The Virtual Stoa

Here’s one, found as they ride towards the finish at Quimper today. Haven’t looked to see if it’s any good or not, but it’s good to see that it exists.

The Great Britain Wheelchair Rugby Association has just announced its team for the Paralympic Games in Athens in September, and I’m delighted to say that my friend Justin Frishberg is in it.

If you haven’t read it already, do go and have a look at “Sex Tips For Red State Girls” over at the New York Times, before they stick it in their archive and make you pay for it in a few days time. It’s all about tryin’ to make a livin’ sellin’ vibratin’ sex toys and other useful things in the Bible Belt.

… or automatic left-wing cant generator is clearly a very useful tool. Here’s a sample:

Nevertheless, Donald Rumsfeld’s worldview leads our attention to the police state which has come to pass. It appears that the pro-Sharon neoconservative cabal represents the crushing of internal dissent in order to propagate the predatory imperialist aims outlined by the crypto-fascist Project for a New American Century. It is not heartening that the unstated purpose of this war represents the repudiation of international law in order to bring about an act of international violence that exceeds even those of the “liberal” Bill Clinton. This suggests that the Pax Americana of the future can be seen in the light of the apparent fabrications which lead to the theocrat Ashcroft’s suspension of our civil rights.

Now that’s not bad at all, as automatically-generated leftist cant goes. I could do with one of those.[via SIAW, I think]

Simple Soviet Style Soda!

[thanks: SM]

Thinking of people who didn’t get where they are today by knowing the difference between foreign countries, everyone’s favourite Iraq analyst Juan Cole has a nice reminder of candidate Bush’s knowledge of foreign affairs back in 2000.

So farewell then, John Barron: obituary in today’s Guardian.

By one of those funny coincidences, Jo and I have just finished watching our way through The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin, two episodes at a time, me for the second time, she for the first, on DVD. And there is still much joy to be had from John Barron’s performance as C.J., boss of Sunshine Desserts…

C.J.: We aren’t one of those dreadful firms where people can engage willy- nilly in hanky-panky with their secretaries.�Reginald Perrin: Certainly not, C.J.

C.J.: Neither Mrs. C.J. nor I have ever engaged willy- nilly in hanky-panky with their secretaries.�

Perrin: I imagine not, C.J.

More scripts, etc., here.

Crooked Timber is one year old today…

Virtual Tophet Josephine (yes, yes, interest declared, etc.) has decided that the quiz everyone’s taking is too skewed to an American audience, and has augmented and adapted the existing lists…

So, here goes:

1. Cats or Dogs? Cats
2. Elizabeth Taylor or Richard Burton? Neither
3. Royal Opera or ENO? I’ve seen better stuff at the ROH.
4. Ancient or Medieval? Late Antique.
5. Titian or Caravaggio? Caravaggio, just.
6. Yeats or Eliot? Yeats.
7. Bruce Forsyth or Larry Grayson? Oh, Christ….
8. George or Ringo? George.
9. To Have and Have Not or Casablanca? Casablanca
10. Tracey Emin or Rachel Whiteread? The latter.
11. The Who or the Stones? The former
12. Dylan Thomas or Ted Hughes? Dylan Thomas
13. Robinson Crusoe or King Solomon’s Mines? Haven’t read the latter, like the former.
14. Fellini or Begnini? You can’t be serious. The former’s a genius, the latter a criminal.
15. Dostoyevsky or Tolstoy? D.
16. Oxford or Cambridge? O.
17. The sixties or the seventies? 70s (just because it annoys so many people. OK: there are other reasons too)
18. Burger King or MacDonalds? BK
19. Jonathan Ross or Angus Deayton? AD
20. Peter Mandelson or Alastair Campbell? !! Good timing: AC, but they’re both odious.
21. Verdi or Wagner? Verdi
22. Duran Duran or Spandau Ballet? Duran Duran, for “Hungry Like A Wolf”
23. Bill Monroe or Johnny Cash? I only take Cash.
24. The Iliad or the Odyssey? Iliad.
25. Hello or Heat? Heat
26. London or Paris? London
27. Moscow or California? Moscow. (But see below)
28. Athens or Rome? Rome
29. Red wine or white? Red
30. No�l Coward or Oscar Wilde? Wilde
31. Vanessa Redgrave or Judi Dench? Hmm. Dench, probably, but haven’t seen much of either.
32. Brown or Blair? Brown
33. British Museum or Natural History Museum? BM
34. More museums: Louvre or Pergamon? Haven’t been to Berlin, so Louvre.
35. Pubs or bars? Pubs. Even pubs in which people smoke.
36. Comedy or tragedy? Comedy
37. Fall or spring? Autumn (shit: Pollard made this joke too. I must be crap.)
38. Coffee or tea? Coffee
39. Jane Austen or Virginia Woolf? Austen
40. Bull-fighters or gladiators? !!! Bull-leapers, -wrestlers or -shitters, please.
41. Renaissance or Enlightenment? Enlightenment, of course.
42. Sunset or sunrise? Sunset.
43. Town or Country? Town.
44. Mac or PC? Mac.
45. Charles or Diana? Is this for “first up against the wall”? (Well, that was Diana…)
46. Tuscany or Provence? Tuscany
47. Email or Telephone? Email, email, a hundredfold email.
48. Fruit or Cake? The Ship of Fools Fruitcake Zone.
49. Football or Rugby? Rugby Football. The kind played by the Rugby Football Union, to be precise.
50. Dolphins or Tuna? Dolphins.

UPDATE [8.7.2004]: Mike and John b have both risen to the challenge. Good stuff.

… I asked myself after reading Norm’s latest which introduced me to one (and a very good one) that I hadn’t heard before. And google came to my rescue and served up this highly relevant page.

Some stolen from here [and scroll down a bit], some from here, some from elsewhere.

a. Klingons or Clangers? The Clangers, of course.
b. Tarkovsky or Tarka the Otter? Tarkovsky, but not as much as other people no doubt.
c. The Clash or The Sex Pistols? The Clash, by more than a mile.
d. Garcia Marquez or Vargas Llosa? I like GM a lot, not read any VL, I think.
e. Red Sox or Yankees? Go Sox!
f. Beer or Wine? Beer.
g. Virgil or Homer? Homer.
h. Bitter or (pale fizzy) lager? Bitter.
i. Rousseau or Voltaire? JJR (obviously)
j. Kant or Hegel? Hegel.
k. Plato or Aristotle? Aristotle.
l. California or Moscow? Moscow. (If it were just Northern CA, it might be different.)
m. John or Paul? Neither did anything much good after 1970, so I’ll duck the choice.

Disclose your own preferences in Comments (except for you Voltaireans out there, who can sod off)…

Chris Bertram has posted a reminder of what Mr Blair said yesterday juxtaposed with what he said on 18 March 2003 about the existence or non-existence of weapons of mass destruction. Curious about what the Anglo warbloggers had to say back then, I glanced through Harry’s archive and found this nice snippet on a related topic:

Robin Cook’s resignation speech is being hailed as a great parliamentary moment but frankly such eulogies are indulgent introspection at a time like this. It matters not whether Cook is a good speaker - he is - but whether he is right or not. Obviously I think he is wrong. But if his speech is to go down [in] history then lets see whether this little phrase will stand up in a few months time:“Iraq probably has no weapons of mass destruction in the commonly understood sense of the term - namely a credible device capable of being delivered against a strategic city target.”

It’s a good point to raise. Perhaps enough months have passed for Harry to revisit this little phrase and then to tell us where he now stands on the question of Mr-Cook’s-Speech-in-History?UPDATE [6pm]: Matt T has more.

“I realised I was an alcoholic the day I mounted Brian Sewell.”

From Tanya Gold, in today’s Guardian. The rest of the article doesn’t live up to the genius of the opening line. But then, how could it?

Max Horkheimer, Frankfurt Schoolman and co-author of Dialectic of Enlightenment; born 14 February 1895, died 7 July 1973.

… today if you haven’t already. In quick succession (but in reverse order) Jamie has filled in his own culture questionnaire, offered his firsthand memories of a hanged man and said everything that needs to be said about the bloody Prospect competition to find Britain’s top so-called public so-called intellectuals.

As I said, scurry on over and have a read.

Good pick, good pick. He’s younger, quite a bit shorter, and will help put states like North Carolina, Virginia and West Virginia into play for the Democrats. As I said, a good pick.

Bloody obvious one, though. What took him so long?

See here.

Yes, it’s the uncollapsable dichotomy game for Americans, played at high speed… [From, via]

1. Fred Astaire or Gene Kelly? No opinion.
2. The Great Gatsby or The Sun Also Rises? Haven’t read either.
3. Count Basie or Duke Ellington? Ellington, but don’t really care.
4. Cats or dogs? Cats. Intensely.
5. Matisse or Picasso? Picasso, by a mile. Matisse is shite.
6. Yeats or Eliot? Yeats.
7. Buster Keaton or Charlie Chaplin? Buster Keaton, definitely.
8. Flannery O�Connor or John Updike? No opinion.
9. To Have and Have Not or Casablanca? Hmm. Casablanca. But like both films very much.
10. Jackson Pollock or Willem de Kooning? Don’t like the former, no opinion on the latter.
11. The Who or the Stones? The Who.
12. Philip Larkin or Sylvia Plath? Neither, really.
13. Trollope or Dickens? Never read Trollope, don’t much like Dickens.
14. Billie Holiday or Ella Fitzgerald? Ella Fitzgerald.
15. Dostoyevsky or Tolstoy? Dostoyevsky, but think Tolstoy’s a genius, too.
16. The Moviegoer or The End of the Affair? Are these films or books? Haven’t seen / read either.
17. George Balanchine or Martha Graham? No idea what this is about.
18. Hot dogs or hamburgers? Hamburgers.
19. Letterman or Leno? Couldn’t give a toss.
20. Wilco or Cat Power? ???
21. Verdi or Wagner? Verdi. But these two are still (probably) my two favourite composers.
22. Grace Kelly or Marilyn Monroe? No opinion.
23. Bill Monroe or Johnny Cash? Johnny Cash, definitely.
24. Kingsley or Martin Amis? Kingsley Amis, for Lucky Jim.
25. Robert Mitchum or Marlon Brando? No opinion.
26. Mark Morris or Twyla Tharp? Who??
27. Vermeer or Rembrandt? Rembrandt.
28. Tchaikovsky or Chopin? Tchaikovsky, but not a huge fan of either.
29. Red wine or white? Red.
30. No�l Coward or Oscar Wilde? Oscar Wilde.
31. Grosse Pointe Blank or High Fidelity? Haven’t seen the former; preferred the latter as a book.
32. Shostakovich or Prokofiev? Good question: Prokofiev, I think, on balance.
33. Mikhail Baryshnikov or Rudolf Nureyev? No opinion. Don’t like ballet.
34. Constable or Turner? Turner.
35. The Searchers or Rio Bravo? Haven’t seen the latter, didn’t much like the former.
36. Comedy or tragedy? Comedy. (It’s the genre capable of the most profundity.)
37. Fall or spring? Autumn.
38. Manet or Monet? Manet.
39. The Sopranos or The Simpsons? Haven’t seen the former, haven’t seen much of the latter, but quite like what I’ve seen.
40. Rodgers and Hart or Gershwin and Gershwin? Rodgers and Hammerstein, please.
41. Joseph Conrad or Henry James? I like Conrad, and haven’t read any James.
42. Sunset or sunrise? Sunset. I’m never really up for sunrise.
43. Johnny Mercer or Cole Porter? Cole Porter.
44. Mac or PC? Macs. All the way.
45. New York or Los Angeles? New York, New York.
46. Partisan Review or Horizon? Don’t read either.
47. Stax or Motown? No opinion. Probably Motown.
48. Van Gogh or Gauguin? Gauguin. A trip to the Van Gogh museum in Amsterdam three years ago cured me of the opinion that VVG was a major painter.
49. Steely Dan or Elvis Costello? Elvis C.
50. Reading a blog or reading a magazine? Blogs.
51. John Gielgud or Laurence Olivier? Not sure.
52. Only the Lonely or Songs for Swingin� Lovers? The former.
53. Chinatown or Bonnie and Clyde? The former, but then I haven’t seen the latter.
54. Ghost World or Election? The latter, but then I haven’t seen the former.
55. Minimalism or conceptual art? These terms are too vague for me.
56. Daffy Duck or Bugs Bunny? Bugs Bunny, in the Road Runner Movie.
57. Modernism or postmodernism? Post-modernism’s just modernism misunderstood.
58. Batman or Spider-Man? Batman.
59. Emmylou Harris or Lucinda Williams? EH, but quite like LW too.
60. Johnson or Boswell? No opinion, really.
61. Jane Austen or Virginia Woolf? Jane Austen.
62. The Honeymooners or The Dick Van Dyke Show? What are these?
63. An Eames chair or a Noguchi table? What are these?
64. Out of the Past or Double Indemnity? What are these?
65. The Marriage of Figaro or Don Giovanni? Don Giovanni, a cena teco, et cetera.
66. Blue or green? Silly question (not like the others)
67. A Midsummer Night�s Dream or As You Like It? Measure for Measure.
68. Ballet or opera? Opera. Definitely.
69. Film or live theater? Apples and oranges, I’m afraid.
70. Acoustic or electric? No preference.
71. North by Northwest or Vertigo? Like the latter, haven’t seen the former, oddly enough.
72. Sargent or Whistler? No opinion.
73. V.S. Naipaul or Milan Kundera?
74. The Music Man or Oklahoma? Oklahoma! (the exclamation mark is missing from the question!) And yes, the Farmer and the Cowman should be friends.
75. Sushi, yes or no? Not really.
76. The New Yorker under Ross or Shawn? Who? Who?
77. Tennessee Williams or Edward Albee? No opinion. Too long since I read either.
78. The Portrait of a Lady or The Wings of the Dove? Haven’t read either.
79. Paul Taylor or Merce Cunningham? Who? Who?
80. Frank Lloyd Wright or Mies van der Rohe? No opinion, I think. Maybe FLW.
81. Diana Krall or Norah Jones? Norah Jones has the whiney voice. Which one is Diana Krall?
82. Watercolor or pastel? Don’t really like either.
83. Bus or subway? Underground or metro.
84. Stravinsky or Schoenberg? Schoenberg.
85. Crunchy or smooth peanut butter? Both are disgusting
86. Willa Cather or Theodore Dreiser? No opinion.
87. Schubert or Mozart? Schubert, by a head.
88. The Fifties or the Twenties? That reduces to Joyce v Elvis, and then Joyce wins. But not by much.
89. Huckleberry Finn or Moby-Dick? Haven’t read either, shamefully, but plan to read M-D first.
90. Thomas Mann or James Joyce? James Joyce, obviously.
91. Lester Young or Coleman Hawkins? Who? Who?
92. Emily Dickinson or Walt Whitman? Dickinson.
93. Abraham Lincoln or Winston Churchill? Abraham Lincoln, I think.
94. Liz Phair or Aimee Mann? Who? Who?
95. Italian or French cooking? Italian.
96. Bach on piano or harpsichord? Harpsichord.
97. Anchovies, yes or no? Definitely not. Except in bloody mary.
98. Short novels or long ones? As long as it takes, for the novel.
99. Swing or bebop? Swing.
100. “The Last Judgment” or “The Last Supper”? The Last Supper, by Leonardo or Birtwistle.

Aneurin Bevan, Welsh socialist and founding father of the National Health Service; born 15 November 1897, died 6 July 1960.

UPDATE [8.7.2004]: Backword Dave has the picture….

Martin Sullivan’s essay on the UK Independence Party is well worth a look, if you haven’t caught up with it already.

One of the good things about early July here at Magdalen is that the students go home and are replaced by a new cohort of baby deer. Baby deer are far more adorable than undergraduates. Apologies for the not-excellent photo, owing to a not-excellent zoom facility on my digital camera. But it is, I think you can make out, a baby deer.

Alan, over at the ACME Music blog, asks an important question:

“If you had to pick the next Prime Mionister on the basis of their Desert Island Discs, who would you elect?”

So I was reading at lunchtime today about Lucy, the goat who has just won a beauty contest — for goats — in Croatia (a different version of the story is here), and there I was assuming that I’d be able to find a picture of said goat somewhere in cyberspace, so I could judge for myself.

Nothing at all.

That’s rubbish.

Norm’s post the other day discussed a very fine book - Harvey’s Hideout, by Russell Hoban - which I don’t think I’ve thought about in more than twenty years. Go and read the post, if you haven’t already, and go and read Harvey’s Hideout, if you haven’t done that either.

Mention of Russell Hoban also reminded me of a rather odd conversation I once had with my PhD supervisor, when we were trying to work out what kind of animal Frances was (as in Bread and Jam for Frances, etc., picture here). Badger and chipmunk were, I think, our preferred alternatives, though I don’t think that either of us was at all confident in our identifications. The matter was referred to his small daughter, who prononced that “Frances is a hairy creature!”, which was both indisputably true and good enough for me.

Fine though Russell Hoban’s children’s books are, my favourite writer of this kind of thing is probably Arnold Lobel, in particular for his magnificent volume Owl at Home (image here, discussion here). Owl really is a hero for our time, and Lobel’s five short stories about Owl’s day to day existence comprise some of the more imperishable pages in the history of world literature.

(Lobel’s Uncle Elephant is another fine book, a classic Bildungsroman, but with an elephant. This book is, however, one that I only ever encountered as an adult, which means that I will always react to it in a different set of ways to those other works mentioned above.)