The Inferno

The gentleman I’m named after is a legendary athlete and one of the greatest runners of all time. Fact is stranger than fiction.

Lasse Viren

I suppose all of us are victims of something or the other, so this is not a panacea for all types, but for some of the most common types anyway.

1. Stop watching TV. Unless your idea of entertainment happens to be shows hosted by Carl Sagan or Sir David Attenborough, turn the idiot box off. It does nothing for your mind. Especially if you’re young and impressionable. Remember that the average TV show glorifies mediocrity and caters to the lowest common denominator and in the long run will only diminish your cerebral capabilities.
2. Turning off the TV should disable this, but in case you’re a true believer, stop paying attention to sports. Watching multimillionaires tussle over possession of an object, once again, does absolutely naught for your brain. At best, you can indulge in cerebral sports like chess. Contact sports of any kind are so horrifyingly bloodthirsty and primitive, you might as well be a barbarian. Oh wait…

3. Start reading. I don’t mean appalling tabloids that cover the latest stars’ pregnancies in excruciating detail, but quality literature instead. It might open your mind to new perspectives, and at the least, will improve your diction and grammar.

Those would be the top 3. I’m sure many will accuse me of being a killjoy, but if your only source of joy is TV shows and organized sports, you might as well throw in the towel. Man had pastimes before the advent of TV and millionaire sport leagues, I’m sure we can discover them again.

I just read on the BBC News site that William Evan Allan, the last surviving Aussie veteran of both World Wars who saw active service passed away. The webpage on Allan’s demise then mentioned this in the second last paragraph.

Australia's Minister for Veterans Affairs, De-Anne Kelly, said his death meant an entire generation who left Australia to defend their nation and the British Empire had been lost.

It was this line that stood out. I think this is the essence of history. 90 years after Allan enlisted, the British Empire is nowhere to be seen. In its place, the Anglo-American hegemony tramples roughshod over the globe, but the sun did set on the British Raj. How many countless young Englishmen died in the jungles of the Orient with a copy of Kipling in their backpacks? How many men did England summon to her bidding and their untimely demise through the clarion call of Empire? While this line does evoke images of a grand empire, benevolent yet stern, a forbidding edifice of civilization beckoning men to die at her feet, one must remember that even the most seemingly eternal of empires have crumbled and gone. And therein, my dear chaps, lies History’s greatest lesson.

Reading the information on mental disorders on a site reminded me of the hilarious excerpt from Jerome K Jerome’s classic “Three Men in a Boat”. But first, here is the list of twelve important, common mental disorders, which, they tell us, are extremely common in society today.

paranoid personality disorder, which is a pattern of distrust and suspiciousness such that others’ motives are interpreted as malevolent

schizoid personality disorder, which is a pattern of detachment from social relationships and a restricted range of emotional restriction

schizotypal personality disorder, which is a pattern of acute discomfort in close relationships, cognitive or perceptual distortions, and eccentricities of behavior

obsessive compulsive personality disorder, which is a pattern of preoccupation with orderliness, perfectionism, and control

narcissistic personality disorder, which is a pattern of grandiosity, need for admiration, and lack of empathy

avoidant personality disorder, which is a pattern of social inhibition, feelings of inadequacy, and hypersensitivity to a negative evaluation

borderline personality disorder, which is a pattern of instability in interpersonal relationships, self-image, affects, and marked impulsivity

dependent personality disorder, which is a pattern of submissive and clinging behavior resulted to an excessive need to be taken care of

antisocial personality disorder, which is a pattern of disregard for, and violation of, the rights of others

histrionic personality disorder, which is a pattern of excessive emotionality and attention seeking

depressive personality disorder is a pervasive pattern of depressive cognitions and behaviors

negativistic (passive-aggressive) personality disorder is a pervasive pattern of negative attitudes and passive resistance to demands for adequate performance in social and occupational situations.

So, if you’ve gone through those and nodded your head wisely at each and wondered, “Hmm, it sounds like I must have that”, here is the excerpt from ‘Three Men in a Boat’ that may put it all in perspective.


It is a most extraordinary thing, but I never read a patent medicine advertisement without being impelled to the conclusion that I am suffering from the particular disease therein dealt with in its most virulent form. The diagnosis seems in every case to correspond exactly with all the sensations that I have ever felt.

I remember going to the British Museum one day to read up the treatment for some slight ailment of which I had a touch - hay fever, I fancy it was. I got down the book, and read all I came to read; and then, in an unthinking moment, I idly turned the leaves, and began to indolently study diseases, generally. I forget which was the first distemper I plunged into - some fearful, devastating scourge, I know - and, before I had glanced half down the list of "premonitory symptoms," it was borne in upon me that I had fairly got it.

I sat for awhile, frozen with horror; and then, in the listlessness of despair, I again turned over the pages. I came to typhoid fever - read the symptoms - discovered that I had typhoid fever, must have had it for months without knowing it - wondered what else I had got; turned up St. Vitus's Dance - found, as I expected, that I had that too, - began to get interested in my case, and determined to sift it to the bottom, and so started alphabetically - read up ague, and learnt that I was sickening for it, and that the acute stage would commence in about another fortnight. Bright's disease, I was relieved to find, I had only in a modified form, and, so far as that was concerned, I might live for years.

Cholera I had, with severe complications; and diphtheria I seemed to have been born with. I plodded conscientiously through the twenty-six letters, and the only malady I could conclude I had not got was
housemaid's knee.

I felt rather hurt about this at first; it seemed somehow to be a sort of slight. Why hadn't I got housemaid's knee? Why this invidious reservation? After a while, however, less grasping feelings prevailed. I reflected that I had every other known malady in the pharmacology, and I grew less selfish, and determined to do without housemaid's knee. Gout, in its most malignant stage, it would appear, had seized me without my being aware of it; and zymosis I had evidently been suffering with from boyhood. There were no more diseases after zymosis, so I concluded there was nothing else the matter with me.

I sat and pondered. I thought what an interesting case I must be from a medical point of view, what an acquisition I should be to a class! Students would have no need to "walk the hospitals," if they had me. I
was a hospital in myself. All they need do would be to walk round me, and, after that, take their diploma.

Then I wondered how long I had to live. I tried to examine myself. I felt my pulse. I could not at first feel any pulse at all. Then, all of a sudden, it seemed to start off. I pulled out my watch and timed it. I made it a hundred and forty-seven to the minute. I tried to feel my heart. I could not feel my heart. It had stopped beating. I have since been induced to come to the opinion that it must have been there all the time, and must have been beating, but I cannot account for it. I patted myself all over my front, from what I call my waist up to my head, and I went a bit round each side, and a little way up the back. But I could not feel or hear anything. I tried to look at my tongue. I stuck it out as far as ever it would go, and I shut one eye, and tried to examine it with the other. I could only see the tip, and the only thing that I could gain from that was to feel more certain than before that I had scarlet fever.

I had walked into that reading-room a happy, healthy man. I crawled out a decrepit wreck.

I went to my medical man. He is an old chum of mine, and feels my pulse, and looks at my tongue, and talks about the weather, all for nothing, when I fancy I'm ill; so I thought I would do him a good turn by going to
him now. "What a doctor wants," I said, "is practice. He shall have me. He will get more practice out of me than out of seventeen hundred of your ordinary, commonplace patients, with only one or two diseases each." So
I went straight up and saw him, and he said:

"Well, what's the matter with you?"

I said:

"I will not take up your time, dear boy, with telling you what is the matter with me. Life is brief, and you might pass away before I had finished. But I will tell you what is NOT the matter with me. I have not got housemaid's knee. Why I have not got housemaid's knee, I cannot tell you; but the fact remains that I have not got it. Everything else, however, I HAVE got."

And I told him how I came to discover it all.

Then he opened me and looked down me, and clutched hold of my wrist, and then he hit me over the chest when I wasn't expecting it - a cowardly thing to do, I call it - and immediately afterwards butted me with the
side of his head. After that, he sat down and wrote out a prescription, and folded it up and gave it me, and I put it in my pocket and went out.

I did not open it. I took it to the nearest chemist's, and handed it in. The man read it, and then handed it back.

He said he didn't keep it.

I said:

"You are a chemist?"

He said:

"I am a chemist. If I was a co-operative stores and family hotel combined, I might be able to oblige you. Being only a chemist hampers me."

I read the prescription. It ran:

"1 lb. beefsteak, with
1 pt. bitter beer
every 6 hours.
1 ten-mile walk every morning.
1 bed at 11 sharp every night.
And don't stuff up your head with things you don't understand."

I followed the directions, with the happy result - speaking for myself - that my life was preserved, and is still going on.


Here’s a neat test I found online while researching the effects of long term anger on humans. If you spend a lot of time angry or just hating everything you see, you might want to take the following test and see how you fare

Clinical Anger Scale (CAS)

I’m not sure if this is one of those spurious pop psychology quizzes, or a more serious one, but it does seem to be the latter. Either way, try it out.

The humble dust mite, cause of allergic suffering for millions.

Very few bands have paralleled the mighty Sodom in their two decade plus stomp through the hairy world of thrash metal.

Agent Orange is simply stupendous. The first two tracks alone are bone-crushingly heavy and have that trademark scary earnestness which all German metal does. Perhaps that IS why it is so effective. This is no mall metal for impressionable juveniles. This is the real deal, as close to perfect thrash as Europe ever came. Kreator and Destruction certainly form the unholy triumvirate of Teutonic thrash, but Sodom is unmistakably at the top of the game. Perhaps the best test of all, Agent Orange dounds as good now as it probably did in 1989, when it was first issued. Not many thrash albums sound as good 15 years later.

I like Sodom because they don’t sing about the whales dying or vegetarianism or how the extravagant rock star lifestyle has got them beat. They sing about war. They chronicle this most barbaric of mankind’s inventions in virtually all their songs, over and over again. Remember the earnest single-mindedness I mentioned earlier. I love them for it. Sodom is also responsible for singlehandedly creating the genre of Vietnam Metal (if such a thing can exist at all). Eleven years after Agent Orange, they returned with M-16, an album reminiscent of their heyday, with a few gems standing out. Opening with actor Robert Duvall’s classic line “I love the smell of napalm in the morning”, M-16 rips along until the title track, which is the best track on the album.

Just before that, in 1999, Sodom issued Code Red. What a masterpiece of the classic 80s thrash sound this juggernaut is. Steamrolling along at breakneck speed, Code Red makes you think you stand all alone in a field, surrounded by your enemies, armed with only a chainsaw. Doom flashback, anyone? The cover aptly illustrates this metaphor, maybe a little too clearly

Now you may think Sodom is another one of those grim Northern European bands who walk around with a scowl and a grudge against the world. This picture certainly supports that thought

But in reality, I’d like to think they are goofier, perhaps not as grim and efficient and industrious as their output seems to portray them to be. Is this assumption supported by

It does not matter. Sodom are living legends, in the metal genre, at any rate. They are also credited with spawning black metal, although that is a dubious distinction at best. If you like premium thrash, with strong elements of death metal in it, and traces of what was to become black metal, you will love Sodom. Harsher than gravel vocals, machine gun riffs and proficient drumming all serve to keep Sodom alive and killing today.

Here’s a particularly evocative snippet from ‘A Bottle of Gin’ by Robert Bloch.


Collins hung up quickly. He'd made a damned fool of himself again. But it was no use. He couldn't tell Edith what he meant to tell her. About the djinn. about the way he loved her.
It was loving her that drove him to drink in the first place. That feeling of inferiority. She was always so calm, so cool. So unapproachable. And he was just a little museum clerk.


Since Turkey is so agitated about entry into the EU, and a majority of people in the EU don’t want them in there, it’s become a big deal these days.

Turkey claims the EU should be a global player and not just a ‘Christian Club’. Turkey, a predominantly poor country with only 5% of its area in Europe and the rest in Asia has straddled the two continents for two millenia. The Romans knew that he who ruled Constantinople ruled the world. The seat of the Byzantine empire, Turkey once was the capital of the world. Even its glorious capital’s names reflect its passage from one conquering empire to another. Byzantium, Constantinople and now Istanbul. Once the European hordes ravaged Turkey. Bulgarians, Slavs, Russians, Italians and Greeks all rushed to Turkey to pillage it once.

But times change. Now it is impoverished, Islamic Turkey that wants access to the rich markets of Europe, something nations like Germany and France are seeking to limit.

Personally, I think that Turkey shouldn’t be allowed into the EU or anywhere near it until it publicly acknowledges, apologizes for and institutes reparations for the Armenian genocide. The first known genocide in the twentieth century, it served as inspiration for Hitler’s mechanized holocaust a quarter of a century later. He is famous for having remarked, “Who remembers the Armenians?” while discussing the Final Solution.

The Armenian diaspora, descendants of an ancient line that has managed to stick together through countless adversity, including extermination attempts by the Turks and the Russians under Stalin, are correct in bringing up this fact before the EU and demanding justice. After all, if the world remembers the Jews and the Rwandans and the Cambodians, why not the Armenians?