As I’m writing this its still Shrove Tuesday, albeit just barely.  As you’re reading this it probably won’t be Shrove Tuesday any more, unless I suddenly develop the ability to type at a phenomenal speed or you happen to live in a different time zone.

I never quite understood the point of Shrove Tuesday, but that’s never stopped me from celebrating it in the time-honoured fashion.  Pancakes were consumed, and they were tasty.  For that, I have Clare to thank.

As a card-carrying lapsed Catholic I’m well aware that Pancake Day traditionally falls on the day before Ash Wednesday, the beginning of the Feast of Lent.  That’s something else I’ve never quite understood.  I get the basic point of indulging yourself with tasty grub just prior to a sustained period of fasting, but why pancakes?  I don’t remember any mention of that in the Bible.

Maybe it was hidden away in some apocryphal scripture:

And on the day before Jesus was led by the Holy Spirit into the wilderness to fast for forty days, He did gather his disciples and did sayeth unto them, Who amongst you has the Jif Lemon?  And his disciples answered him, saying none amongst them had the Jif Lemon.  And Jesus did sayeth onto them, Who amongst you has the golden syrup?  And his disciples answered him, saying none amongst them had the golden syrup.  And Jesus was most displeased and did sayeth unto them, Let he who is without Jif Lemon or golden syrup caster the first sugar.

The Book of Moses Horwitz 4: 8-12

Another possibility is that Pancake Day has its roots in some lost Pagan ritual that has since been appropriated by Christianity.  Writing in the first century AD, the historian Tacitus’ account of the Roman invasion of Britain – The Agricola – mentioned the discovery of giant, abandoned, crêpe-like constructions that were built by indigenous Druids to placate the gods.  This would appear to have its roots in a similar ritual practiced in Ancient Greece, except their big, batter-based offerings were to the local god of music, fertility and theatrical criticism.

His name, of course, was Pan.

Lord Chief Justice Lord Judge has been in the news a lot this week. These stories were all very serious issues that merit very serious discussion by very seriously-minded people. As I’m not a particularly seriously-minded person, however, I feel more comfortable turning my attention to something altogether more glib, trivial and frivolous.

Namely, so to speak, Lord Judge’s name.

It does seem slightly odd (to me, at least) that someone with the surname Judge ends up becoming the Lord Chief Justice of England and Wales.  This would seem to support the theory of nominative determinism, whereby a person’s surname helps to influence their choice of career.  If your surname is ‘Judge’, the theory goes, then you’ve spent so many of your formative years being referred to as ‘Judge’ that you’re going to be subliminally conditioned and/or subconsciously predisposed to pursue a career in the legal profession.   Of course, with us human critters being the fairly complex engines of infinite possibility wot we are, things don’t always work out this way.  Just ask Judge Reinhold from the Beverley Hills Cop movies.

Reinhold notwithstanding, Lord Judge isn’t the only example of nominative determinism.  I first became aware it in the 1990s when New Scientist coined the term and it subsequently became a regular topic in the magazine’s Feedback section:

We recently came across a new book, Pole Positions – The Polar Regions and the Future of the Planet, by Daniel Snowman. Then, a couple of weeks later, we received a copy of London Under London – A Subterranean Guide, one of the authors of which is Richard Trench. So it was interesting to see Jen Hunt of the University of Manchester stating in the October issue of The Psychologist: “Authors gravitate to the area of research which fits their surname.” Hunt’s example is an article on incontinence in the British Journal of Urology (…) by J. W. Splatt and D. Weedon. (Italics mine)

New Scientist – 5th November 1994

Besides Lord Judge and Messrs Splatt and Weedon, my favourite examples of possible cases of nominative determinism include the following:

• Former Minister of Agriculture, Douglas Hogg
• British neurologist Russell Brain.
• Urologist at Musgrove Park Hospital in Taunton, Nicholas Burns-Cox.
• Association of British Police Officers spokesman on knife crime Alf Hitchcock.
• My secondary school English teacher, Mr Hyde.
• Former Microsoft Program Manager Noah Coad.
• Frances Crook OBE, director of the Howard League for Penal Reform.
• Former Archbishop of Manila, Cardinal Sin (1928-2005)
• Law firm in Leamington Spa called Wright Hassall.
• German football team VfL Wolfsburg’s former coach, Wolfgang Wolf.
• Spokesman for the Reagan White House, Larry Speakes.

And my absolute favourite:

• Urologist who specialises in vasectomies: Dr Richard (Dick) Chopp

Nominative Determinism focuses on the connection between surnames and careers, but I sometimes wonder if the influence of a person’s surname can go beyond that and have an impact on their personality type and/or character.  In this respect, the partial-to-booze chanteuse Amy Winehouse and the perpetually perky TV presenter Carol Smilie spring to mind, although I wish they didn’t.   On a personal note, in a previous job I used to regularly deal with a pair of clients called Mr R. Sole and Mr I. Wankawala.  I’m happy to say that they both lived up to their names.

And why should this just be limited to surnames?  Can a person’s first name also have an impact on their personality type and/or character?

Somehow I doubt it.   But then I would say that, wouldn’t I?

‘You’ve all seen that Busch beer commercial where the girl in the short hot pants opens the beer bottle on her belt buckle, leaves it there, lets it foam over her hand and over the bottle and the voiceover goes:  “Get yourself a BUSCH!”

‘Hmmm.  You know what that looks like..?’

Bill Hicks – Relentless

Local chocolate giant Cadbury are in the news today.  The board are resisting a hostile takeover bid from US food giant Kraft, saying that the “derisory” bid is an attempt buy the company “on the cheap”.  If the poster advertising the Cadbury Flake on the Pershore Road in Cotteridge is anything to go by, it looks as though this fight might get dirty:

Hmmm.  You know what that looks like..?

Of course, the humble Cadbury Flake has had a long tradition of employing soft-focus erotic imagery in its advertising campaigns.  This time around, however, the firm seem to be aiming for something a bit more blunt and obvious than a girl in an overflowing bath or a gecko scuttling across a telephone.  The slogan “Succumb to the crumb” is particularly suggestive.   Is it just my filthy mind, or is that first word positively loaded with phonetic ambiguity?

Those advertising people: they just can’t help themselves.

So, Britain’s best-selling red-top is back in the blue camp again. I can’t say I was particularly surprised when The Sun’s 12 year love-in with New Labour came to an end the other week. Maybe it’s because my political conscience first rolled off the production line during the 1980s, but I’ve always struggled to think of the Soaraway One as anything other than a vicious little Tory rag. For me, at least, its recent volte-face was a bit like the Angling Times announcing a return to fishing-themed coverage after a decade or so spent focusing on musical theatre.

I’ve never much liked The Sun, but I don’t expect that revelation will come as a tremendous surprise to anyone who knows me and/or reads this blog. I don’t really fall into its target demographic, you see. It’s not pitched at those of us lumbered with left-leaning tendencies, celebrity tat allergies and a phobia of xenophobic homophobes. Mind you, this probably won’t give the Murdoch clan too many sleepless nights.

In The Sun’s defence, however, at least it’s not the Daily Mail. I may dislike The Sun, but I really do hate the Daily Mail almost as much as it seems to hate benefit cheats, asylum seekers and Jonathan Ross. That probably won’t come as much of a surprise to anyone, either. Still, I shouldn’t just pick on the obvious targets. While I’m on the subject, I detest the Daily Express, despise the Daily Star and wouldn’t eat chips out of most of the broadsheets, either.

These paper prejudices have been with me for years. They weren’t the result of some misspent life of political activism, a disastrous career on Fleet Street or even a Media Studies evening course at the local FE College. No, they have their roots in something far more mundane than that.

It was my paper round wot did it.

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I went to see comedian Robin Ince at Birmingham’s Electric Cinema last Thursday.  He was performing his new one-man show – Robin Ince vs. the Moral Majority – as part of this year’s Birmingham Comedy Festival.  The bulk of the show consisted of a vicious yet hilarious attack on the so-called quality press and – in that respect at least – it was not unlike the final season of The Wire, albeit with more punchlines and less drive-by shootings.  Ince  was on remarkably good form and I’ve written a glowing review about it and everything.  I’ll tell you about that some other time.

Although the emotional content of the show was largely made up of anger, fury and the occasional bout of hysteria, Ince ended his set with something that was extraordinarily beautiful.  He read something I was familiar with but hadn’t seen for ages, a passage by the late Carl Sagan in which the famous American astronomer meditated on a photograph of our planet that was taken by the Voyager I spacecraft some 3.7 billion miles away:

Look again at that dot.  That’s here.  That’s home.  That’s us.  On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives.  The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every “superstar,” every “supreme leader,” every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there – on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena.  Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot.  Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds.

Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light.  Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark.  In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.

The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life.  There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate.  Visit, yes.  Settle, not yet.  Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.

It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience.  There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world.  To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we’ve ever known.

- Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space  (1994)

The image above is the one that Voyager took.  If you look carefully – if you really squint at it – you’ll see a barely imperceptible white dot.  It’s just over halfway down and just under three-quarters of the way across.  It’s barely a pixel.

That’s us, that is.

Seamlessly following on from my previous post, this appeared on The Guardian’s Music Blog back in 2007:

Opening this Thursday, a new exhibition at London’s Art Vinyl gallery, entitled De-Face Value, will showcase hand-painted re-workings of [Phil Collins'] No Jacket Required LP sleeve by artists and musicians…

No explanation required.

“Art for art’s sake
Money for God’s sake”

- 10CC

From BBC News:

Artist Tracey Emin has said she is thinking of leaving the UK in protest about being overtaxed.

In a Sunday Times interview she said she was “very seriously considering leaving Britain,” adding: “I’m simply not willing to pay tax at 50%.”

Far be it for me to undermine your significant cultural significance here, Tracey, but doesn’t this behaviour – technically speaking, of course – put you in the same category of artist as, say, Jim Davidson, Paul Daniels or Phil Collins?   Phil, as you might remember, was another multi-millionaire who didn’t like the prospect of paying higher taxes, so he threatened to leave the UK if the Tories lost the 1997 general election.  Many regard this as a key decisive factor behind New Labour’s landslide victory.

You then go on to say that you’re thinking about moving to France:

“At least in France their politicians have always understood the importance of culture and they have traditionally helped out artists with subsidy and some tax advantages,” she said.

France, of course, is a wonderful country with a rich cultural heritage, Tracey.  You could do a lot worse than to move there.  I must admit, though, I’m not particularly au fait (as they say), with the country’s political system.   I don’t know, for instance, how supportive French politicians are of crass, inarticulate, creatively-bankrupt charlatans.   Don’t get upset, Tracey – I’m not saying that you’re like that, of course.  Of course.  I’m just trying to illustrate a point (and, no, Tracey – I don’t need to employ a team of assistants to help me illustrate a point).

You then say:

“We simply have what I call ‘ambition politicians’ who go from one department to another for career reasons,” she said.

Good on you, Tracey – someone has to stand up to these schmucks.  And ‘ambition politicians’ – that’s such a clever, nuanced turn of phrase.  I really hope it catches on.  And if anyone mentions “‘Ambition artists’ who go from one country to another for tax reasons”, then you take no notice.  Sticks and stones, and all that.

One last thing, Tracey.  I know that the Tories today announced that they’re planning to keep Labour’s 50% top rate tax for the foreseeable future, but you shouldn’t take it personally.  This doesn’t necessarily mean that there’s some kind of cross-party campaign to encourage you to leave.

Maybe they just don’t want Phil Collins coming back.

At Tuesday night’s 8Bit Lounge event at the Hare and Hounds pub, I got chatting to my mate Danny Smith about the ‘H.P. Lovecraft’s Pac-Man’ parody I posted a couple of years ago.  He wanted to read it and I told him I’d send him a link to the original post, but instead I’ve decided to trim it down (yes, it used to be longer than this), tighten it up and try to make it funnier.   Apologies, then, to anyone whose been subjected to this before:

As I woke, I found myself lying upon a hard, polished surface in a dark, stygian place consumed by a most wretched and ravenous hunger.  With no memory of how I arrived at this unhappy fate I could only speculate as to its cause:  Had I been blinded by some vicious assailant and left here to die of starvation?  Was this Hell? Or – more prosaic and yet more terrifying in its aspect – had I been stitched-up once again by those vile scoundrels from the Miskatonic Polytechnic Rugby Union Club?

The darkness was absolute and impenetrable, as though both moon and starlight had been extinguished from the night-black sky by some vast cloak of pure obsidian that had been draped over the firmament and painted black with several coats of black emulsion.  The hunger, too, was quite unprecedented.  I yearned – oh, how I yearned! – for some scant morsel of sustenance from the unforgiving gloom.  It was as though each molecule, cell and atom within me were letting out a plaintive vocal harmony, accompanied by the drum solo emanating from the hollow chambers of my belly. I thought of Thomas de Quincey and his infamous Diary of an English Opium-Eater, in which he described a grub-craving so profound that he could “steal a sticky bun from the pocket of a tramp.”

I thought of my fiancé P_____ – what had become of her?  Would I ever have the chance to gaze lovingly at her pretty round face or to touch those golden locks of hair held in place by that enormous red bow?  But before I could find an answer, a flickering spark of light tore a slice of incandescent brilliance through the hitherto relentless gloom.  Dazzled momentarily – with phosphorescent dots erupting before my eyes – I gasped as the spark ignited and blue light cascaded all around me.  I could see that I now stood between two shimmering walls of the most gaudy electric-blue neon.  They seemed to form a corridor of sorts, and something about the scene reminded me of a strange and disturbing secret passage from the dreaded Necronomicon of Abdul Alhazred, in which he gave a vivid account of a regrettable stag weekend in Amsterdam.

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