{"id":1069,"date":"2006-12-20T10:46:05","date_gmt":"2006-12-20T14:46:05","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thewormbook.com\/hlog\/?p=1069"},"modified":"2006-12-20T10:46:05","modified_gmt":"2006-12-20T14:46:05","slug":"randoms","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.thewormbook.com\/hlog\/?p=1069","title":{"rendered":"Randoms"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<ul>\n<li>I think the <em>New Scientist<\/em> has just published its most haunting headline: <a href=\"http:\/\/www.newscientist.com\/article.ns?id=dn10826&amp;feedId=online-news_rss20\">Moths drink the tears of sleeping birds<\/a><\/li>\n<li>The <em>Mail&#8217;s<\/em> hatchet job on Tom Butler this morning deserves proper analysis. I particularly like the way that they make it sound sinister that he went around a party introducing himself to people as &#8220;The Bishop of Southwark&#8221;.<\/li>\n<li>The difference between Mussolini and Tony Blair is that Mussolini would never have tolerated English rail services. Last night, every single tube line running east from Notting Hill\/ Kensington\/Ladbroke Grove was broken down and out of service. The last train from Liverpool Street to Cambridge was scheduled to run at 9.30 &#8212; all subsequent services would have the last part replaced by a bus journey &#8212; and actually ran twenty minutes late; in anticipation, the waiting room at Bishop Stortford was locked at ten pm.<\/li>\n<li>Steven Poole&#8217;s <a href=\"http:\/\/unspeak.net\/a-robust-effort\/\">suggestion<\/a> that George W Bush be awarded a prize for rhetoric carved out of a single lump of human excrement has merit.<\/li>\n<li>I was talking last night to Perry Worsthorne, who has worn astonishingly well. <a href=\"http:\/\/www.telegraph.co.uk\/news\/main.jhtml?xml=%2Fnews%2F2006%2F12%2F17%2Fnfrank17.xml\">His reminiscence of Frank Johnson<\/a> was, he said, the first time he had been allowed to write for the <em>Sunday Telegraph<\/em> since being sacked as its editor fifteen years ago. It is extremely perceptive<sup class=\"footnote\"><a href=\"#fn1\">1<\/a><\/sup> in thinking that journalistic excellence was not the most admirable part of his character: that was his delight in real culture and the efforts to be made to absorb it. But it also contains a remarkable piece of abuse in passing: <span class=\"sane\">&#8220;It nearly happened when he had at last been given an editorial chair, at <em>The Spectator,<\/em> the first non-university man to have been put in charge of that highbrow journal. Understandably, it went to his head a bit and he did not even try to disguise his contempt for the philistine management apparatchik which Conrad Black had put in charge of the business side.&#8221;<\/span><br \/>\nThe reference (and the pronoun) are to Kimberly Fortier, who became the mistress, then the nemesis, of David Blunkett.<\/li>\n<li>&#8220;Journalistic excellence&#8221; &#8212; my old friend Ed Steen was reminiscing about an elderly mentor of his, whose expenses from Vietnam were supposed to have brought the accounts department of Rupert Murdoch&#8217;s entire Australian operation to a halt for three and a half months. See also the man who hired, on behalf of the <em>Times,<\/em> an ocean-going tug to get out to a sunken cross-channel ferry, at a cost of &pound;8,000 for an hour&#8217;s voyage.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"footnote\" id=\"fn1\"><sup>1<\/sup> he agrees with me<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I think the New Scientist has just published its most haunting headline: Moths drink the tears of sleeping birds The Mail&#8217;s hatchet job on Tom Butler this morning deserves proper analysis. I particularly like the way that they make it &hellip; <a href=\"http:\/\/www.thewormbook.com\/hlog\/?p=1069\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a> <a href=\"http:\/\/www.thewormbook.com\/hlog\/?p=1069\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.thewormbook.com\/hlog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1069"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.thewormbook.com\/hlog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.thewormbook.com\/hlog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thewormbook.com\/hlog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thewormbook.com\/hlog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1069"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.thewormbook.com\/hlog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1069\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.thewormbook.com\/hlog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1069"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thewormbook.com\/hlog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1069"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thewormbook.com\/hlog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1069"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}