Elephants and paper balls.

There's an old joke about a guy sat on a British train crunching strips of newspaper into little balls and throwing them out of the window. You used to be able to open train windows in the old days.

Someone asked him why he was doing it.

"It keeps the elephants off the tracks", he said.

"Elephants? This is Britain. There are no elephants around here."

"See? It works."


The same can be applied to many products in my own field of work, probiotics and prebiotics. As long as you don't get the shits, they're working. Since you cannot say when you'll get the shits unless you have dodgy guts like me - genetic, incurable, and my  lifelong incentive to find a treatment - you cannot know when they have protected you from a bad dose of squirty bottom. But once you're on them, like the paper ball man on the train, you dare not stop. My latest product is a little different, it actually cures the severe shits and not just in humans. But I can't say much, the IP isn't mine and it's going through independent tests now.

This also applies to global warming. Another scare story has conveniently appeared to prop up Chris 'Zoom-zoom' Huhne's new windmill fantasy.

I had a phone call recently from someone selling carbon credits, in between all those Indian guys called Gary who insist my computer has downloaded a virus. I laughed and asked if he was really holding a lot of them and told him to get shot of them quick. His persistence at trying to sell them to me anyway was commendable. He had been in marketing a long time, he said, and knew what he was talking about. He sounded to be about twenty.

Well, I said, I've been in science a long time (probably before he was born) and there has been no increase in global temperatures for over a decade.

He played his trump. "Don't you believe in global warming?"

I played mine "I'm a scientist. I deal in facts, not beliefs. One fact is, there is no warming and another is that the scientists proclaiming it have been caught out. Good luck with your carbon credits but I don't want any."

It'll still work though. Those elephant-scarers will convince the drones that the paper balls keep away an animal that isn't found in this country. Why?

There will be no warming and Zippy Huhne will claim that it was because of his windmills. If we had not fired up the steelworks to full capacity, used up all the fuel on the planet moving those monsters into the middle of nowhere, put each of them on a 100-ton concrete block, dug up the countryside for cables, turned a large chunk of China into a toxic lake for our magnets and kept the windmills still for all but five days a year, the planet would now be a fireball. Honest.

The suckers will fall for it. They don't want those elephants on the tracks even though they can't see the ones in the room.