Wet

From the BBC:

Magician David Blaine has announced plans to spend seven days submerged in a water-filled container in New York.

The illusionist, who spent 44 days in a glass box for a starvation stunt in London in 2003, will use lines giving nutrition and air to stay alive.
...

Organisers say they want fans and well-wishers "to visit, touch the sphere and offer words of support".

Blaine's London stunt, in which he was suspended in a glass box by the river Thames, saw him heckled by crowds. His box was also hit by missiles including golf balls and eggs.

Blaine's spokesman Pat Smith said the magician did not expect to receive similar attacks in the star's "home town". He said: "Anytime he's done anything in New York, the reaction has been overwhelmingly positive. New Yorkers are cool about this kind of thing."

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Au contraire, Mr Smith. Londoners are cool about this sort of thing.

That my countrymen refused to take this pompous, self-publicising buffoon and his pointless martyr-complex remotely seriously is testament to the fact that Britain is still, just about, the finest nation on the planet.

Gorgeous (part 2)

...And if you follow Brunel’s Great Western Railway from London Paddington to Bristol, you’ll pass along the way the massive chimneys of Didcot Power Station.

Everyone claims to hate these steaming giants, but I think they’re extremely beautiful, especially as you cruise sleepily past them in your train carriage. Your natural wonders are all well and good, but for my money man’s ingenuity is really the thing.



They’re like Cloud Machines. In the land of Oz or somewhere...

Gorgeous

The weekend saw celebrations in Bristol for the 200th anniversary of the birth of engineering genius Isembard Kingdom Brunel.

Which is as good an excuse as any for a picture of his most beautiful creation and this great city’s iconic feature: the Clifton Suspension Bridge, which spans the Avon Gorge.




Think of England is off on a big family jaunt to Bruges until after Easter. Enjoy the holidays, dear readers, commenters, friends and foes.

Another Green Teen World

More good stuff from Hitchens:


Let us start with President Bush's speech to the United Nations on Sept. 12, 2002, which I recommend that you read. Contrary to innumerable sneers, he did not speak only about WMD and terrorism, important though those considerations were. He presented an argument for regime change and democracy in Iraq and said, in effect, that the international community had tolerated Saddam's deadly system for far too long. Who could disagree with that?

Here's what should have happened. The other member states of the United Nations should have said: Mr. President, in principle you are correct. The list of flouted U.N. resolutions is disgracefully long. Law has been broken, genocide has been committed, other member-states have been invaded, and our own weapons inspectors insulted and coerced and cheated. Let us all collectively decide how to move long-suffering Iraq into the post-Saddam era. We shall need to consider how much to set aside to rebuild the Iraqi economy, how to sponsor free elections, how to recuperate the devastated areas of the marshes and Kurdistan, how to try the war criminals, and how many multinational forces to ready for this task. In the meantime—this is of special importance—all governments will make it unmistakably plain to Saddam Hussein that he can count on nobody to save him. All Iraqi diplomats outside the country, and all officers and officials within it, will receive the single message that it is time for them to switch sides or face the consequences. Then, when we are ready, we shall issue a unanimous ultimatum backed by the threat of overwhelming force. We call on all democratic forces in all countries to prepare to lend a hand to the Iraqi people and assist them in recovering from more than three decades of fascism and war.

Not a huge amount to ask, when you think about it. But what did the president get instead? The threat of unilateral veto from Paris, Moscow, and Beijing. Private assurances to Saddam Hussein from members of the U.N. Security Council. Pharisaic fatuities from the United Nations' secretary-general, who had never had a single problem wheeling and dealing with Baghdad. The refusal to reappoint Rolf Ekeus—the only serious man in the U.N. inspectorate—to the job of invigilation. A tirade of opprobrium, accusing Bush of everything from an oil grab to a vendetta on behalf of his father to a secret subordination to a Jewish cabal. Platforms set up in major cities so that crowds could be harangued by hardened supporters of Milosevic and Saddam, some of them paid out of the oil-for-food bordello.

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The most recent celebrity I’ve seen throw his dunce’s cap into the ring is Brian Eno, on last night’s Culture Show, who claimed, with all the usual supreme confidence of the person famous for deeds utterly unrelated to international politics, that the Iraq invasion was “completely immoral”. Apparently he’s been one of the big (but presumably pleasantly ambient) noises in the Stop the War jamboree for a while.

Pop stars, film actors and other celebrities are generally leftist because most of them are, in essence, overgrown teenagers. Teenagers naturally want to rebel against the status quo and accepted wisdom, and that’s only right.

But just as it takes a wilful mental perversion for an adult to continue to insist that capitalism is evil, despite the fact that no other system has ever resulted in anything other than comparative misery and oppression, so it takes a wilful sort of blindness to believe that the democratic, liberal, free countries of this world are always in the wrong, or always motivated by greed or imperialism, even to the point of retrospectively pardoning a malignant cyst on the planet like Saddam.

If Bush and Blair...

...got caught together in that matter transporter from The Fly, the resultant hybrid would probably look just like Lord Browne, chief executive of BP.

Think of England’s English Grammar, Comprehension and Literacy Examination (Advanced)

So you think you can speak English? Then try my fiendish test, and think again. The questions are in order of difficulty, and a link to the answers is at the bottom.

NB. No googling, you’d only be cheating yourself

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1. How should the word ‘ghoti’ be pronounced?

2. What do the words ‘cleave’, ‘sanction’ and ‘fix’ have in common?

3. What is unusual about this conspiracy theory: ‘Neil A, NASA’s pet, steps as an alien’?

4. When the Americans built a missile, the Russians built an anti missile. So the Americans built a missile to counteract that missile, and the Russians built a missile to counteract the counteracting missile. This happened ten more times. What did the Russians end up with?

5. Correct the punctuation of this sentence:
Woman, without her man, is useless.

6. Correct the punctuation of this letter:
Dear Tony Blair,
I would like to compliment you. I can't stop thinking that you are one of the best Prime Ministers we have had. So many leaders go ahead and propose policies and then botch the job. We expect it. From you, in years to come, I know we will have better results.

7. Punctuate the following sentences so that they make sense:

a) She told her friends were pointless.
b) The horse rode past the barn fell.
c) Dogs dogs dogs bite bite bite.
d) Badgers badgers badgers badger badger badger badgers badgers badger.


8) Write a sentence with five consecutive uses of the word ‘and’ that makes grammatical sense.

9) Write a sentence with eleven consecutive uses of the word ‘had’ that makes grammatical sense.

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For the feeble-minded, the answers are here.

Duncedom beyond measure

Activist group fails to thank rescuers
(from The Times)

THE Christian group whose activists were freed in a British-led raid in Baghdad yesterday did not thank their rescuers but instead called on them to withdraw from Iraq.

In a long statement released in Toronto, the leaders of Christian Peacemaker Teams (CPT) described how delighted they were to hear about the release of their three abducted members. But they pointedly failed to acknowledge that the hostages had been freed in a military operation involving British, American, Canadian and Iraqi forces. Instead they blamed the presence of foreign troops for Iraq’s problems.

Doug Pritchard, co-director of CPT, said the hostages knew that their only protection was in “the power of the love of God and of their Iraqi and international co-workers”. No mention was made of the special forces, intelligence officers and police who worked for months to secure the men’s release.

“We believe that the illegal occupation of Iraq by multinational forces is the root cause of the insecurity which led to this kidnapping and so much pain and suffering in Iraq today. The occupation must end,” Mr Pritchard said. “Today, in the face of this joyful news, our faith compels us to love our enemies even when they have committed acts which caused great hardship to our friends and sorrow to their families.”

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Next time, how about loving your enemies somewhere where our soldiers don't have to waste their time and risk their lives saving your useless hides?

Howling mad

I watched two very different animated films this weekend: the Wallace and Gromit movie, and Howl’s Moving Castle.

Hugely enjoyable as the former is, it’s the latter, a Japanese anime movie directed by Hayao Miyazaki of Spirited Away fame, that sticks in the mind. Spirited Away was perhaps the first anime film to really achieve mainstream success in the West, and the fact that it and Howl’s Moving Castle have been successful at all in the West is pretty remarkable.

It’s remarkable not because of any lack of quality in the film-making – Spirited Away especially is full of haunting, beautiful, strange images (like the one below) which live long in the memory – but because the Japanese seem to have a fundamentally different approach to storytelling.




Indeed, the Japanese films dispense with the two absolute basics of Western story conventions: the linear plotline, and the concept of ‘Goodies and Baddies’.

All western children’s films, even the really good ones like Wallace and Gromit, The Incredibles, Shrek etc – are essentially very predictable. The Baddies will threaten the Goodies’ way of life, the Goodies will suffer a reversal then triumph against the odds, the Baddies will have their deserved comeuppance and finally the Goodies have a happy ending.

But Howl’s Moving Castle has none of this. There really is no predicting what will happen next, which is very disorientating for the Western viewer, who is taken far out of his comfort zone.

And there is a completely fluid approach to characters. There are no absolute Goodies or Baddies: ambiguous characters perform alternately selfish and selfless deeds throughout. The apparently wicked witch, who turns our young heroine into an old lady, is adopted by the ‘Goodies’ about halfway through the movie for no apparent motive. And although there is a Happy Ending, this is not achieved through any destruction of the ‘Baddies’, but because individual characters break free of their self-imposed spells and the World War is for some reason just called off.

In other words, it’s a whole bunch of people doing one damn thing after another. If it weren’t for the mutating blob-men, demons in the fireplace, walking castles, hopping scarecrows etc, it would almost be just like real life.

This will drive you mad

If you fancy frittering away some precious time, try out this fiendish little game, which will test both your engineering skills and your patience to the limit:

http://www.mousebreaker.com/games/blueprint/play.php

When you get the ball to hit the target it is pretty difficult not to utter a triumphant yelp.

Grauniad Samizdat

With the advantage of three years of hindsight, politicians' failed predictions about Iraq make dispiriting reading. "Any war will cause a refugee crisis of huge proportions," insisted Charles Kennedy. Iraqis proved him wrong by distinguishing perfectly well between a war on tyranny and a war on them, and stayed put. "The same doctrines [of pre-emptive war] could equally be applied by India vis-a-vis Pakistan, or in any dispute where a state feels threatened," warned Shirley Williams, shortly before India and Pakistan initiated talks to resolve the Kashmir dispute. In his tirade before the US Senate, George Galloway eulogised his own wartime perspicacity, which presumably included his assessment of Saddam Hussein: "I think he will be the last man standing in the bunker….

….Mainstream opponents of the war accepted a delusory picture of containment's accomplishments, and understated the costs. Even the Islamists and Leninists of the Stop the War Coalition were less evasive; they can be faulted for lack of candour only in describing themselves as anti-war, rather than anti-American and anti-British. "While war lasts by far the lesser evil would be reverses, or defeat, for the US and British forces," declared Socialist Worker when war broke out.

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So writes Oliver Kamm in today’s article We Were Right to Invade Iraq.

The astonishing thing is where he’s written it.

Any way you look at it, we lose something

David Aaranovitch writes one of the sanest things I’ve read on Guantanamo. The whole article is well worth a read here.

The suspension of habeus corpus is grim enough. The orange boiler suits and the cages are a PR disaster on the world stage.

But 9/11 and then 7/7 gave our Governments an impossible dilemma: we demand that our security forces protect us from people who look like everybody else, but that they do so without being seen to suspect anybody who looks like everybody else.

Don’t let on that tennis balls are for girls

US President George W Bush was hit by a ball at the heavily-guarded US embassy in Pakistan - as he tried his hand at the country's national sport, cricket.

The baseball-loving leader was shown how to bat and bowl by members of Pakistan's national team, using tennis balls instead of harder cricket balls.

"I don't quite have the skills yet," Mr Bush said later, when asked if he had enjoyed his first brush with the game.

He hit two deliveries from the crease, and was struck on the shoulder by one.
The US leader has been touring India and Pakistan.

Cricket remains an obsession in both countries, where the sport - introduced by the British more than a century ago - is a spur for national pride and fierce regional rivalry.

The Pakistani captain said the president had been looking for "a comparison between cricket and baseball".

Mr Bush told a dinner party on Saturday that he had been bowled over by a "googly" - a type of ball where the bowler seeks to surprise the batsman.

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As I’m sure everybody is perfectly well aware, a googly is an off-break disguised as a leg-break bowled with a wrist-spin action by a right-arm leg-spin bowler to a right-handed batsman.

Not to be confused, of course, with a chinaman, which is also an off-break bowled with a wrist-spin action to a right-handed batsman, but by a left-arm unorthodox wrist spin bowler.

And only the greenest schoolboy could mix up either of these with the doosra, which is a leg-break disguised as an off-break bowled with a finger-spinning action to the right-handed batsman by an orthodox right-arm off-spin bowler.

Taking the Michael

From the BBC:

Campbell fills top Lib Dem posts

Newly-elected Liberal Democrat leader Sir Menzies Campbell has begun unveiling his frontbench team.

Defeated leadership rival Chris Huhne is made environment spokesman.

Nick Clegg, a key backer of Sir Menzies' leadership campaign and - like Mr Huhne - an MP only since last year, takes over at home affairs.

Michael Moore gets foreign affairs, Vincent Cable retains his post as Treasury spokesman, while Julia Goldsworthy is made his deputy.

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I know they’ve got an anti-Bush agenda, but surely that's a step too far even for the Lib Dems?

The practical abstract

From the BBC:

The London Underground map, the Spitfire and Concorde have been voted Britain's three favourite designs of the last century.

Design Museum visitors and viewers of BBC Two's The Culture Show were asked to choose from 25 design icons.

Among them were the Routemaster bus, the Mini and red phone boxes as well as more recent inventions such as the internet and video game Tomb Raider.

A public vote will decide which of the three is Britain's most iconic design.

The London Underground map was designed by Harry Beck in 1931 when the Tube grew so large it became impossible to map the lines and stations geographically.

Instead, Beck designed the map based on an electrical circuit, with each line in a different colour and diamonds for interchange stations.

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Told you so.

As well as being a beautiful object, the Underground map represents one of those great leaps of human imagination. It's so obvious afterwards, but nobody thought of it before.

There is nothing useless to men of sense*

From the Times's 'Thunderer' a few days ago:

THE OXFORD philosopher, Sir Peter Strawson, died this week, full of years and honour. For decades, he had won golden opinions by his work on meaning. He was a fine man. Even so, his career had no meaning.

In Greek, philosophy means love of wisdom. It is widely assumed that philosophers are wise men who employ their learning to answer the ultimate questions: the existence of God, the good life, the fundamentals of politics. That was once true, but from the 17th century onwards, there was a steady retreat from the big questions.

Philosophers began to inquire how we can be sure that the external world exists (earlier philosophers had discussed this, but not exclusively). The answer is that we cannot, but that this does not matter. Asked what he thought of Bishop Berkeley’s anti-materialism, Dr Johnson kicked a stone. “I refute it thus, Sir.”

Then there was a further retreat, to analysis of language. How can we be sure that the meaning of words corresponds to reality? In his essay, “The Theory of Descriptions”, Bertrand Russell pondered the phrase: “The golden mountain does not exist”. If it does not exist, how can we talk about it?

The idea that men could wax eloquent about non-existent gold would come as no surprise to a high street bank manager, but that is not enough for philosophy. Russell thought that he had solved the problem. Strawson thought that he had proved him wrong by homing in on a crucial point in Russell’s argument: the phrase “the King of France is bald”.

In a popular guide to philosophy, C. E. M. Joad wrote that after a couple of hours with the hard philosophers, historical or literary works would seem so easy: like bounding along on a country walk after being freed from the weight of a heavy pack. Philosophy does sharpen the mind, but this newspaper’s Su Doku puzzles do too. On the questions that vitally concern mankind, Su Doku is as useful as Strawson.

At committee meetings, Strawson was often silent. His Times obituarist wondered whether “such gatherings provided better opportunities for the observation of folly than for the dispensation of philosophic wisdom”. Yet it is hard to believe that the discussions were anything like as foolish as an argument over the King of France’s baldness. As practised in the Russell-Strawson debate, philosophy had become nothing more than an argument between two bald men over a comb.

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There’s a very funny scene in the first Austin Powers film, where Dr Evil has captured Austin.

Rather than just shooting his arch-enemy, Dr Evil has of course contrived an absurdly elaborate method of execution involving dipping Austin into a tank of deadly stingrays or something, thus affording the spy ample opportunity to escape and ultimately thwart his plans. Scott Evil, his son, is bemused - leading to the following exchange:

Dr Evil: All right guard, begin the unnecessarily slow-moving dipping mechanism. [guard starts dipping mechanism] Close the tank!
Scott: Wait, aren't you even going to watch them? They could get away!
Dr Evil: No no no, I'm going to leave them alone and not actually witness them dying, I'm just gonna assume it all went to plan. What?
Scott: I have a gun, in my room, you give me five seconds, I'll get it, I'll come back down here, BOOM, I'll blow their brains out!
Dr Evil: Scott, you just don't get it, do ya?


This particular Thunderer just doesn't get it.

May the Gods preserve us from ‘usefulness’.

Virtually everything you ever learn anywhere is ‘useless’ if you are so strict, or so unimaginative and literal, about what ‘useful’ means.

Philosophers began to inquire how we can be sure that the external world exists ... The answer is that we cannot, but that this does not matter.

That's true enough: virtually everyone who takes a philosophy course ends up there.

But the journey, not the destination, is the point of studying philosophy.


*Jean de la Fontaine (a wise frog)

More true cliches: the British weather

We’re having a lot of weather at the moment.

So much, in fact, that I have drawn on the board in my office an Expanded Venn Diagram showing the Holy Trinity of the British winter – Rain, Hail and Snow – and their various intermediary stages.

A magnetic marker indicates where we currently stand, leading to much debate amongst my colleagues, all of whom believe themselves to be the most finely tuned to the ways of the English weather.



For the record, the consensus for the Bristol climate at the time of posting is “Snain”.