The Wiki Man

One argument levelled against command economies by people such as Hayek is that, without the information contained in market prices, it is almost impossible to allocate resources efficiently. In other words, there can be no ‘from each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs’ without some price mechanism to reveal what those abilities and needs might be. One argument levelled against command economies by people such as Hayek is that, without the information contained in market prices, it is almost impossible to allocate resources efficiently. In other words, there can be no ‘from each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs’ without some price mechanism to reveal what those abilities and needs might be.

To play this joke, you need a friend who’s flying abroad. To play this joke, you need a friend who’s flying abroad. Just log on to any website that allows you to send anonymous texts and, while the friend is in mid-flight, send an SMS to his phone (let’s assume he is landing in Cape Town) along the following lines: ‘Vodacom international roaming service welcomes you to South Africa. For emergencies dial 112. For voicemail dial 191, you fat beardie twat.’ Obviously it adds to the general hilarity here if the person receiving this is bearded and fat. (Male is preferable, too, as women are all too liable to take offence.

The building is somewhere on the Pembrokeshire coast, the only one in the world, and I have never managed to find it. It is the Church of St Elvis, commemorating the sixth-century Elvis (or Aelfyw) of Munster, famous only for baptising St David and for giving a name to several generations of Presleys. I have always thought it would make an ideal site for staging my annual festival dedicated to the many pleasures which belong (with Elvis) in the category ‘brilliant but slightly naff’. Days could be spent jet-skiing or quad-biking. Food would have chips with everything, plus HP Sauce. The fun could continue late into the night, with revellers warmed by banks of patio heaters.

One of many reasons I love reading about crime on Wikipedia is the marvellous pieces of unintentional comedy you get at the end of an article in the list of internal links.

What divides the left from the right nowadays is almost never the wildly divergent aims each group claims to believe in: it’s simply that, at a personal level, each finds the other bloody irritating. What divides the left from the right nowadays is almost never the wildly divergent aims each group claims to believe in: it’s simply that, at a personal level, each finds the other bloody irritating. The left finds people on the right selfish and self-satisfied. They’re not wrong. A philosopher friend of mine says he dislikes the City ‘not for the money they earn but the unquestioning sense that they deserve it’. The right’s aversion to the left is more complex — sanctimoniousness, perhaps.

Unsure what to buy for your loved ones this Christmas? Here are two ideas. For diehard smokers, try buying an electronic cigarette, currently causing controversy in California, where an attempt to prevent their sale was recently vetoed by Governor Schwarzenegger. The devices cause debate for a host of reasons — not least because there is a near unanimous consensus among health professionals that they present a potential source of enjoyment. Some claim they will act as a gateway drug, causing those ‘smoking’ them (‘vaping’ is the current word, since the devices produce nicotine-infused vapour, not smoke) to move to harder drugs — on that same inevitable path by which youthful dabbling with loose-leaf Darjeeling leads to crystal meth.

After the womenfolk in the household have gone to bed, I like to spend a minute trawling a few porn sites. In my case it may be either www.privateislandsonline.com (the estate agency most beloved of James Bond villains) or more commonly www.savewright.org, with its section ‘Wright on the Market’ listing all the properties currently on sale that were designed by Frank Lloyd Wright. It is a senseless dream, of course. There are no Wright buildings outside the US (bar a handful in Tokyo) and those on sale are usually either a) priced at $4 million, b) in need of ruinously expensive restoration, or c) located seven hours’ drive from Des Moines.

To me this is a silly line of attack. That’s not to suggest there are no possible improvements to Royal Mail services — I can think of several. For instance someone should ask postmen to reverse their round every year, so that it isn’t always the same hapless householders (me, in this case) who receive their post after lunch. When they’ve finished that, they could also question the increasingly surreal placement of letter boxes (it’s now easier to post a letter in a peat-bog nine miles outside Thurso than at Victoria Station), or even adopt that clever Finnish idea where you can pay for postage using your mobile phone. However, as far as the basic service goes, I have no complaints at all.

It is a joke I have heard told 20 different ways since I first heard it 23 years ago. Often the location has changed, along with the nationality of the subject or his transgression. However, the ur-joke, told to me by an anthropologist in 1986, went like this. A tourist is exploring the coast of a minor Greek island when he arrives at a charming fishing village, a model of contented pros-perity. Freshly painted boats bob at their moorings behind a stout breakwater. On the hillside opposite there is a handsome church, almost a cathedral. Enchanted, our traveller asks several passers-by to recommend a good bar for a drink. Each time he is advised that much the best place is the ‘Taverna of Dimitri the Sheep Shagger’.

Some time in the mid-1990s I spent a day in a windowless room watching endless presentations of European television commercials. In the style of the times, most were filmed in exotic tropical locations with lavish production values, sumptuous photography and a pulsating soundtrack. As the day drew to an end, the creative director of an Oslo advertising agency stood up to present his own work. He gave a self-deprecating cough. ‘Back in Norway we have no advertising money at all… so unfortunately we have to have an idea.’ He went on to show charming and imaginative advertisements, typically shot on video cameras. One series simply featured two people talking on a tram. As he proved, imagination can be a good substitute for a big budget.

Fifteen years ago, when I lived in W2, I was sent a leaflet from something called (I think) the Bayswater Residents Association. As is common with anything produced by self-appointed volunteers, the leaflet proposed an exclusively geriatric vision for the postal district in which we lived, one completely at odds with its population. The organisation boasted it had ‘successfully campaigned to prevent the area becoming a centre for nightlife second only to the West End’, a claim that incensed the 29-year-old me, who had moved to the area in the hope of that very contingency. Its membership seemed implacably opposed to any human activity which involved being awake after 6 p.m.

At first glance the climate change debate is simple: you either believe the doom-mongers or you don’t. Soon, however, other questions arise. Is the world warming up or not? If so, is this warming anthropogenic or the result of a natural cycle? If greenhouse gases are indeed to blame, do we reduce emissions now or leave our children to deal with the consequences? Do we trust more to legislation or technological progress? And is the whole thing a whopping great lie? The Delingpolian view that the whole thing is one great big con might still be right. There are plenty of people who have an ulterior motive in spreading fear. Governments love citing market failures as an excuse to intervene.

To Amy******@************.org: I have a LG microwave that I want to sell for $30. I am aware your ad said whites only, but I am an African American. I sincerely hope that we can put race issues aside and just do business. From Amy ****** to Me: I am so sorry that you misread my ad. I meant the microwave should be white, because it would match my kitchen. From Me to Amy ******: Oh, so because I am black, you think that I can’t read… I don’t think I can sell my microwave to a bigot. Subsequent masters of the art have included William Donaldson (as Henry Root), Ted L. Nancy (American author of Letters from a Nut) and Robert Popper (author, under the name Robin Cooper, of The Timewaster Letters).

In the end I ignored my own advice and bought an Apple iPad, purely, as I explained to my wife, ‘for the purposes of research’. The very same ‘research’ that has by now filled two or three desk drawers with a ridiculous assortment of electrical chargers, the devices they once charged mostly lost, burnt out or forgotten. Weeks later, my verdict on the thing is curiously complicated. What I mean by this is that the Apple iPad is a magnificent, life-enhancing device, which in many ways lights a future path for technology… and I really do like it: but I’m just not quite sure that you should buy one.

I am, it’s true, optimistic about the role of technology in making life more pleasant and interesting, but in some areas I am sceptical, even fogeyish. Ask me to design a perfect world and it will have electronics (and medicine) from the present day but engineering and architecture from the 1930s. My answer to any volcanic ash cloud would be to reintroduce a transatlantic Zeppelin service. As for Heathrow’s third runway, let Short Brothers’ Empire flying boats land on the Thames. It is all too easy to fantasise about a golden age of travel while forgetting that it was golden only for the few who could afford it. But something has been lost.

A few years ago a leisure centre advertised ‘Keep-fit classes for the over-60s’. Nobody turned up. To broaden the appeal, they advertised ‘Keep-fit classes for the over-50s’. The sessions sold out. Not one of those joining was under 65 years of age. How many 65-year-olds want to attend anything aimed at the over-60s? And how many small cars would be sold if advertisements showed them being driven by pensioners (the people who actually buy them) rather than elfin 27-year-olds in capri pants? ‘User imagery’ it’s called, and it is a more powerful force than any of us would like to admit. Not only in what it makes us do, but in what it stops us doing.

With the single exception of the in- flight live map with its wonderfully eccentric ideas about the relative importance of towns and cities (what’s so special about Chartwell?), I don’t often use the in-flight entertainment systems on planes. I’m not sure I want to watch Avatar on a nine-inch screen — or on any screen, come to think of it. In fact I think it would be better if, a week before the flight, your airline just sent you a £10 Amazon voucher along with a few book recommendations. In a way, the best improvement to in-flight entertainment has been the BBC’s and Sky’s creation of desktop software which means you can download television programmes to a PC.

I haven’t watched Triumph of the Will all the way through, but I am fairly confident that at no point in the film does Hess suddenly turn to the crowd and say: ‘Yes, sir, your question. Row 689, the blond gentleman in black with the skull insignia? No, not you, sir — the slightly more Aryan-looking gentleman to the right — just behind the eagle.’ (Maiden with coiled plaits wearing dirndlkleid strides over with a boom microphone.) Man: ‘Does the Führer have any idea how difficult it is to bring up two children on an Unterscharführer’s salary, what with hyperinflation and that?’ Fuhrer: ‘Well, Horst — it is Horst, isn’t it?

I don’t know if you have ever been to Paris, but it’s basically a kind of London for girls. I generally try to avoid the place, as you can’t get a decent curry and there’s nothing in the shops unless you are an anorexic dwarf. But a couple of times a year I used to find myself on a breakneck taxi ride between the (pretty crummy) Gare de Lyon and the (crummier still) Gare Montparnasse, trying to catch a train to Bordeaux. Only after my sixth visit did I learn that there was no need for this ludicrous trip. Instead of changing trains in Paris, you could simply hop off the Eurostar at Lille, have some chips and a pint at the bar, then jump on an almost empty TGV train which runs all the way from Lille to Bordeaux. Simples. Why did it take me years to find this out?