Monthly Archives: November 2007
Mellow fruitfulness
We have a lovely crab-apple tree. We always leave the fruit on it so that the birds can pick it clean during cold spells in the winter.
This morning’s headlines
No sign of Gordon Brown anywhere. Hmmm… on second thoughts: that’s next month‘s headline.
Pollution 2.0
MapEcos is very interesting — an application that superimposes location and emission data on Google maps. Go to a location and see where the local polluters are. Click on one of them and up pops date from the EPA database.
It works only for the US at present, but it’s a really neat application of Web 2.0 tools.
Andreessen on Facebook
Marc Andreessen has written a terrific analysis of Facebook as a ‘platform’.
The BBC iPlayer shambles
Cory Doctorow isn’t impressed…
In a recent podcast, Ashley Highfield, director of Future Media and Technology for the BBC, remarked on the difficulty of creating an “open source Digital Rights Management system”. This is a system of software locks that prevents unauthorised copying, while still being “open” in the sense of allowing users the freedom to take it apart, understand it and improve upon it.
Highfield is right: you can’t make a free and open DRM system. That’s because DRMs (which some like to call “Digital Restrictions Management”) treat their users as untrusted parties who have to be policed lest they transgress and make naughty copies. DRMs are designed to resist user modification and “tampering” because users might just open them up and remove the prohibitions they impose. For example, the BBC’s iPlayer DRM prevents you from watching a show more than 28 days after you downloaded it. By contrast, shows that you record on your VCR or PC can be watched forever…
Recession ahead, drive carefully
From today’s Telegraph…
Forget inflation and the manufacturing figures. Stop looking at the latest existing home sales figures or the data on non-farm payrolls. One of the most accurate indicators of an imminent recession is in and Americans should start tightening their belts.
Winnebago, maker of the famous recreational vehicles, expects its first drop in sales in six years
Winnebago, the makers of the famous recreational vehicles so prominent on the highways of the US, is expected to post a decline in sales this year for the first time in six years. Buying a motor home is seen as the ultimate discretionary item, and over the past three decades, declines have always heralded a rapid slowdown in the US economy.
“Recreational vehicles are at the swing end of discretionary spending because no-one needs an RV, and certainly no-one needs a new RV,” said fund manager Ron Muhlenkamp, who began selling Winnebago shares last year.
As the US housing slump continues, petrol prices head above $3-a-gallon once more and consumer confidence takes a nosedive, sales of motor homes, along with other typical discretionary items such as Harley Davidson motorcycles and plastic surgery, are forecast to fall…
Helpful information: The model shown is a 2008 Damon Tuscany 4055. Yours for $231,070 on the road. Cash in that sub-prime mortgage now.
Quis custodiet…?
Seen outside a posh antiques dealer’s premises in the Hague.
The smell of burning toast
The latest Brown cock-up du jour is a gift to right-wing nutters like Simon Heffer. Here he is, this morning, in full spate:
Some of us remember not merely the submersion of the Major government under its tide of lies, peculation, rent-boys and mistresses, but also the Poulson affair of the early 1970s. That, too, like this present funding crisis and the Northern Rock debacle, had its roots in the North East, which since then has become the heartland of Labour’s client state. Poulson and his comrade-in-arms T Dan Smith bribed local councillors and officials to get lucrative building contracts. I am sure that this sort of thing has no bearing on the business interests of the real donor of £558,000 to the Labour Party, said to be David Abrahams, alias David Martin, aged 53/63? What are we to make of the decision by the Highways Agency at a time when the Transport Department was run by Mr Brown’s blue-eyed boy, Douglas Alexander, to waive objections to a development scheme that stood to earn Mr Abrahams/Martin £60 million?
It might seem that Labour has netted a one per cent rake-off of Mr Abrahams’/Martin’s earnings on this scheme. I am sure that this couldn’t be true. But it smells to high heaven, does it not? What is Mr Abrahams’/Martin’s link to Harriet Harman? Why did he feel he had to fund her successful deputy leadership campaign surreptitiously? Is it at all a coincidence that her husband, Jack Dromey, is the party’s treasurer? Is her position compromised by this association with a man with interchangeable names, who uses others to shell out huge amounts of money on his behalf, who was deselected when he stood as a Labour candidate because he invented a wife and child, and who appears not even to have a fixed date of birth? Is that the sort of man Mr Brown wants funding Labour, or his deputy leader wants funding her? Is this the sleaze-free, whiter-than-white image that Labour smugly boasted would prevail once the wicked, venal Tories were ousted? Is that a pig I just saw flying past the window?
Tut, tut. He was doing ok until that last sentence. One mustn’t over-egg literary puddings.
What’s interesting, though, is how bad Brown is at handling this stuff compared to Blair.
William Blake
250 years ago today, the poet, painter and engraver William Blake was born in Soho. One of the great paradoxes of life is that a poem (“Jerusalem”) written by this dazzling revolutionary and dissenter should have been appropriated for imperialist anthems.
And did those feet in ancient time
walk upon England’s mountains green?
And was the holy Lamb of God
on England’s pleasant pastures seen?
And did the countenance divine
shine forth upon our clouded hills?
And was Jerusalem builded here
among these dark Satanic Mills?
Bring me my bow of burning gold!
Bring me my arrows of desire!
Bring me my spear! O clouds, unfold!
Bring me my chariot of fire!
I will not cease from mental fight,
nor shall my sword sleep in my hand,
till we have built Jerusalem
In England’s green and pleasant Land.
I’ve often wondered how this came about. Wikipedia offers this explanation:
The poem, which was little known during the century which followed its writing, was included in a patriotic anthology of verse published in 1916, a time when morale had begun to decline due to the high number of casualties in the First World War and the perception that there was no end in sight.
Under these circumstances, it seemed to many to define what Britain was fighting for. Therefore, Robert Bridges, the Poet Laureate asked Parry to put it to music at a Fight for Right campaign meeting in London’s Queen’s Hall. The aims of this organisation were “to brace the spirit of the nation that the people of Great Britain, knowing that they are fighting for the best interests of humanity, may refuse any temptation, however insidious, to conclude a premature peace, and may accept with cheerfulness all the sacrifices necessary to bring the war to a satisfactory conclusion”[3]. Bridges asked Parry to supply the verse with “suitable, simple music that an audience could take up and join in”. Originally Parry intended the first verse to be sung by a solo female voice, but this is rare nowadays. The most famous version was orchestrated by Sir Edward Elgar in 1922 for a large orchestra at the Leeds Festival. Upon hearing the orchestral version for the first time, King George V said that he preferred “Jerusalem” over “God Save the King”, the National Anthem.
Anyway, Happy Birthday Master Blake!