The almost completely inexplicable artwork choices of The Beach Boys

I love The Beach Boys. I always think more of people who say the same thing. But we seem to be an increasingly skulking, cowed band of largely silent disciples. We all consider that of all the groups in the history of popular music, The Beach Boys are the one who deserve more credit and critical recognition than they generally receive. But on the whole we keep it to ourselves.

There are a few reasons why they have generally been last in the queue when retrospective accolades of greatness are being distributed. Perhaps a lot of them have been identical to the reasons why their fans generally don't try and push their music onto anybody else.

First is that there was a fundamental break in their creative output at the height of their powers in the mid-1960s. Creative differences within the group and Brian Wilson's increasingly parlous mental health - exacerbated, no doubt, by the truckloads of drugs he was taking on a daily basis - caused the Smile album project to dissolve into a series of half-worked tracks and afterthoughts which gradually peppered all of the band's future releases. Shorn of their proper context, they were never as potent as they might have been.

Then there are people who consider them to be an itsy-ditsy band of one-trick ponies. Simple pedlars of surf music or lovey-dovey hippy peaceniks. These people could probably be shown that this isn't the case with a little education, but you'll probably find that they are spectacularly resistant to submitting themselves to such.

And I think that this might be because of a third reason, one which has increasingly been vexing me lately. Specifically, it is the fact that The Beach Boys had a troubling tendency to give some of their most important record releases peculiarly awful, strange and unsuitable cover artwork.

Pet Sounds (1966) - pioneering, epoch-making, pop masterpiece. So, you know, obviously goaty.

Why did they do this? It's hard to say, especially considering that early in their contractual negotiations with Capitol Records the group managed to gain a more autonomous approach to recording at their own expense in exchange for a greater share of the sales royalties. In other words, they needed their records to sell more than most of their contemporaries did. And this was all OK when they were being acclaimed as superstars and Brian Wilson as the Mozart of popular music. People would have bought those records even if the cover had been a splayed anus. However, an album of the half-baked songs spat out by a failed concept album, performed by drug casualties and the worst kind of late 1960s hippy, is a rather harder sell. Putting the record in a paper bag with a $1 bill stapled to the front was probably the wisest course of action, and one which of course the band did not take.

Friends (1968) - low key,  understated and quietly beautiful post-Pet Sounds hidden gem. Best depicted
by a dazzlingly terrifying glimpse into the shattered, disembodied astral plane of an alternate dimension.

Maybe they were making a broader philosophical point about the nature of perception? Of appearances and realities? The records were, for the most part, still great after all. As I clearly implied in the opening sentence. It's possible, albeit a slim possibility. But The Beach Boys were never a band who dealt in slim possibilities. They were all about telling you that you should meditate, growing big beards and imagining that they were a tree.

Surf's Up (1971) - perhaps the last great collection of original material released by the group in
their classic era. So a dismal, unsettling image of a man and horse being impaled in a storm, then.

No, the likely scenario is also the conclusion that I'd hoped I'd not have to draw. But here it is: they were fannies. The sort of fannies whose fannydom did nothing to impair their ear for music, but in any sphere outside of that, all bets were off. Oh well.

Endless Summer (1974) - huge-selling mid-1970s compilation of all of the group's biggest hits,
by extension virtually perfect. Coupled with a picture which could be distributed to every school
in a successful campaign to warn children about the dangers of almost anything. Especially
approaching strange middle-aged men who skulk in bushes. During a tsunami.

Elephants and testicles

I think that it is now universally accepted that cancer can do one, so it's always good to see anyone stepping up to facilitate this process. The doing of one. CheckOneTwo are raising awareness of a cancer which predominantly strikes men. Women may well also be affected by testicular cancer but largely their own testicles remain unfettered.

Testicular cancer is the most likely cancer to afflict young adult men but it is also one of the most curable and survivable. The five year survival rate of sufferers in the UK is over 97%. As with all cancers, to give yourself the best chance it is best to catch it early. That's where CheckOneTwo's #FEELINGNUTS campaign comes in.

So, the next time your partner, spouse or mother tell you to stop playing with your goolies "because we're in the Harvester", stand up and be proud. For you are taking care of business and responsibility for your own health. For once, wrangling your knackers is the sensible, grown-up thing to do. As it ever was.

For more information on CheckOneTwo's #FEELINGNUTS campaign, you can visit their website, follow them on Twitter or Facebook, or watch their YouTube channel.

Rik Mayall 1958-2014

Other people have died before, of course. And unless we've been horribly lied to, they will again. I might, even. But I suppose I'll cross that bridge when I get to it. Rik Mayall crossed that bridge today, numbingly, crushingly, horribly early. It's perhaps the only thing he has ever done to the British public that has not made them laugh riotously and made them feel glad to be alive.

Because that's what Rik Mayall was. A lightning bolt of energy, a distillation of every good thing about this existence, a cocked thumb at all the shitty things that grind people down. Those shitty things are boring. Rik Mayall was never boring a day in his life.

I was too young to have been affected by The Young Ones but the general opinion - and it's not just an opinion that has been made as a snap judgement before today's tears have dried - is that it was comedy's equivalent of the atomic bomb. A programme that was cutting edge, thrilling, visceral, terrifying; a moment in time after which nothing could ever be the same, even if we decided we wanted it to.

Being too young for The Young Ones had its own benefits, mind you. Most of the people who were so altered by it would probably have been off at university or starting out in their working lives when I was watching Rik present Grim Tales, one of the most dazzling, anarchic and brilliant storytelling exercises ever committed to television, let alone children's television. There was never anyone better on children's television than Rik Mayall. He made all the new things seem scary and impossibly exciting all at once.

There was Bottom, too, of course. For the Oppenheimer of alternative comedy to make such an oddly broad, childish and knockabout exercise in smut and toilet humour should have seemed anachronistic. It never did, though. There's no point in trying to analyse why that was. It just was. Rik Mayall understood what was, understood the absurdity of what was, and made us all shit our pants laughing about it.

In the last part of his life, post quad-bike accident (but I refuse to refer to it as "in his later years", he was only 56 years old, for god's sake) his appearances on TV became more sporadic but no less effective or exceptional. The only difference was that they were an even bigger treat. Last year he played in Greg Davies' excellent Channel 4 sitcom Man Down, a programme which I have only just this last month caught up on. He stole the show, of course, without it ever being to the detriment of the overall piece. Like everything else, it seems inconceivable that he won't be back in the second series.

It seems inconceivable that he won't be back, full stop. Rik Mayall and comedy were indivisible in my mind. People have died before, of course, and we've always found some way to recover enough to laugh again. It feels different this time. Peculiar.

We will all laugh again, of course. Rik Mayall won't be there to hear it, but I like to think that there'll be a small part of every titter, chuckle or guffaw which is a tribute to him, his life and his work. Thank you, Rik.

Jimmy Hill the Redeemer

World Cup Red Card Cards

If I'm honest, I think I only watch the World Cup for the dismissals. International football's biggest tournament has a way of elevating everything it touches. There have been countless better goals than Diego Maradona's second against England, but the combination of place, time and significance means that it looks set to remain as THE goal. Likewise, there's no indisipline quite like World Cup indiscipline. People rightly argue that it is a shame that George Best or Ryan Giggs never got the opportunity to grace the World Cup stage, but I feel just as much of a sense of loss for Pat Van den Hauwe or Vinny Jones. Paul Scholes played at two World Cups, but I always got the impression that he never meant to be that bad at tackling. He was never a true artist in the same way as Julian Dicks or Vinny Samways.

To celebrate this finest of the fine football arts, in association with Twohundredpercent I have designed a range of 25 collectible World Cup Red Card Cards, available as greetings cards or postcards. Now other fans of ill-discipline can assemble their very own treasury of the most notable World Cup moments and relive their very favourite wild fouls and outrageous pieces of referee-deceiving fakery. It's sure to bring football into disrepute and the first batch off the shelf will be no doubt heading to FIFA headquarters and the office of Mr. J. Blatter.

FIFA, of course, are continually trying to clamp down on such foul play, potty mouth and various other monkeyshines. However, for the committed fan of the red card, these efforts are nothing but good news. Their chosen method to bring transgressors back into line is to encourage the referees to pop the cards out until they learn, as though they are misbehaving dogs. The only worry red card connoisseurs have is that one day they might, along similar lines, try to reverse the trend and instead reward players who toe the line. Referees taking to the field with a string of sausages or a pocket full of Haribo instead of a notebook and pencil remains my worst nightmare.

159 players have been dismissed in the nineteen World Cup Finals tournaments so far, to 157 different miscreants. Cameroon's Rigobert Song and France's kung-fu master Zinedine Zidane are the only repeat offenders, while Argentina's Leandro Cufré is the only player to be given his marching orders without having set foot on the field of play. 159 in 772 matches equates to a rather meek-looking 0.21 dismissals per match. However, it is a rather misleading statistic, because it is becoming far more prevalent. In the first nine World Cups, just 22 players were invited to leave the field early. In both 1950 and 1970, no-one was sent off at all. The latter of those tournaments was significant as it was also the first World Cup since yellow and red cards were introduced to international football and although the red card didn't make an appearance until four years later, it has since been shown 137 times.

This equates to a rate of 0.25 red cards per World Cup match, or one every four games. In the last three tournaments, this has risen to one every three. Since three games is the minimum number that any team who qualifies for the Finals can play, you are now statistically more likely to have a player sent off than not. If you go further than the group stage and still don't have any players dismissed, you're simply not trying. Days like 18th June 1998, where five players were sent off in a single round of group matches (Denmark v. South Africa and France v. Saudi Arabia) or 25th June 2006, the day of the second round match between the Netherlands and Portugal in which 16 players were booked and 4 sent off are starting to look less like aberrations and more like the norm.

All of which is great news for me, until you remember that whilst dismissals are trending unrelentingly upward, goals-per-game are falling fast. Just as fast as dismissals are rising, in fact, or moreso. At the current rate, by the 2142 World Cup at the very latest we can expect more red cards than goals in each and every World Cup game. I drew a graph and everything, so this is definitely going to happen.

I mentioned my rigorous researches on Twitter and Terry Duffelen, Fußball correspondent on Twohundredpercent and eminent football podcaster, remarked, "red card coefficients are the future of football", a thought which was the perfect combination of funny and bottom-clenchingly terrifying. Because if red cards are to become the game's new currency, we can expect teams going through elaborate simulation in order to prevent their opponents getting sent for an early bath. And while their own tackling would reach new heights of ferocious overkill, the players on the receiving end would react with such Gandhi-like equanimity and calmness that the referee won't know what to think. No-one would get sent off at all. Combine that with there being no goals either and every World Cup game would essentially be like watching Brighton and Hove Albion: you're slightly drunk, it's raining, nothing is happening on the pitch and you don't know where you're supposed to sit.

The only way to prevent this ludicrous situation from occurring is to send everybody off before the game has even started. This is something I'm sure we can all get behind.

It's not just Red Card Cards that are available via my Redbubble, there are loads of other cards, prints and items of clothing to be had. Or you can just go and look at the silly pictures: dotmund on Redbubble

My mates were on the telly

My mates were on the telly last night. This shouldn't be exciting any more. It's 2014, for a start. Nowadays, anyone can be famous if they want to be, and entirely on their own terms. Beauty and lifestyle vloggers from YouTube are now so pulsatingly popular that a public appearance has been known to bring Covent Garden to a standstill. Being on the telly shouldn't still be such a big deal.

My mates, who were on the telly last night

Another reason why my mates being on the telly shouldn't excite me any more is because it's 2014 and this means that I should be old enough to know better. The day before my mates were on the telly (which was last night) was my 34th birthday. I am old. And wizened. Bits of me hurt and other parts smell and I can never quite guarantee which bits are going to fall into which category. I am older now, in fact, than Pete was when I first met him. Pete is one of my mates (who were on the telly last night).

But guess what? Your mates being on the telly is still exciting. Thrillingly so.

We decamped to their local boozer in Hove for the hottest premiere that Sussex has seen since the Norman Invasion to watch. Any locals hoping to watch the Arsenal -West Ham Premier League match were squirrelled away in a room upstairs so as not to bother the people who were watching a televised gardening contest. But no matter, the atmosphere we all created was just as giddy as any communal pub football-watching experience of my life and far more good-natured. Opposing contestants were booed like pantomime villains, and when our heroes prevailed and won the preserves making test at the end, the roof came off. All told, having the gardening on instead of the football may appear to be a bold shift in conventional pub dynamics, but it was an unreservedly successful one. If nothing else, there was a buffet.

Next week my mates will be on the telly again. I'm not sure how I'll cope not watching it in a pub. For a start I won't know when to cheer. I'll probably have to make up all my own chants, too.

Your mates being on the telly is still exciting. However, it's not quite the same as it would have been in the past, because Tim Berners-Lee invented the internet and the internet has allowed the invention of Twitter. Twitter is an instant feedback sluice, a ceaselessly-flowing pipe of data and opinions, thoughts and feelings. Put another way, it's a shitfunnel, and this shitfunnel is going off in your face. Trepidatiously, I began to explore what other people were making of my mates being on the telly last night.

As I have mentioned before, I am now old. Old enough, at least, to not be surprised by people. And I've been on and around the internet for over a decade, so pretty much nothing shocks or offends me any more. So imagine my surprise when this was the very first tweet I saw on the subject:

hashtag: ponces

I wasn't surprised that people didn't like them per se, as we all know that not everyone is going to like you or like your friends. Also, television programmes are by their very nature never the whole picture. They are edited and re-ordered to fit a third party's view of what the narrative should be, with one eye always squarely on entertainment. Someone who doesn't like what they see of you on TV may be pleasantly surprised if they had to deal with you in real time.

I also wasn't surprised that someone who didn't like something had said so on Twitter. It is, after all, a shitfunnel and it's going off in your face. No, what surprised me is that I actually bristled. I bristled! How dare someone I don't know not like my mates (who were on the telly last night). He doesn't even know them! How can you dismiss someone without knowing all the facts?

Oh god, what was I doing?

Against my better judgement, I took another handful of blood pressure tablets and yomped in yet further. Predictably, there were just as many nice comments as nasty ones. Naturally, I found myself agreeing with these and growing increasingly convinced that the people tweeting them and I could grow to be firm friends.

This is, as far as I am concerned, the only rational response any human being could have had

Meanwhile, Lincoln WI approve. Summer Fetes in Spalding may have special guest jam judges this year

I think the positive comments very much outweighed the negatives in the end and so my researches were, on balance, a nice thing to do. My mates were on the telly last night but now they also represent many things to many people. They are everyman heroes, tweed-wearers of the year, nascent gay icons and the beards that just won't quit.

The only one of these things which started to niggle me, in fact, was the use of the word "hipster". "Hipster gardeners", "fashionably-bearded" and "hipster ponces" are all terms I have seen used. As I see it, "hipster" is just the fashionable term for people who try and be fashionable. Being fashionable is a reactive process, whereas Gary and Pete are proactive people. They don't look or dress like they do out of any notion of kowtowing to current trends. They are bringing sexy back on their own terms. Or, to put it another way, they're both too old to be hipsters. A hipster in their 40s would be a pathetic sight, and I think it's impossible to argue that either of our heroes is a pathetic individual. If nothing else, they kicked all your arses up and down that jam tent. Their bouquet was under-rated, too. Renaissance men. Upstanding men. Real men. There's no artifice or pretension there. So bloody shut up with the "hipster" thing, you idiots.

God.

I mean, I might be biased. Next week I will probably be watching the show on my own with Twitter open and I can't guarantee that I won't wade in to any number of futile internet arguments. If this experience has taught me anything, it's that I've learnt nothing and can't be trusted to be rational when there are Feelings floating about. Now, disclaimers out of the way, I'm off to find some more proper, constructive appraisals of last night's show.

It's possible, but they'd only be their own bits that they'd severed by mistake

This is the sort of unnerved feeling you get just before you realise it is, in fact, lust

If you would like to know or see more (and by the way, you definitely do and should) then you can follow my mates (who were on telly last night) on Twitter here: @vegetablismuk, like their Facebook page here: Vegetablism or read their website here: Vegetablism.co.uk. You can also watch them being on TV thanks to the wise owls at the BBC who invented the iPlayer: The Big Allotment Challenge episode 1

Spring clean 2014

Hello again. You are hopefully now aware of my Redbubble page, a growing online portfolio of my work that can also be bought as t-shirts, cards and prints. However, now is a good time to remind you about my Etsy store. Here you can buy original artwork and signed prints, for that much more unique and personal touch.

*touch touch*

However, my Etsy store has been a bit stagnant lately. What I really want to do is to clear out some of the old artworks to make room for some shiny new ones. So, here's the deal.

On February 18th 2014, the majority of the listings on my Etsy store will expire and I have decided that I will not be renewing them. Instead they will gradually be replaced by new original work for people to gawp at in wonder and, hopefully, buy. So this is the last opportunity to get your hands on the existing stuff! To sweeten the deal, I've created two coupon codes for readers of this blog to get discounts on any stuff they buy.

At checkout, simply enter SPRING14 for 15% off any orders between £10-£49.99, or SPRING1425 for 25% off any order of £50 or more.

Please have a look and pass this link around. Let's try and find some of these things a nice home. Remember, these are all originals, one-offs and once they're gone, they're gone.

Brighton seaside painting, £20

Extendable 2 canvas giraffe painting, £100

Rhinole painting, £20

Sussex seaside painting, £40

There are also two signed prints still for sale, 2 of each design:

Over-familiar tigers A3 print, £10

Slothbusters A3 print, £10

Periodic Table of The Beatles

(for a full-size version, click here)

New for 2014: gallery and shop

Oh, hello there. Thanks for dropping by.

As an artist of some (no) international renown, I have recently become aware of the website Redbubble and I think that it is smashing. Redbubble is what artists everywhere have been crying out for, really. It's a community where the huddled, drunken and embittered people like me can meet, it's an online gallery and portfolio and on top of that, they turn your fevered imaginings into products that people can buy. This is so complete as a thing that I needed that I'm not entirely convinced that this isn't all a dream.

Let's assume that it isn't, for the time being. Over the past few days I have been assembling my bits and bobs into a portfolio on my very own Redbubble page. There are things there that you can buy as large prints, posters, framed prints and greetings cards. I will be adding more and more throughout the year. I am currently trying to work my serial killer pictures into some sort of cohesive single product that you can stick on your wall and scare the neighbours, for example.

Also available are t-shirts and hooded tops, guaranteed to make you look irresistible to the opposite sex and randy dogs alike. These feature some older designs and also some new stuff that I have created just for the occasion. Such as this one:

But hey, enough of my yakkin'. Please do have a look at my Redbubble page and also my store. If it moves you sufficiently, you could also tell your friends, colleagues and bitterest, bitterest foes. Don't forget to check back there regularly to see what I've been up to with a pencil, paper, a dream and my tongue sticking out of my mouth because I am concentrating hard.

Gallery: http://www.redbubble.com/people/dotmund/portfolio
Store: http://www.redbubble.com/people/dotmund/shop

Michael Schumacher

Michael Schumacher, seven-times World Motor Racing champion, is 45 years old today. However, this morning he remains in a medically-induced coma after a skiing accident in France.

Schumacher's standing as statistically the greatest Formula 1 driver of all time has been endlessly dealt with elsewhere. In fact, many of these records owe themselves to the seasons where, in an utterly dominant Ferrari car, he won as he pleased. 2001 saw him win 9 times and in the following year he added eleven more victories, never finishing lower than third place. A tighter championship in 2003 (a season where the powers-that-be had amended the World Championship scoring system to try and slow his progress) still yielded six wins on the way to a record-breaking sixth world title. The 2004 World Championship, meanwhile, was his zenith, winning 13 times from 18 Grands Prix with eight pole positions and ten fastest laps. Out of a possible 180 points, he scored 148.

However, unlike the current situation with Sebastian Vettel -where naysayers continually ask how much of his success is down solely to the brilliance of his car - no-one casts aspersions about the value of Schumacher's numbers. If they seem unrelentingly high then it is only because they were deservedly so; Ferrari were a team in disarray when Schumacher joined them in 1996. The fact that he spent the early part of the 21st Century monotonously chalking up successes is solely a result of his own work building a team who were able to deliver them and who were continually inspired to want more. This much said, Schumacher's genius was never better displayed than in the four years between joining the Scuderia and his first World Championship with them - and third overall - in 2000.

There was the dancing, balletic win in the streaming wet 1996 Spanish Grand Prix where he made everyone else look like they were driving Formula 3000 cars, in spite of his own vehicle having the majority of the handling attributes of a truck. Or his win the same year at Spa-Francorchamps in the Belgian Grand Prix where, having qualified over a second slower than Jacques Villeneuve's dominant Williams in the damp, he doggedly prevailed in the dry on race day. How about Monaco in 1997, where he was leading by 6 seconds after the first waterlogged 2 mile lap? Or Belgium, streaking through the field in the wet? Or his electrifying win in Hungary in 1998 where he overcame the faster McLaren cars of Mika Hakkinen and David Coulthard by being able to deliver the performance required of Ross Brawn's impossible tactical gamble?

There were questions - questions that very often unsatisfactory or even disturbing conclusions - about his standards of on-track sportsmanship and racing ethics. Off the circuit, there was also little doubt that he lacked the charisma of the driver he succeeded as the leader of the F1 pack, Ayrton Senna. It was the latter's death at the 1994 San Marino Grand Prix that thrust Michael Schumacher to the top of the pile. His first World Championship, that same year, was a bit of a hodge-podge of an affair. Suspensions, suspicions, accusations of illegality that dogged his Benetton team and the final race collision with his title rival Damon Hill all gave a strong impression that the right man had won but in the wrong way.

A dominant 1995 season, however, confirmed what most of us already knew - rather than just being the best of the rest, Schumacher was coming to hold his place in the sport's pantheon in his own right. By the time he won the first of his 72 wins for Ferrari (bear in mind that the highest career total of victories after Schumacher is Alain Prost's 51) at the following year's streaming wet Spanish Grand Prix, it was clear that there was very little to choose in raw talent between Schumacher and the brilliant Brazilian whose shoes he'd had to step up to fill. Whilst I would hesitate in calling Michael Schumacher one of the all-time greats, any list of the best racing drivers of all time which does not have Schumacher towards, if not at, the very top isn't worth a brass farthing.

Because like all people who are the very best at what they do, Michael Schumacher took what he did and changed it. In Michael Schumacher's era, to be less fit, or less dedicated, or less tactically astute, or less politically savvy as a racing driver meant that you would at best finish second. To manage to get up to his level was in itself no guarantee, as by that point Schumacher would most likely have tirelessly moved onward and upward to a higher plane. Even after his retirement, the standards he set have remained the norm. The modern-day Grand Prix driver is his legacy.

He was a brilliant racing driver, the best of the best and a man whose achievements have cast a long shadow on a significant part of life thus far. It's hard to accept that his 46th year begins in such a vulnerable position, hovering between life and death, when it was the sheer gravity of his presence in the sporting arena that meant that most of my formative years were consumed with loving, hating, supporting or opposing him in some way.

But admiring. Always admiring. Happy birthday, Michael. Get well soon.

Michael Schumacher by numbers

Grand Prix entries 308
Grand Prix starts 307
Grand Prix wins 91 (record)
Podium finishes 155 (record)
Career points 1566
Pole positions 68 (record)
Fastest laps 77 (record)

Formula 1 World Champion 1994, 1995, 2000, 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004. (record)

Grand Prix wins: 1992 Belgian GP; 1993 Portuguese GP; 1994 Brazilian GP, Pacific GP, San Marino GP, Monaco GP, Canadian GP, French GP, Hungarian GP, European GP; 1995 Brazilian GP, Spanish GP, Monaco GP, French GP, German GP, Belgian GP, European GP, Pacific GP, Japanese GP; 1996 Spanish GP, Belgian GP, Italian GP; 1997 Monaco GP, Canadian GP, French GP, Belgian GP, Japanese GP; 1998 Argentinean GP, Canadian GP, French GP, British GP, Hungarian GP, Italian GP; 1999 San Marino GP, Monaco GP; 2000 Australian GP, Brazilian GP, San Marino GP, EuropeanGP, Canadian GP, Italian GP, United States GP, Japanese GP, Malaysian GP; 2001 Australian GP, Malaysian GP, Spanish GP, Monaco GP, European GP, French GP, Hungarian GP, Belgian GP, Japanese GP; 2002 Australian GP, Brazilian GP, San Marino GP, Spanish GP, Austrian GP, Canadian GP, British GP, French GP, German GP, Belgian GP, Japanese GP; 2003 San Marino GP, Spanish GP, Austrian GP, Canadian GP, Italian GP, United States GP; 2004 Australian GP, Malaysian GP, Bahrain GP, San Marino GP, Spanish GP, European GP, Canadian GP, United States GP, French GP, British GP, Hungarian GP, German GP, Japanese GP; 2005 United States GP; 2006 San Marino GP, European GP, United States GP, French GP, German GP, Italian GP, Chinese GP.

Michael Schumacher's other all-time Formula 1 records:

Most consecutive World Championships 5 (2000-2004)
Most wins in a season 13 (2004, tied with Sebastian Vettel (2013))
Most front row starts 116
Most perfect races (win, pole and fastest lap) 22
Most consecutive podium finishes 19 (2001-2002)
Most wins in a single Grand Prix 8 (French Grand Prix (1994-95, 1997-98, 2001-02, 2004 and 2006)
Most wins for a single team 72 (Ferrari, 1996-2006) (Michael Schumacher is also the only driver in Formula 1 history to have won multiple World Championship titles with two separate Constructors)
Most points in a season (10 points for a win) 148 (2004)
Highest championship winning margin (10 points for a win) 67 points (2002)

Adolf Hitler

Gavrilo Princip

Simon Wiesenthal

Herbert Lom

Anny Ondra

Bela Bartok

Franz Kafka

Anton Karas

Ferdinand Porsche

Zsa Zsa Gabor

Harry Houdini

Peter Lorre

Johnny Weissmuller

Billy Wilder

Maria Von Trapp

Laszlo Biro

Bela Lugosi

Erich Von Stroheim

Fritz Lang

Hedy Lamarr

Oskar Schindler

Matthias Sindelar

Ludwig Wittgenstein

Ferenc Szisz

Empire of Austria-Hungary Advent Calendar

Mathematicians amongst you will probably now have finished your calculations and concluded that next year is 2014, a full one hundred years since 1914 and the beginning of The Great War. The Great War was something of a red letter day for my favourite of all the empires, Austria-Hungary. So much land, so much history, so much culture, so little coastline. Not for them, the weekly chore of chasing the seagulls off of the bins. Within just over four years of the commencement of hostilities in July 1914, this once great union had been shattered into its constituent parts and Franz Joseph had to get a job in McDonald's.

It's hard to be too sympathetic, mind you. Commiserating with the leadership of Austria-Hungary about the cataclysmic consequences of the Great War is akin to rushing to get a wet wipe for your next door neighbour who, upon finding that your cat had pooed on his finely-manicured lawn, attempted to throw it back over the hedge only to have it blow back into his eye. As strategic blunders go, it was a bit of a shocker.

But never mind, a century on and it's all still there. Better still, the vast majority of the peoples who would formerly have fallen under the aegis of the imperial system now find themselves living in smaller, thriving, modern democracies. It is arguable, therefore, that the assassins of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo all those years ago are somewhat heroic figures. The people who argue this are, of course, wrong-brained idiots. But I salute their freedom to argue it.

I also salute the Empire of Austria-Hungary. A great bunch of lads. In order to begin the remembrance of the hundredth anniversary of a monumental year in the history of humankind, I thought I would mark the build-up to Christmas with an AUSTRIA-HUNGARY ADVENT CALENDAR. You heard. Twenty-four notable people born in that imperial dynasty (1867-1918). Maybe you will learn something. Maybe it will just keep you together until the inevitable post-Christmas suicides begin. Either way, keep your eyes pointed in this blog's general direction for the next three and a half weeks. Literally a minute (total) of entertainment awaits!

Scottish independence, a cryptozoological perspective

The Slightly-Less United Kingdom: the shape of things to come?

I've not given the Scottish independence debate an awful lot of thought, really. Beside my standard response to any prospective ripple of change disturbing my own little pond - which is fear and panic, of course - I've largely been of the viewpoint that in the case of any referendum taking place over 400 miles from where I live and in which I don't get a vote probably isn't really anything of my concern. Aside from a few procedural queries - what would happen to the Union Flag? Will I need a passport to get into Scotland? What now for shortbread? - I remain admirably placid.

Until today, that is, when I realised that the United Kingdom would be losing its only cryptid of note to another sovereign nation. This is a complete disaster and it needs to be addressed in parliament as soon as possible. The Nessie question.

Loch Ness: goodbye to all that

The Loch Ness Monster is possibly the most famous cryptozoological creature in the world. Only our hairier cousin (or less hairy cousin, if you come from Dorset) the Bigfoot can hope to rival it. It is by far and away the most important possibly-exigent creature in the UK today. A Union without Scotland would have to completely revise what it believed in.

Because, to put it simply, the Loch Ness Monster exists whereas all of the middling British cryptids that skulk in her shadow are probably don't. There is every chance, indeed, that they are in fact merely the fevered imaginings of people who are quite deeply unbalanced in some way. The question of what would give a Scotland-less Union its air of magical mystery is a difficult one to answer. Britain is an ancient land and it relies on its essential cryptid economy for its very survival. It is, perhaps, going to prove the final irony that it was only in killing the last remaining dragon that St. George was able to found the first English settlements.

Nessie: voting YES on Scottish independence

It is certainly an issue important enough to begin to address now, rather than waiting on the results of next year's vote. Britain's most senior post-Nessie cryptid must be decided ahead of time. There cannot be any sort of cryptozoological interregnum in this sceptred isle; that would be a breeding ground for panic, dissension and claimed sightings of all manner of three-headed goats. I don't for a moment claim to be clued-up enough to be able to predict the likely outcome of the Scottish independence referendum. All I do know is, it's not something that those of us to the south of Hadrian's Wall can afford to make assumptions about or adapt to on the hoof. Nessie herself is probably pretty much in the "pro" camp. A lot like Sean Connery, with the additional benefit that she actually lives in Scotland.

To this end, I have been dredging up all the peculiar beings that England, Wales and Northern Ireland have to offer, in order to find a potential replacement for Nessie should one become required from 2014 onwards. Here are the front-running candidates.

THE OWLMAN OF MAWNAN

Advantages: For a start, just look at the thing. The power of flight is also a significant bonus after a century of a rather more geographically-limited Top Cryptid. Also, the Owlman is a known sheep attacker, an always welcome Cryptozoological meme.

Disadvantages: The capacity for flight is a double-edged sword. Defections to Ireland or France remain a possibility, making the Owlman an unreliable choice. There's also the troublingly likely possibility that it's just a Cornish malcontent wearing feathery pyjamas, working through a series of highly ritualised but ultimately unsuccessful suicide attempts.

THE BEAST OF BODMIN

Advantages: In addition to a name which is guaranteed to capture the imagination, the Beast of Bodmin Moor is also much more fierce than the Loch Ness Monster ever was, and more proactive. Unless Nessie starts to pull sheep from the banks of the Loch, the beast offers a far more tantalising mortal threat.

Disadvantages: Let's not beat about the bush, it's probably just an escaped big cat. Or a nutter. Or nothing.

THE TUNBRIDGE WELLS BIGFOOT

Advantages: Unlike the Owlman and the Beast of Bodmin, who are both of a more bucolic disposition, the Kentish Apeman brings a frisson of cryptozoological terror into the more densely populated English home counties. With fewer sheep to bother, this Bigfoot will surely have to start preying on dogs, cats or teenagers with paper rounds, a welcome trope in the study of mythological creatures.

Disadvantages: Very badly lacking in any real caché, an English bigfoot would only add to the already swollen tales of hominids from throughout world folklore. The only potential for originality would be in naming the beast, so that it might be distinct from its hairy brethren the Saquatch, Yeti, Hibagon or Almasti. Also, knowing Kent it's probably just a hairy bloke.

GENAPRUGWIRION

Advantages: From Abersoch, this Welsh condender could possibly give off enough of an air of inclusiveness that would prevent another country buggering off because they hate English people.

Disadvantages: At just a foot long, a skulky brown insect-eating lizard is hardly likely to set any pulses racing. However, this could be the ideal cryptid for home pest control use during the hot summer months.

SHINY THE CAT

Advantages: Fierce, massive, violent, psychopathic and terrifying. Also, its definite existence and ease of location are both a serious boon, after a century of pilgrimage to Loch Ness.

Disadvantages: Perhaps a little too commonplace to really be outstanding, Shiny the cat's key excluding criteria is in fact the high probability that he will fuck you up. Nevertheless, a leading candidate.

SPRING-HEELED JACK

Now we're getting somewhere.