choccy, skills and ganache

As I've said before, I'm not big on desserts, but this was recommended to me by the wife of a good friend of mine who makes cakes for a living, and it looked both a) delicious and b) pretty simple, so I thought I'd give it a go. Now I could just direct you to the original recipe, but it does that American thing of giving all the quantities in incomprehensible American units (cups, for fuck's sake), so I thought a bit of translation might be helpful.

So what you'll need is as follows:

• 30-40 Oreos - available in the UK in packets of 14 or so, so three packets will probably do you. Alternatively you could assert your Britishness and use Bourbons or something instead;
• one standard 250g pack of butter;
• 120g brown sugar;
• one 300ml carton of double cream;
• 350g dark chocolate.

What you do is basically in three stages with an hour or so in between, during which time you can dig the garden, do your tax return, read some improving literature, make sweet sweet love to your lady friend, or all of the above if you're quick.

Step one is to make a biscuit base., much the same as if you were making cheesecake, by blitzing the Oreos, filling and all, in a food processor and then stirring in half the butter, melted. Then press this into a flan tin and put it in the fridge for an hour or so.

Step two is to make some caramel. This sounds like the sort of scary baking chemistry that requires jam thermometers and the like, but actually it couldn't be easier. Throw equal 120g quantities of butter and brown sugar into a saucepan, stir till the sugar has dissolved and the whole thing is bubbling (no more than five minutes or so), then take the whole thing off the heat and stir in 60ml of the double cream. Set this aside for 10-15 minutes to cool, then pour it into the crust - you shouldn't have to do any spreading as it should still be liquid enough to find its own level. Stick it back in the fridge for half an hour or so.

Step three is to make some chocolate ganache. Again, this all sounds a bit like a job for Lindt's master chocolatiers, but it's actually pretty easy. Smash up some dark chocolate into small pieces, heat up the rest (240ml) of the cream in a small saucepan, and pour it over the chocolate in a bowl. Now in theory the heat of the cream should melt the chocolate, but you may find that you have to apply some extra heat to get it to mix smoothly, particularly if you've used (as I did) a very high-cocoa content chocolate. Then pour the whole shebang into the flan tin on top of the caramel and put it back in a the fridge for an hour or two. You may find that some of the fat in the chocolate separates into a buttery deposit on top of the tart as it solidifies; you can just scrape this off with a knife and discard it.

This makes a phenomenally rich chocolatey tart that the original recipe recommends garnishing with some sea salt. I think this is an excellent idea, but it perhaps won't be for everyone. If you find the whole thing a bit overpowering then you could increase the proportion of cream in the ganache or use a lower-cocoa-content chocolate. Also, cut smaller slices than you think you'll need, it's really rich.

In a way it's a sort of upside-down version of this earlier largely improvised creation.

some Bond film titles; yes these are some Bond film titles

Here's a little insight into what I'm shortly to present to the Nobel committee as supporting evidence for my bid for the Nobel Prize For Inconsequential Deranged Film-Related Ravings: a detailed analysis of Bond film titles by number of syllables.

The results are startling, I'm sure you'll agree. The runaway winner, with nine out of the twenty-four titles (including the yet-to-be-released Spectre) is five syllables. The films in question are:

• From Russia With Love
• You Only Live Twice
• The Spy Who Loved Me
• For Your Eyes Only
• A View To A Kill
• The Living Daylights
• Die Another Day
• Casino Royale
• Quantum Of Solace

The beauty of this, as I mentioned around the time of the release of Quantum Of Solace, is that 5-syllable titles lend themselves perfectly to being sung to the tune of Guantanamera. You'll have to slot three extra syllables into the second line, but that's easy enough. Here's some suggestions to get you going:

From Russia With Love
Yes it came From Russia With Love

You Only Live Twice
It's true that You Only Live Twice

The Spy Who Loved Me
Yes she was The Spy Who Loved Me

For Your Eyes Only
It can be For Your Eyes Only

A View To A Kill
We're taking A View To A Kill

The Living Daylights
I'll give you The Living Daylights

Die Another Day
No we can Die Another Day

Casino Royale
We're at the Casino Royale

Quantum Of Solace
I need a Quantum Of Solace

I'm the lyrical gangsta

Here's a list in similar vein to a couple of previous ones: basically a list of some interesting stuff that popped up during a random shuffle sequence on my iPod. The rules change a bit every time I do this: the background here is that I had the big iPod (which has over 9000 songs on it) on shuffle while I was doing some pre-Christmas catering preparation and started tweeting a few interesting lyrical snippets under the hashtag #randomipodlyrics, just to amuse myself.

I re-found the series of tweets while trawling back looking for something else earlier, so I thought it'd be interesting to blog the playlist and also see how many of the songs I could identify from the lyrics after nearly four weeks. I've Storified the list and embedded it below so you can play along at home. Answers afterwards.

So here's the list, with YouTube links where I could find them, and a confessional note if I had to resort to Google to identify them:

1. is from Honey Are You Straight Or Are You Blind by Elvis Costello and the Attractions, from their bracingly bilious 1986 album Blood & Chocolate;
2. is from Fake Plastic Trees by Radiohead;
3. is from You Cause As Much Sorrow by Sinéad O'Connor;
4. is from U Got The Look by Prince;
5. is from Lazarus by the Boo Radleys - that video features various Creation Records luminaries including label boss Alan McGee (the ginger one) and the divine Toni Halliday of Curve (at about 2:35 with the shaving foam);
6. is from Sweet Little Mystery by the late great John Martyn;
7. is from Hey Willy by The Hollies (had to Google this one);
8. isn't really a lyric at all, just an acknowledgement that if you let the noise wash over you then, by some weird pareidolia effect, words start to suggest themselves. All I can tell you is that it's a song from their 2002 "brackets" album;
9. is from Family Portrait by Pink;
10. is from Pyjamarama by Roxy Music;
11. is from Touch, Feel & Lose by Ryan Adams;
12. is from A Song For The Deaf by Queens Of The Stone Age;
13. is from Monty Got A Raw Deal by REM;
14. is from Now Be Thankful by Fairport Convention;
15. is from Heaven And Hell by Black Sabbath, from their Ronnie James Dio period (had to Google this one);
16. is from Hobo Chang Ba by Captain Beefheart, from the legendarily "difficult" 1969 album Trout Mask Replica (I had to Google the song here).

the last book I read

The Birthday Boys by Beryl Bainbridge.

I say, you fellows, here's a ripping idea I've just had: let's go and conquer the South Pole! I hear those shifty Scandinavians are thinking of having a crack at it, so I say let's go and give them a good spanking and bag the bally thing for King and country, what? Yes, of course it'll be bally cold, but we're British, for goodness sake. No need to worry about the stiff upper lip: bally thing'll be frozen solid anyway! Drop more port? Splendid.

Just a little insight there into the exact transcript of the planning meeting for Robert Falcon Scott's ill-fated polar expedition of 1910-1913. And it's that expedition that's the subject of this novel, although, Bainbridge being Bainbridge, it's not an exact linear narrative of the events. Instead what we get is five separate sections, each covering a different period of time (in chronological order), one written by each of the final party of five who made it to the Pole: Evans, Wilson, Scott, Bowers and Oates.

As with Every Man For Himself, describing the broad thrust of the plot is a bit pointless, as everyone knows what happens anyway. Instead the interest is provided by a bit of back-story for each character, and by the interaction between them. This is what Bainbridge was good at: if you want a rollicking wintry adventure story that teaches you how to whittle a knife out of a walrus tusk then you're probably better off with Jack London or someone like that.

One of the fascinating subjects that historians have argued over for the century or so since the events depicted here is: why did the Scott expedition fail so disastrously while the rival Amundsen expedition scooted in, knocked off the Pole and scooted back again with relatively little fuss or drama? Plenty of reasons have been offered, the usual ones being the Amundsen expedition's use of dogs rather than Scott's bizarre insistence on using ponies, Amundsen's ruthless focus on Pole-bagging at the expense of scientific research, and Scott's fatal indecisiveness at various key moments, not least in deciding to take an extra man on the final push to the Pole, further stretching their already thin resources, and finally Scott's running into a window of horrific weather which made progress all but impossible, even for men whose extremities weren't useless gangrenous frostbitten lumps.

The other reason for failure is hinted at in the novel, and it's tied up with the British class system - naturally it was taken as read that the leader of the expedition would be a high-ranking military officer from the upper classes, and that there would be little room for dissent or discussion from his men once the expedition had kicked off. This sort of rigid hierarchical command structure, where there's no channel for criticism or questioning of decisions taken by those in authority, has been shown to be problematic - indeed it was implicated in so many commercial airline disasters that the industry came up with a whole new set of procedures called crew resource management to deal with it.

I remember saying in the review of Every Man For Himself that it was fairly clear that the narrator survived the sinking of the Titanic, because the novel was written in the first person and the past tense. Well, all five sections of The Birthday Boys are written in the same way, and we know that none of the five who reached the Pole survived. The usual way round this is to present the reminiscences as diary entries, but these are not presented that way, indeed Oates' section couldn't possibly be a diary entry since it describes the well-documented circumstances of his exit from the tent and subsequent death. This is really only a problem for a tedious literalist like me, who wants to know: well, in the suspended-disbelief fictional world we're in, how and from where are these words being transmitted onto the page? Are the expedition members all sitting around, in whatever Valhalla dead explorers go to, reminiscing about old times? Remember when Evans' hand fell off? Remember when you LITERALLY DIED? Ah, great days.

A minor quibble, though, really - this is a typically sly and sideways look at a familiar subject. The interactions between the men are fascinating, and the sketched portraits of each man are very convincing (and they are only sketches, as this is a short book at only 181 pages). The Birthday Boys (published in 1991) marked the start of what you might call phase two of Bainbridge's career, which featured a series of novels based on real historical events. Phase one featured novels in more domestic (and purely fictional) settings, including the slightly baffling Winter Garden and also Injury Time, probably still the best book of hers that I've read. Bainbridge herself was universally described as "eccentric" and "chaotic" and "a likable and amusing woman famed for falling over at parties", which I take to be affectionate obituary-ese euphemisms for "constantly pissed".

intershitty 125

I caught a bit on the Today programme on Radio 4 this morning about the possible health dangers posed by the quaint habit train companies have of flinging raw faecal solids onto the tracks. You'll recall I did a blog post about this a while back, expressing some surprise that this was still legal - well, it turns out that something in the region of 10% of train carriages (the ones built prior to 1990) still adhere to the just-chuck-it-on-the-tracks approach. This has been the cause of some concern, not least in Diss in Norfolk and Rochford in Essex where a luxuriant crop of tomato plants has apparently sprung up along the tracks, from seeds (we're presumably meant to infer) pooped out by passengers. Not sure whether any station staff have nipped down onto the tracks to harvest them for the buffet trolley - if so they might want to give them a rinse first.

And consider this - here we are, fifty-odd years after Dr. Beeching closed a third of the British railway network, at which time ALL trains would have just been fitted with the standard poop chute.

So if we assume, since Beeching cut the network mileage by roughly a third, that there'd have been roughly 1.5 times as many carriages about, that means that there'd have been 15 times the volume of raw sewage being flung about as there is today. And bear in mind that's probably an underestimate, because trains were a lot more popular then. So back in the 1940s and 1950s people would have been merrily trooping off on the train in their thousands:

• to the seaside
• to work
• to war to be senselessly slaughtered in huge numbers

- all the while being relentlessly spattered with a fusillade of their own shit. And, remember, this is in times of post-war austerity, powdered egg, no bananas - you can imagine the likely consistency of the results. Not like those shifty French and Italian types with their oily Mediterranean diet and their loose untrustworthy stools - Johnny Britain would have been producing motions with the consistency of obsidian which probably shattered when they hit the tracks, sending foul-smelling shards of shrapnel hurtling towards bystanders. No wonder everyone wore hats back then, and smoked relentlessly to hide the smell.

incidental music spot of the day

Jefferson Airplane's 1967 single White Rabbit, one of the most perfect little psychedelic pop/rock nuggets ever recorded, advertising the slightly peculiar new Citroen C4 Cactus, half chunky mini-SUV, half lavishly upholstered leather sofa.

I'm never sure quite how much my great love for Jefferson Airplane is influenced by my great love (of a slightly different kind) for the fabulously sexy Grace Slick, just as I'm never sure how much my great love for Grace Slick is influenced by her being thrown into sharp relief by her bandmates, a really exceptionally ugly bunch even by 1960s hippy standards. That didn't stop her from sleeping with just about all of them, though, bless her. Here's White Rabbit as performed at Woodstock in 1969.

Secondly, I'd have put a modest sum of money on the backing to the new HSBC "Pink Ladies" advert being by Sigur Rós. I certainly wouldn't have staked any money on being able to identify the song, as with a very few exceptions they all merge into one - no recognisable words to memorise being half the problem. Even being as cagey as that I still would have lost that money, though, since it turns out that the song is called Grow Till Tall by Jónsi, aka Jón Þór Birgisson, the singer with Sigur Rós, from his 2010 solo album Go. So I claim half a point.

well I wish it could be a week and a half after Christmas every week and a half

This is a bit late, but, well, it's been Christmas and New Year and I've been a bit busy with various festive shenanigans, as I expect you have too. But I've had this clogging up my brain like a giant impacted cranial turd for the last couple of weeks, so I've got to get it out there. Wait 50 weeks and read it just before next Christmas, if you like.

Anyway: I trust we're at a point in human history where we don't need to have the tedious discussion prompted by questions like: well, you're an atheist, what are you doing celebrating Christmas? Because we all know about how 95% of the trappings of the festival: the date, the tree, the whole Santa Claus thing, et tediously cetera, are all a mish-mash of old traditions from a whole host of other places, most of them religions that your vanilla Christian would run a mile rather than admit to believing in. So let's all just chill out and have a mince pie. In any case, try making a principled stand and schlepping in to the office on Christmas Day to get some work done and see where that gets you.

[Apologies to whoever I nicked that little montage from, but I did it before Christmas and now I've forgotten where it was.]

No, my purpose here is to do with a particular aspect of Christmas: the music. I was inspired to think about it by this post on Greta Christina's blog, listing 10 Christmas carols acceptable to atheists. To be honest I tend to think that with Christmas carols you should in general get over yourself, accept that we've all mostly grown up in the same culture and that there will be some inevitable Goddery, and just like the ones you're naturally inclined to like, i.e. those that are most familiar from your childhood and have the best tunes. For me that means The Sussex Carol and O Come All Ye Faithful, cracking tunes that build in volume towards the end and incorporate a bit of scope for the organist to go all frenziedly In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida towards the end. If you've ever attended Christmas carol services, there's a reason they leave O Come All Ye Faithful to the end: it's because it's the best tune and really allows the congregation to get some air in the lungs and have a bit of a bellow.

O Come All Ye Faithful does illustrate a bit of a problem with certain carols, though: the jarring weirdness of the lyrics. The second verse contains probably the strangest Christmas lyric ever written: "Lo, he abhors not the virgin's womb". I mean, firstly, why bring wombs into it at all, but secondly, what's with the not abhorring bit? Why would he abhor it? I mean, it's probably a bit dark, but it's a womb. And don't even get me started on the Christian virginity fetish. It's not just O Come All Ye Faithful, though: Hark The Herald Angels Sing is at it as well with "Offspring of a virgin's womb", as is the slightly more obscure Cherry Tree Carol with "up spoke Lord Jesus from in his mother's womb".

And it's not just the relentless wombery: that second verse of O Come All Ye Faithful is a masterpiece of non-obvious scansion. Most people manage to muddle their way through "God of God; Light of Light" without there really being enough syllables to fit the tune, but come spectacularly unstuck two lines further on, possibly as a result of shell-shock after all the womb stuff, but more likely at having to smear "Very God; Begotten not created" across a tune that they were happily cramming "Come and adore him; Born the king of angels" into only a verse ago. The secret is to realise that despite the apparent lack of syllables what you actually have to do is put the "be" of "begotten" at the end of the first line, and then you find that the "gotten not created" flows OK afterwards.

This is actually only the second most impossible Christmas lyric in terms of fitting it into the tune, though, the hands-down winner being the last verse of We Three Kings, which requires you to fit "Heaven sings Alleluia; Alleluia the earth replies" into the space you'd previously fitted "Field and fountain, moor and mountain; Following yonder star" into. I think part of the problem here is a visual one - it just doesn't look as if there are enough syllables here, and so people tend to panic. Actually there are exactly the same number as in the earlier verse, thanks to "alleluia" having four, and if you just start, treat each syllable equally, fit them into the same pattern, and don't panic, you'll be fine, although you will find that, as for O Come All Ye Faithful, you will have to tack the first two syllables of the second "alleluia" on to the end of the first line.

We Three Kings has its share of lyrical weirdness as well - obviously there's that jolly verse about the myrrh, you know, the one that goes "Sorrowing, sighing, bleeding, dying; Sealed in the stone-cold tomb". Yeah, and a Merry Christmas to you too. But go back to the very first line: "We three kings of orient are". What's with the shunting of the verb to the end? What are you, Yoda? Still, at least they lay off the wombs.

Secular and popular music has its share of lyrical oddities as well, not least Rudolph The Red-Nosed Reindeer. Biological implausibility aside, it's a bizarre little story of whatever's the cervine equivalent of racism and/or ableism and just plain old bullying, and then one of those "hey, kid, you're all right" moments based on little more than a nod from the resident authority figure, Santa. To be fair the original book seems to make it clearer that the acceptance was based on Rudolph proving himself as a sleigh-pulling beacon, whereas in the song it sounds as if they perked up pretty much as soon as Santa nominated him. It's a bit weird either way, though.

Incidentally the "official" list of Santa's reindeer (the one that goes: Dasher, Dancer, Prancer, Vixen, Comet, Cupid, Donner, Blitzen) is from the 1823 poem A Visit From St. Nicholas, more commonly known as The Night Before Christmas. This is still knocking about in print, and indeed we had a copy out of the library over Christmas. Rudolph usually gets tacked on to the list as well these days, but he's a latecomer, as the book came out in 1939 and the song in 1949.

Finally, as I usually do at this time of year, I must just register a vote for Jethro Tull's Ring Out Solstice Bells as the atheist's Christmas pop song of choice, partly because it isn't really about Christmas at all. On the other hand, it does feature a gurning beardy snaggle-toothed bloke in tights standing on one leg playing the flute, which I think we can all agree is the true meaning of Christmas.

fuck you and the winged horse you rode in on

Just a quick ugly ill-thought-out splurge to express my revulsion and outrage at the Charlie Hebdo massacre earlier today. I really just have two thoughts:

Firstly: humour is the key marker of a properly civilised society. If your culture is relaxed and self-confident enough to tolerate people taking the piss relentlessly then you're probably on the right track. Conversely, any regime which is hyper-sensitive to criticism, and mockery in particular, just betrays its own lack of confidence in its own rightness. Islam is the canonical example of this: look at the grinding humourless, sexless, life-denying, ritualised childishness of it all. That's my first reaction on hearing of an atrocity like this: oh, you fucking BABIES. You stupid, brainwashed, pathetic, petulant, humourless BABIES.

Secondly: this is what you get when you are too lily-livered to publicly criticise religious lunacy, Islamic or otherwise. You cannot simultaneously hold up freedom of expression as an absolute and then dance around the subject of "blasphemy", as the current UK government has repeatedly done, by saying, yeah, freedom of expression and all, but we should respect others' beliefs and just generally avoid saying anything that might offend. No, fuck that: you either have freedom of expression or you don't, and that includes the right to say things like: fuck the fictional prophet Mohammed, fuck his flying horse and fuck all his followers.

celebrity lookeylikey of the day

Two things occurred to me on reading this Independent article about French novelist Michel Houellebecq's latest successful trolling of the literary world: firstly, wherever he's been for the last few years he's either been quite ill, putting away a phenomenal quantity of vin rouge and Gauloises and possibly crystal meth, or both, because he looks terrible. I don't know the vintage of the first photo here but I would guess it's no more than 15 years old.

Secondly, on closer examination who he actually looks like is the imaginary unholy bastard lovechild of Will Self and Arthur Scargill, or, to put it more prosaically, Will Self with Arthur Scargill's hair.

tell me Michel Houellebecq does not look EXACTLY like the bastard lovechild of Will Self & Arthur Scargill http://t.co/lTuOciFBq0
— Dave Thomas (@electrichalibut) January 6, 2015

Having tossed off a quick tweet on the subject earlier I thought I'd turn it into a proper blog post just so I could have a pop at making the Self/Scargill hybrid a reality. My image-mashup skills are rudimentary at best, but I've had a go, just for a laugh. See what you think.

the last book I read

Inverted World by Christopher Priest.

Helward Mann, is, well, a man. A man who lives in a city. Nothing so very unusual about that, you might say (well, except that the city's inhabitants call it "Earth"), and Helward would probably agree with you, at least until he comes of age, is initiated into the city's complex guild system and begins to understand some of the city's secrets.

Big Secret #1 is revealed when he is permitted to venture outside the city. Well, actually I suppose Big Secret #1 is that there even is such a thing as "outside the city", and Big Secret #2 is that the city moves, not exactly constantly, but in fits and starts, averaging about a tenth of a mile a day, across what appears to be mainly semi-desert scrubland. Most of the guilds are devoted to keeping this process going, so they have names like Track, Bridge-Building, Traction and Navigation. Basically the process is that the city moves on a constantly rebuilt set of four parallel railway tracks a few miles long, which are taken up after the city has passed over them and then re-laid ahead of it. The surrounding land looks broadly "normal", but the sun, instead of being the glowing circle that everyone's been taught about, is a sort of flattened saucer-shape with two great spikes protruding out of it above and below.

The city can't just wander about anywhere, though - it's engaged in a constant pursuit of something called "the optimum", the epicentre of some weird spatial and gravitational anomaly. If the city ever gets too far behind this point then it gradually starts to become subject to some very undesirable effects, which new guild inductees are invited to experience at first hand by being sent on a mission "down past", i.e. in the direction the city has come from (the opposite direction being referred to as "up future"). Helward embarks on his own quest in this direction and experiences both some weird spatial distortion (everything seeming to be flattened and widened the further from the city you go) and an inexorable gravitational pull to what he calls "the south" (i.e. away from the city). He makes it back to the city OK, though we are invited to infer that some who make the trip never return. He finds on his return that there is some weird time dilation happening as well; while he perceives that he's been away for three or four days, a couple of years seem to have passed in the city.

Part of Helward's purpose in making the trip "down past" was to deliver three native women back to their village. By no means everyone on this world lives in the city, and those who don't (variously known as "natives" or "tooks" by the city-dwellers) don't seem to be affected by the gravitational anomaly. One of the other ways in which the city-dwellers are different is that they disproportionately have male children, which inevitably results in a dwindling population. So via a bartering system goods are given to the natives in exchange for local women to live in the city temporarily and bear children, in the hope that some of them will be female.

While this bartering system makes raw economic sense, it inevitably causes tension and resentment among the natives, and the city is increasingly beset by attacks, some of which cause considerable damage to the city's superstructure and necessitate a rethink of the policy of keeping the plebs ignorant of the outside world (since there are now great big holes in the outside walls that people can look out through).

Helward's trips "down past" and "up future" lead him to draw some conclusions about the world the city travels on, principally its shape: it and its sun are hyperboloids (imagine the graph of y = 1/x rotated about the y-axis) and the city's endless pursuit of the "optimum" is just a desperate attempt to avoid sliding off along the x-axis to infinity and destruction.

There's not much time for theorising, though: problems are afoot. Firstly, the new availability of information to the city-dwellers leads to a protest movement developing within the city which demands that the people-trafficking should stop and the city be brought to a halt. This actually turns out to be what has to happen in the short term anyway, as the tracks arrive at a vast expanse of water seemingly far too wide to be traversed by the usual method of building a bridge.

Secondly, an external factor has intervened: Elizabeth Khan, an English-speaking aid worker in one of the nearby villages, has taken an interest in the city and done some historical research, and has disguised herself as a local woman to be bartered in order to get access to the city. At a public meeting to discuss the city's future she makes a speech wherein she reveals the truth (so, obviously, SPOILER ALERT): the mysterious planet on which the city of Earth travels is Earth, the same old spherical Earth it's always been. The city itself is the repository for an experimental power source, invented a couple of hundred years before in the aftermath of a world energy crisis caused by the final exhaustion of the world's fossil fuel supply, which works by hooking up a man-made reactor to a focus point of some newly-discovered electromagnetic phenomenon. This is the "optimum" they've been following, along a great circle that just happens, luckily for them, to have described a route following one of the longest routes of unbroken land on the planet (though not quite as long as this one), from its starting point in China to the Atlantic coast of Portugal, where they are now.

One of the side-effects of the prototype technology they're using (since perfected elsewhere in the world) is that it permanently skews the perception of people exposed to it, resulting in exactly the strange inverted distorted view of the world (and the sun) that Helward has been trying to make sense of. So now the city-dwellers have no choice but to switch their reactor off, wait for the "optimum" to drift off into the ocean away from them and the city, and see what happens.

Christopher Priest is most famous as the author of The Prestige, winner of the venerable James Tait Black Memorial Prize in 1995 (this blog features the winners from 1972, 1981, 2002 and 2006), and subsequently made into a pretty good film by Christopher Nolan. I can't speak for the book since I haven't read it, but the film doesn't reveal itself as having any science fiction elements until right at the end, by which time I have to say I felt obscurely cheated by them, the rest of the movie having been a fascinating story of deceit and misdirection. To have the biggest illusion of them all explained by essentially saying "yeah, that bit actually was magic" was a bit of a dampener.

Anyway, Inverted World (which dates from much earlier, in 1974) is clearly a science fiction novel from the outset, and makes use of a number of speculative fiction tropes, most obviously the one of having the protagonist inhabit a strange confined world with arbitrary rules and gradually arrive at an understanding of how his little world fits into the larger one. There are plenty of other examples of this, most obviously THX1138, Logan's Run, Zardoz and Brian Aldiss' first novel Non-Stop, but also several JG Ballard short stories like Thirteen To Centaurus and The Concentration City. Like most novels featuring a population held in check by a knowledge-denying elite it can be read as a satire on organised religion. The other trope of switching from an internal, subjective, first-person voice for most of the book to an external, objective, third-person voice at the end to provide a jarring shift of perspective is familiar from both I Am Legend and also William Golding's The Inheritors.

I don't read a lot of "hard" science fiction these days; the only books on this list which would unambiguously fall into that category would be the ones by Iain M Banks plus possibly The Sirens Of Titan, Snow Crash and Roadside Picnic, with lots of others existing in a sort of ill-defined netherworld between there and "proper" fiction. That category would include Riddley Walker, Virtual Light, The Memoirs of a Survivor and O-Zone. So it's nice to dip back in occasionally, and I enjoyed Inverted World very much. For all the engineering detail and dizzying mathematical concepts there's a strong human story here, and in many ways the central message is the same as the one in Never Let Me Go (another maybe-it's-science-fiction-maybe-not sort of book): you never know what's going to happen next, so you just do your best to survive from day to day and enjoy the moments when they present themselves, however bizarre your day-to-day situation might seem. It's a nice touch to have the two most sensible characters in the book - Elizabeth Khan and Helward's wife (and subsequently ex-wife) Victoria - be women, science fiction being a pretty male-dominated area generally.

yeah, I got your new year fireworks right here

Happy New Year, everyone. Let's kick off 2015 in style with some kitchen light bulb updates. You'll recall that after the last round-up and the replacement of the most recently demised batch of incandescent spotlights with LEDs that the only four old-school bulbs left were 1, 6, 9 and 11. So WHAT HAPPENED NEXT?!? Read on....

First to check out, on November 26th, was number 1. This was previously replaced on May 30th, so its second incarnation lasted 180 days.

Then, on December 11th, number 6. This is significant because this one was the last of the original batch of incandescent bulbs installed in April - the only other bulb to remain un-replaced since then is number 8, which is a proper long-life energy-saver which you'd expect to last a bit longer. This one was a halogen one at £4.28 a pop, which after 226 days works out at 0.019 pence per day.

Finally, today, number 9. Well, I say "today", but it could really have been any point over the last ten days or so as it's been pretty busy over Christmas and we were away for New Year. Anyway, I only noticed it today. That one was one of the original batch of 40W bulbs and so was of unknown age when it originally expired on September 18th; its second stint lasted 107 days.

So what that all means is that there is now just one incandescent bulb left in the whole kitchen, and it's number 11, the one on the right in the picture above, blazing its defiance in the face of progress like the roar of a doomed brachiosaur trapped in a tar pit as a meteorite hurtles towards it.

I suppose it's plausible that the attrition rate of the incandescent bulbs could reduce (or have already reduced) as more and more of them get replaced by low-energy bulbs and the overall load on the kitchen lighting circuit diminishes, but I am not an electrician and so it's also perfectly plausible that that's all just bollocks. What certainly is true is that IKEA (or at least their Cardiff branch) are currently knocking out the LED bulbs for a pound, a quarter of the usual price. I'd say that represents pretty excellent value for money, since the total number of LED bulbs to expire since I installed the first one in early May stands at a big fat zero.

the last book I read

Turbulence by Giles Foden.

Henry Meadows is a meteorologist, and in the brief sections of the book set in the "present", he's on board a ship made largely out of ice (or, more specifically, a more melt-resistant blend of ice and wood pulp called Pykrete) travelling from Antarctica to the Middle East in 1980 as part of an experimental drought-relief system.

This framing device really just provides a hook to hang the real story off, the real story being that of Meadows' involvement as a keen young twentysomething junior meteorologist in the planning for the 1944 D-Day landings, and specifically the long-range weather forecasting required to fix a date for the invasion in advance.

There's an obvious problem, quite apart from the one of long-range weather forecasting (over a timescale greater than a couple of days) being notoriously error-prone: not only are various advantageous weather conditions (full-ish moon, clear skies, not much wind) required, the element of surprise is also essential and of course the Germans have perfectly capable meteorologists of their own. So the Allies need an edge over the enemy, and Meadows is dispatched to Scotland to sound out the man who just might provide it, Wallace Ryman. Ryman is a maverick meteorologist, who doesn't play by the rules, but dammit he gets results, and those results include the Ryman number, a coefficient which helps make sense of turbulence, something which otherwise wrecks the (already dicey) accuracy of forecasts.

The trouble is, Ryman doesn't seem to be wholly on board with the whole war thing, and seems to harbour some pacifist tendencies, which have led him to largely give up the old meteorology game (hardest game in the world, the old meteorology game) and focus instead on some arcane mathematical theorems for bringing about world peace. Well, you've got to have a hobby, haven't you? So Meadows' assignment is: set up a fake weather-monitoring station just down the road from Ryman's place on the west coast of Scotland, "bump into" Ryman around the neighbourhood and try to get some information out of him.

Although Meadows does strike up a tentative friendship of sorts with Ryman, and they do have some discussions about weather, he doesn't get a lot of useful information out of him. What he does get is a couple of unsettlingly sexually-charged encounters with Ryman's wife Gill, one of which results in a bit of a slapstick oops-oh-no-I've-fallen incident during which bodily fluids are exchanged, though probably not the ones you're thinking of.

All Meadows' ham-fisted scheming comes spectacularly unstuck when his well-intentioned (though slightly drunken) attempt to bring down a Nazi Junkers reconnaissance plane with some booby-trapped weather balloons results, via a rather unlikely sequence of events, in Ryman's death. So with the chances of getting any usable information out of him having reduced from small to zero, Meadows is re-assigned (in some disgrace) to the team collating the various weather readings and predictions from an international team of experts, a more challenging job than it might sound given that none of them seem to be able to agree on anything.

But then Meadows notices some small anomalies in the readings from one of the weather ships in the vicinity of Iceland (no, the other one) and starts to get an inkling of perhaps being able to put some of Ryman's theories to use after all. After a quick dash to the Isle of Wight to make sure the instruments weren't malfunctioning, during the course of which he has a brief reunion with Gill, he returns to the pivotal invasion planning teleconference in the nick of time to persuade everyone that the invasion date should be changed from June 5th to June 6th, as that day will be fine, honest.

And the rest is, quite literally, history. As with all novels of this sort, unless you're going to do some serious post-modern fucking with your audience then the broad details of what's going to happen in the end are not in doubt; in this case that D-Day happens on June 6th 1944 and despite the horrendous casualties is ultimately the platform for the Allies winning the war. So you have to make the story that converges on the known point interesting enough to hold the reader's attention, and Turbulence certainly succeeds there, though not without the odd lumpy moment. As expertly as the circumstances are set up in advance Ryman's death seems contrived and frankly implausible, and while Meadows (from his narrative position in 1980) seems to allude several times to events that happen well after the war is over we never hear about any of that in the main text; instead it's left to what purports to be the text of a commemorative lecture given in 1984 by a German counterpart of Meadows to fill in some of the blanks. And with any novel that features science-y stuff as a central plot feature there's a struggle to fit the necessary exposition in without it being narratively implausible; there's only so much "as you know, Bob, Bernoulli's principle states that...." that you can do without coming over all Basil Exposition.

It's good, though, while probably not quite as good as Foden's first and most famous book The Last King Of Scotland (also filmed). If I'd been obliged to read it without knowing who the author was I'd have made a reasonably confident guess at William Boyd, which I should stress is a compliment. There are obvious parallels to The Book Of Ebenezer Le Page in terms of subject matter, in that World War II features heavily as a plot device. Other novels to feature World War II as a central plot device include Free Fall, The History Of Love, The Office Of Innocence, Island Madness, Restless and The Nature Of Blood. Note that that list is by no means exhaustive.

the last book I read

The Book Of Ebenezer Le Page by GB Edwards.

Ebenezer Le Page is an irascible old codger, as he himself tells us in the opening couple of paragraphs. A proud Guernseyman, he's only ever left the island once, to take a boat trip to Jersey to watch the football, and hasn't felt any need to do so ever again, since he's perfectly happy in his stone cottage, occasionally walking into town to go to the shops and otherwise pottering in his garden, writing down his memories in a series of notebooks and generally bemoaning modern life and so-called "progress".

Born at the tail-end of the 19th century (just like Edwards, for whom Ebenezer is clearly a thinly-disguised authorial alter ego), Ebenezer has lived through some changes, not least two world wars. Fortunate enough not to get called up in time to fight in the first, Ebenezer gets unavoidably caught up in the second when the Channel Islands get invaded and occupied by German forces.

He is a mainly solitary, self-sufficient, pragmatic sort of bloke, so he's able to rub along all right with the occupiers, even striking up a sort of friendship with a taciturn German called Otto who accompanies him on the occasional fishing expedition. That's not to say that he's above a little mischief-making, nor indeed some anti-German involvement of a more serious nature when while on a night-time walk he encounters a German soldier sexually assaulting a young boy and beats him to death with a rock.

Ebenezer never marries, despite the odd dalliance with various local girls. There are a couple of main reasons for this, most notably his general self-reliance and prickliness, and the close view he gets of the various disastrous marriages embarked upon by his contemporaries. There's his best friend Jim Mahy, trapped into a miserable marriage with a local girl who then abandons him and takes their two children away, leaving him to head off to World War I and be killed in the trenches, and his cousin Raymond, almost certainly a repressed homosexual, who dallies with being a clergyman but eventually marries a local girl, Christine, with predictably disastrous results and eventually gets killed by a land mine during World War II.

The other main reason for Ebenezer's long bachelorhood is his relationship with Liza Quéripel, clearly the only woman he ever really loves, but who is such a similar spiky and independent character that they can never stop arguing for long enough to acknowledge their feelings for each other. After their brief, broken courtship when they are both young, Liza goes off and has a couple of kids by a couple of men, bunks up with a few Nazis during the war to keep the wolf from the door and then settles into a dotage of eccentric witchy solitude at the other end of the island.

One of the things that Ebenezer's solitude means is that he's not a big spender of money, and so he's got a bit of a hoard of cash, stored old-school style under various bits of furniture, up the chimney and buried in the garden. Conscious of his own advancing years, he decides that he wants to leave it to someone deserving and sets off round the island on a visiting tour of various nth cousins, all of whom disappoint him in some way with their laziness, stupidity, and embrace of modern ideas like the motor car, feminism or the television set.

Eventually, unexpectedly, Ebenezer strikes up a friendship with reformed hooligan and aspiring artist Neville Falla, and his girlfriend Adele. Recognising in Neville some aspects of his own personality - ruthless honesty, self-reliance, aversion to authority - Ebenezer resolves to make him his sole beneficiary and hurries to get the legal paperwork sorted out before he pops off. Ebenezer seems prepared to forgive Neville his modern obsessions like owning a car, and indeed during a jaunt round the island in Neville's car they find themselves paying a visit to Liza Quéripel's house, where not only are Liza and Ebenezer belatedly reconciled, but after a bit of questioning about Neville and Adele's respective parentage it becomes clear that perhaps their unrequited (and, we're invited to infer, never consummated) love may live on after their deaths in some way.

This is another book that's been knocking around on my bookshelves for 20-odd years since I picked it up in a second-hand bookshop some time in the 1990s. I'm not sure why it's taken so long to get around to reading it; I can only assume that I thought it'd be a struggle to get through. I couldn't have been more wrong, as it happens, as it's extremely easy to read. Ebenezer, almost despite himself, is a tremendously engaging central character and the scenes of island life are convincingly drawn, hardly surprisingly since Ebenezer's lifespan and origins mirror Gerald Edwards' own. Edwards died in 1976, having spent the last few years of his life getting his manuscript (i.e. this novel) rejected by a series of publishers, and it was only five years after his death, in 1981, that The Book Of Ebenezer Le Page was first published.

There are couple of odd parallels with another book published in the early 1980s: John Kennedy Toole's A Confederacy Of Dunces. Both authors laboured with their respective books for years and endured countless rejections from publishers, both died with their novels still unpublished and it was only some years later that they eventually saw the light of day, to instant and enduring critical acclaim. And rightly so in both cases, because they're both excellent, in widely differing ways.

Anyway, it's always nice to be pleasantly surprised by a novel, and while I wasn't expecting The Book Of Ebenezer Le Page to be rubbish (otherwise I wouldn't have bought it in the first place, let alone started reading it) it comfortably exceeded my expectations, and I recommend it. You might say: well, the ending is a bit convenient and implausible, and I'd agree, but by the time you've got there you've built up enough affection for Ebenezer and Liza not to begrudge them a bit of happiness, even if it's right at the end of their lives (within a few hours of it, actually, in Ebenezer's case).

This is the second book in this list to feature the wartime German occupation of the Channel Islands (and indeed Guernsey specifically) as a prominent plot point, the other one being Island Madness which I read almost exactly seven years ago, and which features it as the prominent plot point. It's also (by my hasty calculation, anyway) the fifth posthumously-published book on the list after Notice by Heather Lewis and all three of the Stieg Larssons. 

The Book Of Ebenezer Le Page has been adapted for radio and theatre a couple of times, but never filmed, which means this article must be satirical, which is a pity, because it sounds freakin' awesome.

celebrity lookeylikey of the day

Nuclear-powered immaculately coiffured weirdly unlined futuristic sexbot Gigolo Joe, as played by Jude Law in A.I. Artificial Intelligence, and leek-powered immaculately coiffured weirdly unlined futuristic soccerbot Gareth Bale, nominee for tonight's BBC Sports Personality Of The Year. And, heck, Welshman Of The Day as well; why not?

I wasn't quite sure what to make of A.I. when I watched it, many years ago now (though I think I still have the DVD so I could watch it again easily enough). It was famously conceived by Stanley Kubrick and filmed by Steven Spielberg, but not surprisingly the end product feels more Spielberg than Kubrick, most obviously in the central character's being a child. This is unfair, since that was in Kubrick's version as well, but while the visuals were stunning there was just too much sugar and not enough vinegar for me. Spielberg's very next film Minority Report, while in similar futuristic vein, was a great deal better, though both films suffer from going arse-numbingly on for about 20 minutes longer than it feels like they ought to.

poke her with the SOFT CUSHIONS

The recent publication of the CIA torture report and the accompanying media brouhaha is extremely interesting in itself; almost more interesting is what people's reactions to it, and the question of the use of torture in general, reveal about people's unexamined assumptions, and their willingness to examine those assumptions when invited to do so.

First a confession, freely offered, so there's no need to pull any of my toenails out (though, as we'll see, that probably wouldn't do any good anyway): I was prompted to write this by a good friend of mine retweeting something which on the face of it appeared to be pooh-poohing the findings of the report and offering a big American FUCK YEAH to torturing people.

pic.twitter.com/Br4MCfcdWG
— Jarhead (@LCplSwofford) December 11, 2014

Now I'm not judging anyone: other opinions than mine are available and maybe this was offered in a mocking, satirical sort of way, or just retweeted without due care and attention. Just in case it wasn't, it's worth noting that Eric Bolling, rather than being some sort of military intelligence expert, is in fact a Fox News Channel presenter and the man who achieved the fairly remarkable feat of making the United Arab Emirates seem less sexist than the USA. The original tweeter also appears to be a boneheaded racist, so it's all good.

The trouble is that if, like most people of a conservative persuasion, you're not really inclined to think too much about stuff, then there is a sort of appealing superficial logic to the use of torture: these are people who HATE OUR FREEDOM and will stop at nothing to destroy it, and so, sometimes, regrettably, it becomes necessary to get answers quickly and sometimes, regrettably, that means tearing up the so-called "rulebook", manning the hell up and doing what needs to be done.

The main problem with that is that every single bit of it is bullshit on even a moment's reflection (so obviously the key is to avoid even a moment's reflection). Most of the arguments for the use of torture involve the wheeling out of some bullshit hypothetical "ticking time bomb" scenario that dissolves at the slightest scrutiny: how do you know you've got the right man? how do you know he'll give you accurate information? what motivation does he have to give you accurate information, rather than a) something he thinks you want to hear or b) literally anything that'll make you stop?

In any case, if you're into thought experiments, try this: let's assume that in the ticking time bomb scenario above, you've also got Mohammed J. Terrorist's wife and two-year-old daughter in the next room. Now Mo might be a tough guy, and able to resist things like having his fingernails pulled out with a pair of rusty pliers, but how would he stand up to seeing his two-year-old daughter raped in front of him? Not so tough now, eh? So we should probably do that, right? I mean, in this bullshit hypothetical situation literally thousands of lives are at stake, right? Or, heck, millions, if you like. And when billions of lives are in the balance, our effete western distaste for the brutal raping of young children will have to be put to one side. So we should swallow our pansy liberal pride, saddle up and get raping. The future of the civilised world depends on it.

Now you might say: well, yes, a moment's thought will reveal that the ticking timebomb scenario is bullshit, and indeed most of the well-established torture techniques are almost guaranteed to produce a mental state where you'll get nothing coherent or useful back, BUT maybe that isn't the point; maybe the point is to strike fear into our enemies. Couple of problems with that, firstly that that is almost the dictionary definition of terrorism, so we might need to reflect on who the bad guys are:

- secondly, one of the things that the limp-wristed girly surrender monkeys who drafted the Geneva Convention achieved was to save countless lives by providing a point to surrendering during a conflict: there's no value in surrendering if you believe that you, as a captive, are likely to be either summarily executed or slowly and lingeringly tortured to death; you might as well go out on the battlefield and try and take as many of the enemy as possible with you. If there is some structure that ensures your safety and survival once the combat situation becomes hopeless, well then that gives you a get-out that saves further pointless bloodshed.

So, to recap, torture is a bad idea because:

• it surrenders any moral high ground we might seek to occupy
• it is more than likely counter-productive just on a purely utilitarian lives saved vs. lives lost basis
• it does not work in terms of getting any useful information

Nonetheless some people have an almost visceral attachment to it as an idea. As always, examining your own motivations is the key here, and it would probably be better to admit that rather than some fictitious idea of obtaining information your key motivation here, in the aftermath of some atrocity that the person in front of you (probably foreign, most likely brown) may or may not have been involved with is a more primal desire for revenge. And if the pansy-ass liberals have ensured that you can't just arbitrarily kill people without incurring a substantial amount of paperwork then the least you can do to avenge your fallen comrades is POUND SOME FUCKING HUMMUS UP HIS ASS, GODDAMMIT.

don't fob me off with that

As with at least one earlier post, this is intended as much as a point of future reference for me as a source of great interest or excitement to my regular blog readership, inasmuch as I even have such a thing. At least now I'll have somewhere I can just search for on the blog that contains nice obvious words like FOCUS and KEYFOB if I should ever need to do this again, rather than having to Google it and then remember which piece of correct advice to pluck from all the bullshit advice that's out there.

So, anyway, my car, as generally trouble-free as it still is, does seem to get through a lot of remote central locking keyfob batteries (they're the little CR2032 watch batteries). Replacing these is reasonably easy, requiring only a bit of prising with a small flat-head screwdriver to get the keyfob housing apart, and of course the obligatory swearing. However, that's not sufficient to complete the job, because now you have to re-synchronise the keyfob with the car's internal electrics. This is actually very easy if you know how to do it, but it is rumoured that if you get a garage or a dealership to do it for you, as I'm sure some people do, they will charge you for the privilege.

Anyway, the second piece of advice on this page describes the correct method for re-synchronising a keyfob with a 2001/2002 Ford Focus; I can't speak for earlier or later models. Assuming that you've already done the battery replacement and swearing bit, here's what you have to do:

• Put the key in the ignition
• Turn the key from the OFF position to the II position and back four times in reasonably quick succession (the internet suggests about three seconds); you should then hear a beep and see the immobiliser light flash
• Press any of the keyfob buttons
• Turn the ignition to the I position and back to reset things
• Job done!

If things go according to plan and the new battery doesn't get eaten within the next 6 weeks or so I'm very hopeful that that may be the last time I have to do the replacement and the twiddly ignition-fu (thereby rendering this blog post superfluous), since the plan is not to have the Focus much beyond the end of January. Watch this space!

listomania

We love a book list here at Electric Halibut, as you'll know from previous posts on the subject, so here's a couple that have come to my attention lately that might be of interest.

Here's what Buzzfeed's user community thinks are the 51 most beautiful sentences in literature. As distinct from the numerous lists of best first lines and best last lines (as originally featured here) these can be from anywhere, so the whole thing is even more subjective than those other lists. Nonetheless there's some interest here, not least in noticing that sentences #1, #2, #23, #46 and #48 are from books featured on this blog.

Secondly, here's an interactive clickable cloud of "fiction that everyone should read" from Information Is Beautiful (as already featured on the blog sidebar). I note that I've read 42 of the probably 100 or so books featured. There is an equivalent non-fiction list as well, of which I've read considerably fewer.

celebrity lookeylikey of the day

I was inspired by the children's TV theme the other day to remember the post that I'd meant to do in the wake of this one a few months back. As Doug correctly points out, there is a startling resemblance between me and Ray as pictured on the way up Blencathra in a pair of comedy hats in 2003, and the cuddly gibberish-spouting characters of Igglepiggle and Makka Pakka from the weirdly hypnotic CBeebies show In The Night Garden, which Nia used to be completely riveted by but is a bit meh about these days.

points usually, but not definitely, make prizes

It's not all your high-falutin' gender politics, post-modernism, literary criticism and improvised contemporary dance round here; I've done a few sport-related posts as well over the years. Never Formula 1, though, or indeed motor racing in any form, as far as I can remember. So, let's have at it.

Now I'm not one for misty-eyed nostalgic maundering about how everything was better when I was a wee nipper; clearly it's an unalloyed Good Thing that drivers, track marshals and occasionally spectators are no longer being flayed, sliced up, decapitated, doused in corrosive flammable long-chain hydrocarbons and incinerated on a regular basis. So while I'm tempted to wax all nostalgic about the glory glory days of Prost, Senna and Mansell, I won't. I mean, they were the top guys during my formative watching years, but I wouldn't want to say that they were objectively better drivers than, say, Alonso, Vettel and Hamilton. In any case I was never really a regular watcher of Formula 1; the fact that I probably did watch more races then than I do now is probably as much as anything a reflection of a more general reduction in leisure time.

A quick diversion for a crackpot theory: most of my early sporting memories date from the period 1980-1981. The only obvious exception I can think of is rugby union, where I have a reasonably clear memory of watching the Grand Slam finale of 1978 (when I would have been eight). As for other sports:

• Tennis: the Borg v McEnroe final of 1980;
• Cricket: the Ashes series of 1981 (Botham, Willis and all);
• Football: the FA Cup final (West Ham v Arsenal) of 1980, and Trevor Brooking's goal;
• Formula 1: the 1981 season - Nelson Piquet was the eventual champion, but I can mainly date it from remembering that Alan Jones was defending his title from the previous year, which I have no recollection of seeing;
• Golf: the 1981 Open Championship, won by Bill Rogers;
• Athletics: the 1980 Moscow Olympics, and Allan Wells in particular

Anyway, the belated point of this post is this: I found myself watching the late stages of the recent final race of the 2014 Formula 1 season, a race that the absurd (and hastily abandoned) rule changes had contrived to have the drivers arrive at with the championship still in the balance. In the end Nico Rosberg finished well down the field and Lewis Hamilton won the race to secure his second championship title, but it would not have required a completely outlandish set of circumstances for Rosberg to have snuck in and won the title. If that had happened then Rosberg would have beaten Hamilton to the title despite (let's say for the sake of argument that he'd won in Abu Dhabi) having won 6 individual Grands Prix to Hamilton's 10 (in reality it was 5-11 in the end). Now of course this is possible by design, the places below 1st being awarded decreasing points to put a premium on consistency during the season as well as race wins, but it did make me wonder how many times in F1 history it's happened that a driver won the championship despite at least one other driver having won more individual Grands Prix during the season.

The short answer to that question is that it's a lot less common lately than it used to be. Ironically the last driver to do it was Lewis Hamilton, who won the title in 2008 despite Felipe Massa winning 6 races to Hamilton's 5. That broke a nineteen-year sequence where it hadn't happened at all, and in turn that 1989 season marked the end of a run of eight occurrences in thirteen seasons, that in turn being preceded by only three occurrences in the previous twenty-seven seasons. Here's the full list:

Year	Champion	Race wins	Competitor(s)	Race wins
2008	Lewis Hamilton	5	Felipe Massa	6
1989	Alain Prost	4	Ayrton Senna	6
1987	Nelson Piquet	3	Nigel Mansell	6
1986	Alain Prost	4	Nigel Mansell	5
1984	Niki Lauda	5	Alain Prost	7
1983	Nelson Piquet	3	Alain Prost	4
1982	Keke Rosberg	1	Alain Prost Didier Pironi René Arnoux Niki Lauda John Watson	2 2 2 2 2
1979	Jody Scheckter	3	Alan Jones	4
1977	Niki Lauda	3	Mario Andretti	4
1967	Denny Hulme	2	Jim Clark	4
1964	John Surtees	2	Jim Clark	3
1958	Mike Hawthorn	1	Stirling Moss Tony Brooks	4 3

A few statistical highlights:

• Massa, Pironi, Arnoux, Watson, Moss and Brooks never won a world championship;
• Prost, Lauda and Piquet achieved the feat of winning the championship despite not winning the most races twice;
• Prost is unique in appearing in the third column (i.e. winning the most races without winning the championship) three times, once jointly;
• Prost also holds the record for the most races won without winning the championship: 7 in 1984; note that one of these races (the Monaco Grand Prix) only carried half the usual points;
• The biggest deficit (in terms of race wins) between championship winner and rival is three: Piquet v Mansell in 1987 and Hawthorn v Moss in 1958;
• Hawthorn in 1958 and Rosberg in 1982 achieved the unparallelled feat of winning the championship on the back of a single race win;
• The weird situation in 1982 just adds weight to my theory that 1982 was a weird sporting anomaly caused by sunspots or the Illuminati or something;
• A related factoid from here that's too good not to include: Hulme in 1967 and Lauda in 1984 are the only two world champions not to start a single race during the season from pole position; Lauda never even started a race from the front row of the grid. 

I don't really know why the 1980s in particular were such a golden age for this stuff. The scoring rules were different (in some of those years anyway) in that you could discard some of your worst results, although on the face of it that ought to have favoured even more the guy with the most race wins being champion. There were also far more retirements then than there are now, and, hard as I try to resist saying it, the 1980s were also a fiercely exciting and competitive decade with lots of drivers capable of winning multiple races in a season.