Words! Words! Words!

A grand day for new words (new to me, that is) all garnered in the last 24 hours.

Kizomba. A variant of the tango developed in Angola. A local pub is offering lessons in it.
Lusophone. Portuguese speaking peoples (like the Angolans).
Disaronno. 'An Italian liqueur flavoured with herbs and fruit soaked in apricot kernel oil'. On sale locally.
Percale. 'A closely woven cotton fabric. From the Persian, pargãlah.'

Not a bad haul.

Has the Times got it wrong?

News international is keeping very quiet about the result of Murdoch's experiment of putting The Times behind a paywall. Personally, I'm dubious about its prospects. I very rarely buy a newspaper, because I know that most of the contents will be of no interest to me. I would sooner surf the net looking for items that are relevant, and skip the rest. These days we are all surrounded by an ocean of information. Asking us to pay for it is like charging a fish for water. I still look at the headline page for the Times, and so far have seen no stories that I a) want to read or b) can't find  elsewhere for free. If Murdoch is worried about his profits, the obvious course is to remove the Times' online presence completely, which would at least save him that portion of his overheads.
A similar problem is afflicting the BBC, which is whining because people are watching it online and dispensing with the TV (and its associated licence fee). Suggested solutions for the 'problem' include taxing broadband use or increasing the cost of the licence. Once again: if it doesn't pay, dispense with it.

Prince Charles has said that he was born to save the world ( a reference to his environmental delusions). Am I the only one to be reminded increasingly of the conduct of his ancestor,
King George III?

Baby Found in Sandwich

No, it isn't another cannibalism story.  Turns out that there is a town in Massachusetts called "Sandwich",
where a kidnapped baby was discovered by police. And, while we are in informative mode, did you know that those newsfeed straps across the bottom of the TV screen actually have a name? They are called 'chyrons' after the Chyron Corporation, which originally devised them.

I love it when I learn a new word!

Dissing Mr Bogarde

I never had much time for the late lamented thesp, but I  have never been as cruel in my assessment as amazon.co.uk seemingly is in this snippet from the details of its forthcoming DVD release of Modesty Blaise:

Nice one, amazon! And I only just noticed that they couldn't spell 'Joseph' as in Losey, either.

The General was Right

David Cameron has been in Turkey, stressing  his support for Turkey's entry into the EU. During a lengthy, brown-nosing speech, he quoted statements made by General De Gaulle when opposing Britain's entry into the 'community' back in the sixties:

It becomes more obvious every day that the General was correct. Paradoxically, it was his determination to keep Britain out that strengthened British determination to get in. Funny old world.

Mysteries of yesteryear.

Re-reading, as an adult, a book one last read in childhood is a strange and sometimes saddening experience. I have just finished The Expanding Case for the UFO by Morris K. Jessup. I last saw it when I was ten years old. I can still remember its dark blue wrapper with blurred photos purporting to be those of UFOs. It was printed at the height of the UFO craze when both my mother and I were convinced of the reality of flying saucers. Everyone thought that it was only a matter of time before the aliens landed and revealed their motives - a belief that was helped along considerably by the media and the movies of the times. Flying saucers were  the 'climate change' of the Fifties.
Jessup's book is an oddity. He lists great numbers of sightings from around the world, which serve to remind us how hot the topic was at the time. But for the bulk of his text, he goes backward in time, laying the foundations of the 'ancient astronaut' theory which was later to be exploited by Erich Von Daniken.
He also devotes a large portion of the book to selenology ( a subject in which he was well educated). He describes the vast number of anomalies and changes reported on the surface of the Moon over the past hundred and fifty years. He believed that the beings piloting the saucers were originally from Earth - the remnants of a superior civilisation. He suspected that they were using the Moon as a base.
Among the other lunar oddities he noted was what has come to be called the Linné Affair - an occasion  in the nineteenth century when the crater of that name was said to have disappeared. It led to an explosion of interest in lunar observation, and in due course it was announced that Linné was back.
In the 1950s, of course, this was intriguing. There was no way I could check it out - I had no telescope, and there were few good photographs of the moon. It was a mystery to be savoured.
Alas for mystery. Now, with a few taps on my keyboard, I can obtain a good picture of Linné (see below). No UFOs, no sign of engineering works. Just a cold, stark empty crater, unchanged for millions of years.
I have said that I believed unshakably in flying saucers at the age of ten. But I wonder - if someone had told me at that age, that someday I would have my own computer at home, and with it obtain fine photographs from every corner of our solar system  - would I have believed it? I don't think so. I wasn't that gullible.

Bliss!

Bliss!
Have I won the lottery? Have I won an Oscar, or the Nobel prize?
No. I attribute my euphoria to something simpler: a visit to the chiropodist. For weeks now I have suffered from agonising corns. It was like walking in shoes full of broken glass. Although I see a National Health chiropodist at regular intervals, they will only see you when it suits them. Pain won't get you an appointment; they only do preventative medicine. A professional chiropodist will do a better job, but until my pension came in I couldn't afford one.
Tuesday my financial boat finally came in, and I experienced the joy of having the tough, painful, callused skin chipped away by a skilled lady. Six painful corns, spread over both feet, were removed. I can now stroll about to my heart's content without having to endure purgatory with each step.
Like I said: bliss.

I Write Like James Joyce (?)

I've just been chancing my arm on a new site called I Write Like. The idea is that you paste in a chunk of your own prose, and the software analyses it and tells you which writer's style it most resembles. Being a sceptical soul, I tried it on four blogs from my archives. The system is, if nothing else, consistent; three out of four times it told me that I write like James Joyce (the fourth time I apparently wrote like David Foster Wallace, whom I have never heard of).
Damned it I can see it.

Cherry picking chills.

I shall be accused (with justice) of selecting freak events that cast doubt on global warming. Fine. But no-one can complain if I log such instances (for amusement only, as they used to say when selling marked cards).

Epitaph for a Brute.

Above: Raoul Moat in drag.

Wife beater, thug, murderer, rapist, drug dealer, cross-dresser and as we now, learn, police informant. R.I.P. Raoul Moat.

It was Moat's role as a 'Copper's Nark' which allowed him to cause so much unhappiness to so may others for so long. Time and again he was given a soft sentence for serious crimes. His ex-girlfriend, whom he shot, is still very ill in hospital. PC Rathband, an unarmed officer whom he shot in the face without warning or provocation, will probably be blind for life.
Yet since this monstrous brute shot himself while cornered by police, a kind of hero cult seems to have been built around him. Floral tributes have been left on the site of his death, and a Facebook memorial site has been set up. Even the pathetic Paul Gascoine staggered into the plot, bearing a portion of chicken pieces and a can of lager for 'my mate' as the police encircled the thug. Moat's family are furious (probably with an eye to future damages) and the left-wing press are calling for enquiries.
This huge, malformed creature with the mind of a spoiled toddler is now at rest. But it is unnerving to think that his fans remain on the loose.

Refugee Crisis

The UK supreme Court - an institution so new that most Brits don't even know it exists- has ruled that homosexuals who face persecution in their country of origin may legitimately claim asylum in the UK.
This is, in effect, an extension to the 1967 convention on asylum, which  was an extension  of the 1951 convention - which was intended to deal with the problems of displaced people in Europe following World War II. Great oaks from little acorns grow.
There seems little doubt that the two men - one from Iran, and one from Cameroon - have been subjected to violence in their home countries. It also seems obvious that the ruling falls in line with the existing legislation. But what may be the unintended results of the ruling?
Firstly, it greatly increases the number of people entitled to stay in Britain, together with the amount of social and medical benefits they may claim. How many others could (theoretically) come? Take Cameroon alone. It has a population (at last count) of 18,879,301. Presume further that half of these are male. Let us assume that 1% of these are homosexual - that means that 94, 396 are potential residents of Britain (provided they can get over here in the first place to lodge their appeals). Sub-Saharan Africa as a whole is deeply hostile to gays.  Using the same reasoning, that means another 4,000,000 potential Brits. Of course, there is nothing to stop straight Africans pretending to be gay, and here another problem arises - how can the genuine articles be sieved out from the impostors?
This is a story which will run and run.

Supply and Demand

Various newspapers are bewailing the fate of unemployed graduates. There are now 70 graduates for every one advertised job. This year's graduates are not only facing problems from the depressed economy, but from the massed ranks of last year's unemployed graduates. They are being advised to 'take any job - burger flipping or shelf stacking' rather than sit at home. Sound advice, of course, but jobs at the lower end of the scale are just as scarce as those at the top, and there is a tendency for employers not to take on people who they feel are 'too clever' for the job, and will therefore be unhappy in  it. When we take into account the enormous debts many of these young people will have accrued at university, it becomes obvious that in many cases, they would now be much better off if they had never attended university at all.
During the last labour government it was taken for granted that further education was a good in itself.
More people are now going to university than ever before. Polytechnics have been converted into universities to take in even more students. Result? A massive glut of graduates. The supply greatly exceeds the demand for graduates  by society.
The answer, surely is to shrink the educational sector - a notion still completely unthinkable, but which will surely force itself on to the table. We need a Dr Beeching for the universities.

An Appropriate Response?

                               

The chart above shows the relative sizes of the varying ethnic communities in London. It is interesting to read in connection with statistics issued by the Metropolitan Police in response to a Freedom of Information request from the Telegraph newspaper. They summarise information from a survey of 18,091 males  proceeded against by the police in London in 2009-10. They appear to show that black men are responsible for a disproportionately large number of serious offences (see next chart).

                               

We have to be very careful reading this sort of data. We do not know, for example, how many crimes were repetitious offences by the same individuals, or how many of those proceeded against by the police were later found guilty. But it is obvious that a problem exists within the black community. My own suspicion is that the attitudes responsible for it are historically recent, and are introduced from the gang culture of the Kingston slums. What is the official response?

According to Richard Garside, of the Centre for Crime and Justice Studies at King's College London,

"Given Britain's long history of racism and imperialism it should not greatly surprise us that black and minority groups are disproportionately members of social classes that have tended to experience greater victimisation and to be the subject of police attention". In other words, it's everybody else's fault.

Yesterday London's ninth fatal stabbing this year took place as a fourteen year old black boy was grabbed by a gang at the gates of his school and knifed to death. If we are to prevent such tragedies in future, we're going to need more than the kind of knee-jerk Marxist claptrap offered above.