I think it’s a measure of the success of this thing that my phone won’t stop ringing when the Euston Manifesto site goes down. I even missed two calls while Norm was on the phone to me about it. It’s not a problem with the site itself or a targeted attack; all Websites at our host’s datacentre are down. I don’t know when they’ll be back, but I do know they aren’t there now so there’s no need to ring me.
Has the Euston Manifesto brought another new blog into the world?
A perk of running this site is receiving nice presents from readers / freebies from corporate shills—not that any of them sway my editorial judgment at all, as I sit here watching the Web on my Mitsubishi monitor, eating Bahlsen’s tasty Choco Leibniz.
Recently, in response to one of my posts here, the proprietor of this fine online dog biscuit emporium gave me a huge Lastolite photographic reflector with which I took this not-very-good picture of a very good Sunday afternoon at Richard and Kate’s delightful country residence. (It looks suspiciously like they and their guests are posing for a new thirtysomething US comedy series.)
Today someone sent me a copy of the latest album by the Flaming Lips. I don’t know who because there’s no accompanying note, but thank you. No collection of contemporary music is complete without this distinctive and magical collection of whimsy and harmony.
This is still a favourite PooterGeek post, and the Argus keeps coming up with more gems, though sadly I don’t always have my camera with me.
Thank you to Pete in the comments and to everyone else who’s been sending kind wishes. It’s good to be alive on days like these. I hope eventually everyone will be just as free to say in public how they think we should live in the world we share. It’s a precious gift and one I’m not ashamed to say is worth fighting for.
Fear not, my people. The trouser jokes will return.
Yes, I’m busy and I hope regular readers will be patient with me. As Norm pointed out to me earlier today, the fourth third hit on Google for the word “Euston” is the Euston Manifesto.
Worryingly, this blog, which has thrived on stories of my loserhood, is being disrupted by an improbable success. According to many nervous commentators, normal service will be resumed soon.
This a is funny post about Grumpy Old Men.
Just to demonstrate that the loonies attacking the Euston Manifesto aren’t exclusively Left-wing:
“Does it say anything that Jews do not have to wiped off the face of the earth?
I figured not.
Even “enlightened” Eurolefties are psychotic Nazi Jew-haters.”
I’ve been on the Net for a long, long time but, until this document went public, I’ve never read so much unhinged craziness in such a short space of time—and so much of it aimed personally at me. Apparently my philosophical outlook is fatally undermined by my music being crap. There’s also something exquisitely absurd about the supposed socialist who dismissed my views on the grounds that I’m unemployed.
Yesterday someone on a Leftie blog accused me of inventing slurs in an effort to discredit the Left. This accusation appeared in a thread where the Euston Manifesto was compared to the manifesto of the Nazi Party—with a link to the original obviously. People, it’s not just that I “couldn’t make it up”; I physically don’t have enough time to make it up. I mean, there are pages and pages of this stuff out there already and the thing’s only five days old. I’m going to wake up one morning in a month or so and find my kitchen occupied by a sit-in.
I realise this isn’t an original observation, but the blogosphere is like a trestle table at the global village fete, creaking under the weight of fruitcakes.
Following on from my last post about young people and music, this is funny.
[via Mudbath]
I’m in a Brighton musical instrument shop looking for a couple of brackets for my keyboard stand. There’s a teenager sitting slouched at one of the digital pianos in sweats and a baggy jacket. He’s wearing a mesh baseball cap and through it you can see that his buzz-cut hair is dyed a colour Eminem would probably like.
As I wander over he turns to one of the sales staff and starts yammering at him, “How many piano sonatas do you think Liszt wrote, eh? How many? Go on. Guess! One. Amazing innit?”
Then he starts playing excerpts.
The salesman asks, “And do you want to play pop music on it as well?”
Sonata-boy is now absent-mindedly quoting Chopin.
“Nah. I only do classical. And Elton John.”
In the past few days, for some strange reason, people who have never met me before have been accusing me of being a middle-aged, white, public-schoolboy, “hebe” second-rate academic.
“Second-rate academic”? I dream of being a second-rate academic! I can’t even get a job washing test-tubes.
Goodness, I’m enjoying this.
These three blogs have all drawn attention to the dichotomy between the strange habits of angry Left-wingers online as reported by The Washington Post and the tone and content of the Euston Manifesto. There is something deliciously satisfying about seeing the wilfully stupid wax hysterical at the thought of a few people meeting in a pub, writing down what they think about the world, and then asking some other people if they’d like to talk about it. Though, yes, occasionally there’s a twinge of pity for those driven mad by being caught on the wrong side of history—as you’d feel watching a rabid dog chew at its own leg.
Norman Kember, former hostage, interviewed on BBC Radio 4:
“They were brave, but I disagree with their profession… It’s ironic isn’t it?: You go as a peace activist and you’re rescued by the SAS.“
Writing in Inside Higher Ed, Scot McLemee proposes that people who use mobile phones in libraries should be shot with Taser guns, the pussy.
One of my first email messages today was a piece of spam from a NO2ID campaigner.
Today, 13Apr06, we—bloggers, academics, campaigners, writers, scientists, journalists, citizens—launch the Euston Manifesto. With this document we hope to publicly assert our progressive, democratic, egalitarian, internationalist principles in the face of recent attacks upon them from the Right and, to our dismay, the Left.
Many of us are of the Left, but we come from across the range of political positions. We are not founding a political party. There were differences amongst us over Western military intervention in Iraq. Our declaration is not definitive, final, or perfect; it is, we hope, the beginning of a renewed debate, grounded in a common set of progressive values. You can read and sign the document at our Website where donations towards our costs are also welcome.
Comments are closed on this announcement alone because that is all this post is: an announcement. We simply want to launch this movement in a co-ordinated way and make sure there is time for people to understand exactly what we stand for before criticising it. We welcome discussion of the Euston Manifesto across blogs, in the media, and in the public world and intend that the Euston Manifesto Group, the organisation founded upon the manifesto’s principles, will promote such debate by organising meetings, sponsoring seminars, and publishing ideas.
…when I heard this evening’s BBC Radio 4 news describe the September 11 attacks on New York as a “terrorist outrage”. Did anyone else catch that or were the vapours rising from my Matey causing me to hallucinate?
More than once in the past month I have been accused of lacking imagination and/or tending toward the superficial in my feelings for Nigella Lawson. I’d like to take this opportunity of a lull in posting here to put on the record that I fancied her before pretty much everyone. Had I been aware of Nigella’s goddessness at the age of four, my feelings would have been stronger even than the strange and unrequited adoration of Camilla Gartmore from the year below at Godolphin and Latymer. I’m sure I’m not alone in confessing that it was Nigella’s fine mind that first entranced me—no Englishman with a love of his native tongue could resist her articles. Further, not having owned a television for years, I can honestly say that I still haven’t even seen Nigella do suggestive things with food on a TV screen. My devotion is pure.
I hope that this statement will now put an end to the slanders.
Wow. A version of My Way I don’t feel the urge to turn off half way through. And check out the other trailer for Happy Feet too.
There’s a fascinating rumble going on at Tim Worstall’s place about legal status of certain battlefield practices. Here’s the quote from a Telegraph article that Tim set it off with:
Lt Col Glyn Harper, a professor at the New Zealand army’s Military Studies Institute, who co-authored the book, In the Face of the Enemy, said that on one occasion Sgt Hulme donned a German paratrooper’s smock, climbed up behind a nest of enemy snipers, and pretended to be part of their group.
“He shot the leader first, and as the other four snipers looked around to see where the shot had come from, Hulme also turned his head as if searching for the shooter,” the book says.
“Then he shot and killed two more.” He shot the other two as they tried to leave.
“Hulme deserved the VC for his outstanding bravery, but he shouldn’t have done what he did in disguising himself.”
Other academics have supported the book’s claims. Peter Wills, the deputy director of the Centre for Peace Studies at Auckland University, said Sgt Hulme’s actions were “unsanctioned murder”.
One of the ads I saw on Tim’s site while reading this is for the “digital” version of the Guardian which seems to be a sort of online facsimile of the printed edition that you can browse for a fee. Yes, it includes the photos and layout, but for many of us it lacks an essential part of the appeal of the paper version: the option to throw it (three-or-four times a day) into the far corner of the room in which you are reading it, shouting, “Fuck off!”
Before I set about some other duties, I pause to browse the blogs and bitch about them (affectionately of course).
On the subject of lazy blogging, if Guido is going to complain about substandard satire on the TV, he needs to get some of his own material or at the very least put me on his blogroll before he shamelessly recycles my finds in his posts.
Chris shouldn’t let his obsession with managers blind him to the truth about democracy. In dismissing the New Conservatives’ child poverty “policy”, he writes:
“That there are trade-offs and choices in policy is a fact the managerialists are desperate to avoid.”
No. It’s a fact that voters are desperate to avoid. Plenty of us can’t even face that there are trade-offs and choices in to be made in our own lives, never mind in government policy—a shortcoming that, for example, Ocean Finance is only to happy to exploit. [You can google them for yourself; I’m certainly not linking to the bastards.]
Grammar Puss has done two profoundly unwise things:
You seduce someone with Ella Fitzgerald singing Cole Porter. Applying the Wedding Present (who must be in the top ten of Bands Epitomizing Everything That’s Wrong with Indie Rock) to the erogenous parts of someone’s ears is like massaging sump oil into their bits.
And now, in honour of a far-too-frequent reader of PooterGeek, the Drunken Choir of the Enlightenment sing their hit jingle Happy Birthday [Get A Life] [MP3 729Kb].
Now on The Learning Curve I’m going to talk to Peter Warden, the Head of the Winnie Mandela Community School, about the transformation in its fortunes that he presided over and about his upcoming role as the leader of a new a new government initiative to roll out his exciting methods across a range of failing inner city schools. Peter, welcome to the studio and congratulations on your new appointment.
Thank you, Libby
Perhaps you could explain to our listeners how you managed to achieve such a striking turnaround at Winnie Mandela?
Well, for a long time WiMa as we call it had suffered from indiscipline and low exam performance. In particular there was a macho culture of violence and chronic inter-ethnic tension between members of the various non-European and white British communities within the school. We—myself and my team on the staff—tackled these problems with a whole range of integrated and complementary pastoral approaches. Ultimately though it was one measure in particular that brought all of these threads together in a knitted whole.
And what was that?
We sponsored a studious African boy to travel from his home in Rumbabwe to study with us.
And this boy presumably was a catalyst for improvements in the school, giving stakeholders a fundraising goal, setting an example by his hard work, offering the students an understanding of how, given even their relatively deprivation, there were many many others in this world less fortunate than themselves?
Well, not exactly, no.
So how did he help the atmosphere in the school?
He gave everybody in the school—black and white, Muslim and Christian, poor and not so poor, chav and rude-boy—someone they could pick on.
Pick on?
Yes. A lot of people are sceptical about school bullying policies. They say that such schemes are an ineffective but conspicuous substitute for real punishment of perpetrators, that those testifying against bullies suffer further stigmatization and violence off school premises having been branded as “grasses”, and that the aim of these schemes is to save teachers from actually having to confront classroom thugs and their often intimidating parents directly. We believe they have failed because what has been lacking up until now is a consensus within school communities about who can and cannot be legitimately bullied.
“Legitimately bullied”?
Punishing so-called “bullies” for attacking other pupils isn’t just an infringement of their human rights. It causes unnecessary disruption to established behaviour patterns and upsets teachers and pupils. It can often lead to greater aggression from those branded in this way. This institutional stigmatization of whole sections of the school community is a serious cause of low self-esteem within the student body. In some cases children who have been, for example, excluded for violence against others vent their inevitable frustration by committing further acts of violence or vandalism—in some cases even burning down their own former schools.
So you have devised a scheme of focused scapegoating?
Exactly. Ntendo, our sponsored scholar, worked very hard and came top of many classes. In this elite position he naturally became something of a target of resentment from the less academically inclined. We on the staff did our best to divert the sense of inferiority his peers—regardless of their racial or religious affiliations—felt and channel their understandable aggression towards him. The results in terms of reduced tension and community spirit were remarkable.
How did Ntendo feel about this?
Well, you know what these Africans are like, he always seemed to have a cheerful smiling face.
One of my toff friends lectures history. She’s been looking for good blogs in her subject area lately and “Geoffrey Chaucer Hath a Blog” is her favourite so far. I can see why. It’s clever and it’s funny. (And even funnier now she has explained some of the jokes to me.) As I am in the process of updating my bookmarks I might even add it to my blogroll.
Might be a bit quiet around here for the next couple of days. I’ve been booked, at extremely short notice, to shoot a wedding—and not in a Kill Bill kind of way.
My legal adviser tells me that all members of the UK Independence Party are sane, sensible, and not closet racists at all. Google tells me that their Isle Of Wight branch’s lilac campaign caravan, the completely non-racistly named “Wight Knight”,
is the seventh hit for a search on Google Images for my name. Why is this?
I have had a lot of nice postcards made from photographs of mine. There are six designs, all printed in full colour (even the black-and-white ones) onto good quality card, and sealed against smudging. Here are the images in the set (click on each image to enlarge it), but the matt-finish litho-prints look even better:
All but one of the designs can be used for your own messages; the black-and-white picture of the happy couple outside the church is a request-for-information for my services as a photographer. And there’s the catch: if you’d like some sets of the cards gratis all you have to do is tell some wedding-planning friends of yours—or any other people you know who’ll be in need of an event photographer—about me and put a card with my contact details into their hands.
Just email me and I’ll send you a free pack of cards.
“We want to get married. I won’t let this woman get away,” Tom Cruise told the German media Monday.
The world famous movie star said he and Katie Holmes, also of Hollywood, were planning to marry this summer. They have been engaged since last June.
Kerron came in for some stick the other day for describing the result of “The” Boat Race as:
“Some Toffs beat Some Other Toffs, Ra!”
It is perhaps a bit harsh. You’d have to extend the definition of “toffs” from “members of the aristocracy” to “members of the ruling classes” or “tall blokes whose parents could afford artificially inflated school fees or house prices, plus really tall blokes from overseas doing ‘tourists’ degrees’ in Management ‘Science'”. I hereby align myself with Kerron’s verdict and look forward to some tit posting a comment here telling me that I’ve done so because I couldn’t get in and “have a chip on my shoulder”.
I remember a bloke writing a book that argued, quite reasonably, that Oxbridge domination of the British establishment was bad for the country and practically every review I read of it (usually by an Oxbridge graduate) seemed to think that pointing out that the author had been rejected by one of those universities demolished its central thesis. Just goes to show how over-rated an Oxbridge education is.
(Anyone remember what the book was called?)
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