From today’s Irish Times.

GERMAN RESEARCHERS have discovered a scientific basis for one of the hoariest of horror film cliches.

It’s a familiar scene. A group of teenagers get lost and wander aimlessly through the forest until, just before the knife-wielding maniac appears, one teenager asks: “Haven’t we been this way before?”

Now researchers at Germany’s prestigious Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics have discovered that, when they lack clear landmarks, humans do indeed walk in circles.

The German team examined the paths taken by volunteers wearing GPS tracking devices in a dense forest near the French border and in the Sahara desert.

On days with clear conditions, volunteers kept a straight path – though they often veered from straight ahead – while in cloudy conditions, they began wandering in circles without realising.

Pshaw! Research my eye. This is Old Hat, as anyone who has read A.A. Milne knows. They will recall the story (‘Tigger is unbounced’) in which Rabbit, who is not exactly enamoured of Tigger at first, conceives a plan to take the newcomer for a walk in the fog and then lose him. They do indeed lose him, but then discover that they are walking round in circles under Rabbit’s confident leadership.

Fancy all those Herr Doktors at the Max Planck Institute not knowing that there was Prior Research in this subject. Huh!

The livelihood of a hotel concierge depends on the maintenance of a complex facade: traditionally, he must be obsequious yet peremptory; menial and, at the same time, a bit of a snob. This makes the inner life of the concierge, like that of the psychiatrist or the pastor, the object of speculation. In Muriel Barbery’s novel The Elegance of the Hedgehog, a dumpy concierge nurses a private devotion to Tolstoy. In the 1993 movie For Love or Money, the concierge Doug Ireland (played by Michael J. Fox) must endure the whims, and walk the poodles, of such guests as Mr. Salvatore, who keeps asking for more of “dem things on the pillow,” by which, Doug finally figures out, he means mints.

From a delicious piece by Lauren Collins in the current New Yorker.

Willem Buiter is in Martha’s Vineyard for his family holiday, which sounds nice — except for one thing. His blog post takes up the story.

The only blight on the landscape of this holiday is that, once again, a US presidential family has decided to vacation on Martha’s Vineyard during the month of August. From earlier visitations by the Clintons, I know that the arrival of the presidential hordes on the Vineyard represent a massive negative externality for all those who go there in pursuit of the same thing the president and his family seek: peace and quiet. Whether the local economy gets a temporary or lasting boost, I leave as a project for Econ 101.

The presidential party (or presidential court) that tags along on any presidential journey, let alone a temporary relocation involving the entire presidential nuclear family, looks and behaves like an occupying army. There are hundreds, if not thousands of persons charged with security, ranging from the secret service to the specially beefed-up state and local police forces. Communications experts, specialist medical personnel, myriad advisers and countless other presidential hangers-on cause the Vineyard to sink at least a foot deeper into the sea. The carbon footprint is bigger than that of the yeti. The press corps and assorted other media camp out all over the island, competing with the presidential staff for first place in the hot air emission stakes. Roads are blocked. Traditional rights-of-way are suspended. Beaches become inaccessible.

He’s seen this elsewhere too:

The only time I have been to Davos for the World Economic Forum (the event with the highest ratio of self-importance to importance of any gathering of humans anywhere, ever), president Clinton attended part of the circus. Let me emphasize that I was there ex-officio only – as briefcase carrier (aka chief economist) to the president of the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development. US security personnel simply took over the town, established a defensive perimeter and bossed and bullied everyone there, including the Swiss army and police, on the roads and in the meeting halls. The only time I have seen anything like it was when the Israeli prime minister visited the Binnenhof – the centre of government in the Hague, the Netherlands. Israeli security personnel took such a complete grip on that part of the Hague, that the Dutch prime minister had to argue with them to be allowed to use his own office.

I recognise that security considerations are important, and that the days when a US president could walk his dog down Main Street on his own are unlikely to return anytime soon. Even so, the in-your-face arrogance of the modern imperial presidency is breathtaking and, I would argue, dangerous to a democratic, open society. The gap between the president (or indeed the president-elect) and the average American becomes infinite as soon as the presidential election polls close. This isolation cannot be twittered or blackberried away. The president effectively becomes the prisoner of his court. As a president’s time in office wears on, this isolation leads increasingly to distorted views of reality, at times bordering on paranoia.

The force- and reality-distortion field that surrounds the US president is indeed extraordinary. In the last 15 years, the President and Vice-President have, on separate occasions, visited the village where I live. When the Prez (Clinton) came, an entire floor of the nearest hospital was commandeered (and closed to NHS patients) for the day of his visit. Not sure what happened when Al Gore came.

And while we’re on the subject of how print publications might reverse the decline in their circulations, I should report that we are not the first generation of journalists to fret about these things. My illustrious countryman, Flann O’Brien, was much exercised by these matters and wrote about them often in his Irish Times column. In one, he reported on his Research Bureau’s work on a new form of ink, provisionally called Trink.

It looks for all the world like the ordinary black ink you can buy for twopence. ‘Trink’ however is a very special job. When put on paper and dried, it emits a subtle alcoholic vapour which will hang over the document in an invisible odourless cloud for several days.

The whole idea, he explained, was to print the Irish Times with it.

You will then get something more than a mere newspaper for your thruppence. You get a lightning pick-me-up not only for yourself and your family but for everybody that travels in your bus. Any time you feel depressed, all you need is to read the leading article; if you want a whole night out, get down to the small ads.

Like all great inventors, O’Brien foresaw opposition.

Every great innovation must expect it. Vested interests, backstairs influence. The Licensed Vintners’ Association will make a row; newsvendors will have to hold an excise licence or possibly the Irish Times will be on sale only in hostelries; the Revenue will probably clamp a crippling tax on every copy and compel us to print under the title ‘Licensed for The Sale of Intoxicating News, 6 Days’. All that will not stop us, any more than the man with the red flag stopped the inevitable triumph of the motor car. And no power on earth, remember, can compel your copy of the Irish Times to close down at ten. You and read and re-read it until two in the morning if it suits your book, and even tear it in two and give your little wife a page.

You may laugh, but this is at least as good an idea as some of the dafter wheezes dreamed up by marketing executives to persuade people to buy copies of print publications at newsagents. Of course nowadays, one would segment the market. The Sun and the Mirror would be printed using the cheaper Spanish reds, or possibly bulk-buy Retsina; the Financial Times would be done in one of the Duexieme Cru clarets, or perhaps a decent Chambertin; Vogue would be printed in champagne while Hello! would be admirably served by Tia Maria. The Guardian and Observer would be best suited by Chilean or South African Pinot Noir, I fancy. Loaded and other Lads’ Mags would be printed in Newcastle Brown. The Independent, for its part, would be done in non-alcoholic lager while the Tablet would be printed in communion wine (with the lonely-hearts page perhaps done in Holy Water to discourage fornication?) And of course the Telegraph would patriotically stick to the products of English vineyards.

I tell you, we’re onto something here.

From today’s Guardian.

The Labour party has appointed a ‘Twitter tsar’ with the responsibility of encouraging MPs to use new media.

Kerry McCarthy, MP for Bristol East, has been made the party’s new media campaigns spokeswoman ahead of an election next year that she says will be the first ‘new media election’. A recent study for a newspaper voted McCarthy the most “influential MP” on Twitter – with more than 1,600 followers.

Labour’s advisers are buoyant this week because the party thinks it stole a march on the Conservative leader, David Cameron, by using Twitter to get out a defence of the NHS in the aftermath of an attack by Conservative MEP Dan Hannan on the health system.

Though all involved insist the “we love the NHS” Twitter topic grew organically and was not composed of purely Labour activists, the prime minister and his wife Sarah Brown used Twitter to get their defences in first. The “we love the NHS” trending topic was so popular that the site crashed on Wednesday night.

I’m assuming that the soubriquet ‘tsar’ is the Guardian‘s, not Labour’s. If so it’s just the latest example of a lazy, historically-illiterate habit. It first surfaced in journalism, I think, many years ago in the US media with stuff about a President (Nixon?) appointing a “Drugs Czar”. This was not, as you might pedantically have supposed, the capo di tutti capi of the illegal drugs racket, but a government official charged with running the so-called “war on drugs”, which was at least as misguided as the later “war on terror”.

Er, harrumph!

Thanks for Pete for the original link.

Lovely diary par by Simon Hoggart.

There are few tribes more loathsome than the American right, and their vicious use of the shortcomings in the NHS to attack Barack Obama’s attempts at health reform are a useful reminder.

I was thinking of this during a visit to my 91-year-old dad who is still in an NHS hospital after three weeks, recovering from a broken hip. He has had fantastic care, including a new metal hip, blood transfusions, different antibiotics to match every aspect of his condition; all administered by nurses who remain cheerful even when asked to perform tasks on men – the lethal combination of pain and old age makes some in the ward exceedingly grumpy – that I would not want to do for £1,000 a time. If he was in an American hospital he’d be using up half his life savings to get that standard of care, and few ordinary Americans could afford the insurance that would provide it. (This is because health insurers spend a large part of their income on PR against the ‘socialised medicine’ and on sending pro forma letters explaining why your policy doesn’t cover actual illness.) All over the US there are people whose lives are being destroyed for lack of proper health care provision, and there is no sight more odious than the rich, powerful and arrogant trying to keep it that way.

He’s right. The US ‘debate’ over healthcare reform is becoming increasingly surreal. It’s almost as though the American Right has decided that this is the way to undo what it sees as the blip of an Obama presidency.

Elsewhere the Guardian has a nice piece by an American academic who has lived in this country for many years. He points out — rightly — that the biggest difference between the two countries (and this is true not only for the UK but also for most of the big European democracies) is that fear of bankruptcy has been disconnected from the universal fear of serious illness.

The relationship between doctors and their patients at every level is different from that in the States; here money does not change hands. An American friend of mine with five children was terrified when he became unemployed, fearful that one of them might become ill. I became ill when I was briefly back in the US some years ago, attending a meeting. With an acute urinary obstruction, the first person I saw, and the only one who could admit me for treatment, was the woman in charge of payment. My credit card probably saved my life.

There may be delays, frustrations and bureaucracy with the NHS, but the system delivers outstanding healthcare at no cost to the patient and far less of the GDP that the US system consumes. Being over 60, all prescription drugs are free. Perhaps it is that absence of fear of becoming ill that is the most important aspect of the system.

It’s difficult to believe that the hysterical lobbying against universal health care that’s currently raging in the US could derail Obama’s attempts at reform. But then this is a country where 46 million people voted for McCain/Palin, and where many people think Palin would make a serious presidential candidate.