(no subject)

Okay, my humbugging was a bit previous. I am warm again. A nice man came around and disconnected my cooker, albeit for money. He was rather more middle-class than you might normally associate with the term “gasman”. He kept mentioning the previous job he had been doing for “this chap” round the corner, we spent most of the time talking about Asterix and Tintin, and when I said I was going downstairs for a minute his reply was “Righto, skipper”.

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Notwithstanding the fact that chiller saw the same programme as me and posted about this first, I tentatively suggest that we already have a Quote of the Year (or at least easily top five):

”Every 18 minutes a child dies from a landmine. It used to be every 22, so it’s getting better.”

Heather Mills McCartney

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And, via judge_death, I urge the reader to meditate on this Japanese proverb:

Curry aji no unko ka unko aji no curry ka docchi ga ii?
Which is better: curry-flavoured shit, or shit-flavoured curry?

MI6 mice

I found John Bidde in his 12th-floor office chuckling to himself. He was analysing a plan proposed by Technical and Operations Support to bug the penthouse flat of a suspected Russian [intelligence] officer in Lisbon. One of the Lisbon station secretaries had rented the flat three stories below in the same ancient, rickety apartment block and TOS proposed to use this as a base for the recording equipment. They had identified a means of breaking into the loft above the target’s flat, and reckoned that it would be easy to find a suitable place to mount and hide a small microphone. Unfortunately, for technical reasons, it would not be possible to link the microphone and recording equipment with the normal radiolink and they would need to be physically connected with a fine wire, running from the loft to the secretary’s flat below. The only means of hiding it from view was to thread it down a convoluted drainpipe which wound its way down the building.

After experimenting with various mechanical crawling devices which had all proved unable to work their way down the pipes, TOS had hit upon the idea of using a mouse. They reckoned that by leaning out of one of the loft skylights under cover of darkness, using a fishing rod, they could dangle the mouse, harnessed to the end of the fishing line, into the top end of the drainpipe. They would then lower it down the vertical section of the pipe to the first right-angled bend. From there the mouse could scurry along the horizontal part of the pipe to the next vertical section and so on, down to the bottom of the pipe where it could be recaptured. The wire could then be attached to the fishing line and pulled through the pipe.

Clandestine night-time trials of the murine delivery system on the Century House drainpipes, using three white mice borrowed from the chemical and biological weapons research establishment at Porton Down, proved reasonably successful. One mouse, nicknamed Micky, was a natural and scampered along the pipes enthusiastically. A second, Tricky, occasionally tried to climb back up the fishing line when dangled, but once in the pipe was reasonably competent. The last mouse, christened Thicky, had kept trying to climb back up the pipes and so had been sent back to Porton Down to continue his secret work on chemical-weapons antidotes. Micky and reserve Tricky were to fly covertly to Portugal in [an RAF] Hercules because they could not be overtly taken out of the country without special export licences.

Bidde’s dilemma was whether it was ethically correct to recruit animals to use in spying operations. “Thicky is probably lying bleary-eyed at the bottom of a jamjar by now,” giggled Bidde, and the fate of Micky and Tricky is less unpleasant, so I guess it is ethical.” He squiggled an approval at the bottom of the minute and placed it in his burgeoning out-tray. I later learnt that Micky and Tricky carried out their mission successfully, were returned to the UK in the C-130, given an honourable discharge from duties at Porton Down, and went into comfortable retirement in a TOS secretary’s London flat. The fate of Thicky remains a state secret.

Richard Tomlinson, The Big Breach

(no subject)

The new Asterix book is out in English, and it's dreadful. To someone who grew up on the originals it's desperately sad to see a still-brilliant draftsman insist on shafting his own once-great franchise, due to either senile delusion or a decision to kill the damn thing off once and for all.

The book features a cute purple alien called Toon from a planet whose name is an anagram of Walt Disney, enlisting the help of the village in fending off the attacks of another kind of alien clearly meant to represent Manga cartoons. Also included: clone-robots with the face of Arnold Schwarzenegger but dressed as Superman. It doesn't work as satire, comedy, literature or even a constructive use of paper.

It honestly couldn't be worse if the next title in the series was this:

Not the face

Last week’s episode of The Professionals (on the esteemed Men & Motors channel) featured two of British TV’s least convincing “heavies” ever:


Him off Acorn Antiques

and


Him out of Eastenders who’s so transcendently bad that watching him act is the equivalent of dropping half a pound of industrial-strength mushrooms and then being locked in an abbatoir

Deleted scene

Off-topic rant cut from last week's ID cards post

The Tory Earl (tautology, there) of Northesk questioned the Government's apparent overconfidence in the ID card legislation.

The Earl of Northesk: [The Government’s wording] asserts without qualification that the register will be secure and reliable. I… do not question the desirability of this, but simply to say it is so does not make it so.

The fuddy-duddy fool. You can tell this man's never used the word "strategic" in cold blood. Of course saying it is so makes it so: set a target and your work is done. “Last year we spent £8 billion on Initiative A!” “Did it get any results?” “Yes, we set loads of targets!” “Did you meet any of them?” “Hmm? Can't talk now, we're launching Initiative B!”