The Virtual Stoa

Hearing about this story on the radio this morning and thinking about next Tuesday’s election combined to remind me of this joke.

While I’ve been uncharacteristically silent, the discussion in one of the comments threads below has wandered off from the West Lothian Question to the Schleswig-Holstein question.

All you need to know about that one, as far as I remember, is that Lord Palmerston is supposed to have said that only three people every understood the Schleswig-Holstein question. Prince Albert was dead. A German professor once did, but then went mad. And he himself did once upon a time, but had forgotten all about it.

Probably apocryphal.

With the baseball out of the way (and with me not having to say “Wait till next year!” to anyone, for once), we can turn our attention to next year’s Tour de France…

… You can study the route here…

(Critics are saying it’s a route designed to stop Lance Armstrong winning again, but (i) I’m not quite sure how you’d design a route to do that: he’s that dominant; (ii) if you did want to mess Armstrong around, you’d want to abolish the team time trial again, which US Postal always manages to win, and they haven’t tried to do that; and (iii) there still seem to be quite a lot of mountains, even if there aren’t quite so many high-altitude finishes as usual. But that’s all very first-impression-ey.)

ALDS Game 1: @ANA, W9-3
ALDS Game 2: @ANA, W8-3
ALDS Game 3: vs ANA, W8-6
ALCS Game 1: @NYY, L7-10
ALCS Game 2: @NYY, L-1-3
ALCS Game 3: vs NYY, L8-19
ALCS Game 4: vs NYY, W6-4
ALCS Game 5: vs NYY, W5-4
ALCS Game 6: @NYY, W4-2
ALCS Game 7: @NYY, W10-3
World Series Game 1: vs STL, W11-9
World Series Game 2: vs STL, W6-2
World Series Game 3: @STL, W4-1
World Series Game 4: @STL, W3-0

The Guardian today pays tribute to The Very Hungry Caterpillar.

Yes, it’s the latest press release from Tim Collins:

MPs from north of the border should be stopped from voting on issues which affect Cumbrian but not Scottish voters according to South Lakes MP Tim Collins…

Read the rest here.

Commenting on this post, Naunihal asked the other day, “Chris — how do you feel about the championship now?”

I’m feeling fine.

Arthur Henderson, one of the founding fathers of theBritish Labour Party, born 13 September 1863, died 20 October 1935.

Eugene Debs, American socialist leader and Presidential candidate; born 5 November 1855, died 20 October 1926. Links to several of his writings here.

“I don’t want to rise from the working class. I want to rise with the working class”.

Samora Machel, FRELIMO leader and independent Mozambique’s first President. Born 1933, died 20 October 1986.

A question: Do readers agree with me that all four of the daily broadsheet newspapers in the UK are less good than they were, say, five or ten years ago?

The Telegraph was less good under Charles Moore than it was under Max Hastings, and has been less good under Moore’s successor (whatever his name is or was) than under Moore. The Independent is approaching a travesty of a newspaper. The Guardian has more bad writing in it than it used to have; and the Times, well, the Times just carries on ploughing the dismal furrow it’s been ploughing for a couple of decades now, declining slowly but exceptionally persistently.

Or am I missing something? Or just getting older?

(Supplementary question: if so, why?)

John Reed, Oregonian, journalist and witness to the Bolshevik seizure of power; author of the instant classic, Ten Days That Shook The World.

Born 22 October 1887; died of typhus, 19 October 1920.

Sorry about the silence here over the last few days. The usual reasons: start of term, lectures on Hegel, moving house, those kinds of things.

I’m very pleased to learn over at SIAW that “Britney Spears” is an anagram of “Presbyterians”.

I don’t really know why, but I am.

I read the news today over at Nick Barlow’s, and I’ve just seen the obituary in The Times:

His opposition to new Labour was absolute and unforgiving. Though he refused to defend the hereditary right of the Lords - “I can’t get up and assert that hereditary peers are legitimate and I’m not going to” - he believed that the House of Lords system worked more often than not to temper the excesses of Parliament. When Tony Blair proposed that peers should give up their speaking privileges in return for lunching and dining rights in the House, Russell was withering. “He is literally asking us to sell our birthright for a mess of pottage,” he said. “This does no more than confirm me in my opinion that he is a smooth man. Were he to ask me to sell my birthright for a House of Commons elected by a voting system that makes it truly representative of the people, he might get a different answer.”

One of the Virtual Stoa’s favourite Liberal Democrats.

Sidney Webb, Fabian socialist, born 13 July 1859, died 13 October 1947.

[Those who haven’t the Webbs defence of the show trials should click here.]

At the APSA I picked up a copy of a CD of “Presidential Campaign Songs, 1789-1996” released by Smithsonian Folkways Recordings. It’s a very interesting record, for all kinds of reasons, but rather than talking about those reasons I thought I’d just post the words to “Why Not The Best?”, by John L. Turner.

I heard a young man speaking out just the other day;
I stopped just to listen to what he had to say;
He spoke straight and simple — by that I was impressed.
He said, “Once and for all, why not the best?”He said his name was Jimmy Carter and he was running for President,
And he laid out a plan of action — made a lot of sense!
He talked about the government and how it used to be, for you and me;
That’s the way it ought to be, right now:
Once and for all, why not the best?

He spoke plain and simple and I began to understand
I was listening to quite a man, talking to me.
I began to see…
We need Jimmy Carter!
Why settle for less?
America –
Once and for all, why not the best?

We need Jimmy Carter!
We can’t afford to settle for less,
America –
Once and for all, why not the best?
Why not the best?
Why not the best?

Other highlights include “Huzzah for Madison, Huzzah!”, “Get on a Raft with Taft” and “Keep Cool and Keep Coolidge”. Sadly, the disc’s producers couldn’t find a song commemorating Chester Arthur.

Orson Welles, actor, film-maker, and other things, too. Born 6 May 1915, died 10 October 1985.

Charles Fourier, utopian socialist and prophet of the counter-giraffe. Born 7 April 1772, died 10 October 1837.

Sarah’s worrying away about pronouns and discussing valuable ways of playing havoc with conventional (i.e. patriarchal) written English — all of which reminds me that there’s a handy gender-neutral pronoun for all the family, which starts out from the clunky “he or she or it” and elegantly contracts it to “h’orsh’it”.

The Red Sox swept the Angels in their Divisional Series, and the Yankees knocked off the twins last night, sending the right teams through to contest the American League Championship Series over the coming week.

Actually, I’m not sure it really counts as an American League Championship Series unless it’s the Sox against the Yankees, in much the same way as it isn’t really an Ashes Series if it isn’t England vs Australia.

(The Australians beat India just now, but with luck that’ll just set up another series like this one.)

I observed in August that it was a good sign both for the World of Blogs that Britain’s finest political columnist, Nick Cohen, was clearly spending time not only reading the blogs but giving them generous mentions in his published prose. The trend continues in today’s column, in which he reports on recent conversations with my friend and colleague Mike Smithson of politicalbetting.com.

The rest of the article is pretty good, too, and the conclusion is quite sound.

What with one thing and another, I’ve been in women’s clothes shops more often than usual in the last few days, which allows me to issue this Fashion Advisory.

Women of Britain! Save money by avoiding the grotesque pink and purple shades that seem to dominate this year’s Autumn collections. They’re really disgusting. Marks and Spencer and Laura Ashley appear to be particularly egregious offenders in this regard, but I think there are others, too.

Make quite sure you rinse the descaling solution out of the coffee machine very, very thoroughly before making yourself another cup. Despite following the written instructions more pedantically than usual and pumping a lot of fresh water through my Gaggia machine after yesterday’s descaling, the first mouthful this morning was the most disgusting thing I’ve tasted in a very long while.

The back of my throat has, fortunately, more or less recovered.