[terrorist attack] perhaps

They may well be as claimed by Turkish security:

Police said they believed the attackers were members of a Turkish Sunni fundamentalist group, the Great Eastern Islamic Raiders Front.

... or they may not. There've been a number of instances of groups being slow to claim responsibility and that smacks of a broader destabilization plan. I always think one must look at the net effect of such a thing - whose attitudes does it harden and why would anyone want those attitudes hardened?

In other words, who are all the groups or countries who stand to gain overall?

I can't see the killing itself as the main object. On the other hand, there is a type of law-unto-himself person who just gets a kick out of seeing the big explosion. The sniper killings in the U.S. spring to mind here.

Might well be wrong.

[british seaside resorts] one beneficiary of the recession

Rather pleased, actually, that many Brits are turning back to a long neglected part of their country - the seaside resort. Morecambe in particular holds an interest for me.

When it lost out to Blackpool with its greatly overrated illuminations, even the Winter Gardens, Frontierland, the Midland Hotel and the rest of it couldn't save it - that is, until now. Now the British holidaymakers are returning due to soaring costs elsewhere but it's a sorry sight to return to.

It's a bit like neglecting a trusty car which had served you well for some new-fangled piece of machinery, only to have to sell it and return to your old faithful, now half corroded and careworn but with a smile on its grill that you have returned.

Morecambe's tides made the news not so long ago with the deaths of those Chinese fishermen; it has always been a problem, necessitating a Queen's Guide to the Sands and yet ... and yet ... isn't that part of the adventure, like Lindisfarne on the other coast?

It would be lovely to see places like this drag themselves into the 21st century and offer some of the things overseas holiday spots offer, with just that touch of Britishness to them and a rich history to boot. Drop some of the tackiness and it could take off in the new millennium.

UPDATE at No Clue on seaside resorts.

UPDATE UPDATE at Weston-super-Mare

[justice] what lengths would you go to

Older readers would recall the Winslow Boy, the play by Terrence Rattigan, where a boy is wrongly accused of stealing and his father almost breaks his family in getting the boy exonerated.

Witness this one in the photograph. It was when a black soldier was accused of participating in a lynching and:

Despite their protests of innocence -- and the government's own secret investigation showing the prosecution's case was poisonously flawed -- the men were sentenced to hard labor and forfeiture of military pay and benefits, and were given dishonorable discharges.

Now they have finally been exonerated but at what cost? In Agatha Christie's Tuesday Club Murders and other stories, a similar theme appears quite often - that someone is accused but in this case is not punished but merely suspected for the rest of his or her life.

Example was the trusted servant whom the husband and wife then no longer trusted anywhere around money or valuables when a brooch went missing. She went to her grave, the servant, still under the cloud. Later the wife found her brooch down the back of a chest of drawers.

UPDATE Monday - the veteran who was the subject of the report has now died after receiving his apology.

[drunk passengers] rear deck urgently required

What the hell is going on these days? Here it is again:

Two drunk British women went on a rampage on a charter plane, trying to hit a flight attendant with a bottle of vodka and attempting to open a cabin door as the aircraft was cruising over Austria at 10,000 metres, police said today.

Just posted on that recently and so we have more evidence that we need a rear deck and railing on aircraft.

It's simple. Passenger gets drunk, is issued with an auto-opening parachute and food pack, then courteously shown the rear deck exit.

He or she does the rest.

[saturday caption] add your comments

From MSN

[the unexpected] never at a convenient time

Qatar interior from Wiki

I'm sorry to go on about yesterday's issue of the Qantas flight, when it has been blanket covered by the media but it still really chills me:

"Seeing the hole caused a lot of emotion. People were physically shaking. Many realised how close they were to their own mortality."

It's not just that I've done that run many times and with various incidents - it's something more.

I was once onboard when the flight took off on the second leg to Australia and they told us that a red light was flashing and they were returning to the airport. That delayed us and it turned out to be nothing.

Another was when we were about to take off [from Bangkok this time] and they then decanted us from the plane, all baggage was removed and placed in a large circle and passengers were asked to identify their baggage, open it and await inspection.

Yet another time, we were in the air and I was nervous for some reason. I told the stewardess [sounds really weak, this] about the feeling and she took me up to the cockpit where the flight engineer told me this was the flight which had indeed fallen 15 000 feet on it's last run to Australia from this airport. He explained that the autopilot worked on wave patterns in the air but sometimes these acted irregularly and the plane took some time to pick up on it. No one had been hurt.

More broadly, I was on a BA flight to Heathrow in 2000 and all was normal until we approached Heathrow. Suddenly we dropped 10 000 feet in a few seconds, the airbrakes outside the window shuddering but all the way down it had seemed a controlled drop and hardly anyone was badly affected.

The pilot had been told by aircraft control to immediately be at a different level and now he was told to loop round until a gate was found. What exacerbated it was when he came onto the intercom and said that if we cared to look out of the starboard window, we'd see another plane but not to worry. He'd also been asked to circle round London until a gate became available.

In April-May, getting away from aircraft for awhile, I was doing the usual routine, snug and secure in Russia, then found myself in Sicily in a whirlwind conjunction of events. I have to tell you that that was interesting but a bit jangly on the nerves. It's now possibly arising again in August, possibly not. It's up in the air [sorry for the excruciating pun].

Mortality - how things suddenly drop out.

How to prepare? You can't, simply can't. You just have to meet it as it comes. Promise not to get religious here but it definitely helps a hell of a lot to have some sort of faith as a way through. Also, I suspect all your pigeons come home to roost now too - as you've acted yourself, so it comes back on you now.

It might have just been an incident on a Qantas flight to Australia but it had me thinking very deeply about everything. Don't laugh but yesterday I was in the caffe sipping a coffee and watched them opening the bar in the roundabout between the caffe and the church. I saw the church door open and though I'm not Catholic, I went in there for a while.

Perhaps time to end this before it turns maudlin.

[flight] amazing how these things stay up there

Think they were pretty lucky but the procedures were obviously good.

[flying dutchman] on and on and on

Thinking about this lately:

The Flying Dutchman is a legendary ghost ship that is cursed to sail the seas for eternity. It is often said to have a ghostly glow, and like many other supernatural entities throughout folklore, it is said to herald danger or doom for those who see it.

Quite a few sightings of the Flying Dutchman have been reported throughout history, and stories about the ghost ship's origins abound. Many versions of the Flying Dutchman story set the scene of the ship's loss at the Cape of Good Hope, the Southern tip of Africa.

Nautical version of the Wandering Jew perhaps.

[your cash] in a shoebox in your cupboard

From the Asia Times:

Since a major effect of inflation is psychological, the fact that inflationary pressure has decisively moved back into the 1970s range is important.

At 5% per annum, inflation cannot be ignored. Investors cannot buy fixed-income securities without taking account of the fact that the principal of those securities will have devalued by more than half by the time they are repaid (if they are of 15 years or longer maturity.)

The combination of inflation and un-indexed income and capital gains taxes rapidly raises the tax rate on capital returns to an extremely high level, depressing still further the incentive to save.

For the layperson, this last seems the key to me - the disincentive to save. So in the light of this, what to make of Sackerson's post today, suggesting, via Mish:

The entire US banking system is insolvent.

In Russia there is a long tradition of keeping the money in a shoebox in the top cupboard, keeping it in hard currency and never trusting anyone's exhortations to part with it.

Griselda Writes ... Advice for the Lovelorn

Griselda Haveschott is the lady from Lower Titcup who opened her account as a guest blogger yesterday. You might recall her version of Stargazy Pie. True to her word, she's this day sent in part of her popular "advice for the lovelorn" column which she writes for the Greater Titcup Echo. She assures me that the two letters from the public below are as genuine as genuine can be.

Hello readers of James' blog, Griselda again with my July 22nd advice column in the GTE. James felt it might assist his readers with their personal problems as well:

Dear Griselda,

Please can you help me? Until a few weeks ago I thought I’d found Mr Right at last. This man is charismatic, witty, handsome and a wonderful lover. He brings me flowers and buys me expensive jewellery.

The thing is, though, that he won’t tell me where he lives or works and he won’t let me have his phone number – not even his mobile. He always leaves my flat before midnight and is never able to spend a bank holiday with me.

When he takes me out he makes me wear dark glasses, a high-collared Burberry and a headscarf tied just like the Queen ties hers. That’s not even fashionable, is it? And he says he has to keep his trenchcoat on and his trilby pulled down over his eyes everywhere he goes. I am beginning to think that we might look a little strange on Weston-super-Mare Pier in summer.

Do you think there could be a slight problem?

Mandy Eastborough
Love Lane

Well Mandy dear, we go back a long way, don't we and I know your thoughts on fashion. With the circle Her Majesty moves in, the Balmoral headgear is quite appropriate and you know there is still a vestige of loyalism in this country which likes to follow its monarch’s lead.

Now about your little problem. Are you talking about last Friday week when Brian came into the Brahms and Liszt with Jenny and while she went into the snug he was making eyes at you? Jenny tells me there was absolutely nothing in that, you know. No, I think perhaps you’re referring to another gentleman altogether and yes, there may well be a little problem there. Might I suggest you don your Queenly garb one more time, pop round to 51 Naseby Rd about 9.30 Saturday morning and have a quick peek?

Dear Griselda

Recently my wife and I gave a dinner party for eight at our new Tudor style near the north end of Rutting Forest. We'd toiled pretty much all day to produce the goods, only to have it ruined when one of the guests, who shall remain nameless, straight after the consomme, went out to his Beema for a CD which he then calmly came back and inserted in our player ... our player, mind ... after first switching off OUR background music, grunting, "Can't stand bloody Bon Jovi". Well, really!

What precisely is the etiquette regarding guests bringing music to get-togethers?

[Name withheld for fear of reprisals]

Ladies and gentlemen, Griselda now throws this one open to the readers for your thoughts on the matter. Should guests bring their own music, are we all being just a little oversensitive these days, could we not put up with our hosts' choice just for a couple of hours? Your responses gladly received.

Finally, two thoughts to leave you with, as I always do at the GTE:

Make sure you know where the main stopcock is in the house, that it is in working order and that everyone living in the house knows where it is. I pinched this from Woman's Realm: Tips and Wrinkles [Pan, 1972].

Also, I saw this in visiting some of James' blogfriends: Never trust a man with a beard.