Oops

8:17am

Blogging will be lighter than usual for the next few days thanks to an argument between my finger and a carving knife. 

It's stitched up and protected, but that makes it very difficult to type!
 

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Eh?

6:44pm

I've just seen Ken Livingstone being interviewed about the new £25 congestion charge on 4x4s and people carriers, The revenue, he said, would be used to fund "a massive expansion in cycling and walking". 

I can see that cycle lanes cost money. But could someone please explain to me what it is about walking that needs funding?

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The reality of parallel Sharia

3:31pm

Daniel Finkelstein has an excellent post up on the realities of parallel Sharia law:

The conversion of non-Muslims near death without the knowledge of their families has caused fierce rows. One reason, according to my correspondents, is that conversion changes the destination of any inheritance with Islamic courts deciding and inherited assets flowing only to Muslim relatives or the community.

Divorce battles raise similar questions. Conversion by the father in the run-up to a divorce gives him crucial advantages - he gets custody, turns the children into Muslims and prevents his wife using the civil courts.

Running a dual court system produces extraordinary practical difficulties and the opportunity for human rights abuses. Just ask the campaigners in Malaysia.

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More handwringing

2:39pm

There's a wonderul caricature of a Guardian piece on Comment is Free. I'd have a good laugh, except that it seems to be meant to be taken seriously. Writing about the Mosquito - a device that emits a buzz which can only be heard by people under 25 and which is so annoying that it stops them hanging around where it's working - Rowenna Davis argues:

What really matters here is the psychological effect of this policy; what kind of message does it deliver to our young people about society's relationship with them? For me, it says that you are a pest that needs to be got rid of, not worth talking to or engaging with about community problems - simply something that should be swept away. If we want to improve kids' antisocial behaviour, we need to engage in a dialogue with them, not shoo them away.

Ah, the poor dears. All they want to do is have a dialogue. That's why they hang around in the streets, hoods up, drinking and swearing and glowering threateningly at passers by. That's no doubt why, on Saturday, a group of them slashed my car tyre in broad daylight after I refused to bow to their threatening behaviour and buy them cigarettes. (More on this to follow in another post.)

If they behave like pests - I'd say thugs, but let's not squabble over definitions - then the only way to treat them is as pests.

Anyone who has tried aggressively swatting away a wasp will know that it just comes back twice as likely to sting you. 

But human beings, unlike wasps, have the capacity to understand laws and punishment for bad behaviour. So why don't we try it?

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What is up with David Aaronovitch?

2:10pm

There's an extraordinary piece in today's Times by David Aaronovitch, which is so wrong in every aspect that I can barely believe it's by him (much as I disagree with him on almost everything except Iraq, I usually have a high opinion of his writing). 

Perhaps it's the fact that the Archbishop genuinely is holier than us that has contributed to the exuberant pleasure it has given so many people to misrepresent so violently what the poor man was saying. Or what I think he was saying, for I was pedantic enough - unlike some of his most enthusiastic assassins - to read the bloody speech.

Eh? Let's leave aside how holy he supposedly is. I'm fed up with this idea that somehow the only people who have either read his speech or heard his interview are those who defend him, and that those of us who think his speech was a disgrace not just to his office but to the liberal values of his country have clearly not bothered to read or hear his actual words. 

I'm not going to go over old ground but almost every serious commentator I have read has represented his words both to the letter and spirit and has clearly read the speech and heard the interview.

If David Aaronovitch thinks the Archbishop's words really were as bland as he represents them as being, then either it's he who hasn't read them or he is a lot dimmer than I have always thought he was.

As for this comment:

The conservative Jewish commentator Melanie Phillips exercised some extra-jurisdictional powers of her own in calling for the Archbishop to be dethroned (next week the Vicar of Dibley gives her choice of Chief Rabbi), entirely missing Dr Williams's conservative attack on the decline of civility and “customary ethical restraints” produced by our “narrowly rights-based culture”.

Well, that is simply beneath him, as Melanie herself points out:  

I wonder which is the greater of my crimes — to be ‘conservative’ or to be Jewish?

Apparently, this should debar me from saying that Rowan Williams should step down as Archbishop of Canterbury or saying who I think should be his successor.

What on earth was he doing writing this column the other day - White woman v black man. One's got problems - about the US elections and telling us who he thinks should and shouldn't be elected? Since he is neither black, female or American, he was surely excercising "extra-jurisdictional powers" of his own. I assume he has never once argued that a foreign politician should be removed from office. I assume he always kept quiet when Pinochet was in power, and never once expressed the view that the National Party should be removed from power in South Africa. 

Awful stuff. Really, really awful stuff.

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Not nice. Not nice at all.

12:48pm

Via Samizdata, here's what's on the wall at Barack Obama's Houston campaign office:
 

A Cuban flag with Che Guevara superimposed. Let's hope that Obama's staff are not in their candidate's image.

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Not always wrong

10:56am

I'm not sure whether the best comment about this would be the notion of a monkey with a typewriter eventually typing the complete works of Shakespeare or the fact that a stopped clock is right for one minute every 12 hours. 

(I annoy Mrs P intensely by pointing out, every time we pass it, that the clock on the junction of Finchley Road and Hendon Way, which has to my recollection been broken for over a decade, is correct once every twelve hours. I have an inexplicable wish to arrive one day at the traffic lights in front of it at eight minutes to six, so I can tell the time from it.)

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What am I missing?

9:29am

I think I might have made a mistake. The reviews of Daniel Barenboim's Beethoven cycle have been uniformly ecstatic. And the buzz has been clear that the series has been something very special. (Have a look at Intermezzo, one of my favourite sites, for some excellent and really informative reviews.)

I have long since dismissed Barenboim as a pianist. I have simply been to too many recitals of his and gone away having felt as if he'd been slapdash and arrogant - too many wrong notes, too little care and too much of a 'one for the bank' air about the event. (Much like too many of the Vienna Philharmonic's concerts here or, worst of all, the St Petersburg PO's shocking touring concerts.) I kept going back for one more try and finally came to the conclusion that, fine conductor as he now is, his piano recitals were a waste of everyone's time - and money.

Jessica Duchen raves today about his 1960s set of Beethoven Sonatas: 

I learned all the Beethoven sonatas - by ear - as an insomniac teenage piano-nut with a turntable, headphones and the LPs of Barenboim's Complete Beethoven Sonatas on EMI, recorded back in the late 1960s. Our Danny was in his twenties. They are stupendous. When I wasn't listening to him, I was listening to Schnabel, who was also revelatory - but it was Barenboim who grabbed the imagination's heart-strings from note no.1; somehow one sensed his identification with every aspect of Beethoven, from the profound mysticism to the humour, from the personal tragedy to the great humanitarian idealism. And now, if Beethoven is the most idealistic composer who ever lived, he could have no better match than Barenboim. 

Yes, yes. Barenboim was indeed a stupendous pianist. But in my - extensive - experience of his playing now, was is the operative word. 

A part of me thinks this cycle's acclaim might be a case of the Emperor's new clothes; that the commentariat are raving about it because they predetermined that it would be the big event of the year. But to be fair, I speak in total ignorance, since I haven't been to any of the recitals. So I have to think that they are right, and he is once again the pianist of old. Maybe he has actually practised properly for this cycle, or treated it with the proper respect. 

Having turned down any number of chances to book, and invitations from friends to go with them, I think I made a mistake. At least I'd have found out whether it's hype or reality.

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17 years for a life

7:51am

Drunken teenagers who kicked a father to death are jailed for life

reads the headline.

But then, as we all know, life doesn't mean anything of the sort: 

He [the judge] said that Swellings, the gang’s ringleader known as “Swellhead”, of Crewe, would be jailed for a minimum of 17 years. Sorton, of Warrington, and Cunliffe, formerly of Warrington, will have to serve at least 15 and 12 years respectively before being considered for parole. 

So the leader will, if he behaves himself, be out by the time he is 36. In my book, that's getting away with murder.

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Can you speak English?

7:44am

Ricky Gervais in today's Radio Times (via The Times):

“I love paying tax,” the comedian tells the magazine. “It helps justify how much I earn. There’s something unsavoury about tax exiles. Pay your tax or f*** off.”

 Er, they have. That's why they are known as tax exiles.

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