Category Archives: Asides

Sale of indulgences, Release 2.0

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Engagingly snotty piece about Dave ‘Vote Green to get Blue’ Cameron.

Apparently Cameron offsets his carbon emissions by donating to a carbon-offsetting company that encourages people in the developing world to ditch modern methods of farming in favour of using their more eco-friendly manpower to plough the land.

The details of this carbon-offsetting scheme are disturbing. Cameron offsets his flights by donating to Climate Care. The latest wheeze of this carbon-offsetting company is to provide ‘treadle pumps’ to poor rural families in India so that they can get water on to their land without having to use polluting diesel power. Made from bamboo, plastic and steel, the treadle pumps work like ‘step machines in a gym’, according to some reports, where poor family members step on the pedals for hours in order to draw up groundwater which is used to irrigate farmland. These pumps were abolished in British prisons a century ago. It seems that what was considered an unacceptable form of punishment for British criminals in the past is looked upon as a positive eco-alternative to machinery for Indian peasants today.

What might once have been referred to as ‘back-breaking labour’ is now spun as ‘human energy’. According to Climate Care, the use of labour-intensive treadle pumps, rather than labour-saving diesel-powered pumps, saves 0.65 tonnes of carbon a year per farming family. And well-off Westerners – including Cameron, and Prince Charles, Land Rover and the Cooperative Bank, who are also clients of Climate Care – can purchase this saved carbon in order to continue living the high life without becoming consumed by eco-guilt. They effectively salve their moral consciences by paying poor people to live the harsh simple life on their behalf.

WIlliam Gibson on eBay

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I’ve become a really keen observer of the rationalization of the world’s attic. Every class of human artifact is being sorted and rationalized by this economically driven machine that constantly turns it over and brings it to a higher level of searchability. . . . The tentacles of that operation extend into every flea market and thrift shop and basement and attic in the world.

“Every hair is being numbered — eBay has every grain of sand. EBay is serving this very, very powerful function which nobody ever intended for it. EBay in the hands of humanity is sorting every last Dick Tracy wrist radio cereal premium sticker that ever existed. It’s like some sort of vast unconscious curatorial movement.

“Every toy I had as a child that haunted me, I’ve been able to see on eBay. The soft squeezy rubber frog with red shorts that made ‘eek eek’ noise until that part fell out. I found Froggy after some effort on eBay, and I found out that Froggy was made in 1948 and where he was made and what he was made of. I saw his box, which I’d long forgotten. I didn’t have to buy Froggy, but I saved the jpegs. So I’ve got Froggy in my computer.

“This is new. People in really small towns can become world-class connoisseurs of something via eBay and Google. This didn’t used to be possible. If you are sufficiently obsessive and diligent, you can be a little kid in some town in the backwoods of Tennessee and the world’s premier info-monster about some tiny obscure area of stuff. That used to require a city. It no longer does.”

From an interview with the Washington Post.

End of the ‘two-shot’?

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Hooray! Peter Preston spotted it.

You do a little news interview and, when it’s over, you then do a ‘two-shot’. The interviewee mouths a few silent nothings. The interviewer nods in mock interest (and total boredom). The camera rolls for a couple of minutes in case slivers of this weary mime are visually needed to leaven the chat.

Fakery? Channel Five News has announced it is ditching the device, with Sky only a second behind. It’s either a stirring victory for truth and honesty – or (nod-nod-wink-wink) a splendidly cynical chance to get rid of a television reporter’s most demeaning, least favourite chores.

Wonder if the BBC will follow suit?

Quote of the Day

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Sometimes I think God put video content guys on the planet to make the music guys look progressive and visionary.

Analyst Michael Gartenberg, commenting on NBC’s decision to take its stuff away from Apple because Steve Jobs wouldn’t agree to sell their video content at $4.99 a pop (compared to existing price of $1.99)

Hulu, hulu

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Well, well. News Corp. is getting ready to roll out its putative YouTube killer. Here’s the breathless update from the site:

The first bit of news we’d like to share is that we have a name: Hulu.

Why Hulu? Objectively, Hulu is short, easy to spell, easy to pronounce, and rhymes with itself. Subjectively, Hulu strikes us as an inherently fun name, one that captures the spirit of the service we’re building. Our hope is that Hulu will embody our (admittedly ambitious) never-ending mission, which is to help you find and enjoy the world’s premier content when, where and how you want it.

Actually, it’s basically another way of spelling ‘turkey’.

Note also the cheerful, friendly Terms and Conditions which state, in part,

You are also strictly prohibited from creating works or materials that derive from or are based on the materials contained in this Site including, without limitation, fonts, icons, link buttons, wallpaper, desktop themes, on-line postcards and greeting cards, unlicensed merchandise and mash-ups, unless you have obtained the prior written consent of Hulu or unless it is expressly permitted by this Site in each instance. This prohibition applies regardless of whether the derivative materials are sold, bartered or given away.

Drudge reported

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Interesting profile of Matt Drudge by Philip Weiss. Sample:

The left hates Drudge for good reason; he has helped kill one Democratic presidential aspirant after another and has started in on John Edwards this season. But as Halperin and Harris note, Drudge only gained his power because liberals so dominated traditional media that they disdained the Internet. Now that he’s opened the territory, the left is doing pretty well itself. “There’s a pretty healthy group of left-wing sites online, which tends to balance things, no doubt,” says Donna Brazile. “But Matt is in a class by himself.”

At times Drudge does sound like a conservative. He hates big government, immigration, and abortion rights. When Jimmy Carter criticized George Bush in the foreign press, Drudge questioned his loyalty. But Drudge’s ideological heart is libertarian, and many of his anti-corporate riffs would stir a left-wing anarchist. Drudge has been highly critical of partnerships between Google and state governments, and he fears corporations. He believes that people in surgery have had chips implanted without their knowledge, that the day will come when the government will “dart” a chip into you without your permission, and that DNA will be collected from spit on the street, “and then they can impose any rule, even against smiling.”

Republicans can’t count on Drudge. He praises Rosie O’Donnell and Michael Moore for their independence and fight, and seems to despise Giuliani and McCain. “Breitbart is an intellectual, dyed-in-the-wool conservative, and educated. Matt is not a book reader. I think he probably struggles to make right-wing noises,” says one Republican…

Thanks to the incomparable Arts and Letters Daily for the link.

Five years on

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My lovely Sue died five years ago today. It’s a beautiful summer afternoon, just as it was then. The house is peaceful. The lilac tree we planted where she planned to put it is thriving. Life goes on, but the sense of loss endures. A few evenings ago, walking in the grounds of the church where she’s buried, I remembered Thomas Hardy’s poem, The Walk:

You did not walk with me
Of late to the hill-top tree
By the gated ways,
As in earlier days;
You were weak and lame,
So you never came,
And I went alone, and I did not mind,
Not thinking of you as left behind.

I walked up there to-day
Just in the former way;
Surveyed around
The familiar ground
By myself again:
What difference, then?
Only that underlying sense
Of the look of a room on returning thence.