Sodom and Begorrah

Lovely review by Michael Billington of Frank McGuinness’s new play about Michael MacLiammoir and Hilton Edwards, the gay couple who dominated Irish theatrical life in my boyhood.

“McGuinness is not simply writing a paean to the past. He is also exploring the symbiotic link between gayness and theatre. At one point, Conrad [the MacLiammoir character] recalls that the pioneering youthful dream of himself and Gabriel [Edwards] was that “we shall conceive a child in Sodom”.

That is exactly what MacLiammoir and Edwards did. The oldest Dublin theatre joke is that, with the Gate devoted to a gay fin-de-siècle aesthetic and the Abbey to rural Irish naturalism, the city’s two playhouses offered a choice between “Sodom and Begorrah”. But theatre itself, McGuinness implies, becomes for gay men and women a surrogate form of procreation: the only tragedy lies in the medium’s inherent impermanence. ”

Very nice essay by Chris Hitchens on George Orwell. Looks like a foreword from his forthcoming book on the same subject.

No easy fix for protecting kids from porn sites
“NYT” article, May 3 2002.

One of the most thorough reports ever produced on protecting children from Internet pornography has concluded that neither tougher laws nor new technology alone can solve the problem.

“Though some might wish otherwise, no single approach — technical, legal, economic or educational — will be sufficient,” wrote the authors of the report, “Youth, Pornography and the Internet,” issued yesterday by the National Research Council. “Rather, an effective framework for protecting our children from inappropriate materials and experiences on the Internet will require a balanced composite of all of these elements.”

Lots of good stuff and common sense here. For example…

The report compared the problem of protecting children from online risks to dealing with a more mundane hazard of daily life. “Swimming pools can be dangerous for children,” the authors wrote. “To protect them, one can install locks, put up fences and deploy pool alarms. All of these measures are helpful, but by far the most important thing that one can do for one’s children is to teach them to swim.”

Very interesting interview with Caspar Bowden of the FIPR on the growth and futility of Internet surveillance.

“If admitting the error of one’s ways makes one less likely to repeat the error, there was little evidence that Mr. Gates, Microsoft’s chairman and co-founder, was prepared to take responsibility for his company’s misdeeds.”
“NYT” on Gates in the witness box.

The End of History man

Excellent profile of Francis Fukuyama by Godfrey Hodgson .

From a review of a new biography of Sonia Orwell…
Jenny Diski in the London Review of Books.

“I understand from reading and anecdote that some people do die with a smile and the words ‘It’s been a good life’ on their lips. But not many, surely? It seems to me almost unreasonable, indecent even, not to feel some degree of regret as life winds down towards the end. And life, of course, has generally only just got properly started before it begins to show signs of not going on for ever. So when I read in David Plante’s Difficult Women (1979) that Sonia Orwell in her final years complained to him, ‘I’ve fucked up my life. I’m angry because I’ve fucked up my life,’ it doesn’t seem to me necessarily to imply a particularly tragic or wasted life. At least not necessarily more tragic or wasted than most. Unless you take the Chinese view, an interesting life is the best we can hope for in an existence which ends, for all of us, prematurely with illness or ageing and death.”

Why doing the right thing is sometimes in one’s best interests

According to the World Wildlife Foundation, plants have created a quarter of all the medicines currently prescribed by ‘scientific’ medicine. And four out of five children with leukaemia are saved by the rosy periwinkle, which originated in the tropical forests of Madagascar. So why then are we so blase about the industrialisation which is reducing biodiversity by the day?

Mobile Surprises. Two surprises today.

The first is to discover that my new phone, a cheap and unassuming Ericsson T39, actually has a builtin POP email client and can be configured to send and receive email via my regular account over GPRS, which I’m starting to believe is therefore worth the rather high costs charged here in the UK.

Setting the phone up for a non-standard connection isn’t entirely trivial, though, and the second surprise, when I called my service provider, Orange, was to get through immediately to somebody who understood my rather technical questions and knew the answers. And this was just before midnight. Amazing! [Status-Q: Quentin Stafford-Fraser’s notepad]

NY Times: “A Microsoft executive told a federal judge that the company should be allowed to make changes in its Windows operating system that impair the performance of other programs so long as the company believes it is acting in the best interest of Windows users.”  [Scripting News]