One random thing about me

I know it's been fashionable to dismiss the "25 random things about me" meme that's been viralling round Facebook by saying, "I really couldn't care less, you narcissitic chump", or words to that effect.

But I've actually really enjoyed reading these infonuggets - after all, these people are my friends, and uncovering a small part of a familiar person's secret history can be quite thrilling, even if it is something slightly mundane like, "I secretly fancy Stephen Mangan."

I started a list myself, but only got to 12 because I was starting to sound like Woody Allen, and not in a good way. So I'll just publish the first "thing about me" I came up with here. To be honest, it makes anything that could possibly follow it seem insignificant and futile. Ready?

1. Until 24 February 2002, I had never seen an episode of The A-Team. By chance, I ate the first bagel of my life exactly five years later, on 24 February 2007. Neither experience was particularly life-changing.

Useless but intriguing fact of the day

Child actor Corey Feldman had his second marriage officiated by ordained minister MC Hammer.

Pointless but oddly fascinating fact of the day

The theme tune to classic '80s children TV show Button Moon was written by Doctor Who actor Peter Davidson and his wife Sandra Dickinson.

Some questions

In The Bourne Ultimatum, what was Jason Bourne's ultimatum exactly?

Will British smokers' resistance to the cold and therefore illnesses like influenza and pneumonia increase because of the recent ban on indoor public smoking - and will smoking, as a result, become healthy again?

What is the difference between the Japanese verbs desu, arimasu and imasu?

How good are Elektrons? (The band, not the subatomic particles, though they are also pretty good.)

Do Christians view the watching of unauthorised TV material on YouTube an infringement of the eighth commandment ("Thou shalt not steal")? Does this still stand if said programme is Songs of Praise?

Should the band The The be filed under The The or The, The?

Trivia corner: You got a lotta Merv

Jack Peñate is the grandson of Gormenghast author Mervyn Peake.

Sched fool

"The first Big Brother programme went out five days after they’d gone in the house, was half an hour long, and was shown at eleven at night."


As pointed out by Peter Briffa

Weekend thoughts

When I'm old, I would like to look grizzled. Is a regular smoking habit likely to make me more or less grizzled? Hopefully the answer is less grizzled; if more, then I'll have to up my cigarette intake – and then the grizzled factor will be offset by the inevitable early cancerous death. Thus, I won't appear grizzled for very long.

***

Clearing out the stuff stored under my bed – I'm in the process of packing to move house – I come across an old English Lit essay accompanied by many files of notes. Then an old A4 refill pad. Oddly, both the A4 refill pad itself and the phrase "A4 refill pad" have become strange to me; how much life has changed since the glory days of academia!

***

Also, an old journal. An outdated concept indeed - imagine a blog, but on paper. This one begins at the end of 2003 and ends at the start of August 2005, with not all that much in between. One entry mentions that "The last official bare-knuckle fight was in 1889 between John L. Sullivan and Jake Kilrain." I always did love my trivia.

I got five on it

It's the 10th birthday of the oft-ridiculed Channel 5 (aka Five) tomorrow. Fact fix: the first advertisement to appear on the channel was for the perfume Chanel No 5. Cunning, eh?

Downlodd

The man Tadich has spotted this extraordinary website called the 365 Days Project, part of UBUWeb ("a resource dedicated to all strains of the avant-garde, ethnopoetics, and outsider arts").

The project consists of a day-by-day collection of MP3s of the weird and wonderful rarities dug up from flea markets. Having had a flick through it, I've noticed that the tunes generally fall into three categories: eccentric but great, disturbing, and downright insane.

It's all totally Peel. Do the delving yourself, but here are a few examples which I enjoyed (and was terrified by), split into my three categories:


1. Eccentric but great

Testing 1... 2... 3... by the Bolivar Blues Band
1977 blues track created by a German speaker company for testing your hi-fi equipment.

They say: "...some funkalicious blues playing all on side A with narration by the Bolivar Speaker Works people. Grade A stuff."

Hey Jude by Assagai
Cover version of the Beatles classic, sung in "an unknown African language".

They say: "Assagai were formed in England in 1971 by South African exiles and a couple of Nigerians (one is the singer on this track)."


2. Disturbing

Distant Star by Anthony Hopkins
Yes, that's the Anthony Hopkins. A bit like William Shatner's spoken cover versions or John Betjeman's jazz stuff, but far more scary; he's clearly trying to sound wise and mysterious, but instead just sounds like Hannibal Lecter.

They say: "The thin, paper sleeve; the juice label, so low budget, it can't be true, I thought, biting my lower lip, but there was the face: unmistakable...I simply had to buy it, 50p"


3. Downright insane

Jesus Loves Me by Baby Lu-Lu
Woman with deep south accent puts on child's voice and sings religious songs. Truly hideous.

They say: "I was expecting it to be unlistenable, and when I took it home and played it, I found I was right! However, I was also entertained. Within it's mind-boggling wretchedness is a grating blend of annoying, frightening and unintentionally funny sound that captures your attention."


Introuniversal Jam/Don't Be So Holy Poly Over My Souly by Kit Ream
Tadich sent me the link to this with the warning that it was "truly the sound of a mind violently shaken from its moorings". He is so right.

They say: "According to someone who knew him, [Kit Ream] dropped tons of acid in the '60s and wound up in a mental hospital where he spent six months staring at his own reflection in a mirror. Eventually the acid wore off, he was deemed 'cured' and let loose in society, whereupon he decided to become a guru and make a record."

Magnificently bonkers

Just nearing the end of Charlie Connelly's Attention All Shipping which Sarah got me for Christmas. It's a travel book about the author's voyages to all the areas mentioned in the shipping forecast. He is a funny man indeed. My favourite bit is about the Urquhart family, a bunch of 17th century eccentrics who hailed from Cromarty in Northern Scotland. It goes like this:

...the most famous residents of the castle had been the Urquharts, several of whom were magnificently bonkers. One early Urquhart, for example, lived for several years convinced he was actually dead. Every night his bed would be wheeled into the courtyard and winched up to battlement level by a series of pullies so that it might be easier for his maker to come and spirit him away in the night. Despite this apparent foolproof method of contraception – I can't imagine Mrs Urquhart was too enamoured of her husband's morbid alfresco nights – he and his wife reputedly produced thirty-six children, the poor woman. The best-known Urquhart, however, was Thomas, who lived in the mid seventeenth century. Thomas was the first man to translate Rabelais into English and indeed did it 'more Rabelais than Rabelais himself' according to Bernard Levin. He was also a total fruitcake. Among other things, Thomas claimed to have traced his family tree right back to Adam and Eve. Although his Rabelais translations remain in high regard, his other writings were so eccentric as to be practically impenetrable. Making up words on the spot didn't help. 'Amblygonosphericalls', 'extrinsecall', 'grediftal', bagrediffiu', 'pubkegdaxesh' and 'obliquangular', for example, all appeared in the space of one paragraph in his book Trissoetras, and none was ever heard of again. Flushed with etymological creativity he tried to start up his own language in his 1653 book Logopandecteision. It didn't catch on. Thomas, knighted by Charles I in 1641 – although no one seems to know why – was present at the Battle of Worcester and fled to Holland after the English Civil War, where he is reputed to have died laughing on hearing of the restoration of Charles II.

Charlie Connelly, Attention All Shipping: A Journey Round the Shipping Forecast
(Abacus, London: 2004), pp58-9

Flock of Seagals

Are you in?

The facts of life

Some things I've discovered recently. I am sharing these things with you. YOU!

• Tottenham Court Road skyscraping monstrosity Centre Point is built on the site of a gallows
• The name 'Wendy' was invented by JM Barrie, creator of Peter Pan*
• Barbara Streisland and Tina Turner are both big 24 fans
• In Russian if you're extremely drunk, you say "I am meat" ("Я в мясо") - meaning that you have no eyes, no ears and no senses
• Mark Kermode is a Christian
• Clare Short's cousin is US-Canadian actor Martin Short**
• Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes never said "Elementary, my dear Watson" - it was invented by PG Wodehouse in his 1915 novel Psmith, Journalist
• Naomi Campbell was engaged to U2 bassist Adam Clayton in the 80s
• There have only been 20 episodes of The Vicar of Dibley
  

* Wikipedia slightly disputes this, but I think it still kind of counts.

** I actually had this factoid confirmed in an email from Short herself, which was exciting. I emailed back with the line "Great, thanks Clare. I loved him in Three Amigos." She didn't reply.

Gets your goat

Thinking of going for the charity Christmas option this year and buying your loved one a goat for an African family? Think again, fool. Animal Aid, the UK's largest animal rights group, say this:

• £11 sends six chickens to an impoverished area where they can heighten the disease risk and severely damage the immediate environment
• £125 provides a pair of goats - animals known to cause desertification, thereby reducing the amount of farmland available to local people
• £750 sends a cow, who will drink up to 90 litres of the villagers' water every single day

The Nintendo Wii's out today. Get one of those instead.


Animal Aid
Wii. Are. Your Friends

Retronyms

I've learnt a fun new word: 'retronym'. A retronym describes an item renamed because of the arrival of a newer version which renders its label outdated or no longer unique. So, 'World War One' is a retronym, because it wasn't called that until World War Two came along. As are 'acoustic guitar', 'black and white TV', 'Before Christ' and 'silent film'.

Here are some less obvious ones, which I enjoyed:

- Forward slash: before MS-DOS introduced the backslash ( \ ), what we now call the forward slash was known simply as 'a slash'
- George HW Bush: Bush Senior didn't use his initials publicly until his son Dubya became President
- Cold-water tap: it was just 'the tap' before the invention of the water heater


More retronyms here

Amazing factoid #2

Notoriously uncool crooner Gene Pitney, who died today, played maracas on The Rolling Stones' version of Not Fade Away.

Amazing factoid

You know that annoying incoming text message ring on Nokia mobile phones? The one that goes bip-bip-bip beep-beep bip-bip-bip? It's Morse Code for "SMS". Amazing.

Who Maimed Roger Rabbit?

It was reported today (Reuters) that China has banned any programmes that combine animation with live actors. Why? Because they'll "jeopardise the broadcasting order of home-made animation and mislead their development".

The best part of the story for me was the fact the film Babe (the one with the talking pig) is banned in China, "on the grounds that animals don't talk".

Read about more film genres banned in China

Two observations

California Uber Alles

Yesterday I noticed for the first time the sinister fascist undertones of The Beach Boys song California Girls. What I once believed was a carefree ode to beautiful American females has suddenly turned into a right-wing anthem of ethnic cleansing. In the song, we hear of the protagonist's travels around the country and the world, with visits to a variety of exotic locations. But all he can think is "I wish they all could be California girls". It's a frightening thought: all nationalities, all cultures liquidised in favour of one master Californian race.

I put this to Kearns, who suggested the song could also be read as a call for a liberal immigration policy: the teller wishes they all had the opportunity to be California Girls. This is also possible. Either way, life will never be the same again.

Socksial healing

Say you have 12 pairs of socks and wear one pair a day. If you look at the life of one individual pair, you'll see that for 11 days of the 12-day cycle, that pair will be either be sitting in a dirty clothes basket, going through the washing and drying process, or spend its days lying in a drawer – ie doing nothing for at least 334 days of the year. Imagine the possibilities if we could somehow harness the power of these unused socks.