Wow! At £5.70 a dram it should be good, and blimy, it is. Just had a wee Talisker to start. Nice iodine, golden syrup and black pepper accents, but it gets knocked into a cocked hat by this complex beauty. I don't know where to begin. It speaks in full sentences. The first nose is like the essence of a seaside hayfield distilled through a full silver moon. The first touch on the tongue is astringent and warming as cloves, nutmeg and allspice. Throughout the high alcohol note would remind even a meths drinker that there is something to life. In the background, Seumas' bar is selling cullen skink and the smoked haddock backdrop makes a hard stage for any whisky to work. The colour is very pale straw. The whisky rolls on the back of the tongue like pearls fresh out of an oyster and there is a hint of Tobasco that fades into a warm cedar glow.I  know it must be oak, but there is nothing cheap retzina or Aussie Chardo about this. You couldn't imagine a better potpourri for a country house. Seems a shame to tip water into it, but, needs must. The tap water isn't great. The whisky reveals the chlorine and metals that you wouldn't otherwise notice. But the water does release the sweetness, knocking the alcohol spirit down and bringing up the golden sugar and grassy, gentler notes with a hint of wintergreen wafting down the path.

Wish I had paid as close attention to last night's Springbank.

Sometimes things just get to me. Media Planet published a supplement in the Guardian back on 30 October 2008 titled Women in Science, Engineering and Technology: the Problems and the Solutions. The supplement appears to have been commissioned by the Institute of Physics, who are prominent on the cover proclaiming, "Good practice benefits all". The cover is a mess of a design, but I will focus on the 3x3 grid of pictures which makes up about three quarters of the page. In this there are only two photographs of women: one a pair of smiling Asian graduates in mortarboards and gowns holding scrolls (who knows what discipline, or even if they are anything other than models in a PR stock photo). Now, where else have I seen this picture? Oh yes: http://buyessay.org/how-it-works/ That'll get quality graduates into SET.


Another pic is of a young blonde amongst skyscrapers interrogating a mobile phone or similar portable device. There is a picture of three very young girls each of a different racial type marveling at a hand pipetting a substance into test tubes. There is a photo of people of indeterminate gender in full white cleanroom or decontamination coveralls. There are two abstract images, one of molecules and the other of a glowing green binary bitstream. And, there are three pictures of military hardware: an ICBM labelled "United States", a jet fighter displaying the white star in blue roundel of the US Air Force, and what looks like a filthy great flamethrower, or a static rocket test, or a gas-air burst weapon; anyway, an exhibition of hideously inefficient combustion with billowing clouds of black smoke above a torrid fire stream.

Inside the supplement, big (very big) engineering, military technology and physics are conflated. The adverts tell the story: Atomic Weapons Establishment (full page) with a cubist abstraction of a woman's face made of various arty-techy mini images, Defence Engineering and Science Group (full page) with a besuited babe beside a Eurofighter loaded for bear, BAE Systems: Submarine Solutions, with a wireframe submarine (double half-page spread); Halcrow (full page) boasting what can only be described as terraforming megalomaniacal projects.

Sad, really.

As I do when riding to work or pushing Johnny in his buggy, I exercise debates.

It is often said that we do not have a drugs problem, we have problem because drugs are illegal. I was wondering if aesthetics could help. I hypothesised that there might be an aesthetic of opiates. That there might be a connoisseurship of heroin that would analyse the experience and recognise from sensual nuance the provenance, the makers hand, and so on. I hypothesised that if there were such an aesthetic, it would help to mitigate the social ills brought about by heroin use. Users would strive to become more sophisticated, would shun the bad stuff, and generally use would go down. It became quickly clear to me that even though there is an elaborate aesthetic of alcohol: malt whiskies, champagne, bordeaux, CamRA, etc, this doesn't stop people drinking paint thinner and lamp fuel until they are blind and killing each other.

So, is there a place for aesthetics in addressing social ills?
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The car, the house, the job, the phone, the telly, the bank and the supermarket or mall are our architecture of recordation and social control. Each gives us an illusion of freedom and individuality. Each serves, rather, to individuate, identify, monitor, track and regulate our behaviour. This is why I value my bicycles so highly.

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I accept that Mancunians wouldn't want to be lectured at by London. But, I am sorry that the congestion charge was overturned - and by such a majority. It does seem extraordinarily short sighted and selfish. The problem is that the "Christmas" they have voted for: no charge now, will lead to worse congestion, poorer public transport and will do nothing to help anyone reach any sustainable level of emissions.

The Observer published a "warning" by the police on Sunday 9 November under the headline, "Police warn of growing threat from eco-terrorists". In the article, the writers Mark Townsend and Nick Denning, appear to serve as mouthpieces for a simian authoritarianism. They provide little balance to counter the assertion by a "senior source" in the The National Extremism Tactical Co-ordination Unit (NETCU) that, "... eco-activists are researching a list of target companies which they believe are major polluters or are exacerbating the threat of climate change." Something wrong with that?

The article goes on to suggest there is a "... network of UK climate camps and radical environmental movements under the umbrella of Earth First!, which has claimed responsibility for a series of criminal acts in recent months." As far as I understood it, the umbrella works as much the other way. Climate Camp provides the umbrella and Earth First! sympathisers - and environmentalists of all stripes, including such radical membership organisations as the WI and the National Trust - may from time to time come under it. This is not just dreadful journalism in the manner of the Daily Mail, this is an attempt to shape a national debate in ideological terms with, I suggest, the aim of demonising dissent, driving a wedge into the environmental movement. Why?
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Three lovely malts this weekend in Rydal with Ali, Johnny, John, Aileen, Iain and Mhoraig:

• Glen Moray (no age, guessing 7 or 8 years) lovely, honey and black pepper
  
• Glen Morangie, Maderia wood finish, sweet, as you would expect, and slightly cloying
  
• Teaninich 10 yo black pepper, lemon and oak.
  

Technorati Tags: Whisky

I know the Today Programme is not Schnews or MediaLens, but compared to the Sunday Breakfast Show on BBC1 with Bill Turnbull and Sian Williams, it is a beacon of critical thinking. ( Read more... )

Somehow it all hangs together or maybe better said: it all falls apart together. How many more warnings do we need that just about everything we are doing is unsustainable?

I write in response to today’s announcement that Stansted Airport is going to be expanded to handle something like 30% to 40% more traffic over the next couple of years. The numbers are ambiguous. The report says an increase of 10% in flights but and increase from 25M to 35M passengers (10/25 = 40%) Strikes me this announcement is rushed out just when the PM has to be seen to be "optimistic" about the future. Of course there will be more people flying in and out of Britain over the next 5 years, he has to say. To say otherwise would be a sign of lack of confidence in the economy.

Travel will continue to grow, people will continue to take more holidays, food will be flown in from Berserkistan while water is extracted from deep aquifers in desertifying Sahel to drive dwindling oil production. The only thing flying besides accusations is pigs. And, I mean that in all the ways you might take it.

We blame the bankers, the bond traders, the short sellers and so on, but the values of the pinnacle are also the values at the base. Yes, we are anaesthetised by advertising, co-opted by politicians, dependent on supermarkets but, basically we all have to bite a big bullet or the least of our worries will be whether the grey squirrel overtakes the red. We will have eaten them all and be wishing there were more vermin to feed our starving children with.