Dadblog

Reliably excellent analysis by Brad DeLong of the Plame affair in the U.S., which even a confused Brit can (sort of) understand. And sorry to trivialise this, but isn’t “Plame” exactly the kind of name that works with “affair” or “scandal”? You know, a word like “Watergate”? Or “Profumo”? Sort of strange but familiar at the same time? And why am I writing in AQI*?

AQI = Australian Questioning Intonation, a phrase I heard for the first time last Sunday, I think?

According to The Register there’s a whole new way of sacked CEOs seriously annoying the (probably underpaid) people they leave behind. Barclay Knapp, the man who bankrupted NTL (and still didn’t broadband-enable my street, curses curses) left a few weeks ago with $2.1 million in his pocket…and….now…..this:

“The SEC filings also show that the separation agreement bound NTL and its executives from saying anything negative about Knapp as part of a “non-disparagement” clause. ”

“Non-disparagement”? Is “disparagement” even a real word?

Ooh, maybe now I can persuade L senior to buy me a PS2 for my birthday….

From Gordon Brown’s speech to the Labour Conference today:

“Indeed it is because neither you nor I, none of us, ever know in advance whether we will suffer acute or chronic illness; it is because the cost of today’s expensive treatments and technologies, from chemotherapy to heart transplants, are way beyond those of 1948 and way beyond what even the most comfortably off family can afford; it is because the best insurance policy is therefore not the ifs, buts and small print of private insurance, but an insurance policy that covers not just some of the people some of the time but all of the people all of the time, that the argument for a publicly funded NHS is stronger now than even in 1948, and the 25,000 extra doctors, the 80,000 more nurses, the 100 new hospitals units, and the lower waiting times we are now able to fund, demonstrate why we have been right to be open and honest with the British people about taxation: it was right to raise National Insurance for a purpose - to pay for the NHS.”

Right on, Gordon, right on. Makes the LibDems look pretty, well, ordinary, doesn’t it?

Story about Amazon setting up a new company, A9, specifically to build a Web search engine: ““This is part of Amazon’s ongoing evolution from an online bookstore to a technology services company”. Since when did they become a tech services company?

“Unlike Google, A9 isn’t trying to develop an all-purpose search engine that indexes billions of Web pages. The startup instead is zeroing on a one of search engines’ sweet spots — e-commerce. As more consumers have become comfortable with the Internet, a growing number are using search engines to review products and compare prices. The research frequently results in online sales, prompting more advertisers to pay for prominent listings in the commercial sections of Google and other search engines.”

Very funny piece by Mark Steel on why so much academic history is really boring, and how academics leave out the big, interesting stuff because it’s so obvious to them. There’s a bit of a trend of this at the moment; in his fabulous A Short History of Everything, Bill Bryson writes in his introduction about how school text books seemed carefully designed to turn people off the subjects they covered. Or, as Steel writes:

“In one extremely dry book about Charles Darwin, I came across a section that related how he became obsessed with worms, and decided to count how many were in his garden. Having decided there was an average of 53,767 per acre, he piled thousands of them on to his billiard table. Then he studied what happened when he blew tobacco smoke at them, and when his son played a bassoon at them. Then the austere tone of the text carried on as normal, without comment, which seemed most unnerving, as the natural sentence to follow is: “That’s right - a BASSOON. He might have been a genius but he was obviously bloody WEIRD.”"

Fantastic (as ever) review by Nancy Banks-Smith of The Deal, last night’s TV drama about Brown and Blair.

Interestingly, Banks-Smith and Mark Lawson (in his own piece on the programme) both point out that the film is a complete, profoundly unfair hatchet job on Blair, turning him into an inane ball of empty ambition while setting Brown up as a genius, the great forgotten man of British politics. The fact that they do this while making Mandelson almost a sympathetic figure in his tortured desire to be liked shows just how far Blair has gone down in the estimation of a certain kind of issue-waving North London media type (and by North London, these days we mean Camden or Shoreditch, most definitely not Islington). Also interesting that it should be the Guardian’s main TV commentators who point this out most accurately…

A whole afternoon of dusting the shelf with all the vinyl on it and wallowing in a sea of late-teenage nostalgia mixed with early-teenage headbanging. Duran Duran followed by Foreigner. Come on, you know you want to. Well, maybe not.

But Talk Talk - I mean, how good were they? I’ve only got The Party’s Over on vinyl, but after listening to that I embarked on one of those stupid Amazon sprees in an attempt to buy up all their back catalogue which I only had on tape before. This will almost certainly turn out to be a bad idea, but for now, it’s 1985 in here, and the synth-drum absolutely rules…

Oh bloody hell: I bought a brilliant piece of software from an odious Christian toerag. Given my entirely prejudiced but deeply-held aversion to all things religious, the fact that UltraEdit, the finest text editor in the world and something I use every single day, was written by a committe, wankshaft God botherer is profoundly distressing. He even strives to “live in a Christlike manner”! Christ! Or, Buddha! Or, Holy Fucking Allah!

Judging by this pop-up from John Kerry’s website, showing some of the - ahem - T-shirt designs on show at the College Republicans Convention, nasty right-wing youngsters are the same on that side of the pond as on this side. Can this be real?