First we had Bob Woolmer’s death. Sad, but not terribly unexpected for a man with a congenital weight problem. Then, they said it was murder - which seemed incredibly unlikely.
Now it transpires he was poisoned too! So somebody sneaked into his hotel, went to his room, poisoned him, held him down until the poison took effect, and then strangled him. On an island that is awash with handguns, machines designed for no purpose other than killing people. This is very very weird.
Then, perhaps even more strangely, the ICC have managed to concoct a cricket competition that lasts too long. For anyone who knows cricket, the idea that anyone involved in the game could find anything taking too long is incredible. A good 5 match test series takes 25 days. Anything shorter than that isn’t a proper competition. That the World Cup has managed to take too long is a real achievement.
Finally, they have managed to appoint match officials who don’t know the laws of the game. Whatever else happens in international cricket, you can always rely on the umpires and referees to be absolutely on top of the rules. Even when making rather capricious decisions (as Darrell Hair did at The Oval when he decided Pakistan had forfeited), they are within the laws.
The ludicrous behaviour at the World Cup final was so un-cricket it’s hard to believe that’s the sport they were playing. Even club games have umpires with more clue and common sense.
Since the latter two problems are attributable directly to the ICC, it’s tempting to blame the first on them too. So, you heard it here first: Malcolm Speed snuck into Bob Woolmer’s room, poisoned and then strangled him. Just like he did for the World Cup. Presumably the motive was the same - money.
Look! Someone has made a widget that shows how sad I am. The internet is a marvellous place isn’t it. Just check this out:
Some extracts from Christopher Hitchens’ polemic new book.
Paul Graham, a man who is generally right.
They really ought to do something about this. Two more great links from Boing Boing.
The New York Times elaborates on stuff chimps can do. I know a lot of people think this is mental, but I do think it’s inevitable that chimps, and probably a bunch of other animals will eventually gain more humanlike rights in a lot of the western democracies.
There’s a school of thought that there are no rights without responsibilities, and that since chimps can’t have responsibilities, how can they have rights? There are some obvious examples of people with rights but no responsibilities however (children, the mentally incapable) and extending those rights to higher primates at least really isn’t ridiculous.
Even drawing lines at species boundaries is fraught, since there really isn’t any such thing. The species is a useful mental shorthand, and often does closely represent populations because of the way DNA is distributed. However it often doesn’t fit and what are called “species” are chosen pretty arbitrarily. If you wanted to try to define “human” strictly, you might well find that a lot of people don’t actually fit.
There’s a whole new discipline of genetic jurisprudence out there for anyone who wants it.
Predictions of the Year 2000 from The Ladies Home Journal of December 1900. Frankly I think he did amazingly well. The most revealing though, are the entries that he gets utterly wrong…
He obviously missed the effect of everyone having a car (one of his other predictions):
Prediction #3: Gymnastics will begin in the nursery, where toys and games will be designed to strengthen the muscles. Exercise will be compulsory in the schools. Every school, college and community will have a complete gymnasium. All cities will have public gymnasiums. A man or woman unable to walk ten miles at a stretch will be regarded as a weakling.
And how hard insects really are. Imagine, roaches being extinct:
Prediction #11: No Mosquitoes nor Flies. Insect screens will be unnecessary. Mosquitoes, house-flies and roaches will have been practically exterminated. Boards of health will have destroyed all mosquito haunts and breeding-grounds, drained all stagnant pools, filled in all swamp-lands, and chemically treated all still-water streams. The extermination of the horse and its stable will reduce the house-fly.
And this is just plain batshit:
Prediction #16: There will be No C, X or Q in our every-day alphabet. They will be abandoned because unnecessary. Spelling by sound will have been adopted, first by the newspapers. English will be a language of condensed words expressing condensed ideas, and will be more extensively spoken than any other. Russian will rank second.
Aha, he predicted the Intertubes:
Prediction #22: Store Purchases by Tube. Pneumatic tubes, instead of store wagons, will deliver packages and bundles. These tubes will collect, deliver and transport mail over certain distances, perhaps for hundreds of miles. They will at first connect with the private houses of the wealthy; then with all homes. Great business establishments will extend them to stations, similar to our branch post-offices of today, whence fast automobile vehicles will distribute purchases from house to house.
But this is more like the other stuff, pretty perceptive. I never knew cattle used to be able to run…
Prediction #28: There will be no wild animals except in menageries. Rats and mice will have been exterminated. The horse will have become practically extinct. A few of high breed will be kept by the rich for racing, hunting and exercise. The automobile will have driven out the horse. Cattle and sheep will have no horns. They will be unable to run faster than the fattened hog of today. A century ago the wild hog could outrun a horse. Food animals will be bred to expend practically all of their life energy in producing meat, milk, wool and other by-products. Horns, bones, muscles and lungs will have been neglected.
From the wonderful, wonderful, ParentHacks (well really The Lovely Mrs Davis) comes The Top 20 Kids Albums for Parents Who Can’t Stand Kids Music. It had never even occurred to me that something like this might exist, let alone that They Might Be Giants had made a kids album. They’ve even got kids psychedelia from the marvellously named Sippy Cups.
Google kindly informed me that a new Doug Winter has emerged onto the Internet in salt lake city:
THE WINTER BLANKET
The Winter Blanket are established enough to wax poetic with a full-length album. Instead of getting drunk on their signature sound, however, the Minneapolis, Minn., duo cut a short-and-sweet EP that lives up to the widely touted, rarely executed All Killer, No Filler rock credo. To wit, Golden Sun doesn’t so much rock as it does tremble with smoldering, shoegazer jams full of fuzz guitars and hazy harmonies courtesy of Doug Winter and Stephanie Davila (think Hope Sandoval on a good day). Mellow but not numb, the brief collection of bittersweet songs envelopes like a … well, you can see where this is going.
The Winter Blanket? Sheeesh.
This was my first thought too, but Andy beat me to it.
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