The BBC reported last week that the UK had just seen its biggest moon for nearly 20 years after its orbit brought it closer to earth than normal. Jim O’Donnell of the Royal Greenwich Observatory said it was also “higher in the sky than usual… the combination of those two very rare circumstances gives us a rather spectacular full Moon.” I should cocoa… (bloody difficult taking this photo, I should add).
All posts by tc
Well, I thought it was funny
A couple of weeks ago I was sitting in a bar with some colleagues having a drink after work, when one of them – I forget the exact context – compared the noise of something to “A skeleton falling down a flight of metal stairs.” Not unreasonably, I asked him: “Under what possible circumstances might you have come to know what a skeleton falling down a flight of metal stairs sounds like?” “Ah,” he said, “because I used to own two of those Sound Effects records.” He then proceeded to approximate several intriguingly-titled sound effects such as “Mob rioting”, “Man washing up”, “Wet footsteps”, “Miscellaneous Screams 1-17” and of course the skeleton falling down the metal stairs (which incidentally nearly got him thrown out of the bar). Anyway we had a laugh and the topic was forgotten. Then on Sunday I was sitting in the bath – the place where many of my greatest ideas come to me – and for my own amusement started improvising a list of some of the more unlikely sound effects you might “hear” on a Sound Effects record, thus:
1. Crowd of people wearing dayglo underwear, chatting
2. Fake fur coat tumbling down escalator
3. Telephone not ringing in a lonely person’s apartment
4. Van Gogh canvas being eaten by killer whale (one of a series of impressionist works being fed to ocean beasts)
5. Occasional table being painted (gloss)
6. Occasional table being painted (matt)
7. Occasional table being painted (watercolour)
8. Tony Blair being hit by gooseberry thrown during press conference
9. Mime artist faking orgasm in charity shop
10. Stenographer mis-spelling antidisestablishmentarianism
11. Bedroom door opening, being shut, opening again, being shut again, opening again and then being beaten to matchwood by long-suffering owner
12. Sheet of yellow A4 paper being dropped in the London underground (Mornington Crescent station)
13. Sheet of yellow A4 paper being dropped in the London underground (Knightsbridge station)
14. Skirt being looked up
15. Thai restaurant being bought by cigar-smoking businessman
16. Harold Pinter’s stunned silence at being awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature
17. 91-year-old judge breaking wind discreetly during high court libel hearing
18. Cat being put among pigeons
19. A person when they were nothing but a twinkle in their old man’s eye
20. Bowl of porridge
I then had the brilliant idea that estimable humour webzine McSweeney’s might like this list for their very funny Lists feature, in which clever people contribute amusing lists of things – among recent ones are “Subjects of ‘light bulb’ jokes that will probably lead to boring punch lines”, “Fruit drink flavours that never took off” and “Ways in which the disinterred corpse of silent-film actor Lon Chaney would be a better vice-president than Dick Cheney”. I checked the McSweeney’s site today and found that four new lists have been published in the past week – but than mine is not among them. Okay, so maybe my “Twenty Rarely-Used Sound Effects” lacks the topicality of the Lon Chaney/Dick Cheney one and is somewhat longer than “Leonard Cohen’s Seven Immutable Laws of Business”, but that’s no excuse for giving me the cold shoulder. I even sent my list from a different email address than my usual Thoughtcat one so they wouldn’t think I was cynically contributing a piece just to promote my own site. I mean, honestly.
The entertainment value of mobile phones
When I first established the main Thoughtcat website, I included a page called Overheard in which I jotted down odd things I’d overheard people say in public places. I haven’t updated it in some time; laziness and lack of time have been contributing factors, but at some point it struck me that people weren’t saying many funny things anymore – or maybe I’d just stopped hearing them, I don’t know. On the way to work the other morning though there was one I couldn’t exactly miss. A woman boarded my train and sat down near me; I didn’t notice her particularly, being at that moment absorbed in my book (a re-reading of Stephen King’s On Writing), but she was 30ish, dressed in black and just after she sat down she started knitting. A few minutes later her phone rang and her side of the conversation went something like this: “Hi… oh, right, yeah – you have to sort of lift it as you turn it. Yeah, it’s just a knack. No? It’s not opening? Oh, hang on – wait. You know what I’ve done? I’ve locked it. I’ve locked you in! Damn. Okay, listen. Is the taxi driver waiting outside? Okay – call to him out the window and ask him to go downstairs and knock on the left-hand door. I think it’s number 151, I’m not sure, but it’s the one on the left anyway. Ask him to ask for Deirdre or Ivy, and ask if he can have the spare key to the flat upstairs because Amanda has locked you in. Yeah, that’s right. Okay? Okay, I’m sorry! Call me back when you’ve done it.”
She rang off then, and a few minutes later her phone rang again. “Is everything OK?” she said. Pause. “No, it’s downstairs. The door on the left. Forget Deirdre, get him to ask for Ivy. Is he there now? Call out to him – do it now while I’m on the phone.” Pause. “Okay? Is it sorted? Great, okay, I’ll call you again in a couple of minutes.”
The woman ended the call, did some more knitting and then rang the number again. “Is it OK? Are you out now?” Pause. “Oh, great. That’s good news. I’m so sorry about all this! I’m blonde and I’m pregnant – don’t hold it against me!”
Let them eat sausages
…or not. The Guardian reported on Saturday that a huge consignment of sausages and other “food aid” sent by the UK to the US for Katrina refugees has been rejected by the US authorities over fears about mad cow disease. The aid cost nearly £3m of UK taxpayers’ money. As I wrote in a letter which the paper published yesterday, I don’t know what annoys me more, the rejection or the fact that we sent food to the US in the first place. That the refugees needed food is not in dispute. That the richest, most powerful and most obese nation on earth needs our food is.
Three cheers for Walter Wolfgang
I am very proud to say that Walter Wolfgang, the 82-year-old anti-war activist who was manhandled out of the Labour Party conference this week for shouting the word “nonsense” during a Jack Straw speech about Iraq, lives in my neighbourhood. I sometimes see him shopping in my local Waitrose (a home from home, but that’s another story). He actually used to be a much closer neighbour of mine when I lived in a different part of the town years ago but at that time I didn’t know anything about him. Now the whole world knows about Mr Wolfgang (or “Walter” as Tony Blair called him rather patronisingly in his “apology” for the delegate’s treatment).
The first time I got to know about WW was during the war in Kosovo when I attended a local political meeting. (That invasion seemed pretty dire at the time, although compared to Iraq it now seems a model of legitimacy.) It was a slightly weird occasion – in fact so much so that this was not only the first but the last political meeting I’ve ever been to – where the war wasn’t really discussed but railed against by a bunch of lefty oddballs whose views ranged from moderately critical to downright bonkers. As chair of the “debate”, WW was one of the few calm voices in the room. I have to admit that when I first saw the footage of WW being bundled out of the conference on Wednesday’s Channel 4 News, my gut reaction was that the poor old sod had finally lost it, but I was delighted to see that this was a million miles from the truth.
Yesterday’s Independent lost no time in citing Mr Wolfgang’s treatment as the perfect example of everything that is sick at the heart of the government. As if that front page splash with a photo of WW being led away by police wasn’t enough, today’s front page features a whole article by the man himself about the incident and why he was protesting. It’s excellent: “My case is not important” is the self-effacing opening sentence, while later he describes Blair as “the worst leader the Labour Party has ever had” and observes: “Blair’s instincts are basically those of a Tory. He picked up this cause from the Americans without even analysing it. I suspect that he is too theatrical even to realise that he is lying.” That’s a great line and I think the best and most succinct explanation I’ve yet heard for why Blair has acted (pun intended) the way he has.
So, good on you, Mr Wolfgang. If I ran a restaurant I’d invite you in for a meal on the house but as it is I’ll probably have to make do with shaking your hand the next time I see you in Waitrose.
Getting the blues
I suppose I hardly need add to the column inches (or digital equivalent) laying into the US government’s pathetic response to the Katrina tragedy, but it surely can’t be said often enough that the way the refugees of Louisiana have been treated beggars belief. Yesterday George Bush denied the response was slow or that being black (the affected people, that is, not Bush of course) had anything to do with it. Like Tony Blair denying that the bombings in London on what we must now call 7/7 had anything to do with the war in Iraq, it makes you wonder how it is that the only people who believe the bullshit are the very people we trust to tell us the truth.
Anyway, I’ve been following the series of letters in the Guardian in recent days about the old blues songs about the Louisiana floods of 1927, which documented the same effects of the same sort of disaster on the same poor, black people of the same area. Correspondents have also highlighted Bob Dylan’s “uncanny prescience” in his 2001 song High Water. Although this song was inspired by the work and experiences of Charley Patton, one of the original bluesmen in question, the fact that Dylan had now been brought into the discussion prompted me to look up an old Aaron Neville album called Warm Your Heart (which I was just about to get rid of, oddly enough) which features a cover of Randy Newman’s Louisiana 1927. In honesty I didn’t know who was US president at the time of the original floods until I read the lyrics and found there the reference to Coolidge. Doubting that an ultra-literate songwriter like Randy Newman would have got such a fact wrong, I nonetheless double-checked the reference in Wikipedia before sending the letter above. As my initial link to the Guardian letters of 12th September attests, the reference by the original correspondent to Hoover has now become a matter for the Guardian’s Corrections & Clarifications department. (I also didn’t know what “crackers land” meant, and therefore felt a bit uneasy quoting it, but it was taken from the official Randy Newman site, so should have been correct, and in fact the Guardian, when printing my letter, added an apostrophe – i.e. “crackers’ land” – indicating that “crackers” were the residents of the area in question.) Altogether therefore I feel a bit embarrassed about all this, but this whole story seems to prove that, with the internet as powerful as it is, we’re all experts now.
All of which brings me to the image of my letter at the top of this post. As part of its recent relaunch in “Berliner” format, The Guardian is offering its excellent digital edition of the paper free until 26th September. It’s really just a very trendy version of the website, as all Guardian stories can be read for free on the main site anyway (the standard text version of my letter is on this page for instance), but the digital edition allows you to click on a story and read a PDF or JPG version of the actual paper as printed, from which the above is a clipping. Like a great many things these days I think a digital Guardian is a bit of a luxury (if you’re going to ordinarily pay through the nose for such a service you might as well read the paper and be done with it) but it’s nice nonetheless.
The Berliner Guardian incidentally is very cool but the smaller size feels weird, as if something’s missing. When I went to buy the launch edition at the paper stands in WH Smith I couldn’t find it to begin with – I thought it must have sold out already, until finally it turned up looking a bit sorry for itself in a compartment designed for a normal-sized broadsheet. And it’s still too big not to fold in half when you’re carrying it or laying it down somewhere, but because of the dimensions it feels wrong being folded either horizontally or vertically… but I feel I’ve strayed from the point somewhat. To round off therefore and return to my original topic, here’s a link to a withering attack on the US Federal Emergency Management Agency’s handling of the Katrina disaster, with a mention in it of Russell Hoban‘s Riddley Walker no less. As one of my Hoban friends commented when she saw this, “‘Riddley Walker’ and FEMA on common ground — this is eerie.” Or maybe just scary.
The passing of decent geezers
I don’t know about you, but I have a thing for checking the obituary pages of news websites on a daily basis, generally out of curiosity but also with a note of anxiety – it seems to be looking for trouble. While I will of course want to know immediately if someone important (or important to me) has died, I dread actually reading the words. As it happens, today I didn’t have to go to the obituaries for the sad news of two deaths, as they were headline news. The first is Robin Cook, one of the few modern Labour MPs (and MPs full stop) who could rightly claim to be a man of principle and integrity. I mean, Tony Blair uses every possible opportunity to persuade everyone that he has those qualities in abundance, but there’s a vast difference between doing that and actually having them. Blair, being a lawyer by profession, could defend the indefensible, including (seemingly endlessly) his own right to continue as prime minister, but Cook by contrast was the highly respected cabinet politician who took the rare step of actually resigning from the government over its insane determination to take the UK to war in Iraq. The Guardian/Observer website today publishes an extract from his amazing resignation speech, one of the very, very few truly memorable and moving Commons moments in recent memory.
The second sad “celebrity” death today was that of Ibrahim Ferrer, the great Buena Vista Social Club singer. Admittedly he was 78, but I still mourn the decline (with some Thunderbird wine) of that beautiful voice.
They’ve got ’em
…well, let’s hope it’s them anyway. The police officers responsible for the death of an innocent man still need to be brought to account, but the vast majority of the force, I’m sure, have done a brilliant job, as proven by the news of the arrest of the remaining suspects without a single injury to anyone.
Brazilian’s family claim police altered their story
Oh, right. According to this, Jean Charles de Menezes was not, actually, wearing a bulky coat which could have made him look like he was carrying a bomb underneath it. Furthermore, he did not vault the ticket barriers at Stockwell station – he used his Travelcard to get in.
I’ve also read (although I can’t find the damn article now) that De Menezes didn’t come out of one particular flat or house whose address had been found in one of the unexploded rucksacks, as we were led to believe initially – instead, he emerged from a communal entrance door of a block of flats, which anybody living there would have had to use to get onto the street.
The fact that the police have now apparently arrested one of the actual bombers, having disabled him with a Taser stun gun, raises even more questions about the way they tackled De Menezes.
Innocent man shot in Stockwell
It’s come to something when I find myself agreeing with Jack Straw, but he does have a point that the police are in an incredibly difficult position at the moment. This still doesn’t, however, justify the killing of an innocent man, which we now know to be the case.
I must admit that when I first heard the news on Friday I naively thought the police couldn’t possibly have shot someone who was in any way innocent, as they must have had a foolproof reason for tackling a guy so comprehensively. Then when I heard Jean Charles de Menezes was actually innocent, I still felt that he’d been asking for trouble by running away when challenged and jumping the ticket barriers at Stockwell underground station. This does not, of course, justify a summary execution but it does at least make it easier to see why the police acted as they did under the circumstances. The fact that he was wearing an unseasonably heavy coat which could have concealed a bomb and he initially emerged from an address police found in one of the unexploded rucksacks from Thursday’s botched terror attacks didn’t help his case, but now these details just look like the worst possible bad luck.
It seemed fairly common sense that running from armed police is simply not something you do if you’re entirely innocent of any crime, and that he may have run because he was (for example) carrying drugs or was in trouble over something else which under normal circumstances would have been merely arrestable, as opposed to killable. However, I didn’t originally realise the officers were in plain clothes, and they haven’t said he was involved in any other kind of crime, so the fact that he did run surely proves he wasn’t fully aware of what was going on. To him, the guys with guns chasing him could have been anyone from London muggers to Brazilian mafia – I doubt we’ll ever know the full story.
That said, the police’s case is pretty threadbare. The fact that they allowed him to get onto a bus before they started chasing him doesn’t tally with their defence that he could have been carrying a bomb. It looks like the whole operation was botched from the start, and that the intelligence they had was more than faulty. But on the other hand, in the current climate, if you have even the slightest suspicion that a bloke has a bomb strapped to his body, how you’re meant to arrest him in a peaceful manner without risking death and destruction is very difficult to determine – but nonetheless something for the police to sort out without resorting to murdering innocent people.
Incidentally it’s not that I haven’t been watching the news as closely as everyone else for the past few weeks, but I tend generally to think I haven’t got anything very interesting to add to the fountain of comment gushing forth at the moment. Sometimes though you have to stand up and make an exception…