Engagingly hysterical scenes outside the Cambridge Corn Exchange tonight as revellers arrived for my daughter’s Leavers’ Ball. It was interesting to see how many of the girls had managed to transform themselves into replicas of the kind of people normally seen only in Hello! magazine.
What, one wonders, have the unfortunate Indians done to deserve this?
Good God! Janet Daley thinks Gordon Brown is rather good.
In a time of national threat we don’t want cuddly; we want serious and stern. Charm might be nice when politics is becalmed and day-to-day living is secure, but gravitas is a whole lot better when there are unknown numbers of people in your midst ready to commit random mass murder. When a nation is in danger, it judges its leader (or potential leader) by his character, rather than his personality. So if the contest between Mr Brown’s governing style and David Cameron’s opposition is really to be, as my colleague Boris Johnson wrote on this page last week, between humourless Labour Roundheads and jolly Tory Cavaliers, then God pity the Conservatives. The last thing that the electorate will welcome now is the opportunity to be governed by prancing fops.
Ho, ho! The Daily Torygraph reports that…
Apple’s frenzied US launch of the long-awaited iPhone has spread to the internet, where fans are now willing to pay up to four times the retail price.
The iPhone was rolled out across America amidst huge hype on Friday evening, and the devices are now commanding up to $2,000 on eBay.
Americans began queuing for the latest gadget, which combines a mobile phone, music player and web browser in one, up to five days before its launch.
Although Apple has declined to comment on the number of iPhones it sold over the weekend, analysts have estimated that up to 200,000 were sold in the first day…
Hmmm… I just looked on eBay.com and the first iPhone I found was an 8GB model which went for $730 plus $15 for shipping. That doesn’t seem too much of a mark-up for an allegedly ‘frenzied’ market.
This morning’s Observer column…
A new spectre is haunting the planet – technolust. We psychiatrists define it as the self-indulgent craving for attractive gadgets offering at best only marginal improvements over older devices but inducing fleeting, orgasmic, smug superiority in their possessors.
Technolust was thought to afflict only a small minority of the population – generally investment bankers with more money than sense and pony-tailed geeks with neither. But developments in the US have led scientists to fear that the condition is reaching epidemic proportions and affecting people regarded as immune to infection…
At last! Some critical thinking. It comes from Brett Arends, who’s the guy who got into trouble with the Cult of Jobs a while back for describing Apple as “the world’s only publicly traded religion.” Long may he prosper.
The view from James’s college room. Wonder why the Fellows thought it necessary to have battlements.
Cambridge, yesterday afternoon.
A demonstration of Dr. Johnson’s definition of ‘network’ as “anything reticulated or decussated at equal distances, with interstices between the intersections”.
Lord Wolfson, with unexpected headgear.