The View from the Spaghetti Factory (proper redesign coming soon!)

Well, they’ve asked him, so it’s now a matter of waiting to see what the answer is.

I still feel they’ve missed a great opportunity in not pursuing Fabio Capello* assiduously enough, but to my mind Scolari is the best of the current short list. Steve McLaren has earned himself several brownie points with Middlesboro’s UEFA Cup run (showing a dogged determination that England have often lacked under Eriksson) but I’m not sure he’s quite ready for the step up to international coaching. As with Sam Allardyce, I’m sure he will be in a few years’ time. One of the great advantages with Luiz Felipe Scolari is that he’s used to working with work-shy prima donnas.

We’ll just have to wait and see…

[*Who allegedly contacted the FA, offering his services, in the weeks before they engaged Sven, and has recently mentioned his dream of coaching England one day.]

Network Rail have an unenviable task in repairing and maintaining our rail infrastructure after years of neglect, while trying to create the minimum of disruption to the regular service. In the long run, most rail users would probably accept a few weekends of inconvenience in return for a better service in the future.

Yesterday morning, though, I wondered if they have access to PR advisers or, better still, a calendar. To shut down a large chunk of the south London suburban network (basically, a triangle between Sutton, Croydon and Streatham) for 24 hours is never going to be a popular move, but to do so on the day of the London Marathon, when hundreds of thousands of people congregate in central London from all over the country… well, what can you say?

Anyway, enough complaining. Despite the reduced transport options and the rain, the Marathon was a great spectator event, with plenty of plucky determination, joviality and general backslapping. Congratulations to everyone who took part, for whatever reason.

London Marathon 2006 photos on Flickr

One of the recent memes doing the rounds of LiveJournal and other blog networks involved listing the births, deaths and events which share your birthday. I forget the exact rules, but never mind. Here (sourced from Wikipedia) is a selection of famous people who share my birthdate, although none were born in the same year…

Pietro Mascagni (composer - 1863)
Eli Wallach (actor - 1915)
Noam Chomsky (political commentator, linguistics pioneer - 1928)
Ellen Burstyn (actor - 1932)
Tom Waits (singer, songwriter, actor - 1949)
Jamie Clapham (footballer - 1975)
John Terry (footballer - 1980)

Now Jamie Clapham might not be as celebrated in his specialist field than the others in the list, but I’ve included him for the simple fact that, like me, he was born on 7 December in Lincoln.

Historical events? Well, the bombing of Pearl Harbour in 1941 is pretty notable, but laughably insignificant in comparison to the 1971 blaze at the Montreux Casino. Caused by a flare fired by an audience member at a Frank Zappa concert, the event inspired the song “Smoke on the Water”. However, all of this triviality is eclipsed by the events of 7 December 2003, when the Conservative Party of Canada was officially recognized after the merger of the Canadian Alliance and Progressive Conservative Party of Canada (okay, which jumped up little political brown-noser thought it was worth adding *that* to Wikipedia?)

Deaths? Well, nothing particularly exciting… the biggest name is William Bligh (1817), inventor of the two-section chocolate-coated coconut confectionary (and hapless sea captain). You probably haven’t heard of composer Adrian Willaert (1562) but he was pretty important in the development of the Italian Renaissance madrigal. Lovely hands, too.

You know what? I’m going to do something to change history on my birthday and then kill myself exactly a year later. The 7 December page on Wikipedia is going to look pretty damned impressive, I can tell you…

A letter to the Guardian…

As Patrick Collinson says, the legality of Russian download provider allofmp3.com is questionable, but his dogmatic insistence that “real music fans should choose legal services” is simplistic and reminiscent of music industry propaganda. While the allofmp3.com model is certainly not the way to develop a healthy online music industry (I speak both as a professional musician and a user of allofmp3.com) it’s not enough simply to condemn users without examining why they shun the alternatives.

The biggest supplier, Apple’s iTunes Music Store, is typical of legal download services in that its prices barely compete with the major online CD retailers. Plenty of top name CDs can be bought for £8 or £9, often less, from Amazon or Play.com, but what do you get for your £7.99 at the iTunes store? Low bandwidth digital files, crippled with copy protection. Meanwhile the Russians are offering mp3 files up to 384k bandwidth, with an option of lossless (CD quality) downloads on selected albums. Many consumers are clearly happy with the bog standard listening experience, but others demand quality, and if the official marketplace can’t satisfy their (technologically undemanding) needs, they’ll go “underground”.

As Bobbie Johnson reported in the Guardian (4 March) the fault for this situation lies not with Apple and other legal download services, but with the major record labels, who charge exorbitant wholesale rates for their digital product. The fact that so many people are paying to use allofmp3.com (rather than simply using free, illegal P2P networks) shows that there’s an increasing willingness to behave ethically online. However, unless the music industry is prepared to charge reasonable wholesale prices reflecting the vastly reduced overheads of digital distribution, disillusioned music fans will continue to seek other options.

Having spent $580m on the networking site (and ego boost for bored teenagers) MySpace last year, Rupert Murdoch is starting to make his presence felt. According to the Guardian, he’s removed 200,000 “objectionable” user profiles from the site. This is nothing new for the Dirty Digger; despite using topless teenage girls to sell newspapers, he’s not above a bit of censorship from time to time.

What exactly constitutes “objectionable” in this case? If the culprits were guilty of using MySpace as a platform for race hatred or other illegal activities, their removal would be perfectly justified, but I doubt this is the case. Murdoch wants to make easy money out of his millions of unwitting new customers, but can’t risk a backlash from those parents who won’t make the effort to supervise their kids properly (and fail to realise that the little darlings have heard/seen/said/done it all before).

It’s unlikely, given his track record, that Murdoch will want to leave MySpace open to the sort of creativity and free-thinking that certain liberals seem to think is appropriate to the Internet, so make the most of the networking opportunities while you can.