'Nother Solent

London, New York, Paris, Munich / Ev'rybody talk 'bout mmm

Plain English Campaign don' make good music. When even the Guardian devotes a leading article to saying Rummie made perfect sense there ain't much more to say.

Except, possibly, "isn't it funny how some trivial little stories seem to resonate?" I have neglected to do that re-coding thing to my hit counter (given that Bravenet's free hit counter is, well, free, I really can't complain that they are obviously trying to hassle their free hit-counter subscribers into paying for an upgrade), so I don't know if I had a surge in hits but I was struck by how many blogs linked to the post that I dashed off in forty seconds flat. Nor was I the only blogger to comment unfavourably on the award. Beware the fury of the pedant!

(Incidentally, for a surreal mishearing of the lyrics of the "Ev'rybody talk about pop music" song, scroll down this website. I have one of my own. For years and years I thought "Smooth Operator" was "School of the Red Ants." )

How quaint.

EU considers currency controls. (Via England's Sword.)

Have you told a doctor to get the **** out of your life recently?

Perhaps you should. It's good for the heart.

Imagine you are a mother

who has been stationary in a traffic jam for twenty minutes. It is 3.10pm. In ten minutes your rather insecure five year old will finish school - but you couldn't make it to the school gates in time even if the traffic started moving, which it shows no sign of doing. You own a crummy old mobile phone of traditional design. Do you (a) ring up the school and ask the secretary to have a word with the class teacher so that the teacher can offer specific reassurance ("Your mummy says she's stuck in traffic, but she's coming as soon as she can") or do you (b) obey the law. Leaving aside all the various intra-libertarian arguments about how to deal with road and traffic safety in the least coercive manner, the new law against using anything but a headset to talk while in traffic could so easily have been drafted so as to gain public acceptance. It is obviously dangerous to drive along with a phone jammed between your shoulder and your cheek; that could have been banned and most people would have thought, good thing too. But, oh no, they couldn't do it that way. They just had to make talking on a mobile even while the car is stationary and the engine off illegal as well. It makes me wonder if someone in the government has shares in a company manufacturing hands free sets.

When stuck in the sort of really bad dead-stop traffic jam that builds up behind an accident I have seen people get out of their cars and go behind the bushes for a pee. So far as I know, that is legal (it had better be) - but ringing up your worried family to say why you are three hours late isn't.

I was out with a bunch of ladies last night, most of whose political views are unknown to me. Without exception they said they would break this law if they felt it necessary - or convenient - or fun. They might get headsets, y'know, some day, maybe. Right now they had other things to do with their money, like manicures. And we wonder why respect for the law has diminished. Even the police don't seem to have any belief in it; they say that they will "use their discretion". Better than actually enforcing this idiocy, certainly - but so much for the principle of a government of laws rather than men.

I don't know exactly what I get out of blogging.

It can't be pleasure. No one could get any pleasure out of posts like this one of Peter Cuthbertson's, where he imaginatively enters into the mind of a veteran who killed himself after being persecuted first by criminals and then by the police. Yet I would rather have read it than not.

Bulminic kitten cuteness overdose

. You have been warned. Via The Sporadic Chronicle.

UPDATE: Okay, okay, so I can't spel "bulimic". And I like the kittens really. I am pro-kitten.

Quite right too.

Britain is European Top Nation say the Germans; the ones answering a survey anyway. We only beat the Frenchies by 1% though.

There is more heartwarming news from the wacky world of surveys. 57% of 1,001 British adults (Why 1,001? Who was the 1?) surveyed by International Policy Network say, stuff Kyoto we want goodies! Among the nation's idealistic youth the proportion of Kyoto-stuffers is even higher. Who'd have thought it?

Harry Hatchet has been in the wars. Attacked by Noam Chomsky himself! Some people get all the luck. I did once get an email from Justin Raimondo. Actually it was rather nice, but, heck, at least I was noticed.

CORRECTION. Wasn't Harry. It was Hari. I'm very sori.

Life is still tough for the owners of lazy slaves.

That's the title of a post I have up at Samizdata.

Let me make this very clear.

The Plain English Campaign says that Rumsfeld talks gobbledegook. He got an award for talking gobbledegook. But the things he said to get the award weren't gobbledegook. His comments made sense. They were also funny. They were meant to be funny. If the Plain English Campaign can't see this then the Plain English Campaign are being stupid. That would not surprise me. It is not the first time that they have said that something was gobbledegook when it was not gobbledegook, just difficult. Some things are still difficult even when you use easy words. Epistemology, for instance.

The Scots were once a hardy people.

When a Scot of olden time wanted to make his plaid wrap round him in the proper way he would simply jump fully dressed into the burn and let the sopping fabric dry - or freeze - round his body in the correct configuration. Times have changed. My Scotland Correspondent writes:

I happened to get The Telegraph today, and its Scottish edition at any rate has one or two plummy stories you might enjoy. I don't know if you've been following the farcical tale of the (totally unnecessary anyway) Scottish Parliament Building? I'm no expert on it myself, but essentially it's an unsurprising tale of catastrophic overspend. The Executive is now having its angst about it in public, with a big Public Inquiry into what went wrong. So far so boring. I quote the Telegraph's paragraph:

'Staff at the Scottish Parliament are being offered £60 per hour counselling sessions to help them cope with the trauma of appearing at the inquiry into the rising cost of the Holyrood project'

The second story to catch my attention is a euro one, and you've probably already come across it. Apparently new rules on 'activity toys' state that there can be no more than 60cm from saddle or seat to the ground. This will eliminate the traditional rocking horse.

Third and best is the result of a survey which reveals that one third of Americans who come to Scotland believe that the haggis is a real animal, and 23% believe they will be able to hunt it, and are even being sold tours which will enable them to do so. Now I think that while there is potential here for bypassing the iniquitous ban on fox-hunting already in place in Scotland, one should be cautious. As every properly informed person knows; the haggis is a shy and harmless creature which lives on mountain sides and as a result has legs on one side shorter than the other. This would make hunting them rather unsporting, as once you've driven them onto a bit of flat land they can only run round in circles. (Most haggis eaten today has been bred in captivity in specially sloping enclosures)

A post about e-mail guilt, Normblog, Blogger's oddities, and a concluding moment of sheer awe at the way people similar to me in some ways are suddenly different.

I have run out of witty ways of saying that I completely lost control of my email stack. So I'll just say it. "I completely lost control of my email stack." So stern is my determination to avoid all attempts at levity that I refer to an "e-mail stack" rather than an "e-mail pile" and supress a joke about requiring an air-filled cushion. This is no time for jokes. Things are getting embarrassing. For instance, I have only just found out that Normblog has out a profile of me - despite the fact that it has graced his pages for days and days....

Now, utterly excise from your minds the fact that there is a profile of me in Normblog at the moment. This allows me to say that Normblog is so good it burns. Look at all those posts reading like they were tailored to my interests and obsessions. Chocolate. Julie Burchill. What makes a political cartoon acceptable. Non-paradoxes of democracy.

Due to some caprice of Blogspot I only get to read Normblog in bursts - six times out of seven the system will not let me scroll down beyond what is immediately visible, and the usual remedies like pressing f12 do not seem to work. So on the one try out of seven when the sky clears and I can finally scroll down, I gorge myself on good stuff like a pig who has hit the truffle mother lode. And like I said, it's all my sort of stuff.

Yet I think I am right in saying that Norman Geras is a committed Marxist. That, to me, is very strange.

If I've remembered it right, there's a bit in Jung Chang's autobiography Wild Swans where the writer describes how she chatted with a boy from her class while visiting her grandmother in hospital. The scene takes place during a grim period in Chinese history: Jung Chang's grandmother's last months have been made a misery by the Red Guards; the entire family have been persecuted and both her parents have been exiled to separate camps. Yet her schoolfriend speaks without artifice of his devotion to Chairman Mao. By this time, she comments, she had simply had to learn that some of her friends had come up with drastically different answers to life's questions than she had.