September 14, 2002
Pontifex Maximus
A mighty personage writes:My real name doesn't appear on my blog, but I rank #1 for queries for Pontifex, my nom de cyber.As far as why this happens...
One, you have a Google PageRank of 6, which is quite respectable. (For more on Google PageRank, see:
http://www.pontifexexmachina.com/archives/000217.html#000217)[Google PageRank works like this: a link to your site is a vote. The higher the PageRank of a site, the higher the site's vote is weighted. It's much more complex, but I've found that anything more indepth just causes headaches.]
Natalie Portman only has a Google PageRank of 4, for example, so Google prioritizes your site above her, all else being equal.
But Natalie Imbruglia also has a 6, and you rank above her.
Here are some other factors to consider:
* You include your name at the bottom of every post, which cranks up the numbers of time the search word appears on the page, which boosts your relevancy to the query.
* Google also factors in the text of links to you in it's algorithm. And blogrolls that blog your name, or links that refer to you as Natalie, add up, also boosting your priority.Hope this helps.
No it does not help. Quite the contrary! What would help is for you to give me convincing reasons as to why Portman, Merchant and Imbruglia were mere chaff in the wind and Solent is, in fact as well as Google, Supreme Mekon of the Natalieverse.
(Talking of which: Dan Dare. 9am, Channel 5. Unmissable.)
Hola Camp.
Paul Ibsch writes:"Hola Camp was the final straw for a disintegrating British Empire. In the years 1953-1959 the UK had slaughtered 250,000 Kenyans and hanged Dedan Kimathi, Kenya's Nelson Mandela.The net effect of Hola Camp was the denial of history that is so evident in Britain today. Tasmanian Genocide?Opium wars in China? These things happened. And make the Belgians look good. But then again perhaps we Belgians are more honest.
My point about Hola Camp was mostly the oddity of choosing that relatively tiny example. It's like citing the village elders that Stalin's minions had shot on one afternoon in 1937 to stand for the evils of communism - with this difference, that by 1959 British colonialism really was a joke contestant in the World Evil All-Comers. To be honest, I very much doubt that figure of 250,000 slaughtered Kenyans. This brief history of the Kenyan Independence struggle, which praises the Mau Mau, speaks of 5,000 guerillas killed and 12,000 civilian deaths. Likewise this Kenyan educational website which also is pro Mau-Mau, quotes a figure of 13,000 Africans killed in the conflict.
Often I distrust figures for the numbers of victims of colonialism because the same sources downplay or ignore the victims of African or Asian despots, or of socialism.
In general, I see little evidence for a denial of history. I admit that the Tasmanian Genocide is too little known, but it has been in my consciousness for at least twenty years. We get the Irish Famine morning, noon and night, and the major denial of history there is that it is presented as the results of laissez-faire rather than of powerful British interests hijacking the power of the State to strangle any potential competition from Ireland. (You know why there is an Irish linen industry? Because that was all that was left them after tariffs had killed off their wool and cotton industries.) We hear a great deal about slavery (and so we should), but very little about how the Royal Navy drove the slave-traders from the seas.
The Opium Wars are an odd case. They were adequately covered in my school history book, but I never dreamed the day would come when I would see them defended on the grounds of the right of the Chinese working man to smoke whatever he pleased.
September 13, 2002
Smacking update:
the TV news reminds me that the teacher who smacked his kid outside a dentist's waiting room was convicted. In contrast, you and I know that in your home town and mine there are children going to bed tonight in pain and justified fear for their lives, and nothing is done about it because securing a conviction would take effort. And that's under the existing law. Scots parents can be very glad that Jim Wallace's little bit of social engineering can be deferred - until the EU get round to it, of course.UPDATE: In fact, so convinced am I that the proposed law was nothing but another piece of make-work and empire building by whatever they call the Scottish Department of Social Security these days, that I wouldn't be surprised to find that even a great many of those who oppose corporal punishment entirely while retaining a libertarian cast of mind are relieved that it will not come to pass. Any of you guys care to comment?
OK, OK,
I know Google overcounts blogs. And much as Ken Layne deserves to be the very epitome of Ken-ness and Tim Blair, the pattern and exemplar for Blairites worldwide (who on earth is that other chap anyway?), they aren't yet accorded their rightful status by anyone except Google and a rather select group, namely us bloggers.Still. #1 out of 1,900,000. If anyone who understands these things cares to send me one of those stashes or caches or whatever...
Going down my links column: Samizdata doesn't count, England's Sword ditto and there are rather a lot of Iains out there. James Lileks is #3 James in the world - an astounding achievement; Brian comes in at #2, Dawson Third of All The Dawsons, John has no hope under his first name but is Numero Uno Weidner, and Moira, too, is first of all her tribe.
Hot Jiminy Jeepers!
My social life having improved, I hadn't carried out an act of self-googlification in simply ages. I must've lost my touch; I hit "search" before typing in my surname.There are one million, nine hundred thousand mentions of the word "Natalie."
Natalies Portman, Merchant and Imbruglia receive many citations.
None of these ladies are number one, however.
I am the most famous Natalie on the Planet Earth.
Forgotten Empires.
John Weidner writes regarding Seamus Milne's Guardian article yesterday, on the death toll that can be attributed to colonialism:"Funny how when colonialism is mentioned, you hear about Britain, France, Belgium .. but never the empire of the Tsars of Russia, which remained intact until the 1980's..."
The anti-Mecca.
Teresa Nielsen Hayden remembers.I noticed an odd thing in the days and weeks that followed. You'd see little knots of people standing out on the sidewalks, talking, and as they talked they'd all gradually turn so they could look in the direction of Ground Zero--most of them unconsciously, I think. Even when it was out of sight, even in the outer boroughs, you knew exactly where it was, which direction; it was like you could feel it there, this locus of terrible sorrow and anger.There is more:
...On the platforms on both sides of the station, big hand-lettered signs said DON'T STOP HERE, to keep subway conductors who'd driven that route for decades from automatically making the stop.
...It was worse the day our train passed through and there was sunlight shining down into the station entrance. I'd known what was beyond that point, but my imagination didn't encompass it, and so the old concourse was somehow still there for me. I hadn't realized it until that moment.
...One step past that, the friends of friends, the hecatombs start.
Scottish MPs reject
ban on smacking.Whatever was the point of the age limit of three anyway? I've scarcely smacked mine since they were three. Children above that age speak the language and understand deferred sanctions. They can be persuaded, bribed, fined, inspired, put to shame, 'grounded' , given merit certificates and be deprived of their GameBoys as the occasion demands. No smacking of children under one year, that I could have understood. But the point of smacking peaks at about two and a half, when there are certain limitations on behaviour that need to be enforced yet the child does not really understand cause, effect, or enough of language to have the reasons for the rules explained.
Some disagree, of course. But even if you oppose smacking totally, don't get sad about this law dying unborn. You see, we were reassured repeatedly that it was never intended to be one of those old fashioned laws, you know, the sort that people are meant to obey. How barbaric that would be! It was all intended as a signal about the "sort of society we want."
However the Committee were wise to this:
"...we do not accept that it is realistic to remove an available defence to the charge of assault while at the same time reassuring Parliament that the number of prosecutions will not increase as a result."What would actually have happened is that a small but growing subset of parents would have been sued, and convicted. The subset would have been half-consciously chosen for their otherwise law abiding nature, pour encourager les autres and gradually bring about a better world. (Remember that savage punitive assaults on children are already illegal. We are talking here specifically about those cases where a defence of reasonable chastisement could be offered under present law.) The children of really brutal parents and step-parents would have been passed around between the caseloads of different social workers, as they are now. It is awfully troublesome to get the law on people like that. They resist arrest, they don't turn up to court, then when you fine them they don't pay for five years, then when you finally do get them in court they cry about their childhoods into the arms of their social workers and the judge says how he personally has never been the same since Whiffington-Whiffington Major gave him five with a cricket bat for secretly reading the Beveridge Report after Lights Out and lets them off with therapy. So the growing trickle of ordinary parents being sued for ordinary smacking would indeed have brought about gradual change, but not the sort of gradual change desired. It would have been one more step in the inversion of law.
September 12, 2002
Seumas Milne
in the Guardian thinks that if we're going to compare Stalin to Hitler we have to bring in colonialism, too. Now, contrary to popular belief, I do not yearn for the restoration of the British empire, still less the vile Belgian one. The charge is worth further study. I do not know much about the Bengal Famine, for instance, other than it's some people's favourite famine.Someone else is going to have to analyse this. I'm out of time. One quickie point, though. What's Hola doing there listed alongside Dachau and the Gulag? Eleven Mau Mau detainees were beaten to death in the Hola internment camp in 1959. Eleven is eleven too many. I do not need to be told this. But eleven is a molehill compared to the mountains of deaths caused by Hitler, Stalin or King Leopold.
Every dog gets one free bite.
Junius and rising star Mark Kleinman are having a fascinating debate over a possible analogy with the proposed war in Iraq and what would have happened if the French had stood up to the Germans (i.e. enforced the Versailles Treaty) when the Germans reoccupied the Rhineland in 1936.
I make it 66
separate posts on Instapundit for September 11 2002. Not counting updates within a post.
James Taranto
of Best of the Web is among those outraged at the "scare quotes" around the word "heroes" in the headline of this article about the heroes of Flight 93. I'm as annoyed as anyone else about Reuters' spineless policy decision to employ quote marks around the word "terrorist." But are the "scare quotes" here really scare quotes? Much of the article seems to be about what those present in a ceremony honouring them said about the people aboard the flight. The contentious quote marks could be read as really being quote marks.Yes, I know. I'm so nice.
September 11, 2002
A gesture of respect.
Perry de Havilland of Samizdata walked down the Kings Road in Chelsea with his camera and captured these pictures of shop signs requesting a two minute silence at 1.46pm ( = 8.46am New York time) to honour those killed a year ago.
I hesitate
to say very much today. No words could be as eloquent as these heart-searing pictures posted on LGF. I urge you to scroll down as far as it goes. If you value this record of what happened, consider supporting LGF with a donation.Finally, I remember Dawson writing this brief, heartfelt paragraph exactly three months after the murders of September 11. It's about the innocent ordinariness of the victims. Brokers, stewardesses, firemen, janitors, policemen, caterers, publicity managers, tourists, secretaries...
Why them?
"Some say that we shall never know and that to the gods we are like the flies that boys kill on a summer day, and some say, on the contrary, that the very sparrows do not lose a feather that has not been brushed away by the finger of God."- Thornton Niven Wilder, The Bridge of San Luis Rey.
September 10, 2002
In answer to your question...
Simon Phipps of The Mink Dimension said what he thought of the murder of that child in Iran. Check out the comment from "Mike" too.
What did you think
of the case where the Iranian child was beheaded by her father? Here's what Silflay Hraka thought. Best of the Web observed that Reuters appeared to think it kinda cute. The story was listed under "Oddly Enough," you know, where the rains of frogs and the Elvis impersonators go.
Solent: Blog Killer.
Patrick Crozier made me gulp at the Blogger bash the other day. He said that the moment when he decided to give up on Croziervision struck when I wondered, quite casually, whether he could really keep up three blogs. I feel like I've taken off my shoe and found a butterfly stuck to the sole.On the other hand, Crozier dude, enough of your troubles already! If you want to do good in the world you must, simply must, keep up UK Transport Blog. Indeed, it's time the brand went global. The value of a having a major reference source for transport journalists soaked in libertarian assumptions would be inestimable.
Uzi Gal
, the inventor of the Uzi, is dead. And the Guardian doesn't know quite what to make of him. His son Iddo does, though: "...if you are good in something, and you are protecting your country, you might as well stick with it".
Stolen: one peal of thunder.
The Blogger Sex War enters its second day. Godless Capitalist and Mrs Elizabeth Capitalist join forces in Gene Expression to make all my best points before I could in response to this post about sexism by Meryl Yourish. Letter from Gotham fires off a few salvos, too. Scroll up, down and sideways for more highly provocative commentary. (Did you know that in blind auditions orchestras hire more female musicians? That Venus Williams ran a 5:29 mile when she was nine years old?) Though I have to say Diane E misses the point about Stephen Den Beste. Although I am not well enough informed myself about Israeli politics to say which of the two is stronger on that topic, surely a high proportion of his audience consists of technically-minded men to whom what she refers to as an "overlay of wargame theories that look to me as if he got them from science fiction novels" is a feature not a bug.
The Tin Ear Award.
I nominate myself for this: "If you exceed the normal proportions of sex-talk distribution among the various sex-talk types, as commonly practised in such a group, then you will suffer the normal social penalties for violating accepted norms." I changed the second "normal" to "usual" where those lines appear below. It still reads appallingly.
Apologies
to all those who e-mailed me with thoughts on abortion. I do intend to get back onto that topic, and a selection of the e-mails will appear when I do. Right now, though, my mind's away running along different pathways.
'Little Timmy Says Hello.'
Pub. 1999. 24pp. $4.95. "Certain to please" - Tiny Tots Digest.'Little Timmy Meets the Silly People.' Pub. 2000. 24pp. $4.95. "Amusing" - Children's Bookseller Magazine.
'Little Timmy Gets Cross.' Pub. 2001.' 48pp. $5.95. "Possibly more suitable for older readers" - Children's Literature Today. (Limited stock available.)
'Little Timmy Kicks Some Serious Butt.' Pub. 2002. 2pp. $0.50. Not reviewed for legal reasons. SOLD OUT.
September 09, 2002
Test. Test. Test.
Bogger's bluggered again.Oh, so it's finally condescended to function? In that case, pursuant to the discussion below, may I remind you of the day that Hokie pundit posted the best chick pic ever.
Dodgeblog reveals all!!!
Since I heard tell of one poor soul who was sued under the Trades Descriptions Act for selling with salacious hints and a parade of secrecy some sealed brown envelopes, which on being opened turned out to contain pictures of sofas and other soft furnishings, I had better admit that what MommaBear actually reveals to the world is her opinion of female bloggers who sell their show with sexy posters and then complain that the punters ogle them instead of applying serious study to their dissertation on the correlation between Mexican interest rates and the eleven-year breeding cycle of the lesser cicadae.More links if you step inside - are you man enough to take it, boys?
Oooooooh, and there's even more goodies from Andrew if you scroll down one. I'm in it, too. And squirmy alien monsters from the dawn of time. Go on, go on, go on.
UPDATE: On reflection, after reading Improved Clinch's useful roundup of the debate, and after reading more of Dawn Olsen's blog Up Yours, I have softened my opinion. This happens to me a lot - if this blog was written with an enforced cooling off period of an hour it would consist of nothing but the pure light of reason and get one hit a week, and that one in the hope of finding sewing patterns.
One thing first. In all of this discussion I use "right" (and "allowed") in the colloquial not the political sense. I support everyone's political right to say damn near anything, up to and including shouting "fire!" in a crowded theatre - though I have to be on a roll to make that one stick. If that's understood, let's get on.
There are lots of different types of sex talk. I can discern:
- (a) material intended to arouse sustained lust, stuff the reader could use in the various ways pornography is used. I don't want to belabour the issue whether or not all of this category actually is porn.
- (b) material, usually pictures or headlines, intended to get people through the door. Once they are inside the stuff on offer is not sex. The hope is they'll keep reading anyway.
- (c) as above, but clearly a joke.
- (d) material intended to arouse in the reader instantaneous lust plus a smile plus a sense of knowingness plus give the impression that the originator is "one of the guys". Samizdata chick pics are the perfect example.
- (e) autobiographical material, the recounting of which is intended to make the teller feel better in some way. I don't necessarily mean that the teller has a problem, though that is included in this category. It could also be that the teller wants the sheer pleasure of expressing themselves, and has picked this topic.
- (f) dirty jokes.
- (g) serious, usually third person, stuff about political, medical or social aspects of sexuality. This might include personal anecdotes, but the point is always capable of being generalized and intended to persuade. Sullivan sometimes writes in this vein. Clearly Dawn Olsen does too, but heavily mixed in with (b) and (e).
Any of these types can be produced in an intelligent manner, even the dirty jokes. But blogging is a conversation among a group consisting mostly of strangers, along with quite a few aquaintances, the odd enemy and some actual friends. What types of sex talk are allowed in such a conversation? Type (a) is pretty well verboten. The second type is nearly so, partly because the surging hormones you've triggered screw up the social dynamics of the conversation and the flow of ideas, and partly because the failure to gratify expectations isn't always exciting or thought-provoking, sometimes it's just irritating. Type (e) is not forbidden, but a little goes a long way. It can get embarrassing, and, quite genuinely may be of limited interest to persons of different constitution to the teller. All the other types are allowed these days. In moderation.
If you exceed the normal proportions of sex-talk distribution among the various sex-talk types, as commonly practised in such a group, then you will suffer the usual social penalties for violating accepted norms. Other people will exercise their right to react unfavourably. Some won't want to talk to you at all. Others will, but they won't take you seriously. Others will tense up not necessarily because they are uptight, repressed individuals (though they might be, and might like it that way), but rather because they feel that they are at risk of being seduced rather than argued into accepting a certain worldview.
Others simply won't be interested. Yes folks, there are people out there who are more interested in Bill Clinton's political legacy than what he did with his cigar. I'm one of 'em. So are most bloggers in this corner of the net. That's why we congregate here. There are plenty of places on the net offering frank discussion of sex, but if we wanted to go there we'd be there not here.
I don't like your face.
Some mean-spirited woman called Yvonne Rennie has successfully sued an epileptic because she was "upset" by the involuntary contortions of his face during a fit. I keep re-reading this one thinking there must be more to it than that; not even our modernized judiciary could be that stupid. So far I haven't found anything to contradict the headline, though. There's something about a car crash too, but as far as I can see it does not come into this award. The epilectic, Edwin Young, really is being punished to the tune of £3,500 because he looked temporarily ugly. There are people in this world who look ugly all the time, can I sue them?And where the fneeb is Political Correctness now we need it?
Man beheads his daughter.
An Iranian, according to a brief item in The Telegraph, cut off the head of his seven year old daughter, in the erroneous belief that she had been raped by her uncle. Christendom has has also produced cultures (Old Spain and its colonial offshoots come to mind) where girls and women were killed for illicit intercourse, and where rape was seen as "ruining" a woman. But western machismo is practically dead now, and I don't think they killed child rape victims even when it was at its height.
Turkish Gastarbeiten in Germany
have provided two interesting stories over the last few days: Couple try to name baby Osama Bin Laden and Plot to bomb US bases in Germany on Sep 11 anniversary