enough to bring the whole house of cards down, once counsel Mueller's investigation exposes the workings of the Trump shell game? No wonder Wall Street's wary of him - those guys really hate rip-off merchants and it takes one to know one.

Could @realDonaldTrump be closer to the wannabe lynchers in Charlottesville than the looters on Wall Street, not just in his bigotry, but in his real net worth?

Tuesday 22 August 2017

When you've lost the great vampire squid...


Squiddy's snarky comment looks a bit ungrateful, considering all the special favours Trump's been doing for his rich buddies on Wall Street. Or was he, as another tweeter speculated, on both sides of his trade with The Donald (they call it "hedging")? Is there money to be made from shorting white supremacism?

Whether this tweet was two-faced, or merely ungracious, wasn't entirely self-evident. Slightly more obvious was the short list of candidates to for the other "thing" casting a shadow over America. It had to be either The Donald or this adorable critter...
*



*I'm not quite sure where the image originally came from. Fair use? Yeah, probably...

Monday 21 August 2017

Dave's modest proposal

This sounds perfectly reasonable to me:
Fitness enthusiast Dave May has urged his local gym to allow him to continue to enjoy the benefits of belonging to his gym after cancelling his gym membership.

In an e-mail sent at 3am on Monday morning, Dave expressed his desire for "the freest and most frictionless use" of both equipment and personal trainers after his membership expires.

To achieve this, Dave wants his gym to allow services and facilities he has been using before exit day to be used by him without "any additional requirements or restrictions" after he leaves and for him to remain authorised to access the gym after ceasing to be a member.

These proposals would reassure Dave and allow him to "plan ahead with certainty" as he prepares to exit his 12-month contract, the e-mail says.

In a Facebook post accompanying the e-mail, Dave said: "This e-mail will help give me certainty and confidence in my status as a fitness powerhouse after I have left my gym.

"It also shows that as I enter negotiations with my fitness provider, it is clear that my separation from my gym and my future relationship with it are inextricably linked.

"I have already begun to set out what I would like to see from a future relationship on issues such as the use of cardiovascular and resistance machines and am ready to begin a formal dialogue on this and other issues."
And he can't say fairer than that...


"Don't tell him, Pike!"

We Brits never tire of reminding ourselves that we're world leaders in having a sense of humour and we've now even got something called "the Gold TV Comedy Audit" to remind us of our past national triumphs in hilarity, as the Express revealed earlier this year:
“DON’T tell him, Pike!” and “I know nuh-thing” are among Britain’s favourite comedy oneliners, critics have revealed.

The classic Dad’s Army line – uttered by Captain Mainwaring (Arthur Lowe) after Ian Lavender’s gormless Private Pike has been asked for his name by a German prisoner – topped a list of iconic gags from hit shows like Blackadder, Fawlty Towers and Absolutely Fabulous.
It was a pretty funny line back in the day but it feels as if, somewhere along the way, we've forgotten why it was so funny.

The joke works on at least three levels. First, Captain Mainwaring contradicting the whole point of his own order was a witty, compact logical absurdity, in the paradoxical tradition of Lewis Carroll's word games. Second, it's part of a comedy of manners - if this was just some random character slipping up on a metaphorical banana skin it would have been slightly amusing verbal slapstick, but it became properly funny because of the pomposity and self-importance of the character who was falling flat on his face. But the slapstick element of the situation also worked in its own terms, too - watching people bumbling about and doing something really badly can be genuinely hilarious in itself, which is why fail memes are a thing.

The thing is, on any of those three levels, the joke is only funny because we, the audience, can see the absurdity of the situation. The characters on the other side of the fourth wall are oblivious to their own logical inconsistencies, character quirks and ineptitude. The writers, actors and audience are sharing a joke at the expense of the characters. Admittedly, in this case, it's quite a gentle joke - Dad's Army was always about affectionate mockery - with the possible exception of all-purpose killjoy Warden Hodges, most of the characters were essentially likeable, if very silly. But it's only funny because we have a sense of the ridiculous which is lost on the characters.

We've been exposed to this sort of comedy for so long that you'd think that nobody on these islands could fall into the trap of parroting logical absurdities, getting puffed up with self-importance, or making a chaotic hash of things without some memory from Dad's Army, or Blackadder, or Fawlty Towers, or Python, or whatever, popping into mind and prompting some thought along the lines of "Hang on, this is just getting silly." But no, at least for influential people making some of the most important decisions in our national life, there is no fourth wall. Our chief Brexit negotiator, David Davis, isn't watching Captain Mainwairing and laughing at him. He is Captain Mainwaring, blissfully unaware of his own logical inconsistencies, pompous bluster and incompetence...
"You'll find it difficult sometimes to read what we intend, that's deliberate, I'm afraid in negotiations you do have constructive ambiguity from time to time."
...or maybe, as Cliff Taylor has suggested, he's channelling Blackadder's cheerful, but turnip-brained, sidekick, Baldrick:
If there is a cunning British plan in the background here it is being particularly well concealed. Britain’s Brexit secretary David Davis said “creative ambiguity” was needed during a negotiation and that London could not show all its hand. But this looks more like Blackadder than Machiavelli.

London must know that the rest of the EU will not allow it to simultaneously leave the EU, retain the benefits of free trade within Europe and also be able to negotiate new trade deals with other countries such as the US, Latin American and Asian countries and so on.

In political terms this is firmly in the cake-possession-and-eating department. In economic terms, the key problem is that Britain wants to trade freely and without barriers with the EU, while at the same time striking its own trade deals with other countries.
Even when the mockery is affectionate, you're supposed to laugh at these characters, not become them. It's kind of the point of comedy. If you don't get that, you're suffering from a sense of humour failure that leads to some very dark places indeed, as the consistently excellent Flipchart Rick has just pointed out:
I said years ago that if we ever had an authoritarian movement in Britain it would not have uniforms, goose-stepping marches and torchlight parades. It wouldn’t be that interesting. Ours would be a shabby poujadism, led by golf club bores, residents’ association busybodies and parish Pol Pots.

The boorish self-righteous know-all is a staple of British comedy, perhaps because every neighbourhood has at least one. It’s easy to imagine Terry Medford, Martin Bryce, Warden Hodges and Reggie Perrin’s brother-in-law Jimmy in your local UKIP branch. Basil Fawlty would have joined in the early years but left once they started letting in riffraff like Eddie Booth and Alf Garnett. But at least in the comedies even the most dislikable characters had some redeeming features and, in the end, they usually got their comeuppance, their own puffed-up stupidity eventually bringing about their downfall.

Alas, in 2017, this once-ridiculed tendency in our national culture is now calling the shots. As Rafael Behr said last week, to the rest of the world, Britain now looks urbane but unhinged. Sitcom characters, only without the comedy...
You should definitely click through and read the whole thing (as well as Rafael Behr's bleak but brilliant polemic on the subject).

Welcome to the UK, the looking-glass kingdom of backwards Karl Marx, where history repeats itself first as farce, then as tragedy.


Cross-posted here.

Saturday 19 August 2017

We'll only rip you off for your own good

The food industry "will be asked to shrink thousands of products or find other ways to cut their calorie content as part of a Government crackdown on junk foods." Apparently the industry is totally cool with this request. Can you guess why?
The Food and Drink Federation (FDF), which represents manufacturers, welcomed the plans.

A spokesman said: “We are pleased that the Government has confirmed the broadening of its focus beyond just sugar - and towards calories - as it seeks to tackle obesity. FDF has long advocated this ‘whole diet’ approach.

“Singling out the role of individual ingredients and food groups does not help consumers to make good choices about their diet, lifestyle or general health.”
Somehow it doesn't surprise me that the industry welcomes the opportunity to sell us smaller portions for the same price, while claiming that they're only doing it for our own good and insisting that "it's not our fault, the government made us do it."

Thursday 17 August 2017

Ship of fools

Admiral Sir Philip Jones is jolly proud of his new toy:
HMS Queen Elizabeth is the nation's future flagship; the embodiment of Britain in steel and spirit. In the years and decades to come, she and her sister ship will demonstrate the kind of nation we are...
And, by jingo, he's right. What better to symbolise the state of the nation than an unwieldy, massively expensive status symbol?

It's a ship specifically and exclusively designed around one of the most misconceived, overpriced, under-performing warplanes in the long, murky history of defence procurement ("The JSF is a terrible fighter, bomber and attacker — and unfit for aircraft carriers").

It's vulnerable to attack, although if the Navy ask the French very nicely, they might help to defend it (in return for borrowing its sister ship occasionally).

And talking of borrowing, the US Marine Corps have told the UK they'll be using its new aircraft carrier to fly their F-35s over the South China Sea on its first deployment (I guess that's only fair - after all, it was the USMC's input that irretrievably screwed up the F-35's design in the first place, so it would be rude not to thank them for saddling the UK with one of the most expensively useless military aircraft of all time).

A ruinously expensive, ill-conceived boast that's supposed to impress the rest of the world but, in reality, only highlights the UK's vulnerability, subservient status and dependence on the good will of others. Truly, HMS Queen Elizabeth is "the embodiment of Britain* in steel"...



*Apologies to Northern Ireland although, to be fair, Northern Ireland will be increasingly easy to miss anyway, now that it's being fitted with an innovative stealth border, as part of an ambitious project that promises to be every bit as trouble-free and successful as the F-35.

Tuesday 15 August 2017

Anarchy in the UK (and the USA)

Another day, another entirely predictable "health and safety gone mad" rant from the British press:
"DEATH KNELL FOR COMMON SENSE
Big Ben Silenced for FOUR years to protect workers' hearing ... yes, it's all down to Health and Safety!" screamed the Mail in in a front page headline that tried to leap off the page and make your ears bleed with the sheer volume of its righteous indignation.*

How did we arrive at a place where trying to stop people being deafened at work is seen as an outrage against common sense and all that is holy? Fintan O'Toole traces the knee-jerk antipathy back to the grandaddy of folksy conservative common sense...
...one of the best-known lines delivered by that consummate performer Ronald Reagan as US president, in August 1986 [was]: “I think you all know that I’ve always felt the nine most terrifying words in the English language are: I’m from the government, and I’m here to help.”

 ...It was a clever, insidious sneer at the very idea of public service: to be “here to help” is to be at best a well-meaning bungler. Government does not enable: it interferes. Regulation is redefined as molestation. Public service is a public nuisance. The freedom to live in squalor or to make money from those who do so is the ultimate value...

 ...If those who seek to govern express derision for government, if they consistently characterise regulation as red tape and action as interference, they destroy the basis of their own authority. Electorates take the hint and aim missiles – Trump, Brexit – at their own institutions: if government is not here to help, why not destroy it?

The right has played with the fire of anarchy, and now both the UK and the US are anarchic states, one in the grip of idiocy, the other of self-destructive fantasy.
If government isn't here to help, what the hell is it for? "Doing mad stuff for no readily apparent reason" seems to be the reply from the children of the Common Sense Revolution.


*Update - the very best headline on the subject came,  as you might expect, from the Daily Mash.



Sunday 13 August 2017

Soft news story

Another interesting result from Google News. This time it wasn't the pairing of headline and image that looked inappropriate, but the headline itself:
"Levitra soft tabs erfahrung"* ???
Sounds more spammy than your average headline and, sure enough, if you click through on the alleged story, you end up at canadian-pharma dot com:

According to the website, Levita Soft is "a prescription medication for the treatment of erectile dysfunction (ED)."

Maybe it's just me, but even if the dodgy-looking website didn’t put you off, surely the name of the drug would? Or am I the only person who finds the word "soft" a tad insensitive in this context?



*Google Translate tells me that this is German for "experience."

Update - clicking through on headlines like this is not recommended, unless you want to see more headlines like this in your news feed...

Ukip still existing for some reason

I think that reason might be comedy. Mainly because the remarkable Aidan Powlesland is among the gaggle of fruitcakes, loonies and closet racists now vying for the Ukip leadership. And in a three-way contest for the most ridiculous figure in British politics, Aidan is definitely the only candidate who could beat Lord Buckethead and Jacob Rees-Mogg:
Aidan Powlesland, who is standing for parliament in the rural seat of South Suffolk, told BuzzFeed News he wants to set aside £100 million for "an interstellar colony ship design" and £30 million for an "interstellar nano-probe fleet design" designed to attract the attention of Russian investor Yuri Milner, and will provide a £1 billion prize to any private company that can mine the asteroid belt by 2026.
Asked whether asteroid mining was a priority for most UKIP voters – compared to issues such as immigration controls – Powlesland replied: "I suppose the absence of the centrality of a proposition within a general dialogue doesn’t necessarily mean that the dialogue is heading in the correct direction."

...Powlesland's election leaflet also includes a pledge to cut the welfare cap from £20,000 per household to £10,500, abolishing all residential planning legislation to encourage housebuilding, repealing employment laws that entrench "political correctness" so companies can "hire and fire at will", and stopping road construction – because we will soon all be travelling by flying cars.

Other flagship policies include buying "ten flying aircraft carriers" for the armed forces – apparently reviving the large-scale zeppelin programmes of the 1930s – and investing in electromagnetic-pulse submarines. He would deploy 15,000 British troops close to the Russia's border, although in a symbolic gesture of friendship he would also make it easier for Russian tourists to travel to the UK.
In an age when entertainment value trumps sane policymaking every time, ladies and gentlemen, I think we have a winner.

Vote Powlesland. You know it makes sense. Especially if they give all the Ukippers a one-way ticket on the interstellar colony ship, Golgafrinchan B Ark-style.

Saturday 12 August 2017

Rescue boats? I’d use gunships to stop fascists

Refugee rescue boat sent to help far-right anti-immigrant ship stranded in Mediterranean with mechanical failure
See what I just did there, Katie?

By the way, I'm only joking about going all Apocalypse Now on the alt-reich's Mediterranean hate cruise. Fortunately, Katie Hopkins and her fellow trolls love a bit of edgy banter, so I'm sure they'll be wetting themselves with mirth over the hilarious idea of machine-gunning the survivors.

Friday 11 August 2017

Unreadier than Æthelred

Brexit
ˈbrɛksɪt/
noun

The undefined being negotiatied by the unprepared in order to get the unspecified for the uninformed.

I don't know who came up with this, but I got it from here, via here and also posted it here.

Thursday 10 August 2017

Don't fear the reaper (?)

"Thursday briefing: Trump 'extremely getting on North Korea's nerves'"
Another odd pairing of text and image from Google News. Let's just hope there's no actual connection between an ominous hooded figure with glowing eyes and the clash of egos between two grotesquely oversized toddlers who are allowed to play with nuclear weapons.

Tuesday 8 August 2017

Collapse

Easter's chiefs and priests had previously justified their elite status by claiming relationship to the gods, and by promising to deliver prosperity and bountiful harvests.  As their promises were being proved increasingly hollow, the power of the chiefs and priests was overthrown around 1680 by military leaders called matatoa, and Easter's formerly complexly integrated society collapsed in an epidemic of civil war...

...Oral traditions record that the last ahu [stone platforms] and moai [the famous Easter Island statues] were erected around 1620, and that Paro (the tallest statue) was among the last... That the sizes of the statues had been increasing may reflect not only rival chiefs vying to outdo each other, but also more urgent appeals to ancestors necessitated by the growing environmental crisis.
From Collapse, by Jared Diamond. With our own island's political elite apparently too paralysed by panic to do anything about a readily apparent crisis, other than fight among themselves and make obviously undeliverable promises, it seems to me that we've not learned as much from past catastrophes as we should have.

Thursday 3 August 2017

Hybrid vehicle

Camper vans, motor homes, recreational vehicles - their names are legion, but there are usually only two ways of getting one.

  1. Buy an off-the-shelf motor home which the manufacturer has built as a motor home
  2. Buy some kind of truck, van, or minibus and have the interior fitted out with the appropriate furniture by a professional coachbuilder (or do it yourself if you have the skills, time and tools).


But the individual responsible for the mobile Frankenhome below has no time for such conventional ways of doing things:
"I have a flat bed truck. I have a towed caravan. I graft the caravan body onto the truck. Behold my creation! It's alive! IT'S ALIVE!!!"
Spotted in Scarborough, earlier this week.