Tuesday, 5 February 2013

14 / 16. Must try harder.


Wayne Shorter

The Wayne Shorter Quartet have just released Without A Net. Hardly prolific, the fourth album in thirteen years. Then again, he is eighty years old, blowing saxophones with the lungs of someone half that age.

Like Miles Davis, there's no sign of Wayne Shorter ever standing still musically, ever just going through the motions or treading water. Amazing to imagine maintaining that level of creativity and drive into your eighties.


The Baltimore Max Walls

White shirts, skin tight black pants. The Baltimore Ravens. Superbowl winners. Who's brave enough to tell them they looked like a load of Max Walls?

Why isn't that rhyming slang?

“He's gone down clutching his groin Alan.”

“Yeah, watch the slow-mo. I think he's taken one in the Max's.”


Compulsory dog chipping

The Dog Owners' Trust spokesman said, as if this were a screaming endorsement, that “the vets are all for it”. Right behind the measure, your vets. At £30 a pop (and watch the cost soar once it's compulsory) there's a surprise. Equally amazing:

Bricklayers: support compulsory wall-building measures.

MP's: fully endorse compulsory expense fiddling, croneyism and nepotism.

Football: strikers think compulsory diving in the area “will make the game more exciting”.

I've got similar for: dodgy disc jockeys, high court judges, and Jeremy Clarkson, but operate under guidelines (BLISS' Rukes they're called) that preclude writing them here.


Technical English test

They're bringing one in for six year olds. I took the one in the Guardian. I hope it was an adult version. Twelve out of fourteen. The questions got harder. I didn't get the gerund or the prepositional clause-spotting questions right.

I was pleased to correctly identify 'pride' as both collective and abstract. I understand that if kids are encouraged to read and write and pick up the right books and newspapers and magazines, and if an enthusiasm for literature can be instilled, they will get a lot of things right by accident. You don't need to know the technicalities or they're, there, and their, or of effect or affect, to get them right, instinctively. Yet I regularly receive, and am asked to check, documents produced by people with bachelors letters after their names, who would tell you they have bachelors letter after there names, and how having a degree has effected they're employment prospects.

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