you're going to need a bigger boat

We haven't done a halibut-related post for a while, so here is the news for halibuts:

• No halibuts were involved today when an Afghan policeman opened fire on British troops at a checkpoint. A spokesman for halibuts expressed his relief that no halibuts were involved. 
• One halibut was, however, involved in a tragic trawling incident which resulted in him being, erm, trawled. And then cut up and eaten. This is just the latest in a series of giant halibut stories including this one from 2008 (as previously featured on this blog) but also this one from 2009, this one from 2010 and this one from 2011 (this is the fish in the picture - it's the one on the right without the wellies).

A couple of questions arise from that second story, actually - firstly there's the claim that the fish yielded "more than 1,000 portions". That seems like a lot, even from a fish weighing almost exactly twice as much as I do at 186kg (that's a touch over 29 stone in old money). Let's take a look at the maths - I'd say a single portion of fish, if you're not going to be too stingy about it, weighs between 150 and 180 grams. It might even be more if you're inclined to generous portions, but that'll do. Now, a thousand 180g portions of fish (or indeed lead, feathers or anything else) weighs 180kg, which leaves precious little room for throwing anything away, in fact it would mean that all the accumulated guts, eyes, bones, fins and bits of skin weighed a mere 6kg, i.e. a frankly implausible 3.2% of the fish. Even the frugal 150g portion only leaves 36kg of wastage, which at 19.4% of the original fish still seems a touch on the low side to me. And they said over 1,000 portions, remember. I'm not sure I buy it. Or rather I'm not sure I would buy it, if a restaurant offered me 0.1% of the edible portion of a 186kg fish, as I strongly suspect that would be rather a small meal. As a comparison the 2010 story linked above reckons the 220kg fish snagged there would have yielded 970 portions, which if we assume the same portion size range yields a wastage ratio of between 21% and 34%.

Secondly, what is the plural of halibut? I've used "halibuts" in the first couple of paragraphs above, largely for comic effect, but actually I think "halibut" sounds more sensible. I think there may be a rule here, as I can't think of a fish where the plural form sounds sensible compared to just re-using the singular. One cod, two cod, three haddock, five salmon, twelve hake, eighty-six mackerel, four trillion goldfish, and so on. The last one there may hold the key to the mystery - does this rule apply because "fish" is its own plural, and all sub-divisions of the "fish" category therefore inherit their pluralisation rules from it?

Lastly, do not diss the halibut, whether singular or plural. Even a singular one, if it's big enough, can fuck you up pretty good. So watch yourself.

(I'd) like a virgin

This Daily Mail story about a young Brazilian woman called Catarina Migliorini auctioning off her virginity on the internet (apparently some Japanese guy snagged it for $780,000 in the end) reminded me that I'd collected a group of similar stories a couple of years back with the intention of knocking them together into a blog post, but somehow never got round to doing it. Here's the contents of my Virginity Auction File:

• Bristol University student Rosie Reid auctioned off her virginity for £8,400 back in February 2004 to a middle-aged businessman called (or possibly not) "Tom". Her lesbian lover kept a lonely vigil in a room a few doors down the corridor.
• A Peruvian model called Graciela put her virginity up for auction in April 2005, but changed her mind before any money changed hands.
• Raffaela Fico, an Italian men's magazine model, put her virginity up for auction, with an ambitious reserve of 1 million euros, in September 2008. This one seems pretty definitely to have been a publicity stunt.
• Natalie Dylan from San Diego, California appears to be the current record-holder in financial terms after attracting bids of up to £2.5 million (or, alternatively, up to one live tiger). There does seem to be some doubt over the genuineness of her, hem hem, "status", and also whether the deal was ever actually done. 
• Alina Percea from Romania agreed to surrender the precious flower of her maidenhood to some Italian guy in Venice in May 2009. This one has a happy ending, though: after transacting a deal worth in the region of £8,800 for an unprotected boning the man in question wanted to see her again, presumably to cash in a few more goes for free. Ah, romance. 
• Evelyn Duenas, 28, originally from Ecuador but lately resident in Spain, auctioned off her virginity in July 2009 to help pay for her mother's medical care. As with Natalie Dylan, although there were rumours of bids up to a dizzying £2 million, it's unclear whether the deal was ever consummated, as it were. 
• An anonymous 16-year-old from Newry, Northern Ireland offered her virginity for sale online in January 2010, but changed her mind, very probably after becoming exasperated by various drooling newspaper hacks wasting her time. 
• An anonymous 19-year-old from New Zealand accepted an offer in the region of £20,000 in February 2010. 

I'm sure there were probably several others, most likely back in the heady days of 2009 and 2010 when there was one of these stories cropping up every few weeks.

Now of course you can imagine the sort of unmitigated horror that is the comment thread on a Daily Mail article dealing with this sort of thing, and indeed I would urge you as a general rule never to look at a Daily Mail comment thread on any article on any subject, lest your eyes see things that can never be unseen. Those of us who aspire to a more rational outlook on life, however, can use this as a handy calibration tool to try and analyse our own reactions to these stories, both instinctive and (hopefully) more considered.

What, after all, one might say, is the problem here? As long as the women in question are not being coerced into doing this, as long as the men they end up transacting business with adhere to the specified rules, everyone tries to have a good time within the slightly odd parameters set out in the arrangement, and no-one gets hurt, then surely it's all good. There might be some legal niceties to be straightened out given that this may well be considered to be prostitution in some jurisdictions, but in general as long as you aren't soliciting on the street or giving Hugh Grant a blowjob in a car, then you're probably OK.

On the other hand, one might also say: well, that's all fine, but that blithely ignores that there is a thing called the patriarchy which infects everything everyone does, be they male or female. One could, after all, make the same argument about prostitution in a more general sense being an example of rugged entrepreneurship and business enterprise and all that crap, and in theory it could be, but you know and I know that it's mainly seedy fat blokes running strings of terrified malnourished dead-eyed underage Eastern European refugees out of a warehouse somewhere in East London: i.e. scarcely very empowering at all.

So the whole thing is a little bit problematic in terms of Knowing What To Think. On top of all that, what is this virginity fetish all about anyway? I mean, we all start out that way, and in your formative teenage years there is a pretty good chance that at least one of the involvees in any act of furtive and cack-handed fumblage will be a virgin, but as a general rule sex is like most other things (close harmony singing, yachting, canasta) in that a bit of practice and experience goes a long way. One might also formulate a rule that says any sex-based thing heavily fetishised by Islam, a religion more intensely weird about sex than most others (and, let's face it, they all are to a greater or lesser extent), should legitimately be viewed with a healthy dose of suspicion.

celebrity lookeylikey of the day

My gorgeous and generously-cheeked daughter Nia and legendary Anglo-American film director Alfred Hitchcock, as immortalised in the little line drawing made famous by the title sequence of Alfred Hitchcock Presents. It is claimed that the original line drawing was drawn by Hitchcock himself.

balls!

This Daily Mail story about Zoe Ball appears mainly to be a tie-in for her presenting gig on one of the Strictly Come Dancing spin-off shows, with the added bonus of this year's contestant line-up featuring (very briefly, as it turned out) her father Johnny. To be honest I'm a bit mystified about the inclusion of the baby element in the story, as her daughter was born in 2010, but I guess it makes it all sound more exciting. I do hope that the implication in the sidebar headline is just an unfortunate error of phrasing, though, otherwise it sounds as if something unsavoury may have been going on.

I'm sure that's not true, incidentally, though what certainly is true is that Johnny Ball's huge stock of goodwill among people of a certain age (myself very much included) who loved his science-based shows (principally Think Of A Number and Think Again) back in the early 1980s has been eroded fairly considerably in recent years by his idiocy on the subject of climate change. What is most amusing in his paranoid rantings is the suggestion that, because a Google search on his name came back with some pornographic images, essentially the Illuminati had sabotaged the entire internet in an attempt to discredit him, or something. As someone says in the comments to the Deltoid article:

Anyone who does a search for “Johnny Ball” and is surprised and alarmed by porn coming back as a result needs to be warned that they will continually find the internet confusing and alarming and may want to consider never using it.

I'm less concerned by David Bellamy's similar descent into denialism lunacy, as I always thought he was a bit of a pillock. 

that'll buff out, no problem

You'll recall my frustrated and directionless ire when some incompetent buffoon dinked my rear door in Tesco's car park. Well, after three and a half years of damage-free driving since then, the car sustained its second helping of damage a couple of months ago during a camping trip to Christchurch in the Forest of Dean. And to answer the obvious question, no, this one wasn't my fault either.

It was a dark and stormy night.....well, no, OK, it wasn't, but it was a torrentially rainy afternoon, and some water must have worked its way into the delicate electronic circuitry of the automatic barrier at the entrance to the campsite. So once I'd been into the reception area, handed over some money and returned to my car, blissfully unaware of the cruel fate that was about to befall me, I tapped in the barrier code I'd been given at reception, the barrier rose gracefully and I duly proceeded in a forwardly direction.

At which point all hell broke loose - the barrier, having risen in the designated manner, then decided to drop down sharply onto the top of my car and then rise and fall randomly while scraping along the paintwork, making that cackling OM NOM NOM noise that the big pot plant in Little Shop Of Horrors made. And we're not talking one of those flimsy plastic single-bar barriers like they have on the Severn Bridge either; this was the proper half a level-crossing gate job with the metal curtain/fringe thingy under it to inflict maximum damage. So there was a certain amount of scrapey and denty damage to the car:

Now clearly this was all the campsite's fault, and to be fair they shrugged and said, yeah, our bad, get it fixed and we'll sort you out, guv. So I availed myself of the services of Ali at ChipsAway, who in addition to being pretty cheap in comparison to other places will come and pick up your car from your house and deliver it back afterwards, which is nice. Here's the post-repair picture:

Good, isn't it? Unless you took some sort of laser sighting along the panel, you'd probably never know.

the last book I read

Espedair Street by Iain Banks.

Daniel "Weird" Weir is a rock star. Well, an ex-rock star these days, but a ruddy great big globe-bestriding rock star in his day. These days he's living in a converted folly somewhere in Glasgow, having some low-key drunken adventures with various random blokes down the local pub (who think he's his own caretaker), pondering over The Meaning Of It All and trying to decide whether to top himself.

Back in the day, though, Daniel was the bass player and principal songwriter for Frozen Gold, rock legends of the mid to late 1970s. In addition to the multi-platinum albums and the sell-out gigs at the international enormodomes, Frozen Gold collectively managed their fair share of the obligatory rock star misbehaviour, from drugs to smashing up hotel rooms to more life-threatening stuff involving light aircraft. The band's eventual demise is brought about in slightly more mundane circumstances, though, when singer and guitarist Davey Balfour is electrocuted on stage.

The band splits up, Daniel knocks out an indifferently-received solo album, and retires to count his money and have everyone leave him alone. When one of the record company stooges contacts him to break the news that the band's other frontperson (and Daniel's occasional ex-lover) Christine Brice has been shot dead by a crazed fan in Ohio, Daniel decides that the best thing to do would be to kill himself. Cleverly picking a method which will provide him with plenty of time to change his mind, he decides to go to Iona and drown himself in the sea. Sure enough, on the way he has an epiphany in a hotel somewhere up the west side of Loch Lomond upon hearing someone playing some old Frozen Gold tunes in the room next door, and decides that maybe life is worth living after all.

So he heads back to Glasgow, signs away a large portion of his fortune, gives his old drinking buddy McCann the keys to the folly, and heads off north to seek out his old high-school sweetheart Jean Webb, having fortuitously run into her brother in Paisley and discovered that she's recently divorced. Hopping on a train to Arisaig, he asks around until he finds someone who knows her, and parks himself on her doorstep, hoping that she'll be pleased to see him.

This was Iain Banks' fourth novel, published in 1987, and it's probably the most orthodox and non-experimental of all the ones I've read. The rock theme is obviously one close to Banks' heart, as he's clearly a big music fan. Any book featuring the lyrics of imaginary rock songs skirts dangerously close to ridiculousness, though, especially as Banks is clearly a bit of a 70s prog-rock boy, and some of the lyrics do verge on the flowery in places. The general theme of - yes, drugs, sex, excess, playing the guitar on the beach while necking champagne, that stuff is all very well, but will it really make you happy? Hmmm? Really?  No, what you really need is the love of a good woman and the support of a close-knit village community, even if some of them are a bit churchier than you'd like - is all a bit on the cheesy side, even though it's all written with great charm.

Banks also has a repeated theme of people who have enough material wealth never to have to worry about any of that ever again, and how they nonetheless manage to find stuff to worry about: Daniel Weir here, Kate Telman and her cronies in The Business, the Wopuld family in The Steep Approach To Garbadale, and of course The Culture in general in the books Banks writes in his "M" incarnation.

Much of the rock misbehaviour and general incident in the book echoes (no doubt intentionally) real-life stuff: Christine's assassination after some ill-advised religion-baiting echoes John Lennon's, Davey Balfour's onstage electrocution echoes various similar incidents, Leslie Harvey of Stone The Crows in 1972 for one, and even Daniel Weir's nickname echoes the lyrics of David Bowie's 1972 hit Ziggy Stardust:

Ziggy played guitar, jamming good with Weird and Gilly
And The Spiders From Mars
He played it left hand, but made it too far
Became the special man, then we were Ziggy's band

"Weird" here refers to Trevor Bolder, who, like Daniel Weir, was a bass player. 

Further real-life interest, to me at least, is provided by the locations, Paisley in particular, since I spent a fair bit of time hanging out there with my ex-girlfriend Anne between about 1998 and 2002, as it was where her parents lived. So I have in fact been to Espedair Street, not that it's particularly exciting in itself. As it happens I have also been to Arisaig, or at least passed through it on the way to this remarkable campsite on the sand dunes, where we stopped off in order to facilitate getting the early ferry to Skye from Mallaig the following morning.

Anyway, I would rate Espedair Street more highly (among the non-M Bankses I've read) than Canal Dreams and The Business, but below The Wasp Factory, Complicity and Whit. You should probably start with those.

now that's what I call a trade union CONGRESS

Never let it be said that I don't like a bit of politics from time to time; I mean, who doesn't? I do tend to avoid the party conferences, though, partly because a lot of the main action tends to happen during the week when I'm otherwise occupied, but also because they are - the odd Portillo moment aside -  so deadly dull. Even the leaders' keynote speeches towards the end of the conferences are usually irredeemably drab and awful, but they do provide an opportunity for the keen amateur social anthropologist to observe one of the more bizarre political rituals - the public parading of the political wife, followed by the public demonstration of her uncontrollable sexual arousal following her man having given his all behind the podium.

So basically the drill seems to be: party leader (still invariably male, even after all these years) gets up on stage, talks for a couple of hours - formerly from behind a big podium, but the thing these days seems to be to wander around the front of the stage, thereby demonstrating that you've memorised the speech by heart, but not quite knowing what to do with your hands - and then finishes with some slightly clunky crescendo, at which point the audience realises it's all over and goes mental with a standing ovation in the obligatory fashion. At this point the party leader stands around raising his hand for a couple of minutes and blinking a bit as if to say: all this for me, well, gosh, and then grabs his wife (who has made her way onto the stage) and gives her a big lingering kiss on the lips while she gazes up at him admiringly as if to say: I am so rampantly moist for your policies right now; also, cock.

Here's a little montage of the kisses from the 2012 conference season:

It is peculiar to have to remind ourselves that it's 2012, and all three spouses are career women in their own right to a greater or lesser extent - Miriam Clegg and Justine Thornton are lawyers, and Samantha Cameron (who, I should remind you, was a contemporary of mine at Bristol University, though we didn't move in quite the same social circles) has a slightly comedy job working for ludicrous luxury goods company Smythson of Bond Street, as befits someone only slightly posher than the Queen. And yet they still have to be wheeled out to prove the virility of our glorious leaders - not only can John Q Politician talk for an hour without recourse to notes, he's still got enough left in the tank to service the missus afterwards, and a good thing too, because she's hot for his criminal justice policies.

I predict that this will go one of two ways - either sanity will prevail and the whole thing will be ditched as a cringingly embarrassing sexist anachronism, or someone (and it could be me) will make a fortune patenting the Conference-O-Matic speech podium and integral spousal sex platform with full pelvic height adjustment for easy insertion without having to break your verbal stride. So the missus comes up on stage with 30 seconds or so to go, hops up onto the platform, hitches up her dress, and then it's "so, in summary, the party must go forward, not back [knickers off], look to the future, not the past [unzip, drop trousers], and the future of Britain will be NNNNNGGGGGGHHH [insertion] safe in our hands. Thank you." [standing ovation, commence furious thrusting]. Well it would certainly bring back some of the old cynics who have given up watching; I might even have a look in.

On the subject of sexism in politics, I must just give a quick tip of the hat to Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard (she's an atheist, you know) for her epic parliamentary smackdown of reptilian opposition leader Tony Abbott last week. It's difficult enough for a woman to become leader of a political party (see above), let alone Prime Minister, and for the tiny number that do the day-to-day sexism and sniping and casual dismissiveness must pile up towards the eyeballs on a regular basis. Margaret Thatcher remained immune to it all by virtue of being a psychopath, but that's not an option available to most. So it was quite refreshing and cathartic to see Abbott getting both barrels; top marks also to the various political analysis websites for the extensive post-speech use of the phrase "ripping a new one".

horny, porny and corny

I was unaware of the irony of my linking of Fifty Shades Of Grey and the Twilight series at the time I wrote that previous post; just goes to show the value of doing a bit of research first.

Anyway, it turns out that one of the principal reasons that there are so many similarities between the two things is that E.L. James started out writing slightly porny Twilight fanfiction on the internet, allegedly under the pseudonym "Snowqueens Icedragon".

She eventually rejigged the original work, changed the main characters' names, removed all the neck-bitey stuff in favour of some more bondage, and eventually sold it to a meatspace publisher, whereupon it sold a gazillion copies.

the last book I read

Winter Garden by Beryl Bainbridge.

Douglas Ashburner is one of those grey little men that were the source of much comical mileage back in the 1970s, trapped in a fairly mundane marriage and with an unrewarding job. In a desperate bid to enliven things a bit he's embarked on an affair with Nina St. Clair, a stereotypically temperamental artist. Not only does Nina have a bit of a thing for uncomfortable sex standing up in the kitchen (just in case her husband comes home halfway through and she has to shoo Douglas out the back door), but she's persuaded Douglas to come on a trip to Russia with her, presumably at least partly with the promise of some sex of the lying down uninterrupted variety.

Now obviously Douglas can't just say to the wife: right, love, I'm off to Russia with my mistress for a bit, see you when I get back, don't forget to water the aspidistra, so he cooks up a cock and bull story about going on a fishing trip to the Scottish Highlands, and then hot-foots it to the airport with Nina and her two travelling companions Bernard (another artist) and Enid.

Almost as soon as they get to Russia things start to go awry - Douglas' suitcase gets lost, and after an initial night in the hotel Nina suddenly disappears. Nonetheless Olga Fiodorovna, the interpreter assigned to Douglas' party for the duration of their trip, is keen that they press on and do the requisite sightseeing and visiting of sites of revolutionary significance. It becomes clear during all this that the various dignitaries they meet seem to think Douglas is someone other (and more important) than he actually is; weirdly, everyone seems to know Nina as well, though there is no sign of her in person.

The hapless party ploughs on through Russia in a haze of vodka-fuelled dinners and comical misunderstandings, including a comical misunderstanding on a train where Douglas ends up accidentally having sex with someone, as you do. At all times they are assured that Nina is just ill, and being cared for in a sanatorium somewhere, and will rejoin them presently. Eventually the party returns to Moscow to pack up before returning to Britain, at which point Douglas finds a cryptic note in Nina's handwriting with an address on it. Hijacking the airport taxi to take him to the address, he finds himself arrested as a spy and detained.

And, um, that's it. Unlike in Every Man For Himself, it's never exactly clear what's going on at any point here. Is Nina really sick? Or dead? Or has she just, as Bernard suggests, got cold feet about something and buggered off back to Britain early? And what of Bernard and Enid? Does Bernard really secretly speak Russian, as Douglas suspects? And what has he been doing all those drawings of? Are these the same drawings that turn up in Douglas' fishing rod case at the end and get him arrested as a spy?

Winter Garden was published in 1980, and seems quaintly old-fashioned in some ways now: the heavily constrained tourism options open to westerners during the Brezhnev years, but also the way the principal characters act - like in Hotel Du Lac if you weren't told otherwise you'd put Douglas Ashburner at 60-something, but from the clues given in the book you have to conclude he's mid- to late-40s or so. Having one of the main characters (presumably of a similar age) being called Enid doesn't help either, that being one of those names that is irredeemably associated with old people these days.

Anyway, like the other short novels by ladies of a certain age as listed here, here, here and here among other places, this is tremendously sly and knowing and captures certain aspects of human interaction very concisely. What you don't get is any clear idea of what's going on - as this review says, even in comparison with the the rest of Bainbridge's output Winter Garden is particularly enigmatic and opaque. That's not to say it isn't highly enjoyable though, because it is; I just prefer to know what's going on. I don't generally demand that it be spoon-fed to me; I can work it out, but the information has to be there somewhere.

Beryl Bainbridge died in 2010, between my reading of the only previous book of hers I've read [postscript: actually this isn't true, as I've read her 1977 Whitbread Award winner Injury Time as well, which dents the symmetry of the theory a bit] and this one. She therefore joins Russell Hoban on the list of people who have been killed as a result of my reading their novels; sorry about that.

celebrity lookeylikey of the day

Formerly outrageous hamsterphagic comedian and reality TV star, and current 1970s sex abuse accusee Freddie Starr, and former EastEnders matriarch and comedy earring model Pat Butcher.

storm in a tee cup

A couple of follow-up thoughts on recent posts:

I meant to add to the previous post, having inflicted the terrible lame punning title on you, that if journeyman European Tour pro and one-time tournament winner Graeme Storm ever makes the Ryder Cup team (which I strongly suspect will never happen), then I will be extremely disappointed if the media don't come up with a headline of the form STORM ON THE RYDERS or something very similar.

Also, more shouting at the radio today - the Book Of The Week concerned maps, and therefore sounded interesting, well, until it started anyway. As soon as it did it incurred my wrath with a lot of waffle about Google Earth and satnav and "well, couldn't it be said that maps these days point the way not so much from A to B as from, in a very real sense, ourselves, to, as it were, erm, somewhere else", compounded by the oft-repeated claim that fold-up paper maps are a quaint relic of a bygone age, an accompaniment to some imagined soft-focus 1970s family outing with the Cortina estate and the gingham tablecloth and the Spam sandwiches.

In fact, as the constant stream of stories in the media about people having to be rescued demonstrates, setting out without a paper map is a recipe for disaster, regardless of whether you've got a GPS or a smartphone or some other electrical gizmo with you. Electrical gizmos get wet and malfunction. Electrical gizmos have batteries, which run out. Electrical gizmos get dropped on a rock and broken. Electrical gizmos lose sight of the satellite they're getting their information from. And then, in pretty much all those circumstances, you're fucked. Unless of course you've got a map (and ideally a compass) on you. Granted, this does presume you have the ability to read a map and operate a compass, but if you can't do that then it's probably best you aren't allowed out of doors unsupervised anyway. All the major walking sites, as well as the gizmo manufacturers, issue dire warnings about never relying solely on electronic navigational aids. The additional pitfall of using a smartphone in particular as a navigational aid, of course, is that in a subset of the circumstances described above (wetness, smashage, battery death) you've lost not only your ability to navigate but also your ability to call for help.

So the paper map - or the ritzy laminated versions if you're going somewhere like Dartmoor or the Peak District where it will more than likely shit it down constantly - is still very much alive, and will remain so for the foreseeable future. That Dash4It link is the place to go for OS maps, incidentally, as they are much cheaper than in the shops, and they do free delivery. So if you're currently lost on Dartmoor, pull up the site, order the relevant map, put your last known GPS coordinates in as the delivery location, and then hunker down behind a grassy tussock with a KitKat until help arrives.

I should add that I have no beef with electronic navigational gizmos per se - I own a GPS which I use regularly (though mainly for recording track info rather than navigation) and the smartphone apps using the OS data like BackCountry Navigator and ViewRanger look pretty good. I do take a map as well, though. I assume that also taking stuff like waterproofs, a torch and something to eat goes without saying, but you never know.

Finally, books. I was over at The Mall the other day, and a bit of browsing around WH Smith and Waterstone's revealed the in hindsight completely unsurprising fact that literally everyone is now writing 50 Shades Of Grey rip-offs (or rips-off, if you insist). If you think I may be exaggerating for comic effect, I quite literally am not, as I trust these photographs prove:

It's very difficult to criticise these books purely for their choice of subject matter, since after all what people get up to in the privacy of their own bedrooms, or indeed rubber-lined porn dungeons, is no-one's business but their own, and as long as everyone's past the age of consent and enjoys themselves and no-one gets hurt (unless they want to) then it's all good. Nonetheless the themes (in 50 Shades anyway, I can't speak for Bruised Perineum Of Guilty Delight and the rest of them) of female abasement to some mysterious super-rich but troubled pervert whose penchant for stalky manipulation and bondage induces (for some reason) uncontrollably orgasmic sexual frenzy in his (always younger, always virginal) lady friend raise some questions over the psychopathology that underlies all this stuff, and whether it's entirely healthy.

Bizarrely, one can't even escape into the safe and comforting world of children's literature, because the shelves over in that section are literally groaning with the various instalments of the Twilight series, which is essentially just the same sort of thing but with added teen angst and weird crypto-Mormon sexual morality. And werewolves.

ryders on the storm

Much gloaty rejoicing after Europe's remarkable Ryder Cup victory last weekend, and why on earth not. I was down in Swanage for the annual pub crawl so I didn't get to see very much of it, but I kept up with events in real time through the magic of smartphone technology.

There are a couple of modern-day bits of received wisdom about the Ryder cup that people accept unquestioningly, and they are:

1) Europe are better at the doubles formats because they have better "team spirit" for some reason, but struggle in the singles because the USA team tends to be stronger man-for-man.

Here's some analysis of the scores for the last 17 Ryder Cups, since it started being Europe v USA at The Greenbrier in 1979:

Year	Foursomes		Fourballs		Doubles		Singles		Overall
	Eur	USA	Eur	USA	Eur	USA	Eur	USA	Eur	USA
1979	4½	3½	3	5	7½	8½	3½	8½	11	17
1981	2	6	3½	4½	5½	10½	4	8	9½	18½
1983	4	4	4	4	8	8	5½	6½	13½	14½
1985	4	4	5	3	9	7	7½	4½	16½	11½
1987	4½	3½	6	2	10½	5½	4½	7½	15	13
1989	3	5	6	2	9	7	5	7	14	14
1991	2	6	6	2	8	8	5½	6½	13½	14½
1993	5	3	3½	4½	8½	7½	4½	7½	13	15
1995	5	3	2	6	7	9	7½	4½	14½	13½
1997	5	3	5½	2½	10½	5½	4	8	14½	13½
1999	4½	3½	5½	2½	10	6	3½	8½	13½	14½
2002	3½	4½	4½	3½	8	8	7½	4½	15½	12½
2004	6	2	5	3	11	5	7½	4½	18½	9½
2006	5	3	5	3	10	6	8½	3½	18½	9½
2008	3½	4½	3½	4½	7	9	4½	7½	11½	16½
2010	4½	3½	5	3	9½	6½	5	7	14½	13½
2012	3	5	3	5	6	10	8½	3½	14½	13½
Totals	69	67	76	60	145	127	96½	107½	241½	234½

So we can see that it is indeed true that Europe do better at the "doubles" formats, quite markedly so in the case of the fourballs. And it is indeed true that the USA tend to do better in the singles. An alternative view of the results gives:

• Europe have won the doubles competition 9 times to USA's 5, with 3 draws
• USA have won the singles competition 11 times to Europe's 6

Other statistical nuggets include the following:

• Comeback victories (i.e. overall victory after being behind after the doubles) have been achieved by USA in 1993 and 1999, and by Europe in 1995 and 2012
• The draw in 1989 was unique (thanks largely to Tiger Woods - see below), but the smallest possible margin of victory, 14½-13½, has occurred seven times, USA winning by that margin in 1983, 1991 and 1999, and Europe in 1995, 1997, 2010 and 2012
• The Cup changed hands in 1985, 1991, 1995, 1999, 2002, 2008 and 2010.
• While Europe pretty much always seem to start as underdogs, they have now won 5 of the last 6 competitions, 7 of the last 9, and 9 of the last 14. 

2) Tiger Woods is rubbish in the Ryder Cup because he's not really a "team" guy, and gets frustrated when he has to rely on the efforts of others whom he regards as inferior.

I was very interested in Woods' comments after his last-hole 3-putt bogey and generous concession of a putt gifted Francesco Molinari a half in their match. And a very significant half it was too, because it made the match score 14½-13½ in Europe's favour, rather than the 14-14 draw it had been shaping up to be. Woods' reaction to this was basically: meh, whatevs, Europe were going to keep the Cup anyway, so basically I just couldn't be arsed to line up the putt properly or stir my multi-millionaire arse to concentrate and make an effort just for another five minutes. Regardless of the destination of the cup, the difference between drawing the match and losing it is clearly huge, and was obviously evident to the European captain José María Olazábal who went to the trouble of going over to Molinari on the fairway to impress upon him that he was going to try and win the hole, halve the match and win the match overall or he, Olazábal, was going to smack Molinari repeatedly over the head with a paella pan, and quite rightly too.

I'm not sure why I was as irritated by all that as I was, but I find it infuriating - if the match score had been, say, 17-10 rather than 14-13 as Woods and Molinari stood on the last tee then a case could have been made for agreeing a half there and then (though my personal view is that they should have been made to finish - why would you not want to win your own match, after all?), but the overall result was still in the balance. I think what makes it stick in the throat particularly is that you can be absolutely certain that if Woods came to the 18th tee in a major, let's say tied for third and knowing that he couldn't catch the leader, but knowing that a birdie would get him second on his own, you can bet that he would be busting a gut to try and get one, and knowing him probably would. There's an undercurrent of petulance to it: yeah, OK, you won, but shut up, right, 'cos I wan't even really trying anyway, otherwise I totally would have won.

Woods' Ryder Cup singles record is actually pretty good, as it happens; he's only ever lost one singles match (to Costantino Rocca on his Ryder Cup debut in 1997) out of the seven he's played in. The Molinari half was his second; his other four matches all ended in wins. His doubles record is poor, though - won 9, lost 16, halved 1. So do we conclude that this cliché is true as well? I guess maybe we do.

marxist carx it

Among all the predictable explosions of right-wing vitriol following the death of Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm (a predictably more affectionate Guardian obituary is here) what seems to have been overlooked is his striking resemblance to a deranged Woody Allen. Allow me do do my bit for posterity by rectifying that omission here.

god exists; therefore god exists

It's nice to see In Our Time back on Radio 4 on Thursday mornings, though it may mean that my Thursday morning punctuality may suffer as there will be a temptation to hang back so as to hear as much of it as possible (and goodness knows I need little enough encouragement to do that as it is).

Last Thursday's was a little bit of a shouting at the radio moment, though, and crystallises some of my reservations about Melvyn Bragg, otherwise wholly admirable as a broadcaster and general force for intellectual good - reservations previously expressed here.

The subject of the programme was Anselm's ontological argument for the existence of God, which goes a little something like this:

• God is great. No, really reeeaally great. In fact you literally can't think of anything greater, even if you try. Think you've thought of something greater than God? Well, you're wrong, and you've clearly not understood just how great God is, because he's totes the greatest thing there is, or ever has been. End of.
• That being the case, let's imagine that he doesn't exist. That would be a bit rubbish, wouldn't it? It would certainly ill befit the greatest ruddy thing ever. Existing would be far better. 
• We've already established God's status as the greatest thing ever in every respect, and that clearly includes in respect of the question of existence as opposed to non-existence.
• Therefore, God exists.
• Allelujah, praaaaaiiiise him, etc. 

No, it really is that stupid. And it's interesting, in a way, to reflect on how pernicious and corrosive to clarity of thought religion and its general unthinking acceptance by society is that this laughable tosh is still being discussed by at least semi-serious philosophers to this day. To be more accurate, I suppose it's really a reflection of how successfully the entirely vacuous discipline called "theology" has glommed itself onto the coat-tails of the occasionally woolly but in general legitimate discipline of philosophy.

In general there's quite a lot of interesting discussion of the historical context in the programme, and certainly not an unthinking acceptance of the validity of the argument, but still, the reverence accorded to it is all a bit Emperor's New Clothes. Really this is about at the level of one of those old schoolboy mathematical proofs that 1 = -1; no-one actually came away from being shown one of those having really been convinced that 1 and -1 were equal, even if they couldn't immediately see the problem (usually a sneaky square root calculation or a hidden division by zero). And while one can unpick the problems with Anselm's argument (general incoherence of definitions, unevidenced assertion, special pleading, circular reasoning, its similar application to unicorns, the perfect cheese sandwich, etc.), it might be better to ask the question: has anyone, ever, been converted from atheism to theism by exposure to it? I strongly suspect the answer is no, or at least vanishingly rarely. The RationalWiki article I linked to above makes the interesting point that in Anselm's time convincing people of the existence of God wasn't really the point, because everyone already unquestioningly believed in him anyway, it was more about providing a bit of faux-respectable intellectual backing for what you already believed. That remains its primary purpose today, even when inflated to astonishing levels of obfuscatory bafflegab by the likes of Alvin Plantinga.

The other thing that the theologians do, of course, like the sneaky little weasels that they are, is to morph from talking about the God of the ontological argument, about whom (even if you accept the argument) nothing is known save for his existence, to talking about the Christian God of the Bible, about whom all manner of real-world claims are made (most of them entirely refuted by reality), without showing their working for all the intermediate bits. Generally the trick here is to tailor which God you're talking about depending on who your audience is.

Anyway, I assert that there is a glass of whisky greater than which no glass of whisky can be imagined. Clearly, in whisky terms, it would be greater not only to exist rather than not to exist, but also to be in my whisky cupboard rather than, say, in someone else's. Back in a bit.

dixon of cock green

It's very easy to get caught up in the gleeful schadenfreude surrounding the Andrew Mitchell affair, and there's no doubt that with the whole "pleb" thing he could hardly have chosen a word more toxic for a Conservative politician (well, I suppose "peasant" might have been worse), revealing as it does the furious jackbooted Nazi space lizard lurking under the ill-fitting human disguise. In the light of that, the amusing revelation that during his time at Rugby school he was a "stern disciplinarian" and earned the nickname "Thrasher" comes as no surprise whatsoever. His BBC profile also reveals that he used to work for investment bank Lazard Brothers. Lazard. Lizard. Coincidence? I think not.

What struck me as slightly odd, though, was the notion, seemingly unchallenged and accepted by everyone involved in the associated media scrum, that you can be arrested for swearing at a police officer. It certainly seems that this is true, usually under the provisions of the 1986 Public Order Act or for the older offence of causing a breach of the peace. Now I'm certainly not saying that some drunken nutter wandering round a quiet residential area at 2am shouting "CUUUUUUUNT" at the top of his voice shouldn't be subject to some form of legal sanction, but just saying, for instance, "fuck" in the context of a heated exchange with a police officer shouldn't be enough to get you arrested, unless we're still living in the 19th century and no-one's told me.

Police officers are meant to be rufty tufty types who can restrain hardened crims if necessary, after all; they shouldn't be swooning and reaching for the smelling salts if someone says "bollocks" to them. Similarly, if I can't be arrested for saying "shitcakes" to someone I know, or some random stranger who doesn't happen to be a police officer, then I really don't see why the police should be any different. This Guardian article has a good summary of the current position, certain aspects of which the police spokespeople seem a bit embarrassed about discussing, and probably rightly so. Note that you can also be arrested for telling a mounted police officer (very politely, without swearing) that his horse is gay.

the last book I read

Millennium People by J.G. Ballard.

David Markham is a psychologist (a typically Ballardian occupation) all set to jet off to America on a conference when a bomb goes off at Heathrow Airport, killing three people, including, it later transpires, Markham's ex-wife, Laura. Markham's current wife, Sally, persuades him to investigate the incident as a way of exorcising his remaining feelings for Laura (who ran off with one of Markham's work colleagues).

Markham's investigations lead him to a group of middle-class revolutionaries in the gated community of Chelsea Marina - radical paediatrician Richard Gould, priest Stephen Dexter and sexy but brittle Kay Churchill. Their activities range from silly stunts to actual destruction of property, from smoke-bombing a branch of Blockbuster to burning down the National Film Theatre.

But what are they rebelling against? It seems the middle-class are the new working-class - mortgaged to the hilt, school fees to pay, payments to keep up on the BMW, holidays in Provence, all of which leaves precious little for day-to-day living. Yes, they're mad as hell, and they're not going to take it any more.

But it's not all Adam and Jocasta tying their pashminas to the wing mirrors of their Volvo estates and driving around throwing leftover lentil couscous at the police - there are more sinister undercurrents at work, inspired by Richard Gould and Stephen Dexter and culminating in the bombing of Tate Modern, causing more deaths, and then the doorstep execution of a blandly anonymous but popular (and coyly never named) female television presenter. Menwhile the residents' protests (led by Kay Churchill, who David Markham has started a relationship with) culminate in a pitched battle with the police, who eventually withdraw and leave the residents to their own burning houses.

But what has been achieved? The residents of Chelsea Marina who had left gradually drift back and things return to normal. Not for Richard Gould, though, who has greater things on his mind, specifically assassinating the Home Secretary who is doing a post-riot visit to Chelsea Marina. Largely by accident Markham foils this, allowing the lurking police marksmen to give Gould a hot lead sandwich and acquiring a small degree of heroic status for himself into the bargain as he returns to leafy suburbia with Sally.

I remember saying back when Ballard died in 2009 that he'd spent the last decade or so of his life essentially rewriting the same novel several times; certainly the sequence that goes Cocaine Nights, Super-Cannes, Millennium People, Kingdom Come (his last published novel) all share a number of themes: boredom, urban alienation, technology as a means of enslavement rather than liberation, the gradual flattening out and deadening of emotion (what Ballard rather grandly called "the death of affect") and the associated need for people to re-assert their humanity through acts of increasing perversity and violence. Millennium People scores over its two predecessors by being located in a more recognisable setting (the previous two being set in Spain and France respectively) but loses out by virtue of the central plot being less convincing - the violence and depravity in the previous two books had a genuine edge of danger to it, but the middle-class revolt here just seems a bit silly, Richard Gould's psychotic urges aside. There's a bit of other sneaky working in of references from earlier works as well - Markham's wife Sally's fetishistic use of her crutches, despite the injuries she sustained in a tram accident in Portugal having long since healed, echoes the various bizarre episodes with surgical harnesses and calipers in Crash, still Ballard's most notorious work.

Crash is still the book you want, to be honest; I would suggest also that unless you're an obsessive completist you probably only want one of the late-period foursome mentioned above, and as entertaining as it is Millennium People probably isn't it - I would go for Super-Cannes if I were you. Ballard's writing style remains completely inimitable - the obsessive re-use of certain words ("matrix", "stylized", "psychopathology"), the public school/RAF habit all the male characters have of addressing each other by their surnames, the general sense that real human beings don't behave anything like this, the bracing moral and sexual perversity.

I stand by my earlier assertion that Ballard is a writer probably best served by the short-story format, though, so in addition to Crash, Super-Cannes and the weird Heart Of Darkness-esque fable The Day Of Creation you need to have the two collected volumes, as well as the frankly uncategorisable The Atrocity Exhibition. That should do you to be going on with.

incidental music spot of the day

Low by Cracker over some of the player background info sequences on Sky Sports' coverage of the final round of the Tour Championship. Cracker's 1993 album Kerosene Hat, on which Low appears (Get Off This is the other famous-ish song on it) is a bit of a forgotten 90s classic. Here's the official video for Low, starring the lovely Gina Gershon, and here's a live rendition from the Conan O'Brien show.

If you liked those, allow me to direct you to the ludicrously crunchy and catchy Teen Angst from their self-titled 1992 debut album. If the YouTube comments are to be believed the video was filmed on the Virginia ranch owned by the late Mark Linkous of Sparklehorse, and he puts in a few brief appearances in the video zooming past on a motorbike, the video pre-dating by four years or so the drug-related mishap that put paid to any further motorcycle shenanigans.

willy make it? no

Here's something I forgot to add to the previous post, but to be honest it was starting to get a bit long anyway. One of the things we did with Jenny and Jim was to go and have a crack at climbing to the top of Cornwall's highest point, Brown Willy, not exceptionally high at 420 metres (1378 feet) but nonetheless the county high point.

It's actually a pretty short walk from the car park at Roughtor, just down the road from Camelford, but nonetheless we had to leave Jenny and Jim to make the final assault on Brown Willy by themselves as Nia decided that she really didn't want to be in her nice comfy Baby Bjorn any more and was going to tell us about it at considerable volume until we took her back to the car.

All a bit galling, but some trawling through old photographs convinces me with about 95% certainty that I have been up Brown Willy before, at the very tail end of 1999 - I'm almost certain that the photo below shows me at the top in some nasty misty weather and in a hideously ill-judged jeans and baseball cap combo. I know it was somewhere in the vicinity and that spindly summit cairn is pretty distinctive - the nearby summit of Rough Tor is nothing like it, for instance.

The other obvious things to say about the photo are to observe firstly how huge my glasses are and secondly how young I look; then again I was at that point still in my twenties, by about a month and a half. It's been a tough decade.

time off in Looe

Here's a few notes on our trip to Cornwall last week - a sort of combination family holiday for the three of us combined with a substitute for the annual Munro trip (which Nia is a bit young for yet, though I have high hopes of bagging a few with her in future) with Jenny and Jim, who joined us for the second half of it.

• We stayed in St. Germans, which is just a few miles into Cornwall over the Tamar Bridge from Plymouth. Our cottage was rented from here and was very nice, bar a few low beams which the 6-foot-plus holidaymaker needs to be vigilant of.
• St. Germans has a railway station, which I had contemplated using for a quick trip into Plymouth for a look around combined with a crossing of the Royal Albert Bridge (as a companion piece to my earlier Forth Bridge crossing), but which we never got round to in the end. More importantly it also has a very nice pub which not only serves St. Austell Tribute and Proper Job (which I'd previously had on our trip to Exmoor 18 months ago), both of which were excellent, but also does take-away fish and chips which we availed ourselves of on Friday night, and very nice too. 
• In addition to St. Austell Cornwall is home to the excellent Sharp's brewery in Rock, home of the ubiquitous Doom Bar, and also Bays brewery, based in Torbay, which I hadn't encountered before but whose Topsail I had a very nice pint of in the Devonport Inn in Cawsand village. 
• The railway arrives from Plymouth by way of the impressive St. Germans viaduct, which we wandered down to have a look at. Since there are dozens of these on the Cornish main line they were largely built on wooden trestles when they were first constructed in the 1850s as it was cheaper, but all of these have now been replaced by stone structures. In many cases (though not St. Germans, as it happens) this was done by building the stone viaduct alongside the wooden one, re-aligning the tracks across the new one, and then dismantling the trestles. The structures left by this process (many of which are still visible) are known locally as "Brunel's stumps". 
• St. Germans is named after St. Germanus of Auxerre, who I knew I'd mentioned in a book review a while back. I'd assumed it must have been The Name Of The Rose, what with that being quite lidderally chokka with priests and saints and whatnot, but it turns out to have been this one. 
• St. Germans is on the northern edge (the A38 marks the "official" boundary, inasmuch as there is one) of what some call the "forgotten corner of Cornwall", basically the bit south-east of St. Germans principally comprising the Rame peninsula and Torpoint. It's slightly ironic that it was improvements in transport infrastructure that worsened the problem as the building of the Tamar road bridge in 1961 funneled most of the traffic away from the previous best route into Cornwall, the Torpoint ferry. 
• Cornwall's most famous culinary export is of course the Cornish pasty, a product I have to say I've never been all that keen on. If you're exceptionally hungry then a pasty will do a job, but I've always found them a bit dry and carb-heavy. A bit more meat, less potato and perhaps a spot of gravy would pep things up very acceptably; of course some would say well, yes, but that would just turn it into a pie, to which I say, well, so be it. It's like a chip butty - I like bread, and I like chips, but all mashed together it's just too much. Lose the chips, bung a couple of sausages in there, sorted.
• You'll be expecting photos, so here they are. 

the last book I read

On The Road by Jack Kerouac.

Before we start, chalk up another one for the list entitled Books I Bought Like A Gazillion Years Ago And Started But Never Finished Before Finally Getting My Thumb Out Of My Arse And Finishing Them, as previously alluded to a couple of times before on this blog, though just as I forgot Good as Gold when chalking up The Unbearable Lightness Of Being, I in turn forgot about this one when chalking up Good As Gold. Which means that while aside from the heavyweight duo of Pride and Prejudice and Anna Karenina (heavyweight in literary significance terms in both cases, and in actual physical terms in the latter case) I can't think of any others, that's not to say there might not be a couple more knocking around somewhere. I think this one was purchased in the big book-buying splurge I perpetrated when leaving my summer job at the Town Bookseller in Newbury in a last desperate cashing-in of my 30% staff discount, which means that it's taken me something like 22 years to get round to reading it all the way through.

So, anyway - Sal Paradise is an aspiring writer, scraping by in New York on the remnants of a military pension and handouts from his aunt, when he meets wild and crazy guy Dean Moriarty, a charismatic and unrestrained free spirit who persuades him to come on a road trip across the USA via Denver to San Francisco. After various crazy adventures Sal eventually ends up staying in and around Los Angeles for a while before rustling up the bus fare and heading back to New York.

Some months later Sal is with some relatives in Virginia when Dean gatecrashes the party with his wife Marylou (one of several he has in various parts of the country) and persuades Sal off on another trip, firstly to deliver some furniture for Sal's brother and bring Sal's aunt back to Virginia from New York, and then off across the country again to San Francisco, via New Orleans this time. Despite all the jazz-soundtracked nightlife and the crazy cats they meet on the way, Sal is eventually disillusioned by Dean's increasingly erratic behaviour and returns once again to New York.

The third trip starts a bit differently as Sal, bored and friendless in New York, sets off by bus to Denver to seek out Dean. They wangle a deal to deliver a new car to some guy (who may or may not be a mobster) in Chicago, and - just as the guy who entrusted the car to two crazy drunken bums should have foreseen - rag the arse off it, bounce it in and out of several ditches on the way and generally turn up in Chicago a couple of days early with the tyres on fire and the whole thing a smoking clapped-out wreck.

Finally, jaded with all this shuttling about between American cities, Sal, Dean and their new buddy Stan Shephard get hold of another car and go careering off across the border into Mexico, an exciting world of hot weather, spectacular scenery, cheap dope and accommodating underage prostitutes. After going hog-wild for a bit, as one would, they rock up in Mexico City, where Sal picks up a nasty dose of dysentery and is laid low for a while, whereupon Dean abandons him to head back north for more adventures. Chastened by this, and also lured both by the prospect of making a proper living from his writing and settling down with his new lady friend, Sal decides to knock the travelling on the head, leaving Dean to continue his wild adventures without him.

Kerouac famously based On The Road on his real-life travelling experiences, but had to change the names of the protagonists - Dean Moriarty, for instance, is a thinly-disguised Neal Cassady, just as Sal Paradise is Kerouac himself, and various other famous counterculture figures like Allen Ginsberg and William Burroughs play minor roles as well. Kerouac's claim of having knocked the book out in one big stream of consciousness over a three-week period seems to have been largely bogus, though.

To be honest it's a book probably best read in one's late teens, perhaps shortly after reading The Catcher In The Rye, as the themes of restlessness and longing for some ill-defined better and more exciting existence free of the stifling conformity and humbuggery of the older generation are very similar. To the more jaded eye the wild and crazy adventurers just conduct a series of largely unsatisfactory circular trips, constantly short of money and constantly alternating between feeling stifled and restless when at home and yearning for companionship and stability while on the road. The book is also suffused with Kerouac's love of jazz, and the newfangled bebop of the 1940s and 1950s in particular; I have to say that I've always found jazz mostly to be either plinky-plonkingly banal or noisily impenetrable depending on the particular genre (bebop would generally fall into the latter category), so Kerouac's writings on the subject, while evidently reflecting a deep love of the music, didn't do much for me. I think perhaps it's just hard to take jazz seriously after The Fast Show's merciless skewering of its self-importance. Niiiice.

What On The Road clearly also is is a thinly-veiled love story between the narrator and his fabulous unfettered male hero, in exactly the same way as The Leaves on Grey, Demian, The Great Gatsby and Le Grand Meaulnes (which Sal reads on one of his lengthy cross-country bus journeys) were. Interestingly in real life it was apparently Cassady and Ginsberg who were actually lovers.

The multiple journeys described in On The Road would seem to lend themselves perfectly to a map illustrating all the various destinations, but oddly such a thing doesn't seem to exist - here's an interactive map of the first trip, and here's one in Kerouac's own hand from the excellent Strange Maps. Slightly more tangentially, here's a series of remarkable graphical representations of the novel's text by artist Stefanie Posavec. [Postscript: here are a couple of maps - of varying degrees of clarity - showing all four trips.]

Finally, it just so happens that a film based on the book is due for release shortly. I can't make a recommendation either way regarding the film, but - for all its seeming like a bit of a period piece now with its talk of real gone cats digging each other and the like - it's a book you should probably have on your shelves. Just to be clear, that also means that you should read it, rather than just sit on it for 22 years.

On The Road also features in the Time magazine list of 20th century novels that's been mentioned here a few times before.