There’s an extraordinary story in yesterday’s London Evening Standard about a man whose hearing was saved by his iPod. Tadeusz Gryglewicz was on the Number 30 bus when the bomb exploded. He was taken to University College Hospital where doctors told him later that listening to his iPod saved him from having perforated ear-drums. He was listening to Rachmanivov’s Concerto No. 2!
Monthly Archives: July 2005
Worse than Watergate
Frank Rich, in a wonderful NYT Op-Ed piece on the scandal enveloping Karl Rove and the Bush White House.
WHEN John Dean published his book “Worse Than Watergate” in the spring of 2004, it seemed rank hyperbole: an election-year screed and yet another attempt by a Nixon alumnus to downgrade Watergate crimes by unearthing worse “gates” thereafter. But it’s hard to be dismissive now that my colleague Judy Miller has been taken away in shackles for refusing to name the source for a story she never wrote. No reporter went to jail during Watergate. No news organization buckled like Time. No one instigated a war on phony premises. This is worse than Watergate.
Junxion Boxes
Just what we need to set up an Ndiyo internet cafe just about anywhere.
Hits and misses
Last Sunday’s Observer column about the Long Tail.
Ever wondered why every bookstore you go into seems to have piles and piles of a few bestsellers, but not a single copy of anything by Henry James? Or why the video section has all the latest brain-dead Hollywood blockbusters, but not a single copy of Manon des Sources? Or why your local multiplex never shows a foreign language film?…
Odeo goes live
Yep. Find it here. Another push for the podcasting bandwagon.
Online Monopoly
No — not another post complaining about Microsoft, but about an online version of the board game that has sparked a million family rows on wet holiday afternoons. There are 18 London cabs equipped with GPS and every time one traverses a piece of London that an online gamer ‘owns’ s/he collects revenue. Clever idea, but…
(Thinks… what’s to stop the cabbies playing themselves? At least in the board game the pieces are driven by throws of the dice and don’t have motives of their own!)
Would you buy software from this man?
Have a look at this before answering!
Serendipity
Andrew Brown had one of those lovely moments today when two parallel universes are brought together by Google technology.
He’s also very impressed by Google Earth, but that’s no good to me because (like that other great Google offering, Picasa) it requires a Windows client.
Our brave American allies, contd.
Hmmm… Apropos my speculation that we would see a dramatic fall in US vacation bookings in London, here’s an interesting report.
Thousands of US military personnel based in the UK have been banned by commanders from travelling to London in the wake of Thursday’s bomb attacks. Personnel, most of them from US Air Force units at RAF Mildenhall and RAF Lakenheath, in Suffolk, have been told not to go within the M25 motorway. Family members who are from the US are also being urged to stay away. The US air force said the order had been made in the interests of the safety of its troops.
I’ve just listened to a slightly embarrassed British Defence Secretary, John Reid, arguing on the radio that this was just the equivalent of a bureaucratic error — i.e. an order than had been issued immediately after the bombings but had not yet been rescinded. We’ll see.
Update: Order now rescinded. The Commander of US Forces in Europe, General James L. Jones, based at Mons in Belgium, said in a statement:
“While all personnel are encouraged to be vigilant, we cannot allow ourselves to be intimidated by the acts of terrorists. All US personnel are encouraged to continue with their normal routine.”
Phew! So that’s all right then. Thanks to the many American readers who drew this statement to my attention!
Six degrees of separation
Here’s a statistical freak. The chances of knowing anyone directly affected by the terrorist bombs must be vanishingly small. Yet I discovered on Thursday that a woman I know slightly from work had been on the tube train that had been bombed at Aldgate. (She suffered from smoke-inhalation, but is basically ok). Then I find that a friend of my son had been on the bus that was bombed in Tavistock Square, but had disembarked a few minutes earlier, having concluded that it would be quicker to walk. And now I discover that the sister of a colleague had been on the Aldgate train, and had stayed to help the wounded.