In a great post over at Crooked Timber, Kieran Healy discusses Peter Bearman’s new sociological study, Doormen. Of the many interesting angles the book explores, I particularly liked this application of George Akerlof’s theory of the market for lemons (ie rubbish cars) to the market for friends:

The market for new friends also tends to produce contact with “lemons,� and consequently the common experience is that the first friendships one makes in a new community tend to be short-lived. … Think about the people who have time to meet new people. The less interesting and nice they are, the less likely they are to have friends. Since they have few friends, they have more spare time. … just like cars and apartments, these “lemon� friends tend to circulate rapidly … One of the ironies of friend markets is that while the “lemon� friends could find each other and become friends, their characteristics … are especially unappealing to other boring and intolerant people. So while they meet, they avoid each other.

Important note: Unfortunately, explaining this theory to someone at a party does not make you any less of a lemon - rather the opposite.

Anyway, I suspect that the same thing applies to the singles scene - although there’s obviously some interaction here between the market for lemons (”Hmm, if she’s single, there must be something wrong with her”) and the market for melons (”But she has got big boobs”). More research required, I think.

Moving swiftly on from that, Kieran’s post (and this applies to his stuff in general) is a nice reminder that sociology has something useful to offer in a time when economists (sorry, I mean of course Freakonomists) seem intent on capturing its territory and nicking its ideas. He also traces Bearman’s work all the way back to one of the founders of sociology, Georg Simmel, who could also be relied upon for a pithy remark or two:

Fashion is what we do to make ourselves different from the mass, Simmel argues, yet it induces fads and conformity. As societies differentiate, the people in them become more different from one another but the societies themselves start to look more alike.

If two people knew they had to meet somewhere in Dublin at a particular time but hadn’t arranged a particular place to meet, where would they go?

I can think of three possible places:
(a) In front of Bewley’s on Grafton St
(b) In front of Trinity College on College Green
(c) In front of Cleary’s on O’Connell St

Is any one of these the most likely default meeting-spot? Is anywhere else more likely?

As for London, I’m not sure. Many of the most popular areas here have no one focal point - like around Parliament, or Oxford St, or Leicester Square. The statue of Eros in Picadilly Circus is something of a focal point, but I’ve never met anyone there and I don’t know anyone who does. Tate Modern has too many sides. My personal favourite is the Great Court at the British Museum. But I think the bottom of the London Eye might be today’s default London meeting-spot.

The Truth (With Jokes) is the title of Al Franken’s new book.

Like lots of other books, it’s available on Amazon.com. Unlike lots of other books, however, it has a link to its own video commercial starring the author, right there on the product page. The ad is amusing - if you like seeing people getting kicked in the nuts and bottled (and I do!)

I’ve never seen Amazon do this for any other product. I wonder why they’ve chosen a hot-button liberal ideologue with his eye on the Senate to be the first recipient of this bounty? I better not think about it too much, in case it makes me not like Al Franken any more.

I’m sure it’s not related, but Amazon is posting a lower profits warning for this quarter.

Are you a New Puritan?

…if you possess a shred of New Puritanical sensibility you’re likely to think that the big brands - the junk-food peddlers, alcohol promoters, cigarette pushers and even the supermarkets - had it coming. That for too long these kinds of businesses reaped vast profits while riding roughshod over community spirit, public health and morality. The lack of a liberal backlash against increased policing of previously uncontroversial pleasures is significant, too. And it’s a trade-off the New Puritans are clearly willing to make: extra nannying for extra peace of mind.

The term was coined by Jim Murphy of the Future Foundation in a report called The Assault on Pleasure. In keeping with the demands of modernity, contrary to what the title suggests, it is not a passionate philosophical treatise but a consultants’ report.

If you look at the Future Foundation’s website, you get the distinct (and perhaps unsurprising) impression that a description of New Puritans is the first step in deciding how to prise the cash from their clenched fists. But the report, which includes the findings of a ‘national study’, does look beyond statistics to see the obligatory wider malaise.

The ‘assault on pleasure’ seems to be rooted in a myth of decline. Life is not as good as before. Social problems are multiplying and intensifying. Too much individualism and free choice - and certainly too much consumerism - are depleting our stock of spiritual resources…and so on.

And so on indeed. The counter to this poisonous ‘myth of decline’ is presumably to keep believing in the myth of progress. (Or is it?)

The UK National Archives has just released a batch of public information films from the period 1945 - 1951. It’s part of a project which will eventually complete the archives right up to the present day.

I can confirm that the films are every bit as surreal and jaw-droppingly patronising as our cynical modern culture has led you to believe. The following extracted transcript from ‘Don’t Spread Germs’ gives a flavour.

Now, I’m going to show you three things and you’ve got to tell me what you do with them.

Number one. A pint of…

Well you seem to know what to do with that one all right.

Number two. A handkerchief. Excellent.

Remember - coughs and sneezes spread diseases.

Now, number three. A bowl of disinfectant. Hey! You don’t drink it man! That’s for the soiled handkerchief which is full of germs. You put the handkerchief into the disinfectant, which kills the germs and so stops the spread of infection.

Now, let’s get this quite clear; you sneeze into the handkerchief, and then put the handkerchief into the bowl of disinfectant to kill the germs not in with the family’s washing. Got it?

Sure? Good! Remember: Don’t spread Germs.

A man trying to drink a bowl of disinfectant! How things have changed. Why, no advertiser would dare suggest that a man is an incompetent buffoon nowadays - and certainly not in the comfort of his own home.

This is from the Wikipedia entry on Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Games (MMORPG, catchily):

Farming is a form of playing where a player kills monsters in the game for the money and items that the monster drops. Players who farm usually camp an area, kill monsters as they spawn, collect the loot, and later sell the items to others. Players often dislike this practice because many farmers sell the virtual loot for real money. Farmers can also dominate areas that were intended to be lucrative hunting grounds for lower-level players.

Some cyber cafés allow people to play for free as long as they give a percentage of what they earn in-game to the proprietor of the café who then sells the items for real money. There are even online sweatshops, mainly in China, where people are actually employed to collect in-game items for their employer who then sells them. It is reported that one can make up to USD$100 a day, which is actually better pay than many other jobs in China.

I thought they had to be making that bit about Chinese sweatshops up, but, according to this suitably surreal story from 1up.com, they’re not. Which is really weird. That said, there’s worse work (in fact I think I’ve done worse work), and I suppose it represents progress of a sort, or at least progress in the parting of fools and their money.

As for MMORPG, I like the sound of Kingdom of Loathing:

Players in the game choose from a number of classes:
Seal Clubbers (”Seal Clubbers hail from the frigid Northlands, because one character class always hails from the frigid Northlands”), Turtle Tamers, Pastamancers, Saucerors, Disco Bandits, and Accordion Thieves. Each player has three major attributes: Muscle, which determines strength; Mysticality, which determines magical powers; and Moxie, which corresponds to Agility and Charisma in the mainstream role-playing games. Each class specializes in one of the attributes (Seal Clubbers and Turtle Tamers in Muscle, Pastamancers and Saucerors in Mysticality and Disco Bandits and Accordion Thieves in Moxie). Raising the appropriate attribute sufficiently results in gaining a level.

The aim of the game is to adventure in different areas, encountering monsters, hobos, evil food, and other such things and collecting items and meat (which is the in-game currency) until one has the prowess to take on the Naughty Sorceress.

Reading these ads for Jack Daniel’s whiskey really makes me want to pound someone’s head in with a bottle of Mr Jack’s fine-sippin’ fare, but I’m not quite sure why.

Is it the attempt to flog alcohol on the basis of a re-imagined way of American life that’s just as unreal as anything presented in a Christmas Coca-Cola ad? As this helpful Wikipedia page points out, the label on a JD bottle tells us the distillery was founded in 1866, which it probably wasn’t, that Lem Motlow is the proprietor, which he isn’t (he died in 1947), and that Lynchburg, Tennessee has a population of 361, which it doesn’t (I know, next I’ll be telling you that a Citroën can’t break-dance).

Or is it that this unrelentingly smug small-town whimsy is a bit hard to swallow from the folks at the Brown-Forman Corporation (sales of $2.5 billion in fiscal year 2004, y’all)?

Maybe it’s the the dubious implication that the traditions of stuck-in-the-past booze pedlars from the Deep South have some lessons to teach the rest of us about the important things in life, like charcoal, stupid traditions and stuff being hand-crafted, which I for one had previously thought a whiskey couldn’t really be.

I suppose what it is that really annoys me about these ads is that JD and their advertising agency clearly think this kind of shit shifts units in London, and that they’re probably right.

Besides, I prefer this stuff.

Is available here, just in case you don’t get BBC4 and have the connection and patience to watch a fairly low-res and headache-inducing playback on the Beeb website. It’s actually worth it, though - the first season was great, but this first episode of season 2 is way darker and better for it.

I hadn’t heard of Kary B. Mullis before, but when someone promises me a “hilarious Nobel prize acceptance lecture” from an “LSD-toting punk genius”, I follow the link.

That lecture is here, and it’s a bit different alright, though not so much for hilarity as for threading an autobiographical tale of broken marriages and lost love through the story of how he came up with the concept of polymerase chain reactions. Mullis remembers the date of breakthrough experiment because it was the birthday of his ex-wife Cynthia, which provokes the following reverie:

There is a general place in your brain, I think, reserved for “melancholy of relationships past.” It grows and prospers as life progresses, forcing you finally, against your grain, to listen to country music.

He closes his lecture remembering walking to his car having just celebreated the momentous breakthrough with his lab assistant Fred, past avocado trees ripening in Berkeley’s winter drizzle, and concludes thusly - “Neither Fred, empty Becks bottles, nor the sweet smell of the dawn of the age of PCR could replace Jenny. I was lonesome.”

Mullis’s unconventionality apparently also extends to denying both global warming and the role of HIV in causing AIDS, and to acting as a defence witness in OJ Simpson’s murder trial, which on this Wikipedia page leads to mention of “a refrigerator in his home covered in snapshots of all the women with whom he has had sexual relations, using his Nobel laureate status as an aphrodisiac”. Wow, who’d have thought a Nobel prize was such a sure-fire route to stud status?

You should be reading Kevin Drum at the Washington Monthly. For example:

MAGGIE ON MARRIAGE….
At the risk of butting in on Kieran’s territory, I decided to go read Maggie Gallagher’s complete week of guest blogging over at the Volokh Conspiracy to see if I could figure out why she’s so violently opposed to same-sex marriage. Clearly she thinks that SSM will have disastrous effects on the institution of marriage, but it turns out that she managed to write several thousand words over the course of five days without ever explaining why she thinks that. “Bad time management,” she explains. Here’s the closest she comes:

If the principle behind SSM is institutionalized in law…then people like me who think marriage is the union of husband and wife importantly related to the idea that children need moms and dads will be treated in society and at law like bigots.

I promise that this isn’t mockery or an attempt to miss her point. Out of all the posts she wrote, this was the best she could do. She’s afraid that if society comes to accept SSM, then people who dislike it will be marginalized.

Well, I suppose that’s true. And it’s especially true if they can’t actually verbalize their reasons for opposing it in the first place. And I’m afraid this won’t do either:

Imagine you stand in the middle of vast, hostile desert. A camel is your only means of transversing it, your lifeline to the future. The camel is burdened — stumbling, loaded down, tired; enfeebled — the conditions of the modern life are clearly not favorable to it. But still it’s your only hope, because to get across that desert you need a camel.

Now, chop off its legs and order it to carry you to safety.

That’s what SSM looks like, to me.

I dunno. That’s what a camel snuff film looks like to me, but not much else. I think this argument needs some work.

According to The Sunday Business Post, Irish investment company Elgin Capital is planning on spending €100 m on property in Berlin on behalf of Irish investors looking for rental properties.

From memory, post-DDR Berliners are still remarkably trusting of their landlords. With rents about a third of what they are in Dublin or London and solid tenancy rights, including caps on how much rent can increase, in what is supposed to be the capital of Europe, they see no reason to buy property. They would have to live to about 100 for it to be worth their while. A friend of mine (that’s Bernard) currently sub-lets a medium-sized, one-bed apartment with a separate kitchen for €168 a month. I pay €875 for roughly the same privilege in Dublin.

Now the Irish carpetbaggers are arriving, as they are doing in other Eastern European countries such as Bulgaria and Poland, snapping up old properties and building new ones. Those crazy, trusting Germans won’t know what hit them.

Alan Moore’s graphic novel Watchmen has been voted one of the Top 100 novels since the (seemingly arbitrary) year 1923. It’s the only graphic novel to make the list.

http://comics.ign.com/articles/658/658961p1.html

http://milliondollarhomepage.com./

It’s been doing the rounds for the past while - certainly a clever money making scam. At this stage it has received 428,100 dollars: which is an impressive haul.
If it had a real-life equivalent, it would be a beggar walking about wearing a jacket saying “Post Bills”.

I clicked on one of the images on the Million Dollar Home Page and came across http://www.sendusamillion.com/
The cheeky chappies who set this up declare:
“Welcome to one of the craziest ideas to hit the internet, it may have been tried a million times before in various forms but noone has had the gall to openly ask the world to send them one million dollars, pounds or euros. ”

Funny lads, but at the time of writing they’ve made £85.

And it cost them $100 to get their small English flag on the Million Dollar Home Page.

Photo by Alan Lund.

Call it the nuclear option.

www.goats.com

Diageo’s new advertising campaign is legion. Throughout the city, at Luas stops and on buses, Diageo is saying:

They’ve also taken to hijacking people’s mobile phones, but anyone I’ve spoken to hasn’t clue how Diageo ‘found’ their numbers.

Brilliant. Tell people to drink less while telling people to drink even more. I wouldn’t want to see a good night wasted because I didn’t get wasted enough either.

According to The Irish Times: “There has been a significant reduction in respiratory symptoms such as coughing and wheezing among non-smoking bar staff in the Republic [of Ireland] since the introduction of the smoking ban [at the start of 2004], a new study has found.”

“Researchers from universities across the State who conducted the study found a 16.7 per cent reduction in reporting of respiratory symptoms of any kind by bar staff in the Republic since the ban.

“But they found no reduction in respiratory symptoms among bar workers in Northern Ireland over the same period, where smoking is still permitted in pubs.”

Bet nobody saw that coming. It’s amusing to now hear publicans and hoteliers in the UK make exactly same predictions of doom and destruction for their livelihoods that Irish ones made last year. How backward those stupid Brits are, I think, until I remember that only married couples could buy condoms in Ireland until the mid-nineties. But then I remember that England is still ruled by an unelected, hereditary monarch, and it makes me feel superior again.

As the dread bird flu marches imperterbably towards our inevitable doom, various news organisations yesterday tried to get to grips with the horrifying public panic. First, RTE managed to handle the story without reference to a single virologist. Farmers are the people being interviewed - the stories are more about reaction than information.

Kudos goes to Newsnight on BBC two, who finally put an expert in communicable disease on their programme (after some farmers). Finally, one of their interviewees provided the TV moment of the week when he was asked what could be done:

Well, it’s not rocket science, it’s just a matter of putting a few…[pause]…million chickens indoors.”

This is a job for Rockie.

Adolf Hitler walks into a restaurant and says, “Herr Kellner, was ist heute das vegetarisches Gericht?”

and the waiter says, “Essen Sie Fisch, Herr Fuehrer?”

Hitler says, “Jumping Jesus no, a fish isn’t a vegetable! Where did you go to school?”

The waiter says, “Stuffed baby pigeon, perhaps?”

“Why,” Hitler says with surprise, “that happens to be one of my favourite dishes”.

“But, Fuehrer,” says the waiter, “I thought you pursued an ascetic, non-drinking, non-smoking, vegetarian lifestyle”.

“While it is true that after 1931 I ate a mostly vegetarian diet in order to control my flatulence and sweatiness and because Goebbels said it would make me look like I was more Fuehrer-like, my cook and my personal secretary will no doubt in future years testify that I often eat meat and am known to gorge myself on caviar at dinner parties.”

“Good,” says the waiter. “What would you like with your stuffed squab? A side of liver dumplings? Bavarian sausage?”

“It’s like you’ve known me all my life! Das ware total geil!” exclaims Hitler, who wasn’t a vegetarian. *

* Dramatisation

www.veg.ca/newsletr/mayjun96/hitler.html

Don’t know what to do with those potassium iodide (KI) tablets the government posted you a while back? The ones we were supposed to neck if Sellafield ever blew up?

After all the fuss over why we hadn’t already received this “key part of government strategy”, it turned out that the bleeders were effective only against a certain radioactive isotope, iodine 131, that Sellafield no longer even processes. They were so useless, and possibly dangerous, that the government considered recalling them.

But now they can be so much more than a pocket-sized reminder of the Irish government’s unique brand of profligacy and incompetence! USA Today reports:

Despite an order from Congress, the Bush administration has not given millions of people living within 20 miles of nuclear power plants access to pills that could help protect them if they are exposed to radiation.
It will be early 2006, at the earliest, before potassium iodide pills are made available to those people.

2.1 million households in Ireland have these tablets sitting in their kitchen drawer. I feel a KI drive comin’ on…

It’s often nice to discover that large numbers of people hate what you hate. In this case, it’s Real Networks and their RealPlayer software. Jogin.com kicks things off with a great post about this obnoxious software, which inspires emails from ashamed and embittered Real Networks employees and finally a marvellous rant against RN from a consultant who used to work for them. Here’s an extract:

Real’s advertising company at the time was working in parallel to us to conduct consumer research on the Real brand. What they found was shocking. Real, at that time, had almost complete brand awareness among people online. Their brand was the only brand other than Microsoft, Netscape, and Yahoo! to attain this level of recognition. But unlike these other companies, Real was universally disdained by customers …

Real as a strategy had for years intentionally obscured the free download link. Even when users found the link, the download process would try and trick (there is no other word for it) the user into downloading the pay version of the software. Real would even test multiple versions of their design to see which ones were more effective at this.

Real would resort to even more disgusting (and probably illegal) tricks. One page in the process would show the user some very legitimate choices above the “fold” (the bottom of the area of a web page that can be shown in a window without forcing the user to scroll). However, beneath the fold, Real had options for additional plug-ins with dubious value such as sound enhancers and web accelerators, that were selected BY DEFAULT. If a user did not scroll down (and the design cleverly did not signal to the user that they had any reason to do so) they would not see that there were choosing to purchase around $50 in additional software. Real told us that this page alone was responsible for driving their average order up by $25.

The consultant’s email ends:

All this is to say that I think your comments about Real are totally dead-on and that the company, its people, and its product are terrible.

Most people who have ever endured the process of trying to install and then, frantically, uninstall Real Player (most people who have ever used it, that is) will probably go out of their way to avoid using it in the future anyway, but it’s still satisfying to see it laid out plain for all to see that software doesn’t get made this evil unless the makers really want it to.

…specifically I want to talk about the “famine”
About the fact that there never really was one
There was no “famine”.
-Sinéad O’Connor

Sinéad’s not the only one in famine denial.

A recently-purchased cookbook has this to say about potatoes:

This ultimate comfort food has a long history of keeping famine at bay and families together…

So just to recap, that’s about 1 million dead from famine and about 1 million emigrated. Well, I’m sure that’s what Rupert Murdoch meant. Less obvious is the reason for the following exchange that took place between my brother and cousin. My brother was tucking into a nice big bowl of mashed potato.

Cousin: Wow, bit of an old ‘potato famine’ going on here!
Brother: Er, no. I have a lot of potato.
Cousin: Yeah, potato famine? When they had nothing to eat except potatoes?

Ah yeh have to laugh. Sure, in 150 years time we’ll be slapping Ethiopians on the back and laughing at the funny way their people all seem to be obsessed with “teff“.

There’s a new show just started on American TV called ‘Everybody Hates Chris’. It’s a comedy looking back on Chris Rock’s early adolescence, written and narrated by the man himself, and it’s damn funny.

At the start of the first episode, which I’ve just watched through the magic of the Internets, 13 year-old Chris and his family have just moved out of the projects (which his mother reasonably points out is just another word for “experiments”) …

Chris Rock (voiceover):We moved to an apartment in Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn. Now, had we known that Bed-Stuy would be the centre of the crack epidemic, I guess we’d have picked someplace else.

The family climb out of the car and look around their new neighbourhood.

Chris (voiceover): Bed-Stuy even had its own motto - “Bed-Stuy, Do or Die”.

Across the street, a few black youths are hanging about, one playing Run DMC on a big boom-box, another spray-painting “Do or Die” on the front of a house.

Chris (voiceover): Those are some of the guys that are gonna die.

But it’s not all jokes about crack deaths. Actually, it reminds me mostly of Woody Allen’s reminiscences on film about his own childhood. Chris’s parents are just as baffling and unreasonable - as the oldest, he gets given all the responsibility, so his dad tells him “If you smell smoke and you think the house is on fire, take your brother and sister and get out. If you smell gas and you think the house is going to blow up, take your brother and sister and get out. If you smell smoke and your brother catches fire, take your sister and get out”.

But enough of my yakking. See it if you get the chance, either over t’net or whenever an Irish or British channel import it, i.e. never.

I may be a bit late with this, but last month Ofcom, the UK’s broadcasting regulator reached a decision on the broadcasting of the advertisement ‘Click’ on behalf of the Make Poverty History campaign. You can find the text of their decision, with a handy copy of the appropriate laws here.

Ofcom went to some length in the judgement to distance this decision, and by extension, itself, from the inference some may draw, that the aims of MPH are “bad politics”. They came as close as an impartial body such as this can to a ringing endorsement in the prologue to the judgement. Indeed, it seems to be something of a legal grey area, and a great deal of effort has been expended by all sides in the search to understand the political, or a-political, nature of MPH.

It’s a difficult problem, since the purpose of the laws in use here are to prevent deep political pockets purchasing advertising time on national television stations. One wonders what the UK equivalent of Swift Boat Veterans for Truth would be, and it’s good that there’s a body of law curbing direct media abuse for political campaigning (although it can’t prevent everything, like lazy TV programmes featuring two ham-headed tabloid hacks taking on the issues of the day with as much temperance and intelligence as a handful of gravel). This advert, however, simply states that a child dies every three seconds due to a preventable cause, usually malnutrition.

I have no idea how to quantify this problem succinctly, it just seems like the two positions have validity and both good actions have a bad outcome. At what point do we decide to protect the culture we have built, or possibly prevent deaths in another country (though, there’s no gaurantee it will work)? What’s worse? At what point does a message cease to be political and become a moral imperative? Is there a way to satisfy both positions?

Soon, Oliver Stone will make a film of this:

Datura stramonium is the name of a poisonous weed, sometimes used as a hallucinogen. Commonly called Thorn Apple. Datura stramonium is classified as a deliriant, or an anticholinergic. It grows over almost all of the Continental United States.

In the United States it is called Jimson Weed, or more rarely Jimpson Weed; it got this name from the town of Jamestown, Virginia, where British soldiers were secretly drugged with it (in their salad), while attempting to stop Bacon’s Rebellion. They spent several days chasing feathers, making monkey faces, generally acting like lunatics, and indeed failed at their mission. It is also sometimes called locoweed (because of the pharmacological effects) though that term is more commonly applied to leguminous plants in the genera Astragalus and Oxytropus. It is also sometimes called stinkweed (because of its unpleasant odor).

Look here for the full bit.

Hey, I didn’t know Supreme Court Justice nominee Harriet Miers had a blog. Here’s a sample:

BUSH ON FIRE
You know, sometimes working in the White House you forget that you’re standing shoulder to shoulder with giants. But then you have a speech like today and you just can’t believe you are where you are!! And it’s like, he’s talking about *me*! Me, Harriet!

Every time he said “character,” I melted a little bit… and he said it eight times! And when he said I’d “have that same philosophy 20 years from now”–he means when I’m 49 years old. Wow that’s old!

A refreshing change from the obsessive spinning and image control we have come to expect from today’s public figures, I think you’ll agree.

Back when I started blogging, oh many moons ago now, I made a vow never to broach the same subject twice. Ever. But now I do! And the subject is irony! That’s like… we’re talking ten thousand spoons here.

I was yapping on and on about the Reverend Graham Taylor and his use of a Little Britain quote to entertain some 12 year-olds. He was sure they’d get it. I wonder would they. I mean, I know they’d get it was a joke. But would it be the same joke to them? Because it might just reinforce something that children of that age already do - call someone gay as ‘a joke’, when that kid’s real offence is something totally unrelated, like maybe spilling Fanta on someone’s jumper or knowing how the modh coinníollach works.

Perhaps children are basically educated and decent, have been taught that being gay is not a reason to exclude and should be given the chance to hoot along with adults at the irony. But then their headmistress shows she’s not quite there yet either, and that’s when you start to wonder.

Headmistress Barbara Vann later explained that staff were “uncomfortable” at the apparent jibe at Harry Potter’s sexuality - “it is of a homophobic content and we cannot encourage that”.

Got that? Saying someone is gay is a jibe and cannot be encouraged, because it’s homophobic. So it’s disrespectful to people to mention they might be gay, in case they get offended. Which implies being gay is embarrassing. Which, when you think about it, is a little homophobic. [Bonus irony: Until very recently, the only thing that teachers in the UK were not allowed to ‘encourage’ was … homosexuality itself]

Irony and children: I’m not sure they should mix. Others disagree. Doctor Who writer Russell T. Davies thought it was comedy gold for the Doctor’s companion to call him “gay” when he complained about a minor injury. And Eason’s thought it was a profitable idea for schoolgirls to be encouraged to throw rocks at boys - until forced to pull the line of David and Goliath stationery after complaints.

Maybe I should just accept that the onset of eye-watering cynicism happens at a much younger age these days.

…more specifically I want to talk about the “famine”
About the fact that there never really was one
There was no “famine”.
-Sinéad O’Connor

Sinéad’s not the only one in famine denial.

A recently-purchased cookbook has obviously been got to by the Potato Advisory Board. The chapter on potatoes begins:

This ultimate comfort food has a long history of keeping famine at bay and families together…

So just to recap, that’s about 1 million dead from famine and about 1 million emigrated. Well, what do I expect from a Rupert Murdoch publication. Less obvious is the reason for the following exchange that took place between my brother and cousin. My brother was tucking into a nice big bowl of mashed potato.

Cousin: Wow, bit of an old ‘potato famine’ going on here!
Brother: Er, no. I have a lot of potato.
Cousin: Yeah, potato famine? When they had nothing to eat except potatoes?

Ah yeh have to laugh. Sure, in 150 years time we’ll be slapping Ethiopians on the back and laughing at the funny way their people all seem to be obsessed with “teff“.