backword

Thursday, 1 January 2004

Well, Duh »

A chance like this won’t come round again in 2004, so I’d better sieze it.

Crescat Sententia have 20 Questions for Julian Sanchez.

[Q]19: What do you think should be the relationship between literature and politics?

Interesting that you ask that, because I’ve just been reading Richard Rorty’s “Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity” with great interest, and he certainly sees literature and art as central to politics. Our most fundamental value commitments, what Rorty calls our “final vocabulary", are basically prerational. If deep down you don’t share some critical mass of normative premises with someone, you’re not going to be able to bring them around by “committing philosophy on them,” as Nozick put it.

Well, duh.

This is from the second of the today’s Torygraph’s leader, Good night’s work.

According to an international study in 1997, one in five British adults came in the bottom group for English and maths.

Well, duh.

Now, I support the conclusions: evening classes are a good thing. I went to university on the back on an A-level gained at an evening class. But the premise is Horlicks. Put like that, you could say that one in five teams in the Premiership are in the bottom fifth of the league. No kidding, Sherlock. What do they want? That none in the Department of Education shall sleep until everyone comes in the top group for everything?

A chance like this will come round nearly every day for the rest of the year, but that’s no reason to pass it up. Stephen Pollard on New Year’s Eve.

Since celebrating New Year’s Eve is an entirely arbitrary choice, why don’t those of us who would rather smother ourselves with rotting fish than go out on 31st December choose our own, random date, and quietly celebrate it, on our own.

Well, duh.

These 302 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 10:39pm GMT Permanent link.

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I’d Rather Be A Thinker Than A Linker »

Daniel Drezner is sitting in for Andrew Sullivan, and brings confusion to Kevin Drum, who claims not to understand this.

Seriously, the one downside of MT I’ve noticed is that I don’t bother with quick-link posts — probably because, in the back of my mind, it seems ridiculous to create a new web page for a two sentence post. In terms of the linker/thinker divide, MT leads me to fewer of the former.

Oh, come on, Kevin. It’s perfectly simple.

This blogger you’d call a linker

While this one answers to thinker.

Some appear to prefer blinkers.

Blogs are divers:

Kevin cures his colds with zincer;

There’s always the coming brink a’ destruction;

And Christmas — that fur coat looked better on the mink, er

That’s not a rhyme, Rodders you plinker,

I suspect you’re a secret drinker,

Who boots up his blog to curse like a tinker

Or buys the lies, hook, line, and sinker.

These 156 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 11:34pm GMT Permanent link.

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Friday, 2 January 2004

Nor All Thy Piety Nor Wit »

I’m still having problems with the CMS. Rather than have a ‘before’ and ‘after’ in December, I decided to carry on as much as possible throughout last month and start a new regime yesterday. Naturally, I left all the updating as late as possible — until the 31st — and spent longer over lunch at a friend’s house than I planned. Yesterday was a confused rush of rewritten code, and while new entry pages were knocked out, they didn’t show on the home page. This is now fixed. (With any luck.)

I would do it very differently if I could start again. Still, there’s no point in worrying about that now, any more than there is any point in calling the 10 black-and-white films A Pretentious 10, rather than ‘Black-and-White World’ (after the Elvis Costello song).

Comments will work in a predictable way by the end of the month.

These 145 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 6:19pm GMT Permanent link.

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Beer Can Sandwich »

Thanks for asking, I had an excellent New Year. I’d probably have stayed in, watched Jools Holland (if I hadn’t been reading or gone to bed), but that’s no reason to pass it up. Stephen Pollard snapped me out of it.

I had a lively mix of drinks. Two glasses white wine at lunchtime, 3 bottles lager with a curry in the evening, straight onto 3 pints of not-very-good pump beer, champagne around half ten when we got bored of the pub, and red wine and possibly more lager until midnight. Moderate for a Scot, I suppose.

I learned an easy way to order a bacon sandwich in Jamaican. Pretty pointless, as I don’t eat meat, but it kept me amused and I kept laughing madly to myself today. Our group divided over the question of whether High Fidelity is any good at all, or complete crap. At least we largely agreed that The Grifters is much better. (Though I said on the night that it’s Frears’ best work when of course it’s not. There’s My Beautiful Laundrette, Prick Up Your Ears, Dangerous Liaisons (a large contributor to my David Seaman ponytail, and I didn’t even realise that Malkovich was a slaphead), and Bloody Kids — the one with Gwyneth “Cassandra” Strong.)

Then we fell to discussing vibrators, and was told, “every man should have one, because there are only three women in the world who can climax with what God gave to man alone.” I admitted my good fortune at having met all of them and this was deflatingly treated as rather wittier than I had intended. (I had considered buying T. a new one for her birthday, as husband used her old dildo, and she threw it out.) I expressed some surprise that vibrators were so popular (I mean, I know they don’t roll over and start farting, but men are remarkably cheap if you count buying dinner as a negative expense).

I crossed the political incorrectness meridian several times in the conversation that followed, made worse that I was sat next to Tony, of Jamaican descent (see ‘beer can sandwich’ reference above), and in a wheelchair (this gets more like a Richard Curtis movie), but as we agreed on ‘High Fidelity’ (crap) and ‘The Grifters’ (Frears’ best), it didn’t seem to matter.

Come midnight, it was raining stones. so we’d didn’t wake the street as planned. We made do with the pips on digital Radio 2, and the engaged burr of mobiles as the servers overflowed.

These 417 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 10:01pm GMT Permanent link.

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Films I Can’t Include »

I’ve havered for a bit before publishing another draft of my 10 favourite films. I’ve looked at other’s lists. I’ve searched my (non-existent) soul. There are films I can eliminate, and films I should really consider.

Chris Brooke chooses Battle of Algiers, which made a remarkable impression on me, but I can’t recap it now, so it’s not in. He also goes for Napoleon, which, though it was part of the opening of the Edinburgh Playhouse, I’ve never seen. Not in. Now he also mentions High Noon, which is difficult to exclude. BBC2 showed three really great films on Christmas Day in 2000 or 2001: High Noon and Casablanca were two. I forget the third. I’m tempted to slate it as over-ambitious, but for now my own list includes Apocalypse Now, Being John Malkovich, 2001: A Space Odyssey, and Citizen Kane, all films whose reach exceeded their makers’ grasp (at least when they started).

Ironweed. I just remember being disappointed by this. I hadn’t read the book, but I’d read others by William Kennedy. And this has not only king actors like Nicolson and Streep, it also has Fred Gwynne and Tom Waits. Now if you were to persuade me to direct a movie, I could turn down anyone, even the principals. But Fred Gwynne. The judge in My Cousin Vinnie. He was in Car 54, Where are You? and The Munsters, as well as numerous episodes of Bilko (notably as ‘The Stomach’ in the one that parodied ‘Cool Hand Luke’). And Tom Waits, of Rumble Fish and Down By Law — the Tom Waits of ‘Martha’, ‘Shanghai’, ‘Frank’s Wild Years’, the Tom Waits I would exchange my three peak sexual experiences (see previous post) to have played guitar on ‘Downtown Train’ for. It’s still not very good.

I can’t choose Henry V either. It is very good, the best of Branagh so far, though he has the best scriptwriter to help. I’d like to think my dad named my favourite cat (the one I took over when he had a stroke) after, but I fear the name came from the film where Harrison Ford is shot in the head. Branagh does the verse brilliantly, and the whole thing is inspiring. Unfortunately, the Scots were on the French side, so if you want a vote from me, Kenny, you should have chosen a different story.

It’s a Wonderful Life. I know my politics come across like the conclusion of Candide (and Ford Maddox Ford) that one should ‘cultivate one’s garden’. And so they are, more or less. But that was after Candide saw the world. This is a “stay at home and drink your beer and don’t ask questions” movie, and I loathe every second. Yes, you lived your life the wrong way, you stupid fucker! Yes, the miserable bastards cramped your style.Greed is good. I like Gordon Gecko. I like Lenin in October. Anything but this dreadful, hand-patting, bourgeois reassurance. Rise like lions from the slumber! Workers of the world unite! I wanna be anarchy! Anything but City of the Eunuchs. Three Sisters is near enough my favourite (non-Shakespeare) play, but you have to incant under your breath, “Go to Moscow. Go to Moscow. Go to Moscow” through the whole thing, otherwise it means nothing. Otherwise they come and chop down your cherry orchard. I’m with the Joads in The Grapes of Wrath, with Mickey Rourke in Rumble Fish, with, goddam it, Kane. Go to California. Build the Empire. Drink Bud, not Heineken. God, I hate this film. So he might never have existed. You know the end of Matheiu Delarue in La Mort dans L’ame? That’s what nothingness should be like.

Jaws. Big fish. Hitchcock used violins. Spielberg used cellos. Big deal. The fact that, after seeing the trailer, I thought that the shark ate everyone, and was unconsolably disappointed is of no importance whatever. (Though the same goes for Jurassic Park. I thought at least one kid would get chewed a little.)

There are others, but in all the excitement back there, I lost count.

These 676 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 11:36pm GMT Permanent link.

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Saturday, 3 January 2004

Collective Thinking »

Is New Labour worried by Michael Howard’s “I believe” advertisment? According to Matthew Turner they needn’t be, but no one ever stayed ahead by being complacent.

Backword has seen a draft copy of the New Labour stratagem to deal with the current threat. Put together in secret by a team headed by the only person Blair trusts outside his immediate family, Peter Mandelson, it aims to state New Labour’s purpose in as few words as possible. As Mandelson puts it:

You have to realise that the overwhelming majority of voters grew up with television and the Sun. They expect soundbites. They don’t want long, technical arguments, just clear facts. Most of them have an attention span which would shame a tapeworm. Put simply, they’re thick.

We had to get across that we are a party of collective responsibility, that everyone can be a part of. At the same time, we wanted to show that we were tough and don’t fool around. After too many late nights, we boiled the next manifesto down to two key points.

• Prepare to be assimilated
• Resistance is futile

We think it’s a winner.

These 188 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 8:48pm GMT Permanent link.

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Vox Populi »

I meant to blog the Today programme poll before it closed. For what it’s worth in retrospect, I voted (online, once) for

Law 3: A Bill to allow the use of all organs for transplant after death unless the individual has “opted out” and recorded that opt out on an organ transplant register.

It wasn’t a hard decision. The others (A Bill to ban smoking in all workplaces; Double-headed Bill which would have limited the number of terms a Prime Minister can serve to two and would have made voting in General Elections compulsory; Ban all Christmas advertising and the erection of municipal street decorations before 1st December; and The proposal to authorise homeowners to use any means to defend their home from intruders) are all — IMO — junk.

The smoking ban is — if not fascist — an affront to liberty. I don’t particularly like smoking, and most of my friends are against, and complain of this or that pub being smoky and having to wash their hair/all clothes on getting home, but I don’t see why these things can’t be sorted out by negotiation and competition. I think there is room for a few non-smoking bars and restaurants, and for non-smoking areas. Anyway, I lean toward the view that there are too many laws, and have been since the collapse of the Roman Empire.

A double-headed bill is just confused. Neither proposition is contingent on the other; they seem like quite separate issues. I don’t agree on the two-term limitation. I accept that it was a bulwark against dictatorship in the American Constitution, but I suspect that Clinton could have won a third term, and then we’d be concentrating our military energies on those trying to kill us — al’Queada, and not on those who once tried to kill the president’s dad. Plus, a two term limit is more likely to make a wounded Prime Minister hang on to see out his term, and dampen opposition which would overthrow him, as they know he is going anyway. Thirdly (I really don’t like this proposal) governments should be elected on their record, a fresh start every two terms is a way of confusing that, of saying, “You didn’t like Tony Blair, well, Gordon will be quite different.” Not do I see any merit in compulsory voting. Some whacking great proportion of fines do not get paid as it is, why criminalise more people? There are far better reasons to vote already: schools, the NHS, taxes.

Christmas means nothing to me. If you don’t like shops that start their Yuletide stuff in November, boycott them. See your council. If the people in Westminster are so devout that they want their Christmas decorations up in August, why should that affect us in Cardiff or vice versa? This is not a government matter. Parliament should be more important than this.

That leaves only two. The one I support, because I carry a donor card, and I’m certain that when you die, that’s it. I don’t care if my mortal remains are plasticated (or whatever the word is) or used to save lives or put on show for students. The grave’s a fine and private place, but…

The remaining choice is the ‘Tony Martin’ option. Again, it is poorly thought out. This is not because these were proposed by amateurs, MPs are just as bad. Let’s take it step by step.

Homeowners should be able to use any means to defend their home from intruders.

Start with the first word, “homeowners", not, we note, others. Let us suppose that while Lord Archer was detained by Her Majesty earlier in the year, one of his adult sons had stayed in his flat while in London, and had discovered a burglar there. As he would not be the homeowner, any more than if had never left home, or a tenant is, this law would do zip for him. Next, there is the issue of ‘be able’. This means, I suppose that they are currently liable to arrest should they do so now. This seems to posit a legal exclusion zone around private property. Would intruders include Jehovah’s witnesses? double-glazing salesmen? ramblers? Could it include an unwelcome visit by the local constable asking that the stereo be turned down? If a husband catches his wife’s lover in a wardrobe, can he kill him? What about the word ‘defend’? Tim Lambert gets this right: the burglars Tony Martin shot were in retreat. His shots were not defensive, and held not to be by a jury. Read his whole argument; he’s very good. I don’t see that this law, if enacted would have protected Mr Martin, unless it is allowed to do great damage to our constitution.

These 782 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 9:45pm GMT Permanent link.

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Deconstructing Howard »

Matthew Turner (again, what is it with him) seemed to be the first to post on Michael Howard’s weirdness and defends his position over at Nick Barlow’s comments: “I was saying they were weird in their banality.”

I’m suddenly disappointed in Howard. I had hoped that we were recovering a decent adversarial system of parliamentary government where ideas underwent some intellectual scrutiny. Matthew compares Howard (unfavourably) with Chuchill. Quite. You knew Churchill was principled, even if he was capable of horse-trading and compromise. He didn’t have to take out an advertisment in the Times to prove it.

Howard’s beliefs could have come from New Labour. There are traces of 19th century liberalism. None whatever of conservatism.

Here they are, I’ve numbered them for ease of reference.

1. I believe it is natural for men and women to want health, wealth and happiness for their families and themselves
2. I believe it is the duty of every politician to serve the people by removing the obstacles in the way of these ambitions
3. I believe people are most likely to be happy when they are masters of their own lives, when they are not nannied or over-governed
4. I believe that the people should be big. That the state should be small
5. I believe red tape, bureaucracy, regulations, inspectorates, commissions, quangos, ‘czars’, ‘units’ and ‘targets’ came to help and protect us, but now we need protection from them. Armies of interferers don’t contribute to human happiness
6. I believe that people must have every opportunity to fulfil their potential
7. I believe there is no freedom without responsibility. It is our duty to look after those who cannot help themselves
8. I believe in equality of opportunity. Injustice makes us angry
9. I believe every parent wants their child to have a better education than they had
10. I believe every child wants security for their parents in their old age
11. I do not believe that one person’s poverty is caused by another’s wealth
12. I do not believe that one person’s ignorance is caused by another’s knowledge and education
13. I do not believe that one person’s sickness is made worse by another’s health
14. I believe the British people are only happy when they are free
15. I believe that Britain should defend her freedom at any time, against all comers, however mighty
16. I believe that by good fortune, hard work, natural talent and rich diversity, these islands are home to a great people with a noble past and exciting future.

I am happy to be their servant.

OK, hands up who doubts 1. Now, does everyone think, ‘natural’ is the same as ‘good’? Most religions stress a divide between the two.

In 2, he calls the natural wants ‘ambitions’. Is health an ambition?

Number 3 seems banally sensible, until you read Howard’s closing statement. If mastery leads to happiness, why would he seek servitude? It is all very strange.

Matthew has fun with point 4. I’ve never known where ‘the people’ stop and ‘the state’ starts. I thought democracy meant the two were the same. Being against over-governance is not a political position: it is a tautology. Over-anything is bad, whether it is governed, taxed, fed, sexed, or a barrel.

I agree with point 5. I suspect that Mr Howard does not. I’ll believe that he can do something when I see it.

“I believe that people must have every opportunity to fulfil their potential.” Good for Mr Howard. £30,000 per pupil per year, for those skiing lessons, stunt-driving courses, the opportunity to see Tibet, or carve the great Prime Ministers’ heads on the White Cliffs of Dover. It’ll raise taxes, you know.

“I believe in equality of opportunity. Injustice makes us angry” — from the Today programme poll, it seems that a lot of people are upset about Tony Martin, and presumably consider that an injustice. What bearing has that on “equality of opportunity"?

Point 8 may not apply to Boris Johnson, who I believe enjoyed his time at Eton and wishes the same for his own children.

I may have been a heartless child, the idea of point nine never crossed my mind until I was in my 20s. Even though I think Mr Howard is using ‘child’ in the sense of “we’re all somebody’s child”, I still think he’s wrong. If my late father had wanted to go rock climbing or bet his pension on the stock market, I see no reason why a bus pass should have debarred him from doing so.

I don’t, in principle, disagree with the next point, but I would be happier if Nike executives paid their third world workers a little more, and themselves a little less.

I believe that ignorance is an absence. It does not, as such, have a cause. However, let’s go beyond belief and look at facts. Polly Toynbee at least admits that this is a falsifiable belief.

The last four decend into real stupidity.

Sadly, these might convince someone.

These 821 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 11:02pm GMT Permanent link.

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Sunday, 4 January 2004

Wild Rover »

BASTARDS!!

This word was hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 9:58am GMT Permanent link.

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And If And Perhaps And But »

How unpleasant to meet Mr Eliot!
With his features of clerical cut,
And his brow so prim
And his mouth so grim
And his conversation, so nicely
Restricted to What Precisely
And If and Perhaps and But.

Lines for Cuscuscaraway and Mirza Murad Ali Beg

I’ve been wanting to add something constructive, and with any luck, something witty to Arthur Silber’s observations, but I can’t — he says it all.

He has the nuances which persuade me that the anti-war position is right. Pacifism, of sorts, has been the dominant persuasion of the left since the end of the First World War. As Brecht said, “Only the rich can win on one side of a war. The poor on both sides always lose” (from memory: either The Caucasian Chalk Circle or Mother Courage at a guess). There have been doubters of that on the British left: Orwell, so much so he is a selectively quoted hero of the right, and Nye Bevin, who was famously reluctant to go “naked into the conference chamber.”

Oh, no, cried the warbloggers! No “but” allowed! A single “but” — and you were consigned forever to Coalition of the Pissy hell. According to the brave, fearless, always-typing warbloggers, we had spread before us an old-fashioned morality play: on one side, we had pure, untarnished good…

And to prove they really do say things like that:

That’s just a hint at what you festering assnuggets in MoveOut™/ISM/Q.U.E.S.T.I.O.N./NION were trying to protect from being overthrown. No “ifs”, “ands” or “buts”. Period. Stop. End.

Sigh. I know. Quoting the dog is hardly fair. It’s not like I’ve searched for rational opinion. But I don’t think that the polarisation is of our — the anti-war faction — doing. I could quote Arthur more but there’s a link, you can read him yourselves. It’s all Rumsfeld this, Rumsfeld that. He had no problems with Saddam’s torture chambers and rape rooms in the 80s. Chemical weapons (the WMD concept whereby chemical and biological weapons were linked to the far more destructive nuclear arms had yet to spun) were no barrier to our joint end of opposing Iran. That was horse-trading in Le Carré-like miasma. Today is the noon day clarity of pitiless sun and sharp shadows.

Tell you what guys, lets discover oil in Tibet, Zimbabwe, Uzebeckistan. Maybe we will rid the world of dictators yet. But not, I hope, at the cost of another British life. If another Briton has to die, do I see Norman Geras’s hand up, David Aaronovich? Good on you boys. You go first.

These 379 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 11:54pm GMT Permanent link.

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Monday, 5 January 2004

The Dog That Didn’t Bark »

Important financial advice if you invest in stocks and shares. (We reserve the right to call you a ‘greedy capitalist bastard’, though we have dabbled ourselves.) Don’t trust the New York Post if its standard of journalism is represented by this story (via Penny Arcade via Wil Wheaton via MeFi).

It appears in the business section, but its author, Christopher Byron, seems more preoccupied with uninformed personal attacks than with disinterested investment analysis.

So before turning to Take-Two’s other problems, let’s first pause for some thoughts on the core question of what this company actually does — which is to produce and market video games of such luxuriously violent and disgusting content as to leave one simply speechless

Since we’ve already been told that Take-Two’s value “climbed by more than 500 percent”, I suspect that it hasn’t left everyone simply speechless, but what the hell.

But trust me when I tell you that considering what else goes on in “Grand Theft Auto: Vice City,” that phrase is nothing.

I make it a point of principle of never trusting anyone who asks to be trusted, either prove it or stay schtum, chum.

People, this is insane. This is 10,000 times worse than the worst thing anybody thinks Michael Jackson ever did to a little boy — or than any lie the feds think Martha Stewart ever told them, or any line in any song that Bruce Springsteen ever sang that rankled a cop in the Meadowlands.

Is this a stock article or an apologia for minor celebs recently in trouble with the law? How does Mr Byron know what Michael Jackson did? How does he know what other people think he did? 10,000 is quite a big factor. It’s big enough to imply that whatever Michael Jackson did is not really that bad. That’s an interesting opinion.

Penny Arcade are upset because they are gamers. They raised $200M for a children’s hospital this Christmas. Media coverage: zip. Media coverage of a game, plenty. There are lots of studies of violence in the media. It’s a glamourous subject. You’d think that by now someone would have spotted a pattern if killers got twitchy from PlayStation deprivation in the cells.

Like the dog that didn’t bark in the Sherlock Holmes story, there are no reports of mass-murdering gamers.

Media violence may even be cathartic. Unlike Mr Byron, I’ve read the literature.

I was upset enough to write to him at cbyron@nypost.com.

Excellent piece of prejudiced, uninformed hack work.

Have these people hurt you in some way? Where did they teach you to refer to anybody’s father when you know neither party as ‘his daddy’ and ‘Dad’? What is ‘digital snuff porn’ — apart from an oxymoron? If you have children, I hope you never let them watch television, or play ‘Cops and Robbers’ or anything rough like that. Whether violent games, films, and television corrupt is an empirical question. There is still no evidence that they do. If I understand your article, you think that film classification is a waste of time. “Besides: By what preposterous reasoning can one argue that once someone turns 17 years of age it magically becomes OK to glorify mass murder?” Well, tell that to the government. No more Arnie films then.

Still as you work on the business pages, I look forward to you condemning stock in arms traders and the like. I’d watch what you condemn though, your paper’s owner has fingers in lots of pies. You could shoot yourself in the foot one of these days. Metaphorically of course,

yours

Dave Weeden

These 598 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 9:22pm GMT Permanent link.

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Tuesday, 6 January 2004

Nepotism »

My mother cried
When president Kennedy died
She said it was the communists
But I knew better

Sting, Born In The ‘50s

When I woke up this morning, I found myself wondering why I let this hack job bother me. I can’t read two articles on the web without being offended by at least something in one of them.

One reason was the Michael Jackson reference, which was inexcusably stupid. Like most adults, I draw a hard line between fiction (or the virtual world) and reality (a term I prefer to stay away from). It’s one thing to write books about the fetishisation of car crashes or old men seducing teenagers. It’s another to actually share a bed with juveniles, or heave your own child over a balcony. Or anyone’s child.

But everyone agrees about that. This paragraph got me as well.

Take-Two was founded in 1993 by a young fellow named Ryan Brant, who was apparently raised in a family steeped in its own Vice City values. Ryan’s daddy, Peter, a polo-playing fop from Greenwich, Conn., did time in federal prison for tax fraud after trying to write off $1.5 million worth of massages, jewelry, scalp rubs and what-not as business expenses.

Apart from the Statute of Limitations, who says that the acts of the father have any bearing on the son? Cordelia was honest; her sisters weren’t. It’s not rocket science. I had rather hoped that judging a man by his ancestry went out of fashion in the US when the founding fathers so wisely drafted a constitution which protected citizens against kings and other tyrants.

Take Joe Kennedy. I read Robert Harris’s Fatherland before Christmas, and it raised my exiguous knowledge of the man by around — oh — 10,000 times. Appeaser of Hitler, anti-Semite, all round good guy in short. His son somehow rose to be America’s finest president so far. John F Kennedy was after all the man who embroiled his country in a hopeless conflict on the other side of the world, promised an impossible project as a diversion, shagged Marilyn Monroe, and was shot before he could do anything really stupid. I am, of course joking, Kennedy supported the civil rights movement, fought a war against tyranny in Vietnam (and with what we know now about the Khmer Rouge, it almost makes sense), envisioned the most daring and noble project ever attempted by the human race, shagged Marilyn Monroe, and was shot before he could do anything really stupid.

There was at least conviction and a certain musicality about Kennedy’s speeches. Even the “Ich bin ein Berliner” one. If Bertrand Russell couldn’t prove to Wittgenstein’s satisfaction that they were not sharing a room with a rhinoceros, I’d lay odds that you can’t convince me that Kennedy was not speaking the truth. Anyway, it all depends on what you mean by a word. The set of things I refer to as “Jelly Donuts” happens to include the 35th President of the United States. Kennedy’s “We do these things, not because they are easy…” speech was epoch-making. Comparing G.W. Bush to him is like comparing an Captain Oates with frostbite and two pairs of mittens attempting Bach’s ‘Goldberg Variations’ on an old-of-tune ukelele to Glenn Gould.

Kennedy started the Apollo project. The greatest thing that ever happened in my lifetime, sex, drugs, and rock and roll notwithstanding. They put a man on the moon, and I watched it! As Bertie Wooster once said, “Incredulous, Jeeves.”

These 554 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 4:43pm GMT Permanent link.

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Villains Of 2003 »

If Peter Cuthbertson can have his fun with The 20 Worst British Lefties of 2003, it’s only fair that I name my top ten right-wing baddies of the past year.

1. David Blunkett. For lots of reasons. What has he done right recently? The one thing almost everyone agrees on is that ID cards are a bad idea. So the Frogs have them. One moment we’re told they’re the pariah of the EU and the civilised world, the next they show us the way to fascist perdition a secure state. I can’t shake the conviction that French officials are all like Claude Rains in Casablanca, while British ones are more like Bill Pertwee in Dad’s Army. The French may have IDs but I bet they refuse to carry them. Play the Marseillaise, and tell Blunkett to go fuck himself.
2. Peter Mandelson. Tory party fifth-columnist who brilliantly snatched defeat from the jaws of victory with the Nuremberg Shefflield rally, and landed us with five more years of Major. So that was years ago, I’ve never forgiven him. Only in the number two spot because he’s never done anything as successful since, though his victory speech in 2001 came close. Sauron is not pleased with you Peter.
3. Geoff Hoon. Our man at MiniPax. How many kids did you kill today?
4. Margaret Hodge. Dear God. Hit us with the locusts and the boils already. Just get it over with.
5. Peter Hain. Why would we ever want to vote on furthering EU ties? We should all just shut up and trust the wise officers of the goverment. And if we’re not good, I’m sure Mr Hain will take away voting altogether.
6. Jack Straw. The best that can be said for him is that he’s not as illiberal as Blunkett. But like deciding who is worse between Pol Pot and Stalin — sheer numbers or per centage killed, it’s an ‘angels dancing of the head of a pin’ argument.
7. Charles Clarke. Not really his fault, but you would hope that an Education Secretary would have, like, an education.
8. Tony Blair. Not any higher because — for a Thatcherite Tory — he seems like a reasonable bloke most of the time. Shame he doesn’t choose his friends more wisely. People always assume that I hate Tony Blair because he went to Fettes and I went to Royal High, but when Blair was at school, Royal High was a selective, fee-paying boys’ school on Calton Hill. When I went it was a co-educational comprehensive in the sticks. Not that that has any bearing on anything, just an admission of sneaking prejudice.
9. Clare Short. For not knowing whether she was coming or going.
10. Alistair Campbell. The hardest name to include. The closest thing to a decent, admirable person in the inner circle. Intelligent, ebullient, energetic, funny, perceptive. Alistair has nearly everything. I know how badly he wanted to win. Perhaps when he’s been away from Blair for a while, he will recover. If not, he’ll just have to find a volcano to chuck that bloody ring into.

I think it’s in The Road To Wigan Pier that Orwell mentions some Scottish fraction of a fraction who split from their comrades because they all agreed, and that just didn’t seem right. And I know that I’m doing the old Labour self-destruct thing of tearing down my own side. Perhaps I read too much P.J. O’Rourke when younger, but it seems to me that the only politicians you’d even thinking of having a beer with are all Tories these days. Why is it that the Tories who go on Newsnight seem affable, witty, educated, charming, and open to persuasion, while Labour members (like those above) are all blinkered, illiberal, anally-retentive prigs?

To quote Zaphod Beeblebrox:

Shee, you guys are so unhip, it’s a wonder your bums don’t fall off.

These 633 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 6:46pm GMT Permanent link.

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Heroes Of 2003 »

There were some heroes too. Only one is a politician, which shows me being uncharacteristically generous to the species.

There are only seven because -due no doubt to a total collapse of imagination or recall on my part — I couldn’t think of any more. Anyway, I always felt Kant tried too hard to find pleasingly regular numbers of categories of things. Somehow, I don’t think he’d have cared for our 11 dimensional universe where most of the matter is invisible, and even the number of planets in the solar system is debatable.

1. Robin Cook. His resignation speech reminded us — just — that there is still honour in politics. He gave his reasons trenchantly, precisely, and civilly. He may be rewarded with the head of Tony Blair yet.
2. Rowan Williams. While it’s true that he still bothers God on a regular basis, and that he has a beard, he’s been on the right side of everything over the past year. And if you judge a man by his enemies, he’s picked some good fights.
3. Colin Pillinger. Be not afraid to fail. Be afraid of not trying. If that’s not a saying, it ought to be. He had the weight of the lander cruelly cut by bureaucrats, he had a ridiculously short time to develop the project. Kudos for getting Damien Hirst involved, and even for having Keith Allen narrate the TV programmes. As Kennedy said, “We do these things not because they are easy…” Makes me proud to be British.
4. Lance Armstrong. He’s a friend of Bush, but so what? Some of his comments about Ullrich being unsporting took him close to a special ‘bad winner’ category, but his grit in clinching his fifth and closest Tour were phenomenal.
5. Paul Tergat. Another one who’s met Bush. But taking the world marathon record on his sixth attempt, when many people had written him off as a ‘loser’ (he is a former world 10,000m record holder and is the half marathon record holder) showed the sort of pig-headed courage that I admire in Professor Pillinger.
6. Lieutenant Colonel Tim Collins. I may not have agreed with the stated reasons for the Iraq war. (Not agreed with is being ‘economical with the acualit&#eacute;’ myself. I thought they were preposterous bare faced lies from politicians who wouldn’t know a human right if it danced the can-can with a troupe of pink elephants.) But I admire the way we (the British) fought it.
7. Alistair Campbell. Probably the man of the year in many ways. Ran the London Marathon and raised lots of money in the name of a dead friend. Pretty much held the People’s Party together. Shame that he chairs meetings which should be left to elected officials, digs up 12-year-old research, wages petty, petulant squabbles with the BBC, and goes barging into Channel 4 news.

These 469 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 9:01pm GMT Permanent link.

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Wednesday, 7 January 2004

Don’t Follow Leaders »

What Famous Leader Are You?

I’m Albert Einstein. No, really.

What do you mean, “was he a leader?”

These 20 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 5:24pm GMT Permanent link.

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Another Stupid Quiz »

The horror, the horror…

Trad (Joseph Conrad). Arr, T.S. Eliot, John Milius and Francis Ford Coppola, Jerry Seinfeld and Larry David

What Classic Movie Are You?

I don’t see how I can be a classic movie, but there you go, one of my favourites. In fact, one of my top 3 — the others being 2001, and Singin’ In The Rain, though I think I had whittled my list down to a top 10 of sorts. (Found through Norm.)

Speaking of lists, there’s a good piece on the nature of list-making (safe for Nick Hornby phobics like me, as the novelist and Charles Clarke lookalike is not mentioned) by Sarah Crompton in today’s Torygraph.

(I should have mentioned that I got the Famous Leader test from Gert.)

These 105 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 10:36pm GMT Permanent link.

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Joan Aiken »

There’s an obit of Joan Aiken in the Torygraph. A quick check of Google News shows that they are the only paper to bother so far. A pity. She was a favourite of mine in my pre-teen years, and I suspect of a lot of other literate baby-boom age adults too.

I couln’t recap any of her novels at will now, but I remember them as pleasingly pseudo-nasty, with threatening adult baddies or wolves well resolved at the end.

I should have know that she was the daughter of US poet Conrad Aiken though the only lines of his I can recall now went something like:

Uncorseted, her something something
At every step and turn betrays
Her adolescent loveliness

And I only remember that because it got transformed into:

Grishkin is nice: her Russian eye
Is underlined for emphasis;
Uncorseted, her friendly bust
Gives promise of pneumatic bliss.

By T.S. Eliot’s horror of sex in Whispers of Immortality.

These 153 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 11:14pm GMT Permanent link.

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Thursday, 8 January 2004

Gates Of Hell »

British Spin just made me feel very old. Like a few others, he watched BBC Parliament’s coverage of the 1964 election. (And the Daily Mail says, “Repeats, repeats, repeats”. )

Just how close journalists and the rest of us could get to the door of number 10. The reporters really were doorstepping the Prime Minister as he made his way to the palace to resign.

Too true. But, being older than Mr Spin, I remember visiting Downing St in — I think — 1981, and while you couldn’t knock on the door and ask if they ever considered buying replacement windows, you could stand on the opposite pavement, and if the urge took you, lob rotten tomatoes at emerging ministers.

Then Mrs T had those gates put up. Tony Blair has been in office for five and half years now. Isn’t it time he took them down? The IRA are effectively neutralised. If Osama Bin Laden wants to give up his Grauniad column and go back to bombing, he’ll come in a plane. The gates only serve to keep the plebs, aka, Her Majesty’s subjects, — sometimes answering to the electorate — out.

(Ed. What’s all this “I well remember…” stuff? Do you fancy stepping up to the crease when Bill Deedes kicks the bucket? “What an impulsive lad that Achilles is,” I once observed to King Agamemnon. “Yes,” he agreed, “but old Odysseus is a sly one.” How right he was! Etc.)

Mrs Thatcher didn’t appear when I called. Scared of scandal, I suppose. She and Bernard Ingham probably watching from behind the net curtains.

“Don’t go out now Margaret, that skinny lad there with the silly haircut may record your every movement 23 years hence on a yet-to-be-invented contraption called the interwebthing, where nutters record their every passing thought and no one listens to anyone else.”

“Interwebthing? That doesn’t sound very technical. What idiots they must be in the future.”

“Well, you’re the one who ruined education.”

These 324 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 11:17am GMT Permanent link.

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How Green Was My Valet »

The blow fell precisely at one forty-five (summer time). Spenser, Aunt Agatha’s bulter, was offering me the fried potatoes at the moment, and such was my emotion that I lofted six of them on to the sideboard with the spoon. Shaken to the core, if you know what I mean.
Mark you, I was in a pretty enfeebled condition already. I had been engaged to Honoria Glossop nearly two weeks, and during that time not a day had passed without her putting in some heavy work in the direction of what Aunt Agatha had called ‘moulding’ me. I had read solid literature till my eyes bubbled; we had legged it through miles of picture galleries; and I had been compelled to undergo classical concerts to an extent you would hardly believe. All in all, therefore, I was in no state to receive shocks, especially shocks such as this. Honoria had lugged me round to lunch at Aunt Agatha’s, and I had just been saying to myself, ‘Death, where is thy jolly old sting?’ when she hove the bomb.
’Bertie,’ she said, suddenly, as if she had just remembered it, ‘what is the name of that man of yours — your valet?’
’Eh? Oh, Jeeves.’
’I think he’s a bad influence for you,’ said Honoria. ‘When we are married, you must get rid of Jeeves.’

The Inimitable Jeeves

Found through Nick Barlow, who found it through Green Fairy, Quirkyalone, which seems to be a serious version of Introvertster. The manuscript logo seems to read Junky alone, which is rather more interesting.

Quirkyalones are people who resist the tyranny of coupledom precisely because they would prefer to be open to finding that “magical click,” whether that click is found in the context of a romantic relationship, with friends, or on our own.

“Magical click"? What are they talking about? I prefer the term “gentleman’s gentleman” but I’m not giving up my valet for anyone.

These 95 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 12:54pm GMT Permanent link.

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Requiem? »

Everyone’s linking to this article on the death of classical music recording by Norman Lebrecht. (I don’t normally read Mr Lebrecht, who writes in the London Evening Standard, but his novel about classical music, which is called something like The Song of Songs or The Name of Names is very good — I didactically lent my copy to someone so I can’t check.) Everyone being Samizdata, Gert, Kevin Drum, and Arthur Silber.

I agree with Arthur more than the others.

Well, if digital technology is destroying classical recording, why isn’t it doing the same to films? As far as I know, it’s having precisely the opposite effect on movie sales. This idea that “perfection” in recording technique has destroyed the market sounds very contemporary, and very trendy and sort of “philosophical” (at least in some quarters) — but I profoundly doubt that it had anything to do with the decline in sales of classical recordings.

He’s right, IMO. There are no ‘authentic’ or ‘definitive’ recordings. ‘Authenticity’ (if it exists, and I think it’s pretty bogus) doesn’t live inside a recording, and can’t be captured on a CD. It’s actually being in the same room at the same time as the performance, and not knowing for sure how it will unfold: taking the flaws as well as the triumphs. As for ‘definitive’, hands up who’d rather see a fourteen-year-old boy in drag play Portia or Ophelia or Cordelia or Desdemona or Lady Macbeth rather than any professional actress?

One problem with the classical music industry is that its market is adult, educated, and well-heeled for the most part. We own most of the essential pieces already. The popular music market can always sell to ten-year-olds, they can even sell insipid covers of decent songs because kids don’t know any better. Another problem which occurred to me watching the New Year’s Day concert from Vienna last week was that it’s too serious. It must have been around lunchtime in Austria, on the day when the most abstemious nun questions the motives of a god who scooped out her brains and handed them to Jonny Wilkinson for some drop-kicking practice before boiling her eyeballs and sandpapering her throat, and everyone was in evening wear and sat like a passenger in the window seat of a 747 who’s just seen the wing fall off. And the band played dance music. I don’t think Strauss wrote for such a po-faced, reverent audience.

My understanding of markets is usually flawed, but over the past couple of years I’ve hoped that Napster and other file sharing sites kill the recording industry. When music is free (in both senses) record companies, suits, agents, will be redundant. Music can finally get back to what it is for — performance.

These 458 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 2:14pm GMT Permanent link.

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The World’s A Ball »

Excellent post by Chris Lightfoot, Round objects. I’m glad that I don’t get email like this:

apologies—misread the name on the letter I binned. There being so very few people who have disagreed with me on any of these issues, having binned the letter and walked through to my computer, by the time Iarrived and looked through the emails to find the address, I chose yours instead of the correct one.

These 73 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 4:04pm GMT Permanent link.

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No Comments »

I’m having problems with comments at moment — the most glaring one being that the CMS won’t write the comments form onto the HTML files. Apart from that, and the CMS making up its own RSS, whether I want it to or not, and the fact that I’m still running it on my local Windows machine because I don’t trust it not to do something crazy like writing a 45MB file like it did last time on the server, the whole thing is going swimmingly. It more or less counts words correctly. It handles one-word posts. It accepts ordered and unordered lists without trying to enclose them in paragraph tags. It fools with blockquotes quite well and I can even finish a post with a blockquote and it will close it. It doesn’t mess with the quotation marks in markup. When — if — comments work, they will have the same use of paragraphs and curly quotes as entries.

I use Movable Type on my other blog, and while it’s still more flexible and easier to use, it bloody well ought to be. If I can just tweak the last few problems, I think I might conquer the temptation to get a Typepad account.

These 198 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 5:15pm GMT Permanent link.

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Friday, 9 January 2004

The (educational) State We’re In »

I’ve made a couple of cracks recently about the state of education. I might as well balance them with a couple of anecotes to make my position clearer (if anyone is interested).

Last night I ran, for the first time properly this year, with DL and DP, both of whom work in University admin; DL is in Cardiff, DP used to work for Cardiff Uni, but moved to a school which offers courses in Communication, Personnel Management, Telephone Hygiene, and similar bollocks, and which the Major government deemed was a “university”. He was being particularly vituperative about the “uneducated cretins” he was packed off for a management course with.

“They spent most of the time arguing whether managerial skills were innate or could be taught. I kept telling them that philosophers have debated the point for centuries and it was hardly likely that a collective of fuckwits could stumble over any new conclusions. You’d have been up the wall.”

“Well, my view is that these things are either testable hypotheses, in which case, they should be tested, or they’re rubbish.”

I’m quietly surprised that he even mentions his work tribulations to me, after the time at his house years ago with DL and DP’s now wife who also works for Cardiff, when well into my second bottle of wine I suggested that all non-academic university staff be machine-gunned as totally useless, and that all departments except the sciences should be closed, only being allowed to survive if they teach in the street. (Or in pubs like those two philosophy coves in Swansea, who were suspended for some reason, and carried on teaching in the back room of a pub until they were reinstated. I just can’t remember what they were called.)

I can’t see the problem with teaching philosophy in public. It worked for the Greeks and they had the finest civilisation in history with well-established democracy. (Apart from slavery, and the status of women, and the class system, their disdain for all other cultures, all the wars, and having to wait for the Romans to invent sewage. Still everyone had to learn Ancient Greek, which would have made Boris Johnson happy.) Well, perhaps I can.

PHILOSOPHER: Today I have a guest speaker and we will debate the role of feminism in the decline of morals in the West.

QUESTION FROM THE CROWD: I have a question.

P [Sigh] Must you?

Q Yes. Why is there something rather than nothing?

P Well, we’re debating ethics here.

Q You’re a philosopher ain’t yuh?

P Yes.

Q Then why is there something rather than nothing?

GUEST SPEAKER This is the problem these days, no respect.

Q Are you going to answer the question?

P No. You wouldn’t understand it, anyway.

Q How do you know?

GS It was God. Now can we move on?

Q Why is there God rather than nothing? I want an answer.

P I’ll call a constable. Why is there never a policeman when you need one?

GS It’s because society is decadent.

Someone in the crowd heaves a turnip at the Guest Speaker with deadly accuracy.

[Ed: I don’t think the hoi polloi eat vegetables unless they’ve been watching Jamie Oliver, or Nigella. No, scratch that, no one watches Nigella for the cooking.]

VOICE Who are you calling decadent?

GS Help! The peasants are revolting!

CROWD [as one] Tell them to take a bath!

Etc

In the pub afterwards we fell to discussing graduate debt, and how much it has risen in the past few years. [Guardian.] [Telegraph.] AC graduated in the early 90s with £3,000 in the red — one of his colleagues in the Health Service had £13,000 when she left university recently. DL — “I would have had about that, if I hadn’t won a competition which nearly covered it.” Me — “What competition?” “Observer Investor of the Year. They took me down to London [from Manchester Uni] to this place near Fleet Street for a beanfeast, and this was at the height of Thatcherism, and everyone else on my table was from the South East, and I was this wide boy — this socialist boyo from the Valleys, and a history student at a redbrick instead of an economist at Oxbridge — who argued with all of them all night.”

Now if Charles Clarke could find a way for everyone to win some newspaper competition, this whole issue of top-up fees would fade away.

These 738 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 12:29pm GMT Permanent link.

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Power Showers »

I was woken twice in the night by sudden storms which sounded like bags of marbles being dropped by a passing jet. The second set car alarms off twice and then quietened. Neither can have lasted more than 10 minutes. I was still concerned enough to get up and disconnect my answering machine and computer, as I know people who have had their phone lines struck by lightning. Just now, there was a real thunderstorm which sounded very close. I think this will go on all weekend.

These 87 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 1:20pm GMT Permanent link.

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Talentless Hacks »

Wow. Before you can say “talentless hack”, Glenn “talentless hack” Beck tried to lift Adam Mathes’s google-bombing article, and for some reason (perhaps being a “talentless hack”, or a right-wing talk jock with his head up his own self-satisfied arse) thought that no one, no one at all would ever notice. Also on Mefi: the talentless hack knows no shame.

Speaking of plagiarism, let’s compare

Since ‘neo-con’ is code for Jew, le Carre was giving utterance to the kind of demented Jewish global conspiracy theory which is now pouring out of the Arab world.

Melanie “talentless hack” Phillips with

In truth, the people labeled neocons (con is short for “conservative” and neo is short for “Jewish")…

David “talentless hack” Brooks (NYT, FRRYYY). Well, not plagiarism exactly, more “if we repeat the lie often enough no one will be any the wiser” — in short, we have no arguments, so we’ll try to smear those who argue against us with anti-semitism. Those people being, inter alia, Jim Henley, Atrios, Arthur Silber, Josh Marshall, Kieran Healy, Kevin Drum, Andrew Northrup, Oliver Willis, and Mark Kleiman. I had no idea that I read so many closet Nazis. The “talentless hack” finds support in the well rounded shape of another well known liar.

Update: Glenn Beck has rather cleverly changed the page at the original URL given. However, enough Metafilter readers have read it, and they all agree, Glenn Beck is a talentless plagiarising bastard, albeit one with enough chutzpah, or self-ignorance to also pen (or have penned for him, as may have been the case with the ‘Google-bomb’ article) a piece on the death of shame. And to all of you coming from glennbeck.premiereinteractive.com I meant what I said about his having his head up “his head up his own self-satisfied arse”, but don’t worry: I’m sure there’s room for all you ditto-heads too.

These 211 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 2:33pm GMT Permanent link.

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Stranger Than Fiction »

“I say, Jeeves, a man I met at the club last night told me to put my shirt on Privateer for the two’clock race this afternoon. How about it?”

“I should not advocate it, sir. The stable is not sanguine.”

The Inimitable Jeeves

Some things you read seem like mere hyperbole for effect, and have little to do with the actual world. Take this (again from The Inimitable Jeeves).

On three separate occasions horses on which I’d invested a sizeable amount won by lengths instead of sitting down to rest in the middle of the race, as horses usually do when I’ve got money on them.

Horses really do stop for a rest during races.

These 72 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 3:19pm GMT Permanent link.

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Cold Shoulder »

I haven’t seen Cold Mountain yet, but I’m not one to give any film with both Nicole Kidman and Renée Zellweger a body swerve. But what in tarnation does this mean?

I HAVEN’T SEEN COLD MOUNTAIN, which is getting a fair amount of attention. But when the book was getting attention, a lot of people told me that this book, Sharpshooter, by David Madden, was better.

So there is another book which is better, and…? I’d say “read the whole thing”, but that’s it. These law professors can be succinct, not to say gnomic, not to say utterly obscure.

I greatly enjoyed The Talented Mr. Ripley, even if the plot was — to be kind — light-years from the book. I’m thinking of putting The English Patient on my top ten films list, although this is partly to spite my friends DL, who refuses to see it, his judgement being affected by Julia-Louise Dreyfuss in Seinfeld (look, Mr Peterman was right), and possibly by the presence of the word ‘English’ in the title, and NT, who has bought every ‘Best Film’ Academy Award winning film on video, but his copy of TEP is still in its shrink-wrap. (Don’t ask me why he feels compelled to buy films he has no intention of watching; he’s gay, if that’s any explanation.) And, to this day, I carry a torch for Juliet Stevenson because of Truly Madly Deeply, even if she was particularly awful in Bend It Like Beckham.

These 244 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 4:16pm GMT Permanent link.

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Never A Truer Word »

Also sprach Kevin Drum.

As you can see, the flash provokes considerable suspicion on their part, which isn’t surprising considering their basically Luddite natures. I think housecats go through life consistently amazed at all the bizarre stuff we humans think we need in order to be happy. The camera is just one more example in this parade of human weirdness.

These 60 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 10:49pm GMT Permanent link.

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Bert Alert »

From, with a certain inevitability, Atrios.

And not unrepresentative either. I’ve been nicknamed ‘Bert’ twice in my life; once for my surname (never mind that Bert Weedon spelt his differently) and once after Bert in Soap because I’m kind of excitable and talk with my hands. You have to be of a certain age to remember Soap. (Ed: translation: ‘certain age’ = ‘old fart in denial’).

These 67 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 11:45pm GMT Permanent link.

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Saturday, 10 January 2004

Rats And Racists »

Brian Micklethwait has a good post, Melting pot Britain, on Samizdata. Personally, I find the Independent so poor these days, that I’d very leery of accepting any conclusions from an article therein. I also think he’s wrong here:

It would seem that we here all have one thing to thank the BNP for, which is that by claiming loudly that all these newcomers are not British, they have provoked them into insisting that they are.

I’m pretty sure that the generation which came from the Empire/Commonwealth after WWII would have asseverated their Britishness (I hate to speak of populations acting as if with one mind, but here it’s shorthand), but I can’t think where to find some evidence. I suspect that the non-British feeling came in the second generation, and — at a guess- it set in during adolescence when a separate identity was presented, on a plate, as it were, to each confused teenager.

I don’t really have anything valid to add to this, other than to record how happy I am that every electable party and every articulate person in each party now seems to think that race is a non-issue.

I can’t be surprised by this Guardian story, Racist war of the loyalist street gangs.

Northern Ireland, which is 99% white, is fast becoming the race-hate capital of Europe.

Perhaps I subscibe to too generous a definition of ‘race-hate’ but do they really mean that it wasn’t already? I sort of thought that the ‘Troubles’ were the sine qua non of racism. Don’t even start on whether a country, or a province, or whatever NI is, can be a ‘capital.’

Racism is a subject I try not to bother with — everyone denies being a racist, broaching the subject all usually makes all parties look intolerant fools. All the same, British Spin has a good post on Enoch Powell. I, too, consider Powell a racist. The problem is that I expect racists to be knuckle-draggers, and Enoch Powell was anything but that. I even sneakily admire him. His problem, I think, was that he thought that he was perfectly rational, and he couldn’t recognise his own blind-spots. That’s true of all of us, but most of us are less in love with our own intellects.

Finally, and I promise to say this only once, I suspect that a lot of the hate-speech on the more objectionable right-wing political sites, at best, panders to coded racism. I think George Bush has appointed a record number of non-whites to political office, so good for him. However, this is from one of those round-robin Christmas emails, much derided by Simon Hoggart in the Guardian. (NT, who teaches in a high school just outside Austin, Texas, is black.)

This year I had this parent who not only wanted but was allowed to get his daughter who had a 95% average in my class, moved from my classroom to the other honors class — this is completely against district policy. I never found out their reasoning, but how can I think race had nothing to do with it?

Really, really, really finally. Like Jim Henley (who was good enough to send a very nice and prompt reply when I offered some advice on marathon training), I’m astonished by this Hesiod post. I don’t care that he adds an update which says:

I am not arguing that Powell is acting like a compliant Uncle Tom BECAUSE he’s black, and that’s just the way black people act. Quite the opposite. It’s demeaning for a man of his stature and reputation to be put forward by this administration and to dance for the cameras, and lie about pre-war Iraq intelligence.

I have no idea what Hesiod’s intentions are: all I know is what I read. He is the one who raised the issue of race. He may have felt that others have been equally ‘spineless’ (his opinion, not mine), but, had they been white, he would have used less inflammatory language. Wrong, wrong, wrong. If he does it again, he’s off the blogroll.

These 676 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 8:33pm GMT Permanent link.

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Sunday, 11 January 2004

A Kind Of Loving »

The only thing worse than being talked about is not being talked about.

Oscar Wilde

Someone is clearly talking behind my back. From yesterday’s referrer logs (edited for clarity):

05:07pm	Talentless Hacks	glennbeck.premiereinteractive.com/
05:01pm	Talentless Hacks	glennbeck.premiereinteractive.com/
04:35pm	Talentless Hacks	glennbeck.premiereinteractive.com/
04:29pm	Talentless Hacks	glennbeck.premiereinteractive.com/
03:32pm	Talentless Hacks	glennbeck.premiereinteractive.com/
03:30pm	Talentless Hacks	glennbeck.premiereinteractive.com/
03:30pm	Talentless Hacks	glennbeck.premiereinteractive.com/
03:28pm	Talentless Hacks	glennbeck.premiereinteractive.com/
03:26pm	Talentless Hacks	glennbeck.premiereinteractive.com/

Shame that, as a non-subscriber, I can’t find out what they’re saying. And I’m not prepared to subscribe.

These 50 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 9:41am GMT Permanent link.

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Biased BBC »

Not only is the Ba’athist Broadcasting Corporation infamously biased, they are also murderers. I hoped that when I saw this on Snopes, that they would have the story I recalled (it made the front page of the Guardian, which, predictably, failed to mention that it was all part of a henious liberal plot to unravel the Empire, erode the class distinctions which promote civilised deference, and promote atheism, drug-taking, and so forth).

I remember the incident, not only from the papers, but I watched the programme itself. It was a close thing for me too, but I was young, and have a healthy heart and I lasted the whole half-hour of assault. It was all we talked about at school the following day (the programme, not the death).

I am happy to report that the BBC conspiracy theorists are all safe from this kind of attack.

These 146 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 10:16am GMT Permanent link.

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Why I Am Not A Conservative »

Before I start, can we get something straight? ‘Fisking’ is not so-called purely because of Robert Fisk, the redoubtable Independent foreign correspondent — if it were, it would be competing against ‘Mooreing’, ‘Sullivanation’, ‘Steynography’, etc. It passed into popular use because it suggests ‘frisking’ to the pure of heart, and ‘fisting’ to the rest of us. While I’m at it, do Americans know that ‘bogroll’ is UK demotic for ‘toilet paper’ or, as it called by low-brows over the pond, ‘ass-wipe’? ‘Blogroll’ is perhaps a less complementary term than it first appears…

I’ve been wanting to write about, or, indeed ‘Fisk’ Conservatism’s Journey Away From Me by Ken Silber, which, according to Glenn Reynolds is a ‘Fisking’ of My Journey to Conservatism by Keith Burgess-Jackson — but I’ve been looking for a way in, as it were.

I ran with DL this morning and he was talking about how his kids (or plants as I call them in my corrupt Anglo-Welsh), now they are teenagers, are voicing political opinions. His daughter was born in 1990, and he can’t even begin to explain what ‘left’ and ‘right’ meant when he was their age. It’s pretty obvious from discussion all over the the politically-interested blogosphere that lines are being redrawn.

This isn’t terribly new. I remember around the 1987 election reading an interview with Iris Murdoch (Philosopher, novelist, life made into a film, etc; for a period in the early 80s she was my absolutely favourite novelist of all time, though this torch had guttered by the time of the interview) who intended to vote for Thatcher, which is surprising, because not all that long before she had identified herself as a communist. (She wasn’t the only former red to have moved to the right. Dennis Healey, the Labour Chancellor in the mid-70s who did more to set Britain on a monetarist footing than any previous Tory administration, had also been a card-carrying Communist in the 50s.) Two explanations present themselves:

1. She had sold out with wealth and comfort and middle-age; or
2. The conservatives had come over to her position.

To an extent, both of these are right. The conservatives under Thatcher were not the defenders of privilege that MacMillan had been. Now, however, there seems to be a mass exodus from the left. Left wing publications are often staggeringly banal. (All publications are some of the time of course, but the political magazines of the left are largely vaccous, while those of the right — while they still publish much that is air-headed and prejudiced — at least have some reportage and debate.) Our views have become muddled up. Robert Kilroy-Silk, a former Labour MP, pens an anti-Arab rant while Michael Portillo (the sort of Tory I like) moves into the natural Guardian position.

As for the Silber/Burgess-Jackson dispute. Compare

I took the moral permissibility of abortion for granted, thinking that only a misogynist could oppose it. Now I am convinced of its immorality, having been persuaded by Don Marquis’s brilliant essay, “Why Abortion Is Immoral,” The Journal of Philosophy 86 (April 1989).

(Burgess-Jackson) with this:

But if you’re asserting that any and all abortions, whatever the circumstances, are immoral, then I respectfully disagree.

(Silber). I easily prefer Silber. I keep wanting to go over the Burgess-Jackson piece and add ‘some’ here, or ‘a little’ there, and ‘sometimes’ somewhere else. I don’t think I’d have cared for the young ‘radical’ Burgess-Jackson, any more than I care for the older ‘conservative’ one.

I shared the feminist belief that women are oppressed by men. Now I think men are just as oppressed as women, albeit in different ways. I also think that feminism has done real damage to women, despite its protestations to the contrary.

Hang on, men and women are “oppressed"? By whom? And you’re a conservative? I can’t think of a conservative — of any stripe — who doesn’t consider talk of “oppression” whiney it’s-not-my-faultism. Ask almost any right-winger about oppression of blacks and she will point out the senior positions of Condoleeza Rice and Colin Powell, or the wealth of Michael Jordan, and claim that it is all a matter of hard work and talent. Anyway, I’ve never subscribed to that kind of feminism. All women oppressed by all men? Or does this oppression only happen in direct relationships? I used to think that all women, like most men, were kept down by the evil capitalist bastards who controlled the country, but I never saw myself as carrying this oppressive gene.

I also no longer believe that ‘feminism’ means anything. Women writers get labelled ‘feminist’ for just being women, which seems against the spirit of the thing. Feminism seems to be what women believe, especially whoever is writing at present. There are no factions, there is no ontology, there are no predictions. Almost all the changes in women’s social status have come down to technology: the need for women to work during the First World War, the invention of domestic appliances both for cleaning and for food storage, which made shopping less of a daily activity, the invention of the pill. Equal pay has just been market forces. If an employer is supposed to pay a man more simply because he may support a family, why would he hire men?

I think that it is more or less the duty of the young to oppose the status quo. The problem today in the West is that most things are pretty fine as they are. There are few great injustices left.

Conservatism would attract me if every conservative thought like Silber:

“Saved into conservatism"? Perhaps you’re just trying to needle your non-conservative readers, but the phrase grates on me. I thought one of the virtues of conservatism is that it doesn’t seek to “save” people through politics; that it avoids overblown promises and recognizes that politics is not the entirety of life.

But I feel that most don’t. Too many seem wrapped up in their own evangelism.

OTOH, I actually like Burgess-Jackson’s philosophising at Anal Philosopher and Animal Ethics, though I cannot see what he likes about Roger Scruton:

But nihilism is the other side of religion: it is the disappointed howl of the believer on discovering that God is dead. The true nihilist is incapable of settling for the world of compromise, toleration, and secular loyalties that the rest of us enjoy, since it is a world deprived of absolutes. The death of God leaves only one remaining absolute, which is Nothingness. The duty to annihilate is the last remaining glimpse of the transcendental in the heart of the one who has lost all belief in it and who cannot live with the loss.

The death-of-God bit sounds like an almost personal attack on Albert Camus and myself. I cannot speak for myself, but Camus was one of the sanest philosophers of the last century. The rest, starting with ‘But’ (which does not contradict or limit anything which came before) is self-contradictory nonsense. I would trust Professor Burgess-Jackson to build a dry-stone wall; every sentence of his is carefully balanced on what came before, and supports what comes after. Though he could have been more polite to Tim Lambert.

What does appeal to me is the animal ethics site. I can trace my Torygraph readership to the time I bought the paper to read on the train between Edinburgh and Cardiff because it had Alan Clark and Brigitte Bardot (in two separate photos) at an anti-hunting march on the front page, and it occurred to me for the first time that the Telegraph might be a more interesting (not to say better written and more entertaining) way to test my politics than teh Grauniad. I remain anti-hunting, though if Tony Blair has to break any election promises, I would prefer that it is his unworkable and oppressive hunting legislation rather than his promise on top-up fees. But you vote for liars, this is what you get.

It does seem odd that a professed conservative should be a vegetarian. Pythagoras was a vegetarian. Alan Clark was a vegetarian. Nietzsche was a vegetarian. Kafka was a vegetarian. What? Hilter was a vegetarian too? I never knew that. Thank you for telling me, you’re the first one. No really. I must write that down before I forget. Sarcastic? Who, me? No!

These 1126 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 11:06pm GMT Permanent link.

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Monday, 12 January 2004

Without Having Done Anything Wrong »

No one else seems to have approached the Grauniad with my novel idea, so I might as well develop it myself.

Someone must have been telling lies about Gollum, because one fine day, without having done anything wrong, he was thrown into a volcano…

How’s that for a beginning? Straight into media res as old Virgil would have it. No messing about. Being a blog, it is written backwards — but by whom? As the narrative progresses back through the months leading up to this terrible crime, we would glimpse the suspects, yet never quite figure out their motives. (Of course, as a hook for an editor, it also gives a minimum period for the serial to run.)

The only cloud on the horizon is some snotty sub-ed spotting that the name ‘Gollum’ is not original. That’s the problem with films these days. If I add the disclaimer that the Gollum in my book is not supposed to represent any person, living or dead, that should fix it.

These 145 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 9:28pm GMT Permanent link.

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Down To 10 »

With a few days left, but I know I’ll only faff around and reverse my decisions, I’ve got a list for Norman Geras’s Top 10 films poll.

• 2001: A Space Odyssey. Admittedly emotionally neutral; intellectually odd (full of good ideas, but completely wrong about all of them); the best acting is by a computer-voice, and the guys in ape-suits; and splendidly dull, this is still the greatest looking film ever.
• Singin’ In The Rain. Uses just about every technique at its disposal to articulate emotion, so in many ways the opposite of 2001.
• Apocalypse Now. Perhaps the ultimate boys’ film. Crazy with its own cleverness. Just about the only film I’m glad that Harvey Keitel is not in, as Martin Sheen is perfect. (For all the wrong reasons, I take in his back story as a war hero in The West Wing.) Excellent cast, Harrison Ford at the start of his career, Lawrence (as ‘Larry’) Fishburne — Morpheus in the Matrix series — ditto (and he was only 13). Brando.
• Casablanca. For all its liberal sentiments, I’d be surprised if any black person chose this. Sam is the most underwritten role in any serious picture. He is only there for two reasons: to tickle the old ivories, and to show what a good guy Humphrey Bogart is. There isn’t — so far as I know — a George Orwell essay on this, though there ought to be. Casablanca is the epitome of propaganda. Everyone is noble. Sam is noble because he will not leave Rick for twice his (probably insultingly meager) salary. Rick is noble, not running guns for the Nazis, even if they paid much better than the Republicans. Claude Rains is noble, even if corrupt. Peter Lorre is noble, for a criminal. Ingrid Bergman is noble, preferring the dull Paul Henreid over her true love, because it’s the right thing to do. Absolutely bloody everyone, with the exception of the Germans.
• Bringing Up Baby. One of the only romantic comedies in which you can see why the party of the first part is attractive to the party of the second part and vice versa. Greater understanding of what people are like, and what is important in life than in about 90% of the literary canon.
• The Seventh Seal. Possibly the greatest story ever told.
• Being John Malkovich. The final frames are — for an athiest like me — just about the most spiritual conceivable. There isn’t a dead moment when the story finds itself at A and has to move along to B for the purpose of explication, even though this in itself is dull. Although I’m sure a better scholar than myself will find an example in the unperformed juvenelia of Aristophanes, the ‘Malkovich, Malkovich’ scene is perhaps the only new joke since the Second World War.
• Blue Velvet. I think this is Lynch’s masterwork, though he’s far from finished. My favourite director is a straight choice between Lynch and Kubrick.
• The English Patient. As I said before, “this is partly to spite my friends DL, who refuses to see it, his judgement being affected by Julia-Louise Dreyfuss in Seinfeld (look, Mr Peterman was right), and possibly by the presence of the word ‘English’ in the title, and NT, who has bought every ‘Best Film’ Academy Award winning film on video, but his copy of TEP is still in its shrink-wrap. (Don’t ask me why he feels compelled to buy films he has no intention of watching; he’s gay, if that’s any explanation.)” But this more than makes up for Willem Dafoe’s painful cameos in Spider-Man. Kevin Whatley’s death still moves me. Juliette Binoche is — well if I were one of those writer chappies I would know the right words, but they’re all good, roses damask’d in her cheeks and all that rot — ineffable really.
• The Player. This is, because I resent being boxed in like this, a tie with Kieslowski’s A Short Film About Killing, Easy Rider, Life of Brian, and Citizen Kane.

These 666 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 10:39pm GMT Permanent link.

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Meum Et Tuum »

And the other woman said, Nay: but the living is my son, and the dead is thy son. And this said, No: but the dead is thy son, and the living is my son. Thus they spake before the king.

Kings, Chapter 3, v22

Would I go against (according to Jim White — Torygraph, usual restrictions on articles)

luminaries running from Bill Clinton, through Ken Livingstone to Sir Sean Connery

and Matthew Turner? Yeah, why not?

Jim White again:

But the unpalatable truth for any Byron-inspired anti-Elginite is that, without his lordship, there probably wouldn’t be much in the way of marbles to campaign about. When Elgin first went to Athens, his intention was simply to make a plaster cast of the sculptures. He did so, but, when he returned to do more a couple of years later, he discovered that the Ottoman rulers of the city were so sluttish about its statuary, letting whoever fancied have a bit, that several heads, hands and feet that were there on his previous visit had gone. He decided that the only way to preserve their beauty intact was to remove as much as he could to the only place where they might be looked after. Elgin was the hero of the marbles: he wanted them kept together.

I island-hopped around Greece in the early 80s with a Canadian who couldn’t believe that the farmers and taberna-keepers we met were the descendants of mad Achilles and co. If they let themselves get conquered by the Ottoman Empire (by the Turks, had they no shame?), it’s their own fault. All empires are built on criminality: “History, being made by the criminal in us/Is nothing to vaunt of” as Auden said, Greece, perhaps the pinnacle of the civilisation to date, even with its intolerance of foreigners, its slavery, etc, etc, etc, was no different.

Or, to look at it another way, “Property is theft, therefore, theft is property” as Zaphod Beeblebrox observed. “I stole it, therefore it’s mine.”

These 140 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 11:25pm GMT Permanent link.

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Tuesday, 13 January 2004

A Touch Of Evil »

Eve Garrard has a post, Is there anything wrong with the concept of evil? on Norman Geras’s site.

I’d normally say that I don’t think evil is parsimonious: I don’t believe in evil in the way I don’t believe in ‘cold’ or ‘phlogiston’: it’s an absense of a common element, not the presence of some Aristotlean opposite (like Wittgenstein, I’ve never read Aristotle, so I don’t have the lingo).

There are things which make me, as it were, turn again. Hangovers, Peter Mandelson. I was going to add Channel 5, but that’s getting rather good these days.

Or, it was good until Friday’s programme on Mars. Fine until they mentioned terraforming it (no one mentions that this takes 500 years or so, by which time we are practically guaranteed to be waging the Fourth World War with bows and arrows) and sticking humans there. Even then, OK. It was when they suggested that people would evolve differently that they lost the plot. Evolution has everything to do with populations and sexual selection and nothing to do with environment. With current technology, settlers inside the Artic Circle won’t turn into Eskimos in 1,000,000 generations. Evolution, for us, has stopped. (This was an idea I picked up in a Larry Niven short story, and even now, I can’t fault it.)

I’ll get round to reading the actual article and commenting properly some time.

These 231 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 12:25am GMT Permanent link.

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Completely Different? »

Having complained about the state of classical music, I’m going to branch out.

T, who works for the Beeb, sent me this link for the upcoming NOW concert featuring “today’s most brilliant composers.”

I ought to record my disappointment that the tagline resists the obvious joke, going for the tamer “NOW for something new…”

These 54 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 12:24pm GMT Permanent link.

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Short Measures »

There’s a common theme in two posts on different subjects on separate blogs. The Price of Obesity by Edward Hugh on A Fistful of Euros claims that

some US economists have recently been arguing that there has been a significant rise in individuals claiming disability benefits and this has taken a large number of workers out of the labor force, thus — at a stroke — reducing the “official unemployment rate"[.]

While Bobby on PoltiX has a post called No child left behind on a 60 Minutes report on schooling in Houston.

A teacher from one institution, whose 0% dropout rate was paraded around, uncovered huge inaccuracies… The zero drop-out rate was a myth — experts levelled the figure at somewhere between 25 to 50%.

I understand the first item more than I understand the second. I’m not clear what ‘drop-out’ means in this context. If they leave school to start work, is that so bad? And I think I would prefer the term ‘whopping great lie’ to ‘myth’, but that might just be me.

If the electorate is supposed to choose between candidates (or simply to decide whether to continue with the present incumbent, or chuck him out in the hope that the alternative will prove more able), we need to be informed. We need to understand whether governments have delivered their promises. This isn’t new: when Margaret Thatcher was forced to resign in 1990, unemployment statistics were calculated in a very different way to the methodology used when her advertising campaign had claimed “Labour isn’t working” in 1979.

There is something of political importantance in these stories. It isn’t glamourous, and it won’t capture hearts or votes. It affects all serious political parties. And I have no idea how to properly phrase the problem, let alone come up with any solution.

I don’t like being pessimistic — I think that, generally, life is getting better for most people. But I do think that dud statistics are going to play a greater part in political debate in the future, because information gathering and data crunching are much easier than they were 30 years ago.

When I studied psychology, we had one lecturer on the sociology side of things who was very hard to make notes from, because he never seemed to say anything concrete. The only thing I remember from his lectures was an anecdote about a police study of — I think — traffic accidents. He was looking through the data, and working on statistical methods for analysing it when he came on some numbers he couldn’t understand.

“What’s the column here?”

“That? That’s wind speed.”

“What’s that got to do with anything?”

“Well, it’s easy to measure.”

These 368 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 4:53pm GMT Permanent link.

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Wednesday, 14 January 2004

Shoot The Steynographer »

I think it’s a big joke, but, I suppose I would.

I may as well begin with Jackie D’s view of the Kilroy-Silk affair. (Grauniad leader if you need background.) I’m a little confused by her starting-point: it’s not where I would have started.

Andrew Sullivan had a post a few months back where some story about prejudice in the BBC met Andrew’s rather flexible standards of proof. All I can remember now are the closing words: “Yay. Privatise it.” It irritated me then because he lives in the States, what does the way we conduct our country matter to him? He doesn’t pay the licence fee.

It irritates me now because of the assumption that because the BBC is publicly funded, it must be left-biased. Maybe that’s true, of course, but it ain’t necessarily so. But Jackie starts with a quotation from James Lileks, safe in the land of the free, on, you guessed it, media bias. How they [the media] are all collectivist lefties, etc. These drones for Stalin happen to work on American newspapers, which pay them with monies earned through sales and advertising, not a government handout in sight. (Unless you know something about the US media the rest of us don’t.)

I remember in 84 when our paper ran an article that angered campus feminists; they broke into the newspaper office and taped bloody tampons to the file cabinets… Sometimes it’s citizens v. thugs.

I’ve said before that I draw a line between speech and action, and I’d better clarify that ‘speech’ for me, can include marching, chanting, and so on. Breaking and entering, I’m less clear on. Leaving a bloody horse’s head on a bed, that would be beyond the pale; that would be a clear threat of violence. Taping a few tampons to filing cabinets… Well, they may have shocked the callow Mr Lileks, but I believe that they are a tiresomely familiar, and not-at-all shocking, sight to women. And these were, as I understand, students. High-spirited, energetic girls. If we cannot be foolish when young, when can we? If the local rugger-buggers (or ‘jocks’) had pulled a similar trick, it would have been a laugh wouldn’t it? Might have made ‘Animal House’ or something.

Thugs break heads, not play merry japes. It’s an important, and real, difference.

I know what Jackie D and Lileks (the temptation to type Li-lets — an old brand of tampons — nearly overwhelmed me) mean, but “thugs” is hysterically over-the-top. Anyway, Jackie uses all this as prelude to the Kilroy-Silk story, and she links to Mark Steyn in the Torygraph. (Disclaimer: I buy the Torygraph: I bought it today. I did not read Mr Steyn’s article in the print edition. I pay my TV licence fee (now that I own my own place; when I was younger, lived in a tenement and rented, I evaded it, of course) but I don’t watch EastEnders, Kilroy, or TellyTubbies.) Steyn is, well, Steyn. Weather on Saturn fine. How you? etc.

And so, when free speech, artistic expression, feminism and other totems of western pluralism…

Totems? If you must, Mr Steyn, but these were not immanent or a priori in the Western tradition. They were hard won. One only wins freedom by assault. Feminism (which I have lots of issues with) only got anywhere — anywhere includes being acknowledged by Mr Steyn — by acts like taping “bloody tampons to the file cabinets”.

Anyway, Matthew Turner found the Torygraph’s take on Tom Paulin, which may seem a curious divagation to you, but has become an issue following Kilroy-Silk’s suspension.

Tear me to pieces, like the lions set loose among the Christians in the Colosseum in a moment. Grant me a minute of your time. I’d like to attempt to recap what the important moves in this issue have been.

OK, I forget the date, but Rod Liddle (now Deputy Editor of the Spectator, and freelance contributor to the Torygraph) writes some derogatory remarks about the pro-hunting lobby in the Guardian. (As is his right. I am against hunting. With my usual perversity, I am also against the proposed legislation to ban it, because I find it illiberal, and, as such, against the principles I believe this country is for. I also believe in the legalisation of prostitution, that doesn’t mean I can’t be nasty about prostitutes and/or their clients.) The Telegraph (remember this, because I may ask questions later) gets offended. Never mind that those who read both papers is a vanishingly small minority. Rod Liddle is told that he either gives up his editorship (well remunerated) of the Today programme, or his writing. He selects giving up the Guardian, but leaves Today anyway.

The BBC now institute a plan whereby well-known broadcasters cannot have separate journalistic careers; they cannot write opinion pieces in the press, because the BBC is famously “unbiased”. (Note this was forced by the Telegraph).

Robert Kilroy-Silk writes such a piece, before this decision is made. His secretary then emails this old article to the Sunday Express (which he wrote before this embargo, and with no knowledge of it), the Express staff clearly fail to read said article and fail to spot that it is, ah, vintage (the ads for the Excess concentrate on winning a chocolate box cottage and so forth, so you get the impression that only sad, cupidinous, illiterates buy it, and no one actually reads it).

According to the Telegraph story

[Tom] Paulin, who appears regularly on the panel of the BBC2 arts programme Newsnight Review (formerly Late Review), allegedly made the comment in an interview with the Egyptian newspaper Al-Ahram.

So what is the difference between the Paulin and the Kilroy-Silk stories? As far as I can tell, these. Paulin appears as an occasional guest on an arts programme, where he is asked to critique films, book, plays, and so on. This programme, as my friend DL put it when I phoned to tell him that they were talking about Ann Tyler, one of his current raves, is watched by “no one”. Robert Kilroy-Silk hosts a programme which is like an earnest, chin-stroking, “Jerry Springer" — it bears his name, and is hosted by him, and, I believe, on every weekday. Paulin is, according to Radio 4’s Dead Ringers only there to take perversely contrary views “Well [overlong ‘Pinteresque’ pause] I thought it wasn’t very good, you know? It was like I didn’t like it.” Kilroy is the host of a regular slot. Paulin spoke to a foreign news agency, and according to the broadcast version, which may have been edited, told them what they wanted to hear. So what? He’s paid to be the fly in the ointment. Kilroy-Silk is a representative of the corporate BBC, and paid as such. I believe that there is sufficient difference between their cases to rubbish Steyn’s claims of bias. What does he care anyway? He thinks we’re all cockroaches.

I half-think that the Guardian (link above) is right. I also think that Paulin is (less frequently now, because he has become utterly predictable) a guest on Newsnight Review, which I watch (and on which, I should ‘fess up, Natasha Walter occasioned the Sonnet CXXX reference I used on Juliette Binoche the day before yesterday), and Kilroy-Silk fronts some trash programme for those without jobs who are crazy enough to get up before noon. Guess whom I support.

I don’t support absolute free speech. There is a difference between the Grauniad’s scurrilous — and wrong — allegations linked here and — ahem — the truth: Suspect admits killing Anna Lindh.

Jim Henley is right as ever on free speech, though I’d go further. The NYT should keep Brooks and ignore such comments. I usually buy a paper, but I read a quarter to a third of it. I’d guess that the crossword compiler has the greatest effect on sales. If someone really objects to a columnist, boycott the paper — hit ‘em where it hurts. If Brooks offends, don’t read him, don’t make it so others can’t. That door is marked with a swastika. Sartre says somewhere that everyone should act the way they think everyone else should act, and Kant says something similar. (Note to Melanie Phillips and David Aaronovich, this is different to telling people how to act — and looking like a pair of constipated toads in publicity photographs.) I’ve no idea how the market works for newspapers. Does Julie Burchill increase sales or harm them for the Grauniad? I’m ashamed to admit that despite like Nicholas Lezard, Smallweed, and Posy Simmonds, the overall Saturday paper is too poor to even merit £1:20 or whatever it costs, I’ve given up the Grauniad at just the time Burchill left. I’d cast an eye over her writings occasionally, but usually give up early with a — as Miles Davis so perfectly had it “So What"? I’d buy the Torygraph, but I believe it carries a horoscope, and I refuse to patronize (except in the condescending sense) any paper which does so.

After talking to my friend AC last week, who works for the Health Service, but is increasingly disillusioned, because the NHS is not delivering what he hoped it would, and as I am coming to the same conclusion, I wonder where my politics is going. Sometime soon I must articulate why I believe in the market for what I consider the ‘trivial’ and the state for what I consider the ‘essential’ — ie electricity, power, basic food…

I couldn’t quite manage a decent segue, but if we’re on “ain’t it awful” how’s about this, from the Rev Sun thing Moon, supporter of the GOP, etc. Sorry about the pun, but isn’t the man a loon?

One final note on free speech: Diana Moon got fired for blogging. Not fair.

These 1549 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 2:50am GMT Permanent link.

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Wimmin Isn’t Everything »

“Feminism” is a word I try to avoid. This post by Keith Burgess-Jackson inadvertently gives my reasons, but with the intented spin of attacking feminism.

One way in which feminism has harmed women is by telling them that they can “have it all.” Usually this means having both a fulfilling, remunerative career and an emotionally rich, fulfilling family life. It is said that men have always been able to have both of these things, whereas women have always had to choose one…

In truth, nobody can “have it all.” What a strange concept, when you think about it!

Professor Burgess-Jackson is a philosopher, and most of his blog posts are selections from essays on areas which interest him. Like most good scholars, he usually cites his sources. This piece is notably source-free. As he says, ‘nobody can “have it all."’ This isn’t a world-shattering observation. I doubt any of Germaine Greer’s [or insert name of favourite academic feminist here] books claim that women can. Yet feminism is regarded by all parties as a philosophy based on Panglossian fortune-cookie dictums. (I think Professor Burgess-Jackson would say ‘dicta’, and I fear that he would be correct, but it sounds wrong to me.)

I’d say that he was attacking a straw man, but his target seems to be a widely spread belief. What everyone treats as ‘feminism’ is the scrapings of occasional journalism and self-help books. As such, it is not only banal, but has no explanatory powers. In some circles, one claims to be a ‘feminist’ to fit in, and in others, one denies it.

Most of feminism’s demands are now trite. The state should not constrain anyone’s right to work based on sex. (Other considerations, such as criminal record, citizenship, minimum age, are legitimate IMO.) Women should be able to control their fertility (try to stop them!).

Otherwise, bin the label. Think for yourselves.

These 240 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 10:55pm GMT Permanent link.

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Tagging Along »

When I was young, and life was an open book, and all of that, I considered judges, even more than politicians, to be out-of-touch and particularly clueless. I must be getting old. Now, when it comes to conflicts between the legal profession and the executive, I prefer the lawyers.

It may sound anti-democratic — it may be anti-democratic — to prefer ‘professionals’ over our elected representatives, but I think that there is too much confusion between the ballot-box and the appointment of ministers anyway. Not only am I generally unhappy with a system where MPs advocate what they think we believe or ought to believe, but, as I can only vote for my MP, and the party with the most votes gets to install its leader, and that leader then appoints ministers, it seems a long way from my ballot to the decisions made by the government.

I hope that the leaders columns in tomorrow’s papers raise a stink about the Home Office, not only stepping in, but changing the law in the Maxine Carr case.

Previously, prison governors made the final decision on who could be released under the [electronic tagging] scheme, which excludes most violent and sexual offenders.

But now, the government says, decisions on “exceptional cases”, including Carr’s, will be referred to Martin Narey, the chief executive of the National Offender Management Service, the newly merged prison and probation service.

And to show what total bastards they are, by referring such cases to a civil servant rather than a junior minister, they totally ruined my witty segue into…

“’Did I think his unknown partner in this one-stop stand could have recognised him as a minister?’ he asked me in anguished whispers. Probably not, I replied, but I changed my answer when Al revealed the creative use he had made of his red despatch box to improve the excitement of this adventure.

You just want to know more don’t you? I’ll be up all night now trying to find the incident in Alan Clark’s diaries. If I had BBC4, I could watch them, I suppose. Needless to say, I’m at one with the Telegraph on this matter.

These 245 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 11:24pm GMT Permanent link.

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Thursday, 15 January 2004

Eat To The Bleat »

Words cannot express my joy at this wonderful article about a sad, sad tosser. Found via Stuart.

The author, Dennis Perrin, is a man after my own heart:

Being a long-term denizen of the American left myself (with time off during a few pissed-off periods)…

Any pubication which offers you the chance to

E-MAIL this story to a friend (or a foe!)

has to be worth reading.

These 41 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 12:09pm GMT Permanent link.

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Terror Is Human »

It had to happen. I am a supporter of terrorists.

Reading the Guardian’s Backbencher, (because Chris ‘Virtual Stoa’ Brooke gets a mention), I came across a story about, for no reason whatever, Culturenet Cymru’s 100 Welsh Heroes. (This is the full 100.) I didn’t even know the site existed, and I have no idea what it has to do with Westminster politics. I still registered and voted for Tommy Cooper. I can vote again in 7 days, when I may go for Professor Steve Jones for his interest in “spatial heterogeneity and the maintenance of genetic polymorphism in Drosophila and molluscs” or indeed Bertrand Russell. Bertrand Russell was Welsh? I can’t believe that Ron Davies at 48 is ahead of King Arthur (52). And no Anthony ‘Dance To The Music of Time’ Powell, or Sian Lloyd — the Western Mail will have gone into shock.

Anyway, back to terrorism and Backbencher.

But as one Backbencher reader pointed out, the most surprising inclusion is probably that of Cayo Evans, the founder of the Free Wales Army and, according to Culturenet Cymru, “Wales’s leading exponent of paramilitary chic”. Chic, in this instance, meant plotting to blow up “English” targets. “Cayo was a giant of a man, a genuinely magnetic personality, the kind which you don’t often find readily in today’s bland, consumerist Wales,” a friend of the deceased nationalist told the Western Mail. Indeed. As her correspondent puts it: “There’s a fashionable pub in a well-to-do area of Cardiff named after him. If I was more of a revolutionary I’d burn it down. I’m sure he’d have approved.” If you think threatening to blow things up helped to make the Welsh assembly what it is today, then get your vote in soon. Cayo is currently floundering at number 30.

There is indeed a pub (I don’t know about ‘fashionable’) in Cardiff (which I suppose is in Pontcanna, and I suppose Pontcanna is ‘well-to-do’) named after him. I may even go there tonight, if only to harry DL about his sister’s non-inclusion.

These 192 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 2:56pm GMT Permanent link.

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Hitch Hiking »

After reading Dennis Perrin on James Lileks earlier, I’ve found this even better piece on Christopher Hitchens.

Don’t know if Hitch is serious. Yes, his anger about the fatwa is real and understandable. And the fact that the former Cat Stevens, Yusef Islam, endorsed the mullahs’ death sentence clearly enraged him. But getting shitty over “Moonshadow"?

I’ve done that — got shitty over “Moonshadow” too, and more than once. Perrin starts with an anecdote about Hitch from 12 years ago, and his refusal to listen when the author told him,

“Yusef Islam renounced everything about his past. He hates Cat Stevens more than you do. He gave away or destroyed all his gold records. If you really want to show your disgust for him, embrace Cat Stevens…”

Hitch listens, head down, fresh Rothman lit.

“No. Never. Fuck them both.”

Given that Hitch has changed position in most areas in those years, I consider that a very artful device.

These 68 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 4:03pm GMT Permanent link.

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Friday, 16 January 2004

Yet More On Bias »

Good two-sided discussion on BBC bias on metafilter.

On comparing BBC with US talk radio y2karl asks:

So who’re the British equivalent of Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Michael Savage and Dr. Laura again?

You know, we should thank God over here every night that it wasn’t the last who was the drug addict and the first who had the nude pictures posted on the internet.

Fine for the second of those, but, for the first, how could anyone tell? While biffa suggests

Don’t think we really have direct comparisons, TV doesn’t really allow one-sided polemics of that nature generally. Closest you could get would perhaps be Richard Littlejohn (newspaper columnist who got own small TV show), maybe Jeremy Clarkson, pro-car/anti-environmentalist but who’s not very good at putting up arguments.

Though saying that Clarkson is “not very good at putting up arguments” is like saying that my cat has yet to master keyhole brain surgery. And reminds us of:

JEREMY PAXMAN: And you believe American intelligence?

TONY BLAIR: Well I do actually believe this intelligence -

JEREMY PAXMAN: Because there are a lot of dead people in an aspirin factory in Sudan who don’t.

Pure joy.

These 65 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 3:11pm GMT Permanent link.

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I Fought The Law »

“What you want, old man,” I said, “is a policeman’s helmet.”

“Do I, Bertie?”

“If I were you, I’d step straight across the street and get that one over there.”

“But there’s a policeman inside it. You can see him quite distinctly.”

“What does that matter?” I said. I simply couldn’t follow his reasoning.

Without The Option, in Carry On, Jeeves

I was going to comment on British Spin’s Right whingers piece. I agree with him about the whinin’ right. I don’t agree with him about this Guardian piece: it’s balls on all counts.

More than 60% of people in England and Wales admitted in a survey that they had padded an insurance claim, paid cash to avoid taxation or kept the money when given too much change. In western Germany, the proportion was even higher, at 70%.

(Why did no one ask east Germans? Or is the Guardian in denial over the fall of the Berlin Wall?) That’s the survey summed up — in the second paragraph. Here’s the opener.

A middle class crimewave is sweeping Britain, with undetected and often unreported forgery and fraud costing up to £14bn a year — nearly five times that of burglary.

Ah-ha.What I really object to is these are “middle-class” crimes. All other crimes, mugging, rape, murder, and so on are, by extension, restricted to the working-classes. Patronising or what?

The lesson was that a market society was not inevitably an honest one.

Did anyone think it was? We’ve all encountered dishonesty, and we’ve all grown up in variants of “market societies”. I trust no one is surprised. I’ll skip several paragraphs which mention the sky being blue when the sun shines, grass is green, it’s dark at night, pigs cannot fly, Julie Burchill is a fat head, etc…

Crimes such as taking something from the office or asking a friend to bend the rules might involve only minor damage, but set up a vicious cycle.

The clause after the ‘but’ is not justified anywhere. If you’re going to claim a domino effect, you have to show how things are causally linked. It’s all post hoc ergo propter hoc, at best.

If you follow the link, I hope you’ll agree with me — our society really is going to the dogs: people lie to survey takers. Look at the numbers: they’re far too low.

Anyway, British Spin, far for condemning, comes clean.

These 223 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 9:45pm GMT Permanent link.

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Friday Cat Blogging »

I bought Gordon some ‘cat balls’ from Tesco. I bought him a ‘cat tickler’ from the vet. The balls don’t interest him. Pens are far more fun. When he drops them, they don’t roll away. The ‘cat tickler’ doesn’t do anything for him, when used as a tickling stick. He likes to fight with it, and bite the crap out of it.

The greatest cat toy is none of these. It is an alarm clock which came ‘free’ with a bottle of Lynx bodywash I got from T at Christmas. It’s not a bad alarm clock. It seems to keep time. It is black and a little larger than a wrist watch — and it talks. It’s just said, “Good evening. It’s ten-oh-two,” in what its makers imagine to be a husky Mariella Frostrup sort of voice. (Lynx clearly makes you so attractive to women that you need a talking alarm clock to remind you what they sound like. Anyway, I prefer Antonia Quirke, occasional guest and/or presenter on Radio 4 film shows like “Back Row" — especially since she nominated “Master and Commander, yada yada yada” as the best film of last year. My kind of woman, even if the best film was “The Hours” with “Adaptation” a close second.)

Gordon hates this clock. When it goes off, if he gets to it first, he pats it once or twice before smashing it with his best Greg Rusedski nandrolone-assisted serve. As he watches it arc into a corner, you can see the think-bubble over his head, “Another one into the bleachers…”, “That was an easy four…”, etc.

I’m expected to find this cute.

I don’t.

How am I expected to hit the snooze button if I can’t see the bloody clock?

These 289 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 10:17pm GMT Permanent link.

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Take Your Turn »

My thoughts are misguided &
A little naive

Myxomatosis, Radiohead

If you haven’t realised, comments don’t work. Nick Barlow was good enough to overcome this obstacle and remind me by email of the Mighty Reason Man’s parody of the major-league right-wing bloggers. I hadn’t read the comments before, and they’re as good as the skits. Quite a few of us loathe Lileks, it seems. (Part of the reason I do is that he is clearly so similar to me.)

I’m rehearsing a big “moral relativism is good” piece in riposte to Eve ("The ‘G’ is hard" -- I had this wrong originally) Garrard’s Is there anything wrong with evil? posts on Norman ("The ‘G’ is also hard") Geras’s site, so I won’t be doing an “it’s all relative bit” tonight, except that it is all relative. This is Matthew Parris’s take on a well-known blogger (from Maria Farrell’s Protestants and Papists review on Crooked Timber — and thanks for the book, Maria):

…Andrew Sullivan, another Oxford friend. Now a magazine editor in the United States and an acknowledged writer and thoughtful right-wing publicist for gay emancipation, Andrew is one of the first generations of HIV-positive men who are not going to die young, do not need to make a big thing and can get on with their lives. I did not know then he was gay. He was a slight, pale, teasing, alluring, strangely assured young man. Now he’s pumping iron.

This is Dennis Perrin:

This was often entertaining, though once when Andrew Sullivan joined us for drinks, the gossip took a swift dive into the bowels of The New Republic, a loathsome mag personified by Sullivan, who remains one of the most arrogant, pretentious jerks I’ve ever met.

It seems a lot of people revere Lileks, whose main journalistic virtue to me is that he looks like Simon Hoggart of the Guardian and Radio 4, but less so, if you get my drift. What’s odd is that so many think he is some sort of successor to Melville, Hemmingway, Steinbeck, and so forth, the plain-speaking American man of the people who got lost in the academic confidence of Bellow, Roth, Updike, Pynchon, and DeLillo. I think he’s a competent journeyman, no more.

Out of the crowd who get parodied, the one who can write, to me, is the Rottweiler. He’s a pillock, but being a pillock and being a good writer were never mutually exclusive. But the man’s a natural. He writes clear prose, in short sentences. Not long rambling, divagating, obscure pavanes, which meander by the odd commodius vicus of mis-quotation, never quite ending but attempting to suggest the stream, the river, the continuity and connectness of consciousness in long sentences which can’t quite find one of those things we were taught to think of as footballs when I was learning to write that bring the whole caboodle to a full stop.

There’s a comment on Roger Simon’s site which beats me. It goes, roughly “Lileks…perfect pitch… yada yada yada…Lileks quotation…

And suddenly I heard a clear and distinct echo…

[Mark Twain passage]

If you’ve got an ear for such things, that’s Mark Twain.

You know why it sounds familiar? Because Lileks knew the same passage. He wasn’t repeating it out of necessity. like the guy in the Borges story who lives like Cervantes so he can write “Don Quixote” word for word. There’s nothing wrong with allusion, or indeed, literary theft. Wodehouse regularly pillages the better sayings of Marvell, Keats, and company. John Mortimer ransacks the attics of Shelley, Shakespeare and friends. Francis Ford Coppola and Brian de Palma have imitated Eisenstein. T.S. Eliot simply took the canon by the ankles and shook it. But pilfering is not greatness. Greatness is elsewhere.

Complementary Mark Twain story (from Craig Brown (FRRYYY):

Sir Mark also pops up in the rather more neglected memoirs of Sir Edward du Cann: “In a restaurant in Detroit with my friends Wickins he boasted to a waitress with whose slow service he was unimpressed: “I am Mark Thatcher.”

Replied the waitress: “I don’t care if you are Mark Twain, you take your turn like everybody else.”

These 468 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 11:33pm GMT Permanent link.

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Saturday, 17 January 2004

Going To A Party »

Going to a party
Going to the Boston Tea Party

Boston Tea Party, The Sensational Alex Harvey Band

One more thing I hate about Lileks, and then I’ll shut up. This is him on Monday (found through Jackie D):

About 50 members of the political organization, The Sons of Liberty, boarded 3 ships in Boston Harbor. Some were dressed, not very convincingly, as Mohawk Indians. In a very orderly and quiet fashion, they plunked [sterling] 9,659 worth of Darjeeling into the sea.

As James learns from this:

What goes? Looking back, this was one of my first clues — it’s not about right v. left all the time. Sometimes it’s citizens v. thugs.

Oh, sorry, that wasn’t Lileks at all, that was PBS on the “Boston Tea Party". But Lileks is right isn’t he? Their beef was with the government, not the East India Company, which was just a business. I await the column where he declares that no possible good could have come from such thuggish behaviour.

I appreciate that the comparison is a little unfair — but the East India Company weren’t the ones imposing the tax. Revolutions are judged by what they achieve; how they do it (if they succeed) is usually quietly forgotten. You can bet that if some partisan cable channel had been on hand, they wouldn’t have described the proceedings as “very orderly and quiet”. If Mr Lileks considers some student feminists ‘thugs’, what does he think of Nelson Mandela, who was an active bomber in the early 60s? Or David Ben-Gurion, about whom Norm Geras has a very informative post?

I share Mr Lilek’s distate for ‘thuggishness’ — that’s why I’m not a revolutionary. In 1917, I’d have been a Menshevik — which is easy to say now, and it’s easy to scold the Russian Revolution for turning into the Terror and the Purges, but that ignores the fact the old system had to be removed. The world is better for the existence of the United States, Israel, and a racially-integrated South Africa.

Without fiesty girls like those tampon-tapers, would any of us be so concerned about the morality of the Taliban? Or of a threatened Iraqi theocracy?

The means are history. The end prevails.

These 281 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 12:30pm GMT Permanent link.

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Sunday, 18 January 2004

Iowapalooza »

At last! A candidate I can endorse.

Nick comments will work soon — I just have some technical problems. Like being too busy reading Oliver Willis to recode my own site.

These 31 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 4:03pm GMT Permanent link.

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Stuck On You »

Since I ridiculed the Guardian in December over its prudish non-story about the Farrelly Brothers’ Stuck on You, last night I slid around to my local multiplex to see it. I seem to have missed all the reviews on its release — too busy rading blogs.

Although multiplexes post starting times as confusingly as possible, I got this one nearly right: I caught one trailer for “Paycheck” and the Spike Lee ad for Orange and then the movie. I’m glad that I wasn’t late: any film that starts with The Pixies’ “Here Comes Your Man” has already demonstrated that it can’t be all bad. Indeed, “Stuck on You” is hardly bad at all. I saw in it a half-empty cinema, and there was one person laughing like a banshee throughout. Regrettably, both for my street-cred and my opinion of the intelligence and taste of the typical cinema-goer, that person was me.

The ‘bad taste’ label which dogs the Farrellys seems as misguided as the accusations of ‘political incorrectness’. Farrelly Brothers films are the most — the only — films I regard as politically correct in a non-pejorative sense. Far from the tokenism of most commercial fare — which reminds me of the scene in Woody Allen’s “Everything You Ever Wanted To Know About Sex But Were Afraid To Ask” where there is a single black spermatozoon among the legions of white — their movies actually look like US cities. And their jokes are original and clever. Most of “Stuck on You” is visual gags, and beautiful visual gags at that. But there is a far more considered metaphysical side to the conjoined twins idea, something that belongs in the novel Will Self keeps trying, and failing, to write. There is a least one joke Freud (who wrote a book on humour (mostly puns) would have enjoyed. Matt Damon is playing darts whien Greg Kinnear is distracted by a pretty girl. Kinnear makes a sudden move and Damon misses his throw, his dart landing in the head of a drinker, who says to his friend “I think I taste ice cream.” OK, it’s more of an Oliver Sacks joke, but as Freud wrote a few papers on neurology, before he gave up serious research and got distracted by the “talking cure” nonsense, and would have recognised the dart’s resting place as a little north-west of Broca’s area, I think he would have got the joke. I was the only person who laughed.

I love the cleverness of the jokes, a lot of the plot revolves around the shy Matt Damon’s internet romance of three years, where he has told May (Wen Yann Shih) everything about himself, apart from sharing his liver. Damon always calls them ‘conjoined’ except when seeing himself as May does when he uses “Siamese twins" — a good script exposes character through what is not said. When they are finally separated a doctor comes out to their girlfriends, and intones that he has some bad news, “We’ve lost them,” when an orderly runs in, “It’s OK, we’ve found them again, someone took them upstairs.” I was biting the carpet; total silence everywhere else. There a joke where Cher is watching her show with Greg Kinnear in bed and the camera pans over to Frankie “Malcolm in the Middle” Muniz eating popcorn next to her. (They perhaps overdo this one, as when she asks Greg Kinnear if he misses his brother, she commiserates with, “I know how you feel, my boyfriend just started college.") This is an unapologetically heterosexual film: both Damon and Kinnear are lardy, and the male actors have a Mike Leigh kind of drabness, while all the females are luminous. Cher has always suggested a camel with a headache to me, but the Farrelly have a sort of 18th century court painter talent for discovering inner beauty. Meryl Streep (and they do know the actors to pick) has matured into a fun-loving girlishness that was entirely absent in her early striving-to-be-grown-up-and-serious roles.

Having checked the newspaper reviews, I find that both the Guardian and the Observer, to their credit, liked this film, although Philip French’s warm-hearted review itself goes off in the final paragraph.

Damon and Kinnear act beautifully together in every sense. Cher plays herself as a bad sport, as does Meryl Streep, more briefly, as a good one. And the movie works well until the final 10 minutes or so when it collapses into an embarrassing final song-and-dance number, and ends with an excruciating speech by a member of the cast during the concluding credits.

That last sentence is the opposite to my take: Streep’s dancing is a pleasure, as is the uplifting ending. I thought the press would miss the point of the final speech by Ray ‘Rocket’ Valliere, which is hugely, cruelly, comically overlong, as he has Downs’ Syndrome, and sufferers can tend to witter on a bit, but also tender and moving, as he thanks just about the entire cast and crew in an unscripted, sincere, and struggling to be fair kind of way, before moving on to his wife, his niece, and his dead father. Not many films can send up the self-indulgence of the movie world, while allowing real feeling to show, and be so generous to a cast member. Excruciating? All art should aspire to this holy state.

These 817 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 7:10pm GMT Permanent link.

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Monday, 19 January 2004

Silent Day »

No blogging today. I’m hurrying through Giles Waterfield’s The Hound in the Left-Hand Corner, so I can start Matthew Parris’s Chance Witness, which was, incredibly, sent to me by Maria Farrell (see the Crooked Timber Protestants and Papists post for explanation).

It’s a book I would have read anyway: the “Praise for Matthew Parris” includes “’An absolute shit’ Alan Clark” and “’Unreliable’ Alastair Campbell”. My favourite picture caption is “Avoiding the Labour conference on the Pepsi-Max Big One at Blackpool, with the Guardian’s sketchwriter Simon Hoggart (left) and cartoonist Steve Bell (bottom left)”. Other than that, I’ve only read the introduction.

I knew he irritated Thatcher by having a beard and being gay. I didn’t know that he was also, as it says on the back cover, “Chastised by Margaret Thatcher for jumping into the freezing Thames to save a dog…” So, three reasons to like him already.

These 148 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 10:25pm GMT Permanent link.

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Tuesday, 20 January 2004

I Am The One And Only »

Ah, the wonder of referer files. I’ve found that using Google UK’s “I’m feeling lucky” search for “weeden” redirects to this site. How cool is that! Well, it’s very interesting for me. Pity that I’m moving this blog to its own domain at the end of the month…

These 48 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 9:50am GMT Permanent link.

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Overlawyered »

The devil will find work for idle hands to do

What difference does it make? Morrissey/Marr

Microsoft: We took MikeRoweSoft too seriously. No kidding guys, I guess that’s the problem with having more lawyers than programmers. Still, you helped make up my mind, after ages faffing about, I finally bought a G5. And I did think of getting MS Office, but that’s to your recent brilliance, Appleworks will suffice.

I notice that Microsoft “has promised to treat Rowe fairly”. Rowe is a Canadian. Let’s hope “fairly” means “better than we treated everyone else so far”, and better than Maher Arar.

These 84 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 4:50pm GMT Permanent link.

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Wednesday, 21 January 2004

The Times They Are A-changin’ »

Apologies for the slight interruption in service: server crash (again). Roll on the end of the month when my current hosting expires, and I shift this blog to its own domain hosted by Chris Lightfoot’s Mythic Beasts. Or perhaps sooner.

These 40 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 11:19am GMT Permanent link.

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Friday, 23 January 2004

A Pint Of Plain »

When money’s tight and hard to get
And your horse has also ran,
When all you have is a heap of debt -
A PINT OF PLAIN IS YOUR ONLY MAN.

Flann O’Brien

Poor, poor Stephen Pollard. When I finished his piece, I was in tears. Half an hour later my ribs are still sore, but I can nearly contain myself.

These 28 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 11:32pm GMT Permanent link.

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Saturday, 24 January 2004

Stolid State »

What’s the world coming to when you’re forced to use a word like ‘apologist’ in a pub conversation? Whatever it is, it can’t be pretty.

It happened to me when discussing the ever estimable Chris Brooke’s reaction to Paul “The Thinker” Richards’s understanding of the seven types of ambiguity contained in

We will not introduce ’top-up’ fees and have legislated to prevent them.

which all you politics wonks will recognise appeared in the 2001 Labour Manifesto.

(Purely personal anecdote follows. I bought a digital camera this morning. I was minded to buy it from Dixons, which has lots of signs which read “We won’t be beaten on price” and so forth. Knowing what I wanted, having looked at most camera sites and read magazines in Smiths, I said to a salesman, “It’s cheaper in Amazon.” He more or less went deaf on me. His colleague was happier to sell me a camera, but kept giving baby Bambi looks when I said that his employers were willing to insure their sale as a gamble that nothing would happen to it — I was willing to make the same gamble. When I saw the box, I said, that it told the the thing I most wanted to know: that its software worked with OS X. Despite having revealed the first thing about my intended usage, he kept on with the insurance policy. Thank god the Nationwide wouldn’t let me take out enough cash in one day to buy the thing. I bought the same camera, plus case, and charger for 3 quid more than the Dixon’s price for the camera alone in Jessops. Their sales guy, Kim, a Korean, knew about cameras, talked about how it worked, and didn’t try to sell me insurance, odd in an electrical store, I know.)

Clearly whatever they teach in MBAs these days — all products are post-modernly, pure products, and exactly alike in their productness, just sell them for profit, they have no value, worth, or interest — has now reached the David Brent lower slopes of the People’s Party in the shape of Paul “The Thinker” Richards. No surprise: Peter Mandelson thought that he could raise a far higher mortgage than his MPs salary entitled everyone else because he had the option of writing a book at the end of his adventures at the top.

Met Liam Gallagher, Art Garfunkel, and Bez from the Happy Mondays, and told them that drugs were for losers. All three pledged to give up immediately. Ah, the heady power of New Labour! Now safe in the knowledge that can invite teen celebs round to Downing Street with none of this posey rebellious nonsense. Everyone loves power, and would suck George Burns’s dick just to get near it. Just ask me, I’ve been there, baby!…

Another dinner with George Bush, the most powerful man on the planet! Told him how I’d always admired him. He asked if I didn’t used to be a socialist and “one of those disgusting shirt-lifters”, he laughed as he told me how his favourite preacher advocated bringing back stoning for the sins of Sodom. Made note of that for speech for Tony next time in US. Brought planet-sized brain into action and had leader of the Western World eating out of my hand…

Striding up Whitehall stalked by that tiresome Channel 4 crew I was accosted by the most frightful beggar I’ve ever had the misfortunte to behold. He was a supine pile of stinking rags one instant, and a standing pile of stinking rags with a glittering eye the next. I barged past him. “Try selling the ‘Big Issue,’” I snarled. He pulled out a bag of the magazines. “I don’t support charities,” I snapped, look at the good work New Labour has done.” “Peter,” he called “Peter ‘Saddam’ Mandelson, we were up at Oxford together, how we laughed when old Bingo remarked how you looked like the dictator all those trippy-hippies marched against. I went into the arms trade you know, I was doing well, until…” His words faded as I stalked away. That’s capitalism, it takes the lame, the stupid, those too slow to spot emerging or changing trends and spits them out. We are all the better for it.

The only problem with the Mandelson plan is that others like Benn made things happen, and still others — like Alan Clark or Matthew Parris — could write.

Anyway, back to ‘apologist’. DL was complaining about the moribundness of the political scene, and I was countering with something like “If there is hope, it lies in the Virtual Stoa, etc”.

The good thing about DL is that we can — and do — argue about everything. We got on when we met, and I had at least one very pleasant chatty run with him, but we gelled after we went out in a group that Christmas (this would have been in ‘94) and along with Kev Morgan we went back to my house. At some point, we fell out over whether the sonnets proved Shakespeare was gay (I was in the pro-camp, having read Anthony Burgess’s “Nothing Like The Sun” several years earlier — he was in the anti, with evidence about wives, kids, second-best beds, and other irrelevancies). Kevin, who is usually the one who finds fights, being — even more than me — the person who ends up in a corner with some gorilla’s wife, ficancé, or best-beloved, was shocked as we threatened to come to blows over 400-year-old poems neither of us could remember with any accuracy. I even went round to his house to apologise. We’ve been fast friends ever since. (Apart from the times when my argumentativeness has threatened to scupper even that.)

We can argue about anything. I asked who the good-looking guy sat next to him after the running club was. He told me. “Not him,” I said, “the good looking one on your other side.” “He wasn’t good looking.” “Yes he was.” “No, he wasn’t.”

DL, who is a native Welsh speaker, and Welsh contains fewer scurrilities than English, as English has fewer than, say Russian, is perhaps the best-spoken person I know, and he struggles to descibe the current cabinet without the words “fucking cunts”. He is, at least, pleased that I have finally left the People’s Party, if only because my bank bounced the standing order when I was broke. I suppose we’d both have preferred if I had been kicked out for using a demotic term for female genitalia to refer to Her Majesty’s Prime Minister myself on this site.

For some reason, I slipped into the argument that I’ve already deployed here, that, contrary to common belief on the left, the US is qualified to lead the reconstruction of Iraq: they made a good fist of Germany and Japan. I laid out all that I find admirable in a working mixed-economy social democracy. “You’re getting old,” he told me, “that’s so stolid.” Better to live in a stolid state (pun unintended — if I was sober, and it weren’t so late, I’d fix it) than the one we have now, I replied.

And so we argued, me taking Roy Jenkins as a beacon, he for being a Maoist guerilla in South America. Normally he is Mr Reasonable, with me suspended between the angel of Mr Kurtz and the ape of the Viet Cong/Khmer Rouge, building cities on the slopes of Vesuvius.

For no reason other than I can’t be bothered starting a separate post for this — and Bobbie on Politix very kindly has a post Don’t ever say Labour never give you anything, which gives me a Mandelson idea — Norm Geras and Bobbie disagree over BBC bias (not) — BBC bias (is too). All I can say is that, as Norm acknowledges, the BBC were biased — against the miners — and I need more convincing that they are one-sided now. I don’t think objectivity is possible in individual reports, which is what the anti-BBC crowd seem to want. “And after that report on another toddler maimed by a semi house-trained polecat, we cut to the studio with a heart warming story of the beneficient acts of semi house-trained polecats through history…” “Ariel Sharon may be trying to push defenceless Palestinians into the sea, but he is nice to his mother…” Objectivity is an emergent property, if there are more arguments on one side, they should get more coverage. The BBC have made up for their former bias, especially with the wonderful “Mr Day” interview, and the one where John Nott (who? you may well ask) stormed off.

I get the Newsnight weekdaily email. Friday’s included:

Question: What do you get when you cross an elephant with a ton of laxatives?

Answer: Very, very far away.

And people complain about the licence fee.

These 1113 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 2:08am GMT Permanent link.

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Saturday, 31 January 2004

Rumours Of Death Much Exaggerated »

Let’s make one thing clear from the start. I’m not dead. I haven’t posted for nearly a week because I got a little tired of my own voice, and started to feel that I was repeating myself. I still haven’t got comments doing anything interesting yet.

Things are afoot in Backword Towers. I’ve bought a Mac. “Oh yes” as John Major would say, and it’s wonderful. There’s just a lot to learn, and stuff to move over and organise and so on. I’m also moving domains for this blog. This should be automatic and painless, and I’ll advertise the new address when it’s done.

Naturally, I’m pretty gutted at the top up fees results and the Hutton report. Of the two, Monday’s vote upset me the most — entirely for the reasons Chris Brooke mentions. I don’t care if the government made the right decision, a question which seems to have exercised the finest minds on the Telegraph all week, I mind that they broke an explicit manifesto promise not to. To promise to put a man on the moon (or as I’m sure some caucus of the old GLC drafted “This house pledges that, having put a man on the moon by the end of the 60s, to put them all there by the end of the century…") and fail to deliver is regrettable, but to make an easy promise of a negative and break it is outrageous. Not introducing top up fees is easy. I’ve been doing it for year, and done it several times in the past week, and I’ll wager you have too.

If manifestoes aren’t to be honoured, what’s the point of our whole democracy? I won’t be swung by any arguments like “most people didn’t read the manifesto, and those who did, and still voted Labour, did so with regret and their fingers crossed on account of that one policy.” New Labour is stuffed with lawyers. If they can’t draft a simple proposal for the next five years without getting the word ‘not’ in all the wrong places, that’s their problem. Blair’s cabinet have forgotten that we are their bosses, not the other way round. We gave them a mandate, and it included not introducing top up fees. What is so hard to understand?

As for the Hutton report, well God blind me, but how did he pull that one off? Most of the attacks on the BBC strike me as utterly wrong-headed. Greg Dyke seems to have been one of the most commercially-minded DGs ever. (He is, after all, filthy rich from his stint at Granada.) Yet you’d think he was Soviet Apparatchik whose only function was to maintain the old order. So there was one dubious report, which used an ambiguous term broadcast at an hour when no one decent can even think. And?

Meanwhile, there are no WMD. That makes two false reports on the part of our intelligence services, one false positive (Iraq) and one false negative (Al-Quaeda). Do heads roll? Do pots call kettles black?

These 506 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 6:13pm GMT Permanent link.

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