On this day…
… in 1948, President Truman signed the Marshall Plan, which allocated more than $5 billion in aid for 16 European countries.
They don’t make ’em like Truman and Marshall any more. In his marvellous biography, David McCullough quotes Truman as saying something typically self-effacing but profound: “It’s remarkable how much you can accomplish in life so long as you don’t care who gets the credit”. It’s a motto worth trying to live by.
April Fools
Needless to say, I scoured the Guardian for April Fool jokes on the day. And duly found the wonderful BMW spoof full-page ad for its revolutionary new SHEF technology. Then I spluttered with indignation over an authoritative-sounding news story reporting that Tony Blair’s Best Friend, the oily Peter Mandelson, had emerged as the surprise front-runner for the post of BBC Chairman.
Of course — you guessed it — the article was a spoof. So the joke’s on me? Well, not just on me. The Guardian pulled the spoof from its archive. But not before Google had indexed it. As the paper tells it:
“Type ‘Peter Mandelson’ into the Google News search and our spoof story turns up at number two in the list of recent articles. And as if that weren’t misleading enough, most of the other articles cited consist of speculation about the former cabinet minister’s next career move.
Being fooled on any other day simply isn’t funny. What’s more, it’s becoming increasingly difficult to pull off a successful spoof. That isn’t because the public are becoming more credulous. It’s because so much of what we read in newspapers and online hovers on the very borders of credibility.”
Downloading and CD sales
From an article in Wired:
Researchers at two leading universities have issued a study countering the music industry’s central theme in its war on digital piracy, saying file sharing has little impact on CD sales.
“We find that file sharing has only had a limited effect on record sales,” Felix Oberholzer-Gee of Harvard Business School and Koleman Strumpf of University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill said in their report. “The economic effect is also small. Even in the most pessimistic specification, five thousand downloads are needed to displace a single album sale.”
As the article says, maybe the reason album sales are down is because the music’s lousy.
Digital shutter-lag
The Minolta Dimage Xt camera is terrific as a visual notebook — small and light enough to fit in a shirt pocket, and with no protruding lens. But there is an infuriating lag between pressing the button and taking the picture which means one cannot use it for capturing Cartier-Bresson-type ‘decisive moments’.
Given that, this birthday picture is a small miracle, even if it is blurred.
Thinks…. Now if I had a Nikon D70…
Good news about the BBC — at last!
Photograph (c) BBC
Michael Grade has been appointed Chairman. This is a terrific appointment — better than I had dreamed possible. Several reasons why this cheers me up:
One, Grade is admired and respected by programme makers as someone who understands creativity and is willing to nurture and defend it. Many years ago, for example, when he was Head of BBC Television, he commissioned and defended the work of Dennis Potter.
Two: he is loathed and despised by the Daily Mail and the Daily Telegraph. This is always a good test of quality IMHO.
Three: Like me, he is a cigar smoker (see picture). I used to run into him quite a lot when he was Head of Channel Four and I was the Observer‘s Television Critic. I once called on him after Channel Four had moved into their expensive new building on Horseferry Road. It was plastered with stern “This Building is a No Smoking Zone” notices. When I got to his office, I asked whether the ban applied even in his (lavish) suite. “Yes”, he replied solemnly, “even here”. “But”, he went on, “there is a rule that if the people at a meeting vote unanimously to allow smoking, then it is permissible at that meeting”. So he and I duly constituted ourselves as a meeting. Grade proposed the motion to allow smoking. I seconded it. We then held a vote: those in favour — two. Those against: none. Abstentions: none. He then produced a box of Havanas and we smoked and gossiped contentedly.
The BBC is noticeably more po-faced about these things. I wonder if there will be cigar smoke in the Chairman’s suite.
Well, what else would you do if you found a lion in the middle of London?
Walking through Trafalgar Square this morning, I saw these kids clambering on one of the lions who guard Nelson.
Holy Smoke!
At midnight, my Native Land banned smoking in pubs. When the kids and I were in Ireland before Christmas, there was a great deal of phoney outrage from the country’s publicans, one of whom (the proprietor of the Brazen Head pub in Limerick) promised to close his pub if the ban actually came into force.
(I haven’t been able to check if he has been as good as his word. Oh, hang on, thanks to Google, I have. It seems that his firm has gone into receivership. So maybe his business was in trouble anyway.)
But I digress… What was really amusing was the name adopted by the lobby group formed last year to fight the smoking ban. Nothing brutal like “The Pro-cancer Campaign” or “Smoke Free” but “The Irish Hospitality Industry Alliance” if you please. According to the Irish Times, the Alliance is now consulting m’learned friends:
“Mr Finbar Murphy, of the Irish Hospitality Industry Alliance, said it would be referring the regulations to its lawyers to seek their advice on a judicial review.
The Minister for Health, Mr Martin, appealed to the powerful lobby group to stand back and think before taking any such action.
‘Why would you take legal action against a measure designed to protect and improve public health?'”
Hmmm… Doesn’t the Minister know there’s a lot of money in peddling ill-health?
How professionals handle high-volume image flows
Absolutely riveting article by Rob Galbraith explaining how the staff of Sports Illustrated handle the thousands of digital images that flood in from a big sporting event.
CNN discovers News Readers
Finally Big Media gets it. Nice and accessible article on the CNN site about RSS feeds and the significance of the technology. It’s a bit breathless and gee-whizzy. For example,
“Hang on to your hats boys and girls, because your experience of the World Wide Web is about to change, possibly for the first time since Mosaic, one of the first graphical browsers, was unleashed in 1993 from Champaign-Urbana, Illinois….”
But, on the other hand, it communicates well to non-techies. And gives lots of useful links. Author Christine Boese has performed a useful service for her industry.
The paradoxical US of A
From the Economist of 28 February.
1. “America is one of the most religious countries in the industrialised world. Over 80% of Americans claim to believe in God, compared with 62% of the French and 52% of Swedes. About two-thirds of Americans claim membership of a church, 40% go to church once a week, and 43% describe themselves as born-again Christians. Three times as many people believe in the Virgin birth as in evolution.”
Further down the same column….
2. “But America is also one of the most secular countries in the world. The Constitution guarantees a rigorous separation of church and state, and secular groups are assiduous in using the courts to enforce that separation. (On February 25th, the Supreme Court ruled that states could withold scholarships from students studying divinity.) Public schools recoil from even the mildest religious imagery. More than 29m Americans say that they have ‘no religion’, a number that exceeds all but two religious denominations, Roman Catholics and Baptists. For the most part, the people who run America’s media industries in New York and Hollywood are aggressively secular, combining intellectual hostility to Middle America’s religious fundamentalism with a generous measure of cultural disdain.”