After the rain: surface tension
It rained heavily in Suffolk last night.
Useful fact no. 5422
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.
Quote of the day
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.
Wrestling with the Vista monster
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…
Can this be true?
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.
Quotes of a lifetime
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”.
Sex, ridicule and Mr Prescott
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”.
Prescott’s bonanza
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
Creative swarms
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.