[russian hijack] silly season demands sensation

So, it was a beat up. The headline proclaimed: Aeroflot Flight Hijack Attempt Foiled by Passengers. But the text said differently:

A Russian Aeroflot A-320 airliner with more than 100 passengers onboard was en route from Moscow to Geneva but had to land in Prague shortly before 11 a.m., after a hijacker tried to attack the crew. Reportedly the plane's passengers subdued the would-be hijacker. The Itar-Tass news agency said an unidentified man who was drunk picked a fight with two other passengers, threatened the crew and demanded the aircraft alter its course.

In other words, a drunken Russian acted in character. Subdued? Fell over more like.

[presidential debates] discussing real issues or cardboard cutouts

Dalek Duet

Tiberius Gracchus has been reflecting on Presidential Debates in American elections and says they “have assumed an importance over the years that makes them a key part of any campaign.

Famous moments like Lloyd Bentsen's I knew Jack Kennedy, you're no Jack Kennedy quip in the Vice Presidential Debate of 1988 or Ronald Reagan's "There you go again" in the Presidential Debate of 1980 have become part of American history. Not to mention of course the most famous debate of the lot - between Richard M. Nixon and John F. Kennedy in 1960 which supposedly won a tight election for JFK by showing him at his youthful best as opposed to what seemed to be a tired Vice President.”

Interestingly, listeners on the radio thought Nixon had won the debate but the television audience say it the other way. Some other debates:

In 1980 Reagan closed his debate with incumbent Jimmy Carter with a simple question: Are you [the American people] better off now than you were four years ago? Faced with inflation, high interest rates, a continuing energy crisis, and low American prestige abroad, many Americans felt that they were not better off, and Reagan won election.

In 1988 Dukakis had referred to himself as a "card-carrying member of the ACLU", which Bush picked up on and painted his opponent as a liberal who would sell America short. Gene Weingarten, of the Washington Post, spoke of a time when a group of journalists met Dukakis and felt he was "terrific, impressive, commanding, Presidential. We were falling all over each other to find adequate superlatives." Nieman curator Howard Simons heard us all out, then shook his head and said: "Won't win. No sense of humor."

[In an earlier post, Vox’s two principles for winning debates are argued.]

[gift giving] the imbalance of expectation

We were having a little discussion about presents and I came over as a bit curmudgeonly about it all. I felt that the Japanese had the right idea in writing everything in a book – the date, who gave it, to whom, what category it was, how much it cost [roughly], what the occasion was. That way the gift was always appropriate and never created an imbalance of expectation.

Not so, said one lady. A present is a spontaneous gift, an impulse of affection. Yes, said my friend but if one friend is richer and one poorer, then an imbalance is created and the poorer feels awful that he can’t respond in kind. Oh what’s it matter, was the lady’s response. Reply - it matters a lot to the person who is the ‘lesser’, shall we say.

My friend and I had a gift exchange this morning and with one or two exceptions, the gifts were roughly of the same nature. Why to do it at all then, is the obvious question. Answer - because it took effort to get the gifts, to think out what the other wanted and in the exchange, each went home with something more than before and it was to his taste.

Of course you have your own opinion on this, no doubt.

[blogfocus saturday] 21:00 london time

This computer was hit by a Trojan virus about midnight Monday which took it over and reconfigured everything in the name of a Spanish or Portugese host.

Update

Though it is now supposedly back in working order, I had the Blogfocus half ready when the computer suddenly crashed then rebooted itself and the auto-saved text and urls had been wiped.

Update on the update

It will have to be Blogfocus Saturday now, I'm afraid. Tuesday seems to have been a washout. So - 21:00, London time, Saturday, December 30th, New Year Edition.

[sydney to hobart] maxis playing out of their league

The Sydney to Hobart race has always been dangerous because it travels through some of the roughest waters in the world, it is held at an unpredictable time of the year with weather which can become extremely violent very quickly and concentration on the boats is usually on ‘win at all costs’ rather than ‘batten down and play safe’, especially with race leaders.

In recent years, the rise of the ‘maxi’ has been very worrying. In the interests of pure boat speed, the old deep draft traditional lines have been revamped into flat, sleek torpedoes with highly complex systems and immensely strong synthetic fibres and other materials which can suddenly fail. It's not the first time Skandia, for example, has had centreboard trouble.

The result is a fleet of danger machines doing what they shouldn’t. Monohulls are great for safety, seaworthiness and 'slow but sure' when in traditional form but the new plastic fantastics are simply trying to play out of their league and be 'something they ain’t'. Thus Maximus’ crew had to be rescued today by helicopter and the two leaders lost their masts. If you truly want speed and safety, then the only really seaworthy boats are these.

For the record, Wild Oats XI, Skandia and Ichi Ban were leading the fleet across Bass Strait on Wednesday evening after the retirements of early leaders Maximus and ABN Amro One, who both lost their masts in the early hours of the morning. Ichi Ban was also the handicap leader.

[acronyms] pedantry or right on the money

I don’t mention Oliver Kamm’s posts nearly enough because 1] they’re usually so tightly written, it’s difficult to do anything other than post the whole thing and 2] he doesn’t like being quoted [his debate* with Norm over this issue seems to indicate that]. However, this one demands posting - here he is annoyed by an article in the BBC News magazine and he’s right. P-G – you might also be interested in this one:

You can make a plausible case that JPEG is an acronym. DVD-RAM is half an acronym. None of the rest is an acronym; they are abbreviations. MP3 is an abbreviation of an abbreviation. An acronym is a word formed from the initial letter or letters of a group of words. Unicef is an acronym; UNHCR is not an acronym, but an abbreviation. Acronym is a useful word, with no convenient synonym. I fear that its indiscriminate use by journalists who think it sounds modish may be irreversible.

*I reason that as he doesn’t like to quote others, the same would apply in reverse.

[vatican bank again] new profile of one of ‘them’

Martin Kelly’s blog is one of the best going and here he has come up with a piece about one of ‘them’ that I’m always on about, except that I don’t name them from the lists, given my position. Lists, for example, like the 1972 meeting of the Bilberbergers and its eyecatching cast. Like the lady who moved from Tesco to Fitch. Like Marc Ladreit de la Charriere. It doesn’t even start to address the interconnectedness of it all. Instead I rabbit on about the agenda, to almost complete blog-silence.

So here are some excerpts about Mr. Vatican Finance from Martin:

The man whose picture appears above is one of the most well-connected people on the planet; yet although few outside his homeland might know what he looks like, his career path has resulted in him probably wielding more influence over the lives of more people than many elected heads of state. His name is Peter Sutherland, and he's an Irish national.

Born in 1946, the last director of GATT and the first of the World Trade Organisation, chairs both BP and Goldman Sachs International, on the board of the Royal Bank of Scotland, Mr. Globalisation, the cosmopolitan elitist incarnate, adept at moving from place to place and job to job with consummate ease, his name and face largely unknown to the world public but his work still leaving a huge footprint on their lives.

He is reported to be an avid member of the Bilderberg Group and is European Chair of the Trilateral Commission. Globalisation is a policy, not a process, which depends both on mass migration in one direction and the sending of remittances in the other for its success. In a November 2006 interview with the Inter Press Service News Agency … Sutherland was quoted as saying that ''remittances are private funds whose use should be determined solely by those who have earned them.''

The punch line though is that he has now been appointed: 'Consultor of the Extraordinary Section of the Administration of the Patrimony of the Apostolic See'. Who said that the Vatican Bank died with Robert Calvi in the Blackfriars Bridge execution?

[mick jagger] driver tells all

If you scan the posts you’ll see that only rarely does this blog post the MSM’s article lock, stock and barrel and only when it’s a goody and would suffer by being abridged. Thus I post this piece by Helena de Bertodano:

Most taxi drivers have at least one story about having a celebrity in the back of their cab. Keith Badgery can trump them all. He had Mick Jagger in the back of his car for 14 years. And Michael Jackson for four-and-a-half months. Not to mention Madonna, Rod Stewart, Barbra Streisand, Naomi Campbell, Julia Roberts, Jack Lemmon, Celine Dion, Mariah Carey, Gloria Estefan and many, many more.

For years, people have told him, "You should write a book." Now he has. In Baby, You Can Drive My Car, he reveals the antics of his clients, in particular Mick Jagger, whose famous womanising Badgery often witnessed. In fact, the book opens with Badgery tactfully getting out of the car while Jagger says his farewells to Sophie Dahl. "This took some time. By the end of it, the car was actually rocking slightly," he writes.

I meet Badgery at his home in Carshalton, Surrey. His wife Jane, also a chauffeur, collects me from the station in the black Mercedes limousine Badgery used for ferrying around his clients. It is very comfortable, with a beige leather and suede interior and tinted windows. As we cruise along the streets of Carshalton, I almost convince myself that I am famous.

Badgery, 53, used to work for a company that supplied cars to celebrities and became so popular that they would vie for his services. For the past five years he has worked independently, and only stopped driving Jagger two months ago. Jagger used him so often that Badgery had to drop his other commitments. "I basically lost all my clients through Mick because he used me every day of the week," he says.

But Jagger has recently hired a new minder, who also acts as a driver, and Badgery had found himself increasingly sidelined.

Therein lies the juiciness of this article, continued here …

[love profile] some of this was too close for comfort

The Keys to Your Heart

You are attracted to good manners and elegance. In love, you feel the most alive when things are straight-forward, and you're told that you're loved. You'd like your lover to think you are stylish and alluring. You would be forced to break up with someone who was emotional, moody, and difficult to please. Your ideal relationship is open. Both of you can talk about everything... no secrets. Your risk of cheating is zero. You care about society and morality. You would never break a commitment. You think of marriage as something that will confine you. You are afraid of marriage. In this moment, you think of love as something you thirst for. You'll do anything for love, but you won't fall for it easily.

What Are The Keys To Your Heart?

[death clock] let’s get morbid for a change

According to the death clock, I had 596, 789, 786 seconds left to live a few days back on Christmas Eve. Now what was the most disturbing thing about this was that when it was converted into years and days, it came to almost exactly the number of years and days my father was on this earth.

Another neat little statistic was that my BMI [body mass index] was almost exactly the same as Cityunslicker. Isn’t that neat, to employ an Americanism?

See how you go with yours.