Saturday 7 February 2015

gone fishing

I'm off and about. See you in a bit.

But how can I buy old Mighty Fin shows like you periodically talk about? Er. For reasons not unconnected with future plans and comments from our various agents, it is deemed sensible not to rush things into the public domain.

Thursday 5 February 2015

the earl of qatar

Just a snippet of dead earl news, because it's been a while:

She was known as Irene - pronounced Irenee - and was an extremely vivacious woman.  She is also the subject of one of the family legends.  The legend has it that she married the 6th Earl of Craven on an impulse.  He, having been in a drunken stupour at the time, woke up the next day realising what he had done and promptly left, although he left her pregnant.  There is a modicum of truth to the story as this item in Time Magazine’s events page shows:   “Marriage Revealed. William Robert Bradley, 21, orange-haired Sixth Earl of Craven; and Irene Meyrick, daughter of the late in-and-out-of-jail Mrs. Kate ("Queen of the London Night Clubs") Meyrick. The Earl's gallant, one-legged father caused a newspaper uproar in 1926 by eloping with another earl's wife, Countess ("Moral Turpitude") Cathcart.” 


If you read one thing about how the horrible Qataris bought the handball world cup, naturalised a load of players for money, do read this. Villainous Qataris and greedy sportocrats - hard to see what could go wrong. My favourite bit, for what it's worth:

It was conspicuous that all the referee couples who have a reputation for being particularly capable of standing up to pressure were kept away from the games of Qatar in the ‘round of 16’, the quarterfinal and the semifinal. And in all cases, ‘less resistant’ referees were seen by neutral observers as having had a lot to do with the Qatari wins in very narrow games. In turn, Austria, Germany and Poland left the court fuming about mysterious decisions in critical moments, and also totally neutral observers found it to be a bit too much.