VatiLeaks on Darlose

A little while ago, his Holiness the Pope received in audience a group of educational professionals who presented themselves as the Turbo Teachers for Instantaneous Creationism.

            The things an elderly Pontiff has to go through to keep up with the world outside…

            Their spokesman wore a shabby beige turtleneck, unpolished sandals, a beard that needed trimming, and a brand new tailor-made suit jacket. The Pope sighed. Back in the old days in Tübingen, he often had had to deal with New Theologians who favoured the same dress code. The memory alone wearied him terribly. His interlocutor, however, was full of cheer and jumped into the conversation with gusto.

            ‘Your Holiness, before anything, I have a confession to make.’

            ‘Go on, my son’

            ‘Holy Father: not all of us here are Catholics.’

            Now why was the Pope not overly surprised?

            ‘As a matter of fact, Holy Father, many of us are not even believers in the strict sense of the word. We are schoolteachers with a theological problem. That’s why we came to see you.’

            A theological problem? How, the Pope wondered, does an infidel get a theological problem? Fish, on the average, rarely run into aerodynamic trouble. Circles don’t worry about their angles. ‘I am most sorry to hear so,’ the Pope spoke. ‘What may be its nature?’

            ‘Darwin.’

            Darwin? Well, small surprise, the Pope thought. We all have a problem with Darwin. And with Galileo, Keppler, Copernicus, Marx, Einstein, Freud, not to mention that Madonna woman and Harry Potter. ‘I see,’ the Pope said. He had no inkling what the fellow was getting at.  

            ‘He is too slow.’

            ‘Beg your pardon?’

            ‘Darwin. He’s by far too slow. Another confession, Your Holiness: most of us here think his ideas make a lot of sense. I’m sorry if that hurts. But if you look at all the evidence… The fossils… The human genome… The Platypus… The… The-’

            ‘The Spotted Galapagos Turtle Dove,’ the Pope volunteered.

            ‘Precisely! If you look at all those, you can’t get around it. The man had a point. A very strong point. However, we here, and many hard-pressed professionals like us, have to teach his theories in biology class. And that’s another cup of tea. You see: the man deals in hundreds of millions of years. For one petty creation only! The kids just won’t buy that anymore, Holiness! Today’s young adolescents demand instant satisfaction. No beating around the bush. No inertia! A high-speed, exciting story. Something that moves, you know? That don’t stall. That gives ‘m a thrill. Evolution simply doesn’t do that. All of us here know from experience: you Darwin, you do lose. That’s a little joke of mine. Win – Lose, see?’

            The Pope forced his facial muscles into his most sincere smile. He had heard better jokes from octogenarian Carthusians under a vow of silence.

            ‘That’s why our group has decided to return to the Biblical story of Creation. Now there you have a tale you can sell to these Digital Children! No halting the narrative to have the dinosaurs die out. No Sinanthropus Pekinensis being gobbled up by beefy Neanderthalers before those are themselves cruelly knocked out of existence by Crô Mignons, with none of the earlier humanoid variations leading anywhere… No: progress straight and simple: heaven, earth, seas, plants, beasts, man! And in that order if you please! That’s a godsend for a teacher in front of 25 twitchy Twitterkids! That’s what we need on the curriculum!’

            ‘And you can teach it in two hours, instead of an entire semester,’ a crumpled, chubby fellow at the far end of the table chipped in.

            The Pope sighed. Here you always thought you’d seen it all, but there was still more lunacy to meet in this mad mad mad mad world. For a century now, the greatest minds of the Church had struggled to keep Divine Creation in the picture. The harder they tried, the less they succeeded. And just when you think all is lost, children are returned to Scripture so as to cater to their lust for instant satisfaction? Who ever heard of such a thing? He was ready to give these Turbo Teachers a piece of his mind. But then he remembered something a predecessor of his had said, back in the turbulent 60s. He said: “I don’t know what it means when a longhaired hippie writes JESUS on his T-shirt, but it is a start!” Yeah, the Pope thought. Old Paul was nobody’s fool…

            ‘I appreciate your dilemma,’ he spoke at last, picking his words carefully. ‘And if teaching the beautiful beginning of Genesis is your solution, then you have of course my blessing.’

            ‘Except that…’

            Now what? the Pope wondered.

            ‘The Biblical story takes six days, Holiness…’

            Does it now? the Pope almost asked. Oh, it was hard – very hard - not to give in to temptation and treat this fellow to a goodly dose of German sarcasm. But Pride is a sin and Patience a virtue. ‘I know,’ he said once he had swallowed, putting the most tolerant tone possible into his voice.

            ‘Of course you do. And that’s a problem.’

            ‘It is?’

            ‘It is, Your Holiness. Your Holiness: let’s not beat around the bush here…? Let’s put our cards on the table? You rarely meet young people in the wild, and you never meet the kind of kids we are up against. So take it from me, sir: they are animals! They give you lip at the least occasion. They have no patience whatsoever. Their concentration span is about as long-lived as a soap bubble. Six days, sir! That’s an eternity to them! Their most meaningful relationships don’t last that long! They are used to creating entire mid-term papers with three clicks of the mouse! They put together a feature film length movie in a minute and a half! A whole day seems like a thousand years to them! So imagine six! Six!’

Oh, don’t, DON’T tell me, the Pope screamed inwardly. He also was nobody’s fool. He began to suspect where this was going…

            ‘You mean to say God’s Divine Creation took too much time…?’ he probed.

            ‘TAKES too much time, Your Holiness! I’m not criticizing God’s output or his efficiency. It’s just that… To make that quarter drop in the timeslot of our pupils’ heads, can’t we perhaps reduce the timespan a little somewhat? God is omnipotent, right? So why does he need six full days? Seems to me that – if He wished - He could do the same job considerably quicker?’

‘Six hours, you mean?’ 

There was an uneasy pause.

‘Six minutes?’ 

            ‘Your Holiness… Why be so specific? What good is that to anyone? Look, all we are asking here is some room to maneuver. We don’t expect you to rewrite Scripture… We understand that’s not usually done on request. But you are, when push comes to shove, the ultimate authority on these matters, aren’t you? Isn’t there a way you might solicit a somewhat freer translation of the original wording? I don’t know… Your Hebrew surely is better than mine… Could we have a version which speaks of, say, Six Units Real Time? Or something of the sort? You give me that, and I promise you that half the schools in the Western World will be teaching Divine Creation before the decade is out! No more Darwinism. No more Mendel or Kropotkin or Linneaus! Only God as the Express Demiurg. Is that a fair deal or what?’

            Once the Turbo Teachers for Creative Something-or-Other were gone, the Holy Father flipped open his cell phone and dialled a number. ‘Doctor Funes?’ he asked when the phone was picked up. ‘Tell me: that little pet project of yours? The reconciliation of Evolutionary Theory with Biblical Creation? How’s that coming along?’ He listened for a moment, then spoke with a terse voice. ‘Fray José: in the name of common sense and everything that’s holy, would you please please please hurry up with it?!’

Earlier this month, Fray José Gabriel Funes, director of the Vatican Observatory, came out with a declaration that the Big Bang Theory is not necessarily in contradiction to the message of the Bible…

So it goes, dear reader. So it goes…

Golden Quotebook (3): Thatcher on Guillotines

The other day Unmerciful Me quoted Lady Thatcher in one of her less fortunate moments. Let me make up for that while the iron is hot, so to speak. Here is her razor-sharp tongue, in much better shape, describing the festivities for the Bicentennial of the French Revoluti­on, Paris 1989:

‘The celebrations themselves were on the scale which only a Hollywood studio - or France - could manage: an almost endless procession, a military parade, an opera with pride of place in the set being given to a huge guillotine.’

[from: The Downing Street Years, chapter XXV]

Love her or loath her, the lady has a way with words!

Divide et Impera

So. Greece got its 130 billion bailout. Well… got…got? The spoils are being put into a bank account with the label Greece on it. But the Greek cannot dip into it. The money is to go, from the European taxpayer directly to the banks that Greece owes money. This to prevent Greece uses it for other, illegitimate purposes. Paying kickbacks to political cronies, for instance. Or keeping schools open. The construction is called an Escrow Account. Why is it I feel that that E really ought to be in the middle of the term?

Naturally, nothing comes for nothing. Draconian budget cuts must be made, the sheer number and nature of which makes my old head hurt. Given the Supreme Objective behind this whole operation – saving the Divine Euro by keeping Greece in the Heavenly Eurozone – none of these horrid measures can be helped. And yet the Eurogues still want a little more. Something extra. Something justified by the treachery and untrustworthiness of the Greek and their leaders.

They want a Permanent Troika in Athens. A kind of almighty Triumvirate of Bureaucrats superimposed upon Greek sovereignty with a right to veto whatever they please. And they want something else even more ardently. Namely: No Elections! For God’s sake: NO ELECTIONS IN APRIL! None too subtle hints have already been dropped in that direction by several Brussels bigwigs, and many more are soon to be expected, ‘in the interest of stability’. You see: elections are most dangerous things! Elections may upset the whole apple cart. For the entire Brussels elite is aware, deeply aware, of one dire inescapable truth: whenever you put a European proposal to the vote, the electorate returns a resounding No.  

And that must never happen…

Northern Europeans stand at the sidelines applauding all this. Serves the Greek buggers well, I hear them say. You deserve every bit of your punishment, I’ve seen Dutch and German and Finnish facebookies scribble. Forgive them, Lord, for they do not know what they’re doing. They do not realize that what is being done to Greece today will soon be done to them in other ways. For the object of the Brussels Beurocracy is to shape Federal Europe along the lines of the Chinese system: nearly unbridled economic liberty combined with a near total absence of Democracy. ‘A huge power block,’ in the wise words of the great Theodore Dalrymple, ‘under the domination of a self-perpetuating political class and its auxiliary nomenklatura, free of the most minimal democratic oversight or constitutional restraint.’

Divide and rule… Yes, the old trick still works. But old tricks often lead to old mistakes. And I’ll say again what I said last week:

Stop wrecking our democracies. Stop starving our poor. Stop repeating history.

The Book of Burning Questions (1)

You won’t hear me deny it. Life is full of Burning Questions which stand in pressing need of Cool Answers to extinguish them. But I have noticed, over a long life of contemplation (yes, dear reader, there are people who dabble in that dangerous practice of thinking) that most of the Burning Questions on which people waste their time – and my patience – are boloney. Those, the shallow pseudo-mysteries of petit-bourgeois scholasticism, I have no trouble – and no fear of – answering. So that we may never hear of them again out of the mouths of airheads, hair-brains or uppity teenagers called Ivana.

So here goes for the first three out of a lengthy series. Read them, contemplate them, then learn them by heart and use them against all pop philosophers.

Q: Which came first, the chicken or the egg?

A: The chicken. An egg cannot hatch itself.

Q: Is this glass half empty or half full?

A: The answer, my dear mental baboon, is that it is both.

Q: Who wrote William Shakespeare´s works?

A: As such things go, most probably his wife.

Spain Explained (1): Judge Garzón

Over on the Spanish side of the valley, where I sometimes do my shopping, people keep asking me what I think of Judge Baltasar Garzón being put on trial and kicked out of his career by his fellow judges. Some question indeed! One not lightly answered! For it is about as easy to explain Spanish politics as it is to determine the perspective of an Escher print beyond reasonable doubt. Whenever you think you have reached terra firma, it turns out you were looking at your surroundings upside down and inside out.

To understand the Spanish judicial system, one must always keep one dire point in mind: in Spain, the law is like an army’s heavy artillery: you only bring it out if there is an enemy to battle. All the other activities are mere trials (nunca mejor dicho…)

So what about Judge Garzón? I think Judge Garzón had it coming, and the surprise is not that they got him, but that it took them so long.

Who is They? you ask. Well… Other then what the international press tries to make you think, “They” is not only the disreputable fascist die-hard Francoists burrowed deep into the country’s institutions (if the truth be told, there are few of those left). “They” is quite simply Everybody. Garzón’s mistake, as well as his grand virtue, is that over the last decades he took on all comers: left and right, high and low, rich and poor, Spaniards and foreigners, Castilians, Basques, Catalans and the occasional Martian. He prosecuted drug dealers and ETA-members. Soccer bigwigs, cleptocrat politicians, and tax evaders. He hounded Felipe Gonzales and his cronies for organising government death squads, and Augusto Pinochet for doing the exact same thing on a bigger scale on the other side of the Atlantic.

In northern, protestant countries such unprejudiced activity might have gained him a formidable reputation for incorruptibility, honesty and fairness. Think the Good Samaritan, if you will, or Elliott Ness. But this is Spain. And in Spain, such nonpartisan behaviour merely brings you the enmity of all, since you serve nobody’s purpose. The Socialists never forgave the man for exposing the crimes of the Gonzalez governments. The Conservatives – who loved and praised him while he took on ETA and Felipe – growled when he went for General Pinochet, that upright fellow who, in the eternal words of Lady Thatcher ‘Brought Democracy to Chile’! My good friend Igor, father to my godchildren and a very fine man, makes a nice example. Having learned to hate Bolshevism because grew up in Soviet Kiev, he objected to Garzón’s action with the words: ‘Salvador Allende was handing power to the Communists, for crying out loud! And Garzón is only prosecuting Pinochet to make himself important.’

  

Now, there is no denying that Judge Garzón is good at self-promotion. He is somewhat vain (His suits never wrinkle! His hair obeys him! His smile fits on his passport picture!), and he does not shun the lime light, to put it mildly. But personally, I could never much care about his motives. If it takes vanity to prosecute evil-doers relentlessly, then bring on the vanity! By the bucket if you please!

But vanity, in combination with success, often turns into hubris. And I fear this is what happened with Garzón, for in the last three years or so, he did his enemies a favour by opening himself wide up to counterattack. Three cases were brought against him simultaneously; and in each of the three, a man of my Old Bailey experience cannot help but frown and wonder at Garzón’s lack of judgement.

In the first case, he ordered the listening in and taping of conversations between a number of defendants and their lawyers inside the jailhouse. The defendants – closely linked to the ruling PP party – stand accused of a tremendous web of corruption, and Garzón defends his action saying that he suspected the lawyers of helping out in the cover up, and the perpetuation, of the criminal activities. All good and well, but lawyer-client conversations are sacrosanct in a state of law, no matter what. Garzón should have known better.

The second case is no less murky. Some years ago Garzón took a sabbatical to go teach international law at a US university. A prominent Spanish banker then subsidised this university course with a goodly few millions. Shortly before, Garzón had dropped a criminal investigation into the doings of this banker. All involved deny any connection. But as old Julius said when he divorced his falsely slandered spouse: ‘Caesar’s wife should not only be innocent, she should also appear to be innocent!’ Wry words that sometimes ring true. Garzón should have known better.

The third and last affair concerns Garzón’s initiative, some years ago, of investigating the crimes of the Franco regime during the Civil War and the subsequent Dictatorship. This one really inflamed the Spanish right, who may no longer be Francoists, but are utterly defensive when it comes to judging the regime’s role in history (along the lines of ‘not everything was evil…’ and ’40 years of peace…’) These protest that the Amnesty Law, passed with everybody’s consent back in 1977 when Spanish democracy was being set up, forbids the prosecution of any such deeds as murder and torture done by either side. Garzón counters that the misdeeds in question are Crimes Against Humanity, which never prescribe. A moot and valid point, no doubt, were it not that he himself, in the past, dropped a case against those responsible for the left-wing massacre of thousands of right-wing victims in the cemetery of Paracuellos, a little affair no less Nuremberg-worthy… Which somewhat weakens his argument, if you ask ol’ Al. Must I say it? Okay, once more then: Garzón should have known better.

So Garzón only got his just deserts? The Spanish judiciary merely meted out impeccable justice? Well… Yeah… No… There we go racing up those Escher staircases again, desperately looking for the right perspective. Alfred B. Mittington is no fan of conspiracy theories, since he considers most of humanity too dumb to organise a good one. But in this case we must recognize a remarkable concerted action, say. For one thing, eavesdropping on lawyer-client conversations is regularly done in Spain, and so far no judge was ever denounced or tried for it. The colleague who took over the bribery investigation from Garzón, actually continued doing so. Yet he is not being prosecuted either! It would seem that the heavy artillery was not needed everywhere…

More telling than that, however, is the fact that THREE such suits were brought all at once against the uppity eye-catching magistrate of no loyalties and few friends. This makes the independent observer suspect that his foes wanted to make sure that at least one of the indictments would stick. And so it happened. Last week Garzón was nicely sentenced to 11 years of disqualification from judicial activity. He is now 56, so he’ll go seamlessly from exclusion to retirement, from ban to pension. A day or two later, the case involving his banker Maecenas was quietly dropped. It was no longer strictly needed, and nobody in Spain is eager to antagonize the country’s superrich and superpowerful. Lastly, the case about investigating the Dictatorship is still on the agenda. This, I guess, because it screams for retribution, and is a handy ace in the hole in case Garzón appeals his sentence, or takes it – God forbid! – to the European Court of Human Rights. Where concerted action is a wee bit more difficult to organize…

So: do you now know clearly where you stand in that Escher maze?

No?

Me neither.

But at least we know that we are lost, right? 


[POSTSCRIPT: About a week after the above was published, the last of the three cases against Garzón was likewise dropped. The guns had spoken and had been heeded. They could now return to barracks.]

Saturday Snapshot (2)

Portugal, the beautiful land where I live if I cross the village road to my writing studio, is at a crossroads. Being in somewhat better shape than Greece, it has over the last year implicated the entire Austerity Diktat that the Beurocrats and the Abominable Troika forced upon it in exchange for a helping hand. The result? Debt to GNP ratio, which used to be 107, is now 118. In normal parlance: they are now far deeper in shit than they were before they were ‘rescued’. Throughout the Lusitanian hills and valleys, one hears a whisper in the wind that echoes Diderot’s ‘Jacques le Fataliste’: Je ne veux point de ses secours, ils sont trop chers... (I want none of their aid; it costs too much…)

So I figured that this week’s Saturday Snapshot ought to convey the Portuguese predicament. This road sign stands a few miles away from my village in the wooded hills.

Of course, what the sign doesn’t tell you, is that - if you do take the left turn – you will run into an immense ice age boulder smack in the middle of the path after about a mile. Nothing but a bicycle can pass. Tell me again that the Portuguese aren’t fatalistes…! I guess they’ll need it once the Greek Tragedy comes their way too.

Cookbook: Home-made Mayo

Home-made Mayonnaise is a Gift from the Gods. Home-made mayo is to bottled mayo what a live performance of Kathleen Ferrier is to a digitally remastered CD. The former is of course to be preferred, but not always readily available. The latter is not the best one can have, but you can bring it on any time you like. In due time, I will tackle the – delicate – question of how best to chose your bottled mayo. But today, I will merely instruct you how to be Divine in your own humble kitchen.

Unspeakable rubbish has always been written by those Grand Inquisitors of Cuisine, the cookbooks of repute and fame. For some dark reason they all want you to believe that creating a home-made mayonnaise is a difficult and dangerous endeavour. Some say that all the tools and ingredients (yes: even the salt shaker!) must be at room temperature (21º Celsius exactly) for the attempt to succeed. Some pretend that any bowl of home-made mayo is a lethal source of killer salmonella. Others yet again assure you that mayonnaise will never catch if a thunderstorm is threatening overhead, and that it will surely curdle if you reverse the motion of beating for even one thoughtless moment. Lastly there are those that insist you must set aside the better part of two hours to beat a decent mayo.

Forgive them, Lord, they don’t know what they’re babbling about!

Making a home-made mayo is easy (once you get the knack of it), quick (10 minutes), perfectly safe (is France depopulated?) and tremendously satisfying. Here is all you need to use, observe and do.

Ingredients and tools

One large bowl with a high rim

A whisk

A medium size spoon

1 egg yolk

1.5 to 2 decilitres quality oil

1 teaspoon of medium strong mustard

Salt and pepper (to taste)

A tablespoon of lemon juice or mild vinegar

And that’s all, folks! The above ingredients will serve two peckish or three modest eaters (1 decilitre of oil yielding roughly 1.2 decilitre of mayo).

A word about quality. Of course, your mayonnaise will not taste any better than the ingredients you use. Free range eggs must always be preferred to Sing-Sing eggs. As for the oil: just about any quality oil will do: peanut-, soy-, maize-, or sunflower oil. Many people, with good reason, prefer olive oil. However, a true first pressing ‘virgin’ olive oil is far too strong for mayo, and should not be used alone. Mix it with another oil (1:5 max) if you must have the Mediterranean touch. Finally: the more oil you add, the less egg you will taste. So be discreet, and if need be do the smart thing and use two yolks.

Mixing Mayo

 

Now what are we going to do? We are going to make an emulsion of the above, i.e. tiny drops of oil hanging on for dear life to tiny drops of egg yolk. This simply means that the oil and the egg yolk have to be whipped violently into tiny little droplets and gradually mixed together until the sauce is stiff. Necessarily this takes some time, care and effort, but we can stimulate the metamorphosis by tossing in a nice dose of mustard, which also adds taste, and some lemon juice or vinegar, which helps the process along while it kills off unwanted bacteria too. So here we go.

Stage 1: Put the egg yolk into the bowl. Add salt, pepper, mustard and some of the lemon juice (to make sure that the mixture will “catch” in the beginning, go modest on the juice). Stir a little until all these are properly mixed.

Stage 2: Now, as you stir, start adding the oil. At first this should be done drop by drop, so that every bit of oil gets mingled evenly through the yolk. First nothing seems to happen. Then, after roughly 3 tablespoons of oil, you will notice that the mixture gets a little thicker. It has “caught”.

Stage 3: Cautiously, you can now begin to add larger quantities of oil. The sauce will get thick. Then very thick. This is the moment to add the remaining lemon juice. It will make the mixture a little thinner again. From here on, you may add as much oil as you like, until the sauce has the thickness, texture and colour you desire. Taste and add salt and pepper if needed. And that’s it. Your Mayonnaise is ready for the table!

Stage 4 (preservation): If your mayo will not be eaten within the hour, put it in the fridge. There it will keep for a week, but it rapidly loses taste and texture, so I do not recommend keeping it that long. Never freeze mayo, it simply will turn to mush. Also: if you make your mayo 12 hours or more in advance, it is a good idea to add one or two tablespoon of warm water at the very end of the process. It makes the mayo only slightly thinner, but keeps it stiff for a much longer period. And remember: roughly an hour after production, mayo should not again be stirred. It will disintegrate if you do.

Fixing Mayo

Occasionally, because you added too much oil too early in the process, or for no apparent reason (thunderstorms, radio waves, the neighbours playing Herb Alpert music with an open window…), your mayonnaise will not catch, or it will begin to curdle in mid process (ugly little flakes of yolk floating in a sea of dirty oil). Pretty much all the cookbooks then tell you to put a fresh egg yolk in a fresh bowl, and start all over again, using the curdled mixture for oil. I also recommend that solution, if you want to end up with 20 litres of mayonnaise at the end of an exhausting Saturday afternoon.

If that idea does not appeal to you, use instead the Inimitable Mittington Method: get a fresh bowl. Put a dash of mustard into it. Slowly, ever so slowly, whip spoonfuls of the curdled mixture into the mustard. Before you know it, it will catch. Continue with stage 3 above.

Lastly, if you really can’t get it done, as a last and desperate resort, you may add dry mustard powder to the mix. This will make your mayo ‘catch’ immediately. Note however, that you must then add much more liquid (even water) to attain the right thickness of the sauce, since mustard powder absorbs fluids madly. If even THAT doesn’t work, do not use maizena, gelatine, wheat flour, mashed butter or agar-agar. Just get a rope and hang yourself in the attic. Your life is obviously doomed!

Nixing Mayo

There are many, many ways in which you can destroy a perfectly good mayonnaise, and most of them are avidly promoted by popular cookbooks. So the unenviable task falls to this weary old man of warning you what never to do to your mayonnaise. That is, however, a herculean task, for there is no limit to the absurdities the proponents of bad taste will invent in their never-ending quest for self-aggrandizement, originality and health hype. The duty must therefore be postponed to the near future. Keep tuned in, ye readers of taste and sophistication! Alfred B. Mittington will be back!