ryders on the storm

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Other statistical nuggets include the following:

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

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

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

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

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

marxist carx it

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

god exists; therefore god exists

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

dixon of cock green

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

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

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

the last book I read

Millennium People by J.G. Ballard.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

incidental music spot of the day

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

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

willy make it? no

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

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

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

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

time off in Looe

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

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

the last book I read

On The Road by Jack Kerouac.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

headline of the day

Startling news from the normally normally sedate environs of Cirencester:

Just in case you thought that this was just some sort of inadvertent crash blossom in the main headline, the same thing happens again in the second paragraph:

Now it's been a while since I had anything from a kebab van, probably 20 years or more, but I do recall that every time I did I woke up the next morning feeling like I'd been physically attacked and severely beaten during the night. Now I know why!

publish and be drammed

My wife and baby daughter are away for a couple of days, so it's time to kick back, pour a glass of something brown and volatile, and later maybe catch up on some sleep. But first there's a bit of a backlog of unblogged stuff lurking in the whisky cupboard. This will not stand.

First up, Lagavulin. This is a bottle of the standard 16-year-old, which is pretty old for an entry-level whisky - there is a cask strength 12-year-old, but it's not widely available - and generally priced accordingly at around 40 quid. Fortunately my father was generous enough to buy me a bottle for my birthday back in February.

Lagavulin is from Islay, like the Laphroaig and the Bowmore, so you pretty much know what to expect, i.e. smoky peatiness, with a side order of peaty smokiness. It's quite dark, certainly compared with the Laphroaig, as befits something that has spent 16 years sitting in wooden casks. The colour puts it nearer the Bowmore, and it's similar when you have a sniff as well - it's sweeter than the Bowmore, which was noticeably salty, but there's the same rich undertone of something umami-y, maybe a meat pie or a Cornish pasty. Taste-wise it's tremendously rich and round and sweet as well, with the trademark antiseptic after-sting that you get from the peat. If anything it's perhaps just a fraction too sweet and rich for my taste, but it runs a close second to the Bowmore as my favourite Islay whisky of the ones I've tried so far.

Speaking of Islay whisky, you'll remember the Bruichladdich, which was a non-typical unpeated one and a pretty non-typical pinkish colour as well, thanks to being finished in casks that previously held Banyuls wine. Well, here's another pink(ish) whisky: Glenmorangie Quinta Ruban. This is part of the same series of "special" finishes that included the Lasanta - that one got a couple of years in casks that previously held sherry, while the Quinta Ruban gets a couple of years in casks that previously held port (these are traditionally known as "port pipes", for some crazy reason). One of the side-effects of port maturation is a definite subtle pink colour.

This is noticeably sharp and fruity when you have a sniff - quite similar to the Bruichladdich in being quite grapey and redcurranty, though this is less raw and estery since the base whisky is much older (12 years as opposed to an unspecified number probably no greater than 5). It's much more mellow and gently fruity when you drink it as well, though there's a sense that the gorgeous custardy mellowness of the standard Glenmorangie is having a bit of a fight with the sharp red fruity acidity of the port finish. That could of course be me being a reactionary old duffer, but while this is very nice it's not as terrific as the Lasanta, nor even the basic 10-year-old Glenmorangie.

Finally, another whisky that I'm glad to say I didn't have to pay for - this is a Signatory bottling of a 14-year-old Glenlivet originally distilled in 1996 that my fellow whiskyologist Jim bought me as a baby head-wetting present back in May. I'd never drunk Glenlivet before, but it's one of the classic Speyside enormo-sellers, second only to Glenfiddich worldwide in sales terms. This one is from a single sherry cask and is very dark, certainly much darker than the standard 12-year-old, which I think is from a mixture of bourbon and sherry casks. Anyway, with the caveat that I can't comment on what the standard bottlings are like, this is a great big sherry monster, a bit like the Glenmorangie Lasanta and the Aberlour, without having the almondy tang that the Aberlour has. It's got just a hint of something darker as well, like Marmite or creosote (but, hey, in a good way). As "standard" Speysiders (which aren't generally my favourite thing) go this is a good one, ideal when you want something rich and warm and cakey and comforting and the wild and woolly stuff like the Lagavulin seems a bit daunting.

Here's a colour comparison for your edification and reference: left to right, Lagavulin, Glenmorangie, Glenlivet. I offer this basically to illustrate my point about the pinkness of the Glenmorangie (in the middle), the other two being your basic mid-brown, though note how the Glenlivet is darker despite being a couple of years younger.

there's always a catch

Much has been written about Andrew Strauss' departure from the England captaincy this week, so I'll restrict myself to a couple of statistical observations. Firstly, Strauss ends his Test career with 21 centuries, just one short of equalling the record for an English batsman. It's a bit of a statistical oddity that the English record is so low, as the overall record for individual Test centuries stands at a monumental 51 (and since Sachin Tendulkar is still playing, this could yet go up).

If you survey the individual record-holders by country in the table below you'll see how low in the table England are, with only the Test-playing minnows (apologies to New Zealand) below them. England are also the only country where the record is jointly held. Also, curiously, two of the England record-holders had interruptions to the prime of their careers that robbed them of the chance to add to their tallies - Walter Hammond lost 7 years of the prime of his career to the Second World War, and Geoff Boycott voluntarily exiled himself from Test cricket for three years between 1974 and 1977 in a prolonged sulk at not being offered the England captaincy.

Strauss' retirement means that he won't be the man to break the record, but it almost certainly will go in the next year or so - ironically the next man on the list, also on 21 centuries, is none other than Kevin Pietersen, who is in the middle of a bit of a career hiatus himself at the moment, this one entirely of his own making. So the most likely scenario is that it'll be the new England captain Alastair Cook, who currently has 20, who'll break the record, perhaps some time in 2013.

Where	Who	How many
India	Sachin Tendulkar	51
South Africa	Jacques Kallis	43
Australia	Ricky Ponting	41
West Indies	Brian Lara	34
Sri Lanka	Mahela Jayawardene	31
Pakistan	Inzamam-ul-Haq	25
England	Walter Hammond	22
England	Colin Cowdrey	22
England	Geoff Boycott	22
New Zealand	Martin Crowe	17
Zimbabwe	Andy Flower	12
Bangladesh	Mohammad Ashraful	5

Strauss' other record is that he has taken more catches as an outfielder than any other English cricketer, his total of 121 catches putting him one ahead of Colin Cowdrey and Ian Botham. Most of Strauss' catches were taken in the slips, most famously this electrifying effort to get rid of Adam Gilchrist in the Ashes Test at Trent Bridge in 2005.

the last book I read

Idoru by William Gibson.

Colin Laney has a weird talent - he's able to detect patterns in computer data by picking out "nodal points". This makes him very useful in certain contexts and he's spent a while working for a TV network called Slitscan who specialise in celebrity stitch-ups and gossip.

That all ended in some unpleasantness, though, when Laney's pattern-recognition skills led him to correctly conclude that one of Slitscan's stalkees was about to top herself, and he made a botched and ultimately futile attempt at a real-life intervention.

So he's looking for another job. Luckily he's landed himself an interview for one over in Tokyo, recently rebuilt after a massive earthquake (as described in Virtual Light), where he meets the enigmatic Mr. Yamazaki and giant Australian bodyguard Keith Blackwell. It turns out they want him to do his data-sniffing thing on rock star Rez (of the band Lo/Rez), who has recently expressed a desire to get married to a lady called Rei Toei - nothing so unusual there except that she's a digital construct (a "synthespian") and not a real person. So basically Laney is supposed to find out if Rez has flipped his lid, or is being manipulated somehow, or if some other weirdness is going on, all by sifting through the spoor of his online existence.

At the same time 14-year-old Chia Pet McKenzie has been dispatched to Tokyo by her chapter of the international Lo/Rez fan club to try to find out what's going on. She gets talking to a woman called Maryalice on the plane and ends up inadvertently smuggling some contraband through customs for her. Her subsequent attempts to focus on what's going on with Lo/Rez are hampered by various heavy types' interest in the contraband - principally Maryalice's boyfriend Eddie and various scary Russian types who work for a shady outfit called the Kombinat.

In parallel with all this real-life stuff there is an accompanying narrative conducted solely in cyberspace - Laney's attempts to make sense of Rez's data, Chia's attempts to keep in touch with the international network of Lo/Rez fans, and increasingly influential interventions from the idoru, who it becomes clear is the human-friendly face of a massive and growing artificial intelligence. Influential in real life as well, as when it looks like Chia is in serious trouble with those who want to retrieve her smuggled package - which turns out to be some sort of nanotechnology starter kit - things are arranged so that honour is satisfied with the Kombinat, Chia is able to go home unmolested, and Rez and the idoru are free to take their relationship to the next level with some help from the nanotechnology gizmo.

This is a sort-of sequel to Virtual Light, but apart from a couple of brief appearances from Berry Rydell, one of the main protagonists of the earlier book, and being recognisably set in the same universe, there's not much of a narrative thread that links the two. They aren't that similar plot-wise, either, Virtual Light being (despite the title) relatively free of the sort of cyberspace shenanigans that were such a feature of Neuromancer, while Idoru has lots and lots of matrix-based action. Nothing wrong with that, of course, though one of the other things that Virtual Light had was a compelling plot, and for all the portentous hints that Rez and the idoru's relationship is significant of some Momentous Mystical Stuff about to happen (some sort of melding of human and AI with a bit of nanotechnology thrown in, presumably) none of that actually happens during the course of the book.

This isn't really that much of a problem, though, as Gibson's twisted visions of the future are compelling enough without any crash-bang action being required. That said this is probably the weakest of the three Gibsons I've read - as I've said in an embarrassingly large number of places, Neuromancer is one of the great novels of the second half of the 20th century, regardless of genre, and everyone should read it.

two-and-a-bit-item list of the day

Brand names that I never really "got" until having a belated forehead-slapping moment of "oh, riiiigghht!" revelatory clarity surprisingly recently.

• Jonelle - well, it's just some vaguely French name, isn't it, probably some obscure little French linen goods company that got bought up by some big conglomerate or something. It was only when I noticed that the goods were only ever sold at branches of John Lewis and nowhere else that my brain made the (in hindsight completely obvious, as these things always are) vital connection and I realised that it's just "John L" said in a comedy French accent. Merde pour les cerveaux!
• Titleist - I always wondered why people pronounced this one wrong all the time as "tight-list". Just look at the spelling, you idiots! It's clearly "tit-lyste"; probably some obscure little German golf supplies company that got bought up by some big conglomerate or something. It was only after seeing some TV adverts that used the same "tight-list" pronunciation that I had to digest the unpalatable fact that everyone else was right and I was wrong. Having swallowed that bitter pill it was a short mental journey to realising that it's meant to be "title-ist", i.e. one who wins a lot of titles. Scheiße für Gehirne!

I do still maintain that Titleist is a pretty badly-thought-out brand-name, though; something totally unambiguous in pronunciation terms that conveys the same message would be better, like perhaps Titlehound or Titlewrangler or Titlemonger. The only disadvantage of any of those would be the 50% increase in the size of golf balls that would be required in order to fit the logo on.

In terms of badly-thought-out advertising, though, you'd have to go a long way to beat the Enterprise Rent-A-Car advert that's currently doing the rounds. Here it is; check out the little exchange of trans-Atlantic mutual incomprehension that starts at about 22 seconds in:

Yank: Give Enterprise a try - just look for the aluminum signs!
Brit: Aluminium.
Yank: (laughs) No it's not.
Brit: It is. It's got a "u" in it.
Yank: Shut up!
Brit: No, I'm serious: aluminium.

Now this is of course all very droll in a two-nations-divided-by-a-common-language kind of way, but a moment's thought will reveal that it doesn't make any sense. In order for it to have made sense the British guy should have said "It's got an "i" in it", that being the letter by which the words "aluminum" and "aluminium" differ. Others have noticed as well. That the so-called "creatives" in whatever advertising agency dreamed the advert up (and it must be said that it's a pretty dreadful and lazy piece of clichéd hackery even aside from the crass error) just waved this through the review process without noticing it is a testament to the heroic amounts of cocaine they must all have been on at the time.

Just to be clear, incidentally, the deal that was struck with IUPAC in 1990 is that the Brits get their spelling of "aluminium" as the official standard, but that in return the Americans get their spelling of "sulfur" as the official standard. So actually the British guy in the video is right, despite also being wrong.

headline of the day

This one from a couple of days ago on the BBC website:

This is of course another crash blossom as previously mentioned here and here. Needless to say it is the murder of Delia Hughes by person or persons unknown that is the subject of investigation here, not the murder of various members of the police force by a group of crazed crime profilers, however much the headline might seem to suggest otherwise.

the last book I read

Age Of Iron by JM Coetzee.

Mrs. Curren is a retired classics professor living in Cape Town at the tail-end of the 1980s. Not only is the country locked in what turned out to be the vicious death-throes of the apartheid regime (although this wasn't apparent at the time), but on a more personal level has she just been diagnosed with terminal cancer.

She starts to compose a letter to her daughter, long since escaped to America, in the anticipation that this will be the last contact they will have. As if to give her something other than dying of cancer to write about, things immediately start to kick off - a homeless man, Mr. Vercueil, takes up residence in her back garden, and eventually they strike up a grudging friendship and he moves into the house.

Meanwhile her housekeeper Florence's son Bheki has been in some low-level trouble with the law, and the police's callous lack of interest in his fate after a minor traffic incident puts him in hospital motivates Mrs. Curren to some uncharacteristic political activism. Following a mysterious phone call in the middle of the night, she drives out to a nearby black township and witnesses government troops burning it. Later the same night she sees Bheki's bullet-riddled corpse on the floor of a nearby house, and is rudely brought to the realisation that the black community's anger is not solely directed at those whites who are active agents of the oppressive apartheid regime, but also at those who acquiesce in the same oppression by living in the system it maintains, even if they salve their own consciences while doing so with a bit of woolly liberal hand-wringing at the awfulness of it all.

So she decides to take action - after all, what has she got to lose? She considers something spectacular like soaking herself in petrol and driving her car up to some government building, but that's all a bit...spectacular, not to mention painful. Some of the decision-making is taken out of her hands when one of Bheki's friends turns up at her house, closely pursued by the police, and there is a stand-off which ends predictably messily. Eventually she realises that messily is probably how her life is going to end as well, rather than on some neatly climactic note.

You'll remember I've dabbled with Coetzee before, in the form of Slow Man, fully five-and-a-bit years ago. That was quite self-referential and playful, albeit in Coetzee's own slightly po-faced way; this is a different beast altogether, much more like Disgrace in its ruthless dismantling of white liberal sensibilities and assumptions. That said, there is just the possibility, particularly on reading the last couple of pages, of reading the character of Vercueil as not just some random tramp but as some sort of angel of death ushering Mrs. Curren into the netherworld. That aside (and it could be just me) this is pretty stark and uncompromising stuff, a contrast to the heavily allusive and tangential approach to pretty much the same subject taken in Memory Of Snow And Of Dust, but none the worse for that, just the opposite in fact.

Here's a rare video of the famously reclusive Coetzee speaking in public, while introducing David Malouf (as also previously featured in this list) at a literary festival in Adelaide.

the year of the sexist olympics

Leaving aside a bit of disagreement on how best to handle the foul stench emanating from their groinal areas, we're all pretty much down with the idea of equality for the ladies, right? And what better place to demonstrate how egalitarian and groovy we've all become than at the giant festival of all that's best about the human race, the Olympic Games? Especially with the influx of lady athletes from some of the Middle Eastern states that have previously not allowed them to compete - that's all good, right?

Well, let me just offer a small counterbalance to the warm fuzzy feeling everyone seems to be getting about this. While it's certainly true that there were a couple of female Saudi athletes competing in the games, in both cases they hardly represent your average Saudi woman. The judo contestant Wojdan Shahrkhani's father Ali is a judo referee, and while she grew up in Saudi Arabia she doesn't live there, and 800-metre runner Sarah Attar was born - and lives and studies - in California. It's also fair to say that this development - forced upon the Saudis and others under the threat of exclusion from the Games if they didn't comply - hasn't exactly been trumpeted and celebrated back in the country, nor has it yet resulted in any changes to the way girls and women are discouraged and indeed actively prevented from taking part in physical and sporting activities.

But, hey, at least us enlightened Westerners are all about the equality and the celebrating of sporting achievement regardless of gender. Weeeeeelll, yeah, no. Have a look at the series of bizarre reactions to American gymnast McKayla Maroney's being unable to conceal her disappointment at losing a vault contest she clearly felt she should have won. No-one but herself to blame, as she overcooked the take-off on her last vault, pretty much missed the horse altogether and did a fairly spectacular arse-plant into the mat. She still won the silver medal, but clearly was pretty pissed off about the whole thing, and why not. Clearly female Olympians, and female Olympic gymnasts in particular, aren't really meant to want to win quite so nakedly, though, and should instead stand around smiling winsomely under several inches of slap and glitter and try not to sweat or anything similarly unladylike. I mean, I think there's a case for bringing some sort of prosecution against her and her parents for their egregious mis-spelling of "Michaela" as "McKayla", but that's about my only critcism.

In the spirit of not taking cheap shots at female gymnasts' appearance, I abandoned the link-following activities I was indulging in solely to garner a few cheap laughs about Beth Tweddle's teeth. I must just highlight the snippet that I found in the comments to this YouTube clip, though, as it may just be the greatest typo in the history of the world:

but she has shown that she is a world class qymnast- well done Beth!

I think we'd have to get our heads together and thrash out some clear rules, but the women's quimnastics is something I'd really like to see brought in for Rio 2016, even just as a demonstration event.

Just as a footnote, combine the religious intolerance, quickness to claim "offence", nasty authoritarian streak and general sense that there are ways in which women should behave and being a bit too assertive and shouty really isn't quite the thing and you end up with the situation the members of art-terrorism group Pussy Riot find themselves in in a Moscow courthouse at the moment. I suppose the difference is that while I reluctantly accept that there is an element of devout religious belief (however misguided that is in itself) associated with the restrictions placed on the Middle Eastern athletes, the religious element here is a pretty flimsy smokescreen, Pussy Riot's real crime being criticism of lovable old judo enthusiast and ex-KGB chief Vladimir Putin.

kneale before zod

Just a quick addition to the last post: my teasing reference and subliminal link to Nigel Kneale's 1968 drama The Year Of The Sex Olympics set me off on a bit of a YouTube odyssey through some old salvaged 1960s sci-fi drama clips. TYOTSO itself is a satire of an imagined dystopian future where the public are kept docile by being fed a televisual diet of increasingly explicit "reality" programmes, all of which seems strangely prescient now, and stars Leonard Rossiter (pictured) and Brian Cox among others. Nigel Kneale was most famously the creator of the Quatermass series, and by an odd coincidence the man whose given name he borrowed for his central character, Sir Bernard Lovell, died only a couple of days ago. As well as TYOTSO, much of the Quatermass stuff is available in full on YouTube, as well as the haunted house drama The Stone Tape from 1972. Here's a BBC Four documentary about Kneale, with some interesting interviews, from 2003.

Other things that may be of interest include a couple of episodes of the series Out Of The Unknown, in particular Thirteen To Centaurus and The Dead Past, adapted from short stories of the same name by JG Ballard and Isaac Asimov respectively. Both men are pretty heavily anthologised, so these stories probably appear in several places, but I have these two in the collections The Voices Of Time and Earth Is Room Enough respectively.

Nigel Kneale was also the husband of Judith Kerr, who wrote the Mog series of children's books, and father of Matthew Kneale, who wrote the excellent English Passengers, which I recommend thoroughly to you.

the year of the sex olympics

I suppose it's obligatory to do a post at least tangentially related to the Olympics, so here goes. Tangentially, though, remember, so no complaining.

Firstly, here's the photo-finish picture (nicked from here) from Sunday's men's 100 metres final. No particular need to consult it to find out who won, nor indeed who was second, though it might have been useful in determining that convicted drugs cheat Justin Gatlin pipped non-convicted non-drugs cheat Tyson Gay (aka Tyson Homosexual) to the bronze medal by one hundredth of a second. However, it does provide a superb example of the phenomenon of "ski foot" I described earlier, modelled here by none other than Usain Bolt himself.

As you'll remember, this phenomenon happens when an athlete treads on the finishing line in the act of crossing it. Interestingly Bolt did the same thing when he won the World Championships (in a world record time of 9.58 seconds) in Daegu in 2009.

Now, no doubt a lot of the ladies will have enjoyed watching Usain Bolt run around in his close-fitting shorts, and there's no doubt that one of the joys of the Olympics is seeing the remarkable feats that the human body is capable of when trained specifically for certain events, however strange and esoteric those events might seem. Or, to put it another way, gawping at the startling lycra-clad loveliness on display by your chosen gender or genders. And it's not just the spectators; by all accounts the athletes are jumping each other at every opportunity as well, and why not.

Clearly the lovely Victoria Pendleton and the equally lovely Jessica Ennis (despite apparently being a big fat heifer) are high on most straight men's lists, as are the beach volleyballists in a much more general sense (i.e. the sense of not actually knowing any of the individuals' names). A couple of my personal favourites are Croatian high jumper and freaky lanky bug-eyed sexy space alien Blanka Vlašić, who sadly had to make a late withdrawal from the 2012 Games owing to injury, and toothy American sprinter Allyson Felix. Now I know what you're going to say: Felix is one of those tedious American sporting God-botherers, and probably (like her team-mate Lolo Jones) on some kind of tiresome virginity kick, so forget it. To which I reply along the same lines as the Vicomte de Valmont in Dangerous Liaisons:

You see, I have no intention of breaking down her prejudices. I want her to believe in God and virtue and the sanctity of marriage, and still not be able to stop herself. I want the excitement of watching her betray everything that's most important to her. Surely you understand that.

You probably found that quite disturbing, so let's move on. What you'll no doubt find even more disturbing though, as I did, is the shocking revelation that the whole London Olympics opening ceremony, which you thought was nothing more sinister than a sometimes lumpy but overall less embarrassing than we'd all feared cheesy showbiz spectacle, was in fact some kind of huge ritualised Satanic invocation designed to conjure up some sort of invasion of blood-sucking Illuminati space lizards. Or something like that, anyway, if you can make sense of David Icke's ramblings. Also, as if that were not plainly and self-evidently obvious enough, there are giant outlines of heraldic creatures literally carved into the landscape around London, hidden from view only through the flimsy device of the outlines being thinly disguised as roads, rivers and the like, and no doubt by some freaky Matrix-esque reptilian mind-control shit.

Lastly, speaking of the high jump, as I was a moment ago, reminds me that I was watching this fascinating video of the high jump event at the 1968 Olympics in Mexico City earlier, 1968 being the year that Dick Fosbury revolutionised the sport by introducing the "Fosbury flop" to major athletics competition. It's fascinating to look back at a time not that long ago when everyone except Fosbury was doing the event in what seems like a horribly archaic and inefficient way, invariably using the straddle technique, like this. Despite it looking horrendous (no doubt partly due to its unfamiliarity), and the undoubted higher physical efficiency of the Fosbury flop (which allows the athlete's centre of gravity to pass under the bar rather than having to be hauled over it), it's mildly surprising that the world records using the two techniques are only ten centimetres apart, Javier Sotomayor's 2.45 metres with the flop beating Vladimir Yashchenko's 2.35 metres with the straddle.