Tony Blair & Net Zero
Disgraced former prime minister and war criminal Tony Bliar (sic) has called for a rethink – policies based on reducing fossil fuel production and consumption are, he says, “doomed to fail”. When will he ever shut up and go away? Instead, up he keeps popping, but no one has asked him to. Harold Pinter repeatedly described him as a war criminal and in 2010 George Monbiot set up a public ‘bounty’ fund to encourage Bliar’s citizens’ arrest for war crimes, which will remain open for as long as he lives or until he is officially prosecuted.
So what of this latest? It would be terrible would it not if instead of speaking up for the benefit of the country, the planet, he did so because of his own vested interests. He would surely not be stupid enough to do so in a way that was completely obvious. It’s safe to assume he is not a stupid man, so clearly he simply doesn’t care. I have often had to remind myself of the difference between “venal” and “venial”. “Venial” describes those sins which are bad but not as bad as mortal sins. The Cambridge English Dictionary defines “venal” as a willingness “to behave in a way that is not honest or moral in exchange for money”. So that defines both the word and the character of Bliar himself.
George Monbiot to the frontline again, revealing that Bliar works as a lobbyist for Petrosaudi, the oil production company, “earning Tony Blair Associates £41,000/month, plus 2% of any deal he brokered.” Two Petrosaudi executives were convicted in a Swiss court last year for embezzlement of $1.8 billion from Malaysia’s sovereign wealth fund. The judge was moved to describe the executives as “obscenely greedy”. Bliar should surely be held to account for this too, for non-disclosure of personal interests when making public statements.
As an aside, I found myself actually shouting and swearing at Keir Starmer on the tv screen last night, with his new catchphrase warning us of “an island of strangers” whatever that is supposed to mean.
Maths is Fun
I found a pdf on my computer which I seem to have downloaded years ago and promptly forgotten about. Oddly it lacks a title-page but I have established that it is The Mathemagician and Pied Puzzler: A Collection in Tribute to Martin Gardner, 1999, edited by Elwyn R. Berkelamp and Tom Rodgers. It’s a collection of puzzles and mathematical musings, most of which are way, way beyond me, but there is a section which I was able to understand and enjoy. Gardner’s interests did not preclude serious research, but he loved magic tricks and he was keen to expose charlatans using tricks to convince people of the supernatural. There have been three gatherings of the world’s foremost mathematicians, puzzlers and magicians in his honour. He was a humanist who travelled light through life, admiring in particular Lewis Carroll, a professional mathematician who loved to incorporate maths and logic puzzles in his books, such as his invention of the game of word ladders, and Frank L. Baum, author of the Oz books (The Wizard of Oz and a surprising number of others) and was admired in turn by C.P. Snow, W.H. Auden, Jacob Bronowski, Vladimir Nabokov and many others. He was a huge influence on his colleagues in ‘mathemagic’.
Stewart Lamie contributes “Card Game Trivia”. Tarot cards first appeared in Europe in the fourteenth century, soon banned by the church, the four suits we know today were a sixteenth-century creation “to represent the ideal French national, unified (feudal) society as promoted by Joan of Arc: Nobility, Aristocracy, Peasants, the Church (Spades, Diamonds, Clubs, Hearts).” Symmetric backs and fronts of cards were designed to prevent cheating in the eighteenth century, jokers in the nineteenth century “by a Mississippi riverboat gambler to increase the odds of getting good Poker hands” and Lamie himself devised two-sided cards and games in the twentieth century.
Michael W. Ecker writes of “mathematical black holes” in the form of numbers behaving in astonishing ways (which I can understand). One of these is the Sisyphus String, whereby if you take any number and count the number of even digits, odd digits and total number of digits, write those down and repeat the process, you will always arrive eventually at 123, which repeats when the same process is applied again to it – a black hole.
Similarly, if you take any whole number and write it out in English words, count the number of characters and repeat, the black hole number will always be 4.
Narcissistic numbers (what a great concept) are more complicated, being numbers which are equal to the sum of the cubes of their digits (there are only four such natural numbers). Take any multiple of 3, take the cube of each digit and add them together and repeat. This time the black hole number is 153.
Dad’s Army
I watched Dad’s Army on the BBC which showed rarely seen footage and the 2016 film with the stellar cast of Toby Jones, Bill Nighy, Tom Courtenay, Michael Gambon, Bill Paterson, Catherine Zeta-Jones over the course of the weekend. I had seen the film before: it is totally respectful to the original and very, very funny. The fairly recent remake of the three lost episodes I found less of a success, but it wasn’t terrible. I never tire of Dad’s Army. Only Jones and Nighy surely could match the comedy genius of Arthur Lowe and John Le Mesurier. Gambon is a superb Godfrey too. I took two nuggets of pure comedy gold (although how to cap “Would you mind awfully falling in”?), which I am probably paraphrasing slightly here. Firstly, the platoon are putting on a show about the history of Britain, celebrating the country’s victories over the centuries. Mainwaring includes the invasions of Julius Caesar and William the Conqueror. Wilson points out that “we lost those”. “We’ll have none of that sort of talk Wilson.” There’s a very similar line in one of the original episodes when Wilson concedes that the Germans do make “awfully good clocks”. “We’ll have none of that sort of talk round here.” Secondly when Mainwaring is approached by the vicar to ask him if he will be vacating the village hall by one o’clock when it has been booked by a troupe of morris dancers, the captain replies, “Well if we don’t they will just have to prance around outside. There is a war on you know.”
My brother told me of another classic which I have not seen. Godfrey is briefly left in charge of a couple of German prisoners. When Mainwaring returns that they have of course escaped. “What happened Godfrey?” “Well sir, one of them rather wanted to use the lavatory, and after all we’re not barbarians.”
Musical Irritations
There are some songs which I have heard too often, specifically some of those which tend to be sung at pub closing time. I cannot claim that I am not guilty of joining in in the past, but never with the awful “Hi Ho Silver Lining”. Others are “New York, New York”, the seven dwarves “Heigh ho, heigh ho”, “American Pie” (although the full lyrics are pretty good if not Dylanesque), and “Auld Lang Syne”. I am not sure many know what the lyrics of the last one actually mean. I didn’t. We sing the Robert Burns version. The three words literally mean “old long since”. Hmm. Well it’s about old times fondly remembered anyway. My other chief musical gripe is with singers at live gigs who engage in long call and response sequences with the audience, often consisting only of repeated “Oi, yoi, yoi, yoi” or similar. There’s a story about, I think, Robbie Williams, who instructed the audience to sing “this one for me”. The alleged response from the crowd was, “I paid £150 pounds for my ticket, sing it your effing self.” I’m obviously not against audience engagement but even some of the great live bands succumb to the call and response temptation. Mind you, I ‘m not keen on clapping along either (perhaps mostly because I usually get it wrong). I’m fine with drum solos which irritate some, I love them actually. Neil Peart from Rush is in my view the master of them all. The current Rolling Stones drummer, Steve Jordan (this is a Keith Richards worshipping household) I have noticed propels the sound forward, whereas the late Charlie Watts always used to play, he said, slightly behind the beat, which gave the Stones much of the uniqueness of their sound. Jordan is doing a fine job and was anointed by Watts before he died. Otherwise surely the choice would have required at least a conclave.
A few more songs to add on: “My Way”, “A Horse with No Name”, “Delilah” and “I’m a Believer”.
Movies I won’t watch
In a vaguely similar vein, for reasons best known to myself I made a short list of film categories which, these days at least, hold zero appeal for me: time travel, films with too many time jumps, films about cowboys, Vikings, the supernatural, cavemen, horror films and hospital dramas of any kind. I can’t be doing with films within films either, or about film-making. I watched my last horror film a long time ago – they all seem to be basically the same, and don’t generally like war movies, although Guy Ritchie’s The Covenant and Fury were recent exceptions.
Michelle Obama
How we long for the Obamas now. People of great integrity and wisdom. Michelle Obama has been lambasted and derided by the media for her admission that she had needed therapy after her daughters left home to cope with their absence. I sympathise completely. I always was a bit of a Peter Pan and I am guilty of that for my children too, although of course the aim of parenting is, ultimately, to make yourself redundant. I am glad that such a respected and wonderful woman has highlighted the mixed emotions of pride and grief I was made to feel were abnormal when my daughters went off to university.
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