Retro Yakking

The ballpoint pen replaced scratching messages onto walls with stones in the year 1945, at least in parts of Manchester.

Though the humble Biro isn’t really suitable for writing on buildings, it can be used to draw moustaches on sleeping drunks.

In the — granted, very small — world of ballpoint pens, Bic are veritable giants. Bigger, even, than… well, anyone else who ever tried to make ballpoint pens. Of which there are relatively few. Let’s just say Bic make very good ballpoint pens and leave it at that.

Though the modern ballpoint pen is credited to László Bíró, it is argued that Galileo Galilei, he of the stargazing obsession, first drew up plans for a primitive ballpoint pen. Apparently he wanted a pen that would write on the surface of the planets he observed, blissfully unaware that they were thousands of light years away.

Legend has it that the Father Ted ’small… far away’ sketch (below) was influenced by Galileo’s repeated attempts to grab the stars from the sky with the handle of his walking stick.

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This week’s revelations that Tranmere Rovers were put up for sale on eBay for a record six million pounds have had many asking the question of whether it’s the strangest thing auctioned online.

Yep, a Football League club is out of the ordinary, and it’s unlikely that we’re going to see another one listed any time soon.

But it’s only one of a number of strange items that have put to the public bidding on the auction site. It’s time to delve into the archives to see if it really is the most unusual thing ever to be auctioned off via the website (I’ll tell you now - it isn’t).

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To further mark the fortieth anniversary of the moon landings, a cheesemaker has sent a plate of cheddar into space. Unfortunately, the success of the mission is as yet not known, as the weather balloon to which it was attached has mysteriously disappeared.

Shortly after take-off, all contact with the cheese was lost as the GPS used to track its progress failed. Therefore, we can quite safely assume it was eaten, either by hungry Russian astronauts (there are no Vodka springs in space, unfortunately for them) or passing aliens from a neighbouring solar system.

But is it the weirdest thing ever to be sent into space? Well, maybe it is, and perhaps it could open the floodgates for other bizarre things to be catapulted ‘out of this world’…

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What does NASA stand for? The experts will have you believe it’s short for National Aeronautics and Space Administration, but of course that’s rather boring and plain, much like a non-chocolate digestive.

Naturally, the conspiracists have a theory that NASA actually stands for something far more exotic, and there’s a huge cover-up involving aliens and the American government.

I wouldn’t know much about that, but I do know that the guys at the NASA Naming Association missed a trick when it came to adopting a memorable moniker.

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• The amount of time you make your dog wait before giving it a biscuit is directly proportional to the number of fingers it will bite off. Waiting over one minute may also lead to the loss of an arm.
• It takes approximately seven minutes for the floor to become as dirty as it was just before you vacuumed it.
• The further you eat into a packet of crisps, the tastier they become, the very last one being the most flavoursome.
• The optimum number of beer cans to place in the fridge is four: any fewer and they will have been consumed before you return from work, any more and they will have been removed to make way for milk and eggs.

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