Crock of gold at the end of Brighton pier 
(by courtesy of the BBC Newsnight daily e-mail):
Make it idiot proof and someone will make a better idiot.
Give me ambiguity or give me something else.
Hard work has a future payoff. Laziness pays off now.
We are born naked, wet and hungry. Then things get worse.
Reality is a crutch for people who can’t handle drugs.
Out of my mind… back in five minutes.
Look busy – God’s coming.
It’s lonely at the top, but you eat better.
Eschew obfuscation.
Circular Definition: see Definition, Circular.
Don’t bother me. I’m living happily ever after.
I started out with nothing and still have most of it left.
I pretend to work. They pretend to pay me. [BLB note: This was a common and perceptive comment on employment policy in east and central Europe in communist days.]
It’s not hard to meet expenses; they’re everywhere.
Jury: 12 people who determine which client has the better lawyer.
She’s always late. Her ancestors arrived on the Juneflower.
Nothing is fool-proof to a sufficiently talented fool.
On the other hand, you have different fingers.
Laugh alone and people cross the street to avoid you.
Lead me not into temptation, I can find it myself.
Why be difficult when, with a bit of effort, you can be impossible?
All I want is less to do, more time to do it, and higher pay for not getting it done.
My karma ran over your dogma.
Adults are just kids who owe money.
A day without sunshine is like, you know, night.
I’m out of bed and dressed. What more do you want?
And some signs:
From Philip in Cyprus: Faiq Jewellers and Faiq Moneychangers in Muscat.
From Michael Loughrey, a sign from a Texas shop window: “Shoplifters will be beaten, stabbed and stomped. Survivors will be prosecuted.”
From Andrew Emison: Dry Cleaners in Bangkok: “Drop your trousers here for best results.”
And a Nairobi restaurant: “Customers who find our waitresses rude ought to see the manager.”
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Condi Rice’s note to Mr Bush: 28 June 2004
Why do Tony Blair, e.g. in his press conference on 25 May , the BBC, Jack Straw and “Condi” Rice, in her little scribble to Mr President ("Mr President, Iraq is sovereign… – Condiâ€?; Bush: "Let FreeDom Reign!â€?) persist in talking about the handover of sovereignty to the Iraqis when the occupiers never possessed it to hand over? Sovereignty continued to reside in the Iraqi people through all the bombings, invasion and occupation. Don’t these people have advisers who know better? Or, as an e-correspondent of mine suggests, "I think these people know precisely what they are saying. The Coalition’s largesse knows no bounds! Sovereignty certainly cannot be given back to the Iraqi people by the Coalition, who did not possess it in the first place. Nemo dat quod non habet!â€? It’s a relatively small thing, but it makes its squalid little contribution to one’s rage and frustration. Even in talking of their pretend ‘handover’ of Iraq to its own people, they can’t resist the resident lie.
Still on Iraq (sorry): I’ve just come home from seeing Michael Moore’s magnificent film, Fahrenheit 911. I assume that some of the welter of allegations and accusations in the movie may well be inaccurate or unwarranted, but even allowing for that, it seems to me a remarkable and powerfully articulated indictment. If there’s any justice, it should annihilate Bush’s chances of re-election. But I fear that the great majority of American voters who go to see it will be, like me, already converted, and want to have the views they already hold confirmed. Will it reach enough of the undecided swing voters? Michael Moore, interviewed on the radio the other day while over here for the launch of Fahrenheit, said the man he really blamed was Blair. Bush had of course done terrible things, but he was genuinely too stupid to know any better. Blair was much cleverer, much better informed, and might well have had a real opportunity (Moore said) to stop Bush’s war before it began by refusing to have Britain take part in it without clear UN approval. Yet he had gone along with the lies and evasions and twisting of intelligence. He was far more culpable than Bush: yet where were the British Fahrenheit 911s, the angry exposures, the holding to account? Good questions.
In a way, I envy the Americans: at least in the faintly Lincoln-like Kerry they have a respectable, supportable alternative to Bush and his gang. Where’s the alternative to Blair for whom we could conscientiously vote?
A friend and relative asked whether the Royal family really still wielded political or societal power? I told him that in my view the short answer was yes. The long answer is that the monarch (whether present Queen or future King) can exercise considerable influence on the prime minister and other ministers, and that the future King Charles seems likely to wish to do so, having strongly held views on all sorts of fashionable topics and some pretty weird gurus feeding him their often misbegotten ideas, most recently causing HRH to advocate a “cure” for cancer involving, among other things, coffee enemas, the whole régime pronounced by some orthodox practitioners as probably dangerous and certainly ineffectual. According to the great constitutional authority Walter Bagehot, the monarch has three essential powers and rights in relation to his or her ministers: to be consulted, to advise and to warn. Taken together, and if exercised with vigour, these rights can significantly influence (often by inhibiting) ministers’ behaviour and decisions.
The monarch, and indeed other senior royals in significant matters, usually act only on the ‘advice’ of elected ministers, advice which is in practice mandatory. There are also however some significant personal powers under the royal prerogative, not necessarily exercised on the advice of ministers: for example,
• whether to accept or reject a prime minister’s request for a dissolution of parliament and fresh elections: and
• which member of parliament to invite first to try to form a government (which could be highly significant in the event of a hung parliament, a very real possibility at the next general election and a dead cert every time if we ever changed the electoral system and went over to proportional representation, heaven forbid).
There is no consensus among constitutional authorities about the circumstances in which these powers can properly be exercised in disregard of ministerial advice, nor about which political or official figures the monarch should (or properly could) consult before deciding how to act, although there’s a school of thought that argues that the monarch should normally consult his or her own Principal Private Secretary (a courtier appointed by the monarch, not accountable to anyone else), the Secretary to the Cabinet (a senior civil servant owing his or her primary loyalty to the government of the day), and the prime minister’s Principal Private Secretary (ditto). None of these three has any particular responsibility to parliament or the public, although it’s a reasonable expectation that all three, in tendering advice on such vital matters, would seek to act in the national interest rather than in obedience to any narrow party or personal allegiance. But these can be highly subjective issues. Both these personal powers clearly ought to be transferred to some accountable public figure, such as the Speaker of the House of Commons, before some future monarch tries to exercise them in a way that could easily provoke a major constitutional crisis, one indeed that could bring down the monarchy. But no-one is prepared to grasp this nettle for fear of being badly stung (“Now Blair Tries To Grab Queen’s Powers” — Daily Mail; “Power to King Tony” — The Sun).
As I write the radio is playing a clip of the Prince of Wales pontificating about education in a way which is being interpreted as an attack on government education policy, an interpretation being hastily denied by the Prince’s spokesman.
And the royal family has considerable social influence in maintaining its old-fashioned life-style at the apex of Society (with a capital S) with the full panoply of bowing, curtseying, courtiers and others walking backwards in The Presence, the monarch announcing government policy at each opening of parliament as if he or she had formulated these policies him/herself, personally conferring honours and titles, presiding at surrealistically formal banquets, insisting on the wearing of imaginative costumes for different occasions (white tie and tails, black tie, morning dress, top hats for men, hats and gloves for women, you name it), travelling by air and train at enormous public expense to purely private activities (watching football matches in Japan, playing golf in Spain, and so forth). This constantly legitimises the perpetuation of a grandiose life-style for a small social class, a life-style wholly out of keeping with a 21st-century democracy, redolent of wealth, hereditary unearned privilege and gross inequality. The harm all this does to our society (small s) may not be quantifiable, but it is manifestly considerable.
Here endeth the subversive lesson.
London, 1 July 2004
http://www.barder.com/brian/
The first editorial (“Snapshots of war”) in the Guardian of 3 May 2004 surely surpassed previous Guardian records for the mangling of our beautiful language. The half-sentence “it should be recognised that the differences [plural] in language, religion and culture means [singular] that patrolling [sing.] the streets of Belfast and those of Basra are [pl.] hardly comparable” breaks several records, not only for the two mismatches of subject and verb, but also for the weird formulation that “patrolling” is, or are, “hardly comparable” (patrolling is hardly comparable with what other activity?) and that it is linguistic and other differences that “mean[s]” this lack of comparability. The whole thing reads like the winning entry in a New Statesman competition to write the most cruelly strangulated sentence expressing a simple thought.
Compared with that disaster, it seems almost like a picking of nits to complain of a resounding and unnecessary split infinitive (“General Sir Michael Jackson… was right to quickly condemn…”), yet another mismatch of subject and verb (“The events of the last two weeks … means the government will have to think…”), a typo which the most inexperienced teenage proof-reader should have spotted (“the British army had its enough of its own difficulties…”), an example of the writer losing track of his sentence (“a role for which they are rarely trained or equipped to perform” – you don’t perform for a role), and a hanging participle unattached by logic or anything else to its apparent partner (‘Coming just over a year since President Bush staged a photo opportunity to declare “Mission accomplished”, the mission seems further from being accomplished than ever’, where the mission manifestly isn’t “coming just over a year” since Bush’s declaration, which announced its supposed end, not its beginning). And how exactly does one “fuel” a “revulsion”? With unleaded? The image is as dead as that former parrot, if not deader.
All in one short editorial! Doesn’t the Guardian employ proof-readers or sub-editors any more? Sad, sad.
London, 1 July 2004
http://www.barder.com/brian/
