Dannii Outs Danyl

It's tough being Dannii Minogue, I guess, when older sis got the family brain cell.

Here she is outing a contestant on the X Factor in front of 12 million viewers – and in perpetuity via YouTube and the internet:

Who Shat on the Wall?

That is what this young visiter is asking, as the Guggenheim, in all its avant garde wisdom, has dedicated an entire room to Turd Sliding Down a Wall, a companion piece to Dog Urine in Snow at the Reina Sophia in Madrid. (You thought I was kidding, disn't you?)

Just opposite, however, a more pleasing vista:

Downstairs, next to Andy Warhol’s 150 Multicolored Marilyns, is one of the picks of the permanent exhibits, James Rosenquist’s Flamingo Capsule, which memorialises the 1967 Apollo 1 inferno, which killed all three astronauts:

We also liked the Henri Rousseau collection, especially his Carriole du Père Junier:

Diocesan Museum Cuenca

Jesus Carrying the Cross

I suppose there are cynics who, looking at El Greco's painting of Jesus Carrying the Cross in the Diocesan Museum in Cuenca (the charming Spanish city 100 miles east of Madrid on the Júcar River) and comparing it with his St Peter's Tears, might raise the Status Quo objection.

For them, in the same way that the 70s "rock" band had only one tune which they spent a career setting different words to, the faces might be too similar. I’m not sure what Domenikos Theotocopoulos would have responded, but it may have been along the lines that anguish and despair set their own very particular stamp on any man of character.

For me, at any rate, this painting was the highlight of a visit to this gem of a museum in the former Bishop's Palace, located between the Cathedral and the famous hanging houses (casas colgadas). Move quickly through the first couple of rooms containing dark and forbidding tapestries and savour the paintings in the lower chambers.

For company we had only a research student taking flash photographs of the exhibits, who kindly told me he wouldn't let on to the solitary member of the staff at the museum if I wanted to take a few photos. What I didn’t tell him was that she had gone back out into the courtyard after selling us our tickets (just 2 euros) to have another cigarette. All very Spanish.

St Peter's Tears

Ever Wondered What Dannii Minogue Has for Breakfast?

Wonder no longer.

Empathy for Trash

Trust my luck. We decide to spend the first Monday of our Spanish sojourn in Madrid and both the Prado – which I'm not so bothered about, not being a big Velasquez fan – and the Thyssen Bornemisza – more up my street – are closed. So, with temperatures around 35 degrees, we head off to the Reina Sophia, which houses Picasso's "Gernika", a couple of Goyas and loads of modern nonsense.

Now, if you enjoy looking at photographs with titles like "Dog Urine in Snow" and "Flasher" ("in Window with Big Bushy Pubes", in case you were wondering), this is most certainly the place for you. If, on the other hand, you prefer vast galleries with blobs on the wall or earthworm casts on the floor, then the Guggenheim in Bilbao (or Bilbo, as they call it in Basque) is where you need to head.

For a mere 13 euros, you’ll get a chance to walk through a dozen enormous rooms full of rubbish that someone called Robert Rauschenberg took from a scrapheap in Texas and called art after attaching a red hosepipe to the rusting hulk of a dismembered bicycle.

The blurb accompanying the junk is appropriately trashy:

"Individually and collectively, the elements that make up the Gluts are the very foundation of Rauschenberg's artistic vocabulary. His empathy for such items of trash was visceral ..."

Which was pretty much my reaction too.

So, you can imagine my horror on getting to Cuenca at the end of our trip and finding that the town's flagship museum was the Museum of Spanish Abstract Art. Fortunately, the nearby Diocesan Museum (Museo Diocesano) was a real treasure, of which more later – including the El Greco which I snapped while the curator was outside in the courtyard having a fag. (She was female, by the way, so your joke won't work.)

One positive to come out of our encounter with what is fancifully called modern "art" is that my daughter and I were inspired to try a bit of our own. Here is one of the photographs I will be submitting to international competition, entitled simply "View of Sitting Room through Dining Room with Sofa Bed down from Master Bedroom".

Old Corpse Dug Up

One for the silly season.

BBC reporter Lawrie Mayer tries - and fails - to record a series of questions to be intercut with a politician’s answers, as the absurdity of raising issues about defence procurement with an empty chair gets the better of him.

Hong Kong Blogs Sweep Awards at Ulacas

Another year, another meaningless awards ceremony cum space-filler, you're thinking? And you'd be absolutely right. But who can resist the allure of the awards ceremony? The glitz, the red carpet, the phony speeches, the tears, the attempt to look pleased when someone else wins in the category you're up for, the appalling banter of the unlikely pair that have been put together to present the gong for most boring documentary about stateless refugees.

So, without further ado, let's honour this year's crop:

Best Foreign Language Blog: our very first category, and the tensions is almost unbearable as the returning officer declares that this is a tie between Marc le Chef and The Kowloon Kid

Best Moribund Bird and Moth Blog: Hong Kong Birds

Best Defunct Driving and All Things Susan Li Blog: Fumier

Best Corporate Rottweiler Blog: Webb-site

Best Journal-style Blog: competition in this category was especially fierce, and it needed two recounts before the following stepped forward to accept their Ulacas: Gweipo, Joyceyland, Spike

Best Blog by an American Artist Who'd Probably Prefer to be Living in Paris but Has to Make Do Here Like the Rest of us Anyway: Hong Kong Paintings Ltd.

Best Blog by a Man on Cheung Chau Taking Shots of Passers-By: Mister Bijou

Best Blog about Flat Screen HD Televisions and the Relative Merits of Cable TV and NOW TV: Ordinary Gweilo

Best Blog by a Scandinavian Who's a Tad Concerned about the Creeping Islamisation of Lantau Island and its Colonisation By Airmen from Discovery Bay: China Droll

Best Blog Demanding Tap Water in Restaurants, Real Ale in Pubs and Drunken Motorists be Kept off the Streets of Wan Chai: Smog’s Blog

Best Newcomer with an Interest in the ISF Academy: SorLo

Special Award for Seemingly Lifetime Blogging: Hemlock

Best Times Crossword Blog for People who only Appear to be Pedants: Times for the Times

Best of the Best, AKA the Ulacísima: sorry, folks, but the deadline has had to be extended until the end of the year owing to the overwhelming public response.

I'm sorry for everyone I've omitted, but what would one of these occasions be without all those people who say that awards are absolutely without merit artistically - atavistic testimony to the commodification of talent, the homogenisation of cultural identity and the growing hegemony of Hollywood? Until they win one, anyway ...

2010 Ulacas

It's almost time for the awards you’ve all been waiting for, the Oscars of the black-belt blogging world, the UlacasTM.

With a voting system so transparent it could be an advert for Hong Kong's ministerial system, these elections are so clean you could eat your HK$30 seafood banquet off them.

So, stick around, for even as I head off for the beautiful region that ETA put back on the map, scores of tellers will be working round the clock to bring you the results as soon as they've been deemed free and fair by the international observers led by government prosecutor turned persecutor Kevin Egan and Electoral Affairs Commission Chairman Justice Woo Kwok Hing. They don't come much bigger that that.

Yokozuna Japanese Restaurant, Yaumatei

Last night, my wife and I had arranged to see Chloe, the latest film by Atom Egoyan, the man born to be an anagram – with goats and agony crying out for top billing. Since the film was showing at the arty Broadway Cinematheque in Yaumatei at eight o'clock, we decided to try out Yokozuna, which must hold some sort of record for longevity, as it was there when we lived nearby for a couple of years in the mid 1990s, and is still there today.

So too are the people standing faithfully on the pavement just off Nathan Road – like pilot fish around a shark – at any hour of day or night. Armed with this knowledge, I duly arrived at 6.25pm and received my number (84), being informed that there were around ten groups in front of me. Given that the capacity of the restaurant is only 24 people, I kept this information to myself when my wife arrived, merely telling her that the queue was moving fast and we'd soon be inside. As it happened, this turned out to be true, given Hong Kong people's obsession with grabbing a ticket and then disappearing.

The menu is in English apart from the back fold, which gives dishes in Chinese only. One of the dishes listed there, the eel and rice, was proving to be very popular, as we could hear people ordering it all around us. Neither of us being that keen on eel, we opted for grilled chicken from the Starters menu, cold noodles Chinese-style with sour-sweet sauce (a vegetarian dish with sliced mushrooms – a summer speciality that is highly recommended), and a minced chicken and egg bowl (with miso soup), for no other reason than that I fancied some.

Together with two cans of Asahi, the bill came to just HK$145, with the bonus that no 10% service charge is added to the bill – you just leave what you think is appropriate. Being in the heart of darkness, Yokozuna (which appears as "Kozuna" on the neon sign outside the shop) is easily accessible by public transport. If you’re coming by MTR, take Exit C from Yaumatei station, cross Nathan Road at the pedestrian crossing, walk right for fifty yards and it’s on the left next to the 7-Eleven.

As things turned out, the meal, modest as it was, was the highlight of the evening, as Chloe was a load of old tosh. Faced with a husband who she thinks might be having an affair, Julianne Moore does what any normal woman would do in that situation and asks a prostitute to try and seduce him. (They obviously have no private dicks in the town where she lives.)

Well, I don't think it would be giving too much away to say that Moore falls for the hooker – played by someone who looks as if she's just stepped out of the pages of The Midwich Cuckoos. Things have never been the same for the Freckled One since she appeared as a housewife with lesbian tendencies in The Hours opposite Nicole Kidman with an enormous nose. A quick Google search reveals that she's been playing lesbians as if they were going out of fashion, popping up most recently as a gay dominatrix who specialises in sadomasochism in The Private Lives of Pippa Lee.

In Chloe, she doesn’t so much pop up as pop out, her nipples putting in an early bid for Best Supporting Actresses with a performance that is less pencil eraser than Pentel push button. Avoid this rubbish. If you want better girl-on-girl action not to mention a somewhat better film, try Egoyan’s Where The Truth Lies, starring Kevin Bacon, a post-Darcy Colin Firth and two extremely hot blonde birds strutting their stuff to Jefferson Airplane's "White Rabbit".

Red Penny Restaurant

On Sunday afternoon, we thought we'd beat the crowds by taking a late lunch at Red Penny Thai Viet Restaurant, which is situated in the New Territories just south of the Shek Kong airfield, about five kilometres west of Kadoorie Farm.

With the roads in the New Territories so fast – KMB buses playing leapfrog at the entrance to the Tai Lam Tunnel permitting – it took us only 25 minutes to get there from Sha Tin, taking the exit signed for Hong Lok Yuen off the Tolo Highway and then heading left at the roundabout for Lam Tsuen. The only tricky bit is when you come to Wong Chuk Yuen village, where there are two junctions in quick succession. You bear right at the first (Route Twisk), but turn left at the second (off the main road) onto Kam Sheung Road. Red Penny is a couple of kilometres further along on your left. (You can also get there by taking Route 3 and the afore-mentioned Tai Lam Tunnel.)

My wife and her nieces had had dinner here a couple of years ago in the winter, sitting outside and having food grilled on the barbecues. With temperatures touching 35 degrees in the New Territories on Sunday, we opted for a spot indoors, where a steady stream of customers joined us or headed upstairs to a room with an excellent view over Tai To Yan – a decent hill to walk, incidentally, if you fancy something a little off the beaten track.

The food was very serviceable, with the standout dish being the sauteed kale (kai lan) with salted fish. Four dishes and three soft drinks came to a modest HK$370, and the service was pretty attentive, and, most important, relaxed and unobtrusive.

Sauteed kale with salted fish, fried flat noodles with beef and lettuce wrap with minced chicken

I'd imagine this place would get pretty busy in the evenings, or indeed during more regular lunch hours, so booking is advisable (2488-3263). For those with sat-nav, the address is 148 Kam Sheung Rd, Kam Tin, Yuen Long.

Joe Cole Explains Wage Demands

'undred thousand pound a week is nuffin' for the kind of quality you saw at the World Cup – week in, week out.

Cheating? Disgrace? No, Just Football

Eat your heart out, Robert Green

After the ridiculous furore over Thierry Henry's handball against Ireland, which led to a goal being scored by teammate William Gallas, football journalists of the quality of the Daily Telegraph’s Henry Winter – who just last month was named Britain's top sports hack – are losing their grip on reality over another handball, this time one that led to a goal being prevented.

From time immemorial, outfield players have seen it as part of their job when their goalkeeper comes flying out for a cross, flaps at it like a pregnant cormorant and is left stranded like a beached whale, to punch the ball off the goal line if it's too high to head away.

In the old days, the sanction was a penalty to the other side and a chance to make amends from 12 yards. More recently, because the advantage gained by the offending team was deemed to be too great – since a spot kick can always be missed – the individual who made the illegal intervention became the automatic recipient of a red card. Thus, the team that sought to gain an unfair advantage by committing foul play was punished by having to play for the remainder of the contest with only ten men.

Now, it doesn’t take a member of Mensa to work out that if a player commits the offence in the last minute of the match, his team is not going to suffer for it beyond the award of the penalty kick. Which can be missed. And which was missed in Ghana's quarter final against Uruguay.

Cue more wailing and tub-thumping by journalists who should know better, journalists who have watched similar offences being committed every week in the major European leagues – not to mention, the African ones – and who have waxed lyrically about the last-ditch defending of heroes who are willing to "take one for the team".

So why all the bleating this time around? I'm afraid it has more to do with the fact that Ghana was Africa's last hope in an otherwise wretched tournament for the dark continent and that white guilt stands guilty once again of abandoning commonsense and adopting a phony romanticising sentimentality.

Think of it this way. If the misfortune had befallen England or Italy – even Algeria, I suspect – it would have been greeted by murmurs of "Hard luck" and "That’s football". Plenty of jokes too. All very healthy, since we are talking about a sport, a game.

Instead, what we get is a disturbing reminder that the surest way to show that you don't consider a group of people to be on the same level as you, to be as intrinsically valuable as you, is to adopt an attitude of condescension towards them. I look forward to the day when black Africans can be treated by whites in the same way that they treat their fellow whites – with the dignity of reality.

No Bowler Hat, No Rolled Umbrella, But ...

... a freshly-ironed copy of The Times newspaper. With crossword duly completed.

One of my New Year resolutions being to be able to get on the 7.48 am from Virginia Water and have the Times crossword completed by Feltham – thus attracting envious glances from fellow passengers, without having already spent an hour on the puzzle at my mother's house – I decided to stop having the occasional stab at the two-month old offering in the SCMP and splash out a pony* on membership of the Times Online so I could join the Times Crossword Club.

For this, I get a year's supply of printable and interactive versions of the cryptic, concise and jumbo crosswords from The Times and The Sunday Times, additional puzzles including the Listener, Mephisto and Times Literary Supplement (not yet tried – barred-grid puzzles tend to be fiendish) and a full archive of puzzles dating back to 2000, in case I really do have nothing to do.

If, like me, you've dabbled with cryptic crosswords – cutting your teeth on the Telegraph, perhaps – but want to move up to the next level (i.e. complete the thing without mistakes in less than three hours), you could do worse than visit Peter Biddlecombe's blog, Times for The Times.

Peter is a two-time Times crossword champion, which basically means he can complete the puzzle while you're still reading through the clues. And he's also just the man to have in charge of the blog, which tends to attract the more accomplished, fastidious and, just occasionally, fractious solvers.

Besides Brits (vicars and retirees rank high – you won't be disappointed), there are Australians, Americans (not so easily thrown by references to Woking and Wapping as you might think), Kiwis and even a Chinese Malaysian, who used to work as an accountant in the UK.

Although the discussion can be a bit esoteric at times, the blog attracts a high number of lurkers (who occasionally dip their toes in the waters with anonymous contributions registering their progress) as well as setters (who again use the cloak of anonymity from time to time to clarify what they were driving at in a clue that is particularly resistant to a single interpretation).

With times for completion on an average day ranging from 8:11 ("Would've been faster but held up for three minutes by 16 dn") to two hours, there's plenty for everyone in terms of the kind of tips that can be picked up and the thought processes that can be mined. It seems I'm not alone in finding six months on this blog more useful than possession of the Bible for those wishing to crack the Times cryptic crossword, Tim Moorey's How to Master the Times Crossword.

* 25 pounds – a smattering of Cockney rhyming slang is one of the strings you'll need on your bow, along with a basic how-to-bluff-your-way kind of knowledge of Shakespeare's plays, Gray's Elegy, three-letter British rivers and Serbian engineers called Tesla.