Sometimes, things happen that restore one’s faith in humanity. Here’s a report of one such event.

It seems that two unorthodox portraits of Brian Cowen, the Irish Taoiseach (Prime Minister), suddenly appeared in two of Dublin’s leading galleries. One in the National Gallery showed the Taoiseach on the toilet, and another in the Royal Hibernian Gallery (above) showing him holding his Y-fronts. According to the report, the pictures

appeared mysteriously in Dublin among paintings of the country’s other famous citizens in more decorous poses.

The Irish media speculated that the prankster had created the artworks in an attempt to lift the nation’s spirits at a time of deep economic gloom. Judging by the chuckles of visitors and comments inundating the blogosphere, the stunt worked.

“Biffo on the bog”, was one gleeful response, referring to the Taoiseach by his nickname, which stands for “Big Ignorant F***er from Offaly”.

The artist reportedly walked calmly into the National Gallery carrying a shoulder bag. He then affixed a prepared caption for the picture to a free space among portraits of Michael Collins, William Butler Yeats and Bono, before hanging his canvas, undisturbed by security.

There’s been the most ludicrous over-reaction by the government to this — as reported by, e.g. the Irish Times. RTE, the national TV station, cravenly apologised for reporting the incident after a complaint from the government’s Press Secretary (who happens to be a namesake of mine). What it shows, of course, is the power of ridicule. The moral authority of the Catholic church in Ireland never recovered from the revelation that the Bishop of Kerry had not only been screwing a handsome dame (and fathering a child) but that he had been doing it in the back of a Lancia saloon! This led to a wonderful explosion in Bishop Casey jokes (e.g. Q. “What’s the correct form of address for the Bishop of Kerry?” A. “Dad.”) Cowen was already looking ridiculous as a result of the implosion of the Irish banking system. Now he’s a real laughing stock.

Here’s something I ought to have known, but didn’t until I heard an art critic on Radio 4 talking about it this morning. This report dates from February 2003.

In an act with extraordinary historical resonance, United Nations officials covered up a tapestry reproduction of Pablo Picasso’s anti-war mural “Guernica” during US Secretary of State Colin Powell’s February 5 presentation of the American case for war against Iraq.

Picasso’s painting commemorates a small Basque village bombed by German forces in April 1937 during the Spanish Civil War. The painter, in desolate black, white and grey, depicts a nightmarish scene of men, women, children and animals under bombardment. The twisted, writhing forms include images of a screaming mother holding a dead child, a corpse with wide-open eyes and a gored horse. Art historian Herbert Read described the work as “a cry of outrage and horror amplified by a great genius.”

The reproduction has hung outside the Security Council chamber at UN headquarters in New York since its donation by the estate of Nelson A. Rockefeller in 1985. As the council gathered to hear Powell on Wednesday, workers placed a blue curtain and flags of the council’s member countries in front of the tapestry.

UN officials claimed that the cover-up was simply a matter of creating a more effective backdrop for the television cameras. “When we do have large crowds we put the flags up and the UN logo in front of the tapestry,” asserted Stephane Dujarric. New York Newsday, however, reported that “Diplomats at the United Nations, speaking on condition they not be named, have been quoted in recent days telling journalists that they believe the United States leaned on UN officials to cover the tapestry, rather than have it in the background while Powell or other US diplomats argued for war on Iraq.”

This is an extraordinary story. It reminds me of the anecdote (possibly apocryphal?) of a German diplomat looking intently at the painting and then turning to Picasso. “Did you do this?” he asked. “No”, replied the painter, “you did”. As the Italians say, if it’s not true tehn it ought to be.

Well, well. So Charles D was a perfectly normal undergraduate for his day.

Two hundred years after Charles Darwin’s birth, historians have gained new insight into his days as a student at Cambridge after unearthing bills that record intimate details of how he spent his money.

The revolutionary scientist was, it would appear, ahead of his time in his willingness to pay extra to supplement his daily intake of vegetables. And, as one would expect of a 19th-century gentleman, he was happy to pay others to carry out menial tasks for him, such as stoking his fire and polishing his shoes.

But there is little to suggest that he bought many books, or that he did much else to further his studies. The evolutionist famously spent little of his time studying or in lectures, preferring to shoot, ride and collect beetles.

The records, which were found in six previously overlooked college books, are due to be published online tomorrow on the Complete Works of Charles Darwin website (darwin-online.org.uk). They allow historians to pinpoint the date of his arrival at Christ’s College (26 January 1828), as well as providing previously unknown detail of his undergraduate life.

Darwin’s time at Cambridge, from 1828 to 1831 – which he would later describe as “the most joyful of my happy life” – is also one for which there is a comparative shortage of information. “Before this, we didn’t really know very much about Darwin’s daily life at Cambridge at all,” said Dr John van Wyhe, director of the Darwin website. “It had been assumed that there were no significant traces of his time here left to discover, which meant that we were short of information about one of the most formative parts of his life.

Now, in his 200th anniversary year, we have found a real treasure trove right in the middle of Cambridge.”

As it happens, I was in the Zoology Museum the other night, at the launch of the Cambridge Science Festival, when I came on some display cases showing some of Darwin’s finches (above) and the beetle collection he amassed during his time as a student (below).

There’s something magical about coming face to face with objects like this. They have the ‘aura’ that Walter Benjamin used to go on about in The Work of Art in an Age of Mechanical Reproduction.

Thought you’d be impressed by my artistic ability. (But see here for the explanation.)

The Economist’s correspondent in Silicon Valley is moving on. Here’s his valedictory report.

IN 2003, when your correspondent arrived in Silicon Valley, a common response to “How is the Valley?” was “In a nuclear winter.” The dotcom bust had incinerated an entire generation of start-ups. A much-debated essay argued that “IT [information technology] doesn’t matter.” The Valley itself seemed to matter less.

Its geeks were desperately looking for their “next big thing” and minting neologisms (“utility computing”, “the digital home”) in the hope that one might stick. But ordinary people outside the Valley were no longer paying attention. Valley geeks were already hopping onto Wi-Fi hotspots and playing with “smart” phones, but most people were still dialling up to connect to the internet and using mobile phones only for talking. There was some excitement about a fairly new gadget, Apple’s iPod, but nobody suspected that its progeny, in the form of a phone, might one day make the internet “mobile”. Nor did a popular search engine, Google, show signs that it might be a lucrative business, much less a new technology superpower. It was still a world of personal computers, dominated by Microsoft through its Windows operating system.

But towards the end of 2003 two conference organisers, Dale Dougherty and Tim O’Reilly, were brainstorming when Mr Dougherty used the words “Web 2.0”. They immediately realised that the phrase—with its software connotation of a newly released, better and more stable version—had enormous appeal as a rallying cry for the Valley. The Web 2.0 Conference was born, and the first one, in San Francisco in October 2004, created a stir…

Nice piece, which reminds one of how much can happen in a few years. Essentially his stint saw Google rise from an ingenious start-up to a commercial giant.

Warning message on a South African wine box.

Thanks to Andrew Ingram for spotting it.

Nice graphic essay by Christoph Niemann.

I like coffee so much that I have tea for breakfast: The first cup of the day in particular is so good that I’m afraid I won’t be able to properly appreciate it when I am half-asleep. Therefore, I celebrate it two hours later when I am fully conscious.

Thanks to Michael Dales for the link.

I love Niemann’s New Yorker covers.

Last night I went to the Royal Society of Arts (of which I am, ahem, a Fellow, don’t you know) for James Boyle’s lecture.

I’ve been reading his book which — as the event Chairman, Bill Thompson (left in photograph), observed — is beautifully written (unlike some other treatises on intellectual property that I could name). Perusing the list of attendees beforehand (it was a full house), James noted that it was dominated not by IP lawyers but by techies and ‘creative industry’ types, and wisely decided to go into storytelling rather than law-professor mode. The result: a riveting and thought-provoking event.

BillT is right: The Public Domain is a lovely book, gracefully written and persuasive. Its central themes are:

Boyle thinks that we need a movement (analogous to the environment movement) to protect and reverse the enclosure of the public domain.

Like me, JB is a great admirer of Macaulay. (Unlike me, he sometimes writes like him too.) The book has some lovely quotes from Mac’s speeches on copyright. He was particularly fierce against attempts to extend its term far beyond the death of the author — and particularly against the idea that literary legatees might choose to withdraw access to great works. Here he is, for example, on Boswell’s Life of Samuel Johnson.

One of the most instructive, interesting and delightful works in our language is Boswell’s Life of Johnson. Now it is well known that Boswell’s eldest son considered this book, considered the whole relation of Boswell to Johnson, as a blot on the escutcheon of the family. He thought, not perhaps altogether without reason, that his father had exhibited himself in a ludicrous and degrading light. And thus he became so sore and irritable that at last he could not bear to hear The Life of Johnson mentioned. Suppose that the law had been who my honourable and learned friend wishes to make it. Suppose that the copyright of Boswell’s Life of Johnson had belonged, as well it might, during sixty years to Boswell’s eldest son. What would have been the consequence? An unadulterated copy of the finest biographical work in the world would have been as scarce as the first edition of Camden’s Britannia.

Boyle argues that, in many respects, people like Thomas Jefferson and Macaulay got right to the heart of the matter. One couldn’t ask for a better refutation of the IP lobby’s arguments that extending IP rights incentivises authors (including dead ones) than this blast — again about Dr Johnson.

Dr. Johnson died fifty-six years ago. If the law were what my honourable and learned friend wishes to make it, somebody would now have the monopoly of Dr. Johnson’s works… Now, would the knowledge that this copyright would exist in 1841 have been a source of gratification to Johnson? Would it have stimulated his exertions? Would it have once drawn him out of his bed before noon? Would it have once cheered him under a fit of the spleen? Would it have induced him to give us one more allegory, one more life of a poet, one more imitation of Juvenal? I firmly believe not. I firmly believe that a hundred years ago, when he was writing our debates for The Gentleman’s Magazine, he would very much rather have had twopence to buy a plate of shin of beef at a cook’s shop underground.

Shameless plug: James Boyle is coming to Cambridge to give the first Arcadia Lecture at my college. Details here. All welcome.

I was brooding about the (dire) state of the automobile industry, and thinking that however pragmatic a short-term rescue for GM & Co might be, it makes no long term sense to enable them to continue as they were. Why? Because that would just be to encourage them to continue making products that are no longer desireable or needed. (It’s strange how silly SUVs look now.)

As usual, Mark Anderson has an interesting take on what’s going on.

I would like to suggest a way of viewing today’s layoffs in a different light. It now appears that we have been living on borrowed money, literally, since about 2000. Whether you are looking at house pricing and the housing boom (and bust), or stocks, or commodities, or consumer items, it’s all basically true: the pricing of the last eight years was supported by too much personal (and corporate) debt. Alan Greenspan gets most of the credit in the U.S. side of this story, but that’s a different tale.

In that sense, layoffs are not “bad.” Our society tried to live beyond its means, we invented fake ways of making fake money, all built on debt and fake financial structures. All of that now has to come down. The jobs we are “losing” never really existed, by and large. Rather, that level of employment, at least in the way those jobs were allocated, was itself, mostly, also fake.

We are now rewinding back to 2000, like it or not, back to a time when borrowing was high but not exponentially approaching infiinity; when house prices were high in many places, but not doubling and tripling in short order; when stocks were expensive, but not hundreds of times earnings (and not fueled by borrowed fake money).

Once we have done this rewind, down to what you might call a “value base,” a base level of employment justified by a normal (and now temporarily reduced) workload, we can allocate jobs, work hours, and money for salaries all over again, as a society. Guess what won’t happen? All the smartest kids in physics won’t end up on Wall Street. If they do, we’d better all move to some agrarian economy.

I can only imagine how hard it is on families to live through this Rewind Period, but I also suspect that knowing it is a Rewind, rather than an Infinite Collapse, should be helpful. I hope it is.