Mr Bush struggled in part because he feared, with some justification, that the permanent bureaucracy in Washington would be hostile to a Republican agenda. He searched long and hard for loyal Republicans for nearly every post, sometimes sacrificing talent in the process. Mr Obama does not have this problem. Nearly everyone in Washington voted for him. So he worries less about loyalty and more about ability. He did not pick Hillary Clinton as his secretary of state because of her lifelong devotion to the Obama cause.
‘It is unclear why the producers chose Mr Young whose main claim to fame is f***ing over Graydon Carter, being an EPIC FAIL and who maintains an entirely deserved reputation as a self-serving whiny drunk pissant,’ wrote Joshua David Stein on Gawker, a New York gossip site. ‘My friend Gabe deftly pointed out he is like Simon Cowell without the talent or hair,’ wrote Max Silvestri, a New York comedian. ‘But I think he’s like the lady from The Weakest Link but with a more feminine physique.’ Comments like this — comparing me unfavourably to other British television personalities who’ve crossed the Atlantic — popped up all over the internet, mainly from outraged fans. But the most wounding insults were hurled by American restaurant critics, no doubt furious that they hadn’t been asked to appear on the show themselves. ‘A horror’ was the verdict of Adam Platt, the distinguished food critic of New York magazine, who dismissed me as a ‘bald-headed Londoner’ guilty of delivering ‘forced bon mots’.Reviewers accused him of trotting out witticisms he had prepared earlier. For example, he said of one dish where the vegetables were better cooked than the two meat components, “It rather reminded me of one of those Hollywood films in which classically trained British actors have been cast in character roles. The two leads were upstaged by the supporting cast.”
. . . one of the penalties of being a well-educated Brit in America is that people are constantly accusing you of having memorised lines for the simple reason that you talk in complete sentences and — completely unheard of, this — you don’t make any grammatical mistakes.
Harry Nicolaides, 41, of Melbourne, appeared in a Bangkok court yesterday wearing an orange prison jumpsuit, with his hands cuffed and his feet shackled. He has already been in custody for nearly five months.David Farrar calls this disgraceful. Well, yes. But what shocked me was this:
“He has written a book that slandered the king, the crown prince and Thailand and the monarchy,” the judge told the court.
“He was found guilty under criminal law article 112 and the court has sentenced him to six years, but due to his confession, which is beneficial to the case, the sentence is reduced to three years.”
The charge relates to a passage in a self-published novel in 2005 titled Verisimilitude. His family has said that fewer than 10 copies were sold.Other reports have the total sales at seven copies. Even by the normally dismal results of self-publishing, that’s appalling. Has he no more than seven family members or friends?
Surely everyone knows that agriculture and forestry account for 65 per cent of New Zealand’s exports? You might think Australia is a farming nation, too. Yet, despite those outback farms the size of small European states, agricultural exports are not even 4 per cent of the Aussie economy. We are quite simply the biggest dairy and sheep meat exporter in the world. Or, to turn it around, the society whose fate is most closely tied to what is going on in its paddocks. . .That last statistic is staggering. The whole thing is well worth a read.
Our farmers continue to be the least subsidised, the least protected, of any Western state. They are also among the most innovative and productive. For the past 25 years, farming productivity has been growing 3.3 per cent a year compared with a measly 1 per cent for New Zealand workplaces as a whole.
There are more than 150 companies in Tokyo which are licensed to hire out animals of various kinds and although beetles may be cheap, dogs are much more popular.Being Japan, it gets even weirder – you can hire a (this is not about sex) temporary girlfriend or temporary dad for your children. You can even hire a mother.
First you pay a deposit and a hire fee. Then you are issued with a leash, some tissues and a plastic bag and given some advice on how to handle your new friend.
Kaori is a pretty waitress who regularly spends her Sunday afternoons with a Labrador. They go for a walk in the park if the weather is fine, or if it is wet they just snuggle up in front of the TV in her apartment.
“When I look into his eyes, I think he’s my dog,” Kaori told me. “But when I take him back to the shop, he runs away from me and starts wagging his tail when he sees the next customer. That’s when I know he’s only a rental dog.”
When Abu Ghraib is mentioned, history will remind us that it was the Bush Administration that imprisoned those responsible for the horrors. When water-boarding is brought up, we will see that it was only used on three suspects, one of whom was Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, al-Qaeda's chief of operational planning, who divulged vast amounts of information that saved hundreds of innocent lives. When extraordinary renditions are queried, historians will ask how else the world's most dangerous terrorists should have been transported. On scheduled flights?There’s a robustly sceptical view of homeopathy here, and of relativism here.
In September, EMI wisely decided to include a classic 1968 recording of Messiaen's Quartet for the End of Time in their series Great Recordings of the Century on EMI 212 6882. Played by the violinist Erich Gruenberg, clarinettist Gervase de Peyer, cellist William Pleeth and pianist Michel Beroff, this recording provided many people with their first Messiaen experience – and a great one it was. Now paired with his Chronochromie, a huge orchestral piece featuring an arsenal of percussion instruments, the Quartet is perhaps the quintessential Messiaen work, even though it does not feature any keyboard instruments.I can’t believe Peter made that mistake, but any half-decent sub would have spotted that a piece whose performers include the pianist Michel Beroff does indeed feature a keyboard instrument. It rather undermines one’s confidence in the rest of the magazine.
TypeSHED11’s aim is to raise awareness of typography’s role – socially, politically and culturally. It provides a framework for content, where typography is the thread, leaving ground for practitioners, students, academics and theorists to take hold, and use this as a forum to tease out ideas and critical thought, and to participate in rigorous debate and dialogue.Speakers include New York’s Christian Schwartz, one of the world’s most influential contemporary type designers; Melbourne typographer Stephen Banham, described by Eye magazine as a “typographic evangelist”; Japan’s Masayoshi Kodaira, recognised for pushing into three dimensions with his large-scale typographic installations; and influential Amsterdam trio Experimental Jetset, who starred in the film Helvetica and whose work was recently acquired by MoMA.
