Twitter week
All are agreed. This was the week in which Twitter became the people's choice for citizen journalism. Mumbai provided the tragic background.
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There is no light
As (bad) luck would have it, Wildbirds and Peacedrums are in town on Wednesday night and the Rainy Day schedule is packed! But wait, they're supposed to kick of at 9 pm, which might mean 10 pm. On the other hand, because lots of people like to head for home around 11 pm... Regardless of the logistics, here's Andreas and Mariam from Sweden with "There is No Light".
Wildbirds and Peacedrums are husband-and-wife Andreas Werliin and Mariam Wallentin. The mix of his percussion and her vocals creates music that is at times austere, at times rich. It's simple on the surface, but if you listen long enough it comes across as very cleverly orchestrated. The duo dispenses with pop formalities such as hooks and choruses and follows its own path to a sound that owes much to jazz but isn't. Neither is it Swedish nor global. Wildbirds and Peacedrums are unique. Which makes them rare.
Book of the Year title?
It's a tad early to call it yet, but the hot contender for this coveted award is Clash of Civilizations Over an Elevator in Piazza Vittorio. The novel by Amara Lakhous is a series of contradictory, nonchalantly racist, hilarious monologues in a Roman apartment building where immigrants and locals never stop arguing about the elevator. These monologues are, in fact, witness statements recorded after the savage killing of Lorenzo Manfredini, who was stabbed to death in the elevator where — it is said — he often enjoyed surreptitiously urinating.
Between the statements, the author inserts journal fragments written by prime suspect, Ahmed Salmi, who has disappeared. Much to everyone's surprise, it turns out that he is not actually Italian despite the fact that every morning he ordered the "three 'C's" that only true Italians appreciate: "cappuccino, cornetto, Corriere della Sera!" ("I've never in my life," the proprietor of the café where Ahmed breakfasted says, "seen a Chinese, a Moroccan, a Romanian, a Gypsy, or an Egyptian read the Corriere della Sera or La Repubblica! The only thing the immigrants read is Porta Portese, for the want ads.")
In this marvellous excerpt, Amara Lakhous presents "The Truth According to Parviz Mansoor Samadi". Clash of Civilizations Over an Elevator in Piazza Vittorio is a worthy candidate for the Rainy Day "Book of the Year title" award.
A Night Out In Mumbai
"So we headed to All Stir Fry, the restaurant in the Gordon House Hotel in a lane down from there. They told us we'd have to wait 20 minutes. We stepped out again, and as we did so, we heard gunshots, and saw people running towards us from the left side." So writes th excellent Mumbai blogger Amit Varma. "We watched transfixed, and as the apparent scale of the incidents grew, we realised we couldn't go home. We asked if they had a room vacant; they did, so we settled in, switched on the TV, and watched in horror."
Meanwhile, the global news platform GroundReport has updates by Jacob Cherian and Amit Ranat, and people are Twittering and flickering about the terrorist attacks.
Three of the best
When a writer does well, the rest of the country is doing fine. -- John Steinbeck, "A Primer on the 30's," 1960
And! -- John Sack, "M," 1966
He turns the empty glass in his hand, and considers biting off the rim. -- Raymond Carver, "What Is It?" 1972
The above are taken at random from "Esquire's 70 Greatest Sentences". One could pick a different trio, of course, but these are ideal because of their logic, bravado and honesty. Steinbeck is topical, given the state of our world, but what makes his sentence stand out is the logic. Writers live precariously at the best of time and very few societies can afford them so if scribblers are able to buy food and clothes, the rest must be living high on the hog, indeed.
Forty years ago, John Sack had the courage to challenge purist and pedant by using "And!" as a sentence. Horror! A hard core of editors and proofreaders remain in the trenches resisting any expanded role for "and", insisting that it was and will always be a co-ordinating conjunction. But they are fighting a losing battle.
Finally, the terrifying imagery evoked by Raymond Carver says all we ever need to know about the fine line between what's considered sanity and what's regarded as madness. Pain lurks beneath the surface and only superhuman efforts on the part of many at office parties prevent them from screaming aloud in rage or biting the rims of glasses in anguish. Carver was brutally honest about the human condition and his sparse language is unrivalled.
It's a typo! It's a typo!
Two complaints concerning yesterday's post were recorded. But it wasn't the governments of Iceland or Ireland that were upset. No. Long before the sun had risen, Bert Kearney found that "propelled" had three (!) "l"s, and a few hours later Louise Elverfeld noted that "imagined" had been scrambled. Both misspellings have been corrected. Thanks for the alerts, Bert and Louise. Rainy Day's keyboarding is more passionate than precise, alas, and the Movable Type blogging system doesn't come with a spell check function, which is a lame excuse, I'll concede.
Anyway, all this embarrassment serves as a reminder of the "Curb Your Enthusiasm" scene starring Seinfeld writer and co-creator Larry David as himself. A classic, this:
Thank God, for this interweb thingy, I say. Us poor spellers can always amend our errors, while print publishers and headstone carvers must live in constant dread of the typo.
Racing towards the iceberg
In a world of online one-upmanship, Robert Jackson has an enviable suffix: is. That's right; he is in Iceland, which means he is to be found at http://www.jackson.is/. Iceland, home of Nordic myth and sturdy fisher folk has been propelled onto our front pages because of its financial folly, which Robert Jackson unwittingly flagged three years ago in a travel article that appeared in The Telegraph: "Iceland has become a virtually cashless society," he wrote, "everything down to a stick of gum is bought on debit cards. So bring your plastic, but make sure you have a robust limit." That was then. Here's Robert Jackson ten days ago in the Financial Times:
"Think of Ireland. Rotate it 90 degrees clockwise, make it a third bigger and hang it like a pendant from the Arctic Circle. Crack open the earth's crust below to release limitless supplies of geothermal steam, then fill its territorial waters, all 200 miles of them, with an abundance of cod...Now allow this country's banks — virtually unregulated — to borrow more than 10 times their country's gross domestic product from the international wholesale money markets. Watch as a Graf Zeppelin of debt propels its self-styled 'Viking Raiders' across the world's financial stage, accumulating companies like gamblers hoarding chips. Then sit on the sidelines as the airship flies home and explodes, showering its blazing wreckage over this once proud, yet tiny, nation."
Iceland is becoming a virtually cashless society, alright, but in a way never imagined by its technocrats. The really uncanny thing in the superbly-written passage above, however, is the first sentence: "Think of Ireland." You see, that other small, windswept Atlantic island is working hard to catch up with "The Icetanic". Consider this: Two years ago, Bank of Ireland shares were worth €16.49. Last week, they hit €1.20. That €100,000 some retiree-to-be invested in this "blue chip" in 2006 was suddenly worth just €7,278. As a result, Bank of Ireland confirmed on Friday that it had received "unsolicited approaches from a number of parties" willing to make an investment in the group. The race towards the iceberg continues.
Twine
Need a word for Twittering about wine, hence "Twine". Might take off. You never know. Kicking off with Vin Jaune (French for "yellow wine").
Hallelujah!
Leonard Cohen recorded Hallelujah 25 years ago. Since then, it has been analyzed by philosophers, examined by professors, mulled over by theologians and sung by millions of idealistic students at drunken parties. Is Hallelujah a Biblical reference? Or a song of love, loss and suffering? Does it describe pain or pleasure, sexuality or spirituality? Should Obama declare it the anthem of the disenfranchised? Hallelujah has been reinterpreted by an array of artists over the past quarter of a century, but John Cale is one of the few singers who manages to convey all the emotions of this extraordinary Cohen composition.
I've heard there was a secret chord
That David played, and it pleased the Lord
But you don't really care for music, do you?
It goes like this
The fourth, the fifth
The minor fall, the major lift
The baffled king composing Hallelujah
Leonard Cohen (Various Positions, 1984, Columbia Records)
Brideshead revisited, badly, spitefully
Class, establishment, sexuality, privilege, money, and the power it purchases, are some of the key elements in Evelyn Waugh's majestic Brideshead Revisited. But one of his main concerns in the story is faith, in the form of Roman Catholicism, and, sadly, the latest film version of the book trashes this central notion to the point of caricature. In fact, its ham-handed ridiculing of the faith of the dysfunctional Flytes and its wretched mangling of Waugh's numinous language are such that the born-again atheist Christopher Hitchens is compelled to come to the aid of the afflicted.
Back to the shores of Tripoli
Until 1801, the United States and Great Britain paid yearly tribute to the Barbary States of North Africa (now Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, and Libya) for free passage of their merchant ships. Not that this prevented African pirates from plundering all the American and British ships that they could lay their hands on. Their actions eventually led to the first US military action overseas, the Battle of Derne in 1805. Many of the brigands were killed and the American prisoners in their captivity were freed. The opening line of the US Marine's Hymn refers to this action: "From the halls of Montezuma to the shores of Tripoli".
Talking of songs, such was the extent of Barbary piracy that Charles Dibdin, writer of lyrics for the Royal Navy, was kept busy penning ballads on the subject. One of his works, "The coast of High Barbary", celebrates the battle between two British ships, the Prince of Wales and the Prince Rupert, with one of the pirates: "I am not a man of war or privateer," said he / "But I'm a salt sea pirate a-lookin' for my fee." / For broadside, for broadside a long time we lay / Until the Prince Rupert shot the pirate's mast away." And then what happened? "For quarter, for quarter those pirates then did cry.../ But the answer that we gave them, we sunk them in their sea." Jolly Roger!
All of this is quaint history, of course, but today's news headlines give one a sense of the déjà vu. What are we to make of it all? Luckily for us, between Gavin and Jonah Goldberg on the Rainy Day blogroll, we've got Global Guerrillas, an excellent blog on "Networked tribes, systems disruption, and the emerging bazaar of violence," written by John Robb. The terrifying thing about the current wave of piracy, as Robb has pointed out, is that many of the robbers see themselves as latter-day Robin Hoods. "We don't consider ourselves sea bandits. We consider sea bandits those who illegally fish in our seas and dump waste in our seas and carry weapons in our seas. We are simply patrolling our seas. Think of us like a coast guard." A quote there from a New York Times interview with the Somali pirate, Sugule Ali, via satellite phone from deck of a seized Ukranian merchant ship carrying heavy weapons. Imagine the consequences if this "coast guard" were to commandeer a shipload of heavy weapons and sail it, say, over to Hizbollah? Question: Why is the West unwilling to follow and sink the Somali pirates? We have the means. What's happened to the will? Charles Dibdin would have nothing to write about today, alas.
The new face of magazines (and books)
"We've just launched PMc, a personality-based women's fashion magazine exclusively for the iPhone," says the Hot Phone Hit Factory. PMc is the brainchild of New York fashion photographer Patrick McMullan and if he doesn't make a fortune he'll surely earn a footnote in publishing history for creating the first iPhone lifestyle magazine. Rainy Day handed over $0.99 and for that princely sum we got 400 of McMullan's photos, articles by Peg Samuel, Amanda Sterna and Malissa Mayers; an interview with supermodel Hana Soukupova and sculpture by Diana Al Hadid. Magazines for mobiles have arrived!
But the app we really love is the free Stanza, which turns the iPhone into an eBook. The "print" is clear and clean and you can set the lovely Georgia font to whatever size you like. Instead of turning pages, you "cover flow" with a finger swipe and the reader can also bookmark pages. From the 40,000 titles available, Rainy Day picked Orthodoxy by G. K. Chesterton and downloaded it via Stanza from Project Gutenberg. According to Chesterton, the purpose of the book is to "attempt an explanation, not of whether the Christian Faith can be believed, but of how he personally has come to believe it." This is ideal preparation for our entertainment tomorrow evening.
Honey, it's not a Black Swan!
If I had to Twitter a review of "The Black Swan", I'd write something along the lines of, "We live in a world that we don't understand very well and Nassim Nicolas Taleb's book is a map of this world: http://tinyurl.com/ltrsb." (135 characters). Because Twitter permits only 140 characters, there simply isn't the space to say that a Black Swan is "a rare, high-impact event beyond the realm of expectations" (74 characters) and this brings us to the banking part of the ongoing financial crisis. If I understand Taleb correctly, he says that banks use garbage techniques to measure the risk of rare events, so we are all reliant on their garbage data. As a result, the current banking crisis was inevitable. Therefore, it is NOT a Black Swan! The pilot was drunk and the plane was bound to crash.
Again, if I understand Taleb's thinking, there is no conflict between the above deduction and this passage from The Black Swan: "Globalization creates interlocking fragility, while reducing volatility and giving the appearance of stability. In other words it creates devastating Black Swans. 
We have never lived before under the threat of a global collapse. Financial Institutions have been merging into a smaller number of very large banks. Almost all banks are interrelated. So the financial ecology is swelling into gigantic, incestuous, bureaucratic banks — when one fails, they all fall. The increased concentration among banks seems to have the effect of making financial crises less likely, but when they happen they are more global in scale and hit us very hard. We have moved from a diversified ecology of small banks, with varied lending policies, to a more homogeneous framework of firms that all resemble one another. True, we now have fewer failures, but when they occur...Banks hire dull people and train them to be even duller. If they look conservative, it's only because their loans go bust on rare, very rare occasions. But bankers are not conservative at all. They are just phenomenally skilled at self-deception by burying the possibility of a large, devastating loss under the rug."
This shattering critique of banks and bankers is very similar to the thought train being pursued these days by David McWilliams.
More nails in the coffin
Bit late in the day for Howard Kurtz to look back in anger and forward in dread. Especially in light of what his own employer has been engaged in. Still, the record will show that he had the courage to point a finger. Sad, though, to see traditional journalism end with a whimper.
Och, Aye! Barney's bitin' an' fightin'
Trainee reporters are warned to avoid "Dog bites man" stories because they're so commonplace. But since we live at a time when all the media verities are being pitched over the side, dog-bites-man is news, as in when President Bush's Scottish terrier Barney bites Reuters reporter Jon Decker. Thanks to the technologies that enable all of us to have a voice, Barney tells his side of the story and reveals that the Bush-Obama transition may not be as smooth as we're being led to believe.
Scottish English: "The dog died on me" means that the dog died in spite of all my efforts. It's highly unlikely that those will be Bonny Prince Barney's last words.
Tweeter
Reading the latest Malcolm Gladwell book, Outliers, and twittering about the bits that catch the eye in the infamous 140 characters or so.
A tweeter is a user of Twitter. Pete Cashmore's "Twitterspeak: 66 Twitter Terms You Don't Need to Know" is droll. http://tinyurl.com/6a6cmj
The '59 Sound of the Jersey Shore
One critic wrote, "The Gaslight Anthem are like something out of speculative fiction: this is what pop music would be if Springsteen hadn't listened to his producer, let the Ramones record "Hungry Heart", and launched the C.B.G.B.'ers into megastardom." Not that the band from New Brunswick, New Jersey, distances itself from the Boss. In fact, homage to Springsteen is never very far from the surface. It's just that The Gaslight Anthem give those Jersey Shore themes (cars, girls, accidents) a slightly punkier spin. As in the superb '59 Sound.
"Well, I wonder which song they're gonna play when we go / I hope it's something quiet and minor and peaceful and slow." Hmmm.
Critic thinks; Drudge links
Perplexed, perhaps, by the one influential voice that was not heralding "the Messiah-is-come-amongst-us", the very perceptive Clive Davis posted "The end of the Drudge era?" on 30 October. Sure, he hedged his position with that pusillanimous question mark, but he did admit that "It's a long time since I paid much attention to the Drudge Report". In support of his indifference, Davis quoted an appeal for "fresh voices" by the FT's teen heartthrob John Gapper, who confirmed the decline of Drudge and observed that this is due to "a broader shift in the US media, both old and new, towards the Democratic party."
As we've seen, that is certainly true, but the partisan shift is not confined to US media. Gapper's own paper endorsed Obama and the last man standing, The Economist, sheepishly followed suit, although the letters to the Editor this week suggest that many readers, including Rainy Day, were displeased with this posturing.
But back to "The end of the Drudge era?" Don't bet on it says the astute Jack Shafer in "Don't Count Drudge Out". He notes: "If you could access only one home page for breaking news and chose Washingtonpost.com or CNN.com over the Drudge Report, you'd be a blockhead." Exactly. And it's only going to get better for Drudge because of the "broader shift in the US media, both old and new, towards the Democratic party," as John Gapper put it. Anti-establishment voices will be in great demand from 20 January on and Drudge has the cred that the others have shred. By the way, someone somewhere calculated that if the numbers in the Drudge media kit are accurate (500 million page views monthly, 1.95 billion ad impressions monthly), Matt and his mate, assuming a 60 percent sell-through at $4 CPM, are clocking up $56 million in annual revenue. Just by linking!
If this is "The end of the Drudge era?", Matt can smile. But if this is not "The end of the Drudge era?", Matt can laugh. And link. To the likes of this.
Bond cont.
Regular Rainy Day commentator hans ze beeman offers this excellent observation on yesterday's post in which we alleged that the new James Bond film, Quantum of Solace, errs on the PC side:
"I'm split on this. On one hand, you're right, cowardice is a sin, on the other hand, I don't want the Bond movies to become chickenhawk porn. I basically do not subscribe to the idea that Bond necessarily must have topicality; most Bond movies consisted of fights against fantasy foes, of course usually of German descent, and reality only sunk in from afar. Realism usually was never the strength of the Bond series (remember the Superman jump in Golden Eye?).
That's also why I regard Daniel Craig as the worst Bond yet, and the series has become too dark and serious for my taste. I much prefer Bourne, which is the original and not the clone these days."
Bourne, that sexless, humourless, thrilling, killing machine, is indeed the threat. But instead of trying to out-Bourne Bourne, Solace director Marc Forster should have tried to out-Bond Bourne. What we get is neither Bourne nor Bond and that's the source of our disappointment.
The PC Bond
With exemplary deftness, Anthony Lane dissects Quantum of Solace in the current New Yorker. Soul Survivor contains many insights, but none more telling than this: "There may be intakes of breath, in audiences here, when Bond says that American intelligence services 'will lie down with anybody,' and when even the temperate M blurts out, 'I don't give a shit about the C.I.A.,' but how can we seriously ascribe topicality to a thriller that pays no heed to actual foes, such as Al Qaeda, presumably for fear of denting the market overseas?"
Indeed. To understand the cowardice of director Marc Forster in not pitting Bond against Bin Laden, consider what Ian Fleming had 007 do in Quantum of Solace from the For Your Eyes Only (1960) short story collection. We are told that "Bond had been in the colony for a week and was leaving for Miami the next day. It had been a routine investigation job. Arms were getting to the Castro rebels in Cuba from all the neighbouring territories. They had been coming principally from Miami and the Gulf of Mexico, but when the US Coastguards had seized two big shipments, the Castro supporters had turned to Jamaica and the Bahamas as possible bases, and Bond had been sent out from London to put a stop to it."
Ian Fleming was not afraid to "ascribe topicality" to his creation. One doesn't have to agree with his views, but there's no avoiding the fact that he put Bond at the centre of the politics of the day. In comparison, Solace screenwriters Paul Haggis and Neal Purvis sacrificed the character's credibility for the sake of "the market overseas," as Anthony Lane put it. There can be no greater indictment of their veniality.
The Swiss Bond
"Like the fella says, in Italy for 30 years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder, and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love — they had 500 years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock. " Harry Lime (Orson Welles), The Third Man (1949).
What Harry Lime couldn't have foreseen was that the Swiss would move on from cuckoo clocks to films. But the results are just as predictable, which is why the owners of the James Bond franchise should never have allowed Marc Forster within an Alpenhorn's range of Quantum of Solace. Yes, it has enough terror, murder and bloodshed to satisfy any Borgia, but what it lacks is the Renaissance humour and humanity of a Dante or a Boccaccio. When the next Bond adventure is being filmed, Eon Productions should take a look at The Ipcress File (1965). To be sure, Daniel Craig is no Michael Caine and no one wants Bond to turn into a jester, but Len Deighton's Harry Palmer expresses more wit and empathy in four minutes than Marc Foster allows Bond in his entire film.
Talking of Harry Palmer, when I met Michael Crichton three years ago I asked him what advice he'd give to somebody setting out to write a thriller. Here's what he said: "There was a writer named Len Deighton who had done a series of books about an agent named Harry Palmer that Michael Caine played. But how they were done, how they made me feel exactly, how they were structured I studied quite intensely — not in an attempt to necessarily do what Deighton had done, but to really see how the effects were created. And I think that's a very good thing for writers to do." Film directors, too.
The Telegraph's shameful (Palin) link baiting
The Daily Telegraph has hit upon a winning formula for capitalizing on the global euphoria surrounding the election of Barack Obama. The calculation is as simple as it is cynical and it can be defined as follows: Obama+Palin+death = pageviews. A cursory look at the paper's "Most Viewed" homepage tab shows how this is done and how popular it can be. A typical URL, which is designed to maximize traffic, demonstrates how the snare is crafted :
The resulting "story" is a crackpot mixture of flotsam and jetsam from the election that ended last Tuesday, but that does not prevent Tim Shipman for playing the conspiracy card. The MSM never-ending campaign strategy is now clear: Combine Obama with Palin, even if there is no connection, to manufacture "news". This may bring the Telegraph more pageviews in the short term, but it further reduces the paper/site as a reliable source of information. Sad. But that's the new journalism for you.
Perfect adjectives
Look at how waxworks, chagrined and awakened are employed here:
1. "From that year on, Martin developed a passion for trains, travels, distant lights, the heartrending wails of locomotives in the dark of night and the waxworks vividness of local stations passing by."
2. "...the country coolness of the rooms, so keenly perceptible after the outdoor heat; a fat bumblebee knocking against the ceiling with a chagrined droning; the paws of the fir trees against the blue of the sky..."
3. "A wave would swell, boil with foam, and topple rotundly, spreading and running up on the shingle. Then, unable to hold fast, it would slip back to the grumbling of awakened pebbles."
Guess the writer? Hint: He lost everything he had, not once, but twice when he was forced to flee from two of the 20th century's most wicked tyrants. And although the magical sentences above were written in English, it was not his first language.
Twittering
The witty Gideon Rachman is the latest MSM institution to try this twittering lark. Deprecatingly, of course.
Deo Gratias
The composer Johannes Ockeghem was born in 1410 in Saint-Ghislain and died in Tours in 1497. His canon, Deo Gratias, sung by nine choirs of four voices each, is one of the most intricate and glorious pieces of music ever written.
Ockeghem's birthplace has had to endure much. At one point it was threatened by a fierce dragon that roved the forest of Wasmes. But the brave knight Gilles de Chin sorted that. Louis XIV of France forcibly took Saint-Ghislain in 1655 only to see it besieged by Don Juan of Austria two years later. The dispute was ended by the Treaty of Nijmegen in 1709 when the city was given to... Spain! Today, it is part of... Belgium! Soon, it will be part of... Google!
Ryanair and €10 transatlantic flights
The first Ryanair story of the week was that its profits fell seriously in the first half of the year and CEO Michael O'Leary said he expected the airline to be in the red for the second six months of 2008. The bad news was smothered, however, by headlines such as "Ryanair to offer €10 transatlantic flights". A clever PR diversion? Maybe. But maybe not because in his latest e-mail, web entrepreneur Jason Calacanis tells this little story:
Back in 2001 or 2002, when I was bi-coastal (living in New York and LA), I was rocking out my $199 round trip ticket on JetBlue when I saw something extremely odd. An extremely wealthy couple I knew were queuing up to take the same flight. Now, this wouldn't seem especially odd, except for the fact that I knew they a) owned a jet and b) were worth well north of $100m. They were older and they were never going to spend all the money they had.There was a wonderfully bizarre moment of discomfort as we exchanged greetings. Neither of us said anything, but the statement was floating out there above my head: "What they hell are you guys doing on JetBlue when you own a plane?!?!" I didn't have to ask. The woman leaned over and said, in my ear, as if we were both in on something amazing: "$199 round trip... and TVs... amazing!"
€20 sounds better than $199, but there won't by any Ryanair TVs, that's for sure. Still, at a time when "group belt tightening" is in the air, Michael O'Leary might be onto something very opportune with cheap transatlantic flights. And, now that the universally-loathed Bush regime has been toppled, it will be acceptable to visit the US again after its eight years of self-imposed isolation.
Crichton, and Hitchens in search of refreshment
One morning in 1999, Linton Weeks, then of the Washington Post, now of NPR, had arranged to interview the late Michael Crichton in a Manhattan café. And so it came to pass. But then, a dramatic entrance: "In the middle of our conversation, a sleepy-eyed man came bursting through the door. It was the British-turned-American writer Christopher Hitchens, in search of refreshment. Crichton stood up and introduced himself. Hitchens was obviously taken aback and somewhat flattered by Crichton's recognition." Read the whole thing.
Michael Crichton RIP
Had the pleasure of meeting the late Michael Crichton once. He was on a publicity tour, promoting "State of Fear", his critical take on global warming. Crichton's passion for science, and especially honest science, was such that he followed the afternoon session of interviews with a public presentation of his ideas that evening.
Interestingly, given the current mantra of "change", Crichton also took "change" as his motif for his talk and he focussed on how dramatically the world can change as a result of technological progress. 
He began the presentation by asking his audience to look at a photo taken in Berlin at the turn of the 20th century. It showed a group of working men standing beside a large carriage wheel. They were wheelwrights, said Crichton, and they were unable to keep up with demand for their services because the rapidly expanding city needed more and more horse-drawn cabs to ferry people around. It was the same in London and New York at the time.
The chattering classes back then were worried that the ever-increasing number of cabs would result in a scenario where the city would sink under horseshit or the taxpayers would have to fund huge urban horse corrals to keep the needed beasts at hand. The next slide Crichton displayed was of an early automobile. Little did the innocent wheelwrights and the agitated opinion makers know that within 20 years of the Berlin photo being taken the horse would disappear from cityscapes. In the midst of the frantic carriage building and heated debates, no one saw the car coming.
And that's the way it is with change. Michael Crichton pleaded for a more rational look at scientific research and he warned us to remember that we do not know what the future will bring. It will always surprise us, though, he said. Whether it was unknown microbes in "The Andromeda Strain", revived dinosaurs in "Jurassic Park" or reverse sexism in "Disclosure", Michael Crichton wrote about it and entertained millions with his original thinking and great storytelling. RIP.
Power to the people!
Did you see those pictures of people waiting patiently to vote? Lines stretching around blocks and filled with men and women, young and old, immigrant and native, white, black, brown, Asian...
If you saw them, so did the tyrants in Riyadh and Beijing; the thugs in Rangoon and Harare; the gangsters in Moscow and Caracas. And they must be wondering how long more they can treat their subjects as slaves, their women as property; their dissidents as soft targets. Because those very powerful images suggest that the masters of the new technologies can now mobilize more divisions than any dictator can. And those divisions can achieve remarkable things.
So, congratulations to Barack Obama for changing the political paradigm; and congratulations to John McCain for making a truly gracious and honourable concession speech. Snippet: "A century ago, President Theodore Roosevelt's invitation of Booker T. Washington to dine at the White House was taken as an outrage in many quarters. America today is a world away from the cruel and frightful bigotry of that time. There is no better evidence of this than the election of an African-American to the presidency of the United States."
To be fair, Obama was equally accommodating in his victory speech, when he said: "Let's not be partisan and petty. Let's remember Abraham Lincoln. He was a Republican. He faced a nation more divided than it is now. But he reached out to them. And we share a destiny with everyone in the world. 'Democracy, opportunity, and unyielding hope.' America can change. Our union can be perfected."
The big question now is: Will Obama govern as a pragmatist or an ideologue. If it's to be the latter, he can expect to experience "change" himself in 2010. Politics is a process, not a party, and the pendulum swings.
A house divided
It cannot stand, Lincoln said, but seeing that we celebrated another nuptial anniversary last Friday night, there's a good chance we'll be able to reconcile our political differences. The cause of our current division is today's US presidential election.
Mrs Rainy Day is for the Democratic White House candidate because...
"I have confidence in Barack Obama. He is genuine and his wife is a huge plus for his team. I am for his policies and his dream to make America a better place. It's time to give the Democrats a chance, the GOP have been a disaster!"
Mr Rainy Day is for the Republican White House candidate because...
The heroic John McCain would be a great US president and he'd have no fear of making the tough choices that will face the next leader of the free world. We should not forget that if Obama had had his way, all American combat troops would have been withdrawn from Iraq by March, which would have led to genocide and a catastrophic victory for Islamic jihadists.
This preference for soft options could be ruinous in a commander in chief, but maybe a President Obama might surprise us with his resolve. Certainly, a black man in the White House would be an epochal achievement and it would deal a deadly blow to the twin evils of the slavery victimization business and the global anti-America industry.
Regardless of who wins, however, this house will remain democratic and republican because we believe in the right of the people to choose their leaders and expect that these leaders will guarantee freedom of speech, religion and political opinion. So, whoever wins, we'll wish him luck and we'll drink, in harmony and unity, to his health tomorrow night.
Get off your heil horse!
Last week, here, we mentioned the most recent unpleasant effort from Der Spiegel, a German newsweekly which, when it isn't hawking anti-Americanism, pawns off Nazi history porn. Anyway, Gawker picked up on Spiegel's special trans-Atlantic nastiness and then the commentators piled in. Here are a few of the juicy responses:
The German smug superiority over their perfect infrastructure and racism-free society sort of reminds me of my uncle who was a total mess in the 80's, went to rehab, and now frowns and makes snide remarks about how stupid drunk people look when someone has a third glass of wine at dinner. Everyone still remembers the Christmas you fell over and pulled the tree down on Little Doug, Germany.
Also, Europeans bitch endlessly about American cultural imperialism, but they're obsessed with us. OBSESSED I tell you. They gobble up our crappy fast food and line up in droves to see the worst Hollywood has to offer. I really love Europe and liked most of the Europeans that I met, but get a clue, meine Freunde.
Maybe we should "acknowledge" our racism the same way the Germans "acknowledged" theirs. Could invade a neighboring country, Canada say, and build a bunch of death camps there. After we enslave much of the local population and pillage their resources, we can round up all our unwanteds and ship them to their deaths in Canadian gas chambers and incinerate their bodies in giant human-size furnaces. Thanks for the advice Germany. Fuck you.
If Obama wins tomorrow, a lot of Euro-based hate peddlers are going to be out of business... for a while. They'll survive, though, because they know what sells, they're good at selling it and there's a big market for their insane fixation. But Stephen Fry is on the case and he has some rather harsh words for the "sneering" anti-Americanism that the British like to wallow in. Change is in the air.
Big Think beta and the liberal moment
With Arianna Huffington talking about building blogs and Paul Krugman opining on deregulation, the beta version of Big Think is nicely positioned to be an important port of call when the liberal wave breaks. In essence, the site features short clips of big-name talking heads, doing what they do best, which is talking about things. So, we get the likes of Huffington on media, Krugman on economics, Walt Mossberg on tech, Richard Branson on wealth, George Soros on risk, Jimmy Wales on the web... Get the picture? Users can respond with video, audio and text postings.
Peter Hopkins, 24 and Victoria Brown, 33, are the people behind the project and they keep the cost base down by taking a useful technique from the playbook of the documentary film maker Errol Morris: the interviewer is disposed with and the conversation/confrontation is between the speaker and the viewer. Along with good ideas, Hopkin's got good connections. One of Big Think's backers is Lawrence Summers, who was president of Harvard when Hopkins was an undergraduate there. Talking about the old school tie, South African venture capitalist David Frankel is reported to be another investor in the project. He was at Harvard Business School when Brown was there.
Can Big Think break through the noise? It won't be easy because FORA.tv offers a more sophisticated product and it's got the corporate sponsors, too. Big Think idea: Start rethinking the liberal leaning on Wednesday and look for new contributors and users from the conservative spectrum.
Lewis Hamilton's greatest move
Thrilling beyond belief. The last move. The most fantastic finish in Formula One history. And he had the courage to risk it. On the final bend. What a fantastic race! What a champion. Congratulations to a great, great sportsman.
Tweet
Rainy Day posting coming up tomorrow on video site Big Think, which wants to be the YouTube of the intelligentsia: Twitter.
Amerykhan promise
Catchy, funky, funny... Erykah Badu's "Honey" is one of the oddest music videos of the year and the final scene is truly priceless. Don't blink or you'll miss it.
Conventional and all as "Honey" might be in soul music terms, Erykah Badu is not, shall we say, predictable, which means that her latest recording, New Amerykah Part One (4th World War), has the critics scratching their heads in bewilderment. Gets our album "Title-of-the-Year" award, though.
