Yesterday I happened to switch on BBC Radio 3’s Private Passions show (doesn’t Michael Berkeley’s hair look strange?), which is Desert Island Discs for slightly more artistically elevated persons than they tend to have, and with rather more of the actual music.  Most guests take the chance to play slightly off-the-beaten-track music.  Why play stuff which most of those listening will already know? 

Yesterday, I started listening at the point when “award winning Irish writer Colm Toibin” (Radio Times) was talking rhapsodically about the Irish composer Frederick May (1911-1985 - picture on the right), and saying what hell on earth it was being a classical composer in De Valera’s Ireland.  He’d have done better in Stalin’s Russia, said Toibin, which I think would have been a bit of a gamble.  Anyway, they then played a movement of his one and only string quartet, his best work, apparently.  It was very nice.  Maybe Naxos, having issued it and then deleted it as a Marco Polo nearly full pricer, will reissue it on bog standard Naxos.  Frederick May looks a bit like an old Quentin Tarantino, I think.  More from Naxos about May here.  Like Vaughan Williams, who taught him, May made much of folk music, in his case Irish folk music.

Meanwhile, if I subscribed to the Naxos website, I could just play it on my computer.  Like the man says, soon there’ll be no such thing as a deleted album.

My current computer speakers are crap.  Cheaply plastic and cheaply plastic sounding, with no facility to moderate the treble.  Maybe the time has come to get better ones.  Will that make a big difference?  I’m guessing: yes.  I now have room for such speakers, what with me now having a flat computer screen and a space where the bulge at the back used to be.

Anyway, this is just me telling myself not to forget about Frederick May’s string quartet.

Well, quite dangerous.

Incoming:

To Brian Micklethwait,

As a reader of your blog, I think it would be wonderful if you could publicize this very important and quite dangerous development.  The press in France is not only an instrument of the government and leftish PC thought, but it apparently considers itself beyond criticism, and is willing to use the legal system to silence and punish anyone who dares criticize the press itself.

France 2 and Charles Enderlin are suing private citizens for defamation for calling them liars online.

France 2’s outrageous assault on the right to free speech in France, which barely exists at this point (if it ever did exist; the conviction of Emile Zola in the Dreyfus Affair is a typical precedent), appears to be ongoing and very successful.

I was in Paris for recently writing about this.  Here are my first three posts; there will be more coming:

http://neo-neocon.blogspot.com/2006/10/im-off-to-palais-de-justice.html

http://neo-neocon.blogspot.com/2006/10/facade-encountering-palais-de-justice.html

http://neo-neocon.blogspot.com/2006/10/behind-facade-of-justice-french.html

Thanks!

Neo-neocon

Access over 1 million songs - Yahoo! Music Unlimited Try it today.

I have added neo-neocon to the blogroll.

On Saturday afternoon, I spotted this vehicle outside Sainsbury’s in Wilton Road:

Click to get it bigger, i.e. so you can read what it says on the side.  When I did that, and googled it, I immediately got to this blog.

I can’t immediately tell if this is a proper blog or an evil pseudo-blog written by evil advertising copywriters.  This posting has an air of genuineness about it, being about the apples they use for their apple juice.  I presume.  Or “smoothies”, whatever they are.  So, I suspect: a proper blog.

Adriana or Jackie D would be able to tell at once.

More about their vehicles here.

Cute jewelry, etc., done from computer bits.  (Via gizmodo.  I really like this kind of thing, even though I am not a jewelry wearer myself.

Gizmodo and engadget are two regular visiting places even though about half the kit is way beyond me, seeming to consist of meaningless small hand-held TV screens displaying . . . who knows what?

On the other hand, I love reading short bits about things like this super-duper computer for spaceships, or this Japanese robot for inspecting under the floor, a cross between a miniature movie camera and a miniature tank, or these LED car headlights.  The good news is that about half a dozen gadgets seem to go up at these places every day.  I wouldn’t want to spend my whole day, or even my whole breakfast time, reading about such stuff, but a few minutes of it every day is a most pleasing tonic.

Which reminds me, I need to do another of those ain’t-capitalism-great? postings over at Samizdata, illustrated with a particularly sexy gadget found at engadget or gizmodo.

Ideologist are relentlessly prone to misery.  It goes like this: (a): This is how the world should be!  Hurrah!  (b) Oh dear, it’s not like it should be!  Woe!  (c):  It’s getting less like it should be every day!  Woe woe!! (d): Only we can see this!  All others are happy, and deceived!!!  Woe woe woe!!!  (e) (when someone like me tells them to lighten up): Only I and I alone can see it!  All (you) others are fools, fools I tell you! Woe woe woe woe!!! (f) (g) (h) etc.:  Etcetera.  Getting ever more woeful and woebegone.

Cheer up mate.  Buy yourself a pair of keyboard cufflinks.

I went out for a drink with Elena the Struggling Actress this evening, just when I had pencilled in to do some proper blogging for you people.

Elena the Struggling Actress is just now struggling to make the most of an acting course that she is doing.  In the course of describing this course, and her ambitions as an actress, she said, very seriously:

“I need to become a well-oiled machine.”

My mind boggled, in ways that I choose not to describe.

Later, I took a picture of Elena the Struggling Actress.  Behind Elena the Struggling Actress is a broken window, broken in the manner of a car windscreen.  At first I tried photo-ing Elena the Struggling Actress through the window, but that didn’t work.  All I got was window.  Click to get the picture bigger.

Okay this posting is just going to be lots of links, to interesting postings and writings by others, which it is extremely unlikely that you will have read all of, and which only have in common one thing, which is that I like them, or in one way or another found them of interest.  I don’t necessarily agree with everything linked to.

I don’t know where the urge came from to do this, but here goes, in no particular order . . .

The TaxPayers’ Alliance explains why taxcutter critics of David Cameron are wrong about how to argue for tax cuts.  You might have expected the TPA to lead the charge against Cameron on this.  Not so.

The Brazen Careerist dresses for promotion.

A. M. Mora y Leon reports – during and after (i.e. with the result: yes - 78-22 percent) – on the Panama Canal widening referendum.  Great pictures, and a good map.

Squander Two’s posting about how the NHS kills diabetics is getting a lot of attention in my corner of the blogosphere.  Don’t you miss it.

From a bit of a while ago, but short, illuminating and illustrated, is Alice Bachini-Smith’s explanation of why the Gaping Void man is doing so well.

Also illustrated and even shorter, Mark Holland: Whoops.

Jeffrey Archar (well he spelt her Hedda “Gablar") preferred A Moon for the Misbegotten to Spamalot, which he doesn’t get.  He probably does get a lot of spam.  Eve Best, he says, is the new Judi Dench.  I reckon, whenever anybody is described as the new Somebody Else Older and Better, that (a) the new Somebody Else Older And Better is doomed to fizzle out, and that (b) what you really want to be is the first You.

I’ve already linked to these Japan train station adverts from Transport Blog, but go see them if you’ve not done that yet.  Lots of photos.  Now that adverts are being chased out of our homes by new technology that skips past them on the telly, or just never alllows them in in the first place, advertisers are more and more on the lookout for captive audiences, and there is no audience more captive than a station-load of scarcely-if-at-all mobile commuters.

This would have been my Samizdata quote of the day, had the spot not already been taken:

“When he is interviewed by the Metropolitan Police, what innocent explanation will he offer for the fact that 80p in every £1 donated to the Labour Party came from people who were subsequently honoured?”

Great photo of Conservative front benchers in full cry.

Long Tail man Anderson explains how there will soon no longer be such a thing as a deleted album.

Did you miss Perry de Havilland’s classic Samizdata posting just after getting back from hospital last week?  If so, here‘s your chance to correct that.

London Daily Photo is always worth a look, especially today.  I greatly prefer London Dailly Photo to a lot of the other Daily Photo blogs.  Maybe it’s because I’m a Londoner.

Johan Norberg reports on the encouraging progress of Capitalism in the Caucusus, Georgia to be exact.  The entire Johan Norberg site has suddenly stopped working for me, displaying no text at all, no matter what link I press.  (To get from the regular blog to the particular posting about Georgia, it insolently demanded to make changes to my “registry”, which I refused, and it has now gone on total strike, apparently permanently, main blog and all.  Bye bye Johan.) But maybe that link still works for you.  If not, the news is: Capitalism in the Caucusus is making encouraging progress, even if Johan Norberg’s blog is doing less well, according to my experience.  (UPDATE: Hello Johan!  It all seems to be working again!)

Amit Varma links to and quotes Michel Houellebecq in the Guardian, saying:

Life is painful and disappointing. It is useless, therefore, to write new, realistic novels. We generally know where we stand in relation to reality and don’t care to know any more.

Michael Anissimov foresees a nuclear reactor in every home.  Using thorium, apparently, whatever that is.  The countries with the most thorium are, starting from the top: India, Australia, Norway, USA, Canada, South Africa, Brazil.  A rather attractive list.

Matthew Parris hates the marketing-speak word challenge, as in “sorry we can’t do that”.  He also notes that when public spending is being increased it is called “investment”, but when public investment is being cut, it is called “spending”.

And if you want more links, remember that whenever Michael Blowhard entitles a posting Elsewhere, more links is what you’ll get in abundance.

Last night I linked to this review, of some Chopin playing by the late Ronald Smith.  Smith is best known as an interpreter of the music of the highly eccentric Charles Valentin Alkan, and the gist of that review is that Smith plays Chopin with similar eccentricity and that this only sometimes suits the music but mostly does not.

Yet I am enjoying this double album, partly because it is rather oddly played.  Basically, Smith keeps me waiting for certain notes, for no obvious reason and in no way that I can predict.

Different recordings, even seriously badly different recordings, are often very revealing.  They can highlight particular orchestral parts, for instance.  But mostly, by just being different, they can make you listen to the piece, in the time honoured phrase, “as if for the first time”.  Simply, you do not know what the hell will happen next.  And that’s good.

If you know these Chopin Mazurkas well and have settled ideas about how they should be played, you probably won’t like these Smith/Chopin CDs.  But I don’t and I don’t and I do.  The danger of Chopin listening is that it will all sink back into a chocolate box haze of charmingness.  With Smith at the keyboard, there is less haze.  I listen to the notes.

Did you know that the opening phrases of Chopin’s Mazurka Opus 6 Number 2 in C sharp minor - I’ve been listening to this - are strikingly similar in their harmonies to Flip The Switch by the Rolling Stones.  Well, they are.

Ah, what charming lyrics.  But what are they about?  Euthanasia?  The next heroin injection?  Cryogenics?

I’m not gonna burn in hell
I cased the joint
And I know it well
Maybe my carcass
Would feed the worms
But I’m working for the other firm

Here‘s Jagger explaining:

“It’s a very strange lyric, really, about death and about madness and criminality and so on. Quite heavy stuff, really, but it’s a good one. It’s an excellent one to start a record with.”

Are we clear?  (By the way if you follow that link you only get to lots of songs beginning with F.  The individual link to Flip the Switch doesn’t work.  Not in Internet Explorer, anyway.)

The version of Flip The Switch on the album Bridges to Babylon is a mere shadow of the live version, which is sensationally good, on the live DVD of the Bridges to Babylon tour concert, even if I can’t make head nor tail of the damn words.

So when Johnny of Los Angeles CA says:

A pretty bad Stones song. Just doesn’t have any feeling to it. Just seems of the assessmbly line.

... he’s probably talking about the album track.  Don’t knock things that are “of” the Stones “assessmbly” line, Johnny, of Los Angeles CA.  They just had a bad day. Try the DVD mate.  Or: Johnny of Los Angeles CA is an illiterate tasteless brain dead moron and someone should flip his switch.

Question: who wrote this?

I’m a sergeant in the U.S. Army on a human intelligence collection team. I interact with Iraqis on a daily basis and I help put together the intel picture for our area of operations. I have contacts with friends, who are also in my job, in every area of operations in the Fourth Infantry Division footprint, and through our crosstalk I’d say I have a pretty damn good idea of what’s going on in and around Baghdad on a micro and intermediary level.

I wrote heavily in favor of this war before I enlisted myself, and I still maintain that going into Iraq was not only the necessary thing to do, but the right thing to do as well.

And who, on the other hand, wrote this?

The Iraqi Security Forces (ISF) - a joint term referring to Iraqi army and Iraqi police - are so rife with corruption, insurgent sympathies and Shia militia members that they have zero effectiveness. Two Iraqi police brigades in Baghdad have been disbanded recently, and the general sentiment in our field is “Why stop there?” I can’t tell you how many roadside bombs have been detonated against American forces within sight of ISF checkpoints. Faith in the Iraqi army is only slightly more justified than faith in the police--but even there, the problems of tribal loyalties, desertion, insufficient training, low morale and a failure to properly indoctrinate their soldiers results in a substandard, ineffective military. A lot of the problems are directly related to Arab culture, which traditionally doesn’t see nepotism and graft as serious sins. Changing that is going to require a lot more than “benchmarks.”

In Shia areas, the militias hold the real control of the city. They have infiltrated, co-opted or intimidated into submission the local police. They are expanding their territories, restricting freedom of movement for Sunnis, forcing mass migrations, spiking ethnic tensions, not to mention the murderous checkpoints, all while U.S. forces do ... nothing.

Same guy!

His view is: current policy in Iraq is failing dismally, but we can’t cut and run.  Instead, the US should commit half a million men for a decade.

One thing this chap does confirm is that the policy of just “training more police and soldiers” in Iraq is not just not working, it is pouring flames on the fire of civil war.  The US is now busily training both sides.

And us Brits of course.

I want one day to do a huge essay on the “War on Terror”, etc., for public consumption at Samizdata, or some such place.  (Don’t we all?) But I want to precede it by thinking it through out loud here, but privately, you might say.

Much of the strangeness of the atmosphere re Iraq now is that, as I see it, neither big political team, Pro- or Anti-, foresaw what has actually happened.  The Antis predicted that the military preliminaries would be a disaster, but they weren’t.  They were a cake walk.  Few walks, militarily speaking, have been caker.  And although the Antis foresaw trouble, they foresaw mostly opposition to the Hated Foreigners, not civil war.  But the Pros did not foresee civil war either.  They foresaw a potentially difficult, hopefully easy (as it was), military operation, followed by a brisk and cheerful imposition of democracy.  Okay, maybe not that brisk and cheerful, but more brisk and cheerful than has happened.  They certainly weren’t talking half a million men for a decade.

This seems to me to be the crux of the argument, from another emailer to James Taranto:

It’s always a mistake to see the world as it is today and mistakenly compare it with the world as it was on a day in the past. It’s harder to do, but infinitely more useful, to try to compare today’s situation with that in which we’d find ourselves if we had done nothing.

But if the first guy is right, things are about to get a lot worse, because I can’t see the USA committing half a million men for a decade, and, actually, nor can he.

For me, the crux of this whole thing is that Western Public Opinion is now insufficiently clarified to be the basis of any really difficult policies, like sustaining the current Iraq venture.  Things have to get a lot scarier before the West will unite against its foes, instead of doing what it usually does, namely quarrelling amongst itself.

But if things do get much worse, then by definition, Western Public Opinion will be much less concerned about sneering at the Other Bastards in its own countries, and at the Americans, and genuinely terrified about what the Pesky Muslims might do next.  In this respect, the parallel with Hitler and the process of seeing him off is rather helpful.  British public opinion in 1935 wasn’t able to support throttling Hitler.  Just wait for him to calm down, was their attitude.  By 1940, after Britain had been well and truly scared, the Brits were ready to inflict any horror that their leaders could contrive.

I just hope the Pesky Muslims understand this distinction, but I fear that they do not.  Because if and when the Pesky Muslims ever do succeed in uniting Western Public Opinion, against them, they’d better look out.

But meanwhile, there is no such Western Unity, and there’s no point moaning about this.  Disunity is what The West specialises in.

This “Pesky Muslims” phrase has stuck in my mind.  It was used by my host, a retired journalist, during my recent stay in Brittany.  I like the phrase.  It leaves entirely open just who the “Pesky” Muslims are, and just how Pesky they may or may not be.  There is an air of self-mockery about the phrase, an implication that this may all be a fuss about nothing, that I really like.

My “have strange blogs on my blogroll” policy hit the jackpot this evening when I visited Andrew’s Photoblog, which I admit I only do now and again.

Andrew has a photo there of a work of art.

The work of art is not a proper work of art, but Modern Art art, in which (a) a girl sleeps in a bed which (b) the viewers are then supposed to view with shock and awe.  Wow.  A girl in a bed.  Makes the whole world seem different, somehow.  Take that, capitalist imperialist patriarchy!

The concept is that medicine, in this case sleeping pills, have been used to change a human’s natural state in an attempt to create beauty.

The usual stale old Modern Art bullshit, in other words.  So far so ordinary.

But Andrew’s photo is of a bloke sitting on the bed, having his photo taken.

Posing in front of works of art - especially works of architectural art of course - and being photoed is not unusual.  This is regular Billion Monkey behaviour.  But you don’t so often see someone sitting on an Art bed, and being photoed.  Best of all is that there is a lady guarding this bed from Untoward Interference, who has stood up and is saying: No!  You Can’t Sit On The Bed And Be Photoed!

Why not?  It’s not as if there is anything special about the bed.  It’s a totally ordinary bed, bought in a shop.  Being photoed sitting on the bed is no sillier than the bed and the person sleeping on it being presented as Art.  In fact, I would say, rather more sensible.

What I like about this event is that usually the Artists see themselves as in charge of all the subverting and redefining, of all the making you see things differently, blah blah.  Yet here, someone else is rather subtly changing what they are doing, not by yelling at the thing or by damaging it, but by turning their stupid As Found Art into a good excuse for a personal Billion Monkey snap, and the Artists are the ones responding like outraged Daily Mail readers. 

I share Andrew’s amusement, and congratulate him on a fine Billion Monkey photo, even though, unlike with the best Billion Monkey shots, he has to explain what is happening for us to really enjoy it.

I was going to put up this picture of an A380 Airbus, the one that’s been so dreadfully delayed, at Transport Blog.  But it turns out that I am not allowed to put pictures up there.  Not yet, anyway.  So, I put it here:

Click all you want, but this one won’t get any bigger.  The window, of a travel agency in Quimper, is very grubby, and bigger would just make that all the more obvious.

I am very unhappy.  I have another belly ache, of the sort which makes lying down even more uncomfortable than pacing about groaning.  The best cure for my condition is time, preferably time spent sleeping.  But to sleep, I have to lie down.  Groan.

So do not expect much else in the way of blogging here today.

I thought this had gone away, but I celebrated by eating “normally” again, and I now know that normally won’t do any more.  Groan.

As I get older, old expressions suddenly make new sense.  For some time now I have understood the phrase “under the weather”, which I did not when younger.  Now I know better what is meant by “not having the stomach for” this or that.  Groan.

In this condition, I am like a baby, in that emissions of gas are a source not of social embarrassment but of celebration.  Groan.

Also, I now know where the obsession with “healthy eating” products comes from.  People like the kind of person I have now become.  Trouble is, the food I ate last night was all very healthy stuff.  I just had too much of it.  Groan.

I know what you’re thinking.  Groan.

Transport Blog is back in business, and I celebrate, and avoid more onerous blogging, by posting two transport pictures here.

First, a duck, in water, which I snapped earlier this summer.  You often see these ducks waddling about on dry land, but less often, for some reason, in what should be their natural element:

And second, another tourist shifting machine, this time a pretend train.

I snapped this pretty little contraption in the city of Quimper, in Brittany, where I stayed for a week last month.

Click to get them bigger.

Earlier today I did something very strange.  I pretended to be a bad manager.  Well, I am a bad manager, I expect.  I’ve seldom tried to manage anything beyond my own activities.  But I was acting a bad manager, in front of a video camera.

Richard the Radio Producer (who also runs this - I am, fingers crossed, to be the ideal husband in An Ideal Husband) is trying to get a contract in China to make training videos, to train middling rank hotel managers.  The technique he is trying to sell is to show the trainees some video of bad managers in action, with abusive captions.  And then they make videos, with themselves starring, of what good managers do.

So there I was, despising the person I was talking to, being vague, abusive, dismissive, uninterested, generally Basil-Fawlty-ing away as hideously and nastily as I could ... manage.

It was all based on the very well-known book series called The One Minute Manager with me doing the opposite of all this.

One Minute Managers emphasise and negotiate clear goals. Me: “Goals?  Goals?!?  We’re not playing football!  I tell you what to do, you do it.  So, clean.  No need to write that down.  You know how to clean, don’t you?”

One Minute Managers emphasise praise, for specific good actions, immediately after they’ve been done.  Me: “That cleaning you did last month, or whenever it was.  It was good, apparently.  Ooh, that’s a nice printer.” (That last thing I said for real.  We did all this in a big office full of computing kit of all imaginable kinds, and one particular bit of kit looked especially good.  But the camera was permanently running, and Richard said this off-the-cuff remark of mine was particularly good for communicating my deep lack of concern for the individual.)

One Minute Managers reprimand, again specifically and immediately, reprimanding the sin not the sinner.  Me: “You’re a rotten cleaner.  Didn’t your stupid mother teach you to clean?  There are plenty of other idiots who could do your stupid job.”

One Minute Managers emphasise respect for the person praised or reprimanded, with physical contact to emphasise that the manager is on his side.  Me: “Off you go, and no don’t shake hands with me, you’re dirty from all that cleaning.” Pause.  “Oh, are you still here?”

What a bastard I was.  After about half an hour of filming Richard reckoned he had enough bastardry to make a really nasty vid to show his Chinese customers.  If he gets the contract, I may have to go back to do more, at which point I may even get paid.  As it was, no money, but what the hell, the whole thing only took about an hour and it was interesting.

Here’s a picture of Richard, his cute Sony vid-camera (costing about £1,100 in GB, more like £700 where he bought it, in China), and his partner Zou (pronounced “Zoo") who is from Shanghai.

I asked Zou: How is Shanghai pronounced?  “Shang high”, he said, i.e. as we already pronounce it.  A small mercy to be thankful for.

If all proceeds as Richard and Zou hope, I may end up learning things that will be of use to me at the Globalisation Institute blog, where my latest effort, about tomorrow’s intriguing Panama Canal widening referendum, is now up.

The thing that separates Billion Money type photography from the old kind is that with Billion Monkey photography you get instant information about how well you did, and you can delete rubbish immediately!  Certainly as soon as you get your snaps onto your personal computer.  No more trips to the chemist to see how badly you did, at goodness knows how many pence per failure!

And if I had to choose just one type of Billion Monkey shot to show the world just how great being a Billion Monkey can be, it would be not the shots of the shot actually being taken, but the shots that come immediately after the shots of the shot, namely the shots where the Billion Monkeys look to see how well they did.

When Billion Monkeys look at what they’ve just snapped, they stand still!

When Billion Monkeys look at what they’ve just snapped, they frequently assemble themselves into spontaneous groups, with their heads close together in a way that the photographer of a group often has to beg for, and which therefore often ends up looking fake and stupid.  But Billion Monkeys put their heads together automatically!  They often remind me of those ludicrous USSR propaganda shots of workers excitedly reading Bullshit Weekly and getting Very Excited about the Latest Tractor Production statistics, on pain of death if they don’t look happy enough.  Only, Billion Monkeys are happy for real!

The word “chimping” is sometimes used by pointless people to complain about the pleasure that Billion Monkeys get when they look at their recently taken snaps, especially when the Billion Monkeys in question give audible form to their Billion Monkey happiness.  And whereas “Billion Monkeys” is not intended to be in any way a disrespectful phrase – I am myself a Billion Monkey and proud of it! - “chimping” is definitely intended to be derogatory.

Other people having a good time!  How terrible!

In the end, it’s the sheer happiness that I love about so many of these pictures.  Not everyone is happy, and when they are happy they are often happy-absorbed rather than happy-laugh-out-loud.  Often, our Billion Monkey is thoughtful, or doubtful, or even rather horrified.  But even when they’re horrified, they’re basically happy.  Happy because, you know, ha ha!  And when they are merely disappointed, it can be instantly junked.  So, typically, he, she, they, is, are, happy!  Happy, happy, happy!  And what’s wrong with that?  They either got the exact snap they wanted, or can do another to get it, and then they have a memory to treasure for a lifetime.

Not that everyone here is completely happy.  Sometimes the Billion Monkeys have with them mere people, who perhaps wish that they could just, you know, look at things, instead of always be photo-ing them.  (See for instance the first snap of all.) This is why I do all my own serious Billion Monkeying on my own.  (The other trick is, when you are with someone else, have a spare camera, and lend it to them.  That can work.)

So anyway, browse through some of my favourite Billion Monkey instant feedback shots, by clicking at will on this mosaic of seventy seven Billion Monkey photos, of about twice that number of Billion Monkeys, (almost) all of them very happy.