So I was chuntering through my stuff of a Sunday, when I thought, okay, the World Cup is over, but there’s still cricket, isn’t there?  I wonder what Surrey are doing today.  When I started to find out, I got the camera out:

Eat your heart out, Gilchrist.  Benning is an attacking batsman being talked of as an England prospect by others besides me, and he can really go, but when Ally Brown gets into his stride he is something else again.

Wow.

Ah. Shame.  Oh well, I guess it’ll calm down now, and Surrey will eventually make somewhat less than four hundred and lose seven wickets.  That’s what usually happens after big opening stands.

Back again a while later, and yes, Benning is out too, but they are past 400 already and there are still five overs to go.  They’ve sent in the ferocious Mahmood to keep it going, and he’s keeping it going, but Rikki Clarke, it turns out, is really going.

Three and a half overs later:

And finally:

So, to sum it up: Surrey scored 300 in the first 35 overs, with both the openers getting big hundreds.  Then, they turned on the gas.

If you investigate here, you find that Clarke made 82 off 28 balls.  Equally amazing is that the relative plodder, wicketkeeper-batter Jon Batty, got 29 in 10 balls.

The previous record for the biggest team score in a one day game was 443, scored by Sri Lanka against Holland in some ghastly World Cup mismatch. So Surrey have bumped that up by more than fifty.

My immediate reaction to this mayhem was to think: Benning, Brown and Clarke are all English. They would sure have made a difference in the West Indies if they’d been there, instead of the Dead Men Walking that England were picking their top three from over there: Vaughan, Strauss, Joyce and Bell.

But then, I thought about something I’d seen on Friday, when I took a trip to the Oval myself.  Take a look at this, which I snapped during the tea interval:

Yeah, nice stand isn’t it?  Shame about the people not in it.  But, observe that yellow “wicket”, as we cricket people call the strip of heavily manicured grass where the serious business of cricket is acted out, over to the right, far nearer to the boundary than the two wickets in the middle.  Were they perchance using that one today?  This suggests that they were:

Yet even with Brown back in the pavilion, Gloucestershire’s bowlers were still at the mercy of The Oval’s short boundaries, and Surrey’s all-out aggression, ...

Equally suggestive is that in among the demoralised wreckage of the Gloucester reply, there was a century stand between a couple of the Gloucester guys that was almost as ferocious as what Surrey were doing throughout.  Surrey’s second string bowlers bowlers were not that far from getting a similar caning themselves.

So, yes, I reckon it was “The Oval’s short boundaries” - as well as Brown, Benning, Clarke - what did it.  To make room for that stand, the Oval’s boundaries are indeed less long than they used to be, but they’re not normally what you’d call short.  They certainly weren’t on Friday.  But, today, they were.  Presumably they had a rope for the boundary on the other side, not that far from the middle of the real pitch.

Which rather takes the juice out of that record, I think.

My fondest memories of the recently deceased Mstislav Rostropovich are of listening to LPs and CDs of him.  First there was that fantastic CBS recording of the first cello concerto of Shostakovich, when I was an otherwise (i.e. when not listening to classical LPs (or watching cricket matches)) rather unhappy teenager at Marlborough.  Then, there was that equally fantastic Dvorak concerto with Karajan.  I’m also looking forward very much to hearing this BBC Legends performance of the Elgar concerto, as soon as I can get hold of that cheaply, which he never recorded commercially, but which he did occasionally play.  (Come to think of it, maybe I already have this, on on old Revelation CD, which was apparently released without Rostropovich’s permission.  I must try and dig that out.)

I never heard Rostropovich live, or met him.  But, if you like that kind of reminiscence, Stephen Pollard did see and hear him live, a lot, and did meet him, very memorably.

I also remember hearing that other live BBC performance that Pollard mentions, of the Dvorak, at the Proms, on the night that the BBC first broadcast it, which was just when the USSR had barged into Czechoslovakia.  He reminds us that this too is now available on CD.

Well, my weirdly timed spasm of rage about Murali’s action (see the immediately previous posting) has passed, and now, like everybody, I just want a proper game.  Thank goodness for Gilchrist, because his innings at least means that a truly classy piece of cricket is going to decide this contest.  We are at the stage where the rain, and the bad light - which was entirely predictable, they’re now telling us - is making this match end with a whimper rather than much in the way of a bang.  Sri Lanka are 149-3, and the World Cup Final looks like it’s going to be as big an embarrassment as all the other embarrassments in the rest of this shambolic and sad tournament.

What I want to know is: Why the F***K aren’t they using FLOODLIGHTS?  They’re faffing around, not doing anything.  It’s getting darker and darker, and this is becoming a global advert for the patheticness of cricket.  The commentators are trying to conceal their rage, and not doing it at all well.  “A fitting end to a very badly organised tournament.” I’ll say.

I had to take some videos back to Blockbuster, and after doing that I found a pub where they were showing this.  I stayed long enough to witness the turning point of the Sri Lanka innings, which was when the century stand between Jayasuriya and Sangakkara ended, with the latter being out caught Ponting bowled Hogg for fifty something.  With the ending of the first “power play”, i.e. period of compulsory close fielding, the boundaries dried up, and by the time I had got home again the weather had started doing the opposite.  They’re now saying that there will only be 36 overs allowed, to chase down the same total.  Was Duckworth the twat who decided that?  Or Lewis?  Or was it a joint decision?  Whatever, it’s insane.  They should have used floodlights. Sri Lanka now have to score at about 13 an over, and, well, forget it.

“What’s going on?  Tell us?” The commentators are getting nearer and nearer ballistic.  Bucknor stopped play, for no reason.  Now they’re going to carry on.  Perhaps Bucknor was receiving some kind of message in his ears, from the off-pitch umpire.  “Shilpa has some information.” What a farce.  154-3.  “They want the Duckworth Lewis on the scoreboard.” “That can’t be the reason, it’s always been there.” Commentator Agnew’s contempt is palpable.  “I think the Duckworth Lewis rate was wrong.” “It’s now showing 0.” 155-3.  “It’s all going pear shaped.” “Totally pear shaped.” “Oh dear.”

“Appeal for LBW.  It’s been given out.” Jayawardene.  Another huge nail in what for the last half hour at least has been the Sri Lankan coffin.  “It’s fizzling out.” “269 is the revised target.” “It’s fizzling out.  Horribly.  Embarrassingly.” “It’s all a bit hollow.” “Rain and cricket have never sat well together.” 10 overs to score 112.  “It will be very dark when they finish.”

Didn’t the cretins in charge of this farce realise that it would get dark, at that particular time in the evening when darkness happens in this part of the world?  (This part of the world being Barbados, by the way.)

Silva has just hit a six., but it’s too little too late too dark.

“They’re playing a floodlit match without floodlights.” That from Martin-Jenkins.  192-6.  They now need 14.9 runs per over.  “It would be kinder to call it off.”

Apparently the World Cup of 2007 is ending in a lightning storm of extremely visible flashes from hundreds of Billion Monkey cameras.  So I guess the light is still good, but uneven.  They’re photo-ing McGrath, whose last few moments of international cricket these are.

It’s all over.  “The umpires have said: it’s too dark.  It’s over.” “It’s a sorry end.  To have to abandon a match because it gets too dark.  A shabby end to what should be a showpiece of international cricket.” Australia “to all intents and purposes” have won.  Indeed.

First, I thought Surrey had no chance at all (see the immediately previous posting here) of getting anywhere near that fourth innings target of 500, that Hampshire set them yesterday afternoon.  At 283-7 it was done and dusted, as they say nowadays, but at that point two bowlers who can bat a bit, Salisbury and Azhar Mahmood, added what must have been an exceedingly rapid 177, and Surrey got to 460 before losing their last three wickets in a heep.  It often happens this way.  While it is all a futile gesture, the batsmen relax and slog away.  But once it gets serious, and it becomes seriously possible that they might win, it all goes wrong.  Still, losing by only 35 is a pretty good result for Surrey.  Too bad they only get four points for their efforts, with no points at all to show for how much of a fright they must have given Hampshire.

Second, I journeyed out to Shepherds Bush to meet up with Michael to watch the World Cup Final.  The weather delayed everything, so I gave up and went home again, not least because I am suffering from a rather nasty ache in my shoulder and neck.  But while with Michael, I did watch a bit of the Sri Lanka New Zealand semi-final, which Sri Lanka won, and saw Murali bowling.  (He took 4 wickets for a mere 31.) I remarked to Michael that I don’t like Murali’s action.  It just looks too much like chucking to me.  This is an opinion I have resisted, because of reverse racism.  I have told myself that Murali’s action is legal, for fear of being called a racist by Asian cricket fans.  And indeed, I suppose if you go with what the legal theorists call, I believe, “legal positivism”, then if they say Murali’s action is legal, then, well, it is.  Okay.  So be it.

But then later, Michael rang me at home to tell me which pub he has ended up in to watch this thing, and I discussed with him the fact that Gilchrist was making a whole lot better start with the bat in this game than he did in the two previous games Australia played, in both of which he rather conspicuously failed.

It was then that it hit me.  I want Australia to win this thing. More precisely, I want Sri Lanka to be thrashed.  If we all have to accept that Murali’s action is legal, then like I say, so be it.  But they can’t make us like it, and I don’t.  Murali is the big Sri Lankan weapon, and I don’t like that weapon.  I want it swatted aside.  I want Murali to have grotesque figures in this match, something like 7 overs for 70 and no wickets.  Gilchrist is now going like a tank, and has just hit Murali for six.  Good.  Australia 137-0 after 20 overs, in a 38 over game, which Australia, as of now, look like winning by a big margin.  Now Hayden has joined in and has just hit another six.  Now Gilchrist has got to his hundred.  162-0 after 22 overs.  I’m not writing slowly.  They’re scoring fast.  Carnage.  Good.  “Bad for cricket”, you say?  All this Australian dominance?  I say that Murali’s action is even worse for cricket.

I don’t have any personal beef against Murali, I really don’t.  With his action, his talents, his desire to play this wonderful game, I’d be doing just what he is doing.  And yes I have heard the arguments, about how his arm is indeed as straight as he is able to make it, and that other actions, when scrutinised with slowed down film, turn out to be rather dodgier than previously thought.  Murali looks like a wonderful guy.  A fascinating individual, of just the sort you’d want to know.  But like I say, I don’t like it, the way he bowls.  Like I say, it just looks, to me, like chucking.  And a major fact about cricket is that chucking is not allowed.

Please do not misunderstand me.  This is not an argument. This is not the claim that, if you are a cricket lover, you should think as I do about this.  It is simply a description of how - I have only today discovered – I feel.  And it came as quite a surprise to me, when I realised what was happening inside my head, I can tell you.

172-0 in the 23rd over.  Viv Richards is saying that they could get three hundred, and indeed they could, and several more.  But: Hayden caught Jayawardene bowled Malinga for 38.  Out of 172.  Gilchrist 119 not out.  Hayden, they are saying, was “off form today”.  Jesus.

Okay, so I just sorted out the links in the above, and now it’s 201-1 after 27 overs.  11 more overs.  Wickets in hand.  Guess: 330-5.  “Not happening for Murali today”, says commentator Maxwell.

It occurs to me that Gilchrist, who is riding his luck but has now got to 146 not out, is well on course to make an international ODI double century.  And that would be a first, would it not?  Yes it would.  But: Gilchrist out, for 149.  104 balls.  “If that isn’t a match winning innings then I don’t know what is.” Me neither.  Symonds is now in.  A hitter.

But now, the commentators are explaining what Jayasuriya and co are capable of, and talking about what they did to England last year.  But that was England.  This is Australia.

UPDATE: Michael’s just piped me a picture from his pub:

This afternoon I took a short bus ride to the Oval, to see Surrey versus Hampshire, but basically to see Shane Warne bowling.  In the morning he was brilliant, apparently.  I wasn’t there.  He took 5-45 and Surrey were completely out of their depth, apart from Ramprakash who hit a not out century.  By the time I got there, Hampshire had made over a hundred for one on top of a huge first innings lead, and at tea they declared, setting Surrey 500 to win in four sessions.  Fat chance.  But there was a good chance that I would get to see Warne bowl and sure enough, at the end the day there were about fifteen overs of spin, bowled by Warne, and then also Udall.  Warne didn’t get a wicket, but Udall did, when Ramprakash, who had been batting wonderfully, got himself stumped in the second last over.

I took lots of photos of Warne bowling, but Warne’s bowling is an athletic thing.  He’s quite quick, and there’s a lot of movement involved.  So, me not being any sort of sports photographer, the best snaps I could do of Warne tended all to look like this:

In other words, okay as a general impression, but no clicking to get it bigger because this time, bigger would only be worse.  I got plenty of other good photos, but not any truly good photos of the one thing above all else I was there to see.

The other main memory of the day, aside from Warne, was the number of empty seats.  The Oval is a huge place which stages test matches every year.  But a county cricket crowd, if you can call it a crowd, and even if it is boosted by one-off Warne-watchers like me, gets totally lost there.  Rough guess: 500 people.  What a weird way to make a living, playing a weird game in front of tiny sprinklings of people, paid out of the TV revenue of test matches that most county cricketers only very occasionally play in, if at all.  It would be all right if round the edge of the pitch it was just trees, grass and as many folding chairs as the spectators cared to bring with them.  But a four-fifths empty stadium is a bleak and dispiriting place.  Ask the people who’ve actually been showing up in person to the Cricket World Cup.

Half the ground was shut, and there was absolutely nobody at all in any of the green seats in the big new curved stand.  Building work, apparently.

If you click on that, you will get it bigger.  If you need that.

Shane Warne is one of the world’s greatest cricketers, not just now but ever.  London has however many millions of people in it that it has.  Warne very seldom plays in London and pretty soon won’t be playing at all, but while he does he will finally be giving his all to county cricket and holding nothing back for test matches.  Ramprakash is a terrific batsman.  (He hit two sixes, one sumptuous straight drive off one of the fast bowlers, the other off ... Warne, just before he got out.) Yet county cricket, even as good as this, just doesn’t attract that many people these days, and most of those whom it does attract are weird men of a certain age, like me.  Which is presumably a bit of a vicious circle, because the thought of all those empty seats and weird old gits means that this old git won’t be going back any time soon.  Limited overs games, with a decent throng of spectators and a bit of atmosphere, maybe.  Four day games like this one?  Watched by, basically, nobody?  No thank you.

Certainly not tomorrow, because tomorrow means finding a TV set to watch the World Cup Final, and what is more actually getting to see properly what is going on.  With TV you get expert close-ups of everything, and you are in line with the wickets and can see what the ball is doing.  Plus you get replays of everything interesting.  Today, whenever anything interesting happened I kept expecting to see it again, but for this game there were no giant TV screens to do that, and if you missed something important when it happened, you missed it period.  Plus, my eyesight is terrible, and I basically can’t make things out or tell who anyone is from the edge of a big field like the Oval.  I can now see far more in my photos than I could see when I took them.

As it happened, the first Surrey wicket, Newman getting caught by Adams (I learn now from Cricinfo) I missed, because I was faffing about with my cheap binoculars at the time.  At least I saw the second one, the Ramprakash stumping, brilliantly executed by Hampshire’s Nick Pothas.  A fellow old git I got chatting with told me that Pothas will very soon be qualified to play for England.  Since he can bat, and since England have no problem with South Africans, he’s quite a good bet for the England spot, I’d say, any month or year now.

Finally, a couple of snaps I took after play had finished and right before leaving.  The first I show you because it is artistic and thought-provoking and all that kind of thing, and the second because that guy was the nearest thing to a Billion Monkey I saw all afternoon.

Those you can also click on to get bigger.

It took me a while to work this out, but in this, “cat protection” means protection against catastrophe, right?

Last night on 18DSTV, Iain Dale was kind enough to mention my pictures of London buildings.  Maybe he was just bored with all my Billion Monkey pictures, or regards them as intrusive and wrong and wanted to steer me in other directions, but whatever, it was very gratifying and I told him I’d stick up a photo of a building on my blog today.  So, here are eight such photos.  Why hold back?

They are all examples of what I am coming to see as a characteristic London snap, namely the distant sighting of a familiar big London building, already photoed a zillion times by a zillion tourists, and which most local Billion Monkeys have long tired of snapping, but with unfamiliar and very local stuff in the foreground.  As you can see, all but the first of these snaps are of the Towers of Docklands, the first one being of the Gherkin.  All were taken on a walk I took last week from Limehouse to Shoreditch, along the Regents Canal.  Click on them to get the real pictures.

For once, I think I may, in some of these snaps, have made rather excessive use of the zoom feature on my very zoomy little camera.  Whenever I found that I had a choice, I tended to choose the one with less zoom, a smaller set of towers and more foreground local strangeness.  That last one, for instance, could do with much more foreground.  It is the last because it was taken from by far the furthest away, but you wouldn’t know it from the photo.

The secret of internet photo display, I am coming to believe, is collecting them into themed sets.  This is how I am now arranging all my Billion Monkey snaps.  Chimping and self-photo-ing I’ve already done.  In the future there may be (but: I promise nothing!): bag ladies, interesting men, Billion Monkeys wearing gloves, and various other collections linked by theme rather than just by all having been taken on the same excursion or just that I happen to like them.

So it should be with buildings.  The Gherkin, seen from lots of different and peculiar places.  These Docklands Towers, ditto.  (I seem to recall showing a photo here some time or another of the Docklands Towers viewed from faraway Clapham Junction.) The New Wembley Arch.  St Pauls.  The Wheel.  Big Ben.  The BT Tower.  Soon there will be Renzo Piano’s Shard of Glass, or so I devoutly hope.  More towers are also planned for around Victoria Station, which is right near me.

The thing is, London is obviously not like New York, where all the big sticking-up buildings are in a huge solid clump, or for that matter like most US cities with skyscraper clusters in the middle.  But nor is London like other cities that don’t have many proper skyscrapers at all.  It is a hybrid.  (A highbrid.  Hah!) Basically a cabbage patch of six, eight, ten story lumps all jammed together next to each other, but with occasional spikes or towers or, you know, just things zapping their way upwards, for no very obvious reason, but doing it anyway.  And because these things are relatively rare and scattered, and rather individual in shape, they can often be clearly and identifiably seen from many miles away.

Even the Docklands Towers, which in a way are just a banal clutch of lumpish and only moderately big skyscrapers, together form a characteristic London Big Thing, quite unlike any of the other Big Things of London, which in their turn are all quite unlike each other.

Two more sitings of the Docklands Towers, this time from the top of Tower Bridge this time, here, and here.

Quote from this:

From the left marched battalions of self-styled mental health “liberation activists” steeped in the writings of Scottish psychiatrist R.D. Laing. Though he denied being opposed to his own profession, Laing’s notion that madness could be a reasonable reaction to an unjust society, or even a vehicle for spiritual transformation, helped fuel the anti-psychiatry movement of the post Love-In era. The most radical of Laingians carried revisionism one step further: Not only wasn’t psychosis a bad thing, it was evidence of a superior level of consciousness.

The libertarians were fueled by Thomas Szasz, an iconoclastic psychiatrist who was, and remains, an outspoken foe of virtually every aspect of his chosen specialty. Hungarian-born in 1920, and witness to vicious state exploitation of medical practice by the Nazis and the communists, Dr. Szasz pushed an absolutist dogma of individual choice, finding ready converts among members of the Do-Your-Own-Thing generation. Though his early essays offered much-needed critiques of the Orwellian nightmares that can result when autocracy corrupts health care, Dr. Szasz devolved into something of a psychiatric Flat-Earther, insisting in the face of mounting contrary evidence that mental illness simply does not exist. Currently, he serves on a commission, cofounded with the Church of Scientology, that purports to investigate human rights violations perpetrated by mental health professionals.

This is one of the aspects of libertarianism - perhaps “offshoots of libertarianism” would be a better way of putting it - that I have always had a problem with.  My prejudice about Thomas Szasz is (a) that he thinks that mental illness does not exist, and I further believe (b) that this is an absurd opinion for anyone to hold.  But (a) has only been a prejudice, which I acted upon by not reading much of Szasz’s actual writing.  (I have never made any fuss about Szasz being on the Advisory Council of the Libertarian Alliance, as I suppose I might have done.) So I am kind-of relieved that someone who has obviously studied Szasz and his opinions with somewhat greater care than I has arrived at the same conclusion, i.e. (a) above.  He clearly also agrees about (b) as does anyone with any sense.

Whether or not Szasz himself really does hold it, the opinion that mental illness does not exist seems to me, as I say, absurd.  Every other part of our bodies is capable of malfunctioning, so why not our brains?  What conceivable reason can there possibly be to suppose that our brains are incapable of getting damaged, by all the kinds of things that damage our livers, hearts, muscles, bones, skin, blood, breathing, and so on, until every bodily organ or function has been listed?  The idea is ridiculous.

Which is not to say that all behaviour diagnosed as brain damage through injury or illness is necessarily that.  “Laing’s notion that madness could be a reasonable reaction to an unjust society” is surely reasonable, provided you are careful to include that “could”, and don’t say that all behaviour diagnosed as mad is actually sane, no matter how self-evidently mad.

Meanwhile Laingism/Szaszism (by which I mean the habit of not making the above distinction nearly carefully enough) has done terrible damage and caused terrible unhappiness, not only by closing the asylums and turning mad people loose on the world, to cause misery for themselves and for others, but also by blaming the families of mad people – the parents especially - for having caused the madness, on top of all the other miseries they had to contend with.

I suspect that this cruel folly is an example of one those great Bad Ideas that I like to spot - the truth is obvious and the fixed quantity of wealth fallacy being two of my other favourites.  This Bad Idea states that, if something is extremely hard to measure, to understand, to find the right words for, to distinguish between some thing or person being or having that something, and not being or having that something, it therefore follows that the something in question doesn’t exist.  I am sure that all that has been said before and said far better, but by whom, and more to the point: how?  I wonder if it is to be found in this list.

Interesting:

Because of the runoff structure, an electorate which would, in aggregate, prefer to see Bayrou rather than Sarkozy as president, will instead get Sarkozy, because in the first round, many of those who preferred Bayrou to Sarkozy also preferred Royal to Bayrou.

Somebody called Economist.com, of New York, says this.

I say: silly them.  If they really hated Sarkozy that much, they should have voted for Bayrou first time around.  That they didn’t suggests they don’t really hate the guy that much.

My absolute least favourite thing about “Free exchange” is that we are not told who writes it.  “Economist.com” is not a mind I wish to spend any time getting acquainted with, thank you.

Excellent.  Thankyou Instapundit.

Last night I did a posting for the Michael Jennings blog about the Cricket World Cup, having done one previous CWC posting for him.

Talking of which, does anybody know of a place in London where I will definitely be able to watch the Cricket World Cup Final (Australia/Sri Lanka) on TV?  This coming Saturday afternoon and evening.  Michael J?  Anybody?

I like being on Doughty Street TV because it gets me out of the house, and because I in favour of biased TV whatever the bias.  And although politically I am deep into a quietist phase just now (i.e. not managing to write anything at all for Samizdata), occasionally politics gets interesting to me, and on DSTV I sometimes hear about these moments.

Last time I was on, for instance, Iain Dale showed two party political broadcasts, by Labour and by the Conservatives, and that was quite interesting.  The Labour one was the embodiment of the claim that despite having been the Government for a decade, the Labour Government now has nothing to boast about.  It contained no boasting!  All it said was: what do you think we should do?  Ridiculous.  They ought to be saying: remember this, we’ve now fixed it!  Remember that? Terrible wasn’t it?  Fixed also!  Now look at this, we’ll fix this too!  Hurrah for us!  Don’t vote for those other pillocks they won’t fix anything!  But our present Government can’t say any of that because they haven’t fixed anything.  They’re the pillocks now.  The Conservative advert was diabolically clever and slick and vapid, which is all you can ask for from an opposition.  The pitch: we know how to make clever and slick and vapid PPBs, maybe we’d be good at being the Government too.  Worth a try, don’t you reckon?  Better than those other pillocks!

And now there’s this French presidential election happening, which everyone says Sarkozy will win.  A few weeks ago on DSTV, Segolene Royal was mentioned.  What a waste of space.  She had done one of these consultation exercises where she asked a huge bunch of mediocrities what they all wanted, and then, in the form of a Big Speech to the Nation, she read out what everyone had said.

I occasionally visit France, and the thing that has astounded me most was the discussions they have on the radio, at breakfast time.  Lots of words ending in “-isation”.  (French pronunciation: “ease ass eon”.) What we need, say a succession of parasite windbags, is this-isation and that-isation, blah blah, shrug shrug.  I can’t follow all the words but I get the picture.  We need an ongoing process of ongoing-process-isation.  What should we do about Youth Unemployment?  We need more bollocks-isation.  This is what Segolene Royal stands for.  More Segolene-Royal-isation, i.e. continuing incomes for parasites (especially parasite windbags) and no chances at all for anyone who really wants to work unless they bugger off to England, God help them.  Royal wants France to be even more -isation-ised than it is already.  She wants, you might say if you can manage to, an ongoing process of -isation-isation.

Which is why, of all the pro-Sarko bits of internet-accessible writing I have just looked at, this is the one I like the best:

France’s citizens appear to be displaying recognition of and trust in a leader whose words do not sound wooden or hollow, a potential president who does not talk in vague approximations and abstractions as if he were some sort of spirit from the beyond.

No -isationisation from Sarko!  Finally, a President of France who is prepared to tell it like it is in clear, plain English.

The same guy continues:

One of the good things about Sarkozy is that he is not only indifferent to whether certain people will object to his ideas and actions, he actually prefers to alienate some individuals, chiefly those who are likely to lose the privileges they have become accustomed to. Sarkozy appears to be a politician who is not afraid of a potential clash, verbal or literal, someone who says and does what he believes, someone who seeks to extricate politics from the sterilized, aristocratic style of management that dominates it and return it to its proper role.

Talking of alienating certain people, France’s ethnic minorities who new stew and rage in the “banlieus”, whatever they may be, all now hate Sarko and are threatening to riot if he wins, which I think is another good reason to vote Sarko.  A better reason is that if Sarko wins, he just might make France into the kind of place where ethnics can go into business and make some serious but legal money, even if everyone hates them.  More like England in other words.  England hates ethnics just as much as France does.  But, ethnics in England can keep shops open until midnight and suchlike and become respectable and have their children go to university and work for Channel 4 etc., and finally get more posh and less hated, or at least hated for different reasons.  That ladder doesn’t exist in France.  So, if you want French ethnics to do better, vote Sarko, even if the ethnics themselves are mostly going to be voting for the various -isation candidates.  (I’ll bet you anything you like that there are some French ethnics who secretly agree with the hated Sarko.  They look around, and say: he’s right, we are scum.  I want to do better than this shit.)

So, to my massed ranks of French readers, and especially to all my massed ranks of French ethnic readers (i.e. all the ones whose religion I hate) I say: vote Sarko!

I’m on Doughty Street TV again tomorrow night, presumably in my usual slot of 10 to midnight.  Maybe I’ll get to talk about some of this.

Sell them. Michael Jennings’s best email with just a link yet.  The email was entitled “20% off, too”.

This, on the other hand, is how not to handle yourself during such spats.

From last week’s Radio Times, referring to a show on Channel Five at 7.15pm, on Tuesday April 17th.

Big Ideas That Changed The World

3/5 Islam. Former prime minister of Pakistan Benazir Bhutto traces the history of Islam.  At its inception, the religion favoured peace and tolerance.  But when the Crusaders began the first of many attacks on the Holy Land in 1095, a religious sub-group formed, intent on justifying murder and martyrdom in the name of Allah.

So, that would mean that this is all made-up Catholic propaganda:

Abd-ur-Rahman crossed the Pyrenees at the head of an immense army and advanced as far as the Loire River, pillaging and burning as he went. David W. Koeller in his article The Battle of Tours, says, “ (The) Moslem army, in a wild search for land and the end of Christianity, after the conquest of Syria, Egypt, and North Africa, began to invade Western Europe under the leadership of Abd-ur-Rahman.” The Muslim army had between 600,000 to 400,000 soldiers, and “an over whelming number of horsemen.”
(Encyclopedia.com, Battle of Tours). In October 732 AD, exactly one hundred years after Muhammad’s death, in 622 an army led by Abd-ur-Rahman … made contact with the Frankish army … along the road between Poitiers and Tours, [a city which was reputed to contain vast riches.] (Discovering World History Essay).

Abd-ur Rahman led his infantry across the Western Pyrenees and toward the Loire River. A Muslim commander named Al-Semak led the first invasion across the Pyrenees in 721, establishing a base at Norbonne.  He was followed by Abd-ur Rahman with fresh contingents, who moved up the Rhône as far as Lyons and Dijon destroying churches and monasteries, following Muhammad’s creed of especially targeting non-Muslim places of worship, before moving on to Bordeaux.

Whoever did this website doesn’t seem to grasp the notion of links.  And 732 AD was indeed exactly one hundred years after Muhammed’s death, which was in 632 AD rather than 622.  So there may well be lots of other mistakes.  (Shouldn’t “Norbonne” be “Narbonne”?  Don’t know.) Nevertheless, this is not a totally invented description of what happened in France in the early eight century.  Is it?

Last night I was invited to a string quartet concert at Conway Hall.  It was the Emperor String Quartet, whom I had just about heard of.  Just about heard of, in the fiercely competitive world of contemporary string quarteting – an art at its peak right now, in my opinion - almost certainly meant pretty damn good, and so it proved.

They played a Haydn quartet, op 77 no 2, which was highly competent to my ear but no more.  Maybe I just wasn’t in the mood for civilised urbanity.  Then they played Martinu quartet number 3.  In the second half it was Beethoven op. 131.

The Beethoven is an amazing piece and they made it sound more amazing than it can.  Sometimes it can be perfected down, so to speak.  Nevertheless, while listening to this performance, I kept thinking of even better performances I have also heard, where this or that phrase was played even more winningly, this or that chord even more perfectly in time and in tune, without any of that amazingness being lost.  Often it is said of recorded performances that “if you heard this in a concert hall you would not complain, but . . .”.  Well, I did hear just such a performance, a very good one, in a concert hall, yet here I am complaining.  Oh well.

For me the highlight was the Martinu.  After hearing it, I bought a couple of Emperor Quartet CDs that they were selling in the foyer for a tenner each, one of Martinu quartets, including 3, the one they played last night, and another CD of Walton quartets.  I have just played the Martinu, and it is amazing how different the recording sounds to the performance last night.  The opening on the CD sounds like insects.  The same opening last night sounded like your local serial killer rapping menacingly on your attic door.  Of the CD, Julian Haylock says here:

The cool objectivism of the Third Quartet is something of a creative one-off for Martinu, yet the Emperor players succeed in fully bringing the inscrutable score to life, mining its Ravelian expressive world to captivating effect.

Cool objectivism?  Last night it sounded, in the words of the friend who had organised this for me and who was also very impressed, “psychotic”.  Ravel?  Last night it sounded more like Bartok at his most drunken and orgiastic.

One more thing.  It shouldn’t matter, but it did.  The first violin.  He had a permanent half smile on his face that was distracting because rather sinister, like a movie villain.  I kept wondering who he reminded me of, and I still haven’t pinned it down.  My friend said that violinists all go mad (unlike cellists who all remain sane).  Something to do with the vibrations right next to their ears, she said.  Got it.  He looks like an actor, a particular actor I mean.  But, although I can picture this actor, I can’t recall his name.  More distraction.  Any century now, the all conquering Google or whoever will just be able to put a gizmo right next to your head and extract the picture you have inside it, and tell you the name.  Tip of my tongue dot com.

Tonight and tomorrow, on the radio, the Emerson Quartet are playing late Beethoven, including the op 131 quartet that the Emperor played.  Recent Wigmore Hall recitals, the second of which is reviewed here.  Notice how this critic also has his very exact opinions about exactly how this music should be done, having heard it even more times than I have.  I think I will like these Emerson performances a lot, and now that I have it organised to record from the radio, I will.

The internet works in funny ways.  The excellent Idiot Toys now has a posting which includes this:

A fitting tribute to the complex finger-hold’s inventor Sonja Ledovskaja, who died at her home in the Ukraine last week, aged 41, of a heart attack. It’s thought the heart attack was caused by her years as a thing holder, with ruthless coaches forcing young women to eat nothing but milk and cheese to keep their fingernails and hair shiny and strong.

That’s under a picture of an Asian babe holding things, which often happens at Idiot Toys.  That’s all part of why we love it so, those of us who love it.  But this story is not real.  It’s a joke.  Sonja Ledovskaja is a made-up person.  There was no heart attack.

Nevertheless, as a result of this one posting, at a blog where heart attacks are rarely mentioned, adverts have erupted, for this, this, this, and this, in other words for heart attack information, heart attack treatments, heart defence, and other heart related goods and services.  “Ads”, it says above these ads, “by Google”.  From this I deduce that Google can sometimes be over-literal.

Or maybe not.  Maybe people type “heart attack” into Google, in who knows what frightful circumstances, and get sent to Idiot Toys, whereupon they encounter heart attack adverts that they might otherwise have missed.

Via engadget, news of the robofalcon, for chasing away the pigeons, which my namesake will not like at all.

Indeed.

Many big cats living in the UK are thought to have been released into the wild after the Dangerous Wild Animals Act 1976 made it illegal to keep them and other exotic, non-indigenous animals without a licence.

I always said that the Wild Animals Act of 1976 was Dangerous.

Tomorrow Alex Singleton and I will be recording a conversation about J. S. Bach.  This has been much delayed, so I’ve been doing Bach homework on and off for many weeks.  See, for instance, this posting.

Anyway, I’ve recently been reading this book.  And I found the most arresting bit in it so far to be on page 54, about Bach’s time in Cöthen:

Amidst such gifted performers, and stimulated by a cultivated patron, Sebastian began to produce an amazing abundance of works.  Compared with the quantity of original compositions, the amount of other composers’ music performed at court seems to have been minimal.  Unfortunately, the great majority of his Cöthen compositions have been lost; but something of the vitality of this period is reflected in the Brandenburg Concertos, a product of these years.

I did not know that.  About the lost works, that is.  Ouch.  Lots of music like the Brandenburgs, gone.  Ouch.

This is especially frightful for Bach fans like me who particularly love the instrumental pieces.  I personally do not like the way that classical music is often sung, with those heavy, wobbly, hit-the-back-row-of-the-opera-house voices of theirs.  Bach often escapes this treatment nowadays, but there is still a barrier for me, a milder version of the barrier that many find between themselves and classical music as a whole.  But with Bach’s instrumental music, I face no barrier at all.  Unless it gets lost, and I never get to hear it in the first place.

What this illustrates is that Bach was not a great composer quite like the ones we are used to, that is to say like the big names that followed – Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Brahms and the rest of them.  He wasn’t really composing for posterity, and those of his scores that did survive did so as much because others made this happen, as that he made this happen himself.  (It was like this with Shakespeare, too.  His plays anyway.) Rather, Bach was making his music for God, who hears everything and remembers everything and who has no need of his own personal score.  And, Bach was composing to bring his contemporaries closer to God.  He pretty much assumed that future musicians attempting the same would do it with music that they had themselves composed, rather than with music composed by a dead person.

Yes.  So once again with the local internet cafe, although this time with a slightly more private cubicle, which makes me less shy.

My internet connections are mysterious, so mysterious that Computer Guru couldn’t, after a long phone session of me typing “ping” and lots of Sanscrit at the Command Prompt (remember the Command Prompt), and getting all the answers that he associates with an internet connection that is working, work out what wasn’t working.  Has anyone else been suffering from any similar malady?  Except that asking that is like a teacher saying: all those not present raise their hands.  All those thus afflicted are unaware of who else might also have caught it, whatever the mysterious It may be, because they are unable to receive any news of th