A cliché this morning.

This morning, I crept downstairs and discovered that Santa had left me a cliché for Christmas.

It was exactly what I’d been dreaming of.

Perfect.

Merry Christmas.

BBC: Contraceptive pill advert pulled
An advert for a contraceptive pill has been withdrawn after Catholics and other groups complained to the advertising watchdog. The poster for morning-after pill Levonelle One Step used the phrase “immaculate contraception”…

The ASA upheld the complaints, including from the National Association of Catholic Families and the Catholic Truth Society, saying that the headline was “likely to cause serious or widespread offence”.

I can’t help feeling that these people seriously need to re-examine their sense of moral outrage. I mean, which is more offensive:

• a weak pun, based on a mythical event in which a mythical omnipotent being bent one into a mythical virgin, thereby begetting a mythical messiah
• a religion whose dogma dictates that all its followers—even those in poor, overpopulated countries, and countries where AIDS is rife—should not use contraception of any type

Bonkers, in both senses of the word.

See also: Letter to His Holiness the Pope (Julian Date)

Sir,

Putting aside the questionable reliability of IQ tests as a measure of intelligence (“Smoking is bad for your brain“, New Scientist, 11-Dec-04), and ignoring the reverse cause-effect argument that less intelligent people are more likely to take up smoking in the first place (and less likely to give it up afterwards), has anyone considered the impact of a smoking-induced 1% loss in intelligence on the 64-year-olds in question? By my back-of-a-fag-packet calculation, I reckon this gives them the same mental age as young whippersnappers of 63 years and four months.

Richard Carter

Don’t forget the aluminium foil.

There’s an interesting article by Charles Nicholl in the latest London Review of Books, entitled Sneezing, Yawning, Falling. It’s about Leonardo da Vincis note books, and books bound together by other people from da Vinci’s papers. Some wit at the LRB decided to dub the piece The Da Vinci Codices (geddit?).

The article finishes with a few jokes taken from da Vinci’s note books. Here’s one of them:

A woman was washing clothes, and her feet were very red with cold. A priest who was passing by was amazed by this, and asked her where the redness came from, to which the woman replied that it was caused by a fire underneath her. Then the priest took in hand that part of him which made him more priest than nun, and drawing near to her, asked her very politely if she would be kind enough to light up his candle.

This from the chap who gave us the Mona Lisa, the Last Supper, and (some would say) the helicopter.

There’s hope for me yet.

This week’s least surprising headline:

New Scientist: Magnetic bracelet pain relief probably placebo effect

…and this week’s most surprising headline:

Guardian: Krankie hurt in fall from beanstalk

This is the Gruts website’s 100th link to: The New Scientist website. I only know this nerdy fact because New Scientist have just revamped their website and, in the process, have moved all of their archive pages. So, suddenly, my 99 previous links were all broken.

That really was very naughty of them. So I went to their contact page and chastised them thuswise:

Aaaaagggghhhhh! You’ve moved all your pages! How irresponsible is that? Haven’t you heard URLs are supposed to last forever? Now I’m going to have to work my way through all my own (permanent) web pages and correct (or more likely remove) every link to articles in New Scientist. Thanks a bunch! This really is extremely annoying.

…Oh yes, and while I’m at it, kill the popup windows, will you?

But I needn’t have worried: WildEdit to the rescue!

WildEdit lets you search and replace text across multiple folders in the blink of an eye. It is, therefore, EXTREMELY DANGEROUS—but it works a treat. I bought it a few months back when upgrading WildEdit’s sister product, the totally brilliant TextPad text editor (without which, this website would not exist).

If you do a lot of text editing in Windows, do yourself a favour and buy these two excellent tools.

Hands up who remembers me being rather unkind about a poem about the passenger pigeon that appeared in the London Review of Books in August. Basically, I accused the poet of having cut various factoids about the passenger pigeon from assorted books and websites, and pasted them into a ready-made ‘poem’. To show how easy I thought it was, I then used the same technique to generate my own poetic masterpiece about Bolivia.

Well, all joking aside, it turns out I was right: Mark Ford, the assembler of the passenger pigeon poem, has written an article in the latest edition of the LRB, entitled Love and Theft, in which he tries to draw a line between bricolage (a new word for me) and plagiarism. Here is a little bricolage of my own, formed from some of the choicest snippets of Ford’s article [my emphasis added]:

…Already web skills are playing an important role in the evolutionary struggle for survival. Will future historians turn first to the wrist and clicking finger in assessing a corpse from our era? Will those who develop RSI be the information revolution’s lepers? How soon before our relatively recently acquired skills become as obsolete as the ability to kill a mammoth with a spear or write shorthand or programme a VCR?

I found myself pondering all this while writing a poem about the demise of the passenger pigeon, which was published in the LRB (5 August)…

[M]y experience of swooping down and roosting on various websites in search of facts about the passenger pigeon brought to mind another [Wallace] Stevens poem, ‘A Postcard from the Volcano’, which is also concerned with extinction:

Children picking up our bones
Will never know that these were once
As quick as foxes on the hill…

The children blithely picking up the bones of their ancestors, unaware of and indifferent to the sensual fullness of being they once enjoyed, seemed to me to act in a way analogous to my behaviour in cyberspace, hopping from site to site, converting whatever I picked up to a flickering simulacrum of itself, to what Stevens, in the same poem, calls ‘a tatter of shadows’…

My passenger pigeon poem acknowledges that the information it contains has been gleaned from the internet, but it also deploys the Sterne/Burton defence by taking in some allusions, including…

[And so on.]

At the risk of being even unkinder to Mr Ford than I already have been, I couldn’t help wondering whether this internet-hopping poet hadn’t, perhaps, searched Google for comments about his passenger pigeon poem, come across my article (which is currently on the first page of hits), and thought to himself Bloody hell! The gaff’s blown! I’ve been rumbled! I’d better write a piece acknowledging my cut and paste job before this thing goes ballistic! (or words to that effect).

But, no, I think that would be being a little bit too unkind.

I’m confused. A senior government minister admits to having had an affair with a married woman, and claims to have got her pregnant twice. Isn’t he supposed to resign now? Isn’t he supposed to resign, irrespective of whether the allegations of his misusing his ministerial powers to get his ex-lover a cheap immigrant nanny turn out to be true? That’s what they used to do in the old days, when I were a nipper: resign. Those who didn’t were charged with sleaze by the minister’s own party.

Instead, we are all supposed to feel sorry for David Blunkett. The British media are being unbelievably kind to him. Indeed, the BBC has even felt it necessary to justify covering the story at all (they’ve learnt their lesson all right). And get this: not one of the British tabloids—not even the Times—has coined the word Visagate yet. I know this for a fact: I just searched for it on Google news and got zero hits. Remember, you heard it here first.

O’Toole (left).

Blunkett.

But what is perhaps most amazing about all the soft-hitting media coverage of The Blunkett Affair is that absolutely nobody has pointed out the real news story here. Not one of the newspapers or TV bulletins has drawn attention to the unbeleaguered Home Secretary’s uncanny resemblance to the actor Peter O’Toole in the 1968 film, The Lion in Winter. It’s not just the beard. Look at those eyes. Look at that mouth. David Blunkett is Peter O’Toole! Totally uncanny.

Like I said, you heard it here first.

That old tosser, Fitz, was 50 on Tuesday. That’s right, fifty.

By way of a celebration/commiseration, I met him and his latest wife in The Dispensary pub in Birkenhead that evening.

Since we were last at The Dispensary, about six weeks ago, the place seems to have adopted a jet-ski theme. This was something of a first for me. But that’s not the only thing that’s changed in the last six weeks. Since I last saw them, Fitz and Ms Fitz—neither of them Roman Catholics (nor at all religious, come to mention it)—have both, quite independently, started working for nuns.

(I’m not making this up.)

Fitz has been teaching Nigerian nuns numeracy and literary skills. Ms Fitz has been tidying-up in an old nuns’ home.

(I’m really not making this up.)

One of the nuns in the old nuns’ home is named Sister Finbar. There is also a Sister Thomas More, and a Sister Gertrude. But my personal favourite is…

(I’m really not making this up.)

Sister Mount Etna.

(No, I wouldn’t believe me either.)

Conversation with Jen:

R: You know what your problem is?
J: What’s that?
R: You only have two speeds: flat-out or fast-asleep.
J: You mean flat-out or flat-out?

Carolyn sent me a text message last night, informing me that Mr Gibson had died.

Mr Gibson was the elderly Scottish gentleman who lived next door to Carolyn when she and I were growing up in Alistair Drive. I didn’t know him very well, but he always stopped to shout ‘Hello!’ when he was out walking his dog. Mr Gibson was very hard of hearing.

After we went off to our respective universities, Carolyn and I didn’t see each other for a couple of years. We re-established contact at a surprise 80th birthday party that our parents threw for Mr Gibson. It was at this party that I learnt that Mr Gibson had been a prisoner of war, and had worked on the Burma Railway. He never forgave the Japanese, and mildly chastised me when I bought my second car: a Nissan.

It wasn’t until three years ago that I learnt from Carolyn that Mr Gibson’s name was Alistair. She just matter-of-factly slipped it into the conversation one day. Apparently, she and Mr Gibson were now on first name terms. It didn’t seem right, her referring to Mr Gibson as ‘Alistair’. When I told my parents, they were surprised I hadn’t known his name all along, because, in a way, our road had been named after him:

In 1963, my parents, and Carolyn’s parents, and Mr Gibson all put down deposits on houses that were being built in a new road that was to be named ‘Alastair Drive’. But Mr Gibson took great exception to this, and went to complain to the local planning department. He explained that ‘Alastair’ was a damn stupid way to spell the name ‘Alistair’, and demanded they change it. So they did.

Mr Gibson might have lived a loud and unassuming life, but I guess he’s the only person I’m ever likely to meet who lived in a road named in his honour.

As usual, I listened to a number of CDs today.

As unusual, in a fit of unforgivable nostalgia, I am, as I type, listening to a classic album on vinyl (remember that?).

Just for the record (pun intended), after all these years, vinyl still knocks CD into a cocked hat. If you’re after warm and mellow—as everyone should be—digital simply doesn’t cut it.

Vinyl is groovy.

Shargh newspaper:

No, I haven’t the faintest idea what it means either. From what I can gather, it’s Iranian. But, if you scroll down to the end of the article, you will see:

This internet thing is totally bonkers.

The mind utterly, utterly boggles:

New Scientist: Superman too super a role model
Superman is too good a role model. Fans of the man from Krypton unwittingly compare themselves to the superhero, and realise they do not measure up. And as a result, they are less likely to help other people.

Presumably, they’re also less likely to attempt to fly.

It looks as if Mr Springsteen was right—baby, we were born to run:

BBC: Running ‘key to human evolution’
Long-distance running may have been a driving force behind evolution of the modern human body, scientists say. American researchers said humans began endurance running about 2 million years ago to help hunt for prey, influencing the development of the human body. Previous studies have suggested running was purely a by-product of walking. But the study, published in Nature, said humans evolved big buttocks, a balanced head and longer legs to help gather food.

I’m devastated. This completely destroys my theory that our buttocks evolved as musical instruments.

It took me 2¾ hours to get home this evening, driving through unusually early (for the time of year) blizzards.

The blizzards weren’t mentioned on the national TV news.

It would appear they didn’t reach as far as London.