Trivia.

I wish someone had told me this sooner, but they didn't. But you know Q magazine, right? Well, apparently, two months ago, they were giving away a little book on the front cover: The Greatest Rock & Pop Miscellany Ever! I only discovered this on Saturday. The reason this is of particular interest to me is that I wrote about a quarter of it. So I'm sorry that I can't tell you all to rush out and buy Q and read stuff written by me, but I can tell those of you who bought it without my nagging and who haven't thrown the book away that, hey, that's me, that is. Some of it.

I wrote the bits about the Apple vs Apple legal wranglings, the bizarre rock star deaths, the Paul McCartney death clues, and the Fleetwood Mac doppelganger thing, amongst others. The rest of the book is by Gary, John, and Stuart.

Alarm.

The anti-fraud department of my bank called me this evening. So even just their introducing themselves was ominous. It turns out that they do a pretty good job of checking my account for unusual payment patterns, so spotted it pretty much immediately when someone else started using my credit card for online gambling yesterday. They blocked the payments pending verification from me, bless 'em.

I don't think anyone got my PIN, or they'd've been straight to a cash machine. And my other cards seem OK, so I don't think anyone's been at my wallet. Could always be the postman — or, more likely in our case, whoever lives at the house that the postman gives some of our mail to. (Our postman's not the brightest. He repeatedly gives us mail addressed to the petrol station up the road. We do, admittedly, have very similar addresses, but you'd think he might notice the lack of petrol pumps in our two-foot-deep front garden.) Or someone's been through our rubbish — we have a shredder, but maybe I missed something. The neighbours did spot a couple of guys hanging round the back of our house a few weeks ago; went out and threatened to set the wolves on them. That's wolves as in wolves: our next-door neighbours keep Canadian timber wolves. Beautiful animals. We had assumed that these loiterers were interested in the car or the back of the house, but, now I think about it, our bin's there too. And of course there's the Interweb. Maybe someone intercepted and decrypted a payment over Christmas. Or maybe someone hacked one of the sites that's storing my card's details. Hmm.

Bloody annoying, but kind of reassuring that the bank spotted it the moment it started.

A living, breathing document.

As we all know, one of the crap things about Britain's unwritten constitution is that various bits of the ruling class can make it up as they go along. "Oh, no," says the latest Home Secretary, invariably a bastard, "that's always been in there. I don't know what you mean. British Home Secretaries have had the right to throw your firstborn to hungry dogs since time immemorial. No, honestly. Just ask this expert from Oxford University who is one of only three people with access to a book written nine hundred years ago in Pig-Latin by a mad horseman and who definitely doesn't owe me any favours." Wouldn't it be lovely if we had a written constitution, saying things like "The Government shall never refuse a request to bugger off. We really mean it. No arguing." Oh, wouldn't it just?

Well, no. It'd be a start in the right direction, certainly, but, as our American friends will tell you, having stuff written down in plain and unambiguous language doesn't stop Home Secretaries and their ilk changing it on the fly. "The Constitution is a living, breathing document, which we must constantly reinterpret to take into account the realities of our modern age," saith the bastards. "When our founders (may they turn in their graves in peace) wrote that the government shall not infringe a citizen's right to bear arms so as to prevent tyranny, what they really meant was that the government should arm itself to the teeth and ban guns for the plebs. Oh, yes. And look here: a right to privacy! Well, I never. They really were awfully clever men, those founders of ours, writing in a right to privacy without even using the word 'privacy'. My, my. Oh, and 'privacy' means 'partially delivering a baby and then killing it', by the way."

All of which ranting is just a preamble to my saying that this guy is taking the piss:

A West El Paso man is suing his neighbors for $125,000 because he claims the dog barks nonstop. The pet's owners deny the allegations, but their lawyer says that if the dog was barking, it has a constitutional right to do so.

"I can assure you we are going to fight this case to the death. Take it all the way to the (U.S.) Supreme Court if necessary. I can honestly state that if the dog did bark at all, the dog was simply exercising his first amendment right to freedom of speech," said Monty Stevens, lawyer for the Alvarados.

Genius.

An observation.

Been watching the first series of Wonder Woman on DVD the last couple of days. Absolute grade-A comedy genius. It's 1942, and Wonder Woman is fighting Nazis! Eek!

Anyway, the weird thing is this. One of the main jokes of the series is the incredibly bad dialogue. It's preposterous stuff. But, whenever Wonder Woman discusses Nazis, as is her wont, the dialogue remains exactly the same yet ceases to be ridiculous. "The Nazis are so evil that they won't be happy until they have enslaved all the people of the free world!" That sort of thing.

That's how evil the Nazis were: they made corny dialogue sound sensible.

A thought.

It only occurred to me a couple of days ago that, in Surrey, there is effectively no plural of "mouse".

Religion's not all bad.

Rob has found these amazing new snacks:

Meet the Bible Bar — one of the greatest new products ever introduced to the Christian market. This fantastic-tasting, all natural whole food bar contains the seven foods which the Lord calls good in Deuteronomy 8:8 — Wheat, Barley, Honey, Figs, Olive Oil, Grapes, and Pomegranates. You’re going to love this first-of-its-kind nutritional bar with its refreshing, natural fruit flavor and Biblical significance.

Now, I don't always see eye-to-eye with Christianity — sure, it has all too often led to bigotry and violence and hatred and death and destruction and so on — but just look at those ingredients! I may not have tasted them yet, but I'm willing to bet that these bars taste seriously yum. By the looks of it, Deuteronomy 8:8 is one of The Bible's more sensible passages. I mean, grapes? Yum. Honey? Yum. Barley? Yum. Pomegranates? Yum.

I do hope we heathens are allowed to eat them. And I hope that the manufacturers realise that they have the ingredients of a damn fine refreshing yet highly alcoholic drink right there, just waiting to be made.

Flat-pack.

In response to my rant about our bloody dining table, Natalie the Wise's husband was revealed to the public for long enough to explain how to deal with this flat-pack stuff properly:

A typical piece of flat pack furniture, really, assembly instructions included, requires only simple hand tools plus;

Screw thread gauges,

Needle files,

Engineer’s lathe

Blow torch

A simple brazing hearth

Sump oil.

Knowledge of model engineering, gunsmithing or similar would help.

As with so many things, it seems obvious in retrospect.

In response to that post, John Costello has emailed Natalie the following:

I work for a store which sells various forms of furniture, most of which we put together, as well as the actual packs that people can take home. ... One of my various jobs is putting toether furniture for both display and sale.

....

I would say that one piece out of ten or, from some manufacturers, one piece out of five, is badly manufactured. Not just mis-allignment of holes ... but very badly out-of-wack and unusable. ... Sometimes we have to cannibalize two packages to get one piece.

I had always assumed that modern quality control was so good that my experiences with flat-pack muct be bad luck. Turns out not. Nice to know the Universe isn't out to get me. Well, not on this front, at least.

It's puzzling. Electronics manufacturers have quality control these days in the region of a handful of errors per hundred thousand units; same with car part manufacturers — at least the Japanese ones. You'd think furniture would be easier: microchips and moulded aluminium bits of internal combustion engines are, after all, quite new things, while we've had thousands of years of experience at cutting wood into different shapes and sticking them together.

No, I haven't got a point. Just puzzled, is all.

How to get girls.

On the way to work a couple of days ago, I noticed the licence-plate of the Alfa Romeo in front of us: M12 HDT. Not very special, you might think, but the owner had cunningly arranged for the plate to be printed in an italic font, with the 1 and the 2 squeezed close together to look like a capital R, resulting in:

MR HOT

If I were in charge of Alfa Romeo's marketing, I'd take a contract out on this guy.

Unless, of course, his surname really is Hot. In which case, er... hmm.

Unfit to govern.

I must admit to being rather surprised to discover that Charles Kennedy's drinking had the potential to become a scandal. I thought it had been common knowledge for at least a decade, but, our media earnestly tell us, it has been a Dreadful Secret. Judging from the shock of the presenters and reporters on the news last night, you'd think that all our news journalists were tee-total paragons of health and virtue, rather than the chain-smoking coke-snorting adulterous piss-heads they are renowned as. Anyway, I shouldn't think it'll take more than four words to settle the question of whether his drinking makes Charles Kennedy an unfit leader.

Churchill: drunk; Hitler: tee-total.

There.

Meanwhile, George Galloway has entered Celebrity Big Brother, probably the worst TV show since non-celebrity Big Brother, thus revealing once and for all that he is unfit to be an MP. Not because I dislike the show and not because he's an obnoxious lover of tyrants. As I understand the rules of Big Brother, the contestants are allowed no contact with the outside world for the duration of their stay. That includes constituents needing to get in touch with their MP. He is being paid a huge salary out of the public purse, right now, to do a job that he has voluntarily made himself incapable of doing. He can't attend Parliament, he can't listen to his constituents, he can't even read the news. We all realise that he doesn't give a damn about the people of Bethnal Green and Bow, but what about the area of the world he really cares about? If the US pull out of Iraq, he won't know. If the US invade Syria, he won't know. If the Israelis finally do what everyone says they've been doing for years and kill a million or so Arabs, he won't know. If Hamas finally succeed in their avowed aim of killing every Jew in Israel, he won't know. Whether you agree with the tiresome little git or not, it's difficult to think of any justification for not chucking him out of Parliament this time.

The things you learn.

My very early years — till I was eight — were spent in a wonderful house with the best garden ever: Orchard House, Warner Road, Ware, Hertfordshire. I only learnt a few days ago that the house was built for Mr Bird, of Bird's Custard fame. If that isn't a brush with greatness, I don't know what is.

Happy New Year, by the way.