At £429, the base-level iPad would fit the SAUKS equation almost perfectly at $1.50 to the pound, which is where sterling was hovering on election day. At $1.48, the prediction comes in about a fiver more; at $1.40, it’s just over £460, and at $1.30 just shy of its (pre-tax) dollar price.

For all the jokes, it’s clear that Apple’s sales model, with its consistent price points and relatively long product cycles, can only work outside the US with some degree of hedging against currency declines: assuming a year till the next iPad, a weakening pound may squeeze margins at some point, though Apple will be loath to raise prices.

In that scenario, though, the price of an iPad is going to be the least of people’s worries.

Thanks, John Gruber, for showing us how it’s done.

But to get back in the mood for writing, it’s a happy coincidence that the latest spat over Nick Denton’s editorial methods appears at the same time as another brief profile of Felix Dennis, something the media desks seem to write up on a semi-regular basis.

Dennis changed American magazine publishing in the late 90s. It was obvious from Maxim’s first few British issues that it was doomed to fourth place in a market saturated by lad mags; it was also clear that Americans were buying import copies of Loaded with nothing of their own to compare. Conventional wisdom was that the format wouldn’t work: you had your serious gentlemen’s monthlies, the sporty-outdoors mags, the aging hipster mags, the pinkish Details in post-Truman decline. All neatly stratified and commodified. Instead, Maxim’s US launch in 1997, driven by Dennis and a no-bullshit British staff, immediately made GQ and Esquire look fusty, and put Details out of its misery.

Of all the lad mags, Maxim was the one you’d least have expected to succeed in the US, based upon content and market positioning. But that misses one key element: Felix Dennis. Ten years on, it outsells all its US competitors combined, most of which now imitate some or all of its house style. (Details is back on the shelves, though in name only.) As for Dennis himself, he’s no longer at the helm, predicting the slow decline of print mags; that didn’t stop him from getting around $250m for offloading his American titles last year. (Translation: even more time to spend writing doggerel in Mustique. As a poet, he’s a great magazine publisher.)

That’s your model for understanding Nick Denton and his American blog menagerie, his treatment of writers, his PPV earnings model, his zest for publicity. (The comparison is inexact: if Denton writes poetry, he keeps it to himself; his prose sings like a goose.)

All done with complete unnerving honesty. Which you have to admire — from a safe distance.

Update: Denton’s made the comparison himself. (Note to self: 2003 and Kinja seems like a long time ago.) But the report presents it simply in terms of Maxim’s content, not the wider aspects of how both Dennis and Denton seem to view publishing.

Reaching back to my mostly forgotten maths classes, you can simplify the calculation to a standard Apple British Coefficient of 1.2925, for those who don’t get to buy ex-VAT (or, more likely these days, on a weekend in NYC).

Convert the US price, add VAT, stick 10% on top for shits and giggles, then round up to the nearest £49 or £99.*

The MacBook Air fits this, as did the iPhone (figures rounded to nearest UKP):

Rounded up to nearest £99, you get £1199. Voilà.

* Unless it’s under £100, where you round to the nearest £5 or £9. Leopard’s $129 became (£65 + VAT) + 10% = £84, rounded up to £85.

My long-time favourites: the Directors of France. No, not Godard, Truffaut et al. Think guillotine. Think Terror. Think Robespierre dragged off to be the climactic blood sacrifice to the cause. What comes next? ‘Um’, then ‘er’, then ‘uh’, then ‘oh, Napoleon?’ That was them in charge. So, let’s hear it for the people who ruled France for the four years that everyone skips between the blood & barricades and the short bloke.

Sometimes I think of these one-graf periods as pockets of the landscape kept deliberately uncultivated to encourage natural habitats, the fauna in this case being graduate students, who are naturally drawn to such obscure fields because the richest ones are long taken.

That they repeated that repeat after dark makes less sense. The broken verisimilitude, for some odd reason, makes it feel crass. Or perhaps it exposes the innate crassness of the re-enactment.

It was a Jack Ruby moment rather than a JFK one, in one of Denis Leary’s rare original lines. Diana’s death was more JFK, heard at a second remove, and even that doesn’t quite satisfy the need for some diversity across a common experience. Ask most people in Britain when they heard about Diana, and it’ll be the same reply: when they woke up that Sunday morning.

And yet away from that sunlit New York weekday, most people were doing the same thing: watching television, grotesquely compelling by design. I wasn’t: my train left London just before 2 p.m., and I switched on my radio as the first reports came through to the BBC. Three hours and 250 miles later, a pile of rush-printed copies of my local paper were selling quickly in the station concourse. The front page was dominated by a photo of the second plane hitting. It was upscaled, pixellated, unsuited to print.

Although I had ample chance in the hours that followed to associate pictures with what I’d heard described, it brought a strange disjunction that remains with me, as if watching a radio drama re-made for television.