Ignore the hideous music, and watch the near-vertical takeoff. And then ask yourself if RyanAir will buy some.
Category Archives: Asides
Remembering Charles Kennedy
Very nice, generous tribute in the Economist:
Bad times for his party, the union, Britain’s place in Europe: Mr Kennedy’s death speaks to all these. Yet for the many who mourn him, it is above all dreadfully sad, because he was delightful, and in fact this was the main reason for his success. He was, extraordinarily in politics, without malice. He was never, despite his remarkable precociousness, pompous. His jokes, which were frequent, were usually aimed at himself, the institution he served, or both.
Narrating a television documentary on the House of Commons last year, he glanced up, on camera, at a mosaic of St Andrew that towers over Central Lobby. The patron saint of Scots, he quipped, had been positioned to signal the way to the bar. Though he was a political insider—an MP at 23, for goodness sake—Mr Kennedy’s plain good humour always suggested he had a foot in that ruder soil, the real world, which matters most. And that, O politicians, is why he was loved.
Amen.
The ghosts of C.P. Snow
I had dinner the other night in Christ’s and as I was walking out through Front Court, with the Master’s Lodge in the far corner, I was suddenly reminded of C.P. Snow’s novel The Masters and fell to musing that, at least architecturally, not much had changed since the events recorded in the book. I re-read it recently, and concluded that, as a novel, it’s rather feeble. But as a sociological study of a part of Cambridge society in the 1930s it’s actually rather good, and I suspect pretty accurate.
Yahoo Pipes, RIP
Sigh. One of the (few) great things that Yahoo did. And they’re dumping it.
Most heartbreakingly for a lot of developers, Yahoo Pipes is getting shut down at the end of August. Yahoo Pipes is a service that let people build custom web applications that could pull in all kinds of data from all over the internet.
When Pipes launched back in 2007, it was widely heralded as ahead of its time. Tech expert Tim O’Reilly called Pipes “a milestone in the history of the internet.” It was sort of a precursor to Mashery, which helps companies manage and blend data from different sources (including public web sources), and If This Then That (ifttt), which lets people create simple “recipes” like “text me the weather every morning” by combining different data sources and apps.
But Yahoo never seemed to know what to do with it; it never got as many users as the company would have liked, and so now it’s going to be cut.
My colleague Tony Hirst did some great stuff with Pipes. I even built stuff with it myself.
Sam Johnson was here
Dr Johnson is one of my heroes. One of the lovely things about the Old Town in Edinburgh is its ghostly relics of great thinkers.
A newspaper is…
…a partial, hasty, incomplete, inevitably somewhat flawed and inaccurate rendering of some of the things we have heard about in the past 24 hours – distorted, despite our best efforts to eliminate gross bias, by the very process of compression that makes it possible for you to lift it from the doorstep and read it in about an hour. If we labelled the product accurately, then we could immediately add: ‘But it’s the best we could do under the circumstances, and we will be back tomorrow, with a corrected and updated version.’
The *Washington Post‘s David Broder, quoted by Alan Rusbridger in his farewell message to Guardian readers*.
That’s more like it
WASHINGTON (The Borowitz Report) – Calling the Obama Administration’s actions against the soccer organization “weak and ineffective,” Senator John McCain on Thursday proposed military action to “dismantle and destroy FIFA once and for all.”
“These are people who only understand one thing: force,” McCain said on the floor of the United States Senate. “We must make FIFA taste the vengeful might and fury of the United States military.”
McCain said that he was “completely unimpressed” by the Department of Justice’s arrests of several top FIFA lieutenants this week, calling the action “the kind of Band-Aid solution that this Administration, sadly, has become famous for.”
“Rounding up a few flunkies in a hotel is meaningless when the leader of FIFA remains at large,” he said. “I will follow Sepp Blatter to the gates of Hell.”
McCain requested a four-billion-dollar aid package for moderate elements within global soccer, and said that the United States should be prepared to put boots on the ground in Switzerland.
Calling the use of force against FIFA “long overdue,” he placed the blame for the group’s alarming growth squarely on the shoulders of the White House. “Barack Obama created FIFA,” he said.
Never waste charisma on little guys
Lovely insight from Maureen Dowd:
WHEN my brother Michael was a Senate page, he delivered mail to John F. Kennedy and Richard Nixon, who had offices across the hall from each other.
He recalled that Kennedy never looked up or acknowledged his presence, but Nixon would greet him with a huge smile. “Hi, Mike,” he’d say. “How are you doing? How’s the family?”
It seemed a bit counterintuitive, especially since my dad, a D.C. police inspector in charge of Senate security, was a huge Kennedy booster. (The two prominent pictures in our house were of the Mona Lisa and J.F.K.) But after puzzling over it, I finally decided that J.F.K. had the sort of magnetism that could ensorcell big crowds, so he did not need to squander it on mail boys. Nixon, on the other hand, lacked large-scale magnetism, so he needed to work hard to charm people one by one, even mail boys.
Yep.
Online crime, USA
These numbers look like huge under-estimates to me. The obvious interpretation is that much online crime is never reported to the FBI. Interesting though that women fall for fake romance scams, while men lose their marbles over automobiles.
How to start a piece
Louis Menand is, IMHO, the best living literary critic. Perhaps that’s because he’s the most readable. At any rate, I will read anything he writes, on any subject.
One of his gifts is that, like Hemingway, he lures the reader in at the very beginning. Here he is doing it in a recent New Yorker essay on Saul Bellow:
Herzog is the book that made Saul Bellow famous. He was forty-nine years old when it came out, in 1964. He had enjoyed critical esteem since the publication of his first novel, “Dangling Man,” in 1944, and he had won a National Book Award for “The Adventures of Augie March” in 1954. But “Herzog” turned him into a public figure, a writer of books known even to people who don’t read books—an “author.” At a ceremony honoring the success of “Herzog” at city hall in Chicago, Bellow’s home town, a reporter asked the mayor, Richard J. Daley, whether he’d read the novel. “I’ve looked into it,” Daley said.
You get enough people saying that and you have a best-seller…
See what I mean? Read on.