December 2006 Archives
Friday, 01 December 2006
Apology And Correction For Phil Dilks
Although this is a blog, *only* a blog, in fact, I take a certain, shall-I-say, *amateur* pride in getting facts right. I’ve therefore decided to alter my post of 16 February 2006.
I dislike doing this. I’d like records to be kept, and kept reliably. It also puts me - and bloggers generally - at a disadvantage to the printed press: assuming at least one library achives every issue of a paper, subsequent corrections and apologies do not destroy the original story, no matter how much of it was invention.
If I delete something on here: that’s it. It is gone forever. There may be a copy for a time in the Waybackmachine or Google’s cache, but these get revised every so often; so long as there is something on a given page, the latest version of a page will be the one in the store.
However, when I’ve said something wrong - factually incorrect, it’s up to me to put it right. That seems to be the case here. Therefore I’ve decided to remove the whole post (the link to the Daily Mail site fetches a page with no content).
I also apologise to Phil Dilks for any distress, upset, etc caused by my reprinting the Mail’s story (for which he received damages). I acknowledged at the time that the story was both unlikely and defamatory, and I should have been sensible enough, therefore, not to reproduce it.
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Borat And Bond
In which I catch up with the last two movies I’ve seen.
One of my favourite lines, in a work which is a store of quotable passages - Anthony Powell’s A Dance To The Music Of Time is in the The Valley Of Bones, the first of the wartime ones, and at the end of chapter 3.
’Not feeling much like going on the square tomorrow, are you?’ said Stevens. ’Still it was a hell of a good weekend’s leave. I had one of the local girls under a hedge.’
T.S. Eliot wrote human kind/Cannot bear very much reality.
It’s also true that a little excitement suffices for most people. It’s become a commonplace that Casino Royale is about half an hour too long: it’s also several fight scenes and chases too long. The book, which the film sort of comprehends, adding additional violence, was about right. Bond was spied on - his friend Rene Mathis foils the spies, nearly blown up - the complexity of the plot here saves him (the bombers were given two bombs: one to be thrown first which was the explosive, and a second to be deployed immediately after which is a smokescreen; they decide to use the second first, reasonably enough: but they have been double-crossed, both are deadly, so Bond, passing behind a tree, survives), then he plays Baccarat for hours (and loses, before being rescued financially by the US), then he is nearly assassinated, then he wins, and goes off with a girl he both fancies and feels comfortably companionable with. By this point, Bond has drunk at least one enormous cocktail and a bottle of champagne. This is a lot more excitement than most men actually want, and more than any can bear.
But there is more. Bond then falls into a trap, I think because Fleming knows that he is more than a little drunk and very fatigued (not that not falling into it, and doing something different would have saved him). A chase scene follows: Bond has a faster car, he pretty much knows where he is pursuing the villains to: he catches them. The surprise (and less of one if one is as knowledgeable about WWII as Fleming is) is that his quarry have a device such as was used by the French resistance which they drop from their car and which causes him to crash.
Bond is captured in this way, and here is the only fight in the book, which Bond loses.
Bond again felt puny and impotent. ...
As he preceded the thin man over the theshold he knew that he was utterly and absolutely in their power.
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Saturday, 02 December 2006
Bloggers, Eh?
Via Ellis: john sutherland IS SHOCKED BY THE STATE OF book-Reviewing on the web.
Early in August there appeared, some three weeks before the book’s publication, a ’review’ (so called) of Victoria Glendinning’s biography of Leonard Woolf, posted by ’Geena’, on amazon.co.uk. This was well before the book was available to the public, or any above-ground reviews had appeared. This is it: ’I’ve just been sent an advance copy of this book and am very disappointed at the poor standard of writing and scholarship it displays. Glendinning gushes, which is unpalatable enough, but she also makes a large number of errors, which any Bloomsbury addict will be able to spot.’
End of review. The ’errors’ are unspecified. What warrant ’Geena’ has for her dismissal is unknowable under her (his?) nom de hatchet. Are there personal motives? There is no way of knowing. The review remained as the only one on the board until the book’s publication, poisoning Glendinning’s well. Bookbuyers, commercial and individual, consult Amazon to see which way the wind is blowing. Many more than consult, say, the TLS.
Once upon a time there was a book reviewer, a very humble book reviewer, who had a column in the New Statesman, as parsimonious a journal as any socialist could hope to write for. This fellow also scribbled a few unsuccessful novels under uncommercial ’literary’ titles such as ’Coming Up For Air’ and ’A Clergyman’s Daughter’ which, understandably, few people bought. He worked in a bookshop, and, as I’m sure John Sutherland knows, many more people ask the staff in Waterstone’s for advice than read the TLS. Our reviewer used a pseudonym: he called himself plain George (then a common English name) and Orwell (after the river). Who is to know from this ’nom de hatchet’ that he was a former Burma policeman and schoolfriend of Cyril Connolly? Thus were the book buyers of Fitzrovia conned time and again.
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Sunday, 10 December 2006
Cheered Me Up, Though
BBC: Pinochet death ’saddens’ Thatcher.
Chile’s former military leader, who died aged 91 in hospital, backed the UK during the Falklands conflict.
Unlike some countries I could name which we had a so-called special relationship. Until Iraq, that is. Then it all fell apart. They backed us to the hilt until then, don’t you know.
Well, at least the old fascist isn’t just pretending this time.
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Monday, 11 December 2006
They Cannot Be Serious
tehgrauniad (brace yourselves) State department Googles for intelligence on Iran. Now Google.com will probably sue for using their name as a verb. Do you think if I, er, "insert-search-engine-name-here"-ed for "Litvinenko polonium" or "John F Kennedy assassination" I could get to them bottom of either?
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Sunday, 17 December 2006
Kinda Obvious
BBC: High IQ link to being vegetarian.
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Pretending To Be Terrorists
Wow, Chutzpah!
"Those six people should have been arrested and prosecuted for pretending to be terrorists," Gingrich said. "And the crew of the U.S. airplane should have been invited to the White House and congratulated for being correct in the protection of citizens."
Discussed on TPM Cafe. Via Apostropher. The original story.
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Monday, 18 December 2006
Christmas Quiz
I can’t be bothered setting 10 questions like some, so this one will have to do. Who are these characters? (The period is the late 40s.)
In a friendly, even affectionate way, X and Y would often lure Z away from sensible empiricism to wild flights of political fancy, like his view that the Labour Government should, in honesty, try to convert the British electorate to the idea that they should accept a lower standard of living in order to get rid of the evils of colonialism.
Freedom for the Colonies and Lower Standard of Living for all, that would have been his election rallying cry. It was impossible to not to respect the integrity of his ideas and the seriousness with which they were put forward, inevitable that X and Y should see him primarily as an English eccentric ...
Dan Davies has a very welcome long post in which he discusses his thoughts on progressives. (This may or may not be a clue.)
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Tuesday, 19 December 2006
1-2-3-4 What Are We Fighting For?
Not WMD apparently. Now she tells us.
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Friday, 22 December 2006
Christmas Quiz Answer, Finally
Probably too easy, but the answer is Malcolm Muggeridge, Anthony Powell, and, of course, George Orwell. I got it from Anthony Powell: A Life by Michael Barber (p182) who found it in Orwell, A Reminiscence in the London Magazine, September 1963.
Speaking of St George, I recently discovered his As I Please articles from Tribune. It has occured to me to add an Orwell Watch
series to Aaronovitch Watch, and track him week by week with sarcastic comments. But that’s for another time. I think was particularly good in 1945. Bill Deedes going into risible old fart mode in this morning’s Torygraph illustrates why.
For many years, we relied perhaps more than we know on Christian beliefs to influence human behaviour. I would not exaggerate this influence, but it existed, and even those who did not believe in Christianity were conscious of its existence.
Children grew up with a clearer sense of right and wrong than some have now. Murder was taken more seriously than it is today. Sin, which is not widely recognised today, was more clearly defined. Then this influence went into decline. Did it make a difference?
And St George commenting on then old-fashioned mores in raising children.
I HAVE been rereading with some interest The Fairchild Family, which was written in 1813 and was for fifty years or more a standard book for children. Unfortunately I only possess the first volume, but even that, in its unexpurgated state- for various pretty-pretty versions, with all the real meat cut out, have been issued in recent years - is enough of a curiosity.
The tone of the book is sufficiently indicated by the sentence: ’Papa,’ said Lucy (Lucy was aged nine, by the way), ’may we say some verses about mankind having bad hearts?’ And, of course, Papa is only too willing, and out come the verses, all correctly memorized. Or here is Mrs Fairchild, telling the children how when she herself was a child she disobeyed orders by picking cherries in company with the servant girl:
Nanny was given up to her mother to be flogged; and I was shut up in the dark room, where I was to be kept several days upon bread and water. At the end of three days my aunts sent for me, and talked to me for a long time.
’You broke the Fourth Commandment,’ said my Aunt Penelope, ’which is, "Remember the Sabbath day to keep it holy": and you broke the Fifth, which is, "Honour your parents". ... You broke the Eighth, too, which is, "Thou shalt not steal".’ ’Besides,’ said my Aunt Grace, ’the shame and disgrace of climbing trees in such low company, after all the care and pains we have taken with you, and the delicate manner in which we have reared you.’
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Sunday, 24 December 2006
Happy Christmas
I’ve linked to this before, but if you’re in the UK and minded to watch Babe at 11 am on Christmas Day (BBC 1), you may learn something by reading Michael Bérubé first.
I don’t know if 2001 is on over Christmas, but if it is, I also recommend Bérubé’s two parter: Open the pod bay doors and Do you read me, HAL?.
Cool YouTube on The Evolution of the Flagellum.
I’m largely with Ken MacLeod re buying Christmas cards; I’ve no objection to holly or Santas, though: I just avoid the humbug of religion.
HL Mencken’s A Bum’s Christmas.
Christmas miracle: I agree with Alex: John Redwood says something sensible.
On Glenn Greenwood’s site, Nitpicker re-iterates something I’ve said, but with better examples: You would think that Republicans would be shamed by the fact so many of them seem to agree, at least to some extent, with the beliefs of terrorists and other Muslim extremists. Quite.
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Argument And Innuendo
Peter Black is a pretty good blogger. For a politician. No, that’s unfair. He blogs on a variety of topics, usually from an informed position (instead of the wild dilettante-ish hand-waving you get here) and regularly too. He predicted a certain newspaper story (or hinted at its, er, premature release) and now he regrets it.
(Unexciting disclosure: I met Angharad Mair - back in 1994 - and liked her. She’s more famous in the circles I move in for having represented Great Britain in the Women’s Marathon in the 1997 World Championships - and finished with a decent time and place (outside the medals, but 2:36 IIRC or sub six-minute miling) on the same course that Paula Radcliffe dropped out on in 2004. She’s also a newsreader in Welsh, which we’ll come to. Oh yeah, I know Sian Lloyd’s brother too, so objectivity is not asserted.)
If I were Peter Black - that is to say, a Liberal Democrat politician and acquaintance of Lembit Opik - I’d take much the approach he has. He is right to point out that Angharad Mair’s Wales on Sunday article Out on a Lemb! is short on logic. As he says:
So her argument is that because the story is considered to have news value therefore it must be in the public interest to use it. In other words if a story can sell newspapers and attract viewers then it becomes a matter of State and this allows newspaper columnists to pass judgement on issues that have nothing to do with a politician’s professional life or their political judgement and on which the politician concerned has never spoken out publicly themselves.
That is a fair summary of her conclusion and the weakness of her reasoning. However, that is not quite the point of her piece.
Sian Lloyd is articulate, clever, intelligent, very attractive and great fun to be with. But Lembit Opik has discarded her in favour of one of The Cheeky Girls.
Clearly, this is written by someone standing up for a friend. (I don’t know how close they are, but they’re both Welsh speakers, and both have connection in the Welsh media through - ahem! - the medium of Welsh.)
The core of the column is not an argument but a description of a event with a draw your own conclusions
inference. I haven’t seen the programme in question, but the relationship implied is not all that uncommon.
When Lembit and Sian appeared on Celebrity Millionaire, Sian’s general knowledge was impressive and when she didn’t instantly know the answer, she had the intelligence to be able to discard the three wrong answers to pick the right one.
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Wednesday, 27 December 2006
You’Ll Always Be Tossers To Me
The Torygraph almost heralds a happy new year. Blair plane overshoots runway.
A plane carrying Tony Blair and his family overshot the runway when it landed last night.
The Prime Minister was travelling to Miami, Florida, to stay with former Bee Gee Robin Gibb when the incident happened.
Who? Not this tosser, surely?
Robin Gibb loves history so much, he’s bought his own slice of it in Oxfordshire to calm his mind. One third of the enduring pop group the Bee Gees -- with his twin, Maurice, and their brother, Barry -- Gibb is resident in America for tax purposes. However, he is a British subject and loves to spend as much time as possible in his mansion in Thame.
My emphasis. Greater love hath no man for his country than he legs it for Florida.
Title credit: Clive Anderson.
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