This is an item from ‘2003 in Review’ at Editor & Publisher:

Blah, blah, Blogs: Probably the most hyped online development in 2003 (along with growth in site registration), but will these self-important online journals actually change the way newspapers do journalism on the Web?

Umm… do they need to? (Via Instapundit.)

A lazy holiday Sunday, so to begin with let me offer you these odds and ends to occupy or amuse you. Be warned: they’ve all been going the rounds for a while, and you may therefore be familiar with some of them; you may be familiar with all of them. You may not care for them anyway. But, hey, I made the effort! There’s one for each month of the year.

(1) This comes from the Guardian some time in March 1998, though I couldn’t find a link for it:

A Manchester City fan who threw away his season ticket in disgust at the team’s performances had it returned by post three days later, with the anonymous message: “If I have to suffer this rubbish, so do you.”

(2) Children’s books you’ll never see:

You Are Different and That’s Bad

Start a Real-Estate Empire with the Change from Your Mom’s Purse

The Care Bears Maul Some Campers and Are Shot Dead

How to Become the Dominant Military Power in Your Elementary School

Daddy Drinks Because You Cry

(3) Groucho Marx:

Outside of a dog, a book is man’s best friend. Inside of a dog, it’s
too dark to read.

(4) Four people on one side of a river have to get to the other side. There’s a bridge, but it will only bear the weight of two people. It’s pitch dark, so they can’t cross without a torch. But there’s only one torch, and somebody has to bring it back each time. B.M. Nixon takes 10 minutes to cross, Larry Oulde 5 minutes, A. A. (‘Christopher’) Robin 2 minutes, and Dubs Notrechem 1 minute. When two of them go across together, they go at the pace of the slower person. Everybody has to get across in 17 minutes. There’s no trick involved here (no throwing the torch back, shining it along the bridge from the other end etc.). It can be done, legit.

(5) Money, by Richard Armour:

That money talks
I won’t deny.
I heard it once.
It said, ‘Goodbye.’

(6) You may feel you’ve been over-eating in the last few days. If so, here are some diet rules that will help.

(7) Men v women – some stereotypical contrasts (but not as suggested by me, no, no):

Bathrooms. A man has six items in his bathroom: a toothbrush, shaving cream, razor, a bar of soap, and a towel from the Holiday Inn. The average number of items in the typical woman’s bathroom is 337. A man would not be able to identify most of these items.

Offspring. Ah, children. A woman knows all about her children. She knows about dentist appointments and romances, best friends, favorite foods, secret fears and hopes and dreams. A man is vaguely aware of some short people living in the house.

(8) A technological breakthrough?

(9) A letter from the Smithsonian Institute, Paleoanthropology Division – or perhaps not.

(10) There are two pieces of string. They’re made of different materials and are of different lengths. Both pieces of string take exactly one hour to burn from one end to the other. The speed of burning isn’t uniform throughout, so the pieces of string can burn quickly at first, then more slowly, or in any random way. If you’re given only these two pieces of string and a box of matches, how do you measure 45 minutes? The solution only requires you to burn the strings. No other actions like cutting, measuring, etc. are involved.

(11) I wasn’t previously aware that there were engineer jokes, but there are.

(12) Last, and possibly best, perpetual motion.

The item here comes from this morning’s edition of From Our Own Correspondent (11.30 am, BBC Radio 4 – at the time of posting, the audio at the site is still that for last week). It is the BBC’s Stephen Sackur talking about the reaction in his household to the news of Saddam Hussein’s capture:

Then my phone starts beeping. A text message from a friend. Four words which turn my world upside down. Reports say Saddam captured, says the screen on the phone. I call out to my wife, rush to the TV and stick on the rolling news. US sources claim they’ve caught Saddam Hussein. But how to believe it? This is a moment my wife Zina has dreamed about for more than twenty years. How cruel it would be to give way to joy now, only to find hope crushed as it has been so many times before.

But then Paul Bremer comes on to a platform in Baghdad. ‘We got him,’ he cries, and in Brussels we shout, and laugh and hug. Our three children have now gathered around the screen. They’re young but they have a sense of what this means to their mother. Her father was killed by Saddam in one of his first murderous purges after he established his dictatorship in 1979. She was a teenager at the time, and she’s never been home since.

Suddenly Saddam’s haggard face is before us. This man has been a constant presence in my wife’s imagination, to a lesser extent in mine too. He is our personification of evil and yet, perversely, without him we would never have met. A US medic is examining the tyrant’s wild hair for lice and ticks; his mouth is open for a cursory inspection. He’s like a horse being prodded by a vet – the whole scene so improbable that we simply stare, gobsmacked. In the Baghdad auditorium, local journalists are on their feet screaming Arabic curses at the big screen, others are clapping, laughing, crying. One, my wife tells me, repeatedly hollers ‘Play it again! Play the tape again!’ Our phone starts ringing. Zina’s mother is beside herself, giddy with joy. Saddam ruined her life, but at least she lived long enough to see him humiliated.

I take a call from another friend. We start to talk about the news. But I find it impossible. I put the phone down and for a few minutes I surprise myself. I simply sit and sob. Why? Because this moment has taken me back seven months, to images and memories I find it hard to control, to the most harrowing experience of my career; no, never mind career – life.

Last May I was in Iraq working on a story about Iraq’s disappeared. I met families who were travelling up and down the country responding to whispers and rumours of mass graves. They were searching for relatives missing for a dozen years, in some cases much longer. I followed them down a dirt track to a patchwork of fields beyond the town of Hilla, ninety miles south of Baghdad. In the middle of this desiccated landscape I came upon a mechanical digger clawing at the earth. Scores of people were gathered around it, pawing each new pile of soil. In my mind’s eye now – and, to be honest, every day – I still see the hundreds and hundreds of corpses, eaten away by time. I see the tattered soldiers’ uniforms, women’s shawls, children’s shoes, covered in dirt. I see the frantic searchers, pushing, shoving, treading heedless on human bones, detaching rotten identity cards from the bodies to which they belonged, holding up hanks of human hair, trying to remember the precise colour and feel of the hair of their brother, son or mother. This is the Iraq that Saddam Hussein built, a land of murder, nightmares and tears, so many tears.

And now he’s locked up in a cage while politicians, lawyers and the world’s wise men discuss his fate. And that surely is a cause for celebration at the end of this sour, violent, divisive year. But then again, maybe not. After all, only hours after I first reported from Hilla all those months ago, I received a furious email from one viewer convinced that I was exaggerating and manufacturing Saddam’s crimes in order to justify the Bush-Blair war. Even this week one acquaintance here in Brussels expressed his disgust at the sickening behaviour of what he called ‘Iraqi Uncle Toms’ who expressed delight at Saddam’s capture simply to please their American masters. He means my wife, I suppose, or the millions of other Iraqis both in and out of their Saddam-free homeland who are coming to terms with a novel emotion this new year: hope of something better.

(Hat tip: WotN and Jenny Geras for, respectively, making and transcribing the recording.)

The International Red Cross has launched an appeal for $12m of aid for the huge numbers made homeless by the [Iran] earthquake, but they say the amount of the appeal is likely to rise in the next few days because the long-term needs will be considerable.

Donations can be made here, here and here.

Anne Cunningham has moved her blog – with that tinge of regret that all loyal people feel in such circumstances. Anyway, One-Sided Wonder is now here. Do pay it a visit. Today Anne is writing about Christmases past and one or two war-related questions.

Ross Gittins writes:

Conventional economics teaches that gift giving is irrational. The satisfaction or “utility” a person derives from consumption is determined by their personal preferences. But no one understands your preferences as well as you do.

So when I give up $50 worth of utility to buy a present for you, the chances are high that you’ll value it at less than $50. If so, there’s been a mutual loss of utility. The transaction has been inefficient and “welfare reducing”, thus making it irrational. As an economist would put it, “unless a gift that costs the giver p dollars exactly matches the way in which the recipient would have spent the p dollars, the gift is suboptimal”.

Several problems with the reasoning here occurred to me – some, but not all, of which are addressed in the ramainder of the article. I don’t think conventional economics can give a complete account of human rationality.

From football I turn to cricket, offering for your consideration this XI of philosopher-cricketers:

1. Edmund (Jim) Burke, of New South Wales, Australia and revolutionary France.
2. Charles (Mark) Taylor of New South Wales, Australia and the Self (captain).
3. Crispin (John) Wright, of Northern Districts and – I mean, really – New Zealand.
4. Thomas (Sir Jack) Hobbes, of Surrey, England and Leviathan; the scorer, aptly, of 197 first-class hundreds, more than any other man or even creature to date.
5. Stuart (John) Hampshire, of Yorkshire and England in both thought and action.
6. Karl (Eric) Marx, of Transvaal, South Africa and the XI (sic) Theses on Feuerbach; this latter individual an obscure leg-spinner from what used to, and for all I know may still, be Potchefstroom, and who merely interpreted Christianity, believing that the main point was to alter the direction of the ball once it had pitched (q.v. Bernard Bosanquet below).
7. Donald (Alan ‘Davo’) Davidson, of New South Wales – a most philosophical State, as you will already have noted – Australia and just about everything in contemporary metaphysics.
8. Bernard (Bernard) Bosanquet, of Middlesex, English Idealism and the Hegelian googly: in essence an off-break, but with the appearance of a leg-break.
9. Bertrand (Jack) Russell, of Gloucestershire, England and the theory of descriptions – to say nothing of his sketches (wicket-keeper).
10. John (Tony) Locke, of Surrey, England and sufficient human understanding to be able to grasp why he could only take one wicket while Laker was taking the other 19.
11. Walter (Kenny) Benjamin, of the Leeward Islands, West Indies and Theses on the Philosophy of History – being pessimistic reflections concerning the sad decline of the West Indian game in recent times.

Twelfth Man. Adam Smith (considered by some a marginal selection for a Philosopher’s XI, but so formidable was he as a thinker that he played for – indeed captaining – England as Mike, bowled leg-spin for South Africa as Ian, and represented the West Indies as Collie, in just three of his many cricketing manifestations).

As this has been an afternoon of football, a football item seems to the point. I’m not going to mention the fact (he said, mentioning it) that Chelsea have slipped again. And I’m not going to comment on the verdict on Rio Ferdinand. But, in connection with the latter, I must say that this got me thinking:

Yesterday Sepp Blatter, the president of world football’s governing body, warned that any challenge by the club [Manchester United] to the ruling by an FA disciplinary panel could see them expelled from the Champions League.

Under Fifa rules, the decisions of national associations cannot be challenged by clubs in the courts. Article 63 of Fifa’s statutes states: “Recourse to ordinary courts of law is not permitted. Clubs and members… should be required to submit any disagreement to the jurisdiction of the national association.”

In the past Fifa has dealt harshly with clubs who have attempted to overturn its rulings.

Having no legal knowledge of such matters, I see this as a rule appropriate to an organization of gangsters. On the face of it, it appears to be designed to protect the national footballing associations against having even the most outrageous decisions or policies challenged by their members. I asked my friend Matt Kramer for his view, and he replied as follows:

My thinking was exactly the same as yours when I heard about this rule against pursuing matters in the courts. On the one hand, someone can enter into a binding settlement of a matter under which he/she agrees not to pursue litigation. On the other hand, a rule disallowing litigation altogether (before a matter has even arisen) will surely not pass muster under the Human Rights Act.

Any further light anyone can throw on this would be welcome.

My favourite movies poll, announced a few days ago, has got off to a flying start. From the off, the entries have been rolling in. This is not an event you’ll want to be left out of, I can tell you. So keep them coming. Today is surely an ideal day for making that list of 10 movies. Or for beginning to make it, if you’re the sort of person who needs plenty of time to deliberate, to put things on the list, cross them off, put them back, substitute something else.

To get yourself in the mood you might like to look at the lists which have already taken shape in response to my call. See Beatnik Salad, Cobb, Crooked Timber, jdedman, Solomonia, Stephen Laniel’s Unspecified Bunker and Stephen Pollard.

Don’t think you can avoid putting in your entry. As Jackie says: ‘it’s the law’.

Family group, somewhere in England, watching TV. The movie: Iris, about Iris Murdoch as Alzheimer’s Disease gets the better of her. Many scenes of Oxford. At one point a shot of Magdalen Bridge. Blogger member of the family (bit of a saddo): ‘Hey, that’s near where The Virtual Stoa lives!’