DUFF & NONSENSE!

Taki memories

Yes, I did spell that right, not 'tacky' but 'Taki', as in Taki Theodoracopulos, the Greek/American author of the High Life column in The Spectator for the last ... well, more years than either I, or he, apparently, wish to dwell upon. Taki is a notoriously tough writer who once nearly reduced the 'Graun' to tears, poor things.  But then he is a fairly tough character himself.  Alas, the details escape me now but there was a time, in Greece, I think, when he was threatened by some rather heavy criminal types and he let be known through private channels that if they even scratched the paint on his yacht he would unleash a 'nuclear' retaliation that would leave them, their families and their businesses in need of considerable repair.  No more was heard of the matter! 

He is usually described, accurately as he, himself, would proudly admit, as an international playboy.  Today, the very term 'playboy' has a dated, dusty, somewhat fin de siecle feel to it.  Perhaps, having recently celebrated his 70th birthday, he is conscious of the passage of years because he has written, for him, a rather moving and almost elegiac essay on les temps perdu.  In it he describes the 'Noo Yawk' brownstone he has used as a family home for over 30 years.  During that time he has seen, across the street, a baby son born to a young couple and watched on an intermittent basis over the years this little boy grow up, mature and leave home.  'Noo Yawk', being a big city, he never did find out the name of the family opposite or their son.  Like old men everywhere, including this neck of the Dorset/Somerset woods, he deplores the changes he sees around him.  I, to coin a ghastly phrase, 'feel his pain'!  When he talks of Times Square and 42nd Street, I feel I know them from those old black and white movies of my childhood, and from my addiction to pulp fiction so much of which is set in 'Noo Yawk'.  But then he becomes a little more cheerful when he tells us that the Upper East Side (I know it, I tell you, I know it, it's just that, well, I couldn't actually point to it on a map!) has remained unchanged.  Similarly:

"For those of us raised on movies of the 1930s and 1940s, Central Park West's beautiful beaux-arts and art-deco apartment towers were the backdrop to our vision of urban glamour.  Every time I walk by on my daily constitutional round the park, I look at the buildings and I think I can hear the witty badinage, the music of Cole Porter and faintly see Fred Astaire in his white tie and tails."

Yes, I can see it all - and the nearest I've ever been to it is the tip of Cornwall!

Follow my leader!

Following my courageous fight with a dead prawn - which won - I am happy to report my complete recovery and that what passes for normal(!) service here, at Duff & Nonsense, is once again resumed.

The other night I gave a talk on the Battle of Waterloo and yet again I was struck by how well that battle fitted the wise admonition of Benjamin Franklin: "A little neglect may breed mischief ... for want of a nail the shoe was lost; for want of a shoe the horse was lost; and for want of a horse the [General] was lost"; or perhaps, my misquotation (sorry!) of Burns in the heading to my last post, "The best laid schemes o' mice an' men/ Gang aft a-gley".  Whatever, Bonaparte set in train great events over which he lost control and which then engulfed him to his everlasting rage and puzzlement.  Looking back with the perfect 20/20 vision of hindsight one can see clearly some of the errors of omission and commission that led to his defeat.  It leaves one pondering upon the imponderable of what, precisely and exactly, do 'great leaders' possess that persuades others to follow them into the greatest personal, political and military dangers.  I am tempted to use (or abuse!) that poor word 'courage', but that would be  an error.  Timid leaders, with strong reasons for their timidity emanating from their nation's weaknesses, can still claim the mantle of 'greatness' if their timidity saves their nation and avoids that much-admired (in some quarters) action - the futile gesture!  Thus, some of us (yes, alas, I include myself) might find it hard not sneer at the Belgians standing petrified before the oncoming headlights of Hitlerian Germany, whilst singing the praises of 'mad' Polish lancers charging on horse-back against panzers.  Thus, courage is a virtue but not all the time, and not everywhere.

Oh dear, what a long-winded, meandering way to state 'the bleedin' obvious'!  But I am provoked to these ruminations by the recent actions of our last two premiers.  Right or wrong, Mr. Blair, a man from whom I would hesitate to buy a second-hand car, suddenly broke with all his previously exposed characteristics of shiftiness and undeviating pursuit of whatever cause would ensure that his bottom would slide onto the prime ministerial chair, suddenly threw his weight, and his job, behind the invasion of Iraq.  Now, this took considerable political courage.  He risked his premiership and his reputation, and he took on not only the broad, apathetic weight of British public opinion which is always vaguely anti-American but his own party as well.  Indeed, it was this very sense of conviction from a man I had previously thought incapable of spelling the word which provided one of the reasons why I supported him.  Of course, he was utterly unscrupulous in the methods he deployed to achieve his aims and by dint of much lying and corruption (in the sense of politicising the intelligence services) he 'won' the day - my inverted commas around the word 'won' need no explanation!  My point is, that for the purposes of this discussion, whether he was right or wrong is immaterial, the fact is that he had a very clear idea of what he wanted to achieve and he went for it, and slowly, and reluctantly, first his party, then parliament, and finally, the country, followed.  I repeat, for the moment, forget the specific issue, just look at it as an exercise in political leadership.

Need I say that all of that stands in direct contrast with the political cowardice of his successor, formerly spoken of as one of the political giants of the era, 'a man with bottom', a 'big cat in the jungle', whose rages and tantrums shook the rafters in Downing Street for ten years, and who is now perceived to be a trembling pussycat who doesn't throw the furniture around anymore but, instead, hides under it?  In my lifetime I have never seen a 'big man' shrink with such rapidity until, somewhat like the Cheshire cat, nothing remains except the scowl!  I have no sympathy for the Labour party, which is itself decayed and corrupted from within judged by its conduct of the Crewe by-election, and needs a long period in exile to renew itself, but even so, it is a major party of the realm and the fearful man who leads it also leads my country.  A pusillanimous poltroon like Gordon Brown is not fit for that purpose - it is time the Labour party acted.

Do it, Labour, do it for England!

Best laid plans of mice and men ...

Well, the wedding was delightful but the wedding night, er, for me, that is, was dreadful.  I went to bed shivering and despite wearing my socks in bed and clutching my hands under my armpits I could not stop shivering and shaking and sweating.  I fear, once again, the dreaded revenge of the prawn.  I remember thinking as I picked up one large, juicy-looking crustacean that he had a somewhat beady eye - I should have been warned!  Anyway, the trip 'ooop North' for the funeral had to be cancelled which was not a great disappointment, I must confess, and instead the little 'Memsahib' drove me home where I took to my bed.  She is even more terrifying when she adopts her 'Nursey' role than she is normally!  I am feeling better already, but just a bit 'feak and weeble'!

Aways days

A rather incongruous  coincidence of social gatherings, a wedding in Sussex on Saturday followed by a funeral in Harrogate on Monday! So, for obvious reasons this Blog will 'rest easy' until my return.

Two brave, unknown, heroes

One of them, a Chinese, pops into my mind from time to time because once seen, never forgotten. The newsreel shots of him taken in 1989 turned him into an iconic figure and are probably available on YouTube if any of my more geekish readers can find it for me.  I refer, of course, to that young Chinese man who stepped out in front of a tank on its way to put down the Tiananmen Square demonstration.  I think the thing that sticks the image firmly in the memory is the incongruous plastic shopping bag he carried in one hand, for all the world as though he had just popped out to his local Tesco, or perhaps, the nearest Chinese take-away, and somehow all those tanks had really pissed him off!  Whenever I see some of our home-grown, wet, useless, Trot-lot pseudo-revolutionaries 'bravely' confronting sundry British 'Plods' whose boredom with whatever demo is going on is only exceeded by their delight at the overtime, I think of that unknown Chinese and understand a little better the difference between real courage and phony bravado.

I am not sure if my next hero is a man or a woman.  Worse still, I cannot confirm that this is true, I am relying on a friend who read it in the paper.  As we all know, that well-known Russian mafia Capo, Mr. Putin, has been, er, dallying with a rather attractive ice-skating lady (or perhaps she's a gymnast - possibly even a ballerina, although I doubt very much whether that thug is likely to be a balletomane.) Anyway, even the Russian papers have been enjoying a snide giggle or three, and as a result a Bill was hurried through the Russian parliament (my turn for a giggle) banning the media from reporting on the private lives of their, er, 'glorious leaders'.  This Bill was passed by several hundred to one, and my admiration for that 'one' knows no bounds.  He, or she, is an exceedingly courageous person.

If anyone has further and better particulars on either of the individuals concerned, I would be delighted to know more.  In the meantime, I salute them both.

Two great, unknown, Englishmen

Well, you might, just, have heard of the first - F. W. Lanchester (1868-1946).  Today, his memory is probably kept alive mostly amongst the avid classic-car 'anoraks' who revere his famous, inter-war years and eponymous sports car. Quite right, too, because in 1895, amongst other things, he was the designer and builder of the first 4-wheel car in the UK, plus, he invented disc brakes and all sorts of other automobile gadgets and widgets.  You should try and remember him in your prayers the next time you take off in a plane because in the very early days of flying he wrote an extremely learn-ed paper on wing design which stopped planes suddenly falling out of the sky.  Don't ask me for the details, only Dr. 'Teabag' would understand them (he does sums, you know!) but it was to do with airflows and turbulence. He was not only a superb and innovative engineer, he was also a physicist and mathematician of the first rank which earned him membership of the Royal Society.

However, I hesitantly suggest that it was in the field of warfare that he made his greatest contribution to the history of ideas.  On the outbreak of WWI he became interested in the problems of what was then the new field of aerial combat.  He saw what most military commanders already sensed, but without deep understanding, that, all things being equal which they tend to be in aerial warfare, if you can bring to bear on the enemy more weapon systems that he can bring onto you, you will kill more of his forces than he can of yours.  So far, so bleedin' obvious, you might say.  However, what his mathematical brain worked out was, that if you introduce as a factor the passage of time 'T', and then begin to iterate the equation with 'T' in it, then very quickly the killing ratio becomes huge.  This is to simplify a very subtle and complex mathematical equation (which would horrify its author) but suffice to say that Lanchester's Law and its variations, known as the 'N' Square Law, or, the Square Law of Attrition have been, arguably, one of the greatest influences on warfare in the last hundred years. Certainly he can claim to be the Father of the new science of Operational Research which is crucial in every facet of modern warfare. If you 'Google' him you will also come across some highly abstruse papers written by various Heads of Strategy in the big American and Japanese corporations who to this day still use Lanchester's Law as the basis for their marketing operations.

I stumbled over the second of my unknown English 'heroes' only yesterday whilst, as the little 'Memsahib' puts it, "Wasting your time on that blasted computer when you should be doing ............... " (fill in any number of jobs around the house and garden).  Anyway, his name is Lewis Fry Richardson (1881-1953) and I bet you haven't heard of him either, unless you're a meteorologist, a psychologist, a fluid dynamicist, a student of war and its causes or a student of Chaos Theory, because he was an important contributor to all of those fields.  So, just like Lanchester, he was one of those amazing Victorian polymaths the like of which we no longer seem to produce, instead all we get from our universities these days are teeth-grindingly tedious mono-subject specialists who then mature into fully-fledged fanatical experts determined to boss everyone around.

I instantly warmed to Richardson when I read this quote which ought to be hung above the desks of every scientists in the world:

"Mathematical expressions have, however, their special tendencies to pervert thought: the definiteness may be spurious, existing in the equations but not in the phenomena to be described; and the brevity may be due to the omission of the more important things, simply because they cannot be mathematized : : : . Against these faults we must constantly be on our guard : : : . It will probably be impossible to avoid them entirely, and so they ought to be realized and admitted : : : .”

He was, and remained, a Quaker all of his life but during WWI he volunteered for the Friend's Ambulance Service in which he served with distinction as a driver. After the war he worked for the meteorological office but when Churchill insisted that it be subsumed under RAF control he resigned because throughout his life he would never work on any project with links to the military.  Blessed with a gentle humour he is remembered by his fellow fluid dynamicists for this paraphrase of Swift's doggerel: "Big whirls have little whirls to feed on their velocity, and little whirls have lesser whirls and so on to viscosity - in the molecular sense."  The writer of the appreciation to which I have linked, Prof. J.C.R. Hunt of the Dept. of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics  at Cambridge, was a family friend and he relates a charming story of Richardson on holiday with his wife the year the Titanic sank after colliding with an iceberg.  Richardson instantly hit on the idea that perhaps a sonar echo-measuring device might avoid similar tragedies.  Without further ado he had his wife row him up and down in a dinghy in Seagrove Bay whilst he piped notes on a penny whistle aimed at the nearby pier, and using his umbrella as an amplifier, he measured the time taken for the echo to return.  In my view, that's proper science, that is!

Anyway, two very great Englishmen.

'Et tu', Ed?

Interesting speculation by Fraser Nelson in this week's Spectator on the subject of whither Labour? and, perhaps more interesting, Labour with who?  I gave up this forecasting lark back in the early '60s when I boldly predicted to the 'scousers' in my barrack-room that this new group from Liverpool called the Beatles that they were wittering on about were one-hit wonders.  Er, yes, quite so!  Nelson points out, rather shrewdly, that there is a huge difference between the way in which 'Broon' was handed the job and the clunking, clanking Party machinery that will haul in his successor.  In particular, if Labour is routed at the next election the bloody axe will fall mainly on the New Labour Blairites who took seats off the Tories in the last decade, thus leaving the big decision in the hands of the increasingly militant unions, the Party membership (and you only have to read some of the Blogs to get their flavour) and the rump of Old Labour MPs.  In my view, that will leave Milliband jnr. well out of the running.

The not-so-dark horse, of course, is Ed Balls who perhaps isn't quite so keen these days to be known as  'Broon' s' anointed.  Politically, Balls is a loathsome man in my opinion - of course, personally he may be a loving husband and a doting father, although one might legitimately doubt the latter given the fact that to preserve his ideological purity he is prepared to sacrifice his children's future by leaving them to attend a broken state school which has been severely criticised by its inspectors.  His flagrant attack on the last tattered remnants of all that is best in our 'edukashun servis', such as the 'A'-level examinations, will win him plaudits with the hard Left.

However, as Nelson points out, there is one big unknown (amongst a host of smaller ones) and that is the question of how long will 'Dim Dave' last in the job?  Apparently some Labourites give him one term maximum before they are all back in 'business as usual' mode.  If that is so, then whoever takes over from 'Broon' will have timed it perfectly.  But - and it's a whopper of a 'but' - if  'Dim Dave' proves rather more dexterous and intelligent than hitherto assumed, then he could do a Blair and win three elections!  This would be a catastrophe for the new leader of 'Old' Labour.  Just look at how many interim leaders the Tories had to get through before they found one just in time to take the tide.  It would certainly spoil the prime ministerial plots and plans of Mr. and Mrs. Ed Balls, a thought to savour, I feel.

Happily there is yet another cheery prospect to look forward to if Labour is thrashed at the next election.  The vicious in-fighting between the Blairites and the Ideologues will keep me cackling away in my armchair, but the political WMD that will be chucked around between the differing factions within the Ideologues will have me falling out of it and onto the floor weeping with laughter.  You need only visit some of the Ideologue blogsites to enjoy a foretaste of the coming civil war.  It could be the Bolsheviks vs. the Mensheviks all over again, or perhaps the Judean Liberation Front vs. the Liberation Front for Judea is nearer the mark!  Such fun!

Julia M - the most dangerous blogger in the west!

I am delighted to tell you all that 'Julia M' (for Magnificent? Meticulous? Measured? Memorable?),  a frequent commenter here at Duff & Nonsense, has finally started her own blog.  I shall endeavour to add her to my links when my, er, you know, that thing in the brain ... oh, what's it called? ... don't tell me ... oh, yes, my memory kicks in and I can remember how to do it.  I do urge all my readers to pay her a visit, especially those of a left-wing disposition - as you all know, I am very much in favour of blood sports!  In argument, Julia has the ability to use a short, sharp stiletto where I tend to blunder on and on with a base-ball bat.  Spread the word, people!

A new logo for the Tories

All morning Sky News have been concentrating on Boris's front door, outside of which, stood an empty bottle of champagne with some flowers stuck in it.  It struck me as the perfect new logo for the Tories to replace that ghastly scribbled tree with its greenery-pokery image.  I'd vote for that!

In the meantime, Labourites, in a state of Shlock Horror, appear to have had their brains scrambled.  They keep blaming their disaster on 'Blairism'.  Now, I know that a week in politics is a long time, and that Labourites are not the brightest in the land by definition, but you would have thought they would remember that it was 'Blairism' that provided them with three victories on the trot.  Well, if they want rid of all their surplus 'Blairism', they could send it by DHL to Tory Central Office, they can't get enough of it!

A bad day for the Tories

'Hash Broon' appeared on the 'telly' this morning grinding out his usual cliches and platitudes.  I think he composes his statements with a hat full of words and simply picks them out randomly one at a time like Tristan Tzara the Dada-ist poet at the beginning of Stoppard's play "Travesties".  "Leadership", "lessons", "view", "decisions", "courageous", "leading", "right", "long term", "stability", "listening" and so on and on like a demented speak-your-weight machine.  Of course, the word which then hits the deck like a dud dollar is "courageous" which is what he ain't! He ducked an election for his party's leadership, he reared up in fright at the prospect of a general election, he cowered behind technicalities to avoid a vote on the European treaty and then sneaked in after hours with his coat collar turned up in order to sign it and finally he shuffled around the Olympic torch whilst trying simultaneously to bathe in its reflected glow whilst not wishing to handle the beastly thing.  What a pathetic disgrace he is!

'Cameroon' had to hide away the empty champagne bottles and the party-poppers before trying to look prime ministerial for the cameras.  He was sensible enough not to gloat too much and was wise to dampen Tory expectations.  However, I still suspect (I cannot know) that this may have been a bad day for the Tories, or perhaps to put it accurately, a bad day for us.  Last year, when 'Broon' was in his ascendancy and threatening a general election, 'Dim Dave' was 'frit' and in desperation some of his apparatchiks actually began to talk in almost Thatcherite terms.  Then 'Broon' imploded and with an almost audible sigh of relief the 'Cameroons' went back to mouthing platitudes. Now, I don't blame the Tories for keeping their powder dry by not laying out detailed policies as hostages to Labour fortune, but I have a sinking feeling that more of the same is all that the 'Cameroons' can and will come up with if they think they are a dead cert to win.  If so, they won't last long and, perish the thought, some one a lot nastier will come out of the woodwork to give us all the change we yearn for.