¶ Matins: Wouldn’t it be nice if Arianna Huffington’s wish comes true, and the Madoff Affair puts an end to the faux-cluelessness of modern management?

¶ Tierce: Today’s verse of the Madoff chapter: New York’s commercial real estate developers. This mess begins to look like one of Stanley Milgram’s disturbing behavioral experiments. While there’s no doubt that the SEC blew this one, it’s hard to feel sorry for investors who overrode commonsense basics in the stampede to “invest.” Especially when Mr Madoff appears to have mirrored their own way of doing business.

The outsize impact on the industry may have resulted largely because Mr. Madoff (pronounced MAY-doff) managed his funds much the way that real estate leaders have operated successfully for decades: He provided little information and demanded a lot of trust.

¶ Nones: Thailand seems to have turned a corner, as defectors from the People’s Power Party in support of a coalition government headed by Abhisit Vejjajiva.  

¶ Vespers: In 1618, the Defenestration of Prague launched the Thirty Years’ War. (Catholics threw some Protestants out the window.) In 2008, the ? of Baghdad ended the American Misadventure in Iraq. (Wouldn’t that be nice!)

¶ Compline: Something I’d written myself: Lee Stranahan’s plea for large-mindedness from folks unhappy with President-Elect Obama’s invitation to Rick Warren to deliver the invocation on 20 January.

(more…)

¶ Matins: In this time of PETA and no-foie-gras, George lawmakers want to make it easier to secure a death penalty. Save the animals, kill the people: is that the American Way? It does seem so. You could polish up an argument that the nation’s early settlers underwent the harrowing ordeal of crossing the Atlantic because they were pathological misanthropes.

¶ Tierce: Comparing China’s economy to ours, this morning, Tom Friedman reminds us to be careful about what we ask for:

But while capitalism has saved China, the end of communism seems to have slightly unhinged America. We lost our two biggest ideological competitors — Beijing and Moscow. Everyone needs a competitor. It keeps you disciplined. But once American capitalism no longer had to worry about communism, it seems to have gone crazy. Investment banks and hedge funds were leveraging themselves at crazy levels, paying themselves crazy salaries and, most of all, inventing financial instruments that completely disconnected the ultimate lenders from the original borrowers, and left no one accountable. “The collapse of communism pushed China to the center and [America] to the extreme,” said Ben Simpfendorfer, chief China economist at Royal Bank of Scotland.

¶ Sext: Yet another droll site that everybody knew about before I finally stumbled upon it, in the usual way — thanks to Joe or Jason (in this case, Joe).

¶ Vespers: Have you heard of Maria Semple’s This One Is Mine? I hadn’t either, but after reading about it at Three Guys One Book, I’m ordering a copy.

(more…)

¶ Matins: The Cutup-in-Chief is unflappable: ““I’m pretty good at ducking, as most of you will know…”

President Bush ducked — and didn’t get it. He seems to have thought that Muntader al-Zaidi’s outrage was a party prank gone awry, and certainly not representative of any widespread feelings about Duckya’s screwups in his homeland. Who knows what kind of an afterlife the episode is going to take on? Will Mr al-Zaidi one day head Iraq, in the manner of dissident playwright Vaclav Havel?

¶ Tierce: In yesterday’s “Deal Book,” there was a squib about what John Kenneth Galbraith’s study of the 1929 Crash has to tell us about the Madoff Fraud: the first is not the worst.

¶ Vespers: Joseph O’Neill writes! Well, of course…but don’t hold your breath between publications. How exciting, then, to read, at Maud Newton, that Mr O’Neill is a contributor to the current issue of Granta! I rush to yesterday’s mail, and there it is, “Fathers.” Turn to page 76, “Portrait of My Father” — a common title in the book. But what’s this, only three pages! 

(more…)

¶ Matins: An unpleasant story about layoffs from today’s Times. I cite it not as news but as fodder for thought: consider how poorly the philosophy (so to speak) of de- or unregulated free markets has served smart men and women — in particular, what an infernal idea it has been for the ever-fewer occupants of the ever-more-massive pinnacles of American business.

¶ Tierce: Rapacious enough when things are going “well,” the Republican Party shows its fangs — and its tail — when the going gets rough. Currently presiding over an American economic disaster for the second time, they stand forth as the Take The Money And Run Party.

Boy, does Mitch McConnell not get it.

End of Afternoon Update: Even more shamelessness, as conservative senators attempt to break the UAW as part of any bailout deal.

¶ Compline: I’m off to Grace Rainey Rogers Auditorium at the Museum, for a chamber concert to be given by Musicians from Marlboro. Will there be yet another Elliott Carter centennial celebration?

(more…)

I almost fainted at breakfast, when I read yesterday’s Citigroup closing price. I thought that I was getting away for a bit of vacation. Instead, I rather feel that I’ve left the house on fire.

Reading Robert Shiller’s The Subprime Solution yesterday, while edifying, was probably not great vacation reading. Slim, readable, and chock-a-block with magnificent and profoundly capitalist ideas — what could be more capitalist than shorting real-estate futures? — the book is ultimately depressing, because, as Mr Shiller often says (and as I myself know from having attended a couple of panels in which he was a participant), the financial establishment regards him as something of a wild man. In fact, he is the soul of good sense, endowed with an American knack for the new idea. Next to him, the people who actually run things are shown to spout nothing but eyewash and bromides.

Another depressing thing: remembering the awful reviews that Diane Johnson’s Lulu in Marrakesh got in both the daily Times (Michiko Kakutani) and the Book Review (Erica Wagner). Both reviewers completely misread the narrative, which is, to say the least, unreliable. As I recall, they both thought it unlikely that the CIA (unnamed in the novel) would hire a simpleton like Lulu Sawyer. It would appear, however, that she is exactly the kind of simpleton that the CIA goes in for. It takes a special kind of dingbat to refer to a fellow houseguest as “a gangly British laureate poet.” Thanks to Francine Prose’s praise in The New York Review of Books, I realized that my doubts that Ms Johnson could have written the bad book that the ladies of the Times reported were justified.

¶ Matins: So often, reading stories in the business section is like watching fish dart in a rolling stream. Glints of brilliant suggestion disappear almost immediately. What does the following passage, taken from Michael de la Merced’s lengthy story about the bailout to date, actually mean?

“What hasn’t improved is the psychology,” said Max Bublitz, chief strategist at SCM Advisors, an investment firm based in San Francisco. “This thing has morphed from a credit market issue into a banking crisis into an economic crisis.”

¶ Sext: Michael Kinsley writes about a new state of mind: not wanting to buy something cool.

But ultimately even the bargain didn’t seduce me. My mind followed an unfamiliar path. I thought of all the coffee makers we already have, and how each of them had let us down. I thought about another clock to reset twice a year or face its accusatory blinking in the kitchen dark. I asked myself whether attempting to master another set of instructions written in English as a Second Language was really the best use of a month of my time.

For possibly the first time ever, I considered the question of getting the thing home (the issue: juggle coffee maker and fare card on the Metro, or eat up my bargain with a $20 cab ride) before I owned it rather than after. I even remembered — as I had vowed to do the last time my consumer confidence boiled over like this — the trauma of disposing the corrugated cardboard box and all those infuriating blocks of Styrofoam. I went home empty-handed, and my consumer confidence was shot.

(more…)

¶ Matins: You know the drill: first you read the hard stuff, and, then, if you’re really good, there’s a fun picture below the jump. Let me thank, preliminarily, JMG and Wonkette — but don’t touch those links! First, the hard part. First, you must know that

In early August in her prayer time Cindy heard the Lord say, “There will be no more business as usual.”

No, I didn’t know who Cindy Jacobs was, either. It turns out that she’s one of those astute Jahwists who don’t know dingo about Scripture. (Now you may jump.)

¶ Tierce: Howard Schultz and Arthur Rubinfeld, two men who thought that they had retired from the ardors of selling that old black magic at Starbucks, are back at work, hoping to save the baby. (Actually, Mr Schultz has been back since January. Here is Mr Rubinfeld’s rejuvenation plan in one sentence.

Now that he is again leading Starbucks’s real estate team, Mr. Rubinfeld says he will focus on adding stores to urban areas — where there is already a near-saturation of the coffee market, but also a preponderance of affluent young professionals who subsist on fancy coffee drinks.

I hate to say it, but this sounds like Richard Fuld’s insistence that all was well at Lehman Bros. All those affluent young professionals have turned into Ugly Bettys.

¶ Vespers: There’s a career here for me — or there would be if I were a twentysomething: “Does This Song Match My Sofa?” I would specialize in classy sounds for the classically unsure.

(more…)

¶ Matins: As everybody knows, the Dow took flight yesterday. I wouldn’t be mentioning it if it weren’t for a call that I got from Kathleen at about twenty to four. “I’m going to ring the closing bell,” she said. “On CNBC.” Then she had to go.

¶ Tierce: If you were to ask me why I’m going to vote for Barack Obama, I’d answer with Charles Savage’s appraisal of the Federal judiciary, which the Bush Administration has pushed in a patriarchal direction that can only bring obloquy on our system of justice in the long run.

But the fact that you were asking would send me to another piece in today’s Times: “Report on Iraq Lists 610 Contractors,” James Glanz’s report on the Wild-West irregulation that a plethora of privatized goon squads has introduced into Iraqi affairs — all as the result of the wingnut ideology that has poisoned the Republican Party.

¶ Nones: I knew there was a silver lining: “Plastic Surgeons, Not Immune From the Economic Slump, Report a Decline in Cosmetic Procedures.” Natasha Singer reports.

¶ Compline: In a tough decision, Britain’s High Court decided against Debbie Purdy, who was diagnosed with MS in 1995 and who sought a clear position on assisted suicide from the Director of Public Prosecutions. Peter Walker reports.

(more…)

Medici Money is the kind of book that didn’t exist when I went to school. Histories in those days were either ponderous or pop. Monographs were too scholarly for lay readers. Some things, I’m happy to say, have changed for the better.

Tim Parks has his own approach to Renaissance government and finance, and he sees Renaissance art as — contemporaneously, not for us — so much whiting on the sepulchre. He also explains how things worked, when fast minds had to do without fast technology. His wrong-end-of-the-telescope view could not be handier. Don’t miss it!

¶ Matins: Call it Serene Socialism: the Crown Estate, which administers land belonging to the Queen of England, will match investments in deep-water wind turbines.

The decision by the Crown Estate to pay up to half of all pre-construction development costs has brought a huge surge in applications for the latest round of licensing, with almost 100 companies wanting to build wind farms far into the North Sea.

¶ Prime: Comes now Michel McGee, laid-off trader, in Laid off by Lehman. Now that he’s “salt of the earth,” he’s thinking of maybe working at Starbucks, which is a special joke all by itself. (Merci, Édouard)

¶ Tierce: Our current copyright laws create issues that swarm like mayflies at the intersection of politics and property law. What happens when everything that a candidate tells a reporter is copyrighted and, through a narrow reading of the “fair use” doctrine, made unavailable for use by his or her opponent? When — much worse — those remarks remain unknown to everyone who doesn’t buy the reporter’s employer’s product, whatever it might be? Lawrence Lessig opines.

¶ Sext: From Sunday’s Times Magazine (which I never got to), a truly heartwarming story about schooling autistic teenaged boys. Melissa Fay Green reports.

Because the goal of D.I.R./Floortime is the kindling of a student’s curiosity, intelligence, playfulness and energy, the lessons can take on a spontaneous, electric quality. I have seen sessions with young children during which the child and his or her therapist or parent tumbled across the house, behind the sofa, into closets or onto the porch, picking up balls, puppets, costumes, books and snacks along the way. At T.C.S., classes can look like debates between equals; school days can include board games, sports, plays, science experiments, music, art, ropes courses or rafting trips in which all students and teachers playfully compete, contribute and perform. All the boys at the school probably have average or better intelligence. Onlookers might call a few “high functioning” (though that adjective has no clinical meaning), and T.C.S. is an accredited high school and middle school, offering college prep and high-school courses to students able to complete a conventionally rigorous course of study. (Other students pursue less-demanding tracks oriented toward getting a G.E.D., attaining job skills or developing independent-living skills.) So it’s not all fun and social time. But rote learning is never the goal; the goal is that the students should be able to think, to feel, to communicate and to learn. Most of the kids are making the first friends of their lives here.

(more…)

¶ Matins: Can’t make a difference? Do like Luis Soriano, the librarian with “4800 books on ten legs.” At least figure out how to get the man another burro and a few hundred extra books.

¶ Tierce: Best cheeky story in today’s Times: Stephanie Clifford reports on Ivanka Trump’s latest venture, a collaboration with ConAgra in which the entreprenootsie plugs prepared lunches that will last for up to a year in your desk drawer. No refrigeration required! “Office Workers, Ivanka Trump Is Thinking of You.” Yeah, sure.

¶ Sext: Another chapter of the terrible and unnecessary collateral damage of drug-prohibition: Mexican children coarsened by gangland slaughter. Marc Lacey reports.

¶ Compline: Bird & Fortune explain it all to you: Chronicle of the crash foretold:. But people were laughing then, way back in 2007.

(more…)

¶ Matins: One of the saddest things that I’ve read in a long time is also one of the most timely: Paul Reyes’s account, in Harper’s, of clearing foreclosed houses for resale. (“Bleak Houses: Digging Through the Ruins of the Mortgage Crisis“) A big part of the job is hauling left-behind possessions to the landfill.

There, among the whines of reversing garbage trucks, the shriek and hiss of brakes, the groaning of horns, Sue’s possessions slid down into a heap, got fluffed, and were carried over the wall to burn, dissolve, and compress, all traces of what she once prized dragged along the sludge and shoved over the edge into an ash pile so tidal in its proportions as to be barely comprehensible. Foreclosures, in their own way, regenerate: one family’s loss is another’s first home. But this was the colossal deposit left behind, and it was growing by the cubic foot, by the ton. Pulling out of the hangar, driving toward the landfill’s exit, we could see the earth movers perched high up on the trash bluff, where their drivers awaited orders to till another layer, to massage that Kilimanjaro of garbage, and where—if they looked away from the incinerator— they would have had a pretty good view of the city from whose ruin that mountain grew, and into whose streets we now descended to fetch the next load.

¶ Lauds: I didn’t get to the end of this link before I had to go to bed, but I stuck with it a lot longer than I ought to have done. A O Scott showcases films that he finds particularly timely, from Wall Street to State of the Union. And beyond, for all I know!

¶ Tierce: The most curious cog in Sarah Palin’s infernal machinery has been her ability to deflect attention away from the overt racism with which many voters respond to Barack Obama. Democrats and progressives are too busy lambasting the Alaskan’s professional inferiority to attend to boneheads like Ricky Thompson, quoted in today’s Times:

“He’s neither-nor,” said Ricky Thompson, a pipe fitter who works at a factory north of Mobile, while standing in the parking lot of a Wal-Mart store just north of here. “He’s other. It’s in the Bible. Come as one. Don’t create other breeds.”

Instead of Brains-Against-Palin, Democrats ought to be supporting a Scripture-for-Obama movement. Has everybody forgotten the political implications of the Gospels?

¶ Vespers: In his column this morning, Thomas L Friedman quoted a book that ought to be required reading for every high-school student, Charles Mackay’s Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds:

Money … has often been a cause of the delusion of multitudes. Sober nations have all at once become desperate gamblers, and risked almost their existence upon the turn of a piece of paper. To trace the history of the most prominent of these delusions is the object of the present pages. Men, it has been well said, think in herds; it will be seen that they go mad in herds, while they only recover their senses slowly, and one by one.

(more…)

¶ Matins: Any lingering doubt that No Child Left Behind was a screw put to public education by arrogant Bushies whose only acquaintance with public schools is via their servants’ children will be quashed by Sam Dillon’s report.

¶ Tierce: The news from Thailand is weirdly familiar: city-dwellers — and not just the people of Bangkok — feel that rural voters are uneducated and ill-informed. They go further, proposing that rural votes be seriously diluted by interest-group appointments to Parliament — something that looks like the old Catholic idea of corporatism. Aside from that, however, it all sounds just like the American polarization of “flyover” areas — the Continental heartland — and the passengers flying from one Coast to the other. Seth Mydans reports.

¶ Nones: Jolly good news: Paul Krugman has won the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences. An economist whose Times columns are models of lucidity! Even better: the guy from the University of Chicago, Eugene Fama, didn’t win.

(more…)

¶ Matins: Floyd Norris on our current adventure, “The Long Way Down”:

Will this fall be recovered within a week? That is not likely unless someone develops a financial system to replace the fallen one that was based on the fantasy that investors could finance very risky loans, via complicated securitizations, without taking risks.

¶ Tierce: Just my luck: having decided to steer The Daily Blague on a course of secular humanism, I confront a wave of financial disaster that, just to make things irritating as well as inopportune, I’ve been worried about for years. At some point, I knew, some event would act to pull the plug on the warm bath of Greenspansiveness.

I could spend my days writing links to old Portico pages and Daily Blague entries that illustrate my prescience (which was really just common sense), but I think it more sporting to let others demonstrate, if they can, that I was just as deluded, on occasion, as the tycos of Wall Street. I’m too busy, anyway, listening to foreign language lessons on my Nano. Can Teach Yourself Latin — as an audio course — be far off?

¶ Sext: It’s heartening to see Jason Kottke zero in on what’s most important about the coming election. Writing about The New Yorker’s endorsement of Barack Obama in the current issue, Mr Kottke writes,

The key part of the article concerns the candidates’ possible appointments to the Supreme Court and their consequences. A more conservative court scares the shit out of me.

¶ Compline: When I wrote the entry for Sext, I hadn’t read “The Talk of the Town” myself. When I did read it, just now, over dinner, my eyes welled over. As long as an organ of the MSM can turn out a Ciceronian oration of such efficient persuasion, the United States is not altogether broken.

We cannot expect one man to heal every wound, to solve every major crisis of policy. So much of the Presidency, as they say, is a matter of waking up in the morning and trying to drink from a fire hydrant. In the quiet of the Oval Office, the noise of immediate demands can be deafening. And yet Obama has precisely the temperament to shut out the noise when necessary and concentrate on the essential. The election of Obama—a man of mixed ethnicity, at once comfortable in the world and utterly representative of twenty-first-century America—would, at a stroke, reverse our country’s image abroad and refresh its spirit at home. His ascendance to the Presidency would be a symbolic culmination of the civil- and voting-rights acts of the nineteen-sixties and the century-long struggles for equality that preceded them. It could not help but say something encouraging, even exhilarating, about the country, about its dedication to tolerance and inclusiveness, about its fidelity, after all, to the values it proclaims in its textbooks. At a moment of economic calamity, international perplexity, political failure, and battered morale, America needs both uplift and realism, both change and steadiness. It needs a leader temperamentally, intellectually, and emotionally attuned to the complexities of our troubled globe. That leader’s name is Barack Obama.

(more…)

¶ Matins: When I read yesterday’s Matins to Kathleen, she sighed and wondered if I wasn’t getting carried away about Alan Greenspan’s role in the credit crunch. For backup, I decided to search for a report of the disagreement that Mr Greenspan had with late Fed Governor Edward Gramlich. 

Gramlich, long worried about the fragility of the housing market, wanted an investigation that would close down predatory mortgage lenders. Here’s what — according to a Wall Street Journal article by Greg Ip, dated 9 June 2007 — Mr Greenspan had to say about that, last summer.

Mr. Greenspan, in an interview, says he doesn’t recall a specific discussion of the idea but confirmed his opposition to it.

There is “a very large number of small institutions, some on the margin of scrupulousness and very hard to detect when they are doing something wrong,” says Mr. Greenspan, who retired in February last year. “For us to go in and audit how they act on their mortgage applications would have been a huge effort, and it’s not clear to me we would have found anything that would have been worthwhile without undermining the desired availability of subprime credits.”

¶ Compline: How neat it would be to see this: “Paul Newman: Broadway to dim lights in actor’s honour”.

(more…)

¶ Matins: “The athlete is on the floor”: listening to Warren Buffett discuss the credit crunch with Charlie Rose. The American economy is a great athlete, but it has suffered cardiac arrest. The only thing to do is to get it back up and running. That will involve convalescence in the form a two-year recession.

I piously wish that everyone in the country could listen to Mr Buffett’s remarks and, wherever necessary, have them explained just as clearly.

¶ Tierce: Brent Staples writes concisely about the flummery surrounding college-entrance exams. Schools aren’t the only institutions whose reliance on test scores is lazy.

¶ Sext: Except for brief and urgent messages, I refuse to have cell phone conversations with people who are driving. Here’s why.

¶ Vespers: David M Herszenhorn files an interesting report about senatorial dissent to the rescue package, “A Curious Coalition Opposed Bailout Bill.”  

(more…)

¶ Matins: Mayor Bloomberg’s third term: an endlessly interesting question that won’t be answered until (a) Mr Bloomberg fails to win the term by one means or another, or (b) long after his third term. Michael Barbaro and David W Chen report.

¶ Tierce: A word about credit:

In 1929, Meyer Mishkin owned a shop in New York that sold silk shirts to workingmen. When the stock market crashed that October, he turned to his son, then a student at City College, and offered a version of this sentiment: It serves those rich scoundrels right.

A year later, Mishkin was out of business: no workingmen customers. “It” served him wrong, and it’s likely that a similar credit crunch today would have the same impact on ordinary Americans who have never actively invested in anything except a house. (The story was told by Mishkin’s grandson, a former Federal Reserve Board member, to David Leonhardt.)

¶ Sext: Wanting to see what Le Figaro had to say about Belgium’s breakup (the latest on which I read about at Joe.My.God), I came across something far more amusing: Are American writers too ignorant for the Nobel Prize? Horace Lundgren, the permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy (which awards the Nobel) seems to think so.

(Ha! Now that I read Joe’s update, I understand why there was nothing about Belgium at Figaro to keep from scrolling all the way down to Mr Lundgren.)

¶ Vespers: I have a new crush — and it’s very educational. Sarah Sherborne is the moderating voice on the latest crop of Teach Yourself language courses from Hodder & Stoughton. I felt the first flutter of attraction in Teach Yourself Arabic, but before Teach Yourself Turkish Conversation was halfway through, I was besotted. I’ve now added Chinese, Chinese Conversation, and Dutch to my collection, and I’m longing for Portuguese.

(more…)

¶ Matins: French Muslims are doing what black New Yorkers have been doing for years: sending their children to Catholic schools. Katrin Bennhold reports.

¶ Tierce: I was tempted not to post today — not to add more noise to an already overloaded network. The only thing worth talking about is how to tell working Americans that yesterday’s rejected bailout may be all that stands between them and a credit lockdown that might freeze their everyday lives. (Credit isn’t just a matter of consumer credit debt. It lubricates most commercial relationships as essentially as oil lubricates an engine.) And it’s rather late in the day for that conversation.

¶ Sext: Front-page news, buried on page A6: “Olmert Says Israel Must Leave West Bank.” I didn’t believe my eyes!

¶ Compline: Édouard came across a bit of video that hasn’t been run on any of the major sites that we’ve seen. Chant after me: “The bailout is bullshit! You broke it, you bought it!”

(more…)

¶ Matins:The other day, someone said — and I  can’t remember who; someday, I’ll be just like Mr Peabody and have a boy who can write these things down — that it isn’t the stocks, stupid, it’s the credit market. The most basic, elemental player in that market is the money market fund, and talking about money market funds (which are really just specialized mutual funds) was all Kathleen did today. Primary Reserve Fund is the first to fall into the water she is hot.

¶ Tierce: Another Friday, another movie. I’m off to see Ghost Town, which is conveniently playing across the street. Meanwhile, Ken Layne reports on a real ghost town. One in the making, anyway.

Then, under cover of darkness, the family leaves. Sometimes they disguise this escape, coming by once a week to change the lights left on and blinds left open, maybe parking an old camper or beat-up car in the driveway. Other times, nobody bothers. The coyotes and vermin knock over the trash cans, a kid’s bike with training wheels is grown over with the invasive weeds that love dead bulldozed desert.

Have a good weekend, everyone — hold on tight!

(more…)

¶ Matins: Among all the dumb things that Wall Street has been up to in the past 25 years, James Surowiecki reminds us of one that I’d forgotten: the folly of going public.

¶ Lauds: Andy Borowitz nails it:

Given that Internet porn is the only fundamentally sound engine of the American economy…

¶ Prime: My friend, George Snyder, author of 1904, has been tinkering with a new blog, No Talking Cure. Yesterday’s imposing entry has stuck with me.

¶ Tierce: Barbara Ehrenreich has said it before, but maybe now people will listen: positive thinking is for dopes.

¶ Nones: Given the size of my — CD collection, I am often asked, “What’s a great disc for a first date?” The question invariably arouses a great blush, because I am so madly tempted to give very bad advice. The “48”. Charles Ives singing “Over There.” (Heard that one, have you?) Dorian Lynskey at the Guardian can’t believe that Debrett’s recommends Sexual Healing.

(more…)