I was sitting in the Corner Bar of De Brett's tonight looking across the road at the big gap, the twenty-five year gap, in Shortland Street that used to be the Auckland Star. I got to thinking what a waste it was pulling the grand old Star building down, to turn it into a single level car-park for twenty-five years. What else could have been done with it, with His Majesty's Theatre, with the Royal International, with ... ?

Anyway, a bit pissed, I Googled "Auckland Star" and really there isn't much out there. But what there is is grand.

Here's Hillary knocking the Queen's coronation into the second lead spot. And here's the old, old Star building and the old presses.

But check out this page of great old All Black caricatures. There's my old fave Dave Loveridge, who used to hold the ball way out in front in the tackle and dispatch it at the last possible minute. Sid Going is there too and even Joe Stanley. Tane Norton, Andy Haden. Mourie, Hewson (who remembers Hewson now?). Buck's there too.

Remember I said Nick Willis's run reminded me of John Walker? Let's make that Peter Snell, shall we?

Air New Zealand and Qantas are apparently close to inking a cooperation agreement for Tasman services. They reckon they had one in the 1990s and "it worked quite well".

Yes, that would be when tickets to Sydney were $700 return, wouldn't it?

There's trouble brewing in Dili, with soldiers dismissed/deserting their barracks. This guy's pushing shit uphill, looking for a fair trial in the US. And George W. thinks it's his job to say who should rule democratic Iraq. Current PM Ibrahim al-Jafaari is allied to Moktada al Sadr, head of the Mahdi Army.

Abdur Rahman, who can't live as a Christian in democratic Afghanistan, has arrived safely in Italy. At home the Taliban have launched their spring offensive.

In short, business as usual.

This story in the Herald today doesn't quite demolish one of the New Zealand right's favourite memes, but it does put a bloody big hole in it.

According to Statictics NZ, New Zealand's labour productivity growth has increased 55.7 per cent since 1988. That's an average annual increase in productivity of 2.6 per cent compared to 2.3 per cent in Australia. The figures are higher than previously unpublished unofficial estimates.

The stats cover what is called the "measured sector" so government, where activity is largely measured by changes in input rather than real outputs, is not included.

But there is lots of good news in these new figures even beyond labour productivity. The report paints a picture of economic transformation, showing, for instance that capital and "multifactor" productivity have been the major drivers of real GDP growth rather than labour. Capital investment was also the major driver of labour productivity growth.

In short, we really are working smarter, in the private sector anyway.

I was at the Chinese supermarket in Dominion Road on Saturday and, amongst other things, picked up some toothpaste. Now I always thought plaque and gum disease were the big issues in the tooth department, but I think our dentists mightn't be telling the whole story.

For instance, this new toothpaste I'm using, Zi Tuo, guards against "Damnification smudgily teeth" and also "eliminates eyewinker".

My dentist never told me about eyewinker. Not a word.

But that's not all, there's also the dreaded "Usage blot and yellow spot". Here's what we all deserve to know from the back of the packet:

This article contents is natural to do away with contaminative with mouthwash, can valid clearance because take a meal or drink the dirty and yellow dental calculus that coffee, tea, smoke, beverage become behind with tooth spot etc, Do away with specially the pollution increase the white factor, making the brighter white in tooth is more the health, the tone is more delightfully fresh. It contain flouride, can enhance the tooth enamel quality, preventing the decayed tooth.

And don't forget the three-step whitening process (pictured):

1. Damnification smudgily teeth
2. Eliminate eyewinker
3. Healthiness Whiteness (two tier Fl element HAP)

Well I enthusiastically forecast New Zealand would smash all previous games medal records. Clearly enthusiasm can only take you so far. In the end the games were full of disappointments for us Kiwis.

There were many heroic fourths, thirds and seconds and not enough heroic firsts. A lot went wrong and I can't help wondering if the games village might, perhaps, have been a bit too much fun ...

Mind you, there were great highlights too. For me, an adolescent when the truly great John Walker emerged, Nick Willis was a very welcome blast from the past. And didn't he adopt a very Walker pose when he crossed the line? Valerie Vili was pumped for her competition and she definitely gave the best medal ceremony, tears streaming. The Sevens surprised, the netballers and Moss Burmester didn't. A shooting gold was a much needed bonus. The full haul is here.

At least they played Neil Finn at the closing ceremony.

Meanwhile, in the real world, Chris reports a disturbing and yet typically cretinous US legal non-decision. The Supreme Court has declined to hear a case about obscenity, leaving anyone who publishes sexual material on the Internet uncertain whether they're open to federal penalties. It was also Yahoo's turn to behave, like, super, super dumb.

Hooray for Nollywood! Nigeria now has the world's third largest film industry after Hollywood and Bollywood, says The Guardian's Jeevan Vasagar.

The Americans try, but fail, to explain what the bloody hell all that fuss was about surrounding that Aussie travel ad (via Arts & Letters Daily). Finally from Chris, a showdown in toytown. Postman Pat-owner Entertainment Rights says it’s considering making an offer for Chorion, the rights holder of Noddy and the Mr Men, two years after abandoning a previous takeover approach.

Monsiour le Broatch discovers the secret to Dan Brown's success. He also sent a link about Terry Gilliam's Brazil and the Wachowski's V for Vendetta. It's all Greek to me.

Penultimately, from moi (and Slate) why nobody gets to hear the good news from Iraq. Here's a message to the deaf: THE BOMBS ARE TOO LOUD!! (not to mention the sound of electric drills and the screams of Sunni bird breeders).

Ultimately, did anyone else notice the story in the Herald on Sunday about "historian" Michael Baigent's new book? Baigent, of course, is one of the guys accusing Dan Brown of plagiarism. Apparently, in his new book, Baigent reckons Jesus didn't die on the cross, it was all a big conspiracy. Well I've never heard that one before!

Oh, and my apologies for our muse's untoward behaviour this week. Ciao.

PS: Scrap! Scrap! Scrap! (via Lemurgram). I'll hold your sponge any day, Che.

Metro's awards for Auckland's best restaurants are out.

The Restaurant of the Year shortlist:
Supreme Winner: The French Cafe
Fine Dining: The French Cafe
Smart Casual: Cibo
Italian: Delicious
Local: The Engine Room
Chinese: Empress Garden
New Restaurant: The Engine Room/Dine by Peter Gordon
Dessert: The Engine Room
Wine List: O'Connell Street Bistro
Service: Creghan Molloy Wright, The French Cafe
The site is here

Metro got there - they must have inhaled the food, given that more than 70 places are done very quickly and each place has to be dined at, at least three times - with the help of the Sydney Morning Herald's Matthew Evans, one of the few restaurant critics in this neck of the culinary woods who actually knows anything about food, and also how to write.

The French Cafe won top spot, and it's so good that Evans reportedly would like to transport it to Sydney. We're selling everything else, so why not? But one would hope that every customer, big and small, is treated the same at these nice nosh spots. The retired Ms Vile (welcome to guest here any time) had a less than brilliant experience there.

Perhaps it was just a bad day. But I also had one. A celebrating group I was with last year found fault. My champagne glass was not changed when the wine was, my jacket was draped on a step-ladder or some such near the toilets, and the service was more surly than sublime. The food was, I concede, pretty darn good.

(As for Evans, I've not encountered him, but he sounds agreeable. He had the banal but brilliant observation, quoted in Canvas, that more restaurants should offer $5 or $6 glasses of wine. Quite right. Restaurateurs can make just as good a margin on cheap but serviceable wine as pricier and more medal-able. Whether we can get our kicks - remember, label not visible to fellow snobsters - on Mt Slightly More Difficult remains to be seen and slurped.)

I met a dog control officer tonight. I've never met a dog control officer before.

"Do you control cats as well?" I asked.

"Not yet. But the council's considering it."

Remember, you heard it here first.

Also, here's some corporatespeak overheard in a pub. A bunch of working guys in the public bar of the King's Arms, in Newton, in the afternoon talking about the New Zealand boxer Soulan Pounceby. One said he admired the Aussie media in how they labelled Pounceby a baby-killer.

"So how do you redeem yourself after something like that?" asked his mate.

The guy paused and thought. "You have to go out and proactively serve society," he said.

"Proactively." At the King's Arms!

I’ve been feeling as William S. Burroughs must surely have felt when he’d shot up all his junk and his dealer had been busted: I’ve been offline for four days without access to email or this blog because the backlight for the screen of my Toshiba P20 laptop (which has just done that tantalising ‘out of warranty’ shimmy computers always do the month before they enter the realms of built-in obsolescence) failed at the weekend. I’m now working on a screen borrowed from a friend — cheers, Tony — which is attached to the laptop’s external monitor port while I wait for the spare part to be ordered in by the repair shop.

What I’d really like to know right now is the name and address of the genius whose idea it was to put the full version of the instructions on my computer and not in the print manual. I consider myself marginally more geeky than the average computer user (I read instruction manuals before turning them on), but I wasted far too much time in front of two darkened screens this afternoon because I didn’t know I needed to press Fn+F5 to get the laptop to default to the external monitor. The print manual for my laptop contains the following helpful paragraph (and I only know this because I read it as far as page 32):

“Unabridged manual: The full version of this manual comes preinstalled on your computer as a fully searchable CHM file. It contains all the information you need to know to get up and running with your TOSHIBA computer in no time.”

I can think of instances where it might be useful to have an unabridged manual on your computer. But if you’re not yet “up and running”, what’s the point of having the information you need secreted in the very machine you’re trying to access?

Writing instruction manuals must be a dying art nowadays, so few people read them any more. I often talk to people who’ve bought some new electronic gadget but who haven’t the foggiest how to carry out their most basic, intended functions. When I ask if they’ve looked in the manual they shoot me a withering look as though I’ve just solicited sex.

Well over half of the Toshiba P20’s print manual consists of “safety notices” and disclaimers aimed at avoiding lawsuits from disgruntled users with repetitive strain injury, or victims of electric shocks suffered from incorrectly used DVD super multi drives, or (and this is far more likely in the case of the Toshiba P20) “low-heat injuries” caused by the inadequacy of the cooling fans concealed in its base. The manual wastes not a word on connecting the laptop to an external monitor; the preinstalled manual, a page. And, now that I know the “Fn+F5” spell, I’ve also discovered it includes a fascinating, although entirely self-defeating section entitled “The display is blank”. I am unreasonably pleased to be able to tell you that the print manual also ends with a blank page, presumably covering the same topic, and about which I’m sure, were he alive today, Robert Johnson would have composed a fine blues.

It's every journo's dream to bring down a big target. A polly or a CEO or, even better, a government. Investigate has just done a really great job over David Parker. If they don't cream a few Qantas Awards next year you'd have to ask some serious questions.

That said, well done Parker for resigning. This isn't a case of unfocused, historical sleaze. It's a clear-cut issue and Helen Clark was way out of line in criticising Wishart and his magazine for publishing the story.

Labour and Clark really do seem to have lost their touch.

One of the surprises when I returned from Australia and (belatedly) settled down was the number of free TV channels here. Me and the Girlie had talked about getting Sky, but now I'm wondering about that.

At mine we get 11 free channels. That's pretty unbelievable really. We get 1, 2, 3 and C4, Prime and Triangle, Maori and Racing. We get Juice, Alt and a strange channel playing NASA material all day long. Okay there's some in there you'd never watch, but later everything changes again.

One goes to BBC. Prime goes to Fox. Triangle goes to Voice of America.

I've been keeping strange hours of late so I've been watching each of these carefully. Fox is total populist crap. It's the sort of TV you'd get if you gave Winston Peters the job of TV programmer - pure unadulterated tosh.

Sadly BBC World Service, in its own way, isn't much better. Okay it has some good in-depth shows, but the basic news is shallow. They did a piece on Iraq last night that was just a complete nothing.

The one that unexpectedly grabs me is VOA. Again last night, a great interview with Fred Siegel, author of a book about the success of Rudi Guliani's New York. Superb, thoughtful stuff. Sadly it was followed by a real hard-nosed, old-style journo, John McLaughlin (pictured), interviewing ... Miss America 2006. Apparently she can dance on her toes despite having an elongated big toe.

Hmm, I'm doing everything in slow motion today, the result of a lunch that finished at 2 am watching the fabulous Dog's Bollix band.

I hope all your St Paddies were as good as mine.

Commonwealth Games
Anyway, if you are trying to follow the games online, as usual the big newspapers have set up their own dedicated sections. Our Herald's is here, the Sydney Morning Herald's is here and Stuff's is here. TVNZ is delivering live streaming video here. Needless to say the coverage is highly parochial. If you want a less chauvinist tone, try the official games site here.

If you like your coverage more "bloggy" there are a few options as well. English swimmer Owen Morgan blogs here, while this site is written by schoolkids from around the world. Big media has gone all bloggy as well. Stuff's Kerri Welham blogs here, the BBC here, The Melbourne Age here.

Matters arising
Stephen points to this view from Iran, where Tom and Jerry cartoons are considered a Jewish conspiracy to improve the perception of mice. No really. My Dad sent this link, US fundy site which has details on preparations under way for the End Times. Apparently before the third temple can be built in Jerusalem a "red heifer" has to be sacrificed, but to date a perfect heifer has not been found. But never fear, Texas ranchers are selectively breeding to produce the perfect animal. Nice work fellas.

In case you hadn’t been counting, Chris reminds us that Pi Day was last Tuesday, 14 March: "a celebration of one of the most-used yet bizarrest numbers in all of mathematics" says the Guardian (although I don’t think “bizarrest” is a proper word), or, for the numerically challenged the least-used and least-remembered. It made a thought-provoking movie, though.

This article points out that the number is rooted in popular culture: Kate Bush sang the first 137 digits in a song, titled π, on her recent album, Aerial (although some people accuse her of getting the numbers wrong).

This link from Karl Hyde of the band Underworld reminds us that Frank Zappa is gone, and a cornucopia of Zappaesque clips reminds us that there will never be another.

UK comedian Dave Gorman discovers Flickr, and although he doesn’t know how to pronounce it, decides to move his photographs from the attic to the internet. And finally one for me, says Chris, in light of my recent complaints about singledom, via the always enlightening Arts & Letters Daily.

The Palestinians launch a peaceful protest, a strike, against the Israeli raid on their prison and what do they get?

Now, this is the bit that doesn't make much or even any sense to me. How exactly is going on strike against your own people going to do anything to hurt the Israelis? Normally strikers will target those that will be able to create some sort of pressure against the people that they perceive as having wronged them. But, why would the Israelis care that the Palestinians are on strike?

Duh.

At least the poster acknowledges the Palestinians fundamental powerlessness, but the comments are worse:

Think of it like a convicted murderer/rapist going on a hunger strike.

And:

They really are a dumb lot If it wasnt so tragic it would be hillarious.Their thought patterns are really quite screwed up.Brains addled with hatred that results in some bizzare behaviour.

And

Dumb bastards - no wonder why blowing yourself up to get 72 virgins seems like a great idea to them.

Yup, they were there minding their goats and sheep on the land they had occupied for centuries and then, at the whim of the British government, they get turfed off that land and out of their homes. After many years during which their legitimate grievances are ignored, some become terrorists.

Now we tell them to take the road of peace. We tell them terrorism is never justified. We tell them to adopt peaceful means of protest.

And when they do what do we do? We laugh at them and call them a "dumb lot" and "dumb bastards"

Truly sad, pathetic and disgraceful.

Hey girls, what's the problem? I'm back.

A shortfall of men aged 20 to 49 in the Shaky Isles has sparked a wave of "marrying down" by desperate women, researchers say. They found New Zealand women in that age group outnumber males by 33,000 to 53,000, making a good Kiwi man even harder to find.

Government demographer Paul Callister said this meant more professional women were marrying men with less schooling and cash.This was largely because of a lack of eligible men of equal educational or economic status, he said.

First it's New Zealand business losing its backbone and now, unbelievably, it's New Zealand sports fans:

The New Zealand public does not seem to be confident about the team's success, according to a poll on the Stuff website, with 66 per cent expecting less than 10 gold medals and 33 per cent no more than five.

Well, I don't buy it. Just like there's going to be no hard landing for the economy, I'm picking this team to crack its previous best of 11 golds and also beat Sparc's realistic forecast of 46 medals total. Why? Because I'm an optimist, that's why.

Meanwhile, the great social engineer Dr Cullen is said to be preparing a company tax/payroll tax trade-off in part to encourage increased productivity and in part to help fund future superannuation costs. Sounds good to me, especially in the current environment. But what about companies that employ lots of people and aren't that profitable?

Oh, right.

And what about a cut in personal income tax? Now that the odds of a hard landing have faded, the exchange rates are correcting and export stocks are hitting new highs on the stock exchange, well, it's time. But he'll probably wait until the next election. Bastard.

Update 2.47 pm: Burmester wins his 200m Butterfly heat in 1.59.57. The fastest qualifier so far. McMillan also makes final, Aussie swimmer takes best time off Bumester. Helen Norfolk second in her heat, goes to final.

Update 12.03: Just got home from a piss-up. Burmester won. Gold #1! Let's get some rah rah going! He dominated his heat but looked like he had something in reserve. Well done!

I sense a kind of general lethargy in the NZ blog community. As I said yesterday I've been cleaning out our blogroll and a lot of blogs have just gone or stopped. Others seem to be considering it or just not posting very much.

Others seem to be doing less politics and more weird shit. Take GMan for instance. This is one of the funniest things I've seen for a while.

Euroskin at Onan's Tutor reports on a bit of airborne buggery. I'm talking about the elite 82nd Airborne of D-Day fame, son. Seven paratroopers are facing courts martial for appearing in gay sex videos. Uroskin comments:

Such a croc of shit. Uphill gardening isn't a crime so it shouldn't be one for employees of the US Army. Since the ancient Greeks everybody knows that service nookie is good for fighting morale.

Yes, and good house-keeping is also part of the Paratrooper's Creed.

A perfectly normal day. A quiet stroll home along the High Street. A bit of window shopping. What could possibly go wrong?

Find out in a new short story by Malcolm Hutchinson here.

Just a couple of items of interest. Firstly, Sandra Day O'Connor, a recently retired judge appointed to the US Supreme Court by Ronald Reagan, is warning that right-wing attacks on the judiciary could edge the US towards dictatorship.

It takes a lot of degeneration before a country falls into dictatorship, but we should avoid these ends by avoiding these beginnings.

One culprit? Tom DeLay who called for the impeachment of judges involved in the Terri Schiavo right-to-die case. O'Connor says such attacks are a direct threat to Consitutional freedoms.

Secondly, I was cleaning out our blogroll (gee a lot of blogs have fallen by the wayside) and came across this interesting item on Whangamata from Jimi Kumara, who gets a bundle of food out of what the pro development group are calling a "salt marsh".

It’s a great place and remarkably undisturbed. There are usually very few people there, even in the middle of summer. We were there once with some Asians and they were SOOO excited that you could get free food.

The field of kaimoana is miraculously large, and I have long wondered how hard it is for a field of that sort to be established. It seems to suit the people who support the
development to call the area a “salt marsh” which sounds like something completely useless, somewhere Colonel Klink would have to go to in Hogan’s Heroes when he f**ked up.

As Robert Fisk tours the country, John O'Neill takes a look inside the war correspondent's magnum opus, The Great War for Civilisation, and finds it a depressing, but totally enlightening experience.

Read the review.

Forget Tom DeLay, Scooter Libby and all those implicated in the Abramoff scandal. This is how a real pro does it. Claude Allen, Bush's former conservative domestic policy advisor who resigned unexpectedly in February, has just been charged with refund fraud. Slate explains:

In general, a refund-fraud scam goes like this: You purchase an item—a CD player, let's say—and leave the store with it. Then you come back to the store and pick up exactly the same CD player; you take the CD player and receipt from the original purchase to the returns desk, claiming that this is the item you bought, and get a refund for it. You keep the original CD player, and pay nothing. Professional shoplifters like refund fraud because it's relatively safe. Since you never actually steal an object from the store, no one can chase you out to the parking lot.

Hilarious.

Update: Some blog comment and background on Allen here and here.

Don't know how I missed this one. Francis Fukuyama, one of the architects of neoconservative thought and once a strong supporter of regime change in Iraq, now wants to ditch the whole deal.

The most basic misjudgment was an overestimation of the threat facing the United States from radical Islamism.

Although the new and ominous possibility of undeterrable terrorists armed with weapons of mass destruction did indeed present itself, advocates of the war wrongly conflated this with the threat presented by Iraq and with the rogue state/proliferation problem more generally.

And then this beauty:

Going further, he says the movements' advocates are Leninists who "believed that history can be pushed along with the right application of power and will. Leninism was a tragedy in its Bolshevik version, and it has returned as farce when practised by the United States".

He now believes democratisation alone will not reduce the threat of terrorism, a key neocon idea.

Radical Islamism is a by-product of modernisation itself, arising from the loss of identity that accompanies the transition to a modern, pluralist society. More democracy will mean more alienation, radicalisation and - yes, unfortunately - terrorism.

By definition, outsiders can't 'impose' democracy on a country that doesn't want it; demand for democracy and reform must be domestic. Democracy promotion is therefore a long-term and opportunistic process that has to await the gradual ripening of political and economic conditions to be effective.

Hey, I said that (sort of) nearly two years ago!

Fukuyama concludes it's "unlikely that history will judge either the intervention [in Iraq] itself or the ideas animating it kindly". Also his essay here.

For me, the TradeMe story is the biggie of the week. I asked eBay's Aussie MD once if there were any plans to operate in New Zealand and he was up-front that the strength of TradeMe posed a big barrier to that.

TradeMe roundup
Anyhoo, I've ferreted out some trans-Tasman comment for yous fullahs. First here's my old boss, Tom Burton, on big media's hunger for top web properties. It includes, at the end, a handy list of deals done in the past year. Our own Herald chimes in with some weekend analysis of TradeMe's rivals here, and points to areas where the company can find growth here (Scoop has the press release here with a chart). The Melbourne Age similarly warns TradeMe's position is not unassailable as well as providing a detailed portrait of the company and its technology. Finally, Stuff reports Kirky reassuring users fees won't rise under Fairfax.

Google's literary land-grab
Bloomsbury Publisher Nigel Newton is wrong to call for a boycott of the Google search engine in protest at its plans to scan books, says Chris, who mentions the widely blogged story in his Podcast Roundup. Although Google's contextualised advertising might be argued to cheapen the literary greats in Google Book Search, Newton underestimates readers' abilities to totally ignore that advertising, or to dismiss it as opportunism. It doesn't reflect on the work of Dickens, Kafka or any of the greats.

Matters arising
Chris also notes this week brought great news for fans of real food: falling sales have forced the closure of 25 UK McDonald's branches. Could this be a tipping point, asks TV chef Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall.

Nearly 20 years on from the death of one of the greatest musicians ever, it’s time to reassess the life and death of Jaco Pastorius, and to remember that genius is no insurance policy against going off the rails.

The Institute For Interactive Research is a very cool site discovered by NZBC cub reporter Joe Bowman (aged 11). Just don't bother clicking on anything when you get there. Joe also asks us to check out this slightly disturbing picture, and this disturbing Korean animation show website.

"Put it in Mixed Lollies!" says Joe. Did we mention he's 11?

TNR Online’s Keelin McDonell has taken on the assignment of watching The New York Times, “its foibles, its chase after chic, its horrendous editorial mistakes over several years, its goo-goo politics…”

Via NZBC reader Chris McBride, sexagenarians, drugs and rock and roll. Tim de Lisle explains why wrinklies keep rocking. Finally, Peter Taylor investigates how an innocent man was shot dead after the London terrorist bombings.

Oh, and you have two days left to vote for us in the Netguide awards! Rock on.

Well, my gear is here and slowly working its way through Customs. I've found a flat and stopped touring the country. I bought a snazzy computer desk and I'm desperately trying to become a Telecom "broadband" customer - but they are putting every barrier they can in my way. More on that when the saga finally ends.

In the meantime, if you think Aussies overdo the kiwi sheep jokes, think again. When Scoop files a report on the New Zealand shearing champs under "Culture", you'd have to say we're asking for it.

Speaking of things bucolic, what did we all think of The Dagg Sea Scrolls on Monday? I thought some of it (the sheep retention scheme sketch especially) was truly brilliant and, as Clark seemed to concede, some was kinda amateurish. But Dagg still stands up as one of very few worthy works of kiwi comedy.

Now that the Pope can listen to Godcasts on his own iPod, it’s high time the rest of us got religion, too. The iTunes podcast directory doesn’t provide you with much detail until you’ve actually subscribed, so you can waste oodles of bandwidth trawling for the good stuff (and I speak from experience). But if you’re an iPod refusenik, don’t forget you can hear most podcasts in iTunes — just paste the URL provided into “Subscribe to podcast” in the Advanced menu — or another media player on your desktop PC. To alert you to some of the podcasting gems you might otherwise have missed, here are NZBC’s current cultural favourites, with thanks to Tony Murrow for his tips, and also to our Director of the World Service, Mark Broatch, for providing the title to this column. And as for you, Mr Gervais, please note that each and every one of these podcasts is free of charge. Read the roundup.

When Miles Davis went into the studio to record ‘Kind of Blue’ on 2 March 1959, he didn’t have the parts scored and the charts all written out. He had only a theory from which the form of the five pieces developed. This helped to make it a peerless recording, and partly explains why Jimmy Cobb, the drummer, says the album was “made in heaven”. Cannonball Adderley, his alto sax player, described Miles’s band as a workshop: “Miles really kind of talked to everybody and told everybody what not to do, not so much what to do. He never told anybody what to play.” So why not approach a short story in a similar way, I wondered. It wouldn’t be easy; it wasn’t for Miles and he was a genius. So what did I have to lose? At most, some pride and yet more confidence in my ability. Instead of starting with a preordained plot and a line of action, I tried to get most of it down during one sitting, beginning with a sketch, and attempting to capture the spirit of discovery with no unnatural or interrupted strokes. In the end, it took longer to write than it did to listen to or, for that matter, to record ‘Kind of Blue’. Read the story or request the PDF.

Bless me Father for I have sinned. It has been two weeks since my last Mixed Lollies.

A voice from on high: "Holy bleedin Virgins, son! Get on with it!"

"M'kay Boss."

Stephen offers this item on the incredible return of Prince. He also recommends this, from Hitchens, on how religious respect should be reciprocal.

Meanwhile, not a dollar of Wahhabi money should be allowed to be spent on opening madrasahs in this country, or in distributing fundamentalist revisions of the Quran in our prison system. Not until, at the very least, churches and synagogues and free-thought libraries are permitted in every country whose ambassador has bullied the Danes. If we have to accept this sickly babble about "respect," we must at least demand that it is fully reciprocal.

Sadly some of our forefathers, the one who wrote Constitutions and the like, thought religious freedom was unconditional. Fools. Stephen also offers this sage view on blogs and the MSM:

The rah-rah blogosphere crowd are apparently ready to live in a world without war reporting, without investigative reporting, without nearly any of the things we depend on newspapers for. The world of blogs is like an entire newspaper composed of op-eds and letters and wire service feeds. And they’re all excited about the global reach of blogs? Right, tell it to China.

Hell, if it wasn't for the MSM, bloggers would have nothing to talk, or whine, about.

Chris offers the stories behind the songs ("Born Slippy" was a greyhound the Underworlders bet on), this on the 50th anniversary of the great J P Donleavy's Ginger Man, and this article asking whether George Orwell or Karl Marx would have blogged. (Is blogging now the opium of the masses, I wonder?).

Mark notes poms are getting good teeth. Shit, they'll be bathing soon! And via AL Daily, the last natural blonde will be borne sometime around 2202.

Am I alone in wondering whether these Scarlett pics are, you know, made up?

The President denies Iraq is heading for civil war, but even some wingers are now considering the possibility. Moderate Iraqis have had, and no doubt still have, hope for some sort of democratic future and improvement in their lives, but with US reconstruction efforts faltering, death squads on the streets, and an endless insurgency, you have to wonder what happens if those moderates lose hope. This from a resident of mixed Baghdad neighbourhood:

"I used to keep in my mind that Iraq will come back one day," said Shirouq Abayachi, a Zayuna resident who was pondering her country's fate with friends in a social club in central Baghdad on Tuesday. "Now the Iraq I wish to have cannot come back. There is no core left to rebuild."

Beyond the small changes in city blocks — where a Shiite man took down a holiday flag, and Sunni clerics held machine guns as they peered though gates — is a larger shift in thinking. It was not the rate of the violence, to which Iraqis have grown bitterly accustomed, but its texture. Iraqis struck other Iraqis on the basis of their sect, in a rampage that few here could have imagined at the time of the American invasion three years ago.

Iraqis in Zayuna wanted desperately for it not to be true; the phrase "Iraqis are brothers" was on everyone's lips. Once they had glimpsed the underside, many turned away, not wanting to see, but some, like Ms. Abayachi, seemed transfixed.

"Maybe I see the end more clearly now," she said over a lunch of salads and a cocktail. "The end of Iraq."