From the Man in a Shed, via James Higham:

OK some sort of guidelines were asked for so here goes:

For the whole of the week 27th July participants will mostly issue daft and silly posts. ( Moon made of cheese type stuff – or even some genuine left wing moonbattery that may be true – but just shouldn’t be.)

If you want can I suggest adding the keywords #SillyWeek (twitter & blogger) so we can see what everyone else is up to.

If you want I can do some sort of ranking and prize for the daftest of the lot – let me know in comments… might even organise a vote if there’s lots of entries and I’m still allergic to doing paying work.

Everyone else is having fun with the end of term – long political holidays etc, why shouldn’t we ?

( James is that enough ? )

PS Copy graphics etc as you wish.

xD.

The assignment: Your phone, exactly 139 words explaining why it is your phone, and a hero.

Here goes…

This is my phone.

I use it to wake me up, email, text, Twitter, TwitPic, surf the internet, blog, read, write and even, to make telephone calls. Apparently, it works in Afghanistan, but only occasionally in Somerset as the signal there is rubbish.

I did most of my degree on the previous version.

The revolution may not be televised, but it will be covered on a range of social media.

It is powered by lots of tiny gnomes on tiny bikes who have to pedal really quickly if I want to call long distance. The gnomes used to be bigger, but they became smaller, and that’s why Nokia had to change the size of the power cord. Hey, it makes as much sense as any other explanation.

Large and a bit geeky – it is a good representation of me.

I tag the Political Penguin, James Higham and Laurie Penny.

xD.

I have a question (well, three questions, actually): How many have you seen, how many do you already own on DVD (or video) and how many haven’t you seen?

Take two points for every film you own and have seen (only one if you own it but haven’t got round to watching it yet), one point if you’ve seen it but don’t own the DVD, and no points for those you haven’t either watched, purchased or been given.

Own & Seen – Lawrence of Arabia, Psycho, 2001, Casablanca, Vertigo (ten)

Seen – The Godfather, Star Wars IV, It’s a Wonderful Life, To Kill a Mockingbird, Schindler’s List, The Wizard of Oz, The Graduate, ET (eight)

Neither – Citizen Kane, Raging Bull, Singin’ in the Rain, The Searchers, On the Waterfront, Chinatown, Some Like it Hot, Gone With The Wind, City Lights, Sunset Boulevard, The General, The Grapes of Wrath.

Eighteen. Puts me ahead of Sadie, close to Paulie but behind Tom. Consider yourself tagged if you’d like to be… I’m going to try to go to sleep again.

xD.

I’m sure that people of that ilk will, of course, deny doing any such thing; after all, people often referred to ‘LBJ’ and ‘JFK’, so why not ‘BHO’ or ‘Barack Hussein Obama’. The answer, I’d say, is that more than a few people (while I’m sure they’d protest their innocence and make declarations about the number of their Muslim friends) are quite happy to play off racial fears in order to win an election.

Predictably enough, the left/liberals/progressives (delete as not appropriate) were up in arms; this didn’t do much good. However, the issue does need addressing and, until fairly late in the game, it was only outrage that played into the hands of the unpleasant parts that preferred McCain to Obama.

One reply was very straightforward in its simple attack on the unpleasantness and – dare I say it? – unAmericanness of the attacks:

That did, I think, a good deal of damage to the McCain campaign and was equally supportive of the Obama campaign. However, the ‘Obama is a Muslim and so might be a terrorist’ meme was already in circulation. The Great Schlep might have done something to counter that in Florida, but I think a memetic counter-attack could have used ditties like this:

I’d recommend Roy Zimmerman; he’s funny and acute in his songs. I’d particularly check out Thanks for the Support, Defenders of Marriage, I Approve this Message and To Be a Liberal.

The sadness is that the memetic, subliminal and underhanded approach would have been more successful than the direct appeal to intellectual argument and certain groups were very happy to exploit this regardless of what consequences that might have for the quality of democracy in America.

xD.

xD.

Princess Diana’s death – 31st August 1997
Summer holidays, waiting to go back to school. Dad woke me up and we watched things unfold on the television.

Margaret Thatcher’s Resignation – 22nd November 1990
I would have been at school. I don’t really remember a lot about it except that my parents were really happy. Funny thing, politics…

Attack on the twin towers – 11 September 2001
I was having a driving lesson when the first tower was attacked; by the time of the second attack, I was home and watching it on television.

England’s World Cup Semi Final against Germany – 4 July 1990
Honestly, I don’t spend all my life in front of the television. We were watching it on the telly, though. We had returned from Brazil the previous year and my brother, who was born out there, was upset because the country of his birth had been knocked out by Argentina earlier in the competition.

President Kennedy’s Assassination – 22 November 1963
I wasn’t event a twinkle in my parents’ eyes at the time.

I’m tagging Tiberius Gracchus, the Winchester Whisperer, Vino, Peter Kenyon and Chicken ‘Justin McKeating’ Yoghurt.

xD.

a – Jorge Amado – Gabriela, Cravo e Canela
b – Ray Bradbury – Fahrenheit 451
c – Joseph Conrad – Heart of Darkness
d – JP Donleavy – The Saddest Summer of Samuel S
e – Euripides – Electra
f – Henry Fielding – Tom Jones
g – Benito Perez Galdos – Nazarin
h – Ernest Hemingway – The Old Man and the Sea
i – This might be stretching it, but D. Iunius Iuvenalis, aka Juvenal, Satires
j – Jerome K Jerome – Three Men in a Boat
k – Franz Kafka – The Metamorphosis
l – Carmen Laforet – Nada
m – Walter Miller, Jr – A Canticle for Leibowitz
n – Pablo Neruda – Memoirs
o – George Orwell – 1984
p – Marcel Pagnol – Le gloire de mon pere
q – again, nothing that I can think of
r – Jose Rizal – El filibusterismo
s – Ramon J Sender – Requiem por un campesino espanol
t – Leo Tolstoy – Anna Karenina
u – rien
v – P Vergilius Maro ‘Virgil’ – Aeneid
w – nothing
x – Xenophon – Anabasis
y – erm…
z – nope.

Anyone who wants to be tagged by this meme should consider themselves tagged.

xD.

If you have just spilt red wine on the carpet, white wine is good for removing the stain. Red wine should not be used to remove white wine stains.

You can remove the smell of paint  by cutting an onion in half and placing the two halves, face up, in the redecorated room.  The onion absorbs the solvent and becomes poisonous, so don’t eat it.

Bananas give off the gas ethene, which will speed up the ripening of fruit left nearby.

And a couple of random ones of which more people should be aware:

Vermouth and tonic is a surprisingly good drink.

There are lots and lots of free books at Project Gutenberg.

I’m tagging Andrew Brown, Erik Ringmar and Tom Watson.

xD.

1. Brown Eyed Handsome Man – Buddy Holly and the Crickets
2. Bridge Over Troubled Water – Simon and Garfunkel
3. Blue Suede Shoes – Elvis Presley
4. Bleed Like Me – Garbage
5. Blitzkrieg Bop – Ramones
6. Bummer – Scarling
7. Ball and Chain – Janis Joplin/Big Brother and the Holding Company
8. Baby Please Don’t Go – Muddy Waters
9. Bela Lugosi’s Dead – Bauhaus
10. Berliner Messe – Arvo Part

The last one is cheating slightly, as it’s in eight parts, but I’m having it anyway.

xD.

I think that the US systems is based on the federal government not having many competencies. Whether this is right or wrong, it is how the system was originally designed and a lot of the constitutional infrastructure still supports that position. There is too much going on at the federal level. I believe it’s damaging both the Democrats’ chances and the US polity as a whole.

To start with, the polity as a whole. The excess power of the federal government and its invocation as a panacea has led to quite spectacular amounts of pork barrel spending. The amount involved and the damage it causes is detailed at the CAGW. I would note that it is unfortunate that it is mostly ‘rightwingers’ rather than ‘leftwingers’ who oppose pork, which is very unfortunate. Given that the Democrats generally want to spend more than the Republicans, they should be even more interested in making government spending both efficient and effective.

As an example of another effect it has in a particular policy area, I want to look at abortion. I think Roe v Wade should be overturned for three reasons. Firstly, judges should not make policy. A constitution, IMHO, should set the framework in which decisions are to be made or, if you like, the rules of the game, but not what decisions are made as it reduces the effectiveness of democracy and the likelihood of people engaging with democracy (and not just in the ballot box) I recognise that any rules will have an impact, but the manner and extent of judicial decisionmaking in the US is grossly excessive. Secondly, it reduces debate about the issue to legal niceties and not the substance of the issue; if the option is accepted of dodging the argument is allowed for this, it can spread to other areas. Thirdly, and here I’m being partisan, it would benefit the Democrats and have no effect on the availability of abortions. I am given to understand that, in many states, abortion is effectively unavailable because of cost, social pressure and distance. I contend that this is not the case in the states that would permit abortion. It would, as it is a dogwhistle issue, diminish the religious right’s support for the GOP. It would have a similar, but less pronounced, effect on the Democrats. All the while, it would be possible to debate the issue rather than abstruse legal principles.

This principle runs across a whole range of areas; there is not going to be wholesale change of the US Constitution, but there is a real possibility of power being devolved downwards and dogwhistle issues being less shrill.

I’m tagging Ewan Watt, Matt Sinclair and Iain Dale.

xD.