Hallowe'en

If you're born on this day, you have the power to curse people. As presumably, the following people could: the diarist John Evelyn, the snivelling Cockney versifier John Keats, the dictator and mass-murderer Chaing Kai-Shek, the jockey and novelist Dick Francis, the pornographic photographer Helmut Newton, Barbara Bel Geddes ("Miss Ellie" in Dallas), the weirdo Jimmy Savile, the American broadcaster Dan Rather, the physicist Paul Frampton, the hippy detective novelist Kinky Friedman, the inept and unfathomably fashionable architect Zaha Hadid, Johnny Marr, the guitarist for The Smiths, and the former editor of The Daily Telegraph and biographer of Margaret Thatcher, St Charles Moore.
And Vanilla Ice.
There must be something in astrology, surely.

Surveillance society

You can't step out the house these days without being photographed. As someone points out. Here I am in, I think, pictures six and nine. What I made of it can be read in the Wall Street Journal Europe, a link to which I'll build in when it appears.
Later: Which would be here.