lumbering on

I do believe it's ten years today since I started blogging. To commemorate the occasion, here's something Ruritanian: a history of Boris Skossyref; dubious Lithuanian aristocrat, international swindler, possible SIS asset and the man who would be King of Andorra. Enjoy.

Comments

[des von bladet]

Ten moar years!

[Cheryl Rofer]

Happy anniversary, Jamie! Nine for me - same month.

[KSR]

Thanks Jamie, your hard work and insight is very much appreciated. Fair winds and following bandwidth.

[seeds]

I've only been lurking for the last couple of years, but this is easily my most frequently checked and most frequently enjoyed blog. Cheers, Jamie.

[chris y]

As des sez!

Andorra already has two Princes, which must give it the lowest Prince to population ration in Europe. An additional king would lead to overcrowding.

[Nick L]

Congrats! I think I've been reading the blog for about 9 years, glad that's it's still going strong.

[Barry Freed]

Happy Blog Birthday! And wishes for many more.

[Martin Wisse]

Hear hear.

[dsquared]

Happy blogday! As a present, here's forty pounds of Denis MacShane's political career. This scandal was first unearthed by a regular commenter of Aaronovitch Watch, which in turn was started in the comments section here ...

[Richard J]

Happy birthday dear blog!

[jamie]

thanks to one and all. The new header, incidentally, is the flag of the Feiyang warlord clique from 1920's China, who stood for nationalism, the people;'s livelihood and abstract expressionism.

[alle]

Happy tenth anniversary! I have only been around for about half of that time, but it really is one of my favorite places online.

In the town where I live there's a very strange pawn- and antiques shop, overloaded with military surplus, old medals, stamp collections, and lurid totalitarian memorabilia, plus any number of other random things piled up in great heaps. Lenin busts, Wehrmacht helmets and Soviet rubber gas masks poking out of every corner. You can hardly move in there. The owner is a cranky old man who, if you can drag him out from behind the curiosities, will tell you that he worries most about the weather, a world war, and that clever Jews are pulling the strings of central banking. I've always imagined B & T to be a kind of virtual extension of that world, minus the anti-Semitism and the conversations wasted on the weather. And with more Ming vases and Maoism, obviously.

[Phil]

You've got nearly two years on me blogwise. Here's to more.

[Phil]

Wow, MacShane.

MacShane is understood to accept that he made a "grotesque mistake". But he insists he did not make any personal gain from the claims.

Of all the defences to a charge of embezzlement, "I've spent it all" must be the weakest. Presumably the underlying thinking is that he was never intending to pay for those trips out of his own pocket, so the personal gain represented by not having to find the £12,900 himself was purely notional. On one hand, rigging the system to actually put money in your pocket (bad); on the other, rigging the system to provide the free plane tickets which a kind benefactor has unaccountably failed to deliver (kind of a grey area).

[jamie]

POor old Denis. he had to pay the money to himself from an invented thinktank to make up for the profound injustice that no-one from a real think tank paid him.

[Dan Hardie]

Happy anniversary, Jamie.

That flag is a remarkably fine piece of design. Did the Feiyang warlord clique (for whom you are now the number 1 Google result) happen across a passing Russian Suprematist painter forced into exile by the Bolsheviks?

[jamie]

Possibly: we're talking Northeast China here, so Russian influence is a given.

Various warlord cliques used the colour scheme in different designs. It reflects the 'five ethnicities' that were supposed to make up China's multinational empire (Han, Manchu, Mongol, Tibetan and Korean). The Han were represented by 'yellow' so we know who the boss ethnicity is here.

[des von bladet]

Any resemblence to the cycling world champion's rainbow jersey (which in fact gets its colour scheme from the Olympic rings, which is why there is black in their rainbow) may or may not be purely coincidental; it's the flag of Terschelling you really need to look out for.

[Nabakov]

Long time lurker, first time commenter. Heaven's blessings on your first ten years. I welcome another ever victorious decade of B&T with a twist of lemon.

[Malcs]

Happy blogday! It is in no small measure because of you that I currently find myself doing Chinese night class at SOAS. Bet you never anticipated having _that_ kind of effect on your readers.

I guess the remaining of the 55 ethnic minorities pitched up in China after the revolution...?

[Ken MacLeod]

Enthusiastically hail the tenth anniversary of Blood and Treasure! Advance resolutely under the banner of the Feiyang warlord clique!

[ajay]

Loyally embrace the Three Cynical Observations and the Eight Historical Footnotes!

[David Weman]

Hey, I can post here again. Congratulations, Jamie, this is one of my favorite sites.