Once upon a time, the Ndiyo office was tidy. Sigh. On the other hand, Michael (left) and Quentin (right) have written an incredible amount of code in the last month. And it (mostly) works. It’s a good demonstration of the rule that the most efficient programming teams are small.
Or can you? How about this for a new marketing technique? Wonder which edition sells more.
Hmmm… Presumeably, the previous release contained unfriendly ones?
Before Christmas, I lost my fedora. My colleagues unkindly attributed its disappearance to the fact that I had been obliged to eat it. In fact I had left it in the back of a London taxi-cab on the way to an OFCOM dinner. Since then I’ve searched high and low for a replacement. I could only find an equivalent in the US; it seems that British hatters don’t do crushable headgear. Anyway, it arrived yesterday. I am overjoyed, but not half as pleased as the cats, who are indifferent to the hat but think that the box in which it was Fedexed is just dandy.
Pictures by Pete.
Following the runaway success of A short history of tractors in Ukranian, here is my own modest contribution to the genre: A Brief History of the Future — in Lithuanian. The first copies arrived from my agent this morning.
Wonder how you say “Hooray!” in Lithuanian?
Update: Kevin Cryan tells me it’s “Valio!”
Cycling through town this afternoon, I passed a mother and her 8/9-year-old daughter on their way home from the daughter’s prissy, expensive private school. As I came level with them the girl said,
“Well, if you can’t be bothered to cook, I shan’t eat anything”.
Scott Grieder, Ask.com Group Product Manager, was taking notes on an important conference call when his (free) Google Pen ran out of ink without warning. The lapse in this fundamental Google product/service forced him to switch pens at a critical moment, resulting in considerable inconvenience and loss of data.
“I should have known better than to use a free Google product for business purposes.” Scott told us in a recent interview. “Google Pen is fine for home use, but not when my company’s productivity is on the line. I had to switch pens in the middle of taking notes. There’s no telling how much data I lost.”
But then he received a nice handwritten letter from a Google person. “We note your suboptimal experience with our Google pens”, it said, “and are pleased to send you — at no charge — a replacement set. Fortunately our pen architecture is based on Redundant Arrays of Inexpensive Drafting Stuff [warning: embedded geek joke] . If any component fails, a quick recovery is ensured”.
Thanks to James Cridland for spotting it.
… in 1946, Winston Churchill delivered his famous “Iron Curtain” speech in Fulton, Missouri. Full text here.
Il Duce on one of his better days. (Photograph from Wikipedia.)
One of the hazards of ‘tidying up’ in a household as chaotic as ours is that one chances upon interesting articles that were overlooked when the newspaper or periodical first arrived. This morning, for example, I happened upon this article by Amos Elon in the New York Review of Books of February 23, 2006 which was sitting atop a duvet box in my bedroom. It’s a review of Sergio Luzzatto’s book The Body of Il Duce: Mussolini’s corpse and the Fortunes of Italy and the full text, alas, resides behind the NYRB’s paywall. Needless to say, I began to read…
Eleven days before the end of the war, Mussolini (motto: “If I advance, follow me; if I withdraw, kill me”), disguised in a German military overcoat and a helmet that covered most of his face, was caught by Italian partisans. He had left his wife and kids to face the music and was en route to Switzerland with his mistress and booty valued at $2 billion in today’s money. The partisan commander, Walter Audisio, obviously took Il Duce’s motto seriously and shot him — and his mistress, Claretta Petacci — dead outside a villa on Lake Como. This is what happened next:
On the following morning, Audisio’s men took the bodies to Milan, which had just been liberated, and threw them on the Piazzale Loreto. The choice of place was deliberate. A few days before, on this same piazza, the Nazis had dealt similarly with the bodies of partisans they had killed. The bodies of Mussolini and Pettaci were trampled, mutilated, and urinated upon by men and women. Some were armed and fired into the corpses. A woman tried to shatter the Duce’s skull with a hammer. Then Mussolini and Pettaci were hung head down from the roof of a gas station, their hands spread out in a gesture of total surrender, giving the bodies the appearance of inverted crucifixes. [Photograph here, if you’re interested.] During the ensuing autopsy, the morgue door was left open, allowing all comers to walk past and watch nurses play ball with Mussolini’s liver. This horrific episode was satisfying to many at the time and shocking to others. Edmund Wilson, arriving in Milan a few weeks later, wrote in his diary that over the entire city hung the stink of this defilement: “Italians would stop you in the bars and show you photographs they had taken of it.”
Luzzatto’s book chronicles what later happened to Mussolini’s body and reveals that his grave in Predappio (where his remains were eventually interred) still attracts 100,000 visitors a year, many of them reverential.
Hmmm… Something like this would have happened to our old friend, Saddam Hussein, if the Americans had not kept him in custody.
Photographed at 21:57:52 this evening.
