[dog days] summer in the city

Loving Spoonful's summer in the city

Back of my neck getting awfully gritty

Choking heat - really not so pretty

Can't seem to reach the forest it's a pity

So tonight a different scene

Forget the girl I know it's mean

Curse the blistering day it's been

Never mind the supper

Sipping cuppa after cuppa . . .

Forecast - just won't bring the heat down

All the car and truck fumes - ain't nowt but to sit down

Cool change - a dream that just can't be found

Doesn't seem to be a shadow on the baked ground

Toss and turn the whole night through

Dreams of winter things to do

Turn the lights down - mosquitoes too

Waiting for the first snow

Only have to lie low . . .

[blogfocus saturday] post hiatus blues

After quite some hiatus, Blogfocus has returned and some of the newer readers might not know the format. You soon will.

1] Sometimes a blog can hardly be called a blog in the sense which we know it. Sueblimely runs a "help" blog which can lead you to help hints, templates and anything you need to know about the mechanics of blogging. Plus she does my own trick and introduces new blogs. A useful site to stop by. For example:

A couple of sites appealed to my perhaps slightly offbeat sense of humor this week.

· Halliburton's One-Size-Fits-All Climate Change Solution

· Winners of the "I Look Like My Dog" Contest

2] Also in the help and advice category is Simply Social, with Caroline Biggs. More than useful if you're a woman with conservative leanings:

"Simply Social is great, it has taken me to events that I would never have gone to on my own and many which I would not have even heard about! I have had a great deal of fun and in addition I have made new friends. I am happy to recommend Simply Social to any woman who likes to go out and have a bit of fun". [Yvonne]

3] Staying with the Carolines for now, Caroline Hunt is not just a honey, she's the 56th best Conservative blogger on the internet:

Anyone who follows movie news will have seen the various reports coming out of Germany about Tom Cruises next role. He plays Col. Claus von Stauffenberg and it's going to be awful. Sorry but it just is. Hollywood does assassination of Hitler with the director of X-Men. It's just not going to work.

4] David Johnson is wandering the ether on the other side of the pond and now he's wandering the park:

It's been several years since the last time I watched the fireworks. Mostly because It's been several years since the last time I felt patriotic, or that America deserved to celebrate anything. Here in town, going to see the city works meant going to a park and laying down a blanket or setting up lawn chairs amidst a sea of strangers, over top soil soaked with old beer and last week's event.

5] I'd like to count Oddiya as one of our own Blogpowerers and many of you out there are not yet fully aware of the blogpower we have in our midst:

It is estimated that the mountain pine beetle has destroyed 40% of British Columbia's lodgepole pine since 1993. University researchers have now found evidence that the beetle is adapting to spruce as well.

6] The hillside is a great place to observe from and why go any further than another of our own Blogpowerers - MJW?

I saw something rather unpleasant on Saturday afternoon and it wasn’t just a scrappy game of rugby; on the way back from Twickenham, my fiancé and I broke our journey home in Croydon, to do a little bit of shopping. Walking across North End, which is basically the main pedestrian shopping district, going in to Debenhams, we walked past a group of black youths, males in their late teens, who appeared trying to get two bull terriers to fight each other.

Read the rest yourself.

7] Pink Acorn is not a bad name for a site and here she is in action:

Today I visited Second Life (SL), a virtual reality site. Like I need any more reality. I have been reading the "Sicily Scene" blog and the author was nominated for a BlogPower Award. Another blogger set up a room in SL to have the awards presentation. Once you register you can choose your wardrobe, among other things. So any-hoo, the first thing I do is change my clothes because, to me, I look like a slut. The choices I had weren't much better, but hey, it must have been good for someone as this guy walked up and asked if he could kiss me. I said , "NO", I must ask Uncle Guido first.

8] Bringing up the rear this evening is Phishez Rule's Sanity Optional and this blog is already attracting quite some attention:

So I got tagged by Ingsoc. There's this completely new and unheard of meme going around where you list eight random things about you. What? You've already heard of it. Damn. Here they are

1. I have size 10 feet. 9 and 1/2 in dancing shoes.

2. I always put my left shoe on first.

3. I once thought I could be a professional writer. This is not as close as I'll get.

4. I like old cemeteries. They feel so peaceful.

Next Focus will feature The Lone Voice. See you Wednesday.

[dancing] tripping the light fantastic

Quite frankly, I detest dancing.

Let me make that a bit clearer. I love dance - good dance is wonderful to behold and the way those men and women can move, especially on ice, is breathtaking. Torville and Dean were two of my favourites.

I'd love to be able to step onto the dance floor , stride up to the loveliest woman and then transport her around the room on light feet, never once stepping on her toes. I almost did this in Second Life. Alas, that is the virtual world.

Looking through history, it was never a question, pre-war, so I believe. One supposedly learnt to dance. One learnt to foxtrot and tango to tolerable levels [today that's moved on to the Salsa] and the waltz was a piece of cake. The days of dancing lessons really died out towards the end of my youth and though I was taught the moves, they were never later utilized.

Where the average girl will start gyrating the hips to the strains of the latest song, we just tap our feet and nod in time, then go out and kick a football round or bounce a basketball and slam-dunk it. For the average girl, on the other hand, dancing is in the soul, in the physionomy - she's done it since two years of age. She knows all the moves. She feels the dance inside her.

Therein lies the problem.

There are so few guys for whom dancing is more than piston-pumping arms and feet two-square on the floor, drink in hand. For them, clubbing is just the scene, the girls, the atmosphere, the beat, the rhythm. A proportion realize it's much more and adore it.

I honestly think there should be a medal awarded to any mother who gently guides her young son into dance so that by the time he needs it, he's a natural.

Scene

Our hotel in Tenerife some years back. My girl is an accomplished dancer in the "knows-all-the-moves" tradition. Everything, right down to the moonlight, has been custom-ordered for the evening. A flamenco show of great skill gives way to the guests pouring onto the terrace looking out over the sea and what are we going to do?

I feel trapped. Hers, I know full-well, is club dancing and at home, she puts on some music and immediately breaks into dance. Mine is the move-swiftly-on-the-feet-and-hope-for-the-best variety. I haven't danced for years.

I hate it.

You see, years earlier a particularly obnoxious woman, not even my own partner, laughed at my two left feet and at the time I'd wanted to say:

"Yeah, well can you spin a rugby ball vertically over ten metres and land it two metres in front of your fly half or glide through the pack over the gain line? Can you tackle a man four stone heavier and bring him down? Can you score a basket 7 times out of 10?"

We only do well at those things we practise and we only practise that which we love and we only love that which we do well. That which we know we're not adept at - we shy away from.

I'd shied away until this night. Some woman thinks I'm a klutz? OK - that's the end for me. Never mind that I once went to a dance party and danced with almost every girl there. I'm a klutz with two left feet and my current partner this night shows this in her eyes.

So the horror begins and I do what I can. She's doing all these fabulous moves and I'm meant to stand a metre and a half away in this stupid modern manner and do mine. Except I don't have any moves, so I have to make some up but we're not dancing together - she's for her and I'm what I can be.

I hate it.

Then comes a slow number and I'm back in business. With physical contact again I can guide her a little, use the body, I feel lighter on the feet, she suggests this with her body and we try it, I suggest that. It almost works and she's intoxicating me.

I love it.

Back to the fast number and hell begins again and I'm sick of it. I steer her to the side and go and get some drinks. An old, wizened and yet debonaire twinkle-toed Spaniard moves up and compliments the two of us on our dancing.

Yes? Truly? A small smile breaks out on the Higham visage because we'd been watching his partner and him earlier and they were mighty good for that age.

Back with my partner I tell her what he'd said and she laughs sardonically. So we go through with it until the wee hours and then the walk on the shore and the moonlight and the rest of the night I'm on safe ground with.

Next day I look back on the night with relief that the situation was somehow recovered afterwards with the aid of the moon and the shore but as for that horrid modern metre-and-a-half distant, chemistry killing so-called "dancing" - I secretly resolve never to dance again.

And I never have since that night.

[virtual world] ventures into the real

The police are rightly worried:

"Our environmental scanning tells us that even with some of the cloning of human beings - not necessarily in Australia but in those countries that are going to allow it - you could have potentially a cloned part-person, part-robot," Australian Federal Police (AFP) Commissioner Mick Keelty said. "You could (also) have technology acting at the direction of a human being, but the human being being distanced considerably from the actual crime scene."

Mr Keelty said scams had sprung up in online virtual worlds such as Second Life, where people can spend real money via credit cards to buy products such as virtual real estate and gifts. "Policing that is going to be quite difficult," he said.

There is a point, it seems to me, where the clear hijacking and brazen usage of the security forces by the cabal groomed political leadership to remove citizens' rights must be tempered by the need to circumvent genuine crims. I feel much sympathy for the security services today, especially the ordinary officer doing his or her duty.

[rachida dati] les planchers pour les récidivistes

Think it's completely the right way to go:

Rachida Dati était attendue, elle fut observée, au Sénat, où elle présentait hier le projet de loi antirécidive. Pour la première fois, la fille du maçon marocain, élevée dans une famille de douze enfants, garde des Sceaux depuis près de deux mois, affrontait l'arène parlementaire.

Face à une opposition rompue à la polémique, Rachida Dati, épaulée par Roger Karoutchi, secrétaire d'État chargé des Relations avec le Parlement, excellent connaisseur du Sénat, dont il fut longtemps membre, pratique la méthode diplomatique : ton serein, argumentation délayée dans le but de convaincre plutôt que d'écraser l'adversaire.

Female of Moroccan extraction introduces the recidivist act and undercuts the predictable polemique in the coutious and measured manner of its introduction. Politics at its best in my eyes.

[blastocysts] and the dunblane massacre

One was named Sophie North

Occasionally top bloggers produce a tour de force. This is one of those occasions.