Do you know that song, ‘Guantanamera’? It actually means ‘pretty girl from Guantanamo Bay’. It used to be an especially idyllic beauty spot in Cuba which was supposed to have lots of pretty girls. Now the Americans torture people there. Isn’t that ironic?
Screenwriter Andrew Davies, interviewed in today’s Observer Magazine.
These days, you can be a Labour democrat, a Conservative democrat or a Liberal Democrat, but you can’t be a New Labour democrat because that is a contradiction in terms.
Henry Porter, writing in today’s Observer.
This morning’s Observer column…
Microsoft’s problems with Windows may be an indicator that operating systems are getting beyond the capacity of any single organisation to handle them. Whatever other charges might be levelled against Microsoft, technical incompetence isn’t one. If the folks at Redmond can’t do it, maybe it just can’t be done.
Therein may lie the real significance of Open Source. In a perceptive book published in 2004, the social scientist, Steve Weber argued that it’s not Linux per se but the collaborative process by which the software was created that is the real innovation. In those terms, Linux is probably the first truly networked enterprise in history.
Weber likened Open Source production to an earlier process which had a revolutionary impact – Toyota’s production system – which in time transformed the way cars are made everywhere. The Toyota ‘system’, in that sense, was not a car, and it was not uniquely Japanese. Similarly, Open Source is not a piece of software, and it is not unique to a group of hackers. It’s a way of building complex things. Microsoft’s struggles with Vista suggest it may be the only way to do operating systems in future…
The Guardian published a nice obit of Earl Woods, Tiger’s dad. It contains the following stories:
His faith [in Tiger’s potential] took hold when Tiger was aged one. Earl was practising golf in the garage as the tot watched from a high chair. Then he descended, took the club and hit the ball into the net his father had strung up. “I was flabbergasted,” Earl recalled. “It was the most frightening thing I had ever seen.”
At 18 months, he took Tiger to a golf course for the first time and let him play a hole. The toddler shot an 11 on the 410-yard par four, with eight shots to the green and three putts. When he was 11 he first beat his father, who never won against him afterwards…
Now I agree that Tiger is a truly wonderful golfer. I can also imagine that he must have been a child prodigy. But playing a par four in 11 shots at 18 months? Surely this is urban myth territory.
By far the best obit of John Kenneth Galbraith, IMHO, was the Economist‘s.
Bons mots … seemed to come naturally to him. “Economists are economical, among other things, of ideas; most make those of their graduate days last a lifetime.” “Wealth is not without its advantages, and the case to the contrary, although it has often been made, has never proved widely persuasive.” As Kennedy’s ambassador to India, Mr Galbraith preferred to write to the president direct: sending letters through the State Department, he told Kennedy, was “like fornicating through a mattress”….
The piece also reminds one that Galbraith’s effortless style was the product of a good deal of work.
Mr Galbraith strove to perfect his prose, reworking each passage at least five times. “It was usually on about the fourth day that I put in that note of spontaneity for which I am known,” he once admitted.
As Sam Johnson said, “nothing that is read with pleasure was written without pain”.
The popular poet, Pam Ayres, described by the Daily Telegraph as “supplier of comic verse to Middle England for almost three decades”, has written an ode for the Deputy Prime Minister.
Entitled I am ready, Mr Prescott, it begins:
I am ready Mr Prescott
You can take me in your arms
All these years I’ve waited,
To experience your charms,
So fling aside those trousers,
I hope they’re quick release,
For all that hanky panky’s
Made you clinically obese.
What Prescott has discovered (and Blair is about to) is that there is nothing so corrosive as ridicule for a minister (or indeed any other authority figure).
A case in point is the speed with which the moral authority of the Irish bishops dissolved after it was revealed that Eamon Casey, the Bishop of Galway, had sired a son with his lover, Annie Murphy, many years earlier. But it wasn’t the fact of his paternity that did for Casey, but the revelation that he and Annie had done it in the back of a Lancia! There is something irresistibly comic about the thought of a Prince of the Church humping on the rear seat of an Italian saloon.
Much the same happened to the South African racist thug Eugene Terreblanche, who never recovered from transmission of the video footage of his hairy bum rising and falling in an erotic rhythm. Mae West said that “sex is very bad for one, but great for two”, which is true. But if anyone else gets in on the act, then there’s usually trouble. The problem with it, as the Earl of Chesterfield famously observed — and the Deputy Prime Minister is now discovering — is that “the pleasure is momentary, the position ridiculous, and the expense damnable”.
John Prescott arrived at 7.45am. He left just before 11am, looking cheerful – and no wonder, for he had expected to lose his job, but has held on to his title, his car, his driver and his country house (with croquet lawn) while shedding his entire work load. Lottery jackpot winners have settled for less.
Simon Hoggart, writing in today’s Guardian
AN interesting new way of financing film-making…
A Swarm of Angels reinvents the Hollywood model of filmmaking to create cult cinema for the Internet era. It’s all about making an artistic statement, making something you haven’t seen before. Why are we doing this? Because we are tired of films that are made simply to please film executives, sell popcorn, or tie-in with fastfood licensing deals.We want to invent the future of film. Call it Cinema 2.0.
John Prescott has been stripped of his departmental responsibilities, but he keeps his Cabinet place (and the accompanying salary), as well as various perks (such as two Grace & Favour houses). Given the allegations that emerged over the weekend about his behaviour towards a female subordinate, this is astonishing.
What’s even more astonishing is the way the media have swallowed the government line that his sexual misdemeanours are a private matter. If he were the CEO of a public company, then his sexual harassment of a subordinate would already have led to his departure — if only because a juicy lawsuit would be imminent. But he continues as the UK’s Deputy PM. All of which makes Catherine Bennett’s icy column worth reading. Sample:
Miraculous to relate, Tony Blair, Alastair Campbell and a host of columnists appear, for once, to agree on something. John Prescott’s use of a secretary for sexual purposes was “a private matter”.
If, as seems likely, this view prevails, when Blair next takes a holiday this country will be led by a man we have long known to be a violent, inarticulate oaf and now know to be a violent, inarticulate, sexually predatory oaf. At least no one could call us elitist.
How will it be for the women secretaries, civil servants and political colleagues who must continue to work alongside him? Fine, perhaps, when they remember the prime minister’s assurance that this is a private matter. Simply because Prescott assigned his secretary various challenging sexual tasks, and is alleged to have attempted the molestation of at least one other woman, that is no reason to suppose he will lift up the skirt of Tessa Jowell, or look down the front of Margaret Hodge, or harass other senior women who do not appeal to him, or talk dirty to them at staff parties, or turn his assessing gaze on their cleavage, speculating on the kind of underwear that might be supporting it. That is something he only does to his juniors. In private…
There’s more…
Luminaries of New Labour, that most enlightened hammer of sexual and all other forms of discrimination, are defending a man whose lewd approaches to a junior colleague – it will be obvious to almost any other employer or employee in the land – should make him a candidate for immediate suspension. Not to mention an enormous compensation claim on the part of his secretary. A private matter? In a lap-dancing club, perhaps. But this was the civil service. Aside from the choice of locations, a sexual connection this rudimentary, bereft of any romantic trimmings, so closely resembles unpaid prostitution that, given Prescott’s public position, the abuse of power more than justifies the public interest. At what point, during this administration, was the propositioning, at work, of subordinates, redefined as an irrelevant and entirely personal peccadillo?
Great stuff.
The media consensus is that Blair’s last-ditch reshuffle of his Cabinet was “brutal”, and so indeed it was. Two days ago, for example, he refused to accept Charles Clarke’s offer to resign; today he sacked him. But for me the really interesting aspect of the reshuffle is the way it has brought to the fore young Blair loyalists like David Miliband and Alan Johnson. Regular readers will remember that some time ago I surmised that Blair doesn’t want Gordon Brown to succeed him and is therefore trying to ensure that there is a credible younger candidate in place to challenge the Chancellor when the time eventually comes for him (Blair) to stand down.
One way of reading today’s reshuffle is that it has been designed with that objective in mind. And to be fair to Blair (though I have no desire to be), he might be motivated by something other than spite. He may want Labour to continue in power after he’s gone, and suspects that only a younger man stands a chance of defeating the new bicycling Tory leader.
Later: Then there’s the interesting question of why Jack Straw was demoted? I was puzzled by this — he seemed to be doing ok, relatively speaking. But Ewen MacAskill has has sussed it: Straw said a military strike against Iran was inconceivable. Blair thinks differently. So Straw had to go. Ye Gods!