When was the last time anyone gave you a telex number? (Does anyone still use telex?) From a manhole cover spotted today.
More: Wikipedia claims that “Telex is still in use for certain applications such as shipping, news, weather reporting and military command.”
… this is ridiculous.
Regular readers will know that I always photograph this display at Cambridge station when it’s showing a blue screen of death. But this morning there wasn’t even a screen, blue or otherwise. What can it mean?
June 28, 2004
In a few days, Iraq will radiate with stability and security.
Iyad Allawi, newly sworn-in Prime Minister of Iraq.
26 June, 2005
The insurgency could go on for any number of years. Insurgencies tend to go on for five, six, eight, ten, twelve years.
Donald Rumsfeld, US Secretary of Defense
Debris of an evening spent sitting in the garden, talking. One upside of global warming.
Tomorrow, Cambridge University will give an honorary degree to Carl Djerassi, Professor of Chemistry at Stanford, and one of the few people alive to whom the description of polymath might properly be applied — see here if you have any doubts. He’s the guy who invented the contraceptive pill, and could thus be said to have changed millions of lives, and indeed whole societies. I particularly liked his account of how he came to have an Austrian postal stamp dedicated to him.
Another honorary degree will go to David Crystal, one of the world’s leading experts on language (and also one of the most depressingly prolific authors in any language). There was a dinner in my college tonight in his honour, and to my delight I wound up sitting next to him at dessert where we had an intense discussion about Blogging and its significance. It turns out that he’s done a second edition of his book, Language and the Internet, to catch up on what has happened, linguistically speaking, on the Net in the years since the first edition came out in 2001. (Just think: when he was writing the first edition, ‘google’ wasn’t a verb!) I look forward to seeing the new version.
This morning’s Observer column on how eBay management can cope with anything — except an ageing, foulmouthed Irish rock star.
Exhausted by concern over the G8 Summit, I thought I would take a break in the Gleneagles Hotel, where the great event is to be held. Sadly, the hotel was unable to offer me accommodation between July 3 and 9, but I could make a reservation for the 10th. Nice range of choice, too — all the way from a ‘Classic Double’ (soon to be known as a Blair-Brown) @ £340 per night for B&B, to the Royal Lochnagar Suite @£1600 per night. I’m sure all those poor folks in Africa will be touched by the thought of the Lords of the Universe communing on their behalf in such modest surroundings.
My good friend, the late Charles Alan Wright, used to stay at Gleneagles — in a suite. I knew Charlie was rich (he was Richard Nixon’s lawyer for a time), but I didn’t know he was that rich.
Robert Hopkins was a US Army photographer assigned to make a pictorial record of the 1943 Yalta conference between Roosevelt, Churchill and Stalin which sealed the fate of Eastern Europe (and of a lot else besides). He’s published a riveting account of the event, larded with intimate details and some of his pictures.
This is not a piece about high politics, but about the daily life that goes on in the background and yields clues to the personalities involved — FDR in a jeep which has been made presentable by the addition of oriental rugs; or two maids making up the President’s bed. A five-hour drive over cratered roads to get from the aerodrome at Saki in the Crimea to the Livadia Palace — with the entire 90-mile route lined by Russian troops, each one in sight of the next. Bedbugs everywhere. Piles of caviare — but no decent food — for breakfast. FDR made Stalin a Martini but remarked that he couldn’t add a twist of lemon because he didn’t have any. The next morning, a lemon tree appeared. Stalin had had one flown in from Georgia overnight. Unforgettable.
I know that the death toll in 9/11 was terrible, but on this day in 1904 about a thousand people were burned to death in a steamboat fire on the East River. Most of the casualties were women and children.