:: Mind Mash ::

I'm off for a long weekend. "How delightful!" you cry. "Visiting mother-dear in Cumbria? Or a dirt-cheap city-break on the Continent?" Sadly the answer is neither. When I would like nothing more than to put my feet up on the sofa and watch trashy TV (more of that later), my time is to be consumed with theatrical activities. For the next three evenings I'll be strutting the proverbial (no prizes for guessing why I hate the poster) and from Monday I shall be working on lighting for a professional show (Oooh! Look at her...). So, don't expect any more posting loveliness from yours truly. Incidentally, why does MSWord always suggest "Yours Truly" instead of "Yours sincerely" when you sign off a letter (even in the British language version)? This is wrong and shit.

Follow up: with last week's news of the French jamming mobiles in performance venues it looks like we might have to put up with polyphonic r'n'b mind-piss on the tube too. Contributers to the LBL mailout have recently reported startling occurrences of mobiles going off on the Victoria line, it seems the Beeb picked up on this some months ago. Secretly, I have to admit to being quite impressed with my ability to text my friends from the world's deepest metro system last year. Some people are easily pleased, eh? I suppose the only way to guard against hearing a garbled rendition of Call On Me at the cinema is to hire this lot for a private screening, invite your friends and confiscate all mobiles on entry.

Origami news: Another amazing collection of origami models by Takashi Hojyo. Fave models:
  • Archangel Gabriel for the innovative use of pleating.
  • Turbaned man for startling and droll characterisation.
  • Nautilus for its geometric simplicity.
  • Aquarius for the best action sequence - I've never seen a comparable depiction flowing water!
  • Raijin/God of Thunder wins the special prize for all-round technical accomplishment. The technique of box-pleating (precreasing the paper into small squares) is one which has been developed and perfected over the past 30 years or so. Like a physical manifestation of CAD, this allows a design to be meticulously planned before the folds are realised to produce the 3-D model. Momotani's train also employs this method to memorable effect.

Obscene Cocktails: I can't deny feeling gleeful at the prospect of ordering one of these sweary concoctions, a surprising number of which seem to emanate from Australia (perhaps it's not that surprising, really):
fuck face shooter
cum in your mouth cocktail
fuck me sideways
shitface
cockteaser
fuzzy asshole
It's a shame that most of these seem to rely on semantics rather than substance. Surely the shock-factor would be improved if the ingredients were less mundane. As a general rule, I must admit to being fussy on the cocktail front: sweetness and creaminess are qualities I find generally repugnant, whereas the use of large amounts of well-mixed high-quality spirits can only be a good thing. Fruit is delightful if judiciously employed. Baileys is always wrong.

Considerably cheered by the news that the Ferreiras have been told to fuck off, I started Tuesday TV-fest with grimy old 'Enders. The inevitable swich to Channel 4 rewarded me with the stomach-emptying Too Posh To Wash, followed by the first in the new series of Wife Swap. These programmes proved to me that the majority of current "entertainment" scheduling prizes masochism above all else. The latter was an embarrassing endictment of the xenophobic attitude of the English. Unprepared to learn anything about German language or culture, the lazy Brit housewife passed off her domestic inadequacies as a victory for Women's Lib. Rarely have my toes curled so much. Thankfully the mood was considerably lightened by the arrival of Ban This Filth. The sight of three home counties pensioners wading their way through TV's most depreaved excesses (so we don't have to) was a joy to behold. This is a worthy homegrown successor to Eurotrash.

And on to matters philological... WordCount provides an ananlysis of word frequency in the English language. Dry as it sounds, there are some fascinating features to this - I certainly spent some time finding words which I thought wouldn't be included. More interesting still is QueryCount, which analyses the frequency of words that users of WordCount search for. Still on words, this article from the Beeb last week posited a theory that short names are the strongest. Howver, I thought the comments about Stalin were a little misguided. It's important to remember that Stalin had more than one reason for changing his name, Dzugashvili, which sounds distinctively Georgian. Not only is it awkward to pronounce for most Russians, but the name Stalin means "man of steel". Lenin also changed his name (from ulyanov), but he chose to be styled after the Lena river, which you can see here in flood. By the way, those Earth Observatory images are highly recommended. In choosing a massive river, Lenin was following a fine 19th century literary tradition. Evgeny Onegin, eponymous hero of the verse novel, is named after the Onega. And in Lermontov's Hero Of Our Time, the protagonist, Pechorin, is named after the Pechora.

And finally, can I just say yay for Alan Hollinghurst, a deserving winner, despite his rather po-faced attempt to prove that he's not just a gay author. No doubt he would approve of this satisfying anagram.