The truly great meaningless statistic gives you the very precise, scientific-sounding parts of a real statistic, but the journalist leaves out one vital parameter, so that what's left has no meaning at all.

Here is a gem, from today's New York Times:

"The Center for Urban Forest Research estimates that each tree removes 1.5 pounds of pollutants from the air."

Wow! One point five pounds! They didn't even round it up, or down, to the nearest pound! That is so precise! Er, one point five pounds of pollutants every second? Every day? Every year? Over the course of the tree's life? Which might be what, two hundred years? Five hundred years?

And while we're at it, how big is this urban tree, the one that removes one point five pounds of pollutants from the air every second? Or every five hundred years... Is it a six-inch high bonsai tree in a pot on a window sill? Is it a six- foot sapling on a new housing estate? Is it a hundred foot high oak, in the centre of Central Park?

And what pollutants is this mighty oak, or pot plant,  removing with such astonishing speed, or sloth? A pollutant is just a chemical you don't approve of, in a place you don't want it. (Water in your glass is fine. Water in your petrol tank is a pollutant.) Carbon dioxide, for example, is now considered by many to be a greenhouse gas that will destroy the world. So are they counting carbon dioxide as a pollutant? Because trees do little else but remove carbon dioxide from the air. A lettuce could remove one point five pounds of CO2 from the air without even trying very hard. So a hundred foot tree that took five hundred years to do so would be pretty unimpressive. Or do they mean pollutants like lead? A bonsai tree that removed a pound and a half of lead from the air every second would be pretty damn impressive. I'd pay to watch that.

"The Center for Urban Forest Research estimates that each tree removes 1.5 pounds of pollutants from the air."

Jesus Christ.

Incidentally, I found out my book was being broadcast across Ireland next week by reading the news in the Galway Advertiser. Jeeez, nobody tells me anything.

Jude was the Book on One in April, so this is quite a quick repeat. I didn't do the adaptation, which is by the producer, Aidan Stanley. Conor Lovett is marvellous as Jude.

I reckon I'll read from the Galway section of Jude: Level 1, chat a bit, read a few poems, and then sing two or three Toasted Heretic songs, with Declan Collins fingering an acoustic guitar in a manner so sensuous that three-quarters of the women and a quarter of the men in the audience will be distracted entirely from the songs by the thought "If he can do that to a guitar, what could he do to my... wow..."

(Photo: Michael D. Higgins, Julian Gough, and the late Séamus Brennan, at the NUIG Alumni Awards Gala Banquet, on March 1st 2008. Photo by Aengus McMahon.)

The funeral of Séamus Brennan, the Fianna Fáil politician and former government minister, was held yesterday. Given that there's hardly a page of Jude: Level 1 that doesn't feature a prominent member of Fianna Fáil inciting vast crowds into a homicidal xenophobic frenzy, taking bribes from property developers, or using an illegally held firearm to try and kill a defenceless orphan, it's only fair to say that Séamus Brennan was one of the good guys. He stood up to Charlie Haughey when that was a dangerous thing to do, and he tried to clean up a corrupt and scandal-banjaxed Fianna Fáil when the task seemed impossible.

I met Séamus Brennan, for the first and only time, earlier this year. We were both receiving awards from NUIG (or University College Galway, as it was when we were there, back in the early Middle Ages). My award was for my contribution of the term "Ardcrony ballocks" to Irish literature. His was for his contribution to Irish politics, which was considerable. As Ireland's Minister for Transport in the early 1990s, he had broken the (state-owned) Aer Lingus monopoly on flights to Britain, and thus freed a tiny and struggling Irish airline called Ryanair to survive, then thrive. (The young, and the non-Irish, cursing at the 3 euros they've just paid for a small bottle of water on their 1 euro Ryanair flight, will not be aware that air travel out of Ireland, until Séamus Brennan's reforms, was far, far too expensive for 90% of the Irish population. Which was the only reason there was anyone left in Ireland by the early 1990s... My generation had to emigrate by bus.) Later, he was a highly regarded Minister for Social and Family Affairs. When I met him, this year, he was Minster for Arts, Sport and Tourism (the ever-mutating ministry which appears in Jude: Level 1, thinly disguised as the Ministry for Beef, Culture, and the Islands).

The NUIG Alumni Awards ceremony was a black tie affair, Gala Ball and all, and my noble punk spirit was seething after the third round of photographs, "Stand there", "Sit there", "Hold the award a little higher."

I said to Séamus Brennan (who was patiently cooperating, changing seats when asked, standing up, sitting down), you must get awfully sick of these events, I'd imagine this must be astoundingly boring for you. No, actually, he said. Politicians are always handing these things out, but we never get to keep one. In fact, I think this is the first award I've ever received. And it's a great feeling, it's a great honour.

He was so pleased, and humble, and as a result dignified, that I felt like a spoilt little shitehawk for not accepting the award more graciously. So I amended my attitude, and my mood improved enormously, and I had a great night, with my beloved and my family, feasting and dancing and generally knocking seven kinds of crack out of it.

I also talked quite a bit that night with Séamus Brennan, and with the blessed Michael D. Higgins, another former Minister for the Arts, and former recipient of an NUIG Alumni Award (and a former lecturer of mine, in sociology, who used to put the Labour Party's noble redistributionist policies into action by buying me coffee and buns in the canteen after lectures, when I was seventeen and staaaarving). We talked about everything from Beckett to Braveheart, and Séamus Brennan came across as a gentle, thoughtful man, at peace with himself. The shoptalk of two Ministers for the Arts gives a very entertaining insight into the peculiar mix of glamour and grind in the job. At one point, Séamus passed on Mel Gibson's best wishes (from a party the week before) to Michael D. (Michael D. Higgins had, as Minister, helped Mel shoot Braveheart here in Ireland by loaning him, among other things, the Irish Army.) I also heard some very entertaining stories about paperwork and three-foot-high piles of receipts (which reflected very well on Mel Gibson, and less well on some of our much smaller, native Irish film makers.) A mighty night.

Séamus Brennan was diagnosed with cancer a year ago, so he must have known he was dying that night. (Or dying a little faster than the rest of us, as Beckett would probably point out.) He still managed to bring something to the party.

I liked him a lot. May he rest in peace.

Totally forgot to mention it in time for anyone to actually tune in, sorry. This is not because I'm blasé, it's because I'm totally untogether (and find it hard to believe anyone would be interested in my opinion of the short story).

 I will be talking for about ten seconds, probably, so you missed nuthin'.

I'm a fan of spam. I like the way that, beset by predators, predatory itself, it evolves with furious speed. I like to have a dip into my spam box every couple of weeks to see the new trends evolving (like the recent "What a stupid face you have" / "You look so stupid in this photo" variations.)

Ben Myers is right on both points, it's a stunning resource for poets, but to make good poetry out of it you have to be a very good editor. Alive to nuance and resonance. I've been playing with spam poems for years. (Not just spam: this week, I wrote two poems I'm very pleased with, constructed entirely from the legal disclaimers on poetry websites.)

By using spam, and other internet debris, poets can essentially outsource free association. But the best comment on the perils of the method comes from W.H. Auden, in a letter to the poet Frank O'Hara, long before the internet:

“I think you (and John {Ashbery} too, for that matter) must watch what is always the great danger with any ‘surrealistic’ style, namely of confusing authentic nonlogical relations which arouse wonder with accidental ones which arouse mere surprise and in the end fatigue.”
-W. H. Auden

If your ear/nose/throat/soul (add to/delete as appropriate) are alive to authentic nonlogical relations, then spam and all the other digital junk of the internet are your friend. They can jolt you out of the deep groove of habit. The first and hardest step in surprising and delighting others is surprising and delighting yourself.

Tell me if any of the above interest you, and it might help me focus on one of the blighters, and get it done.

Meanwhile I have an article, on economics as a religion, in the new issue of Prospect (the wonderful London-based magazine of ideas). The issue also features a round-table discussion of the current global financial crisis. Several of my favourite thinkers on economic matters take part, including the philosophical hedge fund manager George Soros, and the very wise and grave chief economics commentator of the Financial Times, Martin Wolf. After they have thoroughly depressed and demoralised the readership with the awfulness of it all, I provide the light entertainment, in a two-page afterword, "The Sacred Mystery of Capital".

A sample paragraph or three:

"... But religions evolve, and recent events show that capitalism has begun to evolve less in the manner of the Galapagos finches (whose beaks adjusted over millennia to suit the berries of their individual island), and more in the manner of the Incredible Hulk. Incredible Hulk capitalism can expand the muscle of its credit so swiftly that its clothing of real world assets cannot stretch fast enough to contain it. Expansion, explosion, collapse—Incredible Hulk capitalism sprawls, stunned and shrunken again, in the rags of its assets.

Or, returning to our religious analogy, if capitalism was a religion, it would now be a delightfully demented pseudo-scientific cult. Incredible Hulk capitalism is to the capitalism of Adam Smith what Scientology is to the Christianity of Christ. Both modern high finance and Scientology use the language and tools of science to ends that are religious, not scientific. Both meet a need, a yearning which the old forms of religion and capitalism no longer meet. The need for a mysterious power greater than us, in which we can believe. It must be powerful—but it must also be mysterious. And mystery has been vanishing from the world ever faster, ever since Galileo.

We know what the stars are made of, and can compute their course through the heavens for the next 10,000 years. We can explain the storms and floods that were once evidence of the wrath of God. But as the advance of science has removed the divine mystery from much of life, the advance of free market capitalism has put it back. Only modern economics can now provide forces that we don’t understand. And we need that in our lives."

The whole thing is here, if you're interested.
 

Some of those commenting on his fine piece, "An Ice Cream For Ireland", miss the point, and blather on about democracy and subsidiarity and corporate tax rates. I was obliged to join in and steer this important debate back onto the right path, pointing out:

"Yes, this talk of protocols and democracy and referendums and addendums is all very well, but let’s get down to the nitty gritty, or at least the tutti frutti. What flavour of icecream would win over the most Irish voters?

Nothing too exotic, you don’t want Ireland’s voters to feel foreign values are being foisted on them (so pistachio is out). Vanilla would be the Eurocrats’ obvious, offend-nobody choice. But, on reflection, I would vote no to vanilla. Too bland an offering is also suspicious.

My gut feeling is strawberry."

Several people, instantly grasping the simple genius of the idea, made useful suggestions. My  favourite being from David Wilkins:

"May I suggest that the ice cream given to each Irish voter should take the form of a ‘99′? That would remind the Irish that they are voting not just for themselves but also for the 99% of EU citizens who have been denied a vote on the Lisbon treaty. The whole process is, after all, distinctly flakey."

And Shevvers suggested:

"A pint of Guinness would work better than ice cream."

Which is a strong and original idea, but would be open, I fear, to legal challenge after the vote, from the remorseful and hungover voters.

It is not too late to vote for your favourite flavour over on Gideon's blog. Now that's democracy... 

(The fine photos of the leaders of Ireland's three largest political parties, in case you're wondering, are borrowed from Kieran Murphy, of Murphys Ice Cream, who has a wonderfully ice cream-obsessed website, called Ice Cream Ireland. Although, er, he doesn't know they're borrowed yet. It's a bit late to be ringing him in Dingle, at half two in the morning, to ask permission to use these, but I'll ask him tomorrow, honest. I know, it would have been great to get Brian Cowan, but he's not really an ice cream type, now, is he?)

(An Taoiseach Brian Cowan, being chased by an ice cream man for not buying an ice cream.) 

I'm an Irish citizen (albeit one living in Berlin), who has read the Irish Referendum Commission's free, impartial, 16 page guide to the Lisbon Treaty. I've even tried to read a bit of the treaty itself (dear God). Did you know the first words are - in wonderfully shouty capital letters -

"PREAMBLE

HIS MAJESTY THE KING OF THE BELGIANS..."

A promising, even rousing, start, but it's all downhill from there. Reading the 294 pages of the treaty tells you absolutely nothing, unless you also happen to be holding your old copy of the Treaty on European Union in your other hand. While sitting on your well-worn copy of the Treaty Establishing the European Community.

Typical random chunk of the Treaty of Lisbon (I think it's article 9(b):

"At the end of the first sentence of the first subparagraph of paragraph 1, the words "and address appropriate recommendations to that State" shall be deleted; at the end of the last sentence, the words "and, acting in accordance with the same procedure, may call on independent persons to submit within a reasonable time limit a report on the situation in the Member State in question" shall be replaced by "and may address recommendations to it, acting in accordance with the same procedure."


Eh? EH? Vote for what again? And there's 294 pages of this stuff.

So we had no idea what we were voting for, and the  commentators in the papers (who definitely haven't read it), have no idea what they are commenting on. Given that huge teams of negotiators and translators worked on this in sections, there is absolutely nobody on earth who knows what's in it. It could all be a complicated joke - after all, the first letter of each paragraph in the Maltese translation spells "Sarkozy's bum smells." Though perhaps that's a coincidence.

My feeling, for what it's worth, is that they should have put in a paragraph promising us all an icecream if we voted yes. At least that would have been something concrete that we could have visualised. It would have stood out a mile, for its clarity and lack of ambiguity, in the Irish Referendum Commission's summary of the Treaty. And given that the weather was fairly good on the day of the vote, it might well have swung the referendum.

The really rather terrifically wonderful Susie Maguire just sent me a nice picture of me sitting down in Dubrovnik. I won't explain what the heck I am doing, or why I appear to have a tinted monocle.

A chap needs to maintain an air of mystery.

My shoes are definitely the stars of this photo. They look like they're celebrating getting their own TV series.