Eat, Think and be Entertained

There's a side of London the tourists don't see; a sub-culture of evening salons, tiny intimate comedy gigs and shows where people come together to drink, eat, laugh and learn. I've been to a few recently, and even spoken at a couple, so I thought it would be nice to do a little round up of some of my favourites.

Firstly there's Science Show-Off and Museums Show-off, both the brainchild of comedy geek (or geeky comedian) Steve Cross. I wrote about the shows here in August after doing a spot at one of them. Steve describes them as 'a chaotic open mic night for scientists, science communicators, science teachers, historians and philosophers of science, students, science popularisers and anyone else with something to show off about science'. And that's how it works; around 10 speakers get up on stage and sing the praises of some aspect of science or museums and the funnier they are the better. I've seen presentations on the preservation of human skin, bizarre and downright cruel Victorian Valentine's cards and all manner of other brilliant subjects. Although regularly staged in London, these shows do pop up in other cities too so click on the hyperlinks above and find out if there's one near you any time soon. Or why not contact Steve and arrange one?

Of similar intent but with very different subject matter, we have Simon Watt's Ugly Animal Preservation Society and Iszi Lawrence's Z List Dead List. Both are about championing the underdog. In Simon's case it's those creatures that, through no fault of their own, are considered uncharismatic enough to never be chosen as the logo for an animal charity; animals like the blobfish, the pubic louse and the hairy anglerfish that deserve your love just as much as the fluffy pandas and annoying meerkats do.

Iszi's shows, meanwhile, champion people that history has forgotten unfairly and who deserve greater recognition; people like Mary Tofts who fooled polite Georgian society with her rabbit trick (I'll say no more - look her up) and the Reverend Robert Hawker who invented Harvest Festival but also dressed up as a mermaid to freak people out. Like the Show-Off shows, the format is very simple - a bunch of people get up on stage, one at a time, to extol the virtues of their chosen beast or person - but the final result is hugely entertaining. Again, follow the hyperlinks above for dates and venues.

New kid on the block is Historic Punch organised by Dr Lindsey Fitzharris, caricaturist Ade Teal and History Vault magazine founder Rebecca Rideal. The shows, hosted by Black's Club in Soho (itself a place steeped in bawdy history), see historians giving forth upon a theme. The most recent I attended was themed around 'over-indulgence' and featured talks by Time Team's Professor Francis Pryor who told us about Neolithic hedonism, Dr Lucy Inglis who talked historical drug addiction and Dr Matthew Green who gave us a taste - literally and figuratively - of life in the Georgian chocolate houses.

I say literally as we got to taste the kind of hot chocolate that people like Cosimo de Medici favoured; bitter, dark, thick and laced with things like ambergris, musk and spices. It is an acquired taste, trust me. Incidentally, Matthew also runs Unreal City Audio that does fantastic historical tours of coffeehouse London and Fleet Street. Well worth a visit.

Salon London is a well-established cultural monthly showcase of specialists from the worlds of science, the arts and psychology. The overarching theme is getting amazing ideas - some new, some old - out to a wider public. It has, in fact, now spawned the annual Transmission Prize to reward the person that Salon, Salon attendees and a judging panel consider to have done the best job of 'delivering big ideas, well communicated' in the previous year. Hosted by the wonderfully enthusiastic Juliet Russell and Helen Bagnall, the shows have drawn in a staggering range of talent including Dr Aarathi Prasad, Clare Conville, Damian Barr, Julian Baggini, Marcus Chown, Natalie Haynes, Dr Phillipa Perry, Ella Berthoud, Dr Stu Clark and Tracey Thorn. It's always a treat. And Salon also does shows in Harrogate as Salon North and at the Latitude Festival.

Last but not least, I must mention Skeptics in the Pub, a national and now international form of grass roots informal get-together for critical thinkers. Created by Sid Rodrigues just a few years ago, there are now SITP meetings all over the place. And, while most involve nothing more challenging (or brilliant) than people sitting around discussing interesting topics while drinking beer, many put on talks by guest speakers and the circuit boasts some real heavyweights like Prof Richard Wiseman, Dr Simon Singh, Robin Ince, Robert Llewellyn and Jon Ronson. Do check the link above to see if there's one near you. If not, start one!

So, there you go. A round-up of just a few things you might like to attend if you live in or near London or, in some cases, elsewhere in the country. All of these events will make you laugh and think and laugh again. Plus you'll be socialising with real people rather than the little avatar pictures that appear on Twitter and Facebook. And, as most take place in pubs and bars, you'll be keeping the British pub alive too.

What's not to like?

Weekend Wonders #8 - Oh January ... don't go! Don't go!

This week's column from the Sunday People by yours truly ...

January wasn’t always the first month of the year. The Romans originally used a 10 month calendar that started on the 1st of March and didn’t quite have enough days to fill the year. A leftover from this silly state of affairs is that the tax year starts in April and the names of our months don’t make sense any more.

We all know that words beginning with ‘oct’ usually relate to the number eight – octopus, octagon, octave etc. So, logically, October should be the eighth month, shouldn’t it? Of course it should. And, under the Roman 10 month calendar it was. Consequently, September was the seventh, November the ninth and December the tenth. The introduction of a 12 month calendar – by adding January and February – bumped everything up a couple of months. These two new months were created somewhere around 700BC by King Numa Pompilius.

However, in those days, the calendar followed lunar months (the word month comes from Moon, of course) and 12 periods of 28 days didn’t fit within the 365 day year. Even with two new months it was still too short and the seasons all started moving around. A major rethink was needed. So Julius Caesar stepped in and redesigned it, creating the Julian Calendar. It was better but still not quite right and it took a further tweak by the Vatican under Pope Gregory XIII in 1582 to bring us to the familiar Gregorian Calendar that we still use in the West today. It isn’t perfect, but it’s not likely to change much from now on.

The Anglo Saxons called January Wulf-monath because it was the month when packs of hungry wolves would descend upon the villages.

Make sure you lock the cat flap …

Three Trapped Tigers - New BeatCast Studio Sessions EP

A new three track EP by my good friends Three Trapped Tigers is now available to download through Bandcamp. Pay a quid, pay a tenner - the more you pay, the more you support new music. And now is a good time to latch on to these guys ... a certain Mr Eno has seen their worth and may be involved in their second album this year ...



Here's the Bandcamp link to all of the currently available Three Trapped Tigers goodies.

Weekend Wonders #7 - Get Branded

This week's Weekend Wonders column from The People:

Have you ever wondered why Ebay is called Ebay? Or why ASDA is called ASDA? Everyday speech is studded with brand and company names: yet most of us probably don’t know their origins.

Boots the chemist was founded in 1849 by John Boot who opened a herbalist shop in Goose Gate, Nottingham selling home-made remedies. Boots now owns and runs its own laboratories and discovered the painkiller Ibuprofen.

DIY store B&Q is named after its founders Richard Block and David Quayle. You can buy MDF (medium density fibreboard) flatpack furniture there, which is stronger than the old chipboard stuff they used to sell at the now defunct MFI stores. Incidentally, that didn’t stand for ‘made for idiots’ as some wags claimed. It was Mullard Furniture Industries.

Haribo is named after the first two letters of inventor Hans Riegel’s names and his home town of Bonn, Germany. Coca-Cola gets its name from the coca leaves and kola nuts that were used in the original formula. Pepsi, meanwhile, is named after the digestive enzyme pepsin.

Nice.

Häagen-Dazs means nothing at all; the name was simply made up in 1961 by Reuben and Rose Mattus who thought it sounded exotic.

Waitrose is named after founders Wallace Waite and Arthur Rose, and ASDA – now part of the larger American Wal-Mart group of companies (named after founder Sam Walton) – began life in Leeds, Yorkshire in 1949 as Associated Dairies and Farm Stores Ltd. However, in 1965, it merged with the Asquith chain of supermarkets and adopted the name Asquith Dairies, hence the name ASDA.

Oh, and when Pierre Omidyar found that he couldn’t get the domain name echobay.com (the name of his company) as it already belonged to Echo Bay Mines Limited, he bought what he considered to be the next best option.

Ebay.com wasn’t a bad choice.

Sea Pig. Love Pig.

I've spent the week looking for fascinating LIVING things for the new L series of QI. And, while doing so I came across an animal for which I can find no L connection ... but it's brilliant, so I had to put it on my blog. Say hello to the sea pig.

Sea pigs Scotoplanes globosa are a kind of sea cucumber. The name Scotoplanes has been around for a long time. The genus was discovered and described by H. Theel in 1882 as part of the famous HMS Challenger expedition reports.

They are often characterised by having little legs that come off the bottom surface like you see here (above). But some species are slimmer and have longer legs, like here:



Scotoplanes live in the abyss. That's not just a little deep .. that's the deepest part of the ocean on the flat oceanic plains. Its not unusual for sea pigs to be collected from over 6000 metres down; that's about 3.7 miles.

Scotoplanes don't just occur individually either. Collections and observations of these animals show that they often number in the hundreds. Early trawling records have recorded some 300-600 specimens per trawl.

Like a lot of other deep-sea sea cucumbers, Sea pigs are deposit or detrital feeders. That is, they feed on the fine nutritious scum and goo that falls to the bottom of the seafloor from the top of the ocean (marine snow). They feed on them with the ring of tentacles that surrounds the mouth.

Want to know more? Check out the Echinoblog website (where I stole chunks of this text from).

Weekend Wonders #6 - Rock and Rowf!

This week's Weekend Wonders column for the Sunday People:

The first ever Blue Peter pet was a mongrel called Petra who made her maiden appearance on the show in 1962. It was also her only appearance. It was only revealed in the 1990s that Petra did, in fact, die after that first show (the cause was unknown) but, to avoid upsetting the programme’s young viewers, producer Biddy Baxter scoured pet shops to find a similar looking replacement and no one was any the wiser for thirty-odd years. Petra Mk II stayed with the show until 1977 and had a number of puppies including Patch, who also became a Blue Peter pet.

The show takes its name from an International Maritime Signalling Flag. The Blue Peter is a dark blue square with a smaller white square set centrally within. If hoisted from a ship in harbour it means ‘All aboard – we’re about to set sail’. However, if hoisted at sea by a fishing vessel it means ‘My nets have got snagged on something’. Nautical references abound on the show. The programme’s logo is a stylised sailing ship designed by TV artist Tony Hart and most commonly seen on the much-coveted Blue Peter badges awarded to children and adults who have achieved something special. And the theme music is an old sea shanty called Barnacle Bill. Over the years, it has been arranged by a number of musicians including film composer David Arnold, the performers from the West End show Stomp and composer and multi-instrumentalist Mike Oldfield.

Incidentally, the word petra means ‘rock’ in Greek. Which is why petrified means ‘turned to rock’ and petroleum means ‘rock oil’. Petra is also the name of a city in Jordan that is quite literally carved into a rock face. It’s probably best known to you as the temple where Indiana Jones found the Holy Grail.

I wonder if he got a Blue Peter badge for that?

Kitsch me Quick

Tonight's XL episode of QI revolved around Kitsch and it was a fun show to do. I got to show off some of my personal collection of Viewmaster 3D viewers on the big screens and even let Stephen, Alan and the panellists fondle a few of them.

In case you were wondering exactly what they could see on the military training discs, here's a sneaky peek.

These were produced in sets for training gunners in aircraft recognition. I have a whole set of them. It's hard to show you exactly what you can see through the viewer (and I certainly can't replicate the 3D) but I've put a disc on my scanner and it'll give you an idea:

I also did some 'reworkings' of two famously kitsch paintings for display on the big screens. Sadly, we weren't allowed to use them for the show as we couldn't get clearance but there's no harm in putting them here on my blog I assume. So, here's Stephen as Frederick Dielman's The Widow ...

And Alan as Vladimir Tretchikoff's iconic Chinese Girl.

If you're not familiar with the originals, here they are:

I was sad to learn that Monika Pon (nee Sing-Lee), the lady who modelled for Chinese Girl has recently died. One of my Twitter followers is good friends with someone who had Monika as an aunt. Even sadder is that, as far as I can see, no newspaper has acknowledged the fact.

Tretchikoff''s image may be kitsch but it's an iconic work and, at its last auction in March 2013, it sold for just short of a million pounds ($1.5 million - £982,050). It's going back to South Africa where Tretchikoff lived and worked. Meanwhile, the painting lives on in popular culture; you can see it at the top of the stairs in the parochial house in Father Ted. It can be seen adorning the living rooms of Richie and Eddie in Bottom and of Bob Rusk, the killer in Alfred Hitchcock's 1972 film, Frenzy. It is in several Monty Python TV episodes, it's in the apartment of Ruby, Shelley Winters' character, in Alfie (1966), and it's in the Mick Jagger movie Performance (1970). It is also featured in the 2013 music video for the song The Stars (Are Out Tonight) by David Bowie, in which the painting hangs in Bowie's living room, as well as being the cover image of Chumbawamba's 1990 album Slap!

So RIP Monika Sing-Lee - the Mona Lisa of kitsch (You can read interviews with her here and here and watch one here).

All copyright lies with the respective owners who, I hope, will see that these were done with much love, appreciation and respect for the original paintings. I will, of course, remove them from my blog if requested to do so.

Motorcycle Gorgeousness - the sculpture of Edouard Martinet

Many artists create art exploring the interplay of the natural and mechanical worlds, and some do so using found objects — but we’ve not come across any who combine the two to create such striking and innovative animal sculptures.

Edouard Martinet has created a menagerie of sculptures including birds, fish, insects and even a frog from found car and bike parts that are remarkably accurate representations. A dragonfly’s wings are made from sections of a wire fence while a red ant has marbles for eyes and an abdomen made from a motorcycle headlamp.

 

 

Martinet does not shy away from the scrapyard origins of his creations, even going so far as to place brand logos on to his sculptures. This nod to the manufactured origins of his work only further prove the skill in piecing together such individualised pieces.

 

A personal favourite is an oversized wasp climbing into a giant glass. It takes a long hard stare to recognise the antennae are arms from a pair of spectacles, the eyes are old watch cases and the legs are made from bicycle chains.

The insects are his strongest works here largely because of the intricate nature of their construction and their scale. Martinet’s sculptures are remarkable works of art and need to be seen up close to recognise just how impressive they are.

Words by Tabish Khan at the Londonist

Edouard Martinet website here

Sign Post #3

Back in July last year I shared some of my favourite signed books with you here. I'm very, very lucky in that I get to meet a lot of quite well-known people and getting a book signed is a nice way to remember that moment. I posted a second batch here in November.

I have a LOT of signed books now - over 300 - and they are, for the most part, not worth a great deal as they are signed to me. But this was never about money; it's the joy of having a record of meeting fascinating, funny and brilliant people. Here's a third batch, starting with my copy of Hate Mail by my good chum Mr Bingo.

I should probably explain that Hate Mail was one of those extraordinary ideas that come to you when drunk. Bingo had a big pile of vintage postcards that he'd bought on a whim at a market. Now they were taking up space and he wanted some spending cash. And so, for £40, he offered to send anyone an abusive original illustrated message on one of those cards. The scheme was a huge success and a book of the best examples followed (examples here). You can get one for yourself here. I love what he drew in my book. Bastard.

This is what Jon Ronson wrote in my copy of Them:

And this is Buzz Aldrin. Need I say more? What a guy.

And, lastly, some books by big heroes of mine that are, sadly, no longer with us:

Weekend Wonders #5 - The Jedward Wide Web

This week's Weekend Wonders column for the Sunday People:

John and Edward Grimes – better known as Jedward - were born on October 16th 1991 … which means that they are about the same age as the World Wide Web.

Tim Berners-Lee posted the very first webpage on the very first website on August 6th 1991 – just 23 years ago – but it has grown at an extraordinary rate ever since. It’s difficult to say exactly how many webpages currently exist but, according to Netcraft.com, in December 2013 there were 861,023,217 active websites online. It follows, therefore, that there must be over a billion webpages currently live. There’s a lot of e-mail too. It’s been around longer than the World Wide Web and the first electronic mail was sent as long ago as 1971. However, the form of e-mail we recognise today only started appearing when the World Wide Web opened up our ability to connect to each other.

In the time it takes you to read this sentence, some 20 million e-mails will be written and sent. A report in 2012 by Radicati.com revealed that we send 144.8 million e-mails per day worldwide and that 28% of an average office-based 40 hour working week is spent reading and answering them … despite the fact that 65% of all e-mail traffic is spam.

1991 also gave us the first game featuring Sonic the Hedgehog (Jun 23rd), and the first Starbucks coffee shop which opened in May of that year. We saw the demise of the KGB and Pan Am, and we said goodbye to Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry (Oct 24th), Theodor Geisel aka Dr Seuss (Sept 24th), French crooner Serge Gainsbourg (March 2nd) and Freddie Mercury (Nov 24th). All of which means that, in all likelihood, Freddie Mercury never visited a webpage in his lifetime.

And Jedward are not quite as mature as Sonic the Hedgehog.