Hunting Mr Big

Sean O’Neill argues in The Times today that the police have neglected tackling organised crime in favour of foiling terror plots despite the higher human cost of the drugs trade in Britain. The article (in the print edition, at least) is headlined: “Whatever happened to the fight against the Mr Bigs?”

What indeed? The home addresses of the Mr Bigs in Britain are public knowledge. A search of the electoral roll shows that Mr Neville F Big lives at Glen Lyon Court, Cumbernauld, Glasgow (with Mrs Anne Big) and Mr Mircea C Big lives in Austin Street, Northampton (with Mrs Cleopatra Big). Why (oh why) do the police do nothing about them?

Pop quiz

A quick quiz: Natalia Goncharova is the most successful woman in what field?

a) uneven bars in gymnastics

b) longest service as a prima ballerina

c) youngest woman player to qualify for Wimbledon

d) creator of most expensive painting by a female artist, or

e) most munitions manufactured for the USSR during the Second World War

Yes, you got it. It’s d). Or, perhaps, like me, you didn’t.

I was so surprised that I didn’t know who the most expensive female artist was that I assumed she must be a blip in an otherwise notable top six. Not really, it transpires. Depending on your household, I don’t think that Mary Cassatt, Georgia O’ Keeffe, Berthe Morisot or Agnes Martin are necessarily household names either. Cassatt and Morisot were Impressionists. O’ Keeffe painted flowers that look like vaginas and Agnes Martin was a minimalist or abstract expressionist, depending on what you want to call a series of painted grids.

I think I have heard of O’ Keeffe and I dimly remember seeing some stuff by Martin at Tate Modern once, but I couldn’t, when I first read their names, recall the titles or even visualise any of their works. Indeed, the only woman in the top six who could be considered to have stellar appeal is Frida Kahlo, the moustachioed Mexican known for her bushy-eyebrowed self-portraits (and, to a lesser extent, having an affair with Leon Trotsky).

Everyone knows that women have been historically underrepresented in visual art, but I was still suprised to learn that you have to scroll though 84 men in the bestseller list until you get to Goncharova. She is the only woman in the top 100.

The full list of most expensive female artists, according to Skate Press, goes like this:

Ranking*	Artist	Number of works in Top 1000	Value of works in Top 1000, USD mln.
85	Natalia Goncharova	2	15.36
105	Frida Kahlo	2	10.68
137	Mary Cassatt	1	6.20
139	Georgia O’Keeffe	1	6.17
164	Berthe Morisot	1	5.17
179	Agnes Martin	1	4.74

Fact

Gil Scott Heron, the performance poet best known for The Revolution Will Not Be Televised (see here for a highbrow analysis of the song) is not the only high achiever in the Heron dynasty. His father, also called Gil, was the first black footballer to play for Glasgow Celtic. His debut, in 1949, was a minor revolution in itself.

It wasn’t televised.

Minimalist joke

What?

Poll pot

Not everyone in PR is stupid, in the same way that not all journalists are lazy and not all estate agents would crap in a cup and attempt to pass it off as chocolate mousse. But occasionally there are examples of stupidity in PR so rank that I’m prepared to just accept the stereotype as fact.

A certain employee of Results PR, for instance, conformed to type when he sent out a press release on behalf of an online discount voucher company. The company had conducted a survey and discovered that nine out of ten online shoppers were planning to use discount vouchers. Alarm bells should start ringing in your head whenever a figure of 90 per cent appears, and sure enough the final paragraph of the report confessed to an elephantine sample bias. All of the people surveyed were registered members of the discount voucher company.

The surprise is not that 90 per cent of members of a discount voucher company were planning to use discount vouchers, but that the 10 per cent who had no intention of using them bothered to reply to the survey. (It reminds me of the Sky News poll - conducted using the interactive red button on the remote control - that declared that 98 per cent of respondents intended to vote in the forthcoming general election. Who, one wonders, were the 2 per cent who thought it worth their while to influence the outcome of a Sky News poll but not have a say in who levied their taxes, oversaw their children’s education, influenced their access to healthcare or sent them to war?)

It is possible that the PR man in question is not stupid. Perhaps he knew there was a sample bias but thought that journalists would be too lazy to spot it. Or perhaps he knew journalists would spot it, but hoped that his client would not. Perhaps he knew that his client would spot it, but also knew that junking the useless research would require him to do more work.

I only hope that no journalist does use the survey. If some do, then they get the PRs they deserve.

Bad joke

I want to open a restaurant that serves only a certain type of fish. It would be called “Wholly Mackerel”.

Double word standards

I’ve always been suspicious of Scrabble. It is the Libby Purves of board games, a pastime so steeped in middle-class respectability that it could be the subject of a comic song by Tom Lehrer.

But the worst thing about it is the knowledge that at some point someone is going to put down “es” or “aa” and claim that it should be allowed because it is in the official Tournament Word List, as used in American championships.

I have a bone to pick with the compilers of the TWL. The rules on the box of Scrabble I played with as a child stated clearly that abbreviations, slang, proper nouns and offensive words were forbidden. Clearly this has been overturned at some point, but the Wikipedia entry on acceptable words states that proper nouns are still out, and that only acronyms or abbreviations that have been “regularised” (such as Awol, Radar and Scuba) are allowed.

Fair enough. Banning people from using “zoo” on the basis that it is an abbreviation of “zoological gardens” always seemed a bit harsh. But the TWL doesn’t even observe those rules. Why is “ref”, an abbreviation of “referee”, allowed? Why is Pernod, a brand of aniseed liqueur, included?

Why is “es”, the chemical symbol for einsteinium, alright when “cu”, the symbol for copper, is not? Why include “wank” but not “cack”?

How is it that I can be more of a pedant than the compilers of the TWL? This is dereliction of duty on a grand scale.

Fame

I’m gonna live forever

I’m gonna learn how to fly

It occurs to me that the opening lyrics to Fame, from Fame, are mutually exclusive. Also, it’s rather quaint that while the song starts as pure aspiration, it quickly becomes more practical. What is learning how to fly, exactly? It’s failing to fly. If you’re going to live forever, learning to fly is the last thing you should try. I suggest rewriting the song thus:

I’m gonna live forever

I’m going to invest in cryogenic suspension

Pet hate

I hate Satanists, principally because of the way their sacrificial rituals intimidate my menagerie of farmyard animals. They really get my goat.

Rules for life. Number one in an occasional series

Never engage your Tunisian barber in a conversation about capital punishment.