pruning the tweetstream

I do like Twitter, but the number I'm following had crept up to almost three hundred. Inevitably at this level attentional scotomata will occur, so merely as a matter of survival, I've been trying to cut  down the number of tweets I receive.
This evening it occurred to me that if you've got more than 2000 followers, you've got enough attention already, and if you do something really great, it'll doubtless be retweeted my way. And after all, you should really save your love for those that can love you back.

Pruned tweetstream: unfollow all with >2000 followers (honourable exceptions: @wikileaks, @DalaiLama, @Twips2, some locals) #we'llsee

— Juliuz Beezer (@JuliuzBeezer) July 13, 2012

So farewell then George Monbiot, William Gibson, David Graeber, Moxie Marlinspike, Schuyler Erle, Kutiman, Tim Berners-Lee, Andy Schleck, Fiona Godlee, Richard Smith, Biella Coleman, James Boyle, Cory Doctorow, SpaceHijackers, Jeremy Hardy, MadeUpStats, GuardianStyleGuide, Irvine Welsh, Teju Cole, Jakob Appelbaum, UbuWeb, Translation Guy, Democracy Fail, John Thackara, Petra Boynton, Jon Udell, Rue89, Peter Tatchell, LGBTScotland, SchNEWS, and Alain De Botton.
A pang of regret at no longer being able to keep up with all of you: this list will serve as a reminder should this rather drastic purge result in a dull sense of loss.

On not shooting your stockbroker

If Attila the Stockbroker were to listen to today's Democracy Now! his response is easy to predict:"HANG THE GOLDMEN BY THEIR SACHS!"
— David Rovics (@drovics) July 9, 2012

 I've only ever seen David Rovics perform once—at a squat Vortex gig in Stoke Newington c. 2005. It was a interesting night for many reasons, and so I've followed him since, as you do on Web 2.0. A while back he shouted out online for someone to read his memoire, and so I volunteered. He was kind enough to say that my comments on the manuscript were "the best, most useful feedback i've ever gotten on anything" which was a nice compliment. He also turns out some thoughtful blog posts.
All this throat clearing is a warmup for saying: "Artists: please do not promote violence! There are enough criminal idiots in the world without you joining in!" By idly proposing actions no sober person could agree were just, such blustering makes it less likely that effective action against the bankers, such as prosecutions for fraud, will take place. Much the same phenomena was observed with prosecutions over the Iraq War and torture. Comment threads were ridden with so-called anti-war commenters whose favourite lines were (if they had their way they'd) "string 'em up" or "send 'em to the Hague," the utter plonkers. Bless! When laws have been broken there should be no need to summon the mob. To do so, is in fact complicit with inaction on such major injustices. The truly radical artist makes calm (and devastatingly accurate) calls for justice to be done.
Hmm. Whatever happened to that Chilcot Inquiry then? Iraq War all quietly forgotten? Not in Cabinet Beezer it's not.

breakfast of champions

breakfast of champions
Originally uploaded by Julius Beezer

I didn't naturally use to be an early riser, but these days you'll quite often find me at my desk before 0600h. This is nice as my office faces south-east, and I can watch the dawn appear on the underside of the clouds through the French (natch) windows.
If I've got paid work on, I just get right on with it: the concentration and calm that come after natural awakening from an undisturbed night's sleep are precious indeed, as is the feeling of already having cracked out more than half a day's work by eight o'clock.
If I'm not working for bucks, I'm usually on general internet patrol, curating links for my various interests, gathered through my RSS and Twitter feeds.
This morning was a bit different though. As part of my apprentissage en français, I have resolved to read every word of this year's Tour de France coverage in L'Equipe. Even with Thursday's strike, which blocked distribution of almost all of the national press, including L'Equipe, I was already a little behind.

Canons to the left of them...

Literature is the extant body of written art. All novels belong to it.

This statement by author U.K. LeGuin is clearly unassailably true. The only problem is that this is a category that is infinite from the perspective of any individual. So what should one read? Stephen Ramsey, in his excellent 2010 essay "The Hermeneutics of Screwing Around; or What You Do with a Million Books" [86 kB PDF] estimates that, if you read one book a day from birth, you would need 500 lifetimes to read through the Library of Congress. He proposes a theory of screwmeneutics to address the problem. My mother keeps trying to persuade me to read LeGuin but to do so would contradict my no sci-fi/fantasy heuristic (in this lifetime, perhaps if I had 499 others). I have suffered the flat characterisation and irritating neologism that is so prevalent in the genre when it seemed essential to better understand the internet. (Mssrs Gibson, Sterling, Stephenson, I'm looking at you...) Actually, I have a couple of times attempted the first few pages of The Dispossessed, but it was just too dull for words, so I tossed it, without a moment's regret.

When I tire of screwing around in English, I make an atavistic retreat to the French. Only this morning came into this little haul, for 5€ from the vide grenier I found at 100m from the front door of the flat this morning.  The French educational system here fires repetitive salvoes of the canon at those bored, suffering teenagers. There seems to be little debate about its composition. All those dead white men, endlessly analysed by successive generations preparing for the bac philo. The French will keep trying to construct a Platonic Republic, Popper be damned. I suppose it gives us all something to talk about in cafés, apart from le foot (of which, the least said, the better).

Interesting typo on the Guardian website

Spotting a typo on the Guardian website doesn't have quite the same cachet as catching one in print in the New York Review of Books, for the Guardian has always been notorious for such errors. Notice how the screenshot I grabbed is just another block of sans serif black on white with no texture—it would be trivially easy to fake, but it is genuine. Of course, if you visit the "original" the error may have been silently corrected, though as the publication date is now more than 36 hours old, which is a long time in internet news terms, perhaps it will not be.
I found this one entertaining though: the additional sibilance lent to the term US Congresss by the superfluous s is an effective literary technique to convey an impression of lizard-like evil, in which category those that engage in "sabre-rattling" with Iran should undoubtedly be placed, as there is no way that such aggression could possibly end well.

no more tunes from Painter Babu

It was always nice to say hello to Wull, who spun discs for pimusic nights ("Free music for a better world") with a classic Glaswegian twinkle in his eye. I didn't even make the connection that this guy putting on the records in between the live acts was Painter Babu for quite a while. This was great, because I could have my fanboy moment with someone I already knew to talk to when I realised.
Anyway, now he is dead. Details are pretty hazy: I only found out when I went to check out the pimusic site in an idle moment back before Christmas, by which time the news was already months old. I knew Trevor has been a fan, and he confirmed the news. Lung cancer apparently. He was 48. He did not suffer long. It was a good excuse to get in touch with Paul again, who characteristically offered me a download of Wull's hard drive with all his Cubase files, should I wish to do a remix. I wouldn't presume to touch a note, so here are links to my two favourite tracks: Into Reality a vinyl mashup that includes samples of AJP Taylor reading from his history of the second world war, and It thought, it thought, which features Wull himself. It's sad there will be no more Painter Babu tracks. What a talent! He will be missed.

Interesting typo in the New York Review of Books

Untitled
Originally uploaded by Julius Beezer

Like anyone who has edited articles for the press, I fancy myself good at spotting typos.
In a publication as august as the NYRB such errors seem vanishingly rare, so when they do occur, they are interesting.
Of course, automated spellchecking will catch malformed words that appear in no dictionary, but there is no substitute for the human eye for misplaced valid words—in this case an extra "a" in Louis Begley's review of a newly translated biography of Simon Wiesenthal by Tom Segev. (NYRB Dec 8-21, 2011, vol LVIII, No 19, p46, col 4, line 69).
This has the look of a remnant of a hasty (and partial) deletion of a few words from the offending sentence, most likely as part of a last minute tweak to get the text to fit nicely into the allocated space in the editorial plan. The nature of the content makes one fantasise about last minute legal or political pressure on the editorial team, but this is sheer fantasy. A Freudian slip?
I once met a young man whose team at a big bank spent its days tracking missing millions. This happens all the time apparently. He assured me that cock-ups outnumber conspiracies by a huge margin. This is probably the case here, but it seemed worth adding to the mysterious disappearance sequence anyway.