It is now possible to measure distances on Google Maps. The trick is fairly well hidden, under “Dig a Hole through the Earth” on the featured content sidebar, but if you find it a bewildering collection of geeky measurements become available to choose between points clicked on the map and you can keep clicking until the whole of your walk has been covered. So now I know I walked 36 furlongs before breakfast this morning. Since it’s a Sunday, perhaps I should make that 15803 cubits. It would be interesting to know if that measurement is available on Saturdays. Who could legitimately want it then?

And this has been one of them. I just heard from one friend that she has been diagnosed with MS in her very early thirties; another writes this afternoon to say that his ex, with whom he shares the custody of two young children, has been told by her oncologist that she has three months left. Sometimes middle age feels like a scene from a first world war film in which we all rush or stumble through the mud towards a distant unattainable trench and the only suspense lies in wondering which bullet and which shell has got whose name on it and when it will arrive.

Perhaps by coincidence, Damian Thompson was very quiet for a couple of months after I wrote about him reproducing a neo-nazi propaganda story on his Daily Telegraph blog, though he did ring up to say he would never speak to me again. But recently he has resumed his usual mixture of hating Catholic bishops because they are liberal and hating Muslims because they are not.Telegraph readers just lap it up. In the excerpts below from the latest comments thread I particularly like the call for Muslims to be “interred without trial”. I hope it was a misprint, but one can never be certain.

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It is a dangerous thing to disagree with Steven Poole, but I think his defence of Hobsbawm’s Stalinist account of Eastern European history is just plain wrong. Hobsbawm wrote, in a lecture for Amnesty,

Since the life-and-death struggle of the Russian Civil War, torture in the USSR — as distinct from the general brutality of Russian penal life — had not served to protect the security of the state. It served other purposes, such as the construction of show trials and similar forms of public theatre. It declined and fell with Stalinism. Fragile as the Communist systems turned out to be, only a limited, even a nominal, use of armed coercion was necessary to maintain them from 1957 until 1989.

and the rather unpleasant Oliver Kamm claimed that this meant Hobsbawm was implying that the crushing of the Prague Spring was a “limited, even nominal” use of armed force.

Poole thinks this is either stupid or mendacious, since Hobsbawm was clearly talking about only torture. I don’t think he was. He was talking about torture in a general concept of coercion, and claiming that not much of that was necessary after 1957. This is, strictly speaking true, but in a way which is entirely dependent on the cut-off date. The reason that 1957 matters is that the Hungarian uprising had been the year before. The Russian tanks had then quite clearly demonstrated that they were prepared to use as much force as was necessary to crush any resistance. So when they rolled into Czechoslovakia in 1968 there was no fighting. Everyone remembered Hungary. There was some fighting in Gdansk in 1970, but not a huge amount. Unarmed demonstrators cannot stand up to tanks.

So it is strictly true that only a limited and by Stalinist standards nominal use of armed coercion was needed to maintain the system after 1957, but only because everyone knew—or believed from Hungary to Gorbachev—that massive and wholly unrestrained force would be used to defend the system if it were ever at serious risk.

Morally speaking, Kamm is entirely right here. See also Marek Kohn in the comments, pointing out that the martial law which crushed Solidarity was referred to officially as “a state of war”.

Everything seems to be running fine to judge from the error logs: a few robots complaining that they find themselves hors texte, a place that structuralists believed could not exist; I have meanwhile been running around when not writing nonsense elsewhere, and so this will be something of a grab-bag of improbable observations.

• Yahoo maps has much less detailed satellite pictures than Google of most of the places that interest me. But its coverage of the Göta Älv valley is extraordinarily high resolution. I can just about pick out the potato patch in Lilla Edet where Anita suggested we get married; I can certainly see the exact spot where my book ends, because the casting jetties are distinct against the ice in this photograph. Why should this be? It’s not as if anyone lives there and when I look at the more populated parts of the world, like Essex, or even Uddevalla, the pictures once more receded to blurry green clumps, grey and brown.


• The OLPC project has turned into a complete fiasco. I have a piece about this on tomorrow’s Guardian site somwhere but it happened more quickly than I was expecting. I talked to one of the project’s more sensible and clever boosters this afternon, and his excuse was that while the technology was wonderful, Negroponte hadn’t realised that in order to get the Nigerian government and people like that to buy them, he would have to invest. “MIT doesn’t do bribes” said my friend, “And Negroponte was politically naïve”. Well, there’s one benefit of the OLPC: without this technology no one would ever have heard Negroponte described as naïve.


• Who sent me this? I just found in my list of things to blog a story about a scam from Minnesota headlined Lino Lakes man’s humanitarian deal was a load of carp. Whoever it was, thank you profoundly.

I read this last night in one gulp, which shows the essential virtue of his writing. The story, for American readers, concerns Adam Lang, a Labour ex-prime minister who is holed up in Martha’s Vineyard with his wife and dwindling entourage, working on his memoirs while an ex-colleague plots to have him charged at the Hague for involvement in CIA torture. Yes, it’s Blair, and he even has a strange sinister wife. The ghost-writer, an old, loyal party hack, dies suddenly, and the narrator, an apolitical word machine, is drafted in at very short notice to replace him. The book is mainly damn good fun, full of vivid caricatures: the publishing tycoon, the girlfriend in television, the unspeakably boring yet sinister¹ American foreign affairs pundit. There is also an excellent sense of the excitement of being inside a political campaign, best brought to life in a scene in which the narrator, inside a house under siege by the media, watches a huge television set watching the outside of the house while the commentators speculate on what’s going on and he listens to it actually happening in the room with him. This isn’t in the least bit a literary novel but that’s not its only virtue.

(spoilers follow after the break)
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In a story at once grotesque and astonishing, it turns out that one of the hard drives on the Columbia shuttle which blew up with the loss of the whole crew in 2003 has been treated by a data recovery firm who got 90% of the data off it—after it had been blown up and then dropped two miles. Don’t miss the picture. (via)

I hope it’s not going to be another summer when the Daily Telegraph is the paper that knows what’s going on. I don’t mean that its reports are true, but that they are uniquely informative because they tell us what the Bush junta wants us to believe, and so what it is planning to do. In the summer of 2002 it was the only British paper which wrote as if war with Iraq were inevitable as well as desirable; for the last few years, after the catastrophe in Iraq, became apparent, the Telegraph has been pretty subdued. But now I see Con Coughlin mongering war again.
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I’m pretty certain I saw a peregrine falcon yesterday, even though we are on the limits of their range as reported by the RSPB: in any case, a fairly large falcon with pointed, scimitar-shaped wings and a long, largely straight tail was hunting over a meadow just north of Audley End house. I watched it for nearly five minutes as it gradually ascended. I was wearing polarised sunglasses so the colour was uncertain but what I saw were areas of silvery pale on the breast and body. It was definitely not a kestrel which is smaller, has straighter wings and a less strait tail. Nor did it fly like a kestrel, which tends to move briskly between hovering stations. This bird was ranging over the sky. It had a single call repeated in burst of five or six in two different pitches which is not on the RSPB site but less dissimilar to one of their peregrine posts than anything else. But if it was a peregrine, where is it nesting? The country round here is notoriously short on cliffs and even skyscrapers.

Susan McCarthy, sumac on the Well, has started a blog. She is a wonderfully shrewd and witty observer of animal behaviour, not least when the animal in question is H. Sapiens sapiens though in her hands the second sapiens is an ironic distinction.