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Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. - a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR [Russ.,= self-publishing house]
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Yesterday, I visited some friends in Cambridge. In the evening I was in no great hurry to go home, so I went for a stroll around the colleges and other attractions in the city centre.
The centre of Cambridge in August is a little strange, as most of the university students have gone home, but the town is none the less still bustling with tourists and language students. The many pubs and restaurants are full of people, but the feel of the town is entirely different to how it is at other times of year.
Wandering around the corner from Trumpington Street, I found myself passing The Eagle, described by the sign outside the door as “The most famous pub in Cambridge”. This is likely true, although these days it is not a pub frequented much by university people, as it trades on its fame, selling rather overpriced beer to visitors to the city.
This pub is famous for two things. One is that it was a favourite pub of RAF airmen based nearby during the Second World War. Much of the ceiling of the pub is covered with graffiti writen by airmen prior to dangerous missions. There are various other pictures, model aircraft and similar things in the pub commemorating this aspect of its history.
There are also pictures of assorted other famous Cambridge people (Newton, Byron, and others) on some of the walls, but there somewhat oddly there are no pictures relating to the other reason why the pub is famous. In 1954 two men had some lengthy conversations about a certain scientific matter in one of the bars. At the end of one such session they announced to the barman and fellow drinkers that “We have discovered the secret of life”.
These men were of course James Watson and Francis Crick. Oddly, the proprieters of the pub seem to lack a proper sense of the significance of all this, as the only mention of Watson and Crick anywhere in the pub is a small hand-written sign next to the bar noting that this was the bar where they made their announcement. (However, the significance is well known by others, and the role of the pub was mentioned in many of the obituaries of Francis Crick upon his death just a few weeks ago).
And it was this recent death I think that led me to walk into the pub, buy myself a beer, and raise my glass to the memory of the scientist. I was just considering the question as to whether the discovery that was announced just near where I was sitting was indeed the greatest scientific discovery of the twentieth century (on reflection quite possibly) when my mobile phone rang.
The phone did not show the number of the calling party. This usually means a business call, making it a slightly curious thing to receive at half past eight on a Saturday evening.
“This is <incomprehensible> pizza and kebabs. You ordered a ham and mushroom pizza”.
“No, I didn’t. You have a wrong number”.
“No. I am calling the number that came up on the phone when you called me.”
“In what city are you? I am in Cambridge. If you are not, it is unlikely that I ordered a pizza from you”.
“You ordered a pizza”.
“I am in Cambridge. Where are you?”
“You ordered a pizza from me”.
“No. You have a wrong number”.
“No. Your number came up on my phone. Don’t ever do this again.”
He was starting to get angry. At that point, my choices were to either get upset and start insulting him, to continue playing a game of “Where in the United Kingdom is Carmen Sandiego?” in the hope of convincing him that I could not have possibly ordered a pizza, or to just hang up, and I chose to hang up.
As it happens though, I now rather wish I had not done so, and that I had instead asked him some questions about his telephone. (At least if I could have got him to calm down). Either he manually transcribed the number that came up on his caller ID, and then made an error recording or dialing the number of his customer, in which case there was no mystery. Or, he had a system that automatically logged the number and then dialed me back without the number having to be entered manually. In this case, I do understand why he might not have believed me. This would have had to have meant that there was a bug or malfunction in his equipment or somewhere in the phone network. Which for simple things like forwarding numbers is not something we expect these days.
But as a disruption to the general karma of my day, this was a curious one. Not perhaps as curious as being stopped in the street by a teenage girl and asked if they had ice cream in Victorian times, but still curious. Somewhat sadly, it did completely destroy the solemnity of the drink I was having to the memory of a great scientist.
Senator John Kerry had one of those moments the other night.
For reasons best known to themselves, the Democrats have decided to hold their presidential nominating convention in Boston, Massachusetts. Two findings have emerged from this decision. First, that Americans outside the North-East are being reminded that the Democrats have a liberal New England candidate, with limited appeal outside his backyard. Second, that the traffic chaos caused by the Convention is very unpopular with the inhabitants of that town.
Conspiracy theorists claim that the Republican Governor of Massachusetts has deliberately botched up the arrangements.
So in front of thousands of baseball fans, Sen. John Kerry was introduced to throw the first pitch of the match between the Boston Red Socks against the New York Yankees on Sunday.
First, the fact that the Democratic Convention was happening in Boston was booed by virtually the entire 36,000 crowd. Then most of the crowd booed again (although there were cheers) when Kerry was introduced. Then the macho-man threw the ball short, and the catcher missed. Cue mirth, giggles and fun on the George W Bush blog.
Memo to politicians and actors: never work with babies, animals or baseball fans.
I followed a link from Mark Steyn‘s site to a sad story from Oklahoma.
TULSA – Blake Champlin, a Tulsa lawyer and environmental activist, died Monday at his home when a tree supporting a hammock fell and crushed him.
Obviously, hammocks must be prohibited and all trees within 500 yards of human inhabitation must be chopped down, on public safety grounds. Blake Champlin’s death must not be in vain!
“Minister rejects Bush reliance on abstinence, and backs use of generic drugs”
If I did not know this was about treating AIDS in the Third World, this would be very funny. Spotted in Salon.com.
I have a confession to make.
In May 1990, I contested a local election as a Conservative candidate for Fortune Green Ward in the London Borough of Camden. Had I won, I would have been a Borough councillor representing about 4,500 electors as a Conservative politician.
It seems a Folkestone, Kent Conservative councillor also has some confessions to make.
He said his convictions included death by dangerous driving, indecent assault, drugs possession, carrying a weapon and forgery.
Richdale, an unemployed chef, confessed to using cannabis and amphetamines to control his alcoholic cravings, saying: “I am an alcoholic and I always will be but I haven’t had a drink for 11 years.”
He admitted having sex with a girl of 14 and said: “She told me she was 15 but she was 14. She stayed at mine (home) and I woke up to find her having sex with me.
“But I am not a sex case and I am not motivated by lust. I wish everyone was like me.”
Now I should point out that the lawful age of consent in England is 16, not 15 or 14. The language used by Councillor Robert Richdale in an interview to his local newspaper does not suggest the calibre of candidate that I would vote for. I also find the last two sentences of the quote completely at odds with any sense of personal responsibility. It never had occured to me before now that the closure of the Conservative Party’s youth sections over the past 15 years might be a good idea, as a way of preventing child abuse.
So next time a Conservative complains about the ‘loony’ ideas of libertarians I will not be thinking, perhaps we go a bit too far. The more I see them, the more I like my denunciation of “an unelectable shambles comprised largely of cretins, petty crooks, pompous buffoons and in-bred yahoos. I will take no lessons in morality or “coherent political philosophy” from a Tory.
And that is before I look at the deplorable results in the by-elections tonight, where the Conservatives have made no headway whatsoever against Labour in the Midlands. The Conservatives cannot get one fifth of the vote in a Birmingham constitutency and cannot remotely challenge in Leicester, a city where three out of four MPs were Conservative during the 1980s.
I smell blood so i lie and smear chocolate lather on your bare butt after drunks lick a frantic puppy’s bitter, delicate love leg but i say he would use weak honey spray as purple breast wax & drive a smooth finger from my sausage to get juice with enormous power with a delirious boy lusting mad feet sweat through thousands of rusty and elaborate meat gardens yet easy you chant only ugly behind raw produce in their beauty ships so why not sit your shiny white apperatus and crush the tiny hairy symphony of void summer death petalness and shake your luscious tongue you repulsive mother of true peach fluff who said the milk never worshiped the pink rock as i did and my fiddle is singing to drool.
You may have wanted to know the REAL reason that ‘Friends’ has been taken off the airwaves. The ‘official’ reason is that the show’s makers wanted to quit before the show became too stale.
The truth is rather more sinister.
In Lyle, the California Court of Appeal held that creative discussions in which writers of the popular sitcom Friends developed ideas and created scripts could constitute sexual harassment of individuals listening to the sometimes bawdy banter of the writers.
So now we know.
[Thanks to Virginia Postrel for the link.]
In that marvellously bonkers publication Pravda, it is being reported that the Ukrainian sports authorities are blaming their lack of medals at a gymnastic event on the fact their Russian rivals brought in people with paranormal abilities to sabotage the Ukrainian competitors.
According to the federation’s governing body, evil-minded Russians hired psychics, people with extrasensory abilities in order to paralyze free will of Ukrainian gymnasts during competitions. Such statement of the federation received wide publicity among Ukrainian media sources, reports PrimaNews.
[…]
The federation also informs that “Russian mobs” brought fifteen paranorms to Kiev, including famous Russian medium Alan Chumak. They were seated in VIP seats on the stadium and somehow paralyzed the will of Ukrainian sportswomen; that is why the latter lost.
To hell with the gymnastics! If they can do such things, then they simply must organise special events in which paranormals compete to see who can paralyse the will of the other first! 
No Officer, I am not drunk, I had my will paralysed by Russian paranormals!
A year ago, the student union at the University of St Andrews denounced the Royal Bank of Scotland, along with a plethora of other companies and products, for being unethical. The arguments were generally spurious. In the case of RBS, it involved the fact that they had invested in or given bank accounts – or something – to biotech companies, if I remember correctly. RBS was the most unethical banking choice students chould make, the union claimed.
At around the same time, the Left, led by the One World Society, ran a referendum campaign on whether the union should only invest ethically. The union had already decided to only follow the ideas of ethical investment, but they wanted the student body to vote on it in a referendum so that it would get more publicity. Over 90% of voting students were in favour.
A year later, the union has evaluated its financial position, and has decided to move its money into an “ethical fund”.
With the Royal Bank of Scotland.
While researching for my weekly CNE Environment column I came across a barking mad website. This led me to another loony story. Unfortunately, neither of these would do for an environment column that is meant to present a credible analysis of the eco-fascist movement.
So I ended up with this story from the French TV station TF1. In what has to be the most perfect economic suicide note since the 1920 Soviet Constitution, the French National Assembly has voted to amend the French constitution so as to enshrine the precautionary principle by 328 votes to 10. This could make any future government decision to deregulate anything illegal.
It is a shame that the precautionary principle is not applied to government regulation: in the absence of any overwhelming proof that it will work, such regulation ought to be prohibited. One might expect such lunacy in the French Assembly to be supported by the extreme left and the Green parties (there are several of these in France). But no.
The “centre-right” parties of the UMP and the UDF voted in favour, the Socialists and the Communists abstained, and the Greens voted against.
If this was appeasement, it failed. So which story was the barmiest?
If reading about the failing of Robert Fisk and being hunted in a pub by ‘peace’ activist harridans if your cup of tea (it certainly is mine), then you could do worse than read the compelling and pleasingly off-beat Blog Irish:
Having exhausted her ignorance on the subject of Eamo, she suggested that we discuss the Israeli/Palestinian conflict. We suggested that after five pints that was probably not a good idea.
With no further ado, she started screeching at the top of her lungs at us. We walked to the other end of the pub, and she followed, still screeching. The pub patrons and staff took no notice whatsoever. She left, and returned five minutes later with five angry women who were apparently going to show us the error of our ways. They searched through the pub, and though we were sitting near the entrance, affected not to see us, and left.
It is a funny old world.
One of my two favourite when-I-want-something-stupid websites, b3ta.com, links to this page of mailboxes, of which this one will undoubtedly be the favourite here. In England this would be forbidden, because it would be a replica gun:
The caption at the bottom of this picture says: ONLY IN TEXAS.
They also link to this, another for our triumphs of capitalism series, a machine for instantaneously peeling hard boiled eggs. This is a truly amazing machine. It is as if the hen is laying the eggs ready peeled. Although maybe that would be rather a bad idea, so forget that please.
Earlier in the week they linked to a fine piece of erotic dancing. Americans who worship our Tony, do not click here.
My other favourite mad stuff website is of course this one. Are there other such places I could visit for similar internet fun? Surely there are. Commenters, educate me.
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We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe.
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