Right there, cheek by jowl, barely a cigarette paper between them in The Spectator: Melanie Philips on Iran’s plans for the West and Fergal Keane on the suffering of the Lebanese.
Month: August 2006
Love this app
Diigo is kind of del.icio.us meets local browser bookmarks meets those sticky note apps that were all over the place a few years ago. Bookmark stuff, annotate it so other Diigo users can read your notes, highlight text, post to your blog, to del.icio.us and a dozen other sites. Everything even slightly bookmarky actually – ties the desktop and the web together more profoundly than anything I’ve seen so far plus the social component should be very powerful once the installed base is big enough.
I installed the Firefox plugin this evening (there are versions for IE and Flock) and I’m already an addict. It imported all my del.icio.us bookmarks smoothly and it will mirror my Diigo bookmarks back to del.icio.us for me so I don’t have to give up on them (although without the subheading I like to add to my del.icio.us bookmarks which is annoying).
Love these guys
Really: two bright geeks (well, one bright geek and one with a nice personality) reading out stories from Digg while drinking beer – I’ve been addicted for a couple of months now. It shouldn’t work but it’s quite brilliant. You’ll have to subscribe to the video podcast to see them in action (which, I guess, will require you to go over to iTunes and poke around for half an hour) but it’s worth it. I firmly expect to see copycat formats all over mainstream TV in the next year, complete with laptops…
(You can download the podcasts from here).
Beards, morality
The thing to remember about Hezbollah is that they’re not heroes, saviours or defenders, just stinky ultra-beards, fascists (‘Islamofascists‘ Hitchens would call them), contemptible, opportunistic, morally vaccuous. They’re organised, effective and modern in their operations but incoherent, Ignorant and mediaeval in their ideology. What they really remind me of is an earlier generation of witless fascists: Generalisimo Franco’s Falange, beetling off to Berlin to collect brown bags of money and weapons and promises of assistance from the Führer just as the beards run off to collect their rolls of used US dollars and truckloads of rockets from Tehran and Damascus.
The irony of the Western response to the Israeli attack on Lebanon is that no one expects anything of Hezbollah: not compromise, not compassion, not wisdom nor a readiness to talk. Of Hezbollah we only expect gut-wrenching terror, a total absence of mercy and the kind of perfect nihilism that marks the group’s most loyal adherents with a big ‘X’ that says ‘I am of no value. Blow me up any time’.
Comments are working again
Not that you’re going to bother anyway: traffic around here has dropped off a cliff since the start of the school holidays. Have you all gone on holiday? I suppose so. Anyway, it’s Olly’s 8th birthday in a week or so and Juliet took him and some of his hilarious mates out for the day today (because they’re all going to be on holiday next week) so I won the privelege of taking my lovely daughters to Princess School at Mystical Fairies in Hampstead.
We like Mystical Fairies, not only because they’ve played a major part in the formation of my daughters’ fantasy lives but also because they’re one of the best outlets for my wife’s ‘Airy Fairy’ greetings cards. Princess School involves lots of pretending, lots of games, lots of making things. It lasts two-and-a-half hours which seems like a long time for a three year-old and a six year-old but they were totally absorbed and totally entertained throughout. Brilliant.
You can also learn to be a pirate or a fairy. Obviously.
Spitting nails in London W1
Passing The New Piccadilly today I got chatting with Lorenzo, the owner. His battle with the landlords isn’t going well…
(More pics here).