London Geek Dinner

Paul and I went along to the London Geek Dinner at the Texas Embassy Cantina last night.

(Did you know that from 1836 to 1845 Texas was actually was a country, and that the Republic of Texas set up an Embassy in St James Street in London? Neither did I, but I digress.)

We bumped into Ian outside as he arrived at the same time as us, but that was the only person I saw all night that I can ever remember meeting before.

It was a huge gathering of something like a couple of hundred people and took over the entire first floor of the restaurant. Kudos to Hugh MacLeod and Robert Scoble for the way it was organised. I know how difficult it can be to put events together, and I think that the lightness and sureness of the hand on the tiller in the case was remarkable. It all seemed to come together by magic which means there must have been plenty of trouble shooting behind the scenes.

Very unusually for me I spoke to a load of people, frequently - and this is practically unheard of - initiating the conversation myself.

I'm sure a lot of these conversations will spin out onto the blog in days to come. I even got some takers for AbbeyFest.

RenderMan

I'm working from home this afternoon because my four year old is running a temperature and I've had to pick him up from nursery. He's pretty listless and I think he may be having a reaction to the pre-school booster injection he had yesterday. He may be on the mend though as he just replied, "If I am does it mean I have to go back to nursery?", when I asked him if he was feeling better.

It is really quite easy to telecommute these days given a broadband internet connection and the raft of services such as VPN connection and VOIP conferencing that you can run over it.

Having just caught the credits of Monsters Inc, before sliding in the Incredibles DVD for his viewing pleasure, I have realised that the RenderMan software that Pixar use to make their animated movies may - by keeping my boy diverted - be as significant as any other technology in giving me the chance to get things done today.

One of the most wonderful things about software (and the software market) is the way that features that were originally available exclusively - and at great cost - to specialists trickle down to the province of the man in the street. According to Empire Online, this is about to happen with RenderMan.

Normally with this kind of thing, it's flash bulbs and red carpets. Last night though, there was nothing of the sort. It wasn't glamorous, and it wasn't star studded. What it was, was very informative and bloody good news. Those wonderful geniuses at Pixar trekked all the way over to Blighty to announce that their world beating animation software, RenderMan, will be available for public purchase in just a few months.

To be more specific, they're releasing a new version of the program, that can be used in conjunction with Alias' popular animating programme, Maya. While the Pixar lads talked and explained some of the easy to use (no doubt they use that in the context of one already being a decent computer animator) functions and nifty tricks, employing terms like 'occlusion', 'ray-tracing' and 'Deep shadow technology', Empire just sat quietly, trying to translate this into layman's terms and looking at the pretty pictures getting prettier.

Basically, all you need to know is that this is the beans. When the program is released this summer, we will have reached the point where for �500 and the price of a decent computer (Mac or Windows based) with Maya on it, anyone with the patience to learn the artistic side of animated movie making will be able to create moving images the quality of a Pixar film. But it should be noted that this is the smaller, semi-professional version of RenderMan (the pro version is already available to be licensed out), but damned if what we saw wasn't the bee's knees.

What does this mean for the industry? In our estimation, the effects could be enormous. We expect something of an avalanche of young talent (especially if this is placed in schools) to spring up certainly within the next ten years, and probably sooner. When we had a word with Dylan Sisson, Technical Artist, he agreed. "Absolutely, this is just going to make things explode." Kids and technology � what can we say? It's not so much the programme itself, it's the (seeming) simplicity, and accessibility that's going to change things. It's another great contribution to the world of animation from Pixar, and it can only be a good thing for the future of movies.

Maybe it won't be too long before he can make a movie rather than watching one when he is off school. Update: ssshhhh he's asleep now.

Cinderella Man

I have had a soft spot for Russell Crowe since the incident last year when he got into a fight with his own bodyguard. I thought that it was just so ridiculous that it attained a sort of lunatic grandeur.

That said, I am not all that interested in his arrest in New York for more violent shenanigans while promoting his new boxing movie.

It has reminded me however that I have been meaning to add inline video to my repertoire, so here is the trailer for "Cinderella Man"

Abbeyfest 2005

The free Friday night jazz on the Merton Abbey Mills bandstand is one of the highlights of the year for us, and the line up for AbbeyFest 2005 is now out.

Friday 8th July HAMISH STUART BAND
Friday 15th July TONY O'MALLEY
Friday 22nd July LILIANA CHACHIAN
Friday 29th July POLLY GIBBONS
Friday 5th August RACHAEL CALLADINE BAND
Friday 12th August LIANE CARROLL
Friday 19th August SAMARA

We colonise the walkway between our offices in the Apprentice Shop and the Coles Shop for the gigs, and this gives us a unique vantage point with easy access to our kitchen for booze and grub. Let me know if you fancy coming along one evening.

We kick off on July 8, with Hamish Stuart who, while probably best known for his work as the original lead singer/guitarist with "The Average White Band", has also had an illustrious career as both songwriter and performer working with the likes of Diana Ross, George Benson and Chaka Khan (for whom he wrote the No. 1 chart hit "Whatcha Gonna Do For Me"), as well as spending six years with the Paul McCartney Band.

You can't really complain about seeing him for free while drinking our beer can you?

A Race to the Top

Thomas L Friedman writes about the French "non" to the EU Constitution from the perspective of his Bangalore dateline.

It was extremely revealing traveling from Europe to India as French voters (and now Dutch ones) were rejecting the E.U. constitution - in one giant snub to President Jacques Chirac, European integration, immigration, Turkish membership in the E.U. and all the forces of globalization eating away at Europe's welfare states. It is interesting because French voters are trying to preserve a 35-hour work week in a world where Indian engineers are ready to work a 35-hour day. Good luck.
.............

The dirty little secret is that India is taking work from Europe or America not simply because of low wages. It is also because Indians are ready to work harder and can do anything from answering your phone to designing your next airplane or car. They are not racing us to the bottom. They are racing us to the top.

Always chasing Rimbauds

"A SINGLE VERSE by Rimbaud," writes Dominique de Villepin, the new French Prime Minister, "shines like a powder trail on a day's horizon. It sets it ablaze all at once, explodes all limits, draws the eyes to other heavens." Here is a rather different observation, uttered by George Bush Sr in 1998, that might stand as a motto for his dynasty: "I can't do poetry."
......

M de Villepin has set himself 100 days to restore French self-confidence, to infuse France with a sense of its poetic destiny: �We need a heart that beats for everyone.� For this poet, practical considerations are secondary. As he wrote in his recent 823-page treatise on French poetry: �What does it matter where this path leads, nowhere or elsewhere, if the furrow continues flowering, if the flash of lightning still inflames the night . . . If the poet still consumes himself, he refuses the enclosures of thought, certainties, to camp in the heart of the mystery, in the living spirit of the flame.�

To which the American response will be a resounding: �Whatever.� The Bush White House does not do poetry. At a Nato summit in Prague, Donald Rumsfeld was once forced to sit though a performance of modern dance and poetry. Asked for his reaction afterwards, he shrugged: �I�m from Chicago.�
.......
To the Anglo-Saxon mind there is something dodgy, even dangerous, in the man who rules the world by day and writes verses by night. As W.H. Auden wrote: �All poets adore explosions, thunderstorms, tornados, conflagrations, ruins, scenes of spectacular carnage. The poetic imagination is not at all a desirable quality in a statesman.� Indeed, the precedents are not happy ones, for there is a peculiar link between frustrated poetic ambition and tyranny: Hitler, Goebbels, Stalin, Castro, Mao Zedong and Ho Chi Minh all wrote poetry. Radovan Karadzic, fugitive former leader of the Bosnian Serbs, once won the Russian Writers� Union Mikhail Sholokhov Prize for his poems. On the whole, you do not want a poet at the helm.

Opinion - Ben Macintyre Times Online

Tony Benn for Number 10

A report from the BBC on an appearance by Tony Benn at Hay Festival, records that "the Labour veteran said you achieve progress by keeping on and on about something before people regard you as 'bonkers', next you're dangerous 'until finally they believe they thought of it in the first place'. "

How right he is.

"Trouble always comes in threes", I remember my Dad musing years ago, "hence Anthony Wedgewood Benn." These days he lauds him as a stand up guy who he has respected constantly even if they have not always seem eye to eye.

Shock Mom and Dad ......

........ Become a Neo-Nazi

I've been brooding more about yesterday's post. In this age we live under the shadow of an orthodoxy. And we're oppressed by an orthodoxy because everyone in every age always is. What particularly siticks in my craw now that the Establishment is run by the Me generation, is that they refuse to own up to to this and admit that they are the grown ups now.

This has been going on for a long time, I particularly remember Jeff Daniels' turn as the yuppie "rebel who's only channeled his rebellion into the mainstream," nearly 20 years ago in 1986's Something Wild, and certainly long enough for the law of unintended consequences to kick in, as the following story from Germany attests.

German young people, faced with liberal parents who are tolerant about sex, drugs and rock and roll, are increasingly rebelling by turning to right-wing extremism. Neo-nazi fashion, music and ideology have become an ever important part of German youth culture.

Where did this "German" image come from? It's hard to say who the first person was to show up to a party in a Lonsdale shirt, curse "the Russians" or download the latest CDs by Bremen's Germanic renegade heavy metal band Kategorie C.

But Christian, Stefan and Andy don't really care .......... read on

Tell me on a Sunday

It is interesting on a Sunday to reflect on yesterday's post and the following piece and to wonder if the bigots and culprits of the world are really those that the main stream media regularly claim to expose.

The sun set on the 20th century more than four years ago but you can still see a blood-red glow on the horizon. The century that saw unprecedented technological progress also saw unprecedented slaughter. Previously, religion had served mankind�s deep needs for explanation, order, spiritual comfort and transcendental meaning. Now a new and hideous thing was summoned up to serve the same needs. The thing was ideology, and in a few decades it caused more bloodshed than millennia of religion. It was darker and more irrational, and contained within it something unknown to all the Religions of the Book: a death wish. Religious leaders, however bad they may be, however prone to hubris and hatred, are constrained by fear of God above and by ancient tradition and wisdom. Ideological leaders have no such constraints.

Recently there have been hysterical attacks on the new Pope Benedict, including the charge that he has the blood of millions of Africans on his hands because of the Church�s ban on condoms in a continent ravaged by Aids. I live in Africa, I am an atheist and I think the Church�s prohibition of contraception is wrong, but I want to defend the Pope. To do so, I must compare the good and bad of the Church in Africa with those of the ideologies.

Read the whole thing by Andrew Kenny in the Spectator here.

A Story for the Sabbath

In November 1942, when the murder of Jews in the Cracow ghetto was at its height two Polish Jews, Helen and Moses Hiller, smuggled their small son into the care of a Polish Catholic couple, Mr and Mrs Joseph Yachowitz.

The child arrived with three envelopes from the distraught parents. One contained personal jewellery, another contained letters to relatives in Canada and the US, who were asked to take the boy if the Hillers should die. The third contained a letter to Mrs Yachowitz, a note to little Shachne, and their will.

The letter to Shachne explained how much they loved him, because of which they had given him up to another couple. They told him of his Jewishness, and that they hoped he would grow up to be proud of his heritage. The letter to the couple praised them for their actions, and pleaded: "If we should not survive this madness, raise our son as a Jew."

Sadly, the boy's parents did not survive the Holocaust. When the war ended, Mrs Yachowitz did not post the letters to the boy's relatives in Canada and the US. Instead, she waited a further year, then sought to have the boy baptised and formally raised as a Catholic. She went to the newly-ordained curate in her parish who had a reputation for being wise, compassionate and trustworthy.

She told him about the boy's identity, but not about the letter hand-delivered to her husband and herself.

The young priest listened intently, and asked: "What were the parents' wishes when they entrusted him to you?" Mrs Yachowitz blurted out the full story.

The priest told Mrs Yachowitz it would be unfair to baptise the child while there was still hope that the relatives of the child might take him. He declined to perform the ceremony.
.....
In October 1978... Mrs Yachowitz, who was near death... revealed for the first time her bid to have [the boy] raised as a Catholic, and the reaction of the priest who had counselled her.

She disclosed the young priest's name - Karol Wojtyla, elected that month as Pope John Paul II.

Guys And Dolls: Press

Mixed reviews it seems for Ewan McGregor in the West End revival of Guys and Dolls, but I am sure it is going to be terrific. Our tickets were booked long ago for June 22nd.

I was fortunate enough to see the Richard Eyre's National Theatre production of it twenty something years ago, and it is strange to think that I am going to see the show again shortly after rejoining a gym.

Back in the Eighties I was working in the centre of London and I joined the YMCA in Tottenham Court Road. As it happens, I was due at "Guys and Dolls" pretty much immediately after the first weight training session of my entire life. In those days I was a lot more competitive (i.e. stupid) than I have subsequently become, so the first time I ever pumped iron I rather over did the squats because they were the only exercise I could shift a reasonable weight at.



I have two vividly embarrassing memories of the consequences.

My legs completely gave away underneath me as I was walking down the steps to the tube station. I had to pull myself back up by the handrail and then progress stiff legged to the train rather like Kenneth More's Douglas Bader in "Reach for the Sky".

Worse was to follow.

As I sat through the first act of Guys and Dolls my legs siezed in position locked sharply at the knees, so during the interval I had to retrieve my pre paid gin and tonic by propelling myself to the bar using the knuckle-walk style of locomotion more usually favoured by our chimpanzee cousins. (Foregoing booze that I had already paid for is not an option that would have ocurred to me in those halcyon days.)

Even through all my travails, I really enjoyed a great production of a great, great musical.

Vitamin M

Vitamin M: An Indian English colloquialism in which the M stands for money. It can be used as a nudge-nudge-hint-hint euphemism for bribes and speed money, or to cynically acknowledge the factor that makes the world go round. A phrase for greasy babus and elderly Uncles.

"Every political leader needs Vitamin M (money) to run a party. If they refuse bribes, where will they raise party funds from! said a police inspector from North Mumbai. (Mid-Day, Dec 27, 2003)"

I got this from a site called Dick & Garlick: "Notes on Indian English, Hinglish, Tamlish, Bonglish & other -lishes". Subscribed!

I've always loved colourful slang. "Handing out wolf tickets" for being dangerously angry is one that I have remembered for years from an interview with Tom Waits, another connoisseur.

So to summarise, if I don't get my Vitamin M, I'm gonna be handing out wolf tickets!

PS Years ago Jane coined "ethereal killer" which is a deeply wonderful phrase that we have have never found a use for. I was always pretty sure that I was the onlie begetter of the easily misheard "infomaniac" to describe my work, but looking at Google it seems that that are a lot of others out there as well.

Bubba's Pit BBQ

There is something in the air. David Plotz at Slate has been on An American Barbecue Pilgrimage and Sean Alexander is celebrating that BBQ Season is here,�not only am I Addicted to Digital Media, I'm also addicted to good BBQ.�

It�s clear that the Barbecue means something different to these aficionados than it does to me in the UK and I need to find out what it is. Philosophically I am with George Foreman when he says, "call me anything, just don't call me late for dinner."

Sean Alexander points to the The BBQ Guy Blog, which in turn leads me to BBQ: A Southern Cultural Icon by Laura Dove.

When travelling through the South, your best bet for authentic and carefully prepared Southern cuisine is any of the many barbecue restaurants that dot the landscape. Don't be fooled by the casual atmosphere in most of these barbecue joints; these are the places where the legacy of Southern food is vigilantly protected. In the Southern United States, barbecue is a cherished cultural icon. In other areas of America, "barbecue" is a verb-- Northerners barbecue food on the backyard grill. In the South, however, barbecue is most definitely a noun. A barbecue is a gathering of food aficionados who appreciate the aroma of roasted meat that has been painstakingly smoked for several hours. Barbecue itself is chopped, sliced, or pulled meat liberally doused with a variety of (closely guarded) sauces.

So in Britain, it would seem, like all of the States outside the South, "barbecue" is a verb and the food is grilled out of doors. Down South, "barbecue" is a noun, and Louis Armstrong could go:

Struttin' with some barbecue.
Swinging with the band.
Like the happy people do
'way down in Dixieland.

Hear that slide trombone
and the trumpet "ad lib".
Love to hear a lick
while I do my picking.

Picking on a juicy rib,
cause I'm struttin' with some barbecue.
Feeling mighty grand.
Have another helping, please,
of that good old Dixieland.

And Mister Waiter,
- if you please -
another rib or two! And I go strutt, strutt, strutt
strutting with some barbecue.

I'm pretty sure that the opportunties for struttin' with some barbecue in SW19 are limited, but wait, Google suggests that I may be able to scratch my itch in Shoreditch.

In a historic market filled with diverse cuisine and a bustling maze of booths, Bubba Helberg stands out.

The Arkansas Cafe and Bubba's Pit Barbecue isn't what visitors would expect to find in Spitalfields Market, but there he is with a striped apron and a distinctly non-British accent.

Nowhere else in London will visitors find such authentic American barbecue, smoked next to the front door on a huge grill manned by Helberg.

Helberg, who grew up in El Dorado, Arkansas, about 120 miles from Little Rock, has been educating Londoners about the joys of genuine barbecue for 12 years.

Judging by the reservation-only lunchtime crowd, Londoners have enjoyed the lesson.

Watch this space. Unit 12, Spitalfields Market, 107b Commercial St, London E1 (tube: Liverpool Street or Aldgate East, Tel: 7377 6999) will not remain unpatronised by me for long.

All together now ..

Struttin' with some barbecue.
Swinging having fun.
Like the happy people do
'way down in old E1.

Fog Machine Closes

The fog machine that I wrote about last week closed at �437.95 on Bumblebee Auctions yesterday. It was won by a proxy bid. The proxy bid facility in the system allows a user to set a limit on how much he or she is prepared to pay and leave the system to bid on his or her behalf. This means, of course, that a winning proxy bid will frequently be less than the limit the user set. Who can tell how high the winner might have been prepared to go in this case?

Bumblebee Auctions has to be fair and to be seen to be fair, so it makes the bid history for every lot publicly available on the internet. This can reveal some interesting bidding tactics. The bid history for the fog machine shows that the top bid had only got up to �30.45 on Monday and things didn't really start to get interesting until just before the auction was due to close.

The system has been specifically designed and configured to give a bidder a good chance of winning an item in which he or she is interested. In order to ensure this, we thought that the system should give a user a reasonable opportunity to respond to a rival bid as it would be frustrating for buyers to lose an item right at the last minute with little or no time to respond and place another bid.

The problem was addressed by introducing automatic auction extensions, so if a user places a bid in the last 10 minutes of an auction, the deadline is extended (by 10 minutes) to give someone else a chance. (The system sends the previous high bidder an email when a new high bid is received).

I think this worked well in the case of the fog machine, it can be seen that a bid was made at 20:32:16 (25 seconds before the before the original 20:32:41 end time) and that a counter bid was made at 20:33:43. Overall there were two ten minute extensions during which the price to be paid increased by nearly �200.

(Extensions also protect us from disputes arising from connection latency and PC clock disparities.)

I'd be interested to hear any suggestions for improvements.

David Wooding

It is strange today to think that David passed on a year ago. I remember on hearing that my sister was involved with someone who played the saxophone, ran out for London Welsh, and built his father a computer for his birthday, I joked that if she didn't marry him, then I would.

She did marry him and they had three children, but on this day last year I was in the waiting room in Velindre hospital - fretting through the window over a large black bird that had landed on a lower roof - when they told me he was dead.

I miss him selfishly because I used to talk to him about Daniel Dennett, WH Auden and points between, and because he didn't need things explained to him a million times, and because he understood and would understand, and I don't know anyone else like that.

The Christmas Feast is already a fading memory,
And already the mind begins to be vaguely aware
Of an unpleasant whiff of apprehension at the thought
Of Lent and Good Friday which cannot, after all, now
Be very far off. But, for the time being, here we all are,
Back in the moderate Aristotelian city
Of darning and the Eight-Fifteen, where Euclid's geometry
And Newton's mechanics would account for our experience,
And the kitchen table exists because I scrub it.
It seems to have shrunk during the holidays. The streets
Are much narrower than we remembered; we had forgotten
The office was as depressing as this. To those who have seen
The Child, however dimly, however incredulously,
The Time Being is, in a sense, the most trying time of all.
For the innocent children who whispered so excitedly
Outside the locked door where they knew the presents to be
Grew up when it opened. Now, recollecting that moment
We can repress the joy, but the guilt remains conscious;
Remembering the stable where for once in our lives
Everything became a You and nothing was an It.
And craving the sensation but ignoring the cause,
We look round for something, no matter what, to inhibit
Our self-reflection, and the obvious thing for that purpose
Would be some great suffering. So, once we have met the Son,
We are tempted ever after to pray to the Father;
"Lead us into temptation and evil for our sake."
They will come, all right, don't worry; probably in a form
That we do not expect, and certainly with a force
More dreadful than we can imagine. In the meantime
There are bills to be paid, machines to keep in repair,
Irregular verbs to learn, the Time Being to redeem
From insignificance. The happy morning is over,
The night of agony still to come; the time is noon:
When the Spirit must practice his scales of rejoicing
Without even a hostile audience, and the Soul endure
A silence that is neither for nor against her faith
That God's Will will be done, That, in spite of her prayers,
God will cheat no one, not even the world of its triumph.

The Sith Sense

Darth Vader is waiting to challenge you. Watch as he reads your mind and tells you what you are thinking of - all within 20 questions.

I was thinking of a camel. I could not shield it from him.

I am active

Hello world. This post comes froma terminal inside the Virgin Active club at Abbey Mills where I have just been on my induction course. All the exercise gear seems very geeky. It runs something called the Technogym system. You have a key that you load up with your exercise program and then plug into each machine so it can record what you do.

It also looks as if I can make bookings etc. from the Virgin Active website once I activate my account.

All I have to do now is actually do some exercise. Tomorrow will be soon enough for that I think.

Feedback: Vada Pav

Ah, the joys of having readers and feedback - with the emphasis on feed. After this morning's post about my six month Vada Pav odyssey a recipe has turned up in my inbox.

Ingredients:
Bun - 2

For Mint Chutney:

Mint Leaves - A bunch
Coconut(grated)-1 cup
Green chilli-2
Tamarind- a little salt

For Vada:

Potato - 1
Chilli Powder- 1/2 tbsp
Coriander Powder - 1 Tbsp
Garam masala - 1 Tsp
Salt
Gram Flour (Besan)- 1/ 2 cup


Preparation Method
Mint chutney Preparation method:

Method:
Heat a pan and fry the coconut.Keep aside. Heat oil in a pan and saut� the green chilli and mint leaves. Grind with salt and tamarind into a smooth paste.

For Vada:

1. Boil, peel and mash the potatoes. Add chilli powder, coriander powder, garam masala powder and salt.
2. Make balls out of this and flatten them to the size of the bun.
3. Mix the gram flour with salt and water into a thick batter.
4. Dip the flattened vadas into the batter and deep fry them.

Making the Vada Pav:

1. Spread one side of the bun with mint chutney.
2. Sprinkle little garam masala powder, chilli powder and salt on the other side.
3. Keep the vada in-between the bun.
4. A tasty Indian Burger is ready.

On reflection, I wonder if the Vada is the same stuff that is in a Masala Dosai?

Eight Courses

The coincidence of the return to our televisions screens of Ramsey's Kitchen Nightmares (9pm Channel Four tonight) and the arrival of my credit card bill for last month has reminded me that I haven't written anything about our April visit to Verre, Gordon Ramsey's Dubai outpost.

The reason may well be that - while moaning comes naturally - I find it difficult to find much to say about a flawless evening.

The restaurant design is simplicity itself; brilliant white tablecloths against minimalist dark seating and decoration. There is nothing to distract from the food, and as soon as we sat down, canapes were served in a tiny pair of brilliantly polished copper saucepans.

For the meal itself we selected the Menu Prestige; seven courses which include small degustation portions of selected dishes and a choice of two main courses for an all-in price. We had:

Vine tomato minestrone with roasted langoustine
~
Pressed foie gras and game terrine, marinated fig with a salad of artichokes
~
Pan-fried halibut with etuvee leeks and a lobster risotto

~
Best end of lamb with pommes boulangeres, shallots and baby artichokes served with a tarragon jus

Selection of French cheeses with walnut bread
~
Pre dessert
~
Raspberry and basil bavarois with a salad

Apart from supplying the detail that the pre-dessert was a palate cleansing passion fruit jelly and cream chantilly topped with an icily-refreshing lemon granit, I have nothing more to say. It was perfect in every way.

As our hotel was in the Bur Dubai district, we travelled to Verre by walking down to the Creek and catching an abra - one of the traditional taxi boats - across the water to Deira. On the way I stumbled on a vendor of Vada Pav. I couldn't pass this up - as I have been searching for this Bombay street food ever since Jane went there - so I suppose I really had eight courses that night and ranged from the most basic to the most exalted. It's all good, baby.

(There is quite a significant South Indian and Mumbai presence in Bur Dubai and I must write about the bar-line girls in the club in the hotel some time. That really was straight out of Maximum City.)

Unorthodox Elephants

To celebrate the Bank Holiday I present, for the first time in public, some lines of verse that I have written myself.

Unorthodox elephants live by their wits
On a diet of chocolate and beer.
They're often invited, and never decline
but seldom if ever appear.

These excellent animals all want careers
But not if it spoils their fun,
They turned up their trunks at a three album deal
Preferring to lie in the sun.

Unorthodox elephants affect disdain
For whim, for the caprice of fashion
And yet their opinions are constantly sought
By those who appreciate passion.