“On sighting an elephant Selous would instantly remove his trousers as he found it easier to pursue them in his underpants.”
As one does.
The quote is from Tom Quinn, Shooting’s Strangest Days.
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CNET News.com reports what we have knowns for some time…
It is frustrating that after months of debate, it is still news. I guess the real news is that it is Microsoft saying that. I particularly like this bit:
So what are the 30 coins worth to a technology supplier, I wonder? But before we rejoice too much, Mr Fishenden is not on concerned about the issue of ID cards and biometrics in the first place, just about a more secure and efficient way of gathering and storing the data:
October 19th, 2005 | One comment - (Comments are closed)
 A friend of mine alerted me today to this story, of 34-year-old property developer Sally Cameron:
My friend was trying to imply that the police were somehow overdoing it here. But this seems like a perfectly reasonable set of circumstances to me. After all, you do not want swarthy looking young men in anoraks hanging around harbour installations. But, you cannot pass a law called the Anti-Swarthy-Looking-Young-Men-In-Anoraks Act. It has to be anyone doing anything suspicious, like, you know, walking about. But, cyclists are obviously not a problem. Cyclists are good. This is a well known fact. So, whereas public footpaths in the vicinity of harbours are an obvious problem and need to be shut down, there is clearly no need to involve cyclists in this prohibition. Cyclists are, I repeat, good. So, these footpaths can simply stay as they are, but be cycle tracks. But, that means that pedestrians must now be told to steer clear of these ex-footpaths, despite the fact that they still exist. At which point, since this is the Anti-Terrorism Act that is being imposed here rather than merely some exercise in traffic control, any insubordinate pedestrian who causes trouble, by – I don’t know – laughing when you tell him, or her, about the new arrangements, must clearly be treated as the terrorist that he, or she, may well be. I mean, better safe than sorry. This is the survival of our very way of life that we are talking about, the preservation of our ancient liberties against the forces of barbarism. I cannot see why the Times Online is making such a fuss about this utterly routine matter. October 18th, 2005 | 53 comments - (Comments are closed)
I went from Instapundit to this this presumably not-so-instant pundidtry by Glenn Reynolds called The old industrial state, and from there, via an eBay reference, to another Glenn Reynolds piece called Is small the new big?. The idea here is that that new big businesses – eBay, Amazon – are getting big by helping the small guy to do his thing, unlike the old big business, which was an economically deluded tyrant. But did not the big, bad old industrial system – which only became a “state” in the years of its dotage – also empower people? For as long as it was properly run, it did. The Model T and the Sears Roebuck Catalogue empowered the little guy, just like eBay and Amazon now. The Model T was the basis of many a small business. Sears Roebuck made it possible for smaller operators outside the big cities to function on level terms with the city folks by letting them buy the same stuff and get their money back if not satisfied, just as if they were buying it from a big city store. Most of the USA still lives in small towns, I am constantly told. The old industrial “state” is what enabled them to do so, comfortably. More recently, the personal computer industry – now dominated by big, bad, old Intel and Microsoft – has empowered millions of individuals, and made possible the growth of enterprises like eBay and Amazon. Empowering the little guy is not a new idea. I can still remember the thrill of empowerment that I felt from my first computer, an Osborne 1. There are two quite distinct ideas rubbing together here. One is bigness, and its alleged badness. The other is the genuinely bad idea that it is both smart to try to – and actually possible to – insulate huge numbers of people from market pressures, indefinitely. J. K. Galbraith, quoted by Reynolds, thought that this could happen, and his big idea, if you can call it that, was that business bigness meant being above and beyond market realities. The truth is that a big business that ignores market realities is heading for a big fall. But the little guy is just as prone to economic delusion as the big guy. That is often why he is so little. Like the guy making a small fortune in sport, he started out with a large fortune. The ultimate embodiment of the Galbraith delusion was of course the USSR, which copied the bigness of US business without copying any of the market responsiveness that brought the USA’s business bigness into being in the first place. The USSR just stole bigness from others, and eventually the loot ran out. What is true is that formerly successful and still established ways of doing things can get into serious trouble, and because they once were so successful, they can last way beyond their days of success. There is a lot of ruin in them. Big and successful businesses become Galbraithian. They become, on a tiny scale, economically speaking, the USSR. But they cannot last, any longer than the USSR could. Not being able to murder all their rivals and critics, they last a lot less long. Business bigness is the consequence of a new business idea becoming thoroughly understood by a few exceptional people, who proceed to organise it, and then to triumph over almost all of their rivals. Then, times change, and that kind of bigness needs to change too, but by then millions have got used to it and cling to it. That is the problem of the old “industrial state”. What we are living through is neither the end of bigness nor the beginning of individual empowerment by bigness. It is a transitional period, between one lot of bignesses and other sorts of bigness. And these new bignesses will be just as like to give rise to new Galbraithian delusions as the earlier ones were. And let us also give credit where credit is still due. Those big old businesses got big in the first place by doing lots of empowering of the little guy. To put it in Reynolds-ese: the old big also did small. October 18th, 2005 | One comment - (Comments are closed)
Kenneth Clarke, the former British finance minister of the 1990s and most pro-EU Tory candidate in that party’s race for the leadership, has dropped out of the race. That leaves David Davis marginally ahead of the centrish David Cameron and Liam Fox. My money, for what it is worth, is on Davis to win, but I cannot find much enthusiasm for any of the candidates, to be honest. Tory leadership contests seem to occur with all the frequency of signal failures on the Tube during the rush-hour. There is a sort of wearying regularity about them. I share the sentiments of this article about the lack of policy content from the candidates thus far. The only positive thing about the Tories, it seems, is their ability to keep the numerous global floods, earthquakes and bird-borne plagues off the front pages of parts of the media. In a way, the feat is quite incredible. October 18th, 2005 | 41 comments - (Comments are closed)
The scale of identity theft in Britain as revealed in this story ought to be shocking, but it does not entirely surprise me. My other half used to work in the credit card industry and she has plenty of stories to tell about how careless people are in throwing out old credit card bills and other documents. The slack attitude many people adopt boggles the mind. Of course, when our lovely government gives a grateful nation the new ID card, all be well and we will not have to worry about such stuff anymore. Er, oh, wait a minute… October 17th, 2005 | 15 comments - (Comments are closed)
 I am in New York. I try to visit this great city every now and then, although as it happens I have not been here since 2000. Besides the fact that the skyline of this city has been defiled since then, it is still the same place, although it seems to get richer and cleaner every time I visit. My first trip here was in 1991. I was 22 years old at the time, and before I went I remember my mother being slightly scared for me. At that point New York had a reputation for being a somewhat rough and dangerous place. It had perhaps deserved that reputation in the 1970s, but by 1991 it was not especially fair. When I walked the streets of Manhattan I quickly discovered that New York was a fabulous city, but my first experience was an odd one. I arrived at Newark Airport, collected my luggage and headed for the bus stop outside. However, my progress was impeded by the fact that the dead body of a large black man was lying in a pool of blood at the bottom of one of the escalators. There were policemen standing nearby, preventing other people from coming too close. I do not know how this man died. My best guess is that he simply fell while on the escalator and hit his head. Howevever, my mind was filled with visions of airport shootouts. The thought “What is this place, and what the fuck am I doing here?” went through my mind. I cowered a little. I then got the bus into Manhattan, found the hostel where I was staying, and had a great time. The city was a litttle grimy, and there were one or two rough neighbourhoods, but it was in truth a magnificent place. Since then the city has got a lot richer and more gentrified, and (at least in Manhattan) the rough neighborhoods do not seem quite so rough as before. On Saturday I wandered into Hell’s Kitchen, famous for being a tough location, recorded in bad movies such as this one. But of course its proximity to the important locations of midtown means that a certain amount of gentrification may have taken place. That or the long time residents have taken a liking for politically correct lettuce leaves. Having roughed such a dangerous place, I retired to a nearby restaurant, where I had some Provencale food washed down with an excellent premier cru Burgundy. (Although the food was excellent, the restaurant felt nothing like France. Everything about it was obviously New York, from the size of the portions to the accents to the volume of the diners to the decor). Okay, at that point I got the “kitchen” part. Hell was still eluding me. If you go a long way uptown, then yes, some places are not quite as gentrified as this. But they are perfectly fine, and in terms of safety New York feels these days more like Tokyo than the dangerous, feared place that people in foreign countries had heard terrible stories about during my childhood. October 17th, 2005 | 21 comments - (Comments are closed)
Prepare yourself for a mega-dose of bitter irony. Please take a look at this link to a splendid 100% Che-free site, kindly sent to me by Toni. October 17th, 2005 | 108 comments - (Comments are closed)
It is not just that I dislike filling in forms. Worse than that, I am very bad at it. Which makes it nearly impossible for me to buy things on the internet. Last night I tried to buy some tickets for a comedy show. All I had to do was fill in about twenty boxes with what was required, and every time I tried, something went wrong, and when I went back to where I might or might not have made the mistake, that page disappeared. So I tried again and this time it said that I could not order twice as many tickets all in a row as I actually wanted. So, I gave up. This morning I tried again, and now the thing said that I cannot buy tickets even in the number that I do want. Last night I think what the original problem was was that I failed to tell them that London is in the UK, although that could be quite wrong. Maybe London is not in the UK. Maybe London is in England. Or Great Britain. Who knows with websites? So, now, I and my friends will not be going. This is the secret reason for why shops still exist. Secret, because explaining this fact means admitting that you, like millions of other sensible people, are repeatedly confused beyond endurance by allegedly user-friendly but actually use-effing-impossible, interactive (i.e. you have to do it all) websites. You can go to a shop, see it, and if you can’t do all the things they say you must do with your credit card or your address or whatever the hell details they want, they have to explain what you must do before they can sell you anything. All a computer does is repeat whatever gibberish it was that you did not understand in its tortuous entirety the first time around. This is why banks still exist, instead of all inhabiting cyberspace. The banks all want, physically speaking, to shut themselves. But the people in them know that if they do not explain things face-to-face to actual people from time to time, they will lose out to more obliging competitors. This is why people love their Post Offices. One of the most useful services that Post Offices supply is the service of filling in forms for you. There is a wonderful tax office at the bottom of Euston Tower where you can take your tax forms, and where they tell you face-to-face if you have got everything right. Everything. And when the guy behind the desk whose facial minutiae you can actually scrutinise says that all is now okay, it is. (Apart from the fact that they have stolen thousands of pounds from you and will now do nothing with about half of it and harm with about the other half. Those are different arguments.) This is, more generally, the reason why places – villages, towns, cities – still matter. This is why London exists. This is also why live theatrical performances exist and will continue to exist. I recall reading somewhere that the Marx Brothers beta-tested all their movies by first taking them on the road to show to live audiences, to find out which bits really were funny. → Continue reading: Face to face: why places will continue to exist October 16th, 2005 | 13 comments - (Comments are closed)
Just over a year ago I spent a very happy few days in northern California, spending one very long and pleasant day in the state’s Napa Valley wine region. The region boasts some of the best wines in the world, including the now-famous wineries of Robert Mondavi. Mondavi’s wines caused a global sensation in the trade when, during a “blind tasting” in the early 1970s, wine critics rated his produce a notch above the competition from more exalted premises in Bordeaux and Burgundy. The horror! This article very nicely draws out how the challenge of New World wines from California, Chile, Argentina (a magnificent producer of wine), South Africa, New Zealand and Australia has led to a fairly grumpy response from the traditional centres. This is perhaps understandable. The French produced some of the finest wines of all time, with only a bit of competition from the flowery Hocks and Moselles from Germany and the likeable Riojas in Spain and a few good ones from Italy. About 20-plus years ago, you could walk into a supermarket and choose from only a relatively limited range of wines, much of it fairly basic plonk. Globalisation has put some of the world’s most far-flung wine producers into the reach of Joe Public. All we need now is a similar global “race to the top” in the production of effective hangover cures. October 15th, 2005 | 41 comments - (Comments are closed)
Back in April, whilst delivering political leaflets is the pouring rain, I asked myself (not for the first time) “why do I do this?” After all I do not hold some Conservative party policies in high regard – state pensions increases linked to the rise of average earnings, free higher education, bankrupt private pension funds bailed out with money found from “money forgotten about in banks” and so on. Also I do not like some of the things that the leader of the Conservative party has been doing recently – getting rid of Conservative candidates because he does not like the (very mild) things they have said, or because they happen to have had their photograph taken where there were firearms (which did not belong to the candidate) also in the photograph. Indeed Mr Howard recently got rid of a serving Conservative MP (Howard Flight) for saying he that he thought there was greater scope for savings in the government budget than the Conservative party was committed to (Mr Flight said nothing about “secret plans” and, as his remarks were recorded and published, Mr Howard knows he said nothing about “secret plans”). So why was I getting soaked in the rain putting out leaflets? Well I quite like the people who are standing locally for the Conservative party (I would not like to see them upset – and they would be upset if they lost). But there is another factor – a bad conscience. In 1989 (just as this year) there were County Council elections in Northamptonshire, and a person I knew and liked was in line to become the leader of Northamptonshire County Council. Everybody told me that the lady was in a safe seat and that I need not concern myself with the campaign. And, besides I was off at university (anyway I was going to become a academic and was bored of my years of helping out with practical politics – if I had known what the future really held in store for me I would, if I had found the courage, taken my own life, but that is another story). So I contented myself with coming home for the day of the election and left it at that. The lady lost by three votes and the Conservatives lost Northamptonshire Country Council by one seat. The Labour party made much of the Conservatives losing Northamptonshire and it was one of the factors by which some Conservative MPs justified their attack on Mrs Thatcher in 1990 – an attack the Conservative party (and Britain in general) has never recovered from. I will never know whether Mrs Thatcher would have fallen anyway (wicked people can always find an excuse for their wickedness), but I did leave a local friend to lose. So yes ordinary people “can make a difference”, I proved that by making a difference for the worse. October 14th, 2005 | 11 comments - (Comments are closed)
I have been playing this CD by John Scofield a lot lately. The ace guitarist and fellow band-members punch out a glorious series of songs written by the late, very great Ray Charles. It pretty much blows much of what I think is the dull contemporary fare into the dust. I can also strongly recommend these fellows as well. Music. It is such a personal thing that judging music invites deserved smackdowns. In my subjective view, though, I do think that a lot of the current pop music scene is well, dull as proverbial ditchwater. It does not exactly get the foot tapping, the heart racing, or the head spinning. I cannot imagine trying to seduce some lovely to the latest dirge by Coldplay (can you?). Some of the acts seem so lifeless. Brendan O’Neill, in this week’s Spectator, takes vicious aim at the whole group of bands, in particular Coldplay, for the heinous crime of not just being bland, but also being cringeing, embarrassing Blairites at the same time. (More stupidly, O’Neill attacks such groups for being middle class, as if that should matter a jot). Poor Chris Martin. I almost felt sorry for him after reading the Speccy. Well, almost. I am sure the fair Gwyneth offers considerable consolations, along with that surging bank balance. Check out this hilarious fellow, Mitch Benn, for some side-splitting parodies of everyone from Eminem to Coldplay. October 14th, 2005 | 19 comments - (Comments are closed)
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