March 16, 2002
Trek Follies.
Amygdala, the russet-coated captain, knows his Star Trek and loves what he knows. Here he discusses the work of a woman who doesn't do either.Also, it seems (scroll up) there is a discussion going on about what we all did before blogs. Let's see, I do seem to remember sometimes going to this weird place where there was this really big yellow light in the roof and an intermittent fault in the sprinkler system, but I, like Mr Farber, also remember zines. A slightly closer parallel to blogs were the Amateur Press Associations or "APAs", a sort of paper version of a team blog, in that they usually incorporated comments on the offerings of other members. Once every two months, ours used to come out. Strange days.
Engel takes a train
Bring on the cricket season when we might hear Engel discuss a subject he actually knows something about. While we're waiting, Patrick Crozier takes him on in his new UK Transport blog.Note to anyone just in from the left shore: I do not spend all my time sniping at the Guardian. Sometimes nuclear weapons yield a better tactical solution.
In every day and in every way
my links column will get better and better. The best solution to links stress around is that found by Moira Breen. She invites a different selection of guests to dine at her table every week or so. But to be a society hostess takes work, my dears. One must keep thinking of new and felicitous combinations. Have I really the strength of will to apply myself to this? I think not.At the other extreme, to hold complete open house certainly makes you popular, but a decent conversation becomes impossible in the crowd. Until now the best I compromise I could make has been to perma-link to a bunch of hard-drinking, battle-scarred veterans from the pioneer days of blogging (ah, the glorious days of last November) plus the odd lucky soul who got in by virtue of having a url that is near-impossible to type. (Sort of a reverse Ellis Island.) And I still will do this, because scallywags and tellers of tall tales though some of 'em may be, them's my buddies.
But there are friends as yet unknown out there. And indeed enemies to battle. Furthermore there are a whole bunch of admirable blogs that I have linked to occasionally but whom the winds of chance did not send to my perma-link shore. All these will now find safe harbour in my New Model Army, which in a Cromwellian spirit of efficiency will be listed alphabetically by title. Having done an army metaphor and a navy one in the same sentence, can I work in the Air Force? Piece of cake, old chap. Chocks away!
(I'll put more NMA links in over the next few days, months and millenia and as I remember them. The requirements for entry are kept deliberately vague. Basically, if your name keeps turning up, in you go.)
Revolution is kicking in an open door.
Ben Sheriff has been hard at work google-bombing Marc Herold, with success arriving surprisingly soon. But how long before the googlefascist reactionaries strike back with repressive countermeasures?
Wherefore art thou Nielsen Hayden?
The mysterious Electrolite writes:No, what I said was that my name isn't "Patrick Hayden," apropros of both Nick Denton and Oliver Willis referring to me that way in the last few days. I'm certainly a Patrick. For silly reasons explained at [this compulsory link, don't you dare not click - NS], my last name is Nielsen Hayden.You're right that Avedon Carol isn't a Brit, but she's married to one, she's lived in London for seventeen years, and she's one of the founders and managers of a British civil-liberties organization, Feminists Against Censorship. So her blog probably qualifies at least in part a "British left wing blog," even if she is a "left-winger" who's happy to ally herself with libertarians on a whole range of issues. (If I recall correctly, a couple of her essays have been published as pamphlets by the (British) Libertarian Alliance.)
Welcome, stranger
to Junius, the first British left wing blog I have ever seen, although that may just be my ignorance. Blogster Chris Bertram doesn't let any consideration of party stop him flaming the Guardian's George Monibot.Junius links to Electrolite which is a US blog with a similar liberal (US sense) but anti-idiotarian perspective. (Although the author* has just said that "I'll certainly never again vote for a Democrat who supports the SSSCA or anything like it. Which raises the very real possibility that there won't be a Democrat I can vote for in 2004.") Anyway, Electrolite cites lots of liberal (may the ghost of Adam Smith haunt you until you give us back our stolen name!) US bloggers such as Ted Barlow, Avedon Carol, Charles Dodgson, Gary Farber, Avram Grumer, Glenn Kinen and Ginger Stampley. But Mr Betram is the only Brit in the list. I'll look a right twit if it turns out he's from Elk City, Oklahoma.
*whose name is hidden somewhere in the funky graphics. It's not Patrick.
I am bemused to note
that The New Light of Myanmar, being the official organ of whichever regime is in power there now (see below) as well as red-hot stories like "General Than Swe sends felicitations to Mauritius" runs a chat room. Various indications suggest it concentrates on fashion, which is only prudent when you don't know who is sitting in the big chair today. At the time of writing, however, it consists of a grey rectangle within a white rectangle. All you Burmese fashion fanatics let me know how you get on.
Voodoo in Burma.
The Guardian relates the strange happenings in Zimbabwe's Asian equivalent, Burma. The moribund 92 year-old despot Ne Win has been detained not, unfortunately, by anyone much nicer than himself, but merely by a younger group of equally corrupt generals. Astrologers and practitioners of voodoo hover at his deathbed.
Told you he was the real Blair.
Google admits bloggers are masters of the universe.I wonder how well this story, and Ken Layne's gasp of awe on discovering that he was No. 1 Ken in the world are doing in Blogdex? Answer: not there yet, but I predict they will run.
Now I'm going to say something that will cause you all great pain. Sit down. Take a deep breath. Here it comes: we are all having tremendous fun here, but the fact that Google does this shows its deficiencies as a search engine.
March 15, 2002
It needs to be said.
Midwest Conservative Journal quotes a Buckley column on the evasive nonsense coming from an American Catholic bishop guilty of sex abuse, and the bland fudging of the issues coming from his superiors. Of painful interest to us Catholics. Sure, some of these accusations come from gold-diggers. But not all. Someone in the hierarchy must get a grip of the situation before yet more harm is done.
As well as carrying out the great work
of bombing Marc Herold's rubbishy casualty figures for the war in Afghanistan, Iain Murray has no fear of controversy in other matters:After winning some substantial victories (Savannah, Camden), Cornwallis made a strategic mistake and found himself besieged and outnumbered 2 to 1 by the Franco-American forces (you'd never know he was outnumbered from the way the victory is presented). I don't think General Washington would call the British troops during the Revolution "inadequate".Him. Him. Murray. Not me. Him!The War of 1812 was a draw (just take a look at the list of battles here). Our "inadequate" soldiers torched the US Capital (must do one of those tours one of these days), despite the fact that our best soldiers and generals were in Spain. If Jackson had had to face any of Wellington's decent commanders instead of Lord Longford's ancestor, then the Battle of New Orleans might have been a bit different.
Once upon a time a seat in the House of Lords
meant something, even if it was only that one of your ancestors was a musclebound oaf capable of riding a horse in fifth gear while holding a lance the size of a telegraph pole. I have no idea whether the person calling himself Lord Lipsey has that sort of ancestry, or whether he is merely a creature of Tony Blair. But whichever, he's a patronizing git. This House of Lords Parliamentary Question on pro-Euro bias at the BBC shows why.Lord Pearson (of whom I also know little, but he appears to think he has duties beyond that of tittering as he dismisses serious complaints, which is all Lipsey does for his money) spoke. He cites a series of media monitoring reports saying that the Eurosceptic case is shamefully under-reported by the BBC. He cites the length and detail of the reports with several damning numerical comparisons. He cites the eminence and experience of the writers, showing that they are not mere hacks but people with a reputation to maintain. He cites the charter of the BBC which promises that no significant strand of opinion should go unrepresented, and reminds his hearers that the proportion who wish to leave the EU has never dropped below 40% and has sometimes crossed the 50% line.
And how does Lord Liposuction respond? Hey, he has a good laugh at how all those 40% are old fogeys muttering in pubs, so they don't count. Then he says, yeah, well, people are always moaning about the BBC. Did it meself, mate. Finally he opines that any report Pearson commissions would say the moon was made of green cheese just to get the money. And that's it. That was Her Majesty's Government responding to a Parliamentary Question.
UPDATE & SKID MARKS. Actually, no it wasn't. I was wrong: I am informed that Lord Lipsey was not speaking for the government but for himself. Baroness Blackstone replied on behalf of the government. I still don't think much of Lipsey's manners, or his complacent assumption that his playing to the gallery constitutes a proper response. I assume it's Parliamentary immunity that allows him to claim that the media monitoring firm would say anything for money.
Put this blog in the slow-copiers class.
A reader has e-mailed saying, "I generally download and read your blog off line. I have noticed that your blog copies to disk very slowly compared to other blogs and web pages. Is there anyone you could conveniently ask why this is so?" To be honest, guys, the ones I can most conveniently ask are the computer-literate among you. Anyone know the cause or cure of this phenomenon?
In my heart I'm still fifteen.
Did I ever dream that the day would come when I would say "jolly good" to four Torygraph opinion pieces in quick succession?But really I'm 37. That's 37, three-seven, Captain Heinrichs, not "36 and wants to be one year older" as you so mischievously suggest. Auspicious Echidna not Dubious Dingo. My true Blue Peter presenters are Valerie Singleton, John Noakes and Peter Purves and my lucky Dr Who is John Pertwee. (That last sentence can only really be understood by British readers, and the Dingos amongst you are already sharpening your crayons to press the heretical claims of Lesley Judd.)
DISBELIEVING, GOBSMACKED UPDATE ...and if at the age of fifteen I had entertained, as a joke, the possibility that I might praise an entire series of Telegraph op-eds, never, never would I have dreamed that I might praise a whole pageful of wise commentary from The Sun. But I do. (Link found in Peter Briffa's Public Interest.
Shock admission by Blair.
No, nothing to do with Stephen Byers, it's the real one I'm talking about. I hardly know how to tell you this. No favoured Son of the Echidna he; he actually came into this world in 1965, the Year of the Dingo. Oh dear. The dingo. Lucky number: 3, lucky bodily organ: lower intestine. But as he says himself, "It could be worse. Imagine if I was born in 1967 -- the Year the Dingo Stole my Baby."
Oh, boy, now I've gone and annoyed everyone.
Clearly few of you have been as deeply conditioned to accept a determinedly wholesome and comforting view of nature as I have. Didn't you go to Brownies and get your bird watching badges? Didn't you pore over the big round diagram in Our Wonderful World, the one with circular arrows showing the marvellous economy, interconnectedness and ingenuity of the animal and vegetable kingdoms? Didn't you wipe away a tear at the "Circle of Life" song in The Lion King? I meant it as unalloyed praise, O you stern and unforgiving children of the Enlightenment! Little birds really do eat the seeds in one place and excrete them in another and so contribute to cross-pollination and genetic diversity and hybrid vigour and all that stuff. They do, they do, they do! Without them each cluster of plants would become genetically isolated, inbred, diminishingly fertile and vulnerable to disease. Like a blog deprived of its flow of life-giving e-mails.On second thoughts though, it would probably have been better to go on about bees carrying pollen in their furry legs. I just thought of the birds first. And the p-word followed naturally and was - repentant sniff - likely to raise a laugh. Not the sort of laugh that renders the whole thing ironic, you understand; just a pathetic little laugh that wrongly claimed to have merit by its mere presence.
March 14, 2002
Telepathy?
Mark Byron had almost the same thoughts about Mugabe's eventual fate (see Wednesday 13th, "Why should I give it back...") as I did. Also we both got the BBC Google bomb thing, and just about simultaneously if I've got the time difference right. But the whole point of that is - so did everybody. Still, one must keep an open mind. I'm now thinking very hard about lunch and if he suddenly starts wanting breakfast then That Proves It.
Blogging time nearly up and not a single serious story.
And that's the way it's going to stay today, because I am not in the mood for the real world. Delve deep into the sweetest little Tim Blair teaser line you ever did see and you will discover that the man is 37. What a splendid age to be. It means he was born in 1964, the Year of the Echidna according to the mystic chronology of his tribe. Persons born in this auspicious year are handsome yet modest, courageous yet discreet, intelligent yet in touch with their inner Ferrari, sexy yet chaste, sexy yet sexy, bonny yet blythe, good yet not necessarily gay. Guess my age.
No, no, no!
Moira Breen, apropos of something else says, "I note the presence of the excellent Myria, whom we should all harass into starting her own blog." On the contrary, the excellent Myria, along with Alex Bensky, Capt J M Heinrichs, Alan Freeman and a whole load of other indefatigable letter writers should be offered vast bribes to not blog. They are like the little birds flying from site to site, eating little seeds of wisdom at one and excreting seed-rich poo* at another. Forsooth, woman! Wouldst thou clip their little wings?*this is an environmentally sound simile guaranteed 100% free of rude bits. Poo promotes fertility. Poo carries out mysterious but vital functions of cross-fertilization and genetic mixing. Poo is a Good Thing. What is it with me and toilets today? I feel fine, thank you. Don't write in.
Boris on the toilet.
How can I be so low? How can I be so vulgar as to write headlines like that? I feel bad about it, I really do. Here's a sharp article by Boris Johnston slagging off the way the BBC is fast going down the pan.
The labours of Dawson.
I've just noticed that as well as all the stuff about Watson (the DNA one and it seems a right little schemer, which I'd also heard elsewhere), Bruni, Coulter and not quite enough of yer actual Dawson, our man has the cutest little Sisy-you know who, greek chap eternally punished for cheating death-phean cartoon. Quite what poor Dawson regards himself as being punished for remains obscure, or perhaps he refers only to the rigours of the anti-idiotarian struggle.(It may have been there a while unnoticed by me, since my computer window tends to chop off that bit of the page.)
So I was right.
"Sure enough," writes Gary Wimsett, "Google bomb story and tipping blog story #1 and #2 on blogdex . . ."
March 13, 2002
So I was wrong.
The Google-bomb story doesn't appear on the Blogdex front page at all. (Though it will, Oscar, it will.) But I did find this lovely story about the unexpected images produced by a digital camera fished out of a pond.
Everybody, but everybody
must have linked to this BBC News 24 story entitled Google gets bombed. It quaintly mentions us "many hundreds" of writers of online journals. Perhaps the surge of links to this has something to do with the fact that I have not been able to see any site ending with .blogspot.com all day. But I post on bravely, sending my messages into the unresponding dark. The spirit of Voyager lives on!
Skulduggery in TV-land.
Teams of codebreakers. Secret laboratories... Murdoch company in $1bn TV piracy row.
One of Zanu-PF's legion of new members
tells us what prompted his decision to join Mugabe's party. Trevor Ncube writes in the Guardian.
High praise is due
the perceptive Times sub-editor who put these two letters about EU arrest warrants, one from a man whose parents came to this country from Nazi Germany, right next to the letter demanding that metrication be enforced by law that I posted just now. The point was subtly made, friend, but I got it and so will others.
Give 'em a centimetre, and they'll take a kilometre.
There are matters of great moment on the Times front page today, most of them too depressing to blog. I can just about cope with the level of outrage I feel over this letter on the subject of metrication. Someone once said that men should fight for the law as they fight for their city wall. This jack-in-office has a slightly different conception of the law. It is to be a "support" for enforcing social change. The legal persecution of greengrocers who sell bananas in pounds is to be regretted (I suppose we should be grateful for that much), but only because it generates opposition and puts money in the pockets of lawyers. In other words the law is no more than a cattle prod to be used or witheld in so far as it is effective or ineffective in pushing men in the desired direction. And people wonder why the law is no longer revered, and why the law abiding citizen is regarded as a mug.
March 12, 2002
Yo, righteous brother!
Stop blaming Oxbridge for each year's Laura Spences says Peter Jones. Only he doesn't go far enough. Why should the Oxbridge selectors - or the selectors for any university in any country - be obliged to make ludicrous speculations about which candidate might have been the best had they grown up in a fictional world. I see no difference in arbitrariness between that form of hunch and the traditional "Good Lord, are you old Binky Frobisher's boy? How time flies!"; except that modern criteria select for the louche and the self-pitying whereas the old criteria favoured those with virtues useful in time of war.
Strange but true: Ted Rall haunts my computer.
When I become a management guru I shall coin a special term for facts independently discovered by a fair proportion of the human race yet held back from their destiny as bricks in the House of Knowledge because only mighty gurus like me think it worthwhile to communicate them. One example is that it is much harder to bury a dead cat than you think. Another is that almost any conceivable misspelling of the word "Ceausescu" gets you hundreds of search results. For instance "Caecescu" took me to a shitty (the word is merely accurate) but otherwise moderately amusing article by Ted Rall describing his adventures on the Silk Road. Next to it in Mr Rall's cupboard of goodies sat this oddity called "The Last Six Minutes of Flight 411". I am a shy and timid soul, unlike Jim Treacher. Though cheering on the hunters, I did not follow every turn of the chase as the hounds closed in on their prey. Thus I do not know whether everyone else has already linked to this and drawn enjoyably unfair conclusions from it, given that it must surely pre-date September 11 2001. Can I be the first, please? OK, so I don't want to declare air crash jokes verboten and never get to see "Airplane" again - but this article does show the way Rall's humour has been running for years.
Next stop, Algeria.
When the expected wave of murder failed to materialise I began to think I had been too pessimistic about Zimbabwe. This Times article makes me think I was right first time. Mesdames and Messieurs, faites vos jeux! Which is it to be: Romania (Ceausescu lifts off from roof while mob break down door, captured and shot with wife a few days later); Philippines (Marcos retains last shred of humanity by refraining from opening fire on mob, legs it with wife and 0.0001% of wife's shoe collection, dies in bed.) Or - and this is the one I fear - Algeria. (Election result overridden. Civil war murderous even by the standards of civil wars. Ruling junta still in power, but don't bet on them dying in bed.)
March 11, 2002
Sunday bloggers not on the job.
Airstrip One asks why haven't we noticed the courageous Observer article he links to? The article calls for the NHS to be scrapped. It says that the NHS is as irredeemable as the Soviet economy, and even blames them for letting medical mass-murderer Dr Harold Shipman get away with his crimes for so long. And the author is not some merc but Anthony Browne, the paper's own health editor.
I must have been nuts
when I made the last post. Demented. Deranged. Did I really say that the Afghans had nothing worth stealing? They got rugs! I'd plunder them in a second if the present owners weren't so heavily armed. The good news, as Mrs Random Jottings reminds us, is that plundering investors are encouraging refugees to make more of them for sale so the refugees get richer and I get poorer. At least, though, I need not risk the AK-47s but can buy beautiful rugs at Liberty's as the good Lord surely always intended me to do.Well, maybe not Liberty's. Not unless anyone really makes the tips jar ring. Little mutated salt-bags from IKEA maybe. A lesser destiny, but better than no rug at all.
We don't need no education.
A Mr Martyn Clayton has written an article for The Teacher magazine (House mag for the National Union of Teachers) called "Learning for Life". One particular phrase expressed a certain mindset very well:"Foreign investors are more concerned about plundering the vast cheap labour force than supporting public sector workers. Even if peace is maintained and promised foreign investment materialises, education workers face a long struggle."
Plundering. I like that. The procedure relating to the labour force that you are trying to describe, Mr Clayton, is expressed by those more widely versed in economics (i.e. anyone not actually a Stalinist) as "giving them jobs." Take it slowly now, and you'll understand in time. Plunder is when you steal people's stuff. Foreign investors do not come all the way to rat-infested Kabul in order to steal from the vast cheap Afghan labour force. If you cannot bring yourself to believe that this is because foreign investors are nice guys, believe it because the vast cheap Afghan labour force have nothing worth stealing, unless you have a taste for paraffin heaters adapted to work on goats' urine. The only thing the vast (is it vast? Pretty titchy, I'd have thought, even if you brought the women in) cheap Afghan labour force have that a foreign investor might want is their labour. And then the workers are so uneducated - as you yourself describe - and so unaccustomed to modern ways that it is close to being an act of charity to employ them at all. So they aren't paid what you are, only what you deserve to be.
Bizarre to record, after all that "plunder" talk he seems to think that "promised foreign investment" is a good thing, to be bracketed with peace and all. Perhaps he really does think foreign investment consists of, or ought to consist of, "supporting public sector workers." Wonderful what strange conclusions that mindset can bring about.
"Another damned, thick square book!
Always scribble, scribble, scribble! Eh! Mr Gibbon?" Ken Layne muses on the writer's lot.
March 10, 2002
Pic of me
over on Samizdata. I must with bowed head admit that I still haven't managed to extract that picture of Dawson. Who, by the way, is cracking open the champagne. Congratulations to Claire!LATER: a helpful person has sent me the pictures from Quasipundit. Thanks, amigo! And here they are. Dawson himself had flagged them up earlier, but when I tried to look I got this Quasipundit forum which obviously makes reference to the pictures but seemed to be suggesting that certain well-respected bloggers were either hummingbirds, teddybears or near-naked ladies sprouting batwings. I did not dare to speculate who was which.
No news is good news?
I haven't the heart to post the headlines from Israel this morning. But am I being over-optimistic in attributing the absence of reports from India to an improvement in the situation there? Or are the papers just bored of massacres?
Had lunch
with Joanne Jacobs, her daughter and a bunch of Samizdatans yesterday. Ken Layne, Matt Welch, eat your hearts out.
"I don't do outrage,"
says Emmanuel Goldstein of Airstrip One, "detached cynicism is my affection." So try some outrage, baby. My favourite flavour is "wilfully keeping the poor of the world from making an honest living just to buy the temporary favour of voters in marginal states." I get it sent in from the Third World.