Greg Pytel (GP) returns, asking me to post a comment to my post below, which of course I have done. His further observations are interesting. I do not think it was fair to put up a running commentary (Especially as you well know that all I really wanted was to put […]
Have you heard of anyone called Greg Pytel? The name rang no bell with me either until this morning, when this annoying peevish message arrived: Dear Mr Crawford, Over a year ago I wrote an article "Regulating financial risks" (it was also reprinted by a couple of financial websites like […]
Fame, at last. My already legendary Barnacles piece makes it to the Browser. Hurrah. This is how they list it: Scenes from the diplomatic life, worthy of Lawrence Durrell. Embassies, like ships, have their barnacles: The local bores, gatecrashers, frauds and eccentrics "who attach themselves to the Corps and intend to […]
Just when you think you’ve seen everything, the Human Mind comes up with something utterly new and outlandish. Such as this awesome site which grabs sentences found somewhere or other on Twitter and runs them together with other sentences to produce short poems in rhyming iambic pentameters: With algorithms subtle […]
Here is a YouTube conversation between me and Jennifer Hardie (CEO of Pinnacle Dubai) in which I discuss in general terms the Negotiation Skills course I completed with Pinnacle last week. The general idea is that you should see this magnificent training for what it is (namely magnificent) and sign […]
More strange things going on in the USA about President Obama’s origins and identity. As you know, all sorts of crazed Republicans ran the claim that Obama was not qualified to be US President as he had not been born in the USA, whereas (as any fule kno) he was […]
If you are not on Twitter, stop what you’re doing and sign up. Then find me at @CharlesCrawford and click ‘Follow’. Then run #popleveson through the Search facility and find gazillions of super barresterial jokes linking the Leveson Inquiry (British journalist ethics zzzzzz) and pop songs. All in 140 characters: Leigh-Anne […]
Wikipedia helps us in working out how fast Lord Reith is rotating in his grave as the BBC sinks lower and lower: Rotational speed can measure, for example, how fast a motor is running. Rotational speed and angular speed are sometimes used as synonyms, but typically they are measured with […]
Here is an excellent and readable analysis of a failed attempt by a Congolese national based in Brussels to persuade a Belgian court to ban the 1930s book Tintin in the Congo on (basically) the grounds that it promoted and still promotes racist hatred. The legal move failed: This is all […]
Former Reagan speechwriter Peggy Noonan turns a beautiful insightful phrase – and is impossibly grand. She also knows a thing or two about public speaking: An example of the power of plain words: In late 1996 the writer Tom Wolfe made a speech in New York in which, according to a […]
