CABINET OF CURIOSITIES (NEW CONCEPTS)

[Mick Harper]

[Mick Harper]

Most cultures demand a fair amount from their deities, but not all

[Mick Harper]

[Mick Harper]

This new oven I’ve got is much like the old one except a bit flashier. Which surprised me because I got the cheapest oven in Britain (£59.95) so God knows what an unflashy oven looks like. This one is black and glowers at me a bit. One of the penalties of buying on line, I suppose. Except now I come to think of it, the old one may have been black as well. Funny how quickly you forget. But one thing is new -- a metal attachment thingy you use to pull out the oven tray (also provided). It’s a bit tricky but once mastered it gives endless satisfaction. Kerplong, kerplosh. It’s all in the wrist. Like D'Artagnan. OK, I miss my oven glove -- why wouldn’t I? – but it’s in with the new and out with the old. Kerplong, kerplosh. My new motto. But will the College of Heralds wear it?

[Grant]

One hundred pounds to Wikipedia!
I bung em the odd tenner but only when Jimmy Wales writes one of his pathetic messages.
Katherine takes you for granted when you give her regular payments - just like all women

[Mick Harper]

Grant by name, grant by nature. You are not looking at it transactionally enough. My life, my work, my day revolve around Wiki. If I was required, as is normal for the self-employed, to pay for the tools of my trade and/or for the costs of my enjoyment as a hobbyist, then what are we looking at? A few hundred a month would be cheap at the price. I got it for nothing all those years when I had nothing -- that's fair. Now I am a rich man, the avoidance of guilt at £20 per month is cheap at the price.

When, by my calculations towards the end of the year, I am once more a poor man, I will take stock. But here's the twist. I will have forgotten all about it by then and would have carried on unthinkingly paying for the rest of my life ... except that the ineffable Katherine will remind me right on cue. To cancel.

[Mick Harper]

Due to a temporary there's nothing in the fridge and it's raining situation, I discovered several things last night

1. When you come right down to it, Domino's is best
2. It doesn't matter how many times you add words like passion and double and extra you never get enough pepperoni
3. Potato wedges
4. The 'cookies' were either burnt or they're meant to be like that
5. Coca Cola Zero Sugar is the best approximation yet.

Not a bad informational haul for a relatively small outlay.

[Mick Harper]

Good Husbandry: Growing a Family on a Community Farm Granta £14.99

An inspiring call to arms for our New World. Or perhaps the old world since this is another in a long line of back-to-the-land paeans. The last of which -- the hippie commune movement of the sixties and seventies -- I participated in myself. This is the new wrinkle

[Mick Harper]

A few pages back I wrote about a book on women partisans A House in the Mountains: The Women who Liberated Italy from Fascism by Caroline Moorehead, published by Chatto & Windus and reviewed very favourably by the Guardian. I made, you may recall, the counterclaim that men in the British, American and Allied armies played their part too. And so to this Guardian strapline followed by another approving review of another war book

[Mick Harper]

Yesterday I realised the difference between a credit and a debit card. Since they never tell you, I have always just ticked it randomly on being given the choice and then the other one if that leads to difficulties. I assume the reason for this careful ignoral on my part is that both 'credit' and 'debit' are fairly ominous words so I didn't want to know. Still, now I do I'm available to help others not quite as advanced along the path of financial wisdom even though there are some functional differences I am not entirely clear about.

[Mick Harper]

Weird Facts That Make Absolutely No Sense No. 74

Adolf Hitler gave ten per cent of his income to the Church.

At least that is what David Irving says in his Goebbels bio, with the comment 'almost alone among the Nazi leaders'. Almost alone among Germans I would have thought but maybe tithing is a German thing. Or in this case maybe an Austrian thing. Goebbels is coming across as a sinister but sensationally brilliant figure whereas Hitler appears (to Goebbels and also a little bit to Irving) as a bit of an old buffer. Nazi Germany seems to be something of a triumvirate (I'm only up to 1937) of Hitler, Goering and Goebbels. Himmler (to round out the Colonel Bogey Four) hasn't been mentioned thus far.

[Mick Harper]

When I was young, life was simple. You had a sink, you had a washing-up bowl that went into the sink and you had dirty dishes that went into the bowl. I'm not saying life was easy -- far from it, I can assure you -- but you didn't have anything to worry about on the dirty dishes front. You just left them in the washing up bowl.

Roll forward a few years and you learned that you had it all wrong and that washing up bowls were not very Conran and had to go. But now you couldn't put the dishes in the sink because then you couldn't use the sink for any other purpose. In fact there wasn't anywhere for dirty dishes to go, they just sort of hung around indefinitely getting more and more in the way. You could work round them but it was far from ideal.

Roll forward a few more years and I come down with something rather nasty. Not colon cancer according to NHS Direct but something requiring the digging out of an old washing up bowl to leave by the bedside. Maybe I left it there a bit too long after I'd recovered but anyway it required a lot of hot water, some fairy liquid and being left in the sink to soak. Which gave me an idea. You can probably see where I'm headed with this. Exactly! I decided to try out my old childhood arrangement once more. So far, signs are positive.

[Hatty]

[Mick Harper]

Two weird things here. First off -- and I didn't know it -- was that Goebbels and Magda couldn't stand each other. I am assuming, I haven't got there yet, that Magda committed suicide because of adoration of Hitler not attachment to Goebbels. In fact it is suggested but not quite proved that Magda only married Goebbels to get access to Hitler. However there is no doubt that quite a lot of Third Reich history was affected by the Goebbels/Magda relationship.

But truly weird, if true, is your library banning Irving books. There is an argument to be made about not stocking his later stuff when he is, if not unhinged, then certainly unbalanced. But his earlier books, which includes the Goebbels bio, are just essential. But OK, leave them off the shelves if it makes the citizenry unhappy. Shades of Israel and Wagner.

[Hatty]

A series of books by Philip Kerr are set in Germany during and after the Nazi regime. His main character, a detective and/or private investigator called Bernie Gunther, straddles several decades solving murders and staying alive. The last book, Metropolis, is a good read, I think it's because it's set in 1928, but the rest didn't quite work for me. (Only Penelope Fitzgerald in my experience has the knack of making a character belong to his or her time.)

In the books that I read, Gunther, a self-styled typically bolshie Berliner, is critical of the Nazis which is fine but comments about 'the moral vacuum at the heart of Germany' are jarring because they result from hindsight. He prides himself on his independence, even insolence, and of course hates all the Nazi bigwigs. The stories go back and forth between the 1930s and '50s, or later, but there's never any suggestion of Gunther being contaminated as it were by the regime apart from occasional references to his conscience. Kerr could have turned his detective into a much more interesting, and credible, character study of a German living under, accommodating himself to, a totalitarian government and adjusting to the aftermath.