Cocktail hour

We've reached J in Hans' A to Z cocktail challenge: getting near to halfway through. Hans is having one of his sulks, actually, at the moment, after we missed last weekend's CH. Plus the atmosphere in JMP Towers is more than a little fractious, Barbara The Cat having responded badly to the introduction of The Cat Flap over the weeekend, and now hissing evilly at her sister Margot whenever the two of them cross in the hall, whereas until today they'd kiss and curl up together. Not-at-all obsessive research on internet cat forums - oh yes, they do exist - suggests this is far from a rare phenomenon. 'A vet' comments on one 'Don't try to understand cats. They are very, very, very strange creatures.' Wise words, and a reason why they are so much more interesting and rewarding than dogs, but that's a whole other post. 

Difficult times, then, so in an attempt to lighten the mood, I've persuaded Hans to choose the Jelly Baby for this week's cocktail. Now, there are many cocktails that claim to mimic the particular taste of Jelly Baby, but Hans can report, after several hours with his focus group behind the bikesheds of the local boys grammar, that the best is as follows:

Take 

One measure Archers (peach schnapps) 
One measure Malibu
One measure Smirnoff red vodka
One measure Blue Curaco (come on, you've got some at the back of that cupboard in the kitchen)  
2 little bottles pineapple juice
Lemonade to taste 
and
Beaucoup de ice

Slosh together. Stir. Drink in the spring sunshine. It does taste like jelly babies. And gets you as pissed as a sixth form disco.

PS Hans adds - aren't we all just loving the Matt Crawford fraud arrest plot on the Archers?

Sarah Palin haikus

You knew there was a gap in your literary life, but you couldn't put your finger on it, right? Right. JMP always knows. Well, that gap will be filled, my friend, by a visit to the wonderful 'Why Sarah Palin Is So Freaking Awesome' blog (AELRT not ironic! not ironic!), which, amongst its many treats, features, yes, Sarah Palin haikus.

Here's a taster:

Moose hunting Mom and
Governor of Alaska
Sarah does it all!

I was so inspired, I had to have a go myself at a cheery SP haiku (and commenter JG did after all, in a comment on an earlier post, ask for this blog's take on Bristolgate):

Grandmother of bastard

Her family mired in sin -

They will burn in hell.

It's kinda fun! You betcha!

Update: more Sarah Palin haikus than any half-way normal person could possibly desire or need here.

Hello

If you're the Google user who landed on this humble little blog yesterday by searching for 'mac and piss', I do hope you found what you were looking for. We aim to please.

Only surprise is it took so long

Barack Obama's teleprompter has a blog.

Sample quote:

Now I need to come clean. Those meetings back in 2002 where Holbrooke was speaking to his fellow AIG board members and telling them that it was a good idea to open that London office to handle mortgage swap derivatives? My dad was his Teleprompter.

I feel so dirty. Where's the Windex?

no2eu...

...yes to Democracy, is a group (a coalition of trade unionists, political parties and campaigning groups, to be precise) that has the aim of defending democracy in the EU from a leftwing perspective.

Good stuff, about time, etc. It would be nice for opposition to the lack of democratic accountability within the EU to be seen no longer as the exclusive interest of elderly white Conservatives, and the semi-racist weirdos at UKIP. Democracy is a fundamentally left-wing project, ffs!

"We say...
Reject the Lisbon Treaty
No to EU directives that privatise our public services
Defend and develop manufacturing, agriculture and fishing industries in Britain
Repeal anti-trade union ECJ rulings and EU rules promoting social dumping
No to racism and fascism, Yes to international solidarity of working people
No to EU militarisation
Repatriate democratic powers to EU member states
Replace unequal EU trade deals with fair trade that benefits developing nations
Scrap EU rules designed to stop member states from implementing independent economic policies
Keep Britain out of the eurozone"

Hmmm. Much of that rings JMP's bell. Interesting to see how it develops. More here.

It's Friday...

...and so thoughts naturally turn to the great issues of the day, chief among which is: what are the greatest TV opening credits of all time?

My vote, after long and considered thought, goes to the Sopranos. Everything is fantastic, and taken together, it all fits the series absolutely perfectly. Great camerawork; superb editing and lighting; and great, great music ('Woke up this morning' by Alabama 3). A little mini narrative is created that tells you a huge amount about the main character in a small amount of time (and with no dialogue).

Even, to get sad(der) for a minute, the font is just right.

Surely none better?

Beaming in from Planet Stupid...

...also known as America, is the news that just over 4 out of every ten American adults believe that dinosaurs and early humans lived on the earth at the same time. (Wonder if the rising tide of creationism in the US played a part in some of those responses?)

I have to admit that I love these surveys, apparently specifically designed to encourage other nations to laugh at Americans. "Bloody hell, 72% of Americans think that France is in Africa! Ha ha!" Brilliant.

Still, I have to confess that one of the other 'blimey they're pig ignorant' factoids in this story - Only 53% of adults know how long it takes for the Earth to revolve around the Sun. - made me pause for a minute. Year or day? Day or year?

Oh God. Am I Dumb As A Yank?

That joke isn't funny any more

In a piece of tepid and tired contraversialism, one Thomas H Green (you can tell he's a bit of a plonker just by that 'H'; the crappest one in Steps was called 'H', wasn't he?) writing in the Torygraph says, at the end of an attack piece on the new boxset of Radiohead's OK Computer:

For me Radiohead lurk around the top of only one poll, and that's as the second most overrated band of all time. Number one, of course, is The Smiths, but don't let's even start on that.

Now have a pop at Radiohead if you want for being whingy, prog-rock, blah de blah. It's hardly the first time it's been done, and if you can't get over that to appreciate the music and the innovation, well, hard luck because you're missing out. But his snide little digs at Thom Yorke and co aren't what what really got me about H's article. No, what got me was the lazy throw-away one line attack on the Smiths, quoted above.

The Smiths are just about the only band that I have listened to more, and appreciate more, as I've got older. I couldn't stand them when I first heard them in the '80's; now I think that they are quite clearly the best and most important band of that decade, with The Queen Is Dead that decade's finest album. Morrissey's lyrics and Marr's guitar just sound better and better with the passing of the years.

In short, slagging off the Smiths is simply unforgiveable, and if Thomas H Green had any decency he'd go home, and cry, and want to die.

Doesn't time fly

Sorry for communication breakdown.

Very busy and all that. Too busy trying to take impressionistic photographs of Venice at night. You know what it's like. Nightmare. Hopefully normal service will now be resumed and so on. 

JMP's long weekend

Back Monday.

The Left kicks Tibetans in the teeth, Part 94

Andy Newman over at Socialist Unity is at it now, attacking the Dalai Lama and claiming that independence would not be in the best interests of Tibetans. Because Andy would know, you see. "There is no automatic linkage between the desire to express national and cultural identity and the desire for a separate state", he tells us. Ah. Stupid old Tibetans, they should be aware of that lack of an automatic linkage.

What, human rights? Democracy? Self-determination? No, what's more important for large parts of the Left at the moment is that we keep our "hands off China". Heaven forfend that we pick on them for, well, oppressing an entire people, trying to destroy a culture, torturing dissidents...

Lesbians, home and away

I've commented before that I was born at the wrong time.

Now the bombshell news that there is going to be a lesbian storyline on Home and Away confirms it. Such a plotline during the 1980's would have cheered up my teenage years no end.

Luton, Muslim radicals and freedom of speech

The protest by a small group of radical Muslims in Luton at the home-coming parade of the Royal Anglian Regiment, described by the BBC as an "anti-war" protest*, has raised all the usual, interesting points about freedom of speech.

t is clear to me that

a) such demonstrators have the right to exercise their freedom of speech within the limits of the law;

b) the demonstration was not within the limits of the law; the demonstrators were committing offences under section 5 of the Public Order Act 1986 (I've bolded what I think is relevant in this case) -

5. Harassment, alarm or distress.—

(1) A person is guilty of an offence if he—

(a) uses threatening, abusive or insulting words or behaviour, or disorderly behaviour, or

(b) displays any writing, sign or other visible representation which is threatening, abusive or insulting,

within the hearing or sight of a person likely to be caused harassment, alarm or distress thereby. ;

c) in any event, the police could and should have seen that the demonstration was highly likely to cause a breach of the peace, and moved on the demonstrators for that reason;

d) it is highly likely that this didn't happen and no arrests were made - save of members of the public offended by the demonstration - because of police sensitivities about racism, Islamophobia etc. Consideration of obvious counterfactuals involving eg the BNP and demonstrations outside mosques is instructive here; and

e) it is wrong - both in terms of principle and for more pragmatic reasons - for the police to be guided by such considerations when enforcing the law.

So far, so relatively uncontentious.

But if there are such protests again, and the police take a similar line, we are, it seems to me, facing a very dangerous situation. A group of bearded Muslim men screaming abuse and insults at British troops lays bare significant cultural fault lines in this country, and extremists on both sides would welcome this. If the Luton protest is repeated round the country, and the police act as they did in Luton, then, combined with the deepening recession, the UK faces the very real prospect of a summer of civil unrest, and the final fragmentation of urban multi-culturalism.

*From the Times editorial today: The Islamist demonstrators in Luton who this week barracked soldiers returning from Iraq have been widely described as anti-war protesters. That is a big assumption. Their banners carried slogans including “Muslims Rise Against British Oppressors” and “Anglian Soldiers Go To Hell”. A local MP has claimed that they were linked to al-Muhajiroun - a now defunct organisation that applauded the 9/11 attacks and sought the establishment of a theocratic Muslim state. The protest appears to have been organised by a splinter from that group called Ahle Sunnah al Jamah, which promises more such events.

Whatever their formal affiliation, it is a reasonable inference that the protesters are not anti-war but pro-war. The war they favour is the one being prosecuted, in various parts of the world, by theocratic terrorism against open societies - and also closed ones that adhere to a different form of religious observance.

Quote of the day

There's nothing special about Britain. You're just the same as the other 190 countries in the world. You shouldn't expect special treatment.

- US State Department official involved in planning Gordon Brown's visit to Washington

Oh come on guys. Talk about kicking us when we're down. We didn't need to know that in Obama's mind we rank roughly equal with Burkina Faso, not right now.

Source

Child hyperthermia

Important, beautifully written and very, very moving article in the Washington Post today about parents who have left their babies in the back of their car on a hot day, resulting in the child's death: a far commoner occurence than you'd think. If you're a parent of a baby or small child and you drive, you simply must read it.

A small excerpt:

"Death by hyperthermia" is the official designation. When it happens to young children, the facts are often the same: An otherwise loving and attentive parent one day gets busy, or distracted, or upset, or confused by a change in his or her daily routine, and just... forgets a child is in the car. It happens that way somewhere in the United States 15 to 25 times a year, parceled out through the spring, summer and early fall. The season is almost upon us.

Two decades ago, this was relatively rare. But in the early 1990s, car-safety experts declared that passenger-side front airbags could kill children, and they recommended that child seats be moved to the back of the car; then, for even more safety for the very young, that the baby seats be pivoted to face the rear. If few foresaw the tragic consequence of the lessened visibility of the child . . . well, who can blame them? What kind of person forgets a baby?

The wealthy do, it turns out. And the poor, and the middle class. Parents of all ages and ethnicities do it. Mothers are just as likely to do it as fathers. It happens to the chronically absent-minded and to the fanatically organized, to the college-educated and to the marginally literate. In the last 10 years, it has happened to a dentist. A postal clerk. A social worker. A police officer. An accountant. A soldier. A paralegal. An electrician. A Protestant clergyman. A rabbinical student. A nurse. A construction worker. An assistant principal. It happened to a mental health counselor, a college professor and a pizza chef. It happened to a pediatrician. It happened to a rocket scientist.

Last year it happened three times in one day, the worst day so far in the worst year so far in a phenomenon that gives no sign of abating.

Read the whole thing.

H/t Alex Massie at Coffee House.

Northern Ireland Timeline

4 March 2009: it is announced that Edward Kennedy is to receive an honourary knighthood

7 March 2009: two soldiers at a barracks in Antrim are shot dead by dissident Republicans

9 March 2009: an officer of the PSNI is shot dead by dissident Republicans

Someone, somewhere, has a very dark sense of humour.

@andyburnham

Just checked Andy Burnham's Twitter feed.

"in toilets at work shaving off pubes. am collecting them in plastic bag to make sweater for my rabbit!! lol!!

5.46pm from Twitterberry"

I mean, this man's in the Cabinet. Is there nothing we can do?