sumptuous sumptuary and massive yachts

People are so boring these days, you probably think, rightly. For instance: Lord Moyne. When he was pottering around on his yacht, he wore his red flannel suit. Really? Yes, really. Why would I make it up?

I wish I could find a picture of it. I can't. I can, however, find a picture of his yacht. It was originally a ferry called the Dieppe, which he converted. It's bigger than my yacht.



He renamed it the Rosaura and travelled the world writing books about pigmies and eskimos. You probably know of him, if at all, as the most famous person blown up by the Zionist terrorist Stern Gang in 1944. (Apparently even this is wrong - we now call The Stern Gang Lehi, an acronym for Israeli Freedom Fighters.)

Also: he was, with Churchill, one of the early anti-Hitlers. He thought the Gold Standard was stupid. His oldest son Bryan married Diana Mitford, who left him for Oswald Mosley (Moyne campaigned successfully for her internment at the start of WWII) and he had, for what it's worth, a good and brave Great War.

And it's not as if Churchill didn't climb over Blitzed London in a siren suit:



But still, A RED FLANNEL SUIT?! To the conceivable surprise of those people who assume that things get more extreme over time, and who package the past into a stuffy bowler hat and monochrome fustiness, and who do not even realise they are classic fallacists of the whig school, people with responsible jobs wore wackier clothes than they do now, and that's just how it is. For instance, when I was reading about the small fuss caused by Barack Obama bowing to The Japanese Emperor (Americans do not bow to people who aren't bowing back, and so on), I remembered a bit in Lords of Finance (yes, it's been a while, hasn't it? I can't believe you still haven't read it) where some American undiplomats turned up to an economic conference in London...

Senator Key Pittman of Nevada, who strongly advocated the remonetisation of silver, which Nevada mined like crazy, favoured bright yellow bulbous-toed shoes. When he was presented to George V and Queen Mary, he didn't bow and said ‘King, I’m glad to meet you. And you too Queen.’ He was drunk a lot of the time, and could spit tobacco juice into a spittoon with great accuracy. He was discovered one night by floor waiters in Claridges sitting naked in the hotel pantry sink pretending to be a statue in a fountain; another night he shot out the lights on Upper Brook Street; and when someone rejected the remonetisation of silver, he chased him at gun point through Claridges.



This man wore yellow bulbous-toed shoes. Who knows what colour that suit he's wearing is.

(In 1940, Pittman drank himself to imminent death days before an election. The Democratic Party let Nevadans think his illness was temporary and they elected a dying man. Legend says he was already dead an on ice. Legend is wrong.)

At the other end of the scale, Congressman Samuel D McReynolds (Tennessee) hardly attended the conference because he was desperate to get his daughter presented at court. He threatened the Prime Minister's personal private secretary that the American delegation would go home if this didn't happen. According to Wikipedia, he was succeeded by C. Estes Kefauver. I know how he feels.

put it on the board

I said I'd done my predictions but didn't have time to write them down. These were pre-Thursday, as should be pretty clear in a number of cases:

QB: Rodgers, Peyton Place Manning, Palmer, Favre, All The Philip Rivers Flow Into The Sea, Tom The Brady Bunch, Brees, Kurt Warner Brothers, Big Ben*, McNabb

RB: MJD, Peterson, Jackson, Williams, Grant, My Fair LaDainian Tomlinson, Johnson, LeSean Bones McCoy, Thomas Mr Jones, Addai

WR: Vincent I'm Sorry Ms Jackson, Rice, 85, Fitzgerald, White, DeSean I'm Sorry Ms Jackson, Wayne, Welker, Moss, Ward

Jackson's banged up. Big Ben's not playing.


*Non-playing. All rankings will be of top 9 rather than top 10 as a result

on my desk in the british library

- Clandestine Erotic Fiction in English 1800-1930
Lady Pokingham or They All Do It, giving an account of her Luxurious Advantures (sic), both before and after her Marriage with Lord Crim-Con

- Hugo Gernsback and the Century of Science Fiction
In discussions of science fiction and utopia, Hugo Gernsback traditionally functions as the token buffoon

- Classic Angling, Issue 61
Neil Freeman, his house overrun by angling artefacts, finds the ideal way to restock a new home and still please his wife: by stocking it with attractive (but still fishing-oriented) ceramics

come up and see my sometime

My sometime is amazing. No, that was just a typo.

This evening, as extensively trailed, I'm in Windsor doing a book swap and talking about whatever the audience wants.* It's a really good evening, again as extensively trailed.

Related interviews here and here.


* I notice that in my extensive trails, I use the same blog title. If you come tonight, do not expect me not to repeat jokes.

what? is it any given sunday already?

Yes, it is. By which I mean it's Any Given Thanksgiving, and so three NFL games take place today.



I have done my weekly predictive sums. I beat all-comers in Week 11 on what was, as you will easily be able to predict from this, a very unpredictable week of fantasy scoring.

I talked about this with two friends. One said that since Fantasy is a derivative industry, this meta-challenge with (other) fantasy experts is two steps derived from the activity generating what I as a top economist have to call 'value'. Another offered to help me make a spreadsheet for next season which showed if there were players who experts consistently mis-valued. Be still your beating hearts.

Quarterbacks
ESPN aggregated - 68
Matthew Berry - 67
Wk 10 ranking - 114
Season ranking - 82
RFH - 67

Running Backs
ESPN - 117
Matthew Berry - 127
Wk 10 ranking - 131
Season ranking - 123
RFH - 117

Wider Receivers
ESPN - 208
Matthew Berry - 219
Wk 10 ranking - 444
Season ranking - 310
RFH - 208

I will do something with these numbers at some point. This week I have written down my rankings but I don't have time to type them. I should be somewhere else.

Gregg Easterbrook, since I speculated that he was maybe a horse's arse based on something I can't even remember, has been good. I imagine he read this and upped his game, and he is welcome back into the fold of my Nemeses.

where do they all come from? where's the factory?

Name a male member of The Corrs who doesn't believe in climate change.* Yes, that's right, it's Jim Corr.



Jim says:

My name is Jim Corr. I have been studying what is referred to as the New World Order the past couple of years. I invite you to come with me on a journey, so we can attempt to get closer to what is really going on in the world today behind the movie that's presented to us via the television set

Jim buys into all the half-baked conspiracies. On the subject of 9/11, he says:

that event is the nexus doorway into the bigger picture, being the push towards global governance, the formation of an elite run totalitarian One World Government with the subjugated masses underneath.

Read more here. Jim Corr uses the word 'elite' very, very frequently. He explains that you learn the truth about the conspiracies behind 9/11 after 'a little research'**. This is literally true. Jim Corr is an idiot.

* This is a great post about climate change scepticism. Basically, it says, 'sceptics' are being disingenuous, and none of them will put their money where their mouth is.
** I do not have the time or energy to explain what this word means to Jim Corr, and he wouldn't listen anyway.

RT @matthew

This was a comment on the New Yorker adverts below:

Matthew said...

Was inspired to click on golightlycashmere.com. They have a pair of mittens for $245 (http://www.golightlycashmere.com/products/view/37). Tagline "You will never buy another pair of mittens again".

inspiring photo essay v: bobotie

This has taken forever to get round to. It is hard for me to imagine how you have contained yourselves.

Bobotie is the signature dish of South African cuisine, which does not rank among the world's top cuisines. All the same, it's delicious, and this is how you make it.

In its simplest form, you don't need any of the vegetables that I use. My bobotie is sort of based on how I make Bolognese. But since this is both a recipe and an important historical document of something that literally happened in history, the photo essay begins with a tray of roasted squash with chilli and garlic, as more or less per Jamie Oliver. Key things: don't bother to peel the squash; salt generously. These will take 30-45 minutes to cook at about 3/4 of your oven's power. I only wish I could be more precise. Before roasting, the view will be not unlike this:



Thirsty work, you are thinking, and you're right. I recommend a Dark & Stormy, which you make as if it were a gin and tonic, but using dark rum and ginger beer, and also a quarter of a lime, squeezed.



If you have any vegetarians in the room while you are cooking, they will be obsessed with nibbles. Make them buy their own nibbles.



Put some sausages to cook in the oven, since the squash are already roasting. Also some carrots. Maybe fry up some red peppers and broccoli. If you are a terrible photojournalist, don't bother to take pictures of this stage but move straight on to the main event. Fry some chopped onion in some oil, and after it's softened, add a couple of generous dessert spoonfulls of assorted powder. You could make it two spoons of medium curry powder, or you could, as I do, substitute some of that for mustard powder and paprika. Fry for another couple of minutes.



What next?



Oh yes, I remember. Brown some mince in the pan. As a rule of thumb, one big onion does 500g of mince, so you might have to repeat the procedure more than once. If you have a vegetarian in the house, you might make a batch out of the Quran. I mean Quorn. (Don't kill me for that joke. It was just a joke.) Then combine all the ingredients, including the sausage, which you should chop up into the Quran, I mean the Quorn, I mean the meat version, trying not to think of that incredible pool of fat that emerged from them.



You will now have a load of stuff and be wondering why the hell you have curried a Bolognese, especially when I tell you to put some chopped tomato in.



Oh, hang on though! What's that stuff on top! Yes, people, we're not in Kansas any more, because that is a dollop - a really big dollop - of chutney. You can be creative here. I once achieved astonishing results with a pork and fried apple bobotie, no vegetables, with apple and ginger chutney. Suit your meat to the chutney you have available. Don't be afraid of mangoes. The sweetness works well.

And if you thought you weren't in Kansas before, you're really not going to be in Kansas when you read what happens next. Take a load of bread, probably three thick slices per 500g of meat, and soak them in milk. Then mush these up in your hands, spoon into the pot, and mix thoroughly.



And then, as Kansas disappears between your ruby slippers, quickly get some more milk, break 1-2 eggs into it per 500g of meat, and whisk.



Having ladled the mixture into a lasagne dish or whatever,



you should definitely take another photo of what it looks like when you pour a very thin layer of the eggy milk on top prior to baking for forty minutes at 2/3 oven power.

I mean, why wouldn't you?



Then eat the bobotie with rice and some chutney. Nice lime pickle is really good with it. Lime pickle really varies though.



If I have seemed cagy about quantities, it is because my safety first policy meant that when I cooked for eight, including a vegetarian, I made enough bobotie for eight, plus for me for four of the next five nights, plus for eight more people on the fifth of those nights. It was really nice. I particularly recommend it with a chocolate cake with, basically, sequins that a neighbour has made for another neighbour's birthday.

lies, damn lies and tony romo

I keep saying I haven't got much time on Sundays. I really don't today.

1. Gladwell: Marbury over there on the right drew my attention to the Gladwell-Pinker dabate as to whether the draft selects rationally with respect to quarterbacks. Gladwell says, basically, no, and Pinker says, basically, it doesn't do as badly as Gladwell says, and Gladwell, basically, skewers this rhetorically more than he skewers it actually.

I remember reading around this when the article first appeared in the New Yorker. My take, since you are so keen to hear it, was that there is a correlation which Gladwell skates over because he wants to make a point whch is rhetorically defensible enough to be getting on with, since his life's work, which he has spent over 10,000 hours on and so he is basically a genius at, is to generalise surprisingly, interestingly and with enough truth to provoke people to readjust their assumptions.

2. Hardly any Nemesis space, ironically, since Mike Tanier has his best week of the season. Seriously, just go and read it. Oh, ok, one highlight about a new head coach:

“I had all the answers when I was an assistant,” he said. “I wish I had more answers now.” It’s easy to have all the answers when none of the questions asks how to build an offense around Jamaal Charles.

3. How is your nascent top statistical study going?
You are too kind. Anyway, I have produced a set of numbers based on last week's predictions. I made some good calls - Jerricho Cotchery for instance, and keeping Miles Austin out of my top ten. I made some bad calls everyone made - Marques Colston and Hines Ward. I made some special bad calls all my own - thinking Dallas and Green Bay would have a shoot out and scoring various players accordingly.

What I have done is created a single number from my Top 10s by adding the difference between my predictions and the actual results. I have then done the same for ESPN's aggregate prediction, Matthew Berry's prediction, a robot strategy based on feeding back in last week's Top 10. Next week, I will add in a robot strategy based on cumulative season form.

The robot killed everyone on wide receiver by not picking Colston. Because I am using CBS stats, which are the only ones easily availably, I am making the not-totally-common-sense decision to rate Colston 567, like they do, because he lost a yard on the night and was therefore worse than a zillion people who didn't play.

Anyway:
QUARTERBACKS
ESPN - 68
BERRY - 77
HUDSON - 92
ROBOT 1 - 94

RUNNING BACKS
ESPN - 157
BERRY - 162
ROBOT 1 - 181
HUDSON - 199 (Mendenhall, in particular)

WIDE RECEIVERS
ROBOT 1 - 210
HUDSON - 733
BERRY - 790
ESPN - 795

Even without the Colston issue, the Robot would have won here. WRs are the most random scorers; I did best here; seems likely that luck favours you more in more unpredictable games. The sample size is very small so far. It will take several weeks before the really stop statistical journals start paying attention.

My predictions this week are, and now I've got a stinging headache so I can't bear to look at my computer for another second:

QUARTERBACKS: Brees, Warner, Rodgers, Big Ben, Peyton, All the Philip Rivers Run Into the Sea and Yet the Sea is Not Full, Brady, Schaub, Favre, Palmer

RUNNING BACKS: Jackson, Peterson, My Fair LaDainian Tomlinson, MJD, Jones, Addai, Wells, Johnson, Mendenhall, Forte

WIDE RECEIVERS: Rice (really? What am I thinking?), Fitzgerald, Ward, Andre the Giant, Wayne, White, Colston, Welker, Jackson, 85

Vision. Blurring.

a box of oranges, or maybe a playstation. or a pony

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stories of old kilburn town, and other public appearances

1. I will tell my first story of Old Kilburn Town at The (excellent) Good Ship's excellent wordPLAY evening on January 5th. It will be about love and artificial intelligence, and it will be very moving and funny. The protagonist's name is Tom, but that's a coincidence if you are my friend Tom who lives in Kilburn. I had to call him something and I went for the most boring name I could think of. (That was a joke, Tom.) (Good grief, get a sense of humour.)

2. If you are so obsessed with wordPLAY, presumably you'll be coming on December 1st, where the brilliant Susannah Pearse will be singing.

3. But before all this, there is next Thursday's Firestation Book Swap. Not only will I be talking, but when I swap my book, which is a really good one, I will be sweetening the deal with a brilliant compilation cd. The book swap will not end as late as says on the website, by the way. We've all got homes to go to, and very few of them are in Windsor.

housekeeping / local streetscenes

1. The mysterious kitchen leak looks like it will occasion a new cupboard, some things called plinths that aren't what I call plinths and maybe a new floor, but we can hope and dream this will not be the case.

2. I am buying a chair from an incredibly kind woman who lives nearby. This is a horrible thing I saw when I was going to try it out:



3. This will not be the kind of streetscene I describe in my eagerly awaited stories of Old Kilburn Town. They will mainly deal with Tom, who works in an Artificial Intelligence laboratory and wants a girlfriend. I'm obsessed with AI stories at the moment.

the wisdom of terry pratchett

1. Top international biblical scholars reading anything I write will be familiar with the relentless Ecclesiastes. In The Truth, Terry Pratchett's at it too (The Truth is about newspapers):

The press waited. It looked, now, like a great big beast. Soon he'd throw a lot of words into it. And in a few hours it would be hungry again, as if those words had never happened. You could feed it, but you could never fill it up

I don't think 'beast' is an accident either.

2. TP's good, but he didn't predict superinjunctions:

'Then I'll ban him from doing it!'
'How, sir?'
Vimes looked a little deflated. 'You can't tell me that as commander of police I can't stop some little ti- some idiot from writing down anything he likes?'
'Oh, no, sir. Of course you can. But I'm not sure you can stop him writing down that you stopped him writing things down'

the last word on mermaid erotica, i promise*

You already know how mermaids have sex, it's just your brain hasn't connected a familiar image with the question. How exciting is that! The reveal is below.

You can ask the internet how mermaids have sex. If you do, you get people complaining irately about how the original Hans Christian Andersen illustrations have a tail starting below the bum, and then things got Disneyfied. Or a serious-sounding guy explaining

They can leave the water for certain limited periods of time, when this happens they assume human form, similar to the selkie. It is during these periods that they choose to mate, unsuspecting mates would not be able to tell them from anyone else.

in such a forlorn way that I am CERTAIN that this happened to him.

But then you notice that The Mermaid Problem is literally a thing to the extent that Wikipedia has a quite long page of all the places it's appeared in literature and popular culture (Futurama and Red Dwarf are just two places that think reverse mermaids are more sensible, and Magritte painted one):



The blog Confused? Let's google it Has done the best work on this for hurried readers, and it turns out that answer has been in front of your eyes all this time, as I promised.

In ye olden days, mermaids looked like this:



(Ok, technically this is a melusine, I think, but let's for now assume that melusines are the basis for mermaid myths, since they look more like mermaids than stupid manatees.) Where have you seen one of these before? Oh yes! Here!



And we can all imagine how, well, like I said, that's your lot.


* For now. If you come to my much anticipated Kilburn storytelling session, probably be in January, who knows?**
** I know

mermaid spider erotica II

I know I promised more cookery lessons, and they're coming, but I need to finish what I started.

Further to yesterday's speculation as to whether a mermaid is a fish or a person, sexually, The Shark and the Mermaid by Billie Myers nails its colours pretty clearly to the wall. I don't know why this YouTubist has done a video with dogs. In fact, wait a second, dogs, shark, mermaid, nookie? Maybe it was The Vet!



Further to which, after posting the piece of erotic mermaid fiction with fluorescent eggs I movingly analyse below, The Vet asked:

Well, what do you guys think? Will I be able to make the transition from the children's morality market to the convenience store romance section? And, do you like the scene? Helpful comments certainly welcome. I'm sort of new to mermaid romance/erotica....

Samantha K wrote:

The writing is good, but some of the dialogue is a bit shifty. Why mermaid erotica?

How long is a piece of string?

Arabesque was more fulsome:

Vet, you are a multi-talented genius. How anyone can make such a transition from children and YA to romance is beyond me, but you, sir, pull it off flawlessly.

Just like the mermaid. Sorry

Who knew that mermaids would make such a perfect subject for a romance novel?

Was it me? No

I think this would be a best-seller at the convenience store in only a matter of days after publication.

All this COULD be irony. I don't think so, but it could be

I had a friend, skilled in the writing of mermaid erotica, read this over

Hold up! Surely SHE knew that mermaids would be a perfect subject for a romance novel, even if I didn't (I don't) (I mean I didn't)*

and she would like to point out that Seraphim is a male mermaid's name, not a female.

Oh yes! I knew there was something odd about it! No, wait a second, was the odd thing that it was obviously a male mermaid's name (the pc term is 'merman')? I think it wasn't. I think it might have been that 'Seraphim' is not a-

She suggests replacing it with something such as Ariela or Lilayn or Monyata, or any other female name.

These are excellent suggestions, but since she's his protagonist, I think The Vet should use a name that will make the her stand out from all the other mermaids. What about Kate? Sue? Alice? Marie? Emma?

Otherwise, it is very good (and accurate!)

Mermaids really do have fluorescent eggs and no port in a storm

the scene is excellent, very graphic but described in such a poetic manner as to be beautiful.

I cried twice

Are you sure you've never written in this genre before?

No one - literally no one - could be that good first time

* Google returns 296,000 hits for 'mermaid erotica'. For 'vet erotica' the number only rises to 358,000. The first hit says: 'every conversation seems to return to interspecies erotica'. The most promising erotic fiction on page one is Bunny Love, in which 'A lonely veterinarian experiences erotic romance at a Wiccan retreat.' We've all done it.