The art of punditry

Posted on August 22, 2005 by acb

The many fans of Stephen Glover will treasure today’s column in the Independent. He starts with a long nostalgic look at the old days as a leader writer on the Daily Telegraph:

” … There were at least 10 writers, and none was required to show up until 3.45pm, when the editorial conference took place.
Even then, the chances were that you would not be asked to write a leader. One leader writer went six months without putting pen to paper.1 … “

Then he goes on to the future:

“The hot news is that the Guardian is expected to re-launch in its Berliner format on Monday 12 or Tuesday 13 September. This is a couple of weeks earlier than most people had expected, I fluctuate between thinking it will be a great success or a damp squib. Or might it be neither?”

Who can doubt he will be proved right?

1 One might suspect this last phrase was pure laziness, since journalists type; but I’m not sure that all the Telegraph intellectuals did use typewriters even in the early Eighties. Peter Utley dictated, but he was blind. Others might have used fountain pens, as Michael Wharton certainly did, and still does.

Posted in Journalism | 1 Comment

Search engine spamming wars?

Posted on August 22, 2005 by acb

This is really strange: this morning I had six messages from MT blacklist in my inbox reporting suspected new comment spam. It was certainly spam: six comments all saying

i come from <A Href=”http://www.google.com”>best search engine</A> http://www.google.com

and all apparently from yahoo.nl. The question is, who might have sent these. Obviously not Google, since it is neither evil nor stupid, and this spam will irritate anyone who gets it without boosting Google’s coverage. But just as obviously not Yahoo, which is not evil nor stupid either, though it makes less fuss about not being evil. And, if I let MT-blacklist do its thing, the whole Dutch branch of yahoo will be autmatically added to the blacklist of domains forbidden to leave comments on any MT blog anywhere that uses this plugin. So, by script-kiddie logic, it has to be Microsoft, the owners of the search engine that nobody uses as well as the most completely evil organisation that the world has ever seen.1

But I’m not a script kiddy. I can’t believe any corporation would be so stupid. So it has to be some prankster with an ingenious sense of humour who is trying to make trouble for everyone. The only question is, how widespread this wave of spam will be. Because it is a technique which could be generalised to put all your enemies oon te MT / typepad comment blacklists.

1 Including the mafia, the Chinese People’s Communist party, the KGB, etc etc. Don’t you know anything about computers?

Posted in Net stories | 2 Comments

Russia is our fatherland

Posted on August 21, 2005 by acb

P. Smirnovsky’s A Textbook of Russian Grammar is obviously a book that should be written, even if P. Smirnovsky is unable to undertake the task because he is dead, or possibly never lived. This week’s “Author, Author” competition in the back of the TLS, where you have to identify the sources of quotations, has a perfect phrase of his:

“An oak is a tree. A rose is a flower. A deer is an animal. A sparrow is a bird. Russia is our fatherland. Death is inevitable.”

Google only quotes the phrase above, because it is used as an epigraph for one of Nabokov’s stories, so I suspected at first that it might all be made up. But further research revealed I have libelled Smirnovsky. He did live, and is remembered in the Reserve Room of the Modern and Mediaeval languages Library of Cambridge University:

Main Author: Smirnovskiĭ, P.V.
Title: Uchebnik russkoĭ grammatiki. (vol. 1).
Published: Moskva, 1898.
Format: Book

Posted in Blather | 1 Comment

lament for the younger generation

Posted on August 15, 2005 by acb

Marlborough College is trying to expel a boy merely for being thick and unpleasant. Perhaps you had to have been there to understand how absurd this is. It’s like being thrown out of Big Brother for being a shallow exhibitionist.

This is a school which has been hated by any pupil of any intelligence or sensibility for as long as it has existed. When I was there, the punishment for new boys thought clever was a kind of gang rape involving boot polish and sometimes sodomy with a broomstick. At the time, I would have welcomed, perhaps incredulously, any sign that the authorities thought anyone could be too stupid or too nasty for the school. Now I know better. If the school has shareholders, they should sue it at once for diluting its brand equity. Up until now, to be an Old Marlburian has made a very clear statement about a man — that he is at best a rather pious evangelical Christian, but very probably nastier, more fucked up or more stupid than even the average Anglican bishop. Should this change, no one will know what being an old Marlburian means, and the �22,000 a year that parents pay to brand their children will be entirely wasted.

Posted in Blather | 9 Comments

The French Atomic Empire

Posted on August 14, 2005 by acb

One of the most perfectly done spoofs I have ever read. (via) In this context, there is a Kingsley Amis poem, below the fold, in which the Englishman appears more interested in sex than his French crewmates …

Continue reading →

Posted in Literature | 1 Comment

Smarter than Feynmann

Posted on August 13, 2005 by acb

These videos depict one of the purest pieces of research I have ever seen: research so pure that it is, in fact, impossible to think of a use for this discovery — at the same time, I defy you not to smile when you discover the secrets of spaghetti which defeated Richard Feynmann.

The original story I found in a paper edition of the Economist, and it increases the considerable reverence with which I regard that paper’s science correspondents.

Posted in Science without worms | Comments Off on Smarter than Feynmann

A slogan for our times

Posted on August 11, 2005 by acb

A fine anecdote about Claud Cockburn from a recent TLS review of Patrick Cockburn’s memoir of illness:

“My father regarded going to St Mary’s (Church) as largely a cultural activity of the Anglo-Irish which he was happy to go along with for a couple of days a year to please my mother. ‘I may be an atheist but I am a Protestant atheist,’ he would declare jovially. ‘I don’t see why disbelief should be a barrier to religious bigotry’.”

Posted in God | 3 Comments

What are you doing here?

Posted on August 11, 2005 by acb

all you people who were told by some search engine that my site had the answer to your questions:

   1: lincoln cathedral disputes 1995
1: andrew brown darwin
1: katrina skepper flake
1: worst or worse
1: who is the antichrist
1: selfless altruistic behaviour
1: gathering of clever people
1: womans knickers com
1: email stalking
1: i dont believe you dylan
1: troll clothes
1: miss manners website
1: what can i use around the house as a dildo
Posted in Net stories | Comments Off on What are you doing here?

Coarse fishing in Scandinavia

Posted on August 10, 2005 by acb

There’s a short story below the fold that I think I might flog somewhere but everything I write looks like crap to me at the moment, as if my heart had turned to pumice stone.

Continue reading →

Posted in Trouty things | Comments Off on Coarse fishing in Scandinavia

Clearly an excellent book

Posted on August 7, 2005 by acb

My first agent, and continuing friend, Xandra Hardie the Countess Gowrie Bingley has published a memoir of her childhood which has been getting excellent reviews all over the place. Not that I’m suggesting you buy it, or anything …

Posted in Literature | Comments Off on Clearly an excellent book