(no subject)
1. I rang a friend at BBC Online last week to ask why we have to spell Radovan Karadžić's name as "Karadzic" on all our websites. The answer: because it has to go on Ceefax, which can't handle diacritical marks. Bah. What's everyone else's excuse? Not a single newspaper that I can see is printing it with accents, which I suppose is not the end of the world, but it's a bit annoying to have to go to Wikipedia every time I want to work out how to pronounce someone's name. C and Ć are different letters!
2. A lot has been made, since his arrest (his arrest. Such sweet words. The whole episode has been the best yet argument for the EU), of Karadžić's Renaissance-man-like skills as a poet and conversationalist. A correspondent to the Guardian today said that it put him in mind of some lines from Auden:
Perfection, of a kind, was what he was after,
And the poetry he invented was easy to understand;
He knew human folly like the back of his hand,
And was greatly interested in armies and fleets;
When he laughed, respectable senators burst with laughter,
And when he cried the little children died in the streets.
What a brilliant, brilliant poem that is (it's "Epitaph on a Tyrant" from 1940), and kudos to the paper for printing the letter and reminding us of it.
3. Last time Tom Waits played in the UK I managed to blag a press ticket. This time my sources let me down. He played Edinburgh last night (no tour dates in England, Tom?! Why, Tom? WHY?!) and now I have to read endless five-star reviews in every paper about what I couldn't get a ticket for. Oh man, he even did Tom Traubert's Blues....he hasn't played that live for years....*cries*
4. I hate to, like, jump on the bandwagon and all that, but I have to confess that I am fully in love with Carla Bruni. It's getting to the stage where you don't even care about Sarkozy any more. I actually think the French feel the same way, since her approval rating is about thirty points higher than his - I suspect they may be keeping him in office just because they like his wife. But seriously. She looks like this:
And she sings like this:
And she is smart and funny and full of common sense. When the press unearthed some nude photos from earlier in her career this week, she took Sarkozy aside and warned him about the kinds of things that might come up. His response was admirably French: he examined the prints she showed him, ordered blow-ups of his favourite three, and hung them up in the Élysée Palace. The tabloids are having zero luck embarrassing these two.
2. A lot has been made, since his arrest (his arrest. Such sweet words. The whole episode has been the best yet argument for the EU), of Karadžić's Renaissance-man-like skills as a poet and conversationalist. A correspondent to the Guardian today said that it put him in mind of some lines from Auden:
Perfection, of a kind, was what he was after,
And the poetry he invented was easy to understand;
He knew human folly like the back of his hand,
And was greatly interested in armies and fleets;
When he laughed, respectable senators burst with laughter,
And when he cried the little children died in the streets.
What a brilliant, brilliant poem that is (it's "Epitaph on a Tyrant" from 1940), and kudos to the paper for printing the letter and reminding us of it.
3. Last time Tom Waits played in the UK I managed to blag a press ticket. This time my sources let me down. He played Edinburgh last night (no tour dates in England, Tom?! Why, Tom? WHY?!) and now I have to read endless five-star reviews in every paper about what I couldn't get a ticket for. Oh man, he even did Tom Traubert's Blues....he hasn't played that live for years....*cries*
4. I hate to, like, jump on the bandwagon and all that, but I have to confess that I am fully in love with Carla Bruni. It's getting to the stage where you don't even care about Sarkozy any more. I actually think the French feel the same way, since her approval rating is about thirty points higher than his - I suspect they may be keeping him in office just because they like his wife. But seriously. She looks like this:
And she sings like this:
Click to viewAnd she is smart and funny and full of common sense. When the press unearthed some nude photos from earlier in her career this week, she took Sarkozy aside and warned him about the kinds of things that might come up. His response was admirably French: he examined the prints she showed him, ordered blow-ups of his favourite three, and hung them up in the Élysée Palace. The tabloids are having zero luck embarrassing these two.