Brief technical excursus

One of the fun things about my job is that - just occasionally - I can do pointless things and pretend they are 'interesting' findings. This archive site is great example. I was looking for old versions of the BBC site yesterday - just type that into the Wayback box - and it's fascinating. We're so used to the current versions of things that we forget how recent it all is. I pulled up the BBC site from 1997, when I went to university - and it's mind boggling how bad it is (here's the news site from 1998). The first site at all I can find is from 1996, though I've since seen the 1994 version


Yet I don't remember this being the case at college, and if pressed would have said it was only a bit worse and clunkier than now.


On a second note, and one that I find amusing, the Internet also proves splendidly corruptible. This blog, wonderful though it is, is not an original phrase, but named for the injunction in Paul and in later councils that he who acts / believes otherwise be accursed. Here's Paul in Galatians 1.9: If any man preach any other gospel unto you than that ye have received, let him be accursed. So, it's a good biblical phrase with history, it's then picked up by the early church.


And if you search using Microsoft's Bing, this is what you find. Actually you find

1. Wikipedia's artcicle on the subject
2. Something about a band
3. An article about the Latin term and Greek origins



Tellingly, if you - like everyone else - search on Google, you get:

1. A blog, about how using human embryos is bad
2. Brilliantly, this blog
3. Amazingly, this blog again, highlighting the May 2009 bibliography (BOTM: Phineus Redux)

Google own blogger.com

Saying sorry

For the limited (i.e., no) people who miss this blog, for the long silence, I apologise. But, brilliantly, not as much as the Sun has had to apologise for misspelling the name of Jacqui Janes on their website.

On this affair, they've behaved disgracefully, manipulatively and unfairly on the whole issue. While I share their general scepticism of the dregs of the Labour regime, picking up the outrage of a grieving mother to attack the Prime Minister on this is wrong. He had written a letter personally; he did make time to speak in person to the Ms Janes. There (and even before) it should have rested, given it is over a simple spelling mistake - unfortunate yes, but not a scandal.

This should teach them to refrain in future, but sadly, of course, it will almost certainly affect them only trivially. But we can hope.

Manufactured outrage

I always think it's bad when po-facedness wins, even when there are cheap points to be made. I'm equally keen on people not taking all this very seriously.

So, well done Jack Straw for this response to a question about the hours worked by his Special Advisors:

As working for me as a Special Adviser is, I am told, pure pleasure and stress free, my Special Advisers work exceptionally long hours, often at weekends and late into the evening without complaint, and have not therefore felt the need which they otherwise might to complete timesheets to show that I was sweating their labour

I thought it was funny (for it is). And poor form for the right in pretending to care.

We're in this together

Anna's furious with George Osbourne's speech at conference for his 'patronising' use of the first person plural in his speech. What really riled her was 'we all borrowed too much'. Amusingly of course, the papers and the Today programme have been highlighting Osbourne's reaching deep into his children's DVD collection for the phrase 'we're in this together', apparently a key policy line from the makers of High School Musical (though as Disney spent a lot of the mid century fighting furiously with various Unions, there is a certain irony about that).

They're both wrong though. HSM cannot take credit for 'we're in this together.' It's a generic phrase. Perhaps Osbourne was really focusing on the Nine inch nails song of the same title (I've heard neither). Equally, A's quite wrong to complain that Osbourne's wealth makes him somehow unqualified to comment. Let's be clear, he's keeping the stupid 50% tax, and imposing a cut on MPs and ministers, as well as exempting the lowest paid public sector workers from the freeze (and the front line military - nice touch).

Crucially, and I cannot stress this enough, he's right because we're fucked. We have no money and a debt with more zeros that High School Musical sales. So of course we need to cut jobs and freeze pay and work harder. Labour has been poor in response claiming:
a) they'd cut harder because they've promised to halve the deficit (just as they promised to abolish boom and bust)
b) the Tories would hit the middle class. It's a long way from Labour when people earning over £50k are the class they worry about

I think it's good stuff. The public sector workers being banned from earning more than the Prime Minister is nonsense, and their caps on pension just absurd. Were they to come into force I'd have to move out of the Public sector, but they won't.

Roll on May.

Bibliography, September 2009

Bought (o)

Read (6)

G. Tremlett, Ghosts of Spain

A. Christie, Murder is easy
M. Druon, Le Roi de fer
J. Lovegrove, The Hope
A. Tabucci, Requiem: a hallucination
A. Trollope, The Duke's Children

I'm far to busy to read much this month. Other than holidays I have barely read anything this month. The best though was Tremlett's (the Guardian's Madrid correspondent) book on post-Francoist Spain, which I have had for some time and never quite got round to reading. It's fascinating, insightful and very well done.

Bibliography, August 2009

Acquired:
still haven't counted

Read (13)

BOTM: A. Burroughs, Dry

J. Binns, Ascetics and ambassadors of Christ
B. Bryson, Made in America
R. Carver, Where I'm calling from
D. Dales, Light to the Isles
R. Grant, Colony
G. Greene, A burnt out case (probably read earlier but not recorded)
G. Haigh, Silent Revolutions
A. Lebor, City of Oranges
G. Morgan, AD 69. The year of four emperors
A. Proulx, Brokeback mountain & other stories
P. Roth, I married a communist
H.H. Scallard, From the Gracci to Nero



Cracking month this - barely a bad book, but Burroughs the best. I was very pleasantly surprised by the honesty and the wicked humour of what is fundamentally a depressing litany of alcohol abuse and terminal illness of one's best friend. Uplifting in the end, but very well written. Couple of honourable mentions worth going to Scallard's excellent textbook on the end of the republic and Gideon Haigh's collected essays. A peerless collection from the best cricket writer active today.

It's an odd boy who doesn't like Sport

In one of their odder tracks, the Bonzos recorded a ditty where they reminisced about sport, more specifically, about the odd boy who doesn't like sport. It's an odd song that cannot quite make up its mind about whether to parody the hale and hearty public school vision of sport or the miserable child who has no desire to play. I always remember school as a time when I didn't like sport, though on calaculating reflection I appear to have done a lot of it - all badly. Then, I rather stopped doing and following it for some years at university, and was rather dismissive of those who saw it as important.


Anyway, I'd meant to do a quick sport round up, but time appears to have caught up with me. So very briefly

• I now do think it's important, and smugly spent two days at the Oval watching us win in glorious fashion, before being very hungover the following day
• I am appalled by what Harlequins have done. It's as bad as football and they should be relegated. They were underservedly not banned.
• Football appears to have started; before then end of the cricket season, and seems to be injuring both their own fans (who cares) and indeed members of the England cricket team (much more serious)

I think the reason I dislike football so much is that they appear to have missed the point. It is always meant to be a game, a game taken seriously, but a game. The serious part is the playing. And football forget that long ago. What saddens me is the rugby looks like doing it now; especially my own team. And then there is no point watching. I loved the fact last year that when Harlequins played Stade Francais, fans mingled, fun was had and everyone went back on the same train. Cheating at blood replacements isn't the beginning of the end, but in some ways it the end of the beginning and we can only hope the gutter doesn't beckon.

For to follow football, that would be anathema indeed.