Dingoes At My Boyfriend - quick update

Due to my hitherto unknown time travelling abilities, I am able to bring you tomorrow's news of the trial. You think I'm about to go all Pootergeek on you, but seriously: this story from theage.com.au is dated December 1 2005, which is tomorrow in old money.

Anyway, Murdoch has finished giving evidence, hotly denying the accusation that he used Ms Lees' denim to wrap the head of Peter Falconio, so that he didn't get blood in his van. Latest estimate on remaining time is 2 weeks. I guess the defence will rest on the following "reasonable doubts":

1. No body has been found
2. Only 1 witness, who may or may not be quite attractive, with nice ankles and big b00bs, and had been seeing Someone Else (i.e. not an actual nun).

Incidentally, lest you think I am alone in noticing the prurient interest in Ms Lees (it's been 3 or 4 years since she was generally tried and found guilty), check out this comment piece from the Sydney Morning Herald:

Women have long since stormed the typewriters and two large Australian newspapers have appointed female editors. The Herald has not but, frequently, those with their hands on the tiller are well endowed with the X chromosome. Yet it continues to observe the world through the wrinkled eye of the old (male) perve.

When the media's eye is caught, hang on for the ride; it can be wild and thrilling for watcher and watched. Just ask Michelle Leslie. Or, if she wants too much money for her answer, ask Schapelle Corby. Or Joanne Lees.

Honorary page three chicks, the lot. Caught in the camera's eye, and embraced, stripped bare, prodded, poked and then discarded. As women, they are not just part of the news - their beauty, their eyes, their breasts, their clothes - pass for news itself, chopped and packaged as consumable items. Tasty morsels, one might say.

It's a fact that if you want the latest news on the trial, your search is more successful if you put "Joanne Lees trial" into the Google seearch than if you put "Bradley Murdoch Trial."

I rest, as they say, my case.

1950s hair apartheid

lately, people have been laughing and pointing at me openly in the street. i'm not imagining it.

it's my hair. i've got very fat hair, and a lot of it. and it's mostly grey, even though i am young. i ignored my hair for a short time, it grows quite fast and now it's big hair.

i live in a town called southend on sea. all the men there have very short hair. all of them. i stick out. if i got my hair cut, i could worry about more important things like the environment or poverty. but then i would be joining the herd, knuckles scraping the pavement as i walk.

people point at me and laugh, it's the nineteenfiftiesisation of our culture.

Clarkson Drives 250 mph car

This is an entertaining read. Well known environmentalist and humanitarian Jeremy Clarkson writes of his experience driving the Bugatti Veyron in the Times Online:

You learn to raise an eyebrow at what’s only a foible, and then, as the road straightens out, steady yourself for Prince Albert’s boiler to gird its loins and play havoc with the space-time continuum. No, really, you come round a bend, see what appears to be miles and miles of dead straight road, bury your foot in the carpet and with a big asthmatic wheeze, bang, you’re instantly at the next bend, with your eyebrow raised again.

From behind the wheel of a Veyron, France is the size of a small coconut. I cannot tell you how fast I crossed it the other day. Because you simply wouldn’t believe me.

It's basically my car: a VW Passat estate, with a fancy bodykit and smaller wing mirrors.*

*Joke

Who Wouldn't Wanna Be Keith?

Yesterday, I finally received my Keith Urban Live DVD, which was released on October 10, though I only went looking for one in the aftermath of the CMA Awards, when he received the phallic symbol for Best Male Vocalist and Best Entertainer, and performed an excellent version of "Better Life" from his recent album Be Here.*

I've got that album, and the one before that (Golden Road), and I'd always suspected that he'd be great live, because he's such a good guitar player. After seeing the CMA Awards performance, I remarked to Simon that he played really well, and made it look effortless, which is a good trick if you can pull it off. To play good lead guitar whilst holding down a lead vocal is something else - especially if you also avoid the face-pulling.

Livin' Right Now is excellent. Filmed in HD video, the pictures are superb and sharp, the colours rich, and the sound is top quality. Before an audience of predominantly female fans in a theatre-style venue (steeply ranked seats after the front few rows, and balconies going up the back wall), he gives a brilliant demonstration of what he's about.

You'll see him not only sing and play great lead guitar, but sign autographs whilst singing, lie flat on his back playing riffs, grab a camera off a fan and take a photo of himself with her, and all the other things you might expect from an entertainer of the year.

But wait a minute. Because you're thinking Country, right? How about this Amazon.co.uk blurb?

The concert DVD of country crooner Keith Urban features a riotous set from Los Angeles that features the songs "These Are The Days", "Days Go By", "The Hard Way" and "Who Wouldn't Wanna Be Me" to name a few, plus extra behind the scenes footage.

Not just Country, but a country crooner? I don't particularly care when it comes to categorisations. I don't listen to country because I like cowboy hats and jeans with creases, but because I like the songs and - especially - the gee-tar playing. So, usually, I'd say what-ever.

But there's something up here, because Urban is no crooner. One suspects that the Amazon employee who wrote the blurb doesn't know what a crooner is. Anyway, Urban's voice is the least Country part of him - nothing like an Alan Jackson, or a Dwight Yoakam or a Brad Paisley. He's got a rock voice, pure and simple. It's quite pleasant, but has a limited range, and breaks up quite easily.

As for his guitar playing, there's a lot of springy twang, and doing-doing riffing, but, to me, that's how guitars should sound. As far as I'm concerned, Urban produces the ultimate guitar tone, and plays with the technique I'd kill to have.

In fact, as a package, I think Urban is the kind of rock star I'd like to have been, when I wanted to be a rock star. He's not changing the world with his lyrics, so he's not going to attract that kind of crazy, but he's got floppy-blonde-hair good looks with a crooked nose and shiny teeth, he looks comfortable in his skin, can carry a tune, and plays guitar like a demon.

I suspect a live audience for him in the UK would consist of middle-aged men in lumberjack shirts and cowboy hats from the Woolworths toy department (fooled by that Country tag), but in Los Angeles, the audience ranged from kids of about 8 to people "of a certain age", but they were predominantly young, female, and having the time of their lives. And they weren't just dragged in off the LA streets, either: you can see them singing along with all his songs, which is more than I could do.

Why Country? Dunno. Imagaine a parallel universe in which the Eagles and the Rolling Stones, the Band, and Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers were all filed under Country in your local record emporium, and you'll understand where Urban sits in the scheme of things. Sure, members of his band play mandolin, dobro, and even a banjo (but it's a 6-string guitar banjo) at times, but those are just fantastic textures to have with electric guitars and B3 Hammond organ. Listen: Urban does a cover of David Dundas' "Jeans On" (remember? From the old Brutus ads in the 70s), and he does a version of Tom Petty's solo hit "Free Fallin'", and neither of them seem out of joint with the rest of his set.

Personally, I could do with less of the audience singalongs, and grabbing girls out of the audience for a quick snog (she holds up a sign saying, "Kiss Me, I'm Getting Married"), but it's all part of being an entertainer, I guess.

Best of all, this does what a live set should do - he does your favourites ("You Look Good In My Shirt" is a real party piece here), but he also does the ones you don't think much of on record, and somehow lifts them up with the emotional drive of the live performance. I'll write more on his guitar rig over at GuitarGAS, but if you like proper guitar playing, this DVD is definitely worth having.

===

*As a final word of warning, do not buy the weirdly compiled UK releases. Get the proper US version with a black and white photo of him sitting in a car on the cover, for example. Otherwise, you'll end up with some shitty remix, tailored for what some record company dunderhead thinks is the European taste.

George Monbiot on the coming energy crisis

A dense column, as he says, with lots of figures, but George Monbiot in the Guardian calculates that, even with maximum use of wind turbines and other renewables, our future generating capacity is between 23 and 34 GW short of current demand.

He suggests cutting demand as one solution, but that seems unlikely, because attempts to manage demand based on current figures, don't take account of actual growth.

"Dear Santa, please give me a nelectric toothbrush an a nelectric carving knife and a nelectric breadmaker and a nelectric smoothie maker and a nelectric guitar for xmas, thanks."

Dingoes Ate My Boyfriend Part 364

A flurry of hits on holyhoses by pervy pervs searching for "Joanne Lees b00bs" and "Joanne Lees White Blouse" and "Joanne Lees s3xy" reminds me that the Murdoch Trial continues, with the defence. Last week's confusing revelations about Peter Falconio being seen alive by witnesses 8 days after he was supposed to have been killed turn out to have been part of the prosecution case. Clearly higher minds than mine are at work.

Yesterday, Joanne Lees was back in the box (she already testified over 4 days) to explain why the police sketch of the alleged abductor's van had shelves on it. She denied saying there were shelves. Another witness, who'd said that Lees phoned her at 2pm on the day of the murder and said she'd been to see the Camel Cup (whatever that is), admitted that the call must have been at noon, and that Ms Lees must have said she was going to the Camel Cup.

How this relates to the alleged murder/abduction, only higher minds can now. If I was a juror in the case, I think I'd have slashed my wrists by now.

But things are looking up, because today, Murdoch himself was in the dock, talking about his lousy childhood and all the lousy things that led him to becoming a lousy drug dealer (bit of a holden caulfield reference there). Nobody knows yet how many witnesses for the defence there will be. So we could be in for another month of it.

The Day John Lennon Died

I have a vivid memory of the day I learned that John Lennon had been shot. I'd had one of those bad nights of delirious fever dreams, because I was off school with glandular fever (mono), and that night had been my worst and only bad one.

Then my sister came into my room just after 6:30 in the morning, and shook me awake with the words, "Bob, Bob! John Lennon's been shot!"

It all seemed like it was part of the nightmare from which I'd just woken. I'd turned 18 five days before, but I'd been off school for a while with the mono. I spent the day listening to the radio on the old (valve) radiogram in our front room. I'd been seriously into music only for about 4 years. From the ages 14 to 16 I'd assiduously collected all the Beatles records, singles and albums, and, as was the case for many people, John was my favourite.

If nothing else he was the saviour of guys like me, who had to wear National Health spectacles. Rich kids had expensive frames, but with the National Health the choice offered was sort of Buddy Holly or worse, or you could get the round ones that were a bit like the ones Lennon wore around 1970. They were as cheap as the others, but wearing them made you feel cool, like going to school dressed as a rock star.

This was the 70s, the years of punk and new wave, and I was considered eccentric by most of my school contemporaries. We've probably said before on this blog how strange it is that, in the late 70s, the era of the Beatles seemed impossibly distant. 1980, the last year of the 70s, really was a different age, politically, socially, and musically. I'd always been wise to the fact that Lennon's post-Beatle output wasn't up to much. I owned Shaved Fish, the compilation that came out in '75; and Rock and Roll, his compilation of cover versions that came out in the same year. 1975 was probably a year before I started to buy my own records, and 1980 was the first time Lennon had done anything in all the years he'd been my favourite Beatle.

Even so, I was too savvy to go and buy Double Fantasy. As soon as you knew it was fifty percent Yoko, you knew it would be a swizz.

A few days later, I went out to the doctors to get the all clear on the glandular fever, which - like most things - never affected me as much as it did other people. I had that one bad night and a very sore throat, whereas someone else I was at school with ended up on a kidney machine, and another friend couldn't even swallow his own spit. At the surgery, I met Joanne Nye, who was the daughter of a friend of my mother's. She was very attractive, blonde, a year older than me. I'd danced with her once, but never allowed myself to get into her because it would have been too weird - her mum talking to mine, and so on.

But we met in the surgery, and then I bumped into her in town later. She had laryngitis, something like that, and was off work. I'd just bought a copy of Playboy, because it had a Lennon interview in it. We went back to her house and she got out her record player and her parents' collection of original Beatles 45s. We had a cup of tea and some biscuits, and then, because her mum would be coming home at lunch time, I scarpered.

Never saw her again, but I think of her whenever I think about Lennon's death, and the aftermath. She was a lovely girl, and I was a callow fool.

Cheeky

didi_hat_bw
Originally uploaded by mcmrbt.

No matter how pissed off I get at work, or on the road, just looking at this cheeky face makes me feel better.

We went out for a walk yesterday before lunch, drove over to the Foscote reservoir, which is quite near to where we live. We drove through Foscote itself, which is on a gated road, and consists of a manor house and a few smaller houses.

As we were driving through the gates and along the country lane, CJ said from the back of the car, "It's like visiting a safari park. With no animals. In the rain."

On Friday, Didi ran in to the living room to read her school books to me. My hair's getting long, so I'd gelled it that day to keep it under control. She said, "You look like Elvis and you are fat."

The Friday Flashback Show

Review of Tift Merritt's Tambourine

Review of Bob Dylan's Chronicles

Review of Carla Bruni's Quelqu'un m'a dit

Nostalgia for The Perishers

Sometimes Accurate Review of 2004

This Flickr thread made me laugh. A lot.

Post-Solstice Comfort Food

Another recipe made up from stuff that was left in the fridge

Didi embarrasses me in John Lewis

Tales from the office front line, featuring The Accident Book

On the subject of disenchantment

On discovering the Roy Orbison/Clingfilm site

On flirting

I have a lucky week

BBC NEWS | UK | Football legend George Best dies

BBC NEWS | UK | Football legend George Best dies

The editorial staff of the two national newspapers who published special colour supplements this morning are now punching the air triumphantly. The early publication of these things was of course anticipated in my tasteless post of yesterday.

Conceptual Joke

Heard this very funny news item on Five Live last night, about publicity material produced on behalf of Invest Milton Keynes, which showed photographs taken in Colorado, Scandinavia, and other parts of the world.

The PR agency concerned are now saying it was a "conceptual campaign."

Conceptual as we've discussed before is a word you use whenever you make a glaring mistake.

I love Milton Keynes, you know it. I love all the things you hate about it, but it's always amusing to see PR agencies exposed for the charlatans they are. Rafael has even sent them an open letter.

How did these banes to our existence come to proliferate? It all goes back to the early years of the Thatch government, when they decided that people were unhappy, not because government policies were unfair, discriminatory, and basically evil, but because people "weren't getting the message."

Ever since, we've had to put up with these people telling us the same thing in as many different ways as possible, until our spirits break and we cave in. They have rancid meat, so they spread mustard on it. Then they spread horseradish on it. Then they rub chilli sauce into it. Then they smash you round the head with it. Then they cover it in ice cream and custard. Then they tie you down and force a tube down your throat and liquidise the rancid meat and force it down your throat. When you throw up, they force it down your throat again.

Then Tony Blair goes on telly and says, "We need to get our message across and that's what we're going to do."

Dingoes Ate My Boyfriend Part IV

The latest from the trial of Bradley Murdoch, alleged murderer of Joanne Lees' boyfriend Peter Falconio. Over 70 witnesses have now given evidence and the wharf is still standing. I think the defence may have started, though this article doesn't say:

Two witnesses in the Peter Falconio murder trial have given evidence that they saw the backpacker alive, eight days after he was allegedly murdered.

Robert Brown and Melissa Kendall have both given evidence to the Northern Territory Supreme Court trial.

They said they were working at a service station at Burke in outback New South Wales the weekend after Mr Falconio disappeared.

They said a man they recognised as the missing tourist from newspaper photographs entered the shop on the Sunday."

Whoopsy! This is why having an actual dead body is such an important principle. Without the body, it's just too easy to introduce a reasonable doubt into Jurors' minds.

Here is my George Best Obituary

It's important to get yours in first in the Hallmark Universe.

: George Best had a short but eventful career with Dunstable Town FC. During that period the club enjoyed its record attendance of 10,000 spectators and George played for Dunstable in a memorable 3 - 2 victory over a Manchester United XI."

Apart from that career highlight, Bests' shining moment was an hilarious send-up of Oliver Reed on the BBC Wogan chat show.

Doctors reported that Best made a final deathbed request for a double whiskey, which was administered via IV drip.

Top Ten Vanilla Products

1. Vanilla Cheesecake - made with vanilla caster sugar, with a teaspoon of vanilla essence and vanilla eggs and vanilla cheese (some of that may have been exaggerated)

2. Vanilla Pods - just open the tube for a sniff, or keep in your caster sugar for vanilla sugar on demand

3. Vanilla Sugar - that stuff with the blue label in the "posh products" section at Sainsbury's

4. Fresh Vanilla Custard - find it in the chiller cabinet in the supermarket - black speckles of vanilla seeds should be visible

5. Vanilla Ice Cream - make your own, or get some in a shop - with the little black speckles in it that show it cares. Serve with a slice of hot apple pie or strudel

6. Vanilla Essence - for a quick hit of vanilla, drink straight from the bottle (joke) - or try a teaspoon in a shot of vodka (I've never tried this, of course, but I'm sure it is wonderful)



7. Crèmes desserts Danette vanille à la crème fraîche de Danone - for when you really feel you can't eat any more, but... oh, go on then

8. Alsatian, artisan-made butter vanilla shortbread

9. A good Chardonnay - "vanilla" is often used in the tasting notes for the very best wines

10. Vanilla fudge - no, not the band - the kind you make with clotted cream or buy on holiday for a friend or relative and then eat

late again with homework

1) songs from a room, 2) songs of love and hate, 3) new skin for the old ceremony, 4) death of a ladies’ man, 5) i’m your man (leonard cohen), 6) with the beatles, 7) revolver, 8) the beatles (the beatles), 9) between the buttons, 10) exile on main street, 11) the london years, (the rolling stones), 12) highway 61 revisiited, 13) blonde on blonde, 14) self portrait, 15) blood on the tracks, 16) desire (bob dylan), 17) the basement tapes (bob dylan & the band), 18) the velvet underground (the velvet underground), 19) crocodiles, 20) heaven up here (echo & the bunnymen), 21) kilimanjaro, 22) wilder (the teardrop explodes), 23) compass kumpass (dalek i love you), 24) fiction (the comsat angels), 25) pornography (the cure), 26) world shut your mouth, 27) fried (julian cope), 28) love, 29) da capo, 30) foreverchanges (love), 31) the doors (the doors), 32) marquee moon, 33) adventure, 34) television (television), 35) the psychedelic sounds of the thirteenth floor elevators, 36) easter everywhere (the thirteenth floor elevators), 37) grotesque: after the gramme, 38) hex enduction hour (the fall), 39) sister (the sonic youth), 40) isn’t anything, 41) loveless (my bloody valentine), 42) surfer rosa (pixies), 43) george best, 44) seamonsters (the wedding present), 45) the house of love (the house of love), 46) open season (british sea power), 47) rattlesnakes (lloyd cole & the commotions), 48) closer (joy division), 49) power, corruption & lies (new order), 50) born sandy devotional (the triffids), 51) you can’t hide your love forever (orange juice), 52) songs from northen britain (teenage fanclub), 53) peng!, 54) emperor tomato ketchup (stereolab), 55) the days of wine and roses (the dream syndicate), 56) violent femmes (violent femmes), 57) music for a new society (john cale), 58) songs for drella (lou reed and john cale), 59) coney island baby (lou reed), 60) fifth dimension, 61) younger than yesterday (the byrds), 62) jonathan sings! (jonathan richman & the modern lovers), 63) the girl who runs the beat hotel (biff bang pow!), 64) bird-dog (the verlaines), 65) before hollywood , 66) spring hill fair (the go-betweens), 67) poem of the river (felt), 68) astronauts (the lilac time), 69) odelay (beck), 70) dear catastrophe waitress (belle & sebastian), 71) now is then (the windmills), 72) updownaround (melodiegroup), 73) stories from the city, stories from the sea (pj harvey), 74) everything’s alright forever (the boo radleys), 75) go back to bed, 76) everything’s going to be ok (harper lee), 77) zuma (neil young & crazy horse), 78) after the goldrush (neil young), 79) the milk-eyed mender (joanna newsom), 80) on returning (wire), 81) green (rem), 82) hatful of hollow, 83) meat is murder, 84) the queen is dead (the smiths), 85) slanted & enchanted (pavement), 86) low, 87) scary monsters and super creeps (david bowie), 88) singles going steady (buzzcocks), 89) story of the clash (the clash)

Porno fonts now?

Okay, someone will have to explain this to me. One of our designers wants to have the font Rotis, which is a quite innocuous modern sans serif and serif. Anyway, I went to dafont.com and did a search. You can see the commercial versions of Rotis at the top of the page if you do the same search.

But scroll down, and hello? What's all this then? Porno fonts? Eh?

For when you absolutely need that glyph of a cartoon naked woman fighting a bull, I suppose. I tell our reader as a public service.

But why does a search for "Rotis" bring up the porno fonts? Is it some kind of sexually depraved word?

Vexed by Pensions

The subject of the pensions divide is a vexing one, isn't it? For 9 years I was a civil servant, with a final-salary pension in the works, but since then my retirement prospects have gone steadily downhill.

For example, whereas 18-21 year-old students get National Insurance credits for their time at University, so-called "mature" students do not. So much for life-long learning. Lesson learned: I have a seven year gap in my NI contributions record, because I did too many degrees too late in life.

I was offered the opportunity to join one of these modern personal pensions a couple of years ago. I worked out that if I paid in £200 per month from now until retirement age, I'd get an estimated £300 per month pension. Something like that. Now, £200 per month is a lot of money to find, and the thing about it is, if you could scrape it together, there are any number of other ways to work it.

Paying an additional £200 on your mortgage, for example, could see you pay it back very early, and save yourself an enormous sum in interest. We all know, in the end, that owning a house outright is a safer bet (and all savings are an elaborate form of gambling) than trusting your life savings to a bunch of coke-addled, selfish, stupid, greedy, braying 20-somethings who panic buy and sell stocks and shares for a living.

Three days of cold weather, for example, and gas prices go ballistic. The price doubling, and more, not because of real shortages, or any real prospect of shortages in the short term, but because one bunch of people got greedy and another bunch of people flew into a crack-fueled panic.

in fact, there's a very real chance that you could start saving into a personal pension - doing without a whole host of instant gratification for many, many years, while all around you were enjoying themselves - only to see your entire life savings wiped out by that kind of panic on the eve of your retirement. One day you've got a nest egg, and the next day you've got egg on your face.

I will not trust my future to the kind of people who buy Porsches with their bonuses and can - legally! - sell stock they haven't got on the basis that the price will go down and they can make a profit. You try that on eBay and you'll get arrested, I expect.

Anyway, let's face it. If they're telling you now you'll have to work till you are 67... Think about it: a decade or so ago people - teachers, for example - were regularly choosing to retire in their 50s. Early Retirement were the pension buzz-words of the Thatcher years. Now we're told that early retirement isn't an option, and that we'll have to work till we're 67. In ten years time, it'll be 70. By the time I'm 60, it will be 80, and so on.

I've still got those 9 years of Civil Service pension contributions, mind. Don't think I won't be coming for that, which will allow me to buy a copy of the Beano every week.

Tis the season...

Nice story over at The Reg about copier-related seasonal injuries:

...a hot-off-the-press Canon press release reveals - chronicling the Yuletide travails of the company's 600 highly-trained engineeers as they struggle to cope with a surge in 'non-work-related' festive copier breakdowns.

What Canon means by 'non-work-related' mostly revolves around the aforementioned 'rear-end copying'. Engineers report a 25 per cent increase in emergency call-outs over Xmas, and 32 per cent of the long-suffering copier Flying Squad has at some time repaired shattered glass."

Top Ten Ginger Products

1. Tesco (tssss!) Finest Stem Ginger Cookies - ginger heaven in a biscuit
2. Organic ginger beer - there are different brands, but they're all good, and some are even alcoholic
3. Stones Ginger Wine - for the world's greatest cocktail and winter warmer - the Whisky Mac
4. Joy Lynn White - red headed alt.country singer
5. Ginger Parkin - as seen on Blue Peter by countless generations
6. Green and Black's Organic Ginger Chocolate - owned by Cadbury now, but still ginger
7. Apple, Apricot, and Ginger chutney - haven't tried it, but you know it's delicious
8. Gingerbread Men - if you can catch one, introduce your kids to the great taste of ginger
9. Fiona W. - beautiful red head who kissed me when we were on the VIth Form biology field trip in 1980
10. Crystalised Ginger Pieces - for when you want a big bag of ginger.

Genius Truck Drivers of the UK

So. Yet another service for my car. Last one was in Septembiembre, and the one before that was in Junio. I definitely had a major service in Decempre last year, and I think there was probably another mini-service between then and the Junio one.

It dawns on me that 40,000 miles a year means 4 services a year - 2 of them just for oil change.

My car, which cost me around £18k two and a half years ago, is now worth precisely nuffink.

It's now a fact that I service my car more often than I wash it.

And my mind-set has adjusted to the point where I think I might buy a Ford next time, just because the servicing thereof will be considerabubly cheaper than the Volkswagen option. The VW garage basically get the Inland Revenue to attach your earnings for with a special V-code, which means you get negative personal allowances.

This is All My Own Fault, and I have Nobody To Blame But Myself, because it was My Decision to live on Mars and work on Pluto.

Anyway, I wonder, which manufacturer makes the car that is most resistant to being crushed by an overturning lorry?

It's the time of year. The dark dark commutes, the white cack flying off the roads, the frozen washer jets, the resulting white-out effect on the windscreen; the stupid fucking fog lights and the morons who think their cars look cool with them on; the stupid rear fog lights left on even when there is no longer any fog, and the drivers who are too dumb to take the hint to switch them off... and the random stupidity, aggression, and ignorance of truckers. Shouldn't a GCSE in Physics be compulsory for truck drivers?

Monday night there was a broken down coach in the M1 roadworks at Leicester, which caused a 93 million mile tailback. Yesterday morning, a car transporter overturned in the truck drivers' favourite overturning spot: between J29 and 30 of the M1. There have been a few silly accidents in those Leicester roadworks as well. The speed limit is 40 mph, which most people obey, because there are average speedcheck cameras. There are still 3 lanes, but two of them are narrow and HGVs are restricted to the inside/hard shoulder lane as a result. This is clearly indicated with signage.

But there's always at least one HGV driver who thinks he should be allowed to stay in the middle lane - not only that, but that slowing down to 40mph is optional. He then encounters the narrowing of the lane and the obstacle of a car doing 40 mph and attempts the quick switch to the inside lane, still maintaining his momentum.

Last night, I noted an HGV tyre-sized skid mark in the middle lane in the roadworks, which was several tens of metres long.

Yet another genius trucker taken by surprise by the roadworks, which had only been signalled for 3 miles by, you know, road signs, and slower traffic.

Bush-Blair war row - the facts

The document referred to in the Guardian story Legal gag on Bush-Blair war row has come into my hands. It contains a transcript of an argument between George Bear and Tony Blush (names changed to protect their identities) on the subject of the war in a country I shall call Irakistan to protect its identity.

Blush: What's this I hear about your plans to bomb the BBC World Service?
Bear: I've said it before and I'll say it again: those commie bastards in I-rak-istan deserve-
Blush: That's Ee-rak-istan, you mean.
Bear: Don't start with me, Bony. You ain't got no mono-poly on the American language.
Blush: What-everrrr.
Bear: As I was saying, those commie bastards deserve a nukular strike.
Blush: That's Nuclear, you mean.
Bear: What the fuck you talkin' about boy? Who the fuck invented nukular weapons? You think we don't know how to fuckin' pronounce our own fuckin' products?
Blush: Well... if you look at how it's spelled.
Bear: I don't care how the fuck it's spelt, Bonio, that ain't my problem. My problem - and your problem - are those fuckin' I-rak-istanis and those fuckin' Elkeeds.
Blush: Al Qaeda, you mean.
Bear: I'm tellin' you, Bonny, you correct me one more time and I'll order a few "friendly fire" incidents in Basra. Don't think I won't do it.
Blush: But the World Service, George? Why pick on them?
Bear: I'll tell you why, Bonnet. Because I hear things, that's why. You got those fuckin' A-rabs and fuckin' French speakin' people on there, and I know they're makin' fun of me. I know they've got their beady little A-rab eyes peeled for every little mishtake I make, and I'm telling you now. You get those B-B-Qaeda guys to can it, or I'm not going to be responsible.

At this point, the transcript was snatched from my hands by an enraged official.

Vegetarians, look away now

So what are you having for your cmas dinner this year then? Or Festival of Baal Eating Children, however you term your Solstice celebration?

Last year we had a capon, which was so full of flavour that I went out and bought one to bring home from France with us. But what with the avian flu, I 'spect UK Customs will frown on people bringing back dead chickens from abroad. Be useful to have a dead bird to threaten people with at Luton Airport, though, so I might consider it.

I was looking forward to it again this year, but I just learned that, instead, we're having one of my in-laws' home-raised chickens - a cockerel that lived for the optimum period of time (around 100 days, I think), and is now in the freezer. I'm quite hardened to eating home-produced stuff, because I have had rabbit and pigeon in the past, but this is the first time my father-in-law has slaughtered something I might really enjoy. Mmmm!

Burning issue

I was going to blog this BBC NEWS puff piece about spontaneous human combustion yesterday, but we were having a hot day for the postings, so held off till today.

The BBC piece is just an elaborate promo for Bleak House*, but it strikes me as being one of the internet "hot button" topics, the sort of thing where you'll find the same information circulating endlessly.

There's nothing in the BBC article that I didn't learn years ago, looking up the subject in what used to be called a Public Library, which is what we had before the internet. Our public library has been turned into a joke shop slash stationers slash second hand bookshop slash internet cafe slash place for old people to wait for the post office to open. There may be a small corner still dedicated to actual books.

I was researching SHC (or spontaneous human combustion, for short) because I was working on a script idea called "Strange Fish."

The story involved a couple of paranormal researchers (this was before paranormal researchers on the telly were ten a penny) who went to an isolated fishing village (this was before isolated fishing villages on the telly were etc.) because they'd heard about a cluster of SHC incidents.

The village was fairly cut off - a place that used to have two roads going in, but one of them blocked by a landslip and never repaired - and still had one fishing boat that went out and caught fish that were sold and consumed locally. One of the village's claims to fame, mentioned early on, is that it was a place you could still go to a chip shop and get locally caught fish and chips.

So these researchers show up and start investigating the SHC cases, looking for the usual possible causes - smoking, sparks from open fires - and growing increasingly puzzled when two of the victims don't fit the standard pattern: not old, not ill, not smokers, no open fire...

====

*On the subject of elaborate promos, I was sent a Travel Pictionary set by a vendor this week. A year or two ago, I got a remote control car. These things do not dispose me well towards the vendor concerned. I learned by email this morning that Shania Twain has put her name on a perfume, too, and that said perfume will be integrated into an episode of the US version The Apprentice. Which just goes to show that reality TV shows are just elaborate advertisements.

Although the BBC are the guilty party in the case of SHC (dressing up a promo for a BBC drama as a news item), they're also frequent victims. I've lost count of the number of times Peter Allen on Drive has been interviewing somebody and realised halfway through the interview that he was taking part in a PR exercise. The Silly Season, so-called, is all about these exercises ("A report from the Internet Foundation has found that 85% of all web users are known to drink Pokey Pola while they browse..."), but it's Silly Season all year round now, innit?

bob dylan

went to see bob dylan at the brixton academy last night. a big improvement on wembley arena a few years' ago, and that wasn't bad.
he didn't play for very long - about an hour and forty-five minutes. It was something like two pound fifty per song, not including booking fee. the encore started off with the first verse of london calling, before becoming like a rolling stone. i took an irrational big dislike to one of the guitarists. i didn't like the way he played. i decided that he had won a competition to play a gig with bob dylan's band. bob's all keyboard these days. you'd poo your pants if he picked up an acoustic guitar and shuffled to the front of the stage, and the band fucked off. but that's never going to happen.
i dunno. it was good, but only in the context of extremely low expectations.

The Inspirational Buddy Holly

At lunch yesterday, Simon and I had a chat about Buddy Holly. We're both without a CD collection of the Holly. For me, it's because I've generally resisted buying a CD version of something I previously owned on vinyl. Not just because I don't want to pay twice for something, but because CD transfers - particularly in the first 10 years of the medium - were shoddy, half-baked, money-grabbing efforts which did not serve the material well.

And record companies wonder why people hate them.

But I digress. I was thinking about the Holly overnight, his shockingly short career and his enduring influence. I think there are a number of things about him that serve to inspire. First, he was a geek, wasn't he? No rock god, just a skinny guy who wore glasses. That's almost enough on its own, but of course his songs and arrangements were fantastic, too.

The key thing about his songs, I think, is their stripped-down simplicity. Easy to sing, easy to play, and, for the aspiring songwriter, like a bolt of lightning. I think it was when I realised how straightforward his songs were, and how many variations on the same theme he did, that I started writing my own.

His story is also another reason to hate the record business, and the way it harnesses the energy and talent of individuals, and then thrashes them into submission, sucking as much income out of them before they burn out, or crash and burn. There's never any long-term plan, just a need to hit as many venues as possible while they're hot, and if something terrible happens, well it sells more records.

Warmed over Buddy Holly compilations are as ubiquitous as warmed over Elvis or gently sautéed Lennon, though I guess you gotta have one. But Holly will be out of copyright soon, won't he?

Blind Search Engine Experiment

Thanks to the Guardian Technology Blog for the link to this blind search engine experiment.

My own search bucked the trend for results, and I ended up picking the one that's in last place overall. All 3 sets of results were pretty good, but I picked the one with the most current information, as opposed to the other two which yielded slightly out of date hits after the top one.

You can run the test as many times as you like, but only your first vote counts.

The Thatcher years in statistics

BBC NEWS has this flash-based thing that allows you to overlay different statistical graphs on top of each other, so you can compare - for example - coal production with disposable income, or indeed anything with anything.

The disposable income graph shows that the rich really did get richer under Mrs Thatch - but then we knew that. I wish they'd do the same thing with the Blair years.

Small Earthquake in Timor Sea - slowly grinding wheels of justice unaffected

The amazing thing about a trial, I find, is how fecking slow it is. The Bradley Murdoch trial has been grinding along for, what? Over a month now? Since 17 October. The BBC web site hasn't reported anything for 10 days, but that doesn't mean they've been on holiday down there. And they're still on the prosecution:

"The Northern Territory Supreme Court heard from several witnesses who testified Bradley John Murdoch's white four-wheel drive vehicle was fitted with a new canopy and turbo exhaust in August 2001.The vehicle was also fitted with a new bullbar, and its tray extended, around mid-2001, the court heard.

Testimony was briefly interrupted by a mild tremor which shook chairs and television screens in the building, after a earthquake 500km away in the Timor Sea.

'I've checked out the window and the wharf is still standing,' Chief Justice Brian Martin said."

Are they trying to bore the jury into submission? What strikes me, about this and other trials, is that in the hustle bustle of the court's day, there's usually only enough time for item of testimony per day, even if the witnesses are saying, "Yeah, he put a bullbar on his car? And put a canopy on it?" (note that I've added the AQI, for veracity). Do they really need several people to tell them the same thing? Can't the defence stipulate that they're all going to say the same thing?

Shouldn't the judge have said, 'I've asked several people to look out the window? and report back to me their findings? as to whether the wharf is still standing? Until they report next Monday, this court is in recess?' ??

No wonder justice is so freaking expensive. Nobody has a vested interest in speeding things up, do they? But we know they can do it quicker. In The Practice the trials are usually over in under an hour. People just need to speak more rapidly and object to irrelevant testimony in an outraged manner.

Waiting to die...

Each morning I expect to wake up and learn that he is dead. He's been in a critical condition for some time now, and all remedial measures seem to be prolonging the agony.

No, not George Best: Didi's fish. CJ's is big and fat and since forever seems to eat all the food when they are fed. The other is scrawny and mangy, fading away, living off scraps and waste, and doesn't seem to be eating at all at the moment. We've tried everything. Letting the fat one grab food and then feeding the other while the fat one's mouth is full. Different type of food. Feeding just once a day.

At the weekend, I thought I'd triumphed by getting the small one to take a pellet of food, but within seconds he'd spat it out again. What can you do? I've changed the filter for a First Aid cartridge, but the deterioration continues.

Speaking of George Best and his family, and living in a goldfish bowl I note that I'm a Celeb has made a strong start in the ratings. You sometimes wonder why footballers and entertainers are paid so very much, when it is obvious that many of them would do it for free.

I am...

... Charlie Brown!

Typical.

Best (US) Magazine Covers of the past 40 years...

Read about this in Digit magazine - the American Society of Magazine Editors have voted for the top 40 magazine covers of the past 40 years and you can see them all if you follow the link.

Some striking images there, to be sure, but a lot of the covers just look fairly ordinary and regular to me - nothing you don't see on a news stand any day of the week. That said, it's in the nature of designers to pick up on originality and copy it.

Lisa's List

You can read it more clearly, and with some explanation here, but here is Lisa Rullsenberg's 89:

Eclectic - needs explanation, but there it is...

1) ABC - Lexicon of Love / 2) Arcade Fire - Funeral / 3) The Avalanches - Since I Left You/ 4) Bach/Yo-Yo Ma - Cello Concertos / 5) John Barry - Themeology / 6) Beach Boys - Pet Sounds / 7) Beatles - Revolver / 8) Beatles - 1962-1966 (The Red Apple collection) / 9) Billy Bragg - Back to Basics / 10) Blondie - Best of / 11) David Bowie - Best / 12) Jeff Buckley - Live at Sine / 13) Buena Vista Social Club / 14) Johnny Cash - American IV: When the Man Comes Around / 15) Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds - The Boatman's Call / 16) Ray Charles - Best / 17) Chemikal Underground compilation - Out of Our Heads on Skelp / 18) Clash - London Calling / 19) Constellation Collection/GodSpeedYouBlackEmperor - Song of the Silent Land/Yanqui UXO / 20) Sam Cooke - Best / 21) The Costello Show - King of America / 22) CSNY - Deja Vu / 23) Miles Davis - Kind of Blue / 24) De la Soul - 3 Feet High and Rising / 25) Nick Drake - Way to Blue: An Introduction to Nick Drake / 26) Ian Dury and the Blockheads - New Boots and Panties / 27) Bob Dylan - Highway 61 Revisited / 28) Bob Dylan - Blonde on Blonde / 29) Elgar/Du Pre - Cello Concerto / 30) The Fall - (you choose an album) / 31) Ella Fitzgerald - The Cole Porter Songbook / 32) Gang of Four - Entertainment!/Post-Punk Collection / 33) Marvin Gaye - What's Goin' On? / 34) Emmylou Harris - Best / 35) Billy Holiday - Lady in Satin / 36) Michael Jackson - Best of / 37) Jam - Snap! / 38) Joy Division/New Order - Best of / 39) Led Zepplin - Physical Graffitti / 40) Tom Lehrer - An Evening Wasted with... / 41) Kirsty Macoll - Best / 42) Madness - The Definitive Singles/Two-Tone collection / 43) Magnetic Fields - 69 Love Songs / 44) Bob Marley - Legend / 45) Massive Attack - Blue Lines / 46) Mingus - Mingus Ah Um / 47) Enio Morricone - Best of / 48) Randy Newman - Best / 49) Augusto Pablo and King Tubby / 50) Pere Ubu - The Modern Dance / 51) Lee Scratch Perry - Arkology / 52) Pixies - Dolittle / 53) Pogues - Best / 54) Prefab Sprout - Steve McQueen / 55) Elvis Presley - No. 1s / 56) Prince - Sign O'The Times / 57) Pulp - Different Class / 58) Radiohead - The Bends / 59) Ramones - Anthology / 60) Lou Reed - Transformer / 61) REM - IRS "Best of"/Warners "Best of" / 62) Jonathan Richman and the Modern Lovers - 19 greatest hits / 63) Rolling Stones - Hot Rocks / 64) The Roots - Things Fall Apart / 65) Simon and Garfunkel - Parsley, Sage. Rosemary and Thyme / 66) Nina Simone - Gold / 67) Frank Sinatra - Songs for Swinging Lovers / 68) Sleater Kinney - All Hands On the Bad One / 69) The Smiths - The Queen is Dead / 70) Phil Spector / 71) Bruce Springsteen - Born to Run / 72) Bruce Springsteen - The River / 73) Squeeze - The Big Squeeze / 74) Talking Heads - Stop Making Sense / 75) They Might Be Giants - A User's Guide / 76) David Thomas and the Two Pale Boys - Surf's Up! / 77) Various - I'm Your Fan: Songs of Leonard Cohen / 78) Various - Festival in the Desert / 79) Various - Sounds of the New West / 80) Velvet Underground and Nico / 81) Rufus Wainwright - Want (One and Two - now available as a double pack) / 82) Tom Waits - Swordfishtrombones / 83) Wedding Present - Bizzaro / 84) Barry White - Best Of / 85) Hank Williams - 40 Greatest
86) Wire - The A List / 87) Stevie Wonder - Songs in the Key of Life / 88) Neil Young - After the Gold Rush / 89) Your home made compilation

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SUBMIT YOURS - send yours to 89albums[at]googlemail[dot]com and we'll post 'em up as a proper entry rather than a comment. Please allow time for incompetence.

Urban Cowboy

So, I fast-forwarded through the CMA Awards show on Saturday night, so as to avoid the cringeworthy Brooks and Dunn (what the freakin' hell was wrong with Vince Gill as Presenter for Life?) and all the embarrassing speeches and inductions into the hall of fame ("You're a black man, and although you were part of the Grand Ol' Opry from the very beginning and died as long ago as 1982, it's only now that we've decided to patronise you and your family by inducting you..."), and quite enjoyed some of what I saw.

Faith Hill looked weird though. Like the whole shape of her face has changed. Plastic surgery? For why? But how else to explain her totally bizarre appearance? Bad hair, too. She and Tim McGraw performed the worst track from her recent album. When I reviewed the record, I said it sounded like Tim sneaked into the studio late at night, drunk, and overdubbed his vocal without her consent. On the CMA show, he shuffled down the steps on the stage - like, y'know, a drunk - and they murdered the song all over again. The song which, by the way, has a melody that totally rips off Bob Dylan's "I Believe In You". I wonder if anybody realises that?

Anyway, Sara Evans sang off-key, as did a couple of others. I've said before that nerves often get the better of artists on these occasions. An audience of your peers, and the biggest TV audience you'll ever get must prey on the mind. It seems the less-well-known people don't seem to suffer as much, because there's more pressure at the top.

One act I enjoyed was Sugarland, who were up for the horizon award. I especially liked the way the singer, Jennifer Nettles, was just wearing boots and jeans, as opposed to the absolute fashion disasters worn by many other women. I mean, did Allison Krauss know that everyone could see her legs through her dress? Because she sure weren't standing like she knew it.

Garth Brooks made a surprise appearance, singing a tribute to Chris Le Doux in Times Square. He's supposed to be retired, but you could tell he was buzzed to be back on a stage. Watch that space.

Apart from Sugarland, act of the night for me was Keith Urban. Last year, he was clearly nervous, which marred his performance, but although nerves were still evident, he rode them out, and performed a blistering version of "Better Life" from his recent release Be Here. So I was straight on Amazon this morning buying his live DVD: Livin Right Now.

He was playing a Strat with posh pickups, and made it look effortless. Deserved winner of Entertainer of the Year; not so sure about his male vocal award, because his voice isn't his strongest suit.

It's a list... or a snake...

I'm a little bit ashamed of my 89 albums, because the truth is that I have owned and played to death a great many essential albums - and they sold like hot cakes at the various car boot sales I flogged them at.

This is a short-attention span list. Some are actually on the "missing in action" list, but who said we had to stick to the rules?

Here it is then. Different albums by the same artist are separated by a ; and different artists are separated by a /. I hope...

10cc: the original soundtrack; how dare you / alan jackson: the very best of / allison moorer: alabama song; the hardest part / the allman brothers band: universal masters collection / bob dylan: the basement tapes; nashville skyline; the freewheelin' bob dylan; blonde on blonde (mono); slow train coming / bobbie cryner: bobbie cryner / brad paisley: time well wasted; mud on the tyres / bruce springsteen: darkness on the edge of town; live in the promised land (boot); tunnel of love; lucky town / buddy holly: the singles plus / carla bruni quelqu'un m'a dit / carolyn dawn johnson: room with a view / chely wright: single white female / cyndi thomson: my world / deana carter: i'm just a girl / dixie chicks: home (bonus dvd edition) / dwight yoakam: guitars cadillacs etc etc; gone / elo: all over the world - the very best of / faith hill: faith / frank sinatra: the capitol years / frank sinatra and count basie: it might as well be swing /
gretchen peters: gretchen peters; halcyon / jessi alexander: honeysuckle sweet / joan baez: the best of the vanguard years / jonathan richman: modern lovers '88; jonathan sings! / joy lynn white: between midnight and hindsight; the lucky few; wild love; one more time / julie roberts: julie roberts / kelly willis: easy; what i deserve / kim richey: bitter sweet /
lari white: green eyed soul / lone justice: the millennium collection: the best of / maria mckee: maria mckee; you gotta sin to get saved / martina mcbride: wild angels; emotion / mary chapin carpenter: shooting straight in the dark; come on come on / matraca berg: sunday morning to saturday night / nanci griffith: lone star state of mind / patty loveless: the trouble with the truth / reba mcentyre: what if it's you / rolling stones: let it bleed; exile on main st / sara evans: no place that far; born to fly / shelby lynne: i am shelby lynne; suit yourself / steve earle: guitar town; exit 0 / the band: the band; northern lights, southern cross; the last waltz; the beatles: the beatles (white); beatles for sale (mono); rubber soul; help!; abbey road; past masters (volume 2); at the hollywood bowl / the everly brothers: the definitive / tift merritt: tambourine / tim mcgraw: and the dancehall doctors / tom petty and the heartbreakers: damn the torpedoes / traveling wilburys: volume 1 / trisha yearwood: everybody knows; inside out; thinkin' about you; jasper country / vince gill: the next big thing / wallflowers: bringing down the horse / woody allen: standup comic / wynonna: her story (scenes from her lifetime) / the windmills: now is then

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SUBMIT YOURS - send yours to 89albums[at]googlemail[dot]com and we'll post 'em up as a proper entry rather than a comment. Please allow time for incompetence.

1963 Weather Nostalgia Grips Nation

Clarkson of the Sunday Times on the end of the Oil Age (and the new VW Golf R32):

Nobody knows when [the end of the Oil Age] will be because nobody knows how much there is down there, and equally nobody knows how much demand there will be for it in the future. In the past 40 years the population of the world has doubled.

So will it double again in the next 40? Or will we all be killed by parrots? Only the world’s environmentalists, with their crystal balls and their tarot cards, seem belligerently certain about what’s going to happen next.

I disagree with the Clarkson on a lot of stuff, but I do find him quite sane on the environment and climate change, because - like me - he knows that the global warming lobby has very little data to go on, and an awful lot of interest in securing money and grants. That Golf R32 looks great, too. Spare us £26k, guv? At 30 mpg, that's only going to cost me about £90 a week in petrol.

In other news, the press are going apeshit about the coming Big Freeze: coldest winter for 70 million years, March of the Glaciers, fuel shortages, rising gas prices... And the BBC Monthly Outlook carries this disclaimer:

Monthly forecasting
Forecasting the weather beyond about a week ahead stretches even the most experienced weather forecaster. Complex numerical weather forecast models from the Met Office and the European Centre for Medium Range Weather Forecasting (ECMWF)are run many times for the month (and season) ahead to build up a picture of the likelihood of different weather types affecting the UK.

Malnourished

sand eating 01
Originally uploaded by mcmrbt.

Now it can be told...

My parents were so irresponsible, they abandoned me on the beach at Hayling Island in 1963 and left me to fend for myself.

I was forced to eat sand, with sand worms for protein, and eventually crawled back home to Dumpstable.

I never forgave them. You can see how malnourished I was - near starvation, obviously.

Now he can say what he really thinks...

Roy Keane will be signing on at the Job Centre tomorrow morning.

He'll be going for retraining at the Taylor/Pleat School of Media Commentary, where he will learn to call a spade a fork.

weekend homework: 89 albums

now pay attention, class. you at the back! mcminn! stop making sarcastic comments and listen!

this link comes from lisa at Rullsenberg Rules.

it's a while since we've had any weekend homework, so just follow tim de lisle's brief and hit us with your must-haves. you don't have to be as everyperson as him if you don't want; it doesn't matter if no-one's heard of your selections.

(if you write your selections in a snake rather than a list, that will save space.)

mo'75 to his astral weeks comment, too.

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SUBMIT YOURS - send yours to 89albums[at]googlemail[dot]com and we'll post 'em up as a proper entry rather than a comment. Please allow time for incompetence.

Seven out of ten for seventypercent.com

Mixed feelings about my first order from chocolate mavens Seventypercent.com

On the one hand, the chocolate I ordered is incredible - the Amadei has a clean snap and an amazingly fruity taste, as if it has black cherries embedded in it, except it doesn't.

So top marks for that. But it's one of those ecommerce sites that won't let you order if things aren't in stock (okay, if you have doubts about supply), so obviously what I ordered was shown in stock. Except it wasn't, so the order took a while to fulfill. Fair enough, there was a lot of publicity about the Amadei. I heard Jane Garvey tasting it and not being impressed, and I bet they got thousands of orders as a result of that. Oooh, if Jane Garvey doesn't like it, it must be good!

But the other disappointment was this: "Free Malagasy sample. Free samples of this exciting new chocolate from Madagascar with every shop order, while stocks last."

This message is still on their web site, but I didn't get no free sample. So if they're out of stock, they should take the offer down.

I've tried the purist 70% Amadei... now for the Bonnat 65% milk chocolate: "...milk chocolate that is as strong as a dark, yet tastes sweet and creamy like a milk!"

Ooo er.

we mean it, maaaam

oh fuck, comic bloody relief day today. for our non-uk readers, i should explain that comic relief is a telethon-type-charity-thing. you tend to get accosted by drooling idiots dressed as chickens, thrusting buckets of small change in your face, wherever you go. and if you don't empty the contents of your pockets into the buckets, hand over your car keys and deeds to your house, you're a wanker. some of the money will go to help children in need in the uk and around the world. though many a bellyful of beer and vegetable biryani has been funded by my excursions into the becostumed-collecting-faux-charity scene.*

i caught a passing tv left unattended last night, and observed that in the build-up to the great day, many celebrities are offering prizes which everyone can bid for, prizes which sometimes include the celebritites themselves. terry wogan, for example, is offering a round of golf with him as partner. in dubai or something.

i thought to myself, you don't hear much from elizabeth von windsor on these occasions. wouldn't it be great if she offered a day with her at the palace? you could try on her sparkly hat, ride around on the back of a corgi and beat a maid senseless with a riding crop. but oh no.

she doesn't even give anything. i don't suppose it's her money though. it's ours. what a ridiculous woman and family. let's tickle them all to death.**

* not really.
** is this treason?

F*cking H*larious

Speaking of comedy, which we were, I've caught about one and a half episodes of BBC2's Joanna Lumley vehicle Sensitive Skin, which they keep telling us is some kind of comedy. Here's a flavour:

A chance meeting with an old school friend prompts Davina Jackson to begin looking back on her childhood. And when her mother suffers another stroke, she literally returns to her old haunts. Meanwhile, Al also confronts his past in the guise of an old flame and media grandee Sarah Thorne. This programme contains strong language."

It's whimsical at times, ironic, yes, but not therapeutically funny.

At one point, Lumley sits whimsically on a seat in some woodland and has a conversation about her lost childhood with her imaginary childhood friend, who appears to have been waiting for her. How we laughed. Later she visits her immobile stroke victim mother in the nursing home.

Meanwhile, her husband, played by Denis Lawson, has a crisis in confidence when he meets a loud, braying former sweetheart, who runs some kind of Melvin Bragg-style round table discussion on radio. Earlier, Lumley had met a former schoolfriend, who had admired her beauty and confidence with boys and felt a failure in comparison. The whimsical ironical moment comes when she tells Lumley she's now - essentially - a brain surgeon, while all Lumley has left is her slowly fading beauty. I think I got a stitch in my side laughing at that bit.

Obviously, there's nothing wrong with whim and iron. There's certainly room in this vast multi-channel universe. But you can't help thinking that in some parallel alternate universe BBC2 had something on that was actually funny, and didn't send my alternate self to bed feeling suicidal.

Your Questions, er, Question Answered

Unfortunately, our log of your questions is clogged by billions of searches for Annel1se H3sme, whose name I'm having to disguise in order not to worsen the problem. Many people, somewhat distastefully, are arriving from a forum in which an individual I am sure is not a true gentleman expresses a wish to make use of Ms H3sme's face for something that is probably not terribly hygienic and might indeed lead to an eye infection. How such tawdriness could even enter your mind upon viewing her angelic face is beyond my ability to comprehend.

And you S@ra Be@ny people are persistent, too.

Apart from that, what do you wish to know?

What does Kenny Chesney look like without his hat? He looks like.... this. For real! Or, er, allegedly. Thanks to our reader Anonymous for that link.

How did the universe begin? I'm sure you don't mean the Hallmark Universe. The origins of the universe in which we live are entirely unknown. Which is nice. It doesn't pay to know everything, because then you have what is called plausible deniability

Some scientists believe (or have faith that) it began as an explosion they call the Big Bang, though of what they can't say. What was there before the Big Bang, what form did it take, and how did that begin? Others think that an older universe simply shrank back in on itself to a point of singularity, turned inside out, and began again. Some religionists believe that a supreme being created the universe. But, again with the platform problem: how did the supreme being come into, er, being? I tend to think that it's all a dream, and will be cancelled next season when viewing figures drop.

Is our universe the only one? Lacking evidence to the contrary, it's possible to believe in something called the multiverse, based on the theory that - every second of every day - people make choices that cause time-lines to diverge. In one such universe, you are reading this and finding in quite interesting and amusing. In another, you are filled with a nameless rage. In still another, you decide to watch EastEnders instead. I'm assuming EastEnders is better in your universe than it is in ours.

Shelagh Fogarty's name seems to have been coming up a lot. Her BBC Bio is here. She's a woman of strong convictions who follows her own moral compass, I think it's fair to say. You may have read of her having an on-air disagreement with Geoffrey Boycott, that well known professional Yorkshireman and feminist. The two of them have history - the first time they met, he said to Fogarty, "Hello Leggy," and she's hated him ever since. With good reason, I think. I bet if you cornered her at a party and she was pissed, she'd tell you that she fucking hates that Boycott.

I'm afraid that's your lot this time.

Not so funny

What makes you laugh at the moment? For health purposes we should be laughing for 18 minutes a day, but I'm barely managing a tenth of that I reckon.

Being an increasingly grumpy old codger, I'm finding all the "young people's" tv comedies dull and derivative, and nothing that has come on recently makes me want to tune in.

Remember tuning in? before push-button TVs, before remote controls? That's the era of comedy I'm into, listening to things like Round the Horne and Beyond Our Ken on BBC Radio 7. That's what I'm reduced to: chuckling at 36 year old radio comedy.

"It looks good, it tastes good, and by golly it is good... if you put enough gin in it."

Commercial Fantasies

Following on from yesterday's slight rant about continental drinking culture, I thought I'd share with you my pet theories on how cafés should run.

While I have been trying to train myself not to be impatient in French cafés (with some degree of success), I've noticed that some places don't seem to be run by commercially minded management. Especially when there are no grown-ups in evidence, you do sometimes sit at an empty table for longer than is comfortable for even the most tolerant Brit.

So I try to avoid those places that are being manned/run by students who obviously have no interest in the profitability of each table.

I've also noticed that, if we are the first customers of the day (and I always want to stop for a coffee before anyone else does, since I'd rather drink coffee than hang around in Armand Thiery stores), that we are soon joined by other customers, and a place that was deserted becomes busy and bustling.

Many people are reluctant to sit at an empty table in or outside an empty café. The owners must be sitting around, becoming increasingly desperate for that first punter of the day. Which is why, if I was running a place, I'd have a table outside displaying a sign that reads, "La première boisson est libre pour notre premier client du jour." or words to that effect. Adding "...qui n'est pas un bruit" (I think bruit is French for tramp).

Alternatively, you could operate this policy quietly, ad hoc, so that regular customers might be aware of it, so might start dropping by early for their free espresso. Once you've got the punter at a table, the other punters come rolling in.

As an enterprise, your café is losing money for every minute you are open if you have empty tables. So it pays to get people in early, and it would pay double not to keep them hanging around for service.

nice one, bob

we already knew what a terrible travesty of communication is the email, but it's nice to hear bob say it.

his comments on blogging were not reported, but it's highly likely that he said "feck" at least once.

BBC - collective -selected review

My review of Joy Lynn White's One More Time is one of the "selected member reviews" over at BBC Collective. Catch it while it's hot.

The interview at Puremusic.com that I linked to the other day is a long one. Until she starts banging on about animal rights JLW makes a lot of sense (she probably makes a lot of sense on animal rights, too, but let's not get started on that). One of the reasons for her long career hiatus was the loss of a family member in a flood-related accident.

She also, typically, had record company issues (with Pete Anderson's label, which she describes as incompetently run), which was another factor. But then she got involved in theatre as well, so was appearing as Maybell Carter in some play about the Carter family. I guess the time adds up, and before you know it, it's seven years later.

I must say, I was thinking this morning how the FIFA World Cup tournaments seemed to have impossibly long gaps between them when I was a boy, but now we've barely finished complaining about the last one before we have to start complaining about the next.

As I get older, time moves faster and I remember less.

Laughed so much I crashed the car

Two things made me laugh out loud in the car this morning. On 5Live Breakfast, they were talking about the latest test message gimmick - condensed versions of classic literature - and asked listeners to send in their own.

The best was this. Watership Down: some rabbits move house.

The other funny thing turns out not to be so funny written down, so it will remain our secret.

Doodle 4 Google

Thanks to the Guardian Technology blog for this link to Doodle 4 Google, which shows the Google logo as drawn by some London schoolkids. Cute.

The Google paranoiac's take on this, of course, is that it's nice to see Google brainwashing kids as young as 5, in preparation for the Googletown Massacre.

"The drinks are over here..."

Travel Sick Much?

I've been known to suffer a full day of travel sickness after a relatively short journey. When we drive to France we take the train because the Ferry makes me feel bad for a day. A short bus journey can cause discomfort for a couple of hours. But this is taking things to extremes.

Four years? Sweet Jesus. "As there is no miracle cure, raising awareness is crucial in helping sufferers know that it isn't all in their head." Except it is, isn't it? Because your inner ear is in your head, fule.

(Anatomists may write to correct me if the inner ear is, in fact, elsewhere on the human body.)

Prospect - When Will the Oil Run Out and What Happens Then?

Prospect hosts a debate between Jeremy Leggett (CEO of Solarcentury) and David Jenkins (former adviser to BP).

You may have to register to view this article. Here's a flavour of Leggett's opening salvo:

If there are 2-2.7 trillion barrels left, the topping-out point lies somewhere in the 2030s and we have time to prepare. If there are 1 trillion barrels left, the topping-out point is as close as 2008, plus or minus two years, and there is not enough time to make the transition from oil to alternatives without economic trauma.

BBC Music Quiz

I did shockingly badly on guessing the answers to the first 5 questions on this BBC Music Quiz, but then actually knew the answers for the final few making my score 5/10.

It is Friday.

Wait: it's not?


If you do as badly as me, take comfort in the thought that the questions may be incorrect, because they were set by teachers. I just did the English quiz in the same series, and scored 20/20 - but only by choosing the least wrong answer for one of the questions. It asked, what does "Ostentatious" mean? Correct answers might have included "tawdry", "vulgar" or (more colloquially) "showy." The BBC would have you believe that the answer is "pretentious." Eh? No, no, I really am ostentatious...

CMA Awards

On BBC this Saturday. Strange this about these awards, they seem more based on 2004 than on 2005. I bought that Lee Ann Womack record so long ago I can't remember it. And surely "Whiskey Lullaby" was performed at last year's awards? I'm confused.

Entertainer of the Year
Keith Urban

FEMALE VOCALIST OF THE YEAR
Gretchen Wilson

MALE VOCALIST OF THE YEAR
Keith Urban

HORIZON AWARD
Dierks Bentley

VOCAL GROUP OF THE YEAR
Rascal Flatts

BROOKS & DUNN DUO OF THE YEAR... big surprise, it's...
Brooks & Dunn

SINGLE OF THE YEAR
(Award goes to artist and producer)
"I May Hate Myself In The Morning" Lee Ann Womack
Produced by Byron Gallimore
MCA Nashville

MUSICIAN OF THE YEAR
Jerry Douglas - Dobro

ALBUM OF THE YEAR
(Award goes to artist and producer)
There's More Where That Came From - Lee Ann Womack
Produced by Byron Gallimore/Greg Droman
MCA Nashville

SONG OF THE YEAR
(Award goes to songwriter and primary publisher)
"Whiskey Lullaby"
Bill Anderson/Jon Randall
Sony/ATV/Mr. Bubba Music/Reynsong/Wha Ya Say Music"

It's not the opening hours, stupid

More binge drinking stories in the news today, as fears of the coming Opening Hours Apocalypse grip the nation. Alcohol is bad, mmmmkay? As one correspondent to a Luton newspaper once put it, why do people need to drink so much when they're not even thirsty?

Tony Blair and his team of weasels think that by giving us continental opening hours, we'll magically adopt a continental-style drinking culture. But, aside from the fact that, outside September and October, we don't have the weather for it, we also don't have the venues for it.

Because it's not the opening hours, it's the table service.

It's a culture in which your night out involves sitting with friends/family, having a nice chat about life, and watching the world go by. Occasionally a waiter or waitress will approach your table and take orders for drinks. You will order drinks and go on chatting about life and watching the world go by. The drinks will arrive, and you will enjoy them whilst chatting and etc.

Sit a British person or persons at a table in a French café and see how they fret after 30 seconds that they haven't been served yet. Do they know we're here? Should I order inside? What's the hold-up? Shall we try somewhere else? After a few more minutes, they get up and walk away.

Never mind taking the weight off your feet and enjoying a social chat. Where are our drinks!!?

Which is why, if you want a continental drinking culture, you go to the continent.

Damned

I've got a letter in the Guardian today. One of my green-ink crackpot theories about driver behaviour.

My collected letters to the Guardian are coming out as a (limited edition) book next year. Which reminds me, must email Nicky and Sheilagh over at 5Live...

P.S. I haven't provided a link to the actual letters page, on the assumption that you do of course read the printed tabloid edition. Also it's a bit of an intelligence test to discover the letters page on the web site. Keeps the riff-raff out, don't you know.

Interview with Joy Lynn White

Continuing my campaign to mention Joy's One More Time at least once a week, I would like to encourage you to head on over to puremusic.com for an interview with Joy in which she talks about the reason for her long career hiatus, and her different experiences with both major and minor record labels.

She's at #5 on the Americana chart, which is good work, up from #6 a week ago, and she's being played on 48 radio stations (these charts are based not on sales but on radio play).

You need some Joy in your life, don't you?

Food of the Gods

PooterGeek muses on mushy peas.

I thought about it for a while, and I find it really disappointing that you rarely find the good chips and the good fish in the same place. Chips usually let the side down.

In the office, we were recently treated to a Harry Ramsden's takeaway, but it wasn't very good. The chips were just awful. Buckingham fish bar does some of the best batter I've tasted, but their chips are rubbish.

Years ago, there was a chip shop near Goblin Market in Winslow, near Buckingham, that did crinkle cut fish and chips. They were awesome. We used to drive all the way from Dumpstable to get them, which is a long way in a Morris Traveller.

The only other place I've eaten crinkle cut chips was in the Greek place in Champaign, Illinois. What was that place called, Roy? I was the only person liked the chips, though, which may or may not have been cooked in pig fat. Or whale oil.

Bomb Magnets

This story from yesterday about Railways testing anti-terror systems struck me as odd.

On the one hand, the attempt to produce scanning systems designed to automatically detect "suspicious behaviour" seems doomed to failure (we all know that computers are rubbish by now - except the government, it seems).

On the other, creating checkpoints to scan people and their belongings is surely just playing into the hands of suicide bombers, who seem to like nothing better than to blow themselves up at security checkpoints. Create a bottleneck where people rub shoulders and jostle about (like the Luton Airport passport check), and you will attract the martyrs.

What possible good will it do, once somebody is in a crowd at a checkpoint, to discover that they're carrying an explosive device? If they know they've been rumbled, they'll just set it off anyway.

The same principle applies to the building of nukular power stations, doesn't it? Bomb magnets.

Career Moves

Isn't it interesting how some people have the ability to make just the right moves with their acting careers? That Anthony Stewart Head, for example, was never going to go anywhere in the UK, because he'd saddled himself with those coffee adverts. A hop and a skip across the At-a-lancic ocean, and - after a few lessons in taking blows to the head and falling over - he'd completely wiped out those coffee ads, and has made a name for himself in Buffy. Returning to the UK, you see him in quite a lot of things. I still think he'd have made a better Docotor Who than the previous and current incumbents.

On the other hand, there's Joanne Whalley, who was back on our screens this weekend in some pike-illogical filler. Here was a woman who had key roles in two of the shining jewels of British TV: Edge of Darkness and The Singing Detective (and she was in the pretty good adaptation of A Kind of Loving, too, let's not forget), but then it all went to her head and she swanned off to Hollywood to make a sequence of mostly forgettable video shop fodder. Actually, the right move for her would have been a role in a long-running series like ER. I often think of her when I catch an episode of Stargate because there was a character in it looked quite like her.

I've never seen the appeal of Tamzin Outhwaite, who used EastEnders as a stepping stone into a mirror-universe career in which she is the female Ross Kemp, running around in an army uniform looking angry. She's got a kind of hard, leathery, square face, and the acting range - or so I thought - of an IKEA Klippan sofa.

Last night she was in something called Walk Away and I Stumble, which for most of its length was a story about a bloke who meets a Five on the scale (the one who makes you want to destroy your life so you can be with her) and starts thinking about leaving his wife and kids. Tamzin plays an English Heritage guide, who - at 32 - is single and looking for love.

I'm sorry, but I just can't believe in her as a Five - not on anybody's scale. She's not even a One on mine. But I guess that's what Acting Classes are for.

Anyway, it's clear that Ms Outhwaite has taken a leaf from Anthony Stewart Head's book, and has been to the same drama coach, who has taught her to fall over most convincingly. She falls off a bike. And then she falls at the bottom of the stairs and crawls up them (in the original script, she fell at the top of the stairs and went down them, but this was thought too dangerous by her insurers). Later, she falls in the street, and ends up in hoppital, where she looks red faced and angry about something. She may have fallen over several other times while I wasn't watching.

In episode two, I'm sure she will take falling over to new heights, so maybe she will then be considered good enough to take over from Billie as Docotor Who's assistant.

a mighty cliche falls

5Live's footie commentary tonight was former Division One Champions and European Cup winners Nottingham Forest playing Weymouth of the Conference South in the first round of the FA Cup. First Round.

That's gotta be humiliating. What with the comedy annual renaming of the various leagues, it's easy to forget how far they've fallen. But when was the last time a European Cup winning side had to play in the first round of the FA cup?

There were some precious Partridgesque moments in the commentary, too. Someone had clearly been feeding the 5Live team some howlers, which were then relayed on air, in that this-is-incredibly-dull-but-you-may-find-it-interesting way that Partridge had. Weymouth, we're told, "Are known as the Terras - Terras ending A S - because they used to play in terracotta... they now play in claret and blue."

And: "The stand opposite is known as the Barbara Windsor stand, because that's where the biggest... moaners... are..."

Hilarious. And Humiliating for the Forest fans, of course. A good night for football.

The Big Freeze

As I was scraping the inch-thick ice off my car windscreen this morning, dodging all the dead birds falling out of the sky, I was at the same time decrying the lack of joined-up thinking in our government's policies on energy consumption.

I sometimes think this blog is in danger of turning into some kind of survivalist manifesto. When I fantasise about winning the lottery, for example, I quickly move on from thoughts of new cars and holiday homes on the Vendée coast to fortified buildings, security systems, big piles of wood and canned goods, and armaments.

But if you despair about the state of the world, it's only because you know that it needn't come to that. In the 70s, during the big energy crisis caused by oil embargoes and miners' strikes, the government ran a successful energy saving campaign: SAVE IT! Everybody was made aware of pointless waste, things like putting too much water in the kettle, having a bath instead of a shower, having the central heating on too high.

I was heavily influenced by that campaign and I'm always mindful of the way I use energy at home. On the other hand, we had a government in the 1980s that was determined to accelerate the growth of the economy in any way possible - and that included the privatisation and fragmentation of our energy suppliers, all of whom now have a vested interest (on their shareholders' behalf) in making sure we use as much energy as possible.

As for this government, it's when you hear successive news stories on successive days, as one department or another issues a report or White Paper, that you realise that - not only are they not talking to each other - but that the correspondents who parrot their press releases aren't talking to each other, either.

As the BBC story referred to above notes, none of the current concerns should come as a surprise to anyone.

Five years ago the Royal Commission on Environment Pollution (RCEP) said that rising energy demands, together with a policy of reducing greenhouse gas emissions, posed "...a radical challenge for the UK; a challenge that cannot be met successfully unless the government's energy policies and its environmental policies are coherent."

Reducing energy use should be a priority, it said, but the government needed "...to give much higher priority to energy efficiency, a change in public attitudes, with people linking their own day-to-day use of energy with fossil fuel consumption and the threat of climate change."

Is Your Journey Really Necessary? Er, no.

Heard a spokeswaffle for these jokers on Wake Up to Money this morning. The usual pressure group whinge about there not being enough roads, and too much tax blah blah.

I was most disappointed not to hear their underlying assumptions being questioned. One of their complaints was that the economy was being damaged because people were late for appointments.

And you wonder... how? I've seen a lot of reps in the course of my work, and they're more often late than not. But since I never expect them to be on time, it doesn't concern me. On the other hand, I frequently question the purpose of their visit. Lots of reps are told by their employers that they have to call on all their accounts on a strict rota. I always tell them not to bother. I don't need to see someone every month, or even every two months. Once a quarter is more than enough.

A lot of the time, they turn up just to give you a new price list. Or to tell you about a new price list, which they then have to send by email. Or they arrive with a laptop to show you pictures on a web site of their newly announced products.

The whole travelling rep job description dates from a time before we had email and the rest of the internet, and before we had mobile phones. Most of the reps I see, I'd rather they were just available when we needed to speak to them - able to answer the phone and confirm something, for example, instead of being "in meetings" and "on the road" all the time.

For someone to travel 3 hours up the motorway for a half hour meeting and then 3 hours back home again - well, that's always struck me as preposterous.

So, fuck off, Road Users' Alliance, and rethink your priorities. In other news, looks like they're thinking of targeting speeding motorists as a means of reducing emissions. Quite a good idea: and a side-effect of this will be to reduce congestion (because speeding motorists only ever catch up slower vehicles and then bunch up and become mired in "heavy traffic".). It's chaos theory, innit?

Cultural Differences

Funny, isn't it, the things that trip you up? I'd never really thought about it before, but it is strange how the electric kettle is a rarity in many parts of the world - including the USA.

A lot of these countries aren't really tea drinkers, but there are lots of other uses for a kettle of boiling water (a kettle heats water for pasta, for example, far more efficiently than a saucepan does), so it is odd to discover people still struggling along with stovetop models. We actually bought my French mother-in-law an electric kettle a couple of years ago, because we were fed up with waiting for the stovetop one to boil on her gas stove.

As the Slate article says, UK voltage is much higher than US voltage, so our electric kettles are lightning fast. Yes, that's right: we have the best electricity (and plugs) in the world.

A lot of talk in the press lately about definitions of Britishness, and that's a good one. The UK plug is uniquely brilliant, and driving on the left hand side of the road in a right hand drive car is also superior to the other method. Don't get me started on that.

======

In other news, I was delighted to hear Mr Terry Wogan on his BBC Radio 2 show this morning, pronounce Epiphone the correct way. There is no greater authority than the Wogan.

Friday Trawl Through the Archives

Since we're not around much at the weekend (mind you, nor are our regular readers), it makes sense to end the week with another Caroline Flashback Show...

I dream a movie starring Maura Tierney

Zen and the Art of House Design

A Nostalgia bulletin about the Blow’s Downs in Dumpstable

Why Steve McQueen is better than Brando

When you stop worrying about being cool

Why we're called Hoses - not Houses - of the Holy

Modest proposal re clothes sizing

Rat Stories

I confidently predict that Andrew Murray won't be any good on the main Tennis Tour

And the greatest rock 'n' roll record of all time is...

Air fresheners cause depression... (Incidentally, I've noticed that there are a great many more ads for air fresheners on telly since this story hit the airwaves - a real to-the-mattresses moment for the air freshener industry.