A Very Friday Blog

How to refuse a Christmas drink

2011-12-21T22:07:00.003Z

During the socially fraught Christmas party season it's always advisable to have a legitimate-sounding reason to turn down a drink, but now the "I'm driving" ploy has been exposed (thank you, Medical Research Council, which conducted the study), what's needed are a few surefire excuses that will stop you getting served right away – no further questions asked:

"No thanks. I get really racist after a few drinks."

"Before I accept, I should warn you I brought a guitar with me."

"I love drinking, but it doesn't half make me vomit."

"Not for me, I have a flight to catch later on. No, I'm a pilot."

"I know I don't look it, but I'm only 15. It's a long and deeply disturbing story."

"A few more of these and I'll be ready to describe my unpublished novel to you!"

"Just the one – I left my tiny children home alone with nothing but an angry dog and a gas fire for company."

"I would, only I swallowed all these condoms full of drugs earlier."

"Well, it breaches the terms of my Asbo, but what the hell – it's Christmas!"

- Tim Dowling, Guardian, 15 December 2011

Pippa Middleton's new book

2011-12-05T05:50:00.001Z

A predictable wave of rage greets the news that Pippa Middleton is writing a party planning guide, for the amusing fee of £400,000.

We've been here before, when the Middleton parents were accused of "plotting to cash in on the royal wedding" by selling party props. That is one serious plot. They started a company selling party props in 1987. So the ground was laid for the Great Bunting Wheeze when the potential royal bride was only five years old; eat your heart out, Guy Fawkes.

The nation, or at least its gruesome reflection on TV discussion shows (a self-selecting bunch, you have to admit), is "shocked anew" at this latest cash cow from the royal in-laws. What on earth can Pippa advise about parties that's worth so much money?

("Fast of all, make sure you have enough chars. It is rarely important – like, rarely rarely important – that everyone can sit dyne. This is even true if you're iteside. And nobody wants a hog roast in the jolly old rain, so a marquee is a tairbly good idea…"?)

- Victoria Coren, Observer, 4 December 2011

New Order

2011-11-27T01:33:00.001Z

'We picked the name New Order in complete innocence. Rob [Gretton] came up with it after reading about Kampuchea in the newspaper. We released our first bloody record and everybody's like, "You've done it again you Nazi bastards". We said, Fucking hell! Why didn't you tell us it was also Hitler's new order?! We kind of laughed at our own stupidity and thought, It's fairly typical of the way we do things, let's stick with it'.

- Bernard Sumner, Mojo, July 2011

Growing up in the Waikato

2011-11-19T22:30:00.001Z

'They had an escalator in Hamilton - one at 2-4-6, I think. We used to go ride it on a Friday night - that was the best thing going'.

- Neil Finn on growing up in Te Awamutu, Radio New Zealand, 19 November 2011

Till their eyes are almost staring out of their heads

2011-10-23T02:12:00.000+01:00

From a biography of 18th century English explorer Samuel Hearne (1745-92), who travelled extensively in the vast northern regions around Hudson's Bay, a discussion of Hearne's record of the medical traditions of the Dene Indians (First People):

The Dene had conjurors of their own, highly skilled men who reminded Hearne of magicians and 'jugglers' (sleight-of-hand artists) he had seen working the streets of London. To treat injuries, Dene conjurors would blow, spit and suck on the wound, or else chant over it unintelligibly.

'For some inward complaints, such as griping in the intestines, difficulty in making water, etc., it is very common to see those jugglers blowing into the anus, or into the parts adjacent, till their eyes are almost staring out of their heads; and this operation is performed indifferently on all, without regard to either age or sex. The accumulation of so large a quantity of wind is at times apt to occasion some extraordinary emotions, which are not easily suppressed by a sick person; and as there is no vent for it but by the channel through which it was conveyed thither, it sometimes occasions an odd scene between the doctor and his patient; which I once wantonly called an engagement, but for which I was afterwards exceedingly sorry, as it highly offended several of the Indians; particularly the juggler and the sick person, both of whom were men I much esteemed, and, except in that moment of levity, it had ever been no less my inclination than my interest to show them every respect that my situation would admit... Being naturally not very delicate, they frequently continue their windy process so long, that I have more than once seen the doctor quit his patient with a face and breast in a very disagreeable condition. However laughable this may appear to an European, custom makes it very indecent, in their opinion, to turn any thing of the kind to ridicule'.

- Samuel Hearne, quoted in Ken McGoogan, Ancient Mariner, London, 2004.

The dignity of scientific endeavours

2011-10-07T05:35:00.002+01:00

Defences were found against U-boats. The great (New Zealand) physicist Sir Ernest Rutherford was held upside-down from a rowing boat above the Firth of Forth to see if he could hear anything, and eventually a hydrophone was invented, able to hear underwater noise.

- Norman Stone, World War One: A Short History, London, 2007, p.102

No bananas for Plato

2011-09-15T09:42:00.000+01:00

Kaspar say when he were rilly young he crave adventure so he go to Balaclava. He do the spellings so I know I got it right. Balaclava is near Sevastopol.

'There I am making the Grand Crimean Central Railway. I am that which you English people call a navvie'.

'I aint a Inglish people'.

'I beg your pardon. Are you only borrowing that nose and mouth? Are you speaking their language only for a time?'

'I want coin,' I say, hoping to end talk that turn sly.

'What are you desiring coin for, liebling?'

'Binarnas'.

Kaspar reply to me, 'Plato is saying that there is only one thing for which all coin should be exchanged, and that is wisdom'.

Prolly Playtoe never et a binarna.

- 'Halfie', in Hokitika Town by Charlotte Randall, 2011

Heaven and hell to merge services

2011-09-14T11:48:00.004+01:00

It has just been announced by a joint panel of representatives from both above and below that Heaven and Hell are to merge many of their services in an attempt to reach budget targets set by their respective bosses.

According to a press release, admin and some policy roles currently supporting both Saints and Sinners are to be cut back with many positions merged into one service.

The aim is to continue delivering the complete heaven/hell experience to those who arrive but reduce the amount of paperwork required for the process [...]

The statement said the proposed amalgamation of the policy divisions of heaven and hell would bring a more robust approach to the development of guiding documents. It cited the Ten Commandments as a classic example of great policy writing.

"There are only 10 bullet points in the entire document. They are succinct, devoid of waffle and easy to understand. The mission statement developed by those managing hell is also sharp and to the point. Terms like fire, brimstone and damnation are very evocative and clearly represent the nature of the experience awaiting those heading that way.

"Merging these two different messages into one brief directive: "Good or Evil - You Choose" then syndicating the concept to a reality TV programme will reduce staffing costs and boost profits."

- Terry Sarten, Wanganui Chronicle, 28 August 2011

Children's face paint

2011-09-08T08:26:00.003+01:00

Waiting in line for the boats, our children rub their chins in the dirt and push their foreheads against our feet. They roll around on the ground and shout obscenities, then run in circles, screaming nonsense, while we play with the car keys in our pockets and gawk passively at the boats. Typically, we don't allow our children to misbehave this way. However, we do our best to understand. Their faces are in pain.

Our children's cheeks begin to ache as they wait in line for the boats and continue to ache until their faces are painted at the Frost Mountain Picnic. We've come to understand that all children are born with phantom cat whiskers. All children are born with phantom dog faces. All children are born with phantom American flag foreheads, rainbow-patterned jawbones, and deep, curving pirate scars, the absence of which haunts them throughout their youth. We understand that all children are born with searing and trivial images hidden in their faces, the absence of which causes them a great deal of discomfort. It is a pain that only the brush of a face painter can alleviate, each stroke revealing the cryptic pictures in our children's faces. Any good parent knows this.

- Seth Fried, 'Frost Mountain Picnic Massacre', in The Great Frustration, Berkeley, 2011

Thor only knows

2011-09-03T22:38:00.000+01:00

Special effects seem to muffle rather than quicken [director Kenneth] Branagh's interest, and, besides, there is no CGI in existence that could cope with the difference between [Natalie] Portman, a practicing sylph, and [Chris] Hemsworth, who looks to me like six and a half feet of corned beef. At one point, he takes his shirt off, and she stands beside him, a bit dazed, with the top of her head not quite parallel with his nipples. At the end - and I am giving away no secrets here - they kiss. But how? Is he holding her up, with her little toes kicking his kneecaps? Thor only knows.

- Anthony Lane reviews Thor, New Yorker, 16 May 2011

Cigarettes and Listerine

2011-08-11T11:49:00.000+01:00

Creating and playing on consumer insecurities, advertisers told potential buyers that one key to maintaining beauty, youth, energy and attractiveness was health and personal hygiene. The actress Constance Talmadge, promoting cigarettes, declared, 'There's real health in Lucky Strike ... For years this has been no secret to those men who keep fit and trim. They know that Luckies steady their nerves and do not harm their physical condition. They know that Lucky Strike is the favourite cigarette of many prominent athletes, who must keep in good shape'. Advertisers' success in manipulating the gullible buying public became an article of faith. An essay of 1922 on the subject opened with the words, 'Do I understand you to say that you do not believe in advertising? Indeed! Soon you will be telling me that you do not believe in God'.

In the early 1920s Listerine, variously used in the nineteenth century as a surgical antiseptic, a cure for venereal disease and a floor-cleaner, was transformed by advertising into a magical product which would free its user from the dreadful, life-ruining scourge of halitosis - a faux-medical term for bad breath invented by the marketing men. Their advertisements showed a downcast girl holding her friend's bridal bouquet above the caption, 'Often a bridesmaid, but never a bride'. The cause of her loneliness was 'chronic halitosis' - which, happily, Listerine (rebranded as a mouthwash) promised to cure. Listerine's profits soared from $115,000 to $8 million in just seven years.

- Lucy Moore, Anything Goes: A biography of the Roaring Twenties, London, 2008, p.146-7.

Scottish politics

2011-07-23T03:09:00.002+01:00

We have our own Parliament in Edinburgh, at a place called Holyrood, which, for information, is just north of Brigadoon. If you haven't been there and want to paint a mental picture for yourself, think of the glamour of Hollywood - then think of the exact opposite. With kilts.

But I'm getting ahead of myself. Let me set the scene. The main political parties in Scotland are the SNP, Labour, and The Proclaimers. In addition to the main parties, a number of smaller parties have had some success, because we in Scotland have a system of proportional representation. 'What is this fictional form of voting,' I hear you cry, 'Is it something J.K. Rowling wrote of in the marvellous Harry Potter books?' No, it's real! You may have heard that PR is a concept that's as likely to work as Europe, but it does. As a result there are representatives at Holyrood from minority parties, such as the Greens... and the Conservatives. I should clarify that the situation for the Tories in Scotland is very different to that down south. In Scotland you're as likely to see a Tory as you are fruit. The majority party is the Scottish National Party, headed up by First Minister Alec Salmond. He's a tremendous orator, but he's got the unfortunate tendency, when he becomes passionate, to sound increasingly like a Dalek. 'Westminster must bow to the wishes of the Scottish people. Exterminate!'

- Susan Calman, The Now Show, Radio 4, 1 July 2011.

A peace activist

2011-07-05T01:12:00.000+01:00

I think I can announce it as a fact, that it is not the wish or interest of that government [Massachusetts], or any other upon the continent, separately or collectively, to set up for independency [...] I am as well satisfied as I can be of my existence that no such thing is desired by any thinking man in all North America; on the contrary, that it is the ardent wish of the warmest advocates for liberty, that peace and tranquility, upon constitutional grounds, may be restored, and the horrors of civil discord prevented.

- George Washington to Capt Robert Mackenzie, 9 October 1774, quoted in J.C.D. Clark, 'British America: What if there had been no American Revolution?', in Virtual History, Niall Ferguson (ed.), 2011 (originally published 1997).

On marriage and politics

2011-07-05T01:10:00.002+01:00

Then there's the matter of "personal baggage", which in [Newt] Gingrich's case is a steamer trunk of Titanic proportions. Republicans are strong believers in man-on-woman marriage, so it makes sense that three of the most prominent Presidential possibilities - Daniels, Trump and Gingrich - have married eight times. (Only seven wives, though: Daniels married the same woman twice, with a Grover Cleveland-like four-year interval during which she left him to marry someone else). Gingrich stands out, for hypocrisy (daily demanding Clinton's impeachment which carrying on his own extra-marital affair with a subordinate), brutality (dumping his first wife while she was in treatment for cancer), and chutzpah (attributing his adulteries to "how passionately I felt about this country").

- Hendrik Hertzberg, New Yorker, 23 May 2011

Insert your own 'short leg' reference here

2011-06-15T11:04:00.000+01:00

Freddie Owsley and his family were playing a game of beach cricket last week. Which was a fine thing for a teenager during a half-term holiday in Polzeath. The only problem was that nobody had brought a bat. No matter. Freddie found a suitable stick in the rocks nearby, long, thin and smooth with a lump at one end that would make a good club head. Freddie's hunch was right. The stick had a sizeable sweet-spot and when he swung and hit it sent sixes sailing out into the sea.

They were half-way through the game when a family friend who happened to be a doctor spotted that the reclaimed bat was in fact a human thigh bone. The police later found part of a pelvis and spine as well. Local archaeologist Phil Coplestone estimates that the bones are 200 years old, and thinks that they are the remains of a sailor whose body was washed ashore after a shipwreck in 1808.

- Andy Bull, The Spin cricket newsletter, Guardian, 14 June 2011

How to appear diligent

2011-06-14T13:07:00.000+01:00

Sir - I can remember working in the City of London back in the 1990s when it started to become necessary to work longer hours. A colleague had an extra jacket that he left over the back of his chair so that it looked like he was away from his desk. In fact, he had left to catch his train.

- Cary Labdon, letter to the Times, 25 May 2011

Flashman weighs his options

2011-06-12T15:45:00.000+01:00

In George Macdonald Fraser's 1990 novel Flashman and the Mountain of Light, the eponymous anti-hero and unabashed cad finds himself in a bit of a pickle during his secret mission to the Court of the Punjab in 1845. He sits down to tabulate the pros and cons of his present perilous situation, in his own inimitable style:

EVIL: I am cut off in a savage land which will be at war with my own country presently

GOOD: I enjoy diplomatic immunity, for what it's worth, and am in good health, but ruined.

EVIL: An attempt has been made to assassinate me. These buggers would sooner murder people than eat their dinners.

GOOD: It failed, and I am under the protection of the queen bee, who rides like a rabbit. Also, [the American adventurer and agent Alexander] Gardner will look out for me.

EVIL: My orderly turns out to be the greatest villain since Dick Turpin, and is an American to boot.

GOOD: [Major] Broadfoot chose him, and since I see no reason why he should be hostile to me, I shall watch him like a hawk.

EVIL: Damn Broadfoot for landing me in this stew, when I could have been safe at home rogering Elspeth [Flashman's wife].

GOOD: Rations and quarters are A1, and Mangla sober is a capital mount, though she don't compare to Jeendan drunk.

EVIL: If I were a praying man, the Almighty would hear from me in no uncertain terms, and much good it would do me.

GOOD: Being a pagan (attached C of E) with no divine resources, I shall tread uncommon wary and keep my pepperbox [pistol] handy.

Clockwork cricket

2011-05-27T09:40:00.003+01:00

"Well, I've got my cricket gear in the car. We could try that" - Malcolm McDowell explains the inspiration behind one of the most iconic outfits in movie history, the white suits and codpieces worn by Alex and his Droogs in A Clockwork Orange. McDowell recalled this week how he and the film's director Stanley Kubrick were struggling to come up with a costume for the lead character.

"I was over at his house, you know, looking for stuff to do. And I didn't like anything there, really. They had a big box of hats, some with feathers. I thought that was pretty lame. So I went to the car and got my cricket gear. And he says, 'Oh yeah, I love the white.' And so I put it on. And Stanley goes, 'Oh put the protector on the outside.' So I wore the box on the outside like a codpiece. He goes, 'This could be like the middle ages. I like this look.' And that's how the look of the Droogs came; because I had my cricket stuff in the back of my car."

- Andy Bull, The Spin cricket newsletter, Guardian, 24 May 2011

Observational comedy

2011-05-26T13:51:00.000+01:00

It was very different then, comedy in the 80s. What the comedy was in the 80s was a load of people and they all hated the Tories, and they went out to a place, and there was a guy on stage there, and he hated the Tories. And he'd go, "I hate the Tories!", and the audience would go, "We hate the Tories as well!", and they'd go home happy, 67 pence well spent.

It's very different now, the comedy. I've seen some of it on the Roadshow on telly. It's in stadiums now innit. What the comedy is now is a load of people, and they all hate their electrical appliances. And they go out to a place, and there's a guy on stage there, and he hates his electrical appliances. And he goes, "I hate my electrical appliances!", and the audience goes "We hate our electrical appliances as well!", and they go home happy, forty-seven pounds fifty well spent.

"I hate my toaster, it's only got two settings: black burned charcoal, or just warm bread". It's broken, innit. Mate, that toaster's broken. They wouldn't make a toaster like that. There'd be no market for it.

-Stewart Lee, in Stewart Lee's Comedy Vehicle, s.2 e.4, BBC2, 25 May 2011

Archetypal TNT 'Desperately Seeking' ad

2011-05-20T08:51:00.000+01:00

Further to my post from last year on TNT Magazine's 'Desperately Seeking' column, this classic appeared in this week's edition (16-22 May):

I'm looking for a short blonde Aussie girl with glasses called Jean or Joan: I met her at the Walkabout the Friday before Easter Bank Holiday. She was hanging about the men's toilets with a few scrubbers and I managed to pull her later after the pub shut. I would like to see her again, if only because I have apparently got the clap and she is one of the girls I need to contact. If she can drop me a line I would like to see her again, maybe for a rematch under better circumstances.

It's such a relief to learn that chivalry is not dead.

The requisite amount of contempt

2011-05-14T14:47:00.001+01:00

There was a film last year, the film Kick-Ass. And the young people were very excited about the film Kick-Ass, because in the film Kick-Ass there was a scene where you could see a 12-year-old girl use the word c***, which is the C-word, isn't it.

Now where I live, in Hackney, I can see that any day of the week. In fact only this morning on the 73 bus I saw a 12-year-old girl call someone a c***. Although to be fair there were mitigating circumstances. Her daughter was being extremely annoying.

Did you like that joke? I didn't, I'm ashamed of it to be honest. I'm ashamed of having thought of that joke. Although I have been advised that I might be able to sell that joke to Frankie Boyle's Tramadol Nights. Apparently it has the requisite amount of contempt for vulnerable people. Or 'edge', as it's known at Channel 4.

- Stewart Lee, in Stewart Lee's Comedy Vehicle, s.2 e.2, BBC2, 11 May 2011

Familiarity and Radio 4

2011-05-12T12:47:00.000+01:00

'People don't like things because they're nice - they like things because they're used to them. That's the whole principle behind Radio 4'.

- David Mitchell, The Unbelievable Truth, Radio 4, 2 May 2011.

Delusions of would-be Apprentices

2011-05-10T22:20:00.000+01:00

It's time for The Apprentice on the BBC once more, which is the cue for a round-up of the most foolish and bizarre boasts from previous competitors. Can't they see the headlights getting closer, ever closer...?

"I'm not a one-trick pony, I'm not a 10-trick pony - I've got a field of ponies waiting to literally run towards this job." Stuart "The Brand" Baggs last year, uttering the now infamous line. What?

"When you can break bricks with your hands you believe in your head you can do anything, and in business I take on the same ethic," said Ifti Chaudhri in series four. Andrew Billen, TV critic at the Times, says such horrible jargon is right out of Ricky Gervais's The Office, although done without any sense of irony. "They are Ricky's phrases in the making, but there's no self knowledge in any of it."

"Everything I touch turns to sold." Really Stuart Baggs? Everything except all those sausages you failed to sell in the very first task in series six, resulting in you almost being fired by Lord Sugar in week one. "I don't know why they say these things, because Sugar is quite plain speaking," says Billen.

"Don't tell me the sky is the limit when there's footsteps on the moon." Yes, we've sneaked in a line from one of this year's candidates. Melody Hossani, we look forward to hearing a lot more from you.

- BBC News, 10 May 2011

Holidaying with Kylie Minogue

2011-04-30T16:16:00.000+01:00

Apparently, The Sound Of Arrows is not a 'swoosh' followed by the throaty dribble of arterial blood from a favourite section of torso. It seems to be a scientific experiment to replicate the exact sound of holidaying with Kylie Minogue in a pink seaside pleasure-palace while eating pistachio ice creams shaped like tiny flamingos.

- NME reviews 'Nova' by Swedish band Sound of Arrows, 26 April 2011

The expectant father

2011-04-30T16:07:00.000+01:00

He still asks perturbing questions from time to time. "How long until he gets interesting?" was the most recent one.

"How do you mean?" I replied, putting down my book and reaching for my special tablets.

"How long before he can smile, crawl, talk to me about the Battle of Jutland, that sort of thing?"

"Ah. Respectively, six months, nine months and, if he takes after you, a year, or after me, never."

"What do we do for the first six months, then?"

"I look after him and you look after me."

"Right you are."

Everything will work out eventually, I'm sure. I'm sure.

- Lucy Mangan, Guardian, 30 April 2011

On married life

2011-04-30T13:42:00.000+01:00

Marge: Homer, is this the way you pictured married life?

Homer: Yeah, pretty much. Except we drove around in a van solving mysteries.

- The Simpsons, 'A Milhouse Divided', s.8 e.6, 1996

Jeremy Hardy on education

2011-04-28T09:40:00.000+01:00

Education should be free. If you start charging for universities then why not charge for primary schools? Basically they're trying to steer kids away from carrying on at school anyway, because they want to put them into apprenticeships at 15: [Adopts posh voice] 'The trouble is with a lot of these young kids is that they're better suited to sorting out my bathroom'. The whole of the upper middle class has 'knocked through' in the last couple of years and realises that there's a terrible shortage of tradespeople. So they want to steer the children of the poor away from Hamlet and into grouting.

- Jeremy Hardy, The News Quiz, Radio 4, 22 April 2011

The principal purpose of philosophy?

2011-04-26T13:59:00.000+01:00

"And all this pertains how, exactly?" Ferbin asked. His feet were sore and he was growing tired of what seemed to him like pointless speculation, not to mention something dangerously close to philosophy, a field of human endeavour he had encountered but fleetingly through various exasperated tutors, though long enough to have formed the unshakeable impression that its principal purpose was to prove that one equalled zero, black was white and educated men could speak through their bottoms.

- Iain M Banks, Matter, 2008.

Rotten boroughs

2011-04-21T17:35:00.000+01:00

Until the 1830s, it was common for a rich landowner to regard a Commons seat as his family property. These were the rotten boroughs and pocket boroughs, which had such tiny electorates that an election was easily bought or rigged. The families who owned them considered it their birthright to choose their MPs, or – if money was tight – to sell the privilege to someone else.

Old Sarum, site of the original Salisbury settlement, was the most notorious example. Because there was a bishop's house there in the 13th century, the area was invited by Edward II to send two representatives to the Commons. The bishop moved his residence to Salisbury soon afterwards, but for centuries, Old Sarum solemnly returned one or two MPs, long after its last human inhabitants had left. Only once in six centuries was there a contested election in Old Sarum, when three candidates vied for two seats.

Old Sarum held its elections under a designated tree in a cornfield. None of the electors lived in the constituency. No one did. But the landlord had the right to allocate votes to a handful of his tenants who would assemble under the tree and do as they were told.

The seat was owned by the Pitt family for 110 years, until they sold it for a reputed £43,000 after a member of the family had created a national scandal by instructing Old Sarum's seven electors to vote for a clergyman. It was considered improper for a man of the cloth to sit in the Commons. William Pitt the Elder began his political career under that famous tree.

- Independent, 21 April 2011

The Sun is a mass of incandescent Prescott

2011-04-19T13:47:00.000+01:00

David Mitchell: The human body produces more heat than the Sun on average by mass. The human body generates five times as many calories as the Sun per pound of mass each day.

Clive Anderson: So if the Sun were replaced by a huge mass of humanity...

Sue Perkins: John Prescott?

CA: ...the world would be hotter?

DM: I think that the mass of the Sun isn't that great because it's largely gaseous.

CA: So if it were replaced by John Prescott not too much would change then?

DM: No. I think maybe the sunrise would get less romantic... I think poetry would change. Seeing a spherical John Prescott rise redly from the horizon looking baffled...

SP: You'd long for dusk, wouldn't you?

- The Unbelievable Truth s.7 e.2, BBC Radio 4, 11 April 2011.

Just say no to bow ties

2011-04-18T09:11:00.000+01:00

"It's the truth that you should never trust anybody who wears a bow tie. Cravat's supposed to point down to accentuate the genitals. Why'd you wanna trust somebody whose tie points out to accentuate his ears?"

- Doc Wilson, in David Mamet's State and Main, 2000

Insulted by Authors

2011-04-11T17:11:00.000+01:00

Bill Ryan goes to book signings and attempts to score creative title page insults from the pinned-down and unable-to-escape authors sitting behind the signing table. Here's a few examples:

Karen Russell, author of Swamplandia!

For Bill - You douche bag, you think you can emotionally manipulate me, a very nice person, into insulting you, by appealing to my niceness?

David Mitchell, author of The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet

To Bill - you're so nauseously [sic.] nice!

Amy Sedaris

I'd call you a c--- but you lack the warmth and depth.

For more, see:

Insulted by Authors

Putting an 'i' in front of things

2011-04-02T16:08:00.000+01:00

John Holmes:

As Sean Connery in Highlander once said, right now appears to be 'the time of the gathering'. A time of mass gatherings in fact, in London, as we've heard, with people recently laying siege to shops. I saw them on telly, standing in a queue for two days outside the Apple Store in Regent Street, protesting that the cuts have left them with no choice but to spend £450 on an iPad 2. It's Apple's latest thing of course - a rectangle with a screen that does nothing that three of the other Apple products that you already own don't do already.

But you have to admire the amazing discovery they've made over the last few years. Simply putting an 'i' in front of an already existing word makes it sound cool and must-have. First there was a phone of course, then suddenly it was an 'iPhone'. Macintosh computers, which magically became 'iMacs' - basically a computer with a two-storey tall cinema built in... Personally I blame the Americans, who think that simply by taking something and interfering with it makes it better. See also: iRaq. But it's not just the Americans, of course. This also happened in ancient Rome.

Hugh Dennis (advertising voice-over):

Have you got a Claudius, an old-fashioned Claudius? Afflicted with a limp and deafness due to sickness at a young age? Then upgrade to the all-new 'I, Claudius'. We've made the old Claudius much more powerful, simply by killing his predecessor, Caligula 1.0.

- The Now Show, Radio 4, 1 April 2011

How to be a successful manager

2011-03-30T19:40:00.000+01:00

Head of Olympic Deliverance at London Twenty Twelve, Ian Fletcher, who has asked his employee Kay to deliver a presentation in difficult circumstances, discusses his technique for getting the best out of his staff:

Fletcher: It's never easy when you're asking people to step outside their comfort zone, no-one likes that. But sometimes as a manager it's your job to push people just that little bit further than they think they're capable of.

Interviewer: Right. And are they grateful afterwards?

Fletcher: Not usually, no. They hate it.

Interviewer: Right, yes. You don't think that a presentation on sustainability translated into Portuguese and without any visual aids might possibly confuse them?

Fletcher: I think it might do, yes. So basically so it's a question of how long Kay can keep it up.

- Twenty Twelve s.1 e.2, BBC4, 22 March 2011

Potentially dangerous levels of Katherine Heigl exposure

2011-03-29T10:59:00.000+01:00

'We understand that exposure to this amount of Katherine Heigl is dangerous for anybody, even somebody who doesn't hate her...' - Sony Pictures

In Freak Accident, 34 Katherine Heigl Films Released At Once

Mixing work and friendship

2011-03-28T13:19:00.000+01:00

From a 2007 episode of Channel 4's The IT Crowd, a scene in which office manager Jen tries to avoid inviting her workmates around for a dinner party at her flat:

Jen (Katherine Parkinson): Oh I can't... I can't! It's my home, it's my special place. I can't let you nutjobs into my special place!

Richmond (Noel Fielding): Nutjobs... I hope you're not including me in that.

Roy (Chris O'Dowd): Wait a second, we were all brilliant friends a minute ago.

Jen: Yes, I meant friends in a different way. In a kind of special way that means that you can't come into my home.

Moss (Richard Ayoade): Right, so sort of like not being your friends at all.

Jen: Yes yes! Sort of like that. But in a really special way.

- The IT Crowd, s.2 e.4

The meaning of true romance

2011-03-27T09:25:00.000+01:00

The movies make out that romance is all about heroic displays of emotion, grand passion and running hand in hand through cornfields. But I think what's truly romantic is sharing each waking moment with the same person every day for 25 years and still being able to look them in the eye and utterly mask your despair.

- Charlie Brooker, So Wrong It's Right, Radio 4, 24 March 2011.

"I've never eaten grits, cropped a share, or ridden a boxcar"

2011-03-23T12:06:00.000Z

Hugh Laurie knows how easy it would be to mock a Cambridge-educated doctor's son, now the highest paid American television actor, for recording an album of blues music.

So he's got in first with a statement saying: "I was not born in Alabama in the 1890s. I've never eaten grits, cropped a share, or ridden a boxcar. I am a white, middle-class Englishman, openly trespassing on the music and myth of the American south. If that weren't bad enough, I'm also an actor: one of those pampered ninnies who can't find his way through an airport without a babysitter."

Laurie is a clever comedian and knows how to deflect criticism. When he talked about his family's previous musical sessions - sons on drums and sax, daughter on clarinet and himself on guitar and vocals - he joked: 'Nauseating, isn't it?'

- Martin Chilton, Telegraph, 23 March 2011

The Only Way Is Essex

2011-03-21T13:19:00.001Z

Perhaps the most off-putting aspect of the show is its staginess. Not so much its much-discussed lack of fly-on-the-wall realism, but everyone's uncomfortably stilted delivery. All the conversations on The Only Way Is Essex are full of weird little pauses, as if they're all communicating via a faulty 1970s satellite link-up. It's like watching an old Open University programme on Advanced Pointlessness.

I'm also slightly hamstrung by the fact that I don't understand anything that anyone says. Maybe there's an inexplicably heavy tax on hard consonants in Essex and that's the reason people say "arrrra?" instead of "hello" and "shaaaaaap" instead of "be quiet". At one point last series a character said "naaaloooor" and it took me about five minutes to work out that they meant "nightclub." Between this and the pauses, The Only Way Is Essex comes off like a nightmarish Teletubbies update starring several florescent Bratz dolls (vajazzled, of course).

Last night's episode didn't help matters. Narratively speaking it had a structure that was somewhere between scattershot and nonexistent. A couple got lost in the woods, an old lady went swimming, a Playboy model got a spray tan, a boy legitimately decided that he wanted to be known as Joey Essex, a woman asked where south London was and a pig urinated on the floor and then started drinking it. In fact I've made it sound much more exciting than it actually was. Nothing was captivating enough to make you want to tune in for a second 45 minutes, unless you harbour an inexplicable fascination with incontinent pigs. If things keep up at this rate, I'll be no closer to understanding the show than I was during the first series.

So if you watched and enjoyed The Only Way Is Essex last night, then please explain it to me. Am I supposed to be rooting for these people? Or does the pleasure come from judging them? Is it supposed to be good, or do people watch it because it's terrible? And, if so, is it terrible by accident or design? Honestly, I'm so confused.

- Stuart Heritage, Guardian, 21 March 2011

[If all this means nothing to you, consult the documentary evidence on Cassetteboy vs The Only Way Is Essex, which sums up all you need to know in two relatively painless minutes]

Pretending to have read Tennyson

2011-03-14T09:34:00.000Z

The girl stared at him, dropping her slice of bread-and-butter in her emotion.

'You don't mean to say you read Tennyson, Mr Widgeon?'

'Me?' said Freddie. 'Tennyson? Read Tennyson? Me read Tennyson? Well, well, well! Bless my soul! Why, I know him by heart - some of him.'

'So do I! "Break, break, break, on your cold grey stones, oh Sea..."'

'Quite. Or take the "Lady of Shalott".'

'"I hold it truth with him who sings..."'

'So do I, absolutely. And then, again, there's the "Lady of Shalott". Dashed extraordinary that you should like Tennyson too.'

'I think he's wonderful.'

'What a lad! That "Lady of Shalott"! Some spin on the ball there.'

'It's so absurd, the way people sneer at him nowadays.'

'The silly bounders. Don't know what's good for them.'

'He's my favourite poet.'

'Mine, too. Any bird who could write the "Lady of Shalott" gets the cigar or coconut, according to choice, as far as I'm concerned.'

They gazed at each other emotionally.

'Well, I'd never have thought it,' said April.

'Why not?'

'I mean, you gave me the impression of being... well, rather the dancing, night-club sort of man.'

'What! Me? Night-clubs? Good gosh! Why, my idea of a happy evening is to curl up with Tennyson's latest.'

"Don't you love "Locksley Hall"?'

'Oh, rather. And the "Lady of Shalott".'

'And "Maud"?'

'Aces,' said Freddie. 'And the "Lady of Shalott".'

'How fond you seem of the "Lady of Shalott"!'

'Oh I am.'

- P.G. Wodehouse, 'Trouble Down at Tudsleigh', in Young Men in Spats, London, 1936.

"I'm a hypocrite, but not an idiot"

2011-03-04T11:13:00.000Z

From Film 2011's questionnaire slot, Stephen Merchant offers the movie that he "just doesn't get":

The Lord of the Rings trilogy. I just can't get into it - I'm bored out of my mind. Someone made me watch the director's cuts - I think it goes on for nine or ten hours. You can get to Tokyo in that time! And there's just this endless journey that goes on and on and on for hours. And he destroys the ring and you think "brilliant", and then you go, "well how are they going to get home?", and a giant bird turns up and they fly home. Where was the bird at the beginning?!

But if Peter Jackson offers me a role in any of his films obviously I will take it. I'm not an idiot. I'm a hypocrite... but not an idiot.

- Film 2011 with Claudia Winkleman, BBC1, 2 March 2011

Tim Minchin

2011-03-03T10:52:00.000Z

From his Live at the O2 album, Australian comedian Tim Minchin sings Thank You God, his in-depth analysis of miraculous divine interventions in cases of middle-aged cataract sufferers from Dandenong.

Whitcoulls' downfall

2011-02-28T13:01:00.000Z

Auckland writer Graeme Lay argues that the demise of New Zealand book retail chain Whitcoulls is no surprise:

Stories of Whitcoulls' ineptitude towards local literature became legion among New Zealand writers. For instance, after my first novel, The Mentor, was published, I went eagerly into the Whitcoulls flagship store in Queen St to see where it had been shelved.

It was nowhere to be seen. So without divulging that I was the author, I asked an assistant if she could show me where a new book, The Mentor, was.

She looked thoughtful. "Mentor. That's a kind of insect, isn't it?" And she pointed me in the direction of the Natural History section. "No, no, it isn't an insect," I protested. "Oh no, that's right." She thought again. "Mentor, mentor. Oh yes, that's right. It's not an insect, it's a creature. A half-man, half horse. Try the Classics Section. It's at the back of the shop."

A comment on Lay's article reads: 'I went in to Whitcoulls and asked for a copy of Jane Eyre to give to a relative. The assistant asked, What did she write?'

- NZ Herald, 28 February 2011

Brooker on Gaddafi

2011-02-27T09:43:00.001Z

From 10 O'Clock Live, Charlie Brooker on the increasingly bizarre utterings of everyone's favourite 1980s throwback dictator, Libya's Colonel Gaddafi:

[Via Boingboing]

On the attractions of older women

2011-02-24T15:37:00.000Z

In June 1745 the 39-year-old author and printer Benjamin Franklin, who would later become one of the United States' great statesmen, wrote a letter to a friend. In it, he advised that a young man should marry, but if he could or would not, he should prefer the company of an older woman to that of a young one. Franklin set out eight reasons for his belief, of which the startlingly matter-of-fact fifth instalment is:

Because in every Animal that walks upright, the Deficiency of the Fluids that fill the Muscles appears first in the highest Part: The Face first grows lank and wrinkled; then the Neck; then the Breast and Arms; the lower Parts continuing to the last as plump as ever: So that covering all above with a Basket, and regarding only what is below the Girdle, it is impossible of two Women to know an old from a young one. And as in the dark all Cats are grey, the Pleasure of corporal Enjoyment with an old Woman is at least equal, and frequently superior, every Knack being by Practice capable of Improvement.

[Via Letters of Note]

Mission Impossible Squirrel

2011-02-18T15:41:00.000Z

One intrepid squirrel agent proves that [s]he's got what it takes to complete the ultimate mission. Caution: may contain nuts.

- Via Neatorama

Teaching the teachers

2011-02-16T09:03:00.000Z

From an article discussing principals' concerns about declining standards of literacy amongst New Zealand teachers:

Mike McMenamin, principal of New Plymouth Boys' High School, said there would always be teachers lacking literacy skills.

"I always look at how a teacher relates, challenges and gets the best out of the students. When you start to look at it in depth, there's more than just writing and spelling to consider," he said.

"You have to take into consideration the teacher's ability to inspire a class of students."

He makes a fair point about the need for a broad range of skills, and particularly the ability to provide an inspiring set of lessons for students. But perhaps it's not too much to ask for teachers to be able to inspire students and know how to spell and apostrophise correctly too?

- Taranaki Daily News, 16 February 2011

Rosamund Pike spices up the Baftas

2011-02-14T16:44:00.000Z

From last night's Bafta ceremony in London, actor Rosamund Pike falls victim to an autocue fault and stumbles perilously close to revealing the name of an award winner before the nominees have even been announced. Great edge-of-the-seat television, but Pike is a properly savvy actor with a good head on her shoulders, so it just goes to show that mishaps like this can happen to anyone under that sort of pressure. And Mr Dominic Cooper, you weren't much help!

The conspiracy is much larger than Glenn Beck suspects

2011-02-13T09:26:00.000Z

The Christian Science Monitor discusses reaction to Fox News' Glenn Beck and his conspiracy theories about Egypt, which are leading some conservative commentators to distance themselves from Beck's wacky diatribes:

“Of course, the conspiracy goes deeper than Beck has yet revealed,” writes Jeffrey Goldberg in the Atlantic. “I'm hoping that, in coming days, if the Freemasons, working in concert with Hezbollah and the Washington Redskins, don't succeed in suppressing the truth, that Beck will reveal the identities of the most pernicious players in this grotesque campaign to subvert our way of life.”

“I can't reveal too much here,” Goldberg writes. “But I think it's fair to say that Beck will be paying a lot of attention in the coming weeks to the dastardly, pro-caliphate work of Joy Behar; the makers of Little Debbie snack cakes; the 1980s hair band Def Leppard; Omar Sharif; and the Automobile Association of America. And remember, you read it here first.”

- Christian Science Monitor, 12 February 2011

Rhyming Sigourney with horny

2011-02-09T09:35:00.000Z

Simon Pegg still can't believe he's appearing in a film alongside his childhood crush Sigourney Weaver.

The Alien star plays a "crackpot" woman in the Brit's new alien comedy Paul, and meeting her for the first time brought back plenty of adolescent memories.

Pegg reveals he was so smitten with Weaver, he once wrote a sexy poem about her.

He says, "I’ve fancied her since I was 10. I actually wrote a poem about her at university. She found out about it. She asked me if I could remember it and I pretended I didn't. I rhymed Sigourney with horny."

- IMDB.com, 9 February 2011

Insert Coin

2011-02-03T13:45:00.000Z

Impressive stop-motion animation of coins on a black backdrop in a retro-gaming stylee; includes a brief explanation of how they did it at the end.

[Via Geekosystem]

Moleskine notebooks

2011-01-28T10:37:00.001Z

From the excellent BBC2 rambling sitcom The Great Outdoors, Bob (Mark Heap) puts the world to rights in this outburst:

Ooh look everybody, a red kite! Yeah, they've made a real comeback, like Moleskine notebooks. Except that red kites aren't bought by idiots with too much money.

n.b. I own a Moleskine notebook.

- The Great Outdoors, s.1 e.3, broadcast 28 January 2011

Kermode on The Dilemma

2011-01-24T18:10:00.000Z

The BBC's Mark Kermode reviews Ron Howard's The Dilemma, which I saw in a pre-release audience appraisal preview back in October. Unsurprisingly, he likes it even less than I did, saying that it's '...not so much filtered by as infested by Vince Vaughn'.

Morbid Curiosity Leading Many Voters To Support Palin

2011-01-22T18:13:00.000Z

'Having Palin in office would be like a four-year-long white water rafting trip - it might kill us, but if it doesn't we'll end up with a lot of crazy-ass photos' - Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-KY)

Morbid Curiosity Leading Many Voters To Support Palin

Fearne Cotton's death challenge

2011-01-13T22:59:00.001Z

As imagined by Channel 4's The Morgana Show (Morgana Robinson): 'Skillz!' Embedding disabled, so you'll have to make do with a link.

Death Challenge

Butterfly chair

2011-01-08T18:33:00.000Z

Folds up into a briefcase lickety split, for all your on-the-go seating needs. I want one!

Magic chair

A metaphor for commuting

2011-01-04T17:41:00.000Z

A flock of sheep mill around Wellington station in a 2009 TV ad for UK train fare website Thetrainline.com, featuring a voiceover by comedian Rob Brydon.

How to drink cognac

2011-01-04T09:51:00.002Z

Charles de Talleyrand-Périgord was an enduring French diplomat of the 18th and 19th centuries who once reprimanded an English visitor for gulping down a glass of cognac. "The first thing you should do," explained Talleyrand, "is take your glass in the palms of your hands and warm it. Then shake it gently, with a circular movement, so that the liquid's perfume is released. Then, raise the glass to the nose and breathe deeply." "And then, my lord?" his visitor asked. "And then, sir," continued Talleyrand, "you replace the glass on the table and talk about it." But, the visitor didn't reply, how will that get me drunk?

- Stuart Jeffries, Guardian, 3 January 2011

The least plausible science fiction movie of all time

2011-01-03T16:54:00.001Z

Nasa scientists have named John Cusack's blockbuster 2012 as the most "absurd" sci-fi film of all time.

Experts at America's National Aeronautics and Space Administration (Nasa) and Science and Entertainment Exchange have put together a list of the least plausible science fiction movies ever made, and the big budget 2009 picture came top.

The film, which depicted Earth besieged by natural disasters, featured ahead of two more 'end-of-the-world' movies - 2003's The Core and 1998's Armageddon.

Donald Yeomans, head of Nasa's Near-Earth Asteroid Rendezvous mission, says of 2012, "It's absurd. The film-makers took advantage of public worries about the so-called end of the world as apparently predicted by the Mayans of Central America, whose calendar ends on December 21, 2012.

"The agency is getting so many questions from people terrified that the world is going to end in 2012 that we have had to put up a special website to challenge the myths. We have never had to do this before."

Staff at the organisation also compiled a list of the top 10 most realistic sci-fi films, with 1997's Gattaca, starring Ethan Hawke and Uma Thurman as space agency workers, winning the highest praise from the scientists. Nasa experts also named dinosaur movie Jurassic Park and Jodie Foster's Contact among the most realistic sci-fi films.

- Imdb.com, 3 January 2011

Labyrinth with sock puppets

2010-12-27T16:32:00.000Z

Featuring Amanda Palmer and Neil Gaiman.

Norman Rockwell as high art

2010-12-19T11:30:00.002Z

Reviewer Brian Sewell on Norman Rockwell's America, an exhibition at the Dulwich Picture Gallery:

In overwhelming self-esteem, Rockwell evidently agreed with the verdict of the immaculately dishevelled, widely smiling, cap-toothed examples of American dentistry who are the authors of Norman Rockwell’s America, the book-cum-catalogue of the current exhibition of his work at the Dulwich Picture Gallery. They have it that he was and is “America’s pre-eminent artist-illustrator, perhaps our greatest storyteller, and the world’s most beloved illustrator”. That is one hell of a triple claim. There may well be some truth in the first part, substantiated by his 322 covers for the Post between 1916 and 1963 (almost half a century of a style and vision that underwent no fundamental change) in decades when magazines had far greater penetration and circulation than now. At the storyteller claim, however, I am inclined to toss the names of Fenimore Cooper and his Natty Bumppo, Poe, Stowe, Hawthorne and Twain, who told so many of my childhood stories and Henry James, Edith Wharton and the innumerable hacks of detective and pulp fiction who followed them, for no painted picture tells a story better than a scribbler’s prose. As for Rockwell’s being best beloved of the whole world — this is arrogant piffle, ignorant balderdash, flapdoodle, hokum, bunkum and horsefeathers.

On what purports to be a serious catalogue, the authors impose a repellent Reader’s Digest style and a text of pure puerility, to which the cynic must respond that this is precisely the aesthetic and intellectual level of exegesis that Rockwell merits and that anything more perceptive would be a mismatch with the homespun, cracker-barrel, neighbourly folk to whom his work was pitched.

The hokum and horsefeathers are, alas, infectious: here and there in this wretched text are signed interpolations by the eximious director of the Dulwich Picture Gallery himself, snippets of schoolboy art history declaring, for example, that in The Runaway and Young Valetudinarian, he perceives something of European Old Mastery, Rockwell sharing the aims that Rembrandt pursued with such authority in the last years of his life. Not content with diminishing Rembrandt in this comparison, he does the same for Dou and Van Dyck, tempting ridicule and derision by reproducing their paintings on the same page as, in these two cases, Rockwell’s absent canvases — 25 included in the catalogue are not hanging on the walls.

Elsewhere, in a “Statement” (how pretentious), the director gushes his enthusiasm for Rockwell. Citing his Rockwell “epiphany” at an exhibition in America, he affirms the painter’s greatness, his special skills, his truths greater than reality, his marvellous realism, his visual jokes and whimsical insights, hauls in a comparison with Ostade, hints at a connection with Vermeer, and asks who among us would not want to live in America as Rockwell saw it? He even demands that those of us who do not share this fatuous view should “lighten up” — to which my command of the American vernacular provides no polite printable retort. I observe, in passing, that Vermeer painted a brothel scene and that Ostade was much given to images of peasants drunk, vomiting, emptying their bladders and putting their hands up skirts; we find none of this in Rockwell’s work, in which even the dogs are decorous, never emptying their bowels as 17th-century Dutch dogs so often did in churches.

- Evening Standard, 16 December 2010

How Irish law works

2010-12-14T21:49:00.001Z

'There are three states of legality in Irish law. There's all this stuff here, which comes under "That's grand!"; then it moves into "Ah now, don't push it"; and finally into "Right, you're taking the piss"'

- Dara O'Briain, Live at the Theatre Royal, 2006

No-one puts Baby Jesus in a corner

2010-12-09T10:31:00.001Z

'A watermelon!" I shouted at the Archbishop of Canterbury. "She said that she carried a watermelon!"

Yes, it was a standard Wednesday night out for me: explaining the plot of Dirty Dancing to the leader of the Church of England.

I think Dr Williams has seen the film anyway. But it's hard to be sure. I didn't really let him get a word in.

Having been invited to a reception at Lambeth Palace (in error, I assumed, as I hurriedly accepted before the mistake could be rectified), I had been taken aback to see the archbishop actually standing in the doorway. The Archbishop of Canterbury. My jaw dropped. I clasped his hand. I gabbled something incomprehensible. I am a fan of his and I did the fan thing.

"Well done," muttered my friend Charlie as we finally moved through the doorway and into the reception. "If Lou Reed is standing in this room, I don't think I'll be able to embarrass myself as much as you just did."

Sympathetic, perhaps, to my star-struck awkwardness, the kindly Dr Williams came to talk to us again. It was an opportunity for me to be a little cooler. Say something witty, perhaps. Or wait for His Grace to speak. Or Charlie.

Instead, I apologised for my random opening remarks by way of a rambling soliloquy about the moment in Dirty Dancing when Jennifer Grey sees Patrick Swayze in a nightclub and fancies him so much that she can say nothing more sensible than: "I carried a watermelon."

Oh yes. In this scenario (I realised too late to stop talking), I was Jennifer Grey. And the Archbishop of Canterbury was Patrick Swayze. The grinding, bare-chested target of Jennifer's summer lust. I have racked my brains, in the nights since then, over whether I could have come up with a less appropriate analogy. After some reflection: no. On the plus side, I have worked out that my pillowcase might make a very effective noose.

- Victoria Coren, Guardian, 5 December 2010

Moviegoers' Code of Conduct

2010-12-09T09:31:00.002Z

The BBC's Mark Kermode and Simon Mayo surveyed their listeners for the basic rules of decent and courteous behaviour in cinemas. Here, then, is the bottom line. Read and obey, bag rustlers, phone-checkers and mutterers! (You bastards!)

Early contenders for the Darwin Awards

2010-12-06T10:18:00.003Z

From a discussion of religious turmoil in North African Christendom in the 5th century:

Donatists were fanatical revolutionary martyr-terrorists, attacking landlords and money-lenders and sometimes forcing rich men to run behind their carriages while their slaves rode. And since they believed that martyrs went straight to heaven, they would reportedly challenge passers-by to kill them or would throw themselves en masse off cliffs.

One of the most influential Christians to come out of Africa during this time - or rather to stay in Africa, because he lived in the Libyan city of Hippo Regius - was the bishop of Hippo. St Augustine, as he is known by millions of Christians, was the anti-Donatist rhetorical hit-man. By logic and authority he demonstrated that suicide was not martyrdom but a sin. (It must have been very disheartening for any Donatist, having persuaded a passing fish-paste salesman to kill him, to find that instead of entering heaven he had just bought a ticket to hell).

- Terry Jones & Alan Ereira, Terry Jones' Barbarians: An Alternative Roman History, London, 2006.

Athlone Scumbags

2010-12-04T23:14:00.003Z

Mentioned by comedian Dara O'Briain in his recent stand-up DVD 'This Is The Show', this clip of two rough types having a free and frank exchange of views in a street in Athlone is noteworthy for its wide-ranging inventive use of language - virtually all of which is not in the slightest bit safe for work.

Marketing mega-fail

2010-12-04T09:26:00.003Z

Toy manufacturer Hasbro has released a Transformers toy with a remarkably inappropriate name... so now you can queue up this Christmas to buy your child the new Spastic Transformer. Seriously.

Hasbro unleashes 'Spastic' Transformer

[Via The Now Show]

"You're the first girl he's ever thought about the Führer with"

2010-12-03T11:32:00.002Z

'The future with', not the Führer! Just one of the many mishaps generated by the iPhone's seemingly Tourette's-suffering autocorrect function. For many, many more, see:

Damn You Autocorrect

[Courtesy of Louise]

Whales stuck in traffic

2010-11-26T10:12:00.000Z

What do Cher and Christina Aguilera share, other than top billing in this double diva musical? Foghorn vocals, for a start: a large part of Burlesque sounds like whales stuck in traffic. Immobile faces, also: Cher's has been sanded into death mask perfection, while Aguilera's seems simply glazed with vacuity, frozen in a semi-pout, half-human, half-dolly, unshakably impassive beneath a permanently sunlit bouffant.

- Catherine Shoard, Guardian, 25 November 2010

Salvador Dali

2010-11-25T14:00:00.004Z

The legendary artist appears on the US TV programme What's My Line in January 1957. Blindfolded guests struggle to guess his identity, understandably.

World's biggest Firefly fan?

2010-11-22T23:59:00.003Z

With a somewhat obscure yet refreshingly specific taste in fancy dress, this lady has decked herself out as a person-sized version of Jayne's woolly hat.

[Via Poorly Dressed]

Radcliffe sings The Elements

2010-11-17T10:00:00.004Z

Harry Potter star Daniel Radcliffe sings the periodic table in an arrangement by Tom Lehrer, on the BBC's Graham Norton Show:

[Via PodBlack Cat]

Oh Superman!

2010-11-08T15:29:00.003Z

'Time to clear up and clean up before Danny Aykroyd, Rosie Shuster and friend Margot Kidder drop in ... 'What a well-vacuumed house,' Danny comments. Danny and Rosie have come over on Laker's Skytrain, and say it's grim but cheap.

Margot Kidder is playing Lois Lane in the Superman movie (which is still shooting, over a year after they pulled out of Shepperton).

Apparently most of her work involves hanging in a harness alongside Christopher Reeve whilst people do strange things to them. They have to fight an eagle on the top of the Empire State Building. The first 'eagle' they got was from Taiwan and looked so un-eagle-like, with a funny red crop on its head, that it was sent home and it was decided instead to use large falcons. The falcons would only fly after chicken bones, so Margot and Superman were suspended, with wind machine blowing them, between one man hurling falcons towards another man holding chicken legs.

As Superman perspired heavily, leaving tell-tale patches around the armpits of his costume, one member of the crew was standing by to blow-dry his armpits.

The length and design of Superman's cock was the subject of much controversy, which culminated in Superman appearing at a photo-session with a large metal dong down his tights. Margot said she got so fed up with this thing digging into her leg that she took to flicking it with her fingernail, causing a light but noticeable metallic ting every time she touched his shorts'

- Diary entry for Saturday 6 May 1978, in Michael Palin, Diaries 1969-1979, London, 2006.

DIY house-moving

2010-11-02T19:11:00.002Z

Who needs pricey removal companies?

[Via Popurls]

Mow in haste, repent at leisure

2010-11-01T09:44:00.001Z

A neighbourhood dispute in Fairlie, in which police from all over South Canterbury were called out and one man charged, appears to have stemmed from a row over the use of a lawnmower.

Temuka, Timaru, Fairlie and Geraldine police all attended the incident, which is believed to have occurred about 1pm yesterday on Regent St in Fairlie.

Senior Constable Russell Halkett, of Fairlie, said the situation was "ugly" and involved at least five people. One man has been charged with possession of an offensive weapon and will appear in court later this week.

"People should have known better, they were all adults," Mr Halkett said.

Several people were questioned at the scene and there were further charges pending, Mr Halkett said.

A man was treated for injuries to his head and abdomen.

While he could not confirm the cause of the incident, Mr Halkett said the dispute may have been partly triggered by a lawnmower being accidentally taken from one of the properties.

"That's one version of the story," he said. "Tempers got frayed. It all seems to have started from something that seems pretty trivial. You get these egos involved and it blows things out of proportion."

Mr Halkett said he arrived on the scene to find a punch-up taking place on a driveway. He said he tried to defuse the situation, with police from Geraldine, Temuka and Timaru coming shortly afterwards.

- Timaru Herald, 1 November 2010

"Not all affairs have a positive effect on a marriage"

2010-10-30T12:50:00.003+01:00

Tunbridge Wells [in Kent] has been laid bare as an infidelity hotspot by a controversial website. Nearly 1,000 love rats from the town are said to have signed up to a website which helps married people meet new lovers.

We spoke to one local adulteress who has been cheating on her husband for nine months. She said: "It's a self-esteem boost when you get lots of messages from people wanting to get to know you. I definitely don't want my marriage to end. I'm not sure what I would do if I got caught."

[...]

The website even carries a startling disclaimer, warning visitors that "not everyone is suited to having an affair".

"Not all affairs have a positive effect on a marriage," it adds.

The website claims to have 944 members from Tunbridge Wells, while across Kent more than 11,000 people are using the site to cheat on their other halves.

- This Is Kent, 29 October 2010

"It's not finished... now it's finished"

2010-10-29T16:30:00.002+01:00

'During the first set Rufus has asked that you please do not applaud until after he has left the stage as his exit is part of the piece'.

- Notice to fans attending a Rufus Wainwright concert

[Via Popbitch]

"I wish they wouldn't waste it on dogs"

2010-10-28T17:22:00.002+01:00

Comedian Kristen Wiig reads from a slender collection of poems written by former Three's Company actress Suzanne Somers, in an instalment of the Celebrity Autobiography show.

One man's passion for VCRs

2010-10-22T09:45:00.003+01:00

This chap - Finnish, I gather - has what is perhaps the world's biggest private collection of VCRs. Here he takes viewers on a tour, providing a rare insight into the life of an obsessive collector. And his hair is a bit special too.

[Via Guardian Viral Video Chart]

David Mitchell's metal penis

2010-10-21T19:23:00.002+01:00

From a recording of the comedy panel show The Unbelievable Truth, hosted by David Mitchell:

DM: I'm not playing the game - I see myself as the 'icy host'.

Chris Addison: You see yourself as an Anne Robinson figure?

DM: Yes, an Anne Robinson figure. But still partially organic.

CA: What part isn't organic, just out of interest?

DM: My metal penis.

CA: Isn't that a Kaiser Chiefs album?

DM: I'm very pleased with my metal penis, but it certainly gets through the diesel.

CA: If it's diesel does that mean it's taxed more highly than the unleaded metal penis that you were previously using?

DM: I try and say that I should be able to use the agricultural diesel, because it's used for breeding purposes. But as I have failed to breed with it I'm not allowed.

Rufus Hound: It's classed as a recreational vehicle?

DM: I know, it's ridiculous really, because I've never seen anyone have any fun with it.

- The Unbelievable Truth, Radio 4, 18 October 2010

The naked truth

2010-10-21T09:19:00.003+01:00

The cheek of it... Berliners strip in protest at city's sky-high rents

The movement is sending shock waves through the normally orderly world of Berlin estate agents: when they show off apartments for rent, their presumed tenants strip off and prance around wearing nothing but Mickey Mouse masks to hide their identities.

The protesters, who paint their naked bodies with slogans such as "too expensive" and "rip off", pose as ordinary would-be tenants and queue up to "view" expensive apartments to let.

Once inside they strip off and dance around to blaring music pumped through loudspeakers while being filmed. In most cases they manage to flee before the police arrive. A video of their protest usually appears on YouTube the following day.

"We want every estate agent and every apartment management company to be aware that if they try to rent out flats at rip-off prices, they can expect a visit from us," one of the protesters, who would only identify himself as Denis, declared on one of the videos.

The rent rise protest is conducted by a group called Hedonistic International which recently gained publicity after its members stormed a neo-Nazi pub. Their demonstrations have so far been confined to the Berlin inner-city districts of Kreuzberg and Freidrichshain. Both districts are being gentrified after providing cheap flats for immigrants and students for more than two decades.

- Independent, 21 October 2010

Coachella in miniature

2010-10-18T18:32:00.001+01:00

Lovely tilt-shifted and fast-forwarded short film capturing a day in the life of the 2010 Coachella rock festival; catchy tune too -

Coachelletta from Sam O'Hare on Vimeo.

Careful, you'll have someone's eye out

2010-10-16T22:09:00.003+01:00

'Mum was 15 when the war started, and started work in an office. By the age of 18 she was also an ARP warden. I've never been able to understand how risk-averse my mum is. She hated conkers, pea shooters and anything that could have someone's eye out: skipping, swinging on your chair, talking with your mouth full. I think there must have been something deficient in the diet in 1920s Portsmouth and people were born with very weak eye sockets, so that if you burped a baby over-zealously, there was a risk its eye would pop out over your shoulder. I understand Mum grew up in a time of danger and that she wanted us to be safe, but I did sometimes wonder how she got through the war at all. How did she function as an ARP warden, venturing out during the Blitz in a tin hat, looking for fires, injured people, unexploded bombs and possible German paratroopers? She could cope with all that, but if a Jerry had crept up on her with a snowball, she'd have panicked because there could be some grit in that and that can have someone's eye out'

- Jeremy Hardy, My Family And Other Strangers, 2010

How to get ahead

2010-10-15T10:27:00.002+01:00

'The odd thing in this world is than an eager-beaver type, with no original ideas, who mimes those in authority above him right to the last twist of necktie and scrape of chin, always gets noticed. Gets selected. Rises. In the banks, in insurance companies, big electric companies, missile building firms, universities. He had seen them as assistant professors teaching some recondite subject - survey of heretical Christian sects of the fifth century - and simultaneously inching their path up with all their might and main. Everything but sending their wives over to the administration building as bait'

- Philip K Dick, Time Out Of Joint, 1959

'This Monty Python, is he one of us?'

2010-10-08T09:33:00.000+01:00

'Being Margaret Thatcher was a very demanding, 24-hour-a-day job. Like many people held in the grip of their own convictions, Thatcher had trouble understanding the thoughts and words of others. She was, and no doubt is, a kindly woman. Staff were always pleased when she remembered their birthdays, even more when she remembered their children's birthdays. She could be tolerant of other people's way of living, even when she did not understand or sympathise with it. However, if she had a sense of humour, it was well hidden.

There are many stories about this. When the Liberals adopted a sort of stylised yellow bird as their logo, one of her speechwriters produced a passage based on Monty Python's parrot sketch – 'this parrot is no more, it has shuffled off this mortal coil and gone to join the choir invisible . . .' She had to be persuaded that the lines were funny, and would be recognised by the audience. She had one other concern: 'This Monty Python, is he one of us?' (Interestingly, Cameron referred to the same sketch in his party conference speech this week, confident that everyone would get the joke.)

Earlier, Peter Jay, the son-in-law of the then prime minister Jim Callaghan, had said that Callaghan saw himself as Moses, leading his people after long travails into the promised land. It was a silly thing to say, and Thatcher's people seized on it. They wrote a line for her party conference speech: 'My message to Moses is: 'Keep taking the tablets.'' But she didn't get the joke and tried to change it to 'Keep taking the pills.' Only after it was carefully explained to her did she agree to the proper version.

She was nonetheless the source of much unwitting humour. Just as, in an early silent movie, when you see a man up a ladder with a pot of paint, you know with near certainty that the star is going to walk under the ladder at exactly the wrong moment, so with Thatcher. When a double entendre appeared in the offing, you felt she was certain to utter it.

I recall Thatcher being asked in the Commons about pacifists handing out leaflets outside an army barracks. 'I'm sure soldiers will know exactly what they can do with those leaflets!' she said, to outright laughter from the Labour side and surreptitious giggles from the Tories.

At a training centre in Putney, she was introduced to an extremely large youth who was working with a giant wrench. 'Goodness,' she said, 'I've never seen a tool as big as that!'

But Thatcher saved the best of all for her victory tour of the Falkland Islands. She was taken to inspect a large field gun, basically a ride-on lawnmower with a barrel several feet long. It was on a bluff, overlooking a plain on which another Argentine invasion might one day materialise. She admired the weapon, and the soldier manning it asked if she would like to fire a round.

'But mightn't it jerk me off?' she replied. Chris Moncrieff of the Press Association, who was covering the visit, recorded the manful struggle of the soldier to keep his face, indeed his whole body, straight'

- Simon Hoggart, Guardian, 8 October 2010

Fearne Cotton

2010-09-27T19:08:00.003+01:00

'If you think that [Radio 1 DJ Chris] Moyles is quite annoying you should listen to this Fearne Cotton woman afterwards; everything she says is 'ooh it's amazing, it's brilliant, it's awesome!' It's like listening to someone who has never seen cutlery and then showing them a spoon'.

- Sandi Toksvig, The News Quiz, Radio 4, 24 September 2010

On Wagner

2010-09-25T12:05:00.003+01:00

Stephen Fry recently extolled the virtues of the famed German opera composer Richard Wagner, but for many people his work is rather inaccessible due to its extreme length and bombast:

As Wagner grew older, his operas grew longer, culminating in Der Ring des Nibelungen, composed of four separate operas taking some sixteen hours to perform. For all its enduring popularity, his work has also drawn some inspired criticism. One composer complained that a Wagner opera 'starts at six o'clock and, after it has been going three hours, you look at your watch and it says 6.20', while Friedrich Nietzche derided Die Meistersinger as 'German beer music'. Here are some other choice critiques:

Gioacchino Rossini - 'Wagner has beautiful moments but awful quarter hours'.

Oscar Wilde - 'I like Wagner's music better than any other music. It's so loud that one can talk the whole time without people hearing what one says'.

Charles Beaudelaire - 'I love Wagner, but the music I prefer is that of a cat hung up by its tail outside a window and trying to stick to the panes of glass with its claws'.

The gentlest of the barbs came from Mark Twain, who helpfully proclaimed that 'Wagner's music is better than it sounds'.

- W.B. Marsh & Bruce Carrick, 366: A Leap Year of Great Stories, Cambridge, 2007.

Poll: 1 in 5 Americans believe Obama is a cactus

2010-09-23T10:01:00.001+01:00

WASHINGTON — According to a poll released Tuesday, nearly 20 percent of U.S. citizens now believe Barack Obama is a cactus, the most Americans to identify the president as a water-retaining desert plant since he took office.

The poll, conducted by the Pew Research Center, found a sharp rise in the number of Americans who say they firmly believe Obama was either born a cactus, became a cactus during his youth, or has questionable links to the Cactaceae family.

"We asked people of varying races, ages, and backgrounds the same question: 'What is President Barack Obama?'" Pew spokeswoman Jodi Miller told reporters. "And a fifth of them responded, 'A cactus.'"

According to the poll, Obama has lost favor among many voters who supported his candidacy in 2008 but have since come to doubt he is a mammal. While these Americans concede Obama may not specifically be a cactus, most believe he is a plant of some kind, with 18 percent saying the president is a ficus, 37 percent believing him to be a grain such as wheat or millet, and 12 percent convinced he is an old-growth forest in Northern California.

When asked why they agreed with the statement "President Obama is a large succulent plant composed of specialized cells designed for water retention in arid climates," many responded that they "just know," claiming the president only acts like a human being for political purposes and is truly a cactus at heart.

- The Onion, 22 September 2010

Tourette's Karaoke

2010-09-21T09:49:00.004+01:00

The most excellent skills of Guy Daniel Francis are to the fore in these videos, demonstrating that all you need to improve a good pop song is to add random swearing. Not safe for work viewing due to language, naturally, and here's a bit of info about Tourette Syndrome for some context.

See also: Losing My Religion, A Little Respect, and Mmm Mmm Mmm Mmm by Crash Test Dummies.

[Via Popbitch]

Thieves obviously unaware of the value of livestock

2010-09-14T15:52:00.003+01:00

Instead, they just stole the gate:

A Kingston farmer is concerned someone could have been seriously injured after some "idiots" stole his farm gate along the Devil's Staircase highway to Queenstown at the weekend.

Fortunately some overseas tourists saved the day, after Loch Linnhe Station owner Murray Scott's 4.6m by 1.2m steel mesh farm gate was taken from its hinges overnight on Saturday.

The foolish act left more than 30 cattle and 300 sheep free to roam the Kingston to Queenstown highway in what would have been a blind spot over a hill for traffic heading north.

"It was right at the top of a hill the gate was stolen... just as you come over the hill. If someone had flown over the hill they would've had nowhere to go," he said.

- Southland Times, 14 September 2010

Careless whiskers

2010-09-06T19:02:00.003+01:00

Adam and Kristi from Cracked sum up their top 6 foullest, most noxious facial hair in music. Includes two geezers you've never heard of, plus John Oates of Hall & Oates, owner of the most reprehensible rock moustache in history.

The 6 most atrocious uses of facial hair in music history

[Title pun and link courtesy of the Guardian Guide]

Josie Long

2010-09-06T10:49:00.002+01:00

Comedian Josie Long at the New Zealand Comedy Festival in 2008, on stealing branded promotional pens, the challenges of contemporary mime, and the delights of mis-spelling.

Munchy box!

2010-09-01T18:47:00.002+01:00

Glasgow's finest culinary tradition: the grease-laden, artery-popping combination of kebab meat, fish & chips, naan bread, onion rings, chicken tikka and loads and loads of potential health problems, all sandwiched into a dripping, sellotaped-shut cardboard pizza box. Gory pictures in full at:

What is a Munchy Box?

Iranian editorial policy

2010-09-01T11:27:00.002+01:00

"Sticks and stones may break my bones – but names will never hurt me." I was reminded of the highly sensible old saying when I read about the typically level-headed and well-modulated attack on First Française Carla Bruni and the actress Isabelle Adjani for daring to add their voices to the international protest against the proposed stoning to death of Sakineh Mohammadi-Ashtiani, the 43-year-old mother-of-two accused of adultery, by the Iranian newspaper Kayhan.

This paragon of the free press is directly under the supervision of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's government and has its editor appointed by the Supreme Leader of Iran, Ayatollah Khameini – and don't you just wish you could be a fly on the wall at one of their editorial meetings.

"That Carla Bruni – she says we shouldn't stone adulteresses to death."

"She must be a prostitute!"

"Yeah, and her Mum!"

"And that actress – Isabelle Adjani? She says it too."

"Right, that's it. She was in that film Ishtar, with that Zionist thug Dustin Hoffman – I hated that film! That's 103 minutes of my life I'll never get back again!"

"She's probably a prostitute too!"

"OK, there's our headline – FRENCH PROSTITUTES ENTER HUMAN RIGHTS PROTEST. Now, next up – who's the stunna getting stoned to death on Page 3 today?" [...]

I must say that I was perplexed, though, by the reference to Mrs Sarkozy as a "hypocrite", while drawing ungentlemanly attention to her sexual generosity over the years. (Sexual charity, even, if you count Mick Jagger, who looks as if a very bored giant practised origami on his face for a very long time.)

Surely wishing women not to be put to death for committing adultery, if you are yourself a woman who has slept with married men, is the opposite of hypocrisy – ie, damn good sense? Surely a hypocrite would be a woman who had committed adultery yet wanted other women to be stoned to death for it?

- Julie Burchill, Independent, 1 September 2010

Ava Vidal

2010-08-26T16:19:00.003+01:00

Comedian Ava Vidal on the Michael McIntyre Comedy Roadshow in 2009:

People say what Madonna's actually done is that she's gone to Africa and bought a black child for £1.5 million. Someone said to me, 'Surely you find that offensive?' Not really - I find it exciting, because I've got two black kids at home. I can't lie to you - I skipped home that day. I was like, 'Kids, you need to get your coats on'. And their faces lit up, they were so excited. They were like, 'Ooh mummy, where are we going?' 'I don't know, but with a street value of £1.5 million each you're not staying in my house'.

Too short to be decent

2010-08-18T11:34:00.003+01:00

'This year, my favourite has been the announcement by the headmistress of a school in Hereford that the girls there were wearing skirts "too short to be decent" and from September they will line up every morning and have their skirts measured by teachers. If a girl's fingertips come below her hemline, she will be sent home to change. Some parents have vigorously objected to the new rule, with one mother claiming that "the idea of lining them up is straight out of the Gestapo handbook. It's disgraceful."

A few things.

Number one – the need for an intermediate historical analogy to which one can liken modern inconveniences is becoming pressing. So few things are, after all, really like six million people being systematically slaughtered across a continent. I nominate, "It's like the rule of Napoleon III! A moderate police state, but civil liberties are increasing and people are, on the whole, taken in the round, becoming better off!" Or, "I feel like Myrna Loy during MGM's golden age, forever under the essentially benevolent but still tyrannical eye of Louis B Mayer!" Press your buttons now.

Number two – I remember being a teenage girl. Well, no, that's not true – I remember being surrounded by teenage girls. I was, until the age of about 22, technically a mineral – but I do remember the steaming, roiling tide of hormones that swept everyone (normal) along in an all but unstoppable headlong rush and against which onslaught the entire adult world united in order to mitigate the damage. Even with their best efforts, my educational establishment generally looked like a specialist brothel. Black bras under white shirts were de rigueur, as was enough eyeliner to drown a mouse, and waistbands rolled over so many times you would have thought genitalia were actually part of the school uniform. "Suzanne, where is your vagina today? Oh, you forgot it, did you? That's the third time this week. Once more and you'll go on report."'

- Lucy Mangan, Guardian, 14 August 2010

The moribund Senate

2010-08-12T14:33:00.001+01:00

'Filibusters, once rare, are now used to block the most routine procedures, ensuring minimal cross-pollination of ideas. The obstructionism and crankiness are laughable. Senator Jim Bunning of Kentucky, while vowing not to leave the chamber as a procedural move to hold up unemployment benefits for millions, complained about the personal hardship he suffered for his parliamentary stunt — missing a college basketball game on TV.

“Free smoothies for crazy people in the lobby,” was Jon Stewart’s suggestion to get Bunning out of the chambers, not an unreasonable idea for this gilded nursing home of people muttering into C-Span cameras [...]

Little has changed since Mark Twain offered this assessment: “Suppose you were an idiot. And suppose you were a member of Congress. But I repeat myself.”'

- Timothy Egan, New York Times, 11 August 2010

The most enjoyable aspect of lecturing

2010-08-09T13:59:00.001+01:00

'The most enjoyable aspect of lecturing, I discovered, were the staff meetings -- which the Head of Department conducted as a sort of homage to avant-garde cinema (a genre to which he was excessively devoted). Plot and chronology had been abandoned years ago in favour of expressionist flow-charts and long, meaning-filled silences. At times, his presentations seemed to be taking place in sepia with French subtitles.

Surrounded by the most socially retarded people in a 100 kilometre radius, I experienced an exhilarating sense of eloquence. As my colleagues gazed at their laps -- carefully avoiding eye contact with anyone else and pretending to be invisible -- I found myself making erudite suggestions for the running of the department.

At one meeting, I casually dropped the word 'pedagogical' into the discussion. There was a murmur of approval around the table. At another meeting, the Head of Department asked me to assist with a party of 15-year-old school pupils who were touring the college. "You're just the sort of extroverted person who would inspire these children," he said, without apparent irony.

Alas that his recommendation provided a brutal lesson about social limitations. Two hundred school pupils were gathered in a lecture theatre to receive a speech by the vice-chancellor, who -- at the last minute -- was called away to deal with a crisis. I suddenly heard the Dean of Engineering announce that he was going to prevail upon me to give the talk instead.

My recollection of the next half-hour is hazy. I recall telling the children that the importance of school was over-rated, and that it was better for them to enjoy themselves than pass exams. I may have mentioned that a 'gap year' might be useful to some of them, so that -- in an unfortunate choice of words -- they could try out "having sex and taking drugs". I've blanked out the rest'

- David Haywood, 'Confessions of a Social Retard', 8 August 2010

A vast bicycle conspiracy

2010-08-05T15:27:00.002+01:00

'Colorado's Republican gubernatorial candidate Dan Maes has accused his likely opponent, Democratic Mayor John Hickenlooper, of "converting Denver into a United Nations community" by promoting bike riding and other sustainability issues.

According to Maes, who is a Tea Party favorite, Hickenlooper's bike plans are "all very well-disguised, but [they] will be exposed."

Specifically, the plans that Maes is raising the alarm over include the city's B-Cycle program which makes a network of about 400 red bikes available for rent at locations throughout the city. B-Cycle's website touts that, "bike sharing makes it economical and convenient to use bikes for trips that are too far to walk but too short to drive.... With your magic red bike, you don’t have to look for a parking space or bring your own bike with you everywhere you go. Plus, riding a B-cycle is good for you and good for the environment. It’s the newest and best way to get around town."

However, Maes warns that B-Cycle is "bigger than it looks like on the surface, and it could threaten our personal freedoms."

Additionally, Maes, who made these comments during a campaign rally and also to the Denver Post, worries about Denver's membership in the International Council for Local Environmental Initiatives (ICLEI). The ICLEI, which is an international association of local governments dedicated to sustainable development, has over 600 US communities as members.

Maes, however, says he is not being fooled — “At first, I thought, ‘Gosh, public transportation, what’s wrong with that, and what’s wrong with people parking their cars and riding their bikes? And what’s wrong with incentives for green cars?’ But if you do your homework and research, you realize ICLEI is part of a greater strategy to rein in American cities under a United Nations treaty,” adding "some would argue this document that mayors have signed is contradictory to our own Constitution."

Responding to Maes' accusations that Mayor Hickenlooper is leading Denver down a path towards UN rule, a spokesman for the mayor noted that Denver’s membership in ICLEI dates back to 1992, while Mr. Hickenlooper was elected mayor in 2003'.

- Greenanswers, 4 August 2010

Travelling rough on New Zealand railways

2010-07-31T13:29:00.003+01:00

Countries where the railway came late seemed to lag well behind in provision for passengers. A journalist travelling on New Zealand's first major railway in 1864 reported how he and fellow passengers were 'politely requested by the guard to leave the carriage and help to push the carriage and engine to the summit of the bank ... and on returning to our seats, the guard promptly collected 2s 6d from us as our fares!'

The accommodation on the trains was a throwback to the Europe of thirty years before: 'The standard carriages of the 1870s were tiny four and six wheel boxes with rigid axles, longitudinal (lengthways) bench seats and gloomy colza-oil lamps. Heating, toilets and passageways between carriages were non-existent'. There were only two classes but despite paying 50 percent extra, first-class passengers were in the same carriages separated only by a partition and benefited only 'from horsehair cushions, coir floor mats, brass spittoons and the "quality" of one's travelling companions'.

An English visitor described it as barely up to second class back home but far slower since the trains averaged 20 mph.

- Christian Wolmar, Blood, Iron & Gold: How the Railways Transformed the World, London, 2009