Breaking the journey

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Nice story in the Guardian.

When a middle-aged man swore at airline staff after he was refused a drink on a flight from Manchester to Tenerife, he got a sunshine break he had not bargained for. The pilot diverted the charter plane and dumped the troublesome holidaymaker 300 miles from his destination on a barren volcanic island off the west coast of Africa….

We use budget airlines a lot and I don’t envy the cabin crews. It’s become a horrible job, even when the passengers aren’t obstreperous. It takes about an hour to fly from Stansted to the various airports we use in Ireland, and each time I look on in amazement as the crews rush to get through the same deadly routine — passing through the cabin with a drinks trolley, then coming round trying to sell scratch cards and ‘duty free’ goods. Then tidying up and packing everything away prior to scrambling into their seats in preparation for landing. And then being expected to turn round the plane in 25 minutes. (That’s the RyanAir norm.)

When I was a child in 1950s Ireland, the profession of “air hostess” was regarded as unutterably glamorous. Parents prayed that their daughters might get a job in Aer Lingus, the state airline, thereby enabling them to land some rich businessman as a husband. Mind you, the prospective husbands would have needed to be well-off, because Aer Lingus fired its hostesses the moment they got married. (So, come to think of it, did church/state-run primary schools.) Different world, then.

Hmm… just noticed that the offending passenger is “understood to be an Irish citizen living in Lancashire” who “ignored numerous appeals to calm down when he was refused further alcoholic drinks”. Bet his Ma hadn’t been an Aer Lingus hostess.

Totally Random

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Here’s something to cheer you up — the transcript of a Fox News interview with the Leader of the Free World on the subject of his iPod. The interview begins with Brit Hume asking the Prez what’s on his device now:

Bush : Beach Boys, Beatles, let’s see, Alan Jackson, Alan Jackson, Alejandro, Alison Krauss, the Angels, the Archies, Aretha Franklin, the Beatles, Dan McLean. Remember him?
Hume: Don McLean.
Bush: I mean, Don McLean.
Hume: Does “American Pie,” right?
Bush: Great song.
Hume: Yes, yes, great song.
Unidentified male: . . . which ones do you play?
Bush: All of these. I put it on shuffle. Dwight Yoakam. I’ve got the Shuffle, the, what is it called? The little.
Hume: Shuffle.
Bush: It looks like.
Hume: The Shuffle. That is the name of one of the models.
Bush: Yes, the Shuffle.
Hume: Called the Shuffle.
Bush: Lightweight, and crank it on, and you shuffle the Shuffle.
Hume: So you — it plays . . .
Bush: Put it in my pocket, got the ear things on.
Hume: So it plays them in a random order.
Bush: Yes.
Hume: So you don’t know what you’re going to going to get.
Bush: No.
Hume: But you know —
Bush: And if you don’t like it, you have got your little advance button. It’s pretty high-tech stuff.
Hume: . . . be good to have one of those at home, wouldn’t it?
Bush: Oh?
Hume: Yes, hit the button and whatever it is that’s in your head — gone.
Bush: . . . it’s a bad day, just say, get out of here.
Hume: Well, that probably is pretty . . .
Bush: That works, too. ( Laughter )
Hume: Yes, right.

Footnote: American Pie is the song containing the line “Drove the Chevvy to the levee but the levee was dry”? Who said irony was dead.

Free the IE code!

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Microsoft has announced that it will no longer ‘support’ the Mac version of Internet Explorer. Yawn. But Bill Thompson sees this as an opportunity. If Microsoft no longer wants Mac IE, he argues, why not release the source code and let keen programmers support — and maybe enhance — it. Now there’s a real optimist for you.

Cheney: the real menace

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The best argument for wishing Dubya a long and happy life is Dick Cheney. Even the staid old New York Times seems to have realised what a menace the man is — as shown by an extraordinary editorial entitled “Mr. Cheney’s Imperial Presidency”. Excerpt:

Virtually from the time he chose himself to be Mr. Bush’s running mate in 2000, Dick Cheney has spearheaded an extraordinary expansion of the powers of the presidency – from writing energy policy behind closed doors with oil executives to abrogating longstanding treaties and using the 9/11 attacks as a pretext to invade Iraq, scrap the Geneva Conventions and spy on American citizens.
It was a chance Mr. Cheney seems to have been dreaming about for decades. Most Americans looked at wrenching events like the Vietnam War, the Watergate scandal and the Iran-contra debacle and worried that the presidency had become too powerful, secretive and dismissive. Mr. Cheney looked at the same events and fretted that the presidency was not powerful enough, and too vulnerable to inspection and calls for accountability.

The president “needs to have his constitutional powers unimpaired, if you will, in terms of the conduct of national security policy,” Mr. Cheney said this week as he tried to stifle the outcry over a domestic spying program that Mr. Bush authorized after the 9/11 attacks.

Before 9/11, Mr. Cheney was trying to undermine the institutional and legal structure of multilateral foreign policy: he championed the abrogation of the Antiballistic Missile Treaty with Moscow in order to build an antimissile shield that doesn’t work but makes military contractors rich. Early in his tenure, Mr. Cheney, who quit as chief executive of Halliburton to run with Mr. Bush in 2000, gathered his energy industry cronies at secret meetings in Washington to rewrite energy policy to their specifications. Mr. Cheney offered the usual excuses about the need to get candid advice on important matters, and the courts, sadly, bought it. But the task force was not an exercise in diverse views. Mr. Cheney gathered people who agreed with him, and allowed them to write national policy for an industry in which he had recently amassed a fortune.

So those who think Dubya is evil/stupid/incompetent might console themselves with the thought: at least Dick Cheney isn’t president.

Wikipedia with adult supervision?

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The co-founder of Wikipedia, Larry Sanger, (who left the project some time ago) is launching some kind of refereed collaborative publication called The Digital Universe. Details scarce as yet, but there are journalistic reports (e.g. in the NYT) claiming that it will “allow anyone to contribute and edit entries, but experts vouching for the accuracy of entries will oversee major areas of content”.

The PC mini

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Behold the PC world’s first stab at replicating the Mac mini. According to the Guardian Online Blog it costs £699 inc VAT with no monitor, no keyboard, no mouse, no speakers and no wireless. A Mac mini with a comparable spec would cost somewhere between £359 and £429. So you pay extra for all those viruses, worms, trojans and other Windows-enabled vulnerabilities. Weird. If it had been priced at, say, £199 then you could understand the logic.

The sea-change in the music industry

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File-sharing and downloading is just the tip of the iceberg. What’s really happening is that the old-style, RIAA-approved music industry is on the slide for a good old capitalistic reason: it’s losing touch with its best customers. There’s an extraordinarily perceptive article by Laura Barton which explains how guerrilla gigs, the Net and fan-friendly bands are enabling music lovers to reclaim the charts — and the industry. Excerpt:

This has been the year fans have increasingly taken music into their own hands, rejecting the over-processed diet served up by many major labels in favour of something a little more homemade. In the process they have notched up numerous high-profile successes, including Arctic Monkeys, Arcade Fire, Clap Your Hands Say Yeah, Spinto Band and Nizlopi.
Enabled largely by the internet, bands have been able to record and promote their own music, and fans to revel in it and pass it on – without the aid of major label backing, stylist and towering billboard advertisements. Furthermore, fans are finding it ever easier to interact directly with their favourite bands, rather than seek nourishment from the insubstantial publicist- approved quotes given in interviews. The result, of course, is that the charts in 2005 have become imbued with a rather joyous and friendly anarchy.

Arguably, it was the Libertines who set the pace; the baton then passed to Babyshambles and imminently to Carl Barat’s new band, Dirty Pretty Things. Characteristically, Libertines gigs (and those of their circle) eschewed the overpriced ticketing, over-priced ale gig-going conventions that had become standard in the Clear Channel era, and instead guerrilla gigs were played ad-hoc in bizarre venues, such as rooftops, farms and the London underground. Fans were informed of the “venue” hours before in a flurry of emails, website postings and text messages, and would travel from all over the country to congregate at the elected hour and see their favourite band play inches from them (and probably go to the pub with them afterwards). Pete Doherty allowed fans to bed down in his flat if they missed the last train home.

Have daughter, will travel left

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This must be the oddest story the Guardian‘s political editor, Michael White, ever wrote.

Forget about the conventional wisdom that parents influence the way their children vote. A new paper by two British academics yesterday upturned a longstanding western idea to suggest that it was the other way around. What’s more, daughters make families vote Labour or Lib Dem.

“This paper provides evidence that daughters make people more leftwing. Having sons, by contrast, makes them more rightwing … the paper ends with a conjecture: leftwing individuals are people who comes from families into which, over recent past generations, many females have been born.”