Friday fun: You’ll remember the “Sony Bravia Ad”:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Bb8P7dfjVw&search=bravia from a while back, with all the bouncing balls, melancholy José González music and sunny San Francisco streets. Well, Swansea is not San Francisco, and fruit doesn’t bounce all that well, but “apart from that it’s pretty close”:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CjHzS_twDVY. Local, uh, residents “spoke out in protest.”:http://www.swansea-res.org.uk/news.html (Note also the news of Fr Vincent’s departure at the bottom of that page.) Elsewhere there’s also “this”:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sl5Nv2hOkYE (somewhat less interesting) and “this effort”:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tjOgFRMobMk.

I’ll be at “Firedoglake”:http://www.firedoglake.com/ on Sunday, leading the discussion in the second part of their Rick Perlstein book club. If you’ve read my “previous post”:https://crookedtimber.org/2006/05/16/the-wager-won-by-losing/ on the topic, you’ll have some idea of what I’m going to say, although I hope to expand my argument, and also respond to “Brad DeLong’s critique”:http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2006/05/losing_by_losin.html. It should be a fun discussion – Rick himself will be participating in comments. I’ve said before that us more wonkish types need to be talking more to the netroots people – I’m hoping that this will be a good opportunity to help build that conversation.

Because I’ve managed to get myself a slot as a reviewer for “a local webzine”:http://www.decodemedia.com/tiki-index.php , I’ve managed to get to see a good number of gigs in the general area of america/alt.country/whatever in the past year. So I thought I do a little survey of what I’d been to and make some recommendations. Details below the fold since lots of you probably couldn’t care less!
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Any of you who wonder what we are going on about when we talk about the Eurovision Song Contest, can spend an hour learning about its complete history here (complete with an interview with the marvelous Dana).

I used to be homesick all the time. Now, it is only when I realise that I cannot watch the greatest living Irishman presenting Eurovision on TV.

From Rachel Aspden’s New Statesman review of Alain de Botton’s latest

None of this [pretentiousess] would matter so much were de Botton not selling the promise of taste. The Architecture of Happiness is being advertised on the Tube with a poster of flying-duck plaques – middle-class shorthand for “naff” – asking: “Is this your idea of good taste?” … If this is happiness, I’ll take the flying ducks any time.

Reading this in the kitchen, I naturally glanced up at the wall, which is adorned by a classic flight of flying ducks. I acquired them in my youth in a spirit of irony, but that has long since transmuted into genuine affection (if indeed, the irony was ever genuine). They used to be accompanied by a koala, masked and caped as a flying supermarsupial, but the wall wasn’t a safe place for such a unique item, and we’ve never found another.

So is it OK to like flying ducks? Or is this the crime against the holy spirit of Good Taste that can never be forgiven?