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Does anyone out there want an exquisite pastel portrait done?

Try Barbara Hamilton Kaczmarowska.

The Oxford Webware maestros are helping me liven things up a bit round here.

 So (within the frugal limits of my ability to recall how to do it) there could be easier YouTube links and more pictures now and again.

Some people ask me, "Did you really have a Mini in your living room on the first floor in Warsaw?".

Indeed. This is how it got there:

And this is what it looked like driving in:

And the launch itself, just as the curtain hiding the car was pulled back to general amazement and wild acclaim:

Made a change from the usual diplomatic cocktail party.

Success.

This website has stormed from a standing start in January this year into the Total Politics Top 200 UK Top Political Blogs list, at position 161.

Not as good as, say, position 156.

But notably better than, say, position 166.

And rising fast next year, in hot pursuit of famous former Ambassador turned blogger Craig Murray who is at position 145, down from position 44 in 2007.

August has been much my best month so far, with some 9000 unique visitors.

Many thanks to all those who both like the product - and have taken the trouble to vote.

Aaaargh.

Reckless carbon use on Earth is now having worrying ramifications at the heart of solar system, viz the Sun.

Please governments. Tax us higher to pay for all those schemes to deal with these problems, otherwise all is lost.

One thing is utterly clear.

The Earth is set to get either warmer or cooler.

Definitely.

The world takes another step towards the Internet Cloud as Google launches its new browser Google Chrome.

We, the vast mass of mere users, have almost no idea of what is happening to deliver these miracles of networked cleverness.

Here (via Charles Johnson) is as simple an explanation as we might hope to understand.

(Oh, and while you are passing by LGF, have a look at this dude, an Obama supporter baffled by McCain's choice of Sarah Palin, and not afraid to say so.)

Few if any entries in the coming week as the sun finally emerges in Florida after Tropical Storm Fay. Back to normal service at the end of August.

Just to add that timeshare salesmen in this part of the world are startlingly good.

We were offered the usual free donuts and coffee plus an $80 gift voucher if we 'took the tour' and heard the presentation. So we signed up.

The first salesman hit us with the first offer to extract $30,000 from us. Charmingly done, but fairly easily rebuffed. Then came three more in Star Wars-like space fighter attack waves, peppering us with amazing deals of ingenious shapes and sizes.

It takes nerves of steel to sit through this and not agree to buy something. They make you feel guilty that you have not bought at least a two-week holiday for $2,000.

Somehow we managed it. And departed with the voucher. Better than last year when I walked out in a rage and skipped the voucher.

Timeshare is easy.

Don't.

Back in the West, there is a health and safety policy I have not seen before here at Aquatica, the new water-park next to SeaWorld in Orlando.

As one waits in line for a good splashy ride, a tape-recording in a prissy male Australian voice tells us all that:

Your security is our number one concern. Therefore, lifeguards may not make eye-contact when speaking to you. Nothing personal, mates. No worries!

Huh?

Does eye-contact with lifeguards make some people feel insecure? Or is it that the lifeguards' beady eyes must be roving ceaselessly to spot potential trouble and so they may not have time to alight on you, so please do not feel offended? Something else?

I have sent a message to Customer Relations to ask. Always nice to know what is going on.

Update: almost instantaneous and friendly replies from Aquatica saying that indeed the point is that the lifeguards need to be looking everywhere so may not have eyes for you when talking. I have pointed out that that is not clear from the way the warning is phrased. Over to senior management.

Busy ploughing through Lonely Hearts by John Harvey.

The hero of this series of well praised detective stories is Detective Charlie Resnick. He has a Polish background which makes a lugubrious appearance now and again.

But if Arrow Books are going to do detective stories with a Polish angle, they ought to get Poles to help the proof-reading.

Imagine my shock and dismay to see on p 249 of the 2002 edition (corrected now?) the Polish national dish traduced by being turned into something with an Albanian flavour: they meant pierogi, but it appeared as pieroqi.

Resnick visits a Polish woman settled in the UK. There on the wall (p 251) is a picture of Cardinal Wysznski. Who or what is he? Can't they spell? They must be referring to Cardinal Wyszynski.

Come on, Arrow Books. These are all easy words.

Try Polish for beetle: chrzaszcz.

Then move on the infamous Polish tongue-twister:

W Szczebrzeszynie chrząszcz brzmi w trzcinie
I Szczebrzeszyn z tego słynie.

Which Wikipedia kindly helps one pronounce: 

[fʂʧε.bʐε.ʂɨ.ɲε xʂɔɰ̃ʂʧ bʐmi ftʂtɕi.ɲε]
[i.ʂʧε.bʐε.ʂɨn stε.gɔ swɨ.ɲε]

And means:

In the town of Szczebrzeszyn a beetle buzzes in the reed
And Szczebrzeszyn is famous for it.

As it should be.

As Georgia burns we look to the FT to guide us through all the complexities.

And sure enough:

Paris Hilton is no average airhead, as her self-parody shows

They're right. She is way above average airheadnesses.

She is top of the airhead range.

... just when Barack wants to make America cool again, people are being really mean to him.

How cowardly is that?!

Via American Digest.

Is B Obama losing momentum?

If so, is it because he did not take some earlier advice?

This article is fascinating for its Manifest Badness, on so many levels simultaneously.

It's all about:

the latest example of a noticeable social trend, one that we shall call, obviously, “dolliness”, after the woman who embodies its spirit. Think of the Spice Girls tour and the Sex and the City film ...  a new form of female camaraderie that, while clearly not new, is suddenly out, proud and quite deafeningly loud.

I try not to think about such things. But note the writing: four weary adverbs already, bulging the text like cotton wool stuffed in to expand an unstrained M&S bra.

What about this:

A group of grown-up women out on the razz is rarely cool — or sexy, in the traditional sense. But so what? When the rest of life is a performance, a game of pretending to be a grown-up, a complete cool-void can be a relief.

Ha.Grown-up women are all about pretending to be grown-up! I knew it.

But they're for sure brainy:

And it’s a nonsense that conversations at girl-only nights are just “women’s talk” ... What started out as a few women — among them June Sarpong and the writer Kathy Lette — gathering at the home of Ronnie Ancona became a monthly fixture for 30 or more. Sometimes the conversation was about about the burqa; sometimes nail varnish. Usually both.

Doesn't vampy black nail varnish avoid an unseemly and impious clash?

You can love men, live for them, but what a relief it is sometimes to be around people you don’t need to be anything with.

Women together, and vacuous articles in the Times about women together. A load of nothing?

Anglican Bishops have been marching against world poverty - then tucking in to a worthy feast.

Hypocrites!

When Pope Benedict XVI visited Krakow in 2006 the Polish authorities were determined to prevent any unseemly scenes of drunkenness among the vast crowds thronging to see him.

So alcohol sales were banned in Krakow and for miles around.

In Krakow for the Pope's Mass I went for dinner at the Hotel Stary, where as it happened the main restaurant had been booked for a mass of Catholic Archbishops and others from the Church hierarchy. There they were, finely berobed.

Imagine my suprise to see the long bar groaning with bottles of champagne and wine, laid out in long rows beautifully for their benefit. They did not hold back.

Research needed? 

News that the Arabic word for God has been found miraculously enscribed on a piece of meat in Nigeria alas does not impress me.

When I was in Serbia the erudite paper Twilight Zone carried a picture of the image of Milosevic which had been found on a piece of toast.

And these days people are impatient for miracles.

So, praise the Lord, you can make your own.

Your chance to vote for the Total Politics UK Political Blog Top 100.

First place and Ten Points for this one of course.

After that, up to you.

Nigel Short has a lively use of words, as well as a lively chess style.

See the detailed rulings on his use of the word 'dunderheads' to describe two senior chess officials.

Defamatory or 'mere vulgar abuse'?

Who said that chess is boring?

As a chess fan I decided to use my time in Moscow to get to know some of the world's top players.

This was at the time when the world of chess was in turmoil because of Garry Kasparov's ambitions to make the game more accessible - and more lucrative. In 1993 Kasparov had played England's Nigel Short in London for The Times World Chess Championship, winning comfortably after numerous hard battles where Short had winning chances if not winning positions.

My plan worked well. Very well.

To the point where at my suggestion the Embassy hosted a 'charity simultaneous' event, featuring a number of the best players ever who were gathered in town for a top chess competition.

Thus we had Kasparov, Short, Kramnik and Anand taking it in turns to move against some 40 opponents who had paid for the privilege of being whupped by these giants.

The receipts (several thousand dollars) went to a Russian good cause. The event, the first of its kind at this level in any Embassy, was featured on Russian national TV.

Before Kasparov as White made the first move against each participant, he vigorously seized his two knights and pointed them straight ahead. A gesture of psychological aggression which in my case worked a treat. Not knowing what I was doing, I tried to dig in as Black and was easily swamped.

Anyway, at the Moscow speed-chess championships concerned Kramnik beat Kasparov in a remarkable game full of dashing sacrifices and an ultimately desperate king chase to finish it all off.

Here it is. Press the button and watch the moves unfold.

Terrific, complex stuff.

What was even more remarkable was seeing Nigel Short again a couple of years later. We sat down with a chess board and Nigel played me through the moves of the Kramnik-Kasparov game - from memory.

Perhaps we should not be impressed. That's what chess Grandmasters do - play and remember chess games, even when they have not played the games themselves.

But I was impressed.

Too much Murray v Crawford, eh?

Well how about all of us starting a new round of religious riots, this time with Christians and Muslims joining forces against a common cartoon enemy.

Meet Jesus and Mo. Then keep clicking.

Different.

Because it allows massive direct hits on Utter Fatheadedness, and then documents carefully the attempts of the fatheads to cover their tracks, giving millions of people hours of amusement watching it all.  

Never thought I'd say it, but the time has come to vote SNP.

Anything but this.

Most of the Great Questions of our time boil down to a simple proposition.

In this case, who most deserves to win the forthcoming Presidential election?

Answered!

Yesterday's Wimbledon final left me thinking about the Oxford Exams Finals joke:

"Your answer in that paper was excellent!"

"So was the question!"

Nadal's play soared to new heights, because Federer's did too.

As they say these days, awesome.

Wimbledon gets British people very excited, even though we almost never win anything there.

Maybe a bit too excited?

But Centre Court is always capricious. Sometimes it seems not so much like a court as a courtesan - beautiful, generous, but always capable of withdrawing her favours for no apparent reason, just because she happens to feel like it, or more usually, because she has a thing for a younger man.

Ace writing.

... and there is Lileks, in full flow explaining the magnificence of Wall-E.

We think that we are pretty darn smart these days, what with all our clever new inventions.

But in seventy years' time, won't we look a bit ... quaint?

The communist parts of the world recycled all sorts of jokes. See a few here, as nicely reviewed here.

Some of them maybe emerged elsewhere back in the mists of time and were rebooted for new purposes.

Thus:

"A Russian proverb: If you see a Bulgarian in the street, beat him. He'll know why!"

When I shared that with someone in Poland he said he'd heard it long before in the Middle East, but with the words "your wife" replacing "a Bulgarian".

Or this one:

A Pole, a Nigerian and a Russian are standing outside the hospital ward where their respective wives have just had their respective babies.

Out comes an agitated nurse. "There's been a mix-up. We don't know which baby belongs to whom!"

The Pole says that he will sort things out and enters the ward. He reappears with a strikingly dark-skinned African-looking baby.

"The Nigerian coughs politely. "Excuse me, but perhaps that one is mine?"

Pole: "Look, there's a Russian in there and I'm taking no chances!"

That one is found on the Internet in numerous ethnic and other forms. It is a fine one to use to unnerve clever people from Harvard.

They laugh nervously, shocked at its apparent racially charged political incorrectitude but unable to work out why it is offensive and to whom.

"You are being hierarchical."

"I did not know that that is a perjorative word!"

Mark Steyn in full flow.

A neat article about the (erroneous) idea that a twitching butterfly wing can be shown to unleash a chain of events culminating in a hurricane:

 ... a point Lorenz amplified in his 1972 paper, "Predictability: Does the Flap of a Butterfly's Wings in Brazil Set Off a Tornado in Texas?"

Well before this chaos theory notion started to get popularised, Ray Bradbury (of course) gave us the defining idea.

Maybe a little more humility is needed from eg the Climate Change industry?

Who said the Crawfords lack it?

Good to see my precious DNA being put to such fine use.

Here is a typical modern academic definition:

'a transportation device that compressed spacial units into conquerable size'.

Of what?

Lest you think that Mark Steyn is nothing but a crazed Canadian demographer, have a re-run of this utterly classic piece of work.

His famous interview from 2018 with Monica Lewinsky's dress:

To be honest, I was lucky to get the interview. The dress was supposed to be doing the BBC - the full “Panorama special” treatment, Martin Bashir, the works - but, to protect her identity, they wanted to do that undercover secret-location protect-your-identity trick with the camera that makes part of the screen go all fuzzy and blurry.

“Are you crazy?” she yelled at them. “It’ll look like I’ve still got the stain.”

Read on.

Guido and Iain Dale are riding high in visitors to their respective websites.

Big numbers, comparing favourably if not better with similar sites run by 'mainstream' media outlets. Increasingly they all feed off each other, of course.

Why not? For far too long a tiny number of media pundits have held extraordinary influence over public life round the world. Not because they were smarter or wiser than many others, but because they were taken on by major newspapers and ran a cosy and lucrative oligopoly.

Bloggers and other web analysts give these plump pundits healthy competition.  Plus they point out errors at supersonic speed: 'fact-check your ass', as it's known in the trade.

My own readership is more ... modest. Still, 3000 Unique Visitors a month is OK by me, given that the site has been going only a few months. Thanks, readers

Plus the site has helped me get a droll piece in a brand new UK political magazine launching this month: Total Politics. Be there, or be square.

"I say, cricket does appear to be changing, old boy!"

For anyone following US politics or indeed anyone who is not dead, this is a must-view item.

She seems ... vexed.

Tim Worstall (again!) links to a couple of examples of Pollard-like behaviour, namely hiding messages in a seemingly normal text.

This has been done in the FCO too, of course. Telegrams have been sent with the first or last letter of each new line spelling out a cryptic message.

Plus there was one post which tried to send as many animal metaphors as possible in its telegrams, preferably in as unobtrusive a way as possible:

• lion's share
• a difficulty not easy to bear
• the problem has been dogging us ...

It all passes the time as one pecks away at the dull official keyboard.

Examples please, FCO colleagues! 

Some things just need to be pointed out for the edification of us non-Americans.

Thus yesterday Syracuse beat John Hopkins 13-10 in the NCAA men's lacrosse final.

So what?

Only that a crowd of 49,000 people watched the match.

Blimey.

HT: Power Line

Back from New York. Getting there via JFK airport was an experience.

On the plane I filled in the usual visitor entry forms plus customs form using the only pen I had with me, namely a red-ink Pilot Vball.

When we reached the immigration officer my heart sank. He had the look of someone who was not there to help people Enjoy Life.

"Do you usually fill out legal documents in red ink?" he asked, his eyes glittering.

"Er no, but it was the only pen I had," I replied.

"You're not allowed to fill out these forms in red ink," came the acid reply.

I had wondered about this, but as the form gave detailed instructions on everything except the colour of the ink I had pressed on.

So I boldly hit back: "But the form does not say that you can't".

"It does not say that you can use red ink!" came the reply, as a cobra with a migraine warning a mouse to stand to attention to make the ensuing dinner pass less confrontationally.

"It does not say that you can use black ink either," I observed.

He stared at me as if I were insane. In deep pain he took up his black biro from its position next to a large plastic container full of flourescently coloured sugary candies. And he went through the whole form line by line inking over my red ink in black ink.

"Seems to me that makes it all a lot harder to read," I helpfully pointed out.

I was handed the black biro to sign my name over the earlier red version, which I did. The form now was a mess.

Then at last ... we were thru.

So much bureaucratic life is like this - people getting bored and slumping into meaningless procedure which inconveniences everyone including themselves and actually makes the end-product worse.

Had the immigration officer in this case said firmly but with a smile "Hey bud, use black ink next time OK?" the whole process would have gone faster. He would have made his point, and the actual form left with the US side would have been legible.

And he would have been happier in himself and in his work.

Or maybe they use scanners to 'read' all these forms so that dark ink really is necessary? If so, why not say so on the form and indeed to us to explain why we unintentionally had made life difficult?

As previously noted, this question of how to train/motivate public servants to have the right attitude ought to be at the heart of public administration. But it isn't.

Whatever.

We went to MoMA and saw the wonderful Steinberg drawings.

Back in New York, so re-reading The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand.

The blurb on the back of my Harper Collins edition describes the book as being all about 'ambition, power, gold and love'.

Not really. Did they read it?

This is the best book about Freedom and Communism, a rambling complex philosphical novel on a vast scale. It pits the Ultimate Individualist (Howard Roark, architect, uncompromiser) against the Ultimate Collectivist (Ellsworth Toohey, writer, collector of souls).

It is set mainly in the New York of the 1920s and 1930s. It opens with the defiant young Roark being thrown out of Architecture School for refusing to accept that the Classical idiom of pillars, mantels, grapes and other forms of such decoration and proportion is the only true one:

Your Greeks took marble and they made copies of their wooden structures out of it, because others had done it that way. Then your masters of the Renaissance came along and made copies in plaster of copies in marble of copies in wood. Now here we are making copies in steel and concrete of copies in plaster of copies in marble of copies in wood. Why?

The Dean of the school is aghast. He asks Roark if he intends to design buildings in the 'modern' style Roark advocates:

Yes

My dear fellow, who will let you?

That's not the point. The point is, who will stop me?

Roark goes on to deride and defeat those architects who wanted to design the powerful new hotels and skscrapers of New York using all those Grecian and other classical motifs. His vision rather was sleek but finely proportioned buildings whose coherence emerged from the site and the materials used.

The architecture metaphor in the book is of course a vehicle for Ayn Rand (born a Russian) to describe the supreme ideological battle between Roark and Toohey - she was wriiting at a time when collectivist Nazis and Stalinists were enslaving and murdering millions of people across Europe.

Anyway, I conclude that although he articulates an admirably pure, unashamedly individual freedom Roark was not quite right on his architectural vision.

There is room in society for the eccentric and the misguided. The ridiculous kitschy mish-mash of styles indeed seen in many of the older New York skyscrapers gives them and the city its wonderful exotic charm now. Without all those brooding gargoyles and dazzling art deco designs poised far above the streets, Batman and Spiderman imagery would be far less potent.

Let's hear it for the rock band which extols the virtues of:

(a) Soviet Comunism; and

(b) B Obama

Doesn't post-modern irony sometimes go ... just a bit too far?

Back on languages again.

Slav languages make a distinction in their verbs between Perfective and Imperfective 'aspects'. Thus in Russian/Serbian/Polish there are different verb forms denoting (a) when an action has been done and is now complete, and (b) when an action is continuing or repeated.

Here is a fairly straightforward explanation of the basic point.

We too express these distinctions in English, in a different form:

• Perfective:     Yesterday I ate my sandwiches
• Imperfective:  Yesterday when I was eating my sandwiches, it happened...

And we also use prepositions (often 'up') to denote the idea of finishing an action: "Please eat up your lunch"; "chop up those onions"; "carry out a task"...

The use of these prepositions in English has a colloquial ring. Is there some element of linguistic class distinction here too?

Would an Upper Class person say "I'll ring you up", rather than "I'll telephone you"? Do Upper Class people where possible use a single word correctly to express an idea rather than these prepositional verb-phrases?

Thus "Finish your lunch", "chop the onions" and "complete a task". 

Or is it all just a matter of ultra-correct and/or old-fashioned usage which (probably) is dying out?  

Poland claims to have the EU's longest 'external' border.

Hmm. 

Our coastline is an external EU border. It is over 12,000km long, far longer than Poland's EU 'external' eastern borders with Russia/Belarus/Ukraine and its maritime border combined.

But (with so many islands) Greece's coastline borders are over 13,000km, and on that basis presumably are the EU's largest. Poland has the longest land border with non-EU countries.

Any other bids?

Ann Althouse wonders if it is really so bad for Whites to love Obama for the 'wrong reasons'.

On the other hand, here are some White people who are really loved by Blacks. And it rocks!

Once upon a time when a product required plastic safety glasses the instructions said so, and one used one's intelligence to put them on one's head: lenses to the front of one's face, and the curvy bit in the middle astride one's nose for extra comfort.

No longer.

Now we get from the Kawasaki Corporation detailed instructions on how to deploy them, in delightful if erratic 1930s' English:

Thus:

You must peruse this instruction before use and keep it in strict custody during the using period ...

When you wear safety glasses, you must fully unfold the temples and wear glasses with both hands so that the glasses will weigh equally for nose and ears and stay comfortable ... 

When lenses get dirty, you must not wipe them with dirty gloves, towels or clothes ...

You must not put this glass in a naked condition into the pocket of working wear ...

Indeed. The very idea.

I am minded to set up a website so that anyone on the planet wanting to translate something into English (above all instructions and menus - in Warsaw the other day I was offered Tigerish Shrimps) can pay a modest fee to get the job done properly.

Investors welcome.

An example of utterly wonderful service.

My trusted old Leatherman supertool knife which I bought well over a decade ago somehow got itself 'blocked' and would not open. These Leathermen are the best knives and utility tools around, by the way.

So I looked on the Internet and found that under my 25-year warranty I could send the tool to Whitby & Co here in the UK for repair, no questions asked.

The tool was duly sent off late last week. And this morning a complimentary brand new monster Leatherman Core in leather sheath has just appeared. No charge!

Does service get sharper than that?

Rian Malan's book My Traitor's Heart about South Africa is a towering classic.

It describes in a raw way which much rattled 'liberal' opinion at the time just how African and 'other' most of South Africa in fact is, and just how unimaginably and painfully far 'whites' have to go to be accepted there.

I met Rian while I was based in Pretoria soon after his book came out. I also visited Creina Alcock, a South African of European descent who had renounced white South Africa and ended up living in a small hut in deepest Msinga in Zululand, as described in his book. An astounding real-life story.

Anyway, Rian is still in business. This wonderful piece describes how the two Alcock boys and their amazing fluency in Zulu are carving out a lively and successful role for themselves in the hurly-burly and very African New South Africa.

Read it to the end:

For GG, just visiting the supermarket can turn into an extraordinary experience.

Picture this: you're in a shopping mall in northern Jo'burg. African ladies man a line of tills. They're chatting in Zulu. A young white man reaches the head of the queue, laden with groceries. One of the ladies says, in Zulu, 'Look at the hair on this one's arms. It's a baboon, I tell you.' Her friends titter. The white man says nothing. He's writing a cheque. He rips it out, hands it over. He says, 'Ever see a baboon write a cheque?'

The till lady freezes. She says, 'Oh God. Sorry, boss.' The white man laughs and says, 'Sengi suke kwi mfene ngaya kubasi?' - so I've gone from baboon to boss, eh? This is getting seriously weird; his skin is white, but the sounds emerging from his mouth are African. The till lady shrieks, claps a hand over her mouth, runs and hides behind a pillar.

By now, the rest of the till ladies are convulsed with merriment, and the entire supermarket is paralysed. A supervisor appears, apologising profusely. GG says, 'I think it's funny.' The guilty till lady is coaxed back to her post and finishes the transaction amid gales of laughter and ribald African banter. GG gathers his groceries and waves goodbye.

As he leaves, the entire staff give him a standing ovation.

I once had a go flying a British Army Chinook helicopter, near Dubrovnik.

This is a serious machine. It weighs some 32,000 pounds without a load. Yet its basic controls are disconcertingly simple. One small tweak on a lever and it jumps off the ground into the air.

Pilots who know what they are doing with these stunning aircraft can do remarkable feats of deft manoeuvring.

Such as ... this. Wonderful.

Thus, in capitalist society, we have a democracy that is curtailed, poor, false; a democracy only for the rich, for the minority. The dictatorship of the proletariat, the period of transition to Communism, will, for the first time, produce democracy for the people, for the majority, side by side with the necessary suppression of the minority - the exploiters.

Marx was right. How vile is Capitalism. Allowing an elite to get rich, then to consolidate their privileged position.

No, that's Socialism.

Ooops.

If you get something wrong these days, it can get pointed out out quite fast.

But damage has still been done. And it is creepy how such high-profile matters are often corrected without saying that this correction has happened and why. Are we BBC licence-payers not entitled to rather More?

Here I am at my desk, pecking away at the keyboard, hopping from website to website, wondering what to look at next.

Millions of people round the world are doing the same. Yet how many of them are wondering what makes all this actually work? How does it happen that one types a phrase into Google and within less than a second hundreds of thousands of possible references appear on one's screen?

Here is the answer, a wonderful analysis of the systems running the Internet - and the fascinating issues of how it is all powered.

Read and be amazed.

If you have not read it yet, rush out and buy A Man in Full by Tom Wolfe.

A big novel in all senses of the word, weighing in at 742 pages in my edition. It is crafted with sizzling style. Try this for syllepsis:

"...long legs glistening with youth, lubricity and panty hose..."

The subject of the book is Charlie Croker, a bull-like Atlanta property developer. Larger than life, but sinking into financial trouble. He is summoned to a meeting with his bankers who tell him to start selling his assets to pay his massive debts. The scene features a clash of towering obnoxious egos.

At one point the ruthless banker asks Croker to leave the room as he and his colleagues need to cactus.

Croker can't follow, and asks several times whether he really heard the word cactus. The banker assures him that he did say cactus, and asks again that Croker step outside.

"Are you trying to say caucus?" Croker was all but snarling.

"No, cactus" said the Artiste with a merry smile. "This time we want all the pricks on the outside." 

Magnificent.

Sir Arthur C Clarke has died.

I grew up on his short stories. One sticks in my memory nearly 50 years later.

It shows how slow computers were in those days: a job which took four days could now be done by the chip in a singing birthday card almost instantly. Which is why we are moving along nicely towards creating Hal, or something like him?

This not so much short as tiny story finishes with one of the most magnificent and moving lines in science fiction:

Overhead, without any fuss, the stars were going out.

When I set up this site I naively thought that some people with an interest in international affairs would stumble over it and that a few of them might like to submit fair-minded comments, so a bit of grown-up dialogue on different policy issues might take place for general edification.

One or two sensible and interesting comments have been registered, and my thanks to those who have sent in their views. But by far the largest number of 'comments' are dreary spam messages of some sort aimed at selling chemicals of different shapes and sizes.

Who are the people out there who invent these tedious programmes which scour the web for new entries on Blogs such as this and then automatically deface them?

A question to which there is no ready answer, it seems. I may have to end the misery for us all and delete the Comment facility, so that if anyone is minded to write to me they can send an email and Gmail can weed out all the rubbish.

Pity, but there it is. 

The idea in my preceding post that the worse fate that can befall us is not erosion of our freedoms, but an erosion of the very idea of freedom reminded me of this:

The biggest problem is not that TV shows' plots are too complicated, but that shows have any plots at all.

As good now as it was then.

More hitherto uncollated rock 'n' roll echoes from the arcane world of diplomacy.

By which I mean some sort of reference to actual diplomatic practice, not a passing word such as in Cheap Trick's "I Love you Honey but I Hate your Friends":

That limp wristed two-fisted diplomat
Better draw a map, to see where he's at

Or Elvis Costello's "Green Shirt":

Never said I was a stool pigeon
I never said I was a diplomat
Everybody is under suspicion
But you don't want to hear about that

Or even "Blinded by the Light" by Manfred Mann's Earth Band:

Madman drummers bummers indians in the summer with a teenage diplomat,
In the dumps with the mumps as the adolescent pumps his way in to his
hat.

Try instead the rarified atmosphere of high-level international relations as in Frank Zappa's "Rhymin' Man":

A few years later, legend says,
Rhymin' man made a run for Prez
Farrakhan made him a clown,
Over there near Hymie-Town
Said he was a diplomat --
Hobbin' an-a-knobbin' with Arafat
Castro was simpatico,
But the U.S. voters, they said: "No!"

And Michelle Shocked's impressive reference to the theory and practice of diplomatic immunity:

Oh Streetcorner Ambassador
It seems so clear to me
The more you are ignored
It's called diplomatic immunity

Not to forget immigration policy - George Harrison's magnificent "Awaiting on You All":

You don't need no passport
And you don't need no visas
You don't need to designate or to emigrate
Before you can see Jesus

More to follow.

It's always nice to know what's really going on.

Hillary makes a strong come-back, winning the Democratic nomination contests in Texas and Ohio.

Can she now push to vistory and win the nomination? And then become President?

Will she and Gordon Brown then be assassinated? On the day another tsunami hits Asia?

Don't bet on it.

Or maybe you should.

I first mentioned it here.

And now it's back.

The best, and more importantly only, way to stop burning off carbon to power the planet is to find something else which works. More technology. Preferably quickly.