The Songstone

There we were, last class of the day, and I've made the students work like slaves for four hours. Time to ease up a bit, so we sit round in a circle and they tell some anecdotes. Abdullah, who owns six Arabian geldings, and has a penchant for taking photos of his innumerable Filipina girlfriends, regaled us with this story, which I shall share with you. "Fifteen years ago a friend of mine, who was 14 at the time, drove out into the desert with a guy who had promised to let him drive his pickup. He was a beautiful boy: long hair, smooth face, and the guy wanted to fuck him. "No, no," said my friend, but the guy was drunk on whiskey and had a gun and his way. When he stopped the pickup to have a pee my friend grabbed the gun and shot him five times, then ran over the body. He came back to Doha in the pickup and with some of his friends went back, drove the body to a remote spot and buried it in the sand, throwing the whiskey bottle into the grave with a curse. Unfo

That instead of this tawdry little story , Sky News ran something like this: The producer of the long-running TV series hit Midwonder Blunders has been commended after saying part of the show's appeal is an absence of Tories. Brian False-Gay, the drama's co-creator, who has been with it since day one, said in an interview that the shows - which have run for 14 series - "wouldn't work" if there were any Tories in the village life. "We just don't have Tories involved. Because it wouldn't be the English village with them. It just wouldn't work. Suddenly we might be in Old Amersham. "Ironically, Boreston (one of the main centres of population in the show) is supposed to be Old Amersham. And if you went into Old Amersham you wouldn't see a human face there. "We're the last bastion of Englishness and I want to keep it that way," he added. ITV was quick to praise Mr False-Gay's remarks. "We are delighted and eu

I have been looking at Google Labs and their NGram viewer , which allows you to research the use of any word or phrase in the book corpora of (so far) English, French, Hebrew, Russian and Spanish from 1800 to 2000 and spot trends. I have been playing with this and offer one example . 'You' fell from a peak of over 2 instances per 1000 printed words in 1900 to just over 1.2 per 1000 in 1965 (a 40% drop!) before rising again over the past 40 years. Why did 'you' fall so dramatically out of favour? Why has it revived? Was 1965 a particularly selfish year? Are we now writing about others more than about ourselves? Perhaps not . Certainly the long-term trend for 'I' is quite similar to 'you' with a peak at about 1900 and a steady decline thereafter (although since 1980 and the rise of the New Right it seems to be on the increase again). Even so, at 3.5 per 1000 it is still twice as common as 'you' and more common than any other pronoun. Our favouri

The Great Wave off Kanagawa : Katsushika Hokusai 1760-1849)  (thanks to Tom Clark ) And an update on the nest :

This post from the Guardian says it all so well that I am going to take the liberty of posting it. If Melkelly objects to this I am sure he/she will let me know: Another way to fight : THE POWER OF THE POUND As well as strikes, the British people can use the power of the pound. Every pound has power Move our money from Barclays, HSBC, Santander, Tesco Bank to the Nationalised banks or the Nationwide. That will increase the health of the nationalised banks quicker, increase the share price and help reduce the deficit Don't shop at Tesco, Marks & Spencer, Prudential, Boots and any other tax avoiding company. If boycotts worked for South Africa they can work for the British people. Remember companies like Boots and Prudential are making the deficit worse by holding board meetings abroad to avoid paying the tax they are due to pay. Boots should have paid £280 million but paid £14 million instead. Don't give Boots and Prudential our business or our money. 7 million peop

Still with birds. Perhaps to be heard with this other Nightingale song