No poster in the window

We live in a quiet neighbourhood and there's no real need for canvassers to go round in pairs, so it was evidence of some keenness that the two Labour councillors standing for re-election in our ward came to our door together.

On local issues there was little to argue about. Our local LibDems aren't up to much and the Tories don't bear thinking about. But Labour promise to clean up the town, and I have agreed that they will have my vote if before June 10th they do something about their own offices, which are in sore need of a wash-down at the very least.

Their take on national matters was interesting. One of them had already told me in an email that he "would hope that George Bush does not get re-elected in November" (while adding with absolute truth that "such events are out of our control at a local level").

It seems to me that if that is your feeling about Bush, then since Blair entirely shares his views on what is right for the world, it follows that you should be looking for a new leader for your party. Of course, I couldn't get the two candidates to agree with that on the record, and they spoke without much conviction of how well Blair used to get on with Clinton and what a great relationship he might have with Kerry, while maintaining that he has had a salutary influence on Bush, citing Libya but skirting round Iraq.

During the course of the conversation it was suggested somewhat diffidently that I might like to join the Labour party, for whose candidates I have never failed to vote. Ironically, I might well have signed up at almost any time during the last forty years, but after the Bush/Blair war they will never again get a vote from me in the national elections, let alone a subscription.

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Harper’s and A & L

George in San Francisco tells me that 2,000 people are injured every year in France while opening oysters. I can think of no comment to make on that, but apparently he saw it in Harper’s Magazine Index which he finds “rather useful for a sense of the Zeitgeist” (they talk like that all the time over there). Be that as it may - and all of us need to check on the old ziggers from time to time (though I am more of a Weltenschauung man myself) - the source was a revelation to me. Perhaps I had never encountered it before because I confused Harper’s with Harper’s Bazaar, which is not at all the same sort of thing.

Anyway, the Index is fascinating as a fund of statistical snippets (not all as trivial as the one above). Harper's Magazine itself, an “American journal of literature, politics, culture, and the arts published continuously from 1850”, is as wide-ranging and literate as the online-only Arts and Letters Daily, which more ambitiously claims to cover “philosophy, aesthetics, literature, language, ideas, criticism, culture, history, music, art, trends, breakthroughs, disputes, and gossip”. (What, nothing about plumbing?)

But the latter is only a digest, or rather a free library of well-displayed and tempting links, while Harper’s is mostly fine original writing, well worth the small amount it costs. With very little advertising, it is hard to see how it survives. But then, it is hard to see how any “literary, brainy, and left-leaning” magazine (Amazon’s description) survives in Bush’s America.

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Our Fish Tastes Quite Nice

There has always been a variety of styles in advertising. A hundred years ago approaches ranged from the forthright, where you were told "Take Brown's Tincture Or You Will Die", to the euphemistically genteel, where a dress shop might offer "Inexpensive Models For The Maturer Figure" when they really meant "Cheap Clothes For Fat Old Women".

Nowadays, the range is from the subtle and incomprehensible (e.g. many TV commercials...."What was that one all about?") to the terse and often pointless. One retailer has become the biggest in the country with the help of an extremely feeble slogan displayed throughout their stores, sometimes inappropriately:

The Stag at eBay

For a couple of years I enjoyed myself selling a huge variety of items on eBay. I gave up because the experienced antiques dealer I was working with decided to retire from the trade; he had nobly undertaken the packing and despatch of everything we sold, and apart from missing his expertise I didn’t fancy spending much of my spare time with bubble wrap and brown paper.

I found that completing a successful sale usually involved sending or receiving about a dozen emails. Most buyers are friendly and efficient and I had some happy exchanges of correspondence; I am still proud of the blue star I got for my eighty positive feed-backs. There was one buyer who dithered for four weeks, then sent a cheque (or rather, check) for the wrong amount, then said he wanted to cancel the deal. However, I forgave him when he wrote '...sorry for the incontinence'.

I have been greatly taken by an eBay story passed on to me by a Californian friend, P J Tafka, about a man in Seattle who put his divorced wife’s wedding dress (sleeveless, large, looked like a shower curtain) up for auction last month, no reserve. This produced a first bid of $1, then 113 more bids, a final winning bid of $3,850, five invitations to ball games in other states, and five proposals of marriage. The first part of the story, now widely known in the States through the talk shows, is told on a lavishly illustrated website.

Sadly, things then got complicated and less happy; there is now a book based on the story.

Rhymes

Everyone knows Ogden Nash's bespectacled girl who doesn't get her necktacled. Here are some other tortured assonances.

Tom Lehrer's Wiener Schnitzel Waltz has:
Your lips were like wine, if you'll pardon the simile,
The music was lovely and quite Rudolf Friml-y...

A song about a masked ball has:
...Take off your false face
So I can waltz face
To face with you..

And in Noel Coward's Nina from Argentina (Who Wouldn't Dance)....
She refused to begin the beguine when they besought her to
And in language profane and obscene she cursed the man who taught her to
She cursed Cole Porter too...

Et son copain Grosses-Oreilles

Francophiles were disappointed to learn that the awful Noddy is more popular in France than Babar or Asterix.
Over there they apparently call him Oui-Oui.

Halloo!

This is the Estonian for "hello". My son, just back from a few days in the capital, Tallinn, reports that it is a lovely town and the Estonians are on the whole an agreeable lot with a very relaxed attitude towards the rest of the world (though they don't much care for the Finns who come every weekend for the cheap vodka) and are fairly underwhelmed by their membership of the European Union.

So clearly we should not worry about the threat to our culture and way of life that will arise if there is a flood of immigrants from there. It will probably be no worse than the situation in 1973 when we joined the EU and allowed unrestricted entry to the nationals of the other member countries. Many of us remember the problems caused by the swarms of Dutchmen and women coming over here, cycling about speaking perfect English, with windmills springing up everywhere and the whole place reeking of tulips.

So many cheeses...

...And only one decent limerick:

Il y avait une personne de Dijon
Qui n’aimait pas trop la religion
Il disait ‘Ma foi!
Ils m’emmerdent tous les trois -
Et le père, et le fils, et le pigeon.’

Now see HERE.

A lump of red leather

Most alleged tongue twisters are ridiculously easy, but I know very few people who can repeat, reasonably fast, this simple girl's name:
PEGGY BABCOCK, PEGGY BABCOCK, PEGGY BABCOCK

Poor orientalism

We have had a spate of samurai films recently and they have inspired some ill-informed comments. One of the critics demonstrated his profound ignorance of things Japanese by referring to the writer Yukio Mishima’s obsession with an old samurai practice known as Bunburyodo, translating it as "the dual way of literature and the sword”.

This is nonsense. Mishima’s philosophy was romantic-militaristic twaddle, and he never really understood Bunburyodo. Those familiar with the seminal essay called The Importance of Being by the Japanese-Indian philosopher Osikawai-Oudh will know that the word means, literally, “The Way of Earnestness”, and refers to the ancient Japanese tradition of travelling to give succour to sick friends.

Si vieillesse pouvait...

It’s not quite true to say that when it comes to the capacity to acquire new mental skills it’s all downhill from the age of twelve, but it’s not far off. This was clear to me the first time a child took a Rubik’s cube out of my hand and went twist, twist, twist, twist....... “There you are, Daddy”.

I first encountered computers twenty-eight years ago, when I was already on a downward slope of mental capacity. Since then I have spent around 30,000 hours playing with them, working with them or just staring at a monitor waiting for something to happen, so even allowing for an extremely shallow learning curve I must have picked up a good bit.

Indeed, there are several things I can now do with a computer. But here is a frustrating thing: With all my laboriously acquired skills, and all the marvellous equipment I now possess, I cannot reproduce a program which I wrote in 1982 for my Sinclair Spectrum; I would love to be able to do so because, apart from its sentimental value, it was really quite good in a trivial sort of way.

There is a note HERE of what it does—and a summary of how I spent the 30,000 hours . I have a printout of the program in 700 lines of Sinclair Basic but there is simply no way I can rewrite it, since my programming skill consists only of the ability to write bits of clumsy and verbose VBA code by trial and error. And I have only the printout, not the cassette I recorded the program on, so I can't use an emulator and anyway I have no wish to enter the world of retro-computing.

So now, with years of experience, two PCs with quad core CPUs and vast amounts of RAM, a MacBook 4.1, a Time Capsule, Apple TV, an iPad and a couple of grand’s worth of software, I am incapable of doing something which I could do all that time ago using a little thing the size of a paperback.

Isn’t that sad?

Ich Dien

Eligibility regulations for the "gov.uk" web domain state that "Registration is limited to UK government departments and agencies, local government bodies... and other associated and non-departmental public sector organisations. It is not for use by individuals."

So how did "www.princeofwales.gov.uk" get registered, hey? Did the Clarence House Press Office nip in quickly before the guidelines were laid down, or did Mummy send Black Rod on his behalf to knock on ICANN’s door?

Or perhaps this is just Charles saying: if that Blair person carries on like a royal, then I’m jolly well going to be a government department, so there.

Concealed weapon

When my wife checked in for her flight to Phoenix she was careful not to be carrying any scissors or nail files with her, but Security did not seem at all concerned about another potential weapon she had in her handbag. This was careless of them: she could easily have produced it in mid-flight and said to the pilot "Now, fly this aircraft to Cairo or I'll curl your eyelashes!"

30 St Mary Axe

Today Sir Norman Foster's building is being shown to the media.

All this talk of erotic gherkins and towering innuendos is nonsense. No-one seems to have noticed that it is without doubt a giant suppository.

Before we gang awa'

Farewell then Estée Lauder, who outlived Sir Harry by 54 years and died on April 24th, aged 97.

I did it à ma façon

When a French girl told me that 'My Way' was actually a French song called 'Comme d’habitude' I found this hard to believe but she was right. We know that Paul Anka had something to do with it (presumably the English lyrics) and a quick check with a marvellous website called ABC de la Chanson Francophone suggests that the tune and (French) lyrics were written by Jacques Revaux, Claude François and Gilles Thibault.

But I don’t see how the French words: Je me lève et je bouscule/ Tu ne te reveille pas comme d’habitude… go with the same tune that fits And now, the end is near/ And so I face the final curtain. I mean, there seem to be too many syllables.

Never mind. Discovering that website was a great joy; it has the words of over 19,000 French songs and over 16,000 “foreign” (mostly English) ones, of all periods up to 2004 and constantly updated. Copyright, of course, but OK for “usage privé ou éducatif”.

[Four years later I wrote another note about Comme d'Habitude.]

Easy money

In the Observer last Sunday there was an interview with the man who was a junior manager in a small provincial bank in 1968, when he invented the idea of global electronic money. He called it Visa International and sold it to the world.

Today in the UK we own 60 million credit cards and have a debt on them of £53.5 billion (75% of the European total). Each year, British adults make, on average, almost 40 credit card purchases (the French average two a year, the Germans one every two years). In the United States the value of transactions on cards has just passed those for cheques and cash.

If he had put his name to the product, the inventor of Visa would be the best-known man on earth, but he thought this might affect its popularity.

His name is Hock.

Probably apocryphal

This one has been on the internet for years but perhaps not everyone has seen it:

At a computer exhibition in the US, Bill Gates said that if General Motors had advanced with technology in the same way that the computer industry has, cars would cost $25, get a thousand miles to the gallon and run at two thousand miles an hour.

Piqued by this, GM hit back. They said that if cars were designed along the same lines as computers, they would crash twice a day for no reason whatever. Every time they repainted the lines on the road, you would have to buy a new car.

Occasionally, if you performed some complicated manoeuvre, such as turning left, your car would stop. You would then have to go to the hard shoulder, take the engine out, and reinstall it. Before the airbags could be deployed, you would have to click on a sign saying: “Are you sure?” Instead of warning lights for water, battery and fuel, a sign would light up saying: “This car has performed an illegal act”.

Every now and again, your car would lock you out and refuse to let you in until you simultaneously lifted the door handle, turned the key and grabbed hold of the radio antenna. You’d need to press the “start” button to turn the engine off.

Born 14th April 1904

It is extraordinary to be celebrating today the centenary of a man who died a mere four years ago.

When asked if there were any special problems about acting in his nineties, Gielgud replied "Well, I sometimes have difficulty in remembering my lines. But then, I always did........."

Shakespeare's not the same without him.

Pointless but funny

Those who are not fortunate enough to have The Guardian come through their letter-box every morning will have missed the latest in Simon Hoggart’s series under the above title:

“Doctor, doctor, I keep thinking I’m a moth!”
“You don’t need a doctor, you need a psychiatrist.”
“I know, but your light was on.”