Dinner

Today is Tuesday. This crayfish was caught on Monday morning off Tairua by our neighbour who a year ago reckoned that he’d got his fishing costs down to “about $1000 a kilo”.

He had been diving on Sunday and seen his biggest cray ever but didn’t manage to snare it. Happily for us, yesterday he got some smaller ones – including this one which weighs 800g and measures, as you can see, about 10 inches or 25cm. 

It was cooked last night by his wife. She brought it over this afternoon as a thank-you for my minding their letterbox and garden (i.e. nicking their vegetables) over the long weekend. And now, if you’ll excuse me, I shall go and eat it.

So here is Robert Cray:

There goes the morning

A parcel arrives, by airmail, all the way from England. I tear open the wrapping to reveal a magnificent hardback book, Inside Private Eye: the first 50 years by Adam Macqueen, signed by him as well as by the Eye’s long-serving not-quite-founding editor, Richard Ingrams, and his successor, current editor Ian Hislop. It is arranged in A-Z format as a scrapbook with many photos and cartoons alongside witty accounts of all the magazine’s contributors over the years as well as their targets, libel cases and other causes for celebration. It is designed for dipping into, and it is brilliant. 

Under B, for example, we get “BLUNT, Anthony, extremely displeased to be outed as spy”; under O, “OFFENSIVE, Most, items published in Private Eye”; under R, “REGRETS, Few had by Eds”.

I am pleased to see Arkell v Pressdram covered in full, as it was an inspiration to us at Metro in the late 80s. This was the case of alleged libel where the Eye’s reply to a letter from Arkell’s solicitor ended:

We note that Mr Arkell’s attitude to damages will be governed by the nature of our reply and would therefore be grateful if you could inform us what his attitude to damages would be, were he to learn that the nature of our reply is as follows: fuck off.

Yours etc.

So far – I really must get back to writing my own book – this is my favourite: 

WIKIPEDIA, Rules of, changed thanks to Eye

In 2008, “Street of Shame” carried a story about the collaborative and notoriously inaccurate online encyclopaedia site Wikipedia, to which a saboteur had added various made-up details about a Cypriot football team (“a small but loyal group of fans are lovingly called ‘the Zany Ones’ – they like to wear hats made from discarded shoes”) only to find them reproduced in a match report in the Daily Mirror when the team played Manchester City.

The Eye noted that “brilliantly, by the rules of Wikipedia – which relies on ‘verifiability – whether readers are able to check that material added has already been published by a reliable third party source’ such as ‘mainstream newspapers’ – this is now officially true”.

Within a week, after a solemn exchange of emails between Wikipedia administrators and the Eye hack who wrote the story (me) the website’s guidelines had been amended. “To avoid this indirect self-referencing, editors should ensure that material from news organisations is not the only existing source outside of Wikipedia.”

This put an end to Wikipedia relying on newspapers for facts. It has certainly not stopped newspapers from relying on Wikipedia for facts.

What I’m reading

Surrender by Donna Malane. Liking it.

Mitt Romney’s tax return explained in comment #17. Two words: corporate tax.  

Signs.

Stop melting my Prius.

“Eco-friendly labels are becoming more ubiquitous, but they may be misleading.” You don’t say.

Matt Nolan praises labour market globalisation.

Robust reporting: Tainui news for Waikato readers (via Maui Street).

Home Paddock talks sense about the sale of the Crafar farms, which Cactus Kate rightly refers to as the Westpac farms.

In the February issue of Word (February issue, not online: they’re not silly) English folksinger June Tabor reveals that thanks to Dan Lepard’s 2004 book The Handmade Loaf she is a champion breadmaker:

I once won Best Homebaked Loaf at the Ludlow Food Festival!

Here she is with guitarist Martin Simpson performing Richard Thompson’s “Strange Affair”:

Show me the money

The Herald interviews (not online; page B15 in the Arts section) Anthony McCarten about his new novel, In the Absence of Heroes:

Best-known for co-writing the 1987 hit stage play Ladies’ Night with Stephen Stratford, McCarten directed his first film, Via Satellite, in 1999, the same year that his debut novel, Spinners, was published.

I’m still waiting for my royalties.

UPDATE:
Online now.

How to write a book

This is how I do it. I am not sure which are the most important elements: the research material on all that A4 paper; the CDs of major interviews; the hard copies of what has been previously published on the topic; the brightly coloured versions of Post-It notes; the classic yellow Post-It notes; the glass of water; the glass of wine; or the stack of cookbooks in the distance.

At least I don’t have to make stuff up. Glad I’m not a novelist:

Of meat, cancer, adultery and statistics

More confirmation of the Stratford Theory of Numbers from the BBC which reports:

A link between eating processed meat, such as bacon or sausages, and pancreatic cancer has been suggested by researchers in Sweden.

They said eating an extra 50g of processed meat, approximately one sausage, every day would increase a person's risk by 19%.

Pancreatic cancer is very nasty but the lifetime risk for men is one in 77 or 1.3%. So for the one-a-day sausage-eating community the risk would seem to be 19% more than that, or 1.5%. Hmm. If you ate just one or two sausages a week it might be 1.35%. Change of lifestyle indicated? No, me either.

Recent reading included Panic on a Plate: how society developed an eating disorder by Rob Lyons (Societas, 2011). In the chapter “A smorgasbord of panics”, Lyons debunks the “five a day” fruit and veg policy – a UK professor of food policy (I am not making this up) explains that five was chosen because “it was considered a nice round sum” – then discusses the suggested link between meat-eating and cancer (here is a condensed version) and points out the flimsiness of the evidence:

The studies in question suggest that the people who eat the most processed and red meat have an increased risk of somewhere between 15 per cent and 45 per cent. But given the crude nature of these studies – often based on a questionnaire of a whole variety of different eat­ing and other personal habits in the first week of the study followed by checks on disease status some years later – there is room for all sorts of confounding factors to creep in. Are the kinds of people who eat a lot of processed meat dif­ferent in other ways, too, like being poorer?

That’s why the US National Cancer Institute declared in 1994 that “in epidemiological research, [increases in risk of less than 100 per cent] are considered small and are usually difficult to interpret. Such increases may be due to chance, statistical bias, or the effects of confounding factors that are sometimes not evident”. In other words, if a particular factor does not at least double the risk of a particular disease or condition occurring, treat that result with a pinch of salt. The link between lung cancer and active smoking, for example, is unambiguous, with increases in risk more in the order of 2000 per cent, not 15 per cent. In such circumstances, correla­tion seems a good indication of causation. The red/pro­cessed meat link to cancer is nothing like as strong.

That figure of a 100% increase in risk being the threshold for concern is worth remembering. Speaking of statistical bollocks, the good Oil linked to a superb demolition of that spectacularly stupid story in the NZ Herald based on a press release from an infidelity website – that’s right, you can go online to find someone with whom you can cheat on your spouse/partner. It was headlined “Infidelity: it’s a right-wing, meat-eaters’ thing” and claimed that “If your partner supports National, has a PC, drinks Coke, eats meat, has a tattoo, smokes and is a Christian, be warned – they could be a cheater.”

Over at the excellent StatsChat, statistician Thomas Lumley pulls this apart under the title “Unfaithful to the data, too”:

The proportion of National supporters in the election was 47%, among website members it’s 33%, so National supporters are substantially less likely to be members of the website than supporters of other parties. The proportion identifying as Christian among website members is very similar to the proportion in the 2006 census. 79% of website users are on PC (vs Mac). Again that’s a lower proportion of PCs than in the population of NZ computers (the Herald said 10% were Macs in July 2010, and for Aus+NZ combined, IDC now says 15%) but one explanation is that Macs have more of the home market than the business market.  More members drinking Coke vs Pepsi is also not surprising — I couldn’t find population figures, but Coke dominates the NZ cola market.

The story doesn’t say, but we can also be pretty confident that the website members are more likely to be Pakeha than Maori, more likely to be accountants than statisticians, and more likely to have a pet cat than a pet camel.

Cactus Kate has boldly gone where I wouldn’t and checked the cheaters’ website out. To no one’s surprise what she found a) was repulsive and b) confirms that New Zealanders have but one degree of separation.

So here is Dean Martin (because he was a member of the Rat Pack) with Hank Williams’s “Your Cheating Heart”:

Brand New Zealand

My dear wife – especially dear just now because she has taken the children off to the Manawatu and Wairarapa for the next few days so that I can write a book, or at least get a good start on it as it is due in two weeks – passed on this from Straight Furrow (not online): the owners of a Gisborne lifestyle block sell their organic avocados and mandarins at the local farmers’ market under the label “Quite Tasty”.

“Quite Tasty”. Has there ever been a more quintessentially understated New Zealandy brand name?

Speaking of farmers’ markets, we were in Auckland last weekend so checked out the Grey Lynn version which is down Richmond Road from a café called JAFA and in a hall (unlike our local which is up the road from a café called Rata and outdoors in a park with trees). There was a chap there selling Over The Moon cheese from Putaruru: it is excellent cheese but hardly local which I thought was the whole point of farmers’ markets. Still, the Grey Lynn Community Centre is a very nice hall which is why I published it in Architecture NZ when I was editor a year or 12 ago. 

Sentence of the day

“I’m in the profession that feels with empathy and compassion and intuition.”

Geoffrey Rush, Aussie of the Year. Self-regarding, moi?

Recommended reading

Chris Bourke on banjos and Peter Bland. More on Peter here at the TLS.

A virtual tour of the Sistine Chapel. When I went to the Vatican I couldn’t face the crowds: this will do me. A suggestion: turn the music up LOUD.

The drugs don’t work But maybe.. .  Good to see David Hume quoted; very intelligent/informed comments about trial and error.

Beware the Dorothy.

The red flags of quackery.

Rebonds A, by Iannis Xenakis. Hyper-drumming.

The early music pioneer Gustav Leonhardt has died.

Put Chad Taylor and Jonathon King together and what do you get? City Lights. Fantastic in both senses.  

It’s Chinese New Year, introducing the year of the dragon. So here is Dragon with “Still in Love with You”:

Happy birthday, Neil Diamond

Neil Diamond was born on 24 January 1941. He wrote the Monkees’ “I’m a Believer”, Lulu’s “The Boat that I Row” and Deep Purple’s “Kentucky Woman”. Respect. He did all right as a solo artist too. Legend has it that (insert incredible percentage of your choice, starting at 80) of New Zealand homes had a copy of his 1972 live album Hot August Night. Here he is performing “I Am, I Said” in 1971.

Sample lyric:

“I am,” I said

 To no one there

 And no one heard at all

 Not even the chair

And here he is performing “Holly Holy”, maybe the best Jewish gospel song ever before Leonard Cohen got the idea:

Monitor: Home Paddock