A Boy Not Called Friday

At the end of last year there were articles in the Italian papers about a couple in northern Italy who wanted to name their baby son Venerdi (”Friday” in Italian), but who were prevented from doing so by a court of appeal. It turns out that in Italy there is a law whereby you can prevent a child being given a certain name if you expect that it will cause the child to be ridiculed. They’ve had to call him Gregorio instead, after the patron saint of his birth date. Fair enough if you ask me, after all, Venerdi sounds like a girl’s name.

There’s certainly no law like that in the UK of course where you can call your kids pretty much what the hell you you like. We would probably consider it to be a disgraceful attack on our civil rights by those barmy bureaucrats of the EC if we weren’t allowed to call our children Pocahontas, Peaches, Fifi Trixabelle or Darren, even if the story about the Scotch child named Pocahontas turned out be an urban myth. When I was living in Brighton (naturally, Brighton), there was a woman living up the road who had named her son Aslan. You know, after the lion in The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe? You would hear her calling him in for his tea: “Aslan! Aslan will you get in here now!”

Still there seems to be one law for the rich etc, as the footballer Francesco Totti and his wife have named their daughter Chanel, which, when you combine it with the fact that her elder brother is called Christian, seems to illustrate the points of reference of her parents (I’m not sure whether they’re being named after designers or the fragrances named after the designers, but if the next child is named Hai Karate that should settle the matter).

Corporate Rock

I’m unlikely ever to have a job with the type of responsibility as the people seen in this video, but I’d like to announce that if I ever do end up like these folk, then the readers of this blog have permission to come after me with a big shovel.

You can buy all forms of shovels at this link.

St Thumper’s Bumper Book of Popes

If there’s one thing you can’t really get away from in Italy, it’s the Catholic church. From Pope lollipops on sale in Rome to pictures of Padre Pio in the smallest provincial bakery, you’re reminded of its presence and importance everywhere. As a godless protestant all this stuff was new and alien to me, but when you dig into the history, it can be fascinating stuff. So I thought it was about time I made a post about some of my favourite Popes.

Formosus (891-96)

Nothing better illustrates the fun to be had in reading about old Popes than the case of Formosus, who was Pope from 891 until his death in 896, and who went on trial in 897. The year after he died. Yup, in what is believed to be the world’s first Monty Python sketch, the ex-Pope was dug up, propped up in court and made to respond to allegations put to him by Pope Stephen IV (not reputed to be his biggest fan) in what has become known as the Cadaver Synod. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Formosus didn’t put up a stellar defence, and after being found guilty of all charges was stripped of his robes and thrown into the Tiber. Beats reading about Robert the Bruce and his spider, eh?

Felix I (269-274)

Felix I is generally regarded as the first cat to be elected Pope, narrowly beating Sylvester I, who was Pope from 314-35. During Felix’s reign, the most popular souvenirs in Rome were paintings of his image with the words “I iz infallibul, duz yu hav a pwoblem wiz dat?” written on them.

Liberius (352-66)

Liberius makes the list for the simple fact that he is the earliest pope not to become a saint after his death, and I love an underdog. It’s not clear why he was the first not to get the old Celestial Knighthood, he seems to have made a lot of bankable contributions: he refused to sign the condemnation of Athanasius, gave a favourable reception to a deputation of the Eastern episcopate, and zzzzzzzzz … OK, OK, he doesn’t sound like the most dynamic go-getter, but he doesn’t come across as the Warren Harding of the Papacy either. Maybe he just forgot to miraculously heal some sick old woman in Basilicata in the years after his death, and it’s too late now.

Adrian IV (1154 – 59)

“Cor Blimey Guv’nor, the English ‘ave only gone and got themselves a bleedin’ Pope!” No doubt that was what they were saying on the streets of London Town when Nicholas Breakspear became the first and only English Pope in 1154. As you can an imagine, the arrival of an English Pope brought many changes in Rome: Dentists were excommunicated, a Papal Edict was issued stating that all meat and vegetables must be boiled for at least 45 minutes before eating and, most controversially, the Swiss Guard were replaced by a group of medieval Boy Scouts in tight-fitting shorts.

Pope Joan (???? – ??)

I first heard of the story of Pope Joan in a BBC documentary by about 10 years ago. Apparently, the story goes, Joan tricked everybody into believing she was male for years and the secret only came out when she died in childbirth. The church was then so horrified that for years afterwards during the papal inaugurations the Pope was supposedly made to sit on a hollow seat and somebody would reach underneath the robes to check he had knackers and.. I know! And this was on BBC 1 too!

So there you go, my list of Top of the Popes, and I didn’t even need to mention the Borgias …

Play

The stunning graphics of the Spider-Man game from 1983. Games have evolved, but Morrissey still makes records that sound like the ones he made 25 years ago.

I’m too young to have lived through any really interesting developments in either popular music or cinema. Sure, things have changed since I was 18 back in the late 80s, but not much really, and even the bands of today that I listen to (The White Stripes, Black Mountain, Franz Ferdinand etc) aren’t really doing anything new. At the same time, I realise that I have actually lived through what I think will be remembered in history as the golden age of at least one form of entertainment: video games.

We go back a long way. I remember my brother’s Atari consol back in the late 70s that had Pong (though we called it Tennis; I didn’t know it was called Pong until I saw it called that in an episode of The Simpsons), and I had a handheld Space Invaders console in the mid 80s where a marauding army of 4 (yes, FOUR!) aliens marched towards you. Yet I’ve never been a really big gamer; unlike some of my friends, I didn’t spend entire evenings at high school trying to build up my status on Elite (I spent them listening to Pink Floyd instead),  but I’ve usually had some console or other in the house.

The games I’ve liked the most are the sports simulations, and you can actually illustrate the development of games by looking at how these have evolved over the years. After Pong, the first football game I played was on the Spectrum 48K (a computer with the memory the size of an email) called (I think) Matchday where you could score directly from throw-ins. Then, a while later, Sensible Soccer came along which we thought was really, really sophisticated because you could, like, change formations. Soon though, the developers realised that people might prefer football games where the default view wasn’t that of passing overhead in a zeppelin, and for the last 15 years or so, Fifa and Pro Evolution/ISS have been duking it out and getting increasingly sophisticated. Too sophisticated, maybe, both games have more functions and formations than now I know what to do with; I used to like tweaking things here and there, but these days I tend to just send out the default squads. I wish someone would develop a version for Scottish football fans where the only formation available is 4-4-2, and the tactical options consist of shouting “Man on, Darren!” or “Get intae him, Malkie!” It would be a lot simpler. Maybe I’m just getting old.

Heavy Metal K-Tel

One of the things that will eventually die with all this music downloading malarkey is the cheapo compilation. This is a shame as they were an integral part of the record buying experience. Whether we’re talking about 4-LP box sets of James Last’s greatest hits or Top of the Pops albums with bikini-clad girls on the front inviting you in, these audio equivalents of Corgi books were there waiting to cash in on whatever the craze was at the time (my elder brother even once received Hits for a Truck Driving Man as a present at the height of the CB Radio craze; it contained Convoy, Keep on Truckin‘ and … er many other trucking themed hits).

At the start of the 80s, Heavy Metal was bothering the charts so much that it was inevitable that someone was going to step in and rush out a compilation of the best of today’s metal sounds. It was also pretty inevitable that the someone would be K-Tel.

The result was Axe Attack, which advertised itself as a solid collection of the very best in Heavy Metal, and to be fair, most of the big hitters at the time were there: AC/DC, Motorhead, Black Sabbath, Iron Maiden, Rainbow, Whitesnake etc.  The record achieved this impressive role call by adhering to the classic K-Tel strategy of cramming as many songs onto the record as they could and to Hell with things like sound quality (you get the idea that if they could have, they would have done away with the record label in the middle so they could have squeezed on some Uriah Heep).

It’s easy to laugh at K-Tel, but in the end, this record was probably more influential than any other in introducing Heavy Metal to a new generation of plukey young boys, me among them (actually I was too young even to be plukey; certainly young enough for the line “Well I make a pussy purr with a stroke of my hand” from Ted Nugent’s Cat Scratch Fever to go flying right over my head). Girlschool’s great cover version of Race with the Devil is below.