I couldn't help noticing that the new 100m world record holder is the rather appropriately named Usain Bolt.
Kind of makes you think.
Our former Prime Minister (who famously didn't do God) seems to have wasted no time at all since he left office converting with unseemly haste to Roman Catholicism and setting up his very own Faith Foundation (Nerdy Note: rel="nofollow" attribute invoked in hyperlink tag to signal my utter non-endorsement).
I couldn't help noticing that, with equally unseemly haste, said faith foundation has been awarded charitable status (registered in England, no 1123243)—hot on the heels of the delightfully named HA.SH Foundation.
I have it on very good authority that it's a job and a half getting an organisation registered as a charity in England. The question has to be asked, was Blair fast-tracked?
Or perhaps he just had a quiet word with his imaginary friend in the sky.
NewsBiscuit: Smokers banned from naming or pointing at favourite brand
In further moves to discourage smoking, the Department of Health have announced a complete ban on naming your favourite brand of cigarette or pointing at them in the newsagents and tobacconists.
From now on smokers will have to perform an elaborate round of charades to express their desire to purchase a packet of cigarettes' explained Jane Shillitoe, Under Secretary of State for Health. 'For example, '20 Benson and Hedges' would involve flashing both palms twice, then doing a sounds-like hen move, then indicating a sun, then a little cross to symbolise the word 'and', and finally a mime which recreates a pair of garden hedges. We expect to reduce smoking across the population, except possibly among mime artists.'
Just thinking: wouldn't Trapped Wind be a great name for a free-form jazz ensemble?
…Or, better still, a greyhound.
(Trapped wind—geddit?)
National Geographic have released a five-part video interview, Nigel's Theories, in which Spinal Tap's lead guitarist, Nigel Tufnel, expounds his revolutionary theories about Stonehenge.
Watch and learn.
Sorry about the lack of updates. I've just spent the whole evening on the Dell™ website, trying to order a new computer. Worst website ever: navigation utterly incomprehensible.
Finally managed to specify the options I want and proceed to the checkout, only to be told that I'm not allowed to give a delivery address other than my home address unless I first register the alternative address with my bank—which is shut. The Dell website helpfully advises me that, if I can't register alternative addresses with my bank, I could temporarily change my home address.
Yeah, like I'm that desperate to give my money to Dell.
BBC: David Davis resigns from Commons
Shadow home secretary David Davis has resigned as an MP.
He is to force a by-election in his Haltemprice and Howden constituency which he will fight on the issue of the new 42-day terror detention limit…
He told reporters outside the Commons: "I will argue in this by-election against the slow strangulation of fundamental British freedoms by this government."
As well as the new 42-day detention limit, Davis also cited CCTV cameras and identity cards as things that are eroding our civil liberties.
An MP with principles. Remember those? Me neither. No doubt Labour will chicken out of standing against him.
Unfortunately, he neglected to mention the smoking ban in his list of assaults on our freedoms.
Meanwhile, in related news…
BBC: No deals on 42 days, says Brown
Prime Minister Gordon Brown has firmly rejected claims he "bought" victory in a Commons vote on terror detention…
Opponents claim Mr Brown swayed the DUP with extra cash for Northern Ireland—but Mr Brown insist they voted on national security grounds.
"There were no deals," Mr Brown told a Downing Street media conference.
I wish I'd been at that press conference. I would like to have asked the following question:
"Tell me, Prime Minister, are you familiar with the phrase pants on fire?"
Romanian tennis legend Ilie Nastase walked right past me in Liverpool this lunchtime.
No, I know what you're thinking: you're thinking Richard means someone with a vague resemblance to Ilie Nastase walked right past him in Liverpool this lunchtime. But you're wrong; it really was him.
As far as I could tell, nobody else recognised him. Then he looked at me, and we smiled at each other knowingly. It was our little secret.
"I'm sorry, I'm sorry, it's out of control!" yelped the elderly, disabled Jewish gentleman on the electric supermarket trolley as it hurtled towards me. In the nick of time, I blocked his path with my own trolley.
It'll be something stupid like that which gets me in the end, you know. Mark my words.
That's how many plastic bags were reused by the customers of the Prestwich branch of Tesco last week. Someone had hung a sign up telling us so. Every little helps, they couldn't help adding, without a hint of irony.
I know for a fact that seven of those bags were mine. That's 2.18%.
It seems to me that, at this rate, it's going to take an awful lot of time to save the planet.
Having said that, if and when we do finally save the planet, it seems only fair that 2.18% of it should be mine. That's 11,119,430 km2.
Whenever I attend a pop concert to watch a popular crooner perform their greatest hits, I like nothing better than to play The Devil Woman Game. The rules are rather complicated, but this video should give you the basic idea:
Terry Eagleton, writing in the London Review of Books recently:
[T]he Romantic poet's richly particularised voice is largely a way of giving tongue to the transcendent. From Wordsworth to D.H. Lawrence, one speaks most persuasively when one articulates what is not oneself, whether one calls this Nature or the creative imagination, the primary processes or the dark gods. The self runs down to unfathomably anonymous roots. Men and women emerge as unique beings through a medium (call it Geist, History, Language, Culture or the Unconscious) that is implacably impersonal. What makes us what we are has no regard for us at all. At the very core of the personality, so the modern age holds, vast, anonymous processes are at work. Only through a salutary repression or oblivion of these forces can we achieve the illusion of autonomy. Anonymity is the condition of identity.
It is this bleak doctrine that Modernism will inherit, as a cult of impersonality takes over from the clapped-out Romantic ego. For Romanticism, the self and the infinite merge in the act of imaginative creation. To surrender oneself to dark, unknowable powers is to become all the more uniquely oneself. One must lose one's life in order to find it. For one strain of Modernism, by contrast, the self is displaced by the very forces which constitute it—unhoused, scooped out, decentred and dispossessed. We are no more than the anonymous bearers of myth, tradition, language or literary history. The only way the self can leave its distinctive thumb-print, from Flaubert to Joyce, is in the fastidiously distancing style by which it masks itself. Language itself may be authorless; but style, as Roland Barthes claims in Writing Degree Zero, plunges straight to the visceral depths of the self.
Yes. My sentiments exactly.
Apparently, it will contain one catchy tune and a whole pile of over-produced fillers.
I really think it's about time they branched out a bit.
Jen and I have just returned from a long weekend in Scarborough. We stayed at The Grand Hotel, which is currently undergoing a £7m refurbishment. That was our first mistake: we booked the hotel under the misapprehension that the refurbishments were complete. They aren't. That would explain the carpet-layers on the main (i.e. only) staircase, then.
What was particularly nice about staying at The Grand was how youthful it made us feel. Jen and I were the youngest guests there, to the tune of about 30 years. And the people at The Grand certainly knew their punters: there were shopmobility scooters for hire in the lobby, and the first evening's entertainment was a touring Norwegian children's brass band, followed by bingo hosted by a caller who had quite clearly lost the will to live, followed by (top of the bill!) Bernie Martyn and the Explosive Dancers. It was all very Alan Bennett.
Highlight of the trip was watching a young thrash-metal band performing at a room full of shell-shocked OAPs. A few of the male onlookers clearly thought they were back in the trenches. They had heavy metal in those days too, apparently, but it was called shrapnel.
Just so you know that the Hebden Bridge Times isn't the only Yorkshire newspaper to carry the occasional odd headline:
My grandad fought the Nazis, you know. In Africa. REME. He was injured out. Never fully recovered. Spent the next 50 years gradually deteriorating.
I don't think grandad was a great idealist. He fought the Germans because he had to: we were at war. He was probably totally unaware of all the evil stuff the Nazi Party was up to, but he probably thought he was fighting for king and country, to preserve our way of life. A way of life which, let's face it, is worth preserving.
But one thing's for certain: grandad didn't go to war against Rommel for us to have to put up with shit like this:
Have you ever seen a dog on a beach? It's just about the most joyous sight there is. Dogs are what beaches are for.
I'm thinking of hiring an elephant, painting a Union Jack on the side, and taking it for a walk on Bridlington beach, just to make some sort of point.
BBC: Harman pushes discrimination plan
Equality minister Harriet Harman has set out plans to allow firms to discriminate in favour of female and ethnic minority job candidates.
But it's not discrimination; it's positive action.
So I guess that's all right then.
Guardian: Top of the pots
Vibrant colours have featured in style magazines for a number of seasons but has this transferred to the nation's homes? Are (fingers crossed) our living rooms, kitchens and toilets really sporting zesty greens, brilliant reds and jewel-bright blues, or are we (heaven forbid) still living in a blur of beige? In an effort to create a colour picture of the nation's homes, we asked leading paint companies to reveal their top-selling shades for the past year…
Top sellers
Farrow & Ball Current bestselling greys are (in no particular order) Down Pipe, Shaded White, Parma Gray, Elephant's Breath, Light Gray, Pavilion Gray and Charleston Gray. Bold colours are also gaining ground, including Incarnadine (rich crimson red), Drawing Room Blue, Pelt (deep aubergine) and Churlish Green (yellow/green).
Incarnadine, eh? Remember, you heard it here first.
Off to see Radiohead in Manchester. If you need to find me, I'll be the one at the back shouting Devil Woman!
