March 01, 2003
Kim Jong Il of North Korea like his father before him
is a snake. We know he is because he must surely be descended from a witch who could take the form of a snake; namely the Lady of the Green Kirtle, Ruler of Underland in C S Lewis's The Silver Chair. Consider the similarities. Kim kidnaps people and holds them in servitude for many years, binding their minds by strange charms. He tells his subjects that his realm is the only world, or the only world that matters. His slaves dig tunnels deep under the free lands from which they plan to launch an invasion. Those he has kidnapped are used as tools to make the success of this invasion more sure.A friend suggested this parallel to me upon seeing the Telegraph story about the tunnels linked to above. It is fanciful. But fantasy can sometimes open the mind to psychological possiblities that would not otherwise be considered. If North Korea is so far gone in its descent into madness as to invade the South, would you find it so strange (in this saga that has already proved stranger than fiction) to see a brainwashed abductee at the head of the army?
Let us hope the Silver Chair can be broken in time.
"It is at this moment that my sympathy dies."
Dixie Flatline looks at the motives of the Palestinians.
Guess which side of this controversy I'm on.
In his first week he corrected Lileks for an error of fact in the famous Olive Garden fisking. Is nothing sacred?
UPDATE: You know, I've seen it when those one-year-olds get into a jelly fight at the party, and it's pretty scary. Quick, sweeties all round. Public Interest also had a birthday recently and here is that esteemed blog's very first post.
Just when you thought it was safe to go back on the web...
along comes a subtitled version of the Japanese singing superheroes with sauce receptacles for heads.
February 28, 2003
Oh, all right then. What is the hypercubic root of 4096? Whose last words were "They couldn't hit an elephant at this dist..."? Who scored 6996 runs in 52 Test Matches? Will any of her colleagues at the Guardian ever speak to Julie Burchill again after a no-punches-pulled column like this one? Finally, for a bonus point, did the sub-editor who wrote the headline actually read the column or was he just going by what he thought it would say?