If you aren't interested in Lamarckian evoloution you probably shouldn't bother reading this post

Dogtooth and I were in the taproom of the Cid and Aleph (a soulless chain pub we had been forced into by contingency) and the conversation was flagging. Suddenly Dogtooth seized one of my stray tentacles and tugged urgently upon it.
'Look' he hissed, 'isn't that disgraced Lamarckian biologist Paul Kammerer?'
'I don't see how it can be' I muttered, but he was already up and walking over. I followed a little way behind.
'You're Kammerer aren't you?' he said.
'I don't know this Kammerer you are talking about' said the accused party in a thick Viennese accent. I was ready to retreat at the sturdy rebuff, but Dogtooth pressed on, revealing a previously unsuspected streak of steel in his character.
'Yes you are, you fraudulent rascal. What happened, I thought you killed yourself?' The man sagged visibly in his seat.
'It's true. I am he. When my fraud was discovered I felt I had no choice but to shoot myself in the head with a pistol. There, according to scientific orthodoxy, it should have ended. However, a few days later I woke up with a cracking headache in a small wooden box. As I lay there in my coffin my mind worked furiously, and I remembered that my father had once been shot in the head in a hunting accident, but had survived thanks to receiving excellent medical attention. Clearly he had acquired an ability to survive shots to the head, and passes it on to me. I cried out loudly, and the strength of lung which my mother had acquired while shouting at passing traffic stood me in good stead. A wandering onion seller heard my cries, and dug me up. I escaped from an Austria in turmoil, and settled in South London. I have lived in secret until this moment.'
'You say you acquired a resistance to being shot in the head?' I asked. 'By what mechanism?'
He didn't seem to have any answer to this, and we were in the verge of walking away in disgust, when who should walk in but Karl Jung.
'What a coincidence' Dogtooth remarked.

'Has the naughty thumb of science prodded thy beauty'...?

Ben Macintyre is fed up with ugly science running its warty pustulent fingers all over nice friendly ancient mysteries. 'The myth of Stonehenge,' he explains, 'may be more powerful even than science.' It is possible that the true nature of Stonehenge may elude excavations, but that does not excuse a lot of Romantic gibberish about the death of the imagination. It is a feeble imagination in the first place that cannot accommodate scientific enquiry.

Hamilton busts centuries-old racist myth

You no doubt think that the sandwich was invented by a white Christian English aristocrat. It's all lies. Kids, don't trust whitey.

Bookends

Thank Moses and his sometime-contentious little apostrophe for Private Eye! What a blissful publication - providing, that is, that exposure to it is limited to once or twice a year, beyond which it strangely becomes very tedious very quickly. But were it not for a recent edition of Pseuds Corner (more potential apostrophe trouble for the incorrigible grammarian), only those sincere fools who actually read Pete Paphides's music review column in the Times would have been treated to this:

'Thom Yorke threw rave shapes into the light. Beaming its way forward like a speeding snowplough, a sublimely heavy 'Bodysnatcher' saw guitarist Jonny Greenwood oscillating between filigree fretwork and finger-shredding ectoplasmic scree.'

Proof, if ever it was needed, that any wanker with a thesaurus can be a rock critic. The unspeakable horror of music journalism cannot be overstated.

In related news, Morrissey is sueing NME for libel. For me, it's a win-win.

"The islands with all their minimum and lampblack"

"The islands with the vertebra of some Zeus."
Odysseas Elytis

I was reading Isaac D'Israelli's Curiosities Of Literature and I uncovered the charming detail that the expression 'bringing coal to Newcastle' has a Hebrew equivalent - 'to take olive oil to a city with many olive trees growing nearby'. Not as snappy as ours I feel, but it might make more sense in the original language. Other pleasing kickshaws from the same groaning table include the Chinese 'In a field of melons do not pull up your shoes; under a plum tree do not adjust your hat' and the Arabian saying 'the barber learns his art on the orphan's face'. Lest you get too carried away, there's a piece of stern, if somewhat oxymoronic wisdom to contend with in the dour Scots proverb 'wise men make proverbs but fools repeat them'.

In other non-news, I've been enjoying Madoc by Paul Muldoon. It's such a bloody wonderful mess I want to repeat the whole thing verbatim, but I'll exercise restraint, and just give you a couple of nice moments to tide you over as you rush headlong to the bookshop-

"[Archimedes]
Coleridge leaps out the tub. Imagine that."

" -Might the specter of Hamilton
playing a schottische

on his melodeon

of blood and guts and shit and piss
have been just enough to give Wilkinson a pause."

"All I have in the house is some left over
Squid cooked in its own ink
And this unfortunate cup of tea. Take it. Drink."

Post scriptoid

A footnote for the Mosley affair. Pious, self-appointed arbitrators of social acceptability (a.k.a. Guardian commentators) face an interesting decision this week. Do they side with the Jews or the perverts? These two erstwhile-discrete pursuits after moral equity are about to meet in the middle: either they defend, indiscriminately, the right to practise any form of sexual irregularity, provided it is legal and consensual (a Newtbook firm favourite at 5-4) or they defer to pressure from bolshy head-in-arse religious groups and censure an innocent man for enjoying a bit of imaginative, victimless sex in what he thought was the privacy of his own home. The Toynbees and the Buntings of this world could swing either way...

Odds and sods

Robert Maudsley looks like he might croak at any moment. In the meantime, I have been having my doubts about the capital's culture of gun-crime fear - do rising levels of gun ownership necessarily equate to rising levels of murder or assault? - but I have neither the inclination nor the wherewithal to emulate Hamilton's recent flair with facts and stats, so I'll let that one drop.

[Doesn't the foreshortening in this look a little strange - tiny legs...? No? Maybe not...]

I do, however, think we should try to resurrect the weregild, a measured system of criminal retribution that flourished in pre-mediaeval Scandinavia, if only to counteract this country's often hysterical attitude towards 'justice'. In other news, I've discovered a healthy crop of white-supremacist amateur poetry which I commend to you, dear reader, from the heart of my bottom. And if all else fails, you can always live as Sawney Bean did. All that is required is a restless libido and woman who shares your limited scope for employment and morality.

Nazi Sex!

Some people might find this new obsession with Max Mosley strange, but I'm tickled pink by the confident assertion that "fantasising about one of the greatest tragedies of the 20th century is obviously completely inappropriate.”

Many thanks to the Times for this list of historical reprobates. I'm particularly fascinated by the third Marquess of Waterford, who may have been the alter ego of Spring Heeled Jack, the Post Newt's cryptid of choice. If anyone finds this sort of thing interesting then I would advise them to look into Edith Sitwell's The English Eccentrics. It's a corker. I don't think enough people read Sitwell. Or Norman Douglas for that matter, or Thomas Lovell Beddoes, or Angus Wilson. But I digress.

Paris Hilton's 'music' is put out by Heiress Records. I liked the honesty of that so much that I've decided to start a publishing house called Unreadable Vanity Published Arsewipe.

I really dropped the ball on this one

Good heaven's, look at muggins here blathering on about Balaclavabollocks while Mosley's son engages in Nazi themed orgies. I feel like a prize lemon. Still, it seems a bit cruel of everyone to yell at the poor chap for what sounds like a fairly embarrassing and expensive (£2,500 apparently) sexual predilection. Do we think that that this might have anything to do with the events of his early childhood, what with being separated from his parents and told that they were reviled fascists who he should be ashamed of? No, of course not, he is a horrible racist and should be punished for performing a consensual and private sex act, but not in any way the pervert might enjoy. What I'm personally interested in is how the video got out. If you are a prostitute specialising in Nazi themed S&M it seems that without discretion you don't have much of a business model.

Ephemera

I don't know how my fellow Newtists feel, but I doubt there is much love for Tennyson among us. I like his 'nature red in tooth and claw' but I always find his metre a bit shoddy for such an infamous tinkerer. However, although I'm not a particular partisan of 'The Charge of the Light Brigade, I couldn't resist giving you the fruits of some idle wikipidelling: a number of less famous works of art to emerge from Battle of Balaclava:
The Charge of the Heavy Brigade
The Trooper
The Charge of the Light Brigade (Richard Caton Woodville)Alfred reading TCOTLB in 'eminent Victorian' mode.
The Balaclava Hat
The Last of the Light Brigade
The Thin Red Line (Robert Gibb)
(It's actually not a bad painting I think. For the Woodville I can only apologise.)

Aboard the robust Post-Newt there has long been a broad base consensus that Dylanolatory is pretty unhealthy and deluded. Here is former a 'Yippie', the supremely unhealthy and deluded A.J. Weberman, with some revelations about the man himself. The Yippies seem to have been pretty loathsome as a group, so more on them later.

If anyone can find a video of Michael Power I will be forever in their debt.

Here's some Fuseli to get the taste of Woodville out of your mouth.

Monjoie! Marchons! Dieu le veut! Walloons!

I am returned from abroad. The continental sun has scalded by milky complexion and French food continues to disappoint. Every third car on the road was either Renault, Peugeot or Citroen: protectionism or blinding national pride? Who can say. I almost visited Laon cathedral, and then almost visited Clairvaux abbey, before stopping for lunch and almost finishing a motorway-cafe quiche Lorraine. The Belgians are still the most dangerous drivers on the Eurasian plate, the European currency is strong on the pound and the kilometre is down by .3 against the mile, making journeys across central Europe expensive but mercifully brief.