Fleapit revisited:Help.

Care workers carry out some of the most important work in the whole of our country. Important, difficult, and unrewarding (the average hourly wage of a care home worker is £8.50 an hour*). Care workers wash people, change people, feed people, and wipe their bums. Most importantly of all, they give people reaching the end of their lives a dignity.

That's what raises us above the animals. Watching the TV movie Help (initially shown on Channel 4 in 2021, directed by Marc Munden, and written by Jack Thorne) I was reminded of visiting my Nan in the Oak Lodge Care Home near Basingstoke towards the end of her life. I was reminded of the way that care homes give elderly people a sense of community and even provide them with entertainment. In Help, that came in the form of ventriloquists, visits from sheep, and poetry recitals.

Or it did before the pandemic arrived. Sarah (an excellent Jodie Comer) starts work in a Liverpool care home (it's not just the accents that remind you it's in Liverpool but the references to Ian Rush, Kenny Dalglish, and lobscouse) at the end of 2019. Her boss, Steve (Ian Hart) seems blunt to the point of rudeness but it's soon revealed he's only 'baiting' her and that is, at heart, a good man who cares about the home's residents.

Who include Sue Johnston's Gloria, Cathy Tyson's Polly (seeing these actors who we remember in much younger roles reminds us that old age comes to all of us), and Steve Garti's Kenny. Most of all she bonds with Tony (Stephen Graham, as brilliant as ever), a 47 year old man with early onset Alzheimer's who keeps leaving the home to go and see his mum - having forgotten she has died.

Sarah and Tony bond over stories of youthful escapades and games of shithead and when we finally meet Sarah's father Bob (Andrew Schofield) he's revealed to be quite a piece of work. He's drunk, he's angry, and he's cruel. Maybe Sarah sees in Tony the type of man, kind and humorous, she would have liked her father to have been.

Played very straight with only diegetic. rather than background, music, Help takes us back to those early months of 2020 and takes us behind the door of one of the care homes that Matt Hancock lied he'd put a 'protective ring' around. We hear of the first Covid death in the UK (in the RBH, Reading - the hospital my brother died in) on the radio in Sarah's car and then we discover that people from hospitals are to be moved into care homes to clear beds for Covid victims.

One of the residents, soon enough, develops a cough and though it's as predictable as it is grim what happens next that does not make Help any less powerful. It soon becomes apparent that the government is making disastrous, and deadly, mistakes and mishandling the pandemic and those in care homes, both staff and residents, are being hung out to dry.

As befits a film that even had me welling up during an anecdote about Graeme Souness, Help is very moving from the off. The playing of Fields Of Athenry on a mobile phone, the tears streaming down care worker's cheeks as they realise they've been left to fend for themselves, the residents waving to their families through closed windows, and the vision of an empty lounge where once the residents would have gathered but now no longer can.

Many never again. During the last quarter of an hour there's a twist that doesn't quite fit in with the realistic feel of the rest of the film but it's a minor quibble in a film so important and so well delivered. A film that shows how an already impossible situation was made far worse by the incompetence, greed, and selfishness of Boris Johnson and Matt Hancock. The fact they have yet to face a reckoning for that, and have even profiteered handsomely from their failures, is as criminal as the actions they took, or failed to take, nearly three years ago. We all know that. Help showed it.

*Figures given from the time of the making of Help but, you may have noticed by the ongoing strikes, the government have hardly been generous towards the public sector since then.

Laters, potatoes:The Traitors.

"No cuddling guys. That's a different show" - Claudia Winkleman

I've not watched a lot of reality television in recent years so it was quite a surprise I watched TWELVE whole hours of The Traitors (BBC1/iPlayer) in the run up to Xmas. It was even more of a surprise, to myself, just how much I enjoyed the bloody thing.

The twists and turns (admittedly often engineered by the creators but that's how these things work), the shouting, the tears, the wait at the breakfast table each morning to see who'd been 'murdered', and, more than anything else, the evening eviction in which it was revealed, following their banishment, if a contestant was a 'traitor' or a 'faithful'.

If you've not watched it this will, of course, sound utterly incomprehensible so here's the basic idea. Twenty-two contestants enter a grand castle in Scotland. Three of them are informed they will be traitors and that their job is to both conceal their identities and, each night, murder one of the faithfuls. The murders, don't worry, merely come in the form of a piece of paper informing the contestant they've been 'murdered' and must leave the show.

Each day the contestants partake in a challenge in which they aim to build up a fairly decent cash prize which will go to (a) all the faithfuls remaining at the end if they have managed to banish all the traitors or (b) will be shared by any traitors remaining at the end. Completing the intrigue, every evening all contestants gather together around a large round table where they take turns to nominate, publicly, the person they wish to kick out. The person they believe is a traitor. Or, in the case of the actual traitors, the person they wish to get rid off for quite different reasons.

Once you get used to it, it's a very simple premise - but quite an addictive one. As I'd already stated this wouldn't normally be my kind of thing but a couple of good reviews pushed me in its direction and I'm glad they did. It wasn't, as I first feared, a murder mystery for morons or a game of Cluedo for cunts. 

Presided over, gleefully, by Claudia Winkleman (she divides many but I've always been quite keen on her) in a selection of ludicrously high necked sweaters. Winkleman jokes about doing yoga while scenes show traitors entering towers in hoods like something out of a Carl Theoder Dreyer film. There's the odd attempt at giving the show a Wickerman/folk horror vibe but it's never particularly cruel or vicious. It's too much fun for that.

The contestants are a fair representation of British society or at least the part of it that would sign up for such a public spectacle. They range in age from 21 business student Alyssa to 72 year old retiree Andrea and take in all types along the way. There's friendly and popular 32 year old games obsessed author Ivan, 23 year old uber confident scientist Imran, and 59 year old Fay who's a head of school welfare and soon gains a reputation for ruthlessness.

Amanda is a 54 year old estate agent with a lovely Swansea accent, Amos a bright and popular 30 year old doctor, Kieran (42, solutions consultant) comes across as a bit of a geezer, 28 year old Wilfred - a senior fundraiser, 25 year old call centre agent Meryl, and 29 year old Maddy:- a receptionist from Kent who is unafraid of going against the conventional line of thinking.

Oh, and then there's the people with slightly more daft jobs who are, perhaps unsurprisingly, in the most part a little more extrovert. Theo (26) is a cheerleading coach, Hannah (32) a comedian, and Matt (23) is a BMX athlete. He takes an instant shine to Alex (26), a presenter and actor but what Alex has not told Matt, but we - the audience are aware of, is that her partner Tom (24) is also in the castle with them.

 

Tom's a magician. Because of course he is. Initially they seem like a bunch of over excitable, cocky, pricks who can't even spell each other's names despite them being written right in front of them. But once the whooping and hollering dies down (well, a bit) you start warming to them. 24 year old property agent Aaron seems particularly sweet but, of course, that could look, to some of the others, like a technique to get the eyes off of him. He has, after all, boasted of being a "sincere and honest estate agent".

As if that's something that actually exists. Andrea's good at lying. She has, after all, worked for the UK government and Maddy may come across as ditzy but, for possibly the wrong reasons, she seems to be able to detect traitors better than the others. Which means many of the others soon suspect her. The show is a swirl of cocktail parties, peacocks, extravagant breakfast buffets, far too many black Range Rovers, retching, crying, swearing, suits of armour, chess pieces, inordinate amounts of hugging, and people whose grasp of maths is so poor they regularly refer to being "one million per cent" a faithful.

There are elements of Big Brother but just the first ever, and best, series when the guests were left to their own devices and had no idea they'd actually become famous. The ominous music played (odd versions of Britney's Toxic, Muse's take on Feeling Good, The Cranberries' Zombie, Six Underground by Sneaker Pimps, and crappy Nouvelle Vague/John Lewis advert style takes on Rockwell's Somebody's Watching Me, Nirvana's Come As You Are, and Phil Collin's In The Air Tonight all dressed up in dungeon synth dungarees) is reminiscent of the way they try to make The Apprentice look like something other than a platform for top tier tossers like Trump, Alan Sugar, and Katie Hopkins but that's not the only time the show earns unfortunate comparisons to The Apprentice.

Each day the contestants are given a challenge and split into two teams. These challenges, or missions, are probably the least interesting part of the whole show. They may consists of describing sheep, pushing barrels up a hill, igniting "magnificent beasts" (!), being buried alive, going on some utterly terrifying funfair ride that wouldn't look out of place on Scooby Doo, campanology related shenanigans, or some weird shit in a church in which they have to interact with characters in gold masks who look more or less like the VIPs from Squid Game.

Luckily these bits soon pass and they do, at least, include some rather touching moments. Perhaps most heart-warmingly when Meryl, who has dwarfism and has never been tall enough to go on normal funfair rides, gets to go upside down for the first time and is clearly very excited about it.

There are other nice moments as the contestants bond with each other while at the same time as competing against each other. It's interesting to see just how much herd mentality comes into play when humans make decisions as groups and it's instructive to see just how easy it is for dominant characters to sway others into doing their bidding for them but what was really interesting, for me, was just how bad a judge of character we all are.

Everybody likes to think they're a good judge of character but nobody really is. That's why we all end up getting hurt and let down so often in our lives. At least, here, it's just happening in an elaborate game show. It seems that previous prejudices and personality always trump critical thinking. That could lead one to taking a dim view of humankind but, instead, as the show developed, I found myself warming to most of the contestants on The Traitors and there was nobody I genuinely disliked.

I thoroughly enjoyed this show - to the extent I was genuinely looking forward to each episode - but I'm not one million per cent sure its success can be successfully repeated without the next batch of contestants being too knowing of what they're letting themselves in for and going in with prepared strategies. Its novelty factor, to me, was its strength and I had no idea where it would end up until the very end. The only thing I was certain of is that I would have been absolutely terrible at this game. I'm glad I watched it instead of taking part in it.

Kakistocracy XLI:It's Yer Mone(y) I'm After, Baby

"Well I know that it's hard and I know that it's tough when each thing you're giving me is just not enough. Forget your heart, it's your bank I wanna break, it's just yer money I'm after, baby" - It's Yer Money I'm After, Baby - The Wonderstuff.

Today, for the first time ever - and the Royal College of Nursing was founded in 1916, the nurses go on strike. The government are refusing to get round the negotiating table to talk about a rise in pay and job security for the very people they exhorted us to stand on our doorsteps and clap on a weekly basis just over two years ago during the first wave of the pandemic.

They're joining ambulance workers, rail workers, bus drivers, baggage handlers, border forces, Royal Mail workers, teachers, university staff, and driving examiners in taking industrial action because the pay rises they have received during the last twelve years of Tory misrule have been below the rate of inflation. In real terms, a pay decrease.

They're fed up of struggling to feed their families and heat their homes and, in some cases, they're not best pleased at having to go to food banks. Measured by GDP, as capitalism demands, the UK is the sixth largest economy in the world so you'd think there'd be enough money to pay key workers properly but the Conservative government says no. Going so far, in the case of the current chairman Nadham Zahawi, to claim the nurses are playing into the hands of Vladimir Putin.

It makes no sense whatsoever but that's the current Tory strategy. Where once they blamed everything on the pandemic, now they blame everything on Putin. Never on their own incompetence, never on their own negligence, never on their own cruelty, never on their own vanity, and never on their own terrible policies.

Austerity and Brexit both come to mind as things that have absolutely helped destroy the UK economy but we shouldn't forget the small matter of Liz Truss and Kwasi Kwarteng's disastrous 'mini-budget' that blew a £30bn hole in the country's finances. Chancellor Jeremy Hunt, bought in to fix that, says it's up to ALL of us to fix it but I can't help thinking it's up to the Tory party to clear up their own fucking mess and if they can't do that, which they can but choose not to, they should all resign en masse, have a general election, and let Labour take over.

They found the money to award dodgy PPE contracts to their friends, they found the money to pay for Boris and Carrie Johnson's furnishings, and they've found the money to open a new coalmine in Whitehaven (after boasting they would end 'coal', Michael Gove has given five hundred jobs to Cumbria but a time of drastic climate change the price we'll pay for it in the end seems far too much). Most noticeably of all, they found £29,000,000 to give to Michelle Mone and even made her a Baroness and gave her a seat in the House of Lords.

PPE Medpro, the company she advocated for and then lied about advocating for, sent that amount of money to a trust in her name based on the Isle of Man and with that money she bought herself a yacht and no doubt lots of other things that are far far out of the price range of people worrying if they can afford milk and bread.

Which she called Lady M. Because of course she fucking did. These bastards love nothing more than rubbing our noses in it. That's hardly surprising when you consider that the sort of Bullingdon bullies who have run the government in recent years used to burn £50 notes in front of homeless people.

Mone's taken leave of absence from the House of Lords now but questions remain as to which government ministers enabled her act of criminality. Ultimately, Boris Johnson is to blame as he was Prime Minister at the time but you can also make a case for kangaroo cock muncher Matt Hancock and there are certainly rumours that Sajid Javid's recent announcement that he will retire from frontline politics at the next election is because he fears becoming embroiled in the case.

Or maybe not. Maybe the penny has dropped with Javid, as it has with many others, that he'll be out of a job after the next election whatever happens. So he's getting out quick and setting himself up with some cushy directorship in the city or something.

Though there are few bellends out there who still believe the constant Tory, and Tory press, scapegoating of the innocent to protect their own backs, many have had enough. Blaming the nurses and accusing them of siding with Putin is a step too far for much of the public and it looks increasingly likely they'll be destroyed in the polling booth when they finally call an election.

But what damage will they have done to the country by then? We don't need to speculate anymore. We can just look around and see. Record waits in A&E, people lying in hospital corridors, dying in the back of ambulances, dying while waiting for ambulances, a cost of living crisis so severe that huge numbers of people will simply starve or freeze to death this winter, and ever increasing queues for food banks.

The government offer no solutions to this but continue to bully and hector anyone who dares point this out (legendary dimwit Dominic Raab's staff have even been offered a 'route out' to escape his now infamous bullying). In 'It's Yer Money I'm After, Baby', Miles Hunt of The Wonderstuff sang "I'm in love with myself and nobody else" and that sounds like a perfect motto for this vile and callous Conservative party.

They make the mistake of thinking everyone else is as devious, unkind, and self-serving as them. But they're not. Many of us care about the NHS, we care about public transport infrastructure, and we care about people who are poor, sick, homeless, or struggling to make ends meet. We should help them and not punish them. The best way we do that is to support the nurses in their industrial action and to get rid of the Tories.

 

Paranormal Activity?

Can human beings really have precognitive dreams that foretell the future? Can they really find water by dowsing? Can they really be mediums? Can they really be magnetic? Can they really have psychic ability?

If, like me, you think the answer to all these questions is, in line with Betteridge's law, no then you'll probably find yourself in agreement with Professor Chris French. French is head honcho at Greenwich Skeptics in the Pub (and recently retired from his position as Professor of Psychology and head of their Anomalistic Psychology Research Unit (APRU) at Goldsmiths) and he was at Davy's Wine Vaults (in a much nicer room than last time) for the last Greenwich Skeptics in the Pub of 2022 for a talk called 'Putting the claims to the test' in which he'd speak about how, over the years, him and his colleagues have tested supposed psychics, mediums, and the like to see just how real their powers are.

It's a talk he had to cobble together pretty quickly as the planned speaker Michael Marshall had had to pull out due to a combination of bad weather and rail strikes. Those two things, and maybe a World Cup semi-final which saw Argentina beat Croatia 3-0, no doubt kept a few others away but there was still a reasonably decent crowd so it was a shame the projector had been stolen and Chris had to hold his laptop up to show us some short films.

I'd even nearly been late myself as my plan to visit Goddard's Pie and Mash shop had been scuppered because they were closing early for their Christmas Party. I went to Pizza Express instead but it was a rush to eat a pizza (and drink a Peroni) in time. I got there just in time to hear Chris start by talking about his work and how, both professionally and personally, he always starts off by assuming, skeptically, that paranormal phenomena does not exist.

With the caveat that he'd happily be proved wrong. Mostly, the APRU debunk claims and look for rational explanations as to why so many people believe in things there is no evidence for. But sometimes they also test these claims and one example is the case of Derek Ogilvie who back in 2006 was pretty big. The self styled 'baby mind reader' had a book out and series on Channel 5.

Being on Channel 5, you won't have seen it. But the gist was that he could read the minds of adults, children, and even babies. Babies, somewhat surprisingly, weren't thinking about the things you might imagine them to be thinking about (shitted nappies and sucking milk out of their mum's boobs) but instead had quite evolved thoughts about family businesses, DIY, and car maintenance.

Ogilvie wanted to be tested and he'd heard that, in America, James Randi was offering $1,000,000 to anyone who could prove they had psychic abilities. Unfortunately, to get to Randi, Ogilvie would first need to undergo a preliminary test set by Chris French and his colleague Chrissy Wilson and they weren't offering a cool million dollars. Only "a nice cup of tea and a biscuit".

French and Wilson had noticed that during Ogilvie's readings the children's parents had always been present. Suspecting that, knowingly or not, Ogilvie was using a form of 'cold reading', it was suggested that he carry out some readings without the parents there and all parties agreed that would be fair.

Ogilvie even told a friend he believed the test would be "a piece of piss" but when the parents were called in to see if they recognised the reading of their child only one of six test cases were correctly identified. Which is about the same results you'd get from making a wild guess.

Ogilvie broke down in tears and feared his career was over but, of course, it was not. People who believe in the paranormal don't care what Skeptics think or say. He went on to take Randi's test and he failed that too but Ogilvie's still out there reading the minds of babies now and he still seems to think that babies are obsessed with car engines too.

Another case is that of the professional psychic Patricia Putt who claimed to be the reincarnation of an ancient Egyptian called Ankhara. She quite fancied $1,000,000 too (who doesn't?). When she produced ten readings for Chris and Richard Wiseman (as a preliminary to Randi's test) she scored an incredible 0%.

 

Immediately she admitted she'd failed and was gobsmacked by how abysmally she'd fared. But within just two days she'd changed her tune, claimed she'd been stitched up, and decided to mark her own homework instead. Unsurprisingly, she decided she'd not failed the test but passed it - and with flying colours. Awarding herself a 100% success rate!

Aurel Raileanu, a Romanian man who claims to be a human magnet, is an amusing case. He puts spoons on his chest and they don't fall off. But he also puts irons on his chest and they don't fall off. Television sets too, as well as large pieces of wood which is odd because most people would not consider wood to be a traditionally magnetic material.

When Aurel was put to the test, the simple insertion of a tissue between his chest and the spoons/irons/tellies resulted in the items falling to the ground. It seemed the secret of Aurel's magnetism was, quite simply, that he had a really sweaty chest and things stuck to it.

 

Chris Robinson, the 'dream detective', was 'big in Japan' and he claimed to be a precognitive dreamer who could dream 'to order'. Chris French tested him for a programme on Channel 5 (you'll have spotted a theme by now) but to be fair to Robinson he was allowed a second judge of his choice and he chose the producer of the show who was understandably keen for Robinson's powers to be proved true.

Unfortunately he failed miserably but there was one other case, one other precognitive dreamer - one who paints rather than writes down his dreams, that was a little more curious and worthy of further investigation. David Mandell was, in a Channel 5 (obvs) series from 2002, described as 'The Man Who Paints The Future' and, in some ways, he certainly did that.

He painted disasters and terrorist attacks but he was unable to specify when these dreams would come true. The events depicted could happen in one day or in twenty years. He painted the twin towers crumbling into each other (not exactly right but still), an IRA attack on Heathrow Airport, a sarin gas attack in Tokyo, the Dunblane massacre, and Diana's death in a tunnel.

That all sounds pretty impressive but when you see the paintings they're quite vague (the Diana one is pretty much a scribble) and widely open to reinterpretation after the events. He also painted a very large number of paintings and, twenty years later, 85% of them have no relevance to anything that has ever actually happened.

So, close but no cigar and no $1,000,000 and no evidence yet, anywhere in the world, that such a thing as psychic ability exists. Yet, like the dowsers that Chris French and Richard Dawkins tested in a video shown at the talk, many continue to believe they have special powers and many others remain convinced of it too. A few are downright frauds knowingly lying and conning grieving people at their lowest ebb. But many genuinely believe. We shouldn't go too hard on them but we should debunk them and test their claims. Because if there is a genuine psychic, magnet man, or precognitive dreamer out there they will pass all these tests easily and just think how amazing that would be.

With that I hopped on the DLR to Lewisham, took the P4 bus back home, and watched yet another depressing episode of Newsnight. If paranormal activity can't lift me out of this grim winter (because it doesn't exist) then at least events like Greenwich Skeptics in the Pub and people like Professor Chris French can make life just a little bit more joyful. Looking forward to more of this in 2023.

We Are Slady Parts:Slady @ the Water Rats.

Truth be told, I went to see the all female Slade tribute band, Slady, at the Water Rats on Saturday night more as an excuse for a festive jolly, and catch up, with my friends Gary, Stu, and Doug than I did because I was a huge Slade fan.

It's not that I dislike Slade. Not at all. While they're not quite at the level of 70s greats like Bowie, T.Rex, and Roxy Music, they're definitely in that second tier of great pop bands of the era. Just behind Sweet. Probably a few steps ahead of Sailor, Mud, and Showaddywaddy.

Slady's website doesn't give their real names so I'll use their Slade names and it's obvious from the very start that 'Noddy Holder' is the star here, screaming her way through Cum On Feel The Noize (a lively choice as set opener), Look Wot You Dun, and Skweeze Me Pleeze Me and turning the dial down, just a notch, for Coz I Luv You and The Lovin' Spoonful's Darlin' Be Home Soon.

There are some Slade songs you'll remember well, there are others you'll remember on hearing (for me:- Mama Weer All Crazee Now and Take Me Back 'Ome) and there are others you'll have long forgot. Though the seventies was their imperial phase they continued to have hits into eighties and nineties. Think of the likes of Radio Wall Of Sound, My Oh My, the Big Countryesque Run Runaway, and, worst of all, We'll Bring The House Down which reminds me of filing out of a miserable Reading festival on a Sunday evening in 1988 as a pissed up Liz Kershaw screamed it out over the PA.

Slady don't bother with any of those later songs and place themselves, both music and fashionwise, slap bang in the heart of the band's heyday. While Noddy remains the focal point throughout, it's hard not to be drawn to the enthusiasm of bassist 'Dave Hill' who gives it her all too.

Noddy even leads a singalong to her mum, at 53 - a year younger than me, and, of course it being Xmas, they play Merry Xmas Everybody and everyone, pretty much, sings along. The back room of the Water Rats is so packed that some have spilled into the bar and been distracted by the Argentina v Netherlands World Cup quarter final.

Merry Xmas Everybody, perhaps surprisingly, is not the final song of the set. It's followed by Gudbuy T'Jane (the banger Oasis should have covered instead of Cum On Feel The Noize), a raffle (it's a long time since I went to a gig that featured a raffle), and a cover of Bobby Marchan's Get Down And Get With It (to go with an earlier cover of Steppenwolf's Born To Be Wild).

Get Down And Get With It was a number sixteen UK hit for Slade back in 1971. It was their first top forty hit but it seemed an unusual choice to end the gig with but then forming an all female Slade tribute band seems quite an unusual choice in the first place.

But it looked a lot of fun. It was fun to be there too. Laughing along, singing along, and drinking a little bit too much in great company. IT'S CHRISTMAS!!

Thanks to Doug, Stu, and Gary and countless others for a great night out and apologies to all that the photos are stock ones rather than from the gig itself. It really was too packed to get any good snaps.

Shark! The Herald Angels Sing.

Sharks are crazy, sharks are weird, sharks are different, and sharks are wonderful. That's not just my opinion. That's the opinion of Dr David Shiffman and he should know. He's been into sharks ever since he was a little kid and he's now a marine conservation biologist living and working in Washington DC. He dedicates, it seems, pretty much his entire life to studying sharks and he's even written a book, 'Why Sharks Matter:A Deep Dive with the World's Most Misunderstood Predator', about them.

He was the speaker at last night's, and 2022's final - hence the lame festive pun in the blog's name, Skeptics in the Pub - Online talk (ably, and jocularly, compered by Brian Eggo from the Glasgow branch of Skeptics) and his talk, 'Why Sharks Matter:the Science and Policy of Saving Threatened Sharks', may have been shorter than normal, about half an hour, but it was full of interesting shark stuff. 

In fact I'd go so far to say we were faced with a veritable sharknado of elasmobranchii related information. Dr Shiffman's job is to use science to study, and protect, fish. Specifically, in his case, sharks - and sharks aren't like other fish.

For a start, they don't have bones. Just cartilage. Which makes them very flexible. So much so that they could, if they wanted to, bite their own tails. All other fish, except other members of the shark family like skates and rays, have bones. You'll know that. You'll have seen their skeletons.

They've other advantages over us bony beings too. Not only can they both see and smell better than us humans, they have an entire sense that we don't. Sharks can sense electromagnetic fields which is just as well as it helps them source food that may, understandably, be hiding from them under mud, sand, or rocks. Hammerhead sharks are particularly good at this. Their large heads acting like metal detectors except they're looking for food rather than lost treasure.

You'll have most likely heard of hammerhead sharks but it seems very unlikely you'd be able to name every type of shark and that's because there are 536 different recognised species and that number continues to grow as new sharks are discovered. Some live in rivers, some live in lakes, some live under ice, and some live so deep in the ocean that they never see any light.

Apart from the light they produce themselves. The megamouth shark has glow in the dark gums! The fantastically named ninja lantern shark tops that by having an entire body that glows. Size wise, sharks range from ones the size of your forearm to ones, as described by Dr Shiffman, the size of "a city bus" and, age wise, some of them can live astonishingly long lives. The Greenland shark can live to be four hundred years old and is such a fearsome predator it eats polar bears and moose.

One was even found with an entire reindeer in its body. It's one of the roughly forty species of shark that can be found in the waters around the UK. Some have even recently returned to the Thames. 

Even when it comes to procreation, sharks don't seem to follow the usual rules. Some sharks lay eggs (called mermaid's purses), some sharks give birth to live baby sharks, and some female sharks simply clone themselves. No need for a male shark to get involved.

Though some female sharks do like the male sharks to get involved - and lots of 'em. Some female sharks will mate with several male sharks and the offspring produced following these shark shagfests are believed to have one mother but several fathers. 'Multiple maternity' they call it. The female sharks do seem to have quite a lot of control over their own destiny and, in some cases, female sharks can defer pregnancy until it is more convenient. They become pregnant but lengthen the gestation period for up to four years if they deem that necessary.

These are things I didn't really know about sharks but one thing I'd heard before is that sharks are very very rarely a threat to humans. That's a myth that began with the book, and later film, Jaws. The author of the book, Peter Benchley, was so upset that his book gave sharks their bad rep that he devoted much of the rest of his life to shark conservation.

While sharks are not a serious threat to humans, humans are most definitely a very big threat to sharks. Many species of shark, roughly a third of all species, are severely threatened and the situation is getting worse. The main reason, overwhelmingly so, is over-fishing. 

In the past people have pointed to the Chinese and their supposed taste for shark fin soup but that is hugely exaggerated. The consumption of shark fin soup has dramatically declined in recent years but shark meat demand has risen massively. While it's easy, and potentially a bit racist - hello Morrissey, to point the finger at China, it's worth noting that the UK is the planet's 20th largest shark fishing nation and the world's 10th largest shark meat exporter.

If you go to your local chippy and opt for the "rock salmon" you're eating a shark. A dogfish specifically. Yet nothing is done about this while at the same time over 60,000 people signed a Facebook petition to ban shark finning in Florida. Which would have been admirable except shark finning is already banned in Florida and has been since 1993.

I felt Dr Shiffman could have talked about sharks all night but then, after a fair bit of amiable self-promotion for both his talks and his book, he wound up surprisingly quickly. There was an interesting Q&A that touched on marine invertebrates like sponges and other "soggy weirdos from the deep below", Gollum's cat shark, duck billed platypuses, Katy Perry, Rodney Dangerfield, megalodons, the kid's song Baby Shark, and QI's theory that there is no such thing as a fish.

When somebody asked Dr Shiffman which of the Sharknado films was his favourite he surprised us all. Half expecting him to dismiss this as a frivolous question, he claimed he'd watched - and enjoyed - all the Sharknado films and, to him, Sharknado 2 was the best one. Even better, he claimed the producers of the Sharknado films funded some of his studies.

Nice! As was the whole evening. Thanks to Dr David Shiffman, thanks to Brian Eggo, and thanks to everyone involved with Skeptics in the Pub - Online for providing me with such interesting and engaging content on the second and fourth Thursday evening every month during 2022. I'll be back in 2023 for a talk about, of all things, flags but, until then, enjoy the festive break. The shark nights are drawing in.

 

 

Albums of the Year 2015

 I had assumed all my Top 30 lists from 2005 to 2015 had been lost to the ravages of time. But, thanks to Tina not deleting her emails, a couple of them have reappeared. Here's the 2015 list:-

1.Julia Holter – Have You In My Wilderness

2.Kendrick Lamar – To Pimp A Butterfly

3.Sufjan Stevens – Carrie & Lowell

4.Mbongwana Star – From Kinshasa

5.Tame Impala – Currents

6.Jim O’Rourke – Simple Songs

7.Joanna Newsom – Divers

8.New Order – Music Complete

9.Holly Herndon – Platform

10.Courtney Barnett – Sometimes I Sit And Think, And Sometimes I Just Sit

11.Oneohtrix Point Never – Garden Of Delete

12.Kamasi Washington – The Epic

13.Bjork – Vulnicura

14.Sleaford Mods – Key Markets

15.Jlin – Dark Energy

16.Father John Misty – I Love You, Honeybear

17.Matana Roberts – Coin Coin Chapter Three

18.Jamie XX – In Colour

19.Sleater-Kinney – No Cities To Love

20.Vince Staples – Summertime ‘06

21.Richard Thompson – Still

22.D’Angelo/The Vanguard – Black Messiah

23.Kurt Vile – B’live I’m Goin Down

24.Helm – Olympic Mess

25.Blur – The Magic Whip

26.Laura Cannell – Beneath Swooping Talons

27.Future – Dirty Sprite 2

28.Wilco – Star Wars

29.Carter Tutti Void – f(x)

30.John Grant – Grey Tickles, Black Pressure

 

*sources

 Pitchfork

The Quietus

The Wire

Mojo

Uncut