Band of Five Brothers
Tee hee. Slate skewers Mitt Romney. How can people vote for this phoney? (Sorry about the irritating ad prefacing the spot.)
Alex Massie
Wednesday
Tuesday
Fred Thompson’s message to the world: your dead don’t count
Many years ago now, I had occasion to change trains at Pisa en route to Perugia and it was there, I think, that I first became aware of the Ugly American phenomenon. The station was pretty quiet as I recall, or rather it would have been had the air not been filled with the screeching
A Facebook Agony Uncle Emerges…
What’s the appropriate way to deal with a “Will you be my Facebook Friend?” request from someone you don’t know? How many damn friends should you have anyway? The estimable Reihan Salam tells you what you need to know about these and other social networking dilemmas..
Fat Bastard Actually Accurate Characterisation of the Modern Scot
Oh great. Who knows, perhaps this is even true. I blame Glaswegians. Obesity levels in Scotland are the second highest in the developed world behind the USA, new statistics have revealed. The figures were published as the Scottish Government announced plans to remove sweets and fizzy drinks from schools. Under new rules, the amount of
A local post for local people
Ezra Klein looks at lifestyle amenities of the sort that bright young white folks like to have in their city and observes that Portland and Seattle score better on this than Washington DC. So far so good. Then he adds: DC, by contrast, has a lot of white people working in it, but is actually
Calling a spade by its proper name
James Fallows is right: it’s Burma, not Myanmar. The generals can call their country whatever they like; we’re under no obligation to follow their lead. Equally, it’s Bombay not Mumbai, Madras not Chennai etc etc. Do you plan to visit Venezia or Munchen? Of course you don’t, so Venice and Munich it is.
Gordon Brown’s Best of British
Earlier this year I wrote a piece for TNR’s website suggesting that Gordon Brown’s Scottishness might become a problem for him. Well, with Labour riding high in the polls and talk of an autumn election running rife you might think that this was overblown nonsense. Maybe so. But don’t take my word for it, have
Monday
Nude Polish Women Party
Let’s hear it for the Polish Women’s Party: “We are beautiful, nude, proud. We are true and sincere, body and soul. This is not pornography, there is nothing to see in terms of sex, our faces are intelligent, concerned, proud. We do not have our mouths open nor our eyes closed… All that interests us
Columbia’s Persian problem
I would not have invited Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to speak at Columbia University today, but now that the invitation has been made it should go ahead. In general, however, I agree entirely with Daniel Larison: Manifestly, the man’s views are very often ridiculous, and he is a ranting demagogue, an Iranian Huey Long with less common
Way of the World: Off yer bike edition…
Yes, it’s from the doom-peddlers at The Daily Mail, but still… A police force has banned hundreds of its officers from riding bicycles for safety reasons. Greater Manchester Police has stopped 300 fully-fledged officers and PCSOs from patrolling on their mountain bikes. The patrols are popular with the public because they allow officers to chase
Ahmadinejad and Irving
Reasons why jailing David Irving for “Holocaust Denial” was a bad idea, cont.: It allows Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to say that clearly there must be something to this point of view if “researchers” can be imprisoned for pursuing research from a “different perspective”. And, of course, implicitly he’s arguing that despite all your fancy, high-falutin’ talk,
Department of Problem Solving
Ahmadinejad at Columbia: A) Question: why do you execute homosexuals? B) Ahmadinejad answers that, well, the US has capitol punishment too… C) The President then boasts of the efficiency of Iranian government policy: “We don’t have homosexuals in Iran like in your country”. UPDATE: CSPAN caller now: “Get some research on this so we can
Save our hyphens!
The OED is giving in to the Americans and the internet, abandoning the hyphen. Some 16,000 words in the new edition of the shorter OED have lost their hyphens. Examples of words that now look wrong: Formerly hyphenated words split in two: fig leaf, hobby horse, ice cream, pin money, pot belly, test tube, water
Gore’s Imperative…
Christopher Hitchens cranks up the Will Al Gore Run? motor for another outing: On Oct. 12, we shall hear again from Oslo, and I will be very surprised indeed if the peace prize is not awarded to Albert Gore Jr. (Don’t ask what a campaign against global warming has done for “peace”; that would be
Saturday
A September Surprise?
A snap election in Britain? Iain Dale sees the latest good poll for Gordon Brown and reports that the Tories think it might happen: I understand that CCHQ [Conservative Central office HQ] is on full election alert, with preparations for an announcement by Gordon Brown on Monday. Yes, you read that right. Monday.
Thursday
Journalism 101 | 20 September 2007
Paul Krugman complains that the scale of Democratic triumphs is deliberately under-played by the American media. Conspiracy! In fact, it’s quite strange how the magnitude of the Democratic victory has been downplayed. After the 1994 election, the cover of Time showed a charging elephant, and the headline read “GOP stampede.” Indeed, the GOP had won
VORP over arabists? Not so much. Or, more proof that games played and RBIs are junk stats.
Words just about fail me. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice on the latest Great Moment in Public Diplomacy: “Sports is a universal language… Everybody knows that if you can play baseball like Cal Ripken then you’re going to… have the world at your feet… So he’s going to go out and I’ll bet he’ll find
You’re so vain, I bet you think this world is about you…
I’ll have more to say on Rudy Giuliani’s trip to London in due course, but first this: Rudy Giuliani was on the trans-Atlantic campaign trail Wednesday, schmoozing with conservative idol Margaret Thatcher and bragging about his international credentials. “I’m probably one of the four or five best known Americans in the world,” If nothing else,
Wednesday
George W Bush as HRH Prince Philip?
Once upon a time this sort of stuff could be considered admirably human. Even mildly endearing. It’s a measure of how Mr Bush’s stock has fallen that these days it seems like the usual, if on this occasion trivial, blundering incompetence. From the Washington Post today: “I respect Prime Minister Badawi [of Malaysia], admire his
Bounders in clubland
I have been remiss, gentle reader, in failing to post another corker from The Daily Telegraph’s obituary pages. Lord Michael Pratt, who has died aged 61, will be remembered as one of the last Wodehouseian figures to inhabit London’s clubland and as a much travelled author who pined for the days of Empire; he will