Syndirella allows you to aggregate feeds and read each feed in Syndirella itself either as a text/picture-only entry (on or offline) or by clicking on the link for that blog entry to open the actual blog page in Syndirella's main window (works just like a browser window). No idea about the opml bit though.
It's a bit buggy at times, but it works ok for me, particularly as i often aggregate then go offline (dial-up sucks round here).
Syndirella
I do sometimes understand what it must feel like to be, for instance, Welsh-language literature.
You mean, you have mutations? Ych a fi!
I always finds such lists difficult, because it's not really greatness that we're talking about at all. It's perceived greatness within the context of what we know about the person we're judging and who we happen to remember at the time we're making the list.
Last year the BBC ran several programmes about the Greatest Brit Ever, or somesuch, wherein various celebrities championed various famous British people in an attempt to persuade the viewers to vote for their choice.
The final 100 was the most bizarre list of people, including Tony Blair (what?!), Diana (in the top ten), David Beckham, John Peel and JK Rowling. Most were English and male. At least 40 were born after 1900, and many were musicians. (Robbie Williams? A Great Briton? Oh please!)
All these lists show us is that we've all got rubbish memories for anything that happened before last year (and an awful grip on history), an imperfect grasp of the contributions of cultures/countries other than our own and potentially inaccurate opinions of who actually achieved what.
But then, we all knew that in the first place anyway, didn't we? ;)
To clarify what I was thinking.
One of the key disputes as I understand it is whether the museum was used as a military position or not, as that understandably had a direct impact on whether or not the Americans could have better protected its contents from looting. The Iraqis have said that it was not defended and that the Americans were lax in their protection of the Iraqi heritage stored within. They said that the dugouts were used as shelters, not positions from which to fire on the Americans. The Americans have said that the museum was fortified and that they had to deal with it not as a museum but as a military position.
From watching the program, it was clear that most of the evidence pointed to the Americans telling a closer approximation to the truth than the Iraqis. I hesitate to say 91the truth92 because as has been rightly pointed out, much of the info we have about such events has been spun out of all recognition. But that was the point I was attempting to make with the line that Kathryn quoted.
The second issue is whether or not the looting was as bad as the Iraqi officials made out. Again, from watching the programme it was clear even to a casual observer that many of the cases in the various galleries had been cleared by someone with a set of keys - none of the glass display cases had been smashed, they were all intact but empty. Looters tend not to mind so much about the cases, they92re just after stuff they can sell.
Whilst much of the material was supposed to have gone into safe storage, it appeared that either no one knew where the crates had been stored, or they weren92t going to tell anyone, or that the crates had not been stored but removed. Yes, it92s clear that there is a lot of confusion (and/or obfuscation) about which artefacts left when and where they went, but it does imply that the people responsible for the removal of the majority of missing antiquities were not actually the looters, but museum officials or people connected to them.
Of course, there are a whole load of reasons for museum staff to blame the looters rather than corrupt officials - it92s easier, it saves face, it allows some of the blame to fall on to the American military and finally, it helps to cover up the godawful mess that the museum appears to have been in prior to the war in terms of cataloguing and storage.
Some of the saddest scenes from Dan Cruickshank92s documentary were of the un-touched storerooms. There were artefacts broken and scattered on the floor in jumbled heaps. The place looked like it had been turned over. But when pressed, it was admitted by the museum staff that that was just how they had been storing stuff for years. They had no idea what artefacts they had, no catalogues or records, it was just a horrendous mess.
It92s really awful to see artefacts that have survived for thousands of years being broken by someone treading on them accidentally.
This started off as such an easy story - easy to take the Iraqi figures at face value, easy to blame the American military. It's obviously not such an easy story anymore, but it seems that the temptation to ignore the complications that surround it is too much to resist for some of the press.
There was a fascinating, yet distressing, documentary on the BBC the other day about the ransacking of the Museum of Antiquities. Dan Cruickshank had been over to Iraq before the war started to look at sites of historical importance that might get trashed by the fighting, and when the fighting had stopped he went back to try to find out what exactly happened at the museum.
His conclusion was that many of the missing artifacts were taken long before the battle for the museum happened, that the subsequent looters found little to actually steal, and that the museum had indeed been used as a military position.
He found more evidence to support the American military's version of events than the Iraqi museum officials'. That was something that surprised me - most of the media had assumed that the Americans were lying, but it seems that maybe they weren't.
This is the BBC site for the programme: http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/war/iraq/iraq_after_the_war_01.shtml
OMG the Lensman series! I grew up on that, and haven't read them for years. This whole comment thread makes me want to dig through my boxes of books (not enough shelf space) and read them again! Although I suspect they wouldn't be as good now as my memories of them are.
| Year | Number of comments posted |
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| 2003 | 7 |
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