Sacre bleu!

French drinkers must be spluttering into their Kronenbourg this morning after the government there announced a 160 per cent tax hike on beer, increasing prices in bars and supermarkets by 15-20 per cent.

I suppose the French government thinks it can get away with dipping into drinkers' pockets as beer represents a much smaller proportion of the overall alcohol market than in Belgium, England, Germany or the Czech Republic. If they tried the same thing with wine, I suspect that growers and drinkers would unite and re-run 1789 in the streets of Paris, a bit like the Germans did in the Bavarian beer riots of 1844 that Friedrich Engels wrote about for the Chartist newspaper The Northern Star.

Keeping score

I watched the final game of the World Series yesterday, the twelfth Fall Classic that I've seen. This year, I scored the World Series as well.

The first time I filled in a baseball scorecard was at a Phillies game in the now demolished Veterans Stadium in Philadelphia in 2002. I think we got them going through the turnstile and I made an untutored stab at completing it.

There are two reasons to score a baseball game. The main one is to keep track of at-bats, what batters did in their previous trips to the plate, who's on-deck and the pitcher's record of walks, strikeouts etc. But it's also fun. As well as being creative, using your own symbols and adding a "!" for an outstanding play, I also find jotting down the K's, L5's and 6-4-3's adds to the rhythm of watching a ballgame with its three outs in the top and bottom half of each inning.

London calling?

The NFL arrived in London again at the weekend with the annual International Series game that’s been played at Wembley since 2007. I went to the 2008 and 2009 games, with a mate who lives in North West London and has been a fan of American football since the 1980’s, and enjoyed them both.

The St Louis Rams-New England Patriots match-up was expected to be a one-sided contest and that’s how it turned out with the Massachusetts outfit running out 45-7 winners. But that doesn’t seem to have affected the NFL’s enthusiasm for expanding American football in the UK with the league announcing a second game will be played here from 2013. The owner of the New England Patriots Robert Kraft also said that the he sees a second game as a step towards having a NFL team based in London. I think that might have been a bit of hype to sell the game.

I know that from two games to the eight home games a London team would play isn’t a huge leap but there are other questions too.  Would the other teams be happy about crossing the Atlantic every season? Would the London team be a relocated existing team or part of an expansion of the league? It would be a bit odd to have a London team but not one in Los Angeles although a team that could match the 80,000 attendances of the International Series would be one of the best supported in the NFL.

If the NFL does go ahead with a London team, perhaps they could train in Iceland to cut down on travelling time.

To look for America

Last night on Channel 4, Matt Frei travelled across the American Midwest ahead of next week's presidential election.

Frei was born and grew up in Germany (he did a very good BBC series on Berlin a couple of years back), was educated in England when his father worked here as a journalist and is now a foreign correspondent in Washington. He seems to have picked up the American habit of referring to pretty much the whole population as "middle class", including anyone who's not a millionaire or homeless. In England, someone like the guy he met in Minneapolis who has two jobs, one in a warehouse and one at night in a off licence, would never be called middle-class. I'm not sure how this started, whether it's working-class people aspiring to be middle-class or politicians thinking it best not to talk about a working class excluded from the American Dream.

Frei's trip from Minnesota to Iowa, Illinois, Indiana, Ohio and Kentucky didn't reveal much new - guns, racism, poverty -  but the Republican pollster who told him that no president has been re-elected with unemployment over 7% makes me think Romney becoming president might not be as unlikely a prospect as it appeared a couple of months back.

Thinking about thinking

BBC's Horizon last night took a look back at its programmes about human intelligence.

The programme tried to draw an artificial line between human and animal intelligence, undermined by footage of chimpanzees co-operating, but did cover a lot of material, including the rather creepy Cyril Burt of the Eugenics Society attempting to link IQ to DNA, neolithic writing in a cave in South Africa and research into artificial intelligence.

Unusually for a science programme, it also had some laugh out loud moments, especially the wacky Robert Graham and his Nobel laureate sperm bank in California.

Fly me to the Moon

I'm quite excited at the news that the European Space Agency is hoping to land a robot-controlled probe on the Moon by 2018. The mission is seen as a first step towards humans landing on the Moon for the first time since 1972.

When people look back at the history of human exploration of our solar system, they'll surely wonder why we didn't visit our nearest neighbour for so long. Nixon's administration cut the budget for NASA's Moon missions in the early 70's - along with Lyndon Johnson's inner-city education programme - because of the spiralling cost of the war in Vietnam. Before that, most Americans watching men on the Moon expected to see a permanant base on the lunar surface within their lifetime.

The Moon landings are a bit like Concorde, an example of people co-operating to achieve something that is both technically complex and beautiful but which is then shelved because no-one wants to assume the cost of maintaining it on their own. If you were placing a bet, you'd have to say that the next person on the Moon will probably be Russian or Chinese.

Play ball!

The World Series between the two league champions of Major League Baseball, the Detroit Tigers of the American League and San Francisco Giants of the National League, starts later today.

This will be the twelfth World Series I’ve watched. I got into baseball through one of my mates who’s also a fan. In 2002, we travelled along the East Coast of America, watching games in Baltimore, Philadelphia, New York and Boston. We also spent a day at the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, New York where I took my first and last swing in a batting cage.

I tend to support National League teams in the World Series but more importantly ones that are original members of their league and haven’t switched cities. The San Francisco Giants began as the New York Giants playing at the Polo Grounds in Upper Manhattan before switching to the West Coast along with the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1957 so that rules them out. Detroit on the other hand have played in the American League since its inception in 1901. Go Tigers!