Is picking up a prostitute (electronically) educational?

I read an entertaining piece of journalism today which declares that video-gaming is educational, because it involves problem-solving, patience and learning moves. No doubt you've read of research claiming that kids, old people and pretty much anyone can 'train' their brains by playing games, and thus stave off senility or whatever.

I'm not particularly convinced - the 'skills' required by many games aren't particularly transferable. I'm not certain that learning how to score drugs, dally with prostitutes or (as a very good dissertation I read a few days ago boasted) smash enemies' heads against the kerb until they're dead really count as educational. For one thing, the physics of cranium-crunching and the economics of the sex-trade aren't included in the experience: these are worlds of naked, individualistic capitalism.

But then, I'm not really in much position to preach. I know someone who never completed The Hobbit on a ZX Spectrum, and I'm not much better. The last game I played obsessively was Civilization II in about 1996. I loved it, but got bored because it was so ideologically loaded. To win, you had to be a ragingly violent capitalist ready to nuke your neighbours without cause, whereas I always tried to build a socialist, peace-loving society, and got nuked by said neighbours: clearly the game's designers are Hobbesians, and it disturbed me. Civ 3 and Alpha Centauri just looked rubbish and didn't play as well.

I've tried to play Scrabble, but my copy is a cheating American version. It continually gets all seven letters down while refusing to provide a meaning for the made-up words, and gives me 7 vowels. It got so frustrating that I ended up demanding the suggestions every go and sitting back watching the computer play itself, which damaged my play against actual humans because my mental flexibility had been sapped.

I do occasionally go online to play the Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy game, which is ridiculously difficult: try it, and then wonder where the summer (and your sanity) went.

So, tell me: what games do you play, which games do you recommend I play (and are available on Mac) and what have you learned from them? I see that Civ 5 is coming this year, and will hopefully be Mac-friendly!

Efficiency increase in Pakistan

Workers in Pakistan today reported a massive surge in productivity while school and university assignments became noticeably better informed, following court orders banning Facebook, Youtube, Flickr and Wikipedia due to 'sacrilegious content'.

OK, I'm being flippant. The Pakistani courts have banned these sites in response to a nasty-minded campaign calling on people to post cartoons of Muhammad, many of which are spiteful and racist. It seems rather confused - you have to search for these things to be offended by them, so the devout could just not log on, rather than using the courts. Most Pakistani's won't be affected anyway - web access is restricted to a tiny proportion of the population.

I also don't quite understand the ban on drawings of the Prophet - it certainly wasn't always banned in every branch of Islam, and Muhammad isn't God: he was a man.

Why can't we all just get along?

A battle won

British Airways cabin crew have won their appeal against an ban on their strike action. They're fighting degraded working conditions and victimisation, and British Airways' only weapons are technicalities (in this case, how exactly the union communicates ballot results to its members), which the Appeal Court have rejected. BA will probably go to the Supreme Court, but in the meantime, the struggle continues.

Victory to the workers! And I'll have a glass of wine and a blanket please.

Meanwhile, the Tories and Lib Dems have shown their true colours by announcing that they'll privatise the Royal Mail. Because, obviously, when you need a fair, universal service, you give it to profit-making organisation which will reduce wages, staffing levels and service coverage. Brilliant. Rural folk can now look forward to not receiving mail, as a punishment for living in sparsely populated areas. Service in poor areas will decline, junk mail will increase, deliveries will get later and prices will rocket. Shameful.

Yankee Classics

Album of the Day is Benjamin Lees' Symphony No. 4: Memorial Candles, part of Naxos Records' brilliant project of selling cheap CDs of every American composer (though Lees was born in China of Russian parentage) who hummed a line. It's a patchy affair: some of the composers are lost geniuses (genii?), others are fairly humdrum. Yet there's something brilliantly democratic about giving everyone a chance to be heard, at £6 per CD.

Lees is still alive, in his 80s, and his music is firmly in the classical tradition, rather than part of the experimental (i.e. largely tune-free) movements of the twentieth century. This isn't to say that he's old-fashioned or derivative - he draws on the more interesting of the late Classical and Romantic composers like Prokofiev and Bartok, whose music is brilliant and challenging, and does interesting things with rhythm and sound, influenced by his maverick teacher, George Antheil.

Symphony No 4: Memorial Candles was commissioned to commemorate the 40th anniversary of the Holocaust, specifically its Jewish victims, and features a solo female voice and violinist. It's utterly terrifying, saddening and finally resigned. As it should be.

Here's the melancholy 3rd movement. Ignore the sunshine.

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Thanks for the trees, Swedes!

I've received more books. I bought loads at the weekend (more J. G. Farrell, a cultural history of the depression, an 1899 beautiful copy of the Icelandic Laxdaela Saga and biographies of A. J. Cook and James Maxton), and now another spruce appears covered in words. Dodie Smith's I Capture the Castle, which I'm ashamed to say I haven't read before, Corder's Lionboy, a graphic novel (i.e. a comic) called To Teach by William Ayers (bought because he's a real 60s radical and the right tried to use him to bash Obama), and four more Penguin Great Thinkers books, with the beautiful designs: Ruskin's On Art and Life, de Montaigne's On Solitude, Locke's Of the Abuse of Words and Hazlitt's The Pleasure of Hating (you can tell I've been marking). They're lovely slim volumes of great ideas which I heartily recommend - some of these links are to the full texts).

I'll find time to read them when I'm made redundant.

On your bike

This looks like paradise to me. The sped-up footage gives it the charm of a Harold Lloyd film (imagine it in black and white). Look out for The Man On Two Bikes. What a hero.

Cambridge might be a little like this, if it actually catered for cycling seriously rather than merely tolerated a lot of cyclists.

Gavin Watson, photographer

He's a brilliant photographer, author of Skins, his brilliant collection of skinhead photos. He's appearing at The Hegemon today, in MC001 from 2-4 to talk about his work and sign copies of his book. I'm invigilating, damn it, but come if you can.

A change of pace

For the past few weeks, I've mostly been listening to Riot Grrl and 80s/90s indie pop (Pale Saints and Heavenly mostly), but the next album on my alphabetical trawl through my hard drive is a compilation of Benedictine monks singing Gregorian chants.

Now, I'm ambiguous about religious music as it is: it can be utterly sublime, but it's written for the glorification of an imaginary being which has legitimised all sorts of appalling behaviour (and some good things, to be fair). I'm also ambiguous about Benedictine monks: I spent some of my school life in the tender care of this lot (as well as the Christian Brothers, the Sisters of Mercy - who were heavily armed and not inclined to mercy, I can tell you) and they were, by and large, drunks, mental and physical bullies and very much not what you'd call holy. I just can't imagine the ones I knew producing this kind of contemplative music. I also supposedly sang this stuff in the school choir - nobody worked out that I simply mouthed the words for 2 years because choir practice was better than the homework sessions which were the alternative.

So this is a beautiful album, one which, I suppose, can be treated by atheists as simply music - being in Latin helps most people, but I can follow enough to get annoyed - but it holds all sorts of other associations for me.

Hold my calls, Moneypenny

Very exciting day today. I've been for a swim, I've got lots of marking to do, there's a union negotiating committee meeting to attend, then I'm invigilating an exam.

This is exactly the kind of glamour which attracted me to a life in teaching. The intellectual cut and thrust, the bronzed bodies and white teeth, sipping cocktails in the staff room, impeccably rigged out in designer clothes, before driving off in a rakish cabriolet to a conference in St. Tropez.

Er…

Why I miss the early 90s, part 349

I'll display my unashamedly nostalgic side now. I was caught up in the Britpop craze, having started to buy music while at university from 93-96. Some of those bands were rubbish (Powder, anyone?) and some great (Elastica, Blur's Modern Life is Rubbish distils an era, though it heralded Britpop rather than fully partook in it).

But. Britpop killed off the jungle of non-corporate music - such as shoegaze -  or at least drove it to the margins, where it became fragmented and overly precious. Chasing hit singles, appearing in style mags and being spotted at celeb events became signs of success, rather than producing great work or remaining artistically honest. It was also a deeply laddish culture - females (Lush, Pale Saints, Juliana Hatfield, Liz Phair, Riot Grrl) were marginalised, however good their music, with odd exceptions such as the wonderful P J Harvey.

So today I've been listening to Belly, fronted by Tanya Donelly, formerly of the even more wonderful Breeders and Throwing Muses (I'll come to them in due course). Belly melded jangly guitars, an ethereal voice and a muscular rock rhythm section to produce something captivating. Indie night classics!

He's on fire

Given a time-lapse video camera, a Sigur Rós CD and a healthy dollop of aesthetic appreciation, Sean Stiegemeier has produced something wondrously beautiful from the Icelandic volcano.

Hover over the picture and click the symbol to the left of 'vimeo' for a wondrous full-screen vista.


Iceland, Eyjafjallajökull - May 1st and 2nd, 2010 from Sean Stiegemeier on Vimeo.

Is the judiciary racist? I refer you to bears and woods

I dismissed the judiciary yesterday as reactionary and out of touch. Today's Guardian diary has a piece which illustrates my point rather neatly:

They got Theresa May to the Home Office, and once she's settled in, is there any chance she might send a quick note to the recorder Robin Pearse-Wheatley, whose expressions of sympathy to two Icelandic women who hooked up with a gang of criminals to commit a brutal "honeytrap" robbery seem a little out of place as we fight to rebuild Broken Britain. But no less out of place than his summing-up of their plight. "You seem to have fallen in with a group of black men which seems to have been the beginning of your unfortunate adventures," he said. "After a series of adventures I won't detail, but including time you were shoplifting – which doesn't reflect well on you at all – you, no doubt at the behest of these frightening black men who you were keeping company with, were involved in this incident." Is it because they is black? Seems it is.

Nearly the Big Sleep

I know these are the most dreaded words in the English language, with the possible exception of 'I'm not racist, but…' (which I heard yesterday), but here goes…

I had an odd dream last night. The fire alarm sounded, and after a while I dragged myself out of bed, in my old family home. I then went into another room, where a completely deaf friend slept (a guy I haven't spoken to since 1993, and who never visited my house) and got him out of bed. I then woke up and realised that an alarm was going off in real life, where I live now. I didn't panic, or evacuate the building. Instead, I wearily put earplugs in and went back to sleep.

It didn't occur to me, in my befuddled state, that my building could have been on fire. My subconscious assured me that it must be next door, it must be a false alarm, that I'd be fine. I needed the sleep, after all. Only this morning did my stupidity hit home… I could have lost all my lovely books!

This is Lawfare

An extremely unpleasant aspect of modern industrial relations is employers turning to the courts to prevent workers withdrawing their labour, despite overwhelming votes to strike. It's made easier by a set of 1980s union-bashing laws never repealed by the so-called Labour Party.

The British Airways staff voted massively in favour of a strike. BA has had the strike cancelled by the courts on a ridiculous technicality, a trap set by the Tories 20 years ago.

When balloting for strikes, unions should give those who took part a detailed breakdown of the result, as required by section 231 of the Trade Union and Labour Relations (Consolidation) Act 1992.

The union's barrister, John Hendy QC, said the airline had not been able to find even one employee who did not know the result of the ballot, which voted overwhelmingly for strike action.

This is madness. The ballot was legal. Union members knew the results. In this day and age, a letter in the post isn't relevant: union members see their reps, check Facebook and read websites. 


The facts are these: every member was informed of the result. However, the fact that 11 (eleven) ballot papers were spoiled, out of the 10-12,0000 cast, was 'only' publicised on the union notice board in every workplace - apparently that doesn't count as 'notification', according to this one judge's interpretation. 


What we're seeing is simple union-bashing, inspired and directed by specialist US law firms dedicated to furthering corporate power. Yes, Unite should have seen this coming, but the fact remains: these kinds of laws breach the globally-recognized right to strike. No doubt my employer, and every other one, is learning that the courts (staffed exclusively by rightwing, male, white, upper-class, private school and Oxbridge judges) will always defend corporate interests.


I've just made an official complaint to the BBC about John Humphrys' interview with the union's leader on this matter - Humphrys clearly crossed the line and emotionally hectored Derek Simpson from the perspective of BA's board of directors, rather than making any attempt to be impartial or objective.  

Text us NOW! It plugs gaps!

The inanity of rolling news begging for our views is beautifully captured by Mitchell and Webb.

The height of stupidity has now been reached, and it's embarrassing to admit that it's in The Guardian. Send them your suggestions now:

 Send us your ideas for capping the leak. We'll publish your suggestions online and present them to BP too

Yes, they want YOUR suggestions to save the Louisiana coast!

Meanwhile, the most expensively educated men in the land prove yet again how dumb they really are:

Edu minister Nick Gibb says he'd be happier with grads from Oxbridge than from "rubbish" uni. Good to see elitism's alive and well in Govt!

Gibb went to Durham, so clearly feels inadequate. His comment was actually that he'd rather children were taught by Oxbridge graduates with no teaching qualifications than by qualified teachers from 'rubbish' universities. 


Clearly some problems with this. Firstly, what constitutes a 'rubbish' university? One that doesn't have gowns and castellated buildings? What if said university is very good at some subjects and 'rubbish' at others? What if its teaching qualifications are highly respected and attract students who graduated from Oxford, Cambridge and Durham?


The major problem is this: I've been taught by people with high intellectual honours from Oxford and Cambridge. I've been taught by people with qualifications from 'rubbish' universities. Some of the Oxbridge graduates have been world experts and useless teachers, some of the others have been brilliant teachers rather than great researchers. Some, from both camps, have been brilliant at both. There's also plenty of evidence that non-Oxbridge universities are more innovative as well. New courses always start in 'other' universities. 


There's no way you can write off the vast majority of teachers because they went to the 'wrong' university. This is the politics of snobbery. Teaching is hard work, and an art. You can know an awful lot and not be able to communicate it, to inspire, to hold the attention and gain the respect of a bunch of people, especially at school age, who are essentially prisoners. I'd prefer Oxbridge types to go into teaching rather than banking - they'll cause less damage, but there's no way an elected Minister of State should be shooting his mouth of in such a mindless, kneejerk manner.


By the way - famous Cambridge graduates include one Nicholas Griffin, criminal and leader of the neo-Nazi British National Party. So it's not all gravy down in the Fens, is it?


Still, it could be worse: poor, poor, Texas. 

Paul Uppal - MIA

2 weeks since I asked Paul Uppal MP a few basic questions, such as whether he lives in the constituency he represents. Still, he's a busy guy. Big ministry to run. Oh no, that must have been someone else. He's a back-bench drone, but apparently one who intends to ignore his constituents.

Meanwhile, here's some music.
It's Bellowhead's albums Burlesque and Matachin. Bellowhead are leaders of the amazing British folk revival, specializing in big, good-time party folk performed by huge numbers of people, dragging in bits of Eastern European, jazz and all sorts of other genres. I'm not always in the right mood for Bellowhead - sometimes the voices grate a little on me, and occasionally I'd like a bit more tune, so I head off in the direction of Lau.

I don't think Bellowhead will convert anyone unconvinced by new folk (they do echo the old finger-in-the-ear stereotype), but they're worth a listen and I've a huge soft spot for them.

Monkey see, monkey do…

Turns out that your addiction to porn and gossip magazines is deeply-rooted in our primate brains.

A study involving male monkeys and fruit juice shows that they'll 'pay' (in fruit juice) for a glimpse of a) more powerful monkeys in the troop and b) female monkeys' bottoms.

The researchers suggest that in tribal societies - monkeys and our own - access to information is important to retain cultural capital. So knowing what Tom Cruise had for dinner enables you to relate to others in your group, and may stop you being expelled, ignored or killed! I may be exaggerating slightly.

I'll take my chances with ignorance. Ook!

"A triumph of stupidity over common sense"

Messers CURTIS and ELTON, before they became Infected with the Curse of NOT BEING FUNNY, expressed all that is Good about Politickal Humour in their Televised Play, Blackadder the Third.

(With added Hollandish surtitles for your Convenience).

More wombling madness

Now, there are other Wombles available. For some reason, Ulster Defence Association loyalist terrorists and their friends call themselves wombles (as this fascinating piece explains), and it was also adopted by a group of very impressive anti-capitalist protestors.

Hilary tipped me off to this work of genius: Neil Innes's song (as The Grimms) 'Womble Bashers of Walthamstow'. The Grimms was Innes, some Liverpool Poets and Scaffold, and recorded three albums after Innes left the Bonzo Dog Doo Dah Band. Yes, it was the 60s and 70s.

	Neil Innes - Womble Bashers Of Walthamstow
	Found at Womble Bashers Of Walthamstow on KOhit.net

Just for Ben: a big bucket of Twee

Today's album is Belle and Sebastian's Tigermilk, with their BBC sessions thrown in. I have everything else the band has done, but only on vinyl, so Ben's spared the full horror. Why Ben? Because Belle and Sebastian represent everything he despises: they're mostly middle-class, they sing about middle-class things, he claims they're sexless (despite an album called The Boy With the Arab Strap), they're named after a French children's novel and TV show, and they're in thrall to the 1960s.

All this is true. But. They write thrilling tunes (not always, but often), I'm middle class (as is Ben), sex isn't everything and I don't care where they got the name. It's good to hear Scottish accents rather than faux-American, I like listening to songs of ordinary life, and they aren't nearly so unadventurous musically as their reputation suggests. They're great to dance to and good for listening to alone. They're pretentious and precious: good. The world needs them.

Tigermilk was made for the band's college course, and only 1000 copies were produced - I got my CD bootleg under the counter at my favourite record shop, as word spread. I loved the excitement of such a new band becoming popular by word of mouth. I also liked the envious glances at indie night when James and I turned up with the first B+S t-shirts in North Wales!

'Electronic Renaissance' is my favourite track.















Sorry Ben. Suck it up!

Meanwhile, in la la land

Clive Bloom, whoever he is, thinks that humanities research is a total waste of time, 'hobby' activity conducted 'in a comfy chair' while sipping cappuccinos. Well done, Clive. Obviously, human society is very simple and can be explained simply by biology and associated sciences. You fecking moron.

He adds insult to injury with gems like this:

No academic that I've ever met works nine to five, five days a week. With three months of holiday and every weekend free…

I just wonder if we need a body to dispense largesse to projects that are quite so facile and obscure or those that are the personal pet of some very small clique who believe in the centrality of the oboe to 21st-century culture, or those who are governed by the most fashionable thinking on heritage or the cultural primacy of modern dance, or the digital future of everything. As for the literature projects so in need of funded buyouts, they could either be done at the author's leisure or not at all, rather than splashing their spurious claims of importance across the AHRC's website as success stories.

That's hit quite a raw nerve. I'm exhausted at the moment. I'm always in the office 9-5 and many days I'm in for much longer. My institution's teaching hours are 9-9. I've been in the office until gone 10 p.m. (that's 13 hours) most of this week and last week. Next week will be the same, despite this research showing that doing 3 hours overtime a day leads to a 60% rise in heart disease. I work weekends because I teach so many modules and so many big classes that's it's the only way to mark work in the ridiculously short period of time available. Research basically doesn't get done - which means I'll never get another job. As to a three month holiday - it's bullshit. We have exam boards, resits to mark, clearing hotlines to staff, modules to design, even try to squeeze some research in…

I've rarely read such a vacuous and reactionary piece of rubbish. I think humanities research is important because it helps us to understand human relations and human behaviour. Why he'd reduce this to a hobby is completely beyond me.

Oiks don't need education

Those dedicated social engineers The Russell Group (the twenty or so very rich research universities which consider themselves 'top') have decided that the poor, those with dependent families and others without massive cash reserves and family backing shouldn't go to university.

They've told the government that students should pay commercial rates of interest, rather than the effective zero-interest on their student loans. You currently leave university owing c. £20,000-30,000: imagine the debt under commercial rules. They also want you to start paying more of your loan back, earlier (currently, you pay 9% of your monthly income once you earn £15,000 - which I imagine makes life quite difficult if you have kids, run a car, live in London etc. etc.).

It's a horrible commercial, individualist move which proves that these institutions don't understand what education is for: not to enrich individuals who can then afford to pay the money back, but to benefit society as a whole. Governments subsidise education with taxation because it's a social good. Would you become a primary school teacher, social worker or lab technician on £22,000 if you owed £50,000 for the privilege of acquiring the necessary qualifications?

Wow, talk about selfish and reactionary. Those particular universities are notoriously difficult to get into if you don't go to a private school, so their intake won't suffer - but everybody else will. Back to the fields, peasants!

What larks!

If you've ever thought that youth politicians are freaks, you'll love watching this. They're all odd, but watching triumphant, smug, arrogant, overdressed Tory students is definitely the worst bit. It reminded me that I chose the right side in life.

Wombling Free again!

Recently, I had cause to critique The Wombles for their hegemonic capitalist tendencies. I was, of course, mostly joking. Though Michael de Larribeiti clearly agrees with me: the 'Rumbles' in The Borribles are smug middle-class beasts which prey on the proletarian Borribles.

So I'm very happy that the Elizabeth Beresford's charming books are to be republished - I'm amazed that they were ever out of print. I have most of them already, but will certainly be purchasing the others.

Another colonial appointment

Deputy Welsh Minister: David Jones, MP for Clwyd West. He doesn't, of course, speak Welsh (that's for peasants) even though he represents a North Wales consitutency and he hates wind farms, but he does love nuclear weapons, hereditary legislators, Europhobia and homophobia, judging by his voting record.

Album of the Day: Beirut, Gulag Orkestar

This was a present from my fencing mate, John, who has a much more eclectic musical tastes than I. I'd never heard of Berlin, whose real name is Zach Condon. In all honesty, I didn't play it for ages because John's into mostly laptronica, which I can take or leave, and because the album's name annoyed me.






When I did play Gulag Orkestar, I was pleasantly surprised. It's not hugely innovative (gentle indie plus bits of East European folk stylings, like a light version of Gogol Bordello) but it's cool as long as you don't examine the lyrics too closely. Unless you're a hippy, in which case you'll be fine singing along. It's a fine album - lots of accordion and good arrangements with some striking steals from all sorts of folk traditions (the Klezmer bits are excellent) but the album slips away without establishing much hold on my tune detectors.

Your responses to my cry for help

Mark recommends this:




And Ben thinks this will raise my spirits. 





Thanks to both of you.

Lost in a cultural void

Trapped between election depression and marking hell, I feel my 'hinterland' is disappearing rapidly. I'm reading dissertations and non-fiction (still The Spirit Level, I'm afraid), and my research is gathering dust. Plashing Vole is becoming a wasteland of politics: buttock-faced Cameron is taking over my life.

One dissertation reminded me of a brilliant example of Daily Mail evil. The UK edition campaigned against giving teenage girls the cervical cancer vaccine, because of 'health fears'. Meanwhile, the Irish edition (usually a different front page and nothing else) campaigned, er, for giving the vaccine to teenage girls. Full coverage here.

So come on, readers, distract me. Recommend books, music and TV for the moments I snatch between awarding F grades. I get home after 10 and gormlessly stare at whatever's on. Soon I won't be able to tell the difference between Newsnight and Mitchell and Webb, or whatever else is on 'Dave'. Catching celebrity polluter Clarkson on an old QI yesterday made me apoplectically angry. But that takes me back to BumFace: they're mates.

Heeeeeeeeelllllllpppppp mmmmmeeeeeeee…

I Don't Mind If I Do*

As the rest of the world seems to be going back to the worst aspects of the 1980s, I've decided to trump them. You may have noticed, from my George Formby and Gracie Fields tracks, that I'm going back to the 1940s - the good bits, not the death camps.

This morning I'm listening to 40s radio comedy, specifically It's That Man Again and Much Binding in the Marsh. ITMA was a wartime sketch show, one of the first to mock public figures - 'That Man' was Hitler. Much Binding was set on an RAF base which became a country club after the war, and features much cross-class humour and pop culture references which are still actually funny.

Listen in to some (not many survived as the BBC couldn't afford to record much) here.

*Colonel Humphrey Chinstrap of ITMA turned every question into an offer of a drink.

She's dumb and she's angry

Sky News hasn't covered itself in glory over the past few days. Infuriated by the British voters' reluctance to elect a Tory manifesto, they're displaying a total contempt for democracy. First up is Kay Burley telling her interviewee that he should 'go home' and 'watch Sky' rather than exercise his democratic rights, followed by a protestor's very sensible advice. After that: Sky's Adam Boulton, a toad in human form, actually making Alastair Campbell (former pornographer and fearsome Labour spin doctor) look calm and rational.

World turned upside down, folks!

Paul Uppal - where are you?

Attention to Google searchers: I post about Uppal a couple of times a week. It's worth 
going to plashingvole.blogspot.com to catch up on the latest developments.







I e-mailed my new MP, very politely, a week ago, to ask for some basic biographical information, given that virtually nothing is in the public domain about him.

Dear Paul,

congratulations on your election - I'm one of your constituents.  

Could you give me further details on your profile please? The candidate pages are rather vague. I'd particularly like to know:

your educational history

what businesses you run and have run

how long you have held a Wolverhampton Wanderers season ticket

whether you live in the constituency

what political posts you have held previously

what political parties and pressure groups you have been/are a member of. 

Yours with thanks,

[Vole's offline name]

No reply yet, but that's no surprise: apparently his attitude towards criticism is censorship, as this entertaining discussion shows: naughty Paul and his web-savvy friend Carl delete critical comments on his 'blog' (which consists mainly of Central Office-dictated nonsense and is updated roughly once a decade ( last entry -a shocker - : April 21st 2009).

I'll keep you posted about when/if he every replies. Maybe I'll wander down to his surgery, if he holds one. This one could run and run…

Gorgeous George

I'm a George Formby fan. He doesn't play the ukelele, by the way - it's often a banjolele. If you listen to a whole album, you soon get the idea that he's deeply disturbed - almost every song is about voyeurism: either seeing other people naked or being seen naked.

He's the epitome of British music-hall entertainment - cheeky, witty and fun. We'll all need more of this in the dark years to come. While I'm at it, have some Gracie Fields too - another Northern entertainer who kept the music hall tradition alive on film - I love 'What Can You Give A Nudist On His Birthday?' and 'Looking on the Bright Side' seems perfect for today… Gracie had an odd life - sharing her marital home with husband and his mistress, early cervical cancer, a tense relationship with her public, partly because her second husband was Italian: they stayed in the US during WW2 because he'd have been interned in Britain. A vanished world…

Vinyl countdown: Beethoven

Today, I have mostly been listening to Lush live bootlegs and a download of the Boo Radleys' Ichabod and I. As only 500 copies were released and there's no way to get a legal copy under £100, I don't feel bad about not paying for it. It's wonderful, shoegazy, dubby and pop all at the same time.

But enough of them until the time comes. Next on the list is Beethoven. Luckily for you, most of my collection's on vinyl, but I have the symphonies on CD. What can I possibly say? Firstly: not boring. Dynamic, tempestuous, driven, sometimes obsessive, never mannered or mimsy - the problem with classical music in this country is that posh wankers have stolen it, and everybody else therefore ignores it. The wigs and stuff make us forget that people like Wolfgang were avant-garde troublemakers, hated by the establishment. But if you're in the mood for emotional extremes, Beethoven's your guy. All his symphonies are brilliant, but try the 9th - it towers over everything else for scale and daring. And he composed the whole thing while completely deaf.

Here's the whole thing (Karajan's old-fashioned but good recording) - skip around, find the bits that get you going. "Ode to Joy" is in the fifth clip.

Sold! To the Tories!

OK, I'm not invigilating - got the week wrong.

Mark has sent me this: someone, bored by Nick Clegg whoring himself around the main parties, has put Clegg up for sale on EBay (sale withdrawn at £1m due to some petty clause about not selling humans: proud of yourself, Wilberforce?).

In today's irony news, the new Home Office minister and Minister for Equality has consistently voted against equal rights for homosexuals. Well done, Theresa May (but probably won't). She loved the Iraq war but didn't want an inquiry into it, adores nuclear weapons and hunting (voting record).

The Cabinet's up: depressing if you know who these people are, enigmatic if you're normal. I see that Cheryl Gillan (another millionairess with expenses problems - amongst other things, the taxpayers fed her dog), the Secretary of State for Wales left that country at 11 and never came back - she doesn't even represent a Welsh constituency. She opposed Wales's National Assembly and doesn't speak Welsh. Which means we can look forward to a repeat performance of John Redwood's triumph (though to be fair, speaking human would be an improvement on his normal approach):

O Dave New World?

Morning comrades.
I have a hell of a hangover. Not from alcohol, but from exhaustion (I got locked in my office last night) and depression at five years of the landed gentry marauding round the country like they own it (which they do: 99% of the nation's wealth is concentrated in the hands of the top 5%). There's a gloriously hostile article on the New Tories here.

The Bullingdon Club. Oxford University's £10,000 per year drinking and vandalism club for Etonians and selected other public (private) schoolboys. Members include David Cameron (now Prime Minister), Boris Johnson (Mayor of London) and Gideon Osborne, now Chancellor of the Exchequer. Cameron's second from left, top row.

Zac Goldsmith MP (on left) with Hooray Henry friend.

Multimillionaire dilettante and tax avoider.

Another star New Tory is Jacob Rees-Mogg, the very posh banker who plagiarised articles from the Sun in his election material.

Key Rees-Mogg events:

In 1997, he waged a memorable campaign in Central Fife, crawling the dank, staunchly Labour streets in a Bentley and distributing leaflets with the help of his nanny, Veronica Crook. “I do wish you wouldn’t keep going on about the nanny,” he said afterwards. “If I’d had a valet, you’d think it was perfectly normal.”

…once referred to people who hadn’t been to Oxbridge as “potted plants” and who shares the use of an “exclusive” loo at Claridge’s with the King of Spain…

When asked for his reaction to a Newsnight survey showing that Tory parliamentary candidates were still drawn predominantly from private education and/or Oxford or Cambridge, Rees-Mogg controversially replied "[T]he Tory party, when it's elected, has to be able to form a government and it's not going to be able to form a government if it has potted plants as candidates simply to make up quotas." He went on, "[w]hen you go to an MP, you want somebody who will write an articulate letter to the social services or whoever it is to get your problem sorted out."

Rees-Mogg is notoriously partial to top hats.

Rees-Mogg himself stated (in The Sunday Times, 23 May 1999) that "it is rather pathetic to fuss about accents too much", though he then went on to say that "John Prescott's accent certainly stereotypes him as an oaf". He later told The Scotsman (October 2001), "I gradually realised that whatever I happened to be speaking about, the number of voters in my favour dropped as soon as I opened my mouth."

His sister ('Annunziata', if you please) lost the neighbouring constituency, thankfully. This is what their mother (!) says:

Do people like him? “Well, he’s got quite a weird reputation,” she says. “He’s outspoken and ... unusual. But he and Annunziata like sticking their heads above the parapet.” She sighs. “Can you imagine if they both got in?”

This is what we have to look forward to:



Today sees me marking yet more dissertations (yesterday's were very good indeed but so long) rather than working on my urgent research deadlines, and invigilating another exam. My office looks like the house of one of those hoarders who's found dessicated under a pile of old newspapers and the smell is none too pleasant either. Perhaps there is some body under a pile of essays.

Still, I'm listening to cheery Camera Obscura bootlegs.