Oooh look we have a new Speaker

Ooh how very unexciting

So why mention it? Well, in another life, I did a bit of "political" journalism (even I think my doing such a thing to be incredibly unbelievable and but then again, I have done a lot of different stuff, if sporadically and in small portions) and interviewed John Bercow, just about at the time he was turning into some sort of weird left-wing Conservative, with icky compassion and contrition just oozing out of him.

Course I did know he used to be a Monday Club sort, who liked the sound of slogans like "Hang Mandela!", but I found his Damascene-gotten beliefs quite refreshing and Bercow himself quite likeable, especially because back then you were hearing so much about the liberals who taken the reverse and had turned into neo-con, who were just gagging to blow the crap out of Iraq.

Though, I still felt a mite suspicious (he is, after all, a politician). I think what made this mysterious suspicion even more mysteriously suspicious was that I was reading The Big Sleep at the time, and this description of the ill-fated Harry Jones kept popping up in my head:

"He was a very small man, not more than five feet three and would hardly weigh as much as a butcher's thumb"

(That and this cruel line from a 2001 Guardian profile I'd researched: "A pint-sized chap with short arms and endless ambitions". You'd be suspicious too, eh?)

Because he was. Shorter than Sarkozy, if I mis-remember correctly. My being no Yao Ming made it worse. And even at the time I was thinking this may be why a lot of the Conservative Party are ignoring him because they can't take a Tory, who's both recanted his right-wing views AND resembles a laugh-free Dudley Moore, at all seriously.

Now I'm thinking that the vast majority of Tories, who conspicuously didn't vote him because they thought he was a (literally) Labour-loving pinko communist shortarse, now believe him to be a Labour-loving pink communist shortarse with a Napoleon complex.

Anyway, good luck to him, I hope he survives any Conservative-engineered plot to unseat him after the next election, even if he is a "flipper" with a mannered, slightly grating speaking voice (blimey, he can't even say "responsibility").

He's obviously a portent of things to come: Labour politicians usurped from their pretty offices of power by Tories (David* for Gordon), who aren't really any better in substance terms, but actually are by dint of their not being in a Labour government and everyone supposing it's time for a change. After Bercow, the blue deluge.**

FE: XXXXV
1. What term was coined in 1975 by Ted Nelson in his book Computer Lib/Dream Machines to describe electronic sex toys that can be controlled by a computer?
2. The Drei Zinnen ('Three Peaks') or Tre Cime di Lavaredo are three distinctive battlement-like peaks in which range of the Alps?
3. Which Iron Cross winner, German amateur tennis champion (1909-76) and two-time French Open champion (1934 & '36) won his country's inaugural "Sportspersonality of the Year" award in 1947 and retained it the next year?
4. Adapted into a 2003 film, which Javier Cercas novel tells the real-life story of how Rafael Sanchez Mazas, writer and idealist of the Falange Espanola and close-collaborator of Jose Antonio Primo de Rivera, escaped from execution after a Republican soldier decided to spare his life, and Cercas's obsessive search for that soldier?
5. Originally, it was a communication device used for funeral (hileta), celebration (jai), or the making of slaked lime (kare) or cider (sagardo). After the cider was made the same board that pressed the apples was beaten to summon neighbours and celebrate. Similar to the Romanian toacă, which Basque music device, made of wood (sometimes ikoro) or stone, is played by one or more performers producing differing rhythms, playing with wood knots and spots of the board for different tones?

Y
O
U

D
O
N
'
T

R
E
A
L
L
Y

W
A
N
N
A

S
T
A
Y


Answers to FE:XXXXV
1. Teledildonics (aka "cyberdildonics")
2. Sexten Dolomites (from east to west, known as Kleine Zinne/Cima Piccola (Little Peak), Große Zinne/Cima Grande (Big Peak) and Westliche Zinne/Cima Ovest (Western Peak)
3. Gottfried von Cramm (full name: Gottfried Alexander Maximilian Walter Kurt Freiherr von Cramm)
4. Soldados de Salamina / Soldiers of Salamis (2001)
5. The txalaparta (in Basque, zalaparta (with /s/) means 'racket')


*Excuse my language, but I think that David Cameron is a massive dickhead. He just reeks of the snake-oil salesman, who parps whatever disenchanted people want to hear. Perfect for the office of Prime Minister (he says, thinking of previous office-holders), but I want a dickhead I can be proud of, at least sometimes. I don't think he's the dickhead the country needs as PM.

** But I don't really mind. It doesn't matter too much which party is in power nowadays: they're all (depressingly) fighting for the centre ground, with no decent wedge issues to wage political war with. All governments end in failure. It's in their nature. I just wonder whether the rate of entropy that sets into the impending Conservative government is already being accelerated by the expenses scandal and the economy. Then again, they can always blame the other guys (they did it! it was broken when we got here!) *big sigh*.