Robert Winder has a lovely essay in the Guardian about Tom Wolfe’s book, The Right Stuff. How does it read now, in the light of Bush, Iraq and thWall Street maelstrom? He concludes that

The Right Stuff is now best read as an elegy – a remembrance of vanished times. It describes a place and a mood that have crashed and burned. The seeds of this melancholy may already have been in place when the book was published – Wolfe was describing the early 60s from the vantage point of the late 70s, after all. But he was still able to work in an optimistic, fizzing spirit that has now quite dissolved: no one writes pop songs about astronauts the way that Bowie/Elton John/Pink Floyd and company once did. A book that once juddered with thoughts of the future now comes suffused with the past. Nostalgia for the 60s usually involves thoughts of free love, raw music and ditzy drugs, not the panic attacks inspired by Sputnik and the missile testing in Arizona and Florida. Wolfe was thrilled to find such subjects, and had superb, pyrotechnic fun with them. Who would have thought, only a generation later, that his eager, loop-the-loop prose would seem so sad?

He’s right. Sigh.

I was struck by this quote in an interesting NYTimes piece:

“In the middle of the 1970s, when we were having a big economic downturn, both Apple and Microsoft were founded. Creative people don’t care about the time or the season or the state of the economy; they just go out and do their thing.”

Lovely cartoon in current issue of the New Yorker. It shows a lot of glum airline passengers thronging a departure lounge. Outside on the tarmac can be seen lots of grounded planes. There’s a notice saying “Please be patient. We are drilling for fuel.”

… was Kelvin McKenzie’s pithy description of BBC Chairman, Sir John Lyons, on the (BBC) Today programme this morning, commenting on the Jonathan Ross/Russell Brand fiasco. The diamond-encrusted bit is a bit over the top, don’t you think?

One shouldn’t laugh, I suppose, but you have to admit that what’s been happening to VW’s share price is a hoot. Here’s the FT report:

Volkswagen briefly became the world’s largest company by market capitalisation on Tuesday after an extraordinary surge in its share price driven by a near-panic by hedge funds and other traders to stem losses on positions betting on a fall in the stock.

The extent of the surge, which has led to sharp criticism of German capital markets, triggered intense market speculation that it could force the collapse of hedge funds and heavy losses for investment banks.

VW’s share price rose 82 per cent to €945 following Monday’s 147 per cent jump, leaving it with a market capitalisation of about €287bn ($360bn).

At the stock’s intra-day peak of €1005, its market capitalisation exceeded Exxon before the US oil company started trading yesterday.

It seems that hedge funds, reckoning that VW shares were bound to fall, borrowed them and sold them short. What they apparently didn’t realise is that Porsche and the State of Saxony between them owned or had options on 95% of VW shares. Frantic bidding for the remaining 5% resulted in crazy valuations of a car manufacturer that is — like all its peers — facing a bleak short-term future.

Heh, heh.

As expected, Ray Ozzie announced Microsoft’s cloud computing service. It’s called Windows Azure — which is a bit baffling because, as Nick Carr points out, an azure sky is a cloudless one. (Think of the Cote d’Azur.)