Creative output

While singularly failing to achieve anything solidly creative this year, I have managed to put the artistic equivalent of a revision timetable together. Therefore:

My next book will be entitled 'The Pointless Farm'. It will be billed by my (no doubt thrilled) publishers as 'The Archers' meets Fyodor Dostoyevsky's 'Crime and Punishment'.


Dostoyevsky above: Beating a horse to death with an iron bar or Pointless Farming?

My next album will be entitled "Mining for Nickel" and will be less of a musical experience and more of a aural technical overview of the difficulty in extracting nickel ore from hazardous deep shaft mines.

My next painting will be called, rather poetically in my opinion, Dr Strontium's Jaw, and will offend the vast majority of people with its crass avoidance of taste and form.

Right, now to get to work. Oh look, Big Brother's on tonight....

Reid it and weep

As moste peple (reading this anyway) will be aware, Mike Reid has passed on. I love the BBC's final summary of his life:

In the late 1970s, Reid hosted the ITV children's TV quiz show Runaround, remembered for its incomprehensible rules and the incongruity of him as presenter. "

Animal Baths

An oft-posited cause for the First World War was the mental state of the Kaiser. By all accounts he was a vain man with a real inferiority complex, especially with regards to the British. Hence his building of a fleet of Dreadnoughts to rival our navy's own, causing an arms race and adding to the unbearable tension of the pre-war years.

Well, given the fact the Kaiser was as a child forced regularly to endure something called an animal bath who can blame him? The Kaiser had a difficult birth and, as such, suffered nerve damage to his arm. He was forced to immerse aforesaid arm into a freshly slaughtered hare in the medieval belief that it would somehow cure him.

Helpfully, I've drawn a graph to chart the potential effect of animal baths on renowned people as a warning to physicians. As the Kaiser is the only famous person I know to actually undergo the animal bath procedure there is, admittedly, some conjecture in the individuals chosen.

Subjects were selected using guesswork, the Delphic pronouncements of nearby birds and bits of the Evening Standard read out randomly by candlelight in a pentagram until the individual was named, and their souls dedicated to Asmodeus. Mostly the first one, though.

States within a State

I read with interest today that the sleepy, vaguely hippy dippy town of Totnes is adopting its own currency.

On that note I'm thinking of declaring my own house an independent state. The fun part is deciding what form of government to adopt. A republic is too boring (everyone's a republic nowadays) and so is a constitutional monarchy (who wants to sit around signing off other people's laws, ffs?). An empire, unfortunately, is too grandiose (I'm talking about a house in York after all). Which is a shame, as being an emperor would be cool.

So, I'm left with some kind of grand duchy (which has a pleasant sound to it) or maybe a militant theocracy (which would probably and amusingly annoy the Anglicans. They're quite the thing in York y'know. But despite this, I'm not really fired up with any kind of maniacal religious zeal as, perhaps, the infrequency of my blog postings might indicate).

I've also considered some form of ancien regime absolutist monarchy but I think the survival chances of my new state-within-a-state hinge on a cordial relationship with my erstwhile ruler, Queen Elizabeth II, and I figure her government may not be as tolerant of an absolutist king living in one of her archbishoprics than a less controversial ruler, like a margrave or something.

So, lacking marches to be a grave over, I have decided on Landgrave of South Bank. Now to convince the wife to live under my benign munificence. Maybe I'll do the washing up first (that often helps with things like this).

Taiwan legislature- get ready to rumble!

Taiwan is an unusual place. It's a small island off mainland China and is actually called the Republic of China. It's where U.S.-backed Nationalist Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek fled after being defeated by the Communists on the mainland. So U.S. backed, in fact, that it even occupied the Chinese seat on the U.N. Security Council until 1971(!) when the Communists got it, courtesy of Nixon.

One thing the Taiwanese do really very well is have massive kick off brawls in their parliament. In fact, there was another one just the other day. Why not sit back and watch a compendium of the very best fights Taiwan's MPs have to offer:

United States of Whatever

Clutching a bottle of poor, hastily bought wine, arriving late and flustered at the house party of popular culture as I am, saw this the other day and it made me laugh:

The Mexican Adventure

I have no topical reason for talking about this, so apologies. It’s just that I was thinking about it in the shower this morning.

One of the more surreal events in world history was the decision by the Emperor Napoleon III (The great Napoleon’s rather less great nephew) to put an Austrian Archduke, Maximilian (right), on the throne of Mexico.

Understandably, the somewhat bewildered people of Mexico weren’t entirely happy about an Austrian with an enormous facial hairstyle being made their emperor, supported by French troops (who were presumably equally confused by this latest wheeze of their rather eccentric ruler).

Inevitably, this crazed scheme failed and Emperor Max rather unfortunately shot by firing squad, celebrated in a rather excellent painting by Manet. This drove his wife, who had returned to Europe to generate support for the deranged enterprise, completely bonkers.

The sad thing is Maximilian seems to have been a rather decent chap.

Just shows you, never attack random countries. So, if Hungary declares war on Thailand you know they’ve been warned. By me. Through the use of 19th century analogous examples that have come to me during my morning ablutions. Via a blog no one reads.

It's murder out there

Judges are saying that we're locking up people (specifically murderers) for too long. So our prisons are now filled with aged, broken people who can't remember, and can no longer engage with, life on the outside. It's blatantly obvious that this is due to the Government's Daily Mail pleasing criminal justice system, which demands mandatory sentencing when often it's completely unnecessary just so the baying horde of Middle England can relax in their 4 bedroom mock-tudor, commuter belt idyll a little more securely .

My own view is that murder should be decriminalised. Making it illegal just drives it underground and makes it impossible to police. We should have murder cafés where small amounts of recreational murder takes place in designated areas so it can be controlled. We should look to the Continent where the Dutch have tried it successfully with cannabis and Belgians with rich chocolates.

Entering the world of bloggage

Ok. I've done it. I've started a blog. I wasn't going to. I kicked against it, screaming like a drunk Tarzan. But I couldn't resist it. Perhaps I was scared about missing out. Whatever it was, the challenge is can I sustain this momentary wave of enthusiasm? Or will this drunk tarzan pass out in a breadfruit tree, to be slowly suffocated by the large boa constrictor of lethargy, deaf to the frenzied shrieks of my hirsuite friend, Proactivity, and break the heart of my civilised girlfriend, Fleeting Amusement?

Whatever happens it seems like I'll be stretching metaphors until they snap like a tired rubber band.