Author: James Aylett

• I believe for every drop of rain that falls, a flower grows.
• I believe I can eat three Shredded Wheat for breakfast.
• I believe the Conservatives will win the next general election.
• I believe in miracles.

As reported by Footlights and by James Bachman, Harry passed away earlier this month; I only found out this morning, and today is colder for it.

I was going to write a quick entry about life imitating The West Wing in the announcement today of the first case of BSE in the United States, but I haven’t had time to do the research to do a proper comparison, so you’ll have to just imagine what I might have written.

Even by our sporadic publishing history, this will probably be a fallow period; you certainly shouldn’t expect anything from me until next week sometime. I can’t speak for James, but as he’s awfully busy I wouldn’t hold out much hope.

This week’s edition of The Friday Thing has an article about BBC’s The Big Read which conjectures that everyone who voted for Ulysses (#78) actually mean the cartoon.

I actually have a copy of Joyce’s book, and I’m happy to say that it belongs in the part of my collection that I never intend to read, along with War And Peace, Frankenstein, and a book I bought in New York while making a film called How To Make People Like You In 60 Seconds Or Less (I’m pretty certain the first thirty seconds are “burn this book”).

The cartoon, however, I have fond memories of (refreshed of course by listening to the theme tune at TV Cream). Its playful adventures, with some vague moral dimension, were a lot more enjoyable than, say, Tom and Jerry. Plus, the nerd inside me kind of liked the not-terribly-subtle naming rip-offs.

Of course, by comparison with some of the stuff around now – indeed, most of the stuff around ever – Ulysses 31 is crap. But then so are most books, and perhaps this is where the BBC ultimately went wrong – who cares what books people like? Most of what’s read is rubbish, because most of what’s written is rubbish. The only way of feeling in the slightest bit proud of mankind’s artistic outpouring is to consider all of it, not just one medium. For every bad, there is a good – Henry Moore balances the Sistene Chapel, the Flumps makes up for Dave Dee, Dozy, Beaky, Mick and Titch, and for every Mills and Boon novel used to build a motorway, we’ve got another bar of Bach’s St Matthew Passion. Is Lord Of The Rings truly the best book of all time? Of course not – but it’s useful, because otherwise we’d have to spend more time thinking about Universal Soldier III: Unfinished Business.

Metro has a fantastically incomprehensible headline today: “Teachers flunk test boycott poll”. After reading the article, I managed to figure out what the hell it meant, although it still wasn’t easy figuring out which words were verbs and which nouns. “Teachers flunk test”, I read, before being stumped by “boycott”. Maybe there’s a missing comma, I wondered: “Teachers flunk test, boycott poll” – but no, Mr Doug McAvoy of the NUT seemed pretty happy (if stolid and resolute) – his members aren’t failing any assessments.

The headline writer was clearly trying to be clever – ooh look, we can talk about teachers flunking things – but completely missed that the result firstly uses two pairs of words that mean similar things, and secondly has the object noun at the end of the sentence, after two auxiliary nouns. Why no one looked blankly at them while it was being typeset I have no idea.

The trouble is, it’s difficult to come up with anything significantly better. “Teachers’ test boycott poll flunked” has many of the same problems, but at least makes it clear what the verb is. “Teachers skip test ballot” is the best I can manage; it’s almost impossible to misunderstand, accurately describes what the article’s actually about – but isn’t nearly so zingy (although it does still get a teacher joke in). Any other attempts?

On the subject of headlines, The Sun today has “Klum to be mum”, which is simply beautiful.

There are many things I no doubt could – and possibly even should – write about the final capture of Saddam Hussein, following a six month campaign by the coalition forces to find an Identikit with a big enough beard.

Two things, however, strike me:

• Time crowed about the capture, along with everyone else, in an edition on the shelves today – but dated 22nd December. How easy it must be for them to have an extra week to get their front page done and still be bang up to date! Pity the cover looks shit, really.
• Saddam is denying he had WMD, which I’m inclined to believe. However he’s making matters worse for himself by denying that he did anything else wrong at all. Come the trial – in Iraq, in the Hague, wherever – I thoroughly expect him to still be denying having Kurds shot (no – they were dangerous traitors who would undermine the entire region), having Shias shot (no – more traitors), and having horrible gilted faux-rococo furniture in his palaces (who knows – perhaps they’re made out of traitors, to ensure the maximum damnation for their immortal souls?).

Perhaps there are some things we should never find out. The idea of knowing for sure that Time Warner have access to time travel is a profoundly worrying one.

Yesterday I started using a new toothbrush, having noticed recently that the clever little blue bristles in my old one had started fading away. I’d been pretty impressed by this application of twelfth century dying techniques in the modern era, but as it turns out such innovation is really just the beginning of where our toothbrushes are going.

My new one is definitely Space Age: bristles in three different directions, as many colours (I’m hoping it’s still the blue whose fading will tell me to buy a new one), and sleek, curved and sensual, like a sex toy for your mouth. Erm … like a sex toy. I think back to the toothbrushes I had when I was a child, and feel sorry for their simplicity, their boring tightly-packed bristles, their sheer prosaic utility. If right now even our most humdrum hygiene equipment is becoming exciting to look at, who knows what the future holds? Shaving mirrors with built in stock tickers, soap dispensers connected to the Internet so they can order refills automatically, perhaps even aerosol deodorant that doesn’t freeze your skin – truly the world of Fast Moving Consumer Goods has never been more interesting.

However it’s not just the toothbrush itself that has become advanced. The packaging too has progressed from the simple bits of cardboard I am used to. It’s possible that there is cardboard in there somewhere, under the layers of plastic, glue, and something unidentifiable that looks cool and shiny, but is almost impossible to get into. Perhaps the real future, thanks to a conspiracy at OralB, is that only those who already have very strong teeth will be able to use toothbrushes.

I said that yesterday I started using a new toothbrush; this is a lie. By the time I’d fought my way through its container, it was gone twelve, and I’d almost resorted to a hacksaw.

I can’t hope to rival James’ entry for sheer bile, but a question has been bubbling to the surface here at the Uncertainty Division, namely how to deal with our cumbersome name.

I once knew a London-based music outfit (with hestitation I’ll call them a band) called Noise Union who, after some consideration and a few gigs at places like The Marquee, dropped the first word to make themselves simply ‘Union’. By analogy, some people try to call us simply The Division which, while making sense (being shorter, and taken directly from our name), makes me think of annoying German industrial groups (probably musical, definitely involving metal).

There are some other options, none of which are particularly nice:

• UD – looks nice as a logo, completely useless as a name, as you can’t pronounce it without sounding like a caveman
• The Div – makes me think we’re in some weird gang
• Improbable People – not strictly an abbreviation, but I thought I’d mention it because we’ve been called it in the past

If only we’d gone with our original name, Old Man Harris’ Card Shop, we could call ourselves, simply, Card shop – although that smacks altogether too much of Spontaneity Shop for my liking. Dang, this naming thing is difficult.

Anyway, let the suggestions roll in.

I was trying to improvise some beat poetry as I was out walking, but all I managed to come up with (beyond an idea that Tony Blair, Dorian Gray-like, has Cherie age in his place) was the following:

“A girl with a star in her eye;
Her ninja boyfriend clearly doesn’t like her very much at all.”

Apparently, this sort of thing would never have happened at the White House.

So said a senior figure in the Bush security cabal, quoted on the front page of one of the newspapers this morning – but damn me if I can’t figure out which one now I come to write it up. Anyway, the point is that they are wrong, wrong, wrong. And someone who is so stunningly arrogant they think they can get away with a lie like that – or is so stunningly stupid they don’t think to check their facts before opening their mouth – seriously thought they’d be allowed to deploy miniguns in London? As in the things you stick on tanks to kill people? Oh, I see, it’s the nice miniguns, which merely protect presidents from the dangers of people who don’t agree with them. I feel much better.