plenty more fish

closing tabs

2012-02-02T22:25:00.005Z

1. Yes, I have seen about the horrible supergiant shrimp affairs.

2. Did you write a whole long number '2' and then cut it because you thought, 'Hang on, I'm using that story elsewhere and let's not trail it'? Yes. I do that sometimes. It's a doozy, though.

3. Fly Fishing Mystery Novels. They're a thing. Almost everything is, if you look hard enough. John Galligan is the genre's Chandler. His The Blood Knot, for instance:

Galligan's rewarding if grim second fly-fishing mystery (after 2003's The Nail Knot) offers an emotionally tortured protagonist, Ned Oglivie (aka Dog), and a clan of misfits and survivors worthy of Faulkner, the Kussmauls, who coexist uneasily with each other and their Amish neighbors in remote Avalanche, Wis. Searching for oblivion on a three-year fishing trip and suffering from a vicious beaver bite, Dog is tramping through the woods one morning when he sees 10-year-old Deuce Kussmaul fire his kid-sized .22 into the body of "barn lady" Annie Adams lying in a stream. (Annie liked to paint pictures of barns.) After Deuce's mother, Eve, who's a banned Amish and a meth-user, treats Dog's beaver bite, he agrees to try to prove her son didn't kill Annie. The author brilliantly draws the Snopes-like Kussmauls while writing with flair and passion about fly-fishing, art and fate. But like J. Robert Janes's St. Cyr and Kohler series, Galligan will need to be hand-sold to reach the right audience.

(Fly Fishing mysteries via the always excellent Hang Up & Listen. Josh Levin is not a long way off being elevated to Nemesis-status.)

(My personal plan is never to write anything which 'will need to be hand-sold to reach the right audience'. Not out of snobbery, but practicality.)

That will do for now. Oh, except for this. Thank you Robert Thorogood and Tim Sutton.

author economics

2012-02-01T10:04:00.002Z

I've been meaning to post this for a while. You probably know that movie accounting practices are pretty baroque. Studios do all kinds of nonsense to pretend a film isn't making money - they 'loan' cash to a separate entity they have created to make the film, and the interest is a cost, and all kinds of blah, blah, blah. Maybe the following doesn't tickle your strawberries, but it really tickles mine.

Perhaps the most famous example is the case of “Buchwald vs. Paramount” in which Paramount claimed that the movie Coming to America, based on a Buchwald story, failed to reach profitability:

Art Buchwald received a settlement after his lawsuit Buchwald v. Paramount over Paramount’s use of Hollywood accounting. The court found Paramount’s actions “unconscionable,” noting that it was impossible to believe that a movie (1988‘s Eddie Murphy comedy Coming to America) which grossed US$350 million failed to make a profit, especially since the actual production costs were less than a tenth of that. Paramount settled for an undisclosed sum, rather than have its accounting methods closely scrutinized.

undauntable

2012-01-31T11:34:00.004Z

You may have read on the BBC that HMS Dauntless is being posted to the Falklands. There's always a warship there, the navy says, so it's no big deal.

You might not know that HMS Dauntless is affiliated with The City of Newcastle upon Tyne, Royal Grammar School Newcastle, Newcastle United Football Club, The Percy Headley Foundation in Forrest Hall and the Worshipful Company of Clothworkers.

At first I found these things a bit funny, but the more I think about them, the more I quite like them.

hey! it's a short inspiring photo essay!

2012-01-30T19:55:00.010Z

I'm back from outer space. Literal outer space. One thing I did there was go to WH Smith because I had to catch a train and, as usual, I was fifteen minutes early. I got transfixed by this display:

'Brilliant' seems to be an self-help imprint working somewhere along the lines of 'for Dummies'. People who want self-help don't want to be told they're dummies, though. They're aspirational. They're brilliant.

One title leapt out at me and my co-traveller. We totally understand what confidence is, and presentation, but what is NLP? (If you know, then this IPE is going to be no fun for you. If you don't, read on.) We picked up the book...

We still didn't know what NLP was, but it sure sounded good. We opened the book. First up, the authors' page.

I like the sound of someone who has worked with entrepreneurs and children. I've done that myself and I turned out ok. I'm not a director at Quadrant 1 International, though. That, right there, is the difference NLP can make. I am glad Pat Hutchinson has written another book about NLP, and I am beginning to hope that it mainly says what NLP is. One day I want an enviable record of results.

Anyway, what's next?

Ah, the contents. The impact of words is something I do think about actually. It has had the odd fantastic outcome, but I would like more of those. I wonder what beliefs I could adopt that would accord with NLP? Buddhism? Scientology? Flat-earthism? It's hard to say at this point.

Sorry, facetious. This is just contents. It isn't their job to provide definitions. The next page was the Introduction, which would explain, presumably:

'NLP can change your life'. Well, in a small way, it was already changing mine. But this could be the start of something much bigger - relationships, management skills, success in EVERYTHING and general BRILLIANCE were only a book away. Still, unfortunately, no clue as to nature of NLP. But I had never been more keen. So next page:

Ah, a brief history! Wait? So brief it doesn't even say what NLP is? That is too brief.

And then, finally, 'It does what it says on the tin'. Obviously, given the previous, this is a very ironical chapter title, but we were so grateful that we were finally told 'neurolinguistic programming' that neither of us minded.

After that, there was barely time for me to photograph another page of these bullshit books, surrounding the very brilliant Michael Lewis's The Big Short as if they were fit to share its air, and to be upbraided by a security guard because I was not allowed to take photographs in WH Smith, and for me to say, 'Really?' and for him to say, 'It's company policy,' and for me to speculate, 'I think that's not true, and you're just saying that because you're bored,' before my co-traveller pointed out that we were now on the verge of missing our train. We had to run.

arrgh!

2012-01-20T15:41:00.003Z

I bloody love the Pirates, by Gideon Defoe. I find it hard to believe that I only heard the other day that Aardman have made them into a movie, but I have no choice.

I also bloody love the paragraph in the back of all good books where they tell the history of the type-face used in the book. Here is the one from the back of The Pirates! in an Adventure with Communists:

This book is set in Golombek Bold. Developed in the 1950s by Sergei Golombek as a means of smuggling secrets out of Stalinist Russia, each full stop is really a microdot containing the blueprints of reactor cores, submarines and missile silos. And hidden inside the loop of the letter 'g' is a map showing the true location of where Lenin's brain is kept frozen inside a special refrigerated box!

copycat

2012-01-19T19:54:00.004Z

Just pointing (via Marbury) at a vg NYT piece on the whole online SOPA/Wikipedia/copyright debacle. What we all want is something telling us what to think, right? Well, as Jaron Lanier says, and as you secretly knew deep down, it's complicated, so tough luck. Lots of people a) want to pretend stealing isn't stealing and b) forget that the web is a massive, expensive piece of infrastructure.

Basically, engineering/films/other stuff has to be paid for somehow, and people who do stuff for money will not want to give it away free. To pay for some of it, Facebook sells info about you. Well...

... it’s not Facebook’s fault! We, the idealists, insisted that information be able to flow freely online, which meant that services relating to information, instead of the information itself, would be the main profit centers. Some businesses do sell content, but that doesn’t address the business side of everyday user-generated content.

The adulation of “free content” inevitably meant that “advertising” would become the biggest business in the open part of the information economy. Furthermore, that system isn’t so welcoming to new competitors. Once networks are established, it is hard to reduce their power. Google’s advertisers, for instance, know what will happen if they move away.

As for the bits of the online economy we all know are illegal (even if we personally believe all information should be free, we also know we do not get to pick and choose our laws), for the nth time, the best thing I have ever read on this, by a writer, is this:

I hate how saying this stuff in public results in friends and close associates of mine getting into terrible wheedling conversations with me about it. They're almost like the debates children have with adults about where naughty behaviour begins. 'You're stealing 6p off me every time.' 'Ah, but if I asked you to lend me 6p...' 'That would be fine.' 'If you gave me 6p...' 'That would be fine.' 'If I found 6p in the street...' 'Yes, yes, all that would be fine. You putting your hand in my pocket and taking 6p from me is what isn't fine!' And as for 'Well, you should be fashionable and technologically savvy enough to just make 6p appear out of thin air. Like I did when I took it out of your pocket. It's hardly my fault you can't do that!' or 'I'm probably going to give you your 6p back, possibly 12p or even 24p!' Well, statistics don't support your highly optimistic view. Statistics say most people who nick my 6p just keep it. And forgive me if I can't feed my family on 'probably'. Most friends of mine at least don't go that far. These conversations are about guilt, about weighing perceived mini-societal approval of theft against a creator's disapproval. But do me a favour: we can still be friends if you've stolen my stuff, just don't seek my approval for having done it. You can't get it.

band camp

2012-01-17T16:26:00.005Z

I've been meaning to get to this story for ages. It's about the death of a guy at Florida A&M University's marching band. It seems likely that he died as a result of hazing.

These bands are a big thing - they play at the sports events in front of tens of thousands - and they are socially stratified in all kinds of weird and fascinating ways. To join the in-group within the band, and so get playing time, it at least helps to go through various rituals. It's like fraternities, which I'm vaguely used to from movies, and initiations, which I'm vaguely used to from sports teams and the rest.

I've had a lot of fun in my life binge drinking. I also have had a lot of fun at initiation events. I would say they have not, in general, been horrible. Also, in general, the places I have been, non-drinking was one of the options. I have never had to drink pints with dog food in, which some people have. All the same, I absolutely see the bad side of these things, and this story, where to be one of the cool kids in the drum section you submit yourself to a life-threatening beating. Basically, it's a horrible story, almost certainly not typical, and something I recommend you read for yourself. I don't have a fully-formed view on it, which is why it has taken me so long. I want to close the tab.

Nemesis-watch

2012-01-13T11:45:00.006Z

Mike Tanier's latest NFL column discusses an artfully constructed Atmospheric Documentary about Arian Foster, a terrific, engaging and interesting player with a life-story so unsuited to this hyperbolic treatment that it makes for 'inherently funny' results.

In seventh grade, Foster’s awful, awful teacher asked the class what they wanted to be when they grew up. Foster said he wanted to play in the NFL, and the teacher asked him to pick something else. Apparently, she should have told him to follow his dreams. In fact, she should have handed him a football, excused him from class, and sent him out to the practice field. His high school freshman football coach did not think he was ready for varsity, and planted him on the bench. Oh, we are awful, awful adults, with our legitimate fears that tweeners who dream of NFL stardom might leave themselves with nothing to fall back on, and that 15-year-olds might seriously injure themselves when playing contact sports against 18-year-olds if they have not developed enough mentally or physically. We are just holding back future subjects of Atmospheric Documentaries with our slavish devotion to common sense and safety ... Luckily for Foster, his father was a college football star in the 1970s, and through the miracle of genetics, Foster grew into a 230-pound running back.

Tanier is, incidentally, an ex-teacher.

Non-sports fans will enjoy the Foster section and also the last section on Ricky Gervais:

Here is a little secret from someone who writes lots of jokes for money: sometimes, we write material that is not that good. The 20th Rex Ryan joke is never as funny as the first two. You tighten the material, you bury the weaker joke between the two strong ones, and you put as much polish on the gag as you can, but sometimes you have to serve a microwave taco of a joke, because it is your job.

also, she was one of the ten most photographed women of the 60s*

2012-01-12T13:38:00.004Z

I saw two minutes of The Ballad of Cable Hogue over lunch. This is the first part of the biography of its female lead:

A native of Hot Coffee, Mississippi, Stella Stevens was married at 15, a mother at 16 and divorced at 17. While attending Memphis State College, Stella became interested in acting and modeling. Her film debut was a bit part in Say One for Me, but her appearance in Li'l Abner as Appassionata Von Climax is the one that got her noticed...

'Hot Coffee' is what the locals call it, but it's not a municipal area. She comes from Yazoo City, really. Also, she once opened an art gallery in Twisp.

* Citation needed

bad reviews

2012-01-11T12:05:00.004Z

An ancient book review is doing the rounds on Twitter. For obvious reasons, I hate the idea that reviewers look for books to savage and relish doing so, which some reviewers do. On the other hand, as an ex-reviewer, sometimes you have to say a book is useless. First duty is to your reader, second duty is to the author of the book you are reviewing. Sometimes, those savagings are both fair and fun. If you are scrupulous, reasoned and not malicious, I have no problem with that. This review is a terrific one, and contains the paragraph:

What sets Thackara apart is quite a simple fact. He can't write. After a while, the incredulous reader Thackara to play a game: to open the book at random and try and find a tolerable sentence. Save your effort - you will never win. Thackara is always ahead of you, with his uncanny knack for the not-quite-right word and the yer-what turn of phrase. "You could not see his parents' intricate cultivation, nor that the ball was in the Palazzo Farnese, just after the war." "Justin's friend was not in the courtyard, but the fountain was." "The Hanoverian battery commander, Egbert, was as delighted as a music conductor to show off for his guests behind the embankment wall." These examples are taken entirely at random. It is all at least as bad as this, and some of it is worse to an unspeakable degree.

Intrigued by this, I went to Thackara's Wikipedia page. Whoever is the main editor/writer of the page has given both sides of the story, up to a point. Now, I am not saying that Thackara has own edited his Wikipedia entry. But, in light of the above paragraph, I find the entry's style interesting:

Thackara’s work has received notable extremes of criticism and praise though not in equal measure and sometimes the negative critiques have been commented on. The basis of some disapproval of Thackara is that his language can become inhumanly exalted; his characters’ metaphysical conjectures weigh down the text; and the sprinkling of different languages requires a skill not found in most readers.

The description of the book in question is also, well, read it for yourself.

body fascist opera

2012-01-10T16:44:00.004Z

I go to the opera all the time these days. One thing I have noticed is that the jokes about fat sopranos waddling around playing beautiful waifs are well out of date. Relentlessly, the female lead is a pretty girl who can act.

Of course, it's still ok if the guy is a bit of dumpy haystack, often doing that weird non-acting which is a sort of slow stumble at a forty-five degree angle to the direction you are facing.

Obviously, this not the worst example of sexist double standards on earth, but I think it's interesting.

river of doubt

2012-01-05T18:44:00.004Z

Theodore Roosevelt had carried the lethal dose of morphine with him for years. He had taken it to the American West, to the African savanna and, finally, down the River of Doubt--a twisting tributary deep in the Amazon rain forest. The glass vial was small enough to tuck into a leather satchel or slip into his luggage, nearly invisible beside his books, his socks and his eight extra pairs of eyeglasses. Easily overlooked, it was perhaps the most private possession of one of the world's most public men.

In December 1913, Roosevelt, then 55, and a small group of men embarked on a journey to explore and map Brazil's River of Doubt. Almost from the start, the expedition went disastrously wrong. Just three months later, as Roosevelt lay on a rusting cot inside his expedition's last remaining tent listening to the roar of the river, he clutched the vial that he had carried for so long. Shivering violently, his body wracked with fever, he concluded that the time had come to take his own life.

I love it when Time Magazine appears in a set of search results. I've never looked on Time's site systematically, but it is full of great things, and they might be written in 1904 or they might, like the above, be written in 2006. It's by Candice Millard, and based on her book about Roosevelt's expedition to the River of Doubt (now the Rio Roosevelt) along with his son Kermit and a Brazilian called Colonel Candido Rondon, whose approach to native tribesmen, who attacked him and killed his dog, was 'Die if you must, but never kill.'

The book's gone on my reading list. My reading list is so long.

(Incidentally, in case you don't know, a tuna was sold in the first market of the year in Tokyo for about £500,000. Once upon a time, when I was new at being obsessed with tuna, people didn't believe me when I quoted £50,000. A tuna cost £500,000. Why? Partly it's because Tokyo restaurants have got into the theatre of paying a fortune for tuna at this first market, but basically it's because they're endangered.)

Happy New Listen & Often

2012-01-03T19:33:00.004Z

Another day, another dollar. Another month, another podcast. It's got some unfestive Christmas news from Kilburn, something spooky from Toby Davies, some things you didn't know you needed to know but do from Gareth Edwards and Marie Phillips on the perils of amateur sex. As a bonus feature, you get descriptions of Toby's peculiar flat and a disquisition on emotional neediness.

If you believe the iTunes reviews, it's great. If you think the same as those guys, write another one. If you don't, not so much. The more people who subscribe on iTunes and rate us highly, the more other people who will find us.

Kiss Prudence

2011-12-31T10:35:00.007Z

The other day, I saw Nuts in May for the first time. I only read reviews after seeing shows. IMBD's average score was surprisingly not about 9/10. The reason is a 1 star review which fails to get the point with more heroism than any review I have read since Peter Bradshaw watched Charlie Wilson's War for the Guardian and wrote that the movie didn't seem to understand that arming the Mujahideen against the Russians in the 1980s was to have huge and unintended consequences. (He really did.)

Anyway, off topic: if you like Nuts in May, I really recommend the IMDB review. Here is a highlight:

Towards the end our tree hugging, incoherent, couple get into a fight with some of Ray's friends that have complete disrespect for the rules of camping. Our hero becomes so incensed that a climatic battle ensues between our hero and the head hellraiser. To settle their dispute the two men engage in a stick fight. That's right a stick fight! Now this is where the unintensional humor starts. I laughed so hard at the ineptitude of it all that i thought, "This may make up for the other 80 minutes." After this histerical battle our hero runs behind some bushes to cry his eyes out

I love the thought that this guy was shouting things like 'Haven't these guys ever heard of fight coordinators!' at his screen. The fight in Nuts in May is one of the most painfully realistic things in it, ironically. Go here for the full review

I thought I'd have a laugh at this guy's other work, see if there was anything else to laugh at. The only other film he's written about, however, sees him - to me - sound quite insightful and plausible about a Japanese movie about rape and revenge. The millionth lesson of my life in not being too quick to judge.

***Bonus Feature***
This is a picture of Baranova Nuts in May, son of Evanpark Bruce Almighty, son of Fairweather's A Great Pretender, son of Main Tickle Forbidden Planet, son of Twillin Gate Persuader, son of a dog without a film in its name.

rose-tinted pigeons

2011-12-29T18:20:00.005Z

A while ago I missed a brilliant looking exhibition called Ghosts of Gone Birds, which featured dozens of pictures of (mainly) extinct birds. The above is called a Bishop's O'o', and it's by a guy called Ben Newman. Ralph Steadman contributed a number. This next one is less to my taste as a picture, but that's by the by, because it's of the passenger pigeon and I have wanted to write about the passenger pigeon for ages.

You probably know already that when Europeans arrived in North America, perhaps 40% of the continent's birds were passenger pigeons. They flew at 60 mph in flocks miles long that darkened the sky for whole days. Another lost bird project, which again I basically like, says In the 19th century as America’s urban population grew and the demand for wild meat increased, thousands of men became full-time pigeon hunters. It was inconceivable that such natural riches could be destroyed, but they were, and the passenger pigeon is one of the great poster-children for man's unslakeable bloodlust.

One thing these sites do not mention is that if you are a growing population starting to farm on a widespread scale for the first time, then flocks of passenger pigeons are, basically, worse than swarms of locusts. They can eat more than you can grow. I mourn the passing of the pigeon, but we have to remember that these were not jewels of the sky hunted for meat - these were life- and livelihood-destroying pests. Etc.

don't worry, the bbc's best guys are on it

2011-12-28T18:15:00.005Z

I flicked to the BBC news website. I saw the headline: Tarzan star Cheetah the chimpanzee 'dies aged 80'. I dare say I am partly seduced by such headlines because I thought Me Cheeta was so brilliant. But also, I wondered what the mystery was. Was he not really 80? Had he not really died? Obviously something suspicious was afoot. I clicked on the link.

Curiouser and curiouser, because the new headline read: 'Tarzan's chimpanzee' Cheetah dies aged 80 in Florida. So... Er...? Does this mean a chimp of that age has died, but he wasn't really Tarzan's? Because Tarzan isn't real? That would fit with the earlier one on the basis that it said he was a star of the film but did not belong to actual Tarzan. But what about the 'dies aged 80' thing?

After long and hard discussion for the amount of time it has taken me to produce this post (with a typing cadence that at least one regular listener has likened to falling rain), I have decided that the most likely thing is that the BBC's website uses inverted commas much too much because it is posted by overworked people who are scared of being criticised.

adopt a snow leopard?

2011-12-23T14:50:00.005Z

On daytime television at the moment, there are lots of adverts for adoptasnowleopard.com. There aren't enough of these majestic animals to go around, surely? (And if there are, should we be concentrating our efforts on something else?)

cops and robbers

2011-12-22T18:21:00.002Z

Amazon is selling Treasure Islands: Tax Havens and the Men who Stole the World, which is about 'the ugliest chapter in global economic affairs since slavery - and secretive offshore tax havens are at the heart of the trouble.' Furthermore, 'Tax havens are the most important single reason why poor people and poor countries stay poor ... They have been instrumental in nearly every major economic event, in every big financial scandal, and in every financial crisis since the 1970s, including the latest global economic downturn.'

People who bought this book also bought The World's Best Tax Havens: How to Cut Your Taxes to Zero and Safeguard Your Financial Freedom, which is 'completely up to date and packed with information to help you reduce or even escape tax altogether.'

who was the queen of the waves?

2011-12-22T10:50:00.006Z

A few days ago, looking for a picture of a channel swimmer, I found Gertrude Ederle. Today, with the Daily Mail calling the people upset at there being no female candidates on the Sports Personality of the Year shortlist 'sporting suffragettes', here's a bit more about her. (Hmm. I get that this is not a good, direct or neat link. But you can see how the thought process worked.)

She was the daughter of an immigrant German butcher in Manhattan, and at nineteen she was bitterly disappointed by her haul of one gold and two bronze medals in the 1924 Olympics. In 1926, at her second attempt, she swam the channel in 14 hours and 39 minutes (or 30, or 34, depending on which bit of the internet you are looking at), a record for either sex.

'Gosh,' thought the News of the World. 'We'll offer £1,000 to anyone who can beat that!' This was real money.* Dr Dorothy Logan claimed the prize with a swim of 13 hours and 18 minutes, was feted by the paper, and then announced that she hadn't swum it at all and was just trying to show how badly channel swimming, for all that it was a newspaper craze, was being scrutinised.**

The hoax didn't go great for Logan, and because she signed a legal document swearing to having done the deed, she was fined £100. The court accepted she had committed an offence without realising how serious it was and said she expected her to be a credit to the medical profession. She wasn't struck off. I'm going to write more about her, just see if I don't.

Back to Ederle, from who I have now been distracted for about half an hour reading old newspapers***: she got a ticker-tape parade in NY and a dance step was named after her. In 1933 she fell down some stairs and was bedridden for several years. She went deaf in the 1940s and spent much of her life teaching deaf kids to swim. She never married and died in New Jersey at the age of 98.

* £43,000 via retail price index or £142,000 via average earnings.
** Some German guy broke the record later that month anyway.
*** 'Bearded Patriarch Wields Thong on Boys Who Stole'; Bonnie Prince Charlie relic shield sold for £4,000 (present value £172,000/£568,000)

gary speed

2011-12-20T08:40:00.004Z

Gary Speed, manager of the Welsh football team, killed himself last month. He was 42 and suffering from depression. The first thing I thought was: CTE?

In a nutshell, Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy is a rare brain condition which has been found in a shocking number of American Footballers. It seems to be correlated not with huge brain trauma but with repeated sub-concussive impacts. (Thus, helmets make the game more dangerous by persuading players it's safe to suffer these impacts.) Malcolm Gladwell wrote one of the most prominent things about it in the New Yorker a while ago, but he's by no means alone.

The NFL doesn't really want to address it, but it's having to. So is ice hockey, especially in the light of shocking, and stunning, articles/videos like these, about Derek Boogaard, a guy whose job it is to enforce rough justice in the National Hockey League. Job it was, I mean. He died at 28. The story of how he was scouted, aged 15, dreaming of playing in the NHL but not really all that good at hockey, is about 5.20 into the video. It's... Well, it's at least uncomfortable.

Footballs are lighter than they were - I am sure that heading old leather ones used to cause all kinds of problems - but I'm not sure anyone's looked for CTE. Obviously no one knows about Speed specifically unless his brain is autopsied, and depression is by no means confined to people who have been injured. But it seems sensible for football to look into the overall issue, just in case. In the NFL, players are routinely saying making their brains available for study - one shot himself but not in the head because he wanted the brain to be studied. Ex-players, frankly, are best-placed to take the lead. It is certainly not something you can leave to the Blatters of this world.

(By the way, if you look up Gary Speed's death online to see who else has thought this, you find some pretty horrible and/or batty people. Conspiracoids I will not give the oxygen of linking to them answer speculation that he was gay by presenting this alternative:

The typical Illuminati execution is either car crash (air device rams steering to the side triggered by a radio device, with a detonator fixed to the petrol tank), drugs 'overdose' (easily arranged when a star is on medication or has a habit), suicide (hanging or jumping off a balcony) or heart attack. Gary was a bit young for the heart attack treatment.

Gary was getting very big, and wasn't a corrupt character. The World Cup is coming up, with big money involved. Wales was looking like making it to the last few rounds, and could have caused a sensation. Seeking an explanation somewhere around big money, power and corruption is more likely to give us an answer as to why he died, than the suggestion he was unable to face his family, if he was outed as a gay.

It goes on. It's sort of funny, in a black way, and sort of not.)

pen portrait

2011-12-19T12:11:00.005Z

John Finnemore is doing literal portraits over on Forget What Did and I presume you are loving them. From the Forsyte re-read comes this paragraph, which ends with something special:

Hubert Cherrell stood outside his father's club in Pall Mall, a senior affair of which he was not yet a member. He was feeling concerned, for he had a respect for his father somewhat odd in days when fathers were commonly treated as younger brethren, or alluded to as 'that old man.' Nervously therefore he entered an edifice wherein more people had held more firmly to the prides and prejudices of a lifetime than possibly anywhere else on earth. There was little however, either of pride or prejudice, about the denizens of the room into which he was now shown. A short alert man with a pale face and a tooth-brush moustache was biting the end of a pen, and trying to compose a letter to 'The Times' on the condition of Iraq; a modest-looking little Brigadier General with a
bald forehead and grey moustache was discussing with a tall modest- looking Lieutenant Colonel the flora of the island of Cyprus; a man of square build, square cheek-bones and lion-like eyes, was sitting in the window as still as if he had just buried an aunt and were thinking whether or not he would try and swim the Channel next year.

who is my favourite author?

2011-12-14T15:17:00.006Z

Scott Pack is rounding-up of his favourite films, books and so on from the year, and this made me think. I have, as it happens, had a cracking year for reading. War with the Newts is very good for about forty pages and then becomes all-time amazing; Frederick Exley's A Fan's Notes joins it in the discussion over the best books I've ever read, and for good measure I have been re-reading The Forsyte Saga, which has been in that discussion for a decade.

All the same, I think Dorothy Dunnett is still my favourite author. Favourite is not quite the same thing as 'best'. I have banged on about the Lymond and Niccolo series' before - fourteen books of high octane historical romance (very much not my genre; you have to push through the first 1.2 Lymonds while DD finds her voice, but thereafter I couldn't put them down) - but I am only just reading the Johnson Johnson mysteries for the first time.

Each is narrated by a different woman, while Johnson himself is a diffident-seeming portrait painter with a yacht called Dolly. Dunnett is clever, the stories are complicated and the characters are super. I am in the middle of Dolly and the Cookie Bird (AKA Ibiza Surprise, AKA Murder in the Round).

The cover, above, is from 1985. It's sort of ghastly, but I love it. If it puts you off, let me tell you that it's got nothing on the most lurid of the Lymonds. The one below isn't the worst, but I haven't got time to dig around my shelves. The covers (and titles) give no insight into the books.

Some people like Dick Francis and liked him even more in their youth. One of the funniest things, which a female friend pointed out to me a long time ago, is the clothes he dresses his characters in. For DF, pretty women wear flounces, frills and a ton of perfume. DD is also very clear on clothes, and lots of the books are set at similar times, and I kept feeling the echo. DD is wildly better than Francis, and she does what she does in a much more self-aware way. It is, quite apart from being fun, an excellent bit of high-society social history. Here we are in Ibiza:

Austin hesitated. I'd expected him to be turned out in white tux, all Washington style, but he was wearing a cream wool-jersey suit by Virgul of Paris, with a strawberry cashmere polo-necked sweater. I saw the label.

Who wouldn't look good in cream wool-jersey and strawberry cashmere? (At this point, incidentally, our heroine, a minor hon, is in white moire silk with clear polythene bands in between. Her daddy would have hit the roof, but it's his murder we're investigating.)

helpful notice

2011-12-12T10:07:00.003Z

1. The above was taken in Victoria Park by an eagle-eyed regular correspondent. If you can help, you know the number to call.

2. Woo hoo, the Warhorses of Letters book is fully funded. If you want a copy in the first printing, with your literal name in it (or another literal name of your choosing) then head along to Unbound.

3. Woo hoo, the Mighty Fin Christmas Show is on this week. I know lots of you have had trouble with the Drill Hall website. It's still iffy. You may have to phone them up. If you are hoping to pop along casually tomorrow, Weds or Friday, then I'd book this morning and even then you might be out of luck because those have very nearly sold out. If you want to come on Thursday, then you will likely be in luck. Thursday is the new Friday.

the chambered nautilus

2011-12-09T09:26:00.002Z

Hi. Sorry for low productivity online, which is being caused by high productivity offline in terms of getting the Warhorses of Letters book finished and rehearsing for the show postered below. But this morning, while I was in a very private place, I read a magic bit of Cuppy.

He's talking about an Oliver Wendell Holmes poem about the chambered nautilus - a primitive animal with a shell made up of lots of little chambers - and he discusses the ways in which poets through the ages have got the nautilus' biology wrong.

Then Cuppy returns to the poem, which is about constantly rebuilding the mansion of your soul. The first paragraph here is good, but it's only here to set up the second. You'll see what I mean:

I guess I'm sensitive about my soul. Seems to me it isn't too terrible, surely not in need of any complete overhauling and repair job. I've kept it in mind all along. I won't say it has steadily grown in grace year by year, because I don't believe as much as that was wrong with it in the first place. My soul in early youth was certainly as good as it is now, if not better, and come to think of it I shouldn't wonder if Dr Holmes had something to do with that pleasant state of affairs. As I strode up and down our back yard shouting parts of 'The Chambered Nautilus' at the top of my voice, first in order to learn the words by heart and thus retain my status as teacher's pet, later for the joy of showing off a bit, I don't recall that I thought very much about the meaning of it all. I just liked it. Anyway, it couldn't have harmed me and maybe it helped. Maybe it sank in.

As for those more stately mansions of the soul that Dr Holmes so beautifully recommends, I am not absolutely sure that I qualify there. It doesn't sound like me. I just go along doing the best I can, but nothing too wonderful, nothing sensational. Not that I haven't laid plans for larger mansions than I have achieved. Again and again I did that. I tried. I might have succeeded, too, if I hadn't been crossed up every time by persons I can only describe as lowdown rats - and that's too good for them. If I haven't made the grade you can blame them for it, don't blame me.

A system maintenance is under going. Partial services will not be available during this time.

2011-12-01T09:20:00.004Z

Today's blog title is my all-time favourite maintenance message.

It is particularly relevant today, because it is part of the concatenation of forces trying desperately to put a barrier between you and things I am in or have written. This is a public service announcement.

1. Warhorses of Letters: the book is selling well and we are having fun answering your questions. Some people have asked whether they can get other names than their own printed in the book. In short, 'Yes.' I have just posted a fuller explanation on the Warhorses of Letters blog.

2. Listen & Often: We were on time with the podcast, and it's a cracker, and it was on iTunes briefly yesterday evening. Now, due to some conniptions at our host (see all-time favourite maintenance message above), it is not. I expect it will be again very shortly. If you are desperate, you can listen to it here.

3. The Devil Gets All the Best Tunes: That's what the brilliant flyer above is all about (big up Jamie Wignall for artwork). It's this year's Mighty Fin Christmas Show and it's on at central London's incredibly convenient Drill Hall Dec 13-16. BUT the Drill Hall's booking site has been down most of the last week, so if you want to book, and you really should want to book, you might have to venture a telephone call. We are sorry for the inconvenience.

helen mccookerybook

2011-11-30T13:06:00.002Z

It's more than likely you're not a fan of The Chefs, part of the Brighton scene in the last seventies and early eighties. I know them because of the brilliant song Thrush, which is rude and properly funny. The lyrics are here.

What have I learned today? That their lead singer, Helen McCookeryBook, is still gigging. I am going to go see her.

(Helen McCookeryBook. Beat that with a stick, Barkevious Mingo.)

letter of note

2011-11-29T10:07:00.004Z

I know you are eager to learn what I think of Pippa Middleton's advance, and I do have something lined up on that, but I just wanted to do this first.

Scott Raab has just written a book called The Whore of Akron. Its ostensible subject is a guy called LeBron James, the best basketballer of his generation, who played for his hometown Cleveland Indians, a long-suffering team whose passionate fans he constantly claimed to understand. Then he went to Miami to join a team of superstars, and he did it in a vulgar, self-serving way. Raab knows he's being unfair and his book is about being a sports fan.*

He asked two people for cover blurb: Buzz Bissinger, because Bissinger wrote Friday Night Lights (amazing book, passable film, very good television series) and Philip Roth, because he had just interviewed Roth and Roth is his hero. This, from Slate's Hang Up & Listen sports podcast, is Roth's reply:

Dear Scott,

You’re asking the wrong man to say something about your book. I was curiously incompetent at basketball as a boy, I have never followed basketball as an adult, and I know nothing about the teams or their players. I remember that Bill Bradley played for Princeton while I was teaching there, but otherwise, as far as I know, LeBron James is a hat worn by men in the 1920s.

Sorry to let you down, but you’ll do alright without me.

* Descriptions of how Raab analyses sport's place in his life make it sound like a more memoir-y version of Frederick Exley's A Fan's Notes, which is one of the best novels I have ever read. I have no idea how good Raab's book is, but people say it's very good.

economical

2011-11-28T12:16:00.006Z

You really need me to tell you about the economy? You really don't. But it drives me crazy when bankers tell me that current problems is caused by governments misallocating capital. Bankers have seriously told me this.

1. Still, this Bloomberg piece is a proper piece of proper reporting. In 2008, under Bush, the banks took tens of billions of secret loans, told the world they were healthy, lobbied hard for no change in regulation and paid themselves fortunes out of this borrowed money. The kicker is in the line that banks paid the money back - because people realised that banking was virtually riskless since governments would back them up however badly they screwed up:

While Fed officials say that almost all of the loans were repaid and there have been no losses, details suggest taxpayers paid a price beyond dollars as the secret funding helped preserve a broken status quo.

2. Reporting is a real issue. There are endless stories about government waste, but we can't find out about the similar waste in private companies. Do you think private companies don't waste a fortune implementing new IT systems?

3. Business and banks say they need their silly pay because that is the only way to attract talent. They're bright enough, but they aren't that special. People just as good as good as them would do the same jobs for less.

I am not pretending that it's easy to intervene in this flawed market. I suppose it might be the shareholders job. But shareholders are a smokescreen when they is quoted as any kind of actively assenting body - it is simply too much trouble for shareholders and the people voting for their own extraordinary, un-performance-related pay know it. I'm just saying that there should be no problem calling them a cabal of self-interested plutocrats lining their own pockets and not paying their dues.

'ye gods, a sea cow!' i yelled to my native boatman. 'bring my rifle!'

2011-11-23T17:15:00.004Z

I finished writing my tuna novel this morning. This afternoon, I flicked through a book written by one of my protagonists. I will do so again, and write down the first sentence I read each time:

'Griffiths, with great celerity, had pulled up the mooring stone.'

'Both in animal and bird life, as many people have, no doubt, remarked, a curious wagging motion of the tail synchronises with swallowing.'

'The four of us were now holding the line, but our efforts were quite ineffectual against the strength of this fish.'

'I now commenced to suffer the greatest pain, my leg swelling rapidly -- so much so that when I attempted to remove my shoes, the agony was so acute that the one on the foot of my bad leg had to be cut off.' [Things get much, much worse as the paragraph progresses, believe you me.]

'Here the genius in the man rose uppermost.'

'They waved to us -- our appearance was a break in the monotony of their lives.'

'I think Lady Brown's fame as a mascot was now firmly established for ever.'

'The little crocodile came to life while Lady Brown was holding it.'

And so on. The book is Battles With Giant Fish, by FA Mitchell-Hedges. If you want to spend a lot of money on a copy of your own, the best thing would be to buy this one. It's not a first edition, but it's signed by Neville Chamberlain, who bought it as a Christmas present for a friend called Percy Smith, and eventually Percy's son Rodney.

here be dragonnes

2011-11-22T08:58:00.003Z

I walked past this the other night. It seemed quite disaster movie, especially given the obviously-to-be-destroyed disaster movie set dressing. I kept going, though, like the unwise guy in that film.

tim tebow, narratological quagmire

2011-11-18T14:16:00.004Z

Oh brother. Most of my followers aren't NFL fans, for whatever insane reason. So, in a nutshell:

Tim Tebow was incredibly successful at college but most judges doubted that his skill set would translate into the professional game, where everyone is bigger, faster and harder. He sat on the bench while the Denver Broncos lost four of their first five games this season. He was inserted into the starting line-up and Denver have just won four of their next five, usually, like last night, after Tebow has played dreadfully by all traditional measures and then engineered a thrilling last-minute comeback, as per a particularly implausible television series.

The commentariat is having conniptions. The storytellers waffle about the fact he's dunked in some kind of intangible winner-sauce; the statheads freak out and say his teammates are digging him out of holes.

In addition, he's a fundamentalist Christian of a fairly extreme kind, which gets some people's hackles up and makes others claim any criticism of him is anti-God.* But then, everyone who meets him says he's a great kid, a genuine, straightforward, real-deal kind of guy who his teammates will do anything for because he'll do it right back. And so it goes. If you are a sports fan and in America, the bile, hysteria and so on are basically unbearable by now.

Still, you don't often get long articles in English newspapers dissecting the way commentators narrate stories. Here's my favourite NFL site doing it re Tebow. My favorite line:

There is just something special about comebacks. We'll call it Captain Kirk Syndrome: We have a hero, we know he's great, but he's getting beaten up. We see he's losing, but in our heart of hearts we know he is the superior man and cannot conceive of a universe in which our hero fails. This dovetails nicely into the American aversion to dramatic tragedy, but that's a conversation for another time.

(In other news, Go Devine Warhorses!, the Official Texas High School Football Team of Warhorses of Letters. They're playing Liberty Hill Panthers in the play-offs tonight.

* The hair in the picture is nothing to do with his religion. It's what his teammates got him to do when he was a rookie and he had to take a few pranks. So, in that sense, it is to do with his religion.

the jackal and dan mcgrew

2011-11-17T12:16:00.004Z

Rutherford Film Club's second Marple was Murder Most Foul. It's really terrific, and I heartily recommend. Possibly the highlight is Rutherford auditioning for a dramatic company by reciting The Shooting of Dan McGrew. In the above video, which starts with a trial montage, you can find the recitation at about 2.30 minutes in.

What I thought: I bet The Shooting of Dan McGrew was one of Rutherford's party pieces, and so it was written into the script, in much the same way that CJ Cregg performing The Jackal grew out of a thing of Allison Janney's.

good grief, bbc

2011-11-15T12:49:00.004Z

As two of the people on my blogroll pointed out within half an hour of my taking this picture, The Difference would be a good name for a Doctor Who villain.

To clarify, I think the BBC is brilliant. But even brilliant things aren't perfect. There are idiots everywhere.

better detectives than me

2011-11-14T17:25:00.004Z

There are many of them, even though you probably don't believe it. One was watching Murder at the Gallop with me the other day and where I stopped investigating shortly after learning all about Margaret Rutherford, he read the sentence about Rutherford informally adopting a guy who then had gender-reassignment surgery and he went the extra mile. That is why he is where he is and I am where I am. (Where is he? I don't know.)

Anyway, this informally adopted son became Dawn Langley Simmons. She was born Gordon Langley Hall at Sissinghurst Hall. Her father, Jack Copper, was Vita Sackville-West's chauffeur, and her mother was Margaret Hall Ticehurst, another servant.

Aged nine, Hall wrote a column for the Sussex Express and interviewed Mae West from the star's lap. I don't think it would be allowed now. He became a teacher on a native reservation in Canada, edited the Winnipeg Free Press and returned to England in 1957, aged twelve. Just kidding. He was twenty by then. The next year he biographed Princess Margaret, and followed up in the sixties with Jackie Kennedy, Lady Bird Johnson and others.

He made friends with a rich old painter and she left him $2m and that was when $2m got you somewhere.

He got into Chippendale and had his gender reassigned in 1968, and became Dawn Pepita Langley Hall. Everyone was called Pepita in those days. It was nothing special.

On Jan 21st 1969 she married John-Paul Simmons, a young black mechanic and wannabe sculptor, in the first legal inter-racial marriage in South Carolina. They did it in the front room because the church was threatened with firebombing. Their wedding presents were burnt in the street. They were probably plates anyway.

She had a daughter in 1971 called Natasha Margienell Manigault Paul Simmons. It seems unlikely. An intruder broke her arm and raped her, and she moved to Catskill, NY. She said this happened and it might have done. Her husband did beat her though. I think it was probably him.

warhorse

2011-11-11T13:10:00.004Z

Let us sit upon the ground and tell sad stories of the death of racehorses. Specifically, the death of Ruffian, maybe the greatest filly ever to race. She was out of Shenanigans by Reviewer which sounds like a Warhorses of Letters joke about a horse who wants to be an actor, and she won the Triple Tiara (then the Filly Triple Crown) in 1975.

Basically, she won everything and she won it by miles. Her final race was in 1975, a one-on-one match race with Foolish Pleasure, winner of that year's Kentucky Derby. In a nutshell, she was going to win when two bones in her right foreleg snapped. She didn't stop, pulverising the bones and ripping the leg to shreds.

She was anaesthatised and surgerised, but when she came to she acted like she was still racing and spun herself round and round on her side. She damaged herself so badly that she had to be put down. As a result, horses like Ruffian are nowawadays put in recovery pools so that when they thrash about on emerging from anaesthesia, they don't reinjure themselves.

Of course, if you want to read something extraordinary about the death of a racehorse, this is famously what you read.

the strange power of being in debt

2011-11-09T17:05:00.005Z

One of the (many) great things about Lords of Finance was the insight into how much power was wielded in the thirties by countries who were in debt. It's not the easiest power to use, but it's real. Creditor nations would be really screwed by a default and general systemic breakdown, and so they end up having to bail out...

Anyway, do read an article on much the same thing in Prospect by Tom Streithorst, which concludes:

The Germans would like the southern nations to pay the entire cost of adjustment by cutting wages, slashing demand and accepting an increase in unemployment. But the Greeks can see the upside of leaving the euro, even if it will devastate their bank balances. It is starting to look as though leaving the euro really would be the better of several bad options for the debtor nations. The northern eurozone countries don’t recognize it yet, but today the debtors have more cards than the creditors. Watch out.

Another excellent section is about how Detroit could have been saved if it could have devalued its currency, but it was tied to the stupid, strong dollar. The comparison between rich bits of the Eurozone bailing out poor bits and rich US States bailing out poor ones is not made enough. The parallels, exact and inexact, tell very interesting stories about democracy, economic power, group responsibility and so on.

(The other revelatory thing rammed home by Lords of Finance, in case you're new here, is that we tend to see the Great Depression as 'a crash' when actually it was years of shocks and aftershocks, interspersed with periods of people thinking they were out of the woods.)

shoe event horizon

2011-11-04T16:52:00.003Z

Uh oh. I was in Chichester yesterday watching the Festival Theatre's brilliant production of Sweeney ( I loved: the thirties setting, where the opening makes it clear that people are reveling in telling a gruesome oral folk tale; the realism of Michael Ball and Imelda Staunton; and almost everything else).

The streets of Chichester, it transpires, are paved with shoe shops. The Shoe Event Horizon, which did for the planet of Brontitall in the Radio Hitchhikers', comes about when a depressed society looks at its feet and decides to buy shoes to cheer itself up. The moment of no return is when it becomes economically unviable to open any kind of shop but a shoe shop and the entire financial system is based on the buying, selling and production of shoes. It's a funny idea, and it leads to the evolution of a race of intelligent birds, so what's not to like, but I'd never worried about it before I went to Chichester.

I took a picture of the above shop partly because it was one of three non-shoe shops in Chichester, and partly to entertain one of my more loyal readers. You know who you are.

all alone

2011-11-02T14:53:00.004Z

I came across this via @someoneontwitter (sorry, can't rediscover link). It's pretty astonishing.

It's about a murderer called Tommy Silverstein who is involved in a lawsuit against the Federal Bureau of Prisons, in which he contends that his decades of utter isolation in a small concrete cell violate the Constitution’s ban on cruel and unusual punishment, as well as its guarantee of due process. The description of him cowering under a sheet while a cell was built around him is pretty harrowing, and it's part of a lengthy statement written to describe my experience during this lengthy period of solitary confinement: the nature and impact of the harsh conditions I have endured in spite of a spotless conduct record for over 22 years, and my lack of knowledge about what, if anything, I can do to lessen my isolation.

(In other legal news, you will probably never be affected by the cuts to legal aid which mean that people facing life-wrecking charges will increasingly be unable to get halfway decent representation, because you are rich and/or well-educated. It's only happening because it will never affect rich, well-educated people, and it's really bad. Speak to a criminal barrister about it.)

galloping detectives!

2011-10-31T11:27:00.006Z

I watched Murder at the Gallop last night. Margaret Rutherford, Robert Morley, what's not to like and so on. Things I did not expect: the fabulously cheesy music; some surprisingly meta moments about the thrillers of Agatha Christie; the odd boyfriend character for Miss Marple ('Mr Stringer'); MR's racy ball dress and a truly great dance scene; the amount of story which was about boots.

Anyway, when we'd watched the film, we wondered what MR's early career had been like. Margaret Rutherford on Wikipedia: gosh.

MR was married to Stringer Davis, who played Mr Stringer, from 1945 to her death in 1972. He died a year later. Love the idea of her saying, 'I'll do it, but Stringer's part of the deal.'

Then:

Born in Balham, London, she was the only child of William Rutherford Benn and his wife Florence, née Nicholson. Her father's brother Sir John Benn, 1st Baronet was a British politician, and her first cousin once removed is British politician Tony Benn.

As an infant, Margaret Rutherford and her parents moved to India. She was returned to Britain when she was three to live with an aunt, a professional governess Bessie Nicholson, in Wimbledon, England, after her pregnant mother, Florence, committed suicide by hanging herself from a tree. Her father returned to England as well.

Her father suffered from mental illness, having a nervous breakdown on his honeymoon, and was confined to an asylum. He was eventually released on holiday and on 4 March 1883, he murdered his father, the Reverend Julius Benn, a Congregational church minister, by bludgeoning him to death with a chamberpot; shortly afterward, William tried to kill himself as well, by slashing his throat with a pocketknife. After the murder, William Benn was confined to the Broadmoor Criminal Lunatic Asylum. Several years later he was released, reportedly cured of his mental affliction, changed his surname to Rutherford, and returned to his wife, Ann (née Taylor). His continued mental illness resulted in his being confined once more to Broadmoor in 1904; he died in 1921.

She was an elocution teacher (I bet she was fun) who came to acting in her thirties. As for her personal life:

Rutherford married character actor Stringer Davis in 1945 and the couple appeared in many productions together. They were happily together until Rutherford's death in 1972. Davis adored Rutherford, with one friend noting: "For him she was not only a great talent but, above all, a beauty." Davis rarely left her side. He was private secretary and general dogsbody – lugging bags, teapots, hot water bottles, teddy bears and nursing Rutherford through periods of depression. These illnesses, often involving stays in mental hospitals and electric shock treatment, were kept hidden from the press during Rutherford's life. In the 1950s, Rutherford and Davis unofficially adopted the writer Gordon Langley Hall, then in his twenties. Hall later had gender reassignment surgery and became Dawn Langley Simmons, under which name she wrote a biography of Rutherford in 1983.

Blood D. Hell was Sunday Evening Film Club's reaction to this, and would be the good name for a character in spoof Halloween story. We also loved the line which went something like:

Every chair in this room is stuffed with hair from one of the horses which I have loved and, I think may say, has loved me.

not funny

2011-10-27T00:14:00.002+01:00

People have been incredibly nice about Warhorses of Letters on Twitter.

My favourite by a country mile: @bbccomedy warhorses getting killed by guns and bombs not quite comedy?

perfect engleberger versus othello cheeks

2011-10-25T14:03:00.005+01:00

Is there anything more magical than a truly crazy name? Does any one of us not have a favourite? How on earth could it be that this is not the most visited site on the internet?

This year's Name of the Year finals involved a host of magical match-ups. My favourite bit is that while eleventh seed Monsterville Horton IV is a top wine expert, number two seed Courvoisier Winetavius Richardson is an armed robber.

You are wondering how I finally found this site. Of course, the answer is American Football. The 2009 winner, who defeated Iris Macadangdang, the number one seed out of Kalamazoo, was Louisiana State linebacker and number four seed, Barkevious Mingo.

Oh wow.

I laughed so much I spilt tea down my front

2011-10-24T18:14:00.005+01:00

The above is a direct quote from Marie's section of the Warhorses blog we wrote for Radio 4. Pretty pointed, don't you think, given my current relationship with tea? (Things are much improved, thanks for asking. I will almost certainly be walking normally by the end of the week.)

In other news, may I recommend, as I so seldom do, this video game review?

I don't play video games because I need another time sump like I need another hole in the foot, but I am interested in the ongoing State of the Art, because a new narrative form is emerging, even if a lot of what gets produced is clearly crass. Anyway, Catherine sounds weird; the protagonist Vincent turns into a sheep in his infidelity-inspired nightmares; here is some of the review:

The larger plot of the game involves a surprisingly absorbing and even thought-provoking exploration of fidelity, gender difference, responsibility, and the fear of fatherhood. Vincent has nightmares because he is a cheater, and as the nightmares go on, you realize that almost every guy in the game is a cheater, and you begin to encounter them, too, in similarly sheepified form, in your nightmare puzzle world. These unfaithful boy-men are scared and confused, and, as Vincent, you have the chance to comfort them. If you fail to do that, they start disappearing from the bar, for if you lose faith and die in the nightmare, you die in real life.

It sounds like the writer has clearly had a go at something interesting here.

all go at planet warhorse

2011-10-20T16:51:00.008+01:00

Things are afoot. I have not been as on top of matters as I used to be in my long-lost and much-lamented bipedal days, so here is the news:

1. Warhorses of Letters, the thought of which has filled your every dream these last few months, will be broadcast in four weekly episodes from next Tuesday. Stephen Fry, Daniel Rigby and Tamsin Greig are in it; John Finnemore and I are not.

2. But if only there were a book as well! There is a book as well! Unbound is offering it for sale within three weeks of our first meeting. Marie and I love our novels being published by Jonathan Cape / Vintage but Unbound are super great. The book will contain the letters, obviously, but also features other correspondence involving Copenhagen and Marengo; notes between Copenhagen and an annoying dog he has to share a stall with; extensive hoofnotes; and an Astonishing Bibliographical Essay.

On the books site, incidentally, you get to see a video of Marie and me. My mother's view of this video will be: 'Why did you not iron your shirt?' If you sign up, there will be more such videos. They are in post-production, whatever that is.

3. Listen & Often. Yes, yes, believe me I know. Illness, injury, births and computer failures have ravaged our schedule. Suffice to say, the October episode is in post-production, and we will, from November, have a reliable release date of the start of the month.

how do you unwind when your life is perfect?

2011-10-18T15:20:00.005+01:00

I've been meaning to get back the SS Delphine, as pictured some days back. This is because as well as the yacht's general beauty, it has amazing spaces on deck...

and for sleeping...

but if you think that's good, it's nothing compared to the main lounge, where, sozzled by the general wonderfulness of how your life has turned out, you can dial the excitement up to twelve WITH A GAME OF RUMMIKUB!!!!

Yes, yes! It's an Inspiring Photo Essay!

2011-10-17T16:31:00.013+01:00

Now we're talking. It's been ages since we had an IPE. However, I think it's only fair to put a disclaimer up top: it's not a photo essay for the feeble of heart. You've got that? You're not feeble-hearted? Right. We're all on the same page. So, what do you think that picture is at the top of this page? Well, if that's what you think, you're almost certainly wrong.

What is this picture of then?

You are almost certainly right. It is a cup of tea. But not just any cup of tea. It's... No, wait, it is any cup of tea. We all like tea, don't we? NO! Ok, we do, but it's not all been plain sailing.

Let's go back to that first picture again.

Well, early on Friday afternoon, when I was about to demo Scrivener for a friend of mine who is a top hilarious soon-to-be-published writer of novels for girls, and shortly before I beetled off to Essex to feed the children of most people I know, I...

There's something about me you might not know. You would assume from the fact I can catch et cetera that I have all the grace and balance I could want, and maybe I do, but there is one thing I have never in my life particularly been able to grasp and that is keeping tea in cups. I am a dripper. Fundamentally, this is because I am careless. Something in me refuses to sweat the small stuff. I wish it were not so. I am not trying to be all 'Aw shucks'. I don't want to drip. Now I'm a grown up, I frequently have to clean up after myself.

Back to Friday. I made the tea, and didn't quite put it on the counter. It dropped onto my stockinged foot. 'Stockinged', as you well know, is an old-fashioned way of saying I was wearing socks. I was not cross-dressing. Tea, it transpires, is bloody hot, and that picture you have nearly forgotten about features a couple of bits of the skin that came off the top of my foot while I was de-socking.

I put it under cold water and so on for the next hour while I showed my friend how to use Scrivener. She left. I got out of the saucepan I was standing in. Then I got back in it quite quickly. Then I phoned NHS Direct. They told me that you can't mess around with feet and so I went to A&E.

All very quick in triage, and the doctor said: 'Urgent Care Clinic, straight away, there's no queue.' Nor was there, for the UCC, but the queue to be processed by A&E reception was 40 minutes. This was pretty annoying.

Been a while since there was a picture. This is the ancestral town, where I intended to be by this point in the early evening.

Anyway, I got to the counter, gave my date of birth, and name. Then I waited while the receptionist looked shockedly at me. This was the fun bit, up to a point, because then I got to say, 'There are two Robert Hudsons born that day.' The other one died last year, I happen to know, and I am used to this confusion. It is less fun for the other RH, of course.

Anyway, I eventually got bandaged up. This morning, I had to go back and have the dressings re-done. I was more camera-ready this time. Here is my foot in bandage:

Oh, ugh, isn't it a bit discoloured? Indeed it is. It had been seeping as I hobbled to the hospital. Here is the evidence in my sock / stocking:

A trainee nurse started to undo the bandages...

We all sort of know what kind of thing is coming up - I am putting in interim stages to raise the tension. Here is another, of the gauze:

And here is the tea-damaged foot:

In various ways, especially in terms of toes and nails, the foot has also been damaged by hockey.

Ah, I see you are disappointed. 'Couldn't you,' you are thinking, 'have got a more incarnadine version, assuming that word means "redder"?' I could have and did.

This next picture is of the pot I stood in, this morning, days later. I hadn't been able to carry it down yesterday when I got back from Essex (my foot was sore). On seeing this picture, my girlfriend said, 'Oh, it's your room. At first I thought it was an intensive care ward.' Leaving aside what kind of state she must think the National Health is in, take a moment to wonder at the chaos - atypical to be sure - which had been allowed to take over in a few short days of shortfootedness.

But of course there is a reason for my posting this picture. See this final one. Look into the pan.

Yes, there, on the left, sunk into the water, is another bit of flapped off skin. This pan will soon appear again in one of my much-loved cooking IPEs.

fat virus

2011-10-12T16:56:00.004+01:00

BBC story about a new kind of virus.

The largest virus yet discovered has been isolated from ocean water pulled up off the coast of Chile.

Isolation is cruel. Kids know that when they are five, scientists.

Called Megavirus chilensis, it is 10 to 20 times wider than the average virus.

So you isolated a virus which probably already has pretty serious issues? I hope you feel good about yourselves. I bet you look fat to a virus.

It just beats the previous record holder, Mimivirus, which was found in a water cooling tower in the UK in 1992.

Wait. I'm getting more of a grip on this story now. Are we saying some dago virus has beaten a British record-holder? I'm not certain about anything, I'm just saying, but drugs?

Scientists tell the journal PNAS that Megavirus probably infects amoebas, single-celled organisms that are floating free in the sea.

1. Scientists will say anything.
2. I wish I were floating free in the sea.

The particle measures about 0.7 micrometres (thousandths of a millimetre) in diameter. "It is bigger than some bacteria," explained Prof Jean-Michel Claverie, from Aix-Marseille University, Marseille, France.

Yeah? Well what Jean-Michel doesn't know is some bacteria are pretty small.

"You don't need an electron microscope to see it; you can see it with an ordinary light microscope," he told BBC News.

No, I can't.

Viruses cannot copy themselves; they need to invade a host cell if they want to replicate.

I have friends like this.

Like Mimivirus, Megavirus has hair-like structures, or fibrils, on the exterior of its shell, or capsid, that probably attract unsuspecting amoebas looking to prey on bacteria displaying similar features.

What kind of amoeba doesn't suspect a megavirus with hair-like fibrils? I would and the megavirus isn't interested in me. At some point, people and amoebas have to take responsibility for their own mistakes. Look at the banking crisis.

A study of the giant virus's DNA shows it to have more than a thousand genes, the biochemical instructions it uses to build the systems it requires to replicate once inside its host.

I went out with someone who had a thousand genes once, in a walk in wardrobe.

In the lab experiments conducted by Professor Claverie and colleagues, in which they infected fresh-water amoebas, Megavirus was seen to construct large trojan organelles - the "cells within cells" that would produce new viruses to infect other amoebas. "Everything is initiated from a single particle, and then grows and grows to become this virion factory," explained Prof Claverie. "That's why it needs all these genes."

I once went to a Virion factory. I had never realised that this was how Intel built its next-generation chips.

Megavirus was found off the coast of Las Cruces, central Chile. It was recovered as part of a general trawl in the ocean for biology of interest.

My trawls for such biology take place closer to home.

"This is a new way of doing virology," said Prof Claverie.

If there is one thing the world needs more of...

"Previously, we only discovered viruses because they caused disease in humans, or animals and plants. But now we are initiating what might be called environmental virology and we are looking for viruses everywhere.

If you look, ye shall find...

"You just go to lakes, seas and oceans and pick up the water, and then you filter it, and try to rescue the virus by co-cultivating it with some potential host."

You try to rescue the virus. With some people it's donkeys, with some people it's viruses.

More generally, there is interest in ocean viruses because they have a major influence on populations of plankton, the microscopic organisms that form the base of many marine food chains. And when they kill plankton, viruses are also helping to regulate the planet's geochemical cycles as the dead organisms sink into the deep, locking away their carbon for aeons.

I am interested in them for other reasons, myself.

Prof Claverie said the megavirus would not be hazardous to humans.

He would.

closing tabs

2011-10-11T14:56:00.008+01:00

In an article about Massive Yachts at the NYT:

“When it comes to motorboats, ever bigger is still the trend,” Thomas Mee, marketing director for Camper & Nicholsons, the international yacht broker, said in an interview from Antibes.

Mr Mee, no fool he, pointed out that superyacht sales correlate directly with the rising number of billionaires in the world. The problem, some other guy in the Antibes points out, is that supermegayachts, as opposed to normal massive yachts, are all about ego rather than practicality: 'When you see that Eclipse is too big to enter the port and forced to anchor in the open seas, you realize the inconvenience.' It must be incredibly inconvenient. I suppose he has to take one of his three launches when he wants to go to land, or his helicopter, or his minisubmarine.

There's a magazine called Superyacht Times.

Are you interested in that amazing looking yacht in the picture, by the way? You should be. She's super-amazing, and she's sort of the model for a massive yacht in my interminably awaited tuna novel, which I have basically finished.

2. Also in the NYT is a biography of Pete Gent, an ordinary sort of Wide Receiver for the Dallas Cowboys in the late seventies who wrote the novel North Dallas Forty later filmed with Nick Nolte. The movie is about the brutality of the system and what players will do to play. It was, among other things, a very druggy era - uppers, downers and painkillers. The protagonist is coming to the end of his career, and although he's a relatively young man, he's a complete physical wreck. What he writes about football is not what I feel about hockey, which I will retire from sooner or later, but I won't say it didn't resonate:

I still remember vividly the struggle to nourish desperate desires to be alive as a man can be – to live each day as if it were the last – feeling life pumping through us with the hammering of our hearts. It was a great life. A lot of scary high wire work, too many injuries, and lots of pain. But I felt more in one Sunday afternoon than I did later on in whole years – writing is the only thing I have done that comes close to being as terrifying as being a football player.

3. Just in case you haven't read the story about the guy having sex on the moon:

On July 20, 2002, star NASA intern Thad Roberts stole a 600-pound safe, which contained moon rocks from every moon mission since 1969, from the organization's headquarters. He brought the rocks to a cheap Orlando hotel, scattered them out on the bed and had sex with his girlfriend on them. He eventually tried to sell the ill-gotten goods on the internet and was busted by a Belgian mineral collector.

4. An excellent Guardian piece from Marbury (on the right) re Amanda Knox and how people assume all kinds of things from looking at her face. One of the many, many ridiculous things: the cartwheels as a signifier of guilt. Really? I mean, if you were bright and had done a murder, wouldn't that mean you'd be less likely to do cartwheels? But we were told they were associated with guilt rather than innocence and many of us made a connection that makes absolutely no sense.

panicking plutocrats

2011-10-10T14:06:00.003+01:00

Paul Krugman has written a great piece at the NYT about the crackers reaction to the Occupy Wall Street protest, which has been terribly well-behaved, on the whole. Basically, it's the latest moment where the response from the right to any kind of criticism is to go hysterically batshit. Some telling paragraphs:

...there has in fact been nothing so far to match the behavior of Tea Party crowds in the summer of 2009.

Nonetheless, Eric Cantor, the House majority leader, has denounced “mobs” and “the pitting of Americans against Americans.” The G.O.P. presidential candidates have weighed in, with Mitt Romney accusing the protesters of waging “class warfare,” while Herman Cain calls them “anti-American.”

and

The way to understand all of this is to realize that it’s part of a broader syndrome, in which wealthy Americans who benefit hugely from a system rigged in their favor react with hysteria to anyone who points out just how rigged the system is.

Last year, you may recall, a number of financial-industry barons went wild over very mild criticism from President Obama. They denounced Mr. Obama as being almost a socialist for endorsing the so-called Volcker rule, which would simply prohibit banks backed by federal guarantees from engaging in risky speculation. And as for their reaction to proposals to close a loophole that lets some of them pay remarkably low taxes — well, Stephen Schwarzman, chairman of the Blackstone Group, compared it to Hitler’s invasion of Poland.

Seriously, I want to post it all here, but go and read. The only bit I query is where he says it's that these people 'realize, deep down, how morally indefensible their position is'. I genuinely think most of them live in such a deluded bubble of entitlement that they honestly don't understand that they sold crap most of them didn't understand which undermined society and the taxpayer bailed them out for it. And I still believe they're mostly just these guys and not intrinsically evil, just doing a really bad thing they won't query because their lives are so unfairly great. But until someone calls them on it, they'll stay in the bubble.

the universal panacea

2011-10-07T09:36:00.004+01:00

Holly is 'a working parent with a hectic schedule'. If you're like her, you probably looking for ways to 'spend time with the family', 'get in shape' and 'have fun without breaking the bank'. Well, she says:

Wouldn't it be great if you could achieve this with just one product? Sound impossible? I used to think so too, until I discovered Newgy Robopong, a revolutionary product that's changing the way people think about family fun, exercise and home entertainment.

Really? Gosh. I am so behind the times I even think the iPhone 4s might be better than my phone which turns off randomly ten times a day.

I'd like to have transcribed the whole thing, it's magic, but I am about to film a Warhorses video and I have to tidy my bedroom.

This came via Slate's Hang Up and Listen podcast.

am i being childish?

2011-10-05T15:32:00.002+01:00

I think I might be, but I never stop finding this funny.

i don't know what to say

2011-10-04T15:20:00.003+01:00

Quite a few people said they were waiting breathlessly for my views on the Amanda Knox acquittal. In a nutshell is a nut. But my opinion is simply the obvious one that, since I tediously often have said I think she is innocent, it's great news. Also, such is the Italian legal system in general and the quagmirish bit of it she got mixed up in in particular, I don't blame her for a second for catching the first plane she could.

If you want to know why I think this, then you must be brand new to the blog. In that case, read The Monster of Florence or, at a pinch, my previous posts with that tag. If you have read the book and you still think she might be guilty, I'd genuinely love you to get in touch. It's not happened yet, so I'd be extremely interested.

advertising standards

2011-10-03T10:42:00.002+01:00

Forever? Really, forever?

The other one I enjoyed recently was a new twist on restaurants' general victimisation of extremely youthful foods: 'Baby cod'. Er? Do you mean 'very small piece of cod?' I am almost certain that 'baby cod' are something which High F-W would specifically enjoin us not to eat.

For record, baby cods, as things looking unlike adult cods, are fry. Cod start looking a bit coddy after a few months, and are, broadly, six inches long after a year and 10 inches long after two. They are properly mature another year or so down the line at 20 inches. I think it would be pretty hard to call a coddy cod a 'baby' one with any degree of biological confidence. But even if you wanted to stretch to 'less than a year' you are feeding people things the size of sardines. Is that what 'baby cod' is in restaurants. Maybe. I didn't get any. Please tell me if they are. But it seems unlikely. It seems more likely that we just like eating babies. Somewhere in our vile souls, we think they are more delicious. And, interestingly, the more farmers' market the environment, the more baby killy it seems to be.

while i am being pointlessly grumpy

2011-09-26T19:48:00.004+01:00

I am off to dinner at a restaurant, which I hear is very nice, whose website features one picture and it is the above. It's hateful, isn't it?

hello john hooper

2011-09-26T19:13:00.005+01:00

I hope you Google yourself.

In case you are not John Hooper, John Hooper keeps writing about the Amanda Knox trial. He's not the only person to repeat and repeat the salacious quotes given them by rotten Italian policemen - 'She is an enchanting witch' and so on. I mean, some irresponsible idiot at the BBC has used the headline 'Knox is diabolical, lawyer says' as if they are not repeating this and giving it spurious validity.

But it's John Hooper who is getting both barrels because he writes about it a lot for The Guardian. Sorry, the guardian. And the guardian are the sort of people who think they know better.

He (and the BBC, and the rest) can mealy-mouthedly say that they are just reporting the news by repeating the stuff the Italian prosecution is saying. And they can say that Knox was found guilty. Of course they can. I am not accusing them of doing anything illegal. All I am saying is that my opinion is that they are incompetent, rabble-rousing hacks.

To repeat (and sorry, loyal readers who have heard this at various points before), I am confident in the innocence of Amanda Knox.* So is everyone, without exception, who I know has read The Monster of Florence, a book by New Yorker journalist Douglas Preston describing a previous case monumentally mishandled by the same prosecution team - a simple case which they built into a conspiracy theory edifice of preposterous proportions.

If you have read the book and disagree, I would be extremely interested to hear from you. If you haven't read the book, then I am not that interested in your opinion, given that it will be based on things written by the likes of Hooper, which tend to come down to 'No smoke without fire'. I mean, if you can read The Monster of Florence (and if you are making your living reporting on Amanda Knox you should do this) and report the things Prosecutor Magnini says with a straight face, then I'd be surprised if you can tie your laces without sticking out your tongue.

Ok. Calmer now. Maybe it's Hooper's editor's fault. Maybe. God knows there are a lot of ropey editors who say 'We have to give both sides of the story' even when the story is about something like astrology. But if I were Hooper, I'd have my name removed from anything which did not quote, in detail, some things which make it clear what kind of a guy Magnini is.

* The third guy, the one who was not one of the two middle-class kids that the prosecution later decided were part of a diabolical orgy cult, has said in private that they weren't involved. He said this to a not very reliable witness. On the other hand, his original defence was along the lines of: he had sex with Kercher, then he went to the loo, and while he was there someone else came in and killed her.

business meetings

2011-09-23T11:03:00.004+01:00

Jolly busy. Tall Tales is next week, with some usual suspects (Brandreth, Davies, Finnemore, Leslie, Phillips) and some unusual suspects (Howarth, Stares (YES, STARES), Wilby). Ticketing, in case you are new, is simple: please email us in advance and you will be on the list. If you do not, you might not get in. Email is talltalesnight at gmail.

Part of being busy has been Tall Tales and the next L&O podcast, and part is that I have started the last edit on the feverishly-anticipated Great Tuna Novel, and another part is that I have had four or five sort-of-business meetings recently, what with this, that and the other. At all of these meetings I have ended up drunk (I am just a little guy). I have a massive new-found respect for actual business people who go to three or four meetings a day. I have no idea how they do it.

explicit archers

2011-09-20T23:07:00.005+01:00

I was listening to The Archers the other day, like I can't seem to stop myself doing. Caroline had gone to visit Elizabeth, or it might have been the other way round, and they went into whoever's office it was. I can't remember the next line word for word, but it was near enough to, 'Sorry about the state of my office - it's a bit of a glory hole in here.' I re-wound and checked.

Well. Either someone writing The Archers has heard the expression 'glory hole' and thinks they know what it means, or someone involved in The Archers was having a little fun and trying to slip something through the net, assuming everyone who read it would either like the joke or just take it to mean 'mess'. Maybe loads of Archers listeners will pick up the phrase.*

* What happens when you think you know better than other people, but you don't? Posts like this, that's what. Read the comments.

seriously, just call me nicholas

2011-09-16T14:36:00.004+01:00

I went to the Wellcome Foundation's excellent museum the other day. In it is a picture by AC Hemming who I have not been able to find out much about. This isn't it, but the Hemming picture is clearly based on this one. It is of a Welshman called William Price and I have been able to find out about Price, haven't I just.

He was a doctor and lived to 93, and his last words were 'Bring me a glass of champagne'. Seems like the sort of doctor you'd want, except he also wandered around in fox-skin hat and red clothes with green letters embroidered onto them. Why? I am not sure, but he was an arch druid and the things can't have been unconnected.

He thought the world was made by God out of a snake's egg by a supreme father god. It wasn't. When he was in trouble for being a Chartist, which was earlier in his life, he fled to France dressed as a woman. He was still sane then, or sane enough.

He married Gwellian in a druidic ceremony and they called their first child Iesu Grist. He died very young, and Price cremated him on a hill near Llantrisant. The authorities didn't like it (nothing has changed) but he said there was nothing in law to forbid him and he fought a law case, which he won. He also sold three hundred commemorative medals featuring the cosmic egg and the snake that laid it. Win win.

He had another son he called Iesu Grist. He believed this one was the second coming of Jesus Christ. Maybe he thought that about the first one too. Well, the first one wasn't, and the second wasn't either. He also had a girl called Penelopen (he was Welsh, rather than dyslexic).

After William died, his wife married a road inspector, became a Christian and renamed Iesu Grist 'Nicholas'.

There's more, of course. You might think he was a nutter, but 20,000 people went to his funeral. Will you be so lucky?

whither the antiwhale

2011-09-15T12:42:00.006+01:00

Charles Fourier lived from 1772 and 1837, and according to Wikipedia, 'some of Fourier's social and moral views, held to be radical in his lifetime, have become main currents in modern society.' Among the ones which have not are that, as the world became more harmonised:

a Northern Crown* would encricle the Pole, shedding a gentle dew; the sea would become lemonade; six new moons would replace the old solitary sattelite; and new species would emerge, better suited to Harmony: an antilion, a docile and more serviceable beast; an antiwhale, which could be harnessed to ships; an antibear; antibugs; and antirats. We would live to be one hundred and forty-four years old, of which one hundred and twenty years would be spent in the unrestricted pursuit of sexual love.

Yes, I am back on The Worldly Philosophers.

* I am not clear on the nature of this 'Northern Crown'. I bet Fourier wasn't either.

see me live! see a cartoon rabbit give birth!

2011-09-14T12:01:00.005+01:00

Where I tricked you was that the two things are unconnected.

Ian Leslie, who is great which you should already know if you slavishly follow my links, has written about how he doesn't like calling events he does 'gigs'. I second that.

Tall Tales is a comedy night featuring various, including Helen Arney, Emma Beddington, Benet Brandreth, Toby Davies, Gareth Edwards, John Finnemore, Laurence Howarth, Hannah Jones, Susannah Pearse, Mike Westcott and me, and it takes place in Kilburn every two months. Do come. Less regularly, it takes place at festivals like Lewisham's, where it is taking place this Friday. You'll be there if you know what's good for you because Ellis Sareen will be reprising the role of Ernest Hemingway.

And, while I'm housekeeping, you will notice if you follow the Tall Tales link above, or this link, that Listen & Often's rolling upgrade now includes a super banner design from this guy, of which more of which kind of thing will follow. The second Listen & Often podcast, which is a Tall Tales spin-off and called L&O because someone had talltales.com, is on the site, or on iTunes. Subscribe to it and, only if you like it, rate it. If you give it a bad rating, we have designed a thing you won't understand that will gnaw out the insides of your computer like it's one of those baby wasps that eats the caterpillar its mother laid eggs in.

The third L&O podcast will be available in the next week or so. Toby Davies and I are going to have a conference about setting a specific date for the monthly release. The conference will take ages. It is possible that we decide to make it more frequent. We'd like to, but it takes a certain amount of time to do, even for me, and I don't do the production side.

The rabbit birth scene is in the cartoon above. It's a Polish cartoon about a mole called Krtek, which I was put onto by Scott Pack, the host of Bookswap, an event I am sometimes lucky enough to co-host with him or Marie Phillips, when one of them can't make it because they're at a gig (Scott) or making a Hollywood movie (Marie). It's really quite something.

pretty in pink

2011-09-13T14:48:00.003+01:00

Adam Hayes designed the cover of my book. Interestingly, the version on his website is this one, which was not the one which was sold. I like it.

mistery

2011-09-10T14:58:00.005+01:00

In the endless battle to have my favourite name in the NFL, a new contestant:

The Texans signed Mister Alexander, a rookie from Florida State, to the practice squad after waiving him. His parents named him Mister so if anyone shortened his name to MR, it would mean "Mentally Ready".

'Mark Robert' would have been more likely to be shortened to 'MR'. Though people usually use your surname so he would probably be 'MA'. In which case, they could have told him they called him Mark so that if anyone shortened his name, they were shortening it to 'Mentally Alert.'

If they wanted him to think his name was some kind of analogue for 'Mentally Ready', and seeing as though they were prepared to call the kid Mister Alexander, I think they should have called him 'Mentally Ready Alexander'. Though that would have made him sound like a character in a children's book. I could understand their choice if they made it because they liked the name 'Mister' or even if they 'thought it would be funny'.

oscars and republicans

2011-09-08T11:28:00.003+01:00

Over at Grantland, where I bet you don't spend much time, is a report on early films which might be Oscar contenders. A bit like yesterday's post, this is about sausage-making, a story of how something tasty really comes into being. It's fun:

This year, the number of Best Picture nominees — which could be anything from five to 10 — won't be revealed until the contenders are announced in January, and will be in large part determined by the number of first-place votes each movie gets on the nominating ballot. So if you're an Oscar follower, you'll be hearing one number again and again in the next few months: 5 percent. That's the minimum overall portion of first-place votes that a movie needs to get into this year's Best Picture race, which translates to about 250 voters saying, "Yeah, I think that's the best movie of 2011." That means that right now, Best Picture hopefuls are sort of like Republican primary contenders: It doesn't take much to stay in the game, but somebody, somewhere, needs to love you even if a majority of voters think you're stupid.

What's great about this new system is that it will encourage Oscarologists to think of the Academy not as a monolith with a uniform, hidebound aesthetic, but more accurately, as an accidental confederation of wildly disparate and conflicting factions and constituencies, any of which can become the target of niche campaigns.

one millions pounds!

2011-09-07T14:59:00.007+01:00

I hate it when 'journalist' (or 'politician', frankly) is used in popular culture as a term of abuse, as if these people are ipso facto deceitful, mendacious, etc. It's just nonsense.

However, partly because of the fact that everyone wants free stuff so newspapers don't have money to pay for research which takes time, which means staff journalists have to churn out tons of words a day; and partly because it's the easiest thing to do and lots of journalists are lazy (unlike you, I'm sure) a lot of silly press releases get parroted as journalism.

Slate published a great dissection of how this works last week, with respect to NFL contracts. The Philadelphia Eagles, their reformed dog-killer quarterback Michael Vick and Vick's agent all wanted to announce a $100m dollar contract. They colluded in the creation of one, even though it was absolutely impossible that the six-year contract would ever be paid. In a nutshell, the Eagles can cancel well before the end, and also the sixth year (worth $19m in this case) is forfeited if he plays a third of ANY of the first three years. Thus that sixth year is moot, since under those circumstances, Vick would have long since been cut.

Vick will get about $50m, if he plays well, and about £40m, if he doesn't. Anyone can do this research - it takes five minutes - but newspapers don't bother and so the headline gets repeated. It's not a long piece, and it's about the same process that creates cancer scare stories, and a hell of a lot of others.

sexy mermaids redux redux

2011-08-31T15:51:00.003+01:00

For whatever reason, people send me mermaids. I tell you, though, what I know about mermaids could be written on one of Carolyn Turgeon's postage stamps, because 'Carolyn Turgeon wrote the novel MERMAID, runs the mermaid-themed blog I Am a Mermaid, and is co-editor of the new upcoming annual MERMAIDS publication.' Wow.

One of my senior merm-aides sent me this piece by Turgeon, about a recent mermaid convention in Las Vegas. There was also a pageant, which involves strong men carrying mermaids onto the stage because everyone knows mermaids can't walk. Of course, everyone also knows that mermaids can't breath the cold bright air, but no one seems to care much about that. Carolyn ended up judging, which was arduous, but...

we judges soldiered on and diligently scored every contestant, and new international mermen, mermaids, and merbabies were crowned, and at the end, every contestant came out on stage to sit on chairs or stretch out on the floor. The little girls were sucking on lollipops as crowns slipped off their heads, and that baby was crawling and smiling in his bright blue fish tail, and all those gorgeous mermaids were posing and smiling, and it was all ridiculous and wonderful and awesome, and I was proud to have lent my services and done my part. I thought, This is why I became an author.*

Other agents have told me about Mami Wata, a Congolese spirit which is usually female, and usually mermaidy, although sometimes the bottom half is serpentine. Her main thing is to upset people's boats, take them into a paradisiacal realm and maybe return them or maybe not. If she does, then they 'usually return in dry clothing and with a new spiritual understanding reflected in their gaze.' I bet they do.

* I don't know why I became an author.

dissolving countries

2011-08-30T14:13:00.004+01:00

Some guy in the athletics World Championships used to run for the Netherlands Antilles, but the Netherlands Antilles were dissolved last year.* Curacao and Sint Maarten decided on status aparte, which means they become constituent states of the Kingdom of the Netherlands (like Aruba, of course). They are going to spend Caribbean guilders as soon as they can get organised. It seems like a lot of trouble to go to just for Caribbean guilders.

Bonaire, Sabar and Sint Eustatius became special municipalities of the Netherlands (they use the US dollar and don't have to print it themselves). They are just like normal Dutch municipalities, as if that's a good thing. They vote for the Dutch government and their own mayor and aldermen. They get social security but not as much as if they were still in Holland.

The Governor of Sint Maarten is Eugene Holiday. Do not confuse Sint Maarten with St Martin (an overseas collectivity of France) because they are completely different places (on the same island).

Sint Eustatius used to be known as The Golden Rock because it ignored British/Dutch/Spanish trade embargoes. It played a large part in supplying the Americans during the War of Independence, and Lord Stormont said in 1778 that if it had sunk beneath the sea in 1775, the Americans would have been defeated. 4,000 people died there during the great hurricane of 1780. Only 3,100 people live there now.

Trans World Radio operates from Bonaire.

Willemstad, the capital of Curacao, is one of the world's larger oil handling ports - it's close to Venezuela - and it's really pretty (see above). Willemstad contains the oldest synagogue in the Western hemisphere (1732).

The capital of Saba is The Bottom, and there is one road, called The Road. There is an excellent view from Mount Scenery, which is a potentially active volcano.

* Netherlands Antilles' National Motto: 'Unified by Freedom'. National Anthem: 'Anthem with no name' by Zahira Hiliman, no longer the national anthem but Wikipedia says it still exists as a song. Of course, you can't really trust Wikipedia.

department of metaphor - schrodinger's ruby

2011-08-24T16:27:00.004+01:00

I feel sure I have done this before, but I can't find it, and you may remember the story anyway, but it is just too good for me not to make sure.

In 2009, a company called Wrekin Construction started to disintegrate. The only reason it was technically solvent was that it's balance sheet included The Star of Zanzibar, a ruby which had never been near Zanzibar and which it bought in 2007 for £11m from another company called Tamar, who were coincidentally shareholders in Wrekin.

When Wrekin went into receivership and 400 people lost their jobs, the asset needed selling. But no one could find it. And was it worth what Wrekin said? Wrekin said it was. They said, a note, that 'The fair value of the ruby gemstone was determined by a professional valuer at the Instituto Gemmologico Italiano, based in Valenza, Italy on 31 August 2007'.

On the other hand, Loridana Prosperi, one of the Istituto's gemmologists,* said, 'That is impossible because we were on holiday on Aug 31, 2007.' Also, incidentally, the most expensive ruby ever sold for £2.6m in 2006. Of course, this was a scam, and it was dreamed up by a guy called Michael Hart-Jones who has previously tried to sell bogus AIDS cures. It's probably worth £300,000. He says he bought the stone for $13,000, lent it to a friend who never gave it back, and a lot of other liar's hogwash.

Fun, in a gruesome sort of way, but the bit that I think is great is that until someone looked at the asset for six seconds, it shored up a clearly failing business. It could hardly be more symbolical of the financial crisis.

* Great name, great job.

duck!

2011-08-24T13:59:00.002+01:00

Listen & Often 2 is up here, or you can subscribe on iTunes. I slightly messed up re-posting it yesterday morning for a reason, and so it was offline for a while. I doubt you noticed.

In other news, I am reading The Worldly Philosophers, by Robert Heilbroner. You know the website which grades books by looking at their Pages 69? Well, this one's p69 is in the Adam Smith chapter.

'Consumption is the sole end and purpose of all production,' he wrote, and then proceeded to castigate those systems that placed the interest of the producer over that of the consuming public.

But in Smith's panegyric of a free and unfettered market the rising industrialists found the theoretical justification they needed to block the first government attempts to remedy the scandalous conditions of the time.

a-levels at the movies: some incisive social commentary

2011-08-18T09:39:00.004+01:00

Funny story about schools pimping out pretty girls to be photographed getting results, and a friend pointed out the bonanza that is some pretty Cornish triplets gazing adoringly at pieces of paper getting them into Cambridge (find the link yourself, if you must).

What the annual hoo-ha about grade inflation made me think is this: movie classifications. Some things in the world are on a mixed-metaphorical ratchet squeezing toothpaste out of a tube. It's absurd to say that an A at A-level maths means what it meant in, say, 1973, and it's equally absurd to say that an 18 certificate means the same thing, and those certificates still have official weight.

By which I mean: I watched Badlands a few days ago. It is, like they say, amazing. It's an eighteen certificate. I think that, today, you would only just have to televise after the watershed. It might get a 15 certificate, but it would probably get a 12. I'm not saying what I'd certificate it as, that's not my point. I don't really have a point, like life.

google, motorola, vultures

2011-08-15T14:43:00.006+01:00

Ah, excellent, something topical for my long-promised copyright post. If you don't listen to This American Life, well, there it is, but I don't know why. In this episode, about three weeks ago, the show discussed patent law. Apple is always buying someone, and so is Google, and so are the rest of them, and the reason is that vulturish companies buy loosely-written patents so they can use them to sue companies which actually do stuff. Apple and Google mostly buy companies to get hold of patents and protect themselves from the vultures.

The result is that patent law hobbles genuine innovation and software engineers hate and scorn it. This is brilliant stuff, in and of itself, but what it made me think about was creative copyright.

Basically, software engineers and former software engineers in Silicon Valley, etc. are at the forefront of the move to open up content because it 'wants to be free'. I wonder if their bitter experience of patent law trolls feeds into their view of creative copyright, which they then blithely threaten, and which me and quite a lot of other people I know depend on for their living. It's one of those times where two groups of people think they are talking about the same thing ('intellectual property') but they are divided by their common language.

I haven't got a fully-formed, final opinion on this, but it feels like part of a large, more complicated story.

Another part, incidentally, is simply age. A cohort at the forefront of copyright theft is the young. The young are A) Young, and therefore poor and B) Young, and therefore not necessarily aware of the difficulties of earning a living. I think the second of these is in enormously underrated part of the complicated story. The internet population is very young, and there are lots of things about dealing with life that it doesn't yet understand.

(Anyone wanting to explain to me why copyright theft is ok (and let's be clear, I have indulged in it in my time, but it is what it is) should read this first. In fact, everyone should read it.)

irony is spread thick on british toast this morning

2011-08-14T09:47:00.006+01:00

England beat India yesterday and are officially the best cricket team in the world. Cricinfo marks the occasion with a magnificent piece of pseudery:

Irony. One of the most underrated pleasures. Best savoured slowly and with none of the joy and exhilaration that comes with winning or triumphalism. It's almost bitter-sweet in flavour because it brings with it no great sense of personal achievement or patriotic fervour; just a wry smile and a shake of the head.

Ah yes. The English team this morning aren't exhilarated, and nor are their fans.

Irony is spread thick on British toast this Sunday morning.

Oh brother. Then there is some guff about the riots. Then...

On one hand we have a staid, traditional, somewhat old-fashioned country (in the nicest possible way I might add)...

That is the nicest possible way. I've checked on Google.

...showing off an ugly modern face that looked so incongruous among the iconic tourist sights of London.

[But] There is nothing old-fashioned or traditional about this England team, even down to the Irishman in the middle order and the various other players whose heritage can be traced back to the four corners of the globe but who are now as proudly British as you like. No sense of disenfranchised youths among this lot! And all of this in an old British city (Birmingham) that is now as famous for its Indian balti restaurants as anything else. Ironic indeed.

Indeed. Then it explains how India prefers one-day cricket, which is ironic in some way. Then talks about Alastair Cook...

Cook is the quintessential British stereotype in that respect - understated, efficient and classy without feeling the need to convince anyone else. He is unlikely to be the poster boy for junior cricketers in England but for all that anonymity, he might just be the dinosaur that Test cricket, and English cricket, needs to keep the embers burning.

I actually run an agency that hires out dinosaurs to people who need their embers kept burning at bbqs and similar, or even the embers of long-forgotten love affairs.

Some more cricket stuff follows, and then...

Not to be particularly jingoistic - I don't really care who sits on the throne -

Where did this come from?!

but after watching Britain's youth laying waste to a proud country...

Hang on. I mean, they were bad, but I think a lot of cities would swap, even after the wasting. And I think some small pockets of the country escaped the trouble entirely.

...that I so dearly love from my many years of playing cricket and my days as a student at Oxford,

Oh brother.

I can only hope that Strauss and his men realise that cricket needs them to rule with a velvet glove not an iron fist.

What? Seriously? He's going here?

We've seen what can happen when young people feel disenfranchised and ignored by the powerbrokers - regardless of whether we agree with their gripes or not (and frankly, I don't!);

Well, I suppose it's good that you don't, but to repeat, you're going here? You're saying there's some equivalence between being the number one test nation and being an Imperial power, and that exercising that power has consequences for the governed? (The English cricket team, to remove confusion, don't govern anything.)

cricket too, even Indian cricket, can learn something from that. Rule with grace, mind your manners, innovate with imagination but never forget that the roots of the game still lie in slow-growing soil.

Ah, whither the flights of merry starlings I once gazed upon in my gilded Oxonian youth as I splattered out half-baked essays full of specious analogies.

The Tendulkars of the world can grace any stage but his pedigree was born of traditional parenting.

Spare the rod and spoil the child.

Watching a slowly unfolding Border/Dravid/Yousuf/Kallis/Warne masterclass in Test cricket is a pleasure that should not just be for the video archives - there's room in cricket for all types of kingdoms.

Including the animal kingdom, the plant kingdom, the fungus kingdom and the three (three!!!) different seaweed kingdoms / In my father's house are many mansions*

* Delete according to taste

The King is dead. Long live the King. That's irony.

Not really.

encore

2011-08-13T17:19:00.003+01:00

Why do you come here? If it isn't because you hope for more Cuppy then I don't know. Anyway, here's some more Cuppy.

Khufu's six wives were probably not much fun. In accordance with custom, he had to marry some of his sisters and half sisters, not to mention one of his stepmothers and perhaps other close female connections with exactly the same line of family jokes and reminiscences. When he had stood enough, he could always go out to Gizeh and rush construction work on their tombs.*

* Queen Merytyetes or Mertitiones, the stepmother-wife, survived Khufu and was passed along to his son Khafre. Odd, I must say.

And, on Alexander the Great:

Asia proved to be a regular paradise. In no time at all, Alexander had killed Medes, Persians, Persidians, Cappadocians, Paphlagonians, and miscellaneous Mesopotamians.*

* 'He boldly proclaimed the brotherhood of man.' - FA Wright.

...

The Persian army was all out of date. It relied chiefly upon the Kinsmen, who were allowed to kiss the King, and the Apple Bearers, or royal guard, who had golden apples on the handles of their spears. Darius believed that if he kept adding more Apple Bearers to his army the Persian Empire would never fall. But life is not like that. Apple Bearers are all right, if you know where to stop. After a certain point is reached, however, the law of diminishing returns sets in and you simply have too many Apple Bearers.

...

Alexander's empire fell to pieces at once, and nothing remained of his work except that the people he killed were still dead. He accomplished nothing very constructive.*

* But see FA Wright on Alexander's work 'above all as an apostle of world peace.'

god's incidental musical

2011-08-11T14:59:00.002+01:00

'The name's Priest, Joe Priest. Detective Joe Priest by name and priest by nature. This, my children, is God's incident room. For some of you it will feel like Heaven and for some of you it will feel like Hell, but it's neither, it's Purgatory, and don't you ever forget it.'

This is all that's written on one of my pieces of paper. Anywhere from 1999 to 2001.

'never done' jack and 'don't say' dick

2011-08-11T13:33:00.003+01:00

1. Writing in the same room for a decade produces an awful lot of a paper. List of ideas and projected projects as long as two of your arms. Some I like. Some are nuts. Particularly like the first drafts of things that morphed into other things over time. I found the idea for a radio play (Man Bites Dog) that mated with the folk song cycle (Unrealistic Songs of Old England) that became The Kilburn Social Club.

2. This is my current favourite song. William Shatner and Ben Folds. Proper contempt for the armchair riders. I can't get enough of it.

unexplained

2011-08-10T22:05:00.002+01:00

I make notes for myself all over the place. Usually I can remember why. But...

On old South African notebook, mostly filled with (surprisingly neat) notes from the week after I found the document that my PhD would be founded on and was working through how to organise the things I needed to say, in Tipp-Ex or similar: Q WHY DID HE COMMIT SUICIDE AFTER ONE BIT OF THE PIE? SPECIFY, SPECIFY, SPECIFY.

On venerable crappy phone, as supplied by Orange's villainous insurance department, which is a story for another day, in draft text message section, alongside some very sensible ideas: No miracle chance your free to slaughter Roea

this guy can design my next book

2011-08-07T10:21:00.003+01:00

M S Corley is some guy. A while ago, he did some redesigns of the Harry Potter and Lemony Snicket books, to make them look like Penguins of a certain vintage. Really, go and look at them. They're not all pale orange.

2011-08-06T09:22:00.005+01:00

1. In The Worldly Philosophers, about the underpinning of economics: Be it noted, in passing, that the treasures of the East were truly fabulous. With the share received as a stockholder in Sir Francis Drake's voyage of the Golden Hynd, Queen Elizabeth paid off all England's foreign debts, balanced its budget, and invested abroad a sum large enough, at compound interest, to account for Britain's entire overseas wealth in 1930.*/**

2. Standard & Poor? They're the guys who didn't think people with a history of defaulting on debts and no jobs might default on housing loans, right? Why are we listening to them? This is not a facetious question, even if it's the shape of one. I mean, they're just these guys trying to keep their jobs. And the reason they have them, and the reason we listen to them, is that we're desperate for someone to put numbers on things and make them feel like someone understands them. But we don't. Seriously, people, get a grip.

3. In my next post, I promise, pretty pictures. But seriously, and I have stopped being apologetic about this, listen to a halfway competent historian about America's likelihood of default before you listen to Standard & Poor.

* Not totally sure what that wealth was. WWI wasn't the best for the British economy. Incidentally, I think Golden Hind should be spelled with an 'i'.
** One solution to economic crisis suggests itself, though: treasure ships. Where? Mars? Invest in Adventure.

Nonsense about Doctor Who

2011-08-03T10:13:00.003+01:00

'One example is that of Doctor Who writers Russell T Davies and Steven Moffat who began their careers writing fan fiction about the time lord.'

This appears in a BBC feature about copyright It sounds like rubbish to me. I mean, real rubbish. Russell T Davies began his career in a very traditional way by writing plays as a kid, more while he was at Oxford, going into telly and rising up the ranks.

People speak such nonsense about copyright. The article says that reducing copyright freedoms might well expand creativity. I don't know how much the writer depends on copyright for his or her living. Personally, I don't think it's sane to get too worried about people nicking your stuff online. I think you should make it easy for them not to, but they will, and there it is.

I have a couple of other things to say about copyright after listening to an amazing This American Life about patent trolls crippling software creativity. I have to get my thoughts a bit clearer first. You can hardly wait, can you?

(My favourite thing about this ever is from a guy called Paul Cornell.)

lies, damn lies and publishing

2011-08-02T15:08:00.000+01:00

Is she though? Is she really?

don't cry for me, mr dentist

2011-08-01T17:13:00.003+01:00

Oh brother, this is going to run and run! I noticed the other day that the funny and inexplicable dentist on the Finchley High Road who thinks that people with bad teeth are best enticed by miserable pop art red-heads offering free consultations is actually a dentist who thinks that people with bad teeth are best enticed by miserable pop art red-heads saying various commonplace things that change over time.

I will keep a close eye on this situation.

debt ceiling

2011-08-01T13:05:00.004+01:00

People really care what I think about this, I know.

Nutters is the problem, along with the fact that everyone from commentators to voters assumes nutters can't really exercise power in a modern western political system. And the fact that leaders and voters are just these guys who mainly care about their own jobs.

1. Boehner wants to keep his job. He seriously cares more what the 60 Tea Partiers think than what the more numerous sane Republicans want, because they vote as a bloc, and he needs them (or thinks he needs them) to stay Speaker, which is at least as much of what he cares about, day-to-day, as the sensible resolution of the debt crisis.

2. Glib idiots say that politicians don't have power - it all resides with business giants. Well, politicians do what banks and so on much more than they should, especially in America because they need money for reelection, but the politicians make the decisions that really matter. It just doesn't look like that because they are so often following the agenda of people with money.

This is important when the nutters start getting in. Business people, used to controlling self-interested politicians, think they can control the nutters. They cannot. When the nutters get political muscle, they suddenly start throwing babies out with bathwater. This week, Obama and other non-nutters kow-towed to nutters. I don't think they should have done unless they have a very clear plan for demonising the nutters as nutters, which I don't see. Basically, I think it is very dangerous to assume you will ever have dialogue with nutters, or that they will ever be rational. You have to call a spade a spade.

3. But I can see why that's hard, for people who care about their jobs. Who wants to say: millions and millions of Americans have elected these guys, BUT THEY ARE NUTTERS! It would go down badly.

4. When you have politics becoming extreme like this, you start getting fundamentally irrational decisions.

Partial reading list, like you care: Open World by Phillippe Legrain, The Future of Democracy by Dareed Zakaria, Fascism by Robert O Paxton*, Planet Money and The New Yorker's Political Scene, Marbury.

* I am not saying the Tea Party is fascist. Don't jump on that idea. It's a book about structures of power.

who are the rolling stones?

2011-07-29T13:27:00.002+01:00

Out of touch judges are funny and always have been (a lot of them know they're being funny and playing up to it). Frederick Mead, in his seventies in the 1920s, was all for conservatism and decency, and he went into hives at the thought of women having to hear anything about vice cases, even if they were involved.

When a patrolwoman came up before him (oo-er) and described 'backwards and forwards' movements made by a couple accused of having sex in Hyde Park, which had been observed by two other eye-witnesses, Mead dismissed the charge and called the patrolwoman one of those 'abnormal women who seem to suffer from some sort of moral obliquity'.

This is from Dope Girls again. It's really fun.

lola sin

2011-07-26T11:05:00.004+01:00

Sax Rohmer (Arthur Henry Sarsfield Ward) was batty - his Fu Manchu books are hysterical, he claimed to be a Rosicrucian, and so on.

I am reading Dope Girls by Marek Kohn. It's about the similarity of drug scares over time, and it's terrific. In the 1920s, the hyperbolic kingpins were villainous Chinese, often with more or less willing white wives. In Rohmer's Dope, this is Sin Sin Wa, who had one eye, a pigtail and a raven on his shoulder.* His wife, Lola, is a voluptuous Cuban Jewess from Buenos Aires.** Kohn likes the following mixed metaphor, and so do I:

She was 'one of the night-club birds - a sort of mysterious fungus ... flowering in the dark and fattening on gilded fools.'***

* Romer wasn't thinking of Odin, right?
** Buenos Aires isn't in Cuba.
*** There was a lot of nonsense in these books, but people like Rohmer could hear and turn a phrase. I think it's to do with listening to the words as you write them in longhand rather than poring back over them and editing easily on a screen, which produces more clarity, but often in a painfully tin-eared way.

eat your pebbles, you little ratites!

2011-07-25T16:54:00.005+01:00

How long since there was any Cuppy? Too long.

After the children are hatched, Mr. Emu leads them out for their morning meal of fruit, grass, and the small stones required by the Ratites or flightless birds for digestive purposes. He watches them carefully, admonishing them from time to time in a low buzzing tone. This means, 'Eat your pebbles, you little Ratites!' Emus have been domesticated with considerable success, but there is a drawback to having them around. You must not run away when the Emu approaches or he will chase you and behave rather roughly when he catches you, as he undoubtedly will.* He always senses it when anyone is afraid of him and acts accordingly, so you must pretend to be quite indifferent.** The correct procedure is to stand perfectly still when an Emu comes at you with his wings outstretched and blood in his eye. He may possibly change his mind or drop dead before it happens. If you feel that you simply cannot face the Emu, of course you can try to escape. In making the choice, a good deal depends on where you would rather be kicked. Anyway, getting kicked by an Emu is no worse than lots of other things. Life isn't a bed of roses, you know.

* His kick is less severe than that of the Ostrich, which easily breaks a man's leg. The Emu's kick seldom breaks more than the fibula, the smaller bone of the leg, leaving the tibia in first-class condition.
** He senses that too.

tuppence a bag

2011-07-24T12:14:00.003+01:00

I was walking around in Kilburn the other day, and there was suddenly a flock of birds. They were following this woman.

warhorses of newsflash 2

2011-07-20T16:19:00.005+01:00

The news you all feared is now the news. The titanic battle over Warhorses of Letters casting has seen me hurled onto the bitter stones of life's highway, and Marengo is being played by Stephen Fry. I have to say that his work when we were recording the first three episodes this morning was pretty good. In fact, I'm not 100% certain that he isn't a giant, massive improvement over me. My co-writer Marie Phillips's feelings on the matter are hurtfully clear. She spilt fruit tea on her shirt she was laughing so much.

Copenhagen is playing Daniel Rigby. Something about that sounds wrong but I can't for the life of me work out what it is. Maybe it is because his and Stephen's brilliance so far has melted my pleasure sensors.

Transmission dates are 14th, 21st, 28th December and 4th January, time 11pm. Giddy-up.

press standards

2011-07-19T13:47:00.003+01:00

1. I have finished my novel.

2. On Tuesday 4th September, 1934, The Daily Mail reported that a Glasgow newspaper was reporting that Nessie was a German airship which fell into the loch during WW1 based on a story in a Danish paper which quoted the British Air Force Gazette, which didn't exist.

3. This was the same day that Sir Henry Wood announced his famous Klenovsky hoax. In case you've forgotten it, Wood got annoyed whenever he did an orchestration and was told he'd spoilt the original, so he invented a tragic Russian called Paul Klenovsky and put his name to the orchestrations, which were hugely admired. Good work, Sir Henry Wood.

(Incidentally, that year he separated from his wife Muriel and she took all his stuff and wouldn't divorce him. He started seeing Jessie Linton (who sang professionally as Jessie Goldsack). Apparently (Wikipedia alert), "She changed him. He had been badly dressed, awful clothes. Jessie got him a new evening suit, instead of the mouldy green one, and he flourished yellow gloves and a cigar ... he became human." Wood was not free to remarry, so JL changed her name by deed poll to "Lady Jessie Wood" and was generally assumed by the public to be Wood's wife. Fair play.)

4. As a treat for 1., I started watching How To Train Your Dragon, or whatever it's called. The accent decision they have made seems to be grown-up vikings: Scottish; sulky teen vikings: American. Well, it's a system.

'countess as trapper'

2011-07-18T09:07:00.003+01:00

Story in Daily Mail, 3rd September, 1934:

A castle in France* has been exchanged for a trapper's camp in Northern Manitoba by Countess Guyot de Mishaegen, now in Montreal, who proposes to spend the winter on a trapline north of Sherridon in search of new experiences.

* Maybe France, but I think the Guyot de Mishaegens are an aristocratic Belgian family, rather than a French one.

we could not crack your safe

2011-07-15T09:03:00.005+01:00

Story in Daily Mail, 1st September, 1934:

'We could not crack your safe, but have taken the equivalent in chocolates.' This message was found on a safe in the depot of the Eldorado Ice Cream Company in Ravenscroft Road, Beckenham, Kent, yesterday morning, when the police arrived and discovered the office in a state of great disorder.

listen & often

2011-07-13T19:38:00.007+01:00

You might be so thrilled you can't speak to learn that the first Listen and Often podcast is on iTunes - you can search for it in the store. I designed the logo myself. I am a top international designer, but I am too proud to do it for money.

It's basically the first Tall Tales podcast, which we're rebranding for URL reasons. We are going to put it on its own webpage shortly.

Toby Davies and I will do a show every month, and this first one first features Helen Arney and Gareth Edwards. Toby the Tiger says, 'They're GREEEAAAAATTTTT!!!'. I want Toby to use this as his catchphrase. We'll see.

everything is a lens

2011-07-13T16:18:00.007+01:00

Bill James was on Slate's Hang Up & Listen last week. Bill James is the guy who changed baseball stats, and as a result sports stats, starting in the 1970s, trying to make them reflect important game outcomes rather than the often tangential ones which were traditionally measured. His new book is Popular Crime, which Hang Up & Listen's pundits said is not just about the history of popular crime. In fact, they said, it uses the story of sensational crimes and the public's reaction to them as a way to throw light on wider society.

Well, duh. If you look at anything which is part of the incredibly complicated warp of society, you can use it to look at what that society is like. This is what underpins the commodity monographs about cod, coffee and the rest. It's not an interesting observation, whatever you read on the back of the books making special claims for their particular subject.

Which doesn't mean that Popular Crime won't be an interesting book. I bet it will. Interesting in particular will be miscarriages of justice and perennial hysterias. I am not a devotee of true crime books, but my views on the Amanda Knox case are public record and I am currently reading Marek Kohn's excellent Dope Girls, which is great fun on the twenties, and which is basically about how western drug panics have been very similar in different places and times.

Anyway, what I meant to say was that Bill James talked about a book called, He Made It Safe to Murder: The Life of Moman Pruiett. You need hundreds of pounds to buy a copy. It's about an Oklahoman defence lawyer who defended 343 murder cases and secured 303 acquittals. Only one was sentenced to death, and that guy's sentence was commuted by the President.

It sounds a hell of a story, and was written by a young lawyer in the 1930s and shelved for libel reasons. When the lawyer, Howard K Berry, went to war, Pruiett himself cut a load of the stories and published it as an autobiography. Gosh.

This article refers to him as 'The Black Stud of the Washita' and 'the murderer’s messiah'. Another good bit:

At the height of his career, Moman loved to repeat (and disavow) this anecdote. After receiving a telegram from a man in a distant state ("I am charged with murder. Have $5000. Will you defend me?") Pruiett wired a reply: "Am leaving on next train with three eyewitnesses."

is this just me?

2011-07-12T08:46:00.002+01:00

Why is Catherine Middleton 'Kate' not 'Cate'?

stupid manly women

2011-07-11T12:03:00.003+01:00

Good grief. Kate Ferguson (Mind Tidying: great but very irregular) has just pointed out this story on the England women's team's exit from the World Cup.

Regular readers will know what I think about penalties: there is an inane culture of machismo in British football, one result of which is that penalty takers are regarded as brave and heroic, irrespective of the outcome. This means the macho players - defenders and clogging midfielders, 'step up to the plate'. They are, almost invariably, the least skilful players and worst penalty takers.

Apparently, no one volunteered to take penalties until a couple of defenders 'stepped up to the plate' and missed. Hope Powell, England manager, has framed this in the usual terms of 'cowardice' and so on, borrowed from wider English football culture. What she should have done is practiced penalties, and had a list, which all the players knew about, which ordered them and told them who was going to take the penalties. They would have avoided this nonsense, and they would have had better penalty takers. Penalties are more luck-based than lots of things in football, but the teams that practice them and have a halfway competent attitude to them are the ones who win them more often.

Did this come across as a) a bit ranty? and b) a bit repeaty? I bet it did. Sorry. I will probably have to do it again though, until someone managing England listens to me.

for goodness sake, bbc

2011-07-09T09:12:00.003+01:00

You might not read the transfer gossip page on the BBC, which is sort of surreal otherworld culled from the backpages of newspapers who can print any old nonsense without checking it ('Paper X says Machester City have agreed a £23m deal for Samir Nasri ... But Paper Y says the Gunners set to make Nasri their highest paid player at £110,000 per week ... But Paper Z...' and so on). This is in today's:

Manchester City have been accused of scoring an embarrassing own goal after inadvertantly 'honouring' rivals Manchester United by renaming Eastlands the Etihad Stadium. Fans on social networking site Twitter claimed the Arabic word 'Etihad' means 'United' in English.
Full story: Metro

Yes, yes, you're repeating something you heard from soemone else reporting something some guy on Twitter, but SURELY someone, either at Metro or the BBC, can check what Etihad means? And if someone at Metro DID check, then SURELY the BBC can pass on the fruits of their labour. I mean, in two seconds I learned that the CEO of Etihad stressed that this Etihad means 'Union'. Thus, the story is about some misguided idiots on Twitter. That's fine, but just us give that small piece of information or we waste (some of us waste) the amount of time necessary to write or read (sorry) the above.

I went to sea to see the world, but what did I see?

2011-07-08T13:42:00.007+01:00

I saw Kilburn.

Really? Yes, really. If you go to Kilburn Park Tube Station, you are more or less opposite this pretty extraordinary building, decrepit and down at heel, but Grade II listed:

It's the Tin Tabernacle, one of Britain's few tin churches. Why not more? But what was that you said about the sea? That doesn't seem relevant? Well:

Yes indeed, because this is TS (Training Ship) Bicester, home of the Willesden and St Marylebone Sea Cadets. This is the picture of the inside:

The home page for the W and St M Sea Cadets is jazzier-looking than the Tin Tabernacle, and a lot more maritime. I really like the building, and love that it's a Training Ship.

Incidentally, next door is the RSPCA's Kilburn Clinic, which was set up as a memorial to the animals that died serving in the Great War. Local colour.

what, exactly, is a legend?

2011-07-08T10:46:00.009+01:00

Usain Bolt is fast at running. He says on the BBC, 'I think I'm one of the greats, definitely,' but his 'personal goal' is to be a 'legend', and this means he needs to defend some titles. 'People have crowned me a legend already,' he says. 'I haven't really placed myself that high yet.' I like the idea of 'legend' being a technical, definable term, because:

a) it sounds so ridiculous.
b) it absolutely is. There are rules surrounding the designation - different rules in different contexts - and Bolt knows that. He knows that 'legend' is better than 'great' and that's what he wants.*

As it happens, I think he's probably a legend already, but he's not definitely one, and if he never re-achieved he'd only be a minor sort of legend when he really could be Hercules.

* I've been interested in this since university. 'Legend' was casual and not particularly awesome honorific awarded to lots of those who hung around for longer than three years, since once you'd done that, you had existed in what amounted to a kind of student pre-history. Time is absolutely part of the technical definition. See also, 'icon'; 'national treasure'.

more on edwins walker

2011-07-07T12:47:00.006+01:00

We had some Edwyn Walker news the other day. Now is time for Edwin Walker news:

He was a US Major-General who commanded commandoes on the Riviera in WWII, advised the First Korean Corps and commanded the Arkansas Military District (sounds like a tough gig).

In 1959 he was sent to Germany. He was well anti-communist, which seems fine but he did distribute hard-core right wing literature to his troops, supplied by an evangelist called Billy James Hargis, whose name would be funnier if it were Haggis.

He tried to become Governor of Texas, but was knocked out in the Democratic primary. If you're surprised he was a Democrat, don't be. Without being too reductive, there was a good long period where, for Civil War reasons, the white South was very Democrat. He protested against letting African-Americans into Mississippi University in 1062. It was a proper protest. Six federal marshals were shot.

He is very slightly famous because he came to Lee Harvey Oswald's attention, and LHO tried to assassinate him. He failed because the bullet hit the arm of a chair. It was a good plan and no one linked LHO to it until after Kennedy's death.

He sued newspapers who covered his views negatively, which were that a sinister group of powerful Americans were trying to sell the country out. He also, it is said, inspired the movie Seven Days in May, which is about a US military coup.

Oh, and:

Walker, then 66, was arrested on June 23, 1976 for public lewdness in a restroom at a Dallas park and accused of fondling an undercover policeman. He was arrested again in Dallas for public lewdness on March 16, 1977. He pled no contest to one of the two misdemeanor charges, was given a suspended, 30-day jail sentence, and fined $1,000.

I doubt he was a happy man.

great first lines

2011-07-06T11:40:00.002+01:00

Bleh. There are millions of great first lines, so lists like this are almost all subtitled '(from great books)' but that doesn't mean they aren't fun.

As it happens, I'm not sure how important first lines are and don't worry too desperately about them, because that way madness lies. My favourite one isn't on this list,* and I wouldn't mention the list at all if it weren't for this one, which I dearly love, and which is from a set of books I dearly love:

If you were going to give a gold medal to the least delightful person on Earth, you would have to give that medal to a person named Carmelita Spats, and if you didn’t give it to her, Carmelita Spats was the sort of person who would snatch it from your hands anyway.

(The Austere Academy, Lemony Snicket)

* I, Tiberius Claudius Drusus Nero Germanicus This-that-and-the-other (for I shall not trouble you yet with all my titles) who was once, and not so long ago either, known to my friends and relatives and associates as “Claudius the Idiot,” or “That Claudius,” or “Claudius the Stammerer,” or “Clau-Clau-Claudius” or at best as “Poor Uncle Claudius,” am now about to write this strange history of my life; starting from my earliest childhood and continuing year by year until I reach the fateful point of change where, some eight years ago, at the age of fifty-one, I suddenly found myself caught in what I may call the “golden predicament” from which I have never since become disentangled.

just in case you are an idiot

2011-07-06T00:19:00.003+01:00

, and do not slavishly follow, like a slave, every link on the right of this blog, stop being an idiot and go to Marie Phillips's page now. It's pretty hot stuff.

(If you are a visitor from the future and Marie's links have changed, this is what I'm talking about.)

poor dorothy

2011-07-05T10:15:00.004+01:00

Bloody hell, I thought, when I saw this in a church in York last weekend. When Edwyn Jr was killed at a point-to-point, it must have seemed like such an untimely tragedy, as if he were the child who would die early. In fact, it's Edwyn Sr I feel most sorry for. But it's a close run thing.

(Why Miss Jones, incidentally, your photography is peerless. Thank you.)

what is the best first novel you have read recently?

2011-07-03T11:14:00.004+01:00

It is interesting you ask. I have just loved Boxer, Beetle by Ned Beauman. To repeat things I'll definitely have said earlier, I think the fetishisation of first novels is annoying, because they are seldom best novels, because if people keep practising at things they get better, but that doesn't mean I don't get why it happens, because human nature, novelty, etc., and it doesn't mean I don't often really enjoy first novels for said reasons. (I have a human nature.)

It's about lots of things happening in the mid-1930s. It's really fun. This is a review of it that made me read more reviews by the reviewer, because, quite apart from anything, she quoted the three lines I remembered best ('She had so many freckles that Erskine wondered if she might have stolen some from other children'). Her reviews are jolly good. I haven't read her (main) book because I was put off by the black edges, but on the back of these reviews, I will.

(Low activity on blog because of high activity on tuna book, and Warhorses, and the first Tall Tales podcast, and a short film, and the next Tall Tales, and a luxurious summer barbecue. You must just live with this.)