Englishman in New York

The man who co-wrote the song “Itsy Bitsy Teenie Weenie Yellow Polka Dot Bikini” had the unsettling experience this week of reading his own obituary — the result of an impostor who went through life claiming to be the author of the 1960s smash hit.

[…]”Do you know what it’s like to have grandchildren calling you and say, ‘Grandpa, you’re still alive?’” he said in a telephone interview from Coral Springs. “This is not a game. I am who I am, and I’m proud of who I am. But these phones don’t stop with people calling thinking I’m dead.”

Bitsy Bikini’ Song Co-Author Is Alive (via Mediabistro)

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To watch the rest of the documentary see Harry (via Oliver Kamm).

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Spotted outside our apartment.

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Broker talking into cell phone:

It’s in a lovely area between Windsor Terrace and Park Slope called Greenwood. There’s a cemetery there. It’s a tourist attraction.

Overheard half an hour ago in Park Slope by me.

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Stressful morning. This completely chilled me out. I won’t even pretend to know anything about the music, the song or the performers. If you want to know that you’ll have to see Clive Davis.

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If this anti-war protester in Manchester, England, wants to stop racism why does he support an anti-Semitic movement?

If he wants peace why does his t-shirt glorify violence?

And since when was Hezbollah in the t-shirt line anyway? Whatever next, Hezbollah mugs?

I shouldn’t have asked.

More irritating photographs of protesters at Sweetness and Light.

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Clive Davis revels in the obituary of Fleet Street hack Brian Vine:

A rotund, Wodehousian figure with a booming voice and rubicund complexion, “Vino”, as Vine was known to his colleagues, wore Savile Row suits, sported a monocle (”for opthalmic reasons”, though the glass was obviously plain) and conveyed the general impression of being an escapee from the dustier benches of the Upper House…

Vine also enjoyed exotic cars, and returned from America with a Cadillac convertible. He liked to tell the story of how, on his way back home from Ascot races, he was stopped by a policeman who asked if he had been drinking. “Yes, officer,” he admitted, “I’m completely pissed.” The policeman asked him to get out of the car and produced a breathalyser, only to be stopped in his tracks when he noticed that the car was left-hand drive and Vine’s wife Beverley was in the driving seat.

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What is the world coming to when a liberal democracy has to debate whether or not to torture people?

This op-ed in the New York Times yesterday by former soldier Paul Rieckhoff, the executive director of Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America, says it all:

The question facing America is not whether to continue fighting our enemies in Iraq and beyond but how to do it best. My soldiers and I learned the hard way that policy at the point of a gun cannot, by itself, create democracy. The success of America’s fight against terrorism depends more on the strength of its moral integrity than on troop numbers in Iraq or the flexibility of interrogation options.

UPDATE: Clive Davis has been pondering the same today. Clive doesn’t agree that torture is always morally reprehensible:

I can’t say I’ve been following every twist and turn of the interrogation debate. The reason being that it seems obvious, to me anyway, that there are going to be extremely rare occasions when things such as waterboarding, repulsive though they are, will be morally justified. And, yes, on reflection, I’d say waterboarding - one of those laddish euphemisms we like to throw around - does qualify as a form of torture. (As does the use of intensely loud music. I know other people wouldn’t agree on that.) Do I feel confident that people can be trusted to use techniques like that in the right circumstances a hundred per cent of the time? No. Which is what troubles me most of all.

I’m still not convinced. I can’t escape the fact that there are some things people just should not do. There are lines that should never be crossed because once you cross them you can never go back. By torturing prisoners America is sending a message across the world that it is okay in the 21st century to torture your enemies (albeit in more humane ways than our forefathers). From that moment on how can America chastise any other country for doing the same? And how long before the US tortures someone who is innocent?

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I suppose it was only a matter of time before someone offered their own take on the new American Apparel store on Flatbush Avenue. If the marquee looks familiar, you may remember it from my posts and Times story last year.

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in case you haven’t seen it yet here’s the video of Clinton on Fox News that’s doing the rounds. Ignore the title under the video. Although a lot of the “Fox is evil” accusations are wrong so is blaming Clinton for not preventing 9/11.

Clinton makes some good points here, particularly the fact that the US has seven times more troops in Iraq than in Afghanistan. One thing’s for sure, this man has an infinitely more agile mind than the current President.

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Forbes’ list of the 400 wealthiest Americans—the Forbes Four Hundred—was published last week and there are two important points of note:

1.When the first Forbes Four Hundred was published in 1982 the benchmark for entry was a net worth of $200 million. This year, for the first time, the benchmark is $1 billion dollars. In 1982 there were 42 billionaires. This year there are 400.

2. As you’d expect Bill Gates ($53 billion) and Warren Buffett ($46 billion) are in first and second places on the list. But casino owner Sheldon Adelson is the new number three having jumped from a net worth of $3 billion in 2004 to a net worth of $23.6 billion today. Just to set that in context Adelson’s wealth has increased by $23.6 million per day over the past two years, just under $1 million an hour.

As some of you know, I’ve spent most of this year as part of a team of writers and editors working on a book about the Forbes Four Hundred. The book will be published by Knopf in fall of 2007 to coincide with the 25th anniversary of the list.

The book will have plenty of facts and figures in it. But it will also have lots of fascinating stories about how America’s wealthiest people make—and spend—their money.

Working on the book may have warped my sense of value (when you’re thinking in hundreds of millions and billions of dollars, $10 million suddenly seems very small). But it has also been an inspiration to see how these people, many born into inauspicious circumstances, went on to become some of the most successful people in the country.

Sheldon Adelson was the son of a Boston taxi driver who started out in business selling sample-size shaving cream and shampoo (which he got free from factories) to motels. He made his first fortune with the computer trade show COMDEX in Las Vegas. But he became a billionaire when he moved into the casino industry. He owns the Venetian in Las Vegas, the Sands Macao in China and is currently building a $6 billion complex in China and a $3.5 billion complex in Singapore.

Not bad for a poor boy from Boston.

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George Galloway interviewing Tony Benn.

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Of course, there was the rather inescapable fact that Protestantism embodied dissent, authorized dissent, was dissent: the Queen was swimming against a tide of her own creation. The tide began with religion, but it lapped at farther shores.

Later Protestant triumphalists would credit the Reformation with everything from capitalism to public education to democaracy; they exaggerated but they had a point. Protestant preachers urged both men and women to become literate so they could read the Bible, and literacy blossomed in Elizabeth’s reign. People who read the Bible could read other things, too; and, what was more dangerous, write things. “Every gross brained idiot is suffered to come into print,” fumed an English scholar. The Queen and her Council were less concerned about the idiots than about the pamphleteers, the propagandists, the crititics: this was something new.

Her Majesty’s Spymaster, Stephen Budiansky.

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Via (Complete Tosh)

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Is this funeral home as funny in US English as it is in British English?

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