Point of contention

Cromagnon likes Jonathan Meades.
Jonathan Meades gets on my wick.
To help my readers make their own minds up, I present an exclusive extract from his most recent television programme, "Beyond the Pail", in which Meades explores the cultural and historical significance of the bucket.



Camera pans along B&Q shelf of £1.99 plastic buckets. Meades is sitting halfway along the shelf looking enigmatic.
Meades: Bucket.
Cut. Meades now sits, like Oor Wullie, on an upturned metal bucket.
Meades: Bucket. A cylindrical or truncated conical receptacle typically used for carrying water, paint or sand. Or is it?
Cut. Meades sits on a see-saw with a bucket on his head. He addresses us through a hole in the bucket.
Meades: There's a hole in my bucket, dear Liza. And to mend it, I need a bucket.
Black and white footage of a bucket chain.
Meades (voice over): This is an elementary paradox of self-referentiality, a swirling, swilling brim-full barrel of twisted wisdom. But why is the bucket so pivotal to European thought? What is it about the bucket that can scuttle our precious logic? While a symbol of excess and overindulgence...
Footage of pig eating swill from bucket.
...and of our throwaway society...
Time-lapse footage of city centre bin filling, overflowing, then swarming with rats.
...the bucket is staunchly, counterintuitively old-fasioned.
Cut to a cold-looking British seaside. A small boy lifts a toy bucket, unmoulding a sandcastle, which crumbles to reveal Meades buried up to his neck in sand.
Meades, spitting out a live crab:The bucket is humanity's fourth most basic technology, behind only fire, the wheel and the snorkel. Or is it? And why does the bucket inspire such primeval longing, such yearning for a...
The small boy puts his bucket back over Meades' head. Pleasing silence ensues.
Announcer: The ever-irritating Jonathan Meades returns next week in BBC2's brand new documentary series "We Couldn't Afford Simon Schama".

I ain't a Londoner

but I beg those of you who are voting: please, anyone but Boris. He's a gibbering incompetent nasty right-wing bigot whom I wouldn't trust to keep score in Scrabble. Putting him in charge of a city of seven and a half million people for four years would not be a jolly hilarious jape.

Stereotype threat gets in the news

when someone suggests it can affect rich young able-bodied Englishmen!

Stereotype threat is basically a variation on the placebo / nocebo effect, which I've always found fascinating. If people are given a sugar pill and told "this will make your headache better but may make you nauseous as a side-effect", their headaches often get better and they often feel sick. In the same way, "your gurl-brane makes you crap at maths" can influence you to flunk an exam. It's a strange and powerful piece of human biology, and it's a shame that we currently know so little about its mechanisms - there'd be some interesting practical applications.
Such as PrismCo Algebraic Competence Capsules, which are packaged in a stylish tube with the word Smarties crossed out. I'll be taking three red ones this afternoon before doing some paper corrections.

Life hectic, blogging sparse.

The sort of people who put out fires
Like to play in tumble dryers;
Those with cautious dispositions
Train as florists or opticians.

Showbiz

This thread utterly made my day.
And this evening the pleasingly inept choir I sing with gave a pleasingly not-too-inept performance at a concert also featuring several singers from a local Gay Chorus and a wonderful ladies' choir not all of whom were ladies by silly old chromosomal standards. And that made my day again.
A tasty glass of Fat Cat IPA is now making my day for a third time. Cheers. I will write about science soon.