Sunday shorts
- Thank you mefi. I could spend the whole weekend fooling around at this huge collection of legal streamed music, trying to put together the most perfect possible radio station of concerts promoted by Bill Graham.
- Language Log shows how to make language whimper and beg for mercy: They had not just been dishonest, which is a bad enough sin in academia; they had insulted my intelligence, which is an utter no-no to the nth power with a side order of fries, and will cause me to wreak my awful vengeance. Don’t ever insult my intelligence.
- A glimpse of absolute hubris, from the plug piece for Andrew Rawnsley’s upcoming Blair documentary: Very shortly before the war, in early 2003, there was an Anglo-French summit. Over lunch, Jacques Chirac warned the Prime Minister that he knew what to expect because the French President had been a young soldier in Algeria. Sir Stephen Wall, a former ambassador and one of Blair’s senior advisers, was privy to this conversation. He recalls Chirac telling Blair that there would be a civil war in Iraq. ‘We came out and Tony Blair rolled his eyes and said, “Poor old Jacques, he doesn’t get it, does he?”‘ Wall remarks: ‘We now know Jacques “got it” rather better than we did.’
Of course, if Chirac had been a conscript in Algeria, that would explain everything about his understanding of colonial wars. Stephen Wall went on to be Cardinal Cormac Murphy O’Connor’s adviser for a while: I remember his coming to lunch at the Guardian, very smooth and smart.
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It must be the death of Ruth Graham in the news; the radio station I was picturing: all altar calls, all the time.
The legality isn’t exactly uncontested: http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20061219/184837.shtml