Date: circa 1963, quoted in today’s Daily Telegraph obit:
O what have you done? said Christine
You’ve disrupted the Party machine
To lie in the nude
Is not very rude
But to lie in the House is obscene.
Less preening, George, if you please
Tom Sutcliffe has a nice piece in the Indie [now, alas, behind a paywall] taking George Clooney to task for his Oscar speech in which he said: “We were a little bit out of touch every now and then in Hollywood and I think that’s probably a good thing. We were the ones to talk about Aids when it was just being whispered. And we talked about civil rights when it wasn’t really popular”. (Cue waves of self-satisfied applause.)
Oh yeah? says Sutcliffe. The Aids crisis first broke in 1981 and was global news by 1983. The first film to deal with it at all — An Early Frost — came out in 1985 and was made not by Hollywood but by NBC. It wasn’t until Philadelphia in 1993 that Hollywood really acknowledgd Aids. Similarly with civil rights. In the Heat of the Night and Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner were both made in 1967 — 13 years after the first struggles over segregated education.
So less of the preening, George.
Slingbox
Interesting gizmo. Blurb reads…
Introducing the Slingbox™ — a groundbreaking piece of hardwired ingenuity that will literally transform the way you watch television.
The Slingbox enables you to watch your TV programming from wherever you are by turning virtually any Internet-connected PC into your personal TV. Whether you’re in another room or in another country, you’ll always have access to your television.
That’s assuming you want to, of course. Costs $249. Only available in the US at the moment, as far as I can see.
John Profumo
BBC Online report…
John Profumo, who was at the centre of one of the UK’s most famous political scandals, has died at the age of 91.
John Profumo’s public life was dramatically split into two parts: disgrace and redemption.
Nearly 40 years after he misled the House of Commons and helped bring down the Macmillan government, the former politician was a dedicated charity worker, for whom his friend Lord Longford “felt more admiration than all the men I’ve known in my lifetime”.
Nice coda by Martin Kettle:
Sixty five years ago this week, in March 1940, the 25-year-old John Profumo was elected to parliament in one of those odd, not properly contested, wartime byelections, as the Conservative MP for Kettering (his only rival for the seat was a rebel Labour councillor who ran as a Workers’ and Pensioners’ Anti-war candidate).
His victory brought the young Profumo on to the Tory benches just in time for perhaps the single most important parliamentary vote of the 20th century – the “Norway debate” of May 8 1940.
Although the Norway debate was ostensibly about one theatre of the British war effort, and ironically one over which Winston Churchill (then first lord of the Admiralty) had charge, it was in practice about the credibility of the Chamberlain government to lead Britain through the worsening war crisis in Europe.
Thirty-three Tories voted against the government that day, and another 65 abstained. The result was the fall of Chamberlain and the formation of the wartime coalition under Churchill.
John Profumo was the last surviving Tory MP to have voted against Chamberlain that night long ago.
He may have helped to wreck his party in the 1960s, but in May 1940 Profumo helped to save his country. That’s worth remembering too.
For me, though, the enduring image of the ‘Profumo affair’ is Lewis Morley’s wonderful photograph of Christine Keeler, the beautiful call-girl for whom he fell. The original is in the V&A Museum.
Keynes’s General Theory in a nutshell
Brad DeLong blogged Paul Krugman’s intro to the General Theory…
Stripped down, the conclusions of The General Theory might be expressed as four bullet points:
Economies can and often do suffer from an overall lack of demand, which leads to involuntary unemployment The economy’s automatic tendency to correct shortfalls in demand, if it exists at all, operates slowly and painfully Government policies to increase demand, by contrast, can reduce unemployment quickly Sometimes increasing the money supply won’t be enough to persuade the private sector to spend more, and government spending must step into the breach To a modern practitioner of economic policy, none of this – except, possibly, the last point – sounds startling or even especially controversial. But these ideas weren’t just radical when Keynes proposed them; they were very nearly unthinkable. And the great achievement of The General Theory was precisely to make them thinkable….
Drinking buddies online
Hmmm… Another wacky MIT Media Lab Project…
Lover’s Cups explore the idea of sharing feelings of drinking between two people in different places by using cups as communication interfaces of drinking. Two cups are wireless connected to each other with sip sensors and LED illumination. The Lover’s cups will glow when your lover is drinking.
When both of you are drinking at the same time, both of the Lover’s Cups glow and celebrate this virtual kiss.
Bet they’re not dishwasher-safe.
The clickthrough’s tyrannical efficiency
Terrific post on Nicholas Carr’s Blog about what the Net is doing to newspapers. Sample:
Traditional newspapers sold bundles of content. Subscribers paid to get the bundle, and advertisers paid to have their ads in the bundle, where those readers would see them. In effect, investigative and other hard journalism was subsidized by the softer stuff – but you couldn’t really see the subsidization, so in a way it didn’t really exist. And, besides, the hard stuff contributed to the value of the overall bundle.
That whole model has been slowly unraveling for some time, but the web tears it into tiny little pieces. Literally. The web unbundles the bundle – each story becomes a separate entity that lives or dies, economically, on its own. It’s naked in the marketplace, its commercial existence meticulously measured, click by click. Advertisers, for their part, pay not to be seen by a big group of readers, but to have their ads clicked on by individual readers. They’ll go where the clickthroughs are. Clickthroughs themselves are priced individually, depending on the content they’re associated with. As for readers, they’re not exactly trained or motivated to pay to read anything online. The economic incentives created by the web model are very different from those of the old print model – and it’s economic incentives that ultimately determine business decisions.
Google buys Writely
I’ve been using Writely for a while as an online word-processor that enables one to create documents on which colleagues can also work. Now comes the news that Google has acquired the four-person start-up that created the application. It’s just another step in the progress towards public realisation that the network, not the platform, is the computer. Or, as one of my colleagues puts it, “the PC is dead. It just doesn’t know it yet!”
More: Some useful comments on Good Morning, Silicon Valley.
Life after television, contd.
We may be known as a nation of couch potatoes, but it seems that Britons are grasping the 21st century with both hands: we now spend more time watching the web than watching television, according to internet giant Google.
A survey conducted on behalf of the search engine found that the average Briton spends around 164 minutes online every day, compared with 148 minutes watching television. That is equivalent to 41 days a year spent surfing the web: more than almost any other activity apart from sleeping and working.
Television addiction has been Britain’s national pastime for years, but experts agree that viewers around the country are increasingly switching on their computer screens instead of their TV sets. And it is a phenomenon that is set to grow, with two thirds of respondents in the Google survey saying that they had increased the time spent online in the last year.
The empire fights back
Instructive New York Times piece about how corporate PR is finding its way — unacknowledged — into Blogs.
Brian Pickrell, a blogger, recently posted a note on his Web site attacking state legislation that would force Wal-Mart Stores to spend more on employee health insurance. “All across the country, newspaper editorial boards — no great friends of business — are ripping the bills,” he wrote.
It was the kind of pro-Wal-Mart comment the giant retailer might write itself. And, in fact, it did.
Several sentences in Mr. Pickrell’s Jan. 20 posting — and others from different days — are identical to those written by an employee at one of Wal-Mart’s public relations firms and distributed by e-mail to bloggers.
Under assault as never before, Wal-Mart is increasingly looking beyond the mainstream media and working directly with bloggers, feeding them exclusive nuggets of news, suggesting topics for postings and even inviting them to visit its corporate headquarters.
But the strategy raises questions about what bloggers, who pride themselves on independence, should disclose to readers. Wal-Mart, the nation’s largest private employer, has been forthright with bloggers about the origins of its communications, and the company and its public relations firm, Edelman, say they do not compensate the bloggers.
But some bloggers have posted information from Wal-Mart, at times word for word, without revealing where it came from.
Glenn Reynolds, the founder of Instapundit.com, one of the oldest blogs on the Web, said that even in the blogosphere, which is renowned for its lack of rules, a basic tenet applies: “If I reprint something, I say where it came from. A blog is about your voice, it seems to me, not somebody else’s.”
Quite. Caveat lector.