NBC’s coverage of Wimbledon is, mercifully, finished. That following its finally airing (highlights, not even the whole match) of the Williams sisters’ doubles title win a little while ago. A win which, incidentally, occurred in London yesterday.
And at that time it was being played, it was visible nowhere on either NBC or ESPN. NBC must be paying the Wimbledon organizers a bundle to put up with allowing some of their major matches not to be broadcast live here in the States. Nor allowing competitors like ESPN even to show them either.
In a sense, though, it is nice NBC taking us back briefly to the good ol’ days. For this is how it must have felt decades ago, the Wife joked. Back then, there was a day or so delay showing a major event here that had taken place in Europe, because the videotape had to be flown across the Atlantic first.
[Posted 2:50 PM NY time.]
NBC already has long proven it cannot do the Olympics without forgetting it is a sports event and not a soap opera. But at least that’s not every year. However, now, even its Wimbledon coverage is heading downhill rapidly.
Or perhaps it has been sinking for longer than this writer realizes? Yours truly hasn’t seen NBC Wimbledon coverage in years. And thank goodness.
Commentators seemingly were given various pronunciation versions of Elena Dementieva. How many times was she called “Dementia?” And if NBC wasn’t showing us reruns of matches while live others were in progress, it was having trouble getting from the endless barrage of commercials back into matches we were told it was covering live.
Is it a tennis tournament with commercials now and then? Or commercials interrupted by tennis on the odd occasion? Any sports body that gives NBC exclusive U.S. rights should have its corporate head examined.
Then there is the “licensing” issue. Little is more dated in this twittering day and age than watching ESPN announcers during its partnership coverage suppress a smile while informing viewers a certain other match cannot be mentioned. Why? Because it is the property of NBC.
That when anyone may change a channel and get a result, or turn from the TV, click over to web information sites and discover the result at a web page load instant. Which the Wife did accidentally, when she discovered to her surprise (and horror) that Andy Murray had lost to Andy Roddick in a match we had thought was to be shown live on NBC. Silly us, NBC broadcast it recorded.
Delayed sports on American TV in 2009? When did we suddenly wake up and find ourselves in 1956 again? ESPN was marginally better in its partnership coverage, but that’s faint praise given that NBC is an easy act to follow. For if we all know NBC is losing it anyway, one would think ESPN as ostensibly sports-centered — no pun intended — could at least manage to well cover a simple tennis tournament?
If so, evidently we were expecting way too much. There, she was Serena. In turn, her semi-final opponent didn’t seem to have a first name. She was, inexplicably, almost always “Dementieva.”
Perhaps the ESPN people were trying to impress us with their ability to pronounce it properly? For rather than covering live sports, when we aren’t getting overrun with commercials, talking seems to be what is done best on that channel of late. Or, more to the point, screaming.
Somehow, with at least three separate channels at its disposal, it apparently couldn’t manage full live coverage of a Williams sisters’ doubles match which was played alongside Federer/Haas. Maybe it was the property of NBC? After a while, one loses the ability to care.
ESPN can, however, while American women are playing for a Wimbledon championship, clutter our screens with “Sports Center” highlights of the likes of last night’s Orioles game (Baltimore readers, do not take offense please) and what the NBA draft will mean for the Nets. (New Jersey fans, ditto.) Or never fail to provide us with simulcasts of “Mike and Mike.” To say nothing of insightful, countless programs composed of yelling sports scribblers who otherwise labor for various soon to be bankrupt newspapers.
One never craved the BBC so much. The Beeb’s news coverage may be biased and at times awful. And while they may have blown the post-match to last year’s men’s final, to be perfectly honest overall its sports coverage is light years better than that of any American TV network.
[Posted 6:40 PM NY time.]
…The U.S. military said … on Thursday that a soldier had been kidnapped in southeastern Afghanistan…
Did the U.S. military actually say “kidnapped?” One suspects not, given that we know media continues to have an incredible problem with terminology. In war, combatants are not “kidnapped,” they are “captured.”
As we know, most in media are perpetually wilting over the fact that the U.S. actually detains enemy who fall into U.S. hands alive. Moreover, they have little to n0thing to say about how nearly all of those the U.S. detains survive to be released. When any do not, they go out of their way not to.
So with this capture, we will now see if the post-2001 trend continues. Insofar as this blog is aware, every single U.S. or coalition soldier captured by the jihadist enemy, has been murdered in captivity. That is a 100 percent record of barbarity unequalled by any enemy in all of human history.
[Posted 9:00 AM, NY time.]
The BBC reports:
One of the few survivors of the Khmer Rouge regime’s notorious Tuol Sleng detention centre has testified at a UN-backed tribunal in Cambodia…
About 15,000 people were detained at Tuol Sleng in the late 1970s, but only seven are thought to have survived…
Hmm, just like being at Guantanamo.
Actually not, given the small fact that from U.S. captivity, nearly all captured emerge alive . . . to give media interviews about their unspeakably horrific maltreatment, of course.
[Posted July 1, 8:30 PM NY time.]
Sorry for the quiet. We’ve been internet-less where we are staying for the last few days. But the modem is now replaced.
We have not, however, been TV-less. How many times, exactly, has MSNBC rerun that Martin Bashir Michael Jackson interview? We’ve lost count.
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And Andy Murray wins (that round). Thank goodness!
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UPDATE: Because he hails from Dunblane, ESPN is now lecturing us that maybe Andy Murray’s tennis will cause us all to think of Dunblane for something other than the infamous shooting.
Yet how do they know we think of Dunblane that way? Dunblane was a victim of circumstances: it could have been anyplace. Tying the two together is vulgar.
And, frankly, yours truly is heartily sick of media telling me what I think.
[Posted 5:45 PM NY time.]
Yahoo US homepage, June 25:
“Counterpart?” How morally vacuous and ignorant. For no US president is a “counterpart” to the likes of that.
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Later, Wolf Blitzer on CNN actually gave this credence:
Iranian Ambassador to Mexico: CIA May have Killed Neda
And why do we suspect, had they been around in early September 1939, that CNN would have dutifully passed along the Berlin official line that Poland had attacked Germany on the night of August 31, and Germany was now merely counterattacking?
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Separately, yours truly has also stumbled across a few small asides in various places on the passing of 1970s-1980s pop star, and genius, Michael Jackson. That between President Obama’s current live TV appearance and his last live TV appearance. And that latest appearance always comes long after the previous one . . . increasingly seemingly all of 2 or 3 hours previously.
In the insignificant media coverage of Mr Jackson, we are hearing a great deal about his having “lost his childhood.” At that assertion, yours truly must admit it is a tremendous surprise to learn he had labored in a coal mine. That being so, it would seem no children under age 17 should be allowed on stage. No?
Also he is being much compared in those afterthought reports to Lady Diana and Elvis. Yet it would seem another, and perhaps more apt one, would be with Howard Hughes. Especially given the two decades of incredible weirdness desire for privacy and the fact of Jackson’s having been, in the words earlier this morning of Fox News’s astute Steve Doocy, a “real shrewd businessman.”
Except of course for the continued contrived desire to maintain a public persona. And also that that same FNC reports Jackson managed to die $400 million in debt. Yet actually, if one thinks on it for all of two seconds, that latter is, indeed, quite an accomplishment for a genius and a “real shrewd businessman.”
[Posted 8:55 AM, NY time.]
Getting back into the local road ethos. Yesterday, for example, yours truly had some woman honk at him at a traffic light. The reason: yours truly refused to go through it on red.
Then, a few hours ago, in a shopping center parking lot, an older woman totally oblivious to the fact that she was making a left turn into a stretch that had priority, simply made that turn and never once turned her head right to see if anyone — meaning us — were approaching. Stunned at the display of driving ineptitude that almost hit us, yours truly came to a stop and let her continue on her merry way, as the Wife exclaimed, “I’ve never seen anything like that in my life! What an idiot! There is so much to be said for learning to drive on a manual, where you learn that you must pay attention to more than one thing at a time and not just look for a parking space!”
Neither of that sort of thing is a surprise. They are just small symptoms of a much larger problem. What is happening to the American driver’s ability to drive? Newsday:
The expressway driver clipped by an off-duty Suffolk police officer who then lost control and died in a crash, said he was going the speed limit as the officer went by, the Suffolk County Sheriff’s Department said Tuesday.
Robert Bowen, 34, of Ronkonkoma, a Third Precinct officer and decorated Marine who served in Iraq and Kuwait, was killed before dawn Sunday on the Long Island Expressway, moments after he hit a Ford Explorer and his car flipped, said Chief Michael Sharkey.
The Explorer’s driver later told deputies he was in the center eastbound lane at 4:15 a.m. approaching Exit 58 when he looked in the rearview mirror and saw a car approaching, Sharkey said.
Bowen’s BMW veered right, clipping the rear right corner of the SUV, then went across the right and exit lanes. The car struck a guardrail and flipped at least once, throwing Bowen from the car. He died at the scene…
Newsday’s story header — Witness: Cop killed in LIE crash was speeding — is beside the point. Obviously the investigation continues, but it would appear from the above that the real issue was not speed nearly so much as not obeying lane discipline. Even the LIE is not generally jammed at 4:15 AM. Had that BMW driver passed on the left properly or put a foot on a brake, this fatal crash probably would not have resulted.
We’ve all seen the maneuver. He probably came up quickly on the Explorer, while failing to anticipate, braked hard, and abruptly moved over to the right at the last moment to try to get ’round the slower SUV in front, perhaps to exit. But he cut it too close, clipping the Explorer, with fatal consequences for himself.
Germans driving BMWs at high speed on an autobahn maintain lane discipline. So do British motorway drivers. Yet Americans often assert Europeans drive like maniacs, when actually the reverse is more the case: Europeans aren’t ducking and passing in every direction at every opportunity, thus doing the unexpected, and therefore making driving often an unpredictable nightmare.
As we know, driving while drunk is horrifically bad enough. However, the worrying rise in Americans evidently engaged in driving while stupid is, in its own way, even worse. Because the driver is sober.
A good life thrown away. And a policeman, no less.
Please, stop with the g-damned passing on the right. Among other stupidities.
[Posted 4:50 PM, NY time.]
Having been in transit here to NY over the weekend, yours truly has been mostly off the web and not near any TV, so is only now getting caught up. The latest “revolution” our media has latched onto is, of course, in Iran. That being so, we are getting the predictable wall-to-wall babblings of too many who mostly have no idea what they are talking about.
Because the inner workings of the regime are a mystery. Nonetheless, we get the endless pontificating. And ideological posturing.
Some may think [Carter administration former speechwriter Chris Matthews of MSNBC] that all Iran’s troubles are rooted in U.S policy of the 1950s. [And conveniently not of 1977-1981, of course.] Others may want to think [Joe Scarborough of MSNBC] that the president’s “Cairo speech” has inspired the youth of Iran and elsewhere in the Middle East, and led the regime to having decided to fix this vote. And still others may believe [Mike Barnicle of some Boston newspaper and MSNBC] that “the neo-cons” want to stir up “a wider war in the Middle East.” [An incredibly serious charge to be tossed out there: thus this blog would like a list of names of such "neo-cons" from Mr Barnicle, please.]
Stepping back from the likes of such, one must recall two fundamental facts. 1) Given that the Islamic Republic’s raison d’état effectively is essentially to oppose the U.S., there is nothing to be gained from a U.S. president jumping in to “cheerleader” the protesters; the regime will merely use that support to try to secure “waverers” who might otherwise be tempted to join them, and above all use that backing as the main pretext for crushing the protests. 2) Also the 3o year old regime likely has a strength not to be underestimated; Eastern Europe of 1989 created something of a misleading precedent: houses of cards are not nearly as prevalent as many appear to think they are.
With the regime’s track record, what is likely coming is not to be looked forward to. Regimes built on coercion, and unexpectedly finding themselves facing angry, non-state sanctioned crowds in the streets, traditionally respond with brutality. “Absolute power” is never challenged without consequences.
The key is usually this: at the moment of crackdown, do those ordered to do the brutalizing on behalf of the regime opt to throw in with the other side instead? If so, you get Eastern Europe, 1989. If they don’t, you get China, 1989. Or, more recently, Burma.
What will happen? We don’t know — those three little words making up an expression that too few in media today appear willing to utter. After all, if you do, you can’t blather on for two hours on MSNBC.
[Posted 9:45 AM, NY time.]
The BBC reports:
…Eighteen viewers complained… [Duffy] … was not wearing reflective clothing and her bicycle had no lights in the Diet Coke commercial.
The Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) also said four viewers worried children could copy her behaviour…
Here is the possibly danger-inducing ad, which children ought not to copy. Whether parents believe children should be shielded from even seeing such plainly disturbing images remains a parental discretion matter. Yet, given how bad it is, should it be?:
However, it turns out there’s nothing apparently to worry about:
…With the regulations recommending cyclists wear reflective clothing in the dark, Coca-Cola pointed out Duffy wore a black and white sparkly top that stood out, while her bicycle had lights on the front and rear in each shot.
After investigating, the ASA did not uphold the complaints, noting the “fantasy context” and deciding that older children would understand cycling round a supermarket was not a realistic situation…
Whew. What a relief to learn that contentious issue has now been settled. One less to worry about now among a myriad of other concerns that require addressing, such as running in the playground.
Their own media being totally untrustworthy, and under the thumbs of the State, The Times of London rightfully points out:
…[Iranians] have turned therefore, in their millions, to alternative sources, where they hope the truth can be revealed: websites, social networks, mobile phones and foreign media…
Indeed they have. And, in case the Times hasn’t noticed, many of those Iranians tell us what is happening and to do so rely on anonymity. We don’t know for sure who they are; but others can corroborate, so we get a general picture.
Therefore, we don’t need to know each and every one of their names. Or even if each and every one is telling the absolute truth. What is most vital, however, is that general picture emerges.
The Times newspaper is all for that, as we can see. Apparently, Iranian government thumbs are to be despised, but British ones aren’t. For that same Times newspaper (which, until it publicly apologizes for causing this mess, this blog will no longer reference again on any other matter), curiously, has no problem with that: owing to a court case brought by the Times itself, if you write in Britain in public a single judge has ruled your identity could well be legally plastered on billboards.
Astonishing. And the next time some Times journalist desperately wants to keep his source secret? He should be able to? Yes, he should, we are told amidst self-serving, wriggle, wriggle in a scarily pedestrian post by The Times’s Daniel Finkelstein:
…Writing a blog is a form of publishing. There is no distinction, really, between a blog and, say, a published volume of diaries.
Yes, and the point is?
And when someone publishes then they might reasonably expect that others might take an interest in their identity. This is especially so when they allow their work to go forward for a major prize.
That is irrelevant. In Bristol, right now, a major exhibition by an award-winning artist is taking place in a council-owned gallery. We have no idea of the identity of the artist.
When a public servant decides to reveal the confidences of their colleagues and details of their work, especially on police cases, then their identity becomes a legitimate matter of interest. And other journalists might reasonably investigate the matter.
One wonders: does Mr Finkelstein similarly crave to know if any Iranian public servants are using the net currently? In anonymity? Would that be okay?
What, say, if it turned out that NightJack wasn’t actually a detective at all? Or that he was Sir Ian Blair? Are we really saying that his identity isn’t a public matter?
It makes not a wit of difference if he is a policeman, or is not. It is a blog. He could have been, say, a real estate agent; it doesn’t matter. It seems highly unlikely he would have been an estate agent posing as a policeman and could have pulled it off anyway. Readers (especially when a blog attracts as many as he did) can quickly sniff out a faker.
The proof of that is in the pudding: turns out he wasn’t an estate agent after all, was he?
Yes, it is true that journalists may try and keep their sources secret. But not only is being a source rather different from publishing yourself, other journalists frequently speculate on the identity of sources. Or investigate the matter. Ask Deep Throat…
Mr Finkelstein has rather conveniently overlooked the huge difference. Yours truly does not recall U.S. newspapermen at the Washington Post who were in contact with “Deep Throat” threatening to try to reveal him, thus leading to “Deep Throat” petitioning the U.S. Supreme Court as to how he should be able to keep his identity private. Nor the court then subsequently ruling he had no right to privacy, ultimately leading those reporters at the Washington Post to splash his name across the front page.
More important, and unaddressed by Mr Finkelstein, is why should any source — not just newspaper sources — have an expectation of privacy if he is providing information that will come out into the public domain, and especially if he is a government employee? For there is no fundamental qualitative distinction between a blogger and a source. Mr Finkelstein admits it: “blogging is a form of publishing.”
The only difference is the anonymous writer generates content on his own, whereas a newspaper source is relying on someone else to do the writing. So if rather than blogging on his own, suppose NightJack had been leaking the same information to The Times? The paper wouldn’t have fought desperately to have protected his anonymity, right?
The myopic minds at the The Times have with one blow helped deal a much wider blow that may take decades to undo. And, in the meantime, at what cost to the real greater public interest? For long before there was a web, anonymous writing played a major part in politics and in life.
Or, more accurately, pseudonyms did. Thomas Paine penned “Common Sense” under one. The U.S. “Federalist Papers” were composed under pseudonyms. (Helped by contributors having been at the Constitutional Convention.) And Britain has more than had its share of such writers, too, of course. (Here is but one list of those on the left, in .pdf.)
But we are now finished with that it seems, thanks to the Times. It appears to have much in common with the European Parliament on this issue. So the next time the Times delves into privacy questions, we’ll all laugh. Hypocrites.
In any doubt? Consider this also. CNN “Cafferty File” headline:
Will Facebook and Twitter help bring down Iran’s government?
Who knows? But apparently not if the Times of London and British jurisprudence had their say.
Are any of those twitterers Iranian government employees? So what if perhaps they might be shot? Don’t we need to know?
Mail headline, June 2009:
Terrified Romanian families forced to flee homes in Belfast after racist attacks
Appalling. But as we know, the Mail has always been in their corner. Mail opener, September 2007:
The influx of Romanian migrants has led to an explosion in crime in this country…
Or, perhaps not.
Thousands of bloggers who operate behind the cloak of anonymity have no right to keep their identities secret, the High Court ruled today.
In a landmark decision, Mr Justice Eady refused to grant an order to protect the anonymity of a police officer who is the author of a blog called NightJack.
The officer, Richard Horton, 45, a detective constable with Lancashire Constabulary, had sought an injunction to stop The Times from revealing his name…
As we know, The Telegraph has tackled the corruption and abuses inherent in MPs’ expenses.
As we can also see, not to be outdone, The Times bravely reports here that it has succeeded in unmasking a blogger.
Wow. Yes, isn’t that latter just so journalistically g-damned impressive?
The BBC reports:
Gordon Brown has again accused the Conservatives of planning “savage” public spending cuts after the next general election…
“Spending”? First of all, there is precious little real spending taking place. For “spending” means utilizing cash monies available, over and above that earmarked to cover debt.
However, to do much that it has “done” already, this Government borrowed. Lots.
And for what it still evidently craves to “do”? This Government will borrow. Lots more.
Perhaps Mr Brown would like to accuse the Conservatives of opposing runaway “borrowing”? Probably not, as that might actually risk being factually accurate.
Second, 1997 was a long time ago. The British public no longer naively accepts this Labour “investment” in public services nonsense. For, like “spending,” the word “investment” conjures up images that somewhere down the line there will be a positive “return” to be reaped from the cash, or even from borrowed monies, that had been “invested.”
Or maybe all of those “climate change officers” funded by “borrowing” actually are such an excellent “investment,” that the returns the country will glean from their “work” will be such that it will eventually discover it is they who have actually dragged Britain out of recession, will power the country’s economic engine for decades to come, and are even capable of rescuing flushed puppies?
Yours truly feels this cannot be allowed to slip by, under the radar. One Ed Morrissey may know quite a bit regarding other subjects. However, on this one frankly, he is, simply, wrong:
Government insurance will kill private insurance
As is the Reason writer he also cites, while omitting this paragraph:
…The best result of creating a parallel public insurance scheme is that the United States would end up with an explicit two-tier medical system in which privately insured Americans have better access to better medical care. Such two-tier health care systems already exist in countries with national health care schemes such as the United Kingdom and Germany. In the United Kingdom, more and more Britons are opting for private health insurance instead of remaining with that country’s National Health Service. Privately insured Americans would get higher quality health care, but because the market for medical innovation would be smaller, everybody will get worse care than they would otherwise have received had most health care not been nationalized…
That is carefully crafted double talk, which, unsurprisingly, manages to double back and inadvertently contradict itself. In fact, it is at fundamental odds with Mr Morrissey’s and that Reason writer’s base assertion. How so?
For a decade, yours truly has had regular, first-hand experience of the workings of the British National Health Service. American conservatives who ignorantly “run against” the NHS are irritating. Also, as the Wife once pointed out, the endless intellectual chicanery undertaken to try to make Britain look like some sort of health care “banana republic” when it most definitely is not, is tiresome in the extreme.
Yes, private insurance is all over the place here in “single-payer” Britain. (As if that is now suddenly, to American conservatives, a bad thing?) Curiously, though, in choosing to go private, those Britons (usually the far more well-off, by the way) are engaging in precisely the exercise of personal “choice” conservatives claim to wish to “preserve” for Americans. Also, those Britons are clearly taking advantage of their ability to get “better care” based on their better ability to pay.
Don’t sound too “socialized” that. In fact, it is socialists here who roundly forever criticize private for creating a “two-tier” health culture in which some are getting “better [private] care.” Such immediately undermines the argument that under “single payer” in which private coverage exists (meaning Britain, not Cuba or North Korea), that everyone is forced into “worse care.”
Moreover, the NHS is now over 60 years old, so if we accept at face value that public coverage automatically “will kill off” private, there by now most certainly should be NO private of any consequence in the U.K., not a growing amount. Interestingly also, private is often used to subsidize the public, as even the NHS happily admits:
…Singer Sophie Ellis-Bextor opened The Kensington Wing – the newly expanded and revamped private maternity unit at Chelsea and Westminster Hospital – during the hospital’s annual Open Day on Saturday 9 May…
…All profits from The Kensington Wing are reinvested in the hospital so that the NHS benefits directly from the private maternity unit.
In addition, the claim that “single payer” in itself undermines “innovation” holds no water given that never microphone shy U.K. doctors are overwhelmingly in favor of the NHS, and would be among the first to cite precisely that failing were it worth citing.
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Actually, what we seem to have here is less a cogent refutation of public v. private, than yet more wearying evidence some American conservatives remain adamantly determined to avoid confronting the obvious. But that obstinacy does not alter the reality that American public opinion has been gradually shifting over the last 20 years: for a variety a reasons too numerous to mention here, health care is increasingly seen less as a business and more as a social obligation. As it is here in Britain.
And as is public education. However, before immediately attacking public education as conservatives are often so quick to do, consider this. Conservative pundits regularly extol Thomas Jefferson; and educationally, Mr Jefferson was so thoroughly well-educated pre-public education that he enjoyed the likes of Thucydides in the Athenian’s original Greek. Simultaneously, however, the mass of the people who worked Mr Jefferson’s estate and brought his dinner up from his kitchen could barely read. Or couldn’t read, period.
Conservatives often appear to imagine themselves as having been Mr Jefferson, rather than grasping fully the more likely historical probability that they would far more probably have been those who maintained his roundabouts. But any “two tier” educational system that has emerged in the last 200 years has also led to an America in which most now actually can read, and some few still can read ancient Greek just like Mr Jefferson. Owing to educational “reforms” that helped bring this world about, are conservatives actually seriously attempting to make the argument that that public education was a grave policy error because, functioning alongside still private education, it led to education they suddenly now disparage as being “two-tier?”
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If so, conservatism is in deeper trouble than we had thought possible. For isn’t it socialists, incidentally, who aim for “one-tier”: shared poverty? And while we are (yet again) on this subject, are we conservatives so actually fearful Americans might learn a few other facts? When will we ever be able to overcome the ideological illiteracy, in order to be able adequately to confront the real socialists?
Conservatives correctly distrust red flag wavers; give yours truly the world of Burke over Thomas Paine any day of the week. And as Burke understood, embracing reform is inescapable. Indeed, what happened to paying close attention to a “changing” world while keeping seats at the table, and striving to conserve what has worked well while helping facilitate required “changes” that also actually work? Is that not what conservatism is about?
When did it become a gathering of 18th century-idolizing fantasists in which the club members recline under the apple tree, swapping tales of those bygone “good ol’ days” of “rugged individualist, manly” revolutionary New Hampshire? Conservatives must force themselves to be able to discern the vital difference. Doing so is not always easy, true, but the bottom line is if we conservatives fail to heed properly what the public wants, for a long time to come most of the public may well decide it doesn’t want us.
Soccer season may be over until he returns to the LA Galaxy in July, but David Beckham is still driving the crowds wild! The star turned up at Selfridge’s in London to unveil the fall/winter Emporio Armani underwear campaign to a screaming crowd that even braved the London train strike to see Becks…
Yes, and the Wife was decidedly unimpressed. Yesterday, owing to vital matters decidedly un-Beckham, finding herself on Oxford Street at noon at the exact time police closed the road, her bus became trapped. When she finally got to Waterloo station, she’d missed her pre-booked (so as to get a cheaper fare) train home.
The price we paid for Mr Beckham’s turning up and “wowing” the crowds in the midst of the Tube strike? (There was no train strike.) Another train ticket: over £40. Yippee.
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On the unexpected celebrity sighting map yesterday also, the Wife spotted Terry Waite standing at a bus stop. That didn’t cost us anything, fortunately.
