Game over pronounced at 1100 hrs

Surgeons that spend their spare time running around killing people are likely to perform better in the operating theatre.

(Talking of which this new Swedish metro looks like the sort of place you might pick up some fragging practice. )

End of the road

Some unsavoury politicians from El Salvador picked the wrong neighbouring country for their weekend break.

Bots #2 (More Kentish lawgiving)

Hlothhære and Eadric's (673-686) code provides early evidence of the need for something akin to the Bluewater shopping centre on the Kentish border, as Dark Age shopping in Greater London(-wic) seems to have required filling your ox-cart full of "true men" (metrosexuals not being permissable) to act as human receipts:

"If any Kentish-man buy a chattel in Lundenwic, let him then have two or three true men to witness, or the king's wic-reeve. If it be afterwards claimed of the man in Kent, let him then vouch the man who sold it to him to warranty, in the wic at the king's hall, if he know him, and can bring him to the warranty; if he can not do that, let him prove at the altar, with one of his witnesses or with the king's wic-reeve, that he bought the chattel openly in the wic, with his own property, and then let him be paid its worth; but if he can not prove that by lawful averment, let him give it up, and let the owner take possession of it. "

There must have been a queue at every altar in Kent of ceorlish men attempting to attest to all kinds of things. Consequently, Wihtræd (690-725) proclaimed: "Let the word of a bishop and of the king be, without an oath, incontrovertible." Blair could use a similar piece of legislation today.

Next steps for the music industry?

Blogmaverick has some suggestions for what the music industry should do next. These involve creating a music search engine monopoly and a comprehensive mp3 portal with what he describes as a "holistic variable pricing algorithm". He suspects that the most significant inhibitor of such a plan would be industry egotism, but put another way, it seems to involve making the web less webby, which can't be a very good idea, can it?

Instant Coffee?

V tried to convince me this afternoon that a pair of Guatemalans invented instant coffee. They went to France with their idea and the French got all the credit, she explained ruefully.

Well not all, because according to Wikipedia the inventor of instant coffee was one Satori Kato, a Japanese scientist working in Chicago. It was not however marketed commercially for another 37 years until Nescafé was launched in 1938.

Guatemalans have made significant contributions to coffee-making though. In 1872, Jose Guardiola (actually a Spaniard educated here in England) patented a machine designed to artificially dry coffee: the beans are placed in a large, compartmentalised, rotating drum. A constant flow of hot air is evenly distributed though perforated pipes, and the steady movement and the constant heat combine to make the drying uniform. The Guardiola dryer is apparently still the most popular in use today.

Julio Smout (properly Jules Smout, a Prussian-born Belgian of Scottish descent) also transformed the dry mill phase of the process. His hulling (decorticador) machine replaced the primitive mortar and pestle technique previously used to remove the outer casing of the bean. His design featured a spiral-shaped cylinder that gradually rotates the beans around a casing. As they are caught between the side of the cylinder and the casing the beans are stripped of their husks. Patented in 1881, Smout's invention was originally manufactured by John Gordon in London and has been referred to ever since as the “Smout type of huller.”

Roberto Okrassa, a finquero from Antigua, added a polisher so that both procedures could be accomplished as part of a single operation. He also added some blowers to get rid of dust and parchment, and a more efficient cooling system that reduces the heat the beans are exposed to during milling. Okrassa’s huller and polisher was patented in 1912.

(The slightly loopy bloke that runs the Finca Macadamia just outside Antigua has developed a similar revolving contraption for separating and removing the hard casings of his Macadamia nuts.)

Not sure where V's perfidious French story came from. Anyone have any ideas?

Bots #1 (Aethelbert of Kent)

My present immersement in Albania's Kanun has rekindled my interest in the codification of the blood-feud and other aspects of Anglo-Saxon good manners. Take the laws of Aethelbert, King of Kent (560-616), which set out clear penalties for humping female members of the royal household:

If a man lie with the King's maiden, let him pay a bot [compensation] of fifty shillings. If she be a grinding slave [?!], let him pay a bot of twenty-five shillings. The third class, twelve shillings."

The mid-section of Aethelbert's code deals with the prices to be paid for inflicting various wounds. A struck-off ear cost 12s, a merely pierced one 3s, though if it were also mutilated the perpetrator would have to cough up 6s.

"Let him who breaks the chin-bone pay for it with twenty shillings...for every nail, a shilling..."

The premium-end of GBH was covered by clause 64: "If anyone destroy (another's) organ of generation, let him pay with three leud-geld; if he pierce it through, let him make a bot with six shillings; if it be pierced within, let him make a bot with six shillings."

Three leud-gelds were in effect 3 x the wergeld for ordinary manslaughter, a clear deterrent against low-blows!

Insecurity

This pic shows Guatemalans queueing up on Friday morning to apply for a gun license. The day before 12 people had died in various shooting incidents around the country.

I spent the weekend in the comparatively tranquil setting of the Thames Valley, drinking Good Old Boy ale at the Bull in Stanford Dingley. To get there you have to pass the even more quaintly-named village of Tutts Clump.

We then had a swish and tasty Indian-Bangladeshi meal at a country pub in Lower Basildon that has had an incongruously uptown make-over as The Tamarind Tree. My father couldn't figure out the taps in the Men's room.

A Scanner Darkly

"The most dangerous kind of person is the one who is afraid of his own shadow."

"What is that supposed to meeeeean?"

That little snippet of dialogue more or less sums up the tenor of this movie, which in spite of its tendency to babble and drool, managed to get under my skin (to much the same extent that Waking Life got up my nose.) And it's worth seeing for the scramble suit effect alone.

Close attention to either the plot, the dialogue or the dazzling digital-rotoscope animation is likely to leave your brain as frazzled as the Substance D dependents depicted here.

If Philip K. Dick's original story was about anything, it was probably a representation of his own state of mind. He was after all so convinced that he was under surveillance that he started keeping tabs on himself.

Woody Harrelson's character Ernie Luckman is granted some of the more lucidly comic bits of the script, including a monologue about a world-famous imposter who turned out to be simply posing as such, which includes a great line about Leonardo de Caprio before he "hit his Elvis stage."

Tristan und Isolde

If there is one opera responsible for the phrase "it's not over until the fat lady sings" this would be it. Pretty much the whole score is a long, lyrical build-up to Isolde's final heart-rending transfiguration.

Harmonic suspension is the technical term for the musical form that Wagner show-boats here. You won't be nearly as moved by the Liebestod if you hear it as a stand-alone aria. You really do have to soak up the whole magnificent three act opera.

Ever since I first saw Plácido Domingo dressed up like a dickhead and sitting on a swan on the cover of Solti's Decca recording of Lohengrin, I have wanted to hear the Spanish tenor in one of the preeminent German roles, but it wasn't until I recently downloaded Sinopoli's recording of Tannhäuser (which features a similar wardrobe malfunction on the box) that I was reminded of the unique blend of extraordinary power and emotional subtlety he brings to every role.

It's amazing how young Domingo sounds in this recording with the Covent Garden orchestra and chorus. He has never sung Tristan live as it might have had terminal consequences for his ageing voice. (The tenor that Wagner originally composed the part for went bonkers during rehearsals.) This recording was made in the studio over a period of time and will apparently be the very last studio-recorded opera that EMI releases.

As an adolescent I was fascinated by the Grail legends. By the time I finally sat down, headphones on, to experience Wagner's masterpiece, I had already devoured most of the extant medieval cycles, plus of course Thomas Mallory and Tennysson's Idylls of the King.

Tristan certainly has more going for it in terms of plot than Parsifal, which I would up to now have cited as my 'favourite opera'. (Not that I'd want to sit through that many live performances of it, compared to say my second favourite opera, Così fan tutte.) I had a recording made by Leonard Bernstein on tape which I hadn't listened to for about 20 years, but now after hearing this one, I might have to elevate Tristan to the top of the pile.

I first had a tip-off that Tristan und Isolde might well be the summit of musical achievement by a crabby retail ad designer to whom I had been assigned as part of my internship at Saatchi & Saatchi in 1986. I already had acquired a taste for opera because my social circle then included a pair of twins sired by an established opera singer and a ballet dancer, and one of my mother's closest friends was married to the director of the now-defunct Sadlers Wells opera company. These relationships provided useful opportunities for free samples, and with the twins Baksheesh and I used to get complimentary seats in the stalls at the Royal Opera House, where we drank wine from the bottle and generally narked off the hardened, well-to-do enthusiasts around us. Having said that we did our best to be the most overdressed members of the audience.

Personally I think there is no excuse whatsoever for opera in today's world unless it has something useful to say about the human condition. For that reason Puccini (and much of the earlier bel canto tradition) is mostly complete tosh, hardly better than your average West-End musical, though considerably more pompous and expensive. In fact, other than the scene in La Bohème where Mimi first enters the garret, Puccini is really best avoided altogether. With the exception of Verdi's expansions of Shakespeare, the best Italian opera was composed by an Austrian.

Not to be confused with Tristan + Isolde.

Transmuylleno

Just been listening to an official from Bogotá describing our very own Mayor Ken as an international political hero...for having established the world's first congestion charge system.

Bogota's new Transmilenio is apparently known to local residents as the Transmuylleno, a gag that was messed up by the Newsnight reporter's inept Spanish pronunciation.

Pots and kettles in Soho Square

Protestors outside our building in Soho Square this week. I now feel encouraged to stage my own little vigil outside the Gwatemalean embassy.

The group that threw together this particular bit of counter-PR reported that “Positive comments were given to the protestors by people from neighbouring offices who said [H& K] deserve the protest for being so greedy”.

Interesting. H&K's neighbours in the square include the Catholic Church and the Football Association, not to mention 21st Century Fox and other UK representatives of the global film and entertainment industy.

Lost, Series 3, Episode 8

When it comes to deciding whether this series is of lasting metaphysical interest or a load of bollocks, this episode in particular will have to be given special consideration.

What we saw was the pivotal character of Desmond in a loop between two realities with the writers cleverly exploring weird parallels within weird parallels. (We also saw a number of badly-faked London exteriors and then learned that the background to the picture of Des and Penny in a marina was itself an amateurish phoney.)

Now hokum is just plain hokum when supernatural events are deployed will-nilly within a storyline, but they can serve a useful creative function when used to encourage us to consider what might happen if certain individuals should have privileged access to the otherwise unknowable aspects of human experience (yet in such a way that preserves the unknowability of transcendent reality for the rest of us).

The writing team don't have to provide fixed and final explanations for everything that happens in Lost, anymore than they are obliged to explain the meaning of life, but they do have to leave us with a sense that they have been systematic (and sincere) in spinning their metaphysical web, and that the end result has somehow connected with our subconscious intuitions about those aspects of existence that necessarily remain off-limits to scientific reason.

Personally I was impressed with this episode until Desmond asked the lady in the jewelery shop if she was his subconscious. But it did open up the possibility that everything we see on Lost is some sort of representation of the collective subconscious of the islanders.

With his special relationship to chronological time, Desmond is bound to have some affinities with Hurley that will doubtless be expanded upon later.

We're clearly reaching the point where an episode such as this can only be fully appreciated by someone that has seen pretty much every other one, which marks a clear point of differentiation between this series and your run-of-the-mill soap.

Saint Valentines Day Massacre

Yesterday when I mentioned to Scott that Guatemala's marriage rate doubles on February 14, he speculated on what might happen to the murder rate.

Sure enough, it has been reported today that six men ended up dead outside the same nightspot in Guatemala City on Wednesday night (a brothel located on 13 avenida, between 9ª, y 10ª calles), including a young recently-graduated publicista. Hundreds of expended cartridges lay on the pavement around the bodies.

I watched the very first episode of CSI:Miami last night. Horatio Caine had yet to acquire the mannerism of talking to people with his head listing 45 degrees to starboard, but he did manage to take off and replace his sunglasses twice during one conversation in the Florida Everglades. In the background someone shouted "we've got a floater!"

Overcoming the Monster

Is how Christopher Booker refers to the first of the The Seven Basic Plots seemingly common to all stories told in all cultures, across all periods of history.

It's a fascinating chapter. The monster in question can be literally so (Grendel, Jaws) or figuratively so (Bond baddies, The Nazis) and usually has three main characteristics, beyond being self-seeking by nature and utterly heartless.

- Predator: preys on communities, usually one community in particular.

- Holdfast: has a lair, usually underground, in which it likes to keep all its stuff, and quite often a beautiful female or substantial treasure that will require extraction.

- Avenger: when provoked it becomes especially demented.

However, the monster usually has a blind spot or some other crucial vulnerability which the hero is ultimately able to exploit, but not before experiencing a great deal of hazard. Across world literature the hero's struggle against the monster tends to follow a familiar five stage pattern:

1) The call - a period of anticipation, where the full extent of the threat that the monster poses may be underestimated.

2) The dream phase - a period of initial success (such as Bond's triumph over Goldfinger at cards at the Fontainbleu), when things seem to be going according to plan from the hero's perspective.

3) Confrontation - a period of frustration as the hero starts to get closer to the monster in its well-defended den. Whether the hero is James Bond or Perseus, he tends to enter this phase equipped with 'magic' weapons.

4) The nightmare phase - the final ordeal in which the hero will face failure and extinction: a spot so tight that release from it seems most unlikely.

5) The miraculous escape - sometimes, as in War of the Worlds, the hero can only watch as the monster's flaw is exposed with little input from himself. In High Noon however, Gary Cooper's miraculous escape is provided for by his quaker wife returning to take down one of the baddies from a window overlooking the enactment of his nightmare phase.

In general the hero and/or the community being terrorised is seen to begin the tale in a state of constriction. There follows a period of relative liberation (such as the arrival of the Magnificent Seven in the Mexican village), which culiminates in the final ordeal which proposes an altogether more terminal form of the restriction. There is ordinarily a sense that the death of the monster at the end of the story has lead to some sort of deeper liberation in the lives of the hero and the wider community.

Booker makes the point that although World War II is a recent historical event, the way we tell stories about it tends to conform to a pattern as old as literature itself.

Now all this is interesting in terms of how Cormac McCarthy handles his representation of evil (and particularly Judge Holden) in Blood Meridian. In constructing his alternative western mythology, he doesn't so much subvert the form as completely ignore it.

In places it reads like a non-fiction account of the activities of the Glanton Gang, albeit written in highly poeticised prose. Holden, himself an historical figure with known characteristics, has some of the physical abnormalities that human instances of the monster usually need to have in traditional narrative. McCarthy's judge also appears ageless and able to pop up all over the place. However, his heartlessness is perhaps less clear-cut than your average Gestapo agent, and he demonstrates an intellectual curiosity that we normally associate with a more humanist mentality (though this turns out to be an aspect of his control-freakishness).

Some have called McCarthy's presentation of evil gnostic. I'm not so sure about this. He certainly seems to believe that evil is inevitable, as I do myself, but that is not gnosticism per se. This quotation from one of his rare interviews is revealing:

"There is no such thing as life without bloodshed...I think the notion that the species can be improved in some way, that everyone could live in harmony is a really dangerous idea. Those who are afflicted with this notion are the first to give up their souls, their freedom. Your desire that it be that way will enslave you and make your life vacuous."

So, we might have to add him to the list of intellectual figures that could well have been influenced by Schopenhauer − good is only conceivable within the context of existence within the world of phenomena. Beyond this existence, in the transcendental world of noumena, there is only the heartless Will, which for its very objectivity (and unlike Buddhism's Brahman) is more likely to be the source of evil consequences down here than good ones. Gnosticism on the other hand, posits two equally-weighted deities, one good, one evil, both in the transcendental plane, with the material world itself unquestionably the work of the nastier one.

It's also worth noting that McCarthy's mouthpieces of evil all seem to believe in a crude form of determinism.

Tommy Lee Jones owns the film rights to Blood Meridian, but one wonders how successful a Hollywood take on this could be. So much of its power is locked up in the language. Holden's dual nature as flesh-and-blood man and incarnation of a mythic malignancy would be hard to capture on screen. The way that 'The Kid' disappears from direct view within the gang during the mid-section of the story would also prove problematical I suspect.

Yet one senses that McCarthy's way of handling sudden acts of violence would appeal to certain directors. What makes them most shocking is the way they rarely appear to have any function within the plot. Under Holden's tutelage the scalp-hunters become agents of the most senseless, indiscriminate form of savagery.

In No Country for Old Men I was also struck by the way that the principle of evil, impersonated by Anton Chigurh, exists on its own narrative plane within the story. Few of the individuals that interact with Chigurh survive to tell the tale and crucially, Sheriff Bell and Chigurh never connect before the deluge of violence at the heart of this novel has finally abated.

I bought The Road last night and will report on it in due course.

Budupple

I was skim-reading a biography of Paul Bowles the other day in Foyles.

He and his wife Jane were in Guatemala in the spring of 1938. They'd acquired an omniverous parrot that they'd named Budapple, which formed the subject for an essay that the author wrote in April during their stay in Antigua. Apparently Budupple ate his way out of his cage.

Jane Bowles narrowly avoided an unfortunate incident earlier in Guatemala City. Left by her husband with a group of friends in a cafe, she suggested that they pay a visit to a brothel as a lark. Unfortunately, once inside, she herself was asked by Jorge Ubico's senior bodyguard to join him in a private room. Forbearance wasn't this man's forte, but Jane Bowles somehow managed to talk her way out of the situation.

Rio Sol

Waitrose has started stocking a Brazilian wine called Rio Sol (Cabernet Shiraz) produced in the city of Petrolina, which is in the middle of the sertão (drylands) of the northeastern state of Pernambuco. The label on the bottle celebrates it as the first example of a wine produced in the challenging latitudes of 8 degrees south.

It's very delicious, and whilst Brazilmag enthuses that Rio Sol is "now greatly appreciated by the guests at the Burj Al Arab, the most starred hotel in Dubai in the United Arab Emirates," here in London it is going for a **** price: £4.99.

It's also nicely alcoholic thanks to the tropical sun that blazes over the vines down there. (The Telegraph had a piece last month about the vineyard.)

Waitrose also stocks a fairly decent Mexican wine (from Baja California) produced by the L.A. Cetto company.

Brokeback to Murderer, do you copy, over?

"Everybody's very fat, everybody's very stupid and everybody's very rude. It's not the holiday programme, it's the truth....I really believe that in certain parts of America now people have started to mate with vegetables."

Such were the stand-out passing remarks made by Jeremy Clarkson on this week's Top Gear, which chronicled his and his two mates' road trip from Florida to Louisiana, which began with them attempting to buy a car in Miami for $1000 − in other words for less than the average fly-drive rental deal.

Had Clarkson chosen to visit and offend the local population of a more sensitive, less individualistic nation than the United States ,we might now be facing yet another major international diplomatic incident, and he himself would be surely be helping police with their enquiries much like Jade Goody was last month.

The trio did manage to rub up against some geographically-localised sensitivities in Alabama. Stopping for gas with their vehicles festooned with provocative slogans like NASCAR sucks, Hillary Clinton for President and Man-love rules (in lurid pink paint), they were treated to some deeply-felt southern dialect by the lady in charge of the service station, who then spun round and stomped off having threatened to "call the boys". Moments later a pick-up bearing the said young men arrived. They duly alighted and proceeded to hurl rocks at the BBC presenters and their crew who were by then frantically trying to jump-start James May's $1000 '88 Cadilllac.

If the rednecks don't sue, the vegetarians might. At one stage the team were set the challenge of limiting their diet to anything they found (dead) beside the road. Hammond was just about to barbecue a − mostly-intact − squirrel when Clarkson turned up with an enormous dead cow draped across the roof (windscreen and bonnet) of his Chevy Camaro.

It all made for hilarious television and can be downloaded here at TvTorrents. There was ample evidence that there's plenty of room for Clarkson in the documentary niche currently occupied by Borat and Michael Moore.

His insistence that Miami is a township of murderers encouraged me to check the facts online. There are in fact some 70 homicides a year in Miami, a city of roughly 350,000 people, compared to around 150 in London, a city of roughly 10 million. So London has 30 times the population, but only twice the number of murders.

A single season of CSI:Miami seems to account for most of the 70 murders allocated to the swankiest town in 'God's waiting room'. That show also seems to indicate that the majority of the violently-deceased are affluent, under-30 and unencumbered by close friends and family.

Lies

I'm teetering on the brink of giving up on Enrique de Hériz's Lies (Mentira) I'm about 50 pages in and nobody is dead yet, which may be a large part of the problem after my month-long immersation in the rather more visceral prose of Cormac McCarthy.

At this stage however, everyone believes the first narrator, Isabel, is deceased. But for reasons best known to herself, and which are yet to be of the slightest concern to me, she has decided to hole up in an empty eco-shack on the shores of lake Petexbatún in Guatemala, leaving her family to think that a soggy cadaver dredged up out of the river was hers. The other narrator is her daughter Serena, a meteorologist who is extremely interested in finding our the full truth behind her grandfather's biography. Unfortunately I'm not.

I think I will switch to Ismail Kadare's Broken April, which was the source for the so-so Brazilian film Abril Despedaçado, directed by Walter Salles. Guaranteed a few stiffs in that.

Meanwhile, in Petexbatún, I have discovered a new spot in Guate that sounds worth visiting, though it is rather off the beaten track in the south western corner of the Petén.

"Times have changed. We now have blogs"

There's an excellent academic spat going on between Dan Dennett and H. Allen Orr which Dennett would clearly like to be more public than it has been:

"As I write this message, I am reminded of your earlier trashing, more than ten years ago, of my book Darwin's Dangerous Idea, first in Evolution, which does not permit rebuttals from authors, and then, slightly enlarged, in the Boston Review, which does. You leveled very serious charges of error and incomprehension in that review, and when I challenged them, you responded with a haughty dismissal of my objections (in an exchange in the Boston Review). Quoting an example, dealing with the speed of evolution: "Now I've been in the population genetics business for some time and, frankly, I have no idea what Dennett is talking about. And-I can find no polite way of putting this-it's hard to escape the conclusion that Dennett has no idea what he's talking about either." (1996, p37) Now that was rude-even ruder than your reply this time. When I explained then in a private letter to you what I had meant, you conceded to me in your private response that you had not seen my point in the light I intended, and that my claim was not in fact the blunder you had said it was-but of course you never chose to recant your criticism in print, so your uncorrected accusation stands to this day. Such a gentleman and a scholar you are! But times have changed. We now have blogs, so this time you can readily respond in public to my open letter. "

Beth Rowley live at Cirque

On the Monday before the LG Shine launch event last week, Beth also did a live gig at Fopp in Tottenham Court Road. She has a fine blues voice. Shame about the editing here, but Revver only accepts 100 megs.