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Q Why do you seem obsessed with brand name apparel et al in Pattern Recognition and Spook Country?

A You ain't seen nothing, yet! Actually the new one may explain that, a bit. Or just further convince some people that I'm obsessed. It's one of the ways in which I feel I understand how the world works, and there aren't really that many of those. It's not about clothes, though, or branding; it's about code, subtext. I was really delighted, for instance, to learn who made George Bush's raincoats. A company in Little Rock (now extinct, alas) but they were made of Ventile, a British cotton so tightly woven that you can make fire hoses (and RAF ocean survival suits) out of it. Which exists because Churchill demanded it, because the Germans had all the flax production sewn up. No flax, no fire hoses for the Blitz. The cultural complexities that put that particular material on Bush's back delight me deeply; it's a kind of secret history (and not least because most people would find it fantastically boring, I imagine).

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Goya and Wellington

"Viva Velinton!" When the Spanish master met the then Lord Wellington in 1812, the 43-year-old Briton was the idol of Spain. The streets echoed with cries of "Y viva Velinton!," and beautiful women rushed forward to cover him with kisses. Had Goya been a less truthful artist, he might have tried to idealize the man into some sort of benign hero surrounded by the trappings of glory.

But the future duke, who had little respect for artists, quickly found that there are artists who have little respect for dukes. In this austere portrait, the trappings of glory are absent. Even the order of the Golden Fleece is hidden beneath the cloak, and the sharp-featured face is neither benign nor particularly heroic. Goya painted exactly what he saw: a cold and contemptuous Englishman who regarded the exuberance of the Spaniards as rather poor taste.

The antagonism between the soldier and the artist was duly reported by Mrs. Havemeyer in her privately printed' memoirs. At one point, she wrote, Wellington bluntly told Goya that the portrait would never do and would have to be changed. In a rage, Goya started to pick up a pistol lying on a table near by, and Wellington went for his sword. "Fortunately the two great men were separated before they could do greater harm than to express their opinions of each other," wrote Mrs. Havemeyer. "Goya would never change the portrait nor allow Wellington any longer to pose for him." The artist had finished Wellington's face, and he painted the rest of the picture from a hired model.

[via Time]

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Here, via Kottke, is the story of George Millitt, a fifteen-year-old office worker in the Metropolitan Life Tower, stabbed to death while being pursued by a pack of girls trying to kiss him:

Yesterday he came down and remarked that it was the anniversary of the wreck of the Maine. He explained that he knew it because the ship had been blown up on his birthday and that he was 15 yesterday.

At once the girls began to tease him. They told him that on such an occasion he deserved a kiss, and every one of them vowed that as soon as office hours were over she would kiss him once for every year that he had lived. He laughingly declared that not a girl should get near him, and was teased about it all day.

As 4:30 o'clock came, and the boy's work was over, the girls made a rush for him. They tried to hem him in, and he tried to break their line. Suddenly he reeled and fell, crying as he did so.

"I'm stabbed!"

The text above comes from a 1909 story in the New York Times. The boy was stabbed by a sharp ink scraper he carried in his breast pocket. His tombstone reads:

LOST LIFE BY STAB IN FALLING ON
INK ERASER, EVADING SIX YOUNG
WOMEN TRYING TO GIVE HIM
BIRTHDAY KISSES IN OFFICE
METROPOLITAN LIFE BUILDING'