Well, that’s the rumour anyway. It’s the kind of prime location that would appeal to Steve Jobs.
Blues and Royals officer forced to moonlight as male model?
From this morning’s Financial Times. I know that General Sir Richard Dannett is concerned about the impact of low pay on army morale, but have things really come to this?
Is this ad a spoof? Is there a Second Lieutenant Hulme? If so, why hasn’t his CO torn a strip off him? I remember a time when officers in the Household Division were forbidden to be seen in London wearing a civilian clothes and carrying a parcel — because that was deemed to be the role of servants.
Ballmer: print media are toast
Well, apparently he told a clutch of Washington Post editors that
There will be no media consumption left in ten years that is not delivered over an IP network. There will be no newspapers, no magazines that are delivered in paper form. Everything gets delivered in an electronic form.
Here’s the video.
Levi Sumagaysay at GMSV is not impressed.
It’s not going to happen in my lifetime, though. True, there are people who haven’t subscribed to a newspaper in years for various reasons. (The content is free on the Net. They’re trying to be green by using less paper. They don’t like getting ink on their hands. They don’t have time to read.) Yes, newspapers and magazines will continue to fold. Many will continue to lay people off or wait for them to get so sick of their jobs that they quit. And the quality of these publications will suffer, as they already have. But print media will stick around. I won’t even go into the many reasons that have to do with, um, that’s where many online publications get their content. Instead, I’ll focus on user experience. Technology has yet to deliver a replacement for the convenience of having a paper product to take along on the subway, to the bathroom (insert joke here), to the doctor’s office and to read at the checkout stand. True, some people can read newspapers and magazines on their iPhones, their Kindles. But not everyone can afford gadgets that cost hundreds of dollars, plus the monthly subscription/connection charges. Sometimes, it’s just easier to stick a couple of quarters — maybe four — into a slot and pick up a paper whose pages you can turn and fold, and which you can let your fellow commuter have when you’re done. You won’t see anyone giving up his Treo so a stranger can read the news on it. Also, you never have to worry about a newspaper running out of batteries or needing to be rebooted.
When the technology finally comes around, I’m sure lots of people will be ready for it. But the transition won’t be abrupt, fortunately or unfortunately, depending on whether you work in the newspaper industry. And digital won’t cancel out print. They will continue to coexist, although digital will surely be more dominant.
Levi’s right. Ballmer is just the latest subscriber to what John Seely Brown calls ‘endism’. Media ecosystems don’t work like that.
Bill Moyers on the significance of Obama
Wonderful video commentary on the significance of the party which once represented white supremacy in the South nominating a black man for president.
Thanks to Dave Winer for spotting it.
Life, death, tragedy
This is the saddest story I’ve read in a long time.
An eight-year-old boy has been found hanged in his bedroom in Lancashire.
Joshua Aldred was found unconscious by his grandmother in Lytham on Thursday night. He was taken to hospital in Blackpool but died a short time later.
Joshua’s mother and grandfather had recently died from cancer …
Sex and the Cineplex
On the one hand…
The film takes everything that was unsettling about the series — gratuitous materialism, deliberate elitism, cafeteria feminism — and re-serves it up in a grotesquely glittered confection, in which posh real-estate, $55,000-diamond-rings, and gaudy designer bags serve as unapologetic proxies for relationships, and even the main characters’ children are reduced to accessories. This visual orgy comes with fewer of the redeeming elements — the occasional recognition of hypocrisy, the chatty histrionics, the schmaltz — that swaddled and padded and helped us forgive the irritating unrealities of the series. And since so much of Sex and the City’s success was in its structure — episodic therapy, 30 minutes a week, over six long, tumultuous years — there’s a sense in which the filmic format (here dragged out to two hours and twenty minutes) betray the show’s stumbling essence.
On the other hand…
And yet, and yet — the delightfully confused, giddy-but-torn, no-but-yes feeling that washed over so many women as they took in the series is there in the film as well. Despite its annoyances, it’s often funny and almost always fun, and its length is a strength as well as a weakness, since it provides more of what makes women return to Sex and the City: Not the happy endings, but all the messy ambiguity beforehand. The willingness to wallow in the mess, rather than racing ahead to happily-ever-after, explains why the Sex phenomenon has provided more fodder for the post-feminist culture wars than any television series or movie before or since — and why it will be a long, long time before any other pop culture phenomenon usurps its role in those debates. So those wringing their hands over its legacy might as well take their cues from Carrie’s fictional Vogue editor, Enid: “Spare me a week of faux-soul searching, and just say yes.”
Talk about having it both ways.
I won’t be going, btw. My teenage daughter’s seen it and even she was underwhelmed.
Clinton explained
From James Fallows, writing in The Atlantic…
The Clinton team doesn’t worry about hurting Obama’s prospects of winning in the fall, because they assess those prospects at zero. Always have. Obama might not win if he leads a bitterly divided party, but (in this view) he was never going to win. Not a chance. He would be smashed like an armadillo in the road by the Republican campaign machine, and he would be just about as ready as the armadillo for what was coming.
When Clinton still had a plausible shot at the nomination, this assumption removed all guilt from beating up on Obama. As in: “I have a lifetime of experience that I will bring to the White House. I know Senator McCain has a lifetime of experience to bring to the White House. And Senator Obama has a speech he gave in 2002.” By whittling Obama down, the Clintons were saving the party from a suicidal mistake.
And now that Hillary Clinton no longer has a plausible chance, she (and Harold Ickes etc) don’t need to wake up in the middle of the night and worry: Oh no! Maybe we’re paving the way for George Bush’s third term! They are sure that Obama’s nomination means exactly that, no matter what they do. So by definition they can’t be making things worse. It is like sticking pins into a corpse — you’re not really hurting it any more. And if these efforts in fact make Obama’s victory less likely — well, then, reality will conform to their preexisting view…
As it happens (and as Fallows belatedly acknowledges) others got here before him.
Quote of the day
“Maybe he is interested in some subject, but it isn’t a subject we teach here.”
From one of Lord Snowden’s school reports during his time at Eton.
Chelsea tractors going downhill
Hooray! The Telegraph is reporting that “Sales of popular family cars and 4x4s slumped last month amid growing fears among motorists over the impact of sharp rises in road tax due to be introduced next year.”
On this (D) day…
… in 1944, the Allied landing at Normandy got under way. Wonderful, sobering account of it here.