One’s irony meter hes jest blewn ahp.

The world’s 19th richest woman has used her Christmas address to urge care for the needy.

Beng!

Schism at Squidmas.

Worship not the squid, but instead the belemnite which died for our fins. Worshippers of the squid are heretics, mere protistants.

And the best atheist Christmas pun 2007

goes to Mano Singham for Reason’s Greetings.

Oscar Peterson has died.

The world is a worse place.

If you haven’t heard Porgy and Bess (top tracks Summertime and There’s a boat that’s leavin’) or Night Train both from the Oscar Peterson Trio, your musical life has a void.

His own favourite recording was ‘Live at the Blue Note’, and if that is the late master’s opinion, get that too. His playing was beyond the compass of my poor words. Just go and buy it. You won’t regret it.

At this time, thoughts turn to the infinite, the ineffable and the inunderstandable.

Things like where did we all come from, how did the universe get here, who lit the sun? On pilgrimmage to scienceblogs all was revealed: the Ceiling Cat did it.

It’s as good an explanation as any that will be read out in churches this week.

Update: good grief, there’s a whole bible of it!

Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy film.

I am reluctant to criticise the artistic endeavours of others, but sometimes an event so heinous comes along that one just has to roll one’s sleeves up and lay principles to one side.

Do you remember that epiphany? That moment when the few words your eyes passed over in a book, or you heard spoken from a radio or TV made the glory of language rich to your mind? For me it was in a terraced house on Charlestown Road, Glossop, Derbyshire, England and the occasion was the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy in its purest, original form. Straight from the ferment of genius that was Douglas Adams’ mind, through BBC Radio 4 with the help of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop. And it was sweet.

It was by modern production standards cheap, clunky and poor, but the ideas, the language and the sheer joyous torrent of anarchic fun were entrancing.

The film was on TV tonight, and I made the mistake of switching to watch it…utter, utter, profound, maggot-eating crap. Whichever Hollywood studio did it should be bombed, none of the actors should work again, the screenwriters should be smeared in honey and staked out over an ants nest, the financiers torn apart by wild horses roped to each limb. I’m sorry, I was slack on the actors they should have the flesh torn from their bodies by maddened wool combers, like Saint Blaise. They must have known they were massacring a masterpiece.

And as for Steven Fry voicing The Book. I am saddened. We are all allowed our lapses (hell, I done a few!) but this man did Jeeves well but the Book was…

‘Before Al Gore there was David King’,

so said a director of BP.  David King is no longer the government’s chief scientific adviser, and this interview in The Times is a good one.  He leaves large and important shoes to fill.

Clegg on Today and education.

Now we’re gettin’ some place*. I like his way of dealing with interviewers (see Nick Clegg excels on Today): occasionally using a one-word reply which actually answers the question. In world of voters screaming ‘you lying bullshitter!’ at spittle-flecked radios (and, I suppose TVs) when politicians are interviewed I think he’s onto a winner. Very much in contrast to prime minister Gordon Brown whom I suspect can’t lie straight in bed and never, ever answers a straight question. I hope he is defenstrated by his party right soon and with contumely.

On education, I come from a dynasty of teachers and I asked all three (now retired) what percentage of kids of left their schools not reading. ‘None,’ was the answer. Some were slow readers, but all functionally literate. Two of them, interestingly started their teaching career in the ‘backward class’ (as it was politically incorrectly called then) teaching the real thickoes to (among other things) read. Now helped by progress, testing, initiatives, testing, literacy hours and more initiatives, 40,000 children leave English primary schools each year with a reading age four years behind their actual age: that’s about 9%.

How did they do it back in the dynasty’s day? ‘We heard children read for a lot of the day. Whatever you were doing, you had a child at your side reading.’ And at the end of the day, they had story time. Distressingly old-fashioned: a teacher reading a good story out from a book for the last fifteen minutes of the day. I spent some time in my mother’s school: her class would have invaded Poland if the reward was an extra few pages from The Hobbit. It’s not a panacea, but experience and recent results suggest there’s something in it.

* Louis Armstrong: I love jazz. ‘Take a bass….nah we’re gittin some place…’

God wrestle ye merry gentlemen…

Dateline Whitby: the last Friday before Christmas is known as ‘Black-eyed Friday’.

Neanderthal males from Middlesbrough descend en masse to drink long and deep of our noble Yorkshire beers. Then, in this cradle of learning, this wellspring of Christianity, fount of explorers, this birthplace of noble minds they celebrate the season of goodwill and peace to all men by leathering seven shades of crap out of one another.

Welcome Whitby’s new top cop

Inspector Dave Barf.

The gags are just too obvious to be bothered with.