if not now, venn?

So when I read in the papers on Monday that both of the two £90 million Euromillions enormo-rollover jackpot-winning tickets were bought in the UK, and moreover that one of them was bought by someone who lived in Newport, and the other was bought by a syndicate of employees at an IT company, I thought: well, I fall into both of those categories, so one of them must be me, right? Good job I checked before reserving the Aston Martin, because it turns out neither of them was me. What are the chances?

noooooooooo

I've just had the misfortune to witness the final stages of the X Factor sing-off, and with reference to John & Edward's performance in particular I was put in mind of Calculon's response to Bender's audition performance in the Futurama episode Bender Should Not Be Allowed On TV:

That was so terrible I think you gave me CANCER!

I can't find that particular line on YouTube to illustrate my point, unless you happen to speak Spanish, but here's an audio version.

blogging tip of the day

Here's something I was discussing at work earlier and which might prove useful: how to link to a YouTube clip at a specific starting time. Basically you take the URL for the clip and append #t=XmYs to the end of it, substituting the appropriate numbers of minutes and seconds for X and Y as appropriate.

So I can now take you straight to the Michael Portillo "erect" moment, which is handy. I can also, for instance, skip the rest of the Not The Nine O'Clock News Question Time sketch and take you straight to the funny bit. For those of you too young to remember, that's Clive Jenkins that Richard Davies is impersonating (and Nye Bevan that he's referring to, though of course even I am too young to remember him). Jenkins was a ripe target for impersonation: here, via some similar YouTube magic, is Monty Python's Graham Chapman doing a similar job in 1972.

Jenkins (the real one) can be seen in this slightly surreal pin-up gallery of 1970s/1980s trade union leaders; I've also nicked the image from that page and put it on the left here for you, just in case you can't be arsed to click on the link. Apparently the eventual winner of Trade Union Idol was former leader of UNISON and Buddy Holly lookalike Rodney Bickerstaffe.

a packet of dry roasted disco biscuits, please

More interesting footnotes to the drug advisor sacking fiasco: firstly this article in the New Scientist by David Nutt himself presents a thought experiment originally presented in this NS editorial (the full version of which is behind a paywall):

Imagine you are seated at a table with two bowls in front of you. One contains peanuts, the other tablets of the illegal recreational drug MDMA (ecstasy). A stranger joins you, and you have to decide whether to give them a peanut or a pill. Which is safest?

You should give them ecstasy, of course. A much larger percentage of people suffer a fatal acute reaction to peanuts than to MDMA.

The question to then go on and ask yourself is: given this, on what basis do we come to the conclusion that the sale and consumption of peanuts is OK, but the sale and consumption of ecstasy is not? I'm sure Alan Johnson will be setting it all out for us nice and clearly and unambiguously any day now.

With all this confusion and disagreement, what the situation is clearly crying out for is some Good Old-Fashioned Common Sense. In other words, a column by Melanie Phillips. Mel takes a different tack from the one you might have expected (dismissing the science and proclaiming that drug consumption is Just Ruddy Morally Wrong in some ill-defined way) by claiming that the science doesn't show what Professor Nutt claims it does regarding relative harmfulness of drugs. Obviously you should make up your own minds based on a sober examination of the evidence, but it would be remiss of me not to point out here that Mel also thinks the scientific evidence comes down firmly in favour of Intelligent Design as opposed to, you know, all that evolution rubbish. If you really feel you can't just dismiss everything Melanie Phillips says as the ramblings of a deranged right-wing knee-jerk contrarian, some specific refutations can be found here.

Also in the Mail, A.N. Wilson takes a few potshots at David Nutt as well, in an article that is if anything even more cretinous than Mel's. First this gem:

The trouble with a 'scientific' argument, of course, is that it is not made in the real world, but in a laboratory by an unimaginative academic relying solely on empirical facts.

Yeah, you can prove anything with facts. Secondly he Godwins himself a bit further down:

The only difference between Hitler and previous governments was that he believed, with babyish credulity, in science as the only truth. He allowed scientists freedoms which a civilised government would have checked.

I am not suggesting that any British scientists are currently conducting experiments comparable to those which were allowed in Nazi Germany or in Soviet Russia.

Oh, well, that's all right then. Finally a bit of anti-vax looniness, ostensibly in the name of - hey! - "free expression":

In fact, it is the arrogant scientific establishment which questions free expression. Think of the hoo-ha which occurred when one hospital doctor dared to question the wisdom of using the MMR vaccine.

Absolutely tremendous; top marks.

keith vaz, on crack, yesterday

Couple of further bits on the government drug advisor fiasco - firstly Keith Vaz steams in with a textbook display of Just Not Getting It At All:

Keith Vaz, who chairs the home affairs select committee, described Nutt's comments as "unwise". Vaz said: "As the country's top adviser on the issue, he is implying to many young people that cannabis is not particularly dangerous."

Well, yes, that's the point, isn't it? What with it actually being not particularly dangerous and all. In a rather more surprising development, today's Independent features an article from Bruce Anderson that actually talks a lot of sense:

So let us start with fundamentals. Until the 1960s, our legal system was overshadowed by pre-libertarian theories of the state, which criminalised breaches of Christian morality and started from the assumption that governments were entitled to regulate the private behaviour of adults. As that has all gone over the past few decades, what theory of the state now permits governments to prohibit adults from taking drugs? There is only one intellectually respectable answer to that question: none.

Right on. He does blot his copybook a bit later in the article, unfortunately, with some slightly mental stuff about using the SAS to combat foreign drug traffickers (proper God-fearing indigenous British drug traffickers presumably being all right), which put me in mind of Michael Portillo's infamous Conservative Party Conference speech from 1995. The SAS stuff is towards the end, but I found the most amusing bit to be at about 1:10 when Portillo pauses briefly after uttering the word "erect" to lick his lips lingeringly in what is probably the Gayest Moment Ever at a Conservative Party Conference.

miscavige of justice

Couple of further things in relation to the earlier Scientology posts - firstly this very amusing article regarding some new uniforms that you must buy in addition to the endless course material that you must buy, etc. etc. Most of it is the usual psychotic encyclopaedia salesman garb, but the Dracula capes are pretty cool. And if they prevent you from getting stuck in an electronic incident, then all well and good I suppose.

Secondly, check out this video clip from (sources allege) Tom Cruise's birthday party aboard the Scientology ship Freewinds (I suspect these similar video clips may be faked, though) Recall that there is much hilarious disinformation about regarding how tall Tom Cruise actually is; remember also Nicole Kidman's post-divorce quip about being able to wear heels again. Conclude perhaps in a totally unscientific averaging-out of rival claims that he's perhaps 5'6" or 5'7". Then notice that Scientology head honcho David Miscavige appers to be at least three inches shorter.

Just to be clear, I'm not suggesting that those of less than average height are any less capable of doing their jobs than anyone else, whatever that job might be, and that clearly includes the job of cartoonish supervillain that Miscavige currently occupies. It's just that one tends to imagine cartoonish supervillains as Optimus Prime-sized enormotrons, crushing all of puny humanity within their mighty grasp, not as people towered over by Tom Cruise (which I suppose would put Miscavige at maybe 5'4" or so, at most - this article reckons he is 5'5"). I guess the shorter the subject the greater the concentration of pure evil you can achieve. Clever.

a million shrugging garlicky frenchmen can't be wrong...or can they?

The bottle of Highland Park I bought back in early June finally bit the dust the other day, so I had half an eye out for another one while I was in Tesco earlier, and sure enough my eye was mysteriously drawn to the bottle of 10-year old Aberlour they were practically giving away for £18.

Bit of background: Aberlour is a Speyside whisky, Speyside being by far the most distillery-rich of the whisky-producing regions with something like fifty distilleries. It's fair to say Aberlour is not one of the big Speyside glamour boys like Macallan, Glenlivet or Glenfiddich, though it is apparently the biggest-selling single malt in France; this is probably down to its being owned by French drink-based gigantocorp Pernod Ricard. According to this page, the biggest seller in Spain is Cardhu, and the biggest seller in Italy is Glen Grant. Fascinating stuff.

Anyway, you'd expect certain things from a Speyside whisky - heavy on the fruit, light on the smoke, sweetish, darkish, etc., and Aberlour ticks all those boxes. It's lighter and less intense than the Macallan, though, which is a real slap around the chops with a sherry-soaked Madeira cake (but in a good way). I'm tempted to quote the Paul Giamatti character from Sideways and call it "quaffable but....far from transcendent", though that would be a bit harsh, as it's perfectly nice. No danger of it not getting, consumed, anyway.

[Update after drinking a proper-sized glass while watching the rivetingly awful League Of Extraordinary Gentlemen on TV tonight: it's got a really interesting marzipan-y nose which you don't get with the Macallan and the other Speysiders, followed by the usual sherry stuff afterwards. Second impressions were better than first, anyway, if that helps at all.]

une femme-frappeur, s'il vous plaît

I'll tell you what annoys me about those Stella Artois 4 adverts, since you ask. It's not the general content of the adverts themselves, which is as excellent as ever - whoever came up with the whole "reassuringly expensive" thing back in the day was a genius - it's the name of the product and the way it's presented in the adverts.

In both of the adverts I've seen (which you can have a look at here and here) there's some hilarious French Riviera-set action, culminating in the main character sauntering nonchalantly into a bar and saying "une Stella Artois Four, s'il vous plaît", followed by the obligatory product shot and seductive female voice-over (in English, this time, just in case we hadn't worked out what he was talking about).

Trouble is, the four doesn't really work when you're delivering the rest of the sentence in French, since of course the French word would be quatre. I guess Stella Artois must have concluded that the English-speaking public couldn't cope with that, although interestingly Beck's seem to have come to a different conclusion with their lower-alcohol product Beck's Vier.

It gets worse, though, because they pronounce the four with a proper rolled "r" (because they're French - why do you think they have this outrageous accent?). This makes it sound like the French word fort, which could conceivably be applied to beer, because it just means "strong". Trouble is, the whole point of SA4 is that it's less strong than the standard wife-beating brew. Confusing, isn't it? Even worse, SA4 is marketed in Canada as Stella Artois Légère, and légère means "light", i.e. just the opposite of fort. Phew. Now I need a drink.

Two other things to note before we move on: firstly that Google's language tools offer the following translations of légère: slight, feathery, promiscuous. I suppose there might be a connection with the use of words like "flighty" or "loose" in English to denote the same thing, if you're a 70-year-old Daily Mail reader anyway. Secondly, note that the InBev SA4 web page describes the beer as "a good pallet cleanser". I assume that what they meant was "a good palate cleanser"; if they really did mean it was good for removing stubborn stains from these then I might give it a miss, to be honest.

What I won't be doing instead is going and having a pint of Carling, for reasons that their latest series of beermats make clear, in what I assume is an unintentional way. I've enlarged the slogan below the main picture, just in case you can't make it out: no way will the Advertising Standards guys be on their backs about this one; that's one claim that I'm pretty positive is accurate.

assaulted Nutt

There's a much longer post to be written about Home Secretary Alan Johnson's sacking of the government's chief drugs advisor Professor David Nutt - basically for presenting them (in exact accordance with the terms of the job he was hired to do) with some scientific data about drugs and their associated risks that happened not to tally with the government's preconceived ideas about what they wanted the answers to be - but I don't intend this to be it. Tomorrow's papers will probably take care of it.

Mainly I want to give a tip of the cyber-hat to the BBC's correspondent Mark Easton for managing to work the words "Nutt" and "sack" in close proximity into two successive headlines on his blog, within about three hours of each other. Just in case the web police tidy them up, here they are:



The only thing that needs to be added is this quote by an anonymous "source" purporting to speak for Johnson from the Times article about the sacking:

"Anything that appears to downgrade the dangers of drugs is just not acceptable and it should not have been said."

I don't want to drag religion into every single post (no, really) but this illustrates the underlying problem of which religious belief is just one symptom: most people's inability to do even the most basic critical thinking. As Professor Nutt said in his Radio 4 interview earlier this evening (starting about 30 minutes into this iPlayer link, which may disappear in due course), if the government are going to abandon any pretence of drugs policy being evidence-based and make it some sort of moral crusade, then they should come out and say so. I would add that if they are going to do that they should additionally state very clearly on what basis they are making their moral judgments. Divine inspiration? A craven desire to keep fuckwits like The Sun's Jon Gaunt happy? Let's hope not.