Scots Independence: A (Very) Late Realisation.

 There's an odd time-travel quality in play as I write this.

 It's one a.m. and as such, I have no idea what the outcome of the Scottish Independence Referendum will be. By the time most people read this, they will already know, so whatever I say will already be out of date.

 Nonetheless, in the wee wee hours, I had a minor epiphany about my thoughts on Scottish independence.

 I've written before that as an Englishman I don't actually get to have an opinion, although as Eric Idle pointed out, I perhaps should. Dissolving a union involves more than one party, and if Scotland just fucks off of its own accord it'll be the political and constitutional equivalent of a deadbeat husband absconding in the middle of the night.

"Got a wife and kids and Union Jack, I went out for a ride and I never went back..."

 My opinion, as I've said before, is that I'd like to see Scotland stay part of the United Kingdom. Indeed, I, like everyone else, sort of assumed that they would.

 This is largely down to media coverage that's been pitched somewhere between Michael Fish's "There will be no hurricane tonight" and the Iraqi defense minister's insistence that his side was winning. The news, until the eleventh hour, treated this as a trifling matter that none of us should be worried about. 

 Now, of course, everyone is panicking because (at time of writing) there are reports of record turnouts. Eighty-four percent of Orkney turned out to vote, for example. Granted, eighty-four percent of Orkney is six people and a goat, but such huge percentages seem to have been repeated across the board, and have effectively rendered any opinion polls taken so far as useless. Said polls had a narrow margin in favour of "no," but with five hours left until the count is finished and a result declared, this is anyone's game.

 At this, the final moment, I realised that I should morally probably favour a "Yes." 

 The reason for this is that all my thinking so far has been largely selfish. I don't want Scotland to go because of a sense of familiarity, sure, but also because of a creeping fear that, without Scotland, England will be permanently under Tory rule. However, when I stop and think about it, I realise this isn't Scotland's problem, and that if I lived in an area of the country that had a chance to break away from the current political system, I'd most likely be in favour of it. I'd love to be free of David Cameron and his brigade of detached, monied arseholes who are slowly ruining the country. The only reasons I want Scotland to stick around are to lend electoral weight to the left, and also because I'd be jealous if they didn't have to suffer along with the rest of us. It's only potential bitterness that's making me want a "No" outcome. "When the breakdown hit at midnight there was nothing left to say, but I hated him. And I hated you when you went away." *

 Clearly, this is not the correct attitude. This isn't about Scotland leaving England and Wales and Northern Ireland holding the bag. This is about Scotland, full stop. It's Scotland's decision.

 So, by the time I get up tomorrow, they'll either be gone or they won't. But I don't have any right to bitch - if they leave, I've realised that I actually want them to do well for themselves. It's only jealousy that would make me feel otherwise.

 Although I'll still be glad if they stay.

*I'm frankly amazed at how well Bruce "Mc"Springsteen's work is playing into this...

Saucy Jack Redux.

 In the process of writing last night's piece about the new DNA evidence in the Jack the Ripper case, I made a minor mistake that I need to rectify.

 Unfortunately, it's the kind of minor mistake that is extremely hard to explain clearly without going into massive amounts of detail. Still, in the interests of fairness, I'm going to clarify it and go into massive amounts of detail.

 I said yesterday that author Martin Fido named Aaron Kosminski as Jack the Ripper. Aaron Kosminski is the man who has allegedly come up as a DNA match in the new evidence.

 What Martin Fido actually said was that the police at the time made the same mistake I did, and confused Aaron Kosminski with a man named Kaminski.

 Later memoirs by three police officers active at the time of the Ripper murders - Sir Melville McNaughten, Sir Robert Anderson and Superintendent Donald Swanson - mentioned a Polish Jew with "great hatred of women and strong homicidal tendencies," (McNaughten) whilst Anderson also mentioned in his memoir a "low class Polish Jew" and considered unmasking this suspect, but refrained. Donald Swanson, who was helping Anderson, wrote in the margin of Anderson's manuscript that this same suspect was apprehended by police and eventually sent to Colney Hatch mental institution where he died. His final notation says that the man's name was Kosminski.

 As mentioned before, this is often seen as odd as Aaron Kosminski was noted to be harmless once confined to an institution, rather than being the frothing maniac remembered by Melville McNaughten. Kosminski was also not incarcerated until two years after the final proven Ripper murder.

 Martin Fido, then, suggested that the police were confusing two suspects of a similar name.

 In December of 1888, a month after the last Ripper killing, a man was found wandering the streets of Whitechapel, dazed and mumbling to himself, mostly in Yiddish. He was detained by police and became extremely violent, and was eventually taken to an asylum where he was sectioned under the name David Cohen - a sort of catch-all Jewish name for when no identification was possible, like John Doe.

 Martin Fido contends that this unknown, violent mental patient was in fact a man named Nathan Kaminski, who had previously been treated for syphilis brought about by contact with prostitutes. In naming Kosminski in his memoirs, Fido believes Sir Robert Anderson (or his assistant Donald Swanson) was mis-remembering the name Kaminski.

 Which is exactly what I did last night. So, to recap: Martin Fido did not, as I stated, name Aaron Kosminski as the Ripper.

 Fido's is a plausible theory and easy to see why people get confused. Aside from the similar names, both men were confined to asylums within a few years of each other - Nathan "David Cohen" Kasminski in 1889 and Aaron Kosminski in 1891. Both died in their respective institutions. Both were Polish Jews who lived in the Whitechapel area.

 For the record, however, I don't necessarily buy Nathan "David Cohen" Kasminsky as the Ripper, either. Kasminsky was clearly, dangerously insane. Whilst it's possible that in the month between Mary Jane Kelly's mutilation and being found wandering the streets his last lingering threads of sanity had snapped, I find it hard to reconcile this gibbering lunatic (he was straight-jacketed in the institution as he was too violent to be left unrestrained) with someone who could fool a nervous hooker into taking his custom.

 I appreciate that almost all hookers are forced into their line of work by desperate poverty, and as such they can't afford to be overly choosy of their clientele. I also appreciate that in a Victorian slum poverty and desperation existed on a level I can't really imagine. Nonetheless, after word got out that a murderer was cutting up prostitutes in horrific ways, I think most prostitutes would have been on high alert. They would be extremely wary of customers who seemed in any way strange, and I can't help but feel that Nathan Kaminsky, a man who was only a month away from being found incoherently wandering the streets, would have had a hard time maintaining enough of a veneer of normality to fool a suspicious prostitute.

 As I've said before, my preferred suspect remains "we don't know."

 But hopefully I've cleared up my mistake regarding Martin Fido's theories.

New Ending To Saucy Jack?

[IMPORTANT: I know I don't normally take anything seriously, but in the interests of fairness I should point out that this post contains one very, very unpleasant image of an actual murder victim. It's in context, I promise, but it's not fun.]

 Many people have accused me of being outdated, and they probably have a point. It's not really helping my case, then, that I noticed an important headline today from a hundred and thirty years ago.

 Let me back up a little. According to reports, new evidence has come to light that may prove the identity of Jack the Ripper. I've read a few books on the subject, and had basically chalked the answer of who the killer really was up to "fucked if I know." Many authors have gone to great lengths to prove that their suspect was the correct one, and many of them have been convincing.

 Then again, a few have been amusingly, calamitously wrong. Crime writer Patricia Cornwell fingered artist Walter Sickert as the Ripper, writing a book and making a TV documentary on her findings. Nowhere in the production of either did someone pull Cornwell to one side and point out that Sickert had pretty good alibis for two of the murders, one of which was "being in France at the time." It's a great lesson in why "actual detective" and "writer of detective fiction" are different jobs.

 In 1992, an alleged "Diary of Jack The Ripper" surfaced in the hands of a Liverpuddlian scrap dealer, who said he'd been given it by "a bloke down the pub." In a development that shocked nobody who had ever been in a Scouse pub, this diary turned out to be a fake, but not before Shirley Harrison had written a book about how it was clearly real and identified the true killer.

 The less said about the insanely convoluted conspiracy theories involving Freemasonry and the Royal Family the better.

 Indeed, even at the time, the papers received hundreds of hoax letters from people claiming to be Jack the Ripper, only two of which have are considered to possibly be genuine.

 With all this in mind, it's clear that solutions to the Ripper mystery crop up every so often, and that they should be taken with a grain of salt. Or a big fuck-off gritting lorry full of salt, depending on the claim.

 Where does that leave the current evidence?

 The evidence in question is a bloodied shawl worn by one of the Canonical Five victims - the five prostitutes that experts agree were all killed by the same person in Autumn of 1888 in the Whitechapel district of London.

 The shawl itself is a baffling story. It was taken from Catherine Eddowes, the fourth victim, by a policeman and given to his wife as a present.

"Here's the housekeeping money, love. Oh, and I got you this shawl covered in the blood of a mutilated hooker."

"Thanks, I've been looking for one of those!"

"I've not washed it as I don't know how, so there might be some semen around the edges..."

 For whatever picky reason, his wife didn't want the shawl, but still buried it away in a cupboard where it became a kind of family heirloom until it was auctioned in 2007 and bought by Russell Edwards, who has spent the interim having the shawl DNA tested and writing a book on his findings. 

 Edwards claims that the blood on the shawl proveably belongs to Catherine Eddowes, and that there is also trace evidence of semen that can be matched with the descendants of Aaron Kosminski, a Polish Jew living and working in Whitechapel at the time of the murders, who was later incarcerated in a mental institution.

 Much of this is significant. One of the few witnesses to the man believed to be the Ripper described a man with a "foreign accent" talking to a victim shortly before her death. Similarly, a piece of graffiti found near the scene of a Ripper murder read "The Juwes [sic] Are The Men Who Will Not Be Blamed For Nothing."

 The phrasing of this piece of graffiti is maddeningly ambiguous, and the writing itself was swiftly erased for fear of civil unrest. It speaks volumes of old-world misogyny that people were more worried about a riot caused by offensive graffiti than a riot over the number of women being disemboweled, but I digress. The message played into a larger web of heresay that the Ripper was a Jew. Indeed, a police report of the time claimed that a a local Jewish man had seen and could positively identify the Ripper, but refused to speak out against a fellow Jew.

 Whilst this may seem odd (and indeed, may not be true at all) it's worth bearing in mind the casual anti-semitism of the time, as well as the fact that many Jews, Aaron Kosminski included, he fled Russian pogroms and as such had a very strong community bond. 

 Aaron Kosminski himself was named as the Ripper by author Martin Fido, and has long been one of the more favoured suspects of scholars.

 In spite of all this, I have some doubts about the recent evidence. At the risk of setting myself up for a fall, I'm not convinced by the DNA angle.

 Looking at the canonical five murders, there is a very clear progression of violence as the perpetrator loses his mind. The first victim, Mary Ann Nichols, was strangled until unconscious or dead by her attacker, and then lowered to the ground. Her throat was cut, twice for the sake of insuring death, and her abdomen stabbed repeatedly after that. 

 By Ripper standards, this was mild.

 As the crimes progressed, always with the same modus operandi (the strangulation, the lowering of the unconscious body, the double throat cut) the Ripper began inflicting more and more damage on the corpses. This culminated in the murder of Mary Jane Kelly, the only victim who was killed in her room instead of on the street. Again, this is where I include a very unpleasant picture.

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 Aside from some pictures I saw of a guy who was mauled by a grizzly in Russia a few years back, that's probably the most damage I've ever seen inflicted on a human body. Her face (right hand side if you can't get your bearings) has been cut to ribbons. Her intestines are the messy clump removed and dumped on the bedside table in the foreground. 

 I bring this image up because it illustrates the dam-burst effect of the Ripper's killings. Once the killer snapped, he got worse, and worse, until we end up with the horror show pictured above. 

 And yet not one mention was ever made of semen.

 Whoever the killer was, he didn't appear to actually have sex with his victims, either pre-or-post mortem, and there was no evidence ever mentioned of seminal fluid elsewhere at the crime scenes. 

 I'll admit right now that I'm not an expert at spotting semen on a pavement at night - hell, maybe I should be more vigilant; maybe I've walked through lakes of the stuff unwittingly - but the forensics of the Ripper reports weren't as completely amateurish as we would expect from our post-CSI vantage point. Also, if someone was going to have sex with his victim, then surely there would have been semen at the Mary Jane Kelly scene? He'd gone completely to town on her in terms of everything else, if he was ever going to make it sexual I have absolutely no doubt that this would be where it would have happened.

 Maybe that whole scene was such a mess that something was missed, but I remain unconvinced. Also, Aaron Kosminski was not insitutionalised until 1891 - two years after the Ripper murders. Whoever butchered five women with rapid, marked increases in brutality didn't seem like someone who would suddenly give up and lay low for two whole years. 

 Whilst detained at an asylum, where he would die of an infection a few years later, Kosminski was noted to have no particularly violent traits and to be a compulsive masturbator. Again: If he wasn't concerned about playing with himself in front of hospital staff, then why wasn't there evidence of him doing it at every crime scene? The murders were clearly sexually motivated (victim Annie Chapman had part of her uterus cut out) but never before this new, shawl-stain evidence has there been any indication of the murderer doing anything actually sexual.

 I'm intrigued to see how things play out on this one. Aaron Kosminski could have been Jack the Ripper - he probably  was Jack the Ripper according to people who know more than me - but personally I'm going to wait and see before I buy into any of the "case closed" headlines.

 And now, because this post has gone into some quite harrowing territory, here's a puppy as a palate cleanser:

Improving The Job Market With Ebola.

 There's never really been a time when beer wasn't popular.

 The ancient Aztecs would use a regular beer ration to all citizens as an enticement to live in their newly-invented cities, for example. Nobody wants to live with other people - other people are awful. Beer is the only thing that can get you through a life surrounded by them. We've known this for millenia.

 When prohibition gripped America by the liver for 13 long years, it wasn't whiskey or wine that people marched in the streets for; it was beer.

 In spite of its longstanding place in the human heart, beer isn't just popular these days. It's fashionable, too. 

 This is bad news for a lot of reasons - it jacks up the price, for starters, as anything that's in vogue is bound to cost more. Even worse than the price inflation is the inherent pretentiousness that comes with fashion. 

 Until a few years ago, the only people who really cared about the minutiae of beer tasting were tedious old men with no teeth and cardigans, who sat in the corner of dark, local pubs. As popular tastes have shifted, however, a new breed of beer wanker has emerged. Young, condescending and somehow even less likeable.

 Because of these people - the sort of people who pretend to earnestly care what species of hops are used in the ale they're considering potentially buying the smallest available measurement of - beers now have tasting notes in the same way wines do.

 Much like with wine, these tasting notes are generally full of utter bollocks. I read a description the other day that claimed a beer had "notes of grass [...] and hay." 

 That's an awfully highfalutin' way of saying "This beer tastes of grass and slightly drier grass."

 Regardless of the patent ridiculousness of it all, someone out there is getting paid to write this shit, and that proves to me that there are clearly too many people in the world.

 The world has been suffering a population crisis for years now. Too many people for the planet, or, if we're being honest, not enough jobs for the number of people we have. 

 In the third world, there are too many people and not enough jobs to employ them, meaning these people can't earn a wage, can't provide for themselves or their families, and therefore end up starving. The fact that there's actually plenty of room on the planet to comfortably house and feed us all is irrelevant - the issue is an economic rather than a logistical one.

 Rather than let this happen in the first world, we've developed a thriving bullshit industry. We can't have everyone out of work and starving, so we create jobs that don't really do anything - like writing tasting notes for beers and explaining how they taste like a lawn both before and after it's been mowed.

 This is clearly an untenable situation. The population continues to grow, and we're running out of meaningless tasks to give people to keep them busy and thereby force the already-creaky wheels of capitalism to turn. How can we redress the balance?

 I think the answer is Ebola.

 In recent weeks there has been a severe outbreak of the deadly haemorrhagic fever in Africa. Although not all the numbers are in yet, it seems to be killing about half of all the people it comes into contact with.

 There's very little chance of it making its way to the UK - in news that shocked nobody, the only demographic that seems worried about that happening is UKIP voters:

Via YouGov.com

As I think UKIP are generally wrong about everything, not only do I think Ebola is unlikely, but I think it's not something to worry about. It's something we should be embracing.

 With half the population gone, not only will there be better job prospects for everyone - no more beer tasters - but traffic will be a thing of the past. Parking restrictions, too. Hell, would YOU take a job as a traffic warden if you didn't have to? Now nobody has to!

 Think of it. A world without beer wankers, traffic jams, parking tickets, queues at the post office, and a world that statistically won't contain at least one of Miley Cyrus or Justin Bieber.

 In fact, if half the human race is arbitrarily wiped out, it'll solve even some of our more esoteric problems. Oasis vs. Blur? X-Box vs. Playstation? Apple vs. Samsung? An arbitrary 50% reduction of the world would settle all of these kind of A vs. B debates.

 All we need is a decent pandemic. We have the technology.

Book Review: "Personal."

 Jack Reacher is back.

 Which isn't that noteworthy, in all honesty, as author Lee Child releases a new Reacher novel every year at around this time. "Jack Reacher is back" must be the book advertising equivalent of "Winter Is Coming." Maybe they're the words of House Publishing.

 It's been a tough few years for Reacher fans. As the number of books have climbed into the high teens and our leading man has reached his early fifties, it's hard not to find the whole exercise a little stale. This is before we mention the recent movie (and its threatened sequels) in which the huge, blonde Reacher was played by the neither Tom Cruise.

 With all this in mind, "Personal," Child's nineteenth Reacher book, is actually a pleasant surprise. Where the previous four books have followed a loose narrative arc as ex-millitary cop Reacher - phoneless, carless, devoid of a fixed abode - made understandably slow progress across the USA to a pending appointment that ultimately came to nothing, the new book, "Personal", sees Reacher picked up by the government to help with an assassination attempt on the French president.

 Why Reacher? Well, because it's... "Personal."

 It can't be easy churning out a book every year, so it's understandable that Lee Child might end up spinning his wheels after all this time. "Personal," however, seems to find Child re-focused and re-energised. While recent books have suffered a lack of anything memorable, "Personal" has a number of set-pieces that are, in the best possible way, Child-like.

 Child has also done the reader a favour by creating an imposing villain. Reacher's quarry is a master sniper, able to hit a target from 1400 yards away. As we watch developments through Reacher's eyes, it's hard not to feel increasingly uneasy. A large chunk of Reacher's appeal has always been his formidable physical presence, but being a great street fighter does no good against an enemy who can take you out from three quarters of a mile.

 "Personal" also sees Reacher returning to the UK for the first time since 2006's "The Hard Way." That book, probably my least favourite of the series, saw Reacher storming around in what felt like an episode of The Archers, so it's nice to have Reacher turn up in London for "Personal," hemmed in by modernity and East End gangsters.

 There are flaws, of course. Some plot elements feel recycled (notably from "Persuader", probably the best Reacher novel) and Child's notorious tin ear for character names is in evidence - a female sidekick whose name is Nice and a British sniper named Carson are glaring examples. I've never known anyone in the UK with the name Carson except the late comic, Frankie. Maybe the sniper in question was a portly, grey haired fella with glasses.

"Heh-heh, it's the way I kill 'em!"

 Child has also said in interviews that he never does a second draft of anything, and it's fairly obvious that he should. The dialogue scenes, for one, are always terse back-and-forth exercises in smarter-than-thou snappiness that ends up making every character sound like a variation of Reacher himself. If Jack Reacher is meant to be the smartest man in the room, it would help if other characters didn't seem to think and speak exactly the way he does.

 Also, the final big reveal is obvious to any readers who have been paying attention, and the only attempt to obscure it is made through Reacher's trademark, annoying habit of keeping information to himself until the final scene, like a blonde, big fisted Columbo. In the case of "Personal", however, the reader can probably see the sting coming from, well, about fourteen hundred yards away.

 These flaws in the book are indicative of wider flaws in the series as a whole, and are fixable - second drafts, a little more nuance, and maybe the tried and tested road of making a recurring character ageless - but based on the evidence of "Personal," fixing may not be needed. Because there series isn't broke.