Ten years on

It’s ten years since the OJ Simpson trial. Professor Alan Dershowitz was on Radio 4 talking about the extraordinary interest the trial generated. He recalled being in Jerusalem for a meeting with leading politicians when the Prime Minister (Benjamin Netanyahu) asked him to step into his office for a “confidential conversation”. After closing the door, Netanyahu said, “Tell me, Professor, did OJ do it?” Dershowitz replied: “Prime Minister, does Israel have nuclear weapons?” Nice riposte, eh? And a good story. Wonder if it’s true.

Game, set and match — to Linux

The IT infrastructure for this year’s Wimbledon tennis tournament will be powered by Linux.

Ulysses for dummies

There’s a lot of begrudgery around. Roddy Doyle, for example, has some fatuous views about Ulysses — “over-long, over-rated and un-moving”. (Which neatly summarises my view of Mr Doyle’s extensive oeuvre, by the way.) There’s also a lot of comment on the lines of “it’s such a long and difficult book, isn’t it?” To ease the plight of the intellectually challenged, the BBC has a Cheat’s Guide to the novel and solicits vox-pop views. (Sample: “Man goes for a walk around Dublin. Nothing happens — David Mosley, Newport Pagnell.) But it’s saved by appending Stephen Fry’s riposte:

“Lord help us all. ‘Pretentious drivel’, ‘better off with a good walk rather than reading dusty books’. What possible hope is there for a country which with such self-righteous philistinism scorns its own treasures? Ulysses is the greatest novel of the twentieth century. It is is wise, warm, witty, affirmative and beautiful. it is less pretentious than a baked bean. Read it. read it out loud to yourself. It won’t bite. It wasn’t written either to shock or to impress. Only pretentious barbarians believe artists set out shock: and how these philistines delight in revealing how unshocked they are. Those who attack it are afraid of it and rather than look foolish they prefer to heckle what they don’t understand. Ignore all this childish, fear-filled criticism, Ulysses will be read when everything you see and touch around you has crumbled into dust. Stephen Fry, London, UK”

Bloomsday Blog

The Guardian‘s Fiachra Gibbons has been following in Leopold’s footsteps and blogging all the while. The verdict? Lovely idea and a brave effort but a bit strained. Difficult to be funny to order. It’s the kind of thing that’s more cut out for an audio blog, I think. It must be difficult to attend to one’s surroundings while pecking at a laptop.

Bloomsday 100

It’s Bloomsday+100. My esteemed fellow-countrymen — cheerful descendants of all those who excoriated, despised and censored James Joyce — have now appropriated him for the booming Irish heritage industry. Nice piece by Andrew O’Hagan in last Sunday’s Observer about all this.

My friend Sean O’Mordha, a film-maker who created the best film about Joyce ever made (and deservedly won an Emmy for it), has sent me a Bloomsday present — a copy of John McCourt’s James Joyce: a passionate exile — which has some wonderful photographs. It’s also beautifully written — light and serious at the same time. And it vividly evokes the personality of the exasperating genius we celebrate today. I particularly like this picture:

It’s Michael Farrell’s portrait of Joyce. It was, writes Mr McCourt, “inspired by the story of fellow Irish artist Patrick Tuohy who, while painting Joyce’s portrait, started talking about the soul of the artist only to be interrupted by his sitter: ‘Get the poet’s soul out of your mind’, said Joyce, ‘and see that you paint my cravat properly'”.

The eternity game

Passing St John’s cricket ground this evening, I saw this…

… and was reminded of George Bernard Shaw’s observation that “the English are not a very spiritual people, so they invented cricket to give them an idea of eternity”. He was right, in a way. With those wonderful lengthening shadows and those breezy young chaps in whites, there was something quintessentially English and timeless about the scene. I guess that someone walking along the Madingley Road on the evening of June 14, 1904 would have contemplated esssentially the same spectacle — except of course that Gilbert Scott’s University Library tower would not have intruded upon it.

The font of all knowledge…

… was the headline on a lovely essay in yesterday’s Financial Times by Tom Vanderbilt. The peg for it was the announcement last January by the US State Department that it was ditching Courier New 12 as its official font and switching to Times New Roman 14. Not a promising subject, you’d think, but Mr Vanderbilt wove a lovely thought-provoking piece around it. Here are some of the thoughts he provoked in this reader.

1. We take typefaces for granted, but actually they are an extraordinarily important part of our daily environment. They often communicate instantly — almost subliminally — the identy of the sender of a message. For example, Eric Gill’s sans-serif typeface — Gill Sans — always evokes the BBC for me. And, as Mr Vanderbilt argues, it still stands as a symbol of modernity even though it’s 75 years old!

2. Courier became a dominant font by historical accident. It was designed for the IBM electric typewriters which dominated US (and later Western) offices in the 1960s and early 1970s. More importantly, IBM (for some reason) omitted to take a proprietary stake in it — so effectively Courier was released as an open source product! Because the US government used IBM typewriters, Courier therefore became synonomous with official documents, and also documents issued by US courts and legal firms. Which brings me to tangential thought number…

3. Memories of Charles Alan Wright, a famous US academic lawyer who was a good friend and was a member of the same two Cambridge colleges as me. He died in 2000. Charlie was an exceedingly eminent member of his profession: he acted as Richard Nixon’s lawyer in the closing period of his presidency; and for other clients he appeared three times before the US Supreme Court — and won twice. He was an amazingly prolific writer, reeling off long essays on legal and other topics, letters, reviews and reports. And all in Courier 12. So I never see the font without thinking of Charlie, and remembering one lovely thing he did.

In the Autumn of 1999 he visited Cambridge and there was a dinner for him in Emmanuel. My book had just been published, and I had just received two of the first hardback copies from the publisher. I gave one to Charlie with a dedication to him and thought no more of it. Indeed, I didn’t really expect him to read it — after all, what interest would a history of the Net have for an academic lawyer? But on the way back across the Atlantic on the QE2 (he always travelled in style — Concorde out, QE2 back) he read it thoroughly — and then posted the first ‘reader’s review’ on Amazon! I’ve no doubt that he printed off the draft in Courier 12. He was a devout Republican and very conservative in many ways. But he had a fine mind and a generous heart, and I miss him still.

4. Courier also reminds me of another lawyer friend — Larry Lessig, who is one of the great figures of our time, and now Professor of Law at Stanford. When I first started reading Larry’s stuff — long before his Code book — it was all aimed at legal audiences, and written in Courier. (Larry still uses an antique typewriter font for his lecture slides.) One of my ambitions is to live long enough to see him appointed to the Supreme Court. But I guess we will have to wait for a different kind of American President for that to be possible.

Correction: when we said we were ‘winning’ the war on terror, we actually meant ‘losing’

From CNN today:

“WASHINGTON (CNN) — The U.S. government acknowledged Thursday that a recent report declaring a decline in terrorism in 2003 was wrong.

The report, released in April and touted by top administration officials as a sign of the success of the war on terrorism, was based on faulty data, said State Department spokesman Richard Boucher.

In fact, he told reporters, the corrected report will show “a sharp increase over the previous year.” The corrected version is not yet completed, he said.

Secretary of State Colin Powell denied the errors were the result of an effort to make the administration look good.”

Next TiVO will record off the Net as well as off air

From today’s NYT:

TiVo, the maker of a popular digital video recorder, plans to announce a new set of Internet-based services today that will further blur the line between programming delivered over traditional cable and satellite channels and content from the Internet. It is just one of a growing group of large and small companies that are looking at high-speed Internet to deliver video content to the living room.

The new TiVo technology, which will become a standard feature in its video recorders, will allow users to download movies and music from the Internet to the hard drive on their video recorder. Although the current TiVo service allows users to watch broadcast, cable or satellite programs at any time, the new technology will make it possible for them to mix content from the Internet with those programs.

“This is the fourth electronic video service, and it is an alternative to cable, satellite and broadcast television,” said Tom Wolzien, an analyst at Bernstein Investment Research and Management. Those traditional services, Mr. Wolzien said, “have been the monster gatekeepers, but this is a way for content providers to get past them.”

Rare skills department

Lovely example of an arcane skill currently on display in our village.