A good life, a good country.

Today I travelled from a small North Yorkshire village to London and back for a meeting about a pet project.  It wasn’t a socialist-cheap trip, I was mildly irritated by what I had to pay, but it was at a level that irritated but didn’t dissuade.  The trains were all on time, I got wifi internet at my seat on three of my four trains.  Stop and think about that a sec.  Had I (or anyone else) had a heart attack on the train, I am sure that an ambulance would have picked me up from the very next station and taken me to a hopital where I would have had state of the art treatment, free.  I wasn’t mugged or blown up, I spent some time in the British Library, the food was there inn excess and tasty, the water was clean.  I don’t have any water or mosquito-borne diseases.

Britain: it’s good. And sometimes, we damn well need to say so.

Iain Dale:

big and liberal in defence of free speech. I may not agree with some of his politics, but he sets the welkin ringing with this one.

Chicken Yoghurt has the story (Russian gazillionaire tries to buy London football club, gets called on teh webs, goes sobbing to lawyers (diddumski!), they threaten hosting company which takes down offending blogger and causes a shitload of collateral.) Said oligarch should bugger off to a damp cave and grow a thicker skin, his lawyers should be ashamed of themselves and I hope their riches turn to dung and is forever stuck beneath their fingernails making their canapes smell strange.

Why John Kerry is not fit to be President:

go here and watch the video of an excitable student trying to ask Kerry a question, being wrestled to the ground by uniformed thugs then hit with around 50,000 volts from a tazer, while Kerry stands by and lets it happen. He didn’t deserve to be swiftboated, and could not have been a more catastrophic president than Bush but judging by his lack of concern for that young man, Kerry is a prick who shouldn’t be put in charge of a compost heap.

Pikaian journalists.

Pikaian: very small brained (noun, 2007, a lunartalks original). Pikaia gracilens is the earliest known fossil chordate, dating from the Cambrian explosion around 565 million years ago. Around 4 cm long it had a rudimentary spine and a small anterior nerve swelling which would evolve to become the vertebrate brain. Pikaia was an ancestor of modern vertebrates, but its vestigial mental capacity and bottom feeding lifestyle has remained unchanged in modern political journalists.

Following Ming Campbell’s speech to the Lib Dem conference today, the Lib Dem blogs have been overwhelmingly critical of the media coverage: the BBC has been a particular disappointment. Their headline coverage of his speech was ‘I’m not too old’, headline-mining one part of a comprehensive philosophical and policy-filled speech that set out in the clearest possible terms what it means to be a liberal in C21st Britain. The speech is available in full without BBC ‘analysis’ here. Perhaps the worst bit of nakedly partial, lazy hackery was by Nick Assinder who did his best to make and sustain stories about a leadership challenge where none existed here and in an oh-so smartass piece headlined Ming’s leadership bid. David Nikel deals with him (see below) with such coldly irate verve there’s nothing more to add.

David Nikel goes for the BBC’s pikaian in chief Assinder here.
Paul Walter laments the low-wattage conference coverage here.
Stephen Tall comments on lowbrow times at The Times here.
I lost my temper and The Guardian lost a lifelong reader over this bit of vapid hackery in particular.

I really can’t be arsed with newspapers any more, and BBC News politics coverage has absolutely plummeted in my estimation, too. It really does need to reign back on the two-ways, on the journalists talking to journalists about what other journalists have said, on following the media pack and on the need to fill time with speculation and otiose comment.

Conservative students not liking Cameron.

While in said pub (below) our Lib Dem huddle was approached by a Conservative student in confessional mood, spitting tacks about David Cameron. 20 years old, a right winger, he was truly splenetic about his leader’s performance and prospects. Not one Conservative student he knew, he said, supported Cameron and many were waxing morose.

‘Who else could we have if we ditched him, though?’ He opined. ‘We’re so shallow. No talent.’

I didn’t take a shorthand note, but the quotes are accurate. And if any idle fricking hacks are here, we WEREN’T TALKING ABOUT MING’S LEADERSHIP. We were finishing text for a leaflet to help us stomp the juices out of the last off the Labour vote, which around here is going downhill like Cyril Smith in a gokart.

You can’t beat a pissed, bitter old socialist

for ruining your evening in the pub.  The law should be changed to allow it.

I refer the hon. godless swine

who infest this place to Mano Singham’s webjournal. There is not a sacred cow he doesn’t cart off to the knacker’s yard.

Englishology:
Knacker’s yard: a knacker was called out to a dead or dying farm animal or horse. The knacker would kill the animal, remove and ‘process’ the carcass. The yard was where he plied his noisome but (in years gone by) necessary trade. The first k is silent. Knacker is also a generic name for policemen, a term applied to sportsman who is past his best (’he’s a bit of a knacker’) and a slang term for a testicle. Someone receiving an affront in his gentleman’s parts may refer to a ‘kick in the knackers’.

More heartstopping Mozart

Piano quintet K452, if you can’t do the whole thing at least give the fourth movement a go. The Allegretto: 5.55 of beauty, but with moments when you wonder how a mortal could compose something so sublime.

If the last minute doesn’t move you, go and find an office where you can hand in your humanity.

Islamic creationism hasn’t got a blog

anymore. It did have but it was little more than a reprint of twerpcious Adnan Oktar’s 800 page bilgefest ‘Atlas of Creation’. Oktar has something of a reputation, and his Turkish opponents started a few blogs pointing this out. As a result he went a-whining to the Turkish courts and got WordPress banned in that candidate member of the EU, Turkey. WordPress have suspended his blog. I’m not much in favour of censorship, but this man is a well-funded theistic twerp who can buy his own airtime rather than hooching off WP’s generosity. Latest updates on the turkey that is Turkey’s judicial system and the WP block here.

Spammers should be put to death.

As should people who throw litter out of cars onto the verges of the North Yorkshire Moors. I had thought of impaling on the village green, then I remembered in my dim Catholic youth some chap our Parish Priest (he had but one lung, and a damp, limp handshake) was impressed with.

He had so vexed the Romans that they put a stop to his capers by winding his intestines out onto a convenient sailor’s windlass. Now that is the way to deal with spammers and litterbugs. I googled the shit out of this unfortunate. Step forward St Erasmus (bonkers Catholic stuff alert, more sober Wikipedia on him here), AKA Elmo, of fire fame.

Read the Wikipedia on his martyrdom. You couldn’t believe that stuff if you fell into a bath of whisky and tried to drink your way out. Anyway, having suffered so grisly an end, he was made the patron saint of intestinal disorders, children with colic, cattle-pest and sailors.

As one of the latter, if I catch anyone winding the intestines of a Bishop around my gleaming and annually serviced winches I will kick your arse all round the boat so badly the Pope will make you the patron saint of people with piles. You may disembowel spammers and litterbugs, but do clean up after yourself. Mesenteric membrane fucks up the pawls terribly.