Please get yo choppers up for Snoop Dogg

This article be bout tha British Prime Minister. Shiiit, dis aint no joke. For other uses, peep Dizzy Cameron (disambiguation).

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I'm posting this today, because if I gave you a tool you could use to tranzizzle a website into gangsta slang on Monday you wouldn't do any work.

Gateway to the further South

Few of the stations that stud the Northern line as it snakes through south London have as much stately grandeur as Colliers Wood.

When the sun catches the entrance, the building feels more of a palace than a portal. It gives off a sort of calming authority, even a coolness, which was certainly welcome on the baking hot day I took these photographs.

Those unfussy yet imposing columns that glide airily up each side of the main window are especially lovely. I like how their width is matched perfectly by the distance between each of the vertical blue lines. And look how the roundel fits so snugly in the middle. You can’t beat symmetry when it’s done properly.

Then there’s the way the building is positioned on the corner of the street, its sides slanting (never curving – heavens no!) gently inwards, guiding you almost subliminally towards the entrance. Plus you have those two outer, smaller wings of the station, whose reduced stature ensures that nothing jostles for attention with the regal facade, especially when viewed from a distance.

Colliers Wood is one of Charles Holden’s earliest efforts for the Underground, dating from 1926, but it scrubs up well compared with his later masterpieces at Arnos Grove and Gants Hill. That’s as long as people remember to give it a scrub, of course.

And let’s hear it for not one, not two, but three splendidly gleaming roundels, a real help for anyone trying to spy the station from afar, but a real treat for anyone giving it the once over up close.

That’s my kind of red, white and blue.

Possibly the pudding is over egged above, but now you know why the Colliers Tup boozer opposite has been renamed the Charles Holden.

Doctor my dose

Click here for a piece on the shambolic 1974 performance above by Dr Hook and the Medicine Show that is as funny a thing as I have read in a long time.

Sylvia's Mother will never be the same again Will Sheff, and it is your fault.

Underground, Overground bumbling free

I had to take the Bomber for an orthodontist appointment at King's Hospital this morning.

We went to Denmark Hill on the Clapham Junction to Highbury and Islington section of the London Overground; an experience I found somewhat sobering I'd never previously heard of it despite living in the Smoke since the 80s.

Back in the office and browsing the interwebs over lunch I have found that it only opened in December last year so there is no need to have myself checked out for early onset dementia.

Calon

I am taking a break from William Dalyrmple's Return of a King: The Battle for Afghanistan to read Owen Sheers' Calon: A Journey to the Heart of Welsh Rugby as I am still walking on air since we won the Six Nations again.

Sheers was the 2012 WRU Artist in Residence (an unlikely but wonderful title). Calon documents a year spent at the heart of Welsh rugby; it is the inside story of a campaign that galvanised a nation and ended in Grand Slam success for the third time in 8 years, and I am in favour of it.

I will return to the Dalrymple; I have read every book he has ever published. I went to see him promoting White Mughals: Love and Betrayal in 18th-century India years ago and he endeared himself to me by giving his talk while drinking a pint and munching a packet of crisps despite having the poshest voice in the entire history of the world.

I also saw Owen Sheers at the very same event on the very same evening reading from The Dust Diaries his prose debut.

Spookiness abounds eh?

Gerberit!

The outlet valve on the dual flush mechanism in the bathroom toilet got stuck this morning, and it seems my brain was not up to analyzing the mechanism it at seven o'clock in the morning.

I had to tie it off with an old judo belt of the Bombers and go back and fix it lunchtime.

For future reference, the skinny can be found at http://www.geberit.com.au/web/appl/au/wcmsau.nsf/files/usr-pdf-Geberit_Outlet%20Valves.pdf/$file/Geberit_Outlet%20Valves.pdf. which is probably the definitive work in an, admittedly uncrowded field.

The shower is playing up as well, I can hear the pump complaining but it is boarded up under the bath and I can't face digging it out. Perhaps I will have to bite the bullet and get a plumber in. I wonder if my British Gas Homecare contract covers it?

What a fascinating life I lead.

The Pope, Welsh rugby... and aspirin

Telegraph: 7:30AM BST 26 Mar 2012:

What have the Pope and the Welsh rugby team got to do with headlines last week announcing that aspirin may reduce the risk of cancer? A lot more than you might think.

It is inevitable that a study, such as the one published in The Lancet, that suggests a humble pill might ward off something as feared as cancer will generate huge media interest. But do the findings mean that we should all be rooting through the bathroom cabinet each morning?

Not necessarily. This study, from the University of Oxford’s Stroke Prevention Research Unit, is an excellent example of the frustrating limits of scientific research, and how the most promising of findings cannot be taken as definitive evidence. This is where the Pope and rugby come in.

A few years ago, a shocking study was published in the British Medical Journal. But it received little public attention, despite its impact on the millions of Catholics around the globe, as well as the Welsh nation. In essence, it proved scientifically that there was a 45 per cent chance that the Pope would die during 2008, based on the fact that Wales had triumphed in the Six Nations.

The idea for the study developed from an urban legend that every time Wales wins a grand slam, a Pope dies (apart from 1978, when Wales did particularly well and two Popes died). The researchers set about a painstaking review of the data to see if the legend stood up to scrutiny.

The authors explained that a grand slam is achieved “when, in a given season, one nation succeeds in beating all other competing teams in every match”. Under this definition, 53 grand slams had been achieved from 1883 to 2008. Using complex statistical analysis, the researchers discovered an association between Welsh rugby performance and papal deaths, and no significant associations with the success of any other nations. They concluded that because of the Welsh victory in 2008, there was a 45 per cent chance of the Pope dying by the end of that year. Or, as they put it, three fifths of a Pope would die in 2008.

Hmmm, obviously this important research will have to be reviewed in light of the fact that Pope Benedict XVI must have decided to retire in 2012 when Wales won the Grand Slam.

Further if Wales had played better in the first half against Ireland we could easily have won a Grand Slam again this year, which wouldn't have been good for the health of Pope Francis. Divine intervention, rather in the style of Moses and the the Biblical fixture between the Amalekites and the Israelites, is as good an explanation as any of how Brian O'Driscoll et al managed to run roughshod over us.

Start8 (Geddit?)

The Bomber practically bit my hand off with approval and alacrity when I suggested he install Start8 to get a Windows 7-style Start menu on his Windows 8 laptop. I value his opinion as he hasn't got an axe to grind, and I can't help but think Microsoft has made a huge error here.

Further, Start8 is a great name, a la:

Captain James T. Kirk: Captain's log, Start8 9522.6: I've never trusted Klingons, and I never will. I could never forgive them for the death of my boy. It seems to me our mission to escort the Chancellor of the Klingon High Council to a peace summit is problematic at best....

Seven

See Icons Passim

If Wales win by seven points, they will retain the title because they have scored more tries over the course of the tournament

However, if England score two more tries than Wales in Cardiff the title will be shared

If Wales win by seven and England somehow score three more tries than Wales, they will win the title.

It is my contention that there is a perfect Prince song for every occasion, and this is my chosen theme for five o'clock this afternoon.



(PS Speaking of Sevens, the Bomber played prop for the school in a tournament yesterday. Who'da thunk it?)

The Lord Giveth and the Lord Taketh Away

Amazon have released the AWS Console for iPhone, an app that summarizes the status of your EC2 instances, CloudWatch alarms, total service charges, and AWS Service Health. I got a chance to use it in anger yesterday as we got a CloudWatch alarm on the auction server around lunchtime due to a sudden rush of traffic. It is usefulish but not great. It is strange to think that words with friends does a better job of notifying me on iPhone when it is my turn in a game than Amazon does with letting me know my cloud infrastructure is creaking. AWS Console for Android has been out for a while, and I certainly feel that the burglar's Samsung Galaxy Note has a much wider range of handy sysop and management apps than my iPhone does. Real time Google Analytics seems particularly handy on it from what he tells me.

I learned of the AWS Console for iPhone from the invaluable Google Reader, on the same day the SOB's said they were going to close it. Interwebs, I share your pain.

“Google drives all RSS services out of business by making Reader free. Then shuts down Google Reader. This isn’t about ‘evil’, but trust,” said Benedict Evans, analyst at research house Enders.

Precisely.

Prohibition

30 May 2008

Transport for London (TfL) is today issuing a reminder to Londoners that alcohol will be banned from the Tube, buses, Docklands Light Railway, tram services and stations across the Capital from 1 June.

Yesterday evening as my man Jeeves was laying out the roaring twenties schmutter I needed for Wilton's immersive version of The Great Gatsby (see Icons Passim) it struck me that we're no strangers to prohibition in London since Mayor Johnson banned the sauce from the Tube, trams and buses a while back. (I should have blackballed him at the Bullingdon Club all that time ago when I had the chance.)

Channeling Thoreau on Civil Disobedience and Stanislavski's "An Actor Prepares" I filled a hip flask that I was soon passing round an improvised Northern Line speakeasy carriage.

By the time I got to the venue I was so in character Daniel Day Lewis would have opened the door for me and doffed his cap.

Prodnose: You're the man with a thousand G's, right?
Myself: A thousand what?
Prodnose: Why, G-man, girls, guns, guts...
Myself:: Wrong, baby! I'm an L-man. Strictly liquor, love and laughs.

Gordon's alive!

Winston Gordon claimed gold at the English Judo Open in Sheffield on Sunday.
The Tooting judoka, who coaches at Ernest Bevin College, beat Enfield’s Philip Awiti-Alcaraz in the -100kg final with an Ippon as a result of a throw.

He won his three previous bouts by the same method, beating Theodore Spalding-McIntosh in just 30 seconds in the semi-final.

Ernest Bevin’s Jack Kelly lost to Awiti-Alcaraz in the other semi-final but claimed bronze in the repêchage.

In the U20 competition, Haris Kekic claimed gold in the +100kg category and Adam Horshal won bronze in the -90kg category.

The club won another seven medals at the British Schools Championships the day before.

Congratulations to Winston on winning the English Open. I wonder why he moved up to 100kg after all these years competing at 90kg. Perhaps making the weight just gets tiresome.

You can see the Bomber here with pretty much the crew who won seven medals at the British Schools Championship. Who knows what could have been, but then again you can't do everything. He's training tomorrow, playing a schools sevens tournament on Friday and then turning out for the Ruts at a rugby festival at Effingham and Leatherhead on Sunday. Not a lot of room for judo as well in that schedule.

Princess Lilian, Duchess of Halland

Bells are tolling and flags are flying at half mast in Stockholm for the most unlikely member of the country's royal family

A life the most romantic novelist might reject as excessively far fetched, which began in 1915 in a tiny terrace house in Swansea, has ended in front-page news on the Swedish royal family's official website, with flags flying at half mast across Sweden and bells tolling in mourning for the outsider who became a much loved princess.
.....

Lilian Davies, a soldier's daughter from a coalmining family in Swansea, was largely brought up by her mother, Gladys. She was already exceeding expectations when she moved to London, aged 16. With her dazzling looks, she became a model and an actress, and married a handsome young actor, Ivan Craig.

In 1943, in a nightclub, she met an even more handsome young prince, and her life changed forever.

The offical portrait on the royal website of a stately, elderly woman with a magnificent head of immaculately dressed white hair, wearing an impeccably cut lilac suit and discreetly expensive gold jewellery, looks every inch a royal.

The short announcement gave away nothing of her extraordinary backstory: "Princess Lilian passed away on Sunday March 10 at the age of 97", it read. "Princess Lilian died peacefully during the afternoon at her home on Djurgården in Stockholm. Princess Lilian was married to Prince Bertil, The King's uncle."

Princess Lilian and Prince Bertil were indeed married – in 1976 when they had already been living together discreetly for more than 30 years in France, and she was safely too old to have children.

In a rare television interview before their marriage, as the couple sat holding hands on a sofa, Bertil said: "There is one thing maybe that we regret: that we have not been able to get married before so that we haven't been able to have children. That's something that's rather sad."

He gave a huge, rueful shrug, turned to her, and said: "But after all, we're still very happy, aren't we?" "Very," she said firmly, "very happy."

When they married, on a cold December day in 1976, in a royal chapel at the Drottningholm palace, he was 64 and she was 61.

They met first in the smoky glamour of Les Ambassadeurs nightclub. According to her memoirs, My Life With Prince Bertil, published in Swedish in 2000, when told the man staring at her across the dance floor was His Royal Highness Prince Bertil of Sweden, she responded: "And I'm the Queen of Sheba."

Though she liked him enough to invite to her 28th birthday cocktail party, Lilian later recalled that their relationship only began when a bomb fell near her flat in Knightsbridge, and he came to rescue her in a Swedish embassy car.

Her husband had also met somebody else, and they were divorced. But, as with Edward VIII and Mrs Simpson a decade earlier, the fact that Lilian was not merely a commoner but also a divorcee made it impossible for her to be accepted in royal circles. Her situation became worse when Bertil's eldest brother died in a plane crash, leaving a one-year-old as heir and the prince third in line to the Swedish throne.

When Bertil eventually won permission for them to marry, unlike Wallis Simpson she was given the royal titles of princess, and Duchess of Halland in southern Sweden. But the titles did not bring instant acceptance: she recalled waving to her husband on the television screen as he attended a annual Nobel prize banquet to which she had not been invited.

However, her charm and liveliness won over both press and public, and after her husband's death, in 1997, she took on much of his charity work, particularly favouring children's and sports charities. A regular guest of honour in blazingly bright silk gowns at the Nobel banquets, she was also renowned for her broad tastes in music, becoming a big fan of Bruce Springsteen and attending one of his concerts in Stockholm at the age of 87.

A Welsh Born Icon if ever I heard.

mea culpa

There are always those who ask, what is it all about? For those who need to ask, for those who need points sharply made, who need to know "where it's at," this:

If England win at the Millennium Stadium, they will take the title and the Grand Slam

If the match is drawn, England will win the title but not the Grand Slam

If Wales win by eight points or more, they retain the Six Nations title

If Wales win by six points or less, England will win the title

If Wales win by seven points, they will retain the title because they have scored  more tries over the course of the tournament

However, if England score two more tries than Wales in Cardiff the title will be shared

If Wales win by seven and England somehow score three more tries than Wales, they will win the title.

I made it back in time to watch the second half of England versus Italy in the William Morris yesterday, but it suddenly struck me last night  that the Delphic utterances on the game's implications for the showdown in Cardiff next week to which I treated those assembled were misleading as I failed to take into account the (fairly obvious) fact that each point Wales score will decrease England's point difference by one as well as improving ours. There is a correction above.

The task is not as daunting as I feared; though I went up an mountain, I came down a hill.

Luckily I am fairly confident that no-one puts any faith in what comes out of my mouth. God knows what my ten year old self would have made of such an elementary lapse.

Nitro Circus Earls Court Nov 29

The Bomber has expressed an interest in seeing this in November. AWBI seems like as good a place to stow it for when I inevitably forget the details.

Last Tongan in Powys

Exhibit A

As the Six Nations tournament increasingly seem to turn on who has the best players of Polynesian descent, we need to remember - point of order, mister chairman - that Mako and Billy Vunipola arrived in the UK a decade or so ago when when their father Fe’ao, brought his family over from Tonga while he pursued a rugby career at Pontypool and Pontypridd. Surely it stands to reason that his makes them Welsh-Tongans like Toby Faletau, as opposed to (the entirely distinct) English-Tongans.

You have to ask yourself if Billy in particular been rash by throwing his lot in with England? He's not even on Stuart Lancaster's bench this weekend.

Exhibit B

It's not the years, honey, it's the mileage.

My Dad is 80 today. That's nothing. Ben's friend Luke has an 82 year old grandfather who is getting married this weekend.

LONDON (Reuters) - Is 40 really the new 30? In many ways people today act younger than their parents did at the same age.

Scientists have defined a new age concept and believe it could explain why populations are aging, but at the same time seem to be getting younger.

Instead of measuring aging by how long people have lived, the scientists have factored in how many more years people can probably still look forward to.

"Using that measure, the average person can get younger in the sense that he or she can have even more years to live as time goes on," said Warren Sanderson, of the University of New York in Stony Brook.

He and Sergei Scherbov, of the Vienna Institute of Demography at the Austrian Academy of Sciences, have used their method to estimate how the proportion of elderly people in Germany, Japan and the United States will change in the future.

The average German was 39.9 years old in 2000 and could plan to live for another 39.2 years, according to research reported in the journal Nature on Wednesday.

However, by 2050 the average German will be 51.9 years old and will be expected to live another 37.1 years. So middle age in 2050 would occur at around 52 years instead of 40 years as in 2000.

My head hurts.

Always on Trend

At the Gorringe Park pub on an otherwise unglamorous high street in Tooting in south London, new owners have completely refurbished a former dingy local to include a "boutique movie room" where they show feature films in the evenings and in the daytime for parents and children. There is also an upstairs restaurant and a private dining room, while the ground floor remains a pub in the more traditional sense.

"This is the modern incarnation of the local pub," explained Ed Harper, manager at the Gorringe Park. "It's what a local pub should be, relaxed and friendly, like a home away from home but able to respond to the ever changing needs of the market."

Well I never! The Gorringe Park (see Icons passim) gets a shout out on the other side of the pond in USA Today - the widest circulated print newspaper in the United States.

An acute sense of absurdity

At a celebration at UCLA of the career of Eugen Weber, the Romanian-born historian of France, I made the mistake of describing Eugen as an exile. In his response to the tributes paid him, Eugen corrected me, remarking that he had never considered himself an exile. “From the moment I attained consciousness,” he said, “I wanted to leave Romania. The place is a dump.”

Tristan Tzara (né Samuel Rosenstock), one of the founders of Dada, was a Romanian. Eugène Ionesco, perhaps the most famous Romanian artist of the last half of the 20th century, was a surrealist playwright prominently associated with the Theater of the Absurd. E. M. Cioran, the Romanian aphorist, wrote: “An acute sense of absurdity makes the merest action unlikely, indeed impossible. Lucky those who lack such a thing! Providence has indeed looked out for them.” Dada, surrealism, absurdity—Romania seems to have encouraged such responses on the part of its writers and artists.

Maybe it won't be so bad having a few more Romanians around the place.

---

By the way Joseph Epstein, author of the quote above, is worth reading if you can get past the self-assertion and the the racket that all the names being dropped make as they hit the floor.

Rinse and repeat

Although he is in year seven the Bomber turned out for the school's year eight team yesterday. They won 66-12. I don't know the circumstances but it seems pretty impressive as he goes to a boys' school with two hundred odd kids in each year.

This means he played for the school last Thursday, loafed on Friday, travelled to a five match tournament for the club on Saturday, trained with the club on Sunday, played for the school again yesterday and has training tonight. You couldn't fit a lot else in, but I suppose you pays your money at takes your choice.

Alex, who I take on Tuesday's as he lives round the corner, is planning to play for his school today and then come training with the Ruts straight after. It makes Ben look like a light weight. I am also reminded that Jonnie plays for all the same rugby teams as my own son-and-heir and for the school first 11 at football as well.

Remember next time the Daily Mail tells you that our youth are all fat and sedentary.

Sunrise and sunset for London

04:50 Start of astronomical twilight
05:29 Start of nautical twilight
06:08 Start of civil twilight
06:41 Sunrise
17:45 Sunset
18:18 End of civil twilight
18:57 End of nautical twilight
19:36 End of astronomical twilight

That's what we're getting today it seems.  I only came across it wondering if I could get any time in the garden (post work, pre quiz). Whatever can it all mean do you think? The End of civil twilight is evocative. It could be a book by Robert D. Putnam.

Adding insult to injury

As of yesterday, the Bomber was nursing a bloody nose sustained from a collision with a stray elbow in a try saving tackle at the Curtain Raiser Cup and I was battling slight discomfort in my neck from overdoing a pose in yoga. Does a pattern begin to emerge?

Also, stowing away a card his grandmother had sent him before he went skiing I noticed she had written that it contained "Eros to spend while you are away". I assume she meant Euros but you never know. In fact I would rather not know if he has been spreading Eros around Austria.

Early bird

I have no time to ruminate this morning as I have to bound from my bed to take the Bomber et al over to Twickenham to play in the Quins' Curtain Raiser Cup and we are staying over there to watch the Harlequins versus Exeter this afternoon.

Oh, and by the way, the school beat Oxted (25 to 10 I think) on Thursday.

Felicia Browne

Although broad and effortless poetic and classical allusion is generally assumed to be part of the make up of  anyone fortunate enough to have been educated in a comprehensive school in Llanrumney  in the 1970s, I did have to double check yesterday's Casabianca quotation to make sure I had it precisely right..

In doing so, I was delighted to find that the authoress was born Felicia Browne in September 1793 in Liverpool, but moved when she was very young to Gwrych, an isolated Welsh seaside house; then, in 1809, to St. Asaph, Wales.

Thus (and a happy St David's day to you), we share a surname and a Welsh upbringing.

THE stately Homes of England,
How beautiful they stand!
Amidst their tall ancestral trees,
O'er all the pleasant land.
The deer across their greensward bound
Thro' shade and sunny gleam,
And the swan glides past them with the sound
Of some rejoicing stream.

That was another one of hers. Not really very Welsh and later waspishly reworked by Teddington's own Noel Coward. You can't have everything I suppose.

A Life in the Day of ...

I was just sitting here with the end of the month looming, leafing through contracts and wondering why so few of our clients seems to feel they have to pay us these days, when I was rudely interrupted by some bottom-feeder trying to hack the auction system.

Around this time last year, Ben's rugby team got knocked out in the semi finals of a tournament despite not conceding a single point all day, Liverpool beat Cardiff City in the FA Cup final and the ceiling in my house collapsed due to a leak from a corroded pipe.

Such fun.

The boy stood on the burning deck
Whence all but he had fled;
The flame that lit the battle's wreck
Shone round him o'er the dead.

Yet beautiful and bright he stood,
As born to rule the storm;
A creature of heroic blood,
A proud, though child-like form.

Video Nasty

The upcoming Monsters University has reminded that when the Bomber was a toddler he was absolutely terrified by the opening credits (above) to Monsters Inc. He was fine with the movie itself but the first few minutes of innocuous doodles seemed to scare the living bejaysus out of the little tyke.

The video below is the sort of thing that frightens me these days.

Same Old, Same Old

David Bowie and Prince are hawking new product, while Swansea City AFC have a seat at football's top table. I think it might actually be 1982 again in some strange sort of Groundhog Day development.

Which reminds me Danny Rubin, who wrote Groundhog Day, has been known to joke that they plan to re-release it unchanged as a sequel.

Plank

It is rare for me to bid on our own auction site, bit I have had a punt on an Epiphone Les Paul Studio guitar this morning.

Herewith: http://www.bumblebeeauctions.co.uk/XcAPViewItem.asp?ID=127916

Esquire

Over eighty years, Esquire has published nearly a thousand issues, packed with work from the greatest writers of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Ernest Hemingway, Tom Wolfe, Arthur Miller, Dave Eggers, Ralph Ellison, C. J. Chivers, Nora Ephron … the bench goes deep, and deep, and deep … Philip Roth, Tom Junod, Norman Mailer, Truman Capote, Stephen King, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Chris Jones …

In honor of its eightieth anniversary, Esquire has mined the archives to publish its eighty greatest stories of all time. The first volume, “Great Men”, features epic profiles of eight men who helped invent our world, by eight of the greatest magazine writers of our time.

There’s Gay Talese’s New Journalism masterpiece “The Silent Season of a Hero,” about Joe DiMaggio, next to Tom Junod’s unforgettable profile of Mister Rogers. Tom Wolfe examines the life and influence of Robert Noyce, inventor of the integrated circuit, while the legendary Garry Wills journeys to Martin Luther King’s funeral.

Then comes Scott Raab’s rousing, groundbreaking profile of an aging Paul Newman; Michael Paterniti’s exploration of the world of Ferran Adrià, who taught us how to eat; and Chris Jones’s piece on Roger Ebert, who, even after losing his trachea, speaks with a braver voice than most men will ever know. The volume concludes with two stories that bookend the career of Steve Jobs, by Joe Nocera and Tom Junod.

I picked up Great Men: The Eighty Greatest Esquire Stories of All Time, Volume 1 on Kindle for £2.65. A volume a month for the pretty much the rest of the year ought to keep me diverted during my lunch time recline bike sessions at Virgin.

At last a rhyme for orange!

The Bomber has got back from skiing in Austria early so we will be able to watch the Wales Italy game together this afternoon and debrief. That is a pleasant surprise.

The venue will be the family friendly Cinema Room downstairs in the Gorringe Park.

Siberian wind to strip away your tawdry delusions: Met Office

A BITING wind from the haunted, barren plains of Siberia will expose the lies you tell yourself, the Met Office has confirmed.

Forecasters said the unrelenting wind will search deep inside you, burrowing into you and uncovering the shame that corrodes your soul, as temperatures drop to -11, making the UK colder than St Petersburg.

A Met Office spokesman said: “You cannot hide from it. Even if you shelter behind closed doors, you will hear its whisper and it will say ‘I know who you are’.”

The forecasters said the wind will be a passionate, wild-eyed interrogator of the human condition, forcing you to confront one monumental truth after another.

The spokesman added: “Do not prepare yourself for there is nothing you can do. It will howl at you until you say ‘no’ and ‘yes’ in the same desperate, elated breath.

“Particularly those in central and northern Scotland.”

Goodness me it's chilly this morning, Hat tip, Simon.

Adventures in Motion Pictures

I rather fancy that the motion poster is yet another marketing innovation that is unlikely to outstay its welcome.

Prodnose: So, shall we begin?

Myself: No thanks, if it's all the same.

Head in the clouds

Our Auction site got plugged on an email from MoneySavingExpert.com today that goes out to eight million people.

After a little teething trouble caused by underestimating the demand this would put on the servers we are now coping fine. Well enough in fact for me to be planning to stroll out to lunch after I publish this.

The facilities that I dreamed of back in 2008 (see Icons passim) when there was a film about our auctions on the BBC One Show that generated more traffic than we could handle are now in place, so in 2013 Amazon Web Services has saved the day.

You the man, Jeff Bezos!

Honestly

The World's First Unattended City Shop is housed in a double decker bus that is now parked up at the Mills.

Nearby, “out of control” offending by gangs on an estate has been dramatically reduced thanks to changes in policing techniques, the borough’s top cop has claimed.

We await developments.

Barnaby Conrad

When Barnaby Conrad was nearly killed in a 1958 bullfight, his celebrity pals were buzzing about it at Sardi's in New York.

"Did you hear about poor Barnaby?" Eva Gabor asked Noel Coward in her thick Hungarian accent. "He was terribly gored in Spain."

Shocked, Coward soon realized he'd misheard.

"Oh, thank heavens," he sighed. "I thought you said he was bored."

That would have been a surprise.

Barnaby Conrad Jr. — bullfighter, bon vivant, portrait artist, saloonkeeper to the stars, author of 36 books, and founder of the Santa Barbara Writers Conference, led a life that was anything but boring. Ninety years old, he died Tuesday in his Carpinteria home after a battle with congestive heart disease.

"He wasn't necessarily the world's best novelist or the best bullfighter or best artist or best piano player or best nightclub owner, but he was very good at all of them," said his son Barnaby Conrad III. "He was like a pentathlete.

...............

Bedridden but still sharp, he was reading a book when his doctor told him he had just three or four weeks to live."I guess I'd better read faster," he said.

I'd never heard of him before, but I'm proud to have shared the planet with him from the day I was born until the day he died. Here's the LA Times obit. I'm sure I will be digging deeper.

Revolt into Style

Due to my general idleness images hosted on a decommissioned server have disappeared from early blog entries.

One of the missing illustrations from 2007 (see Icons passim) is of Swansea's own Rockin' Sikh Pete Singh.

I can make amend for that to an extent today as the, increasingly invaluable, Babylon Wales has published a picture of him with The Clash from back in the day.

He is the one with the turban. Did I ever tell you about the time that Topper Headon, reduced to driving a cab, picked Neil up as a fare in Hammersmith?

Onwards and upwards: YouTube has also jumped aboard the Pete Singh express since last time I looked.

Rite of Passage

The Bomber will be off on a skiing trip without me for the first time today as he is going with the school. The coach is leaving at half past three and taking them all the way to the the Salzburg Sportwelt in Austria.

The WBI time machine reminds me that his first two trips were to Austria as well Zell am See in 2008, then Kitzbühel in 2009. After that we went to Cevinia in 2010, Borovets in 2011 and then Andorra last year.

2008 Zell am See

2009 Kitzbühel

2010 Cervinia

2011 Borovets

2012 Andorra

Best passed over in silence

Help, Help

There are two alternative trailers for the forthcoming HBO Phil Spector biopic which stars Al Pacino and Helen Mirren, and is written and directed by David Mamet. I think I prefer the second one.

Whom the gods would destroy

Capote Classic 'In Cold Blood' Tainted by Long-Lost Files.

Ooops. It seems I tempted providence yesterday in praising Truman Capote's non fiction.

Never mind. Try The Duke in his Domain for size. Talent's talent.

a broken arrow

The man who shot and killed Osama bin Laden sat in a wicker chair in my backyard, wondering how he was going to feed his wife and kids or pay for their medical care.

It is a strange world. The last issue of Esquire contained an interview with Megan Fox (Icons passim) that ploughed new depths of puerile, jejune, cod-literary banality.

This month there is a piece that could take its place in the company of work from Tom Wolfe, Truman Capote, Hunter S. Thompson, Norman Mailer, Joan Didion, Robert Christgau, Gay Talese etc. from the long-ago golden age of long-form magazine writing.

Dramatisation, intensive reporting, empathy and acknowledged subjectivity are deployed in the exposure of something dark in the American heart. Enjoy isn't the right word, but it is a rewarding read.

North Star, Nos Da

Follow the link http://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/0/rugby-union/21403912 and watch the video.

The Welsh fan who ran onto the pitch on Saturday to celebrate George North's try and got bundled off by stewards for his troubles is the winger's father.

Anyone who isn't charmed can never be my friend.

Pope Benedict XVI resigns

Dear Brothers,

I have convoked you to this Consistory, not only for the three canonisations, but also to communicate to you a decision of great importance for the life of the Church. After having repeatedly examined my conscience before God, I have come to the certainty that my strengths, due to an advanced age, are no longer suited to an adequate exercise of the Petrine ministry.

The last time a pope resigned was in 1415. Pope Gregory XII did so to end the Western Schism, at a time when there were three claimants to the papacy.

Stalin memorably asked, apropos influence, how many divisions the Pope had.

The Soviet Union lasted from 1922 to 1991. Just short of three score years and ten.

the sixth day

Wales beat France away and then Johnny Boon won the first fight he has had in twelve years in spectacular style yesterday (as you can see).

And God saw everything that he had made, and, behold, it was very good. And the evening and the morning were the sixth day.

Playing the French away

"Go the whole hog, Mog!"

Nothing ever really changes.

What I would have told the Treasury Select Committee

1. Taking into account your £250,000 housing allowance, your pay is to be set at £874,000 a year, or 33 times the national average and more than double what the present incumbent, Sir Mervyn King earns. Are you worth it?

Optimus Prime is the leader of the Autobots, a faction of transforming robots from the planet Cybertron.

2. Should the Bank of England’s inflation target be abandoned and replaced with something else?

The first generation Optimus Prime transforms into a Kenworth K100 cab over truck. Within his chest is a mystic talisman, known as the Autobot Matrix of Leadership or the "Creation Matrix", carried by all Autobot leaders.

3. Is there much more the Bank of England can do to stimulate the UK’s moribund economy, and if so what?

When Optimus transforms, his cab becomes an ion blaster and his trailer disconnects, forming a combat deck.

4. Where did the Bank of England go wrong in the lead up to the crisis and in its response to it?

Across the assorted continuities of the original Transformers universe, there have been various interpretations of Optimus Prime.

5. Will you adopt an easier approach to the banks in an attempt to stop them deleveraging and get credit flowing again?

Prime is secretly plagued by self-doubt and a conflicted sense of pacifism that often makes him an extremely reluctant warrior.

Threesome?

	Haws Galvanised Green Bucket Threesome These buckets are manufactured from heavy gauge steel, hot-dip galvanised to prevent rust and painted green and feature hard wood handles. Can be used for a wide variety of purposes in the home and garden. This sexy threesome is the perfect gift for your loved one this Valentines Day Free bar of Divine Fair Trade chocolate with every purchase
	Price £ 25.99 inc. VAT

I bought a wormery a few years ago though I didn't really ever get the hang of it. I'm still on the supplier's email list. The Valentines Day line they are promoting represents the very apotheosis of romance.

In Memoriam Reg Presley

So. Farewell
Then
Reg Presley

The Troggs Tapes
Made me laugh

So hard I thought
I'd die myself

Angelina Jolie's uncle Jim
Wrote Wild Thing

That makes my heart sing
And makes everything

Groovy

EJ Thribb

ARM fine. How're you?

The only shares I own are doing very nicely thanks.

(Reuters) - British chip designer ARM reported a better-than-expected 16 percent rise in fourth-quarter pre-tax profit as it rode the wave of soaring sales of smartphones and tablets, nearly all of which contain its technology.

The Cambridge-based group licenses its technology to chip makers and receives a royalty on each chip shipped in devices from the likes of Apple and Samsung.

Consumers around the world are increasingly using the Internet on mobile device rather than on PCs that are powered by Intel processors.

"Five years ago an ARM processor could be found in just over a quarter of devices that you could use to browse the internet," finance director Tim Score told reporters on Tuesday.

"Last year, in 2012, three quarters of Internet connected screens and devices used an ARM processor in the main chip."

Shares in the group rose to a 12-year high after it said it would at least meet analysts' expectations for revenue in 2013.

They were trading up 6.3 percent at 948.7 pence by 0822, leading the FTSE 100 index.

The newest smartphones and tablets typically contain multiple ARM-based processors and increasingly ARM graphics as well, helping royalties for the quarter rise 19 percent to $136.8 million (86.8 million pounds), strongly outperforming the market.

The company recognizes royalties a quarter in arrears, so the royalty income came on 2.5 billion chips shipped in the third quarter of the year.

Licensing revenue rose 28 percent to $100.6 million, with 15 licences signed for ARM's latest Cortex-A processors designed for mobile computing, servers and enterprise computing.

ARM said it expected to continue to outperform the wider semi-conductor market in 2013.

Analysts' current revenue expectations for 2013 stand at $1.03 billion, Score said.

ARM reported pre-tax profit of 80 million pounds on revenue of 164.2 million pounds, equating to earnings per share of 4.08 pence for the fourth quarter.

Analysts were expecting the group to report pre-tax profit of 75.6 million pounds on revenue of 152.2 million pounds.

I wonder where I put the certificate?

The Tooting Popular Front

Pup quiz in the Antelope tonight. Tooting is remarkably unchanged since the days of Wolfie Smith.

"Don’t you call me ‘old sport’!"

After failing to make it to Wilton's last December (see Icons passim) I've just booked some tickets for an "immersive" production of The Great Gatsby which they are reviving. I count myself something of a fan of site-specific theatre since I saw a promenade production of Romeo and Juliet here at the Mills in 2009 (see further Icons passim).

Paperman

This clever and charming animated film appears to star Ben. I suppose it is a step up from appearing to star in Diary of a Wimpy Kid.

Gradgrind

For all my advice to convalesce until after he gets back from skiing, the Bomber has decided to turn out at full back this afternoon against Wilson's School.

Ah well, whatcha' gonna' do? I imagine this means he'll play for rugby the club on the weekend as well, just as I was getting used to taking it easy of a Sunday morning.

Reflecting on my parenting skills, we also agreed that he would come to my office after school if he had homework to get it out of the way and I haven't seen him here for that for the last three weeks, though I have been presented with some elaborate excuses.

Swastika over Cardiff

raising a swastika above the City Hall in Cardiff in 1938

The flag was hoisted along with those of Britain, France and Italy to celebrate the signing of the Munich Agreement which effectively carved up Czechoslovakia and appeased Hitler. This was done on the initiative of Cardiff's Lord Mayor, O Cuthbert Purnell. Not at all happy with the sight of the swastika fluttering over the Cardiff skyline, Alderman CH McCale and Councillor Heginbottom took it upon themselves to remove the Nazi banner. They then hid it. The Lord Mayor responded by ordering a replacement swastika to be run up the flag pole. At a heated council meeting the Mayor was asked why the Czech flag was not awarded a place of honour over the civic buildings. He replied that the Czechoslovakian flag was unavailable.

Lord Mayor Purnell would later offer a more detailed explanation of his actions: "I am making no apology for what I did last week. On the morning the news came through that war had been averted I ordered the flags of the four nations to be flown. This was a gesture of goodwill to the nations concerned. It had no political or religious significance. Cardiff is a port and has to maintain friendly relationship with all nations trading with us, and it was on that ground alone that I flew the flags. Were Cardiff not a great port the necessity would not have arisen." Six months later the Nazis marched into Czechoslovakia.

It is not often that I copy something wholesale, but this story from Babylon Wales is so extraordinary I had to share it. I warm particularly to the schoolboy defiance of Alderman CH McCale and Councillor Heginbottom displayed in pinching and hiding the Nazi symbol. Welsh Born Icons they shall be, unless someone busy body birther proves otherwise.

Retribution

A married black cab driver was jailed for 12 years (yesterday) for killing his mistress more than 17 years ago and disposing of her body so that it has never been found.

Kevin Doherty covered up the death of mother-of-two Jane Harrison by constructing a false alibi and even pretending to receive phone calls from her in front of witnesses.

Though the mills of God grind slowly;
Yet they grind exceeding small;
Though with patience he stands waiting,
With exactness grinds he all.

Kru Johnny

Watch Muay Thai Johnny Boon Training on World of Martial Arts
I see from Facebook that Johnny Boon is going to fight on a bill in Epsom on February 9. K1 rather than muay Thai and at lightweight. Lightweight will be a good few pounds less than the video above that's for sure.

I wonder how long it is since he's been in the ring or the cage in an actual bout. The Bomber started training with him in 2006 when he was five so it must be at least that long ago.

Anyway, I wish him all the best. It is a pity I can't go but I am already spoken for that weekend.

Underpromise and overdeliver

"Make sure you have got enough curry for half time."

Bal Ham! Gateway to the South!

We enter Bal Ham through the verdant grasslands of Battersea Park, and at once we are aware that here is a land of happy, contented people who go about their daily tasks in truly democratic spirit.

This is busy High Street, focal point of the town's activities. Note the quaint old stores, whose frontages are covered with hand-painted inscriptions, every one a rare example of native Bal Ham art. Let us read some of them as our camera travels past.

"Cooking apples! Choice eaters!"
"A song to remember at the Tantamount Cinema!"
"A suit to remember at Montague Moss!"
"Cremations conducted with decorum and taste."
"Fight tonight. Bring your own paper."
"Rally Thursday, Berkeley Square. Viscountess Lewisham and Mrs Vera Legge. Up the ruling classes!"

This shows the manifold activities of Bal Ham's thriving community - but in quiet corners, we still find examples of the exquisite workmanship that Bal Ham craftsmen have made world-famous: tooth brush holesmanship.

"On my porch, I carve the little holes in the top of toothbrushes. It is exciting work and my forefathers have been engaged upon it since 1957. [Coughs] The little holes in the top are put in manually, or, in other words, once a year. I recently had the honour of demonstrating my craft before the Holy of Highs. He stopped by one day for a couple of words. I did not understand either of them."

So much for Bal Ham's industries. Now let us see a little more of the town. Here is the great park, covering nearly half an acre. This is where the children traditionally meet by the limpid waters of the old drinking fountain, a drinking fountain that has for countless years, across the vast aeons of time, give untold pleasure to man, woman and child. Beside this fountain, donated by Able Councillor Quills as long ago as 1928, the little ones sit around a trim nursemaid and listen spellbound and enchanted as she reads them a story.

"With one bound, he was by her side. Nora felt his hot breath on her cheek as he ripped the thin silk from--"

We are now entering Old Bal Ham. Time has passed by this remote corner; so shall we.

But Bal Ham is not neglecting the cultural side. This is Eugene Quills, whose weekly recitals are attended by a vast concord of people. He has never had a lesson in his life. Such is the enthusiasm of Bal Ham's music lovers that they are subscribing to a fund to send Eugene to Italy. Or Vienna. Or anywhere...

Night falls on Bal Ham.

From Quill's Folly, Bal Ham's famous beauty spot, which stands nearly ten feet above sea level, the town is spread below us in a fairyland of glittering lights, changing all the time: green... amber... red... red and amber... and back to green. The night life is awakening!

The Al Morocco Tea Rooms...
"Hey, miss?"
"Yes? What d'you want?"
"Pilchards."
"They're off, dear."
"Oh. Baked beans?"
"Off."
"Oh. Meat --- meat loaf salad?"
"That's off, too."
"Pot of tea?"
"No tea, dear."
"Well, just milk then."
"Milk's off."
"Roll and butter, then?"
"No butter, dear."
"Well, just a roll!"
"Only bread, love."
"I might have just as well have stayed at home!"
"Oh, I dunno, does you good to have a fling occasionally!"

And so the long night draws on. The last stragglers make their way home and the lights go out one by one as dawn approaches and the bell of Saint Quills' Parish Church tolls ten o'clock. Bal Ham sleeps. And so we say farewell to this historic borough, with many pleasant memories -- and the words of C. Quills Smith, Bal Ham's own bard, burning in our ears...

Broad-bosomed, bold, becalmed, benign
Lies Bal Ham, four-square on the Northern Line.
Matched by no marvel save in Eastern scene
A rose-red city, half as Golders Green
By country churchyard, ferny fen and mere
What Quills mute inglorious lies buried here?
Oh stands the church clock at ten to three?
And is there honey still for tea?
"Honey's off, dear."

Red Letter Day

Finally, all this time later, all our public facing systems are running in the cloud. We've got one physical server that we actually own co-located in a data centre, but come the end of the month and contract we'll pick that up and bring it back to the office. Perhaps we'll put it out to stud.

HEART: Nothing recorded

I'm off to the dentist in Slough later today. It seems like a bit of a trek I know, but I invested so much getting my teeth fixed in 2011/12 that it seems worth making the effort to see the person who did the work even though she has moved on from SW19.

I'm taking the Bomber with me as well, as its an INSET day and she has been his regular dentist as well.

He was referred to an orthodontist in 2011 who decided he needed five milk teeth out. When we went back in mid November last year the orthodontist in turn referred him to the hospital maxillofacial clinic.

We're still waiting for that appointment though. The orthodontist has sent three letters that the hospital claim haven't arrived: I ring both of them up every few weeks to check. This time I'm getting a copy of the letter myself which I will deliver personally if the hole in the space-time continuum swallows it up again.

In the Depot

A Winter Maintenance message from Torfaen council featuring Darren 'Graceland' Jones.

Sometimes Welshness is its own reward: #gwentgrit.

Ash on a Young Man's Sleeve

I thought the week couldn't get any weirder after illegal immigrants paying criminal gangs to smuggle them out of Britain, and Kerry council issuing drink and drive permits. I was wrong:

The BBC was forced to axe a storyline in Casualty about the dangers of smoking because of Wales's stringent anti-smoking laws.

BBC1's long-running hospital drama was planning a storyline in which a smoker inadvertently caused a fire in a hotel.

But Welsh law bans smoking in enclosed public places and in the workplace, which includes – unlike England – actors lighting up on set.

Clare Hudson, head of productions at BBC Wales, told the Welsh national assembly on Tuesday that the smoking ban could cost its economy up to £20m a year in lost work.

"We had one storyline in Casualty warning about the dangers of smoking and how it caused a fire in a hotel," said Hudson.

"But we could not go ahead with it because of the current legislation.

"And scenes in [the revamped] Upstairs, Downstairs were difficult to work around because we had to shoot them outside of Wales.

"Our drama in Wales has been growing very steadily over the past few years. We don't want to see that growth capped on the basis of the current legislation.

"Without the additional burden of this regulation we would become more successful. It would be part of a fantastic set of incentives to attract dramas here."

Have you heard about the Kerryman ?

Councillors in south-west Ireland have backed a plan to relax the drink-drive limits for some isolated constituents.

The motion backed by Kerry county councillors would allow police to issue permits overriding the legal limit.

Councillor Danny Healy-Rae, who proposed the motion, said it would apply to "older people" who "are being isolated now at home, and a lot of them falling into depression".But Kerry Mayor Terry O'Brien said the motion did not "make any sense".

The motion was passed on Monday afternoon by five votes to three, with seven abstentions - though according to TheJournal.ie news website, 12 councillors were absent for the vote which took place "towards the end of a long meeting".

A number of the councillors who approved the measure are reportedly themselves pub owners - but Mr Healy-Rae denied that this had influenced the vote.

Impetuosity, impetuosity: a fine week for eccentric stories it is that we are having.

Include me out

Illegal immigrants are paying criminal gangs £1,500 a time to smuggle them out of Britain, it emerged last night.

The foreign nationals – many of whom sneaked into the UK undetected in the first place – are put in the back of lorries and transported to France.

By avoiding contact with the authorities they can travel on to a European destination of their choice, rather than risk being sent back to their homeland thousands of miles away.

A genuine Daily Mail article from a strange parallel universe. Perhaps someone paid a sub-editor to smuggle it in.

an excellent employee, who wrote impeccable computer code and submitted it on time

A software developer employed by a US critical infrastructure company, and known only as “Bob”, was fired for outsourcing his duties to China so that he could spend the day surfing the internet.

The story comes from a case study by US telecommunications company Verizon, which was contacted by the man’s employer in May 2012 to help clear up an anomaly in its computer systems.

According to the case study, the offender is in his mid-forties, had worked for the company for some time, and was known as a quiet and inoffensive “family man”, who happened to have expertise in programming languages such as C, C++, Perl, Java, Ruby, PHP and Python. He was, the report suggests: “Someone you wouldn’t look at twice in an elevator. For the sake of the case study, let’s call him ‘Bob’.”

Two years before the case came to light, Bob’s firm had begun to allow its employees to work from home on certain days of the week, while connected to the company’s virtual private network. When its IT security team began monitoring the system in 2012, however, it discovered a perpetually open connection to the network from Shenyang, a major city in China.

Given the country’s reputation for cyber-espionage, and the company’s role in the “critical infrastructure” of the US, the team was understandably “greatly unnerved” by its discovery, not least because it seemed the connection to China had been open on and off for over six months.

The worker whose computer was making the suspicious connection – “Bob” – appeared to be at his desk, working hard. The company expected no less: performance reviews by its HR department revealed that he had been deemed an excellent employee, who wrote impeccable computer code and submitted it on time. “Quarter after quarter,” the case study claims, “his performance review noted him as the best developer in the building.”

The company feared Bob had fallen prey to Chinese malware, which could have been redirecting sensitive information from his desktop to China, and immediately contacted Verizon, its internet provider, for assistance. Verizon’s investigators sifted through the files in his computer, only to find hundreds of invoices from a Chinese consulting firm, based in Shenyang.

Bob, it quickly emerged, had paid the Chinese company less than 20 per cent of his six-figure salary to perform his duties on his behalf, and then spent the day coolly browsing the web. According to the report, which logged his daily computer habits, Bob began his mornings at 9am by flicking through Reddit, and would then “watch cat videos” before taking his lunchbreak at 11.30am. At 1pm he returned to his desk to surf eBay and update his Facebook and LinkedIn accounts. At 4.30pm he would send an email to his bosses, before leaving the office at 5pm.

When the ruse was uncovered, Bob was swiftly dismissed, yet it appears he was running a similar operation across several companies. He paid the Chinese firm approximately $50,000 per year, but took home a salary of several hundred thousand dollars.

We would have promoted him if he was working for us.

"I don't think people understand," she says.

Deep in her house, Megan Fox and I are discussing human sacrifice. I tell her about an Aztec ritual practiced five hundred years ago in ancient Mexico during the feast of Toxcatl, when the Aztecs picked a perfect youth to live among them as a god. He was a paragon, beautiful and fit and healthy, with ideal proportions.

Fox has been telling me about the toll that celebrity has taken on her, how the only way to keep from bending to the outside is to bend within. She's sitting on a sectional sofa in workout clothes and a sweatshirt that hide her body, her knees folded beneath her.

The sacrifice's year was filled with constant delight, I tell her. He danced through the streets adorned in luxurious clothes given to him by the master, decked in flowers and incense, playing magical flutes that brought prosperity to the whole world. He had eight servants and four virgins to attend to his every need, and could wander wherever he pleased. But at the end of the year, when the feast of Toxcatl came around again, the perfect youth had to smash his flutes and climb the stairs of the great temple, where the priests would cut out his heart and offer it, still beating, to the sun.

Megan Fox is not an ancient Aztec. She's a screen saver on a teenage boy's laptop, a middle-aged lawyer's shower fantasy, a sexual prop used to sell movies and jeans.

"It's so similar. It totally is," she says quietly.

God give me strength. The "people who can't write interviewing people who can't talk for people who can't read" school of journalism is alive and well in Esquire. You can read the whole grisly car crash here if you're a glutton for punishment. I also can't help but observe in passing that our heroine's limbs seen to have been Photoshopped by someone with very curious ideas about human anatomy, possibly having never actually seen a flesh and blood woman.

#ithankyou

There were no beefburgers in the chiller when I stopped off at Tesco on the way home last night.

I got the meatballs instead.

They were the dog's bollocks.

Page 3 girl Lacey Banghard evicted from Celebrity Big Brother

PAGE 3 stunner Lacey Banghard last night became the latest housemate to be evicted from Celebrity Big Brother.

Not even an appearance naked from the showers this week could save the glamour girl who had been the bookies' favourite to be third to leave - although she was cheered by the crowd as she emerged from the house.

Ah well. Them's the breaks I s'pose. At least I don't have to worry how to spend the £22 I would have trousered from the sweepstakes if she had won.

truculent and bibulous

For several reasons, but essentially I imagine because I am a ponce, I went to the Constable, Gainsborough, Turner and the Making of Landscape exhibition at the Royal Academy on Saturday.

Constable, Gainsborough, Turner are all very well but I was delighted to discover that the real father of British landscape painting was a "bibulous and truculent Welshman." Is there any other kind?

After too long, we have another Welsh Born Icon: Richard Wilson RA (Penegoes, Montgomeryshire, 1714).

The precautionary principle

As any fule kno, in a fall on an outstretched hand with the elbow extended and the forearm supinated, an injury can be caused as the resulting valgus force compresses the capitellum against the radial head.

This is the type of "radial neck" elbow injury the sawbones has diagnosed for the Bomber. It is not a fracture, but three or four weeks off rugby are prescribed.

He's going skiing in five weeks over half term with the school, so I think he ought to sit out the fray until he comes back from Austria.

Whether he heeds my advice remains to be seen.

Sling yer hook

I apologise for neglecting the blogosphere yesterday. I spent the afternoon in A&E with the Bomber who now has his arm in a sling.

For the record:

• The First Aider at Guildford RFC thinks he is probably OK, but advised us to get it checked out.
• Jonnie's mum - who is a physio - had a look at him and told us to get an x-ray as a precaution
• The A&E doctor (Nicola) looked at the x-day and told us she is 90% sure it will be fine but booked us into the fracture clinic for 9:50 this morning with a specialist just to make sure.

All these fine people are correct and I am very grateful to them, even if it does turn out that all he needs to do is rest it.

What happened to borshch?

Prodnose: What happens to the food that defines a world when that world vanishes? What happened, in particular, to the dish that was once the common denominator of the Soviet kitchen, the dish that tied together the peasant and the cosmonaut, the high table of the Kremlin and the meanest canteen in the boondocks of the Urals? What happened to the beetroot soup that pumped like a main artery through the kitchens of the east Slav lands? What happened to borshch?

Myself: I had some last night actually.

Prodnose: Any quest for the origin of a quintessentially Russian dish such as borshch must begin with Pokhlebkin's culinary masterwork, The Cuisine Of Our Peoples ("Our" meaning "Soviet"). Pokhlebkin immediately acquaints you with a crucial detail: borshch isn't Russian. It's Ukrainian. "One could understand and forgive foreigners for calling borshch a Russian national dish," Pokhlebkin writes, "but when it turns out that they gleaned the information from Soviet cookbooks or from restaurant menus, one is embarrassed."

Myself: There was beetroot I needed to use up in the veg box, sirloin was half price at Tesco, and Discovery brand soured cream topping is rarely absent from my larder. Fate played the straight man,  pots and pans were rattled, and hey presto! din dins. Thanks for the tip about it being Ukrainian though. That'll come in handy next time I need to make small talk with one of the Klitschko brothers, you friggin' halfwit..

Prodnose: Pokhlebkin and the Soviet Union are dead, yet Borshchland lives on. Recipes, like birds, ignore political boundaries. Just as the British empire still has a culinary pulse, beating in a curry in Scotland or in the mug of builder's tea with sugar and milk you are handed in some roadhouse on the Karakorum Highway; just as the Ottoman empire breathes phantom breaths in little cups of muddy coffee from Thessaloniki to Basra; so the faint outline of the Tsarist-Soviet imperium still glimmers in the collective steam off bowls of beetroot and cabbage in meat stock, and the soft sound of dollops of sour cream slipping into soup, from the Black Sea to the Sea of Japan and, in emigration, from Brooklyn to Berlin.

Myself: .... from Brooklyn to Berlin .... to Browne's. The SW19 branch to be precise.

Pet Hate

Shades of "Foulenough in the Fur Trade" from home.

Lauding Michu

We'd been holding out so long

We'd been waiting here alone

Two Mil Michu

I'd been hanging on the phone

I kept singing all along

Two Mil Michu

Oooh oooh oooh oooh oooh oooh oooh

Oooh oooh oooh oooh oooh oooh oooh

Two Mil Michu

Oooh oooh oooh oooh oooh oooh oooh

Oooh oooh oooh oooh oooh oooh oooh

Two Mil Michu

Well, Ive been haunted in my sleep

Youve been starring in my dreams

Two Mil Michu

Ive been waiting in the hall

Been waiting on your call

When the phone rings

Its just some friends of mine that say,

Hey, what's the matter man?

Were gonna come around at twelve

With some Oviedo girls that are just dyin to meet you.

Were gonna bring a case of wine

Hey, lets go mess and fool around

You know, like we used to.

One for the terraces the day after Swansea beat the European Champions two-nil

I got it bad, and that ain't good

My brother was listening to Abdullah Ibrahim while out running yesterday, and thus (action at a distance) I find myself listening to Sathima Bea Benjamin (Mrs Abdullah) this morning.

Specifically a lost date from 1963, finally put out in 1996 by Enja Records, under the title A Morning in Paris, as the session's engineer, Gerhard Lerner, had made a second copy, and finally purchased by me from iTunes in 2013.

The album features Benjamin performing with Duke Ellington, Billy Strayhorn, and Abdullah performing piano on various tracks, with Johnny Gertze and Makhaya Ntshoko as bassist and drummer, respectively.

Duke Ellington and Billy Strayhorn! To lose one, Ms. Benjamin, may be regarded as a misfortune. To lose both looks like carelessness.

What the fork?!

Eating too fast, and not chewing long enough leads to poor digestion and poor weight control.

The HAPIfork is an electronic fork that monitors your eating habits. The HAPIfork gives you precise information about your eating schedule. The HAPIfork alerts you with the help of indicator lights when you are eating too fast.

Every time you bring food from your plate to your mouth with your fork, this action is called:
a "fork serving".

The HAPIfork also measures:

• How long it took to eat your meal.
• The amount of “fork servings" taken per minute.
• Intervals between "fork servings".

This information is then uploaded via USB or Bluetooth to your Online Dashboard to track your progress.

The HAPIfork also comes with the HAPILABS app plus a coaching program to help you eat better and change your eating behavior.

It is fun to laugh at the Strabismus-grade madness of this but, dear me, we do live in a stupid and credulous age.

If it doesn't tun your stomach, there is always Dean Kamen. From the man who brought you the Segway comes AspireAssist: a pump that will “drain” your stomach through a valve inserted into the abdominal wall.

This Sort of Thing Is My Bag Baby

I've got Lacey Banghard in the Celebrity Big Brother Sweepstakes, and I couldn't think of a better summary of the weekend's adventures which explains why you haven't heard from me since Friday.

Prodnose: We are the sort of people our parents warned us against.

Spol Skecial Švejk

According to the Torygraph, it was 90 years ago yesterday that the bohemian writer Jaroslav Hašek, author of the comic masterpiece The Adventures Of The Good Soldier Švejk died.

I've revered the book since I was in University; an interlude that often seems about ninety years ago itself.

While I am on the subject, Professor Sir Cecil Parrott (crazy name, crazy guy!) wrote a fine biography of the truant, rebel, vagabond, anarchist, play-actor, practical joker, bohemian (and Bohemian), alcoholic, traitor to the Czech legion, Bolshevik and bigamist author in The Bad Bohemian: A Life of Jaroslav Hašek, Creator of the Good Soldier Švejk.

The story in that of Hašek's real but satirical political campaign with his "Party of Moderate Progress within the Bounds of the Law" is as funny as anything in his fiction.

I like to watch

The Royal Prerogative endows the Monarchy with ""right to be consulted, the right to encourage, and the right to warn." A subtler constitutional expert than yours truly will have to judge how it applies to the remarkably Pooterish advice above from the Royal YouTube Channel: "Raking leaves in the garden."

For me, there seems to be more than a hint of Being There's Chauncey Gardiner about it.

2013's key news and opinion, as it arrives

You say you want a resolution, well you know

Dear Universe,

I weighed thirteen stone and ten pounds this morning.

On my birthday in June I would like to weigh twelve stone dead.

Further, I would like to do this without cutting down on booze or food.

Can you fix it for me?

All the best,

Nick