January 27, 2005
Writing for hire
Inspired by the case of the journalist who took $240,000 off the Department of Education for writing a positive article, Carl Hiaasen parodies the kind of stuff being written by U.S. journalists in support of Bush's proposed privatisation of social security.
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January 26, 2005
Life in Beit Hanoun
With the lifting of Sharon's ban on contacts with Abu Mazen comes this thoughtful piece from the Washington Post about elections in Beit Hanoun.
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January 25, 2005
Nancy Banks-Smith I love you
One of the delights of reading the Guardian newspaper is that - amongst the sour and disobliging pieces about everything under the sun - there is the incomparable Nancy Banks-Smith. This is someone whose prose style is wasted on television reviews. Here is a sample from this morning:
Twice in Like Father, Like Son (ITV1) someone said "You're not going to like it." And, by golly, they were right. This was flatpack drama, slotted together. Wherever you rapped, it rang back chipboard. The acting, involving a lot of young people, was variable. Jamie (a creditable Somerset Prew), whose school life would have been a lot easier if his mother had bought him a shirt that fitted, discovers that his father (Phil Davis reprising his widely admired white rat) is a convicted serial killer. Tell me, on which planet would Jemma Redgrave, who looks like the front half of a giraffe, have married someone with teeth like that?
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January 24, 2005
Mobile phone on a chip
Texas Instruments announce a mobile phone on a chip . Nokia have it first. They need the boost. Their market share has been collapsing due to their failure to produce
a) clamshell phones;
b) phones with swivel cameras.
This could be the beginning of a fightback.
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January 17, 2005
How polluted is your street?
A UK scientist suggests that prenatal exposure to pollutants from (particularly) cars are responsible for childhood cancers.
How much at risk is your child? Use this service to find out. Enter your postcode and you will get a high quality analysis of pollutants in your area. The only thing lacking is a baseline comparison which would give you an idea of whether e.g. 300 tonnes of CO per square km per annum is low or high.
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January 16, 2005
Desert Island Paintings
In France at the New Year I ran into the sea on New Year's day and missed a step - pulling a calf muscle.
The result was that I learnt the French for pulled muscle "claquement de jambe" and hobbled around for the next three days. Chloe and I sat in cafés, having conversations like this. If you had a screwdriver and access to the best paintings in the world, which eight would you take home?
[The key to doing this is to do it quickly, without much reflection ...]
Mine:
Las Meninas - Velazquez
Cupid and Venus - Albrecht Altdorfer
Self portrait - Rembrandt (the one in Kenwood House, London)
Baptism of Christ - Piero della Francesca
Judas panel, Scrovegni chapel, Padua - Giotto
Birth of Venus - Botticelli
Figures in a landscape - Pollaiuolo
[One with a lot of black paint and straw] - Anselm Kiefer
Hers:
Mark's flight from Venice - Tintoretto
Lobster telephone - Dali
[Purple one at the Tate] - Mark Rothko
Cup of Tea - David Shrigley
Nightmare - Henry Fuseli
Piano Lesson - Henri Matisse
Woods strippers - Caillebotte
Olympia - Edouard Manet
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The new pariah
When first Israel and then the US started taking the line that it was impossible to talk to Yasser Arafat because he was not serious about peace, they said that a new "democratic" Palestinian leadership would be different.
Now an elected Palestinian leader - Mahmoud Abbas - has emerged. His election has called the bluff of the militant oppositionists on his own side, and of the Sharon government. So it is that even before Abbas's inauguration Mr. Sharon has cut off diplomatic ties with him and now sent the Israeli army into Gaza . In less than ten days Mr. Abbas has gone from being a "legitimate partner for peace" into being what Arafat was for Israel - a pariah. Mr. Sharon says that this decision a result of an attack which killed six Israeli civilians at the border crossing between Gaza and Israel.
The propaganda about this is that Mahmoud Abbas has somehow changed his previously dove-ish attitude to Israel. In the run-up to the election there were a series of tut-tutting reports when Abbas referred to Israel as the "Zionist enemy". The fact that his description was given in the wake of the killing of 7 Palestinian kids by a tank shell - was the secondary report and was given by CBS in the context of an Israeli army statement that a) questioned the casualty figures, b) suggested that the dead weren't children, c) if they were children then they were sheltering Hamas fighters.
(It is a point that has been made before, but is worth repeating that Palestinian and Israeli victims in the conflict have a different value. Seven dead Palestinian children get into the second paragraph of a report about election rhetoric. Six dead Israelis create global headlines and are used to justify a renewed military invasion of Gaza.)
The Israeli administration has no desire for a strong, democratic and accountable Palestinian leadership. Such a leadership would pose a threat to them. They wish to see a Palestinian authority which is weak and politically divided. They have made no secret of this . A statement by Sharon chief-of-staff Dov Weinglas in Ha'aretz spelt this out: the Gaza withdrawal was intended as "formaldehyde" against a Palestinian political process. And in fact a "two-state solution" is not viable in the kind of Israel emerging from the second intifada, as this Christian Aid report observes. That this is the case represents the victory of Sharon and the calamitous failure of Palestinian politics.
Expect to see Sharon's government straining every nerve to undermine Abbas over the coming weeks. In the short term, we can stand by for a statement from the US State Department echoing Sharon's attack on Abbas.
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January 12, 2005
Polar Bear Diary
Cold. Fish for lunch. Went through some rubbish. Found a hairbrush. Fish for tea.
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January 11, 2005
Internet Explorer - an open letter to Nationwide
News of yet another "extremely critical" issue with Microsoft's Internet Explorer browser issue makes me think it is worth going public with the following comments, sent in December 2004 to my building society Nationwide plc.
"Dear Sir,
...Supporting Internet Explorer as your default
renders your customers liable to *having their names and passwords
stolen* through the notorious DSO exploit for which Microsoft requires
an update most users are unaware of, and which some (including me) would argue, still does not make their machines secure.
http://www.greymagic.com/security/advisories/gm001-ie/
If you fail to advise your customers to
a) update their IE version and get the latest Microsoft patches;
b) regularly change their passwords
c) use other (more secure) browsers, such as Mozilla, Firefox, Opera,
Konqueror, and Safari
and in particular if you make your services inaccessible to non-IE users they may well come to you for any losses they suffer as a result of being forced to put their personal details at risk
Yours etc."
The help desk guy responded that although he personally used Konqueror on Linux he couldn't see it being supported. I did not get the impression he raised the issue higher up the chain. So I am doing so now.
I have nothing against Nationwide - they are actually one of the better online banking services - but it is time the banking industry woke up to the threat they face. If the banks force their customers to use a vulnerable browser and the customers have their money stolen as a result, then those customers can justifiably claim that the banks have been negligent. The losses to the banks could amount to hundreds of millions. If they are not concerned then perhaps their shareholders should be.
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January 10, 2005
Andrew Sullivan
Andrew Sullivan's personal blog is very good on Iraq (check out Friday 7th January's entry "The Real Debate" - sorry not to provide a deep link, I can't figure out how to do it). His comments about Iraq are surprisingly critical - particularly in relation to prisoner abuse. Sullivan is a libertarian rightist. It is good to see that there are some on the right who still stick up for the rights of the individual.
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January 7, 2005
Bezos says advertising budgets will shrink
My ex-boss Jeff Bezos - always worth listening to - suggests that the money spent on TV advertising for Amazon was better deployed in improving the product. There's a radical notion!
It may have had something to do with the fact that Amazon's off-line advertising in the early days was generally poor, but I think he has a point. The internet has had a huge impact on word of mouth. It is more effective because it is more trustworthy. In the past you only had to rely on your friend's word. Now you can rely on your friend, plus thousands and sometimes millions of strangers.
I have been putting product names into the Market Sentinel search algorithm over the last few days on behalf of a customer (you create a feed from a search term, which gives you live information from the web, including chat rooms) and the results are startling. You know that one product sucks, because people tell you in no uncertain terms, and you know that one product is good, because people are complaining about either a) high prices, or b) poor availability. And you can get this information live!
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Marilou sous la neige
Yesterday night I played Marilou sous la neige by Serge Gainsbourg over and over again ...
What do the lyrics mean?
Marilou repose sous la neige
Et je me dis et je me redis
De tous ces dessins d'enfant que n'ai-je
Pu préserver la fraîcheur de l'inédit
De ma Lou en bandes dessinées je
Parcourais les bulles arrondies
Lorsque je me vis exclu de ses jeux
Erotiques j'en fis une maladie
Marilou se sentait pris au piège
Tous droits d'reproduction interdits
Moi naïf j'pensais que me protégeaient
Les droits du copyright opéra mundi
Oh ma Lou il fallait que j'abrège
Ton existence c'est ainsi
Que Marilou s'endort sous la neige
Carbonique de l'extincteur d'incendie
There are references to another song about the murder of a girl with a fire extinguisher (the source of the "neige carbonique" which turns about to be the "neige" under which she is sleeping) but I don't understand the strip cartoon metaphor. The web, which is normally so good for shedding light on unexplained references, often fails with French things and can't help here.
By the way: check out an excellent interview between Jane Birkin and Carla Bruni about the latter's excellent album and about Serge Gainsbourg, Yves Montand and the origins of the song "La Noyee".
Serge wrote it for Yves, got very drunk with him on whisky, and threw up in the gutter on the way home. Yves rang to say he couldn't record it because everyone would think that the "chienne crevée au fil de l'eau" of the lyric was his wife Simone Signoret.
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January 6, 2005
Market Sentinel
Market Sentinel is the bright spot. It is now working very well indeed. We can monitor how often a brand name or company name is used, and what the context is, and do it live - not just from news sites, but from message boards, corporate sites, anywhere. We are on the point of signing deals with several customers, some small, but several household names, which should take us most of the way towards hitting our Q1 2005 target.
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Birthday
Back in London. Thanks to the generosity of a friend I have spent a week in Provence. Clear blue skies, woodsmoke over terraces of vines, delicious food, stimulating conversation ... Why come back?
Today is my birthday and therefore the official nadir of my year. Some years ago I was so depressed at this time of year (no job, no money, grey skies) that I bought a crate of champagne and some oysters and had all my friends round. It cheered me up so much that I made it an annual event.
Now I have this to look forward to in a couple of weekends time, and I can deal with the problems that have arisen in my absence.
An important resignation from the voluntary group I run ... a late tax return ... mounting debts after the surgery in Dallas ...
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