Zines

I subscribe to three different magazines*. While I enjoy the magazines I subscribe to I’d be lying if I said I read every article in every issue of each. Indeed, between all three combined there’s probably an issue’s worth of articles I’m thrilled to read, an issue’s worth I’d read at a pinch, and an issue’s worth I’m not interested in at all.

And so…I keep dreaming of a subscription service which allows me to choose 15 articles a month from a suite of magazines, turns them into a PDF, and sends the PDF to me to print.  I’d happily pay for it…

 

* And the Surfer’s Journal

Wondering where that go to

About six months late and looking the worse for wear my Boston Review arrived over the weekend.

 

I think I know why it was late….

I’ve never been to France. In a stange way I’m actually kind of chuffed I own a mag that has.

The Book Review Takedown

This is near perfect. I love the horses’ return at the end.

Love Songs

90% of love songs suck. Here’s two that don’t.

 

For what it’s worth, I think Classic Girl works because it’s about actual human experience rather than some sort of idealised form of it. While Ash on the other hand aren’t quite singing about love but instead that giddy feeling of falling into it. Which works just fine amongst the tumbling guitars and space cadet lyrics.

Oh, and, “they may say those were the days; but in a way you know for us these are the days…” has to be one of the happiest lines in pop.

Small Comment

Ok, so busy, busy, and post free until next weekend.

In the meantime though, I just wanted to say that I’m still kinda chuffed that Elinor Ostrom won the Nobel prize.  :)

Certainty

As I opened my mouth I was certain I knew what I was talking about, by the time I closed it again I wasn’t nearly so sure…

Poor

From here:

The combined GDP of the 58 countries of the bottom billion is about $350 billion per year — smaller than the GDP of metropolitan Chicago.

Meanwhile on the back of a very small envelope…

Duncan Green links to an interesting attempt by the World Bank’s Martin Ravallion to answer the question, can the world’s poorest countries eliminate extreme poverty by redistribution? The short answer is that for wealthier developing countries (like Brazil), they actually could. However, for the World’s poorest countries there simply isn’t the money to redistribute.

This got me thinking about the global distribution of wealth and so I jotted a few numbers down on the back of a very small envelope (or, in other words, these are very rough scribbles, they could be wrong and I haven’t double checked them…)

In 2005 global income per capita was $8,730 (US purchasing power parity dollars.) Or, in other words, if the globe’s income was distributed equally everyone would have had earnt $8,730 in 2005. (Purchasing Power Parity takes into account the fact that US$1 goes further in developing countries so everyone would have earnt $8,730 and the cost of living would have been the same as it was in the US in 2005).

The Globe’s income isn’t distributed equally however, and, in fact, in 2005 nearly half the World’s population lived off less than $912/year (US PPP) or $2.50 a day. Approximately 80% of the World lived below the US poverty line of $13/day.

Had the World’s income been distributed equally, the percentage living off less than $2.50/day would have been 0. The percentage living off less than $13/day would have been 0 too. In fact everyone would have been living of $24/day: 1.85 times the US poverty line.

In other words, poverty – as measured by a US poverty line – would have been well and truly eliminated globally. Instead, in the real world 8 out of every 10 people live below that line.

In table form…

Of course, this doesn’t mean that we should strive to equalise global income as a tool to eliminate poverty. Let’s consider that proposition using Eric Olin Wright’s 3 criteria for utopian thinking.

As far as desirability goes, using a simple utilitarian calculus the equalised globe would certainly be desirable. The welfare of the vast majority of the World’s population would be dramatically improved.

The trouble is, such an equalisation would not be (to use Wright’s terms) either viable or, realistically, achievable.

In terms of viability, such radical equalisation of wealth would eliminate the incentives that play a role in generating wealth in the first place. And equality of this degree could only be maintained by the sort of police state that used to keep George Orwell awake at night.

And, in terms of achievablity , the sad truth is that, while redistribution of the nature described above would improve the welfare of most of the world’s population it would dramatically decrease the welfare of one particular group: the already very powerful, who would no doubt resist tooth and claw. Meaning that even if such a world could feasibly exist, getting there would be next to impossible.

Still, it’s worth noting that the staggering phenomenon that is global poverty doesn’t in exist the current day and age because the planet as a whole is too poor. Rather it exists because we are too unequal.

Refs:

Global Figures.

Ravallion 2008 [PDF]

Chen and Ravallion 2008 [PDF]

Paul Collier Debated

The Boston Review has an interesting essay debate on Paul Collier’s thinking and the potential for international intervention to help the World’s poorest countries. Definitely worth a read.

As I read through it I took some notes. When I get time I’d like to write them up into a post of their own, with my own thoughts. For now, they’re over the fold.

Limits to Growth

Wow.

Rich nations will need to reconsider making growth the goal of their societies, according to the leading economist who wrote the government’s report on climate change.

Lord Stern…

What’s Left

More jotted notes, sorry…back to the hillsides and horizons stuff soon, I promise!

I’m trying to think my way through a technical, and neutral, definition of left-wing politics. Historically, the left was defined by a concern with equality but I don’t think this is true any more – quite a few on the left would be happy to tolerate inequality if it led to absolute increases in welfare.

So my draft definition would be:

An active concern with the welfare of the less well off, and a belief in the need for collective action to improve the welfare of society’s less well off.

The key distinguishing feature between left and right being the belief in the need for collective action (collective action, not state action so as to include anarchists). It’s not that the Right doesn’t have concern for the less well off, but rather that they’re more sceptical of active collective efforts to improve things.

Obviously, this is all about degree: most centre right parties favour some collective action in the area of improving welfare, but typically it’s less than advocated than by groups to the left of them.

One other type of definition I thought of was that the left tend to argue that actions that appeal to a deontological ethics (sharing, cooperation etc) will lead to better outcomes in a consequentialist sense too. Of course some segments of the right, particularly libertarians, do this as well, with a completely different set of deontological ethics (particularly geared around self-ownership and property rights), but much of the right (classical conservatives, if you will) argues against the deontologically appealing with the claim that it just won’t work.

In Defence of Globalisation

Once upon a time people felt the need to write weighty tomes defending globalisation. If they really wanted to defend it, all they needed to do was this.

(H/T Chris Blattman)

District 9 – a really short review

For a couple of years I was stalked by the movie Independence Day. People would suggest we go see it at the cinema, I’d stop round to visit friends and they would have just got it on video, I’d get on a plane and it would be in-flight entertainment. Arrgghh. It was insufferable. A long series of cliches and improbabilities held together something a generous observer might mistake for a plot. People called it escapism. Me, stuck watching it again, I just wanted to escape.

Possibly the most grueling element of the movie were the implausibly evil aliens and the flag wavingly fantastic American heroes. On about the third watch, as an antidote I day-dreamed what I figured a more realistic alien encounter movie would look like. For a start we’d be the baddies; the history of human conquest and colonialism makes that pretty likely. And we’d be convincing ourselves we weren’t bad all along, like we’ve always done.

In my day dream movie we, the humans, would be the ones venturing into outer space, made more dangerous than ever with superior technology and interstellar travel. I’d never thought about bringing the aliens here…

…and so I was pretty chuffed by District 9, with it’s alien refugees and realistically detestable humans. It’s an achievement when a movie takes you out of your own collective identity and has you cheering for another race or nationality. It’s an even bigger achievement, I think,  when by the end of District 9 you’re cheering as the lobster-like aliens vaporise human villan after human villan.

Of course, it wasn’t perfect, the plot bulldozed over a quite a few holes. And the portrayal of the Nigerians made me queasy. Surely, a movie set in opposition to xenophobia and simplistic depictions of the Other, could have avoided basing one of its groups of villans on a bunch of stereotypes of Nigerian refugees? Still, the Nigerians are far from the greatest villans in the tale, that title is awarded fairly and squarely to Us, which makes a pleasant change, poor old Them having been tarred with it for so long.

[Update: Here's a Nigerian who thinks District 9 isn't racist against Nigerians.]

I was wondering as I drove home…

is William Easterly a kind-of conservative or  a sort-of libertarian. By which I mean, are his objections to aid and planning driven by a cautious conservative incrementalism that recognises the need for collective action but also appreciates its limits and argues that we should work slowly to improve practice and expand the boundaries of what we can successfully do, rather than making large leaps into the unknown (so something vaguely akin to the conservatism of Michael Oakeshott).  Or does he really believe that collective action itself is mostly unnecessary and that we have the answers we need to the problems of the world in the system of free exchange (libertarian, in other words).

Either way he could be right, I’m not using these terms pejoratively here, I’m just curious – both tendencies can be found in his writing at different times.

Irrational Reassurance

Robert Shiller’s talk on behavioural finance at the LSE is worth a listen (you have to scroll down to find it). It’s rambly, but that seems ok; almost the right tone for a talk on the less rational aspects of economic behaviour.

Listening to it, it seems to me that you there’s a very plausible argument to say that the bank bailouts and stimulus package worked, not just because they freed up capital flows and pumped money into the economy but also because they reassured people that there was something that could be done. And would be done. And that reassurance changed behaviors from the types perpetuating the economic unravelling (cinema, smoke, I’m heading for the door!), to types that slowly started to counter it.

Maybe.

On this theory everything could still go belly up if people were to lose confidence in the ability of governments to act. If they were confronted with government failures to match the market ones we’ve just seen.

-~-

Meanwhile, being pessimistic, if the worst of the GFC is behind us, presumably we’ll be shortly returning to the other crisis it interrupted – commodity shortages. Not to mention the climate crisis on its way…

War, Aid and Photos

William Easterly now has his own watch site, which might be interesting. Although I reckon they should have called themselves Aid Watch Watch.

Meanwhile, Easterly’s co-blogger Laura Freschi has a post taking MSF to task for an advertising video.

Ignoring the specifics of the MSF add, there is an interesting more general debate to be had about the use of images in fund-raising. One which development NGOs have been having for a long time. At its heart is the question “is it right to use advertising images of people in developing countries that perpetuate (unfair) stereotypes of utterly dysfunctional countries and desperate, passive poor people waiting for our help?”

Here’s the dilemma: assume that these sorts of images are very effective in raising money (their continuing presence suggests they are) and assume that the money is put to good use.

The question you then have to answer is, “is that good overcome by the harm caused by the adds?”

This question itself has two parts:

1. Do these adds really do much to shape people’s perspectives of the lives of the poor in developing countries?

2. And, if they do, does that really matter? I.e. is any real, significant, tangible harm done.

On question 1, I think the answer is probably yes, but it’s arguable whether the impact is significant when added to the impact of ongoing media reporting of bad news from developing countries.

On question 2, I really don’t  know: if middle New Zealand had a more accurate understanding of the lives of the poor in developing countries would that change much? Maybe some of our policies towards these countries might alter, maybe? And would that have an impact? Potentially, I guess.

Of course, if you’re talking about the USA or Europe, the impact of changed policies would potentially be much larger. But even then you have to ask what policy changes are currently being hampered currently by stereotypes?

I don’t have the answers but that is what the debate is about. Because if the adds do no real harm, then you’d have to say the good done through the money raised makes them ok, at least from a consequentialist standpoint.

Utopian Thinking for Development Folk

Development work is arguably the death of utopianism. You enter it wanting to save the world, after a few years you’re just happy if your spreadsheets reconcile.

More seriously, development is a business of enforced pragmatism, compromise and incremental change – there isn’t that much room for dreaming of utopia. Nevertheless, Erik Olin Wright’s guidelines for utopian thinking provide a useful schema for development thought.

Wright suggests thinking about Utopias in terms of desirability; viability; and achievablity.

Is your utopia desirable – i.e. would it actually be a nice place.

It it viable – that is, would it ever work – would the constraints of human nature ever allow it to exist.

And is it achievable – could we ever get there from here.

Something similar works for development:

In the case of desirable – you can ask ‘what do you really want from development?’ What will the end goal look like if everything goes well? Is it simply material wealth; or human development; or are you unsatisfied with these and seek one of the alternative developments the post-development people talk about. Maybe you think development is an undesirable objective full stop.

So ‘desirable’ is treated more or less the same. But viable and achievable are shifted from descriptive criteria to questions about change.

In the place of viable – what you really want to ask is: what does country/region/community X need to do to get to this desirable state? What needs to change?

And in place of achievable, what you want to ask is what can we as external agents do to contribute to what is needed. It’s this last question that is, I think, the real kicker for aid agencies. It’s not that hard to envisage what a better development state might look like for most places; its also not that hard to describe what needs to change. It’s much, much harder to outline just what you can realistically do to bring about this change.

Ok – enough rambling for the evening…

Efficiency of What

More random musings…

When economists talk about efficiency, whether they know it or not, what they’re really talking about is efficiency of Utility (well being, happiness, or something similar). While it’s easier, and often a necessary approximation, to think of efficiency in terms of dollars and cents, doing so is meaningless on its own. It needs to be anchored eventually back to welfare.

Following from this, the point I take from Michael Sandel’s first Reith Lecture (well worth a listen; don’t let my rambling put you off) is that, while markets are quite efficient at some things, seeking to extend them into parts of society that have traditionally been the domain of impulses other than self-interest weakens the moral bonds that govern these spheres, and risks undermining social capital.

[Update: Continued the next night] And undermining social capital can reduce people’s well being. Or, to put it another way: if you get to fixated on dollar and cents efficiency and start expanding the reach of markets into moral realms you’ll ultimately undermine efficiency of Utility.

The Wealth and Poverty of Nations (3 schools of thought)

I’m just jotting notes. One of these days I’d like to turn this into a talk. Remember, these are just my musings – I could be wrong.

The Wealth and Poverty of Nations – three schools of thought and a bunch of also-rans

Most of the world is very, very poor, small pockets of it are very, very rich – what gives? What follows is an explanation of three of the main forms of answer to this question, as well as a brief note on some also-rans – theories that have had their days in the sun but which aren’t so compelling now.

Lets start with the also-rans:

Save the Footpath

Save Manners Mall! You can join the Facebook group. You can hardly avoid the eye-catching posters.  But can you, can anyone, actually explain to me what’s there to save? What good is served by the current pedestrianised Manners Mall that outweighs the need to improve our public transport system?

These aren’t rhetorical questions. Maybe I’m missing something amongst the mopey teenagers, the grimy bricks and the sparse, ugly seats. If so, I’d love to know what it is.

Ghosts

Simon has a ghost story from South Amercia. How do you explain these things? He doesn’t give us the back story, so maybe this tale hasn’t been relayed to him first hand by the protagonists, maybe it’s a rural urban-legend. But that’s not the sense I get.

So how do you explain these things?

Of course it could just be people seeking supernatural explanations for simple somnambulism. And I guess that’s most likely the case.

But there’s a part of me, a day-dreamy part fed by teenage years reading fantasy novels, that can’t quite shake the idle thought that our ancestors’ belief in the super-natural isn’t just a collection of mistaken attempts to explain the natural world. But that, once, ghosts existed – an existence impossible to test or to prove. Because test and proof are the vanguard of reason. And because reason itself, if clung to strongly enough, and if drawing upon a sufficient reservoir of shared belief, is sufficient to vanquish these things without contest. Study them scientifically and they vanish.

Of course, there’s also a part of my that thinks the above explanation is utter, utter nonsense.

!

At the River

Marianne quells her internal critic in time to enjoy the view. And as someone who likes views and who also spends far too much time time distracted by his own internal chatter I’m thinking good for her.

I’m also remembering…

…late summer in London and a shorter than usual stop in between surf trips. Short enough that I’d not got round to getting a key cut for the front door of the travellers house where I was staying. The doorbell would do I figured. People would let me in. I did the same for them. It was how the house worked; enough give and take to enable a restless and shifting group of people to live together under the same roof.

Or, at least, that was how I saw it. Rhino the Sicilian South African clearly didn’t.

“You again!”

The exclamation mark was wilted; the weary anger of someone who was missing his sleep.

“Get your own key cut you lazy fuck. I’m not your doorman.”

“Sorry.” Words, especially retorts, fail me when I’m flustered. I pushed past him into the house.

Half an hour later I was walking down to Fulham, continuing my errands, seething in the smoggy heat.

What a jerk. I’ve let him in before. He’s such a weirdo too.

As I walked, concocting all the devastating retorts I’d forgotten in the heat of the moment, my mind drifted to a tale I’d read in a new-age book. In it, two monks came across a beautiful woman at the side of a swollen ford. Acceding, to her request, one of them carries her across. Later that day as they continued along their way, the other monk, troubled, asks the first.

“How could you do that? Carry such a beautiful women? Exposing yourself to temptation”.

To which the first monk answers. “That woman? Are you still thinking about her? I left her at the river.”

It’s a lamentably male-centric story, of course. But the message, I thought, wasn’t bad: it’s happened; let it go!

The trouble was, I couldn’t let Rhino go. The confrontation bugged and bugged me.

And so I stewed, all the way to High Street Kensington. What was wrong with me. Why couldn’t I learn the lesson of the monks. Why couldn’t I let it go. I was travelling, learning all these lessons, and I could never put them into practice. It was so easy I just had to stop thinking about him. And I couldn’t

Except that, oddly enough, I had. I was no longer feeling uptight about Rhino. I was feeling uptight about the fact that I’d felt uptight.

And perhaps, that was progress enough, for that over-heated August day.

:)

A thought experiment…

…for people who think only negative freedoms matter.

You are the last person left alive on Earth. There is no longer a state, nor any rules. There are no taxes to pay. You can do what you want. No one will stop you. No one will ever stop you. Your liberty is complete.

How does that freedom feel?

Soil and Sand

I’ve seen devils coming up from the ground
I’ve seen hell upon this earth
…
Give your leaders each a gun and then let them fight it out themselves

~ Harry Patch

Harry Patch, the last surviving soldier to have fought in the Trenches in World War 1 died last month. He survived the battle of Passchendaele to live to be 111 years old. Radiohead released a song for him, using as lyrics words from an interview Patch once gave. Have a listen.

A couple of years ago I took a tour out to the end of Farewell Spit. As our four wheel drive bus bucked and bounced over the track onto the 26 kilometre long bow of sand, our guide told us the story of Jack Ashford, another Passchendale vet. Jack had been gassed in the trenches there, his lungs ruined. Returned to New Zealand, and advised by doctors that he didn’t have long to live, he sought work in the supposedly curative salt air. He became Farewell Spit lighthouse keeper, and the first person to traverse the length of sand regularly in an automobile.

As I sat out at the lighthouse that day, eating my sandwiches under the sighing marcocarpa trees, staring at the folding swash of the waves out off the shore, I made believe a story. I sketched Jack Ashford in my head, wheezing softly, sitting beneath younger trees, on an afternoon when the seabreeze was light and the ocean no menace to ships. And I imagined him, on that day, finding in the sun and space an antidote of sorts to the doom of trench warfare.

I was doing what everyone does, of course: making up stories to avoid staring the horrors of World War 1 in the face.

But maybe…Jack Ashford did live to be 99, afterall.

Beautiful Titles for Academic Books…

Coral Gardens and Their Magic

North Face: Good, Bad and Ugly

The rock face was sheer and unforgiving. Even in summer the bits that weren’t vertical were dusted with snow. I stared intently, trying to stifle vertigo, swallowed by the drop, by the yawning space below. One wrong move, one misplaced footstep, one frayed rope – and doom. I squirmed on my uncomfortable perch.

Now was not the time to freak out. Most definitely not. The cinema was packed. Half of them rock climbers for sure. What would they make of some balding chubby guy hobbling out at top speed, wailing, sloshing cola.

I practiced a technique I’d used successfully in horror movies.

Don’t worry Terence they’re just actors. Just actors, just actors.

That worked for a bit, right up to the rock fall.

And that was the good. To my non-climber eyes, the climbing scenes in North Face were astounding, compelling, authentic, frighteningly real.

On the other hand, the the bad and the ugly were both to be found where the movie deviated from reality, from what really happened in Kurz/Hinterstrosser/Angerer/Rainer expedition.

The ugly is the portrayal of the two Austrians (Angerer and Rainer), they’re arrogant, freeload off the Germans and ultimately contribute to their demise. They’re also the avid Nazis in the group. Which is all kind of ironic: German movies these days have to be anti-Nazi but, apparently, non-Nazi German nationalism is just fine. And if by a sleight of hand you can blend your anti-Nazism and nationalism in a manner in which foreigners become the Nazis and Germans the anti-Nazis, well that’s even better…hhmmmm.

And the bad is the hokey romantic half story which is tacked onto the climb. The heroine who spends a night on the face, communicating with her almost lover as he slowly expires. But who also salvages from the tragedy the courage to follow her own dreams and live her own life in a meaningful manner. Blah. I can understand why the authors of the movie wanted an ending that salvaged something from Kurz’s death. Plenty of people die rock climbing, but that’s not the story. The story is how they live. The places they go and the beauty, purpose and fulfillment that comes with getting there. If I were making a movie about climbing I wouldn’t want to end with the grim death of a man trapped on a rope, either. But nor would I want to duck my way out of a bind by inventing an improbable cliff climbing heroine who’s future redeems the expedition’s grisly end. Personally, and I’m no movie maker, so maybe this would suck just as bad, I’d end my movie by going back in time, leaving Toni Kurz atop one of the summits he did scale, alive and revelling in it, in a place most of us will never go. If he died on a rock face, he lived on them too. And that’s happy enough in it’s way.

Rational Irrationality

William Easterly digests Vernon L Smith so we don’t have to.  The interesting, if not completely novel, insight is that that which appears irrational in the experiment actually serves a deeper rationality in the real world. Irrationally, players of Prisoner’s Dilemma type games don’t defect and betray their partners as often as you would expect, while in other experimental games a preference for fairness trumps rational self interest. On the surface we’re nowhere near as rational nor self-interested as are the representations of ourselves that populate neo-classical economics. And yet, in real life, where games are played time and time again, and where no woman is an island, being loyal and fair is a form of a rational strategy for maximising one’s own welfare. Often enough, the treacherous are betrayed in return. And the unfair excluded from exchange. And so, as communal creatures, somewhere under our first layer of consciousness we’ve developed preferences for fairness and trust in others, the propensity to exhibit such behaviour ourselves and the tendency to create social norms to foster such behavior. And, broadly speaking this is a good for our self interest.

So far so good, but you get the sense that from this insight Smith and Easterly are then happy to pull out the stumps, declare victory and ignore behavioral economics happily ever after. Which would be odd because the fact that our irrationality is kind of rational at a deeper level doesn’t leave it any less at odds with the model of behaviour underpinning neo-classical economics…

…to be continued (and hopefully made coherent too…)

XKCD again

I know, it’s kind of sad to keep linking to the same comic stip. But, again, perfect.

Where is my mind?

So this morning I discovered my work email account was too large and that I had to delete a bundle of emails. Easy enough. What was more troubling was reading over some of them and having no memory whatsoever of their writing. Where is my mind?

Speaking of which, I know that you can’t actually be a real Pixies fan and like Where is My Mind. Fair enough, I’m not a real Pixies fan. I just like all their songs. Including that one. So here is Where is My Mind.

Red Cliff – a really short review

In this age of globalisation, with the tides of technology sweeping us all towards a crash of civilisations, it is reassuring to learn that there are some things already held in common.  Some things that transcend the great walls of culture. Some universal beliefs. Some starting points for a universal conversation, maybe.

It’s less reassuring to spend two hours in a cinema learning the first of these commonalities is that movies about war, wherever they are made, are filled with the same grizzly cliches.

The typos you make…

from a research note I drafted recently:

“Infant morality is a serious issue.”

Mortality, mortality.

Although, who knows, the morals of infants may have development ramifications we don’t yet fully understand.

Starlings!@#$%!!

Well I can’t say I wasn’t warned. Parked on the other side of the street for a change, under the trees, nipped out for a meal, and returned to find my car covered, like a proto-Nauru…

Gang Leader for a Day

Research for my Masters thesis took me to Brazil. I wasn’t particularly brave about it. Two days before the trip a friend and I replaced the white laces on my brand new running shoes with some old black ones, cunningly, we figured, reducing the risk that I’d get mugged for my shoes (yes, I’m serious, this actually happened). When I first got to Porto Alegre I became a sort of inverse vampire, desperately scampering back to my hotel the moment things got dusky – so certain was I that the streets would become filled with muggers the moment the sun sank behind the horizon. When I got to Rio – fed for months on tales of the dangers of the city – I practically commando rolled across the tarmac at the domestic airport.

In other words, I was nothing like Sudhir Venkatesh, sociologist and author of Gang Leader for a Day. He spent years researching the housing complexes of Chicago, starting off his project by being detained at gun point.

I’ve written a review of Venkatesh’s book, which is up at Scoop Review of Books.

It’s also over the fold.

Wellington!

I know, I know, I’m always saying this but, this evening…

… clouds retreating east, pulled back like a curtain, letting in the winter sky; sunset to the west, smouldering behind the mountains. The wash of breaking waves in bits and pieces along the coast. The hopeful blink of a lighthouse as it waited for the stars…

…had to have been the most beautiful evening that Wellington ever stitched together.

Yeah, Yeah – We all know what you’re against, but what are you for?

As a younger man I was never short of a cause. All for this, all for that. Nowadays though, older and wearier, it’s harder to say just what it is I stand for. Hard, but not impossible. Whatever this is, I’m all for it!

(Wrong) Word!

From the Guardian:

It probably seemed a good idea at the time. But Russia’s attempt to create a joint gas venture with Nigeria is set to become one of the classic branding disasters of all time ‑ after the new company was named Nigaz.

H/T Chris Blattman

Skating

Halfway down I got the speed wobbles. Momentum and gravity too much for the cheap rubber bearings, the skateboard under my feet started whipping this way and that. Quickly, our trajectories became irreconcilable and the board shot off leaving me alone with the tarmac. For a few steps I ran, top-heavy and twisting, desperately trying to stay upright, then a foot clipped a leg and the inevitable took place. Down I went, smacking into the ground, rolling, thwap, thwap, thwap. I lay there for a while, black jeans torn, blood starting to seep from various grazes, before eventually picking myself up, shaky and aching.

I’d like to tell you that I found my board, pulled it out of the bushes, limped back up the road, turned around and conquered that damn hill. But I didn’t, I just hobbled off home. And that was pretty much the end of my skating days.

So I never became a skater but I’ve always been an avid spectator. Not just for the skill, but also for the way they turn the ugly, forgotten, functional parts of the city into sites of fun and grace.

Goldmine!

Gold! – for anyone who ever tired of reading about the world but who doesn’t mind listening to other people talk.

Thanks to my IPOD and the LSE public lectures audio site, traffic jams will never be the same…

State of Play – a very, very short review

Plot twist? Plot dislocation would be my diagnosis. A painful waste of $16.