The clowns who are currently running the EU are very cross because Paul Krugman has been pointing out that their current economic policies (if one can call them that) are manifestly not working. So they’ve been twittering abuse in his direction. His riposte (tactfully headed “Of cockroaches and Commissioners”) reads, in part:

The dignity of office can be a terrible thing for intellectual clarity: you can spend years standing behind a lectern or sitting around a conference table drinking bottled water, delivering the same sententious remarks again and again, and never have anyone point out how utterly wrong you have been at every stage of the game. Those of us on the outside need to do whatever we can to break through that cocoon — and ridicule is surely one useful technique.

There’s an especially telling tweet in there about how “unimpressive” I was when visiting the Commission in 2009. No doubt; I’m not an imposing guy. (I’ve had the experience of being overlooked by the people who were supposed to meet me at the airport, and eventually being told, “We expected you to be taller”). And for the life of me I can’t remember a thing about the Commission visit. Still, you can see what these people consider important: never mind whether you have actually proved right or wrong about the impacts of economic policy, what matters is whether you come across as impressive.

And let’s be clear: this stuff matters. The European economy is in disastrous shape; so, increasingly, is the European political project. You might think that eurocrats would worry mainly about that reality; instead, they’re focused on defending their dignity from sharp-tongued economists.

One of my academic colleagues spends a lot of time in Brussels and tells me that the one tactic that never fails to get Eurocrats riled is to ask whether a particular wheeze/project is “a good use of taxpayers’ money”.

I’ve just been reading a lovely blog post by Angus Croll about the Oxford comma.

“Eh?” I hear you say. It’s the comma that comes at the end of a list, just before the “and” or the “or” — which is why it’s also called the ’serial’ comma. It got the Oxford adjective because of endorsement long ago by that university’s Press’s ancient style manual.

What brought me up short was the realisation that, in a writing career that goes back to the 1960s, I’ve always eschewed the Oxford comma. It’d be nice to claim that this is because I got much of what passes for my education at the Other place, but in fact it’s simply due to the fact that I always thought that the Oxford comma looked wrong, somehow. Well, that and plain ignorance of the issues involved.

The great thing about Mr Croll’s post is that he provides an argument to buttress my inchoate intuition. He shows that the Oxford comma can be positively misleading. Thus:

It turns out that for every phrase that the Oxford comma clarifies, there’s another for which it obfuscates. “Through the window she saw George, a policeman and several onlookers” clearly refers to two people and some onlookers. Throw in the Oxford comma and George has become a policeman: “Through the window she saw George, a policeman, and several onlookers”.

It’s not all plain sailing, though. In the interests of objectivity, Croll cites a case where the (Cambridge?) absence of a comma can cause problems.

“She lives with her two children, a cat and a dog.”

To which I respond that I’ve known people who regarded their pets as if they were their offspring.

Anyway, I’m too old to change the habits of a lifetime. And I’m damned if I will use something from the Other place.

The test of a movie, I always think, is not so much the impact it has on one in the cinema, but whether it lives on in one’s mind in the days and weeks afterwards. Spielberg’s Lincoln, which we saw last night, passes that test with flying colours. There are lots of reasons for admiring the movie, and most of them have been extensively rehashed by critics more knowledgeable than me, so I won’t dwell on them here, except to say that Daniel Day-Lewis’s performance as Lincoln is truly awe-inspiring in capturing the greatness and the humanity of the man: his inner confidence, his conversational style, his unique combination of patience and impatience, his combination of realism and idealism, his wit. And, above all, his weariness.

And who would have thought that you could make a Hollywood blockbuster out of 150 minutes of pure dialogue? But actually the film’s dialogue is a work of genius. Or, more precisely, of a genius, name of Tony Kushner, who strove not just for wit and sparkle, but also for historical accuracy. He worked with the 20-volume OED by his side, checking the historical accuracy of the terms used by the characters. The only made-up word, he told the Boston Globe, was “grousle” — used by Lincoln in exasperation at the cavilling of his cabinet: “You grousle and heckle and dodge about”, he expostulates, “like pettifogging Tammany Hall hucksters.” The dialogue I enjoyed most, however, came not from Lincoln but from Thaddeus Stevens (played by Tommy Lee Jones), whose withering scorn for his political opponents left this viewer awestruck with admiration. (I used to be a TV critic, and so am a connoisseur of invective.) When he moderated his radical stance (he was a fervent believer that all men are created equal) for pragmatic reasons to the statement that “all men are equal before the law”, he was challenged by George Pendelton of Ohio on whether he believed that all men were equal. “You”, he said, staring at Pendleton, “are more reptile than man, George, so low and flat that the foot of man is incapable of crushing you.”

What’s most admirable about the movie is its willingness to embrace the complexity of the story of the Thirteenth Amendment. Politics is always a messy business, and politics in time of war is even messier. What the movie brings out brilliantly, though, is how politics is the art of the possible. It shows Lincoln achieving a supremely worthwhile end (enshrining the outlawing of slavery in the Constitution) by dubious – but not illegal — means. It leaves one thinking romantically about Churchill’s trope about democracy being “the worst system — except for all the others”. And shaking one’s head at the mess that Lincoln’s successors have made of his legacy.

Wonderful story in The Register about Jimmy Wales’s explanation for the popularity of Wikipedia in Chinese restaurants.

Wales also dropped some fascinating vignettes about the online encyclopedia. The organization was banned in China until the Beijing Olympics, and is still not as popular with local internet users as it is in the rest of the world. But the name has started cropping up on local restaurant menus.

He showed images sent in of menus listing beef brisket with Wikipedia, stir fried Wikipedia with peppers, steamed eggs with Wikipedia, and even a bread company that takes its name from the site. The Chinese Wikipedia editors are mystified by this, but Wales suggested a hypothesis.

“What we figured out was that just around the time of the Beijing Olympics a lot of restaurants were expecting millions of foreigners to flood into the county for the first time,” he said. “Restaurants that wouldn’t normally see foreigners decided to translate their menus and if you type almost anything into a search engine what’s the first thing that comes up? Wikipedia.”

Wales also showed off some country statistics that raised a few chuckles. The most popular type of category for Wikipedia articles in Japanese is pop culture information, he said, which given the country’s documented obsession with such matters is unsurprising.

But in German the most popular topic is geography, which raised a smattering of chuckles from those who know their 20th Century history. In France, one of the least popular categories was sex, which Wales attributed to the fact that the population spent more time actually having sex and so was less inclined to read about it.