“Part of the pleasure of travel is to dive into places where others are compelled to live and come out unscathed, full of the malicious pleasures of abandoning them to their fate.”
Jean Baudrillard, quoted by Geoff Dyer in The Ongoing Moment.
Category Archives: Asides
Indian contradictions
Bill Thompson’s in Delhi this week, and is blogging. It’s his first time in India and his reactions are interesting. For example:
When we stopped at traffic lights small children would come over to beg a few ruppees, one showing me her congenitally deformed hands with fused fingers to elicit my sympathy and encourage greater generosity. And knowing that I could never give enough money to make a difference I adopted the standard tourist defensive posture and ended giving them too little to make me feel even remotely good, and too little even to make a difference to them for the rest of the day.
It shouldn’t have bothered me, since I’m not here as a tourist, not here to wonder at the beauty of the city, not here to feel those delightful pangs of liberal guilt as I see the stark contrasts between those who have enough and those who have nothing, or seek some ersatz spiritual enlightenment from a culture which my country spend over a century trying to eliminate.
I’m here to work on a couple of shows for Digital Planet, here with the BBC World Service as a working journalist on assignment and therefore, surely, off the map of conventional morality that would cause me disquiet? Or perhaps not, because the kids did bother me and the extra 30 rupees I gave to my motorickshaw driver as a tip didn’t help at all…
A new golf story
As all golfers know, there are really only two golf stories. The first relates how, after a disastrous tee-shot, the teller rescued the situation with a brilliant second shot. The other story relates how, after a brilliant tee-shot, he screwed it up with a lousy second shot.
But now comes a third story — that the Chinese invented golf! Here’s an excerpt from the Times report…
More than 400 years before Scottish shepherds began tapping a ball across the grass at St Andrews, the Mongol emperors of China were swinging their clubs in the game of “hit ball”, the Chinese Golf Association announced yesterday, in a ceremony at the Great Hall of the People where China’s leaders receive visiting heads of state and the parliament gathers once a year.
Experts from the Palace Museum, China’s most prestigious, and from Peking University were on hand to reveal their findings after more than two years of research. To back up their case, they showed off a replica set of clubs, re-created from ancient paintings that show the emperor at play…
Hoots, mon!
The nicest book of golf stories I’ve come across, btw, is John Updike’s Golf Dreams.
Useful fact no. 5422
Do you know that song, ‘Guantanamera’? It actually means ‘pretty girl from Guantanamo Bay’. It used to be an especially idyllic beauty spot in Cuba which was supposed to have lots of pretty girls. Now the Americans torture people there. Isn’t that ironic?
Screenwriter Andrew Davies, interviewed in today’s Observer Magazine.
Can this be true?
The Guardian published a nice obit of Earl Woods, Tiger’s dad. It contains the following stories:
His faith [in Tiger’s potential] took hold when Tiger was aged one. Earl was practising golf in the garage as the tot watched from a high chair. Then he descended, took the club and hit the ball into the net his father had strung up. “I was flabbergasted,” Earl recalled. “It was the most frightening thing I had ever seen.”
At 18 months, he took Tiger to a golf course for the first time and let him play a hole. The toddler shot an 11 on the 410-yard par four, with eight shots to the green and three putts. When he was 11 he first beat his father, who never won against him afterwards…
Now I agree that Tiger is a truly wonderful golfer. I can also imagine that he must have been a child prodigy. But playing a par four in 11 shots at 18 months? Surely this is urban myth territory.
Quotes of a lifetime
By far the best obit of John Kenneth Galbraith, IMHO, was the Economist‘s.
Bons mots … seemed to come naturally to him. “Economists are economical, among other things, of ideas; most make those of their graduate days last a lifetime.” “Wealth is not without its advantages, and the case to the contrary, although it has often been made, has never proved widely persuasive.” As Kennedy’s ambassador to India, Mr Galbraith preferred to write to the president direct: sending letters through the State Department, he told Kennedy, was “like fornicating through a mattress”….
The piece also reminds one that Galbraith’s effortless style was the product of a good deal of work.
Mr Galbraith strove to perfect his prose, reworking each passage at least five times. “It was usually on about the fourth day that I put in that note of spontaneity for which I am known,” he once admitted.
As Sam Johnson said, “nothing that is read with pleasure was written without pain”.
Sex, ridicule and Mr Prescott
The popular poet, Pam Ayres, described by the Daily Telegraph as “supplier of comic verse to Middle England for almost three decades”, has written an ode for the Deputy Prime Minister.
Entitled I am ready, Mr Prescott, it begins:
I am ready Mr Prescott
You can take me in your arms
All these years I’ve waited,
To experience your charms,
So fling aside those trousers,
I hope they’re quick release,
For all that hanky panky’s
Made you clinically obese.
What Prescott has discovered (and Blair is about to) is that there is nothing so corrosive as ridicule for a minister (or indeed any other authority figure).
A case in point is the speed with which the moral authority of the Irish bishops dissolved after it was revealed that Eamon Casey, the Bishop of Galway, had sired a son with his lover, Annie Murphy, many years earlier. But it wasn’t the fact of his paternity that did for Casey, but the revelation that he and Annie had done it in the back of a Lancia! There is something irresistibly comic about the thought of a Prince of the Church humping on the rear seat of an Italian saloon.
Much the same happened to the South African racist thug Eugene Terreblanche, who never recovered from transmission of the video footage of his hairy bum rising and falling in an erotic rhythm. Mae West said that “sex is very bad for one, but great for two”, which is true. But if anyone else gets in on the act, then there’s usually trouble. The problem with it, as the Earl of Chesterfield famously observed — and the Deputy Prime Minister is now discovering — is that “the pleasure is momentary, the position ridiculous, and the expense damnable”.
Summertime 1
Our crab-apple tree has done its stuff. I know I shouldn’t be amazed by it, but I always am. And gratified. It always summons up memories of Sue, whose pride and joy it was, and who loved with a special passion the magical day every year when it would explode into blossom. And I remember how anguished we both were this time in 2002, when we gazed at it with the same unspoken thought: would this be the last time she saw it happen? It was. C’est la vie…
Quote of the day
From MercuryNews.com…
Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates told an online advertising conference Wednesday that he’d prefer not to be the richest person in the world.
“I wish I wasn’t,” he said in a session in which he was being interviewed by Donny Deutsch, the host of an interview show on CNBC.
Gates is ranked by Forbes magazine as the world’s richest individual, with an estimated wealth of about $50 billion.
“There’s nothing good that comes out of that,” he said. “You get more visibility as a result of it.”
Monotonic dates
Useless but interesting… Just noticed that today’s date is 04.05.06
Later: Lots of nice emails about this. Sean French wrote:
I’m afraid I can outdo you in trainspotteringness. If you’d set your alarm clock last night for three seconds past 1.02am you could have been awake when it was 01.02.03.04.05.06.
And James Cridland was actually awake at that magic moment:
I was listening to the radio this morning just after one o’clock. The exact time?
01.02 03″ 04/05/06
Virgin’s Robin Burke rather ominously played “The Final Countdown”: but the world hasn’t ended quite yet: possibly to Tony Blair’s irritation.