The plague is spreading.  Note the comments.  And the comments here as well, which is where I caught it.  (He, on the other hand, seems not to have infected anyone.)

If everyone is to be trusted, including me, then I hold the record!  4,455.  Truly.  This is the one time in my life when I need someone to hack into my computer and verify that this is true.  Where’s bloody MI5 when you actually need it?  A comment from the person on duty there with special responsibility for me would not come amiss.

By the way, you may like to know that the original title of this posting was “Plink plink plink plinkplinkplink plinkplink plink plink plinkplinkplinkplinkplinkplinkplink”, but that the final “plinkplinkplinkplinkplinkplinkplink” made the sidebar entry for the posting too wide, which caused the sidebar itself to widen, which caused this posting and all the other blog postings on view to disappear down below all the permanent bullshit, to get out of the way.  Just goes to show, eh?

This recollection about Nelson is fascinating:

He entered at once into conversation with me, if I can call it conversation, for it was all on his side, and all about himself, and, really, in a style as to surprise and almost disgust me. I suppose something I happened to say may have made him guess that I was somebody, and he went out of the room for a moment, I have no doubt to ask the office-keeper who I was, for when he came back he was altogether a different man, both in manner and matter. All I had thought was a charlatan style had vanished, and he talked of the state of this country and of the aspect and probabilities of affairs on the Continent with a good sense, and a knowledge of subjects both at home and abroad, that surprised me equally and more agreeably than the first part of our interview had done; in fact he talked like an officer and a statesman. The Secretary of State kept us long waiting, and certainly, for the last half or three quarters of an hour I don’t know that I ever had a conversation that interested me more. Now if the Secretary of State had been punctual & admitted Lord Nelson in the first quarter of an hour, I should have had the same impression of a light and trivial character that other people have had, but luckily I saw enough to be satisfied that he was really a very superior man; but certainly a more sudden and complete metamorphosis I never saw.

That is Lord Castlereagh remembering the great man.  [Correction: It was the future Duke of Wellington.  Thanks Natalie - see comment.]

Was there ever a more prefect example of image projection, the nature of which is illuminated dazzlingly, by at first being done wrongly?  Whoops!  Wrong performance for this bloke!  So, leave the stage.  Then, re-enter, performing quite differently.

We are not talking “image” and “reality” here.  Just two different images and two different realities.

I do not criticise Nelson for his obvious emphasis on image-mongering.  On the contrary, it is all part of what an excellent commander he was.  I feel exactly the same about another hero of mine, Montgomery, who was similarly devoted to cultivating his own fame.

For me the crucial thing is that the men being lead in battle preferred it this way.  Better a self-promoter than a cypher whom you never see.  Central to great leadership is understanding and controlling the effect you have on other people.

Findlay Dunachie supplies the above quote in a Samizdata review of books about Nelson, Collingwood, Trafalgar, etc., which is outstanding, as several commenters have pointed out.

Over the last few months and years, the usually quite long review articles by Findlay Dunachie have been, I would say, just about the classiest things at Samzidata.  He is not listed there as a “principle contributor”.  He is merely a “contributor”.  But as far as quality is concerned he has been and is a principle, no doubt about it.

For technical reasons it is not now possible to link to individual author archives on Samizdata, but if you look at everything in the category of book reviews, you will find most of Findlay’s stuff, and not a lot else.

I also particularly recommend this 1996 Libertarian Alliance Historical Note, entitled The Success of the Industrial Revolution and the Failure of Political Revolutions: How Britain Got Lucky.

Mick Hartley is a terrific blogger, although I am extremely biased about that because I usually seem to agree with him.  He even shares my dislike of Salvador Dali, while conceding, as I do, that his horrible works are very skilfully done.  (Although actually, he merely doesn’t admire Dali.  I loathe him.  So there is a bit of a difference there.)

Here is Mick Hartley writing about conceptual art:

Then there’s the bohemian angle. Artists, part of a ”fundamentalist bohemian sect”, like tweeking the sensibilities of us bourgeois nine-to-five drudges, trying to open up our dismal lives to some excitement, put some colour into our drab semi-detached sensibilities. But by now, one hundred years after Duchamp’s urinal, this is such a cliché that’s it’s hard to believe that it still has any purchase. Yet the latest catalogues continue to talk excitedly of transgressive works, which will subvert our notions of art, and challenge our preconceptions. As though we’re all going to rush for our smelling salts every time we’re confronted with a work of art which doesn’t conform to our chocolate-box prejudices, still, after all the Piss-Christs, and piles of bricks, and Madonnas with Elephant Dung - as though, nowadays, we don’t have to struggle to find an exhibition which doesn’t aim to challenge our boring middle-class preconceptions.

Although, a conceptual artist who exhibited a Prophet Mohammed, done, say, with camel dung, would at least prove that he was serious about challenging preople’s preconceptions.

My opinions about conceptual art are numerous.  One opinion that I hold is the one expressed above, that it is all so passé.  Suburbia is a far more important contribution to civilisation than conceptual art, and is far more subtle and challenging.

Another opinion I hold is that there is a certain kind of person, of whom I am one, who likes art galleries because they are quiet, and because, although you can talk (provided you keep it down), you don’t have to.  Both quiet talk and silence work well.  So, ideal for a first date, and come the coffee or the drink afterwards, there is guaranteed to be something non-personal and thus not over-inquisitive to talk about that you know the other person has some experience of.  Art as conversation piece, in other words.

That conceptual art requires so little effort also makes it good for dating.  What you see is it.  The only even slightly tricky thing about it that you need to understand is that there is nothing to understand.  There are no complicated labels to read, about who made it, why, when, what it is of, what its consequences were, what wars it started or was provoked by, etc.  A twat artist made it, because that’s what twat artists do, not long ago, it is of nothing, it will have no consequences, and no wars – no interesting events of any kind usually – are or will be involved.  Unless it involves someone like the Prophet Mohammed (see above).  Conceptual art is sublimely unchallenging, in other words.  It is very nice, quite nice, not nice, etc., like wallpaper.  Again, great for a first date.  Nothing to seriously distract you from the real object of the exercise.

Dale Amon links to The Blog:

It’s got to have some sort of central nervous system,” said Biff. “Jeepers, if we could just find its brain, maybe we could kill it.”

“That’s just it, Biff – it doesn’t seem to have any head whatsoever! It seems to be some sort of pure unedited energy, and any attack only seems to make it stronger!”

Heh.  Or as my best friend down the road when I was a child used to say: “Arf arf.”

I have had an extremely busy day, with various blogging obligations, and then preparing for and chairing a meeting at my flat, which involved a visit from a cleaning lady (for which I had to do preliminary cleaning), and then shopping.  So, I have spent about two hours today playing with this, which I got to via the Dave Barry blog.

This is a curious computer game which involves clicking on one little thingy, and victory consists of creating the maximum possible amount of commotion with that one push of the mouse.  It appeals to me a lot, and I was getting funny looks when, after the formal procedings of my meeting ended at 9.30pm, I crept into my kitchen and resumed playing with it.

My top score so far is 1,867.

What I like about it is that it plays to my sense of being one of life’s catalysts.  One click and then I sit back and watch everything happen.  And I am already starting to learn regular patterns which, once mastered, will mean that one day I will click once, and it will then commote for ever and ever.

It’s been a long day.

Many is the time one has wanted one of these:

What an inventive time we live in!  But, if you use it when out on your own, you might appear foolish.  Also, I think it should be a bit flatter, so to speak.

I love these mad gadget catalogues.  I got this one from the latest Radio Times.

For old times sake, and also because I happen to have been paying some attention to the argument about the latest educational “reforms” in connection with this nice Mr Cameron being the opposition spokestoff on the subject, I googled “Education”, and got to this letter in some aspect of the Guardian:

Your incisive commentaries on the education white paper by Peter Hyman and Phil Revell (Comment, October 24 and 25) contain more sound sense than a coterie of government ministers could muster between them, with the former’s advocacy of genuine curriculum flexibility and a move towards smaller, more human schools, and Revell’s prescient questioning of the ominous sounding foisting of “parent power” on to a generation of parents with little or no interest in the direct running of schools.

Even more disconcerting is that after a decade of demoralisation, due to the deprofessionalisation of teachers’ work through relentless government micro-managing, teachers now face the depressing prospect of continually looking over their shoulders to field parochial, egocentric concerns from parents whose understandable remit is their own children, rather than the complex needs of all pupils. Just how many crass policy-making errors will it take before politicians finally realise that the most effective way to “drive up” standards is to create the conditions for a trusted, relatively autonomous teaching profession, in which the living, creative art of teaching is nurtured and intrusive surveillance is kept to an minimum?

Dr Richard House
Roehampton University

What the above letter says to me is that education is now a nationalised industry in an advanced, post-Soviet state of derangement.  The full nationalisation phase is over, defined as the period when lots of people actually believed in nationalisation.  This is followed by two contradictory and when combined, utterly chaotic processes: micro-management from the top (the top having lost confidence in its own chain of command), and pseudo-market “reforms” imposed from the top (ditto).

As for parent power, a pervasive confusion is imposed, where the difference between parents running a school is muddled up with parents running away from a school they don’t like.  Choice within, at taxpayer expense, is, as Dr House says, a hopeless muddle of clashing personal agendas.  But the right to choose which school to start with t would work very well, if only parents and teachers were both abandoned by the state and left to get on with it amongst themselves, with the government supplying no money and no management beyond the occasional visit from the police when crimes are committed or reasonably suspected.

The “most effective way to ‘drive up’ standards” by creating “the conditions for a trusted, relatively autonomous teaching profession, in which the living, creative art of teaching is nurtured and intrusive surveillance is kept to an minimum” would be for the politicians to give up completely, and treat education the way they used to treat advertising, namely as sordid and immoral, but legal, and above all, because so sordid and immoral, nothing to do with them.

(Now the politicians both consume advertising on a vast scale and, more and more, they also micro-manage it, perhaps because the two professions are now so much closer than they used to be, and the politicians all have opinions on the subject, the way they used to only about laws on account of so many of them being lawyers.  But those are different stories.)

What Dr House himself thinks his prescription means he does not clarify.  Hurrah for apple pie, he says.  But how do you bake the apple pie?  Total autonomy for him and his colleagues at government expense?  (I.e. the good old days.) I fear so.  A genuine free market, in which he earns his money only from his customers, with maybe a bit more thrown in by charitable donors, old boys and old girls, etc.?  Maybe, but I doubt it.

Arts & Letters Daily links to this review article by Arthur Waldron prompted by Mao: The Unknown Story by Jung Chang and Jon Halliday, and also to lots of other Mao Zedong-ery.  What a horrible man.

Excerpt:

Mao’s hatred of learning was coupled with a passion to destroy China’s cultural heritage. In 1949, when he came to power, the Mongol-Ming-Qing capital of Beijing (Peking) was still intact, with its massive dressed stone walls and gates, its hundreds of temples, its traditional courtyard houses with their exquisite tile roofs, its memorial arches or pailou, and its distinct drama, cuisine, customs, and traditions. Everything had survived the war with Japan; were it extant today, it would constitute one of the world’s most magnificent historical sites.

But Mao decreed its obliteration. In 1958, on the eve of his campaign, roughly 8,000 historical monuments were listed as still standing in the capital. Mao planned to keep only 78 of them; most were destroyed.

It think it was Harold Nicolson – truly not sure but a Nicolson or a Nicholson of some variety – who said, following (a) the death during World War II of his son, and (b) the destruction of the library at Monte Cassino during the battle of that name, that it was (b) that upset him more.  It’s a little presumptuous to say such a thing, but me choosing those two paragraphs from out of all of all the stuff about Mao Zedong’s numerous crimes reminds me of that.

Mao also killed many sons:

Most importantly, Mao was the greatest mass murderer of the 20th century.

Indeed.

As Waldron points out, you wouldn’t see a Hitler picture displayed thus.  I took that photo at the huge Chinese shopping centre way up there on the Northern Line somewhere, Colindale I think.  On the one hand Mao has clearly lost the battle of ideas to Fanta etc.  On the other hand he still partially wins, because he still shares totally undeserved billing with Fanta.  Mao never did anything for humans as good as Fanta.  Fanta never harmed anyone, while Mao murdered millions.

The good news is that this book, and this review article, look like being parts of a general intellectual and moral offensive by civilisation against the many ghastlinesses of how China is ruled and misruled now, this particular book being compared by Waldron with The Gulag Archipelago in its potential impact.  The Chinese Government really really does not like it.

Good.  For a long time, China kept its head down and Civilisation was preoccupied with reducing the USSR to ruin.  But now the USSR is duly ruined, and China has attracted serious worldwide attention through its remarkable economic surge, the obvious basis for a bid for eventual global hegemony.  So now Civilisation, albeit somewhat diverted by Islamic foolishness, is turning its intellectual guns onto China.

Personally I think Civilisation should trade with China, if only because so much of Chinese trade is itself surely very civilised.  But Civilisation should also engage politically, by supporting Chinese oppositionists, by, e.g. re-telling and linking to the stories they are now telling.  Civilisation should use the trade links to send political messages in and out of China alongside goods and commercial messages, rather than vainly try to end the trading.  Let the Chinese despots worry about the impact of all this trade on them.  The point, as with the USSR ruination project, is to do what works, rather than merely to soothe the Western conscience.  If I was the Chinese government, I would far prefer futile attempts at trade embargoes to focussed political campaigns, such as for instance, an enthusiastic attempt to spread news of this book around, a mass willingness to buy it (already a fact apparently), and then actually to read it, and then to spread its many memes and messages far and wide.

The way I see it: two down, two to go.  German Nazism, Soviet Communism, Islamofascism, Chinese Despotism.

Please note that the list does not read: Germany, Russia, Islam, China.  Identifying the exact enemy and learning all about his exact nature is crucial to winning these things.  By this standard the seeing off of German Nazism was a seriously Pyrrhic victories, and the ruination of the USSR, because it now seems to have involved the continuing ruin of Russia also, was not much better.  This latter process, as Mark Steyn explains, is also doing a lot to inflame Islamofascism.  But the moral of these Pyrrhic victories by Civilisation ought to be clear.  Don’t mess with Civilisation; if you do, the people you now tyrannise over and whom you say you represent are liable, along with you of course, to be the big losers.

Is Civilisation strong enough to deal with the last two on the list simultaneously?  And can it win these last two contests less destructively than the first two?  I want to think so, if only because all that trade with China is making Civilisation, as well as China, rich.

Bi, Lesbian Or Gay Society.

Talking of how I blog, I did a piece yesterday for Samizdata about the Conservative leadership contest, and it had the same structure as that described in my previous posting here - see immediately below, no need for a link to that.  It started out very boringly, obviously, about this nice posh Mr Cameron that the Conservatives seem about to be lead by, yawn, but then I began to have more interesting thoughts about why and also when niceness in politicians matters, or does not matter.  Basically, niceness obtrudes as a Prime Ministerial issue when it is believed that nothing important actually needs doing.

See also, in connection with the Conservative leadership contest, this posting on that subject, which I believe is a hell of a lot more profound than perhaps you do.  The whole point about Conservatives these days is that millions of people reckon they are bonkers, and that a lot of them actually are.  They are now moving outside the social mainstream.  If daughters in family TV sitcoms now go out with Conservatives, their parents worry, usually with good reason.

Well well, how very odd.  Harry Hutton’s thoughts on the Conservative leadership contest have vanished, and been replaced by some gibberish about how much fish otters eat per day.  Did I dream it?  Did someone hack into his site with the profundities in question?  Or hack in and delete them?  We may never know.

One of the reasons I have generally been such a failure as a paid writer is that I hate writing under time pressure.  Even putting some trifling piece of nonsense up at this blog becomes a tiresome obligation as the evening gets under way.  So, I am basically putting this posting up so that I don’t have to do anything else here today.  I may, but I don’t have to.

Do you benefit at all from such foolishness?  Well, I seem to be the kind of writer who does blog postings by putting up some link or quote or quota photo or some such, about something commonplace, but then my imagination, for want of a better word, takes wing. This is what you seem to like, or you wouldn’t keep coming, in your tens.  A tangential thought occurs.  An autobiographic recollection presents itself.  An unobvious connection connects in my mind.  And what began as pure tedium comes to life.  But not this time, I fear.

No.  Still can’t think of anything.  Have a nice day.

Another busy day neglecting this blog, so some quota photos.  Click to get them bigger.  I have decided I didn’t like this method of displaying photos, since a lot of the point of having photos is to liven up the blog as a whole even if people don’t giove a stuff about any particular photos.  So, it’s back to little pictures to click on.

And there’s even a website there you can follow up.  That’s if you have no life at all whatsoever.

Just back from a day out, during which I saw the afternoon matinee performance of Richard II, starring Kevin Spacey, at the Old Vic, the theatre of which Spacey is now the artistic director.  Short review: I loved it.  Longer review: on Samizdata, I hope, Real Soon Now, link here to that whenever.  But, I promise nothing.

Earlier in the week I reestablished contact with Mark Rousell, who is now, again, my computer GP.  I missed him.  He was unavoidably engaged otherwise.

I am often frustrated, not so much by computer experts as such (although I do emit the occasional howl of impotent misery), as by my dependence upon them.  And what frustrates – actually, the word is “scares” - me about most of these guys is that they can each of them tell me something very important and clever, but usually can’t, for one reason or another, either because they can’t, or just as likely, because they are too busy sorting out a similar aspect of some other person’s problems, help me with what I really want help with.  Which is: everything. Yes, that’s it, that’s what a lot of us want sorted out with our computers.  Everything.

After I have had the help of one of these other experts, I then have another dozen things that I have to remember.  I’m out of my depth, and now I have to swim with few more little weights attached to my brain.  And the knowledge that I will not remember all these things is what scares me, and makes me reluctant, as it were, to commit, even to a casual date.  These experts tend to be specialists.  They sort out some of your problems.  But that still leaves all the others, which they are understandably reluctant to get involved in.  They just want to help you, and then get out of there and get back to their real stuff.  Each specialist has his own preferences and sorts out things according to his own little ways and likes and dislikes, and everything still works, but remembering it all is nearly impossible.  The more help you get from such people, the harder it gets.

Mark is different.  Mark is what we call in Britain a General Practioner, but of personal computers.  A GP.  He has recently visited me twice.  First, he did a general sort out of my email difficulties, did a bit of scanning for spybots (whatever a spybot is), reassured me about certain strange emails based on hijacking my email address, suggested a printer-cum-scanner that sounds just right for me, and helped out with several other things that I have already forgotten about.  This means, by the way, that where it says contact at the top left, you can now actually contact me.  This will be a mixed blessing, I expect, but, I can now report that does now get to me.

Then, last night, my computer simply stopped.  I rang Mark at once, and described the symptoms.  He made a ninety percent certain diagnosis, which turned out to be right, that it was the power unit, and immediately came round (i.e. this afternoon) with another power unit, which he installed, on his hands and knees, with his box of tools, and had it working straight away.  The coincidence of him getting back in touch, and then me needing him for an emergency fix like this is still making me sweat.  What I would have done without him, I dare not even speculate.

I know people who know most of the things that Mark knows separately, but I know no one else who knows all the things he knows, and who is willing to place all his knowledge, of everything, at my service, for a very reasonable fee.  Plus, his attitude is so good.  He doesn’t radiate even the faintest whiff of that geek-vibe that says you are stupid for not knowing personal computers as well as he knows them.  He gets what being a non-geek is like.  In other words, he is not himself actually a geek.

The reason I am telling you all this, instead of just thanking the guy personally, is that Mark is now engaged in getting a business going in which he offers the kind of stuff he is now doing for me to several dozen other similar persons.  He will soon, almost certainly, be pulling together into one set-up my email, webhosting, web-back-up, etc. etc., thereby replacing and rationalising all my current and chaotic and hopeless uncoordinated arrangements – and he could do the same for you, if you are the sort who needs such an everything service.  And if anything then malfunctions, he can sort it out for you.  I could ramble on further but by now you surely get the idea.  I really recommend this guy.

Not everyone needs someone like Mark.  Many computer users are, as it were, their own computer GPs.  They can keep track of everything, and revel in being good at that, and in coordinating the various experts they sometimes call in for particular matters.  But for a person like me, who lost the plot of what goes on under the bonnet about two weeks after I bought my first computer, Mark is just the sort of ally I need.

Not, however, if you live in Alaska.  Not yet.  Since Mark is an expert in such things as teleconferencing, communications and such like, he is well placed in due course to run a stable of globe-trotting trouble-shooters and advise them about what to do, rather the way photocopier service engineers are always in mobile phone contact with each other and with their bosses now, only cleverer, with cameras involved for instance.  However, Mark said a number of things this afternoon in favour of this attitude, to the effect that face-to-face on-the-spotness is often necessary with computers, because you can do only so much on the phone, or even though a magic programme he has that he can use to take over your computer from a distance and sort it all out for you.  He could not, for instance, have replaced my power unit today by any other method than actually coming here, and then checking that everything worked.  So what I am saying is, if you like the sound of this service, and live in or around London, he could be your man.  But London would probably be best, for the time being.

The one thing that Mark has not tended to bother with is blogs and blogging, which, since I am immersed in it so much, and actually am starting to understand and to understand the workings of, I will continue to draw in other specialist help.

Blogs are not the answer to all information-spreading problems, Mark says, and I agree.  However, I did very tentatively suggest to Mark that a blog might help him with his specific business problem.  He is great at what he does, but finds it hard to put the word out about what that is.  There are, in this life, those that do most of it, and there are those that get most of the credit for doing it, the overlap being incomplete.  Mark is definitely in the doers column, and he now relies on word of mouth, without quite knowing how to stir it up sufficiently.  Yet he does not lack verbal fluency.  He just can’t afford expensive advertising.  So, I suggested that it might make sense to include a blog as part of his – at present somewhat antiseptic and impersonal – web presence.  That is not intended as a criticism.  This website is only at a very early stage of its existence, and Mark is the first to admit that he needs to do lots more to it.  At least he has a website.  But, a blog might help to get him past that “Who is this guy anyway?” barrier.  He would explain things like his typical customer problems, and typical answers.  Satisfied customers like me could comment, and link to him, and ask things and be told things.  He would come across as a real person, and a real person who could be on your side too.

In a way, Mark is a lot like this bespoke tailor who, I believe, did wonders for his marketing by setting up his blog.  Mark, to switch metaphors yet again, is like a bespoke personal computer guy.

Lyn S, already a regular commenter here, and linkee to your left, is supplying a torrent of good stuff and good links just now.

My recent favourite Linn S linkage was to this fractals site, linked to in this posting.  I know what you are thinking.  Art nouveau patterns, squiggly wiggly wallpaper twirlygigs, seen them, drooled over them, got bored with them.

But I picked “squarries”, and I really enjoyed what I found, if only because they looked so very unlike your usual fractal twiddliness.  More like modernist architecture in a squalid part of a very crowded city.  Although, this one I’ve picked out happens to be shinier, less grey and concrety, and more new and industrial, like some SciFi oil plant.  Vaguely 1930s in its colouring, maybe a tad socialist realist.  Cubist figures with smooth and shiny skin work there.

I found that bottom right, here.

But what are these pictures/objects?  Do they come out looking three dimensional, complete with shiny bits where the “light” catches them, or is that contrived later?  What is a “squarry”?

Here it says this:

The name isn’t official ... It’s a Koch curve made of squares instead of triangles.

Etc.  And I am none the wiser.

We are being told to expect a cold winter.

Britain can expect its coldest winter for at least a decade, the Met Office has warned.

Mayor Ken has attached himself to this prophecy:

London Mayor Ken Livingstone warned that London and the South East could face the worst winter since 1962-1963, when Britain was frozen from Boxing Day until April with an average temperature of 0.2C (32.3F).

And I dare say it was quite chilly in the north of Watford and west of Heathrow regions of Britain also, and that it may be again.

I have great respect for short term weather forecasts.  I often make or change my arrangements in accordance with them, and seldom regret it.  One of the many things that a blog can do is remind the owner of it to see if certain much-trumpetted-at-the-time predictions actually come true.  And I wonder if this one will.

I remember the Big Freeze of 63.  The first snow fell on Boxing Day, and it was still around in May.  I was a schoolboy at a boarding school, Marlborough.  When that Spring (hah!) term began, in January 1963, I had brought a hot water bottle with me.  At first there was scorn, but that didn’t last long.  I recall that on several occasions, the water inside my hot water bottle, while still in my bed in the morning, had nevertheless frozen.  Not solid.  But there was definitely ice in there.  No hockey was played at all that term.

Oh, and I almost forgot.  During the Christmas holiday, the “house” we ought to have been sleeping in got burnt, and we had to live in wooden huts, in a field.  The dormitory was another hut.  Hence that frozen water bottle.

I am now reading a book about the naval history of the Second World .  It abounds with the usual horrors, and I think part of why I read such books is to remind myself that all the discomforts I have endured have been trivial compared to all that stuff.  This winter may be unpleasant, but it will be entirely bearable.  And then there will be spring.

Besides which, an unusually cold winter may mean quite a lot of snow, and some altogether different photos of London to the usual ones.  Last winter (hah! again) there was no snow at all.

This is depressing.  I found it in a set of rules for blogging.

Whenever you post anything to the Internet—whether on a weblog, in a discussion group, or even in an email—think about how it will look to a hiring manager in ten years. Once stuff’s out, it’s archived, cached, and indexed in many services that you might never be aware of.

Years from now, someone might consider hiring you for a plum job and take the precaution of ‘nooping you first. (Just taking a stab at what’s next after Google. Rest assured: there will be some super-snooper service that’ll dredge up anything about you that’s ever been bitified.) What will they find in terms of naïvely puerile “analysis” or offendingly nasty flames published under your name?

Maybe.  Maybe.

But here’s another thought.  Your future employer will be looking to see if you have a bit of go about you, a bit of spirit, or that at least you once did, once upon a time.  Have you any youthful indiscretions to talk about, and if not why not?  He wants, above all, to avoid hiring one of those completely risk-averse, bloodless semi-humans who organised his entire adolescence around not looking bad twenty years later.  He wants someone who has tried stuff, done stuff, and made mistakes.  He does not want William bloody Hague, who only became human after he had made a total cods of being Leader of the Conservative Party.

David Cameron looks just like another of these bloodless, calculating, boy-machines.  If he becomes the next Leader of the Conservatives, it will be because he has now, suddenly, acquired a bit of a past, with human blood flowing through it, possibly, allegedly, maybe, no concrete evidence.

If you never do anything or even say anything that you regret, then the chances are that you will have something far bigger to regret later, which is never having done anything at all.

The world is very full just now of John Peel eulogising, and not unreasonably so.  He was indeed a nice and a fine fellow.

I liked everything about him except his taste in music, which generally seemed to consist of the latest thrashings of whatever gang of demented musical hooligans had made a tape in their parents’ garage that week.  By playing every tape of this sort produced in or around Britain during the last forty years, he inevitably played the odd pearl in among the huge piles of swine droppings, and encouraged a tiny few swine droppings makers to try doing pearls in the future.  How could he not?  But it was all very Darwinian, I think.

But the thing I liked about Peel, and which I suspect is what almost everyone liked, is that he did not ever try to sound hip.  He never, never did that embarrassing yet ubiquitous thing that is a twenty seven year old graduate of Harrow and Durham University trying to sound like a fifteen year old from the lower class part of town.  You know what I mean.  Biggest single cause of channel hopping and broken radio and TV sets there is, in my opinion.

Peel, on the other hand, would introduce his next tune – “and now here is Fuck Your Granny’s Goat from the Suicidal Maniacs” – as if passing a rather disagreeable legal document to you across a big desk situated in the most prosperous part of Horsham, Surrey.  He would, at that exact moment, exaggerate his own aging middle- not to say old upper-classness.  Quite right too.  Don’t pretend to be one of these grotesque delinquents.  Instead, be a guiding, encouraging, adult presence for them.

What Peel was doing was welcoming these various reprobates into adult society, without ever surrendering any particle of good manners or adult decorum.  On the contrary, he was acknowledging these various, temporarily unwashed but actually ragingly ambitious strummers and yellers into that particular part of adult life that they had chosen, instead of demanding that they all become lawyers or dentists and hating everything about them, like their parents.  Young people felt un-got-at, either by being screamed at or worse, by being badly and embarrassingly imitated and by having their youthful slang stolen.  Older persons such as me nodded approvingly.  Quite right John.  Young People These Days Aren’t As Bad As All That - They Just Need A Little Encouragement.

If only the music had not been mostly such junk.  But you can’t have everything.

Well actually you could.  More recently, Peel used to do a delightful radio show on Saturday mornings which was all Peel and no Fuck Your Granny’s Goat by the Suicidal Maniacs.  One of the minor but definite sadnesses of my life has been that this usually clashed with CD Review.

I actually don’t have to have little photos for you to click on to get the big ones.  I can just put XX, or something, and you can click on that.  So, here are eleven XXs:

XX XX XX XX XX XX XX XX XX XX XX

I only gradually realised that the picture taken here, eleven times, a bit after I took the ones of the towers in the previous posting, had to include the lady on the right.  I particularly like the penultimate one where she has a smoke.

If this was a Mark Holland posting, all these photos would be 500 pixels across without any clicking, and there would be a hilarious running commentary.  In this case I imagine that there would be Linford Christie references.

Another busy day, so a couple of quota photos, taken in March of this year, from Parliament Hill, Hampstead, looking down over London, and in particular, at the towers of Docklands:

According to my camera, as recorded by my hard disc, the first was taken at ten to five on March 22nd, and the second was taken ten minutes later.  I was lucky with the weather that day.

I still wish cameras could do what eyes do, namely see the fine distinctions within the light bits and the dark bits, of the same view.

Click to get them bigger.

I’ve been out all day today, and a very lovely day it was too, but that means not a lot here.  Just to say, my thanks to Charles Pooter, for commenting that he likes these pictures.

He has a blog, which I will presently add to my blogroll.  I got there just in time to find this choice quote, in the aftermath of the July 7th bombs, which he found at thetoffeewomble and which deserves to stick around and get around:

A friend of mine visits a strip pub, once a week, down by the Gray’s Inn Road. Despite the bombs, he went along this afternoon, as usual, and was the only guy with four strippers. But, he told me, he had to go - ‘otherwise the terrorists would have won’.

Quite right too.

Two jumps, to a blog I never knew existed.  Not a wildly amusing one, but one I never knew existed.  Harry Hutton links to a scornful piece about the daft semi-religious practices of the Blairs of Downing Street in the New Humanist, where they also, it turns out, have a blog.

Two things to say about this.  First, good, I have now done my blogging duties here today.  Any other stuff you get here this side of October 15th is beyond what you are promised.  Like: the rest of this posting, which I now know to have gone on a bit.

Second, more seriously, I think that one of the purposes of a personal and don’t-care-who-reads-it blog like this one is to enable me to feel my way into controversial topics, like this one about the daftness of Goddism.  You see?  I would never say anything like that in a public place, like Samizdata.  Well, sometimes I do, and the commenters erupt like a poked hornets’ nest.  And I know we are under orders to ignore the commenters, but sometimes it is hard.

Besides which, I am in a quandary.  A lot of the good things in the world just now are being done by Christians, i.e. people whose religious beliefs I find it hard not to go beyond total disagreement with, to contempt for.  I mean really.  God, infinitely all-knowing, infinitely nice, presiding over all the horrors of real life, no evidence except for daft ancient literary rumours.  But just now, apart from the odious Islamists of course, I can’t see this drivel doing - or even being much connected to - huge harm, certainly not compared to the atheist lunacies of Bolshevism.

But I agree with the lefties that it can’t be very good for the most powerful, as of now, country on earth to be ruled by people who profess the bizarre beliefs that they do.  I realise that Bush is being misquoted when he is said to have said that God told him to invade Iraq.  But so what?  The report may be inaccurate, but it is essentially true, in the sense that he does believe in God, very seriously, and he presumably must consult God before he does something like invade Iraq.  He certainly isn’t going to get embroiled in denying that God told him to invade Iraq, is he?  ("So Mr President, are you saying that God did not tell you to invade Iraq?  Did he perhaps warn you against invading Iraq?  What exactly did He say?")

My problem is that maybe God was – so to speak - right about invading Iraq.  Things in Iraq have not gone as smoothly as I hoped, but nor have they gone as badly as I feared, and I think things could yet turn out very well.  By the time the Goddist Bush is replaced by some other bloke who takes his unavoidable nods of respect towards Christianity less seriously, the USA’s Iraq policy may be impossible to reverse, and Iraq could be well on the way towards being a Middle Eastern Japan or South Korea, or even West Germany.  Things change in the Middle East, very fast.  Something good happens, like the original war being over in about a day, or that election earlier in the year followed by pro-democracy demonstrating elsewhere.  But then the lefties gradually get the bad news machine cranked up again, and everyone starts to believe, again, that it will all unravel, like Vietnam.  Then something else good happens, and the lefties regroup, temporarily confounded, and so it goes, until ten years later, the lefties give up and look elsewhere for anti-Western triumphs.

In general, some of the best things ever to have been done in the whole of human history (think: Quakers) have been done by Christians, and in a way that is extremely hard to separate from their religious beliefs.  And if some unhinged Christian blogger wants to make that his quote of the day, that’s fine by me, with or without this sentence.

Meanwhile, if you go with the New Humanist types, you find yourself (or such are my suspicions) being offered a package of soft or worse, not-so-soft, soft-in-the-head leftism (of the sort which lusts for catastrophe in the Middle East followed by a general collapse of the West in the face of Islamist barbarism) as the natural consequence of dumping God.  Which does not follow, to put it mildly.

So how and where do you start?

Well, I say, I start here, at this blog.  I may never get beyond a little sloganising and general pacing about the battlefield, as in this posting, but then again, here I have the chance to do better than that, whenever the spirit moves me, if you’ll pardon the expression.

So, new categories: “Religion”, and “Atheism”.  And I think I also need to have “USA” and “Middle East”.

By the way, I dislike the word “humanism”.  My atheism is negative, a statement of disbelief in a daft proposition.  It is not a positive statement in favour of anything else.  I don’t especially believe in humans, or “humanity” (very odd word that), other than believing in the obvious fact that human beings, unlike God, do actually exist.