'Nother Solent

I am the Human Flower.

Weapon: Dark Thorns.

Transportation: Golden Jet Pack.

From Lee's Useless Super-hero generator.

And the number of thy counting shall be... four?

You may find this hard to believe - not that anyone would would make up being as vague and unobservant as this - but I read this post from Iain Murray and completely failed to take in that I was, to my later astonishment, number four in BlogStreet's Most Important Blogs. I had registered that I was somewhat above Edge - a cause for slight surprise - but it was not until Dave Farell sent me an e-mail that I actually took in the number.

It was too good to last. Now I'm down to a (still jolly) ranking of 25, the pack of readers from Enter Stage Right having lapped me and passed on. But still, like Iain, I haven't quite got used to the idea that people actually read this stuff. I sped past 100,000 in the New Hit Counter Era courtesy of Mark Steyn's slipstream and forgot to notice when.

UPDATE: Dr Weevil writes:

Last Monday I calculated a list of "Bloggers' Bloggers" by taking the Blogstreet Blog IQ Top 100, dividing their Blogstreet ranks by their Blog IQ ranks, and then sorting the results. You came out in fifth place, ranking 216 among the general run of blogs and 25 among the heavy hitters, for a ratio of 8.64. A statistician could probably come up with a better formula, but results suggest that this is a pretty decent measure of who is "punching above their weight". Of course, I have an incentive to think so, since I come in at #15 myself.

Go here if you want to see the Top 35. As I mention in my update, the method was unconsciously plagiarized from C.G. Hill of Dustbury

My old comrade Amygdala and my even older comrade Ain't No Bad Dude hold the number one and two spots respectively in this list of "blogger's bloggers". Both are what you might call "robust left". I wonder if that means anything?

(Fans and anti-fans of John Lott a.k.a. "Mary Rosh" of More Guns Less Crime fame might be stimulated by a scroll down the Dude's multiple posts concerning his disappointing behaviour. However I'd take issue with the term "counter-intuitive" or Tim Lambert's claim that... oh, don't get me started. I must go away now and do important things or the whole continent will be engulfed by atomic fire.)

Eurozone on edge of slump as UK thrives

, says this article in the Times. Foreign readers are requested to pay four trillion Euros and make sacrifice to Quetzalcoatl in order to read it, so I'll save you the trouble. It says that the Eurozone is on the edge of a slump as the UK thrives.

Mark Holland

writes:

Loath as I am to nit-pick with a Mark Steyn endorsed scribe I must point out a weakness with the "set-buster" bomb you mentioned. Unfortunately it's only good at Venn diagram mutilation. 'Set' has the most definitions of any word in the English language. 127 if memory serves. However the badger's dwelling is not one of them as it is a 'sett'.

Well, Mr Holland, I am not at all loath to nit pick with you. My dictionary has "sett (also set)" and tells us that the tt spelling prevails in technical senses, such as the particular pattern of a tartan. I don't think a badger hole is at all technical, so there. But let's not quarrel. That one little letter need not hold us back from using weapons of mass destruction on mathematical constructs. These Venn diagrams have it coming. I don't know whether "A union B" refers to trades unions or some kind of imperialist agression, but either way let's nuke 'em back to a pre-Platonic geometry.

The local press

where I live made much of the fact that a rocket launcher was handed in during the recent firearms amnesty. I think that it is the rocket launcher mentioned in passing in this story about a World War II grenade.

A source who ought to know gave a different slant to the story. Want to know what that "rocket launcher" actually was? A spud gun. That's right: it shot potatoes.

Seduced by the color-blind eye of the Cyclops of Power,

or Give Me That Old-Time Commiedom. On Tuesday I was complaining that the People's Daily were sounding unduly like normal human beings. No such complaint can be sustained against the Zapatista Army of National Liberation. Their communiques, informing us with the greatest urgency that the Iraq war is going to be a big mistake, romantically hail from "the Mountains of the Mexican Southeast." Fair enough: I suppose the Clandestine Revolutionary Indigenous Committee can't very well supply the authorities with a return address. The language is so quaint as to suggest that the Indigenous Committee might be into the bits of Indigenous Culture that involve ritual peyote use.

A the whole loopy package is solemnly re-published by ZNet in association with - get this - Le Monde Diplomatique.

Do ZNet have any idea how weird and cultish this association makes them look?

Vale. Salud and may the world which is to come have the distinctive signature of no one!

I have a supplier who discreetly provides me with this sort of good stuff:

...Leaving aside that the title "Interior Minister" has a certain sinister and Metternichian sound to it...

...Nicholas Sarkozy (a name which if you see it upside down in a mirror probably reads 'I am Lord Voldemort')...

...I think perhaps Spanish men are going to need more than just the weapon in their pants...

...Cardassians are stupid and annoying. And lumpy.

...and suggest safe daily limits for the intake of statist propaganda...

...So why are you still here? P*** off and read it, stoopid!

Dave Kopel's in town, and not as pessimistic about gun rights here as you might expect. He mentions a new book by Peter Hitchens called A Brief History of Crime: The Decline of Order, Justice and Liberty in England. It normally happens that whenever one of the talented Hitchens family puts pen to paper the result is reviewed and discussed half to death all over Radio 4. I haven't heard a word about this book.

A public service.

"If you want to appear like you’re at the cutting edge of net culture but can’t be bothered to spend hours online, then never fear. Scotsman.com’s pathetic team of geeks, freaks and gimps will do the hard work for you. While you sip wine, read a book or engage in normal social interaction, they will burn out their retinas staring at badly designed web pages and dodge creeps in chatrooms to prepare for you: Scotsman.com’s lazy guide to net culture."

Back off youse creeps, that pitch belongs to us bloggers.

I have no strength left

to comment on this story about how the burglar shot by Tony Martin is trying to sue him.

Or maybe I have, just. I've heard two separate people ask why no one has yet seen fit to assassinate the burglar concerned. When the law of the land visibly ceases to function something much cruder will take its place.

The truth about Bart Simpson's race.

Gary Farber writes:

"'What race is Bart Simpson anyway? Is he even human?'

Of course not. He's cartoon.

Just like the rest of us, dear.

There are no separate human races. Thare are only those of us less and
more cartoonish. Quote me on this."

Boris the Evil Badger

has been executed, according to the Guardian. If one casts the democracies as the humans and dictatorships as badgers, there is something Saddam Hussein-like in his story, (although no-one to my knowledge ever stole Saddam from an animal rescue centre): early coddling led to a loss of proper fear, so that he attacked humans instead of running away. For a while he was able to defy all attempts at sanctions, forcing two police officers who were trying to catch him to retreat to the safety of their patrol car. Eventually, however, the increasing boldness of his attacks on seemingly random targets could no longer be ignored and he was reduced to his component atoms by a massive earth-pentrating "set-buster" B61-11 mini nuclear bomb launched as a favour from USAF B-2s stationed at RAF Fairford.

Or, if you prefer, put down by a local vet. No doubt local activists will say that he could have been contained by non-violent means, but I can't help thinking that an assisted passage to the next world was the only real solution to the Boris problem. Mr Mike Weaver, chairman of the Worcestershire Badger Society has claimed that, "This tragedy shows the folly to keep [sic] wild animals as pets." Seems to me that Boris did just fine as a pet and "this tragedy" actually shows the folly of freeing animals from rescue centres. Staff at Vale Wildlife Rescue (who had taken in Boris after he was hand-reared by some party not mentioned in the report) said that he had never displayed any signs of aggression before being stolen or deliberately released from the centre last week.

Which is more than you can say for Saddam Hussein. Mass grave of Saddam's victims found in Iraq.

Austrian tourists missing in the Sahara found, according to a sketchy report.

Israelis not the targets this time, so....

Marduk reports that the Guardian, the Independent and the San Francisco Chronicle have all rediscovered the word "terrorist".

Tories pledge

to scrap tuition fees. I'm just waiting for the Conservative Central Office discussion paper on nationalisation of the means of production, distribution and exchange.

Then again

, better for several million people if the People's Daily really was indistinguishable from the Peterborough Citizen and Advertiser, i.e. extinct since 1973. This disquisition on who qualified as human in communist terminology serves as a reminder of just what a bunch of grindingly vicious dipsticks the People's Daily served.

Comprador Bourgeois Element Realises Futility of Remaining As Running Dog of Imperialism

. The People's Daily also reports Clair Short has resigned. They don't say anything remotely resembling my headline, though. I made it up. Okay, so the hard-drinking boyos of Beijing press pack didn't exactly break that story themselves, but you'd think they could do more than reprint Reuters or AFP. It's a cold grey world we have come to, when the People's Daily is indistinguishable from the Peterborough Citizen and Advertiser. Couldn't the comrade writers put more of a Chinese slant on things?

Oops. I'm just leaving.

UPDATE: If Bart Simpson were here (which thank the Lord he's not, sir) he'd tell me not have a cow, but I'm actually having an attack of PC guilt about the post above. You know how it goes, some incongruity makes you laugh, you press post & publish, you go away, you come back, you re-read your own stuff, you realise that you will have to go away forever and live out your shameful days as a bag lady. Can I just take this opportunity to state that I am quite aware that the possession of an epicanthic fold is, objectively, the human norm, and to generally emote a soft mist of niceness and goodwill over everybody. Thank you.

UPDATE TO THE UPDATE: What race is Bart Simpson anyway? Is he even human?

"Those insane Canadians,"

writes Rob Hinkley, "painting cartoon birds, tigers, bomb-wielding pink elephants and skantily-clad ladies on their bomber planes.And proudly calling a bomber which has flown 84 missions the "X-Terminator", as though to celebrate the carnage it has caused: how grotesque! How hideous! Or something."

There are no problems, only opportunities.

The ever-positive People's Daily sees the bright side of SARS.

"Hu Angang, a noted researcher, said the changes underway in China's public health system would bring more changes to the country's whole government administrative mechanism.

An old Chinese saying goes: "disaster can be converted to be good fortune at the right time".

I mock, but he has a point there. China's government needs a lesson in the costs of authoritarianism - I just wish it could be given by some other teacher.

Still obsessed after all these hours?

The rest of the blogosphere has moved on in its orbit about whatever it orbits about, but I'm still stuck in the Drabble season. Here, Ms Drabble, is a picture of an RAF aeroplane bearing shark's teeth nose art pictured in North Africa early in WWII. Some accounts say that the Americans picked up the habit from the RAF, not vice versa. That's RAF as in Royal Air Force as in your own British air force, Ms Drabble. Still think "a nation that can paint those faces on death machines must be insane," huh?

Probably.

Royden H Wood IV

writes regarding my admission last Wednesday that I don't know the polite way to eat oranges:

Maybe I can help you out with the orange peel thing too. Take the entire Orange, peel and all, and before cutting it or whatever, take it between your open, flat palms and roll it around a bit. Kind of like you're working with clay. Do this for a little bit, maybe a minute. Then peel with your fingers, starting at the top or bottom, whichever, start at a pole. Dig your finger in there, and peel a little back. Work it carefully, in a spiral fashion, and you can peel the entire, err, peel in one piece. Voila, you don't have to worry about the polite way to discard the peel.

Of course, in another day, when I was active in the US Marines, I'd just eat it like an apple. [What, no silver service? The horrors of war indeed. - NS] Most of the vitamin C is in the peel anyway. Probably not the polite thing to do.

Of course it isn't. The truly thoughtful guest refrains from eating the peel until he has amused the company by wrapping it round his teeth, flexing his gums and saying (indistinctly), "Run away, I'm the orange-toothed monster."

Daniel Messing

writes:

I read Greenmantle and the other Hannay mysteries long ago, and have re-read them (once, with difficulty, to one of my children--too different a world for him). I take them down now and again to re-read favorite passages. So much of it so un-PC, and yet seems to ring true.

But perhaps it isn't "true." I believe it was Arnold Bennett who criticized another author's description of a prison hanging, remarking that the other had obviously not attended such an event, in the end supplying his own much better description, then adding that he likewise had never attended.

Oddly enough, that was the world in which I spent much time when I was growing up. My father supplied us with most of Blackwell's "Best Books for Children" and we read them all.

So you didn't like v.I. But Sandy? The Tea House? The description of the dance there? Sandy's description of being torpedoed? These pictures give me pleasure.

Me, too, muchly. And there's the interlude on board the Essen barge, a sort of hard-working arcadia. And the thought of Mr Blenkiron makes me wonder about George Galloway.

Enter Stage Right

has up an interview with Mark Steyn. ESR's e-mail alerting me to it mentioned a shocking secret, and there certainly is one¹, but for me the big surprise came one or two paragraphs before the end.

Synchronicity is a wonderful thing. There can be no more than a few hundred souls on this planet who have read Buchan's Greenmantle during the last three years, and Mr Steyn and I are two of them.² There are a select few hundred, too, who have read this blog... and whaddya know?

¹Berkeley!? How could you?

²Truth to tell, I skipped a bit when that Von Einem woman started to play a major role. It's so tedious to be told that one ought to be fascinated.

Going wobbly.

The TV news says that General Jay Garner has been recalled from Iraq, following regional administrator Barbara Bodine. Seems a weak move to me, designed to pander to "world opinion" and its squeamishness about the military; if the US isn't careful it'll end up with the worst of both worlds - having to jump when the UN says "frog" yet still having to carry the blame for any failures on its own.

UPDATE: Now Ceefax is reporting a slightly different story, with Gen. Garner demoted/moved sideways rather than recalled. Not so much a wobble as a worrying vibration. My point stands: there are two good things about the UN not being involved in Iraq. One is that the UN isn't involved; the other is that the US knows it can't blame anyone else if everything goes pear-shaped. That's a motive to damn well make it work.

Let her very name be accursed.

Iain Murray has taken a most awful revenge on Margaret Drabble for this. He has quietly appropriated her last name to express his frustration with the Blogger bug that takes the reader to the wrong post despite the link being correctly typed. (Naturally, his link will probably take you to the wrong post. If it does, go here and look for "Just like that.")

Should the usage become general, it won't be the first drabble in the dictionary. It has long meant a story told in a hundred words: a structure as light and strong as a balloon that can carry its own weight a thousand times over. The origin of the term, according to Secret Master of Fandom Dave Langford, lies in Monty Python's Big Red Book which says: `Drabble. A word game for 2 to 4 players. The four players sit from left to right and the first person to write a novel wins.'

Monty Python had a bit of a thing about Margaret Drabble. She turns up in this sketch, too.

Man: ...It's a free country. (enter a knight in amour) I mean if I want to eat a squirrel now and again, that's me own business, innit? I mean, I'm no racialist. I, oh, oh...

The knight is carrying a raw chicken. The man apprehensively covers his head and the knight slams him in the stomach with the chicken.

Woman: I think it's silly to ask a lizard what it thinks, anyway.

Chairman (off): Why?

Woman: I mean they should have asked Margaret Drabble.

Thirty years on, the unconscious wisdom of Python becomes clear: Drabble and the occasional eater of squirrels were avatars of each other. ("I mean, I'm no racialist" - "I have tried to control my anti-Americanism, remembering the many Americans that I know and respect") Male and female. Plebian and genteel. It's a ying-tong thing. You Americans wouldn't understand.