The Virtual Stoa

Canaan Banana, first President of independent Zimbabwe, born 5 March 1936, died 10 November, 2003.

Leonid Brezhnev, General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, born 19 December 1906 in Kamenskoye (now Dneprodzerzhinsk), died 10 November 1982.

Leo Huberman, American socialist, founding co-editor of Monthly Review, born 17 October 1903, died 9 November 1968.

When did Pepper’s Burgers on Walton Street in Oxford open?

Please report any sitings from before 1992 in the Comments.

Étienne Cabet, French utopian socialist and author of Voyage en Icarie; born in Dijon, France, 1 January 1788, died St Louis, Missouri, 8 November 1856.

If you’ve got any strong political opinions, you might want to head over to the Polling Station at TC’s website, where he’s asking the important question, “What Should the Government Do Next?” As things stand, the Kendal Northern Relief Road is in the lead (seven votes), narrowly beating off a challenge from Improvements to the M6 (four).

And there’s a touching story about how “Christmas has come early” for 9-year old Sophie Hunter, who has won the competition to design Tim’s Christmas card (although, sadly, no picture of the winning design is provided.)

Oh yes, and there was an election in the United States during my Blog Silence, which annoyed me, not only because the Republicans won, but also because I’d spent the previous twelve months reassuring various nervous Americans I know here in Oxford that they wouldn’t.

Bugger.

Also great fun, of course, over the last few days, has been the saga of Stephen Pollard and YouGov. Pollard wrote a characteristically irritating post about how YouGov wasn’t very good, in his opinion, which prompted a damning response from one of the chaps who works there in the comments box (reproduced here).

A little later, Pollard announced that “Some of you will notice that a post which was here earlier today about YouGov, the pollsters, has disappeared. I’m afraid that, for reasons which I can’t go in to, I have had to pull it.” This is mysterious, for the title of the original post was “Pollard Speaks, YouGov Quakes”, which makes it highly unlikely that Pollard pulled the post after YouGov pointed out that it was libellous, Pollard not being the kind of guy to quake in the face of any kind of legal threat.

All of this then left regular readers puzzled, first as to why Pollard continued to leave the offending post up on his site here, despite having told the world that he had pulled it, and second as to why he went on to insist that he’d won some famous victory over YouGov (”Game, set and match”), even though, quite patently, he hadn’t.

Idiot.

(For more discussion, see Anthony Wells’ blog here, and for a good point well made try here.)

Favourite Recent Blog Moment: From Daily Moiderer Marc Mulholland in Norm’s Profile:

What commonly enjoyed activities do you regard as a waste of time? > Brushing one’s hair.

(Marc also posted a chunk of Macaulay on his site, by way of marking his birthday (TBMacA’s, not MM’s) which reminded me that I’d once done the same.)

Apologies also to the friends and families of David Widgery, Pier Paolo Pasolini, George Bernard Shaw, Lucio Colletti and Katayama Sen, who would have been celebrated in the Dead Socialist Watch over the last couple of weeks or so if only I’d been paying proper attention.

People who know far more about John Peel than I do (and who drink Pale Fizzy Lager) tell me that he should have been commemorated, too. That’s probably right, but if anyone can supply me with documentary evidence of Peel’s left-wing politics, apart from his well-known remark that DJs were a bunch of left-wingers, that’d be helpful.

(The main impact on my life that John Peel had, I’m afraid, was the theme music to Home Truths, which, along with the words, “And now, ‘Thought for the Day’…”, was far more effective at getting me out of bed immediately than any loud electronic alarm clock could ever manage to be.)

Apologies for the ongoing silence, and thanks to those who’ve enquired about either my wellbeing or that of the blog.

It’s been a busy term here in Oxford, and it’s unlikely to get less busy any time soon with the undergraduate admissions season about to begin, but the additional reason as to why there’s been no posting in these parts recently is that the place where I’m spending most of my time these days doesn’t have an internet connection yet (except for those chunks of the day when one of the neighbours has his/her wireless network going…).