Darth Vader's portaloo.

BBC Radio 4 has just started broadcasting a second season of Parting Shots, in which Matthew Parris delves into the archives of the Foreign Office to reveal the confidential valedictory despatches submitted by senior British diplomats upon leaving their postings.

The first ten minutes or so of the first episode spent a little too much time quoting ambassadors being unimpressed with foreign cuisine and manners and even architecture, but it did include one absolute gem of an anecdote:

Sir Julian Bullard: Bonn, 1998

There are the regional differences, which become more evident as one learns to recognise the surnames, accents and facial characteristics which go with certain attitudes of mind, but I think it is still possible to talk of German national characteristics. One of these is the seriousness, thoroughness, humourlessness, perfectionism and pedantry which have made the German the butt of so many anecdotes.

To quote a true one: the artist Philip Ernst painted the view from his window, leaving out a tree which spoiled the design. That night he was attacked by remorse, got up from bed and cut down the tree.¹

The latter part of the episode was considerably better, focusing on the way that until very recently the Foreign Office simply expected diplomats' wives to act as a sort of unpaid hotel manager/hostess/event organiser/auxiliary diplomat² and the way that modern spouses – having their own careers, and being less willing to pack their children off to boarding school for the duration of a tour of duty overseas – had organised a campaign to at least be paid for doing all that work, or to have a professional event manager paid to take on that side of the embassy's functions instead of everything falling to the ambassador's partner.

Assuming that they don't spend a third of every episode quoting British diplomats being undiplomatic about their hosts – the first season wasn't like that, so I hope this one won't go down that road – Parting Shots is going to be well worth a listen over the next few weeks. The first episode is available on BBC iPlayer³ for another six days.

1. For what it's worth, I can completely see where Ernst was coming from. ↩
2. One diplomat's wife observed that traditionally one of the jobs of the ambassador's spouse when attending a function was to engage the dullest VIP in conversation, presumably so as to prevent their boring the pants off anyone important. ↩
3. For UK residents – or, more accurately, for those whose connection to iPlayer is coming from an IP address located in the UK. Correction: it turns out that you can listen to most iPlayer radio content regardless of whether you're in the UK. Thanks to Martin Wisse for the correction. ↩

A lovely Astronomy Picture Of the Day today: An Airplane in Front of the Moon.

Superman's honeymoon.

[Via LinkMachineGo!]

Emily Lakdawalla's latest What's up in the solar system post incorporates a new feature this month: a chart created by Olaf Frohn showing the location of every active space probe.

Phillip Toledano's delightful, thoughtful photo essay The Reluctant Father is decidedly not just another collection of baby photos by a devoted daddy. Lovely work, and probably not what you imagine it's going to be after the first few images.

Go, see for yourself.¹

[Via MetaFilter]

1. As his site doesn't flag up the idiosyncratic approach it takes to page navigation, let me spell it out for you: you advance to the next image by left-clicking with your mouse, either on an image or on the space to the left of each image. If you want to go back to a previous image, left-click on the 'Back' link that appears at the top left edge of the page, just below the words 'the ANTHROPOLOGiST'. ↩

Before I saw the link to the trailer for the remake of True Grit earlier this evening, I was only vaguely aware that a remake was in the works; I certainly hadn't paid any attention to who was involved. My mistake. The remake is written and directed by the Coen brothers and stars Jeff Bridges as 'Rooster' Cogburn, with Matt Damon and Josh Brolin co-starring in the roles originally played by Glen Campbell and Robert Duvall.

A solid cast, a nice, straightforward storyline that it would be hard to mess up and a a very decent trailer that suggests that they've stuck pretty closely to the original. It looks very much as if the Coen Brothers are about to atone for their last, woeful, attempt at a remake.

Apple's iTunes 10.0.1 update makes an unwelcome change to the user interface:

iTunes 10.0.1 introduces a new feature: most items now have a 'Ping' dropdown button where the Music Store arrow links used to be. These appear even if you've disabled Ping.

The buttons cannot be disabled in the UI, but there's a Terminal fix to do it. [...]

There's also a huge Ping sidebar that pops up at the right edge of the iTunes window when you first open the updated iTunes, but Apple do at least provide an easy way to hide it by using a button at the bottom-right edge of the window.

I have a horrible feeling that every time Apple updates iTunes from this point on I'm going to have to to play whack-a-mole with that damned sidebar…

NB: the fix I link to above is for users of iTunes for Mac OS X only. Users of iTunes for Windows can find what look to be the equivalent instructions here.¹

1. As I don't use Windows I can't vouch for the efficacy of the latter fix. ↩

Question: What's the storyline [of Mad Men]?

Answer:

[Comment #16, from Larkspur, dated 3 September 2010 at 08:31pm]

[...] What it is, basically, is a horror story. It's set in New York in the 1960s, and is NOT ripped from any of those headlines of yesteryear. It's about the American advertising industry, and even though it's set at the beginning of the Vietnam war, World War II is omnipresent. [...]

The horror part of it is that like most entertaining horror, it takes a familiar world and injects something unspeakably hideous into the narrative. This horrific element is, in "Mad Men", primarily (but by no means solely) displayed in the tribulations inflicted upon the women and girls in the story. (And remember, all female humans were "girls" except the ones who were "ladies".) [...]

[Via Michael Bérubé - American Airspace]

Water and concrete.

[Water image via FFFFOUND!]

Guardian cartoonist Steve Bell greets Labour's new leader:

When Ed was brought into the government I had Gordon Brown say to him: "Since Tony left, this government has had a mad eye deficiency and you have not one but two."

But although the eyes are the obvious feature, I think he has huge potential for caricature. Like John Prescott and unlike Tony Blair, his face does tend to betray what is on his mind.

From a MeFi thread on source code commenting:

//
// Dear maintainer:
//
// Once you are done trying to 'optimize' this routine,
// and have realized what a terrible mistake that was,
// please increment the following counter as a warning
// to the next guy:
//
// total_hours_wasted_here = 25
//

Meet Dot.

[Via GromBlog]

By far my favourite iteration of the Keep Calm and Carry On meme: Keep Calm and Don't Blink. So geeky. So British. So right.

[Via slipstream]

Last.fm intern Joachim Van Herwegen explains the thinking behind his Gender Plot tool:

About 6 weeks ago I started a short internship at Last.fm. For my project I wanted to explore Last.fm's data to learn how listening preferences vary with the listener's age and gender. Apart from the science, the most important thing I found is that you can make awesome plots with this information.

I started by making a chart to show what kind of music you "should" be listening to if you really want to fit in with the most common artists in your age range and gender [...]

The sizes of the artists' names indicate how popular they are, while their position shows the gender mix and average age of their listeners. Based on the positions of the larger names, it's already obvious which age category is most common amongst Last.fm users.

I don't care one whit about what music I 'should' be listening to at my age/gender,¹ but the data plots are still fascinating – much more so once you get away from looking at the entire Last.fm user base and look at subsets of the data. The most stereotypically 'male' act on my chart is Black Grape, just ahead of Living Colour and Prefab Sprout, whereas my most 'female' acts are Rilo Kiley, Regina Spektor and Florence + The Machine.² It's also neat to see which of my favourite artists are clustered around the mid-point of the 'male/female interest' axis: in increasing order of their average listener's age (i.e. from left to right on the chart) we have Explosions in the Sky, Pixies, The National, Eels, New Order, Stevie Wonder, Echobelly and Squeeze. I'd have guessed that at least half of those acts would skew a bit more towards the 'male' end of the axis. Shows what I know…

It would be nice if the tool could plot charts for entire Last.fm groups. I'm pretty sure that the chart for readers of The Word Magazine would skew rightwards, but I'd be fascinated to see what other trends and surprises it might reveal.

[Via waxy.org]

1. I know: I'll bet they all say that. ↩
2. It's worth remembering that in the interests of legibility – not to mention processing time – these charts only plot the most listened-to subset of your library of artists. In practice the span of any given user's listening habits will almost always be a lot wider than it appears on the chart. ↩

Boris Johnson on meeting the Pope:

There we were on the tarmac at Heathrow as the papal jet prepared to land. The cameras were trained on the night sky. The red carpet was rolled out. The charming Foreign Office people tried for the umpteenth time to remind me where to stand – and all the while my mind was whirring with a single question. It is a problem that goes to the heart of the relationship between church and state. It is a question that will be studied by future generations of students of theology and patristics, because the answer we give – and the answer you give, off the top of your head – is an indication of the balance currently existing between the privileges of spiritual leaders and the egalitarian demands of our temporal world.

Never mind abortion or paedophile priests. As Pope Force One taxied towards us, there was one issue still revolving in my mind at the speed of a Rolls-Royce fan jet. Should the Popemobile be liable for the congestion charge and, if not, why not? Should the Holy Father have to pay £8 to drive through Westminster, like everyone else? Or should that fee be waived, in recognition of his status as the vicar of Christ on Earth? It is a tough one, and I am sure there will be clear-sighted readers of this paper who will take opposite views; and it is that very division of instinct that is so revealing about the psychology of this country. [...] ¹

[Via The Browser]

1. The answer, for anyone who doesn't want to follow the link, is that the charge only applies to "normal" road use: if the road is closed off so the Pontiff can wave to a sea of admirers then that's not "normal" road use and would attract no congestion charge. How much time the Pope's driver spent in traffic is another question entirely. Not very much, I'd guess. ↩

We probably shouldn't hold out breath waiting to see this bit of tradecraft feature in a James Bond script:

In June 1915, Walter Kirke, deputy head of military intelligence at GHQ France, wrote in his diary that Mansfield Cumming, the first chief (or C) of the SIS was "making enquiries for invisible inks at the London University".

In October he noted that he "heard from C that the best invisible ink is semen", which did not react to the main methods of detection. Furthermore it had the advantage of being readily available.

[Via The Edge of the American West]

Phil Gyford is trying to talk himself into building his own weblogging tool:

Writing my own weblog CMS from scratch is, of course, lunacy. Consequently, I have been coming up with an elaborate justification for why the project is, at least, lunacy with a more respected real-world precedent. If you're allergic to Internet metaphors look away… now. [...]

John Locke and Ben Linus, reunited:

Forget Rizzoli & Isles: Are you ready for Linus & Locke? In news that could cause the Lost fan base to have a synchronized aneurysm, Vulture hears that last week, J.J. Abrams and frequent collaborators Josh Appelbaum and Andre Nemec (Alias, Mission: Impossible 4) began pitching a comedic drama to the networks that would have Michael Emerson and Terry O'Quinn – a.k.a. Benjamin Linus and John Locke/Smokey – playing former black-ops agents.

I trust that at least one episode every season will involve Michael Emerson's character being tied to a chair in a darkened room and yet still somehow manipulating Terry O'Quinn into doing his bidding.

[Via AV Club]

Quick Look was a wonderful addition to MacOS X, but there are a couple of things that have always irritated me about the implementation. First, you can't keep more than one Quick Look preview window open at a time. Second, if whichever Finder window the item you're previewing lives in loses focus the preview window disappears, only to reappear once you give that window focus again. I'd have preferred some way to 'pin' a Quick Look preview open so that it hung around while I went searching for other items I was interested in viewing-but-not-opening.

DropLook is a nifty little utility that fixes both those problems. If you drag a file onto the DropLook icon, it opens a window that stays open. Also, you can drop multiple items onto DropLook, all of which will remain visible until you close their preview window. Simple, handy and free: what more could you reasonably ask for?

[Via bsag]