Saw Lady Gaga’s BBC Radio One show from Carlisle streamed on BBC 3. We were told she was terrifically excited, this being the first time she’d ever played Carlisle.

She was carried on in a plywood coffin from which she clumsily emerged to totter across the stage in a plastic outfit which I assume was supposed to be sexy into which she had stuffed something in the shape of a beach-ball to give the impression she was eight months pregnant. A symbol of the Earth Mother, I am told. She then performed a range of hops, skips and jumps pleasantly reminiscent of Ms. Anne Widdecombe’s jitterbug interlude on Strictly Come Hoofing. Then she started singing.
She has a fine voice, despite a tendency to squeak at unexpected moments and a tremulous uncertainty on high notes. She has some good songs. But, for a certainty, she is no Madonna, no Beyoncé.
The album, Born This Way is a credible effort, produced with bags of panache and with a couple of effective big-ambition numbers suitable for belting out by summer throngs. But The Album of the Decade? Have a titter of wit.
Low-point of the Carlisle gig came when Ms. Gaga did her best with the Milton DeLugg/Willie Stein classic ‘Orange Coloured Sky’, forever associated with supreme jazz balladeer Nat King Cole.
Listen to Cole caressing the lyric, and then the blast of brass to waken the dead from the Stan Kenton orchestra, and, tell me true, which puts the other in the ha’penny place.

Flash! Bam! Alakazam! So there’s a banker, a Sunday Independent reader and a woman on benefits at a table with 12 biscuits on it and the banker takes 11 of the biscuits and says to the Indo reader, “You’d better watch out, that scrounger has her eye on your biscuit.”

“Court must ensure Gadafy held liable for regime’s actions”, shouted the Irish Times over eight columns above an article by a Peter Cluskey commenting on the UN Security Council’s reference of Gadafy to the International Criminal Court for war crimes allegedly committed in the course of the current conflict. The indictment of Gadafy was sponsored by, among others, the US, Russia, China and Israel.
None of these States accepts the jurisdiction of the ICC over its own citizens. In theory, the Security Council can override a refusal to comply with an ICC summons. But the US, Russia and China have veto powers and the US routinely vetoes any resolution displeasing to Israel. So, no chance of Russia being brought to book for Chechnya, or the US for Iraq, China for its atrocious treatment of the Uighars or Israel for its crimes against the Palestinians.
Resolution 1970 empowering the court to move against Gadafy contains a paragraph explicitly giving immunity to Nato forces involved in military action in Libya. “Nationals, current or former officials or personnel from a State outside the Libyan Arab Jamahiriya which is not a party to the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court shall be subject to the exclusive jurisdiction of that State for all alleged acts or omissions arising out of or related to operations in the Libyan Arab Jamahiriya established or authorized by the Council, unless such exclusive jurisdiction has been expressly waived by the State.”
To close off any residual possibility of their citizens being made amenable to the ICC, the Bush administration negotiated, and Obama has copper-fastened, more than a hundred bilateral agreements whereby States undertake never to hand over a US citizen to the ICC, irrespective of the crime the citizen has allegedly committed or the persuasiveness of the evidence. In Iraq and Afghanistan, this protection has been extended to mercenaries working for US “security” companies.
The bilateral agreements spell out that no country which endorses the authority of the ICC will be eligible for US military aid: “No United States military assistance may be provided to the government of a country that is a party to the International Criminal Court”.
Obama, Putin, Hu Jintao and Netanyahu feel free to bring forward a resolution authorising ICC action against the head of a State to which they are hostile, while telling the court that it can go take a running jump if it ever presumes to apply the same criteria to themselves. And “experts” queue up in the likes of the Irish Times to pronounce that all this is perfectly OK.
You don’t have to have a good word to say about Gadafy to hold that this is not OK at all.

“Philosophically one has to question whether there is any merit in being worried about anything” – memo from Deutsche Bank to senior managers prior to bankers’ meeting on the Eurozone crisis.

Anybody who has ever tried to croon a lullaby to a child will emphasise with Go The Fuck To Sleep.
US writer and new dad Adam Mansbach has based the text on his futile efforts to lure daughter Vivien to slumber. The book is set for publication this month. “The eagles who soar through the sky are at rest/ And the creatures who crawl, run and creep/ I know you’re not thirsty. That’s bullshit. Stop lying/ Lie the fuck down and sleep.” Or: “The cubs and the lions are snoring/ Wrapped in a big snuggly heap/ How come you can do all this other great shit/ But you can’t lie the fuck down and sleep?”
Good question.