Anyone for Rothko?

I could be persuaded.(image from here)
We have until 2 Feb next year (well until 2 Dec this year really)

King's Arms, Waterloo

Had my faith in London pubs somewhat restored by last week's trip to the Eagle. Hope the King's Arms proves just as enjoyable this evening.

At least the City doesn't go on strike

More good stuff from Mark Steel:

... despite being the most vastly paid section of society, no one can explain a single thing they do that's of any value at all. If they had their bonuses stopped they could hardly go on strike, as it's unlikely that it would cause much of an emergency, with people appearing on the news to say: "Unless they get back to buying files of bonds and selling them half an hour later for three million pounds profit, I'm going to run out of share speculation, and I can't put up with that, as I've got three kids."

Revisionism

The financial crisis is making Martin Kelner look at "It's A Wonderful Life" in a very different light:

... we might have to take a revisionist view of It's A Wonderful Life when it resurfaces this Christmas. The saintly Stewart, you may recall, lent money to the poor people of Bedford Falls, with no real guarantees the money would ever be paid back, while the villainous Barrymore said it was madness granting loans to every redneck hick from the sticks (I am paraphrasing) who could write his name on a piece of paper. Turns out Barrymore was right and that the whole movie is based on a flawed premise. Into the water with you, James Stewart.

So instead of a heartwarming classic about the fundamental decency of man, it should be regarded as a cautionary tale for bankers. Don't think my Christmas dinner will taste as good this year somehow...

Eh?

Whatever qualities David Miliband may eventually bring to the job of Labour leader, command of the English language is clearly not one of them:

"I do not accept any of the allegations that are being put around," he told reporters. "This hearsay that the BBC is repeating with absolutely no basis is something that they should know better than."

Case for new Pod

Went for this one in the end.

More Bad News

That description of The Beatles reminded me of this bit from the excellent "More Bad News":

Vim Fuego: Yeah, "Warrior of Genghis Khan" is a political song.
Sally: Burning looting raping shooting, repeat.
Vim Fuego: Well I guess it's more poetical political.
Sally: Isn't it just macho-male egotistical dominance along with orgiastic blood letting and violence against women?
Den Dennis: Yeah, that's the bits I like.

(The original "Bad News Tour" might be better though. Discuss.)

Test Match Special

Mark Steel loves TMS, so it was a boyhood dream fulfilled to be the lunchtime guest:

... none were as entertaining as the magnificent Geoffrey Boycott, who walked straight up to my son and with crisp authority said "And what do you do? Do you bat or bowl?" Because it can't occur to Geoffrey there's any category of human being that doesn't do either. If you stuck him in the middle of Ecuador he'd go straight up to an old woman on a donkey and say "And what do you do? Do you bat or bowl?"

Read the rest here.

"There is no musical or artistic experience here"

So this is why the powers that be in Israel didn't want a visit from The Beatles in 1964:

"There is no musical or artistic experience here but a sensual display that arouses feelings of aggression replete with sexual stimuli."

Sounds great to me. What were they complaining about?

Complete bankers

A graduate trainee shares his pain in Saturday's Graun. What amazes me is how little imagination these guys have:

A few months into the job, a colleague took me down to the car park under our offices. His message was clear: keep your head down, and 10 to 15 years from now you can have your own Ferrari to park in your own Lehman parking space.

All that money, and that is the height of your ambition? Is that really the best you can do? Don't think I'll ever understand why rich people all seem to want the same, boring stuff.

Slightly doomed

Heard a good point on the Today programme last week. Or at least I heard it on the podcast I was listening to in the middle of the night. Alistair Darling got tons of grief a couple of weeks ago for saying we were facing the worst economic situation for 60 years. He was accused of "talking down the economy". In fact, it seems he was largely right. Although now that we are being told that this is the worst crisis for 80 years, was he guilty of underestimating the problem? Perhaps he should be taken to task for his irrational exuberance, not his excessive pessimism.

I can already imagine the interviewer's words next time Darling appears on TV: "Chancellor, just how doomed are we exactly?" Completely or only slightly? Not sure if he was asked this on the Today programme this morning, but he certainly should have been.

"I no longer care at all"

Hilarious comment follows this Stephen Pollard article:

I used to care passionately about the survival of the West. I no longer care at all. I shall be dead; I have no children. Let Islam finally triumph over the Christian West if that is God's will. Do we as a people deserve any better? I mean, look at the way we live!

Life in Princes Risborough (where the author of the comment resides) must be even worse than I thought.

Rick Wright tribute

Greene for PM

World-weary contempt and thinly veiled misanthropy are great for writers, but perhaps running a country requires something a bit more uplifting.

Oh I dunno... perhaps Graham Greene is the best PM we never had. Then again, it probably would have been a bit of a struggle keeping the notoriously itinerant chap in the country long enough to carry out his duties. Perhaps he could have focused solely on visiting world leaders, while some poor sod got on with the real work of running the place in his absence...

Advice for GB

Suggestions for Gordon Brown's conference speech next week:

One pitch is that you dispense with political matters completely but come on and speak in solemn fashion and in their entirety the lyrics of "Eye of the Tiger" by Survivor. As you'll no doubt remember, they begin: "Risin' up, back on the street/Did my time, took my chances/Went the distance, now I'm back on my feet/Just a man and his will to survive." But become even more moving subsequently.

Worth a try I suppose...

Obama effect?

Something for Obama's team to build into their calculations - voters who shy away from backing a black man at the last minute:

Doug Wilder, 77, still meets people who wanted to vote for him when he stood for governor of Virginia back in 1989 but found they just could not do it. They said they would. They even thought they would. But when it came down to it, they just could not vote for a black man. "I've had people who tell me 'I didn't vote for you for lieutenant governor or governor. I wish I had that chance again'," he says.

On the eve of his election he led in the polls by 9%. On the day he won by less than 0.5%. They call it the Wilder effect - the shortfall between white voters' professed support for black candidates and their propensity to actually vote that way. They also call it the Bradley effect, after the Los Angeles mayor Tom Bradley who stood for California governor in 1982. Back then the deception continued even after some had cast their ballot. Bradley's exit poll lead was so significant that early editions of the San Francisco Chronicle projected his victory. He lost by just over 1%.

The question over the next two months is: will there be an Obama effect?

This is from Gary Younge at the Guardian.

London's Slow Food Market

... starts tomorrow. Yum.

The Eagle Ale House, Clapham

... is where I'm going tonight (NB NOT, and I repeat NOT, for "drinkypoos"). Hope it's as good a boozer as the reviews suggest.

UPDATE: an excellent place - decent beer and it was curry night as well! Shame Arsenal couldn't win, that would have made the evening even better.

US elections

The Republicans' tactics in the presidential election campaign make me think of these lines from The Thick Of It, uttered by Glen Cullen:

This is a bucket of shit. If someone throws shit at us, we throw shit back at them. We start a shit fight. We throw so much shit back at them so they can't pick up shit, they can't throw shit, they can't DO shit.

That seems to pretty much sum up McCain's approach. "We throw so much shit at them so they can't pick up shit, they can't throw shit, they can't DO shit." It's his only hope.

The Thick Of It was so brilliant I don't think I've fully grasped just how good it was yet. Does that make sense? More quotable bits here.

Springer

Finally caught up with the Jerry Springer episode of WDYTYA last night. Interesting stuff - thought he came out of it quite well. Like Boris Johnson. Unlike Patsy Kensit.

Things NOT to do before you die

Glad to see "read Ulysses" is on the list, as I have tried and failed several times:

... it is guaranteed to clog up your all too short life. Banned, criticised and suppressed on moral grounds when it first came out, it thereby became far more famous and far more durable than it would ever have been otherwise. Had it been published openly originally, the book would in all probability have been ignored, or at least gained wider recognition for the pretentious nonsense it is. The lives of generations of English Literature undergraduates the world over would have been considerably eased as a result.

Har de har.

UPDATE: this is from The Times:

There’s a brilliant scene in the much-underrated sitcom It Ain’t Half Hot, Mum, when Sergeant Major Williams (Windsor Davies) snatches a book from Mr La-di-dah Gunner Graham and says:

‘What’s this you’re reading? Useless?’

‘Ulysses, Sergeant Major.'

Tee hee

Check out the box this "distraught" Lehman employee is using to carry her no doubt meagre work belongings - kind of appropriate:



(via Charles Arthur) - actually, perhaps the box has wine in it, and she is off to console herself, along with a few oenologically-gifted colleagues! Perhaps it is a gift from a grateful client which could prove embarrassing and has to be disposed of immediately...

(retrieved from the Mail site - apologies for linking to that vicious rag)

Vaughan again

"Everyone would have loved to see me in charge but I do think the team needed a new direction."

Talk about false modesty! (if that link is not right, see the Guardian's "The Spin" newsletter for 16 September)

*shudder*

Can I just say at this point that I absolutely can't stand it when people say "drinkypoos" to refer to going for a drink. Makes me want to puke. That is all. Sorry to interrupt. Carry on.

Rick Wright RIP

Bummer. Only three of the guys left now.

UPDATE: Dave Gilmour reacts. And here's the Mojo obituary.

Grange Hill RIP

You will not be forgotten.

Death Magnetic

Think the new Metallica album just crashed my computer. Appropriate really I guess. Thanks, Rick Rubin, for giving us this band back.

A Sunday morning walk

I seem to be linking to Peter Wilby a lot these days. Here he shows us how newspaper editors decide what stories to include:

When I was news editor of the Independent on Sunday in the early 1990s, I sent a reporter to a northern council estate. The aim was to expose the reality of poverty as, at the time, there was controversy over whether, in modern Britain, it existed except as a statistical abstraction. The report was vivid, the pictures striking. I was rather pleased with the full page we laid out.

Alas, the then editor, Stephen Glover - now a Daily Mail columnist and also my rival press commentator on the Independent - was having none of it. This was not, he said, "a Sunday-morning read". The pictures did not show a place "where I would want to go for a Sunday-morning walk". I was instructed to spike the piece or at least move it to a less prominent position.

And that was the early 1990s - possibly contradicting Nick Davies's contention that the trivialisation of news is a recent phenomenon. It's probably been happening forever. The rest of the column (which doesn't actually deal with that issue) is here.