March 2004 Archives
March 31, 2004
Yuck
Politics is an ugly business and there's nothing uglier than Messrs Howard and Davies scoring the easiest points of their miserable careers from the Romanian visa scam. They're so in tune with the Daily Mail's second-rate racial hygiene fantasies that it makes me nauseous. The apparent chaos in the immigration service is hardly encouraging (another frustrating, pointless own-goal) but nothing in this story supports the phony hysteria and gutless populism of the Tories – they can barely contain their glee. It's like free money for a bankrupt political force like the post-Thatcher Conservative Party.
Sealing the borders – rolling on the giant National condom against foreign contamination – is an almost irresistible policy for a mainstream politician at a time of crippling uncertainty, real threats from brown-skinned terrorists and accelerating globalisation of capital and labour. That doesn't make their disreputable double-act any nicer to watch. This is the lowest point in Howard's leadership so far and something tells me we'll see lower.
Some links: today's Downing Street press briefing on the topic – scrabbling when they should be kicking Howard smartly into the weeds. The Commons debate according to today's Evening Standard and tomorrow's Independent. A gripping piece from The Guardian about the business of preparing 'business plans' for wannabe immigrants in Sofia.
March 30, 2004
Morton on Mars
I should have know that Oliver "Mapping Mars" Morton would have the edge on the mainstream media for the current blizzard of Mars news – and particularly for the breaking Methane story. Azeem directs me to Morton's incredibly well-informed weblog which is currently running between 48 hours and a week ahead of the broadsheets (add 24 hours for broadcast outlets because they get their stories from the broadsheets). This is a really good example of the power of the best weblog media. Morton is a Mars maniac and knows his planet (although his excellent book is weirdly out of print, according to Amazon, which doesn't seem right given the year we've had). More to the point, his insight is accessible, authoritative and accountable. A mainstream media outlet might be able to provide two from that set but certainly not all three.
March 26, 2004
Water everywhere
My kids – before they're my age – will know Mars better than I know, say, Tasmania or Patagonia. They won't have been there but they'll feel like they have. If they're paying attention (unlikely), they'll also have a pretty detailed mental image of two or three of our Sun's other planets, submarine images from Europa's salty ocean and – maybe – reasonable pictures of half a dozen small-ish, blue-ish planets orbiting other stars. I suspect they'll also know that the solar system – and the universe beyond it – are greener and more hospitable to life than we could ever have imagined and that there's as much water (liquid and otherwise) on distant planets as there is here on earth. They'll also have a pretty good idea how it got there.
Leo Enright, the BBC's Space Correspondent (now that's a good job title) has made a wonderful series of programmes about the discovery of water elsewhere in the Universe. His amazement and pleasure at the rush of new discoveries he uncovers keep spilling over into infectious laughter. Joyful factual radio.
March 24, 2004
Reports reports reports
In case you haven't had enough reports lately, here are two really fascinating ones. One that got lots of press when it came out last week (including useful summaries from The BBC and The Guardian) and one that got approximately none at all a couple of weeks earlier. The first, The Barker Review, is about housing policy. It's a proper, grown-up piece of economic analysis (and hence unquestionably naive and unpolitical) from a top Bank of England adviser but the message is simple: we need to build lots more homes in Britain and we need to get on with it. This is the kind of thing that gets the Today Programme and The Daily Mail steamed up, hence the press coverage.
The second, The local labour market effects of immigration in the UK, is probably even more important in the long run. It's from deep within the Home Office's Research Development Statistics department and its conclusion is understated but dramatic: “The perception that immigrants take away jobs from the existing population, thus contributing to large increases in unemployment, or that immigrants depress wages of existing workers, do not find confirmation in the analysis of data laid out in this report.” In the design of a rational future immigration policy, credible statistical analysis like this is going to be vital. Whether its conclusions can be made politically palatable or not is another matter.
The Barker Review of Housing Supply. Delivering stability: securing our future housing needs. HM Treasury, 17 March 2004. The local labour market effects of immigration in the UK (PDF), Home Office, 6 March 2004. The Home Office link is from Kenan Malik's weblog.
March 23, 2004
The next Stella Vine
The near-legendary Paul Murphy has a show opening on 3 April at the cheeky Transition Gallery in Hackney (London's Brooklyn). Transition hit the headlines a few weeks ago as home of notorious pole dancer-painter Stella Vine, set for international stardom since Charles Saatchi bought her small primitivist painting of Jade from Big Brother Princess Diana for £600. Murphy's show is called APU150 and features 150 drawings of Apu, the convenience store owner from The Simpsons.
The show is rumoured to climax with a huge laser projection of a naked Apu as Mephistopheles inside the dome of St Paul's Cathedral. A plan to moor the terrifying, three hundred-foot, lottery-funded 'Apu Blimp' to the roof of the London Assembly has been shelved pending a safety review by the Mayor's Office. Murphy may be twice the age of most of the trendy young artists currently making waves in the top Thames-side galleries but I'm confident he'll be able to smoothly follow Vine onto the international stage if he can stay off the gargle for long enough (Paul, take this picture to the opening for recognition purposes. You never know).
March 17, 2004
Following the wrong leader
Peter Preston in The Observer on the 'compact revolution' in newspaper publishing. I'm pretty sure this is the beginning of the end for broadsheet newspapers (although they'll take a decade to die) and I'm interested to note that serial innovator The Guardian has decided not to visit planet tabloid any time soon but I think the fact that the same paper has apparently stumbled on an online publishing model that might just work is actually much more important in the long run. As I keep saying, The Guardian's 'digital edition' is a genuine innovation, works beautifully and – remarkably – might even coexist (for the time being) with the paper's continuing free online version. While copying The Independent and rushing out tabloid editions probably makes short term sense for Murdoch et al, copying The Guardian's digital strategy will almost certainly be more important in the future (yes, that's Andrew Neil rubbing his hands over the Guardian's compact dilemma in The Scotsman and Brian MacArthur in The Times).
Tivo has landed
We've adopted a second-hand Tivo (why don't the cable companies launch their own PVR? What's wrong with them? Do they like being kicked around by Sky?). PVRs are supposed to change your life. Ours is weaving its strange magic in ways we didn't expect: if the Tivo's busy recording something, we'll politely sit down and watch until it's finished (rude to interrupt). We now routinely watch Seinfeld straight after the morning school run (very decadent). The kids want to know why we can't fast forward live TV. Yesterday we recorded a documentary about head lice (because we could)...
March 15, 2004
Lovely money
Lots of handsome Bulgarian paper money from a huge private collection of old bank notes, bonds and so on. Bank note design is a fascinating collision of authenticity (not a forgery), accountability ('promise to pay') and aesthetics (National pride, solidity, 'bankability', history). How will a nation communicate these values once physical currencies are history and States lose their monopoly over their production?
March 12, 2004
A grim kind of hope
Is it perverse to hope, as I do, that the Madrid attrocity is ETA and not Al-Qaeda? If it's the former, we can expect electoral collapse for the separatists (the last European hold-outs for a militant, colonial-era model of national struggle) and, hopefully, a final purge of their twisted, irrelevant ideology but, if it's the latter, then the 'nihilists' have their European beach-head and the world looks different again.
March 11, 2004
Dyson, Diamond, Didion
Two very good reviews from the New York Review. Cheeky polymath Freeman Dyson on the paranormal and trendy geographer Jared Diamond on Easter Island. Two beautifully-written excerpts (first, second) from Joan Didion's melancholy Californian memoir (actually, Diamond is professor of geography and physiology – how does that work, then?).
March 08, 2004
Defy orthodoxy. Buy something from my new sponsor
You'll have noticed (if you can see my right-hand nav at all, which some of you apparently can't) that my weblog is now sponsored by an Apple dealer and an online liquor store. This seems quite appropriate, given my interests. The new addition, Arthur's Bar, is not your standard bottle shop either – principally, if you ask me, because of one extraordinary product – a blended whisky that costs nearly 150 quid per bottle. Classic Cask is the only 35 year-old blended whisky in the world and Arthur's Bar is the only place you can buy it (they blend it themselves, you see).
Any half-qualified alcoholic will tell you that nobody bothers to keep blended whiskies for more than about twelve years – the bottle of Classic Cask in my drinks cupboard was distilled in 1964 – the year of Coltrane's A Love Supreme and Harold Wilson's first Government. The extraordinary complexity and smoothness (that's the limit of my fancy booze reviewer language right there) of this whisky should be enough to persuade you to remortgage your house for a bottle of something so strange and so lovely. You'll have to take my word for it, though – they don't do free samples.
March 07, 2004
Transport issues in post oil-crisis urban policing in the United States
Important journalism from Miranda Sawyer in The Guardian (the paper that reliably tackles the big issues). I hate to quibble but, even when I was a kid, everybody knew that Starsky's Ford Gran Torino wasn't a real muscle car, just cheesy product placement from the wrong side of the oil crisis (by the way, check out the disclaimer about the new S&H movie at the Gran Torino site).
March 05, 2004
Warm white wine, peanuts, outer space, celebrities... Marvelous
The highlight of the week was on Wednesday. First, fantastic French Vietnamese lunch with parent and wife Juliet, baby Rosa, sarcastic artist Paul Murphy and noted author Yolanda Zappaterra (they don't have a high-chair but Bam-Bou was probably the most baby-friendly restaurant we've ever been to), then to Carlton House Terrace to help Demos launch their latest genuinely cool report on space (which you can download in full here). Think Tanks are pretty dry places and they're less influential than they think. 'Evidence-based' policy-making turns out to be third-way mumbo-jumbo – most public policy is inevitably still cobbled together in the corridors and smoke-filled rooms – usually in the hours before a really tight vote.
Politicians (especially jaded, second-term politicians) care less about the coherence and long-term value of their policies than about the next electoral test. When outsiders do exercise influence the legislative outcomes are usually so compromised and hedged as to barely resemble the original, crystaline thought (hence the messy, slightly desperate programme of 'government by wheeze' we've seen lately – lots of panicky, irrelevant, second-priority laws making it to the statute book because tougher, more realistic legislation would produce more unsupportable rebellion).
Your average Think Tank thrashes around in its own public policy thicket – housing, science, health. Not Demos. I'm trying to imagine the original meeting: "let's do space". "What, you mean like public parks and stuff". "No. I mean space. Outer space. Beam me up, Scotty. Hubble. Beagle 2" "Bloody hell. Good idea. Bags the jet pack" "All right. But I'm wearing the Spock ears."
Of course, the best part of the evening was chatting with completely undaunted Colin Pillinger, the man behind Beagle 2, and clever Alex from Blur. Pillinger was mobbed by his fans – mostly male, difident and forty-something. Some were actually asking for autographs. Alex was more-or-less ignored but hung around until he could politely leave. Space was top dog at least for this evening.
March 01, 2004
Pictures to set a small boy's pulse racing
Lovely 360 degree QTVRs of aeroplanes (and rockets, of course) from the Smithsonian's collection and a gallery of equally lovely photos of old tractors and trucks from Antique Power and Vintage Truck Magazines. Someone gave me the Smithsonian link but I can't remember who. Sorry!