Aw, isn’t that nice. This email just popped into my mailbox from a PR firm which shall be nameless.

Hi John,

I’m getting in touch because I thought you’d be interested in hearing about a new celebrity mobile video service launching today. It’s called Sparkle.

Sparkle brings you video messages from the stars, direct and unedited. It is the only subscription-based mobile video service that guarantees regular authentic, never-before-seen footage of genuine stars. Sparkle connects you via video message directly from your favourite celebrities’ mobile phone to your own, at least three times a week.

Sparkle is launching to coincide with the Gumball 3000 Rally 2011. Celebrity Gumballers including Hollywood’s Christian Slater, the cast of Dirty Sanchez, hip-hop star Eve and Sparkle Ambassador Tamer Hassan will film and share their Rally experience in real time only on Sparkle.

We’d like to give you the chance to test Sparkle for free.

Note the cheery familiar tone, and the assumption that a tech blogger might be interested in news about celebs — which suggests a complete failure to do any background research on the intended recipient of such trash!

And the funny thing is that until this moment I thought that Sparkle was some kind of domestic cleaning product. It isn’t — but it’s a lot of other things besides.

My Observer colleague Peter Preston had terrific piece about the lawyers-vs-Twitter controversy in yesterday’s paper in which he highlighted an aspect of all this that has not received the attention it deserves. This is the fact that the motive force behind the growth in privacy injunctions is not just the intrusiveness of the British tabloid media, but the enterprising greed of London’s leading law firms. As he puts it,

The other defining change of the last 12 years has gradually seen the essential big earner for England’s small but richly endowed libel bar sliding away. English libel law, offering heavy damages, huge fees and real advantages to a prospective litigant, has slowly become another victim of the digital revolution. Our courts have traditionally welcomed cases from all over the globe, however vestigial publication to a UK audience may have been. In that sense, the internet seemed to offer still plumper pickings. But American administrations, first at a state then a national level, became disgusted by the justice they saw meted out to their citizens by the Strand. They have decided that no English ruling that infringes the right to free speech can be enforced across the Atlantic. Our own politicians, spurred into action, are seeking to reform the gross imbalances of English libel.

And this decline in libel rewards is fundamentally connected to the rise in privacy speculation since 1998. Max Mosley could have chosen libel, but opted for privacy. Lawyers, naturally, have moved into this fresh, potentially lush area of litigation. Sweeping injunctions – nobody has quite counted them yet – have become the weapon of first resort. Sometimes (as with Trafigura’s attempt to gag the Guardian) the case has been too outrageous to endure. More typically, though, the queue of celebrities at the court door has succeeded in buying expensive secrecy for marital misdeeds – even if some, such as Andrew Marr, eventually repented of going to court.

(Emphasis added).

What’s going on, I suspect, is that law firms are encouraging clients to splash out on what they (the lawyers, that is) must know is futile expenditure. In the case of footballers earning anything up to £200k a week, the fees probably look like small beer, so there’s clearly room for business expansion here — for lawyers.

In the interests of helping innocent footballers I’ve built a simple DIY calculator which will enable the average footballer to work out how much it will cost him to fail to get a US court to force Twitter to reveal the identify of Twitterers. It assumes that a US law firm will also be needed to do the business on the American side. On the assumptions I started with, it looks like the minimum cost would be about two days’ wages.

The problem, for those who read recipes on their iPads, is how to keep the precious device safe from the various fluids and other hazards likely to be found in kitchens. The solution (apparently) comes from Chef Sleeve. The triangular box in which the disposable bags come doubles as a stand.

Just thought you’d like to know.

Interesting piece in The Atlantic.

There are politicians who don’t cheat on their wives, movie stars whose marriages don’t end in divorce, and professional athletes who aren’t womanizers, but a pro bodybuilder turned Hollywood star turned governor?

Arnold Schwarzenegger never had a chance.

His impending divorce has been the talk of Southern California drive time radio for at least the last week, and I’ve yet to encounter anyone surprised by the news. It’s because we remember. Eight years ago, on the eve of the special election that won him the statehouse, the Los Angeles Times published a scathing story about his groping problem. “The initial Times report told the story of six women who said that the star had touched them in a suggestive or aggressive manner without their consent,” James Rainey recalled this week. “Eventually, a total of 16 women, 11 of them giving their names, described physical humiliations suffered at the hands of the man who was running to replace Gray Davis as governor in the recall election.” 

Today the newspaper has finished what it started.

“Former California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and his wife, Maria Shriver, separated after she learned he had fathered a child more than a decade ago — before his first run for office — with a longtime member of their household staff,” says the front page story. “The staff member worked for the family for 20 years, retiring in January.”

I never look at photographs of Schwarzenegger without thinking of Clive James’s wonderful description of him looking like “a condom stuffed with walnuts”.

It’s not often that one feels genuine sadness when a politician dies, but I felt it this morning when the news came through that Garret Fitzgerald died last night. He was one of the very few Irish politicians who was a genuine intellectual — a fact often illustrated by the (possibly apocryphal) story of him emerging from an exhausting all-night EU negotiation session and expressing the view that while the resulting deal might be ok in practice “the question is whether it works in theory”.

He was for many years an academic at University College, Dublin and benefited from an unusual clause in the terms of employment of lecturers in the National University of Ireland (of which UCD was a constituent college) which gave staff unpaid leave of absence to hold public office while keeping their academic posts open. So even when he was Foreign Minister or Taoiseach he always had the possibility of returning to academic life. Perhaps that’s what gave him such a sublimely distracted look.

He was a mass of contradictions: the son of two heartland Irish nationalists, he ought to have been a visceral anti-Brit. But he was exactly the opposite — which perhaps helps to explain why he was able to overcome the damage done to Anglo-Irish relations by the antagonism between Charlie Haughey and Margaret Thatcher. In that sense — as former President Mary Robinson pointed out on Radio 4 this morning — there was a strange resonance in the fact that he passed away on the night when the British monarch was making a speech down the road in Dublin Castle, at a banquet to which he had been invited.

Searching for images of him this morning, I was struck by this one (from Wikipedia), in which he looks eerily like my maternal grandfather — who was a devout Fianna Fail supporter and probably disapproved of Garret (who led the opposing political tribe, Fine Gael). The nicest personal memory I have of him comes from a day when I was heading for Davey Byrne’s pub off Grafton Street in Dublin. I suddenly saw Garret walking towards me, accompanied by one of his grandchildren, a young girl who was holding his hand and talking animatedly to him. What was striking was the fact that he was entirely engrossed in what she was saying, and paying no attention whatsoever to what was happening on the street. It was a lovely encapsulation of the fact that while he may have been a statesman and a world figure, at that moment he was, purely and simply, a loved and loving grandfather. May he rest in peace.

LATER: Nice round-up of tributes on Politico. And the LRB has put up a list of the articles he wrote for the magazine.

On June 15, Google launches its Chromebook netbooks. The Ubergizmo site has a useful preview of the Samsung version. Highlights include:

The most interesting revelation, however, had nothing to do with the hardware. Google announced a “Chromebooks for Business” deal which, for $28 per employee per month, organisations get:

There’s also going to be a comparable deal for education – at $20/student per month.

This could be really interesting – especially as many organisations (including major UK newspapers and universities) have already gone over to Google Apps (Gmail and Docs especially).

Amazon.co.uk will be selling it from June 15.

Hmmm… I see that the IMF’s Articles of Association state that its officials “shall be immune from legal process with respect to acts performed by them in their official capacity except when the Fund waives this immunity.”

I’m continually impressed by the creativity and ingenuity of the people who do the cover designs for high-end magazines like the Economist and the New Yorker. This one from the issue of the New Yorker following Bin Laden’s killing is, IMHO, a minor masterpiece.

I’ve got far too many books to read at the moment, and so have been havering about whether to get Francis Fukuyama’s The Origins of Political Order: From Prehuman Times to the French Revolution, partly because it seems very relevant to understanding why countries like Egypt stand a chance of becoming modern states while one’s like Libya and Bahrain don’t. Until this morning I had concluded that life is too short to read long books way outside of my field, but having read David Runciman’s absorbing review, now I’m not so sure.

Fukuyama’s new book is dominated by the influence of another of his mentors, the conservative Harvard political scientist Samuel Huntington. Huntington is best known for his own cosmic soundbite – The Clash of Civilizations. But his main interest was in political order: how to achieve it and how to mess it up. Basically Huntington thought there are two things that could go wrong on the road to a well-ordered society. You could fail to get there because your society never gets beyond a condition of internecine conflict and incipient civil war. Or you could get there and find your society gets stuck in a rut and fails to adapt to new threats and challenges. Fukuyama takes this framework and applies it to the problem of democratic order. Why is it that some societies have gone down the democratic route to stability while others have remained stuck with autocracy? And will democracies be able to adapt to the new threats and challenges that they face?

Runciman provides a lucid and illuminating summary of Fukuyama’s argument, which I suppose might constitute an argument for not buying the book. Against that, he’s whetted my appetite for it. Damn.

Oh — and while I’m on the subject of understanding why some countries work and others do, there’s an interesting review by Pankaj Mishra of Anatol Lieven’s new book on Pakistan.

Approaching his subject as a trained anthropologist would, Lieven describes how Pakistan, though nominally a modern nation state, is still largely governed by the “traditions of overriding loyalty to family, clan and religion”. There is hardly an institution in Pakistan that is immune to “the rules of behavior that these loyalties enjoin”. These persisting ties of patronage and kinship, which are reminiscent of pre-modern Europe, indicate that the work of creating impersonal modern institutions and turning Pakistanis into citizens of a nation state – a long and brutal process in Europe, as Eugen Weber and others have shown – has barely begun.