Photographed by Phil in Reading M4 Services
So who’s going to get me down from here?
Tilly, in our apple tree, following the unexpected arrival of an energetic puppy.
Farming today
Comberton, near Cambridge.
Spoon feeding
Photographed at a dinner in the Royal Society of Arts in July. Note the highly ornamental ceiling.
Betamax v. VHS, Round 2
History repeats itself, said Marx, the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce. There are two competing standards for the next generation of DVD disks. One, Blu-ray, developed by Sony, stores 25 GB on a disk. The other, HD DVD, created by a consortium led by Toshiba, stores 15 GB. Needless to say, they are incompatible.
The commercial madness of this is obvious to all concerned, but nobody wants to give way. And now, talks about a possible compromise have apparently been abandoned. Rational consumers will sit on their hands until a clear victor emerges — which could take a while. (At a time when sales of DVDs seem to be stagnating.) Sony’s Betamax was technically superior, but lost out to VHS. Blu-ray is technically superior to HD DVD….
More… And I’d forgotten about the daft DRM technologies proposed for the new formats. Fortunately, Ed Felten hasn’t.
Window shopping in Berne
Photographed by Dale in Berne, Switzerland.
Blair’s snortling location revealed
It turns out that he was in Barbados after all. I missed the coverage of Robin Cook’s funeral because we were on hols, but wondered why Blair didn’t attend. It seemed to me to be an error of judgement, not to mention a lapse of taste. And of course I laughed at John McCririck’s crack about the Prime Minister “snortling in his paid-for holiday home”. But according to the Belfast Telegraph, the Cook family asked Blair not to come because they didn’t want the funeral turning into a military and security circus. So it looks as though I was wrong — as indeed was McCririck. Nice word “snortling”, though. Must remember it.
Amazon shorts
Here’s an interesting development. According to The Register,
Amazon.com is to start selling electronic downloads of short stories, single chapters of books and even single scenes from novels as part of a new section called Amazon Shorts.
At the moment this looks like being a US-only deal, and each download will cost just 49 cents.
The idea is that readers will be able to sample new authors at very little cost, or buy updates to books they already own or to read alternative endings to favourite stories.
This is a great idea. No excessive DRM either.
The joys of tourism
Photographed outside a coach stop in Donegal.
Coincidences
Seeking to catch up on reading over the holidays, I took some back issues of the London Review of Books with me. I was particularly taken by “Looking for someone to kill”, one of Patrick Cockburn’s grimly realistic dispatches from Baghdad. I admire Cockburn’s journalism — he and Robert Fisk seem to me to be the best Western journalists writing about the Middle East. I’m also interested in him because I met him once or twice, and because his parents, Claud and Patricia, had been very nice to me when I was an undergraduate in Cork in the 1960s.
Later that day, we went to Donegal in search of more reading material for the kids, and wound up in the Four Masters bookshop on the Diamond, a small shop which has an interesting range of books for sale. It carries, of course, the usual beach-thrillers by Grisham etc., but also stuff (Seamus Heaney’s collected prose essays, Roy Foster’s mega-bio of WB Yeats, Andrew Marr’s lovely book on journalism etc.) which implies a discriminating and quirky owner.
Up on the top shelf I found Patrick’s autobiography, The Broken Boy.
The title comes from the fact that Patrick contracted polio at the age of six, and still bears the scars of it. (Which makes his ability to report from some of the most terrifying places on earth all the more remarkable.) So of course I reached up and took it down. The book fell open at a page showing this photograph.
I recognised it immediately as one of mine — I took it in the 1970s when visiting Claud and Patricia in their home in Youghal when I was back from Cambridge. It was lovely to see it used to such good effect, because it captures something of her remarkable spirit.
Claud was one of my heroes, and he and Patricia were immensely welcoming and tolerant of the hotheaded and opinionated would-be journalist who sought their company in the Sixties. I’ve never forgotten Claud’s advice to me when I told him I’d like to try journalism after Cambridge. “Make sure you libel someone important early in your career”, were his parting words. As a TV critic in the 1980s and 1990s, I did my best to live up to it (and enriched some lawyers as a result)!