If the Prime Minister's a Junkie, the Public Has a Right to Know

John Crace, writing his Guardian parliamentary sketch:

“If he was a decent man, he would apologise,” Starmer said. But Boris isn’t a decent man, so he didn’t. Instead he continued to rush on his run.

– John Crace, Boris left flailing as his limitations become clear for all to see

Any Velvet Underground fan immediately recognises that as reference to their song ‘Heroin’:

When I’m rushing on my run
And I feel just like Jesus' son
And I guess that I just don’t know
And I guess that I just don’t know

I don’t know if ‘to rush on one’s run’ is a common expression among heroin addicts, but John Crace has been there himself, so presumably knows what he’s talking about. Is he, then, trying to tell us something about Boris Johnson’s predilections?

Perhaps not; perhaps he just means that Johnson’s enjoying the high of parliamentary debate, of being in the chamber, of being prime minister. But since the rest of the piece is about what disaster PMQs was for him, that seems unlikely.

Is this one of those open secrets that everyone in Westminster knows, including political journalists, but no-one reveals, because it’s not the done thing, old chap?

I do hope not; but we should be told.

On Devs

Just watched the last episode of Devs. Several friends recommended it after I said “What shall we watch next?" a few weeks ago. The question was intended rhetorically, but they gave answers anyway, which was nice.

In terms of its pacing, Devs was likened to Kubrick. Fair enough. I saw some Lynchian overtones in it. Or sub-Lynchian, anyway. I enjoyed the journey, but was slightly disappointed with the destination.

Not, however, as disappointed as I feared I was going to be halfway through the last episode. I practically cheered when Lily threw the gun away. But then poetry-quoting Stewart fucked everything up.

Of course, as soon as you (the programme maker) introduce simulations, you (the viewer) can no longer trust that anything is “real,” so everything gets slippery and to some extent, what’s the point?

Where it disappoints, I think, is that Forest’s incorrect determinism-based view was not actually overturned by the ending. We don’t see him and Lily living in an alternative branch of the multiverse, but in a simulation that could be entirely consistent with his belief that reality proceeds on tram tracks – thereby obviating the guilt he feels for contributing to his wife and child’s death, and also getting him off the hook in his mind for his complicity with his murderous ex-CIA security chief.

I found the first episode quite disturbing: the music was screechingly discordant and set my teeth on edge, and that creepy statue towered over everything. And the fact that the statue was still there, still creepy, at the end was confusing. Surely he’d only had it built because his daughter died? But in the sim where his daughter survived, it was still there and the company was still named after her. Only Devs (or Deus) the project was missing. Which suggests that he had named the company and had the statue built, not as a commemoration of his daughter, but because – I don’t know, really.

The other weird thing about the first episode was that, not having seen the cast, I spent the first ten minutes saying, “Is that Ron Swanson?” The fact that one of the first things he says was a complaint about government regulation feels like a clue. Nick Offerman does an impressive job of disappearing into the part, but he couldn’t hide his voice.

Still, I’ll never be able to watch Parks & Rec in the same way.

Also Katie, when explaining Devs to Lily, uses “reason” when she means “cause.” Her pushing the pen is the cause of it rolling across the table. The reason it happened is because she chose to push it. Reason (to me, at least) implies intelligence or at least sentience behind the action. Cause is the correct word to use when discussing cause and effect.

And when she asked Lily to name a truly random event, Lily should have said, “Nuclear decay.”

Another Superb Nightmare Courtesy of Charlie Kaufman?

A new Charlie Kaufman film? Hell, yes! The interesting thing about this four-star Guardian review is that the trailer makes it look much more interesting than the review does. But then, I suppose that’s the purpose of trailers.

Anyway: I’m Thinking of Ending Things

Woolf Banks

I’m reading Virginia Woolf’s Orlando at the moment, and enjoying it very much. There’s a bit right at the beginning, gruesomely involving a severed head, that I think Iain Banks might have been echoing in The Algebraist – considerably more gruesomely.

My bike ride this morning took me to Bloomsbury, Woolf’s old area. On my way back, going through Islington, I thought of Walking on Glass, and I suddenly realised that we have multiple characters walking around there with a lot going on in their heads, which is very similar to what happens in Mrs Dalloway – though in Central London

If you follow that link you’ll see that I noted the stylistic connection between the two back in 2018, which I had forgotten today.

There have probably been theses written on such parallels.1 And Banks was an English graduate, after all, so he’d surely have studied Woolf. I have no great insight here, just a morning’s literary musings.

  1. Though a little googling suggests not; or at least nothing public. ↩︎

Arrival, 2016 - ★★★★ (contains spoilers)

This review may contain spoilers.

This is glorious. I'd give it five stars if it wasn't for the fact that I don't think they had to have Hannah die. They could have misdirected us at the start a different way.

Plus, that first few minutes means we start off feeling sad. It's a serious film, but it doesn't have to be sad.

Not that there's anything automatically wrong with sadness ("Happiness for deep people." -- Sally Sparrow). Still, I think effectively fridging a little girl -- or not, but that's how it appears at first -- weakens the whole piece.

Great to see a complex problem resolved with communication and compromise though.

And! Sequel, please: I want to see what the heptapods need from humanity on 3000 years.

See in Letterboxd

My Contributions to Nikola

A few months ago I wrote that I had switched the way my blog was handled. Not just the blog, the entire site, of which the blog has always been only a part. From being a WordPress blog, with a simple static front page, I moved to the whole site being statically generated: written in Markdown and converted into HTML using a tool called Nikola.

One of my reasons for doing that was to have control over the tools I use. If I chose one that was written in a language that I know, namely Python, then at the same time as changing my tools, I would have the chance to improve my knowledge of the language.

As you might expect, then, I’ve made some contributions to the Nikola project. First I fixed a few minor bugs. And now I’ve created both a new theme and a new plugin.

Blogging Inspirations

There are a couple of styles of blogging that have inspired both elements of my own networked writing, and the things I’ve contributed. Those are:

  • The ‘link posts’ used by John Gruber of Daring Fireball (and others, but I feel Gruber popularised them). In these, the post title becomes the link to the item the blogger is writing about. The blog post’s own permalink is also present, but indicated by another element, such as the timestamp. On daring fireball it’s the star after the title.
  • Titleless microblog posts, as popularised by Dave Winer at Scripting News. Again, lots of other people do these too – not least many on Micro.blog – but Winer was an early and is a continuing advocate.

I wanted to be able to use both of these techniques myself, and with only a small fix and some tweaks to template files, I could. But I also wanted to make them first-class citizens of my site, and to make them easily accessible for anyone else who use Nikola. So a theme that handled them well, and a plugin to ease their creation (well, creation of titleless posts) seemed like the way to go.

The GruberWine Theme

Given the inspirations, I named my theme ‘GruberWine’. It’s available in the Nikola theme repository. The details are here. It’s based visually on another theme, called zen-jinja, but I made a lot of changes to the CSS.

The Nikola Micro Plugin

Nikola provides a command-line tool for creating posts: nikola new_post. But that makes you enter a title. You can tweak things afterwards to remove the title, but if you know up front that your post won’t have one, you can now use my ‘Micro’ plugin, by running nikola micro. The details are here in the plugin repository.

The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie by Muriel Spark (Books 2020, 21)

This short novel feels surprisingly modern. Indeed, maybe it’s modernist. It was written in the fifties, and is set in the thirties. The modern part is mainly the way it plays with time. Starting at a point and then flashing back is simple enough, but then we get various flashforwards and explanations of what’s going to happen to the various characters. It’s all very elegantly done, with the changes smoothly integrated, so they don’t feel like jumps at all.

Jean Brodie is a teacher, and kind of an educational reformer, in that she thinks her students should be taught a broad array of things, and should learn about the world, rather than just follow a narrow, fixed curriculum. She would never “teach to the test” – which phrase is never used, but Brodie would be strongly against that modern malaise.

But she very much plays favourites. Her “set” get all her attention (outside of school as well as in it), and all the other pupils – those who have no chance of becoming “la crème de la crème” – are ignored. She is, ultimately, exceedingly self-centred.

Notoriously, she also has exceedingly dodgy – or maybe just deeply naive – political views. Here is Sandy, the main viewpoint character, when Brodie has shown the class a picture of Mussolini and his fascisti:

They were dark as anything and all marching in the straightest of files, with their hands raised at the same angle, while Mussolini stood on a platform like a gym teacher or a Guides mistress and watched them. Mussolini had put an end to unemployment with his fascisti and there was no litter in the streets. It occurred to Sandy, there at the end of the Middle Meadow Walk, that the Brodie set was Miss Brodie’s fascisti, not to the naked eye, marching along, but all knit together for her need and in another way, marching along. That was all right, but it seemed, too, that Miss Brodie’s disapproval of the Girl Guides had jealousy in it, there was an inconsistency, a fault. Perhaps the Guides were too much a rival fascisti, and Miss Brodie could not bear it.

It gets worse, though, when she:

was going abroad, not to Italy this year but to Germany, where Hitler was become Chancellor, a prophet-figure like Thomas Carlyle, and more reliable than Mussolini; the German brownshirts, she said, were exactly the same as the Italian black, only more reliable.

She sees the error of her ways, though, after a fashion:

After the war Miss Brodie admitted to Sandy, as they sat in the Braid Hills Hotel, “Hitler was rather naughty."

She has some more positive views, though:

“We of Edinburgh owe a lot to the French. We are Europeans.”

*Sigh*

But my favourite quotes involve religion:

The Lloyds were Catholics and so were made to have a lot of children by force.

And getting back to those Fascisti:

By now she had entered the Catholic Church, in whose ranks she had found quite a number of Fascists much less agreeable than Miss Brodie.

It’s a sad story, in the end. Worth reading, though.

Ad Subtract

Amused by Dave Winer’s comment: “can’t stand podcasts with advertising.” I’m far from a lover of advertising, but podcast advertising is, to me the best kind. Or the least-bad kind, anyway. I use Linode, and TextExpander, and 1Password, and Hover… all because I first heard about them on podcasts (and/or because I got discounts on them from podcast ads).

But maybe that’s a particular kind of podcast, or a particular kind of ad. They tend to be independents or small companies like Relay FM; ads that are read by the presenter, in their own voice – sometimes, though not always, in their own words. (Sometimes not their words, but weirded up.)

Dave goes on to say:

What’s even worse is podcasts with advertising with the proceeds going to charity. WTF goes through their minds. Why do they even bother.

– Dave Winer, Untitled

Not sure what he’s talking about there.

What I don’t like is adverts that are injected separately from the body of the podcast. Another voice cuts in (or precedes, or concludes), talking about something irrelevant. Those ones are comparable with TV advertising, and I always skip them.

2020: An Isolation Odyssey

You should watch this. It’s only short. Indeed, only as short as the last section and closing credits of 2001: A Space Odyssey.

And do watch the credits. You’ll learn the name Lydia Cambron.

2020: An Isolation Odyssey from Lydia Cambron on Vimeo.

And you know what? It’s nice that a video is not on YouTube for once. I always somehow preferred Vimeo anyway.

The Guardian Might Stop Being a Printed Paper

Colin Morrison, writing at ‘Flashes & Flames’:

The Guardian, which has arguably become the world’s most sophisticated digital news operation, may be contemplating an end to its printed newspapers. That may have been signalled by the recent decision to cut 180 jobs (or 12% of its UK workforce) as a result of Covid.
...
But, tellingly, newsstand print sales, at £49.3m, were 50% down compared with 2016. Last year, print accounted for 42% of revenue (£94 million) and an estimated £75 million of production, distribution and marketing costs. So, the printed newspaper may last year have delivered almost £20m of real profit. But now Covid is pushing it into losses from which it may not be able to recover – without dramatic change.

Interesting and unsurprising to learn that Saturday is (was?) its biggest day for print sales:

Like most UK national newspapers, The Guardian has been highly profitable on Saturdays because of higher prices and sales volumes. Pre-Covid, The Guardian had been selling 100,000 copies at £2.20 on weeekdays. But, on a Saturday, it was selling 246,000 copies at £3.20 – and with more advertising revenue too.

After our local newsagent stopped delivering the Saturday Guardian, we went out and bought it most weeks… until Covid and the lockdown. We haven’t bought it since, probably, March. But we do pay online, as supporters and subscribers.

I don’t think I’d mind that much if it went digital-only, though it would be the end of an era. You’d think they could keep just the Saturday edition, but:

The management may already have concluded that any plan to print a newspaper only on certain days (including the weekend) will not be viable. Much of the experience (especially of the Newhouse family’s Advance newspaper group in the US) seems to show that reducing the daily frequency seldom works: once the daily habit is broken, newspaper buyers quickly seem to stop buying the paper altogether. A consolation print option could be the expansion of the 101-year-old news magazine Guardian Weekly which claims readers in more than 170 countries.

I’d guess they’ll maybe keep The Observer going for a while: Sunday papers have their own distinct identities.

The contrast with digital could not be greater. The Guardian has 160 million monthly uniques across the world, some 25% in the UK. More striking, though, are those digital editions in North America and Australia/New Zealand which, respectively, have advertising revenue of £25 million and £11 million. These are now strong operations, evidenced by Australia where The Guardian is the fourth largest online news service with an audience of 11.6 million (more than 50% of the adult population) – ahead of News Corp’s national daily, The Australian.

Good to know it’s beating Murdoch on his home turf.

Harvard’s Nieman Journalism Lab describes The Guardian as “a weird newspaper” because: it has nearly two-thirds of its readers coming from outside its own country; started in one city and moved to another; and is owned by a trust that mandates it promotes liberal journalism in Britain and elsewhere.

“A weird newspaper”: works for me.