Two spare tickets - barely used...

A US woman charged with offering sex for baseball World Series tickets has denied she did anything wrong.

"I'm not embarrassed about my actions. I'm embarrassed about how I was arrested," Susan Finkelstein, from Philadelphia, told AP news agency.

The 43-year-old was speaking a day after meeting an undercover policeman responding to her ad on Craigslist. She described herself as a "gorgeous, tall, buxom blonde diehard Phillies fan. I'm the creative type! Maybe we can help each other!" --- [BBC News site, Oct 29^th 2009]

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Raucous voices chanting “Four nil, four nil, four nil” could be heard receding down the lino-floored corridor, as a clump of drunken football supporters were bundled towards the custody suite by Constable Charmian Berg. To be fair, Det. Inspector Wetherby inferred the football supporters from the chanting; Berg's substantial rear aspect obscured all but their extremities from view. Wetherby shouldered open the door to his office and nodded briefly to Det. Constable Jarvis, who was unfolding his stooped and bony frame from a chair against the wall.

“I think we've got another one, sir” Jarvis said, flourishing a copy of the local paper. A hunted look in his eyes belied the would-be bravado of the gesture.

“Right-oh,” said Wetherby, “what have we got? Cup final? Test match?”

“It's... it's worse than that, sir. It's... darts”.

Wetherby gave an almost imperceptible shudder despite himself. What would they stoop to next, these desperate predators? He took the paper from Jarvis' pale hand and ran a rheumy eye down the small ads section. There, amid the motorised bath lifts and second-hand trouser presses (“buyer collects – no time-wasters”), was a paragraph circled in blue biro:

Wanted: tickets for darts final

Mature female darts fanatic -

must see Barneveld at the Lakeside.

I like big men... especially if they

can finish with a double top...

Genuine offers only – no Bull (geddit?)

Box 19-20-20

Wetherby sighed.

“Have we followed up on the ad.?”

“Yessir”, said Jarvis. He consulted a small notepad – “She'll be at the Foggy Duck, Frimley, at 19:00 hours, sir. She'll be wearing a... a... feather boa, sir.”

“All right, son”, said Wetherby gently. “Sit you down, sit you down. No-one said this was an easy beat, boy, did they? Right. You'd better get your punter's kit on and get down th...”

At that moment, the door lost a brief and uneven contest with Constable Berg.

“Awright?” Her light baritone bounced effortlessly off the walls, as she favoured Jarvis with a proprietorial leer... “Oy, Jarvis – I've got tickets later... for the snooker. You interested?”

Wetherby glared at her, putting a paternal arm round Jarvis' shoulders. Beneath the thin blue serge, he could feel the boy shiver.

“Steady there, lad... she's only having you on”, he muttered.

Respectfully dedicated to the memory of Alan Coren (27 June 1938 – 18 October 2007) - has it really been two years already?

Cruel to be kind?

With thanks to microwaved_bear
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I'm so glad there's a word for this

"I wouldn't dream of suggesting, of course, that P M is a shifty, manipulative power-monger. And as for the allegations that there was something dodgy about his mortgage arrangements - well, those don't bear repeating."

Apophesis, apparently.

From the "Dictionary For Today"...

Bigamist (n): (i) an incorrigible optimist; (ii) a masochist.

Sinister leanings

Ciotóg, it turns out, is the Gaelic for "left handed"... the original or underlying meaning being "the strange one". I, for one, would not argue with that.

I admit to a certain fascination with my vague Irish ancestries. Apparently if you go back a few generations you will find a link to the O'Bleege family, one of whom suffered an appalling agricultural accident with a baling machine. "Nobless" O'Bleege, he was known as, after that.

Is it safe?

It occurs to me to wonder why, in some countries at least, we spend many formative months of our children's lives doing all we can to convince them that bears are cute and cuddly.

At the German bookstore

I went to the bookshop last time I was in Germany looking for some Lewis Carroll... the only German-language version I could find was "Alice in Ordnung".

Modern malapropism

Overheard recently:

"Well, yes, I did hear him say that, but I think it was just a Freudian slit".

800 years of progress

The Medieval Humours:

• Melancholic
• Choleric
  
• Bilious
• Sanguine

The Modern Humours:

• Sarcastic
• Ironic
• Hilarious
• Lavatorial
  

Politics - the art of the possible, indeed

I've seen Alan Johnson's ministerial assertion that he won't be U-turning on ID cards, because they were "a manifesto commitment", so I went to have a look at exactly what the manifesto said about ID cards. I had to stop after the first paragraph, though, because I couldn't take the hilarity.

"In our first term we banished [sic] the demons of ten per cent interest rates, mass unemployment, wages of £1.50 an hour, and outside toilets in our schools" - Tony Blair

So, where do we stand today?

1 - 0% interest rates (from a collapsed banking system, regulated by a government which has bailed it out at taxpayers' expense while shafting anyone who saved in the form of pensions, investments or deposits);

2 - mass unemployment (a 12-year high, at 7.2% or 2.26 million people, and rising...);

3 - (see item 2).

...

I held out great hope, then, for the truly statesmanlike goal of banning school dunnees (I mean - screw war, violent crime, drug abuse and the threat of international terrorism, let's focus on the big picture here...). To my dismay I found this from Devon:

"At the end of this programme no school will be delivering classes in temporary Horsa huts and no school will be totally dependent on outside toilets although some will keep their outside toilets to serve pupils taking part in activities outdoors."

The two-year capital programme will run from April 2009 to April 2011.

Ah well... there's a worthy ambition around which Gordon can build his next manifesto: to be the man who finally rid Britain's schools of brick shitters.

A cube by any other name...

Why do we still call them "ice cubes"? When was the last time you saw one which was actually cubic? Were they ever?

The Moral High Ground

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Jeu d'esprit

Before Cartesian dualism, what was the French for "esprit de corps"?

Probably best...

Inductive reasoning

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When is it "time to move on"?

Politicians, being either constitutionally unable or pragmatically unwilling to say what they mean (or mean what they say) have many code-phrases which allow them to mean something while denying that they said anything of the sort.

My current favourite is "it's time to move on". This is polspeak for "Bugger - I've been caught right in the headlights, and my only slim hope of wriggling away from this one is to point past you and shout 'Oh my God! Percy! A giant humming-bird is about to eat your hat and cloak!' ".

The Director of Public Prosecutions' shredding of the 'case' against Damien Green MP was so comprehensive yesterday that Jacqui Smith didn't even dare try the "time to move on" line herself. That was left to Shaun Woodward. "What matters now is to move on", he said, though why the task should have fallen to the Northern Ireland secretary is a question on which the press remains silent.

He's had a busy shift, though, being called upon by The Scotsman to defend Gordon Brown over "smear-gate". He does not disappoint:

"Northern Ireland Secretary Shaun Woodward later defended Mr Brown as an "honourable man".

"I'm extremely sorry this happened because I think we're all degraded by it and I think the Prime Minister today hopefully has made it absolutely clear that he is extremely sorry," he said.

"It is now time, I hope, to move on."

Wonderful thing, hope... it springs eternal, or so I'm told.

Jacqui Smith herself, of course, was entirely correct to say that it would have been irresponsible of the police not to take action if sensitive information had been leaked. The only problem is that none of the leaked information could reasonably have been described as sensitive, as the DPP's report so crushingly confirms.

Ms Smith must be wondering if, perhaps, it is now time to move on.

Герой нашего времени

A hero of our times...

Capt Chesley Sullenberger III, the pilot who recently landed his passenger jet in the Hudson River, saving the lives of all on board, contacted the library at Fresno, California, after the crash to ask for an extension on the loan of one of their books - on the basis that it had been in the hold of the plane.

The book was one on professional ethics, entitled: "Just Culture: Balancing Safety and Accountability"[1].

Se non è vero, è ben trovato.

[1]

Cuirthe

Cur, g. curtha and cuirthe, m. - act of putting, sending, sowing, raining, discussing, burying, vomiting, hammering into the ground, throwing through the air, rejecting, shooting, the setting or clamp in a rick of turf, selling, addressing, the crown of cast iron buttons which have been made bright by contact with cliff faces, the stench of congealing badgers suet, the luminence of glue-lice, a noise made in a house by an unauthorised person, a heron's boil, a leprechaun's denture, a sheep biscuit, the act of inflating hare's offal with a bicycle pump, a leak in a spirit level, the whine of a sewage farm windmill, a corncrake's clapper, the scum on the eye of a senile ram, a dustman's dumpling, a beetle's faggot, the act of loading every rift with ore, a dumb man's curse, a blasket, a 'kur', a fiddler's occupational disease, a fairy godmother's father, a hawk's vertigo, the art of predicting past events, a wooden coat, a custard-mincer, a blue-bottles 'farm', a gravy flask, a timber-mine, a toy craw, a porridge mill, a fair day donnybrook with nothing barred, a stoat's stomach-pump, a broken-

Flann O'Brien