Alex Massie

Alex Massie

Friday

Alex Massie

Get a grip, Ron Burgundy

Will Ferrell: clown. Top Hollywood star Will Ferrell last night appeared in University College Dublin to accept a prestigious award in front of 1,500 students. The 40-year-old star of 'Anchorman' was dressed in the full Irish rugby kit as he accepted the James Joyce Award from the Literary and Historical Society for his outstanding contribution to comedic acting. Ferrell had a packed O'Reilly Hall in stitches throughout his 40- minute speech where he joked: "As I look out at this crowd, I see the future of Ireland, the future of Europe. And let's face it, the future looks pretty bleak." [Editorial note: given the location, this was clearly a serious observation]... ...

Alex Massie

Another reason why mobile phones are bad: editors can find you

Things that make you despair: young journalists who have never read Scoop. In a better world that would be a sacking offence. Clive publishes a reminder of the novel's glories as part of his excellent Notebook feature: "Come to think of it," he added moodily, "there's no point in answering anyway. Look at mine." CABLE  FULLIER  OFTENER  PROMPTLIER  STOP  YOUR  SERVICE   BADLY  BEATEN  ALROUND   LACKING   HUMAN  INTEREST  COLOUR  DRAMA PERSONALITY  HUMOUR  INFORMATION  ROMANCE  VITALITY "Can't say that's not frank, can you?" said Corker. "God rot 'em." Well, yes, exactly.

Alex Massie

The Saintly American

Among the many idiocies stuffed into Mitt Romney's race-quitting speech at CPAC, this one, for which admittedly he cannot bear full responsibility, is a peach: Simon Peres, in a visit to Boston, was asked what he thought about the war in Iraq. “First,” he said, “I must put something in context. America is unique in the history of the world. In the history of the world, whenever there has been conflict, the nation that wins takes land from the nation that loses. One nation in history, and this during the last century, laid down hundreds of thousands of lives and took no land. No land from Germany, no land from Japan, no land from Korea. America is unique in the sacrifice it has made for liberty, for itself and for freedom loving people around the world.

Thursday

Alex Massie

Obama Now Officially Front-Runner

So says Time Magazine's (and friend to this blog) Jay Newton-Small: For anyone who thinks this race might be a tie, and yes, David Axelrod, that includes you, there’s a lot of evidence today that Obama is now the frontrunner. He leads in number of states won, he leads by his own campaign’s tally in pledged delegates, he is so far ahead in the money race that his opponent is borrowing money and he clearly has the momentum coming out of Super Tuesday. How is he NOT the frontrunner?? The Expectations Game just became a little tougher for Obama.

Alex Massie

Promises, promises…

From Is There More to Life Than Shoes: In the court case brought against him for breach of contract over a referendum on the EU Constitution, Brown's personal barrister has just told the court that "manifesto pledges are not subject to legitimate expectation". Given the content of most political manifestos, isn't this a welcome relief? Imagine a world in which they actually did what they promised? Scarcely bears thinking about.

Alex Massie

Big in Japan. For real…

Are books dead? No, just different. Or, rather, story-telling adapts to new technology. To wit, Japan. As the New York Times reports: TOKYO — Until recently, cellphone novels — composed on phone keypads by young women wielding dexterous thumbs and read by fans on their tiny screens — had been dismissed in Japan as a subgenre unworthy of the country that gave the world its first novel, “The Tale of Genji,” a millennium ago. Then last month, the year-end best-seller tally showed that cellphone novels, republished in book form, have not only infiltrated the mainstream but have come to dominate it.

Alex Massie

American history as it’s taught today…

Ross and Rod despair, quite naturally, over this poll asking American teenagers to name the "10 Most Famous Americans". Presidents and First Ladies were excluded from the poll. It's an illuminating view of how American history is taught these days. anyway, The results were: 1. Martin Luther King Jr.: 67% 2. Rosa Parks: 60% 3. Harriet Tubman: 44% 4. Susan B. Anthony: 34% 5.Benjamin Franklin: 29% 6. Amelia Earhart: 25% 7. Oprah Winfrey: 22% 8. Marilyn Monroe: 19% 9. Thomas Edison: 18% 10. Albert Einstein: 16% Interesting that only MLK and Rosa Parks received the endorsement of more than 50% of high school students.

Alex Massie

Department of Religious Stupidity

According to Mitt Romney, Europe is doomed because we're all a bunch of godless pornographers. Yes, really. But then, here's what the Church of England has been up to, just today. Exhibit A: Let there be Darkness.                         LONDON (AFP) - Two senior Church of England bishops called Tuesday for Britons to cut back on carbon, rather than the more traditional chocolate and alcohol, for the Christian period of Lent this year. The Bishop of London, Richard Chartres, and Bishop of Liverpool, James Jones, have teamed up with aid agency Tearfund to invite the public to take part in a "carbon fast" for the next 40 days.

Wednesday

Alex Massie

Super Tuesday Quidditch

Vital US election issue: which Hogwarts house would each candidate be in? The Economist reveals all here. In other news, CNN and Fox remain unwatchable. Fancy that! How to choose between ghastly Lou Dobbs and David Gergen on the former and Bill O'Reilly on the latter?

Alex Massie

Books-U-Like

Norm's poll of your favourite English-language novelists has reported its findings. Not a great surprise that Austen and Dickens come first and second. But really, how can Norm's erudite readers have placed Philip Roth third (albeit a very distant third) and Ian McEwan sixth? This suggests a serious lack of, well, judgement. Wodehouse, for the record, came eighth - just behind Graham Greene and ahead of Nabokov.

Alex Massie

Jings! Whatever next?

Have I mentioned that this (admittedly old) ghastliness is enough on its own to make me wish Democrats select Barack Obama rather than Hillary Clinton? Well, it's enough to make me reach for my Browning anyway: Bill Clinton suggested during a TV appearance that, should his wife be elected president of the United States, he be referred to as the “first laddie.”Clinton jokingly suggested the moniker during an appearance on “The Oprah Winfrey Show,” the Chicago Tribune reported Thursday."My Scottish friends say I should be called 'first laddie' because it's the closest thing to 'first lady'," he said.

Alex Massie

Super Tuesday Tea Leaves…

TNR's John Judis looks at the exit polls and gets to the nub of the matter, not just for tonight but for the campaign for the rest of the year: while Obama has clearly caught up to, and perhaps passed, Clinton in the battle for the nomination, they continue to have complementary strengths and weaknesses. To win in November, Obama is going to have do much much better among the white working class--one can assume that he would get Clinton's female voters just as she would get his African American voters. Clinton, on other hand, looks very shaky among white men. There remains a question, too, whether the young voters and independents who have flocked to Obama's banner would vote for her in the fall.

Alex Massie

Boston Massacre

Shockingly, Massachusetts, perhaps the most racist state* in the country (well, north of the Mason-Dixon line anyway) votes for the white candidate not the black one. This, apparently, is a massive victory for the Clinton campaign. Some of us are less surprised. *Well, Boston anyway - a city famously unfriendly to blacks, even those who are rather good at basketball... UPDATE: A reader reasonably points out that Obama took Boston 53-47. It's the rest of the state that did him in. My apologies for the cheap shot. Meanwhile, Hillary seems to have won 66% of the Hispanic vote in California. This is only a partial endorsement of Clinton. America's race wars are a lessening factor - hapily - but Latinos and blacks do not, it is fair to say, tend to get on very well.

Alex Massie

Athens to their Rome for sure…

Sure, Fox and CNN are almost unwatchable (I'm tempted to switch to Al-Jazeera English) but the good folk at The Economist remind one that the BBC is perhaps even worse: 9:10 : Katty Kay (yes, that's really her name), a BBC anchor, pronounced Hillary Clinton the victor in Tennessee: this was especially notable, says Katty, because Al Gore lost the state in 2000, so it was a relief to see a Democrat finally win. You know, in a Democratic primary, that's probably going to happen. Pretty much every time.

Alex Massie

Iain Dale asks, I respond…

Top Brit-blogger Iain Dale asks Ten Questions about the US election: 10. How long before Mitt Romney's money runs out?9. What circumstances would encourage Michael Bloomberg to run as an Independent?8. Who will Al Gore endorse and when?7. How long will Huckabee's ego hold?6. When and if should Bill Clinton be put out on the stump again?5. What will John McCain have to promise to gain Huckabee's endorsement?4. How negative is Romney prepared to go?3. How important will the VP choice be for each candidate?2. Obama hasn't yet made a gaffe - how bad would it be for him if he made a big one?1. Is Osama bin Laden the biggest known unknown in this election - i.e. how would a new terror attack affect the election? In order: 10. Doesn't matter. You can stick a fork in Romney now. He's done.9.

Tuesday

Alex Massie

“Administrative shortcomings!”

Ordinaily Derek Conway wouldn't interest this blog. But the Tory MP, who has had the party whip withdrawn after defrauding the taxpayer by paying his sons to "work" as his parliamentary researchers has performed a great service nonetheless. Though, Mr Conway was reprimanded by the Standards Committee after "no record" was found of Freddie Conway doing any work for him as a researcher. The student was paid more than £40,000 for his three-year employment period. we should be exceedingly grateful to Mr Conway for his contribution to the Lexicon of Political Euphemism. According to the MP, using his parliamentary allowance as a family allowance to pay for his child's boozing at Newcastle University was an unfortunate case of administrative shortcomings. Priceless.

Alex Massie

The heart of Obama’s appeal: symbolism

As Jason Zengerle says, this sort of thing trumps anything the "Wife of a Man from Hope" can produce. Even cynics and Kennedy-haters are permitted to smile at this. Speaking at Ted Kennedy's endorsement palooza yesterday Obama told this story: It’s about whether we’re going to seize this moment to write the next great American story. So someday we can tell our children that this was the time when we healed our nation. This was the time when we repaired our world. And this was the time when we renewed the America that has led generations of weary travelers from all over the world to find opportunity, and liberty, and hope on our doorstep. One of these travelers was my father.

Alex Massie

Media whoring: gaelic edition

Switch off your radios: I shall be on BBC Radio 4's PM programme at around 5.45pm talking about, of all things, state-sponsored Gaelic TV. It may not surprise readers that I consider this a perfectly senseless boondoggle. by the standards of government waste it is, for sure, trivial and harmless stuff. To the extent that it perpetuates the nonsense that we should all be speaking Gaelic and have bilingual signs all over Scotland it's further evidence that the national capacity for self-delusion and fatheaded history endures. You can listen online here.

Alex Massie

From Colombia to Queen’s

A classic, touching American story by my friend Nancy Trejos in the Washington Post's magazine: SAT ON THE AVIANCA FLIGHT FROM BOGOTA TO PEREIRA, my forehead pressed against the window, staring out into the clouds. It was September 11, 2007, and I was flying over Colombia, my father's homeland. I had been there only once before, at 13, when I accompanied my father to visit my grandparents and other relatives in Pereira, his home town. They hadn't seen my dad since he left for the United States 25 years earlier. They welcomed him back as a hero then because, unlike them, he had made it to America and created a life for himself there. Seventeen years later, I decided to go back alone. This time, I was in Colombia to meet a relative I had not known about the first time.

Alex Massie

Department of Unfortunate Friends

An endorsement Obama could have done without. He better hope McCain wins the GOP nomination because any other Republican candidate will be happy to use this to argue that Obama is the terrorists' friend. More than 80 volunteer lawyers for Guantanamo Bay detainees today endorsed Illinois Senator Barack Obama's presidential bid. The attorneys said in a joint statement that they believed Obama was the best choice to roll back the Bush-Cheney administration's detention policies in the war on terrorism and thereby to "restore the rule of law, demonstrate our commitment to human rights, and repair our reputation in the world community.