Tip for the Day
From our UK edition
Courtesy of a friend's Facebook status update: XXX XXXXX advises you not to chop chillies before inserting contact lenses Good advice!
Alex Massie
Thursday
McCain’s in the house, but which one?
From our UK edition
I suppose that, technically, it has nothing to do with whether a candidate for the Presidency is worthy of the office, but, really, don't you think John McCain should at least know how many houses he owns? From the Politico’s Jonathan Martin and Mike Allen: Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) said in an interview Wednesday that he was uncertain how many houses he and his wife, Cindy, own. “I think - I’ll have my staff get to you,” McCain told us in Las Cruces, N.M. “It’s condominiums where - I’ll have them get to you.” The correct answer is at least four, located in Arizona, California and Virginia, according to his staff. Newsweek estimated this summer that the couple owns at least seven properties….
Wednesday
Latin America’s Under-Performance
From our UK edition
Tyler Cowen is generously soliciting questions: here's mine, asked knowing that Tyler is keen on South America and capable of answering almost anything... Why do Latin American countries perform so poorly at the Olympic Games? The Republics of the Caucasus and Central Asia win medals in sports such as wrestling and weight-lifting, West Africa has produced sprinters while East Africans dominate distance running. So it can't just be poverty, right? Is Latin America's comparative failure explained by a combination of poverty and physiological factors? That is to say, do Latin American countries with high Indian populations suffer from an in-built disadvantage?
A Sadly Predictable Picture…
From our UK edition
There's the theory - and history - of cricket in Scotland. Then there's the reality... Scotland vs England, The Grange, Monday August 18th, 2008. Match abandoned.
Hawkeye Nighmares
From our UK edition
Kerry Howley moves from Washington DC to the American heartland and finds herself discombobulated, nay gently panicked, by the niceness of the place: The only other place I’ve lived where people didn’t steal bikes was a military dictatorship. The good news is that she's promising to blog more.
Monday
The Lessons of the Past
From our UK edition
Bill Keller's piece on "Springtime for Autocrats" in the New York Times has received plenty of attention (See Yglesias's sane response for instance) but for Russian and Caucasus commentary I'd recommend Neal Ascherson's article in the Observer. It's probably the best-balanced, most historically aware and, for that matter, humane piece I'd read on the whole grisly affair. As he puts it, we've been here before in the Caucasus and only the Russians have learnt anything from history. A foolish, counter-productive Georgian policy has failed (again) and the west should think long and hard about when and how it plans to bluff in the future...
It is never difficult to distinguish between a batsman with a grievance and a ray of sunshine…
From our UK edition
Scottish cricket is a tough school. Not so much because of the standard, but on account of the conditions cricketers must endure north of the border. The climate is not, to put it mildly, suited to the greatest game. And this summer has been especially bleak; my own club, Selkirk, haven't played since mid-July, rain forcing our last four fixtures to be abandoned without a ball being bowled. And that's in August. Early season play, in shivering April and biting May, is not for the faint-hearted. Playing cricket in Scotland one can never entirely escape the sensation, even under blue skies, that fate is lurking around the next corner, armed with rain... In that sense, then, Caledonian cricketers must endure more difficult conditions than their comrades in other, more sun-favoured climes.
Sunday
Tonight’s TV…
From our UK edition
It's a Sunday night in August. Hardly the most auspicious time of year for television programming. Still, that also makes it a reasonable moment to see how Channel 4 is faring in its mission to meet its public service remit. Tonight, on the supposedly up-market and less-idiotic-than-most channel, you be reassured that British TV is still "the best in the world" by watching: 19:00 Make Me a Christian: Would a return to a more 'Christian' way of life halt this country's moral decline? Reverend George Hargreaves would like to find out. 20:00 Wife Swap: Working parents Suzanne and Paul Newman swap lives with Wioletta and Tony Butler. 21:00 Big Brother: All the highlights from the Big Brother House.
Ronnie Drew, RIP
From our UK edition
The Foggy Dew should be busy tonight. Mind you, so should all the other pubs in Dublin. There'll be more cause than usual for singing now that one hears the sad news of Ronnie Drew's death. The Telegraph obituary puts the appeal of The Dubliners quite well: The Dubliners achieved fame and notoriety as singers of street ballads and bawdy songs, and as players of fine instrumental traditional music. Their emergence coincided with the British folk revival of the early 1960s, and they were one of the first folk bands to break into the pop charts. In Ireland their closest rivals were the Clancy Brothers.
Saturday
Obama’s Jobs Rhetoric
From our UK edition
Since we're on the subject of Barack Obama's economic nationalism, here's a radio ad airing in Wisconsin in which he suggests John McCain has a treasonous desire to ship American jobs off to nasty, grasping foreigners. You can listen to it here. (Text of the ad is also after the jump).It's all part of some "Buy American" strategy to be pursued in Pennsylvania and the midwest. Great. Now, sure, some of this is just campaign rhetoric.
Friday
England Our England
From our UK edition
So, after a nip and tuck South African affair, Norm and I finish the week by selecting our teams to represent a post-1945 England. As always, players need only have played for England after 1945 to be eligible for inclusion and the merits of their inclusion are to be judged on the totality of their career, not just the part of it that took place after Hitler's War.
Arise, Sir Nils!
From our UK edition
Really, can Friday stories get much better than this? A penguin who was previously made a Colonel-in-Chief of the Norwegian Army has been knighted at Edinburgh Zoo.Penguin Nils Olav has been an honorary member and mascot of the Norwegian King's Guard since the 1972.Over the years, he has been promoted through the ranks after being adopted by Royal Guard who visited the zoo.During the ceremony, Nils had a sword dubbed on each side of his head, where his shoulders should be, to confirm his regimental knighthood.A crowd of several hundred people joined the 130 guardsmen at the zoo. A citation from King Harald the Fifth of Norway was read out, which described Nils as a penguin "in every way qualified to receive the honour and dignity of knighthood".
Barack Obama, Nabob of Nationalist Negativity
From our UK edition
Expect more of this. The ad hits McCain on jobs, lobbying and Washington insiderishness and has a nativist whack at dodgy foreigners too. In other words, it's probably pretty effective...
Wednesday
Department of Food
From our UK edition
An excellent recipe for "breakfast pizza" courtesy of the New York Times. It is, however, I would suggest, incomplete. That is to say, the pizza would be immeasurably improved by the addition of black pudding. Or haggis, now that I think of it.
Tuesday
The Battle for South Africa
From our UK edition
Episode three of the Geras vs Massie cricketing showdown is underway. It's Norm's turn to pick first and, as I feared he might, he's exploiting his greater knowledge of South African cricket. Getting my excuses in early, I consider myself the underdog in this game. Anyway, the rules are the same as ever: only chaps who have played post-1945 are eligible for selection... You can follow the action here and, of course, at Norm's place too.
Capello’s Common Sense
From our UK edition
More evidence emerges that England selected the right man when they asked Fabio Capello to rescue their football team. From the Times today: On another issue - Wayne Rooney's smoking habit - Capello was curiously indifferent, a stance that brought out sweat beads on the foreheads of his FA employers, fearful of their manager unwittingly being cast as the spokesman for a generation of English butt-heads. Capello later returned to clarify his position and the moral guardians were headed off at the pass... Capello's lack of interest in making a judgment revealed that the difference between football people in Europe and Britain is not merely a matter of tactics or technique. The fact is, smoking is not seen as the great taboo for a sportsman abroad that it is here.
Fallows vs Brooks
From our UK edition
And it's no contest: James Fallows dismantles David Brooks' column on China. His advice: Take a little time and look around, David. The parts that don't fit what you theorized before arriving are actually the most stimulating. That's in response to Brook's beloved pseudo-scientific hucksterism: If you show an American an image of a fish tank, the American will usually describe the biggest fish in the tank and what it is doing. If you ask a Chinese person to describe a fish tank, the Chinese will usually describe the context in which the fish swim. These sorts of experiments have been done over and over again, and the results reveal the same underlying pattern. Americans usually see individuals; Chinese and other Asians see contexts.
The Kosovan Connection
From our UK edition
There's not much point in arguing with Andy McCarthy, but National Review's resident pop-eyed frother-and-splutterer-in-chief has this to say today: the recognition of Kosovo was a huge blunder, forced by those who think Muslim agitators will like us better, rather than sense weakness, if we appease and break the rules for them. On what planet was this the argument for recognising Kosovo?
Quote for the Day | 12 August 2008
From our UK edition
Yes, I mentioned this post earlier. But... But the very most obvious thing about today's XXXX is how internally varied and contradictory it is, how many opposite things various of its people want, how likely-to-be-false any generalization is... XXXX here is China but it could just as usefully be the United States of America. That's something foreign correspondents and, just as importantly, foreign editors need to bear in mind at all times. And not necessarily only with regard to America and China either...
The Streets of Baltimore
From our UK edition
If you like The Wire you should definitely read this piece in the Washington Monthly. And if you don't like The Wire that must be because you haven't seen it yet. If that's the case, you have a treat in store: 60 odd hours of the best television series ever made. I mean this sort of thing is horrific. Yet also horrifically compelling: What would become the fifth and final murder charge in the case of Willie Mitchell and his cohorts took place two months later. This time, only Mitchell’s friend Shawn Gardner was directly involved. It began with a man named Darius Spence, who had found out that his wife, Tanya, was cheating on him with a local drug dealer everyone called “Momma.” Spence decided to have Momma beaten up severely.