Reid's memories of getting at least a half dozen requests for the song a night when he was a radio DJ
On This Day - March 19th
From the speech by Tony Blair opening the debate on a British resolution to authorize military action against Iraq.
Blair: "The question most often posed is not why does it matter, but why does it matter so much?. Here we are the Government with its most serious test, its majority at risk, the first Cabinet minister resignation over an issue of policy, the main parties internally divided. People who agree on everything else..."
An Honourable Member: "The main parties?"
Some Liberal Democrats: "Not us."
Blair: "Ah yes, of course, the Liberal Democrat. Unified as ever in opportunism and error."
There was raucous laughter in the Commons. I saw the speech on cspan.org, and it was truly funny too: they say comedy is timing, and he timed both of his last sentences perfectly. The expression on his face (appropriately smug), was perfect.
Time passes, and I find this summary of the speech.
Finished reading A History of the Modern Middle East by William L. Cleveland.
It's a rather long book, but the chapters are actually self-contained, so you can go back and forth without losing too much. Written by a prof from my alma mater.
Matt Haughey: “Don't get me wrong, I like America; I love the natural wonders, the people, and the laws, but everything in Canada seems nicer. People seem mellow and even when I accidentally stumbled onto the worst heroin infested alley in Vancouver, I didn't fear for my safety like I would in a major American city.”
Darren Barefoot on Angèle Yanor: “I may have judged her column prematurely. If she indeed lifted a lot of content from the Times, the quality must be better than I thought. On her site, Ms. Yanor rather laughably argues that she "never called herself a journalist". Ah, well, so long as you publish regularly in a major newspaper but don't profess to be a journalist, ethical considerations don't apply. Is she aware of the irony that the bottom of her blog page reads "content may only be published with prior written consent"? There's no indication of actual copyright, so the text's origin may be up for grabs.”
And in a subsequent entry, Darren notes that Yanor's own website contains plagarized material, and not material that's been the focus of national media attention.
Photodude: “not every kid with a blog and a digital camera has the same family, the same friends, or lives in the same city. Each person provides a unique viewpoint, even if their subjects are things you consider boring. To them, they have an entirely different meaning. ¶ And that’s why they put them on the web. Not for you. For them.”
Laura Kipnis: “If power comes in more than one guise, you will not hear Wolf discuss it. Instead, we learn from her and others that unwanted sexual advances demean and disempower the recipient, and being unwanted, should never have happened in the first place. Brandishing the phrase is thus the first step in extinguishing the behavior, soon to be forever purged from the repertoire of human mating conduct. Just to be clear, we're not talking here about cases of ongoing unwanted sexual advances—or threats, or quid pro quo demands—otherwise known as "sexual harassment," which should be subject to the most severe punishment, including loss of livelihood, property seizure, and potential incarceration. Here we're speaking strictly of the one-time unwanted advance, as in the Wolf-Bloom contretemps.”
Kipnis says the unwanted sexual advance is a feminist issue because the advance came from someone in a higher position than the target. What follows that is an interesting discussion on sexuality as "low culture" and even how the phrase "unwanted sexual advance" implies that we can and do know what our desires are before they happen. Also, check out the last paragraph for how women can exert the power they have over men.
I heard about the Bloom-Wolf saga almost a month ago on Jay's weblog, linking to Camille Paglia's commentary of the incident.
Although unrelated to the Bloom incident, Naomi Wolf has been mentioned this weblog previously:
Sasha Frere-Jones: “In the past three years, grime producers (who make the beats that m.c.s rhyme over) have developed a fierce, antic sound by distilling the polyrhythms of drum and bass or garage—the music of choice at many raves—to a minimal style sometimes consisting of nothing more than a queasy bass line and a single, clipped video-game squawk. Today, the music’s choppy, off-center rhythms are blanketing London. Some tracks are beginning to show the influence of American hip-hop genres like crunk, but the m.c.s’ cadences are unmistakably black and British, indebted to Jamaican dance-hall music and West Indian patois. ¶ Grime exists largely in an informal economy. Some artists make their débuts on homemade DVDs, which feature shaky footage of competitions between m.c.s—a little like spelling bees, but louder.”
Chantelle Fiddy's World of Grime which features short commentary about up-and-coming grime artists (with occasional photography) and the people she links to in her sidebar, Livin' in the Grime with black-and-white photography of the competitions Frere-Jones talks about, and a PubSub feed of 'Dizzee Rascal' (just to watch the bloggers who compare up-and-coming grime artists to the most famous one) are good resources to keep track of the grime scene.
Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett: “Newton Pulsifier had never had a cause in his life. Nor had he, as far as he knew, believed in anything. It had been embarrassing, because he quite wanted to believe in something, since he recognized that belief was the lifebelt that got most people through the choppy waters of Life. He'd have liked to believe in a supreme God, although he'd have preferred a half-hour's chat with Him before committing himself, to clear up one or two points. He'd sat in all sorts of churches, waiting for that single flash of blue light, and it hadn't come. And then he'd tried to become an official Atheist and hadn't got the rock-hard, self-satisfied strength of belief even for that. And every single political party had seemed to him equally dishonest. And he'd given up on ecology when the ecology magazine he'd been subscribing to had shown its readers a plan of a self-sufficient garden, and had drawn the ecological goat tethered within three feet of the ecological beehive. Newt had spent a lot of time at his grandmother's house in the country and thought he knew something about the habits of both goats and bees, and concluded therefore that the magazine was run by a bunch of bib-overalled maniacs. Besides, it used the word "community" too often; Newt had always suspected that people who regularly used the word 'community' were using it in a very specific sense that excluded him and everyone he knew.”
Maki: “Growing up, I've always been one of the "other": not white, not "really" American, not even African American, not a man, certainly not Swiss, and not even "really" Japanese. Therefore, I suppose that my tolerence level for being excluded, intentionally or not, is rather high. Now, I admit that I used to care a lot more about this, and so I pushed myself to participate a lot more in the mainstream of at least the Web Design Community. Nowadays because my focus has changed, both professionally and personally, I don't care nearly as much, and I write whatever I feel like, especially on this site. I can certainly understand the frustration of feeling excluded from something. Nevertheless, I can't help feeling uncomfortable with the sometimes strident clamour about these issues, and for creating more and more groups and subgroups of "what's in" as defined by a few.”
Maki is talking about articles suggesting that men dominate blogging and points to Rebecca Blood's notes about actual research showing that if men make up a majority of bloggers, it is a bare majority. Maki writes more about being an outsider in general, and as Bill James writes about 'inside baseball', it's not necessarily better being an insider or an outsider, but different. It's probably a fair statement that a large minority (possibly even a majority) of bloggers are outsiders to the subjects they discuss. I certainly include myself in that group, talking about grime or dating without any specialized knowledge of or without much experience in the subject. That doesn't stop me, and nor should it, really. I have opinions on things just like everybody else does, and they are reflected more in what I point to than what I actually come out and say, because it's easier for me to let people call bullshit on them than it is to let people call bullshit on me.
For a variety of reasons, I've indefinitely disabled comments on Just a Gwai Lo.
