He is not a team player let alone a team leader
As I vacillate on the Labour leadership business, and try to decide what's best for party and country, I keep coming upon things that increase my feeling that Corbyn might not be the right one for the job.
Specifically today, two posts by MPs suggesting he is poor at communicating and building bridges with people.
First, Lilian Greenwood of Nottingham on how he undermined her on transport policy and the referendum.
And then Bristol MP Thangam Debbonaire’s Facebook post about the chaos around her being appointed to, and/or sacked from, a shadow-cabinet post.
And yet there’s also this article claiming that those two posts are part of a “scheme to knock Corbyn.”
What’s a person meant to believe?
I'm having trouble with WordPress not wanting make a "Link" format post if I have too much other stuff in it.
Pamela Constable on her parents' WASP values
Great piece in the Washington Post by one of their correspondents whose Republican parents would have hated what the party has become:
it occurred to me that our cerebral and courtly African American president, struggling against the tide of an angry, visceral age, had more in common with this elderly WASP gentleman than did many white Republican leaders of the moment.
Source: I rejected my parents’ WASP values. Now I see we need them more than ever. - The Washington Post
After Nice, Don’t Give ISIS What It’s Asking For
Good advice from The Intercept:
Putting the "Mental" into Governmental
This is beyond insanity: Government axes climate department - BBC News
Pokémon Gone
I am so not a gamer.
Oh, I loved Asteroids back in the day. I solved Monument Valley, and I got on fine with Alto’s Adventure. But I’ve never got more sophisticated modern games. There’s a whole big post about that that I’ll maybe write one day.
But Pokémon Go has lit up the internet for the last week or so, and it sounded kind of fun. So I thought I’d give it a try. Probably more healthy than arguing about the Labour leadership crisis on Facebook, anyway.
I was just out at the shops, and I remembered I had it, and sure enough, there was a wild Golbat outside the local supermarket. You’ve got to throw the pokéball to catch them, right? I’ve seen enough of the TV series with my kids to get that.
But could I catch it? Could I buggery. No matter how many times I flicked up on the screen to send the ball towards it, it just would not connect. I must have tried like fifty times, standing outside the shop like an idiot.
This is why I never get into games. I soon hit upon something frustrating and get bored with them. No doubt I was doing something wrong. I’ll try again, I suppose, but it’s very discouraging.
Oh, and I couldn’t get the name I wanted. “Devilgate” was taken, but so was it along with just about every suffix I could think of, including just random strings of numbers.
Kind of cool to see the pokéball rolling off under the vegetable racks, though.
How in the World are they Making that Sound?
OK, so why did no-one tell me that Jonathan Richman -- of whom I am, or used to be, a fan -- released a song back in 1992 or so, called “Velvet Underground”? I’ve been a fan of them since long before it was cool, as you know.[^fn1]
OK, so though Jonathan wrote the mighty “Roadrunner” (and apparently was called by some, “The Godfather of Punk”, though I thought that was Iggy), he later moved to a much more mellow, quieter sound. And that’s fine. There’s nothing wrong with that. We don’t always want to to be listening to the loudest stuff.1
But anyway, it turns out that there’s this song about the Velvet Underground, which is cool as fuck, as you might expect. Jonathan, of course, has been associated with the Velvets since the early days, roadieing for them and whatnot. So who better to write a song that tries to evoke the startling, shocking effect they had on people, on the music scene, back in 1966 or so?
Here’s his description of John Cale in action:
A spooky tone on a Fender bass
Played less notes and left more space
Stayed kind of still, looked kinda shy
Kinda far away, kinda dignified
They were “America at its best,” he says, and who could disagree? If you haven’t heard it, it’s on Apple Music, Spotify and even YouTube, where I understand the younglings like to go.
Both guitars got the fuzz tone on
The drummer's standing upright pounding along
A howl, a tone, a feedback whine
Biker boys meet the college kind
After one of the choruses where he sings, “How in the world were they making that sound?/Velvet Underground,” he says, “Like this,” and launches into a verse of “Sister Ray.” It’s all very, very cool.
-
Though let’s face it, we mostly do. If there was a god, and it didn’t want us to listen to loud music, then why would it have invented amplification? ↩︎
All the Birds in the Sky by Charlie Jane Anders (Books 2016, 9)
This is an infuriatingly brilliant book. Or brilliantly infuriating. It’s about the tensions between magic and science in a world where both exist. The characters are great and annoying (which only adds to their greatness). The scientists don’t think of investigating magic scientifically, even when a witch helps them rescue someone from an experiment gone wrong, which is annoying. But not very, because it’s so lovely. I predict it will win awards.
