if you notice this notice you will notice that this notice is not worth noticing

When we moved into our house in June 2010 one of the things my late predecessor warned us about was not to leave any vehicles parked on the pavement out at the front of the house, in contravention of the double-yellow markings. Not such a problem for us as we've got a driveway which can accommodate up to three cars, but it's occasionally tempting for visitors who don't want to go and park up round the corner for some reason - heavy stuff to load and/or unload, general laziness, that sort of thing. Leave your car there for a NANOSECOND, we were warned, and the long arm of the law will display its great vengeance and furious anger; and you will know their name is Gwent Police when they lay their vengeance upon thee.

Turns out that while this may have been true in the heady days of the mid-to-late-noughties, it isn't true any more. I don't want to get all EVIL TORIES WITH THEIR CUTS AND AUSTERITY AND THAT on your ass, but it is nonetheless true that most forces have seen numbers cut and, as much as I'd like police priorities to be primarily focused on my personal comfort and convenience and more generally being the shepherd protecting my righteous ass in the valley of darkness, that shit ain't the truth. And one aspect of the cuts has been the general slackening-off of illegal parkers getting their collar felt.

Our little section of pavement is a bit of a honeypot for the illegal parker, as it happens, as there is a handy rank of shops over the road (Spar, kebab shop, post office, chemist, betting shop) with limited parking in front of them. So there's an understandable temptation for people to just pull up on the kerb, dash across the road, pick up a large doner and chips and then be off again. And in a sense I don't mind that, as long as parkers display a minimal level of sense and park in front of one of the many generous sections of wall that are provided (picture courtesy of Google StreetView, just in case that wasn't obvious).

It's really only when people ignore the wall sections and park across the end of our drive that annoyance ensues. I have on a couple of occasions arrived back from picking up the girls from school/nursery/childcare only to find a car abandoned across our drive with freely available sections of wall on either side.

hey @SolusCoaches, is YJ04NGE still one of yours? https://t.co/hfvpCSbUGB because some terrible arsehole was driving it yesterday.

— Dave Thomas (@electrichalibut) 11 March 2016

Hazel has experienced the same thing and as she's more prone to getting all irate and SOMETHING MUST BE DONE about these things she suggested getting a sign made that we could put on our gatepost. So she and her sister Paula cooked up some wording and Paula got a sign made on a classy bit of Welsh slate as a birthday present. That was in May but I've only just got round to putting it up.

I should reiterate at this point that I had nothing to do with the wording other than auditing the spelling (at Paula's request). My personal view is that the words "Polite Notice" on a notice of this sort are either a) redundant, since it's obvious, or more likely b) passive-aggressive bullshit, since it's not really polite at all. But I really didn't feel that I cared enough to get involved. Anyway, the sign is up now, so we'll see whether people oblivious enough to park across a clearly visible driveway are inclined to stop and read a sign and modify their behaviour based on its wording. Personally I have my doubts.

Ironically, we've had fewer problems with inconsiderate idiots just lately, as the pavement space by our front wall has been partially occupied for the last three weeks or so by a small silver Nissan hatchback. It's parked quite neatly in front of the wall, so it's not inconveniencing us in terms of being able to get in and out, and it's positioned in such a way as to make it impossible to just swing onto the pavement and end up blocking our drive; you'd have to swing onto the bit of pavement in front of the house next door and then reverse back. Clearly people aren't going to do that, since the whole point of the manoeuvre is to park and abandon the car as quickly as possible with minimal repositioning.

But, on the other hand, it's clearly been abandoned, and sooner or later someone's going to set fire to it or break in and start sleeping in it. The reason it's no longer being driven becomes clear if you use the DVLA's vehicle enquiry service to look up its tax and MOT status: while it's taxed until the beginning of September, it doesn't have a current MOT. And sure enough if you have a sneaky look inside there is even an MOT certificate refusal printout on the passenger seat, which reveals some minor-sounding electrical issues and some more serious-sounding exhaust and emissions problems as the reason for failure.

In keeping with my low-ish level of concern about the situation I've been indulging in some gentle low-level trolling of Gwent Police on Twitter, just to try to prompt them to take an interest. I suspect that when I finally decide I'd like it towed away I may have to ring up and register some sort of official request, though.

This car parked outside our house for a couple of days now. Bonnet slightly open, looks abandoned. @gwentpolice pic.twitter.com/ZFtbLDzqkr

— Dave Thomas (@electrichalibut) 6 July 2016

celebrity fantasy edificylikey of the day

I could not begin to guess how many times my elder daughter has watched Frozen, but it's a lot. I myself have seen significant chunks of it on a number of occasions, though I've never watched it all the way through. Oddly, I am much more familiar with the second half of the film, as I generally seem to wander in around the time Elsa (or, to put it another way, Idina Menzel) is belting out the film's signature song, Let It Go. This does mean I generally catch the bit where Anna says to Kristoff "I want you to take me up the North Mountain" and I have to suppress a snigger.

As if the vocal gymnastics of the song didn't give her enough to do, Elsa also conjures up a spectacular crystalline ice palace out of thin air while she's singing. Well, she is magic, after all. It was only on the most recent viewing of the scene that it occurred to me what it reminded me of: the similarly spectacular crystal palace that Dr. Manhattan builds during his exile on Mars in Watchmen.

As always, I am far from the first person to make this connection, and, as this Slate article points out, there are a number of plot parallels as well: key character with extraordinary powers that they are obliged to rein in to be acceptable to society, voluntarily exiling themselves and giving those powers free rein. Dr. Manhattan doesn't sing, though.

cobblers!

Among the huge collection of books that we read with Nia and Alys are a number that either Hazel or I had as children. Now there's a bit of a vetting and weeding-out process that these things have to go through before we approve them for consumption by our own kids, mainly to ensure that they aren't terrifyingly bloodthirsty religious tracts, unspeakably violent in some other way, or over the edge in terms of adhering to outdated sexist stereotype: you know, passive pretty princess in pink awaiting rescue by some muscular square-jawed prince in tights brandishing a MASSIVE SWORD in some eye-wateringly Freudian way.

I don't want to give you the impression that our childhood reading material was a horrendous parade of rape and disembowelment, and most of the books are fine. Which isn't to say that some of the "classic" fairy stories aren't a bit weird, though. There's the health and safety implications of uncontrolled eating of porridge off the pavement, for example, but consider also the hoary old tale of The Elves and the Shoemaker. What's going on there then? I mean, I get the basic thrust of the story, but why were the elves compelled to come in and do all that hard work in the first place? The shoemaker and his wife are basically a nice couple and they reward them in the end, at which point they skip gaily off never to be seen again, but I don't think we're meant to infer that they were doing all the cobbling in the expectation of reward. There's some back-story there that we're not privy to, I think.

Clearly the reason we're not given the elves' back-story in our Ladybird edition is that the authors and illustrators (whoever they were) were too busy shoehorning in a load of lascivious subtext. Take a look at the shoemaker and his wife.

He's a wizened little goblin of a bloke with a luxuriant white moustache, while she's clearly much younger and a bit on the buxom side. No wonder they're practically reduced to penury - he's got no time, still less inclination, to be spending hours hammering shoe-leather together when he could be upstairs hammering her nubile young flesh.

Even the title of the book is a smutty joke in innocent disguise. The Elves And The Shoemaker? Look at the initials: TEATS. Utter filth.

tanks for the memory

Here's one for the "coincidence?? OR IS IT??!?!!!? yes; yes it is" files - last night while I was cooking dinner I caught the second half of what turned out to be a repeat showing of an episode of Underground Britain on Channel 5. Quite interesting as it included presenter Rob Bell visiting the old Inchindown fuel storage facility near the Cromarty Firth, one of those things that's big enough to be measured in football pitches, as part of the ascending London bus/football pitch/Wales alternative chummy slightly patronising man-in-the-street SI scale of size comparison units.

One of the things that people inevitably do in large enclosed spaces is a bit of the old shouting, just to test out the echo and reverberation properties of the space. In an attempt to apply a bit of a sciencey gloss to this the programme wheeled in Trevor Cox, a physicist specialising in acoustics, who, it turned out, had made use of the space in early 2014 to set a world record for the longest-lasting reverberation. This Herald Scotland article gives a bit more detail, although strangely it does refer to him as "Steven Cox" throughout.

So then this morning I was listening to Radio 4 on the way to work, as I usually do, and Jim al-Khalili's The Life Scientific came on. Jim's guest? None other than Trevor Ruddy Cox, acoustic physics guy and possessor of the world record for longest reverberation. It fair makes you think: maybe there really is a divinity that shapes our ends, rough-hew them how we will. Oh all right, no it doesn't.

regarding Henrik

Among the ludicrous number of records set by the thrilling last round of the Open Championship at Royal Troon today, and Henrik Stenson's victory - lowest aggregate score (264) in major championship history, equal-lowest score in relation to par in major championship history, first Swedish player to win a men's major - the ones that resonate most closely with the particular obsessions of this blog are the two rounds of 63 that bookended the tournament. Not only were they made by the two men (Mickelson and Stenson) who contended for the title, but they illustrated perfectly the two ways in which 63s can be made. Stenson's was the textbook grandstand finish, winnng in style with a 15-foot birdie putt on the 18th to become only the second man after Johnny Miller in 1973 (the very first 63 of all) to shoot 63 in the last round of a major to win. Mickelson, on the other hand, had a putt for a 62 which looked to be in all the way until it lipped out at the last moment, something that Johnny Miller, Nick Price and Tiger Woods (and possibly others) can sympathise with.

Stenson's round therefore becomes the seventh of the 29 to deliver a win, while, inevitably, Mickelson's becomes the 22nd that didn't - he becomes the sixth player to shoot one and finish runner-up. This year's Open also becomes the fourth major championship to include two separate rounds of 63, after the 1980 US Open, the 1993 Open and the 1995 USPGA.

Player	Tournament	Year	Round	Result	Winner
Johnny Miller	US Open	1973	final	WON	Johnny Miller
Bruce Crampton	USPGA	1975	second	2nd	Jack Nicklaus
Mark Hayes	Open	1977	second	tied 9th	Tom Watson
Jack Nicklaus	US Open	1980	first	WON	Jack Nicklaus
Tom Weiskopf	US Open	1980	first	37th	Jack Nicklaus
Isao Aoki	Open	1980	third	tied 12th	Tom Watson
Raymond Floyd	USPGA	1982	first	WON	Raymond Floyd
Gary Player	USPGA	1984	second	tied 2nd	Lee Trevino
Nick Price	Masters	1986	third	5th	Jack Nicklaus
Greg Norman	Open	1986	second	WON	Greg Norman
Paul Broadhurst	Open	1990	third	tied 12th	Nick Faldo
Jodie Mudd	Open	1991	final	tied 5th	Ian Baker-Finch
Nick Faldo	Open	1993	second	2nd	Greg Norman
Payne Stewart	Open	1993	final	12th	Greg Norman
Vijay Singh	USPGA	1993	second	4th	Paul Azinger
Michael Bradley	USPGA	1995	first	tied 54th	Steve Elkington
Brad Faxon	USPGA	1995	final	5th	Steve Elkington
Greg Norman	Masters	1996	first	2nd	Nick Faldo
Jose Maria Olazabal	USPGA	2000	third	tied 4th	Tiger Woods
Mark O’Meara	USPGA	2001	second	tied 22nd	David Toms
Vijay Singh	US Open	2003	second	tied 20th	Jim Furyk
Thomas Bjorn	USPGA	2005	third	tied 2nd	Phil Mickelson
Tiger Woods	USPGA	2007	second	WON	Tiger Woods
Rory McIlroy	Open	2010	first	tied 3rd	Louis Oosthuizen
Steve Stricker	USPGA	2011	first	tied 12th	Keegan Bradley
Jason Dufner	USPGA	2013	second	WON	Jason Dufner
Hiroshi Iwata	USPGA	2015	second	tied 21st	Jason Day
Phil Mickelson	Open	2016	first	2nd	Henrik Stenson
Henrik Stenson	Open	2016	final	WON	Henrik Stenson

No mention of this year's Open will ever be complete without comparing the Mickelson/Stenson duel to the Watson/Nicklaus Duel In The Sun at Turnberry in 1977. I agonised about whether I should list that as the first Open I remember seeing when I was constructing this list, as I have a definite memory of seeing it, and the climactic bit on the 18th green (and Tom Watson's spectacular 1970s check slacks) in particular, as a small boy, but I couldn't say with absolute certainty that it was live, or reasonably near-live. I'm pretty sure it was, and it's not conclusively ruled out by our having been out of the country (as we were for the 1975, 1976 and 1979 Opens), but I decided I couldn't be sure enough to include it, so I went for 1981, which I was sure about, instead. Possible nicknames for this and future head-to-head duels at Open Championships are below, and can be tailored to the prevailing weather conditions as appropriate:

• the Battle In The Breeze
• the Fracas In The Fog
• the Melee In The Mist
• the Scrap In The Squall
• the Disagreement In The Drizzle
• the War In The Warmth

things can only get batter

Haven't done a recipe for a while, and those I have done in the last couple of years seem to have been mostly desserts. So here's a ridiculously simple one very much in the vein of the yogurt flatbread one from back in 2013, but if anything even more quick and idiot-proof. I got the original idea from a recipe printed on one of the paper inserts with one of our periodic organic vegetable boxes from Riverford, but plenty of versions are available on the internet, all pretty much the same.

Farinata

You will need:

Chickpea flour (50g)
Warm water (150ml)
Olive oil (a teaspoon or so)
Salt and pepper

Those quantities will make a generous one-person pancake; scale up as required. Put the water in a bowl, grind the salt and pepper into it, dump the flour in, whisk it about a bit, add the oil (you could add other flavourings at this point if you want, some herbs maybe), whisk some more. Most recipes say to then leave it for a couple of hours, but mine got barely 20 minutes and didn't seem any the worse for that. Heat some olive oil in a pan, pour the batter in, leave it for a couple of minutes and then loosen it up with a spatula. Once it's acquired some colour on the bottom slide it out onto something ovenproof (baking tray, pizza stone, etc., or just leave it in the pan if you've got a posh ovenproof skillet) and stick it in the oven for 10-15 minutes.

 

the bloggers read and the readers blog

Couple of follow-ups to previous posts:

I was struck by an arresting phrase on page 132 of The Piano Teacher, during one of Erika's trips to the Prater park in Vienna to do a bit of discreet voyeurism.

It's the last sentence there, specifically the bit that says "the whores hustle and the hustlers whore". It took me a minute or two to remember that this is the title of a song from PJ Harvey's 2001 Mercury Prize-winning album Stories From The City, Stories From The Sea.

I'd assume that it'd be too much of a coincidence for the song title not to have been lifted from the book, and the book's themes of sexual disgust are quite Harvey-esque, so I think it's quite plausible she'd have read it. Stories From The City, Stories From The Sea is the glossiest and most commercial album she's ever released, but it's all relative, so don't go expecting S Club 7 or anything. And it's great, but probably not as good as the really stark stuff like this rendition of White Chalk from 2007.

Secondly, you'll remember my attempts to date a world map that my sister had used as some quirky gift-wrapping paper - well, this flowchart from the excellent xkcd webcomic seeks to provide a step-by-step method for doing the same job. I haven't exhaustively tested it, but I think my map takes you down the route that ends at the "PERSIA OR IRAN?" box and therefore ends up with a date of 1935-1940. Since I'd calculated 1932-1936, and if we charitably assume that we're both right, that narrows down the date of my map still further to 1935-1936.

the last book I read

The Piano Teacher by Elfriede Jelinek.

Erika Kohut is the piano teacher of the book's title, tutoring and mentoring a group of students at the Vienna Conservatory. After a hard day bashing the ivories she heads home to the apartment she shares with her mother, and later in the evening to the bed she shares with her mother. Yes, there's something a bit rum going on here, as we discover in the opening pages where Erika buys herself a nice dress and goes home and has a proper knock-down hair-pulling fist-fight with Mother about profligate spending and having improper thoughts about men.

So we can see that Mother is controlling Erika's life to a slightly unhealthy degree. We learn that there was a Father, for a while, but he got packed off to a mental asylum (which was probably a relief, to be honest) and subsequently died (ditto, I shouldn't wonder). We also learn that one of Erika's outlets for asserting some degree of control over her own actions and her own body is self-harm, some of it of a disturbingly sexual nature. She also roams the streets of Vienna seeking out sex shows to watch, though she seems to derive little pleasure from watching, instead just sitting there primly with her handbag and haughtily ignoring the more usual raincoat-clad clientele.

Erika has a new student, Walter Klemmer, who takes a fancy to her despite the gap in their ages (Erika is in in her late thirties). Erika isn't used to male attention, although she has occasionally "known" men, hem hem, in the past. So things take a while to come to the boil, but when they do, and Erika and Walter have a charged encounter in the toilets at the Conservatory, her wilder repressed desires are unleashed, and she writes Walter a letter detailing all the stuff she'd like him to do to her, most of it eye-wateringly slappy and bondage-y. She also increases the riskiness of her voyeuristic behaviour by hanging out in a local park and watching people having sex in the bushes.

Walter is a bit taken aback by all this, to be honest, as he was really after something a bit more vanilla and just fancied a bit of older woman. After a couple of further unsatisfactory encounters, Walter decides to get what he originally wanted by going to Erika's apartment, locking Mother in the bedroom, and beating and raping Erika in the living room.

Erika goes to the Conservatory the next day armed with a knife and some vague idea of stabbing Walter, but, after watching him laughing and flirting with some female students for a while, she instead stabs herself in the shoulder and returns home. We're invited to infer that Erika will just return home and resume her more repressed existence, once she's put some Savlon and a plaster on that shoulder wound, anyway.

So it's the basic boy meets girl, girl unveils brutal and deranged sex manifesto, girl loses boy, boy rapes girl, girl stabs herself kind of story we've all heard a thousand times before. Not exactly a laugh-a-minute, as you can imagine, though it has a sort of savage energy that propels you along. As with some earlier books in this series it's hard to find a "way in" to any of the characters, since they're all damaged and disturbed to various degrees. It's quite bracing to read something so wilfully spiky and clearly uninterested in giving the reader an easy time, though - in that respect I was reminded a bit of Notice which also contains some queasy scenes of sexual violence.

The Piano Teacher is probably best known for its 2001 film adaptation featuring a much-garlanded performance from Isabelle Huppert as Erika. I haven't seen it, but it sounds like a pretty faithful rendering of the book. Elfriede Jelinek won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2004, not without some controversy, with one of the judges resigning and issuing a statement describing Jelinek's work as "whining, unenjoyable public pornography", which is probably a bit harsh. Links to other Nobel laureates can be found here.

The Piano Teacher also pops up on various lists of "best foreign novels", including (at number 40) this one. Of the 100 novels I've listed there I've read, if my counting is correct, thirteen. Other list-nerdery: although Jelinek is Austrian, this book doesn't yield anything to add to the foreign-language list here since "Austrian" isn't a language except as a dialect of German, which I've already bagged.

it's all good fun until someone loses an EU

So, Brexit, then. And while it's awfully tempting to dismiss the 52% of the UK population who voted to leave the European Union as just a rabble of dimwitted racists, and I'm not saying there isn't a good deal of truth in that, it might just be more productive to try to work out what the hell went wrong.

A few things are obvious: no-one really thought there was an economic case to be made for leaving, so no-one really seriously bothered trying to make one. So basically there was just a lot of dog-whistling around the subject of immigration, which has turned into an elephant in the room totally out of proportion with its actual importance (since the British public are as utterly wrong about the immigration figures and impact as they are about just about any other subject you could care to mention). So when people urge political parties to really tackle immigration, what they really mean is address people's largely imaginary concerns about it and their mistaken perception of its impact. This is actually quite hard to do without just pointing out to people that they are massive racists, which as a vote-winning strategy is not great.

Equally obvious is that, of the major Leave campaign figureheads, Boris Johnson is a brazen and ruthless political opportunist who was campaigning for a Remain vote as recently as February 2016, and moreover as a European correspondent in the 1990s was personally responsible for a whole stream of the sort of barmy Eurocrat banana-straightening stories that fuelled UK Euroscepticism in the first place. Nigel Farage, by contrast, is a proper old-school fascist of the type that always seem hilarious and buffoonish right up until the point where they acquire power and it becomes clear they weren't joking after all. Like that comical Charlie Chaplin lookalike guy in Germany in the 1930s. I mean, who remembers him now?

A gazillion words have already been written bemoaning the barking irrationality of the Leave vote, and in particular how places like Ebbw Vale were persuaded to cast a vote profoundly in opposition to their own best interests, so it might be more profitable to explore a couple of wider (but still related) issues, like, for instance: who can we blame? I have a couple of suggestions.

Firstly, and most obviously, David Cameron. I'm inclined to blame Cameron for a lot of things, as you know, but this referendum really is his fault, since he promised it back in 2013 as a sop to the truculent faction of borderline Nazis in his own party who he feared would otherwise defect to UKIP in large numbers.

But, you might say, what's wrong with having a referendum? This is democracy in its purest form! Anyone arguing against having a referendum must basically HATE DEMOCRACY. This is quite difficult to argue against, since the counter-argument basically boils down to: people are idiots. It's quite salutary to remember why parliamentary democracy exists: because it's absurdly impractical to canvass everyone's opinion on any particular subject (modern technology means it's easier than it's ever been, but it's still absurdly slow and difficult) and it's desirable to bundle up that decision-making capacity - region by region, say - into a single elected representative whose job it quite literally is to be engaged and informed on the topics that decisions might need to be made about, while the people who elected him or her get on with their day jobs amid their usual fug of ignorance.

I'll tell you who else is to blame, though: the media. The BBC, for one, has come in for some criticism in the past for, as this Huffington Post article puts it, "sacrificing objectivity for impartiality", or, in other words, promoting some bullshit idea of "balance" in a debate by presenting both sides and being reluctant to take a position on how those sides align with reality. Both of those linked articles were about climate change, but the same charge can be levelled at the BBC's (and other broadcasters') coverage of the referendum. If there are two sides, and one side is peddling easily-debunked lies and nonsense, it might actually do the viewing public a service if the liars were held to account. To put it another way, the current model only really works when politicians occupy a position somewhere within the bounds of what you might call "reasonableness" or at least can be trusted (most of the time) to be arguing in good faith - once you get a statistical outlier like Farage or Johnson (or Donald Trump, to pick an example from elsewhere) who will just brazenly lie, and, if challenged, shift their position and lie again, the system can't really cope. And treating people like Farage like any other politician legitimises and normalises his political views - look at how often he gets invited onto Question Time, say. I haven't seen Nick Griffin get invited back, and pretty much the only difference between them is that Farage looks less like a thug and has a posh voice.

On that subject, it's interesting to reflect how much we as a nation are still unconsciously in thrall to archaic notions of class, and more specifically notions of what a member of the ruling class looks and sounds like. Take the currently-beleaguered Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, for instance. Now I'm certainly not going to claim him as the potential saviour of humanity, but my experience is that most people, even those not inclined to vote Labour, think that he is clearly a man of principle, honesty and decency who talks a lot of good and compassionate sense on issues regarding social justice. However, ask those people whether they can see him as Prime Minister and they'll probably laugh and say: well, no, of course not. But why not? Because, I put it to you, that's not what members of the ruling class look like. Rather than looking like a scruffy and slightly humourless geography teacher, the ruling classes wear sharp suits, have braying penetrating posh voices and have arrived at the top of the political ladder without acquiring any messy baggage along the way by ever having expressed any sort of principled view or taken a stance that might now be inconvenient.

Furthermore the ruling classes have their debating skills honed at debating societies at Oxford and Cambridge where they become well-practised not only in arguing for causes they have no belief in (equally handy for a career in the legal profession if the political thing doesn't work out), but also in the art of the meaningless sound-bite, the swift and pithy put-down, and the sort of wordless braying and hooting that will stand them in good stead in the House of Commons. So, for instance, despite being a monumental failure as a Chancellor even by his own self-imposed measures, George Osborne still gets a free pass as a "serious" politician because he's a toff who can afford some nice suits, as well as, as some may have alleged, a boatload of cocaine. Similarly, Tony Blair, despite not being a Tory, looked the part, while Ed Miliband, while he had the suits, talked a bit funny and once made a bit of a hash of eating a sandwich, so clearly he wasn't quite the thing.

Now it's certainly true that, as well as not having much support among the Parliamentary Labour Party, Corbyn's approval figures with the general public aren't great either. But one thing we know after the referendum is that Joe and Josephine Public are easily swayed by bullshit tabloid stories, and if there's one person the tabloids love writing bullshit stories about, it's Jeremy Corbyn.

I think, as it happens, that it's likely he'll have to go, but I'm troubled by the whole business as a natural Labour voter for several reasons. Firstly I don't see an obvious successor, secondly I wonder how the Labour party membership have got so out of step with the PLP and the public (or vice versa, depending how you look at it), and thirdly the tabloid venom, which is just an aspect of the wider problem I've described above, can't be a healthy thing in the 21st century. But then again neither can a vote to leave the EU. So, in summary, fuck you, Britain.

Actually, hang on, lots of Brexit- and Corbexit-bemoaning there without any proposals for solutions. So, briefly, here's a couple of ideas:

• Stop legitimising racism by saying either that a large tranche of the Leave vote wasn't motivated by it or that lots of people have "legitimate concerns" over immigration. No they don't, they just hate brown people. Tiptoe round the issue and you are part of the problem.
• Electoral reform. If, as looks possible, the Labour party splits into left and centre-right factions and the LibDems experience an uptick in popularity as a result of their commendably bold anti-Brexit stance, then we're going to be in the sort of multi-party environment we haven't been in since forever. Which is all great, but for the first-past-the-post system which will ensure massive Conservative majorities forever under those circumstances, particularly if the Scots take themselves out of the picture by leaving the Union after a second referendum. Some sort of proportional representation system whereby every vote counts might go some way towards hauling general election voter turnout upwards towards the 70-odd percent that the referendum got. 
• Stop having referendums, as they're clearly a terrible idea, particularly if most voting happens under the first-past-the-post system, and therefore encourages the view that people can register a "protest" vote (perhaps as part of a general unfocused desire to register dissatisfaction with the political process) without it having any consequences, as some people seem to have done here.
• Have a look at the House of Commons. Yes, tradition, heritage, all that bullshit, but it's toe-curlingly embarrassing to watch the general school-playground quality of the exchanges in there. If some of the I-refer-the-right-honourable-gentleman-to-the-answer-I-gave-some-moments-ago bullshit has to be swept away in order for Joe Public to feel involved in the policy-making process, then so be it. Alternatively, require ministers to regularly appear before some sort of select committee for some much more forensic questioning, get some non-political subject matter experts in to grill the hell out of them, and make sure it's televised.

the last book I read

Home by Marilynne Robinson.

The "home" in question is the Gilead, Iowa home of Robert Boughton, former Presbyterian minister. Formerly the home of his wife and eight children (four boys, four girls) as well, but times change and stuff happens - his wife died and the children all drifted off into their own lives.

A bit of orientation with regard to dates - the year when these events take place is never explicitly stated in the book, but references to the unrest in Montgomery place the date somewhere between 1955 and 1957.

But, now, here is daughter Glory, the youngest child, back to stay for an unspecified length of time after the breakdown of her lengthy engagement to a fiancé who eventually turned out to be married to someone else, and moreover not especially keen on paying back all the money Glory had given him. So, chastened, here she is back for a while, which basically means cooking and cleaning and tending to Dad rather than kicking back on the porch with a mint julep.

Hot on Glory's heels, and more surprisingly to everyone, comes her brother Jack, the black sheep of the family, fleeing some unspecified disaster in his own life. Jack's history includes a troublesome childhood, getting a local girl pregnant and then leaving his family to pick up the pieces when the baby died, alcoholism and disappearing off the radar for years at a time. Just to illustrate the point, he arrives hungover and with just the clothes on his back, his suitcase having been lost in some ill-remembered incident.

Jack and Glory and their father fall into a domestic routine, though relations between Jack and his father are polite but awkward at first. Of course, Gilead being a small town, word gets around, and this creates some tension, since Jack's name is mud in certain quarters, not least with Reverend Ames, Robert Boughton's old friend, ministerial opposite number (Congregationalist vs. Presbyterian, whatever the difference is) and theological sparring partner. No baying mob arrives at the house with pitchforks - it isn't really that sort of book - but there are a few tense dinners at the house with Reverend Ames in attendance and a couple of pointed theological discussions during which Jack (a well-educated and Bible-literate guy despite his dissolute ways) tries to tease out an answer to the mystery of his own nature. Was he born bad? Has God cursed him in some way? Boughton sr. struggles with similar questions: is Jack the way Jack is because of some deficiency in parental love? If so, how come the other seven children didn't turn out the same way?

Jack tries to ingratiate himself with Reverend Ames by attending church, but after receiving a fire-and-brimstone sermon that he feels is specifically directed at him he falls off the wagon somewhat and is discovered in a pitiful state in the garage by Glory, who helps him clean up and make himself respectable.

Jack's disintegration isn't Glory's only problem, though, as Reverend Boughton's health is starting to fail. This is a problem for Jack, too, as he has a desire to make his peace with his father in some ill-defined way before either his father dies or Jack's desire to disappear and be away from responsibility and scrutiny gets the better of him, as he's self-aware enough to know that it eventually will. But what can Jack say? That he's found Jesus and repented of his evil ways? That would be a lie, but is the sin of lying outweighed by the comfort it would bring his father? But then, if he did that, would his father believe him anyway?

Inevitably, by the time Jack has agonised over what to say, his father has deteriorated to the point where he only intermittently recognises who Jack is. Nonetheless Jack says his piece, and, as the other siblings are summoned to oversee what it's assumed will be their father's last few days, Jack slips quietly away.

There is an unexpected coda: after Jack has departed and before the other siblings arrive Glory gets a visit from Della, Jack's wife from St. Louis and the woman he has been writing to intermittently since arriving at the Boughton house, presumably to explain and/or apologise for whatever misdemeanour led to him setting out on the road in the first place. It turns out that not only is Della black (and hence very ill-at-ease in rural Iowa) but that she and Jack have a son together. Once she's discovered that Jack has gone, Della departs, with Glory promising to pass on any communication.

As you can see, it's not a thrill-a-minute action-fest, any more than it is a slapstick laugh riot. Obviously it's not intended to be either of these things, though, and it is what it is, a slow, meditative character-driven story in which stuff does happen, but low-key stuff of the kind that actually happened to people in 1950s Iowa, i.e. not involving transsexual zombie Hitler or exploding spaceships.

What it also is is a book suffused with religion - Jack himself is portrayed as an unbeliever, but even he seems to have a yearning for the kind of meaning (however illusory) that religion provides to some of its adherents. And of course Boughton sr. and Ames are well into the old theology, exchanging cherry-picked Bible quotes with each other to support some arcane doctrinal point or other. All of which sounds like it ought to be supremely irritating to the atheist reader, but it isn't, because these are wholly convincing characters. Many characters in many books do things and hold views I disagree with or disapprove of, after all, and if I insisted on only reading books populated by versions of myself it would be very dull indeed. So my enjoyment of Home is (obviously) a testament to Robinson's skill as a writer - just to illustrate this point, when she engages in a more informal discussion of science and religion about a third of the way into this longish Paris Review interview it certainly does stray into supremely irritating territory fairly quickly.

It's not just about old men quoting the Bible at each other, though: it's about people's ambiguous relationship with ideas like "home" and "family" - simultaneously yearning to be there but feeling stifled when you are there, for instance. It's about the mysteriousness of other people's character and motivations, and even the mysteriousness of one's own. It's about what remains unspoken as much as what is spoken - Jack clearly decides early on that he can never tell his father that he's married to a black woman, for instance.

The key other thing to say is that this is a sort of companion to Robinson's hugely successful and award-laden 2004 novel Gilead, portraying essentially the same set of events from a different point of view (Gilead was a series of letters from Ames to his young son). It's not a sequel, and Robinson's view is that the books can be read in any order you like. As this New York Times review puts it, the two books

do not coexist in a relation of chronological sequence or thematic priority, but instead turn together like enmeshed gears impelling a single narrative machine

- a bit like the first three books of the Alexandria Quartet, in other words. I suppose it's a measure of how much I enjoyed Home that I'll be seeking out Gilead on future book-buying trips (though these are strictly rationed these days). Home itself won the Orange Prize (it's the jollier-sounding Baileys Prize these days) in 2009 - previous winners featured on this blog are Bel Canto (2002) and We Need To Talk About Kevin (2005).

thou shalt not bear false tweetness

Quick follow-up on yesterday's religious conversion thing - as always I am surfing the bleeding edge of the Zeitgeist, as the appearance of this article in the New Yorker on the same day shows. Lawrence Krauss doesn't specifically use the words "Pascal's Wager", but nonetheless makes the point that people's expectations of deathbed recantations from atheists are based on the assumption that the immediacy of their death makes the terms of the wager suddenly seem more attractive. Which is patently ridiculous, of course, since utter nonsense doesn't stop being utter nonsense just because you happen to be facing up to imminent death.

The questions directed at Richard Dawkins after his recent minor stroke and gradual recovery show a similar sort of thinking, mixed with a bit of the "no atheists in foxholes" gambit, i.e. the assumption that atheists do believe in God really, they just affect not to because they're a bit pissed off about having to go to church when they were kids, or not getting that pony they prayed for, or being repeatedly brutally raped by a parish priest, or some such petty insignificant nonsense.

The accusations by Dawkins' supporters (or, at least, fellow non-believers) that the Church of England were "trolling" him by publicly offering up a prayer for his speedy recovery seem to me to exhibit the same sort of bad faith (no pun intended) assumption in the other direction, though. Yes, obviously the C of E spokespeople will be aware that Dawkins would scoff at the notion of there being someone to offer up a prayer to (as would I), but the point is that the people offering up the prayer believe in its efficacy (well, probably), so let's all just view it as a nice and conciliatory gesture and stop being arseholes for five minutes.

blessed are the carpet-shitters

It's a bit of a trope in the atheist movement to share stories of how you, the free-thinking rational atheist person, came to throw off the shackles of the religion you were brought up in and embrace evidence and all that good stuff. And I'm certainly not here to knock that, since for all that non-belief has come a long way lately it's still fighting against the dominant cultural paradigm, which is to at least pay lip service to the idea of some overseeing deity who made us all, looks out for us, really hates the gays, etc. etc. So the whole solidarity/consciousness-raising thing has considerable value. The Richard Dawkins Foundation, for instance, has a whole page dedicated to converts' stories, and some of them are genuinely inspiring and humbling, particularly to someone like me who never really had much of a journey to make or that many challenges to overcome.

There's an expectation, though, that these conversion stories will all operate in one direction, that direction being from belief to non-belief, and a tendency to scoff at any tales of conversions in the other direction. To be fair, you could certainly argue for some justification for a sceptical attitude towards such stories, given the history of bogus claims of "deathbed conversions" attributed to various historical figures from Thomas Paine to Charles Darwin to Christopher Hitchens, and the rather distasteful affair of Antony Flew, a philosopher and high-profile atheist (well, high-profile in philosophical circles, anyway) who supposedly underwent a conversion to Deism late in life and wrote a book about it - or, rather, a book was written to which his name was prominently attached. As proper rationalists, though, it behooves us not to dismiss these out of hand, since there are undoubtedly people who genuinely do go from a state of non-belief to some sort of belief in some sort of deity, however woolly and ill-defined.

An example popped up on my Twitter feed the other day - that tweet and the ones that follow it give you a flavour of what to expect, but it's worth reading the article that it links to, which is here. Obvious but important things to say: I have no reason to doubt Nicole Cliffe's account of her journey from non-belief to belief, and she herself acknowledges that it happened at a period of some internal personal turmoil. What's fascinating from an atheist perspective is to try to imagine what sort of mental process could have been going on to prompt something like this. It's all too easy to say: well she's clearly had some sort of undiagnosed stroke or something, or GONE FREAKIN' MENTAL in some other way, but if we rule this out, what then? The trouble is that nothing in the article comes even remotely close to explaining something as seemingly (to an atheist, at least) inexplicable as this, something which seems (again, to an atheist) like Tim Robbins standing in that river in the rain for a bit and then voluntarily crawling back up that shitpipe and consenting to be locked in that tiny cell for the rest of his life, and occasionally recreationally bumraped in the showers.

One might also want to ask people who write articles like this: OK then, can you set out in reasonably clear terms what it is you believe, being sure to make a clear distinction between those things you think are actually real, and those which are some sort of metaphor for something which in turn may or may not be real? Read Sarah Perry's essay here, for example, and see if you can suppress your irritation at the inability to distinguish between "story" and "actual thing", nor indeed to grasp the idea that distinguishing between these things might be a useful or desirable thing to do. It's the same sort of thing that Karen Armstrong has parlayed into a whole career of writing books and then talking about them on various media outlets.

But, you might say, as irritating as all this is, these people are not hijacking commercial aircraft and flying them into buildings, they're not throwing gay people off high rooftops, and they're not terrorising already-traumatised women outside abortion clinics, so where's the harm? And I'd mostly agree with you; in general as long as people aren't demanding that their absurd beliefs be used to constrain the actions of others in some way (e.g. by killing them, in the most extreme cases) then I guess you can believe what you like.

It would still be better for the people concerned, though, and to a lesser extent for everyone else, if they didn't believe absurd stuff, just because of the general desirability of what you might call good epistemic hygiene. A sort-of analogy might be: if you don't wash your hands after having a shit, the person you're most likely to make ill is you, so maybe it doesn't matter to others. But there is a good chance you'll make your children ill, if you have them, and a smaller chance of infecting other people. Plus, once you've diverged from good sense, where do you stop? Who's to say that in a few months you won't just be shitting on the floor? What principle tells you that not washing your hands is OK, or even desirable, but shitting on the floor isn't?

I suppose the other aspect is just that I'm more inclined to sympathise with someone clinging to religious thought in, say, Iran, where access to material (books, the internet, other people) that might facilitate an escape from religion is heavily restricted and the consequences of public atheism much more severe, than with people doing so in a liberal western democracy, albeit one where, ridiculously, we still have an unelected head of state and religion remains embedded in our government and legal systems, but nonetheless one where the consequences of "coming out" are generally minimal. There's also this notion that agnosticism as opposed to atheism is the more "sophisticated" position to take, whereas in fact all that does is demonstrate that you know nothing about science or philosophy, in particular the branch relating to how knowledge is acquired.

So, basically, what I'm saying is: this tweedy wishy-washy sort of religious belief may be safe for discussion at your next Church of England coffee morning, but don't let your guard down too far as someone could shit on the carpet at literally any moment.

the last book I read

The Book Of Laughter And Forgetting by Milan Kundera.

Before we go any further here, one should pause to ask: what exactly is a novel? Can it be a made-up story layered on top of and intertwined with actual historical events? Why certainly. Can it have spaceships and entire planets made out of a sort of sentient pink custard? Sure, why not. The entire story told by a dead person? Knock yourself out. A sort of semi-fictionalised travelogue featuring lots of grainy black-and-white photographs of random stuff? Yeah, OK, if you like.

So here is a novel, but it's not necessarily the sort of novel where you can start a summary by saying: there's this guy, Bernard, and he only has fourteen hours to save the Earth! There's only one problem: HE HASN'T GOT A HEAD.

I finally started writing my techno-thriller novel, so far it's going great! pic.twitter.com/dDHTMcnsag

— Pixelated Boat (@pixelatedboat) April 13, 2016

Sometimes you have to start by saying a bit about the structure of the thing. So in this case that means saying: this is a novel made up of seven separate bits, a couple of which overlap and feature common characters, and most of which feature people who are from Kundera's native Czechoslovakia, back when that was a thing. There are some loose themes linking the bits, clues to which are given in the novel's title, but broadly speaking they all revolve around life in Czechoslovakia before and after the Prague Spring and how that made things very difficult for people and forced some of them (Kundera for one) into a life in exile. A potted summary of the seven parts would go something like this

• I: Lost Letters - Mirek travels to the home of his former lover Zdena to retrieve some love letters he sent her more than 20 years previously. He is tailed everywhere in Kafka-esque fashion by the secret police, who eventually arrest him. 
• II: Mother - Karel's mother comes to visit, which is a bit awkward as he's got plans for a threesome featuring him, his wife Marketa and their friend Eva. After a bit of Robin-Askwith-in-Confessions-Of-A-Communist-Dissident stuff featuring near-interruptions from Mum she eventually retires to bed, thus allowing some serious three-way boning to occur, leavened with a bit of existential angst lest anyone start enjoying themselves too much.
• III: The Angels - some fragmented stuff involving two young women trying to make sense of Eugène Ionesco's play Rhinoceros, and also the author himself (or a fictionalised version thereof) in a previous incarnation as a writer of horoscopes.
• IV: Lost Letters - Tamina, a Czech exile, wants to retrieve some old letters to her (now dead) husband that she left in Prague, and attempts to persuade a couple of her new friends (by sleeping with him in the case of the male friend) to travel to Prague to get them for her.
• V: Litost - Krystina, a married woman in her thirties, is in the early stages of an affair with a younger student. Having agreed to come and stay with him (and presumably consummate their relationship at some point during the night), plans are derailed when the student is dragged along to a meeting of poets which runs on well into the night. For this and other reasons Krystina refuses to sleep with him when he eventually returns.
• VI: The Angels - Tamina is mesmerised by a young man who appears one day in the cafe in which she works; she goes on a journey with him which concludes with a boat trip to a mysterious island populated entirely by children. Eventually she tries to escape and, finding herself unable to get back to land by boat, swims for it and drowns.
• VII: The Border - Jan's main concerns are his relationship with his girlfriend Edwige, the occasional liaison with some other random woman, the sickness and imminent death of his friend Passer, and, y'know, the usual existential angst. After an unsatisfactory experience at an orgy run by his friend Barbara, the novel ends with Jan and Edwige wandering along a nudist beach somewhere.

So, as you'll gather from that, some of it is a very literal depiction of the problems caused by the oppressive Communist regime in Czechoslovakia, while some of it is much more allusive. You'll get no insight from me, for instance, on what the episode with Tamina and the children in part VI was meant to convey, other than that it features some slightly queasy sexual episodes that reminded me of similar episodes in Children Of Darkness And Light. And some of the philosophising reminded me of some similar passages in The Unbearable Lightness Of Being, the previous Kundera in this list.

My personal feeling is that TULOB is better, despite TBOLAF being hailed as a work of genius by some, John Updike among them - the more linear narrative makes it easier to grasp what's going on and care about the outcome a bit more. Some of the sexy sexy stuff here is a bit odd, too - there's quite a bit of sex, but much of it is fairly mechanical and joyless, and Kundera has, or appears to have, what you might call a slightly 1970s attitude to topics like male infidelity and rape. But perhaps this is meant to reflect the deadening of emotion associated with constant surveillance and the constant possibility of being dragged off to a show-trial somewhere and never seen again: who knows.

The Book Of Laughter And Forgetting also features a cover image that might be a bit on the vicar-frightening side; previous examples have included G. and The Anatomist. 

that's survey to do it

Nice to see that in addition to the Daily Mail the list of people monitoring this blog for ideas includes BBC Four, who evidently decided to tailor a programme to my exact specifications in a (successful, as it happens) bid to lure me in to watching it.

That programme was A Very British Map: The Ordnance Survey Story, which, as the name suggests, was largely about maps, and as an added bonus contained a short section about triangulation points, and mentioned in passing that some people bag them as a hobby.

A couple of mild criticisms: firstly for perpetuating the idea that paper maps are some sort of quaint anachronism that will eventually be consigned to the dustbin of history - while it's no doubt true that paper map sales have fallen, people will still want and need them for all sorts of good, practical reasons even while they're drooling over their wrist-mounted GPS podules at the same time.

Also, rather bizarrely, the woman doing the narration insisted on pronouncing the name of the organisation as "Ordinance Survey" throughout. Now the respective definitions of "ordnance" and "ordinance" do swim about a bit in my head, if I'm honest, but I do remember pretty reliably that the map guys make use of the word without the "i" in it.

incidental music spot of the day

Your very own Won't Get Fooled Again in the early stages of Channel 5's The Best of Bad TV: The 70s. You can pretty much imagine what featured here, I expect: various dwarves in rubber suits running around bumping into the scenery in old science fiction series, various crappy game shows with hilariously awful prizes, and some sphincter-tightening sexism and racism from comedy classics like The Comedians and The Wheeltappers And Shunters Social Club.

There was also a spot for the public information film Dark Water: pretty creepy, but not a patch on The Finishing Line. A quick scan of this compilation suggests it's not in the list (it was not a Public Information Film in the strict sense) but there is nonetheless some excellent nightmare fuel in there. Here's The Finishing Line, if for some reason you don't fancy sleeping tonight.

and on the third day he blogged again

A couple of religion-related stories in the news around Easter (so a few weeks ago now, but y'know, sue me, I've been busy), occupying spots somewhere near the tragic and comic ends of the spectrum, respectively.

Firstly, David Cameron's at it again with his Easter message: farting all sorts of meaningless soundbites out of his potato-ey face-hole. The co-opting of things that are clearly universal human things, or at least things that most societies that have progressed beyond making crudely-fashioned drinking vessels out of each other's skulls and crudely-fashioned flutes out of each other's femurs have adopted as the best ways to behave, as somehow quintessentially Christian values, is a pretty common one, even while being a) patently ridiculous and b) implicitly making the claim that any other religions that claim them as foundational values are WRONG and have STOLEN THEM from Christianity.

Some of the things that Cameron is claiming LITERALLY DID NOT EXIST until some bunch of ill-educated goat-herds threw the Bible together some time during the first couple of centuries AD are such hilariously anodyne concepts as:

Values of responsibility, hard work, charity, compassion and pride in working for the common good and honouring the social obligations we have to one another, to our families and our communities.

Needless to say things like "hard work" are things that pre-Christian societies like the ancient Egyptians and Greeks knew nothing of, while they were building the pyramids and the Parthenon and that. Interestingly the paragraph above appears to be an almost word-for-word retread of part of a speech he gave in Oxford back in late 2011. I guess once you've got your shtick down there's no point trying to re-work it. Zoe Williams in the Guardian picks all the bullshit apart far better than I've done here.

The other obvious riposte, made more pithily by Stephen Fry here, is that what Christianity considers its foundational values have changed over time - not much "compassion" on show during the crusades, for instance. If you want a modern example, look at attitudes to things like women's rights and homosexuality - things the various churches would have been implacably opposed to back in the day, and would have found wider society broadly in agreement, but since societal attitudes have moved on and become generally more groovy and inclusive those same churches are increasingly desperately hanging onto its coat-tails to try to retain some relevance.

Cameron knows what he's doing, of course: no public statement of this sort will be issued without there being some point to it in terms of keeping the core Conservative voting bloc onside. Cameron's Machiavellian strategist Lynton Crosby will no doubt have run the figures and calculated that there's more value in issuing some vaguely comforting platitudes to the ageing spinsters and apoplectic retired colonels who vote Tory habitually than in saying anything vaguely meaningful to people who care about statements actually making sense, since the stuff-making-sense demographic won't be voting Tory in large numbers anyway.

Secondly, there's this rather bizarre story about the Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby wanting to standardise the date of Easter. Now I actually quite like the rather haphazard appearance of Easter in the calendar, for a number of reasons, one of which is: since I'm exceptionally averse to advance planning I rarely know when Easter is more than a couple of weeks in advance, so the four-day weekend is always a pleasant surprise. But, says the Archbish, people find it confusing, so we should try and have it on the same date every year. As always it's interesting to try and put yourself in the head of someone who, while seemingly able to do normal things like drive a car, operate a bank account and make it to the toilet in time, also believes some hair-raisingly irrational shit, and try to work out what makes them tick.

The obvious criticism of Easter as it stands is: look, this is meant to be the most significant thing in the Christian calendar, and the whole significance of it rests on its being the commemoration of some actual events that actually happened, as ridiculous as they might sound. So surely that would necessitate the festival being on the same day every year? Christmas is on the same day every year, after all. And the current arrangement with the whole business of it being linked to the cycle of the moon is a bit of a DEAD GIVEAWAY of its pagan beginning-of-spring nature-worshipping origins (although it should be said that the whole thing about the conveniently-named pagan goddess Ēostre is fairly thinly-evidenced).

Amusingly, though, the Telegraph article demonstrates that either the Telegraph's reporter or the church authorities themselves haven't grasped the actual nature of the problem, since there's talk of keeping Easter to a Sunday:

Now you can see the point of this, since there's a well-established tradition of having the Good Friday and Easter Monday bank holidays bookending the Easter weekend, and if Easter suddenly starts happening on a Wednesday then there's the whole question of what happens to them. As much as I don't care about imaginary Jewish zombies, I don't want to lose my four-day weekend. And those Lindt bunnies are pretty awesome as well.

The trouble is, of course, if you keep it to a Sunday you aren't fixing the date of Easter at all, you're just introducing a slightly simplified arbitrary rule for calculating the Sunday on which it occurs: the first Sunday in April, say, rather than the first Sunday after the first full moon after the vernal equinox as it currently is. To which the obvious riposte is: why would you bother? And I suppose the obvious answer is: because it keeps the church in the news, and provides at least the illusion of the people in charge being open to change, responding to criticism, moving with the times and all that horseshit.

My advice to the Christian churches is this: either leave things as they are, thereby implicitly acknowledging that your absurd Bronze Age voodoo belief system survives mainly by virtue of how deeply culturally embedded it is, and that actually the last thing you want to do is to make people think too much about what any of it means, or fold up your tents, sneak away into the night, and stop bothering everyone. Or, I suppose, thirdly, produce some proper evidence for the resurrection (and, moreover, that the guy who was resurrected was the Son of God, and, even moreover, that there's this guy called God who totally exists) that ties it to some specific date which we can all then agree hereafter to call Easter. Job done.

meet the new song, same as the old song

As a further tribute to Prince, here's a two-item music list for you: songs which start, do the basic tune for a bit, then have a sort of break-down section where things go a bit wibbly-wobbly for a while about two-thirds of the way through, before cranking back up to the original riff/chorus/whatever for a brief finale, then almost immediately signing off.

• Won't Get Fooled Again by The Who. A song only a year younger than me and still one of the top two or three most viscerally thrilling rock songs ever recorded, this smashes out one last colossal powerchord before a section featuring just the pulsing synth line that runs through the whole song, then gradually winds up Keith Moon to a frenzied drum tattoo that precedes Roger Daltrey's throat-stripping YEEEEAAAHHHH (as featured regularly on CSI:Miami), the brief bit about "meet the new boss, same as the old boss", a few more powerchords, and then thank you and goodnight.
• I Could Never Take The Place Of Your Man by Prince. This has a longer break-down section featuring some nice jazzy guitar-playing which eventually winds back  up to a "one, two, three, four" (well, on repeat listening it's actually "one, two, one, WOOOO") and a quick blast through the song's main riff, and then before you know it it's gone, with just a wisp of guitar feedback hanging on the air.

Both songs were also issued as singles with the break-down section edited out (plus quite a bit more stuff in the case of Won't Get Fooled Again) to bring them both down to about 3½ minutes. In both cases it's the longer version you want.

Here's the raw data, complete with WAV file profiles for both songs: the break-down section in Won't Get Fooled Again runs from about 6:35 to about 7:45, while the longer one in I Could Never Take The Place Of Your Man runs from about 3:45 to about 6:00.