Election update

No, not those tiresome goings-on in the US. They will result in either 4 more years of exactly the same, or 4 more years of almost exactly the same. Foreign policy (slavish support of whatever Israel does, plus starting wars without having a clue of how to finish them) will be particularly the same. Economic and financial policy will continue to ignore my suggestions of arbitraging the helium market if you can't corner it and securitizing commercial sex.

I'm talking about the election, by examination, of prize fellows at All Souls, that Oxford centre of the exquisite. Oh, "provided that candidates of sufficient merit present themselves". Plonkers.

The procedure has three parts. The first is a series of 3-hour written exams, including an essay on a one-word topic ("Crevices" this year) and papers on your chosen special subject. This was classical sociology for me, so I had to confront things like "What does contemporary historiography tell us about STDs in 4th century Athens?" The short answer here happens to be the right one, but you have to choose your moments.

The second, for chosen candidates only (including your correspondent), is a viva, where they interrogate you on what you wrote. ("Tell us, Mr Inkspot, what tool would you use if your crevice is not flexible?") I have to say, since false modesty is repellent, that I aced the papers and wiped the floor with them in the viva. I gave them Saussure, I gave them Plato, I gave them Derrida ("Se naitre, ce n'est qu'entrer dans le neant.") Well, possibly it wasn't Derrida, since I had just made it up, but I could get away with it because, it was clear, none of those smug feuilletonistes had read Derrida either.

The third was last night. They invited the surviving candidates to dinner, gave us cherry pie to eat, and judged us on what we did with the pips. Now Beast had made this fabulous suggestion of turning them into anal beads for the Warden, and that was my plan.

Before dinner they gave us champagne, Joseph Perrier '96. This is a small house, but the champagne was just fine. Yeasty rather than grassy, I had lots. The other candidates included a couple of striking young men in Armani. To cope with them, I flashed a twenty at a passing waiter and told him to make sure that they got champagne cocktails rather than straight champagne, and lots of them. He promised that an extra twenty ("for the butler") would ensure it.

And so to dinner. You'll want to know what we had.

Potage des tourterelles. Yes, I know, eating turtles is frowned upon these days, or even illegal, but nobody's told All Souls. They raise them for the table in a private underground aquarium. [Filthy sherry of some kind. I left it alone and had more champagne.]

Tourbot, sauce merluche des branleurs. The fish you get in this country can't touch what you get in Bombay, and this was good without being special. [A boring Chablis. Waiter! More champagne! By now I'd noticed a honeyed taste to the champagne, but I put it down to the sauce, not having full confidence in the kitchens' interpretation of dried codfish. Anyway, I had another glass or two to make sure I still liked it.]

Tournedos Rossini des flaneurs. Properly hung fillet steak, with real foie gras, of course, and cooked to perfection. [Some sort of Crozes Hermitage. I forget what exactly, but, boy, was it good. I filled my boots.]

Tarte aux cerises des suceurs. The cherry pip anal beads were a howling success; they delighted the Warden, to judge by his "Ooh, wait till I show the Dean!" [Ch. Suduiraut '88. I cannot resist Sauternes, and this was delicous.]

Le dessert. Grapes and bananas from the college's own hothouse and cheese from one of its farms. [Ch. Leoville-Las Cases '82 and Graham's '55. Oh my fucking god. The '82 Las Cases has 100 Parker points. Yes, read'em and weep, one hundred, the perfect score, the full monty. And I had heard of, but never encountered, the legendary Graham's. Go and look them up, I can't describe them.]

Today brought a polite note containing the Warden's regrets, etc. So where did it go wrong? Well, another time I wouldn't have stood on the table and used one of the bananas to conduct the company in a rousing chorus of the college song ("His swapping tool of generation..."), but at the moment it seemed so right.

Bastard double-crossing butler. Still, there's always next year.

Education matters*

Mlle Inkspot is long since back at school. It must be autumn. The students have flocked back, including Keira Knightley, who's off to the local dog college to enhance her motivation for the title role in the next remake of Hound of the Baskervilles. All so eager to learn.

Except that education is an industry where the customers want less for their money.

"I get the impression that you understand this, but what you write should be correct and coherent so that the reader, besides me, is convinced, and easily convinced. Oh, and your spelling could be better."

"Doesn't matter as long as I get the right answer."

"Well,  somebody reading it might get the impression that you don't know what you're talking about, and are lazy and ignorant. You're really putting yourself at an unnecessary disadvantage compared to the people who do write well, and can spell."

"..."

"Look, 'accelerate' has two c's. And it's printed here in the question! Can't you even copy correctly?"

*Doesn't it?

Profiling

My profile lists my interests as sex, food and mathematics. (Separately; steady on, now. The fluid mechanics of syrup sex are specialized.) Clicking on each reveals the number of people on blogger with that particular interest; the results are

sex: 19,800

food: 55,600

mathematics: 5,000.

Taking food as the standard, I'm surprised and pleased by how much mathematics that is, and surprised by how little sex.

Xfactor and chips

I know about Xfactor (a popular televisual entertainment, m'lud) because I've seen it. Simon Cowell's haircut alarms me and the Louis person annoys me, but my reasons for not watching regularly are my reasons for not watching TV regularly: I never know when something embarrassing is about to happen. Given that I would be sitting next to Mlle Inkspot, who, like all daughters everywhere throughout time, is six*, the threat of embarrassment is overwhelming. At any moment there will be an explicit reference to sex and I have to have my fingers in my ears and be chanting lalalala in advance. So there is just no point.

Chips are OK. There's a Turkish chip van near our house every night bar Mondays. I don't understand the never on a Monday rule, but I can't ask because I don't speak Turkish and the chip van man doesn't understand English beyond "Good evening, two large chips please". He gets cross if you omit the good evening.

*And how do daughters stop being six? Easy: one day they are six and the next they are married with children. That's my plan, anyway.

Sleaze factor 40

From the NY Times of 14 Oct (registration needed). To avoid copyright problems I've made up some of it. No, I haven't, I haven't got the imagination.

"Friends of Ms Allen told ABC that she had sought to break off the affair when she learned that Mr Mahoney was involved in other extramarital relationships.

Mr Mahoney fired Ms Allen in January 2008, and she began legal proceedings in February that concluded with a settlement in March, Democratic staff members briefed on the matter said.

"You work at my pleasure," Mr Mahoney told Ms Allen in a Jan. 20 telephone call that was recorded and played for Mr Mahoney's employees. "If you do the job I think you should do, you get to keep your job. Whenever I don't feel like you're doing your job, then you lose your job. And guess what: The only person who matters is guess who? Me." "

UPDATE: it disappoints readers Scarlet and Beast that Ms Allen is, indeed, not Ms Lily Allen, "the perky pop princess who gets everywhere else". But not, we hope, under Beast's duvet.

Blogging the void

Poker again last night. The drearier writers on the subject start from the assumption that the only point is to win money; I happened to do so this time, but that's not the major aim. Financially it's a zero-sum game, but emotionally it's decidedly negative-sum, since the pain of losing a certain sum of money (it doesn't matter how much, provided it's enough to hurt) is not nearly balanced by the pleasure of winning the same amount. The real gain, the real high comes at the point where you push all your chips into the pot and then wait for your opponent to call or fold. For this period of time, which might be a minute or so, there is a tremendous feeling of release. You have no more decisions to take, and all the pressure is on him, as he comes to terms with such things as:  how good he thinks his hand is, what your hand might be, what he thinks you think he has, how much he fears you, how much he thinks you fear him, what has happened in the past between the two of you, and so on. Really the relationship between you is more important than anything, including the actual cards.

I can't achieve the same effect with roulette or racing. In either, you can bet all your money and then there is nothing to be done until the ball falls in its slot or the winner passes the post, but there is no antagonist, so no agon, so no release, just boredom.

Financial advice redux*

It's in the nature of cornering a particular market that it excludes all but the participants. So those of you who are too late for the helium idea (everyone except Dr Maroon and Mrs Pouncer) need something else.

You will have noticed that the Irish have had this brilliant wheeze of guaranteeing all bank deposits. The English etc have been too dim to ask what they're guaranteeing them with and have fallen for this like a ton of bricks. Look, the only interesting thing I know about Ireland is that it has peat bogs and peat-fired power stations, so what can they offer besides peat futures? They can't print their own Euros, the Germans won't let them. However, Gorilla Bananas has raised the idea of a tart-run investment bank (brilliant, GB) and it is clear that such a bank could offer something better. Compare and contrast:

``I'm sorry, it's all gone wrong, but you can have a wheelbarrow load of peat next Tuesday."

``I'm sorry, it's all gone wrong, but you and your wife can shag me and a friend for 2 hours next Tuesday.''

Case closed.

*No, I don't know what redux means, and I bet John Updike doesn't either.

Wildlife documentary

I spent 2 hours yesterday afternoon in the company of 60 or so of my colleagues, all intelligent people (I'm generous today), debating issues that no sane person could care about. Yet we talked, we listened, we paid attention, we considered, all with an elaborate politeness that was indistinguishable from pomposity, and we voted on a proposal. Then it turned out that half of us thought the proposal meant one thing and half of us the opposite, so we had to do it all over again. After that, we moved on to an even more absurd subject, and finally went home satisfied that we'd done a good day's work.

That evening I got busted out too early in a holdem tournament. I got all my chips in the pot at a point where I was 2:1 favourite, but my opponent caught an ace on the river. So ordinary.

So what is the point of this post? I'm sorry, there is none, I'm just venting my disgust at the banality and squalor of my life. Honestly, a bunch of primates foraging for celery would have organized themselves more efficiently, and wouldn't have put themselves in a position to be rivered by a miserable ace.

Financial advice

Could the 2 tons of helium lost at the recent LHC explosion have been used instead to bail out Wall St? This arose at Arlington's place, but a moment's googling shows that with liquid helium amazingly cheap, at $15 a litre, max, a straightforward application of this idea is unlikely to have worked. Maybe the lifting capacity would have removed some of the more egregious individuals to a region of the troposphere where no-one would mind them. But my main point is that this same googling  also revealed a minimum price of $3-25. This presents  the most fantastic arbitrage opportunity. Plus, the biggest helium plant, in Texas, forecasts that it will be exhausted in a decade. Corner the market now, is my advice. And if it goes wrong, well, your next party will have the best balloons ever.