November 2006

Sorry, I’m nearly a month late, but better late than never to have mourned his passing. A lovely Guardian obit here. A couple of nice letters here. Full text of Hungarian Tragedy here. I note that Chris Brooke has not yet added him to the DSW. A further note for Oxford-connected people — this Peter Fryer is no relation to the Pete Fryer who works for Unison (nor, interestingly, the late Bobby Fryer of Bobby Fryer Close. The Healyites just had lots of Fryers, I guess).

I’ve been reading Karen Cerulo’s Never saw it coming and while it’s generally pretty good, it contains what I assumed was a howler of a mistake, but turns out to be a gross misjudgement. Cerulo argues that the generally optimistic view taken by Americans does not extend to deviant groups, and uses as an example, the Heaven’s Gate cult which, as she states believed that they would be removed from the Earth by a spaceship following the comet Hale-Bopp, their true home’. As she says, most reporting of the group treated it as the epitome of the lunatic fringe. I assumed that Cerulo was somehow unaware of the fact that all the members of the group had committed suicide in an attempt to ensure that the spaceship didn’t miss them. I looked at the endnotes to check the dates on some of the cited media reports and discovered a note reading

144. Henry 1997, 4. Readers may recall in order to hasten their arrival in heaven, all thirty-nine members of the group engaged in a mass suicide

which to my mind justifies the lunatic fringe description. In any case, surely this point was important enough to include in the main text, or a footnote on the same page.

While I’m on this subject, is there any excuse for persevering with endnotes in books*? They’re just about useless, (those that don’t give something worse than useless like “ibid” or “loc cit”). If the material is of too little interest to be included in the main text or in footnotes, and can’t be omitted altogether for reasons of academic nicety, couldn’t it be placed in a supporting website?

* Footnote/endnote: A bit more discussion of this at Andrew Norton’s blog (thanks to Damien Eldridge for locating this for me)

Here are some interesting video finds:

• Blind teenager “sees” thanks to clicking sound (amazing)
• Drums & piano compilation.. by someone who doesn’t play either instrument (that may not sound appealing, but it’s worth the click)
• A new way to multiply (not necessarily faster than one’s old way, but I still found it interesting)

Also, as proof that YouTube has grown up, I am now receiving spam through it:

Since the sender’s ID wasn’t created until five days before sending this note and the account has no bookmarked or submitted videos, it’s a safe bet (beyond the content of the message) that its sole function is to generate spam. (I have purposefully removed the URL the user is trying to advertise from the above image.)

The clock has hit zero, and as soon as the ball is dead, the game is over. Gloucester, the unbeaten league leaders, are one point ahead thanks to a late penalty. Bristol, having led for most of the match, now face defeat. But they don’t panic, they go through the phases in the driving wind and torrential rain, umpteen times without a knock-on, edging closer to the line. Jason Strange, Bristol’s replacement fly-half waits in the pocket. The ball comes back to him. Everyone knows what will happen next. The Gloucester forwards charge him down, but the kick is away and the ball sails between the posts. The stadium erupts as nine thousand voices chant Bristol! Bristol! and eighteen thousand arms are raised aloft. Over the tannoy comes the sound of the Spencer Davis Group. Duh Duh Duh Duh Duh Dah! Duh Duh Duh Duh Duh Dah! So glad you made it! So glad you made it! “Top of the league”:http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,377-2471412,00.html.

(Bristol, recently bankrupt and in the lower divisions, came up for last season and survived, just. The bookies had us as nailed on favourites for relegation. But here we are, top of the league, with Wasps, Sale, Bath and now Gloucester among the vanquished. It probably won’t last, but these are moments to remember always, and that was one of the best finishes to a sporting event that I’ve ever experienced.)

UPDATE: the moment at YouTube:

In Europe, we’re having to re-evaluate and re-negotiate our relationship with Russia. Not easy, when you consider that Russia’s ‘relationships’ with its Near Abroad – the very countries whose love the EU hopes to earn using soft power and economic enticement – are toxic, violent and dysfunctional. Russia truly is the jealous wifebeater of eastern Europe and central Asia.

From the outside, Russia looks like a poisonous nest of oligarchs, ex-spies, energy tycoons who are both oligarchs and ex-spies, and an increasingly indifferent populace and authoritarian centre. We watch but don’t understand as their poisonous games are played out in London football clubs and sushi bars. And we can see the power games Russia plays to try to isolate or simply antagonise former Soviet and now EU states (and also how states like Poland rather clumsily try to use the EU to retaliate). But there’s so much long history and bad blood, that most Europeans can’t really understand what’s going on.

So, with Christmas stockings in mind, what are the best new books/sources in English on modern Russia? (or in French) And any on the ex-Soviet new member states and their relations with Russia?

More generally, how do we Europeans come to terms with a resurgent Russia (without the Germans breaking ranks)? Should we continue to woo the Near Abroad? Even when it’s clear the Belarussians are only courting us to wind up Putin, and we’ve wrongly encouraged the Georgians to believe they’re not on their own?

Big questions for a Friday afternoon. But maybe while CT’s US readers are sleeping off the turkey, some of the rest of us can think about how Europe in particular needs to approach Russia.

Australia now has its own version of the Downing Street memos, dating back to 28 February 2002. That’s when Trevor Flugge, Chairman of our (massively corrupt) grain trading monopoly AWB was told of the invasion of Iraq, and of Australia’s planned participation by our Ambassador to the UN*, John Dauth who even predicted that readmitting weapons inspectors would only produce a short delay.

This adds yet another layer of deception to what was already an amazing story of duplicity.

* The official line from our Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade is that Dauth was just making a lucky guess.

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According to Scott Jaschik at _Inside Higher Ed_, David Horowitz’s ‘Bill of Rights’ movement has just suffered a “stinging defeat”:http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2006/11/22/tabor in Pennsylvania. Some of the juicier highlights below:

Horowitz said that he was furious about the “breathtaking audacity of this theft of the report by the Democrats and the unions,” and that a “cabal” of faculty leaders had convinced “weak-spined Republicans” (who controlled the committee) to go along with the “theft.” … In the end, though, the panel on Tuesday stripped away what he had been citing as points of victory. The final report kept the language saying that it couldn’t find evidence of problems with students’ rights. … because the final vote on the report was unanimous — on a committee controlled by Republicans — the committee made it more difficult for Horowitz to blame his problems on liberals. … In getting the Pennsylvania House of Representative to create a panel to study these issues, Horowitz won his major legislative victory last year, so the report’s outcome has been highly anticipated. Last week, he said he viewed Pennsylvania as a model for what he hoped to accomplish elsewhere and that he would be working to create similar panels in other states next year. … Asked how he could claim victory when the legislative panel had worked so hard to identify student victims, and failed, Horowitz offered more stories of students who were being hurt. He said that he had spoken to a dance student who was upset about her paper’s grade and that he had encouraged her to file a grievance. She didn’t want to. Horowitz acknowledged that there was no political issue in the paper, but said her reluctance to go through the grievance machinery showed the problems that students face. … Horowitz, asked why he couldn’t document more of the cases of students being hurt — the basis of his movement — said: “Why do I have to run around the country finding these kids?”

.. or how to figure out whether you are hallucinating.

In the past few weeks I have come across more and more commentary about the site MyBlogLog, a service that is responsible for the list of pictures of other recent site visitors on the sidebar of some blogs (example).

But I was confused. I was quite sure that I had signed up for a free MyBlogLog account over a year ago, and this was not at all the service it had offered back then. I started searching and most recent commentary focuses on the above-mentioned social aspect of the service. So how to figure out if I am just utterly confused and mixing this up with another service?

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After nine lovely Mondays spent anticipating the evening’s installment of Spooks, series 5, it’s all over. Monday is back to being plain old boring old Monday and Brussels seems even greyer than usual. Which isn’t to say this series was stellar. It was bigger and sexier, with more explosions and grander conspiracies. But the noisier Spooks gets, the less it seems to say. Spooks always had an eerie talent for anticipating world events – it started filming in the months before 9/11 – but fact is now so much stranger than fiction.

Two more of the few remaining characters from the first series have been dismissed. The only discernible character arc in the whole of series 5 was that of our hero, Adam, who spiralled further and further downward, with a quick stop off to bang his nanny. Actually, his story was a good one, and put the lie to most action-led tv series where characters bounce back from the deaths of loved ones within an episode or three. But the entry of a new female lead (Ros, played by Hermione Norris) flattened the entire series and crowded out two far more interesting and sympathetic characters, Zaf and Jo. Which is a pity, because Hermione Norris has the animation of a wooden cadaver. She’s no more credible doing hand to hand combat with Mossad agents than she is laying a glamorous honeytrap for a Saudi playboy.

The original strength of Spooks was the ordinariness of the spies and their struggles to reconcile their normal lives with the weird reality of their working world. Tom might have been an SAS-trained killer, but he had terrible taste in girlfriends and was never far from a nice cup of tea. The younger spies put their lives on the line every working day, but as junior civil servants they couldn’t really afford to live in London.

I know it’s dramatically useful for tv show characters to have no life outside of work, except for the occasional relative who can be placed in jeopardy. But it’s dull, dull, dull (not to mention deeply unquestioning of live-to-work capitalism). Life in the bubble suffocates the characters and makes them less believable. And that kills precisely what was so great about Spooks. Series five squeezed its characters into a smaller and less lifelike world, just as it inflated the scale of the threats a mere seven people face off. It’s now recycling stories – like the embassy hostages – from earlier series, but that only shows how much the Spooks has lost its own plot.

Well worth reading; Alex Harrowell at Fistful of Euros dissects the difficulties of the French right following the left’s decision to run Sego in next year’s presidential election;

‘The problem being, of course, that De Villepin is damaged goods, Juppé is a rush-job and a crook, having just returned from trouble with the law, and Chirac is old, unpopular and has scandals like a dog has fleas. Sarkozy, for his part, represents the heritage of the non-Gaullist “droite classique” and, more importantly, appeals to the cult of America. His argument (everything is terrible and only I, the new young US-style leader, know what to do) and his prescription (free markets and mass surveillance) bear a far closer resemblance to Tony Blair than anything found on Ségolene Royal.’

I’ll be moderating Firedoglake’s book club again on Sunday. This time, we’re talking about Jacob Hacker’s _The Great Risk Shift_. I’ve written about it “here”:https://crookedtimber.org/2006/10/16/review-jacob-hacker-the-great-risk-shift/ and “here”:https://crookedtimber.org/2006/10/23/hackwork/ on CT, while John posted on Hacker and David Frum “here”:https://crookedtimber.org/2006/10/28/to-bear-our-fortunes-in-our-own-strong-armswhich-now-we-hold-at-much-uncertainty/.

Belated congratulations to the janitors in Houston. The pattern of events is strangely familiar to some of us; but none the worse for that. Have a happy Thanksgiving. Brilliant.

If you Google for “greatest rivalry in sports”:http://www.google.com/search?q=%22the+greatest+rivalry+in+sports%22&hl=en&lr=&c2coff=1&safe=off&client=firefox-a&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&start=0&sa=N today you’ll get a lot of references to the Ohio State-Michigan series (largely because of last week’s game) several references to Red Sox-Yankees, and a few other college pairings. From a global perspective, these all look faintly ridiculous. Does any of these rivalries really compare to Real Madrid-Barcelona for history, or Celtic-Rangers for intensity?

It’s probably futile to say which of these is *the* greatest. But I think on the list should be the series “that starts in a few hours”:http://usa.cricinfo.com/db/ARCHIVE/2006-07/ENG_IN_AUS/.
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The elections for parliament are held in the Netherlands today. The first exit polls are expected at just after 9 pm Dutch time. While in general elections in small countries are not particularly interesting for an international audience, one never knows what surprises (which may be relevant also beyond the national borders) are waiting for us. Apart from the question which party will become the biggest and hence (most probably) deliver the prime minister, here are two other prominent issues of the current Dutch elections. [click to continue…]