Trumpets

Andy - stout fellow that he is - has got tickets for Wynton Marsalis at the refurbished Ronnie Scotts for the first week in August, and one is earmarked for me. Forty five notes is a bit steep for a ticket for anyone, but an opportunity to see the best trumpeter in the world in as intimate a venue as Ronnie's is not to be passed up.

Strange about me, trumpets and Andy. I first struck up an acquaintance with him years ago when we were working on an oil rig design at Bechtel's offices in London, and I noticed that every lunchtime he would pull out his horn, pop a mute in the bell and find an empty office for half an hour's practice.

He was responsible for me seeing Arturo Sandoval in Ronnie Scott's as I tagged along to support Andy's brother Phil who was in the support band.

And he was also at the kill for one of my key musical experiences when we were in the front row at the Hammersmith Odeon watching Miles Davis, so close to the great man himself that I could hear his trumpet's valves tapping as he played.

Fusion Confusion

Look at the starters on this menu?

Have I stumbled upon the ultimate in food fusion? I am certainly thinking of changing my plans for next Burns Night.

ADDRESS TO THE HAGGIS PAKORA
– by Lorna M. Angus

Fair fa' yer honest sonsie face
Great chieftain of the curried race.
Aboon them a' ye tak' yer place
Wi' herbs an' spices.
Weel are ye worthy o' a grace-
But this suffices!


The groanin' trencher there ye fill
Now - after culinary skill
Gastric delights for which I'd kill
Arouse my greed.
While through the door the family spill


Wi' unco speed!
The chicken tikka's sheer delight,
For onion bajjis, we would fight,
The rogan josh we praise outright


But hopes still soar - ah. ...
If we could only taste tonight
Haggis pakora!
Aye, -mark the chiel, pakora fed
The trembling earth resounds his tread
For gie tae him his daily bread-A
large chapati
Wi' meat and sauce sae tasty spread
An' ne'er a tattie!
Oh - kitchens, dishing out this fare
Jist min' tae tak the greatest care
For Scots are wantin' mair an'mair
Meals in a hurry.
So if ye want their gratefu' prayer
Gie them a curry!

Captain's Log: Supplemental

Even though North West Spain has been officially covered in "Eat Your Way Around The World in London, we have booked a table at the Barcelona Tapas bar tonight to watch Arsenal play Barca in the European Championship final; a typically daft, futile and generally agreeable Coraider gesture. See Catalan Cuisine: Europe's Last Great Culinary Secret for a lowdown on the grub. I don't see why it shouldn't be quite good in a chain, I've always found that Old Orlean's tucker matched pretty well with the stuff you actually get in the Big Easy.

Speaking of "Eat Your Way Around the World in London" misfires we went to Masaledar in Tooting the other week, but I couldn't figure out where to put it on the map.

It is East African/ Gujerati cooking so I started off with Mogo - which is deep fried cassava chips sprinked with chili and black pepper and accompanied tamarind chutney; African I guess.

For the main course I had Haleem which is a a Nihari like dish seldom seen on menus. Mixed lentils, barley, lamb and whole spices cooked overnight for a wonderfully soft and rich texture, and best mopped up with a naan.

This was one the of heartiest things I have ever eaten. I felt like hiking off to Baluchistan and wrestling a black bear myself after I got outside it.

Two conclusions:

I really must find out more about the food form what is now Pakistan.
I must find out why so many Asians left Kenya in the 70s.

She still works for me

I added a comment to my MP's contribution to the NHS debate on I agree that all too often the NHS...: 9 May 2006: House of Commons debates (TheyWorkForYou.com).

It is innocuous and contains a typo but as a worked example I think it shows the potential value of the service.

I suppose that in a way www.theyworkforyou.com is a social network just like www.myspace.com. It is still early days but I think I am beginning to understand where Marc Canter's Digital Lifestyle Aggregator might fit into this picture.

Update: I see that in this view of the speech in context comments are included as well.

she probably lives in Tahiti

When I was a young boy
My mama said to me
There's only one girl in the world for you
And she probably lives in Tahiti

I'd go the whole wide world
I'd go the whole wide world
Just to find her

One of the great charms of the googlified web is that I can pop any of the random phrases and recollections that bubble up from my subconscious into it and follow any serendipitous hits.

So yesterday, "theresonlyonegirlintheworldforyouandsheprobablylivesintahiti" lead me to Wreckless Eric's own website and his own comments on the song.

He's playing the Half Moon in Putney later this year on June 28th. I lived in the flat over the clock shop next door to it when I first moved up to London and used to be woken by the hoofbeats of the dray horses delivering beer early in the morning. Sounds unlikely for the latter part of the 20th century but it is true.

I bear many an honourable scar from that house of madness. I wonder whatever happened to Nick, John and Rod, my flatmates. Last time I heard - many years ago - Rod was working in a refugee camp for Afghans in Pakistan. That was in the time when it was an obscure, out of the way posting.

Chris and I first met Rod and John in Bilbao when we were on our way to Pamplona. They asked us to look after their luggage while they argued with the police.

Happy days.

Ramin Jahanbegloo

English PEN's Writers in Prison Committee has taken up the case of Iranian academic and writer Ramin Jahanbegloo.

Here is Janabegloo on 'The Legacy of Isaiah Berlin'.

One of the most important aspects of Berlin's philosophy is his liberal theory of pluralism. His defense of value pluralism as the most essential conception of moral and political philosophy has achieved classical status. He also elaborated with considerable originality a conception of freedom that supports his philosophical view of human ideals. According to Berlin these ideals are inherently rivalrous by nature and they collide in practice. In other words value pluralism is a moral foundation for the political ideal of toleration and peaceful coexistence among genuine goods, since it affirms that there is no one right way of life for men. Berlin’s commitment to a pluralist philosophical anthropology is in fact a rejection of the idea of a perfect society or a perfect human life.
............
For him there is no process of individual self-creation in society without choice-making. As a matter of fact, for Berlin, choice-making is not a subjectivist account of human identities. On the contrary, individual agents who are practitioners of diverse cultural traditions are conceived by him as being conditioned by common forms of life possessing an objective dimension. This commits Berlin to an idea of belonging which he holds not as a political participation, but as a membership in a common cultural tradition.

Bearing witness to that is a very brave thing to do in contemporary Persia. I wish there were more people who understood it over here to be honest.


RECOMMENDED ACTION:

Please send appeals:

- expressing concern for the safety of Ramin Jahanbegloo, who is detained incommunicado in Evin prison;
- seeking immediate assurances that he is not being tortured or ill-treated;
- seeking full details of the reasons for his arrest, including any charges that may have been brought against him;
- calling for his immediate and unconditional release if held in violation of Article 19 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, to which Iran is a signatory.

APPEALS TO:

Supreme Leader of the Islamic Republic
His Excellency Ayatollah Sayed ‘Ali Khamenei,
The Office of the Supreme Leader
Shoahada Street, Qom, Islamic Republic of Iran
Email: info@leader.ir , istiftaa@wilayah.org

Head of the Judiciary
His Excellency
Ayatollah Mahmoud Hashemi Shahroudi
Ministry of Justice, Park-e Shahr,
Tehran, Islamic Republic of Iran
Salutation: Your Excellency

President:
His Excellency Mahmoud Ahmadinejad
The Presidency,
Palestine Avenue,
Azerbaijan Intersection,
Tehran, Islamic Republic of Iran
Fax: Via Foreign Ministry: 00 98 21 6 674 790
(mark: "Please forward to H.E. President Ahmadinejad")
Email: dr-ahmadinejad@president.ir

She Works For Me

Not so long ago I added an RSS feed produced by www.theyworkforyou.com to my blogroll. The feed tracks my local MP's contributions and last week I got my first hit from when she contributed to a 9 May House of Commons debate on the health service.

I was interested to see how they present the debate like a weblog, so you can review the whole thing or look at each contribution as a separate "post" on which you can comment as you might on any other blog.

That is very clever, because what they are essentially doing is subsuming some of the bread and butter of the UK political system into the blogosphere and - as importantly - allowing it to be monitored and manupulated by our evolving software tools.

I am going to subscribe to the site news feed to keep track of how the service evolves into the future.

Local Heroes

Abbey Mills did me and my guests proud yesterday the kids had a great afternoon painting with Tess and ARTTess, and then Garfield fed us five adults and six children and hosted us into the evening at Ting 'n Ting.

It is difficult though for me to give either of them the mad props they are due because neither has a website. Here endeth the first lesson.

Did you know that Tim Berners-Lee - the father of the web has a blog? In a recent post he said,

Do you have a URI for yourself? If you are reading this blog and you have the ability to publish stuff on the web, then you can make a FOAF page, and you can give yourself a URI.

This has been nagging at the back of my mind, because I have no very clear idea what he means, which is something I ought to own up to before I start nagging people to set up web sites so that I can link to them.

In general I must admit that everything that TBL is trying to do with the Semantic Web and Resource Descriptor Frameworks has left me floundering in its wake.

I've been brooding a little on the Semantic Web today, after I got a call from my brother at Colliers Wood tube station early this morning to say that the line to Waterloo was closed and that his party were going to have to get two cabs to hustle them to town to get their Eurotunnel train on time. I felt a bit embarrassed about this becaue it was me who had advised them to get the tube when the information about engineering works was available all the time from Transport for London.

Later on I got hugely delayed driving into London because I hadn't heard about the Chelsea Victory Parade or the Strokes Association's London Bridges Bike Ride 2006. It does seem ridiculous that our networks and computers can't warn us about problems like that. I suppose that is the promise of the Semantic Web, which also reminds me that Bill Gates called for a directions microformat in his speech at Mix06. (It is also worth knowing that the Transport for London Journey Planner knows about the engineering works and tells you that the best route around them for today so it should be quite simple to double check a route automatically against that before setting off for example.)

Sapphic Session

This week we arrived at Greece in our ongoing campaign to eat our way around the world in London.

I came across the Sappho Meze Bar (9 Clapham High Street, SW4 7TS) a couple of weeks ago when I had to walk back to the office from Stockwell when the Northen Line was out: I couldn't help but be intrigued by a restaurant with no menu, for that is what it is.

After we walked in, the governor showed us to a table, explained that there was a £9.50 a head charge, quizzed us about our likes and dislikes, and then disappeared to go about his business.

First he brought us the wine along with two little spinach and cheese filo pastry parcels, and then shortly after a tray of about a dozen small dishes along with a freshly baked loaf of Greek bread.

"Food to make you live better and longer", he said about half an hour later after we had worked our way through it.

"I feel better already," I said. "When will I start to feel longer?"

Five minutes later, the table was groaning under the weight of the main course; a chicken dish, a lamb dish, and a pork dish plus vegetables. We hunkered down and worked our way through them - delicious.

A honey laced desert arrived. We did our duty by that and courteously declined coffee.

It was a great meal and great value for money. Placing yourself in the hands of an expert who decides on your behalf as opposed to guessing from an unfamiliar menu is a good idea when you are exploring a new cuisine.

As we left I told the chef what a fine old time we had had. "I know what I'm doing", he replied with no hint of false modesty.

Follow the links for our real and imaginary destinations as we eat our way around the world in London.

(I wonder if I will get more traffic than ususal in a post with "Sapphic" in the title in these prurient, "safe search is off" days?)

Hoff Invaders

And so a torturous, round-about refugee trail sprang up. Paris to Marseilles, across the Mediterranean to Oran, then by train or auto or foot across the rim of Africa to Casablanca in French Morocco. Here the fortunate ones through money or influence or luck might obtain exit visas and scurry to Lisbon, and from Lisbon to the New World. But the others wait in Wimbledon, and wait and wait and wait.


A treat from the David Hasselhoff Arcade, to help to pass the time as we wait and wait and wait for Panto.

Stereotypes

Admiring, along with the rest of the world, the Crocodile Dundee, Ocker insouciance with which miners Todd Russell and Brant Webb exited the Beaconsfield mine (read a transcript of live coverage here) after a rescue that Australian Prime Minister John Howard described as a "wonderful demonstration of Australian mateship", I couldn't help but wonder, not for the first time if the much derided institution of national and cultural stereotypes might not have some positive aspects.

It is an idea that struck me - if you'll allow me to leap from crag to crag like a mountain goat - ages ago when I was watching Billy Wilder's masterpiece movie 'The Apartment'. Most of the personalities in the story are unmitigated swine, and even the two sympathetic leads - Jack Lemmon and Shirley MacLaine - are weak characters who are largely responsible for their own problems.

The only two fully formed people among the dramatis personae are Dr ("Be a mensch!") and Mrs. ("The best thing for dizzy is a little noodle soup with chicken") Dreyfuss, the couple next door who are so Jewish they are almost caricatures yet personify adult sympathy, warmth, generosity, charity and neighbourliness.

My ideas aren't fully formed on this yet, but I suppose a weblog is for these shavings from the bench. Maybe I should start collecting or even inventing positive stereotypes.

Ruthless

Having already addressed the nation on the general topic at the time of the Buttiglione affair last year I was hoping to steer clear of the Ruth Kelly controversy that takes up the entire front page of the Independent today.

Now that even Chris is thinking of running a book on how long she will last I have decided to have my tuppence worth to the extent of clarifying the postion of the Catholic Church vis a vis how "men and women who have deep-seated homosexual tendencies" should be treated.

It is pretty easy to find as it is in the Catechism which says:

"They must be accepted with respect, compassion, and sensitivity. Every sign of unjust discrimination in their regard should be avoided."

Couldn't be clearer really, yet how many people know it and how many commentators refer to it?

"Homosexual persons are called to chastity" granted, but so is everyone else apart from married couples.

You can agree or disagree with it but it is not confused or hypocritcal. Ruth Kelly - as a practicing Catholic is bound to think that homosexual acts are sinful, but she is also bound to think that adultery is sinful along with envy, sloth, gluttony, wrath, pride, lust, and greed and many others.

Let's be frank Gordon Brown and John Prescott have got the last seven pretty much wrapped up between them and she manages to work with them.

Losing it

Mark “3-in-a-Bed Rent Boy Shame” Oaten, the former Liberal Democrat Home Affairs spokesman has invited further derision in an article penned for the Sunday Times by announcing that he blames his fall on the onset of baldness.

"I don’t think I would ever have had reason to reconsider my sexuality had it not been for a combination of factors and events at a difficult period in my life," he reveals.

"I doubt that, on its own, my dissatisfaction with politics would have prompted me to act as I did, but it coincided with something of a mid-life crisis. I was turning 40 and I really felt that I was losing my youth. The problem was undoubtedly compounded by my dramatic loss of hair in my late thirties. This really knocked me for six. I started to look noticeably older.
"Any television appearance would result in a barrage of e-mails, not about the issues I’d raised but about my lack of hair. Whether supportive or not, they all asked what had happened to my hair. It’s perhaps not surprising that I became more and more obsessed by its disappearance. For me it was a public sign that my youth had ended. "

Poor, poor bunny, had he but realised. Exhibits A (Billy Zane) and B (Jason Stratham) above reveal that - in matters of the heart - Britain's sweetheart Kelly Brook is a serial, slaphead succubus.

Bald as I am, I should be so bald. If only she kept her blog more up to date.

Prohibition Inhibition

It is a month ago today that I noted that I had stopped losing weight, and over the last few weeks I have been putting it on again.

As I am still working out all the time, I have come to the unhappy conclusion that I will have to look at my diet.

The first change that I am going to make is to give up drinking at home. I decided this on Friday so - being me - I spent the last few days drinking all the booze in the house (with the exception of my Polish vodka collection which I only bring out on special occasions).

We shall have to see what difference that makes. It was quite odd to be revisiting Sebastian Flyte's alcoholic decline in Brideshead Revisited as I was putting the stuff away with grim determination.

Shade of Bale

For some reason I have got out of the habit of inducting Welsh Born Icons.

2005 was the year of the Welsh superhero, so now that Warner Bros have commissioned a sequel to Batman Begins for release in 2008, I have decided to add Christian Bale (born Haverfordwest 1974) to the august WBI body.

Did you know that he was so thin and weak after making The Machinist that he could only do one press up - and that with his trainer holding the back of his t-shirt - when he started bulking up for Bruce Wayne?

He must be bonkers. If he was cast in my life story - unlikely I agree - would he drink 20 cans of Stella and a box of red wine every day?

Et in Arcadia ego

After dawdling over Rohan Candappa's Picklehead, which I enjoyed a great deal not least because the author is a pretty much exact contemporary of mine, I have taken up Brideshead Revisited. ( Candappa was captivated at university by the TV series just as I was by the way.)

It is strange to be immersed again in the book's autumnal recollection of gilded youth, when both Charles Ryder - its narrator - and Waugh himself when he wrote it are younger than I am (or indeed than Rohan Candappa is) today.

I had forgotten quite how accomplished a writer Waugh was. From the Prologue, this:

I had played every scene in the domestic tragedy, had found the early tiffs become more frequent, the tears less affecting, the reconciliations less sweet, till they engendered a mood of aloofness and cool criticism, and the growing conviction that it was not myself but the loved one who was at fault. I caught the false notes in her voice and learned to listen for them apprehensively; I recognized the blank, resentful stare of incomprehension in her eyes, and the selfish, hard set of the corners of her mouth. I learned her, as one must learn a woman one has kept house with, day in, day out, for three and a half years; I learned her slatternly ways, the routine and mechanism of her charm, her jealousy and self-seeking, and her nervous trick with the fingers when she was lying. She was stripped of all enchantment now and I knew her for an uncongenial stranger to whom I had bound myself indissolubly in a moment of folly.

As CS Lewis noted, "We read to know we are not alone."

Ramin Jahanbegloo

Once again via Normblog, I see that there is now a blog carrying updates on the arrest of Ramin Jahanbegloo in Iran. There is a feed we can use to follow development here.

A Little Local Difficulty

I see that Labour lost control of the London Borough of Merton in yesterday's election. The Conservatives have 30 seats, Labour has 27 and there are three independent councillors so no one has overall control of the Council.

A poor reward indeed for an administration that succeeded in making SW19 so cool that Boradway is buzzing with the news that David Hasselhoff himself is coming to the New Wimbledon Theatre to appear in Panto this Christmas.

(In my Colliers Wood ward though, Labour swept the board and the Greens beat the Tories to a poor third.)

CHAKALAKA

We jumped aboard the number 93 bus to Putney last night to check out, what seems to be the only South African restaurant in London, though God knows there are plenty of of Springbok boozers.

I started with boerewors and chakalaka which was described on the menu as "traditional South African farmer's sausage served with chakalaka - a spicy tomato and onion salsa - and sweet corn miele pap."

(I ordered it by pointing at the menu because it seemed to me that Boerwores must almost certainly be pronounced Boer Wars and I didn't want to get into a Basil Fawlty and the Germans scenario with the waitress.)

Interestingly enough the chakalaka had a strong tang of harissa, and miele pap seemed to be grits. The further we get eating your way around the world in London the more tangled things get, which in a way is the point of the whole exercise.

Paul - entering into the spirit of the thing for once - had a special (crocodile tail salad) to start then kingclip (South Africa’s favourite fish) served with savoury rice, seasonal green vegetables and topped with seafood bisque.

I had grilled springbok loin (which tastes like beef) garnished with red onion marmalade and served with with roast root vegetables and a spinach puree.

We drank a 2002 Nederburg Cabernet Sauvignon.

Another continent is blooded in our campaign, follow the links for its real and imaginary destinations.

DLA

I went along to see Marc Canter at the bean feast Ian Forrester organised on Monday night and I had a blast. He really is a provocative, larger than life character. (You get a tast of his tone by reading him arguing the toss with various prodnoses about his Wikipedia here)

He was talking about his plans for a new category of software called Digital Lifestyle Aggregators that he is working on with his company Broadband Mechanics.

They are going to be launching their software - perhaps in Beta I can't remember - in June. It seemed to me, in essense, to be a kind of clearing house that could be used for importing and exporting weblog posts, social networks, playlists and preferences etc. between differerent commercial environments or hosts.

Armed with this insight I asked him, "Is it a kind of clearing house?"

"No," he replied, so I guess we are going to have to wait for it to come out to understand. He seemed smart as a whip to me though, so I shall certainly stay tuned.

(PS I approve of the Polar Bear as a venue. £2.55 for a pint of Stella a stone's throw from Leicester Square is not to be sneered at.)

Ramin Jahanbegloo

I take the liberty, below of republishing an entire post from Normblog.


<<Ramin Jahanbegloo has been arrested by the Iranian intelligence services. Jahanbegloo is a liberal intellectual who has invited western intellectuals to Iran. Michael Ignatieff mentions him here:

I was invited not by the mullah-dominated universities but by the Cultural Research Bureau, an independent center in Tehran that publishes books and runs its own gift shop, gallery and lecture hall. My Iranian host, Ramin Jahanbegloo, works in a tiny shared office at the bureau, inviting foreign guests and building up a small circle of free-minded students whom he lectures on European thought. He and I had never met, but he has published a book of conversations he had as a student with Isaiah Berlin, the Oxford philosopher of liberalism, and I have written a biography of Berlin. We are Berliners.

There is a picture of Jahanbegloo here (scroll down). These two links refer to the arrest (so I'm told). >>

I've got a copy of Jahanbegloo's 'Conversations with Isaiah Berlin' (an old edition picked up for a song from a bargain shop as I recall) a coincidental connection that shouldn't but does amplify my reaction to his plight so I'm posting this immediately to make some small contribution to passing the message along.

'Fitness for Purpose'

LONDON: Responding to "Closing the Gap", a report - by Her Majesty's Inspectorate of Constabulary - on the ability of the current structure of policing in England and Wales to provide effective and sustainable services in the future, a leading figure in organised crime has voiced his approval of plans to reduce the number of police forces in England and Wales from 43 to 12.

Supporting police modernisation, British crimelord Harold Shand said, "Modern organised criminals are sophisticated, organised and well-resourced entrepreneurs trafficking in drugs and people, engaging in fraud and extortion. We run business empires that reach from the other side of the world to the dealer on the street corner".

Pointing to efficiency gains over the last decade , Shand noted that the price of an ecstacy tablet has fallen from £20.50 a ten years ago to only £7 today and that prices of heroin and cocaine both fell by 30 per cent over the same period.

"Ten years ago, the price of one ecstasy pill would have bought 14 pints of lager or 222 cigarettes. Today, the £7 street price for a tablet of ecstasy is the equivalent of 3 pints of lager or 30 king-size cigarettes.

"We work in a competitive industry. Dealing with 43 separate Police Forces fragments our business processes, reducing efficiency, and hindering our work in delivering value to the customer. We welcome the proposed streamlining."

While this endorsement will be welcomed by the Home Office, serial Labour rebel MP Paul Flynn struck a dissenting note saying: "This is a decision that is rushed. It's not based on any rational basis. It will help only the criminals and it will harm the whole structure of the police. It's reorganisation for reorganisation's sake."

Darfur

Via Normblog, this report:

Joined by senators from the left and right, Oscar-winning actor George Clooney used his star power on Thursday to focus attention on Sudan's Darfur region, where he said the first genocide of this century was taking place.
Clooney told heart-breaking stories of visiting the border area between Chad and Sudan's Darfur region last week, where he watched refugees spilling into sordid camps and women foraging for food who faced the threat of rape or death.

As a rule, I'm not very keen on Mr Clooney's political initiatives, but when you're right, you're right, so more power to his elbow on this one.

As for my inconsistency:

Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself,
(I am large, I contain multitudes.)

BBC 2.0

When did Margaret Thatcher first appear on the BBC? Which was the last
band to appear in session for John Peel?

The BBC has put a searchable catalogue of details of 946,976 BBC radio & TV programmes dating back 75 years online.

Imagine if they do succeed in putting much of this online and available on-demand as their Creative Future project envisages.

To love, youth, and good arguments

Za milosc, mlodosc i dobra awanture.

I'm taking my Polish Vodka collection on its first road trip down to see my brother in Wales today, and I have found some more calls to arms at Toast a Drink in Polish.

Vodka is your enemy, so pound it in the gullet.
Wódka to twój wróg, wiec lej ja w morde.

To the drunkard: who lives half as long, but sees everything twice.
Pijany zyje dwa razy krócej, ale widzi dwa razy wiecej.

Drink up, the glass is getting spongy.
Pijmy, bo szklo nasiaka.

For my own contrubution, I put "Until The Incredible Hulk takes up Macrame - Make Mine Marvel!" into http://www.poltran.com/ and came up with:

Przed Niewiarogodny Kadłub statku bierze *Macrame* - Wyrabiają Kopalnia Podziwiać !

Calling out around the world:

A votre sante, to France!
Alla Salute to Itlay!
Cheers! to Britain!
Egé szé gé re, to Hungary!
Kanpai to Japan!
Na Zdrowie, Poland!
Ooogy Wawa, for the Zulus!
Prosit, Germany.
Salud! Spain.
Saúde! Brazil.
Skal! Sweden.
Slainte! Ireland.
Wen Lie! China.
Yasas! Greece.
Za vashe zdorovye! Russia.
Zivili! Serbia.
Zum Wohl to Austria.

Bubonic Plagiarists

Kali Amanda, New York representative for the Browne escutcheon, has been telling me about a controversy raging there about a Harvard University freshman who has plagiarised huge portions of her first novel.

I've dug up a story in NewKerala.com that thunders - DID NEW YORK GHOST WRITING SHOP PEN KAAVYA VISWANATHAN’S BOOK?

Amid all the pursed lips and furrowed brows, and perhaps because I have actually been to a call centre in Bangalore, I can't help but smile at the idea that a South India born wunderkind has turned a multi million dollar trend on its head by outsourcing her work to a literary sweat shop in the Big Apple.

You go, girlfriend!

Coincidentally, in one of the first developments for years that might restore my faith in the British judiciary, the judge who presided over the failed Da Vinci Code plagiarism case at London's High Court hid his own secret code in his written judgement.

Seemingly random italicised letters were included in the 71-page judgement given by Mr Justice Peter Smith, which apparently spell out a message.
Mr Justice Smith said he would confirm the code if someone broke it.
"I can't discuss the judgement, but I don't see why a judgement should not be a matter of fun," he said.

A Cocklecarrot for our age and not before time. (The judgement is here if you want to try and crack the code yourself.)

(By the way the post title 'bubonic plagiarists' is shamelessly plagiarised by me from Peter Cook's assessment of David Frost.)

End of an Era

I see from the BBC that Councillors in Cardiff will be voting today on proposals earmarking six secondary and 11 primaries for closure.

St Illtyd's, the secondary school where I was corralled for seven years up to 1979 is one of those singled out for the chop. It is also the place where all my brothers and uncles and most of my male cousins served their time under the stewardship of the de la Salle brothers.

I can't honestly say that I have any overwhelming nostagia for the establishment, but it is still a bittersweet development.

Something that amazed me at the time was that we had a stirring school song. Do many places?

So - for old time's sake - once more with feeling:

To green fields set with golden flowers
In ancient days St. Illtyd came
And there he set his college towers
Where scholars flocked drawn by his fame.

Green and gold, green and gold
Strong be our hearts and bold
To keep unsullied our great name
Adding to ancient glory modern fame
And ever honoured hold
The green and gold.

Every Day, Every Day .....

Lion Man

Arsenal fan that he is, I let my five year old stay up until half time watching the second round of their semi final clash with Villarreal on the telly last night.

His parochial ranting and raving at the serial injustices done to the gunners was hilarious when you consider that he has only the most tenuous grasp of the laws of the game. That said, his pronouncements when watching sport are to all intents and purposes indistinguishable from mine, and from my father's in his turn. Perhaps there is a gene for it.

His team won through , and in the process I was delighted to learn that he thinks that the singular of linesmen is Lion Man. A misapprehension to be sure, but one of which I approve; lion men they shall be to me henceforth.

I watched the first round in the Mayfair Tavern last week and remarked on what a friendly place it was. Not too far away, in the early hours of Saturday morning, Mohammad and Hayder Ali, 23 and 24, were pulled from a white Mercedes van and stabbed to death by a gang of about 15 Asian men.

I know nothing whatever of the circumstances of this tragedy, but I demand that we must keep on keeping on learning from and about all the people who live around here. And about and their food and their culture.

Insignficant as my sympathy must be in the scheme of things, I offer my own condolences to the Ali family: Bismillahir-Rahmanir-Rahim.

The Voysey Inheritance

I generally try to catch most of the stuff that Peter Gill directs, at least in London, and I'm just back from watching a preview performance a new National Theatre production of Harley Granville Barker’s 'The Voysey Inheritance'. The press night is Tuesday.

There has been a lot of noise lately about the fiftieth anniversary of 'Look Back in Anger'. Barker's play is is hundred years old - as it was first produced in 1905 - but its concerns seem a lot less dated to me than Osborne's rant does.

Here is Peter Gill on directing Voysey. Googling around I have discovered that Gill is going to direct a revival of 'Look Back in Anger' in Bath later this year as well. Best of luck to him. I can't see that the brattish Jimmy Porter has much to say to us in the 21st century.

Mistress of Spices

I went to see Mistress of Spices yesterday. It got at best lukewarm reviews, but since I could quite happily while away an hour and a half looking at a poster of Aishwarya Rai, that carried very little weight with me.

The real problem with the movie I think is the voice over. When Rai's character - Tilo - converses with the spices it is difficult to suppress a giggle. I think the film would have been a lot better if that narration was cut completely. You'd lose a bit of exposition but I think the mystery might add to the experience.

I enjoyed it a lot however, and Rai's performance was luminous. I'm sure she will have a big hit in the West one day.

Old School

Local Beat Officer job description:

I know a fat old policeman
He's always on our street
A fat and jolly red-faced man
He really is a treat
He's too kind for a policeman
He's never known to frown
And everybody says he is
The happiest man in town.

A ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha
Ooo hoo hoo hoo ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha
Ooo hoo hoo hoo ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha
Ooo hoo hoo hoo ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha.

He laughs upon point duty
He laughs upon his beat
He laughs at everybody
When he's walking in the street
He never can stop laughing
He says he's never tried
But once he did arrest a man
And laughed until he cried.

A ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha
Ooo... ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha
Ooo... hoo hoo ha ha ha ha ha ha
Ooo hoo hoo hoo ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha.

His jolly face was wrinkled
And then he shut his eyes
He opened his great mouth
It was a wondrous size
He said 'I must arrest you'
He didn't know what for
And then he started laughing
Until he cracked his jaw.

A ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha
Ooo... ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha
Ooo... ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha
Ha ha ha ha ha ha ooo hoo ha ha ha ha ha ha ha.

So if you chance to meet him
When walking round the town
Just shake him by his fat old hand
And give him half a crown
His eyes will beam and sparkle
He'll gurgle with delight
And then you'll start him laughing
With all his blessed might

A ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha
Ooo... ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha
Ooo... hoo hoo ha ha ha ha ha ha
Ooo hoo hoo, oo hoo, ha ha ha ha ha ha.

Literature Map

I finished looking at Birds Without Wings again this morning in preparation for Chris's grupo libros. It is very disheartening to be plunged into the horrors of a war - the latter stages of which I was previously completely unaware.

I noticed that Drosoula and Mandras escape to become protagonists in Captain Corelli's Mandolin and that the omniscient narrator notes Italian soldiers who occupy Eskibahce arrive uninclined "for playing mandolins and singing choruses from operas".

To be honest I was a bit unnerved by de Bernieres' abrupt changes of tone (from tragedy to comedy, or from fiction to history) throughout the book and by the way he wears his heart so clearly on his sleeve.

I am going to read something lighter before I go on to Brideshead.

Check out these literature maps for the four writers we are looking at:

Evelyn Waugh
Louis de Bernieres
Khaled Hosseini
Javier Marias

I've got no opinion on the relations but they are intruiging.

The Evil of Two Lessers

I had a meeting at a client's office in Victoria on Friday and noticed that the building still housed the Conservative's Campaign Headquarters.

This got me thinking about the fruits of David Cameron's first few months leading the party: sod all.

No wonder folk are disenchanted with politics in the UK when we have, to adapt a US observation by Lewis Black:

• Labour - the party with bad ideas


• The Conservatives - the party with no ideas, and


• (The eternally parenthesizable, Liberal Democrats - the party with no idea).

New Brain, New Broom

It is probably says more about me than about them, but I was surprised when I blogged about his Live Clipboard initiative lately by how few of the people I spoke to about it had heard of Ray Ozzie.

Here is a profile from Fortune Magazine. I must admit, I hadn't realised he had become quite so significant as he seems since taking the Microsoft dollar.

Why, man, he doth bestride the narrow world
Like a Colossus, and we petty men
Walk under his huge legs and peep about
To find ourselves dishonourable graves.

Pizza the Action

I called up Pizza Hut last night and ordered a thin crusty supreme.

Half an hour later they turned up with Diana Ross.

(Hat tip, my brother Vince.)

Set 'Em Up Tom

I spent a rare evening noodling round on the piano last night.

Back in my youth I developed a sort of ersatz cocktail bar style in which I hit the keys largely at random. My left hand plays four note harmonised block voiced chords (leavened with chromatic passing chords) and my right hand plays blues inflected runs and trills.

I've found that Harold Arlen and Johnny Mercer's 'One for My Baby' is a handy tune for this style as you can do the bulk of it as a sort of Cmaj7, Dm7, Em7, Fmaj7 vamp without the substitutions getting too ridiculous.

Nowadays, I'm never - if I can help it - more than a heartbeat away from an internet connection so it is difficult to resist the myriad online fake books even when you are at the (ebony and ivory) keyboard. Last night among all the dross (chord progressions are surprisingly slippery) I found a 'One for my baby' transcription that seemed to be quite closely based on the classic version from 'Frank Sinatra Sings for Only the Lonely' so I ponied up the four or five bucks required to download it.

This inevitably lead to further involuntary research.

It's quarter to three, there's no one in the place
Except you and me
So set 'em' up Joe, I got a little story
I think you should know.

According to Wikipedia, Mercer wrote the lyrics sitting in bar called P J Clarke's on Third Avenue in midtown Manhattan, while being served by a barman called Tommy Joyce and apparently called Joyce up the next day to apologize for not being able to make his name fit.

That seems a bit lame to me. I propose:

It's quarter to three, there's no one in the place
Except you and me
So set 'em' up Tom, just like back in high school
No date for the prom.

Was that so hard? But wait, P J Clarke's has another claim to fame. It also stood in for Nat's Bar in Wilder's 'The Lost Weekend' in which Ray Milland (born Reginald Truscott-Jones in Neath January 1905 and hereby inaugurated Welsh Born Icon) declaims:

It shrinks my liver, doesn't it, Nat? It pickles my kidneys, yeah. But what it does to the mind? It tosses the sandbags overboard so the balloon can soar. Suddenly I'm above the ordinary. I'm competent. I'm walking a tightrope over Niagara Falls. I'm one of the great ones. I'm Michaelangelo, molding the beard of Moses. I'm Van Gogh painting pure sunlight. I'm Horowitz, playing the Emperor Concerto. I'm John Barrymore before movies got him by the throat. I'm Jesse James and his two brothers, all three of them. I'm W. Shakespeare. And out there it's not Third Avenue any longer, it's the Nile. Nat, it's the Nile and down it moves the barge of Cleopatra.

I've already had a Bloody Mary in Harry's Bar in Paris. Do I need to pencil in a nervous breakdown in PJ's before I die, I wonder?

The Craic

Waxing weary of the King's Head, we ended up watching the Arsenal game in the Mayfair Tavern last night

Although I've not spent much time there, I've always liked the idea of the Tavern - an Irish, or perhaps more accurately Galway, boozer - being in the same building as the Tooting Islamic Centre. This speaks to me of a relaxed live and let live attitude that seems to be in peril from all the humourless grievance mongers in the modern world.

Also, as a proponent of aspirational, non-exclusive ethnic groups I was very pleased to see a good proportion of black Irish, Mediterranean Irish, Asian Irish and even Oriental Irish among the clientele, united at least in appreciation of the craic.

I'm not concerned with mundane and quotidian reality. My Irishness is the Irishness of blarney, or The Quiet Man, or of a story Budd Schulberg tells about the 1941 Billy Conn, Joe Louis fight.

Conn was leading and had only three more rounds to go and his corner was telling him to stick and move, stick and move, you can't lose if you stick and move. And Billy's saying, "Nah, I'm going to knock him out." And he came out in the 13th and started to mix it with Louis and down he went. And in his corner - it's a classic - the manager's saying, "Goddammit, Billy, didn't we tell you to stick and move?" And Billy, lying there on the ground, says, "What's the use of being Irish if you can't be stupid?"

All of which brings me in a meandering Irish way to the problem of your man Flatley. That'll be himself , the Lord of the Dance, the Celtic Tiger to be sure. George Clooney excepted, is there another cat on the the planet who thinks he has got more cream?

He is an oik and a cad and i diskard him from the Ireland I choose to imagine.

England, his England

Now that my five year old is in school and subject to peer pressure, it seems that all my work on inculcating Welsh chauvinism in him may come to nothing. Soccer is in the ascendancy over rugby and he has become - of all things - a precociously dyed in the wool gooner. (A gooner, for my New York readership, is a supporter of the Arsenal football club.)

Does this mean that I have to back the Gunners in their semi-final clash with Villarreal in the European Champions League tonight? Being a parent is hard.

I suppose I could get used to supporting Arsenal with him, but what about England?

I started muttering darkly about fate when I was half watching a BBC programme on Monday about Pierro della Francesca's famous Resurrection fresco. The risen Christ is carrying what appears to be an England supporters' flag.

Billophobic

I emerged from my house just before 8 am on Good Friday - on my way for a swim before hitting the road with my five year old on an Easter Holiday trip to see family in Wales - to find that some scum sucking sons of bitches had thrown paint over my car and the cars belonging to about half a dozen of my neighbours on a rampage through our street.

My first thought was that I should report the incident to the Police so I called the local station and was put on hold for ten minutes. I hung up and dialled the emergency 999 number. This was answered crisply but I was told that I had to call my local station to report the incident.

I tried the local station again and waited again for ten minutes before giving up. Bear in mind that during the twenty plus aborted minutes of this attempt to report the incident I was fretting about house paint drying on and ruining the finish of my car.

I spent the next two hours or so cleaning my car. After I had finished the obvious surfaces, I had to open the doors and the boot and rinse the paint that had leaked into and through the seals and over the internal paintwork and mounts. This second cleaning produced a new set of drips over the rest of the body. I was not best pleased.

A cameraderie developed between us neighbours as we wiped and sluiced and it became clear that pretty much all of us had given up in trying to report matter to the Police. One guy made me laugh by saying that if the gendarmes had deigned to turn up they would probably have arrested him for washing his car in the street during a hosepipe ban.

I didn't want to let the matter drop though, so after I had cleaned myself up I went to http://www.online.police.uk/english/default.asp to report the matter online.

This system - to my utter bewilderment - asked me to decide if my report should be classified under any of the following categories:

Hate Crime Any hate incident, which constitutes a criminal offence, perceived by the victim or any other person, as being motivated by prejudice or hate.
Hate Incident Any incident, which may or may not constitute a criminal offence, which is perceived by the victim or any other person, as being motivated by prejudice or hate.
Racist Incident Any incident which is perceived to be racist by the victim or any other person.
Homophobic Incident Any incident which is perceived to be homophobic by the victim or any other person.
Transphobic Incident Any incident which is perceived to be transphobic by the victim or any other person.
Faith Related Incident Any incident which is perceived to be based upon prejudice towards or hatred of the faith of the victim or so perceived by the victim or any other person.
Sectarian Incident Any incident which is perceived to be sectarian by the victim or any other person.
Disablist Incident Any incident which is perceived to be based upon prejudice towards or hatred of the victim because of their disability or so perceived by the victim or any other person.

I don't know where to start on how perverse this is. An incident need not be a crime remember, so what is to stop the list being extended again and again and again?

Firstly, can I draw your attention to the ludicrous codicil "or so perceived by the victim or any other person" which extends - potentially infinitely - the coverage of every incident covered by every verse of this ludicrous catechism?

Secondly, why do I have to jump through all the hoops of this taxonomy just to report hooligans pouring paint on my car? I neither know nor care if they think that my car is gay or heretical.

Thirdly, I have never even heard of transphobic, but if I Google it the majority of hits I get from the whole world are from UK Police sources. This speaks eloquently about priorities.

When I got to Wales I remarked to my Dad that this unholy partnership of administrative incompetence and bien pensant contempt for anyone outside the new establishment's current list of pet groups of victims is what drives people to vote the the BNP.

Hey presto, what should emerge yesterday? Research carried out for the Joseph Rowntree Charitable Trust has suggested that up to 25% of people have thought about voting for the far-right party.

I have decided to coin a new word Billophobic for the those of us who are frightened of the UK Government's tidal wave of legislation targeting opinions with which they disagree, and the cynical use of the Police to publicise, legitimise, and enforce these policies at the expense of doing their real job.

Expect Billophobic incidents.

A Little Water?

More, from Joseph Tartakovsky in the LA Times, on vodka:

Etymologically, vodka in Russian means 'little water.' And because the average Russian guzzles a world-best 5.2 gallons per year, a little water has gone a long way in damaging the collective body politic. A few years ago, the Finnish physician directing the Russian office of the World Health Organization explained: 'If you did this in Finland, half the population would be dead in a year. This is clearly not normal.'

The Russian people disagreed. 'It's our way of life. How can we stop drinking with a climate like ours?' said one. From another: 'Our people are willing to live in poverty, but if the government tries to make them stop drinking, it might lead to social unrest. Nobody can make us stop drinking.'

Not that the powers didn't try. In 1917, the Bolsheviks banned vodka and condemned drunkenness as a 'social evil irreconcilable with the proletarian ideology,' perhaps because they believed, as Friedrich Engels had stated, that drinking was the bane of the working classes. It is probably closer to the truth to say that work was the bane of the drinking classes. No vocation without intoxication, cried the workers, and in 1924, the ban was reversed - an early instance of Soviet utopianism succumbing to Russian reality.

Vodka Etiquette

No that my vodka collection is coming on nicely, I am starting to turn my mind to etiqutte and tradition:

So, if you want to drink like a Pole how should you go about it? The simple answer seems to be to consume everything you can get your hands on, and then some.

I quite the idea of toasts. Here is a suggested series:

First glass (standing up): Your health!
Second glass: Now one for the other leg.
Third: God likes a Trinity.
Fourth: A good table has four legs.
(Etc. etc. until you are drunk.)
Last glass: See you under the table!

With the noble exception of the Tatanka, forget about using vodka in cocktails. In Poland vodka is drunk neat, not diluted or mixed. Regardless of the size of the glass, though, it is drunk in one gulp, or 'do dna' ('to the bottom'), as Poles say. A chunk of herring in oil or other accompaniment, or a sip of mineral water or juice, is consumed just after drinking to give some relief to the throat, and the glasses are immediately refilled for the next drink.

Russians seem very similar, usually cleansing the palate with a sip of coke, or fruit juice but most often, beer. "Vodka without beer is money thrown in the wind", they say. Like the Poles, Russians nibble between shots of the hard stuff; grazing on zakuvski. Zakuvski is varied: caviar on blinis, smoked fish, black bread, pickles etc.

At a Russian session, an empty bottle should always be placed either beside the leg of the table on the floor. An empty bottle on a table is a bad omen for drinkers.

Russiann group drinking is synchronised and it is considered an offense to drink before somebody makes a toast.

I could live with that, but the tradition in which the drinker grabs the nearest person's head and takes a deep sniff of hair after downing a shot of vodka is too weird even for me.

(Refs 1, 3)

Eppur, si muove

In one of the splendidly baroque meeting rooms of the Vatican's Apostolic Palace, the 263rd successor to St. Peter as Vicar of Christ hobbled slowly to his presiding chair before an assembly of bishops of the Roman Catholic Church.
It was 1994. John Paul II had fractured his right thigh in a bathtub fall, triggering a news-media torrent of frail-Pope-is-dying stories, but, more accurately, ending the 73-year-old Holy Father's getaways to the ski slopes.
The bishops watched him in silence. John Paul sat. He spoke. 'Eppur, si muove,' he said. 'And yet, it moves.' One wonders how many bishops got the joke.
Allegedly this was Galileo's defiant declaration to his Inquisition judges in 1633 after they sentenced him to life imprisonment for declaring the Earth orbits the sun, not the other way around as implied in Scripture.

Think of all the subtle meaning of that joke in those circumstances and then imagine having to explain it to someone incorrigibly literal-minded.

"Angels can fly because they take themselves lightly," in Chesterton's phrase.

More and more I think that humourless fundamentalism (whether Christian, Moslem, Hindu, Atheist or any other stripe) is a common denominator of many of the threats we have, do and will face.

Behold the Man

Not long ago, I read in the Weekly Standard:

ONE OF THE LEAST VISITED memorials in Washington is a waterfront statue commemorating the men who died on the Titanic. Seventy-four percent of the women passengers survived the April 15, 1912, calamity, while 80 percent of the men perished. Why? Because the men followed the principle 'women and children first.
The monument, an 18-foot granite male figure with arms outstretched to the side, was erected by "the women of America" in 1931 to show their gratitude. The inscription reads: "To the brave men who perished in the wreck of the Titanic. .
. . They gave their lives that women and children might be saved."
Today, almost no one remembers those men.

Perhaps we can remember them today, nintey four years after their sacrifice. The valour of Flight 93 notwithstanding, similar solidarity is difficult to imagine today and something valuable has been lost.

Saladin at Easter

The Church of the Holy Sepulchre is a Christian church now within the walled Old City of Jerusalem. The ground on which the church rests is venerated by most Christians as Golgotha, the Hill of Calvary, where Jesus was crucified. and it also is said to include His burial place (the sepulchre).

After Saladin recaptured Jerusalem in 1187 there was some discussion about destroying the Church of the Holy Sepulchre to take away Christian pilgrims' reason for returning to Jerusalem. In the end, Saladin insisted that it was to be respected.

Since Saladin's time, two Moslem families (the Nusseibehs and the Joudehs) have been the guardians of the key to the Sepulchre managing the rivalry of the Greek Orthodox, Armenian Apostolic, Roman Catholic, Coptic Orthodox, Ethiopian Orthodox and the Syriac Orthodox custodians.

That is my story for this Good Friday.

Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called sons of God

Salaam

The Classic Blunders

My five year old is watching 'The Princess Bride' while I'm working from home again.

Vizzini's taunting of the Dread Pirate Roberts resonates with the news today:

You only think I guessed wrong! That's what's so funny! I switched glasses when your back was turned! Ha ha! You fool! You fell victim to one of the classic blunders! The most famous is never get involved in a land war in Asia, but only slightly less well-known is this: never go in against a Sicilian when death is on the line! Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha! Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha! Ha ha ha-

Sohrab and Rustum

I finished reading "The Kite Runner" last night but I don't want to comment on its merits and demerits here as that is a discussion for another venue.

Something I do want to remember though is the way a couple of nooks and crannies in the book were illuminated by the meanderings upon which the blog has taken me.

Stories of Mullah Nasrudin featured, as did nihari, and I was interested to see the state's encouragement of children to spy and report on their parents - subject of a recent rant of mine - used to illustrate the depravity of the Russian imposed Afghan regime.

The tragic story of Sohrab and Rustum also plays a central part in the book's story arc. I was pleased and surprised to find that I knew it already as I had studied Matthew Arnold's poem in the classroom as a boy. (Perhaps my lamentable state of education is more related to my being jaded when I was in school than to the school itself?).

There is a an annotated version of the poem at "Sohrab and Rustum: An Episode" (1853) which might be of interest to other Kite Runner readers.

He spoke; and Sohrab smiled on him, and took
The spear, and drew it from his side, and eased
His wound's imperious anguish; but the blood
Came welling from the open gash, and life
Flowed with the stream: all down his cold white side
The crimson torrent ran, dim now and soiled,
Like the soiled tissue of white violets
Left, freshly gathered, on their native bank,
By children whom their nurses call with haste
Indoors from the sun's eye; his head drooped low,
His limbs grew slack; motionless, white, he lay--
White, with eyes closed; only when heavy gasps,
Deep, heavy gasps, quivering through all his frame,
Convulsed him back to life, he opened them,
And fixed them feebly on his father's face;
Till now all strength was ebbed, and from his limbs
Unwillingly the spirit fled away,
Regretting the warm mansion which it left,
And youth, and bloom, and this delightful world.

Le Mot Juste

Curiously satisfying - given the tabloid caricature of his habits - that the Sandhurst graduation ceremony of Prince Harry, and lap dance habitue confreres, as army officers should rejoice in the given name a Passing Out.

Live from Iraq

I'm not really much of a pimped out thug - no homies on lockdown last time I looked - but I do feel compelled to throw a mad props shoutout to Neal Saunders.

Joking aside, this album written and recorded by US soldiers in Baghdad is so raw and vivid that consideration of it being good or bad seems superfluous.

(Update: P.S. I imagine that the title "The Man with the Ho" would have a different implication coming from a rapper than it did coming from Edwin Markham, as well.)

Cedar

Last night as part of our continuing campaign to eat your way around the world in London after work, Paul and I lit on the Lebanese Cedar Restaurant.

(A stray thought; why is it always The Lebanon rather than just Lebanon. You never hear of The Switzerland. Answers on a postcard please.)

I had fattoush(which is a variety of chopped vegetables and fried Lebanese bread infused with mint, vinegar, olive oil and sumak) as a mezza and then a mixed grill (which is a selection of lamb and chicken cubes, shish kebab grilled on skewers served with onions and tomatoes).

Paul had Arayes - Lebanese bread filled with finely ground lamb, onions, parsley, cinnamon and allspice then toasted on the charcoal grill - then Kafta Kheshkhash (lamb with parsley and garlic grilled on skewers and served with a hot tomato sauce.
We also shared some rice and finished with Baclawa.

A particular revelation was the wine. We had a bottle of Clos St. Thomas and then got talking to Elia - the proprietor - about Lebanese wine. He put us on to some real good stuff called Massaya, a blended red from the Bekaa Valley. He told us that many people make their own wine and spirits and gave us a complimentary glass of what he called arack, which tasted more like Pernod than the Sri Lankan stuff I am most used to drinking.

What a great friendly place.

Since the beginning of time, everyone who stepped onto the Lebanese soil has paid tribute to the fertile land called : The Bekaa Valley. This stretch of land has been known as the cradle of the biggest empires. The Bekaa Valley is where the Romans chose to build one of the biggest jewels of Lebanon - The Temple of Bacchus - holding within its walls the hymn of love and the mystery and secrets of wine Winemaking is an art.

Sakura

After discovering Hanami recently I was delighted to see the vision on the left when I opened the bedroom curtains this weekend.

As I celebrated with a glass or two in Japanses style, I decided to compose my own haiku tribute.

Here is the skinny from Wikipedia on how you go about it.

"Haiku is a mode of Japanese poetry, a late 19th century revision by Masaoka Shiki of the older hokku (発句), the opening verse of a linked verse form, haikai no renga . A traditional hokku consists of a pattern of approximately 5, 7, and 5 morae, phonetic units which only partially correspond to the syllables of languages such as English. It also contains a special season word (the kigo) descriptive of the season in which the renga is set. Hokku often combine two (or rarely, three) different elements into a unified sensory impression, with a major grammatical break (kire) usually at the end of either the first five or second seven morae. "

I came up with:

Through my front window
Spring blooming cherry blossom.
Where is the corkscrew?

A 5,7,5 syllable pattern wth the kigo at the beginning of line two, the kire at the end of that line, and a contrasting yet complementary element introduced in the third.

As I was quite happy with it I decided to translate it into Japanese with Alta Vista's babelfish. That gave me:
私の前部窓のばねの咲く桜を通して。コルクせん抜きはどこにあるか。

On a whim I translated it back into English again:

Through the cherry tree where the spring of my frontal window blooms.
As for the cork plug pulling out it is somewhere?

Pure Zen.

Land of my Fathers

I demand that you listen as Bryn Terfel delves into the history of one of the most stirring national anthems in the world, Land of My Fathers.

The words were written by Pontypridd weaver Evan James beside the river Rhondda, and set to music by his son James on a harp in 1856. Some 50 years later, it became the secret weapon that helped to defeat the all-conquering 1905 All Blacks, and in doing so became the first national anthem to be sung at an international rugby match.

Many anthems express the desire to slaughter enemies. Land of My Fathers expresses a love of home and the hope that Wales and its language will live forever. Bryn concludes that Land of My Fathers is the greatest national anthem in the world...ever."

Listen and learn Wales' lesson to the world: limitless self assertion coupled with hugeness of heart. Hence, "our anthem is the finest in the world by a long chalk" is married with "it doesn't matter if you don't understand the words".

Weightless

There hasn't been any crowing here for a while about my weight loss because, quite frankly, it has stopped.

I'm still exercising almost every day although I am now alternating days of aerobic and weight training because I find that I've moved up to a level of intensity with resistance work that requires a day of rest before I work my muscles in that way again.

It may be that I'm not ready to try and lose weight as opposed to noticing that I'm losing weight through exercise.

Exhibit A: Yesterday I watched Saturday Kitchen for the 45 minutes I was on the cross trainer and then went to a Polish deli in Streatham to enhance my vodka collection and pick up some cold meats.

Exhibit B: I've done my dips, pull ups and presses etc. this morning but now I'm off the the French market that is being set up in Abbey Mills.

Do you begin to see a pattern emerging?

Something to Remember

I worked from home on Thursday looking after my five year old who is off school for the Easter holiday. I took him swimming lunchtime - after he had watched Harry Potter and then played in the garden in the morning - and he persuaded me to let him ride his little bike, stabilisers and all, to the pool.

We had a falling out on the way back when he earned a telling off by cycling over a road rather than waiting for me on the pavement at a junction.

He cried a bit and was still sulking for the hundred or so yards back to the house. When we got there he sat in the front garden said he didn't want to come in.

"Fine," I said, "stay outside if you like."

I went in, leaving the front door open, sat down at my desk and started work.

Five minutes later he glided in wordlessly, placed a flower beside my right elbow, and went and sat on the couch.

Thus we were reconciled in a perfect moment.

The stones will cry out

The abject end of Denis Donaldson and the sordid catalogue of like atrocities enumerated by Jenny McCartney in this week's Spectator, reawakened memories of the murder of Robert McCartney and the inimidation of his brave family.

His sister had a baby she is naming after him earlier this month, but says:

"Fifteen people were involved in Robert's murder, the attempted murder of Brendan Devine, and the clean-up operation. Only two people have been charged. There's still a lot of work for us to do."

It is too easy for things like this to slip our minds among the day to day clutter of our lives...

Harry Potter and the Brokeback Mountain

Men kissing and cuddling? You must think I'm daft.
The Sun Online has brought a fun new internet meme to my attention; spoof 'Brokeback Mountain' trailers made up from other favourite films.

I bought "Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban" for my five year old yesterday. He is on holiday for Easter and I watched it with him, so the example below is my current favourite.

Live Clipboard and Microformats

I'm intrigued by Ray Ozzie's work on extending the clipboard user model to the web by building on XML, RSS and Microformats, and I had a bit of a play with it after work and before the football last night.

The two established microformats that he has built initial examples on are iCal for Events and iCard for Contacts so I used Harvey Nichols Fifth Floor Restaurant and our visit to its Vodka University earlier this week for my implementation.

If you right click on the event or contact below you will be able to paste it in to the empty "holder" below. More impressively if you visit the Microsoft sample page you will be able to paste the data from my blog directly into it, and conversely take data from the sample and paste it back into "A Welsh Born Icon".



Imagine the possibilities if you could paste contacts and appointments directly from the web into Outlook.

I'm going to follow developments closely.

Na Zdrowie

Well, we bowled up for Vodka University in Harvey Nicks on Monday and it was absolutely great.

I've been surprised to find that - with the exception of Zubrowka which you can pick up in Sainsburys and the post office in Colliers Wood - other Polish vodkas are elusive. (Which is odd as Zubrowka - as an anti coagulant and mild hallucinogenic - is not at first glance the most respectable of Polish offerings.)

It was among the sixteen vodkas that we tasted, but we also got a chance to sample three other Polish brands; Belvedere (sic), Wyborowa, and Luksusowa.

Until fairly recently, vodka was confined to the Poles, the Russians and the Scandinavians. From my brief experience I would say that Russian vodka is all about alcohol, Scandinavian vodka is about pretending not to be alcohol, but Polish Vodka is far richer, stressing texture and weight. I intend to continue my pursuit of it.

The Fifth Floor Restaurant put on a meal for the graduates of the Vodka University that we took up at £39.50 for three courses and unlimited Harvey Nichols own label wine. Memories after that as you can imagine are hazy.

There is one peripheral incident that may be worth remembering. On a trip to the loo I noticed a bloke in an eccentric hat at the bar. On closer inspection this turned out to be Chris Evans in the centre of a sycophantic entourage. He really struck me as an arse ; drawing attention to himself as the only person in the building with a covered head which I bet if challenged he'd claim was camouflage.

The Man with the Hoe

I had meant to be blogging Vodka University today, but I've left my notes at home and I can't remember how to spell most of the East European brand names.

Unafraid of dramatic changes of tone, I'm filling the hole with a poem by Edwin Markham that enjoyed a brief vogue as the 19th Century turned to the 20th.

On some dark days I wonder if it is not more prescient of the 21st, "when this dumb Terror shall rise to judge the world" and a companion piece to Yeats' 'The Second Coming':

Bowed by the weight of centuries he leans
Upon his hoe and gazes on the ground,
The emptiness of ages in his face,
And on his back, the burden of the world.
Who made him dead to rapture and despair,
A thing that grieves not and that never hopes,
Stolid and stunned, a brother to the ox?
Who loosened and let down this brutal jaw?
Whose was the hand that slanted back this brow?
Whose breath blew out the light within this brain?


Is this the Thing the Lord God made and gave
To have dominion over sea and land;
To trace the stars and search the heavens for power;
To feel the passion of Eternity?
Is this the dream He dreamed who shaped the suns
And marked their ways upon the ancient deep?
Down all the caverns of Hell to their last gulf
There is no shape more terrible than this--
More tongued with cries against the world's blind greed--
More filled with signs and portents for the soul--
More packed with danger to the universe.


What gulfs between him and the seraphim!
Slave of the wheel of labor, what to him
Are Plato and the swing of the Pleiades?
What the long reaches of the peaks of song,
The rift of dawn, the reddening of the rose?
Through this dread shape the suffering ages look;
Time's tragedy is in that aching stoop;
Through this dread shape humanity betrayed,
Plundered, profaned and disinherited,
Cries protest to the Powers that made the world,
A protest that is also prophecy.


O masters, lords and rulers in all lands,
Is this the handiwork you give to God,
This monstrous thing distorted and soul-quenched?
How will you ever straighten up this shape;
Touch it again with immortality;
Give back the upward looking and the light;
Rebuild in it the music and the dream;
Make right the immemorial infamies,
Perfidious wrongs, immedicable woes?


O masters, lords and rulers in all lands,
How will the future reckon with this Man?
How answer his brute question in that hour
When whirlwinds of rebellion shake all shores?
How will it be with kingdoms and with kings--
With those who shaped him to the thing he is--
When this dumb Terror shall rise to judge the world,
After the silence of the centuries?

Gnarls Barkley

Perhaps the BBC headline "History made as song tops chart without selling a single CD" is a trifle hyperbolic but yesterday is likely to be remembered as the day the torch was passed (at least for the UK) from objects to bits as the standard mechanism for music distribution.

There is an Official site for Gnarls Barkley that plays the track and they are on myspace.com as well. (I must make time to look in more detail at myspace. News Corp's $580 purchase of it last year put it on my radar, but a profile I read in Vanity Fair was so inane I got discouraged.)

I'm vaguely pondering my home set up in light of the convergence of computing, communications and entertainment technology. At the moment I've just got an 802.11g wireless router ADSL modem and I am carting my Toshiba Qosmio back and for to the office.

Maybe now is the time to add some storage from the Buffalo Linkstation range. I could connect it to the router with the ethernet cable and use it to serve media all around the house via the wireless network. Possibly if I combined it with something like the SlimDevices Squeezebox3 I wouldn't need a PC at all.

It is certainly weird to be considering what is essentially a NAS device as a consumer home entertainment component.

Hanami

The arrival of spring raises an important question. Is it better to admire the cherry blossoms drunk or sober? In Japan, the consensus is 'drunk'. When the sakura bloom, Japanese people sit in parks getting raucously sloshed and contemplating the transience of life, as symbolised by those briefly spectacular flowers. Everyone agrees that alcohol heightens the experience.

This week's Economist introduced me to a Japanese festival - Hanami - of which I was previously unaware.

According to Wikipedia: Hanami was first used as a term analogous to cherry blossom viewing in the Heian era novel Tale of Genji.

What a great idea, if I can find some cherry blossom next weekend I will plant myself under it with a bento box, a case of Kirin, and a bottle of saki and get quiety sloshed meditating on Basho's haiku.

Come out to view
the truth of flowers blooming
in poverty

Reading List

I've finished 'Written Lives' so I'm moving on to 'The Kite Runner', as I've read the other books ('Brideshead Revisited' and 'Birds Without Wings') that we have set ourselves for May.

'Written Lives' was great, though let down by the final section; 'Perfect Artists'. Most of the book was delightful and frivolous, but the last twenty or so pages was frankly trivial. There is a difference.

I note in passing that there is an Official Website of Khaled Hosseini, Author of The Kite Runner.

New Age Neo Krypteia

Regular readers will know that there is a strong chance that I am going to end my days hoarding canned goods against 'The Rapture', and discount my millennial ravings accordingly but I was irritated to read a press release issued by Cleveland Police yesterday.

Police Chief Rounds Up A Posse Of Seat Belt Sheriffs
Thousands of youngsters are being recruited by Cleveland's Road Policing Chief - to ride "shotgun" in the family car.
Insp Eric Robinson wants posses of Seat Belt Sheriffs to ensure that the clunk click rule is followed for every trip.
Around 8,000 letters are being sent out to nine and ten-year-olds asking for their help in ensuring family and friends always wear seat belts - and the drivers don't use hand-held mobile phones when driving.
.....
Insp Robinson said: "We want to save lives, not deal in the aftermath. We all know that not wearing a seat belt is an offence, but more importantly is that children and their families are safe - and who better to make sure everyone belts up that the children themselves."
In his letter Insp Robinson asks youngsters to ensure their mums and dads, brothers and sisters wear seat belts for every journey - even if just to the shops or on the school run.
"Crashes can happen at any time so I need some Seat Belt Sheriffs to keep an eye out for me," he wrote. "We all know it's against the law not to wear a seat belt, but it's more important that you and your family stop yourselves from getting hurt."
Insp Robinson plans to recruit his first posse at Rossmere Primary School in Catcote Road, Hartlepool on Monday April 3rd 2006 at 11.00am.

My distaste - in its intricate image - strides on two levels.

The first is simply visceral revulsion at such a nakedly blatant attempt to turn a cadre of children into prissy sneaks and teachers' pets. I am fortunately convinced that human nature is sufficiently immutable to condemn it to failure notwithstanding the appeal of 'Spike the Road Safety Hedgehog'.

The second objection is more profound. What on earth gives the Police the notion that it is acceptable for them to set children to spy on their kith and kin in order to further their policies?

The example may be - from a civil liberties perspective - comparatively trivial, but the principle - especially in the context of the current regime - is of paramount importance.

Remember that Tony Blair really said, when launching his Respect agenda:

"I can't raise people's children for them...but what I can do is provide the right system of sanctions and support for families where they need them."

The supercilious arrogance of that remark and its implicit contempt for ordinary - though I prefer the adjective 'normal' - people is so hair raising that I thought at first that it must have been a slip taken out of context. Not so. It is trumpeted on Downing Street's own website - http://www.number10.gov.uk/output/Page8890.asp.

For Blair, and the fatuous ideology he represents, it is self evident that it would be better if he and his acolytes could raise our children for us (thus inoculating and protecting them from the countless viscious unthinking phobias and isms with which the ordinary working stiff is so clearly infected) rather than letting us muddle through on our own.

Here's a history lesson on where thus style of thinking can lead. You draw the dots, I'm tired:

When a male child was born in Sparta soldiers came to the house and examined it carefully to determine its strength. The baby was bathed in wine rather than water, to see its reaction. If a baby was weak, the Spartans exposed it on the hillside or took it away to become a slave (helot). When the child reached the age of seven, he was taken from his family. Boys were organized into age groups or Agelai (meaning flocks ) and lived communally in dormitories. Once assigned the Agelai, the child became subject to the Agoge. The Agoge was what allowed a Spartan child to become a citizen. The training that went on throughout the Agoge was brutal. Always under the control of someone older than themselves, the specific Agelai were subjected to numerous competitive events and staged battles. After the Agoge, the Agelai, were reintegrated into society slowly, by undertaking the krypteia. The krypteia was undertaken by select individuals rather than by the entire agelai, during it, armed with a small knife, but without shelter, clothing, or food, the youths hid during the day, and in the evening as a sort of 'secret police' patrolled the helot land plots in search of potential revolts, and roamed the mountainside.