Daily Archives: February 25, 2006

Real courage

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Amid all the posturing cant about ‘freedom’ and ‘standing up to fanatics’ triggered by the Danish cartoon controversy, here’s an example of real courage.

Oblivious to the bowl of day-old pasta resting among the exposed wires of his home-built computer, 16-year-old Laurie Pycroft, a floppy-haired sixth form dropout from Swindon, flicks between three screens to keep up with his emails, blog and website. Empty Coke cans, juice bottles and fried chicken boxes litter his bedroom floor.

This is the unlikely nerve centre of a new pro-vivisection campaign which has attracted the backing of some of the most respected scientists in the country. In Oxford today, Pycroft’s group, Pro-Test, will launch the fightback against the city’s army of vocal and sometimes aggressive anti-vivisectionists.

At noon, the teenager will stand up in front of as many as 1,000 vivisection supporters and introduce the most eminent supporters of his campaign, consultant neurosurgeon Professor Tipu Aziz and neurophysiologist Professor John Stein.

I’m delighted to see that the Oxford rally went ahead.

Don’t mention Armageddon

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From today’s Independent Online…

In the event of all-out nuclear war, the BBC was to distract the nation by broadcasting a mix of music and light entertainment shows, secret papers released by the Home Office reveal.

Hundreds of security-vetted BBC staff and a select band of unnamed radio artistes were to be clandestinely dispatched to transmission sites across the country at the first signs of international tension.

Just before the first missiles had reached Britain, the BBC was to use regional centres in Birmingham, Sheffield, Bristol and Middlesbrough to broadcast a national service that the Government hoped would create “a diversion to relieve strain and stress”.

I’m reminded about the jokes that used to circulate in the 1960s and 1970s about “things to do during the four-minute warning” [that the UK population was supposed to get before the nukes detonated]. My favourite was “Buy A Renault 4 and watch it rust”.

On free speech and cartoons

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Lovely letter from an Economist reader:

SIR – The cartoon controversy brings to mind an aphorism by the American humourist Sam Levenson: “It’s so simple to be wise. Just think of something stupid to say and then don’t say it.”

Trading standards and free software

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Wonderful piece in the Times by Gervase Markham, who looks after licensing for the Mozilla Foundation.

A little while ago, I received an e-mail from a lady in the Trading Standards department of a large northern town. They had encountered businesses which were selling copies of Firefox, and wanted to confirm that this was in violation of our licence agreements before taking action against them.

I wrote back, politely explaining the principles of copyleft – that the software was free, both as in speech and as in price, and that people copying and redistributing it was a feature, not a bug. I said that selling verbatim copies of Firefox on physical media was absolutely fine with us, and we would like her to return any confiscated CDs and allow us to continue with our plan for world domination (or words to that effect).

Unfortunately, this was not well received. Her reply was incredulous:

“I can’t believe that your company would allow people to make money from something that you allow people to have free access to. Is this really the case?” she asked.

“If Mozilla permit the sale of copied versions of its software, it makes it virtually impossible for us, from a practical point of view, to enforce UK anti-piracy legislation, as it is difficult for us to give general advice to businesses over what is/is not permitted.”

I felt somewhat unnerved at being held responsible for the disintegration of the UK anti-piracy system. Who would have thought giving away software could cause such difficulties?

Who indeed? Sometimes, it’s difficult to explain altruism to people. Sigh.

Thanks to Seb for the link.

Our mistake

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Thoughtful Guardian column by Martin Kettle. Excerpt:

In Vasily Grossman’s remarkable novel Life and Fate, there is a powerful scene in which two Bolsheviks encounter one another as prisoners in one of Stalin’s labour camps in 1942. The younger Bolshevik, Abarchuk, who is convinced he is there in error, remains a believer in the cause; but his older mentor, Magar, has gained wisdom through experience. When the two comrades snatch what turns out to be their final conversation, Magar looks around the camp and distils their years of revolutionary experience in words of terrible simplicity and force. “We made a mistake,” he tells Abarchuk. “And this is what our mistake has led to.”

It has become increasingly hard for a truthful person not to apply those same words to the situation facing the US and Britain in Iraq. It is not Stalin’s Russia and Bush’s Iraq that are the same, of course. It is the dreadful clarity of Magar’s conclusion about the way events can evolve. In Iraq we too made a mistake. Adapting a comment by the 19th-century diplomat Talleyrand, I see Britain’s role in the invasion not as a crime, but as an error – and the scenes of desecration and murder this week across Iraq are what our mistake has led to.

A billion legal downloads!

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Yes, siree! The Apple iTunes store has sold its billionth song.

The billionth song, ”Speed of Sound,” was purchased as part of Coldplay’s “X&Y” album by Alex Ostrovsky from West Bloomfield, Michigan. As the grand prize winner, he will receive a 20-inch iMac, 10 fifth generation iPods, and a $10,000 Music Card good for any item on the iTunes Music Store. In addition, to commemorate this milestone, Apple will establish a scholarship to the world-renowned Juilliard School in his name.

I wish some corporate psychiatrist from Harvard Business School would write a comprehensive explanation of why the music industry didn’t see the opportunity.

Flann rides again!

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Well, well. An amazing report on BBC Online on how a fleeting placement of Flann O’Brien’s surreal novel, The Third Policeman, on the cult TV series, Lost, has led to an upsurge in sales.

More than 15,000 copies were sold in the three weeks following the Lost episode airing in the US – equalling sales of the previous six years.

O’Brien (whose real name was Brian O’Nolan) played a big role in what might loosely be called my literary development, in that I was once thrown out of the National Library in Dublin because I had been reading back numbers of his Cruiskeen Lawn column in the Irish Times and was overcome with uncontrollable, hysterical laughter. A stern custodian escorted me to the door. I had been obliged to resort to the National Library because my mother regarded the Irish Times, the house organ of the Protestant Ascendancy, as a publication of the devil, and would not — as she put it — “have that heathen rag in the house”.

There are two good Wikipedia pages on O’Brien — one about his novels, the other on his newspaper column, but by far the best online reference is Carol Taaffe’s splendid essay.

For such an outrageously funny and original man, O’Brien seems to have had a pretty miserable life — as captured in the title of Anthony Cronin’s workmanlike biography — No Laughing Matter: the life and times of Flann O’Brien. He died in 1966.