Whale Watch

Pilot Whales. They're rats of the sea you know. Not content with taking fish from the mouths of Japanese schoolchildren, these blubbery rascals have been copying their larger cousins and going after innocent squid. For too long we have tried to peacefully co-exist with whale kind. We have no more options. The hunt must begin. I'll be down at the wharves with Starbuck, Stubb and Fedellah.

In other squid news, scientists are defrosting the best specimen of Colossal Squid found so far.

The Newt has been following the Max Mosley scandal with a keen interest, and lately the plot has thickened. MI5, sexual perversion, Nazis, motorsport - can this story get any better?

Dogtooth is very fond of Rossetti. I can't imagine why.

Forecast: hand-cut, oven-roasted, lightly-salted, seal-packaged

Yesterday afternoon I received an angry phone call from the London Prodigal, telling me to book flights to Japan immediately. When I questioned the nature of the trip, he made some very rude remarks ('strumpetous, groin-dwelling bible salesman' was, I think, the Parthian shot) and hung up. At the time I was sitting in a bay windowseat of the Cary Grant, a pub that, ordinarily, only exists on a Thursday, but, in this case, had decided to make an exception. Shortly after this incident, a man touring with the Floridian Children's Disney Show sat down near me, and I spent the remainder of the afternoon telling him never to go to Spain.

Squif

not by Paul Muldoon

After a party which raised the rafters
And under a deluge of last weeks telly
I watched her drink down two pills of blue
Handrolled narcotic jelly.

We talked like two sturdy Tyrolean peasants, digging
Dogwood and Bog Rosmary, and cutting planks of ash
Into the exact shape and size of water-maybe
Which I shared with the dog, along
With a little food from the fridge
And slept like a baby.

Thing's have been rather slow for the last week or so...

Here are some cocktails for you to try:

Hangman's Blood - (Created by Anthony Burgess, this cocktail is much more trouble than it is worth.)
"Into a pint glass, doubles of the following are poured: gin, whisky, rum, port and brandy. A small bottle of stout is added and the whole topped up with Champagne... It tastes very smooth, induces a somewhat metaphysical elation, and rarely leaves a hangover."
Papa Doble - Ernest Hemingway's drink of choice. A Daiquiri with double the rum in it.
Hamilton's Encumbered Finesse - This drink was only mixed once, by me. I turned my back for a moment and it was seized and drunk by a passing spot welder.
1/4 gill antebellum rye whiskey
1/4 gill pastis
1 gill heavy water
1 tsp bicarbonate of soda.
The drink is served in a brandy snifter, with an anchovy over the rim and a chaser of carot juice

The prancing phantoms and ghosts of my rude forefathers

Up my, my family tree,
No blue blood, no nobility;
No trace of aristocracy -
Except for Uncle Sebastian
Who once raped a duchess.
My Family Tree - Jake Thackray

Unlike the stalwart Mr Thackray I cannot claim an ancestry untouched by privilege. In fact, I recently discovered that my distant predecessor the Honourable Charles Hamilton was no less a personage than the inventor of the ornamental hermit. Horace Walpole was dismissive of the idea, saying it was foolish to put aside a quarter of one's garden to be melancholy in. Pooh to the workaday doubters of this world! I shall be melancholy in as large a portion of my garden as I see fit.
The whole issue of ornamental hermits has been done to death, but I could not deny you the story of one charming personage, to be found in the pages of Edith Sitwell's English Eccentrics -
an unnamed amateur hermit possessed of twenty hats and twelve suits of clothes, each emblazoned with an allegorical device. Two of the best are the 'patent teapot: to draw out the flavour of the tea best - Union and Goodwill' and the 'Wash-Basin of Reform'. One hat even had four mottoes embroidered around it - 'Bless Feed', 'Good Allowance', 'Well Clothed', and 'All Working Men'. As Ms Sitwell remarks - 'you may imagine the sensation aroused by these aspirations expressed in millinery'. This individual lived in a large allegorical garden, in the middle of which hung an elaborate effigy of the Pope, and cultivated a long white beard. We shall not see his like again.

Another of my ancestors, the famous Anchovey Hamiltonne, preempted the Hermit craze of a later century by living for several months in the grounds of a nearby stately home, accosting visiting noblemen for money and neglecting to shave. He was beaten soundly by a local blacksmith, and ejected from the county. It is a terrible thing to be ahead of one's time.

Obama has accused Pennsylvanians of being bitter, and clinging to guns, god and racism. I hope that we see a lot more of this sort of no-punches-pulled campaigning back on British shores. Perhaps Brown could berate the lazy Mancunians, while Cameron makes a speech attacking duplicitous, gobby Cockneys and Clegg launches into a long overdue condemnation of of whiney, theiving Scousers. Anything to jumpstart real political debate, and get a few politicians egged.

The Newt holds hetrogenous views on guns and God, but is in full support of bitterness.

Robot Soldiers

According to this article in Al-Beeb, the US will introduce "robot" soldiers into combat within eight years.

Forgive me for dreaming, but I hope to eventually see a massive robot surge led by a heavily mechanised Gen. Petraeus.

'Scree at Cowthorpe' by Tod Pughes

After the frost-heaving,
Land is still.

Water waits,
Earth bides its time,
Sky chewing its fingernails.

Until the rock bleeds again its green sludge.

The scree is assembled by small goblins.
Maudlin pixies run to and fro.

The sun weeps like a bereaved Viking,
And all around
Chronic animals vomit over the bodies of dead herdsmen.

LTCM

Long Term Capital Management the hedge fund that famously 'blew up' in 2000 is more topical now than ever.

The below video shows the terrifying power of leverage(borrowing) in financial transactions. Once the mainstay of shamans and narcotic users, predicting the future is massive business in finance.
The latter half of the 20th century saw an exodus from academia to wall street where third rate physicists were tasked with building complicated models to predict the market. From the Black-Scholes options model to rational pricing, it seemed that man's power through mathematics was almost limitless.

Of course not every physicist/mathematician/'quant' was successful, but many on wall street believed large profits could be reliably realised through mathematical methods. As the video implies, ultimately markets reflect human behaviour- and this behaviour, often simplified as greed and fear, is ultimately unpredictable. These people never learn and as history gloriously repeats itself. Try to enjoy the ride and be glad your income is high enough(hopefully) not to be affected by the massive rise in food prices.

Parosetrie

The Spark Plug
(not by Seamus Heaney)

From a long time ago I remember
an ostensibly mundane object or event
let's make it a spark plug this time

(I looked up its name in Irish
in a big leathery book -
speouighbhellchoiughsh)

the curve and cylinder of it
filigreed with detail
and hard as a kitten's eye under a gas-lamp.

anyway, now it's a long time in the future
perhaps the very present
and that brassed intrusion

previously described
serves to in some way elucidate
my current situation.

You probably didn't know about this:

Jimmy Carter is filmed attacking a rabbit with an oar, yet somehow he's still thought of as a paragon of benevolence. Conspiracy theorists to work!

Charlton Heston
Was in at least one Western*
As well as playing Moses leading the Jews to the promised lands.
Anyway, the undertaker has taken the liberty of prising that gun out of Mr Heston's cold dead hands.


*the Western I am thinking of is The Big Country. He co-starred with Gregory Peck, and I once saw Peck asked about the film's significant homo-erotic undertones. The wooden-headed McCarthy-baiter smiled and softly replied 'please God nobody tell Charlton'.

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.