Robert Bernstein, the founder of Human Rights Watch, does something he never anticipated. On the op-ed page of the New York Times, he joins the organization’s critics:

Israel, with a population of 7.4 million, is home to at least 80 human rights organizations, a vibrant free press, a democratically elected government, a judiciary that frequently rules against the government, a politically active academia, multiple political parties and, judging by the amount of news coverage, probably more journalists per capita than any other country in the world — many of whom are there expressly to cover the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Meanwhile, the Arab and Iranian regimes rule over some 350 million people, and most remain brutal, closed and autocratic, permitting little or no internal dissent. The plight of their citizens who would most benefit from the kind of attention a large and well-financed international human rights organization can provide is being ignored as Human Rights Watch’s Middle East division prepares report after report on Israel.

Rights Watchdog, Lost in the Mideast (NYT)

The BBC today releases a deluxe, special edition DVD box set of Fawlty Towers. And they’ve kindly agreed to give one set to EiNY readers.

I wanted to come up with a suitably difficult quiz question. But in the days of Google it seems that just about every answer is never more than a few Google clicks away. (Though Googling “who is the real life Basil Fawlty” throws up a few wrong answers.)

instead, I’ve decided you’re going to have to get creative. So, drop me an email with your favorite real life Fawlty Towers story. It can be anything: a shoddy hotel, a rude manager, incompetent staff, awful food. If you have photos, even better.

Keep it short. And send it in before October 29. I’ll announce the winner on November 2. For inspiration, here are a few examples from Season One of how not to treat your staff and guests:

David Hockney is renowned for tinkering with technology, such as photography and fax machines, in his artwork. But hidden at the end of this great profile in this weekend’s New York Times is, to my mind, a really fascinating fact about his use of new media today:

Mr. Hockney, wearing one of the old Savile Row suits he likes to paint in (“Even when they’re wrecked, they still look good”), was sitting at a table in the middle of the space, holding forth on the stupidity of smoking bans and his theories about lenses, mirrors and image making, and showing off his iPhones. With the program Brushes, he uses them to paint miniaturized sunrises and still lifes; he now has two, because he quickly filled the first.

It was immediately clear that — his new passion for plein-air painting aside — Mr. Hockney has a new love: digital technology. Around the room hung multiple photographs by Jonathan Wilkinson, his full-time technology assistant, of artworks that were also hanging on the walls. They were so exact that it was often hard to tell the originals from the photographs.

The confusion was intensified because some of the originals actually began life as photographs — like the two 27-foot-long friezes depicting a group of trees Mr. Hockney noticed at the edge of town, which he photographed individually, then collaged together and detailed in Photoshop. Others were made at home on a Macintosh, including portraits he painted earlier this year using Photoshop and a Wacom tablet. (A selection will be at Pace Prints.) Near a table covered with video cameras, someone had tacked up printouts of Mr. Hockney’s iPhone paintings.

Mr. Hockney also uses the computer to compose his paintings, either to help him step back and regard the whole of a multipanel work or to refine individual canvases. He often tries out colors and ideas on a photograph of an unfinished painting, or plays around with a JPEG of the image in Photoshop. Afterward he returns to the studio to put his ideas on canvas.

There’s a very interesting audio slideshow and an excerpt from a Hockney documentary too.

David Hockney’s Long Road Home (NYT)

Congratulations to A Brit Out of Water, who recently became a father! I think he may still be in the dog house with his partner, though, judging by today’s blog post recounting the home birth and subsequent two weeks:

Day two
I’m no expert, but nowhere in the baby manuals do they generally say “if you give birth after midnight, and get to bed at 4am, you should move house later that morning.” But the winning combination of a baby turning up 11 days late, and my wife having an idiotic husband, conspired to cause the movers to turn up less than nine hours after the birth. Suffice to say that my name was mud for some considerable time afterwards.

…Day seven
Let me give you some marriage guidance advice, should you need it. If you have a child, and you move house on the same day, you’re going to be unpopular. If you then spend a day on telephone calls as you attempt to organize a conference for your company’s senior management team the following week, you should probably keep your suitcases close by just in case.

Fourteen days that changed the world (A Brit Out of Water)

The Tiger Lillies, “the great punk/avant-garde cabaret band,” play St Ann’s Warehouse, in New York, this weekend. I had the misfortune to sit through the first half of their show in London a little earlier this year with Clive Davis. Mercifully, Clive released me at the interval. But, he did return valiantly for the second act, resulting in one of the most delicious reviews I have read this year:

Let me begin by stressing the positives. First of all, we got to hear a Jake Thackray song playing over the speakers during the interval. Second, although this show feels as if it lasts four hours, it is all over in less than two. And that, ladies and gentlemen, is just about all the enthusiasm I can muster for this pathetically misconceived evening.

We have all heard of Grand Guignol. The latest Gothic extravaganza from Martyn Jacques and his “satanic folk” colleagues — now celebrating 20 years of cheerful deviancy — could be described as Petit Guignol. It tries desperately to be dark and cynical, but in the end it is about as subversive as that TV commercial in which Johnny Rotten reinvents himself as a butter salesman.

The Tiger Lillies at New Players Theatre, WC2 (The Times)