My last post was provoked by the continuing gloatiness of Australia’s cricket fans and it linked to a normblog post that looked suspiciously like an example of such behaviour. Truth was he was just being sarky so I’ve changed the link. My apologies to Norm, who isn’t a bad loser—though I very much hope that some kind of England recovery will turn him into one.

More importantly, over the weekend, I also posted about people’s possible misperception of the appearance of the recent victim of the Stockwell police shooting and of one of the “failed” suicide bombers. That post wasn’t intended as a judgement. I have posted before about my my own and others’ difficulties in accurately reading the world around them—and not done so disapprovingly. What interested me in particular about the widely-published security photo is that, even though, on the evidence of the photo itself, the sweatshirt says “New You”, my being told repeatedly that it said “New York” made me see it as saying “New York”. Funny thing is—and this might be the last time I ever link to the words of dsquared—it probably does.

Do you remember a superb Guardian(?) television advertisement in which a skinhead appeared at first to be mugging a city gent with a briefcase, but, as the camera pulled away, we saw that he was actually pushing his “victim” out of the way of a falling pallet of bricks? Strange that it should take a “recently arrived” “American” “obsessive” to point out that The Guardian is employing a new kind of ultra-Right-wing youth. I remember, at the height of the fashion for skinhead politics, fashion, and music in the Midlands, one of my dad’s former teaching colleagues (who later went on to be headmaster of a private school in Pakistan) ironically commenting that he had to feel sorry for the Asian skinheads in his classes. There are quite a few metaphorical “Asian skinheads” living in Britain now and I don’t feel sorry for them at all.