'Nother Solent

An exchange of e-mails.

James Lileks wrote

"Wha - you mean...

. . .I wasn't on your link list before?

And I'm supposed to be HAPPY now?

(sulk)

before going off to answer the 1,970,945th one saying "liked that Screed, man".

I replied:

Re: wha - you mean...

...you weren't up at six every day, frantically checking, oh please, has she put me on the list yet????

Linka columna ew cwey arewaadul rhinfa

That was meant to say "Links columns are very stressful things" but my hand slipped to the left. It looks a bit like Welsh, doesn't it? I think I will preserve its alien beauty by posting it. Hope you don't mind.

My New Month's Resolution: I Will Be More Sloppy.

The sun is shining. There are Worlds To Be Conquered out there, and indeed Garages To Be Tidied. So I resolve not to fact check any portion of anyone's anatomy in the following post, but merely to let the words pour out. Then I shall sternly go forth with a bin bag to a fate unknown.

First, go and look at Hell In A Handbasket, a new blog from James Rummell. (Found via Instapundit, as so often. I suppose new bloggers write in and announce themselves, or perhaps he sniffs them out by means of one of those airport security machines.) Scroll down. You will find:

DIDN'T SHERLOCK HOLMES HAVE A GUN?
"...One of the things that Dr. Watson had to do was haul the Webley around. A six shot handgun (some models for concealed carry had five rounds), the Webley was a massive chunk of iron. I can understand that Holmes had someone else carry the thing.
"What confused me was the fact that they were wandering around London with a gun. The city of London had been a gun-free zone for centuries. How did the consulting detective get away with such a blatant crime right in front of Detective LeStrade?
"Well, Holmes and Watson were members of the aristocracy, so such things as following the law was beneath them.

"It might have been good to be the king, but it was also good just to be distantly related to him."#

Comments [2]

The "Comments [2]" consist of a wail from me saying "Holmes and Watson broke no law..." and then a familiar rehash of the true (and important and serious) fact that pistols kept for self defence were commonplace in Britain at a time when the crime rate was very low. Back came Mr Rummel with an unexpected response:

Drat. It won't come up. I think he's online this minute, but I can't see an e-mail address to tell him to go away and pick up a coffee while I pull up his comments. You're all going to have to trust me. Mr Rummel said something to the effect that "London proper" had been a "charter city" and gun free zone since time immemorial, and that the Queen has to ceremonially ask permission to enter the city limits.

You learn something new every day. I had no idea of this fact but have no reason to doubt it. However I still think I'm right. Firstly, by "London proper" I suspect is meant "the City of London" which I do know retains all sorts of quaint customs. Now that phrase refers to the area within the almost vanished Roman walls - this being one of the facts I am not going to check, 'cos that garage awaits me - but at any rate the true City is very small, not much more than a village by modern or Victorian standards. As chance would have it the financial district sits there now, hence all that talk of stockbrokers being "something in the City". And Baker Street, dreary modern thoroughfare that it now is, lies within London but outside the City of London.

A second point is that if there was a law against firearms in the City, I am pretty sure that it was on a level with the law requiring males between the ages of fifteen and fifty to assemble for longbow practice after Church every Sunday, and the one demanding that every London cab keep an adequate supply of hay for the horse. For I have come across a good deal of anecdotal and some more respectable numerical evidence to suggest that within the lifetime of many still with us people from all strata of British society kept guns for self-defence.

Which brings me to my third and last point. Which is that this is a neglected field of enquiry. So here's a job advert:

SITUATION VACANT
HISTORIAN
An opening is available for a dedicated researcher to study probate records and so forth with a view to establishing the extent to which Britain was once an armed society. An examination of the comparative situation in America would also be of interest. References required.

I reckon some brash young chap could really make his name doing this, don't you?

While I was in France

, Jim Bennett wrote this column about the French. So of course I missed it.

A possibly relevant-thought pops into my mind. I was struck, talking to a French lady at the next table (if only I wrote for the Guardian and could call this sort of anecdote "research"), by the note almost of jokey-but-meant-it-sort-of pleading in her voice. "You tell Tony Blair," said she, "to get in the Euro. You tell him." Alas, he and I have not been introduced, and the Euro is not an economic project at all. It is meant to be a marriage tie, as the Franco-German alliance was before it. Shotgun marriages rarely work well.

I spent a whole minute of irreplaceable life trying to work out what the bump in the bride's gown would be in that metaphor. A sign I ought to be in bed!

"As usual we straddle the fence" - or is it just the milk of Canadian kindness?

Captain J M Heinrichs (a Canadian, natch) offers this explanation for all these Canadians getting so into the Milosevitch issue:

"The senior prosecutor is from BC and the senior advisor to Milosovic is from Ontario:
a. As usual we straddle the fence;
b. It demonstrates on of the usual divisions in internal politics here;
c. We are a kindly and non-judgemental people, unlike others."

Looks like Dawson is back

but, um, experimentally sleeping, according to the graphic on his site...

Brian Linse asked me to guess what Dawson looked like, and I said, sort of gothic with long hair. I may even have said, long romantic hair. And he says, '"that's not a bad guess..."

That Stupid Simpsons Thing.

Mail from Geoffrey Barto of Turkeyblog:

"The whole cheese-eating surrender monkey bit is, to my mind, not that different from the denunciations of an American cowboy foreign policy or the dismissal of an American society that's all money, no culture, etc. That is, the French have unfair, unnuanced caricatures of Americans, and the Americans have unfair, unnuanced caricatures of the French.

"I wouldn't get too worked up about this, you might have to take French leave to sort it out (or is that une congé anglaise?). Once upon a time (or so I'm told) the English made sure their ladies didn't have children by using a French letter; the French used une lettre anglaise. Neither set of expressions has much currency today; they counted for a lot more when all the world was waiting to see how the Anglo-French rivalry worked out.

"Vital and sophisticated nations take note of one another and they look for ways to get a leg up on their competitors on the world stage - including silly jokes (you'll notice that no one makes Botswana jokes or slings insults at the Hondurans). That France is a target of American jokes is just an affirmation that it has both a different worldview than the U.S. and enough importance that we care. The French will not really need to worry until we find someone else to make fun of."

A new peversion?

Could Self-Blogdexing be even more addictive than Google self-abuse?

Waking up famous,

further joy awaits James Lileks. Yeah, his Daily Bleat has joined my links column. To find space in my mystic groups of five I had to eject Libertyblog. The poor thing had not moved since December 27 and the Coroner's office had become insistent. Go on, have a good, last read. There was fine stuff there. Unemployment in New York. Kofi Annan and the Muppet Show.

Gotham on India.

Instapundit also led me to Letter From Gotham, a new blog by "Diane E."

She, like me, thinks of Partition.

"The link to Muslim News is to Britain's biggest Muslim news site, allegedly. They do not cover the Muslim attack on the train that killed 60 Hindus, which ignited the current wave of communal violence. Am I the only person to notice some eerie similarities to the communal violence of Partition? (Not that I'm an expert, but I did see the Jewel in the Crown. I remember those train attacks.) Then there's an article about how the MCB--Muslim Council of Britain--boycotts Holocaust Remembrance Day in Britain, on the grounds that it pays insufficient attention to the Palestinian "nakba." Then there's a couple of articles about the India situation. What a frightening, tragic mess."

It is not quite true to say the train massacre that started the current round of violence is ignored - it is at least mentioned in this story. Far down the page. And, oddly, in a tone that suggests that everyone knew about that anyway - yet it sure wasn't Muslim News that told them. Look, here's their South Asia Archive. Note the big glaring gap for February 27. February 26 had the Hindus converging for their big, and it is fair to say, inflammatory, Ayodhya protest. Did anything untoward, anything worth reporting, happen after that protest? No, no, just another day - according to MN.

Sadly, this smarmy, discreetly vicious but oh-so-modern journal is indeed the biggest news source for British Moslems. It sets the tone for other Moslem papers of reporting crimes against Moslems in a big way, yet underplaying crimes by them. (Let me say explicitly that the savage mob-murder of innocent Moslem men, women and children at Ahmedabad must indeed be reported and condemned.)

One could charitably hope that some of the peculiarities of Muslim News's reporting stem from the fact that they make vastly more use of agency stories than material original to them. Only I don't feel very charitable. It was that magazine's female editor (usually described with star-struck admiration for her modernity) who reduced the US ambassador to Britain almost to tears on a BBC panel & audience programme called Question Time mere days after September 11. I do not like Muslim News.

There are Moslems in Britain who are not part of this. Their position is heartbreaking.

[Spelling note. I usually use the spelling "Moslem", as I did in my first post today. Obviously the journal I refer to here prefers "Muslim." In retrospect I'd have done better to stay consistent with one spelling throughout one post, but I just want to get this thing out.]

[UPDATE: Diane tells me that for complex Bloggeresque reasons you may not see the stuff I quoted when you click the link. But you will see it later.]

Jim Muchow

returns fire on my Lileks rejoinder. His comments are in italics:

"Perhaps it makes more sense to those across the pond, but I didn't understand the "biting satire" of the too-late-for-two-world-wars joke. From over here - or perhaps only to me, it seems like a tepid whine intended for domestic consumption. Regardless of the time frame."

People engaged in a desperate war often find it almost unbearable that others are not so engaged. The more so if those fighting believe that their fight will really protect the whole world. That is the root of the current resentment felt by Americans of the European chattering. Perhaps Europe awaits, all unknowing, its Pearl Harbour.

Also, your mention of the facts that the UK was involved in the war against fascism from the beginning and that the Red Army faced down 90% of the Wehrmacht were true (well, maybe the 90% was a bit high) but superfluous.

I got that figure from AJP Taylor years ago. I dare say it's been superseded by subsequent research.

First of all, it was a "screed"; one should allow the writer a bit a freedom even if the facts were not completely in order (a la "never let facts get in the way of a Good Rant").

My back-comments were in the same screedly spirit. I agree that Lileks' rant was a corker, a beaut and a peach. Instapundit takes us to a site called Blogdex (of which more later) that says that it was the sixth most quoted thing in all Blogdom.

Second, the commencement of military actions by the US on two fronts in addition to the vast amounts of foreign aid to both the UK and the USSR were crucial in ending the war in a timely manner. I think most of the parties at the time realized this (the Japanese admiral, Yamamoto, certainly realized it). So, to paraphrase Lileks, you'll forgive us our seeming arrogance if we think we were the essential component in defeating fascism in the 40s. And later in the 90s.

All true. My minor quibble with Mr Lileks was not with his statement that the US did have practice in defeating fascism, but with the statement that the rest of the world did not.

I enjoy your blog, good to have you back from vacation.

Thanks!

Dreadful things are happening in India

and more dreadful things will surely come.Indian train massacre sparks revenge killings.

There were many train massacres carried out by both Hindus and Moslems during Partition in 1947. I have heard enormously high casualty figures quoted for that orgy of violence; as high as a million. This story is therefore one of the most ominous I have yet heard in 2002. About ten years ago now in an APA (="Amateur Press Association", a sort of paper version of a multi-person blog common in Science Fiction circles) to which I then belonged, one of the members prophesied that if India and China could "turn the corner" in the next ten years then the world's future would be set fair. Yesterday I would have said that things were looking fairly hopeful; at least both countries were opening up their economies. Today, not so good.

I just loved these "towboat" pics - but, alas, there's a problem with showing them to you.

That boat stuff was courtesy of David Janes, coming originally from a Mr Desjardins. However if you click the link you will find a cautionary tale about what happens when the whole world suddenly picks up on a site.

Quantized Jottings.

Random Jottings has a snippet on the phrases "quantum leap" and "sea change". Reminds me of my old Treasury days. Any time a spending department wanted to spend a zillion or so on a new computer system that would ensure "a quantum leap in the service we are able to supply to the public" I would be ready with, "oh, you mean a change so utterly tiny that it can go undetected for 99.99% of recorded history and for 99.99% of human activity?"

I must say, I did not know the grisly origin of "sea change" until I read it in Jottings. I always thought it meant the watershed.

Why can't I be James Lileks?

There are several answers to this question covering such thorny issues as the quantum-uncertainty breakdown covering the hyperspatial exchange of consciousness paradigm; the alarm, potential distate and indeed civil penalties incumbent on same-sex unions that would be suffered by his wife and my husband were such an exchange to take place; and finally the fact that I can't smoothly connect domesticity to God to an Arab video game in one unified column like he does here.

Lighten up!

The feud between Aint No Bad Dude, It's Stephanie and Samizdata is getting close to pistols at dawn. There were some notable female duellists. One time a lady was facing a man. The man, a gentleman literally to the last, courteously fired his pistol in the air. The female nodded her head in gratitude then drilled him through the heart.

Now, I trust - I hope - that Uhlman, DuPont and the guys are all still joking and haven't got to that stage yet....

While at Sami I note that Dale Amon has an Alcor tag. (i.e. he has taken practical steps to get his body frozen after death in the hope that he can be revived later when technology has moved on.) I don't consider this a bet worth taking myself, but I know one or two good folk who think it worth a try. The cryogenics meme often seems to go with a militant atheism I certainly do not share, but I do not think that linkage is logically necessary.

Drat!

I'd like to tell you about the two links that Geoffrey Meltzner kindly provides, one of which I think is the same as Geoffrey Barto's, but unbelievably irritating computer things keep happening when I try to even look at them. And the bar saying "post" and "post and publish" keeps disappearing so I cannot edit the previous post.

But while I'm on the subject of Grasshoppa (link below) I may as well say that yes, the US Libertarian Party certainly does advocate the legalization of hard drugs. As do I, despite agreeing with you that they are dangerous and harmful.

Geoffrey Barto at TurkeyBlog: discusses (and translates) that Le Monde story I mentioned, and provides this link.

And Geoffrey Meltzner at Grasshoppa provides

Who was it had those cool boat pictures?

You know, the boat goes splish! under the bridge and then pops up the other side. I think it was one of those Canadian chaps below. Alert readers, please assist.

Canadians on Milosevitch.

There is an ongoing and principled discussion going on between Damian Penny, Lawrence Garvin, and David Janes about the legitimacy of Milosevitch's tribunal, the morality of googleslobo and similar issues. Actually they aren't the only ones swimming in that pool, but for some reason Canadians seem particularly involved. All that constitutional argument must have made their minds run on the relevant railway tracks.

Lileks on Engels (Matt not Freidrich (Engels not Welch)) UPDATE:

i jUST NOTICED, oops, sorry, I just noticed another little Lileks slip. Sorry about this. I do see the problem. "Freidrich Welch" writes unjustly sneering article, Lileks writes justly sneering takedown, and who do I keep sniping at? Consider it a compliment, sort of, to the standards I expect of both parties. Anyway. And The Point Is? you ask. The point is that it was not merely "an official" that called Israel "a shitty little country" but the French Ambassador to Britain. You know, I've just had a lovely week in France and met some lovely people, and I did feel for Matt Welch's wife, a French lady, when all of us (me included to my shame) were going on about that stupid Simpsons quote. But French Ambassadors aren't supposed to be like that any more, not since the days when they were called Citizen So-et-so and taunted the Scarlet Pimpernel as he writhed in his chains.

[I'm talking about a thing headed "That dreadful bounder Lileks," third post down.]

Talking of French headlines and the Jews

, while in France I read, very slowly, some of an article in someone else's copy of Le Monde (Saturday 23rd Feb, I think) dealing with the upsurge of anti-semitism in France. I would like to link to that article, but due to linguistic incompetence the best I can offer is this link to the whole paper. I did try to search for "juif" and "anti-semitisme" but got too many results to trawl - which does suggest in itself that the issue is not being completely ignored.

While I was there I found "Le Web et moi, et moi, et moi." in Tuesday's issue. Guess what that's about.

A correspondent expresses the hope

that I am "not one of those Jews who....". It is always a pleasure to be able to fulfil the hopes of another. I am not any sort of Jew, either by race or religion. But if I were a Jew, and if I were about to be murdered for being one, I hope I would make such last words to my murderers as did Daniel Pearl: "I am a Jew, and my father was a Jew."

Although I knew from French headlines that Pearl had been killed on video, I have only just found that moving detail out from Blogs of War. Dr Frank also has a take on the same Matthew Engels (any relation?) article James Lileks takes out below. And he has an account by Tristin Laughter of the changes that 9/11 made to her views - and her life. Ms Laughter had been best-friends with a couple and their young son. After the man of the couple was killed in one of the planes she visited the wife and child. This was her experience:

"Coming all this way to help my best friend, I couldn't help her at all. She was enveloped in her own darkness and sadness and I couldn't reach through to her. Jackson wandered the house calling out for his daddy. We all needed each other yet could not quite reach each other. The darkness of the grief around us was so profound that it completely isolated us all."

The natural and painless death of my father in law the day before yesterday was infinitely less evil than deliberate murder but, still, I do today know well that isolation, which survives everyone's best efforts to comfort each other. It is an isolation that won't end in this world. But I do hope it will diminish with time for the people in that account.

That dreadful bounder

Lileks has been shockingly cheeky to his cultural superiors at the Guardian. While doing so he reached into the freezer where they keep the stereotype body parts and inadvertently made a Creature of Horror by the Frankenstinian fusing-together of drunken Liverpool Taig Liam and drunken Liverpool Prod McSodden. The thought of the two of them in one beer-swilling body will long keep me awake a'nights.

The difference between Lileks and the Guardian is that the former knew he was dealing in stereotypes. ("Just dealing on a small scale M'Lud. For me own personal consumption and a few nice crass ones to share with my mates, honest.") The Guardian article is so snobbish and provincial that it does not so much defy parody as defy the efforts of the muscles of the upper stomach to keep down breakfast. For example: with an air of having just discovered it, the writer quotes that joke about the US being late for two world wars, better luck next time. Now that joke was biting satire in 1944. By about 1970 it had mutated into one of the many convincing period touches that made Dad's Army such a believable portrait of the Home Front. By 2002, dear Guardian-writer (Matthew Engels), it is a dead joke. It has ceased to be.

But joking apart, Lileks old chap, regarding the last few lines of your bally article, you Americans didn't defeat Fascism completely on your own. We were there too, and for the whole party. Not to mention the Red Army which may not have been exactly my favourite organisation but did face down nine-tenths of the Wermacht.

Bravery and evil.

Christopher Johnson of the Midwest Conservative Journal takes Charley Reese to task for a column in which he calls the WTC killers "brave". To my surprise I find myself lining up with Reese on this one semantic point (so long as I'm allowed to part company with him as soon as possible thereafter). To think straight it is necessary to pay attention to the meaning of words, and it is an accurate use of the word "brave" to say that men who can suppress fear of death enough to kill themselves in carrying out an attack were brave men. As brave as were the Kamikaze, and many members of the SS and the Khmer Rouge. Bravery, like intelligence, can be peverted to the service of evil. It remains what it is.

Ain't No Bad Dude

ain't the dude any more, it's a lady called Stephanie Dupont. She holds the line against the dorkist hordes while the man himself cavorts with the ladies in London. As a certified Dude-hugger who did not charge for the privilege, I can authoritatively tell you, Stephanie, that I am not a paid escort! But, yes, there is someone out there who does like cats. Even orange cats. Even orange monster communist cats who have an inadequate appreciation of other cats' justly-acquired property rights. Such is my indiscriminate benevolence that I did not make it into the A-string of a violin and an orange muff as it amply deserved but merely ejected the wretched beast from my cats' kitchen.

Oh, and I'm sure Brian doesn't actually hate "Instantman". Vigorous and frequent disagreement, I grant you!

More on that Zimbabwe tape

: This BBC News 24 story reports the back-and-forth jumps in the on-screen timer. These guys obviously watched the bit in Thunderbird 6 when Lady Penelope's cobbled-together words were used to lure our boys into a trap. Video-fakery by editing is older than I am. In contrast, digital and sound manipulation good enough to make a well-known face appear to say false words has not yet been born - though it kicks in the womb.

Zimbabwe, Lies & Videotape.

Now only Heaven knows what is going on in that sad country. Today's Times story about Zimbabwe includes a quote from this ex-Mossad agent, Menashe, wherein he appears to say that, yes, his video was a set-up - but Morgan Tsvangirai proves his unfitness for the presidency by falling for it. Unpeturbed by this admission, Mugabe has charged Tsvangirai with treason.

Today's story makes an odd contrast with yesterday's, in which the old evildoer was depicted as making overtures to Tsvangirai via President Obasanjo of Nigeria in an effort to save his skin come the deluge.

Thanks, everyone,

for the kind messages and prayers.

In the midst of life...

I was going to post a very happy account of my holiday, and the merry evening I spent with several bloggers last night. Sadly, though, the news has come that my dear father in law - a man with whom I disagreed on a million subjects and loved very much - has died suddenly. So no posts for a while. If you pray, please remember the many people who will miss him so much.