Here’s a handy chart from The Times showing how tall Hazel Blears is, as compared to (i) hitherto well-documented and in some cases actually-existing varieties of penguin and (ii) the Extinct Giant Tropical Penguin discussed below. [Thanks, David E.]
I don’t think there’s any significant facial hair in Mr Brown’s new Cabinet, if these pictures are anything to go by. Beards were absent from the Cabinet room from 1931 to 1997, as I’ve discussed before, and it now looks as if the Blair era, for all its faults, was a unique Bearded Cabinet Minister Interlude, with Robin Cook, Frank Dobson, David Blunkett, Charles Clarke and (a bearded) Alistair Darling all holding Cabinet office. I’m not sure there are any obvious ministerial beardies on the horizon, either, but perhaps we’ll find out more tomorrow when the junior ministers get reshuffled.
Whenever I go past Pepper’s Burgers on Walton Street these days, it seems to be closed. And the people at this page seem to think it has closed down. This would, obviously, be utterly disastrous for humanity in general and the residents of Jericho in particular, so I hope it isn’t true. Does anyone know what’s going on? (I might have to produce another Defunct Oxford Institutions page.)
The BBC:
The Milibands are the first brothers to sit in Cabinet since Austen and Neville Chamberlain (in fact, half-brothers) in 1924.
What about the 4th Marquess of Salisbury (Lord Privy Seal) and his brother, the 1st Viscount Cecil (Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster) in Baldwin’s second government, 1924-7?
(Maybe they weren’t both Cabinet posts?)
Reading this story reminded me of Sam the Eagle’s talk on the conservation of endangered species from this episode of the Muppet Show. I was going to link to it on YouTube, where I saw it again quite recently for the first time in absolutely ages, but some killjoy has removed it, so I can’t. But perhaps you remember it, too.
I quite enjoyed the sixty-eight minutes during which we were primeministerless yesterday, but that’s probably because I spent virtually all of them eating a delicious lunch at Gino’s on Gloucester Green.
The BBC usefully covers the crises that hit the nation during this period of acephalousness (acephalocity?): Chantelle and Preston split up, a man was attacked by a buzzard in Aberdeenshire, and so on.
P.S. If anyone can produce a suitable-sounding German word for “primeministerlessness”, I shall be very pleased. I imagine it’d be quite long.
Over here.
So if Jack Straw is the new Minister for Justice, do we have a new Lord Chancellor or not? Is it still Charlie Falconer? Do we have one at all? Presumably we do, because otherwise Brown would be in the same mess Blair was in when he tried to abolish the post. Or has something changed? Anyway: what’s going on?
Edward Carpenter, English socialist and champion of gay sex. A clerical fellow of Trinity Hall, Cambridge, Carpenter resigned his holy orders and left for the North, teaching astronomy at Leeds and living from 1880 near Sheffield with his lover, Albert Fearnehough. He published Toward Democracy anonymously in 1883; from 1882 he was a market gardener and helped to popularise sandal-making as a suitable activity for socialists. He wrote a programme for the Sheffield Socialist Society in 1886, as well as “England Arise: a Socialist Marching Song”, and his 1889 Fabian Lecture was published as Civilization: Its Cause and Cure. He began his major works on sex in the 1890s, with Homogenic Love, and its Place in a Free Society later republished as Love’s Coming of Age. His most widely-read work was The Intermediate Sex, published in 1908. A pacifist, he opposed both the Boer War and the First World War. Born in Brighton, 29 August 1844, died in Guildford, 28 June 1929. His grave is here.
Anthony Buckeridge, author of Jennings Goes To School and other books, born 20 June 1912, died 28 June 2004.
Alexander Berkman, born 21 November 1870, committed suicide 28 June 1936.
By my count there are seven PPEists in Gordon Brown’s new Cabinet: Jacqui Smith (Hertford & Home Secretary), Yvette Cooper (Balliol & Housing), Ruth Kelly (Queen’s & Transport), Ed Miliband (Corpus Christi & Cabinet Office), James Purnell (Balliol & Culture - an unlikely combination), Ed Balls (Keble & Schools), David Miliband (CCC & FCO). That’s a lot of PPEists. And at least three of the Chancellor’s most recent team of special advisers are PPEists, too (Shriti Vadera, Dan Corry, Stewart Wood; I’m not sure where the other two studied. Perhaps Michael Jacobs and Gavin Kelly did PPE, too? Who knows?). So Gordon Brown may not like Oxford University much, but he does seem to like the PPE degree (or at least a subsection of those who take the course) very much indeed.
Stephen Pollard sensibly thinks that most online petitions are “a gimmicky waste of time”. But not when you put your online petition on the No.10 website, as anyone is able to do. Then, if Pollard agrees with it, it becomes “imperative that it is signed”, no less, “precisely because it has the imprimatur of 10 Downing Street”.
What a funny man.
(Note also that in the post below this one he demonstrates his mastery of Islamic culture by confusing a hajib with a hijab, and note also also that the case was never about the hijab anyway, but about Ms Begum’s jilbab.)
Over here.
The candidate, on Newsnight:
Jeremy Paxman: Do you think the Party should say sorry for what happened?
Jon Cruddas: I do actually, as part of a general reconciliation with the British people over what has been a disaster in Iraq…
Harriet Harman: I agree with that.
Jon Cruddas: And I don’t think we can actually rebuild a sense of trust and a dialogue with the British people unless we fundamentally reconcile ourselves to what the situation is on the ground and our own culpability in creating it.
Harriet Harman: I agree with that.
The Deputy Leader:
She said she had not been referring to the need for an apology, but agreeing with the need for reconciliation with the public.
“I have not said I will press for a public apology from the government or the Labour Party,” she said.
I suppose she’s no more craven than the average New Labour politician, but, still, she’s pretty craven.
Clara Zetkin, German Social Democrat, Sparticist and Communist, born 5 July 1857, died 20 June 1933.
Maxim Gorky, born 16 March 1868, died 18 June 1936.
Paul Hirst, formerly an Althusserian Marxist partially responsible for the Pre-Capitalist Modes of Production volumes, latterly a post-Althusserian who had much of interest to say about the contemporary world, born 20 May 1946; died 17 June 2003.
The British Film Institute has just released its triple-DVD set of Jan Svankmajer: The Complete Short Films, and this is what Marina Warner has to say about it in tehgraun:
“26 extraordinary works so far, they unfold his artistry and his preoccupations with rare richness, and have been annotated by an admiring group of critics and film historians. So this set of short films is a marvellous and invaluable collection.”
Yes, indeed, yes indeed - Svankmajer’s Dimensions of Dialogue may be the best short animated film that there is, and many of the others are not bad at all - and there are special reasons at the Stoa for celebrating the release of the set: it’s been assembled, put together, produced, hand-tooled (I’m not really sure what the appropriate verb is) by my brother Michael. So well done him.
See subject line.
Sonja Davies [also, also], Vice-President of the New Zealand Federation of Labour, peace campaigner (”Mrs Peace”) and Labour MP for Pencarrow, 1987-1993; born Wallaceville, 11 November 1923, died 12 June 2005.
The BBC, covering the issues that matter, over here.
(The Virtual Stoa’s favourite polydactyl lives in Marin County, California; but I don’t think Alison Thomas is interested in him, owing to her less than fully cosmopolitan attitude, when it comes to cats.)
When my friend Katherine isn’t thinking about ideal theory, she’s training for a 100km in 24 hours journey across the South Downs, or somesuch, on foot, to raise money for Oxfam and the Gurkha Welfare Trust. Sponsor her! Blog over here (a must for foot fetishists! and blister fetishists — there must be some out there), and click on the “Sponsor Us!” link on the left-hand side. Highly recommended (unless you think, of course, that Oxfam is a bunch of neocolonialists).
Enrico Berlinguer, national secretary of the Italian Communist Party, 1972-1984. Born 25 May 1922, died 11 June 1984.
