Our lad Brad wins the Tour.

I'm not very keen on sponsored pro sport, especially not when sponsor is Sky, and I'm not at all patriotic - still, it is quite something for a Brit to win Tour de FRANCE, team-mates: Chris Froome second - and Mark Cavendish claimed his fourth consecutive final stage victory ! All with Paris looking its best in glorious sunshine - I'm in Paris again, though best view was on TV :-) Quite exhausting - off for a relaxed soiree about Paris and jazz songs near Blvd St. Michel.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/0/cycling/18946960

He also has his father's genes - a great cyclist, but despite a long bender afetr an Olympic win, he resisted his father's drinking genes, which led to broken marriages, deserted kids and a being beaten to death in a drunken brawl.

And the French seem to like him rather more more than that American guy:

" 'They know now that he is articulate. They know he is good at interviews. But above all they know that he has a life outside of cycling - that he likes music and British culture, and that he is very proud of it.

"And the French respond really well to that side of him. I know people who are not at all into cycling, but who are definitely interested in Wiggins the man.' "

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-18899902

Maybe it's because I'm a Londoner - that I moved to Nice.

While I know there are some here who still harbour resentments about London winning the O Games, I personally agree with every word written here

Guardian - Andrew Rawnsley - This five-ring circus is only for those in love with white elephants

The "legacy" is only for those who are in love with white elephants. The future of the stadium is still moot. The Olympic velodrome is a handsome building for which no one can see a purpose after the Games. There will be some new housing in a previously derelict part of east London, but constructing an Olympic Park was a very expensive way of going about that. New York had regeneration projects as part of its bid and has gone ahead with them anyway - at a fraction of the cost.

As was predictable - and indeed predicted by those of us who examined the effect on previous host cities - the Olympics are having a baleful impact on London. Fearing traffic gridlock and oppressive security, residents flee. Some tourists come to watch the Games, but more are scared away. The Mall, Horse Guards and St James's Park have been in lock-down for weeks.

Every time I step in the London underground, I am assailed by posters and the booming voice of Boris warning Londoners to stay out of town during the period of Olympic occupation. And Lord Coe alone knows what fate may befall anyone caught in the vicinity wearing a T-shirt that is not approved by the corporate sponsors and the authoritarian jobsworths enforcing their branding rights. The siting of surface-to-air missiles in parks and on the top of flats completes the alluring city-under-martial-law look. It is like stepping into a dystopian future in which Britain is run by a military junta headed by Ronald McDonald.

keep to the Fen Causeway

Guardian - will Hutton - The American election is really a battle for the future of capitalism

Look, if you've been successful, you did not get there on your own. When we succeed, we succeed because of our individual initiative but also because we do things together." So said President Obama, campaigning in Roanoke Virginia, last week. He went on: "If you were successful, somebody along the line gave you some help".

He listed great teachers, government research, roads and bridges and the whole fabric of the American system as various ways in which "somebody along the line" would have contributed to your success. This was the essence of the social liberalism of the great British thinker Leonard Hobhouse, but now championed by an American president. Hobhouse passionately argued that capitalist wealth was co-created by the interaction of society, social capital and the entrepreneur. Government investment, financed properly by taxation, was the precondition for a successful capitalism.

Fox News, self-appointed 21st-century American custodian of free-enterprise capitalism, rather as Pravda guarded communism, was on to the issue like a flash. In my New York hotel, I watched an overheated Fox commentator begin railing about socialism and before long Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney took up Fox News' cue as is mandatory for any Republican politician. The speech really "reveals what he [Mr Obama] thinks about our country, about free enterprise, about individual initiative, about America," he declared. "Did you build your business? If you did, raise your hand." Hands, pre-arranged, shot up. "Take that, Mr President," he finished.

keep to the Fen Causeway

Guardian - Ed Vulliamy - Global banks are the financial services wing of the drug cartels

"People don't like to ask how close the banker's finger is to the trigger of the killer's gun," says Woods.

But in this newspaper - when we revealed the original "cease and desist" order against HSBC - the former head of the UN Office on Drugs and Crime, Antonio Maria Costa, posited that four pillars of the international banking system are: drug-money laundering, sanctions busting, tax evasion and arms trafficking.

The response of politicians is to cower from any serious legal assault on this reality, for the simple reasons that the money is too big (plus consultancies to be had after leaving office). The British government recruits a former chairman of HSBC as trade secretary just as the drug-laundering scandal breaks.

my bold

keep to the Fen Causeway

A review of Can's Lost Tapes album, which places the band in the context of their time in a way I have never seen attempted before

The Quietus - Constant Forward Movement: Taylor Parkes On Can's Lost Tapes

Progressive rock in Britain reflected a kind of aspirational complacency: trying to escape a three-chord trap, these generally well-brought-up musicians reached for the classical forms in which so many of them had been schooled. Fundamentally snobbish and bourgeois, this approach was poison to the new German bands, the kind of thinking from which they felt compelled to take rapid, immediate flight. The so-called Krautrock groups, even as they pushed at the limits of what rock could do (or what it could be), were drawn to precisely the elements of this music the Brit-proggers sought to purge: the inarticulacy, the mantric repetition, the grunginess, the extraneous noise. In Can's case, this sat well with an avant-garde aesthetic which couldn't have been more clearly opposed to the fetishisation of formal "perfection". What's more, they understood the potential significance of sound, its psychological sway, its strange capacity for subversion.

"Television is immensely interested in the political opinions of beat musicians, because they can't talk," a smirking Irmin Schmidt informed a German TV crew in 1971. "TV is not at all interested in the political opinions of people who also want socialism and a more human society, [and] can spell it out. I am insecure, I know much too little... so television, being gloriously critical of society, can take me as an example. So that it can preach: 'look, they do not know what they want!' [A little] bit of the revolution we want is included in the music, but you can destroy this when you manipulate the musicians in such a way that they are forced to interpret their music with words..."

Jaki Liebezeit was playful when he suggested that Can could be an acronym for communism, anarchism, nihilism, but it wasn't supposed to be a joke. This is a side to Can which is often forgotten, but they were as much oppositional as anything else, an extreme reaction to their own past and present. There's no other way to make sense of them; the unity, the exquisite restlessness, the way they work so very hard to transcend time and place. Can's relationship to the mood of post-war Germany is more than a footnote. It doesn't define them, but does provide a context within which they're easier to understand, and harder to reduce. This was "alternative" music, not (just) in the sense of consumer choice; a demonstration of a different way of living, an impression of freedom. Way out, as a way out.

keep to the Fen Causeway

Sorting stuff stored away under the ceiling, I found a (Hungarian) boy scout magazine from December 1936. It must have belonged to my grandfather, but I couldn't determine why it was kept (or how it ended up among my university books). Lots of innocent stuff, a report from a visit to the Berlin Olympics (without any swastikas on the photos but with a photo of a Hitler-Jugend group) – and a centerfold with air raid warning signs (meant as collectibles?). Apparently, war was something expected, not something happening in distant Spain only.

_{*Lunatic*, n.
One whose delusions are out of fashion.}

Hollande's red carpet revenge on Cameron - Europe - World - The Independent

When David Cameron refused to meet the future French president François Hollande while he was on a campaigning visit to Britain earlier this year, it was viewed as "le snub". But in a move likely to raise the eyebrows of diplomats, the French head of state will exact his revenge this week when Ed Miliband becomes the first British politician to be invited to the Élysée Palace - before Mr Cameron.

The Labour leader and President Hollande will hold talks on youth unemployment in Europe over a working lunch on Tuesday. They are also likely to discuss the Tour de France, which Bradley Wiggins is expected to win today. Mr Miliband has been keeping an eye on the race and was was enthused by the way the French had taken the British cyclist to their hearts.

Mr Miliband, accompanied by his strategy chief Lord Wood, will meet the French Prime Minister, Jean-Marc Ayrault, and Martine Aubry, secretary general of the Parti Socialiste, for breakfast before a summit on youth unemployment with President Hollande.

Today was the Gay Pride parade in Colorado Springs. The big news this year is that the DOD has allowed military people to march in parades in uniform. So the parade was headed up by a color guard of people now no longer subject to DADT. (I'm not completely clear on whether these are active duty or retired people, but in any case, allowing them to act in this capacity is new.)

Honestly, the parade this year seemed less outrageous than in years past. Perhaps as this whole tempest in a teapot subsides, the whole point of having such a parade will fade away.

Anyway, as a bonus, here's a picture of asdf! Sorry for the bad quality--it's not my fault. I'm in a white t-shirt and hat, to the right of center, behind the lady in the chair.

Jump to 2:00 to see why