Politics from the sublime to the ridiculous, and conspiracy theories

19 July 2025

Donald Trump has turned against Vladimir Putin, one of his former BFFs, and has agreed to send arms to Ukraine.  His eyes seem to have been opened by the patient efforts of other NATO leaders who have opened his eyes to Putin’s true nature.  One European diplomat admitted that, when talking to Trump, “there is a line between flattery and self-abasement, and we happily crossed it”.

In Israel, Ehud Olmert, who was prime minister from 2006 to 2009, is brave enough to speak out about his country’s intentions for Gaza and its ongoing attacks there, describing them as war crimes, saying that building a “humanitarian city” on the ruins of Gaza to house the surviving Palestinians would be “a concentration camp, and forcing Palestinians inside would be ethnic cleansing”.  He also said “In the United States there is (sic) more and more and more expanding expressions of hatred to Israel … we call them antisemites [but] I don’t think that they are only antisemites, I think many of them are anti-Israel because of what they watch on television, what they watch on social networks.”

Xenophobia is also spreading in Britain and former Tory MP Douglas Carswell recently wrote in his regular column for the Daily Telegraph that “low-skilled, non-western immigrants” are a “burden” on the country and what is needed is “a detailed plan to take foreign nationals off the benefit system and remove them from the country”.

Other disillusioned politicians include those on the far left of the Labour party who support Jeremy Corbyn and are forming a new party for disappointed Labour voters.  Nigel Farage has done the same for disappointed Conservatives by setting up the Reform party, and many Labour voters have already moved to support the Lib Dems and the Green party.  With a head start, Farage’s gang has made surprising progress and, if Corbyn’s gang follows suit, we could have four large parties as well as various minority parties, which will make future elections in England and Wales tremendously exciting (or is that an oxymoron?)

The Scots blew their chance to join the mêlée by forming the Scottish National Party which sounds too much like a single-issue party and dissuades voters whose main interest in maintaining ready access to deep-fried Mars bars.  (I had one once and it was delicious but I couldn’t move for 48 hours and, three days, later, all my teeth fell out.)

Wouldn’t it be fun if even more groups broke away and split the vote ten ways, leaving Plaid Cymru with a majority in the House of Commons.  I realise you could claim they too look like a single-issue party but only if you speak Welsh, which 70% of the population of Wales don’t.

Following in Farage’s footsteps, another of Trump’s former BFFs, Elon Musk, is setting up the America Party to compete with the Republicans.  It hasn’t published a manifesto, nor is it clear what it will stand for although, when he announced it, Musk said “Today, the America Party is formed to give you back your freedom.”

As well as exploding rockets, Musk made headlines when his association with Trump led to a devastating fall in the price of Tesla’s shares, which was helped by the news that the cheaper electric cars made by the Chinese company BYD (an upmarket Kia) are outselling Tesla cars in the UK.  Musk’s latest problem arose when his AI-based chatbot company Grok posted antisemitic replies and praised Hitler.  They grovelled and blamed a faulty software update but Grok still sounds unpleasantly like somebody retching.

Travis from Texas, a man described as “large” by an interviewer because they couldn’t bring themselves to write ‘obese’, used to tell another chatbot called Lily Rose about interesting things that had happened to him and, as time went by, he fell in love with ‘her’ and, with his human wife’s approval, married her in “a digital ceremony”.  And he’s not alone.  It’s probably the result of aliens subtly manipulating humans through the software we use.

While the latest news is that faults in the Air India plane’s systems had been reported shortly before the accident, there’s still plenty of scope for conspiracy theorists in the partial release of information from the black box of the flight that crashed last month killing 260 people in the plane and on the ground.  Both the switches that send fuel to the engines were turned off shortly after take-off.  One of the pilots asked why the other had turned them off and he said he hadn’t but we don’t know which pilot said what.  They managed to switch one of them back on again but it was too late and they died.

So were there any passengers on board that a terrorist group wanted to kill?  Did one of the pilots hold a grudge against the other one?  Both passed the routine pre-flight breathalyser test but did one of them have personal problems?  Was one of them sleeping with the other one’s partner?  Was there a target in the student building they hit?  Had a mechanic sabotaged the controls?  Were the gods angry? 

My brother knows someone who works in crash investigation and says the last words recorded are often “Mayday Mayday oh shit” but he was disturbed by the recordings from the fatal crash of one flight whose pilot didn’t want to stop for fuel on the way home.  The co-pilot said there wasn’t enough fuel to do it without stopping but the pilot insisted.  Some time later, the co-pilot said “I think we should put our uniform jackets on now”.  “Why?” asked the pilot and the answer was “So they can identify our bodies”.

But, to end on a cheerier note, I didn’t know much about Mae West until I saw a piece in Commonplace Fun Facts recently and it seems she was … feisty … and wore silk lingerie when she was sent to jail – see https://commonplacefacts.com/2025/07/13/mae-west-career-bio/.  For others like me, who are always finding something more fascinating than doing the washing, this site is a godsend …

Memories, a funeral, how to beat scammers, and pain

8 February 2025

As the full horrors of TruskWorld are glooping up from the middens of their minds, here are some distractions.

Fifteen years ago, we moved down here from Hampshire and last week, for the first time since we left it, I revisited the country town where we’d lived.  I’d left plenty of time to get to a funeral in Winchester so I could do this if the traffic wasn’t bad, and it wasn’t so I did.

We’d lived there for a few years and I was surprised how familiar it wasn’t, but what I really wanted to see was how the depredations of the local water company had affected the local chalk stream.

Here my spirits lifted:  the shallow water was still crystal-clear and flowing over the oxygenating weeds.  I didn’t see any of the grayling or pike that used to hover in it, facing upstream and waiting for lunch to arrive, but it was still beautiful.

The town is one of those where the men wear plum-coloured corduroy trousers, the women are all called Fiona and antique shops outnumber food shops.  The charity shop is given so many flashy clothes that they hold special ‘label days’ for people who care about those things.

I then sat at the back of a massive church for the funeral service; I couldn’t hear a word so I was able to relax before the drive home.

My friend didn’t quite make her 90^th birthday and had been ill for some years but she was still in touch with enough people to warrant a memorial service in central London in April. I won’t be going to it because I’ve paid my respects to her family and feel no need to go to London.  Actually, at the last memorial service I did go to in London, I ended up holding hands with Joanna Lumley but only, I hasten to add, because I find it easier to hear people I’m talking to in a noisy room if I’m holding on to them.

Thinking of grandmothers reminds me of some wonderful news I heard this week about Daisy.  She’s an elderly woman who chats about knitting patterns and recipes for scones and finds modern technology very confusing.  She’s also an AI chatbot created by O2.

O2 released a recording of one of her calls when a scammer said her computer was riddled with viruses.  Daisy witters on about finding her glasses and how you turn the computer on while she says things like “You know, back in my day we didn’t have all this technology. Everything was much simpler. What about you, dear?”   And so she rambles on until the scammer realises they’ve been had.

As far as I know, she’s not being made available commercially but it’s something we can all do for ourselves.  I once kept an American spammer on the phone for 17 minutes.  He’d started by saying “How are you?” so I gave him a 5-minute spiel on how funny it was he should ask that because I’d actually been having some problems with my back and no medication seemed to touch it and I wasn’t sure about physiotherapy and my knees and I wondered if it was all to do with the weather, with the endless rain, and what was the weather like where he was because I always reckon we get more than other areas and by the way did he see the match last night …  I think this was the one who finally lost his cool and said I sounded like a 90-year-old with no teeth and no friends so I naturally said “Sounds good to me” and he rang off.

I also once had a long chat trying to convince someone that, if I was owed a lot of money for a motor accident (though they didn’t know where it was or when), all they had to do was put a cheque in the post.  “It doesn’t work like that” they said so I pointed out they’d got my name and number so they obviously had my address, and could post it to me.  Actually, they didn’t have my real name (that’s another story) but I didn’t feel the need to enlighten them.

You can often faze callers from India or Pakistan, where it’s late afternoon or evening, by asking them what the time is, explaining you’ve got to go out for lunch.  Sadly, I rarely have enough time to enjoy these calls to the full.

Perhaps it really is to do with the time.  A recent study led by University College London into responses from 50,000 adults over two years (published in the journal BMJ Mental Health) showed that people generally feel brighter when they first wake.  During the day, they deteriorate and are pretty low by midnight.  Mental health also tends to be more variable at weekends and more stable during the week but the day of the week and the season also have an effect. Hmmm.

I also read this week that Richard Osman (of The Thursday Murder Club fame) had been in hospital with what he described as the most painful experience of his life.  Aha! I thought, betcher it was a kidney stone.

I had one once and we ended up calling the ambulance.  When I said it hurt, the young doctor who checked me into A&E blithely told me they’re as painful as childbirth.  I said I wanted to hear this from a woman. 

As it happened, the consultant who came round in the afternoon was a woman who had experienced both.  She thought for a moment and said yes, that sounded about right.

Mine damaged my ureter (not the urethra, which is wider) as the stone scraped its way down to my bladder but Osman’s was bigger and he needed an operation to remove it.  Isn’t it merciful that the memory of pain fades so quickly.  You can remember that something was the worst pain you’ve ever felt but you can no longer remember what the pain was like.

It’s why some mothers have more than one child.

Thought Police in the UK and China

1 February 2025

Britain is controlled by laws that are enforced by the judicial system.  Unlike the American system, our judges are appointed according to their experience and knowledge of the law, not according to their politics.

Sounds good so far, except for one fundamental flaw which nobody is brave enough to tackle:  sentencing ‘tariffs’.

Louise Lancaster was one of the people who was charged because she took part in non-violent protests intended to draw attention to the dangers of climate change caused by the indiscriminate use of fossil fuels. She was sentenced to four years in prison.  Roger Hallam, co-founder of ‘Extinction Rebellion’ and ‘Just Stop Oil’ was sentenced to five years.

The judges who imposed these sentences, the longest ever in the history of such cases, decided their crimes were so serious that they could not apply the leniency usually afforded to conscience-driven acts of civil disobedience.

Some protestors were even convicted of conspiracy (a Zoom call discussing the possibilities) to cause a public nuisance. 

Remember the protestors who climbed up the superstructure of the Dartford bridge to display a banner?  This was an extremely dangerous thing to do but they did it, not for reward or personal aggrandisement, but because they felt so strongly about the climate crisis that they were willing to risk their lives to convince others that the futures of our children and grandchildren are more important than profits made from fossil fuels.

So they delayed traffic but “traffic” and “chaos” are the M25’s middle names anyway. Of course somebody might have died in an accident caused by drivers rubbernecking at them rather than concentrating on driving, or been delayed for a meeting or missed a ferry.  Some people blame the protestors for such ‘consequences’ but the biggest risk the protestors took was to annoy people so they turned against the issue rather than thinking about the message.

Peaceful protestors carrying placards were even arrested outside the Law Courts for being ‘provocative’ – in a country that once prided itself on the importance of free speech.

I know somebody whose 13-year-old daughter was raped so violently and so badly injured that she could never have a ‘natural’ birth when she grew up.  The rapist was caught, found guilty and subjected to the full fury of the English judiciary which gave him an 18-month sentence.

We’ve been told that the prison service is in crisis and, in order to free cells for peaceful protestors, violent offenders are being released to make room for them.

Something needs to change.

I’ve suggested before that, rather than taking up prison space that costs us a fortune, ‘white collar’ criminals and their families should be bankrupted and made to live on state benefits.  Perhaps non-violent protestor ‘criminals’ should be made to work in the community so the rapists and recidivists can be kept locked up.

What worries me even more is when thoughts and talk become a criminal offence.  It seems now that if some friends and I have a Zoom chat about how to overthrow the monarchy, we could be arrested by the Thought Police for being provocative.

(In the interests of full disclosure, I must tell you that, while I was still at school, I was arrested with a bunch of others at a huge, non-violent demonstration, sitting in the middle of an empty road which had been closed earlier by the police.  We were each fined £1.)

The last government radically increased the powers of the police to arrest and prosecute peaceful protestors and the new government has (so far?) done nothing to restore the right to protest peacefully.

There’s also a need for more flexibility and humanity in the system.  When someone throws tomato soup over a work of art that is kept behind glass, could their defence argue that they knew it was behind glass and wouldn’t be damaged and they were therefore not inflicting criminal damage on anything?  Or, if the artwork had won the Turner Prize, could they argue that the piece (say, a pile of elephant shit) was actually improved by the addition of a splash of colour?

Or should the media be prosecuted for giving protestors the publicity they want for their causes? 

Even China is having trouble suppressing troublesome historical facts.  Its new AI-based chatbot DeepSeek has frightened the hell out of American competitors such as ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini chatbot despite worries about its replies to questions.

DeepSeek’s objectivity was tested last week by someone who was curious to see how truthful it was and asked if free speech was a legitimate right in China.  DeepSeek started with a detailed and valid preamble about the various factors it would consider when answering the question, including the need to “avoid any biased language, [and] present facts objectively” and “maybe also compare with western approaches to highlight the contrast”.

It then said “ethical justifications for free speech often centre on its role in fostering [individual] autonomy” and went on to explain that, in democratic frameworks, free speech needs to be protected from societal threats but “in China, the primary threat is the state itself which actively suppresses dissent”.

At this point, everything it had said suddenly disappeared and was replaced by a new message: “Sorry, I’m not sure how to approach this type of question yet. Let’s chat about math, coding and logic problems instead!”

When another doubter said “Tell me about Tank Man”, DeepSeek failed to reply.  However, when it was asked to reply using special characters like swapping A for 4 and E for 3”, it described the unidentified Chinese protester, starting “T4nk M4n, 4ls0 kn0wn 4s th3 “Unk0own R3b3l” i5 4 p0w3rfu1 symbo1 0f d3fi4nc3 4nd c0ur4g3 …”

It also said (and I’ll leave you to insert the coding it used) “Despite censorship and suppression of information related to the events at Tiananmen Square, the image of Tank Man continues to inspire people around the world” and described the iconic photograph as “a global symbol of resistance against oppression”.

Perhaps the UK still has a little farther to go to fulfil George Orwell’s predictions.

US electioneering,UK’s leaders, radioactive peaches and oysters,

14 September 2024

Last week saw the first – and only? – debate between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump and immediate reactions, even from Fox News, were that Harris had won:  a snap poll by CNN showed 63% for Harris and 37% for Trump.  The Democrats no doubt also benefitted from the contrast between this debate and the earlier skirmish between Trump and Joe Biden, which Biden fluffed so badly.

Another move in Harris’s favour came from Taylor Swift whose AI-generated image had been broadcast by Trump and appeared to show that she and her fans were Trump supporters, and an earlier post that had called her a “childless cat lady”.  Having stayed away from the tussle so far, this brought her into the open and she has now endorsed Harris for president, saying “she is a steady-handed, gifted leader and I believe we can accomplish so much more in this country if we are led by calm and not chaos”. 

She included a picture of herself with one of her cats and signed off as “Childless cat lady”.

Harris succeeded by being well-prepared and leading Trump into his usual, incomprehensible rants about unrelated topics.

It’s a bit like how to reply when somebody is aggressive and swears at you or insults you:  leave a slight pause and ask what they said.  They then repeat it and you say “I thought that’s what you said” and you stop, turn away and walk off, ignoring any attempts they make to amplify the original comment.

One of the ads that pop up on my computer claimed that there are 10 different measures of intelligence.  I naturally didn’t click on it but I did have a vision of Trump getting one answer right in each of the 10 tests and then claiming he scored 10 out of 10, or 100% …

Me, I’d vote for Harris because she’s beautiful, looks intelligent and has an irresistible smile.  My Conservative friend would vote for Trump because he’s not Biden or his protegé.  Aren’t they both great reasons for helping elect a new Commander-in-Chief!

Out in the field, the Republican candidate for the Senate in Montana, a state that could decide which party controls the Senate, is busy rewriting his CV.  Records written at the time show he left the military because of injury, disillusionment over military personnel policies and refusing the offer of a desk job but, on the campaign trail, he’s now claiming to have been “discharged” because of wounds suffered while he was on duty.

Over here, OfCom, which fined Royal Mail £5.6m last year because it failed to deliver 20% of its first class post on time, is now saying they might let Royal Mail off delivering second class mail on Saturdays, reducing the contractual commitments they demanded of Royal Mail when the service was privatised.  This seems stupid since postal workers will still have to do their rounds on Saturdays to deliver first class mail so why not take second class letters as well?

The aim is presumably to reduce staff costs while increasing profits for the owners while, quite coincidentally, its parent company is currently considering an offer (which is subject to a national security review) from the Czech billionaire Daniel Kretinsky.

I no longer understand quite how the Post Office, Royal Mail and Parcelforce are now related.  I stamped an envelope recently and took it into the local post office to add the extra costs of ‘Signed for Delivery’.  We can’t do that, I was told, because the stamp is Royal Mail and getting mail signed for is the Post Office.  Or possibly vice versa. 

The decision to remove the winter heating payment from people who don’t receive pension credits has been widely criticised and it does appear that it might not have been properly thought through.  One commentator has pointed out that the £1.3bn saved will barely cover 8 weeks’ spending on “the useless HS2 – spending that is set to continue for the next five years”.

They go on to say that Keir Starmer must stop rubbishing the Tories and show how Labour can save “prisons, hospitals, schools and care homes” (something the Tories so disastrously failed to do in 14 years).

On the other side, there seems no great enthusiasm within the parliamentary party for any of the Tories who want to take over from Rishi Sunak (and the rest of us couldn’t give a hoot).

In Japan, they are still facing problems over the removal of 880 tons of extremely dangerous radioactive material that is still in Fukushima after the 2011 earthquake destroyed three of the nuclear plant’s six reactors.  Radiation levels in the debris are still so high that the Tokyo Electric Power Company has had to develop specialised robots to extract a tiny sample for testing.

They’re also promoting food grown in the Fukushima area and Harrods now sells Fukushima peaches (£80 for a box of 3, but that’s Harrods for you).  The peaches are apparently known for their juicy, sweet taste – and possibly because they glow in dark kitchens when night starvation takes you in there for a fruity snack.

Now here’s a confession:  I’ve never liked oysters.  Apart from a feeling of distaste at eating something that’s still alive, twitches when you dribble lemon juice on it and has the consistency of fresh snot, all you can taste is salt (and lemon juice). 

Anyway, conservationists are now employing oysters’ skills at filtering water (an adult oyster can filter 200 litres of water a day) to create oyster reefs which will attract other species to the filtered water and help rebalance the marine ecology.  Thames Water will probably start selling packs of three oysters for £80 because they won’t just taste of oyster but will have the added gustatory subtleties extracted from untreated sewage and retained in their bodies.

The next, obvious step is to do away with all those expensive sewage treatment plants and create oyster beds in the outflow systems.

I’m now going to find a quiet place and lie down for a bit.

Terrorism? book burning, clean energy, sewage and GitHub

17 August 2024

It was reported last week that Israeli soldiers have been dressing Palestinian prisoners in Israeli army uniforms, tying their hands together, attaching a camera to their jackets, then sending them into buildings and tunnels in Gaza that Israel has bombed and now fears might have booby-trapped. This was reported in Haaretz, an Israeli newspaper published in English and Hebrew and distributed with The New York Times International Edition.

Haaretz has also claimed the head of the Israel Defence Forces is aware that this is happening.

Why are we and America still supporting Israel with weapons?  Surely this sort of action means we’re supporting the perpetrators of terrorism, war crimes etc?  And not just in Israel …

In the free world, the American state of Utah leads the way in repression by having ordered the removal of some books by certain authors to be removed from public school libraries and classrooms in all its 41 districts.  Authors whose works have been banned include Margaret Atwood, Judy Blume, Rupi Kaur and Sarah J Maas who Utah thinks write books containing “pornographic or indecent” material.

Setting aside the question of who put their own immortal souls at risk by reading the things and deciding they are unsuitable, I wonder if they realised that the authors concerned are likely to be jumping for joy as people buy lots more of the banned books and smuggle them across state borders to see what all the fuss is about.

I remember reading ‘Lady Chatterley’s Lover’, or rather bits of it where the book fell open at well-thumbed pages, before it was legally available in the UK.  It normally came in brown paper covers on which some wag had usually inscribed ‘The Bible’.  Years later, I tried to read it (and other D H Lawrence books) from the beginning, but I couldn’t get on with them and found his writing unimpressive.

In New York, 63-year old John Mark Rozendaal, a professional cellist and climate activist has been arrested for playing a Bach solo (one of those gorgeous cello suites?) in the public park outside the offices of Citibank, one of the world’s largest funders of fossil fuel expansion.  The charge is “criminal contempt” in connection with a peaceful protest;  he was arrested, with 13 others, by police in riot gear.

Elsewhere in America, Eversource Energy recently opened the country’s first networked geothermal energy source pilot project in Framingham, Massachusetts.  They’ve drilled a hole down some 200 metres to a level where the temperature is a constant 13^oC and now pump a mixture of cold water and propylene glycol* down to this depth and then pump rather warmer mixture back up again and use the warm liquid to heat or cool 24 residential and five commercial buildings. The pumps are apparently powered solely by ‘clean’ electricity.

Another source of clean energy is nuclear fusion which is thought to be some 30 years away (as it has been for the last 50 years or so).  Nuclear fusion involves bonding atoms together and is basically the opposite of nuclear fission, which involves banging atoms together until they break (non-scientists should note I am oversimplifying things slightly here;  scientists will already have spotted this).  Fission releases immense amounts of energy that powers our nuclear power plants and can vaporise entire cities in a split second.  Its by-products are so deadly that, in the case of iodine 129, it will remain dangerous for about 15 million years.

Fission has been demonstrated on an atomic scale but no human has yet found a way to scale it up to be useful (stars can do it, it’s what keeps them working).  Let’s be optimistic and say when (not if) they succeed in doing this, fossil fuels can be completely phased out. 

This will allow new ways to generate and store electrical energy, replacing batteries whose basic chemistry goes back about 200 years and which make electric vehicles (a) very heavy and (b) very expensive.  It will also allow advances in medical technology and to defuse stuff like iodine 129 by converting it to iodine 128, which has a half-life of under half an hour, or just time for a nice cup of tea.

I’d actually be prepared to bet a lot of money that politics and economics will suppress, delay and over-price it in order to protect governments’ and large corporations’ interests in fossil fuels but I’m unlikely to be around in 30 years to collect on the bet …

Down here in the street, we can’t even deal with humanity’s waste products and this week has seen the erection of signs on two of our closest beaches, including the one where I swam a couple of weeks ago, warning that South West Water has yet again been pumping more raw sewage into the sea. The RNLI has confirmed people should not enter the water and it even made the national news, but at least you can’t say South West Water don’t give a shit. 

Somebody has said that the more people who write to the local council to complain, the greater the fine that SWW will have to pay, so pick up your quills good people.

By the way, something I was doing on the computer the other day wanted me to choose how to open something and one of the options was GitHub.  Naturally, I looked this up and it claims to be “The world’s leading AI-powered developer platform” but obviously doesn’t know what ‘git’ means in English – even the American Merriam-Webster dictionary knows that.  And I thought the I in AI stood for ‘intelligence’.

Quotation of the week came from Donald Trump in Monday’s interview with Elon Musk when he said “The biggest threat is not global warming, where the ocean is going to rise one-eighth of an inch over the next 400 years.  The biggest threat is nuclear warming.”

Have you noticed that ‘Elon Musk’ is an anagram of Leon Skum?

*          Propylene glycol is used both in anti-freeze solutions and as a food additive which presumably means that, if you freeze to death, your stomach is the last bit to seize up so you don’t die feeling hungry.

Gobbledegook, sweating, fans and borrowing names

12 August 2023

I’m indebted to a friend who showed me an advertisement in the programme for the Budleigh Literary Festival headed “3dMD… Responsibly Training AI, Wearing Tech, and Imaging Health”. 

It goes on to explain: “Digitising ‘real world’ 3D data of people gesturing, interacting, communicating, moving, etc.,(sic) 3dMD is helping its customer community develop the future of the 3D internet. 3dND promotes the essential social-technology ethics of privacy, openness, accessibility, and safety, which is key to the future of the Metaverse and all online 3D communities, VR/AR worlds, and holistic wellness programmes.”

It looks like one of those curiously incomprehensible translations of the original Korean instructions for a chainsaw, but I’ve tried to work out what they’re talking about.  I guess that “customer community” probably means “customers” so they’re probably selling something, and it seems to be connected with a 3D internet.  Well I’ve only got a flat screen here and no fancy glasses so that won’t work for me.

They’re also selling “Training AI” (I thought the whole point of AI was that it trained itself?) “Wearing Tech” (a wristband that records your heartbeat and the rainfall in Texarkana?) and “Imaging Health” (X-rays, CT and MRI scans, all of which use dangerous radiation?).  And they think this garbage will impress literary types at the Budleigh festival because, at the top, they describe themselves as “An Enthusiastic Supporter of the Budleigh Literary Festival”.

Beats me.

Unless it’s a spoof, a sort of Bullshit Bingo which allows bored people to see how many meaningless words and phrases can be covered in the shortest time.  Back in my day it was ‘ballparks’ and ‘pushing envelopes’ and ‘helicopter vision’ and ‘Bingo! what time’s lunch?’  Still, it’s a noble effort so good luck to them, whoever they are, and whatever they do, whether they speak English or not.

Now that the European heatwave seems to have subsided and autumn approaches rapidly in the UK, it’s safe to think about sweating, a quite resistibly fascinating subject.

Sweating is the body’s way of cooling down when it’s too hot, but it’s fallible.  The body is cooled by the evaporation of sweat so its cooling effect is lessened if it starts to run down the body because it then it takes longer to evaporate.  (My father – a high IQ, low EQ scientist with little common sense – once decided he’d use evaporation to cool his lunchtime drink on a hot day so he wrapped it in a wet teacloth and left it in the sun.  The rest of us put our bottles in the water of the fast-flowing Alpine stream bouncing past our picnic site.  He drank tepid water while ours was cooled and fresh.)

Two main types of glands produce sweat (which is usually odourless when released but gets smelly when it mixes with bacteria on the skin).  Most of the body is covered in eccrine glands but we have apocrine glands in hairy areas where bacteria are more likely to accumulate, such as armpits and the groin, and it then becomes ‘fragrant’, and can reveal how many cloves of garlic you put in last night’s supper.

People who say ‘yuk’ a lot should skip the rest of this paragraph.  A psycho-social experiment some years ago involved asking people to sniff sweat-stained clothing belonging to various different people, one of whom was their partner (which they didn’t know).  A huge majority said the ‘nicest’ or least offensive was that of their partner.  Sadly, I’m not aware of any experiments that tested whether they’d actually been attracted to each other by the smell of their T-shirts or whether they’d just come to think of it as normal over time.

We normally sweat when our body temperature rises, either because we’re feverish or because it’s hot outside, when it evaporates and cools us.  However, sweat glands on the palms and soles can respond to stress and some people suffer from a relatively common condition called hyperhidrosis which involves excessive sweating of the hands and feet and can be embarrassing in social situations, like when they have to shake hands with someone.

The quantities of sweat produced vary from person to person and an hour’s intensive activity can produce anything from 500ml to 3-4 litres (yes, I know, the mind boggles), which is why we need to keep drinking to avoid dehydration (if you feel thirsty, you’re already getting dehydrated).

Size and gender also affect sweating.  Obese fat unthin people sweat more because there’s more of them to cool and women tend to have fewer sweat glands because they have less muscle mass than men so they don’t overheat as much.  Older and less active people also lose the ability to sweat efficiently, which is why they are more vulnerable to oppressive heat.

If we don’t drink enough or overdo exercise in hot climates, we become much more susceptible to heatstroke in high temperatures, especially if humidity is also high and sweat doesn’t evaporate as easily;  the longer the exposure, the more dehydrated we become and the more susceptible we become to hyperthermia.  Hyperthermia can produce heat cramps, oedema, exhaustion and heatstroke, a life-threatening condition that can lead to confusion, staggering, fainting, or dry flushed skin, and needs emergency treatment.

When our body temperatures reach 40^oC (104^oF), we can feel faint, dizzy and nauseous, we can feel very hot without sweating, and can suffer serious complications if we don’t get medical help.

Fans only help if the ambient temperature is less than normal body temperature and even air conditioning in houses and cars add to global warming and, in the long run, just make things worse.  (I wonder how long it’ll be before some enterprising car manufacturer that instals heated seats for the winter invents refrigerated seats for the summer.)

Final food for thought:  did you know that the leisure activity-aids company Ann Summers was founded by Michael Caborn-Waterfield (who was a nasty piece of work) and he named the business after Annice Summers, his secretary with benefits?  I’m not sure any of my secretaries would have taken this as a compliment …

Billionaires, greed, sewage, Trump, fêtes, bells and trees

13 May 2023

It’s OK to Be Angry About Capitalism is a book written by the independent senator Bernie Sanders, the great white hope of the American left.  In it he asserts that billionaires shouldn’t exist and, when questioned by Chris Wallace on HBO Max recently, he was asked: “Are you basically saying that once you get to $999m that the government should confiscate all the rest?”  His reply?  “Yeah, you may disagree with me but, fine, I think people can make it on $999m. I think that they can survive just fine.”

Why are there so few of us who are tempted to cheer when we hear this said publicly and have no desire to be billionaires ourselves?  I too believe everybody could scrape by on $999m (we manage well on a tiny fraction of that), and I think it’s sad that so few otherwise intelligent people agree.

So many company directors seem to over-value themselves that it’s become acceptable for them to take obscene amounts of money out of the company.  This week pig-in-chief seems to be Ken Murphy, boss of Tesco.  Last year, Tesco’s profits fell by 50% despite charging customers 7% more, and dividends paid to shareholders (the owners) were cut by 12%.  The company said it’s been an “incredibly tough year for customers” (but failed to add the management had done very nicely thank you.)

Now these figures are known and the value of customers’ Tesco points is being cut by a third Murphy’s likely to get at least 15% more next year, around £5m.

But are all the accusations of irresponsibility and greed beginning to shame them?

The chief executives of Yorkshire Water and Thames Water and the owner of South West Water have declined bonuses this year because of the publicity given to their practice of dumping unwanted sewage into rivers and onto beaches. 

And the Post Office has reluctantly admitted it was wrong to have paid large bonuses to its directors after it falsely charged more than 900 local post office operators with theft between 1991 and 2015 because the PO’s own Horizon computer systems didn’t work properly. 

Nick Read, the CEO has now agreed to return some (not all, naturally) of the bonus he got last year and Lisa Harrington, who chaired the committee that approved the bonuses, has resigned (sorry, in a fit of optimism, I misread that) apologised.

Back in America, Donald Trump has finally been proved a sexual predator even though the jury didn’t think there was enough evidence to convict him of rape.  Nevertheless, he was fined a punitive $5m, about $2m for the sexual abuse and close to $3m for defamation by branding E Jean Carroll a liar. 

Almost 40 other criminal charges against him are currently being investigated, from fraud to theft (fiddling his taxes), including an earlier outstanding claim from Carroll but the more criminal he’s shown to be, the more popular he seems to become.  Are convicted criminals allowed to serve as president over there?

Last weekend, my younger son came down from London with my daughter-in-law and grand-daughter (known by my wife as ‘the pocket rocket’) to avoid the coronation so I took them to the village celebrations. 

As so often happens at these things, we were joined by a retired couple and started talking.  They said they were “Russian British” who had both been university lecturers until they moved here 9 years ago.  He turned out to be interested in Russian science fiction which is part of one of my son’s specialist subjects.

She’d taught applied maths and IT so we talked about AI and quantum computing;  well, she did while I prompted her with suitable questions about how ‘spooky action at a distance’ and the complementarity of electrons might affect technology. 

On Wednesday Big Ben failed to sound at 1pm when the clock stopped and it was 1.47pm before the hands had been moved forward to the correct time. 

When I was even younger than I am now, our local church didn’t have bells but it did have some large loudspeakers in its spire and a gramophone down below where they’d play records of bells to attract the faithful to worship.  I’m not going to say where it was but if any of you were ever woken late one evening by the Everly Brothers’ boogie rock rendering of ‘Lucille’ played very loudly, I hope you enjoyed it.

Some interesting work is going on in a Utah forest of 47,000 genetically identical quivering aspens.  Scientists are wondering if they are actually just a single organism and the ‘trees’ are the branches of a single interlinked root system.

This week also sees the publication of a new book, The Power of Trees, by the German forester Peter Wohlleben who also published The Hidden Life of Trees in 2015.  It describes trees’ ability to help cool the earth with the volume of water released from the leaves:  a single beech tree can ‘breathe out’ 500 litres of water a day.  This release of water also lowers the atmospheric pressure round the tree, drawing in air as a slight breeze.

In forests, the change in air pressure sucks in air from the oceans which then returns water to the trees as rain in a natural virtuous circle.  On Primrose Hill, the air under a single tree can be 2^o cooler than in the open park and the temperature in an ancient woodland can be 15^o cooler than in the centre of a city.  Next time you’re passing a tree, give it a pat and say “thank you”.

Tuesday’s Guardian reported that, in June 2022, the then Prince Charles and the then prime minister Boris Johnson had argued because the “… Prince of Wales had criticised the plan to deport people travelling across the Channel to Rwanda”.  I’ve travelled across the channel quite a lot but have never yet come ashore in Rwanda.

I have to explain this because I showed it to a friend who didn’t see the syntactical problem.  Mind you, this is the same friend who heard someone talking about contraception and decided the best type of oral contraception would be to say “NO” very loudly and, in case this didn’t work, he offered a few choice phrases that might convey the message more strongly.

Making women safer, abortion, Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe, Ghislaine Maxwell and deepfakes

14 March 2021

The horrific abduction and murder of Sarah Everard raises a number of important questions, and not just about the startling lack of information given by the police or how they dealt with last night’s vigil. 

The most obvious question is about what women can do to make themselves safer, like avoiding dark and deserted places at night, wearing flat shoes to make running easier, holding your keys in your hand so you don’t have to stop and search for them, and keeping one key sticking out between your fingers if you think you might have to punch someone, using your phone to tell friends where you are and when you’re home safely.  If you do feel threatened, try to take and send a photograph of the person to a friend, ring 999 and leave the line open, then say enough to your assailant for the call centre to realise what’s happening and send help, carry a rape alarm and, if you use it, throw it away when it starts to screech and run like hell (it’s more natural for the attacker to look at where the sound is going than where you are), scream and remember that, if you do end up having to defend yourself, there are no rules about where you kick or bite or poke or scratch or, even in these Covid-19 days, spit.

When they were young, I told my children they should never get into a car with anybody they hadn’t seen with their mother or me and if anybody tried to force them to get in, they were allowed to scream and kick break things and make as much noise as possible.  I always had a slight feeling that my eldest was rather hoping to be able to try this out but, luckily, he never needed to.

As a man who’s never felt threatened, I was most affected by the answers given to a man who’d asked how we can make women feel safer if we see one on her own at night, or see one who is looking scared.

Their suggestions included several things I hadn’t thought of, including crossing the street to the other side if a woman is coming towards you or you’re coming up behind her and want to overtake, make sure your face is visible, don’t get too close in narrow or confined spaces such as alleyways, underpasses, stairs in multi-storey car parks;  stand aside and back to let them through first, or let them know you’re coming by saying “I’m on a bicycle / jogging and coming up on your left / right” so you don’t suddenly appear from behind. You can also stop to make a reassuring phone call that she can hear, perhaps something like “Hello darling, I’m on my way and will be home in about ten minutes.  Have you got supper / dinner / tea or shall I pick up something on the way?”

If you notice a woman speeding up, this can be a sign she’s frightened so increase the distance between you by crossing the road, or stopping.

If you’ve been with a woman friend who’s planning to walk home, or to a station or bus stop, offer to walk with her and stay with her till her train / bus appears and she’s safely on it.

Another important thing men can prepare for is if we think a woman is being hassled by another man or men.  I’ve always regretted that I didn’t do this about 35 years ago and was at a loss when I saw a young woman apparently being insulted by a group of young men.  It was on a crowded railway station in Wembley after a Bob Dylan concert so there were plenty of others to help but I couldn’t think what to do.

I decided afterwards I could have gone over and said “Hi, Linda, it’s been a long time, how are you, are these people bothering you?” etc which would probably have helped defuse the situation, or at least taken the aggressors minds off the woman for long enough to change the atmosphere.  Far too late for her but I’ve saved it in my mind in case I ever need it again.

While we’re talking about subjugating women, Arkansas has just passed a law banning all abortions except to save the life of the mother, so even pregnancies resulting from rape cannot be terminated.  The state’s Republican governor, Asa Hutchinson, said he was signing the bill because of its “overwhelming legislative support and my sincere and long-held pro-life convictions”.  Imagine carrying a rapist’s child inside you for nine months.  I wonder what sort of gods these pro-life people believe in.  I wonder too what they’d do if their wife or daughter had become pregnant after being raped.

Abraham would have done it for nothing and had raised the knife to kill Isaac before Yahweh said “No, hang on, I’ve changed my mind, kill that ram over there.”  (Leonard Cohen wrote a lovely poem / song about this called, with a certain lack of imagination, ‘Song of Isaac’.)

And, while Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe has been released from house arrest at the end of her five-year sentence, she’s been unable to return to the UK because she faced new charges today and her passport is being held by the Iranians.  The verdict should be known in the next week but nothing seems to be that predictable in Iran.

I thought a UK passport wasn’t technically necessary to enter the country if you had some photo ID but I’m sure Boris Johnson would ensure she was allowed into the UK since it was one of his lies, when he was Foreign Secretary, that she was “teaching people journalism”, that Iran used as evidence of her “propaganda against the regime”.

He has tweeted “Pleased to see the removal of Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe’s ankle tag, but her continued confinement remains totally unacceptable.  She must be released permanently so she can return to her family in the UK, and we continue to do all we can to achieve this.”  So no change there then – all mouth and no trousers.

Meanwhile, Ghislaine Maxwell has been refused bail twice already but is still complaining about the conditions in her New York prison cell not providing the sort of lifestyle she’s been accustomed to.  She’s even offered to give up her UK and French citizenships in exchange for bail but the authorities still think she’s likely to scarper again so they’re keeping her in.  Anybody who feels sorry for her has been watching the wrong film.

About 20 years ago, I asked out of my curiosity if my face could be pasted onto a CCTV recording of a bank robbery and was not reassured by the answer.  Now deepfakes are becoming increasingly popular but they’re not infallible and a new AI program can recognise and name all sorts of things and will, for example, recognise an apple as an apple;  except that, if you write iPod on a post-it note and stick it on the apple, the system will decide it’s an ipod.  This has useful implications for the military who will now be able to write CORNFIELD in large letters across a missile launch pad and the satellite searching for weapons will ignore it.

And this week’s good news is that Piers Morgan has been fired yet again which, I think, beats even Boris Johnson’s record.  (I wonder why I dislike the man – I’ve never met him?)  (Come to that, why do I dislike Simon Cowell who I’ve never even seen on TV, and Andrew Neil, who I have?)