2016 — 25 July: Monday
"Prelude, fugue and riffs for clarinet and jazz orchestra" (Bernstein) makes for a relatively unusual "Breakfast" choice1 by Petroc.
The latest splendidly-suited chap...
... with the "unacceptable face of capitalism" has been named (but, doubtless, not shamed) by some MPs. The crime (as usual) consists of getting caught after first hoovering up an Establishment "honour". Then an amount of money that would put the average dodgy welfare benefits claimant to shame. I can't help noting the American "vampire squid" was involved in the rapid sale of the ailing business to its "manifestly unsuitable" buyer for £1 too.
Come back "Tiny" Rowland, Robert Maxwell, et all-too-many al.
I'm absolutely certain...
... this will be nothing but a soaraway success, and for such a bargain price, too:
The US telecoms giant is expected to merge Yahoo with AOL, to create a digital group capable of taking on the likes of Google and Facebook. Verizon bought AOL — another faded internet star — in a $4.4bn deal last year, which gave it ownership of the Huffington Post,
Techcrunch, Engadget and other news sites.
Shortly afterwards, Verizon announced it would start combining data about its mobile network subscribers — which is tied to their handsets — with the tracking information already gathered by AOL's sites. By doing so it said it could deliver more "personalised" ads.
Just what the world needs. Besides, who ever saw one of these mergers fail to deliver on its promises? I fear I haven't yet forgiven Verizon for blacklisting my email simply on account of it being from some dodgy non-American domain at one time. Sorting that out took several weeks of persistent intervention by an American citizen and chum of a chum. [Pause] More tea, vicar?
"Peeps"?
What is it with all these people and their vivid imaginations? (Or should that be "delusions"?)
Gotta keep those Southern Baptist peeps happy!
Lake Woebegon
Self-belief is a wonderful thing:
... more than 90% of people describe themselves as above-average drivers. The same self-assessment was reported by more than 80% of drivers surveyed while they were in the hospital recovering from accidents, many of which they had surely caused themselves.
Recall that delicious "Ivy retardation" I noted a while ago?
... if there are indeed inequalities in our society, they result from uneven distribution of opportunity, caused by:
* Left Believer: Sinful human nature
* Right Believer: Social pathologies
* Left Unbeliever: Oppression by the various types of human malignity that inevitably arise in capitalist society
* Right Unbeliever: Insufficiently rigorous education policy, insufficiently family-friendly tax and health-insurance policies, excessive regulation stifling enterprise, etc.
Having fluctuating fields of interest...
... I was reading the blog of a physicist (Brian Skinner) describing his struggles to understand quantum fields. He quoted a set of excerpts from a 1953 essay by Freeman Dyson that prompted me to track down the Dyson collection...
... in which it was reprinted. Click the pic to see the bibliographical note Dyson himself added 39 years later.
More recently, our blogger had some more to say, culminating in a link to Feynman's fascinating Nobel Prize lecture transcript.
Hark! Is that Mrs Hubbard, complaining about her empty cupboard? 'Fraid so.
Having just heard...
... Neil MacGregor's "Shakespeare's Restless World" — and very excellent it was, too — it didn't take me very long to see why it rang a bell. Thanks to my habit of snaffling good reading from the "London Review of Books", and to Alan Bennett's consummate skills as a diarist, I was reminded of this anecdote...
Richard [Griffiths] had an unending repertoire of anecdotes and an enviable spontaneous wit besides. I was working with him at the time when Henry VIII's flagship the Mary Rose was being laboriously raised from the depths of the Solent. This was being done by means of a cradle when
suddenly a cable snapped and the wreck slipped back into the water.
'Ah,' said Richard. 'A slight hiccup on the atypical journey from grave to cradle.'
... when re-skimming the LRB piece. It also revealed both a supremely appropriate epitaph (8 April) for la Thatch (unimproved aspects of British Gas and similar privatised bodies) and the fact (3 May) that Bennett was reading MacGregor's book after attending Griffiths's funeral in Stratford.
Kodification...
... is proceeding quite smoothly. I've dealt with 94 sets of stuff so far, and I'm about to start on TV material beginning with the letter "E". Such good fun.