houdini in the desert

On Ted Hughes being admitted to Poet's Corner

2011-12-26T13:29:00.000-08:00

To the residents of Poets Corner

Budge over ditty-mongers, Ted
Is here; and lugging rhymeless tomes
He comes to join the rhyming dead
And here engrave his timeless pomes
(That’s timeless in a modern sense
As in “no time to pause and think.”
It doesn’t mean they transcend tense.)
No long re-writes – why waste the ink?
The stuff just poured out from his heart
With that berating earthy voice
Committees love; and hence their choice.
Now Ted can share with you his art:
“When inspiration fails use guile!
Who reads all that? Just clock yon pile!!”

Auenis player

2011-06-18T08:21:00.000-07:00

I was recently intrigued by the above caption, mirrored on several sites, to an image of a Roman mosaic depicting a man with a panpipe. Sensing the red herring, it didn't take me long to narrow down the source of the information to an online article whose author claimed to have “stumbled” on a Latin word, undiscovered by previous Latin dictionaries, meaning “panpipes”.

He found this word “auenis” in a line from Ovid. “Sub galea pastor iunctis pice cantat auenis”. As anyone who knows his Latin can see, “avenis” here is an ablative plural, confirmed by the presence of “cunctis”, ablative plural of cunctus, meaning “joined”, in agreement with it. A quick search in the dictionary will turn up “avena” meaning “oats” and by extension, a stalk of a grass or cane, and therefore “tube” or “chalumeau”.
The passage comes from book V of Tristia, in which the poet bemoans the civil strife in the countryside, causing the ploughman to plough unhappily with one hand, holding a weapon in the other, and here, the shepherd, under his helmet, to play on reeds joined with pitch (a makeshift panflute) to calm his sheep, who are afraid of the wolf.

Ovid also used the expression “avenae structae” to mean panpipes, literally “arrayed tubes”. These were presumably of better manufacture than the ones made by the shepherd with the materials to hand in the war-torn countryside.

Supposing for a moment that there was a word “avenis” or “auenis” (i-stem 3rd declension) meaning panflute, what is it doing in this sentence? If it is a nominative that would make it the subject in competition with “pastor”. The only other possibility ending in “-is” is a genitive. Either way, that leaves poor “cunctis” orphaned, a participle with nothing to qualify. The correct parsing of the line is therefore, as I tried to explain to him, “sub galea”=under his helmet, “pastor cantat”=the shepherd sings/plays, “avenis”= on tubes”, “cunctis pice”= joined with (coal tar) pitch.

While there may yet be undiscovered words of the Latin language, they are unlikely to inhabit the verses of Ovid, a poet already studied by millions of schoolchildren and professors.

When I made contact with the author to put him straight I was treated to a barrage of vituperative messages in which he claimed as his authority the Internet, specifically an online Latin dictionary compiled by an amateur from Texas. Blind faith in dubious sources goes back to before the printed word, where at least the name of the authority quoted carried a certain amount of weight. But today the argument "Just Google it and you'll see" seems to trump common sense.

So who was the authority in this case?

Well it turns out that he makes no bones about not even being one. By "just Googling" the name of the compiler of the dictionary, one William Whitaker, I came upon the following engaging disclaimer:

"I am not a Latin scholar, only a dictionary hacker (in the old sense of one building with only an ax as a tool). While I try to [...] do the best I can, I am a very unreliable source [...] And I am not qualified to even try English-to-Latin."

Ah, my faith in Google is restored!

The Frog and the Scorpion: Fable or Prophecy?

2011-02-10T06:58:00.000-08:00

Today at last, even the most Panglossian, chai-drinking Utopian dreamers are being grudgingly forced to admit that the Koran, a book held sacred by a fifth of humanity, contains a 1400-year-old call to arms against the other four fifths. Muslims are enjoined to fight them to convert them, squeeze them for tax or kill them.

There is a well known folk tale about a frog and a scorpion which typifies albeit in caricature the present confrontation between European do-gooders and Islam. The scorpion asked the frog to give him a ride over a river. The frog demurred, saying that he didn’t want to get killed by the scorpion’s sting. The scorpion argued that he wouldn’t do something as stupid as that since they would both drown. This made sense to the frog who agreed to carry the scorpion across. Halfway across, the scorpion stung the frog and as they were both sinking the frog asked why. The answer came: “Because it’s my nature, and I cannot change that”. The learned Arabist Hans Jansen, testifying at the trial of Geert Wilders for incitement to hatred, stated that what distinguished Islam from other religions is precisely its immutability. Everything in it is based on what is written, mektub, and that cannot be changed by man.¹

A variation on this story puts a fox in place of the frog. The scorpion’s last words in this version were: “It is better we should both perish than that my enemy should live.” An answer which succinctly encapsulates the attitude of those sworn to the destruction of Israel: the current Iranian leadership, Hizbollah in Lebanon, and Hamas in the Gaza strip. By their indifference to taking casualties, both Hamas and Hizbollah have already demonstrated with “conventional” weapons that the Cold War doctrine of balance of deterrence - which kept the peace for so long - is no longer valid. Speaking of Iran in the film Iranium Bernard Lewis remarked: “With these people with their apocalyptic mindset, mutually assured destruction is not a deterrent, it’s an inducement.” Iran, famous for having prepared a generation of schoolchildren for martyrdom during the war with Iraq, now waits to up the ante.

For nearly a century United States foreign policy agents have been assiduously playing frog to scorpions worldwide, in Latin America and Africa, but above all in the Middle East and South Asia. American money has been naïvely funnelled in huge quantities to support regimes or the resistance groups which oppose them, on a “lesser of two evils” basis. Generous funding enables these “allies” to buy sufficient arms to become in effect a greater evil than the one the US was hoping to use them to defeat. At which point they turn against their erstwhile mentors and Americans are left to rue their ingratitude. Saddam Hussein in Iraq and the Mujahideen – later to morph into the Taliban – in Afghanistan are only the best known examples. The astonishing thing is how often the mistake is repeated, in a chain sequence. By deposing its former ally Saddam and bringing a semblance of majority rule to Iraq it has taken the lid off a can of worms by empowering the much more religiously deranged Shia section of the population, which Saddam had successfully kept down. To balance this error and in an effort to limit the consequent growth in Iran’s influence, the CIA now funds the Jundullah, a separatist Sunni terror organisation in south-east Iran. Who will be the next beneficiary of American largesse? Already the Taliban, a bunch of murderous goons, are being invited to talks likely to lead to power-sharing arrangements in Afghanistan. Doubtless, a condition of their participation will be a second helping of US funding, and so it goes on. The US seems to have boundless faith in its ability to buy buddyhood matched by a total blindness to the contempt engendered by its efforts to do so. As a result it ends up setting political wildfires and wondering why its hands get burnt.

A similar sucker role is also being played in Europe by governmental coddling of Islam. Every political and religious concession made to Muslim “sensibilities” adds a plank to the platform of those who would see democratic governance replaced by God’s law, as dictated in the seventh century by an illiterate serial rapist, mass murderer and armed robber – to keep the list short. Just like the frog, who had nothing to gain in the deal even if Scorpion were to keep his word, European governments are motivated by a futile desire to be liked. They will be lucky to earn pity. As for votes, they are beginning to get some surprises in that direction too.

What is most instructive in this cautionary tale is not so much the self-defeating spite of the scorpion (which we cannot change anyway), but the frog’s blithe acceptance of the scorpion’s arguments. By assuming the scorpion to be motivated by common sense and a shared survival instinct the frog judges the scorpion by his own rational standards. The scorpion has astutely based his arguments on his understanding of the frog’s thinking. Conversely, the frog is unable to form a conceptual framework to deal with the scorpion’s mindset. The frog takes the Confucian view that man’s nature starts off fundamentally good². It is this incomprehension which puts the frog at a disadvantage and is the biggest threat to frog survival. How best to overcome this barrier to understanding? How can frogs brought up to believe with Candide that “all is for the best in the best of all possible worlds” learn to deal with a culture which says “If there is a dwelling purely for you in the hereafter with Allah to the exclusion of [other] people[s], then long for death if you are truthful.”³

There is an urgent need for frogs to come to an intuitive understanding of scorpion mentality. They will need to accept not only that such a mentality is possible in today’s world, but also that it is probably beyond a frog’s power to change it by kindness or persuasion. At the same time, if we can question the frog’s naivety, we might be able to avoid drowning in our own goodwill, and quit offering a free ferry service.

The frog’s weak spot

If we try to take a big step back and compare today with Churchill’s time, it is interesting to ask why the West seems to have lost the ability to breed principled leaders, or even stout defenders of national sovereignty or identity. And even if one Western country could produce such a person, what freedom of action could such a leader have in today’s world? The democratic seesaw tips between the so-called “left” (buying the votes of the poor with the money of the rich) and the “right” (letting the rich get quietly richer in return for electoral campaign funds). This meaningless dichotomy means that the public debate is centred on totally spurious priorities, built around two opposing strategies of getting elected.

After World War II, national sovereignty was eroded first by multinational companies who could simply threaten to relocate, taking jobs and tax revenue with them if they didn’t like a government policy. But in the 1990’s, old style industrial capitalism became terminally corrupt. Stock option remuneration packages turned executives from loyal corporate officers and pillars of the community into raiders with a three-year grab-and-run plan. Honest reporting gave way to accounting legerdemain, and tax havens opened their arms to those on the run both from their governments and from angry shareholders. As currency controls evaporated in the unquestioning rush towards the “ideal” of free trade, Big Capital took over the reins from Big Industry, and can now breathe down governments’ necks, forcing them to make austerity programs that none of their voters want. This extortionate practice, causing widespread bankruptcies and job losses, is cynically termed a “bailout”. So if the people have no say any more, what is the point of democracy?

Big Capital is the baby of the “positive net worth individual” (PNWI). This means people who, by being dealt good cards and/or playing them right, are able to pay off their mortgages and put enough money aside to live by asset management alone, or without working at all if a good manager can be found. Big Capital consists of institutions owned and run by these PNWIs and its principal activity is that of getting even bigger. It used to do this by investing in promising industries, thus creating wealth and justifying its own existence. In recent years however, it is looking at less risky sources of revenue, such as rental property and the financing of welfare states. Yawning social service deficits in developed countries are attractive sources of interest for the lenders. Unemployment is becoming big business, and a safer bet than productive enterprise. It has the secondary advantage of slowing inflation, Big Capital’s big enemy (and friend of the NNWI – Negative Net Worth Individuals – did they but know it).

In political terms this encourages the emergence of a new electoral strategy called “centre” politics, in which the poor are given money borrowed – not taxed – by the government from the rich. The magic here is that the government wins the votes of the poor, who think that it is working in their interest, and at the same time earns campaign funds from the rich, who can watch their pile grow with all that low-risk interest. It is as if the rich are making the poor a loan which is paid back by the government. The victims of this arrangement, our children who will shoulder the debt, are too young to vote. On the property side, wealthy landlords can charge sky-high rents to tenants who happen to receive housing allowance from the government, paid for with more borrowed money, yielding more interest to the rich and prising the wealth gap ever wider. The obvious instability of such arrangements results in those “bailout” moments described above. By threatening to downgrade a country’s credit rating, Big Capital is simply saying: if you can’t afford to pay us we will charge you even higher interest. In this it is dealing with politicians who are all playing the “centre” electoral strategy and are easily cowed by threats of a walkout from their sponsor. Amongst other favours, centre politicians do everything within their power to maintain house prices, especially in the UK – one of the most indebted nations in the world – which only benefits holders of interest-bearing loans (the banks and building societies), a fact which may surprise house owners who are weak at mathematics.

By giving the appearance of existing for the benefit of borrowers, financial institutions serve as front organizations, or catspaws, for the real cash beneficiaries, the PNWIs. In fine, they package and opacify the greed of depositors and shareholders (“investors”), screening it from customers whose function is to provide revenue. They can use their privy knowledge of the arcana of macro-finance to pull the wool over the eyes of legislators. During panics and crises often precipitated by the better placed among them, their representatives are suddenly available to offer expert advice to governments, suggesting bailouts and warning against controls. If governments, instead of talking about tough negotiations with banks and funds, were to acknowledge that they are begging the rich for advice to get out of the mess, while also tapping them for loans, the public would be presented with a truer picture. Why are State governments, who supposedly have the power to set taxes, going cap in hand to rich lenders and offering them deals to make them still richer? If any sign were needed that Western governments can no longer lead a pig to market, this fits the bill.

OK now: having caricatured Big Capital’s takeover of real power from nation-states, it might seem paradoxical to go on to describe this all-powerful beast as the frog’s weak spot. What makes it so is its lack of what used to be called moral fibre. Lending institutions have a primary duty to make their shareholders and depositors richer. These shareholders and depositors may include people with strongly held moral principles, but since voting power is proportional to holdings, the richer and therefore more wealth-intoxicated generally hold the majority. It is these people who, through the institutions which manage their wealth, have voting power which trumps that of electorates of nation states. Yet this power is virtually incapable of serving any principle other than dull greed. Driven by a constant stream of new hungry depositors, Big Capital will never afford the pasha’s luxury of being so rich he can affect a reckless indifference to wealth. And this is where the frog is most vulnerable: in its inability to do useful things to do with its money other than make more of it. Unlike a Saudi prince, the rich man in the West is owned by his money.

Islam’s critique of the West relentlessly hits this very spot. The faithful are told that the world would be a fairer place if there were no more lending at interest, and if the rich were obliged to pay zakat to support the poor. And this is the very message that Western politicians should be delivering if they were really sincere in fighting on behalf of the majority of voters, most of whom are Negative Net Worth Individuals – at least in the debt-ridden UK and USA. But then who would pay for their TV ads at election time? More to the point, would the TV stations – owned by Big Capital – even run the ads? In any case, by refusing to tell voters the macroeconomic truth, Western Governments leave the door open for the truth to arrive from another quarter, dressed as religion this time.

When macroeconomic manoeuvrings - a “system” - produce manifest injustice, one can try to understand the mechanism in order to correct unwanted effects. But with Big Capital always several steps ahead of governments, and inventing ever more arcane plays to hornswoggle an ever dumber electorate, this will not happen. Instead, we will see violent reactions led by those who haven’t a clue what the enemy’s game is. This leaves few options. No internal force will ever stop Big Capital from gobbling up the entire world - if Islam doesn’t gobble it up first. Islam can win the hearts and minds of those who feel themselves victims of “the system”. But it is the frog who in the end is the biggest victim of its own system, snared by shareholders and depositors sunning themselves out of its reach.

To change the zoological metaphor, the West is a sitting duck. Islam is a bigger, tougher challenger than Communism was. And the West now has its arms tied in historically unprecedented ways. It waits in the grip of a triple paralysis: intolerant idealism or political correctness, the slo-mo legal labyrinth of supra-national legislation and treaties, and Big Capital’s full Nelson. Plus it may soon run out of credit.

Notes

¹

Reading the Koran in chronological order reveals constantly shifting positions on a number of topics. It seems unreasonable that a god who changed his mind so often during the 23 years of Mohammed’s “ministry” should be forbidden from doing so in the ensuing 1400 years.

²

人之初性本善

³

Koran 2:94. One of the meaner verses of the Koran. The phrase khaalisatan min duuni nnaasi – “especially to the exclusion of people” seems intended to make paradise all the more appealing when there are less tourists or if you don’t have to share those virgins with anyone else.

Is the Koran desirable?

2009-02-11T04:24:00.000-08:00

Since I posted the piece entitled "Is the Koran actionable?" I have come to realise that the real problem of the Koran lies not in the isolated verses where it steps over the lines (lines which were drawn by mere mortals in the House of Commons committees which frame our laws), but in its pervading paranoid tribalist mindset. Geert Wilders's film Fitna also makes a verse-by-verse indictment, which though it pinpoints different verses as objectionable, fails to answer the broader question of whether we would want such a publication even with the offending verses removed? Threatening hellfire on unbelievers (fakirs), and those who pretend to believe (the muneffekhs) is not illegal because the punishment is posthumous and does not constitute assault under English law. Still, Geert is to be saluted for taking on the fight, albeit obliged to resort to legalistic nitpicking curiously reminiscent of the 1925 Scopes Monkey Trial. The truth is, for dealing with fire breathers, England was never more in need of this gentleman:

Given the prickly sensibilities involved, the best I can do for the concerned reader is direct him to a page where he can download
St George screensavers. If you get an error message, copy the address from the address bar (Ctrl+C), say a little prayer to St George and then paste it back in in the same place (Ctrl+V). Don't ask why that works.

An Englishman's home

2009-01-29T01:58:00.000-08:00

For too long the Englishman's home has been his financial instrument, and speculation has taken his mind off productive work. He has learnt to spend his time watching the changing size of his pile. His view of the Euro matches this mentality. He considers it his birthright to be able to leverage the strength of the pound to buy cheap property abroad and is sorely miffed when as an expat he can no longer live like a king on a sterling pension. But money is like the oil in a car's motor. If it isn't continuously pumped through the system the engine seizes up. The view of money as treasury which needs to be piled up is primitive and is equivalent to letting all the oil accumulate in the sump where it can do no good. For this reason alone, the euro, which has increased the ease with which money circulates over a large area of the world, has proved its worth, and for the Brits to stay out of the eurozone is to deny its potential for lubricating and feeding the real economies of both Europe and the UK.

Thomas Jefferson said "If the American People allow private banks to control the issuance of their currency, first by inflation and then by deflation, the banks and corporations that will grow up around them will deprive the People of all their Property until their Children will wake up homeless on the continent their Fathers conquered".

Seems the same fate is befalling the mother country.

I dreamed a dream

2009-01-10T10:08:00.000-08:00

Last night I dreamt we captured Osama bin Laden. Me and four other lads. It was me that spotted the clue. There was a row of large Victorian houses facing the common, all of them abandoned because of repossessions, but only number 30 was actually boarded up. The line of footsteps in the frost leading up to the door gave it away. His office was actually at number 10, and he would have had to slink across a road every day covered by his faithful lookouts and stenographers because there was an intersection in between.

Leading our captive by a rope across the common I was surprised to bump into Oliver, an old school friend whose surname escapes me, engaged in sloshing out a pig-sty cum water-buffalo-pen.

On reaching HQ I was not sure who I was supposed to hand our prisoner over to. The assembly hall was full of soldiers seated on the floor listening to a lecture, but their brown uniforms were no guide as to which side they were on. But I was soon reassured by the voice of the lecturer, who spoke English, and was warning the troops against dangerous heresies such as Gnosticism or Arianism. Looking for a room to hold the prisoner I was dismayed to discover that every door I opened revealed Shakespearean actors getting costumed. I ended up getting the prisoner a part in the Tempest. Later, wandering down the corridor alone, I saw a young lady in battle fatigues and a white muslim headscarf trying to contact her leader on her cellphone. "Obama! Obama! Obama!" she shouted with growing alarm, as it gradually dawned on her that he must have been renditioned. Her shouting woke me up.

Ditty for the missing Kitty

2008-12-19T23:47:00.000-08:00

The weather has turned kind of funny,
It's suddenly raining subpoenas,
Since Bernie Madoff with our money,
And Dreier took us to the cleaners.

Well, their names were a bit of a giveaway...

2008-12-01T07:16:00.000-08:00

Popinjay Art (3)

2008-12-01T07:07:00.000-08:00

My favourite Catalan expression, used when talking about something so overpriced that no-one can afford it, or so pretentious that no-one can understand it, is "una gran tocada dels collons", which freely translated means "a great tickling of the balls". The present downturn in contemporary art prices exposes how some fancy people's balls have been tickled. To borrow the words of Meredith Whitney who (according to Michael Lewis, here) caused the market in financial stocks to crash. "If you want to know what these Wall Street firms are really worth, take a hard look at the crappy assets they bought with huge sums of borrowed money, and imagine what they’d fetch in a fire sale."
It may be premature for artists with something to sell apart from their signatures to cheer, but you are allowed to grin.

Popinjay Art (2)

2008-10-14T08:48:00.000-07:00

If you think Damien Hirst is bad, I invite you to Clairac's International Art Salon coming up this month in Clairac (Lot et Garonne, France). Contemporary Art is sick enough when it is original, but in the hands of French provincial pastiche merchants it truly heralds the end of civilisation. The nude in the poster for the exhibit looks as if she has been hit by a TGV before being smeared onto the canvas with kitchen implements and some kind of industrial plasticiser. Her severed right arm has been saved for an arresting sculpture to be unveiled over the vin d'honneur after the speeches.

Fuel shortage hits swifts

2008-10-14T08:00:00.000-07:00

Has anyone seen our swifts? They disappeared from our village in mid-May halfway through the breeding season and haven't been seen since. On the insect front, we have also only had seven flies, one potter wasp and a single humming bird hawk moth (macroglossum stellatarum) in the house all summer. The two facts may be related. Presumably swifts, which spend all their lives on the wing except when nesting, and (I have read somewhere) fly five times the distance from the Earth to the Moon in a lifetime, need a certain amount of fuel, measured, let us say, in grams of insects per kilometre. So when the density of airborne insect protein falls below the required threshold, what gives?

Swifts live up to their name and are born racers - until they crash. Once they fall to Earth they have trouble taking off again because their wings are too long. They can't feed and they lose morale fast. Anyone who has tried to restart a crashed swift or make it feed from the hand knows the problem.

Apart from their role in keeping down the mosquito population, swifts fulfil an essential function in livening up peaceful village evenings with their noisy rodeos. So are the treetops, hedgerows and ditches littered with swifts who just fell from the sky because of a shortage of insect protein? And are rustic eaves now full of the corpses of the chicks whose mothers never came back to feed them?

Bad language

2008-05-28T11:00:00.000-07:00

I read this a while back on bbcnews

A group of French speakers in Japan are suing the governor of Tokyo after he described French as a failed language.
The 21 teachers and researchers are demanding compensation and an apology for the "insulting remarks" from Governor Shintaro Ishihara.

Mr Ishihara is accused of saying he was not surprised French did not qualify as an international language, as it was "a language which cannot count numbers".

The veteran politician is well-known for his outspoken comments.

He has previously drawn criticism for saying the Nanjing Massacre, in which hundreds of thousands of Chinese were slaughtered by Japanese troops in the 1930s, never happened.

Mr Ishihara is referring to the fact that French, not having simple words for seventy, eighty and ninety, has to resort to periphrasis to count between 69 and 100. Some numbers are quite challenging to give out over the telephone: 84 24 20 14 94 comes out as quatre vingt quatre vingt quatre vingt quatorze quatre vingt quatorze, which read fast comes out as 84 84 94 94.

French also has over the centuries suffered a process of phonetic attrition unparalleled in other European languages, so that an instruction to put a thermometer in the baby's armpit (dans l'aisselle) could be quite legitimately be misconstrued as meaning to put it in his stools (dans les selles). Only Tibetan to my knowledge has so many silent letters.

So Mr Ishihara's remarks appear justified - so long as he is not trying to imply that Japanese counts better than French and should therefore be an international language. Let's start at the very beginning (a very good place to start - in Julie Andrews's immortal words). "One day" in Japanese is ichinichi, and "one person" is hitori. Where is the word for one? We all know the word for "person" is hito. But counting upwards, we find that "two persons" is futari. Where did hito go?

"Two days" is futsuka and so fut means "two"? But "two portions" is nininmae (which is written as futari followed by the character mae). So where did fut go?

Or maybe ri means person? But "Three persons" are sannin, so where did ri go?

Confused? Counting in Japanese is a killer, and we only got as far as three.

In the seventh century Japanese was a primitive unwritten language possibly with Korean ancestry and phonetically not unlike Polynesian in its simplicity. It then had the misfortune to import the entire Chinese "alphabet" in order to write itself. But Chinese writing is not phonetic, and along with the characters of Chinese, came the words they represented. This huge influx of words already contained a mass of homonyms even when correctly pronounced with the right tonal distinctions; when adopted into the limited sound palette of Japanese the mass became an unnavigable ocean. Sixteen Chinese syllables: zang, sang, cang, cao, zao, suo, xiang, qiang, sao, zheng, song, zong, cong, zhuang, chuang, zeng and ceng, each with a possible four tones which helped you guess the meanings were reduced in Japanese to one sound: sô.

Right up until the twentieth century the Japanese muddled bravely along with the weight of this huge foreign vocabulary distorting their grammar and overloading their phonology, so they had to trace characters in the air to make themselves understood. And then came the American occupation. For the second time in Japanese history an entire (for them) unpronounceable vocabulary was imported wholesale, along with meanings which they could only grasp after their own fashion.

Without going so far as to say Japanese is a failed language, it might be instructive to make comparisons based on the amount of money and school time spent in each country on simply mastering reading and writing. Wouldn't some kids do better kicking ball?

Languages are the greatest shared creations of humanity. But languages, like bridges, evolve towards failure. Each bridge that doesn't collapse serves as an incitement to streamline the design and cut costs until...

Off with their heads!

2008-04-17T09:49:00.000-07:00

So now they are talking about cutting off your Internet connection for downloading songs:

The notion of turning service providers into copyright cops has been gathering momentum since November, when Sarkozy announced the French plan, which was negotiated with the record industry and Internet providers. If the plan is approved in Parliament, service providers would cooperate with a new, independent authority to identify and warn pirates who could eventually face the cutoff of their Internet accounts.

It would contribute to more balanced discussion of this topic if Nicolas Sarkozy's wife's personal interest as a recording artist were to be declared. He is certainly not acting in the general interest of France, whose trade deficit with the USA would only increase if all pirating were to stop.

If his poppet's pockets are really in such dire need of additional lining, His Majesty should simply punish those who download Carla Bruni songs. The guillotine could be wheeled out of retirement for the purpose. Why cut off their Internet when you can cut off their heads? A romantic gesture indeed.

Can she knit?

Come back Genghis, all is forgiven!

2008-04-17T09:35:00.000-07:00

Chinese cannot be blamed for believing what they have been taught to believe - among other things that the biggest "rogue" of all, whose huge portrait still hangs in Tiananmen Square, was only 30% wrong. This was the man who was responsible for 70 million deaths. Had he been 100% wrong he could have wiped out half of the Chinese population of the time!

Now here's something else they won't teach in Chinese classrooms. The period when Tibet is supposed to have been "part" of China, is also the period when China was part of a Mongol, then a Manchu, Empire. So if one applies the Chinese government's own specious historical arguments to the true facts, Tibet should be returned to Mongolia.

By the same token, Algeria should still be a French département, and as for Ireland... time was when Gay Byrne could joke "we should apologise to the Queen and ask her to take us back." Wouldn't wash these days, though.

One dog starts them all barking.

2008-03-23T13:37:00.000-07:00

(From iht.com): Xinhua, the official Chinese news agency, published commentary Sunday accusing Pelosi of ignoring the violence caused by the Tibetan rioters.

" 'Human rights police' like Pelosi are habitually bad tempered and ungenerous when it comes to China, refusing to check their facts and find out the truth of the case," it said.

Surely even such a misinformed "news" service as Xinhua must have heard rumours that Tibet has been closed to outsiders, rendering it impossible for Ms Pelosi to check into a hotel let alone the facts. But while she is in Dharamsala she could help the Chinese leaders by sniffing around to see if they really have jackals in monk's robes, and how this unlikely disguise helps them steal chickens.

The Chinese themselves have a saying which goes "若要人不知，除非己莫为" (ruò yào rén bù zhī，chú fēi jǐ mò wéi) which boils down to saying: "if you don’t want others to know about it, don’t do it." So all we can do is assume that if they got something to hide, they must be doing it.

Unfortunately, a century of turmoil has turned China, once thought of as the cradle of "Oriental philosophy" and birthplace of wise sayings and homely advice such as the above, into a place where anger is held in respect. A place where it is considered statesmanlike for leaders to indulge in paranoid rants and name-calling. And where it is de rigueur for everyone else to follow suit. The Chinese have another older expression which could describe a modern propaganda campaign: "吠形吠声" (fèixíng-fèishēng) meaning: when one dog barks at a shadow all the others join in.

So it's refreshing to read in the same article that: A group of prominent Chinese intellectuals has circulated a petition urging the government to stop what it has called a "one-sided" propaganda campaign and initiate direct dialogue with the Dalai Lama.

Let's see where that gets them.

Some of you might want to check out this guy's website http://www.throughanexilelens.org

Popinjay Art

2008-02-11T11:23:00.000-08:00

Without going into arguments about the meaning of art, it would not be too wide of the mark to say that to succeed in today's Contemporary Art market, just two things are necessary. They are: to (1) get noticed and (2) have cred.

To achieve (1) it would be sufficient to ride down the main street in Teheran dressed as Lady Godiva. This gets you noticed, but only in places like Teheran. In the rest of the world, in places where big bucks are being spent on art, the problem facing artists and gallery owners alike is how do you get noticed when people are no longer surprised by any antics?

In today's climate, the feverish and highly publicised competition between Sotheby's and Christie's provides some kind of answer. Get sky high prices for your work and people will pay attention. The mechanism for doing this is quite simple and involves gallery stooges bidding up a sample of an artist's work in return for a kickback from the gallery of most of the price paid. Naturally, because of a cynical public, it only works in tandem with a cred building operation, in which art critics play a vital and equally well remunerated role.

Which brings us to (2). Cred works as long as you have a credulous pool of punters. Lady Godiva will have an uphill task persuading the Teheran morals police that she was making an artistic statement. This may be partly due to her lack of a real message, but I put my money on her apprehenders' limited credulity. Some would call this a lack of culture, but who is right? In the cultural capitals of the world, how much investor credulity is the work of high prices? Time was when exhibition catalogues featured paragraphs of turgid prose, which the artist himself couldn't understand, devoted to puffing up the artist's message. But today, to get credibility, it is enough for a gallery (or for Damien Hurst) to put its money where its mouth is. With enough money, the message part can be left blank.

My point is that when people are punting on stuff just because they see its price going up, you have what is called a bubble. And when the bubble pops, as it invariably does, all your cred goes down the drain along with your moolah. A white canvas with nine knife slashes which was once a statement of wealth, and may once have caused a stir at some dimly remembered exhibition, loses that meaning when prices plunge, and becomes a symbol of gullibility. At least a nice Gauguin on the wall will comfort you until the dunners arrive, but a perspex box of flies will not even serve to settle your debts. Creditors are notoriously conservative in their tastes, which, in a way, explains how they became creditors.

For those dreamers who think the market will be there to bail them out I say this: the large auction houses' practice of guaranteed sale prices, like all insurances, only serves to incite buyers - who will be future sellers - to greater recklessness, and is a safety mechanism they can ill afford to offer in a bear market.

J.K.Galbraith's A Short History of Financial Euphoria neatly describes the mechanisms behind the seventeenth century tulip bubble, lest you forget. It should be required reading for those who believe we have moved on from those years. It is as short as its title promises and should be re-read at least once every two years.

One day, I would like to talk about art, as I have a soft spot for real paintings, as a visit to my online gallery will surely show.

The rape of Changchun

2007-12-18T09:07:00.000-08:00

So there was a bit less hoohah this year about the famous Rape of Nanking (or Nanjing). The Herald Tribune's Eamonn Fingleton writes: "For observers of Sino-Japanese relations the big news in the past week has been that there has been no news. Although last Thursday marked the 70th anniversary of the beginning of the notorious Nanking massacre, political activists in both Japan and China have been notable - so far at least - for their restraint.

"Given that the massacre, which began on Dec. 13, 1937, and continued for six weeks, was one of the worst atrocities in military history, the Chinese people would be forgiven for expressing their feelings in less muted terms."

Prize-winning Chinese writer Xu Zhigeng estimates the dead at over 300,000 dead. Maybe he won the prize for making the highest guess. Other estimates are as much as 50% lower. Wherever the truth lies, it was a sad chapter in history.

Almost as sad, in fact, as a similar massacre ordered eleven years later by a Chinese general, Lin Biao, presumably (according to Jung Chang and Jon Halliday's version of events) at the behest of that arch Malthusian, Mao Zedong. Lin's actual words used on May 30th 1948 were "turn Changchun into a city of death". This was achieved by blocking all food going into the city and refusing exit to anyone, man, woman or infant in arms. Towards the end of the five-month-long agony, starving mothers were coming out to offer their babes to the soldiers who barred their exit, while begging to be killed themselves. Changchun's mayor's estimate was of 170,000 survivors out of an initial population of half a million, a higher death toll than even the highest estimate of the Nanjing massacre.

While this horror story was unfolding, I was being born in a pleasant town on England's south coast in a thunderstorm. So should I have a beef? It all comes down to the luck of the draw.

Changchun is a fairly featureless North-Eastern Chinese provincial capital city whipped by blizzards in the winter and sandstorms in the summer. Its pride is an international sculpture park intended to offset in some small measure the drabness and boredom of the place. I have only met two people connected with the city. One was a girl who was born and bred there and came to France to study. I asked her if there was a siege museum in her town similar to the one in Nanking and she didn't know what I was talking about. The other was a young gay American who had been paid $17,000 US to marry the daughter of a wealthy Changchun family to help her get the hell out of the country.

This shows that the Chinese Boss Party is capable when it so wishes, of tastefully burying memories along with the dead, and therefore the lack of fuss about Nanking should come as no surprise. As for those whose memories could not be erased, and whose faith in their country might have been shaken by the siege, some were able quietly to save up enough cash to buy a Green Card for their progeny, to avoid that most terrible of fates, extirpation of the family line, should the wind ever start blowing the other way again.

The good news is that tourists are once again welcome in Changchun. One online travelguide mentions tea shops and pubs and exotic flavours. For lovers of history the Jilin Provincial Museum exhibits glorious stories of Chinese heroes during the Anti-Japanese War (1937 - 1945).

And for those of you who find history a big yawn, you can't knock the genteel attractions of Bournemouth. As its name implies, a great place to be born.

Brainteaser

2007-12-03T09:49:00.000-08:00

Having been advised that my blog needed livening up with some pictorial content, I decided to go one further and give you a little brainteaser. The image below contains three types of bloodsucking animals. Can you name the one hiding in the middle?

People in grass houses...

2007-11-27T20:06:00.000-08:00

...shouldn't stow thrones.

Heart attacks are nature's way of disposing of superfluous troublesome males. This highly politically inkorect revelation came to me as a result of reading an article about red deer. Apparently they have heart attacks too. Usually it is the fate of previously dominant males who have been dethroned by a younger, stronger rival. Such individuals have outlived their usefulness to the herd and have become a nuisance and a danger to its survival. So nature does what nature does. In terms of evolution it shouldn't be too hard to sketch scenarios to explain why groups with this disposal mechanism could win battles against those without it. Killing off old rogues gives the group an evolutionary edge.

So, my best beloved, if this is true, you will doubtless want to huddle round and learn how not to become superfluous old rogues. Sod the group, I want to live! I hear you say.

In the article, which must be over twenty years old at least, the precipitating factor most commonly observed in red deer deaths by heart attack was sudden loss of territory - and the concomitant loss of control over females. Parallel situations in human society can take many forms, and territory can have many guises. An orchestral conductor has his patch, and can tell the pretty Korean cellist when to come in, while a bus conductor has his and can tell people where to get off. Some territories are unique and unassailable, while others change hands faster than boxing trophies. Humans have evolved so many ways of carving out patches that it is sometimes hard to recognize that a patch exists at all. Academic specialities multiply and subdivide, allowing some old professors a long, golden retirement, with the occasional Christmas card from former female students. New records keep being added to the Guinness book, creating new fields for excellence. With each new field, there is room for a new top dog, and groupies to cheer him on. And then along came the Internet, with its domains, personal pages, blogspots and an endless supply of virtual terrain just going begging.

So have we averted the risk?

In order not to be kicked off a throne, a good plan might be to avoid sitting on one. At the heart of any territory is that old human need: recognition. It is what drives those heart attack prone over-achievers. If we could live without that, could we avoid heart attacks?

Or if we could learn to content ourselves with recognition from our dog, could we live to see better times? What happens when the dog dies?

Now that is a question which has stumped humanity for a long time.

Homo seropositivus

2007-10-25T02:06:00.000-07:00

We read on bbcnews that:

"Humanity may split into two sub-species in 100,000 years' time as predicted by HG Wells, an expert has said. Evolutionary theorist Oliver Curry of the London School of Economics expects a genetic upper class and a dim-witted underclass to emerge (...) People would become choosier about their sexual partners, causing humanity to divide into sub-species."

It is always nice to have one's ideas confirmed by theorists. Even if 100,000 is a much too generous timespan, and a Hollywood world view has blinded the man's science. A much faster-acting splitting mechanism than sexual choosiness could be HIV/AIDS.

It won't be long (in evolutionary time) before some HIV carrier populations become resistant to AIDS. They will be able to interbreed quite happily among themselves, but any attraction non-carrier populations may feel for them will always be fatal.

The privilege of being HIV negative will over time accrue to those with access to better education and information, and the means to afford blood tests for their propective partners. These could well converge with the class that Professor Curry describes as "tall, slim, healthy, attractive, intelligent, and creative and a far cry from the 'underclass' humans who would have evolved into dim-witted, ugly, squat goblin-like creatures."

The emergent overclass may appear to have all the advantages, the best schools and hospitals, choice of mates, and the power to oblige HIV positives to be tattooed at birth with dodgy equipment; but as the pariah caste becomes stronger and more resistant to HIV's pathogenicity, it will have gained one significant genetic advantage over the HIV negative Uebermensch.

But perhaps by then the overclass boffins will have figured out a way to farm underclass blood to produce a vaccine against their heinous effluences. That way bored baronets can revert to sharing a needle with the butler and poking the parlourmaid without fear of the consequences.

Sounds like heads I win, tails you lose.

Is the Koran actionable?

2007-10-18T09:47:00.000-07:00

Muslims in the UK and other countries trying to have incitement to hatred on grounds of religious belief banned could be shooting themselves in the foot. Drafters of such a law will have to tread pretty carefully if they want to avoid having the Koran itself withdrawn from shelves.

Muslims are known to revere the text and are categorically opposed to the idea of changing one iota - or hamza - despite the book's evident need of a good editor or ghost writer to sort out its rambling, incoherent style, its ranting tone and penchant for self-serving anachronisms such as the claim that Abraham was a muslim. And that's before we even look at the legal aspects.

One group who might consider itself poorly treated if the book is allowed to continue to be available in public libraries is the growing majority of atheists which the Koran calls unbelievers. To find out if the text actually incites hatred of this group, nothing simpler than to type in the word "unbeliever" into the searchbox of the searchable online Koran.

What the search reveals is that although Allah is going to do unspeakably horrid things to unbelievers, the believers themselves are simply enjoined not to number unbelievers among their friends. So the question boils down to does sending to Coventry count as an act of hatred, or do you have to be more beastly?

An alternative way to resolve the conundrum would be to substitute the word "muslims" for "unbelievers" into the results of the search, and ask muslim lawyers if they consider the resulting sentences actionable. If so then they must be equally actionable in their original form.

They might then contend that incitement to hatred on grounds of belief does not include incitement on the grounds of unbelief . Do unbelievers not believe anything, or can it be claimed they actively believe there is no God? The simple solution to protect everyone's rights would be to insert the words "or unbelief" after belief, so that the wording reads "incitement to hatred on grounds of religious belief or unbelief".

While I feel that the book could incite impressionable minds to a paranoid world view and should therefore not be given to children, the incitement to actual hatred is not explicit enough to merit outright banning, and anyone who hates people as a result of reading it is the sort of crackpot who probably hates people without the need for literary justification.

As I said, in framing such a bill careful attention will need to be paid to the choice of words, the more so as it is too late to ask the book's author to measure his.

An ark for the Big One

2007-10-08T10:10:00.000-07:00

One day a huge earthquake is going to make a lot of people wish they had built themselves geodesic domes.

Well of course it won't, because domes have not been on most people's radar for a while. But traditional rectangular houses have two main weak points: the right-angle joins, which fail in wooden structures; and the parallel walls, which respond in unison to directional shocks. That pretty much takes care of the whole house.

One thing which makes city planners shy away from domes is the problem of packing them together in high density districts. What do you do with the "wasted" space between adjoining circles? Also, how can you build high rise?

I have often wondered why we can't build in hexagons like bees. A bee must navigate using six cardinal points rather than our four. So our problem could be simply one of vocabulary. Were the honeycomb principle to be extended to houses or hotels with many rooms, those bodily directions - left, right, back and front - would be inadequate for giving directions to the restroom. It seems we are limited to the amount of limbs we have. If only it were second nature to think North, Earth, East, South, West and Worth - with East and West sliding down to 4 and 8 o'clock and Earth and Worth moving in at 2 and 10 - we might have less earthquake victims and more interesting brains. But to be as brainy as the bee we would need an extra pair of arms.

There is an ancient disused Koranic school out there in the Colorado desert - or is it New Mexico? - built on a honeycomb plan. When I wrote to Time's editorial board about this after the last Los Angeles quake, they buried the story.

I therefore mention it here for the benefit of Time readers who feel they are not being fully informed.

Burma: whaddya gonna do?

2007-09-27T01:25:00.000-07:00

Corrupt dictatorships need corrupt dictatorship neighbours for mutual money laundering and, if the worst comes to the worst, as padded boltholes for overthrown leaders. China's support of hoodlum governments in North Korea, Laos, Burma and Kazakhstan is the fruit of parleys between goons who, while talking up friendship between peoples and making large scale deals in oil and lumber (and arms and opium and rubies...), respect each other for what they are: greedy slimeballs. All that's missing is the Jersey accent. As for the protesting monks, the Burmese leaders probably saw this one coming when they moved the capital 400 km northwards. To dislodge them, the marchers have a long way to walk, and they will have to get past a lot of Chinese hardware.

I read in the First Post "In a country of 55m, there are 400,000 soldiers. Add in their families and dependants and you get 2m people who live better than the rest, with their own shops, schools and hospitals, have a grip on the country's resources and see little reason to give it up." HEY! That idea was stolen from the Brits! Actually, the Japanese stole Burma from the Brits, then perfected the idea. Does that sound too confusing? They then farmed the idea out to the local generals, in return for looted hardwood and rubber. The deal is still on. It's what they call constructive engagement.

The plundering of England

2007-09-07T08:06:00.000-07:00

It used to be simple: Normans against Saxons. You could tell which side was which by the language. Normans were the tall blond ones who spoke French, which was the official language of government in England for something like 400 years. Saxons went from being freeholders to become tenants. Now, 941 years after the Norman invasion the linguistic divide has been reduced to a few vestigial shibboleths, and a German royal family sits on a vast real estate portfolio amassed over the centuries by Norman and Tudor forebears, with former owners paying for recalcitrance with their heads, and often spilling their guts as well. Over time the gruesomeness has gone but the Domesday heist continues. The use of treason charges to increase Crown property was rendered unnecessary by the purchasing power generated by estates already under management, and calls for land reform have been democratically stymied by the landowners sitting in the House of Lords.

So are we now at peace?

In modern England the two sides have morphed into two opposing "interest groups": those who pay *interest* - or rent - and those who collect it. The former have a vested *interest* in higher inflation, which reduces their debt, while the latter have an *interest* in it staying low, and also hold the most of the levers to make sure it does. Perhaps significantly, house prices are left out of the calculation. This simple omission masks an important fact: that even when interest rates appear stable, the rising equity base on which interest is being paid means ever increasing income for the lenders.

Look at the small-ads outside Earl's Court station and you will see that all the rents asked for accommodation are higher than the wages offered for jobs. This situation would have been familiar to Saxons living under Norman landlords.

The Norman invasion's legacy is a nation obsessed by property - and blondes. Hair dye has allowed Saxons to become temporary Normans. Tabloids and trash TV create working class celebrities out of nothing, and then shoot them down when they start behaving to the manor born. Conversely, Normans have learned to jettison plummy vowel sounds when dealing with the feral underclass at home, only to rediscover them when among their own kind in foreign ski resorts.

Curiously, Brits facing eviction for unpaid mortgages still love their Queen. But if a flick through the Daily Mail is anything to go by, they still have a lot of hatred to spare, and no fixed object to pin it onto: dole fiddlers, philandering vicars, other drivers, football referees, striking railmen, pedophiles, and the judges who let them out.

Maybe by sending their brave lads to sort out other conflicts in the world, they can make their own ones disappear. Bringing home the World Cup would help. But I think we ought to draw the line at pontificating at African governments who go in for genocides, ethnic cleansing and wholesale expropriations. After all they are merely preparing the ground for constitutional monarchies of their own. And will one day learn to plunder in a more gentlemanly way.

The Soup God anyone?

2007-07-22T23:48:00.001-07:00

Who could ever accuse Stuart Kauffman of atheism? In his creation scenario where chemicals self organise into cells, as a water droplet finds its spherical shape, internal forces are at work. Compounds begat compounds, until a quorum of compounds with catalytic action took over, an autocatalytic set was formed and creation took off big time. This is where the soup thickens, and gets too complicated for most voters. But mercifully Stu boils it down for them by saying all we need is to assume 1 or 2% of the compounds are catalysts and the whole thing ferments on its own. We don't even have to name any individual components, just do the math! The same process of self-organization is happening on the macro scale in human society.

Stu's explanations are elegant and for some, esoteric, while his writing style has reviewers divided. So how are we going to popularize his ideas to reach type A personalities and the Bible Belt voter? Stu's book At Home in the Universe is meant to be a popularization of his earlier work The Origins of Order. One thing comes through: Stu is a believer. But being clever is a lonesome business. What we need to do is figure out how we can sell the Soup God to the mathematically challenged. A hard road lies ahead.

Don't sell your huts

2007-07-19T00:31:00.000-07:00

So Vanuatu is the happiest place on earth?

The archipelago of 83 islands in the western Pacific is the happiest place on the planet, according to a new "happy planet index" published by the New Economics Foundation (NEF). The UK languishes in 108th place, below Libya, Iran, and Palestine.

Well I've got my beef about that too.

The three biggest unhappiness factors in modern society are rent, debt, and the lies of those in power. And the higher the rent, deeper the debt and more cynical the liars, the bigger is the unhappiness. What can be happy about a place where musicians can no longer afford to live, and greengrocers or fishmongers can no longer afford to set up shop? Where debts are resold behind the debtor's back at a discount he would be glad to receive himself? Where credence in disputes is given by default to the smarter dressed?

If, as many of my friends believe, the UK has gone down the pan, I am sure a lot of that is due to the Englishman's propensity to use his home as a financial instrument. And put himself in hock up to his eyeballs to do so. The only winners in putting housing out of people's reach are the lenders.

At this time of year, my picturesque little riverside village in the South of France fills up with English visitors. You can spot them with their faces glued to the photos in the real estate agent's window. On learning that I live here, one old gentleman looking for a place to spend his retirement, asked me if the area was up and coming, valuewise. He had two houses up for sale in Blighty, and could afford any of the houses here cash down. But he had lost the ability to simply decide if he liked something.

So my advice to the Vanuatu folk, faced as they are sure to be with an influx of well-to-do happiness-hunters, is: hang on to your islands. Let people visit. Let some people come to live. But don't sell them your huts.

The End of Trust

2007-07-12T22:22:00.000-07:00

Francis Fukuyama envisaged an End of History in which men lost their chests and everybody sort of drifts into that least evil state: liberal democracy. He then wrote a book called Trust which explained why only the West and the Japanese can have a large corporate culture. I am still waiting for the sequels: The End of Trust. Or how about History Reboots? But seeing as how Frank's academic and government postings are helping mellow out his point of view towards the ultra violet end, maybe someone else should take up the story…

Is Liberal Democracy really the last stage of history? This idea of letting people vote for what they wanted slowly developed into the wholly laudable exercise of taxing the haves to pay for public services. It then morphed into buying the votes of the poor with the money of the rich. For a while at least. Now the USA shows the way forward out of this stagnant impasse: instead of taxing the rich you hit them for campaign funds to bamboozle the poor. A lesson from biology: stuff grows or it rots. Should Liberal Democracy be any different?

So how will Trust end? One way is stock option remuneration packages. They transform executives from loyal company servants into ravenous sharks with a three year agenda: to make the results look good at the end of that period for just long enough to cash in and get out – and on to the next. These predators will always be in demand because of the connivance of an equally predatory shareholder base. And Devil take the hindmost.

Another thing Frank has a dig at is Chinese society. The lack of trust outside the blood-related extended family is the reason why they can't have large corporations. The news provides examples of Chinese hankee-pankee:

eBay.cn has had a taste of sellers copy-pasting legit ads from the US site into the Chinese site to attract innocent bidders for unbelievable (and not to be believed) bargains. Now you need an ID card to become a member of Chinese eBay.
Beijing street vendors are selling mantou buns with a filling made of cardboard picked off the street and spiced up to taste like meat.
Efforts by Chinese wine makers to create a French style appellation contrôlée culture are stymied by label forgers
The biscuit goes to the recently executed head of the corrupt Food and Drugs administration, whose 170,000 product approvals will now have to be re-examined one by one.

These examples show what the Chinese need to learn from the West if they are to create the large corporate culture: they just don't have enough hypocrisy. Oops, I mean they lack a sophisticated business model. What those bun sellers could use is a pharmacy degree. They could go multinational and sell drugs! Those eBay fraudsters need to get Wall Street trading licenses to give their talents full vent. Give those label forgers green cards and let them become contemporary artists. And the Chinese FDA? Take a leaf from the American FDA's book and just don't be so obvious!

http://www.sais-jhu.edu/faculty/fukuyama/Books.html

Dubya's short memory

2007-07-12T15:30:00.000-07:00

Iraq's political leaders have agreed on a constitution, Bush said. "Now they are discussing some other legislation about the sharing of the wealth of the country, about constitutional review. All this needs consensus. We are not working by the majority rule of 50% plus one." Did I hear you right, Dubya? Blessed are they with short memories.

Houdini in the desert

2007-07-09T07:16:00.000-07:00

Well, the name hadn't been used, which was a good start. And it encapsulates the feeling you experience when you have finally released yourself from all your bonds, unpicked all the locks that held you back in your life, thrown of the chains and stood up a free man to discover... nobody's watching. And there's no water.