Follow-up

Further to my post on Monday, the world's most embarrassing and futile protest is currently taking place five floors above me.

Ten foot cock and a few hundred virgins

I do not have a degree in history or modern politics, and therefore do not feel qualified to comment on the Israeli/Palestinian conflict. In fact, I am intentionally and almost outrageously ignorant. I do not have a legitimate defence for this, I simply do not have the time or motivation needed to wade through the decades of reports, opinions, propoganda and retaliations to come to any reasonable outcome. And were I to (a more disgraceful excuse), it would change precisely this: .

I took (and take) a similarly ego-centric view with Ye Olde Irifh Troubles. Growing up in 80s-90s London with a mother who worked in a bank and a father who pointed a videocamera at The News, I was well aware that I had a significantly (yet microscopically) higher chance of being murdered on the way to school than people who didn't go to school in London (little has changed there, I'm told).

But I honestly could not bring myself to care. The H22 didn't go over Hammersmith Bridge, and Ealing Broadway is on the other branch of the District Line, and frankly were I to see two guys beating each other up in the park I would stay away. To walk past the same two guys 100 years later is embarrassing for everyone concerned, but the two options: ask who started it, or call them both assholes, are hopelessly naive.

I have no issue with other people having opinions, of course, assuming they are well-formed. I received this leaflet today, however, which we shall join halfway through:

No amount of appeals to Western governments, the United Nations, the European Union or any of the Middle Eastern regimes - all of whom were overtly or coverty complicit in Israel's assault on Gaza - can safeguard the lives and democratic rights of the Palestinian people. Nor can this be achieved through the so-called "two state solution", which would leave the Palestinian people in little more than impoverished Bantustans and the Jewish people in a military garrison state, controlled by religious zealots.

Only the unification of the Jewish and Arab working class in the struggle for a Socialist Federation of the Middle East can bring peace to the region and secure a viable future for its entire people.

Communism is the answer! When they find out they'll be kicking themselves.

Unrelatedly, I have expanded the Sheffield Venn Diagram wiki to include the Captains Planet and Eternal Drunkness projects, because evidently this is where I ought to be focusing our collaborative energies.

Aetherial Nonsense

When the gods saw what Prometheus had done, they summoned together 144 of the wisest men, one for every nation of the world. And the wise men were shown how to see the aether and how to put it to use, lest only one nation know its power and use it to destroy all others.

So the wise men returned to their homes, and taught their fellows and children.

Four score nations drew their aether from the earth, where Prometheus found it, and they used it for fire, and for industry, and for war.

Four dozen nations drew their aether from the air, and these nations found light, and they found knowledge, and they touched the stars.

Fifteen nations drew their aether from blood, and these people had long life, and medicine, and they forged the future of the race.

But the wisest man returned to his nation, and his nation was never heard of again. For he could see that if the aether was in everything, then everything would soon enough burn.

Pills, thrills, chills, and ills man, kills

OH NO KETAMINE, reports the Sheffield Star today, in desperate earnest.

I am endearingly naive about everybody's favourite animal tranquiliser - a vegetarian friend of mine once confided over a sneaky plate of swordfish that after dropping out of existence at a party, re materialising two hours later to discover her breasts being molested, it probably ought just be for horses.

I once went to a party at her house that was so evidently drug-fuelled (by which I mean, I couldn't stand the music) that after staggering home in a cloud of sweet, green mist I tried to note down some of my observations. Reading back the following morning, I realised there was no way I could convey the frenzy and mania throbbing through their torn-carpet living room, no way I could articulate the foul taste of watching a girl repeatedly insist to a stranger that she had a boyfriend.

If I wasn't so naive, I presumably could, but there's something insincere about being an experience junkie for the sake of accurate description. And besides, ketamine kills almost two people a year! Not worth the risk, evidently.

Seduced by Daniel Craig

The Guardian's interview with the kids from Slumdog Millionaire renders their dialogue in a delightfully parental way. The last handful of paragraphs are especially fun.

I rewatched Casino Royale over Christmas and was amazed by this subtle and blindingly effective portrayal of Bond's arrogance and status life, on the phone to room service:

'And some more caviar. Yes, with everything.'

What? What the hell is, 'Everything?' My mind boggles at the concept of caviar as anything greater than a fictional foodstuff, and to imagine it accompanied by some everything is actually a little frightening. Do I need tools? If it wasn't caviar - if it was, say, chocolate mousse - it would be a different issue. But I'm not convinced that caviar is something to be delicately nibbled from my partner's silken bosom. Therefore, I need a spoon. Or an everything.

I wonder how many revisions of this scene Paul Haggis went through. How many of Daniel Craig's ad-libs they filmed. 'Yes, with everything. Wait. No egg.' I don't even know if there is egg. There's presumably more than - I guess - toast? Cheese, perhaps. Sweet chilli sauce. A tiny stove so you can wrap it in fresh pancakes.

It's common knowledge now that you hold the cork and twist the bottle. A friend of mine will happily pick up the wrong cutlery to see what everybody else at the table does before swapping for the correct stuff. If you drop your bread in the fondue you don't actually get spanked anymore. And we've all known since childhood that gazpacho soup is meant to be cold.

But I think the only solution here is never, ever, to be seduced by Daniel Craig.

Introduction to an interview that hasn't happened

The details about Nat Johnson are, she's been feeling ill and has taken drugs that have made her feel funny.

She's wearing a blue-net ballgown, but downstairs she was wrapped in a dark woolen overcoat, anonymous. At her feet is the same high-ball half-pint of some blackcurrant concoction she was sipping without a straw but with one eyebrow raised.

Her fringe is split to reveal only her left eyebrow.

She wears a large amber pendant, suspended precisely a golden ratio above her neckline. When she forgets the words to a song, she says, 'Fuck,' as if there's an 'h' in it. When she's remembering the words to a song, she looks up and to the left, and then closes her eyes. She bites her lip during the loud ones.

Jeffrey's been taking photos of Nat from the front. He got in free because he knows the headline. The details about Jeffrey are, he has long, thin and yellow hair, tied back in a ponytail skewed to the left. His converse sneakers are the same colour as red crayons, and he takes digital photographs on the slow setting - flashflashflashFLASH.

Jeffrey came with Juliet. Juliet has a ring like a colossal bronze shell fragment just exploded onto her middle finder. She has a purple trench-coat belted up to the tightest notch and she giggles whenever Jeffrey takes her picture. Under the coat she's wearing a horizontal-striped stretch-top that perfectly accentuates her 36D-cups. She chews the nail of her index finger when she thinks she's thinking and her tights always match her headscarf. Juliet has brown roots under her yellow hair and is drinking water from the tap because they don't serve mineral water here.

The details on here are, there's an email stuck up next to the bar complaining about its clientelle. The barman has a hat like a Yorkshire/Baseball mongrel and is stingy with his blackcurrant.

Definitions

I know I'm far too late to be commenting on last week's wind turbine, but I just saw The Sun's headline and it reminded me how piqued I get at this issue.

If you see something flying, and you don't know what it is, it's a UFO.

That's it. That's what the initialism bloody means. You cannot 'prove' an object is a UFO, because you cannot prove a negative. It is a UFO *until* you prove otherwise.

If you want to try to prove a UFO is some fashion of extra-terrestrial transportation, well good fucking luck and stop pissing about with my language.

Archaeologist's Memoir - The Forge Library

Here is our world, they say, scorched and shattered.

Once, they tell you, we could cross the ocean in half a day.
Once, they say, we touched the moon.
Once, they sigh, all this was grass.

They tell you, after three more years, you'll be able to tell the truth from the lies. And then they take off your blindfold.

There are millions of them: plumped and stacked and lined up in their neat little rows and columns and passageways. Clasped tight in leafed metal bonds. They whisper and hum in the pale white light. As the forge they protect cools them and lights them and keeps them safe, they sing.

Most of them only sing lies.

Some speak of war. Some speak of love. Some speak of animals long disappeared, who spoke themselves and had their own wars and their own loves.

Here is our world, they say, torched beyond recognition and spliintered into billions and billions of perfectly formed, spaced and justified words.

Assume everything you know from outside is true. And assume that it was us who once had the power to... create... these books. Everything else here is a labyrinth built to destroy you. The towered shelves on their oiled tracks and the tiny letters on their silken pages and the lights humming in the floor and the walls and the everything. Just pick up a thread, and follow it until it contradicts itself.

They say, keep the blindfold.

You can throw it away if you find anything.