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so, OK, no religion....wait, what was the first bit again?

2012-01-30T20:17:00.008Z

Let's not imagine, even for a moment, that Really Bad Ideas are the sole preserve of the religious, goodness me no. Just when you think we're all on board with the whole abandonment of religion thing (as a component part of a triumphal march of progress towards rationality and empiricism in a more general sense) someone who should in theory be on the right side suddenly pipes up and demonstrates that they just Haven't Got It At All.

Case in point: Alain de Botton's recent publicity binge in promotion of his truly unspeakably appalling idea of having a giant monument to atheism built, a sort of Atheist Temple if you will. It should be noted that de Botton has some previous in this area, having previously argued that we should adopt lots of the rituals of religion in a sort of pick'n'mix stylee, you know, a Jewish bread-making ceremony here, a Catholic bring'n'buy sale there, a clambake and genital mutilation workshop every alternate Sunday, that sort of thing. Because unless we do we will literally be soulless dead-eyed automatons, or, worse still, Richard Dawkins.

Note in the video how he sneakily equates religion and morality a couple of times, and slips in words like "spirituality" without doing that thing that all right-thinking people do when they hear the word - you know, that instinctive shoving of the tongue down into the gap between the lower teeth and the lower lip and then the grunting straining noises and the frantic head-slapping with alternate hands. NNNGGGSPIRITUALITYNNNGGGGHHHH *slappetyslappetyslap*. You know, that thing.

I suppose this is another Bill Maher-esque stopped clock right twice a day thing, in that obviously de Botton is right about the God not existing bit, but wrong about pretty much everything else. He also sets off various of my finely calibrated arsehole alarms by decrying Dawkins and others' "aggressive" and "destructive" approach towards religious belief. This is particularly ill-timed at the tail-end of a couple of weeks of quite concentrated evil religious apeshittery which throws into sharp relief people pointing out that made up stuff is, well, made up stuff. Frankly the more aggressive and destructive we all are towards that shit the better.

It hardly needs stating that all this ritual-observance and temple-building bullshit plays right into the hands of those who trot out the line that "atheism is just another religion", and is therefore quite obviously a huge own goal. What the hell do we need a temple for anyway? There are monuments to empiricism and rationality everywhere, indeed if it were not for empiricism and rationality there would be no monuments of any kind anywhere higher than you could slop together with a bit of wattle and daub and a couple of dead squirrels. What do you think enabled the guys who built Salisbury Cathedral to work out how high they could build the spire without it collapsing under its own weight? Faith? Fuck off.

There's my temple to atheism, right there. Made in Scotland. From girders.

the last book I read

2012-01-23T10:23:00.006Z

Look To Windward by Iain M. Banks.

So here we are again, back in the AI-moderated anarcho-utopia of the Culture. You'll remember from previous visits their technological advancedness and their tendency to get involved and try to massage the development of other (small-c) cultures into directions they deem desirable, with sometimes mixed results.

Well, they've been at it again here - a long-ago skirmish during the war with the Idirans (sort of giant sentient armoured tortoises, as featured in the first Culture novel Consider Phlebas) resulted in the deliberate detonation of a couple of stars, with the inevitable attendant gigadeaths, and now the light from those detonations is about to reach Masaq', one of the Culture's Orbitals. This has been turned into the excuse for a bit of a cultural jamboree, as if to (slightly smugly) acknowledge the Culture's occasional propensity for mistakes, while at the same time revelling in their ability to throw a party and the fact that, as a civilisation that has ascended to the enviable heights of permanent leisure for all and dispensed with bourgeois notions like money and possessions, no-one has to get up to go to work in the morning.

Not everyone views the Culture as an unequivocally benign and civilising influence, though: the Chelgrians have been nursing a grudge for a while after a bit of well-intentioned Culture meddling to try and persuade them to dispense with their barbaric caste system backfired. The Chelgrians are a bunch of bipedal cat/fox/marsupial types (well, apart from the vestigial extra limb in the middle of the body which I've never seen a cat have), broadly civilised but with their predatory past a bit more recent in evolutionary terms than the Culture's inhabitants and therefore more of an inclination to hang on to outmoded notions like honour and revenge.

One of the most famous Chelgrians, Mahrai Ziller, a composer, is a resident of Masaq' Orbital, having fled there from Chel during the caste wars. Another Chelgrian, Major Quilan, has been sent on a mission to Masaq', ostensibly to try to persuade Ziller to return home, but in fact on a deadly mission so secret EVEN HE DOESN'T KNOW WHAT IT IS!!! Yes, it's The Chelgrian Candidate. Quilan's mission is more wide-ranging than just popping a cap in a politician's ass, though; he's planning (well, once he gets his memory back) to blow up the Hub's controlling Mind and kill about five billion people, thereby taking roughly proportionate revenge for the Chelgrians killed during the Culture's ham-fisted intervention.

This is probably the most straightforward Culture novel since The Player Of Games, all of the intervening ones - Use Of Weapons, Excession, Inversions - depicting events on the outer limits of the Culture's society in one way or another. The crazy physical geography of the Orbital is very well realised, as are the day-to-day dilemmas of its inhabitants - not the sort of mundane concerns that you and I have to put up with, but more esoteric stuff like where to go hang-gliding next, what sort of body you want to be reincarnated in should you accidentally hang-glide into a live volcano, and indeed whether it's worth even attempting any physical or artistic endeavour anyway given that with a snap of the fingers you could get an AI Mind to do it far better and quicker than you could ever hope to do.

Portraying non-humanoid aliens is always tricky, and though Banks tries to load the dice in his favour here by having Kabe Ischloear, the Homomdan, be the most rational and level-headed non-AI character in the book, a ten-foot tripedal pyramid who occasionally gets mistaken for an item of modern sculpture is a tricky sell, recalling as it does Douglas Adams' hyperintelligent shade of the colour blue. The Chelgrians are a bit more successfully realised, and he manages to make the tortured Quilan a fairly sympathetic character, despite his intention of committing planet-scale genocide. What's missing is any real suspense, though, the Culture's AI Minds being so clever as to almost eliminate even the slightest possibility that Quilan's scheme could ever succeed, though what Masaq' Hub does with the knowledge is perhaps slightly unexpected.

A couple of other quibbles: it's not entirely clear what the point of the episodes on the airsphere planet is, other than for Banks to have some fun with the gargantuan dirigible behemothaurs (giant sentient alien hot-air balloons, basically) that roam its atmosphere. And presumably the couple of teasers featuring the female Chelgrian assassin who turns out to be a cloud of nanobots from an unknown civilisation (who, we're invited to infer, have manipulated the Chelgrians for their own ends) will be revisited in future books. And the business with the "hilarious" spaceship names really isn't as funny as Banks seems to think it is.

Overall it's as rollickingly good fun as all the other Culture books, though, with the usual crafty swipes at organised religion. There's a bit of techno-geekery as well, but you can skim over those bits to get to the actual plot. Overall I'd say it's better than Excession, but not as good as Inversions.

they have websites for EVERYTHING nowadays

2012-01-21T20:30:00.010Z

Here's a couple of amusing items I've snapped on my handy phone-camera recently. Firstly I strayed into Clas Ohlson in the shiny new St. David's Centre in Cardiff back before Christmas - it's a sort of low-rent IKEA with more gadgety stuff and less ridiculously-named furniture. Anyway, I found myself in front of a display of electronic gadgetry and spotted this:

Yes, that's right, it's an AsaKlitt PedoMeter. I know, I know, it's puerile schoolboy humour, but that's what you come here for. Just in case it's not clear enough, here's a zoomed-in version:

Useful to have some sort of scientific method of detection, though, as otherwise all sorts of confusion can occur. As an aside, I hadn't realised that the paediatrician who was mistaken for a paedophile by a bunch of vigilante numbskulls lived just outside Newport (not any more, though, I'm pretty sure).

Then, just last week, back in the seemingly safe and surprise-free environment of the office, I acquired a new stapler, which bore, on close inspection, a rather disturbing legend:

Again, here's the relevant bit for the hard of seeing:

Now I assume that actually Rapesco is meant to be pronounced as three syllables, with the emphasis on the second, i.e. to rhyme with UNESCO, and that they are of mid-European origin, maybe Italian (the website is a bit cagey about their country of origin). That's not how it reads at first glance to a native English speaker, though.

It would be remiss of me not to link at this point to the classic list of unintentionally funny company URLs; Rapesco would slot in quite well next to Therapist Finder (which you'll notice now redirects to a more innocuous URL).

I didn't think to snap the amusing shelf logo in front of the WD-40 display when I was in B&Q last weekend, so you'll have to take my word for it that it mirrored the online product page by saying AEROSOL LUBRICANT in big letters, at which point I was reminded of the immortal Not The Nine O'Clock News Swedish chemist sketch.

gove forth and multiply

2012-01-21T13:50:00.004Z

Couple of brief items that may be of interest:

If you can't be arsed sitting through the full 158 minutes of David Fincher's adaptation of The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, here's a condensed version which you can zip though in five minutes and also accurately skewers most of the ways in which the book, though a lot of fun, is in many ways pretty silly.

More school-related religious madness now: Conservative Education Secretary and Pob and Rick Moranis impersonator Michael Gove's plans to give every school in the country a copy of the King James Version of the Bible seem to have stalled a bit, more for reasons of finance restrictions than as a result of any sort of Oh For Fuck's Sake What Was I Thinking moment of clarity or anything like that.

Also, I'm sure this is probably a slight misquote, or at least taken out of context, but the Mail has him referring to the KJV as "the most important book written in the English language". Well, of course this particular version is written in the English language, but if I started saying that, say, Crime And Punishment or The Unbearable Lightness Of Being or Aunt Julia And The Scriptwriter was the greatest novel ever written in the English language people would probably take issue with my reasoning, and rightly so.

Note, however, that there are undoubtedly people in the more scary bits of the USA who would probably run you out of town on a rail for pointing out that the English versions of the Bible are translations from the original Hebrew via Greek with all the attendant loss of nuance and mistranslation of idioms that you might expect. I would strongly recommend stopping short of pointing out that even the original manuscripts were just folk myth and other made-up stuff anyway if you don't fancy a hot lead sandwich.

the last book I read

2012-01-15T13:44:00.005Z

At Swim-Two-Birds by Flann O'Brien.

Ah, bejaysus. So, anyway, our un-named narrator (a device we've seen before, here, here, here and here for instance) is a young student living with his uncle in Dublin. Like all students he's a bit too fond of going out drinking with his friends, lolling around in bed in an unhealthy manner and generally neglecting his studies, much to his uncle's chagrin.

But there's precious little time for studying with all the wild flights of literary fancy our young friend is committing to various notebooks: wild fantastical tales based on Irish mythology and featuring mad King Sweeny and Finn MacCool (the bloke who's supposed to have created the Giant's Causeway, among other things) and various other goblins and random folk dreamed up for the purposes of narrative mischief.

Things start to get out of hand when one of our narrator's literary creations, Dermot Trellis, conjurs up in turn various other characters - Furriskey, Shanahan, Lamont - who eventually rebel against the narrative purpose Trellis has for them and gather at the (also fictional) Red Swan Hotel to exact their revenge on him, assisted by Orlick, Trellis' son who has recently sprung into existence fully-formed at the age of about twenty-five and is also, handily, a writer.

The revenge takes the form of a rambling tale (written by Orlick with narrative suggestions from the others) describing Trellis' abduction by a Pooka called MacPhellimey, the various tortures and humiliations inflicted upon him and his eventual trial in front of a jury composed, strangely, of his accusers. Just as verdict and sentence are about to be passed, we are interrupted in the real world by the news that the narrator has passed his final exams; his uncle calls him into his study to congratulate him, the book-within-a-book snaps shut and the story ends.

So there you have it. Strip out the story-within-a-story-within-a-story bit and all that happens is some scuzzy student guy has a few nights out and a few long lie-ins and then passes his exams, but then again something similar could have been said for, say, Inception (levels within levels within levels again) and I thought that was pretty good. And At Swim-Two-Birds is pretty good, too, notwithstanding the opinion of some contemporary critics that it carried "a general odour of spilt Joyce" (it was published in 1939, the same year as Finnegans Wake). Since my Joycean reading starts and ends with A Portrait Of The Artist As A Young Man, though, I wouldn't really know about that; all I can say is that the wild flights of imaginative fancy here, especially the outlandish torments visited upon Trellis in the second half of the book, are very amusing, though if you're at all allergic to metafiction and general authorial intereference and smart-arsery and prefer Proper Ruddy Stories you might want to give it a miss.

At Swim-Two-Birds is another book in this list to have also featured in the rather more prestigious list of Time magazine's 100 best English-language novels since 1923, the previous one being Snow Crash. It also fulfils one of the major criteria for being a Proper Serious Work Of Art by selling pretty much zero copies while O'Brien (whose real name was Brian O'Nolan) was alive; O'Brien supported himself by working for the Irish civil service and writing various columns for newspapers. Apparently there was a brief spike in sales of his later novel The Third Policeman after it featured fleetingly in an episode of Lost in 2006 (far too late for O'Brien who died in 1966). There's product placement for you.

Interestingly, it seems that there is a film in the works as well, the brainchild of actor (and now director) Brendan Gleeson, and with some pretty big names attached to the project. If there was ever a book that warranted the epithet "unfilmable" I would have thought this would be it, though.

you will know they are christians by their love

2012-01-13T22:24:00.007Z

I dunno what the opposite of the Bad Faith Award would be - clearly Good Faith Award won't do for a number of reasons - but if there was one then I reckon the remarkable Jessica Ahlquist would be a front-runner for the 2012 version.

Just in case you missed it, this is the story of Cranston West High School in Rhode Island, which since the 1960s or thereabouts has displayed a School Prayer prominently on the wall of its auditorium, in flagrant disregard of the First Amendment to the United States Constitution. That's the bit that ensures separation of church and state, and prohibits precisely the sort of officially-sanctioned religionism involved in splattering an explicitly Christian prayer across the wall of your nominally inclusive, multi-denominational school. A small thing, you might say, but Jessica Ahlquist decided that it was important to make a stand and have it removed.

Despite being caught bang to rights, the school voted to keep the banner, obliging Ahlquist, with some help from her Dad and the American Civil Liberties Union, to take the case to court, whereupon the court applied the law, as they were obliged to do, and upheld Ahlquist's complaint.

Again, this might seem trivial, but it is crucially important to keep chipping away at the foundations of the great edifice of unearned privilege that religion enjoys, and if this makes people think a bit about why they would tend to turn a blind eye to a Christian prayer on a school wall, but would object in the strongest possible terms to a Muslim one, or a Zoroastrian one, or a Wiccan one, then that is a good thing. It's important to realise how courageous a stand this is, too, particularly when you see the outpouring of Christian love and tolerance and general turn-the-other-cheek-iness ("Satan is gonna rape her") prompted by the legal action.

Our very own Daily Mail is predictably insane on the subject, right from the banner headline:

Note the weaselly quotation marks around "religious". You can see where they're going with this, and they get right onto it pretty quickly:

The banner at Cranston West was judged to promote religion because it takes the form of a prayer addressed to 'Our Heavenly Father' and concluding 'Amen'.

Apart from its opening and closing, the banner does not appear to have an overtly religious message.

And it's just telling people to be kind and nice, right? Who could possibly object to that?

Idiots.

dorries seems to be the hardest word

2012-01-12T18:58:00.008Z

I'm afraid that unless you got on your bike and went and sought them out yourself you've missed the 2011 Bad Faith Awards. This, you'll no doubt remember, is the award given out by New Humanist magazine to the person who has done the most to thwart and damage the cause of reason and progress during the year, most probably via some form of religious loonery.

To be honest I'm not sure the 2011 list of nominees was as creative as in previous years - two US Republican presidential candidates (Rick Perry and Michele Bachmann) and Melanie Phillips seems like a few too many obvious targets - but the runaway winner was the richly deserving Conservative MP for Mid-Bedfordshire, Nadine Dorries.

Anyone whose clearly stated religiously-motivated views on things like sex education in schools and abortion would ensure (were they ever to be implemented, which thankfully seems unlikely) a generation grew up badly informed about sex, and therefore more likely to experience unplanned pregnancy, and then in turn would ensure that a proportion of those same people died because they were unable to get access to abortion services when they urgently needed them, seems to me eminently worthy of treatment far harsher than ridicule in a magazine.

would jubileeve it

2012-01-11T20:11:00.007Z

It's Wednesday so it must be time for Pointless Pedantry Hour. Strap yourselves in.

There was a bit on the Today programme earlier in the week (or it might have been on Start The Week, I can't remember) about the dear old Queen's Diamond Jubilee this year. The presenter went on to say that this was only the second Diamond Jubilee year in British history, the other being wacky old Queen Victoria's in 1897.

Now I am not a constitutional monarchy expert, as you know, in fact I'm more of a "first up against the wall come the revolution" kind of guy, but this struck me as surely incorrect. Stay with me and I'll explain.

Here's the thing: either 2012 is a Diamond Jubilee year by virtue of being a year that, when it started, was scheduled to contain the date of the 60th anniversary of the current monarch's accession to the throne, in which case it will remain a Diamond Jubilee year even if the Queen dies before February 6th, or it isn't a Diamond Jubilee year at all yet, but it will be once we've got to February 6th without the Queen buying the farm (and I reluctantly concede that I know of no reason to think she is in any immediate danger of checking out). Or, I suppose, we could say, as a third option: it is a Diamond Jubilee year, but it could retrospectively be declared not one if the Queen should be shot by Prince Philip in a hunting accident or randomly murdered and concealed in a shallow grave on the Sandringham estate (not necessarily by Prince Philip, but who knows) in the next month or so.

Anyway, either way, by most of those definitions 1820 was a Diamond Jubilee year as well, being the year that, when it started, was scheduled to contain (on October 25th) the 60th anniversary of the accession of George III. This never actually happened, as George (who was thoroughly deaf, blind and mad by this time) died on January 29th, but the exact same radio bit could have been done on January 10th 1820, if things like radio had been invented then.

ooh 'eck it's oobleck

2012-01-07T17:55:00.005Z

That last post was partially inspired by a link from Ben Goldacre's mini-blog. Here's another from the same source: the splendidly-named Fuck Yeah Fluid Dynamics, a mind-blowing repository of cool stuff, mainly in video form, demonstrating how fluids behave and interact in the most weird and wonderful and often counter-intuitive ways. There's the inevitable oobleck, of course, but also all manner of fascinating stuff involving what appears to be golden syrup, as well as oil, water, and assorted random explosions.

Clearly no website devoted to fluid dynamics can get away without featuring the Tacoma Narrows Bridge collapse, either.

oh no, not again

2012-01-07T11:50:00.005Z

There are a number of things which are utterly fascinating about this riveting account of the last minutes of Air France flight 447 leading up to its crash into the Atlantic Ocean in June 2009, not least that it was a problem entirely caused by human error, bad team management, uncontrolled instinctive behaviour and unchecked assumptions, and not an engineering problem at all, beyond the brief (and hardly unprecedented) icing-up of the pitot tubes that sowed some of the initial seeds of the confusion which led eventually to catastrophe.

There seems to be some disagreement over how much the passengers knew about what was going on during the aircaft's uncontrolled descent. I'm quite prepared to believe that among all the intense turbulence that was going on no-one would have sensed that the aircraft was descending at 10,000 feet per minute - after all if experienced commercial pilots can be bewildered by the input of their own senses then I'm sure your average Jean-Claude can as well - but I do wonder what the in-flight information screens were showing during this time.

As I've said before I do find these irrationally reassuring as they provide some input into what's going on, the complete sensory vacuum and lack of control being one of the things that makes flying so uncomfortable. Even if things are getting a bit bumpy, the back-of-the-seat screen reading out a steady altitude and airspeed throughout is comforting. However, assuming the screens hadn't been switched off, anyone on the Air France flight would have presumably seen the airspeed slow to a crawl and the altitude figures start to scroll downwards in an increasingly rapid blur. Now I don't know about you, but I would have found this somewhat alarming, right up until the point whare I abruptly got turned into gristly strawberry jam.

The other thing that struck me about the article was this line:

At 2:02 am, the captain leaves the flight deck to take a nap. Within 15 minutes, everyone aboard the plane will be dead.

- and, later, this one:

Another of the pitot tubes begins to function once more. The cockpit's avionics are now all functioning normally. The flight crew has all the information that they need to fly safely, and all the systems are fully functional. The problems that occur from this point forward are entirely due to human error.

I was immediately reminded of the bit in The Hitch-Hiker's Guide To The Galaxy where the protagonists are threatened by a missile attack from the automated defence system of the planet Magrathea:

The planet in question is, in fact, Magrathea. The missile attack shortly to be launched by an ancient automatic defence system will merely result in the breakage of three coffee cups and a mouse cage, the bruising of someone's upper arm and the untimely creation and demise of a bowl of petunias and an innocent sperm whale.

- and later on:

It is, of course, more or less at this point that one of our heroes sustains a slight bruise to the upper arm. This should be emphasised because, as has already been revealed, they escape otherwise completely unharmed, and the deadly nuclear missiles do not eventually hit the ship. Our heroes' safety is absolutely assured.

Of course that one was the other way round, in that that it all ended happily. I know where I would rather have been.

that's a turn-up for the books

2012-01-05T22:53:00.007Z

While we're knocking up graphs, here's some updated ones illustrating my blogging prowess throughout 2011. And a sad and sorry tale of woe it is too, with 2011 yielding just 150 posts, a decrease of some 14% even compared with the slim 175 posts I managed in 2010. Here's the monthly breakdown:

- and here's the yearly one:

There is one crumb of statistical comfort to be gleaned from all this doom and gloom, though: not only does the 33 book reviews among those 150 posts represent the highest book-related-blogging:other-stuff-related-blogging ratio ever achieved at 22% (comfortably beating 2010's 13.7%), but it's also the highest absolute number of book reviews posted in a year, beating the previous figure of 28 held jointly by 2007 and 2009. Here's the graph:

for whom the bridge tolls

2012-01-04T19:41:00.004Z

Another year, another increase in the bridge tolls for the Severn bridges, to predictable outrage. I mean, I'm not crazy about it, particularly the 30p increase (a whopping five and a bit percent) after a couple of 10p ones, but what can you do?

What you can do, if you wish, is try and research the history of the toll charges for the bridges since the old one was opened in 1966, at which time you would have pulled up in your Model T jalopy or your Austin Seven and the cheery toll attendant would have taken half a crown off you before sending you on your way with a cheery "mind how you go, squire" and a robust clip round the ear.

The progression of charges post-1992 (and incorporating the addition of the second bridge in 1997) is listed here, but pre-1992 you have to dig around a bit. I eventually found this old Hansard extract which reveals that there weren't that many changes made between 1966 and 1992, the main highlights being:

a post-decimalisation knocking off of the spare ha'penny in 1973 (two-and-six being 12½ of those nasty newfangled new pence);
an increase to 20p in 1979;
various up-and-down-ness in the mid-1980s as an increase to 50p was first reversed after some legal challenges and then reinstated to 50p later, presumably partly to pay all the accumulated lawyers' bills;
up again to one whole pound in 1990.

The seemingly vicious price hike to £2.80 in 1992 is partially explained by the rearrangement of the toll system so that you only paid in one direction (going into Wales), and presumably also by the need to drum up some revenue to pay for the new bridge. Increases have been steady since, the total increase of £3.20 between 1992 and 2012 averaging out at 16 pence per year. Here's the whole story in funky graphical form.

this film is dragon on a bit

2011-12-29T19:35:00.005Z

Here's a few plot spoilers to ruin the viewing experience for you should you decide to go and see the new film of The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, and you should, because it's really very good.

David Fincher's films, whatever their other qualities, are always visually stunning - Panic Room, Seven, Fight Club - and this is no exception. The eye-popping opening title sequence with lots of black figures and oil backed by a thunderous industrial version of Led Zeppelin's Immigrant Song is almost worth the admission price alone. Rooney Mara is exceptionally good as Lisbeth Salander - despite being skinnier than Noomi Rapace was in the Swedish film she's still not really physically tiny enough for the part, but there aren't many people who would be.

It's always interesting seeing a film where you've already read the book on which it's based - while this meant that the shock revelation that cuddly old Stellan Skarsgård is actually a serial killer with a hermetically-sealed porn dungeon under his house wasn't a surprise to me it did mean that I could spend some time spotting what they'd changed for the film. There's not much, to be fair, but the two main things seem to be:

the brief relationship Mikael Blomkvist has with Cecilia Vanger is omitted, presumably as it doesn't add much to the plot and since Blomkvist is already boning both Salander and Erika Berger it wouldn't have left any time for sleuthing. They've taken the opportunity to make Cecilia (played by Geraldine James, who is 61) slightly older than in the book.
the revelation of Harriet Vanger's identity is handled completely differently - in the book the sleuths hack into Anita Vanger's phone as she calls Harriet in Australia to tell her Martin Vanger is dead and she can come home, while in the film Anita never makes the call and Blomkvist works out that this is because she is Harriet Vanger, having assumed Anita's identity at the time Anita helped her escape from the family home all those years ago.

None of which particularly detracts from the film, and you have to cut some corners when adapting a 533-page novel, or you end up with a 6-hour film (it's still a pretty beefy 158 minutes). I look forward to seeing who they're going to get to play Ronald Niedermann in the two sequels. Maybe they'll CGI him like in the two Hulk films.

the last book I read

2011-12-29T11:09:00.005Z

Old School by Tobias Wolff.

Our unnamned narrator is a student at a prestigious American public school - or, rather, what the Americans would call a private school, since their rules for naming these things follow more rational rules than ours do. Among the traditional values common to all such institutions - honour, loyalty, tradition, wearing ridiculously long scarves, belting out the school song every once in a while - this particular school has an especially strong literary tradition, and their status allows them to snare some pretty heavy literary names to visit the school and judge the writing contest that precedes each visit. The prize is a personal private audience with the writer, so competition is fierce.

As the book opens in late 1960 we're in the run-up to the visit of venerable poet Robert Frost, and the writing contest is in full swing. Our narrator, despite being one of the school's central literary clique and heavily involved with the production of the school's literary magazine, doesn't win this one, and nor does he win the one that follows it, a rather more controversial visit involving Ayn Rand. However, it is revealed that the next visit will be from none other than Ernest Hemingway, who just happens to be the narrator's literary idol.

So the stakes have been raised? But how to win? What to write? The narrator is convinced that something more soul-baring than his previous efforts is required, perhaps addressing his discomfort over his Jewish ancestry, something he has worked hard to conceal during his time at the school. Inspiration proves elusive until one day, while trawling the magazine archives in the school library, he comes across a story written for the magazine of a nearby girls' school a few years before which seems to express his feelings perfectly. Perhaps just a few tweaks, a change of narrator gender here, a change of name there.....

Things play out pretty much as you might have expected them to from this point: the narrator submits the thinly-concealed copy as his own work, it wins the contest, the meeting with Hemingway is arranged, but then at the eleventh hour the subterfuge is discovered and the narrator is expelled and sent home in disgrace. It's presumably of little consolation to him that (it now being mid-1961) Hemingway never attends the event anyway, preferring instead to shoot himself in the face with a shotgun.

And so we move on beyond the narrator's school days - bundled straight from school onto a train back to the family home he disembarks in New York and does various menial jobs there while trying to establish himself as a writer. Eventually succeeding in this, and having re-established his link with the school's alumni network, he is eventually invited by the school's new headmaster (who was a young teacher while the narrator was there) to be the visiting writer at the school's next event. Ah, the irony, the wheel, full circle, etc. etc., you get the idea.

The boarding-school coming-of-age thing is a well-used literary trope, so it's hard to read a book like this without some preconceptions; in particular it's hard to get through even the first half-dozen pages without replaying several scenes from Peter Weir's 1989 film Dead Poets Society in your head, though the book does have the considerable advantage of not featuring Robin Williams.

It's all beautifully written, and some of the set pieces are excellent - Wolff has great fun satirising Ayn Rand's loony worldview in the section recounting her visit, for instance - but it almost feels like three or four short stories (Wolff's more usual literary medium) linked together and padded out to novel length. I liked it, and the teenage boys coming of age in the hothouse environment of a boarding school is a classic literary setting (though I suspect in reality there's rather more furious wanking than portrayed here), but because of that you've got to do something pretty startling to stand out from all the other novels, films, etc. covering the same ground.

As an aside, while I hadn't read any of Tobias Wolff's work before (he's probably most famous for his autobiographical work This Boy's Life, which was made into a film in 1993), I have read The Age Of Consent by his elder brother Geoffrey Wolff, which is a different sort of beast altogether, a queasy tale of sexual abuse and suicide, but well worth reading.

the last book I read

2011-12-27T17:51:00.005Z

Come Dance With Me by Russell Hoban.

Christabel Alderton, 54, is the singer with aging goth-rock stalwarts Mobile Mortuary. Elias Newman, 62, is a doctor specialising in the study and treatment of diabetes. Nothing so strange there, you might say; well, no, actually you probably wouldn't say that, but this is a Russell Hoban novel, so a certain amount of quirkiness is par for the course.

Anyway, Christabel and Elias meet at an art exhibition - Christabel has just got back from the toilets after having to go and throw up after coming over all unnecessary looking at Odilon Redon's Cyclops (which is a bit weird, to be fair). No sooner have they met and exchanged a few cryptic pleasantries than Christabel dashes off to the loo again, where Elias pursues her and thrusts his phone number under the cubicle door.

Christabel's reluctance to get involved in dealings with men is explained by her past problems with them: namely that several ex-lovers and her own four-year-old son Django have died in bizarre and/or mysterious circumstances, and she's a bit concerned that she's jinxed in some way. But eventually Elias' persistence pays off and they go on a few dates, culminating in a (chaste) night spent together at Elias' flat and then his attendance at a Mobile Mortuary gig in London, but then Christabel disappears from Elias' life as quickly as she had entered it.

A few enquiries among the other members of the band reveal that the tenth anniversary of Django's death is imminent and that Christabel has gone to Maui (where it happened) to commemorate the event. It also turns out that Django died by falling off a cliff, and, concerned about what form this commemorative activity might take, Elias hot-foots it to Maui to catch up with Christabel and persuade her that there might be things worth sticking around for.

Here's a funny thing: I bought this book in one of the numerous second-hand bookshops in Hay-On-Wye after reading Kleinzeit (my first Hoban) back in August 2010, and between then and it bubbling to the top of my pile of things to read (exactly a fortnight ago in fact) Hoban has died at the age of 86 - here are the obituaries from the Guardian and the Independent.

The general consensus from the obituaries seems to be that the mid-period stuff set away from Hoban's usual contemporary London is the pick of his work - stuff like Riddley Walker, Pilgermann and Fremder. Certainly Come Dance With Me (published in 2005) is much gentler than any of those (or than they sound, rather, since I haven't yet read any of them), and while it's still very playful and charming it's less wilfully odd than Kleinzeit was.

I suspect Hoban is one of those authors who you either "get" (in that you find the trademark quirkiness and occasional random tangents endearing) or you don't (in that you find them all a bit irritating); personally I found the two I've now read to be highly enjoyable. Come Dance With Me is as light as a feather even in comparison with Kleinzeit, which wasn't exactly War And Peace, but none the worse for that. And it's really short - 188 pages, large print, lots of chapter breaks - so you can knock it off in a few hours. Have a go.

my god: it's full of pies

2011-12-23T00:18:00.004Z

I'm sure you recall with as much nostalgic affection as I do the old days of bartering, where you'd build a dry-stone wall for someone and he'd pay you in venison cutlets, or you'd shoe a horse for the priest and he'd repay you by forgiving you for all that shit you did, that sort of thing. Well, I'm pleased to report that the practice is alive and well here in South Wales - my talented and resourceful wife did a photoshoot for the good people at Mary Clark's Pies in Cardiff and in addition to paying her in actual cash they made up the shortfall with a big box of pies. Check it out:

A great big box full of pies is pretty good in itself; I'm pleased to be able to report that they are also very good pies - I know this as I've just eaten two of them in one sitting like a big fat greedy knacker. I'm off for a lie down now.

the last book I read

2011-12-19T18:48:00.007Z

The Fifth Child by Doris Lessing.

David and Harriet Lovatt aren't one of your groovy modern couples. They're a bit staid, a bit old-fashioned, you might even say, but after meeting at an office party and recognising each other as kindred spirits they're very much in love and have set up a nice little life for themselves in a sprawling old house, with plenty of room for the unfashionably big family they're planning to have.

Sure enough Harriet soon starts firing out offspring like bullets: Luke, Helen, Jane and Paul. Money is a bit of an issue, but David's father has a bit of spare cash knocking about between yacht purchases so he's prepared to help out, though the general consensus seems to be that David and Harriet should slow down a bit and perhaps discover the joys of effective contraception.

No such luck, however, as Harriet soon finds herself pregnant once again. This one seems different, though - painful and troublesome in the womb, and things don't improve when he finally batters his way out a month early. Ben is a strange, troll-like, Neanderthal creature quite unlike the angelic children that preceded him. But what is he really? A changeling? A throwback? It seems it's a bit more than just his generally unprepossessing appearance, as he lacks the other children's cheery disposition as well, is slow to learn and seems to have a generally malevolent streak. The other children soon learn to steer clear of him, and possibly with good reason as a couple of pets meet mysterious deaths and suspicion falls upon Ben.

Eventually Harriet and David find their home life disrupted to such an extent that they have Ben committed to an institution. The other children are delighted by this and home life returns to something approaching normality, but Harriet is racked with guilt and eventually makes the long drive north to retrieve Ben from the hellish existence he has been consigned to. Which is all very commendable, of course, but means that he's now back at home, with a good dose of post-institution trauma to add to his existing problems.

With Ben back the large family Christmas gatherings peter out, and as soon as the older children can they drift away from the house as often as they can, and eventually permanently. Ben, now approaching his teens, drifts into hanging out with a local motorcycle gang and, once he reaches secondary school, acquires a gang of followers of similarly misfit looks and behaviour. The book ends with Harriet and David seeing Ben on the TV news on the sidelines of a city centre riot, and considering selling the house and moving away (and, we're invited to infer, not telling Ben where they're going).

From my pitifully small sample of Doris Lessing's output I'd say the pattern that emerges is that the earlier ones like Briefing For A Descent Into Hell (1971) and Memoirs Of A Survivor (1974) are the weird hallucinatory ones, and the later ones like The Good Terrorist (1985) and The Fifth Child (1988) are told in a much more straightforward and linear way. I think the key to understanding The Fifth Child is to realise that the whole story is essentially told through the viewpoint of Harriet, who may or may not be completely reliable. Are we to assume that Ben is really as he's described, or is it just that Harriet can't cope with someone who diverges even slightly from her idealised notion of what a perfect child should be like (i.e. like her previous four angelic children)? Is Ben really the hideous troll-like creature of Harriet's description, or maybe just a bit slow, or maybe on the autism spectrum somewhere? So you can view it as a straight horror story of a family being menaced by a goblin-like changeling, or you can view it as a satire of nice middle-class liberal horror at having to cope with a child with mild mental impairment, who clearly isn't going to win any Olympic swimming medals or the Nobel Prize for Physics or anything like that, and their inability to come to terms with that being projected onto the (blameless) child. Clearly there are echoes of other books here, most notably We Need To Talk About Kevin, though as here I should point out that (apart from the suspicion over the pets) Ben hasn't actually killed anyone yet.

Speaking of Nobel Prizes, Doris Lessing became the oldest ever winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature when she was awarded it in 2007. As befits a sparky 88-year-old she gave no concession to the various reporters who wanted a soundbite out of her after the announcement was made. And while I think Briefing For A Descent Into Hell remains the one to read, The Fifth Child is (at only 159 pages, and large-ish print) a disturbing and thought-provoking little book and well worth a look.

at our house, nathaniel sits on a spike

2011-12-17T18:32:00.008Z

And now the mystery object round. So, mother and youngest child only: what's this?

I ask because I found it in my loft while I was clearing it out the other day. Some sort of early prototype satellite dish? A funky glass-topped table with the base missing? A chair for extreme masochists? An Illudium Pu-36 Explosive Space Modulator?

Well, as it happens there is some writing on the glass bit, and it turns out to be a URL which directs you here. OK...so what do they do? Well, it turns out they make mannequins; well, someone's got to I suppose. And if you snoop around a bit you end up at the "support options" page, where the mystery is finally solved - what we have here looks like the "calf-spike" option. What our predecessors were doing with one of those I have no idea. Unless....

you can prove anything with facts

2011-12-14T22:09:00.006Z

You know that thing that some people have whereby they take a kind of perverse pride in not reading novels? There's a bit in Sideways where Miles is picking up Jack from his in-laws' house to go on their weekend away and the subject of Miles' novel-writing comes up, and Jack's future father-in-law says something like: meh, I never read novels; when there's all this stuff to find out about the world why would I want to read something someone made up?

Strangely such people never seem to apply the same sort of logic to other artistic media. Films? Meh, I never go to see films - I just stay home and watch documentaries about rural llama husbandry in the lower Andes. Music? Meh, I never listen to music - I just listen to somebody reading out the Oxford English Dictionary and the Periodic Table on a constant loop.

In any case, the usual argument regarding finding out stuff about the world is bogus - I mean, never mind the obvious retort about finding out things about human nature etc. from novels, even the idea that you don't learn cold hard facts is bollocks on even the most cursory examination. Why yes, since you ask, I can and will furnish you with an example: on University Challenge the other night Jeremy Paxman asked a question which basically went: the tropical diseases kwashiorkor and [some other disease I've forgotten the name of; might have been marasmus I suppose] are caused by a deficiency of what? I knew the answer was protein solely because it gets a mention in The Poisonwood Bible (on page 514, see below) and I clocked the word at the time and went and looked it up.

Incidentally it is indeed a picturesque word, and derives from the Ghanaian for "the sickness the baby gets when the new baby comes", which is rather wonderful, although not for you if you get it.

the last book I read

2011-12-12T13:59:00.007Z

The Gathering by Anne Enright.

Ah, bejaysus. It's not all Guinness and hurling over in Ireland, you know - there's a dark side to all the blarney, as this earlier entry in this list made clear, or at least I think it did, but then again I may not have had the faintest idea what the feck it was all about. Arse biscuits!

Anyway, the Hegarty clan are from Ireland, and as befits a bunch of reproductively incontinent Catholics, they have brought twelve children into the world. It could have been worse, mind you - old mother Hegarty had seven miscarriages as well. Old pa Hegarty evidently wouldn't leave her alone, the dirty fecker. So when Liam Hegarty kills himself by filling his trouser pockets with rocks and walking off Brighton beach into the sea, his sister Veronica is left with the task of rounding up the remaining siblings for the funeral.

As with a few other books in this series (the last two for starters, not to mention here, here, here and here) this establishing of the narrative in some nominal "present" is just to provide a structure to dive off into much assorted flashbackery - Veronica's currently troubled marriage to husband Tom, wistful reminiscences of her youthful relationship with American student Michael Weiss, childhood memories of the various siblings (Liam in particular) and some lurid speculation about the nature of her grandmother Ada's relationship with her husband Charlie and their landlord Lambert Nugent. It eventually becomes clear that Veronica's obsessive interest in this is because of her witnessing an incident of sexual abuse involving Nugent and Liam, in Ada's house, back when Liam was about nine years old. We are invited to conclude that it was this incident (and perhaps others like it, who knows) that sowed the seed that led to Liam topping himself thirty-odd years later; Veronica certainly seems to think so, anyway.

So we emerge back into the "present" to find the siblings gathering for the funeral, and a predictably motley bunch they are too: one priest, one successful businessman, one secret alcoholic, that sort of thing. After the wake when Mammy has been packed off to bed they crack into the booze and reminisce about old times - the expectation that something similar will happen after the funeral proper, however, is derailed somewhat by the unexpected arrival of one of Liam's old girlfriends and her son. Liam's son, also, it turns out. And so the wheel of life comes full circle, yadda yadda yadda.

While this is a great deal more linear and less opaque than Winterwood, it does suffer from being one of those books that doesn't contain a single character you can really like, or even care much about. Presumably Veronica is meant to be that person, but she's almost comically glum and joyless about everything, which makes it difficult. Liam, the golden boy of everyone's reminiscences, doesn't feature enough, even in flashback, for us to learn anything much about him except that he was a fairly cruel womaniser. And it seems that we're expected to swallow the implication that the abuse at the hands of Lamb Nugent was the reason for Liam's suicide without much compelling evidence being offered - I mean, fair enough, it may have been, but we want to avoid assuming causation where there isn't any, don't we? And the family drinkathon after the wake, which we assume is going to lead to truths being discussed and old wounds reopened, all that sort of thing, peters out without any of that after Veronica buggers off home early.

The Gathering won the Man Booker Prize in 2007 (making it the third Booker winner in this list after G. and Hotel Du Lac from 1972 and 1984 respectively) - the prizegiving blurb describes it as "exhilaratingly bleak" - well, I'd agree with the second half of that. I mean, it's fine, but.....hard to engage with, let's say. The one bit that's presumably meant to be uplifting, when Liam's son Rowan is wheeled out at the end, strikes a bit of a false note of tacked-on resolution after all the unremitting grimness that's preceded it. If it's a recommendation you're after here then what I would suggest you do is read Colm Tóibín's The Blackwater Lightship, which shares many of The Gathering's themes - female narrator, wayward brother, family gathering, Irish setting - but which is, for want of a better word, better.

cnoc cnoc: who's there

2011-12-11T23:40:00.008Z

More whisky now, as I've acquired a couple more bottles since last time. Firstly, here's the AnCnoc 12-year old, which I bought a duty-free litre bottle of on the way back from Scotland in September. AnCnoc is the rebranded output of the Knockdhu distillery, renamed to avoid confusion with Knockando, as featured here.

AnCnoc brands itself as a Highland Single Malt, thus putting itself in the same region as such diverse stuff as Dalmore, Clynelish, Old Pulteney and Ben Nevis. However, checking out the location of the distillery, right on the eastern edge of the Speyside region, gives you a better idea of what to expect. Far from resembling the toasty marmaladey delights of the Dalmore and the Ben Nevis, this is a lot more along the lines of the Cardhu and (ironically) the Knockando - sweet vanilla fudge followed by something a bit drier and more shortbread-y, maybe even slightly citrus-y, quite light in colour and taste, perfectly pleasant and quaffable, but perhaps not quite punchy enough to be truly memorable.

Next, Glenmorangie Lasanta. This is one of a range of special finishes that also includes Quinta Ruban (port) and Nectar D'Or (Sauternes) - this one is basically your bog-standard 10-year-old bourbon-cask-matured Glenmorangie given an extra two years in sherry casks and then bottled.

Now I'm mildly suspicious of fancy-dan finishing being applied to whisky - although both the Caol Ila and the Bruichladdich were perfectly nice - but the basic Glenmorangie product is full of lovely custardy goodness, so it's not as if they're trying to put lipstick on a pig here. And, sacrilegious though it might seem to say it, I reckon this might even be better than the standard product - the basic custard cream taste is still there, just wrapped up in a lovely warm jacket of comforting cakey sherryesque insulation that takes it more towards the territory occupied by the big sherry monsters like the Dalmore and the Aberlour.

Finally, Glenfiddich. It's taken a while to get round to by far the biggest-selling single malt whisky in the world, but Asda were knocking it out for a frankly derisory 18 quid last week so it seemed rude not to. We have of course featured a Fiddy here before, the Caoran Reserve, which (just to further undermine what I was saying earlier about special finishing) was really very good indeed. Anyway - read anything about the standard 12-year-old product and you'll discover that pretty much all of the reviews (like the Dalwhinnie heather thing) say "pears". I can sort of see what they mean, as there's something slightly fruitily astringent about it, though it could just as well be apples as far as I know.

The label blurb says it's a blend of sherry casks and bourbon casks, and sure enough (see below) colour-wise it's somewhere between the sherry-tastic Lasanta (on the left) and the bourbon-only AnCnoc (in the middle). Anyway, as you might expect from a gazillion-seller, there's nothing that's going to frighten the horses here, and I reckon the Caoran Reserve is better, but that's not really a complaint.

What, you want a verdict? All right: Lasanta first, Fiddy second, AnCnoc third. Happy now? That overall whisky league table is in the pipeline, honest.

reverend evil

2011-12-10T10:31:00.005Z

Here's a couple more gems from my inbox, of varying degrees of length, generosity and bewilderingness. Firstly this one:

I offer you the screenshot from my Hotmail inbox rather than just the text to illustrate the little cherry William has put on top of an otherwise rather mundane (well, apart from the 58 MILLION FREAKIN' DOLLARS) and matter-of-fact cake: he's a Reverend! No-one who holds the title Reverend could be an evil man. Surely.

It's not quite as pared-down to its bare essentials as this one, but it's pretty close. At least this one actually names a figure, rather than just saying, essentially: send money, get money, simples.

This one is a bit longer and more rambling. The opening greeting is a bit crawly bum-lick, though.

Hello dear,

I am Mrs. Sandra Collins I am a US citizen and am 68 years Old. I reside here in Denton, Texas; my residential address is as follows; 38 Wellington Oaks Cir, Denton, TX, United States. I am one of those who took part in the Compensation many years ago and I had paid over US$14,000 for the past years while in the US, trying to get my payment all to no avail.

So I decided to travel with my Son to WASHINGTON D.C with all my compensation documents, where I was directed by the (FBI) to contact Mr. Peter Okodua, who is a representative of the (FBI) and also a Human Right Activist at the COMPENSATION AWARD COMMITTEE currently in West Africa. However, he explained further in details that whosoever is contacting through emails are fake. In accordance with section 13(1)(n) of the international gambling act as adopted in 1993 and amended on 3RD July 1996 by the constitutional assembly.

Furthermore, I was re-issued a compensation sum of $600,000.00.Usd after all necessary clearance and legal documentations As directed for the claim of my Compensation payment which was released successfully.

In addition, I was fortunate to glance through the full information list of unpaid Beneficiaries in which this e-mail was addressed on that list.

In other words, you can stay in touch with Mr. Peter Okodua directly on the below details.

COMPENSATION AWARD HOUSE

Name: Mr. Peter Okodua
Email: mrpe_okodua@hotmail.com
Phone number: +234-703-767-4931

NOTE: I’ll advise you to stop all transactions whatsoever.

Thank You and Be Blessed.
Mrs. Sandra Collins

A couple of things to note: firstly that there is apparently a place called COMPENSATION AWARD HOUSE, which is pretty awesome, but, more importantly, we seem to have progressed to a sort of meta-419 scam here. The message is somewhat garbled and self-contradictory, but what I think Mrs. Sandra Collins is saying here is that she was scammed by advance-fee fraudsters, but found this great legal resource (the aforementioned COMPENSATION AWARD HOUSE, and the upstanding person of Mr. Peter Okodua in particular), who will sort everything out for you, including a generous compensation payment, for the payment of just this small and frankly insignificant fee! In advance!

Note that the sum involved is a relatively paltry 600,000 US dollars, small potatoes indeed compared to 58 million, but just remember that that one is A SCAM, and this one is TOTALLY REAL. Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain.

headline of the day

2011-12-05T23:18:00.006Z

Well, I don't know, you do your best to make your little corner of the blogosphere a brighter place, and this is the thanks you get:

Actually this is an article from today's Independent taking the piss out of giant pandas for being ridiculously fat, lazy, fussy eaters and generally useless at sex. So not like me at all, then - after all I am a relatively unfussy eater, as long as you go easy on the eggs. On the other hand, I do like a nice bamboo shoot or two.

abyssinia later: I'm off to hang with dahomeys

2011-11-30T13:42:00.013Z

My brief dalliance with mid-20th century African history and politics in the last book post, as well as the interesting old bits of paper post a few days ago, remind me that I have been sitting (not literally) on some more interesting stuff for a while. As so often the more fascinated by maps you are the more interesting it'll be.

My sister Hannah gave us a book of photographs from the Magnum photographic co-operative last Christmas - fascinating in its own right, but almost more fascinating (to me, anyway) was the paper she'd wrapped it in, an old wall map of some sort. Clearly fairly old, judging by the names of some of the countries. But how old?

We all know the method for dating a dictionary: masturbation. I don't mean doing it, I mean looking the word up. Maps require a different approach, though, and the obvious one would seem to be: construct a table of date ranges from the names shown on the map, and the date of the map will be in the (hopefully narrow) band of dates that they all have in common. Let's check it out.

Europe and the Middle East first - a larger map can be viewed here.

Most obviously there is a united Germany, which means it must be before 1949 (or after 1990, but I'm ruling out that possibility). The presence of the Polish Corridor and the Free City of Danzig suggests it's the post-Treaty of Versailles borders, i.e. after 1919.
Yugoslavia's borders suggest it's before 1941, it must also be after 1918 as Yugoslavia didn't exist before then.
Similarly Czechoslovakia didn't exist before 1918.
There's no Israel, so it must be before 1948.
The "Levant States" generally referred to the French Mandates of Syria and Lebanon between 1920 and 1946; similarly Transjordan existed between 1921 and 1946 (at which point it became Jordan).

Let's take a look at Asia (bigger map here):

French Indochina existed officially between 1887 and 1954, after which it became North and South Vietnam and Cambodia.
India is still occupying all the territory now occupied by Pakistan and Bangladesh, which puts it before 1947.
Sri Lanka is still called Ceylon; the change happened in 1972.
Sakhalin is still in two bits, the lower bit being the northernmost prefecture of Japan - this situation lasted from 1905 to 1945 when the whole island reverted to belonging to the Soviet Union.

This is all very interesting, but we know where the real interest is going to be: Africa. Countries change their names there as almost often as I change my underpants - i.e. once every two or three years. So we should be able to narrow it down still further. Let's have a look (bigger map here):

Dahomey existed as a separate state between 1894 and 1960 - it is now Benin.
Wikipedia is a bit sketchy over exactly when Abyssinia changed its name to Ethiopia, but it was at the latest in 1941 when it became independent.
Tanganyika became (along with Zanzibar) Tanzania in 1964.
Nyasaland became Malawi in 1964.
Basutoland became Lesotho in 1966.
South-West Africa became Namibia in 1968.
Bechuanaland Protectorate became Botswana in 1966.
French Guinea became Guinea in 1958.
Italian Somaliland became part of Italian East Africa in 1936.
Madagsacar became the Malagasy Republic in 1958 (and Madagascar again later).
Upper Volta is conspicuous by its absence as an independent state: this state of affairs existed between 1932 and 1947 (it's now Burkina Faso).
The splendidly-named Ubangi-Shari was a French territory which carried that name between 1903 and 1960 when it became the Central African Republic (which it still is).

So, if my identification of all those dates is correct, it would seem that we can conclude that this is a map of the world that dates from the mid-1930s, specifically between 1932 and 1936.

read all about it

2011-11-24T23:28:00.010Z

Much upheaval at Halibut Towers over the last few weeks, some planned, some not. More of that at tedious and unnecessary length later, but for the moment here's some by-products of a few trips up to our loft to lift up some boards and have a general root about and tidy up in advance of getting some electricians in to sort out the parlous and potentially fatal state of our wiring.

Among all the knackered old loft insulation, bits of polystyrene and wood and other assorted junk I found some bits of old newspaper that had evidently been used as makeshift packing and/or insulation back in the day. And when I say back in the day, I mean way back in the day, as upon closer inspection the bits I retrieved reasonably intact turned out to be from a copy of the South Wales Argus from Friday, January 20th, 1956. Here's a few scanned pages:

A few things to note:

There's a report on the first day's play in this unofficial Test match between England and Pakistan in Lahore.
Leslie Davey from Blaenavon was convicted of beating to death William Roberts, the man whom his wife had been "associating" with. Just to be clear for a 21st century audience, that means "fucking".
You could pick up a nice house in the Beechwood Park area (i.e. pretty much the exact location of Halibut Towers) for around £3,000.
Just to put that into perspective, a top salesman could expect to earn in excess of £1,000 per year.

There is (on the penultimate page) a list of the pubs in the Newport area where you could obtain a delicious pint of creamy Guinness (and these were the days when it was still OK to claim that it was "good for you"). Of the ones in Newport proper here's the current state of play:

The Cambrian Inn on Commercial Road appears to have met its demise fairly recently, as the building is still there, and still recognisably a pub, at least until recently.
J. Dobell and Bartholomew Ltd. on the High Street is long gone as far as I know.
The Griffin on Griffin Street is still there.
The Murenger House on the High Street is still there and remains probably the best of the city centre pubs; that said it's the only one on this short list that I've ever been in.
The Potter's Arms on Dock Street is now just Potters, a bit more trendy wine bar-y these days.
The Old Rising Sun on Shaftesbury Street is still there but is long since empty; it's on a bit of an awkward spot these days right on a roundabout under the giant Heidenheim Drive flyover.

duvalwatch continues

2011-11-23T22:21:00.004Z

There was an interesting article on the BBC website the other day about David Duval, one of my favourite golfers and a man whose recent trials and tribulations would have crushed the life out of a lesser man. Duval seems to have a Zen-like calm about him these days despite seemingly uncontrollably erratic form; the article describes his bid to qualify for his PGA Tour card for the 2012 season (and so far so good as he finished tied 2nd in the preliminary event).

The last time Duval got a mention here he had just finished tied 2nd in the 2009 US Open - after that he started off the 2010 season with a bang by finishing tied 2nd at the AT&T tournament at Pebble Beach. Results after that were a bit erratic, but included another top 10 at the Frys.com Open late in the season, and a few other decent results meant that he kept his tour card by finishing 106th on the money list, his best result since 2002. 2011 was less good - after a couple of tidy results in the early tournaments including a tie for 9th at the Northern Trust Open the rest of the season was pretty dreadful and he ended up down at 152nd on the money list, outside the top 125 that retain their card by right.

Duval's struggles resonate with me in particular, as he's not just grindingly mediocre in an easily understandable way - he makes a lot of birdies, but just throws in the occasional disastrous quadruple bogey at inopportune moments, something I can relate to very closely. But there are plenty of fairly recent examples of players emerging from decade-long slumps to enjoy a string of late-career victories, Hal Sutton and current world number 5 Steve Stricker to name but two.

the last book I read

2011-11-19T16:26:00.006Z

The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver.

I've seen this little quote in various places, mostly unattributed - this link attributes it to Annie Dillard's book Pilgrim At Tinker Creek, though she is only quoting a story she heard somewhere else. Anyway, here it is:

I read about an Eskimo hunter who asked the local missionary priest, 'If I did not know about God and sin, would I go to hell?' 'No,' said the priest, 'not if you did not know.' 'Then why,' asked the Eskimo earnestly, 'did you tell me?'

There are a few schools of thought regarding what you have to do to get to the Christian heaven (the particular branch of vacuous hand-waving nonsense concerned with this is called soteriology). Some say just being generally nice is enough, while others say no, you pretty much have to buy into the whole God/Jesus/crucufixion/rich man/eye of camel thing, otherwise you're fucked. Which, as this blog post observes, means that either all missionaries are arseholes, or God is.

Nathan Price clearly is of the get yourself in there and convert those heathen savages school of thought, and wouldn't have much truck with the Eskimo anecdote, judging by his decision to uproot his family from rural Georgia to the deepest darkest depths of the Congo in 1959. His wife Orleanna and his four daughters Rachel, Leah, Adah and Ruth May clearly don't get much of a say in the matter.

Needless to say when they get installed it's not quite the parade of grateful pickaninnies queuing up to be delivered from their primitive unsaved state that they might have expected - the locals have their own gods, thanks, and they seem to be about as effective as any others, generally not wiping out the harvest and killing everyone with flood and pestilence unless they really feel like it. Plus the village chief derives part of his authority from supposedly having the ear of certain key guys in the existing hierarchy. So this new guy Jesus is going to have to display some pretty impressive chops if he's going to displace the incumbents, and Reverend Price is labouring under a few disadvantages, not least the language barrier, but also a general lack of aptitude for dealing with conflict. It's probably at least partly a lack of practice, there being not much in the way of rival snake-worshipping voodoo religions in 1950s Georgia, and not much sassy back-chat at home either, the Rev being an iron-fist patriarchal type.

The daughters, whose alternating voices most of the novel is written in (with occasional interjections from Orleanna) are a bit more receptive to their new surroundings and do their best to integrate with the new community, in their differing ways. Rachel, the eldest, affects a lofty disdain for all the undignified messiness of it all, a stance somewhat undermined by her gift for unfortunate malapropism. Meanwhile feisty Leah helps her father dig the vegetable garden and picks off targets with her home-made bow and arrow, all watched by her mute and crippled twin sister Adah and younger sister Ruth May.

The family survives various scrapes - Adah is briefly believed to have been eaten by a lion, Ruth May breaks her arm, the village is briefly overrun by army ants, and Rachel has to negotiate a series of misunderstandings which nearly result in her being betrothed to the village chief Tata Ndu. Eventually their luck runs out, though; Ruth May is bitten by a green mamba and dies. This is the last straw for Orleanna, and, having presided over the burial, she leads the rest of her daughters out of the village, on foot and in the clothes they stand up in, leaving Nathan to continue his ministry alone.

Having gone their separate ways, the family re-establish themselves in various far-flung locations. Orleanna and Adah return to America, where Adah is eventually cured of her disabilities and becomes a doctor. Leah stays in the Congo with her husband Anatole and witnesses the country's troubled metamorphosis into Zaire. Meanwhile Rachel is working her way through a succession of husbands and ends up running a hotel somewhere north of Brazzaville. The fate of Nathan is never conclusively established, but it is rumoured that he chose the wrong group of people to preach to somewhere deep in the jungle and got himself killed. The novel ends with mother and daughters, reunited, returning to a newly-renamed Congo to try to locate Ruth May's grave.

The troubled history of this particular bit of central Africa, and the Congo Crisis of the early 1960s in particular, is tightly interwoven with the story of the Price family; it turns out, for instance, that Ruth May dies on the same day as Patrice Lumumba is killed and much hope for a brave post-colonial world dies with him. Instead Joseph Mobutu siezes power, with American connivance, and ushers in 30 years of violence and corruption.

The historical stuff is all very fascinating, in fact in a way it's more fascinating than the Price family's African antics - the first two-thirds of the book, covering the family's time living in the village, is interesting in its own way, but not much of any real consequence happens until Ruth May's death, at which point the chronological pace speeds up and the last third of the book covers 35 years or so. You can bet that if this had been by Joyce Carol Oates, an author whose work it superficially resembles, that a great deal more misery and indignity would have been heaped on the family's heads. The all-female voice means that Nathan is a strangely remote figure, too - the inner thoughts and motivations of an evangelical Baptist missionary prepared to come halfway across the world to preach are potentially a good deal more interesting than those of his sixteen-year-old daughter, with the best will in the world.

On the basis of the two Barbara Kingsolver novels I've read, I'd say Prodigal Summer is probably the one to go for, which is not to say that there's anything terribly wrong with The Poisonwood Bible, just that I wasn't totally bowled over by it. I'd also suggest that if you want a novel about a charismatic and slightly deranged father-figure leading his young family into the wilderness with predictably tragic results, the novel you want is Paul Theroux's The Mosquito Coast.

you ain't seen me, right

2011-11-16T22:36:00.005Z

A couple of brief supplementary bits after the last post:

We went to a few pubs in Edinburgh, most notably the excellent Abbotsford on Rose Street, which we went to while we were on our way to Calton Hill to watch the fireworks. The firework display was actually happening at Meadowbank Stadium a mile or so up the road, but we (and a lot of other people) decided we were too lazy and/or tight to get tickets so we hung around on top of the hill and watched from there. Anyway, the Abbotsford has many interesting local (or at least Scottish) ales, most notably Avalanche from the Fyne Ales brewery which I had a couple of and was very good.
If you followed the link to the Silent UK raid on the Forth Bridge you may have seen some of the other fascinating stuff on the site, most notably the infiltration of the now-defunct Mail Rail lines under London. The whole urban exploration thing is fascinating, I think - if you think so too then you will find much to enjoy at places like Forlorn Britain, Derelicte, Forbidden Places and PlaceHacking. If you're tempted to try and emulate any of their activities, just remember it's trespassing, almost certainly illegal and we never had this conversation.

you (now) know what I did last summer

2011-11-16T19:19:00.005Z

Here's a few links to some recent batches of photos that may or may not be of interest:

Firstly, and rather belatedly, some photos from my wedding to the lovely Hazel back in June at the delightful Steppes Farm, which is in Rockfield just a few miles from Monmouth. The licensed venue for weddings at Steppes Farm is their restaurant, The Stonemill, which is also well worth a visit just for the food, which is excellent. They also serve excellent beer from the Kingstone Brewery, which is just a few miles away in Tintern - the Kingstone Gold is particularly quaffable, and I should know, as I quaffed quite a quantity of it on the day.
Secondly, the annual Swanage trip in September. You'll pretty much know the drill by now, and I've eased off on the obsessive documentation of the pub crawl(s), so there are fewer photos than in previous years. We did, however, branch out on the Sunday and go to Wareham, where, after a pitifully short token stroll up the river and back we did a tour of some pubs, most of which were quite good, the pick probably being The Old Granary, which in addition to having a scenic riverside location and some of the best Badger beer I've ever had, appears to have a strictly all-supermodel bar staff hiring policy in place, which is nice.
Finally, a brief jaunt to Edinburgh a couple of weeks ago to do a recce for a wedding Hazel is shooting in December, as well as some standard touristy activities we didn't do last time we were there in February 2009. One of the things we did do last time was visit the Scotch Whisky Experience up by the castle, but as it was being refurbished at the time we got a somewhat cut-down version of the full experience - basically a room, a video, a PowerPoint presentation and a glass of whisky. This time, however, we got the full multimedia package complete with a trip on a little ghost-train style ride with carriages shaped like whisky barrels. And, equally importantly, more whisky (Old Pulteney, as it happens, on this occasion). Served, interestingly, in a room dedicated to displaying the world's largest single collection of Scotch whisky, collected by some guy from Chile and then donated. A fascinating historical document (of, in a lot of cases, distilleries that no longer exist and whiskies that can no longer be obtained, anywhere) but I really think buying this stuff and then not consuming it is missing the point a bit. We also rectified an omission from an earlier trip and climbed the 287 steps to the top of the Scott Monument. I should warn anyone aspiring to do this that the last section is very cramped and narrow; I am not especially fat (well, not massively fat, anyway) but I did struggle to cram my broad manly shoulders through the top section of the spiral staircase and emerge onto the top platform. Good views, though. And you get a certificate (see right). While Hazel was off doing wedding-related activity on the Saturday morning I took myself off on the train from Haymarket to North Queensferry (about a fiver for a return, and a trip of about 15-20 minutes) to have a look at the Forth Bridge. And very impressive too, although it was still somewhat shrouded in mist. So I went back to the station, got on a train going the other way, got off at Dalmeny on the other side of the bridge and wandered about the slightly larger and more interesting South Queensferry for a bit. By that time the mist had cleared and I got some quite good pictures, aided by the bridge being largely free of unsightly scaffolding for once. Those even more fascinated by bridges than me might want to get even more up close and personal, in which case try either this video of someone taking a lift to the top, or this account of some somewhat hair-raising ninja-stylee urban exploration.

good heavens

2011-11-01T09:09:00.009Z

Any form of social change which proceeds by little baby steps (as most of them do) will tend to be largely invisible to those participating in it unless they make a point of stepping back and reflecting on it. Hell, that applies to any form of incremental change; I still see the same face looking back out of the bathroom mirror as I did when I was 20, but I'm self-aware enough to know that that's an illusion.

It's instructive, then, to watch this clip from the BBC programme The Big Questions and reflect that it wouldn't have been so long ago that it would have been unthinkable for the intervention about 25 seconds in to have been made, and for the subsequent exchange to have happened. If for some reason you can't see the clip, here's a (slightly paraphrased) summary:

God-botherer: All aborted foetuses go to heaven. Totes. For real.
Sensible woman: By that rationale, doesn't that mean we've done them a favour by aborting them before they can get all soiled and sinful?
God-botherer: No. Also....look over there! [runs away]
Sensible woman: This whole "heaven" idea is patently ridiculous, isn't it? I mean, look at yourselves.
Some idiot: Aha, but you "believe" in money, and that doesn't exist, does it? HA! CHECKMATE!
Sensible woman: WTF?
Some idiot: Money. Doesn't exist. Ergo, a) there is a God, and b) I win.
Sensible woman: WTF?

The woman courageous enough to tell a room full of swivel-eyed goddists that they are idiots is Kate Smurthwaite, who is a stand-up comic, vice-chair of Abortion Rights UK, blogger and tweeter.

Now you might usefully choose to argue with the value of calling those who believe in heaven "idiots" (clearly by any objective measure they are idiots, but you might question the political effectiveness of telling them so). It's interesting, though, to compare that pretty mild rebuke with the reactions in the comments threads at the various sites where the video clip has been posted, a few of which are reproduced here, and a disturbing number of which take the form "how dare she - a woman - diss God? Someone should RAPE SOME SENSE INTO HER". Now it's not necessarily easy to tell which of these are genuine insane religious outrage, and which are just 14-year-olds trolling, and, in both cases, how much these sentiments are amplified as a result of the Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory, but it puts "idiot" in perspective, anyway.

Of course the increasing social acceptability of vocal dissent from the status quo of religious nonsense being given uncritical approval is great - on the other hand the fact that there still exists a religious TV programme on a main terrestrial channel called The Big Questions is a bit depressing. As this tweet says, as far as God and religion go there really is only one "big question", and the answer is "no".

mmmmm......fattening

2011-10-30T19:17:00.007Z

We went to the Cowbridge Food Festival today, always a reliable source of tempting yet expensive gourmet items. Today's haul (pictured below) included:

Some cheddar from the Blaenafon Cheddar Company - this particular one has Brains SA and chillies in it
Some more cheddar from the Snowdonia Cheese Company - one garlic and herb one and a cranberry one
Some elephant garlic from the Garlic Farm on the Isle of Wight
A beef and stilton pie from the Wessex Pantry
Some venison haunch steaks from Venison in the Vale
Some assorted chocolate brownies from the Chocolate Brownie Company
Some Calabrian sausages from Gorno's

We also popped into the Vale Of Glamorgan Inn as they were running a real ale festival. I had a couple of quite decent pints, which is always nice at a real ale festival where you're generally required to choose from a list of a dozen or so you've never heard of, but more importantly in order to get to the bar for the second of them I had to step around none other than legendary Wales and British Lions full-back JPR Williams. Given that the 17-month driving ban he picked up for a drink-driving incident in March 2010 will have expired only a couple of months ago I trust he had made alternative arrangements for getting home, seeing as how he was tucking into a pint with some gusto.

the last book I read

2011-10-27T19:08:00.007+01:00

The Very Model Of A Man by Howard Jacobson.

A good story has a beginning, a middle and an end, they say. And this one has a beginning, all right: the Beginning Of All Things, which, according to some people anyway, was exactly 6014 years ago last Sunday.

Actually we don't quite start from the very beginning, as this isn't principally God's story, any more than it is Adam and Eve's, though they all feature at various points. This is the story of Cain, a more significant figure in human history (or at least this mythical version of it) than most people realise. Think about it: the first human to be born, rather than just poofed into existence out of some dust or a rib-bone, and therefore the first baby, the first child, the first teenager, all that stuff, as well as possibly the first person with a belly-button. And, of course, as you'll know if you were paying attention in bible study class, the first murderer.

It's not quite a straight rehash of the Book of Genesis, though - Adam and Eve aren't the innocent fig-leaf-clad nymphs of popular legend, but instead a pair of cantankerous middle-aged types, while God is barely competent to take charge of the planet without accidentally magicking stuff into existence left and right. Meanwhile Cain amuses himself thinking up names for stuff - parsley! gazelle! molybdenum! - and growing various amusing mutant plants. All is well until Eve bears another son - Abel, the apple of his parents' eyes, and the source of much inevitable fraternal (and, ultimately, fratricidal) tension and resentment.

These post-Edenic reminiscences are revealed to be a series of public performance-art-esque readings given by Cain in his new dwelling place, Babel. Yeah, that Babel. What he's been up to since fleeing the familial home isn't clear, but he's now set up in Babel and seems to be something of a local celebrity, as well as a focus for fear and superstition among the local seers and sages and entrail-readers.

Anyway, Cain's rambling recollections eventually build up to the climax we and his audience have been waiting for, the story of how he killed his brother. Having delivered himself of this, he feels it necessary to escape from other people, and from the ground which cried out and betrayed him after he killed his brother. So, what better way to do this than to build a ruddy great big tower? That can only go well.

The Very Model Of A Man could be said to mark a key mid-point in Howard Jacobson's literary career - following the rollicking comic novels Coming From Behind, Peeping Tom and Redback (the last of these published in 1986, six years before The Very Model Of A Man in 1992), and preceding a six-year gap in his output (prompted, some say, by the lukewarm critical reception it got). It's certainly the least obviously comic of the novels of his that I've read, though it does still contain some cherishable turns of phrase, and is (as all Jacobson's books are) liberally marinated in concentrated Jewishness, with the obligatory kvetching and pessimism.

Beyond the surface cleverness and the bold choice of subject matter it's hard to see the point of it, though: it's not as if there's any particular surprise in the climactic revelation about Abel's death; we all knew that was going to happen, and there isn't even the consolation of any spectacular chainsaw dismemberment or anything like that; Cain just punches him in the head a few times and he carks it. In Cain's defence, though, bear in mind that Abel is the first person in human history to die - had God made it clear that this was even possible? This is all pre-Ten Commandments, don't forget, with the "thou shalt not kill" and all that stuff. Are we sure that Cain knew the possible consequences of his actions? What the point of all the surrounding scenes set in Babel is isn't clear either, beyond establishing, given Cain's treatment of his native girlfriend Zilpah, that a few years contemplating the error of his ways hasn't made him a nicer person.

A geographical footnote, while I remember: the half-built ziggurat at Etemenanki that Cain is offered as the starting point for his tower is a real place, a few miles south of Baghdad, and is even marked as "Tower of Babel" on Google Maps. Nothing but a few lumps of rubble left now, though.

No doubt Woody Allen is heartily sick of people hankering after "the early, funny ones", but my favourite Jacobson books are the first three. The later ones like No More Mr. Nice Guy and The Mighty Walzer are fine, but don't have the manic comic energy of the earlier ones. And The Very Model Of A Man is probably best described as an interesting experiment with some good moments, but overall it feels like an overwrought attempt to write something "serious" and "significant". Peeping Tom is probably still the one I would recommend, overall, though I should point out that I haven't read the more recent ones like the 2010 Booker winner The Finkler Question.

you really CAN'T get better than a Kwik-Fit fitter

2011-10-22T21:34:00.005+01:00

I went to Kwik-Fit the other day. Nothing so very out of the ordinary in that, you might say, and of course you would be right. It was just a fairly bog-standard trip to get the front two tyres on my car replaced, expedited by the provision of the facility to pre-order your chosen tyres via the Kwik-Fit website.

It's all done while-u-wait stylee, so my only complaint would be regarding my own failure to take a book with me, so I was left reading an out-of-date Sunday newspaper colour supplement for the 45 minutes or so I was sitting around waiting for the horny-handed oily proletarian type they'd assigned to my car to finish the job.

No, the only reason I mention any of this is that on examination of the invoice they presented me once they'd done the job I discovered something rather interesting. Take a look:

No? Look a little closer; here, I'll do it for you:

I swear to you there's no fakery involved here; my car was genuinely manhandled by that bloke off Civilisation (here's episode 1 in full; check out the sidebar for the others) in the early 1970s (and Conservative MP and serial sex pest Alan Clark's dad), with subsequent quality control procedures being carried out by Frank Sinatra's mate and Jerry Lewis' comedy sidekick. You can just imagine what would have happened if something had proved to be seriously wrong with the car:

When some swarf hits your eye
Like a big pizza pie
That's your head gasket gone, guv, that'll cost you

- not to be confused, of course, with the marine biologist eel-spotting song That's A Moray; one of a whole sub-genre of songs including Come On And Do The Conger and Are Eels Electric? And of course this one.

that's quite a feet

2011-10-21T22:08:00.004+01:00

It's tabloid innumeracy time again. Have a look at this Daily Mail story about some canoe-footed freak who sent off for a pair of slippers off the internet, one a size 13 and the other a size 14½. He got the size 13 one back all right, or so the story goes, but there was a decimal point mix-up with the other one and he ended up with a size 1450 slipper! Which is seven feet long! Those crazy inscrutable Chinese.

Now I know what you're thinking, because it's what I was thinking - why would a decimal point mix-up result in a size 1450 slipper? A size 145 one, sure, but how and why would they have slipped the extra zero in? And while there isn't a strict linear relationship between shoe sizes, surely common sense dictates that a ratio of 100 between the shoe sizes would have resulted in a ratio of more than seven (if we assume, and let's do that for the moment, that the proper size one would have been about a foot long) between the slippers?

Time to pop over to Wikipedia for the lowdown on how UK shoe sizes are calculated. It turns out that the length difference between successive shoe sizes is a barleycorn, or a third of an inch, and that an adult size 1 shoe will fit a foot 8⅔ inches long. The upshot of which is that given either the shoe size S or the foot length L (in inches) you can calculate the other by plugging it into one of the following formulae:

S = 3L - 25
L = (S + 25)/3

So if you had a foot that was exactly a foot long, you would take a size 11 shoe. Similarly, a size 14.5 shoe would fit a foot (14.5 + 25)/3 = 13.2 inches long.

So what of the claim in the original story? Well, let's plug some numbers into the formulae and see what falls out. A seven-foot slipper is 84 inches long, which means it corresponds to shoe size 227. On the other hand, a size 145 slipper is 56.7 inches long, or about 4 feet 9 inches. Stick an extra factor of ten into the mix, though, and you find that a size 1450 slipper is 491.7 inches long, or a fraction under 41 feet. Considerably bigger than the one in the picture, clearly.

So pretty much none of the numbers in the Mail's story bear any resemblance to reality. It seems most likely that what they've got hold of here is a publicity stunt for a shoe-related website, combined that with a failure to do even the most basic checking of either the facts or the sanity of the numbers being thrown around, and vomited up this pointless abomination onto the page.

howls of derisive laughter, bruce

2011-10-20T22:28:00.006+01:00

More interesting and revealing word choices from the Daily Mail today as they attempt to wind their readership up to a frothing climax of right-wing outrage. Here's Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard, the brazen hussy, not only failing to wear a hat in the presence of the Queen, but also failing to display the correct degree of servile forelock-tugging deference to unearned privilege by curtsying in the designated manner. I don't know, you hand the bally country over to the bally convicts and this is the sort of thanks you get. As always the comment thread provides some amusingly frothing lunacy:

She has no breeding whatsoever, that is why she didn't curtsey. Awful excuse for a woman, and an even worse example for a leader of a government.

Explanation for this weird and seditious behaviour is provided just beneath the main banner headline: apparently Ms. Gillard is a "self-confessed republican". Not only that, but she is - you might want to sit down at this point - an atheist; self-confessed, I shouldn't wonder. And not married. And, most troublingly for the Mail's readership, it is strongly rumoured that she is a woman. The horror!

Fortunately the Queen is a good Sheila, and not at all stuck-up.

[Following a brief exchange in the comments wherein it was pointed out that Gillard was born in Barry, I hereby nominate her Welshman of the Day as well; for a gender-based disclaimer regarding this title see this post.]

celebrity lookeylikey of the day

2011-10-16T11:52:00.005+01:00

Here's a couple selected from the team I confidently expect, after today's awesome performance against Australia in the semi-final, to be lifting the World Cup next weekend. France may have something to say about that, but they'll have to improve by several hundred percent on anything we've seen so far. Anyway, here's splendidly-named All Black full-back Israel Dagg and American actor (and ex-husband of Greta Scacchi, the jammy git) Vincent D'Onofrio, pictured here in Full Metal Jacket. Thanks to Dagg's efforts it was the Australians who were in a world of shit, however.

Next, and I'm aware that I'm not the first to notice this, here's All Black centre (and sole try-scorer today) Ma'a Nonu, and the Predator, Arnie's main antagonist in the 1987 film, erm, Predator.

i've got some dice; fancy a game of c***s?

2011-10-15T21:33:00.005+01:00

Just as the producers of the Ed Sullivan Show discovered in the mid-1960s when they took exception to the line "trying to make some girl" in the Rolling Stones' song (I Can't Get No) Satisfaction and demanded that it be bleeped, getting all pearl-clutchy and censoring something entirely innocuous usually just leads to people filling in the blanks in their own minds with something far more filthy. Here's a good example:

My first thought (WARNING: swearing approaching) was: what the hell is a "cuntping machine"? Is that even a word?

For full comedy effect note also that the shooter was called Mr. Deadman, and that he claimed to be acting on orders from the golf club's manager, one Mr. Badger. You couldn't make it up. Unless someone did, which, on reflection, this being the Daily Mail, is quite possible.

stand up and be counted

2011-10-11T21:38:00.008+01:00

Hearken ye back, my friends, if you will, to the brief bit I did some time back about the Bill Bailey gig we'd been to in Bristol. Now Bill was pretty good, but I don't want to claim that he was the catalyst for the sharp uptick in the frequency of our attendance at various comedy gigs in the Bristol and Cardiff area over the last 18 months or so. Nonetheless, deny it as I may, that uptick has provably and demonstrably happened, and so it demands an explanation. And yet I don't have one. Deal with it.

Anyway, we're perhaps in danger of straying from the point, which is, or was, a brief summary of some recent comedy gigs I've been to, possibly with a view to influencing, however slightly, your future comedy-gig-attendance behaviour patterns. I will say, in advance, that there seems to have been a bit of an Irish theme - I don't know why, that's just how it panned out.

Dara O'Briain, also in Bristol, in, if this review is of the same gig, which I suspect it is, March 2010. He's stopped doing the excellent homeopathy routine, but it was still very good.
Russell Howard at the Cardiff International Arena, which since we went there has mutated, Fiery Phoenix stylee, into the Motorpoint Arena. He was fine, though he's a bit matey and genial and bouncy for me, and the CIA (as it was) is a great huge echoey impersonal enormodome of a place, which isn't ideal for a comedy gig.
Dylan Moran at the St. David's Hall in Cardiff. I had high expectations of this as I love Black Books and I've seen some gig footage on TV which was hilarious. However, I don't know whether he was just having an off night (and with someone whose act is as apparently randomly rambling and discursive as Moran's - though of course it could be incredibly tightly scripted for all I know - there's probably some natural variation) or had imbibed too heartily of the backstage hospitality, but he seemed to be phoning it in somewhat. I was reassured that I hadn't just imagined this when he apologised when signing off before the interval for having been a bit rubbish and promised to be better afterwards. Which he was, to be fair, but the damage had been done.
Ed Byrne, also at the St. David's Hall, just a couple of weeks ago. Now I'd seen Ed Byrne on various comedy panel shows - Mock The Week, for instance - and he was, you know, OK. So my expectations were sort of middling - maybe that's the key, as in fact it was excellent.

Fondly remembered comedy gigs from my past include before-they-were-famous encounters with Harry Hill and Al Murray in the comedy/cabaret tent at Glastonbury back in the 1990s, punctuated by foul-mouthed and increasingly surreal (and increasingly naked as the evening wore on) compering from the late Malcolm Hardee, including some memorable banter with a bloke in the audience who kept bellowing "tell us a joke" at him. Hardee's reply was "OK, I'll tell you a joke - there was an Englishman, an Irishman and a Scotsman.....and they all thought you were a cunt".

Now that Bill Hicks is dead the living comic I'd most like to get to see is probably Stewart Lee, though I accept that he is a bit Marmite-y - you either think the Beckettian deconstruction of all the scaffolding under the jokes is the funniest thing ever or you hate every minute of it. I find it difficult to believe that people would not find the somewhat controversial Top Gear routine to be a work of genius though. Also, showbiz anecdote time: I once saw Stewart Lee walking past the Queen's Head and Artichoke pub near Great Portland Street tube station in London while I was sitting around outside with my friends Mark & Lorna eating tapas. Slightly redder in the face and fatter in real life, as all showbiz types are when not caked in slap and wearing a corset.

saturday, 6am and I've got a semi

2011-10-11T09:52:00.005+01:00

I reckon this has been one of the more interesting Rugby World Cups, and of course it's not over yet. My overall opinion may yet be coloured by what happens on Saturday morning, but for the moment it's all very exciting. As always Welsh expectation has gone through the roof, largely off the back of one very impressive performance against an Irish team who probably started the game as marginal favourites.

We were a bit up and down during the group stages, starting with a narrow loss to South Africa that really should have been a win, following up with a nervous win over our old nemeses Samoa, and then two easy wins over Namibia and Fiji that included lots of confidence-building tries but didn't really tell anyone anything useful. So we'll see. My only worry is that we may just go into the semi-final as slight favourites, which is an unaccustomed position for us, but if we play like we did against Ireland there's absolutely no reason why we can't win.

Inevitably there's been lots of harking back to the inaugural World Cup in 1987, which was the only previous occasion Wales got to this stage of the tournament, eventually finishing third after a last-gasp 22-21 win over Australia in the play-off match, thanks to this Adrian Hadley try and Paul Thorburn's touchline conversion. It's also been noted that the four semi-finalists here (Wales, France, New Zealand and Australia) are the same as at the 1987 tournament.

Here's another little statistical oddity that makes this current World Cup unique, though: three of the four semi-finalists have lost at least one pool match on the way.

Wales lost 17-16 to South Africa
Australia lost 15-6 to Ireland
France lost 37-17 to New Zealand
France lost 19-14 to Tonga

France's qualification for the semi-final stage after losing two pool matches is unique in World Cup history. The only previous World Cup semi-finalists to arrive at that stage without a 100% record in the pool matches were:

France in 1987 who drew 20-20 with Scotland in the pool stages
England in 1991 who lost 18-12 to New Zealand in the pool stages
England in 2007 who lost 36-0 to South Africa in the pool stages
France in 2007 who lost 17-12 to Argentina in the pool stages

The first three of those went on to reach the final, but all lost. Unless the All Blacks win the tournament as expected (and given their history, plus a couple of key injuries, most notably to Dan Carter, you never know) then this will be the first World Cup won by a team who lost a match on the way. Exciting times.

the rear of the hair in the easiest and best way

2011-10-08T21:34:00.009+01:00

We're all accustomed to clearing a bit of spam out of our webmail accounts - you know, that phishing, advance fee fraud and herbal Viagra stuff that clutters up your inbox and your junk mail folder and obscures that vital and long-awaited mail from the cantilevered genital truss suppliers.

I've never had spam in Arabic before, though, so I was slightly taken aback to get a few in the last couple of days.

Now normally you can just scan down the list and go: yup, herbal Viagra, 419, 419, fake Facebook message, phishing, herbal Viagra, etc. and then just click "empty". But how to know what the Arabic messages are telling you, or indeed selling you? It could be something really important, like directions to the Ark of the Covenant or something like that. Luckily Google Translate has an Arabic capability these days, so let's do a bit of cut & pasting and see what we get:

Well I don't remember that from Koran school. Let's try another one:

Well I don't know if doing it "Basahel ways" makes any difference, but that appears to be essentially the same thing. How about the next one?

Those crazy Sri Lankans. Here's the last one:

That doesn't make a lot of sense, but that's just the subject line; the body of the e-mail goes on at some length in similarly incoherent vein. Whether this incoherence is a property of the original e-mail or of Google's translation I'm not remotely qualified to tell you, but this one seems to be a bit more in the standard vein of trying to get you to buy something rather than obsessing about clitoral hygiene or male breast-feeding, which to be honest is something of a relief.

the last book I read

2011-10-01T13:58:00.007+01:00

Havoc, In Its Third Year by Ronan Bennett.

It's some time shortly after 1630 - no, not half past four, you idiot, the year 1630. Which means that we're in the reign of Charles I, who of course eventually met a head-choppy demise at the hands of Oliver Cromwell's Roundheads. We haven't got to that stage yet, but there is an increasingly militant upswell of Puritan feeling afoot.

It's in this climate of suspicion that John Brigge comes to an unnamed town somewhere in the north of England to discharge his duties as coroner, specifically in regard to a seemingly clear-cut case of infanticide - Irishwoman Katherine Shay has been arrested after a dead newborn infant is found in her room at a lodging-house. An open-and-shut case, on the face of it, but one of the primary witnesses, a young woman, has disappeared. Brigge orders her found and brought before him before a verdict can be reached.

Brigge himself is somewhat preoccupied with matters relating to childbirth - his wife Elizabeth is expecting their first child, and he must regularly ride the distance between his country farm and the town in order to keep tabs on Elizabeth's condition while still fulfilling his duties as coroner. These duties are made more difficult by the increasingly hysterical political atmosphere - Brigge's former friend Nathaniel Challoner has been swept to power in the town on a promise to crack down on matters of law and order, dispense swift justice for wrongdoers, cleanse the streets of vagrants and petty criminals, that sort of thing. The Puritan underpinnings of all this cause Brigge further problems - he is secretly a Catholic, something that could already get you into trouble, but which under the brutal new regime would probably cost you your head.

Brigge's child (a son) eventually arrives, but not without a few dicey moments for both mother and child. When Brigge returns to his duties after this drama he finds things have deteriorated further - various former town dignitaries have been arrested and imprisoned on trumped-up charges, and he himself is viewed with increasing suspicion. He discovers that the young witness in the Katherine Shay case has still not been found and resolves to find her, concluding that the town's governing regime's reluctance to pursue her must mean they have something to hide. having finally caught up with her he finds that this is true - it was her child that died, and the child's father who smothered it in a bid not to be revealed as the father. But who was he? Brigge suspects Richard Doliffe, a local constable who has risen rapidly under Challoner's regime, but before he can act he discovers that his wife has died (of some sort of post-childbirth blood infection, by the sound of it). After burying her and returning to town he finds that things have reached a new pitch of hysteria and paranoia, and shortly after witnessing the hanging of a Catholic priest he is arrested and imprisoned.

Awaiting his inevitable public execution, Brigge awakens to find smoke pouring in through the window; the town is under attack and on fire. Released from his cell by a former employee of his who is now working for Challoner, Brigge escapes, then returns to the prison, frees as many prisoners as he can and flees the town with a motley assortment of followers, including Katherine Shay, various members of his household staff and his infant son.

Inspired by Katherine Shay's constant addressing of Brigge as "Germanus" a loose cult grows up around Brigge, who had after all delivered most of them from probable death. Not really the time or the place to be deviating from Protestant orthodoxy, though, and the people the group meet react badly to the pilgrims, eventually resulting in a violent encounter as a result of which Brigge is reunited, in a way, with Elizabeth.

Bennett is an interesting character, by the sound of his Wikipedia page; Northern Irish, imprisoned a couple of times for his political activities in the 1970s, he's written a couple of novels set in exotic locales which seem to be allegories for stuff closer to home (The Catastrophist for one), and Havoc, In Its Third Year is similar, though time is the distancing factor here. The past is a foreign country, after all. The modern themes being satirised are clear though, fundamentalism, intolerance, anti-intellectualism, that sado-masochistic yearning conservatively-inclined people have for a Strong And Decisive Leader who will Crack Down on stuff and Get Things Sorted Out. And once things are sorted out, you can have your basic rights back, OK? It's just that at the moment, in the current climate, they're inconveniencing the swift discharge of justice.

You could ignore the allegorical stuff and just read it as a rollicking story of intrigue and suspense if you wanted though, and it would still work. The language in particular is nicely pitched - you want people speaking in plausibly archaic-sounding English instead of saying "yeah, that is well bad, innit", but you don't want impenetrable archaisms sending you to the dictionary every five minutes and getting in the way of the story. My only criticism would be that the ending is a bit weird - the mini-pilgrimage after the escape from the burning town only occupies the last ten pages or so, but it adds a weirdly quasi-religious coda that doesn't really sit comfortably with what's preceded it. And Brigge's demise with the visions of Elizabeth beckoning him across a field of corn is a bit, well, corny, evoking as it does the final scene of Gladiator.

That aside this is excellent, though, and the judges who gave out the Irish Novel Of The Year award in 2005 agreed with me, which is nice, even if they did give the equivalent 2007 award to Winterwood, which I was less keen on.

headlines of the day

2011-09-28T22:39:00.008+01:00

It appears, tragically, that the story of Percy Foster, dwarf, porn star and Gordon Ramsay lookeylikey, and his tragic death in a badger sett in mid-Wales was made up. Which is a terrible shame, as it generated some cracking headlines, of varying degrees of hysteria - the first is from Sky Australia and the second from the inimitable Sunday Sport (where the story seems to have originated).

Apparently real, though, however much it might sound like something out the Final Destination movies, is this story of a bloke who managed to fall into a clothes horse - and not in an understandably fatal manner like out of an aeroplane or anything, it was from ground level.

there's nothing like a tight end in frilly pants

2011-09-28T22:09:00.006+01:00

Following on from my pointless bitching at the tail-end of the last post, here's another thing that always strikes me as odd - more in amusement than anger this time.

Have you noticed how people mangle the fairly simple French word lingerie? You know, bras and pants and stuff. I don't know (just as an aside) if there's some sort of ISO standard for the threshold of skimpiness and frilliness which marks the boundary between bog-standard "underwear" and Sunday-best "lingerie", but clearly some sort of dividing line exists, however arbitrary. Anyway, while standard French pronunciation would require the word to be rendered "lan-jer-ee", with the middle syllable all but swallowed if you're doing a proper French accent, more often than not people render it "lon-jer-ay" for reasons I can't begin to imagine. The Wikipedia article linked above reckons this a specifically US pronunciation, but I've heard it in the UK as well, probably more often that the proper one in fact (though I should point out that I don't hang out in social circles where the word lingerie crops up all that much in day-to-day conversation).

More importantly the picture on the right isn't posed, or at least not in quite the way you might think; no, there really is a Lingerie Football League (in America, naturally) where young ladies play American football while wearing their underwear (and a token amount of protective clothing). I think I'm right in saying that this is the most awesome sport ever invented anywhere, ever.

salander hope and glory

2011-09-27T22:07:00.008+01:00

I've now seen a couple of trailers for the English-language version of The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, and, well, it looks like it might be pretty good. David Fincher has a track record of interesting stuff, the cast is certainly suitably stellar, and Rooney Mara has undergone a pretty dramatic Lisbethification process by undergoing an eye-watering selection of piercings and a disastrous haircut. In fact I'd say, solely on the basis of appearances, that she's closer to Lisbeth Salander as written than Noomi Rapace in the original Swedish adaptations, as she's more frighteningly skinny and intimidating-looking. By contrast I think Michael Nyqvist is probably closer to Mikael Blomkvist as written, Daniel Craig being a bit clenched and buff for the role - despite being a thinly-disguised authorial alter ego, and therefore irresistible to women, Blomkvist is meant to be a bit rumpled and out of condition.

Now there is a school of thought that says that it's axiomatic that the Swedish adaptation is better, what with it being Swedish and all. I view this as being an aspect of the same kind of Scando-fetishism that unquestioningly rates things like Let The Right One In and Wallander as better than, say, UK or US vampire films and detective dramas just because of the exotic setting - and the sneaking suspicion we Brits have that the Scandinavians are all having a constant akvavit-fuelled sauna-based sex orgy while we're doing it with the lights off and our socks on.

There may be a language snobbery element to it as well - the original film being somehow more authentic because it's in the original Swedish, acted by Swedish actors. Well, the trouble with that (apart from the inherent difficulties with subtitled movies) is that it's a ridiculous double standard - am I to be pilloried because I didn't read the novel in the original Swedish? Because, I didn't, I read it in English.

This raises another vexed question, though, the question of accents. Here is an English-language film set in Sweden, featuring people who are meant to be Swedish. So should they speak with Swedish accents? That way lies the danger of ending up sounding like the Swedish chef on the Muppet Show. On the evidence of the trailer, Rooney Mara is sporting a bit of a Swedish accent, and Stellan Skarsgård sounds a bit Swedish (but then of course he is Swedish), while the rest of the cast who speak any significant amount of dialogue (mainly Daniel Craig and Christopher Plummer) stick with pretty bog-standard unaccented English.

All of which is fine by me - you're asking for a fair bit of suspension of disbelief just by having foreign characters converse in English, and if you go too far by having people identify their nationality solely by accent you run the risk of ending up in Allo, Allo territory, which clearly no-one wants. The only alternative is sticking rigidly to the original languages, which you can get away with if you're Quentin Tarantino, but not otherwise.

On an almost completely unrelated topic, but just while we've got the word "tattoo" in our collective head, can we all stop pronouncing French actress Audrey Tautou's surname as if it were the word "tattoo"? Read it, notice the "u" after the "a", realise it must be pronounced "toe-too", do so, move on with your life, stop annoying me. Ditto "sudoku". Japanese word, three syllables, clearly and unambiguously must be pronounced "soo-doh-koo", simples. So what's with probably more than 50% of people pronouncing it "suh-doo-koh"? I literally can't fathom whether it's some sort of mass hysteria, word blindness, laziness or just blithering stupidity, but people do it all the time. LOOK AT THE LAST LETTER! IT'S A "U"! HOW CAN IT BE PRONOUNCED LIKE AN "O"? Oh, it makes me mad.

total loonar e-clips

2011-09-24T21:53:00.012+01:00

I think it's perhaps time for a bit of a round-up of some recent religious lunacy. Remember, I seek this stuff out so that you don't have to.

Firstly, there's been a couple of bits in the news recently about the campaign to raise a bit of consciousness about barking religious lunacy being taught in British schools, under the weaselly guise of Intelligent Design. Here in the UK we scoff superiorly at the constant battle in the USA to combat those who want to try to sneak creationism into the curriculum, or edge evolution out of it, in an "it couldn't happen here" sort of way, but it can and it may unless we get our act together. We've been bumbling along just assuming no-one would be so stupid as to try and sneak religion into the science classroom up to now, but the campaign's assertion is that we now need some specific guidelines, and they're probably right.

The campaign already has an impressive number of heavyweight signatories, including, inevitably, Richard Dawkins, who got wheeled out on Radio 4's PM programme earlier this week to provide a bit of contrast to the dim bulb they'd dug up to argue for teaching the controversy or some such nonsense - Simon Morris, who is apparently a science teacher to some kids in London, poor bastards. It's not a very edifying exchange, largely because Morris is such a dimwit, but it at least illustrates that there are people out there who really believe this stuff, and some of them could be teaching your kids.

That was just to warm your blood up to a gentle simmer so you don't sprain anything when I unload this next lot on you.

Here's an amusing article in the Washington Post that seeks to allay the fears of anyone who thinks that the latest crop of high-profile Republican politicians is looking to install some sort of Christian theocracy in the USA in the unthinkable event that any of them should ever get within spitting distance of power. One paragraph from the article bears repeating here as it is just too delicious for words:

As I have explained before, Christians who seek to participate in the political process do so not as an attempt to install some type of theocratic rule, but to ensure that the government fulfils its God-ordained role in society to promote justice, provide security, and protect the God-given freedoms of its people.

That sort of level of complete lack of self-awareness really is quite remarkable. Not content with trying to drag the USA back to the 19th century, swivel-eyed Stepford Wife looney tune Michele Bachmann has dived into the murky waters of vaccine paranoia this week by claiming that the Gardasil HPV vaccine gives you brain cancer or something. I mean, it's a bit late for the religious right to be making up this sort of thing; everyone knows their objection to the HPV vaccine, and it is that once free of the mental shackles imposed by the risk of cervical cancer their previously virginal and innocent 12-year old daughters will instantly turn into dead-eyed cum-gargling crack whores, a bit like Jodie Foster in Taxi Driver but without the cute outfits.

Next, back to Radio 4: I'm glad to say I missed philosopher John Gray's programme about the conflict between science and religion - glad because on the basis of this summary he seems to have spent the entire show making an absolutely colossal insufferable arse of himself. Basically this is the tweedy beardy Terry Eagleton/Rowan Williams argument that chuckles indulgently at atheists having got hold of the idea that religious people do anything as gauche and obvious as go around ACTUALLY BELIEVING IN ANYTHING, goodness me no, it's all about ritual, about shared experience, about something metaphorical, I'm not sure exactly what but it's a bit like art and literature and shit, and who could honestly say they aren't moved and inspired by those? Mmmmmmm? Isn't it?

Science isn't actually about belief - any more than religion is about belief. If science produces theories that we can use without believing them, religion is a repository of myth. Myths aren't relics of childish thinking that humanity leaves behind as it marches towards a more grown-up view of things. They're stories that tell us something about ourselves that can't be captured in scientific theories. Just as you don't have to believe that a scientific theory is true in order to use it, you don't have to believe a story for it to give meaning to your life.

To which there are two responses: firstly, that is not an accurate representation of religion as practised by 99% of the world's religious people, who do indeed believe some pretty specific things, and believe them pretty firmly, thank you very much, my word yes. Secondly, as this comment at Ophelia Benson's Butterflies And Wheels captures very pithily, if you're making the assertion that atheists are missing the point, being overly literal etc. etc., by insisting that believers believe in stuff like the virgin birth, the resurrection, all that jazz, then what I'm going to need you to do is sign, in the presence of all your Christian brethren, this public declaration that says that those things are all bullshit. Then we can proceed to the debate about metaphor and stuff like that. If you find yourself unable to do that, well then we're not missing the point after all, are we?

Speaking of the startlingly be-eyebrowed Archbishop of Canterbury, he was in the news as well this week, musing about how to spread the word of Christianity in these secular times. Apparently one of the difficulties is that atheism is so darn cool these days, what with Richard Dawkins practically outdoing Jay-Z for space on schoolkids' iPods, and that makes promoting fusty old Christianity a bit tricky, what with all that going to church and hanging out with old people. Nothing to do with, erm, reality or any of that stuff, apparently.

Finally, there's been some furious behind-the-scenes work going on in the top theology labs to try and arrive at a position on the Genesis creation myth that doesn't instantly collapse into absurdity when compared with science, or, to put it another way, reality. Now the obvious way to do this is just to say: well, it's a nice story and all, but it's just a bodged-together conflation of various other old creation myths and there's absolutely no reason to suppose it bears any relation to the actual history of the earth and the human species, both of which are reasonably well understood by other means. Heck, it doesn't even manage to be consistent with itself, let alone external reality.

If you hold to the position that that option is inadmissable, then you have a problem - either you say, yep, Genesis is a metaphor for something, but all that other stuff about the gays and not coveting your neighbour's ass is totally meant to be taken literally, or you say, well, it's not literally true, I mean, there wasn't really a talking snake, but it reflects reality nonetheless. The latest way to do this is to latch onto the concepts of known historical human population bottlenecks and more specifically the concepts of Mitochondrial Eve and Y-chromosomal Adam and try and shoehorn all that into the story. Basically what this article says (and you could be forgiven for missing it among all the tortured rambling) is that Adam and Eve weren't the first two humans, but that instead they carried some sort of "soul gene" and then subsequently an "original sin gene" that then spread throughout humanity. Yeah, I know. Never mind that y-Adam and m-Eve lived about 60,000 years apart, and that the bible pretty explicitly leaves very little wriggle room on the question of Adam and Eve being the first humans, if it eases the constant ache of cognitive dissonance then I suppose it's of some value to the devout. But, you know, there is an alternative - just get rid of it all, like having a really big cathartic shit. You'll feel so much better.

the last book I read

2011-09-24T15:23:00.011+01:00

Children Of Darkness And Light by Nicholas Mosley.

Harry is a journalist, slightly rumpled and morally compromised and borderline alcoholic in that way that journalists in fiction usually are (and maybe in real life too; who knows). Harry is off from his London home up to Cumbria to investigate some confusing stories of a group of children who've had visions of the Virgin Mary.

Harry has some previous in this department as he encountered something similar during his time in Bosnia covering the conflict there in the mid-1990s (presumably in or near Medjugorje); he's also not unhappy to get away from London as he's been having a torrid time with his wife Melissa, to the extent of leaving her with a black eye after an argument. He's also got his eye on comely journalist colleague Janice who is heading up to help cover the same story, and is looking forward to the prospect of some discreet hotel-based action.

When he arrives, though, he discovers that things are a bit less clear then they appeared. He has a series of strange encounters on the beach near the hotel he has chosen to check into, which also turns out to be near a nuclear facility (presumably Sellafield) at which there has recently been some sort of leak or other crisis. Not only that, despite choosing the hotel on a whim they seem to have been expecting him, especially alluring receptionist Ellen who tells him where he can find the children.

He then has a series of increasingly strange encounters with the children, and especially Gaby, a young girl of twelve or thirteen who turns out to be of Bosnian descent. First he encounters her in a barn at a farm, before she is taken away in a car by a man who may or may not be from Social Services, then he meets all the children during some strange fishing ritual back at the beach, from where they go to the house of kindly wheelchair-bound Mrs. Ferguson, who is conducting some mysterious scientific experiments in the local area, and then later they all head back to the hotel where Harry ends up in his room with a group of naked twelve-year olds (including Gaby) in his bed and him and Ellen sharing a mattress on the floor.

So not much rugged investigative journalism being done yet then, indeed the story Harry was chasing seems to be largely forgotten as he heads back to his home in London. Expecting to be reunited with Melissa he finds her missing and son Billy sharing a bed with his schoolfriend Jenny, whose parents seem to be undergoing some relationship trauma she's escaping from. A series of further mysterious encounters ensue - first in a local pub with Janice, who instead of hooking up with Harry in Cumbria has rekindled a relationship with Charlie, who now works as a security officer at the nuclear facility but was formerly a soldier in, among other places, Bosnia. Then he meets up with Melissa and they find Billy, Jenny and Gaby near some abandoned buildings down by an old canal. Seeing a light from another warehouse they sneak a look inside, only to find some sort of weird Operation Spanner-esque BDSM sex orgy going on, complete with all sorts of eye-watering nailing and fisting activities. Deciding to do a bunk from the scene before the police arrive, they escape down the canal in a rowing boat.

Finally - the boat-based escape having been successful and family life returning to normal - Harry returns to Bosnia to follow up some threads from the original story, and during the course of another encounter with some orphan children and a mysterious nun gets a new perspective on what's been happening.

Some novels conform pretty closely to your expectations - expectations built up, assuming you're not already familiar with the author, by reading the blurb on and inside the covers while browsing around the bookshop (one of the second-hand shops in Hay-on-Wye in the case of this particular one). Some, on the other hand, don't - this is one of those. The first couple of chapters are pretty solidly down-to-earth as they set the scene of Harry's unhappy home life, occasional drink problems and possible burgeoning romance with Janice. Once he gets to Cumbria, though, it all gets increasingly weird and dream-like, no-one seems able to have a normal conversation without talking past each other in a portentous way, and Harry drifts through the series of strange situations without (seemingly) feeling the need to question or take a grip on events. Whether the kids really have had some sort of visitation, what's been going on at the nuclear facility, what's up with the tangential references to child abuse and Social Services' involvement, what Mrs. Ferguson was up to with her experiments, whether Melissa really has been having an affair, what's going on with Jenny's parents, how Billy and Jenny and Gaby ended up together down at the canalside House of Fisty Sex Games - all these questions are left unanswered.

There's a general air of dreamy and slightly queasily erotic mysticism running though the book, and Mosley has some slightly odd stylistic tics, most jarringly phrasing all the thoughts that run through Harry's head as questions, even though most of them are just statements. This Observer review nails it quite nicely - while generally favourable it is peppered with phrases like:

virtually story-less
without the slightest concession to straight narrative
teeters on the edge of wilful eccentricity
anarchic attitude towards punctuation
an obliquely original species of novel

In fact this can safely be characterised as a fairly odd book in general, and though I enjoyed it I did find myself wondering what the hell was going on at various points, and how much of this stuff was meant to be really happening, a problem I had to a greater or lesser extent with a few other books in this series, notably Laura Blundy, Winterwood and Memoirs Of A Survivor.

Interestingly, as I only discovered after finishing the book, Nicholas Mosley is the eldest son of Oswald Mosley, and the half-brother of Max Mosley, who of course would have fitted right in at the warehouse sex orgy at the end of the book, as long as someone was wearing a Nazi outfit. But, as they say, you can't choose your relatives - Mosley overcame this shaky start to win the Whitbread Prize in 1990 with his novel Hopeful Monsters. Even more fascinatingly this is the second book in the last half-dozen that has had a title in the format X of Y and Z, this being the other.

RIP REM

2011-09-23T21:45:00.008+01:00

Kudos to legendary American rock band REM for bowing out with dignity this week, rather than just milking it on the live circuit for the next 20 years in the face of dwindling album sales and musical relevance.

REM's history is in a very real sense my history in terms of having a genuine interest in music - it was when I went to Bristol University in 1988 and discovered the Fry Haldane record library in the Students' Union that I really got an idea of the breadth and range and weirdness of what was out there waiting to be listened to - one of the first things I really got into was REM's fifth album Document, and, after it was released the following year, 1989's Green - these two were the albums that really launched them onto the world stage.

It's fair to say that this was probably a good time for them to go - my view is that all of their first ten albums, from the mysterious jangly mumblings of 1983's Murmur to the wild experimentation of 1996's New Adventures in Hi-Fi, are pretty much essential, but that New Adventures was their last really good album, the rest being fine but not startlingly good, with the exception of 2008's back-to-basics rock thrash Accelerate. So you could say that it was drummer Bill Berry's decision to quit in 1997 that did for them, and you might be right.

The first really major rock gig I ever went to was an REM gig as well, at the now-defunct Wembley Arena in what a bit of research tells me must have been June 1989. Even with a bit of allowance for rose-tinted spectacles this is still in the top two or three rock gigs I've ever been to, the opening blast through Finest Worksong being a proper hairs on the back of the neck moment (you can see footage from that tour on the excellent concert DVD Tourfilm). I also saw them at the also-now-defunct Cardiff Arms Park in 1994 touring in support of Monster. My principal memory of that gig is standing watching their encore rendition of Let Me In, Michael Stipe's grungy lament for Kurt Cobain, with my sister sitting on my shoulders and some drunk bloke singing along next to me after having spent the previous five hours or so swigging red wine out of a 2-litre Coke bottle.

My advice for the REM novice is to start with 1986's Lifes Rich Pageant, still their finest moment, proceed to Document and Green and then take it from there. Everyone should own some REM albums.

the last book I read

2011-09-07T20:00:00.008+01:00

I Am Legend by Richard Matheson.

A bit of a rum cove, Robert Neville. Holed up in his house drinking whisky and obsessively sharpening bits of wood every night, by day he stalks the streets of Los Angeles breaking into people's houses and hammering wooden stakes into them. Well, you've got to have a hobby, haven't you?

And it's not like Neville can take up something more social like joining a book group, because he is the last man on earth. Or, at least, the last one unaffected by the wind- and insect-borne plague that has transformed the rest of the human race into something resembling vampires - pale-skinned, sensitive to daylight and garlic, active at night, and with a disturbing habit of biting people on the neck and sucking their blood. No, the book group idea is definitely out.

So Neville lives out a grim existence - roaming the city by day staking slumbering vampires, and skulking in his boarded-up house at night while they throw rocks and shout for him to come out. Eventually he decides that he really has got to find a hobby, and starts researching the possible origins of the plague, and conducting experiments on some of the vampires, both the living and the undead (there are both kinds) to try and work out how the disease works. He eventually concludes that it is some sort of blood-borne bacterium, so powerful that it can animate the human body in search of sustenance even after death.

Out roaming the city one day Neville finds himself not alone for once - a young woman, Ruth, is out walking in a field. He catches up with her and persuades her to come back to the house with him, where they talk, though Neville is still suspicious - is she immune or infected? Gradually the tension thaws, and after a brief sexual encounter Ruth agrees to undergo a blood test. While Neville is looking through his microscope at the results, she clouts him over the head with a mallet and escapes.

When he awakes he finds that she has left him an explanatory note - she was a spy sent by a group of infected people (living ones, the undead ones being just zombie-like automatons) who are trying to find treatments and possibly cures for the disease, but who have had loved ones killed in their beds by Neville, who they see as some sort of rampaging bogeyman who must be stopped at all costs. She urges him to flee before the death squads come for him, but it's too late - one day they do come, and, while slaughtering all the undead vampires, they capture Neville and imprison him.

Ruth comes to see Neville in his prison cell and illustrates the error of his perspective to him - it is the still living infected population who are the last hope of the human race, not him; he is just a savage leftover of a dead race who must be put down like a dog before he can do any more harm. In a last show of compassion she slips him a couple of suicide pills so he can at least escape being made a public spectacle of.

It's a brave man who tries to put a new spin on the old vampire legends - Bram Stoker's Dracula remains the definitive vampire story, but it doesn't attempt to address vampirism in any sort of scientific way, preferring to stick with the old tropes about vampires being able to shape-shift into giant hounds and bats and the like, as well as providing the source material for Bela Lugosi to deliver a couple of the greatest lines in movie history. Even more modern vampire novels like Stephen King's Salem's Lot adhere fairly closely to the supernatural explanations. I Am Legend makes a commendable attempt to ground the vampires' lifecycle and behaviour in the real world, though, which I suppose makes it more of a science fiction novel than a horror novel, assuming that those terms mean anything.

I Am Legend has been filmed three times, as The Last Man On Earth in 1964 (featuring a hilariously miscast Vincent Price as the protagonist), as The Omega Man in 1971 (featuring Charlton Heston in the second of his trio of science fiction appearances, between Planet Of The Apes and Soylent Green) and finally as I Am Legend in 2007 (featuring Will Smith). All of those films saw fit to mess with the basic storyline in one way or the other, the downbeat ending in particular - as with The Talented Mr Ripley, it was obviously decided that there was only so much that the cinema-going audience would put up with.

The post-apocalyptic setting echoes a few other books, for instance Cormac McCarthy's The Road and Stephen King's The Stand. King, who is a big fan of Matheson and wrote the afterword to my Gollancz SF Masterworks paperback edition, also stole pretty much wholesale the segment where Neville buries his wife Virginia and has her reappear, undead, on his doorstep, for the finale of Pet Sematary. The last-minute switch of viewpoint throwing all that has gone before into a new perspective is similar to the one at the end of William Golding's The Inheritors. Anyway, it's a miniature masterpiece (at only 160 pages), and you should read it.

the last book I read

2011-09-05T20:22:00.006+01:00

The Talented Mr Ripley by Patricia Highsmith.

A bit of a rum cove, Tom Ripley. Fingers in pies, a few little shady ventures on the go, most recently a bit of low-level financial confidence trickery, but nothing serious. I mean, it's not like he's murdered anybody.

When Herbert Greenleaf hails him across a New York bar, then, Ripley's first reaction is to guiltily assume one of his schemes has been rumbled, but in fact Greenleaf has recognised him as an acquaintance of his son, Dickie. Overestimating the closeness of their friendship (something Ripley actively encourages him in), Mr Greenleaf offers Ripley a job - go to Italy, where Dickie has been swanning about for some time at his father's expense, and persuade him to return home, join the family business and generally knuckle down to adulthood and responsibility.

Since Mr Greenleaf is covering all his expenses, Ripley readily agrees and sets off for Italy. Once there he contrives a supposedly chance meeting with Dickie, who is sunning himself on the beach with his American friend Marge Sherwood. A bit of stalking activity later and Ripley is being invited to move from his hotel into Dickie's rented house. His burgeoning friendship with Dickie and his virtual monopolising of his company leave Marge feeling excluded and resentful, and when Ripley starts aping Dickie's clothing and mannerisms she becomes suspicious of the nature of their relationship. Dickie starts to have similar qualms himself after he comes back to the house to find Ripley wearing his clothes, and there is a cooling-off of their friendship. Seeing his free ride on the Greenleafs' money coming to an end, Ripley persuades Dickie to come on a farewell trip to San Remo, during the course of which they go out in a dinghy and, seeing that they are out of sight of land and other boats, Ripley impulsively murders Dickie by caving his head in with one of the oars and then weighs his body down with the anchor and dumps it over the side. He then takes the boat to a secluded spot near the shore and scuttles it.

So now what? Well, Ripley has a few tricks up his sleeve, like some impersonation and signature-forging skills, so he decides that he's going to become Dickie Greenleaf for a while. He gathers up Dicke's clothes and passport from the house and heads off to Rome, where he puts his forging skills to good use by writing some letters: to Dickie's parents assuring them that he's still alive and that they should continue sending him the allowance cheques, and to Marge suggesting that perhaps they shouldn't see each other for a while.

Obviously the subterfuge of Ripley being Dickie is only going to hold for as long as he can avoid meeting anybody who knew Dickie while he was still Dickie, i.e. alive. So when Dickie's old friend Freddie Miles calls round, Ripley has to do some frantic reversion into being Tom Ripley for a while; trouble is, the housekeeper knows him as Dickie Greenleaf, and so eventually, after some sitcom-style misunderstandings, Freddie smells a rat and comes back to confront Ripley about it, at which point Ripley has little choice but to murder him with an ashtray, bundle his lifeless body into his car and dump it among the tombs lining the Appian Way.

Things are starting to get complicated: the police are sniffing round after finding Freddie Miles' body, and they're also concerned that this Tom Ripley bloke seems to be missing, and both men knew Dickie Greenleaf and saw him not long before they disappeared. So Ripley (as Dickie) decides to lie low in Sicily for a bit until the heat's off. Eventually he has a better idea - return to Italy, revert to being Tom Ripley again, and pretend to have been off touring round Italy and be unaware of all the fuss. So he contrives to turn up in Venice and report to the police to confirm that he's not actually missing after all.

So the question now becomes: what's happened to Dickie? In due course Dickie's father (with a private detective in tow) and Marge turn up in Venice to ask Ripley the same question, and Ripley steers them towards concluding that he must have killed himself, possibly out of remorse after murdering poor old Freddie Miles, or possibly not. All seems lost when Marge finds Dickie's rings in a trinket box at Ripley's rented house, but (after briefly toying with the idea of murdering her) Ripley manages to persuade her that Dickie gave them to him for safekeeping shortly before vanishing, almost as if he was not coming back, eh Marge? Fortunately Marge seems convinced.

So Ripley seems finally to be clear of worry. The only remaining fly in the ointment is that now he's not Dickie any more the regular income has dried up. In fact pretty much everyone seems to have concluded that Dickie is dead. So with one last facsimile of Dickie's signature Ripley produces a fake will on Dickie's old typewriter (which he then disposes of in a canal) leaving everything to Ripley. Problem solved!

Having your major protagonist be an amoral murderer would have been revolutionary enough in 1955, letting him get away with it and leaving him with a nice house in Venice and access to his victim's trust fund even more so. It's interesting that both film adaptations of the book, Plein Soleil aka Purple Noon in 1960 and Anthony Minghella's The Talented Mr Ripley in 1999, changed the ending to give Ripley a bit of comeuppance. In the earlier film Dickie's body slurps up from the deep at an inopportune moment, and in the Minghella film Ripley is portrayed as having embarked on a homosexual relationship with an Englishman, Peter Smith-Kingsley (who appears briefly in a much more minor role in the book), whom circumstances then dictate that he has to kill to avoid being rumbled, at, presumably, some psychological cost to himself as well as the risk of being discovered as the killer.

It seems a shame that they had to make the gay subtext explicit in the later film, because, well, it stops being subtext, then, doesn't it? The thread running pretty clearly through the book is that Ripley (in addition to various psychological issues, like, you know, murdering people) is probably at least partly a repressed homosexual (possibly like the narrator of Demian). That seems pretty clear from his tortured relationship with Dickie, and also his attitudes towards Marge: resentment of her relationship with Dickie at first, and a more general dislike later. It's interesting that the casting of Gwyneth Paltrow as Marge in the Minghella film makes her a great deal more attractive than she's portrayed as being in the book, but of course in the book we're seeing her through the distorting lens of Ripley's sexual disgust. The other thread that runs through the book is the passing of the old class divisions - Dickie and Freddie Miles' attitudes to Ripley are slightly disdainful, as he doesn't have their urbane upper-class manners and easy social skills, or the right old school tie, but he comes out on top in the end as he's not only cleverer than they are, but not as effete and sybaritic and lazy. That's your actual meritocracy in action, right there. And murder, also.

Convincing portrayals of proper psychopaths in fiction are quite rare; there's Hannibal Lecter, but he's a cartoon character compared to Ripley, who displays all the standard symptoms - poor impulse control, little or no empathy, a plausible veneer of normality, no guilt or remorse for his actions - but without the pantomime silliness. I suppose there's an echo of Lolita here as well, in that the central character has few redeeming features and commits a whole slew of atrocities throughout the book, but we still retain a bit of sympathy for him at the end, probably more so for Ripley than for Humbert Humbert, actually.

Anyway, this is terrifically sly and clever stuff, as long as you haven't got the sort of highly developed moral sense that demands that people who do wicked things get strung up good and proper for it. In fact it's so cunning you could put a tail on it and call it a weasel.

the blend is nigh

2011-09-01T21:51:00.007+01:00

Let's clear up the last two un-sampled whiskies in the cupboard. These just happen both to be blends, so it seems only right to do them together. The only blended whisky we've featured here previously was the mighty Johnnie Walker Black Label (that bottle has just bitten the dust, as it happens), so it's about time we did some more.

Firstly, Jameson Special Reserve. This is a first as it's an Irish whiskey (and therefore carries an extra "e"), although I did allude way back in the early days to having recently finished a bottle of 10-year-old Bushmills. This bottle was given to me by our excellent and generous Irish friends Mark and Lorna when they popped in at our post-wedding barbecue, and it's only now, a couple of months later, that I've got round to broaching it. This carries a 12-year age statement, which means all of the whiskey in it is over 12 years old - this one is to the standard Jameson as Johnnie Walker Black is to Johnnie Walker Red, if you like.

Though the raw ingredients and most of the preparation process are pretty much identical, Irish whiskey differs from Scotch whisky in a few important ways, most notably that almost all Irish whiskey is triple-distilled - with a very few exceptions, notably Auchentoshan, Scotch whisky is distilled only twice. In theory this makes the end product a bit smoother and more refined. Also worth noting is that while Jameson is marketed as a blended whiskey, and indeed so it is, being a mixture of malt and grain whiskies, all the whiskey contained in it is produced at the Jameson distillery. This is in marked contrast to how almost all blended Scotch whisky is made; in the main the blending houses don't produce their own whisky (though they might own distilleries elsewhere whose output they have first dibs on), and they source the constituent bits from a wide variety of places.

Right, stand aside, I'm going in. It's all shortbread and honey with just a whiff of something more estery like pear drops or whiteboard cleaner; very inviting. Have a sip and it's still sweet and biscuity - if you didn't know what it was you might well assume that it must be one of the more mellow Speysiders like Knockando or Cardhu, though I think it's a bit more interesting than either of those.

The second bottle is a litre of Johnnie Walker Green Label I picked up in the duty-free shop at Heathrow before we went to Canada; remarkably it survived ten days in an RV and the return flight without getting either broken or consumed. Green Label is the next one up the hierarchy from Black Label, and a 70cl bottle will generally set you back about 40 quid, so a litre for a smidgen under £30 seemed pretty good to me. The next one up, Gold Label, generally retails for around £60, and the top one (one-off absurdly expensive specialities aside), Blue Label, will set you back something like £150, so it's unlikely I'll be shelling out for either of those in the near future.

Actually, technically Green Label isn't a blend, it's a vatted malt, which means that it's 100% malt whisky (unlike blends which contain grain whisky as well) from various distilleries. As well as the odd dash from other places the box claims that it's principally a blend of Caol Ila, Cragganmore, Linkwood and Talisker, all of which are at least 15 years old (compared with 12 years for the Black Label). Well, I've never tried Linkwood, but Caol Ila and Talisker are both pretty robustly smoky, and Cragganmore has a bit, too, so you'd expect the blended end result to be pretty aggressive.

So it's a bit of a surprise when you dip a nose (your own, ideally) in to find that it's pretty friendly - very rich and intense and cakey, but it's not shoving a burning peat brick in your eye in quite the way you might have expected. It doesn't seem to be any smokier than the Black Label, for instance. It's all rich dark raisins and sherry when you have a sip, too, and now it seems less smoky than the Black Label. There's a bit of an after-zing on the tongue from the peat, but it's really quite civilised. It's really tremendously good, but you almost wish it was just a little bit rougher and more sweary and punchy.

Of the two I'd have to say I prefer the Johnnie Walker, just because I like a little bit of a backhanded smoky slap round the kisser, but they're both very good. Ask me whether I prefer the Green Label or the Black Label, though, and I'd struggle to give you an answer, at least without a large glass of each, a big leather chair and a couple of hours to think about it.

alive? would that I were, mr charteris, would that I were

2011-08-31T22:43:00.007+01:00

The latest of the many tributes to recently demised broadcaster Robert Robinson was this programme broadcast in the 9am post-Today slot on Radio 4 this morning, called, and why not, A Tribute to Robert Robinson. Much gushing about Robinson's unmistakable voice, tremendous erudition and love of language and wordplay, and rightly so; all the more regrettable then that the first clip they chose to illustrate this, a bit of typically Robinsonian preamble about shop and pub opening times and the rituals surrounding them from the long-running radio programme Stop The Week, contained a snippet about the unacceptability of these places opening up "one parsec too early".

Unfortunately the parsec is an astronomical unit of distance (equal to about 31 trillion kilometres) and nothing to do with time, as anyone who's shared in the (so far) 34 years of geeky ridicule heaped on this bit of dialogue from Star Wars will know. Note also that the second clip features one half of celebrity couple Harrison and Calista Fordhart.

Also no mention (in the bit of the programme that I listened to, anyway) of Robinson's ownership of one of the world's more spectacular combovers, one which, moreover, he only started to sport relatively late in life, thus requiring anyone who'd been paying attention to his TV career to believe that he'd got less bald as he got older. Furthermore no blog post mentioning Robert Robinson would be complete without a link to the legendary Fry & Laurie Robert Robinsons sketch. Here's the real thing on Ask The Family just for comparison purposes.

Unfortunately the programme isn't available on iPlayer for some reason so you'll just have to take my word for it. At least one other person noticed though. An extra mark for being so clever!

pray silence for the saxe-coburg-parker-bowleses

2011-08-30T22:01:00.005+01:00

Marriage: it's a wonderful institution. But I don't want to live in an institution! Also, marriage: it's not a word, it's a sentence! Entertaining though all that sort of nonsense may be, the reality is that marriage is a wonderful thing, though, of course, very much like one's wife, it is not to be entered into lightly or carelessly. But what to do about names?

Back in the day, of course, the unquestioned convention was that the wife would discard her "maiden" name (what with being, hem hem, a virgin when she got married and all) and adopt that of her husband. But in these egalitarian times that doesn't always happen, and rightly so as it's a bit of reflexive patriarchical repressiveness that should be problematic to anyone who takes the trouble to think about these things at least a bit. Come to that the whole notion of the bride's father "giving her away" to the groom is a bit strange, and if I'm perfectly honest I'd have been as happy to have discarded that bit from our ceremony, but you have to have a bit of balancing out of what you want against what other people want, so I was happy to concede that one.

Back to the names, though. If we agree that the application of the groom's name is not very satisfactory, then we have to come up with a new and workable scheme. It won't be easy, but I'm confident that if we pour ourselves a nice glass of wine and put our heads together we can get the whole thing Straightened Out Once And For All in no time.

Now some people go for the double-barrelling thing; let's say Mr. Jenkins marries the comely and buxom Ms. Winforth - he remains Mr. Jenkins, but she becomes Mrs. Winforth-Jenkins and any of their offspring become known as the little Winforth-Jenkinses. Which is fine as far as it goes, but of course creates a couple of problems, firstly that the kids don't have the same surname as their Dad, which may cause some issues at school, and more fundamentally that this solution doesn't satisfactorily scale any further than one generation. I mean, let's say that in a separate incident Mr. Aquascutum marries Ms. Smythe, and the kids become the little Aquascutum-Smythes, and that some years later little Hector Aquascutum-Smythe marries little Perpetua Winforth-Jenkins. Well, what then? Do the kids become the Winforth-Jenkins-Aquascutum-Smythes?

Something better is required. So how about this - we adopt the same convention as for interspecies animal hybrids, so that the resulting couple and offspring acquire a name that is a sort of combined portmanteau version of the first half of one name and the second half of the other. Now there's still an element of patriarchy asserting itself here, as for hybrids the convention is that the male provides the first half of the name and the female the second (compare tigons and ligers, for example), but let's go with it for the moment.

So for the examples above, Mr. Jenkins and Ms. Winforth produce a brood of little Jenkforths, and when one of them marries one of the little Aquascythes we get a resulting litter of Aquaforths or Jenkfythes, depending on how the gender balance works itself out. It's implicit in this that both parents have to change their names as well, but that's not a huge departure from what wives are expected to do at the moment. There would have to be some scope for slipping the odd extra letter in here and there to avoid unfortunate results - Mr. Hunt marrying Ms. Cudd would produce a family of perfectly acceptable Hudds, but Mr. Cudd marrying Ms. Hunt would be problematic. Indeed myself and Hazel provide another example - our original names (Thomas and Hannant respectively) give the perfectly respectable Thomnant according to the rules, but if the genders were reversed you could end up with Hamas, which might be dodgy in some parts of the world.

You can have fun with celebrity couples according to this rule as well: Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman become Tom and Nicole Crudman, Brian McFadden and Kerry Katona become Brian and Kerry McFatona, Peter Andre and Katie Price become Peter and Katie Andrice (and who could resist calling their kids Vindaloo and Dopiaza under those circumstances), and of course Michael Jackson and Lisa Marie Presley become Michael and Lisa Marie Jacksey. And then there's Gavin and Gwen Rossfani, Chris and Gwyneth Martrow, Lewis and Nicole Hamzinger, Mike and Zara Tindlips, and William and Kate Windleton. You can probably make your own up if you like.

the last book I read

2011-08-29T17:32:00.013+01:00

Notice by Heather Lewis.

Having a bad day? Our un-named narrator here is having a worse one, a whole unending succession of them in fact. Fleeing an abusive childhood and a spell in a juvenile institution, she dabbles with drugs and ends up working as a prostitute, picking up tricks in the car park of the local railway station.

As we join the proceedings she's just picked up a guy who seems to be after something a bit more spicy than the usual back-seat blow-job; he takes her home to meet his wife, Ingrid. After the moderately strange initial encounter - he makes her watch while he has anal sex with Ingrid on the living room carpet, and then takes her outside and fucks her on the bonnet of his car - a series of stranger sexual psychodramas is played out, always involving some S&M elements (bondage, belts, cigarette burns) and eventually involving the narrator moving into the couple's spare room. Which it transpires is spare because the couple's daughter (whose room it was) has left - whether by dying or just moving out it isn't clear, but there's a suspicion that the rough sex games are re-enacting some unspecified earlier abuse involving the daughter.

Eventually it becomes apparent that lives are going to be in danger if things continue, and the narrator engineers an escape. Kinky Bondage Incest Guy takes a fairly dim view of this, however, and shops her to the police, so that she gets arrested and sent to another institution for psychiatric evaluation. It's a bit of a mixed bag, this: on the upside she meets therapist Beth who seems to genuinely take an interest in her background and welfare, on the downside she is the subject of occasional rape by one of the male guards. Eventually Beth engineers her release on the condition that they continue their counselling sessions on the outside.

Once released the narrator resumes some of the elements of her old life - occasional visits to the station car park to pick up tricks, some of whom also have drugs to sell - but continues to see Beth. Things get more complicated when she and Beth start having a sexual relationship, though, doubly so because this is an unfamiliar sort of sex - more than just a business transaction or a raw assertion of power. Tell me more of this thing called love, James T Kirk.

Not really knowing how to deal with this sends our narrator into a tight spiral of picking up more and more dangerous tricks, getting abused by them and then getting some TLC from Beth while unloading a consignment of grief and guilt and remorse. Eventually a truly scary encounter with three of her former drug-dealing buddies and some guns and knives puts her out of action and forces some re-assessment of her life, and some searching questions: is she just doing this to feel alive after being numbed by her childhood experiences? Or is this just the increasingly reckless behaviour of someone who can't quite pluck up the courage to kill herself and is hoping someone else will eventually do the job for her?

Like the narrator, the town where all this happens and therefore the railway station which features heavily in the narrative are never named, but there's no doubt that we're on a one-way journey to Grimsville Central here. Unless you choose to detect a little bit of I Will Survive/what-does-not-kill-me-makes-me-stronger defiance in the last chapter then the whole book could be read as one long-drawn-out suicide note, all the more believably so as Heather Lewis killed herself in 2002. This, her third novel, was published two years later in 2004 - apparently it dates from between the first two novels to be published (House Rules in 1994 and The Second Suspect in 1998) but was rejected at the time for being too dark and explicit. It's certainly hard to see this being a "goer", commercially speaking, and like The War Zone it's hard to describe this as "enjoyable" in the conventional sense. Like The War Zone this is about the indelible nature of childhood abuse, and how it fucks up your chances of ever having normal adult relationships once the damage has been done to the delicate wiring of the brain. So while it's hard to empathise with the central character's twisted self-absorption and constant lapses into self-destructive behaviour, it's easy to sympathise; this is how abused people act.

It's hard to criticise a novel like this that was clearly wrenched out of some very real personal anguish, but it is a bit one-note: all the male characters are uniformly bastards, and abusive controlling rapist bastards at that, and we never really find out much about Beth other than she is prepared to ignore the usual bounds of counsellor/counsellee propriety and possesses saintly patience and forgivingness. There's no sense that the narrator is ever going to be able to escape from the spiral of abuse and addiction and despair, and clearly the same was ultimately true of Heather Lewis herself. It's the sort of book that you're pleased to know exists out there among the Harry Potters and the One Days, but for all that it's not a place you're going to want to hang out all that often. If you do fancy checking it out here's a preview of the first three chapters, and here's Allan Gurganus's afterword to my Serpent's Tail paperback edition.

how do I Libya let me count the ways

2011-08-26T19:18:00.006+01:00

Strange news today as the Libyan rebel forces sweep through the former Tripoli stronghold of Colonel Gaddafi. While Gaddafi himself is nowhere to be found, some of the stuff he left behind is interesting, none more so than the scrapbook revealing the former dictator's unrequited love for former US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice.

Not only that, but, if you remember, there were rumours of Condi herself having a bit of an unrequited thing for her former boss George W Bush, mainly prompted by a much-circulated (but, to be fair, based purely on hearsay and never recorded) story about a supposed Freudian slip at a private function whereby she referred to Bush as her "husb..." and then hurriedly corrected herself.

Talk about a bizarre love triangle. Also, as I'm sure you're picturing already, possibly the world's most disturbing spit-roast.

e was givin it herbal, so I done im

2011-08-21T20:04:00.011+01:00

Having made a start on the garden clearance a few weeks ago I decided it was about time I finished the job - which basically meant uprooting a load more buddleja, the remainder of which was no less tenacious than the first lot, as you can see by the size of the roots:

During the course of this activity I managed to spike the end of my thumb quite deeply (through a thick-ish pair of gardening gloves) on a bit of broken glass that was embedded in the flower bed; I should probably have gone and had a precautionary tetanus shot, as I don't think I've had one since before going to Africa in 2000, but, well, I didn't. The incubation period for tetanus is typically a week or two, so I think at this point I'm probably OK (as it's now been a couple of weeks and my entire body hasn't locked solid yet).

Anyway, minor comedy injuries aside it all went fairly well, as you can see from the before and after panoramas below (note that some electronic trickery has been used to render the first picture; do not adjust your computer).

Having done all that it seemed only right to make use of some of the freed-up flowerbed space, so I've stuck some more herbs in. Here they are:

Left to right: oregano, rosemary, thyme, sage, basil, parsley, more thyme, chives. In my experience rosemary, thyme and chives are reasonably indestructible, so they should be OK. The basil is looking a bit sick but to be honest has survived longer than I expected; the parsley is looking a bit sick as well but only because I scalped it last night to put in with some fish.

the last book I read

2011-08-20T18:42:00.012+01:00

Laura Blundy by Julie Myerson.

Laura Blundy has just killed her husband. Messily. Stove his head in with a large bronze ornament, and then mashed his face in with a poker when he turned out to be still alive and twitching.

Obviously one doesn't do these things for no reason, and Laura's reasons are fairly simple: she's in love with Billy, a young man fifteen years her juinor. Actually it's not that simple, as Billy is already married to someone else, and has four children. He's been working as a labourer on various major projects in central London including the Embankment and Joseph Bazalgette's revolutionary sewer system. Which is a living, to be fair, but it doesn't compare with Laura's husband Ewan's income; Ewan is (or was) a surgeon, and met Laura under the slightly odd circumstances of having to preside over the amputation of her leg after she'd been run over by a hansom cab.

Laura's history is murky and mysterious - it transpires that the cab/leg incident followed fairly closely after her release from prison after a period of incarceration for some unspecified crime, and that she had a baby boy back when she was fifteen, which subsequently died. It seems also that despite being born and brought up in reasonably comfortable circumstances she ended up sleeping rough on the banks of the Thames, so that and the subsequent spell in prison presumably made her more receptive to Ewan's offer of marriage, especially given the prospect of having to return to her former life on one leg. Reduced circumstances, you might say.

So, anyway, there's Ewan, all smashed and mangled, and Laura has to work out a way of getting rid of him. Naturally she ropes Billy in to help, and they dismember Ewan and lug him down to the Thames in some sacks. Having weighted these down and lobbed them in the river, they consider their future, and conclude that there's really no option but to do a runner down to Folkestone and make a new life over in France.

This is where it all starts to get a bit weird. What are we to make of the fact that there is a grave with Laura's name on it? Or that Billy's history seems to be closely intertwined with Laura's dead son's? Or maybe he isn't really dead at all? Come to that, by the end of the book Ewan doesn't seem to be really dead at all either. What's going on?

I'm not sure I can be of much help here, other that to say we may be in similar territory to that occupied by Cloudstreet and William Golding's Pincher Martin, i.e. last thoughts of someone about to die - oddly, by drowning in all three cases, Laura having made reference several times to a previous attempt to drown herself in the Thames, which we're invited to conclude may have been successful after all. So does that mean Billy (the adult version, anyway) is a figment of her imagination? Or is he real, but being haunted? Search me. The gradual realisation that we may be reading a story narrated (and possibly made up) by a dead narrator is similar to that experienced by the reader of Winterwood, though without the same degree of frustration and bafflement. We're not really given enough information to be able to draw any solid conclusions; presumably the point is to illustrate the primeval pull of the mother/child bond, even (possibly) beyond the grave.

As usual Myerson is exceptionally good at conveying the messy practicalities of sex, childbirth and all that sort of stuff (as previously mentioned here); the same goes for the extended and somewhat gruesome descriptions of the leg amputation and the dismembering of Ewan's corpse. The general grinding tedium and horror of a life on the streets in Victorian Britain, not to mention the all-pervading filth and grime and the ever-present probability of dying a horribly protracted and painful death of some (these days) trivial ailment are all vividly rendered as well. Because I am a tedious literalist who likes loose ends tied up, not to mention an amoral soulless godless killing machine, I would have liked a bit more of a definite indication of what was going on at the end, rather than effectively being told to work it out or make it up for myself, as that seems to me like a bit of a dereliction of authorial duty. That gripe aside this is very good, though not exactly a barrel of laughs. I recommend the other two Myersons I've read - 1994's Sleepwalking and 2003's Something Might Happen - as well. Mentioning Winterwood above reminds me of the other book that this brought to mind - Richard Adams' powerfully strange 1980 novel The Girl In A Swing. Completely different setting, but similar in that it involves a woman with dark secrets in her past marrying an otherwise blameless man to escape from them, with some blurring of the line between what's supernatural and what isn't.

List-y trivia now: if I'm right this is the first book in this series to have a title that is just someone's full name. There have of course been previous entries that were just a single given name or surname (Justine, Mr. Phillips, Utz, Balthazar, Lolita, Walter, Kleinzeit, Chatterton, Demian, Mountolive), and a few that featured a full name in the title with some other words (The Truth About Lorin Jones, One Day In The Life Of Ivan Denisovich, Christie Malry's Own Double-Entry).

go forth and mull-ify

2011-08-19T23:49:00.006+01:00

Here's the second of the pair of Tobermory whiskies my father bought me as a wedding present: this is the peated version, which is marketed under the Ledaig label. Now you'll notice the similarity in terms of packaging to the unpeated Tobermory 10 featured here a while back; the general repackaging has included the Ledaig as well, which is now offered as a 10-year old expression at 46.3% ABV.

The old Ledaig, which was a bargain in various supermarkets, Morrison's in particular, carried no age statement, and therefore could probably be assumed to contain whisky that was something like 5-7 years old. The extra maturing time, as well as the increased ABV, makes quite a difference to the appearance, as you can see from this comparison shot: the old one was much paler and yellower, while the new one is richer and more golden brown.

None of which matters a tinker's cuss if they've ruined the whisky, of course, but I think it's safe to say they haven't: imagine if you will a cross between the smoky mackerel of the old Ledaig and the fermented cabbage of the new Tobermory, with a bit of sherry cask sweetness added, and you'd be in the right sort of ballpark. It's a rich smoky affair, less sweet than, say, the Ardmore, but richer and sweeter and less antiseptic than the Talisker or the Bowmore. I think it's really good, but it's fair to say Tobermory isn't the best-loved or most fashionable distillery. If things go to plan, though, I will be there quite lidderally in person on the second weekend in September, so I will hopefully have a chance to pick up some more of their product. Watch this space!

birdie num num

2011-08-19T19:25:00.007+01:00

A couple of sporting updates and corrections: firstly my list of Test hat-trick takers who have also been hat-trick victims (which went: Darren Gough, Shane Warne, Stuart Broad) should also have included Sri Lanka's Nuwan Zoysa, who in addition to doing the hat-trick against Zimbabwe in 1999 was Mohammad Sami's second victim when he took a hat-trick for Pakistan against Sri Lanka in the final of the Asian Test Championship in 2002.

Secondly, the recently completed PGA Championship in Atlanta provides a further data point for my list of golfers who have shot a round of 63 in a major championship. Steve Stricker's first round was the 25th such round in major history, and he missed a very makeable putt of ten feet or so on the last green which would have given him a 62 and sole possession of the record, and incidentally rendered all my statistical analysis obsolete and pointless, so in a way I'm quite glad. I'll reproduce the whole table here so you haven't got to go and look it up.

Player	Tournament	Year	Round	Result	Winner
Johnny Miller	US Open	1973	final	WON	Johnny Miller
Bruce Crampton	USPGA	1975	second	2nd	Jack Nicklaus
Mark Hayes	Open	1977	second	tied 9th	Tom Watson
Jack Nicklaus	US Open	1980	first	WON	Jack Nicklaus
Tom Weiskopf	US Open	1980	first	37th	Jack Nicklaus
Isao Aoki	Open	1980	third	tied 12th	Tom Watson
Raymond Floyd	USPGA	1982	first	WON	Raymond Floyd
Gary Player	USPGA	1984	second	tied 2nd	Lee Trevino
Nick Price	Masters	1986	third	5th	Jack Nicklaus
Greg Norman	Open	1986	second	WON	Greg Norman
Paul Broadhurst	Open	1990	third	tied 12th	Nick Faldo
Jodie Mudd	Open	1991	final	tied 5th	Ian Baker-Finch
Nick Faldo	Open	1993	second	2nd	Greg Norman
Payne Stewart	Open	1993	final	12th	Greg Norman
Vijay Singh	USPGA	1993	second	4th	Paul Azinger
Michael Bradley	USPGA	1995	first	tied 54th	Steve Elkington
Brad Faxon	USPGA	1995	final	5th	Steve Elkington
Greg Norman	Masters	1996	first	2nd	Nick Faldo
Jose Maria Olazabal	USPGA	2000	third	tied 4th	Tiger Woods
Mark O’Meara	USPGA	2001	second	tied 22nd	David Toms
Vijay Singh	US Open	2003	second	tied 20th	Jim Furyk
Thomas Bjorn	USPGA	2005	third	tied 2nd	Phil Mickelson
Tiger Woods	USPGA	2007	second	WON	Tiger Woods
Rory McIlroy	Open	2010	first	tied 3rd	Louis Oosthuizen
Steve Stricker	USPGA	2011	first	tied 12th	Keegan Bradley

So we continue the slightly surprising trend of a round of 63 only giving you a one in five chance of winning (5 out of 25). It's getting more difficult, too: while four of the first ten 63s resulted in wins (up to and including Greg Norman at the Open in 1986), only one of the subsequent 15 (Tiger Woods at the USPGA in 2007) has resulted in a win.

Here's the distribution of 63s by the major they were made in:

2 at the Masters
4 at the US Open
8 at the Open
11 at the USPGA

What this tells you about the relative difficulty of the tournaments I'm not sure; the US Open is generally regarded as the toughest major in terms of scoring relative to par, and yet there have been twice as many 63s as at the Masters. Odd when you consider that the US Open has been won with a score of ten under par or better just twice (Tiger Woods in 2000 and Rory McIlroy in 2011), while the Masters has been on no less than 25 occasions. Maybe it just tells you that professional golfers gradually get their eye in during the year and come the last major they're in the zone.

dilutions of grandeur

2011-08-18T18:42:00.009+01:00

You'll remember the protracted hoo-ha over the British Chiropractic Association's legal action against science writer Simon Singh, which for once resulted in an outcome pleasing to all right-thinking people everywhere, i.e. a comprehensive victory for Singh. Despite that whole business being a spectacular own goal for "alternative" medicine, this hasn't deterred others from boneheadedly failing to get the message.

The latest case is particularly interesting for a number of reasons; it involves the large multinational corporation Boiron, manufacturers of homeopathic "remedies" on an industrial scale, and a minor Italian blogger called Samuele Riva. Basically Riva made some snarky remarks, as bloggers do (and even I have been known to do from time to time), about a particular homeopathic product, and Boiron seem to have instructed their lawyers to get all lawyery on Riva's ass, as lawyers do, and indeed on the collective ass of his blog hosting people, and demand that they not only remove the offending posts and associated images, but shut Riva's blog down completely, immediately, and with extreme prejudice.

What makes this doubly delicious (aside from the inevitable Streisand effect and associated uncontrollable exposure and ridicule that Boiron will now be subjected to) is that not only is the "active" ingredient in the Oscillococcinum preparation diluted beyond there being the slightest chance of there being anything but water in the resulting liquid, but that the supposed "active" ingredient they started with doesn't even exist in the first place! While we're all having a good laugh about that, spare a thought for the poor duck which has been ritually beheaded (this is apparently important) and then had various portions of its heart, liver and pancreas wrung out into a test tube in order to extract this non-existent magic goop in the first place.

Then again, the whole point of homeopathy is that the smaller the dilution of the original ingredient the greater the effect, so maybe there's something supremely powerful about doing the same with an ingredient that NEVER EVEN EXISTED IN THE FIRST PLACE. Surely if you completed the process by not actually taking the remedy AT ALL you'd get something dangerously powerful that would probably blow your tits off.

Perhaps going after (with all due respect to Samuele Riva, who I'm sure is a fine upstanding individual) relatively inconsequential bloggers is a sign of the times; the big companies not wanting to get involved in a protracted and high-profile court case with someone (any of the TV companies who've made documentaries examining the subject, for instance) who might have the resources to fight back - clearly the last thing they would want is a forensic examination of the truth about the mechanisms and efficacy of homeopathy.

As an aside, the notion of producing homeopathic remedies in industrial quantities is a bit of a strange one to get your head around - is the repeated dilution automated? What about the succussion? I suppose in theory there's no reason why they couldn't be. I'm now picturing a huge warehouse with great ranks of flasks being slapped against pads of leather by robotic arms in perfect synchronisation, then the contents being poured into a much bigger vat of water, only for another robotic arm to dip a second test tube in, and for the whole process to begin again. Or, in the scenario where I ran the company, the same warehouse being entirely empty except for a standpipe in the middle with one bloke just filling bottles from a tap. I mean, why would you bother? The customer isn't going to know any different, after all.

celebrity lookeylikey of the day

2011-08-15T22:56:00.005+01:00

Golfer, winner of the 2009 Wyndham Championship and possessor of a slightly odd loopy Furykesque golf swing Ryan Moore, and showbiz offspring, TV presenter and general waste of space Jack Osbourne.

the last book I read

2011-08-14T18:02:00.007+01:00

Memory Of Snow And Of Dust by Breyten Breytenbach.

Meheret, an Ethiopian journalist and writer, is introduced to Mano, a mixed-race South African actor, at a writers' conference in Switzerland, the introduction being engineered by Barnum, a South African writer living in exile in Paris.

Mano and Meheret begin a relationship which takes them from Paris to Burkina Faso and back again; while in Africa Mano becomes involved with revolutionary politics. Soon an opportunity arises for Mano to travel to South Africa on the pretext of doing some preliminary research for a film based on Barnum's life, but with the ulterior motive of meeting with some revolutionary contacts within South Africa. However, someone has betrayed him and he is arrested, charged with the murder of a woman, and sentenced to death.

That's really about it for what you might call orthodox narrative. The remainder of the novel is a series of fragmented recollections of Meheret's Ethiopian childhood and remembered stories of her ancestors, letters from Meheret to her and Mano's unborn child, imagined reconstructions of conversations between Mano and his political colleagues, brief interludes depicting South African police brutality, and towards the end a series of letters written by Mano in his prison cell in the certain knowledge of his impending execution.

It's all very complex and allusive and, to be honest, rather opaque in places, perhaps for the same reasons that Falling Man was, i.e. a commendable desire not to be banal and clichéd and obvious in tackling a big and traumatic subject that most people know quite a bit about already (the arrest and imprisonment of political dissidents on trumped-up charges in apartheid-era South Africa). It's also impossible to separate the events depicted in the novel from real life, since Breytenbach lived in exile in Paris in the 1970s (he was unable to return to South Africa after marrying a non-white woman, in contravention of South African law at the time), returned clandestinely to South Africa in 1975 on a political mission, was betrayed, arrested, and imprisoned for seven years, returning to Paris on his release in 1982.

If you're like me, then you'll perhaps not be particularly familiar with Breytenbach's work (he's primarily a poet rather than a novelist), but the distinctive name will have you scratching your head wondering where you've heard it before. Well, I'll help you out: it was probably in the Spitting Image song I've Never Met A Nice South African - Breytenbach gets a mention at the end (at around 2:05).

Anyway, this is powerfully written and occasionally gripping, but to be honest there are probably better (or at least more linear, if linearity is the kind of bag you're into) novels about apartheid-era South Africa available, probably by either Nadine Gordimer or André Brink. Brink's A Dry White Season (later filmed), which, by an odd coincidence, sits right next to this book on my bookshelves, might be a good place to start.

um bongo um bongo they drink it in the congo

2011-08-10T19:12:00.008+01:00

There's riches and fame to be had from making an entire comedy act out of basically just coming on stage and saying "does anyone remember Spangles? Eh? Eh? Spangles?" Just ask Peter Kay. But I want to exhume malodorous old cultural items to a slightly more specific purpose than that, so forgive me. Or, alternatively, consider this: Pacers. They were like minty Opal Fruits, weren't they? Yeah? Do you remember?

My purpose here is as follows: the following is a list of adverts I remember from yesteryear (some are more yester than others), the last lines of which conveyed (and were deliberately calculated to convey, in my view), perhaps in addition to some trivial surface meaning, depths of transgressive perversity certainly not suitable for the time of day at which they were aired.

This first one is pretty well-known, and Googling the phrase in question revealed a fair amount of internet discourse about it. It's this NatWest advert, which according to its YouTube title is from 1991, but I'm with the writer of this list who reckons it must be from a few years earlier than that. The line here is, of course: "Course we do! It's not all work, work, work!", which just about provides the makers with some plausible deniability, i.e. they can claim the spotty little herbert featured in the ad was just referring to going out on the town, whereas in reality he was talking about taking his cute little curly-haired blonde colleague home, unlocking her vault and making a substantial deposit, followed by a speedy withdrawal.
That one was easy to find, however I've had less success with the other two, so maybe someone out there can help. The second one is from a bit more recently, maybe late 1990s, and I'm pretty sure it was an advert for a brand of coffee. The set-up is as follows: woman gets back from a weekend away to a flat she apparently shares with another woman in an upmarket young professionals sort of way, only to find that the other woman has had her boyfriend round for the weekend and they've been whooping it up by (among acts of a more penetrative nature, presumably) drinking flatmate #1's coffee, which, we're invited to infer, is a bit of a pre-agreed no-no activity. After a brief frosty moment, flatmate #1 decides to forgive and forget, and the two pals enjoy a cup of coffee together from the forbidden stash. As the camera pulls back, flatmate #1 says to flatmate #2, with just the ghost of a saucy smile playing across her lips: "So....did he enjoy my aroma?". Yeah, they'll say it's all about the coffee, finest Arabica beans from the Colombian mountainside yadda yadda yadda, but they know and we know there's a bit of an undertone of furtive knicker-sniffing wrongness here.
Thirdly, and, I think, broadly contemporary with advert #2 (i.e. probably late 1990s) there was an advert for what I think was probably some sort of telecommunications company, possibly BT, possibly someone else. In fact it possibly wasn't even telecoms at all; the only reason I think it was is that it mainly features a woman obviously talking to a (probably female) friend on the telephone. Now we're party to the first few bits of the conversation, which establish that there's some talk of men, and possibly recent nights out, that sort of thing. There's then some sort of voice-over or other distraction which drowns out the conversation, during the course of which the product sales pitch is delivered, and this ends just in time for us to watch and hear the woman say "What? Sideways?". Oooer matron, etc.

Any ideas? I'm on a horse.

headline of the day

2011-08-08T18:30:00.005+01:00

This one in the Independent:

Seems a little harsh, unless they're talking about her sizzlingly unresolved sexual tension with Michael Portillo on This Week, in which case, well, maybe.

i STILL don't beliiieeeeeve it!

2011-08-07T19:22:00.006+01:00

In the interests of balance and fairness, and just for the epic lulz, I should draw your attention gently yet insistently towards this article in the New Statesman, which is a follow-up to the one featured here a while back wherein people list their reasons for believing in God (whichever particular version it is they believe in, from woolly philosophical abstraction to Old Testament psychopath complete with fire and smiting, and all points in between).

You'll be unsurprised (particularly if you read the associated blog post) that I didn't really find any of the reasons presented in the original article particularly compelling; you'll be equally unsurprised that I find the stuff in the non-belief article to be a lot better, though a lot of the responses are broadly similar to each other, as you'd expect:

Richard Dawkins is as sensible and understanding as ever about people's reasons to believe (nonsensical though they are) and the reasons why you really shouldn't - this won't stop him being painted as "aggressive" and "shrill", though, obviously, for reasons explored here.
Most of the others - Victor Stenger, Susan Blackmore, Michael Shermer, Jerry Coyne - just make the obvious point that they don't believe in God simply because there is no even remotely compelling reason to do so, i.e. any evidence, with the rider that the concept is badly-defined and slippery and meaningless anyway.
PZ Myers introduces a welcome note of ridicule by pointing out how ridiculous most of the beliefs and practices are.
They must have caught the usually affable AC Grayling on a bad day, though he is as usual entirely right.
The only people who drop the ball are Philip Pullman, who starts well but makes a last-minute swerve into the wishy-washy bullshit territory of agnosticism, and Ben Goldacre, who affects a weary disdain for the whole thing. At which point whoever interviewed him should have given him a sharp slap round the chops and said: I didn't ask you how much you cared, and I'm not asking you to get out and man the atheist barricades. What you clearly mean is that you've made up your mind not to believe and you're not very interested in discussing it. Which is a reasonable enough position to take, but if that's your position, get over yourself and say so and stop being such an arse.

Anyway, further discussion on both the belief and non-belief articles is available at the New Statesman website. As always, approach the comments sections with some caution as there is some weapons-grade stupidity on display; I exempt the very first comment on the non-belief article from that criticism, though, as it simply reproduces a quote from comedian Sean Lock, which really condenses the whole discussion down to its essence:

I don't believe in God because....I've thought about it.

what I did at the weekend

2011-08-04T20:12:00.006+01:00

Non-Canada-related this time, but just to finish the photo round-up: last Saturday I decided to head off up a few hills on my own, as I do from time to time. Now I've done quite a lot of the hills around the South Wales area, so I decided to head a bit further afield. Inspired by this list of Hewitts and Nuttalls in Wales (fiddly qualification rules aside that basically means mountains over 2000 feet) I hatched the scheme of ticking off as many as I could, a sort of parallel project to the Munro one that's already underway. The list contains 190 peaks, of which I have been up at least 24 - I say "at least" because without more rigorous checking there may be some subsidiary peaks I've climbed almost without noticing on the way to somewhere else.

Anyway, I noticed that there were three hills up in a little self-contained group in the Radnor Forest, so I decide to go and have a crack at them. I parked up in New Radnor, just off the A44 between Kington and Llandrindod Wells and did an anticlockwise circular tour taking in Whimble (not quite 2000 feet but, ironically, the most distinct "peak" of the lot), Bache Hill (2001 feet), Black Mixen (2133 feet) and Rhos Fawr (2165 feet). There's a bit of steep-ish ascent at the start, but for the most part it's fairly level walking on big heathery plateaus (plateaux?); Black Mixen and Rhos Fawr in particular would be boggy, treacherous and a featureless navigational nightmare in bad weather (fortunately it was quite nice on Saturday).

The trade-off you make by avoiding the more exciting, craggy, higher peaks is that you lose 99.9% of the people who might otherwise be up there with you. How much of a benefit this is will of course depend on your levels of curmudgeonly misanthropy; as far as I'm concerned it's great. Apart from a few New Radnor folk walking their dogs on the lower slopes I had the summit plateau entirely to myself all day. How relatively unfrequented these hills are can be seen by the amount of effort the Ordnance Survey make for you to be able easily to navigate them using their maps: the divide between Explorer sheets 200 and 201 cuts right down between Bache Hill and Black Mixen, and there's little or no overlap between the two sheets, so you need to buy both. You can bet that if that'd happened to Pen Y Fan they'd have moved things around to sort it out.

Anyway, as usual I took the GPS with me. Here's the route map (10.1 miles for the round trip, apparently) and altitude chart:

Also as usual I took the camera and took a few photos. Here they are.

canuck panic

2011-08-04T19:26:00.004+01:00

Sorry, I know I'm boring you now. Two further Canada-related things: firstly you can find several hundred photographs from our trip here.

Secondly, in the light of my cryptid post of a week or so back it would be remiss of me not to point out that Lake Okanagan is legendarily home to the lake monster Ogopogo. I clearly remember having a set of 45 rpm 7" singles when we were kids that had various nursery rhymes and songs on them, one of which was a rendition (sung by a young-ish child as I recall) of this song. This article suggests that it was the song which lent its name to the monster (back in the 1920s) rather than the other way round.

well burger me

2011-08-04T18:56:00.006+01:00

As for food, most of the time we were cooking our own, but there were a few exceptions. I've already mentioned Villa Caruso in Jasper, but while in Vancouver at the start of the trip we went to a couple of contrasting tapas bars, both good in their own way.

La Bodega is quite traditional, and none the worse for that, although we were a bit jet-lagged and knackered when we went there (I had to keep kicking Hazel under the table to wake her up), so I'm not sure we really appreciated it fully.

By contrast Bin 941 is what you might call a modern and funky twist on the same thing - the picture is of a small brick of houmous with some olives on top. It's far from a triumph of style over substance, though, the food was delicious.

We also had a steamed burrito from Steamrollers - nice enough, though I must say I'm not sure about the whole steaming concept, as it means the burrito ends up a bit soft and soggy. You want a bit of bite, really.

Finally, the big public market on Granville Island is a food-lover's wet dream - wall to wall fruit, veg, fish, sausages, booze, you name it. They also have various exotic fast-food outlets, including one where you can purchase a halibut burger. What's not to like?

ale seizer

2011-08-04T18:19:00.005+01:00

In addition to wine sampling, we also stocked up with some Canadian beer, both for the RV trip and while we were on Vancouver Island. As with most places once you get beyond the bog-standard generic lager-y stuff (Molson, Labatts, Moosehead etc. etc.) there are some interesting smaller craft breweries making some more flavoursome stuff (usually labelled "IPA" or "Pale Ale"); as luck would have it a lot of these do 12-bottle variety boxes with a selection of their products for you to sample. Here's the selection we bought while stocking up the RV on the way out of Vancouver:

That's a box from the Okanagan Spring Brewery and a box from the Granville Island Brewery. We also bought a supplementary box of Alexander Keith's IPA along the way (it's thirsty work driving an RV) - this isn't particularly local, as it's brewed in Halifax, Nova Scotia.

When we got to Vancouver Island we stopped at a liquor store on the outskirts of Nanaimo to stock up - both the boxes we bought here are from breweries based on the island, one from the Lighthouse Brewery and one from the imaginatively-named Vancouver Island Brewery.

I think overall the Vancouver Island Brewery box was my favourite of all the ones we tried - the Piper's Pale Ale and the Sea Dog Amber Ale in particular were excellent. We also visited the bar at the Dockside restaurant when we were on Granville Island - they brew their own beer, and very good it is too, the Cartwright Pale Ale in particular.

o caaaanadaaaa

2011-08-04T14:25:00.016+01:00

As some of you will already know (and you should if you've been paying attention), the lovely Hazel and I got married a few weeks ago. Now getting married is great and all, but arguably even greater is the freedom you get to then go on a great big holiday afterwards. We decided, with very little argument, to go to Canada.

We bookended the trip with a couple of days in Vancouver and four days on Vancouver Island, but the main thing we did was hire an RV (from the good people at Fraserway near the airport in Vancouver, most of whom seem to be German or Dutch for some reason) and go on a road trip. Thanks to the magic of Google I can create you a map of our itinerary showing you where we stopped, in fact I have done just that: here it is.

Here's a bit more detail about our route and what we did on the way:

Day 1: Vancouver to McLure: 249 miles. Quite a long day, as in addition to the distance involved we had to pick up the RV, get the tutorial on how to work the RV (in particular, how to empty the water and sewage tanks without getting knocked off your feet by a tsunami of your own assorted feculence), work out how to drive the RV (which are quite large, even the relatively compact 20-footer we hired, plus they have automatic transmission with a column shift, plus you have to drive on the right) and pick up food and drink supplies. So we didn't really have time for any sightseeing (we skipped our planned detour via Hell's Gate) and pretty much just turned up at the Pinegrove campground, had some food and beer and went to bed.

Day 2: McLure to Clearwater: 52 miles. A short hop here as we wanted to do some walking in Wells Gray Provincial Park. We did a hike up Pyramid Mountain and then a low-level tour of some waterfalls, of which Helmcken Falls is probably the most famous, but (in my opinion, anyway) Spahats Falls is the most spectacular. We then headed back to Clearwater to stay at the Dutch Lake campground.
Day 3: Clearwater to Jasper: 197 miles. We stopped off at Mount Robson on the way to have a bit of a look at it (sadly we didn't have time to shin up it), and very impressive too. We stayed at Whistler's campground, which is run by Parks Canada and is (just about) walking distance from town - taxis are available for the return trip if you're feeling too lazy/full/pissed. Note that in the national parks (Jasper being in Jasper National Park, surprisingly enough) you will need to pay a park fee of about ten dollars per day, in addition to any camping fees.
Day 4: in and around Jasper. We went on the Jasper Tramway which takes you most of the way up Whistlers Mountain (you can walk the rest of the way to the top, which of course we did). We then went on a boat trip on Maligne Lake, which contains Spirit Island, one of the most photographed locations in the world and currently available at a free desktop wallpaper gallery near you. We then went into Jasper, hit a couple of bars and went to Villa Caruso for dinner, which is very nice, though far from cheap.

Day 5: Jasper to Saskatchewan River Crossing: 123 miles. More importantly, this section is the top end of the Icefields Parkway, one of the world's great scenic roads. Along the way we stopped at the Columbia Icefield to explore the Athabasca Glacier - we went up onto the glacier in one of their specially-designed fat-tyred "sno-coaches" and had a bit of a wander round, and then joined a small group for a walking tour below the glacier foot to check out the local flora and fauna and see the evidence of the glacier's gradual retreat over the last 150 years or so. We stayed at the David Thompson Resort, half an hour or so up Highway 11 north-east of Saskatchewan River Crossing.
Day 6: Saskatchewan River Crossing to Radium Hot Springs: 196 miles. This is mostly the southern section of the Icefields Parkway, as far as Banff anyway. On the way we stopped of for a look at Peyto Lake and Lake Louise, both very pretty (and quite crowded, Lake Louise in particular). We then headed off to Radium Hot Springs, where in addition to checking in at the Canyon RV campground we had a dip in the therapeutic waters of the hot springs themselves, which are all very pleasant.
Day 7: Radium Hot Springs to Kelowna: 278 miles. Another long day, but we wanted to have two nights in Kelowna so that we could do a wine-tasting tour (Kelowna being the centre of the Okanagan wine region) and not have to worry about driving anywhere afterwards. So we didn't do much sightseeing on the way, except to stop off in Revelstoke for lunch. Beyond the mountain scenery the actual town of Revelstoke is pretty nondescript, so we didn't hang about, and headed off to check in at the Hiawatha RV Park.

Day 8: in and around Kelowna. We booked a wine tour with Wine Your Way tours, which turns out to be ex-sommelier Shalyn and her car. We did a tour of four wineries: Mission Hill, Rollingdale, Cedar Creek and St. Hubertus, by the end of which we had absorbed not only lots of fascinating wine information from our well-informed guide (despite feeling like we were starring in Sideways), but also samples of something like 25 wines and were a bit addled. In a futile attempt to soak up some of the wine we also called in at the Carmelis goat's cheese emporium and sampled some of their excellent wares, including some goat's cheese ice cream (and very nice too). My suggestion: try the Chabichou cheese and the St. Hubertus Pinot Blanc, they're both great.
Day 9: Kelowna to Hope: 233 miles. We drove south from Kelowna to Osoyoos to visit the NK'MIP Desert Cultural Centre, in the middle of a weird little arid desert micro-climate (certainly weird after walking on a glacier only a couple of days earlier anyway). After watching a presentation of a bit of traditional Native American snake-wrangling in the visitor centre we went out onto the nature trails to find a few rattlesnakes for ourselves; no luck though. We then headed on to Hope and stayed at the Kawkawa Lake campground.
Day 10: Hope to Vancouver: 94 miles. Part of the reason for stopping off in Hope was to make this last leg nice and short, as we had to drop the RV back by 11:30am. So no sightseeing, just a bit of last-minute tidying up and emptying of sewage tanks and back to the Fraserway depot. They were then kind enough to ferry us plus luggage over to the airport where we were picking up the hire car for the rest of the trip. But that, as they say, is another story....

tell me more about this thing called "wealth acquisition without Christ"

2011-08-03T20:28:00.005+01:00

Strewth, here's a good one:

From: big.xandy@uol.com.br
Subject: RE:GOD BLESS YOU REAL GOOD!!!
To:

Dearly Beloved in Christ,

I am Mrs Fola Howard, daughter of Late Sherrif Kindimbu from West Africa, to be precise, Nigeria. I am 68 years old,my mother is From England, why my father is a Nigerian, and I'm an half cast by birth, I was married to Late Richard from England,and currently i am a new Christian convert,suffering from long time Cancer of the heart. From all indications, my condition is serious and according to my doctor it is quite obvious that I may not survive the sickness, although as a christian, I believe God and I know that I will not die, I will leave to declare the glory of God. My late Husband Late Mr.Richard A.Howard,he and my only son was killed by his family members,because he does not agree with them, I am presently leaving alone.Our Lord Jesus Christ is my comforter.

After the death of my husband,I made up my mind to travel abroad to leave the rest of my life and continue to do the work of God as a missionary. I c alled our lawyer and I instructed him to sell all my Husband properties and shares to enable me raise some money to continue my mission, which he successfully sold the Shares and some of the properties and he was able raise the sum of USD$9,000,000.00 (Nine million dollars) The fund is in cash,for the safety of the fund until i am able to travel out, he packaged the fund and it was deposited in a Bank for future claim, on behalf of my late husband.

Now that my sickness has gone to this stage, and the doctor's analysis is that i may not live more than 3 months got me scared and I want the fund to be used for the work of God all over the world through you,and to help the poor,widow, orphanage homes and also build a worship center for the Lord.

I have prayed and I told God to direct me to an honest Christian who will help me receive this fund and utilize it for things that will glorify the name of God. After my prayers,I searched the internet, and i found your email address and contacted you. Please if you are willing to use this Fund for the work of God, i will like you to send to me your private phone and fax number, full names and address, to enable me have a clue on whom you are, and also to enable me have confidence in you, and be rest assured, so that immediate arrangement can be made on how the Fund will be claimed by you on my Late Husbands Behalf as his Next of Kin and New Beneficiary I await to here your urgent reply.

Lastly, i honestly prayed that when the fund has been transferred to you, it shall be used for the said purpose, even if i am dead before then, because i have found out that wealth acquisition without Christ is vanity, and this gave me a good reason and i made a promised to God that the fund will be used to build His temple. May the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God, and the fellowship of the Holy spirit be with you. Amen.

Kindly contact me at my email address: flhoward@live.com

May God Bless you
Mrs.Fola Howard.

Well, the extreme religiosity is certainly new (though wasted on me, clearly), compared to previous efforts, but I'm a bit concerned about the casual reference to "My late Husband Late Mr.Richard A.Howard,he and my only son was killed by his family members,because he does not agree with them" - so I imagine they'll be totally happy to see 9 million dollars handed over to a complete stranger then.

third time's the charm

2011-08-02T18:56:00.004+01:00

Just a couple of further cricketing nuggets: it is of course true that the India team England have just brutally trampled into submission is not an absolutely full-strength one - they have been deprived of the services of their principal strike bowler Zaheer Khan (hamstring injury), talismanic opener Virender Sehwag (shoulder) and his regular opening partner Gautam Gambhir (elbow). All of whom could in theory be back for the third Test at Edgbaston, but which raises the question: does this count as a proper humbling of the world's top-ranked side if some of their best players were missing?

The trouble with answering "no" to that question is that it rules out regarding as "proper" victories many of the great triumphs of the past: does England's legendary Botham-inspired 1981 Ashes series win not count because Australia's best batsman Greg Chappell declined to tour that year? Does England's equally legendary Ashes triumph of 2005 not count because both of their victories (at Edgbaston and Trent Bridge) came in matches where Australia's premier fast bowler Glenn McGrath was absent through injury? Does Australia's 5-0 drubbing in the return series in 2006-07 not count because England were missing Vaughan and Trescothick? That last one is a bit of a stretch, admittedly, but you get the idea. To use a sporting cliché, you can only beat what's put in front of you.

Secondly, hat-tricks. If you have a look at the list of all 39 that there have been in Test history (Stuart Broad's at Trent Bridge being the 39th and latest) a couple of interesting statistical gems can be teased out:

there were 16 hat-tricks in the 504 Test matches in the 83 years between 1878 and 1961. This includes the only instance of two in the same match; even more remarkably both of those were by the same man, Jimmy Matthews; even more remarkably they were the only six wickets he took in the match, and even more remarkably the third victim in both cases was the same man, Tommy Ward.
there was then a bleak period of 603 tests and 27 years between 1961 and 1988 during which there was only one hat-trick, Peter Petherick's (on his Test debut) in 1976.
since then things have reverted to something resembling the pre-1961 frequency with 22 hat-tricks in 893 matches in 22 years between 1989 and 2011.
Broad becomes just the second man to be a hat-trick victim (i.e. someone's third wicket) and to take a hat-trick himself. Broad was Peter Siddle's third victim at Brisbane just eight months ago; the only other man to achieve the same thing was Shane Warne, who did it in the opposite order, taking a hat-trick in 1994 and then being Harbhajan Singh's third victim in 2001. The only other hat-trick-taker to feature anywhere in another bowler's hat-trick is Darren Gough, who was Warne's second victim in 1994 and then did the hat-trick himself in 1999.
there must be some scope for analysis of whose was the "best" hat-trick, by some measure of the excellence of the three batsmen involved. I'm not going to do the legwork, but you take total aggregate runs scored by the three batsmen as the metric then if I had to guess I'd say either Irfan Pathan's trio of Salman Butt, Younis Khan and Mohammad Yousuf, or Harbhajan Singh's trio of Ricky Ponting, Adam Gilchrist and Shane Warne would be pretty high on the list. You'd have to decide whether you were talking about total career aggregate runs per batsman, or career aggregate runs at the time of the hat-trick, of course. Tricky stuff.

flying balls at the bell end

2011-08-01T19:18:00.005+01:00

You'll all have your own opinions on Bellgate™, I'm sure; for what it's worth I think sanity and what you might call natural justice prevailed - watch the end of pretty much any session in a Test match and you'll see people just grounding their bats and wandering off. Add to that that just about everyone on the ground, including most of the Indian fielders, thought the ball had gone for four, and you have a recipe for a good deal of bad feeling had the appeal and dismissal been allowed to stand.

However, let’s dial down the misty-eyed Spirit of Cricket rhetoric as displayed in this rather pointless ECB press release - yes, all’s well that ends well, but really the Indians shouldn’t have made the appeal in the first place, so the kudos available for belatedly doing the right thing and withdrawing it should be pretty limited, and all the talk of giving Dhoni the Man of the Match award is a load of old flannel (they gave it to Stuart Broad in the end). On the other hand it would have been nice for the authorities to make a brief announcement to the crowd bringing them up to speed with what had happened before the end of the tea interval, thus avoiding the umpires and the Indian team getting a barrage of boos as they came onto the field of play, which later turned to rather shamefaced applause as Bell emerged down the pavilion steps.

That said, Bell was a bit careless and I'm sure he won't be doing that again; it does seem a bit silly that the laws allow for such a farcical situation to occur, though. Really once you've grounded your bat to complete a run you should only be eligible for being run out if you are actively attempting another one. I can see that this still leaves a bit of a grey area ("Attempting a run? No, Mr. Umpire, sir, I was just sprinting up the pitch to have a chat with my batting partner"), and you'd have to think about what the implications were in terms of being able to run someone out for backing up too far, but it might still be an improvement. That would have nipped this incident in the bud before it started, as well as this peculiar incident involving Muttiah Muralitharan in Christchurch a few years back.

I was a bit surprised, though, in all the commentary on the subject during the Sky Sports coverage, that no-one mentioned the almost identical incident and subsequent furore surrounding Tony Greig's run-out of Alvin Kallicharran in Port-of-Spain in 1974. Last ball of a session (last one before the tea interval at Trent Bridge, last one of the day at Port-of-Spain), people wandering off a bit casually, sharp-eyed fielder throws down the stumps, appeals, umpire a bit reluctantly has to adhere to the letter of the law, diplomatic incident and negotiation during the interval, batsman reinstated, honour seen to have been satisfied on all sides. There's even an odd similarity in the scores involved: Bell had 137 at the time and went on, after being reprieved, to make 159, while Kallicharran had 142 when the incident occurred and was dismissed early the next day for 158. Spooky. Except it isn't, really.

I'm certainly not claiming I'm the only person to have spotted the parallel, just that as far as I know none of the Sky or BBC coverage mentioned it. From reading the various accounts it sounds to me as if Kallicharran was a great deal more culpable (and therefore lucky to be reinstated) than Bell; the ball hadn't made it off the square, and he hadn't grounded his bat. Needless to say that wily old fox Geoffrey Boycott is a bit more on the ball history-wise, though in his case he has a bit of an advantage as he was actually playing in the match in question.

at it like rabbatts

2011-07-29T23:10:00.005+01:00

It's just a small, footling and frankly petty and small-minded gripe, but it bothered me at the time, so in the spirit of full disclosure of unnecessary detail about irrelevant stuff on the internet (blogging, in other words) here it is.

Kirsty Young's guest on Desert Island Discs this morning was lawyer and businesswoman (and current chief executive of Millwall FC) Heather Rabbatts. I didn't hear much of it, but I did notice that her first choice of record was Corinne Bailey Rae's cover of the hoary old standard Que Sera Sera.

There was a lot of gushing about how innovative an arrangement it was, and how CBR had really put her personal stamp on it, that sort of thing. Now I have no personal animosity towards Corinne Bailey Rae - her music is nice enough in a dinner party background wallpaper music sort of way, and she's been through a lot lately - but her version (it's from her 2011 release The Love EP, a selection of covers), while markedly different from the cutesy Doris Day version, is pretty much a carbon copy of the legendary Sly and the Family Stone's version from way back in 1973. Do these people know nothing?