Robert Sharp

Pupil Barrister

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Name-alikey

7 June 2006 / / 13 Comments

My statistics programme tells me that someone from North Carolina visited my website yesterday, after typing the following into a search engine:
Robert Sharp for Congress
Nothing provokes as much introspection as your own personal homonym achieving something. Somewhere in America, some guy, some two-bit yahoo has manoevered himself enough, so that a place in the US House of Representatives is now a realistic proposition! We do not know each other, and yet he jeers at me from accross the Atlantic.
I have been top of the Google rankings for my own name for a while. There was a time, a year ago, when a State Supreme Court judge, one Robert Sharp Bean of Oregon, challenged for the top spot. He is dead though, and mentionings of him online seem to have tailed off somewhat. Thanks to WordPress, I remain comfortably top the billing, every time I check. Now, however, I need to watch out for this new kid-on-the-block, this Robert Sharp for Congress fellow, to ensure he makes no play for my crown. Who does he think he is?
Fact: You, dear reader, have searched for your own name in Google.
Of course, you will deny it. I will not believe you.
So tell all. How did knowledge of your homonyms, your name-alikeys, make you feel? Superior, or inadequate?
I confess, Robert Sharp intimidates me. He’s all ‘project management’ and user testing. I take comfort from the fact that he develops Windows Longhorn, and thus totally off my Venn diagramme of Possible Worlds. I wouldn’t want Rob Sharp‘s job although he’s clearly done well for himself. I would like Robert Sharp‘s job, though most of his portfolio is rather parochial. Robert Sharp, on the other hand, just gets on my nerves, and needs a better website.
I would love to have met Dr Robert Sharp, who was pretty cool in a geeky way. But he’s dead too. Most of the other Robert Sharps yeilded by Google are mainly priests and scientists – earnest fellows. I feel we might have something in common. Besides our name, that is.

No Sharps

No Sharps at Gatwick Airport. Photo by yrstrly

Update

Don’t forget Rob Sharp, features writer at the Independent. Irritatingly, no-one has asked if we are one and the same person yet, so I can’t claim credit for his output. One day…

Pod-Fisking

7 June 2006 / / 0 Comments

Andrew Sullivan, has taken the art of ‘fisking’ a medium futher by recording a pod-fisk – that is, a podcast that criticises a public broadcast by someone else, clause by clause. In this case, the subject is President George W Bush, defending the malicious proposed constitutional ban on gay marriage.
I am not usually a fan of lengthy fisks. It is ironic that it was apparently Sullivan who coined the term, since he crafts some fantastic self-contained essays, which I prefer.
The genre works well in audio form, however, especially when the subject matter is all style and no substance. Sullivan does an excellent job, arguing that the entire point of the federal system is to allow diversity of law and lifestyle, and that an issue as divisive as gay marriage should be solved at the state level. His assessment of why the President is supporting the ammendment – as a short-term political smoke-screen – is damning.
I have always thought that the existence of homosexual relationships would be life- and love-affirming for everyone else. They demonstrate that love is not the same thing as the base desire to procreate. It is a higher thing.
Sullivan also takes Bush to task over the suggestion that ‘activist judges’ are somehow overriding the will of the people. The British Judiciary have been accused of the same thing recently, as their interpretation of the Human Rights Act has led to some politcally damaging court rulings. In both cases, the argument is that since existing laws have led to counter-intuitive court rulings, then clearly it is the law that is wrong, and not the political attitudes that consider those rulings undesirable. In these cases, no-one dares to suggest that the values enshrined in documents such as the US Bill of Rights, may better capture the values of the people to whom they apply. If those same people have a differing view of a particular case, then perhaps it is they who are the hypocrites. It is not the fault of their existing laws, or the judges who apply them. In this situation, we seem short on conservative pleas to “respect the rule of law”. But as The Daily Dish continues to point out, that has never been on King George’s agenda.

Eyes

5 June 2006 / / 9 Comments

The light of the body is the eye: if therefore thine eye be single, thy whole body shall be full of light.
But if thine eye be evil, thy whole body shall be full of darkness. If therefore the light that is in thee be darkness, how great is that darkness!
Matthew 6:22-23

Dr Crippen, the NHS Blog Doctor asks if there are any volunteers who will donate their body to medical science. Dissecting a human body is invaluable experience for medical students’ understanding of their primary place of work, but apparently there is a decline in the number of people making donations.
I mentioned this at a small gathering yesterday. Once people had overcome my social faux pas of mentioning human dissection while eating, it was interesting to hear people’s views on the matter.
Most people in the group could not stomach the idea of being chopped up. I find this this attitude rather… immature? Or maybe it is lack of imagination, failing to conceive a world in which you no longer play a part. The body will be dead by the time it happens, so there is no sense in imagining what it might be like to be subjected to the student’s knife. The act of donation is part of your existence. The act of dissection is not. Furthermore, dead bodies are all, ultimately, either burnt or digested: A distgusting thought if one imagines it happening to oneself, but an unavoidable destiny nonetheless. For the squeamish, I would imagine a clean and clinical dissection would be a preferable post-mortem journey. Of course, the destruction of the body during burial or cremation does not occur with a group of teenagers looking on. Perhaps there is a dignity in dissolving to your original carbon atoms in private.
A more positive consensus on the subject of organ donation. Everyone had a card, with various boxes ticked. In the case of four of the group (all women, I noticed), the one box they had declined to tick was the eyes. While they were fine with donating something trivial like a kidney, and even something as poetic as the heart, they would rather keep their eyes to themselves. This, the consensus claimed, was because while other organs are hidden away, “you can actually see the eyes.”
Perhaps they had remembered the old saying “the eyes are the mirror to the soul” and considered that taking the eyes would somehow be removing something more than a cornea. I had not considered this before, and in this materialistic, aetheistic culture, their attitude caught me by surprise.
Cicero (106-43 B.C.) is quoted as saying, Ut imago est animi voltus sic indices oculi (The face is a picture of the mind as the eyes are its interpreter). I found that and the quote from the New Testament via Phrases.org.uk

Tips for taking penalties

4 June 2006 / / 5 Comments

An interesting Letter from London by Clive Davis; an enjoyable post by Dave Hill on The Meaningful Game (he is fast becoming my favourite blogger on Comment is Free); and England’s 6-0 victory over Jamaica. I have reached a point where I can no longer resist the urge: I must opine on something footbally.
Penalty shootouts are an easy thing to analyse, because the number of factors that influence the outcome are much fewer when compared to an actual ninety-minute match. Just one kick, and a binary outcome. With more and more games being decided on penalties (most importantly, the 1994 World Cup final), one would assume that, by now, the managers and players would have solved the equation. Annoyingly, this is not in fact the case, as Peter Crouch’s ridiculous over-the-bar effort on Saturday reminds us. So allow me to state the bleedin’ obvious…
(1) Most penalty saves are lucky. Crucially, not good judgement or good reactions. Goalkeepers find themselves in the vicinity of the ball, and palm it accordingly…
… so (2) It is all about power. Even if the goalie dives the right way, he will be a second behind the ball, and will not stop a powerful shot…
which means (3) It is all about the run-up. This has been a long held opinion of mine, ever since Romania lost to the Republic of Ireland in the second round of Italia ’90. They were let down by Daniel Timofte’s causual, poncy, cool-as-a-cucumber, two-step run-up that allowed Pat ‘Packie’ Bonner to make the save. Bonner got all the credit, but it was Timofte’s doing. The Italian hosts succumbed to Argentina in a similar fashion.
A plea to English penalty takers: For the love of God, Queen and Country do not try to be clever. At Old Trafford, Crouch attempted a nifty lob from the penalty spot, and looked quite the gangly fool. Leave trickery and audaciousness to the Brazilians, because they have the confidence to pull it off. There is no need to try and fool the goalkeeper. He’s not actually part of the equation.

Forest Gate and Ninety Day Detention

3 June 2006 / / 3 Comments

Police at Landsdown RoadThe news channels are eagerly following the aftermath of the raid on a house in Forest Gate. Police officers are searching the house from top-to-bottom with massive vaccum cleaners, apparently.
With the talk of evidence gathering and ‘credible intelligence’ I cannot help thinking of the 90 day detention proposition that the government put before the House of Commons. If the police find evidence and proceed quickly to a charge, that would lend some weight to the suggestion that the police do not actually need 90 days worth of intrest free credit.
What if they don’t find the evidence? Does that validate the supporters, or opponents of 90 day detention? The former group would say that we’ve let a crimminal walk free. The latter group would suggest that the authorities had made a mistake, and thank goodness no-one has been detained for 90 days without trial.
It is obviously a set of un-falsifiable hypotheticals at present. But it will be interesting to see for just how long Messers Kahar and Koyar are detained.

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