album of the day

Déjà Vu by Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young.

In theory it sounds great to have a whole bunch of independent singer-songwriters in your band; everyone's only got to write a couple of songs each, so you can just cherry-pick the best ones from each party.

Of course in practice this can make for rather lumpy and inconsistent albums; the later Beatles albums, for instance, like The White Album or Abbey Road, suffer from this problem.

And, to be fair, so does this one. The first Crosby, Stills & Nash album was a bit more consistent in tone, but the addition of Neil Young to the mix had a couple of effects: a slightly harder and more electric sound and a general increase in the levels of anarchy and chaos - this is par for the course for anyone working with Young, as Jimmy McDonough's fascinating biography Shakey makes clear.

So the album is divided into four distinct sections (all mixed up with each other): Stills' folk/rock numbers Carry On and 4+20 and his cover of Joni Mitchell's Woodstock, Crosby's amusing cocaine paranoia on Almost Cut My Hair and Déjà Vu, Nash's romantic pop sentiments on Teach Your Children (lovely) and Our House (nauseating), and Young's gorgeous Helpless and slightly overwrought Country Girl. Stills and Young's collaboration Everybody I Love You finishes things off.

The key to all this, of course, is the three and four-part harmonies, and I suppose it's a bit like loud electric guitars, in that it either sends shivers down the spine, or it doesn't. If it doesn't, take a look at yourself, have a word, and possibly have your vital signs, pulse, etc. checked.

incidental music spots of the day

A couple of Who songs on the opening credits to two of the CSI spin-offs: Won't Get Fooled Again on CSI: Miami and Baba O'Riley on CSI: New York on Five US. Both can be found on the essential Who album Who's Next from 1971.

I didn't watch much of CSI: New York, but I can say that CSI: Miami is undoubtedly one of the stupidest things I've ever seen on television. This is partly down to the absurd orange wash that is plastered over everything (especially the ludicrous bit at the end where they're all walking along the beach in silhouette), but it's mainly down to David Caruso. Maybe the orange filter is just put on to tone down the effect of his hair. Anyway, if you don't believe me, an amusing montage of ridiculousness has been compiled here.

probing the corridor of uncertainty

A few pictures from our weekend trip to Nottingham for the Test match between England and India at Trent Bridge can be found here. Sadly it looks as if our 100% record of England victories in matches we attend (England v Pakistan at Headingley in 2006 and England v Australia at Edgbaston in 2005 being the previous two - in the Ashes match the moment of victory occurring on the day we were actually there, which was nice) will be no more after tomorrow.

eco-apocalypse! so let's hide in a tunnel

Interesting article in the Independent today about what an imagined future world might look like if humanity were suddenly to disappear. Actually it's a preview of a new book called The World Without Us by Alan Weisman.

It's an interesting thought experiment, a sort of turbo-Gaia (by which I mean the more cuddly Gaia-redresses-the-balance-of-things imaginings usually involve at least some humans surviving, even if they are reduced to savagery). As the article acknowledges, it's been done before (the imagining bit, not the extermination of humanity) - the two examples given here are a New Scientist article by Laura Spinney from a few years back which references the book After London by Richard Jefferies - written in 1885 and still in print, and the novel A Scientific Romance by Ronald Wright.


I was mildly surprised at the omission of one particular name, though, because the whole premise screams JG Ballard to me. Ballard wrote a lot of books on these themes in the 1960s, from the more straightforward stuff like The Wind From Nowhere, The Drowned World and The Burning World (later republished as The Drought), to the later, weirder stuff like The Crystal World and Hello America. All of which is great, but for me his reputation rests on the more profoundly disturbing and experimental stuff he got into in the early 1970s. If you haven't read Crash (later filmed) and (in particular) The Atrocity Exhibition, then your life is missing something. More Ballard can be found here.

The picture I've included above is Europe After The Rain by Max Ernst, whose painting I like very much, as it seemed somehow appropriate. A portion of it was also used as the front cover design of a volume of Ballard short stories in the 1980s.

Anyway, the reason all this struck me with particular force was that when we were up in the Brecon Beacons last weekend we passed the remains of the Torpantau tunnel, formerly the highest railway tunnel in the UK (it closed in 1962). It's not part of the Taff Trail, though that does run along the trackbed nearby, but is very much still in existence, and you can get inside if you've got a decent pair of wellies and no qualms about what is, essentially, trespassing.

I was looking for a picture after getting home, and I found several, including this one. Two questions occurred to me at this point:

• isn't it a slightly strange pursuit to keep an extensive archive of photographs of old railway tunnels? Interesting though some of them are...
• and secondly, might an alien observer not conclude, on seeing some of these pictures, or on parting some wild verdant fronds to reveal the portal of one of these tunnels, quite likely in a secluded place well removed from any current evidence of human habitation or activity, that in fact the cataclysm envisaged at the start of this post had already occurred, and that we, the current dominant species on the planet, were simply following in the footsteps of some earlier, grander, more ambitious race?

random news articles

Inspired by Andy's cutting-edge research into all that's new in the world of poo, I humbly and respectfully submit this as the best news headline I've seen recently: Nude man has anal screwdriver.

And just in case you were starting to get a warm, fuzzy, cuddly, one big happy family kind of feeling about the human race, take a look at this, and the comments section in particular. I know it's a bit of a stretch to include those who read The Daily Express under the banner "the human race", but stay with me. The last comment (first chronologically) is the best, instantly rendering further comment pointless. It's so perfect you almost assume it has to be taking the piss. Er, and then you remember it's The Daily Express. They even manage to work a Princess Di reference in there as well. Genius.

Finally, did you know that Dick Cheney was President of The United States for a brief period earlier this week? Well, it's true - George W Bush was anaesthetised for a routine colonoscopy involving the removal of some polyps, and during that time the Veep assumed the powers of POTUS, to coin a couple of amusing colloquialisms. I seem to remember catching a whiff of brimstone, hearing the theme from The Omen in the air, seeing a baboon give birth to a badger - the little things that tell you something, somewhere, is Very Very Wrong. Others seem to have sensed the same thing. This Daily Show clip seems to have been removed from YouTube (do we detect the scaly taloned hand of Cheney at work again?), but the truth is still out there, if you know where to look.

I never drink......wine. Oh go on then

Wine. Sometimes a bottle just isn't enough.

That's an advertising slogan that I think could be a winner for the wine industry, though I'd be wanting a cut of any profits accruing from its use. They could pay me in wine, as a gesture of goodwill.

Anyway, if you do decide, in advance of making any oenophilic purchases, that a standard 75cl bottle just won't do the trick, your usual obvious course of action is to buy a box. 3 litres (i.e. four bottles' worth), and because there's no glass involved you can convince yourself that you're saving the planet into the bargain. Plus, you can, once it's finished, remove the internal foil bag, inflate it by blowing into the tap and use it as an emergency camping pillow.

Or....you can avail yourself of one of these (see below). This is a 5-litre box of Côtes du Ventoux from the excellent Cave de Sylla in Apt, which I bought when we were in Provence back in June. See how its bulging beefy majesty dwarfs the puny 3-litre box of Banrock Station Shiraz Mataro which I've included for comparison purposes. Also - the Aussie wine was a very reasonable £12.99 from my local Sainsbury's, but this one was a mere 14 euros, which, at today's exchange rate, works out at £9.38. So that's £1.88 a litre (£1.41 a bottle), compared with £4.33 a litre or £3.25 a bottle for the Aussie one. All depends on the quality of the wine as well, of course, but the Cave de Sylla allow you to do a bit of pre-emptive tasting before you buy, and this was definitely the best of the boxed ones.


Incidentally the legend on the left-hand side reads "un chant plein de lumière et fraternité", which I would translate as "a song full of light and brotherhood". Which is all well and good, though "a big box full of cheap booze" would probably have done just as well. There is a slogan on the other side as well, and it reads "il faut se rendre à ce palais magique" which I think broadly translates as "you must go to the magic palace". I've no idea what that means, but I suspect necking 5 litres of wine at one sitting might grant you some sort of insight. I'll let you know how it goes.

incidental music spot of the day

....Jacksonville by Sufjan Stevens (from the fabulous Come On Feel The Illinoise! album) on the little between-programme spots where they flash up the channel logo (just in case you'd forgotten which channel you were watching) on Five US on Freeview (I was waiting for House to start, since you ask). I believe they're called "idents", actually. In fact if you click on the Five US link here you'll hear a brief clip.

weekend fun

I'm lucky enough to have a very understanding and accommodating girlfriend. And I don't just mean the weird sexual stuff. An example for you: when the drizzly rainclouds settled over South Wales on Saturday like a blanket of rancid porridge, most people would have viewed my suggestion that we should probably go outside and climb some mountains with about as much delight as a bucket of tepid sick.

But, instead, she actually seemed to be (or at least gave a convincing act of being) quite keen, so off we went. To here, approximately, i.e. the red circle doesn't quite mark the place where we left the car, as it's halfway up a hill - it was actually in the car park marked just to the right of the circle. Then we walked up onto the ridge (following the pink diamond-marked path on the map, broadly) which bends around to the west towards Pen Y Fan, got all optimistic as the cloud seemed to be clearing a bit, got as far as the crossroads of paths below the ascent onto Cribyn (pictured, in somewhat better weather), realised the weather was getting worse and decided we probably ought to head down out of the clouds before we fell off the ridge, and descended via the path by the reservoir (top left on the map page above - hit the up arrow to see the rest, or click here).

Shame not to make it all the way round the Pen Y Fan ridge (which had been our original intention), but it did mean we were back in Cardiff early enough for a couple of pints of Brains SA for me and an SA Gold for Hazel in The Albany. So not all bad news then.

Walk photos can be seen here.

for the love of God

I wonder if it would be wrong of me to permit myself a brief chortle of glee at the High Court's throwing out of Lydia Playfoot's case against her school for preventing her wearing her so-called "purity ring" to school in contravention of its dress and jewellery code. Well, bugger it, I'm going to do it anyway. (It's probably wrong that the phrase "purity ring" makes me come over all Finbarr Saunders, as well. I was hoping to have the text "Lydia Playfoot's ring, yesterday" pop up when you hovered your mouse over the image, but I don't have the l33t skillz, or indeed the inclination, to work it out. Postscript: it works in IE, but not Firefox. I'll leave it now.)

Perhaps it would also be wrong of me to compare the deeply sinister Silver Ring Thing organisation (and their UK chapter with whom Lydia Playfoot is associated) with the Hitler Youth? It's the whole wholesome apple-cheeked Strength Through Joy jollity of it all, I think. And the intense humming of evil that emanates from them both.

Bottling stuff up, including perfectly natural and normal stuff, is always counterproductive - insert your own champagne bottle/dam burst/Cliff Richard's testicles metaphors here. There's plenty of anecdotal and more rigorous scientific evidence that in the area of sex education in particular what kids need is just information, delivered in a timely and non-judgmental way, ideally without any reference to the big magic pixie in the sky who'll be watching you and be really angry, for no rationally explicable reason, if you and that cute little redhead from your sailing group sneak off for a quick hand-job behind the boathouse.

In the light of all that, and observing that Lydia Playfoot looks quite young for her 16 years, it would probably still be very wrong of me to speculate that once the hormones kick in in a big way she'll be ravenously fellating the entire school first XI behind the science block.

Oops.

Tour de France extras, plus swearing

Things you can encounter while riding the Tour de France

1. a dopey labrador
2. Borat

Further non-cycling-related fun can be had here. Pick your favourite swear-word, or suggest some new ones. And be assured it is both big and clever. Skid pipe!

which is better - liar or twat? I dunno....

Amusing fall-out from the (unsurprisingly) abortive demo of Steorn's somewhat implausible perpetual motion machine in London a couple of weeks ago; an interview with the CEO of the company, Sean McCarthy.

Now claims for having actually produced a perpetual motion machine seem pretty uninteresting, in that doing such a thing violates some pretty fundamental laws of thermodynamics. I'll let you in in a secret: I reckon they haven't really done it. Bet against me if you like, but I'd recommend small-denomination banknotes.

No, in my view a more interesting question is the one prompted by reading the recent McCarthy interview. Now he comes across as reasonable, articulate, fairly knowledgeable about the scientific concepts involved (he has a background in mechanical engineering, apparently, though I don't know to what level), and humorously self-deprecating about the failure of the demo. So, you have to assume one of the following two things is true:

• he is a charlatan who is trying to suck as much venture capital as possible into his completely fictional smoke-and-mirrors (and probably some big hefty batteries) project before finding a way to abscond with the loot;
• he genuinely believes that his organisation has come up with something, and has deluded himself to such an extent that neither the failure of the demo, nor the comprehensive dismantling of it by the proper scientists, should they ever be allowed to look at it properly, will dissuade him.

This is a fascinating question - Eric Ash on the BBC plumps for the second option. I was going to say "charitably", but I'm not so sure it is; it's weighing up an intellectual crime against a moral one, and I'm not sure I have a correctly calibrated set of scales. My guess, for what it's worth, is that it's the first; a bit of lovable Irish blarney goes a long way. As does some sympathetic newspaper coverage of the "little guy" and his plucky fight against the stifling powers of scientific orthodoxy, especially when the little guy claims to have something that will benefit humanity.

An almost exact parallel of which was in the news this week as Andrew Wakefield was up before the beak for irregularities involved with his research into autism. Needless to say the papers used it (despite the specific case here having nothing to do with it) to rehash the tired old stories about the spurious "link" between MMR and autism. None of which was very interesting, but asking the same two questions about Wakefield is: i.e. is he a charlatan whose motivation was just financial, or does he really believe what he says, despite his own claims being disowned by his co-workers at the time, his methodology being comprehensively dismantled, and all the studies done before and since the scare (well, sadly it's still very much alive) showing no link whatsoever?

I have no idea. Next week, how wi-fi causes global warming. Wi-fi is pretty recent, right? And global warming is like, recent too, yeah? QED.

back in the saddle again

It's the start of the second week of the Tour de France, so it's about time the world, or at least that infinitesimally small proportion of it that drop in on this blog occasionally, knew what I think about the whole event.

Here's what I believe to be a few salient observations about the Tour de France:

• It is, without doubt, and by a distance, the most gruelling, athletically, physically and mentally demanding event in world sport. Imagine cycling from, say, Cardiff to London every day for three weeks, with that routine only broken by the occasional stage which is either a shorter (40 miles, say) individual time trial where you've just got to hammer the whole thing out as fast as you can, or a mountain stage involving cycling up mountains twice the height of Ben Nevis.
• Consequently, while cycling still has a bit of a doping problem, what's even more surprising is that there are guys who can complete the course at all without being out of their minds on drugs.
• There are certain parallels between watching the Tour and watching Test match cricket, in that each day's action is long drawn-out (a full-length stage can last between 4 and 6 hours) comprising long periods in which not much happens, punctuated with moments of frantic action.
• The flat mass-finish stages aren't all that interesting, to be honest, except for aficionados of sprint-finishing (i.e. the fight for the green jersey, probably the least interesting of the individual competitions). The real interest is in the mountain stages in the Alps and the Pyrénées, and in the various individual time trials which are where the Tour is won and lost.
• Usually the winner is a time trial specialist who can hold his own in the mountains. All the great multiple Tour winners of recent years, Armstrong, Indurain, LeMond and Hinault, have fallen into this category.
• Interestingly the Tour this year might be won by a pure climber, Michael Rasmussen. It's quite rare for this to happen, the last time was in 1998 when the late Marco Pantani won. The last man to win the King Of The Mountains competition and the overall yellow jersey in the same year was the legendary Eddy Merckx in 1970.

My first memory of watching the Tour de France was in 1985 when we went for a family holiday to Brittany. This was the year of the last of Bernard Hinault's five victories, and he was a Breton, so the whole place went quite literally bonkers. I don't remember watching much of Greg LeMond's first win the following year (the picture is of LeMond and Hinault, who finished second in 1986, ascending the legendary Alpe D'Huez), but I watched most of 1987's Tour when Irishman Steven Roche narrowly beat Pedro Delgado, including a legendarily insane mountain descent to make up a potentially Tour-losing time deficit and put him on course to be only the second man to achieve the legendary Triple Crown of Tour of Italy, Tour de France and World Championship in the same year (the inevitable Merckx being the other).

I also clearly remember LeMond's two victories in 1989 and 1990 after a life-threatening shooting accident in 1987, including the closest Tour victory in history when he hurtled through Paris at record speed to deny local boy Laurent Fignon (the picture is of Fignon and LeMond racing wheel-to-wheel the same year) in the closing time trial in 1989. The Indurain years, 1991-1995, were a triumph of ruthless efficiency over excitement, and the Armstrong years, through no fault of Armstrong's, were a bit monotonous as he ruthlessly destroyed the competition every year.

This year's Tour looks like it could be the most wide-open for years, and hopefully without the drug scandals that have dogged cycling in the past, not least after Floyd Landis' (now disputed) win last year. We'll see. The finish is on the Champs-Élysées on Sunday the 29th, but the likelihood is the Tour will be decided by the end of the last mountain stage on Wednesday 25th, or at the latest in the final individual time trial on Saturday 28th. My guess is it'll either be Rasmussen (pictured), if he can grab enough time on the mountains, or one of the allrounders like Andreas Klöden or Cadel Evans, if they can nick enough time off Rasmussen in the time trials.

high five!

Finally got round to signing up to Facebook this evening - I can already see it's going to be hugely addictive, particularly for people who have far more friends than me. I'm sure it's a force for good, socially speaking, though, unless you're some kind of crazy sinister stalker type (and no way am I one of those). Already, just to give you a for instance, I have made contact, of a sort, with my old mate Graham who I haven't spoken to, still less seen, for many years. There is an argument to be had about whether sitting hunched over computers in separate rooms, and indeed separate cities, really constitutes "socialising" in any rational sense, but hey, at least you can't catch anything.

Postscript: this appears to provide a link to my profile. What with the whole cross-confirmation of friendship thing the uninitiated may find it doesn't work. So sign up already!

the last book I read

The Anatomist by Federico Andahazi.

Here's one to recommend to your grandmother. Physician Mateo Colombo discovers the clitoris, scandalises mediaeval Italy and is banged up in prison for heresy and Satanism.

It's based on a true story, in the sense that Mateo Colombo was a real person, who did some genuinely groundbreaking work in the area of blood circulation, work later built upon by our very own William Harvey. It is also true that he published a work called De Re Anatomica which included mention of "the seat of pleasure" in women, but the claim that this is "the discovery of the clitoris" is somewhat dubious to say the least.

None of which really matters, as this is a work of fiction after all. And a generally pretty entertaining one, though also fairly light and insubstantial. It received a lot of publicity when it was published in Argentina in 1997 as it was awarded a major prize which was then rescinded at the request of the prize sponsor on the grounds that the author was a "Communist porn artist". You can't pay for that sort of advertising, especially when your themes are sex, science and the suppression of knowledge.

That's part of the problem, though - the suppression of knowledge (particularly sexual) and the repression of women in the 16th century are pretty easy targets, and the Mateo Colombo presented here is a strange and enigmatic figure whose motivations are never entirely clear, beyond of course experimenting with the effects of drugs by getting fellated by prostitutes after smearing his penis with belladonna. Then again who hasn't done that? Anyway, it's an entertaining read whose subject matter and the furore surrounding its publication suggest a profundity and significance that probably isn't really justified. Unless of course you're a religious fundamentalist, in which case you'll almost certainly have some sort of aneurysm. Enjoy!

On a more serious note, I say: stimulate her clematis. You can't go wrong!

hot festival action

Well, as it happens we got a glorious sunny day on Saturday, sandwiched between a slightly damp one on Friday (but not enough to make it seriously muddy, luckily) and a torrentially wet and horrible one today. So my sacrifice to the mighty and merciless sun gods was answered, which was nice. And no-one will miss a couple of goats, so it's a victimless crime, really.

Anyway, we got the festival bus over from Clifton, got the picnic blankets down, cracked into the pork pies and cheese and got stuck into some serious drinking, mainly based around the beer tent and the Pimm's bus, the latter handily located about 50 feet away from where we were sitting. Hic! The beer tent sold excellent Gem as well as the organic blonde beer Wild Hare - this goes down very well indeed on a sunny day, I can tell you. The Bath Ales website is a bit too Flash-y for its own good so I can't link you to the beer page directly, but you should be able to work it out. There were occasional distractions from the bands on the main stage as well, though the only act we made a point of watching was the very wonderful Beth Rowley in the acoustic tent at 8pm. Once she'd finished we had to decide whether to head back to the main stage for The Fall at 9:30pm, or head off back into town to beat the rush at the end of the day. Having experienced the nightmare that is getting out of Ashton Court with 40,000 other people in previous years we decided to make a break for freedom, and we were vindicated in this decision to the extent of being back in the Pennyfarthing on Cotham Hill by about 10pm, enough time to wind down with a few pints of Wadworth's 6X.

Found the time to take some photos as well - here they are.

Finally - 40,000 people eating Thai curry and drinking ale is going to generate some waste products to be disposed of - luckily the organisers had enlisted the help of the redoubtable Andyloos to cater for all of their human effluvia disposal requirements. Sadly the festival-goer wasn't presented with anything up to the standard of The Millennium, just your bog-standard (geddit?) plastic cubicle. No indication on the website as to whether they're any relation of Rebecca Loos, ex-"personal assistant" (hem hem) of David Beckham and occasional pig-masturbator.

here comes the sun, lalalala - no, it's gone again

It's the Ashton Court Festival this weekend (more details here and here) - Bristol's very own mini-Glastonbury, only cheaper, with better beer, and no bands you've actually heard of to distract you from the serious business of sitting around in a field getting drunk. I've been for the Saturday for each of the last three years, and the weather has been cloudio (but dry and warm), scorchio and scorchio respectively. Good form, then, but this year's forecast isn't looking too good. Sunday looks worse, mind you.

Not to get all misty-eyed and nostalgic, like I occasionally do about early-1990s trips to Glastonbury, just to annoy people, but when I first went in 2004 it was a fiver to get in (way way back it used to be free) and you could cart in as much booze as you liked; this year it appears that tickets cost £12 on the door, and, more disturbingly, you can't bring in your own booze any more! All out of the festival organisers' control, as it's one of the conditions imposed in order for the festival's licence to be granted, but still, it's a bit of a pain. Luckily the very excellent Bath Ales are one of the local sponsors of the festival and have a substantial beer tent selling a range of their excellent wares (Gem is probably the one to go for, unless it's absolutely roasting, in which case SPA might be a better bet). So I should be all right. Slightly tangentially I find it just very slightly disturbing that the hare logo on the bottle is rather reminiscent of the animated filmic rendering of The Black Rabbit of Inle. No? Just me, then.

Actually, looking at the line-up I see the mighty Fall are playing at 9:30 on Saturday night. I generally make a point of not remembering anything after about 6:30 on these occasions, owing to spending too much time in the Bath Ales tent, so don't expect any reports on whether they were any good or not.

album of the day

Beyond by Dinosaur Jr.

Well, this is a pleasant surprise. The original line-up of Dinosaur Jr. last played together on an album in 1988's Bug - the group continued after that as a J Mascis solo project in all but name until 1997's Hand It Over, while original bassist Lou Barlow went off and formed Sebadoh, who were reasonably successful in a low-key sort of way, but who I never really got the hang of.

But now they've re-formed and released a new album, this one in fact. And it sounds pretty much exactly as you'd expect it to sound. Their 2001 compilation Ear-Bleeding Country sums it up pretty succinctly; these are fairly simple country-rock-tinged tunes played by a thunderous rock power trio fronted by a mad guitar genius, Mascis, who these days seems to have turned into a cross between Jerry Garcia and Gandalf.

It's a more ramshackle, less produced affair than their best album, 1993's Where You Been - you can hear that on the first track, the rockin' Almost Ready, where someone seems to have turned the recording apparatus on a couple of seconds after the song started. The other contrast with that album is that Barlow gets to sing a couple of songs here, Back To Your Heart and Lightning Bulb - weirdly he sounds a lot like Bob Mould. There's the obligatory weird plangent acoustic number (I Got Lost) in among the noise, otherwise it's the usual showcase for Mascis' absurdly brilliant guitar playing. The YouTube collection of video clips is all a bit lo-fi; this one of them playing This Is All I Came To Do in Northampton, Massachussets last November is probably about the best.

what does she DO to them? I think we all know...

One last tennis-related story as Wimbledon fever dies down a bit - Martina Hingis had a pretty forgettable Wimbledon by her standards; surviving a couple of match points against chubby ginger British no-hoper Naomi Cavaday and then going out to Laura Granville of the USA in the third round. No, the real story here is Hingis' recent(ish) engagement to Czech player and former world #8 Radek Štěpánek.

Nothing so remarkable there, you might think, and I'd be the last person to encourage feverish and sweaty-palmed prurient speculation about female tennis players' private boudoir activities, but just this once: the "Swiss Miss" has a bit of previous in this department, as it happens. I'll take you through it:

• Justin Gimelstob went out with Hingis briefly back in 1997. He has suffered from chronic back injuries ever since, though he still plays on the tour.
• Up-and-coming (no, stop it) Spaniard Julian Alonso started dating Hingis the following year. From a career high of world #30 that year he quickly sank without trace.
• Magnus Norman reached the French Open final in 2000 (losing to Gustavo Kuerten) and started seeing Hingis the same year. He retired in 2004 after struggling with severe hip injuries since 2001.

It's all earned her the nickname "The Black Widow" in some quarters. And now....Štěpánek has had a back injury since late 2006, roughly when he popped the question. Coincidence? I want you to picture a series of robust, healthy tennis players filing one by one into Hingis' bedroom and emerging a few months later as shrivelled, exhausted, hollow-eyed, broken men. If that isn't fevered enough for you, imagine ex-doubles partner (no, stop it) Anna Kournikova doing it as well.

the last book I read

The Autumn Of The Patriarch by Gabriel García Márquez.

Well, this is a rum do, and no mistake. The dictator of an unnamed Central/South American country lies dead in his presidential palace, with cows and goats nibbling at his toes, and the people he has oppressed and terrorised for untold years emerge blinking and trying to decide whether they should laugh or cry.

So far, so straightforward. You'd expect a bit of back-story at this point as well. And you get it, in a strange sort of way, in that you get whisked backwards and forwards through time in a surreal series of snippets demonstrating the madness and brutality of the regime, with no particular pointers as to which event preceded which, or even who the narrator is at any point in time (it shifts around randomly throughout the book from various unnamed participants to the dictator himself and back again).

It's constructed in a very strange way as well; six or seven 30-page chapters, each of which has no paragraph breaks at all and is made up of 3 or 4 massively extended sentences at most. All of which (no doubt entirely deliberately) gives a strange, hallucinatory, stream-of-consciousness feel to the whole thing; on a more practical note it also makes it quite hard to read if you're tired, or to leave and come back to. It's only reading a book like this that you realise how you normally find your place when coming back to a book - you scan through the first few words of each paragraph and find the last one you remember, and then go from there. No such luxuries here.

No-one writing a book about Latin American dictators would be short of real-life inspiration: people like Marcos Pérez Jiménez, Juan Vicente Gómez and Rafael Leónidas Trujillo, as well as examples further afield like Franco (apparently Márquez was living in Barcelona while he was writing the book) provide all the atrocities and abuses of power, and demonstrations of the truth of the maxim about absolute power, that you could want.

It's a less cuddly and accessible read than Márquez 's masterpiece One Hundred Years Of Solitude or Love In The Time Of Cholera; no-one here, even those who do survive long enough to make an impression, is remotely sympathetic, and the stylistic weirdness makes it a pretty relentless experience. But again, no doubt that's the idea. It's powerful and compelling stuff all the same. Just as long as you don't mind tracking back 10 pages to find the start of the sentence every time you come back to it.

incidental music spots of the week

Interesting tunes spotted being used as incidental music recently:

• Led Zeppelin's Black Mountain Side being used on the BBC's never-ending series Coast to soundtrack a piece about a yoga-based commune on Caldey Island in West Wales.
• Creedence Clearwater Revival's Fortunate Son featured in and playing over the closing credits of the entertaining but somewhat ludicrous Die Hard 4.0.