27Feb04 — 0

Another Cat In A Hat

Judith will like this one for two reasons:

  1. it’s about Lyle Lovett,

  2. in typical New Yorker style the article uses the word “début” and retains the e-acute.

The New Yorker is probably the last popular magazine in the English-speaking world where the editors insist on the diaeresis (not umlaut) in “cöoperate”.

The Lovett article comes via Normblog, which has some excellent recent posts, including one about The Passion*, one about suicide bombers and two about Iraq. I realise this is a very small sample upon which to base my hypothesis, but could it be that there’s something Jewish about the Lyle phenomenon?

*Yes, it sounds strange to warn people that an article about a movie of the crucifixion gives away the plot, but this one does.

26Feb04 — 0

The Price is Right

I was chatting with Leasey over lunch about house prices yesterday (as the English do, just after they’ve finished discussing the weather). They are in the news again. What does this mean “on the ground”? Well, I found this bargain for a start. A quarter of million quid for a converted garage in Peckham? I’ll take two.

26Feb04 — 0

Hound Dog

At work today, Wiqqi and I had a chat today about the ongoing Goodhart debate. (Is there a reasonable Left liberal case for arguing that multi-ethnic societies are inherently divided?) Then we pondered the question of exactly how mad Muammar Gaddafi, the Michael Jackson of World heads of state, is. (Does this mean Kim Chong-il is the Elvis of premiers?) The BBC describes how this is, surprisingly, a matter of debate in Libya, too.

The BBC gave me a couple of grim laughs at Libya’s expense in the Radio 4 Midnight News this morning. Firstly, Colin Powell once again gave great quote on the question of the Libyan Prime Minister’s “we were only joking” claim about the country’s admission of responsibility for terrorist acts. Would you feel comfortable if the Secretary of State of the most powerful country in the planet used the phrase “just a little blip that will go away” while discussing you with the World’s press?

My second smirk appeared when the Beeb described the Libyan government’s behaviour in recent history as being “somewhat erratic”.

[Right now I’m laughing at Robin Lustig on the same radio station trying vainly to prod an official of the United Nations to express outrage or even mild surprise at Clare Short’s shocking revelation that people bug his colleagues. Incidentally, do you think it’s deliberate that The World Tonight‘s Web page carries the interestingly misspelled headline “Blunkette to get tough over terror”?]

25Feb04 — 2

Spies Like Us

Claire‘ll have a thing or two to say about this one.

Katharine Gun, formerly of UK snooping centre GCHQ (direct descendant of Bletchley Park), has been acquitted of charges under the Official Secrets Act, having told the World that the US had asked the British to tap the phones of representatives of anti-Iraq war countries.

I am not alone in noticing that, given her outlook on life, she chose a pretty strange job. For example, how many successful spies say things like this?:

“Obviously I’m not prone to leak secrets left, right and centre… but this needed to get out, the public deserved to know what was going on at the time”

It’s alright, chaps; she doesn’t make a habit of leaking; we’ll let her off this time.

And doesn’t this seem a smidgen naïve from a professional spook?:

“I’m just baffled in the 21st century we as human beings are still dropping bombs on each other as a means to resolve issues.”

Obviously we should have taken the Tony Benn approach and just invited Saddam and Slobodan over for a nice cup of tea—instead of getting all shirty and 20th century about things.

Talking of professional spooks, ex-spy and self-publicizing “whistleblower” David Shaylor chimes in in the same BBC report with this:

“If the intelligence services are going to do things that are illegal they have to expect people to whistleblow.”

Omigod. We wouldn’t want members of the intelligence agencies breaking the law on Her Majesty’s service, would we? Where would it end?

25Feb04 — 0

Artistic Licence

You have probably found it difficult to avoid some knowledge of the Paris Hilton affair, even if all you’ve heard about it is from spam offering you the “full, uncut version”. You only need a superficial idea of what she got up to with her boyfriend and a video camera to find this one of the most bizarre and inspired legal defences ever. It’s borderline Wookie.

24Feb04 — 0

Conspicuous Contempt

Murph comments on the “Conspicuous Compassion” question over at Oliver Kamm’s place. I think he’s Australian. He’s probably not English because he is so in touch with his feelings. According to Murph, Diana Spencer was “a selfish simpleton and a tart”—and as for anti-war protestors:

“[M]orons. Never have I seen such a sorrier pack of losers all trying to feed their egos by slandering the people who they know will protect them. The attitude reminded me of a 14 yo girl who hates her father but will show up to the dinner table and eat his food.”

21Feb04 — 0

Oz-fest

I went to an excellent farewell do yesterday evening to say goodbye to J-FK before she flies off to run Australia. Our foursome took a corner of the huge table of guests at a Korean restaurant on the Holloway Road, just a stagger from Highbury and Islington Station.

Airport has a lot of friends who do “strategy” and “policy”, but our group only contained one full-time wonk: Chirpy Cockney Chris (along with Lyn and Sonya). I was briefly sucked into a conversation with someone from the Treasury who found my so-called Left libertarianism interesting, but Claire‘s current activities even more so. (If you mail me, Claire, I’ll tell give you the dirt.)

19Feb04 — 0

Modern Pop Is Rubbish

Things are so bad with British popular music that even my dad has noticed. He watched The Brits and actually took the time on the phone to point it out to me. This article in The Times [sorry, you foreigners will need a subscription] points it out too, ironically by harking back to the days of “BritPop”, as though British bands were successful then. As I have pointed out several times*, objectively—that is to non-journos, not snorting coke in the lavs of a retro-styled cocktail bar in north London in 1995—they weren’t. Check the stats. For all the talk of “Cool Britannia” new British bands didn’t actually sell records in significant numbers anywhere else then either. Except for the Spice Girls. Now our big overseas unit-shifter is Dido. There’s progress.

“One moan was particularly prevalent. What were all those Americans doing there? What with performances by The Black-Eyed Peas, 50 Cent, Outkast, Beyonc,Ai(B, Missy Elliott, Alicia Keys and No Doubt’s Gwen Stefani, the ceremony’s title suddenly failed to make much sense. The days when Blur claimed multiple awards for their works of cockney art-pop, an altogether younger Tony Blair paid tribute to “British music back once again at the top of the world” and Geri Halliwell popped out of a Union Jack minidress seemed long gone.”

Why were so many Americans there? Because they are better than us. Because US record companies value talent, hard work, charisma, strong songwriting and have a clue about black music. They don’t care so much about what’s “cool” either—an obsession here which, sadly, somehow manages to smother originality, British music’s last redeeming feature. Right now, everyone keeps telling me Franz Ferdinand are our next great hope. I rest my case.

*PooterGeek has the number one hit on Google for the phrase “the death of pop music“. Perhaps they mean me?

17Feb04 — 0

Just Like Us

Ultimately, the goal of the work I contributed to in my Master’s thesis (1996) was to find a new computational technique for examining 3-D images. With it, psychiatrists would be able to detect variations in in the structure of human brains (in something called their “torsion”) and identify schizophrenics without having to dissect their heads post mortem, when treatment of the condition is academic.

I turned a mathematical method into some computer programs. with a view to chopping up volumes of human brain from MRI scans. Although my short project was promising, when I finished it I was so much in debt that I couldn’t afford to go back to Oxford to do a PhD continuing what I’d started. (Yes, I know they call them “DPhil”s there.) I got a job instead—a terrible one as it turned out.

About half-an-hour ago I turned on a radio programme (randomly) to find out that the relevant research group in Oxford now had a method for making this particular comparison. They had applied it to normals and schizophrenics and found…

…that there is no significant difference between our brains and theirs.

(You can decide for yourself which of the two populations I belong to.)

16Feb04 — 1

Holy Fucking Hell. What Next?

I should introduce this one by pointing out that, a couple of years ago, having read an excellent article of Prof. Jardine’s about a piece of science history that interested me, I contacted her to ask if she would be interested in working with me on something related. She might not have received my email, but I certainly didn’t receive any acknowledgement of my message from her.

If Black Triangle’s transcript of an edition of Newsnight Review is accurate, it seems I had a lucky escape. Can you imagine what it would be like to be recorded forever in print as having been one of her, er, collaborators?

13Feb04 — 0

Mystorian/Historian

Susan Carruthers, associate professor of history, Rutgers University, New Jersey, US, writes in the Times Higher Educational Supplement [Website down 08:30] about three books on contemporary international affairs. Her contribution to the 30Jan04 edition [not free online] should be given to students as an example of how to smother reason with fashionable polysyllabic flannel. Here are a couple of snippets:

With geopolitical sands shifting underfoot, it is hard to avoid intimations of profound systemic upheaval. But the sensation of living through a pivotal phase has generated much perplexity as to why US imperialism has taken a new territorial turn in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Reading Harvey and Gamble requires less suspension of disbelief… …If the decline and fall of hegemons is a world-systemic inevitability, Harvey nevertheless avoids an over-determined or fatalistic reading of Washington’s recent actions. America’s predicament has been aggravated by its elite’s chronic inability to apportion the fruits of its international accumulation to its own domestic dispossessed. Instead Washington has let “fictitious capital” flourish, sanctioned corporate corruption on a massive scale, and failed to invest in America’s own, desperately needed, infrastructural regeneration.

Usually, however, the THES‘s book reviews are excellent. This week, for example Chandak Sengoopta, Senior Lecturer in history, Birkbeck College, London, gives Peter Lamont’s The Rise of the Indian Rope Trick the second favourable review of it I have read. The style and content of Sengoopta’s commentary are rather different; his article is concise, clear, informative, accurate and witty:

[Lamont’s] book is meticulously researched but addresses a wider readership, avoiding earnestness, jargon and ideological blather. One shudders to imagine what an English professor, waving his regulation copy of Edward Said’s Orientalism might have done to this story.

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