Alex Massie

Alex Massie

Friday

Alex Massie

Golf interlude

From our UK edition

I was part of the team covering the 1999 Open for Scotland on Sunday - that's the tournament you all remember more for Jean van de Velde's collapse than for Paul Lawrie's victory - and what I remember most from that week was how much the pros whinged about the way Carnoustie had been set up. It affronted their sense of themselves. They had a point in as much as the fairways were narrow, the rough had been watered and a tough course had been protected against benign conditions. But they still whinged, forgetting that they were playing, as they do in every competition, the course not the other golfers. Also, of course, the links was the same for everyone.

Alex Massie

Brown’s Scorched Earth policy

From our UK edition

Mr E is correct to highlight this significant post from Fraser Nelson: The Scorched Earth policy has begun. The FT has a hugely significant story – that the Treasury is “working privately on plans to reform Gordon Brown’s fiscal rules” which would “initially allow for increased borrowing”. In the vernacular, Brown has realised that if the Tories win the next election the he is now spending with Cameron’s Gold Card – every by-election bribe, every union sellout will be funded by borrowing with the bill sent to D. Cameron Esq. Cameron will have to tax us to pay for what Brown is today spending. The Treasury is claiming that it was always going to “review” its 40% limit after the current economic cycle ends.

Alex Massie

Headline of the Day | 18 July 2008

From our UK edition

From the Daily Telegraph: Could Helen Mirren's bikini start a revolution? The usual rule is, as you know, that the answer to any question posed in a healine is almost always "No". But who knows, perhaps this is the exception that proves the rule...

Thursday

Alex Massie

Hello to Berlin

From our UK edition

So, Barack Obama travels to the middle east and europe next week on a trip designed to burnish his statesman credentials. Among the events planned: a major open-air speech in Berlin, possibly at the Brandenburg Gate. The good folks at The Corner see this as an own goal. To wit, Peter Kirsanow: Here in flyover country the reaction to Obama's trip (except for the understandable stops in Iraq) is just as likely to be " What country does he want to be president of?" It's true some Americans like to be liked. But lots of Americans also are skeptical of candidates who look like they're trying to pass John Kerry's "global test.

Alex Massie

Say it Ain’t So, Ricco…

From our UK edition

The other day I was all poised to praise Riccardo Ricco, whose two stage wins in this year's Tour were thrilling pieces of cycling. I was going to suggest that if Damiano Cunego could show some better form there might be some hope that we could enjoy a modern rivalry that might offer a pale echo of the great Coppi-Bartali tussles of the past. Not so fast, my friends. Ricco has been kicked out of the tour (though, as always in cycling, the details remain less than clear) and the Saunier-Duval team has withdrawn from the race. Perplexingly, the organisers say this shows they are winning the battle against doping.

Alex Massie

A Question of Accent

From our UK edition

Megan wonders whatever happened to the classic upper-crust New England accent: Why did this happen? Television tends to flatten regional accents, of course, but how come Britain held onto its aristocratic tones, while America's slipped softly and silently away? Well, it's true that the aristocracy, in as much as it still exists, has maintained a certain distinctive way of speaking, but it's not heard very often. David Cameron, for example, is sometimes labelled a "toff" but his accent is very different from that of Harold Macmillan or Alec Douglas-Home for instance. There's not much cut-glass around these days. You won't, for instance, find many people in British movies talking in the manner of Trevor Howard and Celia Johnson in Brief Encounter.

Wednesday

Alex Massie

Labour Isn’t Working

From our UK edition

Would even the west of Scotland Labour party stoop to producing a fake war hero to endorse Margaret Curran in the Glasgow East by-election? According to Guido, why yes they would...

Alex Massie

Obama: not funny enough for the White House?

From our UK edition

David Frum: At a dinner last night, some friends were discussing about what Obama should have said about that New Yorker cover. One suggested that Obama ought to have said "It's hilarious" - that at least would have put an end to the talk he has no sense of humor. There may be something in that, though really questions as to whether or not Obama has enough of a sense of humour really does seem classic silly season stuff. (See Maureen Dowd today for more of this). Still, for what little it's worth, I think Obama's best response would have been to say he loved it and ask if he could have the original drawing...

Tuesday

Alex Massie

Wodehouse on TV?

From our UK edition

In response to this post, a reader asks how did I like the Fry and Laurie TV adaptations? Well, only up to a point is my answer. They are, probably, as good an effort as television can muster but they still, to my mind, fail to cut the mustard. An honorable failure, then. Or rather, to put it more charitably, they were closer to being a success than anyone had ay right to hope they would be. Fry was, I always thought, rather too oleaginously piscine as Jeeves while Laurie played Bertie as - hard though this may be to believe - too much of a fat-headed ass. They got away with these excesses largely because the two friends act so well together; their timing and ease in each others company rescued them on numerous occasions.

Alex Massie

Bureaucracy Creep

From our UK edition

Apparently the US government's "terrorist watch-list" now runs to more than a million names. How useful can it be then? Let's see, shall we? The Justice Department's former top criminal prosecutor says the government's terror watch list likely has caused thousands of innocent Americans to be questioned, searched or otherwise hassled. Former Assistant Attorney General Jim Robinson would know: he's one of them. Robinson joined another mistaken-identity American and the American Civil Liberties Union on Monday to urge eliminating the list that's supposed to identify suspected terrorists. "It's a pain in the neck, and significantly interferes with my travel arrangements," said Robinson, the head of the Justice Department's criminal division during the Clinton administration.

Alex Massie

Barack Obama, Isolationist!

From our UK edition

Really? Says who? Says Jamie Kirchick in a piece at Standpoint. Kirchick hangs this dubious thesis upon a single shoogly nail: If the Democrats learned a lesson from their last presidential election defeat, however, it’s that they were not isolationist enough. In a little noticed remark earlier this month, presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Barack Obama expressed exactly the same sentiment as Kerry four years ago, using almost exactly the same language. Outlining his economic agenda delivered at a speech delivered in Raleigh, North Carolina, Obama stated that “Instead of spending $12 billion a month to rebuild Iraq, I think it's time we invested in our roads and schools and bridges and started to rebuild America.

Alex Massie

What’s the matter with France?

From our UK edition

Since yesterday was Bastille Day, this seems as sensible a moment as any to ask: whatever happened to France? How did a once-great nation fall so low? And, are there any grounds for hoping that France may recover from this shameful, pitiful, nadir? I speak, of course, of cycling. No Frenchman has won the Tour de France since Bernard Hinault took his fifth yellow jersey way back in 1986. Worse still, apart from Laurent Fignon (winner in 84 and 85 himself), no Frenchman has since come even close to hauling on the Maillot Jaune in Paris. It gets worse: Fignon won the Giro d'Italia in 1989 and Laurent Jalabert took the Vuelta d'Espana in 1995  but those are the only two French triumphs in the grand tours since Hinault's final Tour win.

Monday

Alex Massie

A Wodehouse Reader

From our UK edition

A correspondent has a confession and a question: "I have, shamefully, never read Wodehouse and want to read all the Bertie and Jeeves stories. But where does one start?" There is no shame in this. Indeed there's a sense in which one might (almost) envy the Wodehouse novice; how splendid to be able to cast off the concerns of the modern world and slip into this altogether finer place for the very first time. My friend has a summer of plenty ahead of him. (Mind you, there's something to be said for reading Wodehouse in the depths of hellish winter too. Perhaps this accounts for his enormous popularity in Russia.) Yet he is wise to proceed cautiously.

Alex Massie

Outrage Up to 11!

From our UK edition

Jesus, people, would you get a grip? Apparently there is bipartisan outrage over this week's very amusing New Yorker cover: Obviously the New Yorker, that bastion of shoddy journalism and fist-bumping reactionaries, is hell-bent on destroying America. And apple pie. Hell, they probably want to restrict the franchise... Oh, hang on... Ben Smith reports that according to: Obama campaign spokesman Bill Burton: "The New Yorker may think, as one of their staff explained to us, that their cover is a satirical lampoon of the caricature Senator Obama's right-wing critics have tried to create. But most readers will see it as tasteless and offensive. And we agree." Most readers will, of course, not be half as stupid as the Obama campaign apprently considers them to be.

Alex Massie

Vive La France!

From our UK edition

This one's for my French friends and readers. Here's Yves Montand singing Les Feuilles Mortes. Wonderful stuff.

Sunday

Alex Massie

New Labour Gets Ruthless

From our UK edition

Labour's latest approach to crime: Plans to 'shock' knife carriers Not quite what it seems admittedly, even though wouldn't surprise you if these clowns did suggest we start electrocuting teenagers, would it?

Alex Massie

Blogging Beckett

From our UK edition

Noah Millman, one of my favourite bloggers, on Brian Dennehy appearing in Krapp's Last Tape: It’s a marvelously devastating bit of theater, as Beckett should be.Krapp’s Last Tape is – and should be – a particularly uncomfortable play for a blogger. Here sits a man, a writer, having reached his grand climacteric, looking back on a life devoted to a project of self-creation through self-revelation (and using new technology – the reel-to-reel tape recorder), and consumed with self-disgust at the utter waste of such an effort. The fact that I’m continuing to blog after having seen this play is only more evidence that theater lacks any real power to change one’s life. Which, I think, Beckett would agree with. Discuss!

Friday

Alex Massie

The Two Scotlands

From our UK edition

This post by my old friend Fraser Nelson is the best thing I've read so far about the Glasgow East by-election: It is tragic comic to see Labour taking such a philosophical attitude to the scandalous deprivation in Glasgow East during this election campaign as if they were talking about the weather. “Oh, its heartbreaking and very complex” they say and use phrases like “multiple deprivation” to make it sound so complicated that government cant do anything about it. What’s happened is that Labour’s remedy to poverty – more money – has made the problem worse. As they recommend, read the whole thing.

Alex Massie

The Wisdom of Crowds | 11 July 2008

From our UK edition

So what are the best (and worst) things since sliced bread? Danny Finkelstein reveals all and, frankly, it's tough to argue with the findings. Pleased too, to see the TV remote polling so well...