Oh No - Not Obesogens...

I know that this is a subject that should really be left to Richard & Judy's diet expert, that whip-thin exemplar of low-carb virtue - but here's the latest on the 'Obesity Epidemic'. You and I might have thought, in our simple-minded way, that it was down to too many people sitting around in overheated homes, doing nothing but stuffing themselves with junk food, washed down with sweet drinks. Tsk tsk how heartless of us. Make way for the new kids on the lardy block, the 'obesogens' - evil chemicals that might yet make helpless lardbuckets of us all (or at least offer us another handy copout). As I have asked many a time before - does anyone seriously believe this stuff? Clearly, as they say, further research is needed (coughs politely, holds out begging bowl). Meanwhile, what should really concern us is the factoid right at the bottom of the report - people are swelling up like balloons and joining the ever-growing ranks of the obese as a result of... giving up smoking! It's an obesity timebomb I tell you.

A Poem

For no particular reason, I pass on this beautiful, sad and simple poem about how one day becomes the next (or fails to). Here...

A Scorched Guitar

This seems a high price for a scorched guitar (one careless user). By my calculations, this makes 150 Hendrix guitars equivalent to one top-rank Titian. More to the point, for the price of one such guitar, you could buy up a gallery full of a really good, but unfashionable British painter - which seems a rather better idea to me, but then if iconic guitars are your thing... The world, it seems, is full of elderly teenagers.

Me In a Nutshell

It may be September, but the silly season is still with us, as this handsome piece of 'research' demonstrates. Its findings are, note, both 'significant' and 'surprising'.
Checking off my musical tastes against the character traits listed, I learn that I have high self esteem and low self esteem, am creative, introvert and outgoing, at ease, gentle and not gentle, hard-working and not hard-working. I'd say that was me in a nutshell.

Bat-Ears and the Sexy Librarian

Our old friend, the bat-eared, big-bellied bruiser, Charles Clarke - in our student days, Bryan and I used to laugh and throw orange peel at him - is at it again, stirring up a little storm in the stained, chipped Labour teacup. Here are the facts: There is no one to replace Brown who is any less unpopular; Any replacement would necessitate an election, which Labour would lose; Nothing will happen.
How tired, ugly, tawdry and boring it all seems against the wondrous spectacle of American electoral politics - especially now the extraordinary Sarah Palin has swung into action. Whoever put McCain up to this, it was (imho) a genius appointment. Here is a human being from Somewhere Else, someone who really does look like Change, even Change You Can Believe In (and who might well mop up quite a few aggrieved Clintonistas into the bargain). Of course it could all go hideously wrong, and the Dems might yet land a killer punch, but it's looking even harder for them to win now. And let's face it, chaps, she's a bit hot, isn't she, in that sexy librarian way ('Why Miss Palin, I never realised...') - or is that just me?

Beyond Any Tale...

I've been reading a volume of Chekhov short stories - one of these books, in fact - which contains the longest of them all, My Life. This I had never read before. Needless to say, it is a masterpiece, sharp-eyed and honest in that unique Chekhovian way, with moments of joy balanced by an ample, lucid sense of the absurdity and randomness of life, its 'weirdness and vulgarity' (as Stanislavsky put it). It is also, at times, very - and very darkly - funny. Unusually for a Chekhov story, it is in the first person, and, though it certainly isn't any kind of autobiography, it touches on many of Chekhov's preoccupations and those of his time. Despite the first person, most of the time the narrator seems to have only a hazy and imperfect idea of who he is, what is happening to him, and how he can communicate any of it to anyone else. As so often, the great and wise V.S. Pritchett captures the essence of this: 'What Chekhov saw in our failure to communicate was something positive and precious: the private silence in which we live, and which enables us to endure our own solitude. We live, as his characters do, beyond any tale we happen to enact.' Perhaps that is why Chekhov is always and essentially comic. Anyway, if you haven't read My Life, do.

Really Bad Titles

If you haven't come across this wonderful radio comedy, seek it out - I think it's on digital BBC7 at present, and will surely be back on Radio 4. Ed Reardon is Grub Street's grubbiest, seediest and most desperate hack (his name and that of his friend Jaz Milvane are adapted from characters in George Gissing's New Grub Street), and one of the most vividly ghastly comedy creations of recent years.. But the detail I want to draw attention to is the name of his sole successful novel, Who Would Fardels Bear? This strikes me as the perfect Really Bad Title. There must surely be competitors out there in the world of real books - they may even be Really Bad Titles attached to Really Good Books... An old favourite of mine is an Alan Paton title (which I've never read) - Too Late The Phalarope. Any more?