normblog

Anything Goes

Wife of the Norm and Husband of Wife of the Norm have duly returned from their brief trip to London to celebrate Wife of the Norm's impending birthday, and I can report authoritatively that a good time was had by all.

One of the highlights was seeing Trevor Nunn's production of Anything Goes at the Theatre Royal Drury Lane. You know me, I don't like to appear like a dumb enthusiast or anything, but I'm telling you it is out of this world. If you have any feeling at all for the musical as a genre - and if you don't, then my heartfelt commiserations - and you haven't yet seen it and have the possibility of doing so, pick up the phone and book yourself and the person you like best a couple of tickets.

What can I tell you? Music and lyrics by Cole Porter. Not just classics like 'Anything Goes' itself, 'You're the Top', 'Easy to Love' and 'I Get a Kick out of you', but a song I had forgotten from the only other occasion I'd seen the show some forty-five years ago in the Town Hall Bulawayo (with my big sister Suzanne in the cast): 'All Through the Night' - which by its subtle melodic progression just confirms you in the view that where you want to be is right there where you are.

And that's basically my take on the thing as a whole. I sat through that performance delighting in the fact that I was in the presence of something exceptional, a production so full of energy and talent, inventiveness and humour - including a rendition of 'The Gypsy in Me' to rank with some of the Marx Brothers' finest moments - as to remind you why live theatre is so great, containing, like the greatest moments in competitive sport, the power to lift you beyond mundane experience on to some other plane. Don't ask me where that is because I couldn't tell you, but I was there last night.

WMD hypothesis

Greg Sheridan, in The Australian, reports the view of two Israeli military intelligence people:

Saddam, [Amatzia] Baram believes, made a fatal miscalculation about the effect of the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the US.

Says Baram: "Two days after 9/11 Saddam went on TV and said America will get much worse punishment unless it changes policy on Iraq and Palestine. Three months before the war he gets his nuclear scientists together on TV and thanks them for the great contribution they are making to Iraqi security."

Naturally the Americans, and everyone else, drew the obvious conclusions, or as [Yaacov] Amidror puts it: "We knew for sure the Iraqis had (WMD) and they couldn't tell us how they got rid of it. People didn't draw the worst case scenario, just the logical case."

And, as Baram points out, after September 11 the US just wasn't prepared to take the kind of risks Saddam constituted.

Baram believes former US president Bill Clinton's four-day bombing campaign of 1998 destroyed a lot of Saddam's remaining materials.

... "But (Saddam) did not know that UNSCOM would not come back again for four years, so starting reproduction would have been dangerous."

But at the same time Saddam could not afford to let the rebellious Shi'ites in the south think he no longer had WMD. "In 1991 the Shi'ites revolted and he crushed them but now he could not fly his helicopter gun ships and his army was halved," says Baram. "He was afraid of another massive Shia revolt.
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Baram believes Saddam cut back a lot of his actual weapons after 1998 but kept core capabilities. His calculation was that the Shi'ites would not rebel if they thought he had WMD but the Americans would not attack unless they found a smoking gun. With the core materials relatively easy to hide, he thought that day would never come.

In this, as in so much else, he was fatally mistaken.

(Hat tip: Sophie Masson.)

London weekend

I'm outa here shortly, people. Me and WotN are off to the Big Smoke to celebrate her birthday (I'm not saying which one, but it's a significant one). We have treats laid on. Back soon.

Beach Boy's barmitzvah?

No, not exactly, but Richard Schwartz has just started The non-bloggish blog, and if you check it out you'll see what I mean. In fact, I'll tell you what I mean. Richard's first posts include a report on the Brian Wilson gig at the Royal Festival Hall, and a collection of some 'unlikely bar mitzvahs of the famous'.

Ah, the Beach Boys. There's something to blog about: 'and she forgot all about the library / like she told her ole man now'. Immortal stuff.

Welcome, Richard.

Stones not gathering moss

If you want to understand the mechanics of skimming stones, this item is for you:

[S]kimming stones across water has been popular for thousands of years, the rules remaining unchanged since ancient Greek times. The world record, set in 1992, is claimed to be 38 rebounds.

(Hat tip: Anthony Cox.)

Prime time

I remember that, when I first came across Euclid's proof that there is no highest prime number, it just struck me as the goods - the simplicity and economy of it.

Stating the proof in a 'literary' way so as not to put anyone off, it goes roughly like this (and I will doubtless make some technical error here, but then you can pick me up on it):

(Prime numbers being numbers divisible only by themselves and 1…)
> Assume there is a highest prime number, p.
> Then, multiply all the primes up to and including p together and add 1 to the product, obtaining the number n.
> This number, n, is now either itself a prime, or it isn't.
> If n is a prime, then there is a prime higher than p.
> And if n isn't a prime, then as n cannot be divisible by any of the primes up to and including p (because dividing any of these into n will leave a remainder of 1), n must be divisible by a prime lying between p and n; so, again, there is a prime higher than p.
> By the same method, there must also be a prime higher than n, and so on.

Or: see, more briefly, here.

It also intrigued me when I first read of Goldbach's Conjecture - that every even number is the sum of two primes - and read that though no counter-instance to this conjecture had yet been discovered, neither was there a proof for it. How odd! Whether this is still the state of affairs obtaining I couldn't say.

In my thirties I took a course in the evenings to get me to the equivalent of A-level or university entrance maths. One of the new things I learned then was some elementary computer programming, and I devised an algorithm for generating primes. I still have it somewhere.

Why am I telling you all this? Why not? It's Saturday. I read a piece in the Graun a few days ago by Marcus du Sautoy, about maths education. He said:

One certainly can't shy away from teaching the technical side. Learning a musical instrument or a language requires a certain amount of tedious hard graft, too. But why can't this be balanced by learning about the great ideas, history and people that make up the true story of mathematics.

In making this argument du Sautoy focused, among other things, on the fascination of prime numbers. You better believe it.

That purple dress she wore

Check out the Do-it-yourself Country & Western Song site. It enabled me to compose this gem:

I met her at a truck stop all hunched over;
I can still recall that purple dress she wore;
She was sobbin' at the toll booth but I loved her,
And I knew no guy would ever love her more;
I knew deep down I'd stay with her forever;
She said to me our love would never die;
But who'd have thought she'd turn green at her health club;
I never had the chance to say goodbye.

(Via Just Another False Alarm.)

Geldof on Blair

After Blair lied and Blair spied, a bit of a change: Blair tried. Bob Geldof writes about the Commission for Africa. Warning: you will have to work your way past a vacuous sentence about 9/11.

This is an amazing and powerful thing for Britain to do. I like Brown and Blair as men. Whatever you read about the cynicism and spin behind this commission, it's simply not true. In many private conversations over many years, both these men have been ferociously impassioned on this issue. It was stupid for a Tory shadow minister to sneer that "Blair thinks he can save Africa". He knows he can't; but like most of us, if he could, he would. Blair wants to help. This should not be about party politics. This is something we don't have to argue about.

And here.

True warrior of freedom

Everything happens:

Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe, under fire at home and abroad for his intimidation of domestic opponents, was feted as a "warrior of freedom" on Thursday by Venezuela's President Hugo Chavez.

The 80-year-old African leader, who is barred from traveling to the European Union by EU sanctions, was warmly received by left-winger Chavez after he arrived in Caracas to attend a two-day summit of developing nations.

"You are and always will be a true warrior of freedom," Chavez said as he presented Mugabe with a replica of the sword of Simon Bolivar, the Venezuelan-born independence hero of Latin America.

(Via Socialism in an Age of Waiting.) And see also here.

The Dude on The Passion

With just about everyone else weighing in on the Mel Gibson movie, I thought I'd keep quiet till I'd seen it. But the more I read about it, both from those hostile and those not, the less I feel I want to see it. This, from Christopher Hitchens, has further tilted the odds against my doing so, but I still may want to go and judge for myself.

Gibson claims that the Holy Ghost spoke through him in the directing of this movie, and that everything in it is from the Bible. I very much doubt the first claim, and I can safely say that the second one is false.

The Bible does not have an encounter between Jesus and a sort of Satanic succubus figure in the Garden of Gethsemane. The Bible does not have a raven pecking out the eye of one of the crucified thieves. The Bible does not have Judas pursued to his suicide by a horde of supernatural and sinister devil-children.

Moreover, whatever the Bible may say, the Roman authorities in Jerusalem were not minor officials in a Jewish empire, compelled to obey the orders of a gang of bloodthirsty rabbis.

It was Rome that was boss. Indeed, Pontius Pilate was later recalled by the Emperor Tiberius for the extreme brutality with which he treated the Jewish inhabitants (and you had to be quite cruel to get Tiberius to raise his eyebrows).

Yet Gibson is evidently obsessed with the Jewish question, and it shows in his film.
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In order to keep up this relentless propaganda pressure, Gibson employs the cheap technique of the horror movie director.

Just as you think things can't get any worse, he shoves in a gruesome surprise.

The flogging scene stops, and you think: "Well, that's over." And then the sadistic guards pick up a new kind of flagellating instrument, and start again.

The nails go through the limbs, one by one, and then, for an extra touch, the cross is raised, turned over and dropped face-down with its victim attached, so that the nails can be flattened down on the other side.

The vulgarity and sensationalism of this would be bad enough if there wasn't a continual accompaniment of jeering, taunting Jews who want more of the same.

(Hat tip: yes... Anthony again.)