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TALLRITE BLOG
You can write to me at blog2-at-tallrite-dot-com |
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| October 2004 | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Issue #87 : Miscellaneous Posts During October 2004 [650]
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Bin Laden Springs Back to Life I can only express my astonishment.
Well, regrettably, it seems he is not dead. He was perhaps badly injured, but if so has made an excellent recovery over the intervening three years. Though the video looks convincing to a non-expert like me, there are nevertheless others who advance reasons for believing that the video is fake. For example,
Coming as it does just ahead of the US Presidential election, the video's purpose is clearly to influence the vote (just as Al Qaeda's Madrid bombings did). But how? Whilst claiming glory for 9/11, OBL is trying - according to Islamic expert
Fahmy Howeidi - to convince people that, if
they do not vote for President Bush, they will be more
safe, more secure. In other words, OBL, like Mr Moore, is endorsing Senator Kerry! What wonderful, vote-catching news for the Republicans. The world's most notorious terrorist is afraid of Mr Bush. The indomitable Mark Humphrys dug up this apposite slogan some weeks ago, which says it all. So Mr bin Laden is alive and well, but not quite as sharp as he once was and as he still thinks he is. He's a bit like England soccer captain David Beckham bragging about his cleverness in deliberately earning a yellow card, not realising his stupidity in announcing his cleverness. George Bush can thank, at least in part, OBL's latest video for the victory he will earn on Tuesday.
Democracy Challenge to Irish Left I had another ding-dong earlier in October in the letters page of the subscription-only Irish Times with Raymond Deane, the accomplished professional musician who is also Chair (musical chair?) of the left-wing Ireland Palestine Solidarity Campaign. Mr Dean had complained about Israel's incursions into Gaza in response to Palestinian rocket attacks from Gaza aimed at (as usual) civilians in Israel. Apologists for those who consistently target civilians consider the correct Israeli response is, well, to do nothing. But his assertion, not for the first time, that Israel only “purports” to be democratic prompted me to hurl at him a challenge. I had plagiarised it from Mark Humphrys in his exchange early this year with the Irish Peace Society, another left-wing organisation which despite its name avidly supports Palestinian terrorism.
He replied a week later to my defence of Israel's actions in Gaza but dodged the challenge, understandably because he can't counter it. So the next day, the editor published a reiteration of my challenge. Simultaneously, Mark Humphys picked this up and restated the challenge (which is originally his) at the end of his own lengthy exchange with the Irish Peace Society. We're both still waiting. The Left has no answer, other than further defense of murderous tyrannical regimes, such as that of the Palestinian Authority. The imminent demise of Yasser Arafat at least now affords the long-suffering Palestinians some chance for the future. A promising sign is that former PA Prime Minister Abu Mazen, whom I once described as a great hope for the Palestinians, and whom Mr Arafat would like to kill, is now apparently chairing PA meetings in Mr Arafat's absence.
Giancarlo Casale explains
The next day I mentioned my musings to my landlord, whose wife is from Brazil. “That’s funny,” he said, “In Portuguese the word for turkey is ‘peru.’ Same bird, different country.” Hmm. With my curiosity piqued, I decided to go straight to the source. That very afternoon I found myself a Turk and asked him how to say turkey in Turkish. “Turkey?” he said. “Well, we call turkeys ‘hindi,’ which means, you know, from India.” India? This was getting weird. I spent the next few days finding out the word for turkey in as many languages as I could think of, and the more I found out, the weirder things got. In Arabic, for instance, the word for turkey is “Ethiopian bird,” while in Greek it is “gallapoula” or “French girl.” The Persians, meanwhile, call them “buchalamun” which means, appropriately enough, “chameleon.” In Italian, on the other hand, the word for turkey is “tacchino” which, my Italian relatives assured me, means nothing but the bird. “tacchino” also means “peacock”; moreover turkey also translates as “pollo d'India”, or “Indian chicken”.] “But,” they added still on matters Italian, “it reminds us of something else. In Italy we call corn, which as everybody knows comes from America, ‘grano turco’Turkish grain’”. So here we were back to Turkey again! And as if things weren’t already confusing enough, a further consultation with my Turkish informant revealed that the Turks call corn “misir” which is also their word for Egypt! By this point, things were clearly getting out of hand. But I persevered nonetheless, and just as I was about to give up hope, a pattern finally seemed to emerge from this bewildering labyrinth. In French, it turns out, the word for turkey is “dinde,” meaning “from India,” just like in Turkish. The words in both German and Russian had similar meanings, so I was clearly on to something. The key, I reasoned, was to find out what turkeys are called in India, so I called up my high school friend’s wife, who is from an old Bengali family, and popped her the question. “Oh,” she said, “We don’t have turkeys in India. They come from America. Everybody knows that.” “Yes,” I insisted, “but what do you call them?” “Well, we don’t have them!” she said. She wasn’t being very helpful. Still, I persisted: “Look, you must have a word for them. Say you were watching an American movie translated from English and the actors were all talking about turkeys. What would they say?” “Well ... I suppose in that case they would just say the American word, ‘turkey.’ Like I said, we don’t have them.” So there I was, at a dead end. I began to realize only too late that I had unwittingly stumbled upon a problem whose solution lay far beyond the capacity of my own limited resources. Obviously I needed serious professional assistance. So the next morning I scheduled an appointment with Prof. Şinasi Tekin of Harvard University, a world-renowned philologist and expert on Turkic languages. If anyone could help me, I figured it would be Professor Tekin. As I walked into his office on the following Tuesday, I knew I would not be disappointed. Prof. Tekin had a wizened, grandfatherly face, a white, bushy, knowledgeable beard, and was surrounded by stack upon stack of just the sort of hefty, authoritative books which were sure to contain a solution to my vexing Turkish mystery. I introduced myself, sat down, and eagerly awaited a dose of Prof. Tekin’s erudition. “You see,” he said, “In the Turkish countryside there is a kind of bird, which is called a çulluk. It looks like a turkey but it is much smaller, and its meat is very delicious. Long before the discovery of America, English merchants had already discovered the delicious çulluk, and began exporting it back to England, where it became very popular, and was known as a ‘Turkey bird’ or simply a ‘turkey’. Then, when the English came to America, they mistook the birds here for çulluks, and so they began calling them ‘turkey’ also. But other peoples weren’t so easily fooled. They knew that these new birds came from America, and so they called them things like ‘India birds,’ ‘Peruvian birds,’ or ‘Ethiopian birds.’ You see, ‘India,’ ‘Peru’ and ‘Ethiopia’ were all common names for the New World in the early centuries, both because people had a hazier understanding of geography, and because it took a while for the name ‘America’ to catch on. “Anyway, since that time Americans have begun exporting their birds everywhere, and even in Turkey people have started eating them, and have forgotten all about their delicious çulluk. This is a shame, because çulluk meat is really much, much tastier.” Prof Tekin seemed genuinely sad as he explained all this to me. I did my best to comfort him, and tried to express my regret at hearing of the unfairly cruel fate of the delicious çulluk. Deep down, however, I was ecstatic. I finally had a solution to this holiday problem, and knew I would be able once again to enjoy the main course of my traditional Thanksgiving dinner without reservation. Now if I could just figure out why they call those little teeny dogs Chihuahuas.... To summarise ...
All EU member states, and the rest of Britain, are accurately represented on the cover. But Wales has disappeared and been replaced by water. (Few are shedding tears.) Wales has been sliced off along a line from Chester to the Severn Estuary, roughly along the English border, which is now just a beach, with to the west nothing but sea until you reach Ireland. The Daily Mail understands perfectly ...
It's supposed to be here, or in French here, but it isn't. Internet Commentator points out that the Welsh don't care if their country disappears provided other EU citizens' tax money continues to flow into their coffers.
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| Return to Tallrite Blog |
After
disappearing from view and sound since December 2001, Osama bin Laden (OBL) has
apparently sprung back into life with an authentic 
OBL
accuses Mr Bush of telling lies, and mocks him for reading 
How did the turkey get its name?
A
bureaucratic blunder has left Wales off a map of Europe on the cover of
the 2004 edition of the prestigious Eurostat Statistical Compendium (price
€50), which contains all the facts and figures on Europe.
Meanwhile, those negligent EUrocrats seem to be so
emb- arrassed that they've taken down the report from their web page.
Now, for a little [Light Relief]
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Gift Idea |
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Good to report that as at
FREED AT LAST, |
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BLOGROLL
Atlantic Blog (defunct) Blog-Irish (defunct)
Jihad
Religion
Iona Institute
Leisure
Blog Directory
My Columns in the
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What I've recently
But it's not
entirely honest in its subtle pro-Palestinian bias, and therefore needs
to be read in conjunction with an antidote, such as See detailed review +++++
BP's ambitious CEO John Browne expanded it through adventurous acquisitions, aggressive offshore exploration, and relentless cost-reduction that trumped everything else, even safety and long-term technical sustainability. Thus mistakes accumulated, leading to terrifying and deadly accidents in refineries, pipelines and offshore operations, and business disaster in Russia. The Macondo blowout was but an inevitable outcome of a BP culture that had become poisonous and incompetent. However the book is gravely compromised by a litany of over 40 technical and stupid errors that display the author's ignorance and carelessness. It would be better to wait for the second (properly edited) edition before buying. As for BP, only a wholesale rebuilding of a new, professional, ethical culture will prevent further such tragedies and the eventual destruction of a once mighty corporation with a long and generally honourable history. Note: I wrote
my own reports on Macondo +++++
A horrific account of:
More details on my blog here. +++++
After recounting a childhood of convention and simple pleasures in working-class Aberdeen, Mr Urquhart is conscripted within days of Chamberlain declaring war on Germany in 1939. From then until the Japanese are deservedly nuked into surrendering six years later, Mr Urquhart’s tale is one of first discomfort but then following the fall of Singapore of ever-increasing, unmitigated horror. After a wretched journey Eastward, he finds himself part of Singapore’s big but useless garrison. Taken prisoner when Singapore falls in 1941, he is, successively,
Chronically ill, distraught and traumatised on return to Aberdeen yet disdained by the British Army, he slowly reconstructs a life. Only in his late 80s is he able finally to recount his dreadful experiences in this unputdownable book. There are very few first-person eye-witness accounts of the the horrors of Japanese brutality during WW2. As such this book is an invaluable historical document. +++++
This is a rattling good tale of the web of corruption within which the American president and his cronies operate. It's written by blogger Michele Malkin who, because she's both a woman and half-Asian, is curiously immune to the charges of racism and sexism this book would provoke if written by a typical Republican WASP. With 75 page of notes to back up - in best blogger tradition - every shocking and in most cases money-grubbing allegation, she excoriates one Obama crony after another, starting with the incumbent himself and his equally tricky wife. Joe Biden, Rahm Emmanuel, Valerie Jarett, Tim Geithner, Lawrence Summers, Steven Rattner, both Clintons, Chris Dodd: they all star as crooks in this venomous but credible book. ACORN, Mr Obama's favourite community organising outfit, is also exposed for the crooked vote-rigging machine it is. +++++
It is really just a collation of amusing little tales about surprising human (and occasionally animal) behaviour and situations. For example:
The book has no real message other than don't be surprised how humans sometimes behave and try to look for simple rather than complex solutions. And with a final anecdote (monkeys, cash and sex), the book suddenly just stops dead in its tracks. Weird. ++++++
It's chapters are organised around provocative questions such as
It's central thesis is that economic development continues to be impeded in different countries for different historical reasons, even when the original rationale for those impediments no longer obtains. For instance:
The author writes in a very chatty, light-hearted matter which makes the book easy to digest. However it would benefit from a few charts to illustrate some of the many quantitative points put forward, as well as sub-chaptering every few pages to provide natural break-points for the reader. +++++
The author was a member of Britain's V Force, a forerunner of the SAS. Its remit was to harass Japanese lines of command, patrol their occupied territory, carryout sabotage and provide intelligence, with the overall objective of keeping the enemy out of India. Irwin is admirably yet brutally frank, in his descriptions of deathly battles with the Japs, his execution of a prisoner, dodging falling bags of rice dropped by the RAF, or collapsing in floods of tears through accumulated stress, fear and loneliness. He also provides some fascinating insights into the mentality of Japanese soldiery and why it failed against the flexibility and devolved authority of the British. The book amounts to a very human and exhilarating tale. Oh, and Irwin describes the death in 1943 of his colleague my uncle, Major PF Brennan. +++++ Other books here |
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After
48
crackling, compelling, captivating games, the new World Champions are,
deservedly,
England get the Silver,
No-one can argue with
Over the competition, |
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