'Nother Solent

It's not every day

I cheer on anti-corporate direct action. But doday I will. Go, Rob! Show those presumptuous capitalists the limits of their power.

The unorganised doily-making militia.

Odious of Odious & Peculiar spends a flight contemplating how to commit on-board anti-terrorist mayhem with his crochet hook. I'm surprised they let him in with a crochet hook; I don't think they would at Stansted. The Stansted/Charles De Gaulle tendency appears to have kiddies in costume and wielders of craft yarn more to the forefront of their minds than actual terrorists as the sort of person they wish to thwart and annoy. Given the real peril, what an astonishing example of the human tendency to elevate doing something easy over doing something useful.

Mind you, if I may say so without offence, I can see why Mr Odious might appear to the jaundiced eye of a security man as being a teeny bit closer to the statistical profile of the average terrorist than a silver-haired granny half way through a baby blanket. He thinks things like this:

Am I the only one who, as I shuffle forward in my socks, waiting to retrieve my belongings, dreams of challenging them all to an iaijitsu duel? "Taste my watered steel, you dim-eyed troglodyte! I shall send you to the Land of Wind and Ghosts, that your intestines may be eternally devoured by wild boars! Yes, I have two forms of ID."

Short-term future.

There is much controversy and confusion over whether Muslim cleric Yusuf al-Qaradawi, who said:

“Israelis might have nuclear bombs but we have the children bomb and these human bombs must continue until liberation.”

is to speak at a forthcoming educational conference sponsored by the Metropolitan Police.

The title of the conference? Our Children, Our Future.

Every time a child says, "I don't believe in fairies" there is a little fairy somewhere that falls down dead.

They certainly have grown up at Charles de Gaulle airport. Stay away, Tinkerbell. These guys would shoot you down for violating French airspace.

Shall I be very, very naughty? I shall. I don't believe in officious airport security.

Eat my thread tail, Babylockers!

The preliminary checks had been done. Tension, balance, position - all were perfect. Time to go.

With a practised touch of her foot on the pedal, Solent eased the mighty machine into action. This was not the gentle Sewland that she had trained on; the hard-pumping Janome engine could spew out twenty yards of thread in ten seconds. Five, ten, fifteen, twenty: the pattern repeats flashed by like milestones. Now she was flying, the knife cutting through the fabric with slick, contemptuous ease, the upper looper a blur. Yet some instinct warned of trouble ahead: external corner coming up. A curse escaped her lips, but already she was adjusting to the threat, reining in the plunging needle. At that, habits learned and honed from hundreds of hours on a conventional machine almost let her down with this beast and its different ways. She almost stopped too soon, the way she had learned in the old days, needle still in the fabric. Somehow, though, her first teacher seemed to be by her side speaking directly to her mind: Go further. Right outside the fabric. Don't be afraid. In that instant she regained control and cooly brought the needle to a halt that crucial three stitches on. In a fraction of a second the presser foot had been flicked up and the fabric yanked round by ninety degrees. Once more the pedal moved beneath her foot. Once more the MyLock motor gave voice. "Okay, honey," Solent muttered through clenched lips, "let's see what you can do." This time there was no holding back. Blades and needles seemed less to cut the surplus fabric than to vapourise it. Solent was no novice but it was all she could do to hold the seamline flat as the twin HA-1 SP needles ate up the yards. There was no time to wonder at the marvels of engineering that kept loopers, needles and blades dancing without a misstep even as the speed hit maximum.

Yet the end was in sight. As the pressure on the pedal eased the roar of the machine dropped to a purr. She gently brought it to a halt a precise two centimetres past the end of the seam. Presser foot up - thread on the cutter - snap! Securing the thread-tail could wait. For now the job was done.

"Coffee?" said a voice. Her trusty groundcrew was at her elbow.

"Coffee," she confirmed, flicking closed the power switch and leaning back. "Shaken, not stirred."

Alice Bachini is back! And in Texas, planning to stay there. And I didn't know, until she commented on one of my posts and sent me a courtesy note.

I've OD'd on WWII references recently. But the fixed quantity of bombing hypothesis did get a trail of thought started about the way British Intelligence deceived the Germans into thinking that their bombs were falling north and east (or was it south and west? I can't remember) of where they actually were falling. This involved getting people killed in Walthamstow who wouldn't have been killed without the deception. But fewer people.

No time to search out links now. Gotta go to a riding lesson.

Naming Names.

Black Triangle points out an inconsistency of policy over at the Independent.

What next, Mr Fisk? Revealing the names of people on Witness Protection programmes to demonstrate the futility of the War On Drugs?

Someone else can bring up Valerie Plame. I'm too disgusted to raise the energy.

Dic Lit.

Jo Tatchell writes an interesting piece in the Guardian about fiction and poetry by dictators, concentrating on Saddam's romantic oeuvre. It says at the bottom that the article is abridged from a longer one in Prospect. I hope the Prospect version includes mention of "The Hundred Days," a play about Napoleon written by Mussolini and someone called Giovacchino Forzano. I seem to recall it was reviewed - favourably - in Signal magazine.

Jim Bennett

writes:

Yes, I have had that thought myself over the last few years when I see websites with a profusion of typefaces, colors, etc.

Whenever people get new technologies that enable them to do things they couldn't before, they go through a period of exuberant excess trying out all sorts of things that really, when one thinks about it, are better left undone. So it was with Victorian typography (and interior decoration, for that matter) -- and so it is with web design today.

As for the poster, it wasn't really aimed at black people, who knew very well what the Fugitive Slave Act meant. It was intended to shock to white population into seeing what was going on.