The wrong road, retrodden

Many US news-sites, and a small mess of blog-artists, are fretting over the current phenomenon of the Tea Party movement. Fruit-cakes fully included.

Its insanities were adequately dissected in last week's Doonesbury strips:


There must be some intelligence in that little black wafer, for it transcends mere coincidence that Day Two of the Great British Election Campaign, the bedside iPod's sparrow's fart shuffled up a neat piece of déjà vu:

Oh, we're meetin' at the courthouse at eight o'clock tonight --
You just walk in the door and take the first turn to the right.
Be careful when you get there, we hate to be bereft,
But we're taking down the names of everybody turning left.

Oh, we're the John Birch Society, the John Birch Society,
Here to save our country from a communistic plot.
Join the John Birch Society, help us fill the ranks
To get this movement started we need lots of tools and cranks.

That's from the Chad Mitchell Trio's live album, At the Bitter End, all the way back in March, 1962. It's on YouTube, but as a text-only karaoke version.

The real rib-cracker in that lyric comes just before the final reprise:

Fighting for the right to fight the right fight for the Right.

Which, of course, here, there and anywhere is what really matters.

As always, in any political faction, your opponents are in front of you.

Your political enemies are behind him, marking your back for the sharpened stiletto.

View, if one must, the chain-jerkings of ConHome, and their internecine frotting over the last hemi-demi-semi-quavering of Tory policy on Europe, the less than enthusiastic noises of approval for "Dave", and the constant fear of back-sliding. Any mild dissent marks the accursed troll.

Anything short of a Tory landslide on Election Night (which simply ain't gonna happen) will open the floodgates of recrimination.

A tea-party is the last thing to expect. Sphere: Related Content

The UK's coming iPhone mania

Today, officially, we had confirmed what had long been predestined, predicted and overdue. The O2 network's monopoly on the iPhone has been broken:

Orange's success in breaking into O2's exclusive deal to stock the iPhone is expected to lead to a Christmas price war with the cost of the Apple handset coming down for UK consumers. It is also likely to be available from at least one more mobile phone operator, with Vodafone also understood to be close to signing a deal with Apple, though it may not have the device in time for Christmas. Executives at Vodafone, which stocks the iPhone in just under a dozen countries, have long maintained that they would like to get their hands on it in the UK.

For the record, the current O2 pricing is:

The basic 8GB version of the handset currently costs £96.89 for a customer willing to pay £29.38 a month under an 18-month contract, but is free for anyone willing to spend £44.05 a month for the same period. The largest 32GB device is £274.23 at £29.38 a month over 18 months and free only for someone willing to pay £73.41 a month over two years. This makes the total cost of the phones between £625.73 and £792.90 for the basic phone over 18 months, and between £803.07 and £1,761.84 for the 32GB phone over 18 months.

Ouch! To help the odd transatlantic reader here, that means the top of the range 3GS costs a mere $2,800 over an eighteen month lock-in (which also denies a couple of iterations of up-grading).

More to the point, it seems that Orange and any other network buying in do so without Apple taking a share of the revenue.

What is happening, of course, is that the iPhone market has matured considerably. None of the competitors have managed to match the appeal and salescraft of Apple's prestige model. The constabularies of the UK would tell us that on thefts alone. As a result, the advertising for the iP{hone has changed: it no longer features the hardware, but it sells (very successfully) the associated applications.

So, chuck this into the admixture:

Apple's App Store is home to some 85,000 applications as of Monday, and the company claims that over two billion apps have been downloaded by iPhone and iPod touch users so far.

Apple CEO Steve Jobs commented "The rate of App Store downloads continues to accelerate with users downloading a staggering two billion apps in just over a year, including more than half a billion apps this quarter alone."

The App Store is Apple's online service where iPhone and iPod touch owners can find and download third party applications for their handheld. The store is home to games, productivity applications, social networking apps, business tools, and more.

Apple's App Store launched in July 2009 and had already seen 1.5 billion application downloads by its first anniversary only two months ago.

That's one entire story from macobserver.com, today.

If it were not for the Apple habit of over-pricing (to retain the prestige image), Steve Jobs could probably do a King C. Gillette (he's the one you didn't recognise at the head of the post), give away the iPhone and collect on the apps.

In passing, the iPhone is the one bit of Apple kit that Malcolm neither has nor covets. Sphere: Related Content

Sunday evening with Fred

Astaire, that is.

To accompany a good read, Malcolm dons his Sony noise-canceling [sic] headphones; and cranks up the G4 iPod. That avoids the distraction of the iPodTouch screen waking up with each change of track.

For the occasion he had installed a new Playlist; and settled back to nearly two-and-a-half hours of Top Hat, White Tie and Tails.

Although improved from the original shellacs, sound quality is -- naturally -- hardly hi-fi. But, who cares?

And so time passes.

Pages are turned. Cabernet is sipped. A good evening is had.

Occasionally the surreality of the audio-only of tap-dancing Fred strikes through: as peculiar and irrational as, say, the ventriloquist "turns" that used to "appear" on the BBC Light Programme.

Occasionally, too, the sheer delight of those clever lyrics, in particular those of Irving Berlin, breaks through.

Omaha, Nebraska, twinned with Naas, County Kildare: birthplace of not just Frederick Austerlitz, but also Nick Nolte, Marlon Brando (whose mother first put Henry Fonda on her stage at the Omaha Community Playhouse) ... and Malcolm X/Little. Sphere: Related Content