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

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

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

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

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

une femme-frappeur, s'il vous plaît

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

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

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

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

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

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

assaulted Nutt

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

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



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

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

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

a seemingly unremarkable blog post....OR IS IT?!?

I'm grateful to the people at spEak You're bRanes for their championing of the fine work of novelist Cuger Brant aka regular BBC Have Your Say contributor Bruce Grant.

Don't be fooled by the availability of the Brant oeuvre on Amazon - publishers Epic Press are a "self-publishing" (or, less kindly, vanity publishing) operation. Amazon's "search inside" facility does allow you to get a taste of the truly epic awfulness of the content, though. Have a look at Something Wicked This Way Comes, for instance. Note that the title is taken from Shakespeare via the 1962 Ray Bradbury novel of the same name. Then have a look inside. Woo hoo!

Obviously being a really awful writer doesn't preclude your being a really successful one; just look at Dan Brown. Brown's stuff (and I confess I've only read excerpts, never a whole book) seems to me to be just generally ploddingly, leadenly awful rather than reaching the truly dizzy heights of dreadfulness that Brant is capable of.

Maybe Matthew Reilly would be a better comparison? My impression (again, only from the odd chapter, never a whole book; I don't think I could take it) is of someone far more hilariously shit than Dan Brown. On the other hand, his books are published by a professional publisher who, you'd like to think, might at the very least prevent books being published with large-font spelling mistakes on the front cover.

No, I think the only valid comparison here is with the baleful bard of Barnes, weaver of dreams, titan of terror: Garth Marenghi. Just as the full series of Darkplace was suppressed by The Man for being "too subversive, too dangerous, too damn scary" so it is with Cuger Brant's Cassandra-esque shamanistic prognostications. Did you reject my novel because it was shit? Did you really? Or was it that it just BLEW YOUR MIND? Yeah? Yeah? Oh, right.

what a bunch of cults

It would be remiss of me not to link to the other Scientology story of the week, which is the one about the CoS getting fined the best part of a million dollars by a French court for fraud. The Daily Mash makes the obvious point, though in fact the specific fraud perpetrated here was to do with Scientology's wacky medical treatments and "personality tests" rather than their even wackier supernatural belief system. This follows similar slapdowns in 1997, 1999 and 2002, as Scientology continues to fight for the freedom for religious organisations to run massive unaccountable brainwashing schemes and commit massive fraud. Although they prefer to shorten it to "freedom of religion", generally.

stuck in an electronic incident

If, in a scenario even more unlikely than the previous one, you decide to follow the flowchart path that leads you to Scientology, here's a couple of pieces of recent news that may be of interest.

Firstly, the high-profile defection of amusingly-named film director Paul Haggis (director of Crash and In The Valley Of Elah, and also writer of Million Dollar Baby and Quantum Of Solace, so it was presumably he who cooked up all that tosh about secret reservoirs in Bolivia). This was after a dispute over gay rights, and also about the Church of Scientology's policy of "disconnection" which Haggis had personal experience of, but the existence of which which was nonetheless denied outright on network TV by Scientology's chief public mentalist Tommy Davis. The full text of Haggis' letter can be found here.

You will of course remember Tommy Davis from this earlier post; his usual strategy is to turn up all clean-cut and suited as the friendly public face of Scientology, and then become weirdly hectoring and aggressive really quickly in a (usually successful) bid to freak everyone out and suppress any serious discussion. Full credit to Martin Bashir, then, for persisting with what should have been a totally innocuous line of questioning - one that CNN's John Roberts had a go at in the earlier clip but didn't pursue - what exactly is it that you believe? Davis' response is so peculiar it really has to be seen to be believed.

I suppose what Bashir could have done would have been to ask a couple of what you might call meta-questions on the same basic subject, like: one of the defining features of religions is that their adherents are keen to talk about them - scarcely surprisingly, since that's how they get converts. Sure, they might gloss over a few of the less palatable or more obviously ridiculous bits, but basically they'll be positively falling over themselves to tell you about how great it all is. What are we to make, then, of an organisation that claims religious status, with all the legal protections and tax breaks that go with it, but resolutely will not engage in any discussion of what the fundamentals of its belief system are? What possible motivation could there be for members of such an organisation to behave in such a way?

Secondly, if you missed the extraordinary Tom Cruise video, then I urge you to watch it; if you saw it, well, watch it again. It is mesmerisingly weird and awful. Then consider this story. The Cruise quote goes like this: "They're squirrels. Stuck in an electronic incident. It makes me so angry!". For the benefit of those not indoctrinated in the insane CoS jargon, a "squirrel" is someone who changes or subverts CoS founder, prescription drug addict and fat insane fraud L. Ron Hubbard's original texts, and an "incident" is some sort of pivotal event in human/thetan history trillions of years ago (that's right, thousands of times older than the known age of the universe), the lingering echoes of which cause psychological problems to this day. If you read the list on the Wikipedia page it sounds like Hubbard was either a) pissed or b) taking the piss when he dreamt them up. The Gorilla Goals? The Obscene Dog Incident?

Much more information is available from the in-depth investigation of Scientology done by the St. Petersburg Times. Almost inevitably, the best bit of all this is the magnificently mental response from the CoS to the allegations made by a couple of escapees, made by, you've guessed it, Tommy Davis. Two weird further things about Tommy Davis: firstly if you were listening carefully to the earlier CNN interview you'll notice his evasive response to the "what do you actually believe?" question (at about 5:10). Note the reference to the Encyclopaedia Britannica. Here's where he got it from (at about 1:00). Secondly, I used to quite fancy his mother. That's that ruined then.

choose wisely

In the frankly unlikely event that you've been inspired to go and join a religious group by reading this blog, you'll be wanting to know which one to join - and you'll be in need of some guidance, as there are a bewildering array of sects out there, all a-bowing and a-scraping to a host of different deities.

This flowchart has been popping up all over the blogosphere the last few days (it seems to have originated here; I first saw it here, but it's also here, here and here), so you may have seen it before, but I think it's worth reproducing. Clickification should provide embiggenment, if you need it.

there really IS a word for everything

You know that chest on the floor, arse in the air thing dogs do when they want you to chase them, throw a stick for them, or some other depressingly stupid activity that dogs find endlessly amusing? Well, doggy behaviourists call it a "canid play-bow", apparently, and it's a pretty universal signal among the whole doggy family (including wolves). That's "bow" to rhyme with "now", not with "low", incidentally, just in case it isn't obvious.

Next week: that 360° rotation thing cats do on your lap before lying down.

music list of the day

Songs that have repetitive codas (varying from the brief-ish to the interminable) that, on the whole, they'd be better off without.

Song	Artist	Proper bit	Coda	Total
Accidents Will Happen	Elvis Costello and the Attractions	2:13	0:47	3:00
Insomniac	Echobelly	3:38	0:37	4:15
Hide And Seek	Imogen Heap	3:23	1:06	4:29
Layla	Derek and the Dominos	3:10	3:55	7:05
Hey Jude	The Beatles	3:09	3:55	7:04

Things to note:

• Accidents Will Happen is one of Costello's best songs, but the animated video is pretty dated and horrible. The starker (and no doubt cheaper) ones like Pump It Up have aged better.
• Here's a live acoustic version of Insomniac from 2009 (the original was from 1994), which I link to less for the quality of the performance (the sound is pretty shitty) than to demonstrate that Sonya Madan is still absolutely lovely even 15 years on.
• The inclusion of Hey Jude might be a bit controversial, but, come on, it would be an even better song if they all just shut up after 3-and-a-bit-minutes and skipped all the na-na-na-na-ing, wouldn't it?
• Note the spooky similarities between Hey Jude and Layla in terms of timings - the coda bits are exactly the same length (and longer than the "proper" song in both cases). Note also that in the case of Layla the coda seems to have been parachuted in from a completely different (and slightly rubbish) song.

no further questions, your honour

An interesting discussion in the comments to a recent post prompts me (via some thought association which isn't perhaps immediately obvious) to link to some stuff I've had knocking around in the to-blog pile for a while.

There was a bit of a furore recently about the decision of the Atheist Alliance International awards panel to give an award to American comic and talk-show host Bill Maher in recognition of the impact made by his film Religulous (this site claims to have the whole movie in downloadable form).

No complaints about the film, though I haven't seen it, and from the YouTube clips available he does seem to be having a pop at some pretty easy targets (David Icke, for goodness' sake, though on the other hand this bit is pretty good), but the sceptical and scientific blogging community were not best pleased given Maher's well-known and very public barking nuttery regarding medicine, and vaccination in particular. On top of all this, the fact that the award is called the Richard Dawkins Award (though Dawkins isn't personally involved in the selection process) and that Dawkins himself had already agreed to turn up in person and present it caused a bit of flak to head Dawkins' way as well.

In the end his website issued a slightly sniffy statement defending the decision (or more accurately distancing Dawkins from it slightly), and insisting that we should all focus on the movie, and according to those who were there on the night Dawkins issued a mild rebuke (in a very civilised English sort of way) about Maher's bizarre anti-science crackpottery before handing over the award, and honour was generally seen to have been preserved on all sides.

The whole affair raises some interesting questions, though, like: is it possible to arrive at the right answer by the wrong route? Well, that one isn't so interesting, because clearly the answer is yes. However: how accommodating should the sceptical community be to people who've arrived at, say, atheism through an irrational process? Back when I was sitting mathematics exams you were told to "show your working", and marks would be docked if you failed to do so, or if there were errors in the method you used to reach an answer, even if it was the right answer. After all, science is a method, it's not a set of answers. If you haven't grasped the method, what use are your answers? Even a stopped clock is right twice a day.

In Maher's case I suspect it's a general knee-jerk contrarianism and iconoclasm, which would explain him being simultaneously an atheist and an anti-vaxxer - i.e. it's just a case of finding what the consensus of opinion or the most powerful lobby group is on any particular issue and taking up an opposing position (I suspect Penn & Teller of doing the same thing). Interestingly, I gather that Maher has spoken in favour of the HPV vaccine Gardasil, presumably because his finely-calibrated controversyometer told him there was more mileage in pissing off the religious lunatics who oppose it on the grounds that it is a one-way ticket to an endless teenage bukkake sex orgy (I'm paraphrasing Stephen Green of Christian Voice here, but only slightly).

But does it cheapen or undermine the sceptical/rationalist/scientific cause to sweep objections like that under the carpet in the case of Maher? In other words, should the AAI have given the award to someone else? Or is it just the best and most pragmatic approach to fall in behind Religulous and the award on the grounds that that'll expose the film to the widest audience? Or is there a danger that this will be seen as some sort of endorsement of Maher's position on vaccines, particularly as whenever someone on his show is able to get a word in edgeways and challenge him on it, he does the usual trick of putting his hands up and claiming he's only asking for a "debate" on the subject? I mean, debate is good, right? This is trick #1 in the creationist playbook, after all. Or (last one, promise) would a public dispute be playing into the religious media's hands? You can see the headlines now: Atheists In Schism Over Dogma - We Told You Science Was Just Another Religion.

The image on the right here is from this brilliant range of Teach The Controversy T-shirts. Just watch yourself wearing them in certain American states. There's even a David Icke one! And a Bertrand Russell one!

denied!

As the weather forecast for today was quite good I had planned to go and have a look at Fan Brycheiniog over in the less-frequented western half of the Brecon Beacons National Park. In fact I'd even got as far as putting some stuff in the car before it started raining. Now I'm not normally put off by a bit of rain, so I thought: I'll set off and see if it clears up as I go. It was hammering it down by the time I went past Cardiff, and continued to do so as I went past Pontypridd, at which point I thought: fuck it, I'm going home for a bacon sandwich. Another time maybe.

Instead, here's a selection of photos from the walk I did with Hazel and my parents last weekend in the better-known eastern Beacons, and in somewhat better weather. It includes a trip to the top of Fan y Big, not the highest point in the area by any means at 2359 feet, but interesting for the rock "diving board" you can stand on at the summit, if you feel inclined to do so. I dug up some ancient photographs when I mentioned it last time, so the one on the right is an up-to-date one for comparison purposes.

celebrity lookeylikeys of the day

Firstly, philosopher and mathematician Bertrand Russell and actor Gary Oldman in his guise as Count Dracula from Francis Ford Coppola's 1992 film. It's the hair, of course.


Secondly, the lovely Sally Bretton, star of such TV comedy fare as Green Wing (excellent), Absolute Power (not bad) and Not Going Out (not so good), and the equally lovely Victoria Pendleton, world and Olympic cycling gold medallist.


Yeah, I know what you're thinking. You're thinking: that's all very well, but that's not the Victoria Pendleton photo I want to see. And what I'd say to that is: I know. Here it is.

the last book I read

The Shooting Party by Isabel Colegate.

It's the autumn of 1913, and a party of guests has gathered at the country estate of Sir Randolph Nettleby. In addition to the usual lavish banqueting and quaffing of burgundy and port, there is also to be a game shoot; the regular hosting of these on his estate is a source of some pride to Sir Randolph, and to his team of gamekeepers and beaters.

We meet the guests: Lord and Lady Hartlip, Bob and Olivia Lilburn, Count Tibor Rakassyi, Sir Reuben Hergesheimer, Charles Farquhar and Lionel Stephens. We also meet some of Sir Randolph's family: wife Minnie, daughter Ida and grandchildren Cicely and Osbert. A couple of expertly-sketched scenes are enough for us to get to know them a bit better: Gilbert Hartlip is a taciturn and humourless type, his wife Aline is a bored society lady whose boredom has led her to a string of affairs (most recently with Charles Farquhar, who she nonetheless doesn't seem to like very much) and gambling debts; Bob Lilburn is a dull and stolid sort of bloke whose wife Olivia, starting to realise how boring he is, is conducting a flirtation with Lionel Stephens; Tibor Rakassyi is a Hungarian nobleman who has his eye on young Cicely, and Reuben Hergesheimer is a middle-aged Jewish banker.

Below stairs, as it were, lurks another group of characters, including head gamekeeper Glass and his bright and ambitious teenaged son Dan, odd-job-man and occasional poacher Tom Harker, maid Ellen and footman John.

The shoot begins, disrupted briefly by the appearance of blood sports protester Cornelius Cardew. His arrival prompts some of the more self-aware and reflective members of the party (Olivia Lilburn, for instance) to wonder: what is all of this for? Not just the slaughtering of hundreds of pheasants, woodcocks, ducks and who knows what else, most of which will never be eaten, but the whole social circuit of endless weekends at country houses, meeting the same people, talking inconsequentially about nothing but whose country house you were at last weekend, the endless changing of clothes for rides in the country, drinks, dinner, the ruthlessly enforced social structures and strictures preventing you from ever saying what you really think.

Of course the date at which all this happens is no accident in this regard: it's barely nine months or so until the outbreak of the Great War and the start of the inexorable process by which all the stuff that underpins these people's lives will be swept away. We see an example of this in the book: young Dan Glass dreams of being a scientist and going to university to study: this sort of increased social and economic mobility among the "lower" classes is the beginning of the process that would bring the old class system down, the additional irony being that in offering to fund Dan's studies, Sir Randolph is helping to sow the seeds of his own demise.

Of course it would be very easy to draw the crusty country-house types as braying chinless buffoons, but Colegate is cleverer than that. Sir Randolph is a kindly old geezer and so is his wife Minnie (though slightly dotty), but hopelessly bound by notions of social position and duty. Similarly Olivia Lilburn and Lionel Stephens are reasonably sympathetically portrayed, though they are ultimately unable to act on their love for each other by the fear of being excluded from "polite" society (and, even more ultimately, by Lionel's eventual death in the war).

Sir Randolph considers any overtly competitive stuff like practising shooting or keeping tabs on your individual tally of kills to be a bit vulgar and not quite the gentlemanly thing; however this doesn't stop Gilbert Hartlip and Lionel Stephens and their respective loaders conducting a private battle. It is this rivalry which prompts the novel's climactic events, when, knowing he is trailing Lionel Stephens' tally of birds, Gilbert Hartlip reflexively takes a shot at a low-flying woodcock and hits Tom Harker in the face, fatally as it later transpires.

If you're seeing some similarities in all this to the film Gosford Park, you wouldn't be entirely wrong - Julian Fellowes admits as much in his foreword to the latest Penguin edition of the book (which, rather oddly, in its online version at least, misspells her name as "Isobel" throughout). The Shooting Party itself was made into quite a celebrated film in 1985, featuring all manner of heavyweight British actors. The book won the W.H. Smith Literary Award in 1981; my fairly brief list for this one goes: 1960, 1981, 1986, 2002.

I don't know whether that award carries any sort of cash prize along with it, but I can reassure you that regardless of that Isabel Colegate probably isn't short of a bob or two, what with having sold Midford Castle near Bath where she lived for many years to actor Nicolas Cage in 2007 for a cool 5 million quid. Strangely neither of the lazy drunken hacks who wrote the articles in the Daily Mail or the Independent at the time bothered to find out that "Mrs. Briggs" was actually a renowned and award-winning author (the Times managed to make the connection). An amusing footnote to the story is that Cage now seems to be selling up to finance the settling of a large tax bill from the IRS.

warsi versus nazi

In the light of the decision to allow fat odious racist buffoon Nick Griffin to appear on BBC Question Time tonight and the storm of media commentary surrounding it, let me offer you another quote, this one from the late Linda Smith:

I don't want to give them the oxygen of publicity. I don't even want to give them the oxygen of oxygen.

I believe that was originally offered in relation to Neil and Christine Hamilton, but it works equally well here. I should qualify all this by saying I think it was probably the right decision to allow Griffin to appear, but regrettable that his loathsome party have acquired enough of a platform to make it necessary to consider the question at all. A cogently-argued alternative view can be found here.

As always the Daily Mash captures the mood of the nation - the huge TV audience the show will no doubt attract won't be people keen to see democracy in action or people taking a genuine interest in the BNP's policies, it'll be people hoping Griffin comes on in full Nazi regalia and starts denying the Holocaust or calling Baroness Warsi a Paki on live TV.

quotes of the day

In the first place divest yourself of all bias in favour of novelty & singularity of opinion. Indulge them in any other subject rather than that of religion. It is too important, & the consequences of error may be too serious. On the other hand shake off all the fears & servile prejudices under which weak minds are servilely crouched. Fix reason firmly in her seat, and call to her tribunal every fact, every opinion. Question with boldness even the existence of a god; because, if there be one, he must more approve the homage of reason, than that of blindfolded fear.

Thomas Jefferson

There is something feeble and a little contemptible about a man who cannot face the perils of life without the help of comfortable myths. Almost inevitably some part of him is aware that they are myths and that he believes them only because they are comforting. But he dares not face this thought! Moreover, since he is aware, however dimly, that his opinions are not rational, he becomes furious when they are disputed.

Bertrand Russell (found here). Incidentally Russell was born in Trellech in Monmouthshire, which makes him eligible for nomination as today's Welshman Of The Day.

ludo: game over

Today's notable death of someone I didn't even know was still alive: broadcaster Ludovic Kennedy, who was 89 (actually, about a fortnight short of his 90th birthday).

I'm too young, fresh-faced and cherubically innocent to remember Kennedy's heyday as a broadcaster (which was in the late 1950s and early 1960s on news and current affairs programmes like This Week and Panorama); my only recollections of seeing him on television are of the rather gentler TV review and discussion show Did You See..? in the 1980s.

But he was also a long-standing campaigner against miscarriages of justice, one of the prime movers in getting the UK death penalty abolished in the 1960s, in later years a campaigner for a sensible policy on voluntary euthanasia, and a vocal humanist and atheist and author of All In The Mind: A Farewell To God in 1999, thereby scooping Dawkins, Harris and the like by about 7 years. All of which makes him a Good Bloke in my book.

From a family of sport and games enthusiasts, he is survived by his brothers Cluedovic and Judovic Kennedy, and his sister Jengavic Kennedy.

damsons in distress

Second instalment of the great pre-Christmas drink brewing extravaganza: damson gin. I won't go into the recipe in great detail as it's already available here: basically this year's batch comprised three two-litre jars, each loaded with about 600g of damsons, 200g of sugar and a litre of gin.



Give it a couple of months and it should be ready to decant. Also, the gin-soaked damsons can be made into a crumble, though one somewhat hazardous to human health, what with the alcohol content and all, plus the ever-present danger of someone sparking up a cigarette and the resulting fireball taking out most of the street.

step AWAY from the pork chops

We've had kosher telephones. We've had kosher light switches. This week's contenders for the prize for extreme religious silliness are as follows:

• The kosher lift.
• The kosher fridge - what makes these fridges special is that they come with a "Sabbath Mode" capability which can be engaged by those concerned about desecrating the sanctity of the Sabbath while reaching for a pint of milk. Basically it's a sort of stealth mode where the light doesn't come on when you open the door, the compressor doesn't try to compensate for the inevitable rise in temperature when you open the door, etc. etc. I like to imagine that it's engaged by flicking a big switch whereupon a siren and big flashing yellow lights come on, a big rumbly computer voice intones "SABBATH MODE ENGAGED", and then the fridge settles down to a low hum, refuses to dispense anything except unleavened bread and gefilte fish, and keeps reminding you to phone your mother.
  

Of course even if you do manage to get hold of the milk without desecrating the Sabbath in any one of the myriad available ways, you still need a kosher kettle to make a cup of coffee. At which point you should probably seek professional assistance - fortunately much advice on kosher kitchen design is available, most of it entirely insane.

you disgust me

Couple of follow-ups (follows-up? I dunno) to the previous posts which may be of interest:

• Ralph Lauren have taken the criticism of the doctored Filippa Hamilton photo on board and have responded in a measured and sensitive manner by....firing Filippa Hamilton for being too fat. Just as an experiment I fed the figures (5 feet 10 inches, 120 pounds) quoted in that article into an online Body Mass Index calculator, and it returned a calculated BMI of 17.2. So it's true, she is a BIG FAT HEIFER.
• In response to being threatened following the initial blog post, Photoshop Disasters have dug up another alarming-looking Ralph Lauren advert from the archives.
• In a related story, Karl Lagerfeld offers us the benefit of his considered opinion on the skinny models question, presumably having come to the conclusion that being a freakish wizened 76-year-old gay man in black leather fingerless gloves makes him some sort of expert on what makes a woman desirable. And his opinion is, basically, if you have any objection to the use of skinny models then you're just jealous and you should shut your big fat sweaty disgusting gob, pie-face, and for God's sake stay indoors on the sofa where no-one can see you, you disgusting wobbly oaf.
• The Daily Mash has the latest on the Trafigura affair, and in particular the legal furore following "its decision to hose down some Africans with a big boat full of shit".

surely the firestarter should be getting cremated?

There's an entertaining interview with The Prodigy in this month's Q magazine, wherein Keith Flint outlines his plans for the steps to be taken in the event of his death.

Firstly, he wants to be "buried with my arse sticking out of the ground, so people can park their bike, they plug their bike in and it plays Firestarter". And his preferred epitaph? "He Was Such A Cunt".

Respect.