About Hurricane Michael

OK, call it the pathetic fallacy, but maybe Hurricane Michael is really trying to tell us something about consumer capitalism. In any case, it’s given Naomi Klein her next book cover...

Pity we haven’t got a bit of rope

Admit it, you don’t really understand the Euro crisis. And you don’t understand Beckett either, not properly. I certainly don’t. But we all know what they mean. 

(By Michael Cembalest at ZeroHedge.)

Package deal

I’ve never really liked Christmas. Even its few redeeming features are dying out; the Salvation Army band that used to play at Victoria seems to be have replaced by an ad hoc, plain-clothes combo that barely gets through a single verse of ‘David’s City’ before grinding to an embarrassed halt.

So I was delighted to read the thoughts of Joel Waldfogel, who has offered sound economic analysis to support my instinctive distaste for that cornerstone of the modern Yuletide, the giving and receiving of gifts. The transaction, he argues, represents a deadweight loss; the value placed on a present by the giver inevitably exceeds that which the receiver calculates. In any case, in a developed economy, if people want something, they’ll probably buy it for themselves. ‘Gift shops’, almost by definition, sell things that nobody really wants to own.

But then you read down the article, and discover that Waldfogel has a book out, with the Zeitgeisty title Scroogenomics. I can’t help but think that, for all the author’s protestations, more than a few copies will be purchased as Christmas presents; probably for grumpy gits who profess to loathe Christmas. And of course I have a book or two out at the moment, and despite my anti-festive feelings, I’m not going to forbid anyone from buying copies as gifts.

Maybe Waldfogel and I should enjoy Christmas together, scowling across a bowl of lukewarm sprouts, pulling crackers with royalty statements inside and then spending the rest of the day feeling guilty.

The virtues of shelf-reliance

I’ve been doing some research that involves skimming a representative selection of American pop polemicists from the past 10 years, and it seemed pretty zeitgeisty (straitened global circumstances and all) to start in the second-hand bookshops. Oddly, there were loads of lefty tomes (Michael Moore, Al Franken, Naomi Klein, Noam Chomsky) but very little from the rightists (Ann Coulter, Rush Limbaugh, Bill O'Reilly, Bernard Goldberg and so on).

However, I did pick up a slightly foxed copy of Freakonomics and, since I’ve been accused of plagiarising said tome, I thought I'd better get round to reading it. So, applying the analytical techniques of Messrs Levitt and Dubner, I can tell you that the political imbalance in two second-hand bookshops proves that: there are no right-wingers in Bangkok; there are lots of right-wingers, but they keep hold of their books (maybe they’re slow readers); there are lots of right-wingers, but they’re quite poor, so every time a second-hand right-wing book appears, they snap it up; there are lots of right-wingers, but they’re functionally illiterate; there are lots of right-wingers but they never go to second-hand shops because they smell funny (the shops, that is, not the right-wingers); there are lots of right-wingers but they never go to second-hand shops because they smell funny (the right-wingers); there are lots of left-wingers, but they have very small apartments, so they’re forever thinning their book collections; there are lots of left-wingers, and they’ve burned all the right-wing books; any or all of the above.

Next week, Chris Anderson on why Middlesbrough will be relegated, and why they won’t and why they might. And Malcolm Gladwell does a funny little dance in his vest and pants.

Just one fucking thing after another

Forgive the fragmented nature of this post, which rather reflects real life at the moment. (Occupying my in tray right now: wine labels; upholstery; Leonard Cohen; 9/11; lost cheques; ants.)

1. I am now also blogging at Rock’sBackPages: this is my first effort.

2. Someone called Stephen Jones (see comments) appears to have got it into his pretty little head that I’m something to do with a cabal of swivel-eyed free-market fundamentalists called the Adam Smith Institute. Well I’m blimmin’ well not, OK?

3. Please go and check out my friend Stuart’s site, Your 10 Movies. It’s not quite buzzing yet, but the more people who show up to argue about whether The Seventh Seal is better than High School Musical 3, the better.

4. Did you know that in the first 11 years of the Academy Awards, the Best Director Oscar was on seven occasions won by a man named Frank?