Watching the skies

We just got back from a trip to Frome in Somerset. It would have been nice to wander around the town for a bit, but we started out late and had to get back to get dinner on.

Still, we got what we went for:



It's the Celestron Firstscope 114 - a 4.5 inch reflector - and it's Spud's first telescope.

He read my mind

You know what? I was thinking that Norm's series "The Momma 'n' Daddy Collection" was beginning to run the risk of getting mired in "family circle nostalgia". Mac (who is also a big fan of country music) suggested an antidote in the form of some lyrics from the Mary Gauthier album she bought earlier this year.

So, imagine my surprise when I checked out the latest post in the series to find that Norm has quoted the very lyric that Mac suggested.

Must be something in the air.

$100 bird

Like a lot of people, we’ll be eating turkey today. And what a bird we got!

This not just turkey: this is a free range, dry plucked, hand finished Bronze, reared on a balanced cereal diet, rich in oats and allowed to roam in cherry orchards and meadows.

Yep, once again, we went for a Copas turkey – they’re expensive but really good eating.

Yuletide Greetings

For non-religious families like us Christmas means a tree, presents and a family feast - it's not about cribs, carols and Christian rituals. Our festive traditions - the tree, the holly, the mistletoe - have pagan not Christian roots. Christmas is a flag of convenience for our mid-winter celebration.

I mention this because some people think there's something a little odd about non-believers celebrating Christmas. Or they think we've lost sight of the true meaning of it all. I don't think so. Like Scribbles says, the shoe's on the other foot.

Have a cool Yule.

Religious obsession

Fellow expat Scott Callahan notes the BBC's seeming obsession with overstating the role of religion in American society.

Though, to my mind, the BBC is not the worst offender, the Guardian has long pushed the same line. A while back, Mark Lawson was telling us that "The US is a theocracy suffering from galloping spiritual inflation." And, on Saturday, Harold Bloom chimed in with his observation that the Bush administration "daily fuses more tightly together elements of oligarchy, plutocracy, and theocracy."

OMG! With all that "daily" fusion going on, pretty soon we're going to end up with an oli-pluto-theo thingy. (I'm guessing that would be a Bad Thing.)

My blogson

No 1 Son has started his own blog. His first post is a condemnation of the evils of dog breeding and, by implication, pet breeding in general.

Do I have any advice for him as a novice blogger? Yes, keep those kind of views to yourself around cat bloggers - they'll tear you to pieces.

Bias and distortion

Scott Burgess at the Daily Ablution takes a well-aimed swipe at his favorite target:

[D]espite its all-too-frequently displayed anti-American, anti-Bush agenda, BBC News remains in large part a news organisation. And however flagrant its unabashed editorial slant, the Guardian is still, for the time being at least, a newspaper - if only barely.

The Independent, however, is neither.

Read it all.

Musical accompaniment

Mac just texted me to let me know it's Motown Night on RTE's Mystery Train. You can listen to the show here.

What you waiting for?

Angry headlines

Has anyone else noticed how "angry" the headlines at BBC News are getting, these days?

If you read their site on a regular basis, you might be forgiven for thinking that practically everyone in this country is angry about something or other. Even the clergy, it seems, can scarcely contain their rage.

Don't they know it's one of the seven deadly sins?

Oy vey and little fishes

It's a phrase my grandmother used to use in extremis. I haven't thought about it for years (and I've never heard anyone else say it) but it came back to me this morning when I read the latest pronouncement from the President of Iran.

The BBC reports:

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has courted further controversy by explicitly calling the Nazi Holocaust of European Jewry a "myth". "They have created a myth today that they call the massacre of Jews and they consider it a principle above God, religions and the prophets," he said.
On live TV, he called for Europe or North America - even Alaska - to host a Jewish state, not the Middle East.

I expect a number of European commentators will rush to "contextualize" Ahmadinejad's remarks, explaining to us simple folk why we shouldn't be alarmed - though, somewhat surprisingly, Jonathan Freedland in the Guardian says he's not going to play that game anymore.

[E]veryone has their limits and last week I reached mine. On Thursday the president of Iran chose to stand with the cranks, neo-fascists and racists who deny the factual truth of the Holocaust.
"Some European countries insist on saying that Hitler killed millions of innocent Jews in furnaces," said Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. "Although we don't accept this claim..."

Suddenly, the usual apologetics won't work. No one can say Iran's president was really complaining about Israel or Zionism, rather than Jews. No one can say he was talking about the west's colonial crimes. He was peddling, instead, one of the defining tropes of the racist hard right: Holocaust denial. It is a stance that seeks to deny Jews their history, their suffering, almost their very being. Like denying that African-Americans were ever slaves, it is a move made by those who wish only harm.

Intolerable cruelties

An editorial in today's Times of India addresses the case of an Indian in Saudi Arabia who has been sentenced to be blinded in one eye:

Fyodor Dostoevsky once said that the degree of civilisation in a society can be judged by entering its prisons. The observation can be extended to crime and punishment as well.
That being the case, the punishment meted out to P V Naushad, a working-class Indian expatriate, by a shariat court in Saudi Arabia is a blot on the system of justice in that country.

The court has ordered that one of Naushad's eyes be gouged out as punishment for injuring the eye of an Arab in a scuffle. An eye for an eye is not just barbaric, but a perversion of justice.

[...]

The quest for a more humane definition of justice should not be debated as a clash of civilisations. It is just another, but an important and necessary, step towards the creation of a world that values mercy more than revenge.

Indeed.

Little Atoms redux

The Little Atoms radio show (broadcast fortnightly on Resonance 104.4 FM) features live discussions from a "Rationalist, Pro-science, Atheist, Humanist" perspective.

If you miss a broadcast, you can listen to it here. Previous shows have featured discussions with Norman Geras, David Aaronovitch and Harry from Harry's Place.

Well worth a listen.

Thought for the day

Recovery is not an event, it's a process.

The Best of British

Tim Worstall has the latest Britblog Roundup.

He's also has a thorough fisking of Madeleine Bunting's latest opinion: "Consumer capitalism is making us ill - we need a therapy state".

She may.

Snowclones

There's a rising tide of them, or something.

The Three Rs

Reading, writing, reproducing.

Religious strife

It's a couple of weeks old now, but this headline from the Times caught my attention:

"Church of England evil, say archbishops"

What, really, really evil? Who'd have thunk it!

It's all about "unrepented sexual immorality", seemingly.

Blogging the burka

Scribbles on the burka:

The burka isn't about modesty or religious expression, it's about obliteration of the self; a complete eradication of individuality. It is about making yourself a non-being. I will say it now, I still feel sick when I see a woman in a burka, not because I am racist, not because I have anything against Islam, but because any abuse of the self shocks and upsets me.

Me too.

Link via the inestimable Norm.

Go get 'em Mo

Maureen Lipman meets a Holocaust denier at a North London garden party.

Simply delicious!

Blogroll changes

OUT

A Small Victory: Michele has stopped blogging (never thought I'd see the day) but, as she said, she's been blogging a long time and "eventually long becomes long enough."

Cut on the Bias: Is on indefinite hiatus as Susanna struggles to get her doctorate back on track. Good luck with that.

The Daily Bread: Hasn't been daily for a while, and rarely features bread. Go figure!

Suburban Blight: Appears to have been blighted. A lot of folks are hoping Kelley's ok - me too.

IN

Tim Worstall: Compiler of the BritBlog Roundup and, of course, THE BOOK.

Four OUT and only one IN. Help! My blogroll is shrinking.

Harrumph

Excuse me, just clearing my throat.

It's been so long since I posted on even a semi-regular basis that I'm beginning to fear that I might have forgotten how to blog.

At least I'm not alone.

Festival food

Fed up with turkey? Looking for something a little bit different to put on the table this Thanksgiving?

You might want to try Stuffed Aussie. Angie Shultz has the recipe.

Though personally, if you're going to eat an Antipodean, I'd recommend the New Zealand variety - they're not so tough.

Slavery days

Listen:

"My name is Fountain Hughes. I was born in Charlottesville, Virginia. My grandfather belong to Thomas Jefferson."

Fountain's story and others are available in an online anthology of American slave narratives at the University of Virginia.

In Remembrance

Anthem for Doomed Youth

What passing-bells for these who die as cattle?
Only the monstrous anger of the guns.
Only the stuttering rifles' rapid rattle
Can patter out their hasty orisons.
No mockeries now for them; no prayers nor bells;
Nor any voice of mourning save the choirs,-
The shrill, demented choirs of wailing shells;
And bugles calling for them from sad shires.

What candles may be held to speed them all?
Not in the hands of boys but in their eyes
Shall shine the holy glimmers of good-byes.
The pallor of girls' brows shall be their pall;
Their flowers the tenderness of patient minds,
And each slow dusk a drawing-down of blinds.

Wilfred Owen 1893-1918

Man's work

Jon Absalom writes in today's Guardian on the joys of being a househusband:

It is difficult, being a househusband; certainly more difficult than I had imagined. The practical aspects of parenting - naps, meals, baths, bedtimes - are well established. So are the basics of keeping house. None of it is the least bit difficult, once you know how. But a lot of it is boring. And the hours ... they start when it's dark and cold, and they last for an unreasonable amount of time. There is little time to yourself; no time for mulling over your emails, or surfing the web, or popping out for some pleasure shopping. There's no breakfast and a shower before work. You live and sleep on the shop floor.

I tend to refer to myself as a full-time father rather than a househusband, but the work's the same. And it leaves very little time for anything else.

Autumn break

We just got back from our first trip to Center Parcs.

I was hoping to blog while I was away, and maybe catch up on some e-mail, but I couldn't find a wi-fi connection and access to the resort's computers was limited and expensive.

Anyway, it was great to get away and the boys really enjoyed it - they went swimming every day. It was a nice, relaxing break.

But, here's something that struck me when we arrived: the Gideon's Bible on the bedside table seemed strangely out of place. I hadn't expected to find one there and it jarred a little. I had thought we were still in merry old, multi-cultural England but Gideon seemed to be saying:"Welcome to Christendom".

What's going on? Is Center Parcs a specifically Christian organization, or are the Bible Boys paying for the privilege of leaving their trash in my room?

Really, I'd like to know.

Something different

Every now and again, I like to try something new, something I've never done before - and then go at it with a will.

This year's "something new" is acting: I've started a drama course one evening a week. Yes, I'm learning to be an actor!

Last night in class, I acted out a scene from one of Shakespeare's plays and was so surprised by the teacher's response that I have to say, at first, I doubted his sincerity.

T: Ah! You've played this role before.
Me: No.
T: But you've seen the play?
Me: No.
T: You've done a lot of acting though.
Me: Er, no.

Quite embarassing, really - especially having to reveal that I trained originally as an accountant and have spent my working life in business. Maybe I missed my vocation!

Somehow, I doubt it. But you never know!

The Politics Test

Yep, I took it. Turns out, I'm a democrat. Who'd have guessed?

The daily round

Well, Mac left around 8 to go to work - it's the first day of her new job - and I'm back to being full-time father, househusband, head cook and bottle washer.

Hopefully, I'll be able to find time in the day to do some blogging. But before that, there's menu-planning, shopping, cleaning and tidying to be done.

Back later.

Toady's typo

Mac starts a new job on Monday. All this week, she's been getting e-mails from her current co-workers wishing her goodbye and good luck. This one left her somewhat bemused:

"Good luck. I was great working with you."

Heh.

Poker for bloggers

Pokerstars are running a free online poker tournament for bloggers. So, of course, I signed up.

I don't know how many of the bloggers on my blogroll play poker, but I've heard rumours that one or two of them do.

Anti pig control

They can have my stress pig when they pry it from my cold, dead fingers.

The Daily Ablution

Scott Burgess is back at the keyboard, fully refreshed and in fine form.

Family time

Did I ever tell you how proud I am of these guys?



From left to right: The Big Fella, No 1 Son and Spud behaving for the camera - it's not a pose they can hold for long.

Bad blogging day

My apologies to any bloggers who received spurious trackbacks from me, yesterday. I was deleting some half-written draft posts and accidentally published a few of them by mistake.

Sorry, guys.

Thought for the day

"Depression is caused not by submitting to our circumstances but by our anger with ourselves for doing so."

Lewis Wolpert.

BBC bias

Via BBBC: Bias at the BBC? Shome mistake shurely?

In the ghetto

Via PooterGeek's web wandering: Shreena's Live Journal provides an insight into life in a close-knit Indian community in North London.

Most of my extended family live in what could be called a "ghetto" in North London - i.e. almost everyone in their area is Indian (with some Jewish streets) and everyone they socialise with. I'm somewhat at a loss as to what to think about it. On the one hand, I do find it genuinely shocking that my cousins went to schools where there was no mixing between different races and, even more shocking, that this continued at their universities. But, on the other hand, I don't get any sense from my extended family that they wanted, at any point, to "mix" more with whites and it's very clear that they actively avoid blacks and muslims.

It's worth reading the whole thing, though I'd take issue with the idea that the community where Shreena's extended family live "could be called a 'ghetto'." It sounds like an insular community, for sure, but it doesn't come across like a ghetto.

This is a ghetto.

Adventures in Wonderland

Supposedly, when Captain Ed uses a word it means just what Oliver Willis chooses it to mean - neither more or less.

Well, Jeff Goldstein's got something to say about that in a couple of posts on "moribund intentionalism and the death of the author".

Read 'em both.

Atlantic blowhards

Philip Stott has an illuminating post on Hurricane cycles and human hatred over at Envirospin Watch, including a review of the last two hundred years of Atlantic hurricanes, which emphasizes the cyclical nature of hurricane activity over the longer term.

He rightly concludes:

The idea that recent hurricane patterns may be readily attributable to single-variable human-induced 'global warming' is just not tenable.

He also has a thing or two to say about some of the newspaper articles that followed Katrina's aftermath.

Essential reading for the mitigated sceptic.

The Daily Doom

Talking of shrill polemicists, I’ve just seen the front page of today’s Independent. Here’s their lead story:

Super-powerful hurricanes now hitting the United States are the "smoking gun" of global warming, one of Britain's leading scientists believes.

The growing violence of storms such as Katrina, which wrecked New Orleans, and Rita, now threatening Texas, is very probably caused by climate change, said Sir John Lawton, chairman of the Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution.

In support of Lawton’s remarks, the article refers extensively to a paper published in last week’s Science. If they’re referring to the recent paper by Webster, Holland, Curry and Chang: Changes in Tropical Cyclone Number, Duration, and Intensity in a Warming Environment then I think they must have got their wires crossed somewhere, as the authors themselves conclude:

[A]ttribution of the 30-year trends to global warming would require a longer global data record and, especially, a deeper understanding of the role of hurricanes in the general circulation of the atmosphere and ocean, even in the present climate state.

Does that sound like the "smoking gun" of global warming to you?

Mixed marriages

Alice Bachini discovers that marrying an American is a social sin in some quarters:

Among certain Old World circles, marrying an American and moving to Texas are about the most outrageous, personally-insulting actions a person can possibly undertake without breaking the law. When you tell people, and mention that they would be welcome to visit anytime during the next half-century they will probably be alive throughout, they act like you invited them to a new colony on Mars, only more so. “Oh no… I don’t think I’ll ever go there.”

Merchants of doom

Jeremy Rifkin (author of "The Hydrogen Economy"), writing in today's Guardian, blames his fellow Americans for the devastation caused by hurricanes:

Katrina and Rita are the entropy bill for increasing CO2 emissions and global warming. The scientists have been warning us about this for years. They said to keep our eyes on the Caribbean, where the dramatic effects of climate change are first likely to show up in the form of more severe and even catastrophic hurricanes.

[...]

Katrina and Rita, then, are not just bad luck, nature's occasional surprises thrust on unsuspecting humanity. Make no mistake about it. We Americans created these monster storms. We've known about the potentially devastating impact of global warming for nearly a generation. Yet we turned up the throttle, as if to say: "We just don't give a damn."

The problem for doom merchants like Rifkin is that there's little evidence that hurricanes are becoming either more frequent or more severe. Take a look at this table of hurricane strikes to hit the US mainland over the last 150 years, showing the number of hurricanes by decade and the number of major events (Category 3 or greater).

1851-1860.....19.... 6
1861-1870.....15.....1
1871-1880.....20.....7
1881-1890.....22.....5
1891-1900.....21.....8
1901-1910.....18.....4
1911-1920.....21.....7
1921-1930.....13.....5
1931-1940.....19.....8
1941-1950.....24....10
1951-1960.....17.....8
1961-1970.....14.....6
1971-1980.....12.....4
1981-1990.....15.....5
1991-2000.....14.....5
2001-2004.......9.....3


[Source: National Hurricane Center]

If anything, the data indicates a reduction in the number and severity of hurricane strikes since the 1940s. Here's what the AOML's Hurricane Research Division has to say on the issue:

[It] is highly unlikely that global warming has (or will) contribute to a drastic change in the number or intensity of hurricanes. We have not observed a long-term increase in the intensity or frequency of Atlantic hurricanes. Actually, 1991-1994 marked the four quietest years on record (back to the mid-1940s) with just less than 4 hurricanes per year. Instead of seeing a long-term trend up or down, we do see a quasi-cyclic multi-decade regime that alternates between active and quiet phases for major Atlantic hurricanes on the scale of 25-40 years each.

Regardless of the data and contrary to the opinions of experts in the field, a lot of people are blaming Katrina on global warming. We'd do well to remember that many of the people peddling this line, like Jeremy Rifkin, are not members of the evidence-based community but shrill polemicists pursuing their own agenda.

UPDATE
And, talking of shrill polemicists...

Britblog showcase

Tim Worstall has the lastest Britblog Roundup, which is where I found Natalie Bennett's review of "War Reporting for Cowards" by Chris Ayres.

I've been looking for a good read: I've just finished "The World Within War", by Gerald F Linderman and I'm struggling through Michael Oren's "Six Days of War" - comprehensive but hard going.

And yes, I read a lot of books on war - you could say it used to be the family business.

Desparate measures

I sometimes find myself wondering what the phrase "racial equality" actually means, and how we'll know if we ever achieve it. I imagine Trevor Phillips, head of the Commission for Racial Equality, has the answers to both those questions - he certainly has plenty of suggestions for practical action. The problem is they all have an air of desperation about them.

For example, back in March, Phillips proposed that British schools should consider separate classes for black school boys - that would be 'separate but equal', I suppose. He also suggested that black fathers should be denied access to their children if they refused to attend parent teacher meetings - non-black fathers who exhibit the same behaviour would suffer no such sanctions.

Today, as the BBC reports, Phillips will give a speech warning that Britain is in danger of 'sleepwalking' its way into racial segregation. And he suggests new measures are needed to address the problem, including forcing "white" schools to take larger numbers of pupils from ethnic minorities - sounds like busing to me.

Presumably, in line with Phillips' earlier proposals, once these kids have been enrolled in the "white" schools, the black boys amongst them will be segregated and educated in separate classes. Or am I missing something?

I'm thinking the CRE may be looking for a new director sometime in the new year.

Simon Wiesenthal 1908-2005

From a short biography at the Simon Wiesenthal Center:

Wiesenthal once spent the Sabbath at the home of a former Mauthausen inmate, now a well-to-do jewelry manufacturer. After dinner his host said, "Simon, if you had gone back to building houses, you'd be a millionaire. Why didn't you?" "You're a religious man," replied Wiesenthal. "You believe in God and life after death. I also believe. When we come to the other world and meet the millions of Jews who died in the camps and they ask us, 'What have you done?', there will be many answers. You will say, 'I became a jeweler', Another will say, I have smuggled coffee and American cigarettes', Another will say, 'I built houses', But I will say, 'I didn't forget you'."

Theater time

Mac and I are off to the Tobacco Factory this evening to see "The Fall of the House of Usherettes".

Loosely based on a gothic horror story by master of the genre, Edgar Allan Poe, [...] It's the tale of a crumbling old cinema and the Usherettes, three ghoulish sisters who are guardians of the ancient picture palace and its secrets.

Mac saw some rave reviews of the show last time it was in town (which is about ten years ago now) and has always regretted missing it. Me, I don't know what to expect - these guys look capable of anything!

Anthropostology

Sounds like Norm got snowed with mail after his recent post asking for help with the Anthropic Principle.

On a related note: a recent correspondence published in Nature magazine proposed the Misanthropic Principle as a resolution to the Fermi paradox. It suggests the reason we haven't been visited by aliens is because we're really not very nice.

And there's me thinking we were mostly harmless.

On recovery

Recovering from long-term illness is a strange and surprising experience. Sure, recovery is what you hope for, but when you're really sick, you can't imagine ever getting better. Then, one day, you wake up and you don't feel so bad, and the next day is better and, before long, you realize you're well again.

And that's great, but it takes a bit of getting used to - long-term illness is psychologically as well as physically debilitating. When I was sick, I couldn't do anything, so I got used to doing nothing. Now I'm well, I've got to get back into the habit of doing things again - like blogging. And I don't mind saying, it's proving tougher than I thought.

Of course, I could always go back to pointless, incessant barking. It has its attractions.

World music

Unmissable: Mongolian throat-singer Yat-Kha with a cover of 'Black Magic Woman' on last night's Mystery Train with John Kelly. The track is 40 minutes in - catch it while you can.

He's also been featuring a spot of New Orleans music every night, last night he kicked-off with Archibald singing Stack-A-Lee. Sweet.

Here's the playlist. Enjoy.

Helping and hindering

A few days after Katrina struck, I noted that I hadn’t seen any offers of aid from the international community. Frankly, I was concerned that anti-American sentiment would inhibit foreign donors from offering emergency relief.

I’m pleased to see that hasn’t happened and more than 50 countries have now offered help and support.

Not everyone has been so generous - Nick Cater’s comment piece in today’s Guardian opens with the contention that “Withholding aid from the United States is the only way to remove its domestic and foreign policy blinkers”. And Cater (who incidentally is the international editor of Giving Magazine) maintains a singular lack of compassion throughout. Here are his closing paragraphs:

If America learned anything from being the recipient of others' charity, it would be worth every penny. But on aid, disasters, climate, poverty, race, religion and more, its failure to listen does great damage to its own vulnerable people and those around the world gripped by poverty, hunger or disease.

After 9/11, the world sent millions of dollars to benefit mainly better-off Americans. Our charity was not necessary then; it is not necessary now.

As Cater himself asked in another context, whatever happened to the humanitarian imperative to aid those in need?

Pure serene

Much have I travelled in the realms of gold,
And many goodly states and kingdoms seen;
Yet did I never breathe such pure serene
Till I heard PooterGeek speak out loud and bold.

Okay, so I'm paraphrasing Keats, but really, you gotta read the whole thing. Laugh? I almost choked!

Warning: Not suitable for people drinking hot beverages near their keyboards.

I have mail

So, not having checked my e-mail for some time, my laptop is telling me I have 283 unread e-mail messages. And all I can think is: "I wonder if that's a prime number?"

Turns out, it is. It's also a backlog. I'm getting round to it, though I was initially tempted to adopt the Solent solution.

Blaming Wal-Mart

I've heard Wal-Mart blamed for a lot of things, but John Harris (writing in yesterday's Guardian) comes up with a new one on me.

In the States, a recent survey by the National Endowment for the Arts revealed that the percentage of people aged 18 to 24 with experience of reading novels, poetry or plays had fallen by a third over the last 20 years. Given that the same period has seen the rise to retail omnipotence of Wal-Mart, it isn't hard to join the dots.

Join the dots!? Is he kidding? The idea that Wal-Mart's rise is responsible for literature's decline is like saying that global warming is caused by too few pirates: correlation does not imply causation.

Unless, of course, you hate supermarkets and like blaming Wal-Mart. Then, it seems, anything goes.

Bomb scare

BBC Wales reports that army bomb disposal experts were deployed in Swansea today after a suspicious package was discovered on a local bus.

Judging from the image accompanying the story, I don't think the army were taking the incident too seriously. Either that or someone needs to explain the whole concept of Remote Control to this soldier.

A drowned city

I stayed up late last night watching ABC’s coverage of Katrina’s aftermath. The devastation is mind-boggling and the logistical problems facing the emergency services are daunting. A correspondent at VodkaPundit highlights the difficulties:

Imagine trying to resolve the 9-11 mess if NYC was under six feet of water, all comms were out, the interstates were flooded and the majority of the infrastructure more or less completely out of commission.

And then there are “the 2%'ers”.

Biggest behavior problems are among those who are going cold turkey and there are quite a few. Cops figure that is going to get worse and with it the associated problems.

Those problems are already legion. Reuters reports that Loiusiana Congressman Charlie Melancon says as many as 100 people have died in his district as a result of the violent disorder that has broken out in the city. And Louisiana Govenor Kathleen Blanco has warned that National Guard troops deployed in the area are under orders to "shoot and kill" to restore order.

Meanwhile, in contrast to large-scale natural disasters in other countries, I haven't yet come across any reports of offers of aid or disaster relief from the international community or NGOs.

It looks like America is going to have to deal with this thing on its own.

Us and them

The BBC reports that researchers have completed the sequencing and analysis of the chimpanzee genome. It's long been held that chimps are humanity's closest living relatives, having diverged from a common ancestor only about 7 million years ago, but now we can see just how close that relationship is.

The study shows that our genomes are startlingly similar. We differ by only 1.2% in terms of the genes that code for the proteins which build and maintain our bodies. This rises to about 4%, when non-coding or "junk" DNA is taken into account.

The long-term goal of the project is to pinpoint the genetic changes that led to human characteristics such as complex language, walking upright on two feet, a large brain and tool use.

As the study’s lead author, Tarjei Mikkelsen of the Broad Institute at MIT, says:

We still do not have in our hands the answer to a most fundamental question: What makes us human? But this genomic comparison dramatically narrows the search for the key biological differences between the two species.

Nature magazine is commemorating the project’s completion with a special web feature on Pan troglodytes, including some previously-unseen footage of chimpanzee behaviour.

Random quote

It has been established beyond doubt that the placebo-controlled, randomised controlled trial is not a fitting research tool with which to test homeopathy.

Society of Homeopaths

Random picture

Games Day

The Big Fella's hosting a War Hammer/LOTR games day, today. Half a dozen ten-year-old boys are about to descend on us accompanied by armies of plastic orcs and homemade scenery.

They'll keep themselves amused for hours, and all we have to do is feed them. They won't stop for a meal in the midst of battle, so feeding them means providing snacks and sodas throughout the day.

I'm not sure I'll get much blogging done today.

Three weeks in bed

Bedrest: it's a cure-all, I tell you!

A month ago, my seasonal asthma kicked in. In previous years, I've required hospitalization and been close to death on more than one occasion.

In the past, even on good days, I'd be incapable of all forms of exertion - walking any distance or climbing stairs, for example. And on bad days, acute hypoxia would leave me incapable of recognizing when I needed emergency medical attention. Mac has, quite literally, saved my life on more than one occasion.

This year, as my symptoms worsened, I took to my bed expecting at some point to end up back in hospital,. It didn't happen: it seems I've gotten away lightly this year. I've had symptoms - sometimes they've been debilitating, mostly they've been irritating - but nothing like in previous years.

So what's changed? The only difference I can see is that , in the past, I've tried to work through my asthma season, ignoring the symptoms and carrying on like I'm not ill. It doesn't work, of course - I used to quickly become exhausted and eventually I'd be forced to lie down. This year, I did things differently. I didn't try to soldier on. When I got sick, I went to bed and stayed there until I got better. It worked!

Mac regards this as the right way to respond to illness but, for me, it's revolutionary. I was brought up to soldier on, and not to let things get the better of you. My family's attitude to illness held that symptoms, unless obviously and immediately life threatening, were to be ignored. In practice, this meant that, whatever the complaint, if your head wasn't falling off you would likely be told to "get on with it". To even acknowledge a symptom was tantamount to giving in to it. And "giving in" was the worst crime in the book.

Mmm. You know, maybe Mac's right, perhaps I do have a characteristically male attitude to illness.

Anyway, I’m up and about again.

Catching up

Having been off-line for nearly a month, I'm busy dealing with a backlog of e-mails. As a result, posting here will be light to non-existent for the next few days (no change there, then).

I'll be back.

Remember me?

I’ve spent the last few weeks with my head in my hands: computer problems have prevented me posting, my e-mail is totally screwed and my regular tech support has moved to Oxford.

Nobody told me there’d be days like these.

Out and about

It's been a fine sunny day in the South West. We took a picnic out to Chepstow Castle and had lunch by the River Wye.

Fine weather, nice food, good company and a seriously impressive castle (much of the original Norman hall-keep, built in 1067, is still standing) - we had a grand day out.

Shabbat Shalom

I'm a regular visitor to Joe Katzman's Good News Saturdays at Winds of Change. Mostly, I go there to read T L James's regular series of posts on Sufi Wisdom.

As terrorist Islam does its best to discredit the religion, it's important to remember that there are other voices within the faith. One such is the Sufis, a branch of Islamic mystics with roots in many religious traditions. The lessons of Sufism are often communicated through humorous stories and mystical or romantic poetry.

This morning, James once again features one of the many stories told around the figure of Nasrudin, whose exploits I'm coming to regard as a kind of spiritual soap opera - in today's episode, Nasrudin gets burgled.

The BBC on terror

PooterGeek is back. And he notes a strange distinction in the BBC's reporting of indiscriminate attacks on civilians:

The agents of Al-Qaeda who murder innocents in Iraq are different from the ones who murder innocents in the UK because the ones in Iraq are "militants", whereas the ones in Britain are "terrorists".

And USS Neverdock says the BBC has some explaining to do:

Perhaps the BBC would care to explain to the victims and their families, how this could happen since, according to the BBC's "The Power of Nightmares", this is all just a "myth".

For those who missed it, the BBC documentary's principal contention was that "the threat of terrorism to the West was a politically-driven fantasy".

How wrong can you be?

The aftermath

Today's attacks in London have so far claimed the lives of thirty-seven people and injured hundreds more. The transport system, both in London and beyond, has been severely disrupted and, at least in the capital, is unlikely return to normal for several days.

And yet, there is no sense of panic or despair, only a quiet resolve to carry on despite the carnage, and a fierce determination not to be intimidated. Whatever the perpetrators of today's events hoped to achieve, they are mistaken if they think the British people can be cowed into submission.

Tony Blair's response to the blasts seems characteristic of the national mood:

It's important [...] that those engaged in terrorism realise that our determination to defend our values and our way of life is greater than their determination to cause death and destruction to innocent people in a desire to impose extremism on the world.

Whatever they do, it is our determination that they will never succeed in destroying what we hold dear in this country and in other civilised nations throughout the world.

This evening, my thoughts go out to the victims of today's tragedy and to the families of those who lost their lives.

London bombings

Scary question (via Scott at the Daily Ablution) from Sky's coverage of the incidents: "Do these look like conventional explosions?"

Probably - it seems the attack was intended to disrupt London's transport rather than to cause major casualties - but it's too early to know for sure.

UPDATE
11.45: Normblog has updates.

Instapundit and Tim Worstall have links.

London under attack

The BBC is reporting that a series of explosions rocked central London this morning. Major incidents are reported at Edgware Road, Kings Cross, Liverpool Street, Russell Square, Allgate East and Moorgate. There are, as yet, no indications as to the number of casualties.

My eldest son just rang to say he's safe - he's visiting London with his friends and they were planning on going into the center today. They're not going anywhere now: the Underground has been closed and there are no buses running in central London.

I've told him to stay put, anyway. And when he's ready to come home, I'm going to go get him.

BBC News are being very cagey about it, but it looks very much like a co-ordinated terrorist attack. It was always a possibility and London's emergency services have trained hard to deal with incidents of this kind. It looks like they're responding well to the crisis.

Cooking not blogging

I haven't been blogging much recently.

Recovering from a couple of bouts of serious illness while trying to maintain some semblance of a blog has been difficult. But I'm reasonably confident that I'm on the road to a full recovery. Mac and the boys are, of course, extremely pleased - they've missed my cooking!

As evidence of my continuing recovery (and to give you a flavor of life in the Junior household) here's this week's menu:

Sunday - cannelloni stuffed with spinach and ricotta
Monday - chicken fajitas
Tuesday - kofta bhuna, chana dahl, pilau rice & homemade chapatties
Wednesday - cheese & lentil wedge wth a tomato and tarragon coulis
Thursday - felafel, humus, baba ganoush, salad and pita
Friday - spaghettini with garlic and fresh herbs

They're just the evening meals. Lunchtimes, I like to experiment with new recipes (Monday, it was fettuccine all'arancio). And, in the afternoons, I'll sometimes make treats for when the boys get home from school - homemade potato chips, fried dumplings or onion bharjis. The rest of the time, I'm shopping or planning next week's meals, which hasn't left much time for blogging.

Still, there's hope. If my recovery proceeds apace, I should be back to more or less regular posting sometime soon, maybe.

Look out for me, huh.

Favorite movie stars

The results of the Normblog movie star poll are up. It's nice to see Cary Grant take the top spot; next to Jimmy Stewart, he's my favorite actor and a Bristol boy to boot (Mac went to the same local school).

Here's the way I voted (with four out of the top five):

Ingrid Bergman
Humphrey Bogart
James Cagney
Kirk Douglas
Cary Grant
Katherine Hepburn
Robert Mitchum
Barbara Stanwyck
James Stewart
Spencer Tracy

Watching Wimbledon

I haven't been blogging much recently; I can't understand how anyone can blog when Wimbledon's on.

You see, tennis is my game, though I haven't played for a couple of years - not since I messed up my knee doing Tai Kwon Do. Now, all I can do is watch. But when Sharapova is playing, watching is almost enough.

The Ladies' Championship is down to the last eight and all the matches will be played today. Here's the draw:

Lindsay Davenport (US) v Svetlana Kuznetsova (Rus)
Amelie Mauresmo (Fr) v Anastasia Myskina (Rus)
Mary Pierce (Fra) v Venus Williams (US)
Nadia Petrova (Rus) v Maria Sharapova (Rus)

Four Russians in the last eight!

I'm hoping for a Davenport-Sharapova final. But if Venus Williams gets past Mary Pierce today, the Sharapova-Williams semi-final should be a joy to watch.

Normal blogging (whatever that is) will resume after the weekend.

Day by day

Chris Muir's strips just keep getting better and better.

Tree fells boy

There's been a little drama in the Junior household. Yesterday, the Big Fella managed to run face first into a tree, and a jagged branch has cut a three inch gash down the front of his face.

He's got a bump on the head, a big black eye and he's going to have a scar. But it could have been worse - less than half an inch to the left and he'd have poked his eye out.

I told his Grandma what happened, she wasn't very sympathetic: "He ran into a tree? Tell him he's an eejit!"

I already did. Bless him.

Little green microbes

It seems some people at NASA are getting worried about the prospect of life on Mars.

New Scientist reports:

Before the US sends humans to Mars, it should rule out the possibility of dangerous life forms on the planet, a NASA advisory panel has reported. And it says the only reliable way to do that is with a robotic sample-return mission - which could take more than a decade to implement.

Social scrutiny

Via Most Sincerely Folks: Application forms for the new UK Identity Card are now available online.

Anyone for tennis?

Wimbledon starts today and the BBC will, as always, be providing top quality coverage of the event.

I'll mostly be watching Sharapova - she begins her defense of the title on Tuedsay. I like her game and I think there's a good chance she'll win it again this year. When she's on form - and it looks like she is - she's awesome.

Go Sharapova!

Soaking Cruise

The BBC reports that Tom Cruise was assaulted at the London premiere of "War of the Worlds".

Four members of a freelance camera crew were arrested at the War of the Worlds premiere in London after its star Tom Cruise was squirted with water.

The 42-year-old actor's face and jacket were drenched with water squirted from what appeared to be a microphone.

The crew was working for Channel 4. It said it hoped Cruise would see the funny side of the stunt which was for a new comedy show.

So, Channel 4 is now paying people to go around assaulting celebrities in the street because they think it makes good television!? I don't know what it is that leads some people to think that if they have a camera and a microphone they are somehow above the law. In any case, the individuals involved have been arrested and bailed, and will face police questioning today.

After they're through with the police, they might start thinking about how they're going to respond to Cruise's lawyers.

A spokesman for Channel 4 told the BBC:

The water squirting was not intended to cause offence and was very much in a spirit of fun. We hope Tom Cruise will be able to see the joke in the spirit with which it was intended.

Sounds like wishful thinking to me. Village Voice said it a while ago: "Tom Cruise sues the way Robert Downey Jr. violates his parole."

I hope he takes them to the cleaners.

Monkey business

If monkeys had money what's the first thing they'd buy?

Mark Liberman at Language Log explains what happened when researchers taught capuchin monkeys to use money:

After "several months of rudimentary repetition", the monkeys learned that one-inch silver disks with a central hole "were valuable as a means of exchange for a treat and would be similarly valuable the next day". Chen and Santos were then able to experiment with price shocks, wealth shocks, gambling games and so on. And along the way, the monkeys began on their own to exchange money for sex.

I thought patriarchal capitalism was supposed to be responsible for the commodification of sex. But if monkeys are doing it...

No porking

From the BBC: A Bristol pub owner has been given a two-year Anti-Social Behaviour Order for putting up a sign in the car park of his pub saying "Porking Yard".

Local magistrates ordered landlord Leroy Trought to change the wording to "Parking Yard" after the local mosque complained that the sign was offensive to Muslims. Trought faces a prison term if he breaks the order.

Mr Trought undoubtedly feels hard done by (he's changed the name of his food stall to "The ASBO Snack Bar"), but he should count himself lucky that the Religious Hatred Bill is not yet law. Otherwise, he might have been convicted of "incitement to religious hatred" and jailed for up to seven years.

Looks like free speech is getting expensive.

Elderflower Sunday

Today, we'll be out gathering elderflowers for this year's batch of elderflower champagne. Mac usually makes about five gallons of the stuff - we'd make more if we had the bottles to put it in - it's my favorite summer drink.

The recipe comes from an old Women's Institute book on homemade wines and cordials published in the 1950s. I highly recommend it.

ELDERFLOWER CHAMPAGNE

2 elderflower heads
1 1/2 lb. white sugar
2 tablespoons white-wine vinegar
1 gallon of water
1 lemon

Pick elderflower heads that are in full bloom and put them in a bowl with the sugar, vinegar and the juice and cut up rind from the lemon (not the white pith!). Add the water, cover and let the mixture stand for twenty-four hours.

Strain the liquid into strong bottles, cork firmly (screw-tops can also be used) and lay them on their sides. In two weeks it will be sparkling and ready to drink.

Just in time for the second week of Wimbledon. Perfect!

Daily Mail-o-matic

Found at qwghlm: The Daily Mail Headline generator - "A new Daily Mail headline every time you click the green button."

My favorite: DOES TEENAGE SEX STRIP HOUSE PRICES OF ALL DIGNITY?

Poker Joe

Recently, instead of blogging, I've been playing poker. Online. For money. It's ghastly, I know - but someone's got to do it.

Since before Christmas, when I had to give up work, tournament poker has been my only source of income. I haven't won much - no more than a few thousand dollars - but every little helps.

Anyway, just saying, I find it hard to blog and play poker at the same time -though some people seem to manage it.

So, if I'm not here or lurking around the blogs, you'll find me at Pokerstars - look me up and say hello.

Africa and the G8

Martin Kettle, writing in today's Guardian:

My fear is that the dynamics of the G8 summit involve too much of the naive leading the naive. Too much of the Make Poverty History campaign reeks of middle-class Europeans trying to feel good about themselves by prescribing very radical but practically dubious solutions to Africa's problems. Unusually, though, a similar criticism can be levelled against our normally pragmatic and careful government too. Geldof and Brown are in the same game. Both are brilliant at playing on liberal guilt. Neither of them is nearly as good at helping us to understand Africa.

Family file

I got a video file from my eldest son today - he's in the middle of his exams.

I know it's normal for students to let off a little steam on mid-exam weekends. Sometimes they even video the proceedings - I can understand that. But sending a media file of it to your dad! Now, that is original.

Thanks, son!

(I'd post a link but the file's too big to upload)

Frivolous ping

I know I already said this, but Suburban Blight is back and looking better than ever. Kelley's just upgraded to Movable Type 3.17, and is in need of "a frivolous test ping". So, here it is: PING!

Welcome back, Kelley.

Local graffiti

For some reason, Bristol seems to produce more than its fair share of graffiti artists: Delj was bombing walls in Bristol long before he made it big with Massive Attack, and then there's Banksy.

I know it's wrong but, so help me, I really appreciate some of Banksy's work - it livens things up a little.



Respect!

Update
Must be the day for it - more graffiti blogging here.

Fisking Walden

Via Ed Thomas at Biased BBC, I found the Rottweiler Puppy's cracking response to Brian Walden's recent column for the BBC on the decline of the West and European opposition to the US.

You should read it all, though one bit stuck me - regarding the lack of gratitude shown towards the US for its historic contribution to European security, Walden has this to say:

Perhaps the US deserves much gratitude for what it's done to preserve European freedom. In practice it doesn't get it. Its influence and culture are resented...

That's certainly true, though (as RP points out) there's a word for people who criticize American materialism while avidly consuming its products.

As for expecting gratitude from Europe, I think we've had all we're going to get. Reading Walden, I'm reminded of the fact that Americans like Europe a whole lot more than the Europeans like America - such relationships are bound to end in tears.

My advice? Never love someone with low self-esteem, they'll end up hating you for it.

Over the Wall

Clive Davis is in Berlin:

A shame there's so little left of the Wall. But it's hard to describe the feeling you get when you're crossing a road and suddenly realize that the thin, two-brick line running across the tarmac represents the point where East and West once met. Somehow that's more meaningful than any grand memorial.

Advice for life

Via Language Log: Mr Sun offers some practical advice to this year's crop of new graduates. It includes a few things they most likely won't have heard at Commencement, such as:

Make a list of the things you want to do before you die. Be as open to your heart as you possibly can. Now, throw that ridiculous piece of trash away and get your ass to work. The ball is over, Cinderella.

And,

If you start lowering your expectations and compromising your principles now, you won't have to play catch-up when mounting debt and endless tedium crush what was once your soul.

Recent graduates should read it all.

The morning after

Rereading my post from yesterday on addiction and recovery, I realize there's more I wanted to say.

First off, though I use the terms "addiction" and "recovery" I don't mean to imply that I accept the assumptions that often underlie their use - I agree with Dean Esmay when he says that drinking is a choice not a disease. Even so, I acknowledge that environmental and genetic factors can make it really difficult for some people to make that choice.

Secondly, (and this is probably the reason I'm stoked up enough to be writing this) like a lot of people, I've lost friends to addiction over the years. Some of them came back from it, some didn't. Some are still out there doing their thing, one or two others are long gone.

Every recovering addict I see, every time I meet someone who's kicked the bottle, it gives me hope that maybe some of the people I once knew might also be taking steps to recovery - that one day they might be clean and whole again.

I'd like to say more but, to tell you the truth, I find it difficult to write on this subject without becoming over-emotional. So, I'll finish with someone else's words: the author's note at the end of "A Scanner Darkly" by Philip K Dick.

This has been a novel about some people who were punished entirely too much for what they did. They wanted to have a good time, but they were like children playing in the street; they could see one after another of them being killed -- run over, maimed, destroyed -- but they continued to play anyhow. We really all were very happy for a while, sitting around not toiling but just bullshitting and playing, but it was for such a terrible brief time, and then the punishment was beyond belief: even when we could see it, we could not believe it. For example, while I was writing this I learned that the person on whom the character Jerry Fabin is based killed himself. My friend on whom I based the character Ernie Luckman died before I began the novel. For a while I myself was one of these children playing in the street; I was, like the rest of them, trying to play instead of being grown up, and I was punished. I am on the list below, which is a list of those to whom this novel is dedicated, and what became of each.

Drug misuse is not a disease, it is a decision, like the decision to step out in front of a moving car. You would call that not a disease but an error in judgment. When a bunch of people begin to do it, it is a social error, a life-style. In this particular life-style the motto is "Be happy now because tomorrow you are dying," but the dying begins almost at once, and the happiness is a memory. It is, then, only a speeding up, an intensifying, of the ordinary human existence. It is not different from your life-style, it is only faster. It all takes place in days or weeks or months instead of years. "Take the cash and let the credit go," as Villon said in 1460. But that is a mistake if the cash is a penny and the credit a whole lifetime.

There is no moral in this novel; it is not bourgeois; it does not say they were wrong to play when they should have toiled; it just tells what the consequences were. In Greek drama they were beginning, as a society, to discover science, which means causal law. Here in this novel there is Nemesis: not fate, because anyone of us could have chosen to stop playing in the street, but, as I narrate from the deepest part of my life and heart, a dreadful Nemesis for those who kept on playing. I myself, I am not a character in this novel; I am the novel. So, though, was our entire nation at this time. This novel is about more people than I knew personally. Some we all read about in the newspapers. It was, this sitting around with our buddies and bullshitting while making tape recordings, the bad decision of the decade, the sixties, both in and out of the establishment. And nature cracked down on us. We were forced to stop by things dreadful.

If there was any "sin," it was that these people wanted to keep on having a good time forever, and were punished for that, but, as I say, I feel that, if so, the punishment was far too great, and I prefer to think of it only in a Greek or morally neutral way, as mere science, as deterministic impartial cause-and-effect. I loved them all. Here is the list, to whom I dedicate my love:

To Gaylene deceased
To Ray deceased
To Francy permanent psychosis
To Kathy permanent brain damage
To Jim deceased
To Val massive permanent brain damage
To Nancy permanent psychosis
To Joanne permanent brain damage
To Maren deceased
To Nick deceased
To Terry deceased
To Dennis deceased
To Phil permanent pancreatic damage
To Sue permanent vascular damage
To Jerri permanent psychosis and vascular
damage

...and so forth.

In Memoriam. These were comrades whom I had; there are no better. They remain in my mind, and the enemy will never be forgiven. The "enemy" was their mistake in playing. Let them all play again, in some other way, and let them be happy.

Essay research

From an essay on Julius Caesar at Cheathouse:

The Emperor Julius Caesar is perhaps most famous as the first Roman Emperor to convert to Christianity. His rise from a humble birth as a peasant boy to Emperor is a tale of bravery, adversity and ultimately triumph through faith.

Julius Caesar was born as Groyxo Gaul in 54BC into an immigrant family in the back streets of Rome. Neither parent was rich. The French historian Robert Kilroi-Silc noted: "Sa mere etait un hamster et son pere etait comme des baies de sureau."

His mother was a hamster?

No, it's not the work of some demented student. As blogger Alun explains, it's an attempt to figure out how bad a paper needs to be before it's rejected by an online essay bank. Obviously, the limit has not yet been reached and further research is needed.

(Link via the highly recommended Carnival of Bad History at Bora's Science and Politics blog.)

Addiction and recovery

A couple of posts over at Dean’s World - from Dean Esmay and Scott Kirwin - got me thinking about addiction and recovery. Dean was highly critical of Alcoholics Anonymous (though he’s since moderated those criticisms) and I just wanted to share my experience.

A couple of years ago, funded by the local authority, I took a busload of recovering addicts down to Cornwall for a week by the sea. Most of them had multiple addictions, usually alcohol and cocaine, and none of them had been clean longer than twelve weeks.

The idea was they’d get a week in the water with a surfing instructor, early morning exercises on the dunes and group work in the evenings. All in all, it worked well - the few incidents we had were emotional rather than physical confrontations. And, by the end of the week, some of the guys were even managing to stay on their boards. I got a lot out of it (quite apart from a week’s surfing), as did my co-worker, and I know the guys from the hostel enjoyed it.

Was it worth it? Probably not. Chances are, after twelve months, seven out of ten of them will be using again. In two years’ time, maybe one of them will still be clean. Even if they all managed it, I doubt any would credit their recovery to a week’s surfing in Cornwall.

But who knows? I’ve seen stranger things. One bunch of addicts I worked with had replaced heroin with cycling, and pedalled their way to recovery. They stayed clean and, along the way, founded a charity that provides accommodation for people in recovery - they kicked-off their fund-raising drive by cycling coast to coast across the States.

Another guy I know had a whole range of addictions. He quit them all one by one: heroin, cocaine, amphetamines, alcohol. He got through it because he found his vocation in life – painting model soldiers. Now, he does it for a living. He’s been clean twenty years, has raised a family and is as happy as any man I know.

Not one of the people I know who’ve come back from addiction would say that going to AA meetings was what got them through. It helped for sure, and they’ll tell you that they couldn’t have got through without it. But on top of that, there’s something each of them discovered, something they could connect with outside themselves that made it worthwhile for them to choose not to drink or use drugs again.

I know that every one of them would recommend AA/NA to someone who suspected they had a problem with alcohol or drug abuse. I’m not a big fan of the twelve step program but it works – if you want it to.

Torture and abuse

Via the Belgravia Dispatch: In a thoroughgoing and well documented post, John Henke at QandO argues the case against torture. And makes an observation as to its causes:

Widespread torture doesn't simply, oops, "just happen". In the isolated instances in which it does happen, it is the result of a very major breakdown in the command structure. As Dale Franks wrote: "Since there are no bad troops, only bad leadership, I have to wonder how complicit the chain of command is..." Indeed, that is the question: if the discipline breaks down so terribly at one place, the problem may well be at a local level. If discipline is breaking down at a lot of Military Intelligence detention centers across the globe over the course of years, then the chain of command is implicitly broken all the way to the top.

Alternately, they might be "just following orders".

I'd say probably a bit of both. And it's got to stop.

Common people

Jarvis Cocker ain't got nothing on this guy!

With thanks to Dean Esmay, who has the lyrics and an audio link.

Sunday roundabout

Normblog is polling the top ten movie stars.

Over at A E Brain, a young artist announces his presence to the world.

There's politics and Doctor Who at Biased BBC.

Oxblog highlights the organic adventures of Ham Solo and Chewbroccoli.

There's a little cold turkey at The Daily Bread but no caffeine for Jackie.

Roger L Simon asks what "fair and balanced" means. Lots of people tell him.

There's a blog western going on via Suburban Blight.

And finally,

VodkaPundit discovers Henry Raddick.

English manners

Ever had one of those elevator experiences that leaves you wishing you'd taken the stairs? An American in London just did, and she has an observation about English men. It seems they don't have the good manners she expected:

This comes as quite a shock to me, as somewhere in the back of my mind, for no specific reason, I was anticipating gentlemanly manners beyond compare.

It's a common misconception and stems, I think, from the pervasive notion of the English Gentleman. It's nonsense, of course. In general, I've found that one can only reliably expect impeccable manners from those Englishmen who ride bicycles while wearing scarves and carrying umbrellas.

There aren't a lot of them about.

Breathless in Bristol

My weekend away got cut short. After just one night under canvas, my health deteriorated to such an extent I had to come home. Mac and the boys are still in the Gower.

Summer is always a difficult time of year for me: my asthma worsens and, at times, becomes life threatening. Our family vacations usually involve at least one medical emergency - I'm always the culprit.

Last summer, we had to cut short our time in France after I got sick. By the time we made it to the ferry, I was halfway to hypoxia. Maybe a little more than halfway - I can remember feeling deliriously pleased that I had enough French to ask: "Y a-t-il un docteur à bord?"

In any case, they responded with admirable haste, and I was hustled off to sickbay, where I spent the next several hours improving my French in the company of a very charming nurse.

Sadly, there were no French lessons for me when I got back to Bristol yesterday, just the NHS. Now, mostly recovered but with the family still away, I'm left rattling around the house on my own.

Expect some blogging.

Treasured memories

Mac and I are taking the two young ones camping this weekend.

Young ones? Who am I trying to kid!? They're 7 and 10 now - big boys. And my eldest is 16. How did that happen? Sometimes, it seems like the years have just flown by. And it won't be long now 'til they're all grown up and gone.

Here's another father thinking on the same subject as his son approaches his thirteenth birthday.

It seemed just a moment ago when he was a little boy. Now, in just a few days, Jackson would become a teen-ager. The time was not far off when he will be too big a kid for me to kiss him goodnight. The time was not far off when he will not be down the hall at all.

"There will come a time – and terribly sooner than I would realize – when I would give anything to have Jackson down the hall, in his room, waiting for me to come and kiss him goodnight. I would give anything to have a time machine, to be able to come back in time to just this moment right now, to be able to have him there in his bed in his room, to kiss him good night just one more time.

I don't imagine this weekend will be the last time the boys and I go camping together. But I do know that many of the things I, too often, take for granted today are tomorrow's treasured memories.

Catch 'em while you can.

(With thanks to Joe Katzman at Winds of Change for the link.)

Poetry corner

Punks and poets

The Academy of American Poets has recently overhauled its website Poetry.org, which is where I found an article by Chad Davidison called Got Punked: Rebellious Verse.

The title caught my eye, and I was looking forward to reading it. As it happens, it's way too cerebral for my liking.

Punk, though it celebrated its own death, is constantly reborn. Poetry, too, is continually redefining itself, continually resisting its own intelligence. Iggy Pop pops up in Jim Jarmusch films. Ziggy Stardust might be dead, but Bowie isn’t. And the artistic androgyny Bowie embodied? What better way to represent Keatsian "negative capability" or Eliotic "extinction of personality"? Punk lives long enough to annihilate itself, then repeats the feat like a god at the center of a harvest myth.

Mmm. I'm guessing Davidson's never seen a punk poet like John Cooper Clarke in action.

The Rough Guide to Rock described Clarke's high-speed delivery as being "based on the rhythms of rock and amphetamine sulphate rather than any conventional poetic metre" - that about captures it. Stark and direct, it was "the verbal equivalent of the headlong musical thrill of punk."

John Cooper Clarke is better heard than read: if you get the chance to see him live, take it - it's an experience. In the meantime, try "Beasley Street".

In the cheap seats where murder breeds
somebody is out of breath
Sleep is a luxury they don't need
... a sneak preview of death
Belladonna is your flower
Manslaughter is your meat
Spend a year in a couple of hours
on the edge of Beasley street

Like they say, read the whole thing.

Talking religion

There's a lively discussion going on over at Harry's Place following this post from David T about attacks on religious belief.

[T]o take a position of absolute condemnation in relation to any mainstream religious ideology is rarely anything other than disproportionate and phobic.

I think he's right. And there's a fine example of a disproportionate and phobic response in the comments - one commenter recommends the desecration of religious books as a kind of shock therapy for believers, on the grounds that:

Most religion is a form of mental illness, and the sooner that here and now, in the 21st century, that the mental illness corcerned is wiped out or cured, the better humankind will be.

Funny really, that's kind of like the way some people feel about socialism.

Planet Monbiot

Via the Daily Ablution. George Monbiot channeling the spirit of environmentalism in yesterday's Guardian:

Everything we thought was good turns out also to be bad. It is an act of kindness to travel to your cousin's wedding. Now it is also an act of cruelty. It is a good thing to light the streets at night. Climate change tells us it kills more people than it saves. We are killing people by the most innocent means: turning on the lights, taking a bath, driving to work, going on holiday. Climate change demands a reversal of our moral compass, for which we are plainly unprepared.

Thankfully, the ancient sages, long ago, addressed such questions. As Lao Tzu might have said:

Give up washing,
Renounce illumination,
And it will be 10,000 times better for everyone.

Give up holidays,
Renounce mobility,
And people will rediscover global harmony and love.

Or something.

Fisking fashion

Hugh Green at Most Sincerely Folks has done a fine fisk on an article from Marie Claire magazine about Muslim women and the burqa.

He realizes it's a hopeless exercise:

Railing against the opinions on head covering expressed in the column of a women’s magazine that makes quite a lot of money advertising shampoos and cosmetics is a bit like railing against the characters in an episode of Dynasty for a lack of moral agency.

Hopeless or not, it's highly readable.

What's that noise?

My afternoon blogging session was briefly interrupted a few minutes ago when I heard some shouting from the street.

By the time I got downstairs, Mac was already on the phone to the police. A violent assault was taking place right in front of the house.

Outside, two cars (both full of young men) were pulled over. One of the drivers was out of his vehicle and lashing violently at the other driver, who having half-opened his door, was struggling to protect himself.

It didn't stop there. The guy returns to his vehicle, brings out a steel nightstick and starts swinging it into the front of his victim's car. Just bashing it in! And all the time, he's screaming obscenities at the top of his voice.

Then, like it never happened, he gets back in his car and drives away.

Just thought I’d share that with you. Got to wonder what Dave would make of it all.

Critical malfunction

I just don't understand it.

Michele makes a list of "The Definitive, Never Snobby, Unpretentious, Ridicule-Ready ASV 100 Movies of All Time". And she leaves out "My Cousin Vinny"!

What was she thinking?

Hypocritical correctness

Marcus Brigstocke, writing in today's Guardian, says that the "straight, white, able-bodied, Christian, PC-phobic majority" should stop going on about political correctness.

Accusations of politically correct thought control have become a pathetic and transparent excuse for lazy racists, sexists and Islamophobes the land over. Challenging PC has become a game of chicken for bigots - daring each other to run out into the busy PC motorway and say something stupid before dashing back for cover.

Let's stand that on its head (we'll get nearer the truth):

Accusations of racism, sexism and Islamophobia against those who criticize political correctness have become a pathetic and transparent excuse for lazy media elites the world over. Defending PC has become a game of chicken for idiots - daring each other to run out into the busy mainstream and shout some insults before dashing back for cover.

There are valid and cogent criticisms of political correctness, particularly in so far as it impinges on freedom of speech. Ignoring these issues and resorting to name-calling does nothing to advance discussion. But then maybe I'm taking Brigstocke too seriously. After all, he's a joker not a thinker.

But, while I'm at it, what really rankles about Brigstocke's piece is that, after condemning racists and bigots in his opening paragraphs, he goes on to use a couple of pretty offensive characterizations in writing about his fellow Europeans.

In pursuing his point, Brigstocke imagines "some greasy, lank-haired French lad called Didier [...] wearing his rucksack on his front" and "some piggy-faced blond boy called Heinrich [who] came and ate everything in your fridge". Is that really the politically correct way to talk about one's neighbors?

Rank hypocrisy or postmodern humor? Sometimes it's hard to tell the difference.

Blaming Lucas

Why has the latest Star Wars trilogy been such a disappointment?

Smash has the answer.

Life, liberty & psychiatry

I spent my time as an undergraduate studying psychology, sociology and philosophy. It didn't get me very far - I was majoring in Accounting and Finance. After two years at college, bored with my course, I took a sabbatical and got a job as a nursing assistant on the psychiatric ward of a large general hospital.

The ward was designed to be a short-stay unit - none of the patients were supposed to spend longer than six months there. The idea being, within that time, the patient would be either discharged or transferred to long-term care. In reality, many of the patients had been on the ward for over a year, but none of the nurses had been there longer than six months. When I left to go back to university, I was the longest serving member of staff on the unit.

The place was understaffed, the nurses were undertrained and inexperienced, the doctors all but invisible, and the whole set-up was poorly resourced. Hardly an environment conducive to the relief of mental distress.

I suspect the lack of funding for psychiatric services is due, at least in part, to the social stigma attached to mental illness. Even today, the pervasive prejudice towards people with psychological problems seriously distorts public responses to mental health issues.

As an example, do a search for "schizophrenic" on BBC News and you'll get a list of murder reports, not news of recent medical advances or human interest stories. Or look at the way ASBOs are being used to manage the "anti-social" behavior of people with mental conditions. As the Observer reported on Sunday, some sufferers are in danger of being jailed if they publicly display symptoms.

Or take the Human Rights Act, which recognizes "the right to liberty and security of person" but explicitly denies that right to "persons of unsound mind" - a clause the British government seems keen to take advantage of with its proposals to ban people with mental health problems from leaving their homes.

It's like an old friend of mine once said: Human rights are a fine thing in principle. But how human do you have to be to get them?

Foreign affairs

Last week, the Big Fella was explaining some board game to his friends at school. "It's great!" he tells them. "And you get to play Uncle Joe." Blank faces from his friends, so my boy elucidates: "Uncle Joe! You know - Stalin." More blank looks. The Big Fella was flummoxed.

Friday after school, still astonished by it all, he says to me: "How can anyone get to be ten years old and not know who Stalin was!?"

He's got a point. They've all heard of Hitler. Why does Stalin get a pass?

Schlock horror

What is going on at the Social Affairs Unit?

First, Orac at Respectful Insolence points out some anti-evolutionary posturing from history professor William D. Rubinstein.

Then, S J Masty pops up claiming Hollywood is to blame for Abu Ghraib and for rampant police brutality in the US - seems it all started with "Death Wish".

The abuses carried out by US soldiers in Abu Ghraib are not a one-off. Such abuses are widespread and are a product of the culture fostered by American movies and cop shows, which glorify law breaking by the "righteous" in order to achieve "justice".

Focussing on police brutality in the US, Masty says he knows of "no American who denies that a nasty, unnecessarily authoritarian and bullying cop-culture is afoot across America". (Really? Not one?) And...

My elderly relatives, retired to Florida, [...] now complain that every 82-year-old, retired gynaecologist pulled over for a burned-out tail-light on his Oldsmobile is handcuffed, manhandled, hit or kicked, and occasionally knocked to the ground once or twice for good measure. Once noticed by the police, he becomes a "perp" and forfeits his rights.

Staid, middle-aged doctors in Michigan are afraid to write letters to newspapers complaining about local government for fear of being persecuted by the state, mostly by police or regulatory investigators. Accurate or not, their fear is genuine.

"Accurate or not"!? Is he kidding? Read it all - it's the worst piece of schlock I've come across in a long time.

I don't know where I got the idea, but I thought the Social Affairs Unit was a think tank. Obviously not.

What a picture

Oliver Kamm provides an extract from Christopher Hitchens's portrait of George Galloway in today's Independent.

It's not pretty.

Worked out

Nothing from me today - I'm burnt out after an afternoon spent delving into the legislation underpinning local authority regulations. If you haven't read the Local Government (Miscellaneous Provisions) Act 1976, don't.

Mañana.

Chance meeting

I've been in Bristol for over twenty years now. One of the advantages of living in one place for so long is that I quite often bump into people I haven't seen for years.

Recently, quite by chance, I met up with someone I used to know when I first moved to Bristol. He's now the Deputy Lord-Lieutenant (cute title). Fifteen to twenty years ago, we were both active in promoting local regeneration initiatives in Bristol's inner city, particularly in the St Pauls neighborhood, home to many of the city's Afro-Caribbean population.

Since those days, things have changed a lot for both of us, but some of the problems in St Pauls have gotten worse, thanks largely to the influx of crack-cocaine.

Anyway, back in the eighties, both of us had read and admired "Endless Pressure", Ken Pryce's groundbreaking study of West Indian lifestyles in Bristol. It was essential reading for outsiders like me doing development work in the area, and it was widely appreciated locally for its accurate depiction of Afro-Caribbean life in the city.

I was dimly aware that Ken Pryce had done other studies, but I never thought much about it, except occasionally to wonder why I hadn’t come across more of his work. Yesterday, I found out why.

My former colleague told me that, some years ago, Pryce had been doing a study on drug dealing in Jamaica and had been found dead, face down in some ditch somewhere, a victim of the violent subculture he’d been studying.

Today, I’m left sadly reflecting that the advent of crack-cocaine, along with the gang violence that accompanied it, not only derailed many of the hopes we had for the inner city twenty years ago, it also took the life of a fine sociologist who, had he lived, might have done much to document and explain the culture that killed him.

Language blogs

Language Log has a roundup of posts from blogging linguists.

Following the links, I learnt that the Chinese word for 'crisis' is not a compound of the words for 'danger' and 'opportunity', 3,000 of the 6,000-7,000 currently used human languages are headed for extinction, John Betjeman and C. S. Lewis fell out over Coleridge's pants, and Google library ninjas have launched virulent attacks on European culture (or not, as the case may be).

Learning the difference

Damian Counsell, in an excellent post exploring learned responses to human difference, notes that ”humans are naturally disposed to discriminate against members of other tribes."

I think that's right.

And as Damian says, understanding the basis of prejudice doesn’t excuse racism, it allows us “to acknowledge our flaw, resist its effects, and build a world where those who express it are put at a disadvantage.”

Celebrity blogger

You know, sometimes, you can think you really understand somebody. And then, you read their blog and realize you don't really know them at all.

Infamous address

Richard Luscombe, writing for Scotland on Sunday, reports that developers are looking to build a casino complex close to the Gettysburg battlefield.

It's not a new story - the Associated Press piece on which it was based appeared over a week ago and was carried in the Sun-Sentinel. But what is new in Luscombe's treatment of the story is his reference to Lincoln's "infamous Gettysburg Address".

Infamous? Well, it wasn't applauded in certain quarters at the time - the Chicago Times referred to it as a "silly, flat, and dishwatery utterance". But to calll it "infamous" smacks of either ignorance or a particularly skewed perspective.

Or haste - perhaps Luscombe was just cutting and pasting from some other source. I was surprised to find that Google shows 140 results for ""infamous Gettysburg address" including, astonishingly, The History Channel.

Unbelievable!

Legitimate target

Madeleine Bunting's opinion pieces for the Guardian usually leave me speechless. Yesterday's column, "Honour and Martyrdom", (in which Bunting argues that western revulsion at suicide bombings is somehow inappropriate) was no exception.

Thankfully, Norm Geras has both the words and the patience to address Bunting's conflated arguments and strange sympathies.

[N]ot one of her factors of supposed explanation addresses the thing she really needs to address about suicide bombing, namely, why moral revulsion isn't the right response to the deliberate murder and injury of innocent people in furtherance of a political cause. For it is sacrificing them: depriving them of, or wrecking, their lives, as a mere instrumentality towards some putatively desirable end, which is sometimes remote, sometimes, even, impossible to achieve. It is a crime against those so sacrificed, a crime under international law, and a crime against humanity by codes and conventions now universally recognized.

Except, of course, that such codes and conventions are not recognized by those whose moral relativism allows the conclusion that one person's "innocent civilian" is another's "legitimate target".