The Moony Shot

Lovely photos of the moons of Saturn. Taken from the spacecraft Cassini (which I thought was an Italian furniture manufacturer). Fun things you find on Der Spiegel.

Neal Pollack Apologises for Over-reacting to Rita

From his blog.

If anyone is stalled on I-35 somewhere between MLK Blvd and 51st Street, we have a lot of water here that we hoarded in a panic a few days ago.

Eight posts tonight. Can you tell I'm catching up a week's worth of reading?

My Nightmare is Reborn

Simply Red is rerecording their back entire catalogue.

Hucknall has no wish to exploit his fans.

Nauseate. Bore. Cure insomnia. But no exploitation. So bad it inspired Manic Street Preachers to write Motown Junk.

Status in the British Library Reading Rooms

From the Guardian, The Hidden Tribes of the British Library, covering the status associated with various reading rooms.

...a seething hotbed of elitism and hierarchy.

This reminds me of a travel review I once read about the famous Cafe de Flore in Paris. The lovely sidewalk tables were tourist territory, and thus low status. Inside the cafe in the beautiful wood-panelled interior the status was better but still not as high as in the upstairs room, which was more modern and uglier and therefore used by high status types like Simone de Beauvoir.

I recycle because it lets me dump more rubbish

From the Ludwig von Mises Institute (thanks Tim), an article on recycling. I've read similar material elsewhere. The bit that is a little disturbing to me is the religion-like education of everyone that recycling is good.

Drive a Castle

Forget those wussy H2s and H3s, the new H1 is out.

The H1 has a new engine, a 300-horsepower 6.6-liter Duramax turbodiesel V-8, which improves the estimated average mileage all the way into double digits.

Woohoo!

The huge gap between the front seats makes H1 the perfect dating vehicle for young people who have taken a pledge of abstinence.

Maybe Hummer owners won't breed.

Oprah gets ideas off The Concrete Bloc

Going through my book stack rank, Oprah found A Million Little Pieces and made it her latest book club selection. Good job Oprah, although she's a little behind the times. It was Amazon best book of 2003 and the sequel, My Friend Leonard, is already out.

Leaving Guantanamo Bay, thanks to cricket

Australian David Hicks, in Guantanamo Bay for fighting with the Taleban against the Americans, is trying to claim British citizenship. His lawyer was talking to him about the cricket when it came out that he didn't support the Australians because his Mother was British. This is significant because the British governent has been successful at getting Brits out of Guantanamo Bay while the Australian governement supports the US military justice system and so has left Hicks to face trial there.

Read it on the BBC.

I married a Californian

I married a Californian. That's why I get email like this:

That is SO rad!

I think that behaviour is not a conscious decision. It is how the Californian DNA expresses itself.

Fifty-Seven Thousand New Zealanders

The BBC built an amazing presentation of Britain's immigration distribution, by British region and country of birth. Here's the page for New Zealand-born people (like me). As you might guess, the place they seem to cluster in is London. Now those 57,000 people is over 1% of the New Zealand total population, which is like three million Americans living in Auckland (I can make infoporn too).

Browsing around the rest of the map you can find the places with the most overseas-born people - number one is Wembley in London at 51.93%. New Zealand also has the highest percentage of high-income earners among its settled population, although the USA tops the charts for new immigrant economic performance.

Australia's All-time Most Watched TV Programs

My hometown rag, the Sydney Morning Herald, has merged togther data from different eras of TV viewer recording to produce a most-watched list. It gives a little insight into the Australian mind, although mostly it shows how limited the choices were back in the old days.

My favourite entry is number 6, "The Sound of Music first TV showing". That's ahead of the Moon landing, Star Wars and 2004's Australian Idol final.

in sufficient aggregate, they are deadly

Lionel Shriver writes about being childless, interviews two of her childless friends and look at how their individual life gains combine to produce an 'economic, cultural and moral disaster'.

As we age - oh, so reluctantly! - we are apt to look back on our pasts and ask not 'Did I serve family, God and country?' but 'Did I ever get to Cuba, or run a marathon? Did I take up landscape painting? Was I fat?'

She's also the author of We Need To Talk About Kevin, a book about a mother who has a horrible kid and figures out it is OK to hate your child. As you can guess, she's got a lot of negative attention for this.

Books are like Packets of Cereal at the End of a Supermarket Aisle

The Observer's book critic Tim Adams writes on Scott Pack, the head buyer of Waterstone's, a British book chain.

...where once you could trust that the books in the window or on the tables were the ones that the manager thought were the best or most interesting in his or her shop, now they are generally the ones which make the least risky bestsellers and for which publishers are prepared to support most with marketing spend.

My first response to this article was 'duh, I already know about market forces' but then I realised that there is a strong belief that 'good' bookshops improve life quality by sharing good books. The article only makes sense in terms of its violation of that. Waterstone's pushing of books where the publisher pays for the promotion is shocking only if you believe bookstores exist for the public good. Of course, this is just like cereal manufacturers paying to put their brand at the end of supermarket aisles.

The punchline in the last paragraph is worth the read.

Edvard Munch was a little miserable

Robert Hughes writes how Munch's paintings of neurosis and suffering are paintings of himself exaggerated.

The Scream, 1893 - which is to neurosis what the Mona Lisa is to smiles - was, by his own testimony, a self-portrait.

I just like the cool paint jobs

The Curator of Transport Engineering Technologies at London's Science Museum comments on Pimp my Ride. From n+1 magazine.

The MTV crowd has tried to recover the pleasure of mass by crowning the 7,000-pound Cadillac Escalade king of the road. Yet to ride in one of these modern monstrosities is about as much fun as airline travel, albeit in business class.

2005 Books Stack Rank is Here

I wrote my books stack rank. This is, in order of what I would keep in the lifeboat drill, the list of books I have completed this year. Likely some books have been forgotten. I might even fiddle with the ordering. I will certainly update the stack rank as I finish more books.

Part of the reason I wrote the stack rank was an exercise I once went through where I ranked the day's events in order of what I expected their pleasure to be, and then ranked them again at the end of the day in order of how much fun I actually had. Scoring much higher then expected were things like Shopping at the Supermarket and Walking to Work.

I am keeping it real

So Mike Foster's blog, ikeepitreal has inspired me to comment on one of the books I am reading. Among the Foucault and the de Botton is:

The Naked Soldier - A True Story of the French Foreign Legion.

Yes, I am reading a trashy autobiography about a dude who joins the French Foreign Legion. By letting my blokey desires manifest like this I am keeping it real. I will add that I do not want to keep it real enough to actually join the legion.

Observer Infoporn Nitpick

I like reading the Observer Blog but last week it had a piece of infoporn on schooling and costs.

They report 50p is spent on a primary school meal and 60p on a secondary school meal. They also add that 500 million pounds are spent on pupil snacks eaten while travelling between school and home per year. I think we are supposed to be shocked at the contrast in size of amounts even though the units are so ridiculously different - one single child meal versus all snacks of all students for all ages.

If we do some maths on these numbers we get, roughly, the following:
Students are at school for 12 years. I am not going to look up the population age distribution tables but we can have a conservative guess that the school system, which has most of Britan's five to seventeen year old people, has over five million of the population of sixty million.

5,000,000 people eat school meals say 200 days a year.
That's 1,000,000,000 meals a year, or about 500,000,000 pounds.
Funnily enough this is the same number as is spent on snacks.
So people spend the same amount eating snacks on the journeys both to and from school as they do on a single school meal.
This doesn't seem worthy of attention.

Travel or Tourism?

I'm not sure where I picked it up from, but I've always wanted to participate a little in the life of places I visit. I don't like visiting the sights of a destination as much as I like getting some idea of the habits of the people who live there. This caused tension for me when I was a child. For example, I visited Rome with a school class and although I can remember going to many ancient places, the parts of Rome that are most vivid in my mind are the trams, the pasta and the soft drink.

When I am visiting somewhere I tend to focus on small items - breakfast comes with goats milk, bread is really hard (or dark if you are in Germany), builders labourers all wear the same blue trousers (in Provence at least), and so on. Summing up all these items gives me a feeling for a place and something I can take with me to expand the possibilities of how I live.

One of the four books I am currently reading is The Art of Travel by Alain de Botton. This is shaking up my view of travel to some degree, but I find that where I differed from my fellow tourists as a child, I have more in common with the content of this book. Although maybe I have turned into a travel snob.

Alain de Botton's writing is entertaining. For example, talking about good weather days at the start of Winter:
They were like false signes of recovery in a patient upon whom death has already passed its sentence.

I don't think this will stack rank higher than de Botton's Status Anxiety, but it has so far been a wonderful way to spend a couple of hours.

Ageism Survey in the UK

The Guardian reports on a survey on attitudes towards age.

Back in the 39 Steps series of books, Richard Hannay was a young man at 39. So when is middle age? When I was a kid it was 40-60. But I wouldn't call Jamie Moyer middle aged.

"If you are a 24-year-old man, you believe that old age begins about 55, which is surprising because if you are a 62-year-old woman, you think youth doesn't end until 57"

Childhood Paradise in 2016

I grew up in London and I loved the Underground. As the decades pass, it covers more area and gets more complex. This is good. Here's a map of proposed line extensions for 2016. Maybe I should retire to London with a train pass, an iPod and a collection of good books.

I'm not sure what I think of this

NYT Op-Ed on river access battles in Montana.

The money quote of this article is:

...there's something wrong when a billionaire buys a ranch, gets a tax break for an easement and then chases the locals off the river in the name of conservation.

In the UK there are public rights of way across a huge amount of farmland - you walk along public paths that go through fields of cows and across stiles. It is part of the culture there. In Australia I don't ever remember anyone going down the gorgeous Shoalhaven River that went through the farm I worked on (Jinglemoney in the Southern Tablelands). People used national parks for their recreation. And they certainly never walked across the paddocks to get there. The Devon bulls would have got them.

I'm not sure where I stand on the issues in the article, but I know I don't like the manipulative way the arguments are presented. For example,

Consider the people who are fighting for access to the river: retired miners and schoolteachers and other working folk.

How could we possibly deny those retired miners their river access.

Berlin Doesn't Revolt

The Pet Shop Boys do a new score to Battleship Potemkin.

... slowly my own revolutionary ire began to dim. My train had arrived on time, and my döner kebab tasted good.

I will also point out that doner kebabs eaten outside of Germany do not have umlauts.

Spell with flickr

Another great use of the internet is 'spell with flickr'. These things entertain me, but I don't know why.

Brent Herring Unthinkable Bulgarian

Brent is the 13581st most common word according to wordcount.org, which bases its ranking on the British National Corpus, a 100 million word collection. It is immediately followed in the list by Herring.

At a meta level is their 'query count' feature which tracks what people are searching for on wordcount. The first two names on the list are Jesus and John, although Sex and Love appear before anyone is named.