Please don’t throw me in the briar patch

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The Minister is breaking with tradition and making three resolutions for 2009.

First, I shall not buy any more books until I’ve worked my way through through the enormous piles of unread, pulped dead trees that have amassed on my bookshelves over the past 18 months.

Second, in an attempt to simplify my existence, improve my quality of life and free up time in which to do things I really want to do I shall take positive steps to loosen myself from certain tar babies to which I find myself welded.

Finally, I shall emerge from the grieving process for The Lost 26,000 Words and start writing the fucking book again.

In the circumstances of the ongoing Clusterfuck To The Poor House, it’s probably too much to hope for prosperity so…

Health, peace and happiness.

Oh mother, I can feel the soil falling over my head

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Fucking Hell.

Drunken revellers will probably notice no difference during tomorrow’s new year celebrations, but thanks to the Earth’s erratic rotation they will have fractionally longer to enjoy the moment and perhaps linger over that celebratory midnight kiss.

British physicists and official timekeepers around the world will insert an extra second or “leap second” into the new year countdown to bring the most accurate atomic clocks in line with the astronomical day.

“The difference between atomic time and Earth time has now built up to the point where it needs to be corrected, so this New Year’s Eve we will experience a rare 61-second minute at the very end of 2008 and revellers all over the UK will have an extra second to celebrate,” said Peter Whibberley, a senior research scientist at the National Physical Laboratory in Teddington who is helping to coordinate the time update.

2008 has been a crock of shit.

Why can’t they add the extra second to the start of 2009 so we can all enjoy it properly…?

No Irish (except Wogan), No Blacks, No Dogs

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Unbelievable.

{Programme Name:}   Sarah Kennedy
{Transmission Date:}  19 – 11 – 08

{Comments:}
At around 7.10am on 19 November, Sarah Kennedy wondered how, given that ‘so many Muslims are called Mohammed’, teachers could differentiate between them in class.  Mohammed is indeed a fairly common Muslim name, but Sarah is a fairly common English name – indeed, I was once in a class with two Sarahs.  My teacher then differentiated between them by calling them ‘Sarah A’ and ‘Sarah M’, cunningly using the first letter of their surnames.  Why would or should this be any different with Muslims or children called Mohammed?  Does Ms. Kennedy consider Muslims to be special cases in some way?  I consider Ms. Kennedy’s singling out of Muslims in this manner to be – at best – passively racist.

Ms. Kennedy has form in this area and regularly comes out with ‘ambiguous’ statements that are open to misinterpretation: indeed, just a few moments before this comment Ms. Kennedy needlessly announced a record by Tanita Tikaram (born in Germany, grew up in Basingstoke) in the sort of mock Indian accent that I thought had died with Peter Sellars.

Given the new puritanism currently sweeping the BBC (and Radio 2 in particular) please can the BBC explain why this sort of output is considered appropriate?

Regards,

[The Minister]

From:  reception@bbc.co.uk
To:    [The Minister] Date:  Sat, 27 Dec 2008 5:54 PM

Dear [Minister]

Thanks for your e-mail regarding the ‘Sarah Kennedy’ programme.

Firstly, I should apologise for the delay in getting back to you. We realise that our correspondents appreciate a quick response and I’m therefore sorry that you’ve had to wait on this occasion.

I understand that you were offended by comments made by Sarah during the programme concerning children with the name Mohammed. I note that your concerns lie with her comments as to how teachers would differentiate between the many children with this name and that you feel that Muslim children were being singled out in this instance.

The editor responsible for this show passes on the programme’s apologies for any offence caused. He has also spoken to Sarah about this.

I can assure you that your complaint has been registered on our audience log. This is a daily report of audience feedback that’s circulated to many BBC staff, including members of the BBC Executive Board, channel controllers and other senior managers.

Thanks again for taking the time to contact us with your feedback.

Regards

[name removed to protect the innocent] BBC Complaints
____________________________
www.bbc.co.uk/complaints

SMIP #12: Strawberry Fields Forever by The Beatles

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213 weeks.

1,494 days.

Four years, one month and two days.

It’s not a long time.

And that is how little time elapsed between the release of Please, Please Me on 11 January 1963 and the release of Strawberry Fields Forever on 13 February 1967.

That is how little time it took for The Beatles to re-define pop music TWICE.

Having blown away years of musical torpor and stagnancy with their harmonies and harmonica, their calls and responses and undeniable joie de vivre, The Beatles rode a four-year wave of insanity before being forced to retreat to the recording studio.

When they emerged from that exile with Strawberry Fields Forever (and the almost-but-not-quite-as-scintillating Penny Lane), they had re-written the rule book again.  In doing so, they undoubtedly lost some of their audience: those ten-year-olds in January 1963 were still only 14 and not many 14-year-olds could cope with the loss of the lovable Moptops and the emergence in their stead of this weird-sounding band.

Because 213 weeks is not a long time at all.

The UK picture sleeve for The Beatles’ 1967 double A-side single,
Strawberry Fields Forever/Penny Lane

It is a scientifically proven and well known fact that Strawberry Fields Forever contains precisely 4,825 sublime moments in its four minutes and five seconds: McCartney’s Mellotron introduction [0:00-0:09]; Lennon’s “Cranberry sauce!” during the second fade out [4:00-4:03]; the backwards cymbals [2:13-2:29]; the stabbing of the brass section [1:55-1:56]; the blissful interjections of Harrison’s newly acquired swordmandel [1:19-1:21 and 2:05-2:08]; Ringo’s astounding drumming [from 0:12]; the reversed tape [3:37-4:00]; the Morse Code [0:15-0:20]; the fake fade out [3:22-3:37]; the variations in time signature; the entire lyric; you name it.

And, of course, The Big Edit [at 1:00].  Everyone knows the story – two takes, recorded at different tempos and in different keys, painstakingly merged into one coherent finished product by producer George Martin and engineer Geoff Emerick.

It is no less aurally impressive for all that retelling; unless you are directed to the precise moment of the Big Edit (between “I’m” and “going” at the start of the second refrain), it’s almost imperceptible.  It’s relatively easy to do things like this when you’ve got a massive computer-driven desk at your fingertips; it’s something else entirely when it’s just you, a razor blade and a manually-operated variable speed reel-to-reel tape player.

Sound engineer Geoff Emerick receives a Grammy award from Ringo Starr in March
1968 for his work on the sessions for the Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band
album, sessions that began on 24 November 1966 with the recording of Strawberry Fields Forever

And yet none of this innovation is the SMIP that has brought tears to my eyes on more than one occasion.  Strawberry Fields Forever‘s SMIP belongs to the sixteenth-century stringed instrument, the violoncello.

In the spring of 1982, a music teacher tried to convince me to learn to play the cello.

It was never going to happen: the instrument was alien to me – I simply could not relate to it.  While I knew that cellos existed, I could not then point to a piece of music to which one was an integral part.  My parents owned no classical music records, they did not listen to Radio 3: it was something for which I genuinely had no reference point.

I wanted to learn the piano – an instrument that sat in the corner of every pub, bar or hotel and was always on stage alongside my favourite singers and groups.  There were no piano lesson slots available when I joined the school for the summer term of 1982, so I was left with the cello.  But being stuck with a big violin between my knees was never going to cut it for me.  I was a shabby student who didn’t practice, didn’t try and didn’t care.

Had my music teacher tried to inspire me not with names such as Bach, Beethoven, Elgar and Haydn but with names such as Lennon, McCartney, Harrison and Starr I might have been more motivated.  Had he gaffer-taped a pair of headphones to my head and forced me to listen repeatedly to Strawberry Fields Forever my interest in the cello might have been more profound.

Blessed with a producer, orchestrator and arranger as gifted as George Martin, The Beatles had a resource denied to their peers, one they mined for all it was worth: the baroque, Bach-like harpsichord bridge to In My Life was, for example, written (uncredited) and performed by Martin.  Cellos littered Beatles songs – 1965′s Yesterday (astonishingly only an album track in the UK) featured a string quartet while the 1966 single, Eleanor Rigby, contained no “rock” instruments at all, the band replaced by a string octet.

George Martin in the Abbey Road studio with Paul and Ringo, c.1968

While John Lennon might not have known too much about counterpoint, Martin did.  When tasked with providing an arrangement of strings and brass to enhance and embellish Strawberry Fields Forever, Martin employed the technique in the song’s third verse to stunning effect.

For thirteen delightful seconds [2:17-2:30] across eight glorious bars, 32 gorgeous strokes of a cello’s bow weave above, below and around Lennon’s nonsense – “I think I know/ I mean, ah, yes/ But it’s all wrong/ That is I think I disagree” – and define conclusively what represents beauty in pop music.

Were I permitted to pick the last sound I would ever hear (and could not choose the voices of my loved ones), it would be this segment of this song.

Happy holidays.

I did my best; it wasn’t much

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Yes, yes – a million times yes.

Alexandra Burke – the pointless insult to proper musicians that has won this year’s X Factor…

Hallelujah is fragile and personal, and hearing this wailing cookie-cutter nobody wobbling her way through it is offensive…

A characteristic of Simon Cowell’s multi-headed, music killing monster is the emptiness you see in its eyes. Take a look at that video again. Is there a soul behind those eyes?

Get in.

Jeff Buckley made number two; even Leonard Cohen’s original made number 38.

Get thee behind me, Satan.

SMIC #7: ‘Fire and Water’, from Zerkalo (Andrei Tarkovsky, 1974)

By julesallen in SMIC 2 Comments Tags: ,

“Tarkovsky is for me the greatest, the one who invented a new language, true to the nature of film as it captures life as a reflection, life as a dream.”

- Ingmar Bergman

I first came across Andrei Tarkovsky when I was 15, reading a review in The Radio Times of a film called Rosie Dixon – Night Nurse (Justin Cartwright, 1978). The quote which caught my eye was that this film made “Carry on Doctor look like a Tarkovsky movie”. I had no idea at the time who Tarkovsky was, but because of this quote, I wanted to find out. Shortly after this, I went to live in France, where luckily for me, Tarkovsky’s films are shown on the telly.

Whilst not a member of any avant-garde movement, Tarkovsky was without question experimental, non-linear and defiantly elliptical in his approach to film-making. How one reacts to a Tarkovsky film depends for the most part on whether the viewer is “willing or ready to consider the meaning and aim of their existence in any higher sense” when going to the cinema. For him, an unwillingness to do so “is often masked by the vulgarly simplistic cry, ‘I don’t like it!’ ‘It’s boring!’ – like the utterance of a man born blind who is being told about a rainbow. He simply remains deaf to the pain undergone by the artist in order to share with others the truth he has reached.”

Right. So having established, therefore, that we’re not in Ron Howard territory, what of the films themselves? Well what one cannot sensibly deny, is Tarkovsky’s mastery and invention in terms of the creation of imagery – the language of Cinema. Each sequence of a Tarkovsky film may resonate with many other art forms, such as painting, poetry, theatre and ballet, but it also differentiates itself and distinguishes itself from them. His use of timing, movement, camerawork and the integration of sound to create images that remain unforgettable is beyond doubt – whether they mean anything to you, unaccompanied as they are by conventional plotting, characterization or dialogue, is for you to find out.

Tarkovsky’s breakthrough film (and his most accessible) was a moving account of the life of the tortured 15th Century Russian artist Andrey Rublyov (1966), unveiled this week as one of the Archbishop of Canterbury’s two favourite films*. He followed this with his most popular film, Solyaris (1972) based on a short story by science fiction writer Stanislaw Lem. Both pictures marked him out as a filmmaker who believed utterly in the primacy of the image (or the sequence of images) to communicate with the viewer, over the script. This appeared entirely excusable in the case of Solyaris, a genre film, but the long takes, lack of cutting, variable pacing and cavernous silences, punctuated by occasional, disquietingly disconnected bursts of classical music, came to characterise his entire body of work, which later dealt only with humanity at its rawest.

The impact of Tarkovsky’s films at first was one of massive polarization of interest: between those who were interested and those who weren’t. On the one hand leading European critics recognised and hailed a modern master; on the other hand came a massive, baffled shrug of shoulders from cinemagoers. It was never going to be a money-spinner. Tarkovsky once said that he “loathe[d] the concept of ‘entertainment’ in the Cinema, as it degrades the author and the viewer”. You don’t say, Andrei.

What Tarkovsky saw as the meaning of Cinema was “juxtaposing a person with an environment that is boundless, relating a person to the whole world.” The last image of Solyaris, with the camera drawing back into the sky, revealing the principal character’s house and the wasteland around it, to be merely a tiny island in a world otherwise entirely underwater, illustrates this vision rather well. Silence, solitude, but also simplicity, abound in his work.

Like many other filmmakers, Tarkovsky was evangelical in his belief that the genius of an artist is revealed not in the absolute perfection of his work, but in absolute fidelity to himself and in commitment to his own passion. We often say we prefer a film-maker’s ‘personal films’, but for Tarkovsky, there could be no other kind.

Of the later films he completed before his premature death of lung cancer in a Parisian hospital in 1986, three are now acknowledged masterpieces of 20th Century Cinema: Stalker (1979), Nostalghia (1983) and Offret (The Sacrifice, 1986). The SMIC comes from my own personal favourite, Zerkalo (The Mirror, 1975). In Zerkalo, a writer who is dying seeks to conjure up images from his childhood. Insodoing, his memory becomes like a camera and plays the tricks a camera plays, heightening certain details which otherwise appear irrelevant and interspersing the images with precise sounds. The images that he conjures up are of course always striking (or they would have been forgotten) and they may be accurate or may not: they reside half way between a dream and an eyewitness account.

I urge anyone with an open mind who hasn’t already done so, to devote 120 minutes of their time to a Tarkovsky film. As the man himself would have it:

“Touched by a masterpiece, a person begins to hear in himself that same call of truth which prompted the artist to his creative act. When a link is established between the work and its beholder, the latter experiences a sublime, purging trauma. Within that aura which unites masterpieces and audience, the best sides of our souls are made known, and we long for them to be freed. In those moments we recognize and discover ourselves, the unfathomable depths of our own potential, and the furthest reaches of our emotions.”

*[...the other favourite being The Muppet Christmas Carol (Brian Henson, 1992) , which erodes the prelate’s credibility somewhat – surely The Muppets Take Manhattan (Frank Oz, 1984) is superior?].

Colophonics of the Redesign

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Most WordPress blogs have, I contend, become too busy.  There are too many sidebars, widgets and adverts; just too many bells and whistles generally.

The Ministry is not an exercise in making money and, as such, those bells and whistles have no place here.

I therefore wanted a minimalist, single-column theme that presented the content simply and clearly, with a horizontal menu across the top of each page for ease of navigation.  I also wanted to keep the fuschia, white and grey on black look of the original dark.cash theme.

I am also, however, more than a little obsessed by fonts.  I spent a long time researching fonts and combinations of fonts to get the look I wanted.  I wanted a specific sans serif font for the title and headlines (Myriad Pro) and a specific serif font (Didot) for the body text.

However, the Web lets down site owners and designers when it comes to fonts.  Unless the correct font is already installed on the computer that is accessing a site whose Cascading Style Sheet uses that font, then the operating system will simply replace that specified font with what it deems the nearest alternative.  This is particularly a problem in Windows.

For example, Helvetica font is installed as standard on Macs but PCs substitute Helvetica with Arial, a font that comes as part of Windows.  Arial may superficially look like Helvetica but there are significant – if subtle – differences between the two that make a noticeable difference.  (You can read more about those differences here.)

While the launch version of the new theme looked great on my Mac – Myriad Pro and Didot everywhere I looked – I was horrified when I fired up a PC and found Arial and Times New Roman staring back at me: the Ministry looked like something off Geocities circa 1996.

Didot does not, sadly, come as standard on PCs.  Times New Roman looks like shit.  The thought of most visitors having to read my drivel in a font that’s even uglier than my prose was too much to bear.

I have therefore made a decision to go all sans serif.

Most modern computers – whether PC, Mac or Linux – have Myriad Pro on their system as the font comes bundled with versions of the free Adobe Reader software installed since January 2005 and the Ministry should therefore render correctly on most visitors’ screens.

If Myriad Pro is not available, the Ministry’s CSS code lists (in descending order) Optima, Gill Sans, Lucida Grande and Lucida Sans fonts as alternatives before plumping for the real generic sans serif typefaces of Verdana, Helvetica, Geneva, Arial and Trebuchet MS.

As things stand at the time of writing, the Ministry looks best of all in Safari on a Mac, where it displays thus:

However, the site also now renders more or less as I want it to in Safari on a PC, and in Firefox on both PC and Mac.  (I’m still working on Opera, which for some reason is not picking up the font tree code.)

If the Ministry looks like shit in your browser, that’s probably because you’re using a shitty browser that doesn’t support web standards – almost certainly Internet Explorer.  If you complain about this, I will laugh at you because I do not care.  If, however, you are using a modern, standards-compliant browser and the site does not render in a decent sans serif typeface, or you have otherwise have trouble viewing or reading the site, please let me know.

Free Deirdre Rashid

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Stop the presses, we’ve a late entry for Cultural Nadir.

A woman has left her job!

She must be a very important woman in a very important job because Arrivederci Gordon and Posh Boy Dave both deemed the event important enough to record farewell messages for her.

Arrivederci Gordon opined: “Congratulations on the support that you’ve won throughout the country.”

PBD said: “The sofa will never be the same without you.”

Support throughout the country?  A departure that means the end of comfy chairs as we know them?

Who can this be?  A senior Ikea designer?

Oh, it’s Fiona Phillips from GMTV.

So the voluntary departure of an overpaid woman barely anybody knows from a programme barely anybody watches (1.1 million viewers each day is not exactly up there with The Morecambe & Wise Christmas Show 1977 is it?) is deemed worthy of political comment.

Our economy is in meltdown; our armed forces are engaged in the illegal occupation of another sovereign state; and the planet is melting.  Yet our “leaders” (sic) have got enough time to tit around like this.

It’s your vote in 2009: cast it wisely.

No, no, no: listen to ME

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Each December the man who is julesallen puts together a Cultural Review Of The Year, with contributions from friends, acquaintances and hangers-on.  The Director’s Cut of this year’s Ministerial contribution is reproduced below for your delight and amusement.

Written Word

I put together a fine share purchase agreement this summer: does that count?

Stage

I failed to set foot inside a theatre all year.  The theatrical world did not complain.

Cinema/DVD

I don’t think it was a great year for Cinema overall – The Dark Knight, Mamma Mia and Quantum Of Solace all made me pray for death to come – but I enjoyed quite a few DVDs.

The year started well, with me catching up with the brilliant Tell No One and The Lives Of Others on DVD.  Juno deserved its success and I thought Ellen Page’s performance was terrific.  No Country For Old Men was just excellent in every respect.

I really enjoyed 2 Days In Paris and Paris, Je T’aime.  I liked Vantage Point until the final 20 minutes.  Venus made me laugh a lot, as did Stranger Than Fiction and Priceless.  Rendition was a well made movie, notwithstanding the presence of Meryl Streep.  I surprised myself by liking Catch And Release: chick-flick producers take note – cast Kevin Smith in a romcom and even I’ll watch it.

My favourite movie of this year, though, was Lars And The Real Girl.  I only finally saw it on DVD in October but I loved every frame (even, surprisingly, those frames in which Emily Mortimer featured).  Ryan Gosling is one of the five most interesting actors working today and, while I’m automatically well disposed towards any movie that emphasises the importance of society and socialism, this was just a smashing story, well told.

Website

I’ve really enjoyed the writing on Popdose throughout its first year, a collective effort from a network of lovers of popular culture.  Lifehacker continues to feed my inner geek.  One of the many music blogs I visit, The B Side, introduced me to many new pieces of great music and the incredible life story of ‘Sir’ Lattimore Brown.

Above all, though, three websites made the US general election for me: Politico and FiveThirtyEight.com were invaluable resources, while Things Younger Than Republican Presidential Candidate (Oh, And Did I Forget To Mention War Hero?) John McCain was a daily treat that occasionally had me weeping with laughter.

Televisual Entertainment

I’ve all but given up on TV.  If I had my way the Ministerial Residence would no longer have a television: now I’ve finally learnt how to use proxy servers and torrents it’s just a big, irrelevant box in the lounge that used to insult my intelligence.

For lack of anything better to watch over dinner I sat through and quite enjoyed Reaper (E4) and Chuck (Virgin 1) but neither pulled up any trees.

30 Rock was and is immense, though why it’s taken Five so long to show the second series is beyond me.  Fortunately, copyright-bending technology means I’m already onto the third…

The only other thing I’ve gone out of my way to watch is The Daily Show with Jon Stewart (More4).  161 editions in 2008 and about 120 of them were laugh-out-loud funny, which is a mighty strike rate.  I suspect Stewart is even more gutted than me that the show is on hiatus when someone threw shoes at Dubya…  It’ll be interesting to see if the producers can keep up the standard when their fella moves into the Oval Office.

I feel I should like Gavin & Stacey, as lots of people I respect rate it very highly.  However, every time I see a clip it leaves me cold.

Sport

For the first time ever I don’t have a single football memory from the year: the game has eaten itself and barely interests me anymore.  Padraig Harrington retaining The Open was great viewing; for a few hours on one Sunday in July, I became a tennis fan – the Wimbledon final was astonishing; it was lovely to see Paula Radcliffe win the New York Marathon, particularly after her insane insistence on completing the Beijing race despite being unable to walk had me in tears at 3am one Sunday; and the last lap of the season’s last Formula 1 grand prix was like something out of Boy’s Own.  (That said, I’m delighted the nonentity of a man that is Lewis Hamilton was beaten to the BBC Sports Personality award by Chris Hoy, who not only deserves it for his brilliant achievements but also seems actually to have a personality.)

Otherwise it’s the Olympics.  Lots of great moments – Michael Phelps, Christine Ohuruogu, Rebecca Adlington (you can take the girl out of Mansfield, but…), the rowers, the sailors, the breathtaking performance of our cyclists (I’ve become a big fan of Victoria Pendleton) – but the stand out was the performances of Usain Bolt.  Sometimes your brain can’t quite comprehend what your eyes are seeing and I had to re-watch his performance in the 100 metres final a few times before I believed it.  Thank God he appears to be clean.

Music

Best Album
Raphael Saadiq – The Way I See It
Mark Ronson has inexplicably built a career and reputation out of slapping some half-hearted horns on a karaoke backing track and claiming that this lends it a Sixties/Seventies Motown/Philly vibe.  Raphael Saadiq (Charlie Wiggins to his friends) shows the preening prinny how it’s done and has produced some blissful tracks that at times stand shoulder-to-shoulder with the output of Holland-Dozier-Holland and Gamble-Huff.  As the beatspermil.com review says:

The Way I See It is a good record to give to your dad, it’s a good record for making love, and it’s a good record for your wedding reception. And it won’t make you want to blow your brains out after you hear it at your fifth high school dance. Because this isn’t just a retro throwback – Raphael Saadiq has out-mastered the masters. Play it for your girlfriend – you’ll get laid.

Very Good Albums
The Killers – Day & Age: shouldn’t work but it does
The Last Shadow Puppets – The Age Of The Understatement: at times sublimely good
Snow Patrol – A Hundred Million Suns: strictly by the numbers but no less listenable for that
Robert Plant and Alison Krauss – Raising Sand: I hope this is a one-off because I’m not comfortable liking anything with which Plant is involved

Good Half-Albums By Those Who Could Have Done Better
Bon Iver – for Emma, forever ago
Neil Diamond – Home Before Dark
Ray LaMontagne – Gossip In The Grain
Ryan Adams & The Cardinals – Cardinology
Adele – 19
Elbow – The Seldom Seen Kid
Kings Of Leon – Only By The Night
Kaiser Chiefs – Off With Their Heads

Partial Returns To Form By Those I’d Long Since Written Off
R.E.M. – Accelerate
The Verve – Forth
Oasis – Dig Out Your Soul

Those Whose Back Catalogues I Have Explored In Depth For The First Time And Greatly Liked
Creedence Clearwater Revival
Chic

A year on and I still can’t decide about Duffy.

I’m going to shoehorn radio into this category.  I love radio but have despaired over the paucity of British commercial radio for years.  While BBC Radio 2 has diversified and widened its scope and – in so doing – become the most popular radio station in the country, commercial radio has responded by constantly narrowing its computer-generated playlists in an attempt to elminate any risk of alienating its core audience without ever attempting to attract new listeners.

Radio 2 plays 750-800 different tracks each week, whereas in the week to 27 September, Capital Radio played just 234 different tracks and repeated them an average of 9.7 times.

When Virgin Radio re-branded as Absolute Radio it bucked this trend.  In its final week as Virgin, it played 500 unique tracks and repeated them an average of 3.5 times.  In its first week as Absolute, it played 732 unique tracks with an average repetition of 2.4; in its second week it played more than 900 unique tracks with an average repetition of 2.  Whether this approach will work remains to be seen, but the station has become much more listenable at least for the time being.  I’m enjoying it while I can.  (Absolute also employs Iain Lee, whose Sunday night phone-in is the funniest thing on the wireless.)

Cultural Highlight

Undoubtedly, the US Presidential election result.  Enough has been written on that subject by far better writers than me (indeed, more than enough has been written previously by me): suffice to say I had a smile on my face on 5 November, 6 November, 7 November, 8 November…

I’ve quite liked how a fun-sounding little “credit crunch” has turned into the most profound failure of free market capitalism in history.  Still, never mind, eh?  We all make mistakes with other people’s money.

In the same vein, it was nice to see a few Chancers getting their comeuppance, even if another dozen filled each gap they left.  For example, Richard Branson’s increasingly tarnished marque was rejected by the people who bought his Megastores and the people who bought the radio station – meaning that he lost two massively lucrative trade mark licence fees in the space of nine months: that should make for interesting reading in the group accounts.  Oh, wait a minute: he doesn’t publish his group accounts, does he…?

Gideon Osborne was exposed by one of his Bullingdon chums as the Chancer he is after his Club Med freebie; the Barclay brothers got the caning they deserved by the serfs of Sark and promptly showed just how much they respect democracy; the twonk who co-founded the Carphone Warehouse eventually learnt that public companies are not private playthings, while that nice Conrad Black chappie is nine short months into a 78-month prison term for failing to learn that lesson himself.

And Jim Beresford and Douglas Smith, partners in the Doncaster-based Beresfords Solicitors, were struck off for ripping off hundreds of invalided ex-miners and their families to the tune of tens of millions of quid.  Shame.  My heart will bleed even more for them when those funds are traced and find their way back to their rightful owners.

Let’s hope 2009 holds a similar fate in store for Satan Cowell.

A late contender for cultural highlight came from Muntadar al-Zeidi who managed to hold Dubya to greater account with a pair of size nines than any of the American legislature, the American judiciary, the American people, the United Nations or the International Court in The Hague.  A marvellous piece of old-fashioned political protest.  I loved the fact that CNN reported it with the explanation: “In Arab culture, throwing shoes at someone… is considered an insult,” as though doing so in Pig’s Knuckle, Arkansas is a sign of affection.

Cultural Nadir

Manuelgate.  Seriously: WTF?

Balls the size of water melons

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For the first time in ages, I think I’m speechless.

The outgoing US vice-president, Dick Cheney, last night gave an unapologetic assessment of his eight years in office, defending the invasion of Iraq, the US prison camp at Guantánamo Bay, secret wiretapping and the extreme interrogation method known as waterboarding.

In his first television interview since the presidential election in November, Cheney displayed no regrets and gave no ground to his many critics within America and around the world. He summed up his record by saying: “I think, given the circumstances we’ve had to deal with, we’ve done pretty well.”

The last time I saw chutzpah like this, Liberace was still alive.

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