Blood & Treasure

it says what?

Michael Brooke recounts the mishaps of westerners having tattoos in languages they don’t understand.

The tattoo parlour in question was in Chinatown, so he decided to have his name done in Chinese.

As his nickname was 'Cookie', this seemed pretty straightforward, the Chinese being very keen on fortune cookies, so the resulting tattoo consisted of the second half of that particular character combination. He returned home, went back to work, and on impulse decided to show it to a colleague of Chinese extraction...

...who burst out laughing and asked "why have you got 'biscuit' tattooed on your arm?".

These things can go deeper than just the formal meaning of characters, given that much of written Chinese is based on pictoral representation. You hear of women having the character for woman tattoed on them for pseudo feminist reasons, said pseuds then walking round blissfully unaware of the fact that they are now stamped with an indelible image of an arm holding a brush, visual confirmation of the idea that their role in life is as unpaid domestic labour.

divine opportunities

OK, so an ex-priest convinced by his study of the bible that the big geezer is due to take an active hand in our affairs interferes with the Olympic Games while dressed in traditional nutter costume, apparently out of frustration that his views don’t get an airing in the media. Clearly, he’s barking, maybe even Dagenham.

According to several Father Ted related sources the dancing priest was inspired by a "real life dancing priest from Northern Ireland. While I don't know which priest they mean, I like to think it refers to Father Neil Horan. Father Neil, who lives in Nunhead, is a self acknowledged expert on biblical prophesy and sends predictions that Jesus is about to return to head up a world government to, well, everyone. Amusingly, he also spends his time trying to convince BBC Question Time to devote more time to biblical prophesy, and complaining that he was once removed from Question Time's studio.

I saw Neil Horan outside the Commons on Wednesday, dressed in his special peace outfit (which for the uninitiated, is traditional Irish costume, but with the addition of what appears to be a brown PE skirt with the Israeli flag stitched to the front of it). Sadly he wasn't dancing, but he was waving a huge placard telling us that the war had been sent by God. While photos of him (which are distressingly absent from the internet) have him look like a rather a jolly Graham Norton style dancing priest, in real life he looks bloody terrifying in his bright green costume and knee high socks, waving his banner about.

Another Jesus whooper elsewhere is also convinced that the boss shaman is a big government interventionist, whose divine sanctions have been vouchsafed to him. This man is a bestselling author.

Much of The American Prophecies is devoted to close exegesis of the page of the Bible on which incoming presidents have laid their hand while taking the oath of office during the swearing-in ceremony. It is a presidential privilege to choose the passage. What did the 42nd president (known to the irreverent as Slick Willy) select for that fateful day? Galatians 6:8, "For he that soweth unto his own flesh shall of the flesh reap corruption."

Prophetic or what? More damning, however, than his fleshly reapings with Monica, was Clinton's betraying the sacred mission entrusted him by God. He cannot plead ignorance, when his time comes to stand before the divine bench. As governor of Arkansas, he was specifically instructed by his pastor, the Rev WO Vaught, "You might be president one day. You will make mistakes and God will forgive you. But God will never forgive you if you turn your back on Israel." Which, to the great peril of his country, Clinton did, at Camp David in July 2000. What followed, 14 months later in Manhattan, was a mark of God's stern displeasure at the errant president.

So far as I can tell, the only difference between the two is opportunity.

fissionably wasted

A friend recently retired from Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico – yes, that one – and has published a brief history of it, along with an assessment of its current troubles.

Many things have changed at Los Alamos since its beginning in the Manhattan Project, the crash program to develop an atomic bomb in World War II. Changes in the way scientific research is practiced, the role of the national laboratories, and how security is maintained are coming together in a damaging way, mixed with today’s divisive politics.

the duchess said to me

There is a subsection of British bloggers in danger of becoming a Nick Cohen discussion group. Well, yes, and here we go again….

Blunkett constantly plays the prolier-than-thou card against anyone who questions his attacks on civil liberties. His opponents are Hampstead bleeding-hearts, he bellows. Guardian -reading girls' blouses who don't know what hard men forged in the furnaces of Sheffield must do to clear the mean streets of crime.

But when his day's work is over, he dismisses bourgeois Hampstead as too common for his refined tastes and heads up-market to the aristocratic attractions of Mayfair and Chatsworth; to parties at the Spectator and dinners with Barbara Amiel. He shows no signs of worry that the company he keeps may mark him as a stonking humbug.

Paul Dacre too, I hear. It’s probably too late to use the llliberati coinage about Blunkett and his other reactionary friends – it’s too much of a lagging response to liberati. But given their collectively fervent nature, maybe illuminati would be better.

I'm probably the last to know, but...

Look who's back!

via Jim Henley, who's also back.

boys are nothing but trouble

I’m not averse to schadenfreude. It’s one of those faults that seem too much like consolations to have the will to renounce. The waster son of Britain’s pre-eminent class warrior faces jail in South Africa, for allegedly meddling in a small country’s affairs for fun and profit. No, I won’t laugh. I won’t even snigger. I’ll just say: hey Mark, think of the numbers.

It occurs to me that Mark Thatcher’s alleged involvement, along with assorted European jet setting white trash and casino sweepings, in the Equatorial Guinea caper has a lot of the same dynamics as the “War on Terror”, though on a much smaller scale. In short, it’s a personal affair seemingly undertaken by people with an impregnable sense of impunity.

Consider: Two children are born into the high plutocracy. Previous generations have made and married their own money, securing power and influence thereby, making their way in the political structures of their respective countries. The children are masters of all they survey – rich as Croesus, free as dolphins. Both have an inborn sense of entitlement.

Child number one enjoys the good life, stumbles through college, uses his parents’ friends to launch and then rescue himself from disastrous business ventures, before cleaning up his act and settling on a couple of undemanding jobs in government.

Child number two takes a harder road, keeping his money but renouncing his privileges. His sense of entitlement drives him to the head of a revolutionary movement preaching nothing less than the overthrow of the political and economic arrangements his parents, and the parents of child no 1, strove so hard to build and maintain. He forms, leads and inspires a lethally effective terrorist group; evades death and capture; becomes a name to scare children with, while thousands more are inspired by his example.

In a way, people make too much of the Bush-Bin Laden family and business connections. The issue here isn’t whether they are in league in some bizarre way, but the fact that a conflict with global consequences is being fought –at its highest levels – between a small network of people who know and know of each other. It’s like some squalid brawl between village moneybags in medieval times. Forget about the clash of civilizations. Talk of Islamism and the faults and virtues of Western civilization is just intended to make people feel that they have some constructive role in– some detectable influence over – what is being done to them.

One child of the plutocracy has chucked his dummy out of the pram, and it falls to another to smack his bottom and send him to bed, that business may prosper once more. The rest of us are just munchkins. This is where the triumph of liberal democracy has led. The major practical worry is that child number two is clearly of much higher quality than child number one – quality in the sense of being fit for purpose. On the bright side, at least Mark Thatcher isn’t US president.

telephone booth indian

Via Arts and Letters Daily, a rather aimless piece about A J Liebling’s press criticism. I’ve not read much of that specifically – just the piece on right wing fruitcake Roy Howard in The Telephone Booth Indian.

Liebling’s OK, but it’s beyond me where he gets his reputation as a master of prose. There’s nothing objectionable about the way he writes. The jokes all come along in good order and when it’s time for insight delivery, he doesn’t telegraph the punch and is generally tart rather than trite. But there’s an overmasticated quality to the prose. Maybe it’s a New Yorker thing. There’s the same problem in Joseph Mitchell’s stuff: lowlife cutting polite capers in drawing rooms, threadbare but clean and with its nose properly wiped.

Still, who am I to grouse? Liebling and Mitchell patrolled Lower Manhattan at around the same time as HL Mencken and George Jean Nathan were running the American Mercury in the same location. Meanwhile, Runyon parodies away on Broadway. And then there's the Algonquin crowd, if they're to your taste. Perasonally, I can take or leave them. All that writing – and all that stuff to write about – in an area that would comfortably fit between the valley of the River Irk and Cheetham Hill Road. The only cultural landmark we’ve got round here is the old Co-operative Biscuit factory, home of the world famous Crumpsall Cream Cracker. And that’s been replaced by an engineering parts warehouse.

note: this post has been severely edited, due to chronic rambling.

about this much

I got 38% on the estimation test. Curious how people seem to be clustering around the high thirties mark. But does this mean that I'm bad at estimating or that the guesses which I estimate round are way off the mark in the first place? Is there any way of distinguishing the two? Is it just that I have no idea of the answer or no idea full stop?

gone mad

A couple of years back, I thought the PC meme had finally reached the end of its cycle when I saw a documentary on paedophiles. One wretch asserted that his idea of fun was unfairly castigated. Look at those muslims, busy infibulating their daughters. Why didn’t they get all the stick? Political correctness, that’s why. Political correctness gone mad.

Well that’s that, I thought. Now it’s hit the gutter. It never entered popular conversation anyway. It was just a thought substitute in op-ed pages, headlines, and political speeches. Perhaps it had a small following among the Colin Hunts of this world, but that was all.

Obviously, I spoke far too soon. Oliver Burkeman chronicles the ongoing life of a lifeless concept:

Since the concept of PC is mainly rightwing doublespeak anyway, you can make some reliable predictions about those instances where it is held to have gone mad.

First, the level of outrage will be out of all proportion with the allegedly mad policy, which will either be perfectly sensible or, at worst, a bit oversensitive to other people's feelings - hardly a war crime.
Second, the story will be more complex than it appears (in the Ofcom faggots case, the ad made a deliberate joke of the word's homophobic connotation).

Third, the "slippery slope" argument may be used, with some furious everyman complaining that, now you're no longer allowed to hurl racist abuse in the street, it can only be a matter of time before they ban breathing.

He forgot the corollary. It’s exactly the same people who complain about political correctness when it comes to racist speech who also complain about the end of civility in public discourse and a general lack of respect for others. Sometimes, like Michael Howard, they do it in the same speech.

There was an "ethical quagmire" where "the clear distinction between right and wrong has been lost in sociological mumbo-jumbo and politically correct nonsense", he added. ...

He also called for more respect to be shown by people in general, urging stronger discipline and respect in schools and at home.

when, O Catiline

This is one from the department of strange bedfellows. A Plaid Cymru MP introduces an impeachment motion for Tony Blair based on a report by an academic generally associated with the far left, backed by a faction of Conservative MPs, led by Boris Johnson, also editor of the Spectator…which is naturally whooping the whole thing up.

I think Boris is behind this. I have misplaced my copy of Sallust*, but I think I know what our favourite erudite classicist buffoon is thinking about:

When, O Catiline, do you intend to cease abusing our patience? How long is that madness of yours still to mock us? When is there to be an end of that unbridled audacity of yours…

To which the answer would begin: “look, y’know. I’ve always been a pretty straight guy..

It would be just like Boris to dig up the impeachment process from its constitutional tomb, too. Imagine Blair being tried by the House of Lords. The old ruling class reaches from the grave and clutches bony fingers around the throat of the brash arriviste…

I suspect my historical imagination is being overstimulated. It’s a stunt of course, but fairly well thought out. Note that it targets the PM specifically, while giving the government the chance to back away, shaking it’s collective head if the process gains sufficient momentum:

"It is important to make it clear that it is the Prime Minister's own conduct that is at the centre of this - not the Government as a whole. That is why a vote of no confidence would be unfair and inappropriate."

As an aside, it’s generally common to use the recent shake up of alliances in politics to pursue arguments through guilt by association. I think this has actually been one of the best consolations of the whole Iraq nonsense. I’ve always liked and respected genuine libertarians, for instance, and have enjoyed actually being on the same side as the libbos over the past year or so.

And how could anyone not look at a Trot-Tory-Plaid Cymru alliance without cracking a big stupid smile? It’s almost as good as the ginger alliance.

*I hereby enter this phrase in the Oliver Kamm awards for fatuous erudition, 2004

Update: I nearlyt forgot. here's the impeach Blair website, via Anthony Wells.