Grobert Raves

I was bedridden over the festive period, thanks to an injury I picked up in the opening of a new Primark last September, and I elected to soothe my fevered brow at least partially with Robert Graves' endearingly insane non-essay The White Goddess. Apparently Graves had read The Golden Bough, he just managed to miss the point. I think an illustrated edition of this work is long overdue. Just think what a talented woodcutter or engraver to do with these sample excerpts -
"Since there were always twelve stones in the gilgal, or stone circle, used for sacrificial purposes, the next jaunt is to chase the white roebuck speculatively round the twelve houses of the Zodiac."
"Her nests, when one comes across them in dreams, lodged in rock-clefts or the branches of enormous hollow yews, are built of carefully chosen twigs, lined with horsehair and the plumage of prophetic birds, and littered with the jaw bones and entrails of poets."
"An English or American woman in a nervous breakdown of sexual origin will often instinctively reproduce in faithful and disgusting detail much of the ancient Dionysiac ritual. I have witnessed it myself in helpless terror."

There's no other way!

Ah, me! Damon Albarn's latent hardline-Socialism has finally taken flight! His was never a difficult portfolio of politics to fathom: fierce condemnation of American interventionism coupled with an apparent contempt for people 'educated the expensive way', seasoned, perhaps, with a few mm3 of art student self-loathing... All in all, the sum total of his worldly wisdom looks to have been informed by beards, berets and coffee - though probably not TV, which, he tells the world and anyone else who's listening, should certainly be 'dismantled', followed by a necessary sea-change in 'our value system', and the almost total obliteration of the media. "There's just so many things I would alter," foaming, maniacal Albarn tells press. If that isn't the language of a Marxist revolutionary, I'll eat a whole bay of pigs.

Bad Sex Awards 2007

I first became aware of this illustrious title while thumbing through Schott's Almanac 2005 however the award dates back to 1993- people say nothing good came from the nineties!

Apparently there is a correlation between good fiction and bad sex with some authors having won both the Bad Sex award and the Booker prize- nobody has won both for the same book.

Below is my favourite:

Why am I embarrassed about taking off my clothes in front of a robot? I pull the dress over my head like a schoolgirl, untie my hair, and sit down. She is smiling, just a little bit, as though she knows her effect.

To calm myself down and appear in control I reverse the problem. ‘Spike, you’re a robot, but why are you such a drop-dead gorgeous robot? I mean, is it necessary to be the most sophisticated machine ever built and to look like a movie star?’

She answers simply: ‘They thought I would be good for the boys on the mission.’

…

‘So you had sex with spacemen for three years?’

‘Yes. I used up three silicon-lined vaginas.’

How can a lesbian sex scene between man and machine be artless?

Update, 01:24: I tracked down my copy of Schotts and found some more quotes

A flock of crows, six or eight, raucously rasping at one another, thrashed into the top of an oak on the edge of the square of sky

The context is not important here.

Slither slither slither slither went the tongue, but the hand that was what she tried to concentrate on, the hand, since it has the entire terrain of her torso to explore and not just the otorhinolaryngological caverns - oh God, it was not just at the border where the flesh of the breast joins the pectoral sheath of the chest - no, the hand was cupping her entire right - Now! She must say 'No, Hoyt' and talk to him like a dog...

Beautiful alliteration

She reached the staircase and climbed the first step but the cold was numbing her mind. She fainted, upright and motionless with seawater up to her belly. Lobster swam to her purple feet. Cut off the bloodless hand with his pincers, and climbed up the inside of the leg as far as the clenched knees. He was amazed at the pleasure he felt from being held in this way. His pincers slipped between the thighs, prising them gently apart.

Lobster by Guillaume Lecasble

Stop All The Clocks

NFU website poll: "Do you think the clocks should stay forward during the winter, and move an hour forward in summer, to bring us into line with the rest of Europe?" 65% think yes.

Well it would be great except that if you only moved forward an hour in the summer every year, the day would begin an hour later every year, so in twelve years time, a day that would have begun at 9 am would begin at the equivalent of 9p.m.. No wonder the Europeans have such difficulty keeping deadlines, driving and working a sensible number of hours in a week.

Also Porter was angry to be ejected from a nightclub when the clocks went back. The only reason he went was for the extra-hour free.

Somebody I was chatting to asked me whether I thought that people who worked over the hour when the clocks went back got payed for the hour lost. That's like asking if a long-haul flight attendant gets payed for two hours work on a trip to the States.

Badgerlosis

The Guardian quotes today from a report discussing the effect of culling consumptive badgers on the spread of bovine TB. The report employs the phrase,

Bereaved badgers will traverse the country...

I wonder if this isn't taking poetic licence a bit too far.

Priceless Ming Shattered

Sir Menzies Campbell, the Scots "bulldog lawyer" turned politician, lies at the bottom of the political sea not far beneath the wreck of his own party. The postNewt calls for a new leader of the LibDems who can rid the party of its new found sleezefree, chivalrous and sensible air and get the party back to basics. Alcoholism, drug abuse, rent-boys, and cheeky girls need to be high on the agenda if Britain's waning third party can salvage its bad name.

Rumblings from my lung.

Silver Dollar Jim, as some of you may know, enjoys his cigarettes. There is something beautiful about inhaling the smoke of fine virginian tobacco rolled on the thighs of illegal Mexican immigrants. There seems to be almost no event where a cigarette would not add to the occasion positively in some way. If any of you have enjoyed a smoke whilst on the crapper it is an interesting experience, if not a little unsettling. There is always the post-supper pre-crap cigarette, often goes well with an americano- it makes the final defecation all the more satisfying. Then there is the obligatory cigarette after sexual intercourse whether hand relief or not. It turns one's hand relief into an occasion! Lest we forget, perhaps the most sublime experience of life is a gorgeous double fag after a long haul flight. Of course these are some of the most common smoking occasions. I have never smoked during sex, in a hospital or while playing squash but I have my entire smoker's life ahead of me. 15 more years of bliss.

I have laid the facts down on the table for all to read. Yet for reasons that defy economic, social, metaphysical and evolutionary logic, HM Government has banned it in enclosed public places. This forces the poor, defenceless smoker into the night to be savaged by some gang-member looking to 'score some rock'.

Silver Dollar Jim hopes that the current public sentiment against enjoying tobacco is just a fad, like prohibition in his own country or the current obsession in the pornographic industry with tattoos.

Peripatetic Paninaros push pallid product

I was walking through my local high street at around lunchtime when I was offered a promotional panini (sic) by a woman in a tabard. The jostling throng hurried me along before I could properly say thank you, which gave me some passing discomfort, but nothing compared to that conferred by the 'panini' proper, which was composed of heavy glutinous ciabatta, sweaty cubes of cheese and a square piece of ham, the entire sandwich innocent of butter and seasoning. Some questions were raised.
1 - Assuming the sandwich was supposed to be eaten as it was, why would Ugo's (that, as far as I remember was the company name) go to the expense of handing out free samples when palatability is clearly not the bankable suit of the product?
2 - Assuming that the sandwich was supposed to be grilled before consumption (grilled seems to be the default setting of the expatriate panino) which would explain the underbaked ciabatta and the cubic cheese, why would they give out this product at midday in the high street, when most people would be unable to get to a grill or toastie maker for at least five hours?
3 - Does it make sense to preserve the Italianate plural (panino/panini) in a loan word? Also to be considered: Should people who call toasted bread with tomato and basil 'brushetta' be mocked or hailed as patriots? Should we call a female barista a bariste?
4 - Is it fair or even tasteful of me to be rude about a free sandwich that I was handed in the street?

Flying High in Mumbai

For those of you who share Hamilton's ever-diversifying penchant for prescription medicines, I am now in a position both to recommend and to caution you against Parvon-spas, an opioid analgesic with antispasmodic properties prescribed me by a cheerful consultant in Jaipur. This drug was, as far as I can tell, in my case, completely unnecessary. I made it clear that the abdomenal muscle pains incidental to my gastric shenanigans were very minor. Nevertheless the doctor decided that a three-day course of strong painkillers was the way forward. I have experienced vagueness of mental faculties, fatigue, spontaneous anger and mild euphoria. I would liken the good periods to that sense of pleasant detachment effected by gentle dope-smoking; but the bad parts are comparable to the worst, most soul-destroying hangovers. Parvon-spas is a charmless appellation. I feel that Dogtooth's Gambit is apposite and has real prospects as a calling-card when this giddy formula hits the backstreets of London.

Michael Winner seems to have lost a lot of weight lately, which means that he now reminds me harshly of my own mortality.

I have long enjoyed Anjana Ahuja's Science Notebook column in the Times, but does it not seem strange that a major newspaper should allow the bulk of its science reporting to be done by a postgraduate who specialised in space physics (probably the branch of science with the least bearing on our everyday lives). As scientific issues such as cloning and genetic modification, the status of DNA evidence in trials, animal testing and the threat posed by climate change increase there currency in political debetate it is worrying how few MPs, government officials or journalists have a grounding in the physical sciences.

When Cole Porter was played a recording of Ella Fitzgerald, arguably the greatest singer of her age, singing his songs he is said to have remarked only 'what marvelous diction that girl has.' As, in fairness, she does.

Bibliographica Impenetranda

'Get stewed' said Philip Larkin, 'books are a load of crap'. He was, up to a point, right. Broadly speaking the only hobby more likely to waste your time, scarify your liver, retard your career, stunt your social powers and atrophy your pudenda than the reading of novels is the writing of them. There are however two parts of every novel which are both fun to read and to write. I refer, of course, to the blurb and the first sentence. Generally a quick glance at these two bits of prose will see you through all but the most protracted lavatorial visits, and arm you with enough information to claim to have read the book in social situations. (This may not suffice in the case of 'the classics' which many people were forced to read at school. Don't panic, it is no coincidence that these very same 'classics' are the ones with helpful little introductions at the start. Don't, for the love of God, confuse this introduction with the Author's Foreword, which is even more boring and pointless than the novel itself.) So, I have devoted my not inconsiderable free time to crafting a series of first lines for your enjoyment. A selection of gripping and informative blurbs is sure to follow.

Firstly let us consider some antiquated styles of opening sentance, popular in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, but outclassed by the sleeker and higher powered openings of today.

The Locational Opening - 'Rumsfield House lay quiet as the dawn broke/sun set (it doesn't matter what the sun is doing, as long as it is doing something) behind its high roofs.' For this type of opening you will need a stately home. The sun also does these things behind Watford services, but no novel will come out of that.


The Geographical opening - 'The village of X lies in the county of Y on the north side of the river Z, surrounded by the forest of J.' This sort of opening will continue with a local squire adopting the son or daughter of a washerwoman (also local) and will play out in rollicking, picturesque form.

The Biographical opening - 'I was born in the village of X, which lies in the county of Y on the north side of the river Z, surrounded by the forest of J.' The narrative proceeds in a similar manner to that of the Geographical opening, except that it is in the first person, and is usually written by Tobias Smollet rather than Henry Fielding.

As you will no doubt have worked out, the art of the opening was in its infancy until very recently. In modern times we have seen a return to the concept of In Media Res, the Greek technique of starting in the middle, proceeding on the beginning, and then moving to the end. A modern thriller might begin 'The Rugglington revolver (if you writer a thriller make sure you mention the manufacturer of all the guns, this will make the book sound well researched) jumped in my hand, and the man in black spun backwards toward the cliff edge.' A more punchy thriller writer might start his book 'Bang! went the Rugglington Revolver.' A writer more punchy still will just write 'Bang!' which brings us pretty close to the gripping, if unfortunately untranslatable opening sentence of Beowulf: 'Hwæt!' (the exclamation mark is implied rather than written, but like 'oy!' the word is hard to say without one).




But it was Anthony Burgess who wrote the book on opening lines. The book is Earthly Powers, and the opening line is 'It was the afternoon of my eighty-first birthday, and I was in bed with my catamite when Ali announced that the archbishop had come to see me.' If you must ignore my advice and actually read a book then Earthly Powers isn't a bad one to waste your time on, though it isn't a patch on the first sentence. It fulfills all the criteria for a good first sentence: it raises questions it cannot answer, it hints at a story far more interesting than the one about to be told, and it brings into the story characters who will become regrettable burdens by the end of the first page. A sentence like that is perfect, because the average reader will think 'only a really great writer could take an opening line like that and weave it into a full and complex story'. The average reader is a forgiving soul, and assuming he or she doesn't make it down the first page (and once you have a really excellent first sentence your next challenge is make sure that no prospective reader does make it through the first page) then he (or she) will assume that you have succeeded, and you are, in fact, a really great writer.


Anyway, here are some more first lines after the Burgess model:

It is now nearly Whitsun, and though I may still be persona non grata in many parts of Northumbria, Porson's worm and it's attendant properties are finally mine.

Marcus was playing backgammon with his late Uncle Millroy when the Admiral's gyrocopter landed on the east lawn.

'The Headmaster has left for Vienna' said Dr Nicodemus, his eyes flashing wildly in the light of the burning museum, 'and I fear that nothing on earth can stop him now'.


An incident

I walked into a pub with a copy of The Doctor is Sick in my hand (I had been reading it on the tube) and Dogtooth looked at me in surprise. 'You're reading something by Burgess other than A Clockwork Orange.' he noted astutely. 'Isn't that a bit leftfield?'

An Evening with Dogtooth: Popular Quotables

I enjoyed this from GK Chesterton:

In former centuries the educated class ignored the ruck of vulgar literature. They ignored, and therefore did not, properly speaking, despise it. Simple ignorance and indifference does not inflate the character with pride. A man does not walk down the street giving a haughty twirl to his moustaches at the thought of his superiority to some variety of deep-sea fishes.

Delightful!

Misconduct

Courtesy of Charlie Brooker in The Guardian: 'This week Charlie accidentally got drunk and speculated wildly and offensively about an ongoing news event, breaking into song as he did so, at the top of his voice, in a pub.' We need to see more of this. Mr Brooker will receive a warm welcome at the Muted Slughorn.

Small things for small minds

'How dare you have a terrible cocaine addiction at Phillipe's birthday party!'

This made me laugh. So did this.

Brass Monkeys

As if the African farming community didn't have enough on their plate... An unfortunate turn of phrase. I'll try again: (Clears throat) AS IF the farming community of Nachu, in Kenya, did not have enough to be getting on with, the female contingent of the village are now being menaced by an influx of monkey sex-pests. 'The monkeys grab their breasts, and gesture at us while pointing at their private parts,' complained one woman. There is widespread concern among the local people, but, perversely, the first thought that struck me on reading this unhappy tale was that we should all, perhaps, be taking the Great Ape Personhood movement more seriously. In fact, the common-and-garden variety monkeys are excluded from proposals, but one wonders whether their case should not be reviewed in light of their exhibiting an advanced and highly-sophisticated facility with comedic sexual vulgarity and chauvinist backchat. Or perhaps Australian men should simply be downgraded.

Post-colonial guilt syndrome has Britain in a half-nelson

None of my numerous get rich quick schemes is bearing fruit, and the duns and bailiffs are closing in, so I have regrettably been forced to seek gainful employment as a typist and part time waiter. This will have obvious ramifications on the frequency of my posting, but I'm sure you will all cope. I took a break from my hectic schedule last night to watch The Last Confession, which is about the surprising and unexpected death of John Paul I, and stars David Suchet. We were encouraged, at least implicitly, to warm toward the short-lived Pope because of his liberal views, particularly regarding birth control. Could it be that the likability of a given Pope is inversely proportional to how Catholic he is?

I'm currently angry about the plan to build a statue of Nelson Mandela outside the Palace of Westminster. I suppose I have to state my compulsory respect for St Mandela (the respect is actually genuine, though I hate the odour of sanctity which surrounds him, and which C list celebrities, who wouldn't know Biko or de Klerk from Adam, flock to inhale), but I don't see why a South African hero should get a statue in London. If we are going to be motivated by craven post-colonial guilt and liberal self abasement let's at least build a statue of Gandhi or (and I like this idea) a wild haired Mau Mau freedom fighter, in other words people who enacted a genuine change in British history. There is room for many a statue of Mandela in South Africa, and maybe even a few more in London, but to erect a monument outside Parliament is nothing less than creepy. Imagine if the Japan put up a statue of the Duke of Wellington outside their parliament, would we be flattered, or would we think them either ingratiating or insane?

Jesus supported Villa!

For several months I've been a-nose-scratching over the numerous examples of supposed racial/religious provocation, and the number of people who publicly start bonfires under their collars at every opportunity. There was the problem of the Birmingham Sikhs who stormed a theatre after a performance depicting sexual abuse in a gurdwara - laughable, I know! But it's hardly the first time the Sikhs have resorted, en masse, to violent and unreasonable measures. Later we all had to endure an enormous, self-indulgent Islamic whinge-along about those irreverant Denmark cartoons, about which I can sum up my feelings in either of two considered phrases: Free Press. Fuck Off. The Moslem 'bath of their own tears' love-in was at least a rational response - albeit overblow - to their censorship of the prophet's image. Now, there are Christians and, puzzlingly, Hindus protesting over a Malaysian cartoon of Jesus smoking a cigarette and brandishing a can of lager. I would go so far as to suggest that those protesting are perhaps without a sense of humour. In any case, last time I looked - though in the Labour Britain's political climate, one could be forgiven for thinking otherwise - smoking was not a moral transgression. Ultimately - and perhaps a new addition should be made to our manifesto - religious sensibilites are a myth! No-one really cares about insensitive images, they just crave an excuse to waggle their swollen religious identities at the rest of the world.

Punjabia

Just as I was beginning to be able to translate freely from Delhi English into English English, the itchy feet propelled me Punjabwards. Inadvisedly, I failed to get out of Amritsar after the first day, and am now looking at a second night of (albeit air-conditioned) hell in the dusty nightmare of the north-west. Amritsar is host to the very beautiful Sikh enclosure of the Golden Temple, but the Sikh religion is one of spectacular morbidity and unwarranted fanaticism. The ethos of the the creed is constructive, but for a religious group that worships a piece of paper, one cannot help feeling that the Sikhs take themselves a little too seriously. And in light of the seemingly slight differences between between their faith and the predominant Hindu inclination (they share the same objectives and the same notion of a formless/everyshaped deity, although Sikhism is without the perceived idolatrous clutter of Hinduism), and the lack of hostility on either side of the religious divide, the call for an independent nation of Khalistan seems about as reasonable as a Dorset secession movement...can you imagine: 'We will not rest until we have claimed our right to a freer, stronger, independent Dorset!'

In Defence of Neoconservatism

I'm bemused by the idea circulating in various film reviews that we need to decide which is better, Bond or Borne. This kind of ranking is moronic: both franchises serve up similar thrills and compared to, say, The Princess Diaries or Dude Where's my Car? they are very clearly aiming at the same demographics. The Bourne Identity clearly shows the influence of the Bond films (namely in the idea that espionage involves climbing up walls in black outfits and handling firearms rather than asking questions).
I am a great fan of the Bourne films, after watching the Bourne Identity I simply couldn't believe no-one had told me about it, however I can't help but rail at some of the claims made by Brenden O'Neill in Spiked. Bourne is not nearly as clever as its ravishing grey and blue photography makes it look: like the film Ronin it hides the heart of a balls to the wall action film behind muted colour tones and a 'classy' European setting. The films are much less clued up on post-Cold War politics than O'Neill claims them to be. Any film which portrays the CIA as a powerful and threatening force, rather than a hunted, haunted entity completely failing to combat international threat while its authority at home is steadily eroded by an unfriendly White House does not have its finger on the pulse. Washington is far more of an international force than Langley Falls could ever hope to be. Bourne is a much less complex hero than O'Neil gives him credit for, he stands reliably against government organisations who are almost always shown to be malicious without cause. The Bourne films fail to engage with the depressing reality that grim and despicable as American and Western foreign policy may appear to be, it is often our only bulwark against the greater evils of Communist or Islamist aggression.

I'm working on putting together a half-way readable review of Thomas Pynchon's Against the Day. In the meantime, for you enjoyment, I give you Proverbs for Paranoids, culled sensitively from Gravity's Rainbow:
1. You may never get to touch the Master, but you can tickle his creatures.
2. The innocence of the creatures is in inverse proportion to the immorality of the Master.
3. If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don't have to worry about answers.
4. You hide, they seek.
5. Paranoids are not paranoid because they're paranoid, but because they keep putting themselves, fucking idiots, deliberately into paranoid situations.

So farewell, then, Bill Deedes (1913-2007)

Separated at birth

Lavatoria

I enjoyed Mick Hume's most recent article in spiked. However, I'm left torn over issues such as 'awareness ribbons'. I hate anyone who wears one, or at least I would if I didn't know lots of generally decent people who do wear them, but I find it hard to scoff at the whole concept of 'awareness'. If any positive change is bought about in Darfur by UN intervention then we can thank the medias interest in the region, compared to, say, the Congo which is far harder and more dangerous to get cameras into. Take the Poppy Day phenomenon: I don't wear a poppy because I don't see any particular need to remember the first world war, but I do give money to the collectors more often than I give to any other charity can janglers because I don't want to think that I'm refusing the Poppy for reasons of parsimony. The cause is a good one, and they've pried some money from me which would no doubt have gone on drink, and indirectly the entire Poppy gimmick is to thank for it.

I visited the lavatory of a London pub, and while urinating I noticed a machine selling 'novelty condoms', including what looked in the picture like condoms with clown faces on them. I dread to think what sort of man would look at his equipment and think 'It's good but it could do with being funnier'.


Some artists gain fame by their elusive, boundry-breaking genius, some by their obsessive dedication to the detail. Some, however, are just in the right place at the right time. Case in point: Andrea Della Robia, probably the only Old Master whose work I would pay a gallery owner to take out of my house.

Why we should take the police out of policy

In concert with Hamilton's exposure of Metropolitan idiocy and double standards, I find it objectionable that the police will freely propose new and uncomfortable restrictions on our lives every time they decide they don't like an aspect of their job. Crucially, the post-adolescent years between 18 & 21 are (give or take a cheeky annum) most people's bright college days, in which we live in unfortunate and sometimes electric proximity to the permanent residents of provincial towns and villages. It is important to usher as many of us as possible into pubs and clubs on any given evening, where we can do less damage to ourselves and innocent bystanders. And whatever happens, we will get hold of the stuff - without delay or exception. Anyone who swallows the equation NoHooch'Til21 + ThirstyStudents = AppleJuicesAllRound seriously needs their head examined. Peter Fahy, the Cheshire Chief Constable who has suggested the minimum age be raised, has unwittingly requested much more work. As the situation stands, he only has to police the 2% of 18+year-olds who are actually out of control. If and when he gets his way, he will have to police 100% of the 18-21s who like alcohol - and I imagine that's 100% of them.

Newtballs: "Your life is worth more than a chocolate bar." An insight provided by DCI Cliff Lyons of South-east London.

Barring university students from pubs will undoubtedly make them drink more responsibly!

The chief constable of Cheshire has said that parents of teenagers are 'abdicating responsibility for their children.' He goes on to place the blame for Britain's supposed 'binge culture' squarely at the feet of advertisers and the drinks industry. Abdicating responsibility is a terrible thing, isn't it?

An interview with a futurist

Hamilton: "Mr Ernesto Giacometti Dolcelatte, you are the worlds foremost, and indeed only, Futurist Curator. You curate the Academy of Primitive and Archaic Art in Luxembourg. Your unique attitude to the presentation of painting and sculpture has won you few friends in the Art Establishment. Perhaps you could tell us a little..."

(At this point I was interrupted; the impatient Mr Dolcelatte had noticed my nephew's tricycle lying abandoned on the floor, and clambered onto it. With his knees round his ears, and puffing smoke from his cigarette like a small steamship, he was describing frantic circles on the floor. I tackled him off the bike, and hit him sharply across the face. After a tussle, and then a loud debate, we agreed that he could conduct the interview between laps of the room, and every ten minutes he could go into the garden to let off some firecrackers.)

Mr D: "The thing you must understand is that up to this point all art has been too slow. While it may have other points of interest, it is rendered unpalatable to the Futurist sensibility by its stultifying lack of motion. The APAA was constructed to overcome this difficulty."

Hamilton: "And how do you achieve that?"

Mr D: "Well, initially we employed a number of small devices. Early on in the project we discovered that any small statue, for example a Cellini nymph made out of gold and bronze, could be glued to the blades of a blender. When the machine is switched on the piece becomes high speed, kinetic, Futuristic. If only Cellini had worked in a more durable medium, like cast iron or steel, he could have been a noteworthy artist."

Hamilton: "Where did you go from there?"

"Mr D: We soon realised that we would never be able to truly explore the potential of these pieces as long as people insisted on viewing them as objects, rather than high speed events. We held a Titian week, during which we shot a series of his preparatory sketches out of a cannon at a group of Ukrainians, but ticket sales were surprisingly low and budget issues forced us to stop on the fourth day. However, other schemes have been a great success, for example, where else can you see a piece of Native American woodcarving mounted on a trolley and accelerated down a hallway by magnets, or one of Lucas Cranach's early alter pieces swung from a ceiling rafter by a steel cable?"

Mr Ernesto (left) and Colleague (right) work on their controversial new method of introducing the work of Eric Gill to a potential gallery goer.

Hamilton: "Bold and radical stuff indeed! What does the future hold for the APAA?"

Mr D: "Once sufficient funding has been achieved we will convert the entire gallery into a train which travels from Paris to Shanghai in just eight hours. The dining car will serve ozonised steaks and beetroot from the vacuum still. The front of the train will be fashioned like a gigantic fist, and a number of inbuilt whistles will make the train scream unbearably as it moves through the air."

Hamilton: "Thank you Mr Dolcelatte. It has been a pleasure..."

(I spoke in vain! No sooner were his final words out of his mouth than Ernesto Dolcelatte had vaulted lightly out of the window and into the cockpit of an idling autogyro. As he flew away over my house he dropped an aluminium square on which were printed the words 'Due to it's unnecessarily stationary nature, I am about to knock off your chimney pot'.)

Broad Brushstrokes

From the morass of cynical EU laws and directives has surfaced the clause prohibiting the routine vaccination of animals against Foot and Mouth disease. A more pernicious piece of legislation you could not wish for. As Matthew d'Ancona very properly points out in The Spectator, there is no good reason why animals should not receive the vaccination in view of the large number of antibiotics and medicines with which they are already treated. Of course, the explanation is as simple as it is offensive: this flabby, regressive, jealous, grasping body of protectionist bureauworms cannot bear the idea of denting consumer-confidence in European meat; so naturally, they prefer to enforce measures that are potentially (potential that has the potential soon to have been realised twice in 6 years) catastrophic. From where I'm standing, Euroskepticism has never looked so appealing.

=Dogtooth spent most of the weekend visiting the National Gallery. Far from gaining a new appreciation, I left in something of a hot mood, feeling angry and disappointed with many of the painters who, up until this point, I have revered. It is clear to me now that, in all respects, the late Nineteenth Century was an inferior forty years. For Courbet, Manet, Degas and Cezanne, I have unshakeable admiration. By advancing the cause of portraiture they bore the only worthwhile fruit of that twoscore years. Portraiture: bold and infinitely fascinating! And how feeble and self-indulgent appear the so-called 'experimentations' of Monet's Poplars or Seurat's bloody dots in the shadow of a magnificent Ingres, a Delacroix, a Gericault or a Velazquez. Even Constable's landscapes knock the Impressionist efforts into a gaping macaroon. Go back another few centuries, and you have the likes of Titian, Lippi, Raphael, Masaccio and Caravaggio to contend with - painters who actually strove to represent human bodies and engender action, atmospere and interest, as opposed to few wispy forms shimmering ineffectually among some blurred trees. Who did Monet think he was, sitting in his boat? Claude (-Oscar?) Monet! The macaroon gapes for thee, thrice wider than for other men!

2012: The Year of the Elephant in the Room

I started watching boxing after Lennox Lewis beat Evander Holyfield in the second fight of 1999. What this means is that in my viewing lifetime there has never been a heavyweight fighter of any charisma or talent. Our current undisputed heavyweight champion is the uninspiring Ruslan Chagaev, who gained the title by fighting the walking freakshow Valuev, a seven foot Russian slugger styled 'The Beast from the East'. Over in England we have had the occasionally talented but soulless Danny Williams, the former kickboxer Matt Skelton, and the supremely unlovable and arrogant Audley 'Fraudley' Harrison. Any of these dubious characters could easily knock out one of the talented and exciting fighters to be found in the light and middle weight classes at the same time, but they could never hope to acheive the same level of respect or popularity.

What this means is that the pleasure derived from sport is not dependent, as is sometimes claimed, on the sportsmen being the best in the world at their endevour, but rather on more intangible qualities like elegance and heart. There is no reason therefore why the Paralympics should not be taken as seriously as the Olympics. That being said, there is something deeply unsatisfying about the Paralympics. Mostly it is the rather worrying ethic which seems to pervade the games that it is not about the winning, but about the taking part. Nobody ever boos the opposing amputees, and if Britain's wheelchair rugby team fail in disgrace at the next games we can be sure that there won't be any angry tabloid articles berating them. The overwhelming feeling of the Paralympics is 'aren't they doing well'. I won't take the games seriously until contestants start taking performance enhancing drugs.

There's no news like a lack of news

A long car journey today gave me ample opportunity to savour Radio Four's dreaded hour and a half of news headlines (between 5 and 6.30 if you want to enjoy it yourself. It's almost a pleasure when the Archers comes on) and I was amazed by the amount of non-news on the Foot and Mouth incident. It strikes me that news outlets assign the number of minutes each story gets according to importance, rather than how much there is to say. I accept that another outbreak of Foot and Mouth would be a dreadful and significant event, but I don't see why I need to hear constant speculation and reminders that the situation has not changed in any significant way since yesterday. When there is news, tell me it, until then let's hear about something else. It's a bit like the compulsory ten minutes of time allocated every evening for over a week to telling us that areas of the UK affected by flooding have been damaged just as badly as everyone thought they would be, but no worse.

Dogtooth's recent mockery of Green envirobeefery bought to mind a new training regime which I have myself adopted. I get on a treadmill and rack it up to a goodly pace, and then fix my eyes on the calorie counter. A medium sized egg is 80 calories, so I run until I feel tired, and then see how many eggs worth of calories I have burned. I then go home and consume that many eggs. I sort of think that moving the calories through my system, rather than letting them hang around in my subcutaneous expanses, has the effect of flushing out unhealthiness, or something of that sort. At the very least it allows me to eat a lot more eggs than I otherwise would.

Meditation on Thais

Thaksin Shinawatra has bought Manchester City FC. This is just bizarre. Thaksin, lately the Prime Minister of Thailand, was deposed in his absence after a military coup in september of last year. Since then he has been living in London. In 2004 he laughably attempted to buy Liverpool FC. Presumably he tasted the delicious prospect of owning his own club then and has never looked back. Hmmm. Football and coups d'Etat? This is really the London Prodigal's territory. Although Dogtooth was in Bangkok when the tanks rolled in and was compelled to keep tabs on the whole affair. How strange that I should have witnessed the ousting of Thai statesman, yet I have never watched a Manchester City match.

Where's the beef?

There's no idiot like a pedantic idiot. Research done by Chris Goodall, Green candidate for Oxford West, endeavours - by way of a quite breathtaking departure from reason - to show that driving to the shops is four times greener than walking the same distance. Greater idiocy hath no rationalisation than the empirical evidence offered to support this claim: that a brisk walk to the shops will result in the sudden and uncontrollable urge to devour 100g of, say, beef, the production and delivery of which leaves a hefty carbon footprint in its wake. No doubt Hamilton's trusty abacus could provide us with some reliable stats and figures, but I imagine that a national aggregate of two to three main meals is eaten daily, discounting intervals of snacking. Appetites tend to be large or small, and rarely fluctuate. Clearly a 7km treadmill session would put the wind up the conscientious calorie-counter, but I have never known anyone to return from the 400 yard hike to the post office gasping for 100g of minced beef to quell their raging metabolism. That a significant number of Europeans expand quite markedly in their middle years is proof that we are overeating/underexercising anyway, and that the amount of food we need has little bearing on the amount we eat. Goodall's statistics may apply to a hyena abroad on the African plains, eating according to its requirements; but since the dawn of what might broadly be called civilisation, they have not been applicable to our lot.

This just in: Dogtooth popped out to the shops earlier to pick up some basic groceries. When I returned I drank a chaste glass of orange juice. I breakfasted modestly this morning; notwithstanding, the impulse to gorge 100g of beef is not overwhelming. I will hang on until supper-time.

My Day Job

I recently had a long meeting with my Literary Agent, who also manages my PR and acts as proxy in a number of prolonged legal disputes I seem to have got entangled in, and we agreed that with the Harry Potter phenomenon finished this was a good time to step into the breach and introduce a new generation of children to the wonder of the written word. Because of the recent success of The Dangerous Book for Boys we agreed it should be an old fashioned yarn of derring-do etc. in the mold of Conan Doyle and John Buchan, and luckily for you people it will be serialised for free upon this very blog. Gather the children around then, as I give you the first instalment of:

Sir Arthur and the Mystery of the Cordwainer's Toe
"Silence is the condemned man's only prerogative" said Lord Entwistle, pushing the decanter across the table toward me, "but perhaps you'd care to tell us what became of the Brigadier, and the aeronautical device of the Philadelphia Jesuits?"
"With pleasure" I said, selecting a cigar from a proffered box, "It all began last January, on a bitterly cold afternoon. Like any sensible fellow I was seated before a roaring fire with a monograph of Chaldean adverbs, the last of my uncle Nungent's '66 Taylor's, and a large sixpenny whore. I was disturbed from my comfortable reveries by a hoarse salutation, and from the thick London peasouper which swirled round the far end of my study stepped a curious figure. His bearing and demeanour were undoubtedly that of a naval man, but he was dressed in the clothes of an off duty magician, or the proprietor of a second rate dog training school. He sported a large ginger moustache, of the sort which might be worn by an army chaplain recently defrocked for unnatural sexual practices,and on his cheek were tattooed a number of cryptic symbols.
'Sir Arthur' he cried, 'I come to you under the orders of the foreign office. I am told that you are a daring fellow, who would gladly put his unique talents to the defense of the empire overseas'.
'Why' I replied, 'I am a man of no particular talents. I am considered, I admit, the finest blow pipe marksman in Europe, , and a world expert in Persian dietary habits, and I'm anyone's match at Hungarian kick-boxing, but other than that my interests are somewhat obscure. However I will gladly put my few poor abilities at the disposal of my country.'
'How would you feel' he asked 'about undertaking an exceedingly dangerous mission to Constantinople?'
'Dash it' I cried, 'it sounds just the caper I've been looking for! Pull up a whore and tell me all about it.'
The visitor sat down and produced a Mussulman water pipe. For a period he was silent as he carefully filled and lit it. Eventually he looked up, his head wreathed in fragrant smoke.
'What do you know' he asked 'of the nation of Russia?'
'As I recall it was a small province of the Rhine Palatinate, which briefly attained the status of an autonomous Lutheran republic during the Thirty Years war, before being claimed as a crown possession of the Austro-Hungarian empire'
'So we have long believed. However it now appears that this was a misapprehension caused, through circumstances too Byzantine to enter into, by the idiosyncrasies of an eighteenth century archivist in the department of records, by the name of Paisley. Russia is in fact a huge and powerful nation, ruled by the Romanov dynasty and profession the Orthodox faith, situated to the far east of Europe. Its climate is extreme and its main export is timber. Its embassy is situated on the Strand, between the Royal Anthropological Society and the Pickwick Hotel.'
'Good God!' I cried. 'I always thought that building was some kind of dry goods emporium.'
'That' said my visitor darkly 'is closer to the truth than you realise.'"
"Confound it!" ejaculated Lord Entwistle passionately, "This web of intrigue is so deep and mysterious it seems that it might go on forever."
"Yes" I replied, allowing, I must admit, a wry smile to play on my lips, "it seems that it might."

Saturn Devouring His Pension Plan

One of Dogtooth's recent posts raised the topic of art and value. He suggests that a copy of Sunflowers should be valued according to its similarity to the original. Not so. I can receive all the artistic value of Hamlet from a paperback copy (let's assume there has been no textual jiggery-pokery) but that does not mean that the manuscript for Hamlet would not be worth far more money. When I buy, for example, one of Goya's black paintings (see above), I am not only paying for the artistic value but also for a unique artifact. Of course as an impoverished sea creature I might think that rarity value a ridiculous extravagance, but I bet I'd change my mind if fifty million came rolling through the door.

The Treason of Metaphors

What I want to say concerns an article (predominantly the second half, or last seven paragraphs) by Brendan O'Neill, SpikedOnline's illustrious editor. The article is a slightly flat and uninspiring variation on an original theme: the erosion of civil liberties. It's quite good stuff, if a little jaded; but notice O'Neill's rhetoric getting the better of him towards the end:

...a bill of rights that was based on a fear of out-of-control politicians and a suspicion of the celebrity-obsessed public would run the risk of turning freedom into stone, ossifying it, making it a museum piece that can be admired by lawyers and professional civil libertarians but which remains beyond the reach of the smoking, drinking, junk food-eating man in the street.

I don't see this. How would a written catalogue of civil rights have less application to the 'man on the street' than lawyers and academics? How would its application be more complicated than the Law, which has no trouble treating its subjects impartially? O'Neill has fallen victim to the felicitous metaphor. He has happened upon an analogy so fruitful that he cannot bear to part with it. The focus of his piece (a written bill of rights) is now dictated by the logic of the metaphor (an artefact on a high shelf behind thick-plated glass in a museum). Never mind that these two things are not analogous: rhetorical logic is irresistible, even to the orator.

The Treason of Images

Dogtooth is not usually known to equivocate, but in the case of Robert Thwaites I find myself once again navigating a tight passage between liberty and practicality. The value of authenticity has never diminished - much to the consternation of Roland Barthes, who would argue, probably quite sensibly, that a flawless forgery of van Gogh's 'Sunflowers' should fetch the price of the original. Or alternatively - as our economics would have it - the price of the original should fall to the aggregate of the collected fakes. In essence, Thwaites's crime was only to take advantage of the absurdly inflated value of original works of fine art. His forgeries received high praise from everyone up to and including his sentencing judge, not to mention that the paintings were of such a quality to dupe the art experts who purchased them. Honesty in one's dealing should of course be encouraged, and serious fraud exposed and punished. But as a country that hands out serious prison terms to forgers, we should reflect soberly on the how selling high-quality paintings under the name of a past-master (these were not copies of originals, but original works in the style of John Fitzgerald, a 19th century dreamscape artist) came to be a criminal offence.

Giblets to stuff the turkey of inactivity

According to Madeleine Bunting, who frequently leaps fully-clothed into freezing lakes, "we need that attentiveness to nature to understand our humanity, and of how we fit, as just one species, into a vast reach of time and space."
People really should think before they commit this sort of thing to paper.

In Memoriam

I was going to impose Ingmar Bergman's face over the knight, but I'm looking for a job and I don't really have time. To be quite honest the biggest shock about Bergman's death for me was the fact that he was still alive. Ho hum.

Tangentially, one of the most mysterious disappearances that I have ever experienced was a rented copy of Wild Strawberries which removed itself from a video player and disappeared altogether when I left the room for fifteen minutes for a cup of tea and a chicken tikka pasty.

Attempted fun with maths:

Last night I was watching Mock the Week, which I fully accept is unforgivable, and one of the news stories mentioned was a claim by police that one in twenty drinks in nightclubs is spiked. Eagerly I dusted down my calculator and got tapping. Assuming that all drink-spiking victims are women, and that everybody drinks two drinks each on average, that means one in five women drinks a spiked drink every night. Good work sturdy women of Britain, who seem to be largely able to consume spiked drinks and go home unmolested!
Also, in a nightclub which sees five hundred patrons a night there will be a thousand drinks, of which fifty will be spiked. Assuming that the prolific drink-spikers manage five Micky Finns a night each, that means that one night club patron in a fifty makes a concerted effort to drug someone else. Factor in the likelihood that most of these spikers are men and the figures become more mind boggling still.
Imagine my disappointment when a trawl of Google failed to turn up said report.

Even so, it is very hard to credit the idea that drug rape is remotely as common as it is perceived to be, though no doubt it is deeply horrible when it does occur. Only 2 percent of women who claim to have been molested with the aid of drugs showed any traces of narcotics in their systems other than alcohol or recreational drugs. Although I am not arguing for the matter to be ignored entirely, it does seem odd that a person of sinister intent would run the risk of introducing an illegal knock-out drop into somone's drink rather than just wait for someone else to suffer the inevitable effects of voluntery overindulgence.

The Death of the Novel

I am reading The Da Vinci Code. Who breaks a butterfly upon a wheel? as Lord Rees-Mogg queried, and Pope before him. Nevertheless, here is a little list of things that have irritated me already:

1) In spite a 500 year tradition of referring to the peerless Renaissance trailblazer as Leonardo, Dan Brown has now decided that we ought to be calling him 'Da Vinci'. This is quite simply monstrous.

2) The use, or possible conception, of the verb to serpentine. This usage is sufficiently disgraceful, and although I am, in theory, in favour of the organic advancement of the English tongue, I feel Brown is perhaps not the person to whom to entrust this delicate task.

3) Bad grammar (split infinitives, etc); awkward syntax that trips over its own untied clauses; a prose style that would make McGonagall blush; gratuitous use of italics for effect and suspense; a cheap, faux-Hollywood turn of phrase that should never be found outside a 12 year-old's creative writing assignment; and, finally - though doubtless more complaints will arise as I progress (if progress it be) - a bollock-gnawing propensity to patronise his readership by feeding us very basic points of information e.g. that his protagonist will be able to seek refuge at the US embassy because, apparently, it is not within the jurisdiction of the French police.

What I did on my holidays: an incident in the high Himalayas

Making my way through India's frozen north I arrive at length in the backpacker's paradise of Manali. On the drive up from the bus station I notice that several of the eateries spread along the winding mountain path have 'trout fish' advertised on handpainted signs outside. 'A pan fried trout, drawn freshly from the glacial streams, is just what I fancy after the grindingly relentless diet of dal, paratha and momo, enlivened only with the occasional gnasher crumbling piece of grit, which I have enjoyed up till now' I thought to myself. That very evening I dressed in my finest threads and sauntered down to the nearest cafe.
'Trout please' I say to the smiling waiter. He disappears, only to re-emerge with what apears to to be a large piece of hashish, which he places on the table in front of me.
'No, no, I want trout.'
He gestures to the narcotics.
'Ne, ne. Charas ne. Trout hai. Trout fish.'
He must be simple, for he cannot understand my flawless hindi. He just pushes the drugs a little closer to me.
'Trout. Trout. In pani hai. Ribe da. Ribe.' I realise I have lapsed into bastardised pan-slavic. I have little option but to leave fishless and forlorn. I have similar experiences at all the subsequent eating places. Perhaps 'trout' is some sort of code word. It looks like it's dal for supper again.

...But everybody hates the Jews

The following message is directed specifically at anyone who has ever speculated about the root cause of Hitler's anti-Semitism: DON'T! I've heard ludicrosities spanning the whole breadth of human insanity, from rumours about Hitler's own Jewish origins to half-baked anecdotes about bad childhood experiences with Jews. Like many others in Weimar Germany, Hitler had scrappy notions of Jewish Communism as the cause of Germany's political impotence, layered with Romantic notions of an Aryan Germany. You might as well suggest that Ken Livingstone's political affiliations can be explained by his having been daily cuffed around the head as a boy with a hardback copy of The Road to Serfdom.

A modern Ahab

This is beyond parody. I like to imagine the sainted Rudy standing above a small ferret and shaking his fist at it...

A flight of fancy brought about by lack of sleep...

The time has come to confront the elephant in the room: In two weeks time smoking will be banned in England. The effect this will have on The Muted Slughorn – the labyrinthine boozer frequented by Dogtooth, myself, and on occasions even the Newt, or at least one of its creatures – remains to be seen. There have been rumblings about a euphemistically named ‘contingency plan’. Rumour abounds – only a couple of days ago a lean Swedish trawlerman seated in the saloon bar told me of a planned secession, which would leave the Slughorn beyond the law of any government in the world. Other less dramatic speculation suggests that a loophole has already been introduced, lending credence to the stories of a tunnel from the beer cellars emerging in a deserted office in Whitehall. Perhaps most alarming of all are the hushed mentions of a ‘patio garden’. What kind of garden the Slughorn might have does not bear thinking about…
The pros and cons of the smoking ban have been dealt with at length, and I’m not going to rehash them, but instead I want to draw attention to the aesthetic ramifications. No more Watteauesque taprooms, no more seeing Turner’s House of Lords, and its elemental interaction between smoke and water, recreated in a smoky gents. No more forgiving veil of blue smog to mask those of yellow tooth and grainy skin. The future will be hard and bright and uncompromising, and if that doesn’t make you feel like a cigarette I don’t know what will.

P.S. - I found this rather amusing.

Are you drinking what we're drinking?

Aside from the obviousness of having a European - or preferably pan-national - system of unitary measurement for alcohol, the undercurrent suggestion that it is safer to drink a pint in Denmark than in England, though only parodic of the government line, is still uncomfortably close to the legislative rationale of this flagging Labour front-bench. Does anyone else wish it were Blair's entire cabinet who were about to resign rather than the PM himself?

An adventure on the stairwell:

I share a hallway with two other people. One of them is a young man with a taste for UK hip-hop and narcotics, the other a woman of advancing years who must surely be wondering by now what went wrong with her life. I recently received an email telling me that our landlord had 'received complaints about the smoke which has been emanating from one of your rooms. I've been told that it smells of drugs and not tobacco. Probably cannabis.' Avoiding for a moment the rather delicious appended non-sentence (presumably designed to address the likelihood of said drug being marijuana while not discounting the possibility of it being crystal meth or opium) we must ask ourselves why such a complaint would be made. At first it seems obvious that were your neighbour using drugs then 'something should be done'. However it is very hard to find a rational motive for actually objecting to the practice. I can sympathise with the complainer insofar as the pungent odours of cannabis smoke are not pleasant, but to be exposed to said fumes for any length of time would require that the person lingered in the corridor for far longer than can be considered seemly.

The sanity of a person is inversely correlated to the number of films they watch between 4 am and 1 pm.

I am currently rather taken by the idea that a 'warning label' on alcoholic drinks would stop people getting drunk. I recently quaffed what I thought was a large glass bottle of very expensive apple juice: judge of my surprise when a closer examination of the packaging showed it to have been a litre of Calvados. I remember my last thoughts as I reeled drunkenly to bed - 'if only the government would force the producers of these deceptive liquors to put some sort of warning on the bottle'. I suppose that a pint of beer will come with a verbal disclaimer from the barman.

Illegal penises

A senior judge has been cleared of charges of exposure after allegedly flashing a woman on a train. The maximum penalty for exposure is a two-year jail sentence. In terms of rational and proportionate responses to perceived crimes, I think, in this case, convulsive mirth on the part of the general public would be about right. The law is an arse. Over and out.

It's funny how quickly 'Big Brother Racism Row' has become a cliche...

Our UK readers who have not been lucky enough to avoid series seven of the moronic reality show Big Brother (I don't even have a television, yet here I am blogging about it at six thirty in the morning) will know that one of the contestants has been thrown off for her reckless use of the word 'nigger'. From what I can tell from the transcripts, the nigger in question reacted to the word rather competently, with a cool admonishment. I'm not going to get into the complex issues surrounding whether the word 'nigger', parroted as it was from hip-hop culture and rap lyrics rather than directed as a racial slur, warrants an eviction. All I would say is that the Newt's official stance is that fact we support free speech as a legal right does not mean we think media outlets should be forced to direct whatever slurry some lone idiot on the payroll might spout at the public. However, what does alarm are the calls for BB to be stopped altogether. I don't like the idea that the British Public have become to racist to broadcast.

More fun with maths:

In popular automotive television show Top Gear the presenters suggested that road works take longer than necessary because of the malign influence of that popular scapegoat 'health and safety': to demonstrate this they resurfaced a road in twenty four hours, rather than the week which the council would have needed. Very impressive! Except for the fact that in order to do this they needed to hire 32 employees rather than the usual 14, and they worked for the full 24 hours. Assuming that most workmen put in a five day, eight hour a day week. Therefore the 'inefficient' council could have got the job done in 560 man hours, rather than the 768 hours the Clarkson lead construction team needed.

Blake really can't draw - or write poetry...Why do we study him again?

The "human form" - Sir Isaac Newton (curiously naked) by William Blake.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------

'The Blossom', by William Blake:

Merry, Merry Sparrow!
Under leaves so green
A happy Blossom
Sees you swift as arrow
Seek your cradle narrow
Near my Bosom.

Pretty, Pretty Robin!
Under leaves so green
A happy Blossom
Hears you sobbing, sobbing,
Pretty, Pretty Robin,
Near my Bosom.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

So Farewell Then Little Boy Poisoned by Religion and Old Hags,

not by William Blake

-

O little boy lost, what will you do

If I sit here all day shedding tears over you?

Will you run to the priest and be sermonised to death?

Will you run to the harlot who, for all I know, might not be permanently miserable and steeped in sin all of the time...

O! O! O! dark...wrath...fear...illicit sex...clergymen...chimneys...O O O!

The London Prodigal Exposed

Wembley

After an evening of shenanigans with The London Prodical which involved sex, drugs and rooftops, Silver Dollar Jim got a personal view of the new Wembley to see that most eagerly anticipated football match. The final... between Conference rivals Exeter and Morkham. The day was doomed from the start. I was supporting Exeter as they were the only team who's name I managed to remember. I gave the friendly beverage seller a genuine asthma attack with the cigarette I was innocently holding in my left hand. Exeter lost and the Morkham manager fell over multiple times when he ran onto the pitch after the final whistle. This lower league stuff is so undignified, at least in the premiership the hooligans managing the clubs are living in Kensington & Chelsea.

Baby guitars

Following from Dogtooth's statement of fondness for Roy Smeck I must express my own growing fascination with the George Formby school of seduction.

1 - Most importantly, always carry a small stringed instrument.

2 - When invited to give a performance (or even if not) ignore anyone else in the room, and direct your song at the most attractive woman you can see.

3 - Work in as many smutty double entredres as possible, but diffuse any sleaze-factor with a charmingly boyish smile.

4 - Give a high pitched laugh at any moments you consider particularly funny.

5- Try and have your performence cut short by some pompous male authority figure.

Personally however, if I had to pick the most dashing comic singer I'd have to go for Jake Thackray.

On an unrelated note: do we think that The London Prodigal has anything to do with this?

The Hair of a Madman...

A chemical study of Beethoven's hair suggests that his infamously stormy temperament was the result of lead poisoning. A slightly more complex way of saying - he had mental hair. Good old Ludvig Van: he could have kicked Mozart's arse any day.

The virgin story.

I viewed part of a documentary on the channel 4 tonight about a man in his late twenties who is still a virgin and has had no sexual contact with the female specimen. He apparently had "intimacy issues", these issues only became apparent when the Dutch Sex Therapist that he was forced to "go all the way with" was an elderly woman. Is gerontophilic pornography really what we should expect from a Brown government? At least under Blair c5 had good softcore straight to tv movies on after 12.

The best fitness routine.

The "Arctic" "Monkeys"

The Post-Newt seems to have become a vehicle for stock manipulation, so in an attempt to steer the conversation elsewhere, I'm going to talk vaguely and uselessly about something I noticed in the news. Gordon Brown did it in his speech at the Labour Party Conference, and - probably in direct reference to that speech - Tim Hames did it in the Times this morning. These are, in fairness, the only two examples I have, but there are surely others. It has become a very robust political half-volley to gesture publicly to the Arctic Monkeys. It is usually politicians or journalists who have given up trying to remain in touch, and have started making sport of their advancing years - playing the loveable grandparent card. The idea is that "Arctic Monkeys" is the newest metonym for pop music. Making the occasional ignorant and casual reference to the group is a clever way of trivialising popular culture and making one's own business (politics, journalism, etc) seem more important. But why the Monkeys? Why not "KT" Tunstall, Amy "Winehouse" or "Kings of Leon"? Personally, I think people just find the name "Arctic Monkeys" funny - I think it tickles the childish sense of humour. I imagine Gordon Brown chuckling on his sofa at mention of the band.

Financial Sector

Buy Easyjet shares, they're undervalued.

Disclaimer: This suggestion is provided on an as is basis and postnewt are not responsible people and have no moral compass. Easyjet may not even exist. This is not endorsed by the Coca-Cola company or any of its affiliates or sponsers.

Racist Maths

A long silence from my underwater lair. The Muted Slughorn recently declared an amnesty on stolen bar furniture and I've been having a recurring dream in which I have to escape from a lunatic asylum by extreme violence and guile.
The student publication of the place of Higher Education where I work occasionally as a test tube cleaner and find a ready market for smuggled curios and exotic 'male enhancers' recently published a headline decrying the racism within the institution. After a lifetime of casual discrimination directed at me by various small minded chordates I am sensitive to this issue, and at first the statement that 30 percent of foreign students had experienced racism seemed worrying. However, closer examination of the statistics soon reassured me. Given that one is either prone to racism or one is not (very few liberals can identify a single point of their life when they abandoned previous beliefs and shouted 'rag head curry muncher' or another such crude slur at a startled shopkeeper, and then returned to their previous tolerance) we can assume that for a given number of people who have experienced racism there are about at most a quarter as many people perpetrating racism. I can't claim maths is a strong point, but given that around seven percent of the university students are from overseas, and only thirty percent of that number have experienced racism, and assuming that on average every racist student has sinned an average of four times, only 0.525 percent of the students could be considered racist. A closer examination of the argument suggests that even this tiny percentage of students is an over estimation - staff of the university are included as well.
We seem to be doing a racism theme today, so here are two more pieces of idiocy:
Anti-Racist Maths - whoever came up with this idea clearly suffered from the delusional and in itself rather racist belief that our mathematical system was developed in Europe, which would explain why we still use roman numerals in our calculations and have no concept of zero...
Positive Hip Hop - I have never seen an article encouraging indie or rock musicians to take responsibility for the education of their listeners. This seems to me the latest in a long line of movements, headed by people of all races, which see black culture as a work in progress, in need of outside guidance.

I can't seem to work the links today, but here are the three relevent ones - perhaps a benevolent fellow newtists could sort this out for me -
http://www.nouse.co.uk/2007/05/08/are-we-a-racist-university/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-racist_mathematics
http://www.boston.com/ae/music/articles/2006/01/30/aiming_for_an_alternative_hip_hop/?page=2

James Gordon Madonna Testes Yoda Clinton Brown door Reginald PerrinBrown

While leisurely spending my work day browsing wikipedia I stumbled upon the true name of the chancellor. See here

Update: The article has been retracted. Come back later for saucy photos of gordon brown and chirac.

Three of them, and Alleline

In spite of my not inconsiderable statephobic paranoia, the idea of the Service working undisturbed has always appealed. They clearly serve our best interests - let us hope this is not the end for MI discretion.

Sweet Charity

I have a theory about charitable donation. Hamilton and I were into the 74th hour of our bi-monthly draughts rubber at the Muted Slughorn. Me to play. But first, the important business of drenching my whistle. My round. No-one behind the bar, so I helped myself to vintage bottle of elderflower wine, noticing, in the process, a donation box sitting accusingly by the pulls. 'Please give generously in support of Dapple, an elderly shire-horse who was being bullied by other horses, and had to be removed from the field and provided for separately.' What an endearing cause, I thought, and was on the verge of popping a ripe trio of shiny doubloons into the tub, when I realised my error. Of course I was willing to give to such an appealing cause, just as I would willingly give to the RNLI, or the RSPCA. Such charities are the most rewarding by far, since you can go on featherbedding the ol' conscience without having to accept the existence of real problems in the world: Global warming, children in need, famine in sub-Saharan Africa. The Donkey Sanctuaries of this world provide an invaluable service: they offer a comfortable domestic problem about which no-one is too fussed. Giving money to Oxfam or the NSPCC, for example, forces us to recognise the afootness of very serious societal, economic and political malaises - the sort of which it is preferable to remain ignorant.

Once, during Prohibition, I was forced to live for days on nothing but food and water.

Alcohol related lobby groups such as Alcohol Concern, seems to have garnered quite a lot of media coverage recently. Consider the following:

Call to stop children's drinking and Call to raise drinking age to 21

The first is utterly unenforceable and the second is abhorrent. Rather than copying the highly regulatory approach favoured by MADD, I - along with many others - have always been in favour of the more sophisticated approach to alcohol demonstrated by our neighbours across the channel. So what would be the sole result of the proposed laws? They'd successfully fill the middle classes with angst as they wondered whether they'd be shopped for offering little Penelope a sip of wine or letting Rufus indulge in a glass of West Country cider to accompany his Sunday roast. Come to think of it middle-class consternation - tremendous.

William McGonagall - the 'worst poet in british history'

Beautiful Railway Bridge of the Silv'ry Tay!

Alas! I am very sorry to say

That ninety lives have been taken away

On the last Sabbath day of 1879,

Which will be remember'd for a very long time.

See more here

Fear, loathing and immeasurable satisfaction

Wild horses couldn't drag me away from this one: watch Hunter S. Thompson interview (after a fashion) Keith Richards.

Hardly knew thee? I never knew thee!

3287.6 people die every day in road accidents across the world. 174 people die of flu-related illness daily in the States alone. Between 1988 and 2000, 47 Oklahomans were hospitalised as a result of lawnmower-related burns; 5 ultimately perished. Now ask me why I'm not praying for the souls of the Virginia Tech. victims...no, true, because I don't believe in god - but also because they are no dearer to me than any of the figures cited above. That they happened to bite the dust at the same time in the same place does not make their death any more of a tragedy, or any less of a statistic. There hasn't been a gun massacre of these proportions in the US since 1999. The shooter was mentally unstable; but perfectly sane people veer into oncoming traffic every day of the week. Why is it that the more unusual and outstanding killings attract the most concern? I'm concerned about the quotidienne killers! the blights that are here to stay; not these trickster-reapers that pop up unexpectedly at irregular intervals and playfully drag a few unfortunates down the Styx. If campus-blanket-gun-massacre victims continue to meet their maker at a rate of 32 every 8 years, I think I can live with that, don't you?

Update: Good measured material, once again, from our friends at Spiked.

Has Hamilton the drive to be a sporting hero?

It's the question all the papers are asking.

Nappy Headed?

Predictably the liberal e-zine Spiked, of which Dogtooth is much enamoured, has taken a strong editorial line in the Don Imus affair, and initially I sided with them, being fairly keen on free speech myself (other startling facts about me: I don't like being hit on the head and I don't endorse murder) but I'm starting to have my doubts. If some form of government legislation had forced CBS to fire Imus then I would have been dead against it, but no coercion was involved. CBS fired Imus because they judged him to be, despite his large audience, to be more of a problem than an asset. Do we think that a private company should be forced to suffer financially just to defend an elderly racist's right to free speech? Just because we are glad to live in countries which allow freedom of media does not mean our media should gratuitously offend. Do I think that I should be allowed to draw Mohammad? Yes. Do I plan to do so? No. I feel no compulsion to risk my safety to exercise a theoretical right.

Breakfast of Champions:

So farewell then Kurt Vonnegut.

Hamilton gets distracted...

I was originally going to complain about something or other, but I saw this instead.

Also, here is Mme. Moitessier by Ingres. I think it is a very good painting.

Post-Newt Winter '07: A Retrospective

Dogtooth's soul is nervously sipping a long dark cup of tea, and he is left feeling profoundly unoriginal this afternoon. Here are some of the more brilliant examples of our journalism from the last few months.

• How It All Began
• Anadin Extra
• Hamilton Craves an Iron Liver
• Dogtooth is a Tree-hugging Pinko
• Hamilton's Rip-snorting Melville Pastiche
• Dogtooth's Early-afternoon Routine (inc. Flaubert/Zombies)
• The London Prodigal's Lovecraftian Laundry Nightmare

Sentimental claptrap pertaining to legitimised violence:

Appy polly logies for the long absence. I had pressing undersea business to attend to. It looks like I'm holding the fort here at Newt Towers - The London Prodigal is off net, and Dogtooth is in Wales, where the enlightening force of the blogosphere has yet to reach.
Speaking of Wales, I have just watched Joe Calzaghe beat Peter Manfredo in Cardiff. The event was a poignant one. Manfredo was a former contestant on Sly Stallone's boxing reality show The Contender: a product of television as much as of any boxing gym. He described himself before the match as 'the real Rocky', and believed he could win by sheer 'cojones'. Naturally he got taken apart. Manfredo is brash and young, aggressive in the ring and outside it. Calzaghe is camera shy, dignified, his face always tinged with a Latino Celtic melancholy even in victory, and for much of his career inexplicably obscure and unpopular. Manfredo catapulted to fame in a few weeks, while Calzaghe had to put in years at the top of his sport before getting any attention at all.
I watched the American Dream being taken apart: Calzaghe has a tight, cold style and Manfredo barely laid a finger on him. What surprised me was that I wasn't entirely happy about it. When Manfredo came out of the ring in the third round he must have known he was already lost, soon he was up against the ropes and offering no resistance as Calzaghe pummelled him round the head. The referee stopped the match, not because Manfredo showed signs of any serious hurt, but because he was so soundly outclassed. Many, including Frank Warren, feel that the match ended prematurely, but this in itself seems a suitably unromantic, tired, European ending for an American dreamer. Calzaghe has now won twenty fights as a WBO super-middleweight champion, making him the longest reigning title holder around, Manfredo will be heading home physically unharmed, but with his fairytale cut coldly short, after a fight he could never have hoped to have won. It is probably worth remembering that before Rocky there was On The Waterfront, and as Calzaghe said before the fight 'he's the contender, I'm the champion'.

Wife Beater Triacontaology

The Wife Beater Epic.
While our serial polygimist hero beats his wives sinister forces are moving in the galaxy.

The hero is a devout catho-marriagist- a bizarre religion based on the idea that there is no god, there is only marriage.

His almost insatiable lust drives him to marry repeatedly. There is no deeper reason for beating his wives, he just does.

These films will need enormous amounts of disposable finance and if any readers know of financiers will they please get in touch.

March of the Idiots

I was just watching the News at Ten, and a report on global warming suggested that 2007 was predicted to be 'the hottest year in the history of the world' - Hamilton keeps an open mind about anthropogenic global warming, and certainly distrusts the Bush/Clarkson school of head-in-the-sanding, but he suspects that whoever wrote the report didn't have a clue what he was talking about.

Jargonising

Question Time last night was a cringe-and-wince affair. Dimbleby was in playful mood, as was the former primate, Lord Carey, though his treatment of casino-building as a 'moral question' scores him no points with the Newt. Nigel Farage rather delightfully suggested a Tory/Labour merger, but as ever it was the odious Blears who really ruffled my trousers with here flight-attendant-intonations and vaginal-deodorant viewpoint. Here are a few of my most-hated potboilers from the current political rostrum:

'Walk-on-by society' - a favourite of David Cameron. It's just trite.

'All walks of life' - a patronising euphemism for 'different careers, some of which (we are loath to admit) might be more productive and remunerative than others'.

'A range of different faiths and cultures' - The Newt has no real sympathy with either Faith or Culture, but is willing to tolerate any harmless entity. Dogtooth is not opposing diversity - it's just a disgusting phrase that makes me want to tear out my tongue and staple it to my ear.

'Apologist' - this has suffered recently from very lazy usage (it's been a bad year for -isms). An apologist for slavery is someone who defends and upholds slavery. I don't think that's quite what Ms Blears meant...