I have just spent the time between putting up the last post and now, deleting all the comment spam I have had since last doing any housekeeping on it. Whereas before you had to delete each list of 20 comments page by page, now wordpress allows you to search for keywords, and if the list is less than a certain amount (I’m guessing based on my searches that it’s 4000), the whole lot comes up. You can then select all and delete.

So I put on my thinking cap and here are the terms I used, and what they found (total 31479)

viagra 1066
cialis 946
loans 2599
lesbian 891
tranny 253
juicy 40
girl 1719
teen 855
shoe 98
bisexual 33
smoking 81
diet 1750
phentermine 1786
britney 59
dvd 140
poker 2030
bondage 197
gucci 25
price 181
baseball 34
video 594
magazine 93
discount 172
wholesale 63
auto 1560
health 1359
medical 114
catalog 618
professional 35
pharmacy 1135
xanax 308
nude 1409
tit 1400
escort 97
photo 297
gay 510
free 2640
pics 126
anal 330
hentai 292
full 150
interracial 20
ballantine 2
rotary 14
aaa 97
outlet 35
casino 1799
hotel 201
election 4
news 3555
mp3 33
exercise 8
sex 3131
adult 67
homeowners 394
mortgage 851
music 82
pussy 599
ipod 33
america 330
home 1992
insurance 2770
rental 121
cheap 154
voucher 1
samples 2
designer 17
oral 60
mature 96
roulette 262
dog 77
puppy 12
cat 692
asian 108
hair 171
porn 258
amateur 96
visa 148
japan 53
black 437
actual 664
travel 59
bbw 42
buy 183
prozac 18
prescription 25
links 907
information 3486
reviews 601
bang 13
learn 12
texas 167
soma 43
movie 71
spam 289
shaved 15
cunt 67
naked 20
ass 378
fuck 20
indian 71
women 4
suck 14
pretty 3
cute 5
young 7
bible 16
site 1004
research 267
foto 10
pic 154
tattoo 19
ka-ka-sh-ka 3589
game 63
value 189
poem 4
car 1932
friend 192
beer 3
bar 37
store 26
bag 33
book 350
move 53
job 15
intro 225
myspace 11
source 80
tv 10
hot 327
http 2672

The last one was because I couldn’t think of any more actual terms to pull out of the gobbledegook with which I was left at this point, so I tried to capture all. As there happened to be under the maximum amount in the list at this point, it displayed all results, I unchecked legitimate comments, and thankfully deleted the rest.

Now to find wordpresses’ spam plug in…

A new series of Balderdash and Piffle has recently begun. Babyfather and I greeted the original with enthusiasm - it’s a lovely idea which makes an edifying change from the mindless vacuousness which absolutely no one is forcing us to watch every day. Genuinely interesting, it picks up on social, cultural, and economic history as viewers write in trying to give pre-datings for citations of words in the Oxford English Dictionary.

The new series has been less well received in our household. For a start, the presenter, Victoria Coren, had begun edging her way onto the shortlist for the list of “personalities” of whom my tolerance is very low. Also on this list (reasons in parentheses) are June Sarpong (that voice), Keira Knightly (the whole smug package), and Aishleyne from last year’s Big Brother (she looks like her breath smells of onions - the list of her other offences would not fit in the space of one blog). (And excuse the excessive use of brackets, but yes, I am aware that all of my pet-hates are women, but I don’t think, as Babyfather seems to, that this necessarily means anything.)

Victoria (Vicky as she likes to call herself) presented such a simpering, self-satisfied persona to the cameras that it began to seriously erode the pleasure the programme gave me. The mock-flirtatious smiles, coupled with an accent which I imagine Victoria herself (I will not use a diminutive for her) believes to be cut-glass, became too much for me and I began hoping that she would be cut down to size by the guardians of the OED to whom she submitted her weekly findings. Stern and academic, they presented a nice foil to her capricious flippancy, and a couple of cutting words from them would surely have stemmed the stream of her twittering.

In addition to this, our Friday night schedule was already full, and with Ugly Betty, Peep Show (now finished - and thank goodness, with the “watching through the gaps between my fingers” horror that some of the episodes accomplished), Friday Night with Jonathan Ross, Eastenders, and more recently the double whammy of Big Brother plus eviction show, our sky plus was already creaking through over use. So something had to go and it was B&P.

That notwithstanding, it is to the idea behind the programme that I owe this blog entry. For I have coined a new word of which I am proud, and I want it recorded here for posterity.

Last week Babyfather and I were having one of the wondering conversations which we have of an evening, and the word forelock was mentioned by one of us. We discussed its origin and I wondered if fetlock was so named because it’s a piece of hair above a foot. (It is, I’ve just checked.) So forelock is hair on a forehead, fetlock is hair on a foot. So far so simple. But I began pondering other possible variants, and came up with the coinage knoblocks. It may not look like much at first, but say it aloud a couple of times. Allow the second syllable to roll off your tongue and enjoy its comedy potential.

I’ve written a possible dictionary entry:

Knoblocks pronounciation ‘näb-"läk NOUN. The locks of hair which grow on the pubic bone above the genitalia. Originally coined for use with reference to a man’s anatomy, it became used for both male and female pudenda when the person who coined the word consigned mingelocks to the dustbin of etymological history.

I’ve timestamped this entry. We first discussed it last Thursday 31 May. And maybe when it’s in the OED or the Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English, or wherever it will first be honoured, this little blog entry will help ensure that Victoria Coren doesn’t get her knoblock nets in a twist.

Returning late from dinner with family friends last night, Babyfather turned the radio on to find out the England cricket scores. Radio 5 live had been taken over with a live phone-in to discuss the ‘disgraceful’ behaviour of vice-captain Freddie Flintoff when he went out on the piss with a group of 5 other members of the England world cup squad. One woman phoned in and said that he clearly has an alcohol problem for which he should be punished, and when questioned on this, said that he had let us all down with his antics.

Freddie - likes a pint.

Firstly. I can’t be the only person to think that what happened was quite funny, can I?

Secondly, if he does (which I strongly believe not to be the case) have a drink problem then he should receive sympathy and support, and offered treatment, not censure. The comments on the show I heard and on online news sites this morning are horrid - treating alcoholism as a choice and a disgrace rather than a devastating illness which wrecks lives.

Thirdly. Since when did the nation’s sportsmen owe us something? Since when did they become accountable for a nation’s distress when they don’t perform to the best standard? I can assure the bizarrely misguided caller who I heard last night that Flintoff wants England to win the world cup a whole lot more than mere spectators, even fans so dedicated that they spend their lives and their money travelling round the world with the Barmy Army. As far as I am aware, my tax dollar does not fund the England cricket team, and much as I love to watch them and hope that they win, I don’t think it’s my right to have an Ashes/World Cup winning cricket team.

Fourthly. Since when did sportsmen become the pillars of morality which they seem to be expected to be now? A sample of comments on the Evening Standard’s website This is London read “Flintoff is a chav. The moment he appeared with a short sleeved T- shirt & tattoo’s in Australia it was clear he was unfit to lead England at cricket. So it has proved, he should be warned, shape up or ship out, drunken louts not required.” “All we hear about nowadays is sportsmen behaving badly. Before playing for your country was about pride but its all about the ‘celebrity’ side of it now. These sportsmen are role models to youngsters and should act responsibly not like drunken teenagers.”

Nonsense. All they want is to play cricket. They didn’t ask to be role models, and it is not their fault if the tabloid press use non-stories like these to illustrate their own thundering, (and hypocritical) morality. And anyway, what’s wrong with going out and getting drunk? Flintoff is 29 and world famous. Nasser Hussein may point to a drink problem in the team, but after the few months he’s had, wouldn’t anyone want a bit of a bender?

Finally. Cast your minds back to September 2005. We’d just won the ashes (I was there, at the Oval), and the lads had gone on a three day bender which included a grand parade on an open top bus, nights without sleep, interviews with the press which were barely coherent, and a visit to Downing Street where Freddie wasn’t the only one who admitted to being worse for wear. The players were offered tea and water, and after a quiet word the Prime Ministerial fridge was raided, and they were given beer and wine instead. Harmy was pictured with a beer on the children’s climbing frame. All the papers carried pictures of the victory parades, and glowing stories of their drunken antics. Here’s a report at the time, which starts with a snippet from a Vaughan interview

“Then, with a sly smile, he added: “It’s been a long night. We’ve celebrated in true English fashion.” One look at the players, smartly dressed but bleary-eyed after a late, late night, and still glugging down beer or flutes of champagne, told you that much was true.” Not that anyone cared. Two months ago, cricket was languishing in a peloton of sports behind football, now it’s sexy and cool. As Christine Simon from the Isle of Wight put it: “I don’t follow cricket usually, but this makes you feel proud to be British, it’s what the country needs. The atmosphere is marvellous.”

So what do we gather from this? That it’s ok to have a drink problem when the country is celebrating a win with you? That when you’ve won the Ashes you can take a break from the tabloid-imposed role model duties? Or just that the papers will make a story out of anything, and if Fletcher had had a quiet word, past captains hadn’t got on their sanctimonious high horse, and the media had accepted it was just a bit of fun, most of us wouldn’t have cared a toss about it, beyond it being a mildly amusing story?

We spent a lazy Sunday with the Babyfather’s parents, at a lovely Hampshire pub. On the way back, we popped into Blockbusters to pick up a DVD (Little Miss Sunshine) to round off a lovely weekend. The last thing I expected was bad news, but a message left by Busy while I was out of range, and picked up on our return to the house, tore a discordant hole through the evening. A rally in Zimbabwe (masquerading as a prayer meeting) had been disbanded by police. One activist had been shot dead by police. Along with roughly 110 people, the leaders of the opposition party on both sides of the recent split were arrested.

But, most upsettingly for me, Busy and Blonde’s uncle, Mike Davies, chairperson of the Combined Harare Residents’ Association, was arrested with them. Mike is also a close friend of my parents, and I phoned my mum but they had no more news than what we already knew: lawyers were being denied access, and Professor Arthur Mutambara (the leader of the side of the opposition party which split from Morgan Tsvangirai’s last year) was missing. Missing is not a good thing to be in a Zimbabwean prison.

We have trickles of news coming through today, but more annoyingly, floods of rumours too. Many of these masquerade as news, and if you type in Zimbabwe on the Google news site as I write, you will likely still see a story which says that Mike and two others he was arrested with had been transferred to the Goromonzi torture centre. This is a relic of colonial days which, along with the intelligence body the CIO which used it then and now, Mugabe retained in his government, in what would be an amusing Orwellian parody if it wasn’t so bloody awful. High profile detainees there have included Philip Chiyangwa (cousin to Mugabe, and supposed ring-leader of an espionage ring passing Zimbabwe’s secrets to the South African government), and Ray Choto and Mark Chavunduka, journalists at the Zimbabwe Standard arrested in 1999 and tortured by the army. It’s not a good place to be, but we soon hear that Mike isn’t there, but in the relative safety of Highlands police station - in the leafy Northern Suburbs most popular among the remaining middle class white Zimbabwean. Which cells in which police station matter in these circumstances - some are definitely worse than others. As my younger brother - who, in his time as a young idealist political activist in Zimbabwe, spent time in most of them, good and bad, around Harare - will tell you, some of them are notorious for bed bugs, some for lice, some for cockroaches. Catching TB is a huge risk, and the standards of cleanliness vary from one to another, although none of them are clean. And those are just the comfort issues. If they want to torture you, you’re more likely to go to certain stations or camps.

Not knowing for sure is a really hard thing to cope with, and for that more than anything I sympathise with all of Mike’s family, at home and over here. We’ve had emails through from his family back home to say they now know he is definitely at Highlands, and one from my mum to say it looks like a bail hearing is set for tonight. So at least they should get to see him. If that is, in fact, true. I’ve lost count of the times in the past I’ve had phone calls to say my mum, stepdad, or brother have been arrested back home for various supposed transgressions against the regime, but I thought we’d stopped having to worry about this sort of thing. Until contact is made, it doesn’t matter that the sensible 99% of you knows that all will be well, that the police know the world’s eyes are on them and will be too scared to perpetrate severe acts of violence, that the people arrested are savvy and resourceful, you can’t help thinking that they are suffering with the 1% of your brain too worried to be sensible.

In the meantime, Mugabe announced today his intention to stand in the next elections, meaning if he wins (and how can we believe different given recent elections) he will be 90 when the next term of office runs out, and his dictatorship will have lasted 34 years. In the meantime, the man shot dead leaves behind a widow and three children of school age. In the meantime, Morgan Tsvangirai, president of one side of the split MDC has been seen with severe swellings, and with injuries limiting his vision and preventing speech. He has apparently passed out several times. Having ascertained that Mike is at Highlands Police Station, we are left wondering where are those who were supposed to be with him at Goromonzi: Nelson Chamisa, the Member of Parliament for Kuwadzana, and Elton Mangoma the MDC deputy treasurer. Mutambara’s whereabouts are still unknown, and Lovemore Madhuku, National Constitutional Assembly (NCA) Chairman was rushed to hospital with a broken arm and other serious injuries early in the morning. A human rights lawyer trying to see his clients, at one of the police stations to which they were believed to have been taken, was assaulted, and denied access to them.

And last night, in the streets of Highfields, the high density suburb where the rally was due to take place, police continued to clash with ordinary citizens, assaulting members of the public who, in the absence of anything better, armed themselves with stones to fight off an attack by water cannons, tear gas and guns.

New Year’s eve, 8am, sitting in the overcrowded cafe area outside Harare airport. The airport was chaotic with the bluster which goes with having 2 international flights leaving in the same morning (this qualifies as remarkable in the tourist-shunned Zimbabwe of the present day). We’d found out our plane was delayed by two hours. We’d been shouted at by an irate official when we lifted the barrier to get in the queue (which we joined legitimately at the back - we just hadn’t been able to manoeuvre the pram around the milling hoards), and told, and I quote ‘no no no no no no no no that is not how it works, I am going to report you to the head of the airport’. We’d then queued for 45 minutes before seeing other passengers with babies being graciously ferried to the front of the line. We’d had very little sleep and I had a chest infection. Babyfather had angrily told me I was being ungracious with my parents after their warmth and generosity to us over the course of our 18 day holiday.

So we found ourselves scrabbling for seats in the cafe, ignoring a bizarre altercation in which racist insults were being hurled, all, it would seem, because of the refusal of one person to give another a match with which to light his cigarette. Babyfather was feeding Doodle (nee Bubble), the parents were talking to some friends who happened to be there, and looking round I saw the front page of what passes locally for the Sunday Papers, depicting a lifeless Saddam Hussein suspended by the neck.

I have ambiguous and vacillating views on the execution of Saddam Hussein. On the one hand, I oppose the death penalty entirely. I think that no person, or group of people, can claim the right to decide to end a person’s life. On the other, isn’t that exactly what he did, several hundreds of thousands of times over in the course of the last few decades? On the one hand, the people whose family were amongst those hundreds of thousands deserved closure. On the other, the conviction leading to his execution was only for a hundred and fifty odd of those, and many, including the Kurds, feel he should have been held accountable for all of his atrocities. On the one hand, his hanging serves as a rallying call to those who still supported his regime. On the other, his continuing to live was considered by many who had opposed his regime to be proof that he could return.

All of these points have been endlessly debated in the many media which always serve as the platform for such cogitation. But there is something beyond the easily circumscribed ‘issues’ which has bothered me about the news. When I had heard, the day before, that he had been executed, we had been on a jaunt out of newspaper range in the Eastern Highlands of Zimbabwe and I hadn’t been aware it was due to happen. It left me cold and I am still struggling to work out why. Perhaps because a part of me felt that it was just and fitting, and I was disconcerted to feel this reaction to the news of someone’s execution. Present with us on our jaunt was an old family friend, Lawyer, who said ‘well, you either believe in the death penalty or you don’t.’ Younger Brother, whose opposition to the Mugabe regime resulted in him suffering personally, and losing friends to politically motivated murder, said that he supported the Saddam decision, and I recalled agreeing with him when he said that the most just punishment for Mugabe wouldn’t be to execute him, but to let him loose, unarmed and unguarded, onto the streets of a high density suburb where the poverty and repression he had inflicted on the masses are such that in their anger, YB believed that they would turn on him. I am not so sure now that I would support this - for it, too, would satisfy a blood lust which seems to me to be at odds with the idea of justice. And even if justice is being meted out to someone who has caused incomprehensible suffering, do we not have cause to worry if we get a frisson of satisfaction out of seeing even the most execrable man die?

Skip forward, and back in Harare airport Parents, Babyfather and myself were discussing it, and I was asserting my belief that the English papers wouldn’t show those pictures because of good taste holding sway. Babyfather wasn’t so sure.

Skip forward again - to a semi-deserted Sainsbury’s on New Year’s morning, populated by walking wounded of the night before, a few elderly people wondering aimlessly and a nose-ringed couple staring quizzically at the Belazu products on the ‘posh product’ shelf. We’d arrived back at the flat the night before, three hours late at around 10 after an eventual journey time of around 18 hours. I’d fallen asleep on the sofa before midnight, and having woken up to an empty fridge, gone out to supply us with the makings of breakfast. I was looking forward to coffee and croissants, a little light levity in the papers as they discussed the New Years honours. But inevitably, the image which greeted me on the front page of The Guardian was again of the hanged man. And I was angry at the paper for not allowing me to decide myself if I want to join the hordes worldwide gorging on images on the event on YouTube. Queen of Cakes, who works for The Guardian, says that it is just a representation of an historical event. And the thrust of that particular article was, indeed, about the fact that the images were around the world almost immediately - and that a grainy camera phone video clip made the execution available to anyone who wishes to see it. Later in the paper a very well-written obituary level-headedly charted Saddam’s life. I hadn’t known much about it. About his murder as a teenager of three people to prove his machismo to male relatives. Of the whimsy with which he would order people executed. Or the lack of any kind of belief system to underpin his political aspiration.

The comments on YouTube have been predictably puerile. Almost Beavis and Butthead-ian in the ‘cools’ and drooling ‘wows’. The last minutes before he hanged, it has been revealed today, were filled with taunts and insults from bystanders. And yes, he deserved nothing less. And yes, it’s one life in exchange for the many that this butcher took. And yes, maybe justice has been served. But it still bothers me that we all have to participate in a global feeding frenzy at his corpse.