Dadblog

A site called Bloodyspew, which seems to do nothing more than present pages from some insane 1970s Dianetics manual, which begins as a history of religion and segues into a day-to-day description of the existence of a Volunteer Minister. I can feel a screenplay coming on….

The thing most Europeans don’t realise about most Americans is how very, very smart the Yanks are. How it happens is anyone’s guess, but your average American just seems quicker to the mental ball than your average European. And nowhere is this more true than in business theory. I just read the May 2003 edition of Fast Company (how European is that, to read a magazine like “Fast Company” two months late?) and it’s full of good stuff about “The New Normal”, described as “a slightly awkward, slightly odd place that, in some ways, calls for the best attributes of both bubble and bust.”

What follows is a shopping list of apparently irrefutable advice: be calm, be measured, don’t rush, know where your revenue and profit is going to come from, don’t build Rome in a day. The best bits are Seth Godin on “the problem with gradual” and uber-investor Roger McNamee on The New Normal itself - a wide-ranging, thoughtful and overall very, very smart analysis of what the impact of good, clear-headed management might be in the post-boom trenches.

But…. is any of it really true, applicable, practical, real? Americans might be smart, but sometimes you get the feeling they’re describing this smart, slightly mechanistic world that exists inside their heads and which they’re trying to project onto the rest of the world. Statements like “honesty and commitment must go both ways” - well, yes, but do they? Can they? And will they ever?

Or perhaps it doesn’t matter. The thoughts of Messrs. McNamee and Godin might be meaningless in the real world. But they make you think, and that’s enough.

In the midst of one of those midday office discussions (this one being “what was the nomenclature of the Corsicans in Asterix in Corsica?” stumbled across this excellent Asterix website by a chap called Gareth Thomas, including reviews of all the books and special mention of lack of political correctness (in Asterix in Corsica, the druids collect herbs by waiting under trees for things to fall off, ie, all Corsicans are very lazy). I still don’t know what alea jacta est actually means, though.

“The plural of anecdote is not data”. Ben Goldacre, Guardian Life supplement, June 19 2003.

According to Popbitch, Tim Simenon of Bomb the Bass is now an “accountant”. Of course, this could mean he’s running his own record label and does the books himself. Anything else is too awful to contemplate.

Factoid from All Music Guide: “David Bowie’s first televised performance was with his second group, the Manish Boys, who played their debut single I Pity the Fool on the UK music show “Gadzooks! It’s All Happening” in the spring of 1965.” Was this music show created by ur-geeks on sabbatical from inventing MUDs and launching Forbidden Planet?

But a search on that worldbeating programme title did lead to some Google serendipity: a snippet from the Radio Times in 1965, and an immortal entry on Memorable TV (”A sequel to Beat Room and offering the same kind of fare, top pop acts as well as dance troupe The Beat Girls. Presenters were Alan David and Christine Holmes. The title changed to Gadzooks! It’s the In Crowd and later it shortened to just Gadzooks!”). Apparently Lulu presented it for a while, too. And Robert Powell’s wife was one of the original Beat girls, you know.

Like pretty much everything else, if you can make your mind up about the euro, you’re either ignoring some fact somwhere or are just misinformed. As Larry Elliott says in his great column today on Brown’s non-decision on Britain joining, it’s a bad idea whose time has come. It’s good and bad, right and wrong, dumb and brilliant, revolutionary and inevitable. The best we can hope to be is broadly in favour or broadly against, but capable of persuasion. I find myself broadly against, and it took Elliott to make me realise why: I’m uncomfortable with the Franco-German attempt to impose “structure” in a classical Englightenment way on something as messy as a dozen economies. I’d rather “muddle through” than sort it out. I am, in other words, English, not French. Besides, Orwell would have hated it, which is normally a sign that’s something to be avoided.

Latest from the BBC: iCan, an “e-activist” tool suite. Wired News says the in October the BBC will “flick the switch on an ambitious website designed to help Britons organize and run grassroots political campaigns. The site, dubbed iCan, is designed to help citizens investigate issues that concern them, find others who share those concerns and provide advice and tools for organizing and engaging in the political process.”

Interestingly, the impetus for this came from the FaxYourMP-led campaign against identity cards.