Dinner With Schmucks

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Terrific Esquire blog post by Charles Pierce, triggered by the news that Obama is having dinner with some of the more lunatic Republicans. “The president is having some congressional Republicans over for dinner again”, is how Pierce puts it, “so that he can conduct another seance for the purposes of getting their political souls to rise from the dead”. One of the invitees is Senator Johnny Isakson of Georgia. “Isakson”, writes Pierce, “apparently, has been giving the president the impression that he may be the new leader of the Not Entirely Insane wing of his party’s congressional caucus, a position that has been open since Richard Lugar failed his annual carbon-14 dating test and was retired to an Indiana tree farm”.

And this is how the post ends:

Too often, the economic problems of this country are sold to its citizens as being far too complex for them to understand and, therefore, by clear implication, too complex for political democracy to handle. And the hell of it all is that most people are completely aware that this is happening to them. They see it in their own lives. It’s not as though the foreclosures, and the looted pensions, and the food-or-medicine decisions are happening in some Phantom Zone to other people.

What’s worse is that this is not being done by stealth, or by sharp practice, though sharp practices there are. It is being done deliberately and people are being encouraged by their government and by the courtier political media — and by the utterly corrupt financial media, especially on television — that their stagnant wages and the yawning gap in income inequality are both symptoms that the economy is getting better. A viable democracy is not sustainable within the economic model, and subject to the economic forces, that are prevailing now in our politics. Sooner or later, something’s going to blow. People are being asked to ignore the circumstances that are grinding them down, day by day, and being told that their economic pain is really for their own good. Who are you going to believe, after all, Maria Bartiromo or your own lying eyes?

Pierce is right. Soon or later, something’s going to blow.

My advice to Tony Hall

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Tony Hall takes over as Director-General of the BBC this week. The Observer, like every other newspaper in the land, was keen to offer him advice and Vanessa Thorpe (the paper’s Arts and Media Correspondent) asked various people what they thought Hall should be focussing on. I was one of the people she consulted, and some of what I said is included in her piece. Here, for the record, is the full text of what I said.

In thinking about its future, the BBC ought first to look back to its roots. Lord Reith may have been a crusty old patriarchal bird but in a way his vision for the BBC was startlingly egalitarian. He believed that the corporation’s mission was to bring the best to everyone. And he wanted the things it created to be free from commercial and political manipulation. When considering what the BBC’s role should be in a digital world, Tony Hall and James Purnell could do a lot worse than return to those two aspirations.

Because we’ve all bought into the techno-utopianism of the early Internet, we tend to assume that it’s always going to be open to everyone. But as more and more of the world goes online, it’s clear that we’re heading in a very different direction — towards an online world dominated by huge, primarily foreign-owned, corporations which are creating walled gardens in which internet users will be corralled and treated like captive consumers, much as travellers are in UK airports now. The dream that the Internet would make everything available to everyone on equal terms is fading fast.

For various reasons, including accidents of history, the BBC is the only institution in the world with the resources and the capability to challenge the drift towards commercially-controlled walled gardens. It has a huge archive of cultural treasures — 6 million photographs, 4 million copies of sheet music, a complete record of everything that has ever been broadcast, one of the world’s largest record collections, and national and international news reports for every day for the past 70 years — plus recordings of most of what it has ever created and transmitted. And it sits at the heart of a society endowed not only with the world’s lingua franca, but also with 2,500 museums and galleries, six national libraries, a thousand academic libraries and some of the world’s best universities.

So here’s what the BBC should be doing next: orchestrating the creation of a new kind of unwalled online garden, one which gathers together all of the nation’s cultural heritage in digitised form, together with: the metadata which enables things to be discovered; open access for all; and and permissive licences that allow citizens of Britain — and the world — to access, enjoy, consume, learn from and remix the great things that this society and its people have given to the world.

Wodehouse at war — and all at sea

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There are basically two kinds of people in the world: those who think that PG Wodehouse is the greatest comic writer in the English language; and those who for the life of them can’t see what the fuss is about. I am firmly in the former camp, which is why I was fascinated by BBC4’s Wodehouse in Exile (screened last Monday and still available on iPlayer as I write on Sunday morning).

It deals with the one great blunder that Wodehouse made in his life – broadcasting (on German radio) some light-hearted reminiscences of his time as an internee in a German prison camp. Coming at the height of World War II and before the United States entered the war, this was a bone-headed idea which led to him being accused of treachery in Britain and to permanent (if luxurious) exile in the United States.

It was a terrific production, with Tim Piggott-Smith giving a wonderful performance as a bemused innocent at large in a dangerous world, and by Zoe Wanamaker as Ethel, Wodehouse’s fiery, exotic wife. Nigel Williams’s screenplay did a great job of explaining how ‘Plum’ got into the mess, and of what a tragedy it turned out to be.

Checking with the two Wodehouse biographies (Robert McCrum’s and Frances Dolandson’s) in my collection suggests that the screenplay was pretty accurate. But what was most striking to me was a realisation that the reason Wodehouse was so good at bringing two of his greatest creations – Bertie Wooster and Lord Emsworth – to life is that he was, in a way, just describing himself. In real life he was, like Bertie, a good-hearted, innocent chump.

The Chatwin syndrome

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This morning’s Observer column:

Bruce Chatwin has a lot to answer for. Specifically, he’s responsible for a forthcoming initial public offering (IPO) on the Italian stock market. It all goes back to something he wrote in his book The Songlines. He had arrived in Australia and was setting up a work space in a caravan. “With the obsessive neatness that goes with the beginning of a project,” he wrote, “I made three neat stacks of my ‘Paris’ notebooks. In France, these notebooks are known as carnets moleskines: ‘moleskine’, in this case, being its black oilcloth binding. Each time I went to Paris, I would buy a fresh supply from a papeterie in the Rue de l’Ancienne-Comédie.”

Chatwin goes on to relate how the notebooks were made by a small firm in Tours, the owner of which had died and whose heirs had sold the business. So he assumed that the source of his beloved notebooks had dried up. What he didn’t know was that the business had been bought by a Milanese stationer who eventually began producing the notebooks again. And what he could not have known was that the business would one day be floated on the stock market (3 April, to be precise). The IPO could value the company at up to €560m (£473m)…

The Royal flight path

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As readers of this blog know, I love the Economist‘s cover art, even if I think the editorial line is sometimes nuts. This week the magazine (which persists in describing itself as a “newspaper”) has decided that the way to expand Heathrow airport is to do so by building up to four new runways to the west, over what is now a reservoir.

One side-effect of this idea would be to place the flight-path directly over Windsor Castle, which might cheese off its current owners, a thought neatly captured by the cover.

Captain Scott’s last letter — 101 years on

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Writing to his Commanding Officer, Admiral Sir Francis Bridgeman…

My Dear Sir Francis

I fear we have shipped up – a close shave. I am writing a few letters which I hope will be delivered some day. I want to thank you for the friendship you gave me of late years, and to tell you how extraordinarily pleasant I found it to serve under you. I want to tell you that I was not too old for this job.  It was the younger men that went under first. Finally I want you to secure a competence for my widow and boy. I leave them very ill provided for, but feel that the country ought not to neglect them. After all we are setting a good example to our countrymen, if not by getting into a tight place, by facing it like men when we were there. We could have come through had we neglected the sick.

Good-bye and good-bye to dear Lady Bridgeman

Yours ever

R. Scott

Excuse writing – it is -40, and has been for nigh a month

[Source]

The letter has been acquired by Cambridge’s Scott Polar Research Institute and released 101 years since Scott’s final diary entry (for March 29, 1912).

The night Steve Jobs came home

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Astonishing set on Flickr by Tim Holmes, who was working in Apple on December 20 1996, the night that the Apple Board, in desperation, welcomed Steve jobs back to the fold. Tim grabbed an Apple QuickTake digital camera and went to the ‘town hall’ meeting that had been hastily called. He got some memorable, atmospheric shots — but also in the process collected evidence of how poor the camera was, technically speaking. Those purple jackets, for example, were actually black. Jobs cancelled the camera project shortly after taking over.

The long Good Friday

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It’s Good Friday and when driving one of my kids to the station I was surprised by how much traffic there was. When I was a kid, Good Friday was the most boring and longest day of the year. In Catholic rural Ireland in the 1950s, you see, nothing, but nothing, moved on Good Friday. All the shops and offices were closed. No pubs, no buses. And almost no traffic. Then at 3pm everyone trooped to the church for three hours of interminable ceremony supposedly commemorating the passion and crucifixion of Christ. And all this decades before Mel Gibson got in on the act.

One Good Friday, though, sticks in my memory. We were staying with my grandparents in the tiny Mayo village where they lived. It was a beautiful, hot, sunny day. Nothing moved. Even the stray dogs in the street seemed to stop scratching. I know because I was out all day on the street watching them, waiting for my father to arrive.

He had gone to Dublin the previous day on the train to buy our family’s first car — a Morris Minor — and was driving it back to Mayo. This was a big deal in the 1950s. And an even bigger deal for us, because it was the biggest purchase my parents had ever made up to that point. (They weren’t able to afford to buy a house until much later.) The weeks preceding this particular Good Friday had been taken up with intense discussions of what vehicle to buy. I seem to remember that it came down in the end to a choice between a boxy-looking Fiat and the Morris. Brochures were solemnly consulted, and opinions sought. But in the end it came down to the solid British product. And that is what I was excitedly awaiting on that hot, airless afternoon.

What I was desperate for, of course, was that Da should arrive before I was dragged off to church by my ultra-devout mother. I didn’t hold out much hope: Dublin was a long way away, and in those days people were supposed to drive new cars gently. They used to have notices on the back saying “Running in, please pass.”

But miraculously he made it in time! To this day I can recall the shiny black metalwork of the tiny car, the shiny chromework, its red upholstery, the clean functional dashboard dominated by a single dial. And the smell! That new-car smell that, even today, people remark upon when they enter a new vehicle. And then I was dragged off to church. Needless to say, I remember nothing of the ensuing service. But I still remember the aroma of our new car.

Google’s Keep: is it for keeps? Probably not

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So Google has decided that Evernote needs to destroyed. That’s not what the search giant says, of course, but that’s the clear intention. The company has launched Keep as a web service and an Android app. This video confirms that Evernote is the target, because it could have been made about the older service.

I’m reminded of the way Apple launched iCloud as a way of dealing with Dropbox. That doesn’t seem to have worked. I’m still using Dropbox and avoiding iCloud. I expect I’ll continue to use Evernote, for two reasons. Firstly it’s built into my daily workflow. And secondly, if I pay for a service I have some level of confidence in its continuity.

No such certainty attends reliance on any of Google’s services. Charles Arthur has a terrific piece in the Guardian, “Google Keep? It’ll probably be with us until March 2017 – on average”, based on an analysis of 39 services that Google has shut down. Here’s what he found:

According to data I’ve gathered on 39 Google services and APIs – ranging from the short-lived “Google Lively” (a 3D animated chat introduced on 9 July 2008 and euthanised just 175 days later, on 31 December) to the surprisingly long-lived iGoogle (a personalised Google homepage, to which you could add RSS feeds and data, introduced in May 2005 and due for the chop in November after 3.106 days) – the average lifespan of products that don’t make the cut is 1,459 days. That’s just two days short of four years. For those keen on statistics, the standard deviation is 689 days; bar one item (iGoogle) all the group members lie within two standard deviations of the mean.

There are various ways of looking at this. One can, for example, applaud Google’s creativity — the way its engineers spew out innovative, experimental services as “perpetual betas”; it shows the kind of cognitive surplus that the company generates. Good for them!

On the other hand, one can take the view that as a dominant company on the Internet, Google has acquired special responsibilities: it’s become like a public utility and therefore should not behave like a cheeky, innovative start-up. Thousands and thousands of serious Internet users (including yours truly) built their work-flows round Google Reader; and Google’s entry into the RSS-aggregator market effectively ended the lives of earlier, smaller products. (I remember a time when the most chilling question a start-up could face from a potential investor was: “What will you do if Google decides to enter your target market?”)

Now, having wiped out those small fry, Google exits with a blithe statement saying that it needs to focus on core business.

I have a hunch that Google will come to regret this particular decision. Apart from anything else, Reader drove a lot of traffic — far more, I suspect, than Google+ does.

On the basis of his statistical analysis, Charles Arthur thinks that we can expect Keep to be around only until 18 March 2017.