um bongo um bongo they drink it in the congo

There's riches and fame to be had from making an entire comedy act out of basically just coming on stage and saying "does anyone remember Spangles? Eh? Eh? Spangles?" Just ask Peter Kay. But I want to exhume malodorous old cultural items to a slightly more specific purpose than that, so forgive me. Or, alternatively, consider this: Pacers. They were like minty Opal Fruits, weren't they? Yeah? Do you remember?

My purpose here is as follows: the following is a list of adverts I remember from yesteryear (some are more yester than others), the last lines of which conveyed (and were deliberately calculated to convey, in my view), perhaps in addition to some trivial surface meaning, depths of transgressive perversity certainly not suitable for the time of day at which they were aired.

• This first one is pretty well-known, and Googling the phrase in question revealed a fair amount of internet discourse about it. It's this NatWest advert, which according to its YouTube title is from 1991, but I'm with the writer of this list who reckons it must be from a few years earlier than that. The line here is, of course: "Course we do! It's not all work, work, work!", which just about provides the makers with some plausible deniability, i.e. they can claim the spotty little herbert featured in the ad was just referring to going out on the town, whereas in reality he was talking about taking his cute little curly-haired blonde colleague home, unlocking her vault and making a substantial deposit, followed by a speedy withdrawal.
• That one was easy to find, however I've had less success with the other two, so maybe someone out there can help. The second one is from a bit more recently, maybe late 1990s, and I'm pretty sure it was an advert for a brand of coffee. The set-up is as follows: woman gets back from a weekend away to a flat she apparently shares with another woman in an upmarket young professionals sort of way, only to find that the other woman has had her boyfriend round for the weekend and they've been whooping it up by (among acts of a more penetrative nature, presumably) drinking flatmate #1's coffee, which, we're invited to infer, is a bit of a pre-agreed no-no activity. After a brief frosty moment, flatmate #1 decides to forgive and forget, and the two pals enjoy a cup of coffee together from the forbidden stash. As the camera pulls back, flatmate #1 says to flatmate #2, with just the ghost of a saucy smile playing across her lips: "So....did he enjoy my aroma?". Yeah, they'll say it's all about the coffee, finest Arabica beans from the Colombian mountainside yadda yadda yadda, but they know and we know there's a bit of an undertone of furtive knicker-sniffing wrongness here.
• Thirdly, and, I think, broadly contemporary with advert #2 (i.e. probably late 1990s) there was an advert for what I think was probably some sort of telecommunications company, possibly BT, possibly someone else. In fact it possibly wasn't even telecoms at all; the only reason I think it was is that it mainly features a woman obviously talking to a (probably female) friend on the telephone. Now we're party to the first few bits of the conversation, which establish that there's some talk of men, and possibly recent nights out, that sort of thing. There's then some sort of voice-over or other distraction which drowns out the conversation, during the course of which the product sales pitch is delivered, and this ends just in time for us to watch and hear the woman say "What? Sideways?". Oooer matron, etc.
  

Any ideas? I'm on a horse.

headline of the day

This one in the Independent:

Seems a little harsh, unless they're talking about her sizzlingly unresolved sexual tension with Michael Portillo on This Week, in which case, well, maybe.

i STILL don't beliiieeeeeve it!

In the interests of balance and fairness, and just for the epic lulz, I should draw your attention gently yet insistently towards this article in the New Statesman, which is a follow-up to the one featured here a while back wherein people list their reasons for believing in God (whichever particular version it is they believe in, from woolly philosophical abstraction to Old Testament psychopath complete with fire and smiting, and all points in between).

You'll be unsurprised (particularly if you read the associated blog post) that I didn't really find any of the reasons presented in the original article particularly compelling; you'll be equally unsurprised that I find the stuff in the non-belief article to be a lot better, though a lot of the responses are broadly similar to each other, as you'd expect:

• Richard Dawkins is as sensible and understanding as ever about people's reasons to believe (nonsensical though they are) and the reasons why you really shouldn't - this won't stop him being painted as "aggressive" and "shrill", though, obviously, for reasons explored here.
• Most of the others - Victor Stenger, Susan Blackmore, Michael Shermer, Jerry Coyne - just make the obvious point that they don't believe in God simply because there is no even remotely compelling reason to do so, i.e. any evidence, with the rider that the concept is badly-defined and slippery and meaningless anyway.
• PZ Myers introduces a welcome note of ridicule by pointing out how ridiculous most of the beliefs and practices are.
• They must have caught the usually affable AC Grayling on a bad day, though he is as usual entirely right.
• The only people who drop the ball are Philip Pullman, who starts well but makes a last-minute swerve into the wishy-washy bullshit territory of agnosticism, and Ben Goldacre, who affects a weary disdain for the whole thing. At which point whoever interviewed him should have given him a sharp slap round the chops and said: I didn't ask you how much you cared, and I'm not asking you to get out and man the atheist barricades. What you clearly mean is that you've made up your mind not to believe and you're not very interested in discussing it. Which is a reasonable enough position to take, but if that's your position, get over yourself and say so and stop being such an arse.

Anyway, further discussion on both the belief and non-belief articles is available at the New Statesman website. As always, approach the comments sections with some caution as there is some weapons-grade stupidity on display; I exempt the very first comment on the non-belief article from that criticism, though, as it simply reproduces a quote from comedian Sean Lock, which really condenses the whole discussion down to its essence:

I don't believe in God because....I've thought about it.

what I did at the weekend

Non-Canada-related this time, but just to finish the photo round-up: last Saturday I decided to head off up a few hills on my own, as I do from time to time. Now I've done quite a lot of the hills around the South Wales area, so I decided to head a bit further afield. Inspired by this list of Hewitts and Nuttalls in Wales (fiddly qualification rules aside that basically means mountains over 2000 feet) I hatched the scheme of ticking off as many as I could, a sort of parallel project to the Munro one that's already underway. The list contains 190 peaks, of which I have been up at least 24 - I say "at least" because without more rigorous checking there may be some subsidiary peaks I've climbed almost without noticing on the way to somewhere else.

Anyway, I noticed that there were three hills up in a little self-contained group in the Radnor Forest, so I decide to go and have a crack at them. I parked up in New Radnor, just off the A44 between Kington and Llandrindod Wells and did an anticlockwise circular tour taking in Whimble (not quite 2000 feet but, ironically, the most distinct "peak" of the lot), Bache Hill (2001 feet), Black Mixen (2133 feet) and Rhos Fawr (2165 feet). There's a bit of steep-ish ascent at the start, but for the most part it's fairly level walking on big heathery plateaus (plateaux?); Black Mixen and Rhos Fawr in particular would be boggy, treacherous and a featureless navigational nightmare in bad weather (fortunately it was quite nice on Saturday).

The trade-off you make by avoiding the more exciting, craggy, higher peaks is that you lose 99.9% of the people who might otherwise be up there with you. How much of a benefit this is will of course depend on your levels of curmudgeonly misanthropy; as far as I'm concerned it's great. Apart from a few New Radnor folk walking their dogs on the lower slopes I had the summit plateau entirely to myself all day. How relatively unfrequented these hills are can be seen by the amount of effort the Ordnance Survey make for you to be able easily to navigate them using their maps: the divide between Explorer sheets 200 and 201 cuts right down between Bache Hill and Black Mixen, and there's little or no overlap between the two sheets, so you need to buy both. You can bet that if that'd happened to Pen Y Fan they'd have moved things around to sort it out.

Anyway, as usual I took the GPS with me. Here's the route map (10.1 miles for the round trip, apparently) and altitude chart:



Also as usual I took the camera and took a few photos. Here they are.

canuck panic

Sorry, I know I'm boring you now. Two further Canada-related things: firstly you can find several hundred photographs from our trip here.

Secondly, in the light of my cryptid post of a week or so back it would be remiss of me not to point out that Lake Okanagan is legendarily home to the lake monster Ogopogo. I clearly remember having a set of 45 rpm 7" singles when we were kids that had various nursery rhymes and songs on them, one of which was a rendition (sung by a young-ish child as I recall) of this song. This article suggests that it was the song which lent its name to the monster (back in the 1920s) rather than the other way round.

well burger me

As for food, most of the time we were cooking our own, but there were a few exceptions. I've already mentioned Villa Caruso in Jasper, but while in Vancouver at the start of the trip we went to a couple of contrasting tapas bars, both good in their own way.

La Bodega is quite traditional, and none the worse for that, although we were a bit jet-lagged and knackered when we went there (I had to keep kicking Hazel under the table to wake her up), so I'm not sure we really appreciated it fully.

By contrast Bin 941 is what you might call a modern and funky twist on the same thing - the picture is of a small brick of houmous with some olives on top. It's far from a triumph of style over substance, though, the food was delicious.

We also had a steamed burrito from Steamrollers - nice enough, though I must say I'm not sure about the whole steaming concept, as it means the burrito ends up a bit soft and soggy. You want a bit of bite, really.

Finally, the big public market on Granville Island is a food-lover's wet dream - wall to wall fruit, veg, fish, sausages, booze, you name it. They also have various exotic fast-food outlets, including one where you can purchase a halibut burger. What's not to like?

ale seizer

In addition to wine sampling, we also stocked up with some Canadian beer, both for the RV trip and while we were on Vancouver Island. As with most places once you get beyond the bog-standard generic lager-y stuff (Molson, Labatts, Moosehead etc. etc.) there are some interesting smaller craft breweries making some more flavoursome stuff (usually labelled "IPA" or "Pale Ale"); as luck would have it a lot of these do 12-bottle variety boxes with a selection of their products for you to sample. Here's the selection we bought while stocking up the RV on the way out of Vancouver:


That's a box from the Okanagan Spring Brewery and a box from the Granville Island Brewery. We also bought a supplementary box of Alexander Keith's IPA along the way (it's thirsty work driving an RV) - this isn't particularly local, as it's brewed in Halifax, Nova Scotia.

When we got to Vancouver Island we stopped at a liquor store on the outskirts of Nanaimo to stock up - both the boxes we bought here are from breweries based on the island, one from the Lighthouse Brewery and one from the imaginatively-named Vancouver Island Brewery.


I think overall the Vancouver Island Brewery box was my favourite of all the ones we tried - the Piper's Pale Ale and the Sea Dog Amber Ale in particular were excellent. We also visited the bar at the Dockside restaurant when we were on Granville Island - they brew their own beer, and very good it is too, the Cartwright Pale Ale in particular.

o caaaanadaaaa

As some of you will already know (and you should if you've been paying attention), the lovely Hazel and I got married a few weeks ago. Now getting married is great and all, but arguably even greater is the freedom you get to then go on a great big holiday afterwards. We decided, with very little argument, to go to Canada.

We bookended the trip with a couple of days in Vancouver and four days on Vancouver Island, but the main thing we did was hire an RV (from the good people at Fraserway near the airport in Vancouver, most of whom seem to be German or Dutch for some reason) and go on a road trip. Thanks to the magic of Google I can create you a map of our itinerary showing you where we stopped, in fact I have done just that: here it is.

Here's a bit more detail about our route and what we did on the way:

• Day 1: Vancouver to McLure: 249 miles. Quite a long day, as in addition to the distance involved we had to pick up the RV, get the tutorial on how to work the RV (in particular, how to empty the water and sewage tanks without getting knocked off your feet by a tsunami of your own assorted feculence), work out how to drive the RV (which are quite large, even the relatively compact 20-footer we hired, plus they have automatic transmission with a column shift, plus you have to drive on the right) and pick up food and drink supplies. So we didn't really have time for any sightseeing (we skipped our planned detour via Hell's Gate) and pretty much just turned up at the Pinegrove campground, had some food and beer and went to bed.

• Day 2: McLure to Clearwater: 52 miles. A short hop here as we wanted to do some walking in Wells Gray Provincial Park. We did a hike up Pyramid Mountain and then a low-level tour of some waterfalls, of which Helmcken Falls is probably the most famous, but (in my opinion, anyway) Spahats Falls is the most spectacular. We then headed back to Clearwater to stay at the Dutch Lake campground.
• Day 3: Clearwater to Jasper: 197 miles. We stopped off at Mount Robson on the way to have a bit of a look at it (sadly we didn't have time to shin up it), and very impressive too. We stayed at Whistler's campground, which is run by Parks Canada and is (just about) walking distance from town - taxis are available for the return trip if you're feeling too lazy/full/pissed. Note that in the national parks (Jasper being in Jasper National Park, surprisingly enough) you will need to pay a park fee of about ten dollars per day, in addition to any camping fees.
• Day 4: in and around Jasper. We went on the Jasper Tramway which takes you most of the way up Whistlers Mountain (you can walk the rest of the way to the top, which of course we did). We then went on a boat trip on Maligne Lake, which contains Spirit Island, one of the most photographed locations in the world and currently available at a free desktop wallpaper gallery near you. We then went into Jasper, hit a couple of bars and went to Villa Caruso for dinner, which is very nice, though far from cheap.

• Day 5: Jasper to Saskatchewan River Crossing: 123 miles. More importantly, this section is the top end of the Icefields Parkway, one of the world's great scenic roads. Along the way we stopped at the Columbia Icefield to explore the Athabasca Glacier - we went up onto the glacier in one of their specially-designed fat-tyred "sno-coaches" and had a bit of a wander round, and then joined a small group for a walking tour below the glacier foot to check out the local flora and fauna and see the evidence of the glacier's gradual retreat over the last 150 years or so. We stayed at the David Thompson Resort, half an hour or so up Highway 11 north-east of Saskatchewan River Crossing.
• Day 6: Saskatchewan River Crossing to Radium Hot Springs: 196 miles. This is mostly the southern section of the Icefields Parkway, as far as Banff anyway. On the way we stopped of for a look at Peyto Lake and Lake Louise, both very pretty (and quite crowded, Lake Louise in particular). We then headed off to Radium Hot Springs, where in addition to checking in at the Canyon RV campground we had a dip in the therapeutic waters of the hot springs themselves, which are all very pleasant.
• Day 7: Radium Hot Springs to Kelowna: 278 miles. Another long day, but we wanted to have two nights in Kelowna so that we could do a wine-tasting tour (Kelowna being the centre of the Okanagan wine region) and not have to worry about driving anywhere afterwards. So we didn't do much sightseeing on the way, except to stop off in Revelstoke for lunch. Beyond the mountain scenery the actual town of Revelstoke is pretty nondescript, so we didn't hang about, and headed off to check in at the Hiawatha RV Park.

• Day 8: in and around Kelowna. We booked a wine tour with Wine Your Way tours, which turns out to be ex-sommelier Shalyn and her car. We did a tour of four wineries: Mission Hill, Rollingdale, Cedar Creek and St. Hubertus, by the end of which we had absorbed not only lots of fascinating wine information from our well-informed guide (despite feeling like we were starring in Sideways), but also samples of something like 25 wines and were a bit addled. In a futile attempt to soak up some of the wine we also called in at the Carmelis goat's cheese emporium and sampled some of their excellent wares, including some goat's cheese ice cream (and very nice too). My suggestion: try the Chabichou cheese and the St. Hubertus Pinot Blanc, they're both great.
• Day 9: Kelowna to Hope: 233 miles. We drove south from Kelowna to Osoyoos to visit the NK'MIP Desert Cultural Centre, in the middle of a weird little arid desert micro-climate (certainly weird after walking on a glacier only a couple of days earlier anyway). After watching a presentation of a bit of traditional Native American snake-wrangling in the visitor centre we went out onto the nature trails to find a few rattlesnakes for ourselves; no luck though. We then headed on to Hope and stayed at the Kawkawa Lake campground.
• Day 10: Hope to Vancouver: 94 miles. Part of the reason for stopping off in Hope was to make this last leg nice and short, as we had to drop the RV back by 11:30am. So no sightseeing, just a bit of last-minute tidying up and emptying of sewage tanks and back to the Fraserway depot. They were then kind enough to ferry us plus luggage over to the airport where we were picking up the hire car for the rest of the trip. But that, as they say, is another story....

tell me more about this thing called "wealth acquisition without Christ"

Strewth, here's a good one:

From: big.xandy@uol.com.br
Subject: RE:GOD BLESS YOU REAL GOOD!!!
To:

Dearly Beloved in Christ,

I am Mrs Fola Howard, daughter of Late Sherrif Kindimbu from West Africa, to be precise, Nigeria. I am 68 years old,my mother is From England, why my father is a Nigerian, and I'm an half cast by birth, I was married to Late Richard from England,and currently i am a new Christian convert,suffering from long time Cancer of the heart. From all indications, my condition is serious and according to my doctor it is quite obvious that I may not survive the sickness, although as a christian, I believe God and I know that I will not die, I will leave to declare the glory of God. My late Husband Late Mr.Richard A.Howard,he and my only son was killed by his family members,because he does not agree with them, I am presently leaving alone.Our Lord Jesus Christ is my comforter.

After the death of my husband,I made up my mind to travel abroad to leave the rest of my life and continue to do the work of God as a missionary. I c alled our lawyer and I instructed him to sell all my Husband properties and shares to enable me raise some money to continue my mission, which he successfully sold the Shares and some of the properties and he was able raise the sum of USD$9,000,000.00 (Nine million dollars) The fund is in cash,for the safety of the fund until i am able to travel out, he packaged the fund and it was deposited in a Bank for future claim, on behalf of my late husband.

Now that my sickness has gone to this stage, and the doctor's analysis is that i may not live more than 3 months got me scared and I want the fund to be used for the work of God all over the world through you,and to help the poor,widow, orphanage homes and also build a worship center for the Lord.

I have prayed and I told God to direct me to an honest Christian who will help me receive this fund and utilize it for things that will glorify the name of God. After my prayers,I searched the internet, and i found your email address and contacted you. Please if you are willing to use this Fund for the work of God, i will like you to send to me your private phone and fax number, full names and address, to enable me have a clue on whom you are, and also to enable me have confidence in you, and be rest assured, so that immediate arrangement can be made on how the Fund will be claimed by you on my Late Husbands Behalf as his Next of Kin and New Beneficiary I await to here your urgent reply.

Lastly, i honestly prayed that when the fund has been transferred to you, it shall be used for the said purpose, even if i am dead before then, because i have found out that wealth acquisition without Christ is vanity, and this gave me a good reason and i made a promised to God that the fund will be used to build His temple. May the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God, and the fellowship of the Holy spirit be with you. Amen.

Kindly contact me at my email address: flhoward@live.com

May God Bless you
Mrs.Fola Howard.

Well, the extreme religiosity is certainly new (though wasted on me, clearly), compared to previous efforts, but I'm a bit concerned about the casual reference to "My late Husband Late Mr.Richard A.Howard,he and my only son was killed by his family members,because he does not agree with them" - so I imagine they'll be totally happy to see 9 million dollars handed over to a complete stranger then.

third time's the charm

Just a couple of further cricketing nuggets: it is of course true that the India team England have just brutally trampled into submission is not an absolutely full-strength one - they have been deprived of the services of their principal strike bowler Zaheer Khan (hamstring injury), talismanic opener Virender Sehwag (shoulder) and his regular opening partner Gautam Gambhir (elbow). All of whom could in theory be back for the third Test at Edgbaston, but which raises the question: does this count as a proper humbling of the world's top-ranked side if some of their best players were missing?

The trouble with answering "no" to that question is that it rules out regarding as "proper" victories many of the great triumphs of the past: does England's legendary Botham-inspired 1981 Ashes series win not count because Australia's best batsman Greg Chappell declined to tour that year? Does England's equally legendary Ashes triumph of 2005 not count because both of their victories (at Edgbaston and Trent Bridge) came in matches where Australia's premier fast bowler Glenn McGrath was absent through injury? Does Australia's 5-0 drubbing in the return series in 2006-07 not count because England were missing Vaughan and Trescothick? That last one is a bit of a stretch, admittedly, but you get the idea. To use a sporting cliché, you can only beat what's put in front of you.

Secondly, hat-tricks. If you have a look at the list of all 39 that there have been in Test history (Stuart Broad's at Trent Bridge being the 39th and latest) a couple of interesting statistical gems can be teased out:

• there were 16 hat-tricks in the 504 Test matches in the 83 years between 1878 and 1961. This includes the only instance of two in the same match; even more remarkably both of those were by the same man, Jimmy Matthews; even more remarkably they were the only six wickets he took in the match, and even more remarkably the third victim in both cases was the same man, Tommy Ward.
• there was then a bleak period of 603 tests and 27 years between 1961 and 1988 during which there was only one hat-trick, Peter Petherick's (on his Test debut) in 1976.
• since then things have reverted to something resembling the pre-1961 frequency with 22 hat-tricks in 893 matches in 22 years between 1989 and 2011.
• Broad becomes just the second man to be a hat-trick victim (i.e. someone's third wicket) and to take a hat-trick himself. Broad was Peter Siddle's third victim at Brisbane just eight months ago; the only other man to achieve the same thing was Shane Warne, who did it in the opposite order, taking a hat-trick in 1994 and then being Harbhajan Singh's third victim in 2001. The only other hat-trick-taker to feature anywhere in another bowler's hat-trick is Darren Gough, who was Warne's second victim in 1994 and then did the hat-trick himself in 1999.
• there must be some scope for analysis of whose was the "best" hat-trick, by some measure of the excellence of the three batsmen involved. I'm not going to do the legwork, but you take total aggregate runs scored by the three batsmen as the metric then if I had to guess I'd say either Irfan Pathan's trio of Salman Butt, Younis Khan and Mohammad Yousuf, or Harbhajan Singh's trio of Ricky Ponting, Adam Gilchrist and Shane Warne would be pretty high on the list. You'd have to decide whether you were talking about total career aggregate runs per batsman, or career aggregate runs at the time of the hat-trick, of course. Tricky stuff.
  

flying balls at the bell end

You'll all have your own opinions on Bellgate™, I'm sure; for what it's worth I think sanity and what you might call natural justice prevailed - watch the end of pretty much any session in a Test match and you'll see people just grounding their bats and wandering off. Add to that that just about everyone on the ground, including most of the Indian fielders, thought the ball had gone for four, and you have a recipe for a good deal of bad feeling had the appeal and dismissal been allowed to stand.

However, let’s dial down the misty-eyed Spirit of Cricket rhetoric as displayed in this rather pointless ECB press release - yes, all’s well that ends well, but really the Indians shouldn’t have made the appeal in the first place, so the kudos available for belatedly doing the right thing and withdrawing it should be pretty limited, and all the talk of giving Dhoni the Man of the Match award is a load of old flannel (they gave it to Stuart Broad in the end). On the other hand it would have been nice for the authorities to make a brief announcement to the crowd bringing them up to speed with what had happened before the end of the tea interval, thus avoiding the umpires and the Indian team getting a barrage of boos as they came onto the field of play, which later turned to rather shamefaced applause as Bell emerged down the pavilion steps.

That said, Bell was a bit careless and I'm sure he won't be doing that again; it does seem a bit silly that the laws allow for such a farcical situation to occur, though. Really once you've grounded your bat to complete a run you should only be eligible for being run out if you are actively attempting another one. I can see that this still leaves a bit of a grey area ("Attempting a run? No, Mr. Umpire, sir, I was just sprinting up the pitch to have a chat with my batting partner"), and you'd have to think about what the implications were in terms of being able to run someone out for backing up too far, but it might still be an improvement. That would have nipped this incident in the bud before it started, as well as this peculiar incident involving Muttiah Muralitharan in Christchurch a few years back.

I was a bit surprised, though, in all the commentary on the subject during the Sky Sports coverage, that no-one mentioned the almost identical incident and subsequent furore surrounding Tony Greig's run-out of Alvin Kallicharran in Port-of-Spain in 1974. Last ball of a session (last one before the tea interval at Trent Bridge, last one of the day at Port-of-Spain), people wandering off a bit casually, sharp-eyed fielder throws down the stumps, appeals, umpire a bit reluctantly has to adhere to the letter of the law, diplomatic incident and negotiation during the interval, batsman reinstated, honour seen to have been satisfied on all sides. There's even an odd similarity in the scores involved: Bell had 137 at the time and went on, after being reprieved, to make 159, while Kallicharran had 142 when the incident occurred and was dismissed early the next day for 158. Spooky. Except it isn't, really.

I'm certainly not claiming I'm the only person to have spotted the parallel, just that as far as I know none of the Sky or BBC coverage mentioned it. From reading the various accounts it sounds to me as if Kallicharran was a great deal more culpable (and therefore lucky to be reinstated) than Bell; the ball hadn't made it off the square, and he hadn't grounded his bat. Needless to say that wily old fox Geoffrey Boycott is a bit more on the ball history-wise, though in his case he has a bit of an advantage as he was actually playing in the match in question.

at it like rabbatts

It's just a small, footling and frankly petty and small-minded gripe, but it bothered me at the time, so in the spirit of full disclosure of unnecessary detail about irrelevant stuff on the internet (blogging, in other words) here it is.

Kirsty Young's guest on Desert Island Discs this morning was lawyer and businesswoman (and current chief executive of Millwall FC) Heather Rabbatts. I didn't hear much of it, but I did notice that her first choice of record was Corinne Bailey Rae's cover of the hoary old standard Que Sera Sera.

There was a lot of gushing about how innovative an arrangement it was, and how CBR had really put her personal stamp on it, that sort of thing. Now I have no personal animosity towards Corinne Bailey Rae - her music is nice enough in a dinner party background wallpaper music sort of way, and she's been through a lot lately - but her version (it's from her 2011 release The Love EP, a selection of covers), while markedly different from the cutesy Doris Day version, is pretty much a carbon copy of the legendary Sly and the Family Stone's version from way back in 1973. Do these people know nothing?

don't noc it till you've got the nac

Do you own a rucksack? I know you do; everyone does. I myself probably own half a dozen or so, of varying shapes and sizes and with a varying array of mud and grass adhering to the outside and a varying selection of forgotten mouldering pork pies and decomposing Peperamis hidden in the inside pockets.

"Rucksack" seems to have become the canonical term for this particular piece of equipment, with "backpack" increasingly popular as well. Back in the day, though, you had other words to choose from as well, which (though I daresay some old fogeys continue to use them) have slipped into disuse, comparatively anyway, and they are "knapsack" and "haversack". It seems very odd to me that there are three perfectly good words, all ending in "sack", which describe essentially the same thing. What's it all about?

A good dictionary is your friend here, if you want to know the derivation of words. There seems to be general agreement that the three prefixes derive as follows:

• "ruck" from the German for "back"
• "haver" from the German for "oats", the implication presumably being that that's what people used to carry in them; why you'd be lugging a bag full of oats up a hill I have no idea. Some of the dictionaries say that a haversack specifically has one strap rather than two, some disagree.
• "knap" from a German word meaning "bite" or "eat", presumably any sort of food in this case, so you're not restricted to porridge and flapjacks.

I don't know why one usage persisted while the other two now sound quaintly Famous Five-y, like they should be filled with crusty hard-boiled egg and potted meat sandwiches and fruit cake supplied by a beaming ruddy-cheeked farmer's wife who cheerily refuses any form of payment with a "be off with you, master Julian". Or is that just me?

Note also that there seems to be a trend in some quarters towards dropping the two k's from "rucksack" so it becomes "rucsac", presumably as part of a general desire for all outdoor technical equipment to be as lightweight and efficient as possible; those two cumbersome extra k's were just weighing the whole thing down. I wonder if perhaps "napsac" might make a comeback in the same way? Or "bacpac"?

whale meat again

I've noticed a bit of a flurry of sea monster stories in the Daily Mail recently, and by "a flurry" I mean "two": this one about a mysterious thing washed up on a beach in China, and this one about a slightly smaller but equally mysterious thing washed up on a beach in Scotland.

The first (and indeed only) rule of mysterious dead things either washed up on beaches or hauled up by boats is that they are always the badly (or extremely well, depending on how you look at it) decomposed remains of some perfectly well known and documented creature, however freaky and weird they may look. Just as the bizarre-looking thing hauled in by the Zuiyō Maru is just a basking shark, it's equally clear that the Chinese sea monster is a dead rorqual (i.e. a large-ish whale) of some sort, and that the Aberdeen sea monster is some sort of smaller toothed whale or porpoise, probably a pilot whale, since these great big blubbery cretins are getting themselves stranded on beaches all the time.

I will admit, even knowing all this, to a certain fascination with mysterious stuff washing up from the murky deep - if you feel the same way then the cryptozoology section of Darren Naish's excellent Tetrapod Zoology blog is the place for you - lots of excellent stuff on the two Montauk monsters (aka a couple of dead raccoons), the Lake Champlain monster (probably a funny-shaped log), the Hook Island monster (an elaborate hoax) and many more (including some land-based stuff). The coelacanth really has a lot to answer for here - because it managed to skulk around undetected for 65 million years without having the decency to evolve into something different and start wearing digital watches and entering into complex hire purchase agreements we now have to put up with the constant chorus of "well, you don't know there aren't a colony of plesiosaurs in Loch Ness, do you? Remember the coelacanth!".

One last word on this subject: if you do find yourself with a large dead whale on your beach in a state of decomposition and need to get rid of it pronto as it's putting the beachgoers off their ice cream, then on no account should you attempt to blow it up. On the other hand it may just blow up anyway; you never know.

can't go for that, ooh ooh ooh, knockando

Still a few whisky matters to take care of, so here's an idea: let's have a sort of Celebrity Death Match and do two at once.

Here's a bottle of Knockando I got at Waitrose for £19. Now Knockando's USP seems to be that they label their bottlings with a "vintage" (1997 in the case of my bottle) rather than a simple age statement (though, slightly confusingly, they do issue one of those as well - 12 years for the entry-level one). What the practical consequences of this are I'm not too sure, other than that if it means all the whisky in the bottle is from the one year this rules out throwing a dash of older whisky in to enrich things, as some distilleries do (the rule being that the age statement denotes the age of the youngest whisky in the bottle, so you can lob a bit of 30-year-old into your 12-year-old during the vatting process if you really want to).

Anyway - it's quite straw-coloured and light as befits a whisky mainly matured in ex-bourbon casks, and it's got that biscuity/buttery smell that other bourbon cask-matured whisky like Glenmorangie has, as well as something a bit more estery, like magic markers. The taste is biscuity as well, and sweeter than you'd expect. This is basically a very mellow Speysider in the vein of the Tormore and the Cardhu - not as exciting as some, but really quite nice if you just want something nice and mellow that won't rip your face off.

Secondly, I bought a half-bottle of 10-year-old Glenfarclas for £11 in the Heathrow duty-free shop on the way to Canada (along with a bigger bottle of something else which we'll get to later), and, slightly surprisingly, had some left to bring back with me.

This one is a much more golden-brown colour, which tells you it's been matured in sherry casks. Sure enough it's rich and almondy rather than dry and biscuity, though I think I detect a bit of magic marker/whiteboard cleaner here as well. Unlike the Knockando this one is slightly less sweet than you expect when you taste it; it's quite similar to the Aberlour and possibly the Macallan.

So what have we learnt? Well, confirmation that while Speyside whiskies are very nice, I still favour the slightly hairier-chested stuff produced north and west of the region; also that while their reputation is (rightly) as being mellow, civilised, un-smoky and all that stuff, there's still a fair bit of variation to be explored. Overall I probably have to give my vote to the Glenfarclas, firstly because it's just that bit richer and more interesting, but also because the name sounds like something a drunk Scotsman would say.

headline of the day

I suppose it is a bit like harpooning a walrus in a bathtub, spearing an elephant seal in a wash-basin, torpedoing a manatee in a paddling pool, or any other even easier variant of shooting fish in a barrel, but I offer for your enjoyment anyway this splendid example of tabloid innumeracy - here's a heart-warming story in the Daily Mail about a couple who share a birthday (July 19th, since you ask) who have now had a son who - wait for it - was born on the same date! Now I'll grant you this is fairly unusual and a nice little conversation piece at dinner parties before the wine kicks in and someone comes out with something toe-curlingly racist, but perhaps not as noteworthy as the Mail headline suggests:

A quick moment of reflection on the number of days there are in a typical year, and the obligation for any baby, I don't care who your parents are, to be born on one of them should prompt the amateur mathematician to smell a bit of a rat here. You can see where the Mail have got that number from - all three of them have the same birthday, there are 365 days in a year (let's forget February 29th for the moment, just to keep things simple), therefore the probability of all three having the same birthday is one in (365 x 365 x 365 = 48,627,125). Right? Well, no.

For starters, the odds of two people sharing a birthday are one in 365, not one in (365 x 365 = 133,225) - the point being it doesn't matter which day the first person's birthday is on, the second one just has to match it, and has a one in 365 chance of doing so. Add a third person into the mix and the odds of them having the same birthday (and therefore that date being shared by all three) just adds another factor of 365 to the mix, i.e. the probability of the whole thing - boy meets girl, discovers they share a birthday, impregnates her, baby is born on their mutual birthday - is one in 133,225. No millions involved, still less 48 of them.

However, we're not interested in the probability of the whole shooting match, just the baby bit, since the parents getting together and sharing a birthday bit has already happened. The odds of this are going to be at best (or worst, depending how you look at it) one in 365, and they are only this until you know you're pregnant - once you know this the range of available dates for the baby's birthday narrows considerably. Let's assume that we require the baby to be born healthy and normal in all the usual respects - if you're in a first world country with decent medical care this probably means a window of 24-40 weeks after conception as possible birth dates (and the lower end of that could be touch and go survival-wise). That's 16 weeks, i.e. 112 days. So, unless you already know you're out of the game (if the Parkers had conceived in August, for instance, there's absolutely no way the baby could be born on July 19th), you're actually only looking at odds of one in 112 or thereabouts. Less of a snappy headline for a news story, I'll grant you.

Probability is inherently counter-intuitive and hard to grasp, though, even for quite clever people, never mind Daily Mail readers. The notion that throwing ten heads in a row doesn't make a tail more likely next time is a hard one for some people, people whose heads would probably explode if confronted with either the birthday problem or the Monty Hall problem, both seemingly simple situations where the obvious "common sense" answer is wrong.

Interestingly, this article applies the birthday problem's conclusion (i.e. that you only need a group of 23 people to make it more likely than not that two of them will share a birthday) to the handy existing data set of all the US Presidents (of which there have been 43, making it over 90% likely that there'll be a match) - sure enough James Polk and Warren Harding share a birthday, November 2nd. QED!

stand by for a clear description of my opening

It's amusing translation manglings day here at Halibut Towers - firstly here's an e-mail I got the other day. Similar to a lot of the mystery Nigerian benefactor ones or the ones telling me I've won the Albanian lotttery, except that this one appears to be offering me a job:

From: KhvongDeloycise@hotmail.com
To: [redacted]
Subject: Dave Thomas
Date: Mon, 18 Jul 2011 12:59:39 +0000

I would like to take time now to welcome you and to give you a to-the-point rundown of the position's benefits and expectations. If you are taking a career break, are on a maternity leave, recently retired or simply looking for some part-time work, this position is for you.

Occupation: Flexible schedule 2 to 8 hours / day. We can guarantee a minimum 20 hrs/week occupation
Salary: Starting salary is 2000 GBP per month plus commission, paid every month.
Business hours: 9:00 AM to 5:00 PM, MON-FRI, 9:00 AM to 1:00 PM SAT (UK time).
Region: United Kingdom.

Please note that there are no initial fees or deposits to be made prior or after taking this position. If you are interested then today reply to this email and you will be touched by the direct employer to get more clear description about this opening.

Sincerely, Deloise Kong
// HR department Basel Ltd.
_____________________
Latest News: milk supply hit in city.

The obvious couple of observations to make are: firstly that milk crisis news is a bit non-specific - which city? Should I consider panic buying before stocks run out? Secondly, there's very little that indicates what sort of a job it is, but perhaps the last line holds a clue: "reply to this email and you will be touched by the direct employer to get more clear description about this opening". Sounds like utter filth to me.

Secondly, the Charlotte Church weeing/shagging/knickers incident is all a bit of a non-story, but translate it badly into another language and then back into English again and it all starts to seem a bit more exciting. I have literally no idea what linguistic route this article took to end up in the right old two-and-eight it's in, but it makes for interesting reading:

Drunk, Charlotte Church Making love in the Car Rear

The Welsh soprano origin, England, Charlotte Church, making news after the circulation of a video that showed he was drunk with the saggy pants down to her ankles.

The Sun on Wednesday (13/07/2011), reported that 25-year-old singer was allegedly drunk after attending a charity event at the polo game. Under conditions that are out of control, he was with her ​​boyfriend, Jonathan Powell, then make love in the back of a van.

”I do not believe what they do,” said Jim Davies, a guest on the show who happened to see the attraction of both reckless. Davies said the mother of two children and her boyfriend did not care about the people around and still make love like a teenager who was intoxicated by romance. ”He can not even stand up and almost fell, ” said Davies again.

Before you get drunk, just sing the Church Welsh national anthem on Saturday, in Glanusk Park, Powys, in a fundraising event for children’s hospitals.

Her boyfriend, Jonathan (24), caught on camera at around 22:00 local time. In fact, the local security to see the action. ”They are really crazy and love do not know the place,” said the security.

This seems not to be a one-off translation disaster - other headlines on the same site include Rihanna Replace GaGa So Queen Facebook, Emma Watson Want To Become Yourself and Elin Nordegren get kids millionaires as a replacement Tiger Woods.

a self-confessed blogger writes

Much hilarity is to be found in the story of Niko Alm, the Austrian atheist who has won the right to be pictured on his driving licence with a colander on his head on the grounds that it constitutes "religious headgear" - the religion in question being Pastafarianism, i.e. membership of the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster, peace be upon his noodly appendages.

Now that's all a lot of fun, no-one likes a good laugh more than I do, etc. etc. - however, I do have a query: what's with this bit of phrasing?

A self-confessed atheist, Mr Alm says he belongs to the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster, a light-hearted, US-based faith whose members call themselves pastafarians.

"Self-confessed"? That's an interestingly charged phrase that used habitually to be attached to the front of the word "homosexual", until it was repeatedly pointed out that this makes whatever follows sound like it's something to be ashamed of. It seems to me highly revealing of the acceptability of overt atheism in general public discourse that the BBC article should phrase things in this way.

Google is your friend for this sort of thing; a quick not-particularly-scientific analysis reveals the phrase "self-confessed" prefixing pramaholic, wig addict, nutter, gym bunny, boring bastard, geek, whiner, video gaming addict, and so on and so forth, all carrying some baggage of slightly furtive embarrassingness. Narrow the search to "self-confessed atheist" and you get a series of articles that vary in tone but are generally not well-disposed towards atheism. Same goes for "self-confessed homosexual", though it seems to be only in the murkier backwaters of the internet that you see that phrase used these days. "Self-confessed feminist" still pops up occasionally too.

The point is, would anyone describe themselves, or another as, say, "a "self-confessed Catholic"? A "self-confessed Muslim"? A "self-confessed heterosexual"? A "self-confessed dental hygienist"? No. I'm prepared to believe that the reporter did it unthinkingly (for some reason) but there is an implicit slight involved and it must stop. Now I am off to put a colander on my head in solidarity. Ramen.

the last book I read

A Case Of Lone Star by Kinky Friedman.

The old Elmore Leonard/box of chocolates metaphor works just as well with the Kinkster's oeuvre, i.e. you know pretty much exactly what you're going to get. And that is: something short and snappy, probably comfortably under 200 pages, lots of wisecracking Chandler-on-acid humour, an actual mystery (usually involving murder) in there somewhere, and lots of tangential colour involving Kinky's Manhattan apartment, his cat, regular consumption of Jameson whiskey, Winnie Katz's lesbian dance class and Kinky's motley crew of friends and associates.

This one has Kinky called in to the Lone Star Café in downtown Manhattan to investigate the apparent murder of Larry Barkins of the Barkins Brothers with his own guitar (via repeated blows to the head). The killer has left a calling card - the lyrics to a Hank Williams song. Soon the bodies are piling up faster than the proprietor can clear them away: all country music artists, and all murdered in a way mirroring the lyrics of one of ole Hank's songs. Kinky reckons he knows what the killer's up to, but to catch him he's going to have to resurrect his semi-defunct former career as a country and western singer and offer himself up as bait by playing a gig at the Lone Star Café....

As I suggested during our previous encounter with the Kinkster, in general I reckon the earlier, snappier books are better: this one, published in 1987, seems to be the second one in the series. Spanking Watson dates from 1999 and in addition to being the latest one of the five I own, is also the only one to exceed 200 pages. I mean, it's only 217 (A Case Of Lone Star is a mere 166), so we're not talking major literary elephantiasis here, but there's just a suspicion of a bit of self-indulgent meandering going on.

Anyway, it's all very entertaining in a bone-dry, deadpan sort of way. It's interesting to see where Kinky mixes in real life with the fictional stuff: he really was a country singer, of a sort (here's They Ain't Makin' Jews Like Jesus Anymore), Chet Flippo is real and really did write a biography of Hank Williams, and most bizarrely of all the story about Kinky playing chess with Samuel Reshevsky at the age of seven turns out to be true as well. Who knew?

the root of all evil

You'll remember my attempts to wrestle the garden at our old house from an impenetrable jungle with pterodactyls nesting in it into a useful herb garden (despite the best efforts of an army of gastropods) - well, I've started doing the same at the new place. The enemy here, rather than a warehouse-engulfing plague of ivy and bindweed, seems to be an infestation of buddleia; I had a go at trimming them down to ground level a few months ago but they grow astonishingly quickly, so they were starting to blot out the sun (see below):


This time I wanted to do the job properly, so I decided to dig them up by the roots. Simple, right? Well, it turns out buddleia (and these may have been here for a while) grow really deep roots - check these mothers out:


These bastards had grown right under the decking, and it took a good deal of trowel-work and hernia-inducing yanking to get them out. Some of the others were equally deep:


Anyway, having done that, and then having had to leave things to their own devices for three weeks, I was unpleasantly surprised on my return to find a couple of buddleia shoots poking up through the earth. I yanked them out, but check out the root length - in three weeks! It's either going to be a running battle to keep the stuff at bay, or take off and nuke the entire place from orbit.


Anyway, undeterred by all this, I've now put the first couple of herb plants in, specifically some thyme and some chives. Here they are:


The other pre-existing plant infestation we've got is a huge expanse of mint - obviously this is more useful than the buddleia, but we'll have to keep an eye on it to make sure it doesn't take over the whole garden. What I need is some recipes requiring a huge quantity of mint, ideally less time-consuming and messy than the mint jelly.