Devolution. The march of unreason continues, with Islamic creationism. I can hardly wait until the book reaches Britain.
The story that wasn’t. On a happier note, the ever-reliable Ben Goldacre demolishes the recent Observer cover story on MMR.
Freak sheep. Neuroscience blog Retrospectacle looks back at the Alexander Graham Bell paper, “The Multi-Nippled Sheep of Beinn Bhreagh.”
Samuel Langhorne Clemens (1835-1910), better known to the world as Mark Twain, considered the lifelong duty of his acerbic pen—as he put it a letter of 1888, accepting an honorary MA from Yale—to be “the deriding of shams, the exposure of pretentious falsities, the laughing of stupid superstitions out of existence.” It was a role which, he continued, made him “the natural enemy of royalties, nobilities, privileges and all kindred swindles, and the natural friend of human rights and human liberties,” and he embraced it wholeheartedly.
These are just a few of his assaults on the “swindles” he saw deforming humanity in the nineteenth century, and of which the world remains far from free…
On slavery:
The skin of every human being contains a slave. [Notebook]
On God and religion:
When one reads Bibles, one is less surprised at what the Deity knows than at what He doesn’t know [Notebook]
More than once I have been humiliated by my resemblance to God the father; He is always longing for the love of His children and trying to get it on the cheapest and laziest terms He can invent. [letter to Clara Clemens]
On religion and politics:
In religion and politics people’s beliefs and convictions are in almost every case gotten at second-hand, and without examination, from authorities who have not themselves examined the questions at issue but have taken them at second-hand from other non-examiners, whose opinions about them were not worth a brass farthing. [The Autobiography of Mark Twain]
Look at the tyranny of party—at what is called party allegiance, party loyalty—a snare invented by designing men for selfish purposes—and which turns voters into chattels, slaves, rabbits, and all the while their masters and they themselves are shouting rubbish about liberty, independence, freedom of opinion, freedom of speech, honestly unconscious of the fantastic contradiction; and forgetting or ignoring that their fathers and the churches shouted the same blasphemies a generation earlier when they were closing their doors against the hunted slave, beating his handful of humane defenders with Bible texts and billies, and pocketing the insults and licking the shoes of his Southern master. [The Autobiography of Mark Twain]
On wealth and the wealthy:
It is easier for a needle to go through a camel’s eye than for a rich woman to sprain her ankle & keep it out of the papers. [Letter to Carolyn Wells]
The lack of money is the root of all evil. [More Maxims of Mark]
In the second in an occasional series (read the first here) in which First Drafts brings your attention to stellar comments in the blogosphere that may otherwise fall under your radar, do read this delightful response from one “AllyF” to a well-intentioned but dreary post on the Guardian’s Comment is Free site, in which one Will Hodgkinson attempts to extrapolate from news of a recent uptick in sales of 7″ singles evidence of a great vinyl comeback—a record is “a gilded chalice holding the holy water of music,” and so on. Shining like a crazy diamond through the murky hi-fi geekdom of the other comments on the post, AllyF both nails the eternal, unflinching optimism of vinyl junkies (for a rather more sceptical take on the state of “physical” recorded music, look out for the cover story in the August issue of Prospect, published next week) and makes us laugh very hard.
In Prospect last month, David Flusfeder explained the poker boom and the battle between the small poker clubs and big casinos. The modern era of poker, he wrote, can be dated to 2003, when the gorgeously named Chris Moneymaker won the Main Event of the World Series of Poker in Las Vegas. The Main Event, also known as the Championship Event or the Big One, began with six players in 1970, and is now the most important fixture in the poker calendar. Moneymaker was the first person to win the Main Event after qualifying on the internet, a rags to riches story that boosted the game’s popularity and confirmed the merging of the online and live versions of the game. In how many other sports can an amateur enter the top professional event and have a chance of winning?
I was grateful for the education Flusfeder provided, for I knew very little about poker before reading his article, and I suddenly had a need to know more. My youngest brother Chica had inadvertently got himself a place at the Main Event in July by winning a small-stakes game on a poker website. He was going to Las Vegas, expenses paid and his $10,000 buy-in provided. How strange.
My brother graduated a year ago and has since found that playing online poker—with its tax-free earnings, flexible working hours, sofa location and the thrill of the game (though he says it’s diminishing)—is preferable to a normal job. And he’s rather good at it. But playing poker online is a whole different story to playing for real, with its tells and fake tells and poker face. “Internet qualifier” is an epithet often used dismissively at the Main Event. Our mother, who vaguely objects to poker on moral grounds, found herself suggesting that he should get some experience in a casino.
Never mind if you get knocked out in the first round, we said, what an achievement to get there, what an experience to be there, you’ve got nothing to lose. But then he got through Day One (of which there were three, to knock out the first few thousand players), and then Day Two. Was this to be a Moneymaker story? On Day Three he came unstuck. But he did himself proud. He came 389th out of 6,358. And he flies back to England tomorrow a richer man (the top 621 players end up in the money).
David Flusfeder was there too. He finished in 321st place, leaving Las Vegas with more money than he came with for the first time. See his blog for the full story.
Congratulations to you both.
I’ve just read an advance copy of Don Tapscott and Anthony D Williams’s Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything, and it’s been a stimulating experience (for those unblessed by review copies, they also have a blog). With detailed reference to sites like google booksearch, facebook, wikipedia, del.icio.us, flickr, digg and youtube, Tapscott and Williams argue that a newly collaborative economic paradigm is upon us, and that in this new era the model is one not of consumption but of prosumption:
…where customers participate in the creation of products in an active and ongoing way. As in Second Life, the consumer actually co-innovates and coproduces the products they consume. In other words, customers do more than customize or personalize their wares; they can also self-organize to create their own.
It’s heady stuff, and I’ve enjoyed the book a lot, but it also left me with a sense of tonal déjà vu (I’m thinking especially of Freakonomics, here.) With its jaunty roll call of case studies, ranging from the Library of Alexandria to Ford’s mass-production methods and the triumph of Wikipedia itself, I couldn’t shake the sense that the past was being somewhat indiscriminately plundered for its prefigurings of the present; and that, at root, the authors were not very interested in being right about exactly why things happen, but were extremely interested in showing that they’re right about the way things are going to be.
Simple is not automatically wrong (although I winced at a reference to the Library of Alexandria containing Socrates’s writings), but I do find that this kind of breathless futurology lacks a sense of several crucial ingredients in human nature—largely on the darker side. Books like this, of course, set out to be sources of inspiration rather than of final answers, and Wikinomics succeeds admirably here. But there is less that is new under the sun than many would like to believe, and more that is intractably difficult than any would wish.
Happy birthday to blogs everywhere. The Wall Street Journal celebrates ten years of blogs, and gets Harold Evans, Newt Gingrich, Tom Wolfe and others to weigh in. It may also be the 25th anniversary of computer viruses. Or, it may not be.
He can be serious. It’s a bit late for a Wimbledon article, but Clive James wants to praise the commentary of John McEnroe nevertheless.
How do you pronounce yarmulke? I’ve read all the comments on this Crooked Timber post, and I’m still not sure.
What’s the significance of a two-dollar wine winning an open tasting competition to find California’s best Chardonnay?
Not a lot, according to many critics. As they point out (in places like the lively comments section of the Napa Valley Register,) several of California’s finest whites weren’t entered into the competition, while subsequent tastings by other experts have failed to replicate the endorsement, and have even brought the accusation that the tasted batch was of a rather different standard to the bottles of “Two Buck Chuck” usually sold to consumers. The controversy, however, has resonances well beyond the world of West Coast whites.
There may be no accounting for tastes, but protecting the value of “blue chip” wine brands is becoming an increasingly important (i.e. increasingly profitable) activity. Château Pétrus, for example, has seen cases of its recent vintages changing hands for over £20,000—or around £1600 a bottle. Such is the desire of the massively wealthy for diversification that you can now put your capital into a Fine Wine Fund directly regulated by the Financial Services Authority—so long as you can afford the £50,000 minimum investment. And readers of Mahesh Kumar’s 2005 Wine Investment for Portfolio Diversification will doubtless have been thrilled to learn that, between 1982 and 2002, his Fine Wine Index produced an annual return of 12.3% against 9.2% for the FTSE 100.
Although renowned wines are largely excellent, it’s their status as exclusive and increasingly re-saleable brands that’s driving the top end of the market. But status is also a trickle-down phenomenon and, despite the increasing global availability of decent wines at low prices, it seems that more and more of us are claiming to possess discerning palates in order to impress our peers (men are the biggest bluffers).
After a monumentally wet 2007 in Europe—with a shortfall of up to 1.5 billion wine bottles currently forecast—it’ll be interesting to see how the wine world reacts. Two-dollar Californian whites may soon be changing hands for an awful lot more.
Movie-related fact-checking has today brought me incidental amusement, via a few of the more bizarre translations of English-language film titles to be found around the world. I started small, with the rather worrying French and Belgian rendering of the 1998 flick Wild Things as Sex Crimes. Progressing to Italian, I chuckled a little harder at 1968 car caper The Love Bug becoming Il Maggiolino Tutto Matto (”The Totally Crazy Beetle”); and slightly harder still—although I’m not proud of this—at its 1974 sequel, Herbie Rides Again, appearing in West Germany as Herbie groß in Fahrt (translation, unamusingly, “Herbie, largely in transit”).
In Israel, still more inventive linguists clearly prevail, and even a rapid online survey yielded masterful conversions such as Groundhog Day into Waking Up Yesterday Morning, Spaceballs into Crazy in Space, Fatal Attraction into Fateful Courtship, and—a particular favourite—The Naked Gun into The Gun Died Laughing. My special achievement award, however, belongs to whoever decided that the 1992 zombie horror fantasy Army of Darkness would be best presented to Japanese audiences as Kyaputien Supamaketto, or “Captain Supermarket.” Genius like that needs no justification.
Two Kit Kats and a Curly Wurly. According to the New York Times, British chocolate bars are the world’s best—although the article only really gets around to comparing them to American ones.
Sushi and sustainability. Slate brings together two authors of recent books on sushi to chew the fat.
Cooking the books. What happens when you believe the press release of a book.
Perhaps not entirely surprisingly, Julian Le Grand’s account of Tony Blair’s “golden age” did not exactly convince everyone. This week at Prospect online you’ll find sceptical replies from novelist Adam Thorpe, who is concerned that his adopted country of France may, under Sarkozy, adopt the thuggish materialistic mores of modern Britain, and Dan Atkinson & Larry Elliott, who argue that the “Anglo-social” welfare model celebrated by Le Grand is merely the mess we have ended up with after years of Blairite dithering.
We also have a response to Benjamin Pogrund’s attack on the proposed boycott of Israeli academics, by Haim Bresheeth.
UPDATE See also Pervez Hoodbhoy’s disturbing account of extremism in Pakistan in the light of the bloody end to the Lal Masjid mosque siege.
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