Buyer Beware

Spring, and this young man's fancy turns to wheat beer. It being Friday last night, and yours truly having had a long week, I wandered around the corner to the local shop to pick up some ice cream (for Country Mouse) and beer (for myself). Being a gas station, their selection isn't the most wonderful (long on icehouse, short on good brew) but they usually have at least a few shelves dedicated to Maine breweries like Shipyard and other regional goodies like Sam Adams.

Sure enough, on the bottom shelf of the middle cooler were several sixes of Sam Adams' White Ale- not a world class wheat beer by any stretch of the imagination but good enough to be getting along with after a long week. But as I opened the case to grab the beer my gaze fell upon a spectacular feat of packaging.

The carboard carrier was a blaze of oranges, yellows, and reds. The font was inviting, and the beer description tantalizing. The whole thing looked like a product of Pete's Wicked Brewing- a fine brewery, and no mistake. I decided to go with the "Spring Wheat Spiced Heat" instead.

So imagine my disappointment when I got home and poured the first bottle. Upon taking a sip I tasted the unmistakable foul rice sump of BUDWEISER apparently used to marinate an Earl Grey teabag. I grabbed the bottle. Sure enough, in tiny, tiny print it read "made by Anheuser-Busch, St Louis, MO".

TRICKED! I had been tricked! Those AB arseholes- canny enough to know that no sane beer drinker would pick up their fermented rice pudding if their name appeared prominently on the label, had deceived me by making their noxious chemical stew look like the product of a half-decent brewery. If I were Pete's Wicked, I'd sue the bastards.

Still, I drank the beer (through gritted teeth). I'd paid for the bloody stuff and was out of mixers for my rum. Even so, that's a dirty rotten trick of Anheuser-Busch.

Spring Hits Maine...

You can't beat a little bit of spring sunshine. Mondale toddled off to Little Rhody, while Listmaker has buggered off completely. Country Mouse and I (along with Med School Mama and her family) took the The Honorable MEP approach and went in search of maple syrup in the Kennebec Valley:

Me and the Mouse at the Pownalborough Courthouse, Maine's oldest. CM's grandparents' used to have a summer place next door. I dare say someone in her family built the original- they have been in Maine longer than granite.

Said courthouse.

MSM and her brood.

Down the road, at the farm's sugar shack.

Farm mud is universal.

Who knew maple syrup was so complicated.

More machinery, all in the pursuit of 3 gallons an hour.

The end result.

Mama and mama-to-be under a fantastic tree.

Shutterbug Jr snaps away, while Mr. Ployes contemplates his own syrup operation.

I can't read, and I can't write, but that don't really matter; cause I'm a Norwich City fan and I love a good tractor.

History Friday on a Wednesday: "Civis Romanus Sum"

I was going to subtitle this rare "History Friday on a Wednesday" post "Gunboat Diplomacy", but the excellent Flying Rodent beat me to it. Pop over there and read his stuff, there's a bunch of loves, as he's rather splendid.

Anyway, to my post. With 15 British merry Matelots and bolshy Booties under lock and key somewhere in deepest, darkest Iran, HMS Cornwall and her flotilla bobbing about sheepishly in the Shatt al Arab, and Tony Blair mumbling about how this sort of thing is just not on, one's thoughts wander back to the 1850s and the days of Prime Minister "Leg Over" Palmerston. Most specifically, the Pacifico Incident and the birth of gunboat diplomacy.

To quote (in it's entirety) the entry on the Pacifico Incident from The History of Great Britain:

"The decade of the Great Exhibition begins with an event which suggests a new British attitude to foreign policy. This is the approach later characterized as gunboat diplomacy, in which military force is used to impose the nation's will on another country.

Known as the Don Pacifico incident, the event concerns a Portuguese Jew of that name trading in Athens. When an anti-Semitic crowd burns his house, in 1847, he sues the Greek government for damages - with little result, until he appeals to Britain for help on the grounds that he is a British citizen (as a result of being born in Gibraltar).

The Liberal foreign secretary, Palmerston, provokes fierce controversy by the vigour of his response. He sends a naval squadron into the Aegean in 1850 to seize Greek ships to the value of Don Pacifico's claim. Censured in the house of lords, Palmerston wins a majority for his action in the commons where he argues that 'a British citizen, in whatever land he may be, shall feel confident that the watchful eye and the strong arm of England will protect him against injustice and wrong'.

Four years later the watchful eye and strong arm of England are in the care of a Conservative prime minister, Lord Aberdeen. He too sends warships to the Aegean to back up diplomacy, this time in support of Turkey.

A joint British and French fleet steams through the Dardanelles in 1854 as a gesture of warning to Russia. The result in this case is full-scale war in the Crimea. A few years later Britain and France again act together in distant waters. They use two minor incidents which would normally be the stuff of diplomacy (in the British case the offence of some Chinese officials in 1856 in boarding a British merchant ship and lowering the red ensign) as a pretext for launching a renewal of the Opium Wars.

The steam-assisted warship has made it possible, as never before, for a strong nation to police the entire world in its own interest. And to an unprecedented degree ordinary members of the public now feel closely in touch with events."

Not that I'm advocating for a minute that anything like that would work in this case (after all, the presence of our gunboats provoked their gunboats to attack our gunboats, etc, etc ad nauseam). But it must have been fun in the high Victorian era, and not just because of the outrageous facial hair.

Aliens Attack

A typical Briton preparing to unleash himself on the flower of American womanhood.
There were a couple of related stories on the BBC website late last week that had a fair amount of resonance for me. First up was actor, wit, and Mondale's role model* Stephen Fry, who caused a stir by suggesting that the continued success of British actors in Hollywood had less to do with their stage chops and more to do with their elongated vowels:

Brit actors 'judged on accents'

And then the BBC's own pontificators had a bit of a ramble over the subject of British accents in America in general:

Gee, I just love your accent

As my accent and myself having lived in the US for 12 years I'm somewhat of an expert on this phenomenon. I can't speak for my female counterparts, but I've found as a chap that a little drop of one's Gordon's gin accent often will smooth the path in professional or personal encounters. Much of what is said in the two BBC articles is undeniably yet superficially true, but let me offer my fellow British men a word of caution. Accent adoration has a half-life formula, which I'll try to lay out below:

Accent adorability = Degree of resemblance to Hugh Grant + hair floopiness + general bashful loveliness / amount of time someone actually spends with you after realizing that you are as obsessed with sport as much as American men + potency of your farts + first time you are observed out of your nut on Theakston's Old Peculier

Its a slightly different formula for the workplace, but not much.


(*Except for the celibate homosexuality)

Notes on a Scandal

A scene from "Caged Heat III"
As Country Mouse said last night as we left the theatre, "I don't know if it was meant to be one, but that was the best black comedy I've seen for a long time."

Perhaps it is meant to be a drama and we were meant to take it seriously. But I had much more fun with Notes on a Scandal when I realized quite quickly that the whole film was camper than a row of tents. In more than one scene it reminded me of The Killing of Sister George or Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? Whatever the intentions of the director and the screenwriter, Judy Dench was intent on having a rip-roaring time playing a "villain" so arch I expected the film to end with her wrestling Adam West and Burt Ward over a vat of fluorescent green chemicals.

I'm not going to review the film in its entirety (Listmaker does a good job of that here). Instead I want to note that if I am to ever be reincarnated as a bitter and twisted psychotic middle aged woman I want to come back as Judy Dench in an endless loop of the 10 second shot in which she drives maniacally through a wet London night with her face resembling an electrocuted carp and Philip Glass strings booming urgently in the background, all the while being filmed from a slight angle.

Weasel Whiskers

Two interesting recent searches that lead someone to this site- "Auld Slapper", the grandmotherly prostitute who performed unmentionable acts on England soccer ace Wayne Rooney; and "Naturists play sports". You know who you are, and you know you need help. Help that only a naked Auld Slapper playing volleyball can provide.

But onto the matter at hand today: Shaving.


I don't normally do product endorsements on these pages but I do have to mention the most wonderful present Country Mouse brought home from Portland this past Sunday, a jar of Maine Shave's moisturising shave cream.

When I was a spotty herbert of a teenager and just starting to shave* my dad gave me a brush, some mug soap, and one of my mum's lady bics and told me to hack away. As I aged and I needed to shave more often** I switched over to a more modern combo of aerosol can and multi-bladed bit of shiny plastic from Gillette or similar. I'm not fully sure if it was the exorbitant cost of replacement blades, a dislike of unnecessary packaging, or a visceral hatred of those stupid ads which suggest that Razor A is built from leftovers from the Space Shuttle and will make sultry lab assistants shake down their hair and wriggle out of their skirts but last spring I said "Balls to the lot of them" and decided to go back to the older, less Maxim-y way of shaving.

I invested in a brush and razor combo on a stand- very nice brush but the razor was crap. I soldiered on for a while with my Mach 3 and the brush/soap combo, but I couldn't stand paying a small fortune to Gillette every month and so finally bought a German-made long handled chrome Merkur safety razor.

Now the problem was the cheap shaving soap I had been using couldn't hold out against the panzer division of a razor I was dragging across my face. It seemed like I was cursed to either use a razor I hated but I'd get to use the brush; or use the razor I liked but have to use that wasteful Mr. Whippy foam. With the winter up here in Maine one does need a decent bit of skin protection, lest one's face look like a post-Dioxin Viktor Yushchenko.

Just in the nick of time, enter Country Mouse bearing gifts. The Maine Shave stuff ain't cheap but it does what it says on the label. I shaved with it and then stepped out into the biting wind and salty air of coastal winter: no burn, no soreness, no bumps or lumps, no redness. I love the packaging, and the product looks good in the jar. I was at a bit of a loss to describe the smell- not really perfumey, not really barbershoppy- until it hit me that it smelled a little like the time I caught a whiff of a bear's den while watching the warden's service tag hiberating bruins***. Let me hasten to add that that bear's dens actually smell good; like a dog at its best with cedar, hazelnuts, and blueberries thrown in.

The upshot is I wholeheartedly recommend this Maine Shave stuff; they have a ladies line too, should any of you women reading not feel inclined to buy your bloke a nice pressie.



*About once a month.
**Twice a month
***I know that sounds ridiculous, but I did do that, about ten years ago

The Good German

Apart from my brief attack of cineaste-ism in college I've never spent a lot of time with film noir. I know this is a big mistake on my part, classic genre and all that, but I was always foolishly content to take my Bogart straight heroic (Casablanca) or as a delusional eccentric (African Queen, The Caine Mutiny). The dramatic contrast of the cinematography seemed to have less impact on me growing up in what was essentially a black, white, and grey country. Again, I apologize for my Philistine ways.

Perhaps this lack of familiarity with the noir genre made it easier for me to enjoy Steven Soderbergh's The Good German. I may not know noir, but I know Soderbergh and while I might not always dig the results of some of his more cutting edge experimentation, I have always admired the way he approaches projects.

This time out Soderbergh set himself the challenge of filming a 40s style film, not only in black and white but also on old equipment and film stock with a genuine feel and look. He was not making a pastiche or a homage but rather the real thing. Did he succeed, and did he make a good film in the process?

Let's start with what I liked. Despite sounding like a Teutonic drag queen, Cate Blanchett has rarely looked better or moved through the world in a more intriguing manner than in this film. One of things I like most about Blanchett is the way she manages to look almost completely different in every role she takes without much more than posture, facial expressions, and the judicious application of hair dye. It is a testament to her work that I could have watched a whole movie with her walking around Berlin alternately full of fear and confidence.

I thought Soderbergh blended the newsreel footage he found with his shots well, and succeeded in making the film appear vintage in most aspects. His shot selections were spot on, as was almost all of the lighting. I suppose the biggest compliment I can give him is that I kept expecting Orson Welles to round the corner and steal at least half the scenes. I also liked the winks at the audience I was able to pick up on, and I'm a sucker for a well-lit DC3 Dakota on a wet runway.

I also thought the story was good- the "twist" was never in doubt, but its exact nature did keep me guessing. The reveal didn't have me sharply breathing in, but I didn't spend half the movie in a state of abject boredom either.

OK, now the bad.

George Clooney is one of my favorite actors, but I'm beginning to think he's taking those Cary Grant comparisons too seriously. In this film, poor George got socked in the jaw so many times I feared for his brain- were we going to get a noir version of Regarding Henry? Clooney's performance in this film was less Cary Grant and more Jimmy Stewart- too "gee shucks" for a supposed tough-as-nails reporter who'd seen it all. Perhaps his work was too subtle for me, but the novelty of Clooney playing an unwitting patsy soon wore off and I spent a fair amount of time hoping that the next time he got cold-cocked on the chin it would be with a plank with a nail sticking out of it.

Tobey Maguire isn't even a good Spiderman, let alone a good amoral chancer on the make. Was Giovanni Ribisi not available?

You set a film in Berlin in 1945, try to make it to the standards of the period, and you lose interest in involving the Russians after about half an hour? Next time, more shaven headed, cynical Soviets in unbuttoned tunics, nursing neat liquor please.

Soderbergh should have decided if he was setting out to make a version of The Third Man or the counter-Casablanca. He tried to make both and ended up falling short.

Finally, if you are going to set strict rules about film stock, equipment, lighting, even the theatrical poster, then make sure the dialogue and imagery jibes with the period. I know people in the forties cursed like troopers and were at it like rabbits, but the movies Soderbergh was so painstakingly trying to recreate with The Good German couldn't show simulated sex or get away with more f-bombs than a Dick Cheney muttered aside. Soderbergh should have shown more discipline. You can't colour outside the lines of self-imposed strictures.

On balance though, I did enjoy this movie. Don't be put off by my carping, go see it or get it on Netflix. Me on the other hand; I'm off to rent a stack of original noir.

The Good German: 7/10

A Letter to National Public Radio

I don't know if they will read it on air or not, but I had to write it or my blood pressure would have gone off the charts:

To the Editor;

I am surprised, to say the least, that you chose to follow a report on the inquest into the friendly fire death of British Lance Corporal-of-Horse Matty Hull with a general exculpatory commentary by former US Navy pilot Ken Harbaugh on the fog of war as seen from the cockpit.

Harbaugh began his remarks by disclaiming any deep knowledge of the incident in question and then went on to offer a general "accidents do happen" explanation for the tragedies of airborne fracticide, implicity excusing the A-10 pilots who killed Hull in direct contradiction to the extensively argued conclusions of the British coroner.

Without a doubt, confusion in battle does arise, and it is not always easy to distinguish ground targets from a fast moving jet platform. However, unlike the senarios described by Harbaugh, the pilots who killed Hull were not under ground fire and were not operating at the extremes of their endurance (they circled the British convoy for many, many minutes before attacking). They did however decide to attack their allies despite instructions from their ground controller to check with him before engaging any targets and after amazingly misidentifying the large orange panels identifying an ally as rocket launchers.

The cockpit video, easily tracked down via a few seconds of web searching, makes all of this apparent and for the conspiracy-minded offers ample reasons for why the US military initially refused to release it and why the British military refused to acknowledge it existed. While it is obvious that the A-10 pilots did not maliciously attack an ally, they were at the very least reckless, and this fact needs to be acknowledged publicly. The public radio audience is hardly well served by "yes, but" pieces by commentators seeking to lessen the impact of the actions of their former compatriots.

Death by friendly fire is hardly a new phenomenon. No less a light than General Patton once threatened to turn his guns on the 8th Air Force unless they stopped mistakenly attacking his positions. However, in this time of official reasurances about the accuracy of our smart weapons and the professionalism of our armed forces, NPR should perhaps be asking questions about why we still kill our own troops and those of our allies with such depressing frequency rather than offering airtime for those inclined to blame anything and anyone but those who actually pull the trigger.

The cockpit video:


The story:
Friendly Fire Killing 'Unlawful'

The pilots who did this were promoted.

I Do Appreciate a Bit of Youtube

The amusing Mitchell and Webb of the BBC, via the interweb:


I always enjoyed their radio show and was saddened to read that the TV version was pretty poor. This however made me laugh out loud- shows you shouldn't always believe what you read, I suppose.

What Have These Two Got To Be So Happy About?

Hamas's Ismail Haniya & Fatah's Mahmoud Abbas appear to be inordinately tickled by events
I reckon one of them told the old "Why did the suicide bomber cross the road? To blow up a pizza joint" joke. It wasn't funny the first time Ismail told it Mahmoud, so I don't know wht you are laughing so much now. Both of you: off to your rubble strewn compounds to think about being more thoughtful.

In Book News...

Close George, but that's not a book, its "People" magazine
Two wonderful stories from the world of letters:

Odder book titles make shortlist
"...The Bookseller magazine has released its shortlist for the Oddest Titles prize, honouring fringe publishing....Last year's contest was won by Gary Leon Hill for his impressively titled The People Who Don't Know They're Dead: How They Attach Themselves to Unsuspecting Bystanders and What to Do About It..."

This year I'm pulling for Proceedings of the Eighteenth International Seaweed Symposium this year, but that's just because its the only one I've read. The others on the shortlist are:

• How Green Were the Nazis? edited by Franz-Josef Bruggemeier, Mark Cioc and Thomas Zeller
• D. Di Mascio's Delicious Ice Cream: D. Di Mascio of Coventry: An Ice Cream Company of Repute, with an Interesting and Varied Fleet of Ice Cream Vans by Roger De Boer, Harvey Francis Pitcher, and Alan Wilkinson
• The Stray Shopping Carts of Eastern North America: A Guide to Field Identification by Julian Montague
• Tattooed Mountain Women and Spoon Boxes of Daghestan by Robert Chenciner by Gabib Ismailov, Magomedkhan Magomedkhanov and Alex Binnie
• Better Never To Have Been: The Harm of Coming Into Existence by David Benatar

This week also saw a refreshing alternative to all those reams of bullshit and humbug about the greatest books of the year/century/all time lists; the ones where liars tell researchers that they have read books like Tristram Shandy so that they seem learned. What could be more of a reality check to authors, publishers* and arts commissions than the list of books least likely to be finished by the British?

Variously displaying a lack of willpower (Allen Carr's Easy Way to Stop Smoking), good taste (the bloody awful The Satanic Verses) and a healthy understanding that life is short (My Side, "by" David Beckham) this wonderful list is a fantastic guide of what not to read to the end for people too lazy to fail to finish books for themselves. Indeed, I dare say the same thing applies to blog posts- after all, d

(*Who will probably take the wrong lesson from this and deduce that this means that they can still publish this drivel but can leave half the pages blank)

Happy/Sad

I'm sad that the members of The Jam are so short on cash that they are allowing Cadillac to use Start to advertise ugly repub-mobiles driven by self-satisfied tosspots, and that they let them use the song without lyrics apart from the chorus.

I'm happy that my father-in-law, who came to visit Friday, gave me a great line for future use. We were discussing both the iminent arrival of David Beckham and the post-Downing Street US lecture circuit possibilities for Tony Blair. I mentioned how funny it would be if they teamed up to do a speech together, at which point father-in-law observed that the poster tagline should read "One has balls, one doesn't".

That is all.

British Comedian Inman Dead at 71

British children of the seventies and American viewers of PBS will probably have no problem identifying the catchphrase "I'm Free". Issued with regularity by the character Mr. Humphries on the sitcom Are You Being Served? it punctuated popular culture, even beyond it's sell-by date. Alas, the actor behind the trilling phrase, John Inman, died yesterday aged 71.

I wasn't the greatest fan of the show, even as a kid, although it's innocently naughty humour was far superior to the annoying Benny Hill and occasionally as good as that put out by the Two Ronnies, Morcambe and Wise, and Dick Emery. I just wanted to note that even given the fashion excesses all around him in the late sixties and early seventies, John Inman was one hell of a snappy dresser:


Just shorten those collars a bit and you'd be all set today.

It Must Be Almost Baseball Season

Daisuke Matsuzaka
Proof, if proof is needed, that baseball's opening day looms from my pre-bed conversation with my lovely consort Country Mouse:

Weasel: "I was just watching the spring training highlights on NESN. That Matsuzaka has a wicked greasy slider. He's going to win a lot of games this season."

CM: "Who were they playing? The friggin' Marlins. Ooooh. Big Deal. And its only spring training."

WW: "I still think he looks good even though its early. The Sox are going to jump out to an early lead."

CM: "Like every year, and then they'll blow their brains out. They always get our hopes up then crush us."

WW: "I dunno. I just have a good feeling."

CM: "See? That's why you are not a proper Red Sox fan."

How can I argue with that, from someone born into Red Sox fandom, in Northern New England on a day the Sox lost 12-8 to the Orioles, a woman who celebrated the Sox in verse, and who still has a thing for Dennis Eckersley's mustache?

As Refreshing as a Glass of Tizer

While reading a story on the BBC about British military overstretch, I was exceedingly pleased to learn that the top military Brit is an RAF officer called "Air Chief Marshal Sir Jock Stirrup".

With a name like that it is almost worth putting "Imperial" back in the title "Chief of the Defence Staff".

Chocks away! There's cabbage crates over the briny, what!

Type n' Sniff

This is only going to distract them from randomly typing the complete works of Shakespeare.
News from South Korea:

Fragrant future beckons for web
"Within a decade the net will be able to deliver smells as fast as it does data, predicts a report. The forecast came in a wide-ranging survey produced by the South Korean government to find out what consumers will want from future technologies...."

I'm still undecided as to the benefits of this. I'm not sure if my investment in the domain name "fatandsweatypeopleinacrowdedroom.com" is going to be a money spinner or dead on arrival.

Short Fidel Castro, Get in Early on Memorial Souvenir Manufacturers Stock

From the BBC website on Wednesday:

"Ailing Castro says 'I feel good'"

Who is most famous for saying "I feel good"? James Brown. And where is James Brown now? Dead, in a box. "I feel good", my arse.

Fidel old boy, take a tip from elderly English people. The more you complain about how you are in an advanced and unstoppable state of geriatric collapse, the longer you will live.

Castro spins, pivots...

...Tumbles to the ground and demands his cape.