no introduction necessary

As you know, I'm all about the Twitters these days, so when I had a thought in the wake of listening to Badge while writing the Jack Bruce bit, I decided to crowdsource its ass and put it out there to see if the Twitterati could make anything of it:

today's Twitter survey: can you name some famous tunes whose opening riff is mostly if not exclusively played on the bass guitar?
— Dave Thomas (@electrichalibut) October 28, 2014

I can think of two by Queen: Another One Bites The Dust and Under Pressure. Only other one that springs to mind is Badge by Cream. Others?
— Dave Thomas (@electrichalibut) October 28, 2014

As with all questions of that sort, it's not as simple as it might sound - are there allowed to be any other instruments playing? Does the bass have to be the first thing you hear? How long does the bass-driven bit have to be? As always the lines that get drawn here are pretty arbitrary, but having posed the question I felt entitled to be the one to draw them.

Anyway, after a few valuable contributions from various people we ended up with what I think is a pretty good list covering a wide range of musical genres. There were a whole host of otherwise excellent and interesting suggestions that fell foul of one or other quibbly rule I pulled out of my arse, though.

These are the ones I thought of:

• Another One Bites The Dust by Queen
• Under Pressure by Queen & David Bowie
• Badge by Cream
• Lucretia My Reflection by The Sisters Of Mercy
• Time Is Running Out by Muse
• White Rabbit by Jefferson Airplane
• Summer Nights from the Grease soundtrack
• Come Together by The Beatles
• Feel Good Hit Of The Summer by Queens Of The Stone Age
• How Many More Times by Led Zeppelin

Here are a few suggestions from other people:

@electrichalibut Bass intros: I Wanna Be Adored, Stone Roses. Dazed & Confused, Zeppelin. Bullet In The Head, Rage Against The Machine.
— Joe Ivory (@joeivory) October 28, 2014

@electrichalibut how much bass do you need? Dazed & Confused starts with the bass, but not for long. Similarly Would? by Alice in Chains.
— Andrew Gosling (@andrew_gosling) October 28, 2014

@electrichalibut Keep the Faith - Bon Jovi.
— Angela Phillips (@AngelaMPhillips) October 28, 2014

@electrichalibut would mine pass the rules? Ace how long... animals we've gotta get out of... if not best you hush. Or indeed hush hush.
— The Black Rabbit (@DougMackDodds) October 29, 2014

From all the suggestions these are the ones I deem acceptable:

• Orion by Metallica
• Higher Ground by The Red Hot Chilli Peppers
• Would? by Alice In Chains
• Dazed And Confused by Led Zeppelin
• Bullet In The Head by Rage Against The Machine
• We Gotta Get Out Of This Place by The Animals
• How Long by Ace

Here are a few suggestions that didn't make the cut for various reasons:

• I Wanna Be Adored by The Stone Roses - 40-odd seconds of ambient noise before the bass kicks in
• Twisterella by Ride - intro too short to be meaningful
• Street Tuff by The Rebel MC & Double Trouble - brief spoken intro
• Groove Is In The Heart by Deee-Lite - slightly less brief spoken intro
• Steady As She Goes by The Raconteurs - a few bars of drumming before the bass bit
• One Of These Days by Pink Floyd - some swirly atmospheric noise first
• Money by Pink Floyd - all that business with the cash registers first
• Keep The Faith by Bon Jovi - few bars of guitar drone first
• Too Shy by Kajagoogoo - few bars of synth and drums first

And a couple that I'm still conflicted about:

• Seven Nation Army by The White Stripes - actually a regular guitar fed through an effects box
• Ace Of Spades by Motorhead - genuinely a bass but so trebly it doesn't really sound like one

I'll leave whether you include either or both of those as an exercise for the reader. Anyway, put all that lot together and you could make a pretty decent playlist, I reckon. Here's a (much shorter) list on a similar theme from a few years back.

celebrity lookeylikey of the day

Comedian and ubiquitous quizcom panellist Sean Lock, and film director Danny Boyle. I like Sean Lock, but I think he's one person who is actually at his best when he's got people to bounce off on panel shows, rather than in the more traditional stand-up setting. As for Danny Boyle, everyone likes Shallow Grave and Trainspotting, and everyone agrees A Life Less Ordinary was a bit shit. Where I perhaps diverge from most people is in that I was distinctly unimpressed by Slumdog Millionaire, and in that I really enjoyed Sunshine, indeed it was the link to the Sunshine clip that I included in the earlier post that set the train of thought off that eventually ended up here.

ace of bass

Just a quick and slightly belated (since he died on Saturday) RIP for Jack Bruce, singer, songwriter and musician of many hats over the years but most famously singer and bass player (and joint frontman with Eric Clapton) of legendary late-1960s power trio Cream.

As I've said before, the compilation album Best Of Cream (the one with all the vegetables on the front, as pictured above), issued in the immediate aftermath of the group's break-up in 1969, is one of the definitive musical soundtracks of my childhood, probably rivalled only by the 1972 Simon and Garfunkel's Greatest Hits compilation and Book of Dreams by the Steve Miller Band for sheer relentless number of plays over the years.

That particular compilation isn't available any more, but there have been a gazillion others over the years, the ones I own being the 1983 compilation Strange Brew, which duplicates the vegetable album's track listing except for the two extra tracks Politician and Anyone For Tennis (and also has the full version of White Room rather than the single edit), and the more extensive 2005 compilation I Feel Free - Ultimate Cream, which is probably the one to go for. That Wikipedia link suggests there was a second disc of live material with that one, but the version I've got doesn't have it. That's OK, as it happens, since for all their formidable reputation as blues-jazz-rock improvisers in a live setting I think it's the tight little psychedelic nuggets they produced as singles that hold up best: Badge, Tales Of Brave Ulysses and SWLABR are probably my favourites, Bruce's bass-playing on Badge being particularly memorable.

lupin the loop

Couple of brief follow-up notes regarding previous posts, one recent, one not so recent.

Firstly, it was unforgivably remiss of me to neglect to mention that as a result of the explodey demise of bulbs 5, 7, 10 and 12 I can now declare myself the winner of Kitchen Light Bulb Connect Four! Yeah, eat my randomly coincidental linearly-connected bulb filament self-immolation pattern, losers.

Secondly, you might remember my amusedly baffled WTFery at being presented with Wagamama's list of possible food allergies. To be honest, after getting a link to a Monty Python sketch and a couple of cheap fart gags out of it I thought no more about it, until today when I was presented with a list of allergy information from Chef & Brewer's website (a Chef & Brewer establishment being the likely venue for the office Christmas lunch some time in December). And what do I see listed? Lupins!

A bit of internet research reveals that the lupin bean is actually quite widely-used as a foodstuff, particularly in Latin America and the Mediterranean, and crops up (in dried and ground-up form) increasingly frequently as a gluten-free substitute for wheat flour in various culinary applications. Anyone planning, on learning this, to pop straight out to the garden and dig up some lupins for dinner should be warned that unless carefully prepared the lupin bean can contain toxic quantities of certain alkaloids, and you don't want to get lupin poisoning. And that's if you're not allergic to it.

That's all very well, you'll be saying, but I DEMAND to know which of Chef & Brewer's delicious generic pub grub options have potentially dangerous lupin products in them, lest I start tucking into a portion of cod and chips only to unexpectedly have my liver turn inside-out with alkaloid poisoning. Well, you'll be relieved to hear that the answer appears to be: none of them. Not a single one. Still, it's nice that they at least allowed for the possibility.

the light stuff

It's been a while, hasn't it? And great things have been afoot, so listen up.

Following the last round-up, I decided that it was time to re-populate the ceiling with some new bulbs, as we were down to five and it was getting a bit dark. This was on September 21st; I know this because I tweeted about it at the time:

As luck would have it, I had exactly seven incandescent bulbs left (all bog-standard 40W ones from B&Q), so I was able to exactly fill all the slots and briefly have the full complement of a dozen bulbs blazing down. Needless to say it didn't last.

By September 23rd we'd already lost one, number 4. By September 30th we'd lost number 5 as well, and by October 8th we'd also lost numbers 7, 10 and 12. We're HAEMORRHAGING FILAMENT HERE, PEOPLE.

There is a pattern to the way they've expired, though. The original batch expired in the following order: 2, 3, 10, 4, 5, 12, 7, 1, 11, 9. I replaced 2 and 3 with IKEA LED bulbs, thus effectively taking them out of the equation. The new ones have expired as follows: 4, 5, 7, 10, 12, i.e. the same 5 as last time (different order, admittedly). At this point the only bulbs to remain intact from the batch installed in April are numbers 6 and 8.

So at the weekend I'll install the 5 IKEA LED bulbs I've got in the cupboard (again, spookily, just the right number) and the whole cycle will begin again, although hopefully periodic exploding activity will be confined to the remaining bulbs which are not either long-life or LED, i.e. bulbs 1, 6, 9 and 11. Once these all buy the farm and are replaced with LEDs this particular topic will hopefully be replaced by a yearly bulletin saying NOTHING TO REPORT. We'll see.

that's the storify of my life

Here's the brief post-Swanage round-up. A bit of a mixed bag this year in terms of weather, but to be fair both the golf games were conducted in the dry (in the sunshine, even, on Saturday) and it was really only on Sunday that we got properly rained on.

If I were to fill in the last line in the big table I included in the previous post, it would look something like this:

Year	Dates	Transport and Pubs	General Notes
2014	10-13 Oct	Andy's Landy The Crow's Nest The Bull and Boat The Square and Compass The King's Head	In-car Stella pouches. High five! Harry wins the golf?! Corben! Corben? Wet and windy walk to Worth. Y-shaped dog turds. Pumpkins. Chickens. The tiny island of Estonia. The world's worst game of darts. Continue along Cockrod for 1.3 miles.

Photos can be found here. As promised we did also live-tweet a bit of pub-crawl action on the Saturday, and various other inconsequential stuff at other times. Twitter's hashtag-viewing facility obviously has some weird algorithm in it that excludes tweets (even from the "All" view) based on some impenetrable set of criteria, so only a small handful of the full set of tweets are now available via the standard hashtag link.

This simply will not do, so what I've done instead is use Storify to create a (hopefully) permanent record of our inane witterings and drunken blurry gurnings; have a look at this. It's ordered with the most recent tweets first, so drop down to the bottom and work up if you want them in chronological order. [STOP PRESS: I found the button that orders them the other way, so you shouldn't need to do this now.] It is also alleged that one can embed the Storify timeline in a web page, so let's have a go:

the last book I read

Fremder by Russell Hoban.

Fremder Gorn is having a bit of a peculiar day. When we meet him, he's floating though space without spacesuit or helmet, the freighter Clever Daughter that he was on a few seconds before having spontaneously dematerialised from around him. By chance he gets rescued by another passing ship, and needless to say the authorities are keen to know what happened, and how he escaped.

Fremder is a flickerhead, someone fitted with a cranial implant that enables him to be the conduit for a sort of hyperspace drive that allows ships to traverse huge interstellar distances in next to no time. While accidents do occasionally happen they don't usually leave any survivors, so Fremder is a source of considerable interest, not least to giant supercomputer Pythia, who conducts an interrogation to find out what Fremder has been up to, particularly the stuff he doesn't even know about himself.

Fremder is also of interest because of his ancestry: son of Helen Gorn, the inventor of the flicker drive, along with her brother Isodor. Both of them died by their own hands in mysterious circumstances, in Helen's case a couple of months before Fremder was born (some sort of incubator being presumably involved for the remaining time).

It turns out that not only is the thing implanted in Fremder's head not quite the bog-standard flicker implant (it's got some special properties), but also that Pythia isn't the giant supercomputer he thought she was - the truth is somewhat more weird, and explains why at the end of the book Fremder finds himself on board Clever Daughter II heading for the same co-ordinates as before. Can he escape again?

This is the fourth Hoban in this list, which equals the record jointly held by Iain Banks (with and without the M), Lawrence Durrell and William Boyd. It's quite "hard" sci-fi in places, in contrast to Riddley Walker which was post-apocalyptic, and Kleinzeit and Come Dance With Me which are set in recognisable versions of contemporary London, but it's still as quirky and charming as any of the others. It's somewhat more oblique in its approach to its subject matter, and a lot of the sciencey stuff is hand-waved away, but it still packs a lot of density into 184 pages. It's probably not as good as Riddley Walker, but that's a pretty high bar.

For all the trademark Hoban idiosyncrasies there are some common themes here: most science fiction works that require people to travel between star systems (rather than just orbiting their own planet) are obliged to cook up some form of hyperspace drive just to compensate for everything being interstellar distances apart and the trips taking many thousands of years otherwise. So you've got the warp drive in Star Trek, the Millennium Falcon making the jump to light speed, the ill-fated gravity drive from Event Horizon, and the flicker drive here. Similarly, there is a long history of fictional teleportation systems, and what happens when they go wrong, from Stephen King's short story The Jaunt to The Fly.

making plans for nigel

I have a confession to make, and it's a slightly shameful one. Here it is: there is one thing about Nigel Farage that I find admirable. Phew: there, I've said it. It's good to get these things off your chest.

I'll tell you what it is, if you like. There is a long and generally excruciatingly embarrassing history of politicians doing photo-opportunities in pubs, and on these occasions, pretty much without exception, they try to bolster their down-to-earth, man-of-the-people credentials by supping on a pint. It's almost without exception a pint of ale, as befits someone committed to great British traditions, and pretty much without exception you can almost hear the slight wincing gagging noises being made as Joe Politician raises the glass to his lips and has a tentative sip. That's George Osborne there on the right in a particularly fine example.

I honestly don't know why people do this, as the public know that the political classes in general are from a social stratum that would much prefer a nice gin and tonic or a glass of a nicely chambreed Chateau Lafite Rothschild to something as proletarian as a pint. But, like the furious tonguing of the wife after the conference speech, it's a tradition that no-one wants to be the first to try and shake off.

So it's quite refreshing to see that when Nigel does a photo-op holding a pint and grinning (and most of Nigel's photo-ops involve him holding a pint and grinning) it's because he really fancies a pint. And when he's drunk it, he might very possibly go and get another one. I should make honourable mention of Barack Obama here, too, who when presented with a pint of Guinness on a trip to Ireland, downed it with obvious relish.

Note that none of this absolves Nigel Farage of being a colossal gurning nitwit and an unpleasant right-wing opportunist, just to be clear. Nor should this post be taken as an endorsement of drinking during working hours, however much Farage and Boris Johnson (and William Hague back in the day) might think it's a terrific idea.

pale, male and stale

It was, of course, inevitable that in the wake of the mainstream media interest in the atheist community's sexism problems there would be a backlash from that most oppressed and put-upon group, Angry Blokes.

Basically this gist of this bone-headed article is: hey, dude, look up "atheist" in a dictionary! It just says "lack of belief in gods", right? Nothing about racism or feminism or any of that shit, right? CHECKMATE, etc., etc. Or, to rephrase the complaint a bit: "nobody told me that when I started being an atheist I had to stop being an arsehole".

Well, firstly, nobody is telling you that you have to stop being an arsehole, just that it would be nice if you did, and, furthermore, that we reserve the right to tell you when you are being one.

The depressing thing is, this is actually quite simple. Putting the dictionary aside, anyone who bothers to be an "out" atheist and tell people about it, as opposed to an "out" a-unicornist, say, is effectively already making a political statement, one which says: I'm bothering to mention this because (by contrast to the unicorn stuff) there are real-world consequences of people believing this stuff, most generally hostility to reasoned enquiry and dissent, the tendency to kill each other for believing in slightly differing flavours of nonsense, and the brutal oppression of women. Furthermore, you're making the (hopefully fairly obvious) statement: I think these things are bad, and that the world would be a better place if they stopped, as far as is possible.

To come at it from another directiom, I maintain that atheism does imply and entail a concern for feminist issues, because in large part the social structures which maintain patriarchy have been established and enforced by religions. So if you hold to the idea that, say, brutal Islamic oppression of women is bad (which it undoubtedly is) then you can't really go on to say that you're fine with, say, Sam Harris' lazy trotting out of sexist tropes. Or, at least, not unless you're a) engaging in some extreme denial about the existence of institutionalised sexism in western societies or b) pulling a Dear Muslima and suggesting that because one is "worse" than the other (by some imaginary metric) that we can safely not care about the one involving the rich white dudes whose books we like.

Among the things that involves ignoring, though, are things like the terrorist threat made against Utah State University TODAY for having the temerity to invite computer games writer and activist Anita Sarkeesian to speak. This isn't the first death threat that's been made against Sarkeesian, and the authorities are taking it extremely seriously, not least because the guy mentioned admiringly in the e-mail, Marc Lépine, was very real and killed 14 people (injuring 14 more) at the École Polytechnique in Montreal in 1989, supposedly because of a similarly virulent anti-feminist agenda. And let's not forget that this is all happening because Sarkeesian dared to put out some videos making the (fairly self-evident and uncontroversial, you'd think) case that the video game industry has a problem with how its products portray women.

The barely believable follow-up to that is that the talk has been cancelled, not by USU but by Sarkeesian herself, over concerns for her own safety once it became apparent that Utah's barking gun laws would permit attendees to carry concealed weapons into the venue even after a threat such as this one had been issued.

Back to the original article - one of the more chucklesome elements is the juxtaposition of the pooh-poohing of "liberal issues" and "social justice" and the photo-montage the author (or an editor) saw fit to illustrate the piece with. Take a look:

It may be instructive to list the people illustrated here:

• Penn Jillette, 59, white, magician, comedian, tedious hectoring loudmouth, likes calling women cunts;
• Neil DeGrasse Tyson, 56, person of colour, astrophysicist, occasional inaccurate quote-rememberer, generally pretty good on recognising social justice issues, BUT a man who, crucially, does not self-identify as an atheist, for what I think are weaselly bullshit reasons, but nonetheless that's not a label that he accepts;
• Bill Maher, 58, white, comedian, talk show host, pseudoscience advocate, likes calling women cunts;
• Lawrence Krauss, 60, white, physicist, unfortunate choice of friends, rumours of inappropriate conference behaviour;
• Christopher Hitchens, 62, deceased, white, journalist, casual dismisser of women;
• Sam Harris, 47, white, writer, neuroscientist, careless perpetuator of sexist tropes and taker of great umbrage when called out on it;
• Daniel Dennett, 72, white, philosopher, cognitive scientist, no known form on the subject that I know of;
• Richard Dawkins, 73, white, evolutionary biologist, tweeter without due care and attention;
• Ricky Gervais, 53, comedian, purveyor of thoughtless ableism, likes calling people cunts;
• Ayaan Hirsi Ali, 44, person of colour, writer, activist, regrettable neo-conservative wingnut.

Just to summarise, of these ten people, only 9 of whom actually self-identify as atheists in the first place, eight are white, nine are male, and all but two (of the nine who are still alive) are over 50, with the youngest being 44. If the list had been specifically chosen to satirise and undermine the article it was attached to, and perfectly illustrate the point being made by the people it was dismissing, then I'd say they'd done a pretty good job.

sirhowy you? fine, thanks

Swanage 2014 photos to follow in due course, but in the meantime here's a small gallery of pictures I took when we went on a brief family walk near Newport a week or so ago. We went to the Sirhowy Valley Country Park, the car park for which is a few miles west of Newport over near Wattsville. The main path follows the route of the old Sirhowy Railway and is consequently nice and level, though you can branch off either south up onto the ridge that eventually takes you to Mynydd Machen (thus duplicating the walk I did to bag it back in 2009) or north down towards the Sirhowy River, which is what we did here, as it seemed likely that nearer the river would be a good place to hunt for muddy puddles to jump in.

As always there's a high proportion of shots just of Nia being adorable; if you can't be bothered to scroll through these one by one I've put together a little animated GIF of her throwing some dance moves which you can view here. I should also plug the people at gifmaker.me for their free GIF-generating facility, and also remind you of this earlier example featuring me, Doug and Anna re-enacting the old Morecambe and Wise going-off-stage routine on Penarth pier in 2007.

tweet fanny adams

Just a very quick one to say: if you happen to want to keep up with the 2014 Swanage activities in real time then your best bet is to do one of the following:

• keep an eye on the live webcam at the Bull and Boat - if we adhere roughly to last year's schedule we'll be there about 5pm on the Saturday;
• watch out for tweets with the hastag #SwanageXIII - I can't promise how much live-tweeting action there'll be, as we may be too busy necking ale and talking bollocks, but we may manage a few, no doubt of increasing profanity and incoherence as the evening wears on.

in dorset? yes, I certainly do

Next weekend sees us head off in Andy's Land Rover for the annual Swanage trip, a fixture in my social calendar for, ooh, ten years now. Or is it eleven? Or twelve? One of the problems with remembering the history of this sort of thing is that recollections tend to be hazy, for obvious reasons.

For instance: it was the generally received wisdom that the first year we did a "proper" Swanage trip was 2003, when we actually did two, in May and November, to coincide with the release of the second and third Matrix movies. However, evidence (i.e. some photos) recently unearthed from the depths of Andy's laptop reveals that in fact we (Andy, me, Robin and Harry) did a trip in October 2002. This is simultaneously fascinating, because we all look about twelve in the photos, and troubling, because it means that our proclaiming of the 2012 trip as Swanage X was incorrect, as it was actually Swanage XI. I suppose we can just do a bit of Stalinist revision of history and say that the 2012 trip marked the tenth anniversary of the first trip, and that therefore it was, in a very real sense, Swanage X. Whatever, I'm not going and changing all the photo captions now.

So it seemed like a good idea to capture some historical info before our descent into senility and incontinence is complete, probably any day now. The first thing I've done is to upload all the historical photos I've got, all the way back to 2002. Click on the year in the table below to go to the relevant photo gallery.

The Saturday pub crawl has evolved slightly over the years, so this list from 2007 is now slightly out of date. The canonical town centre pub list now reads as follows:

• East (formerly The Peverill)
• Bar Seven
• The White Horse
• The Purbeck (until 2009, now closed, but still the venue for a salutatory slug from the hip-flask)
• The Ship
• The White Swan
• The Anchor
• The Red Lion
• The Black Swan

Rather than list all those every time I've just noted where the crawl differed from that list in a way that any of us can remember, or if we visited any other notable pubs on our Sunday walk. The columns are hopefully self-explanatory; some of the cryptic notes in the "General Notes" column can be illuminated by clicking on the links (usually to a relevant photo), some are probably best left slightly mysterious. I've included the 2005 trip to Llangennith as a sort of honorary Swanage as it filled the same slot in the calendar and followed pretty much the same format.

As for attendees, Andy, Robin and I have a perfect 100% attendance record so far, Phil made his solitary appearance in May 2003, Richard joined us for the Llangennith trip in 2005 and has attended every one since, and Harry started in a blaze of glory attending the first three trips and then took a breather for just the nine years before rejoining us in 2012 and 2013 (and 2014, all being well).

Year	Dates	Transport and Pubs	General Notes
2002	18-21 Oct	Andy's Saab	Swanage 0! Andy's Mum's static caravan. Cheese racing. Port.
2003	23-26 May	Andy's Saab The Vista Bar	Phil! Matrix Reloaded. Rhythm Sticks. Table tennis in the Vista Bar. Phil’s Famous Backwards Golf Shot. Snow Flaps. Police layby interview with Carling tinnies. Phil being banned from Swanage forever.
2003	7-10 Nov	Andy's Saab The Vista Bar	Last trip to the caravan. Grappa and blue Aftershock. Matrix Revolutions. Harry asleep in the Red Lion. Table tennis and bowling in the Vista Bar aborted due to child invasion. Harry's wrist exerciser. Harry's "special interest" videos (aka wrist exercisers).
2004	3-6 Sep	Andy's Saab	Camping! Sunny weather. Train trip to Corfe. Russian porn model. Banged shins. Vomiting. Wurzels.
2005	14-17 Oct	Andy’s Scooby The Worm's Head The King's Head	Llangennith! i.e. not actually Swanage at all. Richard's first trip. Overloaded Scooby. Cats (small, far away). Quaver Dog. Barmaids. Angry snake. Herbal interruptions. Fireworks. Splintered/splinted tent poles.
2006	22-25 Sep	Andy’s Scooby The Mowlem	Seafront wave chicken. Lighthouse walk. Farty Globe. Ryder Cup climax.
2007	5-8 Oct	Andy’s Scooby Square and Compass The King's Arms Royal Oak	Blues Festival! Power cut. Caving. Fishing at Winspit. Fish supper. The Matraverses. The legendary 23lb carp. Stan being gutted. Weird starey kid in The Royal Oak. Pumpkins. Loganberry beer.
2008	19-22 Sep	Dave’s Mum’s Scooby Square and Compass Scott Arms	Richard's hole-in-one. More fish. No buses to Scott Arms. Taxi to Scott Arms. Chapman's Pool. Ryder Cup again.
2009	11-14 Sep	Andy’s Landy The Ship The (Studland) Bankes Arms The Village Inn The Crow's Nest	First trip in the Land Rover. Camo hats. Folk festival! Morris dancers. Bender in a Bun. Kyle. Kyle's Mom. Sandbanks. Bus on a boat. Nudists! Last of the (late) summer Purbecks. Will Killeen and his mum. Crazy Clogging Care in the Community Crystal Carl. Or was it Chris?
2010	15-18 Oct	Andy’s Landy The Greyhound The (Corfe) Bankes Arms	Green Bastards. Vote For Yourself! Train to Corfe. Demise of the Purbeck. Hypnocat. Appletise? Appletiser? Burning the fencepost.
2011	16-19 Sep	Andy’s Landy Various Wareham pubs The Square and Compass	Decaf coffee!? Orange women. Bus to Wareham. Pigs! Supermodels in the Old Granary. Pickle the dog. Barbecuing Andy's pants. Beaver Maintenance.
2012	29 Sep - 1 Oct	Andy’s Landy The Greyhound The (Corfe) Bankes Arms	Return of the Harry! Swanage X (or so we thought at the time). Ridge walk to Corfe. Exploding Party Grill. Ryder Cup smartphone updates.
2013	11-14 Oct	Andy’s Landy The Crow's Nest The Bull and Boat	Do Not Touch This Window. The Bull and Boat webcam. Very wet walk via Peverill Point.
2014	10-13 Oct	Andy’s Landy	Who knows?

bar stewards

You might remember my adventures in the loft a while back, and the ancient yellowed newspaper fragments I retrieved, which included (among other things) a list of Newport pubs, most now sadly defunct or, at best, turned into trendy wine bars, not that Newport is generally a trendy wine bar sort of city.

Well, here's another much larger list of South Wales pubs which are now closed - I think the idea is that the closures are all relatively recent, i.e. within the lifetime of the average reader. Anyway, of the 84 on the list I count ten in Newport, as it happens several of which are within a stone's throw of our current or previous homes.

• The King's Arms in Caerleon is a bit more than a stone's throw away, but I start with this one as it's the only one of the ten I've actually set foot in, not while it was the King's Arms but following its transformation into Spice Corner, a quite decent Indian restaurant. If you look closely at the sign you'll see they do retain the subtitle "at the King's Arms" just in case of any confusion. 
• The Black Horse on Somerton Road is still standing according to Google Maps, though I can't say I'd ever noticed it was there, even though I drive past it several times a week. Local residents' protests apparently saw off Tesco who wanted to turn it into a store, but that didn't save the pub which is due to be demolished any day now. 
• The King was a very impressive building just a bit further down Somerton Road - I say "was" because some time in the last few months it transformed itself into a big pile of rubble. As recently as May 2013 it had changed hands with much talk of redeveloping it, but no, they just knocked it down.
• The old Corporation Hotel on the corner of Cromwell Road and Corporation Road is being converted into flats, following an only very slightly suspicious fire just after the new owners took it over. 
• The Oddfellows & Foresters in Baneswell was definitely still a going concern when we lived just round the corner in York Place, though I don't think we ever went in; this list reckons it closed around 2011 (we moved the year before).

This list from 2009, containing 40-odd closed Newport pubs, paints a fairly grim picture. It should be said that some places do buck the trend from time to time, though - that list contains The Gladiator in Malpas, just the other side of the M4, for instance, and it's still derelict in StreetView as of today (though the magic time-travel facility suggests it was open in 2008), but in fact it seems to have now re-opened as the Usk Vale, a slightly more upmarket operation by the sound of it. Good luck to them, I say.

If you do find yourself stuck in the centre of Newport and you need a pint, then the best thing I can suggest is that you either get yourself over to Ye Olde Murenger House or take a short walk to Stow Hill and either the Pen & Wig or the Red Lion, any of which should provide you with a) a reasonably decent pint and b) a better than 50/50 chance of making it out alive. In central Newport that's about the best you're going to get.

headline of the day

So here's another crash blossom for you, from the BBC website today:

Naturally you'll have a mental image, as I did, of a foxy lady reclining on a sun lounger somewhere having a wistful reverie involving her falsely imprisoned husband being delivered from his ordeal, perhaps like a slightly sexy version of the bit at the end of The Railway Children.

That isn't actually what this is about, though. It's actually about some Scottish bloke who thought his wife was having an affair, and therefore did the obvious thing, which was to print up a load of posters of her in a state of undress (which he just happened to have) and stick them up all over town. The "free" bit reflects the judge's decision not to imprison him following a period of good behaviour. It's not clear from the story whether his wife actually was having an affair, or whether they're still married (the incident was a year or so ago), though I would expect the answer to the second question to be "no".

o captain my captain

Just a quick round-up in the aftermath of Europe's victory in the Ryder Cup. Firstly an updated version of my points table from last time round:

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
2014	7	1	3	5	10	6	6½	5½	16½	11½
Totals	76	68	79	65	152	133	103	113	258	246

What this doesn't show you (since it aggregates the scores from Friday and Saturday) is that for only the third time in the history of the modern Ryder Cup (i.e. USA against Europe, the period covered by the table) a team won all three individual days of competition. Europe won Friday 5-3, Saturday 5-3 and then Sunday 6½-5½. The only other times this has happened were the two thumping European victories in 2004 and 2006. The winning teams also led after all three days in 1979, 1987, 1997, 2008 and 2010, but in these years they all lost a day's competition along the way: Saturday in 1979 and 2008 and Sunday in 1987, 1997 and 2010.

Clearly there's no competition for Welshman of the Day after Jamie Donaldson's shot to the 15th on Sunday. Donaldson was rock-solid on his Ryder Cup debut, and in fact in general the rookies on both sides all did very well, Donaldson and Dubuisson for Europe, and Patrick Reed, Jordan Spieth and Jimmy Walker for the USA. I felt a bit sorry for Stephen Gallacher, who got saddled with an out-of-sorts Ian Poulter against a fired-up Spieth and Reed on Friday and then drawn against Phil Mickelson on Sunday, tough enough even had Mickelson not been pissed off at being benched for Saturday's foursomes and out to prove a point.

So once again we can indulge in some amusing speculation as to why the Americans seem to be unable to get to grips with the Ryder Cup of late. The fractious post-match press conference suggests choice of captain may be an issue. Legendary golfer though he is, Tom Watson did have the air of a bemused great-uncle watching the kids running about at times, and at 65 he was 18 years older than Europe's captain Paul McGinley. The 25 years since Watson's last appearance as a player in 1989 is the second-largest margin for a captain in the modern Ryder Cup era, behind only John Jacobs who captained the losing European team in 1981 having made his sole playing appearance in 1955. By contrast, McGinley appeared as a player as recently as 2006.

So here's an esoteric piece of trivia for you - only once in the last nine Ryder Cups (and only 5 times in the modern era) has the contest been won by the team with the captain with the longer gap since his last playing appearance: Europe in 2006 captained by Ian Woosnam (last playing appearance 1997) beating the USA captained by Tom Lehman (last playing appearance 1999). Five times (Langer and Sutton in 2004, Ballesteros in 1997, Wadkins in 1995, Nicklaus in 1983) a captain was appointed who'd played in the previous Ryder Cup, and, uniquely, Raymond Floyd enjoyed an Indian summer to his career that enabled him to play in two further Ryder Cups as a player after his appearance as captain in 1989.

war, HUH, good god, y'all, what is it good for

I was anticipating a bit of cathartic shouting at the radio this morning once it was announced that one of the guests on Start The Week would be Karen Armstrong, former nun and author of many books on many religious topics. Neither of those is a source of annoyance per se (though neither are life choices that I would have made), rather, the annoyance comes when trying to tie down what Armstrong's own religious beliefs actually are, a process very much like trying to grasp smoke. Here are a couple of example quotes:

'God' is merely a symbol that points beyond itself to an indescribable transcendence.

I say that religion isn't about believing things. It's about what you do. It's ethical alchemy. It's about behaving in a way that changes you, that gives you intimations of holiness and sacredness.

As an alternative approach, try reading the first few pages of The Case For God via the Amazon preview facility; if you can get to the end of page three without bellowing SAY SOMETHING MEANING ANYTHING and plunging pencils into your eyes then your mellowness exceeds my own.

So I was expecting some weapons-grade bullshit of that nature - as it happens, though, Armstrong was on the programme to plug her latest book which, as far as I can tell, seeks to absolve religion from the claim that it's the root cause of most of the world's wars. Just to be clear, there was still a bit of shouting, since while I agree that it's always a bit more complicated than that, I don't think that entirely lets religion off the hook.

You can certainly argue that basic "human nature", inasmuch as there is such a thing, plays a part. So certainly there are aspects of social behaviour that have developed to increase in-group cohesiveness and loyalty (for instance, a repository of shared ritual and myth such as that provided by religion) that have the side effect of making people view "outsiders" as strange and scary, if not actively malevolent. So you can try and get religion off the hook by saying that it's just an aspect of something more general, something you might call "tribalism" or something like that.

The problem with that, even if you buy it, is that religion does a whole bunch of other stuff as well, and one of those things is to make a whole bunch of (patently false) claims about the gloriousness of the life to come after this one. As soon as you view death as not an ending but merely the gateway from this vale of tears to a glorious eternal bliss with all the ambrosia and virgins you can eat, it makes talking yourself into easing the passage of others (and perhaps yourself) through that gateway all the easier.

I didn't hear Tom Sutcliffe making that particular point, but he did do an excellent job of holding Armstrong's feet to the fire over one of her central claims, which is that there is a significant group of people who hold to the thesis that Armstrong is arguing against in the book, i.e. that religion is the sole (or at least principal) cause of all the world's wars. When challenged to name some of these fundamentalist atheist straw men, the best Armstrong could manage was "a taxi driver I once met", which is pretty piss-poor.

Needless to say the question "yes, but is any of it true?" (i.e. in terms of the central claims made by religions) didn't come up during the section of the programme I listened to, and I'd be pretty confident that it didn't come up at all. As far as I can gather Armstrong takes the Terry Eagleton view on such questions, i.e. that they are a hopelessly gauche attempt to apply science-y concepts like "evidence" to things which transcend the use of such blunt instruments. Or, to put it another way, a great lumpy splattery fusillade of bullshit.

Lastly, a note on pronunciation: throughout, Tom Sutcliffe pronounced "Karen" as if it were the name of the ferryman of the dead from Greek mythology, sort of like the word "caring" but without the last letter. Most of the other guests just pronounced "Karen" like normal people do, so now I'm unsure whether Karen Armstrong pronounces her given name in a strange way, which Tom Sutcliffe was just politely adhering to, or if he just generally pronounces "Karen" that way. Bit strange, either way.

the last book I read

Ripley's Game by Patricia Highsmith.

So, what's Tom Ripley been up to? When we left him at the end of Ripley Under Ground he'd just about managed to extricate himself from suspicion in the murder of a couple of people and involvement in a convoluted art fakery scam, so he's felt it best to keep a low profile for a bit at his country retreat near Fontainebleau. His crime contact Reeves Minot still occasionally pesters him for occasional favours, but Tom doesn't get involved with the messy stuff.

That's not to say that he might not offer a bit of advice and guidance from time to time, though, and when Reeves contacts him with the suggestion that there's these couple of Mafia stooges who it would be terrifically useful to have rubbed out, Tom has a bit of a flash of inspiration: there's this guy, Jonathan Trevanny, who he met at a house party a while back, who's got some sort of terminal blood disease, but who seems to be generally walking and talking and physically OK. Why not make him an offer? He's going to be less afraid of death than most, and might appreciate the possibility of a nice little nest-egg to bequeath to his wife and young son when he eventually carks it.

So Reeves contacts Jonathan, and dangles the carrot of some pioneering medical research being done in Germany, which Reeves might be able to bump Jonathan up the queue for. Absolutely no obligation, but at the same time Reeves might have a couple of little odd jobs that Jonathan could carry out while he was there, for a substantial reward of course.

Jonathan is persuaded to carry out the first murder on the subway in Hamburg - your classic shoot someone at close range in a crowd, drop the gun, slip away in the confusion kind of job - and is then persuaded to have a go at the second, the murder of a higher-ranking mafioso on a train. This one is a bit trickier, however, as it requires the use of a garrotte, gunshots being too conspicuous. At this point Ripley has a (rare) attack of conscience, and unexpectedly turns up on the train to help Jonathan dispatch the mafia guy and his minder.

So far so good, except that it turns out that not only did the minder not die (despite having his arm severed when the train ran over it) but he reckons he got a good look at the two guys who murdered his boss and then pushed him out. So now Tom and Jonathan are potentially on a Mafia hit-list, not really a place you want to be. Tom persuades Jonathan to hole up with him at his country pile for a bit for their collective safety, and sure enough a carful of goons shows up. Fortunately for Jonathan Tom is by now a bit of a dab hand at the old murdering game and he dispatches most of them, persuading the survivor to phone his boss and tell him that they'd got the wrong man in exchange for his freedom. Or, rather, in exchange for a promise of his freedom from Tom, a promise that turns out to be worthless, since as soon as he hangs up the phone Tom bashes his brains in with a table leg.

So now (in addition to a bit of floor-mopping) there's some corpse disposal to be done. So Tom and Jonathan take the gangster's car (and one of Tom's) plus bodies to a secluded spot a couple of hours' drive away and torch the lot, but not before Jonathan's wife Simone has turned up at the house, seen everything and had to be drugged and sent home in a taxi. Awkward.

So now they're in the clear again, right? Trouble is, the Mafia have got to Reeves Minot as well, and after a few judiciously applied cigarette ends he's coughed up Jonathan's address. So there's another showdown at Jonathan's house in Fontainebleau during the course of which Tom bashes a couple more Mafia heads in, this time with a hammer, and Jonathan catches a bullet in the chest while trying to protect Tom. Tom's complex moral code obliges him to drive Jonathan to the hospital, but, once it's clear that he's died, also allows him to scarper immediately afterwards.

So now Tom's freedom is pretty much in Simone's hands - she can either shop him to the French police, and forfeit Jonathan's generous pay-off, or keep it and ensure Tom gets away. When Tom unexpectedly meets her on the street in Fontainebleau and she spits in his face, he recognises the emotion for what it is: self-disgust. She's kept the money.

This is the third of the five Ripley novels, published in 1974. Ripley is actually a bit more active in the killing department in this one, being solely or jointly implicated in the knocking off of five people (all Mafia types), compared with two in the first book and one in the second. I have to say I didn't find Jonathan Trevanny's transition from terminally ill and impoverished expatriate picture-framer to murderer (and then tragic self-sacrificing hero) to be at all plausible, but as always Ripley is so fascinating as a central character that that almost doesn't matter. A completely implacable killing machine would be relatively uninteresting, but Ripley is devoted (in his own way) to his wife, capable of normal human responses to beautiful music and the like, intensely attached to his home, and capable of occasional moments of generous behaviour that even he himself does not quite understand.

The Talented Mr. Ripley is probably still the one you want, but the two sequels certainly don't sully its reputation. Like both its predecessors Ripley's Game was filmed, once in 1977 as Der Amerikanische Freund (The American Friend) and again as Ripley's Game in 2003. The latter features John Malkovich as Ripley, who while as compelling as always is probably a little bit too feline and evil to be strictly true to Ripley as written (not to mention being too old). Matt Damon was criticised for being too "bland" in The Talented Mr. Ripley, but actually that's the whole point; Ripley is just this unremarkable guy who happens to also be an amoral killer. Well, you know, nobody's perfect.

bravo victor golf uniform

Everyone else is doing their My Favourite Ryder Cup Moments bit at the moment, so I'm going to get in on the act as well. I actually came to the Ryder Cup a bit late; while my earliest live TV golf-watching recollection is of the end of the Duel In The Sun at Turnberry in 1977 (when I was seven), I don't specifically recall watching any live Ryder Cup coverage until 1993, when the USA won 15-13 at the Belfry (their last victory on European soil, as it happens) to retain the cup they'd won back in The War On The Shore at Kiawah Island two years before. My Ryder Cup history since then goes something like this:

• In 1995 I happened to drop into The Ship on Lower Park Row in Bristol on a Sunday evening for a pint on the way back from somewhere (probably on the way up to my flat from the railway station), only to discover that they had the golf coverage on and they were about halfway through the singles. Several hours later I staggered out and home having witnessed Europe come back to win from being behind after the doubles for the first (and, until 2012, only) time in Ryder Cup history. Nick Faldo's nerveless up-and-down from 93 yards to beat Curtis Strange was the key moment (combined with a calamitous sequence of missed putts from Strange), and Philip Walton's nervy stumble over the line a while later clinched it. This is probably my favourite Ryder Cup experience, just for the general happy unexpectedness of it all - firstly getting to see it at all, and then the result.
• I watched the climaxes to the Ryder Cups of 1997, 1999 and 2002 at home, but I couldn't say for certain that I watched any of them strictly live; it might have been the BBC's highlights package a bit later.
• I can certainly say that I watched the highlights package for the 2004 Ryder Cup, having done a bit of Likely Lads-style keeping my head down to avoid finding out the result. Plenty of schadenfreude as it became clear it was going to be a record-breaking rout, but it's never quite the same as a nail-biting finish.
• 2006 saw the first of two occasions where the Ryder Cup weekend coincided with the Swanage weekend; in this case (largely by luck) we'd just got to the pub after the traditional Sunday walk when the key singles matches started finishing, so we were comfortably settled in with a pint when Henrik Stenson holed the match-winning putt. Again, as great as that was it was another rout for Europe (18.5-9.5, the same score as in 2004), so the nail-biting element was lost.
• I honestly can't remember watching in 2008, though since Europe got their arse plated up and handed to them I could just have blotted the experience out. I expect it's more than likely I saw at least some of it.
• In 2010 the Ryder Cup took place at Celtic Manor, a mere mile-and-a-half from our house. Anticipating traffic gridlock and general chaos we decided to go on holiday to Turkey for the week, returning on the Monday, the day after it finished. Inevitably this plan was scuppered by the Welsh weather as the match had to be concluded on the Monday. Swings and roundabouts, though, as we had some hours to kill between checking out of the hotel and getting the coach to the airport and took ourselves plus bags off to the local sports bar, which just happened to be showing the golf. Not only that, but the nail-biting finish to Graeme McDowell's match with Hunter Mahan that delivered the cup back to Europe took place with a few minutes to spare before we had to shoot off and catch the coach. 
• In 2012 the match once again coincided with the Swanage weekend; this time we were back at the campsite having a barbecue when the climactic Sunday action happened, so we had to keep up with events via Andy's smartphone and a rather intermittent mobile signal. The interminable waits for the BBC Sports page to refresh added an element of suspense of their own.

So what to expect from 2014? Well, I'll be at work on the Friday and at a wedding on the Saturday, but you can rest assured I've cleared out my V+ box in anticipation of recording much of the coverage for later watching. I fully intend to dedicate a big chunk of Sunday to watching the singles, though.

And who'll win? Well, home advantage counts for a lot - only six of the seventeen matches since 1979 have resulted in "away wins", four for Europe and two for USA: USA in 1981, Europe in 1987, USA in 1993 and Europe in 1995, 2004 and 2012. Both teams look very strong, though I suppose there is a question mark over the European wildcards - Westwood and Poulter have both been picked on past Ryder Cup form rather than on having done anything much this year. As for the rookies, Jamie Donaldson is a very solid player these days, Stephen Gallacher is a reserved type who needs to show that he's not intimidated by the raucous atmosphere, and Victor Dubuisson is a mystery wrapped in an enigma wrapped in a garlic baguette.

There is the Tiger Woods factor, though - the last time he failed to make the team was in 2008 when he was recovering from knee surgery, whereupon a young USA team featuring six rookies won handsomely. The idea that the Ryder Cup format suits neither him nor his team-mates (when he's on the team) is probably an over-simplification, but there seems to be something in it.

A neutral would probably say that another nail-biting finish resulting in a narrow victory for the USA would be the best thing for the long-term health of the competition. To that I'd say: you're probably right, but can we leave that till next time, please?

hilary killery hilarity

Some extremely amusing furore this week over the publication of some new material by double Booker winner Hilary Mantel, in particular the title story of her new collection of short fiction The Assassination Of Margaret Thatcher.

The first thing to say (as this Guardian article does) is that there's a supreme irony in Thatcher's old PR guru Tim Bell expressing some purse-lipped disdain about "taste" or "decency" or "morality", this being the man who did PR work for General Pinochet, for goodness' sake.

Secondly, it does strike me that those kicking up a fuss about this must just be the sort of people who never read any fiction, since fiction does this sort of thing all the time. Heaven forbid that any of them should peruse even the title page of my copy of JG Ballard's seminal (in every sense) 1970 work The Atrocity Exhibition, lest they have some sort of seizure:

I draw your attention to items 10, 14, 15 and the two items in the Appendix in particular. It was Why I Want To Fuck Ronald Reagan that got the book's first American print run pulped prior to distribution. I know I've said it before, but if you have the remotest interest in boundary-stretching 20th-century fiction you really need to read some Ballard, probably The Atrocity Exhibition and Crash plus as many of the short stories as you can get your hands on.

Let's hope nobody tells Tim Bell about what happens at the end of Inglourious Basterds.

he's not actually a REAL professor, you know

You know that thing where you think you've thought of a great thing, and you discover just after putting it on Twitter that you're, like, the millionth person to think of it and imagine they were the first. So before you tweet "hey, war doesn't determine who's RIGHT, just who's LEFT, amirite?! #iraq" maybe just check how original that thought is, to avoid embarrassment.

So I wonder what went through lanky rap guy Professor Green's mind while he was thinking up a title for his new album, and deciding on Growing Up In Public. I mean, I can see that the phrase has a nice sort of self-deprecating ring to it: yeah, I did some crazy shit, but I was young, and now I've mellowed and grown as a person, and - hey - in a very real sense we've been on a journey together, you and me, so you should probably continue that journey by buying my new album.

But a moment's Googling will reveal that this is a title that's been used for a number of works of art in various media over the years, very possibly with each person using it congratulating themselves on thinking up the phrase for the first time in the history of humanity and being far too excited to get on and use it to bother checking whether it really was all that original.

The alternative explanation is that the Prof knew all about the other uses and was entirely relaxed, nay, enthused, even, about giving his hard-hitting rap album the same name. Study the list below and see how plausible you think that is:

• Lou Reed seems to have coined the phrase, or at least its usage as a title of a work, in 1980 by using it as the title of a solo album;
• Jimmy Nail followed suit in 1992, using it as the proper title of the solo album most people probably know as "the one with Ain't No Doubt on it";
• I was going to add: Geri Halliwell also used the title for a volume of autobiography, as I was absolutely convinced that I'd seen such a book in the shops, many years ago now. However, I'm forced to conclude that I imagined the whole thing, since the two volumes listed on Wikipedia are called If Only and Just For The Record. Searching elsewhere on the web draws a blank as well;
• It was used as the title of a 2000 album by Irish electronic musician Donnacha Costello;
• It was also used as the title of a 2012 album by Flemish boyband 3M8S (you see what they did there; also, yes, Flemish boybands are apparently a thing).

It's a phrase that crops up in various other places too: it's the title of a chapter section of Irvine Welsh's Trainspotting, and it's used a headline in this Independent article about Richard Linklater's film Boyhood and this old Melody Maker article about Depeche Mode. The earliest citation I can find is this alleged quote by former teenage film star Annette Funicello.