I’m not wild about having a Tory government, but less distraught about it than most of my friends seem to be. It’s sure as hell better than a Conservative minority government. Yes, the Tories will destroy anything not nailed down in the coalition agreement, and probably a few things that are. Yes, both parties will band together to shit on the poor, and we’ll eventually start wishing we had Blair or Brown.

As for Labour: this is the only time I can remember being on the side of the Labour leadership, against belligerent backbenchers. Particularly irritating were the attacks on the SNP — a party who, even if not in a coalition, would be relied on by lib-lab in any vote of confidence. Tribalism is a double-edged sword, I guess: good when aimed at the Tories, hopeless when when directed at the SNP. Difference: the Conservatives

deserve

.

BBC:

The Scottish National Party has called on the Liberal Democrats to join a “progressive alliance” involving Labour, the SNP and Plaid Cymru.

…


Labour dismissed the SNP’s progressive alliance suggestion

as a desperate attempt by Mr Salmond to make himself look relevant.

WTF Labour?! That’s 6 votes we desperately need to keep the Tories out. What are you doing not just turning them down, but dissing the SNP while you’re at it? Seriously, can anybody explain this? It seems an utterly bizarre reaction in the circumstances.

Good work to all those at the electoral reform demo, btw. Sorry not to be there; have too many long-overdue things to get done.

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The Mr. Bean film sees the eponymous hero, a hapless museum attendent, foisted on a foreign museum under the pretence that he is a visiting expert. Grilled about his critical methods, he answers that “I sit and look at the paintings”. The museum officials, impressed by this back-to-basics approach, immediately hire him.

Beyond the world of farce, there’s always a bubbling undercurrent of non-professional intellectuals, independent scholars by choice or implication, sometimes producing work of staggering quality but entirely lacking in professional ambition. Over the years, they build up devoted, if rarely large, audiences — people cutting their essays out of whatever small magazine they can get published in, stashing away otherwise-forgotten gems, like the cluster of music geeks hovering around that promising local band which never quite gets a CD out. The internet makes it much easier, of course.

George Scialabba seems to be one of them, according to this review by Scott McLemee.

It also, incidentally, provides a more positive view of Opus Dei, as a form of social innovation more suited to the young and devote than traditional orders:

“For several hundred years,” he told me, “a small minority of Italian/French/Spanish adolescent peasant or working-class boys — usually the sternly repressed or (like me) libido-deficient ones — have been devout, well-behaved, studious… the bright ones become Jesuits; the more modestly gifted or mystically inclined become Franciscans…”

Instead, he was drawn into Opus Dei — a group trying, as he puts it, “to make a new kind of religious vocation possible, combining the traditional virtues and spiritual exercises with a professional or business career.”

I like Jonathan Raban, and I’ve not read Phillip Blond’s

Red Tory

. Still, I’m more than a little dubious of the former’s critique of the latter. It seems to be mainly based on a cultural affinity for the city over the country, and on a disbelief that institutions run by stodgy and self-isolating small-c conservatives can ever do social good.

what meaning they might have for people on sink estates or in sprawling, ethnically diverse conurbations, like those of the Midlands and the North, is beyond comprehension. Like his literary predecessors, Blond, when he thinks of England, sees mainly its church-spire-haunted countryside.

Well, yes, but so what? If Blond can get rural tory do-gooders actually

doing good

rather than tut-tutting over the neighbours, I’m all in favour. Let’s make a more radical urban variant, and build an odd-couple alliance of urban anarchists and rural reactionaries.

I’m an intermittent fan of GTD. That is, I tend to ignore it for a while, and then

This largely depends on what’s happenign in my life; there are long stretches where I only need to deal with one or two large projects. Since GTD is optimized for managers needing to track a large number of small tasks, it’s not much use for me. But then live spins out of control, and I return to David Allen for some imitation of control.

Within GTD, the big problem is that it doesn’t handle big tasks very well. Often a project consists of “Do this. Then do it another 850 times, over the next 3 moths”. Sure, I can keep adding each chunk to my next actions, but it doesn’t really help. What I need is something to remind me that I need to work on the task, show and recognize the work I’m putting into it, and otherwise keep out of the way.

So, I took a look round online to figure out how to deal with the problem. Turns out there isn’t one; everybody has bolted her own system onto it. Sucks, really it does.

I’m less than overwhelmed by Michael Bracewell’s book England is Mine. I do have to admit, though, that he has a nice turn of phrase — even if it is in a style that must have landed him in Pseuds Corner:

So pop, despite itself, became arty. English society, high on the new convenience foods, allowed English culture to develop a kind of boil-in-the-bag popism as the successor to the beans on toast of social realism. [80]

[slightly less entertaining on re-reading, when I realise that “boil-in-the-bag popism” probably means music rather than the Bishop of Rome]

This seems too good to be true. In fact it was, and got canceled pretty sharply.

Kings is a television drama series ….loosely based on the Biblical story of King David, but set in a kingdom that culturally and technologically resembles the present-day United States