[blogfocus tuesday] murder, science, women and silly people

1. As you know, Lady Mac and JMB met in Vancouver and it was one of the great meetings in history, sort of like when Delphi met Oracle in Bavaria or when Stanley met Livingstone:

As you know Lady Mac lives in Morocco and you know that she is always having adventures there. Well she brought those adventures with her to Surrey, for six people were found murdered in a condominium not far from her hotel and a small plane taking off from the Vancouver airport crashed into an apartment building, killing the pilot and injuring people in one of the apartments. All in the space of the few days while she was here. There's no such thing as coincidence you know.

2. Charles Robertson is back and didn’t even tell us:

Whenever someone tells you that something is so because it is the "scientific consensus", you should instantly treat the proponent's position with scepticism. A moment's thought experiment will tell you why: several hundred years ago, the scientific consensus said that the sun revolved around the earth. That, however, did not make it so, as we all now know.

3. On the question of the Scottish Blogroundup, whose url MacNumpty fails to give us and therefore it has to be googled, the worthy Scot defends his gender against the charge of sexism:

The fact is, it can't just be a case of us being male chauvinist pigs: IndyGal was doing the Roundup, she was preparing it all day, and she couldn't find enough posts by women bloggers to justify a full roundup using only posts by women, as she admits. So there's more going on than us snubbing women. The problem is wider: either there are fewer women blogging than men on the subject, or there are more women blogging but they haven't yet come to our attention. Both of these problems can be fixed, but not by us.

4. Cleanthes simply hasn’t the time to devote to the lady who's always up for a good kicking:

Toynbee that is.

This article is poor and is given a thoroughly good shafting in the comments. It still deserves a thorough fisk but I have a life and a day-job and I suspect that there are many others with much more:

* vitriol,
* extensive vocabularies of the undeniably required profanity (Guess what.)
* experience of dealing with La Polla (told you so. Update: I really did tell you so.) and, crucially,
* time

who will do so properly long before I get a chance to.

Wasn't aware Cleanthes read the Guardian, to be honest. Still, we live and learn. More tomorrow, if we’re alive.