For those of you who fancy hearing some of my melancholy solo songs, you can now head over to this last.fm page, where the whole of the December Nights EP is streaming for free. Also, for no particular reason, please enjoy some recent mobile snapshots, including one of my boy Nick Rosier whipping some cream into shape.

“Is a man who is just discovering the Internet qualified to lead a restoration of America’s economic and educational infrastructures? Is the leader of a virtually all-white political party America’s best salesman and moral avatar in the age of globalization? Does a bellicose Vietnam veteran who rushed to hitch his star to the self-immolating overreaches of Ahmad Chalabi, Pervez Musharraf and Mikheil Saakashvili have the judgment to keep America safe?”
Frank Rich, New York Times

This kind of thing represents exactly why I stopped reading The Guardian; it represents the sort of soft-headed thinking that seems to pervade editions of the paper, particularly at the weekend.
Fabulously, the BBC monthly forecast is assuring me that things won’t be getting better until September (in weather terms, that is - I don’t look to the BBC meteorologists for predictions of a more existential nature). This means that I have timed my holiday, as usual, to perfection. It isn’t helped that this time last year I was in a sweltering New York City, eating bagels, drinking coffee and generally wondering why, when I dislike urban spaces in general, I can’t resist a big sweaty city like Barcelona or New York. Unfortunately, London doesn’t really do it for me - perhaps it’s just too close to home.

Two interesting opposing positions on the value and centrality of the internet in the modern world. This from one of my favourite blogs, The Daily Dish by Andrew Sullivan (from The Atlantic), discussing his vacation away from the usual hyperconnections to the virtual world:

“I can't remember when I last unplugged quite as effectively as I did the past two weeks. For a week, no email; for another week, only marginal reading of the web. The come-down wasn't too brutal, as I slipped into a bit of a coma for a while. And the feeling of free-floating freedom that being a normal pre-web person provided was a bit of a revelation. You can get lost in these here Internets. Sometimes you need to clear the mental horizon of all protruding objects and breathe a little to remember what being human used to feel like.
I did my usual mini-retreats into the dunes and beaches of the Cape. What I find I crave after months of intense blogging is solitude. This may sound weird since a blogger is usually physically alone. But never mentally. In fact, being in the thick of the blogosphere is to be bombarded with company, loud and quiet, polite and rude, always begging for engagement. You can be on the end of a wharf in Provincetown and still feel as if you're in downtown Manhattan or central London. So I headed out to the beach, sans husband and dogs, for a temporary vegetative state. I took a photo of my veg-station above one day last week. It conveys the general idea.”

And this article on the man who would be president of the most technologically significant country in the world:

“I do understand the importance of the computer,” Mr. McCain reassured in The San Francisco Chronicle last week. “I understand the importance of the blogs.” He said, “I am forcing myself — let me put it this way, I am using the computer more and more every day.” But keeping up with technology “doesn’t mean that I have to e-mail people,” he said. “Now, I read e-mails.” The staff is “constantly showing them to me as the news breaks during the day.”

This was a decidedly different Mr. McCain from the one who said in South Carolina last year that it was important for leaders to communicate with bloggers, “as painful as that might be.”

Or the Mr. McCain who in an interview with Fortune magazine two years ago called himself a “Neanderthal” about computers, in contrast to his wife, Cindy, whom he called a “wizard.”

From NYTimes