Frost
An hour later, the frost had disappeared and it was a normal, dreary East Anglian winter’s day.
Roll out the barrels
Every year, on Boxing Day, the village of Grantchester holds a barrel-racing competition. A section of the road is cordoned off and lined with straw bales. Teams of four from pubs or nearby villages then proceed to race one another by rolling barrels from one end of the course to another. The origins of — or indeed the rationale for — these curious proceedings are unclear, and in any case may be beside the point: the organiser Francis Burkitt was once quoted as saying that “the whole point of the event is that it is pointless – it’s a slightly mad English holiday tradition which is great fun.”
Sounds simple, doesn’t it? Well, it ain’t.
I had great fun photographing the proceedings (see the photostream on Flickr if you’re interested). But of course for me the main interest was in watching the spectators. For example:
Or here:
Hmmm… Who was it who defined a psychologist as “someone who goes to the Folies Bergére and watches the audience”?
Still, at least I didn’t come on Jeffrey ‘Lord’ Archer, the village’s most notorious resident. One must be thankful for small mercies.
On this day…
… in 1979, Soviet forces invaded Afghanistan. Big mistake, currently being repeated by US and its allies.
Going, going…
Snapped outside Cambridge’s last remaining cigar shop. End of an era. When I came here as a student there were three specialist tobacconists.
Cookery lesson #153
Carbon sequestration. Or what happens when you put a muffin in the Aga oven and then forget about it.
Orchid
Spotted on a friend’s window-sill this afternoon.
Happy Christmas!
Earthrise at Christmas — taken taken by the Apollo 8 crew in December 1968. Possibly the most influential photograph ever taken. Certainly it changed the way many of us see our home planet. Click on image to see a larger one.
Creating docs within Googlemail
Just discovered (via the Gmail Blog) that if you have keyboard shortcuts enabled (and Gmail.com registered as an exception to the ‘block pop-up windows’ preference) then hitting ‘g’ followed by ‘w’ opens a Google doc. Very useful.
Friedman: Rebooting America
The NYT man reflecting on the squalor of JFK Airport after a spell abroad.
All I could think to myself was: If we’re so smart, why are other people living so much better than us? What has become of our infrastructure, which is so crucial to productivity? Back home, I was greeted by the news that General Motors was being bailed out — that’s the G.M. that Fortune magazine just noted “lost more than $72 billion in the past four years, and yet you can count on one hand the number of executives who have been reassigned or lost their job.”
My fellow Americans, we can’t continue in this mode of “Dumb as we wanna be.” We’ve indulged ourselves for too long with tax cuts that we can’t afford, bailouts of auto companies that have become giant wealth-destruction machines, energy prices that do not encourage investment in 21st-century renewable power systems or efficient cars, public schools with no national standards to prevent illiterates from graduating and immigration policies that have our colleges educating the world’s best scientists and engineers and then, when these foreigners graduate, instead of stapling green cards to their diplomas, we order them to go home and start companies to compete against ours.
To top it off, we’ve fallen into a trend of diverting and rewarding the best of our collective I.Q. to people doing financial engineering rather than real engineering. These rocket scientists and engineers were designing complex financial instruments to make money out of money — rather than designing cars, phones, computers, teaching tools, Internet programs and medical equipment that could improve the lives and productivity of millions.
For all these reasons, our present crisis is not just a financial meltdown crying out for a cash injection. We are in much deeper trouble. In fact, we as a country have become General Motors — as a result of our national drift. Look in the mirror: G.M. is us.
That’s why we don’t just need a bailout. We need a reboot.
There’s an interesting (and ironic) echo here of the famous observation made by a GM executive in a Congressional hearing. According to the Wikipedia entry for General Motors:
In 1953, Charles Erwin Wilson, then GM president, was named by Eisenhower as Secretary of Defense. When he was asked during the hearings before the Senate Armed Services Committee if as secretary of defense he could make a decision adverse to the interests of General Motors, Wilson answered affirmatively but added that he could not conceive of such a situation “because for years I thought what was good for the country was good for General Motors and vice versa”. Later this statement was often misquoted, suggesting that Wilson had said simply, “What’s good for General Motors is good for the country.” At the time, GM was one of the largest employers in the world – only Soviet state industries employed more people. In 1955, General Motors became the first American corporation to pay taxes of over $1 billion.