Compulsive hoarding is pretty out there, no? I mean what kind of a weirdo saves all that cardboard and bubble wrap, ties it up with string and wedges it in on top of crappy old wing chairs and fake-veneer TV cabinets stacked high with bundles of old newspapers and books, then tops the whole teetering pile off with 30-or-so cat litter trays (full), leaving the felines themselves – perhaps 40 of them – to smarm along the alleys carved through this dreck (for this is but one room of an entire semi so engorged), shitting and pissing wherever?   More...

The transvaginal probe is a long, dildo-shaped instrument used to detect foetal heartbeats – or, at least, that’s what an unholy alliance in the US of state legislators, anti-abortion campaigners and their medical henchmen see as its purpose. Increasing numbers of states are demanding that women seeking abortions be subjected to the probe, so that they can hear the beating heart of the “person” they are about to murder. One doctor interviewed on BBC’s Newsnight – standing in front of the examination couch, probe in his hand – explained that the procedure had no medical utility and was simply a way of traumatising these women.   More...

In keeping with the convergence of downtown Los Angeles – as depicted in Blade Runner (1982) – and Britain’s metropolitan regions, there is an increasing number of noodle bars throughout the realm. I speak here of London, because that’s where I live – but I’ve noodled about in cities as diverse as Sheffield, Bristol and Cardiff. The basic noodle bar format is refreshingly bare bones: strip lighting, melamine-topped tables, wipe-dirty floor and a clientele with its faces over bowls of broth.   More...

I consider chicken again – and gladly! At night, in sweat-basted sleep, I slip and slide over chicken-skin terrain, popping juice-engorged blisters with my toecaps. By day I wonder if I should try out the new takeaway that’s opened down the road, the name of which – Chicken Valley – appeals to my sense of south London’s fowl topography: a vale of chickens, what might that be like?   More...

People say social media are enormously important. Yes they do. Presumably they tweet this sort of thing to one another: “Social media are enormously important because they create new virtual communities that offer all the advantages of propinquity without the drawbacks of phys prxmty.” I say “presumably” because I’ve never actually tweeted myself, so I don’t know if they compose their pithy 140 character apothegms intuitively – or aim for an approximate count then abbreviate as above. In the giddy months when Twitter was trilling up and up to its current state of cacophonous ubiquity, I was asked on a radio panel show if I’d ever consider tweeting and replied that the only circumstances under which I could imagine doing such a thing would be if a songbird flew into my mouth.   More...

Will Self’s latest Real Meals column from the New Statesman:

I remember about half a decade ago being on a metro in Barcelona, rattling out through the suburbs towards some beachfront resort, and a young man getting on with a life-size puppet of Madonna that he proceeded to dance with – her stuffed legs were tied to his live ones, her insensate hands clasped in his feeling ones. I can’t recall which Madonna record was playing on his beatbox but it was big that year. I thought the performance exquisite and witty but then I was in touristic mode while the other passengers were commuters. I dobbed up a two-euro coin – they sat there stony-faced.   More...

It’s often said contemptuously of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, president of Iran, that he has a degree in traffic management. In fact, his degree is in civil engineering and traffic management, but as the latter is almost always subsumed to the former, it’s impossible for us to know to what extent his expertise lies in designing and constructing roundabouts, and how much in assessing their capability for regulating traffic flows. Anyway, what’s wrong with traffic management?   More...

The latest Real Meals column from the New Statesman:

My old friend the writer and academic David Flusfeder and I arrived early at the Ebury Hotel in Canterbury for a dinner after a literary event at the University of Kent. It was the only table our Kentish colleagues had been able to find that wasn’t in a loved-up restaurant – this being the evening of 14 February. In my experience, Valentine’s Day dinners à deux are always an anticlimax. If you need a special anniversary meal to call attention to your mutual love, the chances are it’s already spent. The most passionate dinners, I’d argue, are in fact ante-climactic, because you’ve already made love before you’re handed the menu.   More...

The latest Madness of Crowds column from the New Statesman:

Saturday Live is an innocuous enough Radio 4 magazine programme that goes out – duh! – live on Saturday mornings. I listen to it in a desultory fashion. At times, it seems heart-warming, yet it can also be not only unbearably winsome but a perfect exemplar of a certain we’re-cosy-but-sort-of-liberal-and-compassionate strain in the self-identification of the British bourgeoisie.   More...

The latest Real meals column from the New Statesman:

Now I know what a susceptor is, I’d like one put inside George Osborne’s pants – actually, I wouldn’t mind having one put inside my own pants, or indeed just about everyone’s pants on this godforsaken Siberian island of ours. A susceptor, for those of you not up to speed on the wonders of dielectric heating applied to cooking technology, is a thin layer of aluminium either seamed through the packaging of microwaveable foods, or inside the small plastic or paper trays they reside on. The metal absorbs infrared energy efficiently and then radiates it inwards towards the food (or the chancellor’s genitals, pubic area and possibly lower belly, depending on whether he’s a briefs or boxers sort of a chap).   More...