Getting pickled

Getting pickled

It has only just occurred to me, probably because I’m slow on the uptake, that most, or all, of the contemporary world’s most infamous dictators have been teetotallers. Hitler, Mussolini, Idi Amin, Saddam – even Joe Stalin, who would drink water passing as vodka while his chums got plastered and indiscreet so he’d have an excuse to execute them in the morning, although he usually didn’t bother with an excuse. And it probably hasn’t escaped you that the latest teetotal totalitarian is the guy on Coke in the White House.

After lengthy research, the last truly guttered despot I can trace is Genghis Khan, who amassed the greatest land empire in history, although often mounting his steed for battle backwards after a particularly heavy session. His son Ogodei carried on the family swallying habit but died early, “conquered by wine” as the Daily Mongol reported it.

Down the ages scientists have tried, although not very hard, to come up with a cure or a preventative, to the effects of alcohol, the dreaded hangover. The Romans recommended two eels “suffocated in wine”, while other suggestions include taking a sauna, jumping into a freezing loch, and the perennial rehydration one – drinking a pint of water before stumbling into bed although if you’re totally wellied you probably won’t remember where the bed is never mind the water.

Doctors and boffins are more interested in solving the common cold – incentivised by drug companies – rather than the booze question, because the former doesn’t involve the kind of moral stupidity that comes with downing alcohol until your kidneys scream. Older readers may even recall the TV scientist Dr Magnus Pyke in the 1970s and 80s who, when he wasn’t gesticulating wildly from cathode-ray tubes, spent his working life fruitlessly searching for the hangover cure.

All of which, after this lengthy perambulation round the point, brings me to the latest alleged remedy. Pickle juice, although you should probably spit out the gherkin or the onions before drinking. Apparently it’s de rigueur for Polish drinkers who allegedly don’t get hangovers and cautious Germans who believe that a pickled herring or two will keep the aches and shakes away.

There’s even a drink called a pickleback, invented by the Americans, of course, which is bourbon followed by the brine, which must be the most disgusting combination since Adolph and Eva.

Now athletes and nutritionists are hailing the juice and its revivifying properties. Tennis pros have been seen quaffing it from small, highly-priced bottles between games. Arsenal’s Lucas Torreira was pictured swigging mid-match. The juice contains antioxidants, which are supposed to help contain blood sugars, boost gut health and be 40% faster-acting than drinking water to stop muscles cramping. Who wants to drink water any way? As WC Fields put it, fish do disgusting things in it, although he was rather more frank in his description.

AI write!

An artificial intelligence firm backed by Elon Musk has invented software, catchily called GPT2, which can write its own news stories, features and books (that’s me out of a job). Fed the first sentence of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four – It was a bright cold day in April and the clocks were striking thirteen – the program then produced a plausible futuristic fiction set in China. The company which developed it is OpenAI, which was set up to collaborate and share its open source work with others. Except it hasn’t released the author software, because of potential misuse, like generating fake news, or writing Donald Trump speeches (surely already employed? Ed).

No such qualms at thispersondoesnotexist.com, which does what it says in the title and generates a new lifelike, computer-generated image each time the page is refreshed. The site was created by Philip Wang, a software engineer at Uber, using research released by chip designer Nvidia. The rest of it, the technical stuff about neural networks and generative adversarial networks, I’ll leave to larger brains. The dangers here are inherent. Creating your own fake but plausible profile, with an image that can’t be back searched. Handy for dating sites and social media.

Of mice and men

So, finally, the man who propelled us into the Brexit bourach has appeared to warn us of the dangers of a no-deal Brexit.

David Cameron shrank from facing down Rees-Mogg and his ERG pals and called the referendum which, rather than solve the issue, stoked division and contumely.

Cameron then went into purdah, where he remained until this week, claiming that he was writing his memoirs, whether in the study of his house in London’s Notting Hill, or the £25,000 hut in the garden of his second home in the Cotswolds.

The hut is painted grey. Or, as the trendies’ paint company Farrow & Ball, describes it – Mouse’s Back. I doubt that will be for long.

Moral turpitude

It’s been a week when the moral compass didn’t just go awry but totally detached from its bearings. Boris Johnson claimed spending £60 million on investigating historic child sex abuse was money “spaffed (urban slang, ejaculated) up the wall” – shocking and a mite rich from someone who, as London mayor, spent £53m on the feasibility of a garden bridge, money washed down the Thames.

On the same day Lord Steel, Baron Steel of Aikwood, formerly David, the first Presiding Officer of the Scottish Parliament, admitted to the child sex abuse inquiry that he had known and kept quiet about the sex crimes of his party’s MP Cyril Smith.

Not only did Steel not tell the police in 1979 he did not launch any Liberal party inquiry. He says it didn’t even occur to him that the child rapist might continue his abuse. But Smith did continue, in the 1980s and 90s, as a subsequent police report confirmed. Extraordinarily, in 1988, Steel successfully, if unconscionably, nominated Smith for a knighthood.

The LibDems have suspended Steel and launched disciplinary proceedings against him. Last year, Smith was posthumously stripped of one of his honours, the Freedom of Rochdale. Fred Goodwin’s knighthood was rescinded for screwing the Royal Bank of Scotland and its customers. Shouldn’t Steel be stripped of the ermine?

Rushdie judgment

RECENTLY I recounted the story of coming across Salman Rushdie in a Seattle radio station. He was then under the Ayatollah’s fatwa and accompanied by two armed British coppers (paid for by me and you).

That woke memories of his own encounter with Rushdie in reader Roy O’Neil. It was in the 1980s, shortly after Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children had won the Booker Prize, and prior to The Satanic Verses. At the time Roy was a lowly assistant in (the late) John Smith’s bookshop in St Vincent Street, Glasgow.

As Roy describes it the shop received “an informal visit by the great man at short notice”. So a table where he could sell and sign books was set up by the front door. At the time, Rushdie was largely unknown outside literary circles and customers assumed he was part of the shop management. So he was bombarded with questions like, “How do I get a refund on this damaged book?”, “How do I redeem this WH Smith voucher I got for Christmas, I want to get a box of chocolates instead”, and also “I’m bursting, where’s the cludgie?”

I may have embellished this just a smidgeon but, Roy faithfully reports, the final straw came when a woman approached Rushdie, and asked him where she could get the latest Jeffrey Archer novel.