Dear car manufacturers,
We’re not fooled by descriptions of cars as “five-door” when it is really four doors and a boot. All cars have boots. The boot is the vehicular equivalent of general studies A-level. Give it up.
Yours faithfully,
Le Poulet Noir
1. Elisabeth Schwartzkopf is remembered by a handful of opera enthusiasts for her career as a soprano, but whatever singing ability she may have had is almost entirely eclipsed by her appearance in 1958 on Desert Island Discs, a BBC radio programme that requires interviewees to choose eight songs that would be their sole entertainment on a desert island. Seven of her choices featured her own voice, and the eighth was the instrumental prelude to an opera recording in which she was the star.
2. Norman Wisdom chose five of his own songs, including the appropriately titled Narcissus.
3. Rolf Harris, cartoonist, artist, pop singer and a national treasure who recently admitted that he’d never read any Shakespeare, has appeared on Desert Island Discs twice, so he cannot claim not to understand the concept. Nevertheless, for his second outing, in 1999, he chose three songs of his own.
4. Only two people have ever chosen Gary Glitter records to take with them, and one of them was Gary himself. Paul Gadd, to call him by his real name, was interviewed in 1981, 15 years before he was convicted of abusing two underage girls.
5. And finally, Engelbert Humperdinck, the ham-faced cheese-peddler who, if placed under a metaphor grill, would be a crooning croque monsieur. He only chose one of his own records, but earns his place with his spectacular choice of book to take with him to the island: his own autobiography.
The Amish iPhone Store
If anyone knows where I can buy this track (for reasons unfathomable, I cannot buy it from the MySpace site) then I’ll be as grateful as a cockney pensioner with a cup of tea.
The Independent made a courageous decision to stand out from its rivals on the day after the Royal Wedding by using not a photograph of the event, but a drawing by Tracey Emin. The artist is not known for her drawing so much as her installations, but the Indy splashed on the image anyway despite its obvious shortcomings.
Will this become a trend, I wondered. Will Tracey become an artist-in-residence for the newspaper, composing impressionistic works of art in response to every news event? Here is a top 5 of how The Independent might have observed momentous occasions over the last 100 years, from the recent expiry of a certain terrorist mastermind to the sinking of the Titanic.
The killing of Osama bin Laden
September 11, 2001
The Tiananmen Square massacre
The US capture of Iwo Jima
The sinking of the Titanic
Has anyone else noticed, in the widely circulated photograph of President Barack Obama and his staff watching the killing of Osama bin Laden, the presence of Malcolm Tucker, the foul-mouthed spin doctor from The Thick of It, sitting behind Hillary Clinton?
Official captions suggest he is Denis McDonough, deputy national security adviser to the President. I don’t usually count myself as a conspiracy theorist, but if you base all your judgment solely on these pictures then something is certainly awry.
I should point out for legal reasons that Kate Moss is not, at least to my knowledge, a Nazi. She is merely the face of a company named after one.
Hugo Boss was a card-carrying member of the Nazi Party, and not in a he-had-to-join-up-to-save-his-business kind of way. He joined two years before Adolf Hitler came to power and remained as one while he produced uniforms for the Waffen SS.
Now, I don’t believe that children should be made to pay for the sins of their parents, and I’m aware that there are other companies still in existence that did worse than Boss’s. (BASF, for example, manufactured the gas used to murder Jews in the Holocaust.) That said, I find it profoundly weird that so much money has gone into promoting the name of a man who thought Hitler was a force for good.
I don’t know about you, but it is going to be hard for me to envision Kate Moss’s face henceforth without seeing a little moustache on her upper lip.
Two monks walk into a Dostoevsky-themed bar and order drinks. “I’ll have a Karamat,” says one.
“I’ll have a Karamat, too,” says the other.
The barman frowns apologetically. “Sorry brothers, Karamat’s off.”
I have just been shown another rather brilliant paragraph from The Times that never made it into print. It reminds me of the time that Martyn Lewis, the former BBC newsreader, appealed for there to be more upbeat stories in the press. One of the newspaper’s Scottish staff wrote:
Organisers have praised lower levels of crime at T in the Park this year, despite the attempted murder of two men as the festival drew to a close.
An acquaintance of mine, T, works for The Times. His job is to vet articles before they go into the paper and weed out howlers. His favourite paragraph of 2010 was this, which speaks for itself:
“He was unique. There will never be another Kenneth McKellar,” said the late singer’s son, Kenneth.
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