Quotulatiousness

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.

May 28, 2012

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.

May 24, 2012

Unsupport your unfavourite Premier League team

Filed under: Britain, Football, Soccer — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 13:18

Duleep Allirajah explains why he’s a “90-minute Quisling”:

Years ago, long before Google came to the salvation of lazy football writers who couldn’t be bothered with microfiche searches, the term ‘unsupport’ was coined in the football magazine, When Saturday Comes.

It meant, as the name suggests, the exact opposite of supporting a team. You wished defeat on another team, hated that team with a passion. So, for example, in the last day of the Premiership season, many neutrals wanted Manchester City to win the title. This was not through any great love for the oil-rich upstarts in blue, but because they were unsupporting Manchester United. In the Premiership era, Manchester United are simultaneously the best supported and, at the same time, the most unsupported club in the land. Unsupporting is the football equivalent of Newton’s third law of motion: all the time United are successful, hatred of the side occurs as an equal and opposite reaction.

You can tell a lot about people by the team they hate. Take Manchester United unsupporters. They assume two forms. In the blue half of Manchester or on Merseyside, the Anyone But United (ABU) sentiment is an expression of bitter local rivalry. But throughout the rest of the country, ABU represents an increasing disenchantment with modern football. Manchester United is essentially a proxy for the gentrification and commercialisation of the game. When fans sing ‘Stand up if you hate Man U’, it’s not simply green-eyed envy of United’s success, it’s also a howl of protest against the corporate takeover of football. United embodies everything the traditionalists hate about the Premier League: the hype, the desecration of 3pm kick-offs, the relentless merchandising, the prawn-sandwich munching ‘plastic fans’, and the absentee foreign owners

The constant appearance of Manchester United and Chelsea at or near the top of the English Premier League have always seemed to me to be a good argument in favour of a salary cap in the NFL style: otherwise richer clubs will always be able to buy their way to a higher season finish than poorer teams.

On the other hand, the NFL could learn from the EPL with their promotion/relegation system (I say that in full knowledge that my beloved Vikings would have been relegated after the 2011 season if such a scheme was implemented). Of course, structurally the NFL and EPL have many differences preventing the adoption of the other sport’s practices, but as (I think) Gregg Easterbrook pointed out, Ohio State … sorry, The Ohio State University’s football team could have beaten both of Ohio’s professional teams for much of the last decade.

May 8, 2012

“If this drought continues much longer, we’re going to run out of umbrellas”

Filed under: Britain, Environment, Government — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 10:40

Rob Lyons on the amusing juxtaposition of a “hosepipe ban” in the south of England and the wettest April since record keeping began:

It never rains but it pours scorn. That must be how many of England’s water companies feel as millions make fun of them. Having just declared a hosepipe ban and spent a fortune on posters declaring ‘WE ARE IN DROUGHT’, the heavens have opened. Result? The surreal combination of drought restrictions on water use going side-by-side with the wettest April since records began in 1910.

It is as if the declaration of drought were a latter-day raindance. Comedian Jimmy Carr quipped what everyone was thinking: ‘If this drought continues much longer, we’re going to run out of umbrellas.’ The combination of dramatic flooding in some parts of the country that are under drought restrictions caused one friend of mine to coin the term for our current water status: ‘flought’. Pictures of Thames Water’s bus adverts juxtaposed with people in the street huddling under brollies made newspaper front pages.

Yet, while the current situation is bizarre, the water companies do have a point. If the current storage sites are running low of water after two years of well-below-average rainfall, then we need to start preserving stocks. One month of heavy rain is welcome, but unless we have a particularly sodden summer and, more importantly, a damp-and-dreary winter, supplies could start to look very sparse indeed. That’s particularly true in the south and east of England, which depend on underground aquifers to store a large proportion of water supplies. The levels in these aquifers rely on winter rain to drip through the rocks above. Summer rain tends to run off, evaporate or get absorbed by growing plants. A quick look back to February and the warnings coming from Thames Water and others show how serious the problem had become before the deluge.

April 13, 2012

Mapping 18th century shipping patterns

Filed under: Africa, Americas, Asia, Economics, Europe, History, Science — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:06

An interesting post at the Guardian on tracing historical shipping patterns:


(Larger version at the original URL)

James Cheshire, of Spatial Analysis, has taken historical records of shipping routes between 1750 and 1800 and plotted them using modern mapping tools.

The first map, above, shows journeys made by British ships. Cross-Atlantic shipping lanes were among the busiest, but the number of vessels traveling to what was than called the East Indies — now India and South-East Asia — also stands out when compared to Dutch and Spanish records.

I was surprised to see how many trading voyages there were to and from the Hudson Strait — fur trade traffic, I assume.


(Larger version at the original URL)

This second map shows the same data for Dutch boats. The routes are closely matched to the British ones, although the number of journeys is noticeably smaller.

You can also see the scattering of journeys made by Dutch ships to Svalbard, off the North coast of the Norwegian mainland

April 9, 2012

The “bloodiest battle” in British history

Filed under: Britain, History — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 12:28

Although the total number of casualties would be exceeded in other wars the British fought, the Battle of Towton in 1461 was the bloodiest battle to take place in Britain:

The bloodiest battle ever fought on British soil was not Hastings in 1066, when King Harold died, nor Marston Moor in 1644, where the Whitecoats fought to the death against Cromwell’s Ironsides, nor Culloden a hundred years later, where “Butcher” Cumberland broke the Highland clans. It was the now all-but-forgotten Battle of Towton, fought on Palm Sunday 1461, between Lancastrians and Yorkists in one of their many clashes in the Wars of the Roses, to decide who should be king.

Forces totaling 75,000 men marched to Towton, reckoned at 10% of the total military-age manpower of England and Wales, and 28,000 of them died there. The figure is the result of a body count performed on the field by heralds and confirmed by several independent contemporary witnesses.

[. . .]

Even though far more of Henry’s Lancastrians than Yorkists fell at Towton, the battle was not even a decisive one: The Wars of the Roses rolled on for more than 20 years afterward. One reason for the clash’s harrowing violence was that civil war had turned into personal vendetta. The Yorkist leader, later King Edward IV, had lost his father and younger brother, dying in battle or murdered after it. Killing York senior and stirring the wrath of his son was a mistake, for the 18-year-old was 6-foot-4, a giant by medieval standards, and he had charisma that inspired followers.

His Lancastrian enemies were led by the Dukes of Somerset and Northumberland and Baron Clifford, all of whom also had fathers to avenge. After years of regional feuds and fighting, the gentry and even the yeomanry of England had scores to pay off as well. There was no taking for ransom, and no quarter given. That probably accounts for the determination with which both sides fought, confirmed by high losses suffered even by the winners. Twenty thousand Lancastrians died, probably at least half of them as they were remorselessly pursued in retreat, but 8,000 Yorkists fell too.

One of the reasons the battle is so little-remembered — aside from it not being decisive in spite of the carnage — is that it was shoved down the memory hole by the Tudors after that dynasty came to the throne:

Very few records of the battle survive, which is one reason that so little is known about it. Historians believe this could be due to an early propaganda campaign by the Tudors.

Author and historian George Goodwin, who this month publishes a new book: Fatal Colours: Towton, 1461 – England’s Most Brutal Battle, said: “The Tudors did a tremendously good propaganda job in making Bosworth the key battle because that was the battle which ended the Wars of the Roses. They were the winners and they got to write the history books. Because Towton was a Yorkist victory that wasn’t really very useful to them.”

April 7, 2012

Rationing is not the optimal solution to shortages

Filed under: Britain, Bureaucracy, Economics, Environment — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 10:36

Tim Harford on the recently imposed “hosepipe bans” in parts of southern England:

But it was chucking down with rain this week. It was snowing, too. How can we be talking about drought?

Water isn’t like electricity: it can be stored, within limits. You don’t get a water shortage if you have a dry week and you don’t cure a water shortage with a few April showers. You get water shortages after a couple of years of low rainfall.

And how do you cure water shortages?

Hosepipe bans, apparently.

Is that a good idea?

Probably not. It’s appealing for the water companies because the revenue they receive is capped by the regulator. They can’t make more money by supplying as much water as possible to as many joyful customers as they can reach. It’s easier to just yell at customers to stop watering their lawns. It might be annoying but the water companies don’t lose much as a result.

[. . .]

You’re not suggesting a “flushing the toilet ban”?

I am not suggesting any kind of ban. It’s the idea of the ban that’s problematic. A new article by economists Jeremy Bulow and Paul Klemperer analyses the advantages to consumers of rationing schemes rather than simply raising the marginal price. The bottom line: the advantages are typically illusory. Rationing reduces supply, relative to what could be provided if prices were higher. It also misallocates resources — there’s no reason to expect that the people who get the scarce product are the ones who value it most. And rationing encourages all kinds of fun and games to try to get around the rules.

So you just want water to become more expensive.

I hope water will become cheaper, on average. But I certainly want it to be expensive to use lots of water at a time of shortage. We want everyone to have an incentive to save some water and the obvious way to do this is through water metering.

March 21, 2012

Converting teachers into pre-grief counsellors

Filed under: Britain, Education, Health, Randomness — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 08:51

Dennis Hayes on the recent trend in teaching: preventing children from having “best friends” because the emotional pain of losing a best friend is too much for kids to bear.

In some English schools, having best friends can now get you in serious trouble with teacher. At the weekend, it was reported that primary school children in certain areas are being discouraged from having best friends to avoid the ‘pain of falling out’. Gaynor Sbuttoni, an educational psychologist working with schools in south-west London, told The Sunday Times, ‘I have noticed that teachers tell children they shouldn’t have a best friend and that everyone should play together… They’re doing it because they want to save the child the pain of splitting up from their best friend.’ Sbuttoni is not the first to speak out against this trend in the UK, and ‘no best friend’ policies have been in place in some US schools for quite a while.

Reading the reports, it might seem like this is just a silly intervention by meddling teachers, which simply needs to be stamped out. But that underestimates what is going on in our schools. The teaching profession is being reformed as a therapeutic profession, often prioritising the delivery of therapy over education to ‘vulnerable’ children and young people. As this new therapeutic profession develops, more and more interventions like ‘no best friends’ will arise, either spontaneously in classrooms or as a result of conscious intervention by school heads, local authorities, government and, of course, Ofsted, which runs with every fad and fashion.

Meddling in young children’s emotional lives is the worst feature of contemporary schooling. Children are now trained to have ‘appropriate’ emotions through emotional literacy classes and so-called subjects like SEAL — the ‘Social and Emotional Aspects of Learning’. The training on offer in such sessions is nothing short of emotional manipulation. Children are taught to be moderate; empathy is good, anger is bad. They are taught to be emotionally dead, out of touch with all the emotions that make up human relationships, passion, anger, jealousy, hatred and even love, which is sentimentalised and sanitised. This is the anodyne therapeutic ethos that now dominates education at all levels.

January 16, 2012

Cory Doctorow recommends a book on English libel law

Filed under: Books, Britain, Law, Media — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 10:17

There’s a reason that individuals and organizations try to sue for libel under English law, rather than their own national legal system:

The Guardian published a long excerpt from Nick Cohen’s forthcoming You Can’t Read This Book: Censorship in an Age of Freedom, a fantastic-looking book that reveals the dirty truth of English libel law, where “money buys silence” for some of the world’s most notorious dictators, thieves, and bad guys. English libel law is so broad that it allows, for example, Russian oligarchs to sue Russian newspapers for punitive sums (“the cost of libel actions in England and Wales is 140 times higher than the European average”) in an English court, merely by demonstrating that someone, somewhere in England looked at the paper’s website. And yet, the libel law in England and Wales doesn’t actually protect people from the most common forms of libelous publication: false declarations of criminal suspicion by the police, false claims of financial irregularities from credit reporting bureaux and false statements in former employers’ reference letters are protected unless they can be shown to have been malicious and negligent.

September 10, 2011

Opposing the EDL as a way of expressing class hatred?

Filed under: Britain, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 11:50

The English Defence League (EDL) has come in for a lot of criticism for its provocative approach to expressing their concerns about issues like immigration. The critics, however, are not all pure in their opposition, however:

This video, currently causing a stink on Twitter, rather confirms what draws many young middle-class liberals towards anti-English Defence League campaigning: it provides them with a semi-legit cover for expressing their fear and loathing of the white working classes.

In the video, two well-bred kids say things about working-class EDL supporters that could have been lifted straight from the pages of John Carey’s The Intellectuals and the Masses, that exposé of early twentieth-century snobs’ disdain for vulgar little people. The anti-EDL campaigners describe a female supporter of the EDL as “the most tattooed, horrible scrote of a woman” they have ever seen and then laugh as they talk about how she was “kicked up the arse” by a left-wing protester. It’s not normally okay to hit women, they admit, but you can make an exception when it comes to female EDL supporters because “they aren’t women — they’re dogs”.

The video has proved enormously embarrassing for Left-wing campaigners against the EDL, who are desperately trying to distance themselves from the naked class hatred expressed by these two twits. Yet the fact is that a great deal of anti-EDL protesting is driven by a barely disguised hatred for that apparently ugly, uncouth, un-PC blob of white flesh that inhabits inner-city council estates. The two guys in the video have only stated it in a more explicit fashion.

July 1, 2011

Duleep Allirajah: “The Most Pointless Sporting Argument Ever”

Filed under: Britain, Soccer — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 11:32

He’s quite right: this has to be the nadir of international sporting debates:

Where do you stand on the controversial issue of a Great Britain football team? Disgusted that the British Olympic Association is threatening the independence and proud traditions of the home football nations? Angered that the Welsh, Scottish and Northern Irish associations are trying to thwart the Olympic dreams of their young players? Or, like me, do you want to be woken up when The Most Pointless Sporting Argument Ever is over?

If you’re wondering why the proposal for a unified British football team has caused such controversy, let me explain. There has never been a single UK football association. Instead, all four countries — England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland — have their own football associations. Each country is recognised by FIFA as a separate entity even though they are not sovereign nations. It’s one of the residual privileges enjoyed by the nation that invented the game. Although the Brits have minimal influence within FIFA, as the 2018 World Cup bid and the farcical presidential election demonstrated, all four UK nations are represented on the eight-member International Football Association Board (IFAB), which is the sport’s law-making body. The home nations also retain the right to appoint a FIFA vice-president. Although the English FA is keen on fielding a British team in the 2012 Games, the other national associations fear that their independence and FIFA privileges will be jeopardised as a result.

The debate took a farcical twist this week when the British Olympic Association (BOA) announced that an ‘historic agreement’ had been reached with all the home nations to field a Great Britain team at the Olympics. However, no sooner had the BOA made its announcement than the Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland football associations angrily denied that any agreement had been reached. Oops!

July 22, 2010

First results from new study around Stonehenge

Filed under: Britain, Europe, History, Science — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 07:27

A new study of Stonehenge by the University of Birmingham and Vienna’s Ludwig Boltzmann Institute for Archaeological Prospection and Virtual Archaeology has made its first major discovery:

Archaeologists have discovered a second henge at Stonehenge, described as the most exciting find there in 50 years.

The circular ditch surrounding a smaller circle of deep pits about a metre (3ft) wide has been unearthed at the world-famous site in Wiltshire.

Archaeologists conducting a multi-million pound study believe timber posts were in the pits.

Project leader Professor Vince Gaffney, from the University of Birmingham, said the discovery was “exceptional”.

The new “henge” — which means a circular monument dating to Neolithic and Bronze Ages — is situated about 900m (2,950ft) from the giant stones on Salisbury Plain.

I imagine, given how many times Stonehenge has been mucked about with by earlier enthusiasts, there must be much misleading data has to be sifted and re-sifted before any definite discoveries can be announced. Stonehenge has been fascinating people for centuries and there are probably lots of amateur investigations that may well have made the situation more confusing (think of a sixteenth century equivalent of Indiana Jones or Lara Croft with a nose for treasure).

June 7, 2010

Tweet of the day: World Cup edition

Filed under: Humour, Soccer — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 10:33

pheadtony: Erectile dysfunction is on the increase. If you suffer, please put a white flag with a red cross on your car to show your support.

February 19, 2010

Bosworth Field, real location now made public

Filed under: Britain, History — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 12:12

As I mentioned back in October, archaeologists have located the actual site of the Battle of Bosworth Field in 1485. Now that they’ve had time to do more research and examination, they’ve gone public with the location:

The true site of one of the most decisive battles in English history has been revealed.

Bosworth, fought in 1485, which saw the death of Richard III, was believed to have taken place on Ambion Hill, near Sutton Cheney in Leicestershire.

But a study of original documents and archaeological survey of the area has now pinpointed a site in fields more than a mile to the south west.

A new trail will lead from the current visitor centre to the new location.

[. . .]

The original announcement was made in October but the exact location was kept a secret until now to protect it from treasure hunters.

Researchers also believe they have identified the medieval marsh where Richard III was dragged from his horse and killed.

October 21, 2009

QotD: England of bye-gone days

Filed under: Britain, History, Quotations — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 00:11

[I]t is worth noting a minor English trait which is extremely well marked though not often commented on, and that is a love of flowers. This is one of the first things that one notices when one reaches England from abroad, especially if one is coming from southern Europe. Does it not contradict the English indifference to the arts? Not really, because it is found in people who have no aesthetic feelings whatever. What it does link up with, however, is another English characteristic which is so much a part of us that we barely notice it, and that is the addiction to hobbies and spare-time occupations, the privateness of English life. We are a nation of flower-lovers, but also a nation of stamp-collectors, pigeon-fanciers, amateur carpenters, coupon-snippers, darts-players, crossword-puzzle fans. All the culture that is most truly native centres round things which even when they are communal are not official — the pub, the football match, the back garden, the fireside and the ‘nice cup of tea’. The liberty of the individual is still believed in, almost as in the nineteenth century. But this has nothing to do with economic liberty, the right to exploit others for profit. It is the liberty to have a home of your own, to do what you like in your spare time, to choose your own amusements instead of having them chosen for you from above. The most hateful of all names in an English ear is Nosey Parker. It is obvious, of course, that even this purely private liberty is a lost cause. Like all other modern people, the English are in process of being numbered, labelled, conscripted, ‘co-ordinated’. But the pull of their impulses is in the other direction, and the kind of regimentation that can be imposed on them will be modified in consequence. No party rallies, no Youth Movements, no coloured shirts, no Jew-baiting or ‘spontaneous’ demonstrations. No Gestapo either, in all probability.

George Orwell, “England, Your England”, The Lion and the Unicorn: Socialism and the English Genius, 1941-02-19.

« Newer Posts

Powered by WordPress