Q. What did Humphrey Bogart say to the geometer?

A. Here’s looking at Euclid.

Groan? Well, as a matter of fact, that’s where it’s from, the Groan‘s Pyrgic Puzzles, but I can’t find a link for it.

Anne Cunningham has been having an interesting time in France. A friend gave her a book on politics which led her to the following question:

Politics explores crucial domestic problems of sexual etiquette. What should the sleeping arrangements be in a ménage à trois? Is it polite to read while two people have sex beside you?

I’ve been reading books about politics all my adult life but I have somehow managed not to come across this question before. And it’s one I haven’t much thought about. No, I’m gonna level with you; I’ve never thought about it. In the words of The King:

Always lived, very quiet life

Not that I haven’t had my moments, you understand. Aaanyway, so I started to think about the question after I’d encountered it over at Anne’s place, and I feel I’d like to share some of my thoughts with you.

First off, isn’t it rude of them to have sex while you’re reading? But then that wasn’t the question posed, and answering a question with a question is a typically Jewish thing to do – so hold off on it. Go with the original. Maybe it wasn’t rude of them; maybe they’d asked – politely – whether you’d mind, and you’d said, no, you wouldn’t mind, and so they are, umm, following through, and you’re reading – and is this rude? Top of my head, I’m bound to say that I’m not too sure. What’s the core intuition here? Is it that, if you’re reading it must mean that what they’re doing isn’t too interesting to you, and this would be an insult? OK, so now I’ve got a thought path. This I can pursue.

The answer, in that case, is surely going to depend on whether you’re reading something interesting or not. If what you’re reading is a book the two of them would regard as truly dull, that would be insulting. As if to say, ‘Even this is better to contemplate.’ Like, maybe, if you were just reading a manual – on chess openings. Or a thriller with a limp plot. What, though, if you were reading a cricket book (say, one on the art of batsmanship), studying the chapter on how to execute a stroke to fine leg? That might be OK. There must be a whole set of gradations here. An article from Mind or The Journal of Philosophy, containing some really penetrating philosophical analysis, or a fascinating volume of oral history, these must surely justify your reluctance to attend to the activities with which your friends are busily going ahead.

(That’s enough of that. It’s not what readers of this site are used to or expect. Terminated – Ed.)

There’s a great interview with Emmylou Harris here, about Gram Parsons:

One night, I was listening to a tape of the show, and I heard his singing. We were doing The Angels Rejoiced Last Night, that Louvin Brothers song, and I went, ‘My God – this guy is an amazing singer.’ All of a sudden it just hit me. Before that, I’d been so focused on trying to learn my parts, and learn the songs, and play guitar and keep up with the band – ‘cos I’d never worked with a band before. I’d been so trying to just get up there and do the gig and follow Gram, that I hadn’t been listening. I’d been listening with part of my brain, in order to function – but I hadn’t been listening with my heart, I guess. And I finally heard it, and I fell in love with his voice. And I started to get it.
…..
I should have suspected the hypocrisy in the hippie music movement. Merle Haggard was okay when he did The Lonesome Fugitive and Mama Tried, ‘cos he had been in prison, so he was one of the good guys who had gone against the establishment. But as soon as he did Okie From Muskogee, everybody moved away from him like a bad smell. But it was a good song.
…..
The drinking did bother me, but when you’re really young, you don’t think that you or anyone you know that age is really in any trouble. I was naive about it. I look back on it now and I think, ‘How could I not have known that he was in trouble?’
…..
And if he hadn’t died. We were definitely moving that way. A couple of weeks before, I’d finally accepted the fact that I was in love with him. But, you know, why even tell him? I was going to see him in a few weeks. I had all the time in the world. And then he died, so I never even got to tell him.

Read the rest. There are also interviews at the same site, and on the same subject, with Chris Hillman, Hank Wangford and others.

I was quietly perusing my dnoc the other morning – as ya do – when I got stuck in the middle of a sentence. Here is where I got stuck:

With ministers again on the rack over the intelligence on Iraq…

Do you see it? Or, rather, hear it? ‘… on the rack… over… Iraq’. That’s lodged in my brain these last few days. The rack… Iraq:

The rack, Iraq
The rack, Iraq
A booba dee bop
A zooba dee hip
A yubba dee yep
A hepa dee zep

You know the bit in On the Town where Gene Kelly, Frank Sinatra and Jules Munshin strut their stuff? They sing:

New York, New York
A wonderful town
The Bronx is up
And the Battery’s down
The people ride in a hole in the ground
New York New York
It’s a wonderful town

Well…

A booba dee bop
A zooba dee hip
A yubba dee yep
A hepa dee zep

The rack, Iraq
An excellent game
The Graun arrives
And it’s always the same
The war was wrong, Tony Blair is to blame
The rack, Iraq
It’s an excellent gaaaame

A booba dee bop
A zooba dee hip
A yubba dee yep
A hepa dee zep

The rack, Iraq
A game to maintain
Forget mass graves
We still wanna complain
Say ‘Why no weps?’, don’t say ‘Saddam Hussein’
The rack, Iraq
It’s a game to maintaaaiin

A hooba dee hop
A booba dee bop
A weeba dee bleep
A greeba dee sneep

The rack, Iraq
A matter for blame
We’re so, so cross
We are really aflame
The late regime? Well, we ain’t got no shame
The rack, Iraq
It’s a matter for blaaaayyyyme

A tigga dee too
A migga dee moo
A wupta zee dup
A shupta dee glup…

Autocrat at the Breakfast Table is a brand new blog, inaugurated in the early hours of this morning. It goes on my blogroll on the strength of the Prospectus, which contains this sentence:

It’s greatly to the credit of the doughty men and women in the blogosphere… that they are always hospitable to dispute, if it is made in a spirit of amiable contention.

The Prospectus also says this:

Encoded in the whole business of the weblog community is a covenant rare in public debate. It is accepted that the participants are intelligent, articulate souls whose views, as expressed on their sites, are considered and impassioned, gently insisting that we attend even if we, in the last instance, disagree.

I may have been influenced slightly by finding normblog on the Autocrat’s blogroll – but not too much so.

Here, in a piece by Ian Buruma, is something that I too have been arguing for a while (see, for example, this):

[T]he kind of violence currently directed at targets associated with the West, from the World Trade Center to a discothèque in Bali, is not just about the United States. Nor can it be reduced to global economics. Even those who have good reason to blame their poverty on harsh forms of U.S.-backed capitalism do not normally blow themselves up in public places to kill the maximum number of unarmed civilians. We do not hear of suicide bombers from the slums of Rio or Bangkok.

Buruma goes on to diagnose an ‘Occidentalist’ form of anti-modernism as being at work. I disagree with with what he says about the Iraq war towards the end, but it’s an interesting piece.

Not all dreams of local authenticity and cultural uniqueness are noxious, or even wrong… [T]he poetic romanticism of 19th-century German idealists was often a welcome antidote to the dogmatic rationalism that came with the Enlightenment.

It is when purity or authenticity, of faith or race, leads to purges of the supposedly inauthentic, of the allegedly impure, that mass murder begins.

(Hat tip: Anthony Cox.)

Here’s a report about what’s going on in China to try to clamp down on the use of the internet for political dissent:

As an Amnesty report revealed this week, the Chinese government is using an increasingly heavy hand to try to silence the growing whispers of opposition on the web. The group says 54 people had been arrested for disseminating their beliefs through the internet by December – a 60% increase on the previous year.

Their alleged crimes include organising online political petitions, proselytising for the outlawed Falun Gong movement, and spreading “rumours” about Aids and Sars. They face sentences of between two and 12 years in prison. Four have died in detention and there are reports of torture.

In part, the increase in arrests reflects the explosive growth of internet use in China, where the number of surfers rose by 32% last year to 78 million. But it also reflects the government’s quandary in trying to promote the economic, modernising side of the web, while suppressing its political and subversive nature.

They may just have a problem there.

If you have a benign and tolerant view of blogging and bloggers, you should perhaps read this person, who seems to hate it – and us:

You are all pretentious twats. You make up irritating jargon for the sake of it. All of your blogs talk about the same crap. You are fucking stupid. You are all sheep. Your blog is fucking up Google.

And that’s only some of the subheads. Each one of them is elaborated. I wasn’t sure whether to stop blogging at once, or to blog at least this item, in order to give the view some airtime, before shutting down normblog forever.

(Via Cobb.)

As South Africa prepares for national elections, the question of the impartiality of public broadcasting media surfaces in another way:

The lavish coverage of Mr Mbeki and the ANC by the state South African Broadcasting Corporation has been widely criticised by opposition politicians in many newspapers. The Pretoria News questioned why the nation’s public television channels saw fit to devote two days of live coverage to Mr Mbeki launching the ANC’s election manifesto, when the opposition parties will not get even an hour of coverage when they unveil their platforms.

Professor Shlomo Avineri gives his view about Ariel Sharon’s plans vis-à-vis Gaza:

Q: Do you believe this Gaza initiative is a genuine endeavor by Prime Minister Ariel Sharon to carry out unilateral disengagement from Palestinian areas?

A: “It certainly looks like this. Nobody knows motivations and I am unable to read the tea leaves. But there’s no doubt that in the last year or so Sharon has moved gingerly, but surely in this direction. It started with his talks about having to make ‘painful concessions’; he referred to the Israeli rule on the West Bank and Gaza as an occupation that has to end – not the usual language used by Likud people… [U]ntil now we have had some words, some planning… but the ultimate test will be implementation. But I think the way is very clear.”
…..
“Unilateral disengagement has really a twofold agenda: On one hand it is trying to put, as much as possible, an end to the Israeli occupation of the Palestinians… On the other hand, it is the only reasonable way Israel can put a stop to suicide bombing… For that you need a unilateral disengagement, for that you need to make it difficult, if not impossible for them to get into Israel.

“To have a meaningful barrier, you need to take down some settlements, and the settlements in the Gaza Strip are an obvious case – and as Sharon has said – they are not going to remain under Israeli rule.”

(Hat tip: Gur Hirshberg.)