On CSPAN, i have seen Mr. Kerry address the black caucas, Mr. Cheney eat custard in Wisconsin and Mr. Bush screw up at the Journalists of Color Convention. Barring few exceptions, they were either addressing a handpicked crowd of "true believers" (miners, mill workers, born again christians in swing states, etc.) or, especially in Mr. Bush's case, an often compliant press corps. This, I find highly disturbing and extremely unhealthy, indeed illegitimate, in a democracy. It, in my opinion, has the following repercussion:

The "she-said , he-said" comes in the picture because candidates neither talk face to face nor are asked tough questions. The press reports sound bytes and the readers/viewers *loose track* of what the dis-agreement is all about, indeed where the argument began in the first place. (Main reason why many voters see little or no difference between Mr. Kerry and Mr. Bush)

Instead (and here is where the media comes in), the media presents spiced-up, juicy, prime-cuts of mudslinging in soap-opera like episodes. Take the popular swift-boat veterans episode, for example (now in its second season). Here, a decorated soldier is being questioned the validity of his awards !! 35 years later ! Even if you disregard the irony of an awol like Mr. Bush questioning Mr. Kerry, the very episode is *insane* and deserves absolutely *no* press coverage. Can any decorated soldier use his miliitary triumphs to stand for President from now on ? ( In a remarkable and unpredictably twisted response, disgraceful excuse-for-a-journalists like Mr. Dan Rather have begun to dig up twice buried dirt on Mr. Bush. )

This reminds me of a sign i saw in a restroom is San Francisco this weekend: "Do not throw the garbage on the floor" - an unusually blunt sign compared to the public politeness I am used to in the US. But, then again, i thought, this is exactly what the US media has been doing to the American voters nowadays. There is so much garbage thrown by the media on the floor that the voters aren't even educated about the real issues. Like America's energy dependence on the middle-east, mounting budget deficit and poor public health-care system. Issues that, i believe, are most important to these voters in the long-run. And issues that they are blissfully unaware of, unless they read political scientists or a few well-heeled columnists like Thomas Friedman.

Its a catch-22, really. Media produces no debate. No debate produces a numbed, confused voting populace. A populace that understands only easily digestable sound bites. So, Mr. Kerry and Mr. Bush deliver, yes, easily digestable sound bites. Including:

Mr. Kerry: "scrap NAFTA", "tax outsourcing companies" -- economists would (many in the FT) will attest to the supreme stupidity of such broad and unqualified statements. Yet, the unemployed, numbed in Ohio would find a song they like in such travesty.

Mr. Bush: "saddam gassed his own people. he supported terrorists" -- two sentences with no relation to each other. Indeed, there are more terrorists in Iraq now than there were under Mr. Hussain.

H. Coleridge

"She is not fair to outward view"

SHE is not fair to outward view,
As many maidens be;
Her loveliness I never knew
Until she smiled on me.
Oh, then I saw her eye was bright,
A well of love, a spring of light.

But now her looks are coy and cold,
To mine they ne'er reply,
And yet I cease not to behold
The love-light in her eye:
Her very frowns are fairer far
Than smiles of other maidens are.

Traditional Mandarin & Politicians:

Lord Butler's traditional Mandarin vs Blairite dictum that the government "needed to say what we mean and mean what we say".

Traditional Mandarin's complex sentence structure is as follows:

Allows exponents to leave readers with a clear sense of what is being said, even though the literal analysis of the text would allow the author to deny ever having suggested such a thing.

A favoured technique is to place at the beginning of a sentence an avowed denial of everything that follows.

Classical example:

Traditional Mandarin(TM): Without any implied criticism of the present or past chairman,,,we see a strong case for the post of chairman being held by someone with experience of dealing with ministers in a very senior role and who is demonstrably beyond influence and thus probably in his last post.
Modern English(ME): The chairman was clearly too junior, too inexperienced in the ways of ministers and too eager to toady to his political masters to secure his next job.

TM: We do not suggest that there is - or should be - an ideal or unchangeable system of collective government, still less that procedures are in aggregate less effective now than in earlier times. However, we are concerned that the informality and circumscribed character of the government procedures . . . reduces the scope for informed collective political judgment
ME: The changes to the style of government instituted by Tony Blair helped cause this cock-up. Things were much better in my day

TM: It may be worth considering the appointment of a distinguished scientist to undertake a part-time role as adviser to the cabinet office
ME: For God's sake, let's get someone who knows what he's talking about

TM: he JIC, with commendable motives, took responsibility for the dossier
ME: In trying to help, the JIC really screwed up.

But it is when Lord Butler raises the prospect of Mr Scarlett's being forced out of his new job - while making clear that he is calling for no such thing - that one sees the true subtleties of the dialect in the hands of a master.

TM: We realise that our conclusions may provoke calls for Mr Scarlett to withdraw from his appointment as the next chief of SIS. We greatly hope he will not do so.

ME: There is more than enough in this report to prompt calls for his resignation but don't try pinning it on me. And besides, as a former head of the civil service, I'm reluctant to draw too direct a link between error and accountability

Aid worker Marcus Prior travelled with the World Food Programme (WFP) to visit the Darfur refugees:

In the absence of television, thank heavens for my satellite radio - live commentary on England versus Portugal in the Euro 2004 quarter-finals. Whoever coined the phrase "it's a small world" got it wrong. Tonight, miles from anywhere, the world feels bigger than ever.

Sudan's desert, with its golden sand streaked with red, broken only by the odd village, would be breathtaking were it not for the dark shadow of human rights abuses that hangs over it.

I went to visit a small, inadequate shelter that had become home to a mother and her four children. The eldest is clearly severely mentally ill. As we talked, she stopped to reach for a small plastic bowl filled with water and poured some of it into a cup. It was all she had - but with the temperature at over 45C, she offered it to us. It was hard to know which way to look.

Debate between Financial Times' chief music critic Andrew Clark and Arts writer Peter Aspden.

Question: Has the proliferation of festivals devalued their concept?

Mr. Clark: Yes.

Festivals are now commonplace. In today's cultural environment, the word has become meaningless. All the world's a festival. We have too much choice. Culture has a become an industry, a commodity to be sold. The modern festival takes the process to the extreme: it is sort of supermarket where the paying public is persuaded to bulk-buy processed culture.

They used to inspire a sense of pilgrimage.

They celebrated interculturism, the rare, the exotic. They offered things that were otherwise not available.

What should be the purpose of a festival?:
- a source of renewal, a break from routine
- a forum for open-minded discussion
- a time for inquiry
- everyone, on both sides of the stage apron, is motivated to stop and think; to ask questions about what is being performed, why it needs to be performed and what the performer and the witness can bring to it in this place alone, under these unique circumstances. Make the artist-audience relationship more of a conversation, less of a transaction by, for example, celebrating the identity of the host city.

Seeking enlightenment through a series of artistic challenges that stimulate and stretch the mind and senses.

The problem with today's cultural landscape is that there's overprovision of what people can buy, and underprovision of space where people can engage in creative dialogue. It celebrates narcissism and the economics of art. Its trick is to flat-pack what is already available. It's only distinction lies in being more conservative, more expensive and more exclusive than your average season-to-season promotion.(Such purism could indeed be romantic conceit)

The problem comes when art is used as a tool of social inclusion. Addressing the quotidian concerns of humanity are all very well, but it encourages a definition of artistic merit by popularity, not excellence. That's audience manipulation, not art.

Too many promoters get away with passing off mediocre as special, often with a hefty premium on the ticket.

Mr. Aspden: No.

They create an irresistable sense of event - providing the medium by which tens of thousands get the arts bug.

They are a vital tool for cross-fertilization, breaking down barriers between high and low,popular and classical,new and old.

Appreciation for arts must be seen in a wider context. It should take its place among all our other reasons for living, not put itself above them. The trouble over obsessing over expressing the inexpressible is that you fail to perceive or express anything real at all.

Art has simply become too arrogant, too isolated from the quotidian concerns of humanity. Culture, in an environment free from the pressures of everyday life, is arid escapism. Art should be embedded in fabric of everyday life. The idea that we need some kind of idyllic retreat to engage better with the handiwork of humanity's greatest imagination is monasticism.

Most art performed in front of public is neither transcendent nor execrable, but somewhere in the middle. And it's fine for people to enjoy that, without feeling the need to be radically challenged. And the last thing they want is some professional critic pissing on their parade because they should have been at the avant-garde love-in(no food or drink provided) down the road.

Model for making it big in small town India. Using the internet.:

Now if only this idea could be applied even more usefully:

1. Getting discounted village-wide fertilizer orders.
2. ?

Financial Times on Almodovar's "La Mala Educacion":

We know what to expect from the unerring hand of Pedro Almodóvar: a cinema steeped in emotional extremes that delights in tricks and contradiction and that coaxes us into the moral quicksand of contemporary life with such dexterity we barely notice our feet getting damp.

How does he manage it? The melodramatic plot twists, the reckless celebration of sexuality in all its shapes and forms, the garish colours - it should be a recipe for the most ghastly exercise in high camp.

Yet, it invariably works: the melodrama hums with authenticity, the pan-sexual cavortings resonate with feeling, the primary hues shimmer stylishly, in perfect empathy with the vivid entanglements cast before us.

So when we hear that Bad Education is an emotional triangle, we are duly forewarned. We know it will be more of a psycho-sexual, three-dimensional dodecahedron of head-spinning complexity and brutal frankness; and yet, we will care.

True, there is a triangle at the heart of the tale, one involving a Catholic priest and two under-age boys - nothing too controversial there, then. But Almodóvar structures his story with such understated cleverness, shifting time frames, stories within stories, that we are never quite sure of our ground.

IHT presents an argument against the widespread over-simplification that Congress' victory is due to the growing "rural-urban" divide:

In India, unlike China, it is not self-evident that the poor rural areas subsidize the rich urban ones. To the contrary, Indian government heavily subsidizes the agricultural sector while imposing numerous "luxury taxes" on the urban rich. While it is true that India's agriculture needs further investment to improve it's land productivity, this year, in any case, rural areas were mostly prospering, albeit perhaps temporarily, from a combination of good crops and stable to higher farm prices.

So why were the poor unhappy with the BJP ?

I think the argument offered by most commentators regarding access of TV in villages bringing a "rich-poor" divide to their huts is over-simplification.

Given the complexity of the regional, caste and class interest parties that make up India’s body politic, no simple explanation of electoral events is possible. In northern India in particular, rural voters are divided more by caste than united by demand for more resources.

An increasingly predictable feature of the latest result was the defeat of incumbent governments, both Congress and BJP led ones, in the states as well as at the center. The Congress Party team governing Karnataka, was defeated as surely as that in neighboring Andhra Pradesh, whose chief minister, Naidu, was a high-profile technology promoter aligned with the BJP. It seems more likely that these two state governments lost because they were incumbents than because they did not pay sufficient attention to rural needs.

At the national level, Congress may have been helped by a rejuvenation of the Gandhi name by a new generation of the family (Rahul & Priyanka) and rejection of the ‘‘foreign’’ label that the BJP had tried to pin on Sonia Gandhi.

But more broadly the election may simply show that:

a) voters still exercise their rights
b) they take a suitably cynical view of politicians
c) do not believe their promises
d) unwilling to let any of them stay in office too long.

Indonesian voters seemed to deliver a rather similar verdict last month to the two main parties as well as to President Megawati Sukarnoputri. There, as in India, rural voters predominate, but in crowded Java, at least, the geographical divide between town and country is less clear and everywhere ideological, regional and religious affiliations transcend any politics based on rural issues. In the Philippines, the urban poor are as numerous as their rural cousins. Economics might demand that agriculture receive much more attention. But electoral politics is all about personalities and avoids policy issues. Rural issues barely get lip service.

Perhaps surprisingly, it is in more developed Thailand and Malaysia that rural voters are a better defined electoral class. In Thailand, where rural voters are still the majority and the gap between Bangkok and the countryside is very wide, Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra triumphed in the last election partly because of a promise of rural handouts and debt reduction for farmers. In Malaysia, rural voters matter because they are mostly Malays in areas where the battle for the Malay soul between the governing UMNO and Islamist opposition is most intense. In the recent election, sky high palm oil prices were worth a lot of votes for UMNO but they were not the substance of the political debate. Rural voters still predominate in most of Asia and they decide elections. But they do not define the political issues, least of all as an urban-rural divide.

Notes from conversation with Luis on MP3 compatible CD players:

CD-DA follows what is known as the "red book" format. Samples 16 bits at 44.1 Khz. (Human audible freq. are ~6Khz - ~ 20Khz, so 44.1Khz meets Niquist's law). This is also precisely what wav format is.
MP3 is an audio compression format, which approximates "cd quality" by selectively extracting most human discernable samples from wav.
.Wav files can be written to CD in their original CD-DA format.
.Mp3 files can be written to CD in either ISO-99* format, which is an audio filesystem format, or written as CD-DA (if your CD player doesn't recognize ISO-99*. Remember, this doesn't get you back the original wav quality - the quality is still mp3).

Input to an mp3 converter is (usually?) wav files. The "stream rate" decides how much of the original CD-DA quality is maintained.128kb(its)ps is a common stream rate. Obviously, the more the stream rate, the less the compression.

A standard 700MB CD can store around 10 hours of MP3 or about 1 hour of wav ! Hence the market for CD MP3 players.

New formats in the market:
Super Audio - samples ~32 bits at ~ 90Khz. Most CD players don't recognize this format
Quicktime audio - compresses wav to half the song's original size, without compromising audio ! (?)
Video CD - audio format recognized by most DVD players