NEW WORK BY SOPHOCLES, EURIPIDES, HESIOD, OVID, ET AL.

Couldn't help but think that this story should perhaps be generating more publicity.

HITCHHIKER'S GUIDE

The movie The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy is nearly upon us. It will be released in the UK on the 28th April, and in the US on the 29th. Which we should all be very excited about, if for no other reason, then because both Stephen Fry and Alan Rickman are providing voiceover services.

If, however, you can't wait until then, the classic BBC radio series from 1981, starring lots of people called Jones is streamed on the KCRW website. Get it while it's hot.

I HAD NOT THOUGHT DEATH HAD UNDONE SO MANY

The Pope
Prince Rainier III of Monaco
Saul Bellow
Frank Conroy
Frank Perdue

And that's not even including Terri Schiavo's death from embarrassment, last week.

Aren't these things supposed to come in threes?

Also I have a cold. Have you ever had a cold in April in Southern California, when the sky is postcard blue and the sun is all warm on your skin and the scents of summer tickle your nasal hairs? It's actually quite embarrassing.

BEEF WELLINGTON

At a wedding, a table of 10 formally-dressed persons are looking over the menu. The main dish is Beef Wellington. Everyone (vegetarians excluded) is pretty happy about this. Beef Wellington is good choice for a wedding breakfast, the consensus seems to be. Everyone likes Beef Wellington. There are grumblings of satisfatcion and clinkings of champagne flutes.

Then the American asks: "but what is Beef Wellington?".
"Well it's beef, isn't it?"
"Yup. Dead cow."
"They cook it. It's cooked cow".
"Cooked in a rubber boot."
"Right."

It quickly becomes apparant that nobody actually has the faintest notion of what Beef Wellington actually is exactly. They just know that it's good. A whisper spreads around the room. What exactly is Beef Wellington? Then a chain-smoking kid with a broad Midlands accent pipes up. "It's a beef tenderloin coated in sweated-down mushrooms wrapped in a pancake, then wrapped in pastry. That's your traditional Beef Wellington, but it gets mucked about with." Eyebrows are raised. The kid can't be more than about twenty-five.

Turns out this guy's a professional chef. He can furnish you with descriptions of where exactly on the cow the tenderloin comes from. He can give you a very precise definition of the process of sweating. There's something disconcerting about hearing expressions like "sweated-down" with a Brummy accent. It sounds nasty. Much nastier than if, say, Nigella Lawson had said it. Nigella would have pronounced the 'T'. He says swe-id.

There are murmers throughout the dining area. Everyone's pretty impressed with this knowledge. People are arguing about who should have the kid on their pub quiz team. But he's oblivious. He's gone outside for another fag, checking the footy results on his phone. The people seated at the tables no longer feel quite so formally dressed.

CLENCH

An alarming new trend: a number of billboards have been appearing recently in the Los Angeles area that have been rented out by private individuals. For example one has appeared on Westwood Blvd (just a little along from the Chantico ad, as a matter of fact), which says the following:

HAPPY BIRTHDAY JULIA

LOVE YOU ALWAYS

This is accompanied by a headshot of a woman, presumably Julia, in an oval border, and is set on a wrapping-paper background of streamers, balloons, and champagne glasses. This billboard, it should be noted, is of the large, widescreen variety (circa 10 x 30), and the photograph which appears on it was evidently not taken with enlargement in mind. It is poorly lit and low-res and has been cropped out of some smiling group shot, is the impression here. The woman's face is all blurry and splotched and red.

Across the street is a similarly-sized advertisement featuring a professionally-taken image of the undeniably comely Halle Berry who is appearing in a TV movie of Zora Neale Hurston 1937 classic Their Eyes Were Watching God.

Regarding the poster, Julia must surely be experiencing mixed emotions. It must be humbling to be so well thought of that someone, or some group of people, is willing to go to all the trouble, not to mention expense, of renting a billboard and producing an aeroplane hanger-sized poster in order to pass on their good wishes. But it also must be sort of horrifying to see oneself so large, so unflatteringly rendered.

Also the sort of family (it smacks of the familial, not friends, and surely not work collegues?) that wants to plaster their well-meaning affection and gratitude all over a billboard are probably the sort of family that insist on daily, if not hourly repetitions of just how very much the other family members are valued and appreciated and loved. Which, after a while could maybe start feeling over-insistent and cloying and nightmarish, and could well raise questions about what is it about one's demeanor and general proclivities that give off the impression that one needs to be constantly reminded about their worth and loveliness.

Which is perhaps why when I see posters of this nature I am left wondering precisely what is wrong with the person, what horrific personal trauma has this person endured that needs to be compensated for with such public declarations of devotion, and wondering whether they find the whole experience as buttock-clenchingly horrific as I know I would.

HYPERBOLE

Here follows a plug for the The Hollow Men's TV show:

If you live in the United States you should really make an effort to tune into Comedy Central at 10:30pm (9:30pm central) on Thursday 10th March, for 'tis the inaugral show of a comedic phenomenon about to sweep the English-speaking world. To future generations you will be able to say that you were there, you saw the very first broadcast of the very first episode of the very first series of the most influential TV comedy that ever there was.

If you don't have access to cable, you should come round to our house. We'll be watching. Bring a bottle.

If you don't live in the United States (you fool) you can go to this website to find out what all the fuss is about.

EGG

There's an interview with Dave Eggers on The Onion AV Club website.

You can get to it by clicking this link here.

CHOCOLATE PRODUCT

On Westwood Boulevard there is a large billboard for a new Starbucks chocolate drink product that goes by the name of Chantico. The billboard says this:

To describe its chocolateness could deplete the world of adjectives

It is a source of constant amazement just how many errors they've managed to squeeze into a single sentence.

1) Presumably what it being not-described here is how chocolatey the drink is, not how chocolate it is, for which the appropriate noun would be chocolateiness.

2) 'to deplete the world of adjectives' - deplete carries the sense of using up, or lessening the amount of. Isn't the point that once they have been used to describe Chantico the adjectives no longer carry their full semantic weight, that having been used to describe the chocolateiness, they can never be used to describe anything else again; in which case one doesn't decrease the amount of possible adjectives, one merely renders them redundant. Wouldn't deprive be a more suitable verb here? Or enervate, or divest, or just anything that doesn't have the explicit sense of lessening the number of?

3) Adjectives are not the only way to describe something. e.g. The sentence "This Chantico tastes like faeces" contains two (2) nouns (of which one is proper), one (1) pronoun, one (1) preposition, one (1) verb, and zero (0) adjectives.

4) To describe its chocolateness could deplete the world of adjective, but not necessarily, we're really not quite sure. This is just weak. To describe its chocolateness would deplete the world, is surely a much better choice, from an advertising point of view, even if a shade less truthful.

Technically speaking, there is nothing grammatically wrong with any of these 'errors' (except possibly (1). But part of the issue with grammar is that there is no empirical right and wrong, it's merely the way we use language; but that means we're responsible for making the right sorts of choices that are appropriate to the given context. There is nothing wrong with the sentence in the Chantico ad, but it just seems a remarkable accomplishment to have made at least 4 bad choices in such a short space, and then to plaster it all over Los Angeles in stinking great four foot lettering.

TYPOGRAPHY

Surely it is about time that someone invented the double italic.

There is nothing more irritating than when someone writing in italics needs to emphasise something and has to resort to taking the words in question out of italics to lend the passage the relevent oomph, thus:

Don't you have anything better to think about?

This is not emphasis. This is de-emphasis. It has the exact opposite effect of what is desired. This will not do. What's needed here is an extra-leany typeface: double italics.

Of course, one could always acheive double emphasis in other ways:

Don't you have ANYTHING better to think about?

Or:

Don't you have anything better to think about?

But I think we can all agree that really squinty writing would be a much better option. So come on typographers, get your thumbs out of your asses.

HIATUS

Dear reader,

Please, O please forgive the aching chasm that opened up between the previous entry and this. It was unconscionable of me, I know. And thank you for being so forgiving, for returning anyway, despite the silence. You are truly loyal.

Excuses can, and perhaps should, be made. You may have noticed that my trailing off coincided with the Presedential Election out here in the grand ol' U.S. of A. I don't know about where you were, but around these parts the re-election of the current administration struck with forceful velocity. It was if some dark blanket had fallen upon us. It was as if we had lost a war; as if everything that we believed in no longer counted for anything. Imagine if the Nazi's had won the second world war, and somehow you were in the priveledged position of knowing precisely how malevolent their regime was. That was kind of how it felt. There was a foreboding, we had lost, and now we just had to wait for all hell to break loose.

This was, perhaps a little melodramatic, I confess. Normality crept back inch by inch. But it made blogging hard, was the thing. We sort of lost our faith in democracy, and really, what is blogging if not democracy? It was hard to write for people when we no longer had faith in them.

Maggie said: "When we have the freedom to say whatever we want, it is no surprise that we disagree with one another. What is remarkable is that we agree on so much." And we wanted to believe her, we wanted to believe that there was hope, but we weren't so sure.

We also made the blundering error of reading Philip Roth's dazzling book The Plot Against America, which, in retrospect, was perhaps a foolish move. For, you see, the book tells the story of the creeping, insidious havoc that is wrecked by the election of a right-wing goverment, and the impact that it has on the daily lives of an American family. If you haven't read it yet, you should. Though perhaps you shouldn't do it when a conservative goverment is being re-elected in your country of residence. Because it's the sort of thing that gives you the wiggins.

But here I am, returned, back by popular demand, (if being told to "come on. Get on with it" is what passes for popular demand these days). Also my faith has been restored in humanity, for today is the day that Charles, Prince of Wales and Camilla Parker Bowles announced their intention to be married in April. This is wonderful news. Good luck to the old trouts, is what I say. Can't wait to see what the British press make of it all.

Oh by the way, did you hear that we're going to invade Iran?

Here's to the future, people. Cheers.