backword

Thursday, 1 July 2004

Thou Shalt Not Covet Thy Neighbour's Job »

Oh rats. Front page story in this morning’s Torygraph: Stop the plotting, Blunkett warns Brown. But, of course, Blunkett didn’t tell Brown anything. He gave an interview to the New Statesman where he made comments which were open to interpretation as coded messages to Brown.

Blunkett denies chancellor swipe according to the BBC.

As Eugene Volokh once said, “Another beautiful story ruined by ugly fact.”

These 65 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 11:20am GMT Permanent link.

The Heart And Mind Of America »

I shouldn’t have been so surpised by Michael Bérubé’s interest in football. Daniel Gross claims that Europe’s favorite sport is more American than baseball.

In 1986, … then-Congressman Jack Kemp opposed an anodyne congressional resolution to support U.S. efforts to play host to the 1994 World Cup: “a distinction should be made that football is democratic, capitalism, whereas soccer is a European socialist [sport],” the former quarterback said.

Cue demolition job.

Not only that, but I learned,

“Whoever wants to know the heart and mind of America had better learn baseball,” Jacques Barzun wrote a half-century ago.

Listen to the heart and mind of America:

During the singing of “God Bless America” in the seventh inning, an image of Cheney was shown on the scoreboard. It was greeted with booing, so the Yankees quickly removed the image.

(Found through Chris Brooke.) Surely they can’t all read Maureen Dowd in the local paper? Could this be the First Ripple of a Political Tidal Wave?

Good stuff in Slate right now: why Internet Explorer sucks (aka tabbed browsing rools), Surfergirl “a dispatch from the wilds of American pop culture” which itself links to this completely wonderful idea.

A less wonderful idea was flypaper which will forever be associated with Andrew Sullivan, but came from David Warren:

This is exactly what President Bush wants. To engage them, away from Israel, in mortal combat. To have an excuse for wiping them out — a good, solid, American excuse, from which Israel has been extracted.

Thing is, weren’t we supposed to wipe them out?

Several people in Jolan said that the foreign fighters — Saudis, Tunisians, Moroccans, Yemenis, and Lebanese, directed by Syrian militants—had been crucial to the defense of the neighborhood. The groups of mujahideen who hung around mosques included men who looked to me like Arabs from the Gulf. Most of them were dark, with angular features, and they had long, well-groomed beards. Their dishdashas were short, in the Wahhabi style, ending a little below their knees. Friends of mine who had been held by mujahideen told me they had heard men speaking with accents from the Gulf, Syria, and North Africa.

The foreign mujahideen still in Jolan imposed strict Islamic codes of behavior on the neighborhood. They harassed Iraqis who smoked cigarettes or drank water using their left hand, which is considered impure. They banned alcohol, Western films, makeup, hairdressers, “behaving like women” — i.e., homosexuality—and even dominoes in the coffeehouses. Men found publicly drunk had been flogged, and I was told of a dozen men who had been beaten and imprisoned for selling drugs.

Nir Rosen in Falluja.

These 132 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 12:54pm GMT Permanent link.

Two Images Of Saturn »

Credits: Edward _ for Saturn II and BBC News for Saturn I.

These 14 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 4:33pm GMT Permanent link.

Various Pleas Of Insanity »

Andrew Northrup thinks Bush junior is a liar. My favourite, with so many to choose from, is he lied about seeing the first plane hit the WTC. It’s a very strange lie, because he was being filmed in a classroom at the time. Of course, the footage appears in Fahrenheit 9/11:

“More interesting is the moment where Bush is shown frozen on his chair at the infant school in Florida, looking stunned and useless for seven whole minutes after the news of the second plane on 9/11. Many are those who say that he should have leaped from his stool, adopted a Russell Crowe stance, and gone to work. I could even wish that myself. But if he had done any such thing then (as he did with his “Let’s roll” and “dead or alive” remarks a month later), half the Michael Moore community would now be calling him a man who went to war on a hectic, crazed impulse.”

Christopher Hitchens defends Bush’s flycatching moments. As does fellow partisan Adam Yoshida (in his own comments yet):

The President can’t get up and run about wherever he likes. No one had any idea where they were going to take the President even at that point.

Actually, he can. It’s not for anyone else to have an “idea where they were going to take the President”, that’s what being the chief means.

Far more interesting is this point-by-point going over of Hitchens’ whatever-it-is by Chris Parry.

Hitch had a snark too far:

[T]his supposedly “antiwar” film is dedicated ruefully to all those killed there [in Afghanistan], as well as in Iraq.

And what, exactly, is wrong with honouring the dead? And should it be dedicated joyfully to those killed in Bush’s adventures? Hitchens himself never mentions soldiers unless he’s attacking them.

Either these goons were acting on someone’s authority, in which case there is a layer of Either these goons were acting on someone’s authority, in which case there is a layer of mid- to high-level people who think that they are not bound by the laws and codes and standing orders. Or they were acting on their own authority, in which case they are the equivalent of mutineers, deserters, or traitors in the field. This is why one asks wistfully if there is no provision in the procedures of military justice for them to be taken out and shot. Or they were acting on their own authority, in which case they are the equivalent of mutineers, deserters, or traitors in the field. This is why one asks wistfully if there is no provision in the procedures of military justice for them to be taken out and shot.

Prison Mutiny, 4 May. The ‘them’ in the last sentence, like the ‘they’ in the preceding one, seems to refer to ‘these goons’. Apparently ‘goons’ can be ‘taken out and shot’ but not the ‘layer of mid- to high-level people who think that they are not bound by the laws and codes and standing orders’. Class war anyone?

So far, the press has focused on the questions “who knew” and “how far up did it go?” I’m equally interested in the question of how far down it has gone and how widespread it is.

A Moral Chernobyl, 14 June. Perhaps this is a final, misdirecting admission that the orders did come from ‘a layer of mid- to high-level people who think that they are not bound by the laws and codes and standing orders’. And as Hitch notes

The graphic videos and photographs that have so far been shown only to Congress are, I have been persuaded by someone who has seen them, not likely to remain secret for very long.

So soon we will know “how far down it has gone and how widespread it is” but not the other answer.

Hitchens should himself stick to the important questions.

President Bush is accused of taking too many lazy vacations. (What is that about, by the way? Isn’t he supposed to be an unceasing planner for future aggressive wars?) But the shot of him “relaxing at Camp David” shows him side by side with Tony Blair. I say “shows,” even though this photograph is on-screen so briefly that if you sneeze or blink, you won’t recognize the other figure. A meeting with the prime minister of the United Kingdom, or at least with this prime minister, is not a goof-off.

From Hitchens on Moore, link above. I wouldn’t call Bush “an unceasing planner for future aggressive wars” and I doubt anyone else would or does. True, Moore doesn’t show Bush’s indolence, but inactivity is somewhat hard to film.

Now, I just don’t get this at all. According to figures compiled by the Washington Post, to August 2003 from the time he took office, Bush had taken 250 days off. … But Jimmy Carter only took 79 days off during his Presidency, while Bill Clinton spent only 152 days kicking back during his two terms in the top job.

Chris Parry, link also above. Bush’s fondness for time out (during a war yet) is a matter of record. At least Hitchens spares us another defence of that lovable, chubby-cheeked incarnation of the worst qualities of Kim Philby, Mohammed al-Fayed, and Ernest Saunders — Ahmad Chalabi.

Parry article (which disagrees with the Poor Man’s thesis that Bush lied about the WTC — I think incorrectly: if he had known, why did he even go into the classroom?) found through the comments to this Atrios post. (Warning: original linked article includes a disturbing image.)

To be fair, Kevin Drum also didn’t like it, but gives rather better reasons which he went on to justify. Neither did Henry Farrell, who is also very cogent.

Elsewhere Defiant Saddam appears in court with more lawyers than OJ and good grounds for a plea of insanity.

The images — cleared for broadcast by the US military — were the first of Saddam Hussein since his capture in December. They showed Iraq’s former president looking thin, haggard and with a trimmed, grey beard.

Why did the American military have to clear the images? I thought we’d handed over power and “like a thief in the night, Paul Bremer stole away from Baghdad, transferring what little authority we’ll let the Iraqis exercise to the Interim Government two days early.” Arkhangel, who was rather closer to the action than any adminisitrator or journalist.

These 513 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 6:58pm GMT Permanent link.

You Read It Here First »

I should stop reading all this Michael Moore nonsense, but just one more. This is shurely shome mishtake:

Leaving aside the fact that the bin Laden family, which runs one of Saudi Arabia’s biggest construction firms, has never been linked to terrorism …

Well, I Googled for the only one I can name, osama bin laden. No, no link to terrorism at all.

Half way down the page is link to an clip from the movie. I should know better than to trust MSNBC, but I clicked it. It paused for a very very long time before it told me my operating system was not supported. Good grief. Heh.

These 84 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 8:14pm GMT Permanent link.

Friday, 2 July 2004

Call Him Drunken »

This just came on the party shuffle on my iTunes and reminded me that the Dupe (as I believe his friends call him) thinks that ordinary soldiers should be taken out and shot.

I can’t speak for all ‘Stoppers’ but I certainly support our troops, and I consider Bush’s attempts to cut back US veterans’ benefits nothing short of disgusting.

Ira Hayes,
Ira Hayes

[CHORUS:]
Call him drunken Ira Hayes
He won’t answer anymore
Not the whiskey drinkin’ Indian
Nor the Marine that went to war

Gather round me people there’s a story I would tell
About a brave young Indian you should remember well
From the land of the Pima Indian
A proud and noble band
Who farmed the Phoenix valley in Arizona land

Down the ditches for a thousand years
The water grew Ira’s peoples’ crops
’Till the white man stole the water rights
And the sparklin’ water stopped

Now Ira’s folks were hungry
And their land grew crops of weeds
When war came, Ira volunteered
And forgot the white man’s greed

[CHORUS:]

There they battled up Iwo Jima’s hill,
Two hundred and fifty men
But only twenty-seven lived to walk back down again

And when the fight was over
And when Old Glory raised
Among the men who held it high
Was the Indian, Ira Hayes

[CHORUS:]

Ira returned a hero
Celebrated through the land
He was wined and speeched and honored; Everybody shook his hand

But he was just a Pima Indian
No water, no crops, no chance
At home nobody cared what Ira’d done
And when did the Indians dance

[CHORUS:]

Then Ira started drinkin’ hard;
Jail was often his home
They’d let him raise the flag and lower it
like you’d throw a dog a bone!

He died drunk one mornin’
Alone in the land he fought to save
Two inches of water in a lonely ditch
Was a grave for Ira Hayes

[CHORUS:]

Yeah, call him drunken Ira Hayes
But his land is just as dry
And his ghost is lyin’ thirsty
In the ditch where Ira died

Johny Cash, but you knew that.

Hitchens is the man who said, regarding Michael Moore:

[T]his supposedly “antiwar” film is dedicated ruefully to all those killed there [in Afghanistan], as well as in Iraq.

Yes, as we all know everyone who goes to funerals is some kind of pussy and those who write songs or decidate movies to dead soldiers are some kind of traitors. Chris, why do you hate America? Chalabi has been so good to you. Iran beckons.

These 90 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 1:33am GMT Permanent link.

Mwah!! »

Today dear reader, I have joined the cosmopolitan elite. Norm asks because Nick Cohen asks “Why have luvvies fallen for Moore’s nonsense?”

So, whoop-de-doo! I’m a luvvie! And you thought I was just some bitter provincial pseudo-intellectual getting by on warmed-up Kingsley Amis with the odd dash of second-hand Foucault.

Do you think they’ll let me in at the Groucho if I wear trainers?

What do you mean, “No, not even if you show up in evening wear on the arm of Jennifer Garner"?

These 89 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 1:54am GMT Permanent link.

Random Acts Of Kindness »

Today’s Doonesbury is strangely touching.

B.D. gets a visit.

These 6 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 10:46am GMT Permanent link.

And There's Moore »

I didn’t know there was a campaign out against Fahrenheit 911, did you? I thought Hitch was his own drunk, and maybe he is, but through Long story, short pier, I’ve discovered Move America Forward, a jolly patriotic organisation and a “front … for the political public relations firm Russo Marsh and Rogers [RM+R], which has strong ties to the GOP.”

Its website

“encouraged readers to contact [movie theater] executives to ask them not to show Fahrenheit 9/11, saying: ‘…it is important for us to speak up loudly and tell the industry executives that we don’t want this misleading and grotesque movie being shown at our local cinema. We need these executives to be overwhelmed with letters, phone calls and FAXes … in addition to emails. Sending an email alone is not enough — since in some cases an aide can easily click DELETE.’”

(I just adore their use of upper case: fax is not an acronym. Perhaps when the re-election campaign gets under way, they will come up with a snappy title, like CREEP [Campaign for Re-Election of the President]. Showing my age there, I fear.)

On their website, RM+R boast that “when it comes to winning elections, few firms can match the success of Russo Marsh + Rogers, Inc. …”

Thank god they’re out suppressing the vile film. Just think how many misguided luvvies would be flocking to the box office if they weren’t.

These 132 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 11:18am GMT Permanent link.

Quote Of The Day »

Found through Kevin Drum:

Mr. Moore’s greatest strength is a real empathy with working-class Americans that most journalists lack. Having stripped away Mr. Bush’s common-man mask, he uses his film to make the case, in a way statistics never could, that Mr. Bush’s policies favor a narrow elite at the expense of less fortunate Americans — sometimes, indeed, at the cost of their lives.

Paul Krugman — who knows the case that statistics make.

These 14 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 12:40pm GMT Permanent link.

A Meme Spreads »

Will’s Wayne Rooney/Shrek meme spreads to the BBC.

These 8 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 1:01pm GMT Permanent link.

Non-Virtual Stoicism »

Yesterday the Torygraph reported on Captive Marines happy to be back in hot water.

No explanation for the incident yet, but the men maintain their innocence.

British officers were more forthcoming about the Iranians’ behaviour. “They were clearly in Iraqi waters. If they had been any nearer Iraq they would have been on dry land,” said one officer.

I’m happy to believe that it was a show of strength by Iran, probably mostly for internal audiences. But who can fathom the motives of the friends of Ahmad Chalabi?

Cpl Monan said that, since his return, the unit had been the butt of British forces humour. They have been sent a map from one army unit helpfully marked “Iraq — Good; Iran — Bad” and a tastefully adapted version of the Rod Stewart hit Sailing.

There’s nothing more reassuring than British stoicism.

We shouldn’t be there of course, but the people we have there are the best in the world. Unlike the politicians who sent them.

These 87 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 1:16pm GMT Permanent link.

Coalition Of The Shrilling »

I think you should watch Oxblog very carefully over the next few days, because Josh is going to have a time explaining the thinking behind the new Bush ad.

These 29 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 1:32pm GMT Permanent link.

When A New World »

… to seek out new life, and new civilisations, to boldly go…

Gene Roddenberry, proudly splitting infinitives since 1966

This better not be a hoax. The BBC is reporting that Hubble has catalogued over 100 new planets. (NB this story is not on The Extrasolar Planets Encyclopaedia or the Hubble site. Even Slashdot has had to stick with the BBC as the sole source of this.)

The discovery will lend support to the idea that almost every sunlike star in our galaxy, and probably the Universe, is accompanied by planets.

This is an odd idea: most stars haven’t shown us their planets. There are two explanations for this. Both depend on the gravitational attraction exerted on the parent star by orbiting planets. Stars with very massive planets display a wobble, so reason 1 is that stars whose planets orbit at 90 degrees to us are going to be more readily spotted than those whose orbit in the same plane as Earth; reason 2 depends on the mass of those planets and how close they are to the star. Most of the ones recorded so far seem to be very close in: making their solar systems very unlike ours.

In most sources, the mass of Jupiter has been found to be approximately 1.9 x 10²⁷ kg, or is equivalent to approximately 318 Earth masses. Although this is 318 times the mass of Earth, the gravity of Jupiter is only 254% of the gravity on Earth. The reason for this is the fact that gravitational force of a planet exerts upon an object at the planet’s surface is proportional to its mass and to the inverse of its radius squared and Jupiter is a large planet.

Mass of Jupiter. I remember two things from my space geek teenage years. One is Carl Sagan’s speculation about the constitution of other solar systems.

In another chapter, Sagan speculates on the likelihood that other planetary systems contain worlds that support life. He includes an illustration depicting five “model solar systems” created by a computer simulation designed by Stephen Dole …

Scientific American (original contains non-working link to illustration). The other was speculation that Jupiter was a “star that failed.” (The Extra-solar Planets Catalog “includes only (with a few exceptions) objects lighter than 13 M_Jup (no deuterium burning) orbiting stars.") While we don’t know the mass of all the non-planetary stuff in the solar system, 13 Jupiter masses sounds like a lot more than orbits our sun.

If I understand this correctly, if every extra-solar system were identical to ours, we wouldn’t have seen any of them yet, and non-observation does not constitute a disproof. But we have seen some systems, and now we seem to be arguing that these may be anomalous and ours may yet be the norm. I sympathise with this, but I think it’s dodgy reasoning.

I think “are we alone in the universe?” is a profound philosophical question (but then I’m not greatly interested in moral reasoning). The idea of other worlds has bothered serious thinkers since the early Greeks, Voltaire’s Micromegas being the one that sticks out in my memory.

I’m not a US taxpayer, so this isn’t my business, but the U.S. presidential commission which “says the government should shift many of its space tasks to private industry so the government can focus on human space exploration” has got everything backwards. There is nothing on Mars, what’s the point of sending people there? Colin Pillinger remains my top write-in candidate for Prospect’s top intellectuals. (If private industry wants to exploit space by all means let it. (And I mean make a real profit, not a privatised siphon for government money.) But the science is too valuable (and anyway is confined to universities which don’t have millions, still less billions, to squander on research projects) to miss. Manned space exploration is too risky — even without the dangers of computers going nuts or acid-blooded alien killers — and space is too big. We can’t get anywhere in a realistic time.

Space is big — really big — you just won’t believe how vastly, hugely mind-bogglingly big it is. You may think it’s a long way down the road to the chemist, but that’s just peanuts to space.

Douglas Adams, but you knew that.

Why should the taxpayer fund a project which reminds even me of the scene in ‘Babe’ where the farm animals watch a firework display and go “Ooooh, …. Ahhhh…."? Because since the Enlightenment, personal wealth, comfort, safety, likelihood of children reaching maturity, health, in short every index of the requirements for a good life have rocketed. When all the prejudiced nutcases call the West ‘civilised’ in comparison to the Middle East, what they mean is that we had Newton and Galileo. Science, IMO, depends on serendipity (actually this is my approach to everything: blogging, photography, programming, writing, dating): do a lot of it, and amazing things happen. We need more Hubbles.

And if you haven’t already, read Steven Weinberg’s Dreams of a Final Theory.

These 637 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 10:55pm GMT Permanent link.

Tinfoil Tom »

When even (admittedly sensible, libertarian, and scientific) Labour supporter Damian weighs in on Tom Watson, I feel a little less bad about comparing the voices Tom gets to Paul Dacre.

But Lenin springs up in Tom Watson’s comments

Tom, that is utterly pathetic. I am no fan of the Lib Dems, but perhaps one good reason why crack heads and junkies shouldn’t go to jail is because THEY’RE NOT CRIMINALS. They’re sick. Sick people don’t get better in jail. If some of them are guilty of crimes, then perhaps the answer is to try them for the crimes they are guilty of rather than for the drug they’re addicted to.

You sound like an embittered acolyte of Lord Tebbit, not a Labour MP.

As ‘tw’ says earlier:

Currently it is an offence to possess a class ‘A’ drug like heroin or crack.

So, legally, they are criminals, but Tom ‘tw’ Watson still sounds “like an embittered acolyte of Lord Tebbit, not a Labour MP” to me. He does, however, sound utterly New Labour which is why I won’t vote for them next time. If you live in Birmingham and have the opportunity to take any photos of our Tom looking even slightly Hitchensed please send them to me. I’ll be happy to put them up.

These 115 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 11:59pm GMT Permanent link.

Saturday, 3 July 2004

Jaw Meets Floor »

Brad deLong compares two “Washington Post’s two-faced Jim Hoagland” pieces October 20, 2002 (green) and February 1, 2004 (blue).

Their work is only one part of a monumental record of failure on Iraq by the CIA, which has at different moments sought to understand, support, co-opt and then overthrow Hussein. The agency succeeded in none. Considering the extent of that failure, it is no surprise that Bush has until now relied little on the Langley agency for his information on Iraq. There is simply no way to reconcile what the CIA has said on the record and in leaks with the positions Bush has taken on Iraq.

So Bush didn’t listen to the CIA when he proposed the invasion of Iraq. (This was when the invasion looked good.)

The truth in Machiavellian terms is worse: Bush and Blair accepted and actually believed the flawed intelligence that their spy bosses and senior aides provided, and then inflated it in their public speeches. Credulity, not chicanery, would be the plea, your honor.

So Bush did listen to the CIA (who are now credited with giving exactly the opposite advice attributed to them in 2002), and it’s their fault. It’s their fault too that the credulous Bush and the naive Blair then “inflated [intelligence] in their public speeches.”

Anywhere else, and this is called lying. And how many speeches concentrated on Saddam’s tortures?

If yet another investigation of the CIA is needed, it must be broad and not limited to weapons of mass destruction. Why did the agency fail to predict before the war the deadly insurgency that American troops now face? That will lead to examination of the fruitless “decapitation” strategy the agency pursued in Iraq for 15 years, to the detriment of other, more promising approaches.

I’d have gladly supported a “decapitation” strategy: Saddam was [is?] an evil bastard, and I wouldn’t have lost sleep if he’d been assassinated. He gave grounds when he tried a strike at Bush senior. But “Why did the agency fail to predict before the war the deadly insurgency that American troops now face?” I’m not certain that they did fail to predict it: Hoagland’s 2002 article castigates them constantly for pessimism. I even predicted it myself:

Realistically, we can’t withdraw. The consequences would win us no friends and make us look weak. But staying in looks like giving us Ulster with suicide bombers.

(But I note that I also said the paragraph immediately above “One scenario looks more likely now: we can repeat Gulf War I. We calculate that regime change isn’t worth the cost, assume that we’ve weakened Saddam enough, impose sanctions, and pull out.” I’ve been known to change my mind mid-sentence, but there’s no excuse for not editing a post before publishing it if you revise your opinion. Mind you, I read another old post today, and I have no idea what I meant.)

Will internal contradictions bring about the collapse of Jim Hoagland?

These 270 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 12:52pm GMT Permanent link.

Sunday, 4 July 2004

Spoiler Alert »

Damian seems to have read my mind. (And please read him first.)

The New Yorker does contain some fine articles, so it’s a shame that its pernickety style book makes everything read as if it has been worked over by a particularly fusspotty pedant. The article attacking Lynne Truss’s Eats, Shoots & Leaves is typical, abusing her for writing “the striking Bolshevik printers of St Petersburg who, in 1905, demanded to be paid the same rate for punctuation marks as for letters …” There should, we are told, be a comma after “St Petersburg” because as it stands the strikers are being distinguished from other St Petersburg printers who did not go on strike. (The same would, technically, apply to “children who like spinach” and “children, who like spinach”. ) So in New Yorker style, Ms Truss’s prose would read: “… St Petersburg, who, in 1905, demanded …” which may be correct but is of course harder to read and understand, like so much in that great monument to nit-picking.

This from a newspaper whose subs meddled with an otherwise fine article commemorating Anthony Buckeridge (see Harry Brighouse on Crooked Timber for the correct spelling of ‘Darbishire.’) And speaking of commas, Mark Lawson (who can still be excellent on all corners of the Beeb) has a too-typically vapid article (and I’m a blogger: I know all about writing about nothing) on Nicholson Baker. A rather better piece is by Andrew Gumbel.

Baker wrote the excellent Room Temperature (though most readers consider it poorer than his first; I’m in the minority here), which is basically about a man bottle-feeding a six-month-old baby. (Yes, that is the whole plot.) He considers various things. Inspired by the milk, he ponders the disappearance of suburban deliveries, and he compares the child in his arms to a comma. (The ‘Martian’ school of poetry, which was mostly Craig Raine anyway, died out when its conceits were superseded in prose by this book and the opening chapter of Martin Amis’s “Other People.") Baker has a lot to say about commas. (I still have a hard time with them.)

Baker isn’t Jeffrey Archer. He’s not ever going to be a popular novelist. There’s a good Nicholson Baker Fan Page whose author is the eponymous blogger of J-Walk blog and who received hate mail on account of Baker’s unpublished new novel. I’ve read quite a bit of Baker and if he and his publisher say the book is about two men in a hotel room talking, that’s what it’s about. People don’t do things in his novels.

I think it’s a valid opinion to object to a book about the assassination of the President, but hate mail is no answer, and certainly not when it’s sent to the owner of a web page on the author’s previous works.

I found J-Walk through smart or happy which I found through Liz Ditz who was linked by Steven den Beste who is unfairly maligned thus:

Can’t say that I’m surprised that it’s Den Beste who’s responsible for this particular turd in the arena of public discourse.

by Henry Farrell who considers the post (at a time when he couldn’t have read it: it’s not just the rabid right who condemn what they know nothing of) “offensive behaviour” on the strength of this petulant post which frets about the damage done, when den Beste was gentlemanly enough not to name names or even institutions (if I thought a researcher was as sub-standard as SdB does, I’d have outed the university). Since no-one was identified, I’m at a loss to understand Laura’s whiney comments in the CT post linked above

Blogging isn’t always a conversation amongst equals. Some have much louder voices, because of their traffic and loyal linkers. Smaller bloggers are in danger of getting gangbanged by the loyal linkers. And some, like my blogless co-author, have no voice whatsoever. She has no outlet to restore her credibility.

I don’t see how anyone’s credibility was injured. It’s not SdB’s fault that the co-author doesn’t have a blog. What’s he supposed to do? Play his invisible violin? I know I’m playing mine.

These 463 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 12:40pm GMT Permanent link.

Voyage Of Discovery »

You and me baby ain’t nothin’ but mammals
So let’s do it like they do on the discovery channel

The Bloodhound Gang

Apparently, U.S. Postal are to abandon sponsorship of Le Tour. (It’s hard to see what a state near-monopoly is doing supporting a foreign event. They’d do better working to get over the negative image of Cliff in ‘Cheers’ and Newman in ‘Seinfeld.’) Lance Armstrong’s team will be sponsored by the Discovery Channel in 2005, when, in addition to the Tour of Georgia, there will also be Tours of Texas and California. Or so they say on Eurosport.

I was in Texas during part of the 2001 Tour de France, but I didn’t notice much interest outside a couple of downtown bars with “Go Lance” placards. I don’t expect that to change, but I could be wrong.

These 116 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 2:59pm GMT Permanent link.

Comment Of The Year »

Just now on BBC1

— The referee has been very even-handed, Mark

— Yes, you couldn’t accuse him of being a homer.

— Well, I’m sure a lot has been written about Greek History and Civilisation, but for now we’ll stick to the football.

And what will Alan Hansen say when he can’t get away with “Verry poor defending."?

These 19 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 9:41pm GMT Permanent link.

Hypocrisy »

OK. Damian reads me, so I have to be careful what I say. Nick (who, for Damian’s edification, started the whole ‘Backword Dave’ thing; until then, I was merely another Dave among the the millions) links to my slagging off of Tom Watson where I said: Some ugly blogger.

If you live in Birmingham and have the opportunity to take any photos of our Tom looking even slightly Hitchensed please send them to me. I’ll be happy to put them up.

And Damian has started linking to Nick. Moreover, I see from my referrers that someone came to this site from Technorati’s links to Tom Watson and moved on, looking for photos of me. Former student of Norm.

So, in the interests of full disclosure, here is a picture of me (taken on 19 July 2004) which previously appeared on the interwebthing here:

It was my camera, but I didn’t take the picture, obviously. And here, with far less excuse, but if Norm can brag about his Political concepts students, Dai here may be less celebrated than Liam, but he makes up in pulchritude what I lack. And, as he may yet be the brother-in-law of the next leader of the Lib Dems, don’ expect me to join in the negative campaigning chorus.

These 176 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 11:32pm GMT Permanent link.

Monday, 5 July 2004

Fragile Beauty »

Apropos of nothing at all really, I found this rather beautiful Seattle times editorial. I’m not sure the final paragraphs make sense.

Defying the age of celebrity, and resisting the lucrative market for antiquities, the property owner kept mum about his treasure for decades. He was a respectful and silent steward for a story that needed to unfold slowly.

It seems to me that the story didn’t unfold at all, but that is to nit-pick.

The link to the Cassini-Huygens images is the best waste of time you’ll discover today.

These 53 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 12:34pm GMT Permanent link.

Illegal For A Very Good Reason »

I don’t share Tom Watson’s views on “crack heads and junkies,” but I am in favour of strict controls of certain drugs.

13H 42 Steve Vermaut’s Funeral This Morning Steve Vermaut raced the Tour de France with the Lotto team in 2001 (finishing 36th overall). He suffered a heart attack on 13 June and after several weeks in an artificial coma, he lost his life on Wednesday. Vermaut’s funeral was held early today.

From today’s Le Tour en direct which doesn’t seem to be archived; but it is here — with the opinion “with Stive Vermaut it was obviously congenital” (spelling in original). What the hell is a man who can’t have been over 30 (he seems to have been 28), and who was fit enough to finish 36th in the Tour three years ago doing dying of a heart attack?

Eurosport has been following the exertion of two riders per day using Polar heart rate monitors. On the prologue someone kept his heart rate up around 200 bpm. (The rule-of-thumb for maximum rate is 220 - age, so that’s very high.) When I was fitter than I am now, and when I wore a monitor, a comfortably fast 9 - 10 miler would be in the mid-140s, I ran most of the Berlin Marathon at 155, and a cross-country race I had to lie down to recover from finished at 172 (probably a couple of bpm lower than my max).

Intensity of effort is usually calculated by subtracting resting HR from the maximum, and resting HR from present rate and diving the second by the first. A rider with a resting HR in the mid-30s (not unusual; Steve Ovett’s was 36, Miguel Indurain’s was famously 28, mine bottomed out around 42) might have a max of 190, giving him a range of 190 - 35 = 155. If his heart is pumping blood at 160 (which is what they were sustaining yesterday) that’s 160 - 35 or 125 over resting rate and 125/155 = 81%. That’s very tough for five hours, and requires a very healthy heart.

At the start of the race, every rider has to have a medical. I may be speaking ill of the dead, but ‘congenital’ my arse.

These 322 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 1:43pm GMT Permanent link.

Tuesday, 6 July 2004

New Roll On The Blog »

The fat man has a blog! If he makes regular entries (which I doubt), he’ll go on the blogroll.

Drove around to a few theaters tonight while in NYC … Every show sold out, people sitting in the aisles. I have never seen that in a regular movie theater before. I love to stand in the back and watch people watch the movie. …

We broke the $60 million mark tonight at the box office. I really can’t fathom this. More theaters are being added next week.

Yes, it’s true, I’m on the cover of Time magazine this week. And Entertainment Weekly. Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue is next!!

Would Hitch joke about a future booking on Modern Drunkard? I think not.

Well, it’s late. Gotta get up to see who the next veep is. 62% of the country is female, black or hispanic. What are the chances? Ok, how bout in my lifetime? Before Haley’s Comet returns?

With an attitude like that, no wonder they hate him.

I fully expect to disagree with at least half the film, but that’s like hypnotised compliance for me.

And if you judge a man by his enemies, Moore is the man of the year. Who knew there were so many luvvies around? But the luvvies I’ve known are all a lot nicer and more decent than the bellicose wingnuts I’ve met.

These 103 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 3:27pm GMT Permanent link.

Either/Or »

Found on Norm though I guessed (correctly) that Chris Brooke would also have had a shot, the Teachout Cultural Concurrence Index. Explanation (NB further up the same page).

Fred Astaire or Gene Kelly? Gene Kelly, mostly for “Singin’ in the Rain”, directing as well, and being the better looking.
The Great Gatsby or The Sun Also Rises? I’ve never got the Great Gatsby, so the Hemmingway.
Count Basie or Duke Ellington? No real opinion.
Cats or dogs? Cats by a long way, but I like Labradors.
Matisse or Picasso? Probably Picasso.
Yeats or Eliot? Not easy but Eliot.
Buster Keaton or Charlie Chaplin? I think Chaplin, more ambitious.
Flannery O’Connor or John Updike? Not sure. I find Updike very good, but “too rich”, like you’re being asked to appreciate every verb.
To Have and Have Not or Casablanca? Casablanca.
Jackson Pollock or Willem de Kooning? Pollock, not so familiar with de Kooning.
The Who or the Stones? Has to be the Who.
Philip Larkin or Sylvia Plath? Larkin. I love Larkin; don’t really care for Plath.
Trollope or Dickens? I haven’t yet read Trollope (I intend to) but not so fond of Dickens. Finally having discovered this interweb thing where everybody else has read science fiction, I feel less guilty about the omission.
Billie Holiday or Ella Fitzgerald? I’ve got a lot of Holiday and no Fitzgerald, but that may be another lacuna.
Dostoyevsky or Tolstoy? Dostoyevksy when I was younger, less sure now. Can I say Chekov?
The Moviegoer or The End of the Affair? Don’t know either, but if the second is Graham Greene, he’s over-rated.
George Balanchine or Martha Graham? Who?
Hot dogs or hamburgers? I don’t eat meat, but more generally it depends. When I first visited Chicago, someone there told me, “In New York a hot dog is just a hot dog, in Chicago it’s like a garden.” And they do like their salads. McDonald’s is so unrepresentative of American cuisine.
Letterman or Leno? No opinion.
Wilco or Cat Power? Never heard of either.
Verdi or Wagner? Wagner, I think.
Grace Kelly or Marilyn Monroe? Kelly, mostly because of Hitchcock.
Bill Monroe or Johnny Cash? No opinion. I’ve never heard of Monroe.
Kingsley or Martin Amis? Kingsley. Martin’s not a bad essayist and journalist.
Robert Mitchum or Marlon Brando? I think this isn’t an aesthetic choice, it a choice of criteria. Brando trod water a lot, so I might go for Mitchum.
Mark Morris or Twyla Tharp? No opinion. I get the same kick out of ballet that I get when I don’t like a well-received book or film: it reminds me that despite all my good intentions, some things are still alien to me.
Vermeer or Rembrandt? Rembrandt.
Tchaikovsky or Chopin? Probably Tchaikovsky.
Red wine or white? Red. Would anyone say white?
Noel Coward or Oscar Wilde? Wilde has the capacity to move me to tears. I’m less familiar with Coward, but I’ve never found him so affecting.
Grosse Pointe Blank or High Fidelity? Haven’t seen either.
Shostakovich or Prokofiev? Probably Prokofiev, but I wouldn’t go to a concert if either had more than one piece in the programme.
Mikhail Baryshnikov or Rudolf Nureyev? Before my time.
Constable or Turner? Turner.
The Searchers or Rio Bravo? Probably ‘The Searchers’ but not seen either for a long time.
Comedy or tragedy? Comedy, unless it’s Shakespeare.
Fall or spring? Probably Autumn.
Manet or Monet? Not sure, I’ve always confused them.
The Sopranos or The Simpsons? First series of the Sopranos was excellent, but my enthusiasm dwindled with the second. OTOH, I’ve never seen a Simpson’s episode I haven’t liked.
Rodgers and Hart or Gershwin and Gershwin? Pass.
Joseph Conrad or Henry James? Too close. I think James is funnier, but probably Conrad.
Sunset or sunrise? Depends where and who with.
Johnny Mercer or Cole Porter? Pass again.
Mac or PC? Macs, used both, prefer Macs.
New York or Los Angeles? I wouldn’t go back to LA unless I were being paid. I like New York, not sure I could live there.
Partisan Review or Horizon? No idea.
Stax or Motown? More familiar with Motown.
Van Gogh or Gauguin? Gauguin, far better on people, and more insightful.
Steely Dan or Elvis Costello? How is this a choice? Where’s the similarity? Costello.
Reading a blog or reading a magazine? Blog.
John Gielgud or Laurence Olivier? I think Larry.
Only the Lonely or Songs for Swingin’ Lovers? Frank.
Chinatown or Bonnie and Clyde? Chinatown, I found the latter repulsive.
Ghost World or Election? Ghost World has a terrific performance by Steve Buscemi, but Election resonates.
Minimalism or conceptual art? Minimalism, conceptual art largely sucks.
Daffy Duck or Bugs Bunny? Bugs.
Modernism or postmodernism? Modernism, but these are critics terms, they don’t mean the same things to different people.
Batman or Spider-Man? Who cares?
Emmylou Harris or Lucinda Williams? Pass.
Johnson or Boswell? I’d rather read Boswell, but I’d rather have known Johnson.
Jane Austen or Virginia Woolf? Austen. I tried reading Woolf after “The Hours”. Didn’t get out of chapter 1. I can’t believe she even found a publisher.
The Honeymooners or The Dick Van Dyke Show? Apart from Gore Vidal’s “Penis van Lesbian” joke I know nothing of either.
An Eames chair or a Noguchi table? A what or a what?
Out of the Past or Double Indemnity? Not seen the former.
The Marriage of Figaro or Don Giovanni? I’ve seen one very good production of Don Giovanni, so feel I ought to go for that.
Blue or green? Well when this site was blue, I’d have said blue, but now it’s green …
A Midsummer Night’s Dream or As You Like It? Possibly the Dream.
Ballet or opera? Opera.
Film or live theater? Film, but I like some theatre.
Acoustic or electric? Depends on what’s being played.
North by Northwest or Vertigo? Close but North by Northwest.
Sargent or Whistler? Not familiar enough with either to judge.
V.S. Naipaul or Milan Kundera? Never read Naipal.
The Music Man or Oklahoma? Oklahoma!
Sushi, yes or no? No.
The New Yorker under Ross or Shawn? I have no idea.
Tennessee Williams or Edward Albee? Albee. I’d rather see Burton and Taylor in “Whos’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf” than Brando in “Streetcar."
The Portrait of a Lady or The Wings of the Dove? Not sure I’ve read either, but I have a feeling that James went off at the end.
Paul Taylor or Merce Cunningham? Who?
Frank Lloyd Wright or Mies van der Rohe? I was impressed by a van der Rohe tower block in north Chicago two years ago. I haven’t see any Wright close up.
Diana Krall or Norah Jones? Not heard either.
Watercolor or pastel? Watercolour.
Bus or subway? Depends on the city. But I’m not fond of buses.
Stravinsky or Schoenberg? Not keen on either.
Crunchy or smooth peanut butter? I suspect this question is about inferior PB with sugar. Eugh! Crunchy.
Willa Cather or Theodore Dreiser? Huh?
Schubert or Mozart? Mozart.
The Fifties or the Twenties? This is presumably in the States, so it’s the Prohibition against Eisenhower. Both pretty awful.
Huckleberry Finn or Moby-Dick? Not read Huck Finn, tried Moby Dick three times but always get caught when he insists a whale is a fish. It shouldn’t matter, but it does.
Thomas Mann or James Joyce? I think I’ll go for Mann.
Lester Young or Coleman Hawkins? Too ignorant of both.
Emily Dickinson or Walt Whitman? Whitman.
Abraham Lincoln or Winston Churchill? Churchill, lots to admire.
Liz Phair or Aimee Mann? Who?
Italian or French cooking? Italian.
Bach on piano or harpsichord? Piano I think.
Anchovies, yes or no? No.
Short novels or long ones? As long as they’re not like the novel in the Hancock sketch where the last page is missing, I don’t care.
Swing or bebop? Swing.
"The Last Judgment” or “The Last Supper"? Not seen the former. Is “The Last Supper” the one where Cameron Diaz’s housemates kill all the wingnuts (including Jason “George Costanza” Alexander)?

In all cases, the first option is Terry Teachout’s preference. I think I flunked making a choice.

These 1355 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 6:49pm GMT Permanent link.

Money Quote »

Norm found through Anthony (but by email, not on his blog) this terrific New Scientist piece:

On the West Bank, the Israeli and Palestinian water managers cooperate every day over practical management of water, even while they disagree about how it is shared out. …

We have to plan water use together.

It’s a lot like that Eastern philosophy parable about the guy who dies and goes to heaven and asks if he can see hell first and hell is this very long table piled with food and six-foot chopsticks and everyone is starving, and when he’s seen enough, he rises to heaven and it’s this very long table piled with food and six-foot chopsticks and everyone is happy and well-fed.

You know, every time I read someone like Melanie Phillips spouting how crazy and degenerate the Palestinians are, I have to forcibly suppress the thought “if you think Israel is so great, why don’t you live there?” I’m not claiming that Yasser Arafat is the best leader of Palestine. I think the closest thing to a “solution” is the realisation that it’s not a zero-sum game and they “have to plan [everything] together.”

Western interference (or Arab interference) is like neighbours crowding round a domestic argument and taking sides. It’s not who’s right. It’s how they can rub along.

Despite rumours to the contrary, this problem is soluable.

These 193 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 10:04pm GMT Permanent link.

The Wrong Comrade »

I could have called this “Political Correctness” (too Daily Mail) or “Colonial irrigation” (too self-indulgent), but Norm quotes the Dupe thus: (I doubt this will be up forever; I’ll do my best to find a permanent link)

Christopher Hitchens: There’s denial about that — by the way, stoning isn’t in the Koran. What is so wonderful about this confrontation, it means the United States has to be on the side of secularism and realize only the atheists are our real friends. It’s high time we did realize that. In Iraq, the —

Tucker Carlson: Not the agnostics?

Christopher Hitchens: The atheists — the agnostics are wavering, but the communists are brilliant. One way to prove by the way the bad faith of the American left, it doesn’t care what its comrades think.

Deroy Murdock: A lot of my libertarian friends say, let’s have free trade, but as far as intervention, don’t do anything unless attacked. On paper, that’s wonderful. But the Bin Laden followers are interested in seeing you, me, Christopher dead. We have to face that reality.

Norm only quoted this sentence:

One way to prove by the way the bad faith of the American left, it doesn’t care what its comrades think.

I’ve read early Hitchens, and he is subtle, but lord knows what he means by this. A little contact with the real world and he’d know that that RMT train drivers, for instance, don’t care what other unions think.

I don’t care what my comrades elsewhere think. I prefer to retire, make up my own damn mind and see who has the intelligence to agree with me.

I run this particular Hitchens line around my brain the way you test with your tongue a particulary invasive dental treatment. And I think he’s saying “you better take my line on this.”

These 142 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 11:33pm GMT Permanent link.

Wednesday, 7 July 2004

Teachout Score »

I passed on more questions than Chris Bertram but fewer than Jamie. Anyway, given that I chose column A 24 times out of 77 answers, I’ve got a TCCI of 31%. Is this a record? Now what do I do with it?

These 44 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 7:41am GMT Permanent link.

First Sentences »

Chris Brooke posts on Great First Sentences Of Our Time which saved me searching the Guardian site for "I realised I was an alcoholic the day I mounted Brian Sewell." (I saw it in the paper shop this morning.) To his credit, Sewell said, “If I was ever unsure I’m a homosexual, I’m not now.”

The Telegraph has a deadly first paragraph on the Tory leader.

Michael Howard has a new campaign strategy. He wants everyone to know that he has a very attractive wife.

Andrew Sparrow, political correspondent is unimpressed by the Howards joint appearance on “This morning.”

[Presenter Fern] Britton gushed: “We’re not used to having a British politician with a beautiful and very supportive person by your side. We’re used to this in American politics, but this is a first for us.” The comment seemed particularly harsh on Cherie Blair (not to mention Norma Major, Ffion Hague and Betsy Duncan Smith).

Middle-aged curmugeon John is equally dismissive of Steve Wright’s interview with the Prime Minister.

Autumn election anyone?

These 97 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 10:34am GMT Permanent link.

Incredulous »

“Incredulous, Jeeves”
“I believe you mean ‘incredible,’ sir.”

Sully quotes Hitchens approvingly:

[Michael Moore] says that the whole of American foreign policy is determined by the Saudi Arabian royal family. Now, the Bush administration has been to war with two of Saudi Arabia’s friends. The Taliban, who they helped to impose in Afghanistan, and the government of Saddam Hussein, which they regarded as their buffer state against the Shia. The actual history is exactly the opposite of what Moore’s paranoid suggestions are.

I don’t think he says the whole of American foreign policy. But you have to whistle with admiration at the chutzpah of the refutation. The Taliban and Saddam were “Saudi Arabia’s friends.” They were also America’s, or were Reagan’s invitations to the White House for the guerillas in Afghanistan just another symptom of senility? And Donald Rumsfeld’s visits to Saddam, they didn’t count as friendship at all. So, since both states turn out to be our friends as well, we couldn’t possibly have gone to war with them! It’s all been a bad dream.

Sully goes on to say:

But subjectively, [Michael Moore] simply loathes American market capitalism more than Islamist fundamentalism.

Which is why he makes films, possibly market capitalism at its rawest, as opposed to begging.

This mindset is structural. It was the same in “Roger and Me.”

I have no idea what this means. Are midsets structural? Are there non-structural mindsets? God alone knows. I saw “Roger and Me” when it came out, there weren’t any Islamic fundamentalists in it.

And like all ideologies, it is resistant to any new data.

Ah, I get you now.

So the threat of Jihadist terrorists using weapons of mass destruction is unimportant to Moore compared with outsourcing or the nefarious Bushes or evil corporate America.

Well, there may not be any WMD (but that might be ‘new data’ to Sully), but, as Sully himself says

Nothing changed on September 11 for Moore. He has simply used that tragedy to pursue his ancient objectives. And they are a terrible, cynical distraction from the war on terror. In other words, Moore is guilty of the fundamental charge he has leveled against this president.

My emphasis. Now, if Moore doesn’t believe in the ‘war on terror’ how can he have levelled the charge of distraction from said war against the president?

Things didn’t change on 11/9/2001, they changed on October 2000 when:

two attackers on a small boat carrying up to 500lb (225 kg) of high explosives rammed into the USS Cole as it was refuelling in Aden port.

Seventeen American sailors were killed, and at least 40 people were wounded.

I’m off to see F911 tonight. And I hope the forces of market capitalism make Moore very very rich indeed, whether I like the film or not, because, boy, does he upset these wankers.

These 250 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 12:14pm GMT Permanent link.

Prediction Of The Day »

The roads between Cambrai and Arras look wet, slippery, and nasty. These things seem to get worse as the day goes on. I still expect to see Lance in yellow and on the podium tonight.

I’m still sceptical that he can win though.

Ah, Eurosport seem to think I’m wrong. I think they prefer T-Mobile. Mind you, they’re only 7th at the first checkpoint.

These 64 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 2:54pm GMT Permanent link.

That Was Awesome »

Forgive me, but I’m going to do a bit of a Jim Henley here. It’s far more entertaining and funny than the sourpusses want you to think. Michael Moore clearly loves his country, in a patriotic way which is slightly embarrassing to those of us who are cultured enough to have learned to scorn such things.

To borrow from Jim, that-was-AWESOME!

I did discover one outright lie (or to be as kind and gentle as possible, an economy with the actualité):

Actually, I didn’t say the first thing ["a piece of crap"]. It’s not my style. But if pressed, I probably would have wanted to say that.

Which is very odd if you read the review.

Picked up from the Daily Howler.

These 96 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 11:52pm GMT Permanent link.

Thursday, 8 July 2004

An Alternative View »

While I may go through with the Jim Henley parallel and write six further posts on “Fahrenheit 9/11” here’s an email I got this morning.

Hope you all got back home OK, and that DL’s suit isn’t ruined! Shame you don’t keep an umbrella in your brief case along with all that fruit.

The trains weren’t running, and neither were the buses to Thornhill. I deliberated about joining you at the pub, but having faffed around for long enough, opted to jump into the first available taxi. This was driven by an Iraqi who fled Bagdad 20 years ago when a family member was killed by Saddam’s henchmen.

He had an interesting point of view which very much serves to negate Michael Moore’s thesis that the Iraq war was terrible as it was a business conspiracy. The taxi driver said that it was all about oil and it was right and proper that it should be, as a) the western economies will benefit b) the Iraqi people will benefit (as the yanks and others will pay a reasonable price for the oil whereas Saddam skimmed 98% of profits). So, put that in your pipe and smoke it!

As well as giving me his view he also discounted the taxi fare (first time that’s ever happened to me!)

Don’t say I don’t research both sides.

These 32 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 10:50am GMT Permanent link.

Aneurin Bevan »

Statue of Aneurin Bevan, Queen St, Cardiff.

Since Chris’s splendid Dead Socialist Watch reminded me of the anniversary of Nye Bevan’s death, I’ve been meaning to put up a photo of his commemorative statue on Queen Street, Cardiff (outside, for those of you with sharp eyesight, the Ann Summers shop; right of picture).

Compressing the picture has made the legend unreadable, but it says, “Aneurin Bevan/1897 - 1960/Founder of the National Health Service”.

These 67 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 3:52pm GMT Permanent link.

An Ella Fan »

Since Norm posts about Ella and Billie, here’s a dissenting opinion from Jo Fenn (Olympic 800m hopeful and singer-songwriter):

I would love to be Ella Fitzgerald — the most soulful voice I’ve ever heard.

Also on the sports pages of today’s Torygraph are two pieces on 100m Commonwealth and World Champion, Kim Collins, described as an unlikely hero and a late bloomer.

It’s a pretty desperate bid to enlist him to alter the unlikeliness of England’s Sporting Triumph (Norm also picked this up), but any subject of Her Majesty who kicks American arse is fine by me.

These 82 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 5:50pm GMT Permanent link.

These 82 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 5:50pm GMT Permanent link.

One Up »

Crooked Timber is one year old today. (Or yesterday, if you read this tomorrow, or even …)

And they’ve added me to their blogroll or ‘lumber room’ even! For which, thanks.

These 31 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 5:57pm GMT Permanent link.

Fahrenheit 9/11, Part 2 »

Writing follow-ups on “Fahrenheit 9/11” has been harder than I expected. Since most of the opinions against have concentrated on Moore’s alleged mendacity, it seems only fair that I compare my reading of the film with theirs. However, rereading what I consider rather histrionic bile, and, moreover, reading it carefully, is something I can put off for days.

I consider Dave Kopel and Christopher Hitchens the two who address the content of the movie in most detail. (And if you can think of a better example, please email me.)

I saw it in the UGC Cardiff on Orange Wednesday (so with two of the four of us being on Orange, it cost £9:90). Screen 6 was sold out, but that may have been for the reason above; certainly there were no adverts because the house lights stayed up while ushers shooed moviegoers to the end of rows to allow others to sit with least disturbance. We were right in the neck-cricking front row beside some skater-scruffy student-types, one of whom could well be a finalist in “World’s Most Annoying Laugh” championships — especially when coupled with his apparent precognition for anything resembling a joke, or any appearance of George W Bush on the screen (and there are a lot in the first section). I think DP, who sent the email I published earlier, was seriously considering violence. Whatever he thought, and he whispered various means of sabotaging the next salvo, I was persuaded not to laugh (except in conscious parody), which, as I’m an admirer of the James-Lange theory, may have spoiled the impact of the film a little.

Oh, we were sceptical. DP especially, but then he always is. We met in a pizza house where he produced a month-old copy of the Torygraph with a survey which “showed” that 42% of “vegetarians” ate red meat. (I’ve got used to this. By way of compensation, he’s been an excellent friend in a crisis, such as when my father died.)

I think DP’s first attack when we left the cinema was on Moore’s presentation of the “Coalition of the Willing” which included countries without any militia at all, but omitted the UK, Spain, and Australia, to name three.

OTOH, it’s a goddam movie folks! It’s not a PhD thesis. It doesn’t come with footnotes. If Moore was the only source you had on the Gulf War, well, IMO, he’s no worse than the Murdoch press or the Mail. Not good, but true of a lot of people, and not an argument for suspending the press (the editors, from lamposts, well, don’t tempt me). “Fahrenheit 9/11” is emotional (which is not, IMO, the antithesis of ‘logical’, but that’s an argument for another day), it’s polemical, it’s funny, and it’s a bit wild. All of these are good. It doesn’t stick to facts corroborated by 50 different sources; Moore sticks his opinionated neck out. But it’s very clear that this is one-sided; it still makes substantive allegations. There is more than one way to argue. Wit always wins over dessicated logic (not that there’s much of that in Moore’s hortatory opponents), and the blank, primate, dumbness of Bush is anger-rousing and funny.

It’s easily Moore’s best film. It couldn’t have been made here. I don’t know why not; I admire British TV, but just as they ruin sitcoms like “Dad’s Army” or “The Office”, so we just can’t do anything approaching the Coens, David Lynch or whoever. It’s more than just dentition. When I say it’s his best film, this may sound like an endorsement of Moore’s very limited appearances. In fact, he’s the best thing. Compare him to Nick Broomfield for instance, and you see how American sass compares to British etiquette (I can’t say politeness, Americans can be for more polite, both sincerely and sarcastically, than us). i could have done with more of Moore declaiming the patriot act from an ice-cream van loudspeaker.

He really rises to the occasion when, because only one Congressman has a child in Iraq, he tries to hand out recruitment leaflets to Congressmen. The first shown is the scarily-effusive model politician who greets Moore as if he won his seat by one vote and had identified MM as the swing constituent. Even he, as the News of the World has it, made his excuses and left (with a leaflet). The next politician was a colder fish. As Moore explained his mission, he wore the mask Leonard Nimoy used to don before telling William Shatner that he was “illogical, captain.”

More tomorrow, I have a birthday to go to.

These 765 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 7:23pm GMT Permanent link.

Jury's Prudence »

Before I go, one last important bloggable item. My MP has been called for jury duty and he will go ahead, after a deferral. The Torygraph approves.

Good for him. I’m still prepared to do all I can to ensure he has all the spare time he needs.

These 48 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 7:43pm GMT Permanent link.

Friday, 9 July 2004

The Other Quiz »

The ‘British’ version, set by Josephine.

Cats or Dogs? w333333333333333333e. I don’t know what that means, but that’s Gordon’s opinion. He very nearly posted a comment (which read ‘nnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnbn’) to Crooked Timber. If he ever succeeds, it’s dogs. Until then, the other thing.
Elizabeth Taylor or Richard Burton? Since Burton is dead, it’s far more likely that I’ll get married to Liz.
Royal Opera or ENO? Difficult, but RO.
Ancient or Medieval? Ancient. All went downhill when the Italians got mixed up in it.
Titian or Caravaggio? I pronounced ‘Titian’ like ‘Titan’ with an extra vowel until I saw Alan Bennett’s “Single Spies”, but Caravaggio, much darker, and a Derek Jarman film to boot.
Yeats or Eliot? Tom, if you’d read all Willie, including the mystic stuff, you’d understand. Mind you, I tried ‘Appearance and Reality’ because it’s name-checked in ‘The Wasteland’ and that’s hard to forgive.
Bruce Forsyth or Larry Grayson? Brucie, and I remember both.
George or Ringo? Ringo, may have been “not even the best drummer in the Beatles” according to John, but still the funny one.
To Have and Have Not or Casablanca? Casa. Been there. It’s not a bit like the movie.
Tracey Emin or Rachel Whiteread? Whiteread, but not by much.
The Who or the Stones? The Who.
Dylan Thomas or Ted Hughes? Hughes. I’m with Robert Graves who considered Thomas a phoney.
Robinson Crusoe or King Solomon’s Mines? Crusoe.
Fellini or Begnini? I know nothing of either. One day, I’ll get into Fellini.
Dostoyevsky or Tolstoy? Chekov. Probably the poor mad one over the rich mad one.
Oxford or Cambridge? Cardiff, duh. Cambridge: Wittgenstein, Newton, Hawking, Leavis, among others.
The sixties or the seventies? 60s.
Burger King or MacDonalds? Burn ‘em both down.
Jonathan Ross or Angus Deayton? I’ve never been embarrassed in the presence of Angus, but when “The Last Resort” (Ross’s first attempt at Letterman impersonation) has been on TV for a few weeks I was walking through Seven Dials or Covent Garden with this girl I knew from Edinburgh, and she spotted JR sitting on a bench, minding his own business. “It’s him!” She cried, pretty much in his face. “It’s him. It’s him!” Plus, Deayton is called ‘Angus.’
Peter Mandelson or Alastair Campbell? Close, because I’m sure it was actually Campbell who killed Clause 4, but I respect him. He’s bloody sharp too.
Verdi or Wagner? Wagner, with or without helicopters.
Duran Duran or Spandau Ballet? I’ve seen Spandau, but Duran for “Save a prayer."
Bill Monroe or Johnny Cash? Pass.
The Iliad or the Odyssey? Odyssey.
Hello or Heat? What are these?
London or Paris? Paris. I’ve spent 3 days in my entire life in Paris, and I got mugged — in a district called, if I recall, Stalingrad — I got away, but being surrounded by violent French louts is not pleasant. Never happened in the five or six years I lived in London. I also got offered free beer at the ‘Café Moustache’ by the moustache and leather-trousers wearing patrons. I passed. No one ever offered me free beer in London.
Moscow or California? Never been to Moscow, anyway, no fair comparison. San Fran yes, LA, no.
Athens or Rome? Now? has to be Rome despite earlier answer.
Red wine or white? Red.
Noel Coward or Oscar Wilde? Still Wilde.
Vanessa Redgrave or Judi Dench? Vanessa, certainly when she was younger.
Brown or Blair? Brown, duh.
British Museum or Natural History Museum? Dinosaurs! Even if, as Boris says, “… the Science Museum … has seen a 100 per cent increase in footfall, to the point where seeing the dinosaurs in half-term is like filing past Lenin …"
More museums: Louvre or Pergamon? Pass. Too long since I saw either.
Pubs or bars? Pubs.
Comedy or tragedy? Comedy.
Fall or spring? Spring, I’m not being Pollarded again.
Coffee or tea? Tea, I can’t really handle (decent) coffee. I drink lots of tea though. Milk in first, whatever Orwell says.
Jane Austen or Virginia Woolf? Austen, Woolf is unreadable.
Bull-fighters or gladiators? Well I suppose bull-fighter choose what they do (I’m sure Patrick of SIAW would argue that they’re trapped by bourgeois ideology) while gladiators were victims, but I’ve met a trainee bullfighter, so it has to be them.
Renaissance or Enlightenment? Enlightenment all the way.
Sunset or sunrise? Probably sunrise, if I still haven’t gone to bed.
Town or Country? I’ll say country, never really lived there, but want to now.
Mac or PC? Mac (OSX though)
Charles or Diana? Di, for the AIDS and landmine stuff. I like her a lot more now she’s dead as it happens.
Tuscany or Provence? Don’t know either.
Email or Telephone? Email (followed by text)
Fruit or Cake? Fruit
Football or Rugby? Footie, but not crazy about either
Dolphins or Tuna? To swim with? I’ll second the second most intelligent species on Earth.

And for HOTT (husband of the Tophet)’s extra questions:

Klingons or Clangers? The wooly whistlers.
Tarkovsky or Tarka the Otter? On a cold day, I’d always like to be a little otter.
The Clash or The Sex Pistols? The Clash, indeed.
Garcia Marquez or Vargas Llosa? Pass.
Red Sox or Yankees? Pass again.
Beer or Wine? Beer.
Virgil or Homer? Homer.
Bitter or (pale fizzy) lager? Bitter, for me, but I’ve spent the last two evenings in restaurants drinking Italian lager (Wed) and Stella with curry (Thurs). Not enough places understand beer.
Rousseau or Voltaire? JMA (Voltaire)
Kant or Hegel? Kant.
Plato or Aristotle? Plato, but I’m fairly ignorant of Aristotle.

No more. Ever.

These 933 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 10:37am GMT Permanent link.

Declining Standards In Education »

I refer not to whatever the Torygraph is sighing about in state schools today (I haven’t read that far yet), but to the appalling ignorance of this graduate of Magdalen College, Oxford.

Comment also from Brad DeLong, Oliver Willis, and The Poor Man.

It must get a bit grating to have someone from a country you’d thought you’d held a successful revolution against setting himself up to tell you how to run your nation. As Bread DeLong concedes, George W Bush has some pretty decent speech writers:

When we examine our Nation’s history, we discover these and countless other stories that inspire us. They are stories of the triumph of the human spirit, tragic stories of cruelty rooted in ignorance and bigotry, yet stories of everyday people rising above their circumstances and the prejudice of others to build lives of dignity.

This month, and throughout the year, let us celebrate and remember these stories, which reflect the history of African Americans and all Americans. We can all enjoy the works of writers like Paul Laurence Dunbar, James Weldon Johnson, Zora Neale Hurston, and Langston Hughes.

President George W. Bush Proclamation for National African American History Month. So it might surprise them and the President to read:

Now I know Kerry is a liberal, but does he really want to cite a man who wanted to abolish private property and loved Stalin?

Kerry’s crime? To use a line from Let America be America again by Langston Hughes. Note, if you will, the colour of the poet’s skin, and consider what the mainstream parties were doing for people like him. Then consider what Sullivan’s party (though surely he can’t vote? oh, duh, he’s not a black felon) is doing on his favourite issue, gay marriage. And then wonder if anything he says is consistent:

Sullivan has a large audience, which represents a pretty big amount of trust. If he violated that, by selling one story to the Advocate while painting a significantly different picture on his blog, then he will probably lose a big chunk of his audience, along with their trust, and deservedly so.

Comment on Michael J Totten: To Hell with the Republican Party. Why, when Hughes supported the only political movement that would have him, does Sully think that means he “loved Stalin"?

Again, the right-left double standard. If a fascist poet in 1938 had called to remake a pure racial America on the lines of Hitler’s Germany, would he now be quoted by any leading politician? But the communists get a pass. Again. And again. And again.

Despite his PhD in Political Science, Sullivan seems ignorant that the US was racially segregated until the 1960s. And “a fascist poet in 1938"? Hmmmmm. Racks brains. Let’s see. Sullivan considers the Guardian left-wing. Could it manage to review “a fascist poet [from] 1938"? Indeed it can, and it offers fulsome praise:

As for America: in 1920 Pound penned “A Canticle”, a piece of doggerel uncollected until now that begins “Light of the World! My country ‘tis of thee, / Where booze is banned and letters are not free … ” and so on in satirical vein.

He was a young man then (this was two years before he pruned “The Wasteland so it started with a double reference to the bassoon solo in “The Rite of Spring” and Chaucer), but

Pound himself remained the scourge of America, sounding off about matters literary, educational and, increasingly, political and economic.

Not many politicians quote Pound, but that’s more to do with his difficulty and unmemorability. Don’t get me started on the more quotable William Butler Yeats who “was briefly involved with the fascist Blueshirts in Dublin.”

Sullivan is also partial to the Governor of California, so nobody mention him and “That which does not kill us makes us stronger.”

These 356 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 1:30pm GMT Permanent link.

Mr Modest »

Damian is the subject of the Normblog profile. He’s too modest to brag about it, or let it inflate his ego, or start making speeches. He’s shy and retiring, poor lad.

These 31 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 1:55pm GMT Permanent link.

When Luvvies Attack! »

Shock! Good reviews of Michael Moore in The Guardian “it lands a kidney punch on the complacency of the political classes” and The Telegraph:

In its punk-rock, fairground-boxing-booth manner, it also harvests and channels the antipathy felt by many people both to George Bush and to the war he has waged. A final irony is that it’s being released in the week Tony Blair admitted that weapons of mass destruction would probably never be found in Iraq.

And while the Evening Standard review requires subscription, the teaser paragraph on the free-to-view home page reads:

After a masterfully orchestrated whirl of publicity, including its near-domination of Cannes and a huge box-office haul in the US, Michael Moore’s anti-Bush polemic Fahrenheit 9/11 lands in the UK. Becky Howard finds that it lands a well-aimed punch in the right place …

Will Nick Cohen resign in disgust? More Moore movie opinion soon.

These 52 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 4:12pm GMT Permanent link.

Saturday, 10 July 2004

The Thing-In-Itself-ness Of Oliver Kamm Has Been Established »

Matthew Turner has a post this morning on the objectivity of Oliver Kamm which threw me a little because I couldn’t recall where Chris Lightfoot had accused Oliver Kamm of a ‘gag’. Oliver Kamm and joke in the same sentence? Surely not. Oliver Kamm and supercilious sneer, perhaps. So I searched Chris’s site (full disclosure: he’s the host of this one), and no dice, so I searched Oliver Kamm and found the accusation.

More broadly I’d say that your stuff about the war against Iraq and the “war on terror” is much more entertaining than these exercises where you quote two or three random bits of polemic out-of-context and try to use them to illustrate that (say) a Liberal Democrat, an environmentalist or a Stalinist has (in your view) made a fool of themselves. Since your trademark gag here is to claim to be “objective” you might want to try sampling from a wider field. For instance, it has been drawn to my attention that from time to time politicians of other persuasions say idiotic things; in fact, they do it quite often. I’m sure that your position on the left of politics will allow you to identify many ready targets for your invective in the US Republican party, the Home Office, the City of London, and so forth.

Chris. To which Oliver replies:

My objectivity is not a gag but a statement of fact.

Can he mean by ‘objectivity’ his “ding-an-sich"-ness? I don’t doubt Oliver’s objective existence, or his thingness. Fact? No question. But alas:

If you look back at, e.g., my series on Do-It-Yourself Economics, you’ll find that I select targets from business (the Director-General of the CBI) as well as politics. I’ve also criticised Tony Blair, whom I admire as a politician, for his closeness to precisely that way of business thinking. It so happens that my research indicates that the most consistently disingenuous and fallacious argumentation in mainstream British politics comes from the Liberal Democrats.

So who has decided on Oliver Kamm’s objectivity? Yes, Oliver Kamm. I’m not certain that objectivity is possible, or if so, a good thing (remember, I like Michael Moore). Nor am I at all sure how objectivity can be established, but I know it takes a third party to declare it — at least, peer-review of said ‘research.’.

And for that full disclosure, I used to be hosted by Ghoulnet, but I wasn’t entirely happy with some of their replies to my support enquiries (and Chris now knows how often I ask for support), and I found through referrer files on another site (someone else looked up Ghoulnet, and I went through the other search results) this page:

Changed hosting service to Mythic Beasts. I had problems with disk space and log file management on Ghoulnet, so moved to a more flexible and personal service.

And when I recognised Chris’s name on the email which replied to mine asking for more details, I was sold. In short, I admired his site first, and used his hosting second.

These 249 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 4:14pm GMT Permanent link.

Is It OK If I Call You Perv For Short? »

Leaving no stone unturned, Bush writes to General Pervez Musharraf asking for help in his re-election campaign.

These 17 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 6:33pm GMT Permanent link.

You're Fired »

As someone who didn’t know that “You’re fired” was the catchphrase of The Donald in a pub quiz, I’ll never forget it now. (Something to do with some reality TV show, I think.)

If you have a catch phrase, it’s “nice to use it, to use it, nice.” (Needs work, that one.) Anyway, The Donald uses his, “President Bush, you should be fired.”

“Tell me, how is it possible that we can’t find a guy who’s 6-foot-6 and supposedly needs a dialysis machine?” Trump said. “Can you explain that one to me? We have all our energies focused on one place — where they shouldn’t be focused.”

I think bin Laden slipped through our troops disguised as a washerwoman. 6-foot-6 and a dialysis machine eh? Perhaps he stooped a little and hid the machine in a basket of dirty clothes.

These 96 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 7:15pm GMT Permanent link.

Roberto, Mon Heras »

A couple of days ago I predicted that Lance Armstrong would wear yellow after the team time trial (not that hard; it’s the third year they’ve won it), but I said that I was sceptical that he’d win overall. So for Chris Brooke and anyone else curious why I think this here goes.

It was bad intuitive statistics. It’s very hard to win Le Tour: there are 190-odd riders altogether at the start, and while the odds aren’t exactly 190-1 against a random name winning, with all the crashes it is a bit of a lottery, and there are usually quite a few riders in with a chance. Of course, it’s very rare to win several Tours, but that doesn’t mean that the odds against Lance winning this one (and hence six) are higher than against him winning just the present one. So, while that was part of my thinking, it was quite wrong.

I did, however, feel that Lance looked awful last year. (His book, Every Second Counts, convinced me that he’s not on drugs; he can just put himself through more pain than anyone else.) Fellow five-time winner Bernard Hinault thinks, “He’s not looked that good this year and everyone saw how he struggled in the mountains last year.” Chris Boardman backs Ullrich.

Who do I favour?

Roberto Heras and José Luis “Chechu” Rubiera were young Spaniards with beautifully civilised manners, but on bicycles they climbed mountains with leg-breaking intensity. Heras was slightly built and reserved, but when he was on the bike scaling an alp he seemed to flutter with a hyperkinetic , hummingbird quality. He was so good that there were times when I had trouble keeping the pace he set.

Times such as this.

Stage 11 [2002] would take us to a village called La Mongie, halfway up the famed Tourmalet. …

… We reached the bottom of the Tourmalet, with George [Hincapie] still riding in front. Normally, George wasn’t a climber, but we needed him to do some work today …

Next, Chechu and Roberto took over — and over the next few minutes they blew the Tour apart. They set such a fast pace that within minutes it crippled most of the field. …

Now Chechu faded, finally spent. Roberto took over. …

But Roberto’s pace was so strong it hurt even me. …

Meanwhile, I said to Roberto just ahead of me, “Tranquilo, tranquilo,” meaning, “take it easy, take it easy.”

Roberto, slowed down a little, to my relief. But I did such a good job of hiding my distress that [team tactician] Johann [Bruyneel, who “once won a famous Tour stage by beating Indurain"], watching me on a screen from inside the team car, thought I was fine. He saw a chance to open some real time on the field and didn’t understand why we had slowed down, so he got on the radio and said, “Roberto, venga, venga.” “Faster, faster.”

So Roberto started to go faster. I said again, “Roberto, tranquilo.” He slowed down again. …

At the finish line I found Johan. “What were you doing?” I said. “I was telling Roberto to slow down and you were telling him to speed up.”

He said, “You were hurting?”

“I was fucking dying.”

(From “Every Second Counts.") I hope that answers it, plus as the BBC note:

US Postal were loathe to lose Armstrong’s most trusted lieutenant, who is clearly well respected in the cycling fraternity.

But Liberty paid £1.1m to release him from his contract and £850,000 a year.

Sorry Lance, good book and everything, but you can’t win ‘em all.

These 249 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 8:26pm GMT Permanent link.

The Position Of Annoying Talking Animal Has Been Filled »

Gosh. Shrek 2 is wonderful. Not many feature films have a soundtrack (available from Amazon) this good. Songs by Pete Shelley (The Buzzcocks), Tom Waits, Eels, Nick Cave (I preferred the Cramps version of ‘People Ain’t No Good,’ but whatevah), that’s what I call classic rock.

(The site isn’t so good, you need the IMDB for cast lists, etc.)

Is a movie which samples so many other texts modernist or post-modernist? Whatever it is, I love it — of course, ‘The Wasteland’ is my favourite poem ever.

All that and it offends the prudes at the Traditional Values Coalition. How close to perfect can any one person stand?

These 108 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 11:59pm GMT Permanent link.

Sunday, 11 July 2004

Splendid Shrek »

Nice to see that Damian also enjoyed Shrek 2. It’s not kinky at all, really. I thought at first the cross-dressing “Ugly Stepsister” was voiced by Ray Winstone, and then Jonathan Ross, but it turned out to be US talk show host Larry King, hardly an underground character in the US (unless you think everyone in the media is infected with some left-wing virus).

There’s a lot I love about the film (I was tired when I came in last night, so I wrote less than I thought, which makes a nice change). Third-best visual joke: Antonio Banderas’s Puss-in-Boots with the tail of a blind mouse dangling from his mouth.

Second-best visual joke: Shrek and Fiona rolling in the sand on their honeymoon when the incoming tide rolls over them, and rolls out with a mermaid kissing Shrek which Fiona drags off by the tails and heaves back into the sea. Shrek does this marvellous “I couldn’t help it” shrug.

Best visual joke: Stay-Pufft Gingerbread Man wrenches the giant plastic cup off a Starbucks’ roof — the patrons run out and into the Starbucks across the road. (I know, product-placement, but still. And is there product-placement for Tivo when the animals in Shrek’s shack pause and rewind the news they’ve just watched?)

Other best visual joke: when Shrek is human and handsome, surely he is the young Sean Connery to match Mike Myers’ Scottish accent and the James Bond references in the Potion factory.

Every vista is an eagle-eyed parody of LA, the traffic-light squeegee bandit, the stretch carriage, the “Far Far Away” sign in the woods. (Worst credit: the Hollywood sign. It’s a sign! Jesus.)

Best exachange:

Donkey: You’re supposed to say “You have the right to remain silent!”. No one said I have the right to remain silent!

Shrek: Donkey, you HAVE the right to remain silent. What you lack, is the capacity.

The arc in “Shrek 2” is simple but timeless: Shrek and Fiona go from constant honeymoon sex (thesis, for any Hegelians out there) to barely talking after meeting her parents (anti-thesis) to accepting each other and her parents (synthesis).

It’s hard to say how Shrek treats Fiona differently to the imposter Prince Charming. When Shrek carries her over the threshold into their holiday chalet, her head goes through the wall. He’s not particularly gentle. But the Prince’s contact is more patronising and domineering. The difference seems to be that Shrek as Fiona’s true love treats her as an end in herself, while Charming treats her as a means — to the Kingdom and dyadic social normality.

The thing the moral minority ought to object to besides the thong-wearing Pinocchio and the transvestite barman is that the goodies are not the handsome and rich, but the sincere and authentic. Anyone who tries to police feelings is a villain.

It’s almost sad that Mad Mel is on holiday, her reactions to such a jolly entertainment would be a treat. Not that as a “public intellectual” she’d lower herself to popular culture, except to sniff that you shouldn’t bother with it (like Pollard and Glastonbury). Never mind that Umberto Eco wrote a fine essay on being fat and wearing jeans, and George Orwell was entertaining on tea-making, or Nicholson Baker wrote a novel about breaking a shoelace, or the only passage in “The Wasteland” which doesn’t owe something to the canon is a conversation about false teeth. “Public intellectuals” all.

“Shrek 2” is a celebration of post-sixties morality: being oneself, not answering to conventions or authorities.

I know this is paradise

Everyone old has dreamed of all their lives —
Bonds and gestures pushed to one side
Like an outdated combine harvester,
And everyone young going down the long slide

To happiness, endlessly.

Philip Larkin, High Windows (Collected Poems, p 165)

Apart from the jokes, the voices, and the music, the great thing about “Shrek 2” is that it’s so liberated from conventional morality. It’s a must for sensible children. Writing about it now reminds me of the GIs in the “Fahrenheit 9/11” singing “The roof, the roof, the roof is on fire. Burn motherfucker burn.”

Splendid.

These 616 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 11:18am GMT Permanent link.

See Lance Ride »

Will has found, for reasons which he blames on me (?!?) this splendid (if slow-to-load) corporate bullshit.

Whatever I think of Nike (which is not largely good — I do have several pairs of shoes, plus technical T-shirts, socks, shorts, and other stuff, but it costs my conscience, reader, I worry about it), they are at least providing jobs for the third-world poor. I like them more than the idiot who let his dog run across the road just now. At least two riders looked seriously hurt. Bastard.

These 89 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 4:11pm GMT Permanent link.

The Cyclist And The Spinner »

I was going to try not to post this, but since Will found the Nike Lance Armstrong ad, and Chris found the TdF Blog, and since that links to both me and Reasons Why Lance Armstrong and George W. Bush Are Similar, I can’t resist.

Of course Lance Armstrong and George Bush know each other. Lance is from Austin, the capital, and still has a home there. He’s been a guest in the White House and the Texas State Capitol (which looks like the White House, except that it is pink, and, being in Texas, is larger). As he says in “Every Second Counts":

… The impact of winning the 1999 Tour de France was larger than I ever imagined it would be, from the first stunned moment when I stepped off the plane in Austin, into the Texan night air, to see people waiting. There was yellow writing painted on the streets, “Vive la Lance,” and banners stretched across the streets and friends had decorated our entire house with yellow flowers, streamers, and balloons. I was bewildered to be invited to the State Capitol to see our then-governor, George W. Bush, and afterward there was a parade through town with more than 6,000 cyclists (in yellow) leading the route. People were lined up five deep along the sides, waving signs and flags.

(P9.) Lance receives a birthday cake at the White House (photo). Bush announces Increased Funding for Cancer Research and introduces Lance. Remarks by the President In Ceremony Honoring Lance Armstrong.

All of which rather made me think of Armstrong as a straight-arrow Republican. He grew up in a one-parent family, so I should have guessed that he’d be lighter on the “family values” stuff than many of the President’s supporters. He has his own politics. Interviewed by the Times.

Once we settle down to talk at a long wooden table, we are swapping stories about George W. Bush, his fellow Texan. We agree that our politics are different to Bush’s, but that the President is smarter, funnier and more likeable than the caricature. Even Sheryl, whose politics Armstrong describes as “way out Left”, says that it’s hard to meet Bush and not like him. I had assumed, because he and Bush were Texans and I’d seen pictures of them laughing and joking in the Oval Office, that Armstrong was a Republican. But he says his politics are “middle to Left”. He is “against mixing up State and Church, not keen on guns, pro women’s right to choose”. And very anti war in Iraq.

And the journalist who slips in “We agree” as he were more used to being the story than writing it? Alastair Campbell. Armstrong is more reticent in his book, where he merely says, “My reply was that I wasn’t in favor of war — who is? — but that I support my president, and our troops.” He’s direct with Campbell.

He mocks my line that you have to “give it time” before those weapons of mass destruction show up. “You know when they caught Saddam and the doctors were rooting through his beard and Sheryl said to me, ‘Why are they doing that?’ and I said, ‘They’re looking for them weapons’. Come on, man.” He laughs and shakes his head and I know I’m not going to persuade him. “What’s Blair like?” he asks. “He a good guy?” I say he is. “Yeah, looks a good guy.”

Bush and, for that matter, Blair are clearly believers — unlike Armstrong and Campbell.

The next office we went to was that of Senator Brownback. I knew of the senator because he had survived a bout with cancer, like me. The sensator was very certain that the cancer had altered his view of both life and the afterlife: he had become a born-again Christian. We settled onto a sofa.

“Tell me how cancer has changed your spirituality,” he said.

There it was again, that uneasy question. I wondered how to explain to the senator that my spirituality is mine, and mine alone. But before I opened my mouth, my friend Jeff Garvey, the chair of my cancer foundation, understood my dilemma and jumped in, “Lance’s wife, Kristin, is Catholic,” he said quickly. “And he has a chapel in his house.”

I was grateful for the out, but I decided to be straight. I gave him my honest answer, and said, “I relied on my doctors, and the medicine and the science, they were my hope.” I added that I believed in my personal responsibility in my cure, to educate myself, and to combat the disease.

Every Second Counts, p 216-217.

Good for Lance. I still think Heras will win.

These 271 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 7:11pm GMT Permanent link.

Monday, 12 July 2004

What A Rip-off »

Chris Lightfoot had a characteristically sceptical and equally characteristically detailed post about the shortcomings of ’chip and PIN’ credit card validation.

And on such things, there was a good Telegraph story last week (free registration probably reuqired) on an eBay scam.

Looking back, there were a number of signs that I was being set up, but confidence tricksters work on the simple psychological truth that people tend to believe what they want to believe, and I wanted to believe that someone was going to sell me a new X505 for $1000 — which was definitely at the low end of the price scale, even for eBay.

That “people tend to believe what they want to believe” is equally true of the security of ‘chip and PIN’ cards — and indeed much else.

These 68 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 10:52am GMT Permanent link.

The Last Bastion Of Liberalism »

Jim White, in the Telegraph is largely unimpressed by the weekend’s sport relief, and suggests that Footballers must open their pockets to charity. (Link should work without free registration.)

It might seem churlish at this point, given the efforts of so many willing souls, to point out that there are far easier ways for British sport to raise a few million than getting members of the public to row through baths of baked beans or putting gentle Ben Fogle in the boxing ring and asking him to rearrange the face of Ricky from EastEnders.

Here is an example: maybe those spraying each other with champagne on the winner’s podium at yesterday’s British Grand Prix could donate their winnings to the cause. Or perhaps some of those who trousered huge cheques from Wimbledon last weekend could hand over half the cash. And what about those football agents who, between January and June this year, managed to charge the impoverished clubs outside the Premiership a figure approaching £1.4 million for facilitating a few transfers, a service which involves not much more than making a couple of phone calls? How about them dropping 15 per cent of their fees into Sport Relief’s hat? OK, 10 per cent. Look, even five per cent would make a difference. And that’s my last offer.

He’s not happy with the state of sport is he?

More likely, if the Metropolitan Police could be characterised as institutionally racist, then British sport — football in particular — is institutionally greedy. Until there is a root and branch shakedown in its thinking, volunteers will all be rowing through beans for some time to come.

In the actual sports section (they lend Jim to the opinion pages once a week), Kate Hoey complains that “some sportswear companies who wish to be associated with the Olympic ideals cannot guarantee their products have been produced without contravening universal ethical principles.” Exactly the sort of thing a Labour MP should be saying.

Finally, Bill Deedes considers the limited efficacy of Parliamentary legislation.

I think back to the long discussions we had in committee on how far mental health entered into it [grounds for abortion], and I remember thinking: how on earth can we guide, let alone direct, doctors on how to judge a mother’s mental condition?

Since 1967, politicians have come more and more to believe that social problems can be swiftly resolved by Acts of Parliament. David Blunkett and his Home Office are high priests of that doctrine.

On an ethical issue such as abortion we depend far more on professional integrity than on text cobbled together by the parliamentary draftsman.

I know that ‘objectivity’ is different from ‘balance’ — but a self-confessed Liberal voter and former front benchers from the two major parties sounds like a balanced slate to me. I’d call the first two opinions ‘centre-left’, and I’m sure similar views still appear in the Guardian, they just seem more accessible in the Torygraph.

These 158 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 3:30pm GMT Permanent link.

32 Days To Athens »

Blogging Le Tour seems to be all the rage just now, so as everyone else is covering it, I looked at some of the other books Lance Armstrong’s co-author Sally Jenkins has written. She’s also produced No Finish Line: My Life As I See It, the autobiography of the legally-blind distance runner, Marla Runyan. Runyan made the Olympic 1500m final in Sydney, which was as far as I thought she’d get, but she’s already won her 5000m Olympic Trials semifinal. The final is tonight: it ought to be as much a formality as a race can be — she has run 14:59.20 this year, and Olympic qualifying time is 15:08.70. I don’t know about you, but I can’t help but be impressed by an athlete who could win gold in the Paralympics (not that there’s anything wrong with them), but dares to take on the able-bodied instead.

Nine-and-a-half seconds may not seem like a comfortable cushion between Runyan’s time and Olympic qualification, but selection criteria really are that tight. The Men’s 100m “A” (guaranteed if selected) qualifying time is 10.21s. The UK Trials held on Saturday saw Jason Gardner finish in 10.22, ahead of Darren Campbell (10.23), Mark Lewis-Francis (10.24), Nick Smith (10.28), and Christian Malcolm (10.29). I like Jason Gardner. At the start of the season last year, he and others — including the supposedly retured Colin Jackson — were training on UWIC’s indoor track at the same time as me. Unless Jackson had lost form dramatically, it was clear that Gardner was flying. I’d like to see him run in Athens, and he was only 0.01 outside automatic qualification. But the US trials were over the same weekend: the first four all ran under 10s. You wonder why we bother.

These 292 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 4:52pm GMT Permanent link.

Tuesday, 13 July 2004

How To Say 'No' Gracefully »

Pete Townshend explains why he wouldn’t allow “Won’t Get Fooled Again” to be used on the soundtrack for Fahrenheit 9/11.

Found through David T of Harry’s Place. In the post which follows that one, Gene is far fairer to the movie than I expected (and he acknowledges its many strengths, particularly where its concerns overlap those of Harry’s Place). And I never thought I’d say this (this might be on its way to Backword clichedom), but I agree with Sebastian Holsclaw (or more exactly, his mom).

Moore does not do this. He is not a documentarian.

What he produces is a lot closer to ‘found art’.

Moore’s pictures — when they succeed — are not factual. The best bits, for me, were the recruiting soldiers in the mall (especially when they’re in the car and a jogger runs past and one says something like, “That one’s getting away") and Moore stopping Senators in the street. “Fahrenheit 9/11” isn’t like an edition of “Panorama”, but it is a kind of art.

Update I forgot How to review a movie you haven’t seen, Tim Lambert’s splendid take-down of Paul Sheehan and Christopher “Never Tell A Lie” Hitchens.

These 176 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 12:51pm GMT Permanent link.

Random Wonkery »

I’m not sure why this is interesting. Indeed, I’m not sure that it’s interesting at all, but Matthew Turner posted last month on Athletics Records. But as I was looking at the Athens Qualifying Standards yesterday, I decided to compare Men’s and Women’s qualifying times (in seconds).

Event	Men	Women	W/M
100m	10.21	11.30	1.107
200m	20.59	22.97	1.116
400m	45.55	51.50	1.131
800m	106.00	120.00	1.132
1500m	216.20	245.80	1.137
5000m	801.5	908.70	1.134
10000m	1669	1905	1.141
Mar	8100	9420	1.163

Apart from a slight blip at 5000m there’s a constant progression with the ratio of the times becoming larger as the distance increases.

The anomaly here is that the only woman anywhere who could qualify for a men’s event is Paula Radcliffe with 2:15:25 last year in London (which happened to fall inside the qualifying period), but as seven men ran inside the “B” time in London this year, we wouldn’t have seen the first woman in a men’s race, even if it had been allowed. Paula was the fastest UK marathoner in 2003.

I doubt this means anything.

I was certainly wrong about Marla Runyan’s victory in the USA Olympic Trial 5000m being a ‘formality’ as she came second — by 0.06s to Shayne Culpepper.

Darren Campbell also disagrees with my summation of the GB Olympic Trials versus the US version. He told the Telegraph:

“I don’t think there is anything to fear from those guys. The Americans ran in perfect conditions while the weather in Manchester was horrendous. Given the conditions, I think the sprinting performances here were phenomenal.”

I’m not convinced.

These 206 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 3:16pm GMT Permanent link.

Shrill »

I’m happy to point out shrillness (shrillery?) from Republican partisan hacks like Sully or the Dupe, but in the interests of fairness I should ask you to condemn this shrill post. How can the left look itself in the mirror?

These 40 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 3:31pm GMT Permanent link.

Backword Prediction Comes True Shock »

I said earlier, that “I never thought I’d say this, but …” was on its way to becoming a cliché round here and so …

I never thought I’d agree with John ‘Balloon Juice’ Cole, but:

I am generally against the death penalty, but in cruelty to animal cases, I think it is justified. How someone could dump this fellow in the ocean is beyond me. Scum.

Say it again, John. Found through Moe.

These 43 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 7:00pm GMT Permanent link.

I May Yet Be A Tory »

In the untypically unshrill comments to Gene’s "Fahrenheit 9/11” and me post Neil W includes “Abstinance only sex ed” among “the many vicious policies of the Bush administration.” Today’s Torygraph leader: Sex, please, we’re human:

Sexual abstinence is as likely to take off as the chocolate radiator or the alcohol-free martini — be it in Africa, America or Britain.

These 35 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 10:13pm GMT Permanent link.

Wednesday, 14 July 2004

Killing With Kindness »

I think Operation “Buy Hitchens a Drink!" is serious.

Have you ever read Christopher Hitchens, and wanted to show your appreciation?

Has it ever occurred to Joe Katzman that, not being a blockhead, Hitchens writes for money?

Donating $5-10 to this campaign won’t save the world or anything grandiose — just help buy Christopher Hitchens some bottles of Johnnie Walker ~~Red~~ (his libation of choice).

This is clearly the meme of the day, Gregory Djerejian, for instance says:

But I’m pretty confident that the FOPT argument [’fruit of the poisonous tree’ theme (the argument that the forgery taints all the Niger intel)] won’t get Josh [Marshall] and ilk where they want to get on this story (more on that soon). So’s Johnnie Red-tippling Hitchens, by the way.

All very odd. Provided Hitchens isn’t armed with a shotgun it can do no harm he wouldn’t have done to himself anyway. Though that Guardian story is loose with the facts — not intentionally, merely through bad grammar. “Five years for shooting self in the testicles” is actually untrue. His crime was possession of an illegal firearm, not self-mutilation. While this paragraph teeters on the mendacious.

David Walker, 28, had drunk 15 pints of lager when he accidentally discharged the gun, which had been stuffed down his trousers, Sheffield crown court heard.

From which you might conclude that it was his custom to stuff a shotgun down his trousers before a night out, and, had he stopped at fourteen pints, he would have remained in one piece.

The Telegraph does a better job of sticking to the facts.

Spending the day drinking lager? Clearly no pleasure was involved. He’s better off in prison.

These 165 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 7:03pm GMT Permanent link.

Thursday, 15 July 2004

Allez Cat »

Like Chris, I was unreasonably pleased by Richard Virenque’s ride yesterday. It’s taken him up into fourth place, and placed him as the current wearer of the polka-dot jersey. The back page of the Telegraph has a superb photograph of Virenque being chased by the devil, better than the one on this Reuters story.

Of his main rivals, Armstrong leads fellow American Hamilton by 43 seconds, Germany’s Ullrich by 55 seconds and Spain’s Roberto Heras by 1:57.

Importantly neither Armstrong nor his US Postal Service team have shown any sign of weakness, riding strongly at the head of the peleton.

Ullrich has said the Tour will be decided by minutes and not seconds but Armstrong disagree.

“A minute on Ullrich is a lot in my opinion,” said the Texan, who beat Ullrich by just 61 seconds in 2003.

“I say that because if our positions were reversed, I would be worried and thinking I’ve already got a minute to pull back.”

Both Matthias Kessler and Frenchman Sebastien Hinault are out after crashes on descents yesterday. Kessler’s was televised and looked particularly nasty — I’m surprised he even attempted to carry on. That’s a blow to Ullrich, and I think Lance’s chances of winning look better than they have done so far.

I’m baffled by the finish, but so is everyone else. According to procycling.

Erik Zabel was led out to take the bunch sprint in St Flour (and some much-needed points) by Andreas Kloeden, yet couldn’t get past his team-mate.

Kloeden looked over his wrong shoulder at the finish, and didn’t see Zabel, who could easily have whispered — or grunted — to advertise his presence.

These 144 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 12:24pm GMT Permanent link.

Facts And Fabrications »

Well, well, well. This morning’s Sun headline was Bloody Nasty Bastards (actually the story is from Going undercover in the BNP to be broadcast on BBC1 tonight). This confirms my opposition to proposed religion-hate legislation, which will make legitimate criticism of fanatics illegal. Without it, even the Sun can condemn racists.

One swaggering sicko will be shown boasting of a brutal attack on an Asian man.

Another fantasises about blowing up mosques and machine-gunning worshippers with “a million bullets”.

And party leader Nick Griffin is recorded damning Islam as a “vicious, wicked faith” practised by “cranky lunatics”.

That’s the Sun, which Serbian journalist Nick Medic attacks in today’s Torygraph for its (totally invented) “Swan Bake” story last year.

My colleagues in the Refugees, Asylum Seekers and the Media (RAM) Project were outraged. Many of them had fled for their lives because the regimes in their home countries had not taken kindly to journalists digging up the truth; yet here in Britain, journalists seemed to be getting away with fabrication — and using asylum seekers as scape-goats.

The Sun was allowed to publish a “clarification” “acknowledging that it had confused conjecture with fact” on page 41. Bastards.

These 92 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 1:19pm GMT Permanent link.

Why Must I Be Blue? »

Who’d a thunk it? I took this Slate quiz, and I appear to be a Democrat.

These 16 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 1:47pm GMT Permanent link.

Two In The Bush »

I hope none of my readers missed this robust exchange of views. However, anyone who shares Josephine’s disappointment will be saddened by Whoopi Goldberg who has been dropped from “ads for diet aid maker Slim-Fast.”

The New York Post said of Goldberg’s appearance at the event: “Waving a bottle of wine, she fired off a stream of vulgar sexual wordplays on Bush’s name in a riff about female genitalia.”

Will the sisterhood forgive her?

These 40 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 2:51pm GMT Permanent link.

Tout LeMond »

According to Eurosport, Greg LeMond has attacked Lance Armstrong again. The only online report I can find is Lemond accuses Armstrong.

LeMond, the first American to win the Tour, says just because Armstrong has never tested positive for banned substances does not necessarily prove he is not using drugs.

“Everybody says that. But neither had David Millar tested positive and he now admits he took EPO,” LeMond told Le Monde daily.

I so want Lemond to be wrong. I’m sure he’s got no evidence, so I think it’s him rather than Lance who’s harming the sport.

These 46 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 3:20pm GMT Permanent link.

It Gets Worse »

Christopher Hitchens wrote these words on June 14.

But get ready. It is going to get much worse. The graphic videos and photographs that have so far been shown only to Congress are, I have been persuaded by someone who has seen them, not likely to remain secret for very long. And, if you wonder why formerly gung-ho rightist congressmen like James Inhofe ("I’m outraged more by the outrage") have gone so quiet, it is because they have seen the stuff and you have not. There will probably be a slight difficulty about showing these scenes in prime time, but they will emerge, never fear.

Ed Cone reports than Seymour Hersh (the anti-Chris, if you will) “says the US government has videotapes of boys being sodomized at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq.”

He called the prison scene "a series of massive crimes, criminal activity by the president and the vice president, by this administration anyway … war crimes.”

The outrages have cost us the support of moderate Arabs, says Hersh. “They see us as a sexually perverse society.”

It seems that Hitchens, while flattered by Operation “Buy Hitchens a Drink!" has “requested that monies raised be donated via his contacts to the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan.” Well, good for him. (Though drinking such swill hardly improves my opinion of him, what’s wrong with something decent? And I’m not sure it wasn’t an insult of some kind. Half the comments I’ve seen suggested that he dried out instead.) But I’d feel better about the Kurds if we were being a lot tougher on entry conditions for Turkey’s entry into NATO and the EU.

The gassing of Kurds at Halabja by Saddam Hussein’s forces exercised a large number of Labour MPs. Eight parliamentary motions were tabled condemning it. If Blair had joined his colleagues, he would have been in the company of the likes of George Robertson, Paul Murphy, Ian McCartney, Mo Mowlam, Chris Smith and Harriet Harman, all of whom were later to serve in his Cabinet. Other motions condemned the British and American governments for supplying Saddam with chemical weapons. One called for the immediate termination of all financial aid to the Iraqi government, including a £340 million export credit guarantee signed a month after Halabja.

One signatory was Ann Clywd. From the late 1980s onwards she became an ardent advocate of the Kurdish cause. Her attempts to highlight their suffering at the hands of Saddam were distinctly unfashionable. In April 1995 she was sacked as shadow Spokeswoman for Overseas Development for missing an important Commons vote on Europe. She was the first person Blair dismissed as party leader.

John Kampfner, Blair’s Wars, p7. But sod Turkey’s miserable human rights record. It’s part of the coalition of the willing alongside Uzbekistan. (Thanks to Lenin for that link.)

[Craig Murray, ambassador to Uzbekistan] wrote to his superiors in London on the day in which he watched Bush talk of “dismantling the apparatus of terror” and “removing the torture and rape rooms” in Iraq, pointing out that “when it comes to the Karimov regime, systematic torture and rape appear to be treated as peccadilloes, not to effect the relationship and to be downplayed in the international fora … I hope that once the present crisis is over we will make plain to the US, at senior level, our serious concern over their policy in Uzbekistan.”

(Murray is on C4 news as I write this. A good bloke.)

And people wonder why I consider Blair’s commitment to human rights to be a sick joke.

Raping children? How did it ever come to this? The US administration sought to condemn stable gay partnerships between consenting adults — and it covers up the rape of minors, in the name of morality.

These 220 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 7:22pm GMT Permanent link.

Friday, 16 July 2004

Tom Watson Gets It Right »

Don’t wear sandals
Can’t afford the scandals

TW speaks truth: here.

It certainly has.

Will our Tom learn that there’s more to politics than name-dropping and negative campaigning? I suppose ‘issues’ are Old Labour and for all I know the word is banned from the Millbank dictionary.

Tom’s previous posts on the current home page (in reverse order):

I like Quadrophenia by The Who
I can’t sleep, I’m so excited
Lib-Dems are nasty (but it seems that a lot of commentors on Tom’s site are the Labour left; and the anti-phone mast campaigner is a fruitcake)
Ooh! big noise coming up from Millbank. (Skipping with much joy)
Lib Dems are thugs (again) — they threaten kickings with their sandals
I knock on a door
Lib Dems — nasty and divided
I deliver two leaflets. This is hard. I’m knackered
Heigh ho! We’re campaining!

Yep, not a single issue (apart from phone masts) gets mentioned. You wouldn’t think that the Labour Party bothered producing a manifesto, or had a conference where it decides policy (and used to debate them, before the whole thing was stage-managed into the torpor of a Cliff Richard concert).

And the Lib-Dems aren’t tough enough on crime? What to do with joy-riders? Do we sent them to Gitmo or Abu Ghraib?

Reminds me of this old party conference story.

No less an authority than Lord Gowrie has confessed to having felt a “bat-squeak of desire” when he witnessed Mrs Currie, then a Birmingham councillor, swinging a pair of handcuffs at the Conservative Party conference in 1981, while she made a speech about law and order.

Tom’s natural home, if you ask me.

Update. Of course, I forgot that there were two elections on the same day. As it happens, the one in Birmingham (where Tom Watson is) was held by Labour, with 460 votes more than the Lib-Dems. Still a large swing against Labour, so a resounding kick in the teeth for the Blairites.

These 224 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 10:20am GMT Permanent link.

Jersey Cows »

I can’t find any pictures of the cows that briefly held up Le Tour yesterday (and described sarcastically by the New York Times as “[e]ven more tingling [than local boy’s David Moncoutie’s victory]"). So these ’jersey’ cows will have to do.

These 41 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 12:01pm GMT Permanent link.

Ullrich, Voeckler, Virenque, And Hamilton All Struggling »

Lance’s Postal Team look unbeatable at present. Ullrich is losing time, Virenque has burned himself out for the day, it seems, Voeckler was never a climber, and Hamilton is clearly hurting.

That minute Armstrong had over Ullrich is growing. Could be six wins.

And Armstrong attacks!

These 46 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 3:59pm GMT Permanent link.

Sometimes Beautiful, Elegant And Harmonious »

Japan holds ex-chess star Fischer. I think that should read ‘former chess star’, as Fischer is clearly not ex yet; though he did invent a “new version:”

He also announced that he had abandoned chess in 1996 and launched a new version in Argentina, claiming it would bring the fun back into the game and rid it of cheats.

Check-mate as chess king taken by police in The Scotsman, which may have the best headline, though I like the bin Laden overtones of Elusive chess genius captured after 10-year hunt (Ireland on-line; the Scotsman make it twelve years).

In radio interviews, he praised the September 11 terrorist attacks, saying America should be “wiped out,” and described Jews as “thieving, lying bastards”. His mother was Jewish.

My head hurts: if his mother was Jewish, is there a useful sense in which he is not? Surely he has the right to be nasty about his own people, or it that only extended to liberals while being withheld from right-wing nutjobs? I don’t want to defend Fischer as sane or as a role-model, long before he fled the US, he was worried about every manner of tinfoil hat stuff — the FBI, UFOs, if I remember correctly.

But he disappeared again as US authorities accused him of violating UN sanctions imposed against Yugoslavia by playing the match [against former opponent Boris Spassky in 1992]. The sanctions were imposed on Yugoslavia for the war in neighbouring Bosnia-Herzegovina

I don’t condone what he did, or deny that those sanctions were right. But Fischer has, IMO, a three-fold defence. He’s a couple of pawns short of a chess set, for one; you wouldn’t have in your house if there were sharp objects left out. Two, he was used by US intelligence in his original match against Spassky in Reykjavik. He was, for a time, for the nerdy like me (my dad naturally supported Spassky), the American who took on Communism.

BBC journalist and chess expert David Edmonds, co-author of the book Bobby Fischer Goes To War, says Americans were profoundly shocked by the transformation.

“To many people, he had been an American icon in 1972. The match had been presented as a classic Cold War battle,” he told BBC News Online.

“The Soviet Union had held the world chess title since World War II and chess was an enormously important propaganda tool. Lenin was a keen chess player, so was Trotsky — even Karl Marx himself played chess. …”

The expectations placed upon him, and the stakes he was supposedly playing for count as “cruel and unusual” to me. And the crime he was being punished for? Three, he was a genius.

But his style of playing … was sometimes beautiful, elegant and harmonious, but he didn’t try to please the crowds over the chessboard — he played to win the game.

He was, in short, an artist. Personally, I think genius excuses a lot.

These 272 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 9:39pm GMT Permanent link.

Coming Soon »

If anyone knows what this PayPal thing is and how I can set up a Paypal button, like this noble effort, I’d be very grateful. (But please! If you have rats, send them to Harry instead.)

I propose to forward any monies received to my “Buy Keith Richards more heroin” campaign. Naturally, given the illegality of this substance throughout much of the world, my purchasing arrangements must remain secret. Anyone who has ever listened to the Stones, or anyone who has worn stupid clothes, or had events of a good night out related to them by third parties (indeed, Pete Townshend, whom we shall come to in a minute, when asked where he got his “windmill” style of guitar strumming, replied he stole it from Richards at some gig; Keef, angel that he is, denied all recollection) and wanted to show your appreciation will be welcome to donate. I know that Mr Richards (ne Richard, but that name was spoiled by that Christian bore) is a multi-millionaire, and unlikely to need charity in the foreseeable, but why should that stint your generosity? You either like him or you’re a square.

But for anyone else who took the Terry Teachout thing and went for “The Who” over “The Stones” I’d propose the Keith Moon “brandy, amphetamines, and dynamite” collection. (I know, he also liked to jump motorbikes over the dividing wall between him and Hollywood neighbour Steve McQueen into the latter’s swimming pool, but there is support and there is stupidity.) I tried to read his biography once, but all the days started to blur into “Woke up, threw TV out of window, called Ollie Reed, knocked back a bottle or so of brandy, took pills, send out for explosives, blew up hotel…” which, let me tell you, lacks plot, character development and all that, and becomes dull with the 400th repetition. However, a small donation of $5 or $10 would be adequate appreciation for the drum solo on the track that Pete Townshend wouldn’t release to Michael Moore.

Funny thing is, he’s dead. So is Oliver Reed.

Coda for Americans: I agree with Robi, but I’m puzzled by where Joe is coming from.

These 363 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 10:37pm GMT Permanent link.

Saturday, 17 July 2004

The Gallant Gentleman »

Lance says all the right things in this morning’s Torygraph: Armstrong gallant at Basso’s win.

The American five-times winner trailed just a bike length behind Masso to take the Tour de France by the scruff of the neck but his thoughts were with Masso whose mother is suffering with cancer.

“Ivan deserved to win the stage. He’s a hell of a good guy and was strong on the final climb,” said Armstrong.

“He and I have been friends for a long time. Now off the bike we’re working on his mum’s situation to see if she can win the fight against cancer.

“It was special for me to be out there with him. In the last week we haven’t talked about the race but talked about his mum. It was a pleasure for me that I didn’t win.”

Of course, Armstrong didn’t need to win. Basso isn’t (yet) a threat, and only Voekler’s brave and unexpected effort yesterday kept the five-time winner out of yellow. But what a good guy.

“For me the biggest surprise was that Ullrich and Hamilton lost time, I didn’t expect that,” Armstrong said.

“The race isn’t over, Ullrich’s never good on the first mountain stage but we’ll see what happens tomorrow. I think they’ll get better.

“Ullrich might have taken one on the chin today, but he always comes back and is strong in the last week.”

Tyler Hamilton has now retired from the race. He had been having problems with his back. At 33, this may have been his last chance. And his dog died too. Poor sod.

And where is Heras? Writing the mountain guide for the Beeb is not enough. Roberto, I’m counting on you.

These 98 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 12:44pm GMT Permanent link.

If I Were A Gambling Man ... »

… I wouldn’t be betting against Stephen Hawking. Others have — and won. Hawking himself announced his change of mind.

Found through MetaFilter. Some background on the naked singularity bet.

These 31 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 1:39pm GMT Permanent link.

A Special Day »

Phil Liggett’s post-race opinion.

And, what about the expected challenge from Roberto Heras and Iban Mayo, the great Spanish climbers? Mayo almost abandoned but, instead continued and finished the day almost 38 minutes behind, while Heras trailed home 21-35 down. It was a special day in the Tour de France.

Mayo was supported by a rider from a different team when he got back on his bike — but he really didn’t look like he’d finish. (Discussion on Eurosport — from memory as I don’t have shorthand: - but “X” (probably Kessler, but I’m not sure) kept on riding with a broken rib. - Sean Roche: “Yes, but he’s only a domestique.” Will supposed class warriors like Chris Brooke and myself abandon Le Tour after such comments? Fat chance.)

Basso is a threat after today. I want Lance to win now — for being such a nice guy as I said earlier, but not as much as I want Basso’s mother to recover from cancer. If wishes were horses, beggars would ride, as my dad used to say. If there is a cure for cancer, it’s in research, not prayer. Lance Armstrong Foundation.

These 148 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 7:39pm GMT Permanent link.

Sunday, 18 July 2004

Flash Mobs Are So Last Year »

The thing for summer 2004 is reviewing My Pet Goat on Amazon.com.

After reading the enclosed story “The Pet Goat,” I was stunned by its lyrical beauty and easy cadence. The tempo, the choice of words, and the layout on each page captured my imagination so much that it took me about seven minutes to recover my bearings.

I think all these people have seen the same film.

Found through The Poor Man.

These 27 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 7:00pm GMT Permanent link.

Working Class Heroine »

Will was kind enough to call me his ‘favourite token liberal* (* Of course, “my favourite token liberal” can change-day-to-day so don’t read too much into that.")’ He’s also self-aware enough to say.

And another thing, before anybody starts something, yes I do think that sometimes the likes of our Julie or the book in question may over romanticise, or give an overly-rosey hue to working class life and culture, but still, It makes me feel good.

The ‘book in question’ is The Likes of Us, ‘our Julie’ is, alas, and a lass, Julie Burchill.

Alongside this runs the story of Michael’s own Southwark folk — his dad, like mine, was called Bill — and I couldn’t help reflecting smugly that for all their apparent advantages and “good starts” in life, one rarely reads middle or upper-class memoirs in which shameless, clear-eyed parent-worship is indulged in. Indeed, reading some biographies of prominent social figures, one would sometimes think that the only way the ruling classes have of expressing love to their offspring is by raping them.

All children of the ruling class hate their parents — it’s well known.

Jenna said her parents have the “best marriage,” citing as proof that “my dad thinks my mom’s funny even though she’s really not — she’s cute, she has funny quirks.”

Oh sorry, that’s the Yanks. Ah, here’s the British ruling class.

The twist is the determination of Diana to provide her sons with a well-rounded view of the world beyond the royal palace. Her steadfast commitment to keep their feet on the ground has paid off even from the grave. In a break from the traditional role of an heir to the throne, William spent one summer on a humanitarian mission in Chile.

Or, as one of the lads was precised by an interviewer.

Prince Harry today spells out his mission in life: to keep alive the memory of Diana, Princess of Wales, and carry forward the good work his late mother “didn’t quite finish”.

Yeah, sounds like he really hated his parents.

And I can’t wait until this little lad publishes a book about his dad. Though, “to be fair” his dad might be “actually too rich to be middle class,” writing for a popular red-top rather than an ex-broadsheet nobody reads anyway, and being a successful novelist and all of that. Not that that matters because, even though or Julie did say “Though to be fair, I’m actually too rich to be middle class, which is a relief of sorts” it was the ruling class she accused of rape — and she muddles the “middle” and “upper” classes in a way to guarantee a failing grade for an A/S level politics student. Oh, Fred West anyone? He loved his kids, you know.

I’m rather glad that Rupert Murdoch is paying for Julie voddies these days. Two total bastards who deserve each other. (Oh, and Will when you say “There’s an article in The Sunday Times by Mr Collins today also on the subject covered here. I realise anyone who comes here is well informed and up to date with stuff and that …” I ought to tell you that some of us, even the liberals, wouldn’t buy a Murdoch rag if you help a gun to our heads, threatened to murder our families and raped us. OK I bought the Sun the day that “we” won the election. But I should have known in Rupert smiled on Tony, he’d turn out to be a shit.)

Julie is apparently offended by the term “white trash” (as was I — I was more angry at its implied use in “It seems to be generally assumed that the work of the sniggering video-morons is black and white: one of the very few moral absolutes of which we have a firm and decided grasp” — the friend of Ahmad Chalabi). However, Julie goes a little too far when she says, “the most victimised, demonised, neglected social group in existence.” This would be white Southerners, the bastards who make up the KKK, about whose rituals Billie Holliday wrote “Strange Fruit"? Yeah, right, they’re poor victims. Hold on while I get my violin to serenade the BNP in Bradford.

“White trash trailer park,” taunted big brave Tony Parsons from Essex, of all places, in the Daily Mirror, of all places …

Wow, Julie seems to know rival journalists’ private lives in great detail. Is that research, or hang on, isn’t he her ex-husband? Is she still not over that? Oh dear, here is Julie writing about the proles in — quel irony! — The Times, while “Essex Boy” Tone scribbles in the Mirror.

Actually “white trash” is the wrong phrase. The right one is “white bread” which is what all the locals called me when I wandered about the Memphis the tourists miss. “White trash” is what whites call themselves.

I wrote this piece early one morning flicking between This Happy Breed and EastEnders, marvelling that more than 50 years ago even a flaming, frivolous snob like No¨l Coward could manage a rounder, more realistic, picture of the working class than the presumably caring and sensitive types who write ‘Stenders …

That might be why Coward’s work is still around more than half a century after he wrote it, while Eastenders is hack work. Coward wrote a play every few months at best, EastEnders goes out for an hour-and-half — a proper play length — every week. Even working class geezer Ian Dury considered Coward a ‘Clever Bastard.’

Noel Coward was a charmer.
As a writer he was drama.
Velvet jackets and pyjamas,
The gay divorce and other dramas.

But Julie has to gloat that she pulled herself up by her white stilletto straps.

No matter how successful India Knight, say, becomes, she will never really know if she could have made it had she started from the same place as I did. And that’s got to niggle.

OTOH, Tony Parsons is from Essex, and he’s more successful than Julie. I wonder if that niggles. (She mentions him all the time, while he never mentions “Julie who?” A chin-stroker than one.)

A while ago I posted some holiday photos. “Four-year old Joe” when not sitting on racehorses too talented to interest Stephen Pollard, is developing what his dad, an electrician, calls a “Pentyrch plum”, and he says “actually” too. It’s easy for Julie “too rich to be middle class” (news to Bill Gates, I’m sure) Burchill to claim she’d bring up her kids as working class, I don’t know anyone else who would.

These 723 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 10:26pm GMT Permanent link.

Killer Fact »

The new Will Smith film isn’t the only travesty of Isaac Asimov.

In Asimov’s Foundation trilogy, a scientist named Hari Seldon leads a small band, called the Foundation, that tries to rebuild civilization after the collapse of a galactic empire. In the cult’s view, their leader was Seldon, and Aum was the Foundation.

Granted, it’s not unusual for sociopaths to glom onto works of fiction and use them to defend their aims. But Asimov may be the rare writer who has been adopted by two WMD-seeking terrorist leaders. Soon after the Sept. 11 attacks, some began speculating that al-Qaida, too, was inspired by Asimov. Why? Foundation, when it was published in Arabic in 1952, was translated as Al-Qaida.

Foundation/The Base, geddit? It would be less ironic if the only bit of the synapse-destroyingly dull Foundation book I can remember weren’t “Violence is the last resort of the incompetent.” Obvious to Isaac Asimov, polymath, not so to Lord Butler and half the blowhards in Fleet Street.

These 59 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 11:29pm GMT Permanent link.

Monday, 19 July 2004

Comments »

In response to popular request, I’ll add a comments form to posts from now on. It’ll take a couple of days to get the bugs out. I wrote this months ago in PHP, and about 90% of the code seems to be dedicated to various security matters. I can’t recall what they all are now.

I am going to recode the whole site in Python some time soon, but for that I’m going to have to revisit exactly what the hell I was thinking when I did this originally last December.

These 91 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 10:19am GMT Permanent link.

Comments Part Deux »

Well that didn’t work. Here we go again. Talk amongst yourselves.

These 11 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 10:55am GMT Permanent link.

Paul Foot »

Rise like Lions after slumber
In unvanquishable number —
Shake your chains to earth like dew
Which in sleep had fallen on you —
Ye are many — they are few.

Everyone seems to have noticed that Paul Foot has died. (That is David T of Harry’s Place, Norm, Chris, and Nick, who all have a few things to say.)

The comments thread on the BBC story is entirely positive. Just wait until lackeys like Jeff Jarvis and Andrew Sullivan discover that people in Britain so casually use the term “comrade.” Proof that public ownership is a bad thing, and that the BBC should be handed over to Rupert Murdoch forthwith! ("Pleassse massster, show uss the preciousss.")

Which brings me to today’s Doonesbury on Rupert Murdoch.

'We're back and chatting with Rupert Murdoch …' '… No administration has ever had its own network before. We saw a need.' 'Amazing. Where'd you get the idea?' 'Well, I own media in China …'

As Darren Farr from Billericay says Paul Foot was

One of the great people in journalism — and one of the very few to stand up to Robert Maxwell whilst he was alive! RIP; you will be missed.

Some people did stand up to Maxwell. Not Roy Greenslade, Guardian’s media editor, or whatsisname, big fellow, Burnley supporter, runs triathlons, chaired the JIC and used to run the country. He stood up for Robert Maxwell by hitting Michael White who remembers Foot in the Guardian.

These 153 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 1:35pm GMT Permanent link.

That Was A Waste Of Time »

I suspect that Harry’s Place was the first to notice the publication of the Hansard Society’s blogging study — because it’s one of the eight ‘political blogs’ studied.

Norm found one glaring fault. The word ‘debate’ as used in the report is flawed. If nothing is settled by a vote, equality of speaking time isn’t moderated by a chair, there isn’t a quorum of listeners, and no policy or action is decided — in what sense is blogging a debate?

Firstly, it provides a bridge between the private, subjective sphere of self-expression and the socially-fragile civic sphere in which publics can form and act. As democracy becomes more sensitive to affective dimensions, attention is paid to a revalued recognition of subjective and intersubjective articulations.

Balls. More thoroughly. Total balls. More articulately, any kind of expression is predicated on other people: there is no “subjective sphere of self-expression.” “As democracy becomes more sensitive to affective dimensions …” hold on there lad as what becomes more what to what? Is democracy changing? I hadn’t noticed. Sensitive? Can an abstract noun be sensitive? “Affective dimensions” you’ve lost me there. I thought I’d seen every episode of Star Trek at least thrice and I’ve never heard of them. (OK, I do know what is meant here: I’ve got a degree is psychology after all. But it’s a bollocksy airy-fairy way of saying ‘emotional’, ‘intuitive’, or ‘girly’.)

The increasingly accepted notion that the personal is political challenges the belief that experience is only politically significant if it can be represented as a collective interest.

Well, that’s what politics is. And why it’s the antithesis of ‘personal’.

Thirdly, blogs lower the threshold of entry to the global debate for traditionally unheard or marginalised voices, particularly from poorer parts of the world which are too often represented by others, without being given a chance to present their own accounts. Blogs such as … are refreshing additions to a global debate in which contributors have tended to be better at speaking for than listening to the world’s least privileged.

There must be a M$ Word programme that scatters trendy buzzwords around texts — “challenges”, “refreshing”, “debate.”

I do like this bit though.

Blogging politicians are always going to be seen as a little bit like those old Communist apparatchiks who had to sit in the front row at rock concerts and pretend to swing to the beat.

Not surprisingly, they found that Harry’s Place was the most frequently updated of the blogs surveyed. Perhaps that was because it’s written by four people, who aren’t accountable to committee decisions in the way that the Greenpeace and Howard Dean blogs are.

Conclusion, we ought to keep an eye on these blog things in case they get popular, but really they’re just a bunch of wonks who should get a life spouting off.

These 297 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 9:42pm GMT Permanent link.

Tuesday, 20 July 2004

Paul Foot Note »

Paul Foot gets a better than expected obit on the Torygraph (which, along with every other Fleet St rag, he once contributed to — registration probably required).

The conflicts in his life were well illustrated when he found himself in robust debate with General Sir John Hackett on a television programme. “Come, come,” said Hackett after a particularly vicious thrust, “that’s no way to speak to your godfather.” Foot laughed and looked suitably abashed.

But what is a consideration of anything or anyone without some barb?

However, there was also a blinkered, fanatical side to Foot. “Paul believes that all the upper classes are evil and dedicated to crushing everyone,” wrote one of his editors, Mike Molloy, “and has this romantic view of the working classes. Now I know there are many evil people in the working classes, coming from them myself — and some very nice, saintly people like Paul in the upper classes.”

Overall, though, he comes over as a lot cuddlier than the rest of the SWs.

As a sort of balance, there’s also an obit of Sir Julian Hodge, working-class lad made multi-millionaire and Private Eye target. (I was surprised to learn that though ‘he was regularly pilloried in Private Eye as “the Usurer of the Valleys"’ — which I understood as covert anti-Semitic baiting — that he shared Richard Ingrams’ Catholicism.) Pretty much the anti-Foot, working class to riches (rather than working on Socialist Worker for £28 a week) and, reading between the lines, less than saintly.

These 136 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 9:17am GMT Permanent link.

Wet Blunkett »

The judge said five to ten — but I say double that again
I’m not working for the clampdown
No man born with a living soul
Can be working for the clampdown

Strummer/Jones

Vicki Woods asks How dare Blair and Blunkett blame it on the Sixties?.

Harry of the eponymous place notes —

This time though, what is generating the column inches in the papers (which yes really is the main aim of such crime announcements) are not the policies themselves but the fact that Blair and Blunkett have blamed the 1960’s for a lack of social responsibility.

He’s right in that it may be an intentional diversion, though Blunkett always seems sincere. But then it could be me, rather than the Home Secretary who is being naive here. As Christopher Howse writes in the notebook next to Vicki Woods.

A two-volume official Olympic report, full of shiny b&w photographs, published by the Germans after the 1936 Berlin games, took my eye in a second-hand bookshop.

It made much of the long-distance triumphs of the Finns (perhaps reckoned Aryan by twisted Nazi science), but I was struck by image after image of black athletes taking their places on the winners’ rostrum. I’m sure such off-message solecisms would not occur under improved modern media manipulation. Goebbels and his friends were beginners.

Ms Woods is coruscating on the clampdown king.

Still, we mustn’t blame David Blunkett for distancing himself from the Prime Minister’s madder sound bites. To coin another Sixties phrase, he would, wouldn’t he? But what was it that was so very wrong with parenting in the Sixties, anyway? He told the Today programme that there was, “a breakdown in terms of discipline. A little bit of ‘anything goes’ was built in.” Oh, really? Not in my house it wasn’t. Not from my parents, or anybody else’s parents I had to hide my nefarious behaviour from.

Harry cites David Aaronovitch.

Actually, of course, we all did nothing. As Jonathon Green says in his book All Dressed Up: “The [60s] counterculture, while noisy, embraced relatively few people; neither dope, sex nor revolution impinged, other than through the tabloid press, on the great majority of lives.” That describes Blunkett all right.

To which Harry adds:

It also describes most working class people and most people of any class who lived outside of London or who didn’t happen to be at a prominent University in 1968.

Well come on. There’s a lot more sex and hangovers in the novels of working-class Alan Sillitoe than in those of old Etonian George Orwell. As Ms Woods says:

There was a Wilson government (on and off) through the 1960s: Blunkett can’t have failed to notice that, either. Even in Sheffield. The Abortion Law Reform Act, the decriminalisation of homosexuality, the Pill, the white heat of technology — they can’t have passed him by.

Indeed. 1970 was a far more pleasant year than 1960. I’ve taken advantage of all of those (there would be no gay clubs else, the rest speak for themselves), and I wouldn’t give them up for anything. Mr Aaronovich again —

Sounding more like Thora Hird than a retired Ugly Rumour, Blair told an interviewer, “When I was young, people still left their doors unlocked.”

We didn’t. Leave the back door open for an hour in our part of north London in the mid-60s and you’d be burgled.

And where I grew up in Edinburgh too. I can’t speak for where Mr Blair lived when he went to Fettes. Perhaps he could leave his doors unlocked.

And, even if Harry is partly right about everyone outside of London missing out on the fun, as Borges in the comments reminded me, the 60s produced the Velvets (including South Wales prole John Cale). If nothing else, the music was wonderful.

These 218 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 11:08am GMT Permanent link.

Some Days Even I Don't Understand Le Tour »

Voeckler is out of yellow as Lance wins another stage. Sean Roche seems to think Armstrong wasn’t pleased that Basso contested the finish rather than leaving it to Ullrich as etiquette may/may not demand.

Armstrong first, clear of Basso, himself clear of Ullrich. Ullrich’s problem is that his team isn’t as strong as Armstrong’s. He made a big brave effort and solo attacked to gain a minute but a US Postal team effort pulled him back.

Virenque tired on the last short climb, but finished in 6th, gaining still more King of the Mountains points.

I wouldn’t discount Ullrich winning tomorrow, he looked a lot stronger today — and Basso sticking close to Armstrong.

These 115 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 4:04pm GMT Permanent link.

Thursday, 22 July 2004

Summertime Blues »

I’m going through the fabled ‘blog burnout’ phase at the moment. Expect posting to be light.

In response to this thread, I’ve hacked a new look for Harry’s Place here.

Tony Blair has been Labour leader for 10 years? Bastard.

Lance Armstrong? Well I thought he looked tired last year, and I didn’t think he’d win three individual stages and one team time trial. Hell of a nice bloke it seems and good luck to him. He didn’t like the Alpe d’Huez time trial, and, god, the spectators looked hairy. According to Armstrong, who had plenty of opportunity to smell their breaths, they’d been drinking all day. (And I’m sure several straight arrow cycling types didn’t realise that a bottle of supermarche vin rouge has more alcohol than 5 gallons of Coors’.)

Just to rub salt in, Heras dropped out. Still, if Virenque makes it to Paris, he gets a record seventh polka-dot jersey.

Robert Harris in the Torygraph yesterday called Blair a Tory. He was being more complimentary than that sounds, so I’ll only quote a paragraph which I find telling.

In any case, if Blair did have a faction, it would probably not be on the Left at all, but located somewhere deep within the Conservative Party. Right-wing in his instincts even before he became party leader, Blair has clearly moved further to the Right since entering Downing Street. Of all his predecessors, the one with whom he evidently has the closest rapport is Margaret Thatcher.

Bill Deedes, today, if I read between the lines correctly, rates Blair the fourth-best PM of his acquaintance (out of fifteen in all) — after Thatcher, Churchill, and Atlee.

People now would not believe the conditions I found on Tyneside, in South Wales, in Liverpool when I toured the so-called Distressed Areas for this newspaper in the 1930s. That is why Churchill lost in 1945, as I thought he would.

That inequality is still the spiritual home of the tenacious Labour Left. That and unilateral disarmament and one or two other obsolete notions are what gave Labour a much smaller share of government in the last half of the 20th century than the Tories. Don’t I know it — I was a Tory MP from 1950-74!

I think that sums up what I love about old Bill. The (earned) arrogance of “[t]hat is why Churchill lost in 1945, as I thought he would,” and the personal experience. I don’t know if I agree with him over unilateral disarmament and the “one or two other obsolete notions” whatever they are. However, it’s an analysis which is a lot more convincing coming from a former Tory minister than it does from parrotting Labour drones.

These 287 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 9:54pm GMT Permanent link.

Friday, 23 July 2004

A Good Finish »

A few days ago, I mentioned Tyler Hamilton’s retirement from Le Tour. In his final commentary on this year’s race he pays Tribute to Tugboat.

Tugs and I slept side by side that night. Ironically, one year after he had done so for me, I was comforting him at the Tour de France. Before the start of stage 10, I said my good-byes. My wife drove him back to Girona where the vet was waiting for her call. On the way into town she stopped at a bakery and bought a whole bag of pastry. It had been weeks since Tugs had been well enough for a treat. But Haven’s brother Derek, who traveled with her to France, suggested they take Tugs to a park for his final feast. They carried him out of the car and sat with him under a shady tree and fed him his chocolate and sugar and cheese-covered desserts until there wasn’t a crumb left. He was still on earth, but I think, in that moment, he must have been in heaven.

At the end, Haven tucked my jersey from stage 9 under one of Tugs’s legs and his last Credit Lyonnais Lion under the other. He was a bike racer’s dog from start to finish.

Found on the TdF Blog.

These 30 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 3:45pm GMT Permanent link.

To Do Is To Be »

On Monday, I called the Hansard Society’s blogging study a waste of time. I found its presumptions unfounded or at least opaque and unexplained, its methodology unjustified, with inadequate explanation of why there were only eight subjects on the jury (and, indeed, why they were six men and two women), and why those particular blogs and periods of observation. In a word, poor.

But a longer, more detailed and better blog paper was published this week, co-authored by real bloggers and academics Dan Drezner and Henry Farrell.

It starts from a real observation.

In late December 2002, Trent Lott resigned his position as Senate Majority Leader in the wake of inflammatory comments he made two weeks before at Strom Thrumond’s 100 th birthday party. Although the event was broadcast on C-SPAN and reported in the mainstream press, it took almost a week before the media devoted significant coverage to Lott’s comments. …

Most political analysts credited “bloggers” with converting Lott’s gaffe into a full-blown scandal.

Unlike the Hansard paper, it doesn’t just assume that blogs constitute some kind of ‘voice of the people’ and are therefore ‘good for democracy.’ Surprisingly (to me anyway) the most sensible voice is Glenn Reynolds, who — much less surprisingly — ‘gets’ blogging. I’m not sure what blogging is — there’s no comparison which seems useful. I don’t like the “it’s eighteenth-century coffee-houses” approach when it blatantly isn’t. Blogging is neither discussion nor debate, although both happen.

The Hasard paper is too unimaginative. As Norm quotes it:

The most appealing blogs are those which provide genuine debate between bloggers and visitors to the blog. Blogs that do not offer this facility give visitors little reason to return.

Norm doesn’t have a comments facility (which is what he and I understand by this passage); nor does Instapundit.

I have no desire to quarrel with the first sentence quoted, leaving the judgement contained in it as being exactly that — a judgement. However, if the second sentence is referring to the presence or absence, specifically, of a comments box, then I’d say the research on which it was based was faulty. My evidence for saying so: this and this. A reason to return? To read what’s on the blog if it’s worth reading.

If a research paper glosses over such a stonking counterfactual, there’s something wrong. Drezner and Farrell know what they’re talking about. Although Drezner, the swine, also links to what was going to be my closing observation, describing it as “More scholar-blogger research from Glenn Reynolds. With experimental evidence no less!”

At least he knows what blogs are good for. And, come to think of it, how research should be done.

Since Dan Drezner ruined my finale, I’ll end by pointing out that Norm was too modest when he said in the post linked above, “Having always been rather a theory-oriented sort of a person, I cannot boast any extensive knowledge in the techniques of empirical research.” Having read Chris Brooke’s dissent from Norm’s poll results and especially the discussion in his comments, which raised the ugly memory of Channel 4, HMV, and Classic FM’s most influential musician poll. Whatever you say about the results of Norm’s poll, he asked for votes on all-time favourite rock stars which is pollable. Who is the “most influential over the past 1000 years,” assuming the question makes sense, is not.

These 385 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 8:35pm GMT Permanent link.

There's Nothing Else To Do »

From every corner of the interweb thing but mostly MetaFilter and Chocolate and Vodka comes this Quicktime cover of Pulp’s Common People. Other formats available.

(Christ on a bike! Suw of ChocNVodka, like me, wrote for the “award winning student newspaper, Gair Rhydd.” It stopped winning awards when I started.)

Various MeFi reactions: “The man is a God.” “oh, crap, this is great.” “This is fucking fantastic.”

And it totally is.

Some background on the vocalist.

Actually, he spent a great deal of time at the Toronto Shakespeare Company. He was Christopher Plummer’s understudy in fact. All joking aside, [he] was considered a hot property at that time. His first big break was when Plummer was sick one night, and he had to do the Hamlet role. Audiences said he was magnificent. Serious roles like The Brothers Karamazov followed.

According to Slashdot.

And when asked “What’s the award for?” by the Onion A.V. Club, he said, “For singing, I think. No? Okay. Lifetime achievement, though I’m not quite sure what it is I achieved.”

Too modest.

These 113 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 10:01pm GMT Permanent link.

Saturday, 24 July 2004

Eurgh! »

From the BBC: World’s tiniest fish identified. The stout infant fish (of the genus Schindleria brevipinguis) “is only about 7mm (just under a quarter of an inch) long” and lives around the Great Barrier Reef.

No one has yet tried inserting one into their ear canal.

These 46 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 11:58am GMT Permanent link.

Sunday, 25 July 2004

Just The Facts »

Thanks to von for the link to Lawrence Lessig’s extraordinarily cool forensic fisking of Bill O’Reilly. (Includes link to 11.8MB mov file, so readers unfamiliar with Murdoch hackery can acquaint themselves with “Fair and Balanced” reporting and thank the old country, yet again, for the BBC.)

These 47 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 11:26am GMT Permanent link.

What It Says On The Tin? »

You’re acting like a first year fucking thief! I’m acting like a professional!

Car with slogan 'bringing together professionalism and elitism.'

Same car, close up on 'professionalism and elitism.'

I passed this car on the way to the organic market this morning. I can resist anything except temptation.

elitism noun advocacy of or reliance on the leadership or dominance of a select group … [OED]

Backword proudly continues to bring together amateurism and social democracy (not to mention the Common People — we should be so hip at 73) and plenty of tripe as well.

These 51 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 12:49pm GMT Permanent link.

Villains From The 1960s »

In the cloakroom as well, however, standing near its center, the focus of activity in it, was another senator, the Democratic Leader and hence the Senate’s Majority Leader, Lyndon Baines Johnson.
He was not a member of the liberal faction, far from it. His state, Texas, had been one of the eleven Confederate states, and his accent was often (not always, for his accent changed depending on whom he was talking to) the same syrupy southern drawl as that of the Barbour County registrar, and he used many of the same words and phrases—including the word that David Frost hated; Lyndon Johnson was, in fact, using that word a lot in the Democratic cloakroom that Summer. “Be ready to take up the goddamned nigra bill again,” he told one of the southern senators, Sam Ervin of North Carolina. Walking over to a group of southerners, he told them there was no choice but to take it up, and to pass at least part of it. “I’m on your side, not theirs,” he told them. “But be practical. We’ve got to give the goddamned niggers something.” “Listen,” he told James Eastland of Mississippi, who was anxious to adjourn for the year, “we might as well face it. We’re not gonna be able to get out of here until we’ve got some kind of nigger bill.”
Johnson’s voting record—a record twenty years long, dating back to his arrival in the House of Representatives in 1937 and continuing up to that very day—was consistent with the accent and the word. During those twenty years, he had never supported civil rights legislation—any civil rights legislation.

Master of the Senate Robert A Caro

This is one of those posts I meant to write during my off period last week. British Spin doesn’t like the 1960s.

Trouble is, it was the Greers, the Kuireshis, the Tariq Ali’s [sic] — and their political equivalents at every level of the Labour party and the Democrats — at their prime in the Eighties, who were supposed to hold the line.

Tariq Ali and Germaine Greer were active in the 1960s, but Hanif Kureshi is a year younger than Tony Blair.

I don’t know what “the line” is either. “Holding the line” usually refering to repelling an attacker or invader, and I have no clue what Spin is thinking of.

Spin’s pique seems to be not aimed at the 1960s — indeed he admires some 1960s legislators, even including Lyndon B Johnson among “visionary and committed liberals.” Knowing what I do about Johnson see epigraph, I wouldn’t call him “visionary” or “liberal,” but I won’t gainsay his committment. He worked hard at that.

It seems to be the generation which came after that he doesn’t like, but how that is Tariq Ali’s fault escapes me. True he was a dodgy old Trot, but so was Christopher Hitchens, why not single him out?

Spin says:

Speaking as one child of the Sixties children. I refuse to be lectured about liberal morality, about responsibility, about community by a generation that so signally failed to defend all three when it was their turn to do so.

Which is alien to me, supposing as it does that ‘morality’, ‘responsibility’, ‘community’ are qualities which are under threat from an external agency (like the Devil, I suppose) and need to be defended. He does mention “a rising tide of the right” but the ‘right’ is just a political affiliation — they have the same access to those virtues (?) as the left. Even when I was a member of the people’s party, I believed that Labour was as morally superior to the Tories as Arsenal is to Man United. Everyone hates them, but that doesn’t make them “immoral.”

It is — I suppose — ironic that the person who started this little issue is David Blunkett, a man who has few doubts about his own reserves of ‘morality’, ‘responsibility’, ‘community mindedness’ — and who is unquestionably of the right.

To remind myself who is on the dark side and who on the light, I’ve put images of the villains on the left (naturally), while respectable ‘left-wingers’ are on the right. Perhaps the bad guys have something in common I’ve missed, I don’t know.

It’ll be a very long time before I’ll be able to vote Labour again.

These 369 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 3:04pm GMT Permanent link.

Tour De Lance »

Sheryl Crow in 'War is not the answer' T-Shirt.

Lance Armstrong has won his historic sixth Tour. It’s rather a shame that through Norm I found this disappointing (or not, as it lives up to the Grauniad’s current reputation of always being wrong) article.

Lance Armstrong is poised to claim a unique sixth victory in the Tour de France. He shares his achievement of five wins with four other riders, and many Europeans find it galling that an American (from George Bush’s home state of Texas, no less) is set to surpass the European quartet of Merckx, Anquetil, Hinault and Indurain.

(Actually, George W. Bush was born in New Haven, Connecticut; his degrees are from Ivy League North-Eastern universities, and he had his teeth checked by a Texas Air National Guard dentist, but he calls himself Texan.)

Transatlantic rivalry is only part of the story. Some cycling fans object to how Armstrong’s nine-man team operates with the sole purpose of ensuring their man will be wearing the winner’s yellow jersey as the riders enter the Champs Elysées tomorrow at the end of the three-week race. Europeans like the idea of the noble individual, striking out from the pack to ride heroically and alone over the mountains and through the vineyards to claim his prize. Merckx would attack, attack, attack, never content with second place. This year the colourful French rider and six times king of the mountains Richard Virenque chose Bastille Day for a daring 130-mile breakaway, to the delight of the home crowd.

The European ideal explains why Euro 2004 flopped the way it did: with teams from this sceptered isle scything our way through unco-ordinated bands of 11 individuals who just happened to wear matching shirts.

I thought individuality was the American way. Of course, not all riders are like Lance.

If I don’t want to get sideways with the guys on my team, it’s important to make them feel that when I’m winning, they are too. One way to do so is to ride on their behalf in several races a year. I spend a protion of each spring working as a support rider, and trying to help my teammates win races. I act as a domestique, shield them from the wind, protect them in the pack, and carry their bottles — and it’s one of my favourite parts of the season. And you know what? It feels good. I don’t just do it so that they’ll do the same for me in the Tour de France. I also do it because it feels better than solitiude, it’s more gratifying than riding purely alone.

(Lance Armstrong with Sally Jenkins, Every Second Counts. A splendid book.)

It’s not just US Postal in the Tour which employs team tactics — it’s everyone. Because drafting makes such a big difference in performance (hiding behind another rider is far more efficient) if there weren’t teams and domestiques no one would make the pace.

I explained the math. Floyd [Landis] was making a salary of $60,000, but if he bore down and made the nine-man squad that raced in the Tour, and we won, he would get about $50,000 more in prize money.

The Tour is designed around team tactics. Lance Armstrong didn’t invent them. (Note: US Postal did not win this year: T-Mobile, with Kloden 2nd and Ullrich 4th — his first finish not on on the podium — did.)

“The Tour de France has helped my career and helped me become who I am,” said Armstrong, a personal friend of fellow Texan President George W Bush. “If someone asked me which country in the world I preferred after Texas — I mean the United States — then I would say France. And I mean it.”

Brendan Gallagher in yesterday’s Telegraph.

Norm also links to Insults, spit spur Armstrong, which is, how you say, comme Michael Moore avec le verité — the fans were like that with everyone. Even Lance says so.

“I don’t think it’s a good idea to have a time trial on the Alpe. It was scary. There were too many people, a lot of Germans, a lot of Belgians who weren’t being too nice,” he told French television.

“There were a lot of Americans as well.”

But back to Brendan in the Telegraph. He’s been providing a nice touristy counterweight to the tech and tactics talk of Phil Liggett.

Hitherto, the French have respected but not always admired his extraordinary strength — mental and physical — and efficient riding style. But they have lamented the apparent lack of panache in his cycling and the apparent absence of passion in his life.

That changed last summer when the French public were intrigued to learn that he had won his fifth Tour while enduring a bitter marital break-up and divorce. They were also won over by an extraordinary stage win high in the Pyrenees after he was accidentally knocked down by a woman spectator during the final kilometres. He picked himself up to sprint up Luz Ardiden mountain and claim a vital win.

The French like Lance. He’s not one of these Ian Rush types who have their favourite biscuits flown over and comment that being on transfer in Europe is like “being in another country.” He speaks French (he was joking with Virenque on the podium today), some Flemish, some Spanish, and poor Italian. (He said the wrong thing to Pantani on one climb.)

His stock rose further when it emerged that, following his marriage break-up, he had been seen with the film star Sandra Bullock, and that he had subsequently been dating Sheryl Crow. Gradually, the French feel they are beginning to accept the man in the fabled maillot jaune as one of their own.

Crowe has accompanied her new partner for most of the Tour this year, jetting back to America for just four days to fulfil a long-booked concert engagement. On her return last weekend, Armstrong moved into top gear and recorded a stunning stage victory on the 6,700ft Plateau de Beille, which he immediately dedicated to the new woman in his life.

Since her return, he has won a further three stages, offering conclusive proof, according to the French, of the properties of love.

It’s an explanation I want to believe. I know zero about her music, but I think Sheryl (above) might have inspirational qualities.

Lance’s fellow Texan George Bush has hosted Lance at both the Texan capitol and the White House, and I’m sure he’s aware of his guest’s politics. But if the reader has missed my earlier post I’ll revisit his interview in the Times. We all know newspapers can be biased, but this discussion strikes me as true. Lance is, bluntly, anti-war. He spoke to Alastair Campbell.

So the “summit” has begun and here I am, thinking that I’d be getting hours of top-quality insight for my triathlon training, and, instead, it’s like I am back in my old job, defending military action, defending the Bush-Blair relationship, insisting we did the right thing and saying, long term, it will make the world a safer place. But Armstrong is screwing up his face and he won’t have it. “I don’t like what the war has done to our country, to our economy,” he says. “My kids will be paying for this war for some time to come. George Bush is a friend of mine and just as I say it to you, I’d say to him, ‘Mr President, I’m not sure this war was such a good idea’, and the good thing about him is he could take that.”

He’s a remarkable athlete, he’s survived cancer, good-looking but his girlfriend is stunning, and he’s got sense. There’s no justice.

These 440 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 6:58pm GMT Permanent link.

Monday, 26 July 2004

And Farewell To Paul Foot »

What will survive of us is love.

Philip Larkin

Nick Cohen has a generous personal tribute to Paul Foot in the Observer. Using Foot’s ‘Red Shelly’ as a template, Cohen praises his “good humour, openness and tolerance.”

And, inevitably, in the Telegraph, Bill Deedes (reg probably required).

I shall miss Paul Foot, whom I knew for more than 40 years. He might have been a socialist revolutionary, but I never met a man with whom I so disagreed politically and found it easier to get on with.

Paul exemplified the British gift, once practised in the House of Commons, of disagreeing with someone without getting nasty. These days many wrongly think that wet.

Then again, you can read Oliver Kamm, who thinks it wet.

These 49 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 5:32pm GMT Permanent link.

Wednesday, 28 July 2004

Scenes From A Protest »

I’m a disappointed photoblogger today. I went to the dentist for a check-up, and apart from the fact that I had my first filling in I don’t know how long, I saw the inside of my mouth for the first ever time because my dentist has one of those micro-cameras on a flexi-thing. What she hasn’t got is any kind of a computer connection beyond the monitor, so she can’t keep the film she made — and more importantly to me, she couldn’t email me the still of my drilled out tooth.

So instead are some some shots of a one-man protest in town today. I should have asked him what it was about but, as you can see, he was engaged in conversation with the fellow in the uniform.

I’ve no idea about the rights or wrongs of his protest, but it was very colourful.

These 150 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 4:46pm GMT Permanent link.

Hak Mao »

If the last post was too political, here’s my cat lying on a wall.

Gordon lazes on a wall.

These 15 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 5:04pm GMT Permanent link.

Happy Birthday To Ya »

Normblog is one year old today. I did the King Lear thing for the Virtual Stoa’s third, so I can’t use that again. It looks like Stevie Wonder will have to do.

These 32 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 8:45pm GMT Permanent link.

The Man With Two Names »

Laban Tall recommends Theodore Dalrymple aka Anthony Daniels. (I didn’t realise they were the same person.) This is the full New York Sun article; don’t blame me if it gets archived or otherwise disappears.

I’m puzzled why it’s the New York Sun which chooses to profile Dr Daniels, and, indeed, why their reporter is so naive as to never have ventured south of Times Square after midnight, or indeed tplaces such as Sixth Street in Austin, or to downtown Chicago, New Orleans, or San Francisco. But maybe he has, and is playing dumb.

“If you can have ideological drunkenness, this is ideological drunkenness,” Mr. Daniels says, almost shouting to make himself heard.

“And what is the ideology?”

“The ideology is, ‘I’ve got a right to do whatever I like, and you’re not going to stop me.’”

Sounds like freedom to me. I thought such inalienable rights were what the war on terrorism is supposed to be about.

” Most intellectuals of the middle classes are just not interested in this,” he continues as we stand in the midst of the swaying, inebriated crowd. “And it’s partly because they don’t think their fellow citizens are real human beings at all.They don’t expect people to conform themselves to a certain kind of behavior. They just expect them to be savages.”

There’s a lot of Rousseau wound up in that assumption. I do think my fellow citizens are human beings. I find the term ‘savages’ empty. I “don’t expect people to conform themselves to a certain kind of behavio[u]r” (though British norms of spelling would be nice). Regular readers may have gathered that, against my supposed political grain, one of my journalistic heroes is Bill Deedes. I love Bill for several reasons. One, he really is a man of the world, one who, though unlikely to have bought the T-shirt, has been there and done that. He’s also able to praise political opponents, as he did with Paul Foot: that doesn’t mean that he lacks political convictions — as an former Tory minister and editor of the Telegraph I don’t doubt that he has more than all of Tom Watson’s intake of New Labour nodding dogs. Bill is said to be the inspiration behind ‘William Boot’ in Evelyn Waugh’s “Scoop.” Personally, I find him rather Wodehousian. He’s clearly clubbable — a man you can take anywhere. I also don’t doubt that in his more callow days, he wasn’t above pinching policemen’s helmets, attempting to cross the Drones swimming pool in full evening wear by swinging from hoop to hoop, or falling backwards into fountains like Sebastian Flyte. I’ve read enough classical literature to know that many fine Greek philosophers or Roman senators suffered from what Byron termed ‘a hot youth.’

Mr Tall and Dr Daniels are entitled to their views, but if it’s OK for the nobs, it’s OK for all.

The rest of the article, now, well there you have me. I really like “he describes the police as ‘sinister,’ ‘militarized,’ and ‘simultaneously bullying and ineffectual.’” There’s a post on the police that’s been dying to get out, but now is not the time.

[Dr Daniels’] father was born before World War I in a London slum where children could be seen going to school in their bare feet. Daniels senior was taught Latin, French, and German, using textbooks whose difficulty, according to his son, “would terrify a modern teacher, let alone child,” and was treated “as if he were fully capable of entry into the stream of higher civilization.” Had his father been born in similar circumstances today, Mr. Daniels believes he would never have made it out. Not only would he not have learned any foreign languages, he would barely have learned his own.

My own father was born in what he termed the “respectable working class” in Salford, Manchester, and from what he told me, that wasn’t his experience of the local school. He went to Manchester Grammar on a scholarship, which may count as “entry into the stream of higher civilization” then again, he didn’t fit in, and left at 15 (a year later than his father wanted). He didn’t go to university until after he was discharged from National Service in 1945. Even then he complained that when was taught chemistry, his lecturer refused to refer to atomic theory and preferred to stick to C19 models. (I read up on the history of science when I was at university myself, and I consider chemistry without reference to the periodic table to be incomprehensible.) The asceticism of “textbooks whose difficulty… would terrify a modern teacher, let alone child” is impressive, but as a life-long fan of the Romantic poets, I’ve never been able to shake the impression of them bellowing V-E-R-Y V-E-R-Y S-L-O-W-L-Y like Chingford chavs at the patron of every inn they begged to stay the night in. “Latin, French, and German” forsooth. It wasn’t until Chapman translated Homer that any of these noodle-headed schoolboys realised what the Greek they’d been translating like so many vending machines was about, and it wasn’t until Jowett’s Plato that anyone in the Western world got any of its meaning. Perhaps not all. When Ford Madox Ford met Joseph Conrad, they’re said to have recited between them the whole of “Madame Bovary.” (Ford was German, Conrad Polish; they conversed, and wrote, in English.) And Nietzsche got the Greeks before the rest of Europe, but he was a professor at 24, and smarter than the average bear.

I think Dr Daniels is unfair on modern schools. I won’t deny that my own schooling was frustrating, and it was only with the licence of university that I discovered anything. If I can spell, it’s because I read a lot, and I read a lot because I was able to read before I went to school, which I owe to a loving dad — which to be conservative for a moment, the state can do nothing whatever about. Schools, as any reader of Molesworth or Dickens kno, are horrible.

I’ve written far more than I meant to (but I have sat on this for nearly a day). I agree with Dr Daniels about recent public architecture (I love some modern corporate architecture: the Lloyds’ Building for instance). And I don’t demur from Mr Tall’s judgement of him as a ‘great man’ — I just disagree with him on almost everything.

These 861 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 10:58pm GMT Permanent link.

Thursday, 29 July 2004

More On Goats »

Tom Knight in today’s Torygraph profiles Maurice Greene.

The Olympic champion already thinks he is the Greatest Of All Time and has the tattoo ‘GOAT’ emblazoned on his right shoulder just to emphasise the point.

Really, I’m lost for words.

These 13 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 12:14pm GMT Permanent link.

Rubbish »

Through Nick (who claims “it’s been in all the newspapers” — well I missed it) comes the spoof of Preparing for Emergencies. Simply splendid. I looked at the government’s effort yesterday: utter rubbish. The BBC reports spoof website will stay online.

Nick also has the best comment on the Young Fabians. They don’t need parody.

The Young Fabian Group was officially convened in May 1960 at a meeting organised by Fabian Society assistant general secretary, Dick Leonard. The Fabian general secretary, Bill Rogers, encouraged the formation of the Young Fabian Group and was replaced by Shirley Williams in late 1960 who continued to support the infant Young Fabian Group Committee.

Bill Rogers and Shirley Williams went on to found a party which merged with the Liberals to form Tom Watson’s nemesis. Which is surprising when they also boast that:

All of the young MPs selected at the 1997 and 2001 elections were Young Fabians and Young Fabians provided volunteers for both Tony Blair’s leadership campaign in 1994 and the new clause IV campaign in 1995.

Even odder than their bizarre slogan “because Ideas + People=change” is the banner of the site which I assume illustrates various ‘young fabians’ — all are white, and three squares (out of 22) are given over to a young lady’s thigh and knee. Well, we’ve all sat in political meetings and let our minds wander. Perhaps that’s what it’s about.

I’m also very impressed that the first item listed under Publications is the Herbert Morrison Memorial Lecture to the London Young Fabians — November 2000, which contains the priceless sentence.

In my grandfather’s journey from Labour’s internal collapse and massive electoral defeat in 1931 to its famous victory in 1945 lies a parallel with New Labour’s journey from near wipe out in the 80’s to triumph in 1997, except of course for the little matter of the Second World War!

(Hmm. Why did Labour win in 1945? Possible cause 1: Herbert Morrison. Possible Cause 2: WWII. Difficult question.) It’s only part of the lecture, the whole thing is here. Peter Madelson’s own site doesn’t mention his proposed new job. Instead the home page starts with “Over 11-13 July I chaired the Progressive Governance Conference …” And what did he do there?

In my concluding remarks to the conference, I said that I believe that the Third Way is the best basis for our political project on the left because although it has not and will not solve all the problems of the world it works better than any alternative when it is given the chance.

I’ve always believed that socialism “works better than any alternative when it is given the chance.” No? Ah well. Despite having read numerous books on NuLab I still haven’t a clue what the “Third Way” is, apart from being an old slogan of Mussolini’s. Looking it up on Google yeilds a political party and a dog training programme.

This government, its favourite cronies, its upcoming ~~drones~~ bright young things, and its “common sense advice” are all rubbish.

These 313 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 7:37pm GMT Permanent link.

Little Shaver »

Peter Mandelson.

Good job he lost the moustache.

Image from the highly recommended Guacamoleville.

These 13 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 7:51pm GMT Permanent link.

Who'd A Thunk It? »

Ken MacLeod gets a recommendation from an unlikely source. Ouch!.

These 10 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 8:04pm GMT Permanent link.

Friday, 30 July 2004

Never Say Never »

Pretty dire piece in today’s Torygraph How Orwell misread the sporting spirit by Brendan Gallagher, whose essays on Le Tour were usually very entertaining.

George Orwell wasn’t wrong about much but he was way off beam with his famously jaundiced view of sport. In 1941, with war waging and Britain contemplating a grim future, he wrote: “Serious sport has nothing to do with fair play, it is bound up with hatred and jealousy, boastfulness, disregard of all the rules and sadistic pleasure in unnecessary violence. In other words it is war minus the shooting.”

The words of a man who never played competitive sport — a perplexed observer.

To which I can but observe two things: Orwell fought in a war (in Spain), so he had the advantage of knowing at least one half of the simile, and he “never played competitive sport"? The camera lies again.

These 63 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 12:58pm GMT Permanent link.

Oh, Alright Then »

Many happy returns to John Band and ’Rocky’ Cuthbertson whose blogs have reached the venerable ages of one and two respectively.

These 21 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 4:18pm GMT Permanent link.

No IDea »

BBC: ID card plans ‘badly thought out’. The Scotsman: Blunkett ban on ID card finance info.

HOME Secretary David Blunkett is refusing to publish full details of finances behind the controversial national identity scheme, despite recommendations today from an influential committee of MPs. …

“We are concerned by the lack of clarity and definition on key elements of the scheme and its future operation and by the lack of openness in the procurement process,” the report said.

And the Telegraph goes further: MPs scathing over plans for national ID cards.

Nor is The Register happy: a bad idea, but we’ll do it anyway.

Many of the concerns raised in the report mirror those reported in The Register. The MPs said the cards could make identity fraud easier in cases where cards were not inspected in detail. They also expressed concern about function creep, and the degree of access MI5 and MI6 would have to the database.

Shadow Home Secretary David Davis told The Independent: “It is extremely disturbing that decisions on ID cards are being taken in secret. ID cards raise complex questions of civil liberties so of all of the policy decisions taken in secret, ID cards shouldn’t be one of them.”

However, in apparent defiance of its own findings, the report broadly supports the introduction of a national identity register and identity card. The general sentiment is that ID cards are OK, but the government must proceed with caution.

My emphasis. Typical David Blunkett — a crazy half-baked idea, implemented in secret, and with very little evidence of competence.

These 63 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 4:50pm GMT Permanent link.

Francis Crick »

I’ve been thinking about posting on Francis Crick, but really Norm has links to most decent obits, and some nice observations too.

I like the concluding paragraph in the Telegraph, which is a testament to collaboration.

Indeed, he should become the patron saint of late-starters. For his first 36 years, Crick was a mediocrity. On the day he met Watson he had not even earned a PhD, let alone made a discovery or a reputation. Yet the next 50 years saw such a torrent of ideas, insights and discoveries as may never fall to one man again.

These 36 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 5:16pm GMT Permanent link.

Smart Sheep »

One academic area I’m interested in that I don’t think gets enough attention is animal cognition. Animals — most vertebrates anyway — are smarter than we like to think. I suspect what seems like a trivial, even sentimental question may have profound consequences. New Scientist is a serious publication, yet a few years ago I’d have dismissed an article like ET first contact ‘within 20 years’ as fanciful. Now, we’re starting to get data on factors in the Drake Equation. (I love the Drake equation: it’s a real world synthesis of astronomy, geology, chemistry, evolutionary biology, and possibly psychology and sociology. To a dilettante like me, it’s crack cocaine.) In the foreseeable future, we ought to have tolerable estimates on the “fraction of those stars with planetary systems” and the “number of planets, per solar system, with an environment suitable for life.” The “fraction of suitable planets on which life actually appears” may never be known. On the other hand, I’ve always considered the “fraction of life bearing planets on which intelligent life emerges” to be vanishing small. Intelligence does not seem to evolutionarily useful. Most species get by without it.

However, I’m starting to think that intelligence is less of a leap and less unique than we’ve flattered ourselves. Stories like Crafty sheep conquer cattle grids show that mammals are adept at problem solving, they just need motivation.

I agree with Chris Brooke who puts it like a professional philosopher (not surprisingly, because that’s what he is).

Testing things on animals is something to be bothered about. The Enlightenment of Edward Tyson, Jean-Jacques Rousseau and the splendid Lord Monboddo was one that was terribly interested in the relationship between great apes and human beings, and I don’t really go along with SIAW’s attempt to paint the whole animal rights movement as thoroughly anti-Enlightenment. John Gray put it best, I think, when he said (something like this), that great apes are often the best subjects of animal testing because of the extent to which they’re like human beings, but to the exactly the same extent to which they’re like human beings, they shouldn’t be the subjects of animal testing. There is an important and a difficult ethical debate to have about animals being used — both for scientific research and for food — but that debate has got to be a democratic one, and democratic debate isn’t possible when firebombs are going off and contractors and researchers are being criminally intimidated.

A less impressive professional philosopher is Peter Singer in the Guardian today.

Yet in comparison to the funds that go into research using animals, the amount spent on developing alternatives is still very small.

This is a completely irrelevant point. Public funding is going to be directed at research which will produce useful drugs; while private funding will be directed toward producing profitable commodities (these ends may of course be the same). Research into research methods is always a sideline.

In a society that continues to eat meat, however, [total abolition of all animal research] is an unrealistic goal. If people think that their enjoyment of the taste of animal flesh is sufficient reason to confine millions of animals in horrific factory farms, transport them to slaughterhouses and then kill them, why would they reject the use of relatively smaller numbers of animals in experiments designed to find cures for major diseases?

Perhaps unrealistically, I think there is a possible solution in less meat-eating all round. I’m a vegetarian, but I have much less of a problem with killing than with factory farming and the conditions animals are brought up in. Anyway, I think that, in this country, we are a lot more humane than we might be. Yet again, I find this government weak and confused.

But in every other way, this Government is encouraging the animal rights groups with irrational legislation. The draft animal welfare Bill published last week panders to the ludicrous British obsession with the cute and cuddly. The hunting Bill pretends to protect fluffy foxes, but they will be killed in other ways.

(My emphasis.) Alice Thomson in the Telegraph co-incidentally writing about civil disobedience. Surprisingly, my sympathies here are with the Countryside Alliance. It’s tough being a pro-hunting vegetarian.

I can’t be the first blogger to suffer from ‘subject creep’ where a post on one thing moves through several others.

These 419 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 6:52pm GMT Permanent link.

Fahrenheit 991 »

I asked why we bother and then admitted that Darren Campbell disagreed with me. As a distance runner myself, I don’t get excited about sprinters, but London tonight saw Asafa Powell beat Maurice Greene in the 100m final (9.91s to 9.97s); no British athlete made the final, let alone came close to 10.0s.

I’ve little time for Mo Greene. I hate his strutting over-confidence, his god-bothering kneeling sessions at the end of every race he wins, his GOAT (Greatest of all Time) tattoo, the way he walks like he spent the last 24 hours on horseback. But Kim Collins, whom I have enthused about, couldn’t do better than fifth or break 10s tonight, and Powell looks very very like an Olympic champion. So, disregarding a few issues, Greene can do little wrong. (But if you gamble, he’ll be over priced to win gold.)

As a distance runner, I’m so happy that Gebrselaisse won tonight. I’m also happy that Craig Mottram (no relation AFAIK to Buster, the NF supporting tennis player) became the third (ahem!) white man to run 5000m under 13 minutes tonight. A bloody brave and confident effort, and Haile would have won under any circumstances excepting a fellow Ethiopian or Kenyan on top form. Which is a euphemistic way of saying that I wouldn’t back him in the 10,000m.

Andrew Sullivan (sorry can’t find the link right now) claimed that Great, but there are greater on the BBC site proved anti-American bias. Piffle! Sport has moved on. Merckx won as an amateur (compared to Armstrong) and he raced all year round. Lance is almost a specialist who starts each Tour fresh compared to his rivals. I’m a distance runner myself and my personal hero is Emile Zatopek. (His politics you have to work out for yourselves. He lived in a Communist country, and rose to the rank of Colonel, expending most of his efforts on athletics, yet he also supported (as a celebrity) the “Prague Spring”. ) Zatopek completed the incredible feat of winnning gold in the 5000m, the 10000m, and the Marathon in 1956. No-one now could do that. Individual dominance has been eroded by better training methods. I greatly admire Lance, as I admire Haile, but to ask “is he the greatest?” is only to echo what they ask themselves. It’s not disrespectful, or anti-American, or racist. It’s to attempt to appreciate greatness. As I hope to argue in a future post, high hopes lift us all.

These 410 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 10:36pm GMT Permanent link.

Saturday, 31 July 2004

Big-Hearted Boris »

Stephen Pollard is an Ignorant Git according to Sarah Sands.

The Left-wing commentator Stephen Pollard made a similarly dangerous assumption earlier this week. “Who cares about Lance Armstrong?” he asked. “Cycling is as dull and quaint as curling.”

Well, excuse me, but what would a policy wonk on the Atkins diet know about the torment that propels cyclists?

“Left-wing"? I’m reading (on the recommendation of Jamie) Nick Cohen’s Pretty Straight Guys. I haven’t seen Pollard recommend bringing back the noose for shoplifting, or that women of childbearing age dedicate themselves to breeding heroes for the protection of the Fatherland, or the gassing of gypises, so by New Labour standards, he’s way out left. The ignorant git,though, is to the right of Ms Sands’ friend and colleague.

The reason why Boris Johnson is so loved by liberals owes much to his being a cyclist. He is quite shameless about this. In his forthcoming novel, the main protagonist — a Tory MP dogged by scandal who fails to notice a terrorist attack taking place in front of him — is redeemed by the fact that he rides a bicycle.

I’m going to read that book. Not that Ms Sands is necessarily more enthusiastic about cyclists than Atkins boy.

This is not economic lingo: these are livelihoods, you whippety, illiterate hippy-terrorists. Inwardly righteous, outwardly sweaty and fetishistically obsessed with Lycra, they carry their passions on their sleeve, wandering round offices and homes with bits of wheels and jester shoes.

If you wanted soft-centred sweetness, you are far more likely to find it in a mighty-muscled man driving a Hummer. Why do they want to drive a tank if it isn’t because they have the hearts of cherubs?

I don’t get the logic there, especially as she apparently lives with a “hippy-terrorist.”

Sometimes I ask my husband whether he would like to join me and the children on the school run. He shakes his head, swings his leg over the saddle and calls back: “He who travels fastest, travels alone.”

And I thought the Telegraph was the paper of respectable family life.

These 123 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 10:47pm GMT Permanent link.

Sifting Through Words Like An Archaeologist Through Sand »

Really this is too addictive. WORDCOUNT also here. My only problem with it is that it regards plurals as discrete words, so “strawberry” is ranked 13322, but “strawberries” is ranked 16403, but that’s the fault of the data (and, presumably, the software used to sift it).

These 46 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 11:07pm GMT Permanent link.