Do you have a smoke detector? Is it the optical variant or the ionising type? Whats that, You don’t know? Well, lets put it another way. Is it old or is it new? Because if it has been sitting on your ceiling for longer than you can remember, silently flashing its wears at you, waiting for the day when all of your belongings go up in a ball of flames so it can emit its life saving high pitched scream at your confused, sleeping ears, then Richard Handl from Sweden could have used it in his scientific bid to split the atom in his own kicthen. He cant now because the Swedish police have confiscated his nuclear material because, even in Sweden, creating nuclear experiments in your kitchen, or indeed anywhere in your house, without the proper permission and licenses, is a no-no. Which, apart from anything else, raises the question: If he had had permission, would concocting a imitation of the fishbowl Marshall Islands in his Ikea clad kitchen have been legal? One suspects not.

Boson nuclear colider in swedish kitchen

But why smoke alarms you ask? Because in order to split the atom, as our friend in Sweden set out to do, you need something to split; and that something needs to be making gyger counters have epileptic fits. Sitting in the bellys of these UFO shaped life rafts, or at least the aforementioned ionising type, is a small amount of Americium (Am-241) with a half life of 432 years. To layman’s such as you and me, that’s nuclear. Take another look at that pale, IBM-beige box on your ceiling and revel in the fact that 15,000 years after you, IT will still be going strong.

What North Korea fail to do, a swedish man does in his microwave

Forsaking the hyperbole, its pretty tame really, especially when you consider Uranium 238 has a half life of 700 million years. In order to get the required amount, Richard Handl would have needed over 100 smoke alarms, and smoke alarms are not very romantic. So what else could he use? Radium? It is much more effective than the puny Americium, has a half life of  1599 years and is found in almost all watches and clocks dating back to before the 1950, after which  it was made illegal for being too fucking dangerous. Yes, it made your nice Swiss made clock hands glow in the dark but it also made you glow in the dark whilst simultaneously burning your retinas within an inch of their mucus coated lives. You can get hold of truck loads of these clocks and watches on Ebay, for practially nothing. Yeah for the Internet.

This little fucker is what all the fuss is about. Learn how to split it and the world, as they say, is yours

So Geiger counter and the necessary ingredients in place, Mr. Handl set about splitting the atom in his own kitchen. Over the course of a number of months and all the while posting updates on his blog, You can read it here. It is written in grammatically bad, at times comedy English, adding a coating of potential hoax to the whole proceedings, almost like Borat. At this time Take The Blame™ is still unsure about the authenticity of the experiments. Why, for example, is a 31 year old nuclear scientist cracking neutrons in his kitchen and not working in a nuclear collider in Geneva? The following comes from the site.

After one of his experiments went a little haywire and caused a miniature nuclear meltdown on his stove Mr Handl called the scientists at the Swedish radiation experiment laboratory to guide him on his mission. The nuclear police blew the door down and confiscated the material. Experiment over.

Photos of the meltdown clearly show Mr Handl was a smoker

So, The North Koreans can’t do, The Iranians can’t do, Syria can’t do it, The Russians nearly blew up the world trying to do it, but a Swedish man nearly did it in his microwave.

Take The Blame™ doesn’t know. Is it inept to try to split the atom in your kitchen? Maybe, but its also pretty impressive. Maybe the ineptitude is on behalf of the nuclear police of Sweden who didn’t notice a man posting pictures of nuclear meltdowns on the Internet, whilst explaining how he was attempting to split the atom in his kitchen. Maybe the ineptitude lies at the feet of the Axis of Evil who cant, thankfully, do what appears pretty straight forward, at least on a micro scale.

Our ethos is simple, we are here to take the blame. Apparently we live in a blame culture; and in a blame culture there needs to be someone who you can turn to when there is nobody else who will shoulder your blame. Whatever the reason, whatever the occasion, we are there for you. From the simple and the transparent – be it stubbing your toe or spilling your tea; waking up late for work or missing the bus – to the arduous, perplexing, intricate and convoluted – your dog died; you hate your boss; the IOC decided to oust you from your abode and build an Olympic sized Ice-rink in your back garden and erect an athletes village in your once pristine street-market turning a once thriving local community into a dull and bland advert for a hotch-potch amalgamation of too much glass, no class and student residents. We are there. Blame us.

Politics, science, philosophy, food, revolution, environment, education, celebrity, television, crime, animals, history, love, money, relationships, family, sport, technology, travel, war, weather, health, business, birthdays, parties, celebrations, drugs, employment, nature………….and breathe…………..cybercrime, nuclear energy, credit cards, pornography, computer games, graffitti, hollywood. Kitchen sink. There is blame.

If you have anything you want us to take the blame for. Tell us. Let us know. Post a link. Send a letter. And we will publish an apology, allowing you to sleep soundly, safe in the knowledge that the blame rests with us. Go on, don’t be shy.

At twenty three minutes past one on the morning of April 26th 1986 in a small Ukranian village by the name of Pripyat, all hell broke loose.  The ground literally welled up in a garguantuan fireball and the little red skinned, horned bastard himself said hello. An initial power surge in the main reactor which couldn’t be controlled is the official line most often cited as probable cause. During the first attempt to shepherd the original power surge, a bigger, more devious second spike laid waste to any hope of control; ruptured the concrete foundations and detonated the rustiest, most dilapadated piece of nuclear homemade kit ever assembled, skywards. Chernobyl was born.

The nuclear explosion sent a mushroom cloud billowing into the Ukrainian early morning and radiation was catapulted west. Europe was beckoning. Everyone knows that The Ukraine tried to conceal the explosion, or at least not broadcast it. Maybe they thought they really could ignore the glowing sheep, the acid rain and the thousand upon thousands of cancer deaths. But that is not why we are here today. We are not pointing the finger at this ineptitude.

Thanks to an in depth, expensive and lengthy scientific project involving a team of scientists from France, Norway and America, apparently birds in the immediate vicinity of Chernobyl have smaller than normal brains. They are lacking in brain capacity when compared to their fair-weather friends from California or Paris. Really? Really? Yeah, you think? You need a 10 year experiment to work that little gem out? Nuclear explosions make birds stupid?

History is littered with pointless experiments (more of which we will come to at a later date). How long this particular multinational experiment took, and the cost involved in sending teams of scientists gallivanting around the world with metal detectors and bird nets was not disclosed, suffice to say, it was considerably more than the $0 that would have been required to ask a 7 year old if nuclear explosions have a damaging effect on animals.

What else did the experiment, published in Plos one journal have to say? Well, the actual size of brain reduction is 5% and the effect was most pronounced in birds under 1 year of age. It doesn’t stop there, for the published answer as to why the nuclear birds happen to have a 5% smaller brain… Drum roll…. “It is unclear exactly what mechanism is shrinking the birds’ brains.” Nuclear. Explosion. Radiation. That’s our guess. We apologise for the waste of tax payers money on such insight.

This is a box of Spam. It is not an email of zero interest promising you a bigger penis or a box of viagra

A little over 6o years ago a group of men from Manchester, England, produced what is widely conceived as the first computer in the guise we know it today: that of fixed memory which can store a program. Using just 128 bytes of memory, weighing over a tonne and taking up a whole room, it calculated the highest factor of a number. Known as ‘Baby’, it differed from the American ENIAC and Colossus in that it didn’t require – sometimes days in the aforementioned models – re-wiring every time a new calculation needed to be carried out. It is a far cry from today, the age of instant communication gratification.

In the time you read that first paragraph, nigh on 100 million electronic messages upped and left their respective outboxes. Within them were stored the thoughts, feelings, aspirations and desires of the multitudes. Hearts were broken and marriages ruined. The dirtiest secrets were revealed in a myriad of confessions, the innocent and guilty parties left to rue the night before. The most powerful men and women on Earth decided the fate of thousands and saved the life’s of countless others; business men and women divulged the keys to a fortune and lost as much again as the markets surged. Across the globe the days business is dissected, old plans resurrected and future plans lamented. Not bad for one minute in time.

Sadly for every 1 of those eventful emails, 9 polar opposites are sent and received. Of the 1 billion and growing emails that are sent every year, 90% are of absolutely no use. They are spam, and nobody seems to apologise. It is a glaring omission on someones behalf that they did not see it coming. A glance in any single inbox you care to mention will hold material that would, without hesitation, get you publicly killed in some countries on earth, sent to prison in others, flogged in yet others and castrated in the ones not mentioned. So why is it allowed in ours? Why is nothing concrete done and whose fault is it? What can be done? You turn on the spam filter and it either ignores all the spam or simply takes every email you receive and disposes of it.

Taketheblame™ has learnt that 57% of the junk that drowns your inbox originates in the good ol’ US, a further 16% emanates from South Korea, the remainder from the other 4 corners of the globe. Free Viagra, low interest loans, extra income, free money from Nigeria and free degrees from prestigious universities all figure heavily in the most detested spam. This is a family site so we can’t go into too much detail, but it is the XXX sites, the blatant pornographic advertising that makes it so surprising that governments, police agencies, IT companies and Internet watchdogs do not stand up and make a difference. The malicious brainwashing and corruption of our youth is surely excuse enough to free our inboxes? Until such action is taken, Taketheblame™ is here to act as your spam filter.

In the scheme of things I suppose that 36 million is not a great deal of money. A small bonus to a wealthy banker, an average footballer. You probably couldn’t get hold of a decent powerboat for that so for the BBC to go 36 million pounds over budget isn’t such a big deal is it? On a website? Yes, www.bbc.co.uk cost a staggering £110 in the 2007/8 financial year. Not bad going. Only they were apparently not strictly meant to spend that much cash. The budget was only £72 million with a buffer, if you like, of the base plus 10 percentiles, giving a lottery busting £81.6 million. So where did the extra wongar get blown? And who is responsible for such gargantuan over spending?

Maybe it got spent on some quality broadcasting on the television? You know, TV, what the BBC used to do so well before they sold Neighbours to Channel 5. On a thorough inspection of the TV listings, its still just a pile of crap with the odd token quality program slipped in. They channels still stop broadcasting at 11pm as unemployed people don’t watch the BBC. It still shows contemptible American trash through the day, boring antique and local news shows in early evening, reality drivel late evenings and 13 year old Hollywood “blockbusters at night. So no, the extra money didn’t get spent there.

Taketheblame couldn’t find the story on the BBC website, the extra 36 million obviously doesn’t accommodate news that close to home. Don’t shit where you eat or something. All we could find was some quality journalism/research on biscuits and how different varieties can influence the outcome of a business meeting.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/7432092.stm

But still no money.  The BBC trust which carried out the report and found the over spend came out and said that the extra money was infact.

“was not overspend, but the misallocation of £24.9 million in overheads and costs to other budgets within the BBC, representing poor financial accountability”;

Hmm.. so poor accountability? But who do we hold accountable? Have they been fired, reprimanded, sent to prison? Someone must have done the accounts? Maybe they just gave it all to Jonathan Ross? Who knows. Liberal Democrat Shadow Culture, Media and Sport Secretary, Don Foster said, on hearing of the report,

“This report is a damning indictment of the management of bbc.co.uk. Future investment will only take place if accountability is increased. Not only has the BBC lost track of a phenomenal sum of money, but this mismanagement will now directly impact on the future development of this popular service.”

So we all agree? So who is to blame? Anyone? TaketheBlame will shoulder this heavy financial burden, it is obviously us who are to blame. Its probably under the cushions on the sofa.

It is not to get in the water. Sharks are eating people and they are not to blame!

People being eaten by sharks is never a good thing, some would say it isn’t even a funny thing. But sharks have to eat too. They don’t have  the luxury of choice, they don’t go on diets, they eat what they see and invariably don’t see what they eat. Sometimes they even eat human legs and the human being attached to it, as has happened this week on the sunny shores of the Mexican town of Zihuatanejo. Twice. Sadly for the locals and the flocks of tourists that descend, this isn’t Amity and police chief Martin Brody is not here to hunt down the perpetrator and dispose of it in some highly unlikely, nigh-on impossible feat of daring involving an old electrical power line or a conveniently place oxygen tank.

dedicated to Roy Schneider.