pretenzioso? me?

I had to do a quick run down to Tesco to pick up some lunch supplies earlier, and happened therefore to be in the car with Radio 4 on between 11:30 and 12 o'clock. This enabled me to catch a few brief snippets of a programme about Oulipo, the French experimental literature group (it's a portmanteau word formed from "ouvroir de littérature potentielle").

I'm vaguely familiar with Oulipo through having read a couple of novels by two of its more well-known members:

• If On A Winter's Night A Traveler by Italo Calvino. You can gauge quite quickly whether you're going to enjoy this or not by deciding whether you're intrigued or enraged by this opening paragraph:
  

  You are about to begin reading Italo Calvino's new novel, If on a winter's night a traveler. Relax. Concentrate. Dispel every other thought. Let the world around you fade. Best to close the door; the TV is always on in the next room. Tell the others right away, "No, I don't want to watch TV!" Raise your voice - they won't hear you otherwise - "I'm reading! I don't want to be disturbed!" Maybe they haven't heard you, with all that racket; speak louder, yell; "I'm beginning to read Italo Calvino's new novel!" Or if you prefer, don't say anything; just hope they'll leave you alone.

  If you just want a Proper Ruddy Story with no authorial intervention and general post-modern dicking about, then you might be best advised to look elsewhere. That would be a shame, though, as it's great. I also notice that Sting's new album has a title which is a nod to this novel. Pretentious? Lui?


• Life: A User's Manual by Georges Perec. Back when I used to have a summer job in the Town Bookseller bookshop in Newbury (on the canal bridge in the town centre, here) I recall conducting a lengthy search on behalf of a customer for this book, which I'd never previously heard of. We did eventually manage to locate a copy for him, which I had a sneaky flick through before handing it over. Incidentally the Town Bookseller later became a branch of Ottakar's (who, as you'll discover if you click on the link, were themselves later taken over by Waterstone's), and is now a Cornish pasty shop (apparently it was a Costa coffee shop for a while as well).
  
  Anyway, my point, such as it is, is that when I eventually decided I wanted to read L:AUM it was a great deal easier to find as there were handy things like Amazon around to help me out. And a strange and mysterious book it is too (though also sad, funny and all sorts of other stuff). On the surface a series of eccentric and occasionally interlinked tales concerning the residents of a fictional Paris apartment block (and therefore less obviously experimental than the Calvino novel), the novel's underlying architecture is built according to an extraordinarily involved and complex set of rules and constraints, of which the Wikipedia article has a good summary.
  
  It's very entertaining, though the hoops Perec has to jump through to obey his own self-imposed rules make some of the chapters a bit odd (some are just long lists of the contents of a room, for example). I strongly recommend giving it a go, though.
  
  Perec's other experimental literary exploits include writing an entire novel without using the letter "e", and constructing the world's longest palindrome (a mind-melting 5000+ letters long). And that hair/beard combo was pretty extraordinary, too.

this week I have been mostly eating potatoes

I seem to have accumulated a few foody pics on the camera, so here they are with a few explanatory recipe notes.

Spanish Stew & Tortilla

I picked up some interesting-looking pork and fennel sausages in Waitrose the other day, made by the people at Unearthed. We also have a big sack of potatoes from Hazel's parents which we're gradually working our way through, so this seemed like a good excuse for a Spanish stew and potato omelette extravaganza.

First, the stew:


You've got your sausages, obviously, plus a 500g pack of boneless chicken thighs, a couple of onions, some garlic, some Peppadew peppers, a couple of tins of tomatoes and a tin of beans - I've got cannelini beans, but any old white beans would do; haricot beans, butter beans, that sort of thing. The amounts as shown here will make about four portions.

Cook the onions and garlic a bit, bung the meat in, cook that a bit, throw everything else in, add a bit of thyme and paprika, maybe a dash of red wine, and leave it to cook.


Meanwhile, the tortilla. Now most recipes for this would have you cook the potatoes slowly in a frying pan in several batches. I can't really be arsed with that, though, so a profitable short-cut is just to dice them up, slosh a load of olive oil over them and then stick them in the oven for half an hour.


Then beat up half-a-dozen eggs in a bowl; I threw a bit of grated cheese in as well, though this is no doubt sacrilege to the tortilla purist. Stir in the spuds. Then pour the whole sloppy mess into a hot oiled non-stick pan.



All you need now is a bit of green salad and a large glass of wine.


Thai Fishcakes & Noodle Salad


What I've got here is 400g or so of white fish (this is haddock, as it happens), a few spring onions, some garlic, a lime, some ginger and chilli, some Thai curry paste, some Thai spice powder and some parsley and coriander (out of a jar, though fresh coriander would be much better). This will make enough for two people.

Divide the fish in half. Chop half of it fairly finely, and throw the other half in the food processor along with the other ingredients (well, don't throw the whole lime in, just squeeze the juice out of it). Whiz it around for a minute or so until it's a smooth-ish paste. Then take the blade out and stir the chopped fish in.


Make the mixture into little patties (lots of small ones is better than a small number of large ones, as they'll only fall apart) and fry them in some sunflower oil in a non-stick pan.


By this time you'll have made the noodle salad by blanching some ready-cooked noodles for a couple of minutes, and then mixing them with some chopped Peppadew peppers, chopped spring onion, lime juice, sesame oil and fish sauce. All you need then is a few salad-y leaves, and a cold beer.

there's a strange kind of chemistry between us

As we discovered yesterday, if there's one thing that we know about scientists, it's that they are godless killing machines and cold-hearted pitiless genocidal maniacs. It turns out some of them are also high-class prostitutes; well, at least one of them is; well, used to be anyway - specifically Dr. Brooke Magnanti, a research scientist in a Bristol hospital, who has recently revealed herself to be notorious sex blogger Belle de Jour.

So far, so meh, well, plus maybe a little bit of prurient interest in joining the dots between the bright and high-powered scientist in the lab coat and the high-class hooker in the suspenders doing a bit of light bondage with paying clients.

What's arguably more interesting is how the papers have responded - the original revelations were in the Sunday Times, and there was also a fairly baldly factual and non-judgmental piece in the Guardian. Needless to say the Daily Mail prefer judgmental to non-judgmental (they describe the Sunday Times article as "remarkably uncritical"), and just plain mental to either. So they went with the story of the ex-boyfriend who Dr. Magnanti says was partly the reason for her revealing herself (i.e. she was concerned he would spill the beans) - apparently his name is Owen, and he is in the army. Therefore, by the Mail's unassailable logic, he is one of Our Brave Boys and immune from criticism. And what a tear-jerking story of seduction and abandonment he has to tell:

Meanwhile, Owen rattles around the house by the coast he bought for Brooke in the hope this would be where they would start married life together. All he has for company is the cat they both used to dote on.

The cat! Won't somebody think of the cat? And meanwhile she, the Dirty Bitch, is off selling her stories of guilt-free rogering to the papers like the Filthy Whore that she is. Which makes her No Better Than She Ought To Be, I shouldn't wonder.

here's the barrel; now choose your fish

In linking to the excellent New Humanist blog in yesterday's post I noticed that they are currently inviting nominations for the 2009 Bad Faith Awards. These are presented each year to "the person deemed to have made the most outstanding contribution to the cause of unreason". This year's list of nominees is an excellent cross-section of people guaranteed to get the rational thinker into a foaming incoherent forehead-slapping rage, and includes in Terry Eagleton and the British Chiropractic Association a couple of previous targets for specific bile-flecked ire on this very blog.

I recommend you get over there and cast your votes using the buttons provided. I haven't voted yet as I'm having some difficulty deciding - the Pope is the obvious one, but Eagleton is such a giant cock that I'm tempted to vote for him instead. And while I wasn't previously familiar with Damian Thompson's writings for the Telegraph, and while he's not directly responsible for the ravings of his regular commenters, the level of insane bigotry that can be found in the comment thread for, for instance, this piece is pretty alarming. And then there's insane coffee-table book publisher and fishing enthusiast Harun Yahya aka Adnan Oktar.

Sadly no room for my favourite rent-a-loon Stephen Green of Catholic Voice, though I notice he was on the shortlist last year (when Sarah Palin was the runaway winner). I went for Eagleton in the end, by the way; looking at his smug beardy face in my previous post pushed me over the edge. The voting position as at about 1:30pm today is captured on the left - as you can see the Pope is well in the lead, with the BCA in second, and Eagleton in fourth.

down with Newtonism!

It's difficult to tear your hair out while at the wheel of a car on the motorway, and just as well as I have little enough of it to spare anyway. Had it been possible I might have done so this morning, however, while listening to the brief interview the Today programme did with author Dennis Sewell, who is doing the rounds promoting his book The Political Gene: How Darwin’s Ideas Changed Politics.

It's late, so I'll be brief - basically Sewell's thesis is: Charles Darwin's discoveries led inexorably to the advocating of eugenics, and therefore inevitably to the extremes of Nazi Germany and the Holocaust, and more recently to the atrocities committed by the Columbine killers. Sewell was keen to point out that he had no disagreement with the central science (though he did then go on to disagree with it, as it happens), but with the use it was put to by those who came after Darwin. That being the case it's hard to see the justification for the prominent use of Darwin's name, unless of course it's just a transparent bid to squeeze some cash out of the old geezer's multiple anniversaries this year.

It's always amusing to play spot-the-logical-fallacy with these idiots, the most obvious one here being the huge appeal to consequences at the heart of his argument (equivalent, say, to blaming Isaac Newton every time someone falls off a high building), but there's also the slippery attempt to draw an equivalence between "Darwinism" and, say, Marxism or Islam in terms of their capacity for unforeseen consequences. Trouble is, Darwin wasn't espousing a political worldview, merely trying to explain how the world works. While it's certainly true, for instance, that by today's standards his views on race seem pretty archaic and unpalatable (though there's a case for saying that he was pretty liberal for his day), it isn't for those that he is remembered. Since science is not a religion, we're under no obligation to accept everything Darwin said as truth unquestioningly; we can just pick and choose those bits that repeatedly stand up to empirical testing and reject the rest.

Anyway, various others have taken turns to tear strips from Sewell's still-twitching corpse in an entertaining way.

celebrity lookeylikey of the day

Conservative party candidate and current source of minor media frenzy Elizabeth Truss, and Irish rugby hero (and their saviour yet again on Sunday) Brian O'Driscoll. Again, you've got to get past the hair, and once again I've provided a means for you to do that by some seamless photo-editing.

oh christ; oh jesus christ

By way of a tribute to Edward Woodward, who died today, here's the climactic scene from the classic 1973 film The Wicker Man. Just to spoil it for anyone who hasn't seen it, this is the bit at the end where the locals re-enact an ancient fertility ritual by putting a policeman and some chickens into a giant man-shaped basket and setting fire to it. Looks like the chicken might be a bit overcooked by the end, to be honest.

And here's the equivalent scene from the less-celebrated 2006 remake, starring Nicolas Cage.

I haven't seen it, but from these couple of montages (the second one admittedly deliberately cut together for comedy effect) it looks buttock-clenchingly awful, and seems to feature Cage overacting even more than in the rivetingly terrible Face/Off. Who would have imagined such a thing were even possible? I suppose one might conclude that Cage is just hamming it up in any old shit these days to pay the bills.

the last book I read

G. by John Berger.

John Berger's career and public profile follows an interesting trajectory: painter and art critic and occasional novelist from the late 1940s up to the early 1970s, suddenly phenomenally famous in 1972 owing to the prize-winning success (of which more later) of this novel, and also of the book and television series Ways Of Seeing (most of which is available on YouTube, for instance episode one which is available in four parts here, here, here and here), then back to art criticism, exile in France and political activism, all of which he still pursues energetically at the age of 83.

On the face of it the story he tells in G. is a pretty simple one - boy born to a British/American mother and an Italian father, grows up in England in the 1890s, is seduced by his cousin at the age of 15 and therafter becomes a sexual adventurer, serial seducer and libertine who pops up Zelig-like (or Forrest Gump-like, if you prefer) in the background of various momentous events in western Europe during the years leading up to the outbreak of the First World War (and therefore ending up in a similar place time-wise to the previous book in this series), depite having no interest in politics whatsoever, or indeed seemingly much at all beyond the constant thrill of the sexual chase. When he does, more by accident than anything else, become directly involved with an uprising in Trieste in the early days of the war he is promptly killed and dumped in a canal for his troubles.

The point of the book, though, is not so much to tell G.'s story as to use it as a jumping-off point for various things, firstly a series of tangential fictionalised musings on various real historical events such as the Milan riots of 1898, the race to achieve the first air crossing of the Alps in 1910 (eventually achieved by Jorge Chávez, but at the cost of his own life), and the battle for control of Trieste between Austria, Italy and Slovenia in the run-up to World War I, and secondly for Berger to do various metafictional experimentation:

I write in the spirit of a geometrician. One of the ways in which I establish co-ordinates extensively is by likening aspect with aspect, by way of metaphor. I do not wish to become a prisoner of the nominal, believing that things are what I name them.

A cubic metre of space; empty it of your conception of that space; what remains is death.

Er, yeah. There's a fine line here, on the wrong side of which this sort of pretentiousness would be profoundly irritating, but the relentless energy of it all rescues it, plus the occasional amusing sex doodles scattered throughout the text. We aren't given anything as bourgeois and obvious as any sort of motivation for G.'s development into a fairly heartless Don Juan, or indeed for his last-minute conversion into political activism on the streets of Trieste; indeed the character of G. himself remains as opaque and mysterious to us at the end of the book as at the start.

G. was the fourth recipient of the Booker Prize in 1972; Berger's radicalism made him briefly notorious as he announced during his acceptance speech that he would be donating half of his prize money to the British arm of the Black Panthers in retaliation for Booker McConnell's history of exploitation of sugar workers in Guyana. G. also won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize in the same year, so you can add it to the lists mentioned here and here. It is also the second book in this series to feature a cover which could conceivably cause some consternation on the bus, among the unusually prudish anyway.

if not now, venn?

So when I read in the papers on Monday that both of the two £90 million Euromillions enormo-rollover jackpot-winning tickets were bought in the UK, and moreover that one of them was bought by someone who lived in Newport, and the other was bought by a syndicate of employees at an IT company, I thought: well, I fall into both of those categories, so one of them must be me, right? Good job I checked before reserving the Aston Martin, because it turns out neither of them was me. What are the chances?

noooooooooo

I've just had the misfortune to witness the final stages of the X Factor sing-off, and with reference to John & Edward's performance in particular I was put in mind of Calculon's response to Bender's audition performance in the Futurama episode Bender Should Not Be Allowed On TV:

That was so terrible I think you gave me CANCER!

I can't find that particular line on YouTube to illustrate my point, unless you happen to speak Spanish, but here's an audio version.

blogging tip of the day

Here's something I was discussing at work earlier and which might prove useful: how to link to a YouTube clip at a specific starting time. Basically you take the URL for the clip and append #t=XmYs to the end of it, substituting the appropriate numbers of minutes and seconds for X and Y as appropriate.

So I can now take you straight to the Michael Portillo "erect" moment, which is handy. I can also, for instance, skip the rest of the Not The Nine O'Clock News Question Time sketch and take you straight to the funny bit. For those of you too young to remember, that's Clive Jenkins that Richard Davies is impersonating (and Nye Bevan that he's referring to, though of course even I am too young to remember him). Jenkins was a ripe target for impersonation: here, via some similar YouTube magic, is Monty Python's Graham Chapman doing a similar job in 1972.

Jenkins (the real one) can be seen in this slightly surreal pin-up gallery of 1970s/1980s trade union leaders; I've also nicked the image from that page and put it on the left here for you, just in case you can't be arsed to click on the link. Apparently the eventual winner of Trade Union Idol was former leader of UNISON and Buddy Holly lookalike Rodney Bickerstaffe.

a packet of dry roasted disco biscuits, please

More interesting footnotes to the drug advisor sacking fiasco: firstly this article in the New Scientist by David Nutt himself presents a thought experiment originally presented in this NS editorial (the full version of which is behind a paywall):

Imagine you are seated at a table with two bowls in front of you. One contains peanuts, the other tablets of the illegal recreational drug MDMA (ecstasy). A stranger joins you, and you have to decide whether to give them a peanut or a pill. Which is safest?

You should give them ecstasy, of course. A much larger percentage of people suffer a fatal acute reaction to peanuts than to MDMA.

The question to then go on and ask yourself is: given this, on what basis do we come to the conclusion that the sale and consumption of peanuts is OK, but the sale and consumption of ecstasy is not? I'm sure Alan Johnson will be setting it all out for us nice and clearly and unambiguously any day now.

With all this confusion and disagreement, what the situation is clearly crying out for is some Good Old-Fashioned Common Sense. In other words, a column by Melanie Phillips. Mel takes a different tack from the one you might have expected (dismissing the science and proclaiming that drug consumption is Just Ruddy Morally Wrong in some ill-defined way) by claiming that the science doesn't show what Professor Nutt claims it does regarding relative harmfulness of drugs. Obviously you should make up your own minds based on a sober examination of the evidence, but it would be remiss of me not to point out here that Mel also thinks the scientific evidence comes down firmly in favour of Intelligent Design as opposed to, you know, all that evolution rubbish. If you really feel you can't just dismiss everything Melanie Phillips says as the ramblings of a deranged right-wing knee-jerk contrarian, some specific refutations can be found here.

Also in the Mail, A.N. Wilson takes a few potshots at David Nutt as well, in an article that is if anything even more cretinous than Mel's. First this gem:

The trouble with a 'scientific' argument, of course, is that it is not made in the real world, but in a laboratory by an unimaginative academic relying solely on empirical facts.

Yeah, you can prove anything with facts. Secondly he Godwins himself a bit further down:

The only difference between Hitler and previous governments was that he believed, with babyish credulity, in science as the only truth. He allowed scientists freedoms which a civilised government would have checked.

I am not suggesting that any British scientists are currently conducting experiments comparable to those which were allowed in Nazi Germany or in Soviet Russia.

Oh, well, that's all right then. Finally a bit of anti-vax looniness, ostensibly in the name of - hey! - "free expression":

In fact, it is the arrogant scientific establishment which questions free expression. Think of the hoo-ha which occurred when one hospital doctor dared to question the wisdom of using the MMR vaccine.

Absolutely tremendous; top marks.

keith vaz, on crack, yesterday

Couple of further bits on the government drug advisor fiasco - firstly Keith Vaz steams in with a textbook display of Just Not Getting It At All:

Keith Vaz, who chairs the home affairs select committee, described Nutt's comments as "unwise". Vaz said: "As the country's top adviser on the issue, he is implying to many young people that cannabis is not particularly dangerous."

Well, yes, that's the point, isn't it? What with it actually being not particularly dangerous and all. In a rather more surprising development, today's Independent features an article from Bruce Anderson that actually talks a lot of sense:

So let us start with fundamentals. Until the 1960s, our legal system was overshadowed by pre-libertarian theories of the state, which criminalised breaches of Christian morality and started from the assumption that governments were entitled to regulate the private behaviour of adults. As that has all gone over the past few decades, what theory of the state now permits governments to prohibit adults from taking drugs? There is only one intellectually respectable answer to that question: none.

Right on. He does blot his copybook a bit later in the article, unfortunately, with some slightly mental stuff about using the SAS to combat foreign drug traffickers (proper God-fearing indigenous British drug traffickers presumably being all right), which put me in mind of Michael Portillo's infamous Conservative Party Conference speech from 1995. The SAS stuff is towards the end, but I found the most amusing bit to be at about 1:10 when Portillo pauses briefly after uttering the word "erect" to lick his lips lingeringly in what is probably the Gayest Moment Ever at a Conservative Party Conference.

miscavige of justice

Couple of further things in relation to the earlier Scientology posts - firstly this very amusing article regarding some new uniforms that you must buy in addition to the endless course material that you must buy, etc. etc. Most of it is the usual psychotic encyclopaedia salesman garb, but the Dracula capes are pretty cool. And if they prevent you from getting stuck in an electronic incident, then all well and good I suppose.

Secondly, check out this video clip from (sources allege) Tom Cruise's birthday party aboard the Scientology ship Freewinds (I suspect these similar video clips may be faked, though) Recall that there is much hilarious disinformation about regarding how tall Tom Cruise actually is; remember also Nicole Kidman's post-divorce quip about being able to wear heels again. Conclude perhaps in a totally unscientific averaging-out of rival claims that he's perhaps 5'6" or 5'7". Then notice that Scientology head honcho David Miscavige appers to be at least three inches shorter.

Just to be clear, I'm not suggesting that those of less than average height are any less capable of doing their jobs than anyone else, whatever that job might be, and that clearly includes the job of cartoonish supervillain that Miscavige currently occupies. It's just that one tends to imagine cartoonish supervillains as Optimus Prime-sized enormotrons, crushing all of puny humanity within their mighty grasp, not as people towered over by Tom Cruise (which I suppose would put Miscavige at maybe 5'4" or so, at most - this article reckons he is 5'5"). I guess the shorter the subject the greater the concentration of pure evil you can achieve. Clever.

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

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

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

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

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

une femme-frappeur, s'il vous plaît

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

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

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

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

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

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

assaulted Nutt

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

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



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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

what a bunch of cults

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

stuck in an electronic incident

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

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

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

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

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

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