Hootenanny state

So, what’s your ghastliest ever New Year’s Eve experience?

Book face

One of the more delectably useless features of LibraryThing is the author gallery function, which arrays portraits of the people who wrote the books in your library, in alphabetical order. This can throw up a few rather startling lookalikes – as distinct from lookunalikes – adjacent to each other. Who’da thunk that Anthony Beevor and Frédéric Beigbeder would be so similar; or Malcolm Bradbury and André Breton; Ian McEwan and Roger McGough? The only problem is that now I don’t want to split up these unlikely twins, which means I’ll probably never sample from the wells of Aphra Behn, Wallace Breem or Leslie McFarlane. Sorry.

Sproutrock, etc

Mourning has broken

I’ve posted this in several locations today, initially in response to Peter Oborne’s article on the Telegraph site, where none of the marmalade-flecked tweedbots complained about it, so I guess they approve. It does seem to be ideologically consistent, if nothing else. You can sign the petition here.

Since Lady Thatcher was renowned for “rolling back the frontiers of the State”, I find the notion of a State funeral grossly inappropriate. Could the event not be funded by private enterprise? I’m sure the financial institutions and utilities companies that did so well from her policies would compete furiously for the right to have their logos emblazoned on the coffin and the backs of the pallbearers; and perhaps advertising hoardings could be set up along the route of the procession. The minister in charge of the service would be expected to utter a few kind words about the generosity of these supporters alongside the conventional “ashes to ashes” stuff.

The mourners themselves could be asked to chip in, with the scale of their contributions reflecting their prominence in the service: big donors at the front, plucky constituency stalwarts in a more modest position; the relationship between party donations and awards of peerages, MBE’s, etc could act as a model.

I'm sure it’s what she would have wanted.

Pining

Pretty soon it will be possible to concoct bespoke entertainments based on the preferences you express – possibly inadvertently – through your behaviour on Facebook, Amazon, iTunes and the like. A book or movie or piece of music will be cobbled together on the basis that on Monday you retweeted three jokes about Kim Jong-Il and once put a Jeanette Winterson novel on your wishlist. In fact, with the release of Tran Anh Hung’s Norwegian Wood, the process might have been perfected already. It’s based on a novel by Haruki Murakami, who gave this blog its name; it’s set in Japan, a country for whom I hold a befuddled affection; it stars Rinko Kikuchi, by far the best thing in the tiresome Babel; the director was responsible for the excellent The Scent of Green Papaya; and the music is by one of the blokes out of Radiohead, about whom I’ve written two and a bit books. Yesterday, I finally got round to watching it.

And it was... all right, I guess, but could have been half an hour shorter. I think the software may need tweaking.

That was the year that was

One of the five or six people left behind at the BBC after the move to Salford asked me quite some time ago whether 2011 was One Of Those Big News Years. Here’s what I said, even though both Vaclav Havel and Kim Jong-Il were ill-mannered enough to croak the wrong side of my deadline.

PS: Actually, I was wrong. It was 1848.

And she had to unlearn the trumpet as well

I was going to say something about Dan Rebellato’s magnificent evisceration of the Daily Mail’s half-witted theatre critic Quentin Letts, but there really is nothing I can add: just read the bloody thing. Similarly, I’m not sure what needs to be said regarding the story, reported in The Sun so it must be true, of the Dorset woman who has spent 12,000 of your Earth pounds in her efforts not to look like someone who used to be in EastEnders. One does wonder if there’s a market for a lookunalike agency, which will hire out people who don’t look like George Clooney or Fiona Bruce or my favourite Holy Roman Emperor, Charles the Bald, so they can hover at your party or corporate event, revelling in their antidoppelganger status. Over to you; who would you most like not to resemble?

Friction burns

 

Following my passing comment about the potential empathy between Asian cultures and punk rock, news arrives from the Indonesian province of Aceh that a large group of skinny-jeaned wrong ’uns have been rounded up and sent for “re-education”. And at around the same time, The Protester become’s TIME’s Person of the Year, and Christopher Hitchens goes to Stage V. Tonight I shall eat oysters, and raise a glass to the grit.