The Evil Diaries: “I’ll take my chances”

The life president of the Work Cancellation Foundation, Jim Mellon, was in touch this morning and readily persuaded me to short Tungsten (TUNG) – which I did at 68p. I know that Crispin Odey disagrees but I’ll take my chances.

*****

Orosur (OMI) today come up with a very bullish results and current trading advice. I really do not know why the shares remain down at 9.5p offer.

*****

Beximco Pharma (BXP) held its AGM on Saturday last. there is no remark by the chairman in his statement that matters are deteriorating. Far from it. So, although it is taking a long time, BXP remains a stonking buy at 17.5p.

*****

In this weekend’s Spectator, a contributor, a Theo Hobson, thinks more people should object to online promotion of adultery. But these sites are all about initially considering matters at a distance and are therefore relatively ineffectual. However, the Royal Enclosure at Royal Ascot has a huge array of close up and willing meat on offer, dressed to the nines and gagging for it. This is where the objectors should start.

*****

Sir Tim Hunt might have been wiser to hold back from commenting on intergender relationships in laboratories (although his remarks seemed entirely plausible to me) but his compulsory resignation from UCL is yet another incident in the long decline of common sense in this country. Dominic Lawson in yesterday’s Sunday Times finished off by remarking: “Like so many social trends, it has blown across the Atlantic Ocean. Read, for example, a recent article on the US website Vox, entitled “I’m a liberal professor and my liberal students terrify me”. The author writes:

“I have intentionally shifted my teaching materials as the political winds have shifted. (I also make sure all my remotely offensive or challenging opinions, such as this article, are expressed either anonymously or pseudonymously).

I once saw an adjunct not get his contract renewed after students complained that he exposed them to ‘offensive’ texts written by . . . Mark Twain. His response, that the texts were meant to be a little upsetting, only fuelled the students’ ire and sealed his fate. That was enough to get me to comb through my syllabi and cut out anything that I could see upsetting a coddled undergrad . . . Hurting a student’s feelings, even in the course of instruction that is absolutely appropriate . . . can now get a teacher into serious trouble . . . Instead of focusing on the rightness or wrongness . . . of the materials we reviewed in class, the complaint would centre solely on how my teaching affected the student’s emotional state.”

This, in fact, is where Sir Tim Hunt has come unstuck. His real offence is not to have said something that can be proved to be inaccurate or unjustified, but that he has committed a crime against students’ sensibilities. Which, weirdly, confirms his opinion that too many of them take criticism personally.”

Finally, I only reluctantly settled to watch the Henry Cecil cum Frankel documentary on Channel 4 on Saturday evening since I feared a fountain of gush. But there is no denying that Sir Henry’s comments at the prize-awards ceremony at Ascot in October 2012 after Frankel’s last and fourteenth straight win that Frankel was the best he had ever trained, the best that anybody has ever trained and probably ever will train was strikingly poignant since he himself was barely able to speak his words through the physical decline that his cancer had brought about. He died in June 2013.