One of my friends has already bailed out of Neal Stephenson’s Quicksilver, and I can see his point (basically, his point is that he got a 100 or so pages in and still had no idea what the story was about). I’m now reading it on faith (I’m about 400 pages in), and on the promise of the occasional scene of Stephenson brilliance (the pirate chase, Jack Shaftoe in the mine, Eliza at the Amsterdam Opera). But I did have a horrible thought last night. Quicksilver is part of a trilogy, the Baroque Cycle. What if this story doesn’t come together until, like, the end of the third novel? I could be retired before I get that far. Is this all some kind of elaborate Enoch Root gag?
Apologies for all the Stephenson references. If you’ve read any of what he’s written, you’ll know what I mean….
It’s a sad day: Peter Ustinov has died. One of the unflinching good guys, I’d say. If there is a better place, he’s in it.
I was mildly pissed off that the Guardian was paying that awful witch Anne Widdecombe to be its “agony aunt”. It was just too arch, too post-modern, too bloody knowing to be true, and I firmly believe the Guardian shouldn’t be lining the pockets of any nasty Tories, let alone a front-bench uber-dope like Widdecombe.
But I admit it, her column is great. It starts off mad, but then becomes increasingly sensible, and I think it works because however bizarre Widdecombe is, she’s not nearly as bizarre as people whose lives are so empty that they have to write to a newspaper for advice on how to live them. Her opinions are candid, of course, but also strangely compassionate - as when she warns a wife whose husband is unemployed and feckless to “do make sure that what you are witnessing is not a slide into depression, which would need a very different response.” Is this a warm side of Anne, or did some exasperated sub add this in at the last minute?
So, the Americans have got a lot of troops in Iraq. So have the British. A few other countries are in there too: Australia, Poland, Spain (for now). But who’s got the most troops in there after us and the Yanks?
Mercenaries.
That’s right, mercenaries. According to The Economist, the third biggest military contributor in Iraq right now is “private military companies”. They even have their own acronym, PMCs. Thanks to Iraq, revenues among British military companies have increased from £200 million in 2002 to over £1 billion today. They have either boringly generic names, like Global Risk Strategies or Control Risks, or excitingly non-specific ones, like Erinys (which now has a 14,000-strong force in Iraq). And they’re earning so much money, according to the Economist, that people are leaving the regular armed forces to join up with them.
Hearing this, after the stuff about the attempted mercenary plot in southern Africa the other week, makes me the think the world has either gone completely hatstand, or The Wild Geese was in fact a documentary.
What the world needs today, with a hangover and a splitting headache (well my world at least): a list of Robin’s “Holy ***” exclamations from the Batman TV series.
Someone’s set up a what’s wrong with the BBC website wiki, which seems a rather surly thing to do on the face of it, but as the public broadcaster they must put up with this kind of random moaning all the time. Now, what price the charter renewal process being conducted via a wiki? No? Well, never mind.
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I’ve long thought the Evening Standard had descended into farce, and, as currybetdotnet points out here, they reached a new low earlier this week. Their lead story was about how one of the Madrid bombers was “obsessed” with David Beckham. As currybetdotnet puts it:
“For a second there I just thought it was a crude attempt to sell more papers by reducing the largest terrorist attack on Western European soil to being a bit-part player in the saga of this countries celebrity obsession with the gifted yet vacant England football captain.
“Still I guess that would be a slightly more acceptable way to try and flog their paper than the way they initially broke the news of the attacks themselves - with a screaming headline and billboards proclaiming a terrorist attack on trains, failing to mention with the same prominence that it hadn’t *actually* happened in London.”
Exactly. The Standard uses billboards to promote itself across London more than any other paper does, and these days the whole point seems to be to get something on the front page that is either salacious, sentimental, dramatic or plain misleading. And they even seem to train their sellers to fold the papers in such a way that the front page story isn’t actually visible - so a story like “Madrid bomber obsessed with Beckham”, which is just so plain weird that it might encourage you to by the godforsaken-Daily-Mail-linked rag, turns out to actually be “Madrid bomber once got David Beckham’s autograph and quite likes football.”
And to think, my Guardian-reading father used to buy it every day, and I used to read Bristow when he’d finished with it.
So, did you watch the final episode of Sex and the City? Crap, wasn’t it? But according to the mainstream intellectual media, “millions” tuned in and it was a roaring ratings success.
Stop. Look around you. 4.1 million people watched Sex and the City last night. That compares with 5.4 million views for Murder City, a new crime thing on ITV last Thursday whose first episode was considered a failure. The Inspector Chuffing Lynley Mysteries on the same night scored 6 million.
But everyone I know watched Sex and the City, and everyone I know has a view on it. Still think you don’t live in a classless society?
It’s a techy morning this morning: now there’s this from Typepad/Movable Type, Typekey, a central authentication system for bloggers and commentings. Very neat idea - be interesting to see the commercial applications for it.
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Looks like ads on Webcast radio stations might be about to happen, following an announcement that Yahoo! and AOL are going to pool their radio outlets for sale through one outlet, putting nine million listeners a week in the arms of one sales house. Yahoo! reckon it could be worth $25 million a year to them….
