telescreen.org

Day & Night, originally uploaded by Vidiot.

Something else I learned this week:  upon taking office, every new Prime Minister has a tough job to do:

After the pomp and ceremony of his departure from Buckingham Palace, his speech on the doorstep at No 10, and a partial reshuffle, Gordon Brown's role as prime minister began with an onerous and somewhat sobering task. Tony Blair, when faced with the duty, immediately went white in the face, said onlookers. John Major couldn't face it: he went home for the weekend.

As prime minister, with ultimate responsibility for Britain's nuclear deterrent, Mr Brown has to write a letter, in his own hand, giving instructions detailing what the UK's response should be in the event of a pre-emptive nuclear attack.

The letter will be opened only by the commander of a British Trident submarine, who would have to assume that the prime minister was no longer in a position to take "live" command of the situation. The options are said to include the orders: "Put yourself under the command of the US, if it is still there"; "go to Australia"; "retaliate"; "or use your own judgment".

Scary stuff.  I mean, we know all about "the football" that follows POTUS around, but something about having to write one's doomsday plans out by hand makes the prospect even more chilling to contemplate.

There was scandalously little coverage this week on the accession of Gordon Brown to the UK Premiership.  The United Kingdom is arguably America's most important ally, and political power there is concentrated in the person of the Prime Minister -- to a much greater extent, even, than the President of the United States wields.

Anyway, I was trolling through the British media, and I discovered something interesting that I'd never heard before.  This is, I'm sure, old hat to the better-informed of my fellow Angophiles (not to mention any actual British readers I may have), but did you know that a Member of the British House of Commons cannot resign?  MPs are apparently legally prohibited from doing so, under a 17th-century law.  Quoting from Wikipedia:

In 1623 a rule was declared that said that members of Parliament were given a trust to represent their constituencies, and therefore were not at liberty to resign them. In those days, Parliament was weaker, and service was sometimes considered a resented duty rather than a position of power and honour.

But, of course, MPs can and do resign, for all sorts of reasons.  Take the current shuffle, for example:  it was easy for Tony Blair to step down as Prime Minister; all he had to do was relinquish the leadership of the Labour Party; Parliament was not dissolved, no general election was called, and Chancellor of the Exchequer Gordon Brown took over the party leadership and thus the Premiership.  However, this still would leave Blair as a Member of Parliament; he has represented the constituency of Sedgefield since 1983 (somewhat nominally, I suspect, during his service as Prime Minister from 1997 on) and would still be their MP.  He had his next job lined up -- that of Middle East envoy for the Quartet -- but needed a way out of the Commons.

So they came up with a clever workaround:  one cannot resign from the House of Commons, but one can be disqualified from membership therein.  One way to be disqualified is to accept an "office of profit under the Crown", because of course it would create a conflict of interest for an MP to act independently and still be in the pay of the King or Queen.

Enter the Steward of the Chiltern Hundreds and the Steward of the Manor of Northstead.  These impressive-sounding posts, once real enough, are pure sinecures now :  no duties are expected.  If an MP want out of Parliament, s/he simply applies formally for one of these posts, the Chancellor appoints him or her to the post, and they are therefore disqualified from service in the House of Commons.

Neat.  (And somehow, very British.)

And this is why Gordon Brown's last official act as Chancellor was this arcane bit of parliamentary procedure:

The Chancellor of the Exchequer has this day appointed the Right Honourable Anthony Charles Lynton Blair to be Steward and Bailiff of the Three Hundreds of Chiltern.

Bitters!  In the NYT!

If this leads to the availability of Abbott's, I'm all for it.

OMG OMG legal mangosteens WANT.

Oh no!  Kobayashi has an arthritic jaw.

Omphalos, originally uploaded by Vidiot.

The underside of "Cloud Gate" by Anish Kapoor, affectionately known to Chicagoans as "The Bean."

Sticky rice for President?

Flushing Meadows-Corona Park, originally uploaded by Vidiot.

Just after takeoff from LGA a few weeks back.

Petra Haden's cover of Journey's "Don't Stop Believin'" is absoutely brilliant. 

Go listen.

Fascinating Q&A on the Times' blog, about daily life in Iraq.

I liked the understated writing in this story.  (Wait for the punchline.)

Wheeee!, originally uploaded by Vidiot.

Martin Amis, for all his faults, can flat-out write.  See this immaculately-composed profile of Tony Blair in the Gruniad for starters.  It was hard to pick just one graf to excerpt for this post, but try this one:

Needless to say, there would be no eye-catching motorcade for "the Highway of Death" to Baghdad. Tony climbed into his helicopter; I climbed into another and watched, with fatalistic detachment, as the tawny teenager fed the cartridge belt into the tripod-mounted machine gun. We steered low, just above the telegraph wires. At this height (I was told), no missile would have time to arm itself before impact. The helicopter would take the hit, but it wouldn't actually explode. We also fired off flares as we flew, so that the more credulous projectiles would seek their heat rather than ours. If you closed your eyes you could hear music, military but atonal, like tinnitus.

I was charmed by this reflection by Emma Townshend (Pete's daughter) on growing up as the daughter of a celebrity:

I don't think it was very important to me that other people saw my dad as famous; to me, he was just my dad. Who is really that impressed by what their dad does? I don't know - I was interested in it; but it was hard for me to see the person who would carefully make very, very thin toast, and other little snacks for me when I was ill, as being anything other than my dad. As a teenager, it was probably more significant just that both my parents were not very much older than me. When I was 14, my dad was only 38. They still went to parties and bought records. I knew that they'd taken drugs. It doesn't leave much room for rebellious teenage acts when your parents have done it all before you. Saffy from "Absolutely Fabulous" is so funny because we can all see how that cool-parent, square-child dynamic could come about. But sometimes having him as a dad coloured things: occasionally, I would be reminded it was always the first thing anyone knew about me. At university, I ended up at a college with a great choral musical tradition, and it was a relief to hang out with classical musicians, who might have been impressed if my dad had been Stockhausen, but, frankly, not some guy from a rock band.

The meditation on "Baba O'Riley" at the end of the essay is gorgeous and absolutely worth your time.

Wikigroaning.

(via Waxy.)

Nifty (and nicely-written) article in today's Times about the various types of sirens the NYPD uses:

Taken together, the sirens of the Police Department provide a remarkable — as well as cacophonous — audio record of policing today.

Every time you hear that distinct and invasive wail, which may not technically be a wail, chances are the police officer behind it has made a deliberate, even aesthetic choice. . .

“I go through the whole mode,” he said, his fingers hovering above a dash-mounted keyboard that controls a police car’s lights and sounds.

“But I might start with a wail,” he said, pressing a button. The air filled with a familiar nasal drone. “And then I’d go to a constant yelp,” he said, and the car began bleating. A red Acura driving ahead promptly pulled right, into the center lane, its driver nervously checking his speed. “Then I’d give a little bit of the air horn; I’d give it a little toot,” he said, and gave it a little toot.

“Most highway officers hit the air horn,” he said. A gray Toyota RAV4 that had taken the Acura’s place ahead of the squad car quickly swung out of the way, too, as its driver stared fixedly ahead. The car in front of the RAV4, a gray Volvo, also pulled out of the way.

“Like a hot knife through butter,” Officer Komis said, satisfied.

Turns out there's a reason for all the various tones -- they're aimed at avoiding the dreaded "wash-out effect", when two cars with the same siren tone effectively cancel each other out, and officers can't hear other cars.

The article even includes MP3s for your listening, um, "pleasure."

When trees draw. 

(Via Czeltic Girl, who rocks so hard I can barely stand it.)

I didn't mean for this to be Drug Day on telescreen.org, but I just wanted to point out that this isn't how good government operates:

1.  Students for Sensible Drug Policy sends Freedom of Information Act request to the Office of National Drug Control Policy;
2.  ONDCP sends letter back saying it'll take them 200 years to comply with the request;
3.  SSDP makes gentle fun of ONDCP's Assistant General Counsel's typo and poor English usage;
4.  ONDCP's Assistant General Counsel calls SSDP and threatens them.

You have not lived until you see Rock Hudson and Bea Arthur singing an ode to recreational drugs:

Oh, for the days of drinking on camera...

New York magazine investigates just how businesses from cab drivers to sex shops to four-star restaurants actually manage to make a profit.

Watch this:

And keep a close eye on Bush's wristwatch at about :50 in (3:10 on YouTube's countdown)...

"When Paris Hilton was going to jail last week, more people knew about that than knew that we were sending people into space that day. . .It has replaced what is real news. There was always a place for it, but it was [gossip writer] Rona Barrett. Now it is the equivalent of Edward R. Murrow reporting it today." . . .

"When I was growing up, to watch guys like Walter Cronkite and Huntley and Brinkley, I didn't know what they thought of the news . . . Legitimate news people are giving their opinions. It is hard to tell the difference between legitimate news people and Nancy Grace and Bill O'Reilly."

Trenchant media criticism, from a surprising source.  (!)

Here's a good article from the Gruniad on the history of gin. 

(Thanks to Czeltic Girl for pointing it out to me.)

The great Roger Ebert's musings about the new Pirates of the Caribbean movie.  A brief excerpt:

"Does the word “shipshape” mean nothing in the pirate navy? Their ship, the Black Pearl, looks like it should be dipped in Easy-Off Oven Cleaner."