Top ten unfinished blog ideas

It is well-known that even the crappiest article with “top ten” in the headline will be ridiculously over-rated by Google, and therefore attract way more visitors than the content legitimately deserves.

To that end, here is my very own contribution to the entirely unnecessary top ten genre. Like a ruminant, I’m bringing these half-digested ideas back up from one of my many stomachs for a last chew. Too rambling for a Facebook status update, too under-developed for an entire post –here we go, my Xmas gift to you:

1. All the thrill of the escalator

Does anyone else still get a frisson of big city excitement when they go on a “down” escalator? None of the towns I lived in up until the age of 18 had any shops with a down – it was lifts or stairs only for us yokels.

Every time I ride the down escalator, part of me wants to sing “New York, New York”.

2. Now or then?

Is this London St Pancras 2011 or Berlin Templehof 1936? Fascist art is alive and well...

3, Everyone’s a critic

Has anyone here read “The Communist Manifesto”? I did recently, and I was surprised by how clear and modern Marx’s critique of capitalism is. His descriptions of the finance-driven economy are shockingly prescient of the situation we find ourselves in now.

The second half of The Communist Manifesto is also pretty funny, where Marx kick starts the favourite pastime of every leftwinger ever since and slags off every other kind of socialist who has any point of disagreement with him. Because it’s SCIENCE after all.

And does anyone here like Nietzsche? As far as I can see, his demolition of the foundations of Judaeo-Christian ethics in “Beyond Good and Evil” and “The Antichrist” is irrefutable.

The trouble is, both Marx and Nietzsche go on from their brilliantly-argued critique to erect some batshit alternative scheme on top of it – in Marx’s case, communism; in Nietzsche’s case...errr...well, I’m still not entirely sure. Something to do with “act like a Homeric Greek and don’t give a toss about what anyone else does”.

And the funny thing is, both of those two explicitly denigrate “mere critics”. Why is it so easy to knock things down and so hard to produce alternatives?

4. Don’t put your daughter on the internet Mrs Worthington

If you put a picture of your kids as your Facebook profile picture, no one is going to know if you are who they think you are.  

5. Literary heroics (a)

Thanks to Anonymous (for god’s sake people – just put in any old name when you leave a comment...) for pointing me in the direction of Xenophon. I read the whole of “Anabasis” while on jury duty.

“Anabasis” is the ancient Greek “Bravo Two Zero”. Secret mission in Iraq goes wrong, escape from behind enemy lines, fighting all the way – sound familiar? ANCIENT GREECE IS NOT BORING!

6. Literary Heroics (b)

Whoooooooooooooooooooooooooo lives in a pineapple under the sea? FRIDTJOF NANSEN!

If Xenophon is Andy McNab, Fridtjof Nansen is Bear Grylls – but without the overnight hotels. I just read “Farthest North”, relating his polar expedition of 1893 to 1896. That’s right – three years in a wooden ship on the Arctic Ocean.  

In fairness, there are times when the repetitive prose manages to not only describe the ball-aching boredom he suffered being frozen into pack ice with 13 Norwegians waiting to drift to Greenland but also to elicit it. I could only care so much about what they had for dinner EVERY DAY FOR THREE YEARS. "Took the latitude. We have drifted 12 feet north in the last week. Took a sounding. The sea is very deep. It's been night for six months. Thought I saw a polar bear, but I didn't. I am so bored."

But the unbelievable fortitude of the man – a man of action, and of science and (later) a humanitarian statesman - is just inspiring. Sure, there are plenty of British polar explorers I could have idolised. But their books were not free! Nor did any of them have quite such an impressive moustache and stare. 

7. Vests are not outerwear

It is not acceptable to wear just a vest in public in the UK if you are a man. Even if it’s hot.  Especially when it’s cold.

Also, is it wrong that when I hear the line “don we now our gay apparel” in “Deck the halls with boughs of holly” I can’t help but think of assless chaps?

8. The most revolting cocktail ever

I give you the “Scotti”.  

9. The day I quit the gym

I cancelled my gym membership – and had to work out a three month notice period @£72 a month! Outrageous. If anyone has any ideas on how I can avoid turning into Jabba the Hutt, I’d be most grateful for your input.

10. And then the abyss stared back into me

The trouble with writing a blog is that when I meet people in the real world, I don’t have anything left to say to them. In telling every interesting anecdote I have on here, and polishing and grinding down the sharp edges on the facts until it becomes a routine or a bit of schtick, I lose the will to ever mention it again. 

Rhapsodies of Bohemia - pt3

Neville Chamberlain once washed his hands of Czechoslovakia by calling it “a far-away country of which we know nothing”.

As such, I like to think that these three blog posts about my recent trip to Prague are working to prevent such appeasement of any future Hitler.

By making you not know nothing about it, and in fact know something about it.

The Czech Republic, that is.

Czech Technology

I shouldn’t really have been surprised by this (because it happened to me in France as well), but the first thing I did on getting out of the airport was to try and check my emails - and of course, I couldn’t get the internet on my phone. So I had to hold out for a WiFi network.

Naturally, I was very uneasy until I got online. God knows how anyone managed to go on holiday in the past. Or to places where they don’t have WiFi.

Anyway, pursuant to my remarks about the Czech language I was a little disconcerted when faced with the Czech keyboard. Now I know that other countries have different keyboards. But if ANYONE knows where the @ symbol is on the Czech keyboard, please let me know. In order to log in to my email, I had to Google “at symbol”.

Just another reason not to have all those silly accented letters in your alphabet taking up valuable keyboard space.

Czech culture

Ever seen this little chap? 

If - like me - you used to watch the eerie foreign cartoons on BBC2 around teatime circa 1983, you may have a vague recollection. If not, he’s called Krtek (which means “mole”) and as far as I could tell, he is the single most popular thing in the entire Czech Republic.

Perhaps one in every three shops and market stalls in Prague stock every kind of Krtek merchandise you can imagine.

On our last day there, I was starting to think this mole was a little too popular when I spotted him on the front page of a daily newspaper.

But it turned out that his creator, Zdenek Miler, had died that day. Very sad, because in just three days I had become a Krtek fan too.

Alongside Krtek, Prague is overrun with Kafka-kitsch and the occasional Svejk – but no one comes close to the mole.

In conclusion

Elvira and I had a great time in Prague. To be fair, we would probably have had a great time anywhere without the kids, but the location definitely contributed. Prague is easy to get to, (relatively) cheap, safe, simple to navigate, beautiful and fascinating. I give it two thumbs up, and despite the piss-taking in the foregoing three posts, I am now a firm fan of the Czech people and the Czech Republic. 

But after our foreign trip it was nice to come back to the kids and to Boston and see the familiar signs of home.

The Czech is in the post – pt 2

Here’s the second instalment of my guide to Prague for people who share the exact circumstances my wife and I found ourselves in last week. For everyone else, there’s always Tripadvisor.

Czech Language

This is probably historically a highly tasteless remark, for which I apologise in advance - but Prague is basically a German city inhabited by people who speak a language that bears no resemblance to German.

Everything I saw pointed to either Vienna (if it was less than 400 years old) or that whole kind of Brothers Grimm medieval Germany thing (if older).

Anyway, as well as excellent English and German, the Czechs speak a language called “Czech”, and this is a Slavic language. As such – and again I apologise for any cultural insensitivity here – it is a lot like most other Slavic languages, from Russian, to Polish, to Serbian and so on.  For example, the Czechs say “dobra den” and the Poles say “dzien dobry”. PotAYto, PotARto – DUMPling, DIMPling.

Mercifully, the Catholics got to the Czechs before old Cyril and Methodius, and they use our Roman alphabet.

However, this is of little advantage when your find yourself confronted with repeated storms of consecutive consonants, which really do not lend themselves to English tonguing. Elvira and I struggled to ask for “Trdelnik” when we found it, and ended up rendering it like Dora the Explorer saying “turtleneck”.

And here I must insert a little linguistic rant of wider relevance. English has its faults, but it makes do perfectly well with 26 letters. If you need all those goddam accents to cover all the sounds your language makes – perhaps you need some more letters. I’m just sayin’ is all.

Anyway, I can only begin to imagine how Czechs play Scrabble. They are not, however, above a bit of Engrish.

Czech Money

The Czechs are not members of the Eurozone, which means that you can still have loads of fun wondering what the hell is going on with a currency you cannot get your head round - which in turn means that your holiday descends into a purgatory of near-constant mental arithmetic.

Their money is called the “koruna” and £1 is worth anywhere between 25 and 31 of them – which makes for very confusing “value for money” assessments when shopping.

Here’s a piece of useful advice (by my own low, low standards). Get your koruna in the Czech Republic, not in the UK. You get a much better rate (worst case, +3 more koruna to the pound) and you will not be slapped around the face for waving euros around, at least in the vicinity of the airport and Prague itself. Unless, I suppose, you are being met by Vaclav Klaus, who doesn’t like euros. But nor does he drive a taxi.

 

As well as suitcase-hostile block paving/cobblestones, the streets of Prague are lined with exchange booths, in which tourists swap their home currency for ever-fluctuating korunas.

To your left, you can see an example of Czech language, Czech money and German economic colonialism all in one place.

And that, dear readers, brings me on to a little adventure the missus and I had...

So there we were, standing outside an exchange booth trying to work out whether “we buy” means that they buy pounds off you for that many korunas or they buy that many korunas for a pound, when a man sidles up to us and starts asking if we’re interested in changing money.

Now, this chap spoke good English with that kind of accent which, to UK ears, could place him anywhere from Strasbourg to the Urals. He looked kind of Kazakh, or something else Central Asian. Anyway, he said that he’d give us 32 koruna to the pound – which was the best deal we’d seen.

My suspicions were first raised when he insisted on carrying out the transaction behind a parked car. But I wasn’t too alarmed – he’s probably just trying to dodge tax, I thought, and that is in both our interests... I wasn't going to hold that against him. 

So I say I want to change £100. He suggests £200. I say I’ve only got £100. So he whips out a bundle of notes, and counts through them at Paul Daniels speed – one thousand, two thousand, three thousand, one hundred, two hundred. He has my £100 in his hand when I realise that I have actually seen a one thousand koruna note, and the notes at the bottom of his pile are a different colour. And size. And they had “Hungarian forints” written on them.

Like a panther, I grab my money back, rebutting his protestations that they are real banknotes by declaring - I was very proud of this particular bit of wit - “I can read”. And away we go, very pleased not to have been ripped off. Later on that day, I checked the exchange rates and found that 1000 forints were going for about £2.79.

Elvira was deeply impressed by my display of shrewdness. All I can say is that the deep suspicion and cynicism about other people that condemns me to a life of perpetual isolation sometimes has its upsides.

Coming next...Czech Technology and Culture. For real, this time. 

Czech yourself before you wreck yourself – pt 1

Elvira and I have just returned from a child-free trip to Prague, capital of the glamorous Czech Republic – the veritable Switzerland of the former Soviet bloc.

And so, before I return to the subject of my recent jury service (THANKS for the complete ABSENCE of useful legal advice, by the way), I will regale you with a little bit of travel writing.

However, in inimitable ODHSNM style, this will largely consist of my impressions of various things that either did happen or that I am imagining to have happened, upon extrapolation from a more mundane reality. As such, if you are looking for a useable guide on Things to do in Prague – as ever - I suggest you go elsewhere.  

Czech Cuisine

I did not see a single green vegetable on offer, from street food kiosks to five-star restaurants. Come to think of it, unless you count braised red cabbage – which consists more of sugar and booze than cabbage – I don’t think I saw any vegetables at all.

In their place, you have dumplings. Dumplings big, dumplings small, dumplings smooth, lumpy or gnocchi-like – all made of flour or potato, and in Elvira’s well-chosen words all “very binding”.

I can’t fault Czech cuisine for flavour and heartiness, but I suspect that constipation may be one of the country’s biggest public health issues.

Having said that, the degree of bowel irritation I personally experienced as a result of drinking the ample strong coffee on offer more or less offset the bunging-up effect of the food.

At the hotel breakfast, I was led to wonder why the UK is so rubbish when it comes to bread. Here, I was faced with about 20 different options of variously shaped and flavoured rolls, slices and more. Fennel seed in bread, I wholeheartedly recommend. But at home, it’s “white or brown or both”. Why are the British content with damp, floppy, sliced white shite?

Another thing we in the UK seem to neglect is the admirable continental tradition of distilling alcoholic bitters – the Czech speciality being a delightful little tipple called Becherovka.

I have come to the conclusion that the “secret recipe” for Jagermeister – surely the Rod Stewart to Becherovka’s Tom Waits – must comprise one part Becherovka to one part Beecham’s Venos Expectorant for Chesty Coughs.

More to follow, when we consider Czech Technology and Czech Culture...

Nice doing justice with you

You may have been wondering what has happened to ODHSNM recently. No, I was not co-opted to serve in the governments of either Greece or Italy. Much worse, I was doing jury service.

As such, I have not only some actual real world experiences to write about, but also some opinions that are supported by evidence – as opposed to the  steady diet of blind prejudice I usually feed you.

However, I must begin with a warning and a disclaimer. I am not going to tell anyone about anything relating to the deliberations of those juries I sat on, because it is an offence under the Contempt of Court Act 1981.

I am also going to be deliberately vague about when and where I did it and what cases I was involved in. Seems that blog accounts of the details of jury service are a bit sparse, and so even though I have a better grasp of the law in this area than some, I don’t want to go out on a limb and do or say anything dodgy (working from this broadly).

So, as a preliminary – while I await the input of those of my friends and readers who know the law better than me – here are some interesting factoids about jury service:

1. At the court I attended, probably about 50 new people got called up each week. Given that the usual term for jury duty is two weeks, that meant that at any one time there were about a hundred potential jurors locked up in a special waiting room, ready to be called. There is a LOT of waiting.
2. Whenever a trial is ready to start, 15 to 20 of the people get called out – apparently at random (more on the nature of "randomness" in the criminal justice system at a later date...). You may immediately be thinking, “hold on – not 12?” Well, you’d be correct. Those people then go up to the courtroom, where an official literally shuffles cards with all their names on, and the first 12 called out go and take their places. At this point, the counsel can reject any potential jurors they don’t like the look of – so this is the point that your swastika tattoos and copies of the Daily Mail come in most handy. Those rejected or not picked, get sent back to the holding pen.
3. Anyone who is on the electoral register and aged between 18 and 70 can get called up for jury duty. If you get a letter saying you’ve been picked, you can be fined up to £1,000 if you don’t reply to it within seven days.
4. There are nine lions on the Royal coat of arms. I counted them. Many times.

More will follow, pending legal direction. 

The Dukes of Moral Hazard

After praising the Greek government for sticking to its guns on a referendum on the bailout package yesterday, I was rather surprised to find that some 15 minutes after I had published it, Papandreou had changed his mind. The ODHSNM kiss of death strikes again. 

Suddenly George had decided that “democracy” meant something a little less Athenian and bit more Burkean than he’d previously been inclined to lead the world to believe.

By that, I mean:

1. Because the parliamentary opposition supported the bailout – no doubt after having their children taken hostage by G20 agents and spirited to a bunker in Cannes – there was, in fact, total agreement in the Greek polity on the whole “selling oneself and one’s descendants into slavery” issue.
2. The general public had their chance for a say when they elected their MPs. No point whinging about it now Stavros. Just eat your grass and be quiet. 

So, well done everyone - especially Existential Doubt for his article explaining WTF brought us to this moment. That’s the crisis over.

Well, call me paranoid and a prophet of doom, but I’m glad Elvira and I decided to book our upcoming break in a non-Euro country (the Czech Republic, since you ask).

While flights might be cheaper after the Euro has collapsed, I don’t want the added hassle of bartering for food, huddling around burning pieces of furniture in an exploded basement overnight and fending off marauding barbarians during the day on top of the usual stresses of a holiday.

Yes, well done EU and G20. The banks can rest easy knowing that there’s nothing you won’t do to stop them losing a penny. Things are going so well.

While we’re at it, EU, why not finish the job properly? All the governments – step down. Let’s get a Hapsburg on the throne and change the name back to "Holy Roman Empire".

Go George Go

For what it is worth, Greek prime minister George Papandreou can count on the support of this blog in his efforts to inject a little democracy into the EU’s attempt to set an all-time record for throwing good money after bad.

As Seumas Milne says in the Guardian today:

It makes no sense. Unless it's understood that it's not the Greek economy that's being rescued, but European and US banks exposed to Greek debt.

Perhaps my economically-literate blogger friend Existential Doubt could offer some elucidation as to exactly where all this money is going and how it’s going to help?

Money has to be continually poured into Greece so Greece can give it to the financiers, who will stop lending money to governments that spend vastly more than they collect in taxes if they ever lose out, resulting in the collapse of social democratic welfare statist civilisation as we know it - which is only possible when states borrow huge amounts of cash with no idea about how to pay it back from financiers. That about right?

So, am I being naive or missing some obvious point if I can't help but see this as simply delaying the inevitable and impoverishing yourself in the process?

As Kenny Rogers would say:

You've got to know when to hold 'em - and know when to fold 'em.

Anyway, that's enough economics. Here's some politics.

Papandreou offers the Greek people a referendum on whether they want to return to the kind of economic and political colonisation by foreign powers that they spent most of last 500 years trying to shake off, and suddenly, he’s an irresponsible, weak lunatic because - god forbid! - if they are given a say in the matter, the people might decide that they would rather that the banks lose some money than be reduced to eating grass to survive for the next 50 years.

You can question the democratic credentials of a prime minister of Greece whose father was prime minister of Greece and whose grandfather was also...errr...prime minister of Greece. But he seems to have remembered that democratic politicians are there, when it comes to a moment like this, to serve the interests of their people first rather than international capital. 

This Treaty marks a new stage in the process of creating an ever closer union among the peoples of Europe, in which decisions are taken as closely as possible to the citizen.

That’s Article A of the Treaty of Rome, which led to the creation of the European Union. I wonder what went wrong...