Addressing the unfolding meltdown in the financial industry, a recent cover of Fortune magazine depicted some of the Wall Street head honchos who were forced to fall on their swords. Above the photos of the fallen, the strapline asked "What were they smoking?"

A salacious story in the New York Times on the suspicious death of Seth Tobias, hedge fund manager and regular CNBC talking head, suggests that the distractions facing even a minor master of the universe can go way beyond the occassional befuddling toke:

"[Now] an unfolding drama over Mr. Tobias’s estate is providing a lurid account of fast money and faster living in the volatile world of hedge funds. Mr. Tobias’s four brothers and Mrs. Tobias are locked in a legal battle over the estate, which is worth at least $25 million.

And, in a civil complaint, they have gone so far as to accuse her of murder. The brothers, Samuel, Spence, Scott and Joshua, claim Mrs. Tobias drugged her husband and lured him into the pool. Bill Ash, a former assistant to Mr. Tobias, said he had told the police that Mrs. Tobias confessed to him that she had cajoled her husband into the water while he was on a cocaine binge with a promise of sex with a male go-go dancer known as Tiger."

Tiger's current whereabouts is apparently not known.

Having reached about the half-way point of the novel during this morning's commute, I can see why Per Petterson's Out Stealing Horses won the IMPAC award and secured a berth on so many best-of-2007 lists.

Almost every page features a line or paragraph embedded with a truth you didn't know you already knew. And it effects its low-key enlightenment without serving up a side-order of sanctimony that usually accompanies "wisdom."

The above makes the book sound worthy, slightly dull. But it's not, partly because the prose (thanks to translator Anne Born) is as fresh and transparent as glacier meltwater (subtle reference to the book's Norwegian setting).

And it's also a mystery story, in which various disappearances and re-appearances still remain tantalisingly up in the air at this point

More when I have the chance/time/will-power...

The most charitable epithet for John Waters's column in today's Irish Times is "misconceived." A more accurate description would be don't-know-where-to-look awful. Waters's musings on the death of a young Irish socialite, Katy French --whom Waters admits he met just once--presents the dismaying spectacle of a writer who has floated free from the moorings of reality, and is now adrift on the choppy waters of his own delusions:

"She [Katy French] was a child of Ireland in the time of its rebirth [...] Katy was the daughter of our dreams, in the sense that it was the dreams of her people that gave birth to what is tritely called her celebrity. We have these words to box off the lucky/unlucky ones who act out of fantasies, while we stick safely to the grandstand. We refer to them as celebs, implying a different species. But they are human beings, filled like the rest of us with desire, distinguished only by willingness/opportunity to rush in where others fear to tread.

[...]

Driven by angelic recall, they plod on clay feet into the mire of three-dimensional reality. They do not know, are not conscious, that their appetites are infinitely greater than the world's capacity to satisfy them. Katy French was a personification of our fantasies, of our sense of what we were becoming, of how we might unfold ourselves. She was not the only one, but in the immediate past was perhaps the most spectacular light on the skyline, a meteorite of desire plummeting through the Irish zeitgeist."

If readers were not sufficient impressed by Waters's use of "zeitgeist" and the "/" symbol to replace the word "or" (willingness/opportunity, luck/unlucky)--a sign he's read some Derrida--he channels a bit of W.B. Yeats to convince us he's grappling with some heavy verities:

"Katy's death was the result not just of her foolishness, but of our collective helplessness. We do not know what to say to our children as we kiss their brows before allowing them into a world utterly, terribly changed, because that is what we desired. We do not understand the meaning of freedom."

It should go without saying that the death of anyone at the age of 24 is a tragedy. But this bathetic twaddle ("I am crying, writing this") adds nothing to public discussion about the significance, or otherwise, of an individual's passing. Indeed the awesome self-indulgence of the writing, for me, eclipses the subject of this encomium.

A responsible sub-editor would have spiked Waters's piece. A larger question is why people keep on publishing Waters's ramblings. It's not his barmy stable of hobby horses I object to in particular. For example, I can happily read Christopher Hitchens's neo-con diatribes because the guy, regardless of his rebarbative world-view, can write. Waters, on the other hand, may be able to form sentences that, taken individually, loosely conform to notions of coherence and syntax. But on the level of the paragraph and article, his prose achieves the bizarre feat of consisting almost entirely of non sequiturs.

Minister for the Environment, Heritage and Local Government John Gormley shows why the Green Party is so popular with da kids by telling us how he spends his days in his blog.

This week, John's in Bali. But he's not like those FF types with their sleazy junkets. John's just here to save the planet:

"I arrived yesterday evening, it is truly beautiful. It is one of the most popular tourist resorts in South East Asia and it is easy to understand why so many tourists flock here. Unfortunately I will have very little time on this trip to see much of the island. Having seen and heard the weather reports in Ireland in recent days, I know there will be little sympathy for me having to work for the duration of my stay on this tropical island paradise. However I am, along with counterparts from around the world, here in Bali for a very, very important reason."

And to show John takes the environment really seriously, here's a picture of him with a bike!

You might notice that John (or perhaps his department's assistant secretary, in charge of climate change, his private secretary and his press advisor who all travelled with him) has entitled this snap "Zero carbon travel in Bali."

Unfortately, to get to Bali, John and the hundreds of politicos, NGO types, scientists, journos, and assorted hangers-on had to emit quite a fair bit of CO2. In fact, according to Bloomberg News:

"Government officials and activists flying to Bali, Indonesia, for the United Nations meeting on climate change will cause as much pollution as 20,000 cars in a year.

The delegates each will produce an average 4.07 metric tons of carbon dioxide, or CO2, to reach the resort island 950 kilometers (600 miles) from Jakarta, according to estimates e- mailed to Bloomberg by the UN agency holding the conference."

But thanks to the Greens' policy of "carbon offsetting of all official air travel", the taxpayer should cover any regrettable-but-necessary emissions from John's Bali team.

By the way, love those sandals, John!

From The Monkey's Typewriter's modern-life-is-rubbish research department this urgent piece of information:

Merriam-Webster's Word of the Year 2007 is "w00t"

"w00t? wtf?", you might be asking. Well, according to the M-W site it's an interjection "expressing joy (it could be after a triumph, or for no reason at all); similar in use to the word "yay"."

More illumination "[the] word first became popular in competitive online gaming forums as part of what is known as l33t ("leet," or "elite") speak—an esoteric computer hacker language in which numbers and symbols are put together to look like letters. Although the double "o" in the word is usually represented by double zeroes, the exclamation is also known to be an acronym for "we owned the other team"—again stemming from the gaming community."

(I'm not convinced that the practice of putting numbers and symbols together to look like "letters" (I think "words" is bit more accurate) is so uncommon that it deserves to be caled an "esoteric computer hacker language.")

BTW, I have time for entry number 6 in the list: Sample usage: Last night's episode of Fair City struck me as a grim specimen of sardoodledom.

This week The New York Times/International Herald Tribune painted a bleak picture of modern Italy with "In a Funk, Italy Sings an Aria of Disappointment":

"[For] all the outside adoration and all of its innate strengths, Italy seems not to love itself. The word here is “malessere,” or “malaise”; it implies a collective funk—economic, political and social—summed up in a recent poll: Italians, despite their claim to have mastered the art of living, say they are the least happy people in Western Europe. [...]

The latest numbers show a nation older and poorer — to the point that Italy’s top bishop has proposed a major expansion of food packages for the poor.

Worse, worry is growing that Italy’s strengths are degrading into weaknesses. Small and medium-size businesses, long the nation’s family-run backbone, are struggling in a globalized economy, particularly with low-wage competition from China.

Doubt clouds the family itself: 70 percent of Italians between 20 and 30 still live at home, condemning the young to an extended and underproductive adolescence. Many of the brightest, like the poorest a century ago, leave Italy."

The word "hope"—a sacred phrase in the American political lexicon—peppers the article, although in Italy it seems noticeable only by its absence.

But Italy is not the only country in "old Europe," apparently, that looks into the mirror and feels aghast at the shabby figure staring back. Another piece in today's NYT notes that number of children attending Berlin's soup kitchens is rising. Recently, Newsweek featured a slightly tired-looking Angela Merkel on its cover under the heading The Lost Leader. The accompanying feature bemoaned that fact that Merkel's inclination to search for a consensus among her grand coalition was hampering the difficult, but necessary, work of "reforming" Germany (in other words, making Germany more like the United States).

If Germany's stuck in the mud, France is in flames. Unfortunately, unlike in May 1968, nobody seems to care overly about what the French think or feel about the recent riots. A recent Time cover proclaimed "The Death of French Culture"--as if the Hexagon has transmogrified into Iowa overnight. (The article's arguments are ably challenged by Bernard-Henri Lévy in a recent Guardian article.)

Meanwhile, U.S. commentators patronizingly applaud President Sarkozy's call for his compatriots to be more like Americans.

So, the three largest societies in the Euro zone—Germany, France, and Italy—are essentially kaputt, en panne, or finito.

You would think, reading all this coverage, that it would be 1.47 euro to the dollar today, rather than being very much the other way around. Perhaps it's because the sclerotic economies of the Eurozone Big Three won't have to grapple with all those unemployed mortgage hucksters, financial "engineers," real estate peddlers, construction workers--not to mention families facing home repossessions--to the same extent as the more "dynamic" economies that are ceaselessly promoted as models.

Despite unleashing the phrase "Web 2.0" on an unsuspecting world, Tim O'Reilly can be considered one of the computer industry's good guys. The books released by O'Reilly are a cut above the usual illiterate tat that passes for software documentation and O'Reilly himself seems to have a genuine belief that technology can be used for altruistic purposes. Having said that, I find his dogged adherence to Silicon Valley's dominant mindset (markets=good/government=bad) difficult to go along with.

For example, a recent New York Times op-ed piece by O'Reilly pondered the convergence of the web and mobile devices. In the piece O'Reilly argues that truly open platforms—as opposed to proprietary systems offering restricted access to developers—empower market forces to create innovative new products:

But as many people know, when Berners-Lee was building the foundations of the "Web" he was working for CERN (the European Centre for Nuclear Research), a massive government-sponsored enterprise that can hardly be described as "an environment of free-market competition." Going further back, the very infrastructure of the Web--the packet-switching network that allows multiple computers to serve as nodes in a communications network--was pioneered by an agency of the U.S. Defense Department, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. Again, the Pentagon isn't the first outfit that comes to mind when the phrase "free-market" is uttered.

So one wonders why entrepreneurs and advocates of the software industry are reluctant to acknowledge the contribution of government-financed "Big Science" to the IT revolution. Perhaps because the involvement of monoliths such as CERN and the Department of Defense jars with the mythology of Silicon Valley, a place whose Romulus and Remus are Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard. The founders of Hewlett-Packard famously started their company in a garage, and this template of go-it-alone innovation has provided the template for some of the most successful firms that have followed in HP's wake, most notably Apple and Google.

Yet one also wonders whether this willed overlooking of how taxation created an environment that facilitated individual achievement doesn't have a political tinge. After all, Silicon Valley is not only where the future is created—it's famously also the place where vast fortunes can be accumulated very quickly. The immense wealth that can suddenly descend on the lucky/smart (tick according to your view of the Web 2.0 phenomenon) individual is a factor in the ever-growing income disparity in the United States.

The populist upsurge affecting American politics is a sign of unease about this widening chasm between the have-nots and the have-everythings. It now seems even presidential candidates are no longer terrified about discussing better funding for government programs. But those who might have to pay more to support these schemes—including the IT industry's portion of the richest 1 percent who paid 27.6 percent of all U.S. federal taxes in 2005—mightn't be entirely happy about the resurrection of "Big Government." And what better way of hampering such a Progressive agenda by denying that tax-funded organization ever did anything useful?

I know it's a somewhat limited demographic, but if you've had a prefrontal lobotomy during the past few weeks, finding appropriate Christmas TV fare can be a challenge. You want something light, so as not to distract you from the absorbing task of managing your drool. Well, RTE has just the programme for you--Celebrity Jigs 'n' Reels. Responding to a huge upswell of indifference among the Irish public, the programme "returns this year for the New Year's Eve party to end all parties with seven willing celebrities box-stepping and jigging their way to midnight all in the name of charity."

Yes, it might be mindless garbage, but it's for charity--which means all involved don't really have to make an effort to be any good.

On the other hand, if you have more than basic brain-stem function, I recommend for your holiday delectation the following elevating material:

James Meek explains how to boost your scrabble score; Caleb Crain discusses the implications of the decline of reading; Malcolm Gladwell tells us why IQ tests tell us more about the society that sets them than the people who take them.


And to end the post on a festive note, here's another Malcolm, Malcolm Middleton with, for me, the Christmas song of 2007: We're All Going to Die: