Ypres, Loos, Somme, Arras…
Poppyman wants to know: have you got yours yet?
Society
Wednesday
Baseball Division
Yup, it’s time for the Fall Classic. I’m taking part in a symposium at Culture11. My first contribution, in which I out myself as a temporary Tampa Bay Rays fan, is here. Why Tampa? Largely, as I say in the wee piece, because I enjoy Philadelphia’s beery opera buffa and do not much fancy that being corrupted by victory. Happily Michael Brendan Dougherty and Tim Carney are around to talk, like, about actual baseball.
Political Advertising 21
Jobs being sent overseas to cosset foreigners? Not a new phenomenon.Not a new campaign themse either. Here’s a Clinton-Gore ad from 1992 that could easily have been made by Obama this year.
The Last Throes
It’s over. How so? Because campaigns that have a chance of winning don’t perform stunts like this: Please join our campaign for a conference call at 11:30 a.m. EDT, with former CIA Director Jim Woolsey and McCain-Palin Senior Foreign Policy Adviser Randy Scheunemann to discuss recent news stories about which candidate terrorists would like to see in the White House in 2009. [Hat-tip: Marc Ambinder] UPDATE: Dave Weigel, bless him, has more.
Leaderless
The Times has gone understandably big on its scoop about George Osborne’s activities in Corfu. Many have been taken aback by quite how hostile the tone of its coverage has been—Osborne and The Times editor James Harding were thought to be friends—and if what Guido and several others are hearing is true, it seems that tomorrow’s coverage will be the harshest yet towards Osborne personally. But in all this there is one notable absence: The Times has not yet run a leader on the matter. On Tuesday, one of its editorials did refer to Deripaska but the reference was to his financial difficulties not to the hospitality that he had
PMQs: the aftermath
Gordon Brown’s call for an inquiry into the allegations surrounding George Osborne was pure political mischief. But it has worked. Both the BBC and Sky reported the call prominently on their one o’clock news broadcasts. As Nick Robinson noted on the Daily Politics, it was a clever way of giving the press a second day angle to the story. The Speaker’s decision to call Dennis Skinner right towards the end is not going to do anything to silence the whispers that he is too partisan. There was only one topic that Skinner – who has previously been chucked out of the Commons for making allegations about Osborne and cocaine –
PMQs live-blog
Even before the revelations about George Osborne, today’s PMQs was of particular importance for the Conservatives. The encounter was perceived to be the Tory’s best chance to burst Brown’s bubble. But now it has taken on even more importance. If Cameron gets clunked, Tory backbench morale—which is surprisingly low given that the Tories still have a sizable poll lead—could plummet. We’ll have live coverage from noon. 12:03 Osborne is sitting on Cameron’s left. 12:05 Brown looks confident. But Cameron gets in a good jibe calling Brown ‘a master of dodgy accounting.’ The Labour backbenches are raucous today, the Osborne scandal has put a spring in their step. 12:10 Brown is
The R-word
The throng saying we’re entering a recession has been joined by its most significant member so far. Mervyn King deployed the R-word in a speech to Leeds businessmen last night, and the markets have reacted accordingly. Sterling collapsed against the dollar – hitting a five-year low of $1.6203 earlier. Whilst the FTSE share index has looked wobbly since opening. All of which fuels the idea that no amount of Mandelsonian manoeuvring – or no amount of public cash – can prevent the poor state of the economy being the story of the next few weeks, months, years. The question that remains is whether Brown & Co. will capitalise because of it. Or whether it
Shares that go up as banks go down
‘Whenever there’s a catastrophe on Wall Street, our business just gets better — because our products become more collectable.’ So says Bob Kerstein, founder of Virginia-based Scripophily.com, the world’s largest buyer and seller of historic bonds and share certificates. The recent blizzard of insurance and investment banking failures has brought Kerstein particularly brisk business. ‘Our Merrill Lynch certificates are selling very well, and we’re almost completely out of Bear Sterns certificates,’ he says. ‘A few months ago you could buy a Merrill Lynch certificate for about $20 or $30. Now they’re worth upwards of $100.’ The collectors’ market in early and historically significant bonds and share certificates first took off
Banks too risky? Try flying saucers
Kim Schlunke would like you to buy a flying saucer. No, honestly, he’s got a video of it on his mobile, showing one buzzing round his lab in Perth, Australia. See it fly! See it hover! See it land delicately on its little legs! It looks, in other words, like a special effect of the sort that DreamWorks can throw into a movie with scarcely a thought. Yet this flying saucer does not break the laws of physics, and Schlunke, one of those archetypal garrulous Aussies, has actually flown in a larger version which could one day become a flying car. Well, he says he has, although his phone has
To muzzle the short-seller is to muzzle free speech
The market needs speculators who are willing to challenge the big battalions, says Patrick Macaskie. Don’t believe the hype: short-sellers were not the villains of this financial crisis People everywhere have been grappling with what has befallen them. Like the closing stages of A Midsummer Night’s Dream we are waking from a reverie and human folly at its most extreme is being revealed. It is harder to see the happy ending but some things will be for the better. When I think of my children I will be glad to see sensible house prices and society getting a bit more serious and self-critical. But the adjustment will come at a
The market crashes, but the gravy train rolls on
It is difficult to think of anything more depressing than the recent photographs of a smirking Lord Mandy in his ermine drag flanked by two of yesterday’s major groupies, Lord Falconer and Baroness Jay, she who gleefully masterminded the removal of the hereditary peers, but couldn’t resist a title for herself. At the very moment the PM was berating the bonus culture, his new friend, Lord Mandy, was looking forward to trousering some serious dosh from Brussels, and senior executives of our self-congratulatory, ratings-obsessed BBC were awarding themselves £318,000 extra for doing nothing discernibly advantageous for the licence payers. A gravy train still leaves every hour for the fortunate few.
Eat, drink and play bingo. Red or white?
Bingo is a game that I have never really seen the point of — despite recent advertising campaigns attempting to market it as the new raucous ‘girls’ night out’ of choice. It was thus with trepidation that I climbed Home House’s grand staircase and entered one of their private rooms along with 30 other guests for a game of wine bingo. I was swiftly handed a glass of something light and fizzy, thankfully, and all images of fat, single, middle-aged Gala-dwelling women and their legs-11 disappeared. It was only when I reached for what from a distance looked like a macadamia nut in a round basket, but was in fact
Surprising literary ventures | 22 October 2008
The Crows of Pearblossom is a rare children’s book by Aldous Huxley, written in 1944 and published posthumously. It originated as a present for his five-year-old niece Olivia de Haulleville, who often visited Huxley and his wife, Maria, at their ranch in Llano in the Mojave Desert (Olivia later moved to the Greek island of Hydra and became Mrs Yorgo Cassapidis). It was while living on the ranch that Huxley began experimenting seriously with psychotropic drugs such as mescaline and LSD. The story deals with two crows, the female of which wears an apron. Mrs Crow finds that her eggs are being eaten by a Rattlesnake, and after suffering 297
Tuesday
Annals of Polling, American Division
And then they were eight. Tracking polls that is. Which one should you follow? Or, rather, which should you discount? Happily, Nate Silver is here to explain it all. What I find odd about American polls, mind you, is their tiny sample size. National Journal’s tracking poll only follows a few hundred people for instance and even national opinion polls often only consult around 1,000 people. That’s roughly the same kind of sample size used by British pollsters. But of course there are 60 million people in Britain and 300 million in the United States. Our polls should, therefore, be more accurate. Right? And in America how difficult would it
Pollster Wars
Ooops. I meant to mention Mike Crowley’s entertaining New Republic piece on the polling wars. It’s a fun, breezy read that’s well worth your time: Shock Poll – blared a Drudge Report headline on December 26, 2007, just one week before the Iowa caucus. At a time when most pollsters were showing a dead heat in Iowa, this new survey found Hillary Clinton with a 15-point lead over Barack Obama. But the only shock, as it turned out, was that someone could have gotten it so wrong: Obama would beat Clinton in Iowa by eight points. The offender was the New Hampshire-based American Research Group. ARG is a black sheep
In Praise of the Amateur?
Mark Steyn says his old friend and former boss Boris Johnson is a “total squish” on ideological matters (ie, he’s a Tory) and adds this chummy postscript: If Boris can be Mayor of London, Sarah Palin is certainly qualified to be President of the United States, if not Supreme Galactic Commander of the Cosmos. There’s something to this, though of course if Boris buggers up London then that’s tough news for Londoners but not too much of a concern for the rest of the world. The Presidency of the United States is in a rather different category.
FCO vs Hacks
It seems like Sir Nigel Sheinwald’s assessment of Barack Obama was leaked to the Telegraph months ago. But it was in fact published earlier this month. I’d meant to write about it at the time, but the moment passed and that seemed to be that. Still, Slate has republished the memo, permitting one to observe blogospheric rules of timeliness and revisit the affair. Affair, of course, is putting it too strongly. Our Man in Washington’s report is decidedly cautious. There is not a scrap of controversy in it. On the contrary, it is dry, sober, even-handed and judicious. It could, if it were less dull, be a Financial Times profile.
Tito the Builder?
Apparently he’s the new go-to guy in this daft Presidential election. Of course, it shows how out of touch I am that when I saw Tito was the headline act I found myself wondering quite how Yugoslav politics had become an issue. Then I realised that it was the lovely Sarah Palin who’d been talking about Tito, so obviously it had to be something else entirely. UPDATE, October 27th. Ana Marie Cox braves the nonsense: Obviously, the big draw in Leesburg this morning was Tito the Builder, aka Tito Munoz, aka defended of Joe the Plumber. If you had ever wanted to hear a crowd of Northern Virigian White People
Department of Academia
I’m indebted to Nathan Origer for drawing my attention to a fascinating event at the University of Maryland: Subject : Provost’s Conversation: “Re-presenting Disability: Million Dollar Baby, Tropic Thunder and Anti-National Sexual Positions” When : Monday, October 06, 2008 12:00 PM – 1:30 PM Where : Stamp Student Union : Charles Carroll Room Event Type(s) : Lecture A Conversation with Robert McRuer, Professor of English, George Washington University This talk examines a few of the films that have sustained intense criticism from disability activists and theorists over the past few years. Reading these films within a queer theoretical perspective and through the cultural logic of neoliberalism, McRuer affirms and extends