Surfing the current wave of horrors: still trapped in that comatose science fiction writer's fever-dream

It's been a nightmare couple of months. Events that seem to confirm we are in fact trapped inside the dystopian fever-dream of a comatose science fiction writer are coming at us in an intensifying wave of horror.

I'm marking this current wave from the disappearance of Malaysian Flight MH370 on 8th March with 239 passengers and crew on board. Theories such as a rogue pilot, a terrorist hijack, a remote controlled hijack, a Diego Garcia landing like something out of the TV series Lost, and a mysterious cargo abound. We don't even know into which ocean it crashed … if in fact it did. The grief of the families who have no hope of closure for the foreseeable future is heartbreaking.

From natural causes to malice to rank stupidity, the disappearance or death of large groups of innocents in such a short space of time — not including the war zone of Syria where the daily death toll continues to mount numbingly — is removing all complacency we used to have in our western bubble of stability. There's a demonic force abroad in the world and it's getting closer, confirmation if any were needed that we are all in this together. None of us is an island, we are all part of the continent and it really is that every man, woman and child's death diminishes us.

Perhaps the most angering aspect of the capsized South Korean ferry is the order for the kids to stay in their cabins while the captain and some of the crew made good their escape. This is only relieved by the tales of the heroism of those crew members who did stay, and a diver who lost his life in the search.

Within weeks, Mother Nature dropped two mountains onto two towns thousands of miles away on two different continents. One waterlogged mountain killed 29 with at least 20 people still missing in a mudslide in Oso, Washington State on 22nd March. A few days ago in Afghanistan, another completely engulfed the town of Abi-Barak, with thousands buried and no more survivors expected.

For sheer malice, nothing matches Boko Haram's kidnapping of 230 young girls from their school in Chibok, Nigeria on 25th April. Having flouted the group's fundamentalist worldview by receiving a western education, regarded as evil, they now face being sold as "wives" or simply being killed.

It's tornado season in the US. The British climate now features regular flooding. The Chinese economy is looking alarmingly bubbly … and World War 3 might erupt in the Ukraine.

Meanwhile, no nuclear bomb has been dropped … yet. Nevertheless, here we are standing in the rubble of the Enlightenment with the buildings intact and our common humanity in tatters. Charlatans, hypocrites, phoneys, fuckwits and thieves run everything and fight for top-dog status. Meanwhile, it's all going up in smoke, down the swanee and through the looking-glass.

I'm half-expecting to hear of an asteroid strike wiping out a city. Or the Canary Island overhang finally dropping into the Atlantic, sending a tidal wave which will destroy the eastern seaboard of the US and West Hampstead. Either that or the ruling class will finally return us all to the feudalism they apparently miss so keenly.

So today I'm getting out the comfy chair, sitting in the garden and dreaming about what life was like before late capitalism grew totally decrepit. All that promise and no knickers, now running on empty and barely held up by a rusty zimmerframe while we scramble for survival.

Chimp makes tools and outsmarts our current political stars

Smarter than a lot of people I could mention, Kanzi the Bonobo chimp makes tools and considers a witty riposte to George Galloway at the same time.

Able to work out how to get to the banana in the box, he can also tell the difference between bad sex etiquette and rape — he just chooses not to put it into practise. He is, after all, a few million years behind us on the evolutionary scale, but what's GG's excuse?

This video is like going back in time and seeing how our ape forefathers started to use tools that would end up giving us Shakespeare and the nuclear bomb.

Miserabilist that I am!

Never mind Tiger Mom, I want a buffalo minder

A pride of not so proud lions and crocodiles seen off by a herd of horny-headed critters when a baby buffalo finds itself on the menu.

For more cute furry animals being decidedly uncute, try this. Aaargh!

Katia eruption "10 times easier to pronounce than Eyjafjallajokull"

A bigger eruption from the easier-to-pronounce Katia volcano promises to bring relief to media announcers world-wide. The chaos of the past week, where TV and radio announcers struggled to say, "Eyjafjallajokull", reduced some to tears, although they insisted it was the microscopic shards of airborne glass ripping up their corneas and not professional shame that made them cry.

Katia erupts every 80 years, or whenever she's sufficiently disgusted with the human race to let them know how she feels. Unable to articulate the words, "You make me sick", she belches out her message in Geologese: in this instance her herald Eyjafjallajokul grounding politicians from all three main parties in her attempt to stop them polluting the atmosphere with the standard output of untruths.

A perfect storm of political betrayal of the electorate, corporate trashing of society, and the brutish crushing of the BA workforce is thought to be stoking up Katia to settle our hash with her ash.

Moves to offer BA boss Willie Walsh as a sacrifice to the goddess of the first, smaller and more tongue-tying volcano were thwarted by Walsh's pre-emptive ash-cloud offering of 26 flights packed with British passengers today.

Willie Walsh is a wanker. Alliteratively.

Katia eruption "10 times easier to pronounce than Eyjafjallajokull"

A bigger eruption from the easier-to-pronounce Katia volcano promises to bring relief to media announcers world-wide. The chaos of the past week, where TV and radio announcers struggled to say, "Eyjafjallajokull", reduced some to tears, although they insisted it was the microscopic shards of airborne glass ripping up their corneas and not professional shame that made them cry.

Katia erupts every 80 years, or whenever she's sufficiently disgusted with the human race to let them know how she feels. Unable to articulate the words, "You make me sick", she belches out her message in Geologese: in this instance her herald Eyjafjallajokul grounding politicians from all three main parties in her attempt to stop them polluting the atmosphere with the standard output of untruths.

A perfect storm of political betrayal of the electorate, corporate trashing of society, and the brutish crushing of the BA workforce is thought to be stoking up Katia to settle our hash with her ash.

Moves to offer BA boss Willie Walsh as a sacrifice to the goddess of the first, smaller and more tongue-tying volcano were thwarted by Walsh's pre-emptive ash-cloud offering of 26 flights packed with British passengers today.

Willie Walsh is a wanker. Alliteratively.

Mother Nature's Alien Headfrakk: How Parasitic Wasps Have Babies

Holy ker-rist! Just watched footage of the first stages in the life-cycle of the parasitic wasp on More 4 (waiting for The Great Sperm Race).

A caterpillar is stung by a parasitic wasp and implanted with eggs. Over time the larvae grow inside until they take up a third of its by now obese body. In order to keep the host alive, the larvae only consume the blood and stay away from the organs.

So far, so gruesome. Now for the Alien stage.

The wasp larvae need to get out and, in order to cut through the caterpillar's tough skin, they've grown little saw-like teeth. When it smiles, it does indeed look like what Bette Midler termed, having seen Ridley Scott's classic sci-fi horror, "a penis on a skateboard". The caterpillar — let's call it "John Hurt" writhes in agony but only for a short while, for in an added twist, the larvae secrete paralysing chemicals, although what John's supposed to do with a third of its body mass exploding out of itself is anyone's guess.

In the delightful video above, the babies (Aw, they have their mother's eyes) BURST out. To protect themselves from other parasitic wasps, they start to spin cocoons around themselves.

Now, here's the headfrakk ... John Hurt doesn't die but comes to. You'd think, consdidering what it's just been though, it would mash the little fukkas. But, instead, something in the chemicals secreted by the larvae makes it spin a covering, not to protect itself, but to protect the wasp pupae! Gasp!

Not only that but it then hangs around to guard the silken mass from predators ... UNTIL IT STARVES TO DEATH!!!

I know people like this.

Hmm. Sperm. The human equivalent of fifteen miles in two seconds, huh?

Mother Nature's Alien Headfrakk: How Parasitic Wasps Have Babies

Holy ker-rist! Just watched footage of the first stages in the life-cycle of the parasitic wasp on More 4 (waiting for The Great Sperm Race).

A caterpillar is stung by a parasitic wasp and implanted with eggs. Over time the larvae grow inside until they take up a third of its by now obese body. In order to keep the host alive, the larvae only consume the blood and stay away from the organs.

So far, so gruesome. Now for the Alien stage.

The wasp larvae need to get out and, in order to cut through the caterpillar's tough skin, they've grown little saw-like teeth. When it smiles, it does indeed look like what Bette Midler termed, having seen Ridley Scott's classic sci-fi horror, "a penis on a skateboard". The caterpillar — let's call it "John Hurt" writhes in agony but only for a short while, for in an added twist, the larvae secrete paralysing chemicals, although what John's supposed to do with a third of its body mass exploding out of itself is anyone's guess.

In the delightful video above, the babies (Aw, they have their mother's eyes) BURST out. To protect themselves from other parasitic wasps, they start to spin cocoons around themselves.

Now, here's the headfrakk ... John Hurt doesn't die but comes to. You'd think, consdidering what it's just been though, it would mash the little fukkas. But, instead, something in the chemicals secreted by the larvae makes it spin a covering, not to protect itself, but to protect the wasp pupae! Gasp!

Not only that but it then hangs around to guard the silken mass from predators ... UNTIL IT STARVES TO DEATH!!!

I know people like this.

Hmm. Sperm. The human equivalent of fifteen miles in two seconds, huh?