Well, better late than never, here’s the long, even keenly, awaited G XI. No excuses for its late arrival, but comfort yourselves with the thought that you’ll have less time to wait before the H XI arrives to batter everyone else’s bowling to pieces. So, following Armstrong, Benaud, Constantine, Dexter, Edrich and Fry, it is
I’ve an op-ed in today’s edition of The Scotsman on the similar fixes Gordon Brown and Hillary Clinton find themselves in (right down to rown’s reported willingness to hire Mark Penn) and on how they are ill-served by the prevailing political trends in Britain and America respectively. It’s behind a (tedious) subscription firewall, but the
Patrick Hillery, President of Ireland from 1976-1990, has died. From the Telegraph’s obituary: As president, Hillery’s main achievement was the restoration of stability to the office; this he accomplished largely through invisibility and silence. If only other Presidents – and especially ones with more power – could be persuaded to follow Paddy Hillery’s excellent example…
Or, a rare instance in which Alastair Darling and I appear to be in agreement. Me, this morning: What is Gordon Brown’s ministry for? What does he want to achieve that his party could not achieve in its first ten years in power? Again, the answer is hard to discern. As with Mrs Clinton there
Neill Harvey-Smith reports from the trenches of the Health and Safety salient. It’s a desperate, dangerous place.
Attention Wire fans: if you haven’t done so already you should really make sure you read Peter Mosko’s new book, Cop in the Hood. Moskos, a Princeton and Harvard sociologist actually joined the Baltimore Police Department and spent more than a year patrolling in the city’s Eastern District ghetto (where much of The Wire was
Gordon Brown flies to Washington today (where, inter alia, he will have meetings with McCain, Clinton and Obama) so, naturally, this is the cue for fresh fretting over US-UK relations. Nile Gardner, currently exiled at the Heritage Foundation, duly volunteers for duty: Divine intervention might be required to improve the state of U.S.-UK relations, which
A splendid piece on elevators – yes, lifts – in this week’s New Yorker. Two things make tall buildings possible: the steel frame and the safety elevator. The elevator, underrated and overlooked, is to the city what paper is to reading and gunpowder is to war. Without the elevator, there would be no verticality, no
I hadn’t realised until Sallie James at Cato pointed me in the right direction that neither John McCain, nor Barack Obama nor Hillary Clinton voted on the (awful) 2007 Farm Bill. Well, I guess one can see why. Still, it would be nice to hear their answers to the questions: 1.Why didn’t you vote on
Mr Eugenides has a delightful item about everyone’s favourite “Viewspaper”, The Independent Matt Zeitlin points out a couple of elementary truths to the Weekly Standard It’s April 15th, so it’s time for Megan’s tax plan to get another airing. Stephen Colbert on the candidates. Plus! Who’s the real Irishman, Colbert or Bill O’Reilly? The wives
I’m talking about kidneys of course. Over to Alex Tabarrok: Only one country in the world has eliminated the shortage of transplant kidneys. Only one country in the world has legalized financial payments to kidney donors. That country is Iran. In an important report, transplant surgeon Benjamin Hippen argues that the Iranian system has saved
Astonishingly, this story seems to be true: THE railway station bar, once a classic venue for romantic encounters, has fallen victim to the health and safety police. When Michael Leventhal, a London publisher, wanted to impress his date on her birthday, the longest champagne bar in Europe seemed to be the perfect setting. So Leventhal,
Charles Crawford, formerly Our Man in Warsaw, Sarajevo and Belgrade, thinks we should have told the Saudis to hop off and let the BAE corruption trial proceed. Not because anti-corruption investigations are good in themselves but because it would have been a demonstration of toughness. In the longer term, then, the national interest would have
You don’t have to be an Anglican or even especially religious to think that this Oxford Evensong set to jazz is very cool. Beautiful. (You can listen to it again for the next five days by clicking on “Choral Evensong” at the link.)
You might not be permitted to dance at the Jefferson Memorial in Washington, but London’s Liverpool Street Station is definitely flashmob-friendly. The world’s first-ever RickMob gathered there on Saturday… Groovy, baby: According to the BBC: A British Transport Police spokeswoman said: “We monitored the incident. There were no problems, no arrests. They did what they
Did you know that you can be arrested for dancing at the Jefferson Memorial? Julian Sanchez explains. Megan also leaps into the fray. Almost no-one writes sensibly about house prices. Thankfully Chris Dillow is a bird of rare common sense. Norm remembers Botham at Brisbane. Happy days. If Clinton could be the “first black President”
This blog is, I just realised, one year old today. Jings, who’d have thunk it? Anyway, thanks to all those who linked and, of course, to all who have visited and read and left comments and all the rest of it.
Got some free time this weekend? Why not enter Fark’s Design a Flag for the Nanny State competition. A couple of entries I liked… [Hat-tip: KMW]
Damnit. I’d enjoyed working up a good lather of indignation and righteous fury over Hillary Clinton’s claim, repeated ad nauseam, to have played an “instrumental” role in the Northern Irish “peace process” (see several posts collected here, for instance). And now she’s gone and spoiled it by, rather strikingly, walking back from her preposterous claims.
There’s a gauche quality to Chris Matthews, the long-time MSNBC gab-fest host, that could almost be endearing if it weren’t for the unfortunate – and transparently obvious – truth that the man is a monumental ass. Anyone who has ever been tempted to throw a brick at the television when Matthews is yapping away will