The Word Cloud

This might seem a rather strange title for a blog to the uninitiated so I will do the courtesy of explaining. In fact, this seems to be almost a nice one, I say almost because I have developed intermittent toothache and had to enrol with a new dentist who I am seeing tomorrow, he or she is a Portuguese. OK, you would be forgiven for saying 'what is so remarkable about that?' A very understandable statement of course

The fact is from 1977-1980, I had the good fortune and privilege of accompanying my parents to Portugal as my father was about to start a diplomatic appointment at the British Embassy in Lisbon,as a Naval and Air Attache.  I cannot deny it was a wonderful and sometimes challenging experience. A lot of the challenge I hasten to say was that I developed a peptic ulcer. Some of this was due to a slight over abundance of cheaper wine and the rest is private which I would rather not divulge. The consequence was that this was not an isolated incident and culminated in a hiatus hernia,to say nothing of the fact, unbeknown to me, I was also manufacturing gall stones which eventually had to be removed with the gall bladder in 1984, four years after our return.

The point I am trying to convey is since our experience in Portugal and its people, we have discovered that there is a growing number in East Anglia, the most noted being in Thetford but there is also a small contingent in Sudbury, ten mines from where I live. Apart from the dentist being Portuguese ,I observed on one occasion, a sign in Borehamgate Precinct, a sign in three languages, one of them being Portuguese, Cuidado in reference to a wet floor, which means beware. I am no linguist so by and large while I was out there, I picked up the language ad hoc with odd words. Also on our return, as with Portugal, one could pick up ready cooked Frango or chickens to you and I, something we ate often while out there.  It is now over thirty years - my how time flies as the expression goes or tempes fugit yet we still find Portuguese associations, giving both Mum and I, lovely tugs of nostgalgia and that wonderful fuzzy feeling that we never really left. I also found a new friend who runs Writer's Circles for the whole of UK whose antecedents came from Russia yet settled in Portugal. See what you mean, it follows us around beautifully, ensuring that experience endureth for ever.Long may it do so 

I couldn’t imagine liking karaoke, but it was - hold your breath. Opening scene – people arrive. I am the only Englishman, outnumbered by four Germans with deck chairs, a Viking, and Hanke. The other eighteen are mainly girlfriends of Hanke’s Thai ex, who have come along for the freebies. Food and drink are on his tab. He mumbles under his breath.

All polite.

Next scene – food – a buffet. I stuff pizza and salad down my throat, washed down with 5% Chang Export. Thai ladies eat. Farangs eat. Hanke makes noises, gets up to sing, and the karaoke begins.

First song: Green Green Grass of Home – Tom Jones. I look up. The video is a scene on a beach with dozens of scantily clad women, one of whom is right up to the camera. She is wearing a wet T-shirt and bikini bottoms.

Hanke singing in a lovely gravelly monotone – ‘four grey walls surround me’ they’ll all come to meet me – babes cavorting on the beach. ‘GGG of Home’. The T-shirt lady bends over and shows her bikini bum to the camera. I haven’t laughed so much, it was hilarious.

Well you can guess it pretty much deteriorated into a mega piss-up with dancing and decorum teetering on the edge. One of the German women tells me she only likes one German singer. I say Marlene Dietrich – she says no...

That was Thursday. Saturday I surface. More later.

Hi everyone!

I haven't opened my account lately because I have been really busy - vacationing. I am currently in Italy where I am to attend a friend's wedding. I read all your messages, though.

I'm looking forward to be home soon, but not on my desk, which probably now has a "leaning tower of paperwork."

x 

    There are plenty of repulsive 'bush tucker' foods in the world, from witchetty grubs to monkey brains, but for sources of truly horrifying foods, we have to look closer to home. Much closer. Too close, in fact.

1) Foreskin banana



    Oh no, this is totally not the worst one on the list!

    The Sakalava tribe of Madagascar are all for recycling. They also practise circumcision. (You know what they say about circumcision? - It's no skin off my nose!) Put the two together, add a banana, and you have a delicious item of quaint ethnic cuisine. Seriously, at the boy-child's circumcision ceremony, the severed foreskin is placed on the end of a banana (Sigmund Freud will be spinning in his grave) and eaten by the child's grandfather. Chewy!

Source: Andrew Zimmern - Bizarre foods.

    But it's not only Madagascar where folks like to chow down on a morsel of dick skin: they're at it in Canada as well. In 2009, no less a personage than the Governor General of Canada, Michaelle Jean, participated in a Hasidic ritual which involved her eating actual foreskin and lentil soup. She is reported as saying that it was 'kinda like chicken, but more tender'. Eeewww - lentils!

Source: Marcia Mallow - bentspud.com

2) Placenta Lasagne



    There are apparently many health benefits to be gained by a mother eating the placenta after giving birth, both for herself and the baby. I suppose it's no more disgusting than . . . nope, can't think of anything that even comes close.

    There are many (way too many) placenta recipes on the Internet. Most of them start by telling you to cut off the cord and the membranes (excuse me while I hurl), and that the placenta must be fresh - no more than three days old. Well, you wouldn't want to eat a mouldy placenta, would you?

    This recipe for Placenta Lasagne is fairly typical:

    Ingredients: 1 to 3 lb minced placenta, depending on how many portions you're serving.

    (Wait a goddam minute! You're gonna serve up your afterbirth at a fucking dinner party? Do your guests know what they're gonna be eating? And what wine would you serve with that, anyway?)

    I'll spare you the details. Basically, you make it like regular lasagne, using minced placenta instead of minced beef. I'll just have a salad, thanks.

Source: www.mothers35plus.co.uk

3) Urine Cocktail



    While there are many who espouse the health benefits of urophagia, there are just as many who warn of the health dangers of the practise. For the undecided, here is a (physically) harmless substitute:

    Ingredients:

    2 oz gin
    1 oz lime juice
    3 oz club soda

    Serve warm.

    "Serve warm" ? That is just wrong. So wrong.

    Interestingly, the Koryak people of Siberia are reported to have used the psychoactive Amanita muscaria mushroom, commonly known as fly agaric, as a ceremonial entheogen (ie, it makes you see gods, or at least pixies). The mushrooms have side effects which include nausea, twitching, sweating and drooling. These undesirable effects can be avoided by passing the mushrooms through a human filter, since the active alkaloids are unchanged as they pass through the human body, allowing the urine to retain the intoxicating effects of the mushroom: those who drank the urine of those using the mushroom would experience the psychoactive effects themselves. Tribesmen who could not afford the mushrooms drank the urine of those who could; tribesmen drank their own urine in order to prolong the experience; and tribesmen on trips (in more ways than one) carried their own urine with them. They sometimes concentrated their urine by partially freezing it and ingesting the remaining unfrozen liquid.

Source: www.damninteresting.com/urine-for-a-treat/

4) Placenta Smoothie



    This one would be pretty revolting even without the placenta. If you can drink this without gagging, I salute you (and move a long, long way away from you).

    Ingredients:

    1/4 cup fresh raw placenta
    8 oz V8 juice
    1/2 cup carrot
    2 ice cubes

    Blend at high speed for 10 seconds and serve.

    Serve to who? Not me, lady! The online recipe describes this as "a tasty thirst quencher". I will never, ever be that thirsty.

Source: www.mothers35plus.co.uk


5) Turd Cake



    I hope this novelty cake is made out of chocolate. Mind you, it's Japanese, so you can't be sure . . . (Google 'Japanese scat girls' and you'll see what I mean. Or rather, don't.)

Source: www.zimbio.com

6) Placenta Pate



    In 1998, Britain's Channel 4 was reprimanded for broadcasting a programme in which a woman's placenta was served to, and eaten by, twenty relatives and friends. A spokesman for the Broadcasting Standards Commission described the programme as 'disagreeable'.

    The presenter, a TV cook called Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall (no, honestly, that's his real name!), devised a recipe using the afterbirth of a lunatic- er, I mean, a woman called Rosie Clear to make pate to be served at a party to celebrate the birth of her daughter, Indi-Mo Krebbs (see, told you she's a lunatic. 'Indi-Mo Krebbs' ?).

    The placenta was fried with shallots and garlic, flambeed, pureed, and served on focaccia bread. Mrs Clear's husband, Lee, had seventeen helpings (weirdo!) but the other guests were 'less enthusiastic'.

Source: news.bbc.co.uk

In a top secret bunker cunningly hidden on The Cloud beyond the wit of man or woman (it’s that wispy bit just to the left) OFP,Veek and myself have been beavering away on a classified project. (I told them beavering was illegal in this country, but would they listen...?)

We are now ready to reveal this project, mainly ‘cos we need your help. We are going to write an e-book of poetry, short stories and flash fiction in aid of SSAFA (Soldiers, Sailors, Airman and Families Association)  http://www.ssafa.org.uk/.

They are the country’s oldest armed forces charity and provide help to people who are serving or have ever served, even for one day.

The working title of this project is ‘Warrior Poets’ and we would like you to help by submitting work and/or using your editing skills. We already have the Writer’s Workshop on board as our support team (apart from editing, that would be cheating anyway.)

Submissions

To submit work you need to have an armed forces link, which actually will be most of you. I don’t care if your Great Uncle 6 times removed was third assistant bottle washer at the Battle of Trafalgar, if you’ve got a good story please submit it.

We want poems, short stories (max 3000 words) and flash fiction. This includes life writing, ie true stories, diary extracts etc.

What I definitely do not want is anything political, racist or abusive.

Please submit on Warrior Poets group page.

Deadline will be 1 September (subject to change) in order to edit book for Crimbo.

Other ways to help.

You can also help by offering to critique or edit work. Either in a buddy-buddy system with another Cloudite or on the Warrior Poets Group page.

I hope the book will also contain work from serving personnel, their families, other, maybe older, veterans, the odd classic poem and maybe the odd celeb. (most of them are...odd that is)

That’s it really, although I’m sure I’ve forgotten something. A publication date hasn’t been decided with SSAFA yet, but they are on board (we can even use their logo!)

They had the Christmas No1 record last year, let’s give them a best selling book as well!

Hello everyone - just beginning to be able to peek back at cloud. Lovely to see/read you all.
I am trying to self publish and launch my barge story for my mum. She was 90 on Sunday so am in a bit of a rush.
Also off to a funeral tomorrow (my aunt, mum's younger sister) it has been an annus horribilis for our family this year! Oh no last year.
I digress.  But you can see why I am in  a rush.

I would like to be able to save the story onto a dongle as my computer is palying up but I can't see how to do it, nor how to get it onto my external hard drive. when I pressed 'save' in the good old days I was given choices which drive ie 'A' or 'C' but now it gives all kinds of formats like PDF or text etc, but how do I send it to the above?

Thank you in advance.
Still smiling at your joke Alan.

You know, there was a time when I could go down the town with a couple of quid in my pocket and come back with two or three shirts, a pair of jeans and something for dinner.

Bloody CCTV, it's everywhere these days.

The wild grass beneath us was only a little damp now after the scorching hot day we’d had. A couple of days ago there had been a huge super cell storm and apparently there’d been some tornadoes out by Castor. Near as I could tell, the storms had passed on but it was tornado season and you could never be too careful. We weren’t technically in tornado alley but twisters were fickle things and could appear anywhere. Eris said that tornados and hurricanes were nature’s way of showing us that she (Eris called nature ‘she’ because of it being called Mother Nature, I guessed) was still the most powerful force on this planet. With all the wars and folks chopping down rainforests and global warming, Eris says that nature is fighting back. It sure made sense to me, especially after I saw how Katrina had destroyed so much of New Orleans.

   We were lying in the clearing between the woods and the Gum Pond bayou in Bienville Parish. Hundreds, probably thousands, of insects hovered and swooped across the water, their wings buzzing and whining as they flew, occasionally getting eaten by frogs and other reptiles that leapt like slimy green missiles out of the water. The air smelled rich and cloying, a mixture of the moist earth, rotting vegetation and animals that made up these thick swamps. The sky was clear above us and the moon was big, low in the sky and golden coloured, like syrup. It was the day after the full moon, when the moon began its waning phase. That was something else Eris taught me. I never realised until she came along how ignorant I’d been all my life. She opened my mind up something crazy. Nowadays I was looking at the world in a whole new light because she’d made me see and understand everything that much better. Eris was a miracle, a true gift from God.

    I never said that to her though; she was kinda anti religion. ‘Because of how it warps people’s minds,’ she said. I’d been brought up to be a good Christian boy by my parents and I still was, I just didn’t need to go to church no more. My God was everywhere. He showed me His existence by bringing Eris into my world. I truly believed that. Some would say I was blinded by love but if I was, well then, that was just fine by me.

   I’d brought a cooler full of beer for the celebration later and we were sipping from a bottle each. We sat in companionable silence and I thought over a conversation Eris and I had in bed that morning, about how and why people do such goddamn nasty things to each other.

   ‘You know, the thing I’ve realised, that most people don’t understand, can’t even comprehend, is that we’re all the same. We’re all capable of doing great stuff and shit stuff and all the other colours in between black and white. But people are scared and they let other scared people get to them and warp their thinking, change their path, until they could be thrown into a pit of rattlesnakes and be as clueless as you can be, become one even. You have to look out for the rattlesnakes. That’s all I’m sayin’. Eris looked at me, dubiously, out of the corner of her eye and said ‘Ok, I get what you’re saying, Marcus, except the rattlesnake part. That was straight out of the left field.’

   She lifted her head so she could sip her beer and winked at me. I laughed and coughed as I sat up, grass stuck to my bare back and all messed up in my hair. Her hair, which was darkest brown and long enough for her to sit on, was splayed out around her head, looking like dark water with its dips and waves. Her skin was pale and completely without marks and her eyes, a deeper, more complex green than even the Louisiana swamps held. Sometimes I thought they flickered, danced, the way the shine on a dragonfly ripples as it flies past.

    Off somewhere in the woods, crickets chirruped at each other while foxes slunk around, their small paws barely ruffling the leaf littered floor. Bats fluttered through the leaves and wolves howled in the distance. They never came here though, into the clearing. I wasn’t sure why; maybe they were scared of the ‘gators that sometimes sunned themselves here.

   ‘You know, I think you‘ve turned me into some sort of hippie.’ She looked at me with that raised eyebrows face she got when she thought I was full of shit. ’I mean it! You got me thinking about Mother Nature and how to change humanity and all types of stuff I ain’t never thought about before.’ I smiled my huge, dumb ass grin at her and she rolled her eyes back at me, flicking a bug off her long dress and wiggling her bare toes in the grass.

    ‘As for what we were saying earlier, I don’t believe none of this end-of-the-world fear mongering they keep going on about on the news and in the papers, though I get why they’re doing it. If scaring the shit out of all the idiots and rednecks means these assholes clean up after themselves, I’m good with that. Aren’t you?’ I grabbed another beer out of the cooler and twisted it open. I offered her one but she held hers up to show me she had some left.

   ‘But if we’re all capable of good then surely we should be given a chance to prove that by being told the truth about what’s going on in the world, not the governments spin on it. At least that way, there’ll be more well informed assholes.’

   ‘Erm…’ She had me there. My debating skills weren’t up to much and she was way too smart for me. ‘Well, uhm, maybe I'm just full of shit.’

   She laughed and said, ‘I think that’s most likely, don’t you?’ then turned her face towards the woods. We could hear the others approaching.

   There were shouts and rustling as our friends stormed their way through the trees to find us. I called out to them and soon torch beams were cutting through the darkness around us. There were six of them, just like we planned, eight of us in total, four men and four women. The sacred number, it represented infinity; the never ending cycle of life.

   ‘What took y’all so long? We’ve been waiting for your slow asses for nearly two damn hours.’ I got to my feet and gave Eris my hand so she could stand up. ‘Well, we didn’t wanna interrupt your little love session now did we? Though I can hardly account for the other hour and fifty five minutes,’ my friend Ben called out to me; a big shit-eating grin on his face.

   ‘Better than your three minutes, you drunk redneck.’ I threw him a beer which he caught, gleefully.

   ‘That’s enough boys, we don’t have much time.’ Eris said, her tone ringing with authority. Her being the only one of us without a Louisiana accent immediately made her sound the most intelligent, something that maybe should bother me, born and raised here like I was, but it didn’t. I’d do anything for her, even if that meant walking into the gates of Hell.

   ‘Do we have everything?’ She looked around at all of us and we held up our hallowed objects. Mine was a vial of snake venom on a black leather strap. I’d squeezed the venom out of the snakes myself, just like she asked, and she’d been real pleased about it.

   Ben held up his silver athame, a knife used in rituals, with the black onyx decorated handle and different runes carved into the sharp, tarnished blade. I recognised some of them as ones that Eris had taught me but not all of them.

   Jacob rattled his dirty cloth bag of bones, seven from different animals and one human rib he stole from the coroner’s office where his daddy worked.

   Adam held a bottle of red wine that we had all added drops of our own blood to. I wasn’t sure if we were supposed to drink it later or not. Eris just said she’d tell us when the time was right.

   Jessica had a bundle of long reeds tucked under one arm and a large zip lock bag filled with smaller bags of different herbs and flowers in her hand. I didn’t know what was in there but Eris helped Jessica pick them herself which made Jessica as pleased as punch.

   Ava had a vial, very similar to mine, filled with her own menstrual blood. That kinda grossed me out if I was honest, though I’d never be so rude as to say anything about it. Eris explained to me that it symbolised the fertility cycle, one of the most important functions of life and was therefore a necessity.

   Mary clutched a bag of sea salt, a grimy looking compass and five black candles, infused with the scent of jasmine. Because it was night blooming which Eris said was very important.

   Eris and I brought the most crucial element, the piece that pulled the whole thing together. He was a known paedophile. The cops had been trying to lock him up for years but he was a devious son of a bitch and kept managing to get away with his nasty shit. We were gonna put a stop to that tonight. Of course none of us wanted to pick someone good, we weren’t evil or nothing, so this guy, Horace, had been the logical choice. Eris and I knocked him out with chloroform, stripped him of his clothes and brought him here.

      ‘Prepare the pentacle,’ she told Mary who got to work straight away. Eris told us we needed a pentacle for this instead of a pentagram (a pentacle has a circle around the five pointed star, a pentagram doesn’t) because the circle made out of sea salt would protect us in case anything went wrong. I didn’t really like the sound of that but I trusted her. She wouldn’t let anything happen to us, especially not to me. Eris loved me, I knew she did. I mean, she didn’t say it back when I said it to her, which kinda hurt, but maybe it was just the wrong time. She’d say it to me eventually, I knew that she would.

   Mary began placing the candles using the compass until they formed the points of the star then linked them up with the reeds Jessica handed her so that the centre of the pentacle was visible. After that, she surrounded the formation with the sea salt circle. Eris smiled at her and nodded, acknowledging a job well done. Mary blushed, a deep pink colour, and fluttered her eyelashes at Eris. I was pretty sure she wasn’t a lesbian (I’d heard rumours of her fooling around with Jason Redditch in high school), Eris just dazzled everyone that way.

   ‘Jessica, it’s your turn. Do you remember what I told you to do?’ Jessica nodded vigorously and began to organise the herbs. She started to burn a different one at each candle, filling the air with oddly colourful and fragrant smoke that made my nose tickle and my eyes water.

   Eris shut her eyes and said quietly, ‘Move the sacrifice to the middle of the pentacle.’ I looked at the other men and nodded towards Horace. We each grabbed a limb and carefully laid him out in the centre of the star, his legs apart and arms spread wide out, palms up. Now it was my turn. Eris had instructed me to dribble the venom on his forehead, over his heart, on his upturned palms and the tops of his feet. Jessica scattered flowers over his body and Jacob placed the bones around him, evenly spaced with the human rib bone above his head.

   Ben was just handing Eris the athame when Horace started to stir. His eyelids fluttered as he fought to open his eyes but soon they were wide open, taking in the scene around him.

    ‘Hey… Hey, what’s going on here?! What the Hell are you kids doing to me? Where the fuck are my clothes and what’s this shit on me?’ He tried to get up but we moved in to hold him down while Eris approached with the athame. Horace struggled beneath our hands, terror in his eyes, clear as day. I looked away and tried to ignore him. I knew there was no turning back now, even though his pleads for release twanged at my heart strings. Misgivings or not, we had to finish. For her, we had to complete the ritual.

   Eris started the chant she’d taught us and we joined in, our low voices uninterrupted by Horace’s shouts for help.

    ‘Abaddon, nos dico in vos. Baphomet, nos es vestri vernula. Belial, nos cultus vestri atrum vox. Asael, nos dedi vos is vitualamen. Lucifer, capimus vos in nos.’

   Our chanting voices slowly got louder as wind began to churn up the woods around us. The air was hot, even for a Louisiana night in spring and we were all sweating profusely. Even Eris looked warm as she stepped inside the pentacle, athame raised high above her head. Horace took one look at it and started screaming, struggling so fiercely that it was getting close to impossible to hold him in place. The air started to smell, like electric and rotting meat, sulphur maybe. I gagged as I chanted. The wind was howling now, whipping us with leaves, branches slapping against each other, animals crying out in fright. Everything around us was moving violently; all except the flames of the candles which remained perfectly still, as did the flowers and bones within the pentacle.

    Quick as a snake, Eris plunged the athame right into Horace’s heart. He howled with pain and blood poured out of the wound as she pulled the knife back out. He died with his eyes wide open, staring pitifully up at the sky, a silent prayer on his lips. ‘Ava, pour the blood into the wound. Adam, pour all the wine around him. Don’t stop the chant. He’s almost here.’ They quickly did as they were told while Eris began to dance inside the pentacle, the soles of her feet picking up grass as she danced through the wine and the blood. As she picked up the pace, so did our chanting, faster and louder until we were screaming it at her, at each other, at the world around us. Her whole body was shaking, her eyes closed and her mouth hanging open in what looked like purest ecstasy.

   Suddenly she stopped, and then everything stopped. The wind died down, our chant was hushed, like something had come along and snatched the words from right out of our mouths. It was eerily quiet now and the air thrummed with power. Eris’ eyes fluttered open and we all took a scared step back. Her beautiful green eyes had been transformed. They were coal black, the whites were gone, and reflected no light, not even from the candles. Dark voids that held us transfixed. Chuckling menacingly, she turned from us and reached her arms up towards the stars.

    ‘He’s here.’

Read a annoying article today about black holes. They came out with the usual twaddle about a star collapsing to a 'infinite density at an infinitely small point'. Allow me to deconstruct that with my bare teeth.

A 'point' is just a location. It can't be a object, cos it's dimensionless - it has no length, width or height, so there's no space there for anything to exist. It's no more than a set of coordinates.

As for being 'infinitely small', nothing can be infinitely small. Spacetime is grainy - that is to say, there is a minimum size that anything can be. Just as energy can only be emitted in discrete quanta (ie, you can't have half a photon), spacetime comes in building blocks of a definite minimum size - the Planck length. A single grain of spacetime is 1.616 x 10 to the power of minus 35 metres across (quite small, but not infinitely so).

This means that a body undergoing gravitational collapse to form a black hole can only shrink to a sphere one Planck length in diameter. It can't shrink to a smaller size, cos there isn't one. It could only occupy a single grain of spacetime, which can't be any smaller. If it vanished to a dimensionless point, it would cease to exist, and couldn't therefore have a gravitational field.

The article also said that spacetime becomes 'infinitely curved' around the singularity. What is that even supposed to mean? Spacetime could only wrap itself around the collapsar's ultimate grain, which has a small but not infinitesimal size.

They also said that 'nothing can escape from a black hole'. Well, I know of at least two things that can: quantum entanglement (a consequence of Wolfgang Pauli's exclusion principle) and gravity.

There's a hypothetical scenario where a astronaut has fallen into a black hole. As long as it's a large one (eg, the black hole at the centre of the Milky Way galaxy), he should be able to survive for a good long while before being torn apart by tidal forces (poor sod). But they say "Unfortunately, he can't describe what he sees inside the black hole to anyone outside, cos it's impossible to transmit any information across the event horizon." Well OK, you can't use quantum entanglement to transmit info (the fabled SciFi QED - Quantum Entanglement Device, which would supposedly make instantaneous communication possible over distances which would otherwise involve a time-lag due to the limitation of the speed of light for conventional communication methods such as radio) cos quantum entanglement is 'non-local', ie independent of spacetime. Any QED info would arrive at all points in space and time - imagine a page of Morse code, where every single dot and dash was printed all over the entire page: it would be a mess, and there would be no way to extract any information from it.

There is another possibility, though, using gravity waves.

Classical physics defines gravity as a apparent force caused by the curvature of space. Quantum mechanics disagrees, and says gravity is a actual force mediated by virtual particles called gravitons. But both sides of physics agree that there's something called 'gravity waves'. Quantum mechanics says all particles can be treated as waves, and classical physics says moving distortions of space (waves) can be generated by agitation of massive objects. Gravity waves could escape from a black hole, cos the hole's gravitational field won't act on them. So the hypothetical astronaut could use a gravity wave generator to create a coded signal which could be picked up from outside the event horizon - so much for the Cosmic Censorship hypothesis (up yours Roger Penrose!).

Well, got that out of my system, feel much better now!

In all of the Patrick McGilligan interviews with screenwriters I have read, George Axelrod's is the only one to begin with the subject critiquing the Backstory books. I'm not sure what that says about him but I'm sure it says something. As you may have guessed Axelrod wrote the screenplay for Breakfast at Tiffany's, adapted from Truman Capote's novella. It was in fact on TV last week but I'd never seen it before, taped it, and just got round to watching it today, plus I'd recently read the Axelrod interview. I really enjoyed Tiffany's and I think part of the reason it's aged as well as it has is because of the vagueness forced upon it by the production code. In Capote's book Holly Golightly is a call girl and even as late in the day as 1961, a major studio would not have that. Worse still the man in the book is likely homosexual, a subject about which major studios still get jittery. Axelrod made sweeping changes, the largest being that the man (played by George Peppard in his pre-A Team days) becomes a gigolo, so he and Holly are basically in the same line. It's still impossible to mention either character's profession but Axelrod uses that to his advantage, our uncertainty about what they are mirrors the character's uncertain relationship, the undefined nature of which is the crux of the piece. From a remove of 50 years it also makes the film less dated; if they had talked about their occupations then the film would have showed its age, by not doing so Axelrod has inadvertently allowed it to stand the test of time. The film is not to everyone's taste, but I enjoyed it and I think there's room for an essentially sweet, offbeat romance amongst the more formulaic ones. The only thing I dislike is the same thing that Axelrod did; the bizarre casting of Mickey Rooney as the comedy Japanese neighbour. I've nothing but respect for Mr. Rooney and for Blake Edwards who directed, but the result is just not funny. Axelrod was a favourite target of the Production Code, Legion of Decency, and various other killjoys, as his films (some adapted from his own plays where rules were less stringent) frequently dealt with sex (The Seven Year Itch, Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter). But that did not stop him from writing some very successful films, despite his belief that most of them were mangled to some extent, leading him to direct 2 himself (unsuccessfully). Arguably Axelrod's greatest film was banned, but not because of any sexual content. The Manchurian Candidate (1962) was banned after the assasination of President Kennedy and was not re-released until 1988. It is a phenomenal film, and one with a dark sense of humour that often goes unrecognised. It's a film that has not dated and so had no need of a remake which made me very cautious of the 2004 version, but you know what? it's actually a very good film too. How often does that happen? An alcohol problem blighted the second half of Axelrod's career and he never really recovered, but his work in the 50s and 60s is remarkable, capturing Hollywood as it evolves to keep up with the new era. If he had only written Manchurian Candidate he would be remembered as one of the greats, but Breakfast at Tiffany's confirms that position and shows a range that most writers would kill for.