backword

Wednesday, 28 July 2004

The Man With Two Names »

Laban Tall recommends Theodore Dalrymple aka Anthony Daniels. (I didn’t realise they were the same person.) This is the full New York Sun article; don’t blame me if it gets archived or otherwise disappears.

I’m puzzled why it’s the New York Sun which chooses to profile Dr Daniels, and, indeed, why their reporter is so naive as to never have ventured south of Times Square after midnight, or indeed tplaces such as Sixth Street in Austin, or to downtown Chicago, New Orleans, or San Francisco. But maybe he has, and is playing dumb.

Continue reading The Man With Two Names.

These 887 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 10:58pm GMT Permanent link.

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Happy Birthday To Ya »

Normblog is one year old today. I did the King Lear thing for the Virtual Stoa’s third, so I can’t use that again. It looks like Stevie Wonder will have to do.

These 32 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 8:45pm GMT Permanent link.

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Hak Mao »

If the last post was too political, here’s my cat lying on a wall.

Gordon lazes on a wall.

These 15 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 5:04pm GMT Permanent link.

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Scenes From A Protest »

I’m a disappointed photoblogger today. I went to the dentist for a check-up, and apart from the fact that I had my first filling in I don’t know how long, I saw the inside of my mouth for the first ever time because my dentist has one of those micro-cameras on a flexi-thing. What she hasn’t got is any kind of a computer connection beyond the monitor, so she can’t keep the film she made — and more importantly to me, she couldn’t email me the still of my drilled out tooth.

So instead are some some shots of a one-man protest in town today. I should have asked him what it was about but, as you can see, he was engaged in conversation with the fellow in the uniform.

The 30 million a year subsidy by Cardiff County Council to Private Landlords via the Housing Benefit System to be seen for what it is 'Gross Financial Mismanagement of Government Funds' Over priced rented accommodation the result [sic].

Nye Bevan in his wildest nightmare never dreamed the welfare state would be used to create property millionaire, let alone have the Labour party endorse it. Not only are they happy to pay private landlords mortgages they give them 100 to 150 bonus on top. Pity they are not interested in doing this for the hapless tenant. [sic].

I wanna vote None of the above. 55% would given the chance. Will they let us [sic].

I’ve no idea about the rights or wrongs of his protest, but it was very colourful.

These 150 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 4:46pm GMT Permanent link.

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Monday, 26 July 2004

And Farewell To Paul Foot »

What will survive of us is love.

Philip Larkin

Nick Cohen has a generous personal tribute to Paul Foot in the Observer. Using Foot’s ‘Red Shelly’ as a template, Cohen praises his “good humour, openness and tolerance.”

And, inevitably, in the Telegraph, Bill Deedes (reg probably required).

I shall miss Paul Foot, whom I knew for more than 40 years. He might have been a socialist revolutionary, but I never met a man with whom I so disagreed politically and found it easier to get on with.

Paul exemplified the British gift, once practised in the House of Commons, of disagreeing with someone without getting nasty. These days many wrongly think that wet.

Then again, you can read Oliver Kamm, who thinks it wet.

These 49 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 5:32pm GMT Permanent link.

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Sunday, 25 July 2004

Tour De Lance »

Sheryl Crow in 'War is not the answer' T-Shirt.

Lance Armstrong has won his historic sixth Tour. It’s rather a shame that through Norm I found this disappointing (or not, as it lives up to the Grauniad’s current reputation of always being wrong) article.

Continue reading Tour De Lance.

These 440 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 6:58pm GMT Permanent link.

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Villains From The 1960s »

In the cloakroom as well, however, standing near its center, the focus of activity in it, was another senator, the Democratic Leader and hence the Senate’s Majority Leader, Lyndon Baines Johnson.
He was not a member of the liberal faction, far from it. His state, Texas, had been one of the eleven Confederate states, and his accent was often (not always, for his accent changed depending on whom he was talking to) the same syrupy southern drawl as that of the Barbour County registrar, and he used many of the same words and phrases—including the word that David Frost hated; Lyndon Johnson was, in fact, using that word a lot in the Democratic cloakroom that Summer. “Be ready to take up the goddamned nigra bill again,” he told one of the southern senators, Sam Ervin of North Carolina. Walking over to a group of southerners, he told them there was no choice but to take it up, and to pass at least part of it. “I’m on your side, not theirs,” he told them. “But be practical. We’ve got to give the goddamned niggers something.” “Listen,” he told James Eastland of Mississippi, who was anxious to adjourn for the year, “we might as well face it. We’re not gonna be able to get out of here until we’ve got some kind of nigger bill.”
Johnson’s voting record—a record twenty years long, dating back to his arrival in the House of Representatives in 1937 and continuing up to that very day—was consistent with the accent and the word. During those twenty years, he had never supported civil rights legislation—any civil rights legislation.

Master of the Senate Robert A Caro

This is one of those posts I meant to write during my off period last week. British Spin doesn’t like the 1960s.

Trouble is, it was the Greers, the Kuireshis, the Tariq Ali’s [sic] — and their political equivalents at every level of the Labour party and the Democrats — at their prime in the Eighties, who were supposed to hold the line.

Continue reading Villains From The 1960s.

These 369 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 3:04pm GMT Permanent link.

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What It Says On The Tin? »

You’re acting like a first year fucking thief! I’m acting like a professional!

Reservoir Dogs

Car with slogan 'bringing together professionalism and elitism.'

Same car, close up on 'professionalism and elitism.'

I passed this car on the way to the organic market this morning. I can resist anything except temptation.

elitism noun advocacy of or reliance on the leadership or dominance of a select group … [OED]

Backword proudly continues to bring together amateurism and social democracy (not to mention the Common People — we should be so hip at 73) and plenty of tripe as well.

These 51 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 12:49pm GMT Permanent link.

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Just The Facts »

Thanks to von for the link to Lawrence Lessig’s extraordinarily cool forensic fisking of Bill O’Reilly. (Includes link to 11.8MB mov file, so readers unfamiliar with Murdoch hackery can acquaint themselves with “Fair and Balanced” reporting and thank the old country, yet again, for the BBC.)

These 47 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 11:26am GMT Permanent link.

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Saturday, 24 July 2004

Eurgh! »

From the BBC: World’s tiniest fish identified. The stout infant fish (of the genus Schindleria brevipinguis) “is only about 7mm (just under a quarter of an inch) long” and lives around the Great Barrier Reef.

No one has yet tried inserting one into their ear canal.

These 46 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 11:58am GMT Permanent link.

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Friday, 23 July 2004

There's Nothing Else To Do »

From every corner of the interweb thing but mostly MetaFilter and Chocolate and Vodka comes this Quicktime cover of Pulp’s Common People. Other formats available.

(Christ on a bike! Suw of ChocNVodka, like me, wrote for the “award winning student newspaper, Gair Rhydd.” It stopped winning awards when I started.)

Various MeFi reactions: “The man is a God.” “oh, crap, this is great.” “This is fucking fantastic.”

And it totally is.

Some background on the vocalist.

Actually, he spent a great deal of time at the Toronto Shakespeare Company. He was Christopher Plummer’s understudy in fact. All joking aside, [he] was considered a hot property at that time. His first big break was when Plummer was sick one night, and he had to do the Hamlet role. Audiences said he was magnificent. Serious roles like The Brothers Karamazov followed.

According to Slashdot.

And when asked “What’s the award for?” by the Onion A.V. Club, he said, “For singing, I think. No? Okay. Lifetime achievement, though I’m not quite sure what it is I achieved.”

Too modest.

These 113 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 10:01pm GMT Permanent link.

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To Do Is To Be »

On Monday, I called the Hansard Society’s blogging study a waste of time. I found its presumptions unfounded or at least opaque and unexplained, its methodology unjustified, with inadequate explanation of why there were only eight subjects on the jury (and, indeed, why they were six men and two women), and why those particular blogs and periods of observation. In a word, poor.

But a longer, more detailed and better blog paper was published this week, co-authored by real bloggers and academics Dan Drezner and Henry Farrell.

It starts from a real observation.

Continue reading To Do Is To Be.

These 385 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 8:35pm GMT Permanent link.

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A Good Finish »

A few days ago, I mentioned Tyler Hamilton’s retirement from Le Tour. In his final commentary on this year’s race he pays Tribute to Tugboat.

Tugs and I slept side by side that night. Ironically, one year after he had done so for me, I was comforting him at the Tour de France. Before the start of stage 10, I said my good-byes. My wife drove him back to Girona where the vet was waiting for her call. On the way into town she stopped at a bakery and bought a whole bag of pastry. It had been weeks since Tugs had been well enough for a treat. But Haven’s brother Derek, who traveled with her to France, suggested they take Tugs to a park for his final feast. They carried him out of the car and sat with him under a shady tree and fed him his chocolate and sugar and cheese-covered desserts until there wasn’t a crumb left. He was still on earth, but I think, in that moment, he must have been in heaven.

At the end, Haven tucked my jersey from stage 9 under one of Tugs’s legs and his last Credit Lyonnais Lion under the other. He was a bike racer’s dog from start to finish.

Found on the TdF Blog.

These 30 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 3:45pm GMT Permanent link.

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Thursday, 22 July 2004

Summertime Blues »

I’m going through the fabled ‘blog burnout’ phase at the moment. Expect posting to be light.

In response to this thread, I’ve hacked a new look for Harry’s Place here.

Tony Blair has been Labour leader for 10 years? Bastard.

Continue reading Summertime Blues.

These 287 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 9:54pm GMT Permanent link.

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