Tom Roper's Weblog

Saturday's selections: Ascot & Doncaster

Uttotexter didn't pass their inspection, a pity, so today I have:
200 Ascot Kadara
205 Doncaster DIamant Noir
235 Ascot Le Roi Migeul
315 Doncaster Magical Balliwick ( you may recall earlier win with this beast this month)
Jonathan Rendall writes an amusing piece in this morning's Times on gambling and is correct about the unlikely and unexpected beauty that can be found at a racecourse on an otherwise dreary afternoon. The intellectual challenge seems to me the point,. I made some remarks on online poker a while back, and it seems to me that, while conventional poker has a lot to offer and I wouldn't mind a game, though I haven't seriously played since the Junior Common Room of Eliot College twenty five or more years ago, even the real game, with fifty-two cards cannot match the subtle variables of a horse race: going, form, jockey, trainer, parentage to name but a few, plus the fact that a race will never be contested by the same field as in a previous season. I hear of some chaps in Hong Kong (inevitably) who were using a computer model to try to forecast the results of races. their model had something like over 300 variables when they stopped counting.

BMJ reports that a journal rejected article after objections from

"A leading nephrology journal has rejected a guest editorial questioning the efficacy of epoetin in end stage renal disease, despite favourable peer reviews, apparently because it feared losing advertising."

Journal rejects article after objections from marketing department
Owen Dyer
BMJ 2004;328:244

Magnier pronounced Magna

And today in the Times Cornelius Lysaght clears up the little matter of how his name should be pronounced. Was I alone in imposing a Frenchified pronunciation on the name? Advice from the BBC's Pronunciation Research Unit, endorsed by the man's office, is that it should be said as Magna as in Carta. Very useful as he is much in the news, not because of Coolmore but because he and J P McManus have been unwise enough to invest in a football club.

Magnier in FT

Fascinating piece in today's Financial Times by Rachel Pagones, bloodstock editor of the Racing Post, on John Magnier and the Coolmore stud. When they started off with Green God they charged 1,500 guineas for him to cover a mare. Now at his Ashford satellite in Kentucky, stallions with Storm Cat for sire or grand-sire can ask for $500,000. Coolmore earn 70.5% of the Irish bloodstock industry's income. Bloodstock is now throroughly globalised: Green God would cover 40 mares a season, while one of Coolmore's stallions in 2004 will cover 200 and then head for the southern hemisphere to do the same again in their season.
Magnier and his associates had two new ideas: syndication of stallion ownership, unusual when they started off in 1971 and buying yearlings, then a twentieth of the price of stallions. This allowed them to buy more and offset the cost of duds against those they got right: they reckoned they needed to get it right every four or five times.
I think full text is only available on the FT site to subscriber., but the article is worth reading and is:
Pagones, Rachel
How Magnier became king of the turf
Financial Times January 29 2004: 18

Francis Sitwell

Today, Francis Sitwell, son of Sacheverell and nephew of Edith. His full Christian names: Francis Trajan Sacheverell. Had a career in PR,and advised Ken Livingstone in the campaign to save the GLC.

Lost books again

Some more that I remember:
A compilation of Che Guevara's writings entitled Venceremos, edited by John Gerassi. Most of the works in it were speeches and as I remember them better for their rhetoric than for their political analysis. Set me thinking: was there ever a significant organised British Guevaraist presence? I can't recall one. In later years there was a Turkish organisation that used to frequent the London May Day marches equipped with flags emblazoned with Che's face, but I don't remember anything else. Unlikely in any case since Guevarism rather wrote off the labour movement in countries like Britain and had much in common with Lin Piao's line of the countryside surrounding the city on a global scale.
Flann O'Brien's At-Swim-Two-Birds. Another one that I must replace.
Also lost a complete Milton, but I have replaced that (several times over...for some reason I have at least three copies of various editions, possibly more)

Today's selections: Naas and Cheltenham

150 Naas: Contempo Suite
200 Cheltenham Guilt
235 Cheltenham (Cleeve Chase) Hardy Eustace
305 Cheltenham (Pillar Chase)Therealbandit
335 Cheltenham (Ladbroke Chase) Whereareyounow

Lost books

I've lost a lot of books over the years. Here's one's that I miss:

Patrick Hamilton's Hangover Square: I was sure I had a copy, but when I wanted to lend it to a friend, could not locate it anywhere. May turn up when I move house and/or catalogue my collection.

Lots lost when my parents moved house after my father retired from practice as a GP. They lived in a big house, quite central in Cambridge, on Lensfield Road by the corner with Tennis Court Road. While we needed a big house the space to accommodate a consulting room, a waiting room and even a dispensary as well as the normal rooms for a family of four, when he gave up the practice there was no case for staying there, my brother and I having moved away. Much furniture was sold, including the roll-top desk I had had in my study, and my father also sold some of his surgery equipment to a doctor based somewhere in North London, Edmonton I think. As I was living in Golders Green at the time, it was suggested that the same doctor should bring down the books to his surgery, whence I should collect them. Of course a mixture of the practical difficulties involved and general laziness on my part meant that this never happened and I left it so long that I did not dare contact the doctor to collect them. I hope they went to a good home. Among them were:

John Donne's complete poems, in the Oxford edition. This I won as the Old Persean Society Essay Prize at school, for an essay on Marxism and religion (I argued for the first and against the second).

John Dos Passos's USA: fantastic book, must replace

James Joyce's Ulysses: the Penguin edition, bought when I was 14 from a branch of Heffers on the corner of Trumpington Street and Pembroke Street, where I spent much of my time and money as a teenager. I read and re-read Ulysses all the time. I did not find it at all inaccessible, though I later borrowed Finnegan's Wake from the then-excellent Cambridge public library and was defeated. Cambridge public library was in those days in the Guildhall, the entrance more or less opposite the Corn Exchange and the Guild café where I and school fellows would gather to drink revolting coffee.

An account of May 68 in Paris by two Observer journalists which was published as a Penguin. This was politically formative: apart from their account of the bewildering number of groupuscules involved, their description of the Comités d'Action Lycéeen was very influential on me and others who set up Cambridge Schools Action Union and later on the Cambridge branch of the National Union of School Students. I still have some copies of our journal which we edited in a basement of the Cambridge Students Union offices by the Round Church (not to be confused with the nearby Union Society, a talking-shop for would-be MPs). The journal was called Hedghog, a title devised to indicate that we were small but prickly. The President of CSU in those days, who was very helpful to us, was one Charles Clarke who later went on to greater things

I shall list more lost books as I remember them.

PNAS on e-journals

An article in PNAS discusses the economics of e-journals and site licences and consequent effects on the scientific community.
Carl T. Bergstrom, and Theodore C. Bergstrom
The costs and benefits of library site licenses to academic journals
PNAS 101: 897-902; published online before print as 10.1073/pnas.0305628101

LRB: John Sutherland on publishing

John Sutherland writes the diary in the latest London Review of Books , which he devotes to a discussion of publishing. His remarks were inspired by a letter to all his members from last year's President of the Modern Languages Association (for me and other medical librarians the "other" MLA...those initals evoke the Medical Library Association for us). So while what he has to say is chiefly about monographs in the humanties, it has much interest for the growing debate on scientific publishing. His final suggestion is that every university teacher should be given $200 in book tokens redeemable against the publications any of the top fifty academic presses, this being sufficient to revive academic publishing.
Suerland has some interesting things to say about changes in publishing and their effect on libraries, but he seems to underestimate the potential of institutional archiving and other new ways of publishing have to solve the problem. He claims that quality control has been "almost impossible to apply to web generated scholarship" something that those who edit and contribute to many peer-reviewed electronic publications would contest.
Sutherland, John
Diary
London Review of Books 26 (2); 31 22 January 2004