Quotulatiousness

June 6, 2012

Cassy’s guide to naming spaceships

Filed under: Greece, History, Humour, Media — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 08:13

You have to put a bit more thought into how you name your spaceships, people of the future!

Dear People of the Future,

Congratulations! If you’re reading this, you’ve just received a state-of-the-art spacecraft, and you’re probably about to take it on an extremely dangerous mission. Your journey may even concern the safety and continued survival of the human race.

But don’t worry! I’m betting your new ride is pretty sick. It’s probably got a warp drive and maybe a solar sail and lots of other technology I couldn’t even begin to understand.

At this point, you’re probably wondering: What should I name my spacecraft?

It’s good advice. Really. But I was surprised to find that there had been a USS Custer, a USS General Burnside, and even the USS Benedict Arnold.

H/T to John Turner for the link.

Colour footage of the D-Day landings

Filed under: Britain, Cancon, France, Germany, History, Military, USA, WW2 — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 00:02

Reposted from last year.

Update: Jonathan Kay on the forgotten casualties of the Slapton Sands exercise:

In the dead of night, just over 68 years ago, 30,000 Allied soldiers stationed in British ports filed onto amphibious landing craft, and put out to sea. The flotilla sailed toward its objective, and all went according to plan — until a German naval squadron patrolling the English Channel spotted the Allied force and opened fire. The defenseless landing craft began burning and sinking, sending more than 600 men to their deaths.

The surviving ships sailed on to their assigned landing zone, disgorging the soldiers onto the beach. There, the killing continued: More than 300 troops died in the sand, blasted to bits by incoming shells. All told, 946 men from among the original 30,000 died that day — a fatality rate of about 3%.

That figure was hardly unusual for major Second World War offensive operations. And yet, amazingly, the tragedy described in the paragraphs above wasn’t actually an offensive operation at all. It was Exercise Tiger, an American training mission that took place in April, 1944 — a full five weeks before D-Day.

The beach that the men landed on wasn’t in Nazi-occupied Europe, but Slapton Sands on the Devon coast. And the shells that rained down on the dunes were fired not from German artillery positions, but by guns on the British cruiser HMS Hawkins. As British historian Giles Milton notes, “the Supreme Allied Commander, General Eisenhower, had ordered that real ammunition be used, so that men would experience actual battlefield conditions. It was a disastrous decision.”

June 4, 2012

BBC coverage of the Jubilee Thames Pageant nearly as bad as the CBC coverage

Filed under: Britain, Cancon, Media — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 12:32

I was in the same room as the TV yesterday, which was tuned to the CBC’s “coverage” of the Queen’s Jubilee celebrations along the Thames River. Every time I paid a bit of attention, Peter bloody Mansbridge was committing another linguistic atrocity (HM-C-S Belfast? She’s a former Royal Navy ship, not an RCN vessel, Peter — oh, and she’s a light cruiser, not a “battle cruiser”). And aside from the Royal Barge, and the canoe from Peterborough, the boat that got the most attention was a bloody power boat that apparently was in a James Bond film. Crikey!

It seemed as though every appearance of a maple leaf had to be relayed to viewers — not, mind you, actual footage of the things they were talking about. The mandate seemed to be to keep the faces of the presenters front-and-centre all the time when they weren’t showing the Royal Barge. And on the odd occasion they’d show part of the flotilla, the CBC personalities felt the need to talk as much as possible even while they weren’t on camera.

From the National Post, Scott Stinson on the banality of it all:

Long after the royal barge had passed my vantage point near Chelsea Bridge on Sunday afternoon, I nipped into a London pub to warm up, dry off, and catch the rest of the proceedings on the television.

After the first few times someone on the BBC broadcast gushed about this or that aspect of the Thames Diamond Jubilee Pageant, I chalked it up to a mild case of homerism. The 1,000-boat flotilla was, after all, an impressive spectacle. Then I noticed how often the commentators were using the pronoun “we” when describing things, as in “we are all so anxious to catch a glimpse of Her Majesty.” So much for journalistic detachment. By the time one of the broadcasters was positively marvelling at the skill and ingenuity of the captain who was in the process of docking the royal barge, it was apparent that most of the Beeb’s broadcast team had gone right bloody native.

I mean, shouldn’t docking a boat be part of the job? Would we not expect that the person given the task of piloting the Queen up the Thames be better than decent at it? Yet, here was the commentator, oohing and aahing at the fact that the captain of the Spirit of Chartwell had pulled up alongside the dock and was now moving the boat sideways up to it for a gentle landing. “Look at that!,” he enthused. “It’s amazing!”

Jan Moir in the Daily Mail:

Turn the royal trumpets to the parp and piffle setting. Muffle the funeral drums. For on a molten grey stretch of the Thames, with a global television audience of millions watching, something died yesterday.

It was the BBC’s reputation as a peerless television broadcaster of royal events. It just could not survive under an onslaught of inanity, idiocy and full cream sycophancy uttered, muttered and buttered on thickly by a team of presenters who were encouraged to think that they were more important than the events unfolding around them.

Someone, somewhere thought that their celebrity personalities were enough to see them through this all-day broadcast. How very wrong they were.

‘I’ve just spotted my 70-year-old dad out there,’ gurgled Sophie Raworth, as barges packed with senior royals and VIPs slid by, unremarked upon. Who was in all the other boats? We never did find out.

Yes, the BBC1 coverage of the Diamond Jubilee Thames Pageant was historical — historically awful.

[. . .]

What were Beeb bosses thinking? If ever an event was crying out for a Dimbleby to dimble nimbly in the shallows, with that trademark mixture of gravitas, humour and sagacity, then this was it.

Instead, we got Sophie Raworth and Matt Baker, bouncing around as if they were presiding over the jelly stall at a chimps’ tea party, somehow managing to sound patronising about nearly everything.

June 2, 2012

Tim Harford on the basic daftness of “Buy British” policies

Filed under: Britain, Economics, Government — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 10:35

The same is true for “Buy American”, “Buy Canadian”, or “Buy Australian” programs, too:

The government could at least encourage everyone else to “buy British”.

An intriguing concept. But I don’t understand how this would support the British economy at all. Imagine the whole country collectively agreed not to buy fancy foreign muck unless it was at least 20 per cent cheaper than a comparable British product. Imports would surely take a beating. Assuming the rest of the world simply ignored our silly British ways and did not retaliate, exports would — at first — be unaffected.

Isn’t reducing imports exactly the desired effect?

But such an imbalance of exports and imports would not last. British exporters, flush with the foreign currency they had earned, would seek to spend it, or to find somebody else who wanted it. No one holding pounds would be terribly interested — everyone has, after all, agreed not to buy foreign products unless they are particularly cheap. The only way to get pounds in exchange for dollars, euros and yen would be to offer a premium.

In other words the value of the pound would have to rise.

Of course. And after it had risen a respectable amount, those foreign products would be cheap enough to buy again. Imports would recover. And exports would suffer from the stronger pound. They would and the eventual result would be that we would still buy some foreign products. To the extent that British domestic substitutes flourished, there would be an equal and opposite effect on British export industries.

So there’s no point in a “Buy British” campaign?

You might just as well run a “screw British exporters” campaign.

The Eurovision Song Contest and the European Union

Filed under: Europe, History, Humour, Media — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:45

Mark Steyn on the similarities between the top TV event in Europe and the EU itself:

One recalls the 1990 Eurovision finals in Zagreb: “Yugoslavia is very much like an orchestra,” cooed the hostess, Helga Vlahović. “The string section and the wood section all sit together.” Shortly thereafter, the wood section began ethnically cleansing the dressing rooms, while the string section rampaged through the brass section pillaging their instruments and severing their genitals. Indeed, the charming Miss Vlahović herself was forced into a sudden career shift and spent the next few years as Croatian TV’s head of “war information” programming.

Fortunately, no one remembers Yugoslavia. So today Europe itself is very much like an orchestra. The Greek fiddlers and the Italian wind players all sit together, playing cards in the dressing room, waiting for the German guy to show up with their checks. Just before last week’s Eurovision finale in Azerbaijan, The Daily Mail in London reported that the Spanish entrant, Pastora Soler, had been told to throw the competition “because the cash-strapped country can’t afford to host the lavish event next year,” as the winning nation is obliged to do. In a land where the youth unemployment rate is over 50 percent, and two-thirds of the country’s airports are under threat of closure and whose neighbors (Britain) are drawing up plans for military intervention to evacuate their nationals in the event of total civic collapse, the pressing need to avoid winning the Eurovision Song Contest is still a poignant symbol of how total is Spain’s implosion. Ask not for whom “Ding-Ding-A-Dong” dings, it dings for thee.

June 1, 2012

“Only the enemies of the Euro and of the European political project … dream of such a cataclysm”

Filed under: Britain, Economics, Europe — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 13:22

To be a True European, you must believe in the European project wholeheartedly and unreservedly. Any other attitude is unacceptable:

I was once interviewed by one of Le Soir’s best-known journalists, who asked me whether I was in favor of the European project. I said that I would answer if she would tell me what it was. She did not, and we moved on to other subjects. Whatever the European project may be, those who don’t embrace it wholeheartedly — with a fervor that can only be described as mystical, considering that no one can explain or define it in simple terms — are depicted not as skeptics, but as enemies. Thus in Le Soir, we read: “Only the enemies of the Euro and of the European political project, notably the City of London, dream of such a cataclysm [the break-up of the single currency]!”

The City of London — Britain’s equivalent of Wall Street — here plays the role of the bloated plutocrat of Soviet iconography or of the Jewish manipulator of Nazi iconography, pulling the strings behind the scenes in order to achieve its malevolent design of controlling the world. One can make many possible criticisms of the City of London, but a determination to destroy the viability of the euro for some unspecified, atavistic reason is certainly not among them. If the euro is viable, the City couldn’t destroy it; if it is not, the City cannot save it. Besides, the idea that there is a congregation of malign conspirators within the fabled Square Mile who would rejoice at the euro’s implosion is absurd; the prospect is almost universally viewed with apprehension, though it would not come as a surprise to everyone.

This is why I always cheer for whoever is bidding against Toronto to host the Olympics

Filed under: Britain, Economics, Sports — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 00:02

If publicly funded professional sports stadiums are bad for the local economy (and they almost always are), “winning” the bid to host the Olympic Games is far worse:

The history of the modern Olympics (and of other large-scale sporting events) reveals a consistent pattern. Organizers or local politicians in the host city commission “impact studies,” which almost always promise extravagant economic benefits. Studies performed after the event, however, find no positive effect at all — let alone one approaching the initial estimates. So it isn’t surprising that a PriceWaterhouseCoopers study commissioned by the British government forecasts that the Games would add about $9.4 billion to London’s GDP between 2005 and 2016. That seems like a large number until you realize that the London metro area’s GDP is roughly $712 billion annually. If the Games’ benefits were spread evenly throughout the decade, they would increase London’s GDP level by 0.1 percent each year.

Further, that $9.4 billion benefit pales compared with the cost of hosting the Olympics. In 2002, the UK’s Department for Culture, Media and Sport estimated that the cost would be $2.8 billion. Ten years later, London’s budget for hosting the Games is $15 billion. Costs already run above that figure and are likely to rise to approximately $38 billion, according to an investigation by the TV network Sky Sports. That would easily dwarf the economic benefits that the PriceWaterhouseCoopers study predicts. Security alone will be extremely costly: more British troops will patrol London than there are currently at war in Afghanistan. And these figures don’t count many hidden and indirect costs of hosting the Olympics — most prominently, disruption to business and traffic congestion. Traffic in London is already difficult; with special lanes for Olympics-related traffic, daily commutes will become a nightmare. (London’s transportation commissioner, Peter Hendy, helpfully advises commuters to go to the pub to avoid rush hour.)

Update, 5 June: The good news just keeps on coming for the London Olympics:

The boom to the economy that the Government hoped the Games would bring to the capital appears to become a bust with tens of thousands to tourists spurning the hiked prices, congestion and heightened security.

While bookings for July and August are down by 35 per cent on last year other European capitals appear to be prospering from London’s gloom.

French ministers, who lost the Olympic bid to Britain, might be quietly rubbing their hands with glee not only for dodging the £10 billion Games bill but also with a 50 per cent rise in tourism bookings. Similarly Barcelona and Berlin have seen their tourist numbers soar by 100 per cent over the summer.

This is an example of why, when the announcement was made that Paris had lost out on the bid for the 2012 Olympics to London, Reason titled their coverage “Lucky Paris“.

May 29, 2012

Is junk science more credible when presented with a British accent?

Filed under: Britain, Media, Science, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 11:10

In Slate, Daniel Engber talks about how easy it is for British junk science journalism to get republished in the United States:

More damning was the story’s overseas origin. The five-second study arrived in the American press by way of the Daily Mail, which explained in its own coverage that the work had been funded by a manufacturer of cleaning products, and then advised readers to replace their mop heads every three months so as to “minimize risk” from dangerous bacteria. When I contacted Manchester Metropolitan University for more details, I learned that the “researchers” and “scientists” described in media reports amounted to one person — a lab tech named Kathy Lees, who did not respond to my inquiries.

Let’s not single out the Mancunians, though: Industry-funded science fluff litters the whole of the British Isles. Also in the past few weeks, the U.K. press fawned over a comely chip-shop girl from Kent who was found by a national television network to possess a scientifically validated, perfect face, while the British version of HuffPo reported on a mathematical formula for the “perfect sandwich” — produced by a University of Warwick physicist in collaboration with a major bread manufacturer. Spurious mathematical formulae concocted at the behest of PR firms compose their own journalism beat in England: In recent years, we’ve seen the perfect boiled egg, the perfect day, the perfect breasts, and many more examples of scientists getting paid to turn life into algebra. As a naive magazine intern, I once took an assignment to write up one of these characteristically English equations — a means of calculating the perfect horror movie, in that case. The team of mathematicians behind the research turned out to be a couple of recent grads from King’s College London, who’d watched some movies and gotten drunk on vodka on behalf of Sky Broadcasting. “We only spent a couple of hours doing it,” one of them told me, “and didn’t put all that much thought into whether it works or how accurate it is.”

I love the use of the sure-to-be-useful-frequently term “labvertisements” for this sort of science-flavoured PR spam.

A review of the War of 1812 (non-Canadian-centric version)

Filed under: Britain, Cancon, History, Military, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 00:08

The DiploMad appears to be blogging again, and for proof, here’s a neat little capsule of the War of 1812 without the Canadian aspect being treated as the most significant campaigning area of the war:

The war was brought about by British arrogance and American stupidity. The British were not reconciled to an independent United States, and could not take the place and its bombastic pronouncements about liberty seriously. They basically ignored the USA’s assertion of being a sovereign state, and proceeded to treat American ships and seaman as some sort of Brits gone rogue. The USA, for its part, could not understand that the British were in what they saw as a life-and-death struggle with Napoleon Bonaparte. We did not respect that. We reckoned we could trade and make deals with France, such as the spectacular Louisiana Purchase which filled Napoleon’s coffers and served his aim of helping create a huge potential rival to Britain, without raising British concerns or provoking them into action.

[. . .]

The British, despite the war in Europe managed to put together a more than credible military and naval force against the distant United States. The Americans, in turn, showed a talent that would serve us well in future wars by getting our act together at the last minute and putting on a damn good defense of the country. The US army, however, remained plainly horrendous throughout the war with its corrupt and politicized officer corps, and its half-baked, ill-planned and even worse executed invasion of Canada. The US also set the precedent of burning York — today’s Toronto — which led to the British burning of the nascent US capital which the army failed to defend. The army partially redeemed itself in the Battle of New Orleans, under the otherwise reprehensible Andrew Jackson (Note: Why is he on our $20 bill?)

The US navy, however, proved completely different, and did an amazing job of fighting off the much larger British navy, wreaking havoc on it, carrying the war into British waters, and even eliciting a warning from the Admiralty to the Royal Navy to avoid one-on-one combat with US ships. The US navy also fought a superb campaign on the Great Lakes which resulted in the British fleet withdrawing from those waters.

Minor quibble: the Royal Navy withdrew from Lake Erie, not from all the Great Lakes. Lake Ontario was still the scene of a major fleet-building contest with vessels of up to 130 guns under construction or entering service when the war ended.

QotD: London slang of the 1930s

Filed under: Britain, History, Quotations — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 00:02

London slang and dialect seem to change very rapidly. The old London accent described by Dickens and Surtees, with v for w and w for v and so forth, has now vanished utterly. The Cockney accent as we know it seems to have come up in the ‘forties (it is first mentioned in an American book, Herman Melville’s White Jacket), and Cockney is already changing; there are few people now who say ‘fice’ for ‘face’, ‘nawce’ for ‘nice’ and so forth as consistently as they did twenty years ago. The slang changes together with the accent. Twenty-five or thirty years ago, for instance, the ‘rhyming slang’ was all the rage in London. In the ‘rhyming slang’ everything was named by something rhyming with it — a ‘hit or miss’ for a kiss, ‘plates of meat’ for feet, etc. It was so common that it was even reproduced in novels; now it is almost extinct1. Perhaps all the words I have mentioned above will have vanished in another twenty years.

The swear words also change — or, at any rate, they are subject to fashions. For example, twenty years ago the London working classes habitually used the word ‘bloody’. Now they have abandoned it utterly, though novelists still represent them as using it. No born Londoner (it is different with people of Scotch or Irish origin) now says ‘bloody’, unless he is a man of some education. The word has, in fact, moved up in the social scale and ceased to be a swear word for the purposes of the working classes. The current London adjective, now tacked on to every noun, is ‘fucking’. No doubt in time ‘fucking’, like ‘bloody’, will find its way into the drawing-room and be replaced by some other word.

1. It survives in certain abbreviations, such as ‘use your twopenny’ or ‘use your head.’ ‘Twopenny’ is arrived at like this: head — loaf of bread — twopenny loaf — twopenny

George Orwell, Down and Out in Paris and London, 1933.

May 28, 2012

Playing definitional games to demonize ordinary people as quasi-alcoholics

Filed under: Britain, Government, Health, Liberty — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 10:02

Most reasonable people would agree with the notion of using the government’s powers to help “problem drinkers” to drink less. It sounds like a good idea, unless you’re a weirdo libertarian type. Or a “problem drinker”. Building on this, the Scottish government recently passed a minimum alcohol price law with the stated intent of helping “hazardous” drinkers to drink less. But what’s the definition of a “hazardous” drinker? It’s almost certainly not what you’d expect:

A model of the possible effects of minimum pricing by the University of Sheffield has often been drawn upon by the media due to a lack of definite information on the effects of MAP. On the surface, the results look relatively reasonable to someone in favour of minimum alcohol pricing. At 50p per unit, the study suggests that the average ‘harmful’ drinker would be most likely to reduce their intake, followed by ‘hazardous’ drinkers, with ‘moderate’ drinkers suffering least, which, of course, all sounds very fair.

But on closer inspection, it appears as though my own drinking is hazardous. If you’re male and drink more than a pint a day of fairly standard lager on average, yours is too. If you’re female, you’re entitled to even less before you abandon moderation. ‘Binge drinking’ can be any more than 8 units in a single session, or three pints of lager. No, this is not a joke. Millions of British people, who certainly wouldn’t think of themselves as dangerous consumers of alcohol, are in this category. The words ‘hazardous’ and ‘binge’ seem almost bound to bring to mind serious, tabloid-beloved alcohol abuse. This isn’t the case.

[. . .]

Alcohol addiction is a serious social problem. Like all addiction, it’s closely associated with more severe health risks, mortality and crime, and requires the attention of government. Whether price increases help is debatable. An enormous 2009 meta-study of the effect of price on alcohol consumption certainly shows that alcohol consumption is inversely responsive to price. As the cost of alcohol rises, all groups drink less.

But the study also shows that heavy drinkers are significantly more inelastic than others, reacting less to price. This might well seem logical, as the group contains people who are addicted to alcohol. Alcoholics are less likely to consider increases in prices in the same way that casual drinkers do. Will some of the most dependent drinkers simply increase the amount they spend? We don’t yet know. Scotland is about to find out.

So aside from the basic nanny state meddling, the price hike won’t actually produce the reduction in alcohol consumption by the very folks it’s intended to target. It will increase profits for the producers of the cheapest forms of rotgut booze. What’s that old saw about unintended consequences again?

The EU elites’ fear of populism reveals their loathing of ordinary people

Filed under: Europe, Politics — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:32

In sp!ked, Patrick Hayes looks at the predictions of populist disaster from the EU elite:

There is little the EU elites fear more than so-called ‘populism’. According to one commentator, ‘in conferences and dinner parties from Brussels to Bratislava, the topic of populism dominates conversations’. As Corrado Passero, Italy’s minister of economic development, declared earlier this year, ‘our worst enemy right now is populism’. Clegg echoed such concerns in his interview with Der Spiegel. ‘Frankly’, he said, ‘questions about the British debate on EU membership will just be a small sideshow, compared to the rise of political populism’.

[. . .]

The casual equation of ‘populism’ with xenophobia, racism and even Nazism reveals much about the EU elites, and not a great deal about the actual views of the public. After all, that word — ‘populism’ — is commonly defined along the lines of the Collins dictionary as, ‘a political strategy based on a calculated appeal to the interests or prejudices of ordinary people’. Which raises a question: do Clegg and the many other politicians and commentators fretting about populism see xenophobia, racism and nationalism as being the default political prejudices of the public? From the public discussion, it would seem that if the ignorant, feral masses are not kept in their place by a liberal elite which understands their genuine interests, then concentration camps are just around the corner. As a Guardian editorial put it: ‘When Brussels or Berlin loses sight of [democracy], voters reach for simpler and uglier solutions.’

The widespread concerns being voiced by the political classes about the dangers of populism speak to an elitist disdain for mass politics. Trying to represent the uncontrollable electorates is seen to be cynically pandering to their proto-fascistic whims. The fear of the rise of populism, then, comes not from a genuine concern that a Fourth Reich is imminent, but rather from a terror of the public. The only solution is seen to be greater consolidation and centralisation of power in Europe-wide institutions in Brussels. These can then insulate the enlightened elite from the barbarian hordes roaming across Europe, so they can continue in their attempt to keep civilisation alive. The worst xenophobes are in fact among the European political elite, petrified of the ignorant, bigoted Others that make up the rest of the European populace.

Three Jubilees, three different Britains

Filed under: Britain, History, Media — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 09:18

In The Economist, “Bagehot” looks at the three most recent Jubilee celebrations, to see what the events might show of the state of Britain.

The 1977 Silver Jubilee:

Celebrations in 1977 involved children’s food—sausage rolls and jelly, hot dogs and ice cream—and beer for the grown-ups. There were violent sporting contests, from tugs-of-war to free-form football matches. To conquer reserve, fancy dress was worn, often involving men in women’s clothing. From the West Midlands came news of an all-transvestite football game, with the laconic annotation: “all ended up in the canal.”

London displayed both patriotic zeal (flag-draped pubs in Brick Lane, big street parties in Muswell Hill) and hostility (cheerless housing estates, slogans declaring “Stuff the Jubilee”).

Scotland was a nation apart. A file reports “total apathy” in Croy. In Glasgow the anniversary was called “an English jubilee”. Snobs sneered along with Scots. At Eton College, a wooden Jubilee pyramid was smashed by old boys. At Oxford University, examinations were held on Jubilee Day, in a display of indifference.

The 2002 Golden Jubilee:

By 2002 and the Golden Jubilee, Britain comes across as a busier, lonelier, more cynical place. The royal family was “just showbiz”, sniffed a diarist from Sussex. There is angry talk of Princess Diana and how her 1997 death was mishandled by the queen. There are fewer street parties than in 1977, all agree. This is variously blamed on apathy, the authorities (whose job it is to organise events, apparently) and above all on health-and-safety rules. In 1977, in contrast, one Wiltshire village cheerfully let a “pyromaniac” doctor take Jubilee fireworks home to add extra bangs.

And finally, this year’s Diamond Jubilee:

Visiting Wimbotsham, Bagehot is shown elaborate plans: cake-baking contests, pony rides, a teddy bears’ picnic, a sports day, a pensioners’ tea. But there will be no tug-of-war (people might hurt themselves) and the face painters have liability insurance. Still, the festivities will dwarf those seen in 2002, locals say. The monarchy endured a “big lull after Diana”, suggests David Long, the driving force behind Wimbotsham’s Diamond Jubilee. As the queen grows older, she is “more highly thought of”. Linda Nixon, a Wimbotsham pensioner, credits Prince William’s royal wedding with reviving enthusiasm. Prince William and his brother Prince Harry are “like everyday people”, she says.

QotD: Don’t read this before lunch

Filed under: Europe, Food, France, History, Media, Quotations — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 00:01

In the kitchen the dirt was worse. It is not a figure of speech, it is a mere statement of fact to say that a French cook will spit in the soup — that is, if he is not going to drink it himself. He is an artist, but his art is not cleanliness. To a certain extent he is even dirty because he is an artist, for food, to look smart, needs dirty treatment. When a steak, for instance, is brought up for the head cook’s inspection, he does not handle it with a fork. He picks it up in his fingers and slaps it down, runs his thumb round the dish and licks it to taste the gravy, runs it round and licks again, then steps back and contemplates the piece of meat like an artist judging a picture, then presses it lovingly into place with his fat, pink fingers, every one of which he has licked a hundred times that morning. When he is satisfied, he takes a cloth and wipes his fingerprints from the dish, and hands it to the waiter. And the waiter, of course, dips his fingers into the gravy — his nasty, greasy fingers which he is for ever running through his brilliantined hair. Whenever one pays more than, say, ten francs for a dish of meat in Paris, one may be certain that it has been fingered in this manner. In very cheap restaurants it is different; there, the same trouble is not taken over the food, and it is just forked out of the pan and flung on to a plate, without handling. Roughly speaking, the more one pays for food, the more sweat and spittle one is obliged to eat with it.

Dirtiness is inherent in hotels and restaurants, because sound food is sacrificed to punctuality and smartness. The hotel employee is too busy getting food ready to remember that it is meant to be eaten. A meal is simply ‘une commande‘ to him, just as a man dying of cancer is simply ‘a case’ to the doctor. A customer orders, for example, a piece of toast. Somebody, pressed with work in a cellar deep underground, has to prepare it. How can he stop and say to himself, ‘This toast is to be eaten — I must make it eatable’? All he knows is that it must look right and must be ready in three minutes. Some large drops of sweat fall from his forehead on to the toast. Why should he worry? Presently the toast falls among the filthy sawdust on the floor. Why trouble to make a new piece? It is much quicker to wipe the sawdust off. On the way upstairs the toast falls again, butter side down. Another wipe is all it needs. And so with everything. The only food at the Hotel X which was ever prepared cleanly was the staff’s, and the patron’s. The maxim, repeated by everyone, was: ‘Look out for the patron, and as for the clients, s’en fout pas mal!’ Everywhere in the service quarters dirt festered — a secret vein of dirt, running through the great garish hotel like the intestines through a man’s body.
George Orwell, Down and Out in Paris and London, 1933.

May 25, 2012

QotD: Sherlock and the fickle tide of fashion

Filed under: Books, Britain, Media, Quotations — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 00:02

[Y]ou can see why men wanted to get the look. Perhaps they noted the effect Cumberbatch, by no means your standard telly hunk, had on lady viewers […] and decided it must have something to do with the clobber. So it is that Britain’s latest men’s style icon is a fictional asexual sociopath first seen onscreen hitting a corpse with a horse whip. Surely not even the great detective himself could have deduced that was going to happen.
Alexis Petridis, “No chic, Sherlock”, The Guardian, 2010-09-04

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