Lost Worlds

Hand-SOME!

Here's Alfred C. Frawley III of Preti Flaherty, who is the lawyer in charge of suing Dutson (see previous post).

Yes. You'd want him on your side. In his suit. And his hairdo. And... is that a beard? Of course you would.

Yet.. if he's Alfred C. Frawley III, one wonders what one earth Alfred C. Frawley I and Alfred C. Frawley II looked like.

And whether they'd be proud of Alfred C. Frawley III.

What a life. (But then there's always the money.)

Bad Corporate Mistakes

Who on earth advises corporations that it's a good idea to try and stifle criticism with heavy-handed lawsuits? And how come an advertising agency – which you'd think would understand about public opinion – like Warren Kremer Paino Advertising can be perfectly sanguine about the consequences of behaving like this?

Gosh, all they had to do was laugh, acknowledge their simple error, and it would all have gone away having given a few people a smile.

Instead, they may have made sure that, for the rest of time, they are branded on Google as bullying clowns.

Perhaps "intense and congenial" WKP President Tom McCartin should bail out fast, drop this anti-free-speech lawsuit, sack his advisers, and spend the money saved on rebranding his company. Truth and lies go halfway round the world at about equal speed now.

Technorati Tags: business, culture, media

The View from Cell Block H

It's been said often enough, but it's still true: the thing about living in the Ugly Building (just what the hell was it with architects in the Sixties? Why did they hate everyone so much?) is that you can't see the Ugly Building from your window. What you see is this:

Please Sir Will You Make Everything All Right

Fresh from the first High Table of term (finding myself sitting next to a terribly nice man called Lester Morse, charming in a way only East Coast Americans know how to be charming) and back to Cell Block "H" to a swathe of beseeching emails from undergraduates realising that in addition to (a) death, (b) taxes and (c) wanting to be a writer (which they assume is a passport to a life of carefree self-expression rather than drudgery, poverty, depression and the caprice of ratfaced MBAs in Marks & Spencer's suits) there is also (c) Tripos.

I wonder whether I am alone in eliciting such heartfelt pleas ("I really do not understand Easchylus" and "Please tell me how it all actually, you know, works"), and am letting down my beseeching children. I wonder whether I am egregiously nasty in wanting to say "Brace up. It's only an exam and you should have worked harder."

But then the indescribably-more-distinguished-than-I-will-ever-be Mary Beard pops up on The ("Blogs will be the salvation of the MSM") Times to reassure me that I am not alone.

Technorati Tags: culture, education, literature

Don't Mention the war

Brian Haw demonstrates in London's Parliament Square against Britain's invasion of Iraq. Poor Tony Blair was unable to have him arrested, tried and convicted (for being a dissident) because the absurdly-named Serious Organised Crime and Police Act 2005 was not restrospective.

But Milan Rai was convicted of breaking SOCPA for reading out – on the steps of the capital's war memorial, the Cenotaph – a list of British soldiers killed in Iraq. As was Maya Evans, who took part in the same commemoration (or unpatriotic dissident pro-terrorist demonstration, if you happen to be Tony Blair).

As of yesterday, it is illegal to glorify terrorism. If I announce that I think the British invasion of Iraq was our most glorious hour; that our current actions, and those of our allies the Americans, are heroic, magnificent and guided by the immanent hand of God; and that we should stay there until Mr Blair's Mr Bush's God's will has prevailed, and that I believe this even though I also believe the invasion was illegal under international law, then I must also believe that the invasion and occupation were acts of terrorism against a sovereign state, and therefore am guilty of glorifying terrorism.

To recap, then:

1. If I stand up in London and say the invasion of Iraq was illegal and I denounce it, I am guilty under SOCPA.
2. If I announce that the invasion of Iraq was illegal but to hell with that, it is glorious all the same, I am guilty of glorifying terrorism.
3. It is therefore illegal to believe that the invasion of Iraq was illegal.

Wouldn't it just be easier to pass a law making it illegal to criticise our Glorious Leader democratically-elected Prime Minister?

(Except, of course, we didn't elect the Prime Minister.)

Oldest, Worst Excuse Now Ratified By Court-Martial

Flight Lieutenant Malcolm Kendall-Smith refused to go to Iraq because he believed the deployment of British troops to be illegal. He was prevented from calling, as witnesses:

• A former member of the SAS who resigned from the British Army because he believed the Iraq invasion was illegal, and because he refused to serve alongside US troops because of their conduct; and
• An Iraqi doctor who had come to Britain to describe the state of his country following the invasion.

Flt-Lt Kendall-Smith was yesterday imprisoned and dimissed the service after a remarkably Blimpish speech by Judge Advocate Jack Bayliss, even more blithering than usual. And so the oldest excuse, deployed by war criminals throughout history – "I was only following orders" – has been ratified. So too, once again, we are reminded of the true colours of Tony Blair's government, the most profoundly corrupt, authoritarian, anti-democratic that I can remember.

The only point in writing this (it has already been written about in every newspaper in the country) is that it will eventually turn up on Google; and so increase the store of infamy awaiting future historians when they google the debased and dishonoured name of Anthony Blair, a hollow, solipsistic man who disgraces the office he so abuses.

The Question of Charm

Charm is hard to define – almost as hard as defining "arch" – but we know it when we see it. The new National Lottery commercial has got it. The Lottery is a terrible con trick best described as a tax on the poor. The counter-argument to that is that, for a small amount of money, you can buy hope.

Followed, of course, by despair. The classic addictive cycle.

But I wonder whether charm (or at least a major element in charm) isn't hope in despair. Listen to the words of the little song. There's something terribly cruel in there. And something terribly odd, too. Patience and Prudence were 11 and 14 when the song came out in the Fifties, along with the rather pecularly sexualised "Tonight you belong to me" and "Gonna get along without you now", and not just interjected by our postmodern, lizardy, pederast-scenting knowingness, either. Here they are:

But the animation epitomises charm. And isn't the landscape the city we inhabit in our dreams: ricketty, textured, complex, inefficient and infinitely more human than the sterile conceptions of town planners, which require us all to aspire to the condition of machines?

How Is This Day Just The Same As All Other Days?

"Oh," they say, "I'd like to be a writer, too." What they mean is "I would like to have written stuff."

They do not know what it's like, but if they want to know what it is like, let them learn what it is like.

That's exactly what it is like.

(I worked on a couple of Infocom adventures, back in the day. They were like that. Working on them was like that, too. There was a big room full of people listening to Phil Collins and trying to make things like that happen, so that they could say "Look what just happened."

>look what just happened

There is no just happened here.

>say "aus-tin-i-an per-for-ma-tive" very slowly.

Nothing happens.

Oh yes it did.)

Technorati Tags: journalism, literature