[al gore] speculation is the name of the game

Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama both have strikes against them. As this Age article states:

Although Clinton has proved herself a highly capable senator, worries abound about her electability. And then there's the recurring query that worried Democrats whisper to each another: Is Bill behaving? Obama certainly qualifies as the next new thing, and … yet, in the age of terrorism, it will be a tall test for a first-term senator with no real Washington accomplishments to persuade the country that he's ready to be commander in chief.

That dynamic of doubt is sparking renewed interested in Al Gore.

"More and more people are asking, 'What about Al Gore?' " says Steve Grossman, former chairman of the Democratic National Committee. "If Al Gore were to announce for president, he would be a first-tier candidate on day one. Instead of it being Hillary and Obama on the covers of the national magazines, you would have three faces there."

Of course, this is the season of all sorts of speculation but the more I read of this, the more one looks at historic US presidential run ups such as this and this and the likelihood that the Democrats might struggle for the presidency with the current candidates, it might be worth a second glance at this Al Gore factor.

[apologies] higham's guide to doing it right

This blog is fed up to the back teeth with all this apologizing. Here are two of the more recent ones:

# ABC rebuked "Grey's Anatomy" co-star Isaiah Washington on Thursday for using an anti-gay comment this week and Washington issued a lengthy apology.

# Redford Says Bush Owes An Apology

As a service to readers, here is a link to an apology-help-write site and below is my blank which you’re welcome to copy and use:

I, [insert name here], formally and unreservedly apologize to [insert name here] for any offence or damage I may have caused [insert time frame] and wish to add, even though it in no way mitigates the deep humiliation and injury caused by my remarks, that I was not myself at the time and in no sense either believe or support the said remarks and further state that by calling [insert name again] a [terrorist, prat, chav – fill in your own], I was well out of order and wish him [or her] the very best for the future.

Always have this at hand, should you ever need to apologize, following a mouth-off-first-think-later type situation. Thank you and sorry.

[guido] the rich get richer and the poor …

It all began, as far as I can see, with this attack by Tim [the manic] Ireland, giving a point by point account as to why Guido Fawkes should be struck off. Countless other bloggers got in on the act. Then Paul Linford weighed in with this:

Keen observers may have noticed that, with the possible exceptions of UK Daily Pundit and myself, the debate is thus far polarising on political lines....

That may well be so but I don’t consider myself to be particularly left wing and Guido’s account of the tiff:

Skip this if you have a low boredom threshold, because it is for the geeks. Guido himself is basically simultaneously bored by, but amused that the blog boycott / de-link call has so spectacularly badly backfired, with hits up again to a new month and year high at 2,345,463 page views yesterday … so it looks like it is over and normal service can resume. So, for old times sake and just to wind Blog Brother up one last time, here are yesterday's stats. On Day 2 of the link boycott, Blog Brother himself slipped from fifth to sixth ranked link referrer…

… does not fill me with love for the man. Some time back, on someone’s blog, Guido’s alter ego commented and I commented under it, supporting what I thought were his essentially correct remarks. I’m not ‘naturally’ anti-Guido. But I am anti-bignoters who crow about their stats and for whom it’s the only purpose of blogging.

I have just been through his blog [thereby contributing, in a miniscule way, to his already swollen stats] and I’ve come to a conclusion I hope is not jaundiced:

He may have once been a good blogger. Who knows? He’s not anywhere near the blogger Iain Dale is now. Whatever one says about Iain, his posts are well-written and are not constantly self-referential [not constantly were the words]. In other words, he delivers product. Plus there’s Doughty. Doughty can’t be ignored, it is heavily influential and well put together.

Iain Dale contributes to the blogosphere in other ways too. He’s forever analysing it, creating lists and running drinks evenings for bloggers of a certain bent. Which is where Guido comes back in because he was one half of the latter event and all credit to him.

In the end, for the life of me I can’t see what 2,345,463 people see in his blog and why he wields such enormous influence. I can name eight to ten blogs immediately which are better and that was the primary purpose behind Blogpower. To give the top blogger [without the readership] a small chance.

I have no personal beef with Guido. It’s just a Dr. Fell situation, really.

[sublime classic] does such an animal exist

What is sublime? What is the most sublime piece of music you ever heard, what was the context and did you ever hear it repeated?

Was it somewhere here:

Beethoven - Piano Trio Op. 97 in B Major, Brahms - Piano Trio No. 3 in c minor orShostakovitch - Piano Trio No. 2 in e minor [with Natalia Gutman], which, incidentally, is coming up live in early February.

Can popular music ever be sublime? If my reputation is not already shot to ribbons, I’m going to thrust forward the Stranglers’ Down in the Sewer [all four movements of it] as an example of how a genre was hijacked and turned into a piece of fabulous music [within the parameters of pseudo-punk].

All right, all right, I know, I know. So what about Thijs van Leer and his magic flute, with Jan Akkerman and his improvised guitar and keyboards, in Focus, in such classics as Birth and Hamburger Concerto?

What about one of my favourite groups of all time – Can – and Tago Mago?

[bitta bovva] the chavs and the happy-slappers

I s’pose I can’t talk.

I was roaming London in the days of Splodginessabounds’ Two Pints of Lager and a Packet of Crisps Please, lived next door to the genesis of some record label I can’t remember [Virgin? Island?], drank in ‘ammersmith and Stamford Bridge, wore smoking jacket, bowler and Stranglers teashirt and generally made a prat of myself.

You all remember Bad Manners, the Beat, the Specials, the Selecter and so on? That was my era and there’s always been a bit of an underculture in Britain.

Fast forward twenty five years and I’m right out of it. What is this chav culture? Something about Burberry and Prada and Rooney – seems like it’s just a metamorphosis of the old thing which was always going on. Violence? London was always violent. Doug ‘n Dinsdale wouldn’t tell me why but they assured me it was so.

So is there anything actually … wrong with it … other than a bit of high spirits? Utterpants says:

"Short of enforced sterilisation, these shameless sluts will continue to breed like sex-crazed rabbits—smoking, drinking, fighting and fornicating their way into every corner of the land."

"Sterilisation?" we asked. "Isn't that a bit drastic?"

"It's simply no good pussy-footing around with bans on the sale of Burberry baseball caps and designer tracksuits to teenage Chavs," he replied, as he sucked on a curiously shaped glass pipe and blew a cloud of pungent smelling tobacco in our direction …"

Uh-huh. Still doesn’t seem all that bad. Sad that the young have turned into mindless excuses for humans, strangling the language in the process but still, we can’t change the world, right? Then I saw this Guardian article. Wiki put it more in context:

England, 18 June 2005: Police arrested three 14-year-old boys for the suspected rape of an 11-year-old girl who attended their school in Stoke Newington, London. Authorities were alerted when school staff saw footage from the students' mobile phones.

Nice stuff. Have we finally reached this stage?

[cancer] breast density huge factor

Researchers have found that women whose breast density was 75 per cent or more were 4.7 times more likely to develop cancer than those with density under 10 per cent. Women with dense breasts were 18 times more likely to find a cancerous tumour within 12 months of a negative mammogram.

This underscores that cancer is actually hardest to detect in women with the highest risk, a double-whammy that will likely result in a serious rethinking of screening.

Pardon my ignorance but by ‘dense breasts’, do they mean … er … ‘big breasts’? Well, apparently not:

On a mammogram, the gland tissue in the breast looks "dense." This means that it's thick or hard to see through. Some women have denser breasts than others. Dense breasts have more glandular and connective tissue and less fat tissue. Younger women tend to have denser breasts than older women. And thinner women tend to have denser breasts than heavier women.

Seems to me women have a lot to contend with in life.