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Time to eat

Hello again. I've been gone for a long time and you folks must be starving, so here's a recipe....

Papayoudilly's Chorizo and Sausage Rice

(serves 3–4)

You will need

3 good quality sausages
3 uncooked chorizo (sausage size)
Large Onion
Some mushrooms
One aubergine
Celery salt (optional)
Cayenne (optional)

For the chicken stock, you will need:

One chicken carcass (roast remains)
I large carrot
4 sticks of celery
I large onion
10 peppercorns
Salt
4 bay leaves
rosemary, sage, marjoram and thyme



I made this with chicken stock. You don't have to. You don't have to do anything. But I think it vastly improved the dish. As always with recipes, if you don't have an ingredient, either forget it or substitute it.

So, first the chicken stock.
Take the remains of a roasted chicken, roughly chop one large carrot, 4 sticks of celery and a large onion. Add 4 bay leaves, a dozen whole black peppers, rosemary, sage, thyme and marjoram and some salt. Add enough water to cover the chicken carcass and simmer for a couple of hours, strain and, er, that's it.

Take three sausages and three chorizo, chop into slices of about 2cm, and fry in a large pan with a little olive oil. Give them a few minutes to start cooking. A fair amount of oil will come out of the chorizo. Dice an aubergine (about 2-3 cm squares) and add, chop a large onion and add, then chop some mushrooms and add. Stir with each addition so that everything has oil on it. If you have celery salt and cayenne pepper, add a pinch or two of each as well.

Cook, stirring occasionally, until sausage pretty much done. Add a mug of basmati rice, stir around and let it absorb the oil and cook for a bit. Then add two mugs of chicken stock and make sure the rice is submerged (if using water rather than stock, add a mug and a half max). Cover and simmer on low heat for about ten minutes (or until rice is cooked).

The Time of India

Highly unusually, Christopher Martin-Jenkins said something both useful and interesting on Test Match Special the other day. If you turn your watch upside down, you get the time in India, unless you are in India, in which case you get the time in the UK.

Minger Schminger

So there we go then. Ming the Merciless elected on a 72% turnout - less than three-quarters seems pretty pathetic for a bunch of so-called political activists (cf: the 92% turnout in the Palestinian elections). I did like the way the result was announced by a man with a mittel-European accent, making the whole event sound as though it was a quarrel in a faraway country between people of whom we know nothing. Chris Huhne may be a fine person with admirable qualities for all I know, but I breathed a sigh of relief when I heard him accepting defeat. On air he comes across as the most boring person on earth, and reminds me of me (aurally, as it were, missus) though also reassuringly not shit-faced in any sense of the word.
Meanwhile...David Mills claims to have received a gift of £350,000 from "Diego" who says he couldn't have sent it to him as he was in prison on suspicion of corruption at the time. The details are too much for me at this time of night (and I've tried, believe me) but Mills says his letter to his accountant was part of an "insane ploy" to get tax advice for an unnamed friend. Tessa maintains an extraordinary level of ignorance about the £350,000 "gift", paying off the huge mortgage a few weeks later etc..Her majesties opposition continue to piss in the wind, or I assume they do as I have no idea idea what they are up to. If they brought back Archer and Aitken at least they could claim some proven expertise in lying and deception with which to taunt the "opposition".

I think David Mills £350,000 gift smells
	like a fetid corpse in the sun
	like cat shit and rancid butter on toast
	like smegma paté
	like roses
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Meanwhile...the red pepper I brough in Sainsburys today had a sticker on it sying "As Seen On TV". Was it a famous vegetable? I ate it.

Hey, Pop Pickers

I have recently been exploring this excellent musical blog thang, Radio Blog Club. Lots of different playlists. You pick a song/artist you like and then see what else someone who has that in their playlist comes up with. Well, something like that anyway. Iggy Pop does the best version of the much-covered Louie, Louie. The Prince Buster original of Enjoy Yourself (click on Seu Jorge Lady Stardust, and it's in that playlist) is sublime, darling - in a different class to the (very good) Specials version, though it seems to have disappeared since last night. There's even a humorous ditty about George Galloway. Lots of good French stuff. All sorts really.

I have just finished Gyles Brandreth's diaries of his time as an MP. Entertaining enough for me to get through all 500 pages, and as the years cover 1991 to 1997 it's a bit like reading the humorous recollections of someone in Hitler's bunker - it's ok to laugh as you know they, all the bad guys, are going to get it in the end. Happy ending aside, I only wish to bring two bits to your attention - both of a sexual nature.
In a footnote on page 5, Brandreth tells us of his role in Lord Longfrod's inquiry into pornography when (in 1971) he accompanied Longford on a fact-finding trip to Copenhagen with, inter alia, Malcolm Muggeridge and Cliff Richard.
On 26/3/96 he attends a dinner hosted by Neil and Christine Hamilton (!) for Barbara Cartland. The Wales' marriage is in deep doodoo, and Dame Barbara opines "Of course you know where it all went wrong? She wouldn't do oral sex, she just wouldn't. It's as simple as that. Of course it all went wrong."

Health and Safety

I heard Caroline Flint (who she? a Health Minister it seems) on the World At One yesterday saying "Public health is not about Dick Tax." Well you trying saying "dictacts" and see what comes out.
Then I heard a discussion about the "glorification of terrorism" clause bollocks on the PM prog today. Lots about the difficulty of defining glorification, but nothing on problems with defining terrorism. What a load of crap just so the powers that be and their ineffectual hangers-on can be seen to be "doing something" or "sending out the right message". What was wrong with incitement to violence? What a bunch of fucking assholes. (I know this sort of gratuitous swearing can only weaken any point I may or may not be trying to make, but it makes me feel a fuck of a lot better).
To end on a positive note, the dickheads managed to vote for a ban on smoking in public places. I never thought I'd say this, but as I now realise the extreme weakness of my own will power, Thank You House of Commons. I think it will help me stop smoking and it will vastly improve the chances of my children not smoking. Give me an Alcohol Free Premises Bill and I may live to pensionable age.

Chris Morris is not funny

I watched the South Bank tribute to Armando Ianucci last night. The man is funny and talented (with a heavy hint of smug self-satisfaction) and The Thick Of It is about the only telly I've attempted not to miss recently (Six Nations and Test matches excluded, natch), however...he made some claim that it wasn't funny when you could see comics being comics, which was why they had gone for realism in The Day Today. But the Day Today wasn't realistic, wasn't funny and attempted to parody something beyond parody (24 hour rolling news channels have enough trouble looking real as it is). Now I realise this sort of opinion can get you a fatwa, and I am already anticipating the death threats from ces bourgeois de merde* who revere the man (you know who you are) and will be outside my house with their placards and state of the art suicide bomber chic but The Day Today never did anything for me. As for that bloke with the flared nostrils, he shouldn't be allowed anywhere near a TV screen, and even Patrick Marber (an acclaimed playwrite so they say) reflects the worst of Ianucci when he performs, his only character being sneering, supercilious and, yes, unfunny.
Then there were the over frequent cutaways of Melvyn Bargg (still taking the Labour whip, as far as I can tell) nodding sagely, liver spot to the fore, eyes narrowed knowingly yet inquisitively...give me strength. And I say this as a man who has the In Our Time homepage bookmarked. Still, it was good to learn that the swearing in The Thick Of It is done by a specialist. The scripts are sent to a man up north (whose name I sadly forget) who adds top notch creative abuse. I doff my expletive enhanced hat to him.

*Merci a Bernard Laporte

Westminster Dour

It's suprising how in 24 hours when I have cooked my first cake (carrot, delicious), been stopped by police ("Looks like suspect for bagsnatch in Chuchill Square") and found a new political hate figure (John Hutton) time can drag.
"If anyone thinks that the right way to respond to Mr Cameron's emergence as Tory leader is somehow for us to move to the left, I've only got one message for them and that's just Get Real. There are no votes, there is no sense in moving in that direction. Labour has never won an election and never will win an election by moving leftwards."
That would be my new hate figure (sorry Trisha, we men are fickle) on last night's Westminster Hour. I'd never heard of the guy before, though already I find it difficult to recall this period of pre-lapsarian innocence. I wrote down some other stuff he said and then re-read it and it was like trying to catch hot air. The historically-challenged replacement for Blunkett at Works and Pensions is a former flatmate of Alan Milburn and has been mentioned as a possible successor to Blair by none other than Will Hutton. Lord fucking help us.
Then there was some Tory saying he would welcome the creation of a Homeland Security department in this country. Security schmurity, do we have to slavishly follow the US in name as well as deed?

The Meaning of Bishfest

Our ryhming slang correspondent from Bucks wrties

In the course of a delightful evening at our local French pub - "Le Soppy Hog" perusing yet another load of what our Scottish friends would call "gloopy pesh" in that obscure journal, the Shy Pope Log, I noticed that the word "Bishfest" has crept into our language. A search on Google now reveals more than "an annual festival set in the rolling hills of Buckinghamshire".
I haven't been able to discover its meaning, (something to do with a rant about software that doesn't work) but perhaps one of your readers can help me?

Arthur P Bottlebank (Miss)
Arbroath

No elucidation comes from either Urban Dictionary or Webopedia. Comments or explanations welcome.

Palestinian psephology

In the Palestinian elections Hamas got 74 seats (57%), Fatah 43 (33%) and others 13. On the popular vote however, Hamas got 42%, to Fatah's 38% - the complicated electoral system (combining both party lists and constituencies) bringing about the disparity between votes cast and seats won.
Compare this to the UK. At the last election Labour got 55% of the seats, yet only 37% of votes cast (on a 62% turnout). Hamas' 57% of seats from 42% of votes cast (on a 92% turnout) looks almost fair by comparison.

Talking of voting, my reader survey currently shows 100% of votes cast have been for "Life. Time you got one" from an electorate comprising one person (myself, natch). Come on people! Vote now and vote often.

By the way, my Shorter Oxford dates "psephology" to 1952, wihch I find surprising.

Reader survey

Feel free to add your own comments. You may tick as many boxes as you like.

My reaction to this blog can be roughly summarised as
	Quite brilliant! Could you post at least three times a day?
	Outstanding! How do you maintain the quality of your submissions?
	Your links have changed my life
	I have recommended this site to my parents
	Where can I find some decent internet porn?
	What is cricket?
	Who is Patricia Hewitt?
	Would you like to increase your penis size?
	You are a Guardian-reading Radio 4-listening nonce
	Have you considered posting when not under the influence?
	It compares well with other blogs. This is saying nothing.
	Life. Time you got one
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Basil D'Oliveira

I am half way through Peter Obourne's book on the great all rounder. (Those with no interest in cricket had better stop here: in fact those who are interested in cricket should stop here as well, and go immediately to find out what's happening in the final Pakistan-India test.)
A fantastically moving book. Dolly barely got to play on grass until he came to England to play club cricket at the age of 28, and didn't play an officially recognised first class game until he was 30. Not bad for an England player who ended up with 2,484 runs averaging over 40, and 47 wickets. His best playing years were spent in South Africa playing on dirt and canvas covered pitches, where he was renowned, among other things, for his love of hitting sixes. When he first arrived in England he was delayed getting out of the airport as he couldn't find the blacks and coloured channels, similarly when he first went to play for his club, he stood outside for a long time wondering where the changing room was for non-white players.
As Obourne points out, we hear much of the great white South African players (Richards, Proctor et al) who were denied their prime playing years by the boycott of South Africa, but little of the many "non-white" players who were never allowed a chance and of whom we have not heard.
Another thing I didn't know (or had forgotten) was that when they introduced the Population Act of 1950, to define the population by race, members of the same families could be differently classified, not only hugely affecting their prospects, freedom etc., but also meaning they could no longer live in the same area, let alone house. If your son was classified coloured, he could not even legally visit a parent who lived in a white area.
More amusingly, I like the idea of BJ Vorster thinking the MCC Committee of the mid-sixties were a bunch of dangerous, subversive pinkos.

Duchess of Health 3

Old Tish was on the today prog today (she started the politicians favourite "Let's be clear", trans: to obfuscate) actually saying what the Grauniad so keenly anticipated on Monday. The Brighton and Sussex University Hospitals NHS Trust (deficit: £14m) is one of ten trusts "named and shamed" for poor financial management. I can't say I've noticed many signs of profligacy ("Golden Oscietra Caspian caviar with your x-ray, sir?") when I've been. When we visit are we supposed to fix the staff with a severe look and say "Shame on you" . Apparently not, as our frontline services are doing a magnificent job (criticising nurses, doctors and policeman is politically verbotten) so it must be the fault of all the accountants/managers etc. who both the Tories and Labour have been so keen to see running our hospitals.

Duchess of Health 2

The ghastly Hewitt woman takes up the main headline in the Guardian today. "She is expected to say that financial management must have a higher priority than clinical objectives during the coming year". Bloody fucking news people. It's what we hear all the time on the Today programme (except when I remember not to listen, habits are habits, on which Ken Tynan had some apposite wit on stained habits - perhaps it will come to me). Why don't they wait till she says it! Then they can report it. I, however, am free to rant at will on the mere reports (am I a fucking news programme? Am I? Well. I ask you.) Well done Patty (salary £133,997), at last you have responded to the people's wishes. I for one never enter a hospital with out thinking, "I do hope they impose proper financial constraints when considering whether or not to give me the best available treatment."
"We think we should operate to remove your tumour"
"But have you considered the cost implications? Your half-year accounts forecast overspending totalling £948m by the end of March. I think it's best if you just leave it."
Ah, yes. Ken Tynan said (or more likely wrote) "Old hards die habits". Slightly tortuous, but you get the idea.

Duchess of Health

I heard Patricia Hewitt on the Today programme this morning (no links, I am not spreading her words). A more smug, self-righteous, stuck-up, pompous, patronising ass would be hard to find. It could be just the affected "posh" accent of the Australian expat that grates (surely all ex-Canberra Girl's Grammar School girls don't sound like this?). But it's not. It's the formulaic apparatchik "I'm glad you asked me that" type responses that make me want to vomit. And I'm not even going to mention her role as Director of Research for Andersen Consulting.

Jeffrey Lewis

I came across Jeffrey Lewis on the Andy Kershaw show recently singing Williamsberg Willy Oldham Horror, which I thought was magnificent. It is still available on Radio 3 listen again.
Go to the 8 January 2006 prog. The song is about 59 minutes in. A tour de force on life, art and the life of the artist.

Another masterpiece is The History of Punk on the Lower East Side from his album The Last Time I Did Acid I Went Insane.

Enjoy

Good read

I heard a fine edition of A Good Read last week (no longer available for listening to, I fear) on European crime fiction. Ok, let's not beat around the bush, on the superiority of Euro crime fiction (this being the use of European which excludes British). And pleasing it was to hear that three out of five of Marcel Berlins' recommendations were my own favourites, Camilleri, Vargas and Lucarelli.

I was given a (signed, no less) copy of Robert Fisk's The Great War For Civilisation for Christmas. It weighs in at just under 1,400 pages, which makes bath and bed time reading quite tricky. It is best suited, not inappropriately, to being read bible-style, from a lecturn. I looked at a number of reviews and, despite one by an ex-ambassador in the Guardian, which highlights some factual and translation inaccuracies, struggled to find one which seriously challenged his overview, ie: that the west has been fucking the Middle East for a century (see also Steve Bell), and that we reap what we sow. I found one review (since lost) in which Fisk admitted that after page 230 (I'm guessing here) there were no laughs. As I am now on page 250 and already weighed down by the unremitting tales of torture and slaughter, this is not entirely encouraging.

As I write this, news has just come in of the victory of Michelle Bachelet in the Chilean presidential elections. The socialist doctor, working mother, victim of torture etc. has become the second female head of state of a South American nation, and the first who is not the protagonist in a musical by Andrew Lloyd Webber. I raise my glass to the latest Latin leftist leader.

Happy Noo Year (hic)

Well here we are again after an extended Christmas break. It only seems reasonable to take up where I left off, and where I have been all this time. I was in Lancing yesterday (the "town", not the public school) in search of its architectural highlights. There were none, but I did find a copy of the TLS from 28.10.05 on sale at the library for five pence. It contains the following information about Anthony Burgess...

In the sixties Burgess and his wife Lynn would get through a dozen bottles of gin a week, despite hardly ever entertaining. He liked a couple of bottles of wine with his evening meal, pints with double whisky chasers down the pub. If in need of stimulation, he would take three dexedrine tablets, washed down with a pint of G & T. For a pick-me-up, he mixed a cocktail called Hangman's Blood:
"Into a pint beer glass doubles of the following are poured: gin, whisky, rum, port and brandy. A small bottle of stout is added, and the whole topped up with champagne. It enduces a somewhat metaphysical elation, and rarely leaves a hangover."

Burgess died of lung cancer, aged 76, possibly related to his 80 a day cigarette/cigar habit. His wife, Lynn, died aged 47 of cirrhosis.

The Single Helix

"One single star of the Aquila galaxy, ten thousand light years from home, has a cloud of ethyl alcohol around it big enough to provide a bottle of the finest Johnny Walker for every person on Earth every day for the next five thousand billion years."

This consoling thought comes from Steve Jones' "The Single Helix" (Little Brown 2005). Whatever the scientific equivalent of illiterate and innumerate is, I'm it. This book is full of many excellent and unfamiliar - to me - scientific thoughts, such as Zipf's law. I paraphrase, obviously, but it applies to the size of either animals or businesses - and many other things - and the frequency of their occurrence: the smaller they are (insects, self-employed), the more there will be of them - the larger (elephants, multi-nationals), the fewer. The relationship is constant in a huge range of examples, with notable exceptions. There are far more - relatively large - farm animals than there should be for their size, and about ten thousand times as many humans as there should be according to Zipf. A reckoning awaits?

On voting systems, Jones tells us that the Mathematical Association of America and the American Statistical Association, packed with people who understand numbers better than most of us, use an approval system of voting to elect their committees. This involves voting for as many candidates as you like - those you approve of, that is - with each vote carrying the same weight. The result is, statistically, the nearest to the concensus view. Fantastic! Say goodbye to negative voting and/or voting for someone for fear of another getting in. Everyone votes for the people they think are ok, and the result is a reflection of this. No votes wasted. Simple and much easier to understand than single transferable votes. Will someone please tell the electoral reform society? In fact, I think I'll right to Dr. Ken Ritchie tonight.

Tories and Class 'A's

Not much more than an hour after the announcement of David Cameron's election as Tory leader, Shadow Home Affairs Minister Cheryl Gillan put out this press release.



Given the newly minted Cameron slogan, the nasal emphasis of the photo and the peculiar US dateline (12/06/2005), I suspect this may not entirely bona fide.

Freemantle

I recently read Freemantle by John Buchan (1916). A ripping yarn of the finest quality but, more interestingly, packed with the prejudices of the time. For those who don't care this sort of thing themselves, here are some choice examples of racism, sexism, anti-semitism and (repressed homosexual) homophobia. Buchan, of Thirty Nine Steps fame (Freemantle is the second in the Richard Hannay series), was a very popular figure, who became an MP and, finally, Governor-General of Canada. As it says in the introduction to the Penguin edition, "selective quotation can make him seem absurd, or disgraceful" so here goes...

Senior civil servant and 'good guy', Sir Walter Bullivant, on the Germans - "You are an intelligent fellow, and you will ask how a Polish adventurer, meaning Enver, and a collection of Jews and gipsies should have got control of a proud race."

On a sympathetic, yet enemy, German - "Gaudian was clearly a good fellow, a white man and a gentleman. I could have worked with him for he belonged to my own totem."

On another sympatico German - "That fellow gave me the best 'feel' of any German I had met. He was a white man and I could have worked with him. I liked his stiff chin and steady blue eyes."

On a 'bad' German's poor notion of psychology - "In Germany only the Jew can get outside himself, and that is why, if you look into the matter, you will find that the Jew is at the back of most German enterprises."

The 'bad German again - "There had never been a woman's hand in that place. It was the room of a man who had a passion for frippery, who had a perverted taste for soft delicate things. It was the complement to his bluff brutality. I began to see the queer side to my host,"

Richard Hannay on himself - "I could see that I was becoming rather a figure in the captain's eyes. He liked the way I kept the men up to their work, for I hadn't been a nigger-driver for nothing."

On a swaggering Turkish official - "He strutted away and it was all I could do to keep from running after him. I wanted to lay him over my knee and spank him."

Hannay and his pal are of low cheer - "We were both in pretty poor spirits. 'Europe is a poor cold place,' said Peter, 'not worth fighting for. There is only one white man's land, and that is South Africa.' At the time I heartily agreed with him."

They are accosted by some Turkish ruffians - "They jabbered among themselves, and then one said very slowly: 'He...want...pounds,' and he held up five fingers. They evidently saw by the cut of our jib that we weren't Germans."

Hannay goes for a drive with Hilda von Einem, the evil yet beautiful German lady behind the conspiracy - "Women had never come much my way, and I knew about as much of their ways as I knew about the Chinese language... I had never been in a motor car with a lady before, and I felt like a fish on a dry sandbank. The soft cushions and the subtle scents filled me with acute uneasiness."

Hannay's pal, Sandy Arbuthnot, on women - "There never was a man so near the divine as Joan of Arc. But I think, too, they can be more entirely damnable than anything that was ever breeched, for they don't stop still now and then and laugh at themselves."

On his pal Sandy Arbuthnot, "He had a pair of brown eyes like a pretty girl's"

On the impressive Enver, a Pole on the German's side - "He was a slim fellow of Rasta's build, very foppish and precise in his dress, with a smooth oval face like a girl's, and rather fine straight eyebrows."

On his pal Peter Piennar, "He had a face as gentle as a girl's."

Selective quotation can be so unfair. Make of that lot what you will.

Interactive Voice Response systems

Here's something you don't hear very often. I heard an interesting piece on You and Yours today (a tedious Radio Four consumer programme, for those of you lucky enough not to know it). It was about how to get through to a human being when you dial a company and are offered endless options and/or are put on hold forever. The only responses I can remember off hand are to keep hitting zero fast, which confuses the system, or to remain silent so that it thinks you don't have a touch-tone phone. Most companies have specific codes to enable select people (usually those who work for it) to get through.

The piece was based on a website run by a Bostonian called Paul English. His blog is a curate's egg of tips on all sorts of things, many - though not all - good for techy-types. His IVR Cheat Sheet contains ways to get round the IVRs of specific companies. This is very american, but you get the idea and he says he is now getting info from other countries, including the UK. You can also listen to the programme (Automated Phone Systems, 05/12/05), though how long they keep it, god knows.

Kids, hunh?

Susanna at breakfast, à propos de rien,

"Dad, is it against the law to make a gravestone that doesn't say RIP on it?"

For Jean Baudrillard fans only

When googling "baudrillard shopping" the first ten results produce three like this:

Baudrillard, Jean books at the best price
Buy Baudrillard, Jean books from the best shops. Click on the products or use the search form below to find ... Top products Top searches. Yahoo! Shopping ..

DOMAIN NAMES AVAILABLE!!!

According to Gregor's cyber guru, all one word dot com domain names have been taken. Unable to resist this challenge, a cursory flit through my SOED comes up with the following, still avaialble:

catabaptist.com (administrator of irregular or schismatic baptism; one who opposes baptism)
dartars.com (a kind of scab on the chin of lambs)
enigmatography.com ( the making or collecting of enigmas)
feuage.com (a tax upon chimneys or hearths)
hamose.com (having hooks; hooked - ok, it does say this is a pedantic variation of hamous, which is taken)
hominivorous.com (man-eating)
indignify.com (to treat with indignity, to dishonour; to represent as unworthy)
interemption.com (destruction, slaughter)
inerm.com (destitute of prickles or thorns; unarmed)
lecanomancy.com (divination by the inspection of water in a basin)
nomenclate.com (to assign a name or names to; to call by a certain name)
selvagee.com (a hank or skein of rope-yarn marled together, and used as a strap to fasten round a rope or stay, or as slings, etc.)
tapayaxin.com (the orbicular horned lizard - mexican origin)
tipsify.com (to make tipsy; to intoxicate)

and finally

kinaesthesis.com (not entirely satisfactorily defined by the SOED as the sense of muscular effort that accompanies a voluntary motion of the body) is available. Kinaesthetic, which I understand to mean the sense of one's own bodily movement, can be found in use (so you can get the meaning there) in the works of Wittgenstein - probably On Certainty. kinaesthetic.com is already taken.)

Miscellaneous update

I have been rather lax in my postings these last few days. I find only a collection of notes serving as reminders of what I was going to blog about. That and a copy of John Buchan's Greenmantle, where I have carefully noted the abundant references to racism, anti-semitism, mysogony and (repressed homosexual) homophobia. Despite this, a ripping yarn, though stangely improved when I started prejudice-spotting. I still plan a comprehensive list of the above, but as it is a little too like work (work? no, sorry, come again?), it will have to wait.

My notes are as follows:
Garrison Keillor radio show
Google search instinct
Memory - Fortensky - Drink

As far as I can remember, these refer to the following...

Garrison Keillor's radio show on BBC radio 7. Seems like a nice enough bloke, and one of the few pieces of non-repeated Radio 7 programming. But whenever I listen the whole thing is quite insufferable. I think "smug" may be the word, but as it is only on on early weekend mornings (I'm guessing - 5am? 6am?) I don't have the strength to list the stream of bile it provokes in me. Periodically I forget and am driven by the maddening shit available on the other channels to give it another go. It's still hateful. Thank god for the brief respite in the madness provided by Test Match Special at 5am tomorrow morning.

Google search instinct is an odd one. I was trying to find a National Lampoon cover (January 1977) I remembered from the distant past to send to Gregor so I googled "national lampoon covers" and I went to the fourth or fifth hit which looked good , and it was. Experience rather than instinct enables you to spot the cyber wheat among the google chaff, so what is my point? I wish I remembered. What I don't wish I remembered is who Larry Fortensky was (a husband of Elizabeth Taylor that she met in some drying out clinic, since you ask). Memory, where is thy delete button? I try drinking to forget, but from what I remember, it is a blunt instrument, better at erasing conversations than matters trivial or grave.

Blagger Blunkett

David Blunkett (annual income minimum £215,000) is to be allowed to keep his "grace and favour" home in Belgravia for the time being because of security considerations.
What makes me think that unlike, say, a company car, the taxman will have no interest in this? Or is the security consideration that they want whoever wishes harm on this blameless man to know where he lives?

News values

My online philosophical dictionary defines a syllogism as

An important variety of deductive argument in which a conclusion follows from two or more premises (the OED is not so different).

So what about this self-evident truth?

No news is good news
All news is bad news

Who needs a minor premise? I say, go straight from a major premise to a conclusion.

When is silence not silence?

Steve has sent this.




If you listen to it on BBC7 it breaks down as:

00:00–00.26 talk
00.26–00.39 silence
00.39–01.45 Big Ben chiming
01.45–03.09 silence

Suspect device

This mainly from today's Private Eye (Number Crunching).

Number of days a terrorist suspect can be detained before criminal charges must be levelled:

Australia: 1
Spain: 5
USA: 7
UK: 28 (government proposal: 90)

Psychonarcolepsy

Branching out into strange behaviour patterns, our shopping correspondent has sent us this (read from bottom upwards).
It's at times like this that we give thanks for the existence of the world wide web.

Cat food

My cat has eaten Felix Crisp crunchy topping for some years. It comes in letter shapes, but I have seen no improvement in her reading.

Do politicians grow old?

Yesterday Shimon Peres was ousted (or kicked out in normal talk) as leader of the Israeli Labour Party. Reasons given included Peretz's (his successor) trade union base, leftist disillusion with the Peres/Sharon alliance, and support for Peretz - a Moroccan Jew - among the sephardi, rather than traditional ashkenazi Labour types. The fact that he is 82 was apparently not an issue. Say what you like about Israelis, and believe me, I do, but it seems they are not ageist. Ken Clarke tried running as Tory leader, and being 65 was counted against him (well, a bit). Can anyone name a country where voters mattered and someone ran for election as head of state over the age of 80? Obviously Peres wouldn't have got it in, but still unusual that he might even have been considered.

Peretz seems encouraging from the little I've read of him - refusing to support Sharon, wanting to return the Labour party to its socialist roots and making peace with the Palestinians a priority. I'll believe it when I see it. Which I won't.

Amir Peretz is 53.

Cyber stuff

A couple of sites to amuse your children two chinese students and mothergooserocks
plus one for veneerophiliacs from our Shopping correspondent

Is Sarko scum?

"The deaths proved a flashpoint for the frustration and fury of second- and third-generation north and black African immigrants, and spread nationwide, fuelled by remarks of the hardline interior minister, Nicolas Sarkozy, who called the rioters "scum"." So says the Guardian website in a report dated 11 November (not bad going considering it's 4:10pm on 10 November).

My own characteristically superficial research reveals the word he used was "racaille", which translates more as rabble. Our Paris correspondent says "yes definitely not scum, racaille actually conjures up, in the modern Parisian mind at any rate, what I imagine are what you call chavs". She's been in France a long time, so her Modern English isn't what it was, chavs being definitely not immigrant. Still, the Guardian has decided, Sun-style, to go with the more emotive scum.

Our Paris correspondent continues
"We were so shattered that Sarkozy (it says Fuck Sarko on the wall opposite our gate, painted a couple of nights ago) had said he would expel all foreigners arrested in the rioting, be they with resident permits or without, and so convinced that this would cause an explosion, that my teenage sons both watched the news with me last night because they didn't believe what I'd heard on PM on Radio 4 ..."

As Fred Truman would say, what is going off out there?

Ockham's Grid Reference

Latitude: 51.26,
Longitude: -0.69

It would be foolish to say more.

Pick of the Week

I have just finished listening to Melvyn Barg's In Our Time on Radio 4 - The Blackfriars and The Greyfriars - about the Franciscan and Dominican orders. Quite brilliant. Papayoudilly says: This is radio of the highest calibre - it rocks!.

I strongly recommend you download In Our Time (This prog has now gone, but the whole show seems to have taken an interesting philosophical bent) . And while you're at it, you could do a lot worse than go to Radio 4 listen again and listen to Genius with Dave Gorman and John Fortune (ibid).

Joke

Returning from hot yoga, James tells me how to address a New York cabbie:

"Can you take me to the corner of Broadway and fifth, or should I just go and fuck myself?"

Gordon Bennett

Having mentioned his intro, it seems fitting to mention Alan Bennett's last entry to his diary, which I read today. David Blunkett has just resigned.

"...anyone hounded by the newspapers has my sympathy, even though in Blunkett's case the leaders of the pack were the very papers he courted. Scarcely had he cleared his desk when the judges in the Lords condemn the indefinite detention of foreign nationals as unlawful, a judgement which, it's to be hoped, signals some sort of turning of the tide. Santa may call at Belmarsh if not at Guantanamo Bay."

The entry is dated 16 December 2004. Less than 11 months later, Blunkett has resigned again, and Blair et al are trying to force though yet more anti-terror legislation. Under existing powers, a man can be arrested for heckling the Foreign Secretary at the Labour Party Conference, and bankers can be extradited to the US for trial without production of evidence (though not vice versa). The latest proposals, apart from locking people up for 90 days without charge, during which time they could lose their job, house etc., also outlaw the glorification of terrorism and the dissemination of information encouraging terrorism ("conduct which gives encouragement to the commission, preparation or instigation of such acts, or which is intended to do so" - nice use of "or"). University libraries are worried whether they need to purge certain chemistry books, or those which may be sympathetic to Guy Fawkes.

Would the tide were turning, Alan. What we have here are the early days of an extreme proxigean spring tide (google it yourself).

Mr President

More from our Boston correspondent. He sends this sign seen at the recent anti-war
demonstration in Washington, DC.

Blogging

It strikes me, and I haven't bothered counting them, that a disproportionate number of comments on this blog are from myself. This is fine up to a point. Having a conversation with myself is what I do most of the time. Slightly worrying, though, to think that anyone can tune in to this conversation. I need one of those things you can supposedly fit to your car, in this case to disable my send/publish post button when I am over the limit.

Much more worrying is that the last two posts are making it look like the fucking shopping channel.

White Goods

Gregor has sent me two URLs to facilitate the purchase of cheap white goods (sussex appliances and discount direct). Which is all very well for him as he has a new house and a new baby. I have a house full of white goods and chlidren demanding the latest in black goods, but I'm sure I'll be grateful next time the washing machine packs up.

They used to say in downtown Babylon "The Gods do not deduct from man's allotted span the hours spent in fishing" though whether this includes hours spent surfing for cheap white goods, I wouldn't know.

Of course, nowadays in Babylon the gods use a variety of hi-tech ordnance to deduct from man's allotted span, whether they be fishing or not.

From our Boston correspondent

Yesterday our Boston correspondent bought a cd by a friend of his from cdbaby.com as it was too obscure to be available at amazon. The following is cdbaby's shipping notice:


Thanks for your order with CD Baby!

Qty Description Price Total
=== =========== ===== =====
1 STINGY BRIMM: 'case you haven't heard... $12.97 $12.97

Sub Total $12.97
Shipping $2.25
Grand Total $15.22

Your CD has been gently taken from our CD Baby shelves with
sterilized contamination-free gloves and placed onto a satin pillow.

A team of 50 employees inspected your CD and polished it to make sure
it was in the best possible condition before mailing.

Our packing specialist from Japan lit a candle and a hush fell over
the crowd as he put your CD into the finest gold-lined box that money
can buy.

We all had a wonderful celebration afterwards and the whole party
marched down the street to the post office where the entire town of
Portland waved 'Bon Voyage!' to your package, on its way to you, in
our private CD Baby jet on this day, Sunday, November 6th.

I hope you had a wonderful time shopping at CD Baby. We sure did.
Your picture is on our wall as 'Customer of the Year'. We're all
exhausted but can't wait for you to come back to CDBABY.COM!!

Thank you once again,

Derek Sivers, president, CD Baby
the little CD store with the best new independent music
phone: 1-800-448-6369 email: cdbaby@cdbaby.com
http://cdbaby.com

Flag Aid

Am I the last person to notice that Ireland and Italy have the same flag (a green, white and red tricolour) ? Isn't there some sort of law against this?

I am slightly bewildered, and would welcome any help on this. Are there any other countries in the world with the same flag? What would happen in the event of an Irish-Italian war?

Scott trust?

Seeing an emaciated fashion model cut out on the contents page of the Guardian magazine I thought, oh no, another article on skeletal fashion models, the rise of eating disorders in the young, etc.. How reassuring then to turn to the article ("Never has wrapping up warm been so stylish"). A delightful free advert for the likes of Yves Saint Laurent ("Sophia P...wears coat, £4,285, skirt, £400, and shoes £395) and Alexander McQueen (Anna...wears cardigan, £995, and skirt, £560).
This should encourage all those teachers and social workers to smarten up a bit. Apparently much of this finery is available at their local branch of Harrods.

I have seen fashion models on a shoot on two occasions (Chelsea and Paris, since you ask). Both times I was aghast (yes, I tell you, aghast) at these living definitions of skin and bones. About as attractive as something off a mortuary slab.

And while on the subject (and ignoring Alan Bennett, October 30) I note that as a consequence of now being fully used to the Guardian's Berliner format, the Observer seems to get larger with each passing week.

Syllogisms

Doug writes (see Reading Update) "There's nowt so queer as cyberspace, as my old grandad would have said had he not died many years before its invention."

From which we posit:

Real space is discovered.
Cyber space is invented (not discovered).
ergo
Cyber space is not real space.

Or one could write

Existing space is discovered.
Cyber space is invented (not discovered).
ergo
Cyber space does not exist as space

As cyberspace is real and does exist, one conclusion I see is that it is not space. What is a definition of space? Something with four dimensions - height, length, breadth and time? If it is not space, what is it? Is the answer only formulable in boringly complex electro-mathematical symbolism? This would not satisfy me.

I suppose another conclusion could be that something invented can be real and exist. So the question is, what is the difference between something discovered and something invented? You discover something which is already there, you invent something by rearranging what is already there. So, does the problem arise out of linguistic confusion and, thus explained, vanish in a Wittgenseinian puff of smoke?


POST SCRIPTUM
Am I just making a category mistake, a la Gilbert Ryle? As I never got around to reading The Concept of Mind, I wouldn't know. Perhaps the language is too loose for logic. (Too Loose For Logic - another one of those possible titles for my autobiography).

Reading Update

Just finished reading "Have Mercy On Us All" (Commissaire Adamsberg Investigates) by Fred Vargas. Fred is a historian and archaeologist, with a scientist mother and an intellectual father ("Why crime? I think now because it was the one thing that my father, an incredibly cultured man, detested") and an artist sister with the same pseudonymous surname. She also leads the campaign to stop the removal of Cesare Battisti (formerly of the Italian "terror cell" Armed Proletarians for Communism turned French crime writer) from France to an Italian jail.
Commissaire Adamsberg is very fine, and I am looking forward to reading the second (and last until the Battisti business is resolved, apparently).

I searched for some article on Ms Vargas on the web, and made the mistake of hitting google's Translate This button. It started like this:

"Fred Vargas, author with success of polars and enquiring recognized at CNRS, are one of the principal coordinatrices of the committees of support for Cesare Battisti. It worked (the day, the night) with the drafting d'un delivers urgent: "the truth on Cesare Battisti." with the editions Viviane Hamy , editor who s'est also committed in this combat. Urgent book , because it possible that Battisti leaves France this month, is menotté, to finish its days in prison in Italy."

Well I suppose you get the general idea. Doug and Carole gave me Alan Bennett's "Untold Stories" for my birthday. In the short preface to the Diary section it says:

"...in earlier diaries much more of what I wrote down had to do with what I did whereas lately the entries are more often occassioned by what I've read or seen on television. I should get out more..."

Touché!

Soup

For those of you looking for soup-related proverbs...