Headline of the week

Virgin warns infected customers

And courts risk of being sued under the Trades Descriptions Act?

Sorry, couldn't resist it.

Ash Wednesday

Technology changes, the nuts and bolts of the human condition not so much. After a sustained campaign to interest me in two billion per cent APR credit cards, this morning my Yahoo mailbox was advertising a hair restorer ("9 out of 10 men..."). It was like scanning the ads in a Victorian newspaper.

Well, I am happy to report that I am well, nay luxuriantly, provided with thatch. On the other hand the latest offering, liposuction for men, may be an option if my Lenten fast proves too gruelling - a pretty good bet based on previous years' performance. I've done OK so far today, Frau G having acceded to my pleas that I should not be left alone with an unfinished packet of Choco Leibniz.

On a more serious note, as of today both Grumpys are officially headed Rome-wards. If you are of a praying disposition, please say one for us.

And then he invaded Belgium...

Inevitably much instantly forgettable comment on The Engagement, but I did enjoy this slice of history from Christopher Howse:-

'The service, in St George’s Chapel, was full of copes, scarlet robes, ermine, silver trumpets, tabards, choirs and quizzing-glasses. But it was something of a shambles. The Garter Knights became entangled in a mêlée, Disraeli had to sit on his wife’s lap on the train back, and the four-year-old future Kaiser threw his jewelled dirk across the chapel in a tantrum, biting the leg of one of Bertie’s brothers when told off.'

Prophetic, did they but know. Bertie, the bridegroom, was the future Edward VII, and let's hope that William proves to be husband material of rather better quality than him.

Nein, danke!

What have I done to deserve this? Here's the latest offering that amazon.de is trying to interest me in:-

Can't help feeling the title comes over as ever so slightly sinister in German. That and the author's choice of shirt colour...

More unsaintly remarks concerning a great Catholic man of letters

Thank you Ross, this has made my day.

Typo of the month

'Social networking sties means [sic] that animal-rights campaigners can spread their message with touch-of-the-keyboard ease, says Judith Woods.' (here)

I'm all for confining the persons who have been harassing the Koupparis family to sties in which they can network with each other to their hearts' content. Not that I would want them to share their accommodation with pigs - that would be most unfair to those intelligent and pacific animals.

And since you ask, I only eat pork if free-range.

Maybe not the strongest argument ever against GM food?

...this one from Martin Kelly:-

'Genetically modified food seems to be where the mindset of 'Star Trek' meets
that of 'Old MacDonald Had A Farm', the intensely modern, ultrarational view
that believes technology is the cure for all our ills applied to the most basic,
most ancient of human practices. GM may have some value. However, there may also
be some value in the human race deciding to recite the words 'Give us this day
our daily bread'. It works for me. Which of the two is more likely to lead to
you having bread to eat is one of those many things in life to which we will
never know the answer. We might think we know; but we won't, not really.'

Well, I don't what I'm doing wrong in the prayer department, but, no matter how often I say that one, all the shops round here still expect me to fork out money for the stuff.

Seriously, does Martin have the faintest idea how much he would have to eat if agricultural technology had remained static since the day the prayer was first uttered?

"God moves in a mysterious way his wonders to perform", says William Cowper's well-loved hymn. Sometimes, though, the mystery is merely mystification of our own making. Sometimes he's just asking "what did I give you lot brains for?".

Election fever hits Curmudge - more incisive commentary

Now the small fry are making their presence known.

First off we have the Curmudge Socialists ("make the wbankers pay"). Their candidate looks as if he last smiled on the day Margaret Thatcher announced her resignation. This is the effect Trotskyism so often has on those who can't kick the habit in time. There but for the grace of God...

OK, even if your candidate doesn't exactly radiate good vibes you've pretty much got to show the punters what he looks like lest they suspect you are concealing even worse things. What you don't have to do is gratuitously compound the offence by subjecting them to a mugshot of Bob Crow. I regularly wake up screaming in the small hours having dreamt that Bob Crow was running the country.

Moving swiftly on, UKIP's man looks more the sort of bloke with whom one could contemplate sinking a tolerably agreeable pint. Indeed, his communication has the feel of having been composed shortly before chucking-out time on Saturday night. The greenish tinge of his mugshot suggests it might have been taken the morning after, displaying the after-effects of indulgence in a dodgy doner on the way home.

On to more serious matters: the Lib Dems' man, who will indubitably be our next MP unless he forgets to look both ways while out canvassing. Whereas the Green candidate (not to be confused with the green man from UKIP) has adopted an arboreal name, this one has sought to inject a much-needed touch of glamour into the campaign by borrowing the surname of a French film star.

I feel he makes rather too much of the endorsement of the retiring MP: "David who?", I hear the voters cry. They are pictured standing under a large black umbrella (didn't they have an orange one?) held by the MP, next to the cycle racks at Curmudge station, and looking less than enchanted with the situation. "Climate change is the biggest threat facing humanity", we read below this, so you would think they would be looking a bit happier about the fact that it is still possible to get really cold and wet on an April day in Curmudge. But no, they have the unmistakeable air of two men who would rather be on the beach at Cannes with the divine Isabelle.

"Gordon Brown has failed the people of Curmudge" is illustrated by a photo of the PM shaking hands with the other GB. Damning evidence indeed! But methinks if Nick Clegg gets his hands on the levers of power he will find that he needs to go through the motions of basic courtesy with people far, far more unpleasant than George Bush.

In the interests of balance I would like to make sport of the Tories at this point. But I've had nothing from them. Doesn't augur well.

Stirring up apathy

So here we are again. In passing, I had ever such a strange dream last night. I dreamt a volcano erupted somewhere, and somehow or other it stopped me getting home for a week. Whatever was that about, I wonder.

Well, I've missed a large chunk of the election campaign. By way of making up for lost time, here are the impressions I've garnered in Curmudge over the past 24 hours.

The Green candidate has rather charmingly displayed his commitment to the cause by naming himself after a tree, but I suspect this may not be enough to swing it for him.

So far only Labour have actually been round. Their man introduces himself as 'an experienced politician, ready to represent Curmudge'. The other things he says are mostly not quite as inspiring as that, though. His desperation has now reached the level where you start calling the other side Nazis; apparently he doesn't have a minder with sufficient sense to warn him that stiff-armed salutes are best avoided if you happen to be half Austrian.

It's not looking good for Cameron, is it? I know Curmudge is different - an extreme case of the nationalization of the middle class, where anything in the way of belt-tightening is not going to be a vote-winner unless Education, Education, Education is ring-fenced, ring-fenced, ring-fenced. Nevertheless, it must be ominous for Dave that even in the posher bits there are occasional splashes of orange but no Tories coming out. Clegg certainly seems to have set at naught all DC's efforts at cornering the touchy-feely-alternative-to-Labour vote. Might he actually have done better to present himself as a conservative?

So it's a less than nail-biting contest in Curmudge, which the Lib Dems have held since 2001*. One good thing about the prospect of a hung Parliament is the hope that we may at last get a slightly more grown-up electoral system. As it is, I'm not sure I'll manage to summon up enough willpower to get dressed. Do they let you vote in pyjamas?

*Only since 2005 actually - shows you how much I know. But with a respectable 10% majority.

Is this the ultimate epitaph for Blair's Britain?

'In late 2005 the government appointed Mr Blair's former private secretary, Francis Campbell, as ambassador to the Holy See after the post was advertised.

'It was the first time a British ambassador had been recruited from open competition. One hundred and twenty people applied for the job, according to the Foreign Office.'

(from)

Yes indeed. Equality for us, open competition for them. Sooner or later you realize that the more some things change the more they stay the same.

'The [119] creatures outside [(clutching the utterly futile CVs they had sweated over)] looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again: but already it was impossible to say which was which.'

Bah, humblog

I have frequently wondered what it is about me that makes me such a peerless blogger. Now I know:-

'Feeling grumpy "is good for you"

'[...]

'An Australian psychology expert who has been studying emotions has found being grumpy makes us think more clearly.

'In contrast to those annoying happy types, miserable people are better at decision-making and less gullible, his experiments showed.

'While cheerfulness fosters creativity, gloominess breeds attentiveness and careful thinking, Professor Joe Forgas told Australian Science Magazine.

'[...]

'Next he asked them to take part in a series of tasks, including judging the truth of urban myths and providing eyewitness accounts of events.

'Those in a bad mood outperformed those who were jolly - they made fewer mistakes and were better communicators.'

Well, that's my New Year's resolution sorted, then. All jollity to be rigorously avoided. And, however grudgingly, more charity towards those whose views have me tearing my hair out. They can't help it, they're just too blooming happy!

We will be taking a blogging break over the next week and a bit, so we can perhaps risk just a little seasonal cheer. And we now unbend ourselves sufficiently to wish all readers a blessed and joyful Christmas (and/or Hanukkah) and a fruitful New Year.

Pedants' Corner

A red-faced Torygraph has made a swift correction, but if my eyes weren't deceiving me, when I first read their report on the Subway sandwich bar chain it contained this:-

'One industry expert says: "In a lot of city centres it has replaced the donor kebab shop as a place where people go to get food and hang out after the pub."'

I always did wonder what went into those kebabs.

Good in parts

Some highs and lows from the curate's egg that is Harry's Place. This is the kind of thing I read it for: an erstwhile leftist group from El Salvador provides a textbook instance of the meeting of the political extremes:-

'La Voz editors Salvador Duarte and Marta Consuelo Hernández included lengthy quotes from a notorious and long-discredited anti-Semitic tract, Protocols of the Elders of Zion, to buttress their arguments. They proclaimed the legitimacy of Hitler’s National Socialism. They echoed Nazi lies that the Russian Revolution was financed by Jews for Jews and denounced Leon Trotsky, a leader of that revolution and founder of our political current, for his Jewish heritage.'

The kind of thing I can do without is HP's attempts to prove its leftist credentials by smearing for Barack. Naturally Sarah Palin is an irresistible target, and naturally it's Brett who leads the charge against her faith. Her Pentecostalist pastor talks about spiritual warfare, and that makes him 'the flip-side to Islamism' . So that'll be 'flip-side' as in the side that doesn't go around murdering randomly selected civilians but apart from that small detail is just the same. Typical Brett.

Gene manages to do even better, though:-

'It appears that Palin did not officially support Buchanan’s 2000 campaign for president, although as mayor of Wasilla, Alaska, she did wear a Buchanan button when Buchanan visited the town. She wrote in a letter to the editor of an Anchorage newspaper: “As mayor, I will welcome all the candidates in Wasilla.” (I can’t help wondering if this would have applied to David Duke if he had run for president and visited the town. After all Buchanan’s and Duke’s views on a number of issues– immigration, race, “Jewish power” and Israel– are not a million miles apart.)'

Palin the Osama lookalike meets Palin the David Duke groupie, thanks to the magic of the 'what she's actually done isn't quite awful enough, so let's invent something worse and suggest she could have done it' technique.

OK, there won't be many people on either side playing fair in this campaign. But you could always try setting a precedent, guys...

PS on Palin: this is substantially a fair cop. But then so too is this.

Did the earth move...

...for you too?

Fascinating that you apparently had to be in a very specific part of town to feel it. Our fourth-floor flat in Berlin used to shake regularly when a heavy lorry drove past, and for a second or so I thought that was what was happening. Then I realized what it must be. I'm a bit of an earthquake veteran, you see - I experienced what I guess must have been the 1990 Bishop's Castle quake. That was, as I remember it, just a single jolt. I was sitting at my desk at work (in South-West London), looked round to see who had given my chair a shove, and there was nobody there. This time I was a lot closer to the epicentre, and the room was shaking from side to side for a good five seconds as if a giant hand had taken hold of the building.

No damage done, but some people nearer the epicentre weren't so lucky.

Frau G slept through it, and was distinctly unimpressed when I woke her up to tell her about it.

Personally, I blame the gays.

Pants

As worn by Kirk Elder, a man of few but well-chosen words.

What's happened to Scott?

Remember Scott of the Ablution? He was a magnificent fisker of the liberal papers, his finest hour coming when he infuriated the Grauniad by revealing to the world that it had taken on a Hizb ut Tahrir member as a trainee reporter.

It all went quite a year and a bit ago, without any warning. And, as I discoverd last night, now the blog's vanished altogether. Why? It's at moments like this that blogging feels like a pretty unsatisfactory communication medium.

Here some other fans (another of our favourites among them - don't even think of doing a vanishing act, Snoopy) bemoan the disappearance, and one of them links to an archive which has preserved his stuff.

Thanks for the blog, Scott, and whatever you're up to, I hope you're enjoying it.

Long-range forecast

The establishment is now preparing to vacate Schloss Grumpy and relocate to Dear Old Blighty. This will entail light to non-existent posting over the next month or so, I fear.

This may turn out to be the month in which Christian Aid criticizes Hamas, Rowan Williams acknowledges that the security barrier really does keep terrorists out as per specification, the World Council of Churches launches its Ecumenical Accompaniment Programme in Darfur, and Ken Livingstone gets round to saying 'sorry'. If so, I'll try and find time for a sentence or two. But business as usual is on the back burner for the time being.

If you fear withdrawal symptoms, dear reader, look on the bright side: you'll have more time to get to grips with David Hirsh's paper on Anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism. And once you've finished that, you might want to start on Matthias Küntzel's Jihad and Jew-Hatred: Islamism, Nazism and the Roots of 9/11, which has just picked up a prize at the London Book Festival.

PS You can read the first chapter of Küntzel's book here.

What's on a man's mind

'Brown needs big beasts in his lame menagerie'

- thus the link to a comment piece in the Sunday Times.

It took me a second or so before I realised that the fourth word did not contain an 'r'. I need new glasses. Or something.

PS If you're disposed to take this seriously, maybe I was thinking along the right lines after all.

Word of the Week

Indie reader Calvin Aitkin has coined the delightful portmanteau word 'talismatic'. Blending 'talismanic' and 'charismatic', it admirably describes what tigers are. When viewed from a safe distance, of course.

Something for the weekend

This may not quite be the last word in bizarre sports, but it can't be far off.