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

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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.

dangerous bed rest

Bed rest is more dangerous that you might think, so while John Lennon and Yoko Ono's "Bed-ins" of 1969 may have been derided at the time, indeed still are today by some, I consider their action to have been courageous.
I was four years old then, and black and white images and grainy colour film footage of the event have been a small part of the media firmament I have gazed on ever since. So it was nice to find that Yoko Ono (now 78!) has decided to make the film they made about the happening available on YouTube for a little while (until 21 August apparently), and I watched the whole 80 minutes with interest.
There is much to appreciate: the obvious charisma and intelligence of John Lennon; seeing Instant Karma and Give Peace A Chance in their original contexts (and imagining their gestation); the bespectacled fashions; the frank hostility of some of the media representatives. It's interesting that I've never really had the chance to hear John Lennon speaking at length before, and I guess that's because he was sincere in his revolutionary beliefs, and never failed to promote them when interviewed.
Reportedly only otherwise available on VHS, it's perhaps a bit too much to expect an elderly person to "get it," and "turn on" to the internet by releasing the work less restrictively, so the gaping blank that will appear in the embed hole below after the 21 August can stand as a testament to the shortsightedness of the bourgeois(e) artist who does not realise that the point is to communicate...
Oh, and it's a bit dark, so turn up your screen contrast. And very tediously, this embed seems to have been automagically made too narrow, and I really can't be bothered sorting it out. If this troubles you, click through to youtube. Still, camerapointyman guy who shot the thing in the first place seems to have done a pretty good job at keeping the important stuff in the middle of the picture, so I'm not going to worry about it too much.

On the strange disappearance of Barry's Universal Gronkulator

I've physically hosted my own website in the past, so I know how much of the heavy lifting Google and other similar services are doing. It is also a regrettable consequence of this that smaller websites hosted by independent technically minded people have a tendency to disappear, just when you want to go back and cite them.

One such concept which comes to mind every so often is that of Barry's Universal Gronkulator, not to be confused with the Gonkulator that Google's search now offers as the default result when you enter the word into the search engine. There are still traces of the concept hanging around in the indexes, but not at archive.org, which in any case does not tend to preserve images very well.

Well, as far as I can recall, the Universal Gronkulator was based on a Sharp Zaurus, which ran Linux, and therefore potentially at least, could be kept free from proprietary malady, and users fully in control of their data. But this was not the most important thing. The most important aspect of the Universal Gronkulator was the case, which converted it from a geeky desk toy to a real world field tool for the aspiring truthteller. The case was important because it kept spare power, spare memory chips, and spare connectors stored conveniently alongside the device.

Now, you may contest that the average smartphone exceeds the functionality of the original gronkulator, but in fact it fails for several reasons. Firstly, it is proprietary, so if a central authority insists that it phones home somewhere other than the user intends, there's not a lot the user can do about it. And even if the smartphone is free software based and jail-breakable, this functionality is notional rather than actual for the vast majority of users.

Also, you need to keep the thing charged up, an important limitation for field use compared with just carrying some spare batteries.

The importance of generic connection, the ability to pass recorded material off on discrete (and discreet) memory chips, and to connect in manifold ways to the network was equally crucial to its potential. And if you don't have a nice case, you'll lose all those important bits and pieces.

So here's to the memory of Barry's Universal Gronkulator. I guess I should devise its successor and post a picture here to help keep the concept alive, but I really should be getting on with the day job, so this note will have to do for the time being. If anyone out there can help in the restoration of the original, feel free to post appropriate links in the comments.

A star is dead

He was a bit of a star was Barry Mason. A delightfully enthusiastic presence. A tireless activist for the cause of cycling. And a very nice man. So it's sad news that he's dead, aged only 60. Still, what a great way to go: swimming off a beach on a cycling trip to northern Spain—in June. Somewhat reminiscent of the death of the great Roy Porter, who died, at a similar age, cycling home from his allotment with a bunch of fresh daffodils in the basket.
Bazza (as I once rather disrespectfully called him, to his obvious horror) will be fondly remembered by a great many people as one of the good guys. There is no higher accolade in the Beezer thesaurus.

The call of the Mac: proprietary freedom postponed

It seemed only fair to replace the old Mac after I finished it off with a full cup of coffee versed amidships into its already battered and grubby keyboard. Within a few seconds it was dead. I let it dry out for a few days and then tried booting it off the mains power supply, but it wouldn't boot--and still smells very strongly of coffee. It was a nice tool for curating CD/DVD/internet playback reclined in bed of an evening, so we missed it when it was gone. Hopefully the data will be retrievable onto another machine. I'm just waiting for the USB 2.5in SATA hard drive enclosure to arrive, and we'll see.

Anyway, I decided to introduce Mme Beezer to the delights of the comedy roast, and found this rather fine example of the genre: a general mocking of Pamela Anderson surrounded by her comedy entourage, posted in eight parts to YouTube.

It's almost 90 minutes of viewing, and eventually rather exhausting, but there were some very good bits indeed, amongst a considerable amount of what I think my late grandmother might have called "blue banter." Still, it was quite charming, and M. Lee-Jones's musical intervention was competent, thanks to his super backing musicians, and we watched it to the end quite content, having had to brush tears from our eyes on occasion. There is anthropological interest in its representation of American taboo in the early twenty-first century, and a lot of quite immaculate American English spoken word stuff, which is of considerable interest for the linguist.