VHS is dead. Long live DVD!

UK High Street retailer Dixons has announced that it is to stop selling video recorders. According to the BBC report, Dixons will phase out VCRs due to the boom in DVD players, sales of which have grown seven-fold in five years.

“It ends a 26-year love affair with a gadget which changed viewing habits by allowing people to leave home without missing their favourite programmes. Dixons expects to sell its remaining stock of VCRs by Christmas.”

Sigh. End of an era. I was a TV critic for 13 years, and ran two video recorders for most of that period. But nobody who has spooled backwards and forwards through as much tape as I did would ever decline a TiVO — or even a DVD recorder.

Potty Prince Charlie

One hesitates to intrude on private grief. As an Irish citizen happily resident in the UK, the English Royal family are not my problem, but it was hard to stifle a cheer when Education Secretary Charles Clarke finally broke the ministerial taboo which prevents public criticism of the Royal Family and made it clear (in a BBC Radio 4 interview) that he thought Prince Charles’s recent leaked thoughts on education, were, well, balderdash, In a leaked memo, Charlie had apparently ranted about a “child-centred system which admits no failure”. Today’s “learning culture”, opined Britain’s future monarch, “gave people hope beyond their capabilities”.

Well, well. This from a guy who has £7 million a year in unearned income (and a net worth of £300m), who despite the best education money could buy barely scraped a couple of A-levels, was admitted to Cambridge with them while hundreds of students with four straight As were rejected, and even then could barely manage a 2.2 in his degree. This from a guy who works about one and a half days a week, employs three butlers and four valets, has 2,000 hand-made suits (@ about £2,000 a throw) and requires that his liveried footmen bow before addressing him. And yet this pompous toff — who would have a tough job holding down a job as manager of a bottle bank — seems to have no qualms about aspiring to Britain’s top sinecure? Who gave him this “hope beyond his capabilities”? Er, the hereditary principle which ensures that, no matter how idle or dimwitted one is, the plum job eventually falls into one’s lap.

Repetitive Failure Syndrome

Topic of today’s Observer column.

Bill’s inbox

According to today’s Guardian, Bill Gates gets four million emails a day. None from me, I’m glad to say. Thanks to David Livesey for the link.

God’s Own Country

Forget the Bahamas; Ireland’s the place to live. Here’s the Independent‘s take on it anyway:

“For generations, hundreds of thousands left the Emerald Isle fleeing war and famine – all clinging to the belief life would be better elsewhere. Now, after two decades of a meteoric rise that has staggered financial gurus, Ireland has topped a poll as the best place to live in the world.

In a report published by The Economist magazine, the Republic won over Switzerland, Australia and Italy. In the process, Ireland trounced the main destinations of its traditional emigration. The US ranked 13th with the UK coming in at a miserable 29th position – the lowest of any EU pre-expansion members. Of the countries surveyed, the worst place to live in the world is Robert Mugabe’s Zimbabwe which came bottom at 111th.”

Here’s what this paradise de nos jours looked like the other day on my way back from the HEAnet conference. That gap in the mountains is the Gap of Dunloe, near Killarney.

Ethics, politics and networks

I was invited to give the closing Keynote at the 2004 HEAnet Conference. Text can be found here if you’re interested.

O’Rourke on Colin Powell

There’s a nice interview of Colin Powell by PJ O’Rourke in The Atlantic. I particularly like this exchange:

SECRETARY POWELL: Our great strength is the image we still convey to the rest of the world. Notwithstanding all you read about anti-Americanism, people are still standing in line to come here, to get visas and come across our borders.

P. J. O’ROURKE: Voting with their feet?

SECRETARY POWELL: Voting with their feet. So there’s something right there.

P. J. O’ROURKE: Back in Lebanon in 1984, I was held at gunpoint by this Hezbollah kid, just a maniac, you know, at one of those checkpoints, screaming at me about America, great Satan, et cetera.

SECRETARY POWELL: Then he wanted a green card?

P. J. O’ROURKE: At the end of this rant, that’s exactly what he said: “As soon as I get my green card, I am going to Dearborn, Michigan to study dental school.” And he saw no disconnect.

SECRETARY POWELL: He’s there now. He’s not going back to Beirut.

P. J. O’ROURKE: He hated America so much and wanted nothing more than to be an American.

SECRETARY POWELL: They respect us and they resent us. But they want what we have.

BL to provide wireless net for readers

People using the wonderful British Library near King’s Cross will be able to access the net via a new wireless LAN. Hooray! Charges are £4.50 an hour or £35 a month.

Don’t blame us!

Christine Happel sent me this delicious picture.

The subversion of language — contd.

For decades one of the most objectionable aspects of British tabloid journalism has been its sanctimonious determination to ‘name the guilty man/men’ whenever there’s been a disastrous accident or a horrific organisational cock-up. This always seemed to me (and my academic colleagues) as a desperately wrong-headed way to look at complex issues. Often, these large-scale failures reflect not so much the deficiencies of individuals as the complexity of the systems in which they are enmeshed. So (we argued) they are more productively viewed as systemic failures.

But now, guess what? The phrase ‘systemic failure’ has been picked up by the government’s spin machine — and used in a novel way: to ensure that nobody has to take responsibility for what goes wrong. It’s not clear when this started but my colleague Ray Ison thinks it may have begun with the Butler Inquiry into the failure of UK Intelligence services in the run-up to the Iraq war. I’ve just looked at the report and can’t find the word ‘systemic’ in it anywhere, but Ray’s right in one respect. Lord Butler decided that the cock-up over intelligence about WMD was a “collective failure” and then used that to argue that it would be inappropriate to fire John Scarlett, the Chairman of the Joint Intellegence Committee which cleared the infamous (and ludicrous) dossier on which Blair took the country to war.

Whatever its provenance, though, it’s clear that ‘systemic failure’ is now synonomous with “nobody’s responsible, Guv.”