Recently visited a good friend of mine whose job has taken him to the Midlands; despite the grinding poverty and socio-cultural deprivation of the area, he and his young family are doing well. However, I couldn’t help but notice that his eldest daughter (3) has inherited a horribly debilitating speech impediment from her mother - she pronounces words like “bath” and “class” with a short “a”, like what they do in the t’up t’north of England. The girl’s father is, like me, of good southern stock, so it must be absolutely mortifying for him; but it seems as if the defective gene wins out in cases like this.

I’m sure resident linguistics expert LZ will back me up when I state categorically that no research WHATSOEVER into this has ever been conducted; so in the name of science, and in order to determine the demographic / probable wealth and good looks of you, gentle reader, I’d like you to tell me which side of the isogloss you fall, by means of voting in the latest Very Poll.

(NB 1 - Since this is such a ground-breaking and scientifically vital study, I’ve taken the unprecedented step of disabling the “Couldn’t Give a Toss” feature.)
(NB2 - If you’re Americo-Canadian and that, I assume that your life-chances aren’t damaged in the same way by having a short “a” as they are over here.)

- “Granny, what would you like for Christmas?”
- “Hmmm… let me think… well, what I’d really like is an album of incredibly well-known songs, all of which have been already covered more times than Shergar’s mum, each arranged in an identically slow and mawkish manner to suit the astonishingly one-dimensional vocal timbre of a woman who looks like she was a member of the 1984 East German shot-put team.”

Yes, the long-awaited Susan Boyle album is out today. I haven’t yet seen the cover, but I can guarantee you that, by the middle of next summer’s car boot sale season, the artwork will be more familiar to me than the lines on my own time- / age- / Simon-Cowell’s-endless-stream-of-lowest-common-denominator-shite-worn face.

If you hadn’t given up on “Very Poor” by now (which you mostly have), you will now. Or will soon. Because there will be more of these. Oh yes.

First off -

Q - What does Johnny Depp do when he fancies some postural exercise on holiday in Jamaica?
A - Pilates of the Caribbean.

(If I’d been REALLY ambitious and slightly racist, I could have made it a Japanese fan of Johnny Depp - “Pirates / Pilates” - but that may well have been too funny.) Secondly -

Q - What is the favourite tubular pork-meat-based product of a French-speaking fan of the horror film franchise starring Tobin Bell?
A - “Saw 6″

I’ve always said that if you need to explain a joke, it simply isn’t funny. With that in mind, the punchline is supposed to be read as “saucisse”, i.e. the French for “sausage”.

Finally (and to be fair, this one isn’t mine - which is why it’s vaguely amusing):

Q - Why did the tree-hugger refuse to eat pasta on his flight?
A - Because he wanted to cut his carbonara footprint.

Ithangyew…

Everybody out there over the age of 30 will be familiar with The Human League’s “Dare!” (and if they aren’t, they bally well should be) - it’s one of the definitive albums of the 1980s, and the template for a million and one pale and uninteresting imitators currently engaged in a synthpop revival - so I’ll spare you a bit of the the usual muso-socio-politico-historico-eco-lefty-liberal-socialist guff that normally goes with a TTOTDOWOHOHCBATCI. But not all of it, obviously.

“Love Action” was the first single from “Dare!”, but not the biggest; that was, of course, “Don’t You Want Me”. But - whisper it soft - in the author’s opinion, “Love Action” is actually the better song. It’s absolutely classic pop, catchy and minimalist, and memorable for three other reasons: 1) the rhythmically tricky intro (it’s in 4/4, the easiest time signature of all, but try counting along and picking exactly when the main drum part comes in - it’s VERY difficult) 2) the impenetrable chorus lyrics - “I love your love action / Love’s just a distraction / No talking, just looking / Watching your love action”. Eh? Is he watching a porno? Watching his partner “enjoy herself”, as it were? (There’s probably an easy answer - those of you who may have spent more time on the Good Ship Venus might want to enlighten me) and 3) Phil Oakey’s portentous baritone. I challenge anyone to try singing this song without artificially deepening the timbre of their voice, dancing robotically, pulling a moody face, growing their hair long, having it militarily straightened and then cutting half of it off by mistake…

(…although sadly not by the Children’s Secretary - “Nutt Sacked by Balls” would be approaching some kind of headline nirvana.)

As you’ll have gathered, pun-friendly Professor David Nutt, the government’s chief adviser on drugs, has been fired after repeatedly and publicly expressing opinions which differ from government policy.

On the one hand, I have a gram (albeit a gram heavily cut with talcum powder, baking soda or similar) of sympathy for the government; Nutt has always appeared to be fond of making, and standing behind,  big brash banner statements which have been open goals for the sections of the press which might want to misinterpret / quote out-of-context / misquote completely anything which could be percieved as a soft line on drugs. E.g. (and, to make my point, these aren’t direct quotes, but they’re what people remember) “cannabis and LSD are less harmful than alcohol or tobacco” / “ecstasy is as dangerous as riding a horse” etc.

On the other hand, sacking an independent scientist who you’ve appointed yourselves because you don’t like what his research is saying smacks of a) a worryingly totalitarian insinct, b) huge government confusion over the issue, and c) a desperate attempt to stay onside with the tabloids’ simplistic “drugs are bad, nnkay?” position. I can picture some Malcolm Tucker spin figure rabidly hectoring the minister concerned - “I don’t care what the fucking nutty professor says, remember the Murdoch mantra; no cannabis, you dopey cunt, and no heroin, you prick!” (or however Armando Ianucci might have written it*).

More seriously, what does it say about UK politics’s relationship with science? If we suffered a US-style lurch to the looney religious right, would a populist government dismiss scientific facts, encourage the teaching of creationism and ban Darwin from schools? OK, that’s a gloomy and faintly ridiculous prognosis - but equally gloomy and ridiculous is successive governments’ feeble attempts to deal with the facts and arrive at a sensible policy when it comes to drugs.

(* - i.e. way, WAY more amusingly.)