[desert island dilemma] five from ten

Imagine that this island is uninhabited and you're forced to leave a sinking ship to go to it.

It's been done to death but let's do it again, just this once. You have to choose five of the ten variants, [no combining two as one and no other choices]. The island is as in the pic, no more, no less.

You reach it by a boat which can hold four people but two places are filled with the things you're taking. There are birds in the trees but not many. The boat is too small to take to sea but it can be used around the island and there are fish in the vicinity.

There is a patch of nice soil on the shady side of the island. It gets quite cold at night. There are no predators either on the land or from the sea or air. Rain does fall seasonally.

1] Combination blow up mattress and blanket for two;

2] Fishing gear but no bait;

3] A nice, strong man*;

4] Water desalinator which works on solar power;

5] A delectable, yet useful girl*;

6] Flint type fire maker;

7] Cutting and digging tool combination set;

8] All kinds of seeds in a pack for food and for growing trees;

9] Two months compact food pack until things grow;

10] The last variant is a choice of your own but must have cost under $US200 and can't be a form of transport.

* If you take both, you also lose two from the five choices because the extra person would occupy the space. That means you'd take the two people and only one other item.

[happy birthday] to bag's blog

Happy Birthday to Bag's blog [and his granddaughter]
Happy Birthday to Bag's blog [and his granddaughter]
Happy Birthday to Bag's blog [and his granddaughter]
Happy Birthday to them!!!

2 years old - yippee!!!

[boris johnson] and the sound of breaking glass

Note the Bullingdon eyes. This is one aristocratic Rottweiler of a candidate.

Just a few words on Boris Johnson's former club:

‘I like the sound of breaking glass’ is one of the Bullingdon society’s mottos and particularly true of one member who, at L’Ortolan in Berkshire, took it upon himself to eat his wine glass rather than his Michelin starred meal. At another infamous Bullingdon garden party, the club invited a string band to play and proceeded to destroy all of the instruments, including a Stradivarius.

Harry Mount, George Osborne, Alan Clark, Lord Bath, David Dimbleby, Boris Johnson and "it has recently emerged", the Tories’ man of the people, David Cameron, were trained to the pressures of fame by the champagne quaffing, bellicose Bullingdon.

Cameron was a member of the club at a time when it was de rigeur to engage in the ‘man of the people’ pursuits of washing down “a cocktail of drugs with an honest, working class box of chips and a five pound bottle of wine”.

The boys at Asadodo put it like this:

So irresponsible was the Bullingdon indeed, that to this day those invited to join the Club's 20-strong membership are welcomed by having their rooms trashed (something which, admittedly, many students are capable of achieving without the aid of some chinless types in dinner dress) and then required to book a private room at a local establishment where the Club's members can drink themselves into near insensibility before reducing the room to a state where it would look far from out of place in Central Baghdad.

Compare this to Lady Ellee of Ely's take on Boris:

The reason I like Boris Johnson is because he is obviously very intelligent (and I have a weakness for brainy men), and the way he tends to smile and charm his way through life, through his various gaffes. At the end of the day, we know he is not perfect, but then who is? Ken Livingstone, perhaps?

Who said the female of the species doesn't have a weakness for the "bad boy"? And Ellee is 100% right about Red Ken.

Now whilst my own youth was spent, with the lads, starting forest fires, smashing milk bottles on doorsteps, taking harpoons to parties, creating crop circles of beer bottles in forest clearings around the fire, marrying girls I'd carried off into the woods to have my evil way with and brawling on ships - still, there's something ultimately far more destructive [except the forest fire of course] in the Bollinger antics.

Maybe you can't accept what I'm driving at here but there is a deep disrespect for and indifference towards what others hold dear in the Bollinger modus operandi and by extension, in Boris himself.

Board up your windows and hide the plates, that's all I can say. Lady Ellee hopes he can create dialogue in London. Boris would explain, as Claude and Eustace did in Jeeves and Wooster before going out on their all night rampage:

Well, Lady Ellee, you've got the agenda almost right.

This girl obviously thinks Boris is the goods. I do too. Vote 1 for Boris! Anyone but Ken.

[dr. johnson] meet david campese

Click on Wiki pic to see Johnson in his glory

Dr. Samuel Johnson bestrode the literary world like a colossus and is known by centuries of educated people. David Campese was an Australian Rugby Union winger, known by a few generations of rugby lovers.

Johnson was extraordinary for his ordinariness. After all, what did he bring to the pool of world knowledge? The Hegelian dialectic? Existentialism? Did his work eventually blight nations around the world like a Marx?

Henry Herbert, 10th Earl of Pembroke, said of him in 1775, quoted in Boswell:

Dr. Johnson's sayings would not appear so extraordinary were it not for his bow-wow way.

This is to misunderstand what he did. He took snippets of truth, simplified them and expressed them. So did Dickens. So did Monty Python. Many put these latter into the genius class.

People are down on Johnson, not for his ability but for his willingness to accept the entourage, the Boswellian praise - surely not sycophancy because it was at least deserved. He lived the life of one of the greats. He would have driven a Rolls.

People won't forgive him his lack of humility. After all, Walter Scott had this humility in full measure, writing in 1826:

The Big Bow-Wow strain I can do like any now going … The exquisite touch which renders … commonplace things interesting … is denied to me.

Once Johnson turned to a party of literary ladies who were deeply in awe of the colossus of letters, noticed their reticence and addressed them:

Ladies, I am tame. You may stroke me.

Don't we put extraordinary conditions on our heroes? Not only must they be genii but they must be self-effacing, doing their work unpaid, giving selflessly to the young and leading the exemplary life of a saint.

It's the Unwritten Law of heroism and is almost as important in our minds as the genius itself.

Take David Campese and many who remember him admit his genius on the field, as long as they're not English and you don't mention 1991. You may mention the Lions of 1989. One never knew what was coming next. The Penguin Book of Australian Sporting Anecdotes [1996] quoted Nick Farr-Jones, the Australian half-back as saying:

He [Campese] is the sort of player whose brain doesn't always know where his legs are carrying him.

Bob Dwyer, the coach said:

We all know there's a loose wire between Campo's brain and his mouth.

Campese himself said:

It's always good to be a big mouth as long as you can back it up on the field - and I'm lucky I can do that.

The book put it:

David Campese had a long career making acidic comments about anyone who had a difference of opinion with the mercurial winger. It was not surprising that one of the chapters in his biting autobiography, On a Wing and a Prayer, was entitled The Loner.

Wiki dislikes the article on him and additionally posts:

The neutrality of this article is disputed.

By their own lights, both these men were great. The reason grandparents don't extol their virtues to their grandchildren is that they both broke the Unwritten Law. They'd both stepped over the line into the realm of self-regard and became caricatures of themselves, like Chesterton in his ridiculous cloak, hat and cane.

But does that make them any less the genii they were? I'm still big rap for both - I think they were both extraordinary men, the like we will not see again for a long time.

Oh I clean forgot to include a Johnson quote:

Every man has the right to utter what he thinks truth and every other man has a right to knock him down for it. Martyrdom is the test.

[favourite room] what would yours look like

Richard Hannay, in the 1915 thriller, The Thirty-nine Steps, briefly escapes his pursuers and finds himself ensconced in the country home of Sir Walter Bullivant, Permanent Secretary at the Foreign Office:

We went to his study for coffee, a jolly room full of books and trophies and untidiness and comfort. I made up my mind that if ever I got rid of this business and had a house of my own I would create just such a room. [John Buchan, Chapter 7, The Dry-fly Fisherman]

Therein lies the theme of this post. What would be your ideal room? My new header for the remainder of the summer is Bilbo Baggin's room at Bag End and the circular windows and doors are quite appealing to me, together with the woody colour scheme I've tried to run through the template.

Let's make this interesting, shall we? Let me challenge you to post a picture, on your own site, of a room which would come close to being very, very liveable for you.

Would you do that and then please provide the link?

[valentine's quiz] know your massacres

1] It took place in:
a. New York, New York
b. Chicago, Illinois
c. Los Angeles, California

2] Al Capone led the:
a. Northside gang
b. Westside gang
c. Southside gang

3] Leader of the other gang was:
a. Bugs Moran
b. Bugs Malone
c. Bag's Rants

4] At the time, Capone had arranged to be on vacation in:
a. Bermuda
b. Paris
c. Florida.

5] The 7th man shot was not one of the gang but:
a. a mechanic fixing one of the cars
b. a passing policeman on patrol
c. one of Capone's gang

6] The weapons used were:
a. Gatling guns
b. Thompson sub-machine guns
c. FR-249s

7] The only survivor was Johnny May's Alsatian dog, named:
a. Stinker
b. L'il Al
c. High Roller

8] Moran hadn't been there but later lost his empire to the Chicago Outfit under:
a. Frank Nitti
b. Dutch Shultz
c. Legs Diamond

9] The Act which caused Capone to gain his empire was:
a. The Volhead Act
b. The Volstead Act
c. The Volmouth Act

10] Which two of these fought Al Capone:
a. Andrew Mellon
b. Frank Nitti
c. Eliot Ness

Answers here.

Crowd waiting to see the bodies brought out