Rome under Sulla was like a bus, with half the passengers trying to drive, and the rest trying to collect the fare.

- F E Adcock

do not speak of these things again.

Takashi Shimura (志村 喬) in Ikiru (生きる)

do not do that shower a favour again.

it is a sign of weakness.

they all despise us, anyway.

pink bedding plants.

Rüdiger Vogler and Hanns Zischler in Im Lauf der Zeit

looks like rain. miserable.

Bette Davis in The Letter

try not to cry.

Bruno Ganz in Der Amerikanische Freund

drink some water.

you know when you see an airplane sometimes - i don't mean any old airplane, i mean, you know, a passenger jet airliner - anyway, you see one, in the air, clearly having recently taken off from the angle it is curling up into the sky at.

well i don't mean now for any environmental reasons, i don't mean unease because you are - and you would be quite correct, good on you - concerned regarding the impact on the planet that this passenger jet airliner in your field of vision will have (if you have the ability of sight, to see is to have sight, by one reckoning, a common reckoning, and certainly correct), but for other reasons, well, say you see one, and you are near a fairly busy airport, so a minute or so later you might see another one, totally by accident, you just happen to look up at the right spot, you're not looking for them deliberately.

anyway, that happens sometimes, and sometimes it sends you under.

-

a link to an article at the Guardian website by Paul Collier dated Friday 3 April 2009, headed 'Beyond the begging bowl' and sub-headed 'Haiti need not be a failing state. Its problems are fixable if only the world community co-ordinates'

the almost flip manner, the cursory air, in which this blog describes crimes, violence, war, mangled body parts, tragedy, crimes, monstrous crimes, crimes at the behest of clean-shaved men in suits, or viciousness perpetrated at the behest of bearded men, bodies asunder, any rent, hellish crimes, all this blood, tragedies and errors, vile hell, the almost flip manner, the cursory air, must cease, or be modified.

When you see a swordsman, draw your sword. Do not recite poetry to one who is not a poet.

Chán proverb.

there was a letter to The Guardian a few weeks ago (here), from Marc Glendening, the campaign director at a body called ICCwatch.
the letter concerned the highly imperfect arrest warrant the International Criminal Court had issued for Sudanese president Omar al-Bashir, a warrant which certainly deserves criticism (though not on the grounds Glendening chose to pitch his tent).

ICCwatch state - on their website -

"ICCwatch exists to monitor and provide a critique of the International Criminal Court and the broader movement towards transnational governance.

The experience of the International Criminal Tribunal for Yugoslavia (ICTY), together with its Rwandan counterpart (ICTR), have left many real advocates of human rights, democracy and international peace extremely anxious concerning the activities of
the ICC."

the letter is of a piece with ICCwatch's raison d'être: fair play to them.

but contrast their approach with that of leading rights agency Human Rights Watch, who note - whilst acknowledging the many mistakes of the ICC to date, in a piece from last summer regarding the court's first five years - that "Since then, the ICC has made significant progress."

Glendening's letter (after some initial Westphalian guff that - completely inexcusably - totally neglects fundamental debates about the responsibility to protect) finishes with what is obviously supposed to be a stirring flourish, an at-first-glance-reasonable point regarding Robin Cook famously saying the court was not created to put powerful Anglo-American leaders in the dock.
(of course, given the UK is party to the court, it is possible a Prime Minister might one day be in the dock. pigs might fly, of course, but that is down to the fact there are many more worse leaderships - sadly - in the world than the British PM.)

there are important debates to be had about in particular the USA and international justice (they are not members of the ICC, for starters, and recall the disgraceful American carrying on after the ICJ's Nicaragua case, weakening the ICJ with their appalling antics), but to drag up a fairly useless aside about two other countries (and the USA is not party to the ICC, let's not forget; it should be, but it isn't at the moment) when the subject under discussion should be the Sudanese regime is disingenuous to say the least; does a discussion about Sudanese crimes not merit exclusivity?
(at this point Glendening should be congratulated for noting some of the other countries - including those paragons of virtue Russia and China - that, unfortunately, do not agree with the ICC.)

would a (hypothetical) indictment for the Chadian leadership on human rights abuse grounds need to be met with an ICCwatch letter to The Guardian about (the undoubted sins of) Françafrique?
a letter on the same subject, in the same link, from the Amnesty UK director, is entirely different in character, and all the better for it.

the truth of Glendening's project is laid bare in a shameful sentence in the middle of his letter: "It is revealing that the ICC does not list among its elastically drafted list of offences the supreme international crime of waging aggressive war."

no.

no, no, no.

this will not do.

the supreme (international) crime is, of course, genocide.

to state otherwise is a sin of omission, and a sin that needs to be loudly exposed and constantly rubbished for the muddle-headed cobblers it is.

(tbc, it should be added one can see what Glendening is getting at with his usage of "international" above - one state doing violence to another is deeply offensive to the order of state sovereignty, to say nothing more here - but the Westphalian underpinning of ICCwatch means that, for all sorts of implications that anybody sane should be able to work out for themselves, my characterisation stands as fair comment.)

Brian Barder helps to put a boot - i think deserved - in toward Dambisa Moyo.

(she has recently been in an interesting Standpoint piece with Richard Dowden.)

and more so

'ISAF Contributing Nations'

Kirsty Wark on BBC2's Newsnight - with reference to this awful law-in-waiting (a moral crime, because appalling outrage, in-waiting) - asking, if you scrape to the bones of her phrasing, does Afghanistan deserve the support (and, so, anyone living in Afghanistan) of other countries, and, so, thus unpicked, Kirsty Wark actually asking do the error-ridden efforts of ISAF and so on - with their often tragic blunders, but also fine successes worth lauding, and the names of each and every fallen human needing appropriate commemoration - need to be taken away because of this despicable law-in-waiting, Kirsty Wark - either devil's advocate or believing what she says - appearing to articulate that parts of Afghanistan be handed over, as it were, to some of the most extreme and barbarously reactionary forces on the planet because Kirsty Wark - yes, in common with anyone with a heart that functions correctly - is rightly disgusted with an ethical crime-in-waiting that is bad law.

(whilst acknowledging that food and pervasive, toxic corruption are fundamental issues.)

Joshua Foust.

"The crime here is not that a law is being passed to normalize a routine practice; it is that this was a routine practice and we chose not to care about it in the first place."

here in full.

about this time last year:

"Since the Taliban era, there are 8,000 more schools and 140,000 more teachers, he added.

About 70 percent of the girls and 97 percent of the boys in RC-East now have access to a state-sponsored education, as well as access to basic healthcare that has increased to nearly 80 percent, resulting in a 25 percent reduction in infant mortality, adding up to about 90,000 lives, Maj. Gen. Rodriguez said."

(source.)

presenter Seyi Rhodes went to Sierra Leone for series 2009 episode 4 of Unreported World to investigate the psychological after-effects of the war on some people.

Rhodes meets Patrick, who has memory problems.

the end credits rolled as the camera focused on a young person who had their head buried between their legs.
they were sat among some rocks.

jogging.

go jogging.

for this you need running shoes, trainers.

jogging.

going jogging.

buy some trainers.

go jogging.

The container carrying around 110 people, believed to be migrants, was found about 15 miles south of Quetta..."The death toll is 46," said a police official, Ghulam Dastagir.
:...
Survivor Nizar Ahmed, 15, told AFP from hospital that he came from...Paktia..."We have all come from Afghanistan and we were going to Iran," he said, without being able to explain why they were bound for the Islamic republic or when they left home.

-

I sit in the middle of them. Kune, to my right, speaks French. He speaks loudly and is keen on reporting his story. To my left, Bilal is whispering in English. He is shy and scared. When he finds out I am Italian, his face brightens and he starts naming the Italian soccer players he knows.

When Kune understands what Bilal is saying, he starts shaking his head and says: "les enfants…avec tous les problems il a, il pense au foot…"

systemic

fuck this for a laugh

How can I be sure that none of your jewelry contains conflict diamonds?

Do I know where the diamonds you sell come from?

Can I see a copy of your company's policy on conflict diamonds?

Can you show me a written guarantee from your diamond suppliers stating that your diamonds are conflict-free?

structural

the new

is

YOU ARE ALL FUCKERS

and to take this advice and learn to live with

the drinking of milk

DON'T be a crack addict

'for them to accuse is unthinkable'

get yer scrips

Ad Reinhardt - - > Bridget Riley

YOU KNOW, DON'T YOU, WE BELONG TO SOME FAMILY OF ARTISTS, SAME ONE, NOT CHINESE OR INDIAN OR JAPANESE OR ITALIAN, MAYBE MUSLIM, THAT NON-FIGURATIVE ARAB AND PERSIAN CROWD.

also to be clear

There! I have reverted to the Eliot lecture metaphor, but it seems peculiarly appropriate in this situation. Arendt jumps up and down on it at the safer edges of the pond. Kertész treads light where it is thinnest.

My Cousin went to a Walter Pater dinner party and all I got was this lousy 'Naomi Wolf LOLZ CATS' tee-shirt

When, as LS mentions, Virginia Woolf suggests in 1938 that it doesn't matter whether women support liberal democracy or fascism because middle class women like her are having such a dreadful time, I feel a rising hatred for her. Privileged and racist, I think. But then I reason she didn't know what was happening, how could she have known?

The fact is, I think the camps are now treated as an old horror story, something of a bore. Let us move on to other matters. By all means let us move on to other matters.

Arendt and Refugees.

In dealing a product of fine art we must become conscious that it is art rather than nature

- Kant

some highlights from the Mai '68 edition of Prospect (somedisco antecede)

Žižek
From the 1970s onwards, a new figure of the “spirit of capitalism” emerged: capitalism abandoned the hierarchical Fordist structure of the production process and developed a network-based form of organisation founded on employee initiative and autonomy in the workplace. Instead of the hierarchical chain of command, we get networks with a multitude of participants, organising work in the form of teams or projects, intent on customer satisfaction. In this way, capitalism is transformed into an egalitarian project

Astrid Proll (Baader-Meinhof)
We lived a kind of armed existentialism.

Rudi Bogni
1968 in Italy was more about hormonal growth than about politics. It brought us the Red Brigades, but not democratic maturity. I mistrusted from the outset a movement based on megaphones and one-liners.

P.J. O'Rourke
Mind-altering drugs were the best part of the 1960s.

"Defense officials said the Army troops inflicted heavy damages on the rebels as they put up resistance, adding that 19 bodies of LTTE fighters were found in subsequent search operations."

the poster who has put this up calls it One of the Greatest Scenes of The Sopranos.

damn right.

an instrumental of Xzibit's Paparazzi is the tune, and i must admit i was flashing on this when i saw Il Divo yesterday, which makes very effective usage of Fauré's Pavane at one stage

Bashar al-Assad.








































Il potere logora chi non ce l'ha.

- Giulio Andreotti

After supper she got out her book and learned me about Moses and the Bulrushers; and I was in a sweat to find out all about him; but by-and-by she let it out that Moses had been dead a considerable long time; so then I didn't care no more about him; because I don't take no stock in dead people.

happily, the following post at normblog mentions Richard Rorty, which immediately reminded me of Simon's post once on same and Manc outfit Raw-T.

unfortunately, the meat of the post is devoted to yet more parochial rubbish from another Simon, that man Jenkins.

this is President Obiang of Equatorial Guinea.

he is very good at his job.

his job is the projection and maintenance of power.

quivering with rage as one links to this, but over at the Swots Terry Glavin has found a bunch of extravagantly idiotic Fox News talking heads insulting the Canadian military, which just goes to show any amount of political abuse in the direction of Rupert Murdoch is entirely justified.

"Master Corporal Scott Francis Vernelli, 28, Corporal Tyler Crooks, 24, and an Afghan interpreter were killed and five others were injured as they walked through the dusty terrain. All of the Canadians were members of the same November Company.

The second blast occurred in the Shah Wali Kot district north of the city. Trooper Jack Bouthillier, 20, and Trooper Corey Joseph Hayes, 22, were killed when their vehicle struck an improvised explosive device. They were members of the Royal Canadian Dragoons."

odious garbage here.

truly superb Johann Hari article on Jade Goody

'Words of straightforward snobbish abuse – “chav” and “pikey” – were becoming acceptable again.'

A failed asylum-seeker who returned to Darfur under a government repatriation scheme has been murdered by Sudanese security officers after they followed him home from the airport in Khartoum, The Independent has learnt.

Adam Osman Mohammed, 32, was gunned down in his home in front of his wife and four-year-old son just days after arriving in his village in south Darfur.

The case is to be used by asylum campaigners to counter Home Office attempts to lift the ban on the removal and deportation to Sudan of failed asylum-seekers. Next month, government lawyers are expected to go to court to argue that it is safe to return as many as 3,000 people to Khartoum.

But lawyers for the campaigners will tell the Asylum and Immigration Tribunal that people who are returned to Sudan face imprisonment, torture and death. Mr Mohammed, a non-Arab Darfuri, came to Britain in 2005 seeking sanctuary from persecution in Sudan, where he said his life was in danger. The village where he was a farmer had been raided twice by the Janjaweed, the ethnic Arab militia, forcing him and his wife and child to flee their home.

His family in Britain told The Independent that Mr Mohammed witnessed many villagers being killed and became separated from his wife during a second attack on the village a few weeks later. He escaped to Chad before making his way to the UK in 2005.

But last year his appeal for asylum was finally turned down and he was told that he faced deportation. In August last year he was flown to Khartoum under the Home Office's assisted voluntary return programme, in which refugees are paid to go back to their country of origin. He stayed in Khartoum for a few months and then, when he believed it was safe, he travelled to Darfur to be reunited with his family.

Mohamed Elzaki Obubeker, Mr Mohammed's cousin and chairman of the Darfur Union in the UK, said: "The government security forces had followed him to another village, Calgoo, where his wife and child had sought help. They came to the village to find him and then targeted him. They shot him in front of his wife and son."

here in full.

a rare Australian bird

the actresses Alicia Witt (l) and Kelly Reilly (r)

"Moyles, for example, whose endless bloke-down-the-pub patter (and reluctance to play any actual music) normally irritates me no end, came across as genuinely funny and warmhearted, while Cheryl Cole continued her transition in the public's imagination from not-very-talented and quick-tempered reality show winner to beautiful-but-kindly big sister who can remain radiant at 15,000 feet. And who would have thought that 'our very own, the gorgeous Alesha Dixon' (copyright Brucie, 2008) had such a filthy cackle of a laugh?
...
At times, I wondered what had happened to the determination of those alternative comedians who set up Comic Relief, to do things differently: to raise money in a way that didn't objectify the recipients and instead saw them as active participants in achieving social justice."

Martin In The Margins on Comic Relief.

'Elders of Zion to Retire'

After a humiliating year left most of its financial holdings, as well as the entire civilized world, on the verge of collapse, the organization has re-defined its mission in terms of bridge games and making it to restaurants for the Early Bird Special.

here.

Hoare on Tudjman.

Magas on Tudjman.

If you look to the language in the above paragraph, you can see this same confusion continued and even extended, in that "insurgents" are described as more "sophisticated" because they get more vicious as the American presence becomes less noticeable. Wait: Wasn't the "insurgency" supposed to be a protest against occupation?

Hitchens with a point.

Mick Hartley: You Can't Just Hide a Million People

caught some of Party Animals again - been getting re-shown on the BBC, two years after they originally broadcast it - it's an 8 part drama serial focusing on a group of Labour and Tory researchers and prospective politicians, and two senior parliamentarians in Westminster.

(the cast includes Patrick Baladi as a senior Tory, Matt Smith as a Labour office assistant, and Shelley Conn as an ambitious young Tory.)

the end of the last episode had Stopfordian actor Andrew Buchan (he plays Smith's elder brother, he is a lobbyist) and the Geordie actress Andrea Riseborough (she is Smith's character's colleague, a Labour minister's intern; incidentally Riseborough is good in The Devil's Whore, Channel 4's atmospheric English Civil War drama) falling into bed together after doing coke in a pub bog, and there's a wonderful rather sexy moment as he's pumping away when she greedily sucks his thumb, telling him what they're doing is far better than their original idea for a nightcap (which was to go clubbing).

anyway Buchan meets his deceased father's mate, a seemingly principled (presumably Old, or Old-ish) Labour MP - we can reasonably infer this as the bloke is given a northern accent - in a pub and they are drinking pints (in fact Buchan drinks quite a lot of beer, both bottled and pint glasses) and have plates of what look like chips in front of them as they chew the fat.
later the MP tells Buchan his father would be ashamed that his son works as a lobbyist ("he would hang his head").
it's very realistic, i think, about evoking that particular element of that rather closed world of particular Westminster-area pubs where - among other denizens - bright young things drink beer that will surely one day enhance their waistline, and garble out fractured ideas at one another.

there's a section where Buchan's new client - a genuinely chilling Russian oligarch on the lam from Moscow - makes an implied threat to Buchan about something, and the lengths to which Buchan's character goes to watch his back are inventive, desperate, and all the while sound tracked by ale.

Buchan was in the ITV drama The Fixer (where he plays, er, a fixer) and from what i saw of that - less than a full episode, granted - he was convincing in it, and the show was decent.

"shot for going to work"

read this.

glad to see it provides a take-down of some disgracefully piss-poor Guardian journalism.

Osler on Scargill

Oliver Kamm re-iterates a very good, basic point in his final paragraph here

Karadzic not entering a plea is entirely expected.

One can not play games with entire regions and even with the world as a whole. I am abiding.

only when it involves the deliberate policy of massacring several thousand men and boys because you don't like them, eh Radovan.

open letter from Shalom Lappin to the Vice Chancellor of York University

"The BBC's Umaru Fofana at the court in Freetown said that as the verdicts were delivered, Sesay looked very serious and Kallon, clad in a smart light green suit, could have been mistaken for one of the lawyers, while Gbao buried his face in his hands and looked very dejected."

here.

the superb CAFÉ TURCO recently celebrated its first birthday, and yesterday there were these lovely pictures of cuties

Jim D has embedded an extraordinary 6 minute plus Youtube recorded on a phone at 5:30 am yesterday, Shift C, "yellow", from the BMW Mini Plant at Cowley.

his post has the apposite title of Agency workers treated like shit by BMW Oxford.

Workfare: Freud Flies Fast.

ModernityBlog has rounded up a couple of invaluable Guardian/Observer reports from northeastern Sri Lanka here.

the details are horrific.

i have been linking to normblog a lot of late but here's another one. whenever he mentions his mate Ian Holliday writing something, i always pay attention as Holliday talks sense.

it's going on about the Rohingya boat people, and the entire post is worth reading in full, not least because the final line from Geras himself is masterly in terms of controlled anger making a point far more impressively than any amount of swearing rants from pie-eyed pub tub-thumpers such as myself.

the latest from Hitchens (click here to visit) at Slate is about Zimbabwe - he is nothing if not a reactive writer in the best sense - and there's some reaching going on, but what i wanted to do is quote the final paragraph in full, as he makes a connection that i think one rarely sees from big name writers and journalists in the every day press.

I once spent some time with Sebastiao Salgado, the UNICEF special envoy for the eradication of polio. By 2001, when we visited Calcutta and other parts of Bengal, this horrible and preventable illness was well on its way to joining smallpox as a thing of the past. But if only a few pockets resist inoculation, the malady, which is almost insanely infectious, comes roaring back across wide swaths of neighboring territory. And in certain militant Muslim areas, where it is believed that the inoculation is a plot to make people sterile, the doctors and nurses of the campaign have been shot as imperialist intruders. As a result, polio is spreading again. Once more, it seems to me that this could qualify the Federally Administered Tribal Areas of Pakistan as having, to that extent, become an international responsibility rather than just the concern of Pakistan alone. The fact that the Taliban and al-Qaida spread from the same source may not be entirely coincidental, which is why I offer the thought that human rights and epidemiology may be natural partners [my emphasis] —and that Zimbabwe could make an excellent laboratory in which to test the proposition that the two kinds of health are related.

Hitchens is obviously correct and should be thanked for pointing out the fundamental link between epidemiology and the study of rights.

The analysis of famine as a social experience rather than a technical malfunction is the foundation of the case for politicizing famine.
- Alex de Waal, in the 2004 preface to that revised Famine that kills of his.

also in the preface, he references Nutrition matters: People, food and famine (Helen Young and Susanne Jaspars, 1995).

again, this is another paragraph worth quoting in full.

Famine that kills became perhaps best known for its strong claims about the epidemiology of excess mortality in famine. The finding that infectious diseases were the principal cause of famine mortality was nothing new, and in retrospect it is astonishing that such an elementary fact of disaster epidemiology should have caused such a stir. There is no doubt that the position that I argued is too strong. The striking and unexpected finding that socio-economic indicators had almost no correlation with mortality levels led me to search for an alternative explanation, which I duly found in the health crisis model. This residual hypothesis was then forwarded, perhaps not cautiously enough. There are so many intermediate variables between income and food access and the nutritional status of children that the inference that nutritional factors played almost no role cannot be sustained by the data. As Helen Young and Susanne Jaspars subsequently pointed out, nutrition matters (1995). For good measure, they derived their data from Darfur. I stand corrected. But my chief point, that food consumption failures cannot account for famine mortality in the absence of analysis of disease, is correct. And the practical recommendation that measles immunization, malaria control and clean water supplies are at least as important as emergency food relief, still stands.

the Tigers have now denied responsibility for the attack attributed to them on Monday, through TamilNet.

so after the alleged suicide bomb blast on Monday near Vishwamadu that was initially reported to have killed 28 people (though DefenceWire quoted an updated toll of 32 people by Monday night), Reuters is today reporting that Sri Lanka's Tamil Tigers on Wednesday denied gunning down civilians streaming out of the country's war zone, and the Red Cross said 16 patients had been killed in shelling.
(also, that Reuters article says 29 people were killed in the Monday attack.)

note, then, that the LTTE - through TamilNet - deny the death by shooting of 19 civilians.
the TamilNet response to Monday's alleged bomb blast was however, perhaps, not entirely believable.

as - it looks likely - the LTTE is staring a conventional military defeat in the face (the BBC is including that map in all its reports: there's a Red Cross spokesperson clip embedded there - nice to hear a union mentioned!), the grim assessment being made all over is that insurgency tactics (in the contemporary sense of that ugly word) are sure to increase.

from the view of the Tigers, who must have suffered many casualties in recent months, their storied martyrdom culture must be looking most attractive for a brush-off from the perspective of the leadership.

added to this a rigid, abusive govt. currently rejecting ceasefire calls ('must get the job done'), the immediate outlook seems as bad as it's been for a long time, in terms of the impact of this fighting on the people, the cruelty of the miserable, massive displacements, the shutting down of freedoms and active persecution from the govt. and the prospects for an upturn in those wicked martyr operations.

i was watching Masterchef earlier (one of my favourite telly) and there was a Metropolitan Police London Transport cop in one of the heats and he was a nervous guy when cooking, and he admitted he was getting a bit stressed.
the look on his face when he didn't make the cut, it really was heart-breaking, i felt so sorry for him.

(i mean, you always feel sorry for the people that don't make the cut i am sure, but this chap just looked so pained, i felt so sorry for him.)

some great food in tonight's show, as ever.

Q: Why is there so much ignorance and hatred in the world?

A: Because of the Jews.

nicked from swears from the Dissensus jokes thread

this all reminds me of an excellent post from Norm Geras a few years ago which he entitled Shoah business, taking aim at the stupid, monumentally wrong and pernicious idea that some fools like to peddle about the oppressive weight of that tedious 'Holocaust industry'.

you should really read it all by clicking here, but the concluding paragraph is entirely correct.

Yes, a people who lost a third of their number, and two-thirds of their number within Europe, have a certain understandable (remember that word?) preoccupation with the experience, and many minds, not all of them Jewish, have found in the experience matter meriting close study as well as other types of reflection. Much has been produced, much learned, a certain amount obfuscated; good work has stood alongside bad and indifferent work. That's all. 'Holocaust industry' is base mockery of a vast human tragedy and the response to it. It's worthy of Norman Finkelstein, and unworthy of Michael Burleigh.

the following really grabbed me from the start of that piece.

Among these is a Lefebvrist "bishop" named Richard Williamson, who doubts his own version of the facts of the Nazi Holocaust and who furthermore suspects the Bush administration of having orchestrated the events of September 11, 2001, in order to afford itself a pretext for war.

Richard Williamson, twice over.

politically speaking, i wish you extreme ill.

As with Cardinal Bernard Law, the enabler of child-molestation, who is now sheltered by Rome and who was able to vote in the election of Ratzinger as pope, so with those who slander the Jews with innuendo and worse, and who spread the vile libels that blame the democratic United States for the theocratic terrorist attacks upon it. One might think a responsible church would be indignantly arraigning and expelling such people rather than piously seeking reconciliation with them. Apparently, one would be wrong.

Hitchens.

in short, the Pope doesn't seem to have too much of an issue with homophobes and anti-semites.

Erwin James on a John Martyn prison gig.

(via the fabulous Shuggy.)

Dissent re. John Updike, here.

good words about the changing role of the public writer, criticism, and a nice finish about Rabbit, Everyman.

Of the Farm: like the sound of this "peerless novella"

the stuff about comfortable married sex reminded me of Ian McEwan who does a very fine job of evoking this, briefly, in Saturday.

Honesty is the best policy.

The Sri Lankan government has told civilians to leave an area where it is fighting Tamil Tiger rebels, saying it cannot guarantee their safety.

The shells, which fell into the pediatrics and women's wards other than a kitchen and a chapel, killed nine patients and wounded 20, Red Cross spokeswoman Sarasi Wijeratne said.

so, read up again in Waterland when Graham Swift is going on about eels and then find out something about the three species of sand eel to be found in Swedish territory and eels yeah.

eels yes eels.

that is one idea, anyway.

granted not a particularly good one.

also: this is deeply, deeply wrong.

(via.)

Amstell.

a gem.

i really liked Graeme quoting Willa Cather here.

i'm going to put the excerpt in full up.

This was an important market day, and Auclair went down to the hill early. The black frosts might set in at any time now, and today he intended to lay in his winter supply of carrots, pumpkins, potatoes, turnips, beet-root, leeks, garlic, even salads. On many of the wagons there were boxes full of earth, with rooted lettuce plants growing in them. These the townspeople put away in their cellars, and by tending them carefully and covering them at night they kept green salad growing until Christmas or after. Auclair's neighbor, Pigeon the baker, had a very warm cellar, and he grew little carrots and spinach down there long after winter had set in. The great vaulted cellars of the Jesuits and the Récollet friars looked like kitchen gardens when the world above was frozen stark. Careless people got through the winter on smoked eels and frozen fish, but if one were willing to take enough trouble, one could live very well, even in Quebec.

incidentally, the temperature in Sept-Îles at time of posting (11:15 pm British) is about minus 20.8 degrees celsius

+

loving Karnage on 1Xtra right about now, and the rest of them, there's a hell of a lot going on there

"We plan to open one restaurant in London before the end of 2009, find a group of farmers and ranchers who can supply us with the highest quality food and begin to find a group of top-performing managers who can help us establish a very special Chipotle brand in Europe," said Steve Ells, Chipotle founder and CEO, in a statement.

here.

two of the commentators from that Shiraz Socialist piece linked to here on Sunday past with good looking blogs are Natalia Antonova and The SmackDog Chronicles (Ver. 2.6)

as the SLA drive on (and on) the BBC's Alastair Lawson discusses a few options for Prabhakaran the man*

"I have been in the business of journalism a good long time. Indeed, 2009 will be The Sunday Leader's 15th year. Many things have changed in Sri Lanka during that time, and it does not need me to tell you that the greater part of that change has been for the worse."

Sunday Leader leader, by Lasantha Wickramatunga.

+

On 12 January, four Ethiopian soldiers died in a roadside explosion just outside the Somali capital along Mogadishu and Afgoi road, as they were heading back to Ethiopia.

“The explosion was so big that it lifted a big Ethiopian military truck off the ground and jolted the ground around the area where the explosion occurred and I can prove the death of 4 of the Ethiopian soldiers, and the injury of scores of others of which I cannot actually guess the exact figure” said an eyewitness.

writes the AFCEA's Nighwatch

---

* incidentally

here is a recap.

"At trial, witnesses accused him and his soldiers of horrific torture in the West African country. Among the techniques: electric shock, molten plastic, lit cigarettes, hot irons, bayonets and biting ants shoveled onto people's bodies. Prisoners were kept in water-filled pits covered by heavy iron gates and barbed wire."
writes the Herald's Jay Weaver

"Taylor is a U.S. citizen, (he was born while his father lived in the United States) and tortured hundreds of Liberians during as commander of the so-called "Demon Forces," a special security unit meant to protect his father, the President, from 1999 to 2003. The precedent is now set for more cases to follow.

Chuckie Taylor's trial is also important for Liberia. This is the first and only conviction in a war crimes trial for the war in Liberia; no tribunal has been setup in that country."
writes FP blog's Elizabeth Dickinson

Quentin Skinner in context

bloke from the Telegraph doesn't appear to be overly keen on pierogi, for some reason: his loss

the Telegraph is reporting that Chipotle is opening in the UK this year.

A confession: if there is one cuisine likely to bring me out on hunger strike, it is Mexican. The only rival on my yuck list? Tex-Mex. I'd rather eat Polish, or even 1970s British. But some like it hot, clearly: in the capital, a new Mexican, Chilango, has food lovers queuing around the block in Fleet Street, while the market feel of Wahaca near The Strand is fun and affordable. Chipotle, an American chain, is also due in Britain this year.

this is good news in terms of choice for Mexican street food/Tex-Mex lovers based in the UK.
(people who live in Mexico and the USA, and i know up in to parts of Canada, are clearly very lucky in this regard, and must bear in mind that context is all.)

aside from the new Fleet Street opening mentioned above, and Thomasina Miers opening her second branch of Wahaca (Thomasina is fairly committed, it must be said), there are a few Mexican places in London apparently of note.
(Time Out lists nine places here, of which the happily named Taqueria, Mestizo and the Thomasina gaffs have long intrigued me the most; i have never ate in any of them. it must be said that at least one of the places mentioned, Los Guaduales, is explicitly acknowledged as a Colombian eatery..)

as said the other day, in the UK* the best Mexican grub (and bear in mind, context is all) for my money is Cambridge's Mannamexico, followed by Belfast's Boojum.
the now-expanding Mancunian mini-chain Barburrito (for those who know the Manchester dining scene, i must admit what this person has to say here about El Macho made me laugh) has recently opened a third venue (their first outside Manchester), in central Liverpool, and they can be considered an honourable third.
i mention Barburrito as the owners were inspired by lunching at Mexican fast-food gaffs in the USA whilst travelling, and will have encountered many a Chipotle in Chicago when they researched (there used to be a Jonathan Schofield - Manchester-area local travel guide-type, historian and food writer - review of the first opening that IIRC made this specific claim about Chicago on the Manchester Evening News website, but as he is no longer with the MEN - AFAIK - i cannot find it).
i only mention Chicago because i love the place.
(for more on Schofield, see here.)

anyway, as someone once said to me, there are perhaps similarities between, say, the Chipotle experience, and the Barburrito experience.

as it's been a few years now since McDonald's ceased their relationship with Chipotle (see here), i think we can look forward to Chipotle coming across the pond without too many snide remarks accompanying them. (i don't mean to sound straw-mannish here, but as with Pret a Manger and McDonald's, i have myself encountered fairly frequent mention of this in person, and in my experience the fact of their relationship at the time was sometimes used as a stick with which to denigrate Chipotle in general, although this was far from the case all the time.)

(with respect to the great Bandini.)

---

*
bearing in mind my sole experience of Mexican food in London was a meal around Old Street once, and the only other experiences of Mexican stuff i've seen much of in Britain are a gaff in Edinburgh, that cheerful little burrito van that used to be on Birmingham's Broad Street, and, er, that's about it..

Happy Birthday Motown!

news from the four largest English cities

"Prayers have been said at a service to remember a sub-postmaster's son who was shot dead by armed robbers on Friday."

'Detectives have identified a man they are hunting over a double stabbing on Merseyside that left a man dead and his son seriously injured.'

A teenager is fighting for his life after being stabbed in south-west London.

A 29-year-old man is recovering in hospital after being shot in the stomach in south Manchester.

Now, maybe Cath and I read different newspapers but I certainly haven’t noticed supporters of Jacqui Smith’s recent proposals, or conservative feminists in general (by which I mean moralists who see puritan legislation as the solution to this issue) being howled down by IUSW or ECP supporters. It just is not true.

here.

"This paper analyses the backgrounds and consequences of the Hama massacre, an uprising of mainly Muslim rebels in Syria in 1982, which was brutally crashed down by Syrian government forces."

i've recently been introduced to the blog I kid you not (although author Edmund Standing has stopped posting, having moved on to pastures new).

he is excellent on the BNP.

BNP tries to reach kids, but reaches Nazis instead.

The History National Curriculum: Myth and Reality.

The 'Nazi' Question.

BNP: Police run by 'left-wing mafia'.

their greatest film alongside Barton Fink imo, FWIW

number 3 film

here is a scene from the single greatest film of 2008

It is obligatory to disregard laws conflicting with the immediate claims of life