Topic: Jeremy Clarkson

[Yellow Petals]

Love him or hate him...

Jeremy Clarkson has a way with words...

TimesOnline.com - September 10, 2006

Amazing what you can dig up in Africa
- Jeremy Clarkson

Not that long ago a chap from the town where I live took his metal detector for a walk in some local fields and found a hoard of coins, one of which revealed the existence of a Roman emperor who was not mentioned in any of the history books.
It all sounds jolly exciting, but I suspect that for every man who finds gold at the end of his garden there are about a million who devote their lives to the search for buried treasure and end up with a collection of old Coke cans and the gearbox from a 1957 Massey Ferguson.

That’d be like devoting your whole life to DIY and never once erecting a single usable shelf.

Nevertheless, last week I joined an archaeological search party on the Makgadikgadi saltpans in Botswana. And guess what? Within just four hours we’d unearthed an early Iron Age burial ground. That’s like taking up alchemy and making gold on your first attempt.

Our guide, quivery with excitement, stepped from his quad bike and told us in a hushed whisper, as though he might disturb the scene with sound waves, that we must go lightly in case we trod on what might turn out to be an important artefact.

Pretty soon he was on his hands and knees piecing together what had plainly been a rather badly made bushman vase, and my children were bringing him beads fashioned from bits of ostrich shell.

“Oh my God,” he wailed. “Do you know what these are? These beads! They’re the dawn of art. They’re the first example anywhere of early hominids decorating themselves. You can draw a direct line from these beads to the Renaissance.”

Well, I looked at one as hard as I could, but so far as I could tell it was a small piece of ostrich shell with a hole in the middle. Not exactly Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. I’ve seen better in Ratners.

Then he found some fossilised wood and I honestly thought he was going to burst.

“Do you know what this is?” he wailed excitedly. “It’s only the third piece of fossilised wood ever found out here!” Well, I examined all the angles and couldn’t seen why this was important in any way. If it was just a piece of wood, then so what? This tells us that many years ago there were trees. I sort of knew that. And if it had once been part of, say, a chair, then what does that tell us? That Iron Age man had a grasp of carpentry? Well he would.

I should explain at this point that many years ago some archaeologists dug a huge hole in my school’s grounds, claiming they’d discovered the most important Viking site ever. Every day they went in there with their toothbrushes and their nail files, and every night I’d leap in there in my cowboy boots, because the whole site was strictly out of bounds. This meant it was a tremendous place to have an undisturbed cigarette. Archaeology, then, has never really floated my boat.

And what’s more it turns out I’m not very good at it. I wandered about with my hands in my pockets failing to see anything even remotely man-made. Perhaps, being tall, my eyes are too far from the ground, but whatever, in the whole day I didn’t unearth a d**n thing.

My seven-year-old daughter, on the other hand, turned out to be quite an expert. Having found several beads and some potted shrapnel, she uncovered what turned out to be a human leg bone. Quite how our guide worked this one out I have no idea, because to me it just looked like a long thin stone.

And quite why it mattered I don’t know either. Over the years many people have died, so it stands to reason that there are many bones out there. Finding one in the ground is like finding a star in the night sky or an idiot in local politics.

It’s the same deal with pots. People have always made them. And people have always dropped them on the floor. So finding the pieces today is of no moment.

I watch Time Team on television occasionally and every time one of those earnest young men pops out of his hole with a bit of crockery I just want to say: “Oh, why don’t you just go to the pub.” Archaeology, as we all know, is simply a tool that enables very stupid people to get into university. Fuse it with media studies and you end up with Tony Robinson.

Desperate to enliven my morning of walking around with my hands in my pockets, I planted my iPod under the crust of the salt and then called over my family to show them what I’d found.

“Look,” I exclaimed to the assembled group. “These Iron Age Johnnies were more advanced than we thought.”

It fell rather flat, if I’m honest. The rest of my family were genuinely captivated by our find and the history it represented.

They didn’t think it even slightly odd that our guide logged the location on his portable GPS system, saying he’d return as soon as possible with a team of experts from America.

Can you believe that? That people are prepared to fly halfway round the world to poke about in the ground looking for pots, for no financial gain.

No, really. They will simply donate their find to a museum so they can be looked at by daytrippers who are only in there because outside it’s raining.

[Robert_Brenchley]

The guy turns me right off, but then history and archaeology are things that interest me. The Domitianus coin he mentions is fascinating. The first one was found in France, went to a provincial museum, and was lost. Only a plaster cast was left. The experts condemned it as a fake; they said it was an altered coin of Tetricus I. I have loads of those, since it's a period that interests me; coins were very crudely made, the Roman empire was on the point of collapse, and had actually split into three parts, and the economy was in ruins. The coins of the two do look very similar. There was one expert who argued that the coin was genuine, but nobody believed him.

Then the second one turned up. A hoard was found fused into a solid mass by corrosion, and the finder took it to the British Museum. The Domitianus coin was found in the middle of the mass as they cleaned it, demonstrating that it couldn't possibly be a fake. It was sold to the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, and the proceeds shared between the finder and the guy who owned the land.

For the period, it's extremely nice coin, with a lifelike portrait, quite unlike the normal crude things. In general, portraits that good are only found on aurei (gold coins), but I've seen similarly good portraits on specimens of the first issue of Tetricus. It was a time of endless military coups and instability, and the first thing a new emperor did was to issue a large payment to his troops to keep them happy. I suspect that some of these, at least, were struck with extra-nice dies, and perhaps given to the officers. Since Domitianus didn't last more than a few weeks at most (or he'd have produced a lot more coins; the histories say another short-lived usurper of the time, Marius, lasted two days, and his coins aren't rare), he never got any further than a small initial issue.

It's not correct that the history books don't mention him; there are two brief references, but he was assumed to have been mythical until the second coin turned up.

Hee's a link to a page on the coin http://www.thebritishmuseum.ac.uk/cm/Domitianus.html .

[CotswoldLass]

Jeremy Clarkson Rules OK!

[Yellow Petals]

The United States of Total Paranoia
- Jeremy Clarkson

I know Britain is full of incompetent water board officials and stabbed Glaswegians but even so I fell on my knees this morning and kissed the ground, because I’ve just spent three weeks trying to work in America.

It’s known as the land of the free and I’m sure it is if you get up in the morning, go to work in a petrol station, eat nothing but double-egg burgers — with cheese — and take your children to little league. But if you step outside the loop, if you try to do something a bit zany, you will find that you’re in a police state.

We begin at Los Angeles airport in front of an immigration official who, like all his colleagues, was selected for having no grace, no manners, no humour, no humanity and the sort of IQ normally found in farmyard animals. He scanned my form and noted there was no street number for the hotel at which I was staying.

“I’m going to need a number,” he said. “Ooh, I’m sorry,” I said, “I’m afraid I don’t have one.”

This didn’t seem to have any effect. “I’m going to need a number,” he said again, and then again, and then again. Each time I shrugged and stammered, terrified that I might be sent to the back of the queue or worse, into the little room with the men in Marigolds. But I simply didn’t have an answer.

“I’m going to need a number,” he said again, giving the distinct impression that he was an autobank, and that this was a conversation he was prepared to endure until one of us died. So with a great deal of bravery I decided to give him one. And the number I chose was 2,649,347.

This, it turned out, was fine. He’d been told by his superiors to get a number. I’d given him a number. His job was done and so, just an hour or so later, I was on the streets of Los Angeles doing a piece to camera.

Except, of course, I wasn’t. Technically you need a permit to film on every street in pretty well every corner of the world. But the only countries where this rule is enforced are Vietnam, Cuba, North Korea and the United States of America.

So, seconds after breaking out the tripod, a policeman pulled up and demanded that we show him our permit. We had one that covered the city of Los Angeles . . . except the bit where we were. So we were moved on.

The next day I was moved on in Las Vegas too because the permit I had didn’t cover the part of the pavement I was standing on. Eight inches away was fine.

You need a permit to do everything in America. You even need a passport to buy a drink. But interestingly you don’t need one if you wish to rent some guns and some bullets. I needed a 50 cal (very big) machinegun. “No problem,” said the man at the shop. “But could you just sign this assuring us that the movie you’re making is not anti-Bush or anti-war.”

Also, you do not need a permit if you want — as I did — to transport a dead cow on the roof of your car through the Florida panhandle. That’s because this is banned by a state law.

Think about that. Someone has gone to all the bother and expense of drawing up a law that means that at some point lots of people were moving dead cows about on their cars. It must have been popular. Fashionable even.

Anyway, back to the guns. I needed them because I wished to shoot a car in the Mojave desert. But you can’t do that without the say-so of the local fire chief who turned up, with his haircut, to say that for reasons he couldn’t explain, he had a red flag in his head.

You find this a lot in America. People way down the food chain are given the power to say yes or no to elaborately prepared plans, just so their bosses can’t be sued. One expression that simply doesn’t translate from English in these days of power without responsibility is “Ooh, I’m sure it’ll be fine”.

And, unfortunately, these people at the bottom of the food chain have no intellect at all. Reasoning with them is like reasoning with a tree. I think this is because people in the sticks have stopped marrying their cousins and are now mating with vegetables.

They certainly aren’t eating them. You see them growing in fields, but all you ever find on a menu is cheese, cheese, cheese, or cheese with cheese. Except for a steak and cheese sandwich I bought in Mississippi. This was made, according to the label, from “imitation cheese”.

Nope, I don’t know what that is either but I do know that out of the main population centres, the potato people are getting fatter and dimmer by the minute.

Today the average petrol pump attendant is capable, just, of turning on a pump when you prepay. But if you pay for two pumps to be turned on to fill two cars, you can, if you stare carefully, see wisps of smoke coming from her fat, useless, war losing, acne-scarred, gormless turnip face.

And the awful thing is that you don’t want the petrol anyway, because it’ll simply get you to somewhere else, which will be worse. A point I shall prove next week when we have a look at what happened in Alabama. And why the poor of New Orleans will sue if the donation you make isn’t as big as they’d hoped for.

[Roy Bham UK]

I wouldn't pee on the bloke if he was on fire, I don't want to add any more as it would appear that I don't like him very much.

I just Googled him and found this, which must be why he is famous.

http://cars.uk.msn.com/news/car_news_article.aspx?cp-documentid=475259

[Robert_Brenchley]

The second one was on the right lines; a friend of mine was taken for a ride in the back of a car as a teenager and terrified out of his life by an FBI agent who threatened him with never being able to get a job, etc, etc. His crime was to start an underground newspaper at his school. Talk about paranoid.

[Mrs Ava]

He might be a twit at times, but he is a funny twit.  He makes me larf!!  ;D

[Roy Bham UK]

I'd replace the 'I' with an 'A' and stick a Fez on his head then I may raise a titter. ;D