The Virtual Stoa

Most of the time, I only pay attention to the world of cycling in July, and then only for the duration of the Tour de France. When the race has reached Paris, or, usually, after the final mountain stage, I stop paying attention until the next Tour comes around the following year, as it always does.

Something different is going on this year. Not only have I been keeping half an eye on the two Olympic road race events yesterday and today, but I’ve also begun reading books about professional cycling, which I’ve never done before. I mentioned Matt Rendell’s Significant Other a bit earlier; I’ve just finished William Fotheringham’s splendid book about the death of Tom Simpson in 1967 on the Ventoux, Put Me Back on My Bike; and I’ve got two more lined up on my recently-acquired-books shelf: Geoffrey Wheatcroft’s history of the Tour, and Rendell’s earlier book about the history and politics of Colombian cycling.

So I’ll be a much better-educated cycling fan by the time the 2005 Tour kicks off in the Vend�e.

(Other recommendations of quality cycling lit more than more than welcome.)

Pioneer blogging MP though he may be, Tom Watson’s been pissing me off of late with his thuggish by-election tactics, stoking up the fear of asylum seekers in Birmingham Hodge Hill, and going on to say loopy and offensive things about the Lib Dem candidate in Hartlepool.

The man’s a disgrace, and a disgrace to the party of which I’m (occasionally) proud to be a member.

So, for a bit at any rate, I’ll redirect the Tom Watson link on my sidebar to the Comical Tommy parody site, by way of totally ineffective protest, and I encourage other bloggers to do the same.

I spent a very happy pre-Copernican half-hour earlier today down at Oxford’s Museum of the History of Science having the mysteries of the astrolabe explained in a very informative talk. So I think I can now tell the time at night armed only with an astrolabe, the correct latitude plate, and a visible star. That’s probably a skill worth having.

They also have on display in the entrance gallery a very fine 1798 French armillary sphere, which is not (alas) keyed to the French Revolutionary Calendar, but which is (pleasingly) organised around the ten-hour day.

More on astrolabes at astrolabes.org (of course).

Nick Cohen’s piece in today’s Observer — on Mr Blair and Mr Berlusconi — is a far more satisfying piece of work, so good for him.

It’s also further evidence of the amount of time that Cohen’s spending reading the blogs: the New Statesman piece mentioned below referred to a Chris Bertram Crooked Timber post on the laughable John Laughland, an earlier NS piece praised Harry’s Place, he’s popped up in Oliver Kamm’s recently-disabled Comments box, and here is is with polite words to say about my friend and colleague Mike Smithson’s politicalbetting.com…

Bloggers sometimes navel-gaze on the subject of the relationship between the mainstream and the blogmedia: I’d say it’s an excellent sign for the vitality of the World of Blogs that one of the very small number of really excellent political commentators working in the British press today — no, sod it, the only really excellent political commentator — is choosing to use the resource we collectively provide as much as he is.

Jamie, over at Blood and Treasure, is entertained by Hazel Blears’s advocacy of the new “Labour Academies“…

… But what’s even funnier is that the “course tutor” for the bit on “Labour’s political thought” is none other than the greatest moron ever to inhabit the Wonderful World of Blogs, Paul “The Thinker” Richards!

There’s an odd piece in this week’s New Statesman by the generally excellent Nick Cohen, which begins by observing (i) that there are a few duff scenes in Fahrenheit 9/11, (ii) that Ken Livingstone is a bit of an opportunist, and (iii) that Seamus Milne is a crappy editor of the Guardian’s op-ed page (well, that’s a reasonably fair pr�cis), and goes on to infer from these kinds of things that “there no longer is a left with a coherent message of hope for the human race” and that “unless you believe that the failure of the world’s peoples to look leftwards is all the result of brainwashing by the corporate media, you have to conclude that the left is dead.”

It’s strong stuff. But whether it’s more rubbish than nonsense or vice versa is something I’ll leave to anyone who wants to register their opinion in the Comments.

(Particularly odd, in fact, that a writer who leans so heavily on the importance of leftist internationalism should draw such epochal inferences — diagnosing the death of “the left” worldwide — from the activities of the usual handful of parochial Anglophone suspects.)

(They loved it over at Harry’s, of course.)

UPDATE [10 minutes later]: Norm posted on this an hour ago. Where I find Cohen to be strangely Anglophonicocentric (if that’s a word), Norm takes the opposite view, and reckons that the Left is messed up because it is, worldwide, too hung up on the personality of the Anglophone occupant of the Oval Office. Well, that’s an almost fair précis, but it’ll do for now for an Update.

Bertolt Brecht, b. 10 February 1898, Augsburg; d. 14 August 1956, East Berlin.

In den finsteren Zeiten,
wird da noch gesungen werden?
Ja! Da wird gesungen werden von den finsteren Zeiten.

August Bebel, b. 22 February 1840, d. 13 August 1913.

Over here.

UPDATE [13.8.2004]: Four arguments have been made against the Bish, one by Backword Dave, two by the Guardian editorialists and the fourth by someone in the Daily Telegraph.

Backword Dave says that he can’t see the racism to which Bishop was alluding. Note first, though, that the word “racist” is the Guardian’s, in the report linked to above, both in the headline and in the report, and that the Bish — on what’s given to us there — doesn’t link the question of race directly to the song (which would be silly) but only to “growing English nationalism, which he said was stoked by football fervour, and ‘a wish for a white-dominated simple world of Englishness’.”

The first reason presented by the Guardianistas can be dismissed. In fact, it’s precisely because the Holst tune is such a good tune that it needs to be saved from association with this wretched lyric so that people — perhaps not in our generation, but in a luckier one to come — can enjoy The Planets again, free from involuntarily making mental associations with Tories waving flags.

The Guardian’s second reason is that Spring-Rice, author of these words, was no jingo, did some good things and had some fine opinions. But this is the kind of occasion when we can go for the ball without necessarily attacking the man, and call for the song to be retired without seeking to diminish the historical reputation of the Poet Spring-Rice.

The Telegraph writes nonsense, especially when it points to the unquestioning patriotism of the first verse and remarks that “that is fine, stirring stuff in the context of the First World War, when the hymn was written”. Well, some of us might beg to differ.

Incidentally, Dave, I don’t think the “rebellious Scots to crush” verse was ever officially part of the British national anthem. It’s a fun verse, though.

Since the whole point (well, a substantial part of the point, anyway) of having the West Indies play Test Matches in England is to watch Brian Lara make bucketloads of runs, I wish he’s stop getting out for low scores.

Bugger.

Continuing the tradition of Friday pie-blogging on Wednesdays, Fafblog lays the smack down on the Okra Tofu Pie.

Tom Driberg, born 22 May 1905, died 12 August 1976.

… To all the people who’ve been coming to this site in search of images of “beheading”. Just because I once posted a link (click on “Charles Stuart”) to a tasteful depiction of the execution of Charles I in 1649 doesn’t mean that you’ll be able to gratify your twisted Al-Qaeda fantasies (or whatever) over here. So fuck off.

Backword Dave’s Nipples Have Exploded With Delight: Over here. (I just hope it wasn’t too messy.) But I should have thought that the Monty Python reference he really wanted was to the Hackenthorpe Book of Lies.

On my way back from my favourite nearby curryhouse this evening, I started thinking about what the Substantial Civilisational Advances in the UK have been since the war (1945, that is, not 2003).

And after ruminating over a few candidates — one-day cricket, BBC television, mass higher education, and so on — the two that seemed to me to stand out by quite a way were feminism on the one hand (and all that flows from that) and the widespread availability of pretty good Indian food on the other.

Is there anything comparable that I’m missing?

UPDATE [9.45pm]: Yes, yes, add “socialised medicine” to the above list to make a troika. Stupid of me, really. Feminism, Indian food and the NHS. What else?

Here he is, speaking in Middlesborough today on the subject of crime:

Government ministers cite the British Crime Survey as evidence that there has been a steady decline in crime over the last nine years. But the BCS excludes lots of crimes from its calculations - such as murder, crimes against children under sixteen, sexual offences, dealing and taking drugs and shoplifting. It is estimated that around twelve million crimes a year don’t even make it onto the BCS radar.The most reliable crime statistics - those crimes actually recorded by the police - show that crime in Englandand Wales has risen by almost 850,000 in the last five years.

Happily, we in the Republic of Blogs have already had Chris Lightfoot address this topic here and here, so we have powerful reasons for suspecting that Michael Howard is talking out of his arse.(Any idea where he gets this “estimate” of twelve million crimes from, anyone? Is it just the difference between the reported crime figures and some kind of extrapolation out of the numbers dug out of the BCS; is it produced by totting up the reported crime figures for murder, crimes against children, etc.; or is it just plucked from Howard’s own [or, indeed, somebody else’s] arse?)

Everybody’s favourite jesting philosopher Sidney Morgenbesser died not so long ago, and Norm and Chris Bertram have been posting links to obituaries and to jokes.

Here’s another one: asked whether ontology encompassed epistemology, Morgenbesser replied, “No matter, never mind.” [via]

Over here, if you haven’t seen it already.

So there was some discussion of the Greatest West Indian Cricketers while I was away, over here especially.

I’m too young to have anything coherent to say about any of the great players before 1984, except to repeat whatever it is that C. L. R. James says about them in Beyond a Boundary, but I just wanted to enter the controversy about the absence of bowlers from the approved list to say that if I were to draw up a list of the best five or the best six or whatever West Indian cricketers of all time ever then Curtly Ambrose would be somewhere on that list (along with everybody else’s choices).

Now the press tells me that he’s playing the bass guitar in a reggae band. Good for him.

The Virtual Stoa is back, probably, after a two-week intermission.

We were off in London for a few days, and then in Cornwall for a few more.

Jerry Springer: The Opera is very good, as is the Eden Project. And the coast around Land’s End is very fine.