News from Matt about latest developments in 10 Downing Street.

Thanks to Pete for spotting it.

“History is shaped by coercion and ideas, and of those ideas are probably the most important.”

Berkeley political scientist Steve Weber, in conversation.

A few years ago, at the height of the Celtic Tiger’s roaring progress, I attended the First Communion of one of my nieces. The occasion provided a useful insight into the extremes of conspicious consumption that credit-fuelled affluence had induced in my fellow-countrymen (and women). Now comes an interesting, er, confirmation that these excesses haven’t yet been extinguished by the recession.

TWO CO LOUTH priests have taken drastic measures to ensure the worst excesses of the boom don’t creep back into a weekend Confirmation ceremony.

Fr David Bradley and Fr Tony Gonoude have written to parents of children taking the sacrament in the Church of the Holy Family in Drogheda tomorrow with a list of rules and regulations that must be adhered to during the ceremony.

The rules are being introduced so the ceremony is not “ruined”, the letter states.

The 10-point list of conditions tells parents not to arrive in stretched limousines or horse-drawn carriages, as has happened in the past, because of the demand for parking. Instead, they are advised to make a donation to a local homeless charity or women’s aid centre.

In the letter – sent home with schoolchildren earlier this week – the priests said that “going on past experience, sometimes guests or extended family that the young people have with them attending the ceremony can absolutely ruin the whole ceremony”.

Parents are asked to arrive at least 10 minutes before the 11am start time and to switch off their mobile phones before entering the church.

Chewing gum is not allowed during the ceremony as it is “both disrespectful and bad manners”.

No standing is allowed in the porches or at the back of the doors during Mass.

Moreover, anybody leaving the church during the ceremony without good reason “will not be allowed back into the church until Mass is finished”…

… in 1953, Everest was conquered as Edmund Hillary and sherpa Tenzing Norgay became the first climbers to reach the summit.

I’m not a football fan, but if you read British newspapers it’s impossible to avoid the subject. Tucked away in the avalanche of lachrymose coverage of Newcastle United’s relegation from the Premiership I found a fascinating factoid which captures the essence of the economic lunacy of the football business: Newcastle has 15 players earning more than £50,000 a week; and none of their contracts has a relegation clause. To my (non-lawyer’s) mind, this sounds as though the club is committed to paying them even though it’s now lost the television income that makes such crazy remuneration possible.

Then came Wednesday evening and Barcelona’s delightful victory over Manchester United. For me, the most interesting comparison lay in the two team’s shirts. Note the main logo on the Barcelona kit:

It turns out that Barcelona gives £12 million to Unicef every year. That’s right: gives.

Compare this with Manchester United’s kit:

The club’s main corporate sponsor is the insurance company at the heart of the banking meltdown — the one that had to be rescued by the US government. Tells you everything you need to know about the English Premiership, really.

LATER: Dave Boyle (Whom God Preserve) emailed to alert me to Dave Conn’s fine article in the Guardian. Excerpt:

Manchester United versus Barcelona is a dream final for the romantic, two great clubs sharing traditions of skill and panache – yet the broader values they embody seem now to spring from opposing visions of the sport. On one side of Stadio Olimpico tomorrow will be Barça, “mes que un club” – more than a club – as the Catalan institution proclaims itself, bearing Unicef on the shirts, owned by 163,000 members. On the other will stand the famous Man United, soaked in history and tradition with AIG, the ultimate symbol of reckless financial speculation on their chests, and owned by the Glazers.

The contrasts appear so clear as to be blinding. Barça, who cannot be bought and whose president must stand for election by the fans; United, taken over against the wishes of the fans and the board itself by the Glazer family, who have loaded the club with around £700m of debt and own it, via a thicket of companies, in the low-tax US state of Nevada. Barça, flagbearers for the idea that a football club is a home of belonging; United, epitomising the English belief that the free market, and billionaires, must rule even sport.

Barcelona’s vice-president Alfons Godall, who fought the campaign with Joan Laporta democratically to oppose the old president, joined the board after Laporta’s 2003 election. He maintains the club’s reality is as virtuous as it will appear on the surface tomorrow. “I believe ours is the best model, an example to England,” Godall says. “We are free. We do not depend on a Mr Abramovich. We want to be successful but also to have meaning, social values. I am sure fans of Manchester United, Liverpool, Chelsea and Arsenal would like to be in our situation. But they have passed the point of no return; they are customers, not members.”

Hooray! Ross Anderson and David Mackay have been elected Fellows of the Royal Society. Cambridge press release here.

When clearing out some files I came on a reprint of one of my favourite essays — “On Intellectual Craftsmanship” by C. Wright Mills. It’s an Appendix to his book, The Sociological Imagination, which was published in 1959, and it’s something I often hand out to graduate students whom I’m supervising. Mills believed that “social science is the practice of a craft” and he decided that it might be useful to his students if he told them how he went about practising his craft.

The result is an amazingly insightful, thought-provoking essay which some of my students have found very helpful in the past. I hadn’t read it for a while, and so settled down with the battered photocopy when I should have been doing something useful (like writing that long course description that one of my colleagues has been despairingly requesting for weeks).

What I discovered was that I was seeing the paper in a new light, because I was now reading from the perspective of a blogger. And some of what Mills has to say rings bells for academics who find themselves reflecting on the relationship between blogging and intellectual work.

Mills opens with a reminder that “the most admirable thinkers within the scholarly community you have chosen to join [in this case sociology] do not split their work from their lives. They seem to take both too seriously to allow such dissociation, and they want to use each for the enrichment of the other”. Most of the best bloggers I know display this reluctance to separate their lives from their work. There are a few exceptions, of course — Ed Felten, say, or the Posner/Becker double-act — but, in the main, life and work are intertwined.

And for good reasons. As Mills says:

“Scholarship is a choice of how to live as well as a choice of career; whether aware of it or not, the intellectual worker forms his or her own self in working toward the perfection of craft; to realise personal potentialities, and any opportunities that come his or her way, such a person constructs a character which has as its core the qualities of the good workman… craftsmanship is the center of yourself and you are personally involved in every intellectual product upon which you may work. To say that you can ‘have experience,’ means, for one thing, that your past plays into and affects your present, and that it defines your capacity for future experience. As a social scientist, you have to control this rather elaborate interplay, to capture what you experience and sort it out; only in this way can you hope to use it to guide and test your reflection, and in the process shape yourself as an intellectual craftsman.”

But how best to do this? One answer, writes Mills, is to

“set up a file, which is, I suppose, a sociologist’s way of saying: – keep a journal. Many creative writers keep journals; the sociologist’s need for systematic reflection demands it. In such a file as I am going to describe, there is joined personal experience and professional activities, studies under way and studies planned. In this file, you, as an intellectual craftsman, will try to get together what you are doing intellectually and what you are experiencing as a person. Here you will not be afraid to use your experience and relate it directly to various work in progress. By serving as a check on repetitious work, your file also enables you to conserve your energy. It also encourages you to capture “fringe-thoughts”: various ideas which may be by-products of everyday life, snatches of conversation overheard on the street, or, for that matter, dreams. Once noted, these may lead to more systematic thinking, as well as lend intellectual relevance to more directed experience.”

“By keeping an adequate file and thus developing self-reflective habits”, he continues,

“you learn how to keep your inner world awake. Whenever you feel strongly about events or ideas you must try not to let them pass from your mind, but instead to formulate them for your files and in so doing draw out their implications, show yourself either how foolish these feelings or ideas are, or how they might be articulated into productive shape. The file also helps you build up the habit of writing. You cannot “keep your hand in” if you do not write something at least every week. In developing the file, you can experiment as a writer and thus, as they say, develop your powers of expression. To maintain a file is to engage in the controlled experience.”

This sounds to me awfully like the best kind of blogging — the kind, say, practiced by Dave Winer, Martin Weller, Tony Hirst, Lorcan Dempsey or Nicholas Carr. And Mills’s essay is one of the the best arguments for blogging I’ve come across. Yet it was written in the late 1950s.

Jorge Colombo drew this week’s cover using Brushes, an application for the iPhone, while standing for an hour outside Madame Tussaud’s Wax Museum in Times Square.

“I got a phone in the beginning of February, and I immediately got the program so I could entertain myself,” says Colombo, who first published his drawings in The New Yorker in 1994. Colombo has been drawing since he was seven, but he discovered an advantage of digital drawing on a nighttime drive to Vermont. “Before, unless I had a flashlight or a miner’s hat, I could not draw in the dark.” (When the sun is up, it’s a bit harder, “because of the glare on the phone,” he says.) It also allows him to draw without being noticed; most pedestrians assume he’s checking his e-mail.

From this week’s New Yorker.