Yesterday’s big news - Colin Powell endorsing Barack Obama - took the election one step further towards an Obama victory. Many pundits are saying that McCain can only win this now if he pulls off some sort of masterstroke before November 5th.
Powell’s endorsement gave me an idea of what that masterstroke might be.
Here’s the deal, folks: George W Bush owes John McCain big-time. Bush is largely responsible for the depth of unpopularity to which the Republican Party has sunk; with Bush as his predecessor, McCain has been fighting this election campaign like a man with one arm tied behind his back. And his opponent is a skilled, strong boxer. Plus everyone knows that black people are better at boxing. Anyway, Bush created this mess, so he owes McCain a huge favour; and there’s something he can do to turn the campaign around.
Approximately one week before election day, Bush needs to come out in favour of Obama. Unexpected, but clear and explicit, he must publicly endorse the Democratic ticket. In one fell swoop, the Democrats and their nominee will have their image tarnished, associated with stupidity and failure. Obama will spend the last week of the campaign fighting against accusations of “more of the same”, and in a last-minute “surge”, McCain will claim victory (with the assistance of some fairly blatant Republican vote tampering).
A couple of years ago I wrote a screenplay for a short film. It then got made, by Growing Brain, thanks to the outrageous talents of director Alex Scott.
You can now see it on PooTube.
You can call it Neo-Liberalism, you can call it Thatcherism, you can call it Reaganomics. By whatever name, the doctrine that free markets can by themselves effectively organise our economic resources has been dealt a mortal blow over the last few weeks.
Multinational banks, the very pinnacles of the free-market economy, have been revealed as poor economic organisers, and now they need state help. In the United States and Britain, the government is taking up substantial part-ownership of these troubled institutions.
Why this failure of the free-market system? Continue Reading »
Lately, as I am back in Adelaide, I take my dogs for a walk every day.
I have noticed that they don’t seem to be aware of the leashes that they are wearing as they walk. The leashes are always there, every time they walk, controlling how far they can wander. This has been the case throughout their whole lives, but they don’t ever seem to have gained an insight into it. They often pull senselessly on the leash, apparently not understanding that it is a non-negotiable limitation on their movement. Or sometimes they turn and get their legs tangled in it, never having learnt to avoid this.
I thought, “how strange that an understanding of this leash system appears to be simply beyond their understanding. They perceive the leash momentarily when it effects them, but they seem unable to synthesise these perceptions into an understanding of how it works.”
Then I thought, “I wonder if humans are similarly influenced by things that we haven’t even begun to understand?”
I sometimes think that the main substance of life is our battle to defeat creeping anxieties. Creeping anxieties that sometimes begin galloping; and I am convinced that almost all of us live like this. Tranquillisers, sedatives, barbiturates, are of course one way to do it. Buddhists have developed sophisticated techniques for doing it. But most do it using habitual distractions – things that they can focus on outside themselves. Many people do it by throwing themselves into work; love is another popular cure. Some people are determined to face their anxieties full on, to drag everything out of the box and examine all of it; others refuse to open the lid, or even to admit that the box exists. I don’t know yet which is the best method.
I have another, connected theory: that most people who do remarkable things in their lives have a fierce engine of anxiety working within them. I think that the main reason why a person would do something far beyond the norm is because they have a great need to fulfil, a sort of dissatisfaction that drives them. So anxiety is not just negative, but is an axis that runs through life, both good and bad.
Burton Taylor Studio, Oxford, Wed September 24th - Sat September 27th 2008
This play begins with red powder (dust, blood?) being sprinkled on the floor. Meanwhile Elegba (Anthony Walsh) draws a chalk circle to mark out what will be the “stage” - a neat way of dealing with the BTS space, where there is no intrinsic separation between audience and players. And these gestures loaded with symbolism are a good indicator of what is to come.
Read on at DailyInfo.com
My family are Catholic, though not excessively so. My ancestors came from England and Ireland (as well as the odd straggler from Sweden or Portugal), and were perhaps, in the mongrel-crucible of the Terra Australis, brought together in one way or another by their minority faith. My grandfather told me once that the Catholic/Protestant divide was quite a chasm “back in those days”, with schoolyard groups forming around the twin taunts of “Cat-lick” and “Proddy-dog”.
From as far back as I can remember, until the age of about 13, us kids had to go to church every Sunday with our parents. We hated this, as we found an hour of sitting, standing and kneeling while being talked at by a priest about the most boring thing imaginable. There were a few hymns in which I enjoyed the music – though the words were always pious, flaccid crap. Continue Reading »
If you want to know what I thought of the recent film Paris, my review is up at Daily Info Oxford.
(The review has been slightly hacked at.)
I did a phone interview with a journalist from the Wall Street Journal during the week, and I ended up getting a mention (near the bottom) in his article published today:
Making Every Word Count
If you’re like me, you’ve wasted time taking online quizzes like the one my friend challenged me to take: Name the 100 most frequently used English words in five minutes. (I got 45.)
You could waste all the time you’d like, as Top 100 word lists abound. Word-frequency rankings are part — albeit just a sliver — of the vast output from studies of language corpora, or large collections of written and sometimes spoken text.
read on…
I have finally got around to developing some photos from Catalunya:
