SacredFacts

Scamming the Scammers

June's edition of The Atlantic (yes, I've only just got round to reading it) has a great piece by Ron Rosenbaum on the 419 Eaters. 419 scammers are those Nigerian princes, or widows of royalty, who write to you asking to use your bank account to launder some money in return for which you get a slice of riches beyond your imaginings. The name 419 comes from the number of the section of the Nigerian criminal code that applies to fraud. Apparently some people still fall for this. The 419 Eaters are a group who dedicate themselves to scamming the scammers, playing them along and turning the tables. So far so good and all power to them, but as Ron points out there is a tinge of racism around the site which undermines an otherwise laudable enterprise - particularly on the "Trophy Room" photographs of the scammers doing something ridiculous that they've been tricked into sending in...

Ron Rosenbaum is a really interesting writer. His "Travels with Doctor Death" following up the conspiricists in the US is a classic and great holiday read if you're looking for one.

Sad loss

I was very sorry to read today of the death at 60 of Michael Dibdin. His Aurelio Zen thrillers were a delight - modern Italian noir. He'll be much missed in our house.

Future Gazing

Adrian Monck - or at least his publisher - have kindly sent me a copy of his new book "Crunch Time - how everyday life is killing the future."

Good title - and I shall definitely read it and report back. Not least, because I have a soft spot for future gazing books of which, for obvious reasons, there have been many in the last few years. And they have such great titles. Try a sample from the bookshelf:

The Long Tail
Powerful Times
The Death of Distance
Living on Thin Air
On the Edge
The World is Flat
The Future just Happened
Leading the Revolution
The Empty Raincoat

And the excellent David Weinberger's new one - Everything is Miscellaneous. (Not to mention The Cluetrain Manifesto)

Anyone else got a favourite? Or even just a good title?!

RFK

I'm looking forward to the new film Bobby - about the day Robert Kennedy was assassinated. (Due for UK release Jan 26th).

I'm an RFK fan - I think he was the greater loss of the two brothers. The Kennedy charisma lives on and interestingly in this country appears to cross the political divide. I know politicians of all three main parties who are Kennedy "fans". The imperfections of course add to their appeal. The parallels between the sixties and this decade (a divisive war, major social change, the shadow of a global threat) makes it timely to revive the myths.

I recommend Evan Thomas's biography
The recordings of his speeches.

Try this famous passage:
"The gross national product includes air pollution and advertising for cigarettes, and ambulances to clear our highways of carnage. It counts special locks for our doors, and jails for the people who break them.

"The gross national product includes the destruction of the redwoods and the death of Lake Superior. It grows with the production of napalm and missiles with nuclear warheads....
"And if the gross national product includes all this, there is much that it does not comprehend. It does not allow for the health of our families, the quality of their education, or the joy of their play. It is indifferent to the decency of our factories and the safety of streets alike. It does not include the beauty of our poetry or the strength of our marriages, the intelligence of our public debate or the integrity of our public officials....
"The gross national product measures neither our wit nor our courage, neither our wisdom nor our learning, neither our compassion nor our devotion to country. It measures everything, in short, except that which makes life worthwhile"

Great political rhetoric, whether you agree with the sentiment or not...

The season of Lists and mellow reflection

It's the time of year for all those "Best of 2006" lists and, if you can't ignore them, you may as well join them. So here's mine. Just three in each category - dissenting comments are welcome.

1. Music
Ali Farka Toure - Savane
We lost him to bone cancer this year, but not before he signed off with this classic of Mali blues. In a league apart.
Bob Dylan - Modern Times
I resisted at first but finally succumbed and now see it as one of his finest.
Basement Jaxx - Crazy Itch Radio
Bursting with joy - try keeping your feet (or anything else) still to this.

2. Movies
Brokeback Mountain
I know, I know...but it's a beautifully shot, moving piece of work.
Good Night, and Good Luck
A reminder of the days when the media were the good guys.
Miami Vice
I love Michael Mann movies. It's a triumph of style over substance, but with style like this who cares.

3. Books
Reporting - David Remnick
Readers of this blog won't be surprised by this one. The closest journalism gets to art
The Lay of the Land - Richard Ford
Third instalment of the Frank Bascombe story. There's a little of us all in Frank and vice versa.
The Cold War - John Lewis Gaddis
An outstanding and concise history - in case we forget.

4. TV
Extras
Just brilliant. The David Bowie cameo is my favourite scene. Almost too painful to watch - Gervais and Merchant at their best.
The West Wing
It came to an end. We'll never know what a Santos presidency might have been like but we'll always have our memories of CJ, Josh, Toby and the gang.
The Thick of It
Not exactly a British West Wing - but beautifully observed and a lot funnier. Armando Ianucci can do no wrong in my book.

5. Theatre
Frost-Nixon
How Frost put himself on the line and extracted the closest anyone ever got to an apology for Watergate,
Rock n' Roll
Tom Stoppard on the Prague Spring, Velvet Revolution, Syd Barratt and much more.
Spamalot
I'm not a Monty Python fan, but Tim Curry's twinkling style and the overwhelming sense of fun make it a great pantomime performance.

6. Gigs
These are surprisingly mainstream for me - but there you go (or rather there I went...)

The Rolling Stones - Twickenham
They keep on, well, rolling, and after 40 years of practise know how to put on a hell of a show.
Bruce Springsteen and the Seeger Sessions - Union Chapel
Possibly the best concert I have ever seen - and I'm not even that keen on the music. A magical night.
Dave Gilmour - Mermaid Theatre
His new stuff plus Shine on You Crazy Diamond for Syd.

(BTW I fully expect the Cowboy Junkies at the Union Chapel in March to be one of the highlights of 2007. Tickets going fast)

Sunday reading

The latest edition of the New York Review of Books has three excellent pieces:

Mark Danner on Iraq: The war of imagination, reviewing books by Bob Woodward, Ron Suskind and James Risen. It builds on his analysis of the Downing St memos last year and he promises more to come.

(John Naughton's blogged the same piece here)

Then Neal Ascherson reviews David Remnick's book, Reporting (previously blogged). Ascherson finds a theme:

Most of the profiles in this anthology, though not all, are about leaders—in the United States, Britain, Israel, Palestine, and elsewhere—who fight only to survive. They are skilled and impressive, satisfied that they have "done their best," but they do not risk plunging into those dark places where disasters but also breakthroughs are found. As a result, nothing essential changes and impacted problems remain to poison future generations.

And finally, Jonathan Freedland reviews a clutch of biographies of Ariel Sharon and reconstructs his career and impact on the Middle East. Not least, tracking Sharon's journey towards compromise. As he told the Likud Central Committee a few months before his stroke:

"We cannot maintain a Jewish democratic state while holding on to all the land of Israel. If we demand the whole dream we may end up with nothing at all. That is where the extreme path leads."

A remarkable statement, as Freedland puts it, for it was Ariel Sharon who had led Israel down that path for nearly four decades.

Against The Day

For those of us who like modern american literature, it's a bumper year. As well as Richard Ford's new novel, we have the first novel in nine years from Thomas Pynchon.

Against The Day, he says, "moves from the labor troubles in Colorado to turn-of-the-century New York, to London and Gottingen, Venice and Vienna, the Balkans, Central Asia, Siberia at the time of the mysterious Tunguska event, Mexico during the revolution, Paris, silent-era Hollywood, and one or two places not strictly speaking on the map at all. With a worldwide disaster looming just a few years ahead, it is a time of unrestrained corporate greed, false religiosity, moronic fecklessness, and evil intent in high places. No reference to the present day is intended or should be inferred. "

Sounds vintage Pynchon and at over a thousand pages should keep us going for a while. Anyone new to Pynchon could start with this assessment by crime novelist Ian Rankin.

I confess I never finished Gravity's Rainbow, but Vineland (one of the more straightforward novels) is still among my favourites and a good place to start.

surrounded by conspiracy

Earlier this month the founder of the web, Tim Berners-Lee said he was worried about levels of trust and the amount of misleading information now propagated on the internet. Around the same time, columnist Jon Ronson in the Weekend Guardian explained how he could not longer take some of the more extreme forms of conspiracy theory and was commiting himself to rationality. Then George Monbiot complained that a piece in the Telegraph casting doubt on climate change had led to his inbox being flooded with people saying "i told you so" and accusing him of scaremongering for suggesting global warming is a serious problem.

My email inbox until recently had daily bulletins from the 9/11 conspiracy theorists with annotated photographs suggesting it proved the planes were actually drones and the towers must have been brought down by carefully placed explosive charges. The 9/11 conspiracists seem to be particularly virulent. People I once assumed were serious have suggested to me there's sufficient "evidence" to suggest it could all be US government plot. Pure Bunkum.

Earlier this year Newsnight examined internet conspiracy theories, concluding that they "never remotely fitted with how any sensible person expects the world to behave" - and in January there is a BBC series on conspiracy theories - although my inside contact in the production team says they didnt remotely stand any of them up. There's a surprise. I'm with Berners-Lee and Ronson - I think we need to reassert the importance of rationality.

Conspiracy theories can be fun - try reading Ron Rosenbaum's Travels with Dr Death for entertainment - but let's not confuse them with a serious view of how the world works. I favour cock-up over conspiracy every time. A judgement born of observation and experience.

(ADD: Will Hutton joins the debate in this week's Observer declaring the information battle to have begun.)

Welcome back, Frank.

For some of us the literary event of the year is likely to be the return of Frank Bascombe, the lead character in Richard Ford's first novel for a decade, The Lay of the Land. Frank first appeared in 1986 in The Sportswriter, in despair at the death of his son, with a broken marriage, he gradually finds the strength to pull himself back into the world. He next appeared in 1995 in Independence Day, Ford's Pulitzer prize winning novel where again events force him to break out of the defences he has built around his life. The Lay of the Land promises to take Frank forward into late middle age and, perhaps, some kind of redemption. Ford is on a booktour of the UK this week I believe.

The art of reporting

If fate hadn't led me along an uneven path from the Merthyr Express to the BBC's Global News Division I would like to have been a reporter like David Remnick. Current Editor of The New Yorker, former Washington Post Moscow Correspondent, Pulitzer prize winner, insightful, clever, marginally better looking and a lot more talented than me - he writes like a dream. A new volume of his pieces from The New Yorker has just been published - "Reporting". Long and revealing profiles of Gore, Katharine Graham, Solzhenitsyn, Putin, Mike Tyson and more. And his piece contrasting the response to Hurricane Katrina with Lyndon Johnson's response to Hurricane Betsy in the 1960's is beautifully judged. The closest journalism gets to art.