Holiday reading

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Hmmm… I hate taking heavy books on holiday, but might have to make an exception for Fiasco!, Thomas Ricks’s detailed analysis of the quagmire in Iraq. Here’s an excerpt from the New York Times review…

The title of this devastating new book about the American war in Iraq says it all: “Fiasco.” That is the judgment that Thomas E. Ricks, senior Pentagon correspondent for The Washington Post, passes on the Bush administration’s decision to invade Iraq and its management of the war and the occupation. And he serves up his portrait of that war as a misguided exercise in hubris, incompetence and folly with a wealth of detail and evidence that is both staggeringly vivid and persuasive.

By virtue of the author’s wealth of sources within the American military and the book’s comprehensive timeline (beginning with the administration’s inflammatory statements about Saddam Hussein in the wake of 9/11, through the invasion and occupation, to the escalating religious and ethnic strife that afflicts the country today), “Fiasco” is absolutely essential reading for anyone interested in understanding how the United States came to go to war in Iraq, how a bungled occupation fed a ballooning insurgency and how these events will affect the future of the American military. Though other books have depicted aspects of the Iraq war in more intimate and harrowing detail, though other books have broken more news about aspects of the war, this volume gives the reader a lucid, tough-minded overview of this tragic enterprise that stands apart from earlier assessments in terms of simple coherence and scope…

Is nothing sacred?

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According to BBC NEWS…

Monopoly money will be phased out in a new version of the game in a bid to keep up with the times.

Instead players will use mock Visa debit cards to keep track of how much money they are winning or losing.

An electronic machine is provided, which allows the banker to transfer money from players and record their earnings and payments.

But…

The new updated edition of the game is being sold along with the traditional cash version.

Phew!

The Scaredy Cat Encyclopedia

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From David Weinberger’s journal…

The Encyclopedia Britannica has refused my request to interview an editor for 15 minutes about the process by which it chooses authors. I explained that this is for a book. But, the head of the Britannica’s communications group decided – based on what? – that they don’t want to support people who are “cheerleading for the downfall of businesses that they deem to be part of an old regime.”

Amazon goes bananas

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Yep. According to the New York Times,

Amazon introduced a grocery store last week, complete with sales rankings, customer reviews and recommendations. (For the record, customers who bought Froot Loops also bought digital pedometers. Who knew?) It is the 34th product category Amazon has rolled out since it started expanding in the late 1990’s, but for some it is the most puzzling, since it calls to mind some of the worst Internet business debacles on record…

Reflections

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Under the Fort St. George bridge, Friday 21 July, 2006. Did the graffiti artist intend the reflected image to be the ‘real’ one?

Steve writes

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Today’s excerpt from The Secret Diary of Steve Jobs, Aged 51 1/2…

Wow. Will ya look at these friggin financials! Sales up 24%, net profit up 48%. And our EPS is 10 cents above what those imbeciles on Wall Street were predicting. Gosh. We are sooo friggin hot right now. We’re like the Michael Jordan of business. Nothing but net. Hey, Michael Dell, how you guys doing down there in Buttfriggerville? Huh? What’s that? I can’t hear you. Watchoo say, boy? Sales up 6%, net down 18%? Well, sorry to hear that, wall-eye. Hey, maybe you guys should try to actually invent something. Like, hire engineers and actually design a product. Or maybe not. Maybe just leave that invention stuff to us. Ha! We R 2cool2Btru!!!!! I am going to run out to the JobsMobile and do donuts in the parking lot!!! Then I am going to kiss Peter Oppenheimer on the mouth!!!! Later losers!!! I am so cool!!!!

Pity it’s a spoof.

Hollywood discovers YouTube

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Hilarious piece in the New York Times…

“MySpace: The Movie” first appeared on YouTube on Jan. 31 and since then has had millions of hits, enough viewers to rival big-budget films or TV shows. Mr. Lehre, who is 21 and lived at his parents’ home in Washington, Mich., when he created the video, shot it there with friends. He scored the music himself so he wouldn’t have to deal with copyright issues, designed the graphics and Googled any technical questions he had. This development and distribution process makes even independent films, with their retinue of maxed-out credit cards and frenzied film festivals, look positively mainstream in comparison….

The movie can be found here. It’s vaguely amusing IMHO, but cleverly made. Rather like an art-school project. When I looked it had been viewed 526,878 times.

Wonder what YouTube’s bandwidth costs are.

Blogging is personal, mainly

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This morning’s Observer column…

Mr Sifry reckons that about 75,000 new blogs are created every day, ie about one new blog a second. And just to address the gibe that blogs are like Christmas toys – to be played with once and then discarded – he estimates that 13.7 million blogs are still being updated three months after their creation and about 2.7 million people update their blogs at least once a week.

Professional media folk are predictably incredulous about this. Why would anyone write without being paid for doing so? And, besides, who do these people think they are, gaily airing their so-called ‘opinions’? Jean-Remy von Matt, the CEO of a German advertising agency, spoke for many in the media industry when he fired off an enraged email after bloggers had effectively sabotaged one of his advertising campaigns. In the email he called blogs ‘the toilet walls of the internet’. ‘What on earth’, he asked, ‘gives every computer-owner the right to express his opinion, unasked for?’