Jetting to Constantinople

Arguably the greatest building in the world.


Tomorrow I begin my travels, once again. I hope to return, ere long. Given that I am flying, first, to Istanbul, in Turkey, here's a wonderful and very relevant poem.





Sailing to Byzantium

By W.B.Yeats (1928)

THAT is no country for old men. The young
In one another’s arms, birds in the trees
- Those dying generations - at their song,
The salmon-falls, the mackerel-crowded seas,
Fish, flesh, or fowl, commend all summer long
Whatever is begotten, born, and dies.
Caught in that sensual music all neglect
Monuments of unageing intellect.

An aged man is but a paltry thing,
A tattered coat upon a stick, unless
Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing
For every tatter in its mortal dress,
Nor is there singing school but studying
Monuments of its own magnificence;
And therefore I have sailed the seas and come
To the holy city of Byzantium.

O sages standing in God’s holy fire
As in the gold mosaic of a wall,
Come from the holy fire, perne in a gyre,
And be the singing-masters of my soul.
Consume my heart away; sick with desire
And fastened to a dying animal
It knows not what it is; and gather me
Into the artifice of eternity.

Once out of nature I shall never take
My bodily form from any natural thing,
But such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make
Of hammered gold and gold enamelling
To keep a drowsy Emperor awake;
Or set upon a golden bough to sing
To lords and ladies of Byzantium
Of what is past, or passing, or to come

Holidays in Hell

The desirable holiday destination of Sumqayit, yesterday.



Holidays in Hell

Ten Must-See Destinations for Environmental Masochists


Seversk
Location: western Siberia, Russia
Population: 109,000
Attractions: Entry to Seversk, once known as "Tomsk 7", is severely restricted; until 1992 it was not even marked on maps. Seversk is a company town - virtually the sole employer is the Siberian Group of Chemical Enterprises. The city boasts three seperate nuclear reactors, and multiple plants for the processing, enrichment and weaponising of uranium and plutonium. In 1993 Seversk was bathed in lethal fall-out, when a vat of radioactive phosphate exploded in one of the factories.
Things to Do: Visitors can swim in the colourful Tom River - said to be the world's most radioactive watercourse (with a toxicity equivalent to the outfall from 10,000 nuclear reactors). Twitchers will enjoy the many unique bird species, a product of genetic mutation caused by radiation poisoning. Honeymooners should note that Seversk is nicknamed 'Infertility City' by local wags, as anyone who lives there permanently can expect to become infertile after two years.
Quote: 'At least the moose are easy to shoot - because they are brain damaged.' Adam Nurilyov. Local hunter.
Hell Rating: 8/10


City of 10th Ramadan
Location. Suburbs of Cairo, Egypt
Population: 40,000
Attractions: the main employer in this windblown industrial suburb of reclaimed desert is the asbestos company Aura-Egypt. Production of blue and white asbestos has been in full swing since 1983. In the early years of the industry, the dangers of asbestos were "unknown"; local mothers would knit their children pullovers - using raw asbestos fibre.
Things to Do: favourite pastimes of the locals include coughing, spitting, flobbing, hawking, and gobbing up blooded sputum. Apart from these activities, most leisure-time in 10th Ramadan is spent contracting mesothelioma. This gruesome cancer is probably more common, per capita, in 10th Ramadam City than anywhere else on the globe: early symptoms include chest pain, muscle spasms, and shortness of breath; they rapidly advance to extreme vomiting, heart failure, and death.
Quote: Shabaan Ahmed, a local worker, says of his career as an asbestos worker in 10th Ramadan City: 'After a while my friend Muhsen Afifi died: although he was an accountant and far from the fatal dust. Then in 1995 Abdel-Mounem Halloul died of enteric cancer, and in 1997 Ahmed Abul-Einein died of stomach cancer. I don't feel so good myself.'
Hell Rating: 7/10


Katowice
Location: southwest Poland
Population: 317,000
Attractions: this regional capital of Silesian Poland has been a centre of heavy industry for decades. It is surrounded by mines, steel foundries, coking plants, chemical refineries and decaying ironworks. Nearly all of these run on the local brown coal, or lignite, which produces a smutty and very pungent smoke. This copious smog sometimes obscures the sun throughout the town: a so-called "brown-out".
Things to do: bring the family. A survey of pregnant women showed that more than 50% of placentas were damaged by exposure to pollutants. Babies are regularly born with meningitis, pneumonia, asthma and rickets.
If you fancy an excursion try the vast saltmines of the region. You are sure to bump into some locals: when the pollution is especially bad Katowicans are forced into the enormous mines themselves, where they sleep for weeks on end. Lovers of authentic regional cuisine should look out for the unusual salads - municipal authorities have banned all consumption of green vegetables grown in the district, as they are so contaminated with toxins.
Quote: local journalist Julius Seifer: ''During communist times, when we complained about the pollution, they told us we were unpatriotic. They said the west wanted to bring us to our knees: through ecology.''
Hell Rating: 6/10

Linfen
Location: Shanxi province, China
Population: 3.4million
Attractions: Linfen was voted "the most polluted city on the planet" in a 2007 report from the World Bank. It is the centre of Shanxi's vast automobile industry. Intriguing local pollutants include fly ash, sulfur dioxide, and lead dust.
Things to Do: Listen up. Where most cities have a dawn chorus, Linfen boasts an "evening chorus" of hacking coughs, as the city's smog intensifies towards dusk. The children of Linfen are prone to lead poisoning, which induces brain damage; almost anyone who samples the tasty local water risks arsenicosis. This causes skin lesions, vascular problems, hypertension, and many kinds of cancer. The perfect souvenir of any trip to this attractive city is a "Linfen tan" - a vicious ailment, caused by metallic pollution, properly known as blackfoot disease. Victims suffer bubbling and puckering of the hands and feet; eventually the skin turns crispy black; in extreme cases the appendage falls off.
Quote: "In the past, I dug 60 meters to get clean drinking water," says Li Yonggang, who lives in a stricken village in nearby Yongji County. "But now my well is 180 meters deep, and the water still looks like sewage."
Hell rating: 7/10


Mexico City
Location: Mexico
Population: 25m
Attractions: arguably the most populous city on earth, Mexico City is also famous for its rapid and uplanned urbanisation, the intense use of cars, endless miles of unregulated factories, and the unrestrained burning of fossil fuels. The city also boasts a unique topography - it sits on a sunbaked plateau surrounded by mountains, which means smog and smoke can never escape. This creates a permanent filthy haze that hovers over the entire megalopolis.
Things to Do: enjoy a refreshing shower of shit. As rainclouds pass over the urban areas, they are trapped by that bowl of mountains. Consequently the clouds suck up water from wherever they can - e.g. the vast sewage farms that surround the city. The clouds then backtrack, and release their burden of tainted vapour on the city. This falls as a light brown drizzle - of human excrement. Climatologists actually have a name for it: "fecal rain". Hotels can usually provide umbrellas.
Quote: "Simply living in Mexico City is equivalent to smoking twenty cigarettes a day". World Health Organisation report.
Hell Rating: 8/10


Kabwe
Location: Zambia
Population: 1.1m
Attractions: Lead smelting,
Things to do: build a surprisingly dynamic career. This second largest city in this southern African country was home to one of the world's largest lead smelters until 1987. As a result, the entire city is contaminated with heavy metal, which causes brain and nerve damage in children and fetuses. This leads to massive educational problems throughout the town: for every 10 micrograms of lead in a decilitre of blood, your IQ drops by an equivalent 10 points. On the good side this means you can get a really top job, if you decide to settle down here, as the competition ain't up to much.
Quote: "I thought Joburg was the worst city in Africa, and then I went to Kabwe." Anonymous Medicins sans frontieres aid worker, 2005.
Hell rating: 8/10


Sumqayit,
Location: Azerbaijan
Population: 275,000
Attractions: this town on the Caspian coast features the world's highest concentration of disused oil and chemical works. So spectacular are the decaying, Soviet-era hulks, they have been used in several Hollywood movies as a stand-in for apocalyptic dereliction on a future earth.
Things to do: one of the main pastimes in Sumqayit is dying young. Life expectancy in males is no higher than 60, with some experts putting it lower than 50. It's still falling. Local Azeris suffer cancer rates at least 50 percent higher than their countrymen, and their children suffer from a lively number of genetic defects ranging from mental retardation to bone disease.
Quote: "When the town was working, as much as 120,000 tons of harmful emissions were released on an annual basis," says local doctor Andrei Shalyaban. "There are also huge untreated dumps of industrial sludge, and the rivers are yellow and purple. It's not a nice place."
Hell Rating: 8/10


Norilsk
Location: northern Russia
Population: 100,000
Attractions: Norilsk is known for the smelting of nickel, which occurs throughout the town in vast plants. The smelting is directly responsible for pollution of a flamboyant complexity: the World Health Organisation's list of local air pollutants includes strontium 90, and caesium 137, as well as nickel, copper, cobalt, lead, palladium and selenium. Meanwhile the air and water is full of toxic gases such as nitrogen, phenol, carbon monoxide and hydrogen sulfide. Then there are the disused nuclear subs rusting in the freezing ocean a few miles offshore: they are thought to be leaking radiation.
Things to do: count yourself lucky you're here - Norilsk is world famous! By some estimates, fully 1 percent of the entire annual global emissions of sulfur dioxide come from this one smallish town on the Arctic Ocean. How good is that? But if the stats fail to grab you, then you can marvel at the celebrated "soil mines": metallurgic pollution in and around Norilsk is so severe it is now economically feasible to mine ordinary ground for its dangerous deposits of platinum and other heavy metals.
Quote: Yev Baidovitch, a local writer: "No one would live here if they, or their parents, hadn't been sent here."
Hell rating: 9/10


Sukinda
Location: Rajpur, India
Population: 2.6m
Attractions: Sukinda is a major centre for the Tata Steel company. The region is also home to a dozen of the world's largest lead and chromite mines.
Things to Do: spot the tumours. Those mines flush endless hexavalent chromium compounds into the Brahmani river, where they join 30 million tons of waste rock. The reliance of Rajupurites on this single watersource in turn leads to some of the most virulent and aggressive cancers ever recorded by medicine, including forms of intestinal cancer where the tumour rips overnight through the stomach wall, causing the sufferer to bleed to death through the rectum. Tuberculosis and asthma are common ailments. Infertility, birth defects, and stillbirths are endemic.
The Orissa Health Association has reported that an astonishing 85% of deaths in the mining areas and 86% of deaths in the nearby industrial villages occur expressly as a result of chromite-related diseases. The survey also claims that a quarter of all inhabitants are, at any one time, suffering from pollution-induced afflictions.
Quote: "These allegations about our town are clearly groundless". Rajpur State Official.
Hell rating. 7/10


Moynaq
Location: Uzbekistan, central Asia
Population: 30,000
Attractions: the endless golden beaches go on and on. And on and on and on and on. And on. Just a few decades back Moynaq was a happy and prosperous fishing town on the Aral Sea, one of the largest inland bodies of water in the world. But then the communists diverted the course of two major rivers, which fed the Aral, to irrigate more land for cotton growing. The ecosystem promptly collapsed, and the Aral literally dried up: the seashore retreated by a hundred miles: leaving behind a sterile desert. And a lot of stranded ships.
Things to do: go see the non existent wildlife. Of 173 animal species which flourished here 50 years ago, barely 30 survive today. Fisherman who fancy a challenge should bring their rods. And maybe a telescope: the local river systems used to boast 25 species of fish, now only two remain.
Weather-watchers will also have fun here: because of the disappearance of the forests, which used to regulate the microclimate, the region around the Aral is now exposed to atrocious Siberian winters, and summers where the temperatures can easily exceed 50C in the shade. That's if you can find any shade.
Finally, if you have your own transport, you might consider a pleasant halfday excursion to the nearby Island of Vozrozhdeniye: the site of a secret military base where chemical weapons were tested for thirty years. Spores of fatally poisonous anthrax, leached from the site, regularly turn up in the few fish that remain. Why not try the sushi? Talking of food, gourmets who like their seasoning should have a great time: on some days the entire city is shrouded in fogs of eerie grey saltdust, making any condiments unnecessary.
Quote: "The Aral Sea is a mistake of nature which has to be corrected." Stalinist scientist, 1950s.
Hell Rating: 10/10

A Brief Interlude of Gloating

My regular reader may recall that I spent the winter in unusual circumstances: writing a weird thriller in various parts of Asia, while doing soccer-related charity stories for FIFA.

You may have wondered what happened to the thriller. Or you may not. Who cares I'm gonna tell you anyway.

The following snippet of gossip appeared in Publishers Weekly this Friday past, summing up the buzz from last week's London Book Fair, the premier global bookfest of the spring.



"Several titles out on submission in the U.S. may get a boost from foreign sales at the fair... Jay Mandel at William Morris New York is due to go out shortly with Tom Knox’s The Genesis Secret, a thriller that weaves together the story of an archaelogical dig in the deserts of eastern Turkey with that of a series of random murders occurring in England. Harper bought U.K. rights to two books, and there are offers in Greece and Finland and multiple offers in Germany, Italy, France and Brazil."


Modesty precludes me from commenting further. YAYYYYYYYY!!!!!!!!!

O Tempora, O Mores...

.... my dad has a blog

Nobels

Wladislaw Reymant. Literature, 1924.


How To Win A Nobel Prize


Be A Man

Few Nobels go to women. Only two women, for instance, have won the Physics gong, and no woman has ever won the Economics prize. The Mrs Lucas who shared Prof Robert Lucas’s Economics prize-money in 1995 only got that because she stipulated she wanted half of everything in their divorce.


Be Clever

Going to the right highbrow educational institution helps. The Bronx Science High School in New York has alone produced five ‘Nobellians’. Chicago Uni boasts 58 Laureates on its roster; Harvard 35. And tiny Trinity College Cambridge has won more Nobels than all of Japan.


Be Nominated

Nomination-papers for the six Nobel prize categories (Peace, Literature, Medicine, Economics, Physics, Chemistry) are sent out in November each year by the Swedish Academy. The papers go to thousands of universities, academics, and previous prize-winners all around the world. So all you’ve got to do is befriend a Nobel Laureate. Try taking out Mrs Betty Williams of Belfast (Peace, 1975) for a Babycham.


Be Recommended

Once the nomination papers are in (by February 1st) the Swedish Academy forwards them to various committees. These groups of Nordic brainiacs then spend the summer assessing the relative merits of the nominees. If lasting achievement is anything to go by, the easiest categories to win seem to be Peace and Literature. Henry Kissinger won the Peace prize in 1973 for stopping the war in Vietnam. The war then started again. Anonymous non-entities who’ve won the Literature prize include Shmuel Agnon (1966), Bjornsterne Bjornson (1903), and Selma Lagerloef (1907).


Be Happy

Winning a Nobel is well worth the effort. Dynamite-inventor Alfred Nobel, who started the whole shebang in 1901, left 33 million Swedish crowns in his will to fund the awards. With inflation this money has swollen, such that every Nobel prize-winner now gets 7.9m crowns - nearly a million quid. And you wondered why John Hume (Peace, 1998) was looking so chirpy. Moreover, when you turn up at Stockholm’s Concert Hall on December 10 to collect your cheque, you also get a solid gold medal - none of your plated Olympics rubbish. So get to it.

Poem for the Day

Just found this great poem, in the Paris Review.



S. X. Rosenstock's Rimininny! (1996):

They read no more that day....
Dante



If you can't fuck me while I read, fuck off.
You're not the best of what's been thought or said,
Not yet. But youth, with genius, is enough.

Menage a trois is greatness, not rebuff,
If you gain art from what art's represented.
If you can't fuck me while I read, fuck off.

I want you, and I want a paragraph
Of lengthy James; he does go on. My love
Can you? I shouldn't praise his length? Enough

Of him? The body of work's living proof
We're all rare forms, and living ... in the dead.
If you can't A Little Tour in France me while I read,
fuck off.

I signal lusts by title, not handkerchief,
Since I'm the sex of all that I have read;
Sometimes I write this sex. Kiss me enough,

And well enough, that I may hear the snub
That reading's not a sexual preference.
If you can't fuck me while I read, fuck off,
Or rave how I'm a work of art enough.

Vote for Frankenstein

An Indian politician, yesterday.


Hello everyone. I am no longer in ASIA I am in IRELAND. One day soon I will actually go HOME. Until that moment, here's another essayistic riff provoked by my recent subcontinental travels.



Vote for Frankenstein!



India, it is often said, is a land of a thousand languages. But as recent visitors to the subcontinent can attest, one of those languages is heading for supremacy, and it isn't Hindi. It's English.

English is everywhere in India. On television and roadsigns, in newspapers and advertising. English is also in the mouths of the people, and for good reason. In a country so diverse, English is a unifier. If a traveller from Calcutta or New Delhi wants to be understood in Kerala he is arguably better off speaking the old colonial tongue. Because the official national language of Hindi is a mystery to many southerners.

So pervasive is Indian English, some experts think the native language is in danger of dying out: at least as a serious means of communication. Hindi is certainly struggling as a language of the elite. Mumbai University is reporting a collapse in Hindi studies: ten years ago there were 400 students taking a master's in Hindi every year; that figure has now halved. Many Bollywood stars, like Soha Ali Khan, admit they only talk Hindi to their "drivers and liftmen".

Moreover, when people do speak Hindi, it is often peppered with Anglophone idioms and phrases. Supposedly Hindi newspapers are full of this hybrid "Hindlish": "Tumko aana compulsory hai. Mere dinner ka time ho gaya hai".

All this is rather melancholy for Hindi patriots. But there is a comical aspect - for outsiders at least. Such is the prestige of western culture in India, many locals are giving their children names which are culled indiscriminately from English literature, and European history. Often to bizarre effect.

The upcoming elections, for instance, will see a battle between Romeo Rhani of the BJP, and Zenith Sangma, Admiral Sangma, and Adolf Hitler R Marak of the NCP. And the
honourable candidate for Mendipathar? A mister Frankenstein Momin.

Thai Punks on Bulb

Don't bogart that... er... mosquito coil, man.


I'm STILL in Asia. The following Asia-ish piece, by me, appeared in thefirstpost, a few days back.


Mad Thai Drugs



Drug scares are a regular occurrence in Thailand. In the 1980s, the great fear was "China white" heroin. In the 1990s, methamphetamine came along. Now there is a new drug on the Siamese streets - and it is truly bizarre.

The narcotic is colloquially known as "4 x 100". The name comes from its four main ingredients: Coca-Cola, cough syrup, boiled kratom leaves, and crushed-up coils of mosquito repellent.

Three of these ingredients can be found in the average supermarket. Kratom is an endemic local weed with properties similar to marijuana: you can buy it anywhere in Thailand, for a few baht.

No one knows who first concocted this extraordinary mix. But everyone agrees that 4 x 100 comes from the country's roiled, insurgent south, where bored Muslim youths - forbidden alcohol by their religion - experimented with various substances, to see what made them high. Somehow they hit on the 4 x 100 combination. The resulting brew is drunk very quickly: because it tastes much as it sounds.

The effect is like a slow-burning, hallucinogenic opiate. The user is stupefied, but then becomes agitated - as the dreams and visions kick in.

The craze has lately hit Bangkok. You can see people whacked out of their gourds, on 4 x 100, in many poor parts of the city. The government has tried banning cough syrups containing codeine, but the kids have simply switched to new brands.

Indeed, the fight against 4 x 100 is getting more complex, as the drug evolves. Rumours are circling of a refinement of 4 x 100: known as 6 x 100 or even 7 x 100 - because of the addition of new ingredients. These can include yoghurt, coffee or Alprazolam, (a sleeping pill already nicknamed the "deflowering drug", in the Muslim south). The final ingredient is the powder from the inside of fluorescent lightbulbs.

What I Did On My Holidays

A gluesniffing Indian kid, yesterday.



This piece originally appeared in thefirstpost, a few days back.




Sean Thomas is working for FIFA, publicizing charities around the
world. Recently he arrived in Calcutta. This is a diary of his first
day in this Bengali city, of 15 million people


One Day In Calcutta


21:00 Arrive from Bangkok

22:00 Drive into Calcutta. On the way learn that Winston Churchill
said of this city: "I am glad I have now been to Calcutta, because it
means I never have to go there again".

22:30 During the drive, nearly crash twice due to insane traffic
conditions: cars ignoring lights, trucks barrelling up wrong side of
road, everyone pressing horns creating a mindnumbing cacophony

22:35 Wonder if I am just being paranoid and traffic isn't that bad

22:36 See aftermath of road accident with taxi completely overturned,
in a narrow street: blood is splashed across the asphalt

23:46 Go to bed at hotel with large gin and tonic

09:30 Visit Futurehope, a charity that works with Calcutta's thousands
of streetchildren: abandoned, homeless and feral kids

09:40 Meet nine year old Jamal. Hear how he was found lying in the
railway station, where he slept with a razor blade under his tongue. Discover he used blade to defend himself from attackers

10:10 Meet twelve year old Kesar, who was burned hideously when his
mosquito net caught fire: a fire that killed his mother who was lying
next to him. He was found in the station sniffing glue and smoking heroin.
He plays football with us

10:50 Meet fifteen year old Ravit who was found age seven living on
street having been continuously raped for years by predatory
homosexuals: his syphilis was so bad he had to sit on a bucket of
potassium permanganate for six weeks

10:55 See the wooden sculptures that Ravit now carves. He is a
charming and friendly boy

11:00 Just about manage not to cry

11:40 Go for tour of Calcutta, "the city of joy"

11:50 On way through suburbs pass a begging leper, with no fingers;
see people living in plastic shacks by side of the road

12:00 Learn that we are in "the posh part of town"

1:00 Visit flower and spice market where peasant girls in gorgeous
saris sell beautiful garlands of orange marigold

1:45 See people living under the nearby flyover

2:15 Crawl through traffic and have minor crash: driver ignores incident

2:16: See an angry taxi driver continuously punching a smaller guy, in
the middle of the street

2:30 Go to the shores of the great river Hooghly, a tributary of the Ganges

2:40 Thousands of men are washing in the filthy water. An albino
child, apparently abandoned, stares wistfully at the banyan trees

4:00 Cross the river on the world's busiest bridge - a mighty steel
arch erected by the British - and take the slumroad to the "burning
ghat"

5:00 Three corpses are being cremated in the open air, on great pyres
of wood. A new corpse is being prepared for its immolation. The relatives stand around chatting as they watch the corpse attenders anoint the head with dark brown clarified butter

5:30 Watch as the fire is lit; the scent of burning human flesh fills the air

5:45 Step back from the heat and smoke as a previous pyre is stoked by
the corpse attenders; the half burned corpse rolls out of the embers:
the skull is still intact but the legs are burned to blackened stalks

5:50 Avert face from sight

5:51 See that behind me is a man naked from the waist down, in the
process of soiling himself; his loins are a mass of scarlet sores and
his wounds are seething with flies

6:30 Realise the man is dying

6:45 Climb back in Futurehope van to visit street kids who live under
the platforms of the vast Howrah railway station

7:15 See a teenage boy lying across tracks, with green flannel
draped over his face: the flannel is soaked in glue. His body spasms
as he inhales

7:50 Fight enormous urge to get taxi straight to airport

9:00 Instead go to visit Sonagachi, the red light district of
Calcutta, where 12 year old Nepalese girls grab every man by the arm,
trying to drag him in

9:15 Decide as a group to head directly and instantly to the hotel and get drunk

10:30 Have dinner in hotel restaurant of softshell crab in brandy
sauce, accompanied by Chilean shiraz

11:15 Realise wine cost hundred pounds: realise have drunk, in forty
minutes, a year's salary of average Calcuttan

12:05 Go to bed.

12.25 Stare at ceiling

12:26 Take Valium


www.futurehope.net

The Japanese are Mad, part Seventy Three

Some gay Japanese anime cartoon sex characters aimed at girl fans, yesterday.

The Bizarre Japanese Sex Craze That's Coming Our Way




They call it "yaoi". The derivation of the word is obscure. Some think it's just the Japanese way of saying "gay". Others claim the word is an acronym, derived from: "yama nashi, ochi nashi, imi nashi" (which loosely translates as "no story, just the good bits").
Whatever the etymology, the meaning is clear. Yaoi is the name of a bizarre sex phenomenon sweeping Asia: girls who are devoted to comics and pornography which focus on love, sex and romance - between men.
Of course, it's well known that men like the idea of sex between women. Lesbian erotica - for men - is arguably the most popular genre in the porn industry. But hitherto it was always presumed that women were not interested in boys getting hot with other boys.
The craze for yaoi shows that this isn't true.
Yaoi began with anime and manga comics called shonen-ai, which depict, in a rather softcore way, intimacy between young men. These were originally aimed at a homosexual male market. But then the Japanese publishers noticed that many of their readers were heterosexual - and female.
Since then yaoi, also known as BL (for Boy Love), has developed as a genre of its own: with stories, comics and pornography specifically marketed at girls. Commonly these books and movies are written, shot and devised by women artists.
The stories have a formula. They usually feature a dominant male character - tall and masculine - who deflowers a smaller, more androgynous adolescent. Sometimes the stories are seriously explicit. These hardcore yaoi comics have recently attracted a gay male readership: a rich irony.
What do girls see in yaoi? Theories range from the obvious - "it's nice to look at cute boys together" - to the more complex and psychological: yaoi is a way for women to explore and enjoy male sexuality, in a non-threatening way. But no one really knows.
What is not in doubt is the genre's success. Yaoi magazines sell right across Asia, in their millions. They have become hugely popular in Korea, Taiwan and now Thailand (causing consternation in local politicians). In the last couple of years, yaoi has spread to America; a yaoi convention was recently held in California.
And now yaoi is coming to the UK. An English language yaoi magazine has just launched on amazon; there is even a website: yaoi.co.uk.
Could it take off in Europe? If the next boyband in the popcharts is suspiciously gay, you'll know the answer is Yes.

Naziphobia, Redux

Some of the vast majority of peaceful British Nazis, at a local village meeting, yesterday.



In the wake of the flap over the Archbishop of Canterbury, and his halfwitted remarks on multiculturalism and the law (AKA "Shariagate"), I thought I'd revisit this blogpost of mine, from a couple of years ago.

(I promise to blog something new and exciting soon. But I'm still in Asia, writing the thriller, as of this moment.)


Naziphobia on the rise, says report


A report from the British Anti-Racist Federation (BARF) has revealed a frightening rise in Naziphobia, following the attacks on Britain by extreme Nazis.

Professor Tim Bimley, director of BARF, told us yesterday: 'Just because a few radicalised Nazis have attempted to attack Britain with large scale bombing atrocities, this in no way justifies any revenge against the vast, peaceable majority of Britain's Nazis, who simply want to live their quiet Jew-hating lives as they have always done.'

Heinrich Sturmer, is a British Nazi from Bradford, part of the growing minority of immigrant Nazis in Britain's industrial cities. 'Ever since these radical Nazis attacked London, life for us has become intolerable,' he says, in the lebensraum of his neat little bungalow. 'People stare at us differently. The other day I was goose-stepping down Bradford High Street, shouting in a hectoring manner and demanding that Jew-shops give me free food, and one small English boy shouted Hitler! at me. Luckily the British police jumped on the small boy, beat him up and carted him off to jail. He is now being charged with inciting ideological hatred. But it was a frightening incident.'

BARF has many such accounts on its records. The small British Nazi community in Leeds had their annual torchlit parade interrupted, before their local 'fuhrer', or community leader, could denounce Slavs and gypsies as vile thieving parasites, as is traditional. A hundred miles south, the significant British Nazi community of Luton claims that a local journalist has written columns questioning the British Nazis' use of eugenics, and forced sterilisation.

'These things are traditional to Nazis,' says one Luton Nazi, Hans Schlenk. 'We've always sterilised our mental deficients and stupid retards. And we only allow breeding between blue eyed Aryans. What's wrong with that? It's our way of life. Likewise,' he adds, his small moustache bristling, 'Nazis have a great tradition of gassing undesirable elements in our own community. Its just racism to say we should stop. We're just different. Why can't the British live with that?'

David Bloony, The Runnymede Trust, concurs. 'If multiculturalism is to mean anything, it means that we tolerate cultural differences. Nazis are genocidal sadists with a long tradition of anti-Semitic hatred, we should respect that.' And the attacks? 'If we let the Nazi bombings change our way of life, then we will have let them win. Because that's what all Nazis want. Er, uhm, I mean some Nazis. Er.. don't I?'

Parroting

An African Grey, yesterday.


Greetings. I am in Asia. Writing a thriller. Yep. Maybe I will blog about this at some point, maybe not. Quite frankly, I might not, cause thriller-writing is knackering. Sorry.

Until that moment when I possibly blog about my Asian travels and experiences, or not, as the case may be, here is another piece of warmed-over journalism, lazily culled from all the stuff I wrote for Maxim about ten years ago.

And people say blogging is hard. Cuh.



How to teach a bird to talk

Choose your species
Different kinds of birds have different talking abilities. Macaws are pretty good speakers, but are loud and rough voiced and sound like a Glaswegian after a pint of lighter-fuel. Mynah birds from India are fairly chatty, but somewhat dim and repetitive. Likewise budgies, cockatoos, lovebirds and lorakeets - they can all be taught to speak, but tend to be rather slow on the pick up. According to Irene Pepperberg, the world’s top bird-speech expert, the smartest and clearest talking birds are, without doubt, African grey parrots.

Say some words
Once you’ve purchased your African grey, don’t expect him to be instantly nattering away like a teenager with her first mobile. It takes time. And of course individual critters vary in personality - some are sharp, some retarded. First off, try saying something clear and simple - ‘hello’, ‘goodbye’, etc. Say it slowly, close to the bird. Then say it again and again, and again, for ten minutes, then repeat these ten minute sessions twice a day for several months. If this gets boring you can make a tape and play it next to the cage.

Don’t say fuck
Birds like shortish words with hard, clear consonants. That’s why ‘Pretty Polly’ is so popular. It’s also why ‘fuck’, ‘shit’, ‘arse’ and all the other Anglo-Saxon swearwords are so quickly picked up by even an averagely stupid budgie. And remember, it might be, on the face of it, a laff to teach your nan’s parakeet to say ‘suck my dick, muthafucka’, but do you really want to listen to this phrase several dozen times a day? Every day? For seventy years? Parrots are some of the longest lived creatures on earth.

Try a sentence
Once your bird has mastered some simple phrases - and these should come in a few months - you can move on to more complex constructions, and even get the birds to say them at the right time: like ‘are you going out?’ when you are going out. However, if your bird proves to be a total smart-alec, keep him away from irrelevant noises. Quick birds have been known to pick up and repeat baby gurgles, phone trills, human snoring. And the quickest birds, according to Irene Pepperberg, actually understand some of what they’re saying. Which is another reason not to teach them to say ‘wanker’.

The Exorcist

That's your mum, that is.



How To Become An Exorcist

Get ordained
Both the Church of England (in 1975) and the Roman Catholic Church (in 1999) have restated the ongoing need for ‘proper’ exorcisms. For that reason they still employ official exorcists. These tend to be local priests who have shown themselves to be ‘holy, courageous, and humble’. Candidates should also be physically strong: exorcisms are notoriously stressful. In 1982 the Pope himself conducted an exorcism on a possessed woman which left him ‘writhing on the ground’.

Be lucky
Each diocese or bishopric in the UK (whether C of E or Catholic) has one designated exorcist. That means there’s one living not far from you. But as there are estimated to be only a handful of true cases of possession (i.e. cases of possession which aren’t really cases of Tourette’s syndrome, or schizophrenia) in the UK each decade, even these official exorcists will be fairly fortunate to encounter authentic diabolic manifestation in their working lives.

Change denomination
If you’re determined to hobnob with a hobgoblin, consider working for a more flexible employer. The Eastern Orthodox church, for instance, follows medieval Christian practise in allowing any layman with the right skills and mindset to practise exorcism. And certain ‘charismatic’ sects of fundamentalist Protestantism, like the Universal Life Church, or the Assembly of God, positively encourage their ordinary members to lay into each other’s ghoulies.

Locate demons
OK. So you’ve joined some bunch of frankly mad tambourine-bashers. Now all you need to do is find a malign possessing spirit. Good places to look for demons, according to the Catholic Encyclopaedia, are latrines, wells, cellars, and dogs (particularly liable to possession, apparently). That done, just arm yourself with some salt, a violet surplice, some Holy Water, and a copy of the Exorcism Ritual, or Ritual Romanum, and you’re away. But be careful - on average one American dies each year as a direct result of ‘amateur’ exorcisms.

Christmas Repeats

Merry Christmas Everyone!

I've just had some VERY good news. so good I'm too superstitious to tell everyone what it is, just in case it happened in a parallel universe or something and my revealing what it is will prevent it from having happened in a quantum type Heisenbergy uncertainty principle-ish sort of way.

So instead of telling you my good news, which will have to wait a few days, here, as a present to my regular reader (hello Tom in Milwaukee!) is the very first post I ever posted on the Womble, a post which remains one of my faves.



A Rose By Any Other Name?

Sean Thomas reports on some terminological trouble in the Deep South of France.


It's like any little town in the rural south of France - only prettier. Old men play boules in the shade of the linden trees. Pretty girls cycle past with baguettes pointing from their rucksacks. In front of the Hotel de Ville three tricolores hang ostentatiously in the fine summer sun. In fact, it could be a Gallic vision of earthly paradise - if it weren't for one thing. The town's name is Tampon.

Sipping a pastis in his favourite brasserie, the fifty-something mayor of Tampon, Gaston Lefevre, explains the latest difficulties caused by the town's name. 'It started about about ten years ago, with these Australian backpackers. They came to Tampon, and they took photos. By the town sign.' Gaston finishes his drink, slapping it down on the zinc-topped bar. 'Pas de probleme! But then they tell their friends, and their friends aussi, and now every summer we have many hundreds of them. They come, they take the photo, they laugh and shout Tampon! to their friends, and then pouf! - they are gone. They do not even spend money!'

For such a small place, Tampon is quite haughtily historic. The river Lisiec has been wending its languid way through the vieux ville for nearly two thousand years. Louis XIV used to send his favourite bastard children here; he allegedly once came himself with the royal mistress. Closer to our own time, famous French footballer Michelle Platini recently bought a home in the sunny chestnut-woods nearby.

The people of beautiful Tampon are, consequently, not used to being laughed at: and the touristic kerfuffle over their name has punctured their civic amour propre. But what to do? After much deliberation, the town council has decided to petition the French State, via the Ministry of the Interior, for permission to change the name of the town.

Job done? Not in France. It turns out that under an obscure Napoleonic law - the 'Loi Tissiane' - any French city, town, village, or hamlet is forbidden to change its name, without the express permission of the Senate and the President. Such permission is, of course, almost impossible to get, given the stubbornly slow wheels of French bureaucracy. The upshot is that it may be many years, even decades, before Tampon gets its new, less 'hilarious' name.

It's a setback, but Gaston Lefevre tries to remain stoical. He says they can wait: the townspeople have been called 'Tamponniers' for twenty centuries. He is however burningly curious about one thing. 'You Anglo-Saxons, why do you snigger?' He sighs, expressively. 'In French, the word tampon can also mean what I think it means for you, a coussinet, the cloth for the female period. But we do not have hordes of French tourists laughing by our town sign! Only you English. What is this: your strange humour?'

The derivation of 'Tampon' is obscure. Some people think it comes from the Occitan dialect word tapon, which refers to the rags used to clean, and plug, medieval cannons. That would make some sense, as this part of the Languedoc saw many religious wars in the 13th and 14th centuries. Other scholars think the name predates the crusades against the Cathars and Templars, and is some kind of Celtic tribal name. Perhaps it once belonged to a proud Gallo-Roman chieftain.

But if Tampon's name is curious, there are others in this lost part of rural southern France which are even more intriguing. Not far away from Tampon, towards la ville rose of Toulouse, is the departmental capital of Condom. This town has been the butt of many jokes in the last few decades; but it bears them bravely, and even exploits the possibilities in its tourist merchandise. The same goes for the fishing village of Pubic-sur-mer, down on the sea near Narbonne. It was once favoured by great painters like Cezanne; now it's more famous for its naughty postcards emblazoned with the town's 'amusing' name. This name, of course, simply means the hill-by-the-sea.

And then there's the village of Cuntface. This pretty, straggling village is only twelve miles from Tampon, up the green wooded valley of the River Lisiec.

What is extraordinary about Cuntface, is that the locals do not seem to realise the striking double entendre. When questioned, for instance, the local pattisier, Monsieur Pejul, can only shrug. 'Oui, Cuntface? What are you looking at? Zis name is difficult for you? It means... ow you say?' Similarly blank faces can be found in any of the village's bars and cafes. The people of Cuntface actively deny any knowledge of the English meaning of the name; and look shocked when it is explained to them.

The same remarkable ignorance is shown in the neighbouring hamlet of Fuck-Fuck-Fuck-Fuck-Cunt-Buggery-Tits-Cock-Fucking-Wank-Arsehole. This is a tiny French farming village of some hundred souls, dwarfed by the Pyrenees above. It doesn't even have a bar, or a church, just a little shop, and a rather quiet cafe. In the cafe the local flic, the village bobby, looks puzzled when questioned about his village's extraordinary name.

'Fuck-Fuck-Fuck-Fuck-Cunt-Buggery-Tits-Cock-Fucking-Wank-Arsehole is a very nice place', he says, in his thick but charming mountain dialect. 'We are very 'appy here. I do see there is une probleme with our name. What does it mean? You mean it eez rude?'

Anglophone visitors to Fuck-Fuck-Fuck-Fuck-Cunt-Buggery-Tits-Cock-Fucking-Wank-Arsehole may find such indifference perplexing - even risible. But they should remember that our English-speaking world has more than a few intriguing names of its own. Near the Leicestershire town of Ashby-de-la-Zouche, for instance, is the large village of Derriere-sur-la-Nez. Scholars are unsure why the villages and towns in this part of the foxhunting Midlands have unusual French names; no one has any idea at all why little Derriere should boast such a peculiar moniker.

Other placenames around the UK have similarly wry echoes for foreign visitors. Old Cojones, near Harrogate, sees busloads of chuckling Spanish tourists every summer. Beautiful Scheissedale, also in Yorkshire, gets dozens of German visitors, some of whom aren't there solely because it's in Herriot country. And what about Merde-Merde-Merde-Merde-Merde-Merde-Pissoir-Merde-Foutre-Batard-Pissoir!, a pretty little seaport just south of Alnwick?

Remember that next time you are laughing at a badly translated foreign menu.