I have a useful template for devising hilarious statements about people whose names can also be used as nouns for other things. For instance: Alan Partridge is not a real partridge; Dr Liam Fox is not a real fox; Bob Crow is not a real crow; Edward Tufte is not a real squirrel; you can’t use Frank Zappa to adjust your television.

George Osborne has been in the news, right, because he is like the chancellor, of the exchequer. He does chancelling, yes, in a chancel, isn’t it? He lives in London, I expect, because that is usually where the politicians live.

The thing about him is, you can’t say “George Osbourne is not a real Osbourne”. Even if you can, it won’t make a lot of sense, because an “Osbourne” is not a thing beyond the context of being a surname. So my useful template is useless here.

He does look a bit like a badger, such that even though his surname isn’t Badger, it would be helpful to remind people that he isn’t one. But there is another thing about him: “George Osbourne is not a real George.” By which I mean that his real name is Gideon George Oliver Osbourne.

“George” Osbourne is a liar. He’s been lying to us. Because when someone says their name, it’s expected in Western cultures that the first name is followed by the last name, and that’s that. Osbourne has not met those expectations. But it’s clear that he doesn’t like the “Gideon” name, so what’s a man to do?

I’ll tell you what a man’s to do. Moments ago, into my face fell a book that had been written by Somerset Maugham, who is someone who writes books. But it was not by “Somerset Maugham”; it was by “W Somerset Maugham”. From this fact, we can learn several other ones. We learn that Somerset is not his actual first name, that instead it’s one beginning with W (probably Walt, Willie or Wendy). But we also learn that, just like the chanceller of the exchequer, he prefers his middle name. And that’s fine, since he has the decency to include the first initial, which serves as a helpful indicator that there’s somethin else there. So why shouldn’t Osbourne do the same? Why not “G George Osbourne”?

Via Karthick Gopal, here’s John Gruber writing in 2007:

Major publishing houses almost certainly would be unwilling to permit Amazon to sell e-books sans DRM, in the same way that music labels were originally unwilling to sell DRM-free music. But so why not bundle the Kindle e-books with the good old-fashioned shareable, preservable, paper books? Change the pitch from “buy digital e-books instead of paper books” to “get a digital Kindle e-book with each paper book you buy from Amazon”.

There may never be an iTunes Match for books – it’s hard to prove to a machine that you own a book – and that’s a shame. But if someone has bought a meatspace book from Amazon, why the heck shouldn’t they be able to add the electric version for a reduced price? (Some cool indie book publishers already have this model in place.)

That argument in 2012 seems less infallible than it did in 2007. The status quo now encourages a diet richer in electrons, which more being more high-margin than paper is more preferable to the Jeff Bezos Dog Doo-Dah Band. Better for Amazon, but not better better. And Amazon is a scary gorilla that gets what it wants. (Maybe, right there, I have found the problem with capitalism.)

Clearly, this is a somewhere where Waterstone’s, Barnes & Noble – the big and still meatiest meatspace booksellers – could compete in the face of their own dwindling revenues and inferior/imaginary ebook stores. Imagine: If you bought some books from Waterstone’s, now you can “copy” them all onto your hypothetical Waterstone’s sandwich of plastic for a small price. Why hasn’t that happened yet? Is it already up someone’s sleeve? I hope so.

From the New York Times:

Ms. Schmidt, who once served as the creative director of Moomah, the children’s cafe in Tribeca that caters to parents in denial about some of the distasteful aesthetics of child-rearing, made the cards in her favored style of heavy stock, neutral paper and quaint typefaces.

The second half of Robert Peston’s episodic factual money programme appeared on Sunday. There was too much footage of Peston sitting on trains, glaring at screens and papers and stuff, but like any good sausage it also had some meat in it.

This bit struck me on the shoulder:

(From The Party’s Over: How the West Went Bust, BBC Two. If the video refuses to play, try downloading it.)

1. John Lanchester’s point, again:

   Intuitively, you must think that since we’re having a crisis about debt, [and meanwhile] we’re forcing students to take on debt, a lot of them will then seek ways to immediately pay back the debt by going off and doing the kind of lucrative but not socially useful thing. That must be a quite likely risk.

2. Vince Cable said the “tax” word. And nothing broke. Amazing.

3. The man playing Michael Palin really does look like Michael Palin.

(Here’s an incidental thing: I just spent at least half an hour trying to pass parameters to the Vimeo oEmbed embed machine. I suppose I wanted to make the player more, uh, minimal. Well, it turns out that Vimeo Plus members can prevent people from customising some aspects of their embeds, and evidently Merlin has chosen to do that. Which is fine, but is there a parable in there?)