My family, news from the home front

• My youngest sister, Denise, has been appointed Dean of Arts and Sciences


• My daughter Aimee has bought a house in Portland


• My son Carey has got a dream job: testing computer game software

Hillary RIP

We lost another budgie. One of our young ones who had a damaged wing, and then had also lost her entire tail behind the sofa in a mysterious accident, died under unseen circumstances following an adventurous leap from the cage. We generally let them get out and back in via a long rope ladder throughout most of the day, and with their wings clipped, they can fly short distances, but seem to prefer an exciting plummet from the roof of the cage to the ground, sometimes followed by a little exploration, before climbing back up. But we found little Hillary, who was the tiniest, loudest and cutest of the bunch, expired on the floor, so we don't know if she broke her neck or possibly died of fright due to the dog Desmond's interest in her. We buried her in the back garden near to Sanjay.
We are hoping to get three more, to build our flock back up, as they seem happiest when there are plenty of friends to play with. The cockatiels, Winston and Clementine according to DH (even we chose those names to be androgynous, i.e. Winnie and Clemmie) are doing fine. I am beginning to suspect, though, that Winston is the girl and Clementine should have remained Clement.

Art Buchwald, Columnist and Humourist

Art Buchwald died 18 January at the age of 81. I remember when his column was one of the first things I would read in the newspaper. I was a schoolgirl/young teen when he was at the height of his popularity, but he aged very well, because since his humour was absurd, sharp and never bitter or cruel, it never really went out of fashion. In fact, click on the link above, and then click on the link for the video feature, to see Art at his most sublime, with his self-made, one sentence, video obituary made especially for the web. Brilliant.

Deborama's WWW Number 8 - Tilefish

Tilefish is a UK-based highly specialised shopping site - for Scrabble enthusiasts. Countdown fans also patronise (great Countdown word, that) the site.

Iraq the 51st State (from March 2003)

A good satire and all true. This is from Mathew Engel's column in the Guardian. (NB: as I revisited this piece in my laborious conversion to the new Blogger, I reread the piece - it is chilling how what was satire in 2003 has come to pass - and is not that funny.)

Robert Anton Wilson - I don't see how to take death seriously

Robert Anton Wilson passed away yesterday, five days after posting these words on his blog (presumably with some assistance, as it says he was paralysed):

Various medical authorities swarm in and out of here predicting I have between two days and two months to live. I think they are guessing. I remain cheerful and unimpressed. I look forward without dogmatic optimism but without dread. I love you all and I deeply implore you to keep the lasagna flying.

Please pardon my levity, I don't see how to take death seriously. It seems absurd.

R A Wilson was the main "founder" of a philosophy he called Discordianism, in his cult novel trilogy Illuminatus.

Deborama's WWW Number 7 - the Chimp-o-matic

Today's website of the week is available as a template add-on in Blogger, a flash add-on for your MySpace page or a "stuff" to add to your Google homepage. Chimp-o-matic is simply a very unflattering pic of GWB looking especially chimp-like, accompanied by one of his more boneheaded quotes, which changes daily. It has no redeeming social value whatsoever. And as its creator says, if you think GWB walks on water and heals the sick, this probably means that the terrorists have won.

Our newest birds

Here is a picture of the newest additions to our household. These are two young cockatiels named Winnie and Clemmie. Clemmie is the one in the foregound with the peachy cheeks; she is actually smaller but is standing in front. They join our budgies (but in a different cage for now, although they all get out a lot) : Pearl, Hughie, Holly and Hilary. And of course our little black (now black and grey) dog Desmond.
Winnie and Clemmie came to us as a freebie from my friend Cindy, who runs a parrot rescue centre (not actually restricted to parrots, she also has at least one pigeon!) and she hand-rears birds, does bird-counselling and bird-sitting and all kinds of stuff. She gave us the 'tiels supposedly because they were possibly becoming "feral" after their hand-rearing, so she didn't want to sell them, but really as you can see they are quite tame. We thought it might take a week before they would let us handle them but they were stepping up on our hands and perching on us on the second day.

US Peace delegation protests outside Guantanamo

Why is this not news? OK, so I'll stop being disingenuous. Why is this news being censored? OK, you're right, even that is a naive question. Why are none of the leftist blogs in the US or the UK covering this? Are they not aware? Is there some pernicious angle to the story not apparent to me that makes it OK that there's a virtual news blackout on it in the US and only low-key coverage in the UK? I heard a brief discussion on the BBC (Radio 4) but it was at just past 6 in the morning and not repeated. It's not in the Guardian; it's in only tiny, ultra-liberal US print media. A blog search turned up nothing. A Google News search found a few stories including the one above, but the only "major" papers carrying it were Canadian or Caribbean. What's the deal?

I hope it IS just me; on the 2007 opening of Congress

I had to turn off Nancy Pelosi and her glibly triumphal speech. I'm sorry, I am not a good Democrat, it is true. (I'm not really a Democrat at all; it's just that they're less evil than the other guys.) I mean, first of all, the Dems as a rule are so self-congratulatory it's nauseating. All they did was win one measly midterm, and that barely by a gnat's crotchet, and to listen to them you would think they had stood on an asteroid and hove the straying earth back into orbit. But the really sad thing to me is the utterly fallen state of oratory skills and public demeanor.
This is how I heard the honourable Ms. Pelosi's speech, once I blanked out the content for the above reasons and others: A laboriously, prissily delivered sound bite, then rapturous applause. A brief interval of silence, basking in the glow. A second laboriously, prissily delivered sound bite, more rapturous applause. A third sound bite, slightly more shrill, and the applause, having barely died down, swells again. A moment to all catch our breaths and savour our righteousness. A very laboriously delivered sound bite that thinks it's a rhetorical master-stroke, followed by delirious applause and a group orgasm.
I can remember a time when the whole speech was delivered in its entirety before anyone would consider whether it was good enough to merit a little polite applause or a respectful standing ovation. The sort of newspeak cliche-fests we now have would not have been considered worthy. From what little of the actual words that leaked through into my aggrieved brain, I think the new Majority Leader's text was mainly feminism and its long-overdue rewards. Now if she actually does anything to advance the cause of women in her new position, I may retract my disgust a little, but I am not holding my breath. Because there was also some very realpolitikal waffle about Iraq in there too.

Deborama's WWW Number 6 - Beg the Question? Get it right!

Just in time for Wednesday, I was listening to a great programme about words on the radio (Radio 4's Word of Mouth) and amongst some other wonderful stuff about words that have appeared over the horizon this year just past (2006 that is) there was a snippet about the website for a society that I have always dreamed might exist yet never knew it did all along. The group to which I refer is begthequestion.info and their purpose in existence is to get people to stop using the term "begs the question" in a completely incorrect manner. In case you are one of the majority of - oh - at a guess, 99.76% of English-speakers who do this, I will let the experts set you straight, because frankly I am sick of trying:

To beg the question does not mean "to raise the question." (e.g. "It begs
the question, why is he so dumb?") This is a common error of usage made by those
who mistake the word "question" in the phrase to refer to a literal question.
Sadly, the error has grown more and more common with time, such that
even journalists, advertisers, and major mass media entities have fallen prey to
"BTQ Abuse."
While descriptivists and other such laissez-faire linguists are
content to allow the misconception to fall into the vernacular, it cannot be
denied that logic and philosophy stand to lose an important conceptual label
should the meaning of BTQ become diluted to the point that we must constantly
distinguish between the traditional usage and the erroneous "modern" usage. This
is why we fight.

OK, you ask, in your fog of confusion, what does it mean then? (Because chances are very, very, very high that you have never in your life heard it used correctly, unless you have taken a university-level course in logic or have very well-educated and pedantic parents, or both.) I am not in total agreement with the definition the website (yes, even the passionate are not quite precise enough for me) but the one provided by Wikipedia is quite up to scratch:

Begging the question in logic, also known as circular reasoning and by the Latin name petitio principii, is an informal fallacy found in many attempts at logical arguments. An argument which begs the question is one in which a premise presupposes the conclusion in some way. Such an argument is valid in the sense in which logicians use that term, yet provides no reason at all to believe its conclusion.

I will give my favourite example. In an episode of The Good Life, Margo Leadbetter is asked by Barbara Good why she hates pigs so much. She looks at Barbara in dumfounded astonishment and says "Because they are pigs!"

Deborama's WWW Number 5 - Unfairpak

American readers of the blog will probably not be familiar with the Christmas hamper concept, unless they are even older than me and reside in the Northeast, perhaps. But the Christmas hamper has been the main vehicle of Christmas cheer for working class families in Great Britain since the early 20th century, and Farepak was one company leader in this field, a company which combined elements of direct sales, network marketing and modern finance with the old fashioned idea of "buying Christmas" a year ahead of time and paying for it in small zero-interest payments throughout the year. A charming picture until it all went horribly wrong in September of this year. This website, a real grass-roots effort by victims of the fund's collapse, tells the intricate but nauseatingly familiar story of big banks balancing their books on the backs of small consumers and workers.

Another budgie done gone

Sadly, I must report the sudden death of Sanjay, our prettiest budgie. Last night, after a normal day of playing and chirping and other birdy activities, he suddenly fell off his perch and just died. So now there are four. They seem OK, so it must have just been his time to go. To budgie heaven.

Blogkeeping - New Blogger

I have taken up the new Blogger format with the possibility of categorising posts and numerous other options. I have begun the process of re-templating my "lesser" blogs, Deborama's Book Reviews and Store, Deborama's Kitchen and Deborama's Fund of Knowledge. If you ever read these blogs, please take a moment to look at the format and give me feedback. I have not added back in all the little bits, the javascripts and the sidebar links, but I will if the format seem to be working out OK. I have another blog which I have made private, which is just personal photos and various trivia. If you want access to that, send me an e-mail and request it. (You will have to get a Google account, but you won't have to use it for anything else if you are one of those anti-Google fanatics. Personally, I kinda like Google and all their stuff.)

Deborama's WWW Number 4 - Subversive Cross-stitch

I am just barely under the wire here, and only if I count Alaska time and not GMT. Also, probably too late for Christmas gift shipping, but these might make a good New Year's present for the right kind of person: it's Subversive Cross-stitch. No need to explain what it is, it does exactly what it says on the tin, as the Brits would say. There is also a book.

New Orleans writers struggle to pen rebirth story

Tonight and tomorrow night BBC Four TV will be showing Spike Lee's When the Levees Broke. Earlier I posted about a spate of excellent books that came out over the year and a bit since Katrina. One that I didn't know about then but later discovered was by one of my great favourite authors from New Orleans, Andrei Codrescu, New Orleans Mon Amour (actually a collection of stories, poems and essays spanning the last 20 years, from and about NOLA.) I bought the book for my daughter, another doomed lover of the Big Easy, and I have heard that she liked it a lot. And now I found this story, one of many concerning how the various communities of New Orleans, the musicians, the artists, the political activists, have been struggling creatively but often painfully, to rebuild in the wake of the great deluge.

Look, I know this isn't consistent, but . . .

This just makes me sick. Ok, I wasn't at the trial and I should not judge someone by the expression on their face and I am not one of these uber-feminists who believes all men are rapists or even that most men are. And yes, I have thought that the astonishingly high numbers of people who claim to have been molested by a relative, usually a father or grandfather, is a little questionable. But dammit - look at his face. And look at his words: "I have no idea why my daughter hates me so much as to falsely accuse me of raping her." Well, that's damned suspicious. It would be more believable if you could come up with a plausible reason. Lots of girls are angry when their fathers leave their mothers and it usually doesn't escalate to an accusation of rape, then a formal charge, then a dramatic and messy suicide. How likely is it that a 17 year old girl genius would jump out of a hotel window to certain ugly death just to score a point against her innocent but hated father? I just don't think so.

Deborama's WWW Number 3 - Television Without Pity

My Wednesday Website of the Week for this week is Television Without Pity. This wacky website is couch-potato heaven, with the most in-depth, spoiler-ridden episode guides to current and past TV series you can hope to find. It includes the high-brow and the low, the silly and the sublime, although all the reviewers are rather silly. The episode synopses can run to 14 or more web pages and are often more entertaining than the show itself.

Ali Rap

A new book produced by graphic designer and long-time friend of Muhammad Ali, George Lois, Ali Rap, is a collection of "quotable moments" and iconic images of "The Greatest". Lois is also well-known for his infamous Esquire magazine cover of Ali as St. Sebastian (left). The history behind the picture is fascinating.

Deborama's WWW Number 2 - 6 degrees of Wikipedia

The second ever Deborama's WWW (Wednesday Website of the Week) is Six degrees of Wikipedia. In case the name is not self-explanatory enough, it works like this. You type the titles of two Wikipedia-articled people, places, things or concepts into the two search boxes provided and click on "go". It returns the number of links that separate them. I was astonished how short the links are. I tested it first with my ex-brother-in-law (the only near relative I was sure would be Wikiable) and HM the Queen (entered as Elizabeth II). There were only four degrees of separation; in fact, only three if I did not exclude day-and-date pages. (Try it and you will see why: Wikipedia cross-references all the dates it cites on grand index pages by year, month and day.)
Postscript: SInce just after I posted this, I have not been able to access this site; I keep getting a server-down message. Apologies to readers who tried it and couldn't access.

I have to have this book!

NPR's books previews website, from which I get a daily feed, today has a book called Sister Bernadette's Barking Dog, which is a fond look at the lost art of diagramming sentences. An art that I deeply regret the loss of, by the way.

Enter Sandman

City Pages has a great article about and interview with Neil Gaiman. I love the headline : Why Neil Gaiman is about to become bigger than Death. If you're a Gaiman fan you will get that. But apparently our boy is not the nerdy comic book writer and story teller he once was (not that he was then, either, but he came off that way). There are a massive raft of movies coming out in the next few years that are either based on his novels or graphic novels or otherwise involve him in the production. One is a live-capture version of Beowulf and one is called Death and is based on the Sandman graphic novels. I am sort of a Neil Gaiman fan. I still have never read Good Omens, which he co-wrote with Terry Pratchett and a few of his books I was not able to get into. On the other hand, I did love the Sandman series and also his novel American Gods.

The Freakonomics guy is blown away by Barack Obama

If Barack Obama is as good a politician as he is a writer, he will soon be President, says Steven D. Levitt of Freakonomics fame. The many pages of comments hash out the question of whether or not he (Obama) is in fact a good politician, and with the lively participation of conservatives, it's about even.

Deborama's WWW Number 1 - McSweeney's

The very first one - a subsite of McSweeney's, a very unusually structured blog / wiki thing. This site is dedicated to interviews with people who think their jobs (in some cases previous jobs) are unusual or interesting. The one I read first, and still like best, is the one about working at a strip club with your Mom.

New feature - Deborama's WWW

I am instituting a new feature on Deborama starting today: it is called Deborama's WWW (Wednesday Website of the Week). This is partly inspired by the BBC Radio 2 feature "Miles Mendoza's Website of the Day", which, although I enjoy it, I have often thought I could do better.
If I get really energetic at this, I may post them more often than weekly, in which case they will be titled "Deborama's WMD" (Website More-or-less Daily).

The timetable for withdrawal from Iraq

According to the inimitable Steve Bell. In another bygone era (the early 1970s) there was a joke about something that was not very funny. "What do you call 7500 GIs and 10000 US Marines dangling from the runner of a military helicopter?" "An orderly withdrawal from Southeast Asia." (Alternative answer : peace with honor. Honor. What a quaint word.) The same so-called joke can soon be applied to Iraq, but you might want to add "over the smoking wreckage of an overloaded British helicopter?" And they had the gall to say Iraq was no Vietnam.

The lost boys of Japan

On NPR's All Things Considered, Michele Norris talks with Michael Zielenziger, author of Shutting Out the Sun: How Japan Created Its Own Lost Generation.

Zielenziger profiles a caste of Japanese youth called hikikomori, mostly young men who lock themselves away in their bedrooms, fearful of society's expectations. He also talks about Japan's aging working class and the tendency of young women to shun motherhood.

Zombies sue police

Just another typical Minneapolis story.

Hurricanes may hardly ever happen . . .

. . . in Hampshire, according to Professor 'iggins. But what about tornadoes?

Farewell to a cinematic genius

It's another month, another Deborama obituary. Maybe this is what it means to be over 50. But Altman, who passed away yesterday, was one year older than my Dad (and the Queen.) McCabe and Mrs. Miller has remained on my top-20 list of films for over 30 years.

Now, she just wants to get them home . . .

I found this heart-rending NYT article about 30-year old Capt. Stephanie Bagley through Google News. It's just one of many on-the-ground reports from Iraq that paint a picture of despair and lost faith. In 2003 this blog and many journalists, historians and military experts speculated over whether Iraq would become GWB's "Vietnam". I don't believe things were ever this bad in Vietnam, not just from a specific body-count perspective (where Vietnam was much worse), but in terms of how quickly it all went wrong and how bad we will leave things when we leave. And certainly from the perspective of the morale of the soldiers, Iraq is the worst. With Vietnam, the leaders tended to question the motives behind the war after they got back home, if at all. But just to imagine a young person, in a position of command, with life-or-death responsibilities, who can find no way to believe in their mission but is impelled by duty to do it, it makes me weep. There has been a lot to make me weep in this terrible misadventure.

Catch-up

I have thought, more than once, that the Catholic church could use blogging software as a vehicle for confessions. There would be no need for the "it has been nine days since my last confession" declaration, because the posting dates are very good guilt-tripping devices. (But you can tell I'm not really a Catholic - for one thing I think individual confession is now obsolete, along with limbo and St. Christopher.)
There's too much going on on the personal level for me these days. It's not that there are not plenty of outrages and other noteworthy things going on in the news, it's just that it has to be really extreme before I think my contribution is needed. (And of course, it's never needed, that's just hubris speaking.) I visit MySpace every day, but not my blog. In fact I have met (not in person yet, but soon I hope) a fellow female American ex-pat who lives in a village not 5 miles from here. She is also something of an expert on pet birds, and has a flock of them herself. I finally got the device hooked up to my "newer" laptop, the one that fried, so the little memory stick port no longer works :( , so that I can upload pictures from my camera and I have put here the best of many pictures of our five budgies. Their names, in order left to right, bottom to top: Huey, Pearl, Holly, Sanjay and Hilary.

Bernie Sanders - first socialist in the US Senate

They say the Senate still "hangs in the balance" due partly to the wins by two independents. But one of those is Vermont's new junior Senator Bernie Sanders, formerly its only Representative, and before that the long-time mayor of Burlington. I think we can safely assume he will vote with the Democrats a lot of the time, though.

Amy Klobuchar Wins MN Senate Seat - first woman Senator from Minnesota

Klobuchar takes over the Senate seat vacated by liberal Democrat Mark Dayton. Part of the whole balance tipping deal.

And Keith Ellison, First Muslim Elected to Congress

Like it says. And even better, he's my Congressional rep. Cool.
That's Keith in the picture up there, next to Amy.

Hola, Daniel (y Rosario)

Hasta La Vista, Baby to Donald. I find it a delicious irony that ex-Commandante Daniel Ortega, with wife Rosario Murillo as the power behind the throne, wins the presidential election in Nicaragua and the next day his old nemesis Donald Rumsfeld is forced to resign in disgrace. Nicaragua is desperately poor, with most of the population in extreme poverty. And this is all down to Rummy and his Cold Warrior chums crushing the life out of the country with years of low-level warfare and economic blockade after the Sandinistas first came to power.
There are a lot of little ironies in Nicaragua's political scene. Like Ortega's running mate, who is an ex-Contra and whose house was commandeered by Ortega years ago. (As a gesture of reconciliation, however, Ortega has since paid him compensation, but he kept the house.) Other excellent news from the US elections. Democrats now control the House. Other details to follow . . .

Wolfman meets Dracula and the dangers of zombie sex

Just a little too late for Hallowe'en, I found this priceless article in City Pages, a sort of agony aunt for those in real agony - contemplating carnal relations with various species of the undead for example.
On the way home from work, we tend to listen to a particularly mindless radio show on BBC Radio 1. Today the DJ or host or whatever he is, Scott Mills, tried lamely to stir up a controversy that people, especially in Britain and especially "these days", don't "appreciate the true meaning of Hallowe'en". According to Mills, the true meaning of the holiday has something to do with devil worship, and therefore if you are going to dress up, it should be as a witch, warlock or Satan. What rubbish! This man knows absolutely nothing of his heritage, particularly given the fact that he is gay. The "Hallow" in Hallowe'en is hallowed as in holy or in this instance, saints. What has that to do with devil worship. And what has devil worship to do with witches and warlocks? And anyway, the minor Christian (not Satanic) holiday of Hallowe'en has been combined with the forbidden Celtic pagan one called Samhain. This is traditionally a time when the boundary between the mundane world and the world of faerie thins and vanishes. It is in the folk memory of the "the faerie court will ride" that people indulge in fancy dress and wild parties. To my mind, that is the true meaning of Hallowe'en.

What it's come to

I am sort of watching (intermittently listening to) PMQs on the TV (Prime Minister's Questions for those not familiar with British politics, and no, I can't explain what it is, you will just have to watch it sometime.) I see in the Guardian that support for Labour has slipped to a 20-year low, and that the Conservatives have a chance at coming back to power. How can they be so stupid? Also in the Guardian is this excellent comment piece from Simon Jenkins on Iraq.

This country has been turned by two of the most powerful and civilised nations on Earth into the most hellish place on Earth. Armies claiming to bring democracy and prosperity have brought bloodshed and a misery worse than under the most ruthless modern dictator. This must be the stupidest paradox in modern history. Neither America nor Britain has the guts to rule Iraq properly, yet they lack the guts to leave.
Blair speaks of staying until the job is finished. What job? The only job he can mean is his own.

I voted

Two years ago, I joined Democrats Abroad, not that I'm a Democrat necessarily (except, of course, the small "d" kind) but it was important to try to oust Bush when we had the chance. Now "we" (whoever that is) have a chance to have a Democratic congress. Not that that is going to solve all the world's ills, but at least they will (hopefully) stand up to Bush and give him a cold bath of reality for his last two years in office. But anyway, I managed to get myself just barely organised enough to do the ballot and get to a post office and get it sent on its way.
Not much else going on in my so-called life. Today we are getting two more budgies - numbers four and five - who are hand-reared babies. I have managed to get myself back to Pilates for two weeks in a row. I think our GPs are going to get all medieval on my husband and me and force us to tackle our obesity (that awkward phrasing is somewhat appropriate, because it is rather as if we share one big obesity between us.) More on the subject of health - we joined an organic box scheme, and I have blogged about it over at Deborama's Kitchen. (I apologise for the wonky layout of DK; I am working on it.)
And this Saturday I am planning to go to London with friend and fellow American ex-pat Jay. The main objective - a trip to Harrod's (we've never been, either of us.) I probably won't buy anything more than a book and what my DH calls "foodie shites". It's more for the experience.

Muhammad Yunus, Nobel Peace laureate 2006

As Muhammad Yunus, founder of the Grameen Bank, "the most effective anti-poverty organisation in the world" is announced as winner of the 2006 Nobel Peace prize, Middle Tennessee State University is proud to claim him as one of their own. (He was a professor of Economics there.) Back in Tennessee, Yunus's work with the Grameen Bank has always been greatly admired - and influential. Numerous economics students from Tennessee have served internships with Grameen Bank in India, and some southern progressives are considering a programme based on it to help the refugees of Hurrican Katrina.

We are now just another tribe

A quote from a British officer serving in Basra. Here is the whole quote, and its context:

Basra has become riddled with organised gangs, militias and death squads, and its police force is corrupt. According to senior coalition advisers, there are around 20 different security and police groups in the city, ranging from the directorate of education police to the justice police; the governor alone has 200 armed gunmen protecting him. Some of the police units are active in organised crime and have been infiltrated by militias, others work as death squads. There are also around a dozen religious militias.
"We are in a tribal society in Basra and we [the British army] are in effect one of these tribes," said Lt Col Simon Brown, commander of the 2nd Battalion. "As long as we are here the others will attack us because we are the most influential tribe. We cramp their style."

"Evidence of the ball" convicts controversial umpire

I doubt that there is anyone in the world for whom Deborama is their main source of cricket news. Nevertheless, for my own sense of closure, I will post a link to this arcane (to me) and masterful commentary on the latest, and nearly last development in the Hair vs. Inzamam saga over ball-tampering allegations and a forfeited test match. To summarise, the ICC (International Cricket Council) has ruled on the charges, and Inzamam, captain of the Pakistani team, is cleared of ball tampering, but convicted of "bringing the game into disrepute" due to the Pakistani team's sit-in protest over the cheating allegation. But the fact that the key charge that started it all, that some unspecified member of the Pakistani team tampered with the ball, has been overturned by the ICC is almost unprecedented, possibly a career-ender for the controversial umpire Hair, and bad news for umpires generally. Angus Fraser, author of the linked article, had a chance to examine the ball himself, and agrees that there is nothing like conclusive evidence of tampering, even if such a thing could be concluded from the appearance of the ball alone. Another expert witness examined the ball briefly then tossed it aside with a curt "There's nowt wrong w' that." So, ahem. Fraser reckons laws are due to be changed in the near future.

Bereft of a budgie

Sadly, one of our budgies flew the coop on just the third day of his stay with us. Earl, the one lurking in the background in the picture below, shot out of the cage and out an open transom and we have not seen him since. But this was just after what was meant to be the fourth budgie was introduced to the cage. He is Huey, a yellow-green with grey factor (I think). Apart from that, the budgies are fine. I got Sanjay to come right up close to my hand, holding a millet spray, inside the cage. Pearl is quite wary of me, though, and the new guy, Huey, is somewhat subdued. His head is so fluffy it is hard to tell when his eyes are open. A lot of my Google activity the last few days, apart from trying to find a sports bra to replace the one that's missing, has to do with budgie behaviour and care. I will post more pics soon. The news from the outside world has mostly been too dreadful to comment on.

Our three new arrivals

The size of our family has just doubled this weekend. Previously, it was me, DH and Des (a dog) and yesterday we added Sanjay, Pearl and Earl, three lovely budgerigars. They have already settled in, although we are going to get them a nicer and bigger cage very soon, and today we went out and bought lots of cute little bird toys for them. This is a new experience for me, although DH had pet birds in his childhood.

100 Years Ago in Atlanta

NPR has this story about the Atlanta race riot of September 22, 1906. At the time, it was a world-wide story, reported as far away as Italy and France. (The picture left is of a contemporary French newspaper.) In its immediate aftermath, black and white leaders of Atlanta began meeting, the most virulently racist and sensationalist newspaper went out of business. Within 10 years, the movement for black equal rights had turned its back on the accommodationist philosophy of Booker T. Washington and turned to a more activist agenda. However, the race riot has not been taught as part of the history curriculum of Atlanta or Georgia or the US. Until this year, that is, when Georgia politicians re-discovered the lesson and its importance.

The truth about fundamentalism

Karen Armstrong is the foremost world authority on the fundamentalist elements of all three "religions of the book". I am amazed that she can maintain her academic detachment, knowing all she knows about the bloody histories of their fratricidal contention. Today's comment in the Guardian gives just a taste of what she's on about.

What's wrong with Kansas/Connecticut/the Democrats?

Gary Younge is so brilliant. Here is another wonderful commentary he's written in the Guardian, which has the best explanation about how electoral politics work in the US (without getting into the whole "third" party miasma - don't get me started!) This will explain, far better than I ever could, why people who are too poor to pay taxes love the Republicans, why the numbers don't seem to add up in the red state/blue state comparison (hint: they are ignoring someone - could it be? oh, no not again! - black people!!) and, most perplexingly to Brits who know a few Americans, how someone like GW can be elected and even popular.
Some provocative excerpts:

In his book What's The Matter With Kansas?, Thomas Frank described the tendency of working-class people to vote Republican as a form of derangement. He said that the working class had been hoodwinked into voting against its economic interests by "values" issues such as abortion and gay rights. There were two main problems with this argument. . .

So what's the matter with all these analyses? First of all they seem to step over a huge elephant in the room - namely race. There is a reason why we are only talking about white working-class voters: black people, regardless of income, overwhelmingly vote Democrat. Indeed, were it not for black people, the Democrats would have won the presidency only once, in 1964. That was the year President Lyndon Johnson signed the civil rights act, turned to an aide and said: "We have lost the south for a generation." We are well into the second generation now, and the racialised politics of the south seem to be influencing the rest of the country rather than the other way round.

My second hotspot blog

Well, not counting the two I did in between from a motel in Minneapolis. I am back in Keflavik in the 1.5 hour stopover between Minneapolis and London Heathrow.
The trip was great. The highlight, after being there for my grand-daughter's 3rd birthday celebration at a faux Italian kid-friendly restaurant, was Homecoming Sunday at Walker Church. The music has got better in the three years I have been away. It was very powerful. I requested number 62 in the Walker songbook - a countryish number called Powerlines by a guy called Larry Lattanzi.
Powerlines across the prairie
Haybales in the rain
Fields that stretch forever
Fenceposts across the plain.
It's a song about riding the train through America's heartland on a "steel gray afternoon" and just the ticket for the homesick blues. We finished up with "I saw the light" and then of course "Amazing Grace" in the circle afterwards. I feel better now.

Wasn't that a time?

The Guardian has a retrospective article about the Greenham Common Peace Camp. Participants in the demonstrations are asked for their recollections, both the positive and the negative, and it is interesting to see where they are now and how they compare the political feel of the present day to 1981-83. One of the women pictured left is now a Plaid Cymru member of the Welsh Assembly. She feels very betrayed by the Labour party's present support for war in Iraq and the Trident missile. No surprise there. Many women today question the exclusion of men that was a major hallmark of the Greenham Common camp. Could there be a connection, do you think? Who knows how many gentle, thoughtful young men, now more anonymous even than the Greenham heroines, were discouraged forever from political activism, and what if they had come to lead the Labour party, rather than a naked opportunist named Blair and a curiously old-school, paternalistic socialist named Brown, and all their male and female acolytes, none of whom would have been at Greenham Common in the first place? It kind of makes you think.

Minneapolis

I have been in Minneapolis since the evening of the 29th and I've been pretty busy catching up with my grand-daughter Savannah and my daughter Aimee. On Wednesday we went to the Midtown Global Market, which is almost as good as I had been led to believe. My middle sister Cindy was also here from Wednesday night through Saturday morning. We took her to the Seward Cafe Thursday morning and on Friday she took Aimee and Savannah on a mini-shopping-spree at the Mall of America. We all got together with Savannah's paternal grandma and her sisters and mother on Friday night at the Old Spaghetti Factory for Savannah's 3rd birthday. Savannah is a big fan of Dora the Explorer and her cake and most of her presents featured Dora and her companions. Aimee and Savannah go home tomorrow night and then I must turn my attention to all my friends here that I came here to see. The trip will culminate for me with Homecoming Sunday at Walker Church and then back home via Reykjavik. I really have no excuse not to blog constantly, because there is free wifi everywhere including my motel. But as you can see, I am not blogging constantly; must be age and laziness.