I’m sure I’ve mentioned before that BBC7 could have been devised just for me; no news, no music, no sport, no ads, just a lower-middle-brow selection of comedy and drama from the radio archives. I tape the classic comedies for the kids (ISIRTA, The Goons, and, a bit worryingly, Steptoe and Son, are top of the pops in our house, on which more another time) and listen to the dramas myself. The best part of the station finding its feet has been hearing the announcers grow into their material. Initially only Jim Lee seemed to know and love the classic shows (I gather he is considered eccentric for being a Clitheroe Kid enthusiast; I can’t imagine why). My favourite announcer was openly bemused — even a little mocking — when she first started presenting the Paul Temple shows, and it has been a lot of fun hearing her come to love them, a love which is sweetly on display in this interview with Peter Coke (pronounced Cook) who played Temple in the 50’s and 60’s. At 92 Coke is stunningly energetic and on the ball — I caught him misnaming Coronation Scot, but he was otherwise enviously youthful, and obviously delighted to have such a young fan. Example of Coke’s amazing shellwork here (John Q might want to take note); a picture of the great man himself here if you scroll down the page a bit (he was born the same year as Ted Grant!).

BTW, I’ve probably listened to all but one of the extant Paul Temple adventures at least 3 times each, having been introduced to them not by the BBC but by KCRW in the late 1980s. I have only found a couple of the books, neither of which I could struggle through; Durbridge might have been one of our greatest radio writers but it doesn’t work on the page. The quality gap between the books and the radio show is comparable only with the gap between Colin Dexter’s novels and the Morse series.

Update: after some trawling I thought I’d throw in this link to prove that others are nerdier about Paul Temple than I am.

“Ian Buruma in the NYT”:http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/19/opinion/19buruma.html seems to me to get the Ayaan Hirsi Ali issue about right:

bq. Rita Verdonk was only a particularly extreme and unimaginative exponent of this new [anti-Muslim and anti-immigrant] mood. One of her wildly impractical suggestions, mostly shot down in Parliament, was that only Dutch should be spoken in the streets. It was she who sent back vulnerable refugees to places like Syria and Congo. It was under her watch that asylum seekers were put in prison cells after a fire had consumed their temporary shelter and killed 11 at the Amsterdam airport. She was the one who decided to send a family back to Iraq because they had finessed their stories, even though human rights experts had warned that they would be in great danger. This was part of her vaunted “straight back.”

bq. So when Ayaan Hirsi Ali told her own story of fibbing in a television documentary last week, Ms. Verdonk felt that she had no choice. If she didn’t investigate this case, and act tough, the law would not be applied equally. This was inflexible, and given Ms. Hirsi Ali’s value as a courageous activist who had already suffered a great deal, harsh. But it had nothing to do with her views on Islam.

bq. In this context, Ms. Hirsi Ali’s earlier remarks about the “terror” of “political correctness” have an unfortunate ring. It would have been better if she had taken this opportunity to speak up for the people who face the same problem that she did, of trying to move to a free European country, because their lives are stunted at home for social, political or economic reasons. By all means let us support Ayaan Hirsi Ali now, but spare a thought also for the nameless people sent back to terrible places in the name of a hard line to which she herself has contributed.

Via “Butterflies and Wheels”:http://www.butterfliesandwheels.com/notesarchive.php?id=1377 .

I’m reading Learning the World by Ken McLeod (available here) and it turns out that the title is that of a blog* written by one of the characters. This is the first time I’ve seen a novel named for a blog – are there any other instances.

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The Who, “Won’t Get Fooled Again.” Conservative rock anthem. File under: complex irony, I guess.

Will someone be so kind as to email or post the whole list? Also, is there significant, er, hermeneutic analysis, above and beyond the short bit Adler quotes, or is it just the list? Also, this is funny:

Listeners get to decide what the song means, not the creator. The audience got Springsteen’s “Born In The USA” was pro-America, even if Bruce was too dense to figure the matter was out of his hands.

Never mind that concern for the plight of the working man need not be anti-American, I think liberals should push back against rampant conservative ‘lyrical activism’, running rough-shod over the original intentions of our nation’s founding playlists.

I assume “Okie From Muskogee” made the cut. Also “Sweet Home Alabama”. Lots of country music. (I’m reading a book about Laibach. Maybe some Rammstein?) “Material Girl”. Any number of bling-themed songs? The Smiths? “Shoplifters of the World”? Something by Stryper?

Ah! Turns out Bruce Bartlett did his top-40 a couple years ago. The criteria are debatable, as ‘religion’ is deemed an “unambiguously conservative value”.

Something I’ve been thinking about posting on since I read the opening sentence of this “post”:http://maxspeak.org/mt/archives/002168.html by Max Sawicky on J.K. Galbraith.

bq. Like Robert Heilbroner, another giant, John Kenneth Galbraith (1908-2006) wrote books persuading people like me to enter a profession dominated by analysis quite unlike their own.

I had a very similar experience with political science; I decided to do a Ph.D. after reading and loving Benedict Anderson’s _Imagined Communities_, which I later discovered to be completely atypical of what most political scientists do and talk about. Do other academics (or indeed non-academics) have similar experiences? What were the books (or other works) that made CT readers decide to enter a field, and did these books (or whatever) give the right or wrong idea about the field that readers entered?

Just so Henry does not have to doing anything undignified, like remind you all again that he’s over at Firedoglake later today, discussing Perlstein’s Before the Storm [amazon] … well, now I’ve done it for him. And doesn’t it seem like it’s about time for some kind of anti-Perlstein backlash? (Don’t look at me. I don’t have an unkind word. Great book. No kidding.)

Here’s a fun bit from p. 372. It’s time for the Republican National Convention in 1964, at the Cow Palace, in SF:

Across town, at the intersection of Haight and Ashbury streets, a new kind of bohemia was taking shape, although many of its most flamboyant representatives were occupied with a cross-country trip on a bus called “Further,” whose riotous exterior decoration included a sign reading, “A VOTE FOR BARRY IS A VOTE FOR FUN!” A stop along the way was the commune of former Harvard professor Timothy Leary, whose The Psychedelic Experience had come out that year. These were Ken Kesey’s “Merry Pranksters,” later to be immortalized as the first hippies in a book by New York Herald Tribune writer Tom Wolfe. The delegates, mostly gray old factory owners and club women – the butt of cabbies’ jokes that San Francisco banks were running out of nickels and dimes – would have been altogether disgusted by the goings-on at the Haight, were they aware of them; but the folks who would fill the Cow’s spectator galleries – the YAFers and Young Republicans – might have been amused. They were packing North Beach nightclubs dancing the swim (some might have taken in the country’s first topless dancing act), snapping up comic books lampooning such trendy dances by inventing new ones like the “Eisenhower sway” (“sway back and forth. But end up in the dead center. Do not speak while performing this exercise.”, and heckling lefty comedian Dick Gregory at the hungry i when they weren’t laughing at his cracks at the expense of Scranton (“He reminds you of the guy who runs to John Wayne for help”). They did think a vote for Barry was a vote for fun. They exulted in each other, rejoiced, felt an electricity they would not experience again in their lives; it was their Woodstock.

I think it’s rather interesting the way conservatives – particularly movement conservatives – have gotten so adept at being both the party of fun and the party of traditional moral values; while managing to tar the left as both too relativistic and hedonistically permissive (take that, you big hippy!) and too morally authoritarian (politically correct). It’s a good trick when you can make the opposition carry the weight of your own contradictions, as it were.

Munster 23 — Biarritz 19.

_Later_: Here is “Stringer’s try.”:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-hMdc_RCyJg Superb.

Mark Steyn has a way with words. Particularly other people’s. (via Bitch PhD).

[For an earlier instance, scroll to the bottom of this post].

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?

Wil Shipley, who writes the excellent “Delicious Monster”:https://crookedtimber.org/2004/11/13/delicious-monster/ (BibTeX export and nice integration with “LibraryThing”:http://www.librarything.com/ in the next version, please please please) had his identity stolen recently. The story is the by-now standard one of “frustration and anger”:http://wilshipley.com/blog/2006/05/etheft-etrade.html, and is as yet unresolved. As Kevin Drum “has been saying”:http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/features/2005/0512.drum.html for some time, the law in this area is basically broken: the companies need to be responsible for fradulent accounts, just as banks and not customers are responsible if money gets robbed from the local branch’s safe.

Wil’s case is typical. He’s absorbing all the costs of getting his money back out of a frozen E-Trade account, because E-Trade could care less and has no incentive to bother helping him out. Until the law is changed, of course, Wil still has to deal with this himself. One of his commenters makes the following interesting suggestion about dealing with the company over the phone:

bq. Even more important, never hang up. Most call center personel are expressly forbidden from hanging up on you. Simply stay on the line until they think of a new solution.

Sounds plausible. My brother runs a call center that handles the North American traffic for a financial services company. I’ll have to ask him whether this is true. Howie Becker tells a similar story about dealing with recalcitrant call center staff. He had learned from a relative that, at his airline, difficult-to-manage customers were labeled “irates.” First the representative would try to fix the problem, but if the caller persisted they would get bumped up to a supervisor. The representative would tell the supervisor, “I have an irate here”, short for “irate customer.” Becker decides he might as well cut straight to the supervisor, so he calls the airline and says “Hi, I’m Howie Becker and I am an irate. Can you help me with this ticket?” The representative sputters, “How did you know that word?!”