[blogfocus saturday] notes from the blogostocracy

What do we want from a blogger? Surely an incisive mind, sound values an eye on the issues and a sharp quill. And surely that is represented here this evening:

1 I don't recall the last time Fabian Tassano had it wrong, certainly not this time:

MPs fear the control order regime attempt to get round civil liberties by using “prisons without bars” is in danger of becoming a public laughing stock, since six of the current seventeen terror suspects subject to orders have managed to disappear.

Dr Reid is threatening to "opt out" of a key part of the European human rights convention. Such a move — which can only properly be justified by war, or a public emergency threatening the life of the nation — will represent a new round in the continuing struggle between ministers and the courts the public, over liberty versus the fight against terrorism goal of creating a police state.

7 Vox Day is called many things, not least by Michelle Malkin but what can't be denied - the boy can write. Here he looks at a survey:

Some 25 over-65s, with an average age of 70, took part in the study and trained at a gym. Not only did they acquire new strength, but the molecular machinery powering their muscles became as active as that seen in people of 20 or 30....

… and comments:

This is clearly a sign to go for the Holy Grail: the 21-inch guns. If you're already a mental freak of nature, why not become a physical one as well? I've always wanted to have an excuse to get into a confrontation with police and shout "my arms are more powerful than your guns!"

I have noticed that people who lift weights regularly do tend to look significantly younger than their age. Not in the face, but in how their body looks and how they move. And for women, I've seen 50- and 60-year olds who have butts like 17-year old girls, or at least what 17 year-old girls used to look like before they all got fat.

3 The Flying Rodent is not for the faint of heart [or hand]:

After all, nobody knows more than me what unpredictable and capricious creatures young women can be.

I recall an incident that occurred a couple of years before I met Mrs. Rodent, discussing sexual fantasies with my then girlfriend in the wee small hours of the night.

"I think think it would be quite sexy to, you know, watch each other playing with ourselves," said my ex-girlfriend, the cheeky thing that she was, and probably still is.

"Really?" I said, a little intimidated and embarrassed by the prospect, "Well, yes, I suppose it would be quite sexy, wouldn't it?"

My ex giggled, quite thrilled with her naughty suggestion.

4 Mr. Eugenides is extremely hard to encapsulate in a paragraph. Under the heading "We have to have some secrets, Darling", he opines:

Freedom of information has proved its worth since it was introduced, but there have been persistent straws in the wind suggesting that it's working just a little too well for ministers' liking.

Then follows a letter from Alistair Darling, whom Mr E describes thusly:

[N]ot since Norman Lamont has a minister so closely resembled a badger.

... and comments:

Of course, the significance of this is ... rather what it tells us about the likely fate of FoI under the next Prime Minister. Darling doesn't scratch his nuts without consulting Cyclops first. If this is what the monkey thinks, we can be sure the organ-grinder takes a similar view.

5 Croydonian, the anti-October Bank-Holidayist, has some frightening news:

Because the Osmonds are reforming. More here, but readers of a sensitive disposition may well want to ensure that sound is off before proceeding. Apparently they are marking 50 years in the biz, although I find the maths a little troubling as I can find no reference to their having done anything prior to the 60s, and in order for them to be a plurality, the second oldest would have been six at the time of founding.

6 You might wonder at the inclusion of Tim Worstall here, already a mega-blogger and the simple answer is - because he's good. First he takes the Croydonian to task:

The Croydonian thinks that the TUC's suggestion for an October Bank Holiday is a really bad one. I think it's bloody brilliant. October 21 st please. Celebrate it with a march from the square to Waterloo station, making sure that we invite the French Ambassador.

... then later tackles recycling:

So, the question becomes, why are we setting up this vastly expensive system of anaerobic biodigesters, insisting on homes being repositories for rotten food, when we have already solved the problem? Stick it all in a hole in the ground and collect the methane?

7 Whilst he certainly gets traffic to his excellent blog, I still regard Political Umpire as sadly under-rated - he should be as well known as a Worstall or a Dale:

Today I phoned Birmingham City Council on their general contact number. As expected, an automated voice message came first. It explained to me that the call may be recorded for training purposes, then started to list my options. It said something to the following effect:

"If your call is regarding anti social behaviour, press one.

If you have a general inquiry, press two."

Should I draw any inferences from the order in which those two instructions appeared?

8 The problem with my blogrolls is that Blogpowerers are not in the Blogostocracy roll. That's because they're in the Premier roll. But for that, Chicken Yoghurt would be straight in there. Here he presents the best selling album by Flatus Quo:

[I]n tribute to the departing Tony Blair, he and many of his friends have put together an album of Status Quo covers. It’s dedicated to Britain’s voters and is titled ‘Quo Vadis?’ Here’s a sneak peak of the track listings.

1. Down Down - The Labour Party Membership

2. Something ‘Bout You Baby I Like - Tony Blair and Rupert Murdoch

3. Break The Rules - Peter Mandelson and David Blunkett

4. Roll Over Lay Down - The Parliamentary Labour Party

5. Gonna Teach You to Love Me - Gordon Brown

6. Whatever You Want - Tony Blair and Rebekah Wade

7. Roll Over Lay Down (reprise) - The Parliamentary Lobby Journalists

Tuesday Blogfocus will be different in that it looks at two bloggers only at some small length. Hope to see you then.

[some slides] hover for caption

[chinese] wrath of confucius

And while we're still on the topic of the Good Lord, is there any reason you'd suppose He has a down on the Chinese?

Lightning has killed 56 people in China this year, 17 more than the same period last year, Yu Rucong, deputy chief of the China Meteorological Administration, said on Friday.

Another 65 people were injured, 26 more than in the previous year, Yu said, adding the lightning accidents have caused direct economic losses of 10.97 million yuan (US$1.4 million) in the first four months.

Just asking.

[innocence] may the force be with you

As we creep inexorably into the New Feudalism, the novel Lord of the Rings, which I've just been reading parts of again, seems fairly analogous.

It was also Memorial Day on Monday.

No one chooses to go off to war but if there's a threat, it must be met. And brave men and women do that. And it is true that it steels the soul and forges bonds - about all it has going for it.

The greatest error of the Timid is to think they can manage perfectly well by themselves, thank you very much. Really? We're managing the world well at the moment? And we can change it without either regulation or revolution? We can stop the new feudalism, in which the Home Secretary proceeds with the plan of "derogating" from Article Five of the European Convention on Human Rights for our own good?

Personally, I put my faith in the Force but the Force is like buying an Aston Martin or a Rolls - it has its price. You're not just buying a car but a whole lifestyle. You no longer wonder about the car starting each day or how it would fare in an emergency skid or in an accident. It's all taken care of, as long as you do right by the vehicle, according to the instruction manual.

But it costs and costs big.

And when you're travelling along a fair road and that road's downhill and the other man in his Lada 10 seems to be doing just as well beside you, at a fraction of the cost, you can start thinking: "I wonder if maintaining this is all worth it."

The Christian Club is exclusive, with but three entry requirements. You need to:

1 believe that you need to be redeemed in the first place;

2 believe that you can be redeemed in this manner;

3 abide by club rules, which tell you to be charitable to your fellow human.

And that's it.

Very big asks and therefore the reason the Club is so exclusive - more exclusive than the Other Side has to offer because there are so many natural barriers to entry.

So all this garbage about Holy Crusades and Inquisitions and bibles chained to pulpits and written in Latin to exclude the common man; all this Intermediary guff like pontiffs and High Priests and so on, the selling of relics, all the wars invoking the name of Jesus and sporting red crosses, rampant evangelism, bible bashing prudery, Somerset Maugham's target in his excellent tale of the stern and unbending Mr. Davidson in "Rain", devastation of native communities in the name of the Lord - all of that has zero to do with the simple Message contained in a few short pages.

A short tale from earlier days:

We used to take the kids for swimming lessons at the local pool at my northern school and the issue was that one of the new girls [about 12 years old] didn't actually wear a top but swam in her undies.

For three weeks she blithely swam almost as nature intended and strangely, none of the other kids said anything and none of us knew how to deal with it.

Then, in the fourth week, she came in a costume and a modest one too. I was appalled and I hope you do see why. In this I'm 100% with Maugham. Because what was destroyed this day was innocence, based on no discernible biblical text but on a vague sort of prudery born of a notion of what Jesus might have approved of.

You know the 80s film Never-Ending Story? And how the characters in a child's fantasy world were destroyed by the Ravening Wind named Disbelief [or Loss of Innocence]?

That's one of the main dilemmas with Christianity. Another two main problems with its image have always been:

1 the hijacking of the intellectual property through the centuries by States and by the Other Side so that frightened people inadvertently rush into the arms of the Enemy rather than the Protector;

2 the insufferable serenity of believers, nay, the insufferable enthusiasm of the Happy Clapper.

There's a reason for the latter.

I don't know of a Christian who would put it this way but in fact you are being "possessed" by a spirit the moment you click on the button "I Believe". It's a mechanism which works more infallibly than the better known phenomenon of clicking on a porn picture and automatically inviting in the embedded Trojans and other viruses to your computer system.

And someone else's new-found enthusiasm is as inviting to us as a root canal operation, particularly if we're doing life hard ourselves.

When the Happy Clappers compound that with their take-it-as-read platitudes like "Jesus loves you", that's fine for the already devout who've seen the Light but for the great unwashed out here, amongst whom I still count myself one, it's nauseatingly counterproductive.

There's a reason for that too.

JC always went after the Lost Sheep, more than the already Safe and Protected and therefore the bulk of new Christians are people who weren't coping, who didn't have the standard meathead lifestyle or suburban bourgeois decency. In other words, there had to have been something they at least perceived as wrong in life in order to have made this move.

I'm not referring to Christian households here - they're another matter.

So I suggest that the Jehovah's Witnesses and the like could do with a PR refresher course before belting on one's door in the middle of a long afternoon squawk, just to thrust The Watchtower into one's hands and to invite themselves in for a "chat".

I suspect after this I'm going to be doubly damned - I'll certainly be struck off the vicarage guest list and cast into Perdition by the Moral Majority whilst my own bunch of sinner mates and nightcap-sipping sweeties quietly slip away to someone else less Strange.

And what of folk such as Jack Rensimer and Halls of Macadamia? They know I'm for conservative values, patriotism, G-d, the armed service men and women - in other words, like my own father was - and yet I have a damned strange way of showing it in my posts.

Sigh. I don't know what to say, really.

[some notes] about the novels

Re the novels, jmb asked: "So how come we are getting these teasers? Are you going to put it up somewhere as the whole? Is it published?"

No, not published yet although I did hawk an earlier version of Book 1 to some London literary agents in 2000 and one was encouraging, if not conclusive and another was verging on rude.

They must have been rewritten twelve or thirteen times, to cut out the smart literary phraseology and make it leaner and meaner and to deepen the characterizations.

I don't know how you write yours but I have to draw characters from real life - I can't contrive or amalgamate them. Names are real too but applied to the wrong characters.

Time frame is from 1994 to around 2020 [apocalyptic]. I call them romantic thrillers but the truth is they're about a series of continual shocks from the outside world which punctuate the intimacy until they take over the story completely.

I'll try to put the first two chapters up this weekend.

[baby names] the decision of their lives

Clearly, when naming your baby, an awareness of what you're saddling the baby with is paramount.

Version 2.0 and Abyss are not 100% suitable!

In an attempt to assist you with your decision, here is a selection of rather fine names given by responsible parents to their offspring. Which will you choose?

1. Jigme [Richard Gere + Carey Lowell]

2. Fifi Trixibelle [Paula Yates/Bob Geldof]

3. Satchel [Mia Farrow/Woody Allen]

4. Moxie Crimefighter [Penn Jillette]

5. Daisy Boo [Julia/Jamie Oliver]

6. Yamma [James Brown]

7. Jermajesty [Jermaine Jackson]

8. Moon Unit [Frank/Gail Zappa]

9. Betty Kitten [Jonathan Ross & Jane Goldman]

10. Nell Marmalade [Helen Baxendale/David Eliot]

Still not entirely satisfied? There are another ten coming up next time.