Recent stuff that doesn’t justify a post on its own, all sort of smooshed up together: an occasional series.

I’m back to my bad old habit of thinking I’m re-reading a book and then realising, often to my shame, that it’s actually my first time (did I just see the film?) and this time it’s Slaughterhouse-Five. And I see something on the first few pages that I’m sure I would have noticed it first time round, although when first time round happened (although, do please keep up, there wasn’t really a first time round) I wouldn’t have spotted the apparent prefiguring of Twitter and the like, because Twitter and the like didn’t exist. Anyway, the quote:

I have this disease late at night sometimes, involving alcohol and the telephone.

Also, prompted of course by the Gary Oldman-fronted TV series, I have been dipping a cautious toe in Mick Herron’s Slow Horses universe and in the first volume we encounters a downgraded spook reduced to tracking “the mutant hillbillies of the blogosphere” and then

To pass for real in the world of the web she’d had to forget everything she’d ever known about grammar, wit, spelling, manners and literary criticism.

and my mind goes back to the late Noughties, to what we felt at the time was The Golden Age Of Blogging, or maybe even of Meta-Blogging since much of what we typed about was the nature of blogging itself. What was it? What distinguished it from journalism, of old media? If a representative of old media launched a blog and it all went horribly wrong, were we supposed to point and laugh, or explain nicely how to do it better (hoping there might be a real live job at the end of it)? 

And then it all stopped. 

So it goes.

PS: And further into the Vonnegut, I find this:

The spit hit Roland Weary’s shoulder, gave Weary a fourragère of snot and blutwurst and tobacco juice and Schnapps.

And I wonder whether I should really have called this blog “A Fourragère of Snot” or “Snot and Blutwurst” or “Blutwurst and Tobacco Juice” and, for the time being at least, it’s got a subhead again. And yes, I did have to look up what “fourragère” means. And so will you.

Alice Cooper has discovered a version of Andy Warhol’s Electric Chair print in a locker alongside some of his stage props. I was initially amused by the comment from his manager, Shep Gordon, about a discussion the then-drunk rock star may or may not have had with the artist: 

“Alice says he remembers having a conversation with Warhol about the picture... he thinks the conversation was real, but he couldn't put his hand on a Bible and say that it was.”

“Andy Warhol was not really ‘Andy Warhol’ back then.”

Got an e-mail from an old friend, apologising for the fact that she’s only just finished The Noughties, because she doesn’t commute and as a result barely reads anything these days. I sort of know what she means; I’ve got piles upon piles of unread books over two continents, that show no sign of succumbing to erosion. Quite the opposite, in fact. It’s only when I’m on trains and boats and planes that I’m forced into a state of prolonged concentration.

This seems to be a fairly widespread phenomenon. I must admit that a quantity of drink was taken on Tuesday night: Red Stripe for Billy, Guinness, then vodka for your correspondent. But not nearly as much as had been encountered by a gentleman I saw on the way home, barely able to stand, blood trickling from a mysterious wound on his flushed, sweaty forehead. But once he’d boarded the train at Old Street and managed, after several attempts, to achieve a satisfactory bottom/seat interface, he got stuck into a battered paperback of Thomas Mann short stories.

A few unattached thoughts about recent travels:

One: Why is it that, for some people, a visit to some site of natural or manmade beauty is incomplete without a photograph: moreover, one that includes the photographer's travelling companion gurning like a moron in front of said site, usually masking the best bit. And this isn't a sarky dig at Japanese people: they do take lots of snaps, but execute them with searing speed and efficiency, so that an entire coach party from Kyoto can aim, shoot and move on in the time it takes for a retired estate agent from Rotterdam to reposition his wife, fiddle with his exposure and wonder whether now would be a good time to try out that pristine tripod.

Two: Am I alone in finding it rather charming (albeit very arrogant) that French people are the only travellers who do not presume that strangers have English as a default language? "Bonjour!" they all chirruped as we met on the path to the weird underwater carvings of Kbal Spean.

Three: Back in Bangkok, there's a delightful French restaurant called Le Bouchon, nestled amidst the deepest, dankest fleshpots of Patpong. The highlight of the pudding menu is vanilla surprise; the surprise supposedly being the massive slug of whisky that the chef adds to the ice cream. In reality, the surprise comes when my mother, about 20 minutes after consuming said delight, staggers into O'Reilly's Bar and starts boogying to the Beatles cover band, wielding her plaster-encased right arm with gay and dangerous abandon.

Can anyone explain the difference between martial law (which the army's declared) and a state of emergency (which the PM's called)? Which is better? Is it like Top Trumps?

God, the World Service is rubbish.

(Nismes-Desclous 1976 Armagnac, however, is very nice. Shall I have another, or a cup of tea. Oh, all right then.)

Everyone's saying that a military coup will be lousy for business and tourism, but since there's been no effective government for most of the year, I'm not so sure.

Oh Christ, I'm just listening to GWB's speech to the UN. Why does he always sound as if he's about to blub like a gurl?

I had the slightly unnerving but entirely enjoyable experience last night of putting some names to faces, as Patroclus (cranberry and soda), Slaminsky (Carlsberg), Wyndham (Scotch and Coke, very early Beatles), Pashmina (can't remember because of the Absolut Citron) and myself (er... Absolut Citron) met to put the worlds to right and bitch about how crap everybody else's blogs are. Apart from the startling discovery that Patroclus is in fact a burly stevedore called Brian, and that Wyndham is a pseudonym for popular and talented TV presenter Davina McCall, there will be no further revelations that might imperil our plan for global domination and the imposition of a consistent style for links.

Except to reveal that no Perrier was consumed, which is a pretty lame connection to the story that Perrier is to stop sponsoring the award ceremony at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. "We felt that it is time for us to explore new opportunities," said the MD of the fizzy water people, which as we all know translates roughly as "Nobody gives a fuck any more so we're cutting our losses." In fact, does anyone drink Perrier any more? Or does it smell too much of large phones and unfeasible shoulderpads?

However, unlike the Booker Prize, which still commemorates its original sponsor after the relationship ended, the awards have been fully renamed to acknowledge the new kids on the block, the considerably less fizzy (but, on the other hand, untainted by associations with Nestle) Intelligent Finance. The awards are to be known as (and I can only just about bring myself to type this) "the if.commedies". Awards director Nica Burns claims that the new name incorporates: "Edinburgh; the name of our new sponsor; the word comedy."

Well, why not call them the Edinburghintelligentfinancecomedy Awards then? It's hardly less crass and unwieldy, is it? Not that it matters, because Ms Burns hopes that the awards will be known as 'the Eddies', the implication being that Eddie is fit to rank alongside Oscar, Tony, Emmy and all the proper awards that people care about.

Now, the important thing about the Oscars is that nobody really knows for sure how they got that nickname. It wasn't a case of spending days cooped up with branding consultants, only to emerge and humbly drop a hint, like Desdemona's snotty Kleenex, that calling them the Oscars might be a nice idea. It just happened. Although, to be fair, if nature were allowed to take its course in this case, we might find the cream of comic talent competing for the Iffies.

P.S. And while we're on the subject of nomenclature gone a bit rubbish, how about a Hall of Fame for musicians that nobody's heard of?

Budweiser is one of the official sponsors of next month's World Cup, but it's run into a fairly substantial stumbling block. In Germany, where the tournament is taking place, they know a bit about beer, and the American brew is a bit of a joke, albeit a weak one.

"We understand that taste is an important part of the product beer," says Tony Ponturo, vice president of Anheuser-Busch, "and Europeans, particularly Germans, like a stronger, more bitter kind of product." Well it's jolly good that a senior executive of a beer company has sussed that it's quite important what a beer tastes like, but why the hell are you trying to sell them Budweiser then, Tony? It tastes of nothing. It's not even strong enough to be unpleasant. It isn't the King of Beers, it's the Prince Edward (bland, nondescript and pointless). In Europe, maybe, just maybe, people drink beer because they like drinking beer, not because some marketing catamite has decided that they want to buy into an aspirational lifestyle or somesuch witless drool. Maybe people are finally waking up to the fact that the whole branding phenomenon is an attempt to make us pay extra for less.

And please don't get me started on "WHASSUP???" or I'll give Mr Ponturo a "stronger, more bitter kind of product" that will really make his head spin.

From a piece in The Guardian about the endearingly abysmal artist Thomas Kinkade: "Two former employees, Terry Sheppard and John Dandois, told the panel of further examples of Kinkade's unpredictable behaviour: bringing disorder to a Las Vegas performance by the illusionists Siegfried and Roy by repeatedly yelling the word 'codpiece' from his audience seat, and urinating in public - in an elevator and on a model of Winnie the Pooh at a Disneyland hotel. 'This one's for you, Walt,' Mr Sheppard claimed the artist said as he did so."