Anthony

Where have the pianos gone?

It’s perhaps a slightly random thought, but I was listening to a piece of a ragtime music just now, and it occurred to me that you never see a piano in a pub these days. You find them in London bars sometimes – usually covered in pint-glass marks – but most landlords would no more think of having a piano in the pub than they would think of having a chamber orchestra.

This is not me being an old git – I don’t ever remember seeing a piano in a pub, with the possible exception of the Angler’s Retreat at Marsworth – I just wonder where the pianos that the cheery cockneys crowded round in the Blitz have gone. Is there a corner of the country where you can still find a piano in a pub? And if so, does anyone ever play it?

A face that would…

The Stopped Clocks Foundation is dedicated to the worthy cause of getting all the stopped church clocks, town hall clocks and other public timepieces going again. Send them your stopped clock pictures. (via BoingBoing)

WatchWatch

In the old days, single-issue nutters used to write letters in green ink. Now they are better funded, and they all seem to be called SomethingWatch.

Take MigrationWatch. This is a campaign group that fights against immigration using Daily Mail “Britain is full” arguments. It is not officially associated with a political party, but I think it’s safe to say their membership doesn’t overlap with that of the Workers Revolutionary Party.

Their views, and their tissue-thin pretence of impartiality, are summed up in a paragraph from their homepage:

Migrationwatch is not “anti immigration” but we do believe that the present levels of immigration, the highest in our history, are making Britain overcrowded and are changing the nature of our society.

Another preacher of that old-time Thatcherism is Transportwatch, a fairly new organisation dedicated to concreting over railways and making them into lovely, lovely roads.

The intellectual honesty and impartiality of this organisation (which seems to be more or less a one-man band) can be shown in their use of statistics. Their stock in trade is to compare apples and oranges, and my favourite examples are that roads (3,650 deaths a year) are safer than rail (10 or so deaths a year) because:

There are more deaths on all railways, if you include trespassers, than there are on the roads, if you only count motorways; and
There are more deaths per passenger mile on all railways than there are on rural bus routes.

But it’s OK. When TransportWatch get their way, Motorway Coaches will replace trains, and will be much faster over journeys of less than 80 miles. I look forward to the building of a motorway to my rural station in Sussex.

In the beginning

What with the fuss at the moment about creationism in schools, it’s interesting to remember a strong anti-creationist lobbying effort in the UK a couple of years back, led by … er … the Bishop of Oxford.

Who says iPods are destroying the social fabric?

Well, no-one really. But this trippy movie (5Mb, Quicktime of course) might make you wonder what else they’re doing. (from the unhealthily obsessed people of Gizmodo).

And Walls is Sllaw

It’s an old post, but you can never be reminded too often of the short hop between God and pork product. (le poulet noir)

Whole hazelnuts, oh!

ITV’s show Vote for Me – a sort of pol idol, where a three-person panel quizzes people who want to stand as MPs – has been shunted to a graveyard slot at 11 p.m., but is still a fine example of down-the-pub politics. Notable horror: Rodney Hylton-Potts, the soi-disant cabbies’ friend, whose policy is to reduce the population of the UK by 30% through ending immigration and (all together now) leaving the EU.

The story of waves

Following on from the terrible tsunami, the New Yorker recalls a fascinating and beautifully-written article from the 1950s about waves, both regular and tidal.

The Holy Grail chatter that

The Holy Grail chatter that has resulted from the Da Vinci code has spread to an unlikely location – the county of my birth. The Guardian has an article in today’s supplement about claims that the Holy Grail itself is buried somewhere beneath the sleepy market town of Hertford. There is a slightly more manic article here.

Bush fatigue

I think I may have Bush fatigue. I’ve just been reading a post and comments on MetaFilter, and I wasn’t able to work up any sort of outrage or disgust at all, even though the US administration is flying a kite about indefinite imprisonment without trial. It wasn’t that I approved, just that I wasn’t horrified that a civilised country could act that way.

Perhaps the Bush administration has gone ultrasonic, and passed beyond the normal range of outrage, so that normal human beings can’t hear it any more.