Reflections of a stormy petrel

My friends may remember that the BBC's CEO Mark Thompson responded to demands that the repulsive Nick Griffin be excluded from the program Question Time with the following memorable remark: "It is not the BBC's job to exclude people from broadcasts. The government has to do that."

It now turns out that, at the height of the political storm that followed, Director Thompson has absented himself from his post to go on a 425-pounds-a-day survival course for war journalists.

Truly, You Couldn't Make It Up.

So there is this region of Japan called the Shizuoka prefecture, which is very prosperous. Prosperous to the point that it felt that the 97 airports already in use in Japan were not enough; it wanted one of its own, built to intercontinental standards.

Fair enough, one might think. Shizuoka prefecture is reported to have a GDP equal to that of Portugal or Thailand, so one supposes that it can use direct international transportation without having to go through Tokyo (which is some 150 Km, or 90 miles, north of Shizuoka prefecture as the crow flies). However, the designers made a crass and inexcusable mistake: they got the runway's length wrong, and missed out 153 trees owned by a local tea farmer, Mr. Toshimi Ohoi.

Mr.Ohoi is public-spirited, and did not object to his trees being bought and cut down for the good of the prefecture. However, since the planning process had been a complete botch, he put one condition: the Governor had to go. Someone had to pay for the incompetence of the prefectural authorities.

The farmer put his astonishing condition in September 2008. The immensely expensive project had to be frozen, just as the economic crisis bled wealth out of Japan. The authorities began to tear their hair out in despair. By May 16, it had become clear that Mr.Ohoi was ready to fight it all the way to the highest court; on May 18, it was announced that the Governor would step down and that prefectural elections would be held in July. Score one for the principled tea farmer.

(Information from the Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera, May 19)

From www.floridatoday.com:
A church giving sermons about sex may have to find a new home. Brevard Public School District's risk-management department has threatened to boot New Hope Church out of Sherwood Elementary because of a worship series titled "Great Sex for You."

Church leaders mailed 25,000 fliers, asking residents "Is Your Sex Life A Bore?" The three-week program kicked off inside the school auditorium. Pastor Bruce Cadle had said the Christian church has been "shamefully silent" on the taboo topic.

Mark Langdorf, the director of risk management, says the mailers generated complaints, were not appropriate for elementary school children and shouldn't be used to advertise the sermon in the school.

Langdorf says the church's lease contract is under review.

Al Capone's oldest brother, Vincenzo (who took the name of an early Western movie star, Richard Hart), became, quite independently of his younger brother, a frontier lawman in Nebraska. The same opportunity made both brothers: while young Al went to Chicago and swiftly grew rich on Prohibition smuggling, his brother went to Homer, Nebraska, enlisted in the police when it was being expanded under the impact of Prohibition, and swiftly became an ideal frontier lawman. Brave, clever, and incorruptible, a deadly shot with a gun (he was a decorated and highly promoted World War One veteran), he was employed to keep whiskey off various Native American reservations, and gained their trust by learning their languages and habits. He actually became town marshall for Homer, to complete the all-round real-life John Wayne story. He was, however, still Italian enough to acknowledge his family, and in the late forties he revealed his identity to his wife and son and allowed his son to take part in a family reunion and meet his grandmother - and his famous uncle (who, alas, was by then a syphilitic wreck). Family links even managed what probably no other consideration could have: Capone/Hart, apparently in financial trouble in the last years of his life, accepted a little financial help from his brother Ralph, apparently without bothering that Ralph had been in Al's paybooks in the days of his glory.

Al Capone himself started out in life as an accountant - a skill that helped him greatly as he built his booze empire in Cicero and points north.

They had been warned. In April 1914, General von Plettenburgh, commanding the Prussian Guards Corps, issued a decree against the wearing of the so-called "tooth-brush" moustache, pointing out that such an appendage was unsuitable for a Prussian soldier and "not consonant with the German national character." Subsequently, a well-known political figure managed to cast himself as a German super-patriot in spite of wearing exactly that kind of moustache.

One of France's leading cultural icons is the philosopher and journalist, Bernard-Henry Levy. He is about my age, tall and handsome and a ready writer, not without courage.

What I did not know till recently is that he has an equally attractive wife. She has just hit the headlines in her own right by taking up a post as lead singer in another icon of French culture - the famous strip joint "The Crazy Horse."

Schubert's song-cycle The winter journey (Die Winterreise) is, without a doubt, the most desolate, dark, devastating work of art I have ever met. It starts from shattering heartbreak - described in a way that every lover will recognize - and works its way down. Its final song, The organ-grinder, can be said to describe a despair beyond death. In two hundred years of programmatic pessimism, expressionism, existentialism, and so on, no artist has ever surpassed Schubert's depth of darkness, indeed, few have come close.

I have a music cassette featuring the epoch-making account of this literally terrifying piece of work by the great German singer Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau. The cover artist drew in a happy little picture of a Christmas-card-like sledge with bells.