I know

Posted on July 26, 2003 by acb

If you were sensible and grown-up and so on, you wouldn’t laugh at this.

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The trolls have moved

Posted on July 26, 2003 by acb

To a new home, where they won’t disturb the rest of us, and can continue to appear in peace. Another instalment has been added.

Update: there are now seven entries and I have kept up at least once a day.

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Sleazy bits

Posted on July 24, 2003 by acb

Yesterday I managed to get annual indexes working in my cuttings blog. I only have two years’ worth of columns for the Church Times and part of a winter’s work for the Guardian up there at the moment, because those were the easiest to convert en masse into nice html. But this is going to be fun and elegant soon. There are only two pages that still look ghastly, so it’s a pity that one is the search page, and the other, the front.

Posted in Journalism | 1 Comment

Lord Byron’s epitaph on the Presidents Bush

Posted on July 24, 2003 by acb

There is the moral of all human tales;
Tis but the same rehearsal of the past,
First Freedom, and then Glory — when that fails,
Wealth, vice, corruption, — barbarism at last.

From Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage. And here he is on modern Britain:

Kingdoms are shrunk to provinces, and chains
Clank over sceptred cities, nations melt
From power’s high pinnacle, when they have felt
The sunshine for a while, and downward go
Like lauwine loosen’d from the mountain’s belt:

“lauwine” is nice. “Lavin” in Swedish is an avalanche. I wonder if this is a Scots/Norse word.

Posted in War | 3 Comments

Roy Foster

Posted on July 23, 2003 by acb

I am in the middle of profiling him: another reason for silence; and this has involved reading the second volume of his Yeats biography. It’s a tremendous book, by two good tests. I wanted to read more of the poetry, and I wanted to know how the story would end.

Continue reading →

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four second warning

Posted on July 23, 2003 by acb

That password of yours: you know, the clever, eleven-letter one consisting of a word that is in no dictionary of any known language, plus some numbers, and which is also profoundly memorable to you — that Windows password, yes, that is protecting all your most intimate files — how long do you think it would take to crack?

About 30 seconds, you say? From a public web page? You may be an optimist. Some passwords can be done in four seconds by this technique. But the moral is clear. A password without punctuation is worthless.

Posted in Software | 2 Comments

why French intellectuals smoke

Posted on July 23, 2003 by acb

Nicotine enhances several cognitive and psychomotor behaviours, and nicotinic antagonists cause impairments in tasks requiring cognitive effort.

If you knock out the nicotine receptors in the brain, you get the following results:
“in the 2-/- mutant, the high-order spatiotemporal organisation of locomotor behaviour, together with conflict resolution and social interaction, is selectively dissociated from low-level, more automatic motor behaviours. Such deficits in executive functions resemble the rigid and asocial behaviour found in some psychopathological disorders such as autism and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder”.

All this is deeply respectable research, published in PNAS. I shall feel less guilty than ever about smoking when I fish.

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a test case

Posted on July 23, 2003 by acb

Robert Fisk seems remarkably ungenerous and pessimistic in his report of the death of Saddam’s sons, which should surely be a cause for general rejoicing. But he thinks it will make things worse. The fear of Saddam’s return will diminish with their death, he believes; but the effect of this will be to increase resistance to the occupation. Until now, the Islamists have feared that Saddam might make a comeback once the Americans leave. If he is dead, they need fear this no longer, and will step up their war.

Continue reading →

Posted in War | 1 Comment

more silence

Posted on July 22, 2003 by acb

I’m sorry. I have not been posting here. I have been reading Yeats, and working on another blog, which wll contain masses and masses of cuttings, all wonderfully laid out and so on and so forth. But the Mary Warnock profile I did has been picked up by Arts and Letters, which is nice. Nor have I had any comeback on it from furious relatives, victims, and so forth. And soon I will burst back into posting stuff three times a day.

Posted in Blather | 1 Comment

climbing out of the pram

Posted on July 17, 2003 by acb

This one’s for Felix, currently working in tech support. It’s a conversation with a user that shows something about the way that Americans are inclined to treat the help (what could be more humiliating than the moment when Cordelia says ‘I’m a name tag person’?). Except this time the help bites back.

Posted in Software | 1 Comment