Monte Carlo

Le 11e RALLYE MONTE-CARLO HISTORIQUE se déroulera du 31 janvier au 6 février 2008.

MadDog is competing, and is no doubt gearing up for the Départ on Friday.

He has written an excellent introduction to rallying. Now I understand what is going on, I am going to follow it - a first for one who has not had the remotest interest in cars before now.

And best of luck to MadDog!

Pretty

Unnerved by WickedRed's picture of a squirrel kissing a slightly injured hedgehog, I steadied myself with this by Jessica May, an Illinois grad art student who works with roadkill, for instance dressing the animals in baby clothes and varnishing their nails.

Dating: How It Actually Works

Flanders & Swann demonstrate



He was old, he was vile and no stranger to vice.
He was base, he was bad, he was mean.

I can relate to that.

---

And "
When he asked, "What in Heaven?" she made no reply
Up her mind, and a dash for the door
" is a delight of a prozeugma.

Readers: Oooh.

Let The Groove On

Readers: You're not actually Jeff Castle? I thought your name was

Blogista: No it wasn't, and you don't know his was, either.

An Introduction to Tables

Here is a simple Table from "The People's Romance" by Daniel B Klein.

Later in this series we will be looking at more complex Tables.

I will be wearing a green shirt with a button-down collar, a hand-knitted umber tie, grey flannel drainpipes and shoes like dead pigs' noses. I will have grown a straggly salt'n'pepper Amish beard, so you will be able to call me "Shitface Sam" behind my back.

Readers: No.

Yes, this also I will do for you.

Shopping

Readers: You just can't get the original Doctor Who theme these days.

Blogista: Why yes you can and where else but here? And YouTube, admittedly. And it's a 2006 remix.

Readers: But we will pay you handsomely just to be our facilitator.

How Long Blues

Under the weight of its own contradictions will the EU eventually collapse, and this is a magnificent example of how it will be brought down. Despite our pessimism over the constitutional Lisbon treaty, the collapse cannot be long in coming.

EU Referendum don't add an estimate for how long "eventually" is.

Nobody cares, is the thing.

The Downing Street petition for a referendum has attracted 24,000 signatures (still five days to go, for all you folks who haven't got round to it yet).

The Rally for a Referendum at Westminster last October drew crowds in their... hundreds.

That leaves about another 44.5 million voters who either favour the EU or who couldn't give a shit.

Nowhere else in Europe has anyone succeeded in campaigning for a referendum.

Nobody cares, and it will take a quite extraordinary system failure before anyone begins to notice. The "magnificent example" cited by EU Referendum - that putting up some useless henvironmental windmills is proving to be anti some useless henvironmental laws, is not a deal-breaker.

So "the collapse cannot be long in coming" - in two generations? Three?

I bet you anyway that the readers (ha!) of this blog, the writers of EU Referendum &c &c will be a very long time dead by the time the Starry Blue Rasclat is lowered for the last time.

Meanwhile, commuters on the Hove-to-Croydon line, fear to protest when my slinky new moobile phoone breaks into the Horst Wessel Leid. Just a ringtone, ye sleeples'n'sheeples. If you can't beat 'em...

eDating

She: Hm. Looks like your place is nearer than mine.

Blogista: But my place is a bit full with the last ninety-three ladies who said that.

She: My place then.

---

As T.S. Eliot remarked at some philosophy conference or other, "Oh, but I am not here as a Philospher. I am here as an Anthropologist."

"The proper study of Mankind is Man" - Alexander Pope, An Essay on Man, 1734.

Readers: So you're not getting any then.

Fucking

Lying in a half-asleep state this morning I couldn't help noticing that Radio 4 is entirely about fucking, but written by women who won't admit that it is at all about fucking.

Powerpoint

Nothing against Siegfried and Roy, y'unnastan, but all I'm thinking before a Presentation is the three Fs.

Face, Flaps, Flies.

Political

This is what I would do too.

Click to disensmall.

Breach

When Compliance start up about "we're breaching" or "if we do that we'll breach" or "we are about to breach"

or when Senior Management regret that "we have breached" or that "we will have to breach again"

- "breach" being the term applied a breaking of some or other pettifogistically pfuitistical Financial Services Act leading string -

I see in my mind's eye a whale breaching (illustration above).

The same happened for Reginald Perrin at any mention of his mother-in-law, only it was a hippopotamus

and voicelessly as Turkish mutes bowstring their victim, he was shot out of the boat, ere the crew knew he was gone. Next instant, the heavy eye-splice in the rope's final end flew out of the stark-empty tub, knocked down an oarsman, and smiting the sea, disappeared in its depths.

Lost Property

A classified ad posted by a stay-at-home dad in Los Angeles saying he found H.G. Wells’ infamous time machine in Helena appeared in Saturday’s paper to the amusement of people as far away as Europe.

Julian Lee Hobbs, who works by his alias Rory Emerald, posted the ad suggesting he had found the time machine from the 1960s-era movie in Helena’s mansion district.

A suburb of LA? Like, it had wheels or tracks or something? Pfui.

I found the original Time Machine a couple of decades ago in the basement of a garden flat I was renting in Richmond. It took one back to the time a few seconds or so before one had pulled the control lever. The risks of a recursive error seemed high.

After much fruitless tinkering, I left it where I had found it. Perhaps the current resident is looping helplessly forever in tight temporal circles. Maybe and more likely it is now hidden again behind dusty piles of packing crates, cast-away furniture, &c.

HG Wells made the rest of it up.

Sin

There used to be a branch of Fribourg's on the Haymarket.

Turkish cigarettes, "Prince of Wales" snuff.

Staggers

Any disorder of the brain or spinal cord, of muscle, bone or joints, resulting in incoordination and a tendency for sheep to fall or become recumbent, is referred to as 'staggers'. This can manifest in a few individual animals or may be seen affecting a large proportion of a mob simultaneously or within a short time. Animals manifesting such signs may recover temporarily or permanently, or deaths may occur.

Courtesy of Sheep Vet Online.

My flock of daleks have come down with something of the same. I am not sure what to do.

Peace

Peace for Monday : Brian Eno, "The Big Ship", 1975

Storm

Don't You Know Your Life It's So

Post on Pornography pulled
'Cos it was too gross ewwww
Here instead courtesy of YouTubelled
'Za directed-by-directed-by-directed-by-Captain-Mамонт-clippy. Wooo


You can make a Shari Lewis & Lamb Chop puppet feauture out of what you find in your dumpster.

















Dark too our hearts, O love, shall lie and cold
As his sad heart has lain
Under the moongrey nettles, the black mould
And muttering rain.

Time

The "New Scientist" this week leads with yet another article about how Time is an illusion.

How often does this have to be said?

It is not 03:06 in the morning again, I am not about to have a bath, shave, clean my teeth, read a book and fall asleep a couple of hours after that, again.

Nor am I going to catch the 13:19 from Brighton to Croydon and arrive for work at 14:00 all bright-eyed and bushy-tailed and suited'n'booted. Again.

So I can replace the information about which measurement happens first in time with the detailed information about how the observables are correlated, says the very wonderful Carlo Rovelli, a physicist at the University of Marseilles in France.

"Rovelli's work makes the timeless view more believable and more in line with standard physics", says Dean Rickles, a philosopher of physics at the University of Sydney in Australia.

I can only commend these gents to you, says your Blogista, a person who is about to have a bath in the Bathroom of a Flat at the Town of Hove in the United Kingdom.

Mammoth

If you are (and I hope you are) following O'Hara's thoughts on palaeoecology, you will find yourself presented with a cure for hiccups.

Personally I intend to stick with the "folk" methods.

I might persuade the hiccupee to stand on her head and drink a glass of water.

I might blow up and burst a brown paper bag, which contained the currant buns that we had just fed to the elephants at the zoo.

But I would not put my finger up her bottom, at least not on a first date.

In the British Museum some thirty years ago, I bought my then sweetie a cup of tea. It cured her hiccoughs. O tempora o mores.

Library

I am informed by a recent correspondent, one Flossie Purvis, by way of unsolicited "e" mail, that "All hotties love big shlongs".

Going through, as I have been, my voluminous (and what other word properly applies to a library?) library, as indeed it is, I have been unable to find any referen

But other projects intervene.

Perhaps one day the truth will be known.

Sarda

I have heard the Cuncordu di Castelsardo several times - four singers face to face to make a soundbox, creating a fifth soprano voice out of nowhere.

I can't find any clips that remotely get the effect.



Easter in Sardinia, where the choirs parade through the streets to church.

Alas

Oops.

Aksidens hpn. Nice jumper. Pity about the Elastosplat. Epalastpot. Poltastomog. Whatever.

When I get my own dictatorship this will be my National Anthem.
My grateful population will stand and perform our famously "gull-winged" national salute. And sing. Weeping with joy and gratitude all the while.

Then it is the turn of the EU. Oh no, not Beethoven's Ninth, but only the last bit. Pleease.

Savages.

Tum Ti Tum

Blogista: Srm phr trm phrr

Readers: What's that you're humming to yourself?

Blogista: Ohh nothing.

Readers: That was Abba, Super Trouper.

Blogista: Might have been, might not.

Readers: Was too.

Blogista: "And this also," said Marlow suddenly, "has been one of the dark places of the earth."

Readers: Don't start us off on that old cod.

Blogista: Well, it has.

Readers: Srm phr trm phrr

Being Nice to Everybody

Thank you, thank you all.

You're all so nice.

Thank You God For Electricity

In keeping, brothers, with new year resolution number 5, I am trying to cook something special.

On electric hobs. It is a rented flat. I cannot really heave the oven out of the window.

Oh, but do not ask what is it, by the time it is cooked it will not resemble food at all.

Here is My Guide to cooking on electric hotplates.

General principle - wait 30 minutes for the heat to get as hot as you think it ought to, then watch in despair as it continues to climb insanely, or fail.

As for the numbers on the switches,

1 - Not enough to warm baby's milk. Luckily for me and the baby, I do not have a baby.

2 - Who thought this was worth doing? Some vacant fucker from Levitttown.

3 - Scald baby's milk. See 1 above in case you think I was maltreating a baby. Or a Kunekune pig - I have none of those either.

4 - Burn whatever you are cooking. The surface of your food will remain (contra all the laws of Physics) stone cold.

5 - Like reheat in a modern fighter jet on takeoff. Your 'cuisine' is just a smear on the tarmac.

6 - At some point your dinner will burst through the floor of the flat above and kill everybody within the confined space. I wouldn't recommend going upstairs and scraping up some stuff because you are starving. Really not.

---

Addendum: there was, last time I looked, fierce controversy in the pasta world about how you cook pasta. I say, several minutes at a rolling boil, followed by a couple of minutes in the water to settle - time ratio about 9:2 or 8:3 depending on the pasta. Instructions on my "La terra e il Cielo" organic lumaconi - "cook for approx. 21 minutes". Well, it is 'distributed' by a company in Bristol, nowadays the home of disappointed Communists.

---

Note to newlywed ladies: never under any circumstances fling a piece of pasta at the kitchen wall, to see if it is al dente or no. It will stick to the wall, which is disgusting, or it will fall behind the oven and you will have to go rooting for it. Either way your husband will take to whiskey and whores.

---

He will whatever you do, you poor ingenue.

Surely Not

The Blog Readability Test
and sneaky-deaky way of getting a loan ad posted
[href="http://www.cashadvance1500.com">Payday Loans] if you cut'n'paste the suggested HTML
has me down as
which explains the paucity of my readership: so few, these rarefied intellects!

Mr. Xoggoth gets a

so the whole thing is obviously a lot of poo really.

But it is one of the Eternal Stupidities that one is less critical of even the most blatant rubbish when one comes well out of it.

A Star is Born

Following Bart's construct-a-first-album methodology, I ended up with this.

Feels to me like a fusion between Radio Tarifa and Arvo Pärt, which already has me all excited - I can't wait to hear it, which is a pity because I have first to learn to play an instrument in an arab-Andalucian flamenco style. Perhaps I'll just write the songs and put them over on the old comb-and-tissue-paper.

Looking at the proportions of the album cover, it's got to be a Double, maybe even Concept.

---

Not posting anything from YouTube was a New Year resolution, but wotthehell I've broken most of the rest... Radio Tarifa


Arvo Pärt

Never Went Away

The reflections of a zek.

An Apology Extracted. Like Teeth.

Blogeroni: ooo fus blan picsur i pos eva shud i pos lef rit r sentr - an klk spandit

Readres: gwan fkaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaawf fus blan picsur eva

Blogalami: rilly blan z wt y gt

Raeders: we wan hir y touts felinks sperens nstuff hotfelt

Radears: cozzit mater what exude (smot) otta u

Reedars: cmaawn u can do in megency flfi ktn

Blister: k cndo knt nmergec

Redarse: ktn nt knt

B: sry m flot ntirli

The Opinions of Me

I wish I could get all riled up by a World Event or Political Leader or something, and have an Opinion to write about.

But no, nothing occurs.

Nothing.

The Only Thoughts You'll Ever Need

Encyclopaedia.

Penis.

Indeed.

The Brock Inspector

You can't bring that brock on this bus!

Get that brock off the bus!






Just a couple of catchphrases in case a TV sitcom scriptwriter should happen by.

Who Knows

The woman I love died 14,000 years ago.

The sketches are taken from a stone found on the cave floor at La Grotte de la Marche, Lussac-les-Chateaux.

These and several other different drawings of her are clearly taken from the same single image.

Glamour: the corona from backlighting, the vagueness of magic, the nimbus of grammar.

















Here are some of her contemporaries.

Marketing

Gentlemen!

We are proud to reveal

The new killer app of the men's fragrance world

Ye Critick: Gissa squizz.

pssssshhhht

I'm getting
-- car salesroom
-- alcohol
-- sump oil
-- pigs in rut.

Blogista: Don't forget sorry don't forget the special ingredient? Petroleum jelly. Clings like napalm, they won't have to wash for a week.

Ye Critick: Zackly like all the other muck on the market then.

Blogista: I gotta get Turbo into the branding somewhere.

Self-Pity

On the supermarket shelf: Brut, Lynx, Cool Water, Aramis, Denim...

Blogista: Perhaps an Eau de Cologne? 4711?

Shelf: Naaah shove orft nuffink for old codgers ere.

Blogista: Sigh.