Dentists, evolution, forthcoming wars, Mars and sex

18 January 2025

Having expensive teeth, I was attracted by a Google ad offering ‘seniors’ cheap dental treatment so, rather than clicking on the link, I googled Nation.com whose website includes a Union Jack (why does this make me wary?) (though not as much as the St George’s flag). 

Its mission is “Nation.com puts in the work to find the most specialized and trustworthy sources for the information you need. We then vet and gather information, then share it in a digestible manner.”

Anyway, under the heading “How to Access NHS Dental Care”, it says “Accessing NHS dental care involves a few straightforward steps … The NHS website also provides a search tool to locate nearby NHS dental practices.”

Isn’t that great!  The only thing that doesn’t appear anywhere in the guidance is how to find an NHS dentist with vacancies; rumour has it that there are no such dentists anywhere in our entire county.

They’re a bit like skyhooks:  really useful.  The only trouble is finding one.

I reckon my grasp of the English language isn’t too bad but I recently came across a sentence comprising three words and I had to look up two of them.  Try it:  “ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny”.  ‘Ontogeny’ refers to the development of an individual from fertilisation while ‘phylogeny’ refers to the development of a species.

This was originally proposed by Ernst Haeckel in the 19^th century but has since been discredited by what appears to be a belief that the development of individuals and species is more complicated than that.  The origin and evolution of species might have turned out rather differently if Haeckel had been right.

But perhaps evolution is too limiting a word.  With people like Donald Trump thundering over the horizon, perhaps the word ‘devolution’ is an alternative in some individuals.

Trump’s already added Canada and the Panama Canal to his list of takeover targets but I wonder if he’s realised that if he also takes over Mexico, Guatemala, Belize, El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua, and Costa Rica, his troops could have a clear run through to Panama to protect America’s right of passage (geddit?) along the canal which he thinks is controlled by China. 

In fact, although Hong Kong has stakes in a couple of ports, ships using the canal are charged fees based on the ships’ weight and size regardless of nationality even though Trump said last month that, if Panama cannot ensure “the secure, efficient and reliable operation [of the canal] we will demand that the Panama Canal be returned to us, in full, and without question”.  Once again, he refused to rule out taking economic or military action.

The history of the canal and the Canal Zone, which included a strip of land on each side of the canal itself, is certainly complicated but The Panama Canal Treaty and Neutrality Treaty, signed by America (and others) in 1977, transferred American control of the canal to Panama on 31 December 1999. 

Other uncertainties about Trump’s forthcoming reign will include the durability of an Israel / Hamas ceasefire, how long Elon Musk will continue to support him, whether he can maintain the economic improvements achieved during Joe Biden’s term and whether he’ll finally understand the ever-increasing impact of the climate crisis (about which he is in denial).  Perhaps somebody will explain to him in short, simple words why ice is melting in Greenland, exposing valuable mineral sources, and why traffic through the Panama Canal is being restricted because severe drought in Panama has reduced the volume of water kept in lakes to top-up the canal.

A report issued by America’s Justice Department last week quotes the special counsel who investigated him as saying that Trump would have been convicted of crimes over his failed attempt to cling to power in 2020 if he hadn’t won the presidential election in November because the department’s policy prohibits the prosecution of a sitting president;  which makes ‘Justice Department’ sound like an oxymoron.

Do you think he’d be immune from prosecution if he drove a Humvee at speed into a large crowd of Muslims kneeling at evening prayer?  Geneva Convention – pah! It doesn’t work in the West Bank where an ambulance stopped at the Balata Palestinian refugee camp in Nablus and five heavily-armed Israel troops got out and did some target practice on people, including an 80-year old woman who’d frightened them. 

Musk of course is a creative thinker with lots of ideas, some brighter than others, and more money than he can use (money is no use if it’s taken out of circulation and locked up in banks and long-term assets like yachts and islands). 

He’s still aiming to colonise Mars and has said that he’ll be launching the first Mars ‘Starships’ “when the next Earth-Mars transfer window opens” in two years’ time , despite Thursday’s launch failure when they managed to recapture the booster but the rocket engines failed one by one and it exploded.  This was shortly after Jeff Bezos’s rocket New Glenn got a satellite successfully into space but its booster was lost.  Why don’t the two of them cooperate? 

I wonder if Musk will be the first man to set foot on Mars or if he’ll be too busy in 2028 campaigning to be America’s next president.

More cheeringly, or not, depending on your age, is that research has linked continuing sexual activity, including straight, LGBT+++, and self-service, into old age (which was defined as anything over 50 – I refrain from guessing the age of the researchers who chose this definition) seems to help delay the onset of dementia.  It also helps lower blood pressure, reduce the risk of prostate cancer in men and can help people keep looking younger, as well as maintaining cognitive activity and verbal fluency. 

So, if you have sex once a week, you’ll be better at remembering what to buy for supper when you’re shopping;  and, presumably, if you have sex twice a week, you’ll be able to remember if you ate it.

Pardons, Wills, films, children and kindness

28 December 2024

A quick update: Joe Biden obviously read my comment that he hadn’t pardoned any federal prisoners on death row because he’s just commuted the sentences of 37 of the 40 of them to life imprisonment without parole. In doing so, he said “I condemn these murderers, grieve for the victims of their despicable acts, and ache for all the families who have suffered unimaginable and irreparable loss … but, guided by my conscience … I am more convinced than ever that we must stop the use of the death penalty at the federal level.” You see the influence I have with American presidents. (Incidentally, have you noticed people are beginning to use ‘trumpy’ as an insult?)

Thinking about death, have you written your Will? In the UK, a frightening number of people haven’t and die ‘intestate’ so, if you’re one of them and superstitious, I can reassure you it doesn’t hasten your death. I wrote my first Will when I was in my twenties and I’m still alive.

I wonder if eunuchs die intesticulate?

Of course, if you really want to piss off your family, don’t do a Will and leave them to spend your money on lawyers to fight through the Courts to get probate (permission to deal with your stuff) before telling your survivors what the law says about who gets what. Does anybody know who got Shakespeare’s best bed?

Remember to allow for contingencies: if you’re leaving everything to your partner and you’re both killed in the same accident, it’ll be assumed the older one died first so their estate will then go to their partner and then, in the absence of a Will, to the partner’s beneficiaries. So why not leave stuff to people on condition they survive you by a set period – 3 months? or until probate is granted? – and, if they don’t, it goes to your children, or your favourite charity?

And do it properly. It needn’t be difficult but it is absolutely vital to get some very precise formalities right, like getting it witnessed. Handwritten notes saying “All to Chris” don’t work unless you’re dying on a battlefield. Many solicitors now do Wills free and larger charities offer support in writing them.

This is the season of films which gives us nitpickers the chance to spot continuity and bad editing. A few years ago, we watched a recorded Christmas special edition of Sherlock. Not having seen any of the original series, we got a bit lost about characters and plot but I did enjoy the interchange between Holmes and Watson in a coach when Watson’s wearing a hat, then he isn’t, then he is again. Mind you, not everybody notices these things and I had to replay that bit to show my wife ‘The Case of the Disappearing Hat’.

There are websites devoted to such errors, including famous ones like a Fiat 500 in the distance in a Roman chariot racing scene, a Viking wearing a wristwatch in another film and contrails in the skies of Westerns. And, in the 1964 Western ‘Cheyenne Autumn’, members of the Navajo nation spoke their own language but, instead of the scripted words, said things like “this man has no penis”.

Which inevitably reminds me of the monologues Joyce Grenfell gave in the role of a primary school teacher, before she went to the big kennel in the sky. Here’s one that, as far as I know, she didn’t write about a teacher explaining metaphors.

“Metaphor, George – that’s very good! Do you know what it means? / It’s a more picturesque way of saying something. / What? / Yes, pictureskew, it’s the same word, but you pronounce it ‘picture-esk’, not ‘picture-skew’. / Well most people do. / It’s like when you’re grown-up and play a game called ‘Hide the Sausage’ but there isn’t a sausage. / Because ‘Hide the Teddy’ wouldn’t … / Teddy bears don’t smell … / You did what on it? / Yes, Amanda, it would be easier for a dog to find a sausage but we’re not talking about dogs. / Well, I wasn’t talking about dogs, I was talking about metaphor, which is a figure of speech. / No, not that sort of figure. / No, not eight either. / No, not even a million, oh gosh, look at the time, it’s nearly time for break so let’s all tidy our desks shall we, spit spot.”

As inspiration for the new year – and thank you to the friend who told me about this – let’s remember the spirit of the beautiful Kindred Spirits sculpture near Cork in Ireland that was ‘opened’ in 2017 by the artist Alex Pentek and a 20-strong delegation from the American Choctaw Nation. Planned to mark its 170th anniversary, it commemorates the 1847 gift of $170 given by the Choctaw people to Irish famine relief during the Great Hunger caused by misgovernment and the repeated failure of potato crops.

The value of the gift in today’s terms is about £5,000 and was given by people who were themselves still suffering after being ‘relocated’ 500 miles from their 11m acres in the deep south of America to Oklahoma in the 1830s by the white occupiers who wanted to grow cotton on their original homelands.

In 2020, when the Covid pandemic badly affected the Choctaw, Navajo and Hopi communities, the Irish people raised an estimated €1m to help them out, many donors each giving €170 in recognition of the original gift.

Gary Batton, the 47th Chief of the Choctaw Nation, said “Adversity often brings out the best in people. We are gratified – and perhaps not at all surprised – to learn of the assistance our special friends, the Irish, are giving to the Navajo and Hopi nations. Our word for their selfless act is ‘iyyikowa’ – it means serving those in need. We have become kindred spirits with the Irish in the years since the Irish Potato Famine. We hope the Irish, Navajo and Hopi peoples develop lasting friendships, as we have. Sharing our cultures makes the world grow smaller.”

Let’s all practise ‘iyyikowa’ in the future, starting now.

Love and peace to you all in 2025.

IgNobel contender, Stonehenge, Shetland’s big bang and English class boundaries

31 August 2024

Scientists have been researching the learning experiences to be gained from licking an ice lolly / popsicle and have called for this to be included in the national curriculum for primary schoolchildren because it introduces them to the concepts of heating and cooling on a personal level.  Surely this must be at least long-listed for an IgNobel prize this year.

Archaeologists have gotten excited recently by the discovery that the ‘altar stone’, now mostly covered by two of the fallen sarsen stones, originated in north east Scotland, Orkney or Shetland rather than the Welsh quarry where a lot of the other big stones came from.  Detailed analyses of the chemicals in the old red sandstone of the altar stone are consistent only with the northernmost sandstone in the UK.

While the Welsh rocks only had to travel some 200km from Wales, this stone came from about 750km away and raises the question of how it was transported.  An ‘easy’ suggestion is that it was carried much of the way by a glacier during one of the ice ages, except that it’s thought that the movement of ice sheets in the far north tended to ‘flow’ northwards, rather than south.  It’s therefore thought that it was probably moved south by a bunch of very dedicated (or stupid) people because it’s known that neolithic peoples did transport stone by sea, but very rarely so far and, even with tea breaks in Stonehaven and Skegness, it would have taken a long time.

It could presumably have been floated up a river to get comparatively close to the site of Stonehenge (even in medieval times, the River Cam was navigable as far as Cambridge) but there was a still some distance to drag the thing overland.

The question that fascinates me more is why anybody bothered to do this instead of using stones available closer to home and I have a wonderful vision of extra-terrestrials lifting it from an outcrop in Orkney and dumping it in the middle of Stonehenge, then giggling all the way home about the theories humans would produce some 3-5,000 years later.

There are also some clever (and funny) answers on the Quora website to a question about why it wasn’t built on the continent. 

In Shetland, during a test firing of nine rocket engines by the German company Rocket Factory Augsburg at the SaxaVord Spaceport in Unst on 19 August, at least one of them exploded.  The resulting fire was impressive enough to make the national news but nobody was injured and the launch pad was saved.  RFA said it was due to “an anomaly” and has said it will return to normal operations as soon as possible.  It added ““We develop iteratively with an emphasis on real testing”.

Why don’t these people speak English?  What all this corporate bullshit means is that they don’t know what happened but they’re going to carry on lighting the fuses again and again until they get it right.

To be fair, the accident did follow a successful test three months ago when they fired the engines for 8 whole seconds without mishap.

For those who are thinking of popping up to Unst to watch the next 8-second test, it’s worth remembering that it costs more to fly there from London, hire a car to drive the last 80 miles (over two RORO ferries) and book accommodation than it does to have a 4-day all-inclusive holiday in Turkey, or Spain or North Africa.

The recent references to Keir Starmer’s describing his background as “working class” started a friend wondering how accurate he was being, which then started me wondering what ‘class’ means nowadays. 

Back in the old days, when we still had mines and steam railways and manufacturing industries, I assumed references to ‘blue collar workers’ were to people who did dirty jobs and whose collars were more likely to show the dirt than if they’d worn white collars.  ‘White collar’ workers were therefore those who worked in offices which were cleaner so they could wear their shirts for more than one day.  This in turn was loosely linked to ‘class’:  ‘blue collar’ workers were working class and ‘white collar’ workers were middle class but such distinctions clearly applied only to the hoi polloi and not to the ‘aristocracy’ who often had no attributes except inherited money and didn’t have to work for a living.

The middle class then decided there should be an upper middle class and a lower middle class but it all seemed pretty arbitrary.  I once helped a market researcher friend who was looking for an AB person about my age to answer some questions for a poll and, when I asked, they said I’d automatically be downgraded to E when I retired.

Generally, the language people used and their accents would immediately disclose their class but as national broadcasts became less picky (it was rumoured that, after reading the news, Wilfred Pickles was disciplined by the BBC when he rhymed ‘Newcastle’ with ‘tassel’ instead of ‘parcel’), accents tended towards estuarine English as glottal stops and tortured vowel sounds tended to be played down.

In the mid-50s, Nancy Mitford took the mickey in an essay that differentiated between the vocabularies used by the English who spoke properly, who were U (‘Upper class’), and them as talked proper, who were non-U. 

Jilly Cooper then added to the fun by writing Class in the 1960s and, as computers made communications more anodyne, the distinctions dissolved even though somebody I knew, who was brought up in the Marches, moved away and still spent a long time trying to lose their ‘working class Erryf’d accent’ to acquire the speech and vocabulary of what they saw as ‘middle class’, thereby becoming ‘middle class’. 

Other distinctions arise from slang and the influence of foreign languages and my mother, who lived in Japan till she was 13, always used the word “spai” (if that’s how you’d transliterate it) for that sharp, dessicating feeling you get when biting into a sloe berry, a word I used for decades before realising it isn’t an English word at all.  Which probably just confirms my ‘E’ classification at the bottom of the class hierarchy.

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.

Scottish dog poo, dementia tests, YouTube, British titles

22 June 2024

This week produced inspiring news from Scotland:  Edinburgh Council has decided not to spend £100,000 on a scheme to catch the dog owners who leave their dearly beloveds’ poo in public places.

The proposal would have involved shipping dogshit to America where its DNA could be identified and matched against a database of canine DNA.

You will immediately see why I enjoyed picturing a bunch of seriously-minded Scots sitting around a table and considering a report on how to deal with the problem after the city had been named as the worst place in the UK for ‘dog-fouling’.

“Och, I well remember when dogs were licensed.  Was it 7/6 it cost?  That’s 37 and a half pee to you, Angus.  We’d have to issue biometric chips and licences, and get PooPrints to upgrade their DNA records.”

“Och Mhaira, I ken £sd, my tooth fairy would leave me sixpence.  And we’d need scanners to read canine microchips and card machines to fine owners of unchipped dogs.”

“Och that’s great material for this summer’s Fringe comedians who sit on stools.”

“Och Duncan, you’re havering again, but we shall need chipwardens on the streets …”

“Och that’ll cost, Mhaira.”

“Och aye.  That’s agreed then – let the wee puppies poo where they want.  What’s next on the agenda?  Feline faeces in flowerbeds!  Would you look at the time.  Meeting closed.”

Other geniuses of the week include the inimitable Donald Trump who accused Joe Biden of being cognitively impaired because of his verbal stumbles and reminded people he’d “aced” a cognitive test while he was president.  He said Ronny Johnson, who “was the White House doctor … said I was the healthiest president, he feels, in history. So I liked him very much.”  This is how lasting friendships are made but it would have been even more impressive if he’d remembered that the doctor was Ronny Jackson, not Ronny Johnson.

Why don’t both Biden and Trump both take tests for early-stage dementia, administered by the same professionally qualified specialist?  These tests do exist because I’ve done one and I aced it with covfefe.

But now a request for advice – all suggestions will be welcome.

I use YouTube to listen to music but I’ve just discovered that there’s all sorts of other stuff on there.  A young child of a friend asked if he could play games on my ipad and I said he could if he promised not to spend any money, so he disappeared upstairs with it.

When he left, he said “Don’t look at my games history” so, naturally, I did.

I’m sure everybody else knew already but I had no idea that YouTube went so far beyond music as to include snuff ‘games’ and videos.  Some are manga videos, with simplistic cartoon figures being cut up and having their heads blown into red blotches while some are more like games I’ve seen older children playing, with more realistic soldiers going through ruined towns and shooting ‘the enemy’.

Before you ask, yes, I’d been through the ipad’s ‘settings’ and introduced all the parental and other controls I could find but these ‘games’ seemed to have by-passed all of them.  They have titles like “This game put me on an FBI watchlist”, “This game made me psychotic” and “Do not tell my therapist I played this game”. 

I was shocked – and it takes a lot to shock me – that people are twisted enough to put them up on YouTube and that YouTube hasn’t attempted to stop them and, worse still, that 6-year- olds can access them so I’ve now got to find out how to limit what can be seen on YouTube.

Any advice on how to limit access to YouTube would be welcome (in simple language please!)  Can I restrict access to YouTube with a password?

My children used to play ‘bang you’re dead’ computer games in their teens and I later asked one of them if he thought the violence in the games had made him more violent and he said he thought not because they weren’t real. 

I also wonder how children’s hearing will survive the repetitive and percussive sounds of gunshots and explosions.  It’s thought that some 37.5 million adults in America, that’s about one in six, are hearing-impaired and many rely on subtitles but, despite arguably having damaged players’ hearing when they were younger, video-streaming and podcasting companies have been slow off the mark in damage limitation.

Films from Europe and the Far East are automatically subtitled, so should films also be subtitled when the words are mostly spoken in the accent of an ethnic minority.  ‘Trainspotting’ for example, which is largely incomprehensible to sassenachs.

Also incomprehensible to everyone (except misogynists) is why the wife of a man who is knighted becomes a Lady while the husband of a woman who is made a Dame doesn’t get any title.  So Sir John Smith’s wife becomes Lady Smith but Dame Jean Smith’s husband doesn’t become Sir Smith.  (A Lady Jean Smith would have got the title from her father, not her husband;  someone I used to know, who died far too young, would get quite cross and say “I’m not Lady Hilary Weir, I’m Lady Weir”.)

However, the title ‘Dame’ wasn’t introduced till 1917 when the Order of the British Empire was introduced and men were men and even the suffragists were still chattels.

David Furnish, Sir Elton John’s husband, recently pointed out a further inconsistency by saying he should have been given a title when Sir Elton was knighted.  What though?  Could you have a Sir Elton whose husband was Sir John?  And what about lesbians? Dame and Lady?  And trans couples – the Knight formerly known as Lady?

That should rock the boat, upset the applecart, put the cat among the pigeons and stir things up as well as taking the wind from governments’ sails and putting a spoke in their wheels.

I’m on David Furnish’s side:  the current system is sexist and unfair so let’s just invent a new title for the partner of people given titles. 

The biggest anti-Semite, Trump the Felon, Labour dithering, bank’s irresponsibility

1 June 2024

The most effective anti-Semite is now proving to be Benjamin Netanyahu.  This week, he excelled himself by killing about 50 people living in tents by bombing the Rafah refugee camp.  He argued that Hamas terrorists could have been hiding there and what are a few innocent lives worth compared with the death of a terrorist.  He didn’t put it in quite those words but the man is obviously bonkers.

His actions have even caused America, until now one of the biggest supporters of the state of Israel, to pull back and limit their support, particularly since reports have claimed the bombs used in the attack were made in America.

Even those of us who were appalled and horrified by Hamas’s unheralded and murderous attack on Israel in October have been even more horrified by Israel’s wholly disproportionate response that has been extended into a genocidal attack on everybody living in Gaza.  People who have unwisely compared this with the Nazis’ holocaust are missing the point:  no desire for racial purity is being claimed, just Netanyahu’s desire to delay his ending up in a criminal court.

We also heard this week that Israel has been using its intelligence agencies to “surveil (sic – how I hate that word, backformed from surveillance), hack, pressure, smear and allegedly threaten senior staff” of the International Criminal Court by intercepting phone calls, messages, emails and documents, for at least ten years, so Netanyahu had advance warning of what they were thinking.

Isarel also made it clear that “we know where you live”, sending pictures of their families to people who didn’t seem to believe the sun rises in Israel and were seeking an arrest warrant for Netanyahu himself.

It is no doubt coincidental that the governments of Ireland, Norway and Spain have decided to recognise the state of Palestine.

How long will it be before Netanyahu joins Donald Trump in having to offer a defence to a court?  Perhaps he’ll do the decent thing and have heart failure first.

Trump himself has been found guilty of all 34 of the offences he was charged with after only 12 hours of deliberation by the jury.  Even though his crimes were committed to hide things from voters deciding whether to elect him in 2016, he’s unlikely to be given a custodial sentence because telling lies in politics and falsifying business records are ‘white collar’ crimes, but he could have to report regularly to New York’s probation department.  If he is – God forbid – re-elected as president, you can imagine it can’t you:  “Sorry Benjie, I can’t meet you next Tuesday, I’ve got to report to my probation officer”.

What amazes me is that his poll ratings have hardly reacted to his exposure as a liar and a thief and devout Republications everywhere are claiming it’s a stitch-up.  I wonder how many of them have read all the documents presented to the court and listened to all the arguments before making this judgement.

Worryingly, his conviction doesn’t prevent his becoming president again.

Which reminds me that the largest and most complete Stegosaurus fossil ever found is coming up for auction at Sothebys in the summer with an estimate of $4m-$6m.  I haven’t seen any reference to the costs of posts and packing but perhaps it’s ‘buyer collects’.

Which reminds me Jeremy Hunt has promised that current tax thresholds will stay the same for six years, thereby forcing millions more to pay more tax, but he’s said wouldn’t increase taxes.  Anybody else spot the self-contradiction?

The Labour party has been getting its knickers in a twist by refusing to let Diane Abbott, who said something stupid and apologised, stand as a Labour candidate but, luckily, commonsense has prevailed and they’ve changed their minds.

Whether Angela Rayner’s intervention, saying she couldn’t see any reason why Abbott shouldn’t stand for Labour, made any difference, we’ll never know, but it stopped Keir Starmer’s dithering.

Rayner had previously been accused by Tories of having dodged tax on the sale of her former council house but she was given absolute clearance this week by the police, the local council and HMRC.  HMRC of course says it never comments on an individual’s tax matters but, somehow, what a surprise, its conclusions were made public and they stated categorically that she had done nothing wrong.

And a final apolitical thought:  have you ever realised how banks have become less and less interested in securing the money they hold on trust for their customers?  These ‘touch and go’ cards mean that anyone with somebody else’s card can use it to spend up to £100 without permission.  Again and again, until their credit limit is reached (or the card’s owner realises and cancels the card).

Well, the banks will no doubt say, it’s just like cash, which anyone else can spend if you lose it.  Except that it isn’t because the chances of dropping several hundreds of pounds in notes in a public place are very much less.

And, if your account is hacked and your money is transferred to an unknown account, will the banks chase it and refund it?  Will they buggery.  You should have had a second level of security, they say.  Why?  Because (they won’t say) their first level of security is grossly insufficient and they don’t have any control systems that pick up things like a first-ever cash transfer to Switzerland, or repeated payments to betting companies that you’ve never made before.

But why should they take care of the money you’ve entrusted to them?  It’d just increase costs.

This has all happened to a friend of mine recently so, if you’re thinking of changing banks, avoid Barclays like the plague.

Bob Dylan 83 not out, Independence Day and election

25 May 2024

The big event of the week was of course that Bob Dylan celebrated his 83^rd birthday yesterday (if anybody that age still actually celebrates birthdays).

It seems impossible to believe that it’s some 65 years since he left the mining towns of the mid-West and headed for New York with his guitar and complete confidence.  What’s even more impossible to believe is that, like Keith Richards, he’s survived so many drugs that are supposed to leave us all toothless and dead.

I first came across him in a TV play called ‘Madhouse on Castle Street’.  The BBC – as was the policy in those days – wiped the tape and recorded something else on top of it so no copy of it remains and the Holy Grail of his fans is to find somebody who’d taped it as it was shown and has the tape in an attic somewhere.  The only thing that sticks in my mind about the play is that one of the characters didn’t say anything but just sat on the stairs and picked away at a guitar and I liked his music so much that I remembered his name. 

Actually, I misremembered his name and thought for a while he was Bob Yellin of the Greenbriar Boys but a friend then lent me Dylan’s first two albums.  I wasn’t that impressed by his voice and returned the records but the songs stayed with me and, looking back, I wonder if it was the sheer energy of his first album.  A guy in his late teens had the chutzpah to take old blues and folk songs, make enough changes to get his name on the record as writer, pick up a guitar and harmonica and blast them into the microphone with the power of a Little Richard.

His second album was mostly songs he’d written himself although, even back then, he was more a lyricist than a composer and re-used old tunes for some of his words (‘Bob Dylan’s Dream’ uses the tune of ‘Lord Franklin’ and ‘Masters of War’ uses ‘Nottamun Town’).  It also included what’s probably his most famous song, ‘Blowing in the Wind’, although this was made famous by Peter, Paul & Mary.

His disdain for reporters and press conferences became obvious very early when he gave answers to stupid questions,  One hack asked him how many real folksingers he thought there were and he came straight back with “A hundred and thirty seven” (if I remember the number correctly).

He’s been through umpteen incarnations and still has the ability to surprise everyone by producing a good album after years of rubbish.  His voice hasn’t improved on the way and is now so wrecked that his latest albums involve his doing little more than talking his way through the lyrics to the accompaniment of a cello, a guitar and soft percussion. 

His lyrics have always been his real strength and he is often a sublime wordsmith.  He even got a Nobel prize for literature and what is widely believed to be his neuro-divergence / Asperger’s left him not knowing how to respond.  He’s certainly never given any signs that he cares what anybody else thinks of him and even a “thank you” at the end of a gig is now pretty rare.

There is a theory that, because he often changes words and adds or omits new verses in performance, he’s a perfectionist and constantly trying to get exactly the right word;  others (like me) thinks he just tries different words because it seemed a good idea at the time.  He sometimes even seems not to decide on a word until he’s singing it:  in ‘Series of Dreams’, he sings “Past the – tree of smoke” and there’s a microsecond pause before “tree” as if he didn’t know what the word was going to be until he sang it.

The other argument against perfectionism is that he’s written some really terrible lyrics and just left them as they are.  Strange really how he’s become so godlike to some fans.  Why His Bobness and not, say, The Boss?

Anyway, Bobbie, happy birthday for yesterday.

The other, comparatively minor, bit of news this week was that we’re going to have a general election on the 4^th of July, Independence Day in America.  Perhaps we can remember all the achievements the Conservatives have wrought over the last 14 years and choose our own independence from them.  But let’s recall their achievements before we vote: Dave introduced the disastrous austerity years and then asked the wrong question about Brexit, thereby getting the wrong answer, and resigned;  Theresa drew red lines which were likely to be drawn in blood in Northern Ireland and resigned;  Boris didn’t take Covid seriously until far too late and resigned;  Liz tanked the economy and resigned and Sunak vowed to “Stop the Boats” by deporting people to Rwanda.  This last pledge has been so effective that the thought of being deported to Rwanda has led to a record number of people crossing to the UK so far in 2024.

The day after his announcement of the date, all four of the serious papers – the Daily Telegraph, the Financial Times, The Guardian and The Times – ran banner headlines on the front page that used the words “bet” or “gamble”, despite Sunak’s new pledges to delay his £500m scheme to fly nasty people to Rwanda till after the election, and to stop his brilliant no-smoking plans that would have been so profitable for the free-black-market.

Sunak even stooped so low as to visit a warehouse where a number of people wearing hi-vis jackets so they looked like workers asked some questions.  It turns out they were actually Conservative councillors and asked really tough questions like “Do you agree you’re the best person to be the next prime minister?”  (Nobody asked if we are all better off after 14 years of Conservative misrule but we all know the answer to that:  according to umpteen surveys and analyses, it’s “No, unless we were already rich and overpaid in 2010”.)

This was after he’d abused Keir Starmer and the Labour party for a lack of policies and solutions to all the problems that had arisen during the last 14 years of his own party’s government.  I sometimes think Sunak isn’t the sharpest pencil in the box.

Vets, fruit, dogs, Strine and what’s under our feet

23 March 2024

Those of you not privileged enough to get the Guardian will have missed a piece in last Saturday’s issue by Lucy Mangan.  Talking about the recent exposure of how vets, especially those that are part of large groups, charge extortionate amounts to people who feel they must do their best for their beloved pets, she said “As the owner of two cats whom I love more than life itself (well, one of whom I love more than life itself – the other one and I are in talks), … I am shocked. And as an upstanding member of western capitalist society, I am appalled to learn that the profit motive could ever lead to unethical behaviour or any kind of corruption, major or minor.”

The idea of her being “in talks” with the “other” cat made me hoot with laughter, leaving half a mouthful of my lunch spread over the table.  Then of course I had to read it to my wife without giggling.

Down under, a fruit and vegetable producer in New South Wales has just won the title for the world’s heaviest blueberry with a fruit that weighed 20.4 gms and is 39.3mm wide.  Isn’t it wonderful how different we all are!  Brad Hocking decided to see if it was a world record;  I’d have wanted to know what it tasted like.

But they do have strange tastes in Australia.  I once asked if they had any proper beer, tasting of hops, served at room temperature with a slight scum on the top.  The response was along the lines of “Bloody whingeing pom.  Beer should be cold, fizzy and taste of aluminium.”  I resisted the temptation to point out that’s lager not beer and, if they can grow massive blueberries, why can’t they manage humble hops, because Bruce – I’m sure that was his name – was twice my height and proportionally muscled.

They also have their own language, collected in a 1965 book called Let Stalk Strine by Afferbeck Lauder*.  It includes translations of ‘Emma Chisit” (“how much is it”), ‘Gunga Din’ (as in “I gunga din, the door slokt”), “Egg nishner” (that keeps you cool in hot weather) and ‘Tiger’ (as in “Tiger look at this, Reg”).

Which inevitably leads to French Bulldogs, flat-faced little dogs that have been bred by vets so they can’t breathe properly without unbelievably expensive treatment.  They’re accepted at Crufts and have become favourites of the sort of female ‘celebrities’ who like to be papped with something furry nuzzling their paps.

According to the RSPCA, their appeal is fading and the number being dumped has risen from 8 in 2020 to 582 in 2023.  The number of other breeds being dumped has also increased but the French Bulldog is the top reject.  Strangely, Staffordshire bull terriers are also being rejected, probably because they’re associated with those illegal bull terriers that go deaf when the ‘owner’ says “Let Go. Give. GIVE.  That’s my doughnut.”  Actually Staffies are rather nice little dogs and rate very highly for being good with children.

As any fule kno, scientists only have a basic ‘understanding’ of what 15% of the universe is made of so they labelled the 85% ‘dark matter’ or ‘dark energy’ (one always feels better if something inexplicable is given a name).  It doesn’t react with electronic forces or light so, basically, it could be anything from an overlap with another universe to the smell left by the iguanas of the gods.

Perhaps I’m alone in thinking this is slightly arrogant for a species that discovered the uses of electricity about 180 years ago and inhabits a microscopic particle of dust in an unimaginably vast universe that came into being about 13,700,000,000 years ago.  In fact, we don’t even inhabit this particle of dust, we live on its very thin skin and know very little about what’s under it.

For instance, we do know that the magnetic north and south poles swap over every so often and scientists have only hypothesised about why this might happen, and when it’s going to change again.  I just worry whether my satnav will still work.

It’s almost 4,000 miles to the centre of the earth and we know very little about the vast bulk of it.  Even one mile down, it is noticeable warmer than on the surface.  It’s thought that the centre is a viscous liquid (if molten rock can be called liquid) with tectonic plates floating around on top of it, tearing the surface apart (at geological speeds) so magma can spurt upwards through the gaps, or crunching together and buckling the surface to throw up mountain ranges like the Himalayas and the Alps.

In an article just published in Nature, scientists from a range of institutions including the California Institute of Technology and NASA’s Ames Research Center claim that the two huge, anomalous structures buried 1800 metres below the surface under the Pacific Ocean and Africa are remains of the ancient planet Theia which, it’s generally agreed, crashed into the earth millions of years ago.

The study was led by Dr Qian Yuan, a geophysicist at Caltech, who believes that this would explain the existence of these “large low-velocity provinces”, or LLVPs, that were first discovered in the 1980s.

And just room for another bit of fascinating information contrasting the tails of dogs and wolves.  It’s been found that hand-reared dog pups wag their tails far more often than hand-reared wolf pups and dogs wag their tails to the right when something has pleased them, and to the left when they are submissive in threatening situations.  Mind you, somebody else has suggested that dogs wag their tails in more than 30 different ways so who knows.  Our dog certainly has very expressive ears that he can operate independently – his favourite position is combined with a look that says “Did you see me back there with the other dog, I was very good wasn’t I, do I get a treat?”

*   You guessed it of course:  alphabetical order.