His master’s voice

This is for anyone who has had a wife. His own, I mean, not someone else’s.

Sentence of the day

Mona Eltahawy, an Egyptian-born columnist and public speaker on Arab and Muslim issues, responds in the Toronto Star to Saudia Arabia getting a seat on the the board of UN Women, which is dedicated to gender equality around the world:

It took years to make the United Nations’ newest agency, UN Women, a reality, and then just one day to effectively kill it.

Monitor: Mick Hartley

Around the blogs

Chad Taylor has lead in his pencil and he  likes The Social Network:

If TV, as someone once said, is about people walking in and out of rooms, the internet is about them being locked inside.

Matt Nolan says precisely what I thought vaguely about the Herald’s article on Great Chocolate Shortage, that it was bollocks because it ignored how farmers respond to price signals: 

Also note that these poorer farmers in Africa are getting higher incomes now – as the price of what they produce compared to, say washing machines, is higher … so they can buy more washing machines.  Why is this article begrudging them that?

Tim Worstall proposes a convincing-sounding derivation of the word “posh”. It is possibly from Farsi, he suggests, which was the language of the Mughal court. Warning: may contain cross-dressing.

Danyl Mclauchlan aka the Dim-Post has given up:

In our current situation we have a government that knows much about theatre and politics and almost nothing about government and an opposition that probably knows much about government, but in vain because they know nothing about politics or theatre.

Anyway, I’ve reached the point where it’s all too banal even to laugh at so I’m taking a break from blogging for an indeterminate period.

In the comments – really warm, generous tributes from his fans – Russell Brown™ says:

Not concerned. You will torment your friends and family with your opinions so terribly that they will demand that you start blogging again. Just you see if I’m not right.

That may tell us something about the Brown household, but I do hope Russell is right. The Dim-Post has been a must-read.

Paul Litterick at the Fundy Post despairs of England. And, I regret to report, he has a crack at Stephen Fry.

Speaking of Stephen Fry, here he is with Clive Anderson in 1991 complaining about the “sheer vulgarity” of the Conservatives, their bad taste. Just look at what he is wearing:

Too much information

Last week’s Economist had a special report on smart systems and, inter alia, the enormous quantity of information generated: 

Estimates by IDC, a market-research firm, need to be taken with a pinch of salt, because they are sponsored by EMC, a maker of storage systems. But for what they are worth, they suggest that the “digital universe”—the amount of digital information created and replicated in a year—will increase to 35 zettabytes, or 35 trillion gigabytes—enough to fill a stack of DVDs reaching halfway to Mars.

And this is creepy:

Facebook users, by tagging friends in the pictures they upload, allow the service to recognise these people on other pictures.

Thanks a bunch, Facebook users.

Google search term of the day

Google’s algorithm placed this blog at the top of the list of search results for the query “Oh my god ! My mother was playmat”, well ahead of St Augustine’s Confessions at #5 and the “Moses and the Ten Plagues Figurine Set” at #6. Doesn’t Google Japan look pretty with all that Kanji?

I try not to speculate about what people are looking for, but really, “My mother was a play mat”? How does that work? It must be a Japanese thing.

The Talking Michael Caine Blues

Rob Brydon and Steve Coogan duke it out:

Monitor: Kottke.org

More Stephen Fry on himself

In the aftermath of the fuss about his reported comment (obviously a misquote) about women not enjoying sex, Stephen Fry explains himself on his blog. At length. On and on he goes, on and on – it’s a classic case of onandonism – about how being misrepresented is the price a megastar pays for being famous and much-loved, and how he doesn’t enjoy the attention at all. After four pages declaring his modesty he ends with this:

No one can say my life isn’t unpredictable, interesting and...  well, Fryish…

Not even Paul Holmes has invented a word to describe himself.

Monitor: PopBitch

What I’m reading: Frank Zappa edition

Shocking, isn’t it, that you can download books from the internet. Except this one, The Frank Zappa Guitar Book, is long out of print so I couldn’t pay the author and publisher if I wanted to (second-hand copies go for as much as $US175 at AbeBooks). The bars above are a bit of it for your reading pleasure (click on the image for a bigger version). They are the opening of the guitar solo of Frank Zappa’s “Outside Now” from his album Joe’s Garage as transcribed by SteveVai, who got the job of stunt guitarist in Zappa’s band on the strength of his transcriptions. (Zappa was a bandleader on a par with Miles Davis and Charles Mingus: other alumni include Lowell George, George Duke, Adrian Belew, Vinnie Colaiuta and the best-named drummer ever, Chad Wackerman.)

The song is in 11/8 – as you can see above, it’s notated as 6/8 + 5/8 which makes it easier to count but does not explain how Zappa could create such astonishing guitar solos over it. There are many on legal CDs and other (illegal, I guess) downloads on both sound and vision. 

Here is one, a 1980 performance in Paris with Ike Willis (guitar, lead vocals), Ray White (guitar, vocals), Tommy Mars (keyboards), Arthur Barrow (bass) and Dave Logeman (drums). Zappa looks dorky as hell, but boy could he play guitar.

All together now: “These executives have plooked the fuck out of me. . .”

Mrs Merton on Silvio Berlusconi

Kindly, twinkly, avuncular billionaire Silvio Berlusconi, the Italian PM, has been helping yet another attractive young woman, Karima el- Mahroug (that’s her above), with her career, as the Guardian reports:

Berlusconi has been at the centre of a series of scandals in recent years, including claims by a prostitute, Patrizia D’Addario, that she had sex with him in 2008. Berlusconi has denied paying for sex. There was also controversy over his friendship with a teenage model, Noemi Letizia.

Neither of the most recent allegations, however, would seem to make the prime minister liable to criminal charges, even if they were true. The age of consent in Italy is 14. Prostitution is not illegal, though profiting from it is. And there is nothing in what is so far known of Macri’s statement to indicate Berlusconi himself supplied the drugs allegedly used at the holiday estate where he has hosted Tony Blair, Vladimir Putin and other world leaders.

The biggest legal threat arose from another young woman, Karima el-Mahroug, a then 17-year-old belly dancer who is reported to have told prosecutors in Milan that she attended three parties at Arcore, but denies any sexual entanglement with the prime minister.

Mahroug was detained by police in May on suspicion of stealing €3,000 (£2,620), but after a call from the prime minister’s office, she was handed over to a Berlusconi acquaintance – his former dental hygienist, who was this year elected to the Lombardy regional parliament.

His former dental hygienist, you say? Gee, I wonder what she looks like:

Actually she looks like my dentist in Cambridge, but with a way different stylist. That pic is from a Daily Telegraph report back in February:

Silvio Berlusconi has shortlisted his dental hygienist to contest crucial elections next month. The 73-year-old premier was apparently unable to resist the charms of Nicole Minetti, a showgirl turned dental hygienist who he met when his teeth were being repaired after he was attacked in Milan in December.

Helpfully the Telegraph has a picture gallery of nine other young women the kindly, twinkly, avuncular billionaire has helped with their careers. They are all a bit like that. And one other:

Veronica Lario, 52, Berlusconi’s long suffering wife of 20 years and mother of his three children. They started an affair while he was still married to first wife and he saw her topless on stage.

Jimmy Goldsmith was not the first rich man to say, “When you marry your mistress you create a job vacancy,” and he will not be the last. Mrs Berlusconi surely cannot be surprised at her situation. What a man does once and gets away with, he will do again.

Back to that Telegraph gallery. All the women are stunnas, as the Sun would say. One can see what he sees in them, but what do they see in him? Cue Caroline Aherne’s character Mrs Merton interviewing Debbie McGee: “What first attracted you to the millionaire Paul Daniels?”



For all his faults, Edward Heath never embarrassed the English the way that Berlusconi embarrasses the Italians.

Herald headline of the week

Britpop lives again as Pulp reform for the common people

Not for the money, then.