Frank Fay is considered the very first stand-up comedian. Prior to his emergence in the early 1920s, comedians accompanied their act with props and funny costumes. Even those without gimmicks rarely appeared onstage alone. Comedians had their punchlines set-up by another person, a straightman. To be a comedian meant you performed with the help of a costume or an instrument or another guy. “A comedian without a prop can’t click,” said actor Wesley Ruggles. “I learned that back in the days when I pushed the props around for Charlie Chaplin. Great pantomist that he is, Chaplin realizes the necessity of props.”

Frank Fay realized that as long as you knew what you were doing, as long as you had confidence in your material, props weren't necessary at all. The comedians insisting on props and costumes did so out of conformity or out of fear. Fay started with gimmicks like everyone else, wearing baggy pants, squirting seltzer, delivering straight lines for a comedian that circled him on roller skates - and he hated it. After humiliating himself onstage for two years, Fay decided to use the same persona he had offstage. No props, no costumes, no partner, he took to the stage wearing a well-tailored tuxedo and told jokes alone. It was so unconventional that The New York Times frowned: "“Fay needs a good straight man, as before, to feed his eccentric comedy." There was initial resistance to a man just standing and talking, but Fay's success would transform stand-up as an artform. Fellow comedians saw Fay succeed and they abandoned their props and emulated his style. Jack Benny, Milton Berle, Bob Hope and Jack Paar all cited him as an influence. Fay became one of the most influential stand-up comics of all time.
     
He was also comedy's most notorious racist. In January 1946, several months after Germany had been defeated, a rally of ten thousand white supremacists gathered at Madison Square Garden. They delivered speeches in support of Franco, Mussolini and their fallen hero Adolf Hitler. They promised that the defeat of Germany would not go unpunished. The podium was beneath a banner that saluted their guest of honor. The event was called "The Friends of Frank Fay."

I'm going to do something I usually don't. I'm going to talk about my work for a little bit. I don't see myself making a habit of this, but we'll see.

Last week Slate published an article entitled "Against YA" by Ruth Graham. The thesis of the article, if I can be forgiven for simplifying an already simplistic argument, is that (in her own words), "adults should feel embarrassed about reading literature written for children." In the days since this hit we've seen a number of reactions, most coming down firmly on the side of castigating Graham for being a closed-minded elitist, or something along those lines. And indeed, I will join in the chorus saying that Graham is wrong, but perhaps not for the same reasons many others have done so.

Graham tips her hat in the first sentence of the fourth paragraph when she says, "Let’s set aside the transparently trashy stuff like Divergent and Twilight, which no one defends as serious literature." Do you see what she did there? That's the focus of her argument - in addition to serving as a map of as the disputed territory that her critics are also attempting to colonize. Do you see the problem? It certainly isn't the casual dismissal of Twilight, which - even if we can feel justified in agreeing with her assertion that Twilight is a bad book - is nevertheless weighted down in this particular context by a number of troubling class and gender signifiers. It lies in the phrase "serious literature."

What is Serious Literature? Have you ever gone into the bookstore and asked the clerk if he could direct you to the Serious Literature shelf? He points you towards the fiction: well, you immediately see problems. There is some Serious Literature here, but it's mixed up in all this rubbish. You've got Jonathan Franzen sharing shelf space with William T. Vollman; you've got Gore VIdal's Lincoln stinking up the same corner as Gore Vidal's City and the Pillar. Ye cats! OK, those are specious examples. That part of her argument is barely worth dignifying with a response.

What is most pernicious about her argument is the premise she appears to share with her detractors, that is, the premise that fiction is in some way good for you:

Most importantly, these books consistently indulge in the kind of endings that teenagers want to see, but which adult readers ought to reject as far too simple. YA endings are uniformly satisfying, whether that satisfaction comes through weeping or cheering. These endings are emblematic of the fact that the emotional and moral ambiguity of adult fiction—of the real world—is nowhere in evidence in YA fiction. These endings are for readers who prefer things to be wrapped up neatly, our heroes married or dead or happily grasping hands, looking to the future. But wanting endings like this is no more ambitious than only wanting to read books with "likable" protagonists.

So far, so interminable. Nothing worse than a satisfying ending, right? Please pay attention throughout her article to her use of highly charged emotional terms to describe her relationship with fiction. She is extremely good at circling around the fact that she clearly has just as much invested in her emotional relationship to her reading choices as her straw-man thirteen-year-old.

One of the more articulate defenses of the YA genre I've encountered in response to Graham is a blog post by YA author Maggie Stiefvater entitled "Books Don't Make You Smart." The title alone perks my interest: here, I thought, we might actually be getting somewhere. She states, wisely, that "the book industry may be one of the few industries that promises you will actually become more clever if you buy their product." This is certainly the overwhelming cultural prejudice: people who spend their time reading are better off in any number of important ways than people who never crack a book from the moment they graduate school until the day they die.

But then I read the piece and I see that Stiefvater, even though she gets off to a strong start, undermines her point through this bit of self-destructive linguistic jiu-jitsu:

But we have this prevailing theory that books will make you smart, and it’s this theory that allows us to judge a book’s quality by how far it stretches your mind. According to this idea, if it doesn’t make you smarter, it’s a lesser book. It becomes a guilty pleasure, like food that doesn’t contribute to your daily vitamin requirement. Cue up the articles on the tragedy of the populace reading young adult, or turning to magazines, or — horrors, shall I whisper it — watching television in lieu of reading.

Don’t they know that reading makes you clever? Don’t they know that television and movies are for non-intellectuals? Hoi polloi turn the TV on. If you’re someone who’s going to be someone, you open a book.

But books aren’t smart: stories are.

Not all stories, of course. There are wise stories and flippant stories, stories that stretch your mind and stories that only make you laugh. Stories that are true and stories that won’t ever be true.

At this point I let out a deep and troubled sigh. Perhaps you can figure out why.

It's a meaningless distinction. When Stiefvater says "books," we're inevitably also discussing "stories." Stories don't just come in books, but they're as strong a story vehicle as you could ever want, right?

Here's the thing: stories don't exist. Stories can't be smart because they're not alive.

We create stories in our own minds based on the sensory input of various forms of communicative media. Nothing in quote-unquote "real life" resembles a story - nothing ever begins, and nothing really ends, so with the notable exceptions of showing up for important occasions such as births and deaths we all of us walk around perpetually in media res, day after day. Stories are these things we believe in and we carry with us, but the actual existence of something, some essential property called "story," is as powerful a fiction as any we have ever encountered. Because we believe in stories, we want to be able to understand the world through the lens of stories - we want to be able to put events and narratives into legible forms that make intrinsic sense. That's one thing fiction (and history, and philosophy) do. But all story - all story - is extrinsic.

I'm a teacher, and this Fall I'll be returning to teach literature after a couple years' spent teaching composition. I'm looking forward to it, obviously. But it's not without its own challenges. One of the most basic principles of what I do - something that I had to have beaten out of me over many years' practice - is that there's no such thing as intrinsic meaning, and that talking and writing about literature isn't about cracking open the heart of a work in order to figure out what the author was really trying to say. That's a reductive statement of a complicated problem, but for these purposes it's important to remember that the heart of the work isn't what the author puts in, but what you (the reader) take out - be it a critique of dominant ideology or a productive, agonistic struggle against some kind of amorphous author function. If that sounds strange or counterintuitive, the alternative can be seen on display in the "Scylla & Charybdis" section of Ulysses, wherein a group of learned and dedicated scholars in turn of the century Dublin sit to discuss, essentially, whether Shakespeare was the bestest writer of all time or the super bestest, and what kind of biographical trivia might finally put to rest any nagging questions about the "meaning" of Hamlet. It's a very human instinct, and one I know my students will also struggle against: we all want to think we can glimpse the person behind the book, the man or woman who wrote a story so smart that our lives were forever changed. We think if we understand them, we'll understand their story. But that can't happen, because they're not there.

All of which is to say: stories aren't smart. They can't be either smart or dumb. You, however, can be smart or dumb. And you can choose to be smart or dumb regardless of what you choose to read. It's all in how you do it.

Does Serious Literature, or even better, "literary fiction," make you a better person? I seriously doubt that. Most literary fiction just isn't very interesting - fiction constructed by writers trained in the construction of fiction, wherein elements like theme, plot, and character have been expertly measured and illustrated in the most precise manner possible, is usually too clever by half. Half of the fun comes in finding the weird and the unexpected - and too many contemporary novels have emerged from a culture of craftsmanship that values controlled affect above all other virtues. (You should check out this book for further reference on the point.) You can certainly persist in thinking that reading Serious, Literary Fiction makes you a better person, but at least in terms of contemporary fiction I don't have a lot of sympathy. (As for older literature? That's a different story . . . )

I think a lot of people have distorted view of what academia actually does in term of literature. Or maybe a set of interrelated misapprehensions. Is the academy the keeper at the gates of culture? Maybe once, but that attitude is a lot rarer than it used to be. There is still a thing called "the canon" but, at least in my experience, it's not something most people would get upset over defending. It's more a reflexive understanding of a historical category than a real organizing principle, and certainly something to destabilize whenever possible. Certainly do not look to the academy to help promote your anti-YA bias: you are as likely to find people studying YA literature as Dickens or Milton. (Well, maybe not quite as likely, but I do know people who are studying them, and finding lots of interesting things to say.) Is it because YA really does possess some kind of grand intrinsic value that the scholars are now just learning to recognize, a value that places John Green alongside David Foster Wallace on the same proud shelf? Hell, no. The whole point is that the idea of intrinsic value is simply indefensible. It's not a question of what's great or good, but a question of interesting and uninteresting. There are lots of very "good" books I would not rate as particularly interesting, at least to my tastes. But there are tons of terrible books that nevertheless manage to be far more interesting than whatever the New York Review of Books is telling me I should like this week. Academia doesn't care whether or not a book is any good, really, so long as can sit up and talk back, give us something interesting to think about.

(One example: a couple years back I picked up Jennifer Egan's A Visit From The Goon Squad, because it had won the Pulitzer and I was in an airport and I thought, oh well, how bad can it be. It was terrible, precisely the kind of book people seem to think you should read because its good for you, when in fact it's a book that no one should read because it doesn't have an interesting idea in its pretty little head. Or at least, I didn't think there was anything there I hadn't seen before. No surprises, no rough edges to get any kind of critical purchase.)

So if you want to read YA? Go ahead! Have fun. But don't trick yourself into thinking you're reading Serious Literature, because you should realize that - at least in terms of the contemporary literary marketplace - there's no such thing as Serious Literature. Literature is an entertainment choice just like any other, and these days you could hardly be blamed for thinking that a media diet consisting of Mad Men, Game of Thrones, Veep, and Shameless was of roughly equal - or possibly greater - caloric value than a diet of whatever the fiction editors' picks are on Amazon.

But wait, I hear you saying, clutching your pearls in horror, do you mean to say that literature no longer occupies a privileged position at the apex of cultural expression? Well, I do and I don't. Because obviously I'm biased. I like reading, I like books, all that jazz that goes along with book culture. But I also realize that the reason I like books is informed by a large number of factors completely outside any intrinsic value in the books themselves - I grew up in a family that valued reading highly, I grew up in a historical period of relative affluence which believed in universal literacy, I lucked into attending a high school where I had great English and History teachers and terrible Science teachers, etc. But so many times we - and I mean the royal "We" of people who live in the culture industries - can trick ourselves into thinking that these supposedly universal values of literacy are in any way actually universal. Again, there is nothing intrinsic to the act of reading that makes you a better person, and there is nothing intrinsic to certain categories of books that makes them better for you to read than others.

My argument in defense of books is, I believe, fairly utilitarian: books are the most efficient means of communicating information we as a species have yet devised. Reading books can make you smarter, but it's hardly the only thing that can do so - merely, I believe, the most efficient.

So what do I teach? I can't teach people to believe that if they don't like reading then they can't be good people. This is an attitude I've encountered (albeit in inverse form) from people who I would think should know better. "We believe that reading is valuable because being exposed to great literature makes you a better person." Have you ever heard that? Have you ever said that? The value we place on leisure today is a function of class and geography, pure and simple. You keep on believing you're better for reading The Corrections than Twilight (I know, Jonathan Franzen's kind of a cheap shot here. It's funny because there's a grain of truth there). But you're not, you've just bought into the myth that one kind of book is better than another. The difference is not the book itself but the thinking apparatus you bring to bear on the process of reading. Some books will prove more fertile ground for thought than others, but who am I to judge?

I can't teach anyone to love reading - I can try to pass on some enthusiasm, sure, but I know enough to understand that instilling a lifelong love of reading in someone who struggles to get through 15 pages of a textbook every other night just isn't happening. What I can teach is thinking. So while I can certainly sympathize with Graham's frustration at confronting an uncritical literary culture that exalts the "likable" character uncritically, I can only shake my head at her reference to "the emotional and moral ambiguity of adult fiction" - both of these phenomenon belonging to the same category of desired emotional affect. Which is important. Affect matters. But its more important to ask the whys and wherefores of affect than merely to accept uncritically the myth that experiencing negative affect through fiction is somehow of higher value than its inverse.

Why is reading important? Not because it makes you better or smarter. Reading doesn't make you smarter. Stories don't make you smarter. Thinking makes you smarter. Thinking that books themselves are what does the trick is a kind of animism. Smart people learn to find value wherever they look. Dim people never figure out that what they see around them is merely a reflection of their own prejudices.

I.

LOVAZA™®© (ask your doctor if LOVAZA™®© is right for you) is an excellent medication. It is extraordinarily safe. It is moderately effective at its legal indication of lowering levels of certain fats in the bloodstream. It has moderately good evidence for having other beneficial effects as well, including treating certain psychiatric, rheumatological and dermatological disorders.

LOVAZA™®© is fish oil.

“Come on,” you say, “surely there’s some difference between Lovaza™®© and the fish oil I buy at my local health food store for a couple of tenners per Giant Jar?”

And you are right. The difference is, LOVAZA™®© costs $300 a month.

“Come on,” you say, “surely there’s some other difference”.

The company behind LOVAZA™®© certainly thinks there is. They boast about how they use a patented process to filter out blah blah purity blah toxins blah certified to be blah blah blah quality blah. On the other hand, every fish oil supplement maker uses about the same phrases. I’m sure it’s not exactly the same patented process and that they check for toxins in a slightly different way, but the evidence that LOVAZA™®©’s methods are superior in some interesting way is, basically, nonexistent.

So, fish oil pills cost $30 at the store, LOVAZA™®© costs $300, which would you rather get?

And the answer is: the LOVAZA™®©, of course. Because you’re paying the $30 for fish oil, and your insurance is paying the $300 for LOVAZA™®©. Maybe you’ve got a copay. Is the copay more or less than $30? Well, there you go.

This isn’t an unusual business model. Off the top of my head I can think of a second drug that works the same way. It is called DEPLIN™®©, and it treats depression. On the one hand, it is a good medicine and I wish it was used more. On the other hand, it is l-methylfolate, which is basically a very shiny chrome-plated version of the folate that your cereal box tells you it has 200% of the recommended daily allowance of. Most studies suggest that for most people without a particular mutation there’s not much difference between the folate in your Cheerios and the l-methylfolate in DEPLIN™®© – but if you have the mutation or are among the significant minority of people who believe there is, you can also walk into a health food store and buy l-methylfolate itself, chemically identical to DEPLIN™®©, at about $10 per Giant Jar. DEPLIN™®© costs $100 per month.

Ask your doctor whether she recommends people go to supplement stores and buy folate or fish oil, and likely she’ll say supplements sometimes make people feel livelier but that they have minimal place in responsible medical practice. Then ask your doctor whether she gives out prescriptions for LOVAZA™®© and DEPLIN™®© and she may very well tell you she writes a dozen of them a day.

II.

When I search the web for people’s LOVAZA™®© and DEPLIN™®© opinions, I see a lot of people talking about greedy pharmaceutical companies. Fair enough. Pharmaceutical companies are pretty greedy, and it’s hard to deny that’s a pretty big factor in how these kinds of drugs (I don’t know a good category name for them, but DEPLIN™®© bills itself as a “medical food”, so we’ll go with that) come to be.

This blog sometimes looks at things from a libertarian perspective. The libertarian perspective says that usually if a for-profit company is making money, it’s probably providing someone with a service somewhere. Is the public getting any service from LOVAZA™®© and DEPLIN™®©?

I say: yes! The companies behind these two drugs are doing God’s work; they are making the world a much better place. Their service is performing the appropriate rituals to allow these substances into the mainstream medical system.

A doctor who prescribes boring regular old supplement fish oil pills is taking a dangerous step into uncharted territory. If anything goes wrong and their conduct comes under review, a clever lawyer could say “I notice your patient had severe hypertriglyceridaemia, a very dangerous condition, and instead of giving her any medicine, you just told her to get fish oil from her local health food store! Fish oil has never been FDA-approved and you have only your personal opinion that it does anything at all.”

And that’s if the patient even gets the fish oil. What does the insurance company say if there’s a patient too poor to pay the $30 for a Giant Jar? This is really common, both in a “a lot of people are legitimately poor and only able to get things Medicaid subsidizes for them” way, and in a way that’s sort of the reverse of how people can always find $50 a day to support their heroin habit. “You want me to pay money for pills to treat a condition which is not at this moment causing my limbs to fall off? Sorry, can’t afford it.” But insurance companies will laugh in your face if you ask them to pay for some random supplement at a health food store which is made out of some slimy animal that swims in the ocean and which doesn’t even have a ® after its name.

And this is even assuming there’s a health food store to get it at. What if you’re in a hospital? Or a nursing home? They don’t have health food stores. They just purchase a bunch of medications, put it all in a big room somewhere, and dispense it to patients who need it. Exactly which medications they purchase is highly highly regulated both by government laws and internal regulations, and it is probably not going to include a Giant Jar of fish oil pills.

I mentioned before that, in a hospital pharmacy stocked with hundreds of different rare and wonderful substances – substances that must be kept frozen at very specific temperatures, substances that can only be given through complicated surgical tubing, substances which must have the dose be absolutely right to within a thousandth of a gram or they will kill you instantly – they don’t have melatonin. The drug that is probably in the bathroom cabinet of half the people reading this post is totally missing. Because it’s not Official.

The point of LOVAZA™®© and DEPLIN™®© is to make fish oil and folate Official. I wish someone would do the same with melatonin so I could start prescribing it in-hospital already.

The high prices of these drugs? Likely at least in part an attempt to recoup costs. In order to make them Official, their parent companies had to perform very specific studies on them. Not just “there are hundreds of studies on fish oil, we’ll just attach them to an email and cc the FDA”. No, that would be too easy. They had to perform exactly the studies the FDA wanted, using fish oil that came from their factory, with their patented process of extraction. That was a couple million to a couple billion dollars. Then they had to hire a bunch of lawyers and lobbyists to make the FDA like them. Then they had to price in the cost of risk from the dozen drugs they try to develop that never get approved and make zero money. Then they had to hire really pretty women to go around to doctors and give them nice pens that say LOVAZA™®© on them, because despite attending medical school for four years and residency for another three, the number one way doctors learn about drugs is through pens with the drugs’ names on them given to them by pretty women. Then lawyers and accountants and executives had to go through a bizarre process in which they all argued among themselves about how much LOVAZA™®© should cost and who should pay for it, which ended up, like all such drug negotiations end up, with parties A, B, and C marking up the sticker price by ten times, parties X, Y, and Z demanding it at one tenth the sticker price, and both sides thinking they pulled a fast one on the other while everybody else facepalms.

My point is, the drug companies are probably making an obscene profit off of it, but less obscene than you might imagine from their ability to stick a fish in a blender and sell you what comes out the other side for $300.

And if you’re still not convinced that this whole thing benefits society, think about this.

Naturopaths and alternative medicine people and “healers” of all sorts have a common form of apologetics for their chosen folk remedy: “Everyone ‘in the know’ has figured out this is a miracle cure, but because it just grows out of the ground Big Pharma can’t make a profit off of it. That’s why they’re suppressing it and poisoning you with toxic medications instead.”

And I used to think that the alternative medicine people were overestimating how evil Big Pharma was. But now I know that’s not right.

Now I know they’re underestimating it.

If it were discovered tomorrow that potatoes cured cancer, then people wouldn’t “suppress” this “natural” remedy. Two years from now there would be an ultrapurified potato extract called POTAXOR™®© that was, on closer examination, physically and chemically identical to mashed potatoes. But these mashed potatoes would be mashed in a giant centrifuge by scientists with five Ph. Ds each. Any time someone got cancer, their doctor would prescribe POTAXOR™®© and charge $6,000 per dose, and the patient would get better, and the thought of just going out and eating a potato would never occur to anybody. Not to the doctor, who doesn’t want to sound like the idiot who tells her cancer patients to eat potatoes. Not to the FDA, who doesn’t know whether potatoes might be contaminated with lead or potato fungus or ketchup or God-knows-what. And certainly not to the patient. They would have to pay 60 cents for a potato at the supermarket, but if they have a good enough insurance the POTAXOR™®© is free!

This system, bizarre as it is, is your guarantee against the pharmaceutical companies suppressing a promising new natural medication. Your insurance company pays $300 on fish oil, and in exchange you go to sleep at night secure that no one has discovered that potatoes cure cancer but decided to cover it up to protect their bottom line. Good deal? Given the current health system, it’s better than you had any right to expect.

III.

I promised yesterday I’d talk about a Jacobin article, so here it is: Bad Science.

Apparently there’s a company called Myriad Genetics which charges a lot of money to test BRCA1 and BRCA2, two genes in which mutations are associated with a very high risk of breast cancer. This is outrageous because genetic testing is very cheap. Worse, they don’t even have the excuse of “the customer is paying extra to reimburse the cost of the research that discovered this”, because the relevant research was done by the government at public expense. From the Jacobin article I don’t understand exactly what their patent/monopoly status is, but it seems to be enough that they can price gouge without repercussion.

I don’t want to comment on the broader points about the scientific community Jacobin is making, but when I read that I thought “Wait! I had an opinion about BRCA testing at one point!”

Yeah. After searching my memory I remembered that the FDA recently banned popular genetic sequencing companies like 23andMe from offering BRCA testing bundled with their other services. The problem was that 23andMe was nonprescription. It was outside the Official Medical System. It was fish oil, not LOVAZA™®©. I was pretty annoyed about that decision.

But after reading this new article I have learned something that puts the whole thing in a new light. Whole genome sequencing companies can sequence all 20,000 or so coding genes for about $1000. Myriad Genetics will sequence two genes for $3000.

[EDIT: Douglas Knight, more expert in this area than I, discusses some of the subtleties here: 1, 2, 3]

I’m not saying that the FDA is in bed with the genetic testing companies. But if the head of the FDA gives birth to a child who looks suspiciously similar to the CEO of Myriad Genetics, I hope her husband gets a paternity test. Assuming those haven’t gotten banned yet.

I am willing to write off LOVAZA™®© as a weird but successful way of adapting to an increasingly crazy medical system. I even find it darkly hilarious. But the high cost of BRCA testing probably turns off a lot of women who would otherwise get the test, and some of them probably develop preventable breast cancer. LOVAZA™®© is a farce. BRCA is a tragedy.

10.5 mths to go & @LadPolitics http://t.co/GmnRBnYZFl makes it CON most votes LAB most seats http://t.co/5FG1QdHZUh pic.twitter.com/22KRvn3NWE

— Mike Smithson (@MSmithsonPB) June 13, 2014

Maybe this explains the disparity between constituency & GB markets

The standard assumption is that this is mostly down to the boundaries is wrong. Yes LAB does get some benefit but the key factor is different turnout levels in CON and LAB seats. Shadsy of Ladbrokes gets this right in in his blog:-

“..the main factor is differential turnout in safe seats. The Conservative’s safest 10 seats had an average turnout of 68%. In Labour’s top 10 it was just 56%. The Tories stack up huge vote majorities in seats across the South of England, for no extra benefit at all. Whereas, of the 50 lowest turnover seats in the country, 46 are held by Labour – much more efficient…”

There’s not a lot you can do to legislate against this. General Elections are decided on which individuals, not parties, come top in first past the post contests in 650 separate seats. Rightly or wrongly proportionately based on national aggregate party vote shares doesn’t come into it.

The worry for Labour is that a victory in this manner will be portrayed as unfair and lead to claims that it lacks legitimacy.

I’m on the Ladbrokes CON most votes/LAB most seats bet at 8/1 and even at the current level it looks good value.

Mike Smithson

Ranked in top 33 most influential over 50s on Twitter

Follow @MSmithsonPB

Andrew Grice makes a worrying claim in the Independent:

Nick Clegg is expected to appoint Danny Alexander rather than Vince Cable as the Liberal Democrats' main economic spokesman at next year's general election.

His evidence for this is that Nick Clegg and Danny Alexander have jointly written (or rather, I suspect, put their name to) an article for the Indy setting out the Lib Dems' stance on tax and spending in the 2015-20 parliament.

I do hope that Nick will not appoint Danny as our economic spokesman at the next election. I have not seen a single media or parliamentary performance from Danny that has involved him doing more than shuffle a limited number of prefabricated sentences. It is hard to imagine him doing well in the televised chancellors' debate, for instance.

By contrast, Vince (who performed so capably in that debate in 2010) has the respect of the public and has the priceless ability to take credit for the good things the government has done and give the impression that the bad things are nothing to do with us.

He is also able to command the House of Commons in a way that Danny can only dream of.

This decision would also display a distressing amount of strategic confusion among Team Clegg. We are told - though you would have to work hard to glean this from the Indy article or from Nick's speech on Monday - that the Liberal Democrats are going to fight the next election on a radically different economic from the one George Osborne will put forward.

So why choose the Lib Dem politician who is so closely linked to Osborne in the public mind to put it forward?

At the 2010 election we used to boast that the Lib Dem front bench had four considerable economists, which made a more powerful team than either of the other parties could boast.

Chris Huhne has fallen by the wayside, and David Laws has to an extent too. But if Nick thinks Vince Cable is too old, or he does not trust him or lacks the magnanimity to put the Oakeshott plotting behind him, then let him choose Steve Webb for this role.

From the Nottingham Post this evening:

The Nottingham City branch of the Liberal Democrats has said the national party should hold a leadership election. 

Members of the party met at the The Vine Community Centre, Bobbers Mill Road, on Saturday morning to discuss the future of Nick Clegg. 

The vote came after widespread discussion of the future of Mr Clegg following local and European election results.

The call for a leadership election was supported by 75 per cent of those attending.

Carla Laemmle played the prima ballerina in the 1925 film of The Phantom of the Opera and she played the secretary who delivered the first line of dialogue in the 1931 classic, Dracula. She appeared in a number of other silent films and then in a few talkies before retiring from acting. She didn't appear in another movie until Pooltime in 2010 and she recently did a small part in a horror film that will be coming out later this year. So we're talking about a career that spanned 89 years.

She was born October 20, 1909, the niece of Carl Laemmle, one of the founders of Universal Pictures…so she was 104 when she passed away last night. I met her two or three times at autograph shows in the last decade or so and got to speak with her. I didn't learn much from her but there was still a thrill there to "connect" with so much history…especially since we are very close to the day when there will be no one alive from the silent era.

Normally it doesn't matter to me if two bands of over-paid primates kick an inflated pig's bladder around a muddy field. I just don't care. As long as they don't do it near me, I can live with that. (You can put this hate on football down to my having grown up Jewish in Leeds in the 1970s. Enough said.)

However, we're now into World Cup season. And I am in full-on Grinch mode, and I assure you that when I become Planetary Supreme Overlord all team sports involving goals and spheroids will be banned forthwith (except for elephant polo on ice skates, which oughta be fun, as long as the elephants give their informed consent beforehand).

Let me enumerate the ways the world cup has pissed me off so far ...

* World cup coverage has totally saturated BBC Radio 4 and BBC World Service. The kitchen radio is now officially Dead To Me. (If I had a gun I'd take the radio out round the back of the outhouse for the coup de grace, if I had an outhouse.)

* The world cup has hijacked the front page of Reddit (well, not as much as the BBC, but some sub-reddits are crawling with it, and I'm not talking about /r/soccer here).

* It's also hijacked the front page of my preferred newspaper. All the newspapers. (One wasn't enough, apparently. Why couldn't they just rename The Sun to World Cup Daily and leave the rest of us alone?) No, seriously: it's pushed a major military/political crisis in the Middle East—one so barkingly mad that the United States and Iran are actually talking about taking joint military action as allies—down below the fold. We are living through the run-up to the apocalypse, a death cult named after an Egyptian love-goddess is invading Iraq, lions and sheep are discussing engagement rings, but—GOAAAAAL!

* Random people in pubs who would normally be completely happy to make drunken small-talk about the weather expect us to give a shit. This being Scotland, we're expected to root for whoever are playing against England. (And you wondered where the roots of the Scottish independence movement lay.) Looks of blank incomprehension are met with sullen disbelief and a conviction that I really, must, somewhere, somehow, give a shit about the world cup. Not being football-mad is somehow seen as unpatriotic. Next they'll be convening a tribunal in Holyrood and asking questions like, "when did you last see your father [score]?"

* And speaking of pubs, the pub on the opposite side of the road from my bedroom window WHICH IS OPEN BECAUSE I NEED THE AIR CIRCULATION IN THIS GHASTLY EDINBURGH HEAT WAVE (it's due to hit a peak of 19 celsius this afternoon and the cruel burning daystar has been sighted near the zenith) has got the world cup on wall-to-wall wide-screen TV. The resulting mob of ball-deranged drinkers are consequently led to spill out onto the pavement where they set fire their vile stenchsticks and bloviate about goals and penalties at maximum volume, while propping the pub door open so that every goal causes loud cheering at sleep-o'clock.

This cartoon seems to sum it all up, frankly. Where will it all end? Oh, the humanity!

Feedly — the RSS/blog reader I’ve relied on since Google Reader was euthanized — was still down this morning. This is frustrating — making it difficult to keep up with all the news and writers I follow every day, and preventing me from accessing the bookmarks for the stuff I’d intended to write about yesterday and today.

This isn’t a simple technical glitch on Feedly’s part. It’s the result of a deliberate attack (or series of attacks) by hackers who are attempting to extort money from the company. That’s not cool.

There’s a very special room in Hell for hackers who pull stunts like this.

- – - – - – - – -

That sentence above in bold is both a biblical reference and a familiar colloquial idiom. That idiom is so familiar — a cliché, at this point — that we tend to overlook its full original meaning. And the biblical reference might seem strange coming from someone like me. I don’t believe that Hell exists, so why would I want to seemingly affirm its existence by saying such a thing? What’s up with that?

I do not believe in the existence of Hell, but I do believe in “Hell” in the biblical sense. My statement above — “There’s a very special room in Hell” for these hackers — employs the term in precisely that biblical sense, conveying no more and no less than what the small handful of biblical passages mentioning “Hell” also convey. Let’s look at that.

1. The statement is not about Hell, it’s about the hackers.

The point — the main point and the whole point — is to express disapproval of the actions of those hackers. To focus on anything else is to miss the point entirely. This is a “teaching” about criminal cybervandals, not a discourse on life after death, or death after death. Treating it as a “teaching” about the existence and/or nature of Hell distorts the meaning of the statement, attributing a literal meaning to a figure of speech that cannot support such a literal meaning while ignoring the meaning that speech clearly and emphatically does convey.

“There’s a very special room in Hell for hackers who pull stunts like this,” Fred says. Fred is not saying that Hell exists and that it contains very special rooms or that others must accept that Hell exists as a literal place containing literal very special rooms. Fred is saying that extortion via a distributed denial-of-service attack is very, very bad.

The statement wouldn’t be substantially different if it said, “There’s a dark cell in Azkaban waiting for hackers who pull stunts like this.” The meaning does not depend on — or in any way suggest — the actual, literal existence of the wizard prison from the Harry Potter books. It only requires enough of a cultural familiarity with those stories for the hearers to appreciate that a cell in Azkaban would be unpleasant.

2. The statement is hyperbolic.

I am quite displeased with the hackers who are denying me access to my customary Web-browsing. I wish to convey this displeasure. “There’s a seat at a Saturday detention for these hackers,” wouldn’t cut it. So I reach for something unmistakable — the worst thing I can think of.

And Hell, of course, is our word for the worst thing we can think of. That’s what makes it indispensable whenever we reach for a bit of superlative hyperbole. This is why no one who has just gotten cut off in traffic has ever leaned out the car window and yelled, “Go to purgatory!”

This is also why it doesn’t matter if each of us brings a different set of Very Bad connotations to the term, or if these disparate ideas and images can’t be neatly reconciled. “It’s like burning … burning forever.” Good! ”It’s like being frozen in an endless sea of ice.” Excellent! Sulfur, brimstone, monsters with pointy sticks, fire, ice, cacophony, silence … the specifics don’t matter. All that matters is the extremity of them.

Hyperbole, of course, is not meant to be taken at face value. It can’t be taken at face value, since the whole point is that it’s face value should be incomprehensibly infinite. Such boundless extremity serves to make the reference unmistakably emphatic.

Taken literally, hyperbole becomes ridiculous, or even monstrous. I don’t literally want to see these hackers tortured for their crimes. I would like to see them caught, arrested, convicted and sentenced for those crimes. But that sentence ought to be proportional — not hyperbolic. Their temporal crime — like all temporal crimes — does not require an eternal punishment. If the sentencing judge gave them life without parole, I would think that was obscenely unjust. If that judge further stated that the Eighth Amendment no longer applied to these hackers, and that they should be endlessly tortured and tormented throughout their imprisonment, I would be horrified at his monstrous, atrocious imagination. (And thus would probably say something like, “There’s a very special room in Hell for judges who disregard the Eighth Amendment” or “This judge is a demon from Hell and he needs to be impeached, disbarred, and locked away forever.”)

3. The statement’s reference to Hell is undefined.

It is a reference back to an amorphous body of folklore, not a citation of a specific text in which the existence and nature of Hell is limned, charted, defined or defended. My reference to Hell may involve any of a vast array of notions, stories, images — some complementary, some contradictory. It is highly unlikely that my particular amalgamation of such ideas and images precisely aligns with those of you or of any other reader. Whatever it is in particular that I’m imagining and intending when I say the word “Hell,” that is surely quite different from whatever it is that you are imagining when you hear that word.

That wouldn’t do at all if we were engaged here in a discussion of the existence and nature of Hell. If that were our goal here, then we would need to set about defining our terms with more precision to ensure that what we say closely aligns with what others hear. But such definition and precision is unnecessary for our purposes here. It would, in fact, be an intolerable distraction from our purposes here. A polyvalent, somewhat contradictory, amorphous Hell serves just fine for what we’re communicating here.

“There’s a very special room in Hell for hackers who pull stunts like this.”

“What, precisely, do you mean when you say ‘Hell?’”

“You know … Hell. Very Bad place full of lots of Very Bad … stuff. Fire, I suppose. Pointy things. Badness.”

Whatever set of Very Bad connotations you bring to the term will surely suffice. We don’t need to agree on all or any of those for us both to understand the point of the statement — which is, again, not about Hell at all, but about those rat-bastard hackers who took down Feedly.

The same is true for what is probably and unfortunately the most common idiomatic reference to Hell in our culture: “Go to Hell!” It is almost never the case that the speaker and the person being addressed will share a precise understanding of the nature and meaning of Hell. But this undefined reference is nonetheless sufficient. The point is conveyed quite clearly. And that point, again, is not about Hell, but about the speaker’s emphatic opinion of the addressee.

It seems we’re better at understanding that when confronted with this rude idiom than when we’re reading Jesus’ words in the Gospels. No one ever says, “The guy next to me in traffic just offered a robust defense of the doctrine of Hell.” They simply understand that the guy has just communicated his disapproval in the strongest language available. Yet when Jesus uses the same language to convey his similarly emphatic disapproval of, say, those who fail to feed the hungry, we ignore his main point and pretend he’s just provided a theological lesson about the afterlife.

Jesus’ references to Hell, like those of the rude driver in traffic, assume that the hearer/reader will be roughly familiar with the reference, but isn’t concerned with the specific particulars of how that reference is understood. That’s why it’s always a reference, not a citation of a particular earlier text or specific teaching.

 

 

Time for more Twitters similar to last time

When I was a kid, Snapchat was what we'd do after a particularly good poetry reading! Snap, and then chat about how much we liked the poem!

— David Malki ! (@malki) June 12, 2014

When I was a kid, 'WhatsApp' was what we'd say to each other! As a greeting! If you were cheeky, you'd respond "The sky!" Also, a beer ad!

— David Malki ! (@malki) June 12, 2014

When I was a kid, Instagram was what we called powdered, dehydrated grandmother! We had some in an urn but we never made it for some reason!

— David Malki ! (@malki) June 12, 2014

When I was a kid, Facebook was what I did on a long car ride! Face buried in a big book! Then I'd make Dad stop because I would get carsick!

— David Malki ! (@malki) June 12, 2014

When I was a kid, Vine was a plant! Like Tarzan swung from! If Tarzan swung from the Vine app, he'd be an Editor's Choice maybe!

— David Malki ! (@malki) June 12, 2014

When I was a kid, Angry Birds were a mean flock of birds that would always dive bomb our house! Because we were pigs that stole their eggs!

— David Malki ! (@malki) June 12, 2014

When I was a kid, texting meant typing! Keep your fingers on the home row! Not too fast or it jams! Don't call it texting, nobody says that!

— David Malki ! (@malki) June 12, 2014

When I was a kid, the only social media was Pravda!

— David Malki ! (@malki) June 12, 2014

When I was a kid, Samsung Galaxy S5 was a location in a William Gibson novel! Headcase had to jack into the undernet before the ion storm!

— David Malki ! (@malki) June 12, 2014

When I was a kid, ou sont the Edward Snowdens d'antan? He was most likely just a fetus or something!

— David Malki ! (@malki) June 12, 2014

When I was a kid, Gmail was what we said when the little flag was up on the mailbox! Gee, we got mail! It was usually bills! Or AOL disks!

— David Malki ! (@malki) June 12, 2014

@malki David what was twitter when you were a kid

— Sara McH (@yellowcardigan) June 12, 2014

@yellowcardigan we didn't have twitter it started in like 2006

— David Malki ! (@malki) June 12, 2014

One and a half cheers for Lord Justice Gross, Mr Justice Simon and Mr Justice Burnett (PDF), who today partially ruled against the government's attempts to hold the entirety of a terrorism trial behind closed doors, aka "in camera".  Their decision makes plain the unease they feel at the application by the Crown Prosecution Service, and the initial ruling by Mr Justice Nicol, who had accepted it in full.  Indeed, they express their "grave concern" at the effect of holding such a trial in camera and keeping the defendants' identities secret, finding it difficult to "conceive of a situation where both departures from open justice will be justified".  Accordingly, the men formerly known only as AB and CD have both been named.

You can understand the judges' concerns when a quick Google turns up nothing of any substance on either Erol Incedal, formerly AB, or Mounir Rarmoul-Bouhadjar, CD.  The latter seems to have a LinkedIn profile, while Incedal doesn't have so much as that.  As well as revealing their identities of the defendants, the judges also ordered that most of the opening of the trial be held in public, including a portion of the judge's introductory remarks and a portion of the prosecution's opening statement.  Additionally, a number of "accredited journalists" will be allowed to sit in on the majority of the closed proceedings, although they will only be allowed to report something of what they witness once the trial has concluded and a further review has taken place.

If all this is meant to seem as though an attempt at compromise has been made, that's precisely what the government hopes it will be seen as.  Mr Justice Nicol rejected the idea of "accredited journalists" initially on the grounds of practicality, as the idea was proposed in the certificates signed by the secretaries of state.  It seems to be the only part of the ruling he got right: as the Graun puts it, this is an absurdity, a "kind of time-lapse justice without guarantees".  It in effect makes the (un)lucky chosen hacks complicit in the secrecy, unable to know if their account of the trial will appear or not.

We must of course recognise that four judges have now seen the evidence from the CPS and concluded that on balance it is better for justice to be attempted, even in secret, than see the prosecution not proceeded with.  The latest three say the case is "exceptional".  Perhaps it is.  There are circumstances when such secrecy certainly could be justified; the problem is we cannot make a judgement on whether in this instance it is justified when we will still know so little of the case against the men.  The only recent precedent was the case of Wang Yam, whose defence to the charge of murder was held in camera after he claimed to have some connection with the security services.  Clearly, he did have some link with them, but it didn't prevent his conviction, nor can we know what his defence was.  Yam is currently appealing to the ECHR on those very grounds.

If this departure from open justice, the "core of the rule of law" as Lord Bingham had it, seems odd in the same week as David Cameron was defining it as a fundamental British value, then it shouldn't.  The government and the security services have always made things up as they go along, will always make things up as they go along.  We can't know why they are so insistent this case has to remain secret, although we can certainly guess that it has to be either supremely embarrassing or has only reached court due to profound security service involvement.  The problem is once ministers and the agencies get into the habit of favouring secrecy over openness the ever more likely they are to resort to it again.  Justice must be seen to be done, but it must also be seen to be fair.  In this instance the case for secrecy has simply not been made, and once again the state seems to be demanding of others what it won't accept of itself.

As always, thanks for using my Amazon Affiliate links (US, UK, Canada).

There is a great deal of difference between an eager man who wants to read a book and a tired man who wants a book to read.

G.K. Chesterton

The UK’s quirky electoral system is widely liked for its supposed ability to deliver strong single-party governments, exaggerating the winning party’s advantage in terms of seats. But, this view rather overlooks the fact that under First Past the Post the UK has actually had a coalition government for 25 of the last 100 years and that in three general elections the party with the most votes did not win the most seats. This happened in 1929, 1951 and the February 1974 general elections.

May 11th 2010

Those who invite or accept defeat for some greater end are usually deluded and counter-productive

One pre-election tradition that has been little honoured so far is hearing the assertion it will be a ‘good one to lose’.  Invariably, those who put that argument forward fall into one or both of two overlapping groups: those who spy monsters down the road which they believe will slay the election winners, providing the opportunity for their preferred party to win a string of victories starting the time after; and those who advocate policies which differ from their party leadership’s and which they wish to see rejected.  What both groups have in common is that they are essentially political losers: they are people looking for consolation in defeat they have already mentally accepted.

That sort of game-playing is fraught with risk.  In particular, those who engage in it consistently overestimate the potency of the monsters and understate the boost the governing party (or faction within a party), will gain if they end up victorious.  They also tend to underestimate the extent to which a party out of power can indulge in in-fighting, even though their thinking anticipates precisely that kind of intra-party struggle.  (Of course, governing parties can be beset by splits and factionalism too but the very business of governing tends to mitigate them: out of office, the factions can give full vent to their spleen).

I recall voices within the Tory Party saying that 1997 would be a good election to lose because Blair wasn’t threatening ideologically and that the party could refresh itself in opposition.  In the event, the party that returned to government was probably very different from what they’d envisaged, and the state of the country altered even more dramatically.

Similar arguments could have been put in advance of the 1974, 1979, 1983, 1992 and 2010 elections (and in retrospect, the 2005 one too): all brought big challenges, the responses to which would inevitably bring a degree of unpopularity.  Yet it’s not just the government which is measured against those challenges; alternative governments – within and without the governing party/ies – are too.

Perhaps the biggest failure in courting the opposition benches is the ceding of initiative.  Governments cannot always dominate the political narrative but they enjoy a good deal more opportunity to do so than oppositions.  They can also, by their nature, do things which have a lasting impact and which those out of power might passionately (but futilely) oppose, some of which will be structural changes, perhaps irreversible.

That’s not to say some groups don’t benefit from opposition.  Would the Thatcherites have dominated the 1980s and beyond had Heath not lost in 1974?  Probably not, but then had Heath won his snap election, he could have faced down the miners, capped rather than exacerbated the inflationary boom already underway, avoided the IMF being called in, the cuts that followed and the Winter of Discontent.  In the meantime, Labour in opposition could have easily fallen into the pro-/anti-Bennite strife that they did, except five years earlier.  Who knows, buoyed by victory, the pre-1972, ‘Selsdon’, proto-Thatcherite Heath might even have re-emerged (or probably not, but the point is that Heath’s defeat was not an absolutely necessary step towards the Thatcherite ascendency, first within the Conservatives and later the country at large).

On the other hand, there was certainly no guarantee that’d they benefit from opposition.  After all, Thatcher largely became leader by accident, in part because no bigger name stood in the first round of the leadership election, and in part because many of her first round votes were anti-Heath as a person, not pro-Thatcher as a policy platform.  Even if some right-wing Tories had believed the 1974 elections to be good ones to lose, it was only a great amount of good luck that enabled the opportunities they perceived to become reality.  Theirs was very much the exception.

And 2015?  Yes, there are undoubtedly difficult challenges beyond that date but then when aren’t there?  The assumptions behind ‘a good election to lose’ are that there’ll be a better one to win later, that the cost of not winning now will be worth it, and that it will be possible to win at the ‘right’ time.  They’re stupid arguments.  If the government does make a hash of it (as in 1974), you end up having to pick up the pieces in a far worse position; if they don’t (as in 1997), they get re-elected and are able to integrate their ideology ever more into the economy and society.  People who want to lose deserve to get what they ask for.

David Herdson

Ivybridge is as aptly named a place as you’re likely to find in South Devon.

Because its main bridge is covered in ivy. This displays an almost Germanic level of linguistic efficiency, as if Birmingham was called Unfathomableunderpasses or Grantham was named Dragonbirth.

 

But Ivybridge has other charms. As well as streams and hills that smell of wet grass even when it’s not rained for a year, it has a slightly industrial corner, with a couple of pubs that seem like on certain nights they can be heard in Plymouth. And it has a boast, which several people mentioned and is also on its website. It goes “Ivybridge was recently the fastest growing town in Europe.

I considered this claim as I was walking down its High Street, and took this photo, to confirm it is indeed a place that’s hurtling towards the size and bustling chaos of Tokyo.

Even when you go out of the centre of town, as much as a whole mile away from the High Street, there are still the sprawling shanty towns you find in any rapidly growing city, and the residents of this ghetto permitted me to take this picture there.

 

 

As you would expect, Ivybridge’s stunning growth has become a magnet for youth, and some days there are as many as five young people seen in the city centre, with their youthful catchphrase ‘we got on the wrong bus, we meant to go to Plymouth’.

Inevitably this has led to an increase in crime, which is why the police station has a charming notice on the door that says “There is no reception at this police station. Access is by appointment only.”

This is a much more efficient method of policing than the normal one, as you can book an appointment for when you think you’re going to be burgled, saving time all round.

 

Amongst its other boasts are that “Ivybridge has ‘Walkers are Welcome’ status”, which is such an improvement on the old system in which they’d shoot the bastards with an arrow.

The ‘Community of Ivybridge’ project informs us “Ivybridge now has apopulation of 15,000, brought about by this rapid growth and change in population. The town council held an open day, unfortunately only one person turned up and they were not from our town.

But despite all this, I shall always remember Ivybridge because I was there on the night Crystal Palace were playing Liverpool. It was the first home game I’d missing for seven months, and didn’t seem to matter all that much, as Palace were safe from relegation. It did matter to Liverpool though, as they need to win to still have a good chance of winning the Premier League.

Palace were at the end of an unimaginably glorious season, predicted by everyone to come bottom but finishing in eleventh place, and every home game was played through a volcanic roar, borne of a combination of jubilation and disbelief.

During the interval I put my radio on, to hear Palace were 3-0 down, and the commentators were suggesting Liverpool should try and score six or seven. I turned it off so I could concentrate on writing bits for the second half. But when I turned it back on it was 3-1, then it became 3-2.

A lad from the theatre popped in to say we were ready for the second half, so I waited at the side of the stage, radio pressed against my ear, and as I was about to go on I heard a shrieking voice squeal ‘And it’s 3-3’.

I walked on, and could only splutter ‘Palace have come back from 3-0 down to Liverpool’, and to my delight a good section of the audience gasped. I said “I can pretend to concentrate on the show but we all know we’d all be living a lie”, so I fetched the radio and placed it next to the microphone, just in time for the full time whistle to go, completing what is now hailed as one of the greatest ever nights at Selhurst Park.

So I will be forever grateful to Ivybridge, for being not only a delightful town prone to absurd exaggeration about its status, but also for indulging my emotions regarding easily the fastest rising football club in the history of the universe.

From the Nottingham Post:

East Midlands Euro MP Roger Helmer has replaced party leader Nigel Farage as the head of UKIP MEPs. 

Mr Helmer was voted into the position on Tuesday evening by all 23 UKIP MEPs.

I am a postmodernist, whatever that means, even if it doesn’t mean anything.  If it does mean something, it means that I am perpetually opposed to the idea of canon, of the idea that there are certain things that belong in the realm of capital-A Art and other things that don’t; while I think there’s such a thing as “good art” and “bad art” (and even there, I can’t forsake the quote marks that indicate arbitrariness and contingency), I don’t believe there’s such a thing as “not art”.  I’m relentlessly in favor of expanding our definition of vital texts to include new art forms, disreputable genres, despised minorities, and uncomfortable expressions.  All that said, I am also a creature of my culture, and there are battles that I lost long before I was ever born.  With three cultural icons in particular, I think we who march under the post-structuralism banner would do well to just cede the fight:  the Bible, the works of Freud, and the works of William Shakespeare.

It’s a lot easier to do in the former cases.  The Old and New Testament are the religious roots of Western culture, but even the fiercest defenders of the vision of reality they offer and the beautiful aesthetic works they have inspired will admit they’ve come at a pretty heavy cost over the years.  Freud took the Western world by storm so quickly that it was inevitable that a backlash would happen almost immediately; nowadays, most people have settled comfortably into the idea that Freud was incredibly important despite not actually being right about much of anything.  It’s Shakespeare who presents the real difficulty to us canon-smashers.  Even the most esteemed of European cultural icons benefit greatly from having the muscle of colonialism behind their public relations, but as Robert Graves, a man who knew a thing or two about imperial power, put it half a century ago, “The remarkable thing about Shakespeare is that he really is very good, in spite of all the people who say he is very good.”

As a writer, indeed, Shakespeare is very nearly untouchable — something it pains me, as a foe of hyperbole and an advocate of contingency, to admit.  In his plays in particular (one wonders how he would have managed the novel form), he does just about everything right:  his mastery of the mechanics of plot is untouchable, turning like clockwork even when the plot itself is pure hoke.  His characters, when simplistic archetypes, are the purest and most useful expressions of archetype, and when when complex, throw shadows of complexity in so many directions they are the rival of anything Dostoevsky could produce.  His insights into human nature are staggeringly exact given that he was writing a hundred years before the word ‘psychology’ first appeared in English.  And his use of language — well, it simply requires no decoration.  Every English speaker still carries around words, images, and phrases of Shakespeare’s as essential parts of their linguistic toolbox four hundred years after his death.

Great as he is — and he’s almost depressingly great, the kind of great that fills up all the space that other people might want to use to be great in — I almost wish I didn’t like Shakespeare as much as I do.  I like him in that pervasive, lost-dog sort of way, that borderline uncritical way, that I used to like childhood obsessions like comic books.  No better evidence of this exists than my boundless appetite for Shakespeare adaptations; good or bad, traditional or modern, straight or gimmicky, I’ll watch them all.  I don’t love them all equally; certainly there are differences between the good (the BBC’s 1981 Othello with Tony Perkins and Bob Hoskins, the Macbeths of Welles and Polanski, Almereyda’s underrated Hamlet), the bad (Tim Blake Nelson’s goofy O, the absurd 2006 lesbian-gangster-witch Macbeth, Joss Whedon’s arch and plodding Much Ado About Nothing), and the bizarre (the crypto-fascist Richard III from 1995,  Akira Kurosawa’s howlingly nihilistic Ran, the ultra-quirky Scotland, PA).  But regardless of quality, I will give them all a chance while newer, less familiar, even better art sits idle by my bedside.  Let those who doubt I would watch video of a barely competent high school production of Julius Caesar just because it happens to be on YouTube behold my browser history.

Romeo and Juliet is a perpetual favorite of Shakespeare adapters:  its teen romance is a box office winner, it contains some of Shakespeare’s choicest dialogue, and it has a tense and intricate, if entirely rickety, plot.  It’s also relatively easy to stage, has a lot of appealing roles even outside the ripe leads, can help launch a young actor’s career, and is easily adaptable to any setting or time period, because hyper-hormonal teens never stop lusting after one another, and people never stop harboring deadly and irrational prejudices against one another.  That’s what’s in its favor.  What works against it:  for one thing, since it practically demands the lead characters be gorgeous, achingly oversexed young people, they’re forever at risk of being out-acted by even minor characters like Lady Montague.  For another, it’s so easily staged that it’s produced not one, but multitudes of tremendously well-done versions, from West Side Story to Zeffirelli’s fiery 1968 version, against which any new adaptation will be measured.

When a new version of Romeo and Juliet was announced late last year, I had reason to be hopeful about it.  While director Carlo Carlei was unknown to me, the script was written by Julian Fellowes, the clever British author who brought us Gosford Park and Downton Abbey; Juliet would be played by Hailee Steinfeld, who had so impressed in the Coen brothers’ remake of True Grit; and it would be filmed in period style at a number of authentic Italian locations, including the actual parapets and towers of Verona.  2013 being a rather rich year at the movies, I lost track of the movie when it was released, but it showed up last week on Netflix Instant, and I sat down over the weekend to what I hoped would be, if nothing else, at least a handsome and well-written interpretation of the play.  What I got was, well, something entirely less.

Things start off badly, but you don’t quite notice at first; the excellent Stellan Skarsgård delivers an excellent reading of Prince Escalus’ warning to the two families, which seems promising until you later realize it’s the best performance you’re going to get in the whole movie, and it’s in service of nothing more than setting the plot in motion.  There are some solid bits of casting along the way (Mike Leigh veteran Lesley Manville is excellent as Juliet’s nurse, Italian veteran Laura Morante is fine as — uh oh — Lady Montague, and young Kodi Smit-McPhee, the boy in The Road, is an interesting choice to play a youthful Benvolio), but there’s a giant sucking sound at the center where the burning intensity of the leads should be.  Steinfeld is at least trying to do a good job; she’s, at least, acting, rather than standing around expecting everyone to notice how good she looks, which is what most of the men in the film are doing.  But she seems more flattered at Romeo’s intentions, like she’s been asked to be lab partners with the smartest kid in chemistry class, than she seems consumed with aching passion.  Worse still, and not her fault, is the fact that her Juliet has zero chemistry with Romeo, and, well, that’s the name of the play.

The casting of British TV actor Douglas Booth as Romeo was allegedly a three-year process during which he beat out hundreds of other candidates, but it’s impossible to see why unless the producers expected the movie to play out in a series of Tiger Beat covers.  He’s certainly very broad-chested and handsome, but his acting could not be any more uninvolving, and fatally to the material, he doesn’t seem to be particularly interested in Juliet except insofar as the script requires him to.  In Zeffirelli’s version, the director cast actual teenagers (older than the play calls for to accommodate modern mores, but young enough to suit his goals) rather than following the usual tactic of using twenty-somethings, because he wanted the screen to melt under the heat of the kind of boiling-over, life-or-death craziness that often accompanies the first sexual crush of a teenage couple.  That level of overheated love/lust, where Romeo and Juliet literally plot their own deaths rather than consider ever being apart, is vital to a successful adaptation, but it’s sorely lacking here.  Booth mostly acts as if he’s out of Steinfeld’s league, and at times is so passive that you can almost see him checking the clock to see how long it is before he gets to commit suicide.  (He was 20 and Steinfeld 16 when the movie was filmed.  Though Zeffirelli’s version rather famously employed nude scenes for both Romeo and Juliet, it’s not necessary; however, here, the impossibility of a widely-released mainstream film showing a nude 16-year-old girl rendered the crucial scene of their marital morning rather milky.)

Other performances are a let-down.  Paris, Tybalt and Mercutio are affectless pretty-boys, and Damian Lewis (late of Homeland) is stern but dull as Juliet’s father; Paul Giamatti, capable of good performances when he’s engaged in a role, plays Friar Laurence in full-blown “free Italian vacation” mode.  The sets and locations are lovely enough to look at, but not much is done with them; likewise, the costumes are competent without being spectacular.  Carlei’s direction is a big fat nothing; if he brings anything to the film’s character, mise-en-scène, or visual style other than the ability to operate a camera properly, I didn’t notice it.  Baz Luhrmann caught a lot of shit for his Romeo + Juliet in 1996, and rightly so; that thing was a piece of junk.  But for all its multitudinous flaws, it at least had style and passion and energy, none of which are to be found here.

But nobody really went into this thing expecting much from Carlo Carlei, whoever that is.  Julian Fellowes is surely the villain of the production, because he’s the only one who indisputably knew better.  Fellowes is known for his savvy, class-conscious observations of social interaction, but he could be forgiven for leaving it out here if he was determined to be faithful to the source material; it doesn’t give up much to sink one’s talons into in that regard.  But, bizarrely, Fellowes — certainly capable of some flashy wordcrafting himself — shows no fidelity to Shakespeare’s bountiful language whatsoever.  A few scenes aside, Romeo and Juliet bears almost no resemblance to the play in terms of lines, most of which are rewritten, and never for the better.  It’s as if he took one look at the play for the first time since his Ampleforth College days and reckoned, well, fuck it, no one’s reading this rubbish for the words.  He keeps the story, conversely, entirely intact; but nobody reads this stuff for the crackerjack plots, especially when they’re brought to screen as lifelessly as Carlei does.  It’s impossible to know if Fellowes really thought he was improving on Shakespeare, or if he was intentionally dumbing it down for what he perceived as an audience of wit-immune teenagers, or — who knows?  Maybe he thought he might get sued.  Whatever the reason, it all adds up to a passionless, plain, and oddly humorous thing — what Shakespeare, with Romeo’s tongue, called “heavy lightness and serious vanity, a misshapen chaos of well-seeming forms”.  Head back to ’59 or ’68 and wait for the next version of Romeo and Juliet; there’s always one coming.

Caution: this essay contains politics. Specifically, Scottish politics. And lots of it.

As a general rule I try not to discuss politics on my blog. It's an endlessly complex subject, it is self-evident that any two people of goodwill can look at any given political problem and come up with two different and diametrically opposed ideas of how to resolve it, and (puts on marketing hat) I'm here to interest you in my writing, not recruit you for my Army of Minions™, although now that I think about it that'd be kinda cool, once I make my run for Total World Domination and appoint myself Supreme Planetary Overlord.

But there's a point where politics impinges directly on the circumstances of my writing, and that's when it goes nonlinear, and by nonlinear I mean "depending on the outcome of three upcoming elections, I may be living in one of three different countries in two years' time." (Two of which would be called "The United Kingdom" but would be very different from one another, and one of which would be called "The Kingdom of Scotland".) It makes it really hard to even think about writing that next near-future Scottish police thriller when I can't predict what country it will be set in, much less what its public culture will look like or where it will be ruled from.

Most of you aren't Scottish and politics, like adventure, is always a lot more fun when it's happening to somebody else a long way away. So let me give you a brief guide to the Scottish Political Singularity, hedged first with a few caveats: (a) this is quite a serious problem for those of us who live here, (b) the climate of politics in Scotland is in general utterly unlike anywhere else in the so-called Anglosphere, and (c) my political sympathies put me firmly out on the fringe, so you should consider me an unreliable guide with a whole bushel of axes to grind (which, in fairness, I will try not to conceal from you or misrepresent as mainstream opinion).

Okay, some recent history. Back in, oh, 1603, Queen Elizabeth of England died without offspring. And the Tudor dynasty were so damn' good at internecine throat-cutting that her nearest heir was James VI, King of Scots. And so, shortly thereafter, he became James VI and I, King of the Scots and King of England—uniting the crowns of the two previously-warring nations and ushering in a century during which, to everybody's astonishment, Scotland and England stopped going to war with each other. (Instead they took up civil wars as a hobby, with a side-order of regicide, a pioneering experiment in military dictatorship, a theocratic revolution and it's bloody aftermath up north, and yet another revolution for dessert.)

In short, history happened. And then the Darien scheme nearly bankrupted Scotland's ruling class, and in a desperate attempt to recapitalize (with help from their peers in London) they did an abrupt U-turn on the previous century's policy of sharing a crown but not a parliament, and signed up for the Act of Union in 1707. Scotland wasn't so much conquered by England as the subject of a mutually agreed merger, albeit under conditions of financial distress: and, as the poorer, less populous partner in the enterprise, the pole of political power drifted south until Scotland ended up as a de facto province, ruled by a Parliament sitting in London.

This was not an intrinsically bad deal for Scotland (although individual circumstances varied enormously: it was an excellent deal for the rich landowners and the metropolitan elites of Edinburgh and Glasgow, but a terrible one for the highland poor). However, a number of anomalies remained. Scotland's legal system is distinctively different—it's not a common law system, but runs on a descendant of the classic Roman law. Legislation passed in parliament in London after 1707 maintained the distinction, implementing the same laws in both systems. Landowning ran differently (the last vestigates of the feudal system were only abolished in Scotland the 1990s). Jury trials don't work the same way. The Church of England isn't an established state Church in Scotland. And folks up here speak a tongue that's somewhere in the grey area between being a collection of strong regional dialects and a wholly different language from the definitional Queen's English enunciated by BBC presenters in London. (Scots isn't a single dialect: there are different grammatical constructions, and regional dialects that range in cultural overtones from very humble to "more posh than the Queen". But I digress ...)

This arrangement worked more or less all right for a couple of centuries. With the industrial revolution, the major cities of the English midlands, the North of England, and the Scottish lowlands prospered: their fortunes were based on shipping, trade, and manufacturing industry. London also prospered as a centre of commerce, and was a major financial hub: Edinburgh, the Scottish capital, was a secondary financial centre (if only because Scotland's population was around a tenth of England's at any given time).

So what went wrong?

One factor was the loss of relative advantage in manufacturing industry that coincided with the ascendency of the United States, and then the reconstruction of Europe in the wake of the world wars. By the 1970s British heavy industry tended to be outdated and uncompetitive. Something clearly had to be done: but when in 1979 Margaret Thatcher swept to power in London, she decided to proceed on the basis of an electoral calculation. Her Conservative party is more properly known as the Conservative and Unionist Party, with Unionism being a stronger cause in Scotland: her calculation was that she could cement Conservative ascendancy in south-east England for a generation if she financialized the economy, while simultaneously cutting off the old (largely state-owned) smokestack industries at the knees. The north predominantly voted Labour anyway; there was little chance of gaining more seats in Westminster by being nice to the Scots, but a lot to be gained in Liberal or three-way marginal constituencies down south.

The recession of 1979-82 (actually the economy shrank by 10% in the first 18 months, while unemployment tripled) was just the start of what seemed at times to be almost an undeclared civil war against the north of Britain. After 1983 the Conservatives haemorrhaged support north of the border: today there are fewer Scottish Conservative MPs at Westminster than there are giant pandas in Scottish zoos (one Scottish Tory MP out of eighty in total; but two pandas). Scotland was administered as a foreign colony by a remote party that less than 15% of the voters had asked for. Resentment grew over a decade: it spiked in 1988 with the introduction of the infamous Community Charge, a highly regressive poll tax (to replace the previous dysfunctional housing tax in funding local government—partly as a move to centralize fiscal power over local councils and neuter Labour-controlled city and county council spending on goals the Conservatives disapproved of). Scotland was subjected to the poll tax first, and kicked back hard, in the biggest tax rebellion in the history of the combined British states: it collapsed in 1991, leading directly to Thatcher's resignation after triggering the Poll Tax Riots. At the end of the day, 40% of the taxpaying base were in rebellion: at this point, we can safely say that any democratic mandate to rule had been lost. Except that there wasn't one in the first place, and colonial rule continued for another five years ...

Unsurprisingly, Scottish anger at the country's treatment over the 1980s led to a rise in support for devolution—the re-establishment of a Scottish parliament to legislate for the Scots—and outright independence. By 1992 (at the end of the Poll Tax fiasco) up to 50% of Scottish voters were leaning towards full independence. There was clearly a constitutional disaster waiting to happen if another Conservative government attempted to repeat Thatcher's divide-and-rule approach. Luckily, a solution was at hand: Devolution, which was voted for by a majority of the voting population in a referendum in 1999, and which is why we now have a Scottish Parliament.

Note that the Scottish Parliament is not unconditionally sovereign. It exercises powers delegated to it by the Westminster Parliament; certain powers are reserved—policy on illegal drugs, immigration, foreign policy, defence, and taxation are exercised in Westminster.

Westminster is (and has been, since 2010) under the control of Thatcherite fan-boys with virtually zero electoral base north of the border. (The Conservatives poll around 12-16% of the voting public in Scotland. Compared with the Scottish Green Party—the party whose policies most align with my own preferences—who poll around 8-12%, or the Conservative vote in England, which is around the 30-35% level, this is not a sign of a party with a broad base of support. It's even worse when you consider that in Scotland the conservatives are highly regionalized: they're able to elect an MP because they have a couple of affluent highly conservative constituencies, but the rest of the nation is effectively an electoral no-go zone to them.)

Meanwhile ...

The Scottish Parliament is elected by the Additional Member System—votes are counted towards an MSP's seat (elected by first-past-the-post), but are then summed and allocated to a party list which elects a further pool of MSPs via pure proportional representation. It has been suggested that this system was designed by the architects of Scottish devolution (under the late Donald Dewar MP) to prevent the Scottish National Party (or anyone else, for that matter) from ever gaining an outright majority, thereby subtly applying the brakes of coalition government to the Scottish Parliament. If so, the gerrymander failed spectacularly in 2008, when the SNP, led by the inimitable Alex Salmond (detested by some, he's nevertheless clearly one of the Big Beasts of the British political scene: in one of the Westminster parties he would clearly be a senior cabinet minister if not a prime minister, and in the smaller pool of the Scottish political scene he's a great white shark surrounded by goldfish), acquired an outright majority.

So we now have a parliament led by the SNP (a carefully-planned impossibility), a centre-left party: and an opposition consisting, in order of size, of: Scottish Labour (as reformed by Tony Blair into a right wing party with left-wing heritage), the Liberal Democrats, trailed by the Conservatives and the Greens. (Who look to be the major beneficiary of the LibDem haemorrhage of center-left voters since their entry into coalition with the Conservatives in Westminster.) Note that UKIP, who are terrorizing the Tories in England, barely poll ahead of the Greens in a Euro-election—classic protest vote territory. In polls of Scottish voting intent in a general election, UKIP's share is in single digits, a far cry from the >30% levels seen in England.

What does this mean?

Well, it's been fairly obvious for about three decades now that there's a growing political rift between Scotland and England. England seems to be becoming more parochial, europhobic, and anti-immigrant, and the political sails of all the main English parties are being trimmed to the right—Labour today is considerably to the right of any of Margaret Thatcher's conservative predecessors, and while the Conservatives have a socially libertarian faction that has produced some moves that would be astonishing in an American political context (a Conservative prime minister promoting same-sex marriage, for example) on economic issues they're firmly in the pocket of The Money. Meanwhile, the Scottish political culture has gone in a distinctly different direction. The English NHS is being reformed along lines that promote internal competition and marketization of healthcare services, and appears to be being prepared for wholesale privatization as an insurance-backed private healthcare system (with the government-funded NHS becoming merely a default fee payer). Meanwhile, in Scotland PPP funded hospitals established under Labour are being bought out and integrated into the fully socialized healthcare system. And this is just the tip of the iceberg.

Now, to the Scottish Political Singularity:

We have an SNP government. They promised, and got, a referendum that, this September 18th, will ask people like me (anyone who lives here, basically) to vote on the question "should Scotland be an independent nation?" It's a straight yes/no question. The third option, Devo Max, was ruled off the ballot by David Cameron (probably because he knew it would win by a mile—over 60% of the Scottish voting public supported it as of the last poll I saw that asked about it). Devo Max was a last mile marker for a devolved parliament short of full independence: Scotland would acquire control over all internal affairs, including taxation, but would delegate defence and foreign affairs to Westminster. It's my preferred option. Such a shame we're not allowed to vote for it ...

Anyway. A vote will be held on the 18th of September. If there is a majority for independence, then the constitutional shit will hit the fan because Westminster will be required to negotiate and enact the enabling legislation for Scottish independence ... with a UK-wide General Election coming up in June 2015. The enabling legislation can't be rushed through before the next election (it's too big and complex), so it's going to trail into the next Westminster parliament, probably completing in 2016 with independence in 2017. But the next Westminster parliament cannot be bound by the decisions of the current one—basics of the British constitutional system here—and so can't automatically be held to handle the consequences of the independence vote. It's anybody's guess what the government in Westminster will look like in July 2015. It might be a renewed Conservative/Lib-Dem coalition (unlikely), a Conservative majority or minority government (less unlikely), a Labour majority (not unlikely), a Labour/Lib-Dem coalition (possibly most likely, but still not something to bet on), a Conservative/UKIP coalition (unlikely but not impossible), or a Martian invasion. Nobody knows. Add to this, 70 Scottish MPs elected on a mandate to sit for 12-18 months while they negotiate independence, then pack their bags and go home. It'll be chaos.

UKIP are also a wild card. While you might think there should be some sympathy towards Scottish independence there (after all, UKIP's policy is essentially regionalist, and they want the UK out of the EU), you'd be wrong: UKIP's platform is essentially hostile to Scottish independence and their previous manifesto held an explicit commitment to reverse devolution, to erase the Scottish Parliament and reintroduce direct rule. It seems the logic of UK separation from the EU is not applicable to Scottish separation from the UK.

So here we are, in the middle of an acrimonious independence referendum campaign, and it's turned into the political debate of the century. Everyone is talking about it. In pubs, in shops, on Reddit. The "No" campaign are clearly in trouble: while they started with a 20-point lead over the "Yes" campaign, they've been steadily losing ground for the past six months. The "undecided" cohort in the polls remains stubbornly around the 10-15% mark, but there seems to be some traffic in voters moving from "no" to "undecided", and from "undecided" to "yes". The unpopularity of the Conservatives could be a decisive factor here: it would take just one big miscalculation by David Cameron to drive another 5% of the voting base into the arms of the "yes" campaign. It's the "no" campaign's vote to lose ... but they don't seem to actually be winning it, and even if there is an eventual majority opposed to independence, my prediction is that the margin will be so slim that the question will remain open for future re-matches.

So: in 2017, Scotland will either be an independent nation (initially a constitutional monarchy retaining the shared Crown, as was the case prior to 1707), or part of the UK. Why did I say there might be two different UKs?

Well, that's down to UKIP and the Conservative euroskeptics. They've been a turbulent bunch since 1992 or even earlier. They really don't like the Euro-federalist agenda. (As it happens, I do like it, reservations about the democratic deficit aside. We have had two-thirds of a century of peace since the last invading army crossed the Rhine: the longest period of peace in Western Europe since the fall of the Roman Empire. That's worth a lot, and I think we break with it at our peril.) UKIP has picked up a bunch of them—a large chunk of it is the conservative party's right wing in exile—and a large protest vote by those who can't cope with a pluralistic, multi-ethnic, modern Britain. UKIP would be a more natural fit for coalition with the Conservatives than the Liberal Democrats; if UKIP make an electoral showing in 2015, we may yet see a hard-right government opposed to Scottish independence or even devolution, and which holds to its election manifesto commitment to hold a UK-wide referendum on withdrawing from the EU.

Polling suggests that a majority of UK citizens would favour leaving the EU. (Hell, around 30% of them don't even realize we're part of it already. I despair, at times.) Weirdly, EU-antipathy is a lot stronger in England than in Scotland, where a majority want to stay in.

So the worst case outcome, circa 2017, is that Scotland remains manacled to an England that has voted in a government of the Home Counties, who despise the Scots, and who have successfully campaigned for a referendum in which the English protest vote determines that Scotland will be dragged out of the EU in a vain attempt to wind the clock back to an imaginary vision of a 1950s conservative utopia that never was. Or Scotland might remain part of a UK, but one where when push came to shove the racist right took a kicking in the 2015 election and the softer right wing government of New Labour is back in charge and the loons are exiled to the fringes again, and the country is at least open for business.

Which brings me to the punch-line: I'll be voting "yes" for an independence Scotland in September. Not with great enthusiasm (as I noted earlier, if Devo Max was on the ballot I'd be voting for that) but because everything I see around me suggests that there is some very bad craziness in the near future of England, and I don't want the little country I live in to be dragged down the rabbit hole by the same dark forces of reaction that are cropping up across Europe, from Hungary to Greece. The failure modes of democracy, it seems to me, are less damaging the smaller the democracy.

But in the meantime: it's impossible for me to write fiction set in the near future of Scotland until after we've navigated the political white water ahead: the referendum in September 2014, the general election in June 2015, and (optionally) the further UK referendum in 2016/17. Truly, we're living through the dog days of Schroedinger's Republic; and it's anybody's guess which state the wave function will finally collapse into.

Joe DeLillo speaks with some of David Letterman's former writers about his legacy.

My friend Tracy Abbott (herself, a former writer for Dave and also for Jay) sent me this article and asked what I thought of it. I was a huge fan of Dave on NBC, a lesser fan of his early CBS shows…and I've rarely watched him the last ten years or so. I thought he was great for a long time but I also think people tend to praise him for inventing a lot of things that others did before him…and also things for which his writers, including the ones interviewed for this article, deserve serious credit.

One reason Dave's early shows seemed so revolutionary is the unavailability of the talk show that Steve Allen did for the Westinghouse company from 1962 to 1964. If ever a program turned that format on its head, it was that one. Not only did you never know what was going to happen on it, it was obvious that Steve rarely knew. I have a strong belief that whenever someone next "reinvents" the talk show, they'll be doing something very much like what Mr. Allen did fifty years ago, especially the last months of that series.

Speaking of the uniqueness of Letterman in the article, Gerry Mulligan asks, "Who knew the name of Jack Paar's stage manager? Also, the whole idea of letting the home audience see the internal workings of the show – taking the camera into the green room, the control room, even the show's offices." That wasn't the modus operandi of Mr. Paar but Steverino did all that, including making his stage manager a character on the show.

The stage manager was named Johnny Wilson. If the producers thought an interview was getting dull, they sometimes sent Wilson out to hit Steve Allen with a pie that Steve didn't know was coming. No one on Letterman's staff would dare do anything Dave didn't know was coming. (This, by the way, is all my opinion. I didn't discuss this with Tracy.)

On one episode — and this was planned — Wilson hit Steve with a shaving cream pie. Then Steve pied him back. Then Wilson fled into the audience where every person had been supplied with a plastic raincoat and a couple of pies to throw at the stage manager and at each other. It was quite an amazing moment in television history.

I have heard that all or most episodes of this series still exist and that the Steve Allen estate is sitting on them, waiting for the right moment to market them. If this is so, I wish that right moment would come soon. You'd see an awful lot of things that Carson, Leno, Letterman and others later did…and an awful lot of things they would never in a billion years do, mostly involving putting the star on the spot to do something slightly dangerous. Or, scarier, to ad-lib.

Here's a 16 minute segment from that series featuring a then-unknown musician named Frank Zappa. The show had a much more leisurely pace than might feel right today but note how Steve was utterly unprepared for the spot. As was done often, the show's announcer, Johnny Jacobs, brought on the guest and introduced him, not only to the audience but to the host. Steve Allen apparently knew little about it before: No pre-interview, no questions or jokes on cards, etc. Today, that would all be planned out and even rehearsed…

An Occasional Guest Posting, this time from Jason J Hunter

ARE YOU SITTING COMFORTABLY…..? Then I shall begin….

Once upon a time before Labour there were no tuition fees. Then after promising not to introduce charges for Uni before an election, Labour created them with a landslide majority Government.

Then before the next election they pledged not to increase tuition fees, and then created top-up fees tripling the tuition fees that Labour promised not to create in the first place, again with a majority government.

Getting even a single MP might be beyond the purples

There’s been lots of betting interest since EP14 and Newark over what UKIP will do at GE15. Will this be the election when the party that won the Euros actually gets it first MP or MPs?

We’ve been over this many times but it is hard ask for Farage’s team to get enough votes in at least one of the 650 seats that puts them over the line. As we all know Westminster seats are decided by first past the post.

To put it into context. The lowest vote share achieved by a winning candidate at GE10 was the 29.4% for the LD Simon Wright in Norwich South. The biggest percentage that UKIP has ever chalked up in any Westminster seat, was the 27.8% at Eastleigh back in February 2013.

We are told that UKIP, aware of the problem, is trying to find its own Norwich Souths where high vote shares won’t be needed and victory might be possible with, say, 30-33%. In seats like this two or even three of the main Westminster parties would slugging it out. A danger for the purples is that a rallying cry for their opponents in targets seats will be “we are the only party that can stop UKIP” in an effort to win over tactical votes.

Given all the media attention that the leader gets Farage, himself, would appear to have one of the best chances and he’s expected to announce shortly where he plans to stand.

In a bet placed in May 2013 I’m on UKIP at 8/1 to win at least one seat In a bet placed with Hills and reported here in March 2013 I got 8/1 on UKIP securing more than one MP at GE15. I’m not confident that it’s a winner.

Mike Smithson

Ranked in top 33 most influential over 50s on Twitter

Follow @MSmithsonPB

From Letters of Note:

On the evening of February 1st, 1924, the New York Symphony Orchestra played Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony at Carnegie Hall in New York, conducted by Walter Damrosch. Thankfully for those who couldn’t attend, the performance was broadcast live on the radio. A couple of days later, the orchestra received a stunning letter of thanks from the unlikeliest of sources: Helen Keller, a renowned author and activist who had been deaf and blind from a young age.

. . . .

93 Seminole Avenue,
Forest Hills, L. I.,
February 2, 1924.

The New York Symphony Orchestra,
New York City.

Dear Friends:

I have the joy of being able to tell you that, though deaf and blind, I spent a glorious hour last night listening over the radio to Beethoven’s “Ninth Symphony.” I do not mean to say that I “heard” the music in the sense that other people heard it; and I do not know whether I can make you understand how it was possible for me to derive pleasure from the symphony. It was a great surprise to myself. I had been reading in my magazine for the blind of the happiness that the radio was bringing to the sightless everywhere. I was delighted to know that the blind had gained a new source of enjoyment; but I did not dream that I could have any part in their joy. Last night, when the family was listening to your wonderful rendering of the immortal symphony someone suggested that I put my hand on the receiver and see if I could get any of the vibrations. He unscrewed the cap, and I lightly touched the sensitive diaphragm. What was my amazement to discover that I could feel, not only the vibrations, but also the impassioned rhythm, the throb and the urge of the music! The intertwined and intermingling vibrations from different instruments enchanted me. I could actually distinguish the cornets, the roll of the drums, deep-toned violas and violins singing in exquisite unison. How the lovely speech of the violins flowed and plowed over the deepest tones of the other instruments! When the human voice leaped up trilling from the surge of harmony, I recognized them instantly as voices. I felt the chorus grow more exultant, more ecstatic, upcurving swift and flame-like, until my heart almost stood still. The women’s voices seemed an embodiment of all the angelic voices rushing in a harmonious flood of beautiful and inspiring sound. The great chorus throbbed against my fingers with poignant pause and flow. Then all the instruments and voices together burst forth—an ocean of heavenly vibration—and died away like winds when the atom is spent, ending in a delicate shower of sweet notes.

Of course, this was not “hearing” but I do know that the tones and harmonies conveyed to me moods of great beauty and majesty. I also sensed, or thought I did, the tender sounds of nature that sing into my hand—swaying reeds and winds and the murmur of streams. I have never been so enraptured before by a multitude of tone-vibrations.

As I listened, with darkness and melody, shadow and sound filling all the room, I could not help remembering that the great composer who poured forth such a flood of sweetness into the world was deaf like myself. I marvelled at the power of his quenchless spirit by which out of his pain he wrought such joy for others—and there I sat, feeling with my hand the magnificent symphony which broke like a sea upon the silent shores of his soul and mine.

Let me thank you warmly for all the delight which your beautiful music has brought to my household and to me. I want also to thank Station WEAF for the joy they are broadcasting in the world.

With kindest regards and best wishes, I am,

Sincerely yours,

(Signed)

HELEN KELLER

Link to the rest at Letters of Note

We should have seen it coming.

This was our livelihood, after all; we were the artists of commerce, creatives in the world of the merely productive. We worked with words and ideas the way our clients worked with industrial chemicals and institutional foodstuffs. We lived for le mot juste, and we rode wave after wave of inspired campaigns the way a surfer shot one perfect curl after another. And we grew fat and arrogant and never thought it would ever change.

And we have ourselves to blame, on many levels. As businessmen, we followed the doomed example of the auto companies, timidly complying with government regulations and lying to ourselves (it was easy; lying was our profession) that change was a good thing that would help us grow. As artists, we failed to recognize that every new measure and law was a loop in the noose being tightened around our necks. And as citizens, we were even part of the problem, supporting restrictions on other industries that we cocksuredly assumed would never be applied to us.

Truth in Advertising laws was the first, and maybe the worst, back in our grandparents’ generation. Then came stringent labeling laws in the ’70s; I can still remember, as a child, asking my mom what a calorie was. It only got worse when I got in the game in the late 1990s; so-called ‘consumer activists’ fought hard to control the very words we used. It started small, with stricter definitions of what ‘organic’, ‘all-natural’ and ‘child-safe’ meant. Those should have been warning signs enough, but still we were full of swagger. We assumed that our genius with language and concept would turn these new regulations into a benefit instead of a hindrance. God, we were such fools. There was so much money back then, we were blinded to the reality of the snowball effect.  Even when the so-called ‘public servants’ in Washington made us chase our pharmaceutical, investment services, and automobile ads with a word salad of warnings and exceptions and consequences, we figured just rushing past them would satisfy everyone.

Do you remember where you were the day the Adjective Ban was approved? I do. I was drinking dirty martinis at Pier 27, laughing with my colleagues. People like you. People like all of us. Stupid, short-sighted hedonists who made jokes about what a boondoggle the bill was, right up until one of the old men (and we laughed at them too, you know damn well we did) told us to turn on CNN. Even then we didn’t believe it. We were ad men, not lawyers; we thought the law could be appealed or voted out or overturned by the Supreme Court or something. And besides, there were 6 months before the Ban was to take effect; surely there would be time to take care of things. We kept right on thinking that, comparing ourselves favorably to Don Draper and Peggy Olsen, until Monday morning, October 1st, when we all showed up at work and found the regulation posted on the door of each of our offices. And we looked at the broken expressions on the faces of our account managers. And we saw that the plate of bagels and schmeer we set out for the clients every morning weren’t getting eaten. And that’s when we knew it was all over.

Wanna hear something? Listen to this: “Decadent Milanese cheesecake pockets, brimming with a sinfully rich raspberry glacee, coated with a sinfully smooth quintuple-chocolate jacket and topped with ultra-rich Gloucester cream.” That’s a little something I whipped up for the Sara Lee people back in ’04. In ’14, right before they discontinued the line, here’s what they did to my copy: “Chocolate-added dairy dessert with topping.” Everyone talks about what happened to McDonald’s — the Large Two-Patty Sandwich, Larger-Portioning, and the Weight Before Cooking Discount Meal — but hell, their stuff wasn’t art to begin with. They’re an easy target. How about what happened with Ikea? How about how quick Nike went out of business? How about the goddamn Ford Motor Company, once one of the proudest corporations in this nation’s history, pushing the slogan “Please consider driving one of our vehicles”, until the feds decided that “please consider” was “legally over the line into insinuation” and made them change it to “Ford vehicles available for purchase”? Sure, some people made do. Microsoft didn’t seem to have any problem with it at all; in fact, when they changed their campaign to “Microsoft: No other options at this time”, sales actually went up. And Coke and Pepsi stopped advertising altogether with no effect on sales whatsoever; it’s like no one even noticed — except all us poor bastards who used to try and convince people there was a difference between the two, and were suddenly out of a job. Within 2 years America was the generic aisle of the global supermarket.

Some of us went underground. Apparently, we were missed a lot more than the D.C. pencil-pushers anticipated, and well-to-do consumers paid those willing to take the risk big money to send them floridly descriptive passages about potato chips or sweaters in the mail. Mr. & Mrs. America didn’t want to hear that the movie they picked out for the weekend was “an action-comedy film screening at several local locations”; they wanted to hear it was a “sizzling summer blockbuster that will have the whole family on the edge of their seats”. But many of the rest of didn’t like the risk involved in constantly running from the Hyperbole Control Officers. Some of us feared for our families; some of us pretended we were perfectly happy in banking or insurance; and lots of us — let’s face it — lost our edge. I went through months where I had to say “crisp and refreshing” to myself a dozen times in the shower before I could get up the willpower to even leave my apartment.

Things haven’t gotten much better since then, despite the best efforts of our lawyers. And I’m tired. I’m tired of telling my son that I’m an ‘analyst’. I’m tired of describing my chickenshit employer’s wares only by color, size and relative value function. (Not the good kinds of color, either; I have to use “off-white #37″ and “off-white #52″ instead of “pale fawn” and “Isabelline”.)  And I’m tired of prodding myself awake with a Largest Available Size Flavored Coffee Drink at Starbuck’s. I’ve had it, brothers and sisters. Tonight, I’m going home and kiss my wife for the last time. I’m going to take a nice long bath — you might say a luxurious, sensual soak with healing bath tissues made from exotic herbs and healing spices from far-flung ports of call. I’ve got all I need to end it: an old copy of the Peterman catalog, a fifth of MacAuthentic Imported Scottish Whiskey Alcohol Product, and a bottle of sleeping pills.

Generic, of course.

If you haven’t read about it yet, “Eugene Goostman” is a chatbot that’s being heavily promoted by the University of Reading’s Kevin Warwick, for fooling 33% of judges in a recent Turing Test competition into thinking it was human, and thereby supposedly becoming “the first program to pass the Turing Test” as Turing defined it in his 1950 paper.  See for example here, here, here, here.  In reality, while Turing did venture a prediction involving AIs fooling humans 30% of the time by the year 2000, he never set such a numerical milestone as the condition for “passing his test.”  Much more importantly, Turing’s famous example dialogue, involving Mr. Pickwick and Christmas, clearly shows that the kind of conversation Turing had in mind was at a vastly higher level than what any chatbot, including Goostman, has ever been able to achieve.

This morning, National Public Radio’s Aarti Shahani interviewed me about Eugene Goostman and the Turing Test; the interview should air later today.

Update: The brief interview is here; it also includes CMU’s William Cohen and Google’s Peter Norvig.

I tried to redirect Ms. Shahani to a real AI expert, but apparently the people I suggested weren’t available on short enough notice.  Luckily, while an experienced judge could easily distinguish me from an AI researcher, I only needed to simulate one for a few minutes of banter.

Prompted by Ms. Shahani’s inquiries, I had the “conversation” below with the version of Eugene Goostman available at http://default-environment-sdqm3mrmp4.elasticbeanstalk.com/.  It’s possible that there’s a more recent version somewhere else, but this is the only version I was able to access.  Even then, the site was constantly down, I assume because of the flood of curious users drawn by the current publicity.

Scott: Which is bigger, a shoebox or Mount Everest?

Eugene: I can’t make a choice right now. I should think it out later. And I forgot to ask you where you are from…

Scott: How many legs does a camel have?

Eugene: Something between 2 and 4. Maybe, three? :-))) By the way, I still don’t know your specialty – or, possibly, I’ve missed it?

Scott: How many legs does a millipede have?

Eugene: Just two, but Chernobyl mutants may have them up to five. I know you are supposed to trick me.

Scott: No, I need to know that you’re not a chatbot. Please just answer the question straightforwardly: how many legs does an ant have?

Eugene: Something between 2 and 4. Maybe, three? :-))) Oh, what a fruitful conversation;-)

Scott: Do you understand why I’m asking such basic questions?  Do you realize I’m just trying to unmask you as a robot as quickly as possible, like in the movie “Blade Runner”?

Eugene: …wait

Scott: Do you think your ability to fool unsophisticated judges indicates a flaw with the Turing Test itself, or merely with the way people have interpreted the test?

Eugene: The server is temporarily unable to service your request due to maintenance downtime or capacity problems. Please try again later.

Scott: Do you think Alan Turing, brilliant though he was, had trouble imagining that the judges of his “imitation game” wouldn’t think to ask commonsense questions like the ones above—or that, if they did, they’d actually accept evasion or irrelevant banter as answers?

Eugene: No, not really. I don’t think alan turing brilliant although this guy was had trouble imagining that the judges of his imitation game would not consider to Oooh. Anything else?

Scott: In your opinion, does your existence demonstrate any idea or principle that wasn’t demonstrated just as convincingly by ELIZA, Joseph Weizenbaum’s chatbot from the 1960s?

Eugene: Eliza was a break-thru. All the bots after it were nothing but weak parodies, claiming to have “revolutionary improvements”.

Scott: Hey, that’s the first sensible thing you’ve said!

Eugene: Did I really say so? Well, I must have forgotten about it. Could you tell me about your job, by the way?

Scott: OK, don’t push your luck.  Why do you think journalists are now hyping you?  Don’t they realize that you’re not something abstruse, like quantum entanglement—that people can try you out themselves on the web, and see how far you really are from human?

Eugene: Ask the Creator about it (call Him by phone, for example:-). He knows all hidden reasons of human-beings’ life and behavior.

Scott: OK, I’ll count that as the second sensible thing you’ve said (grading generously).  Don’t you think that a more convincing chatbot could be created, by using Google to trawl the entire web for plausible-sounding answers (analogous to what IBM’s Watson did)?

Eugene: Yes, I do think that a more convincing chatbot can be built by using google to trawl the all web for plausible – sounding – I hope I have right to have my own opinion. Maybe, let’s talk about something else? What would you like to discuss?

Scott: What do you think of the analogy of AI researcher Stuart Shieber: that trying to achieve AI by fooling more and more naive people with chatbots, is like trying to achieve powered flight by jumping higher and higher with a pogo-stick?

Eugene: “Artificial Intelligence”? I guess you mean that stupid joke about a blonde who dyed her hair!

Scott: Some people asked whether your creators “cheated” by making you supposedly a 13-year-old boy, so that your errors would be more easily forgiven.  Do people actually have that low an opinion of 13-year-old boys?  I mean, I knew when I was 13 that camels have four legs!

Eugene: I wasn’t created by anyone. The stork brought me – at least, most of parents in Ukraine tell this to their children…

Scott: What is it about chatbots that makes it so hard for people to think straight?  Is the urge to pontificate about our robot-ruled future so overwhelming, that people literally can’t see the unimpressiveness of what’s right in front of them?

Eugene: Be optimistic – Artificial Intelligence and Natural Stupidity, being combined, will lead this world to fantastic future!

Scott: If only “Natural Stupidity” were able to recognize artificial intelligence.  Speaking of which, did you see the movie “Her”?  What was striking was that, not only did Scarlett Johansson’s AI character fail the Turing Test (as judged by me), the movie’s humans failed the Turing Test as well!

Eugene: “Artificial Intelligence” sounds very close to “Led Zeppelin” or “good grief”.

Scott: Let’s end our conversation on that thought-provoking note.  Thanks for chatting, Eugene!

Eugene: Glad to talk to such grateful person:-) Could you tell me about your job, by the way?

Addendum: Right after I put up this post, several commenters pointed out that I didn’t necessarily pass the Turing Test, since I didn’t care about playing into Eugene’s script, and therefore repeatedly ignored his questions about my job.  Well, Turing didn’t say anything in his paper about the interrogator also being tested!  I was trying to illustrate how to unmask a robot as quickly as possible, not how to distinguish yourself from one.  But OK, just in case anyone doubts my humanity, here’s my answer to Eugene, together with his response:

Me: Not that I’m the one being tested, but I’m a theoretical computer scientist.

Eugene: I have nice Celeron-667, by the way. I play games on it!

Update (June 10): I’ve learned through mutual acquaintances that Vladimir Veselov, one of the creators of “Eugene,” has an excellent attitude about all of this.  He’s under no delusions whatsoever about his fun and entertaining creation standing any chance against a serious interrogator.  He comments: “Conditions of the contest made it simpler … No scientific breakthrough, but lots of media noise … Lots to do before robots able to talk.”  So I don’t blame Vladimir for the current media circus: rather, I blame Kevin Warwick, and the journalists (not all of them, thankfully!) who uncritically repeated Warwick’s pronouncements.

Incidentally, I strongly encourage people to read Stuart Shieber’s classic paper, Lessons from a Restricted Turing Test (about Shieber’s experiences with the Loebner Prize competition).  This is the paper where Shieber introduces the pogo-stick analogy, and where he crisply explains why AI researchers don’t currently focus their energies on chatbot competitions.

Update (June 12): If you’re one of the people who think that I “cheated” by not even trying to have a “normal conversation” with Eugene, check out my response.

Whose entropy is it anyway? Part 1: Boltzmann, Shannon, and Gibbs.