For Jean Baudrillard fans only

When googling "baudrillard shopping" the first ten results produce three like this:

Baudrillard, Jean books at the best price
Buy Baudrillard, Jean books from the best shops. Click on the products or use the search form below to find ... Top products Top searches. Yahoo! Shopping ..

DOMAIN NAMES AVAILABLE!!!

According to Gregor's cyber guru, all one word dot com domain names have been taken. Unable to resist this challenge, a cursory flit through my SOED comes up with the following, still avaialble:

catabaptist.com (administrator of irregular or schismatic baptism; one who opposes baptism)
dartars.com (a kind of scab on the chin of lambs)
enigmatography.com ( the making or collecting of enigmas)
feuage.com (a tax upon chimneys or hearths)
hamose.com (having hooks; hooked - ok, it does say this is a pedantic variation of hamous, which is taken)
hominivorous.com (man-eating)
indignify.com (to treat with indignity, to dishonour; to represent as unworthy)
interemption.com (destruction, slaughter)
inerm.com (destitute of prickles or thorns; unarmed)
lecanomancy.com (divination by the inspection of water in a basin)
nomenclate.com (to assign a name or names to; to call by a certain name)
selvagee.com (a hank or skein of rope-yarn marled together, and used as a strap to fasten round a rope or stay, or as slings, etc.)
tapayaxin.com (the orbicular horned lizard - mexican origin)
tipsify.com (to make tipsy; to intoxicate)

and finally

kinaesthesis.com (not entirely satisfactorily defined by the SOED as the sense of muscular effort that accompanies a voluntary motion of the body) is available. Kinaesthetic, which I understand to mean the sense of one's own bodily movement, can be found in use (so you can get the meaning there) in the works of Wittgenstein - probably On Certainty. kinaesthetic.com is already taken.)

Miscellaneous update

I have been rather lax in my postings these last few days. I find only a collection of notes serving as reminders of what I was going to blog about. That and a copy of John Buchan's Greenmantle, where I have carefully noted the abundant references to racism, anti-semitism, mysogony and (repressed homosexual) homophobia. Despite this, a ripping yarn, though stangely improved when I started prejudice-spotting. I still plan a comprehensive list of the above, but as it is a little too like work (work? no, sorry, come again?), it will have to wait.

My notes are as follows:
Garrison Keillor radio show
Google search instinct
Memory - Fortensky - Drink

As far as I can remember, these refer to the following...

Garrison Keillor's radio show on BBC radio 7. Seems like a nice enough bloke, and one of the few pieces of non-repeated Radio 7 programming. But whenever I listen the whole thing is quite insufferable. I think "smug" may be the word, but as it is only on on early weekend mornings (I'm guessing - 5am? 6am?) I don't have the strength to list the stream of bile it provokes in me. Periodically I forget and am driven by the maddening shit available on the other channels to give it another go. It's still hateful. Thank god for the brief respite in the madness provided by Test Match Special at 5am tomorrow morning.

Google search instinct is an odd one. I was trying to find a National Lampoon cover (January 1977) I remembered from the distant past to send to Gregor so I googled "national lampoon covers" and I went to the fourth or fifth hit which looked good , and it was. Experience rather than instinct enables you to spot the cyber wheat among the google chaff, so what is my point? I wish I remembered. What I don't wish I remembered is who Larry Fortensky was (a husband of Elizabeth Taylor that she met in some drying out clinic, since you ask). Memory, where is thy delete button? I try drinking to forget, but from what I remember, it is a blunt instrument, better at erasing conversations than matters trivial or grave.

Blagger Blunkett

David Blunkett (annual income minimum £215,000) is to be allowed to keep his "grace and favour" home in Belgravia for the time being because of security considerations.
What makes me think that unlike, say, a company car, the taxman will have no interest in this? Or is the security consideration that they want whoever wishes harm on this blameless man to know where he lives?

News values

My online philosophical dictionary defines a syllogism as

An important variety of deductive argument in which a conclusion follows from two or more premises (the OED is not so different).

So what about this self-evident truth?

No news is good news
All news is bad news

Who needs a minor premise? I say, go straight from a major premise to a conclusion.

When is silence not silence?

Steve has sent this.




If you listen to it on BBC7 it breaks down as:

00:00–00.26 talk
00.26–00.39 silence
00.39–01.45 Big Ben chiming
01.45–03.09 silence

Suspect device

This mainly from today's Private Eye (Number Crunching).

Number of days a terrorist suspect can be detained before criminal charges must be levelled:

Australia: 1
Spain: 5
USA: 7
UK: 28 (government proposal: 90)

Psychonarcolepsy

Branching out into strange behaviour patterns, our shopping correspondent has sent us this (read from bottom upwards).
It's at times like this that we give thanks for the existence of the world wide web.

Cat food

My cat has eaten Felix Crisp crunchy topping for some years. It comes in letter shapes, but I have seen no improvement in her reading.

Do politicians grow old?

Yesterday Shimon Peres was ousted (or kicked out in normal talk) as leader of the Israeli Labour Party. Reasons given included Peretz's (his successor) trade union base, leftist disillusion with the Peres/Sharon alliance, and support for Peretz - a Moroccan Jew - among the sephardi, rather than traditional ashkenazi Labour types. The fact that he is 82 was apparently not an issue. Say what you like about Israelis, and believe me, I do, but it seems they are not ageist. Ken Clarke tried running as Tory leader, and being 65 was counted against him (well, a bit). Can anyone name a country where voters mattered and someone ran for election as head of state over the age of 80? Obviously Peres wouldn't have got it in, but still unusual that he might even have been considered.

Peretz seems encouraging from the little I've read of him - refusing to support Sharon, wanting to return the Labour party to its socialist roots and making peace with the Palestinians a priority. I'll believe it when I see it. Which I won't.

Amir Peretz is 53.

Cyber stuff

A couple of sites to amuse your children two chinese students and mothergooserocks
plus one for veneerophiliacs from our Shopping correspondent

Is Sarko scum?

"The deaths proved a flashpoint for the frustration and fury of second- and third-generation north and black African immigrants, and spread nationwide, fuelled by remarks of the hardline interior minister, Nicolas Sarkozy, who called the rioters "scum"." So says the Guardian website in a report dated 11 November (not bad going considering it's 4:10pm on 10 November).

My own characteristically superficial research reveals the word he used was "racaille", which translates more as rabble. Our Paris correspondent says "yes definitely not scum, racaille actually conjures up, in the modern Parisian mind at any rate, what I imagine are what you call chavs". She's been in France a long time, so her Modern English isn't what it was, chavs being definitely not immigrant. Still, the Guardian has decided, Sun-style, to go with the more emotive scum.

Our Paris correspondent continues
"We were so shattered that Sarkozy (it says Fuck Sarko on the wall opposite our gate, painted a couple of nights ago) had said he would expel all foreigners arrested in the rioting, be they with resident permits or without, and so convinced that this would cause an explosion, that my teenage sons both watched the news with me last night because they didn't believe what I'd heard on PM on Radio 4 ..."

As Fred Truman would say, what is going off out there?

Ockham's Grid Reference

Latitude: 51.26,
Longitude: -0.69

It would be foolish to say more.

Pick of the Week

I have just finished listening to Melvyn Barg's In Our Time on Radio 4 - The Blackfriars and The Greyfriars - about the Franciscan and Dominican orders. Quite brilliant. Papayoudilly says: This is radio of the highest calibre - it rocks!.

I strongly recommend you download In Our Time (This prog has now gone, but the whole show seems to have taken an interesting philosophical bent) . And while you're at it, you could do a lot worse than go to Radio 4 listen again and listen to Genius with Dave Gorman and John Fortune (ibid).

Joke

Returning from hot yoga, James tells me how to address a New York cabbie:

"Can you take me to the corner of Broadway and fifth, or should I just go and fuck myself?"

Gordon Bennett

Having mentioned his intro, it seems fitting to mention Alan Bennett's last entry to his diary, which I read today. David Blunkett has just resigned.

"...anyone hounded by the newspapers has my sympathy, even though in Blunkett's case the leaders of the pack were the very papers he courted. Scarcely had he cleared his desk when the judges in the Lords condemn the indefinite detention of foreign nationals as unlawful, a judgement which, it's to be hoped, signals some sort of turning of the tide. Santa may call at Belmarsh if not at Guantanamo Bay."

The entry is dated 16 December 2004. Less than 11 months later, Blunkett has resigned again, and Blair et al are trying to force though yet more anti-terror legislation. Under existing powers, a man can be arrested for heckling the Foreign Secretary at the Labour Party Conference, and bankers can be extradited to the US for trial without production of evidence (though not vice versa). The latest proposals, apart from locking people up for 90 days without charge, during which time they could lose their job, house etc., also outlaw the glorification of terrorism and the dissemination of information encouraging terrorism ("conduct which gives encouragement to the commission, preparation or instigation of such acts, or which is intended to do so" - nice use of "or"). University libraries are worried whether they need to purge certain chemistry books, or those which may be sympathetic to Guy Fawkes.

Would the tide were turning, Alan. What we have here are the early days of an extreme proxigean spring tide (google it yourself).

Mr President

More from our Boston correspondent. He sends this sign seen at the recent anti-war
demonstration in Washington, DC.

Blogging

It strikes me, and I haven't bothered counting them, that a disproportionate number of comments on this blog are from myself. This is fine up to a point. Having a conversation with myself is what I do most of the time. Slightly worrying, though, to think that anyone can tune in to this conversation. I need one of those things you can supposedly fit to your car, in this case to disable my send/publish post button when I am over the limit.

Much more worrying is that the last two posts are making it look like the fucking shopping channel.

White Goods

Gregor has sent me two URLs to facilitate the purchase of cheap white goods (sussex appliances and discount direct). Which is all very well for him as he has a new house and a new baby. I have a house full of white goods and chlidren demanding the latest in black goods, but I'm sure I'll be grateful next time the washing machine packs up.

They used to say in downtown Babylon "The Gods do not deduct from man's allotted span the hours spent in fishing" though whether this includes hours spent surfing for cheap white goods, I wouldn't know.

Of course, nowadays in Babylon the gods use a variety of hi-tech ordnance to deduct from man's allotted span, whether they be fishing or not.

From our Boston correspondent

Yesterday our Boston correspondent bought a cd by a friend of his from cdbaby.com as it was too obscure to be available at amazon. The following is cdbaby's shipping notice:


Thanks for your order with CD Baby!

Qty Description Price Total
=== =========== ===== =====
1 STINGY BRIMM: 'case you haven't heard... $12.97 $12.97

Sub Total $12.97
Shipping $2.25
Grand Total $15.22

Your CD has been gently taken from our CD Baby shelves with
sterilized contamination-free gloves and placed onto a satin pillow.

A team of 50 employees inspected your CD and polished it to make sure
it was in the best possible condition before mailing.

Our packing specialist from Japan lit a candle and a hush fell over
the crowd as he put your CD into the finest gold-lined box that money
can buy.

We all had a wonderful celebration afterwards and the whole party
marched down the street to the post office where the entire town of
Portland waved 'Bon Voyage!' to your package, on its way to you, in
our private CD Baby jet on this day, Sunday, November 6th.

I hope you had a wonderful time shopping at CD Baby. We sure did.
Your picture is on our wall as 'Customer of the Year'. We're all
exhausted but can't wait for you to come back to CDBABY.COM!!

Thank you once again,

Derek Sivers, president, CD Baby
the little CD store with the best new independent music
phone: 1-800-448-6369 email: cdbaby@cdbaby.com
http://cdbaby.com

Flag Aid

Am I the last person to notice that Ireland and Italy have the same flag (a green, white and red tricolour) ? Isn't there some sort of law against this?

I am slightly bewildered, and would welcome any help on this. Are there any other countries in the world with the same flag? What would happen in the event of an Irish-Italian war?

Scott trust?

Seeing an emaciated fashion model cut out on the contents page of the Guardian magazine I thought, oh no, another article on skeletal fashion models, the rise of eating disorders in the young, etc.. How reassuring then to turn to the article ("Never has wrapping up warm been so stylish"). A delightful free advert for the likes of Yves Saint Laurent ("Sophia P...wears coat, £4,285, skirt, £400, and shoes £395) and Alexander McQueen (Anna...wears cardigan, £995, and skirt, £560).
This should encourage all those teachers and social workers to smarten up a bit. Apparently much of this finery is available at their local branch of Harrods.

I have seen fashion models on a shoot on two occasions (Chelsea and Paris, since you ask). Both times I was aghast (yes, I tell you, aghast) at these living definitions of skin and bones. About as attractive as something off a mortuary slab.

And while on the subject (and ignoring Alan Bennett, October 30) I note that as a consequence of now being fully used to the Guardian's Berliner format, the Observer seems to get larger with each passing week.

Syllogisms

Doug writes (see Reading Update) "There's nowt so queer as cyberspace, as my old grandad would have said had he not died many years before its invention."

From which we posit:

Real space is discovered.
Cyber space is invented (not discovered).
ergo
Cyber space is not real space.

Or one could write

Existing space is discovered.
Cyber space is invented (not discovered).
ergo
Cyber space does not exist as space

As cyberspace is real and does exist, one conclusion I see is that it is not space. What is a definition of space? Something with four dimensions - height, length, breadth and time? If it is not space, what is it? Is the answer only formulable in boringly complex electro-mathematical symbolism? This would not satisfy me.

I suppose another conclusion could be that something invented can be real and exist. So the question is, what is the difference between something discovered and something invented? You discover something which is already there, you invent something by rearranging what is already there. So, does the problem arise out of linguistic confusion and, thus explained, vanish in a Wittgenseinian puff of smoke?


POST SCRIPTUM
Am I just making a category mistake, a la Gilbert Ryle? As I never got around to reading The Concept of Mind, I wouldn't know. Perhaps the language is too loose for logic. (Too Loose For Logic - another one of those possible titles for my autobiography).