Tiptoe through the Icecaps

To the ranks of the great climate scientists like John Travolta and Paul McCartney, another name may be added - albeit posthumously. Tiny Tim was a singing sensation of the Sixties, and here he voices environmental concerns well ahead of his time. And look - down among the watching kiddies - isn't that the young Al Gore?

The Party's Over

You could be forgiven for thinking that the sale of England shirts and other tat above was taking place following Sunday's humiliating 4-1 defeat of England by Germany, but you would be wrong.The shop assistants were frantically dragging their stock onto the pavement on the day before the match. Precognition, perhaps?
Anyway, England are out of the cup, after being shown up as a third-rate team.
And with any luck, the media will be a little less vain and jingoistic the next time around.

Brave New Word

It's always a red-letter day when I encounter a previously unknown word. It is like discovering an unclassified shell on the beach, or finding a new star glittering in a familiar constellation. Today's word, courtesy of a blog by Ambrose Evans-Pritchard in today's Telegraph, is 'nefaste'. I guessed it was something negative from its Latin affiliations, but rushed to my Chambers anyway. Surprisingly, Chambers hasn't got it, but it does have 'nefast' meaning abominable. That terminal 'e' has a Gallic smell about it: could it be the French version? Anyway, never mind. Thanks, Ambrose.

No Prophet In It

Well, I said we were in for a damp, cool summer. I was wrong. It's a real paint-blistering June.
I said England would be out of the World Cup by today. They aren't; they made it through the first round.
Still, I stand by my other predictions: David Cameron to go, Obama to go, the Euro to go.
I have all the time in the world.

Mountain Labours - Brings Forth Mouse

I write in the aftermath of the England team's first two games in the World Cup. Both were weary travesties which make it fairly certain that after their next outing, on Wednesday, the lads will be limping home.
What makes it so annoying  is the sense of anticlimax, after a commercial buildup so vast and overhyped that many people must have have been expecting something along the lines of the second coming of Christ.  Every shop has been piled high with souvenir tat - cheap St George's flags, facepaints, and the dreaded vuvuzela. I have no doubt that most of this junk is made in China. Even worse has been the buildup on Sky Sports, which has run commercials that Leni Riefenstahl would have been proud of.
Vast, phantom lions roaring in the clouds above the white cliffs of Dover no less, while Wayne Rooney, our brothel-creeping striker, has been depicted much as French artists used to depict Napoleon.

Roll on Wednesday, when Slovenia will doubtless send England home and put us all out of our misery.

Vast Euro Law Spill Threatens Britain

According to UKIP's Nigel Farage, the EU has pumped out a frightening mass of legislation over the last 12 months. No less than 2756 items in a year - that is the equivalent of a new piece of legislation every three hours of the day. Many of these laws will impact upon British lives. Short of leaving the EU, there seems no way of capping the spill.

Quackademia number 2: GCSE in Obama-speak

For once, I don't need to comment personally. The extract says it all.

Europe Swings Like a Hanged Man Do

More heartening news for Eurosceptics. In Germany, Angela Merkel's government is in trouble. An election success by Fleming separatists threatens the breakdown of Belgium. The euro  is in decline as Greece's credit rating is cut. And EU president Jose Barroso warns that that democracy may vanish in southern Europe.
Meanwhile, The EU is going all-out to tighten up its control over member states' budgets. David Cameron is going over there today to argue the British corner - supposedly.
Now is the time for all sensible rats to leave the sinking ship.

Reconciliation? No chance

Hopes are being expressed that the release of the true facts in the "Bloody Sunday" will lead to a mood of reconciliation and to 'closure' for the relatives of the slain.
I don't think so. The celebration of victimhood is a major strand in Irish culture. I once met an Irish girl who refused to even speak the name of Oliver Cromwell - FOUR CENTURIES after the man's depredations on Irish soil. I suspect that even if the soldiers responsible for the shootings were hunted down and publicly burned at the stake, then the Irish would still be celebrating the events of Bloody Sunday in lachrymose song and story for centuries to come.

Some good news - Natural England have scrapped their plans to release 75 giant sea eagles in rural Suffolk. Natural England have already spent £75,000 on the project, while the RSPB and Anglian Water have spent £100,000 between them. All the money, of course, comes ultimately from Joe Public.
If those concerned have spent £175,000 without doing anything, how much would they have spent had the project gone ahead?

Mysterious Blue Plaque

I have been puzzled for a few days by the siting, and nature, of a plaque mounted on the outside of a bookie's establishment in town. It is clearly one of the plaques put up by the Civic Society to commemorate something or someone associated with the premises on which it is located.  This one, unfortunately, is some fifteen feet above the ground, and is therefore unreadable by anyone who has ventured out without their stilts. Lacking stilts, I went into town with a pair of binoculars, with the help of which I was able to read the inscription. It relates to the Viking bicycle company - once a famous Wolverhampton brand name. The company's shop is now part of the Joe Coral empire, and the old factory - now the backside of a lap dancing club - was  down the alley to the right.

You learn something every day.

Boozers bashed again

According to The Telegraph, the Treasury is considering repeating the five per cent increase in alcohol duty imposed in March, and increasing VAT in a bid to reduce Britain's £156 billion budget deficit. This will mean yet another hike in booze prices.
Yet according to HM Revenue and Customs, the tax garnered from alcohol has fallen by £730 million since 2008. In other words, the point of diminishing returns has been reached - and passed. So the price rises will simply force more pubs into closure, creating unemployment, increasing benefit payments, and reducing tax yields. It will increase the number of people taking cheaper, more readily available illegal drugs.
Meanwhile, spending will continue on futile military adventures, bird-shredding windmills and a thousand other idiocies.
What a government.

Euro, Euro, It's Down the Pan We Go

Above, a handful of chocolate euros which I bought from a local newsagent yesterday. Significantly, they had been marked down in price in order to to get rid of them. Below, the latest 'progress' report, from Bloomberg News:

A Case for Assisted Suicide

Stephen Griffiths, pictured above, has attempted suicide in his prison cell. He is awaiting trial for the murder of three prostitutes. The trial will probably be a formality; he has not denied the charges, and was actually filmed on CCTV in the act of murdering the last of the women with a crossbow.
Suppose that, having been found guilty, he attempts suicide again. What should the response of the authorities be?
It is likely that they would, as usual, attempt to save his life. It is my contention that not only should they not do so, but that he should have the option of terminating his life at any time with the cooperation of the prison authorities. His life has effectively ended. Even if he were to be released from jail, his history would bar him from any normal existence. If he had a wasting, incurable disease, most modern liberals would argue that he should have  the right to die. I suggest that the option of spending the rest of his life, effectively, in a single room, with no hope of any future existence, is worse than that of our hypothetical disease sufferer. In the jargon of human rights, life imprisonment is a more 'cruel and unusual' form of punishment than a swift, painless execution. He, and others like him, should have the right to opt out of it.

The more it changes, the more it is the same thing. (french proverb)

F

Long, long ago, in the days of Harold Macmillan and Mr Profumo, there was much talk of "The Establishment". This was not the empty phrase it is today; it referred to the way in which the upper classes in Britain were bonded together - by class, by family ties, and above all by education.
When Harold Wilson's Labour party came to power, all that was to change. A more meritocratic education system was to ensure the influx of new blood regardless of class background. This has continued to be  Labour policy in the years since: first of all by the setting up of comprehensive schools and the downgrading of public schools and of grammar schools, and latterly by the the conversion of polytechnics into universities. Sixty years on, how well has the project worked?
Let's look at the the heads of the ruling coalition. Cameron went to Oxford, Clegg to Cambridge.
Perhaps among the contenders for the Labour leadership we shall see some evidence of the influence of the people's universities. Let us see:
Ed Milliband -    Oxford
Ed Balls -           Oxford
Andy Burnham -Cambridge
Diane Abbott-    Cambridge
Comment would appear to be superfluous.

Deserts of Wiltshire

POD (print on demand) publishing is a wonderful thing. Provided a literary work exists in digital form, a marvellous machine invented by Xerox can input a CD of the work and spit out a bound paperback copy in under five minutes. From this, several benefits flow :
1. Books which had been unavailable for decades, if not centuries, are now back on sale.
2. Vast amounts of paper (and forest) are saved, as no more books are printed than have been asked for.
Supply and demand are exactly balanced.
3. Authors can get their books into print for as little as £100, at no risk to the publisher.
But there can be pitfalls. The appearance of the book may leave something to be desired. See, for instance, the catalogue of Kessinger Publishing - a marvellous collection of books, but all of them issued in the same, garish, custard yellow covers. And look at the  example below. It is a copy of John Aubrey's Natural History of Wiltshire, first printed in the 17th century. And what do we have on the cover? Stonehenge, perhaps? Salisbury cathedral? No, we have an eroded bluff in what is probably the Mojave Desert.
On the other hand, if that really is Wiltshire, then there may be more to this Global Warming lark than I thought.

Units of Deception

How much can you drink before your health is at risk? When does a regular drinker become a binge drinker? According to the Government it is all a matter of Alcohol Units. They were introduced, or invented, in 1984, since when they have been quoted ad nauseam in advertising campaigns.
Before looking further into the background, I had a quick dabble with Excel to see how many pints of your favourite tipple you may imbibe per week before the pink snakes start erupting from the wallpaper.

I imagine any man who drinks at all probably drinks more than the above. Evidence that the danger from booze has been overstated has been emerging ever since. Back in 2007 the Times printed an article that blew the gaff on this pseudoscience. It should be hanging, framed, on the wall of every one of our few remaining British pubs.

Quackademia number 1 : Cognitive archaeology.

And what, pray, is cognitive archaeology? I had never heard of it until I read, as part of a book review, that the author was an Emeritus Professor of Cognitive Archaeology. I naturally googled for an explanation. From Wikipedia, then, a definition:

Cognitive archaeology is a sub-discipline of archaeology which focuses on the ways that ancient societies thought and the symbolic structures that can be perceived in past material culture.
Cognitive archaeologists often study the role that ideology and differing organizational approaches would have had on ancient peoples. The way that these abstract ideas are manifested through the remains that these peoples have left can be investigated and debated often by drawing inferences and using approaches developed in fields such as semiotics, psychology and the wider sciences.

Yes, but having no knowledge of ancient peoples other than through their artifacts, how can the cognitive archaeologist be sure that he is not simply the prey to his own fancies? I had always thought of archaeology as a (literally) down-to-earth discipline. What does your average ditch-grubber think of his cognitive colleague, who presumably can do his archaeology without leaving his armchair? From another website:
Cognitive archaeology has developed in relative isolation of its mother discipline and some in mainstream regard it as almost an heretical science. Because of this, those involved in developing the new sub-field have tended to offer very little dialogue with their straight colleagues. The inevitable split was unpleasant for both camps and as a result of the cognitive archaeologists’ establishing new sets of rules for archaeological interpretation to negate the pressure of academic challenges; they have been cynically renamed the ‘coggies’. The coggies prefer to define themselves as cognitive archaeologists or processualists. 

  The use of the adjective 'heretical' implies that these people are bold, Galilean radicals. I suspect it would be more accurate to say that those in the mainstream regard the approach as utter twaddle.

Jurassic Brum

The question of whether Tyrannosaurus Rex was a raptor, a scavenger or a bit of both is not one that has kept people lying awake for at least sixty million years. It is however, interesting enough for a touring exhibition to be mounted exploring the problem. The show started at the Natural History Museum in London and is appearing at the Gas Rooms in Birmingham until September. I went along with little hope of resolving the problem, but with he expectation of seeing some nifty animatronics.
I wasn't disappointed.  I suspect that the show has little to do with palaeontology and a great deal to with raking in funds for the museums involved. The main attendees seemed to be hundreds of little kids accompanied by their parents and grandparents (the latter at £5.00 per head).
Once you get inside the twilit showroom (why must these exhibitions always be lit like the London Dungeon?) there is plenty to see: skeletons, fossil casts, videos and of course the animatronic monsters, which twitch, growl and jerk about like the over sized clockwork that they are. The children were enraptured, hovering on that emotional cusp between fear and excitement which they seem to enjoy so much. As we left the show we were asked to vote on the three options with which I began this account. The majority of visitors supported the 'a bit of both' theory.
Much ado about nothing, but great fun all the same.

Beavers again.

I was recently ticked off for my post on the role of beavers in the Polish floods. Scepticism was expressed about the likelihood of the floods being exacerbated by the tunnelling of beavers in the river defences. Indeed, it seems likely that the little beasts are being scapegoated for the Polish government's mismanagement of the disaster.
As a sideline to this argument we touched upon the ancient legend (it features in Aesop's Fables) that the beaver, which was hunted (among other things) for its glands, would bite off its own testicles when pursued so that the hunters, satisfied with this, would give up the chase and allow the beaver to escape with its life.  There are at least two things wrong with this tale.Firstly, the glands - which were prized for their medicinal property (they contain aspirin) were not the testicles, but the scent glands, which are situated near the anus. Secondly, the beaver's testicles are internal, so that the operation detailed in the medieval painting above would have been rather difficult to achieve.
Another matter which arises is the etymology of the verb 'to castrate' . Does this relate to the bogus behaviour of the beaver (Latin = castor)? In a word, no. According to an interesting site which I discovered, the word is related to the Latin 'castra' (a military camp) which gives so many English place manes their - cester, -chester and -caster endings.  Such fortifications were 'cut off' from their surroundings by ditches or stockades, and it is this kind of 'cutting off' that the word originally referred to.

I Won a Pen!

I won a pen!
And the best of it is, I didn't even know I was competing for it.
Just after the election, I posted a letter to my local paper criticising the long-winded method of manual vote-counting, and indeed of casting one's vote. Then I forgot about it; it was a lengthy letter and I did not think that the paper would print it; nor had I read the paper in over a week. Then, the other morning, I received a letter from the local department store asking when  I was coming in to collect my pen. It turns out that the paper gives a prize for the best letter of the week, and my wordy offering had won it. It really made my day. The pen is pictured above; the letter (I had to purchase a back-issue of the paper) is below.
I suppose I should mention that the paper is the Wolverhampton Express & Star. I suppose I should also mention, for those interested  in writing instruments (penthusiasts?) that the pen is a Cross ballpoint, retailing at thirty-five pounds.