Oh Krapp

Michael Gambon's going to be doing Krapp's Last Tape in London from the middle of September. I learned of this from an advert on Facebook, that took me to its Fan page where I registered my Like. I'll certainly try and go. Its Beckett so book it.

That said, I'm now getting tugged on the sleeve about this production by targeted adverts everywhere. I've seen it on the Google ads on the blog itself (subtle and understated they are to be found at the very bottom of the page), and on the Google mail web client that I use to manage a few email accounts.

It's starting to get on my nerves. I had imagined myself as something of a twinkle toed sprinkler of fairy dust when I'm writing. The idea that impersonal number crunching engines should look at my blog and correspondence and decide that "plays and novels of loneliness, despair and human degradation" are right up my alley is deeply discouraging.

Prodnose: Never throw letters around carelessly. It could spell disaster.

Fighters Uncaged

The Bomber and I are agreed. The new XBOX for his birthday at the end of September, then Microsoft Kinect for Christmas.

Bring on the heroically unPC Fighters Uncaged:

Among the new films

Coco Chanel & Igor Stravinsky
Darling! Divine! It's divine! It's divinsky!

(She looks a mess in her little black dress

and his Rite of Spring's held together with string.)

I have no idea what I mean by this.

I am not a free man, I am a number

The Bomber is back later today from three weeks in the States, and I have missed him very much indeed.

We (plus a lot of other friends) are doing the Richmond To Windsor Bike Ride on September 5. I am number 1248 and he is number 1249, so there will be a fair few people there.

Then on September 26, I'm doing the 30th Anniversary SwanseaBay10k with my brother. I'm number 35787 in that. There can't be thirty six odd thousand competitors surely? That said I seem to remember that the elite Kenyans had practically finished by the time our part of the throng managed to get past the starting line last time I did it.

Sir William Topaz McGonagall

...... Poet and Tragedian.

For the stronger we our houses do build,
The less chance we have of being killed.

I didn't know until I read it here, that the immortal McGonagall tread the boards as well as versifying.

McGonagall as Macbeth refused to die when run through by Macduff; he maintained his feet and flourished his weapon about the ears of his adversary in such a way that there was for some time an apparent possibility of a real tragedy. Macduff, continually telling him to go down became at length so incensed that he gave him a smart rap over the fingers with the flat of his sword. McGonagall dropped his weapon, but dodged and pranced as if to wrestle. Macduff threw his sword aside, seized Macbeth and brought the sublime tragedy to a close in a rather undignified way by taking the feet from under the principal character.

swarm in here

I suggest you count your bees, you may find that one of them is missing.

After a 3-week boot-camp rehearsal period in Battersea Park, hundreds of youngsters dressed as bees swarmed across London to create site- specific happenings last weekend, highlighting the recent alarming drop in the honeybee population.

The project - called "S’warm" - was the largest performance that the U.K.’s National Youth Theatre has put on.

To think I missed it (c.f. the mouse problem).

World Party

And if you listen now
You might hear
A new sound coming in
As an old one disappears
See the world in just one grain of sand
You better take a closer look
Don't let it slip right through your hand
Won't you please hear the call
The world says

Put the message in the box
Put the box into the car
Drive the car around the world
Until you get heard

Now is the moment
Please understand
The road is wide open

My brother, my sister in law, and my nephew have taken the bull by the horns and set off to travel the world for a year. They've got as far as the wonderfully named Swakopmund in Namibia. We can follow them on http://www.3worldwanderers.blogspot.com/

Nothing is funnier than unhappiness, I grant you that.

This morning the Telegraph in its mission to explain informs us that yoga protects the brain from depression.

Yesterday the message on the same pages was that the drug Ketamine acts like "magic" lifting people out of depression.

It stands to reason then that combining horse tranquiliser injections with asanas would have you walking on air.

Am I really learning anything by reading this twaddle day after day?

What is that your business?

According to the Torygraph science coverage this morning the universe is to expand for ever even though the Moon is shrinking. Don't even get me started on ketamine for depression.

Depression and cosmology? Proof again that all human life is in Annie Hall:

Doctor in Brooklyn: Why are you depressed, Alvy?
Alvy's Mom: Tell Dr. Flicker.
[Young Alvy sits, his head down - his mother answers for him]
Alvy's Mom: It's something he read.
Doctor in Brooklyn: Something he read, huh?
Alvy at 9: [his head still down] The universe is expanding.
Doctor in Brooklyn: The universe is expanding?
Alvy at 9: Well, the universe is everything, and if it's expanding, someday it will break apart and that would be the end of everything!
Alvy's Mom: What is that your business?
[she turns back to the doctor]
Alvy's Mom: He stopped doing his homework!
Alvy at 9: What's the point?
Alvy's Mom: What has the universe got to do with it? You're here in Brooklyn! Brooklyn is not expanding!
Doctor in Brooklyn: It won't be expanding for billions of years yet, Alvy. And we've gotta try to enjoy ourselves while we're here!

Chicken Bones

A music video - hat tip Babylon Wales - shot in Cardiff.

Bessemer Road market .... the memories ........ the memories .....

I checked out the Queen of Denmark album its from on Spotify. A little too much of the shoegazy pie for my taste, but pleasant enough.

Venus and Mars

It was the battle of men vs. women at the American box office this weekend, a conflict won rather handily by Sylvester Stallone and his muscular man-team of action heroes. The Expendables dominated the charts, parachuting into first place with $35 million. That meant Julia Roberts’ spiritual and romantic quest in Eat Pray Love had to make do with discovering itself in second place, with a decent $23.7 million.

After a false start, I am actually reading Eat Pray Love and the moment, and rather enjoying to be honest. Make of that what you will. There is still something atavistic in me however that thrills to see Eric win out in the battle of the Roberts.

Exhibit A: 8 million views


Exhibit B: 1 million views

Justice must not only be done

... it must be seen to be believed.

---

Transcript of Chris Poole Churm Rincewind before the Honorable
Thomas W. Phillips Justice Cocklecarrot on April 22, 2010.
APPEARANCES:
ON BEHALF OF THE GOVERNMENT:
Mark Krotoski Tinklebury Snapdriver
Assistant U.S. Attorney

Q. And is there any significance to "new fags"?

A. That is the term used to describe new users to the site.

Q. What about "b tard"?

A. It's a term that users of the /b/- Random board use for themselves.

Q. What about "troll"?

A. Troublemaker.

Q. "404"?

A. 404 is the status code for not found. It means essentially gone or not found.

Q. Not found on where, the 4chan site?

A. 404 is the http status code for not found, a page not found by the Web server.

Q. In what about "peeps"?

A. People.

Q. "Rickroll"?

A. Rickroll is a mean or Internet kind of trend that started on 4chan where users -- it basically a bait and switch. Users link you to a video of Rick Astley performing Never Gonna Give You Up.

(Uproar in court)

---

On September 16, 2008, during the 2008 United States presidential election campaign, the Yahoo! personal email account of vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin was subjected to unauthorized access. The hacker, David Kernell, had obtained access to Palin's account by looking up biographical details such as her high school and birthdate and using Yahoo!'s account recovery for forgotten passwords. Kernell then posted several pages of Palin's email on 4chan's /b/ board. This unauthorized access was ultimately prosecuted as four felony crimes punishable by up to 50 years in federal prison

millions on website redesigns as job cuts loom

Councils are spending millions on redesigns of their websites despite facing the biggest funding cuts in their history, the Telegraph can disclose.

Agape

Have you ever felt that 1 Corinthians 13 is following you round?

I had to do it as a reading at one of Kevin's weddings. (Prodnose: Bride or groom? Myself: Season ticket.) My father quoted in his speech a couple of weeks ago, and now it has turned up towards the end of my reading of Tim Parks' Teach Us to Sit Still.

It's about love. " In the original Greek, the word αγαπη agape is used throughout. This is translated into English as charity in the King James version; but the word love is preferred by most other translations, both earlier and more recent."

So we get:

Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, and have not charity, I am become as sounding brass, or a tinkling cymbal.

or

If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am only a resounding gong or a clanging cymbal.

Intriguing isn't it?

"Agape is one of several ancient Greek words for distinct types of love, one which became particularly appropriated in Christian theology ..... in contrast to philia—an affection that could denote either brotherhood or generally non-sexual affection, and eros, an affection of a sexual nature."

The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis suggest that that differences in the way languages encode cognitive categories affect cultural values to the extent that speakers of different languages think and behave differently because of it.

It's all food for thought, when you consider the meaning a naive English speaker who knows what pediatrician and Francophile mean might derive for paedophile. I know our manners are bad. Perhaps our language is coarser than it might be as well.

Love is too weak a word for what I feel - I luuurve you, you know, I loave you, I luff you, two F's, yes I have to invent ...

Alvy Singer
Annie Hall

Après le déluge

Myself: A storming set from Damien Flood in the rain at AbbeyFest last night.

Prodnose: Enough with the water references already.

Seriously, it was a great performance for the event as it was seasoned with enough familiar covers to carry the audience along. Some of the folk who play here get a bit too cerebral.

It was good to see Mornington Lockett on sax and Frank Tonto (System X) on drums in the band. Like the old days.

A bit of Tom Jones

In a late night bar, Henry is approached by a mysterious woman who offers to sell him the severed "manhood" of Wales' greatest vocal entertainer… Believing he can make a fortune selling the infamous appendage on to obsessive fans, Henry stumps up the cash.

To help find the right buyer, Henry teams up with his slightly dodgy best friend Teddy and together the two head off on an insane journey that leads them deep into the secret world of celebrity body part trading. Along the way, they have a fight with a Gorilla, are bubbled bathed by a randy pensioner, kidnapped by adult babies, break into a police station, take a day trip to Belgium to meet the World's biggest dealer of celebrity off-cuts and even get caught up in the slowest Police chase in movie history… ...and all for a bit of Tom Jones?

Ramadan

I see that Ramadan is starting today.

The first time I ever heard of it was when Sami El-Taji fasted when I was working for Fluor aeons ago.

One of nature's aristocrats and a gentleman as I recall.

He was also the first Palestinian I ever met. I was only vaguely aware of them as figures you used to see on the TV surrounded by rubble up to then, as opposed to flesh and blood human beings.

What a dimwit I was in my early twenties.

Newport Retort

Bad news from the Torygraph this morning (confirmed Icons passim):

The hit internet video Newport State of Mind, which sent up the Alicia Keys/Jaz-Z collaboration about New York, has apparently been removed from YouTube in a copyright row.

We will have to console ourselves (hat tip, Chris) with Goldie Lookin Chain's response to MJ Delaney's affectionate take on Jay-Z, Alicia and the Chain's hometown:



Perhaps EMI should make a video responding to this in turn?

Too cool for school

Sign our yearbook by tweeting a message using #yearbook or join the class at www.twitter.com/jobs

All thinking movie goers have a place in their hearts for Wes Anderson. I don't go back as far as Bottle Rocket myself but I've been on board from Rushmore up to Fantastic Mr Fox.

Quite why Twitter have chosen to promote a recruitment drive with a tribute to this scene from Rushmore I don't know, though it looks like fun.

Perhaps they're plugging in to the aspirational "My top schools where I want to apply to are Oxford and the Sorbonne. My safety's Harvard."

Manioc

Ben's got a friend from a Brazilian family. They were cooking the other day when we dropped him back, and gave me what I would have taken for a chip (French or freedom fry) to sample.

"It's manioc," I was told.

It turns out that manioc is the same thing as cassava, and I remember cassava from the dismissive references made to it in Blood River.

I noticed what I took to be cassava outside the Sri Lankan shop at the bottom of the road, and took it in to ask the proprietor if I was right. He explained that I was, then took out a knife to show me how to peel it, stressing that I should make sure to discard the dry, hard sections at the end.

I took it home, sliced, parboiled and deep fried it, the served it up with some jerk chicken as a tribute to Jamaican Bammy which is deep-fried cassava flatbread.

Hardly "to see the world in a grain of sand," I'll grant you, but still a good example of the rewards of following your eyes, ears, nose and taste buds. A lot of the time the richness of your experience is as much down to your attitude as your environment.

abbreviated art.

Compare and contrast the sublime:

"I can't think of a nicer place to sit this spring over a glass of rosé and watch the boys and girls in the street outside smiling gaily to each other, and wondering where to go for a nosh."

with the tin-eared:

"I can't think of a nicer place to sit this spring over a glass of rosé and watch the boys and girls in the street outside smiling gaily to each other, and wondering where to go for nosh."

I know I'm late to this but you can read Giles Coren's expletive strewn rant about a sub-editor's mutilation of his copy by the removal of a single indefinite article here.

He is a comedy writer of genius, though it is a Pooterish genius rather than the belle-lettrist genius he seems to imagine.

I was working on the proof of one of my poems all the morning, and took out a comma. In the afternoon I put it back again.

Oscar Wilde

tiny desk

Here's some evidence of Tom Jones stripping his sound down early last year and before Praise and Blame. I really like Brian Monroney's understated guitar playing on this.

What I wouldn't give to see Tiny Elvis perform at the Tiny Desk.

129,864,880

When you are part of a company that is trying to digitize all the books in the world, the first question you often get is: “Just how many books are out there?”

Well, it all depends ........

Counting only things that are printed and bound, we arrive at about 146 million. This is our best answer today. It will change as we get more data and become more adept at interpreting what we already have.

Our handling of serials is still imperfect. Serials cataloging practices vary widely across institutions. The volume descriptions are free-form and are often entered as an afterthought. For example, “volume 325, number 6”, “no. 325 sec. 6”, and “V325NO6” all describe the same bound volume ......

Prodnose: That old chestnut. There is nothing I like better than a good "same bound volume" ploy.

After we exclude serials, we can finally count all the books in the world. There are 129,864,880 of them. At least until Sunday.

The annoying orange

According to Mashable, The Annoying Orange is the most watched web series; too much weird ppl in dis world.

Also on the infomaniac beat, RIP Google Wave. "We celebrate our failures," says Eric Schmidt; a modest man with much, it would seem to be modest about. Can Buzz be far behind the hearse?

Feed, Fight, Fornicate

I found myself reading "Eat, Pray, Love: One Woman's Search for Everything Across Italy, India and Indonesia" last night for God's sake. I can sort of understand how I got there from the "idiot-participatory" martial arts genre via "Yoga School Drop Out", but it still came as something of a shock.

Luckily perhaps, there was a daft assertion about numerology early in the book that woke me from my reverie. [The individual digits of any factor of nine - in turn a factor of three - will always add up to nine or to a factor of nine, for the simple reason that we are recording them in a base ten system Ms Gilbert.]

I tried watching Factotum (a darkly comic adaptation of Charles Bukowski's semi-autobiographical novel about a writer trying to avoid distractions such as his personal peccadilloes of women, gambling and alcohol) to regain some perspective, then set my chest hair on fire "to see what would happen" but I fear it is only a temporary reprieve.

Taking the "p" out of politics?

The internet and the 2010 election

One of the objectives of this short volume ...... is to cut through some of the hype to provide some empirical evidence of the internet’s place in the election and also assess what realistically we might expect from the internet. Hence, Gibson et al’s contribution provides some of the first concerted evidence on the public’s engagement with the internet during the election. The data presented indicates significant rises, since 2005, in internet use across a range of election activities that cannot simply be explained by the growth of the technology alone.

Andy Williamson’s chapter contextualises the role of the internet and social media into longer term changes. One of the suggestions here is that we might not even be looking in the right places to see the influence of the internet, that its real effects are more subtle and away from traditional political arenas in a wider range of online social spaces. The internet is relevant to a campaign because it is an important medium in the lives of so many.

Building on Williamson’s argument, Mark Pack tells us that the internet has now become an organisational necessity for election campaigning but that it has not brought about that strategic change that some have argued we should expect. He argues that the internet has not removed hierarchies or elites. Instead it has created new elites. Pack further suggests that more dramatic changes are likely to occur to the business of governing partly as a result public sharing of information and the opening up of public data.

Matthew McGregor and Will Straw’s chapters focus on aspects of the parties online campaigns. Whilst direct transfer of US style campaigns might not work in the UK, Straw notes that lessons from the 2008 US campaigns were learnt by both Labour and the Conservatives and did play an active part in their 2010 campaigns. He goes further, concentrating in particular on Labour’s use of online tools to help generate local mobilisation and how this might also be taken forward in the context of the current leadership election.

Although much of the media excitement was around social media, one of the key lessons of the Obama campaign was the value of the less sexy email databases and of developing ongoing communication strategies. McGregor highlights differences in the main parties’ strategic approach to new media and suggests that whilst the UK parties arguably began to understand some of the significance of e-campaigning they still failed to fully buy into concept. They still either operated on old-fashioned, top-down broadcasting principles (Conservatives) or only sporadically linked online mobilisation to offline activity (Labour).

A little background reading. It's not all fun and games you know.

Big Weekend

I'm back from Wales and a Big Weekend bookended by a Cardiff Arms Park Mail Choir serenaded anniversary party and the Evolution of Wales exhibition taken in just before departing.

A 4,600 million-year voyage lends a sense of perspective to the M4 you see.

Gold

We are off down to Wales later today for my Mum and Dad's 50th wedding anniversary tomorrow.

In the Commonwealth realms, one can receive a message from the monarch for 60th, 65th, and 70th wedding anniversaries, and any wedding anniversary after that. This is done by applying to Buckingham Palace in the United Kingdom, or to the Governor-General's office in the other Commonwealth realms.

In Canada, one can also receive a message from the Governor General for 50th and 55th anniversaries.

The situation is similar in Australia, where one can receive a letter of congratulations from the Governor-General on the 50th and all subsequent wedding anniversaries; the Prime Minister, the federal Opposition leader, local members of parliament (both state and federal), and state Governors may also send salutations for the same anniversaries.

In the United States, one can receive a greeting from the President for any wedding anniversary on or after the 50th.

Roman Catholics may apply for a Papal blessing through their local diocese for wedding anniversaries of a special nature (25th, 50th, 60th, etc.).

So ten years until the Queen has to step up the plate though President Obama would be on the case if we were Yanks.

Normal service will be resumed after the weekend.

Hardback Times

Rather than letting Amazon take the strain, I went to a bookshop to buy a present earlier this week, so that I could inscribe it. (Happy birthday John.)

Before I went, I printed out my Amazon wish list in case I could pick some of the volumes on it up. Fat chance. To my jaundiced eye, the necessarily limited range of a physical shop now seems ridiculously narrow. I was particularly outraged by the parsimonious offerings in the philosophy section for some reason that probably reflects badly on me.

I settled myself down with a significant Amazon order when I got home.

I can't help but wonder if I'm not behind the curve with my attachment to physical books though. E-books outsell hardbacks on Amazon and Amazon has anniunced that its Kindle store has sold over one million digital copies of the books in Stieg Larsson's Millennium Trilogy: "The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo," "The Girl Who Played with Fire" and "The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest" (Icons passim) making him the first author to make it into seven figures for ebook sales.

Round and Round

The Bomber and I took a spin on Boris' new CS7 cycle superhighway on the weekend, and I confess to being very impressed, and entirely comfortable with my nine year old navigating it which is not something I can generally say about cycling on the road.

There's a TFL online cycling route planner now (here) and the London bike hire scheme launches this week, so it is all action on the two wheeler front.

Cardiff as ever appears to be in the lead though, if more modest, with bikes available as near to Bronwydd Avenue as Roath Park Rec.

From the nothing new under the sun department I recommend this 1936 Pathe News cycling tips film:

Evelyn Hamilton, women's professional cycling champion gives cycling tips - covering fashion and safety. M/S of Evelyn having her legs massaged. She stands up and stretches her arms. She is wearing a revealing bikini.

Various shots of Evelyn cycling down road on racing bike. She wears natty beret and plus fours trousers ........

a truth universally acknowledged

It is a truth universally acknowledged that a girl of a certain age, and in a certain situation in life, must be in want of a right hook.

There is an almost irresistible steampunk brio here. I'm finding myself spending more and more time with viral videos.

Pretentious, moi?

If we think of time as orthogonal to space, a stream-based, time-based Cybersphere is the traditional Internet flipped on its side in digital space-time. The traditional web-shaped Internet consists (in effect) of many flat panels chaotically connected. Instead of flat sites, where information is arranged in space, we want deep sites that are slices of time. When we look at such a site onscreen, it's natural to imagine the past extending into (or beyond) the screen, and the future extending forward in front of the screen; the future flows towards the screen, into the screen and then deeper into the space beyond the screen.

Rubbing Salt

It dawned on me, as the lights dimmed for the screening of Salt, that I have never actually seen noted baby-hoarder Angelina Jolie DO anything. Except hoard babies ..

Reading Lindy West on the new movie "Salt" this morning, it struck me how many of the writers who make me laugh lately are women.

A little further research into this new release having revealed that Ms Jolie trained muay Thai under the supervision of the action director has left me pondering what a long shadow Icons passim throw over what little I manage to take in from all that streams by me.

But seriously

More GELERNTER:

25. If we think of time as orthogonal to space, a stream-based, time-based Cybersphere is the traditional Internet flipped on its side in digital space-time. The traditional web-shaped Internet consists (in effect) of many flat panels chaotically connected. Instead of flat sites, where information is arranged in space, we want deep sites that are slices of time. When we look at such a site onscreen, it's natural to imagine the past extending into (or beyond) the screen, and the future extending forward in front of the screen; the future flows towards the screen, into the screen and then deeper into the space beyond the screen.

That is a posh way of describing something we've done for launch next week. Watch this space.

Ymerodraeth State of Mind

I have officially heard Jay Z and Alicia Keys enough times to last me the rest of my life, though it is watching the video just once more to see just how clever the Newport version is.

In Dreams

We are trapped by assumptions that unravel as soon as we think about them: "we" meaning not only laymen but many philosophers and scientists. Here are three important wrong assumptions.

Many people believe that "thinking" is basically the same as "reasoning."

But when you stop work for a moment, look out the window and let your mind wander, you are still thinking. Your mind is still at work. This sort of free-association is an important part of human thought. No computer will be able to think like a man unless it can free-associate.

Many people believe that reality is one thing and your thoughts are something else. Reality is on the outside; the mental landscape created by your thoughts is inside your head, within your mind. (Assuming that you're sane.)

Yet we each hallucinate every day, when we fall asleep and dream. And when you hallucinate, your own mind redefines reality for you; "real" reality, outside reality, disappears. No computer will be able to think like a man unless it can hallucinate.

Many people believe that the thinker and the thought are separate. For many people, "thinking" means (in effect) viewing a stream of thoughts as if it were a PowerPoint presentation: the thinker watches the stream of his thoughts. This idea is important to artificial intelligence and the computationalist view of the mind. If the thinker and his thought-stream are separate, we can replace the human thinker by a computer thinker without stopping the show. The man tiptoes out of the theater. The computer slips into the empty seat. The PowerPoint presentation continues.

But when a person is dreaming, hallucinating — when he is inside a mind-made fantasy landscape — the thinker and his thought-stream are not separate. They are blended together. The thinker inhabits his thoughts. No computer will be able to think like a man unless it, too, can inhabit its thoughts; can disappear into its own mind.

I give you DAVID GELERNTER's DREAM-LOGIC, THE INTERNET AND ARTIFICIAL THOUGHT. Read it at least a couple of times.

What good is it?

Courtesy of the Grauniard, I learn that the new Tom Jones album is available for preview for free at http://www.we7.com/#/album/Tom-Jones/Praise--Blame.

Free music - Praise & Blame

What do we think? Praise or blame? It's no use asking me, I think everything he does is great.

P.S. I have never previously heard of http://www.we7.com/.

Music and Fun

I ticked a lot of boxes yesterday by going to the Strawberry Hill Music and Fun Day in Twickenham.

1. Exercise. I cycled over and back, getting my cardio for the day done in the sun.

2. Socialise. Met up with a lot of old friends I don't see enough. These days a shirtless Dommy is eerily reminiscent of the Iggy Pop puppet in the Swiftcover TV advert.

3. Food and drink. "This is a song for anyone who has been drinking all day. It's about drinking all day, and its called ...... Drinking All Day" announced Duncan McManus of the Biblecode Sundays.

4. Music. The Downliners Sect formed in 1963 but still deliver the goods. (Downliners Sect on Spotify.)

5. Contributed to a good cause, supporting the restoration of Strawberry Hill House, Britain's only Gothic castle. See serendipitous Icons passim.

My Beautiful Laundrette

The washing machine that came with the house when I bought it has finally given up the ghost, so I went along to Curry's to sort out a replacement yesterday. At first I couldn't find any fitted machines at all as they were in a completely different part of the shop to the bog-standard ones. Then when I finally discovered and chose a suitable model I was told it couldn't be installed until August 19th, so I just gave up on the whole thing and sulked.

This - in short - is why I found myself in a launderette first thing this morning for the first time in twenty odd years. There was a notice on the wall saying that the machines only took the "new 50p pieces". These new coins came out in 1997. So little had changed from the ambience that I remembered that I found it rather soothing to sit there for forty minutes or so reading ancient Mail on Sunday "lifestyle" supplements and reminiscing.

I used to do my washing lunchtimes on Sunday, so long ago that in those days the pubs only opened from noon until 2pm, and I'd sit in the Nelson with the boys for a pint or wto while my smalls revolved in water then hot air a little further up the road.

featuring ludicrous is right

Prodnose: YouTube phenom Justin Bieber has nabbed the honour of having the most-viewed YouTube video of all time from Lady Gaga’s “Bad Romance” capturing 245,746,720 views for his vid “Baby ft. Ludacris.” against her 245,570,952.

Myself: The Shallows: How the Internet is Changing the Way We Think, Read and Remember draws on the latest research to show that the Net is literally re-wiring our brains inducing only superficial understanding. As a consequence there are profound changes in the way we live and communicate, remember and socialise - even in our very conception of ourselves. By moving from the depths of thought to the shallows of distraction, the web, it seems, is actually fostering ignorance.

(Attention on the Beach and) Promenade

The second Jazz Friday of Abbeyfest has rolled around already.

I was talking to Mark at the first last week and telling him how much we enjoyed the promenade performance of Romeo and Juliet last year that took the production all round the Mills and the Chapter House. He said that he hadn't managed to sort out anything similar this year, but that he would have liked to do Cyrano de Bergerac.

I've had pretty much the same thought as there are so may scenes like the opening at the theatre, the baker, the cadets etc. in which the audience could actually "play" the production's in situ spectators. There is also, of course, the issue of my own - currently moribund - translation.

The upshot of a booze fuelled discussion is that, if I can finish it by around next March, they'll do my version here in 2011.

I aspire to the take-it-to-the street genius that is improveverywhere below:

Track 77

I lost my copy of the new Prince album when it was given away with the Mirror on Saturday, but now - due to some "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius" type disruption in the space-time continuum - I appear to have two copies in my gaff.

The stand out is a hidden track; number 77. That's right it comes after sixty odd brief silent efforts. The easiest way to get to it is to go back from track 1. I ripped it to a PC and tried adding it to the "local" files in Spotify thinking that would give me access to it from wherever I ran the app, but no luck so what then is the point of this feature?

Catch Laydown on YouTube while you can.

... from the heart of Minnesota, here come the purple Yoda, guaranteed to bring the dirty new sound...

Christmas with Milo

Our original (2006 vintage) XBox 360 has long gone kaput, but it seems to me that the new slimline, wireless XBox 360 S plus the "controller-free gaming and entertainment experience" provided by the Kinect (previously Natal) looks like a must for Christmas.

Every night around this time

I read the Guardian and I need to go to The National Cowboy Poetry Gathering because:

• Young men from the Basque Country arrived in Elko in the 1870s to work as ranch hands, and now dedicate themselves to serving food whose quality is matched only by its quantity. On our first night we make the amateur's mistake of ordering a meal each, only to be defeated by a perfect filet mignon the size of a baseball mitt, incredible lamb steaks larger than most sheep, and side dishes which might elsewhere be mistaken for swimming pools.
  
• Ramblin' Jack [Elliott] did not acquire his nickname because of a penchant for long walks: in nearly an hour onstage, he gets around to three songs, including Dylan's Don't Think Twice, It's Alright. The rest of the time is taken up with a tangent-riddled anecdote about teaching his dog to drive. It contains not a single punchline, and is one of the funniest things I've ever heard.
  
• It occurs to me to ask Ron what line of work he's in. "Well, Andrew," he says, in that punctiliously courteous way Americans have of employing your name as if it's an honorific, "right at the moment, I'm chief justice of the Nevada Supreme Court."

24–29 January 2011.

Four legs good, two wheels bad

I cycled 22km on Saturday with the Bomber, another nine year old, and another adult. The overwhelming majority of it was along the Wandle Trail which is a designated bike path, but - I hold my hands up - on at least a few hundred yards of it the kids cycled on the pavement.

They're not officially allowed to do this, but I heard on the radio on the way to work this morning that the Mayor and the Met are thinking of changing the rules to permit it.

This is just common sense. The fallout from a child on a bike accidentally colliding with an adult on the pavement is trivial compared to the potential consequences of an adult in a car hitting a child on a bike in the highway.

I am also - as you may imagine - in Boris J's camp when it comes to kids cycling to school.

Further - hat tip Chris - I add that all Welsh eyes should be following Cardiff's Geraint Thomas in this year's Tour de France.

You're sublime, I'm ridiculous

In 2007 I got a new Prince album with the Mail on Sunday. Yesterday I got a new Prince album with the Daily Mirror.

I listened to the first couple of tracks in the car, but when I got home I put the CD down somewhere and now I can't seem to find it again.

In the age of LastFM and Spotify, my ability even to cope with music distributed on a physical object seems to have atrophied away to nothing,

Yellow Belt

The Bomber got his fourth mon at judo on Thursday so he's now a yellow belt. At first he only thought he was going to be playing uke on someone's else's grading so it was a nice surprise when Darren tested him out as well. A marker like this every four months or so is a good way of evaluating and rewarding progress, and there are 18 mons altogether, so that will be plenty to keep him occupied while he is a junior.

We're off for a cycle this afternoon along with his mate Jonnie, and Jonnie's dad Andy as the four of us are doing the Richmond to Windsor bike ride with Bondy et al later this year.

It would be good if I could get him to comb his hair or take a shower from time to time without having to resort to threats of blood curdling violence but overall things are pretty good.

The only real mistake I've made lately is to expose him to my - admittedly very fine - Yoda and Obi-Wan Kenobi impersonations. Has lead him, this has to demand like the Jedi master I speak to his friends to my toe-curling embarrassment.

In future, my own counsel will I keep on who is to hear. A Jedi must have the deepest commitment, the most serious mind. This one a long time have I watched. All his life has he looked away... zzzzzzzzzz

500 million friends

David "Fight Club" Fincher has directed a new movie written by Aaron "West Wing" Sorkin. It's a story about the founders of the social-networking website, Facebook. It is scored by Trent Reznor.

That's enough cognitive dissonance for one morning. I am going for a lie down.

Lunchtime Update

It gets stranger. Here is the founder of Facebook shooting the video conference breeze with the Prime Minister, as posted by No10 on their YouTube channel today.

Paul the psychic octopus

Paul, an octopus in a German zoo who predicts the national side's football results, maintained his 100 per cent accuracy rate at this World Cup by foreseeing the team's downfall at the hands of Spain.
.....
His keeper, Oliver Walenciak, said before the match: "We know that all octopus have nine brains so we know he has exceptional powers.
.....
Paul's unwavering accuracy this year has even seen him become a target for furious Argentinian fans, who blamed him for their side's quarter final defeat against Germany and threatened to eat him.

Spillers

Spillers is the oldest record shop in the world! I never had an inkling. Let's bend the rules a little and elevate a shop to the rank of Welsh Born Icon.

As we're in the neighbourhood be sure to catch "What good am I?" - a profile of Lord Jones of Treforest, on the BBC Iplayer while you can.

ATTN: Sepp Blatter

In the year 2000, an English heritage blue plaque commemorating Mr John Brodie, who died at the age of 76 in 1934, was unveiled on the late Victorian detached villa he had occupied in Ullet Road, Liverpool.

He invented the football goal net. "After he witnessed a near riot at Everton's Goodison Park stadium when nobody could agree on whether the ball had actually crossed the goal line. He perceived the value of attaching a net to the goalposts to catch the ball: the result was a "net pocket", patented by Mr Brodie in 1889."

On the day of the first World Cup semi-final, we may all pause to reflect that perhaps "goal line technology is not so new after all.

Summer Lightning

A star cast in a timeless comedy.

Affably absent-minded Earl of Emsworth, preparing his prize-winning pig Empress of Blandings for the Shropshire Agricultural Show, is afraid that rival pig-owner Sir Gregory Parsloe is planning to nobble his precious Empress. Parsloe fears that Emsworth's brother Galahad's memoirs contain scurrilous stories about their younger days in the naughty 1890s - particularly a racy story involving some prawns. He plans to hire private detective Percy Pilbeam to purloin the manuscript.

Emsworth's sister Lady Constance, equally desperate to stop publication, also has a secret plan.

And romance is in the air. His Lordship's new secretary and Emsworth's niece Millicent are secretly in love, but need financial help to pull off the marital merger. Emsworth's nephew, Ronnie Fish, is also in love with an unsuitable person - chorus girl Sue Brown. But Emsworth refuses to allow Ronnie any more money. Ronnie concocts a plan to regain his uncle's approval.

Pig-napping, private detection, impostering, mistaken situations, fisticuffs and broken engagements ensue. All is set for glorious mid-summer mayhem.

Public service broadcasting still thrives in some parts of the BBC. I note with some concern however that the current IPlayer link for this:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b00swkc1/Classic_Serial_Summer_Lightning_Episode_1/

is much better than the pop up in the current beta:
http://beta.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/console/b00swkc1/Classic_Serial_Summer_Lightning_Episode_1

Kingdom of Ife

I went along to the British Museum's Kingdom of Ife exhibition yesterday with the vague idea that sculptures from West Africa may throw some light on the African mask that I bought from our auction site back in 2004.

All the exhibits were brass, copper, stone or terracotta with no stylistic kinship with the mask at all as far as I could tell, but they were extraordinary works and well worth a visit. I was also surprised that they generally seemed to be portraits from life rather than the stylised images I was expecting.

(PS A club contest judo gold medal for the bomber yesterday morning. Cool that it is just a footnote these days.)

Night Shift

I love every minute Marvin Gaye committed to vinyl with the exception of "The Onion Song" which I hate as much as I hate "Dignity" by Deacon Blue and "Big Yellow Taxi" by Moany Jitchell.

Go figure.

The Chinese Dining Room

I had a meeting in the Chinese Dining Room today. An interesting companion piece to the meeting in the Yellow Drawing Room last February: See Icons passim.

Prodnose: The Chinese Dining Room?

Myself (as if to a child): Its just another name for the Pavilion Breakfast Room. (Muttering under breath) God give me strength!

Abbeyfest 2010

From Russia with Love

Anna Chapman "appears every inch the part, using her charm, beauty and high-society connections to move with ease through the circles of power and use other people to find out state secrets."

I find it hilarious that a lot of the hack profiling of the "femme fatale" at the centre of the cracked Russian spies network in the US appears to be sourced from her Linkedin and Facebook pages.

They seem to be http://www.linkedin.com/in/chapmananna and http://www.facebook.com/chapmananya. Apologies if that is wrong.

Let's just luxuriate in vaguely relevant Bond quotes:

Prodnose: Siamese fighting fish, fascinating creatures. Brave but on the whole stupid. Yes they're stupid. Except for the occasional one such as we have here who lets the other two fight. While he waits. Waits until the survivor is so exhausted that he cannot defend himself, and then like SPECTRE... he strikes!

Myself: I find the parallel... amusing.

Prodnose: Our organization did not arrange for you to come over from the Russians just for amusement, Number 3.

Current Events

In the "War of Currents" era (sometimes, "War of the Currents" or "Battle of
Currents") in the late 1880s, George Westinghouse and Thomas Edison became adversaries due to Edison's promotion of direct current (DC) for electric power distribution over alternating current (AC) advocated by Westinghouse and Nikola Tesla.
.......
Edison opposed capital punishment, but his desire to disparage the system of alternating current led to the invention of the electric chair. Harold P. Brown, who was at this time being secretly paid by Edison, constructed the first electric chair for the state of New York in order to promote the idea that alternating current was deadlier than DC.

When the chair was first use, on August 6, 1890, the technicians on hand misjudged the voltage needed to kill the condemned prisoner, William Kemmler. The first jolt of electricity was not enough to kill Kemmler, and only left him badly injured. The procedure had to be repeated and a reporter on hand described it as "an awful spectacle, far worse than hanging." George Westinghouse commented: "They would have done better using an axe."

There is such a thing as bad publicity. There's no such thing as bad electricity.

I say! What a bounder

Obviously this morning I am with the majority who think that it is absurd that Frank Lampard's goal wasn't given and that the introduction of technology to sense if a ball crosses the line in first class matches is a no-brainer.

Will it be infallible though? I remember Boris Onishchenko in the 1976 Olympic Modern Pentathlon?

During Onishchenko's bout with their captain, Jim Fox, the British team protested that Onishchenko's weapon had gone off without actually hitting anything.
.....
In electric épée fencing, a touch is registered on the scoring box when the tip of the weapon is depressed with a force of 750 grams, completing a circuit formed by the weapon, body cord, and box. It was found that his épée had been modified to include a switch that allowed him to close this circuit without actually depressing the tip of his weapon. Unlike foil, there are no off-target hits in épée, so Onishchenko could get away with this form of cheating if it appeared to onlookers that he had struck anything at all.

Newspapers decried him as "Disonischenko" and "Boris the Cheat". Onishchenko earned the enmity of other Soviet Olympic team members: for example, USSR volleyball team members threatened to throw him out of the hotel's window if they met him.

I should really purse my lips, but there is a certain caddish swagger in rigging up a switch that let's you score at will that appeals to something disreputable in me. Not knowing what Onishchenko looks or looked like, I can't help but visualise him as Terry-Thomas.

Here We Come A-wassailing

I drove down to Cardiff yesterday to see Phil before he emigrated, only to find that almost everyone else in Great Britain was on their way there as well for Armed Forces Day and/or the Paul McCartney gig in the Millennium Stadium enormo dome.

I took the flag of St George off the car at the service station before the Severn Bridge as there's no sense in tempting providence. I hope this wasn't some kind of curse as it won't be going back up now that Germany have walloped England four one and they're out of the World Cup.

The Evil of Two Lessers

Well folks, here it is the the Rolling Stone article that brought down a general.

Compare and contrast Churchill and Alan Brooke in WWII. That is all I have to say. No links. You do a bit of research if you're interested enough.

a true gent

The two guys in white suits practising ne-waza attacks against their defending partners in the phtoto above are:

• the Bomber - centre back
• Kosei Inoue: Olympic gold medalist, multiple world champion, and David Beckham of Japan - front left.

Ben has got a poster of Inoue in action on his bedroom wall at home, though he didn't recongise him as the face is obscured and he put it up "because it looked cool".

The official opening of the dojo and Clubmark Award was a night to remember.

Oh, what's occurring?

Julia Eileen Gillard (born 29 September 1961 in Barry, Wales, United Kingdom) is the 27th Prime Minister of Australia, and is the first woman to hold that office. She was sworn in as Australia's 27th Prime Minister on 24 June 2010.

A Welsh Born Icon previously unknown to me.

Prodnose: Oh, that red head of hers is no lie.

Slovenia and success

Winston Gordon (see Icons passim) won a gold medal at judo in Celje, Slovenia last weekend. It only occurred to me last night (very likely because I am as stupid as a goose) that this is the same Slovenia that England are facing in a do-or-die football match this afternoon.

This is how the BJA reported it:

Leading the way was long-time standout Winston Gordon who provided a timely reminder of the talent which saw him compete at the 2004 and 2008 Olympics, by surging to gold in the under 90kg weight category.

Gordon, 33, who was returning to the British fold after a nine month absence, showed he was in peak condition as he continued his return from a knee injury.

“It’s a nice feeling to get back in the swing of things,” said Gordon.

“I went out and I enjoyed it, it’s important to make sure I’m ticking all the right boxes and my techniques are looking sharp. Hopefully I can push from here and keep on the mind of the selectors.”

Gordon, who's itching to compete at London 2012, won his five fights in emphatic fashion, four coming by way of ippon.

I see him regularly when I take the Bomber to his judo lessons, so I've watched him go from crutches, to a walking stick, and back to the podium over 2009 and 10.

It is an inspiring example of character. Would that England's football team exhibited similar moxie.

How to Explain Pictures to a Dead Hare

Beuys’s first solo exhibition in a private gallery opened on November 26, 1965 with one of the artist’s most famous and compelling performances: How to Explain Pictures to a Dead Hare. The artist could be viewed through the glass of the gallery’s window. His face was covered in honey and gold leaf, an iron slab was attached to his boot. In his arms he cradled a dead hare, into whose ear he mumbled muffled noises as well as explanations of the drawings that lined the walls.

Beuys our troubles are over.

"So no, creativity is not about ‘blue-sky thinking’ but about destruction and loss, transformed into art through the arduous creative process."

The Scottish Play

I went - as a last minute sub - to see Macbeth at the Globe on Saturday night. It's the first time I've ever been and it's great.

It opened in 1997 so I have been "on the brink" of bowling up there for thirteen years. I'll certainly be going again before 2023.

Curiously, I found out yesterday that Ollie and her mum are going there tonight to see Henry VIII. Small world etc.

Après moi le déluge

My mind is a raging torrent, flooded with rivulets of coffee cascading into a waterfall of creative alternatives.

My mind is a raging torrent, flooded with rivulets of thought cascading into a waterfall of creative alternatives

"I didn't come here to save the day," an emotional Costner told reporters here on Friday, adding: "I have come to participate."

It's still far from a happy ending, but I can't help but be cheered by BP's decision to add Kevin Costner's Ocean Therapy Solutions technology to its arsenal in fighting the oil spill.

Hedy Lamarr's U.S. Patent 2,292,387 serves as a basis for modern spread-spectrum communication technology, such as COFDM used in Wi-Fi network connections and CDMA used in some cordless and wireless telephones.

Imagine reading the National Enquirer if I edited it.

Artemis Fowl

Reading this morning in the Grauniard that "the children of Britain have spoken, choosing Eoin Colfer's modern bestseller Artemis Fowl as their favourite Puffin of all time ahead of classic titles including Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and Stig of the Dump", I've popped the book into my Amazon wishlist as a reminder to pick a copy up for the Bomber.

Amazon sell a downloadable Artemis Fowl (Unabridged) audio edition of the book as well as the text itself so I may invest in that at the same time. I've been working though Stephen Fry's unabridged Harry Potter readings with Ben on our drives to Cardiff etc. and supplementing that with the physical books which seems to be a good way of kick starting a reading habit.

I've thought for a while though that what I would really like to be able to buy is a license for a book that included the book and access to an audio version in a single package. It would work for me as well him. It would be handy to be able to listen from wherever I am up to in the Millennium trilogy next time I have to drive somewhere, grinding as I currently am through three brick size paperbacks.

Any publishers listening?

Golden Eyeful

You know the world is changing when the next Bond movie is on "indefinite hold" but Daniel Craig is in the next Bond video game.

I can remember Raybs playing the original GoldenEye 007 on the Nintendo 64. He would often pistol whip his foes on the backside rather than shooting them and roar with laughter. I was never quite sure if that was a good or bad thing.

Round and Round

Our Twitter App got caught in the same bind as everyone else yesterday and Tweeted the same message once a minute from quarter past eight in the morning until nine when I got into the office, noticed the problem and shut it down.

During this period our client lost followers after months of steady gains. Admittedly it was only 0.15% of them, but - note to self - there is no reason for them to give a hoot whose fault it was.

The Boy with a Chip on his Shoulder

I just finished reading "The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo".

It was almost entirely devoid of literary merit.

The story would occasionally shudder to a halt so that the author could subject the reader to a "Ragged Trousered Philanthropists" style explicatory rant on misogyny in contemporary Sweden.

I've never read a book in which the characters made so many sandwiches. (It was strangely reminiscent of Sara Paretsky's VI Warshawski having a bath every two minutes.)

I read the section in which (plot spoiler ahead) a dungeon in which girls have been degraded and done to death is discovered and described, as I was sitting on a bench in the park half watching my nine year old play with his friends, and felt disgusted.

Yet on completing it, I went out and bought the next two volumes in the trilogy; a page turner indeed.

Vuvuzela

Four days into the Wold Cup, and my brain is already completely frazzled by the droning of the vuvuzela.

A vuvuzela, sometimes called a "lepatata" (its Setswana name) or a stadium horn, is a blowing horn approximately 1 m (3 ft 3 in) in length. It is commonly blown by fans at football matches in South Africa. The instrument requires some lip and lung strength to blow and emits a loud monotone (B♭). Commentators have described the sound as "annoying" and compared it with "a stampede of noisy elephants," "a deafening swarm of locusts," "a goat on the way to slaughter" and "a giant hive full of very angry bees."

The sound level of the instrument has been measured at 131 dB(A) at the opening of the horn and at 113 dB(A) two metres in front of the opening, both dangerously high levels for unprotected ears.

Perhaps - as the tone it drones is B♭- I could try drowning it out by amping up a guitar through a flanger and jamming on Purple Rain for the entire ninety minutes of any game I watch? A cure can be worse than the disease.

Silver

The Bomber won a silver medal yesterday at the British Judo London Area Pro Active Fundamental Event so I am chuffed.

I haven't got any photgraphs though. You were allowed to use cameras as long as you registered at the desk but camera phones were absolutely verboten; some sort of incomprehensible child protection measure I suppose

The Great Spare-Time Revolution

I am posting this link to Cognitive Surplus: The Great Spare-Time Revolution somewhat ironically as I haven't had time to read it yet, and there is so much we have planned to do today that I am blogging at quarter to seven in the morning in case I don't have time later.

On me 'ead, son!

The World Cup is upon us.

For those of you who remain bewildered by the mysterious global appeal of the world's most popular sport, for example, I can guarantee that this book will bewilder you even more—but in a good way! Attend to the enduring dictum of the working-class Sophocles of England, the legendary former manager of Liverpool Football Club, Bill Shankly. One of the book's essays quotes from his line: "Some people think football is a matter of life and death. I am very disappointed in that attitude. I can assure them it is much more serious than that."

For those worried by dubious behavior on Wall Street, see the splendid essay "How to Appreciate the Fingertip Save," in which Edward Winters quotes the guiding principle of Albert Camus—the existential novelist who played goalkeeper as a young man in Algeria: "All that I know of morality I learnt from football."

Or, for those who believe that the irresistible universality of the game will be breaking through in America any day now, see the essay "The Hand of God and Other Soccer . . . Miracles?" in which Kirk McDermid cites St. Thomas Aquinas' identification of the crucial elements that make an event truly miraculous.

Robert Northcott discusses Kierkegaard's concept of anxiety in relation to penalty shots, but right now the Danish philosopher's thinking is best applied to England's dark, neurotic fear of what would be a thoroughly deserved national disgrace should the United States beat England in the teams' opening World Cup match on Saturday.

Is there, perhaps, one too many high-flown footballing philosophy in the book? There is. (And there isn't.) The claim that Nietzsche would have been an enthusiastic supporter of the London club, Arsenal, is curiously speculative when everyone knows that he would have rooted for the steamrollers of Europe, Inter Milan. Another of the essayists—raving about the artistic skills of one of the greatest footballers of our time, Cristiano Ronaldo—calls on the aesthetics of Plato and Aristotle to ponder: "Is Ronaldo a Modern Picasso?" To which we might be tempted to respond: "Maybe so. But could Picasso bend it like Beckham?"

And then where would we be? The answer to that is exactly where the authors of "Soccer and Philosophy" want us to be: thinking in fresh and intriguing ways about the Beautiful Game we thought we knew. "The Loneliness of the Referee," Jonathan Crowe's wonderful essay, is particularly appealing to all who, like myself, yell irrational abuse at that ultimate despot and strutting God of the stadium, the ref. But only when his unbelievably blind decisions go against us. The referee, in other words, is to blame for everything.

Mr. Crowe first reminds us that the existential philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre was an avid student of football—see his "Critique of Dialectical Reason," where he remarks with undeniable wisdom: "In a football match, everything is complicated by the presence of the other team."

See Icons passim, as ever.

Take Me Out to the Ball Game

"Grand Baseball Matches in Welsh and American Style." Quite so, as the two world centres of baseball are:

1. the USA
2. Cardiff

Wikipedia provides the skinny.

In the Wandle

Police are trying to determine if a headless body dragged from the River Wandle by police divers on Monday morning could have originated in Croydon.

Pathologists at St George’s Hospital were conducting a post-mortem on the unidentified man while police kept a 100m section of the river downstream of Plough Lane, Wimbledon, sealed off, at the time of going to press.

Unconfirmed reports suggest divers were back in the river, yards from the former home of Wimbledon FC, searching for a head on Tuesday morning.

Police are unclear if the heavily decomposed body broke up naturally or as a result of criminal behaviour. A homicide investigation is pending results from the post-mortem.

A passer-by walking along the towpath alerted police at 9.30am on Monday after spotting the body floating in the river yards from the new Sanctuary housing development.

And so it goes

I have been following http://twitter.com/ghuwevans/ since Chris blogged about his movie last year.

Yesterday I read:

MERANTAU WARRIOR UK RELEASE TODAY! Available for download on iTunes at http://tinyurl.com/39fcw2r

So I bought, downloaded and watched it last night. It is great by the way. Interesting as well that my purchase was entirely sparked and accomplished online; Chris Howells blog begat Gareth Evan's Twitter begat Steve Jobs' ITunes.

I was really only peripherally aware that you could buy and rent movies from ITunes, and must look more deeply into it. Would I be able to carry Merantau round on an IPhone if I had one for example?

In like Flynn

Strasbourg, 04.06.2010 – The handling of the H1N1 pandemic by the World Health Organization (WHO), EU agencies and national governments led to a “waste of large sums of public money, and unjustified scares and fears about the health risks faced by the European public”, according to a report by the Social, Health and Family Affairs Committee of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE) made public today in Paris.

The report, prepared by Paul Flynn (United Kingdom, SOC) and approved today by the committee ahead of a plenary debate at the end of this month, says there was “overwhelming evidence that the seriousness of the pandemic was vastly overrated by WHO”, resulting in a distortion of public health priorities.

Presenting his report, Mr Flynn told the committee: “this was a pandemic that never really was”, and described the vaccination programme as “placebo medicine on a large scale”.

In its adopted text, the committee identifies what it calls “grave shortcomings” in the transparency of decision-making about the outbreak, generating concerns about the influence of the pharmaceutical industry on decisions taken. Plummeting confidence in such advice could prove “disastrous” in the case of a severe future pandemic, it warns.

In particular, the WHO and European health institutions were not willing to publish the names and declarations of interest of the members of the WHO Emergency Committee and relevant European advisory bodies directly involved in recommendations concerning the pandemic, the parliamentarians point out.

However, attending the meeting was Fiona Godlee, the Editor-in-Chief of the British Medical Journal, who told the parliamentarians that, according to an
investigation by her journal, scientists who drew up key WHO guidelines on stockpiling flu vaccines had previously been paid by drug companies which stood
to profit.

Interesting n'est-ce pas? This is damning stuff. Here's a PDF of the provisional report. I will be intrigued to see how much coverage this gets in the UK media up to and after the debate "by parliamentarians from all 47 Council of Europe member states on Thursday 24 June during PACE’s summer session in Strasbourg". Is that the same thing as the European Parliament? I'm ashamed to say I don't know.

Cardiff and St Illtyd's Paul Flynn is acknowledged as a Welsh Born Icon.

Mestre Celso

A mate of Ben's came round for tea on Thursday, so we picked him up from a capoeira lesson as it was just down the road.

The session took place in the park rather than the community centre as it was a beautiful day, and I got to watch the last quarter or hour or so from a bench. It was being taught by an older fellow who a little Internet research as identified as Mastre Celso.

It certainly did my heart good to see a man in his eighth decade doing cartwheels on the grass and smiling as he passed on his skills to a gang of kids. For all that, from what I could see, it wouldn't be that much use in an honest to God tear up, capoeira did look like a healthy lifestyle.

"Smart clothes could soon be helping their wearers cope with the stresses of modern life," says the BBC. Get outside while the sun's shining say I.

The new broom

I realise you don't care about this but I've been looking at Downing Street's announcement of the web traffic for May on the Number10 website.

They report 3,602,030 page views in May, up from 1,142,168 in April which is credible as the election was on May 6th.

They then claim that they have had 14,148,516 page views in 2010 giving a monthly average of 2,829,703. That sounds like bunk. Is it really credible that the web site traffic in April was less than half the monthly average when Gordon Brown went to Buckingham Palace on April 6 to ask the Queen to dissolve Parliament?

I submit ladies and gentlemen of the jury that the bean counters at No 10 have taken a twelve month figure for total traffic and divided it by five instead of twelve. One twelfth of 14,148,516 is a much more reasonable 1,179,043.

This is not a very encouraging illustration of the numeracy of our new masters.

"Never Say Never" Again

1. The Problem



2. The Solution

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3. The Reaction

If you wish to bask in the full, developing story, Greg is posting the standout gems at shavedbieber.tumblr.com. For now, we'll play out with our Tween Commenter of the Week, who is 15-year-old Alex from Switzerland. "What you're doing is going back to world war two all over again," Alex explains. "Hitler wanted to erase Jews from society, you want to erase Justin Drew Bieber."

the charnel grounds

The day after a cab driver went postal in Cumbria killing 12 people and injuring a further eleven, the idea of locking yourself into a mock spaceship to simulate an 18-month mission to Mars has its attractions.

Actually living in a JG Ballard dystopia (Super-Cannes and Thirteen to Centaurus spring to mind in respective reference to the two incidents above) is not necessarily something to relish.

Don't hold your breath

President Barack Obama meets with BP Oil Spill Commission co-chairs, former Sen. Bob Graham of Florida, second from left, and former EPA Administrator William Reilly, second from right, in the Oval Office, June 1, 2010. Also attending the meeting are John Brennan, Assistant to the President for Homeland Security and Counterterrorism, left, and Carol Browner, Assistant to the President for Energy and Climate Change right. June 1, 2010. (Official White House Photo by Pete Souza)

I seem to recall that on January 23rd 2009, President Obama signed an executive order stating that Guantanamo Detention Camp would be closed within the year. It's still open, so I wouldn't put a lot of hope in the "BP Oil Spill Commission " if I was you.

I'm also a touch bemused by what appears to be the complete disengagement of the UK government from the disaster. You'd think that there would be at least sympathetic noises (even if a trifle platitudinous) coming from Whitehall, as it was British Petroleum who pulled the plug and fumbled the finger in the dike.

Hail the Judo Taxi

Corgi have unveiled a judo branded taxi in their collection of official London 2012 merchandise – part of Destination London 2012, a range of 40 London 2012 inspired 1:64 taxis.

The exciting new range follows on from the popular London 2012 Olympic handover bus that was released in October 2009. Made by London 2012 licensee, Corgi, a Hornby brand, the models contain official London 2012 livery and branding. Each model also carries a pictogram of a particular sport appearing in the Games along with special ‘did you know’ facts on the featured sport.

Which is already weird enough even before noting that what appears to be delivered in the illustration is an old fashioned kick in the knackers rather than tomoe nage.