The G8 plan to save Africa comes with conditions that make it little more than an extortion racket.
Thus George Monbiot, writing in the Guardian.
Good piece, by a writer who, like yours truly, chokes on the notion of Blair & Co as ministering angels to the world’s poor.
Healey’s First Law of Holes: when you’re in one, stop digging. Advice lost on eBay’s management, which has discovered that dealing with St Bob Geldof is not at all like handling Wall Street.
Yesterday, St Bob attacked eBay because people were selling Live 8 concert tickets on it for vast sums. eBay replied primly that the sellers were doing nothing illegal. Geldof then called for people to put in “impossible bids” to frustrate the sellers. Some conscientious folks obliged, putting in bids like £10 million. Now they discover that they have been blacklisted by eBay — at the same time that eBay has decided to ban the hitherto “perfectly legal” ticket auctions.
Well, well. Some folks who won tickets for the Live 8 concert have been auctioning them on eBay. Tut, tut. Terrible thing, capitalism — though of course just what Africa needs, according to Western finance ministers.
Meanwhile, St. Bob Geldof is not amused.
Geldof demanded the immediate removal of tickets being sold on the site.
He said: “I am sick with this. It is a disgrace. It is completely against the interests of the poor.
“The people who are selling these tickets on websites are miserable wretches who are capitalising on people’s misery. I am appealing to their sense of decency to stop this disgusting greed.”
An eBay spokeswoman said: “We have offered to make a donation to the Live 8 organisers at least equivalent to the fees we collect from the sale of Live 8 tickets.”
From a Register story:
Microsoft has bowed to Beijing’s political censors and has banned the use of the words “freedom” and “democracy” on some areas of its Chinese internet portal, along with a host of other politically sensitive words such as “Taiwan independence” and “demonstration”.
According to the Financial Times, portal operators have imposed the restriction on the names users give their blogs, although the words can still be used within blog’s text. Users who try to use the offensive terminology are met with error messages informing them that they have used “forbidden speech”, which they are asked to delete from the item.
Microsoft’s statement on ‘Corporate Citizenship’ says:
Microsoft is committed to being a responsible industry partner. We work with businesses, communities, and governments to help advance social and economic well–being, and to enable people around the world to realize their full potential.
Er, except, it seems, in China.
From this morning’s Observer column.
Here’s one way of looking at it. Apple’s position in the PC industry is very like that of BMW in the car business: small market share; innovative and much-admired products; and a fanatically loyal customer base. I don’t think I ever met a BMW driver who would willingly change to another marque. And much the same goes for Apple users. For these reasons, the rest of the automobile industry is perpetually fascinated by everything that BMW does. Same goes for Apple. In those terms, the processor decision is analogous to BMW deciding that instead of having its engines made by, say, Mercedes, it would henceforth get them from Ford. And that would be big news in the car business.
I’ve just received a most helpful letter from the government’s ‘Retirement Pension Forecasting Team’. “Dear Mr Naughton”, they write,
have you thought about how much money you will have when you retire?
Er, no, not really.
We are writing to tell you how much State Pension you may get when you reach State Pension age. The State Pension will give you a start. However, to have the lifestyle you want, you might need to think about saving some more, working longer or retiring later.
[Hmm…, how do those last two options differ?] Then they get to the nub of the matter. Apparently my forecast State Pension is £85.98 a week. After tax, that should be enough to keep me in cigars. Why, I feel better already.
En passant, I can’t abide people who have lifestyles. They are the sort who aspire to hot tubs, en-suite bathrooms and — God help us — patio heaters.
From an essay on “Writing Tools” by Roy Peter Clark…
In 1983, Donald Murray wrote on a chalkboard a little diagram that changed my writing and teaching forever. It was a modest blueprint of the writing process as he understood it, five words that describe the steps toward creating a story. As I remember them now, the words were: Idea. Collect. Focus. Draft. Clarify. In other words, the writer conceives a story idea, collects things to support it, discovers what the story is really about, attempts a first draft, and revises in the quest for greater clarity.
How did this simple diagram change my life?
Read on to find out…
Terrific piece by Victor Keegan in the Guardian. Sample:
It is enough to make a sceptic believe in life after death. For the past few years the music industry has been predicting the death of the singles market because of the global scourge of illegal downloading.
And what has happened? The latest figures show that 524,000 singles were sold last week in the UK, an impressive 7% increase on a year ago and no less that 44% up on sales earlier in the year, when the sirens of doom were at their loudest.
Oh, I’ve forgotten a small point. These figures only refer to sales of what is known in the trade as “physical” singles. If (legal) downloads are included, sales have soared by a staggering 88% in the last year to 977,000 last week.
As a Guardian leader pointed out yesterday, far from killing the industry, downloads have given it a new lease of life. Meanwhile what has the industry been doing? Instead of opening the champagne corks they have stepped up their campaign to rid the industry of the virus they still claim is killing it.
According to the Daily Mail, investigators have tracked down the parents of children who were illegally downloading from the web or making available their own tracks for others. The parents paid £2,500 in compensation to the industry rather than face fines in court and possibly heavy legal costs.
This is a worrying development when a record company acts as prosecution, jury and judge in a matter where it has a strong vested interest. Could anyone seriously suggest that this booming industry has lost £2,500 in sales (the cost of over 2,500 downloaded singles) as a result of action by these teenagers?
The New Yorker has taken some trouble to find out. It all came to light when a number that had appeared in a fortune cookie came up in the US Powerball lottery and 110 people rather than the usual handful turned up to claim their reward.
As regular readers know, I am fascinated by photography, so it’s not surprising that two articles on the subject caught my eye — both published in the New York Times.
The first was an intriguing piece by Michael J. Lewis on how popular conceptions of beauty are shaped by the photographic technology available at a particular time. Black and white film, for example, favoured faces like those of Greta Garbo and Katharine Hepburn.
the intense tonal range of black and white photography favored a richly contoured face, with prominent cheekbones that cast lovely form-defining shadows. An “angular face,” as Katharine Hepburn termed her own, was particularly good at casting shadows. If her face was insufficiently angular, an actress might make it more so. Marlene Dietrich is supposed to have had her upper molars removed to put shadows under her cheekbones, a story she bitterly denied.
In describing these features, people invariably resorted to the metaphor of sculpture, and compared them to a glistening marble statue lighted dramatically from one side. The director George Cukor observed that “that extraordinary sculptural construction of lines and planes,” Joan Crawford’s face, “caught the light superbly, so that you could photograph her from any angle.”
A generation later, in his essay on Garbo’s face, Roland Barthes, the French philosopher, described it as enigmatic “mask of antiquity,” that was “sculpted in something smooth and fragile.”
But the arrival of Technicolor in the 1950s changed all that. The new technology, Lewis writes,
did not take kindly to the sculptural face. The legendary Barrymores, with profiles like a map of the English coast, suddenly seemed too craggy.
There arose a new concept of film beauty. Now the distinguishing trait was not so much facial architecture as a glowing complexion. Neither Marilyn Monroe nor Grace Kelly nor Kim Novak had what might be called a strong face, but all presented vast expanses of vitally healthy skin on the big screen.
Lewis thinks that one of the effects of digital technology — especially movies on DVD — is to lead to an emphasis on oversized facial features. This, at any rate, is how he interprets the findings of a poll conducted by People magazine, which asked its 500,000 readers to choose the fifty “most beautiful” people.
What is the American ideal of beauty today? To judge by People magazine’s new “50 most beautiful” issue, which came out earlier this month, it does not tend to delicate and fine features. If anything, it runs in the opposite direction, toward large and striking features: Angelina Jolie’s oversize lips; the emphatic jaw of Mariska Hargitay, a star of “Law & Order: Special Victims Unit”; the startlingly wide mouth of Julia Roberts.
And the reason for this? Because we see them mainly on a small(ish) screen.
The defining feature of the digital image is its smallness. A head shown on a television screen is usually life-size or smaller, a format that favors large features. Just as cartoonists exaggerate the features of their characters so they remain legible in miniature, so oversize features work well on the small screen. The more cartoonish, within limits, the better.
The other interesting NYT article was a profile of the distinguished photojournalist David Burnett, who in addition to lugging round the standard Canon digital cameras and lenses that most professional snappers use nowadays, also carries an ancient 4 x 5 Speed Graphics camera — because it produces the kinds of images to which digital technology cannot even aspire.