Monday, October 24, 2011
A cornucopia
Following my post on October 18th, now got around to thinking a bit more about the matter of Kevin Lane. But without conclusion. The material on the web site, while odd, did not amount to enough for me to be able to overrule the jury and say he didn't do it. Plus it was unfortunate that he elected not to call his partner to corroborate his alibi. Doesn't look good to me and presumably didn't look good to the jury. My next thought was that one wanted to see a better summary of the case than had been put on the web site. Perhaps the judge's summing up would provide a management summary? Perhaps that is what they are for. But then I got stuck. The Ministry of Justice web site did not help me find out whether or not members of the public could get at summings up. Nor, supposing that they could, had it anything much to say about how. The nearest I got, deep inside some long document about criminal procedure, was something that appeared to say that anyone could apply to the clerk of the court for such stuff, provided the case was ongoing or recent, which this one clearly wasn't. It looked as if was going to take a bit of effort to find out what goes here. If I was rich, I suppose I could just ask my own lawyer to prepare me a brief, but I am certainly not that kind of rich. Perhaps Mr. Branson (the bearded one, not the pickle one) would oblige? Perhaps he gets lots of begging letters about matters like this? And then I noticed that one of the bits of paper I had been given at Trafalgar Square described Mr. Lane as an innocent young man. Which description I believe to be a touch economical with the truth; possibly not guilty as charged, but not innocent in general. At which point I decided that I had spent enough time on him.
Then moved onto a recent LRB, where I was treated to a long whine about how awful it was that the legal aid budget was being cut and all kinds of worthy causes would no longer have access to free lawyers. Whoever wrote it did not seem to understand that if one wants to make large cuts in government spending, which our government clearly does (for good or bad), a good proportion of those large cuts have to come from lots of small cuts across the board. Lots of small cuts to lots of programmes, all of which had previously been proved to be essential, value for money and all the rest of it by world class consultants. One hasn't got time to revisit all this stuff. One just has to get on and make half the distance with roughly pro-rata cuts. Not nice but necessary.
And then there was an interesting piece from R. W. Johnson on elections in the US. He claims a seismic shift over the last fifty years or so. A shift which has left us with rich people and ordinary white males tending to vote Republican. And with professional people, women and other minorities tending to vote Democrat. With the first tendency likely to out gun the second in the mid term. An unholy alliance between those who have done very well out of the last 20 years and those who have done rather badly. What I don't agree with is that things are so very different over here.
And another one on Houellebecq, a chap in whom I took an interest in earlier this year. Searching for him turns up the relevant posts. This article was clearly a very good article as it took more or less the same line on the chap as I would, albeit at considerably greater length. Early work bit prone to porno., but the 'La Carte et le territoire' with merit and without porno., although perhaps not quite up to the puffing in French literary circles. However, first read of the article did involve some alcohol, so I think I will give it another read.
A coincidence, as a few days ago there was another reason to remember Houellebecq, in particular the point noticed on July 11th with the consumer durable in question being a surge protector. Having been alerted to the possibility of weathery disasters by the book about the lack of water in the western half of the US, I thought I ought to protect my shiny new hifi with a surge protector. Off to Maplin where I find that they do not do the Belkin I know and love, just some cheap and ugly alternatives. Have Belkin vanished from the face of the earth? Luckily I persisted all the way down to Staples where I find that Belkin is alive and well. Maybe not quite the same as my existing models but near enough. With the additional and unplanned benefit that the cabling spaghetti in my study is now much thinned.
Monday, January 17, 2011
A load of old dough
First job of the day yesterday (Monday), a stroll in the rain. Quite heavy until mid-morning or so. An outing for my stockman's coat, bought in some army flavoured clothing shop somewhere near Victoria Station. Long black thing, with hood and doubled over the shoulders and rather longer than a conventional raincoat so the knees should not get quite so wet. Sold as just the thing for standing around in the rain in the west country while minding cows. Not bad for walking: both light and waterproof without looking or feeling like a plastic mac.. But, oddly enough, I never used it much when I was in the world of work.
An outing also for numbers of thin worms trying to cross the rather wide pedestrian path along the western side of Horton Lane. Odd that the crows were not taking them.
Also came across a rather large pneumatic drill in West Ewell, much larger than the one I was using last May (May 21st). Drill bit looked as if it was more than two inches in diameter. Not too good for the back I was thinking to myself, when it dawned on me that this was the sort of pneumatic drill which was attached to the end of a digger rather than being swung around by hand. So no back problems and no pneumatics - the drill being driven by hydraulic fluid, just like the JCB one. Although the digger in question was a different brand.
On into Longmead Road where the stream up the side was in full spate. Although for some reason or other the water was flowing much faster in some places than others. All down to the detail of the profile of the stream and of the various drains emptying into it, I suppose. The stream was a couple of feet or so short of bursting its banks but there was one very impressive puddle in the road, at about the place where it does burst its banks from time to time. A moorhen was waddling about between the bank of the stream and a rough thicket which prompted the thought 'where did it come from'. Never seen one around there before. A puzzle as my belief was, based on appearances and experience, that the things could not fly. Had it been washed down the culvert from Stamford Green Pond? However, consultation at TB later in the day suggested that they can indeed fly, a suggestion confirmed this morning by Wikipedia. So its presence now rather less of a mystery.
Back home to the fourth go at bread making. For the third go I did rather more kneading and the result was more like baker bread than the second go. For the fourth go, cut the salt down to a teaspoon - in line with the relevant guidance from the Chief Medical Officer for Baking and Bakeries - and used a mixture of Dove strong white flour and Allinson very strong white flour. The latter was rather different in appearance from the former and appeared to be a little coarser, taking a good deal more jogging to get it through the sieve. For the avoidance of doubt, did the two kneadings to the minute minder. Maybe we will be able to establish whether more kneading is good or whether there is a turning point. But in any event the books are right: handling the dough, watching and feeling the way it changes through the process is very therapeutic. The bread was cooked in two shiny new 2lb loaf tines from Robert Dyas, much cheaper on their bogoff than the same sort of thing would have been from our new Lakelands. Bit of a puzzle about the 2lbs though. I thought that the standard white loaf from a baker was a 2lb loaf but these tins would be no where near big enough for them.
Fourth bread better again than third bread. When fresh, not unlike real bread. Must keep pegging away though: crust too chewy and the loaf not soft and springy when fresh. More than a whiff of the Jacob's Cream Crackers about the things. Next step might be a bread baking manual which might explain. Bread boring moves up to the next level.
Moving onto a higher plane, the night before last I completed my first pass of Chesterton's 'The Return of Don Quixote', an author with whom I had only a slight prior acquaintance, this through his 'Father Brown' stories. Pointed in this direction by Houellebecq who has his fictional version spout a plug for both William Morris and this book. Oddly, one got the impression that Houellebecq really was quite keen on both chaps, never mind what his fictional version might be saying.
A rather odd book, a sort of mild fantasy set in the 1920's or so. Quite a lot of very funny bits but generally a bit of a poke at the various isms and fads of the day. Bit like Huxley, although Chesterton does not go in for the sex or the clever clogs stuff. Lighter touch altogether. Warmly recommended. I wonder how the French chap came to come across it.
My copy, from somebody plugged into the Amazon world, is a first edition from Chatto & Windus of 97 & 99 St. Martin's Lane. Nicely printed at a time when print fashions were a bit different from those we have now and when pages were not nearly as neatly cut. Amused to find the company that Chesterton keeps in the selection from the C & W list of the day printed after the end of the book. Huxley prominent, Proust and Stendhal present. Also books from T. F. Powys, the younger brother of the J. C. Powys who is still in print. Also 'Lolly Willowes' from Sylvia Townsend Warner, which I suspect, has not stood the test of time. Nor 'Out Mr. Dormer' from R. H. Mottram. But why do some people get initials while some get there name in full? Did this used to be a matter of fevered debates between literary agents and publishers?
PS: a little later I find that I suspect wrong. It seems that 'Lolly Willowes' is a forgotten classic, well known to Mr. Google, Wikipedia and Virago amongst others. A 'subversive fantasia in which women are urged to take power and resist '. Perhaps I should get a copy for the BH.
Thursday, February 03, 2011
Chain saw alert!
Walking around Horton Country Park yesterday, I discovered that one of the chain saw gangs has made it across Christchurch Road and has started in the park. Not in force yet as all that has been done is that some of the underbrush around some trees they want to grow big has been cleared away. Trying to put the park back into the Park I suppose, but I would rather that they left well alone. I bet the birds like the underbrush too. In fact, in some parts of the Isle of Wight, the environment types make a point of growing the stuff special. Perhaps I should put the Epsom environment types in touch with them.
More serious, they have done rather a vicious job on cutting back some of the path side hedges with a tractor mounted flail. I dare say the hedge will grow back but it looks a right mess at the moment. Why could they not leave the underbrush alone and take a bit more time to cut the hedges neatly with a hedge trimmer, or maybe even by hand?
Back to another round of slow cook oxtail. 16 hours again at 90C with some onions and mushrooms added for the last 4 of the hours. Very good it was too, the onions and mushroom providing a good bit of garnish. Served with mashed potatoes and brussels sprouts.
In the evening, to Bath's Theatre Royal's presentation of West Yorkshire's Playhouse's production of Alan Bennett's 'The History Boys' at Kingston (upon Thames)'s Rose Theatre. My previous experience of Bennett had been limited to going to the flics to see 'The Madness of King George' and a quick flick through the relevant chapter of Bennett's memoirs. As a former scholarship boy (failed) myself, I thought there might be something here; bit of nostalgia even. Started off rather badly; none of the actors seemed to be pitching their voices right. Then rather put off by the amount of bad language; a fact of life in secondary schools these days, I dare say, but I don't need to have my nose rubbed in it. Scenes interspersed with song and dance routines. Setting seemed to be a curious muddle of everything from the 50's of the last century to the present. Things got much better in the second half. Good use of the revolving stage. But the overall impression was that this was a light piece, and a piece which was much more about the trials and torments of the school life of gays in general and Alan Bennett in particular, than it was about the trials and torments of scholarships. More a series of sketches than a narrative, perhaps reflecting Bennett's early work with the likes of Dudley Moore on 'Beyond the Fringe'. Maybe the idea always was that the thing would be a film. Which is, perhaps, the next stop.
Followed by a check with 'Les particules élémentaires', which I had thought I would have a go at following 'La Carte et le territoire' (see, for example, January 7). To my mind, much inferior, despite winning various prizes. Some of the same things come through. The neat insights into contemporary life. The insight into the lives of contemporaries with unusual private lives. The preoccupation with death, decay and reproductive plumbing. But awash with pretentious porno.. Porno. which is dreary and depressing rather than arousing. Perhaps that is his point, but it does not make for a very cheerful read. Maybe my French is not up for porno.. Some space is given over to Aldous Huxley, his 'Brave New World' and 'Island', but without Houellebecq appearing to have read either very carefully and without appearing to have any appreciation of the qualities of other books, such as 'Point Counter Point'. I gave up about half way through the 300 pages. Organised, incidentally, in the same unusual way as the more successful effort read previously (twice).
Much more fun with M. le Comte d'Herisson, mentioned on 1 February. I share a snippet. It seems that at the time of the restoration after Napoleon, there was much speculation about the survival of the son of Louis XVI, who would have been around 10 at the time that his father was executed. Speculation which was interesting because if the pretender was who he pretended to be, the then current incumbent of the throne, Louis XVIII would have had to step aside, something it seems he was rather loath to do, despite not being much good at this kinging business. Loath to the point of tampering with the evidence and suborning of witnesses. The pretender did not make it.
Presumably because of issues of this sort, it seems that giving birth, if you were anywhere near the throne, was a fairly public affair. The world had to be satisfied that the new egg was indeed hatched by the queen. One could not, of course, be completely sure that the new egg was indeed a royal egg: that had to wait for the invention of DNA. But at least one could be reasonably sure than the new child had the right numbers of arms, legs and so forth and that a proletarian child with the right numbers of such things had not been substituted for a royal one with the wrong numbers.
Thursday, May 03, 2012
Franzen
Have now completed my second tome from this master of contemporary literature, entitled 'Freedom', having read 'Corrections' previously.
A rather long book but I got through it at a reasonable pace. Not too many longueurs. The attention paid to the gruesome details of North American sex reminded me of Houellebecq (see for example 3rd February last) and while it did rise above pornography, I prefer my books to be softer focus about such matters. Quite enough gritty realism in real life these days; a taste which copies across to the television with my much preferring the banal mysteries of Poirot to their contemporary equivalents.
I wonder what sort of a person would write such stuff and am reminded of a comment about Joyce's 'Ulysses' to the effect that it might be a great novel but the sort of person who could write such stuff must be very odd indeed. Better known through the medium of his writing than in the flesh.
That apart, plenty of entertaining material and comment on the contemporary (mainly middle class) scene in the US - including quite a lot of stuff on how Bush feathered the nests of his cronies, not least by providing superb opportunities for profiteering in Iraq. Plus quite a lot of stuff on the eco-scene and the eco-warriors. Material which is probably all the more entertaining for being foreign; the same sort of material about the UK would have nothing like the same piquancy. Probably also prefer to have fun poked at others rather than my own. Patriotic to that extent.
Despite having read the book all the way through, I have no idea why the book is called Freedom. Perhaps one is free to invent reasons. Freedom is just a label, about as significant as calling a quintet a trout: one has to have a title so Franzen or his publisher obliges. But should one be able to condense the content of a novel into one or two words? Should the title be more than a label? I shall ponder while the smoked haddock simmers.
PS: interested to read yesterday about the earnings of the brother of the man who worries about the economy on behalf of the party which used to worry about the needs and aspirations of the working man. OK, so the brother is no doubt a worker too, probably a very hard worker. But he is also a successful player in one of the extractive industries, that is to say one of those industries which somehow manage to extract a huge number of currants out of the communal puddings to pay their chaps, despite it being quite unclear how many puddings they are contributing or how much pudding, with or without currants, is left for the rest of us, working away in other kinds of industries, maybe productive.
A rather long book but I got through it at a reasonable pace. Not too many longueurs. The attention paid to the gruesome details of North American sex reminded me of Houellebecq (see for example 3rd February last) and while it did rise above pornography, I prefer my books to be softer focus about such matters. Quite enough gritty realism in real life these days; a taste which copies across to the television with my much preferring the banal mysteries of Poirot to their contemporary equivalents.
I wonder what sort of a person would write such stuff and am reminded of a comment about Joyce's 'Ulysses' to the effect that it might be a great novel but the sort of person who could write such stuff must be very odd indeed. Better known through the medium of his writing than in the flesh.
That apart, plenty of entertaining material and comment on the contemporary (mainly middle class) scene in the US - including quite a lot of stuff on how Bush feathered the nests of his cronies, not least by providing superb opportunities for profiteering in Iraq. Plus quite a lot of stuff on the eco-scene and the eco-warriors. Material which is probably all the more entertaining for being foreign; the same sort of material about the UK would have nothing like the same piquancy. Probably also prefer to have fun poked at others rather than my own. Patriotic to that extent.
Despite having read the book all the way through, I have no idea why the book is called Freedom. Perhaps one is free to invent reasons. Freedom is just a label, about as significant as calling a quintet a trout: one has to have a title so Franzen or his publisher obliges. But should one be able to condense the content of a novel into one or two words? Should the title be more than a label? I shall ponder while the smoked haddock simmers.
PS: interested to read yesterday about the earnings of the brother of the man who worries about the economy on behalf of the party which used to worry about the needs and aspirations of the working man. OK, so the brother is no doubt a worker too, probably a very hard worker. But he is also a successful player in one of the extractive industries, that is to say one of those industries which somehow manage to extract a huge number of currants out of the communal puddings to pay their chaps, despite it being quite unclear how many puddings they are contributing or how much pudding, with or without currants, is left for the rest of us, working away in other kinds of industries, maybe productive.
Monday, July 04, 2011
Continued...
I came across another sort of marketing recently with an outfit called Hamell - market research not the one man punk rock band. See http://www.hamell-communications.co.uk/. I came across them in connection with a skin complaint and thought without thinking (as it were) that they might have been conducting research into the complaint in question. But, once again, I was quite wrong. They conduct research into how to move one's medicine from a prescription only status to a pharmacist status - which I think means that your pharmacist can give it to you off his own bat or if you ask for it but that it is not on open display - in a revenue maximising way. They are clearly a very go-ahead outfit as they also offer risk analysis. Not altogether clear what risks it is that they would be analysing but presumably they know. They have the Powerpoint.
Now I don't have any difficulty with having outfits which do this for a living. I was simply struck by their being a need. Could only happen in a rich, market-driven world.
I then move off to the chemist to buy some goo for the complaint, goo which I thought was called Dermal 500. I caused much confusion with both pharmacist and myself until I realised that the 500 bit of what I thought was the end of the name was actually the quantity, which happened to be printed underneath the name on the bottle.
Today I go back to the same chemist, confident that this time I have got it right. Quite wrong. This time the confusion arose because they have changed the shape of the bottle with the result that the box is now like a very large box of toothpaste rather than the box (not cylinder) for one of those round squat bottles of whisky. But we get there in the end.
Houellebecq runs on about a similar thing in his Goncourt prize book. You just get really attached to the design of your Rolex (or whatever) and then they go and change it just before you need to buy a new one. The design you know and like has vanished from the face of the earth - unless, that is, you like to browse the car booters.
Monday, May 30, 2011
Booked out
Pleased to be able to report the retiring 3lbs 4oz of books to the Oxfam book bucket at Sainbury's - of which I only paid a proper price for 6oz. Some free from the Wetherspoon's library and some near free from the county library. Two of the books (Duteurtre & Houellebecq) were too porno. for me, the porno. not being sufficiently sanitised by being literary and in French. Two of them I did not get on with for other reasons. And the fifth was the 'New Arabian Nights' by R. L. Stevenson. This book was the prize for the 1st position in the Laira Green Senior Mixed School in Plymouth in 1927. A school which appears to have been downgraded from senior mixed to primary (see http://lairagreen.com/). That apart, the odd thing about the book was that stuck at the inside bottom of the inside back board there was what looked like a postage stamp, marked 'R L Stevenson Copyright' and priced at the rather unusual sum of 4.2 old pennies. On a quick peek, Mr. Google was unhelpful, so one can only presume that this is some quirk of early 20th century copyright law - in which case it is odd that I do not recall coming across such a thing before.
Moved onto perusal of the voting for our borough elections. I find that Epsom boasts two political dynasties. The Dallen dynasty which fielded three candidates, all of whom got in, and the Carlson dynasty which fielded three but scored just one. Don't really approve of this sort of thing in local government any more than I do in central government, although I suppose the locals have the excuse that it is not always easy to come up with the candidates. Indeed, one of those elected for Labour is a 20 year old, first year student of politics at the University of Surrey. Let's hope that he is a lot more mature than I was at that age.
We thought to celebrate our return from the seaside with a bit of steak. Two half pound slices of mature Scottish rump steak from Mr Sainsbury. Very nice they looked too with good body and colour. Grilled for a total of about 10 minutes and turned out very well; something of a surprise as I do not associate Sainsbury's with fresh food. Not escaped from their grocery origins as far as I am concerned. Served with chard, carrots and newish potatoes, all boiled; it being nice after a week away to have a bit of simple veg. with neither butter nor garlic in sight. Washed down with a 2006 Barossa from some antipodean outfit called Henry's Seven. Or perhaps Barossa is the name of the place and Henry's Seven is the name of the wine. Not at all clear but I dare say one could work it all out at http://www.henschke.com.au/. Originally dear but marked down. Very nice it was too; perhaps we should get some more while it remains marked down, a practise I was recently wised up to. French cherries for pudd..
We have not had chard for a while, it being something I used to grow on the allotment but do not see in shops very often. This shop was one of those large farm shops with large car parks which sell a good range of frozen ready meals, a good range of expensive groceries and a sprinkling of local produce. In this case chard and potatoes from darkest Kent. The chard really had been picked the morning we bought it so we ate it when just 36 hours old. Not sure that even the Waitrose supply chain could beat that.
Friday, January 14, 2011
L'identité judiciaire
More from Houellebecq - having got into the third part of 'La Carte et le territoire' for the second time. Much talk of people called 'l'identité judiciaire', who appear to approximate to our scene of crime people. Pleased to find that M. M. H. finds the way that lots of people in white space suits take over crime scenes, often erecting large white tents as they go, as irritating as I do. OK, so these people do sometimes find the evidence which enables us to bang a bad person up. But they are so full of themselves; they have taken on something like a liturgical or ecclesiastical role. Their goings on sometimes seem to be as unpleasant and intrusive as whatever is was that resulted in their being there in the first place. An extreme case being the medical examinations of children during the years when the nation in general and certain newspapers in particular were fascinated by and obsessed with satanic abuse. The years when gung-ho social workers were commandeering helicopters to descend on respectable New Age folk going about their lawful business in remote islands.
Part of the price that we pay for progress.
Then got to wondering why the French call this branch of the judiciary by this name. I was able to find out that it was a sub-directorate (rather than a branch) of the technical and scientific police. But I did not find out where the judicious identity came from, although a clue may be that I believe that one, if French, is supposed to carry one's identity card while in France and be able to produce it for verification on demand by an authorised agent of the state. A useful KPI of state control being the number of people who are so authorised expressed as a percentage of the total population.
Nearer home, I read recently that our own FSS (Forensic Science Service, the people who, inter alia, used to do thousands and thousands of DNA tests at a large facility near Meriden, an interesting little village nicely documented by Wikipedia. Not the one in Connecticut) is about to be abolished in favour of private testing laboratories. Part, presumably of the bonfire of quangoes. I have a recollection that the FSS has not been in existence all that long, having been created from one or more outfits which used to live inside the Home Office. The wheel of management fashion continues to spin. But as I found with CJIT the other day (10th January), not so easy to trace the evolution of government from the web, with the FSS web site being very gung ho about how spiff they are at all kinds of forensic services but much less gung ho about their own history.
But perhaps that is just me. I remember organising a lecture about the internet once, which was full of the history of the internet and which I found fascinating. But I was taken to task by most of the audience for wasting their time with all this ancient history. They wanted to be told about the scene today, not the scene yesterday.
Thursday, August 09, 2012
Sacks
Interested to read in the 'Economist' on the way home yesterday of the doings of a Chinese company called Huawei which, it seems, is muscling big time into the communications infrastructure market of the western world. Some people are concerned that the Chinese government may prevail on the Chinese company to abuse its position of trust and use said infrastructure for snooping. A legitimate concern given the track record of the various parties and one which I would have thought was hard to put to bed: how do you prove that a complicated device does not include some covert, possibly dormant, snooping parts? On the way I notice that one John Suffolk has acquired the grand job title (with the Chinese company) of 'global cyber-security officer', a John Suffolk who was a senior civil servant (having been parachuted in from somewhere in the private sector), so acquiring him is very much part of cosying up to our securocratic establishment. I came across him as the head of a bit of the Home Office with valiant and worthy objectives but which, at the time I left it, had succeeded in spending a lot of money without having too much to show for it. But he escaped without tarnish to a grand job in the Cabinet Office, from whence to China. Clearly a star at schmoozing around the higher echelons of government and its agencies.
Back home finished off a chance read of Sacks (see, for example, May 18) on the deaf - a short book called 'Seeing Voices' which I chanced across at Epsom Library. For an easy going book quite an eye opener. It turns out that sign language proper is a reasonably universal aboriginal language among the deaf. A full blown and very expressive language, quite different from, for example, signed English, which is just a mechanical transcription of English into signs. Prompted, I can see that sign might be very good at expressing space and movement. One product of all this is that the deaf can be very good at the minutiae of the movement of faces and hands: they can see things which the rest of us cannot. The Sacks line seems to be that the deaf should be taught this proper sign at an early age; this will give them community and enable them to develop - in a way that laboriously teaching them to speak and read English will not, this last being a very time consuming business. Striking the right balance between special needs & special facilities and integration is clearly tricky, with no simple solution. I suppose in passing that, like other minority languages, sign must include pots of imported words in order to function in the modern world. He also talks about the way that socialising in sign is very different to socialising with voice. A group of people can be conducting several conversations at once without getting in each others' way. One can converse - or eavesdrop - at a distance. Handcuffing a deaf person is equivalent to gagging a hearing person. Fascinating stuff, and I await my sign primer from the Galluadet University Press, via Amazon with interest. Gallaudet being a place for, and mainly of, the deaf.
PS: reminded of my entry of July 4th 2011 the other day by my purchase of a second potion dispenser from Boots. I had got used to the one I had and was looking forward to buying an identical one. Thought I had succeeded but get home to find that there has been a subtle change underneath. A change for the better, but a change nonetheless. Are thoughts of this sort going to be the only legacy of flogging through Houellebecq?
Back home finished off a chance read of Sacks (see, for example, May 18) on the deaf - a short book called 'Seeing Voices' which I chanced across at Epsom Library. For an easy going book quite an eye opener. It turns out that sign language proper is a reasonably universal aboriginal language among the deaf. A full blown and very expressive language, quite different from, for example, signed English, which is just a mechanical transcription of English into signs. Prompted, I can see that sign might be very good at expressing space and movement. One product of all this is that the deaf can be very good at the minutiae of the movement of faces and hands: they can see things which the rest of us cannot. The Sacks line seems to be that the deaf should be taught this proper sign at an early age; this will give them community and enable them to develop - in a way that laboriously teaching them to speak and read English will not, this last being a very time consuming business. Striking the right balance between special needs & special facilities and integration is clearly tricky, with no simple solution. I suppose in passing that, like other minority languages, sign must include pots of imported words in order to function in the modern world. He also talks about the way that socialising in sign is very different to socialising with voice. A group of people can be conducting several conversations at once without getting in each others' way. One can converse - or eavesdrop - at a distance. Handcuffing a deaf person is equivalent to gagging a hearing person. Fascinating stuff, and I await my sign primer from the Galluadet University Press, via Amazon with interest. Gallaudet being a place for, and mainly of, the deaf.
PS: reminded of my entry of July 4th 2011 the other day by my purchase of a second potion dispenser from Boots. I had got used to the one I had and was looking forward to buying an identical one. Thought I had succeeded but get home to find that there has been a subtle change underneath. A change for the better, but a change nonetheless. Are thoughts of this sort going to be the only legacy of flogging through Houellebecq?
Sunday, September 25, 2011
Cakescript
One of the reasons that the cake story caught my eye was that this was contemporary evidence that the sort of goings on depicted in the Neibelungenlied (as translated by Hatto) really did go on, at least in a modest way, on the periphery of the Europe where the Neibelungenlied was set. I dare say things were done with greater style nearer the Rhine.
The heroes of the Neibelungenlied were just about Christians, as were the Saxons of the cake story. Thinking of that acid and noisy pair, Hitchens & Dawkins, the story that Hodgkin tells is that, in the middle of the interval, becoming Christians was progress. It made behaving yourself respectable; it might earn you a place in a heaven which sounded much more attractive than that on offer in Wotan land. Warriors suddenly saw that there might be another way of being, other than hacking each other to death in the intervals between drinking bouts. All in all Hitchens & Dawkins are a bit dated; their hate the pope belongs to the time of my parents, a time when the church really did have more power than it should and when hate the pope was a reasonable political position. When one is in the thick of things there is little time for nuances. But now the church does not matter very much (except to some of our leaders), we can be a bit calmer.
On reflection, and to be fair to them, they do do most of their acid and noise in the US where Jesus is still very important to plenty of people. Still do baptism and that sort of thing. So perhaps there is still work to do there. But I now wonder if the audiences pay to go and hear them there, the land of the lecture circuit. Is their crusade (not quite the right word but never mind) a paying proposition?
Moving onto a contemporary best seller, just finished a quick canter through 'Et si c'était vrai...' a book of which and author (Marc Levy) of whom I had had not heard until Sutton Library offered them to me for 30p. Wikipedia tells me that he is an interesting cove, with careers in IT and office furnishings before he started clocking up a best seller a year at the mature age of 39. This one was the first. A silly tale, quite readable, about a girl in a coma in a hospital whose spirit returns to fall in love with the occupant of her old flat, the only chap in the world, it seems, who can interact with her spirit. To everyone else the spirit is intangible (see through, invisible and inaudible). I was amused that the last third of the book introduced a retiring policeman, a device which reminded of that of Houellebecq in his prize book. Quite a lot of medical colour, perhaps derived from his stint with the Red Cross. Oddly for a big cheese, Levy does not seem to have a web site of his own but he does have a fairly elaborate blog. I wonder he has his personal assistants do it for him or whether he does it himself? See http://www.toslog.com/marclevy/accueil.
I await the film of the book, just to entertain the BH you understand, from Amazon at £2.46 plus postage. One of the cheaper films that I have bought.
Friday, December 24, 2010
Joyeux Noël!
Not that this screen thinks so. Had a bad attack of the flickers this morning before settling down. No doubt telling me to get my wallet out of its hiding place and move on from cathode ray.
We still have water, so, assuming it really was cold last night, the new water main house has done its job. No need to fork out for emergency plumbers from somewhere in eastern Europe. Or perhaps north Africa.
The lentil soup turned out pretty well with only a very modest number of dead flies floating to the surface (see 19th December). No where near enough to put one off the soup, to the point that there is now only a bit more than a pint left of the original gallon. But for the accompanying bread, a bit let down by what passes for a split tin white loaf from the in-store bakery at our local Waitrose. Might just as well have been one of the much derided loaves of Mother's Pride which used to be delivered by the milkman: crumbly, stale tasting after just a day and nothing much like the product from Cheam, which remains icily inaccessible. At least for me.
The crumbly texture might also affect the stuffing for the festive chicken: the bread for the stuffing having gone down to bread crumbs rather than the more fluffy product you get from real bread. And having forgotten to get the nuts, reduced to using some left over mixed nuts, also from Waitrose. Some not very good hazel nuts - maybe three duds out of twenty nuts - supplemented by some almonds. One dud out of twenty there. It will be interesting to see what difference using almonds makes - something I have never done before. Nor have I ever done mixed nuts before, not believing in the melange of a melange of flavours which results. Palette can't cope.
Maybe next year we will get the vermin people in to get rid of the grey squirrels from our garden so that we can have proper hazel nuts from our own tree, rather than the elderly, kiln dried continental nuts one buys. Different animal altogether. But I suspect a fair amount of slaughter would be needed to get this result; even to the point where our squirrel hating neighbours cry foul, never mind the squirrel loving ones.
I mentioned the other day that I had actually bought a book that Amazon proposed to me - the winner of this years Goncourt, 'La Carte et le territoire', by one Michel Houellebecq - of whom I had not previously heard. And I am not much the wiser now as it does not seem to be the custom of Flammarion to include a potted biog. of the author, in the manner of an English book. But I think he might be a bit odd: the book seems to be about rather odd people - anti-heroes even - including the author himself. Can't remember when I last read a book which included the author as one of the characters, in the third person, in this explicit way.
It is also clearly designed for the Christmas market as not very joyous Christmas Days figure quite prominently. So part 2 (page 127) opened this real Christmas morning on a fictional Christmas morning. The French is not too hard and I am learning some interesting new words. For example, the word 'people' seems to be used somewhere in the personality, celebrity, fashion leader area. A people is the sort of person who might exhibit him or herself in a fashionable and expensive restaurant. The word functioning equally as either singular or plural. Rather harder to decipher was 'bourrelets'. First I find that bourre is the sort of fluff that is scraped off of furry animals like sheep and goats onto prickly bushes like gorse. Be extension the low grade fibre used to stuff mattresses and cushions. By extension, a particular sort of cushion in the form of a tyre or do-nut. By extension, the tyre like folds growing around the neck of a middle aged chef in a wannabee fashionable and expensive restaurant. I least that is where I have got to. Not completely convinced that I have got it right. But rather a splendid word if I have; better than we have in English.
Wednesday, February 23, 2011
Miscellanea
Yesterday to Borough to try a new place for biryani, but as I was running a little late, caught the slow train from Waterloo East to London Bridge. I had forgotten that Platform A at Waterloo East is primarily intended for estuary people and so found myself in a crowded train with the space near the door taken up with two very young families complete with rather ornate baby buggies. Despite the fact that they were travelling well laden in the middle of the rush hour and more or less blocking the exit, most people were very indulgent. To the point where, at London Bridge, a large florid gentleman took control of the situation and directed the two streams of passengers around them, off the train, in good order. A rather flustered young mum looked most relieved.
The lamb biryani turned out to be rather different from what I had been expecting. A good portion of rice and meat, but none of that sloppy vegetable curry usually served with it. Instead, a little bowl of plain yoghurt. Which turned out to be quite handy as the rice was quite spicy. I preferred it to the curried version I am used to: perhaps I shall ask for it next time I am in an Indian and see if they will play ball.
It left me rather full, one effect of which was rather grand dreams. I had been put in charge of physical security of the country's gold reserve at rather short notice and was trying to get a scratch team together to build a simple asset management system from scratch. All very trying. And then the gold reserve morphed into the country's one and only nuclear bomb, a bomb which was kept disassembled and spread over an upstairs floor of a small warehouse, with some of the most innocuous and unlikely looking bits being highly radioactive. One stepped carefully over them. All very odd and no idea where much of it came from - which I usually do.
Still feeling fairly full in the morning, off on a brisk stroll around Horton Lane and West Ewell. Where I find that the council has a rather odd sense of road mending priorities. The relatively new, clean and decent cycle and person path running alongside Horton Lane had some hard-to-see defects, all carefully marked in orange with one of those spray cans the inspectors use. They have now been mended. Which all seems very odd considering the very much more serious holes in the road all over, for example, that part of Stamford Green which runs onto the common.
Lots of signs of spring. Alder and hawthorn buds starting to break. Ground alder, nettles, docks and thistles on the move in the verges. A first dandelion flower bug breaking. Lots of celandines in bud. Daisies and purple dead nettles in flower. Plus various other small flowers I can't name.
Drifted off the flowers and started wondering about detectives, or rather the process of detection. Or the process of coming to a decision.
I decided that some people are good at coming up with decision candidates. Intuitions, options or hunches if you will. These are the creative people. But the important bit, as recognised by the policemen and women who briefed Houellebecq (see, for example, February 3rd), is that one has to check one's hunches. One should always go through due process, review the evidence for and the evidence against, because hunches are quite often wrong. Ideally, the creative person should present his stuff to a committee of reactive people who can react to the stuff without being emotionally committed to it in the way of the creative person.
However hard one tries, when poking about for a solution, once one has had a hunch, one tends to close down. To close one mind to anything other than that which supports ones hunch. Very hard to maintain an open mind. So due process and the reactive types are a helpful antidote.
So the question is, does Murdoch have his own hunches or does he review those of his side-kicks? Livingstone, I think was a reviewer. He reviewed the hunches of his then side kick, The Lord Mendelson. At least I have read something to that effect, although all Mr G. can find is stuff about how they both served on Lambeth Council as loony lefties.
A complication is those cases where the process of making the decision feeds back into what the decision ought to be - which is not the case in a murder. Whatever the investigating team might get up to does not affect who done it. If might affect one's view of the degree of guilt of who done it, or what the charge should be, but that is not quite the same. But if one is, for example, flogging a new advertising campaign to the board, the state the board end up in when they come to make the decision feeds back into the assessment. The assessment and the answer are not independent.
Back home to slow cooked shin of beef. About a kilo of the stuff in four slabs of maybe 5 inches by 4 inches by one inch. Some connective tissue, little fat. Add a drop of port and a coarsely chopped onion. Covered pyrex dish. Enter the oven at slow at 2130 yesterday. Add a little water, some more onion and some mushroom at 0725 this morning. Consumed with mashed potato and crinkly cabbage. All excellent except the mashed potato had some odd black bits, not visible at the time of peeling.
PS: found time in the course of all this activity to file, for the first time, an online tax return. There were some infelicities and I do not yet know what the tax people will make of it, but, overall, the online experience was better than the paper and pencil one. And someone has put a lot of work into making it so.
Wednesday, March 09, 2011
Cultural affairs
Sunday afternoon to the third and last outing for the Sacconi Quartet to Dorking, for this year anyway. Despite being in the middle of the afternoon and by no means full, good atmosphere for this excellent concert. BH very happy with her afternoon out.Started off with the Mozart, probably new to me and certainly a flavour of Mozart I don't recall hearing before. Rather good. Followed by the younger brother of the quartet called the 'Kreutzer Sonata' mentioned on 28th February. So I was close to achieving full house on that front on this occasion; hopefully there will be another before too long. The 'Intimate Letters' we did get was a strange but impressive piece, themed on the same adulterous lines as the 'Kreutzer Sonata' and which followed on nicely from the Mozart. 'Excellente continuation!' as unctuous waiters in pretentious restaurants in France might murmur respectfully in one's ear as one orders. At least they might according to Houellebecq.
In the warm up talk back at the conert, the cellist told us that they had played it as part of some dramatisation of the life of Janáček involving an important luvvy called T. West. They had been very impressed by the difference between his very relaxed rehearsal mode at home, glass of the vino rosso in paw, and his highly energised performance mode; I suppose as performers themselves they would be sensitive to such things. Must try and find out what the show in question was.
Wound up with rather superior & serious business in the form of Rasumovsky 3. Tremendous stuff, improved in my case by a couple of run throughs the day before.
The pork pies (March 11th) were of attractive appearance, but despite this good start were only adequate in taste, texture & so on & so forth. Pastry tasted a bit fatty - fair enough in the sense that raised pastry is made with a lot of lard - but it should not taste fatty none the less. Meat inside in mince form rather than lump form; very little jelly wrapping. My advice to the cook would be to put effort into the ingredients proportionate to the effort that had been put into raising the pastry.
Friday, January 21, 2011
Learned tomes
From this week's TLS I learn that for the price of taking my partner on a 5 day coach holiday around Cheshire and the Peak District, I could have the 4,000 plus pages of the New Cambridge History of Islam. Or instead of just going myself on an 8 day coach holiday to Yarmouth and the Norfolk Broads, I could have the near 2,000 pages of the Oxford Dictionary of the Middle Ages. It seems that the promoters of these two ventures had the misfortune to set out before people realised that the internet made this sort of book obsolete. Reviewers a bit sniffy about some of the detail as well. I think I shall pass on both books and buses.
But 'Securing the State' by Sir David Omand was a much better bet. Affordable even. Partly because it is a rather cheaply produced book from India. Sufficiently cheap that the Sienese fresco which Omand uses as a framing device for the book is reproduced in diagrammatic rather than colour photographic form.
Omand is a well educated person. The sort of person who likes to introduce quotes ancient and modern into his text. So we learn, for example, that Robert Frost wrote a poem involving the idea that good fences make for good neighbours. He is also very well qualified to write about state security having worked his way up through the ranks of the securocrats of the UK and served at the very top of the tree for quite some years. But, sadly, he is not a writer and he has not been well served by his publishers. The text smells of Powerpoint, is stodgy and repeats itself - sometimes word for word. But despite these last faults, I learned a lot from this book.
I should perhaps say that I started from the lefty/libertarian position that gentlemen do not read each others' mail and that public business should be conducted in public. This despite the appalling record of the Soviets in such matters.
So I learn from Omand, that states spy on each other because they do not trust each other and that states spy on their own citizens because of the criminals lurking in their midst. Criminals who are determined, dangerous and devious and who are hard to root out by other means. Including here terrorists both of the religious and the animal rights persuasions. And the own goal of the criminals who make a living out of those drugs which we elect to make illegal. Both sorts of spying entail secrets and secrecy, whence grows a large part of the secret (surveillance) state.
He is very keen on how to organise the secret state. And on how to join the secret state up with the rest of the state. Such as the manager of a key warehouse in the Tesco Corporation, loss of which would bring half the country to its knees in days. All of which is clearly a problem as he gives it a lot of air time.
He is also keen on the moral hazards involved in work of this sort, on proportionality and on the difficulty of carrying the public with it. Part of his answer is that all the sharp end work in this country is done by the police. They might be acting on information from the secret squirrels but it is the police, with their separate organisation and accountability who do the dirty work. Another part is that we have various trusted public figures, neither secret squirrels nor part of government themselves, with oversight of secret affairs. Another part is that secret affairs might be dirty and secret but they are, nevertheless, now subject to the rule of law. They are no longer arbitrary, covered only by the Royal Prerogative.
Another topic is the international character of much of the crime we are talking about. Dealing with it has to be an international venture. So a lot of terrorism is mixed up with Pakistan and dealing with that has to involve dealing with the Pakistani security services. We cannot afford to say that their standards - say on the treatment of their detainees - are not ours and so we cannot work with them.
And lastly, it is all very difficult. Despite all the money and all the secrets, mistakes will be made and the bad people will get through, from time to time. I offer a simple example, drawn from the fiction of Houellebecq. One has a horrible crime, involving the use of a sort of laser powered carving knife, the sort of thing a surgeon might use for an amputation. I assume that such things really exist. So the police write to the two or three hundred organisations in France who have such a thing to ask whether they have one missing. Generally to rattle the cage a bit. One of the organisations is a clinic in Cannes, which submits a nil response. Some years later it turns out that the owner of this clinic is the villain of the piece and that his clinic is a cosmetic surgery outfit which had no need of such a carving knife. So on a good day it might have occurred to whoever processed the nil return from this clinic that it was the wrong sort of clinic. But is it reasonable to expect the average busy detective to spot such a thing?
The lesson being that the bad people can slip through fine nets. So they had better be fairly fine to keep the level of risk reasonable.
Friday, January 07, 2011
Camden council
The head of housing repairs for Camden Council was reported yesterday as saying in a public place that he was not going to lose any sleep over some wall falling on some child. Incidentally killing it. His excuse appeared to be that the wall in question had been built or repaired by a contractor. Supposing the facts of the matter to be anything like those reported, I think this is entirely unacceptable and the chap should get a proper roasting. He was in charge of the relevant department and some of the buck should stop with him. He should certainly not make crass remarks about not losing sleep.
Nearer home, I am now into my second reading of 'La Carte et le territoire' - see December 24th. We had an untitled prologue of 23 pages, a part 1 of 89 pages, a part 2 of 143 pages, a part 3 of 105 pages and an epilogue of 48 pages. The prologue and epilogue being divided into untitled and unnumbered chapters, the parts being divided into untitled but numbered chapters. No table of contents or anything like that.
The prologue is introductory, as one might expect. After that the story jumps around a bit but part 1 is mostly about the productive part of an artist's life - one Jed Martin, whom I think to be fictitious. Part 2 is about the relationship between Jed and the author. The portrait of the author looks to have been drawn from life, which given that this life was rather odd, was rather odd, as mentioned in the previous posting. Part 3 is about solving the particularly sanguinary murder of the author and only seems to have a rather loose connection with the rest of the book. The epilogue runs the artist down into death from cancer.
Some listing of facts about things. So we get to learn quite a lot about cameras and films. About the suppliers of artists' materials. About how to put on an exhibition of modern art. A fair amount of blog worthy flannel about art and literature generally. French not really good enough to judge this last.
Some interesting snippets. Such as the suggestion that the Dignatis clinic in Zurich is a few doors up from a fancy brothel. And that, should you be visiting the clinic for terminal purposes, you might have to wait in a waiting room full of other clients, just as if you were visiting your GP. I found this rather shocking; although on reflection I do not know why. But I do know that in the better brothels of fiction the management take great care that a client coming in does not meet a client going out. Quite separate arrangements.
As noted before, much interest in big festivities such as Christmas when celebrated in a solitary or near solitary fashion. Which does not appear to be as bad in Paris as it is in London; at least some places stay open. Much interest in the lives of near solitary middle aged white males. Some good looking black females get parts too.
Generally, much interest in death, decay and body fluids. Perhaps the author is mates with our own Damien who gets, in any event, quite a few lines in the book. Or that German doctor who dissects dead bodies in an unpleasantly flamboyant way.
But geography was important too. I was moved to get out my Michelin street map of Paris to follow the protagonists around. I was moved to get out a couple of Michelin maps of départements of France. These last are, indeed, rather handsome things and probably a more fitting subject for arty photography (this being what first made Jed famous) than our own Landranger maps. But a puzzle how you do an arty photograph of something sold folded and which would probably never be completely flat again. Perhaps Jed bought them as sheets rather than folded, but the book is agnostic on that point.
And I learned that one advantage of French map folding over English map folding is that you can get at any part of the French map by opening a single fold, in the same way as you would open a book at the required page. This, together with their using thinner paper, makes the things a lot easier to use. Much less map flapping about in the rain. Much easier in a cramped car. OK, so at four times smaller scale there is less detail but there is still plenty to drive or cycle on and nearly enough to walk on. A good compromise between our Landranger maps in folding form and our route maps in book form.
PS: Houellebecq can't be all bad. I noticed some foreign looking chap reading another of his books on the tube yesterday. 'Les Particules élémentaires'; probably in the cheap 'J'ai Lu' edition.
