Stuff I’d Like to Have Read This Week - Last Weekend in Seattle Edition
Hey, guess what! I have a whole bunch of stuff to do! So here, mea culpa, me and my blog: love did tear us apart.
The small dramas of the Olympics are tending to overshadow the historic event they symbolise: China’s emergence from Maoist autarky and austerity to a great power, active in the world. How did we get here, in three short decades?
It appears my wife and I have upset the Government, as part of the small minority of parents who refused to have our 11-year-old child weighed and measured in school last term. The authorities worry that it was the parents of fat children who opted out. Or it could have been parents like us, who object to being conscripted into a fat-headed crusade against child obesity that is heavy on political intrusion and light on proven effectiveness.
Keep reading! >> (so it does occur to me that every year in PE they started with our height and weight and how many pushups we could do, then rerecorded the info at the end of the year. But I suppose that was just physical-education-efficacy-data-collecting.
In one important sense Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, though suffering much, was fortunate: he was a writer, and he was given a great theme, nothing less than his country’s most tragic century. Embraced within that theme is the question of how to be good when your society is evil. Few Western authors can have had that sense of the necessity and nobility of their calling. Born in 1918, he was one of “October’s children”, born soon after the October revolution. Civil war was raging and an anxious silence often filled his childhood home in Kislovodsk, southern Russia, as his family feared crazed militia storming in. The defensiveness in his later character, a fondness for erecting walls around him, may owe as much to this experience as to the labour camp. In the first four years of his life, more than 20 million Russians died unnatural deaths.
Is there anything in this world, really truly anything, more ghastly than the wedding list? I have to ask. A flock of brides laid siege to the headquarters of HSBC in London yesterday, protesting about the bank’s apparent role in the sudden demise of a wedding list company, thereby depriving them of their gifts.
Keep reading! >> (I did skim most of this, and I’d have to say that I get the point about the registry, which I find terribly awkward, but what the really frightening thing is is cake-tasting. This idea that getting married is fun because you get stuff for free? That’s cake tasting. Making appointments for way too many bakeries because you enjoy feeling smug about eating somebody’s cake for free when you know you’ll never buy it as some poor woman watches you stuff your face… What an awful thing that is. I really didn’t enjoy it. And only went to two bakeries.)
The Times - Matthew Parris - Second Item
Is there anything in this world, really truly anything, more ghastly than the wedding list? I have to ask. A flock of brides laid siege to the headquarters of HSBC in London yesterday, protesting about the bank’s apparent role in the sudden demise of a wedding list company, thereby depriving them of their gifts.
That whole bit last night at the opening ceremony with the flag and the anthem? Give me a break. I’ve always liked the Olympics and wallowing in all the emotionality of it all, but good heaven’s, it’s just a bunch of sports. I think now that most of the athletes are younger than me is really making me see the ridiculousness of it all.
It would be naive to suppose, because the Lambeth Conference did not end in schism, that the rifts have been healed or the differences over the most contentious issues narrowed. For two weeks, the 670 bishops were able, through prayer, discussion, personal encounter and a skilful focus on the spiritual rather than the political, to reach out enough to touch each other’s point of view, if not to embrace their differences. Now, however, they have returned to their sees around the world. Positions look clearer from afar. Arguments have been reignited. And there is every danger that the harmony temporarily enjoyed in Canterbury will prove too brittle to survive.
The Telegraph - Please, sir: we need more male teachers
During his brief stint at the Department for Education (as it then was), Alan Johnson bemoaned the dwindling number of male teachers in primary schools and its damaging impact on the teaching of boys. That was 18 months ago. Since then, there have been no discernible policy measures to arrest this trend, with the result that, in early-years classes in primaries, just one teacher in every 50 is a man. Across primaries in general, the figure is about one in seven.
Telegraph Blogs - Peter Foster - Can India ever catch up with China?
After reporting from India it has been a revelation to finally arrive in China, having peered metaphorically over the Himalaya at the big daddy of emerging Asian economies these last four years.
The Telegraph - Barack Obama becalmed
While Barack Obama projected himself as a president-in-waiting on his overseas tour last month, wiser heads were warning that such grand-standing would not play well with blue-collar voters in middle America, preoccupied as they are with plunging property prices and soaring fuel costs.
The Telegraph - Not so fast food
Cavemen enjoy an undeservedly sporty image. We picture them pursuing mammoths or facing sharp-fanged tigers with flint-headed spears. But now palaeontologists have found evidence that our troglodyte forebears preferred consuming ready meals in the comfort of their own caves.
Keep reading! >> (the puns!)
Telegraph - Silvio Berlusconi calls in the troops to reassure his countrymen, by Adrian Michaels
Tourists relaxing this summer near Milan’s magnificent cathedral could be forgiven for choking on their overpriced cappuccinos at the sight of armed soldiers on patrol.
So finally Olympic Opening Ceremony day is upon us, and after all the fears over whether political protests would disrupt the Games, I imagine the Chinese authorities will be pretty satisfied with the way things have gone thus far.
Telegraph Blogs - Urmee Khan - Is this the beginning of a new European Islam?
Today’s news that Muslim women in Britain will be guaranteed equal rights in Islamic marriages has wide ranging consequences, not just for women but for a new model of European Islam.
The Times - Secret deal kept British Army out of battle for Basra
A secret deal between Britain and the notorious al-Mahdi militia prevented British Forces from coming to the aid of their US and Iraqi allies for nearly a week during the battle for Basra this year, The Times has learnt
Telegraph - Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Communism’s deadliest foe, by Marcus Warren
Alexander Solzhenitsyn did more to demolish the moral and intellectual case for Communism than any of its critics, writer or statesman, poet or legislator of the world, acknowledged or not.
Telegraph - So, Barack Obama, you think being a parent is easy? By Gill Hornby
The popularity of Barack Obama among his home press has slumped in recent days. It might have a little to do with his presidential world tour, or his assured air of political entitlement. But it is more likely to have been caused by that incredibly smug interview his wife gave about their perfect kids.
The world’s footballing nations no longer complain that while they field one national team, the UK turns up with four. After the failure of any of the home nations to qualify for the European Championships, the debate has become rather academic.
At the core of Nicolas Sarkozy’s campaign to be President of France last year was one strikingly counter-intuitive hunch. Conventional wisdom, across the French political spectrum, held that the country was so allergic to reform that to promise or attempt it was political suicide.
New Geography - Urban America: The New Solid South
Ever since the 1930s, most urban areas have leaned Democratic. But in presidential elections, many remained stubbornly competitive between the two parties. As late as 1988, for example, Republican nominees won Dallas County and made strong showings in the core urban counties of Cook (Chicago), Los Angeles and King (Seattle).
Wheat & Weeds - What Is With The Washington Times?
This is the front page of WaTi this morning. See the blaring headline & photo: Not-So-Warm welcome? The actual story is way at the back of the “A” section, where you find out there was a protest against American beef, which is actually an anti-SoKo government protest, and a huge, privately-organized pro-Bush rally.
Keep reading! >> (Ah, the return of the tight protest shot. Since the war protests have fizzled here, how I have missed them!)
Wheat & Weeds - Ivan Denisovich Has Died
One word of truth shall outweigh the whole world
Wheat & Weeds - That Hero, Dalton Trumbo
A couple of weeks ago I showed you 76 Trumbos, making light of Hollywood’s preoccupation with the Hollywood blacklist. Certainly First Amendment rights must be defended, but in the latest iteration, Trumbo, Hollywood’s finest stand with a man who wanted Hitler to defeat England and was not only not a stalwart defender of the First Amendment, he expressly wanted the U.S. Constitution to be crushed under the Soviet system.
CDR Salamander - The Olympic Spirit
The IOC must be so proud.
Keep reading (for the picture)! >>
And then there was a bunch of stuff at LGF but it’s too hard finding anything over there.
August 9th, 2008 at 8:20 pm
Well, if Mark Steyn can take a month off…
August 9th, 2008 at 8:25 pm
A month?! I wish! He’s been gone all summer!
August 9th, 2008 at 11:12 pm
I’m thinking of Solzhenitsyn and that little Vermont ‘burg that protected his privacy during his 2nd exile. I think there’s a story there, Ivan meets Newhart, big concept. Seriously tho, a touching story I think.
August 10th, 2008 at 3:14 am
And Steyn isn’t even micro-blogging (tweet)!
August 10th, 2008 at 10:32 am
i know! What a slob!
/waiting for her Regnery book deal