CABINET OF CURIOSITIES (NEW CONCEPTS)

[Mick Harper]

Look out for non-developments in the Torquay Jack and Jill Nursery case. It has all the hallmarks of another outbreak of British-Hysteria. My guess is the bloke held the kids in a way that wasn't quite careful enough. Since the evidence comes from CCTV it is hard to imagine much else happened.

[Mick Harper]

My favourite book is Lint by Steve Aylett and my favourite comic is Stuart Lee so it was gratifying to hear on R4X today that Stuart Lee's favourite book is Lint by Steve Aylett.

[Mick Harper]

Christmas must be coming because the £2 tubes of Cheeselets have hit the stores. Although I'll be getting in the main supplies at the weekend I decided to give myself a treat and have some now. And I mean right now. Such is the speed and intensity of both my typing and my wolfing that it was only when I got down past the usual broken ones at the top (every year it's the same story) and one fell on my keyboard that I realised they weren't broken. They were little Christmas trees.

[Mick Harper]

When watching, say, Newsnight, you fast forward when the politicians are on and you watch when the journalists are on. Why? Well, unless there's a chance of a car crash, you know exactly what the politico's are going to say. With Guardian op-ed pieces they're all journalists so you have to judge by headline. But that's easy enough. Here's two you would at least start reading

[Mick Harper]

So Ezra Pound sends T S Eliott off to Paris to have dinner with James Joyce and gives him a brown paper parcel for the Great Man. Joyce, who has turned up with his son, opens the parcel and finds a pair of second hand brown boots. "Oh," says Joyce. Very modernist.

[Mick Harper]

I have discovered a new corner in our electronic society. Someone in my household had foolishly ordered 3 Vype e-pens when he or she wanted Vype 3 e-pens (or something, we never got to the bottom of it) and the lady in the northern mill town said she would send a replacement and would I return the faulty order. "Let me see where your nearest drop-off point is..." I fretted. High Street Ken? Neasden? Harlow New Town? "Kahn's," she said, naming my local newsagent.

So routine is this arrangement, apparently, that she was sending off the replacement without worrying whether I was going to fulfil my side of the bargain first. The right gear arrived the next day but it was several days before I was buying my Saturday Guardian and waving my gaffer-taped package. "I was told you take these," I said hopefully. "In the box," the bloke said, with the merest flick of the head. And in the corner there was a sort of mini shipping crate with about a hundred gaffer-taped parcels in it. Well, did you know about this? There's been nothing on Watchdog about it.

[Mick Harper]

Now that the cycling season is finished and I can no longer use my exercise bike during stage races, I needed another way of keeping fit. After reviewing the possibilities I decided to put ten reggae Youtubes together and dance along once a day. However as soon as Stir 'em up started it was obvious my computer sound system was not up to the job. But a little thingy popped up asking me whether my computer sound system was up to the job and if not would I like it to be fixed free of charge if so click here. Thus I entered the world of Driver Reviver but more on that when I've got some work done.

[Mick Harper]

Sally: The celebration of Frank's life went well, didn't it?
Mick: It was the numbers that impressed me. There must have been two hundred in that hall.
Sally: Oh, many more than that. And from all over as well.
Mick: I shouldn't think I'll get more than twenty when it's my time.
Sally: I certainly won't be coming.

[Mick Harper]

A House in the Mountains: The Women who Liberated Italy from Fascism Caroline Moorehead Chatto & Windus

I'm very happy for a book to be published in English about the Italian resistance to the Germans 1943-5, it's a medium significant episode both during the war and for Italy's sense of self respect after it. I am extremely unhappy that anyone might think that the Italian partisans (men and women) liberated anything from anybody. That was the British and the Americans.

[Mick Harper]

I am hopelessly in thrall to Zadie Smith but the Guardian tells me her first play is to be based on Chaucer's Canterbury Tales. Should I write and tell her they are probably forgeries? No, perhaps best not.

[Mick Harper]

I was telling you about Driver Reviver. I can’t tell whether the sound quality improvement is psychosomatic but either way it’s fine by me. No, it’s their business model I find intriguing. You either click buttons yourself or they do it for you for 29.99 a month. I’m rich but not that rich. The only downside is that I spend most of the day – one just happened then – saying ‘no thanks’ to their pop-ups which take over my screen.

I could delete Driver Reviver except a) I don’t know how and b) they’ve probably got an embedded algorithm that will return me, soundwise, to a state of nature. And even if they didn’t I’d probably think they had because of the psychosomatic factor. Nevertheless, I regard myself as ahead of the game.

[Wile E. Coyote]

Pope Francis is clearly worried by the number of his followers that are worshipping at the cult of Saint Greta the Great.

What is the Pope to do?

[Mick Harper]

This destitute couple once called at my house looking for a handout. I'm a man of considerable compassion so I said, "How would you like to pretend to contribute to a blog I run to make it seem like a discussion forum to the casual onlooker?" Nice couple ... Hatty and Wiley something or other.

[Mick Harper]

My advice to Prince Andrew from personal experience: it's OK to be born grand, it's OK to develop folie de grandeur, but it's not OK to do both.

[Mick Harper]

Day after day, come rain, come shine, I have to fill up my coffee machine. Why can't it just be plugged into the water mains like a washing machine? Wake up, Britain!