alastair's heart monitor

Repeat Message

2006-06-08T11:46:00.000+01:00

You will now see that as a result of my operations to transport this blog elsewhere it has become somewhat scrambled - all the text formatting has disappeared. So, whether I now like it or not, this is an ex-blog. It is defunct. And something which sounds like that. Go to http://almax.wordpress.com/ for your blog fix

Important Message

2006-06-08T10:37:00.000+01:00

for regular visitors Over the last few weeks Blogger has become so unstable and unreliable that it is an ordeal trying to post anything here. In the last few days in particular it has been a nightmare. I have decided to try another blog-host and I have exported this blog to Wordpress which is at http://almax.wordpress.com/ It's very likely that there will be no further posts here, and if you want to see the latest posts go to that new address. It will probably take a wee while for me to sort things out so I won't be posting much for the next few days. For members of this blog, I still haven't figured out how to renew membership at the new location - perhaps I will just allow a free-for-all in relation to comments, but for updates check at the new location.

Poets Walk, Clevedon, Somerset

2006-06-08T00:45:00.000+01:00

One of my favourite places in Somerset. In the foreground of this photograph (taken 1935) you can see the pathway called 'Poets Walk', so-called because a number of illustrious 19th century literary figures (including Thackeray) used to come here for solitude and contemplation while walking this path alongside the Bristol Channel. The scene has barely changed since this photograph was taken - Clevedon Pier in the distance has been restored and is still a working pier.

A Guy Decides To Sell His Car On E-Bay

2006-06-07T15:25:00.000+01:00

Mistake. Although he gave a very full description and included photographs, the following are just a fraction of his responses to e-mail queries etc about it during the bidding process (click on the heading to see the full thing) :- On 22-Apr-06 at 13:49:33 BST, seller added the following information Ok for the person who came to test drive it and exclaimed "Oh it's Silver - I don't want a Silver one!" Yes it's Silver. Just so that there is no error here The title says it's Silver, the description confirms this and guess what? When you look at the photo's what do you see? Yup you got it. It is indeed Silver. I am so glad that you came to view it, thanks for brightening my day. On 22-Apr-06 at 14:45:39 BST, seller added the following information: Ok a round up of the latest emails: Sorry no swaps or trade-ins - I'm not a garage! Not even a very nice garden shed painted red that I have to dismantle myself, but thanks for the offer. Being registered in 2000 makes it 6 years old...I have never heard of a warranty this long so no it is not under warranty. Yes it is road legal - it's got an Mot! Nope no tax Yes it has a spare wheel. (Have I landed on a different planet or something?) No faults that I know of beyond what's in the description however that's not a promise as I'm not a mechanic and no there is no trial period. Come and try it make your own mind up. If you win you buy. No I don't think that I'm your long lost husband George from Arbroath regardless of how sarcastic I appear to be. It's called humour where I'm from. Personally I think George did the right thing where ever he is. The only finance is: you pay me I give you the car, I'm not a bank! I can't vouch for the other owners but no accidents that I am aware of. Yes you can look at it but no you can't take it for a two day test drive. (I am sure April 1st has gone). Ha ha very funny, no it's not made out of chocolate. (Why me. I get on a train / bus and I get the nutter. I even land the nutty taxi drivers who have just had Paris Hilton in the cab 'honest' - yeh right.). Get a life and start bidding. How do you place a bid?...sorry if this is too complicated for you I tend to think that driving might just be a stretch too far. No it's not left hand drive and your holiday in france and the precise route sounds wonderful. send me a postcard. Arghhh On 22-Apr-06 at 19:45:14 BST, seller added the following information: Ok I think I have become email capital of ebay...a real magnet for wonderful questions: All the seats are present and work, I know that you have counted them in the pictures and can only see 7. There is a very good reason for this...it's a 7 seater. No it's never been raced ...sorry am I missing something here, Auto Galaxy racing???? May be it'll be be a new class at Imola this year - Auto F1 MPV trials. There are no rips or tears to the head lining How the hell do I know if anyone has ever eaten in it. I assume no four course meals but may be the odd hippo pastie. Get a grip. It's not an off road vehicle so I assume it hasn't been used as such...this is an assumption mind you. Oh I see, no dear, 7 seater includes the driver. I can't speak for previous owners, I'm not aware of animals being in it. I suppose a previous owner could have been a zoo keeper or a werewolf. Keep up the emails as there is nothing else I'd rather be doing with my time. have fun and happy bidding. Is it a full moon tonight? On 23-Apr-06 at 12:00:55 BST, seller added the following information: The reason Jerry, that the gear stick is a funny shape is because it's an A U T O M A T I C gear box. Which means that if you do come to look you will find that there is no clutch. It's not missing by the way they just don't need three pedals. Should be just perfect for some as it's just like a pedal car - only two pedals. No it's not like new, Fran, it's 6 years old and done 67,000 + miles with kids. The seats are all fine, except the drivers arm rest as mentioned before. The exhaust appears to be fine. Again no swaps. What is it with people, when I say no swaps please don't take it as a challange. I have been offfered a caravan, 12 cars, 1 lorry, to have my garden landscaped, some rare fish, and I'm sorry but the very kind gent (Donald) who offered me a weekend with his wife (and him it would appear) I have a special message for you. The pictures you sent me of your wife did not, in all honesty help. Some of them looked more like a traffic accident than something that I might remotely find alluring. I am sure that if you set up your own website (assuming that it's not illegal) there will be plenty of sad sacks (many from ebay land going by this experience) who will indulge your (and your wifes) desires. The tyres on the right hand side of the vehicle are not flat. The reason the picture of the rear seats is 'wonky' as you put it, has an awful lot to do with the fact that I was trying to perch myself between the two front seats facing backwards. There was a very interesting hand brake and gear stick threatening to change my gender at that moment. Additionally at the same time, fending off a small child wearing an eye patch and a pirates bandana who was in the process of trying to hack my left leg off with a large plastic knife; a generous donation to family harmony from Santa. The bar you can see in the back is to handcuff the children to.(Joke - don't report me to the RSPCC altough at times....) Its the parcel shelf and can be removed easily. Yes it has privacy glass in the back and your eyes do not deceive you. It's really handy - people can't see inside the back as you transport your clan arround. They should make such glass complusory. Stops you getting a fright on the motorway when you glance sideways into a car as see .... I do wonder about some families. Whimp. Lancaster is not too far to come to look. Try this...bid, win collect. Simple really and it's a lovely train ride. You think writing replies to a zillion questions about this makes car buying fun????? Woha Lisa I think you need to change your friends. Yet again no it's not like new Gavin. Let me put it this way...what would you be like if you have run over 67,000 miles in six years carrying a load of kids (or werewolves)? Got a picture? Good well this car is a miracle. It looks bloody good and far far better than you would after such an event. However new implies without a mark, pristine, no wear...no it's not like new. It's good and it doesn't appear to have been abused like I sense you should be....may be I should introduce you to Donald (see above). For the 34 people who are interested in the tyres. Firstly I am sure that your interest in rubber ...no I can't be bothered, I'm sure Donald and his wife would like to meet you (see above). The tyres are very good. They all look reasonably new. On 24-Apr-06 at 10:42:55 BST, seller added the following information: Heaven help us... Another is it left hand drive? Don't you read or something? If not then I guess this isn't going make a lot of sense then. In which case I guess I can call you anything and you won't know! Nit. Do you think that I have cunningly turned the photo's around to make it just look like a right hand drive vehicle just to fool you???? Give me strength. NO ITS A BLOODY RIGHT HAND DRIVE MPV. On 24-Apr-06 at 13:35:55 BST, seller added the following information: Last few: How fast does it go? Depends on what's in front of you I suppose. It will sit very happily at 90 without even stressing the engine. (On the autobhaan of course, officer). Yes I am a nice bloke really - not had many complaints anyway, why do you ask Amy? Yes it runs on petrol, I am tempted to say I've tried gin and tonics but someone will actually think I mean it. I now understand why car adverts have to include warnings like 'Does not include people and scenery' in them. How do such people get by in life? Do they buy a ticket for the train and think they have a share in the rolling stock?? Yes I like it (The car that is). What sort of question was that Ruth?? It's very stable in cornering. In fact I wish most people were as stable as this MPV. It sits on the road really really well. It really is just like a big car. It is great to drive. Yes Bob the cup holders work. On 24-Apr-06 at 13:38:39 BST, seller added the following information: No Bob the cup holders are not broken or damaged in any way. As I said they work. On 24-Apr-06 at 13:41:05 BST, seller added the following information: Well Bob I just suppose that depends on how big your cups are doesn't it. No I haven't tried them with tins. I Don't drink and drive Bob. On 24-Apr-06 at 13:47:14 BST, seller added the following information: Bob haven't you got work to do or do you find that you have a problem relating to the rest of the human race? What is it with the cup holders? My suggestion is that rather than buying a car you go out and buy a cup holder. It's much safer - trust me. On 24-Apr-06 at 13:51:15 BST, seller added the following information: Thanks Bob and I hope that you have a nice day too. Oh by the way Bob you are now barred from bidding. I figure that the motoring and pedestrian population of Great Britain are safer that way. On 24-Apr-06 at 15:10:48 BST, seller added the following information: Bob sending me an email under a different name won't work either. You are the only person in the world who is even remotely interested in the cup holders and you have misspelled the swear words in exactly the same way as you did in your last email. Nobody and I mean nobody cares about cup holders. Now let me make some predictions Bob and you tell me if I'm right. You collect the numbers of trains at Crewe railway station. You live with your mum even though you are 45. You don't have a girl friend - indeed you might even be a virgin (not that there's anything wrong with that at 45 of course). Your favourite programme on TV is mmmm this is a hard one....got to be one of these inane outake / blooper type programmes or a practical joke programme that darken our culture. You know the kind of thing where a comic pretends to leave you with 15 dogs in the park whilst they go to the loo. That's funny isn't it Bob? You button your shirts right up to the neck even though you don't wear a tie. How am I doing?

ATTENTION Makwuzere - The Aintree Iron Revisited

2006-06-07T12:08:00.000+01:00

Some time ago I posted a wee thing about poet Roger McGough, and that led to an exchange of comments about the meaning of 'the Aintree Iron' referred to in the Scaffold song 'Lily the Pink'. My regular correspondent, Makwuzere, asserted that the Aintree Iron was a pub in Liverpool - but this is not the universal view. I recently came across the web-site of the TV programme QI - thoroughly recommended to all smart-arses everywhere - go here http://www.qi.com/ or if that link doesn't work then click the heading of this post. I thought I'd see if anyone there could solve the riddle - here are the relevant postings - no definitive answer for the Aintree Iron but some fascinating info about the medicinal compound, which I am quite sure makwuzere will find very efficacious :- The Aintree Iron almax 72951. Tue Jun 06, 2006 12:23 pm -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- As in 'Thank You Very Much For.......' On my weblog recently I wrote a short piece about poet Roger McGough and mentioned in passing his membership of the Scaffold and some of their hits including the above-mentioned lyric. This has resulted in many visitors coming to the blog apparently in search of enlightenment as to who or what 'the Aintree Iron' is or was. One correspondent asserted that it was the Blue Anchor pub in the Aintree area of Liverpool. Others were equally insistent on it being variously (a) a tree (b) Liverpool Football Club (c) Brian Epstein (d) a railway yard (e) an iron foundry (f) an open-air urinal ?? and (g) a horseshoe. I read somewhere (I think in the Guardian) that Mike McGear (aka McCartney) who wrote the lyric claims that it is none of the foregoing. Does anyone have the true answer? Tango 1 72959. Tue Jun 06, 2006 1:24 pm -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- It is my understanding that the Aintree Iron is slang. Iron being the abbreviation from "Iron Hoof", cockney rhyming slang for poof. Aintree is a rural area of Liverpool and Aintree Iron is referring to Brian Epstein. I think there are a few sites google throws up that support this. djgordy 72964. Tue Jun 06, 2006 1:41 pm -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- At the time I understood that the Aintree Iron referred to the Liverpool footballer Ian St. John, though there is nothing I can point to to back this up. Song lyrics don't have to refer to anything and it is possible that the phrase is just a piece of nonsense. After all, nobody actually asks what the medicinal compound invented by Lily the Pink was. samivel 72965. Tue Jun 06, 2006 1:56 pm -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- What was the medicinal compound invented by Lily the Pink? suze 72971. Tue Jun 06, 2006 2:08 pm -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Lydia Pinkham's Vegetable Compound (introduced 1875) was a patent medicine including a large amount of alcohol. It was supposed to treat PMT, the menopause and other feminine problems - and modern herbalists concede that, at worst, it doesn't make them worse. Indeed, it contained an ingredient called black cohosh which has been shown to have some efficacy in this area. And if it gets you drunk, well I guess you don't notice the ailment so much. Because patent medicines were exempt from the prohibition regime in the USA, they became especially popular at that time. Mike McGear and Roger McGough wrote Lily the Pink as a cleaned up version of an earlier American folk song, The Ballad of Lydia Pinkham. Among the verses they dropped were these two ... Mrs Jones she had no children And she loved them very dear So she took three bottles of Pinkham's Now she has twins every year And Peter Whelan (Peter Whelan) Was sad because he only had one nut Till he took some of Lydia's compound And now they grow in clusters 'round his butt djgordy 72972. Tue Jun 06, 2006 2:08 pm -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- What was the medicinal compound invented by Lily the Pink? It was an aqueous solution of dihydrous monoxide._ ________________ So the Dalai Lama smiled and said, "well my son, life is like a beanstalk, isn't it?" almax 73149. Wed Jun 07, 2006 11:04 am -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Thank you very much

Jailhouse Rock

2006-06-07T01:18:00.000+01:00

I should, of course, have illustrated Bob Dylan's radio show on the theme of jails with this picture of him visiting Ruben Carter in prison in about 1976

The Absolute Game Revisited - Part 39

2006-06-06T23:39:00.000+01:00

This is a book review from TAG 25 - October 1991. Obviously, at the time, I thought that my comments were worth recording and the book was sufficiently important to slag it mercilessly. Now I don't understand what either the book or my review are about. It just seems like gibberish. See what you think THIS IS THE (POST) MODERN WORLD Football With Attitude by Steve Redhead - Published by Wordsmith, £7.99 Here are my credentials for reviewing this book: a) I do not know what the word ‘postmodern’ means b) I do not own any records by the Farm, the Happy Mondays or the Stone Roses c) Bobble hats, ski hats, flared trousers, drainpipe trousers, baggy t-shirts, designer trainers, designer haircuts, drainpipe haircuts, baggy haircuts, bobble trainers, flared t-shirts, ski trousers, and drainpipe hats all bore the arse off me d) I have never read The Face. In TAG 3, Stuart Bathgate trashed Mr Redhead's previous offering, ‘Sing When You're Winning’. That particular book was sub-titled "The Last Football Book". As if to fulfil his own prophecy Mr Redhead hasn't bothered to write another one. He's simply changed the names of a few chapter headings, altered the ending, incorporated a fanzine listing, and shat out the same crap again. In his own fantasy world, in which football, pop music and "style" have all somehow become the same thing, he probably sees ‘Sing’ as a seven inch single while ‘Attitude’ is the twelve inch mega-mix. Fair enough, except there's nothing on the book cover to warn punters that Attitude is a dub version of Sing. Not only that, but in a breathtaking display of conceit, a large chunk of the latest book is devoted to reminding readers of just what a masterpiece Sing was. It was so good, in fact, that he's written it again. What is this book about? Search me. Apparently football history consists of three phases. Pre-modern, which existed prior to England's world cup win in 1966. Modern, which paradoxically does not cover the present time, but which allegedly ended at some unspecified time in the 1980’s. And, hey, postmodern, which is the current phase. Presumably we'll soon move on to the hyperpostmodern era. As far as I understand it, Mr Redhead seeks to argue that throughout these phases, football, football players, and football spectators have changed, and that these changes have been related to other dynamic changes in society generally. Wow, this is profound stuff. Apparently the bobble-hatted, drainpipe-trousered, cannabis-puffing, Stone Roses fan, with his WaIkman welded to his ears, has different attitudes and aspirations than his cloth-capped, forelock-tugging, pints of bitter-swilling great-grandfather. You don't say ! Well the trouble is that he does say and he takes two books to say it. And not only that, but he takes his analysis to a ridiculous level by seeking to establish that "pop culture" (specifically pop music) is the single most important motive force behind the movement from "modern" to "postmodern" football. While it is no doubt true that the majority of modern (or should that be postmodern? - it's all so confusing) football fans are steeped in pop culture, it seems to me that most can distinguish between a Happy Mondays album and a relegation battle without much difficulty. Fashion and style are transient. Football does not undergo such dramatic transformations. The game is essentially much the same as it was 100 years ago. To me that is its strength. Why should football pay any attention to cloth-eared knob-heads with crap music taste whose idea of "style" is to dress in exactly the same way as their pals? On the odd occasion when pop culture directly impinges on football it usually contrives to produce some abomination like the freak-out in the paint factory monstrosity of the Scotland/Celtic/Arsenal (fill in the rest yourself) away strips. The only part of this book which is remotely plausible is its discussion of the emergence of fanzines, but even here it misses the point. Most editors, contributors, and readers of fanzines are in it for a bit of a laugh. It's entertainment. It's a mistake to see them as style warriors or as part of some politicised "movement". And the old trick of printing photos of Pat Nevin and quoting him with approval won't work with me. Perhaps it's convenient for Redhead's argument to quote Nevin as saying that he had “never felt anything negative about football fans”. Oh really? How about checking Not the View number 4 to see what Nevin thinks of Rangers fans. Personally I find it quite nauseating the way in which the hip football press fawn over Nevin just because he can read and once bought a Joy Division record. No review would be complete without unfairly lifting a quote completely out of context, so try this from page 103 – “lt has much in common with the process of ‘hyperreality’ described by cultural theorists as diverse as Umberto Eco and Jean Baudrillard. BaudrilIard's notion of hyperreality, the "anticipation of reality by images, the precession of images and media in relation to events” is pertinent to a football culture which is increasingly subject to global media attention”. If you can figure out a) What "It" is and b) What "It" has to do with football, then raid your piggy-bank and get down to your local bookshop with £7.99 straight away. This is the book for you. Otherwise, it seems like a load of Baudrillards to me. Steve Redhead is undoubtedly an intelligent person. He probably has something interesting to say about football, but he hasn't said it yet. To write one bloody awful book may be regarded as a misfortune. To write the same bloody awful book twice looks like carelessness. Avoid.

More Chuck Buk

2006-06-06T23:28:00.000+01:00

Hell, even Dylan was quoting ole Chuck on his radio show tonight, "I don't like prisons - they got the wrong kind of bars" Here's another poem for your delight back to the machine gun I awaken about noon and go out to get the mail in my old torn bathrobe. I'm hung over hair down in my eyes barefoot gingerly walking on the small sharp rocks in my path still afraid of pain behind my four-day beard. the young housewife next door shakes a rug out of her window and sees me: "hello, Hank!" god damn! it's almost like being shot in the ass with a .22 "hello," I say gathering up my Visa card bill, my Pennysaver coupons, a Dept. of Water and Power past-due notice, a letter from the mortgage people plus a demand from the Weed Abatement Department giving me 30 days to clean up my act. I mince back again over the small sharp rocks thinking, maybe I'd better write something tonight, they all seem to be closing in. there's only one way to handle those motherfuckers. the night harness races will have to wait.

R.I.P Billy Preston

2006-06-06T22:49:00.000+01:00

Well, the blog is becoming like a full-time obituary column. Billy Preston has died in Arizona of kidney failure at the age of 59. Although he had a number of hits in his own name it is for his close association with the Beatles and to a lesser extent with the Rolling Stones that he will be best remembered. In particular his keyboard sound is all over the Beatles last released album, 'Let It Be' and there is a fairly typical coruscating solo decorating the single of the same name. In the Beatles 'Anthology' film there is a fairly fulsome tribute paid to Billy, both aurally and visually, when George Harrison describes the bickering and backbiting Beatles all perking up and behaving themselves when Billy arrived in the studio to help them out. The film from the sessions bears this out as you see the individual Beatles breaking into smiles for the first time in months when Billy comes through the door. None of the four want their guest to think badly of them, so they actually get some work done instead of arguing endlessly. For several years up until recently my wife and I were in the habit of going to see the Bootleg Beatles Edinburgh Christmas shows - one of the recurring jokes in the show is when a young, very white, guy comes out of the orchestra and plays the organ solo on 'Let It Be' - as he returns to the orchestra Beatle 'John' asks the audience to "give a big hand to Billy from Preston". That good-humoured punning gag will never seem so funny again.

Bob Dylan Spends Some Time In Jail

2006-06-06T20:18:00.000+01:00

I'm just listening to Bob's latest radio show - the theme this week is jail. Bob quotes from Shakespeare and so far plays records by such as Johnny Cash, Bessie Smith, the Pretenders and Andre Williams ("15, 16, 17 that's jailbait")........ ......and Cannon's Jug Stompers - Prison Wall Blues..... ....and Kenny Lane and the Bulldogs - Columbus Stockade Blues etc Bob has just said, "We're half way through our sentence and there ain't no time off for good behaviour"

My Favourite Books

2006-06-06T14:30:00.000+01:00

Number 14 - I Claudius - Robert Graves This is a very obvious one really. You'll see from the cover that my purchase of the book (and its companion 'Claudius the God') was contemporaneous with the (wonderful) BBC television adaptation (circa 1978), with Derek Jacobi magnificent as Claudius. A 'factionalisation' of the most exciting period of the Roman Empire, this book effectively takes the juiciest bits of Suetonius's 'The Twelve Caesars' and spices them up even further to provide the best possible introduction to the decadence and depravity of Imperial Rome. The Emperors whose reigns are dealt with in the book are Augustus Caesar, Tiberius, Caligula, Claudius and Nero. All are fascinating, with Caligula a stand-out both on the written page and on the screen (John Hurt's greatest role?). With unlimited Imperial power came unlimited and loathesome depravity and licentiousness. Lovely jubbly. Graves spares us nothing - love, lust, intrigue, murder, incest, insanity, nymphomania, parricide, fratricide, matricide, anything else ending in -cide, it's all here in spades. Graves spent most of his life on the Mediterranean island of Majorca and he's buried there. Last summer when our tribe were on holiday there we were touring about the island and one day we were up in the mountains near to where Graves lived. I failed in my endeavours to encourage the other philistines to detour off our route to visit this literary landmark. I thus failed to see Graves' grave.

Lobster Fishers, Machrihanish Bay

2006-06-06T00:21:00.000+01:00

by William McTaggart 1909

Cricket News

2006-06-05T20:37:00.000+01:00

Congratulations to Sri Lanka on a marvellous victory in the 3rd Test at Trent Bridge, to square the series 1-1. A stupendous performance by Muralitharan was the key. Sri Lanka beat England by 134 runs Sri Lanka won the toss and decided to bat Sri Lanka 1st Innings 231 all out (66.2 overs) M J Hoggard 17.0 3 65 2 J Lewis 21.0 3 68 3 L E Plunkett 8.2 1 36 2 A Flintoff 15.0 2 52 3 M S Panesar 5.0 3 3 0 Sri Lanka 2nd Innings 322 all out (113.1 overs) M J Hoggard 22.0 4 71 2 J Lewis 20.0 6 54 0 A Flintoff 13.0 1 38 1 M S Panesar 37.1 13 78 5 L E Plunkett 19.0 2 65 2 K P Pietersen 2.0 0 12 0 England 1st Innings 229 all out (91.1 overs) W P U J C Vaas 26.0 5 71 2 S L Malinga 23.1 3 62 2 M Muralitharan 31.0 10 62 3 S T Jayasuriya 11.0 4 19 2 England 2nd Innings 190 all out (68.5 overs) W P U J C Vaas 9.0 1 28 0 S L Malinga 7.0 0 24 0 M Muralitharan 30.0 10 70 8 S T Jayasuriya 22.5 3 54 1

Don't Try This At Home

2006-06-05T20:11:00.000+01:00

Here's a report I read on Yahoo news KIEV (Reuters) - A man shouting that God would keep him safe was mauled to death by a lioness in Kiev zoo after he crept into the animal's enclosure, a zoo official said on Sunday. "The man shouted 'God will save me, if he exists', lowered himself by a rope into the enclosure, took his shoes off and went up to the lions," the official said. "A lioness went straight for him, knocked him down and severed his carotid artery." The incident, Sunday evening when the zoo was packed with visitors, was the first of its kind at the attraction. Lions and tigers are kept in an "animal island" protected by thick concrete blocks. Doh !! - if you are going to do this make sure it's not on God's day off !!

Strange But True

2006-06-05T13:46:00.000+01:00

At the bottom of the page is a wee logo for 'Site Meter' which enables me (and you) to find out a certain amount of limited information about who visits this blog (eg country of origin - which web-site they came from - any search term used etc). It's very limited (not big brother), but it allegedly helps bloggers to make their blog more attractive to visitors. I was looking at the information a few moments ago - as you know I posted a wee thing about Conan Doyle and the fairies yesterday - in that piece I said that the photographs had been taken by two schoolgirls - well, what do you know, the combination of the words 'photographs' and 'schoolgirls' has brought more interest to this blog in 12 hours than 4 months worth of witty reportage - kicked off by a surfer from IRAN !!!! specifically searching for 'schoolgirls' (apparently his purpose was something to do with improving educational standards for females in modern Persia).

Parliamentary Buzziness

2006-06-05T13:38:00.000+01:00

More Broken Arrow

2006-06-05T13:29:00.000+01:00

No 53 - November 1993

The Cottingley Fairies

2006-06-05T00:00:00.000+01:00

Here's a photograph of a young girl and the fairies at the bottom of her garden, circa 1917. The fairies look real, don't they? Get outta here - your head would have to be well buttoned up the back to go for this. Among those with heads buttoned up the back was the creator of the most admired and revered forensic detective of the 20th or any other century - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle staked his reputation on the authenticity of this photograph and others like it - all taken by two schoolgirls. He threw himself heart and soul into providing absolute proof that the 'little people' existed and the photographs were genuine. As a result, in many circles he became a laughing stock, casually throwing away the enormous reputation gained from the Baker Street chronicles. Even making due allowance for the credulity of a more naive age, it is hard to see how a man of ordinary intelligence, far less the deviser of the great Holmes, could be fooled by such an obvious fake. Click the heading for more information and speculation that Conan-Doyle was right all along and is having the last laugh in fairyland.

Campbeltown Library

2006-06-04T23:00:00.000+01:00

I read with some sadness on the Kintyre Community site that the town library and museum is moving from the magnificent (listed) Burnet Building in Hall Street to some new-fangled swimming-pool/multi-purpose affair at Kinloch Park.

Almost inevitably, the Burnet building will be occupied by Argyll council and be turned into a glorified rent-office. Obviously it's many years since I used the library on a regular basis, and things cannot stay the same way forever, but I was quite shocked to see this recent photograph of the area formerly occupied by the children's library - 40+ years ago I stood in this very place excitedly browsing through the Enid Blyton and Just William and Jennings etc books. Now it's all packed up and ready to leave forever.

Truly the end of an era.

Drive Yourself Mad

2006-06-04T22:40:00.000+01:00

Big Stanley, I Presume

2006-06-04T18:42:00.000+01:00

The Absolute Game Revisited - Part 38

2006-06-04T12:41:00.000+01:00

REVIEW (first published in TAG 24 - August 1991) HAMPDEN BABYLON by Stuart Cosgrove, £9.95, Canongate Press £3,000 a week. Hero-worship from males between the ages of 5 and 95. Sexual favours from as many nubile nymphs as you can handle. Free drink in every bar and a ready supply of more exotic substances. If you were a young guy and all this was yours, what would you do ? Unless you're Bobby Charlton or Kenny Dalglish, you'd get whacked out of your brain as often as possible and order up a truckload of Durex, that's what. Unfortunatelv this sort of life-style is reserved for the select few lucky individuals like rock stars, the editor of TAG, and football geniuses. The central theme of Stuart Cosgrove's work is that there is something peculiarly Scottish in drinking, screwing, snorting, punching and pissing away extraordinary football talent. Unfortunately for the book this is manifestly untrue. I call George Best and Diego Maradona as two witnesses among many non-Scots who have contrived to make spectacular arses of themselves. "Hampden Babylon" is sub-titled "Sex and scandal in Scottish football". It is expressly inspired by Kenneth Anger's "Hollywood Babylon". The difference is that while Anger's book genuinely damaged the previously lily-white reputations of numerous film-stars by revealing hitherto unknown sordid details of their private lives, the "Hampden" version merely rehearses familiar tales of drunkenness and debauchery, which, if anything, simply serve to enhance the glamour of the protagonists. Conduct can only be scandalous if the audience are in some way shocked, outraged or revolted by it. If we're being honest, most of us are probably amused rather than outraged when we hear of the Rangers midfield being carted off in the back of a Black Maria after a stramash in a kebab shop. Therefore, despite the sub-title, there is in fact no scandal contained within this book. It's the same problem which afflicted Albert Goldman in his attempted hatchet-jobs on Elvis Presley and John Lennon. Far from being shocked by the revelations, I would have been seriously disappointed if I had found that these two worthies had not spent their time hoovering up vast quantities of illicit substances while naked girls licked strawberry ice-cream off them. Thus with footballers. We expect them to be drunken arseholes. We are not scandalised when our expectations are fulfilled. The first chapter, titled "Round Up the Usual Suspects" gives the game away. Of course, they're all here. Slim Jim, the Law Man, wee Willie, Jinky, the Doc, the Copenhagen 5, Bud, Lou, Champagne Charlie, Mo and Durranty. To a certain extent what follows is a re-tread of all the well-worn anecdotes which we all know by heart, rendered into NME-speak. This is not necessarily a bad thing (I confess that many of my own articles in TAG are an attempt to do the same thing). But it's questionable whether you need to fork out £9.95 to re-live, yet again, Jinky's naval expedition, Bud's pills, Macari's accumulators, Nicholas's attack on a poke of chips, Mo's court appearances. For this reason I found the most interesting chapters to be the ones on Hughie Gallagher (before my time, mate) and racism in Scottish football (including details of the exploits of "Vodka" Vic Kasule). Ultimately, the book is merely an extended and glossy fanzine, which is by no means a criticism. Youngsters wishing a crash course on some of the nutters of yesteryear will find it reasonably amusing. For old lags, however, there just isn't enough sex and scandal, and you may be better advised to spend your money on a subscription to TAG (do I get my ten quid for this, Archie?). The very first chapter recounts an incident where a famous manager enjoyed rampant sex in a TV studio with a well-known TV presenter. Stuart cops out by not revealing their identities. We just have to make inspired guesses. Billy McNeil and Hazel Irvine? Jim Mclean and Kirsty Wark? Graeme Souness and Archie MacPherson ? Now it's that kind of detail that the really prurient amongst us want to know.

Hello, Broken Arrow

2006-06-04T12:22:00.000+01:00

I subscribed to the Neil Young fanzine 'Broken Arrow' for many years. While down in the basement searching the archives I came across a pile of old issues. Here are the front and rear covers of BA 45 from 1991.

Pompous Arses

2006-06-03T23:58:00.000+01:00

One of my favourite web-sites 'boingboing' (based in California) (click on the heading to go there) has received the undernoted letter from a crowd of pettifoggers from London. It is well worth enlarging this document to see the kind of thing which passes for 'legal' communications these days. In fact it is nothing less than a deliberately threatening letter sent to a recipient who has never had any dealings with their client nor intends to. boingboing's response is characteristically combative and to-the-point - "I just opened a letter sent to Boing Boing from some fools at Baker & McKenzie LLP in London. The letter states that their client, Infront Sports & Media, "anticipates the possibility of unauthorized streaming and downloading of FIFA World Cup matches." The letter goes on to warn Boing Boing that Baker & McKenzie will be "actively monitoring your website ... to identify unlawful activity and will, if necessary, take appropriate action to ensure the protection of Infront's rights of those licenses." Oh brother. I don't even know what the FIFA World Cup is. I'm guessing its soccer, which I hate just as much as any other pro sport. Every editor at Boing Boing detests professional sports, and we would sooner stream a video of a crumpled up paper napkin in the corner of a room than show some jackasses running after a ball. The only time we would ever post anything about pro-sports would be to make fun of them. Baker & McKenzie, be on alert: henceforth, Boing Boing will be actively monitoring your website to identify dumbass activity and will, if necessary, take appropriate action to point out instances of wasting clients' money by sending out unecessary and obnoxious warning letters."

Bad Time To Drop In

2006-06-03T21:05:00.000+01:00

We'll Really Shake Them Up

2006-06-03T20:04:00.000+01:00

Sven We Win The World Cup 'cos England are the greatest football team Hungary humbled 3-1 on Tuesday And now today Bob Marley and the Wailers put to the sword........ ..........there can only be one conclusion

Get used to it. This is all we'll hear until Sweden knock them out on 20 June World Cup Poem As I was walking to St Ives I met a tarsal

I'm Not Supposed To........

2006-06-03T19:40:00.000+01:00

...........eat curry unless I've cooked it myself. The ghee or other saturated fat which makes take-away or restaurant curry so addictively delicious is allegedly bad for one with heart problems. In fact, in many cases, it is the primary cause of heart problems. In cooking it myself I am not to use any cooking oil - in other words my self-made curry is nowhere near as delicious as the ghee-laden time-bomb which can be acquired from the nearest curry-shop. I succumb to the temptation of the take-away occasionally. Every Friday.

A Cross Between a Function and a Ruck......

2006-06-03T12:52:00.000+01:00

eg - the Glasgow Bar Association's annual dinner

Here's Georgie

2006-06-03T01:18:00.000+01:00

"I would say the best moment of all was when I caught a 7.5 pound largemouth bass in my lake." —George W. Bush, on his best moment in office, interview with the German newspaper Bild am Sonntag, May 7, 2006 It's quite high on the embarrassment-o-meter when your Chief Executive has his best moment catching a fish, but it goes off the end of the scale when even that turns out not to be strictly true - despite their name, largemouth perch are fairly small fish as a rule and prior to Dubya's amazing feat the largest one caught in Texas was 1.4lbs - at a stroke George raised the bar by nearly 600% - or alternatively he was telling porkies - again. You decide. PS - Yeah, I know that stuff about largemouth perch is not strictly accurate - it is possible that he caught one at 7.5 pounds, but we should not let the facts get in the way of a good story.

Dali back at Kelvingrove

2006-06-02T17:30:00.000+01:00

We don't really need an excuse to show Dali's masterpiece, but here is the BBC story which provides that excuse:- Dali piece returns to Kelvingrove One of Scotland's best loved paintings has been returned to its "spiritual home". Salvador Dali's Christ Of St John Of The Cross has been re-hung at Glasgow's Kelvingrove Art Gallery more than 50 years after it was first unveiled. The painting was bought for £8,200 in 1952 and is now said to be worth tens of millions. It had been exhibited at another city museum from 1993 but was returned to Kelvingrove to mark its reopening. The art gallery and museum has undergone a three-year, £30m refurbishment and will open next month. The piece by the Spanish surrealist artist, which shows the figure of Christ on the cross from above, was recently voted Scotland's best loved painting in a newspaper poll. Glasgow Lord Provost Liz Cameron unveiled the work on Friday. She described it as Glasgow's greatest painting and said Kelvingrove was its "spiritual home". "This makes a trip to Kelvingrove all the more essential for any visitor to Glasgow," she added. The title of the painting was said to have been inspired by a drawing made by a Spanish Carmelite friar who was canonised as St John of The Cross in the 16th Century. It was made after the saint had a vision in which he saw the crucifixion from above. Dali painted his crucifixion scene set above the rocky harbour of his home village of Port Lligat in Spain.

What Time Is It?

2006-06-02T17:16:00.000+01:00

My Favourite Books

2006-06-02T15:00:00.000+01:00

Number 13 - For The Sake of Argument - Christopher Hitchens Away back in February, I raved enthusiastically about Hitchens' book 'Love, Poverty and War'. Rather than repeat myself I have chosen another collection of his writings on various topics in the form of 'For The Sake of Argument' though I think perhaps the other book has a slight edge. Christopher Hitchens is one of the leading intellectuals of our age. Although apparently a product of the British 'left' he has come more and more to be identified with his own self-styled war on 'Islamofascism' and for a 'leftie' he has found himself in the peculiar position of supporting many of Dubya's 'initiatives' including the war in Iraq. Whether you agree with what he says or not, you must admire the courage with which he speaks his mind in relation to matters which many of his contemporaries find too hot or dangerous. For example, his support for fellow-scribe Salman Rushdie was unqualified and unstinting right from the proclamation of the fatwa - unlike many other gutless wonders who disappeared like snow off a dyke at the first hint of danger. Hitchens is a person who will literally defend freedom of speech to the death. The pieces in this collection were written post-Rushdie but pre-bin Laden, so that Hitchens views on the current world situation cannot be found here. But in his article on Rushdie one can see the genesis of his current position - "one must side with Salman Rushdie not because he is an underdog but because there is no other side to be on". Elsewhere he revisits Dealey Plaza in reviewing DeLillo's book 'Libra' about Dallas '63 - rails against first Governor then President Clinton - assesses the Labour Party under Neil Kinnock - reviews Andrew Morton's book about Diana Spencer - waxes lyrical in support of booze and fags - critiques inter alia Nixon, Kissinger, PJ O'Rourke, Warhol, James Baldwin, PG Wodehouse and C.L.R James - and ranges over the whole spectrum of current political and cultural life. All of it accomplished in his trademark mordantly witty style. I find all of this vastly entertaining - especially the bits I totally disagree with. I think Hitchens is an acquired taste - I have acquired it. In February I recounted the amusing spat between Hitchens and George Galloway. By way of illustration of Hitchens style here is a quote from his most recent piece about Galloway in Slate online magazine 30th May 2006 - "Galloway is a member of Parliament by the grace of an electorate in the East End of London but is widely regarded as a corrupt scumbag, an egomaniac, an apologist for tyranny, and a supporter of jihad.......... .............It was a busy week for Galloway. He went to Cuba and publicly embraced Fidel Castro on television, saying that the aging caudillo was a "lion" in a political world populated by "monkeys." The main distinction between Castro and his neighbors, however simian some of them might be, is that he is the only one left in Latin America and the Caribbean who does not submit himself for election. This seems to be the difference that appeals most to Galloway. In both Britain and America, this fawning and cowardly and sinister jerk is considered a hero of the "anti-war" movement. He is, in fact, an excuse-maker for totalitarianism and an apologist for nihilistic religious violence. How long before the democratic left starts to refuse him a platform and make him stand on his own? Some of us will be watching." You know that I'm a big fan of both Galloway and Hitchens, so this ongoing feud between the pair of them is richly comic and highly entertaining, though of course there is a deadly serious side to it as well.

Oh Blogger ! Firefox sake what's going on ?

2006-06-02T13:39:00.000+01:00

Spoke too soon with Blogger and photos - it's all completely firefoxed again

World Cup Gone Wrong

2006-06-02T11:43:00.000+01:00

I lift the undernoted amusing article (which neatly combines my two obsessions) in its entirety from another blog (Hot In A Cold Cause), which you can go to by clicking on the heading above : Who does Bob Dylan support in the World Cup? The obvious answer is the United States, as they're one of the thirty-two finalists, but why would anyone, even an American, want the USA to win the World Cup? Before we get started we should address the question of whether Dylan supports anyone in the World Cup or if he's interested in the sport at all. After all a recent edition of his radio show, Theme Time Radio Hour, was devoted to the theme of baseball, and at one point during the show Dylan called baseball the greatest game in the world. This proves nothing. Theme Time Radio Hour is sent out on satellite radio and available exclusively in the United States, and if history has proved anything, it's that Dylan will always pander to a particular audiences' taste. We also have to get around the fact that he wrote a song named after a baseball player, Catfish, all about the late great A's and Yankees reliever Catfish Hunter. It's almost certain that Dylan didn't write the song out of any love for baseball though; he just liked the name Catfish. Who wouldn't? Back to the World Cup then. If Dylan isn't going for the USA, maybe somewhere with a family background. In his memoir, Chronicles, Dylan says his grandmother was from a small town in Turkey, near the Armenian border, but neither country made it to Germany this year. Maybe he'd choose to support a country whose playing style he could relate to. The likely candidates- Brazil, too obvious. They're probably going to win anyway and if they do, Dylan, along with the rest of us, will be hoping they do it with the style of their 1970 (Blonde on Blonde) or 1982 (Highway 61 Revisited) sides. Unless you've got a very good reason never go with the favourite, you'll look like a bandwagon jumper and Dylan's' never been one of those. Holland are a possibility but they've traditionally been an argumentative bunch- think of Dylan's difficulties with his record producers as described in a 2001 Rome interview. Speaking of Rome, Italy could be in his thoughts. In the same interview Dylan expressed an admiration for the country but, with a cloud of scandal hanging over the current squad, he will probably want to distance himself from any controversy. No one really likes watching England play soccer, not even the English. They don't keep the ball long enough to establish any recognizable style of play and without Wayne Rooney they'll struggle even more this time around. However England tend to provide the most memorable and emotionally draining performances in major tournaments. This is comparable to Dylan's "born-again" period, best experienced by listening to the Massey Hall bootleg concert. Raw, committed and unapologetically passionate, but you wouldn't want to live there. Now Dylan has always supported the underdog throughout his life so we'll have to consider the case of the Ivory Coast or Angola. The closest we can get to any possible impulse towards these teams is in his song Mozambique, where Dylan expressed the desire to visit that country but we can't be sure if he ever made it or was even serious. Besides, neither team is expected to go far in the tournament and there's no point in choosing to support a country that's likely to go out before the knock-out stage. The World Cup is a long event and you need to be backing a side that will take you to the final rounds if you're going to get the most out of it. This is all speculation, we've got to get to the facts. The only known Bob Dylan song mentioning soccer is Goin' to Acapulco from the Basement Tapes, recorded with the future members of the Band. The boys join in with Dylan on the chorus, which goes Goin' to Acapulco Goin' on the run Goin' down to see soccer Goin' to have some fun Yeah Goin' to have some fun In the first edition of Dylan's Lyrics this is rendered as Goin' down to see some girl. Some girl? Dylan and the Band are going down to see some some girl? What, all of them? Who would write that? In a more recent edition the lyric has been changed yet again. This time they're goin' down to see fat gut. This is just idiocy. Listen to the damn thing. It's definitely soccer and that's the end of it. Incidentally, we might like to ponder at this point the role of the Band in this saga. We don't know if Levon Helm is playing on this particular song. He wasn't present on all the Basement Tapes recordings and as the only American in the Band, he probably wouldn't be pre-disposed to soccer. Unlike the rest of the group, who were all Canadians, and would have had more of a grasp of the sport. Dylan himself is nearly, if not secretly, Canadian, being from northern Minnesota. OK, so Dylan and his gang are heading south to see some soccer and, if they're going to Acapulco, unfortunately they didn't think ahead. They would have found on arrival that Acapulco doesn't have a Primera Division soccer club. They would have had to have settled for a lower league game or even an amateur match, but there's no disgrace in that. In fact supporting a lower league club is often a more morally uplifting endeavour (see I took you close I got what I deserved somewhere else on this blog). There's evidence from other Basement Tapes songs that the trip was a good one- Hills of Mexico, Spanish is the Loving Tongue and The Spanish Song, an outrageous piece of drunkenness, where Dylan and the boys chase the girls around the cantina. A few years after recording these songs Dylan would go back to Mexico to act in a Sam Peckinpah movie, Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, and the experience inspired him to write the song Romance in Durango (hot chilli peppers in the blistering sun) which appeared on his album Desire (see above). My vinyl copy of Desire is dedicated to Peckinpah, Allen Ginsberg and Emmett Grogan. Throw Dylan himself and violinist Scarlet Rivera into the mix and you've got a pretty tenacious five-a-side team. So there it is- Bob Dylan will be supporting Mexico in the World Cup and, after England go out, so will I.

Nice One, Cyril (Reprise)

2006-06-02T11:36:00.000+01:00

Blogger working again?

2006-06-02T10:42:00.000+01:00

If you can see the photo here, then it seems that Blogger is fit and working again

Photobucket

2006-06-02T01:35:00.000+01:00

After a day of extreme frustration caused by the twin facts that most, if not all, Blogger users have been unable to post photographs AND that the Blogger authorities apparently do not accept that that is the case (and certainly don't know what to do about it) I have found another web-site which hosts your photos and enables uploading to the blog. This therefore is an advert for Photobucket. For all your image-hosting needs click on the heading to go to the Photobucket site. If all has gone according to plan there should now be a photo of Oliver Reed illustrating the After Dark story below - courtesy of Photobucket. Yee-hah!!!

Blogger Focked, Fogger Blocked

2006-06-01T14:41:00.000+01:00

Blogger is obviously in some sort of trouble - I have not been able to upload photos or any other illustrations for nearly 24 hours now - no sign of the problem being fixed and no acknowledgement by Blogger that there even is a problem. Text is ok - but nobody wants to read a wall of text. I will be posting very little, if anything - in fact probably nothing at all - while this situation continues.

After Dark

2006-05-31T22:23:00.000+01:00

(Note - I had a couple of nice pictures to illustrate this piece, but Blogger is focked at present and won't allow photos - hopefully I can edit this to bring the photos in when it's working again - it's so much prettier with pictures, don't you think?) About 15 years ago Channel 4 hit on the fantastic idea of corralling a gang of talking heads into a TV studio decked out like a sitting room with sofas and comfy chairs for a programme starting at around midnight on a Friday. The room was punctuated with trays of snack-food and soft-drinks and flagons of wine and decanters of stronger stuff, so that the guests could refresh themselves while they debated, live, the issues of the day in a relaxed 'open-ended' format (ie there was no 'ending' time - the debate coming to an end 'when it came to an end' and there being no 'chairman' but a 'leader of discussion'). The programme was called 'After Dark'. The first few Friday evenings were worthy but dull as third division politicians and public figures sorted out the ethical issues of abortion, euthanasia, test-tube births etc. Then one fateful Friday, Helena Kennedy (populist liberal lawyer) was to 'lead discussion' on the subject of male violence towards women and feminist issues generally. Various other worthies made up the guest list, but for reasons which are utterly inexplicable the programmers had invited Oliver Reid, thespian, chauvinist pig and noted piss-artist to contribute his twopence worth, surrounded as I've noted by copious freebie booze (this is a man who, in his youth, reputedly drank 136 pints of beer on his two day stag party. And who once appeared drunk on a TV programme and aimed a punch at Henry Cooper, missing him and connecting with actress Wendy Richard). What could possibly go wrong? Well, by the time the show started Ollie was already more than a few sheets to the wind, and was already drinking fortified wine from a half-pint glass, which he replenished regularly in the first hour or so. He was seated next to a wee frumpy woman who was apparently a prominent American feminist writer, though I cannot now remember her name (actually I can - she was Kate Millett, but I know nothing about her). As soon as she realised how drunk Reed was she was obviously both disgusted and alarmed and she was less than impressed when Ollie began, with great relish, repeatedly and very audibly breaking wind in a semi-musical fashion, apparently deriving tremendous enjoyment and satisfaction from the activity. At about one hour in Ollie broke into a rant about conscription and National Service and could not be deflected from this by Helena's best promptings. By that stage he was well into "I'll tell ye another fuggin' thing.....bassas, fuggin'....you're my best mate, you are.....fuggin' bassa....." mode. Eventually, the rest of the guests, greatly outraged, were able to prevail upon Ollie to stop ranting, and urged him to leave the studio, which he agreed to do, announcing, "Right, I'm off for a slash". Peace and tranquillity reigned for about ten minutes until Ollie could be spotted staggering around the perimeter of the set, tumbler of wine in hand, before lunging drunkenly into view and falling dramatically head-first right over the top of the sofa which contained the wee feminist wumman. His legs collided with her head repeatedly as he struggled to right himself - which he eventually did without spilling a drop. The wee wumman was incensed - quite rightly, by her treatment at Ollie's hands and feet, and she turned to Helena Kennedy to demand that Ollie be excluded forthwith. Ollie chose that fairly inauspicious moment to seize her by both sides of her face and kiss her long and full on the lips. At that point Channel 4 pulled the plug and took the programme off the air, amidst suggestions that the police had been called. Half an hour later the programme resumed with Helena Kennedy announcing that Ollie had promised to behave himself. Cut to Ollie grinning the mad grin of the utterly and hopelessly drunk. Ninety seconds later Ollie made his first contribution under the new circumstances. He said, "Look, I'll put my plonker on the table if you don't give me a plate of mushy peas". The plug was pulled and the programme never appeared again. Ever. Oliver's crowning achievement, was, however, still to come, as his later drunken appearance on Michael Aspel's show, when he delivered an impromptu and utterly deranged version of 'Wild Thing', has since been voted the 90th greatest ever TV moment.

One More Cup Of Coffee 'Fore I Go

2006-05-31T21:20:00.000+01:00

I'm currently listening to Bob's 5th radio show. The theme this week is 'coffee', and it is just as superb as its predecessors. So far we've had inter alia the Inkspots, Frank Sinatra, Squeeze, Otis Redding, and Lightning Hopkins. I'm just off for a triple roasted skinny latte double-decaff made from finely ground Shetland coffee blended with finest Yoruba monkey-droppings, go easy on the latter (but not the latte).

Turn On, Tune In.......

2006-05-31T20:18:00.000+01:00

......eh, what was the question again?? Today is the tenth anniversary of the death of Dr Timothy Leary, Harvard lecturer turned counterculture guru, evangelist of LSD, apostle of psychedelic mind liberation, friend of Beatles, associate of the hippie aristocracy, acid-tester extraordinaire, trouble-maker, radical pain in the establishment ass, all-round nut-case and exactly the kind of person admired and revered on this blog. In 1996, dying of cancer, he arranged for his actual death to be filmed, and issued instructions that his mortal remains were to be launched into space - which they duly were - along with the remains of other fruitbats like Gene Rodenberry (creator of Star Trek) aboard a Pegasus Rocket, which blasted off on 9 February 1997, and is now somewhere near Jupiter. Timothy Leary - Space Cadet - we salute you.

Et R.I.P Grant McLennan

2006-05-31T19:46:00.000+01:00

The Go-Betweens singer/songwriter died of a heart attack at home in Brisbane on 6 May. He was 48 years old. (Notice inserted at specific request of ianb, one of many devotees)

My Local

2006-05-31T15:24:00.000+01:00

Jack Straw (NOT From Witchita)

2006-05-31T15:09:00.000+01:00

.....a Grateful Dead 'joke' there from our 'humour' dept.... Here's Jack as a 'new boy' in 1981 Q - How slimy is Jack Straw ? A - In the end, even too slimy for Tony !!! And that is sliiiiimmmmyyyy

Here's Some Renoir

2006-05-31T14:22:00.000+01:00

Boating on the Seine

R.I.P Desmond Dekker

2006-05-31T14:14:00.000+01:00

I'm Back

2006-05-31T11:57:00.000+01:00

I'm back here again after our brief trip down south to visit our two grand-sons - a delight as always - though I am still sneezing and snuffling with the cold which rather spoilt things a bit. A lot seems to have been happening while I've been away :- John Prescott looks as though he may lose his job for playing croquet while Rome burned. (how ironic - he's clung on for years despite being useless - but a brother playing the toffs game?) Talking of brothers, I've been forced to watch some of Big Brother. I'm not making any homophobic point here but it seems that Glasgow has been represented on this show by a very effeminate homosexual and another character of indeterminate gender. It's a long way from 'No Mean City'. At Holyrood, the SCRO witnesses still maintain it was McKie's print - ah-hah ! - what's the committee going to do now? - they really needed a judicial inquiry - it's far too cosy for the 4 SCRO witnesses to appear together and have their chief interrogator in the form of Alex Neil (well-meaning, but NOT a practiced cross-examiner). Ideally I'd like to see Donald Findlay or the like examining the witnesses in detail in relation to the precise parts of the print which Wertheim et al say is NOT McKie's. Sooner or later it would become apparent which witnesses were trying to say (literally) that black was white. Back to the brothers (and sisters) - The SSP are having a civil war - crikey, an SSP official has been jailed for contempt of court for refusing to hand over documents to the News of the World !!! Had it been an official from the Tory party I somehow doubt if jail would have been such a ready option. As an interested outsider, I am baffled by what is going on there. England are on course to win the World Cup having overwhelmed Hungary 3-1 last night. I don't see how anyone can stop them (this is sarcasm readers). I noticed many cars displaying the St George crosses in the wee area of Somerset where I was. Good on them - as always I have absolutely no problem with English patriotism/ jingoism when it's confined to themselves - it's when they export it to us via the BBC (BRITISH, allegedly) etc that it does your nut in. Why do we want them to lose? - there's absolutely nothing racist in this at all (as you know I'm a mad keen supporter of the English cricket team) - it's just that we would never hear the end of it if they won at football - we've had 40 years of f***ing non-stop yabbering about '66 - that will do for one lifetime thankyou. And hardly a week goes by without an obituary for a fallen 60's hero - this time it's Desmond Dekker who died on 25 May. I had hoped to illustrate this with a relevant photo but blogger is not working properly just now - so photo to follow in due course. So, plenty to catch up on - which I will endeavour to do over the next few days.

Happy Birthday, Bob

2006-05-24T13:07:00.000+01:00

I crawl from my bed of pain for the sole purpose of marking Dylan's 65th birthday.

Medical News and Blog Update

2006-05-23T23:55:00.000+01:00

If you frequent hospitals, as perforce I do, the chances are high that you will pick up any or all of the passing airborne bugs which naturally live there. I was at St John's on Monday - now on Tuesday I have a terrible cold - which is mucho unfortunate because on Thursday I am venturing away from home for the first extended period since my operation. I will be down south until next Wednesday. This blog will therefore cease to function for a week - unless the dear readers make comments on existing posts while I am away. Perhaps I will have the opportunity to post another couple of things before I go - more likely is that I will spend the day in bed with numerous hot toddies (non-Scottish readers should not confuse toddies with totties - while I have no doubt that hot totties would be much more beneficial I will restrict myself to toddies) - I digress for a moment to recall that a friend of mine, when he was a university student, was called before the old-fashioned and very stern Head of the Department to explain why he'd missed some important tutorial. He explained that he'd been "in bed with 'flu". The Head retorted angrily, "In bed with who?" So, from a currently miserable heart monitor it's au revoir.

Village People Auditions Get Underway

2006-05-23T22:22:00.000+01:00

Here's Another

2006-05-23T22:03:00.000+01:00

Monsters in Fine Art

2006-05-23T18:47:00.000+01:00

Click the heading to go to the fantastic competition to photoshop monsters into fine art - here's an example where the Girl with the Pearl Earring has an unexpected visitor in the form of Nosferatu

The Absolute Game Revisited - Part 37

2006-05-23T16:41:00.000+01:00

FITBA' CRAZY (A Psychiatrist Writes) On one memorable occasion Gregor Fisher's alter ego, Rab C Nesbitt, visited his doctor. The medical man's diagnosis was that Rab was a psychopath. The entire Nesbitt family then engaged in celebration of the fact that the patriarch was officially "pure dead mental". This is not an entirely fictional sentiment. In some parts of Scotland being known as a 'crazy bastard' is a compliment of the highest order. Nowhere is psychiatric dislocation so admired as in the wacky old world of football. Candidates for the padded cell abound in every area of the game and we could all make up a list of individuals who would be much more safely tucked up in a straight-jacket rather than a track-suit. Indeed, even my own dear lady wife, whose name for the moment escapes me, has been known to insist that I, myself, am a few diodes short of an integrated circuit when I set off for Ochilview or Glebe Park on days when polar bears are wearing thermal long-johns. On a purely statistical basis it stands to reason that a proportion of the people around you on the terracing are seriously mentally ill. We're all familiar with those hardy, but totally wired, individuals who appear at the game on the coldest day of January wearing a short-sleeved V-neck shirt in their team's colours. Rangers fans have an advantage in this regard as the colour of their arms eventually matches the colour of their shirts, though advanced frost-bite seems quite a high price to pay for colour co-ordination. An aging Rangers fan of my acquaintance has long since taken his obsession with all things blue to its logical, not to say psychotic, conclusion, by having his garden re-turfed with blue grass from Kentucky. This is on top of naming his first-born son 'Ibrox' and his dog 'Baxter'. Not that strangeness is confined to supporters of the big clubs. I was at a Meadowbank game once when I saw a junior member of the brake club finish drinking his half-time bovril. For dessert he ate the polystyrene cup. None of his friends seemed to find this untoward. They were probably too busy dreaming of tucking into the match programme for supper. It's no coincidence that the editor of this magazine styles himself 'Mad Mac' or that contributors have included 'Loopy Larios' and 'The Redcar Lunatic'. Football is a game which is prone to unhinging its followers. The clearest manifestation of apparent madness can be found in the lengths and expense to which some people will go in following a bunch of losers masquerading as a football team around the country. What mania drives Queen of the South fans to travel hundreds of miles to see their team getting gubbed? And when they get to their destination what makes them sing "Worst team in Scotland – oh, oh, we're the worst team in Scotland" and "We're blue, we're white, we're absolutely shite - Queen of the South"? So strange does this sort of behaviour seem to non-enthusiasts that some 'superfans' gain a type of village idiot celebrity status by virtue of their mindless loyalty. One such is 'Fergie', who is Hamilton Accies most famous fan. Most readers will have heard, or heard of, Fergie. He's a bit of a legend in his own lunchtime, mainly due to his foghorn voice which has been honed by years of selling evening papers on street corners. It's only a small step from bawling "Awrahauftimescoresaniracin" to yelling "Safuckincorneryablinbastartye" around the grounds of Scotland. On one occasion Fergie was in Perth to watch the Accies against St Johnstone. The Accies lost badly. After the game, the Hamilton team bus was on the high road home when the driver spotted the lonely figure of Fergie trudging along in the dark trying to hitch a lift. The players unanimously decided to stop and pick the old bugger up. Ten minutes further along the road the bus stopped again and Fergie was forcibly ejected, he having spent the intervening time slagging the entire playing staff for their woeful performance that afternoon, in a colourful language which is uniquely his own. A related disorder is known as groundhopping. One example will do. I was approached by an Ipswich Town supporter one dreich Wednesday night at Hampden while Queen's Park were toiling against Stranraer. He wanted to know where he could get a programme. He told me that he liked to get one for every match he was at, and that he'd only previously failed at the Manchester United vs Dinamo Bucharest match a few years earlier. When I expressed surprise that he couldn't get a programme at Old Trafford he looked at me as though it was me that was mad, "No, no the game was in Bucharest - these Rumanian bastards never issue a bloody programme". Another characteristic of the fan is split personality. You know the kind of thing, "Johnston ya useless wee shite, away back to France ya tube ye...ho, Maurice, ya wee beauty...gooal..Mo, Mo, Super Mo etc". I witnessed a typical form of this schizophrenia in 1975 during the Scotland-England 5-1 game (that's right the game when Stewart Kennedy's marbles were re-arranged on a permanent basis). I watched that game on TV in a student hostel in Dundee where nearly half the audience were English. Before the game there was a fairly friendly atmosphere with both sides expressing 'Que Sera Sera' sentiments. "It's only a game and may the best team win etc etc". A group of Scots arrived headed by a kilted giant blowing the bagpipes. The giant was affability itself as he engaged in playful pre-match banter with his English cousins. When England got their opener after two minutes their supporters were naturally overjoyed and cheered loudly. Goliath was still quite sanguine about this setback. "Ach, we'll pull that back nae bother" he said good-naturedly. By the time England had fired in their third goal within half an hour the atmosphere had undergone a marked change. The Behemoth drew himself up to his full seven foot two and roared like a bull. It was only at this stage that I noticed for the first time that he had "I AM A BASTARD" tattooed across his forehead, and a rather nasty looking carving knife down the side of his sock in lieu of a dirk. He intimated that if there was any further cheering in the event of "the Sassenach bastards" adding to their tally then the offenders would find themselves affixed to the television screen by their private parts. This did the trick. The rest of the game was viewed in silence, broken only by muted celebration of Scotland's solitary goal, and the noise of the TV exploding against the wall in sporting recognition of England's fifth. Some disorders are apparently infectious. One thinks of the mass paranoia exhibited by thousands of Rangers supporters singing in unison "Everybody hates us and we don't care". This of course is not true paranoia in the medical sense, since the essence of the illness is that the fear of persecution is unfounded in fact, while as we all know, in reality, everybody does hate Rangers. The real thing, on the other hand, is rampant on the other side of Glasgow, where every defeat is viewed as part of a global Masonic conspiracy. Who can forget a raving mad Davie Hay threatening to have Celtic apply to join the English league as the Bhoys could not get a fair game in this country. Apparently all of the referees are Masons to a man, carrying trowels, aprons and sashes onto the field with their red cards and stop-watches. Alternatively, everyone connected with Celtic is permanently out for an extended lunch. You decide. Football managers are another kettle of fruit-cakes altogether. The most obvious (basket) case-history is of our old radio rental chum, Ally Macleod. Ally's principal difficulty was that he was suffering from quite bizarre delusions, and unfortunately one of them was that he was just the man to the bring the World Cup to Glasgow. In addition, he believed that his assistant manager was a ten foot tall rabbit called Nigel. While Ally was securely locked up in Ayr and Aberdeen he could safely be written off as a harmless eccentric. With his appointment to the Scotland job his lunacy became positively dangerous. He rallied a tartan army of similarly unstable head-cases. I know - I was one of them. Proof that football can seriously damage your mental health can be gleaned by reviewing the film of those fateful ten days in 1978 when Scotland took a roller-coaster trip off the end of the pier with Ally at the helm. We first see Ally smiling benignly as the squad depart from Glasgow. He looks like a man who is about to set off on the holiday of a lifetime which he won in a competition on the back of a cornflakes packet. He looks relaxed and confident. A man at peace with himself and the world. You can't tell from looking at him that he is in fact crazy as a bug. Or that his dossier on our opponents consists of a few scribbles on the back of his last gas bill, which he's forgotten to bring with him anyway. It's all very well for Ian Archer to tell us after the event that Ally was, in fact, barking mad. If he'd let us in on the secret beforehand it would've saved a lot of trouble for those guys who went to Argentina by submarine. Fast forward to the match with Iran. When they equalise the camera pans onto Ally whose wild-eyed , haunted expression betrays the fact that the door of reality has just been kicked open striking him squarely on the face. As he wrestles with his own private demons you feel sure that if there was a carpet in the dug-out then he'd be biting it. Meantime, please pay some attention to the phizog of Kenny Burns, who chooses this most inopportune moment to reveal that he too has crossed the thin line separating apparent normality from the dark regions of utter and irretrievable insanity. If a film was ever made of this the screenplay would have to be by Stephen King. Ally would be played by Gregory Peck in his "who am I, where am I ?" mode, while Jack 'The Shining' Nicholson would play Kenny. Mind you, it didn't take Ally too long to recover from this temporary brush with reality. He was soon back to (ab)normal, asking rhetorically, "If Peter Beardsley is worth £2 million, then what's Henry Templeton worth ?" One shouldn't be too harsh in judging Ally. He did have the ill luck to have two members of the Johnston/e clan in his squad. Medical research has since shown that this surname is itself a sympton of hereditary madness. Just ask big Derek, Mo, Bud and wee Jimmy. Amongst players there are large numbers whose lifts don't stop at every floor. Is it being too cruel to suggest, for example, that George Connelly was the Syd Barrett of football, with the 1969 Cup Final being his "Piper at the Gates of Dawn"? Gazza, on the other hand, is the Ken Dodd of the game (ie, both had their major success with "Tears"). At the time of the tubby Geordie's weeping there was a much more revealing incident which was caught in glorious close-up by the cameras. I refer to Gary Lineker's gesture to the English dug-out which consisted of pointing his index finger to the side of his head and rotating it in a clockwise fashion. This is the international symbol indicating that packs of fruit bats are out and about in somebody's belfry. Lineker was ahead of the field in understanding that there was nobody at home in Gascoigne's head. Regrettably the space still seems to be vacant. In our own country look no further than Jim 'Chic’ Charnley to find a player who is 100 per cent off his trolley. Chic's favourite routine is to run towards the opposing fans on the pretext of retrieving the ball for a shy. He makes a quick check to ensure that none of the officials are paying attention and then goes into his Coco the Clown role, using the full repertoire of two-finger salutes and groin-thrusting masturbatory gestures. This never fails to entertain the crowd. It was not much of surprise to learn that a recent Thistle training session in a public park was interrupted when some local youths entered into the fun by producing machetes to settle an argument with Chic. Club Directors do not escape the epidemic of craziness. Do you recall Jack McGinn being interviewed on Scotsport about the proposals to build a new stadium for Celtic? When he was asked the quite reasonable question about where Celtic were going to come up with the £30 odd million in readies required to finance such a project, he was particularly evasive, mumbling something about not wanting to discuss that in case other people got to hear of it. The viewer was left with the clear impression that Jack, Jimmy Farrell and Chris White (the Paradise gang) were going to rob a bank. Football's administrators are of course able to function without the benefit of a brain. How else can you explain the decision to change the rules of the league competition in the middle of the season ? At a stroke this transformed the most exciting relegation struggle in the Premier's history into a cure for insomnia. I sometimes wonder whether I am the only sane person here. My own proposal to have a 16 team Premier League with six teams being relegated is quite obviously the most sensible one. Now if you don't mind, I'm just off to Cathkin to watch Third Lanark against Real Madrid. If I could only loosen the straps on this jacket. First published in TAG 22 - March 1991

My Favourite Books

2006-05-23T12:13:00.000+01:00

Number 12 - The Neon Rain - James Lee Burke A genuine wonder of the world is American pulp fiction. You can buy stacks of hard-boiled detective stuff, ranging from the veteran masters of the genre (Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, Mickey Spillane, Ed McBain etc) to less well-known writers like Donald Westlake, Charles Williams, Lawrence Block etc. All with their own angle on the detective story. I love it all. In the last 20 years or so a number of writers have lifted the crime tale up to a different level. Elmore Leonard may be the best-known of the modern writers but far and away my favourite is James Lee Burke - this book is merely representative of about 20 of his novels. The principal in most of these books is Dave Robicheaux, Vietnam vet, recovering alcoholic, and Cajun detective, operating in the Lake Ponchartrain area around New Orleans. Although most of these books are 'action-packed' thrillers in the best tradition of pulp fiction, this is in fact not pulp fiction at all. This is high-class literary writing. Normally, I can't be bothered with flowery descriptive narrative telling me about landscapes or geography or environment generally. But in the case of Burke, his technique is so compelling that I can't get enough of his descriptions of azalea, bouganvillea, cypress and rhododendron bushes growing in grand profusion along the banks of the Ponchartrain, or the aroma of roasted cajun chicken being served on a bed of dirty rice with a side order of boudin and bluepoint crabs and a bucket of iced fried shrimp and boiled crawfish on the hard-shell and a long-necked bottle of Jax and watermelons and cantaloupes and strawberries, and oysters and zydeco music and ante-bellum houses and cottonwoods and willows and poor-boy sandwiches and hyacinths and pecan trees and fishing-boats and bluegill, perch and roach spawning in the bays and bayous and jazz and a blood-red setting sun and sheet lightning over the lake and levees and electric storms and electric mist............. ...........and all the things which were swept away by Hurricane Katrina........ I have never been anywhere near New Orleans or Louisiana, but Burke's books lets you smell it, taste it, hear it, see it. A tactile pleasure which never diminishes - and that's before we even get anywhere near the thrilling plot-lines. Top class.

Crime News

2006-05-23T12:00:00.000+01:00

For Foulkes Sake

2006-05-22T23:25:00.000+01:00

1981 and Fooksy is described in Private Eye's HP Sauce column as a 'New Boy' 25 years later, and now Baron Foulkes of somewhere or other, old George gets gutted, filleted and shafted by Comrade Romanov - George is used as the hapless front-man to explain George Burley's sacking, apparently little suspecting that the next bullet had his name on it.

22 May

2006-05-22T21:07:00.000+01:00

This is a busy week for notable Birthdays - on Wednesday the erstwhile Robert Zimmerman is 65 and able to claim a free pass to take the bus on the Never Ending Tour. But for today I notice that Google are celebrating Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's birthday by modifying their logo thus Other notable personalities whose birthday is today include :- Sir Ming Vase (nee Campbell) leader of the UK Liberal Party Sun Ra (nee Herman Sonny Blount - Jazz Musician born either in Chicago or on Venus depending on which version you accept) Sir Laurence Olivier (nee Larry) - actor Herge (nee Tintin) - Belgian Charles Aznavour - French singer - one of Bob Dylan's faves - true. George Best - eponymous super-hero Morrisey (nee Smith) - singer/tree Jordan (nee comment) - bosom

A Heart Monitor That Isn't Mine

2006-05-22T12:09:00.000+01:00

Right, I lifted this from another web-site, sangsara.net - click on the heading to go there. It just seems so perfect after my piece about Poe a couple of days ago - this article joins Poe and a Heart Monitor together so perfectly that it might have been designed deliberately for this blog. The author points out that this is an advert for a heart monitor, but written in the precise style of Poe and adapting the title of one of his stories :- The Tell-Tale Heart Monitor Finally you did it. You killed the old man. He was not an evil man – most thought him kind, despite a galling inability to prevent his Pekingese from voiding its bowels upon your basil plants. But O! his monstrous eye! Knowing that he looked upon you through that clouded and diseased orb…it could have driven one of lesser mettle to distraction, even to madness. But now the eye lies beneath the very boards you tread, with the head, the limbs, the trunk, and all the rest. In pace requiescat! But hark! What was that? That low, dull, quick sound— A passing constable approaches your dooryard, inquiring about your new wrist-watch. You laugh! “Does a mere wrist-watch chronicle systolic pressure, diastolic pressure, and pulse-rate? Show me the common timepiece that can store up to 30 readings for two different people! Where, pray tell, runs a wrist-watch with the endorsement of the German Hypertension League? ‘Pon my wrist dwells none but the Mark of Fitness WS-820Q Wrist-Mounted Blood Pressure Monitor – no mundane wrist-watch, sir! And I certainly did not kill a guy and stuff his body under my floorboards, if that’s what you’re getting at!” How queerly now the constable regards you. Has he not ears? Has he not eyes? See how the old man’s heart skips – it skips, perhaps, in fear — and the Mark of Fitness WS-820Q Wrist-Mounted Blood Pressure Monitor testifies of the irregularity! How keen your hearing! The fool does not hear, but you hear — and now you see as well! It is as close as your wrist! There, on the screen — the beating of his hideous heart!

You cannot be serious

2006-05-22T11:41:00.000+01:00

As Wimbledon fortnight looms, here's a lookback at a golden age of foul-mouthed yobbery

RIP Nikki Sudden

2006-05-22T11:07:00.000+01:00

Nikki Sudden died at the end of March - I should have marked that here before now. It seems that it's now becoming a weekly occurrence for the pop stars of my youth in the 1960's to pop their clogs. But that's expected as many of them head towards their seventies. But Nikki was from the 'new wave', from the 'punk' era - and he's younger than me, being only 49 when he died. Here is the sleeve of Swell Maps totally bonkers 1977 single 'Read About Seymour' - at 1 minute 27 seconds it is certainly a contender for the shortest ever single, but what an amazing impact it has - even now it is very thrilling to listen to -

And finally.......

2006-05-22T01:29:00.000+01:00

....once again, as I retire to bed

Madman Across The Water

2006-05-22T01:04:00.000+01:00

A report in today's Scotsman. Good old Elton - I like bad-tempered foul-mouthed louts (like myself) Elton John says photographers "should all be shot" Please note strong language in paragraph 5. CANNES, France (Reuters) - British pop star Elton John launched an expletive-laden tirade against the press in Cannes late on Saturday while presenting an award to a young actor during the annual film festival. At a ceremony held by luxury jeweller Chopard, everything seemed to be going smoothly enough as John presented the Chopard Trophy to young Canadian actor Kevin Zegers, who co-starred in the film "Transamerica" with Felicity Huffman. "He (Zegers) is only 21 years old, already he showed incredible talent and maturity," said John, wearing dark glasses and accompanied by actress Elizabeth Hurley. "I sincerely believe he will be a huge star and a great actor for many, many years to come." Then, as photographers called out during his address, he added: "If you saw 'Transamerica' ... I'm talking ... you fuckwit, fucking photographers you should be shot, you should be all shot. Thank you."

I Can't Fit It All In A Word Bubble.......

2006-05-22T00:50:00.000+01:00

........but here's the President explaining Social Security policy....... (I think we've done this one before, but here it is with a picture this time) "Because the—all which is on the table begins to address the big cost drivers. For example, how benefits are calculate, for example, is on the table; whether or not benefits rise based upon wage increases or price increases. There's a series of parts of the formula that are being considered. And when you couple that, those different cost drivers, affecting those—changing those with personal accounts, the idea is to get what has been promised more likely to be—or closer delivered to what has been promised. Does that make any sense to you? It's kind of muddled. Look, there's a series of things that cause the—like, for example, benefits are calculated based upon the increase of wages, as opposed to the increase of prices. Some have suggested that we calculate—the benefits will rise based upon inflation, as opposed to wage increases. There is a reform that would help solve the red if that were put into effect. In other words, how fast benefits grow, how fast the promised benefits grow, if those—if that growth is affected, it will help on the red."—Explaining his plan to save Social Security, Tampa, Fla., Feb. 4, 2005

Best American Fiction of Last 25 years

2006-05-22T00:09:00.000+01:00

I've just lifted this lock stock and barrel from the Contemporary Literature web-site. Click on the heading to go there. Best American Fiction? Today's NYTBR cover story concerns Book Review Editor, Sam Tanenhaus's list of the best works of American fiction published in the last 25 years, the results of a query sent to "a couple of hundred prominent writers, critics, editors and other literary sages," asking that they vote on the question. Tanenhaus's poll drew 125 votes and the following top 5 novels: Beloved by Toni Morrison - 15 votes Underworld by Don DeLillo - 11 votes John Updike's Rabbit Angstrom novels - 8 votes Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy - 8 votes American Pastoral by Philip Roth - 7 votes Books that also received multiple votes from the 125 cast were: A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole Housekeeping by Marilynne Robinson Winter's Tale by Mark Helprin White Noise by Don DeLillo The Counterlife by Philip Roth Libra by Don DeLillo Where I'm Calling From by Raymond Carver The Things They Carried by Tim O'Brien Mating by Normon Rush Jesus' Son by Denis Johnson Operation Shylock by Philip Roth Independence Day by Richard Ford Sabbath's Theater by Philip Roth Border Trilogy by Cormac McCarthy The Human Stain by Philip Roth The Known World by Edward P. Jones The Plot Against America by Philip Roth The list has been available since last Monday and has been the topic of much online discussion. Has Philip Roth really written 6 of the 21 (29%) best American works of fiction these past 25 years? Why only two women on the list and where are all the younger authors who have penned great work in the past quarter century? No one is arguing the merit of the work selected, but the merit of all the work that was not selected. Where are the Zadie Smiths,The Neal Stephensons, and the David Foster Wallaces? Where are the Michael Chabons, the Lydia Davises, and the Walter Mosleys? How do you compare a Bruce Sterling novel to a Philip Roth? How does one derive such a list from a mere 125 votes? And what makes these works of fiction "best?" What do you think? This is me talking again - I've read a few of these - most of the Philip Roth books and a couple of the DeLillo. I haven't seen the full list - you have to join the New York Times Book Review Club to see that but, from the ones mentioned above I, and I don't suppose I am alone in this, want to know where are such as James Lee Burke, Charles Bukowski,Tom Wolfe, George Pelecanos, Elmore Leonard, Chuck Palahniuk, James Ellroy, Richard Powers.....to name only those whose books I can see from where I'm sitting.....where is Stephen King.....where for fux sake is Kinky Friedman??? What do you think?

Nice One, Cyril

2006-05-21T23:50:00.000+01:00

Those readers of a certain vintage will appreciate the humour in this clipping straight away. For younger readers the following photograph may give a clue

RIP Freddie Garrity

2006-05-21T23:46:00.000+01:00

Freddie Garrity died on Friday

Firefox Sake

2006-05-21T23:18:00.000+01:00

I am still fretting about how I've managed to screw up the Firefox display. Even the previous post (being text) cannot be read by Firefox users. However, for reasons which I don't understand, Firefox still displays photos - so I've taken a photoshop copy of the foregoing message - I'm going to post this every so often to try to help Firefox users who end up here. If anyone knows how to fix my ff display then firefox sake let me know

Fire Fux

2006-05-21T22:00:00.000+01:00

Users of Firefox I have obviously but inadvertantly done something to my template which makes the blog illegible in Firefox. I do not know how to fix that. However, if you are really desperate, you can download an extension in Firefox which enables you to view Firefox as if it was Internet Explorer (clever, eh). It's called IE Tab and you'll find it by following the Help and Add-ons link on the Firefox front page. Once you install it (less than 200kb) and add my blog to the list of pages to be viewed as if it was IE - you will be able to view the blog in Firefox. Sorry, that's the best I can do.

Fire well and truly Foxed

2006-05-21T18:15:00.000+01:00

Well I've tried a few things to fix the display problems in Firefox - all in vain, I'm afraid. I searched Google for advice on 'Firefox display problems' - it returned 42 million pages !!! It seems that there are so many potential problems with Firefox that one could easily spend one's limited remaining life buggering about with this - I am not going to do that. If anyone has any bright ideas please let me know. Otherwise, Firefox users - you are foxed.

Just Browsing

2006-05-21T17:34:00.000+01:00

It has been drawn to my attention that this blog is currently not displaying properly in Mozilla Firefox browsers. I haven't got the foggiest idea why that is - perhaps Firefox objects to the smutty content of cats at sea - or is dismayed at my suggestion that Sven has gone over the edge - or doesn't want you to read anything about EA Poe. Who knows? Anyhow, for the next wee while I'm going to try to fix that - this will involve some of the articles being temporarily deleted - but they will re-appear soon enough - meantime use Internet Explorer if you can. Thank you

Roger the Cabin-Boy

2006-05-21T14:03:00.000+01:00

Quick Nurse - the Screens !

2006-05-21T13:03:00.000+01:00

I have to be reasonably circumspect nowadays - by reason of their place of birth I have 2 grandsons who are English - one of whom is now old enough to be wearing the England strip and be repeatedly asking me to agree that 'David Beckham is the best player in the whole wide world'. I have been warned by his mother and grandmother that I must at least give the appearance of supporting Sven's boys. What can I do? And I see from yesterday's papers that Kenny McAskill is urging Scots to support the efforts of our southern neighbours in Germany. Has the whole world gone mad? Judge for yourself when you read this from today's Observer Sven: 'We will win World Cup' Paul Wilson and Denis Campbell Sunday May 21, 2006 The Observer Alf Ramsey said it before 1966 and was proved right. Now Sven-Goran Eriksson, a man not prone to rash utterances, has dared make the same bold prediction: England will win the World Cup. England's manager has confounded the pessimistic mood that had settled over the team's supporters since Wayne Rooney broke his foot last month by declaring: 'I think we will win it this time.' He did so during an interview with Sunday newspapers at England's base in Portugal last week. Reminded that Ramsey had promised the country that his team would lift the trophy in 1966, the Swede surprisingly departed from his usual cautious response when asked about England's chances in Germany. 'I think we will win it this time', he said - eight words that could turn out to be history repeating itself, or haunt him forever. 'Of course I think that, but you know you have huge opponents as well and you need luck on your side. It's not all about confidence, you need a little bit of luck with injuries and referees. LUVVLY JUBBLY !!!! 'mon the Paraguay.

My Favourite Books

2006-05-21T11:30:00.000+01:00

Number 11 - Selected Writings - Edgar Allan Poe

"Man you should have seen them kicking Edgar Allan Poe" - The Beatles 'I Am the Walrus' Apart from appearing in 'Walrus' Poe also features prominently on the sleeve of Sgt Pepper I think we can take it that the Beatles were fans. Coincidentally, both Poe and Lennon died at the age of 40 (though in Poe's case it was alcohol rather than gunshot wounds which killed him). But the Beatles connection is not the reason why I've chosen this book as one of my favourites. Edgar Allan Poe is very closely identified with tales of horror and madness, and of course it is that type of material which draws adolescent boys to his work - it is certainly what drew me. All those macabre stories which were converted into Hammer House of Horror films in the sixties ('The Fall of the House of Usher', 'the Pit and the Pendulum', 'the Masque of the Red Death' etc etc etc) are the stuff which hooks you in. People being buried alive, people digging up dead people, people going mad, more people being buried alive - it's all good stuff (rubs hands in glee). But a surprising discovery awaits. A clue is in the cover of the collection illustrated here. The black bird on the cover is supposed to represent 'the Raven'. On opening the book you find that Poe was not just a purveyor of creepy stories. In fact, he was a poet and a literary critic and an early writer of science fiction. One of his most famous poems is 'the Raven'. The poem is not only something of a masterpiece in its own right - Tell me what thy lordly name is on the Night's Plutonian shore ! Quoth the Raven, 'Nevermore'.

- but it is also the subject of a truly amazing essay called 'The Philosophy of Composition' in which he 'deconstructs' (to use a modern word) the creation of the poem. If you read the poem first then you will probably find it quite startling and affecting, and perhaps moving. You may tend to think of poetry of this sort as having been composed during a burst of creativity in which the writer is assailed by inspiration 'beyond his control' (many writers speak of being merely the channel for something being received from the ether). Then read what Poe says about its composition - "..the work proceeded, step by step, to its completion with the precision and rigid consequence of a mathematical problem." He describes the process in detail - I paraphrase here - in a cold-blooded way he decides that the highest aim of poetry is to capture beauty - the most beautiful thing known to man is a beautiful woman - the poem should inspire the most profound emotion - the most profound emotions are love and grief - the poem should therefore be about the death of a beautiful woman loved by the poet. And so on in clinical fashion. The poem is compelling - the exposition of its construction is masterful. Poe provided the template for Sherlock Holmes in Auguste Dupin. Poe heavily influenced the horror stories of HP Lovecraft, and indeed all of the horror writers who followed him down to Stephen King. Poe practically invented 'science-fiction' as an art form, influencing Ray Bradbury in particular. Poe wrote high quality poetry. In short, Poe was a wonderful writer. Not included in this book, but well worth investigating, is a truly horrifying novel-length story, 'The Narrative Of Arthur Gordon Pym Of Nantucket'. (Hmmm Arthur Gordon Pym - Edgar Allan Poe - I wonder if by any chance they are related) Pym voyages on the American Brig Grampus on her way to the South Seas in 1827. There is mutiny and atrocious butchery on board, then shipwreck and famine. There is rescue by a British schooner which itself is then attacked with the crew being massacred. All of this being merely the prequel to the real horror yet to be discovered. None of this is to be read by anyone of a nervous disposition. 'Pym' still gives me the creeps 30 years after I read it. Wonderful. And much of madness and more of sin And Horror the Soul of the Plot -----from Poe's poem 'Ligeia'

The Resurrection Shuffle

2006-05-21T01:40:00.000+01:00

Tombstone Blues

2006-05-20T13:57:00.000+01:00

All Our Yesterdays

2006-05-20T13:22:00.000+01:00

This is a classic Private Eye cover from 1975. It will not make the slightest sense to anyone under the age of about 45. There was a referendum on the UKs membership of the Common Market (now EEC) in 1975 and the cover depicts Michael Foot and colleague (whose name I can't remember - was it Betty Short or something similar - can anyone assist?) - they were anti-Common Market Labour MPs (Labour were in power and Harold Wilson was asking people to vote for the common market). The word bubbles refer to (a) the then current fear of a serial rapist and (b) the President of France (very pro-Common Market), while the strap-line at the bottom combines an oblique reference to the then-current story of animal organs being transplanted to humans - and to the Right Honourable Anthony Wedgewood Benn - also an anti-common marketeer. Superb. Coming soon - from the same issue - a fantastic newspaper report of a football match.

The Absolute Game Revisited - Part 36

2006-05-19T20:54:00.000+01:00

At this blog we're all beside ourselves with excitement over the imminent World Cup. But come with me now to a bygone age (1994) when the football (soccer) World Cup was held in the US of A. This very long and mainly boring article is from TAG 39 of August 1994. Much of this doesn't make any sense to me now so I wish the reader bon chance. AMERICAN STARS AND BARS American Dream A few years ago I met an American woman on the train from London to Glasgow. It was just shortly after a Papal visit to the USA. She told me, with some relish, that the Pontiff's appearance among his American flock had been the signal for the free enterprise bandwagon to move into overdrive, quickly reaching warp factor nine, before crashing off the freeway in a spectacular explosion of bad-taste and tackiness. Such was the frenzy to take the suckers for every buck they had that nothing was too tasteless to sell. Every spiv and hustler in North America was in the marketplace purveying distinctly cheesy merchandise like 'genuine pieces of the true cross' , 'Turin shroud eiderdowns' and 'flesh-coloured Christs that glow in the dark'. (Or, to paraphrase Frank Zappa, "They're gonna sell you stuff that you don't really want. And, what's more, they've been planning it for years"). The so-called Hispanic/Peurto Rican/Latin community was a particular target for sundry fraudsters anxious to relieve them of their earthly treasures in exchange for a piece of heaven (made in Hong Kong). One of these old frauds had the brilliant idea of whacking out truckloads of T-shirts with JohnPaul II's face on the front, above the legend 'I saw the Pope'. In Spanish... …. Now, it's a little-known fact that the words in Spanish for 'Pope' and 'potato' are 'el Papa' and 'la Papa' respectively. You can guess the rest. There's a warehouse in Brooklyn still storing 400,000 shirts proclaiming 'I saw the potato'. In 1994 they were joined in the dumper by similar quantities of shirts saying, 'The Scottish/English/Welsh are coming'. Of course, although it turned out that none of us were actually going, we had been anxious for years about what might happen to our game in the land of the mighty dollar. After all, not everyone finds American culture precisely to their taste. Take the Ayatollah Khomeini for example. He used to refer to the US as 'the Great Satan'. One report in the Daily Telegraph famously recorded Khomeini as calling for a holy war against 'the Great Stan'. Well, just how did big Stan cope with the greatest show on earth? A Night at the Oprah On 17th June, wearing a Spanish 'I am the couch potato' T- shirt, bermuda shorts and Red Sox baseball cap, I settled down in front of the telly with my bucket of popcorn and vat of coca-cola. Here I am now, entertain me. The opening ceremony was a bad omen. These affairs are always appalling, but it was easy to anticipate that the Americans would trounce all-comers in a bad-taste contest. That well known aficionado of football, Oprah Winfrey, was the MC. She introduced a cavalcade of the competing countries, each represented by a troupe of break-dancers and each inexplicably backed by an earth-bound hang-glider pilot dressed as a psychedelic butterfly. Brazil's entrance into this farce prompted the first gratuitous Brazil/Samba reference from Barry Davies. The next thing we knew, Diana Ross was breenging across the field, miming badly to some unidentifiable dance-beat, before reaching a ball positioned 4 yards from a goal-net. The script no doubt called for her to lash it into the old onion-bag as the first symbolic goal of the tournament. However, a la Brian McClair, she defied the laws of physics by screwing it at least thirty yards wide, before giving way to a rousing chorus of 'The Star-Spangled Banner' (not the Hendrix version). Diana's penalty miss turned out in fact to be heavily symbolic - one month later from almost exactly the same position Roberto Baggio launched his crucial spot-kick out of the stadium and into orbit around Venus to hand the cup to Brazil. La Ross was quickly followed by some nonentity called John Secada apparently extricating himself from the interior of a giant deep-fat fryer to deliver a truly turgid piece of American rawk'n'roll. While he droned on it appeared that the stage had been the subject of an early pre-emptive tear-gas strike by the National Guard. Unfortunately, it merely turned out that somebody had gone crazy with the dry-ice machine. Finally, Darryl Hall and a cast of thousands vomitted forth the instantly forgettable 'official anthem' of the World Cup. Pavarotti it most certainly wasn't. It only remained for President William Jefferson Airplane Clinton to make an opening speech in which he contradicted all received wisdom by announcing that "The World Cup has captured the imagination of our country". England Expectorates I can't believe that the first match between Germany and Bolivia captured anyone's imagination, whether in America or elsewhere. Dull, dull, dull. In fact, half-way through the game I was beginning to think that the Yanks were spot on about football. It was the most dreadful crap. We'd have been better off watching 'Battle of the Supertrucks' or a log-rolling contest. Remarkably, given the sterility of the play, it took Barry Davies until the 16th minute before he struck with his first irrelevant mention of England. In a masterpiece of subtlety he introduced it by commenting that the opening match rarely produced many goals. We should've been able to see the next line coming "In fact, no World Champions have won their opening match since 1970 when England did it". A positively brilliant disguised reference to 1966 by the boy Davies there. One to set my paranoid nerve-ends tingling. In an effort to escape this sonic effluent I switched over to satellite coverage only to be greeted by the dulcet tones of Archie McPherson. Christ! I was back with Barry Davies in time to hear him saying, with obvious petted lip, "This referee was the one who refereed the England - Norway game and saw nothing wrong with the equaliser by Rekdal" . As it happens, Bazza Davies was consistently the worst offender throughout the tournament in the 'little Englander' stakes. He had limbered up for the Finals with a truly grotesque performance during the European Cup Final. You may remember that that match was refereed by Philip Don from Harrow. At one point during the game, Milan's Donadoni went on a mazy run, during which he beat three or four Barcelona defenders, all of whom had a kick at him on the way past. Showing remarkable skill and tenacity, Donadoni stayed on his feet, still in possession of the ball. This piece of artistic wizardry induced Bazza to ejaculate, "Oh, well played Mr Don!" . Apparently the English referee's allowing of advantage was of more moment than the Italian player's brilliance. Davies simply continued to belch forth a shower of similar horse-shit throughout the World Cup. He was the worst, but by no means the only culprit. Brian Moore ran Davies pretty close when commentating on a Holland game. He seemed able to identify the Dutch players only by reference to real or imagined offences committed against England. Thus his commentary ran, "Koeman has the ball. He should have been sent off for that foul on David Platt, but it's all history now. He passes to Wouters, he's the one who elbowed Paul Gascoigne at Wembley you may remember. Now Overmars has it, / must say he looked suspiciously offside at the first Dutch goal against England ......” During the quarter-final between Sweden and Romania, Moore and his partner, Kevin Keegan, contrived to spend much of their time emitting a stream of bat's piss about the 'outstanding' qualities of the referee, namely 'Mr Don from England'. In the second game of the tournament between Spain and South Korea, Alan Parry smashed all existing records by taking just 28 seconds to reveal that one of the Korean players 'plays in the Japanese League, as does our own Gary Lineker', and then immediately followed this up by informing us that "there's a little bit of England out there as one of the linesmen is English and Mr Don (yes, him again) is the fourth official'''. Some people are born arseholes, some have arseholes thrust upon them. The Carpenter is Harry Commentator While I'm on the subject, I may as well deal with some of the other buffoons in the constellation of star commentators. Our old chum, John Motson, had a good World Cup, by his own dreadful standards. At the end of the first week the Guardian newspaper was so impressed that they took to referring to him as 'Hot Motty'. Even so, he wasn't immune to the English disease, ludicrously suggesting that 'Soapy' Sutter of Switzerland was a "Paul Walsh look-alike" (ie he had long hair), while Sutter's colleague Bregy was "very much a Ray Wilkins figure" (ie he had no hair). Rather disconceningly, Hot Motty frequently referred to the Russian team as 'Soviets'. What does he know that we don't ? More characteristically, he lunged in with the most exotic English reference of all, telling us that "the Cameroon shirts were made in Huddersfield". Hot Motty's sometime sidekick, Trevor Brooking, made his bid for glory during the Brazil - Cameroon game when discussing some unexplained decision or other. He assured us that, "We'll hear all about it at the end of the whistle". Over on the Sky channel, Archie 'needs a chip' McPherson continued to meander on in his uniquely strange and unintelligible way. His style is an amalgam of David Francey and Mrs Malaprop. Completely baffling. At least we're used to him. God knows what the English viewers made of his rambling incoherence. I only suffered through a couple of his commentaries, but the old maestro was in top form, producing virtuoso performances packed full of mixed metaphors, non-sequiturs, unfinished sentences and entirely new words spontaneously invented by himself. Listening to him was just like sitting the aural test in your French 'O' level. Utterly incomprehensible. In the Norway - Mexico game he opined that "the Mexicans seem to be phasing themselves". I think that the word he was looking for was 'pacing'. Later on he informed us that "the Mexicans can't get the ball - that's one of the basic criterions" and that "they're coming forward, but making no great leeway". In the Switzerland - Romania game he managed to harness all of his linguistic foibles into one amazing sentence in an effort to convey how tightly marked Romania's star player was, viz "Hagi might not literally have the padlocks on but they're breathing around him trying to suffocate him". To be fair to the old slaphead, he did manage to come up with an outstanding description of the Mexican goalkeeper's outfit when he said, "When he comes out to collect a cross-ball it's like a bird of paradise swooping through the jungle". If he'd substituted 'deranged parrot' for 'bird of paradise' then it would've been just perfect. Meanwhile, the same goalie's rig-out was attracting attention on ITV. When Ron Atkinson was informed that the strips were designed by the keeper himself, he was moved to remark, "To be fair to the lad, they look as though they've been designed by Ray Charles". This comment may have produced puzzlement for younger viewers unfamiliar with the history of blind r'n'b piano players (or East Fife goalkeepers). There's simply no contest. Big Ron is easily the best of the celebrity summarisers. There's no liberal 'new man' guff with him. He just lumbers on, saying the first thing that comes into his head. When asked for his view of the flurry of red and yellow cards he said, "To be fair, the referees are just turning this into a game for fairies" , and he seemed to derive endless politically incorrect amusement from the sight of the Brazilian players holding hands with each other. To be fair, Ron, they were doing it early doors, just for fun, to set out their stall and show their stickability. (Note by shamefaced and politically correct author in 2006 - it turned out in due course that Ron was an appalling racist - but neither I nor, I suspect, you, knew that in 1994) Compare and contrast Ron's performance with the irritating bollocks talked by Messrs Keegan, Howe, Law, Venables, O'Leary etc. An honourable exception was Alan Hansen, who continues to look like the casualty of an overnight visit from a vampire. At last a true successor to the legendary Alistair Dewar has emerged. The principal words in Hansen's vocabulary are 'awful', 'terrible', 'pathetic', 'rubbish', 'scandalous', 'shocking', 'farcical', 'hopeless', 'diabolical', 'atrocious' and 'worse than a pub team'. Great stuff. Funnily enough, all of these words could easily have been used to describe Denis Law's contributions. To paraphrase Basil Fawlty, Denis should be a contestant on Mastermind. Specialised subject - the bleedin' obvious. Example - commentator says to Law, "This is a fantastic stadium, eh Denis ?" Law replies, "Oh yes , faaaantastic. Just faaaan-tastic". Thank you, Denis. Florida's A Grand Old Team To Play For In the absence of any British competitors the media adopted Ireland wholesale, and apparently expected the rest of us to go along with it. It was no impediment that Ireland were transparently the most boring team in the competition next to Norway. The qualifying group from which they emerged was dubbed 'the group of death' (ie the group where you were most likely to die of boredom). While Ireland remained in the competition, BBC and ITV collaborated in the longest-running free Guinness advert of all time. In truth, Ireland's biggest impact on the rest of the proceedings was the pure comedy of Jack Charlton's fanatically deranged obsession with 'wotta' and John Aldridge's highly audible shouts of "ya fookin cheat" during the match with Mexico. (In fairness to big Jack, many of the games were played in unfeasibly immoderate temperatures, so much so that I had to slap on the old Factor 16 just to be able to watch them on the TV). In a tournament riddled with goalkeeping errors, Bonner's gaffe against Holland was something of a collector's item. As someone who routinely supports whoever is in opposition to England, I sure as hell was not inclined to support a surrogate English team. This is all sour grapes of course. Ireland have now twice gone further in the World Cup than we ever have. I'll be returning to this topic later on. Things Don’t Go Better With Coke I should get my cards on the table here. For about six months prior to the finals I was telling everyone who would listen that Colombia were going to win. I fancied Nigeria as finalists with Norway as my 'outsiders'. We TAG scribes have our fingers right on the pulse. If you think I'm embarrassed about being so wildly wrong then how do you think Pele must be feeling? He'd apparently heard that I was tipping the Colombians and immediately hot-footed it round to Ladbrokes to get his money on. Still, I suppose he's consoled by the millions he pulled in through advertising everything which moved and looked as though it might remotely be connected with football. In the advert breaks it seemed to be Pele here, Pele there, Pele every fucking where. Sad. (Don't you think you're overdoing the iconoclasm a little bit? - Ed). Colombia's demise directly led to the murder of Escobar, their defender who'd scored an own goal against the USA. That news was quite literally the most stunning thing which happened in the World Cup. It made us all feel sick. The implications of that particular event require a completely separate article, so forgive me for glossing over it. In contrast, the expulsion of Maradona a couple of days earlier was a tragedy for no-one in particular, except the cheating little bugger himself. I had very quickly tired of his rolling around on the deck after every innocuous challenge, and the perpetual pained expression on his face. At least Willie Johnston now has a suitably illustrious companion in the rogues gallery. Maradona's disgrace indirectly provided us with the cataclysmic Romania - Argentina match, and for that I say three cheers. Fortunately the Argentinian manager didn't attempt any Ally McLeod-type explanation along the lines of "Ach, he'd have been daft to take ephedrine on top of all that cocaine he was snorting". In the context of Escobar's shooting, it was perhaps not surprising to learn that bona-fide head-case Rene Higuita had not been included in the Colombian squad as he'd just completed a six-month jail sentence for his part in a kidnapping. ("Not the ideal way to prepare for the World Cup" quoth John Fashanu). Crikey, give us Jimmy Johnstone in a rowing boat any day. Bastards in the.. eh...Sort of Nauseating Puce Now a word about the refereeing. That word is 'garbage'. Amongst the lessons which we might have learned is that the myth of our refs being inferior to foreigners is exactly that - a total fabrication. The officiating was uniformly disgraceful. The repeated brandishing of reds and yellows for bugger all just completely beggared belief. Years ago in TAG Mad Mac recounted how the aforementioned Willie Johnston had invented an offence new to the canons of football law, by sitting on the ball. At least a further two entirely novel bookable offences were discovered by the Irish team on its own. First, Tommy Coyne was the recipient of a yellow for recovering from an injury before the treatment arrived. Then Ray Houghton received similar punishment for carrying water. I would've understood it if he'd been booked for passing water. But for carrying it? There's an old joke about a guy going round Glasgow spreading a purple powder about the streets 'to keep the elephants away'. When it was drawn to his attention that there weren't any elephants in Glasgow he replied, "Well, that proves that the powder's working doesn't it ?". It seems that FIFA were applying the same principle in ensuring that there would be no foul play by cautioning players before any foul play occurred. The result was that many of the matches didn't really look like football matches at all, as the players struggled to avoid physical contact at all costs. Although it may have made the football more pretty to watch, that's hardly the point. The match between Mexico and Bulgaria was the major casualty, being completely ruined by a lunatic official who seemed intent on getting his card out for the lads at every opportunity. Electric Shocks On the first occasion when the much-vaunted 'electric cart' was mentioned, I misheard it and thought that injured players were to be disposed of in an electric chair. Very soon I was wishing that such a device was available for the officials. There was nothing wrong here that a few thousand volts from Old Sparky wouldn't have cured. As it turned out, the electric cart appeared to actually consist of an old-fashioned - and distinctly un-electric - stretcher, which was usually carried by a couple of young 'Miss America' contestants and a troupe of very fat men. The very fat men always seemed to be in the burger bar whenever any casualties occurred. The usual routine was that the player would go down, roll about in agony for a bit, and then begin to feel slightly better when the yellow card was shown to his opponent. The referee would signal for the electric cart. The fourth official would scour the burger bars for the very fat men. After a reasonable interlude the very fat men would lumber on to the pitch clutching the stretcher and the last mouthfuls of a jumbo-sized moose and maple syrup sandwich. Meanwhile, the player had completely recovered, but had to lie prone for fear of getting a yellow. He'd then be bundled on to the stretcher and be carted off amidst much a-huffin' and a-puffin' from the very fat men, only to spring to his feet immediately on arrival at the touchline. Farce or what? Years ago, during a strike by the fire brigade, the army were called in with their 'Green Goddess' vehicles to act as an emergency fire service. One unit was called out to rescue an old lady's cat which had got stuck up a tree. They duly rescued the moggy and the old dear was so delighted that she invited all the Tommys in for a cup of tea. Thereafter, as she waved them off they ran over the cat. With such hilarity in mind, every time yer actual 'electric cart' (ie golf buggy) made an appearance I was rather hoping it would collide with a hitherto uninjured player. Anyway, where was I ? Ah yes, referees. Our own Les Mottram hardly covered himself in glory. He seemed to enjoy the South Korea - Bolivia 0-0 draw so much that he let it run on for a couple of hours after the traditional closing time. Oh, well played Mr Mottram! But seriously, folks, some people have said that the refereeing actually helped to produce attractive, exciting football. Maybe. But what was the point in introducing entirely new rules the night before the tournament started? The new offside rule was absurd and was arbitrarily applied in a way which made it impossible for anyone to know what was happening. Up until 17th June most of us would have been quite confident about explaining the offside rule to any passing bobby-soxer from Milwaukee. It would now be a brave man who would tackle the task. Looking at the Brazil - Holland match the new rule appears to be that a player in a patently offside position is not offside if, 'in the opinion of the referee a goal for Brazil is likely to result'. No doubt the SFA will be able to adapt this imaginative new law by appropriate substitution of the word 'Rangers' for 'Brazil'. Nuts to Brazil It's becoming less surprising to see the 'minnows' doing well. I think we can say without fear of contradiction that Scotland would have been soundly thrashed by Morocco, Nigeria, South Korea, Team Amerika (big Stan's XI), and the Saudis (pronounced 'Soddys' by Ron Atkinson). Some other pundit has already observed that we ourselves are now not so much minnows, as plankton. All our excuses are fast disappearing. Why can we not even compete with Ireland? I suppose that prior to June we would have put ourselves in the same league as the likes of Bulgaria, Sweden and Romania. But now ? It's a bit frightening to see what they're capable of. What can we do? I've done my bit. I've written to Jim Farry (Dear Mr Farry, it has been drawn to my attention that there are some things which are not quite right with Scottish football. Can you please arrange to rectify this situation immediately). A lot of great football was played in the World Cup. Big Stan did a terrific job in organising the tournament, and there was hardly any discemible intrusion of the grosser aspects of the native culture. The only major disappointment was the Final itself (both in the nature of the game and in the fact that Bazza Davies got the nod over Hot Motty on BBC). Am I alone in having been irritated throughout the competition by 'our' commentators' slavish devotion to the myth of Brazil and Samba football? Naturally, we all still have wet dreams about their 1970 team, but their 1994 squad were as far removed from that as last season's hackers and cloggers at Parkhead were from the Lisbon Lions. One doesn't lightly criticise the World Champions, but it has to be said that the Brazilians were the poorest team ever to win the World Cup. In their three games against USA, Sweden and Italy they managed to score just two goals. Not so much Samba, more 'dying fly'. Despite that disappointment at the very end, I enjoyed the four weeks, though I just wish that the best team, namely Romania, had won it. I also derived some pleasure, in a sad trainspotter sort of way, by noticing that four of the competing players were called Albert, Roy, Flo and Berti. Are they not characters in 'the Broons' ? But, most of all, Big Stanley '94 has given me an appetite for Dumbarton's upcoming opener against the Samba rhythms of Team Queen of the South. Who needs Romario when you've got Charlie Gibson?

More Biblical Quotations

2006-05-19T15:56:00.000+01:00

Now, there's a coincidence......

2006-05-19T15:49:00.000+01:00

Da Vinci Day

2006-05-19T15:44:00.000+01:00

Everybody's off to see the film, starring Tom Hanks (cockney rhyming slang). I was amused to read one critic paraphrasing Mark Twain in relation to Dan Brown's book, "Once you put it down, you can't pick it up"

Ye Just Cannae Make It Up - Part 376

2006-05-19T15:30:00.000+01:00

Click on the heading to go to a story in the Guardian about 5 cleaners being arrested at the offices of the Immigration and Nationality Directorate in London, where they were employed. (this is the organisation responsible for tracking down and expelling illegal immigrants). Reason for arrest - they are illegal immigrants !!! No, don't laugh - it'll only encourage them.

Confusion Will Be My Epitaph

2006-05-19T15:13:00.000+01:00

Thank You Very Much For .......

2006-05-19T14:56:00.000+01:00

My Favourite Books

2006-05-19T12:06:00.000+01:00

Number 10 - Post Office - Charles Bukowski The three regular readers of this blog (you know who you are) will be familiar with my liking for the work of Charles Bukowski. I was a relative late-comer to his writing, having only discovered his books by accident about 10 years ago - though I remembered having seen the film based on his life long before that. 'Post Office' is probably not the best of his novels but it was the first one I read and my affection for it remains undiminished. 'Post Office' features an alcoholic postman by the name of Henry Chinaski. Immediately before publishing this, his first novel, Charles Bukowski was a postman with the US Mail. He was also an alcoholic. I wonder if, by any chance, Chinaski and Bukowski are related. Almost all of Bukowski's work is autobiographical, and it is a total mystery how he could have been such a prolific writer while living an utterly chaotic life, a life almost entirely enslaved by alcohol. But, the fact is that the scenes he describes in this book and elsewhere ACTUALLY HAPPENED. As so often, I was captivated by the opening page, "It began as a mistake. It was Christmas season and I learned from the drunk up the hill, who did the trick every Christmas, that they would hire damned near anybody, and so I went and the next thing I knew I had this leather sack on my back and was hiking around at my leisure. What a job, I thought. Soft! They only gave you a block or 2 and if you managed to finish, the regular carrier would give you another block to carry, or maybe you'd go back in and the soup would give you another, but you just took your time and shoved those Xmas cards in the slots. I think it was my second day as a Christmas temp that this big woman came out and walked around with me as I delivered letters. What I mean by big was that her ass was big and her tits were big and that she was big in all the right places. She seemed a bit crazy but I kept looking at her body and I didn't care. She talked and talked and talked. Then it came out. Her husband was an officer on an island far away and she got lonely, you know, and lived in this little house in back all by herself." From there, off we go on a depraved life of drinking beer, one-night stands with the big woman and others of a similar sort, losing money at race-tracks, throwing up, and drinking beer. And delivering the odd letter from time to time. I must say (and I'm sure that my friend Martin will agree when he reads this), that this life-style bears a striking similarity to our summer and Christmas seasons in the Campbeltown Post Office in the mid-70s. So there's a certain nostalgic appeal for me in this book as well. As indicated before, Bukowski is not for the easily offended. Otherwise get it and read it. It is both hilariously funny and desperately sad simultaneously.

Divine Retribution.......

2006-05-19T01:31:00.000+01:00

.....for that last 'joke'

Biblical Quotations

2006-05-19T01:28:00.000+01:00

This is one I remember from Sunday School

Poetry Corner

2006-05-19T00:40:00.000+01:00

We haven't had any MacDiarmid for a while - here's one of my favourites - even if we have become so anglified that we no longer understand all the Scots words, this poem derives much of its power from the sheer pleasure of saying these words out loud, which after all is one of the main purposes of poetry - isn't it wonderful that the Scots word for 'plenty' is 'feck' allowing the poet to say "Wi' feck o' swearin'" (reminiscent of the lawyer's trick of calling the witness a fecund liar). The message is clear - do not feck wi' the men o' Crowdieknowe. Crowdieknowe Oh to be at Crowdieknowe When the last trumpet blaws, An see the deid cum loupin' owre The auld grey wa's. Muckle men wi' tousled beards, I grat at as a bairn 'll scramble frae the croodit clay Wi' feck o' swearin'. An' glower at God an' a' his gang O' angels i' the lift ---thae trashie bleezin' French-like folk Wha gar’d them shift! Fain the weemun-folk’ll seek To mak' them haud their row Fegs, God’s no blate gin he stirs up The men o Crowdieknowe

New Super-Hero : Heart By-Pass Man

2006-05-19T00:10:00.000+01:00

Breach of the Peach

2006-05-19T00:09:00.000+01:00

Pesky Aliens

2006-05-18T22:41:00.000+01:00

Bob Dylan Radio

2006-05-18T22:24:00.000+01:00

Turn It Up !! Bob continues to be fantastic as a DJ. The theme of the latest programme was 'drinking'. Bob's main joke "Lonnie the Cat – he read about the evils of drinking so he quit reading". Of course, the artwork for the discs which are now inevitably following has become available, and we are proud to bring the sleeves to you here (as always click to enlarge to view in their full magnificence) If any of you out there in blogland would like to hear any of these shows then e-mail me at the usual address and we'll see what can be arranged.

RIP

2006-05-18T20:26:00.000+01:00

I don't speak German, but this nifty deaths intimation in a Swiss newspaper apparently is from Roland Jacob announcing his own demise and reads "I have moved. My new address is the cemetery in Foech Street, Zurich I look forward to receiving visitors".

'Head Buttons Up The Back' Department

2006-05-18T18:37:00.000+01:00

This from the BBC's web-site Silent shop robber sent to jail A masked knifeman - caught by the shop worker he attacked - tried to dodge police questions by pretending to be a Buddhist who could not speak. Callum Neil was silent again at the High Court in Edinburgh as he was jailed for three years and nine months for the attack on Mohammed Sharif. Neil, 29, had drunk a litre of vodka and two bottles of Buckfast. Neil had pleaded guilty earlier to assaulting Mr Sharif with intent to rob him on 23 December. His lawyer told the court on Thursday the clumsy raid was "a cry for help." Well why didn't he just cry for help for f**k sake?

Newsflash

2006-05-18T17:38:00.000+01:00

Shirley McKie ...slight return

2006-05-18T11:15:00.000+01:00

From today's Scotsman: MSPs told of claim officer let McKie into crime scene A FORMER colleague of Shirley McKie, the ex-policewoman accused of leaving a fingerprint at a murder scene, said he allowed her into the home of the victim "because he fancied her", it was claimed yesterday....................... eek!!! - where does this startling information come from - read on...... Alistair Watson, a former detective with Strathclyde Police, who recently made a complaint to police about John Prescott's affair with his secretary, claimed to have heard about this some years ago, while he was working as a taxi driver. It came from an unnamed passenger, who formerly worked with Strathclyde Police. Mr Watson said: "He explained that a young cop who had been guarding the Ross house had admitted letting Ms McKie in before a forensic and fingerprint examination of the scene. "He told me the plan by senior officers was to reveal the existence of this cop at any case for compensation brought against the police by the McKie family." Right, let's see if we've got this right - a former cop (and obvious nut-job) was told this by a taxi passenger who heard it from somebody else. This puts it on roughly the same level of reliability as the fact that my next door neighbour once met a person who knew somebody whose uncle had been abducted by aliens. Right, I'm away to the torture of cardiac rehab therapy - there'll be no more posts till about midnight.

Undertaking News

2006-05-18T00:23:00.000+01:00

Another education cock-up

2006-05-17T23:20:00.000+01:00

I received this from my friend John today : A primary school class started a class project to make planters to take home to their parents. They wanted to have a plant in it that was easy to take care of, so they decided to use cactus plants. The children were given green-ware pottery planters in the shape of clowns which they painted with glaze. The clown planters were professionally fired at a class outing so they could see the process. It was great fun! They planted cactus seeds in the finished planters and they grew nicely, but unfortunately, the children were not allowed to take them home. See if you can guess why.

Barce v Arse

2006-05-17T22:33:00.000+01:00

Congratulations to Barcelona for winning the European Cup tonight. Hard lines to Arsenal. As I write, on the telly they are still arguing the toss about the refereeing decisions. The logic of the red card escapes me. The red card sanction exists to punish a team who have benefitted from foul play which denies a goal. If in fact a goal is scored it seems perverse still to issue the punishment and even more perverse to chalk off the goal (my wife thinks it is 'chopped off' - and there's a certain logic to that). Arsene, as usual in defeat, talks direct from a hole in his Arsene when he complains about Barcelona's equaliser being offside. If Eto'o was offside then it was by about the width of the proverbial baw-hair. It is quite unreasonable to complain about that.

Cartoon Corner

2006-05-17T17:07:00.000+01:00

Oops !!!!

2006-05-17T17:02:00.000+01:00