As PR stunts go, this one is pretty spectacular. Lynx, the deodorant company, not the cat (I prefer the cat) is running a competition for people wanting to be astronauts. As I understand it, the top four in the UK get to go to a space camp thing in London, and from there the winner gets to go forward to an international camp where a crew will be selected. There is apparently some physical testing involved in the later stages, but the first round appears to be decided by voting. I guess they want to know if you can handle the media as well as the physical challenge.

Anyway, I know about this because an old friend of mine, John Precedo, has entered. There has to be a saying about how friends don’t let friends go into space, but John appears to be well off the pace. Even if all my Twitter followers voted for him he’d still be outside the top ten. So why not give him some love.

Well actually the why not is that in order to vote you have to give Lynx an email address, and that address will then presumably be spammed with advertising for smelly stuff forever afterwards. But you all have fake email addresses for such purposes, right?