Saturday, September 01, 2007

[blogfocus saturday] genesis of the bloggers

1. Iain Dale, who incidentally doesn't make it easy to access his old material, is having an identity crisis, as can be seen in the banner above and asks whether anyone can design a new banner for him. That's the latest post but his earlier efforts show that many issues are the same today as way back then:

To understand why this country should question its whole relationship with the EU click on this link. I defy even the most ardent Europhile to defend this.

2. Mr. Eugenides did not begin with much fanfare but with a nevertheless interesting observation of the Tory leadership race at the time:

According to an article in yesterday's Sunday Telegraph, many of the members of the Cornerstone Group of "traditionalist" Tory MPs are considering backing David Cameron. Full story can be found here. If true, this is a big blow to DD. He's trying to paint himself as the heir to Thatcher whilst DC is the heir to Blair - a gross oversimplification, but a convenient one. And, like all good caricatures, it has at its heart a kernel of truth. Cameron seems sure to win the contest - but it's an open question whether or not the party membership would be so keen if they truly understood what he has in mind for the future.

3. In what I thought a neat little piece on Arnie, Vox Day did two amazing things - pumped iron and got no comments. For a 100+ commenter, that seemed a little strange:

In honor of Governor Schwarzenegger's election - I didn't and don't support his political career, but I still like him as an example of what determination can do for an individual - I hit the triceps hard today. After my normal workout, I added a symbolic six reps with the 100-pound dumbell. I figure Arnold would appreciate that sort of homage instead of the usual toast or whatever. So, *grunt* here's to the new governor!

4. Jonathan Swift went out on a limb and predicted what would happen in 2006. How did he do?

Condoleeza Rice will win the 2006 Presidential election.

There won’t be a single terrorist attack in Wyoming.

The Baltimore Colts will win the Superbowl.

Dick Cheney will resign for health reasons and President Bush will choose Joe Lieberman as the new Vice President uniting the country.

American troops will leave Iraq except for the ones necessary to keep order and prevent civil war.

The stock market will soar to 10,000.

5. The Tin Drummer has made a comeback [how's that for a scoop?] but here he writes of the cultural blog to be:

I had intended this to be a cultural blog, full of literature; however at the moment I am drinking rather more than I am reading. And I wanted to make a defence of beer, by which I mean ale, bitter; what is sometimes dismissed by people as "warm beer". This makes me laugh. You don't drink red wine at 2C, so why drink a flavoursome, malty, hoppy, tangy, fruity beer at such a low temperature that you can barely taste anything and your tongue is numbed as it goes down?

6. The ex-globetrotting CityUnslicker got straight down to the issues when he began and at the same time displayed that idiosyncratic spelling he's now come to be known and loved for, along with Tiberius Gracchus:

Today I wanted to briefly air my thoughts on immigration and employment in the UK today. The MSM have been reporting for the last few days on the large numbers of immigrants that the UK has accpeted since 1997. In general they have tried to avoid giving any real insights into the issue and instead have taken simple ideological stances on the statistics produced.

7. Like Iain Dale, another blogger with the extremely annoying habit of not providing archives, Jocko, aka Colin Campbell, aka Adelaide Green Porridge, aka everything else under the sun, gives us the wordy Count Up:

Early one morning in early May 2006, it will be 01:02:03:04:05:06. Only once in your lifetime. And that's all for now folks.

Don't forget that it's 68 days until Hannah's birthday as well.

8. Saving the lady with the capitalized post titles for last, here she is, the incomparable Welshcakes, whose latest post contains some surprises, as does her take on STORMY WEATHER:

Well, not really. This morning it rained hard for about five minutes and there was loud thunder without lightning, which always frightens me to death. [I wondered if, this time, it was old Pluto having a noisy sulk. Perhaps he is going to abduct Persephone again in revenge for losing his status?] If you are out and get caught in a summer storm like that, it is much too hot and sticky to put on one of those raincoats-in-a-bag beloved of the British, and everyone stares at you if you do, as it is evidence of the kind of forward planning that Italians don't go in for. Besides, where's your pazienza? - Just wait a minute and the rain will stop, as suddenly as it came.

If you have pazienza, I'll be back Wednesday evening with another Focus. Ciao, baby.

[deng xiaoping] foresight or blind determination

At first sight, this might seem both boring and irrelevant but when you consider the sheer size of the project, you can see it impacts on the world as a whole. Let me quote just a few stats concerning China's Three Gorges Dam Project:

181 metres high and 2.3 kilometres wide. When it is fully operational, it will supply 85 billion kilowatts of power annually — just 2 per cent of the country's energy needs by 2010.

That's massive. It has also attracted environmental ire:

Environmentalists and scientists fear the reservoir behind the dam will become a giant cesspool that will affect water quality for the 30 million residents a bottleneck for shipping, the migrants it has created will cause social turmoil for generations to come and thousands of people have been displaced, before the cost in wioldlife is even mentioned.

It was also opposed by one third of deputies in the National Assembly at a time of communist Party crackdowns. Still it went ahead. Now I ask the question - was Deng Xiaoping, the man whose quote gave this blog its name, perhaps right all along?

If he were still around and I put all the objections to him, I imagine he'd reply: "And would you prefer us to supply power to our people through coal-burning? How about nuclear means?" Think through the alternatives to what is clearly the cheapest and cleanest variant and the thing starts to look a bit different on the sort of scale we're talking.

Look at the whole article by Mary-Anne Toy, the url, alas, being lost in my pre-blogging days.

[stupidity] a second look

Not Juliet

When I wrote the post on stupidity, Mopsa made it into a gender issue and asked that I even the score. I asked the sweet lass, in turn, to point me in the right direction but sadly, on this she went quiet. Thank goodness for Juliet, who has finally provided me with the material:

I can't believe the Bishop of London, Richard Chartres has somehow found it appropriate to open his sermon during the otherwise beautiful memorial service for Princess Diana by yelling the words, "Who's cheating?!"

Read the rest here.

We love Mopsa

[september 1st] new academic year

Well, I just heard a huge noise with megaphones and everything and looked across the road at the school and yes - it's that time of year again. Across Russia and former republics, it's the start of the new academic year - much frenetic activity, the flower shops do a roaring trade as children buy flowers for their teachers, everybody's all hyper and I'm delighted I'm only observing at a distance this time.

The little guys in their suits and looking resplendent and hopeful, the little girls in their white shirts, hair in bows and their black skirts and the same colour scheme right across this vast land.

Managed to avoid the faculty meeting yesterday and have two ladies coming here today, both sisters and the good thing is that I don't know which is coming first and so I'm getting ready for the surprise. I also have to Min today - can you believe government departments working on this day?

It's not a good day to be out - the cafes and cinemas are packed and everyone's having a jolly good time. Little girl yesterday told me she was so looking forward to getting back and working again. I looked at her to see if she was kidding but she was dead serious.

[tolerant] does not mean equivalent

Here's a hypothetical.

I meet a visiting student from Zimbabwe, before the new academic year starts and invite her to dinner to meet my family. She turns out to be good company and the kids adore her.

Is she one of the family? No. Is she my gender? No. Is she my colour? No. Is she of the same background and experience? No. Do we listen to the same music and read the same literature? No.

Is she welcome at our home? Yes. She's a highly interesting person.

By any stretch of the imagination, she is not equivalent, she is not equal. She is included in this activity and more than this, she's welcome. This is beyond tolerance.

Do I invite her to a faculty meeting? No. She is not included here, not because we "don't want her" or don't "recognize her equivalence with the other professors as being just as good as them if they'll only let her" but through sheer common sense - she wouldn't want to be bored by a bunch of fuddy-duddies plus she can't speak the language.

So no, she's not equal here. Sanity. Common sense. Tolerance and inclusion in some areas does not equal Equivalence and Relativism. These latter two are catch-all rash generalizations based on no known reality in society.

They are political correctness which, by definition, is insane.

Now the Feministi at the university get to hear of her non-inclusion in the faculty meeting and press the board to decree that she MUST be included in all faculty meetings as this is a "tolerant, caring, all-inclusive campus".

So there we all are, not in a meeting but in a large auditorium with the professors lost in the middle, discussing the next academic year and surrounded by all manner of humanity, partying, listening to loud music [tolerance, remember, on pain of dismissal] and how much work gets done?

But at least it's politically correct and the Femnisti at the other end of the campus, whose own meeting no one wishes to attend, have a nice all woman discussion, in the cushiest armchaired room, making resolutions about who else they can find to "equivalentize" this academic year.

Do you detect a slightly intolerant note in this article?

By the way - here's an interesting exercise. Type "university" into Google and see what comes up on the first few pages. I was very surprised.

Friday, August 31, 2007

[culture and heritage] a fading memory

One of Banksy's

I swear I'm not a killjoy. In former days, if you liked breasts, you used to buy the Sun; if you wanted something harder, there was a little shop down the road or there was Soho. There was a place for tat and good luck to those who lapped it up.

There were others who preferred broadsheets - papers like The Times [former], The FT, Globe and Mail, NYT and so on and though a pain in the butt to read on the train, still, it was a good read once you had it folded into position and the crackling stopped. Plus it was great for a Millwall Brick.

Into this category fell the Melbourne Age. Staid old Melbourne was represented in this paper whilst for the print-challenged, there was always the Sun. The Age carried weight and conveyed authority. Now part of the Fairfax "stable", here are the sorts of headlines today:

1. Beach orgy shocks conservative Taiwan

2. Pastor had sex with daughters

3. Heroin addicted elephant to rejoin herd

Now I'm wondering if the April decision to turn all these into tabloids is connected with the distressing drop in taste over the past few years, rivalling Murdoch who's got most of the world press anyway.

However, that's not the most distressing thing. The most distressing thing is this:

Good Friday seems certain to become a part of next year's AFL draw, with the once-sacrosanct space on the football calendar likely to be filled by Carlton and Hawthorn.

Now I don't give a toss about the football these days [rugby and cricket are different] but I'm sure you see the point I'm getting at. Good Friday was always the last bastion and even when Easter Sunday fell to commercial pressures, GF remained respected in some sort of misunderstanding of the relative importance of the days.

Now we have yet another example of the relentless dismantling and rooting out of the last vestiges of Christendom and the west's cultural heritage, then they'll turn on the remaining believers and out of pure spite try to round them up and disappear them.

Oh how the west howled with anger when the Palestinians cheered and cavorted as the World Trade Centre collapsed and will the west do the same now that the new paganism in society and the g-dless blogosphere will gleefully chortle at this latest "victory for reason"?

Can you imagine Iran scheduling a match for the feast of Ashoura or Israel scheduling one for Yom Kippur? Or a Walpurgis Night Derby?

The jackboot is stomping out the flickering candle of Christian hope and joy wherever it can seek and destroy and one has to ask what more do they want? Why will they allow freedom of worship to all bar the Christian?

A whole generation has now grown up uneducated [and I charge that one must be of a former generation to be able to judge that], with a society now disintegrating around them [witness the subject matter on blogs and the divorce and crime stats], pressing on blindly, obliviously rudderless, down, down, down to the new feudal darkness of cold rationalism [as distinct from reason], the new 1984 and Brazil.

Surely that's enough for the forces arrayed against reason?

Not in the least. They have to spit on Good Friday and stomp out every last vestige of the ethical underpinning of our society, fearing something might go wrong and someone, somewhere, might stop and shout: "Hey, where are we all headed? What are we doing? Hey people, we're being lied to. Wake up!"

Pity suicide is not allowed because I now find myself completely at odds with the tat and mediocracy I see all about. I don't mind saying I'm feeling old, irrelevant and marginalized and I'm wondering how much is me and how much is what's happening out there.

I'm going to bed early.

By the way, I apologize in advance to all my friends for the crack at the g-dless blogosphere and the new paganism. I'm just a little distracted, that's all.

[computer] decisions, decisions

Every time I boot the computer now, I have to press reset but in the past two days, I've had to press it twice each time. Just now, I had to go through a long process to get in.

It's the video card and the Catch 22 is that I'd gladly replace it but it is of such an ancient type that no one sells it any more. So, the alternative is to get a new type but the motherboard won't accept the new type so I need a new computer.

I spoke to my Apple seller friend today and I'm getting a MacBook. We thought long and hard about getting the 15 inch Pro and it's not a case of money - it's more the usage of all the bells and whistles and putting the money where it's needed.

But this is also fraught because apparently there are new components coming in soon and it would be silly to buy the current model as is. Why is nothing straightforward?

The good news is that once this thing is up, I'll be able to zip from site to site and visit everyone rapidly. The downside is that at any moment now, say tomorrow, this current computer will irrevocably break down and therefore there'll be no site until the new components arrive and don't forget this is Russia.

My computer mates cannot believe the pressure the inadequate current components are having to operate under so do not fear if I stop posting - you now know what's happening.

[edward pilgrim] took on the council and lost

Most of you are aware of the start of Arthur Dent's adventures when the council wanted to knock down his house to build a bypass:

It hadn't properly registered with Arthur that the council wanted to knock down his house and build an bypass instead. Mr Prosser said: "You were quite entitled to make any suggestions or protests at the appropriate time you know."

"Appropriate time?" hooted Arthur. "Appropriate time? The first I knew about it was when a workman arrived at my home yesterday. I asked him if he'd come to clean the windows and he said no he'd come to demolish the house. He didn't tell me straight away of course. Oh no. First he wiped a couple of windows and charged me a fiver. Then he told me."

"But Mr Dent, the plans have been available in the local planning office for the last nine month."

"Oh yes, well as soon as I heard I went straight round to see them, yesterday afternoon. You hadn't exactly gone out of your way to call attention to them had you? I mean like actually telling anybody or anything."

"But the plans were on display ..."

"On display? I eventually had to go down to the cellar to find them."

"That's the display department."

"With a torch."

"Ah, well the lights had probably gone."

"So had the stairs."

"But look, you found the notice didn't you?"

"Yes," said Arthur, "yes I did. It was on display in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying Beware of the Leopard."

Are you aware of the incidents which gave Douglas Adams the idea in the first place? Many blogs, such as Guthrum the Old and Man in a Shed are bringing all sorts of government inanities to us but this one was more than an inanity - it was at best tragic misunderstanding and possibly sharp practice and at worst, callous indifference.

Do read the short Wiki version of it here:

Thursday, August 30, 2007

[hairstyles] getting one's values straight

In the comments section of my recent post on David Davis, the man who should be PM, the following exchanges appeared:

Welshcakes Limoncello said...

Just read TD's reply and have to say I agree with him that a change of leader is inappropriate at the moment, though Davis has nicer hair! Why am I bothered anyway as I would never vote Tory??

Sir James Robison said...

Nicer hair - now that's an angle I hadn't considered.

ThunderDragon said...

Nicer hair... aren't we back to style over substance here? :-)

Julie said...

Nice hair matters these days, it matters. :-)

This clearly had to be followed up so I ask you to consider this montage and nominate which hairstyle you'd vote for [by the way, the closest to mine is The Enterprise]:

Click for the big pic


[barre] darling of the luminaries

Hmmm, that tree will have to come down, once we can exterminate those fr--in' bees…

Excellent article in the FT by David Buchan [August 26] and not just for this reason:

Raymond Barre, who died on Saturday at the age of 83, was the favourite French politician of the world's financial and business elite.

[…] Above all, he was an internationalist, a member of the shadowy Trilateral Commission, bringing together luminaries from Europe, the US and Japan and, for many years after he ceased being prime minister, the main rapporteur of the Davos World Economic Forum.

Had to admire Buchan's courage - this is not some obscure blog but the FT, for goodness sake. His "luminaries" reference was particularly chuckle producing.

A friend of mine asked me today what I was going to do when they came for me and I said I'd offer to join them if they didn't "disappear" me first.

As for the article, do read it but I take issue with the adjective "shadowy" - there's nothing shadowy about them at all. They publish every damned thing they decide somewhere - as with the hyperspace bipass plans in the Hitchhiker's Guide and the incident it was based on.

[celia green] thought for the day

Essentially, there are two conflicting fields of morality or idealism. The first is old-fashioned territorial morality, of the kind promulgated in public schools and Catholic convents.

Then there is neo-tribal morality, antagonistic both to high ability and to any possibilities of psychological development in a centralised or expansive direction.

Discuss.

[black hole] there may be certain reasons

Ross Fountain had me laughing so soon over having strips torn off me by El Dave [Dave Cole] on another matter:

Astronomers are scratching their heads over a puzzling non-discovery, an enormous hole in the universe measuring nearly a billion light-years across.

I hesitate to offer my humble advice to such eminent astronomers, but when I discover a complete void when looking through my telescope, I usually check to see if I've left the lens cap on. That usually does the trick.

[russia] rushing to utopia ... or not

Ian Appleby has written an excellent post on life in Russia, referring to an issue many of us are talking about over here and what he describes is even more the case here in a bigger population centre:

Sadly, at least in my view, many of these low-profile dwellings, so redolent of the South of Russia, are slated to be demolished, so that shiny new apartment blocks, which could go in any country in the world, can go up in their place. Now, it's easy for me to grumble, I don't have to live in these houses, some of which still have very basic facilities.

Others, though, have been made very comfortable; they are clearly still usable buildings, so why waste their embodied energy by tearing them down? Well, and again this will hardly be news, the land they stand on, close to the centre, has rocketed in value. Developers will get a much better return on the many apartments they can build on the footprint of just one such house.

Another issue is this:

The Russian legislature passed laws forbidding non-Russians to hold market stalls, the vast majority of which were indeed run by other nationalities. The law worked as a sop to the increasingly xenophobic tenor of (ethnic) Russian nationalism, but because there was not, for some reason, a rush of Russians to take up the new business opportunity - indeed, at least in Krasnodar, Russians who made living staffing market stalls for non-Russian employers have been hit quite hard - the law also had the happy side-effect of freeing up a lot of prime real estate.

I can't comment further on this because I'm too close to the process myself here but let's put it obliquely:

I just walked back to the main road to get a car and passed through a huge canopied market of the old kind. Nearly all of these have now been knocked down to make way for centralized mega-marts one has to drive to, to reach. Now this market today, on Pionerskaya, is wondrous - all vegetables and fruits in season are here.

Yesterday, the Min and I were discussing arbuz or watermelon and everyone knows you can get them in late June but they're full of nitrates. The time to buy arbuz is right now. Three weeks from now will be too late.

There's something satisfying in buying in season, rather than the irradiated product all year round. It might be prejudice but the Russian housewife is not a fool when it comes to food and she says that natural tastes better. Everything here was [and this I feel follows the point Ian was making] closer to the earth - you were in touch with reality and lived within your limited means.

It was perfectly fit for purpose. There is a danger of all that being lost.

Crossposted at Westminster Wisdom

[gays] time to get this in perspective

I was on Oscar's side in his dispute with the Marquess of Queensberry because of the latter's unintellectual boorishness.

Mine is a minor blog in the scheme of things, a mere blip on the radar and it's going to become even more marginal after this post.

Principles are the last resort of a rogue, sometimes more important to people than justice, decency and common sense. Occasionally though, principles force their way into one's consciousness and that dreaded position looms up before one - taking a stand.

I must now take a stand, which of course can only lead to my being swept off my little perch. So be it.

This blogger stated yesterday that he hadn't thought much about gays per se, except in oblique references to the gay mafia. My dealings with such people has been friendly and I count gays among friends. I don't know whether there are degrees of "gayness" and whether one is a bit that way or wholly so.

I do know that as a child, I was molested by family friends who were men and not just once. I never told about it because I was ashamed. I also know it affects people in different ways and am well aware of the vampire principle - that one can become one.

I hope I haven't done that but I certainly react with horror if a man even attempts to pat my shoulder or do a standard European embrace. I know I have to go through with it but it's nauseating to me to touch or be touched by another man and I hope I haven't over-compensated with women. As for girls - there used to be an inbuilt societal mechanism which protected them and long live this mechanism, I say.

By the way, that's precisely what is now being broken down by the corrosive moral degeneracy being pushed so hard by my implacable enemy in schools, film, music, upbringing and so on today. Girls of twelve no longer have any protection, are out roaming around freely and I'm wondering where the hell the parents are - are they living in zombie land or pretending it's not happening? Do they think that conferring such freedom on their daughters is leading the daughter to self-discipline?

I have news - things are happening with daughters and my source is big girls who now look back and tell.

Back to gays. This particular "thing" is not normal. Normal is being brought up with an emerging sexuality in cotton wool, well protected by two older generations of caring family, where teachers accept their responsibility to teach right from wrong and then after a hell of a lot of flirting and petting, partners are chosen and they marry. [Yes, I know - the railway cuttings blooming with wildflowers, the bobby on his beat and all well with the world.]

Yet this has been the pattern of interpersonal realtions in the majority of societies over time except for Caligula type aberrances and it protects children and keeps society sane. To point to societies which have gone soft and descended into this, such as ours now but to seize on it as historical justification is utter tosh and cynically ignores that socieites go through stages, just as ours is doing now.

I am dead against "gay bashing" or in fact "anyone bashing" and reject utterly being lumped in with the boors, the bourgeoisie and the intolerant by shrill overreaction to the tone of this article. I'm especially against intolerance of gays, if the participants are adult, so let me spell out what this blog is actually dead against:

1. the calling of aberrant behaviour an equal alternative and introducing the erroneous term "orientation" into the discussion;

2. the calling of this drive "moving on", as in "I'd hoped we'd moved on from this", when what it really means is "descending to oblivion";

2. the gay mafia driving the legislative process outlawing anyone who would call a spade a spade;

3. the hijacking of language, such as the word "spade" and rendering it unusable. I deliberately used the term now in its historic idiomatic sense and will continue to do so. I'll use "gay" to mean lighthearted, frivolous, happy; I'll use "rainbow" to mean that thing you see in the sky.

Monty Python, who had an answer for just about everything and pricked [another of those words] the bubble of pomposity and folly, summed up the whole Thought Police mindset in the stoning scene in Brian. "Jehovah, Jehovah, Jehovah!" called out the unrepentant. Labelling the mindset of the religious elite and mob "Christian" shows either a very shaky or a deeply cynical grasp of theological history and a desire to lay the blame for human excess onto what is, after all, a quite pure set of criteria for living together.

Where does this leave gays? It leaves them with their partners, unharrassed, living the life they want and continuing to enrich the cultural and social history of nations and contributing to understanding and intellect, as opposed to boorishness and priggishness. It leaves the vast majority to get on with their own normal lives. The two meet at parties and are friends. Many readers of this blog who are gay are more than welcome because I don't judge you on your gayness but on your intelligence level.

But to call gayness or "bi-ness" normal and to try to drive public policy and get in to schools and spread this dangerous twaddle; to outlaw anyone who tries to oppose it and to lead campaigns of vilification against them - this is purely and simply wrong and as such, I simply won't be intimidated.

Now what are they going to do - press for my incarceration or something worse to punish me for having the temerity to speak sanity, thereby revealing their true selves? Are they going to ostracize me by never visiting my blog again and trying to prevent others doing so? In this increasingly convoluted society of today - I'd bet that's exactly what some would like to do.

However, to end on a positive note, I also hope there'd be those who would take it in the spirit in which it was given - a plea for sanity to return to our society before it's too late.

Graham Chapman - great example of the very long list of gay people who have enriched our cultural heritage

Wednesday, August 29, 2007

[petfocus] 10 pets, 7 owners

All right, the idea is that you match the pet with his or her owner but I have to tell you there are multiple pets with some owners and I'll try to drop hints along the way.

Sorry, Liz but you were in the last Petfocus and I'm afraid, under the rules, I can't enter your lovely pic but I shall give it its own dedicated post. Ditto Mutley, I'm afraid but send me a smorgasbord of Mutley shots and I'll run a Mutley Festival here.

So, without further ado, to the pets:

1. "The black one is Titan, 7 years old" and if he's half as combative as his owner, he'll lord it over the blogosphere.




2. This is my little dog Tala. Tala's a black, long-haired German Shepherd, a girl and very friendly. Tala means Wolf in American Indian.





3. Ben and Daisy the Rabbits with their tamers. They run wild in our garden now.





4. Flying Spaghetti Monster, just for fun.





5. Taken with a cell phone, presumably in Australia, this is Boots in the Sink.





6. "The white one is Missy, 4 years old (lil bit's favorite)" but unfortunately, the shot was taken with a cell phone and so I include the owner, rather than the pet. Don't you think she looks a bit like her dad?




7. Here's my Red Dragon, "Ordo" - a little tribute to my little-known Celtic heritage.




8. Spotty the Dog. He is an annoying and friendly Tenterfield Terrier.




9 Also taken with a cell phone from the New World, Raia's balancing act also affords us a good look at the owner's toilet.






10 And of course there is Hamish the backyard Cow.




And here are the possible owners [one petless extra has been included, just to confuse the issue]:

Answers here.

[harvey] lest we forget

This is a tribute to a fallen comrade:

“I don’t mind sharing my blanket but does he have to take so much?”

Whatever vicissitudes occur to us all, however we may all fall out over this or that, whichever way it all falls, as long as this blog remains, this photo remains.

[diana] public or private property

If there was ever a public figure who even admitted she was Queen of People's Hearts, it was Diana Spencer of the House of Stewart. So the outcry over the non-inclusion of the public at the memorial service seems justified:

Penny Junor said: "If it is a personal family occasion why have Elton John and Cliff Richard been invited? A family occasion could have been held at Althorp or in the chapel at Windsor Castle rather than in the middle of London. People will turn up because they want to see Cliff Richard, Elton John and the princes."

Whilst understanding the wishes of the princes, who have always been quite private in their leanings, do they have the right to deny the people access? How far do family wishes trump national interest?