Keep your Bolly heart on - she's a heroine! (According to AOL®)

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Dramatic departure for Emmerdale star

Holly Barton will soon suffer an overdose of heroin on screen


Since I knew nothing about Emmerdale - other than the obvious Linda Lusardi connection - it took good old Wikipedia® to put me right that the person pictured is not the said Barton, but the person (with a challenging surname) who plays her:

Holly Barton is a fictional character from the British soap opera Emmerdale, played by Sophie Powles. She made her first on-screen appearance on 17 July 2009


What I'm wondering is of a manifold nature:

* Whether AOL®'s 'people' had any idea who this Barton about whom they wrote was

* In any case, why they chose to use a photo of Sophie P. standing in front of the logo of a duscredited and defunct newspaper

* Unrelatedly, why the item just days ago that reported Lorraine Kelly falling off her horse appeared weeks after a small mention in i newspaper around a week before the end of February*


End-notes

* I have checked, and it was in the edition on Thursday 23 February. So much for 'breaking news' (pun probably intended)!

The full item, under the heading Lorraine Kelly hurt falling from horse (which pretty much is the story), read:

TV presenter Lorraine Kelly said she got a "real fright"** after falling from a horse, which then stamped on her leg. The 52-year-old lost a lot of blood and was rushed to hospital for surgery after the accident on Tuesday [i.e. 21 February]. Ms Kelly tweeted that the horse had made a deep wound that would take several weeks to heal properly [sc. around the time, then, that AOL® reported it as if it were, at least, recent].

** Why this isn't "a real fright" is beyond me (or, although it may be i's house-style, with single quotation-marks).


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Might I ask what our Sunday trading legislation is for? (2)

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18 March

Just, for the sheer helluvit, I had planned to revisit this topic (when I started this posting as what Wikipedia® calls 'a stub'), but it happens to have become topical, with plans 'to relax' the legislation for the time of The Olympic Games.

Already The Opposition is questioning whether this is an initial move to do away with some provisions of the Sunday Trading Act 1994 permanently, which might be calculated to put the idea into the relevant noddle, not least when AOL® flashed a hint, last night, that the National Minimum Wage will be under attack in The Budget.

And, of course, we know how businesses suffered impossibly when the minimum wage was brought in - it's just that they chose to do so in a reaction delayed by many years - and that businesses, like banking, are good for the country as a whole, not just for those who receive large rewards for being part of the sector of financial services.


As for the 1994 Act, what would it mean to relax its effect temporarily? Not having any protection from sanctions, such as victimization or dismissal, if one refuses to work on a Sunday? A different regime for opting in or out of Sunday working?

Or is Mr Osborne going to look at that window of six hours for Sunday opening instead - or as well? So the shop can be open from 9.00 till 6.00, maybe, and if you don't want to work those hours, then

Nice XYZ Plc is offering you nine hours' work on Sunday - take it or lose it, as they want the hours worked, and you will be short on your usual working hours, because they are restructuring the shifts, if you refuse them, and these are part of your allotted hours, not additional ones.

And not that they would roster the rest of your hours at unsocial hours either...


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Bath-times with a difference (3)

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29 February

Someone who was foolish¹ enough to post a comment on the first of what has become a trio of these postings did so to ask what my advice would be on the matter of croutons. To which my immediate response was:

That is a good question, but not one not to be thought of apart from that of the use of condiments, or, of course, of the edicts as a whole of the court of Louis XIV², I must say (probably in a later posting, on a quite diferent topic)...

For, that epoch³ was, just as we still have the origins there of our code of dining etiquette (e.g. not eating off the knife, how to set out the cutlery, and other impermissible uses of it, etc.), the source of various rulings about food and wine (and how, when and why they are to be consumed - with a very special section on cake).

If I had the energy to invent them, we could spend a merrily long time considering them all, but let us confine ourselves - willing prisoners - to the matter of soup (and avoid, if at all possible, the tangentially connected one of letting cheese melt in it).

Well, of course (miser that he was), Louis invented the crouton. You know how it is: you have some pretty big palace stuck in a field outside Paris, and it's hard to get the catering right. The Royal Baker produces too much for numbers at court that day, and Louis is fretting about this bread that is going uneaten and stale, so he tasks said regal bakery with the task of devising a way of using it.

They are bakers, so they already know about freshening up bread by warming it up again a little, and just take it a little further, rescuing bread that has gone beyond those bounds in this form of what can be added not just to soup, but to any dish with a signifcantly liquid element⁴.

Louis is, of course, delighted, and willingly takes the credit in front of those first to see him sprinkle what he dubs croûtons into his French onion (which, of course, The French assuredly don't - and never have - called it, any more than Danish pastries go by that name in Norway): he was thinking of cru plus tons, by which he meant the top-notch crunching noises that would result.

However, that real origin has been subsumed, in the search for some wholesome derivation, by some piffle about the word 'crust' (when there may be no crust involved on any side of the dice that croutons essentially are - though, but at the risk of burning the apex, they could be tetrahedra, or, without that problem (but the much greater one of making them), icosaehdra or dodecahedra).

However, Louis ends up having to banish croûtons, because his - sometimes not very classy - courtiers end up mucking around with them during meals, and even having games of craps with them later. (They were only emancipated after the Revolution, when Danton much prized them.)

The same sparing qualities can be seen in the well-known account of Marie Antoinette - also, as it happens, addressing what to do if bread is short. (No doubt this was the practice of Louis - if numbers at court exceeded supply, the bakers were asked to find some gâteaux to fill the lack.)

I'll wager that she would have used the subjunctive⁵, which I hazily recall being something of the order of Qu'ils mangèrent des gâteaux!, but I'm certainly not going to check that!


End-notes

¹ The word is used for reasons that may become apparent.

² We - seem to - take for granted that a monarch's name has such trailing capital Roman numerals to denote how many Henrys there have been (strange that we stopped at VIII - did the name fall out of fashion, for some reason (probably related to that king's eating habits)?), but why did we adopt this practice (from the Roman Empire, I think - either that, or from someone's repeated playing of Risk), and what happened at the time to lead to that choice?

³ Until cut short by what happened in (and leading up to) 1789 and afterwards, with the rise to power of Gérard Depardieu (and the coincidental reinstatement of chocolate as a form of currency, still marked to-day, more than two centuries later, by those little string-bags of chocolate money at Christmas).

⁴ If you happen to believe in the merits of Wikipedia®, I suppose that you can be forgiven for crediting it when it launches into an explanation of their purpose with salads first ('notably the Caesar salad')...

⁵ Unless a speaker is really classy (or attempting to impress - as impress one must - an examiner in advanced French), people don't go out of their way to use this mood, so knowledge of it all becomes a little vestigial...


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Another successful search with Google®

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4 February

It couldn't just have been hearing Mary Ann Kennedy to-night presenting a largely live show, the last of those that have been on during the week, from events at Celtic Connections (in Glasgow), but I was reminded a little while back of the name Shona Spurtle.

Now, I knew perfectly well what the name meant (to me) - and I will wager that it doesn't mean a whole lot to many others - but I didn't know if it was spelt Spirtle (as I don't remember paying any attention to when I could have seen it written). So, rather than putting into my search-box the name of where Shona comes from, I put in that spelling - setting a challenge.

Obscure though it is - but I might, although I doubt it, find a plethora of fan web-sites in my search-results - Google® knew what I meant, and has taken me straight there:

I now know that there is a clip on YouTube, and that someone liked the name enough to have it as a user-name to comment on a story connected with the Scottish Parliament.

Amazon®, ever ready to please, even claims to have a web-page called www.amazon.co.uk/spurtle, which won't be the laugh that I hope for it to be, as I think that I have clicked such advertising links before...

No, it turns out that I am wrong, for, although it looked like a page of ball-point pens, it is some sort of culinary stick - it could be a magic-wand, for all that I know! - in connection with porridge (the making of, I have to think, as I have no conception how (or why) one could eat that dish with something looking like this).

In any case, they go for nearly £5.00 (well, more than that with postage - is there a standard Amazon® charge for a spurtle?), the best ones boast of being made of beech* (how that can matter to anything?), and you can even buy a box of six. Plus there's a hardback book, but it's miserably not available, called Mrs Spurtle goes South, which, I think, precedes this other appearance as a name.

Bizarrely, there is even a double of the Wikipedia® web-page for the vehicle in which our Mrs (or Ms) Spurtle appeared. It is called Wikipeetia, and it claims to exist solely because 'you spelled someting wrong'**, so:

For your amusement, we've also included a copy of the entire Wikipedia article misspelled

Helpfully, as I am obviously a remedial case for making such an error (?), there is a link that will take me where I can learn to spell English, or just to the unprocessed Wikipedia® piece.
As yet, though, nothing to lure me to buy a recording that shows Siobhan Redmond's exploits as Shona, but she may have gone on to use that 'handle' on Arsebook® and Twitter®, both of which claim that Shona has a presence.

No, again I speak too soon (what a rich vein this is: or is that the - I kid you not! - Glayva talking?), because I can buy a pirate DVD, and there is a web-site with a quotation (and they don't even know where it's from!), which I shall use by way of an ending of all this - for want of a better word - craic:

You are a waster, Sebastian! You are a lying cheat! You are a fibster, a fabulist, an equivocating shim-shammer, a cousining cardsharp, a pathological mythomaniac, a yarner, a palterer who perjures, a whited sepulchre, a cantering serpent, a rat!

Yes, she likes him!


End-notes

* Then again, it is traditional for wash-backs to be made from pine, and not just any old pine, but Oregon pine. We are talking of - if you know what I'm talking about - a very conservative means of producing a drinkable spirit, where they reproduce the dents in the copper-stills, when they have worn so thin that they need repair.

That said, some have taken the view that this Oregon pine approach adds nothing to the all-important taste (too much liquid in there for too short a time to make a difference - except, perhaps, at the leve of homoeopathy), and have gone for stainless-steel vessels. Which you would have no way of knowing when you buy the product, unless you have visited.)

** This seems a tenuous reason to have gone to the trouble of having such a dual text (even if, in it, for example,the word not is turned into 'nto', in a restless attempt to misspell everything, whereas what is really presented is often enough just a meaningless rearrangement of the letters).

I cannot believe that the reason applies in all cases, since this is not the only time that I have looked at what is just the fourth page of search-results, and I do not reall seeing such a thing, although I am often enough searching for a name precisely because I do not know how it is spelt. However, I shall attempt to find the famous Helen Mirran... Well, it didn't surface in the first hundred search-results, but I now know that 66-year-old Mirren, the famous typing error, has - seemingly by her much-vaunted posing nude - earnt the title of having 'the sexiest body on [the] planet' (according to www.salon.com), and also wants not only to appear in Doctor Who, but to be the first female Doctor***.

*** Doubtless her part-time role appreciating art for MOMA (the Museuem of Modern Art in New York) fits her for such a role (I cannot wait for the first Cubist Doctor Who). In the commentary on a clip that she filmed for the museum, which I might have to resist watching (after such a write-up), we are told:

Truth be told, I’m a huge fan of the dame. In addition to being a fantastic actor, she’s beautiful, smart, and completely unpretentious. She’s an art lover, and she is especially enamored of the pioneering abstract paintings of Vasily Kandinsky, whose work is represented in MoMA’s collection and whose “Four Seasons” were very fortuitously on view on the day of her visit. [...]

Like these amazing works, Helen does not disappoint, and in this interview she talks passionately about her great love of painting—particularly her “lovely friends” the Kandinsky paintings—and about the connections between painting and her work.


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Kelly Brook shows us her coconuts! (according to AOL®)

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28 January

So what can that possibly be about?

Well, she is not alone in liking the beach, possibly the tropics (possibly being photographed there*), and then there's this BFG / BGT / GMT business to promote...

So what are the chances of a Hawaiian look, rather than her collection of prized shells garnered from pleasure-beaches from Margate to Skegness, Blackpool to Minehead?

Going to the page, and below a photograph of Kelly** (holding an unhusked coonut - I take it to be such, rather than a partly damaged elephant's testicle) is:

Mostly we are posting this picture of Kelly Brook because we wanted to use the coconuts headline. It's very classy reporting but y'know what? Kelly is lovely (we met her at London Fashion Week), her bikini is lovely, and we wish we were on holiday instead of typing at our desks while a pigeon with a bad attitude watches us through the window.


So, highly informative! - I liked the pigeon's eye view best (in fact, I met the pigeon, also at London Fashion Week, and got all the gossip)...


End-notes

* It seems that the Hindustan Times may know more than most, apparently describing Kelly as 'the ideal travel companion for guys'.

** Meanwhile, Wikipedia®'s entry appears to err on the side of caution, telling us that she ' is an English model, actress, entrepreneur, television presenter and Playboy model'.

Delving further, though:

1. Does Kelly (née Kelly Ann Parsons - any connection with Nicholas?) fill in her census form that way (OK, the chauffeur does it), considering herself 'English' (even if she is), rather than British (even if she is)?

2. In what order do these attributes, achievements or activities appear? - it might seem chronological, but I am less sure, and in what sense do they distinguish her from, say, Linda Lusardi (although the latter is patron of a refuge for orphaned oysters, it must be remembered, as, properly, Wikipedia® records in her entry)? Or does starring in pantomime - and even Emmerdale - constitute a divide?***

3. Does once a 'Playboy model', always a 'Playboy model' apply? Would it still be the case twenty years hence, even if she did not appear in the publication in-between, or does it - any time - become 'and has appeared in Playboy [as a model]'?

4. Plus, aren't we over looking a few things? To name but a few:

* Justice of the Peace

* Piano-tuner

* Auxiliary fire-fighter

* Mother of the Bennett daughters from Pride and Prejudice (because Mrs Bennett was busy, writing her biography of Jane Austen)

* Carpet-layer


*** I do not know about the Playboy part (as the writing is not of the best, and Linda has always been disappointed by its attempts at interviews with Woody Allen). However, Linda has a thriving business, which she started herself ten years ago, where pubs - if any can still be found, and ones where people play not just games, but card-games - are offered a replacement pack of cards, because it is impossible to play properly when everyone knows that the one with the missing corner is the King of Diamonds.


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