… was Kelvin McKenzie’s pithy description of BBC Chairman, Sir John Lyons, on the (BBC) Today programme this morning, commenting on the Jonathan Ross/Russell Brand fiasco. The diamond-encrusted bit is a bit over the top, don’t you think?

One shouldn’t laugh, I suppose, but you have to admit that what’s been happening to VW’s share price is a hoot. Here’s the FT report:

Volkswagen briefly became the world’s largest company by market capitalisation on Tuesday after an extraordinary surge in its share price driven by a near-panic by hedge funds and other traders to stem losses on positions betting on a fall in the stock.

The extent of the surge, which has led to sharp criticism of German capital markets, triggered intense market speculation that it could force the collapse of hedge funds and heavy losses for investment banks.

VW’s share price rose 82 per cent to €945 following Monday’s 147 per cent jump, leaving it with a market capitalisation of about €287bn ($360bn).

At the stock’s intra-day peak of €1005, its market capitalisation exceeded Exxon before the US oil company started trading yesterday.

It seems that hedge funds, reckoning that VW shares were bound to fall, borrowed them and sold them short. What they apparently didn’t realise is that Porsche and the State of Saxony between them owned or had options on 95% of VW shares. Frantic bidding for the remaining 5% resulted in crazy valuations of a car manufacturer that is — like all its peers — facing a bleak short-term future.

Heh, heh.

As expected, Ray Ozzie announced Microsoft’s cloud computing service. It’s called Windows Azure — which is a bit baffling because, as Nick Carr points out, an azure sky is a cloudless one. (Think of the Cote d’Azur.)

The Observer had the great idea of asking people who had known Barack Obama in earlier times for their recollections. Here’s Terry Link, who was a fellow State Senator with him in Illinois.

I don’t drink at all, Barack would have a beer once in a while, so we didn’t carouse the bars like lots of the others. You could say that we were both measured personalities. So I said: ‘Why don’t we have a card game?’ We called it the ‘Committee Meeting’ but there was no shop talk allowed. We had seven or eight Republicans and Democrats and it was a time to get to know one another out of the shadows of the Capitol. We’d take the suits and ties off, sit back and have a night of relaxing. It was low-stakes poker: a dollar stake, three dollar top raise. No one was going to lose their mortgage or house. Barack wore sweat pants and a baseball cap, drank a beer and would cadge a few cigarettes.

If his style of poker is like how he’ll run the White House I’ll sleep well at night. He is very conscious of the odds. If he thought he had a chance of winning he’d stay in the game; if he thought not he’d fold straight away. He read and played the field very well. He was serious at it.

There was another player, Larry Walsh, a relatively conservative Democrat. Barack trumped his four of a kind with a higher four of a kind to take the pot and Walsh threw his cards down. ‘Doggone it, Barack,’ he said. ‘If you were more liberal in your card playing and more conservative in your politics, we’d get along much better.’

There’s an interesting epistemological problem here, in that people’s memories of someone are inevitably coloured by what they know of his or her subsequent career. If Obama had turned out to be a moderately successful academic lawyer or a community organiser, would people have the same kinds of memories of him? I suspect not.

Another Observer correspondent was Larry Tribe, a law professor at Harvard. Here’s part of his reminiscence:

Barack came to see me during his first year at Harvard. It was 31 March 1989. I found my desk calendar and I’d written his name with an exclamation point. From the late 1960s, when I began teaching as a professor at Harvard Law School, until the present, there has been no other student whose name I’ve noted in that way.

He impressed me from the beginning as an extraordinary young man. He was obviously brilliant, driven and interested in pursuing ideas with a clear sense that his reasons for being in law school were not to climb some corporate ladder, nor simply to broaden his opportunities, but to go back to the community.

He had a combination of intellectual acumen, open-mindedness, resistance to stereotypical thinking and conventional presuppositions. He also had a willingness to change his mind when new evidence appeared, confidence in his own moral compass and a maturity that obviously came from some combination of his upbringing and earlier experience.

[…]

We used to take long walks on the Charles River in Boston. Our conversations were enormously wide-ranging and enjoyable, about life in general, not just about work. I had no doubt as I got to know him that he had an unlimited future. I didn’t have a clear sense of what direction it would take, but I thought it would be political and I thought the sky was the limit.

He had a personal quality which was transcendent and I continued to feel that way about him each time we met. And the quality he demonstrated that I’ve always been left with more than any other is authenticity. There isn’t a fibre of phoniness about this guy.