O Great Saint David, still we hear thee call us,unto a life that knows no fear of death;Yea, down the ages, will thy words enthrall us,strong happy words:’Be joyful, keep the faith.’Archbishop Francis Mostyn (1860-1939) of Cardiff, Wales.
Even PG watched the Wales England game on Saturday. How extraordinary that this interview should be shown at half time in perhaps the only match he has ever watched.
I have been surprised to find that I haven't mentioned the Rockonteurs podcast with Gary Kemp and Guy Pratt here before as we are already up to episode 24.Tomorrow you can listen to our interview with @alicecooper joining @guypratt and @garyjkemp
— Rockonteurs (@rockonteurs) February 27, 2021
Here is the great man talking about his fledgling band opening up for The Yardbirds back in the day. He sure can tell a story! #alicecooper #podcast
Link in bio pic.twitter.com/4mWqtAetzm
We are in hell right now, gentlemen believe me and we can stay here and get the sh1t kicked out of us or we can fight our way back into the light. We can climb out of hell. One inch, at a time.
I woke up yesterday morning and glanced with disdain at the pipe cleaner attached to my shoulder. There used to be an arm there. I flexed the bicep, or at least nerve endings and receptors told me I did. There was no visible response from the limb itself.
Later I got a WhatsApp message from my brother
💯 press up challenge.Are you joining me?
I am joining him.
June 22: My birthday.
June 21: Step 4 – All legal limits removed on mixing will be removed and the last sectors to remain closed, such as nightclubs, will reopen. Large events can take place. Tomorrow!
May 17: Step 3 – Indoor venues such as the inside of pubs and restaurants, hotels and B&Bs, play centres, cinemas, museums and group exercise classes will reopen. The new indoor and outdoor mixing limits will remain for pubs and other hospitality venues. Back to the gym and hot yoga?
April 12: Step 2 – Reopening of non-essential retail, hair and nail salons, and public buildings such as libraries. Long overdue haircut.
March 29: Step 1, part 2 – Outdoor gatherings allowed of up to six people, or two households if this is larger, not just in parks but also gardens. The Hendries' investment in garden furniture and heaters starts to pay off?
March 8: Step 1, part 1 – People can meet one other person outside for, say, a coffee or picnic, not just for exercise. Children will still count towards this. Be still my beating heart.
Ludwig Wittgenstein’s famously apophatic conclusion to his TRACTATUS LOGICO-PHILOSOPHICUS is:
Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.
We are also told that Frank Ramsey famously replied:
What we can’t say, we can’t say, and we can’t whistle it either.
Considering Ramsey actually composed the 'official' translation of the Tractatus from German into English this has always struck me a tad disingenuous. Pulling his own leg?
This month's audible credit has been spent on Frank Ramsey: A Sheer Excess of Powers by Cheryl Misak so maybe after I have got through that I will be able to cast some light. (Misak's Aeon essay Philosophy must be useful may be worth your attention if you are intrigued at all.)
(My brother John's latest Audible credit was spent on Stephen Fry's Orwell Collection: Animal Farm & 1984.)
I have of late—but wherefore I know not—lost all my mirth, forgone all custom of exercises, and indeed it goes so heavily with my disposition that this goodly frame, the earth, seems to me a sterile promontory; this most excellent canopy, the air—look you, this brave o'erhanging firmament, this majestical roof fretted with golden fire—why, it appears no other thing to me than a foul and pestilent congregation of vapors. What a piece of work is a man! How noble in reason, how infinite in faculty! In form and moving how express and admirable! In action how like an angel, in apprehension how like a god! The beauty of the world. The paragon of animals. And yet, to me, what is this quintessence of dust? Man delights not me. No, nor woman neither, though by your smiling you seem to say so.
Thomas Tuchel says he was unhappy with the performance of half-time substitute Callum Hudson-Odoi after the Blues were held to a 1-1 draw at Southampton in the Premier League. The Chelsea manager said of Hudson-Odoi, who was taken off in the 76th minute: 'I had the feeling he was never really into the game.'
Matt Hancock : Your report specifies intelligence/counterintelligence with SW19-Corps.Myself : I'm not presently disposed to discuss these operations, sir.Matt Hancock : Did you not work for the Hendrie-A in SW19-Corps?Myself : No, sir.Matt Hancock : Did you not assassinate a government tax collector in Quang Tri province, June 19th, 1968? Captain?Myself : Sir, I am unaware of any such activity or operation... nor would I be disposed to discuss such an operation if it did in fact exist, sir.
When referees fight back: Darren Drysdale confronted Ipswich player Alan Judge face on - but was he right to do so?
Former referee Keith Hackett gives us his view on Drysdale's 'rutting stag' as we ask, what happens next and has this ever happened before?Dad would have said that Darren Drysdale was "dropping the bean" on Alan Judge above. I don't think I have ever heard anyone else use that colloquialism.
It looks like if you change the name servers for an AWS registered domain you need to do it in the "Registered Domains" section rather than changing the DNS records in "Hosted Zones."
AWS: Nick - I'll be very brief, look, the lengths go through to you direct via Admin, not via us. Read the orange handbook, love. https://docs.aws.amazon.com/Route53/latest/DeveloperGuide/domain-name-servers-glue-records.html
Well that's been my morning so far and it isn't even eight yet. How are things with you?
The change was from
ns-499.awsdns-62.com.
ns-973.awsdns-57.net.
ns-1629.awsdns-11.co.uk.
ns-1252.awsdns-28.org.
to
ns1.bluehost.com.
ns2.bluehost.com.
.. in case I need to switch it back.
I noticed an AppleTV app on the Amazon Fire TV stick so I have got that up and running, though it was a pain in the backside as you have to validate it via an Apple device so I had to find and recharge an iPad I hadn't used for five or six years.
There is also a NowTV app, so 2014's box (icons passim) may go the way of all flesh.
There is also a Disney+ app but I am sulking because they have been beastly to Gina Carano (Icons passim).
Undergraduates Hunt for Special Tetrahedra That Fit Together
A group of MIT undergraduates is searching for tetrahedra that tile space, the latest effort in a millennia-long inquiry. They’ve already made a new discovery.
What Aristotle started over 2,000 years ago, a team of 30 undergraduates at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology is continuing. They’ve been capitalizing on a recent mathematical advance that has injected new life into a millennia-long quest to identify shapes that can perfectly fill, or tile, three-dimensional space.
“It’s quite exciting but also at the same time a little intimidating to know some of the greatest minds have been working on this topic,” said Yuyuan Luo, a first-year MIT student participating in the work organized by MIT professor Bjorn Poonen.
Aristotle’s interest in the question arose as a rebuke to Plato, his teacher. ......... read on .........
I am seeing these issues everywhere now. How little geometry, it seems, we actually understand. Next stop protein folding?
I saw Ben last night. Nominally to eat sushi while watching Rurouni Kenshin: The Legend Ends. We succeeded at that, and darn good it was too, but before we watched:
This week, the Crown Estate sold seabed rights to six offshore wind developments for £879m.
The £879m of option fees are paid to the Crown Estate to secure the rights to lease the seabed in each year that the wind farms are in development. They equate to £110,000 per megawatt per year, compared with £20,000 the last time a leasing round was held in 2010. More than £8bn could be paid to the Crown Estate over 10 years.
When the wind farms begin generating electricity, these option fees stop and developers instead pay 2pc of gross turnover to the Crown Estate as rent.
The Queen gets something called the Sovereign Grant in exchange for surrendering all profits from the Crown Estate to the government. Every year, the Queen is given an amount of money equivalent to 25% of the Crown Estate's profits.
The Sovereign Grant for 2020-21 is £85.9 million. That is now due to be boosted by 220m per year.
An increase in the grant to from 15% to 25% was approved by Parliament in March 2017, to help lay for a £369 refurbishment of Buckingham Palace.
I ranted about this earlier this week (see Icons passim). I am astonished that it is not more controversial.
 |
| On the day of the sale "Empty shelves: No custard creams for Brits in Belgium" was the lead business story on my BBC News home page |
For every surface S there exists an integer chi(S) such that whenever a graph G with V vertices and E edges is embedded in it so that there are F faces (regions divided by the graph), we have V - E + F= chi(S).
For a sphere chi(S)=2.
So, if we have P pentagons, and H hexagons we can calculate the number of vertices as follows:
6 vertices for each of the hexagons, i.e. 6*H.
5 vertices for each of the pentagons, i.e. 5*P.
But we have counted each vertex three times (once for each adjacent polygon) so the number of edges E = (6*H + 5*P)/2.
Substituting and solving this equation we get P = 12. So, there are 12 pentagons.
Moving swiftly along, we can see that each pentagon is surrounded by 5 Hexagons. So there should 5*P hexagons, but we have triple counted each hexagon for each of its 3 adjacent pentagons. Thus the number of hexagons is 5*P/3 which equals 20.
That is why - dunderhead - there are 20 hexagons and 12 pentagons in that ball you are standing there bouncing.
Anyway, you are getting under my feet now. Go out and kick 32 polygons worth of leather and air around. I will call you back in when your tea is ready.
England were well beaten in Saturday’s Calcutta Cup and it was only their obduracy, or Scotland’s imprecision, that kept the score-line to a, superficially, respectable 11– 6 loss.
..........Finally, drop the counter-productive talk of brutality. It creates a one-dimensional prism through which England are seen and, more importantly, see themselves. Brutality should be an adverb, not an aspiration.
Strictly Brian, brutality is a noun. Brutally is the adverb for which you are looking. There is also brutal; a perfectly serviceable adjective.
Man, typing that felt good.
There is still a poster on the wall of Ben's old teenage bedroom celebrating Wales' famous 30 - 3 Six Nations win against England in 2013. It is a montage of Leigh Halfpenny; Alex Cuthbert, George North, Adam Jones, Alun Wyn Jones, and Justin Tipuric.
Three of them also started in Wales' encouraging win over Ireland today. Off the top of my head (I haven't checked) Faletau and Biggar played in both games as well. That is quite remarkable longevity in such a brutal game.
The CEC manage 55% of the foreshore of the UK and almost all the seabed out to the 12 nautical mile territorial limits, and have in addition the vested rights to explore and utilise natural resources of the UK continental shelf areas, which extend to the 200 nautical mile limits. These rights include the sub-soil, minerals, and substrata below the surface of seabed, but exclude the rights to oil, gas and coal. The CEC license the generation of renewable energy on the Continental shelf within the Renewable Energy Zone out to 200 nautical miles under the Energy Act 2004. They lease sites for undersea storage of gas and carbon dioxide under the Energy Act 2008.
That's right, the Queen owns, and can dispose of as she sees fit, all the rights to off shore power generation in UK territorial waters. Tony Blair's government ceded this to the Crown in 2004.
Offshore Wind Leasing Round 4 anybody?
This is a disgrace.
These days I seem to be all about the audio book, and I got two more today.
The Second Kind of Impossible: The Extraordinary Quest for a New Form of Matter by Paul J. Steinhardt after Ben and I played with Penrose tiles on Monday, and What the Qur'an Meant: And Why It Matters by Garry Wills as background to our increasingly diverse and inclusive (Diverse AND Inclusive? Ed.) Arabian Nights project.
Born in Cardiff, Glamorgan, Wales on 19 Jun 1961 to Robert Elliott and Anthony John Elliott. Anthony John Elliott married Anabel Meana. He passed away on 28 May 2017 in Gijón, Asturias, Asturias, Spain.
I got an email from an old school friend yesterday. Out on a (COVID sanctioned) walk he had bumped into yet another old school friend who told him a further old school friend, Anthony Elliot, was dead. Died with cancer.
This has hit me pretty hard. We hadn't been in contact for years, but the ancestry link I found above when I googled his name must be correct; he had a Spanish mum and a Cardiff dad. I feel wretched about the fact that he died in 2017 and I didn't find out until 2021.
Let's pretend to cheer ourselves up with an "Ell" story. Julius Caesar was the set Shakespeare for our O level English literature and we were all assembled (mob handed) for a performance of it one evening in the Sherman Theatre, I remember it particularly. Tony Booth was Mark Anthony.
Understand that in the Sherman in those days, you entered from a corridor and then walked down a few stairs into the stalls; the stage was at the same level as the door and we were right at the front. Ell made an unscheduled loo break and then strolled accidentally back onto the stage only to find himself in the middle of the conspirators. The moment he realized where he was is was is the single funniest thing I have seen in my entire life. He lost his nerve and jumped back down with the rest of us. I love him still but it would have been better if he had possessed the sang-froid to stay on the stage and brazen it out. Maybe even stabbed JC a coupla times himself.
Hooray! I have found a PDF of Elizabeth Anscombe's 1958' paper Modern Moral Philosophy.
I am also working through After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory (Third Edition) by Alasdair MacIntyre.
I can't help but conclude from this turn events, that I am spending too much time alone with my thoughts and that - for me at least - lock-down can't end soon enough.
Finding yourself pondering whether virtue ethics qualifies as a rival approach to deontology and utilitarianism, can't be good can it? It's not like everyone else needs to be rescued from agonizing about how Jeremy Bentham or Immanuel Kant's take on life's little challenges might unfold.
The Irish soviets (Irish: Sóivéidí na hÉireann) were a series of self-declared soviets that formed in Ireland during the revolutionary period of the Irish War of Independence and the Irish Civil War (1919 to 1923), mainly in the province of Munster. "Soviet" in this context refers to a council of workers who control their place of work, not a Soviet state.
Well I never. I hadn't previously heard of these convulsions in the land of my ancestors
I was looking at some Proust yesterday. Specifically the C. K. Scott Moncrieff version “Remembrance of Things Past.” Philistine that I am, it made me weep with laughter:
For a long time I used to go to bed early. Sometimes, when I had put out my candle, my eyes would close so quickly that I had not even time to say "I'm going to sleep." And half an hour later the thought that it was time to go to sleep would awaken me; I would try to put away the book which, I imagined, was still in my hands, and to blow out the light; I had been thinking all the time, while I was asleep, of what I had just been reading, but my thoughts had run into a channel of their own, until I myself seemed actually to have become the subject of my book: a church, a quartet, the rivalry between François I and Charles V. This impression would persist for some moments after I was awake; it did not disturb my mind, but it lay like scales upon my eyes and prevented them from registering the fact that the candle was no longer burning.
The immortal Beachcomber (J.B. Morton) was brought irresistibly to mind. "Ah, Lolotte has just entered. Lolotte, the little dancer from the Brebis Qui Tousse, who used to shoot plums off trees with a rook-rifle - how long ago?"
Any road, I started googling the great man to see if I could find any more Rive Gauche first-person-singular riffing when I came across "Morton was born at Park Lodge, Mitcham Road, Tooting." Further research revealed "the house where he was born, now demolished, was on the site of what is now the Morley’s store on the corner of Franciscan Road." I feel that there is a pilgrimage in my future if a 15 minute walk counts as a pilgrimage.
Morton applied his love of the surreal not just to his writing but to everyday life. Walking through Guildford one day with Gerald Barry, Morton stopped at a pillar box. He talked into its opening: "Are you alright, my little man? Don't worry, we'll soon get you out." Soon, a concerned crowd gathered to see who was trapped inside. Somebody summoned the fire brigade to help, while Morton and Barry made a discreet exit. Events like this were quite frequent: on another occasion he littered Virginia Woolf's front doorstep with dozens of empty, quart-sized brown ale bottles.
I have added littering Morley's front doorstep with empty brown ale bottles to my to-do list.
Thank you for everything!! Learned a lot from you and appreciate all you did for me. I wish you the best for the future🙏🏾💙 pic.twitter.com/Hfre4oidhk
— Callum Hudson-Odoi (@Calteck10) January 26, 2021
Callum made his first premier league start for Chelsea on April 4, 2019 (Icons passim). Maurizio Sarri was the manager, but three months later he made way for Frank Lampard. With the appointment of Thomas Tuchel yesterday, and only just 20 years old he is on his third gaffer. Doesn't exactly scream continuity does it?
As I was putting the rubbish out this morning, I noticed a pair of black trousers in the front garden. They looked like they had probably been there some time; I'm not the most diligent of horticulturalists. I popped them in the bag along with the rest of the week's detritus.
Could they have been mine? I pretty much live in black pants; jeans and moleskin as a rule. I had a drink or two (in my bubble you understand) on Saturday night before I got home but surely not enough to start disrobing before I had got the front door open.
I wonder what the neighbours' overactive imaginations made of it? They've been looking at me in askance lately but I just assumed that was because I use Jack Daniels instead of mouth wash, and like to greet the dawn by cranking out Link Wray's Juke Box Mama through my valve amp.
I dropped PG's weekly grocery shop off yesterday. He is taking things slowly waiting for his first vaccination to kick in. It had been snowing, and when he opened the door to let me out, we bumped into a neighbour spreading gritting salt to clear any ice off Peter's path. What a gent. He was just doing it as a civic duty. If I hadn't been on my way home at that particular moment no-one else would even have known he had done it. Old school.
I remember in the first lockdown Peter ran out of stock and called next door on the phone to see if they had any spare. They did, so he popped over to collect an OXO cube left out on the door step as everyone followed regulations to the letter. The unintended and undeserved bathos of that image sums up 2020 for me.
Yesterday was one month since Dad's funeral. As I have got older (I'm still getting older, it hasn't stopped) I have begun to realise that whenever he wanted to teach me anything he would do it in one or two pithy sentences, the significance of which would only dawn on me later. When I was a little boy - scarcely more than a toddler - he told me that Jewish people were very warm and generous. So generous in fact that they would volunteer to work on Christmas day in vital industries and and services so that everyone else could have the day off. "Wow," I remember thinking.
My brother John is nine years younger than me. I told him that anecdote after the funeral. Guess what he told me. Yup. When he was a little boy - scarcely more than a toddler - Dad told him that Jewish people were very warm and generous. So generous in fact that they would volunteer to work on Christmas day in vital industries and and services so that everyone else could have the day off.
The same explanation to two little boys all but a decade apart is plainly no coincidence. He wanted to inoculate us against the virus of casual antisemitism (I use the word casual advisedly).
It isn't theoretical. Our family home is at the bottom of Ty Gwyn Avenue. The Cardiff United synagogue opened around the corner in Ty Gwyn Road in 1955. One Saturday morning in September 1981, as Elliot Fine walked to that very synagogue with three of his children, a German ex-pat neighbour - who had already plagued the family - rammed his car into them before getting out and stabbing Elliott to death. I was twenty years old. The same age my son is as I write this.
Up until now, I have always been reluctant to share what I think of as the wisdom of my father's teaching. Could he not be, perhaps, accused by grievance brokers of coming close to insulting or patronizing the people of whom he seemed, to my young ears, to have spoken so warmly? I needn't have worried. I learned yesterday, from reading a biography of Harry Truman, of something or someone called a shabbos goy,
A Shabbos goy (Yiddish: שבת גוי, shabbos goy; Hebrew: גוי של שבת) is a non-Jew who performs certain types of work (melakha) which Jewish religious law (halakha) prohibits a Jew from doing on the Sabbath. Notable examples include Maxim Gorky, Harry S. Truman, Colin Powell, Martin Scorsese, and - my particular favourite - the adolescent Elvis Presley, all of whom assisted their Jewish neighbors in this way.
What was my old man boosting but a mirror image of this? A live and let live world of respect, tolerance, help and interdependence. It is no wonder I miss him so much.
I finished The Age of Eisenhower: America and the World in the 1950s by William I Hitchcock yesterday.
It is a terrific book with many lessons for our boorish times. One lesson is that it is so even handed that the author's obvious respect and admiration for his subject makes his criticism of Eisenhower for letting the CIA off the hook on covert operations all the more devastating.
Lesson two (on this day of days) is the civility of the handover of office from Ike to JFK.
Israel’s coronavirus tsar has warned that a single dose of the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine may be providing less protection than originally hoped, as the country reported a record 10,000 new Covid infections on Monday.
In remarks reported by Army Radio, Nachman Ash said a single dose appeared “less effective than we had thought”, and also lower than Pfizer had suggested.
By contrast, those who had received their second dose of the Pfizer vaccine had a six- to 12-fold increase in antibodies, according to data released by Sheba Medical Center in Tel Hashomer on Monday.
The issue of some vaccines being less effective after a single dose rather than two is well known, as well as the fact that protection is not immediate. While the first dose can take several weeks to promote an effective antibody response, the second dose can trigger different responses, supercharging the protection. Pfizer itself says a single dose of its vaccine is about 52% effective. Some countries such as the UK have delayed administering their second doses to try to maximise the number of people given a first dose.
I'm not surprised. The cockamamie idea of giving as many people as possible an initial dose of a Covid vaccine - rather than preserving stocks so there is enough for second jabs first came to my attention when it was suggested by serial self-deluder Tony Blair on 22 December. As an idea it is based on precisely ..... nothing. It is like me suggesting that we could double the amount of shots we have available by halving the dose https://www.independent.co.uk/news/health/coronavirus-oxford-vaccine-clinical-trial-safety-nhs-b1760346.html notwithstanding.
I am off to see PG's this morning. I will do his shopping and drop it off, and then ferry him along to his COVID shot and back.
Ages ago he identified Kate Bingham is the only bright spot in the Government's response to the virus.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kate_Bingham
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p093gs4k
How does he do stuff like that? I've never previously given much truck to intuition but I can't really see any other explanation.
Frankie sent me a message last Sunday morning so I could tell Peter it was Helen's birthday today. Unfortunately I didn't read it until I had left but I remember that he had mentioned that very day that he thought she would like Balzac so I emailed him and he recommended either "Lost Illusions" or "Splendeurs Et Miseres Des Courtisanes" as a gift from the two of us.
"Lost Illusions" has been delivered. The English title of "Splendeurs Et Miseres Des Courtisanes" is "A Harlot High and Low." I can't speak for everyone, but the latter doesn't scream light-hearted, surprise token birthday present to me, though I have been chuckling to myself imagining it dropping unexpectedly through the letter box.
The conventional view holds that girih (geometric star-and-polygon, or strapwork) patterns in medieval Islamic architecture were conceived by their designers as a network of zigzagging lines, where the lines were drafted directly with a straightedge and a compass. We show that by 1200 C.E. a conceptual breakthrough occurred in which girih patterns were reconceived as tessellations of a special set of equilateral polygons (“girih tiles”) decorated with lines. These tiles enabled the creation of increasingly complex periodic girih patterns, and by the 15th century, the tessellation approach was combined with self-similar transformations to construct nearly perfect quasi-crystalline Penrose patterns, five centuries before their discovery in the West.
Marshall McLuhan (Hat tip Marina Warner)
Electric circuitry is Orientalizing the West. The contained, the distinct, the separate—our Western legacy—are being replaced by the flowing, the unified, the fused.
Girih (Persian: گره, "knot", also written gereh) are decorative Islamic geometric patterns used in architecture and handicraft objects, consisting of angled lines that form an interlaced strapwork pattern. I wonder if there is a connection between them and the Penrose tiling I was burbling on about yesterday?
 |
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Girih_tiles |
.svg/1920px-Penrose_Tiling_(Rhombi).svg.png)
If you’re doing algebra, you just write down the answer. But for geometric or visual work, you have to translate it into words. That takes time. Often the visual people literally don’t finish the papers. The result is that algebraic people do better in exams, so you find more of them at universities.
Unless I miss my guess, the Bomber and I are going to be all over the golden ratio and local pentagonal symmetry like a cheap suit. Keeping it real, I have ordered a magnet pack "Gee thanks Dad!" so that we can investigate it - drum roll please - by attaching things to the fridge.
After the Decameron, at the rate of one story a day, and then Don Quixote, at the rate of one chapter today, we are now working through the Arabian Nights. I leave it up to you to guess the rate.
The Hunchback's Tale, comes quite early on.
In China a tailor and his wife meet a cheerful, drunk hunchback playing the tambourine. They're entertained and invite the hunchback over for dinner. When the tailor playfully stuffs the hunchback's mouth with fish, the hunchback chokes and dies. The tailor panics.
His wife convinces him to leave the body at the home of a Jewish physician. The physician believes the hunchback fell down his stairs and died; his wife tells him to leave the body with their neighbor, the king's Muslim kitchen steward.
The steward sees the body on the doorstep and starts beating it, convinced it's the unknown thief who's been stealing his food. Fearing he killed the hunchback by accident, the steward leaves the body at a shop door.
A Christian tradesman who works as the king's broker wanders by, drunk. The broker worries the hunchback will steal his turban and beats the body. A watchman stops and accuses a Christian of killing a Muslim.
Ultimately his execution is ordered. Before this can happen, however, the steward confesses to the murder. He doesn't want to burden his conscience with the death of a Muslim and a Christian. The steward takes the broker's place until the Jewish physician admits to the crime, fearing he'll cause the death of two Muslims. He takes the steward's place. Then the tailor confesses and takes the physician's place. It is almost funny as the executioner tires of the rapidly changing victims.
What we actually have here is a charming parable about religious tolerance and honour.
I was watching Prof Wen-chin Ouyang's lecture "The Curious Life of Objects in the Arabian Nights" on YouTube last night. About three quarters of an hour in (https://youtu.be/mTtN69oL34E?t=2785) she identifies where in China this story is set. It is Kashgar. Population 85% Uyghur.
Ironic doesn't begin to describe it.
Inspired in Piss Alley street food market (Tokyo) and Latin American’s (Mexico & Venezuela) street food stalls, we are taking and fusion the best of the Latin and Japanese, traditions, culture and flavors to get a new hardcore street food concept: Noritacos.
The Hong Kong flu, also known as the 1968 flu pandemic,[1] was a flu pandemic whose outbreak in 1968 and 1969 killed an estimated 1–4 million people globally. It is among the deadliest pandemics in history, and was caused by an H3N2 strain of the influenza A virus, which is descended from H2N2 (caused the Asian flu pandemic in 1957-1958) through antigenic shift—a genetic process in which genes from multiple subtypes are reassorted to form a new virus.
....
Four months into the Hong Kong flu pandemic, American microbiologist Maurice Hilleman and his team had created a vaccine and more than 9 million doses had been manufactured. The same team also played a key role in developing a vaccine during the 1957-58 Asian flu pandemic.
The H3N2 virus returned during the following 1969–70 flu season, which resulted in a second, deadlier wave of deaths in Europe, Japan, and Australia. It remains in circulation today as a strain of seasonal flu.
The more things change the more they stay the same. As I have remarked before (Icons passim) 1968-69 resonates with 2020-21. Why do we remember the Summer of Love and Woodstock over and above the Hong Kong flu pandemic I wonder?
Also - while we are all patting ourselves on the back about Pfizer/BioNTech and Oxford/AstraZeneca let's revisit a sentence above: "Four months into the Hong Kong flu pandemic, American microbiologist Maurice Hilleman and his team had created a vaccine and more than 9 million doses had been manufactured. "
Red Dust, takes its name from the cloud of Iron Oxide, emitted when the Steelworks were in production. In times now long gone, there were red clouds of the dust that would hang over the town, settling on cars and washing hung out to dry! The air in Consett maybe somewhat cleaner now, but the memory remains for many, and lives on in this beer!
PG's Small Change talks about the red dust from the steelworks when he was growing up. It came up on Sunday when I was telling him about watching On the Waterfront with Ben. I must try and get him a bottle of this Consett Ale.
When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things.I bought the Bomber an XBOX for his sixth birthday (Icons passim). All these years later he is still an XBOX man. Fourteen years ago I needed to be more involved, so his account was set up with my email address and credit card details. We have never got round to changing this.
Yesterday I got an email saying we had bought "200 Call of Duty®: Black Ops Cold War Points." As I was forwarding it on to him for information I noticed that - for the first time I think - he had overwritten the stored card details and paid with his own. A sentimental rite of passage for me.
Addendum: A while back, when it was still allowed, I was a around at Helen and Mat's in the garden. Their son came out to join us and asked his mother if he could have some thyme. I at least took it for thyme probably because he seemed to me to be heading for the row of potted herbs on the patio. A keen cook myself, I was extremely impressed. But no. He was after XBOX time. It turns out that they ration him via a phone app. Another hour was negotiated and he returned to his pit.
I got a heads up yesterday about Bill Gates on a Radio 4 programme called "How to vaccinate the world," so I listened to it on BBC Sounds in the evening. It was a refreshing change to hear something that wasn't glib. The Guardian leader yesterday was glib. Boris Johnson is glib. Left and right are equally guilty. William Gates III's mother obviously brought him up to chew his food thoroughly before swallowing. More power to her elbow.
Soul Music on my beloved Talking Heads Once in a Lifetime is also available.
I love Radio 4.
"We are ghosts or we are ancestors in our children's lives. We either lay our mistakes, our burdens upon them, and we haunt them, or we assist them in laying those old burdens down, and we free them from the chain of our own flawed behaviour. And as ancestors, we walk alongside of them, and we assist them in finding their own way."
Eternal rest grant unto them, O Lord, and let perpetual light shine upon them. May their souls and the souls of all the faithful departed, through the mercy of God, rest in peace. Amen 🔰🙏🏼 pic.twitter.com/G0JZ8iP9b3
— Old Illtydians RFC (@OIRFC1928) December 23, 2020
I am thinking of Dad of course, and how he explained things to me simply when I was a little boy. Today in this season I remember (somehow I remember as I was a toddler) him explaining to me that Jews were warm and generous people. So warm and generous in fact that they often volunteered to work over Christmas so that other people could have a few days off.
Just a hand on my shoulder steering me the right way.
BBC Sounds: A Promised Land by Barack Obama Ep 8.
Former President Barack Obama continues reading from the first volume of his presidential memoirs A Promised Land, offering a unique and deeply personal account of some of the landmarks of his first term at the White House.
In today’s episode, Obama confronts one of the key issues of any current world leader - what to do about climate change. Prompted by his own experiences of a Hawaiian childhood and driven by the need to create a safer environmental future for his daughters Malia and Sasha, he refuses to be blown off course. With the Kyoto Protocol set to expire in 2012 Obama is determined to negotiate a major international climate agreement. He travels to a summit in Copenhagen but is confronted by stalemate as world leaders refuse to compromise or, in some cases, to even engage with the issue. He decides the only way forward is to engage in a spot of gate crashing with Hillary Clinton.
I listened caught the last five minutes or so of this driving back up the M4 yesterday. I don't think I have ever heard anything so self serving. "That was some real gangster shit back there"??!!
O wad some Pow'r the giftie gie us
To see oursels as ithers see us!
It wad frae mony a blunder free us,
An' foolish notion:
What airs in dress an' gait wad lea'e us,
An' ev'n devotion!
I am in Cardiff. The requiem for dad will be in St Joe's at 11 and the burial in Thornhill at 11.
Thanks to everyone who has reached out to me.
Fuck Boris Johnson and fuck Mark Drakeford. All I wanna do it bury my father with dignity on Tuesday while supporting my mother. I will never forgive the two of you for this shit.
I logged onto Facebook yesterday only to find:
Marcus Campbell Sinclair (1976-2020)
It is with much sadness that I must let you know that Marcus passed away yesterday. He courageously lived with his cancer for many years. Marcus was a unique and gifted person, who will be sorely missed.
Bad news. Much fun with Marcus over the years.
I learned from the comments on the post that he was Emperor Palpatine in the The Star Wars Exhibition at the County Hall, London back in 2007. I wish I could have told him how unimpressed Ben was with his throne (see Icons Passim). He would have laughed like a drain.
At one minute to eight on the morning of January 29, 1928, Danny Driscoll walked to the waiting gallows in Cardiff prison.
With just seconds to go before his life ended he looked up at the sky and smiled. "Well," he said, "they've given me a nice day for it."
Outside the prison more than 5,000 men, women and children jammed Adam Street. A teenage girl led the singing of a Catholic hymn but silence when Driscoll's four brothers were led to the front of the barriers where armed police patrolled - Cardiff's underworld was rife with rumours that an attempt would be made to spring the men.
That underworld was ruled by Cardiff's fabled Forty Thieves, thugs who terrorised local race courses running protection rackets, charging bookies for supplies of chalk and sponges, and even buckets of water. You paid up. Or got cut up.
But Dai Lewis, a popular former boxer, refused to pay up. At Monmouth races on September 28, 1927, he defied the Cardiff gang led by Edward and John Rowlands - "Tich" and "Jack Tich".
A detective recalled years later that though Lewis wasn't frightened, "he was worried". So instead of going home to Ethel Street in Canton he stayed at a hotel.
That night Lewis sat in the Blue Anchor at the bottom end of St Mary Street with Driscoll and Tich Rowlands. John Rowlands and Edward "Hong Kong" Price waited in a cafe across the road. At eleven o'clock Dai Lewis walked out of the pub - and into local legend ....... read on
PG told me this story on Sunday. I had never heard of it. The Adam Street outside the prison jammed with 5,000 hymn singing protesters is the same Adam Street where Dad would be born five years later. 'Hong Kong' Price was PG's brother-in-law's grandfather.
http://www.capitalpunishmentuk.org/Driscoll%20and%20Rowlands.html is worth a look as well.
I stumbled on the Gresham College lectures on YouTube.
Gresham College is an institution of higher learning located at Barnard's Inn Hall off Holborn in Central London, England. It does not enroll students and does not award any degrees. It was founded in 1597 under the will of Sir Thomas Gresham, and it hosts over 140 free public lectures every year. Since 2001, all lectures have also been made available online.
Futurist cooking will be free of the old obsessions with volume and weight and will have as one of its principles the abolition of pastasciutta. Pastasciutta, however agreeable to the palate, is a passéist food because it makes people heavy, brutish, deludes them into thinking it is nutritious, makes them skeptical, slow, pessimistic… Any pastascuittist who honestly examines his conscience at the moment he ingurgitates his biquotidian pyramid of pasta will find within the gloomy satisfaction of stopping up a black hole. This voracious hole is an incurable sadness of his. He may delude himself, but nothing can fill it. Only a Futurist meal can lift his spirits. And pasta is anti-virile because a heavy, bloated stomach does not encourage physical enthusiasm for a woman, nor favour the possibility of possessing her at any time.
RAW MEAT TORN BY TRUMPET BLASTS: cut a perfect cube of beef. Pass an electric current through it, then marinate it for twenty-four hours in a mixture of rum, cognac and white vermouth. Remove it from the mixture and serve on a bed of red pepper, black pepper and snow. Each mouthful is to be chewed carefully for one minute, and each mouthful is divided from the next by vehement blasts on the trumpet blown by the eater himself.
I didn't have any hot water yesterday because I turned it off a few days ago and neglected to turn it back on.
I am trying to work out a way to blame https://www.hivehome.com/ but so far I have come up short. Sometimes I am astounded that I even manage to get through the day.
Pride, 86, who was the first Black member of the Country Music Hall of Fame, died in Dallas, Texas on Saturday, his publicist confirmed.
Dolly Parton and a string of celebrities took to Twitter to pay tribute to the musician.
"It’s even worse to know that he passed away from Covid-19. What a horrible, horrible virus. Charley, we will always love you.
He was lucky to get his career underway before bullshit notions like cultural appropriation got their feet under the table.
Faravahar (Persian: فَرَوَهَر), also known as Forouhar (Persian: فُروهَر) , or Farr-e Kiyâni (فَرِّ کیانی), is one of the most well-known symbols of Iranian peoples, and Zoroastrianism, the primary religion of Iran before the Muslim conquest of Iran, and of Iranian nationalism.
Fifteen years later (see Icons passim) we're back.
Ben and I went to bobochacha last night, at Helen's recommendation. It is a Pan-Asian place. We shared some dumplings to start and then both had prawn Singapore noodles. Singapore noodles are, for some reason, a sort of gold standard with me. I almost always try them to test a new place out. They didn't disappoint.
Last week (see Icons passim) we went to the Little Taperia and we have penciled in the Brazilian Picanha Steakhouse next. All just round the corner and within a three minute walk from each other.
New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern has apologised to those affected by the Christchurch terror attacks as a report shed new light on how the gunman eluded detection.
The nearly 800-page Royal Commission of Inquiry report released Tuesday concluded that despite the shortcomings of various agencies, there were no clear signs the attack carried out by Brenton Tarrant was imminent.
But it did detail failings in the police system for vetting gun licenses, and said that New Zealand's intelligence agencies were focused on the threat posed by Islamic extremism rather than white supremacists.
Among 44 recommendations, the report recommended the government establishes a new national intelligence agency.
Following the report’s publication, Ms Ardern said: "The commission made no findings that these issues would have stopped the attack. But these were both failings nonetheless and for that I apologise."
Jacinda Ardern says "I" when talking about things which went wrong and "we" when talking about successes. On the face of it, perhaps, uncharitably a rhetorical gimmick. It impresses me very much though. I can tell because it has started to infuriate me when other people don't put their hands up an take responsibility. That lemon Vaughn Gething on Radio 4 this morning for example.
Auntie Nelly was the oldest. Peter, my Dad's cousin, was born in 1939. He was brought up in Tremorfa. There was an RAF camp that adjoined the house. His older brother Bernard told him that Auntie Nellie used to come round and "court" Bunny Churcher who was stationed there through the barbed wire at the bottom of the garden in the early days of the Second World War. They married but my uncle Bunny was killed in the conflict.
The two hooligans on the right are my youngest nephews. They have a little sister who is only one year old.
They are eighty years but only two generations away from Nelly. Alys may well have been born a century after her. If we were the Royal Family there would have been maybe a dozen monarchs at the most between 1066 and today.
Dad passed away at the age of 87 at about eight o'clock last night.
The Bomber and I went along to The Little Taperia, a nearby Spanish tapas bar and restaurant round the corner, last night.
I felt that we had to because Morcilla Scotch eggs, with piquillo peppers were on the menu.
A scotch egg is definitely a substantial meal, Michael Gove has said, as he performed a screeching U-turn on his earlier controversial position that it constituted merely a starter.
We also ate salt cod fritters, prawns with garlic and chilli, plus a potato tortilla. Red wine for me. Lager for him.
I know you might find it difficult believe but we mostly talked about philosophy and mathematics. I didn't notice anyone on an adjoining table inclining an ear so as not to miss any of our musings on Platonic solids.
Bethany's collaboration with Rhys Ifans is supposed to drop on https://www.heartofcardiff.co.uk/ today.
It ain't there yet, but it is what is going on these spindrift pages today so I guess we will just have to wait.
I was back in Cardiff yesterday with the intention of putting in a shift making sure Dad ate and drank at least something. He was never really awake though I managed to get some thickened Lucozade and yoghurt into him by putting a sweet drop on his tongue which seemed to trigger a swallow reflex and then following up with the rest of a teaspoon's worth.
At about ten to one, a nurse came into the room to do his "obvs" (short for observations). Concerned that his heart rate was very low, she called in Hannah*, a more senior nurse, who then called the Dr. After that they did an ECG. The Dr took me aside and told me that he was a lot worse than the day before, and implied - quite frankly - that this might be it over the next several days. I could have stayed but I was just getting in everyone's way in that single room.
Later, when I got a call to say he was much improved, a mental image formed of him opening one eye as I left and whispering "has he gone yet, Hannah*?"
*V impressed that Hannah's business-like hair bun was secured with tinsel rather than a hair tie.
