A piece on The Today Programme this morning about the upcoming European Summit in Brussels revealed the unit that delegates use to measure the likely length of the conference – shirts! Three shirts; three days.
It makes perfect sense, of course, but it tickled me and, it would appear, the journalists at Radio 4 as shirt numbers came up on PM later in the day. I’ll have to remember this one next time I’m off to a conference.
Donald rumsfeld has won the Plain English Campaign’s 2003 Foot in Mouth Award for this little gem:
‘Reports that say that something hasn’t happened are always interesting to me, because as we know, there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns — the ones we don’t know we don’t know.’
Strangely enough it looks as though John Prescott has yet to feature in their rogue’s gallery. There’s always next year, I suppose.
On Friday The Missus and I went to the CBSO’s Silent Heroes at Symphony Hall. A wonderfully simple idea to recreate the atmosphere of early cinema by having the orchestra play a live accompaniment to a screening of the Harold Lloyd classic ‘Safety Last’.
It was a fantastic evening. The CBSO played the original jazz band version of Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue as a prelude to the main feature, before descending into the pit during the interval. The lights dimmed; the projector began; the orchestra struck up and it was pure magic. And in the end it left me thinking just one thing: this is how all films should be shown.
I was interested to hear that David Davis – a so-called Tory moderniser – is in favour of the death penalty for serial killers. Presumably it’s to ensure a ready supply of corpses for his master Michael Howard to feast on.