Just finished watching the “C4 faux documentary”:http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0853096/ about the assassination of GWB. Very watchable, I thought. The technique mainly consisted on interspersing genuine newsreel footage with deadpan interviews with participants, including various law-enforcement people and protestors. Politically it wasn’t too heavy handed, though there was a clear attempt to situate Cheney as an opportunist who would use anything, even the killing of Bush, to advance his pet view of the world. Ditto the Syrian oppositionist who postulates official Syrian invasion on the basis of claimed insider knowledge in a manner that reminded me very much of the neocon’s pet Iranian exile. The twist was good, but I won’t spoil things for others by posting it here. I just hope that US cinemas and networks get over their reluctance to show an interesting piece of film.

I meant to respond a few weeks ago to Matthew Yglesias’s “complaints about Pitchfork Media”:http://www.matthewyglesias.com/archives/2006/09/a_long_time_ago_we_used_to_be/ and never got around to it thanks to work obligations and the nine month old. But since it’s not a time sensitive topic, here goes. [click to continue…]

I’m slightly reluctant to post this recommendation, for the simple reason that most of our readers are in the US, and this is old news (really old news) to them. But I’ll post anyway, for the benefit of those who are not, and, especially, for my fellow Brits. I was watching some show the other night in which Charlie Brooker (yes, “that”:https://crookedtimber.org/2004/10/26/those-dastardly-clintonites/ Charlie Brooker) was talking about American TV, and he recommended “The Wire”:http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0306414/ . The fact that David Simon was behind it was enough for me, because “HLOTS”:http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0106028/ was my favourite cop-show ever, so I started renting the DVDs. The Wire has never been shown in the UK (except on some nearly impossible to get satellite channel) and I guess I can see why: plot and dialogue hard for non-Americans to follow, no concessions to the viewer. But it is absolutely compulsive. Basically, it is a tale of two competing bureaucracies: the Baltimore PD and the Barksdale drug gang. On the whole, you’d say that the drug dealers have the more functional of the two organizations but the focus on the internal politics of each and on their political pathologies will elicit instant recognition from anyone who works in, say, a university. And there are great iconic characters too, such as Omar, the gay stick-up man, who only robs from the dealers and leaves civilians alone. I’ll leave it at that (since I won’t post plot spoilers). If The Wire has never been shown in your country, beg, borrow or steal the discs.

As a good European, I aim to get through half a bottle of wine most days, though I occasionally abstain midweek, or when drinking beer instead. We in the UK are really blessed when it comes to wine, since, making little drinkable of our own, we import it from everywhere (by way of contrast, try getting a decent bottle of South African in France). Lately, though, I find my enjoyments somewhat diminished by the increasing alcoholic content of the stuff. Time was, 12 or 12.5 per cent was pretty standard for a bottle of red. Not any more. A trip to my local branch of Oddbins (about 40 yards) revealed that 14.5 per cent was very common (not far off some fortified wines) and that it was hard to find a decent bottle of red under 13 per cent. I guess that there’s some good explanation for the rising strength of the stuff – probably to do with New World techniques. But I’d like something a little less fierce to knock back in front of the Sopranos.

Suppose you do research on gender issues in the social sciences (or practical/political/moral philosophy). It is quite likely that from time to time, or perhaps even often, you meet other scholars who are both sceptical and ignorant about the whole gender issue. They agree that there are sexual differences, but believe that all differences between men and women can be reduced to these sexual differences.
Suppose those sceptics ask you to give them one journal article, or one book chapter, that will give them a primer to gender. It should, thus, be an extremely good introduction to the concept and workings of gender, accessible to people who are intelligent, but have no background at all. They might perhaps later read a whole book, but right now they don’t want to waste more time on studying gender than the time to read one article. What should those people read?

Welcome to Anton Rufus Green, born Sept 30th 2006. I hope I get to know you, and whether I do or not, I hope your life is filled with love, fun, and things of importance. And I hope that when you’re an adult, and move away from the town you went to college in, someone there misses you as much as I miss your dad. My best to your parents — don’t give them too hard a time. I’m sure they’re as lucky to have you as you are to have them.

This is an abstruse bleg. (Move along, move along, if you aren’t likely to want to talk about technical philosophy stuff.) [click to continue…]

If someone hinted two years ago that one day I would be eagerly awaiting the third season of a remake of Battlestar Galactica, my response would have been something like, “Get away from me, crazy person, because that is crazy, what you are saying to me.”

The original series ran in the late 1970s and was very, very dumb. Sure, it’s interesting to learn that bits of Mormon theology were embedded into the show. And I suppose some people will now be entertained by those vintage haircuts. But don’t be fooled by the sickly glow of nostalgia. The show was junk. Let’s put it this way: There was a robotic dog.
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Susan Linn from the Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood was just on the Chris Evans show (of all places) describing Walmart’s new website, on which kids can choose a bunch of toys to add to a list which Walmart will email to their parents. Evans clearly didn’t believe Linn’s description of the site, especially the bit where she says that when you reject a toy one of the elves says that the other elf will lose his job. I think Linn is terrific, but I, too, thought she must be making that bit up, despite, like Evans, having already heard the astonishing accents the elves have been given.

No. Try it. It really is unbelievable. Come on folks, defend poor old Walmart. What good could come of this for the wider world?

Yahoo! hosted a party the other day celebrating the third birthday of del.icio.us and the registration of its millionth user. I found out about it thanks to a listing on Upcoming. It was a fun reason to return to Yahoo! headquarters just a few days after Yahoo! Hack Day.

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I just watched the “trailer for 300”:http://www.apple.com/trailers/wb/300/, a film version of a “Frank Miller graphic novel”:http://www.amazon.com/300-Frank-Miller/dp/1569714029 (which I haven’t read) about the battle of Thermopylae. Looks like the core of it is a good old relentless battle in the spirit of “Zulu”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/B00008PC13/ref=nosim/kieranhealysw-20. There’s also some stuff on Sparta and its amazing toughness, Persia and its big golden thrones, and ambassadors to Sparta standing unwisely close to large open pits. The Spartan tradition of compulsory homosexuality was less in evidence in the trailer. My feeling is that the likes of Melanie Phillips, Christopher Hitchens and Victor Davis Hanson are already drafting the flinty Op-Ed pieces they’ll publish the week the film comes out. They can add themselves to the “wide variety”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molon_Labe%21 “of people”:http://irelandsown.net/Nation.htm “who have been”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Anthem_of_Colombia inspired by the story of Thermopylae. It’s all about juggling the analogy to make sure that you get to be one of the lonely 300, and not the vast invading foreign army.

I’ve not been blogging much of late, partly because I’ve been making the transition between being on leave and getting back to teaching, a transition that involves desperately trying to get one lot of stuff finished whilst hurriedly updating the things that you last had to think about nearly two years ago. One such is “my final-year global justice course”:http://eis.bris.ac.uk/%7Eplcdib/tj.html , which is the usual compromise between things I really think they ought to know about and things that I want to talk about. The main changes have been the inclusion of a lot more material on territory, borders, immigration and the like (weeks 9 and 10), at the expense of things that they should know about already (TJ). (The lecture/seminar distinction, btw, is a little bit artificial on this course and basically distinguishes between teaching hours where I introduce the discussion and ones where students do.) Anyway, it isn’t set in concrete, and I suddenly realized at the last moment that I don’t really know the secession literature at all. So those of you out there that do, or think there’s something else I’m neglecting, feel free to comment.

In mean-spirited response to the executive summary of a report I haven’t read, here is a bad-minded slap down. Pew,the people who write generally solid reports on US Internet usage, ‘surveyed 742 top technology thinkers and stakeholders and gave them a series of “future scenarios” involving the internet and digital technologies to comment on in order to get a consensus on the future’.

And this is what the cheerleading tech crowd believes will happen by 2020:
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By my reckoning, Denny Hastert’s “Galbraith Score”:https://crookedtimber.org/2005/02/22/livingstone-campbell-galbraith/ is “now”:http://www.usnews.com/usnews/news/articles/061003/3hastert.htm “two”:http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com/archives/010153.php . Any bets on whether he’ll stick it out for the grand slam?

Update: We’re now at “three”:http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/05/washington/05cnd-hastert.html?hp&ex=1160107200&en=ed644f3ba9b42abf&ei=5094&partner=homepage