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Wednesday, October 1, 2003

Doublethink «

“Winston sank his arms to his sides and slowly refilled his lungs with air. His mind slid away into the labyrinthine world of doublethink. To know and not to know, to be conscious of complete truthfulness while telling carefully constructed lies, to hold simultaneously two opinions which cancelled out, knowing them to be contradictory and believing in both of them; to use logic against logic…” George Orwell, Nineteen-Eighty-Four.

(See also the Wikipedia definition.)

Frank Johnson in the Spectator thinks the verdict of history is likely to clear Gilligan:

[E]ven if he [Gilligan] was wrong to say that Mr Campbell did the ‘sexing up’ personally, Mr Gilligan’s story that the relevant dossier was ’sexed up’ was true, since testimony to the Hutton inquiry and elsewhere confirms it; Mr Gilligan’s errors of detail and procedure were irrelevant; the Downing Street press people, and the Ministry of Defence at the highest levels, arranged for Dr Kelly’s name quickly to appear in newspapers; they did so because, illogically, they thought that this would undermine Mr Gilligan’s story, and because they did not realise Dr Kelly would embarrass them by killing himself.

and concludes:

Let us hope that the rest of our houses remain safe during his [the head of MI6, Sir Richard Dearlove] tenure of office, though they seem safe from Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction, and seem to have been so for at least 12 years or so before Mr Blair’s and Sir Richard’s war.

Andrew Sullivan admires Blair’s Bournemouth speech, specifically this passage:

Imagine you are PM. And you receive this intelligence. And not just about Iraq. But about the whole murky trade in WMD. And one thing we know. Not from intelligence. But from historical fact. That Saddam’s regime has not just developed but used such weapons gassing thousands of his own people. And has lied about it consistently, concealing it for years even under the noses of the UN Inspectors. And I see the terrorism and the trade in WMD growing.

I consider this just bizarre. Not. The. William. Shatner! Delivery. The use of such weapons must be a reference to Halabja and the Anfal campaign. Fair enough, but these were in 1988, before the Gulf War and before the weapons inspectors arrived. Now Blair seems to be implying that there are other examples, post the Gulf War, and while the weapons inspectors were there, but if we are talking about WMD, not individual cases of brutality (which I am not disputing), then the obvious target would have been the Kurds, and they were protected by the ‘no-fly zones.’ But perhaps the ‘it’ Mr Blair is talking about is the development of ‘such weapons’ not their use. Well, if he is, the factories where these were developed have not been found. What does he mean by the “terrorism and the trade in WMD growing”? Are both growing? Are these related? If so how? If he is concerned about terrorism, what are he and Mr Bush doing about ETA in Spain?

I don’t doubt that Al-Qeda have attacked several times since September 11, 2001. However, they didn’t use WMD in Bali or Kenya. The possibility of terrorists using chemical, biological, or nuclear weapons is indeed frightening, but where is the evidence that there is a connection? It may be a pessimistic approach, but I think we’re going to have to accept terrorism the way we do crime and disease. Talk of defeat of all terrorism is simply absurd. We can defeat individual movements, but breaking the Baader-Meinhof gang did nothing to the IRA. Are we now to believe that all insurgents will henceforth work together, preferably with undersea volcanoes as their headquarters and huge databases with the names and addresses of all their operatives?

And I look at Saddam’s country and I see its people in torment ground underfoot by his and his sons’ brutality and wickedness.

I think Mr Blair means to use the perfect tense here, because where ever Saddam is, his sons, Uday and Qusay, are certainly dead.

The people were ground underfoot at least since Saddam led the coup in 1968, long before the Gulf War and through the 1980s when most Western nations regarded him as less hostile than Iran, and offered covert and limited support during his war with that country. And they were ground some more after the Gulf War, in some cases more so.

So what do I do? Say “I’ve got the intelligence but I’ve a hunch its [sic] wrong?” Leave Saddam in place but now with the world’s democracies humiliated and him emboldened?

Well, you could say we don’t have the intelligence for sure about WMD, but he’s grinding his people underfoot, and we’d like to go to war if you don’t mind. Not to mention that he’s received this intelligence about Iraq and WMD, and it’s the spooks who doubt it, and Mr Blair who has the hunch it is right.

What, in short, is he babbling about?

Hurriedly scribbled @ 8:12 pm GMT

No Soup For You! «

I love a good hatchet job, and HangingDay laying into Douglas Rushkoff is an excellent hatchet job. The whole business of writing about cyber-culture seems vain and navel-gazing to me, and I can’t get into any of the Gibsons, Stephensons, or Rushkoffs. So I’m pretty ignorant. Where Rushkoff seems to be right is that blogs give lots of different opinions. Wow, you say, but it’s true. (The thing is, the piece they hatchet doesn’t seem to be online. The link only goes to a preview of a talk to be given later this month. So the piece has to be read as an attack on his previous spoutings. By way of compensation, there is a link to Nick Cohen on focus groups.)

The piece that most exercised me yesterday, raised my blood-pressure, and generally made my brain all swirly wasn’t the Plame affair or Iraq or the Labour Party conference. It was Nick Barlow’s comments on Top British and US sitcoms. Now the first thing a pedant like me would say is that Cheers (at number 17) isn’t a UK sitcom. It’s set in Boston. (I’ve been there, the bar inside is nothing like the set. It’s expensive too.) The second is that Dad’s Army and The Simpsons should be much further up.

The third is Seinfeld only number two? Bilko is good, but come on. I’m the sort of person usually characterised as anti-American, but if Dubya’s New World Order required that a “a country can only get Seinfeld if you take our nuclear bases,” I’ll take the bases. If I ever meet a girl sensitive enough to my kinks to whisper “Soup Nazi” during sex, I’ll offer to marry her. “Street toughs took my armoire?” “I know, I know. Kind of a cute Nazi, though.” “Believe me, somewhere in this hospital the anguished oink of pig-man cries out for help.” “I’ve yada yada’d sex.” “This woman hates me so much, I’m starting to like her.” “If it wasn’t for the toilet, there would be no books.” (Believe me, I had fun researching those.)

The fourth, the final, the last, the ultimate is that ALL the UK entries were made by the BBC. Justifies that licence fee a little, no?

Hurriedly scribbled @ 1:24 pm GMT

Thursday, October 2, 2003

Wishful Thinking «

Sully links to the Washington Post, Man Behind the Furor, and comments

One thing this profile strongly suggests: this guy is a world class meshuggena pain in the ass. The more he gets on television, the better for Bush.

How exactly? Because he speaks French? Because he’s endorsed a Democrat? Because he has grey hair? I don’t see anything to support the “pain in the ass” allegation.

Hurriedly scribbled @ 4:57 pm GMT

I Don’t Owe You Anything «

To be a prophet is one thing; to be an evangelist is another. The former may suffer indiginities (mostly being ignored); the latter is just a pain in the rear.

I mostly avoid the ‘A-list’ bloggers as they seem far more concerned with blogging blogging than anything else. I recently took Mark Pilgrim off my links, because he wrote a very windy and tedious wind-up of Dave Winer. Dave today links to two of his friends (two to my knowledge who he has never tried to humiliate in public), ‘Doc’ Searls and Ed Cone who both write

on the scandal brewing in Washington, and how it connects to and through the blogosphere.

And both are wrong in their way. ‘Doc’ always seems a kindly, slightled addled, soul to me. He starts with a letter from a reader notable both for its irrelevance and its self-contradiction:

We are sooooooo out of it in Iraq. I remember a dialog from Leon Uris’ Armageddon where a[n] American is leading a group into Germany in the wake of the surrender, … One night the senior French officer is trying to correct the American’s perceptions and he finally tells him that America will never understand occupation, because America has never been occupied. It is portrayed as an arrogant French outlook (world-weary cynicism vs. ignorant innocence), but with an interesting point.

We need the UN in Iraq because we DON’T GET IT. We (America) have no credentials for nation building and no realistic perspective on submission to occupation.

May I stop you there? Go back to the first paragraph again, please. If the US has credentials for nation-building, if any occupation worked (and don’t tell Donald Rumsfeld), it was the reconstruction of West Germany. The Nazis had held power from 1933 to 1945, that’s 12 years, nearly a quarter of a working lifetime if we take one from the age of 15 up to 65. That means all the guys at the top had to at least defer to Nazi patronage, and all the youth would have known nothing else. And Germany today is an almost mirror-image of a fascist state; it is a liberal social democracy which simultaneously manages to be a decent place to live and a world economic power. The US had a hand in that.

However, this all leading up to the Plame story. Here’s ‘Doc’

Still, this is the story that’s finally burning through the teflon. How to tell? Pro-Bush bloggers aren’t cutting the prez any slack on the issue.

(Astute readers will notice this is opposite of the argument in The Poor Man’s blog entry Why would master do this? It’s also the opposite of Ed Cone’s take, see below.)

‘Doc’ quotes Instapundit

You can’t have a special rule on this for journalists, because journalists don’t have special First Amendment rights, and anyway everyone is a journalist now, thanks to the Internet. This will be disturbing to professional journalists, but I don’t see an alternative. And this is a national security leak, in wartime, right?

Now Glenn Reynolds admits that he writes quickly, and if he had thought he could have cut the final clause of the first sentence, and the second sentence altogether. The existence of blogs does not make any difference, because First Amendment rights do not extend to journalists, ie mere membership of a professional institution or non-membership of same is not protection. ‘Doc,’ ever the evangelist, then concludes:

In other words (and mark these), blogging is removing the teflon from professional journalism, too. [Emphasis in original]

Well, unless there has been an amendment to the First Amendment, there was never any teflon there, but ‘Doc’ is convinced that because it isn’t there now, it has been removed, rather than the safer null hypothesis that it never existed.

Ed Cone has a different take. He thinks the “Pro-Bush bloggers” are cutting too much slack.

To skip the CIA story is to declare it unimportant. It’s a lie to their audiences. Yet Reynolds is devoting limited energy to the matter, Volokh even less.

Yet this comes right after:

These guys aren’t lawyers for nothing.

That’s true, they’re not. They’re lawyers for money, like every other lawyer, even if both teach, write books, whatever, on law. They’re bloggers for next to nothing.

We’re returning to what I call amateur journalism, people writing for the public for the love of writing, without any expectation of financial compensation. This process is fed by the changing economics of the publishing industry which is employing fewer reporters, editors and writers. But the Web has taught us to expect more information, not less, and that’s the sea-change that the big publications face — how to remain relevant in the face of a population that can do for themselves what the “BigPubs” won’t.

Citizen Bloggers in N.H.? Dave Winer, Wednesday, April 30, 2003.

I think Mr Cone is mistaking Instapundit for a “BigPub”, in which case his readers should do what he won’t. That’s what blogging is, no? There’s no compensation, and no obligation. Of course, if you donated money to Mr Reynolds, you might be entitled to feel differently, however, I suspect that he would tell you that any money was accepted

  1. Without granting any conditions; and
  2. Retrospectively.

I can hear him saying to our imaginary complainant, “What if I fell under a bus tomorrow, would you sue Mrs Instapundit for a refund? I kinda hoped you’d send flowers.”

Fortuneately, Mr Cone’s readership supply some balance, arguing that the market will sort him out; if readers don’t find what they want, they will go elsewhere, exactly the argument blog-evangelists use against mainstream news. The argument seems to come down to Reynolds and Volokh assigning less weight to the story than Democrat partisans. Both mention it, but fail to be obsessed by it. As is their right, IMO.

Another person I never thought I’d find myself defending is Rush Limbaugh, but two stories on the hortatory disc jockey broke this week. Rogers Cadenhead reacts to these comments:

I think what we’ve had here is a little social concern in the NFL. I think the media has been very desirous that a black quarterback do well. They’re interested in black coaches and black quarterbacks doing well; I think there is a little hope invested in McNabb, and he got a lot of credit for the performance of his team that he really didn’t deserve.

with

McNabb is a three-time Pro Bowler who threw 63 touchdowns the last three years. I think there’s a word for someone who would portray his success, which is easily demonstrated by his statistics, as some kind of affirmative-action treatment.

Affirmative-action in universities and the government, I can believe, but spontaneously in professional sport? Do they even need it? Lots of fans have it in for certain players, but to allege that a certain player is where he is because of his race, ie that there are white athletes being denied a chance is, simply, crazy.

Arthur Silber has some cautionary opinions on the other story (found through Crooked Timber):

It seems that several stories will allege “drug abuse,” and that Limbaugh took “tens of thousands” of pain pills.

…First, as I suspected even before Drudge mentioned it in his headlines, it seems that the “drug abuse” is related to the period when Limbaugh was deaf. Whatever one may think of Limbaugh in terms of his beliefs, this was a terrible tragedy in basic human terms.

Quite so, and while I doubt that Mr Limbaugh would extend the same courtesy to say, Bill Clinton, this is a non-issue.

[L]ots of well-known people over the years have been victimized by a medical establishment that overprescribes all kinds of drugs, including painkillers. And many people end up having terrible problems as a result.

I knew that private medicine had its drawbacks.

In the meantime, Mr Limbaugh has resigned over his comments. I wait to see how the media will take the news.

Hurriedly scribbled @ 3:08 pm GMT

Friday, October 3, 2003

I, For One, Welcome Our New Homosexual Necrophiliac Mallard Duck Overlords «

Excellent Slashdot discussion on this year’s IgNobel Prize winners. (Also covered by the BBC.)

As a psychology graduate, I may be biased but I agree with barakn:

I’m not certain why the London Taxi Driver study received an Ig Nobel. It was a beautifully done study. For those who don’t know, people who want to be black cab taxi drivers in London take a 3 year course (3/4 drop out) to pass an exam. They have to memorize essentially every street in a 6 mile radius (street names sometimes change block by block) and significant landmarks along those streets. All this information they refer to simply as “the knowledge.” It was shown that the hippocampi of these taxi drivers are larger than normal and are larger in drivers who have been driving longer. This study helped change medical opinion on the ‘plasticity’ of the adult brain and has important implications for brain damage and diseases like Parkinson’s.

There are examples of far worse psychology research. Indeed this study received its award for medicine; I’m not quite sure how.

I’d go so far as to praise the winner of the biology award, C.W. Moeliker for documenting the first scientifically recorded case of homosexual necrophilia in the mallard duck:

What still remains is the fact that NMR 9997-00232 was dead while he was being raped (one may argue that the copulation was no rape, but the act was non-consensual anyhow).

(Text from the pdf version.)

The Engineering award went to

[t]he late John Paul Stapp, the late Edward A. Murphy, Jr., and George Nichols, for jointly giving birth in 1949 to Murphy’s Law, the basic engineering principle that “If there are two or more ways to do something, and one of those ways can result in a catastrophe, someone will do it” (or, in other words: “If anything can go wrong, it will”).

Why Everything You Know About Murphy’s Law is Wrong

Hurriedly scribbled @ 9:43 pm GMT

I’d Rather Be A Hammer Than A Nail «

Last week, I quoted Samizdata’s The bogus ‘duty’ to have ID cards:

if X is such a grand idea then it should not be necessary to compel citizens to have X.

Mostly, this is true — the crucial word is ‘should.’ It assumes that citizens are rational and aware of all possible alternatives. The first is a quasi-religious assumption; people are not rational all the time: it’s sometimes assumed that even if individuals are capricious, populations will make logical choices more often than not — this is the ‘trust-the-market’ approach.

There is one case where almost no one thinks this holds: where the individuals concerned are not mature. Children, by definition, are not conversant with all facts, and are not capable of making the rational choice. I hope that it’s not pushing the point to suggest that cognitive maturity is not a simple product of getting older, but the result of experience. I think it follows that for adults to be capable of social freedom, they need to undergo at least a basic education. (I am aware that I’m rushing this argument a little.) So should schooling be compulsory? Andy Duncan thinks not in a well-written and clearly heart-felt rant and it splits those who can be bothered to comment into two camps. (Inspired by this BBC story on £100 fines.) By good chance, DangerousMeta links to this Santa Fe New Mexican story on the trial of a mother whose daughter cut 114 days in one school year. As with the UK story, at issue is the punishment of the parent, and it’s the US law which seems draconian to me.

Assistant public defender Alisa Cook Lauer said Romero took her daughter to school daily, but her daughter ditched classes.

“What else can she do? Walk her daughter to class?” Cook Lauer asked.

But [assistant district attorney Kit] Ayala stressed before the judge: “A young and very bright girl was held back a year because of truancy.”

Note the passive voice. Even the prosecution accept that the daughter was not kept away from school; she was not ‘held back’ — she failed to develop. Blame is implied where none exists. If anyone is at fault, it is the school.

With the Plame case, it is tempting to hymn the security services, and their hard work in discovering WMD. The truth behind the MI6 facade by Sir Peter Heap, British ambassador in Brazil between 1992 and 1995, offers a corrective. I particularly liked the story about the MI5 man whos sent a near-verbatim copy of a newspaper story as classified information back to London, and justified the secrecy with “if it were sent unclassified, other people would know what we were interested in.”

Hurriedly scribbled @ 7:12 pm GMT

Sunday, October 5, 2003

Mind The Gap «

I’ve thought for a while that the Tories have no chance while there is a fundamental split over Europe. This have effectively hobbled them since Geoffrey Howe spoke against Margaret Thatcher. (The same problems dogs Labour, but with far less passion, so it is more easily buried. I suspect that if we ever get near a referendum on the Euro, party unity is over for good.)

Peter Hitchens goes much further:

The Tories are an impossible coalition of irreconcilables. No coherent government programme could ever unite them, always assuming they were able to win an election. Euro-enthusiast and Eurosceptic cannot compromise without betraying their deepest beliefs, and should not be expected to do so. Supporters of marriage and supporters of the sexual revolution likewise can have no common ground. Supposedly conservative thinkers such as David Willetts cannot earn the praise of Polly Toynbee, as he recently did, without also attracting the loathing of the many who think that children should have the right to be looked after by their own mothers rather than watch them marched off into wage-slavery.

With that last sentence, Mr Hitchens succumbs to impartiality-fatigue. It’s a well-argued piece, perceptive on the current problems: it’s not Iain Duncan Smith’s fault; the party is simply unleadable.

I don’t see Hitchens offer a course of action. The consequence ought to be a split, presumably around the Euro. (Mr Hitchens seems to assume that the ‘true’ conservatives who reject all this trendy ‘human rights’ stuff line up behind the roast beef of old England, huntin’, and believe that hanging solves all the crimes too serious for a clip round the ear.) I fear that this would leave Britain a four-party state, with Labour facing a opposing parties who will cancel each other out. Mr Hitchens apparently believes that a “pro-British movement, neither bigoted nor politically correct” will rise like lions from the slumber. No indication what will happen to the pro-European Tories (implicitly accused of ‘political correctness’). I’d say the analysis is right, and the solution wrong. Wait until the same problems hit Labour, where the differences between Brown and Blair are as much of ideology as personal rivalry — but the party chooses to ignore the consequences of this.

Chris Lightfoot (mentioned in my last post) links to two excellent pieces. Stephen I. Schwartz and Daniel Ellsberg argue against using the nuclear threat.

The policy/tactic which replaces MAD is a serious issue. Iran may be developing nuclear weapons. Pakistan and North Korea already have them. None are our friends.

It seems that the Bush administration have been lucky in that the most pessimistic predictions of their opponents have not proved true. But lucky is all they are; is there any evidence that the post-Iraq rebuliding was considered? At all?

Hurriedly scribbled @ 4:06 pm GMT

Duckspeak «

Nick Barlow had a wonderful Quote of the day (from this full White House transcript, emphasis on money quote):

We have more work to do in Iraq. A free Iraq, a peaceful Iraq will help change an area of the world that needs peace and freedom. A peaceful Iraq and a free Iraq is part of our campaign to rid the world of terror. And that’s why the thugs in Iraq still resist us, because they can’t stand the thought of free societies. They understand what freedom means. See, free nations are peaceful nations. Free nations don’t attack each other. Free nations don’t develop weapons of mass destruction. There will be a free and peaceful Iraq. What’s taking place in Iraq is the evolution of a society, to be democratic in nation — nature, a society in which the people are better off.

It’s not a bad speech, apart from the one sentence. I’m immediately sceptical on two other counts: one is terror always equals Muslim terror, as far as I can understand, and terrorist == “freedom fighter” — the Burmese goverment don’t count as terrorists here; and I’ve just been listening to Arnold’s rather pladitidinous press conference in California, and I don’t understand what Republicans mean by the “people.”

I do think there is something in the “Free nations don’t attack each other” credo. That’s partly because we have real politicians like Robin Cook to make the case against reckless adventuring abroad. However, before the First World War they said commercial interests would prevail over nationalist aggression, and we know what happened there. (If you’re in US and probably don’t, there was a war with Germany and the Austro-Hungarian Empire on one side and most of the rest of Europe on the other. It was called at the time the ‘Great War’ and was the first conflict to employ ariel bombing, tanks, and chemical weapons, usually referred to at the time as ‘gas.’ Millions of people (mostly men, and mostly in the military) died, and nothing seemed to get settled. America became involved for reasons which don’t seem all that important now. It’s easy to portray the British and German generals as chinless incompetents who had no understanding of how technology had changed the nature of combat, and persisted in attempting infantry charges of machine guns, an act comparable to holding a sack race across a busy four-lane interstate. Americans, to their enormous credit, learned a great deal about automation and the effects of progress.)

Chris Lightfoot picks up the ball and runs with it, calling the term ‘weapons of mass destruction’ Newspeak.

Hurriedly scribbled @ 11:42 am GMT

Monday, October 6, 2003

Easy As Falling Off A Blog «

Have a look at Dan Bricklin’s pictures from BloggerCon 2003. Do you notice something? Oh, you’re a geek, and you noticed the hardware. So did I, but I will come to that later. It’s not a presence, it’s an absence.

If you picked the attendees at random from a sidewalk in any university town in the States (which is where most come from), the odds of selecting a wholly white sample must be greater than winning the lottery. Actually, the camera sort of lies here — there was one black face, Oliver Willis, and he got to comment on this before I did.

During one of the Saturday sessions a member of the audience referred to the assembled crowd as “utopia”. Now, yes, I loved the blog camaraderie but quite frankly I don’t want to be the only black person in utopia. I was the only black person in that room, and was one of a few minorities. I’m not whining about that, but simply stating the fact that a technology that is mostly the pursuit of upper middle class white males does diddly to change the real world. I’m a geek through-and-thorough but when I hear tooth gnashing about issues like copyright as if they were the most important issue in the world — it tells me that the blog world is somewhat out of touch.

There’s more truth in that paragraph than in the whole “Cluetrain” farrago.

The other surprising thing (or surprising if you buy the blogging hype) is how old the audience members are. None look like even post-grads. I suppose I’ve come to thing of bloggers as being freaks — in the 1970s sense, the hairy, drug-taking, types who lounged on beanbags and came up with the GUI, the mouse, the PC as we know it today, and the internet. This lot are square, man.

I’m not sure any self-respecting blogger wants to meet other bloggers. I don’t think this lot is a representative sample. Meet some other guys? No way; it would be much harder to flame them if we’ve had a beer together. Not that that stops Dave Winer.

As is my wont, I now want to forget all that I’ve said above, and claim that these guys are hip after all. If you’re a geek, you’ll have spotted the third picture already. It’s why I chose that page. See how many laptops have the Apple logo. Most of them. Now I don’t think that blogging will change the world, but bloggers are a niche market among geeks and they are ahead of the game. If they’re all buying Macs, that says something.

Which means that when I buy mine, I’m just following a trend.

Damn.

Hurriedly scribbled @ 1:27 pm GMT

Tuesday, October 7, 2003

Iceberg Ahead «

The Blogging Iceberg (of 4.12 million hosted weblogs, most little seen, [and/or] quickly abandoned) makes several fundamental mistakes. Blogging is very much like diary keeping, and probably appeals to the same sort of people.

Those who abandoned blogs tended to write posts that were only 58% as long as the posts of those who still maintained blogs, which simply indicates that those who enjoy writing stick with blogs longer.

No kidding. However, no one has ever surveyed how long most diaries are maintained, in my experience, not long. I was a serial diary starter when younger, and I’m sure that I was not alone in that.

The survey seems to have been done by program, so the final entry in the abandoned blogs is not taken into account. Has this blogger given up? (Answer is in the second post down.) Which leads onto the second point, it’s easy to set up a hosted account, and easy to drop it, whether you like blogging and want to move on to greater control (eg with Movable Type) or give up alogether. “Abandoned” hosted blogs therefore tell us nothing.

Not everyone wants 10,000 hits a day.

When you say “blog” most people think of the most popular weblogs, which are often updated multiple times a day and which by definition have tens of thousands of daily readers.

There’s nothing in the definition with requires “tens of thousands of hits”: the most popular could have millions or only dozens.

Few hosted blogs are among the most popular, so the sample avoids the very blogs it purports to talk about.

What the survey seems to conclude is that teenagers are great experimenters and quickly bored. Move along now, nothing to see here.

I enjoy Andrew Orlowski’s baiting of the mutual navel-gazing blogosphere, but nothing in this survey supports his thesis.

Hurriedly scribbled @ 7:20 pm GMT

Oh, Damn «

I agree with Sully here.

So we get the baldfaced untruth that the war was because Iraq posed an “imminent” threat. It wasn’t. Or that it was about a causal link between Saddam and 9/11. It wasn’t. Or that it was based in intellgience [sic] from Niger. It wasn’t. Technically, the war was a continuation of the last one, and was fully supported by umpteen U.N. resolutions, including a 15-0 Security Council vote to force Saddam to comply.

Well I agree with the “isn’ts” and I think that it’s true that the war is a continuation of the last one. Except that I also don’t. If the UN had agreed to war, that would have been fine. I don’t think Saddam wanted to comply with the resolutions, but the fact is that he didn’t develop weapons which violated the peace treaties, and I regard the war as unnecessary.

Hurriedly scribbled @ 6:34 pm GMT

The Ingrates «

Gulf father tells Blair to stay away from funeral:

“If it was not for Mr Blair there would be no need for a memorial service,” said Mr Evans, 46, from Llandudno, north Wales. “The Hutton Inquiry and now the report on weapons of mass destruction show that everyone has been covering up or lying about this war.

“It has been more than 150 days and no WMD has been found, yet that was the reason for going to war in the first place. The truth is Saddam Hussein didn’t have the capability to attack Britain or even Cyprus.…”

Berlusconi wins again — in ‘most hated’ poll:

A majority of viewers said he, as prime minister, was the person they were most fed up with. They named Mr Berlusconi as their bete noir ahead of Osama bin Laden, Saddam Hussein, price and tax rises, the destruction of the planet and Italy’s rickety health service.

We ask: who do these people think they are? We don’t live in a democracy. (Free nations don’t develop weapons of mass destruction. George W Bush.) They should be bloody grateful we have such lovely leaders as Blair and Berlusconi. Unpatriotic bastards.

Sorry, for a moment I thought I was Stephen Pollard. As it happens Mr Pollard is pleased that Melanie Phillips now has a blog. As anyone should be. If the pressures of modern life get on top of you and you fear that you’re losing your marbles, there’s a handy reminder that there’s someone far more bonkers out there.

Hurriedly scribbled @ 11:51 am GMT

Wednesday, October 8, 2003

Lucky Black Cat «

Yahoo News announces that Mac OS X ‘Panther’ is released later this month. I’ll wait until the Missing Manual comes out in December. Incredibly, Panther (OS X 10.2) is more efficient and faster than Jaguar (OS X 10.2.x), which may mean that a G4 would do me better than a G5. The only question is how many upgrades can a G4 take? G3s are no longer being supported, so buying ahead may be the best thing for once.

Hurriedly scribbled @ 8:35 pm GMT

The Past Bites Back «

Two interesting observations in Tech Central Station.

Megan McArdle on dot commerce in Why Open Source May Be Doomed:

But it turns out that auto dealers offer some very valuable services to the car manufacturers. …

Auto manufacturers, it emerges, are not (yet) able to custom manufacture cars on demand, for a number of reasons. They have to produce cars based on their best estimate of future demand. They thus require a distribution system that is highly plugged into the local market, and can vary prices and terms to best move the cars that have already been produced off the lot. If they were selling cars on the web, auto manufacturers would have to set one national price, which means either forgoing significant revenue from affluent areas by pricing to the nation’s poorest region, or lose sales in poorer regions by pricing to the upmarket.

Car sales always seemed ideal on the internet. Most of what you get in a car is ‘hidden’ — you can’t tell if it will last in a test drive or whether it will be economical or protect you in a crash. You have to read the specs and take them on trust. So there’s little you really learn in a test drive, unless you’re trading up and have the novel experience of trying out a better vehicle.

That goods live up to certain standards seems a vital part of successful capitalism, yet not something that should be left to the markets. I’ve lived in my house now for five years, and I’ve just been bombarded with offers for cover for my fridge, my washing machine, my Dyson, etc etc. I’ve binned the lot. I think I have the right to expect them to work, without paying protection money, and if one does break down, while fixing it will cost more than the ‘extended guarantee,’ it will still cost less than paying all the vultures. (Or ought to.)

Glenn Harlan Reynolds (aka Instapundit) interviews Neal Stephenson who prefers to write with a fountain pen:

The key difference is that it’s slower. It’s like when you’re writing, there’s a kind of buffer in your head where the next sentence sits while you’re outputting the last one. As long as it’s still in your head, it’s easy to manipulate that next sentence, or even to reject it. Once it’s out, well…

When you’re using a high-speed output method there’s less of that. In my opinion, the first draft quality winds up being higher with a pen. It’s easier to edit — to scratch out a word is easier than backspacing over it. What this enables me to do is to get words down in a way that’s closer to the final version. And it’s more stable: no hard-drive crashes, accidentally deleted files, and so on.

If I took writing seriously again, for anything lengthy, I’d go back to pen and paper. It does seem better, and for the reasons given.

Hurriedly scribbled @ 1:21 pm GMT

Thursday, October 9, 2003

His Name Is Rio, And He Dances On The Sand «

Oh, Rio, Rio, Rio, Rio Across the Rio Grande
Duran Duran (from memory, you don’t think that I’d look it up)

I never thought that I would take any pleasure in seeing a strike broken, let alone joy and the feeling that the right side won.

I only quibble I have with drug-testing (and I may be out of date on this) is that tests at matches are administered after the game, when there is very little chance of any kind of doping during play (and any medical bags could be checked). It’s perfectly normal to start a game fully hydrated and need to pee, but by testing after a game, players can be detained for hours. This seems to inconvenience them for little benefit.

The England players claim that the FA “let down … the whole of the England squad” but I don’t see that the FA had any choice. A hearing requires time to convene. If they were to hold one the day after the offence, Mr Ferdinand (or whoever) could claim that he wasn’t given a chance to seek representation — and since his defence is unwitting absence, this would hold water. Mr Owen is not being punished, he is being suspended. On his pay, he can find a lawyer to explain the difference.

Mostly, I’m in favour of decriminalisation of drugs. What you do with your own body is pretty much your own business. However, it seems fair for airlines to require that their pilots be sober while flying, and, generally, it seems fair for employers to ask certain things of employees. Football players receive very generous remuneration, work short hours, have long holidays, and get plenty of sick leave. How many games will Michael Owen start this season?

Anabolic Steroids (warning: gratuitous picture of California Governor)

overall, have a negative effect on the human body. … In addition to skeletal/muscular injuries that can occur, many other heath risks are probable.

Just to name a few: cardiac risk factors, hypertension, increased LDL/HDL ratio, strokes, elevated liver enzymes, hepatitis, liver tumors, decreased testosterone production, abnormal spermatogenesis, infertility, testicular cancer, altered menstruation, tendon degeneration, acne, male pattern baldness, increased facial/body hair (for woman), deepening of voice.

Both employers and unions have a duty of care and they should stand together for drug-testing.

Hurriedly scribbled @ 11:23 am GMT

Saturday, October 11, 2003

Opting Out «

“That which is a good reason for living is also a good reason for dying.” Albert Camus in Nietzschean mood in The Myth of Sisyphus

Camus gets a lot of things wrong. He denied he was an existentialist (a wise move), yet was part of the existentialist movement (or ‘circus’ according to Arthur Koestler). It’s his later books The Plague and The Fall that I think I should go back to. All I can remember of his diaries were his arguments about love, and they taught me how not to do philosophy. (Essentially he constructs a false definition of love as a state where one thinks of the other all the time and then proves that this is impossible and that ‘love’ therefore can’t exist.)

I don’t think old Albert was much cop on suicide either. He pretty much comes to the conclusion that life is worth living if you’re young and male. Perhaps he thought the rest of humanity was too unimaginative or insensitive to consider suicide. Wittgenstein spend years considering suicide (possibly because he was gay) but produced real philosophy instead. The best book on suicide had already been written, and it considered the subject from much more than an armchair perspective. Emile Durkheim’s Suicide: A Study in Sociology is a shocking book. It takes all the ideas of personal despair, etiology, and tragedy away and replaces them with precedent and methodololgy. Doctors and famers have high suicide rates not because of professional stress (though under Tony Blair, who knows?) but because both have the knowledge and the means.

The New Yorker carries an excellent piece on The fatal grandeur of the Golden Gate Bridge by Tad Friend, which is in part an argument for a barrier.

The Empire State Building, the Duomo, St. Peter’s Basilica, and Sydney Harbor Bridge were all suicide magnets before barriers were erected on them.

If you think argument is better than a physical impediment, you could always write to the FT for advice.

Hurriedly scribbled @ 11:22 pm GMT

Unparliamentary Language «

FUCK, Fuck, fuckfuckfuck, fuck

Just got the site back up after a crash and this reassuring message from my hosts:

Unfortunalty due to the nature of the failure we have been unable to retreive any of the data previously stored on the server, you will need to re-upload your site and configure your mail using the new details provided.

along with this message on their support page:

We have located the problem with the server but unfortunatly the main kernal has corrupted which has prevent our technicians from rebooting this. We are currently creating new accounts on a new server for all accounts affected by this. We will create new acccounts for all clients that have send an e-mail to support regarding this issue then we will be working through the affected list. Please accept our appologies for the inconvenience that this has caused.

By way of apology for the inconvenience caused by this we will be extending the contract of affected clients by 3 months.

I’m so happy, as you can tell. I backed up everything, so re-uploading wasn’t that hard, but the .htaccess doesn’t do what it’s supposed to, and these pages are supposed to act like php not html. I also can’t use my own error pages or ban robots. Am I pleased? Would you be?

Still, I suppose I get three months free. Mustn’t grumble.

Hurriedly scribbled @ 6:23 pm GMT

Sunday, October 12, 2003

I Was A Stranger «

From the book of Matthew:

25:35 For I was an hungred, and ye gave me meat: I was thirsty, and ye gave me drink: I was a stranger, and ye took me in:

25:36 Naked, and ye clothed me: I was sick, and ye visited me: I was in prison, and ye came unto me.

Funny how religion can come back to you. I think it’s all balls, but were I to have kids, I’d want them to have a religious education. I don’t react enough to Leonard Cohen or Eliot as some of the images just pass me by.

But that’s not what I want to talk about.

I want to talk about my admiration of Paul Bint who

impersonated an aristocrat, a ballet dancer, a banker, a doctor, a playboy, a policeman and a property magnate…

I hope that, like me, you warm to the man already. He is, of course, a criminal, not an actor. He was in the paper, The Guardian, no less, not much given to the crime-panic crusafe, after being “jailed for four years.”

I’d like to pause here to mention a thread on Samizdata that I rather liked: So many laws to enforce, so little time which asks

Could there be … a point where there are so many laws that the State cannot possibly enforce them[?]

The answer, IMHO, is ‘yes.’ Even asking the question reminds me of Gore Vidal quoting some Roman on “the more numerous the laws, the more corrupt the state” which also seems true to me.

Mr Bint is a conman, or as the Guardian has it “King of the swindlers” (geddit? Jungle Book reference). Although 41, he has a 25-year criminal career, which shows initiative in my book.

Perhaps I should not have sympathy for Mr Bint. I was conned once. Not much, but it acted as a sort of inoculation. It may be stretching to make a general rule out of one case, but this is my experience. I was in New Orleans, a city that I like a lot, in the process of getting royally lost in the hope of making some interesting discovery. I was hailed by a group of teenagers, and I stopped. American youth is rarely as aggressive as the UK equivalent. They may do drive-by shootings with more accuracy, but they don’t kick heads in. Not usually. One youth said “I bet you 10 dollars I can tell you where you got your shoes.” Now I suppose I don’t really rate the intellect of kids who hang out on street corners, and it didn’t occur to me that I had ‘tourist’ stamped on my forehead, and anyway, I thought the odds of him saying ‘Camden Market’ seemed exceedingly slim, so I thought, “Ohh, ten dollars, cool.”

I looked round, and said “OK” with the utterly naive idea that they were going to give me money.

“You got those shoes in New Orleans when you got up this morning.”

I wished I could say that I’d driven all night from Canada, or at least correct his grammar. All his friends seemed to be in agreement that it was a legitimate use of ‘got’ — but I could immediately thing of another one. I looked around the group, and even if I had a .45 Magnum, which Clint Eastwood tells me is ‘the most powerful handgun in the world’ or something, there were too many of them. I reached for my wallet. They could have kicked me to death and taken it off me (I was carrying enough for three months’ travelling), but they accepted a ten.

Can Americans really be that soft? Gangs in the UK are nothing like that kind. I didn’t learn much from the experience other than you can walk more in the US than is generally thought. I’ve wandered in Memphis with no more harm that several shouts of ‘white bread’ and imprecations to get back to the Elvis part of town. Above 125th Street in Harlem, people stare but no one molests you. (I remember Robbie Coltrane on Parkinson saying that he once took the A-Train and all that happened was that people concerned for his welfare kept telling him to get back downtown.)

But back to Mr Bint. If I hadn’t been a poor deluded fool and thought that I would come out richer, I would have walked on by. This is the hook all confidence tricks from Only Fools And Horses to David Mamet’s House of Games use.

Mr Bint seems to have been particularly imaginative and could be an excellent specimen for research into the chutzpah gene. The Guardian is less approving:

In 2000 Bint began the Scottish phase of his career by boarding the first-class carriage of a Virgin train headed for Edinburgh. Posing as an eminent QC named Lachlan Campbell-Brierdan who was involved in the Lockerbie trial, he complained his wallet and laptop had been stolen.

Apologetic Virgin executives agreed to cover the cost of his accommodation in Edinburgh at the Caledonian Hotel where he ran up a £545 bill and romanced a former Miss Edinburgh.

She became engaged to him, believing he was a wealthy lawyer. During their affair he talked about owning a London mansion and a collection of classic cars. He fled after five weeks.

Though the case which took him to court was his swindling of

a doctor by posing as a top barrister in the Jill Dando murder trial …

Paul Bint … convinced a hospital consultant, Annie Park-McGuinness, that he lived in the so-called Millionaire’s Row in Hampstead, north London. He also told her he had just crashed his Aston Martin car.

The doctor, who worked in University College hospital, London, where he was being treated for minor injuries, later recalled: “I thought he was a respectable and lonely professional. He said he knew many rich and famous people.”

Of course, the story ends in tears for Dr Park-McGuinness. Mr Bint

repaid her hospitality by stealing £60 cash and a credit card to fund a spending spree in which he bought more than £200 of clothes and other items.

Now, I ask, if Mr Bint wanted a hard luck story, why did he bore on about his “rich and famous” friends and his cars? Why not go around with a dog on a string? Perhaps he never saw Boudu sauvé des eaux/Down and Out in Beverly Hills. Perhaps he never read the Good Book. Perhaps he thought that selling the Big Issue was no way to get charity.

Were his ‘victims’ acting out of the goodness in their hearts, or did they think they’d come out considerably richer? Would Virgin have been so obliging to a bloke in a donkey jacket?

The Daily Mail is always telling us that our prisons are full, and that crime is rising. David Blunkett can free one space right now.

Hurriedly scribbled @ 3:55 pm GMT

Monday, October 13, 2003

And Then There Was One «

Mr Black, my cat, died this evening.

He had been winding down since the hot summer ended. I remember when I last took him to the vet because I blogged it.

I’m sure they always say the old ones have ‘many years left.’ I felt so cheated after I had a previous cat (they must have been roughly the same age) put down. He was dead before the vet drew needle out. I felt I had given him to someone else, and they hadn’t given him back. I didn’t want to do the same again.

Before I went for a run this evening I noticed that he was lying very still on the bed. He had pissed himself. He hadn’t lost control before, though he had seemed to be getting gradually more incontinent, and sometimes just meditated in the cat litter. (My other cat uses the garden.) I knew then that he had a very short time left.

I don’t think he was in pain until around 8pm when he seemed to convulse. He may have had a stroke; perhaps a second one. His eyes didn’t seem to see me. If he had lasted the night, I would have had him put down, but I’d rather he died at home, or recovered.

If he were a person, he’d have had to wait for his time. As an animal, you expect him to be put down. Both seem cruel.

I went to downstairs to cook and watch University Challenge. When I checked him, his eyes had closed, and he seemed to be smiling. I knew then that he had to be dead. There was no heartbeat. His limbs felt stiff. I phoned a few people who had fed him in the past, and stupidly stroked him.

I eventually got myself together to lay him out in the spare room.

Hurriedly scribbled @ 10:25 pm GMT

Tuesday, October 14, 2003

By Way Of An Obituary «

So much to say about Mr Black, so hard to say it.

I called him Mr Black because he used to come into my garden and he and my cat Henry would face off and yowl at each other. I took it that he was the local head case, and as he was black, the name chose itself. After Reservoir Dogs:

Mr. Pink: Why can’t we choose our own names?

Joe: No, I tried it before and it didn’t work! I had four guys fighting over Mr. Black!

He was always quite bold. He came in the house a few times, and I think he must have slept under my bed at least once as I saw him at the top of the stairs, when I was at the bottom. He didn’t look in the least bothered.

He moved in on Christmas Eve 1998. I have a transparent cat-flap and it was starting to snow. It rarely lies in Cardiff, but the air was full of flakes. My other two were in the kitchen staying warm and he was peering in and meowing. I mouthed that he could come in and stay over Christmas. He climbed through the flap immediately. He stood on his hind legs and started licking my hand. (It took about a year before I weaned him off licking me.) He turned out to be hungry, but I’ve never been convinced that he was truly homeless. Until about a year ago, he used to disappear regularly in the evening and come back between 9 and 11. Even if it was raining heavily, he was rarely wet.

I suspected that he and my second cat, Tim-Nice-But-Dim, were related. Tim had a home (to prove it, his owners took him when they moved), but was hungry, dirty, and out in all weathers. They swapped bowls when they ate. (This was always at Tim’s instigation, and he ate faster. I just gave him more, and they ended up with much the same.) They slept together. They seemed to get on most of the time, though I woke up one night to find the other two blocking Mr Black from entering the bedroom.

He was perhaps the neediest cat I have ever had. He always wanted to be picked up, and, unlike Henry, didn’t want to be put down again. (Henry seemed to regard cuddling as being like cleaning your teeth. It is something you have to do for health, but you don’t want to do it too much. Though when I shared a house, he was always very glad when I came home. No one else cuddled him, though he was fed and free to come and go.) He was always trying to climb up me, but never got far off the ground. It was only when he was very jealous of a girlfriend once that he shinned all the way up her back and onto her shoulders. He started climbing up my back a few weeks before he died. I couldn’t take him to a vet for new-found energy, though this was an unusual development.

When Henry started to fade I remember them both coming in from the garden. Henry walked in steadily and seriously, as if he were tired after a long shift in a factory. Mr Black bounced in, skipping like a four-year-old being taken to a party. Over the last couple of years that energy left him, but it wasn’t pronounced until the end of the summer. He seemed to sleep longer, but he also slept between my legs. He used to prefer to sleep under the duvet with his head on the pillow, trying to be as human as possible. He started climbing me. He wanted to go out the front door all the time. (I live in a terraced house, which opens onto the street. If a cat goes out the front, he can’t get back in again, and there is a chance of his being run over.) He managed it once, when I cycled to the shops, and didn’t look down when I closed the door. He spent an hour pining to get back in and playing with the local primary school-aged children.

I took him to the local vet once before they closed the branch near me. I was sure that his teeth hurt when he chewed. They confirmed that some were rotten. He also had a small lump on his skull you could move around with a finger. I thought it was something like a ganglion, but the vet suggested that it was an air-gun pellet and they removed it when he was under anaesthetic. Losing it seemed to cheer him up.

As his energy started to fade, he did become annoying in his need for attention. I thought about getting another cat to give him some company and perhaps to cheer me up. I wanted a kitten, but I got Gordon, a recently neutered adult cat who had been sleeping rough in Pontypridd. They didn’t take to each other. Gordon hid when I allowed him to explore the house and Mr Black found and cornered him. I think Mr Black was hurt by a new cat moving in, but Gordon’s life seemed worth saving, and they half got on.

I should have recognised Mr Black’s first stroke. But as my father died after several strokes and we had a cat who had one at 17, I was worried about projecting my expectations onto him. He also didn’t seem paralysed, and while he was oddly moody in his last weeks, nothing seemed physically wrong. I think given the choice between dying at home and dying in a clinic, I’d prefer home. I think he suffered in his last hour, but perhaps no more than he would on a journey to the vet’s. He knew I was there. I don’t know if he was scared. He looked peaceful when he was dead.

Hurriedly scribbled @ 3:25 pm GMT

Wednesday, October 15, 2003

48 «

The Observer lists The 100 greatest novels of all time. I’ve read 48, including a few started but not wholly finished. (I’ve only read Swann’s Way, so didn’t count Proust. Can’t remember whether I finished A Passage to India or Malone Dies.) It’s a perverse list, often naming second-best efforts, the only one of which I really commend is The Plague. The Brothers Karamazov is probably better than Crime and Punishment which goes on longer than it should.

The list misses John Steinbeck, and I think Slaughterhouse 5 one of the best novels of all time, on so many levels. And no Atwood or Updike? Money is Martin Amis’s best, but so what?

The list is well discussed on Tacitus, whose commentors recommend two alternate lists — Modern Library 100 Best Novels and A List That Actually Is About the 100 Greatest Books of All-Time.

Hurriedly scribbled @ 4:57 pm GMT

Thursday, October 16, 2003

Bear With Me «

One of the most hateable phrases in current usage. Charming the first time you hear it, maddening thereafter. Anyway, it makes a headline for a link to the BBC story on The death of cheap lager:

When Stella — a Belgian beer brewed in Wales and sold on its French heritage — was unveiled in the 1980s, it caused something of a stir in marketing circles.

And it seems moot to invite you to look at (would we say take a gander?) Wildlife Photographer of the Year Competition 2003.

Hurriedly scribbled @ 2:30 pm GMT

Friday, October 17, 2003

British Institutions «

Had a ticket to hear Martin Bell, ex-BBC war reporter and independent MP, talk and push his new book Through Gates of Fire: A Journey into World Disorder at the Reardon-Smith lecture theatre from DP on Wednesday.

He spoke well and without notes, even if most of his lecture consisted of well-polished jokes and anecdotes. He clearly wants to get back into parliament. He wasn’t impressed by Louis Theroux’s rehabilitation of the Hamiltons who he seems to have a visceral dislike of, saying that the programme gave rise to his first ‘sexual nightmare for twenty years.’

Like everyone else, he has fallen out of love with New Labour, but from the position of being able to watch it closer than most.

He bore the audience well, complimenting them as being frightening. (I suppose many were lawyers or law students or academics.) We were stuck to one side behind a row of pensioners, at least one of whom dozed off. The acoustics were good for him with his lapel mike, but terrible for any audience member asking questions without the roving microphone which tended to get lost, being passed from hand-to-hand.

With a nice sense of humour, a streak of moral anger, and the capacity for independent thought, he came across as more worthy than 90% of MPs. It’s easy for me, ever since I campaigned for Jon Owen Jones (though he’s a friend of my friend DL, so I shouldn’t be too nasty) in 1997, to regard most of Westminster as idea- and passion-free Borg. Thank God therefore for Tony Benn on Radio 4’s Book of the Week. Benn had a marvelous anecote about the erstwhile MP for where I live now, Jim Callaghan. Before the 1997 election, Millbank drones rang around the membership list and tried to galvanise canvassing and funds. One spoke to Gentleman Jim and asked if he had thought of “doing more for the Labour Party.” Callaghan said that having been a Labour Prime Minister, he couldn’t do much more.

Hurriedly scribbled @ 8:39 pm GMT

Sunday, October 19, 2003

Vox Populi? «

What is it with all these polls of public taste? When did pollsters take over the asylum? I can make my own decisions about what I like without having to ask the audience. Why can’t everyone?

At least public taste showed some sense when it voted Daleks the most evil villains. I’d support the setting up of a misunderstood Dalek support group, and campaign against anti-Dalek discrimination.

Unfortunately, public opinion was more disappointing in its choice of The Big Read Top 21. I hope one of 1984, Catch 22, The Catcher in the Rye, Pride and Prejudice, The Wind in the Willows, and Winnie the Pooh wins. The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy is very good, but better as a radio series. Captain Corelli’s Mandolin isn’t bad, and moved me, but not that great. Likewise Great Expectations, To Kill a Mockingbird, and War and Peace.

There’s a good discussion on Metafilter. I’m shocked that there was no PG Wodehouse in the top 100. I spent a weekend at Gregynog when I was a student, where I shared a room with a guy who’d brought Mort by Terry Pratchett, which was the highest rated of his five novels in the Top 100. I didn’t make it as far as page two. (I expect hate mail.) And no Margaret Atwood, no Philip Roth, no Amis.

I’ve never finished Wind in the Willows. I read it as an adult. I started reading Winnie-The-Pooh (even funnier as an adult) to my then girlfriend in bed. Having read all the books, we moved onto Wind in the Willows which we got on great with, until she discovered that I loved Toad. (But doesn’t everyone?) We fell out when she realised that I was more Eeyore than the Tigger she thought she met. More information than you need there, I think.

Whatever I think, Rowling will win. They kept three Harry Potters (and volume five wasn’t published when the list opened) out of the top 21, as they had restricted it to one book per author. That must concentrate the Rowling support.

Hell, these things don’t matter, anyway.

Hurriedly scribbled @ 6:29 pm GMT

Time For The Tories To Raise Their Game «

Peter Hitchens says This is worse than Suez.

Yet in the Kelly case, it is quite clear that the Government deceived the public into supporting an unjustified aggressive war — the first we have waged since Suez.

Peter Oborne in The Spectator asks If Mr Hoon resigns, as he must, how can Mr Blair not resign as well?

The importance of Tebbit’s revelation could not be greater. If Tebbit’s evidence is to be accepted, then Tony Blair’s emphatic assertion that ‘did not authorise the leaking of the name of Dr Kelly’ was false. It shows up the Downing Street claim that the MoD was the ‘lead department’ on the Kelly business as a grotesque fiction — there was not even an MoD representative at the meeting when the naming strategy was agreed.

The issue has moved on from supporting the war or otherwise. The Tories may have supported the war. They have two bases for doing so: Saddam was evil and in violation of UN resolutions (whether it was for the US and UK to over-rule the UN and uphold those resolutions unilaterally is another matter); and they were misled about the ‘imminent threat.’ The case against Blair is not refuted by the argument that the Tories ‘would have done the same thing’ in fighting Saddam. British forces would have been deployed in Iraq eventually, under any PM. The issue is whether the opposition would have deceived the country.

I don’t think the Tories have a hope with IDS. Watching him against Blair is more embarrassing than the old Kinnock-Thatcher battles, and I’m on the Labour side. At least Hague was witty. They should go for Portillo. There always seems to be a whispering campaign against Miguel — allegations that he’s unstable and unsuitable are never backed up. Of course, he’s not a nice person — he’s a politician. Churchill had flaws. You don’t get a reputation as a nice person going about saying things like “I may be drunk, but you are ugly. And I will be sober in the morning.”

I’d have liked to watch more of Portillo being a single mum as he was on BBC2 this week, but he was up against Coyote Ugly, a terrible, plotless film with lots of pretty girlies. I’d come back from Martin Bell’s lecture (see Friday), and the remote just took care of itself.

Hurriedly scribbled @ 3:50 pm GMT

Monday, October 20, 2003

Aye, Aye «

I’m a great admirer of John Humphreys. He has a marvelous radio voice, a gamut of interviewing styles (if you don’t believe that he can be soft, watch Mastermind), a quick mind, and a humane decency. Stephen Pollard and Andrew Sullivan seem to hate him, always a good sign (although both are professional haters, and I doubt either can tell their real feelings from convenient rhetoric).

Humphreys writes the introduction to Between You And I: A Little Book of Bad English by James Cochrane (abridged excerpt in the Guardian). I have my doubts about the style: I’m pretty sure that whatever language is, it is not an organism as Humphreys claims; if “no one were allowed to touch [language],” no one would speak or write at all. Humphreys concludes:

and the evolutionary wheel will have turned full circle

which is empty to me. Is there an ‘evolutionary wheel’? Evolution, by definition, and any ‘evolutionary process’ is open-ended.

I’m a nasty old pedant. Read Orwell on style. I’m so glad that 1984 (or Nineteen Eighty-Four as its author called it) is on The Big Read Top 21. The point stands: bad English corrupts thought.

In the meantime, support the Apostrophe Action Front.

Hurriedly scribbled @ 1:25 pm GMT

Wednesday, October 22, 2003

My Greatest Novels «

One you start compiling lists of the best books, you have to write them down or they just haunt you.

A lot of these appear on other lists, of course. I’m reading Rebecca, and about to start The Woman In White, which will drag me up to 50 out of the original observer list of 100. I still feel ignorant because I’ve never even tried Zola, Samuel Richardson, or got very far with either Vanity Fair or Robinson Crusoe. Still. I own them, and will crack them open again some day.

People I’d leave off would include Martin Amis (great stylist and essayist), Iris Murdoch (perhaps The Black Prince and The Sea, The Sea are good, but I’m in no hurry to re-read her), William Burroughs (just painful to read). Roth, Atwood, Bellow, Vonnegut, and Wodehouse could have the list to themselves.

Hurriedly scribbled @ 5:28 pm GMT

Friday, October 24, 2003

And They Expelled George Galloway From The Party «

Sully’s thought for the day:

We may expect that, a year from now, the last desperate card in the hands of the anti-Americanists will be not that Iraq is democratic, but that it is democratic solely through the agency of the United States — a fate worse than remaining indigenously murderous and totalitarian [emphasis added].

My friends kept telling me Blair was a cunt, and I refused to listen.

Fortunately, for sanity’s sake, Frank Johnson has some perspective.

With this in mind, I would draw attention to a visiting British politician’s speech on American soil as reported in the Washington Star on 31 December 1940, and quoted in one of the books of diplomatic reminiscences by the pre-war Italian ambassador to several countries, Daniele Varé

‘America’s entry into the [1914-18] war was disastrous not only for your country but for the allies as well because had you stayed at home and minded your own business we would have made peace with the central powers in the spring of 1917 and then there would have been no collapse of Russia, followed by communism; no breakdown in Italy, followed by fascism, and nazism would not be at present enthroned in Germany. If America had stayed out of the war and minded her own business, none of these “isms” would today be sweeping the continent of Europe and breaking down parliamentary government.’

My sentiments entirely; but, had the neoconservatives existed in 1940, the author of those words have been denounced as just an ungrateful European anti-American envious of America’s power. Absent though they are from Martin Gilbert, the words are Churchill’s.

Johnson also says, “It is possible to be pro-American without always approving of what America does.” But that takes judgement, taste, strength of character, and so forth.

Hurriedly scribbled @ 11:47 pm GMT [No comments]

Dam Spam «

Spam is ‘turning people off e-mail’ according to the BBC. Despite my best efforts, huge drifts of spam find their way to my mail server. I had something like 50 junk emails this morning. I swatted them all with Mailwasher. It’s not perfect, but it does a good job of sorting out friends to the top of the incoming list, so they don’t get deleted by accident.

The hardest thing is finding that I have to be careful never to use swear words and write subject lines which are non-generic — even innocuous phrases like “Thanks” and “Happy birthday” are out, never mind “I love you.”

Hurriedly scribbled @ 10:57 am GMT [1 comment]

Saturday, October 25, 2003

About Faces «

I’m not a tv person during the day, but I thought I’d catch the Wales-Italy match this morning. However, I love talking heads programmes, and BBC2 has a interesting show called The Sharp End which is like Late Review but about news and chaired by Clive Anderson.

This morning’s guests were a Tory candidate whose name I forget but he was very relaxed and casual in a an open-necked navy shirt, and seemed to have far more tv presence than his nominal leader, Richard Perle, and representing the left were Alexei Sayle (described in the captions as a “Cyclist and Comedian”) and American writer Eric Schlosser. Women, broadcasters, and the centre were championed by Janet Street-Porter. Perle was clearly out-of-place, the only one in a tie, and as monosylabic as a teenager during most of the persiflage. When he did hold forth, on Donald Rumsfeld’s memo, Alexei Sayle sat and mugged like Tim in ‘The Office’. Unhappily, Sayle’s verbal interventions were much less impressive than his dumb show. Perle didn’t seem interested in arguing anyway, and merely grunted “Chomsky” when Sayle name-dropped the Harvard sage’s name. Perle’s tone was as eloquent as Sayle’s body language, and seemed to say “I can’t convert you, so I don’t remotely care; arguing from authority is bogus; and anyway, I know a lot more about this.” The exchange was redolent of gutsy Palestinian street-kids throwing ineffectual rocks at an indifferent Israeli tank convoy.

Then Schlosser stepped in.

His mode of attack was more sophisticated. “First,” he seemed to say, “I’m an American, so you ought to care about what I think.” He explained that he’d been in New York when it was attacked, which put him at least level with Perle, and shut off any “but I know what’s really going on” interruptions. He said that he supported the “war on al-Quaeda” but not the “war on terrorism” Where Alexei Sayle had raised the whole “one man’s terrorist is another’s freedom fighter” Schlosser kept his argument fixed to Pakistan which, he claimed, was being funded by the US, while openly hostile to “the world’s biggest democracy — India” and possibly supplying North Korea with nuclear weapons. Sadly, Clive Anderson softened the mood before Perle could reposition himself and the furniture started being thrown.

I’ll have to watch next week now. I was impressed by Schlosser.

Hurriedly scribbled @ 8:45 pm GMT [No comments]

Sunday, October 26, 2003

Methodology In Their Madness «

If you weren’t aware that the Guardian and the Observer share a publisher and a website, the following juxtaposition would have meant nothing to you. Yesterday, Stephen Poliakoff described his feelings about market research (in the interests of puffing his new play, naturally). Anyone who has heard of Charles Saatchi’s laughable market research before the Silk Cut and Benson and Hedges adverts will know how unreliable it is. Saatchi had almost uniformly negative feedback. He didn’t tell the client, and launched the campaign anyway. If he had listened, he would not have one of the largest art collections in Britain now.

Poliakoff has this remarkable anecdote:

He outlined to me how BritishTelecom, his old employer, had commissioned a great deal of consumer research into the size of the potential mobile phone market in the early 1980s.… After a period of exhaustive enquiry, BT found the total market for mobile phones would never be more than a few thousand people in the UK.… Similar research undertaken by AT&T in the US had come to the same conclusion, and so BT promptly sold its mobile phone business.… BT’s research had asked such questions as: “If you were on a bus, and the bus was delayed and you had a phone small enough to fit in your pocket, would you find it useful to be able to phone home and say you were going to be late?”

Nearly every single respondent said they would never want to use the phone like that, and they would never buy one even if they became very cheap. This was because they didn’t want to be perceived as foolish or extravagant by strangers. So even if market researchers were skilful and imaginative enough to ask the right questions, the respondent was capable of giving an untrue answer.

I think Poliakoff is wrong to conclude from this that “the consumer had lied.” Respondents (who were not, anyway, consumers, merely putative ones) were asked about a situation they had never been in, and they did not have the imagination the survey required.

Today, the Observer published a poll which reveals that millions think drinking coffee can give you a heart attack… Only kidding about that, the results are far less informative.

Hurriedly scribbled @ 8:20 pm GMT [No comments]

The Potency Of Cheap Television «

Channel 4 is showing a Scary season (presumably for Hallowe’en, as Sky seems to have the same idea). And last night I watched the first half of the 100 Greatest Scary Moments. You could almost see the quality go down as the placings went up. The War Game was quite low, but it’s one of the scariest things ever. Night of the Hunter seemed to feature twice, as despite organising a public vote, C4 didn’t seem to know if they were voting for scary films (like Blair Witch) or scary moments (like the head rolling out of the bottom of the boat in Jaws). Both will make the top 40 to be screened tonight. You can knock me down with a feather if any of the public really voted for the Lumière brothers Train Pulling Into A Station.

Some of the website’s descriptions are pathetic, like this one of The Tripods:

Alien tripods take over Earth controlling human adult minds — so it’s naturally down to a couple of boys to start a resistance. This invading force of giant three legged machines became a sci-fi monster, feeding on the fear of ‘man vs machine’.

I’ve only read the books, but the boys join, rather than start, the resistance. Christ alone knows what “[t]his invading force of giant three legged machines became a sci-fi monster” means. Tripods were in the ‘War of the Worlds’ and in what sense did the force ‘become’ a ‘monster’? The strength of the books is that they seem with hindsight to be an allegory of Nazi occupation and about the strangeness of adults.

Dennis Hopper as Frank in Blue Velvet and Michael Madsen as Mr Blond in Reservoir Dogs were in last night’s programme, which suggests that most of the remaining shockers will be conventional horror films. Now if they would show Night of the Hunter, Theatre of Blood, and Twin Peaks…

For real frights, I’ve always gone to the news. And while man’s inhumanity to man is pretty scary, Mary Wakefield’s cover story in the Spectator chills me far more. The only thing wrong with Darwin’s Theory of Evolution are the words ‘Darwin’ implying that it is a personality cult on a par with Freudianism, and ‘Theory of’ — it’s not a theory people, it’s a given. God did not create Pit Bulls, Chihuahuas, Schnauzers, and Beagles in 4004 BC, any more than there were two race horses and two pit-ponies on the Ark.

We don’t need bogey men like al-Quaeda to bomb us back to the dark ages. We’re half way there already.

Hurriedly scribbled @ 3:01 pm GMT [No comments]

It’s Impassible «

Dictionary.com defines impassible as:

impassible \im-PASS-uh-buhl\, adjective:

  1. Incapable of suffering; not subject to harm or pain
  2. Unfeeling or not showing feeling.

In other words, stiff upper lip. And I thought they said in the US, “nothing’s impassible.”

Hurriedly scribbled @ 2:25 pm GMT [No comments]

Tuesday, October 28, 2003

A Fiver On Boris «

Nick Barlow posts on the runners and riders in the Tory Leadership election.

Boris Johnson is 100/1! Worth a flutter if you ask me. (Though I’m not a successful gambler.)

AAGH! Next Conservative Leader—Sorry, betting is no longer available on this event.

Hurriedly scribbled @ 5:56 pm GMT [No comments]

Wednesday, October 29, 2003

24 Greatest Movies «

Those list-makers are at it again. Through Unlearned Hand, I learn that Roger Simon, Dan Drezner, and Amy Lamboley have all compiled ‘greatest movie’ lists. Simon started it, and declared that no great films had been made in the last 20 years. Drezner then weighed in with 20 of younger vintage, and so on. I didn’t read their lists or explanations before I made mine, and I could add some more now. Yes, there are 24. I got carried away.

I’m with Simon, in that the oldies are the goodies. I’ve long thought that the ‘best films’ are all black-and-white — so long as I can include Rumblefish and Manhattan.

All links are to the Internet Movie Database, for which thanks with checks on names and so forth.

Films which didn’t make it include The Blair Witch Project, because it’s just too silly at the end, AI because it goes oooooon so bloody long, but the first half is classic, whichever Austin Powers movie Mike Myers runs around naked behind a succession of phallic symbols in, because after that it’s just too bitty. Oh, there are more. Many more.

Hurriedly scribbled @ 11:37 pm GMT [No comments]

Rough Beasts «

The feverishness of political discourse in the States boggles me. The Democrats are sort-of Tories and the Republicans are sort-of Tories, and one politician is pretty much as corrupt as the next. Few Americans I’ve met care about politicians in the slightest. Most seem to agree with William Yeats:

A statesman is an easy man,
He tells his lies by rote…

Political commentators, by contrast, are hortatory and didactic — and angry.

Yeats also wrote in The Second Coming:

The best lack all conviction; while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Though this seems true at all times to me.There’s nothing wrong with a little anger or passion, they get the ball rolling as it were. They light the fuse. It’s the state of apoplexy that worries me. Robert Carlyle played Hitler in a mini-series on Channel 4 recently. As always, he was remarkable. Out of many good scenes, the one that stays with me is Carlyle addressing a mostly-empty beer hall for the first time. He is too quiet and all the patrons ignore him. He sees that he is failing and he explodes: he visibly spits when he speaks, his face reddens, and his body writhes. Everyone looks at him. This is the Hitler we know from the newsreels.

If you want a definition of fascism, it’s not a process, it’s not the flags, or the rallies, or the causes, it’s the hate. Above all the lies and the rationing and surveillance in Nineteen Eighty-Four, the Two-Minute Hate was the glue that held the state together. As any method actor can tell you, everyone can find a given emotion if they look in the right places.

The good thing about the Iraqis is that most of them don’t seem to care much. Not so other parts of the Middle East where they still have riots against blasphemy, and people die. How killing a policeman in Pakistan will affect Salman Rushdie in London, or how trampling some of your fellow believers pleases the old boy in the sky are mysteries too deep for my muddled athiest brain.

Joan Didion tries to fathom Mr. Bush & the Divine in a review of Armageddon: The Cosmic Battle of the Ages. The first two-thirds are better than the conclusion, which seems grafted on to me. I read the first book of the Left Behind saga in the States, and her article is a fine exegesis of the escatological convictions of the religious right. However, I think that it’s easy to overestimate the impact religion has. By its very nature religious belief is insubstantial and its ordinances have done little to retard murder, violence, adultery, theft, and so on. I forget who said it, but the Irish believe three things about death. “When you die, that’s it. When you die, your soul goes up to heaven to sing with the angels. And if you don’t bury the buggers deep enough, they’ll come out of the ground to get you.”

Russell Baker reviews Paul Krugman’s The Great Unraveling: Losing Our Way in the New Century in The Awful Truth, and goes some way to explaining the hatred of Krugman that serves as a standby when Sully has a slow day, or when the gears in his brain crunch more than usual.

Hurriedly scribbled @ 12:29 pm GMT [No comments]

Thursday, October 30, 2003

24 Greatest Movies cont’d «

Here are some I forgot

And that really is enough.

Hurriedly scribbled @ 2:04 pm GMT [No comments]

Let’s Kill All The Lawyers «

Is Blogging a dangerous sport? One blogger loses his job (as noted earlier). Another gets a letter from the lawyer of a lunatic stalker alleging that he “recently stole the precious”.

Hurriedly scribbled @ 12:23 pm GMT [1 comment]

Big Brother Is Watching You «

I meant to post under this title when I had a voucher for cat food in the post from Tesco. I use a store card so I know that they have a good idea what I buy, but I still find it a little spooky.

However, I find the idea of one’s employer reading one’s blog and firing one way spookier.

Happy Halloween.

Hurriedly scribbled @ 12:03 pm GMT [No comments]

Friday, October 31, 2003

Captain, My Captain «

I can’t decide what my response to Master And Commander is. I already accept that I don’t have the willpower not to see it.

The site might be great if you’re prepared to tool around, wait forever for downloads, and read fuzzy Flash text. It is at least in the spirit of the books, and it looks beautiful.

By the looks of the actors, Maturin is younger than Aubrey, but in the books, he can’t be. He must be at least in his mid-thirties (possibly older as they meet in 1803 or 4, and he witnessed, and may have taken part in, the French Revolution in 1779) when they meet, and Jack is explicitly 28, and old to be a first lieutenant. Russell Crowe, whatever his merits, is too short, and not English.

It’s not the film that I thought it would be: it’s not Master And Commander, Aubrey has the Surprise, so it must be a little later, perhaps The Far Side Of The World. Why call it by the ungainly combination of two book titles, when Aubrey is only Master And Commander in that first book — afterwards he is a Post-Captain, and why they start in the middle, I don’t know. As this is the one with the Galapagos Islands, it’s the one where Maturin most closely resembles Darwin, which, given the bigotry of much of the world at present, isn’t where I’d have kicked off. Still, I suppose those folks don’t read, and perhaps they think the cinema is sinful.

Patrick O’Brian is one of my many obsessions. I ordered Blue at the Mizzen, the last in the series, from Amazon before it came out and reviewed it within a day. (And only one person found my review helpful.)

Hurriedly scribbled @ 4:12 pm GMT [No comments]

The Yes/No Interlude «

How many straightforward questions can you answer without either a ‘yes’ or a ‘no’? Michael Howard manages 14. That Newsnight interview; requires Real Media player. Link from Rod’s comment on Tom Watson.

Hurriedly scribbled @ 11:46 am GMT [No comments]

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