headline of the day

Stand by for a bit more fuckwitted Daily Mail innumeracy. What's wrong with this headline?

The answer, of course, is that the claim in the headline is immediately refuted by the bar graph displayed just below it - with 75 suicide deaths per 1 million people compared with 27 for black people, white people are in fact around 2.78 times more likely to kill themselves. That's still an interesting statistic, as is the one on the other side of the centre-line, i.e. that black people are ten times as likely to die at the wrong end of a gun held by someone else (and a little under twice as likely to die for gun-related reasons overall). The "five times" bit that the headline-writer presumably got his number from is that white people are five times more likely to suffer a gun-related death at their own hands than at the hands of others. Again, an interesting statistic, but not the one the headline claims, because no such statistic exists.

radio blah blah

Light and shade, tears and laughter, etc. etc. on the Radio 4 slot I like to call "the one after the Today programme" this week. On Thursday we had the excellent In Our Time on the fascinating life of Alfred Russel Wallace (and featuring former Welshman of the Day Professor Steve Jones), younger contemporary of Darwin and the man some feel that Darwin stitched up fairly shabbily by quickly publicising and publishing his own work in response to a letter from Wallace revealing that he was theorising along similar lines to Darwin. A more charitable view might be that Wallace played a vital role in energising Darwin to get off his fat beardy arse and finally collate and publish the mountains of evidence he'd been gathering for the previous 20-odd years.

Anyway, that was all very interesting; interesting in a different and more shouty-at-the-radio kind of way was the discussion on Tuesday entitled Christianity At The Crossroads, chaired by John Humphrys and featuring various goddy types as well as the defiantly godless Matthew Parris. The subject matter for discussion was very much as you'd expect from the title: how relevant is the Christian Church (in all its various flavours) to modern life, particularly in the wake of all the sex scandals, in the Catholic Church in particular? The fact that we've got a fairly new Archbishop of Canterbury and a brand spanking new Pope gave the whole thing a bit of extra spice.

The trouble with the discussion, as it always is with discussions of this kind, is that it was basically a detailed discussion of the warp and weft of the emperor's britches, complete with some disagreements over which colour they should be, whether they should end above or below the knee, whether those little bells attached to the hem are a good idea or not, without addressing the more fundamental question of why the emperor is in fact wandering around bollock naked.

A more sensible starting point for discussion would be: OK, you folks represent organisations that, ultimately, seek to tell people how to live based on an interpretation of the contents of a book that is supposedly the condensed thoughts of a supernatural being who created the world, can be petitioned by prayer, and takes a disturbingly close interest in what we do with our genitalia. This is important stuff, particularly given the dire consequences presented for stepping outside the bounds of what's deemed to be acceptable behaviour. So you will naturally have some pretty compelling evidence that the tenets of your religion are true, and this would be a good moment to present it. Note also that you'll have to account for the church's stated position on various subjects changing over time, usually just after the majority view in society as a whole switched: things like acceptance of evolution, homosexuality, slavery, that sort of thing. But start by convincing us that your supernatural friend exists, otherwise the rest of the conversation is entirely pointless.

Sadly we don't seem to be at a point in human history where that approach is acceptable. The best illustration of this is in that while Matthew Parris musters some robust arguments for things like divorcing the notions of religion and morality, he does still seem to concede without question that a real person called Jesus existed, and that the church that's built up around his teachings has corrupted the message in some way, as well as buggering all those altar boys, which to be fair I don't think the bible explicitly encourages. The reality is that there's absolutely no more reason to believe that the Jesus as described in the Bible existed than, say, King Arthur, and that if you're going to make the claim that no, there really was some guy named Jesus (or more likely Yeshua, Jesus being a subsequent Romanisation of the original Hebrew name) who didn't actually do any miraculous shit but was just a guy around whom various myths coalesced, then you're seriously into So What territory. To steal an argument I read somewhere else, if you're saying that Santa Claus exists, but is actually a plumber from Grimsby who doesn't wear a red uniform or own any reindeer or deliver presents and whose name is Gavin and not Santa Claus then essentially you're agreeing with me that Santa Claus doesn't exist.

So the whole programme was a depressing illustration of the special treatment given to religion compared with any other set of bonkers claims about how the world operates. As depressing as it is I suppose it at least provides a riposte to those who say: relax, you've essentially won, the world is a pretty secular place, chill out, have a cocktail. Clearly we've got a long way to go yet.

the blog cannot hear the blogger

This week's literary Dead Pool also includes the rather more heavyweight name of Nigerian novelist Chinua Achebe. All I can tell you about him is that his first novel Things Fall Apart is well worth a read - the others (he only wrote five, most of them in the 1960s) may well be too, but that's the only one I've read.

Things Fall Apart also gains extra props from me for taking its title from one of my favourite poems, WB Yeats' The Second Coming. I expect it's highly likely that many other works take their titles from the same poem, since it's so full of rich and portentous phrases, though the only ones I can think of off the top of my head are Joan Didion's 1968 essay collection Slouching Towards Bethlehem, and the Joni Mitchell song of the same name from her 1991 album Night Ride Home.

More can be found by Googling selected phrases:

• "centre cannot hold" gives you this photography book and this piece of Star Trek-based fiction;
• "ceremony of innocence" gives you this interactive video game thingy;
• "blank and pitiless as the sun" gives you this song by Australian experimentalists sleepmakeswaves;
• "the widening gyre" gives you a couple of books and an episode from season 3 of the TV series Sons Of Anarchy. There's one called "Turning And Turning" as well, just for good measure.

You get the general idea. Needless to say that's not an original thought and if I'd scrolled down the Wikipedia page a bit I'd have found a much more comprehensive list. I'll get me coat.

you spotty little herbert

I see that James Herbert has died, though of course we shouldn't rule out the possibility that he may yet return as a hideously decomposed zombie shade from beyond Hell to tear our very souls apart, so watch out for that.

I own five of his books (The Rats, The Survivor, Fluke, Shrine and Moon), and I've read a few others as well (The Fog and The Magic Cottage, certainly, plus possibly one or two others) - they were big favourites with teenage schoolboys back in the 1980s (when I was a teenage schoolboy) because in addition to the bracingly graphic violence there was always at least one similarly graphic sex scene tossed in somewhere. He was inevitably dubbed "the British Stephen King", but actually he was nowhere near being in King's class either in terms of writing style or being able to construct plots that, when you got to the end of the book, actually held together or made much sense. I strongly suspect that Herbert was the real-life inspiration for Garth Marenghi's mode of dress, all black shirts and leather jackets and slightly self-important spookiness.

It was all good unclean fun for all that, though, and I've always been rather surprised that more of his books weren't filmed, the Rats trilogy in particular. I guess that before the days of CGI the rat effects (particularly the giant mutant two-headed ones) would have been tricky to realise. The one film I have seen based on a Herbert book was the rather ropey 1981 supernatural plane-crash drama The Survivor, which I don't remember a huge amount about other than that the lovely Jenny Agutter was in it, though as far as I recall she kept her clothes on. I gather the atypically whimsical dog-reincarnation story Fluke was also filmed in 1995 (warning: trailer contains dangerous levels of Voice-Over Guy and general schmaltz). Note that the reasonably entertaining 1980 John Carpenter film The Fog has no connection to the Herbert book of the same name.

I should add (warning: plot spoilers ahead) that The Survivor falls into the Oh Right He Was Dead All Along category of (in this case fairly predictable) plot twists. The Rats is probably the one, if you want one. The sex scene starts on page 68, in my copy anyway.

celebrity lookeylikey of the day

Former world and Olympic downhill skiing champion and golfing WAG Lindsey Vonn, and former world tennis #1 and golfing WAG Caroline Wozniacki.

the pope must die

All the hoo-hah over the election of a new Pope takes me back to my schooldays, specifically 1978, when I was eight. Yes, I lived through the most recent Year Of Three Popes, which it turns out was the first one for 373 years. Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive! Well, no, not really, but I do remember it all quite clearly, and the main reason for that was the (in hindsight) extreme churchiness of the school I went to at the time. It's funny how stuff that in hindsight appears terrifyingly devout and weird seemed perfectly normal at the time, and of course this is how religion operates - get 'em while they're young and don't know any better. The regular school confession sessions we had, for example, whereby a series of booths were set up round the perimeter of the school hall and classes trooped in one by one to confess to a series of made-up misdemeanours and be given a few Hail Marys as penance seem extraordinary to me now, but it was just part of the way things were at the time.

Anyway, 1978, for those of you who don't remember, was the year when Pope Paul VI, who'd been in the job since 1963, died and was replaced by the little-known Italian Cardinal Albino Luciani, who broke with stuffy old tradition in a number of ways, not least in styling himself Pope John Paul I. Two names! This is what passes for revolution in the Catholic Church. He also broke with stuffy old tradition by croaking a mere 33 days into his papacy, in circumstances we'll come back to in a bit, and being replaced by rugged Polish ex-goalkeeper Karol Wojtyła aka John Paul II. I seem to recall a lot of frantic praying at school for God to guide the new Pope in his holy works, which basically seemed to involve going to lots of countries, kissing the tarmac, smiling a lot and patting children on the head.

My recollections of the sequence of events must be flawed, though, because all this happened between late August and mid-October 1978 (JPII was officially empoped on 16th October), and we were at that point in the middle of moving to Java for eighteen months (we travelled out around 20th September). So I'm not sure how we would have got wind of JPII's official pontiffication, still less seen any TV coverage. I do remember further excitement at the Pope's visit to Britain in 1982, by which time we were back in the country and I was at a different, though still pretty Goddy, school.

Anyway, the other thing of interest about the 1978 Popes is the various lurid conspiracy theories surrounding the death of Albino Luciani, most famously the ones gathered together in David Yallop's book In God's Name. As excellent and riveting as this is, it is quite hard to believe that the central claim is true (i.e. that Luciani was murdered), even though the trail of financial corruption and links between the Vatican Bank and some highly unsavoury people are all real. It's pretty much a universal rule that cock-up rather than conspiracy is a more likely explanation, and this case is no different. Or maybe that's just what The Man wants you to think?

don't panic

I'm a day late, as his birthday was yesterday (he would have been 61) but I think it would be appropriate at this point to offer you a couple of quotes from Douglas Adams, who died back in 2001. The anthropic-principle-torpedoing puddle analogy is one of the more famous ones, but I've referenced that at least once here before, so we'll go with a couple of different ones:

Anything that is in the world when you're born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works. Anything that's invented between when you're fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it. Anything invented after you're thirty-five is against the natural order of things.

If you describe yourself as 'Atheist', some people will say, "Don’t you mean 'Agnostic'?" I have to reply that I really do mean Atheist. I really do not believe that there is a god—in fact I am convinced that there is not a god (a subtle difference). I see not a shred of evidence to suggest that there is one. It’s easier to say that I am a radical Atheist, just to signal that I really mean it, have thought about it a great deal, and that it’s an opinion I hold seriously. It’s funny how many people are genuinely surprised to hear a view expressed so strongly. In England we seem to have drifted from vague wishy-washy Anglicanism to vague wishy-washy Agnosticism—both of which I think betoken a desire not to have to think about things too much.

Needless to say you should read everything Adams wrote, not that there is actually that much of it. Some people are put off reading the fiction, which basically comprises the five-part Hitch-Hikers Guide To The Galaxy series and the two Dirk Gently novels, by the perceived nerdiness of the sci-fi associations and the books' extreme cultiness, but the trick is to realise that Adams was first and foremost a great British comic novelist in the same vein as PG Wodehouse or Kingsley Amis, and the stuff about spaceships was just the genre that he happened to choose to express himself in. If you're too lazy to bother with all of it, I'd suggest just reading the first two Hitch-Hiker books (The Hitch-Hiker's Guide To The Galaxy and The Restaurant At The End Of The Universe) and the first Dirk Gently one (Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency). Oh, and you should also read the spoof dictionary The Meaning Of Liff, co-written with John Lloyd, an entire online transcript of which, with occasional typos, appears to be here.

Lots more great stuff here; this is where the first quote came from. The second one was from Jerry Coyne's website here; a truncated version also appears on this excellent list. The full text of the interview from which it's taken appears to be here, which is a bit bizarre since the interview was with American Atheists and the website appears to be a Buddhist one.

one hundred killer hurts

A couple of brief follow-up thoughts on earlier posts:

• Memorable character though he is, Anton Chigurh from No Country For Old Men represents a fairly common fictional trope: the articulate and philosophical hired killer, able to discourse on a variety of subjects, or at least dispense some vaguely karmic bollocks about fate and coin tosses before popping a cap in your ass. Personally I blame Quentin Tarantino, for giving us numerous assorted badasses in Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction quite capable of rapping about pop culture matters or the tricky niceties of foot massage. That in turn spawned a swathe of increasingly ludicrous imitations in films like Shoot 'Em Up and this year's Killing Them Softly. I mean, I daresay there may have been one or two real-life paid killers who have been like this, but most of them are barely-sentient goons.
• A weird footnote to the linked story above about the murder of Aamir Siddiqi is that Hazel and I were probably less than 200 yards away when it happened, as it was a warm and sunny spring day in April 2010 and we'd decided to pop over to Roath Park for a picnic. The picnic was lovely, but somewhat disturbed about halfway through by a large number of police cars and vans turning up, sirens blaring.
• Going back to No Country For Old Men for a minute, you have to do the same sort of life expectancy/novel frequency calculation with Cormac McCarthy as I suggested with Joan Didion, i.e. since he's thus far produced ten novels in 47 years, and he'll be 80 this year, will we get another one?
• The off-screen demise of Llewellyn Moss about three-quarters of the way through No Country For Old Men (it's similarly "off-screen" in the book), and the brief involvement of Carson Wells (the Woody Harrelson character in the film) before being summarily rubbed out both probably qualify for my imaginary list of Unexpected Deaths Of Leading Characters In Films. Or perhaps if not leading characters exactly, then people played by famous actors who you'd expect to have a prominent role. The other obvious ones that spring to mind are Jack Vincennes (played by Kevin Spacey) in LA Confidential, and Danny Witwer (played by Colin Farrell) in Minority Report, in two almost identical scenes. Oh, and of course Adolf Hitler in Inglourious Basterds. No doubt you can think of more; here are a couple of alternative lists. 
• Lastly, a piece of cricket trivia related to the somewhat obscure factoids here, only with the obscurity rating dialled up an extra notch: when Ian Redpath bagged 171 against England at Perth in December 1970 he plugged that spot on the "missing scores" list, and bumped up the lowest entry on the list to 186, where it remained for just over 12 years. 171 remained the lowest score made by only one person for much longer, though, right up until this week in fact, when Hamish Rutherford of New Zealand (on his Test debut) became the second person to bag it during the first Test against England in Dunedin. The lowest entry on that particular list now becomes 218, bagged by Sanjay Manjrekar in December 1989 and no-one since. 

you may have my $25 when you pry it from my cold dead wallet

Here's the latest missive from your friends and mine at Bud's Gun Shop, the lethal hot-lead-propelling device retailer of choice for the discerning homicidal maniac. Apparently in the wake of the Sandy Hook massacre back in December of last year certain sections of the pinko liberal sandal-wearing tofu-eating closet homosexual community made the ridiculous suggestion that perhaps the best way to avoid yet another round of gun-related deaths would be to make guns more difficult to obtain, rather than by the clearly more rational step of arming absolutely everyone, including schoolteachers.

Not to worry, though, because Bud's have got our back on this one, along with the good people at the Gun Owners of America and the National Rifle Association, and by "good" here I mean "terrifyingly deranged", obviously. They won't see people's Second Amendment rights eroded, hell no.

Dear Dave, 

Are you concerned about your gun rights and the current attacks against the Second Amendment? We share your concern and are now offering a unique way for you to take a stand and donate to the NRA and the GOA. Both of these organizations are in Washington doing what they can to preserve gun rights. Convincing lawmakers to do the right thing is not cheap ! We want to help. For the next week (3/8 - 3/15), Bud will donate an additional 20% of the profits for all Silver 2012 Second Amendment Dollar’s purchased.  

The 2012 $25 Gun Dollar features the popular Ruger LCP. It is gem proof minted and is as flawless as the Second Amendment. Every 2012 Gun Dollar contains one-half Troy ounce of pure .999 fine silver. Order now to get the one of the last remaining 2012 $25 Gun Dollars and make a donation so that the Second Amendment stands firm in preserving your right to bear arms and protect life. 

Our popular 2012 One AV Ounce Copper issue is still in stock as well. Stay tuned for the 2013 Gun Dollar issue, it is in the last stages of development and should be released soon.  

Thank you,
Team Buds

This piece of finely minted boneheaded survivalist tat can be purchased here. Here's a sneak preview:

the last book I read

No Country For Old Men by Cormac McCarthy.

It's an early morning in 1980 in southern Texas, near the Rio Grande, and Llewellyn Moss is out and about just minding his own business taking pot-shots at antelope with a high-powered rifle. During his off-road excursions in his pick-up he comes across a disturbing tableau of vehicles and dead bodies: the aftermath of a clandestine drug deal gone violently wrong.

So drug deals normally involve the handover of money in exchange for drugs; there is a substantial quantity of heroin in the back of one of the trucks, but no sign of the cash. Moss follows a trail of blood up a hillside away from the vehicles and finds another body; this one has a briefcase on him with a little over two million dollars in it. So what would you do?

After mulling over this question for a couple of nanoseconds Moss takes the money and his truck and speeds off back to his young wife in their trailer-park home with no very clear idea of what he is going to do next. What he actually does is have an attack of conscience and head back to the killing ground with a flask of water for the one guy who wasn't quite dead. This single act of pointless kindness unleashes a world of shit, as various others are out looking for the money and the drugs and Moss barely escapes with his life, having to abandon his truck in the process. Knowing that the pursuers will soon know who he is and will be on his trail he packs his wife Carla Jean off to her mother's and hits the road.

It's not just the Mexicans who supplied the narcotics that are after him, though, but also a representative of the intended recipients of the drugs, who reasonably enough reckon that if they aren't going to get the goods then they ought to be getting their money back. This representative is Anton Chigurh, a man you don't want to get on the wrong side of, indeed a man you ideally don't want to have the slightest idea of your existence.

Moss is a brave and resourceful man, but intelligent enough to recognise that he has embarked on a road that cannot lead anywhere good. As he himself says:

If you knew there was somebody out here afoot that had two million dollars of your money, at what point would you quit lookin for em? That's right. There aint no such a point.

But what can you do, surrender to your fate? So Moss does his best to evade his pursuers anyway. Also in pursuit, for different reasons, is kindly old county sheriff Ed Tom Bell, who feels a duty of care for those dwelling under his jurisdiction.

Moss's flight becomes increasingly frantic, involving a gunfight with Chigurh at a hotel in which both are injured, a brief escape over the border into Mexico for some no-questions-asked medical treatment, and a final flight towards El Paso to meet up with Carla Jean, during the course of which the Mexicans finally catch up with him. Denied an opportunity for a personal enactment of his appointed task, Chigurh presents himself at Carla Jean's house to explain how, under his idiosyncratic moral code, payment of the debt now falls to her.

As well-known as McCarthy's work is, and as widely-reviewed as this was when it was published in 2005, most people will know it from the Coen brothers' 2007 film adaptation., which won the Academy Award for Best Picture that year. I saw the film when it came out and I can tell you that (a few understandable elisions aside) it's a very faithful adaptation of the book. One of the reasons this is possible is that the book, like all McCarthy's books, and particularly the later ones, is stripped down to the bare minimum of narrative and dialogue necessary to get its points across. This being the Coen brothers there is perhaps just an edge of very black humour in the film, and in Javier Bardem's portrayal of Chigurh, ludicrous haircut and all, in particular, that wasn't in the book, McCarthy not being big on humour in general.

Like The Road (also filmed) this is heavy on late-period McCarthy idiosyncrasies - short sentences, precious few adjectives and adverbs and frivolity of that sort, a general aversion to commas and quotation marks and apostrophes in words like "don't" and "can't" that some people will probably find too infuriating an affectation to get past, and precious little in the way of internal reflection by any of the characters (with the exception of Bell's musings at the end). It's less ambitious than either The Road or Blood Meridian, and to be honest both of those are probably better; all of Bell and Chigurh's philosophising and a bit of subverting of genre expectations at the end can't hide the fact that this is a fairly bog-standard pursuit thriller, brutally effective though it is. You should still read it, though, and see the film too.

incidental music spot of the day

A brief snippet of the intro to The Band's signature tune The Weight on the trailer for the new Tom Cruise apocalyptic sci-fi action adventure movie Oblivion. It's only ten seconds or so, but that's enough for it to be instantly recognisable, and also for me to be pretty sure that the version used in the film isn't the original studio recording as featured on the classic 1968 album Music From Big Pink. Nor is it the version by Smith that featured on the soundtrack album to Easy Rider after some contractual wranglings prevented the original being used - the one in the film is the original, slightly confusingly.

The Band also performed the song at Woodstock in 1969 but refused to allow any of their set to be used in the film or the album, supposedly because they were unhappy with the quality of their performance. So there's a bit of a history of pernickitiness about use of their material, which is probably why a soundylikey version ended up being used. There have been a gazillion cover versions, so it could be any of those.

celebrity lookeylikey of the day

Let's do another one. Here's this morning's Desert Island Discs castaway, autism expert Dr. Uta Frith (no, me neither), and comic Jenny Eclair.

the last book I read

Dinner At The Homesick Restaurant by Anne Tyler.

Pearl Tull is dying. But do her family flock to her bedside? Well, in general, no, or at least not immediately. Son Cody and daughter Jenny have their own lives, families and problems and aren't dropping everything to rush over, and husband Beck left many years ago while the kids were small and never showed his face again. Pearl does have her younger son Ezra, who runs a restaurant in their home town of Baltimore, but that's largely because he lives with her, so he hasn't got much choice.

Perhaps the rest of the family have decided that Pearl is unlikely to cark it before there's been an opportunity for an extended series of flashbacks to various key moments from family history, and so it proves. We learn a bit about Pearl's early life, her brief marriage to Beck, the circumstances of his departure, and various incidents from the kids' formative years intended to illustrate their differing personalities, the short version of which is: Cody always thought that Ezra was his mother's favourite (and so he was), and this bred a simmering resentment over the years which culminated in Cody mounting a deliberate (and ultimately successful) campaign to steal Ezra's fiancee Ruth from him and marry her himself.

So as we haul ourselves back toward the nominal "present" of the book's timeline, we find Cody and Ruth and their teenage son Luke moving around the country following Cody's job, during the course of which he's been temporarily immobilised following an industrial accident. This makes him even more irascible than usual, and Luke decides to escape by hitch-hiking his way to Baltimore and Ezra's restaurant. Meanwhile Jenny is on her third marriage, this one to a jolly beardy type with six kids of his own (to add to her teenage daughter). Ezra has moved on from working for Mrs. Scarlatti at her restaurant to owning and running it after her death (so it's The Scarlatti Inheritance, hahaha) as well as changing the name from Scarlatti's to The Homesick Restaurant. There's a running joke about how over the years he's attempted to organise several family reunion meals at the restaurant but all of them have ended in disaster and in people storming out early for one reason or another.

So, anyway, Pearl eventually dies and the family gathers in Baltimore for the funeral and the obligatory meal at the restaurant. They are unexpectedly joined by their absent father Beck Tull, who shows up and re-introduces himself at the funeral, and is invited along for the meal. Maybe this will be the one where the whole family (Pearl aside, obviously) will stick around until the end?

It's odd reading this straight after Infinite Jest, the two being polar opposites in many ways - Infinite Jest all flamboyant metafictionalism and archness and verbosity, this (like all Tyler's work) all restraint and apparent narrowness of scope and ambition. I say "apparent" because there's a bit more depth and subtlety here than it at first appears, and in any case as I said in this previous Tyler review making this all seem effortless takes more, well, effort than you might think.

I've read a couple of articles which say that this is Tyler's favourite of her own books - my personal view is that I didn't enjoy it quite as much as A Patchwork Planet, partly because the central characters (i.e. the Tulls) are less interesting than A Patchwork Planet's central character, and partly because even less actually happens, outside of flashbacks anyway, which I deem not to count since that stuff has already happened by the time the novel starts (I realise this is a highly dubious and probably meaningless distinction). I do also think that Tyler is one of those novelists where (unless you're particularly obsessive) you probably don't need to read the whole oeuvre, because the level of variation is fairly low. None of which is intended as criticism, particularly, as I enjoyed it; it's hard not to enjoy an Anne Tyler novel. My slight chafing for something unexpected to happen or for someone to suddenly say FUCK is probably just the residual effects of reading Infinite Jest immediately beforehand.

Dinner At The Homesick Restaurant was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1983 (Alice Walker's The Color Purple won it that year). Tyler was nominated again for The Accidental Tourist in 1986 - one of her most famous books, largely owing to the 1988 film adaptation - before eventually winning with Breathing Lessons in 1989.

celebrity lookeylikey of the day

Miranda's resident comedy love interest and eye candy for the ladies Tom Ellis, and French loose cannon and one-man rugby calamity factory Frédéric Michalak.

it's a knockout, except when it isn't

One of the things I quite like about the World Matchplay Championship that's currently underway in Arizona is how straight knockout tournaments like this one fuck with the American idea of how sport is meant to work, i.e. that it should be driven by, and be a less-important adjunct to, the relentless selling of stuff, principally the sponsors' products.

After all, what sane corporate executive would design a tournament where Tiger Woods could go out in the first of the six rounds? And not only Woods, but his successors as world number one Lee Westwood and Rory McIlroy, and Luke Donald in round two as well. I mean, Stricker, Garrigus, Kuchar, these are all solid guys, you know, and your very own Poulter and McDowell, but they're not really going to play in Peoria. I think we need to get the marketing guys on this one and see if we can work Tiger back in somehow. Maybe a kind of plate contest/repechage kind of thing, leading to a lengthy series of end-of-tournament play-offs which last until we get the winner the guys on the board wanted all along.

It is of course true that (sticking with golf for the moment) your more standard four-day 72-hole strokeplay tournaments can be won by unexpected people - who would have foreseen the Elephant Man winning the recent Northern Trust Open, for instance? - but in general the format does tend to flatten out the unexpected stuff a bit. Obviously the major tennis tournaments work in the same knockout-y way, but I would suggest that the pool of potential winners there is much smaller, particularly for the men, so the scope for big upsets for the top seeds in the early rounds is lower. I'm not going to do the legwork and calculate how many of the recent men's Grand Slams have featured, let's say, at least two of the big four (Federer, Nadal, Djokovic, Murray) in the semi-final line-up, but I imagine it might be a while back before you find one that didn't.

There are many weaselly ways of wringing out as much money as possible from a sporting event, almost always at the expense of what you might call the "purity" of the sport, and, more importantly, good sense. The classic one is to have what you advertise as a season-long league contest, run it as one for the first 99% of the season, and then piss all over the value of all that by having a contrived "play-off" thing, just so you can have the whole thing culminate in some sort of Grand Final at the end. Leagues, after all, are sometimes won before the last day of the season, and sometimes the vital points are gained in games not featuring two of the top teams, or even on a day when the winning team don't actually have a game at all! How you work out where and when for Justin Timberlake to whap one of Janet Jackson's tits out and jiggle it about under such a system doesn't bear thinking about. The Aviva Premiership (i.e. English rugby union) has worked this way for ten years or so now, and the slightly more complex FedEx Cup play-off series that follows the main golf season on the PGA tour is basically the same thing.

The other seemingly compulsory thing for team events that work this way is to adopt some sort of ludicrous team name. It's not sufficient for your team name simply to reflect the name of your local area, hell no. It's got to have some other meaningless bit attached to the end. of it. Now this isn't just some reflexive anti-Americanism, because I'm aware that this is an American thing, and in its original form allowed teams to have meaningful "nicknames" that eventually became part of the official name, and that's all fine: Boston Red Sox, Houston Oilers, Dallas Cowboys, etc. etc. It's a bit silly, but I'm not complaining. Requiring a suffix to your team's place-name and then just making up any old shit entirely unrelated to the place is very silly though: Sale Sharks? Sussex Sharks? I mean, sharks are cool and all, but that's just ridiculous.

I'm not sure I really have a point here, other than to say that money is usually a corrupting influence on sport, and in a wider sense Rupert Murdoch is a corrupting influence on pretty much everything.

electric halibut brackets mister brackets

Here is my theory, which, while not related to the brontosaurus in any way, is nonetheless mine, and I own it, and what it is too, and it goes as follows, and begins now: sausages and tennis are very similar, because they both come in two varieties, real and lawn. Granted the spelling isn't quite the same, but nonetheless I think it hits the nail on the head.

Continuing the Pythonesque theme, I've no idea what the motivation was for this article to appear in the Daily Mail today - probably a space that needed filling that there wasn't an obvious story about Kelly Brook or the Kardashians to occupy - but I don't think I'd ever fully registered that the satirical target of the Trim-Jeans Theatre Presents sketch was actually a real product that some people presumably actually bought and used. The mentalists.

single to bumford mingeley, please

Needless to say this is very childish, but very amusing: an interactive map of sniggersome place-names from around the world. I presume a lot of these places share a similar set of problems, mainly tourists showing up to pose by the signs, chortle a bit and then bugger off again. Some people take souvenirs away with them; the inhabitants of Shitterton in Dorset got so pissed off with people constantly half-inching their sign that they had a new one made out of Purbeck stone weighing a ton and a half so that no-one could steal it.

A couple of the place names listed here have previously made an appearance on this very blog, specifically Brown Willy in Cornwall, Wankie (now, less amusingly, Hwange) National Park in Zimbabwe and Lord Hereford's Knob in Herefordshire. I have also been (briefly) to Lickey End, as we got towed to the car park of the Forest pub there by an AA man after my friend Mark's car broke down on the way back from Birmingham Airport after a trip to Barcelona in 1997.

Obviously no list of this sort can be exhaustive; even the large number of UK entries omits the splendid Jacks Bush between Andover and Salisbury in Hampshire, and the painful-sounding Sherburn-in-Elmet in Yorkshire. It also omits to mention the pretty Somerset village of Buckland Dinham, unremarkable enough in itself until you notice that it contains a Cock Road, and that moreover at the end of that road is a pub called The Bell. So if one were standing outside the pub one could in a very real sense be said to be standing at the Bell end of Cock Road. I know this because my friends Jon and Emma live in Buckland Dinham, and the pub organises the annual Buckland Beer Festival, which I attended way back in August 2006 when it rained almost constantly. Just to prove the point, here are some pictures.

infinite text

Last one on this subject, honest, but just to expand on the unsatisfactoriness of page count as a measure of novel length, here's a few lists of the longest novels in the English language. Now this is necessarily a subjective sort of thing - for instance, do multi-book linked series of novels count? Wikipedia clearly thinks so, as its list has Marcel Proust at the top of it. Interestingly the lists all have different numbers of items (ten, sixteen and nineteen respectively) but the general rule seems to have been to keep going until you hit Infinite Jest, then stop, since it appears as the last item on all of them.

Clearly word count is the most sensible measuring criterion for book length, and since Infinite Jest clocks in at just under half a million, I'd say the "average" novel is probably about 100,000 words. I arrive at this number by the following highly scientific method: divide 1079 by 5, which gives you 216; add 20% to compensate for the absurdly small font, infrequent chapter breaks and relative lack of dialogue in Infinite Jest, and that gives you about 260 pages, which probably isn't far off a representative average-sized novel. QED.

Ideally there ought to be some sort of law that requires publishers to include this information somewhere, probably in with all the ISBN stuff and authorial disclaimers at the front. They generally make a point of noting which ruddy typeface it's in, for goodness' sake, so let's throw in a piece of actual useful data as well.

incidental music spot of the day

Underneath The Stars by Kate Rusby over the closing credits to Professor Brian Cox's new BBC series Wonders Of Life. Here are a couple of questions that occurred to me during the program and on listening to the song at the end:

• Why is Coxy presenting a series that's ostensibly about biology? Having watched most of last night's programme I have to concede that there is actually more physics and chemistry in it than I was led to believe by the trailers, but still it seems like a pretty blatant grab for the mantle of the surely-retiring-soon David Attenborough. John Crace makes the same point at the end of his Digested Reads piece in the Guardian. Nothing wrong with the content, in general, though it all goes a bit We Are All Made Of Stars at various points, and a bit Carl Sagan at others (actually this is kind of the same thing), and Coxy still manages to find the time to stand around gazing enigmatically at things and into the camera a bit more than those of us immune to his doe-eyed charms would perhaps want. Just to illustrate that, the image below is a montage of wistful gazing at something just off camera - a lemur, a black hole, a black lemur's hole, your guess is as good as mine - from the covers of his three BBC coffee-table series-tie-in books. 
• What is it with Coxy and Kate Rusby? Is he a fan? Or is it a coincidence? That's the second time he's used one of her songs, after Falling was used over the end credits of Wonders Of The Universe (both songs are from the 2003 album Underneath The Stars). Of course it could just be that she's recorded some songs with suitable titles and/or lyrics, but this tweet suggests that Coxy may have had some input into the music selections, and, let's not forget, music is his first love.

jest one more thing

A couple of follows-up to the previous post, which I felt was getting long enough as it was without throwing any extra stats-geekery in:

• the 96 days that the book took to read is comfortably the longest book-reading duration in this list, beating the 66 days it took me to read Sunset Song;
• that works out at 11.24 pages per day, which is, coincidentally, broadly the same sort of page rate as the previous book in this series, Clea, so I haven't been hanging about, it's just a really long book;
• this also takes the record for the longest book in this series from the previous holder, Until I Find You - as I've suggested elsewhere this doesn't tell the whole story though, as Infinite Jest is printed in much smaller print at 44 lines per page instead of 38 for Until I Find You. The footnotes are printed even smaller, as it happens, but just taking the main text as the benchmark, if it were printed at 38 lines per page it would be 1249 pages long. And that of course doesn't take into account that there will be more words per line in the original owing to the smaller font size as well;
• Sunset Song retains the title of slowest pages-per-day rate at a sluggish 3.91 pages per day (258 pages in 66 days). I'm not sure what else I was up to at the time (August 2008), but it is just pretty chewy going. The only other book in this list that occupied me for longer than 50 days was The Name Of The Rose at 53. 

the last book I read

Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace.

You might have been wondering what had happened to the book reviews, given their usual schedule of one every couple of weeks or so. On the other hand you might not be able to muster the energy to give even the most slightly tepid of fucks about the whole thing. Whatever. Anyway, rest assured they have not been abandoned or abolished; it's just that when you tackle a 1079-page book you need to set aside a bit of time in the calendar. More on this later.

So, anyway. It's some unspecified "five minutes from now" in the near future, or some parallel version thereof - hard to tell because in this future all the years are corporate-sponsored, so we have the Year Of The Tucks Medicated Pad, the Year Of The Perdue Wonderchicken, the Year Of The Depend Adult Undergarment (in which most of the action takes place), and so on. There's a lot going on, so let's dive in and meet the Incandenza family: oldest sibling Orin is a former tennis prodigy, current American football prodigy and rampant womaniser, younger brother Mario is a strange stunted malformed creature who nonetheless finds gainful employment at the Enfield Tennis Academy in Boston, where the youngest Incandenza sibling Hal is one of the Academy's brightest prospects. The Academy is run by their mother Avril Incandenza and was founded by their father James O. Incandenza, who was also a maker of bizarre experimental movies, right up to the point where he checked out of the tennis and movie businesses simultaneously by putting his head in a microwave oven.

The last movie James O. Incandenza made before his messy self-inflicted demise was one called Infinite Jest, a film of which it's difficult to make a critical judgment because it has the unfortunate effect of rendering anyone who watches it a drooling semi-sentient vegetable who if left unattended will starve to death rather than tear themselves away from the screen. The existence of such a thing is of interest to various political groups, including the usual suspects like the US government but also various groups of Québécois separatists of varying degrees of fanaticism, Québécois militancy having become more of a thing since the US decided to make the north-eastern US states (mainly Maine) a giant nuclear waste dumping ground called The Great Concavity, much to the chagrin of the people in Quebec at its northern border, who have been subjected to some fascinating and gruesome genetic mutations ever since. One group in particular, the wheelchair-bound les Assassins des Fauteuils Rollents, bound together in mutual fanaticism by their love of Quebec and their childhood passion for a dangerous pastime involving jumping railway lines in front of trains (and presumably failing, judging by how they've ended up), are looking for the master copy of Infinite Jest (the only one from which further copies can be made) in order to use it as a terrorist weapon.

Just down the road from the ETA is the Ennet House drug rehabilitation facility, peopled by various disreputable and unfortunate types including giant Don Gately, so committed to his new-found position of responsibility at the facility that he's prepared to put himself in the way of a couple of blasts from a shotgun in its defence and spend a good proportion of the novel in a hospital bed recovering, and Joelle van Dyne, ex-girlfriend of Orin Incandenza, ex-muse of James O. Incandenza (and star of at least part of the unviewable Infinite Jest) and now wearer of a face-obscuring veil on account of being maimed with concentrated acid by her own mother. Like pretty much everything here, it's a long story.

Copies of Infinite Jest start turning up in odd places, les Assassins des Fauteuils Rollents close in on both the Enfield Tennis Academy and Ennet House as places where information about the missing master copy may be found, and Hal Incandenza's behaviour becomes gradually more and more erratic, ostensibly as a result of his going cold turkey on his increasing marijuana habit in order to avoid falling foul of compulsory drug testing. And so things build towards a climax - will the master copy be found? Will the wheelchair terrorists be thwarted? What is wrong with Hal? Why did James O. Incandenza kill himself? Surely these questions will be answered.

Well, no, actually things just kind of stop. It's one of those books where you think, about 30 pages from the end, wow, the author is really going to have to work fast to tie up all the loose ends before the end of the book, and then about 10 pages from the end it dawns on you that actually he isn't going to do that at all. How cheated you feel by all this (particularly after having stuck with it for 1000 pages) will probably colour your feelings about the book.

One might go on to say: yeah, but plot schmot, this is really a book about other things: the emptiness of modern "entertainment", the nature of addiction, be it to TV, drugs, whatever, and tennis. Wallace, a junior tennis prodigy himself, writes at great length about tennis (both here and in non-fiction vein, for instance in this famous 2006 New York Times piece about Roger Federer), but he's at his best writing about the grinding reality of drug addiction and depression, two things he knew about from bitter personal experience.

The novel's enigmatic ending has given rise to a whole swathe of theories as to where the various unresolved plot strands were going to converge, most notably in this pretty convincing analysis by recently deceased internet activist Aaron Swartz. It's perhaps significant that Swartz's brief synopsis of how the timeline would have continued contains more actual plot and action than actually features in the book. So what the heck does Wallace fill 981 pages of narrative and 98 pages of footnotes with? Well, there's a lot of describing stuff in minute and excruciating detail (echoing Nicholson Baker who likes to do the same sort of thing), lots of fractured timeline stuff (the book's nominal "now" is right at the start when Hal has his breakdown in the interview room and is subsequently hospitalised, most of the action takes place in what we assume is the previous year, and there are various further flashbacks into the more distant past), lots of stuff at the start that doesn't really make sense until you've finished the book and really needs to be subsequently re-read (a bit like the first chapter of Lolita), lots of dazzling erudition and wordplay. It scarcely needs to be said that there is probably an excess of words here - the 20-odd pages Wallace takes to describe the annual ETA game of Eschaton, a sort of cross between tennis and Risk, could probably have been boiled down to one or two without much trouble, but he was evidently too pleased with the idea to cut it off before he'd wrung it dry - and the whole thing has an air of being written by a man slightly in love with his own articulacy and erudition, and one who perhaps having started a book and had it grow out of control didn't really know how to end it and eventually just had to say: stop, enough. No doubt there is another metaphor for addiction and compulsive behaviour in there somewhere.

Something of an insight into Wallace's mental processes can be gleaned from this TV interview in 1997 (shortly after the publication of Infinite Jest) - it's in four parts, but it's worth watching the whole thing just to recognise Wallace's awe-inspiring articulacy and intelligence and then to start thinking, whoa, this is a guy who thinks about stuff way too much, to a degree that's probably not healthy. It's not totally surprising to learn, therefore, that Wallace suffered from crippling depression for most of his adult life, and, tragically, after an experimental break from his usual medication in 2007, suffered a particularly acute depressive episode and ended up killing himself in September 2008. He thereby brings the number of suicides on this list to four (at least, I haven't checked everyone), the other three being Heather Lewis, BS Johnson and Richard Brautigan.

Off the top of my head, the only other novels I have on my shelves whose page-count exceeds 1000 are Leo Tolstoy's War And Peace (1444 pages), Stephen King's It (1116 pages) and Richard Adams' Maia (1129 pages). It's good to do this occasionally, and Infinite Jest is a good deal easier to read than some of the stuff written about it would have you believe, for all its archness and self-referentiality and frankly absurd length, and it's mostly pretty good fun. I might go for something a bit more digestible next time, though.

bloody valentine's day again

It had been so long (22 years in fact) that no-one really believed it would ever happen, myself included, but suddenly last week Kevin Shields casually let slip that the new My Bloody Valentine album, the follow-up to 1991's legendary Loveless, could be out in "two or three days". Given his somewhat flexible attitude to deadlines in the past this was viewed with a degree of scepticism by most, but lo and behold on Saturday a new website appeared where the album could be purchased and downloaded. And purchase and download is exactly what I've just done: 13 quid for a digital download which is happening RIGHT NOW and a CD which will be in the post in a week or two. The individual tracks are available on YouTube as well, but I would reiterate the point that this is music that benefits from a bit of volume and full frequency-range reproduction, so you may not get the full effect through a set of tinny old computer speakers. The only track I've listened to yet is the album opener She Found Now, which is a mellow yet distorted number very much in the vein of Loveless's Sometimes, which is in no way a bad thing.

The reviews I've read have been generally complimentary to a pantingly moist degree, which is obviously more encouraging than everyone thinking it was utterly shit, but at the same time you wonder how much rock critics who have been writing about Loveless for the last 22 years might have emotionally invested in the new album being good, or at least worthy of another 22 years of critical essays. We'll see.

So, as with Tutti Frutti and Whoops Apocalypse, now I have to find something new to fret about. So here it is: can we please have a follow-up to Neutral Milk Hotel's remarkable 1998 album In The Aeroplane Over The Sea? This couldn't be more different from Loveless, based as it is mostly around Jeff Mangum's acoustic guitar, plaintive vocals and frankly barking lyrics (apparently a lot of it was inspired by the story of Anne Frank, but it's far from obvious) with various odd instrumentation layered over the top. Actually the album this reminds me strongly of is Gene Clark's No Other, not because they sound particularly similar but because they share the same sense of having been made obsessively in a darkened room with no concern at all for what any other contemporary albums sounded like or what anyone else was doing. And they both feature as a centrepiece a largely acoustic 8-minute song (Some Misunderstanding there, Oh Comely here). In a coincidental parallel with the My Bloody Valentine story, Jeff Mangum has recently emerged from a decade or so of reclusivity to play a few gigs. An album next? Who knows.

half an hour later you just want more lupins

On the subject of food, here's a strange thing: the most excellent pan-Asian restaurant chain Wagamama has a website, wherein you can do some browsing of the panoply of spicy delights on offer. You can even include or exclude stuff based on your particular tastes or the particular food-based ideology to which you adhere; just go here and click on "dietary menu filter". Wait just a minute, though....

....lupins? I'm not aware of a lot of Oriental dishes that contain lupins, but that's probably just my culinary ignorance. I expect they're delicious with a bit of soy and wasabi. I think you would be well advised to avoid dishes containing sulphur dioxide (strictly that should be sulfur dioxide, regrettably), though, since it is, and I quote, "a toxic gas with a pungent, irritating smell". You may, if you wish to, make up your own jokes at this point about the side-effects of too much spicy Asian food.

the knead for speed

Haven't done a recipe for a while, so here's a good one. Now this is bread-related, and I don't normally do bread, or indeed baking of any kind, owing (as I've said elsewhere) to the degree of exactitude required in terms of ingredient quantities, preparation methods and timing. Also, baking recipes tend to involve flour, and while I am a cook of wild and savage brilliance, I am also a bit messy, so the whole kitchen area tends to end up with a light dusting of white, as if it had been caught in a snowstorm.

This is very very simple, though, and doesn't require painstakingly exact measurements, plus it takes a matter of minutes to make and a similar number of minutes to cook (with an hour or so in between), so it's great.

Yoghurt flatbreads

You will need:

• Equal quantities (by weight) of flour and natural yoghurt - I used 250g of each and that made about half-a-dozen decent-sized flatbreads. Plain flour will do fine, wholemeal would be great, you could even drop the quantity a bit and top it up with something interesting like gram flour or potato flour.
• Baking powder - for the quantities above a couple of teaspoons will do.
• Other ingredients - I just chucked a few black onion seeds into mine, but you could add anything you like: tomato puree, herbs, cheese, olives, you name it.

That's it, really. Chuck everything together in a bowl, mix it all together, finish off by giving it a bit of a bash together with your hands (you don't need to do much kneading, just make sure it's all mixed properly). Then just park it in a bowl, put a tea-towel over it, and leave it for an hour or so.

When you come back, rip snooker-ball-sized lumps off the dough, flatten them out with your hands (or a rolling-pin, if you must) and put them in a fairly hot dry non-stick frying pan (you don't need any oil) for no more than a minute or so each side. What you're looking for is something a bit more substantial than a chapati, but not as big or thick as a naan. They're best eaten hot as they will go a bit twangy when they're cold, but you can easily soften them up and revive them in a toaster even a few days later.

wotcher cock

Say what you like about corner-shop Spar mini-mart places - yes, people go in there in their pyjamas and slippers, but they're conveniently located and open if not exactly all hours then certainly a lot of hours. More hours than Waitrose, certainly, and in any case I'm more likely to have a sudden need for milk or bread at an inconvenient hour than I am to have a sudden need for lark's tongues or wren's livers.

My local Spar is particularly convenient, as it's quite literally just across the road. It is staffed by some slightly eccentric people, though (and customered by some slightly eccentric people as well, some of them in pyjamas, but that's another story). One of the slightly eccentric things they do is fling chummy endearments at people while handing over change, in that lovable proletarian way that makes uptight middle-class people like me uncomfortable and at a loss for a response - maintain a regal silence and be thought of as all hoity-toity, or weigh in with an ill-judged gor-blimey-strike-a-light-what-about-the-Arsenal-then-bunch-of-wankers-if-you-ask-me-I'm not-racist-but-I'd-send-them-all-back-I'd-pull-the-bleedin-lever-meself and just look like a cock.

Top choice among the terms of endearment on offer from the (almost exclusively female) staff at my local Spar are the ubiquitous (and regionally non-specific) "babe", and a word that could be "doll" but which is actually almost certainly "darl" (as in "darling"), which I think is a typically South Wales usage. All of which set me to thinking: there must be some regional pattern to these things. I recall having to take regular-ish business trips to Chesterfield a few years back, and the endearment of choice there was "duck", just as I vaguely recall it was when I lived in the Nottingham area as a child.

So here's a quickly cobbled-together regional terms of endearment map, with no claims to be comprehensive or indeed accurate, but just to illustrate the sort of thing that could be done with the appropriate research. As always, click for a bigger version:

It would be remiss of me to miss the opportunity to plug the still fascinating Strange Maps at this point; a tangentially related (in that it involves the British Isles - and yes, I know my map omits Ireland) entry is here - a map of the British Isles based on the distribution of first letters of place names.

Another map link shortly; firstly my ramblings about eccentric local supermarkets reminds me of the branch of Somerfield (it's now a Co-op according to Google StreetView) at the top of St. Michael's Hill in Bristol, next door to the legendary Highbury Vaults. In addition to toilet-related celebrity encounters this was also the scene for the following immortal piece of staff/customer dialogue, just in front of me as I queued up:

Vaguely Oriental-Looking Guy: Hello.
Slightly Eccentric Checkout Operator: AAAAH! WE MUST NEVER FORGET THE SAMURAI!
VOLG: Erm, yeah. Um - I'm not Japanese. 
SECO: Oh, right. Three forty-six please. 

Comedy gold. Anyway, this other map: in similar vein to the ones linked here, here's an excellent spoof London Underground map illustrating the secret to writing a story for the Daily Mail. The associated article is here.