Fourth Estate follies, Part 2

If anyone knows how to fix the video clip embedded in this item, I'd be grateful. It's a mini-classic in which Barack Obama submits to a spectacularly silly word-association interview on the Fox Business Channel. Nafta? Iran? Basketball? Although he survives with his dignity intact, it's sound-bite journalism at its very worst. I watched, and laughed, last week, but there seems to be a glitch now. Shame.

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Ex-maestro

It was only after I made a passing reference to Herbert von Karajan that I discovered his centenary had come and gone. Norman Lebrecht wasn't exactly queuing to pay his respects.

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Blue lamp

I just caught up with Danny Finkelstein's column on the dispute over crime statistics:

It is suggested that we are better off trusting our own instincts; that our own experience tells us that things are getting worse - whatever the figures say we “know” that crime is going up. What nonsense... I would say that people are rejecting the crime figures simply because they don't want them to be true.

Yet one thing that strikes me time and again is that people are more and more disgruntled about the service they get from the police. I've recounted my own unhappy experiences before. And at the weekend, when I was enjoying the hospitality at a party in one of the most idyllic parts of the Wye Valley, I got into a conversation with a woman who lives in a crime-ridden Midlands city. Her husband - a teacher -  recently saw youths...

Continue reading...

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Selling "Kane"

As part of my Orson Welles binge, I went in search of the trailer for his masterpiece. First time I'd ever seen this. "I'm speaking for the Mercury Theatre. and what follows is supposed to advertise our first motion picture..." As you might expect, it's more quirky than commercial.

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The future of reading... and the state of the Games

That indefatigable technophile, James Fallows, has finally got his hands on a Kindle e-book. His impressions are almost entirely positive. Knowing what it's like to be stuck on a long flight without a good book, I was particularly taken with the idea of downloading one while waiting for take-off. Very Dan Dare.

Btw, Fallows continues to be a must-read source on the preparations for the Beijing Games. He's still worried about smog, but he also explains why he thinks it's imperative the Games are a success: if they aren't, foreigners will get the blame.

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