Nice one, Mister Ed!

The weekly corrida de toros (always a lot of bull, but today a bit of horse) of Dave and Ed was a nice one today. Only the true die-hard thought Cameron did the business. Even the ranks of ConHome could scarce forbear to fleer:

[Miliband] probably won the exchanges on points, despite Cameron having the better of the arguments.  The Prime Minister all but used the “R” word, alluding to consulting the public and gaining the “full-hearted consent of the British people”.  His insistence that a Conservative Government would want to take powers back from Brussels, and that a Labour Government would give more away, was right.  But my sense is that to the lay voter hinting that you want a referendum in future while arguing that you don’t want one now looks muddled.

That’s Paul Goodman who, despite Malcolm’s partisan sniping is good — and getting better:

Downing Street must be anxious about women’s votes.  From the Tory backbenches, John Glen raised the gain which the Government’s proposed pension reforms will bring to some women, and Mary Macleod plugged childcare: I may be wrong, but both questions had the smell of the Whips’ Office about them. Laura Sandys asked about the great horsemeat scandal.  Cue the Rebekah Brooks jokes.

Edible equines

That’s another chewy matter, currently being digested across the media, including Slugger O’Toole, where Pete Baker has opened his Boucherie Chevaline. Not surprisingly, it’s a bizarre goulash of serious concern and dismal punning:

• One of the few, very, very, few, successful native industries Ireland could boast of was its meat industry, specifically beef. Following the Irish economic collapse it was about the only economic success story Ireland could point to. This will absolutely devastate it.
• I was just checking my burgers in the fridge there……Aaaannnnd they’re off!!!

For different reasons, Malcolm likes both of those … and had to participate, in part recollecting an earlier post here:

I know two things about a horse
And one of them is rather coarse.

Even so, the presence of real meat (beef, horse, or whatever) in burgers is the least of his worries. It’s not the meat that concerns him: like the 99.9% of known germs slaughtered by household cleaners … the problem lies with the other and unknown bits.

One small wrinkle: the Irish tests which revealed the horse DNA date from two months since. What’s been happening since? Why does it become public only now?

Back to the bear pit

Miliband’s smirk at PMQs must have registered all the way to Brighton: he was winning, and he knew it.

Inevitably the Tory (and other) commentators are getting antsy. Hence the demands for a definitive statement of the Labour position, usually expressed in the whinge: Miliband must commit NOW! To which must go the answer: No chance!

Simon Jenkins (in the Guardian) tried, rather tortuously, to reel in his sprat:

From the moment in 2003 that Gordon Brown stopped Tony Blair joining the euro, Cameron’s speech was waiting to happen. The evolving euro would sooner or later need a tight political corset to enforce fiscal, budgetary and monetary union. Britain and other states would not join this, and would therefore need to negotiate their relationship with this euro-specific regime. Labour’s Ed Miliband and Ed Balls, both party to Brown’s victory over Blair, know this well. There need be no disagreement.

No disagreement? Come, come: that’s not the nature of British adversarial politics.

James Forsyth, Speccie-lating away, would like to see a Tory ploy in the whole thing:

Those close to Cameron are arguing that Miliband has now shut the door to Labour offering a referendum, putting Labour on the wrong side of public opinion. They believe that once Cameron has actually delivered his speech, the atmosphere will change and Miliband will have to say what he would do.

Oddly enough, Benedict Brogan got the message:

On a succession of vital topics raised in the interview, Mr Miliband said he couldn’t answer because we are too far out from an election: we will have to wait for the manifesto.

One has to read the rest of that, in the context of the tormented Torygraph, fully to realise Brogan’s frustrated pain that Miliband is not to be hooked. The full beef is hoarsely delivered by David Hughes:

Labour is marching on the spot, going nowhere fast. While the party’s policy review is churning away, Miliband appears to think that he and his front bench can confine themselves to lobbing bricks at the Tories and leaving it at that.

Is that wise? At the last general election Labour won just 8.6 million votes – that’s just a smidgen more than Michael Foot got when facing Margaret Thatcher in 1983 in what is generally regarded as Labour’s most abject post-war electoral performance. That suggests there’s a big job of work to do rebuilding the party, thrashing out a credible post-Blairite position. Instead, Ed Miliband seems content to coast, apparently seduced by Labour’s opinion poll lead into believing the next election is in the bag.

Big mistake.

Which amounts to a genteel version of those pointless and repetitive demonstrators’ chants:

— Wha’ d’we want?
— A target to hit!
— When d’we wan’ it?
— Now!

A problem made in and by the Tory party to eviscerate itself

The bottom line has to be there is no European crisis. Thanks to a steady steer from Angela Merkel, the worst of the €-mess seems to be passed. Ireland is selling bonds again. The appalling Berlusconi is polling at 20-25% and won’t be coming back. Greece and Spain are bleeding; but still only walking wounded. François Hollande has opened his second front (albeit in Mali); and dragged Cameron part-way into the mire: nice one, Frankie!

Only Cameron’s Britain seems to have conniptions; and so — after six months of dither — we may be able to read Cameron’s lips. As Miliband summed it:

The biggest change that we need in Europe is a move from austerity to growth and jobs, but the Prime Minister has absolutely nothing to say about that. This is the reality: the reason the Prime Minister is changing his mind has nothing to do with the national interest. It is because he has lost control of his party. He thinks that his problems on Europe will end on Friday, but they are only just beginning.

The Cameron speech, now on Friday, is:

• not about Britain — though it may include a “shopping list” of unrealisable aims,
• not about a referendum — though Cameron will do his best to imply just that,
• not about Europe, for Cameron and his government have rendered themselves impotent side-liners.

No: it is essentially about:

• fabricating some semblance of Tory unity until the 2015 election (any hopes for the Euro elections of 2014 must already be written off);
• fending off UKIP and Tory back-benchers’ night-stalkers — if Tory policy on Europe came as a stick of seaside rock, the six letters through the stick would read F-A-R-A-G-E;
• The referendum, which Cameron flinched away from before, has now become the last hope: that (not 10% or whatever in the polls) is a measure of how successful UKIP has been.

Bated breath?

Last Monday Nick Robinson, the BBC Political Editor, gave a bald assessment of just how desperate Cameron’s position is:

… he has set out how we might get that referendum on Europe after the next election, but there is a series of ifs:

• If he wins the next election alone (in other words doesn’t have to get this past Nick Clegg)
• If he can persuade other European countries, particularly Germany that they need and want treaty change
• If Britain can then get what it wants in negotiations
• If he thinks he can then win a referendum

If all that happens, well then, yes, there will be a referendum which he thinks will approve a new better settlement for Europe.

But his difficulty in giving that big speech on Europe in about a week’s time is what if he’s wrong on any one of those ifs?

There’s as much chance of all that coming to pass as Mrs Brooks’s ex-policehorse, Raisa, doing a Lazarus out of the Tesco’s chiller.

What’s in a name?

… That which we call a rose
By any other name would smell as sweet.

Juliet’s soliloquy, (II, ii, 44-45), of course and now so clichéed as to need an occasional reference for respectability.

And then there’s the vexed question of the Six Counties of Northern Ireland. In English, this is “Northern Ireland”  — though the most northernly part of Ireland is Malin Head, which is in Donegal — and so, in the parlance, paradoxically in the “South”. Nor, of course, is a Northern Irishman exclusively an “Ulsterman” — because Cavan, Donegal and Monaghan are in the ancient province of Ulaidh, but are not in Northern Ireland.

My passport’s green

Even among the northern (missing capital deliberately so — see more on this below) Irish there is no agreement on what one is: British? Irish? Northern Irish? Ulster Scots? When Penguin Books included Seamus Heaney with Michael Longley, Derek Mahon, Medbh McGuckian and Paul Muldoon, in the The Penguin Book of Contemporary British Poetry, he was the one who famously objected:

Don’t be surprised if I demur, for, be advised
My passport’s green.
No glass of ours was ever raised
To toast The Queen.

He made up for it, though, at Dublin Castle in May 2011.

The People with No Name

That is the title of a fine book by Patrick Griffin, in Malcolm’s view the best account of the Ulster protestant diaspora who occupied and extended the Western frontier of the American colonies. It is subtitled: Ireland’s Ulster Scots, America’s Scots Irish, and the Creation of a British Atlantic World, 1689-1764.

The opening paragraph of that book illustrates the nominal confusions with a variety of names:

BETWEEN 1718 and 1775, more than 100,000 men and women journeyed from the Irish province of Ulster to the American colonies. Their migration represented the single largest movement of any group from the British Isles to British North America during the eighteenth century. In a first wave beginning in 1718 and cresting in 1729, these people outnumbered all others sailing across the Atlantic, with the notable exception of those bound to the New World in slave ships. By sheer force of numbers, this earliest generation of migrants had a profound influence on the great transformations of the age. Even before they left Ulster, they contributed to the triumph of the Protestant cause in Ireland, paving the way for an unprecedented extension of English power into the kingdom. They also figured prominently in the British transatlantic trading system by producing linen, one of the most important commodities exchanged throughout the empire. Sailing when they did, Ulster’s Presbyterian migrants played a formative role in the transition from an English to a British Atlantic. Before their migration, Puritans and adventurers leaving England during the seventeenth century for the North American mainland and the Caribbean dominated the transatlantic world. After men and women from Ulster boarded ships for America, the cultural parameters of the Atlantic broadened, as they and thousands of land-hungry voyagers from the labor-rich peripheries of the British Isles sought their fortunes in a vast, underpopulated New World. In America, Ulster’s men and women again had a hand in a number of defining developments of the period, including the displacement of the continent’s indigenous peoples, the extension of the frontier, the growth of ethnic diversity, and the outbreak of religious revivals. In the abstract, therefore, the group contributed to the forces and processes that dwarfed the individual but yoked together disparate regions into a broad Atlantic system.

The editor of Gaelscéal, Ciarán Dunbar, has picked up Griffin’s essential thesis, inverted it, and now puts up a ruminative thread on Slugger O’Toole:

Whilst working on Gaelscéal on Tuesday last I realized that I did not know the correct Irish term for ‘Northern Irish,’ so I quickly checked focal.ie, the ‘National Terminology Database’ for Irish.

That was a fruitless journey for they had no such term, I requested they provide one.

The term was one I have strangely never needed in Irish and I have never thought about it to date.

On the day, we simply used the English term in single speech marks.

That night I heard two terms used on TG4, ‘Tuaisceart-Éireannaigh’, agus ‘Éireannaigh Thuaisceartacha’, both translating into English as  ‘Northern Irish’ but with a subtle difference in meaning in Irish which the English doesn’t capture.

One implies a mere geographical distinction, the other, perhaps, a clear political distinction.

A meaningless distinction for most but one could argue that constitutional  future of the Northern Ireland state rests on this distinction, whether the Northern Irish are ‘Tuaisceart-Éireannaigh’ or ‘Éireannaigh Thuaisceartacha’ at the end of the day.

Malcolm queries whether English cannot capture precisely the distinction between Tuaisceart-Éireannaigh, and Éireannaigh Thuaisceartacha by doing what he did above: capitalising or not the “n” of “northern”.

Proconsul

Beyond that, the thread provided Malcolm with a bit of further diversion, the Latin version of wikipedia. Yes, indeed: there is one — even if somewhat abbreviated for the present. And here is its definitive statement on the topic:

Hibernia Septentrionalis, quondam (H)ultonia (Anglice: Northern Ireland, Hibernice: Tuaisceart Éireann) est provincia in Hibernia et Regno Britanniarum. Caput est Belfastium et dux gubernationis est Petrus Robinson; ille est dux factionis civilis qui appellatur Factio Unionistarum Democratica. Successit Reverendum Ioannem Paisley, qui abdicavit in Iunio 2008. Proconsul est Martinus McGuinness. Ille est membrum factionis civilis Sinn Fein (Latine: Nos Ipsi), olim dux Exercitus Republicani Hibernici.

Apart from stroking Malcolm’s self-esteem (that even after half-a-century, his TCD Latin, ever so rusty, can still cope), there were several amusements in that.

One was Máirtín Mag Aonghusa transmogrified from the deputy First Minister of Northern Ireland into the far more concise, even poetic, ‘proconsul’. Which instantly directed Malcolm’s butterfly mind to Kipling:

The overfaithful sword returns the user
His heart’s desire at price of his heart’s blood.
The clamour of the arrogant accuser
Wastes that one hour we needed to make good
This was foretold of old at our outgoing;
This we accepted who have squandered, knowing,
The strength and glory of our reputations
At the day’s need, as it were dross, to guard
The tender and new-dedicate foundations
Against the sea we fear — not man’s award.

The subject there was originally Sir Alfred Milner, who was the British High Commissioner in South Africa during the Boer War. The “Oh, gosh!” thing is, stripping from one context to the other, the elevation of  Máirtín to ‘proconsul’ almost works.

“Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt”

Moving swiftly on, there is the conceit of Petrus Robinson, dux Factionis Unionistarum Democraticae (3rd declension, feminine: genitive case!). Thus rendering the DUP into Latin gives us the acronym FUD:

generally a strategic attempt to influence perception by disseminating negative and dubious or false information. An individual firm, for example, might use FUD to invite unfavorable opinions and speculation about a competitor’s product; to increase the general estimation of switching costs among current customers; or to maintain leverage over a current business partner who could potentially become a rival.

In the case of the DUP, precisely.

That was easy

Malcolm enjoys his sallies into Slugger O’Toole’s fragrant boudoir. At its best (and that’s frequently), Mick Fealty’s little empire provides some of the best on-line discussions on things Northern Irish and beyond. There’s been an uplifting one, these last few days, on Eric Hobsbawm, no less. Any thread initiated by Brian Walker is well worth the study.

It is a very well-run joint, too: disrespect and naughty words earn a yellow, red or — perish the thought! —black card.

Yet in Sluggerdom Godwin’s Rule of Nazi Analogies is never far below what is actually said. This is, after all, a place of resort for the knuckle-draggers and sash-wearers of the most unreconstructed statelet in western Europe. Their wrap-the-green-flag-round-me bhoys opposite numbers are none the better.

At which point, temptation strikes. And Malcolm inevitably surrenders:

For the record, Malcolm’s current score is two yellows and one red — largely because there is at least one Slugger administrator with an abysmally-low threshold of irony.

A bit of background here:

• The Ulster Unionist Party is as fissiparous as orgiastic amoeba in eukaryotic ecstasy.
• The UUP is engaged in one of its twice-monthly spats.
• David McNarry, the MLA for Strangford is flying the coop, into the arms of Nigel Farage’s little coterie of miscreants, gay-bashers, chauvinists and golfers.
• Malcolm was awake much of the night with gout. He was not a happy bunny this morning.

And so to the post:

Which means, apart from here, that thought will never been seen again.

Syphonaptera

Or:

How Jonathan Swift well understood right-wing bloggers.

The vermin only teaze and pinch
Their foes superior by an inch.
So, naturalists observe, a flea
Has smaller fleas that on him prey;
And these have smaller still to bite ‘em,
And so proceed ad infinitum.

Somehow, some when, that was contracted down to:

Great fleas have little fleas upon their backs to bite ‘em,
And little fleas have lesser fleas, and so ad infinitum.

In truth, the slim-line version was courtesy of Augustus de Morgan, the twice-coined professor of mathematics at the newly-minted London University: a great man who was ineligible for Oxbridge tenure because of his atheism — though he went the same way as Willie Yeats, seduced into spiritualism by the love for a good woman. Correction there: since the Yeatsian seduction was via that Surrey minx, Edith Maud Gonne, and de Morgan married Sophia Frend, that should read “the love for a better woman”.

Malcolm could wax lyrical and long on any aspect of that; but on to the main point.

1o,ooo albatrosses

In the fall-out from the Supreme Court’s decision on the Affordable Care Act for, former-Governor Ed Rendell was one of numerous talking heads for  MSNBC’s Now show. Rendell said:

Now I think the president can and will continue to point out the good things that are in this act because we’re not going to run away from it. They [Republicans] are going to make it a campaign issue. I have always said we make a mistake, we Democrats, when we don’t stand and defend. It’s going to be an albatross around our neck. Let’s stand and defend it.

No way around it: that is clearly saying the act is a good thing, and the Democrats should be loud in defending it. The “albatross” would be hung were the Republicans’ diatribes to prevail.

With less than two full days, a Google search on “Rendell + albatross” throws up over ten thousand “hits”. The point of contact, though, isn’t MSNBC but Fox Nation vamping on it. In short order the right-wing parasites had leapt on what they wanted to have heard. Within minutes, Erika Johnsen at hot air.com had a completely different interpretation:

I most indubitably agree that ObamaCare is going to be an albatross around Team Obama’s neck…

It’s the way they tell ‘em!

Soon after, a further inversion and invention occurred.

This time it was a distortion of a New York Times opinion piece. Professor Neal Katyal began:

The obvious victor in the Supreme Court’s health care decision was President Obama, who risked vast amounts of political capital to pass the Affordable Care Act. A somewhat more subtle victor, but equally important, was the rule of law more generally: in an era when so many people on the left and right view the justices, and constitutional questions, through the prism of politics, the court today made clear that law matters and that it isn’t just politics by other means.

The title of the piece was A Pyrrhic Victory.

Sadly, that bit of Hellenic history is now only a cliché: to most a “Pyrrhic” = defeat. So, for the record, thanks to the OED:

Of, or resembling that of, Pyrrhus; esp. (of a victory, etc.) resembling the victory of Pyrrhus over the Romans at the battle of Asculum (279 B.C.), in which he defeated the Romans but suffered a great number of casualties; (hence) gained at too great a cost to be worthwhile. Freq. in Pyrrhic victory.

The frothing Right picked especially on the first sentence of Katyal’s second paragraph:

But there was a subtle loser too, and that is the federal government. By opening new avenues for the courts to rewrite the law, the federal government may have won the battle but lost the war.

The “federal government” has executive, judicial and legislative branches. When Professor Katyal identifies two of those three as victors — so who or what is the implicit loser?

That doesn’t need to be a rhetorical question, for Katyal spells it out. The losers are the law-makers of Congress and the legislative process:

… longstanding laws, like the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965 and the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act of 1974, contain clauses that condition money on state performance of certain activities. The decision leaves open the question of whether those acts, and many others (like the Clean Air Act), are now unconstitutional as well.

Can of worms there, then! Cui bono?

It vindicates, yet again, the axiom in Chapter XVI of de Tocqueville: Scarcely any political question arises in the United States that is not resolved, sooner or later, into a judicial question.

That was de Tocqueville back in 1835.

The difference is we now have an interventionist — even a supremacist — Roberts Supreme Court.

The lesser blogging bloodsuckers take any vestige of truth, and regurgitate it as deceit.

If, though, the Supreme Court, having elected the previous President, now becomes not just the the arbiter of last resort, but an active agent in the formulation of all law, we have a greater evil.

And for saying that, and more, Malcolm is now — it seems — denied access to Slugger O’Toole. Yet again.

‘Twas a wonderful craft, she was rigged fore and aft

First up, it’s clear that Malcolm has had issues with Slugger O’Toole (or, to be more precise with Pete Baker thereof). But, then, if you invite people to be offended, what d’ye expect? Take that as your starting point, and all that follows here is sour grapes.

Second, Malcolm has a personal interest here. There is at least a strong possibility he may be rusticated from Norf Lunnen to the County Armagh for extended periods over the next while.

Third, the antecedent, eponymous Slugger O’Toole has been part of Malcolm’s experience since a pasty-faced freshman at TCD, on his walk back to a cold-water flat in Ballsbridge, encountered the Ronnie Drew Ballad Group at O’Donoghue’s on Merrion Row.

Now consider this:

0 – 0 – 1 – 0 – 0 – 8 -37 – 0 – 2 – 4 – 0 – 18 – 17 – 3 – 9 -2 – 7 – 16 – 16 – 1 – 0 – 5 – 0 – 9

Those are the number of comments each the last two dozen posts have received (and that’s back to Monday morning — admittedly those numbers were collected before Malcolm was summoned to fodder). What’s more eighteen of those posts have been made by Mick Fealty, the onlie true begetter, himself.

The biggie there (37 comments since Wednesday, 22 February, at 1:29pm) is on the thread Many Catholics are questioning whether they necessarily have to be nationalist… Now there’s a matter open to dispute and definition. It might even say something of what, sadly, enthuses and engages Six Counties types. Or is the main focus for Sluggerdom.

Again, anticipating the usual, let it be understood Malcolm is an aficionado of Slugger O’Toole; and has offered hundreds of posts (some good, some … inebriated)  over many years. Only a couple have run foul of the editorial process, such as it is.

Slugger has been, in so many ways, the most open, most available, least prejudiced, least partisan, least partial cyber-forum in Northern Ireland. It should, it ought, it must continue.

Apart from anything else, Mick Fealty has committed time and energy, sweat and blood to this platform. Nor is he the only one.

Clearly something has gone awry.

It could be that we are in an inter-election dip; and that temperatures and involvement will rise in due course.

It could be that the whole Northern Ireland thing is presently outside that famous “marching season”.

It could be that everyone is so content with the dispensation given us, there is little reason for discontent or dispute.

Certainly it is self-evident that the previous poison and vituperation has quietened — which is to be celebrated.

It could be that Slugger‘s Pale is too much the golf-club and garden-centre belt around Belfast (actually, these days, it stretches the length of the M1 to Dungannon). The north-west, though, still gets short shrift.

Or, it could be that Slugger‘s moment has come … and gone.

One reason might be, putting aside the excellent Brian Walker and occasional forays from one or two others, Slugger has become very, very limited in its range of topics. Even irrelevant. It once headlined itself as a place for politics and culture. Define “culture” (it seemed to be football and rugby). And compare and contrast (as they always say) politics.ie.

Malcolm very, very much hopes for a second coming, a coalition of the willing, a gathering of the All-sorts:

There was Barney McGee from the banks of the Lee,
There was Hogan from County Tyrone,
There was Johnny McGurk who was scared stiff of work,
And a chap from Westmeath named Malone.
There was Slugger O’Toole who was drunk as a fool,
And fighting Bill Tracy from Dover,
And yer man Mick McCann, from the banks of the Ban
Was the skipper on the Irish Rover.

And so it goes …

Not Slaughterhouse Five (1969), nor even Billy Joel in 1989 (or should that be 1983?). Both are worth a revisit, but we’ve only time for the one:

Never let it be said that Malcolm Redfellow’s Home Service is not a blog of many parts. Still, to the crunch …

It’s hardly a major irritant, but even an itch deserves a scratch. The “story so far” was given, in full, in a post yesterday. Here comes the up-date:

Here’s another story Slugger O’Toole is missing

Malcolm has been on the receiving end of a nasty nip from Slugger O’Toole. Fair enough. Reach for the Savlon and move on.

Yet Slugger does seem to miss a remarkable number of stories with a local flavour, and precisely the kind of cyberspatial stories that do not receive coverage in the mainstream media.

Some detect a Unionist bias in Slugger’s whole approach. As wikipedia tartly reminds us:

The choice of name was originally a reference to a sockpuppet character invented by Tim Murphy of New York, on an old CNN community called Peace in Northern Ireland. Murphy’s “character” was invariably drunk on Bushmills and usually espoused strong loyalist politics, which often caught the unwary or recently arrived off guard. And he never listened to reasoned argument.

“Reasoned argument”: now that really would be novel in Northern Ireland.

Which brings us to …

Dr Éion Clarke

… and, in particular his excellent Green Benches blog.

Yesterday’s post by Clarke dissected the Cameron visit to Newcastle Royal Victoria Hospital, gave us the full Monty and posed all the proper questions.

Clarke teaches at Queen’s University, Belfast. He is expert in applying statistical techniques to most things historical. He is something of a phenomenon on the blogging scene, cropping up as a commentator on a whole range of platforms, over and above his own. He is a literate and numerate critic of the continuing Lansley NHS “reforms”. He is a lefty, and (Malcolm gathers) a paid-up Labour Party card-carrier.

With Clarke on the doorstep of Sluggerdom, one might think he deserves a nod or two of attention.

If it’s good enough for:

• for the Torygraph,
• for the Mirror,
• and now for the Guardian running health blog,

… why does the Mick Fealty empire so patently ignore Clarke?

Particularly when the essence of the story  goes far beyond a mere hospital visit, and allegedly involves the press pack being locked in a side room so as not to witness any fall-out?

Clarke has got a story that could run and run. Slugger O’Toole should be running with it.

A mark of shame to be proudly worn

The story so far:

On Friday Tim Dowling for The Guardian caught up with Yanko Tsvetkov‘s naughty-but-nice “satirical maps of national stereotypes”.

Then Pete Baker, who had first nibbled at it last September, was on Slugger O’Toole with a second bite, under the title:

Mapping stereotypes: “you should be able to find something here to offend you.”

So true, so very true.

So Malcolm threw in his two cents’ worth:

Yeah, Alphadesigner is shamelessly commercial. But —hey! — that’s the way Gove wants our (English) schools and Lansley our NHS. One of those is a cheap laugh.

On which topic (and no stereotypes — better believe it!): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=koY6kXhQDQo

Which, for those not prepared to make the hotline jump, is the viral of the interviewed Irishman telling us that bankers are one letter away from self-abusers.

Let us remember that Pete Baker (with whom Malcolm has previous) headlined his effort with a warning: “you should be able to find something here to offend you.”

At 23:06 pm this evening, this arrived in Malcolm’s in-box:

You have been awarded a yellow card on Slugger O’Toole.
The penalty was awarded for this comment:
http://sluggerotoole.com/2012/02/19/mapping-stereotypes-you-should-be-able-to-find-something-here-to-offend-you/comment-page-1/#comment-994721

The yellow card is visible on your profile and all your
comments. The card will expire in 1 days.

No further action is being taken now, you can still log in and
comment on the site. Further action which could be taken is
a red card (which will ban you from logging in or commenting
for 14 days), or a black card (which will ban you
from commenting or logging into this site for an indefinite
period of time).

Slugger O’Toole
Moderator Team

There’s a whole pile of ironies in there, should one search.

À la recherche du temps perdu: cakes and carrots

No madeleine (surely the most-overworked cake in literary history), but a taste for that Augustinian —  and the need to feed the Lady in his Life and the Pert Young Piece — drove Malcolm back to the Stag.

The Augustinian was off. Instead, the offerings were not only St Austell Proper Job, which Malcolm knew well and had relished in joints such as the Harbourside Inn in Charlestown (that’s the Cornish one), but … hello! … something different!

Old Daily Gold Top

Here is an indicator of how one trend in the great British beer revival is going.

The presentation and the advertising are helpful clues:

This fine recipe gives a beer that will appeal to ale drinkers and lager drinkers alike.

“…so light, you could mistake it for fine lager!”

Well, only if you’d ruined any remaining taste-buds on mass-market froth.

The Old Dairy is located where the depths of Kent are about to tip over into East Sussex. It’s kind of the centre-point of a roughly equilateral triangle made up of Sandhurst (no, not the one for the military types), Sissinghurst (for the gardeners) and Tenterden (the birthplace of printer Caxton and TV-man David Frost). In short, this locality is about as couth and twee as anywhere in England. Just what the day-trippers from the Pas de Calais are expecting.

The brewery is a ten-barrels-a-week micro-brewery — that’s significantly less than 3,000 pints, so you’re not going to find it swilling around too readily. Moreover, the Old Daily boasts some ten brews, several only seasonal, in its recipe-book. The one you’re most likely to meet is Red Top, a simple, honest Best Bitter at 3.8%. And you’ll most easily find it in bottles.

So Gold Top on draught, well off its home patch in East Finchley, counts as a distinct, and worthwhile “find”.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch …

There’s that note of agreement on the ever-present topic of Greene King Abbot from gingerfightback.

Which leads into another of those coincidences that plague Malcolm’s life (as much as they provide the unlikeliest of plot-devices for Dickens’ novels).

For our gingerfightback uses a cute gravatar (as right).

The coincidence is that Malcolm had just cleared out his ever-burdensome spam file, where one “sell” had been:

Not the best post unfortunately. Sorry to be so blunt. You should try some Norwegian carrot cake (gulrotkake) to cheer you up instead.

Ah, how sharper than a serpent’s tooth it is to have a thankless critic!

Malcolm can cope with a bit of elementary etymology: so kake (which is straightforward Middle English) and rot (right out of any of the old Scandinavian tongues) are easy. Anyway, gulrot has its own Norwegian wikipedia page. Which leaves only the “gul-” element. Yet gules is heraldic red, and here the OED goes in for a bit of speculation:

The ulterior etymology is disputed: the word coincides in form with the plural of the French and medieval Latin word for ‘throat’. If the heraldic sense be the original, the allusion may be to the colour of the open mouth of a heraldic beast. It seems more likely, however, that the heraldic use is transferred from the sense ‘red ermine’, in which case the word may represent some oriental name; but the suggestion of derivation < Persian gul , rose (Hatzfeld & Darmesteter), is very improbable.

In any event gulrotkake, taken out of context, sounds as unpleasant as one might wish. After which the criticism seems mere spiteful jealousy at Malcolm’s art, perhaps sort of perverted  vegetable love …  Vaster than empires, and more slow. [Irony alert!]

Particularly so, since Alan in Belfast provided Slugger O’Toole with a particularly tortuous and sinister New Year political insight into carrots.

So, it’s as well Malcolm has the recollection of Proper Job and Gold Top (a quart of each) as a comforter.

“The Educational Value of News 1″

A thread by Mick Fealty, Breaking news and the infantalisation of audiences…,  on Slugger O’Toole, invited all-comers to muse on the nature of “news”.

Fealty’s first thought was a discomforting one:

When you strip it all back, much of the bad blood generated on Twitter towards the BBC during Sunday’s lightening [sic] rebel ‘intrusion’ into Tripoli, was primarily for not giving good entertainment in the time frame required.

That led Malcolm to reflect on what is the value of “instant” news in the age of the three-minute-and-six-seconds timespan of  the MTV music video. Can there be a Weltanschauung for goldfish?

Malcolm has grown up on news, from the days when it arrived in North Norfolk entirely courtesy of Arthur Christiansen‘s Daily Express, the Eastern Daily Press, and the BBC Home Service. So he was reminded of the half-truth: Journalism is the first draft of history.

The axiom’s not true: no journalist or other witness has an instant overview of the very confused landscape. What’s over the hill, and out of sight, might contradict any instant opinion or view. Provided there is another witness, with a parallel account from the other side of the hill, we can begin to acquire a synoptic view.

Then again, no historian can be wholly trusted to come without baggage or prejudice. There’s always another document to come out of the archive, located by a research student with a reputation and a Ph.D. to realise, to change the overtview.

But “first draft of history” has a record. Fortunately, it’s already been researched.

It would seem the onlie true begetter was one George Helgesen Fitch, who worked on mid-West newspapers in the period before the First World War. His work was syndicated by the Adams Newspaper Service, which has a claim to be among the first of that ilk. Fitch was also an Illinois State representative for the Bull Moose Party. Fitch it was who tapped out the sentence:

A reporter is a young man who blocks out the first draft of history each day on a rheumatic typewriter.

That duly appeared in the Daily Star of Lincoln, Nebraska, on 3rd July 1914.

Even Fitch may have been borrowing from The State, then (5th December 1905) as now, the paper of record for South Carolina, and here producing one of those model essays now sadly out of fashion (but which Malcolm respects enough to reproduce in full in the next post).