[blogging test] put these in their correct order

In which order of importance should these activities be rated?

1] visiting other sites for interest but not to show you've been there;
2] visiting other sites and leaving comments to show you've been there;
3] attending to your comments section, answering what your commenters say;
4] creating interesting new posts;
5] increasing your stats through various schemes like RSS feeds and MyBlogLog;
6] just posting your point of view on something with no concern about who reads it.
7] other blog purpose.

[french tgv] are you willing to risk your life

For those who like to prostrate themselves before the great god Onwards and Upwards, the news of France's pursuit of the ever higher and faster will be a joyful event. For others who see other sorts of consequences flowing from such news - they will not be quite so overjoyed.

French officials have inaugurated a new high-speed train link, which will cut travel time between Paris and more than a dozen cities in Germany, Luxembourg, Switzerland and north-east France. The train, TGV, will allow travellers to go from Paris to Reims in 45 minutes, and from Paris to Strasbourg, on the German border, in just two hours and 20 minutes. Under the old schedules, the trip to Strasbourg was nearly twice as long, at three hours and 50 minutes.

TGV stands for "train a grande vitesse," which literally means high-speed train. Tickets, reservations and timetables for the TGV East service will be available starting April 10 on raileurope.com. Trains on the line are expected to travel at speeds of up to 320 kmh, compared to a maximum of 300 kmh for current TGV trains.

Sorry but 300kph is just too damned fast for a train which goes round bends, no matter how great the magnetic hold or levitation. Fiddly little details like human and mechanical error are usually swamped or forgotten in the Eyes-on-the-Glory mindset which, after all, is a form of madness with a difference - it plays games with our lives.

[bobby sox] and don't forget poodle skirts

Girl in poodle skirt and bobby sox

Liz asks what bobby sox are. They're a bit before my time but this might help from Wiki:

Bobby soxer was a term coined in the 1940s to describe the overly zealous, usually teenage, fans of singer Frank Sinatra, who was the first singing teen idol. Typically, they would wear poodle skirts while rolling their socks down to ankle level.

Here is more about them. Frankie Avalon sang, in 1959/60:

When a girl changes from bobby sox to stockings

And she starts trading her baby toys for boys

When that once-shy little sleepyhead

Learns about love and its lilt

You can bet that the change

Is more than from cotton to silk.

If you haven't already reached for the paper bag, then what about penny loafers? Do you know what they were?

[happy monday] great day and great week - yo!

Sorry, Laze and Jem - a bit out of it yesterday but I see the incomparable Flying Rodent has flown in and left one on the blog [below this notice] and a good read on a gloomy Monday it is too.

If you haven't yet made the acquaintance of this worthy gent, I suggest you get yourselves over there right away - he has a Welshcakes Sicily Scene type food post up right now - from Scotland!

Heavy day today but this evening I'll be once again making a pest of myself and the Blogfocus is on schedule for Wednesday evening. So, despite what we have on our hands this week, despite any negative vibes due to the grey skies, it's going to be a wonderful day and a good lunch.

Go to it rightly and may scallops rock yer tadger!

How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love The PM

Always stirring the thinking processes, often left field, never incorrect factually, with an idiosyncratically challenging style, the Flying Rodent is one of the best going, especially when he dons combat gear and Rab C. Nesbitt footwear. Natch - that's why I invited him to blog this evening on a topic of his choice:

Evening all - James asked me to share some of my thoughts on a subject of my choosing, so I thought I'd bore the bollocks off you with an extended rant on nuclear deterrence.

It’s proved controversial, but I think that the Government should be congratulated for convincing Parliament to vote for the new Trident nuclear defence* system. It’s extortionately expensive and completely useless, and Tony Blair managed to convince a majority of Parliamentarians to blow twenty billion pounds on it.

Jolly well done, sir. Truly, this man could sell tits to Hugh Hefner.

It’s just a little disappointing that we’re too polite to ever actually use it. I can’t really imagine any of our recent Prime Ministers ordering a massive thermonuclear strike on Moscow - they’d think it was terribly rude.

Actually, I tell a lie - I could envision Lady Thatcher ordering a strike on Moscow. Now that I come to think of it, I can easily imagine Mrs. T nuking French Guyana, just to annoy Jacques Chirac. At least now, with our shiny new missile system, we could theoretically do so.

That’s assuming the damn thing works, of course. Picture the scene - as the Iranian missiles shriek towards London, placid senior civil servants calmly explain to a panicked Prime Minister that our nuclear arsenal doesn’t work in desert conditions.

Still, nukes seem to be the weapon of choice as far as bloggers are concerned. Every time some crank in the Middle East burns a flag, I wind up reading feverish demands that we turn the entire region into a sheet of radioactive glass.

I can see why that might appeal to certain figures in the Bush administration. After all, it’d make prospecting for oil a lot easier - you’d just have to walk about looking down.

So if we can’t use these missiles, why don’t we take that twenty billion pounds and spend it on something we can use?

If they junked the Trident program and just handed every Briton their own big pointy stick, we’d have enough left over to buy a round and crisps for 55 million people.

I’d think better of New Labour come polling day, I can tell you.

In coming to this conclusion, I've had to consider what would happen to the concept of deterrence. The arms race would brutal, as countries competed to build ever larger and sharper sticks. I suppose that the worst case scenario is the Iranians developing a stick so big and pointy that Mahmoud Ahmadinejad could lean out of his Tehran window and poke us all in the eyes.

I’ve considered that eventuality, and we’ll need to keep a secret weapon of near infinite destructive capabilities in reserve - Britain's enemies will have no response to the shock and awe of the sock and 8-Ball.

We should take great care to use this awesome power wisely.

Thank you for your kind attention - I’ve been Flying Rodent, and I’m here all week.


*You can tell this is the British government we’re talking about - the Americans spell the word “defence” differently, and imbue it with a wildly different meaning.

[chinese junk rig] interface with the west

Left: western plastic fantastic; Right: western boat, Chinese rig

I've just been spending some time looking at the Chinese junk rig and how it is being finally adapted for western use after about 2000 years. As always in these situations, western men and women of pioneering spirit and open minds first took to it and ironed out the problems [for our minds] while going through a steep learning curve to undo decades of western thinking and to start thinking 'Chinese'.

The rig, with all its lines, checks and balances is so at odds with the slick, metal and plastic, dial-in-the-speed western mentality and I'd imagine it wouldn't cut much ice with the average hi-tech blogger. Quite frankly, it looks like a toddler's idea of a sail and yet the Chinese have been utilizing it for blue water sailing since the 2nd century Han Dynasty, so it must have something going for it.

Apparently it's perfect for blue water cruising and awful for racing and therein lies the difference between our frenetic, ever-updating psyche and hi-cost solutions and the Chinese simple materials, simple concept, efficiently working for the purpose for which it was designed.

There's a nice article by Brian Platt who tried to get it operating and now associations are springing up all over the net. To this blogger/sailor, it's slowly growing on him but it would be nice to see some more of the bugs ironed out first.