Helmintholog

• Should we treat stupidity like spam? I quite like the idea, especially as some people are working on a stupidfilter based on spam-fighting principles. With this in place, most comments on newspaper sites would just vanish. Also, if you poke around their site, you will discover the “More” button is spelled “moar”, which is a nice touch.
• Fantastic obituary in the Independent that starts: Sammy Duddy was a colourful Belfast character who combined membership of one of the city’s most lethal paramilitary groups with a career as “Samantha”, a highly suggestive drag act.
• I know I worry too much, but the more I read about the Storm worm, the more I think I should own shares in Apple. Not that a mac will protect you from whatever it is the botnet is going to do, but a lot of people will be buying them after it is over.
• A drunken elk has been reported to the police near Borgholm, on the island of Öland.

Her show at the Junction last night was about the purest slab of punk/rock that I have ever experienced. It’s a small venue: there were maybe four or five hundred people there, all standing, and the sound was excellent. She was able to climb down to the audience and enjoy herself for a couple of songs, though I was too far to see what actually happened. The band was wonderfully tight: two of them must have been playing with her for 32 years now; time enough to learn the chords to Gloria. And, yes, she did Gloria, along with Gimme Shelter, Are You Experienced, Smells like Teen Spirit and a few more I didn’t recognise. It was impossible not to dance. Somehow the passion, the relish and the gawky outsiderhood came together into something that worked as irresistably and pre-rationally as some religious rituals. I remember thinking about half way through that this is what Christianity ought to be like. The show was full of blasphemy, of course — the whole room singing along to “Jesus died for somebody’s sins but not mine” — but this sounded in itself strangely tragic, rather than defiant. It seemed to me more a statement of a ghastly fact than anything else.

In between songs, she talked excitedly about her day in Cambridge — tea with the fellows at King’s College, visiting Wittgenstein’s grave, performing on Rimbaud’s birthday, lying down to recover from all this excitement in one of the meadows and opening her eyes to find a cow examining her. There was a great deal of laughter from the audience at all this. This seemed to me one of the points of punk, and indeed of the hippie music that preceded it: the audience and the musicians should be all part of the same thing and this so very seldom happens anywhere but in pubs that it really does need celebrating when you stumble on it.

One last note about the music: all three of the musicians took their turns playing bass: Lenny Kaye playing in a completely unmelodic, driving punk style which worked very well on some songs, and the keyboard player, when it was his turn, using the bass as a melodic instrument, in some songs supplying almost all the interest and variety. Enough. It was all glorious. If there is any chance to see her in a place like that, take it.

Deborah Kerr is dead. The news doesn’t seem to have reached the wires yet; but my mother, to whose brother she was once married, just rang to tell me. She was a nice woman and a fine actress.

Helmintholog: the only site you need for up to the minute showbiz news.

• I finally got the London Library’s electronic access to scholarly journals working. Still no JSTOR, but lots of goodies anyway, among them an article from the Journal of the American Academy of Religion arguing that the “Prosperity Gospel” movement, known as “Blab it and Grab it” to the outside world, which is one of the more prosperous and visible bits of Bible Belt sub-culture — Benny Hinn, etc — derives its distinctive teachings from a blend of Mormonism and the Nation of Islam. Again, no time yet to do more that skim, but a great story if true.
• Mary Gauthier excellent last night. She seems to have stopped trying to be a Nashville singer, and in fact had a very funny story about how songs are written there. In her case this decision also takes account of the weakness of her voice, which is limited in range and accuracy. On the other hand, it is, when it hits the target, devastating. Very moving solo acoustic versions of “Goddam HIV” and “Mercy Now”. We bought the new CD but have not listened yet.

• This is an example — perhaps the platonically perfect example — of a joke which is either screamingly funny of wholly incomprehensible, with no region in between. It seems to me that if you understand it you are bound to be the sort of person who finds it funny, and if you wouldn’t find it funny you would be most unlikely to have acquired the background knowledge to understand it.
• To the Albert Hall last night, to see the Cowboy Junkies. One really excellent performance, of “200 More Miles”, which was better than any of the recorded versions I have; the rest competent, but never quite on fire. Perhaps the extraordinary voice of Margo Timmins is fading a little. I’m still glad we went. Then I found an invitation to see Patti Smith in Cambridge in my inbox this morning. Curious. The last time I saw her in Cambridge, I recken I was in a room with about 25% of the American anti-war movement; but that was November 2001 in Cambridge, Massachussetts. She wasn’t terribly good, and the atmosphere of pious rectitude, though I admire and in some sense like it, convinced me that this would never be a mainstream sentiment. But the first time I saw her, in about 1978, she gave the most completely sexual performance I have ever seen.

• I will some time, honest, write a proper review of Oliver Morton’s book Eating the Sun. For the moment I just want to say that it is the first pop science book I have read since The Extended Phenotype where I started again at the beginning after I had reached the end. Somewhere around page 200 it takes off into some really virtuoso passages which I must scan in and post. There is a particular way in which science, like art, can make the familiar world strange and new; there is a third, distinct skill in suggesting that scientific thrill in words, and Oliver has now mastered that. Wonderful stuff.
• From the Sublime to the Southern Baptist. There is an autopsy report here on a former assistant to Jerry Falwell, whose death seems to have been scripted by Carl Hiaassen.
• David Sloan Wilson has a paper out looking at genetic correlations for sexual extravagance. This needs proper treatment too. I’ve snagged the PDF but not talked to him.
• Barbara Ehrenreich puts the boot into the younger Templeton:
  John M. Templeton Jr., the president of the foundation, turns out to be one of the funders of Freedom’s Watch, the new rightwing group which has been running pro-war commercials conflating Al Qaeda with whomever it is we’re fighting in Iraq. You may have seen the one in which a veteran complains that stopping the war now would render the loss of his legs meaningless, much like the universe itself.
  This is not John Templeton Jr.’s first or only venture into rightwing politics. In 2004, he started the group Let Freedom Ring, aimed getting out the evangelical Christian vote for George Bush. He recently joined the Romney campaign’s National Faith and Values Steering Committee, a group which includes an anti-abortion activist and a fellow from the Heritage Foundation.