Thursday, October 04, 2007
More beef
A day for a sirloin steak. Unusually, a single steak cut from the bone on the spot, having caught the butcher preparing a bunch of steaks for some order. Usually get a rather smaller steak from a fillet which has been taken off the sirloin in a peice. Excellent steak - sharing an oddity with the last one I had, some weeks ago. That is to say, odd little bubbles of white froth, micro volcanoes, appearing on the surface of the meat towards the end of its cooking. Hard to beat hot steak with fresh white bread as a lunch-time snack.
Is it only in England, that the shooting down of an innocent (OK, so some say he was also an illegal immigrant) sitting in a tube train having been followed from his home because he looked like a terrorist suspect only makes it to the courts as a prosecution brought by the Health and Safety people? Perhaps we should be grateful that it made it to the courts at all (and remember the scarily large number of places in the world where they barely have courts at all). Perhaps the use of the Health and Safety prosecution was a compromise agreed between the CPS and Police to avoid upsetting the latter. Not so impressive is that, while the Diana inquest attracts the full panoply of a government website (http://www.scottbaker-inquests.gov.uk/) to bring you all the latest news, no such facility appears to have been granted to this prosecution. A search on Google did not reveal any such thing - indeed there did not seem to be all that much out there at all. Maybe the real Diana conspiracy is the way that she is being used to divert attention from more important matters.
While it was news to me that the victim did look rather like the suspect, I remain of the view that it is not acceptable for people to be shot in this way. That there is an unpleasantly macho culture in the relevant parts of the police (do you really need seven especially lethal bullets in the head to do the business and remember the other lethal accidents that the same force has been involved in over the years) compounded with hopeless management and procedure. OK, so everyone was running scared at the time and operations of this sort are likely to look like a mess when peered at afterwards: but we have to do better. Otherwise what are we fighting for?
Earlier in the week, by accident, to the Magic Flute. The first time I have seen such a thing for ages. I had not realised how like a pantomime set to decent music they were. And as elsewhere, the good guys have a job not to appear very dull (Kevin Costner used to be a real pro at these sorts of parts. He must have been born dull): the bad guys get all the decent parts. Most entertained by the stunts with doves at the opening - lets hope that the RSPCA or the RSPB don't get their claws into cruelty to birds while rehearsing them. And not being terribly hot on choral stuff generally, was struck by the similarity of some of the music and singing to the cantatas that had been written a hundred years previously, presumably to be used during a mass.
I notice that Liberty's managed to get £7,000 or so for a Mad Hatter's tea party which used to grace its window. Which led us to ponder how one might get such a thing made and how much it might cost. We decided that the idea was the main thing. After that you needed a few props - mainly tea set china - and four figures, mainly head. Presumably the people who knocked up the Spitting Image figures could do the business. As could an half decent art college? So we decided that the whole thing could be done for a couple of thousand. And so unless one was in a tearing hurry, no need to pay seven for the one from Liberty's. Maybe one could have a contest between ten teams from the Surrey College of Art or whatever it calls itself these days. Give each a budget of £1,000 and see who has done the best job in two weeks. All we need now is a sponsor.
The TLS was vying for a place in pseuds' corner last week. There was, for example, a call for papers on 'The sword of Judith: feminine agency and the aesthetics of terror'. Or if you don't facny that there is something called 'Modeling interdisciplinary inquiry: a postdoctoral program in the humanities and social sciences'. Has the methods industry escaped from the management consultants and made it to academia? And we learn from the same issue that Mr and Mrs Hawking will very shortly make it to the Cheltenham Literature Festival. I wonder what an older, very disabled and very eminent astromer has to offer the assembled literati? What on earth will he talk to them about? What will his wife contribute? And if you do not fancy Cheltenham you can go to Woodstock where they have a rival event - this one graced by Ms Truss and the Folio Society. This last being a gang (to whom I have to own that I once subscribed) who produce books which manage to be both bad and pretentious - from a book production point of view that is. Not a pleasure to own at all - with the exception of 'The Rainbow' which is quite reasonably done.
Is it only in England, that the shooting down of an innocent (OK, so some say he was also an illegal immigrant) sitting in a tube train having been followed from his home because he looked like a terrorist suspect only makes it to the courts as a prosecution brought by the Health and Safety people? Perhaps we should be grateful that it made it to the courts at all (and remember the scarily large number of places in the world where they barely have courts at all). Perhaps the use of the Health and Safety prosecution was a compromise agreed between the CPS and Police to avoid upsetting the latter. Not so impressive is that, while the Diana inquest attracts the full panoply of a government website (http://www.scottbaker-inquests.gov.uk/) to bring you all the latest news, no such facility appears to have been granted to this prosecution. A search on Google did not reveal any such thing - indeed there did not seem to be all that much out there at all. Maybe the real Diana conspiracy is the way that she is being used to divert attention from more important matters.
While it was news to me that the victim did look rather like the suspect, I remain of the view that it is not acceptable for people to be shot in this way. That there is an unpleasantly macho culture in the relevant parts of the police (do you really need seven especially lethal bullets in the head to do the business and remember the other lethal accidents that the same force has been involved in over the years) compounded with hopeless management and procedure. OK, so everyone was running scared at the time and operations of this sort are likely to look like a mess when peered at afterwards: but we have to do better. Otherwise what are we fighting for?
Earlier in the week, by accident, to the Magic Flute. The first time I have seen such a thing for ages. I had not realised how like a pantomime set to decent music they were. And as elsewhere, the good guys have a job not to appear very dull (Kevin Costner used to be a real pro at these sorts of parts. He must have been born dull): the bad guys get all the decent parts. Most entertained by the stunts with doves at the opening - lets hope that the RSPCA or the RSPB don't get their claws into cruelty to birds while rehearsing them. And not being terribly hot on choral stuff generally, was struck by the similarity of some of the music and singing to the cantatas that had been written a hundred years previously, presumably to be used during a mass.
I notice that Liberty's managed to get £7,000 or so for a Mad Hatter's tea party which used to grace its window. Which led us to ponder how one might get such a thing made and how much it might cost. We decided that the idea was the main thing. After that you needed a few props - mainly tea set china - and four figures, mainly head. Presumably the people who knocked up the Spitting Image figures could do the business. As could an half decent art college? So we decided that the whole thing could be done for a couple of thousand. And so unless one was in a tearing hurry, no need to pay seven for the one from Liberty's. Maybe one could have a contest between ten teams from the Surrey College of Art or whatever it calls itself these days. Give each a budget of £1,000 and see who has done the best job in two weeks. All we need now is a sponsor.
The TLS was vying for a place in pseuds' corner last week. There was, for example, a call for papers on 'The sword of Judith: feminine agency and the aesthetics of terror'. Or if you don't facny that there is something called 'Modeling interdisciplinary inquiry: a postdoctoral program in the humanities and social sciences'. Has the methods industry escaped from the management consultants and made it to academia? And we learn from the same issue that Mr and Mrs Hawking will very shortly make it to the Cheltenham Literature Festival. I wonder what an older, very disabled and very eminent astromer has to offer the assembled literati? What on earth will he talk to them about? What will his wife contribute? And if you do not fancy Cheltenham you can go to Woodstock where they have a rival event - this one graced by Ms Truss and the Folio Society. This last being a gang (to whom I have to own that I once subscribed) who produce books which manage to be both bad and pretentious - from a book production point of view that is. Not a pleasure to own at all - with the exception of 'The Rainbow' which is quite reasonably done.
# posted by Jim @ 6:54 AM 
