It seems that Fulham football club has decided to appoint the esteemed, and rather haggard, Roy Hodgson as the manager. Lawrie Sanchez and the caretaker boss, Ray Lewington, led the struggling team into the relegation zone. In a similar move, the board of another struggling team have decided to change management, despite apparent improvement in recent form. It is certainly a difficult decision to change mid-stream, especially when the team has built up a rapport with the manager.

Steve Staunton is reported to be top of the list to see them through the rest of the season. Although, they are an ambitious group, with an eye on a spot in Europe.

I’m reading Daniel Defoe’s Journal of the Plague Year at the moment (it’s great), and trying to find out a bit more about him came across this account of an Islamic forerunner of Robinson Crusoe by the Andalusian polymath Ibn Tufayl a.k.a. Averroes, who appears to be due much of the credit for western civilisation as we know it having brought Aristotle and Plato back into prominence in Europe, and who is the sole non-Greek face in Raphael’s barmy but great The School of Athens, the inspiration for School of Rock. Also featured in The School of Athens is Alcibiades, who I only know from his starring role as an attractive maniac in Joseph Heller’s Picture This and who figured in the Peloponnesian War(s), subject of Donald Kagan’s book which Brad De Long links to criticism of while quoting a great passage from Thucydides which is so Heller-esque (Hellenic? Argh) that when an almost identical passage turned up in Picture This I had no idea it was basically a copy. Picture This (which is hard to find, but which everyone should read) is partly about faking history, which obviously got me thinking about Orson Welles’ F for Fake, which everyone should see and which is about faking art and life in general and which you can watch a bit of on YouTube in the form of either an awful trailer or the wonderful final scene at Chartres. And of course F for Fake deals in part with industrialist, movie tycoon, adventurer and noted fruitcake Howard Hughes, who had about as interesting a life as Daniel Defoe, who got me into this mess in the first place.

The Encyclopedia of Decency. Sample extracts:

(1) The Guardian
Reprehensible Media Organ

The Garr-Day-Yan

Islamist daily newspaper, published and purchased by useful idiots, The Guardian (also Al-Grauniad) is the primary source of suspicious propaganda, disseminating racist and anti-American materials, causing fascists to laugh in celebration.

(2) Nobody Could’ve Predicted
Rhetorical Ploy

Noh-Baw-Day Coo-Duv Preh-Dick-Ted

Risky yet potentially fruitful rhetorical gambit, whereby one asserts that the failures of certain foreign policy clusterfucks have been caused by astonishing, unforseeable acts of barbarity and random chance.

(3) Decent Taxi
Rhetorical Ploy

Dee-Sint Tack-Say

Apochryphal, unverifiable mode of transport in which anonymous Ivory Tower elitists and chardonnay-swilling trendy lefties lower their guard, thus revealing their true opinions to Nick Cohen.

I think I would enjoy even a mediocre blog about cycling in Copenhagen, but Cycleliciousness is brilliant. Sample recent posts: bringing the Christmas tree home on your bike, clever measures to reduce lorry-cyclist collisions at junctions, and a ‘cycle bus’ for those commuting into Copenhagen from the suburbs.

The last one’s particularly interesting, because it shows how much cyclists value safety in numbers, and how that means a little co-ordination can make a huge difference.

What could be easier than arranging to commute together? And ride at a comfortable pace, taking turns to shield each other from the headwind. A long, cosy cyclo-commuting train - riding the 20 km to the city in about 35 minutes. Which is easily the same time it takes to drive or train.

As the author points out, these roads are already cyclist-friendly, but critical mass rides demonstrate that when you have enough cyclists they can effectively boss a road and you don’t even need cycle lanes. So I’d be interested to see whether this kind of thing - big groups of cyclists heading into town together at roughly coordinated times - could work in London or Dublin. Combine it with the ‘green wave‘ traffic light system also pioneered in Copenhagen and cycling to work could become the kind of easy, straightforward, non-lethal pursuit that would attract many of the people who would currently never dream of commuting by bike.

Headline from the ‘Breaking News’ section of today’s Irish Times, 20th December 2007:

Tribunal to question Ahern over payments

I do wonder how we have not all gone insane or dead.

If you’re at all interested in economics, history, or economic history, I can heartily recommend listening to Brad DeLong’s lectures from the past semester at Berkeley which you can get here (iTunes podcast link here). The early ones on colonization and industrialization are probably best for brilliant tangents (e.g. the story of how the Kaiping coal mine in late 19th century China was threatened by an edict from state officials who complained that the digging was rousing the earth dragon which in turn disturbed the repose of the late empress buried nearby) while of the later ones I’d suggest this if you ever wanted to find out what monetarism is without being bored to tears.

The National Archives of Ireland are making available the full records of every household in the 1911 Census, starting with Dublin as is only right and proper. You can search it all here. Don’t think any of my family were in the big shmoke at the time but there are certainly fuckloads of Gibneys, Geogeghans and Gannons. Somebody at Crooked Timber found Dev’s record (back when he was Edward DeValera) but I didn’t have much luck finding anyone else famous - no Yeats, which would have been fun.

Finally, something interesting to report about baseball: the first recorded use of the word ‘cocksucker’.

The auction house calls it ‘the most offensive official Major League baseball document that we have ever seen’ and even on that limited basis it does take some beating. Not unreasonably, there are a few quibbles about authenticity - but I will not be deterred from adding ‘cunt-lapping dog’ to my vocabulary.

RTE.ie’s Entertainment Department has a long memory.