Natalie Solent |
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Politics, news, libertarianism, Science Fiction, religion, sewing.
You got a problem, bud? I like sewing.
E-mail: nataliesolent-at-aol-dot-com (I assume it's OK to quote senders by name.) Back to main blog RSS thingy 
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Tuesday, April 16, 2002
I gotta go. I am slowly working through the mail pile, and expect to reach Base Camp C soon. From there I shall launch my assault on the summit. Do you knit too, or just sew?The brothers Judd asked me that question (the answer is aaaaagh!) and sent me this link to this USA Weekend article by Michele Hatty on an unlikely form of "therapy with a takeaway" in the wake of September 11. "In the days following Sept. 11, young people retreated to an unlikely place in their search for solace: a yarn store. The shop in question, Los Angeles' La Knitterie Parisienne, quickly became a haven for gathering, comforting and -- not incidentally -- knitting.Read the rest. Apparently there is a resurgence of knitting among young US urban professionals, some of them male. Good luck to them. So why the aaaaaagh? Because knitting is topologically impossible. (Like sewing machines. When does the needle come up through the fabric, eh?) All knitters have the secret of extra-dimensional finger movements, which could easily be developed into an FTL drive. They are keeping it from the rest of us for fear that the rest of the galaxy wouldn't be able to cope were humans unleashed upon the defenceless stars. The Sorceror's Apprentice. I rather think Emmanuel Goldstein is away. Someone really ought to tell him that in his absence his naughty little apprentice has been playing with the spell book and posting inflammatory comments. "Do they [the warbloggers] not realise that the biggest obstacle in the way of their dream of a genocide on the Euphrates.... "The italics are mine. Twenty years ago I was sympathetic to the peace movement. Such was my concern that I sent off for a handy pack of cards containing useful facts and debating points. A great many of these dealt with reasons to suppose that nuclear war might well happen and the horrors that would be unleashed if it did. Although I did not get many converts with my little cards no one accused me of wishing to have a nuclear war merely because I warned that it was not impossible and would be a fearful thing. Perhaps standards of charity in debate have declined, or perhaps my different experience these days is merely a function of having different opponents. Goldstein (if it is he) says "the warbloggers" - not "some" but "the" - actually want to commit genocide. What evidence does he have for this dreadful charge? I read a lot of warblogs and I have not seen even one statement remotely resembling such a wicked desire.
UPDATE. Re-reading my own post, I see I have left myself open to misinterpretation. Warbloggers do, by definition, want the war on terror to be waged. They do not merely warn against it, they advocate it as better and safer than alternative strategies. My analogy with my time in CND does not hold when considering the "basic war". In making that analogy, I referred to a common additional belief held by many but not all warbloggers. (I myself sometimes do and sometimes do not convince myself that it is a probable outcome.) Namely that if terrorism is seen to succeed then there will be more of it, and in return more and more indiscriminate reprisals, until you might end up with mutually catastrophic, intentionally genocidal war between Islam and the West/Israel. Were this to happen the West would "win", for lack of a better word, but that would be small comfort indeed. The point I was making was that I haven't come across any warblogger who wants this nightmare to come true. They want to fight before the monster grows too big. Monday, April 15, 2002
Moppets & Martyrs (international section). Our latest cutie, found at Don McArthur's blog, shows a child dressed up as a suicide bomber at a march in Berlin. UPDATE: Instapundit comments on the same picture. As does Damianation! As does Lileks. (It's looking as if all I need do is direct you to the links on the left hand column.) (I wasn't kidding. Now it's LGF) Earlier Moppets can be found here, here and here. Notice this? "....His message jarred with a poem by Saudi Arabia’s Ambassador to London published on the same day. It saluted an 18-year-old woman bomber who blew herself up in a Jerusalem supermarket on March 29. The praise for Ayat Akhras and criticism of the White House by Ghazi al-Gosaibi, the veteran Ambassador who was supported by Britain as a candidate to head Unesco, was published on the front page of Al-Hayat, a newspaper based in London. “Tell Ayat, the bride of loftiness . . . she embraced death with a smile while the leaders are running away from death,” Dr al-Ghosaibi wrote. “Doors of heaven are opened for her.” (From a Times story. Emphasis mine.)
Truly, it seems as if the world has written "Not To Be Resucitated" at the foot of Zimbabwe's hospital bed. But sometimes medicine might do more harm than good. This story details how food aid is being used as a weapon against the children of MDC supporters. Would more aid get them fed or just prolong the regime that denies them food? I do not know. It brings down a curse to kill a king. At least that's how it seems for poor Nepal since the heir to the throne massacred his own family last June. Now we learn that 164 people have been killed during a Maoist attack on a police post. Predictably there are those who think the killers just need some love and attention: Siddhi Lal Singh, a Communist Party central committee member, said: "After so many killings, and with the economy shattered completely, the government should start talking immediately."We in Britain know that you should never reward terrorism with immediate surrender. We wait thirty years and then surrender. Bang goes my reputation as a schoolmarm. Should it be "ran" or "run" in that last post? UPDATE: opinion - er - ran 100% with "run". Even a sports duh-brain like me sat up and took notice of Paula Radcliffe's performance in the London Marathon. Not only was her race the second fastest marathon of all time for a woman but it was also her first competitive marathon, and it was ran without clocks or pacemakers. She had no means of telling how she was doing. A fantasy come true. Sunday, April 14, 2002
"...Palestine saves death for its civilians, little boys and young women. This is why Arafat lives and Ayat Akhras is dead." Read the rest at Turkey Blog. MKultra = MK Ultra Matt Johnson writes: "...the level of conspiracy mindedness of Ray Vaughn, he's probably talking about the MK-Ultra program. CIA Mind control. Most of what you read about it seems to be crap, like this. (Of course supermodels must be involved!)Not to mention telepathic instructions to submarines. Way cool stuff. Steve Bodio is a five-star natural history writer. (He didn't ask for the plug; but he is very complimentary to me at the bottom of the page. I trust his profession will ensure that he will take it as a compliment if I employ another of my famously robust metaphors from natural history and describe this as "mutual grooming behaviour") This is what he has to say about museums: The recent post about the "modernization" of museums touched something close to my heart. I grew up in the Boston area (I now live in New Mexico) and have fond memories of the vast collection of stuffed birds and mammals in Harvard's Museum of Comparative Zoology. They have now been replaced by dioramas, and I doubt anyone could gain an appreciation for the diversity of creatures on the planet by looking at dioramas and playing video games. I remember spending hours there, dreaming about the places these animals came from and hoping I would get there one day.Today, it wasn't such a bad bet. Along with Samizdata (to which I contributed a slogan a couple of months ago) you're among my top five blogs. A quickie reflection from me along the same lines: all these animal activists who think zoos - all zoos, however spacious the enclosures, however important the breeding programme - demeaning ought to think ahead twenty years. A generation might grow up who have never looked in wonder at a tiger. If all a child has ever seen is film of rare animals then maybe it will seem as unreal and unimportant as a film that the tiger should depart this earth. We have "Children in Need"; they have this. Fox News have an article about the Saudi telethon The Saudis have assured the US that it is just about helping Palestinians generally and not about rewarding death cultists. Obviously they aren't quite getting the message across. "A 6-year-old boy, with a plastic gun slung over his shoulder and fake explosives strapped around his waist, walked into a donation center and made a symbolic donation of plastic explosives, according to Al Watan daily."Naturally the shocked authorities hastily told the wee one to stop this disgraceful behaviour, and reported his parents to Social Services. Yeah, right. Jenin. There's a BBC radio debaters' programme called "The Moral Maze". Trying to steer the right course when writing about the claims and counter-claims of a situation like that in Jenin, where the Palestinians claim the IDF has massacred hundreds, is very like negotiating your way through a moral maze. Someone trying to stick to the right path is Damian Penny. His writing on the Independent's reporting of the situation at Jenin should be an example to the Independent. Closing the doors of history. Robbyn Kenyon writes: When I was growing up there was a museum in New Hampshire called the Morse Museum. It was small, private and, for a child, absolutely wondrous. Originating in the 1920s or 30s, it contained such incredible marvels as actual, real lions and cheetah cubs (stuffed, of course) and the skins of many other animals (mostly elk and deer of various types) decorated the walls. There were displays of incredibly complicated, carved ivory (the real stuff) and chests and tables of teak, mahogany and brass. There were a couple of cases of human remains, one male and one female which, far from being frightening or ghoulish were remarkable and fascinating. And there were lots of glass cases containing the money of various countries, clothing of various types (ie: the shoes that the women of China who had their feet bound wore), pictures and various other cultural artifacts like bowls, knives and spears.How indeed. In the last year of primary school I noticed that when black or brown-skinned characters (or even black or brown-haired white characters) appeared in some of the older books I read, they never seemed to be the heroes. I was saddened because for some reason I had decided that they were the "team" I supported. I won't say my outrage had much of a moral basis; it was only on about the same level as my irritation that cats, which I also liked, never seemed to get a good press either. Nevertheless I had discovered for myself something about the world that helped me later decide that racism happens and is wrong. In contrast, the modern system seems to be to present to little children a sanitized present where every second white mummy is a car mechanic and every second black mummy a judge. Then, suddenly, the children are held to have reached the age to Know The Truth about "a society irredeemably soaked in unconscious and conscious racism." The past, of course, is shown as nothing but one long act of predation by whites against blacks. Kids all over the world like to dress up. LakeFXDan sent me a link to this picture archive. It took me a while to work out how to see the pictures. Press the number after the description and then scroll down to the frame below. Now take a look at "Kids as suicide bombers" picture No. 3. It has to be said that the two earlier pictures in that category show teenagers rather than actual "kids". (So that's all right then.)
A note: not all the links work - for instance in the category "Armed kids with their fathers" only number 4 works. Saturday, April 13, 2002
Flattery will get you everywhere! The bodaciously excellent Patio Pundit writes to express doubt in the nice direction as to my figure for hits: "I find that hard to believe - I got a whole bunch of hits when you linked to me (100 or so), so if it is true (I believe you, but maybe your counter is in error?), you have devoted readers. I have gotten less referrals from bloggers who claim higher numbers than you do."I had said that my maximum ever daily hit total was 878. Could it be simply that I usually post in the morning GMT whereas most of my readers visit in the afternoon PST? Hence it is usually not worthwhile to hit "refresh"; I may have devoted readers (it's nice to think I do) but even their devotion does not extend to repeated visits while I sleep.
Continuing the theme, this post by Diana Hsieh of the deliciously-named "Noodle Food" starts off by talking about the likely effect of reparations and then describes how Ms Hsieh feels that she was intellectually saved by moving from public (in the US sense, i.e. state-provided) school to private school. In fairness to my own state school, I must say that I experienced there no more than the pessure to conform inevitable when you assemble an age-cohort. Mind you, it was all girls so perhaps the reflexes of the baboon-troupe didn't fully cut in. The Black World Today, black university students yesterday and My Falklands Memoirs. Regarding my earlier post about a dismal column in The Black World Today, John Costello writes:
I can speak from personal experience of the high motivation and willingness to make friends from all races shown by African and Asian nationals who have come to the West to study. At the age of 17 I spent a year as a scholarship student at a private college, of which I have happy memories but which could unkindly be called a "crammer". The students fell into two main groups. The first group consisted of whites who were repeating their A-level year. They weren't for the most part over-keen on learning for its own sake but pressure from their parents who were footing the bill kept the kids' noses to the grindstone. My tuition still came free as God's good air, as it had at school, and so it wasn't until years later that it penetrated the mildly socialist mousse in my head that the hard work and the school fees had some connection with each other. (There were also a few rich white deadheads who had Video Recorders. Money could no longer motivate them.)
The second main group were foreign nationals; Indians, Singapore Chinese, Africans and others. Nearly all my friends came from this group. One Indian girl shocked me by saying that, although she had been told in India that all the British were racist, she had experienced no hostility at all. I stopped short of telling her to go get some in order to please me, although I did say (an opinion I still hold) that if she were mixing with poor whites who felt threatened by her presence it would be a different story.
So 99% of the time the little multi-racial group with whom I chatted away my lunch hours got along fine. There was only one thing that made me feel utterly apart from them: the Falklands war. It wasn't that they were hostile, it was just that they were indifferent. No business of theirs, chum. Some mild "anti-colonial" feeling against Britain was tempered by equally mild opposition to the dictatorship in Argentina. And there me and my sister were, scanning the shortwave dial at half past midnight and up again for more of the same again at six a.m. Please God, don't let any of our ships have been hit overnight. Friday, April 12, 2002
"Oh, you're still alive then." Twenty years ago Iain Dale learned that a young man of his age and bearing his name had just been killed in the Falklands. Scroll down to March 29 to read his memories. Moppets & Martyrs update. Robert Martin writes: Mr. Alexanian’s strained effort to explain away the photographs is fascinating. It so perfectly illustrates one of the most frustrating aspects of any issue arising in the middle east, the mind-numbing capacity of Palestinians, Arabs, and their supporters to evade the obvious and refuse to deal with facts. Thus the denial that the photographs mean what they clearly do. I assume Mr Martin was referring to this. Layman's logic justifies its name when Mr Sheriff sets out the reasons for war in Afghanistan, and the reasons why Real IRA fundraising should be stomped upon. And our "Moppets & Martyrs Calendar" picture for January shows little Ahmed. I don't actually know the kid's name. I post this picture because I had an e-mail asking me to cite a reference for what I said here about Palestinian toddlers. This still picture is not the TV clip I remembered, just an example of the same sort of thing.
Does anyone else remember seeing a TV news clip showing older youths crawling under ropes meant to show a minefield while what looked like very little kids dressed in white looked on? The kids dressed in white were wearing things that looked like the floatation belts used by learner swimmers, but painted black.
BTW The letter surrounding the picture makes some fair points about the need for accuracy, and for preserving the safety of reporters and photographers. But I don't really think the question of whether one of the masked figures was or was not the child's father is that important. (Nor does the fact that at least one of the masked figures was either a teenage boy or girl rather than an adult necessarily mean that they were not "for real". Many suicide bombers have been teenagers.) Does anyone think that the child shown was there without the consent of his family and his society? Which do you think is the better description of what was being done to him: "training to be a suicide bomber" or "just dressing up"?
UPDATE: February's picture can be found in this Christian Friends of Israel website. Use control-F and search for "Palestinian child". The small picture on the extreme right appeared originally in the Jerusalem Post under the heading "Child's Play", and shows a Palestinian child dressed as a terrorist at a Hamas rally to celebrate that organisation's 12th anniversary.
In November 2000 Justus Reid Weiner wrote this essay on the use of children in the Al-asqua intifada. It is particularly useful in that it is fully footnoted. Here are some excerpts: Television broadcasts frequently include what in many Western countries would be deemed "hate speech." On July 2, 1998, in derogation of its commitments to combat incitement under the interim peace agreements (discussed below), a Palestinian television children's show called "The Children's Club," similar in its basic structure to "Sesame Street," aired an episode in which young boys with raised arms chanted "We are ready with our guns; revolution until victory; revolution until victory."35 On the same show, an 8-year-old boy announced to the audience (a group of children), "I come here to say that we will throw them to the quiet sea. Occupiers, your day is near, then we will settle our account. We will settle our claims with stones and bullets."36 Also on the Children's Club program, on February 8, 1998, a girl who could not have been more than ten years old declared that she wanted to "turn into a suicide warrior" in Jerusalem.37(That last is the sort of activity I think I remember seeing on film.) ANOTHER ONE: This article by Ibrahim Hazboun describes children dressing as suicide bombers. Children, not toddlers; but it does show that the practice occurs.
My opinion of Jonathan Freedland has gone up. The man flies his flag. This column begins, "These are days for republicans to walk humbly...", talks plainly about his own misjudgement of the country's mood and then goes on to say why he thinks a connection with the past could be maintained even were the monarchy to go. It's called The story of us, not them. For my part I am pretty sure that the sort of Britain to ditch the monarchy would also be the sort of Britain where the teachers and education bureacrats would ensure that only the story of an extremely select subgroup of "us" reached the history books. The New Class are already well on the way to wiping out certain memories. Look what they did to the Maritime Museum at Greenwich. Thursday, April 11, 2002
"The Bush Administration Plays The Daniel Pearl Race Card." is the title of a commentary by Ray Vaughn in The Black World Today. An admirer of whatreallyhappened.com, Common Dreams C-Span and a Harry Browne voter (presumably because of the drugs angle; I can't imagine Mr Browne's views on racial preferences would meet with Mr Vaughn's approval), Mr Vaughn gives his inimitable views on... everything that pops into his head, really. He tells us all about "the Reichstaff fire" and "How The Leader's is joined by his parrot Tony Blair" [the spare apostrophe represents the parrot, I suppose] and how "We also know about MKultra and COINTELPRO" [I don't], interspersed with randomly generated comments like "with two you get egg rolls" and "It also provides a cover for carrying out racist agendum." I know nothing about the status of The Black World Today. It has an authoritative name, claims to be big and boasts a swanky website, but that proves nothing these days. I sincerely hope that the claim made elsewhere in TBWT's website, that "The professionalism and experience of our world-class team of editors, writers, columnists and correspondents is unmatched in black publishing," is either a lie or true in an unintentional direction.
Echoes from Algeria. I found this excerpt in John and Antonio's Inside Europe: Iberian Notes: From Modern Times by Paul Johnson, pages 497-98: John and Antonio also give the Republican side in and before the Spanish Civil War a less easy ride than is customary. You mean - we have to pay for this? UK Transport Blog's Patrick Crozier reprints and expands upon an Independent article about the Government belatedly waking up to the idea of "you nationalize it - you pay for it, chum" and safety. Crozier is going to be famous. He has the knack of coining ideas linked to physical facts. For instance, somewhere he talks about how the reason that rail travel cannot be split up admistratively in the way that air travel can is that the train is continually touching the rail. This constant friction in the literal sense produces all sorts of friction in the Clausewitzian sense. Constant non-catastrophic repairs, constant knock on effects, you need a unified system. (Which does not and should not mean a State system, so all you hopeful Guardian readers who rushed up to embrace me for having seen the light can go home again.) Whereas air travel is nodular both literally and figuratively. You can break off a bit and work on it separately because you can wield the scissors in some of that empty space.
Another Crozier idea is the "rhythm of an enterprise." Once punctuality is lost it is very difficult to regain it. Which links in somehow with the daily tasks that employees perform. I'm not expressing this very well, which is why I am impressed with them as can. Choosing to be deaf. Here the Guardian prints a selection of letters concerning the child engineered to be deaf. The best was from Sheenagh Pugh of Cardiff: "Sharon Ridgeway seems to assume the statement "hearing is preferable to not hearing" is equivalent to saying "hearing people are better than deaf people". They aren't, but they are incomparably luckier, as I suspect my deaf father and brother-in-law would be the first to agree. When She says "deaf people are no more disabled than someone who speaks French, Italian or Japanese" she speaks as if hearing involved nothing but language. People who speak French, Italian and Japanese can also hear birdsong, Bach and the voices of their loved ones. Those who have never had that blessing, as Jeanette Winterson rightly calls it, are, frankly, ill-qualified to evaluate the lack of it.One could take the absurdity further. The mentally disabled are our fellow human beings. God does not love them the less. I'm not sure, on average, that they are any less happy than those of normal intelligence. Certainly they have their own sense of community. So why not, following this logic, deliberately starve babies of oxygen during birth? Yesterday was my highest ever hit-count, at 878. One day I'll install Bravenet and find out who you all are. The timing of the hits recorded on my BeSeen hit counter suggests that you are nearly all either Americans or insomniacs. Read Norweigan Blogger. He's Norweigan. He blogs. He rules. (In my youth we used to say, "rules OK" but in time of war one drops the superfluous. So I won't say where I found this one.) Senator Clay Waters has in his hand a list of known warbloggers.... (found on Tim Blair) Mr Waters suggests that if one's name has not been included one should sign up to "Warblogger Watch". Sniff. I'd have really preferred not to have to ask. You ain't seen nuthin' yet. Following on from the last post, if you think former Coventry City goalie and Green Party spokesman David Icke's conspiracy theories are weird, go and look in the Handbasket. Also if you scroll up to the top, Mr Rummel gives concentric definitions of the word "Yankee", having heard my account of Moira Breen's inappropriate adventures with the word. Wednesday, April 10, 2002
Puny mammalian scum! Soon you will all be our slaves! Yes, the glorious day is coming when the green of skin will assume their rightful dominance over all lesser races! Hahahahaha! Oops. Broke my cover for a minute there. Mustn't panic, those humans are too dozy to notice. It's all that disgusting warm blood they have; it overheats their brains. That Gary Farber, though, he may have some inkling... Arf a mo before I go. Some fun from Chris Pastel: Well, I don't have a fancy Newton, but I do have an ordinary HP 32S which tells me that 28.41 ml (1 fl. oz in UK) times 16 ozes (obviously the plural for "oz") to the pint gives 454.56 ml, which divided by two gives 227.28 which rounds down to 227 ml for arf a pint. UPDATE / VAGUELY RELATED COMMENT: My dear husband used to be the sane one. So why did I just hear him saying, while sitting next to me measuring bits of cardboard for a remote controlled buggy, "I do like the simple, basic fact that a millimetre is 1/25 of an inch." (Pause) The French realised the doomed nature of their civilization..." Alex Bensky writes: Unfortunately I don't even question the recent report from Norway about someone made to remove his jacket in the parliament buildings because it had a Star of David--while pro-Palestinian regalia goes unchallenged and unremarked upon. This is merely part of the anti-Semitic wave crashing across Europe, as dismally documented by you and other bloggers. This is, I suppose, part of that superior and more sophisticated and cultured European culture that Europeans keep offering to teach Americans. Perversely we continue to engage in our greedy, oppressive, consumer-mad culture. Yet, oddly enough, I note that except among Moslems, some blacks, and the usual fringe crackpots, anti-Semitism barely registers. To the astonishment of our chattering classes but to no one else, fundamentalist Christians' voting patterns didn't seem to be affected one way or the other by an Orthodox Jew on the ballot. It is inconceivable that any national or state legislature would bar a Star of David if it allowed other symbols. And of course, lacking the wonderful structures of the European Union, such an activity would be flatly unconstitutional. The Norwegians will no doubt continue to sneer at us crass Americans. I can live with that. Ah, but you don't have to live in Norway. I keep on hoping to see a wave of reaction against all this. There was that pro-Israel march in France. It would be interesting to know how many of the marchers were gentiles. If the point comes up I always stress that I am not a Jew. I do this because (a) I'm not, and (b) one popular measure of the moral rightness of a case is whether it can attract supporters who have nothing to gain personally. It's obvious to me that's why Moira Breen made it clear she wasn't a Jew, when Netlexblogger (sorry, can't make link work. Look in Moira's site under the word "classified") mistakenly said that she was. His reply starts off OK, but then opportunistically siezes on her jokey reference to being "accused of being British", and continues in this not entirely nice way: It seems that the terms "jewish" is problematic for some pro-israel supporters who pride themselves to stand by the Israeli nationalists, but would feel offended to be "accused" of being members of the jewish people. Let's make it clear. "Jewish" is not an insult on this weblog. Nor is it an insult of being taken for someone else, jewish or not, unless you have serious personal identity problems to solve. Is it insulting to be taken for a "jew" ? Since when has "jewish" become a slang word ? [SNIP] So it is my view that my wording using the term "jewish blogger" was not insulting anybody. [SNIP] So the question is why do some people of WASP background have so little trouble identifying with the Israelis, but would find it almost insulting to be really taken for jews ? It reminds me that some deported jews by the nazis reported that the day the gates of their concentration camp were opened by the Allies, some of their "fellow-prisoners" were shouting by their side to their liberators "I'm not jew. I'm a true prisoner". Today, why should someone reclaim so loud not being called "jewish", making a point of honnor in saying to the face of the world that he or her is a true ("damn") Yankee ? (Note that i would never use the expression "damn" Yankee in my blog that would sound very pejorative when translated in french). By the way, what is the definition of a true "Yankee" ? I sometimes get accused of being American. Even San Franciscan. I try to bear it bravely. Two cheers for the monarchy. Andrew Sullivan is clearly a good deal less attached to the monarchy than I am. Perhaps for that very reason he has expressed better than I could why those who seek to abolish it should be passionately opposed. This is from near the end of the article: Besides, as a practical matter, the monarchy could only be successfully retired and an alternative constructed if there were overwhelming public support. As long as a significant proportion of the country wanted to keep it - even a minority - the replacement would be so constitutionally divisive that it would undermine its own rationale. The Windsors would not be executed. They'd live on somewhere. And plenty of Daily Telegraph readers would still regard them - regardless of the new constitutional settlement - as the legitimate sovereign. We'd be replacing an institution with which many are tired with an institution against which many are passionately opposed. That's called undermining the basic political order - and unless there's a vital reason for doing so, no responsible government would or should dream of it. Abandoning the pound would be divisive enough. Getting rid of the monarchy in the same breath would be tantamount to the destruction of large swaths of political legitimacy in the country at large. It simply can't be done. And it won't be done. A nation isn't simply its people today. It's also its people yesterday. It's a contract, to paraphrase Burke, not just between the current generations but between all the generations who have ever made it up, and especially those that played such a vital role in making it what it is today. For them, the monarchy mattered. That's why it should also matter to us, even if we cannot begin to think of it in even vaguely the same way. Saudis, too, help suicide-murderers turn a profit. At Ken Layne.com I found this UPI article by Pam Hess. Towards the end of the article we had this statement by a Mr Ibrahim Hooper, spokesman for the Washington-based Council on American Islamic Relations: ""Sometimes I'd like to ask these people who criticize these things (the funds) to find a list of Palestinian orphans who shouldn't be fed. Give us a list of Palestinian widows and orphans so Muslims can comply with dictates of not feeding the wrong people," Hooper said. "Are you supposed to penalize some child, some widow, because of what their father did or did not do?" Hey, you can ask some of "these people". Ask me.
I answer: it doesn't take that many thousands of dollars to keep a child fed. You don't have to make a widow rich on the proceeds of murder.
I answer: the majority of the families of evil, psycopathic suicide bombers are, of course, evil and psychopathic themselves. When discussing the death cult dominant in present day Palestine and influential across much of the Muslim world, certain sad but true observations must be made. It is regrettable, but all too likely to be true, that the parents of suicide bombers are evil, their brothers are evil, their sisters are evil, their spouses are evil, and their children are born innocent but rendered evil by about the age of eight. We see them do the work of corrupting these children on our TV screens, when they parade toddlers wrapped about with mock bombs and teach them to sing of murdering Jews. There is no reason to suppose that a task at which so many Palestinian parents and teachers work so assiduously does not meet with success.
Perhaps some of these children can be rescued even now. My goodness, perhaps even some of the adults can be saved, but I'll concentrate on the case of the children since organizations like CAIR do seem very concerned about these orphans. By the grace of God, great things are possible. Some of the children kidnapped by warlords and death-cults in Africa and forced to kill as an initiation test have indeed been restored to humanity and morality. Of course the task is harder in Palestine than in Uganda or Burundi because the Palestinian children, unlike the African ones, were warped and abused by their own parents.
Since Mr Hooper has so kindly expressed an interest in this fine work of giving these abused Palestinian children a chance to grow up into normal human beings, I am happy to respond with my suggestions.
Tuesday, April 09, 2002
Random Jottings is my baby. Yep, that's what John Weidner says. Wow. I'm honoured. (John sent me my second ever Reader Comment. The first was from Brian Linse, and Dawson wasn't far behind.) But, as I said to Glenn Reynolds when adding myself to his list of Instapundit-inspired blogs, what if offspring-blogs start suing parent-blogs for blog maintenance? Talking of Brian Linse, he leads a busy life over there in the Den of Lions. "We had to kill two people, make Stephen and Laura fall in love, and cut a deal with an international terrorist." Whither 227ml? You guys are on the ball. Captain Heinrichs writes: According to the authoritative converter on my Newton MessagePad 2000, in the UK: 1 fluid oz = 28.41 ml .4 pints = 227 ml However in the US: 1 fluid oz =29.57 ml .48 pints =227 ml My listing: 1 fluid ox = never use it, have shot glasses 1/2 cup = 112 ml (also called "Little Scoop") 1 coffee cup = 1 serving instant soup 1 cup = 250 ml (also called "Big Scoop") >1 cup = gauge relative quantity of basic ingredient, add remaining ingredients to taste Be creative! Cheers J.M. Heinrichs What on earth is going on? 0.48 of a US pint is very close to half a pint, but not exactly. No cook yet born can differentiate between 227ml and 228ml so why that exact number? Is 227ml the equivalent of some Thai measurement I don't know about? Is it a secret act of resistance on the part of the Blue Dragon company - and if so, resistance against whom? Have a good old slosh of whisky while you ponder this mystery. None so deaf as those that will not hear. Anthony Woodlief rails against efforts to deliberately concieve a deaf child. In an empty house, my screams echo from the walls. Er, possibly I am getting overwrought about this. But some things just get to you. I just cooked some Blue Dragon Thai 3-minute noodles from a packet. No, they weren't that bad, really quite acceptable. Only - grrr-I'mgoingtoexplodeagain! - on the instructions it said, "Bring to the boil 227ml of water and blah blah blah..." 227ml is half a pint.
So why can't they just say, "half a pint"?
or "227ml or half a pint"
or even, if they must, "250ml"?
Instead, in obedience to who knows what "guideline" they have to say a sum that means half a pint while contorting themselves to avoid putting in print that dreaded, unmentionable obscenity at which all good folk must make signs warding off the Evil Eye, an Imperial measure. Khatami's Iran described by Michael Rubin. This struck me forcefully: "In his recently published memoirs, Grand Ayatollah Husayn Ali Montazeri described a purge in 1988 of political prisoners that resulted in several thousand deaths. Khatami was a member of the ruling council at the time and intimately involved - at least administratively - in the purge." Note how large the number of deaths and how recently they occurred. Brownshirt Barbie. Angie Shultz sent me this wonderfully nostalgic e-mail. Her words appear in italics, mine in ordinary type: Natalie,
Action Man was a jolly sight easier to dress on account of having ball-and-socket joints somewhat resembling one of Larry Niven's Protectors. Unfortunately these joints were a weak point in his anatomy and after a year or two of bungee-jumping on a piece of string thrown from the landing railings Action Man became Quadriplegic Man. Sindy #2 tended him lovingly, while Sindy #1 (helped by her unjointed but squidgy legs) took over his missions, at least when I was in charge she did. Ken was deemed unfit for combat duties as his legs had been paralyzed into a rigid position even when new. Also his waist was too wide for Action's trousers. Tut tut, Ken.
Monday, April 08, 2002
What are friends for? Bitter Girl reports that, knowing of her womanly habit of knitting things, one of her chers amis sent her a most bizarre article and sweetly said I thought of you. What she said in reply her blog does not reveal. And she thought to forward it to me! She knew I liked to sew, you see. Er, Shannon, I'm more into fluffy soft toys. Kittens. Squirrels. Maybe I'm just old fashioned. You go follow the link to see what the creative toymaker is into these days. Feeling happy? I can cure that. Read both Damianation and The World After WTC. Quote from the latter: "Who would have guessed that the road to the hearts of 21st century Norwegians would pass through the blood-soaked floors of Israeli restaurants?" It's painful to be at odds with most opinion in your own country. Here in Britain I can sometimes persuade myself that there is a silent majority giving the lie to the establishment view on, say, Europe. And I think Tony Blair is doing the more or less the right thing regarding Iraq etc. However, when it comes to some of my more far-flung libertarian opinions - guns for instance - hooo boy I am out there on the nut fringe and there is no fudging the fact that 95% if not 99% of decent British folk would reject my views if they could bring themselves to believe that I was serious in holding them. But I doubt that hurts me anything like as much as the peverse response of Norweigan public opinion to the daily outrages in Israel hurts Bjorn Staerk, or the PC blabber in Canada hurts Damian Penny. (Light relief: I'm afraid I still can't do the aelig, oslash and aring things. Back on January 24th the Strong Bear told me how, but when talking to me about computers you have to use very short words indeed, and can't complicate the issue with "&" signs. The level I want is: Press This Key. Now Press That Key. You Can Breathe Now.) Even a priestess of the anglosphere cult must take a moment to congratulate France on an almost embarrassingly definite victory in the Six Nations. Rugby has spread in an unusual way. Usually the mark of history is quite clear: the Indians play cricket and the Cubans baseball. Soccer, of course, was created fully formed as part of the human genome. But what other sport links the countries of the British Isles, France, Italy, Fiji, New Zealand and South Africa? UPDATE: Okay, okay, I know the origin of the game. Dr Arnold picked up Harry Flashman and ran with him or something like that. Then Martin Luther split the game up into Union and League and so we continue to the present day. Floreat Etona. I should have said that rugby is odd in having two separate mechanisms of diffusion: a British Empire one and a purely geographical one.
Views of the South again. Southern boy Patrick Carver quotes a radio commentary on Mississippi achievements. I certainly didn't know about the ballet, but I did know about the heart and lung transplants. Some people asked if I am on some sort of crusade to restore the Confederacy. No, just challenging a stereotype. Bear facts - there are a whole lot of intriguing stories flagged up on Dodgeblog over the last few days, particularly the creekwater thing. Have these people ever heard of Weil's Disease, also known as Rat Syphilis? But actually, being a straightforward bear fan, I am moved to Just Say Wow about a British TV programme that MommaBear is unlikely to have seen yet. It was all about large carnivores in Romania. Did you know that there are more bears in Romania than in all the rest of Europe combined? Or that, for fear of wolves and bears, Romanian shepherds really do wrap themselves in sheepskin coats and lie down to sleep beside their flocks? It was like seeing the opening scene of the Christmas story by infra-red camera.
BTW Momma Bears are admirable role models. Sadly Daddy Bears are not, particularly if you are a stepchild. Elizabeth, the Queen Mother RIP. OK, so my hackles did rise just a bit at that word state in the phrase "exaltation of the British state" in this quintessential Telegraph leader - but, hey, that's just me. Other than that I'm cheering the writer on, and a pox be upon the knave Freedland, who writes for AOL's diddy little news magazine as well as for the Guardian, so I get him both ways. Just why did people queue for so long to see a flag with a coffin-shaped bulge under it? First, let me admit to be present two factors which Mr Freeland has no doubt also mentioned. The sun shone and it's the school holidays. But nobody spends twelve hours making smalltalk with two randomly-chosen strangers just to have a day out and give the kids something to tell their kids. The main reason, of course, was that she was widely loved and with good cause. As everyone keeps saying because it is true, her death marks the end of an era. There are perhaps three or four hundred people in Britain who were alive before she was, and few enough who remember the world before she became a public figure, which I take to have first happened in a small way in about 1915. The Queen Mother and the royal family generally are symbols of permanence and identity in a dangerous and anonymous world.
It may seem odd to talk about a woman who has just died as a symbol of permanence. But of course her influence will survive her by decades or even centuries, as Queen Victoria's did. (Although without meaning any disrespect it cannot be as far-reaching as Victoria's, who managed to have a whole era named after her, the kind of score you just can't top.) Memories of her particular life will flow like a stream to join the river of kings 'n' battles 'n' prime ministers 'n' Alfred burning the cakes. I hope and trust it'll take more than Peter Sissons' bloody burgundy tie to make that river run dry.
Saturday, April 06, 2002
All can have prizes, I don't mind. Belatedly, I'd like to respond to Ben Sheriff's criticism of this old post of mine. [FUTZ! Internal link stopped working when archives updated on Sunday. Just click the man himself: he quotes all you need to know.] He thinks I'm too mean to hard-working but limited students. Actually, I did once, and with fair success, teach remedial maths and English and I was always careful to guard the pride of my students. What I objected to in the letter was the nonsensical and demeaning assumption that an F was as good as an A. It is not (although the F student may be as good a person as the A student), and that hard fact of life is better learned early. It was said in the old days that noblemen only learned one art well, that of horsemanship. That was because "the brave beast is no flatterer and will as readily throw a prince as his groom." What once went for princes now goes for young black boys in state schools. The one art they learn truly is football, because there the crude coaches will give them the unedited information they need in order to progress. Their highly qualified teachers don't.
Here, though, is one change that might please everyone at no cost in honesty. Rather than have GCSEs or A-Levels (or whatever they call them this week) graded A - F, so that everyone knows in their heart that D to F are failing grades, why not have the same upwards-pointing grading system as now exists in music?
A "Grade 1" would be the most basic level. A "Grade 8" would be advanced knowledge. No grade 2 pianist fools themselves into believing that they are as good at the piano as a grade 3 pianist, but on the other hand our grade 2 boy or girl most reasonably thinks of his or her grade as an achievement gained, not as a failure to get the next grade up. I'm not saying this BBC News 24 article on documents found by the IDF in Arafat's compound is particularly good - but at least I can apply the "blog this" function to it. The ordinary blogger website doesn't seem to be working. Later: Blogger is back. And so am I. After ten days of Welsh countryside, unseasonal sunshine and happy ignorance of the mayhem in Israel, I cannot say that it is an unmixed pleasure to reconnect to the wider world.
I am conscious that people a great deal better informed than I have talked this subject into the ground. But, for what it's worth, here are some thoughts:
If I could go back in time and had the power that always is supplied with such fantasies, I'd do everything possible to disentangle terrorist Palestinians from non-terrorists. As several people have observed it's extremely odd to find the Christian Arabs in bed with Arafat. And, among Muslim and Christian Arabs alike, there ought to be a solid block of people whose prosperity resulted from trade with their Israeli neighbours. The fact that there isn't is a rebuke to Israel. And look what happened to Israel's allies in Lebanon.
But I can't go back in time. Here and now the malign death-fixated collective identity of the Palestinians seems to have extinguished all other voices. The whole strategy of the suicide bomber is to make sure that the others of his race cannot be trusted. (Yes, they also wish simply to kill Jews. But even people as mad as they are they cannot believe that they will kill a significant proportion of the Israeli population. As with all terrorism the main aim is to bring down reprisals which will inflame formerly passive groups and hence bring about ordinary war.) And, for now, the suicide bombers have succeeded in that aim.
So it's war. Bad news. I was going to call war the ultimate expression of collectivism, but that is wrong. Genocide is the ultimate expression of collectivism. War is bad news but not the worst of news.
Infantile Italians. Look, I never thought much of the Roman law that a son was subject to his father's rule even to the extent of the son being put to death at the command of the paterfamilias. But this is taking things to the other extreme. Reuters report that an Italian court verdict holds that a father must continue to support his eternal student son (the boy is now in his thirties) until sonny deigns to announce that he has found a job "in line with his aspirations." Hi. I'm back. And where do I turn to get some market-oriented common sense about football? Why, the Guardian, of course. Talking of free markets, reader, hip-hoppist and fellow-blogger Cal Ulmann points out that, "If the state was not giving away internet service for free, via the library, a market may have existed."
Saturday, March 30, 2002
Er... you know that promised internet cafe? The one from which I planned to send holiday postcards has devolved into a mere supplier of food. (I suppose everyone is now connected up themselves. An interesting economic parallel to the demise of the launderette.) By dint of great cunning I have found this terminal at a public library. The State supplies where the market fails - how embarrassing. However the family seem strangely lacking in enthusiasm for me spending my day attached to a computer. Thanks for the e-mails. The American Civil War seems to be quietly re-running itself in a virtual arena inside my e-mail cache. Have fun boys, let me know when you get to Pickett's Charge, and I'll borrow Mike's Remington. I'm going to run away now and play at the seaside. Back Saturday. Sunday, March 24, 2002
One guilt trip and one real life trip. The guilt trip is over my e-mail, which is piled up so high in the computer that I'm surprised it doesn't start leaking out of the speakers. What with the mind-devouring jigsaw yesterday and it being Palm Sunday today (a bunch of us walked to church accompanied by a real life donkey) and kids and life and washing and packing and stuff I haven't got round to answering it, although I have read it all. And now my eyes grow heavy with sleepzzz. Sorry, I will try to catch up in the next few days, although... ... that will be difficult, as we plan to visit family over the Easter period. I'm hoping to check into an internet cafe on at least some of the days. But posting will be erratic, unless someone cares to drop the price of a laptop into the tips jar, not that I'm hinting or anything. "Doctor, doctor, I've turned invisible." "Next!" I was on the floor over this one. There's this chap, see, and he writes an opinion piece for the Telegraph. And it's all about how no-one takes any notice of him when he sounds off about crime and immigration. I dunno why he wants to go on about that stuff all the time, who does he think he is, Home Secretary? Anyway - this'll kill ya, oh it really will - then the Telegraph totally forgets to put his name or job on the article. The (US) South saved civilization, according to both Mark Byron and Possumblog. Mr Byron, who admits to exaggerating slightly, argues forcefully that the gifts of the South to the world in the century just past are military expertise, political and Biblical conservatism and an example of a peaceful and in large measure successful struggle for racial equality. Mr Possum (who is really called Mr Oglesby, but no one can have such a cute blog name as Possumblog and then expect to get away scot free) has a slightly different hypothesis. Mr Byron says he picked up the idea for the post from a book which describes how the Irish monks kept the flame alive in the Dark Ages. And so they did, say I with pardonable pride in my forbears. Only my Welsh husband says it was the Welsh, and St David was the teacher of St Patrick.
Many people in Britain have a very quaint idea of the South. About twelve years ago I was in a wannabe writers' circle, and while reviewing another member's story I recall questioning whether a government employee in modern Mississipi would really get away with saying to a subordinate, "smart for a nigger, aintcha?" (In fairness to the writer, who was quite young at the time, I should say that he immediately took the point, and furthermore it was a good, menacing story.) For my own part, I only found out that so many of the mayors of the cities in the South were black through newspaper stories concerning the series of murders of young boys in Atlanta.
Perhaps British ignorance can be excused, though, on the grounds that there don't seem to be many US films or TV programs that feature the South just as background. There's almost always a plot line involving racial tension. Or maybe it's just that BBC and ITV won't buy any show that features Southern accents unless the plot features racial tension.
There remains one Serious Issue that I simply must resolve. It's hot over there, right? So when you people wear dungarees and no shirts, don't the metal clips get hot against the skin? I forsook the lot of you yesterday, and for what? To do a fiendishly difficult Harry Potter jigsaw. It's in the form of a circle covered with distorted images that only resolve into an actual picture when reflected in the shiny plastic cup that comes with it. I do one jigsaw about every five years, and when I'm not doing one I am quite clear that they are a complete waste of time. All that work, and then the end product clutters up your living room for two weeks until someone kicks the bit of hardboard it's lying on. I wish the Labour Theory of Value were true, for if it were I would surely get thousands for that tricky solid black area at one edge. Saturday, March 23, 2002
This letter struck a heavy blow against my self-image. I always thought I was Mol-ra's evil twin. Now I find out she's mine. Waah, boo-hoo, I want to be the baddie and get all the best lines. Here's the letter: Your post All Must Have Prizes caused me to think of this post by your Evil Twin, Ms. Breen: [link refers to an article by one Shawna Gale who went to Yale and is cross because she's unemployed - NS] What is the connection? That the letter writer is following the same theory you belabor in your post: she spent a lot of time and effort on her degree therefore it must be worth a lot, only the stupid society around her won't recognize that fact.Indeed so. The same phenomenon was observed by Samizdatan David Carr. During his time in the entertainment industry he developed the theory that the reason why actors, directors and so on are so left-wing was that they all worked their socks off to produce something frightfully meaningful for the Edinburgh Fringe and then played it to an audience of their mothers. If only, they dream, society was so arranged as to ensure them an audience. They worked for it, didn't they? Sailors and librarians. Christopher Pastel replies, neatly drawing together several lines of discussion: "I have my doubts about removing paint to make the ships less flammable. Perhaps that was true for a short time in the aftermath of the Battle of the Coral Sea, but the ongoing reason for removing old paint is to remove the rusty spots before applying a new coat of paint. Have you ever been to sea for an extended period of time? The salt eats away at everything, and only constant cleaning (swabbing the decks) and constant repair (chipping and painting) keep the ships from becoming floating rustbuskets. Yes, it's also important to keep the troops and sailors busy (I was a Marine serving on a ship when enlisted as part of Ship's Company and when an officer as part of the Embarked Troops), but it's even more important to keep the equipment in good shape. Genocide studies is a deeply weird field. Well, it would be. Whenever I have dipped my toes in those waters I've whipped them out again quick, not just in recoil from the horrific nature of the subject - I would scarcely have opened a web page with that word in the title had I not had some idea of what the contents were likely to be - but also in instinctive revulsion from the schools of demented little professors and "educators" who scavenge in the wake of the pirhanas. Emmanuel Goldstein of Airstrip One has caught in his net a document produced by just such people. And it's "Approved by the New Jersey Commission on Holocaust Education on September 10th, 1996, for inclusion in the Holocaust and Genocide Curriculum at the secondary level." He thinks that shows the moral bankruptcy of the Anglosphere. It certainly shows that American Irish historians of the famine are frequently far shallower than their Irish Irish equivalents. But we all knew that anyway. However, does Mr Goldstein really think that the authors of this course of study have any less hatred for America than for Britain? So long as they are listing an oddly-chosen rag bag of British crimes spanning the last four centuries (to view, try Control F and "British Colonial Policies") then they are full of patriotic anger regarding the treatment of American prisoners in the Revolutionary War. But just wait till next term (semester) when the class does the Indian Wars and see what they say then. The fact is that there is a whole class of minor academics who were once moved and outraged by the suffering of the Irish at the hands of the British, or by the suffering of other races at the hands of whites. But that motivation has long ago ceased to interest them. They'd hate Ireland too, if they stayed there long enough to hear the church bells ring. Friday, March 22, 2002
The librarians have not yet begun to fight. Christopher Johnson of MCJ defends the honour of his much maligned tribe. The Navy Lark. Reader Jim Miller said that Myria's experiences in a semiconductor plant, and the general discussion of mindless and mindful adherence to Policy put him in mind of The Caine Mutiny. "In the book, a cynical, experienced officer explains to a new one how the US Navy worked. It is a system, he says, designed by geniuses to be run by idiots."As ever policy sometimes lagged behind reality: "...the WW II Navy systems drove the new competent people nuts when they encountered them. And many had to be altered to cope with the actual war conditions. My favorite example: For years, to keep the sailors busy, the Navy had had them paint everything on the ships, over and over. This turned out to make them much more flammable, as they learned at the battle of Coral Sea, and so the sailors were then set to scraping off the paint they had applied earlier."Yet I read this (and I have no reason to suppose that Mr Miller thinks otherwise) as more than just another "top brass are all twits" story. "Keeping the sailors busy" was not such a bad objective - the evil consequences of idleness in an army or a navy are well known.. Just so long as the bull does not become a substitute for readiness and ability to fight. All I need are clicks, clicks. Clicks are all I need. With a little help from my friends the hit-counter should hit forty thousand today. But will you still need me, will you still feed me, when I'm sixty four? Link to this. Google caves in to pressure from the Church of Scientology. However Instapundit, where I found this Microcontent News story, later reports that Google has got back its nerve. Ethnic politics: don't play with fire. And that's about all I know of the rights and wrongs of the conflict in Sri Lanka, but these lines from an editorial in the ColomboPage: Sri Lankan News and Daily Reports struck a chord: "....It is a reasonable point of view, considering that the US has itself declared a war on terror and has banned the LTTE [Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam] within its shores. It is, in any event, almost unprecedented for the US to issue a warning while a peace process is in progress. Obviously there is a change of heart in the US as far as its policy on the LTTE is concerned. The US government did not raise a whimper when there was LTTE aggression of much meaner and destructive proportions several years back into the conflict. There have been several documented instances where the US government issued statements that the Sri Lankan government should “enter into a negotiated settlement” soon after the Tigers had carried out bombings in Colombo city, for instance." The witchunt. Let's get one thing clear. The child's torso found in the Thames was all too real. The police are working with grim seriousness to find those who murdered and dismembered a child for purposes of witchcraft. So such things can happen. That said, I welcome this blast of cold reason on the subject of Satanic abuse from Damian Thompson in the Telegraph. (A pound to a penny the panic-mongers are reading hideous mystic significance into the fact that he's called Damian. You know, The Omen.) In truth, Thompson is too restrained. He writes: "...village gossip about satanic practices led to the removal of nine children from their homes; after a £6 million inquiry, all charges were dismissed and social workers criticised for planting ideas in children's heads."Stuff the six million pounds. Some of those children were removed from their homes as toddlers and kept by the State for five years. Parents, think about that. Transcripts of the original interrogations - no other word will fit - show not merely leading questions, but a remorseless verbal pummelling of the children from which only one answer would free them. We are so used to seeing the word "witchunt" as an allegory for McCarthyism that we forget how the word arose, how it came to be feared. The widening circle of denunciations that fuelled the frenzy followed a pattern already old before Salem. Thursday, March 21, 2002
All must have prizes. My dears, such a quaint letter has appeared in the Times Educational Supplement. It quite brings back old times. Where therefore, has the idea come from that only C grade and above is "good"? To imply therefore that those who are below the "norm" are "failing", is to decry the effort they put into achieving their D to G grades.Breathe it in, my loves, breathe it in. That Marxian whiff of the Labour Theory of Value. That Eau de Staffroom 1970, tinctured with patronage. The children of the workers may not be able to read, write or add up, but the poor lambs did their pitiable best. Who is this Stupid White Man Moore anyway? Lileks knows. Great thing about blogging, it gets you kulcha. Had I not blogged I might very well have lived and died in ignorance of the works of Ted Rall, Michael Moore and Elizabeth Wurtzel. Remind me, why do I do this? Expect more of this. Peru car bomb kills nine in an act of terrorism connected with the forthcoming visit of President Bush. The Minstrels' song. I've had a couple of e-mails from those wandering troubadours of the internet (note totally inoffensive metaphor this time, which as an additional bonus makes me a sort of chatelaine who doth invite the noble bard to singeth a new lay unto this right worshipful company. Cool and I dig the wimple), Alex Bensky and Myria. Alex writes, regarding yesterday's lion & oryx story: On the other hand, when I lived in Israel I heard the following story:Now I ask you, is that nice? Turning to the Lileks-inspired discussion of "it's company policy", Myria writes:
EU yet more sneaky evil alert. David Carr at Sammy's Data* should drop a line to Christopher Booker on this one. Or write the Telegraph column himself. Any way you want, man, but make people listen. *This is what my kids call it. Who is the mysterious Sammy? I found this Washington Post editorial via The Corner, which also ran a hilarious selection of results from their "Define 'Oprahfication'" competition. The editorial, however, wasn't funny at all: They Died for Lack of a Head Scarf Wednesday, March 20, 2002
The door of the animal rescue centre opens. Out comes a cute little moppet, NATS, and bounding at her side is a loveable doggie, BLOGWATCH. Suddenly a little boy, TIMMY, rounds the corner. He appears to be basically a fine, manly little chap, but shows signs of having fallen into bad company lately, perhaps even that of editors. TIMMY: Hey! That's my dog!
NATS: Not any more. You wuz crool to Blogwatch. You left him shut inside while you went off places.
TIMMY mutters something about having a living to earn and then says, "I'll prove he's mine. Here Blogwatch! Here boy!"
BLOGWATCH bounds forward... but then stops. He pauses, looking back and forth. His tail thumps the floor once. Then he turns and scampers off to join NATS. The two new friends go off into the sunset without a backward glance. TIMMY turns for home, shedding bitter tears of remorse. "If only," he sobs brokenly, "if only I had taken him out more when I had the chance..."
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