The ludicrous UK ‘gong’ system has given a piddling ‘honour’ to Jonathan Ive, the designer behind Apple’s iPod and iMac. He’s become a Commander of the British Empire (CBE) in the New Year Honours list. Er, what empire is that, exactly?
Category Archives: Asides
Useful words # 2655
“Paradoxophile”.
Used by Frank Kermode to describe Adam Phillips, the soi-disant expert on flirtation, Freud and other fashionable topics, in the London Review of Books, 19 June, 2003.
Breaking the journey
Nice story in the Guardian.
When a middle-aged man swore at airline staff after he was refused a drink on a flight from Manchester to Tenerife, he got a sunshine break he had not bargained for. The pilot diverted the charter plane and dumped the troublesome holidaymaker 300 miles from his destination on a barren volcanic island off the west coast of Africa….
We use budget airlines a lot and I don’t envy the cabin crews. It’s become a horrible job, even when the passengers aren’t obstreperous. It takes about an hour to fly from Stansted to the various airports we use in Ireland, and each time I look on in amazement as the crews rush to get through the same deadly routine — passing through the cabin with a drinks trolley, then coming round trying to sell scratch cards and ‘duty free’ goods. Then tidying up and packing everything away prior to scrambling into their seats in preparation for landing. And then being expected to turn round the plane in 25 minutes. (That’s the RyanAir norm.)
When I was a child in 1950s Ireland, the profession of “air hostess” was regarded as unutterably glamorous. Parents prayed that their daughters might get a job in Aer Lingus, the state airline, thereby enabling them to land some rich businessman as a husband. Mind you, the prospective husbands would have needed to be well-off, because Aer Lingus fired its hostesses the moment they got married. (So, come to think of it, did church/state-run primary schools.) Different world, then.
Hmm… just noticed that the offending passenger is “understood to be an Irish citizen living in Lancashire” who “ignored numerous appeals to calm down when he was refused further alcoholic drinks”. Bet his Ma hadn’t been an Aer Lingus hostess.
Totally Random
Here’s something to cheer you up — the transcript of a Fox News interview with the Leader of the Free World on the subject of his iPod. The interview begins with Brit Hume asking the Prez what’s on his device now:
Bush : Beach Boys, Beatles, let’s see, Alan Jackson, Alan Jackson, Alejandro, Alison Krauss, the Angels, the Archies, Aretha Franklin, the Beatles, Dan McLean. Remember him?
Hume: Don McLean.
Bush: I mean, Don McLean.
Hume: Does “American Pie,” right?
Bush: Great song.
Hume: Yes, yes, great song.
Unidentified male: . . . which ones do you play?
Bush: All of these. I put it on shuffle. Dwight Yoakam. I’ve got the Shuffle, the, what is it called? The little.
Hume: Shuffle.
Bush: It looks like.
Hume: The Shuffle. That is the name of one of the models.
Bush: Yes, the Shuffle.
Hume: Called the Shuffle.
Bush: Lightweight, and crank it on, and you shuffle the Shuffle.
Hume: So you — it plays . . .
Bush: Put it in my pocket, got the ear things on.
Hume: So it plays them in a random order.
Bush: Yes.
Hume: So you don’t know what you’re going to going to get.
Bush: No.
Hume: But you know —
Bush: And if you don’t like it, you have got your little advance button. It’s pretty high-tech stuff.
Hume: . . . be good to have one of those at home, wouldn’t it?
Bush: Oh?
Hume: Yes, hit the button and whatever it is that’s in your head — gone.
Bush: . . . it’s a bad day, just say, get out of here.
Hume: Well, that probably is pretty . . .
Bush: That works, too. ( Laughter )
Hume: Yes, right.
Footnote: American Pie is the song containing the line “Drove the Chevvy to the levee but the levee was dry”? Who said irony was dead.
Cheney: the real menace
The best argument for wishing Dubya a long and happy life is Dick Cheney. Even the staid old New York Times seems to have realised what a menace the man is — as shown by an extraordinary editorial entitled “Mr. Cheney’s Imperial Presidency”. Excerpt:
Virtually from the time he chose himself to be Mr. Bush’s running mate in 2000, Dick Cheney has spearheaded an extraordinary expansion of the powers of the presidency – from writing energy policy behind closed doors with oil executives to abrogating longstanding treaties and using the 9/11 attacks as a pretext to invade Iraq, scrap the Geneva Conventions and spy on American citizens.
It was a chance Mr. Cheney seems to have been dreaming about for decades. Most Americans looked at wrenching events like the Vietnam War, the Watergate scandal and the Iran-contra debacle and worried that the presidency had become too powerful, secretive and dismissive. Mr. Cheney looked at the same events and fretted that the presidency was not powerful enough, and too vulnerable to inspection and calls for accountability.The president “needs to have his constitutional powers unimpaired, if you will, in terms of the conduct of national security policy,” Mr. Cheney said this week as he tried to stifle the outcry over a domestic spying program that Mr. Bush authorized after the 9/11 attacks.
Before 9/11, Mr. Cheney was trying to undermine the institutional and legal structure of multilateral foreign policy: he championed the abrogation of the Antiballistic Missile Treaty with Moscow in order to build an antimissile shield that doesn’t work but makes military contractors rich. Early in his tenure, Mr. Cheney, who quit as chief executive of Halliburton to run with Mr. Bush in 2000, gathered his energy industry cronies at secret meetings in Washington to rewrite energy policy to their specifications. Mr. Cheney offered the usual excuses about the need to get candid advice on important matters, and the courts, sadly, bought it. But the task force was not an exercise in diverse views. Mr. Cheney gathered people who agreed with him, and allowed them to write national policy for an industry in which he had recently amassed a fortune.
So those who think Dubya is evil/stupid/incompetent might console themselves with the thought: at least Dick Cheney isn’t president.
Have daughter, will travel left
This must be the oddest story the Guardian‘s political editor, Michael White, ever wrote.
Forget about the conventional wisdom that parents influence the way their children vote. A new paper by two British academics yesterday upturned a longstanding western idea to suggest that it was the other way around. What’s more, daughters make families vote Labour or Lib Dem.
“This paper provides evidence that daughters make people more leftwing. Having sons, by contrast, makes them more rightwing … the paper ends with a conjecture: leftwing individuals are people who comes from families into which, over recent past generations, many females have been born.”
Small mercies
We must always be grateful for them. For example, this report in the Guardian.
Monaco has declared Sir Mark Thatcher persona non grata because Prince Albert wants to shake off its reputation as a haven for shady businessmen.
Margaret Thatcher’s 52-year-old son has fallen victim to the attempts by the mini-state’s authorities to put “ethics at the centre of life” there and has been asked to leave when his temporary residency card expires in just over six months’ time.The decision has dashed Sir Mark’s hopes of settling permanently in Monaco. It is the result of a determined effort by the recently enthroned Prince Albert to clean up the principality’s reputation.
Sir Mark is said to be on a list of undesirables who include money launderers, tax dodgers, drug dealers and the mafia.
Hmmm… If I were a money launderer, drug dealer or mafia boss I would be contemplating suing for defamation on the grounds that one’s reputation would never recover from being publicly associated with Thatcher fils. In the meantime, given that he has been refused permission to settle in the US, he will just have to live in the UK and pay tax like the rest of us.
Can you break the habit of a lifetime?
You can? I don’t believe you, I’m afraid. Just visit dontclick.it to see how difficult it is not to click. Thanks to Pete for the link. (Er, you need a Flash-enabled browser to play, btw.)
Truly, Doug Engelbart has a lot to answer for.
Hackers download pirate movies onto compromised PCs
From The Register…
Hackers have developed a sneaky technique for installing pirated movie files on Windows PCs infected with the lockx.exe rootkit. Doctored copies of BitTorrent are loaded on infected machines and used to download Disney movies or the film version of Mr. Bean.
The motive for the bizarre (and short-lived) attack, linked to a Middle East-based group in control of the network of infected machines – remains unclear. FaceTime Communications, the firm which uncovered the attack, reckons the assault is an experiment which might be applied to far more malign purposes in future. The trick creates a scenario where an infected users might be accused of sharing copyright-protected contact without ever using file sharing software.
Tut, tut. A useful way of blackmailing someone, though. Another reason for avoiding Windows boxes.
Why I think the BBC licence fee is good value
Simple. BBC Radio 3 is broadcasting all the works of JS Bach over a ten-day period. It’s just wonderful — no other word for it. And it reminds me of George Steiner’s lovely description of the music — “immense force channelled through a very narrow aperture”. This is what public service broadcasting is for.