I still think it's extreme. They are more Wilhelmine. You don't get proper fascism until you've lost your first world war.
I still think it's extreme. They are more Wilhelmine. You don't get proper fascism until you've lost your first world war.
and in the windy city they have a boreascon?
It may be that the only period when it was safe to be a civilian in a European or American war zone was from about 1800 to 1950; even then this safety was very limited south of the Pyrennees and East of Berlin. I've just been rereading Candide, which opens with the rape, murder and disembowelment of his family, and of everyone on the villages that either the "Bulgars" or the "Avars" pass through.
How did the troops treat civilians in the American Civil War?
For some reason, I am getting an error message at the bottom of the preview pane --
MT::App::Comments=HASH(0x810addc) Use of uninitialized value in sprintf at lib/MT/Template/Context.pm line 1187.
They speak French, don't they? It says so, right on that web site.
It was Kingsley Amis, and you've got it slightly wrong: this is less wrong, but still off:
" 'SF's no good'
They tell us till we're deaf.
'But this is good.'
'Why, then, it's not SF'."
on the other hand, he also wrote a very elegant poem about how boring Jules Verne can be. It starts on page 95 of the Penguin selected poems, but there is no room in this margin, etc.
Fresh-squozen? Shouldn't that be "fresh-squoze"? Or maybe fresh-squoze is the noise the prairie-dogs make, plashing feather-footed through snot-sodden sinuses.
There was a rather lovely edition of Kipling, published in the late Twenties and Thirties, that had a swastika on the spine. My grandparents had about twenty of them, in a glass-fronted bookcase that smelled of cedarwood and pipe tobacco.
You can still find the books, though not, alas, the smells, in second-hand bookshopse here.
Paisley is genuine fundamentalist, which means he's obsessive about his brand of sacred history. When I interviewed him once, he wanted to know which of several Baptist preachers named Brown in Victorian London had been ancestors of mine. He had read their books, and knew where they preached. As it happens, one of my Victorian great grandparents was a Protestant priest in Liverpool -- and thus presumably of Paisleyite views. His son in law, my grandfather Alfred Brown, took a part in the great Ulster gun-running; so he would have been a Paisleyite too. I did not mention these connections. Towards the end of the story, I made a small, quite futile effort to persuade him of the truth of Darwinism.
He got his 'doctorate' by correspondence, from Bob Jones university when he was in jail in the Sixties. I imagine -- perhaps this is a libel on Texas -- that he would be quite at home in Texan politics.
Back to Neil Kinnock -- so long as resistance to having an "independent" deterrent can be portrayed as pathetic wimpishness, anyone who resists it can be --and will be -- destroyed electorally.
And those of us who find ourselves imperial subjects and providers of barbarian auxiliaries, but not citizens, what are we meant to do?
Banting is actually an ancestor of my wife's. His portrait hangs on the wall by our staircase. Family legend has it that he grew so fat he had to walk downstairs backwards (he was undertaker to the Royal Family); his pamphlet, a cure for corpulence, is available online. He has at least one other living descendent, a fundamentalist vicar in Harold's Wood, South Essex.
I worked for the Indpendent for long enough not really to believe anything that appears in it about computers. But that story was completely horrifying, and and completely credible. The hubris involved has the unmistakable ring of truth: as Martial said "power corrupts other people".
Thank you.
Here's another one, by Harry Martinsson; I translated it from Swedish, years ago.
The stone carving
The words that rang around the sacrificial victims
have flown: we'll never hear them, can't imagine
the words for harvest weather, showers of hail:
They're dead, along with words for man and woman.
The sounds which they called their long boats &mdash
carved here with all their naked ribs exposed —
we'll never hear: what milk was, or the sun's name,
their love songs, words for senses, or the sound
of eye, nose, mouth and ear. How did they sound?
The summer words that lived in speech through winter
and their words for snow; the word for autumn apples.
We can't quite catch their name for weighty death:
though here we see that word, we'll never hear it.
That's lovely. May I put it on helmintholog?
Francis is an amazingly good thing. His book on growing up as a precocious child with a dying sister is quite excellent. In fact I think it's rather better than the geek book, though I have only read that in proof. I suspect it was written too hurriedly. On the other hand, the bit of it I do know about, dealing with the human genome, is a wonderfully clear exposition of the problesm and the people.
IN a further, non-satirical development, a prominent English evangelical has compared defenders of gay rights with advocates of gas chambers for Muslims and Jews. Presumably, that makes actual, practising gays the equivalent of concentration camp guards. A friend of mine, who was present at this event on Saturday, says he was cheered by his audience, among them three bishops, two of whom privately assured my friend afterwards that the speaker (whom they have known for years) was 'mad'. But of course gentlemen don't let the insanity of other gentlemen worry them.
I've known Holloway for years myself, and I don't think that insanity distinguishes him nearly as much as nastiness.
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