[important notice] calling all pets

No, this is not Hilary Clinton and I have to tell you it's not a very funny joke. Hilary shows no reptilian characteristics whatsoever and it would be simply actionable to call her one of the lizard people.

Wednesday is Blogfocus Pets Evening Part 2.

What would be nice from everyone not featured in Part 1 is for you to send a piccy of your darling pet [it need not be a dog, cat or lizard] plus your site url or name, before midday Wednesday to:

jameshighamatmaildotcom

Please make the size about 300px or more, in JPEG form. I'll run the Blogfocus on contributions received and if there are fewer than eight, then I'll re-run other shots of pets from Part 1.

UPDATE: Two entries so far. Anyone else want?

[next pm] here he should be

Thunderdragon, who currently has some woes of his own, has posted, under Gun Control:

There is no doubt that David Davis has scored a significant goal against Home Secretary Jacqui Smith with this open letter.

Have I not consistently said and continue to do so and I think Iain Dale is right on the money with this one, that the very best talent the Tories have is sitting right beside the current shadow PM?

But no one listens to me.

The man can run rings round the opposition and most certainly the powers that be that I blog against [plus Labour] would not want Davis anywhere near the controls. Better to have a malleable puppet like Blair and Cameron.

As Leo Amery said in 1914 but it is still pertinent today:

For twenty years, he [H.H. Asquith] has held a season ticket on the line of least resistance and has gone wherever the train of events has carried him, lucidly justifying his position at whatever point he has happened to find himself.

David Davis for PM and Boris Johnson for London. That's all.

[erudite bloggers] three examples

When a blogger titles his posts:

Here they come, a-clucking and a-flapping ...

or

My new favourite word Anthropogenic, in which he writes:

I'm convinced! I'm convinced! Back to the Middle Ages, everyone! Back to when everyone was nice and nobody hit anyone and nobody died, ever, and everyone had enough to eat and was warm and cosy all the time and we used to make our own entertainment and get change from sixpence... I think I am having one of my funny turns, Nurse... and all because because we weren't using oil. Yay!

or Campaign for national Stop Beating Your Wife Day ...

and Slave traders of the world unite ...

then he has to be something special. When a blogger writes:

In times of insanity, it's good to know that there are rational minds to light the beacon of reason for rudderless souls such as I...

and includes titles like All-Change At The Department Of Vengeance, writing:

Dirty Barry Thorpe MP vowed today to exterminate red tape in the revenge process and crack down upon activist nay-sayers. Addressing a baying, drunken mob, the new Minister for Vengeance promised a more streamlined system which would cut the interval between accusation and execution to a maximum of five minutes...

...or Befuddled Egyptologists Struggle With Unfamiliar Hieroglyphics

… then he also has to be something special. When a fearless blogger courts disaster with:

Liverpool is to be European Capital of Culture in 2008. One must charitably suppose that it is culture in the anthropological sense...

to which Dearieme asks:

European Hubcapital of Culture?...

then follows up with a Francis Galton quote:

Whenever I have occasion to classify the persons I meet into three classes, ‘good, medium, bad’, I use a needle mounted as a pricker, wherewith to prick holes, unseen, in a piece of paper, torn rudely into a cross with a long leg […] I used this plan for my beauty data, classifying the girls I passed in streets or elsewhere as attractive, indifferent, or repellent...

he is, in fact, a blogger of the first order. All three of these worthy gentlemen I shall not attempt to emulate, only admire from a distance.

When I compare this to the sentence I keep harping on about ad nauseam, as a prime example of all that is poor in blogging today:

No it's not a monster - it's a f-ck off big grey cloud. But hey ho. The wind and rain make the sea look more picturesque and wild 'n all that cr-p...

... and chuckle at the wry observation of one correspondent last evening, who noted, concerning a currently popular blogging philosopher:

How did [he] recently describe a friend? He would not say in two sentences what he could put into 50...

...I then give silent thanks for the likes of the worthies further up the page and others whose turn of phrase and capacity for wry observation, coupled with a wicked turn of phrase, places them at the very head of the Blogostocracy.

Just one man's opinion, of course.

[hyperlinks] fuel for the big machines

In these days of aggregators, RSS feeds, OPML and who knows what else, where does this leave the humble hyperlink?

It seems very much to me that it is still used by the big machines to assess a blog's "value" or "worth", even though it is only tangentially connected with this. Which raises the next question as to how important hyperlinks are.

I think it was Thunderdragon who ran a post on "Are You a UK Blog?" So I took the test some group had set up and discovered that I wasn't a UK Blog. As you can imagine, this came as somewhat of a shock, as 43% of my readership was UK at that point, followed by 29% from the U.S, 8% from Canada and 6% from Australia.

The reason they offered was that not enough UK bloggers were linking to me. Hmmmm. Now as you know, I run Blogfocus and generally speaking, gratuitously link whenever I can so I hardly saw how they could have been right in that.

So I followed back a number of links I'd included in my own posts over a one week period and realized that while I was thanked on my own site, the fellow blogger often didn't carry that back to his/her own site. And that "carrying back" is where one's assessment as a blog comes from by the machines.

Disclaimer - many, like Welshcakes Limoncello, Colin Campbell, Tom Paine, Tiberius Gracchus, JMB, Lady Macleod, Lord Nazh [whom have I missed?] are kind enough to backlink pretty regularly and a sprinkling of other kind souls from time to time, as distinct from regularly visiting, which then includes good folk like CityUnslicker, Two Wolves, Grendel Grendel, Ian Appleby, Shades and so on but many others simply … don't.

I believe in the principle that one needs to say something fairly significant in the first place to warrant being linked but perhaps if we all became just a tadge more "gratuitous" in our usage of the facility …

Whoa, I hear you say - I've added you to my blogroll - what are you moaning about? Yes, it is a wonderful thing to be in someone else's blogroll and no mistake - it's certainly some sort of confirmation that one is appreciated and no mealy-mouthedness about this whatsoever.

However, for the big machines, sadly, this is not enough. They require hundreds of links in order to be slightly more than a blip on the blog radar. While this might seem unjust, I hardly see how they can do it differently, without prying into people's site stats.

I blame Readers like my Google Reader and bloglinks in part for the situation too.

Second disclaimer - what brought all this on was not my own overall stats which I'm delighted with over this silly season nor the refusal of these people to recognize me as UK [I have a significant U.S., Canadian and Australian readership too] but the position in Technorati of one particular lady I'll not name and her situation incensed me.

Quite frankly, Technorati is anomalous in its decision making.

She is languishing with an "authority" level in two figures whilst another male blogger I checked is up in the hundreds. And yet I see her in many places and the latter gentleman only on the "correct sites" which curry favour.

In short, she's not getting just return for her efforts and I'm sure she'd never ask for it. She'd also say and I agree, that the important thing is just to be read, not commented on or linked. Still, if only half those she visited linked back to her, mentioning something in a throwaway aside, perhaps, her "authority" would shoot through the roof.

That's the point I'm trying to make.

[abortion] it's not as easy as all that

It's nowhere in the "About" on this site, nowhere in the posts, this blogger has hitherto left the issue alone. Until now. Worred about powerful lobbies? No. It's just a bit personal, that's all.

My position is that I have no position.

Tim Worstall comments on Amnesty's decision to back Woman's Choice in certain circumstances and that it has no right to broaden its charter to take in other issues - it's hard to argue with him on this.

Abortion?

Though the man hates it, should he ask her not to? I don't mean rant and rave and tell her it's evil and all that because she can deal with that more easily, I think.

No, I mean asking her quietly not to kill our child.

I imagine that's far more traumatic for her. Did I do wrong by not asking? I felt she knew how I felt about it but I didn't say anything. Was I abetting a felony?

And the next day, when she went off there in the taxi alone because she wanted it that way, did I do wrong?

And when she allowed me to see her the following day and I held her in my arms, did I do wrong? Was I condoning a crime and telling her that it was quite OK to do that every time now?

I have no answers to these questions. She was 34.

[rain] when it sets in

She was 14, I was 15 and the other day I found some letters from her in that green ink, rounded hand and read them again, always returning to the day at the end of summer when she went back home to the country and I had to return to school, to the big smoke.

We had two hours to ourselves on that shoreline and walked in the shallows, went up onto the cliff and all of it in steady rain. Do you love swimming in the rain, the drops pinging the surface of the water, blending with the foam and tingling on the skin?

I adore it and just walking in it, both of you soaked to the skin. You can dry out later. Sailing in it is also a buzz - there's a soft whoosh to steady rain, isn't there, entirely different to patter patter or driving rain?

These days I love the expression "rain setting in" because it means going out onto the balcony, with the rain falling past, centimetres from the metre and a half wide window opening, splashing up at you from the sill, you with your coffee in your hand and I don't care any more about anything bad, only the good things, the romance of rain.

Wiki says:

Many people find the scent during and immediately after rain especially pleasant or distinctive. The source of this scent is petrichor, an oil produced by plants, then absorbed by rocks and soil, and later released into the air during rainfall. Light or heavy rain is sometimes seen as romantic.

Yes, yes, yes.

All my most romantic moments, even the apocalyptic moments have been in rain. I can even imagine the final apocalypse will be in rain. Don't say "acid rain" and spoil the mood. That's the sort of spoilsport thing I'd say.

You want to know how we parted - not my childhood sweetheart, I mean my last love not so long ago? No? Well I'm going to tell you anyway. We went to the Pyramid and there's a restaurant up top and the whole roof is glass [not one sheet, mind - there are girders].

This day the changeable set menu was excellent, the music playing was the best and the rain was thundering down on the roof. How appropriate for a final, parting meeting. She told me many months later she'd gone back there a few times hoping to recapture that time but it had been a one off.

Some people love when the rain clears, the sun peeps out and a new dawn comes. Not me. It always means her new dawn with someone else and mine alone.

I adore rain. When it sets in, that is.