He's 25 years late; but here comes big brother

Orwell titled his novel 1984; so we were relieved to live through that year without Big Brother watching us and talking to us through the TV in our home.

But it turns out that Orwell only missed on the year. Here it is 25 years after 1984 and Great Britain is installing closed circuit cameras to monitor 20,000 families in their homes around the clock. The British government says it's doing this "for the children."

Besides learning that the government of a supposedly free country has taken upon itself the right to conduct 24 hour surveillance in the homes of people who haven't been convicted of a crime, I also learned that the British government has a "Children's Secretary."

Presumably they needed a Childrens Secretary because none of the fully adult secretaries could figure out how to handle complex childhood matters like enforcing truancy laws without spying on people 24 hours a day in their homes.

http://www.express.co.uk/posts/view/115736/Sin-bins-for-worst-families

Hat tip to Mark Steyn, who pointed at this in a post on National Review's blog The Corner.

It's a great time to be alive; but a pall is settling over the world

Mark Steyn recetnly gave a great speech at Hillsdale College. Here are a few paragraphs:

""Give people plenty and security, and they will fall into spiritual torpor," wrote Charles Murray in In Our Hands. "When life becomes an extended picnic, with nothing of importance to do, ideas of greatness become an irritant. Such is the nature of the Europe syndrome."

The key word here is "give." When the state "gives" you plenty—when it takes care of your health, takes cares of your kids, takes care of your elderly parents, takes care of every primary responsibility of adulthood—it's not surprising that the citizenry cease to function as adults: Life becomes a kind of extended adolescence—literally so for those Germans who've mastered the knack of staying in education till they're 34 and taking early retirement at 42. Hilaire Belloc, incidentally, foresaw this very clearly in his book The Servile State in 1912. He understood that the long-term cost of a welfare society is the infantilization of the population.

Genteel decline can be very agreeable—initially: You still have terrific restaurants, beautiful buildings, a great opera house. And once the pressure's off it's nice to linger at the sidewalk table, have a second café au lait and a pain au chocolat, and watch the world go by. At the Munich Security Conference in February, President Sarkozy demanded of his fellow Continentals, "Does Europe want peace, or do we want to be left in peace?" To pose the question is to answer it. Alas, it only works for a generation or two. And it's hard to come up with a wake-up call for a society as dedicated as latterday Europe to the belief that life is about sleeping in."

The entire speech is here: http://www.hillsdale.edu/news/imprimis.asp

Metaphor doesn't get better than this

"Gordon Brown was hoping for a little more than: “I feel your pain. And have you ever seen The Wizard of Oz? It’s about this sweet little nobody who gets to pay a brief visit to the glittering Emerald City before being swept back to the reassuring familiarity of the poor thing’s broken-down windswept economically devastated monochrome dustbowl. You’ll love it!”

“Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn”? Oh, perish the thought. The prime minister flew 8,000 miles for dinner and a movie. But the president says he’ll call. Next week. Next month. Whatever."

You'll never see a more bitingly true metaphor than the one in the first paragraph above. It's Mark Steyn's imagining of the way President Barack Obama presented his recent gift to Gordon Brown when the British Prime Minister visited our national valley boy, the great Oz himself, behind the curtain down at the White House last week. On a whole lot of levels Steyn has it exactly right.

The second paragraph is a bit more abstruse. Steyn is again at his very best there, putting Rhett Butler's words in Barry's mind as he sees the Prime Minister off. Perhaps you can figure it out if you read the whole of Steyn's latest and perhaps greatest piece here:

http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=ZGY4MDk4YjVhZTc4YWEyZWJlODYyY2U2M2VhNjM0Mjc=

Read the whole thing. Percy Bysshe Shelley himself couldn't have done better even though he did provide a metaphor for the eventual world reaction to Barry and the works of his Mighty Hand in his poem Ozymandias, written almost two hundred years ago, the work that inspired Frank Baum to conceive of The Emerald City, The Curtain, Dorothy, Toto and all the rest.

"My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!"
Nothing beside remains: round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away

All of us over forty or so years old remember those boring classes where English teachers made a big thing about the similes and metaphors in the poems and novels written by all those dead old white guys like Shelley. Some of that stayed with me, so I always like to come across a good metaphor, just as I love the current smell of our European allies being napalmed in the morning by The One down in Washington who they thought was the answer to all their prayers, back before he was elected and consecrated as the anointed one and maximum leader of the free world.

Few things in life are quite so satisfying as seeing people get exactly what they ask for and thus richly deserve. It's one of the consolations of growing old.

For, as the old proverb goes. "If you sit by the river long enough you will see the bodies of all your enemies float past."

The most humble Presidential headstone

Mark Steyn pointed to his post of a while ago which detailed his trip to see the most humble Presidential headstone.

http://corner.nationalreview.com/post/?q=MTkwYjE1YmMxMzVhNTM5NzAxYWMwYjNlYzBkNjEyZWM=

“We draw our presidents from the people,” said Coolidge. “I came from them. I wish to be one of them again.”

As an aside I should point out that John Derbyshire made excellent use of Silent Cal's ghost in his novel Seeing Calvin Coolidge in a Dream, which may well be the most original usage of a presidential persona in a book. I have the book available to lend is anyone is interested.

And, if you were born in the last thirty years here's Kethryn Jean Lopez with a three minute youtube primer that will painlessly teach you more U.S. history than you learned in school. If you were born before 1979 it will make you laugh.

http://corner.nationalreview.com/post/?q=YzI4Mjc5MjQ2NzEwZjIyZTA0OTdlMjVhYzQ0MWJmYTM=

A great headline for a picture

"The couple in happier times, before Hassan removed his wife's head."

No word on what he did with her head. Maybe he had one of his other wives cook it up for him with some fava beans.

http://blogs.news.com.au/dailytelegraph/timblair/index.php/dailytelegraph/comments/hassan_chop/

Mark Steyn also penned a great headline for his post on National Review's blog The Corner - "Headless body in gutless press." Steyn wonders why this member of the "Religion of Peace" didn't get as much newspaper publicity when he beheaded his wife as he got when he founded a TV station devoted to showing how moderate, reasonable and non-violent Muslims are.

http://corner.nationalreview.com/post/?q=YWVlZDFkN2RmOGE1YWMzMmY5YjBiZThkYTIxN2Q5ZDU=

Update: It just gets better and better. The Council on American Islamic Relations gave this fellow an award in 2007. In fairness I have to note that their's no evidence he was carrying his wife's head in a bowling ball bag when they gave him the award. A tip of the hat to Greg Pollowitz of National Review, who posted the link to this picture on The Corner.

http://pa.cair.com/content/image.php?Side=gallery&folder=19&img=45

No word on wether the Archbishop of Canterbury has beheaded his wife, or wether he thinks that beheading one's wife should be legal under the sort of Sharia law he advocates.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/religion/4631128/Archbishop-of-Canterbury-Society-is-coming-round-to-my-views-on-sharia.html

Lions and Tigers and Bare-Faced Liars

Lions and tigers and bears were what Dorothy, the Scarecrow, the Tinman and the Cowardly Lion feared in The Wizard of Oz. But today we have much more to fear from Bare-Faced Liars like those in the media who persist in trying to make massacres carried out by Muslims be about everything except what they're really about.

But before I get started on that I wanted to mention that it's as cold as. . . Well, as Pop used to say, it's cold as a brass bra on a witch's. . . Sorry, I forgot for a moment that this is a family blog. Sis reminded me just the other day after I posted that thing about how pleased Aunt Mary would be to see the acceptance of the new word in the language.

Bobbitise was used as a verb by a writer for the Times of India. You'll have to look it up on your own because I don't have time to explain right now since I'm determined not to let this turn into one of these interminable posts that wanders all over the place.

I have to get back to the fact that it's wery, wery cold out there right now, as Bugs Bunny would say. I just walked back from leaving my car over at the Ford Dealer. I wanted to get it serviced before Ford goes bankrupt or they shut all the dealers down. Plus, I noticed on Friday that my inspection sticker was three months out of date.

Fortunately for me the local police are shockingly inefficient after almost eight years of poor leadership by the Bush administration, which is being held responsible for every other goofy thing that goes wrong in the country so why not this. I have a feeling that important laws like getting our cars inspected every year in the proper month and not mixing recyclables in the regular trash will be a lot better enforced after Barry drafts a million or so secret police stooges, I mean community service volunteers, to poke their noses up our. . . er. . . to keep a very close and helpful eye on all of us. And I just can't wait until he provides me with a community organizer to help keep me better organized and more attentive to the environment and stuff.

So anyway, being a law abiding citizen, I dropped my car off at the dealer this morning as soon as I could after realizing that I would eventually get caught; but then I had to walk home, a shocking thing, a very unnatural thing with gasoline down to $1.79 a gallon at the Wawa.

Is this a great country or what! The rest of the world is paying like $8.00 a gallon for gas and we're well on our way down to paying a buck. You almost hate turning the car off overnight and then having to run out there to start it so it can warm up while you're having your second cup of coffee in the morning. I really, really need one of those remote control starters. I'll bet Al Gore never has to waddle his fat. . . er. . . never has to waddle outside to start a frozen car so it can warm up in the morning.

Speaking of which, or rather not speaking of which, I just read a great paragraph in Florence King's latest column in National Review when I slipped outside for a cigarette The way Barry's going to be doing on the White House balcony once he gets inaugurated. What? The media never told you he's a weak willed tobacco addict. Never mind.

Anyway, I'm too lazy to look up the link to Florence King's column, so you'll have to google it if you want to read the whole thing. Her column is called "the bent pin," and this edition's entry is titled 'Iceberg, Right Ahead'.

She wrote, "Did you know it's entirely possible to drink a whole bottle of vodka a day with no hangover or other ill effects if you use milk as a mixer? I did it the last week of the campaign. I don't know what size the bottles were because I don't understand these new foreign measurements, but they were whole bottles and I polished them off. My doctor was alarmed. "Don't worry," I said, "it was skim milk,""

I had a fraternity brother back in college who swore by scotch and milk; but he never could get me to try it. Not that I was terribly scrupulous about the scotch, although I considered it an expensive affectation. That was during the period when I was perhaps not paying as much attention to my studies as I should have been. I had a free ride scholarship from the Navy that also included $100 per month in spending money, and I was making some extra money on the side, so money was the least of my problems; but something about paying for scotch just didn't fit my thinking.

That same buddy and I later quit drinking cold turkey for quite a while after watching the movie The Lost Weekend. The movie was very powerful; but our period of temperance may have had something to do with the fact that we shared a quart of on-sale cognac and a bottle of wine during the movie on the theory that cognac is made from wine so it should be compatible with wine. Oh, and we watched the movie after returning from The Knotty Pine after the bartender rudely refused to continue to serve us.

I think the wine was Barcelona Sweet Red; but it may have been Thunderbird, which had a great slogan. The Senior VP of Sales at my company recently greeted me with "What's the word, Sully?" as I approached him in a corridor. I immediately gave him back, "What's the word? Thunderbird. What's the price? Thirty twice." It turned out he had never heard the slogan, so I had to explain it to him later. He's a bit younger than me so I'm not sure he believed me 100% that T-Bird was sixty cents a quart at the time.

The wine turned out not to be compatible with cognac on top of beer. And it did not endear me to my roommate, Dave B, who returned to the room from the weekend at home to find me curled up on his bed in a nest made of the formerly clean clothes that had been neatly stacked there. He took a can of instant drink powder and turned me into a crusted mummy while I slept. Later, when I woke he was not at all sympathetic to my explanation that I had moved to his bed only because mine became unsuitable for sleeping in during the night.

All was not lost though, for the pattern of events did result in a never since repeated physiological experience. When I finally arose to stumble down the hall to the shower room I found that all I could see was a tiny image in the center of my field of view. The effect was like looking down a long pipe. Very strange and edifying in a certain sort of way.

Ever since then I've been a veritable paragon of moderation in all things, more or less. All of us learn in life. Well, most of us learn, mostly from experience, those of us who survive. There is, of course the fact that ultimately none of us survive. But best not go there.

I was talking about my lack of temperance in my younger days, and perhaps to this day in some things. I take solace in Saint Augustine, who sort of said, 'Lord give me temperance and self control; but not yet.' Good old Saint Augie. He was definitely a righteous dude who would have fit right in at our fraternity, at least before he got into the robes and started talking and writing all kinds of heavy downer stuff.

I've always wondered if he's an ancestor; but I've done so privately since senior year of high school. One of the nuns at Bishop Kenrick became quite cross with me when I speculated a bit along that line in a book report that strayed a somewhat from the theme of City of God. She very unjustly gave me a C for that paper even though that was an A paper if I've ever written one, very inventive. But she was a wise old bird though, that nun. She was just teaching me a valuable lesson with that C grade. Never, never, never speak truth to power. The Cambodians, I think it's the Cambodians, have a somewhat similar wisdom, in their folk saying, 'When elephants dance the mice should stay clear.'

But I was writing about Florence King. Ah, Florence, it's a great pity she's about a hundred or a hundred and ten years old and can't live forever. What a piece of work. One of these days I really need to get her first book, Confessions of a Failed Southern Lady. I've read all of her other books and I've been looking forward to her columns for years.

But I appear to have digressed and gotten myself all twisted around like a coyote in a hall of mirrors with a roadrunner. I was at the Ford Dealer. And I was dressed in about five layers for the walk; but still, I about froze my. . . Sorry again. . . Uh, various and sundry parts of me were very chilled by the time I walked the couple of miles home.

What the heck is going on anyway. We were promised global warming to eliminate these cold winters. Yet this November and December are easily the coldest we've had for a long while. The pond has had a skin of ice on it for a couple of weeks which is unprecedented in the thirty years since we moved here.

Anyway, I plan to get back to that in another post; so back to the running amok Muslims and their perfidious apologists in the media.

Here are the plain facts. . .

Eh, I'm too lazy to lay out the facts and the Ford Dealer just called to say my car is ready; so I'll just give you a link to a column by Mark Steyn, who's a lot more disciplined and organized than me, and who makes a lot of sense on this subject.

http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=NzA2Y2E2MDU2YjQzOTQwZjUzNjcwZDA0OTE3YmFkYzg=

Bursting figs

Chalk this up as a learning experience.

I've been watching a couple dozen figs begin to ripen over the past couple of weeks and now the ripest of them have started to burst before they're fully soft and ready to pick. We've eaten about ten figs, but it appears the major part of the crop will be spoiled, or at least not able to ripen to perfection.

I think rain over the past three days has overloaded them with more water than they can incorporate. Next year I have to keep the fig tree better watered during droughts, especially as the figs begin to mature. Also, there's a damn bird messing with the figs on occasion. I also need to get a net to put over the tree. And I need to research the old Roman recipe for larks and thrushes.

Update: This week's Economist has helped me to develop some perspective on the problem of birds eating my figs. It seems bears are very busy this year eating Canadians. I don't especially like Canadians, except for Mark Steyn and sometimes David Frum when he's not being too annoying; but I also don't especially dislike Canadians. On the whole I'm not sure I approve of bears eating them indiscriminately. I would prefer the bears restrict themselves to eating the liberal ones. They're probably sweeter and chewier than crusty conservative Canadians anyway.

Update 2: This article (http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/09/080926143908.htm)
got me to remembering the stalwart goose Mork, who terrorized all in the vicinity of our pond until Mr. C's dog taught him to be more respectful of others and then ate him. If I knew how to post pictures here I would post the one I have of Mom running from Mork that day at the picnic. First and only time any of us ever saw Mom run. I don't have a picture of Mork startling Jas and getting him down on the ground between the cars. And I don't have a picture of Mork continuing to attack even though Linda was beating him moderately hard about the head and neck with her riding crop. Most of all, I wish I had a movie of Alex dueling with Mork along the bank of the pond. Back and forth, Alex advancing with his giant supersoaker, driving Mork back, and then Mork advancing with beak and wing, fearless. A noble goose. A priceless memory. All the money and effort spent on paleontology is worth it for reminding me of watching that confrontation. Ah, the other memories of that great season when Mork ruled the pond and all within fifty yards of it, chasing even the horses when he chose to go into their pasture.

Update 10/2 - Linda reminds me that Mork played with the horses and that the horses were gone to their new owners before Alex was walking. Ergo, Alex had to duel with a different and later goose, probably one of a pair that was defending young.