Fukushima and the rise of the media plutonium lovers

The media plutonium lovers are out in force as the Fukushima nuclear plant sizzles on - plainly an awful lot of people have skipped the brain-enriching spinach diet. The Sun's Jeremy Clarkson would be happy to have a nuke built in his underpants (plenty of space available for it, then) while the Guardian columnist and secular goddess (in a personal capacity) Suzanne Moore dismisses concerns about the nuclear option by lamenting the number of deaths in mines.

To this point I would just say: one is local, the other potentially global, in its effects. We all know this. And I for one am not prepared to take that risk just so I can bung oven chips in the microwave.

Saddest of all is nuke-adoring Lewis Page, son of 'distinguished journalist' Bruce, who appears to think a blast of radioactivity is no more a hindrance to a long life than a spray tan. He's under the impression that the Fukushima situation is 'winding down' as employees sport happily and healthily in radioactive pools before tucking into the elixir of glowing sushi. I wonder where he gets his information from. The Onion?

The Guardian's George Monbiot also would have us believe in a nuclear future - on pragmatic grounds. And yet in 2006 he gave the nuclear industry this rousing vote of confidence: 'I despise and fear the nuclear industry as much as any other green: all experience hath shown that, in most countries, the companies running it are a corner-cutting bunch of scumbags, whose business originated as a by-product of nuclear weapons manufacture.' I await his report on how leopards have changed their spots.

Meanwhile, Prof Brian Cox's science-adoring wife Gia Milinovich tweets hysterically to her 11,000+ followers on Twitter that she can't bear to watch the news because journalists are making a great fuss about nothing over Fukushima.

I take it neither the Coxes nor any of the above or their over-represented like-minded media peers will be holidaying in Tokyo this summer.

Prof Brian Cox's wife, Gia Milinovich, bans Madame Arcati!

Prof Brian Cox more famous than wife

Ooh, diddums. I notice that Prof Brian Cox's delightfully outspoken wife, nuclear energy-loving Gia Milinovich, has banned Madame Arcati from joining her following on Twitter. I do hope it wasn't something I said. She describes herself on the site as 'married to that mindless pretty idiot from a pop band @ProfBrianCox.' It enhances my sense of romance that she aids self-definition by reference.

I do like her sense of humour. While tolerating certain fans' foolish suggestions that her husband is gay - I fear he is too unimaginative for that lifestyle option - she is happy to reveal, 'My last tweet was about how my chance to shag David Tennant was foiled by Paul McCartney sleeping on my hotel room floor.' Anyway ....

I can understand Gia's sensitivity to my trenchant criticism of her husband who is now the BBC's licence fee-paid voice of secularism and unelected, self-appointed scourge of all faiths. Criticism can be a painful thing, even for one who engages in pre-emptive self-laceration and larky asides. Oh, the pillow laughs! But is divisive opinion much tolerated chez Cox? I sleep alone.

Certainly Gia and Brian are one on nukes. She writes (see link above): 'Nuclear Power Is Not Nuclear War.' He writes (in the Sun): 'Nuclear reactors ... cannot explode like nuclear bombs.' Aren't they just adorable?

Still, I'm not one to bear grudges. Enjoy Gia's blog; laugh at her post-modernist, astutely framed jokes. And read her heart-rending description of being turned into an Invisible Wife by Brian's fame.

Prof Brian Cox: A TV evangelist for the nation's telescope strokers

The monumentally smug Brian Cox has released another fashion book on astronomy. The Wonders of the Universe is a blissful repainting of the universe, a cosmic dye job to make galactic smudges seem coherent, constellations appear pretty. Photogenic diagrams reconstruct astronomical systems for lovers of Lego and Meccano: the universe is nothing but an awesome Cartesian building site that's 93 billion light years wide!

Recycling his old university notes for his fabulously successful series The Wonders of the Solar System (oh, and for the Sun, on which, along with Mystic Meg, he's a regular) has turned him into quite the TV star. It's hard to know whether all this fame has gone to his head because one suspects he's always had the air of a know-all. A hard-geeing northerner geek, with a super trouper centre parting - which by a happy accident is suddenly catwalk fashionable again - Professor Cox disarms us with a smile that rarely leaves his face. When it does, when he's thinking of astrology, for instance, a rather bitter and sulky countenance is glimpsed. Then he looks like a cry baby.

I suspect he has never quite come to terms with the fact that other people are not Professor Brian Cox.

The cover of The Wonders of the Universe is itself a wonder. Thanks to some studio Caravaggio, Brian (or Brain, as we should call him) appears to be the personification of the universe itself: colours have been retouched for a harmonious blending of man and cosmos, as if he were the Crab Nebula come to life. For once he is not smiling, but pensive, if not posing. Is he perhaps absorbed in planning yet another space show for his propagandist mouthpiece, the BBC?

It's a quasi-religious cover. Which is unfortunate given that his adventures in particle physics have left him an atheist; or, a 21st century cliche. If you transplanted the artwork minus the words onto some god-loving pamphlet, you might imagine yet another messiah is among us. In a sense you might imagine right.

As one of his telescope stroking followers writes on Amazon, of the iconic centre parting: 'I'm throwing out my hair gel and getting a nice tortoiseshell comb. God bless you Brian.'

Francisco J Ayala: Don't confuse Dawkins with God Almighty

Francisco J Ayala

Among the very few spokespersons for global sanity is Francisco J Ayala, recent winner of the Templeton Prize and its £1m (donated to charity).

An evolutionary geneticist and molecular biologist, a former scientific adviser to Bill Clinton in the '90s - who has battled with deluded Christian creationists and intelligent designers for years - Ayala argues that spiritual faith and science ought to co-exist. As he says, "[They] are two windows through which we look at the world."

He has no time for Richard Dawkins who has misled a generation into thinking that the issue of God and science is an either/or. By way of example, Ayala refers to Picasso’s Guernica: "While science can assess the painting’s massive dimensions and pigments, only a spiritual view imparts the horror of the subject matter. Together... these two separate analyses reveal the totality of the masterpiece." (To quote the Templeton website)

In an interview Ayala further explains: "Science has to do with the expansion of galaxies and movement of the continents and the origin of organisms and adaptations. Religion has to do with our relationship to our creator and to each other, with the purpose and meaning of life, with moral values that govern our lives. So, they deal with different subjects... there's no need to contradict each other."

Ayala's is a large mind and a refreshing change from the juvenile, materialistic inanities of Dawkins and the Sun's favourite professor, Dr Brian Cox - the smiling rock star host of the Wonders of the Solar System.

Dr Brian Cox and the Wonders of a Solar Smile

The latest sexy darling of atheists is particle physicist Dr Brian Cox, former rock star member of the band D:Ream. His current BBC2 show Wonders of the Solar System is wowing the so-called intelligentsia in the UK, for reasons beyond my understanding. It's telling us nothing we haven't heard already: the Sun is awfully hot, Mercury is hot, too, but gets very cold at night, Venus is Earth's carbon alter ego, and there are some helluva storms on Jupiter. True, I hadn't seen some of the pics of Titan's surface, but think of sand and stones and, presto, you have Saturn's Worthing.

What's tickling mental clits and dicks is Cox's ability to smile while talking. This is quite an achievement. Most people who smile while talking are probably planning to kill you; they're loons: but Coxy Babe couldn't drown a kitten. He's a cuddlesome, hard-geeing northerner geek in awe of the universe. His very orgasmic, transferable relish in repeating what his profs taught him at uni alchemises his commonplaces, with that toothy smile. That he sounds like a simpleton while parroting the number of air molecules in a pebble disarms because one knows he's a swot and make no mistake. We need to look down a bit first before we look up.

Cox is a man boy waggling his box of toys at us: he has nothing new to tell us, just a new way - thanks to his talking smile. At public expense he gets to fly at 60,000 ft to admire the dark blue of the sky, to drive over desert sand dunes to show us what Mars is like (air: thin), and he lights Chinese lanterns to demonstrate the effects of hot air. Oh, it rises.

No wonder he's smiling. I'd be laughing in his shoes.

PS:
(The Mail on Sunday columnist Suzanne Moore wrote me on Facebook after I said Cox was like a kid with toys: "Told Brian what you said. He said Tell them from me that they should stick to shaking their jowels and drinking Claret and leave science to the big boys and girls ;-) Oooooh x"