There is a particularly choice posting up at Chase Me Ladies today.

Harry Hutton has the gift of combining the banal pomposities of the opinion-expressing classes, weighed down with borrowed and mangled literary clichés from a bygone age, with his own extremely unbanal made-up or for all I know genuine opinions, about hanging versus beheading Australians this time.  He is currently my favourite blog-humour-monger.

Let he who is without motes in his eye cast the first beam.

Harry has also achieved the miracle of often quite funny and informative commenters.  The contrast with the primitives who add their superfluous squawks of appeciation and leaden attempts at humour to the Dave Barry weblog is extreme.  Or it was last time I bothered looking at any comments there.

I would be interested to learn Harry Hutton’s views about the Singleton Diet, both the blog and the diet.  If he wants Singleton-Diet-related seriousness to remove the trousers from, he need look no further than here.

Friedrich Blowhard dislikes communal entertainment on a communal screen in an airplane, but sees improvement coming:

Fortunately, as politicians will say, Help Is On The Way. Actually help’s already here provided you’re on the right airline or airliner.

Help takes the form of small video screens mounted on the backs of seats. Instead of a single entertainment sequence, you can select what you view from a reasonable variety of offerings. On transatlantic flights, I prefer the maps showing the route and the position of the plane along with statistics such as altitude, airspeed, groundspeed, distance/time relative to origin and destination, and so forth. On a recent Polar flight from Copenhagen to Seattle I was able to track latitude, discovering that we peaked just shy of 78 degrees north.

As only a very occasional air traveller, I like to look out of the window (which I like to be next to), preferably not just staring at the wing, and both enjoying and pondering the mysterious things to be seen below.  For example, what is this, which I saw out of the window, seconds after photoing the Millau Viaduct, on my trip earlier this year to the South of France?

I still don’t kinow that that circle that you can dimly see there is all about, and would have liked to have had some clues while we flew past it.  Click on that to get the circle in closer-up and with the Photoshop contrast knob set at 50.  But I am none the wiser.

Given the restricted nature of what you see from an airplane, unless you are very lucky, I would especially like this:

SAS’s A340s have videocameras mounted so that you can select views of what’s ahead and what’s below the aircraft. This was fascinating, especially when the plane was taxiing and taking off and landing; you sort of get a pilot’s view of things.

And in a perfect world, I could rerun what we just saw, pick out a picture, and grab it on my little camera card, and show it to the likes of you!  All of which will surely happen in due course.  Why not?  Air transport is becoming ever more competitive.

This article, about something I had never heard of until now, namely the David Beckham football academies, has got me thinking again about education.  This is the kind of thing I used to link to from my old Education Blog.

The relationship between organised games and education of young boys is, I believe, fundamental, and has been for a very long time, ever since the English Victorians decided to de-emphases torture as the basic method of getting boys to do what they told them to do.  They still used torture, but less relentlessly.

Put it like this.  Suppose (which I do not, but that is a different argument) that you want to make boys do this or that, like: pay attention in class.  You can bribe them.  You can threaten them.  Those are your choices.

Bribing boys to behave with money is, I think, a very good idea.  It’s called work, and I am for it, on the same basis that I am for work for adults.  That is, slavery and exploitation (as in too much work that is too nasty for too little money) is bad, for anyone, but people of any age being able to choose work they quite like and getting paid for it seems to me a good principle.  The corollary to “lifetime education “ (i.e. occasional bursts of education throughout one’s life) ought to be lifetime work, i.e. starting work early.

However, that is not a very fashionable opinion nowadays.  The word “exploitation” is now used to blur the exact and vital distinction between nice work and nasty work that I made in the previous paragraph, maybe not for adults so much these days, but definitely still for children.  So, in the meantime, what’s the answer to extracting obedience from boys?  Torture?  Again, and here I wholly agree with the contemporary zeitgeist, not fashionable.  That leaves non-monetary bribery.

And the biggest culturally acceptable bribe for boys is and always has been: games.  Pay attention in class, or we won’t allow you to play football, etc.  Boys love to play games, but are not sufficiently organised to organise such games for themselves.  To put it another way, stopping them from doing this is quite easy.

Linking games playing, and the adoration felt by boys for those who play games very well, with classwork, in a more positive way, by turning footballers loose in the classrooms to teach boys seems to me, in the absence of my anarcho-capitalist nirvana, also a step in the right direction.  This is a point I often made at my old Education Blog.

On the other hand, if you abandon organised games, along with torture and bribes of other kinds, what are you left with?  Out of control boys, is what.  This is exactly what a lot of schools have recently done, and I think this is one of the big reasons for bad boy behaviour in school now.

But this new Beckham academy is huge, and a lot of boys will get to visit it.

But only if they behave.

Over at Flickrzen at the moment is featured this beautiful photo of Nelson’s Column.

It is of course the vapour trails that make it.  But notice also the cranes, bottom left, echoing the shape of the water.

I think I know the day when this was taken.  It was cold, cloudless, and still.  It was the day I took this:

That was during the lunch hour on the Saturday when I also took these.  Shame I didn’t think to walk about two hundred yards to Trafalgar Square.

I said something rather rude to Natalie Solent (top left of these pictures) at that conference (where the pictures were taken).  I told her that the reason Mark Steyn likes her blog so much is that she has children, and Mark Steyn worries about things like that.  Bloggers sitting at home on their own, infertilely, are a Bad Thing, even if they write really well.  I now think this was rather rude, and I pretty much entirely take it back.

The clear implication of what I said was that it was not her writing.  But actually, I think it is her writing.  Her kids don’t do any harm when it comes to impressing Steyn, and maybe make Steyn want to like Natalie’s writing, but they wouldn’t get Steyn reading her stuff if he didn’t like it.

In other words, what Steyn thinks about Natalie Solent is a bit like what Natalie Solent herself says about rape, in this latest, very thoughtful posting.  The Solent kids contribute something to Steyn liking Solent.  But the important thing is he likes Solent’s actually writing.  And, Girls who wear skimpy clothes and who flirt with men who subsequently rape them are, in contrast, not helping.  They are responsible, a bit.  But rape is rape and the rapist is still entirely to blame.  Like Natalie says, this is not a pie chart.

See also: other crimes, like thieving.  If you leave your valuables in a public place unattended and they get nicked, you definitely contributed to your misfortune, and you are right to reproach yourself for your foolishness.  But the thief who nicked them is still entirely to blame for doing that.

The Singleton Diet is developing a running gag, which is that Alex eats potatoes and carrots topped with a rich gravy with the Prime Minister.  He resists the chocolate sooflay with Grand Marniay soaking and instead contents himself with the cardboard biscuits with rancid butter and stale cheese with the Pope.  He has a breakfast of rat droppings and chipboard offcuts soaked in totally skimmed milk before going off to be on the radio to debate globalisation with Adolf Hitler.  Madsen Pirie needs to stay sober, so drinks tepid mango juice with Lea & Perrins Sauce instead of his usual Shatto Nerf du Pap 69, because he is about to become the next monarch and his coronation is this evening, on television.  If Singleton keeps his Diet up for another twenty years, he will become the Samuel Pepys of contemporary London, the difference being that he will be quite fun to read even if you are not a historian, given that, unlike with bloody Pepys, we still know and maybe even care who the various people are that Alex dines with.

I was going to pause around now and give you an example of how the style might be developed, but in describing it I already did, so now I will continue consuming my mid morning breakfast of lukewarm Gold Blend while chewing the last three tablets in my box of Wrigley’s Airwaves Vapour Release Menthol & Eucalyptus Chewing Gum, purchased at my local Tesco.  I probably need now to have something more solid, such as a small but tasty bowl of Kellogg’s Just Right (only available at Sainsbury’s for some reason) semi-soaked in semi-skimmed milk.  But must press on because Jesus Christ will be calling round for a chat around noon, as will Gordon Brown.  The Prophet Mohammed said he might drop by also, but may be busy.  I’ll be sure to let you all know what we all have for lunch.

The Micklethwait Clock appears to be back in sync, despite my worries yesterday.  Last night, I found myself tired just when I wanted to be (1 am), went to bed, went to sleep, and got up much earlier this morning (9 am).  Why?  I think it is because just as a bunged-up nose makes lying awake at night no fun, so too does it make lying awake – and potentially, again, asleep – in the morning less appealing.  So, I get up when I first wake up.  This was why I was tired last night.  I got up yesterday morning despite not feeling fully rested.  (It was late anyway, which is why I didn’t see the value of this at the time (around noon).) This morning, ditto.

The reason I go on about this Micklethwait Clock thing is not to entertain you people - although my experience is that literary oddities like this can work quite well despite not trying to, and perhaps because not trying to.  I write about my Micklethwait Clock for the same reason Alex blogs about his Singleton Diet, which is to change my own behaviour.  I need to make an earlier start, for the rest of my life.  If you are entertained in any way by these peculiar writings, that is a mere bonus.

Nevertheless, I cannot help noting that my minimum blogging duties here, today, are now done.  Since I have a meeting chez moi this evening - Evans and Gabb (in no particular order) talking (in I don’t know what order) about the LA’s future.

There just has to be a posting here.  It does not have to make sense, be interesting, worth reading, etc.  You get what you pay for.

I went from Instapundit to this Pajamas Media report, to this blog posting to these photos and then to this photo in particular:

Nothing very out of the ordinary.  Just a bunch of people queueing up to vote in a referendum, inside a building with pictures on it.  In the foreground: nice flowers.

And that’s my point.  It occurs to me to wonder if the internet may finally be about to solve that recurring Africa problem, to the effect that you only ever see Africa pictures when there’s trouble, when people are starving or killing one another.  Now, thanks to Africa being like everywhere overrun by Billion Monkeys (i.e. humans with digital cameras), a torrent of boring photos of the boringness of Africa will finally correct that dramatic, but hopefully, eventually, rather false impression.

And as if eager to back me up, the telly obliged this evening with some classic Africa misery pictures, from Niger:

Leon Louw was at the Conference I attended last weekend (he’s the guy in square number 3.1, if you get my drift, here), and he commented from the floor, in connection with something or other, that actually the bits of Africa that are now doing well are doing very well indeed.  He was saying that foreign aid harms Africa by rewarding the worst governments with tons of money.  I forget why.  True of course.

Yes, I remember.  It was a discussion about think tanks, and we were mulling over whether you have to compromise or not.  The speaker was saying that think tanks do have to compromise a bit, and be gradualistically positive.  Louw was recalling how, on the radio (although this time it was the BBC), he had been uncompromisingly negative, about foreign aid and a foreign aider whom he denouced as evil and in favour of poverty and what is more that such evil persons, despite having done lots of harm, would then try to take all the credit for the good bits which they had failed to fuck up with their evil aid (which the BBC loved because he was actually saying something and asked him back to say it again).  The think tanker on the platform was trying to get in among the political system and create movements within it that are not now happening. Louw was merely trying to shoot something down in flames, and to demoralise the supporters of it into a state of miserable and shell shocked stupor.  To that end, the more uncompromising the better.

So, here’s to Africa getting soon to live in uninteresting times, and being photographed uninterestingly.

The Singleton Diet is back on track.  Alex is either back eating again, or has set his chocolates and crisps aside.

But the Micklethwait Clock is seriously out of order.  I have had a cold for the last four days, and when you have a cold, your head wants to remain upright.  I’m not good at explaining this without using words like “snot”, so trust me on this. When you go to bed, you want to be asleep quickly.  If you aren’t, you do not want to just lie there.  You want to sit up.  As I say: snot.  So, the Micklethwait Clock is going to need some serious adjustment when the snot issue has abated.  I think I should stop now.

I’m watching a fascinating TV show about the Elgar Piano Concerto that has been cobbled together from sketches, recorded improvisations by Elgar himself on the piano, and the like, by a guy called Robert Walker.  Fascinating.  The resulting piece is about thirty five minutes long, after lots of cutting of the first version that Walker produced.  The creative process was fraught, and the pianist throughout it all, David Own Norris, and Robert Walker are still arguing about it.

Maybe Elgar would have made the final object as long and big as that actual original, but, unlike that actual original, good enough to last that long.  The violin concerto is fifty minutes long, after all.  But then again, I guess the cello concerto is only half an hour.

That such stories as this – another similar one is the ongoing saga of Mahler’s Tenth Symphony – now loom so large in the world of classical music tells you a lot about the state of classical music.  We are deep into the land of diminishing returns in exchange for unprecedentedly superhuman efforts.  The job of acquainting the big wide world with what all those decomposing composers composed is basically done, and they are scraping the barrel, occasionally finding either dubious fragments by an established master like Bach or Handel, Mahler or Elgar, and more commonly worthwhile unfamiliar stuff by lesser figures.  Sooner or later they will have to switch entirely to writing new stuff, and at that point they will have to understand what that involves, which I am convinced that most of them don’t at the moment.  More about that in the future.

But guess what, I have just ripped off a paragraph on that exact topic, by way of a tangent, and here it is.  Basically, the classical music fraternity has got to forget about “classical” music – a distinction that dates from the age of the Great Recording Project and which now makes less and less sense.  Instead, they must just make music.  Yes, some of the music will be “orchestral”, just as a mass of fine organ music has been written since the now long gone age when the organ, like the now equally dethroned symphony orchestra, was the King of the Instruments.  After all, all those organs still existed and were still perfectly playable, so it made sense to go on writing things for them.  But, the musicians mustn’t kid themselves that because their stuff may, what with being played on this peculiar thing called an orchestra, sometimes sound like Brahms, that it is the direct artistic descendant of e.g. the Brahms First Symphony, in the way that the Brahms First Symphony was itself the direct descendant of the Beethoven symphonies, which it was.  This is the equivalent of regarding Elizabeth II as Elizabeth I reborn.  Elizabeth II may wear similar robes to the ones Elizabeth I did, and have a similar title, and say similar words in public.  But there the similarity ends.

I have the Dutton recording of this Elgar/Walker Concerto, and have listened to it, once.  I was eager to hear it, if only because I so love the Elgar Piano Quintet.  Apparently, said the TV show, Elgar listened over and over again to a recording of the Quintet, when he was on his death bed.  How about that?

I did not much care for the Elgar/Walker concerto, but classical music seldom gets to me first time around, usually because I don’t listen to it carefully enough.  I’ll certainly give it another few goes, in fact I am giving it another go right now, because now they are playing it on the TV.  The trick is for me to stop fussing about how I wanted it to sound (a cross between the first Elgar symphony and the second Brahms piano concerto) and instead to listen to what it actually does sound like (first approximation: a cross between the second Elgar symphony and the Dvorak piano concerto – but please don’t quote that as if it was a considered judgement).

Already I am starting to like it more.  This is the kind of show that makes me wish I had a proper way of recording digital TV.

Yesterday I tried to post the posting that you see below, but did not see any result, because I couldn’t.  I was having problems.  But there it is!  I kept going.  Something however crap, every day.

Yesterday two unrelated problems erupted.  First, as I have now been told, my webhosting service upgraded their arrangements, which meant that I had to upgrade mine, or mine wouldn’t work.  Then, second, my internet connection had a fit, and went off line for about a day.

Luckily, I was able to ring up Mark Rousell, and all was, in due course, explained, and then in a bit more due course, sorted.  This experience confirmed everything in that earlier posting.  I am now going to place all my computing arrangements - blogging software, email, webhosting, everything - in Mark’s capable hands.  I know.  Eggs and baskets.  But you have to take risks in this life, and he feels like a very good basket to me.  The crucial point, as I explained, is that this way, when things go wrong, you only need to ask one person.

Coincidentally, in adition to my computer being ill, I have been ill too.  Sore throat, etc.  I had to skulk away from that LA Conference early, and am still not at my best, so this little posting will probably be all you get here today.

Problems.  This is a test.

Back at Liberty 2005, and took more photos.  The first two both feature the great Tim Evans, the LA’s Beloved One and future Great Leader, who is very good at posing for photos.  The first is with Professor Antony Flew, and the second with Gladstone.  Tha National Liberal Club is full of Gladstones.

And the other two are further Billion Monkey shots.  The first features Philip Chaston (not in the National Liberal Club, and second Mario Huet, a long time friend of Sean Gabb.  For a long time I had assumed that Mario Huet was a Sean Gabb alias, but Mario is for real.

Mario was doing lots of videoing, and there will, I think I remember Sean Gabb saying, be a DVD.

By the way, Tim will be doing my next Brian’s Last Friday, this Friday, and will be talking about the future of the Libertarian Alliance.

Update Tuesday: On Monday, just before this blog went off air for a day, I had a rather anxious phone call from Tim saying he is keen to stress that he will not be any kind of sole boss of the LA but will be running it as a twosome with Sean Gabb.  Sean Gabb will be “Director” and Tim will be “President”.  I think those are the names.  This is not a case of Tim being unable to see and take a joke.  Rather does he want different jokes, about him AND Gabb, rather than about him alone.  I’ll get to work on that.

Meanwhile, the message they want to put out is that they want to crank up the libertarian writing again.  So if you have anything of a libertarian nature to say which you would like the LA to publish, get writing and send it in.  The LA website does a lot of business, and people (e.g. rather studious students and policy wonks) who have no time for blogs definitely read stuff there.

Update to the Update: Bloody hell.  If I carry on like this there is a danger of me turning a smooth succession into an imaginary succession crisis.  In my email to my Brian’s Last Fridays list I implied again that Tim will be the sole supremo, but this is not repeat not the case.  And apparently the titles of Director and President are anything but finalised.  In any event, both Tim and Sean will be speaking this coming Friday, which will enable everything to be clarified.

I spent today at Liberty 2005, and here are twenty of the least worst photos I took while there.  I don’t have time to tell you who all these people are.  Just clever people.  That will have to do.  Apart from Mugabe who is a stubborn bastard.

Click to get the big pictures.

The Mainstream Media.  Bastard people!  Except when they give your mates a damn good write-up:

Perry on the far left, and Adriana next to him.  Plus five other blokes.  So far as I can recall, the only one I’ve met is Norm Geras, on the top right, but that could be wrong.

Sample quote:

As I arrive, De Havilland is laughing, nearly hysterically, at a blog at Oliver Kamm, a London hedge-fund manager and member of the “pro-war left” who now also writes a column for the Times. “Just marvellous,” says De Havilland. “I was thinking of making it Samizdata quote of the day. It’s something to the effect that, well, there’s no point in denying that our involvement in Iraq has inflamed [Islamist totalitarian] opinion. Why should we deny it? It’s something we should be proud of!”

Read the whole thing.

I have famous friends.  And I write, whenever I please, for the grandfather of British political blogs.

Lat night, while walking along the Kings Road with two long-suffering friends, I espied a rare pair of automotive birds, namely two of those Indian adapted 1950s Morris Oxfords.  They were decked out with flowers, so they were presumably participating in some kind of London Hindu ceremony, like a wedding.

These two are, I think, examples of the Hindustan Ambassador.  I include the second picture only beause it shows a blurry cyclist going past, in a rather odd and photographically interesting way.  When there is little light around, the camera takes its time, and turns anything moving past what it is concentrating on into a blur.  Click to get the bigger pictures.

The Indian Morris Oxford Saga is one of the great Peculiar Car stories, to set alongside such other politico-economic automotive strangenesses as the Volkswagen, the Citroen 2CV, the Zyl, the Trabant, the De Lorean, and many more that I can’t now think of.

The reason I am so fond of these Indian Morris Oxford adaptations is that the car I most remember my family having when I was a kid was also a Morris Oxford.  It was a blue grey version of this, but without the shades on top of the headlights.  Before that, we had a Standard Flying 12, but I can only just remember that one.  The Morris (WPD 880) was the one I remember.  That also survives in India, I am almost sure, although I think the popular Indian version is of the later Morris Oxford with the more sticky out bits on its rear.

I have always rated Tom Peters as a business writer, and, because I just now discovered it, I am now about to add his blog to my blogroll.  This blog is called Tom Peters in psychobabbly all lower case letters with no space between the tom and the peters, and with an exclamation mark at the end, his point presumably being that, he’s not your usual business bloke in a suit.  Not many are these days, I guess.

I know extremely little about business, having hardly done any at all, but it seems to me that Peters has made a succession of pretty good points, quite well, and more than quite entertainingly, entertainment being central to his message.  I have liked him ever since I first read In Search of Excellence.

I’m not completely sold on the guy, partly because, partly for the same reasons I’m not, so many others aren’t.  Much has been made, in particular, of the fact that many of the “excellent” companies in In Search of Excellence didn’t subsequently do very well.  Yes, that is a problem I do agree.  But then, who does know how to predict business success?  Does this mean that companies should try to be mediocre.  Perhaps, in a way, it does - see below.

More seriously, from the point of view of whether you actually like Tom Peters, is that many find his relentless and quasi-religious upbeatness exhausting or worse, and maybe I would too if I had dealings with him personally.  He might, you could say, bring out the old-fashioned Englishman in me.  Many is the time when some stranger has tried to tug my heartstrings from a stage with overcooked rhetoric of one kind or another, and I have folded my arms, concreted over my face, and just waited for it to end.

Every time I hear the word “passion” misused to mean, “I am really quite interested in it given that I am paid to be”, which happens a hell of a lot nowadays, I feel a little ill.  You can’t switch on passion like an electric light, but lots of people use the word as if you could.  The second Tom Peters book, I seem to recall, was called A Passion for Excellence.  That was when all this passion crap started, if I am not mistaken.

You can’t fake passion, which one of the many reasons why I have never purchased the services of a prostitute.  It is not that I think that it is particularly immoral to buy or sell it, simply that the “it” that I want is not something she will be selling.  She may, maybe (think Jane Fonda in Klute), be selling the pretence of passion, but for me that would be worse than nothing.

But, if I ever attended a Tom Peters show, I would at least start by giving the guy the benefit of the doubt.

He is entertaining and somewhat outrageous for a reason.  One of his more significant observations goes approximately: all business is show business.  The world is full of people who prefer show business to business business, because show business is so much more fun.  So, says Peters, make business business more like show business.  Make it appeal to the emotions, and not just to the wallet and, if you are lucky, the intellect.  Go for excellence as in excellence exclamation mark, rather than as in some arithmetised formula which merely somewhat misdefines it, like: 95% right.

The trouble is that chasing that last 5% in a swirl of exclamation marks can sometimes be very bad business.  Numbers do count, and are often extremely well worth counting, and getting seventy out of a hundred is often plenty good enough.  Some customers are not worth satisfying.  Which are no doubt all points which Peters has answered a million times and more at his many many highly priced roadshow type seminar revival meetings.

I also remember being impressed by a book written by the guy who co-wrote The Pursuit of Excellence with Peters, a bloke called Waterman.  Waterman split with Peters before A Passion for Excellence, as I recall it.  I suspect that Waterman feels as I do about passion.  Search was quite enough for him thankyou.

In his book (now long out of print it would seem), Waterman made much of the value of calmly looking at “friendly” numbers, as well as getting excited about being excellent.  I especially recall a chapter about the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra.  There was no lack of passionate excellence at the SFSO, although no doubt some were more passionate than others as is the way with all orchestras.  But what did orchestral “excellence” actually mean?  What did it consist of?  Waterman looked at numbers, like number of recordings made, and just counted them, without any exclamation marks.  Concentrating on such numbers is often what success is all about.  Don’t forget about excellence, but sometimes, loud and exclamation marked i.e. rather forced and frenetic, enthusiasm is about the only thing a business does have, and the answer is to calm down and do some thinking.  Get the numbers right, get the money coming in, do the job well, meet deadlines, blah blah blah, and let the passion take care of itself.

However, I suspect that Peters would agree with quite a lot of the above.  Having thought about passion and being a reasonably honest guy, he presumably has thought about the difference between it and the mere pretence of it.

Anyway, I will be looking some more at his blog.

If only because I learned at it today that one of my earliest favourite business writers, Peter Drucker, has just died.  I missed that until now.

It seems to be a real blog.  Peters himself is actually writing it, and there are real thoughts there, not just puffery for his latest little product or show.  Plus lots of links to other good stuff.  Okay, others are also writing for it, but why not?  He has minions.  Let them express themselves.

I wonder what she (who is doing very well, by the way – yes I do actually know someone who might one day soon be a genuine Business Success) thinks of Tom Peters.  Probably an old-school marketer and hence the spawn of Satan.  Never mind, I like him.

Ashes to ashes:

Good game, though.

At 10.52 GMT this morning, there occurred an historic moment.  England are playing Pakistan at cricket, in Pakistan, so this was late in the afternoon out there.  And it was when Pakistan lost their final second innings wicket.

Kamran Akmal - c Pietersen b Harmison – 33

You have to be an England cricket fan to realise how amazingly that reads.

England now need 198 to go one up, after this first game of the three match series.

Busy day and another blatant quota posting, this time in the form of a quota quote, from the latest RRF Newsletter, number 56 (not up at the website yet, print only, so far), which arrived in the post recently, and which today I actually opened up and looked at:

A member of the International Teaching of Reading Forum (itorf) has reported that an Ebay search for ‘whole language’ has revealed 16 items, whereas a search for ‘phonics’ has revealed 1554 items.  The writer concludes that when consumers are acting in their own best interests they choose phonics 99 to 1 over whole language.  In doing a similar Google search, she found just over five hundred thousand hits for ‘whole language’ but over three million for ‘phonics’.

But I think this is rather misleading.  ‘Whole language’ is only one of a number of descriptive labels for what it labels.  Another label for the same thing is ‘look and say’.  Another is ‘whole word’.  ‘Phonics’, on the other hand, is the much more widely agreed label for, well, phonics.

But I still sympathise with what this person wants us to believe.

The voice of Patrick Allen now dominates the digital telly airwaves, talking up forthcoming and current shows in a very self-send-up way.  What is that about?  Is he a Trotskyite, like all the other voice-over bastards?  Surely not.  Or is he dead, and is someone else impersonating him?

Actors like Patrick Allen are tragic figures, I think.  In an age when poshly rugged masculinity has been deeply out of fashion, posh real men actors like Allen had to do send-ups of themselves, instead of the real thing.  (They also had to watch a succession of non-posh actors play James Bond, but that’s another story.) One day, rugged posh masculinity will be all the rage again, but by then no actors will know how to do it.  James and Edward Fox are about the only ones who have managed to make a living being posh without being ridiculous, and with Edward Fox, I am speaking relatively when I say without being ridiculous.

I mean, when they wanted someone to do the Alan Clark Diaries for the telly, who did they pick for Alan Clark.  John Naked Civil Servant Hurt, that’s who.  Hurt is a good actor, a very good actor.  But Alan Clark?  Surely not.  They just don’t have any actors who are starry enough, and sufficiently like Alan Clark to do Alan Clark properly.  You either pick a star like Hurt who is wrong for it but a very watchable actor, or an actor who is just like Alan Clark, who has consequently been unemployed for the last thirty years and wouldn’t be good enough to carry the show.

No time for more.  Not only is today Shakespeare Sunday (see below) but I am also busy in the evening, hence this now, in the earliest hour of today.

Tomorrow, I and a bunch of other people are to record A Midsummer Night’s Dream for this enterprise, for the internet, CDs, etc.  I am Oberon and Theseus.  So, this being my first time, and them reckoning that I haven’t got enough on my plate with them two, I am also going to nip next door and record a couple of fairy tales, for a Christnas CD I think.

I have spent the evening reading through my MSND parts, highlighting the syllables I need to be emphasising.  I noticed at the first read-through that the actress who is doing Helena, very well, and who is an actual trained actress and not a rank amateur like me, had printed out her part double spaced and put squiggles on top of her lines.  Felt-tipped pen is my version of that.  It forced me to read through everything again, carefully, aloud, which was good.  Reading the result is the difference between crossing a thousand streams on stepping stones, and crossing a thousand streams by wading across.

The trouble with amateurs is that they never know their lines, and it turns out that even when you are reading your lines from off of a script, you still have to know them.  I am trying not to be an amateur.

Today the Mickethwait Clock was running fine.  I went to bed early last night and was up at 8.40am this morning, and did what I should do, and had a proper breakfast.  Then I listened to CD Review.  But breakfast turned out to have been was too proper and I also had a headache from drinking too much wine last night, so I had to go back to bed for two more hours.  This means that tomorrow, I will probably fall asleep around lunchtime, just when Oberon is supposed to be at his most magical.  Bugger.

I was browsing through some of Adam Tinworth’s photos (blog here), and came across this one:

.

Written messages can make good photos, I think.  Another reason I like it is that my principle socially dyslexic habit is collecting promotional mugs.  Which is better than collecting body parts.  I suppose.

I took this photo about a month ago, and only just realised what I had, although I don’t know which super-celeb it was:

Click to get that all a bit bigger.

Actually it was just a sunny day.

I also rather like the South American dancing lady in the mural on the right.  But the sun is behind her, for real as well as in her picture, and she does not look her best.

For the whole of last academic year, if that’s what they call it, ending last July, I was visiting the school I called Paradise Primary.  You can read about some of my early visits here.

It didn’t work out.  The problem was not Paradise Primacy, or its inmates, adult or juvenile.  The problem was the travelling.  I had blithely told VRH that, sure, a trip to Chelsea