Kitty-rama

After my previous post about cruelty to cats - I tracked down my cats to give them each a big hug. But they don't like big hugs, and ran away. So I approached them quietly and calmy and petted them. But each doesn't like it when I show affection to the other cat, so that prompted a fight. Oh well.

Anyway, I just thought I'd share some pics of my cats. They are either not too photogenic or I am not a good photographer or my camera sucks. (I prefer to blame them or my tool, since I am a poor workman.) Or you can check out this website with cute pictures of cats to fulfill your pet-sploitation fantasies.

Here is a photo of Fancy on my shed roof. You can see her glistening medallion. No, she's not a disco cat - that's her Battersea medallion.



Battersea Dogs' and Cats' Home supplies pets to the stars and turns many lesser mortals away pet-less. So I am quite pleased to have got a cat from Battersea, after three separate visits including a nerve-wracking interview about our cat-owning suitability. Fancy lost her collar one day, and I was really disappointed. How could I brag that my cat came from Battersea? But then a few days later she found her collar and brought it to the Vol-in-Law, dropping it at his feet. She's so clever.

Below is a picture of my other cat. She's not very bright and she is grouchy. She doesn't like to be picked up. But she is very fond of me and that's a characteristic I find endearing in man or beast.



Here is another picture of Fancy - it's all artistic like.



Tags: Pets , cat, Animals, cats

The sad death of Fluffy the Cat

This week in the UK, Holly Thacker, mother of two was sentenced to six weeks for killing the family cat Fluffy by putting it in the washing machine and turning it to the highest temperature setting 90 degrees Celsius.

She was turned in by her ex-husband after she bragged to him, laughing, that they no longer had a cat.

The cat died horribly. You can read more about it in the Sun, but cat lovers be warned that this link shows a picture of Fluffy's body and describes her death in graphic detail. For a tamer, but still disturbing, version of events see the BBC story.

In England, a nation of animal lovers, this has been BIG news. BIG, BIG news. Many people have said that six weeks is not enough for Fluffy's killing. Tough new animal legislation has passed recently, putting a much greater duty of care on animal owners. And many Brits think that people should serve far more time for this degree of animal cruelty.

I would tend to agree that Ms Thacker should have a stiffer sentence, but not for the same reason. I love cats. I have two. I can't imagine what kind of person would do that to any vertebrate (lobsters a whole 'nother story). I feel bad if I accidentally knock one of my cats when they get underfoot. But I think six weeks is a fair sentence for what she did. Fluffy was, after all, only a cat.

But she should have more time in the clink for what she did to her kids. Ms Thacker has two children, 5 and 15, and she boiled Fluffy alive in front of them.


Bothered by this post? See my next one, which is non-stop cute and precious kitty.


Tags: animal cruelty
Pets
cat
Animals,
cats

Terry

My previous post has reminded me of how I lost a friend to liver failure earlier this year. Not that I needed a lot of reminding. Terry was someone I went to high school with, but someone I'd lost touch with over the years. I had heard that he was ill and I emailed him, but I'm not sure he ever got the message.

My brother and I were in Budapest when I got an email telling me that Terry had died. I told my brother and he said "Terry thought a lot of you. Every time I saw him he asked about you." For the whole time that we were in Hungary, I kept thinking maybe my mom got it wrong. Maybe it was a different Terry who died.

It's hard to explain what was so cool about Terry. He was one of those guys that excel at sports played in the back of a bar, namely pool and cards. I don't know how he was at darts but it wouldn't surprise me if he was good at that.

One of my favorite memories is the time I beat Terry at pool. It was in the rec room of some University of New Orleans dormitory (we were down there for the national high scholl quiz bowl tournament, and we didn't do well). I am generally a very bad pool player and he was great, but somehow I had a great moment and beat him. He was mad and blamed an uneven pool table and warped cues, but I didn't care. I knew it was a fluke, but I didn't care. I beat Terry.

I have lots of other memories of Terry, warm evenings playing cards, school trips. But perhaps the most vivid memory is the one where I tried to kill him.

It was during the Law-Co-Hi Rook tournament. (Rook is a partnership bidding card game for 4, less complicated than Bridge, more complicated than Spades and how I happily passed many hours of my teenage life). Terry, an excellent card player, was partnered with St Caffeine, also excellent at cards and with a more stable temperament and demeanor which kept his hand well concealed. I was partnered with another quiz bowl friend, John.

John was a good player, solid and dependable, he understands the distribution. But he didn't take the risks. (He's a doctor now in Knoxville, the kind of guy you'd want for a doctor). Anyway, maybe this sounds conceited, but the only competition I was worried about in that tournament was St Caffeine and Terry.

Well, we met in the tournament before the finals as it happens. As I remember, John and I weren't winning, I could see how the game was going, but we were still a threat. Terry began taunting me, trying to get me to throw my game. It worked.

I snapped. I lunged across the great octagonal library table - and it was only its great width that kept me from reaching him and wrapping my hands around his throat in a single great movement. He just laughed as the teachers rushed over to break up the "fight".

I was ejected from the tournament for "bad sportsmanship" - and of course that meant my partner had to go, too. I explained that to John that we were losing anyway, but he didn't buy it (I don't blame him!)

Anyway, I realise that those stories are maybe a little unflattering on Terry (and maybe on me, too), but that was ok - that was what was cool about him. He was funny and clever and he knew how to punch your buttons, but in the end you knew that was just how he played the game. And it was fun. And I feel sick that I lost touch with him.

He died young, barely in his 30s, and left a wife and two kids behind.

This is an ex-parrot

I've just heard on the BBC that the first case of bird flu has been found in Britian (link to BBC story here). A parrot, in quarantine, has died - and the test came back positive.

Of course, it had to be parrot - lovers of Monty Python may remember the dead parrot sketch - here is a snippet:

Praline: Look, I took the liberty of examimimg that parrot, and I discovered that the only reason that it had been sitting on its perch in the first place was that it had been nailed there.
Shopkeeper: Well of course it was nailed there. Otherwise it would muscle up to those bars and VOOM!.
Praline: Look matey (picks up parrot) this parrot wouldn't voom if I put four thousand volts through it. It's bleeding demised.
Shopkeeper: It's not, it's pining.
Praline: It's not pining, it's passed on. This parrot is no more. It has ceased to be. It's expired and gone to meet its maker. This is a late parrot. It's a stiff. Bereft of life, it rests in peace. If you hadn't nailed it to the perch, it would be pushing up the daisies. It's rung down the curtain and joined the choir invisible. This is an ex-parrot.

Tags: Bird flu

Bad news

I got an email from an expat friend of mine (the one from Ohio who didn't know what SunDrop was). She's in the States visiting her friends and family and her father has taken seriously ill. He's been unwell for some time and awaiting a liver transplant, which is now critical.

I'm awfully sorry that this has happened, but happy (is that the right word?) that she was with her family when her dad became so ill that he had to be put in Intensive Care. Perhaps the hardest thing about being an expat is being so far away when serious illness or death strike your family. You feel so horribly helpless and it's often not clear if you should go (will you be in the way, will your arrival signal a loved one's departure?).

I've seen many expats suffer with the dilemma. It's particularly poignant for the Aussies and Kiwis who are days aways from their families and may not even be able to get a seat. I've watched an Australian colleague struggle with the airlines and pay through the nose in an attempt to see her mother one last time.

At least I can be reasonably assured of being able to get back to Tennessee within the day. But it doesn't make the decision about whether to go or not easier, I've had to deal with this twice once with my mom (she's ok) and with my grandfather (not a happy ending).

Just more proof that they can't govern

A great article in the Financial Times, Cheney Cabal Hijacked US Foreign Policy.

Vice-President Dick Cheney and a handful of others had hijacked the government's foreign policy apparatus, deciding in secret to carry out policies that had left the US weaker and more isolated in the world, the top aide to former Secretary of State Colin Powell claimed on Wednesday.

In a scathing attack on the record of President George W. Bush, Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, chief of staff to Mr Powell until last January, said: “What I saw was a cabal between the vice-president of the United States, Richard Cheney, and the secretary of defense, Donald Rumsfeld, on critical issues that made decisions that the bureaucracy did not know were being made.

Colonel Wilkerson goes on to say something I've always, always known:

The detainee abuse at Abu Ghraib and elsewhere was “a concrete example” of the decision-making problem, with the president and other top officials in effect giving the green light to soldiers to abuse detainees. “You don't have this kind of pervasive attitude out there unless you've condoned it.”

You just don't get those kind of behaviours unless leaders have allowed it, even if it's just with a wink-wink, nudge-nudge. And even if they didn't condone it expressly, they created the environment where that kind of thing can flourish.

I know this may seem like a series of non-sequiturs, but all this crony appointing and the serious failures of FEMA (we can't blame state and local failures on Bush, much as I'd like to) post-Katrina, the quagmirish mismanagement of the occupation of Iraq (even if you thought it was the right thing to do), the deficit, the handing-out of contracts to greedy, non-delivering contractors - all of this, every bit of this is down to failures of governance. This governance is the responsibility of our elected leaders and they have failed.*

The Audit Commission, the public sector watchdog in England, published a report two years ago called Corporate Governance: Improvement and Trust in Local Public Services (link to a large pdf file) that looked at public sector failures in England. It identified several factors leading to major service failures in the public sector (and I would argue in the private sector, too). These were:

1. Leaders creating a culture of self-delusion and deliberate misreprentation of information
2. Poor decisons based on inadequate information and a failure to challenge, often because a climate was a created where people were afraid to challenge authority.
3. Lack of clarity of roles, responsibilities and accountabilities within and between organisations
4. Organisations failed to address known problems in working relationships; and
   
5. Insular organisational culture with poor customer focus or community engagement

Any one of these factors were enough to cause governance failures, and I see evidence of at least 1 and 2 in the FT article alone. Outrageous.

Props to: Brittney at Nashville is Talking for linking it and ChristianLibrul for spotting it

*it's our responsibility to watch them, and maybe we've failed there, too.

Tags: governance impeach bush torture Politics Abu Ghraib

It's bulb time

It's that time of year... the time to buy and plant bulbs. I have to admit I haven't really been in the mood, because the weather has been so warm and though it's nearly the end of October, my impatiens are still looking pretty good.

To put bulbs in, I'd have to pull the impatiens out. I also overplant my bulbs with wallflowers, a very popular biennial in the UK. Wallflowers are often used for big mass bedding schemes in municipal and commercial landscapes, but I find they look really lovely mixed in to my regular herbaceous borders. So many times we overlook annuals and biennials just because they are used in 'professional' mass settings. Marigolds, vinca, wallflowers, ageratum... all those old standbys look completely different and are reliable (and inexpensive) performers in a mixed border setting. Here we can buy wallflowers in roughly 10-plant bare root bunches for about £1 a bunch ($1.75 ish). They come in some wonderful colors, reds and oranges and hot yellows. You just stick them in the ground and they bloom in late May/ early June. When they finish blooming, I just rip them up and stick them in the compost heap and by then early annuals and herbaceous perennials will have come on enough to fill in the gaps - or I can fill in with more tender perennials.

Back to bulbs:

Tulips
I bought quite a few tulips and crocus (crocii ?) when I was in Amsterdam a few years ago. That was a wonderful experience, there are blocks of market stalls along the canals that sell nothing but bulbs (along with a modest selection of souvenir wooden shoes). I was like a kid in a candy store. But tulips have a tendency to 'fade out' over time. They aren't the longest lived bulb, particularly with our wet winters. My tulips haven't fared too badly, as my soil is relatively free draining, but it's definitely time to replenish the supply. I want to concentrate on late blooming tulips, as this is the season where I have the most gaps. I really haven't decided yet which colors or kinds.

Daffodils
Although I have quite a few daffodils already and even though my garden is really small, I think you can always squeeze in a few more. I love spring bulbs, to me they signify the renewal of life. Again, I'm particularly looking for later season daffodils and those with a UT orange and white theme. Two varieties that look likely are Semper Avanti (pictured left - image from Bloms Bulbs where I'll probably order) and Geranium.

I saw some unbelievably lovely varieties of orange and white daffs at one of the Spring shows put on by the Royal Horticultural Society. But many were ridiculously expensive by my standards (I think £5 per bulb is pretty dear, but some were a lot more than that) and I imagine that they need a little bit more pampering than I care to give.

David wins Tory leadership race

Well, it's Davids all around. Both David Davis and David Cameron have gone through to the final selection by Tory membership.

Yesterday, it was rumoured that David Davis might drop out if David Cameron came through to the final two. But there's no sign of that. Both will have to troop around the country now convincing the general membership that he's the man to run the Conservative party.



Tags: Tories UK politics

Those crazy cats at the ASI

From today's posts at the Adam Smith Institute:

They're not partisan, no siree...

While The Adam Smith Institute does not align itself with any political party (Conservative, Labour, or whatever), an interesting blog to note this week is conservativehome.

Though I do think they're intellectually rigorous enough to criticise where they see it's due:

But facts are fact... and the race is on for the Tory leadership.

The race for the Tory leadership is in full swing, and, since this is a Conservative story, conservativehome does a nice job of rounding up the news on the subject. They even tally up a"who is backing who" count (though we'd have preferred a 'whom').

Ya just have to get in the grammar snipe, dontcha?

Tags: Tories UK politics

The Vol Abroad weighs in on the Miers nomination

Well, initially even I was speechless, but I've cogitated and I've finally decided my take on the whole Harriet Miers nomination...





...more Bushco crony-baloney. As a judicial nominee, she's a phony. Stick a feather in her cap and call her macaroni.

You can analyse and criticize, but she's just not qualified. It's a question of sheer luck whether she'll be a disaster or not. My guess would be yes. Look for opinions in favor of corporatist, big money government - and quite possibly against reproductive freedoms.


Check out Tennessee Guerilla Women for feminist focused commentary on the Supreme Court Nominations, for example here, here and especially here.

Tags: Politics, Supreme Court, Reproductive Rights, Harriet Miers, Politics, SCOTUS, Law
cronyism Miers

Leaving London

It seems like I hardly ever leave London. I get a little antsy if I have to cross the M25 (the giant ring road that encircles greater London). I've become a London snob. I'm happy enough to use a London airport to exit the whole country, but I'm a bit phobic about travelling to the "provinces".

Today I had to do so, and I'm barelling across the Kent countryside (very pretty) on a train as I write. Thankfully I'm on my way back to London.

Of course, when I do travel to the provinces the folks seem happy enough to leave London to me (and the 7 million other Londoners). Conversations go a little like this:

"Oh do you live in London? I quite like visiting London, but I couldn't live there, it's just so ---" (take your pick from crowded, busy, noisy, dirty or ethnic)

I usually say I like living in London and yes it's hard but it's great, too. I don't say "I don't think I could live in your squalid little two-shop town whose entire daytime population appears to be made up of juvenile delinquents and middle-aged women wearing oddly colored fleece tops."

I guess it's a matter of perspective. Today someone asked me where I lived in London and when I said Tooting, he said "oh, you live right in London"

It's true that my borough is technically classified as "inner London", but for heaven's sake Tooting is Zone 3. We're practically suburban.

Anyway, it's only one more stop til London town and I'm starting to get that frisson of excitement. Ahh London, welcome me back to your loving arms.... ya dirty old whore.

Best reads?

Time Magazine has just issued a list of the best 100 novels written in the English language from 1923 to present.

Some interesting picks. And I always feel a little under-read when I see lists like these. I've read a fair few but not even near half of this set.

There are actually a few that I've tried to read, but just found impenetrable. For example, Virginia Woolf's Mrs Dalloway, Posession by AS Byatt. As for Naked Lunch by William Boroughs, I couldn't even hack the film and walked out halfway through (after falling asleep a quarter of the way through). I wanted to walk out during the Lord of the Rings film just about the point where I put the book down (after the Hobbit party, yep that early on), but we'd paid London prices for the tickets.

Someone at work recently put a new spin on things for me regarding book lists - she said her partner had estimated how many books he had left to read (about 500) and that made him far more selective in his choices.

I reckon I've got about 630 spots left for quality books. So I won't be going back to pick up Mrs Dalloway or Lord of the Rings, no matter what Time magazine says. But there are a couple of must reads for me on that list, ones I'm ashamed I haven't actually read yet - like The Sound and the Fury and A Death in the Family.

See the full list.
Hat tip: Deliverance

Where's my civil liberties?

Kathy F at What Do I Know has a great little list of how the Labour Government is slowly (or maybe not so slowly) eroding our liberties and freedoms post 7/7.

She says:

When the police state arrests your neighbor, it's not a far walk to your house.

Too right.

I'd add the pushing of 'stirring up hatred' legislation, too. Which on the Home Office site they seem to have declared as law despite the fact it hasn't passed Parliament... yet.


Tags: Civil liberties Terror UK politics

One down, two to go

Well, well, well, the lobby of Conservative MPs have eliminated Kenneth Clarke from the running for Tory leadership. (For those unfamiliar with the process, the Conservative MPs eliminate first one, then another candidate before returning two possible choices to be voted on by the Conservative party membership at large).

Ken had sort of threatened them all...essentially saying "If you don't vote for me, the folks out in Constituencies will be angry."

Of course the folks out in the consitituencies voted for the uber-boring, ineffectual Ian Duncan Smith over Clarke in a previous leadership contest - so maybe Ken's blowing smoke out of his own cigar.

Still, even though Kenneth Clarke is a bit of Europhile and wanted to take the UK into the Euro Currency (treason to most Tories), you gotta have a bit of soft spot for a bloke who an unashamed smoker and tippler.

Had we run an office book, we'd have all picked Liam Fox (the most Conservative of the bunch) as the candidate to be eliminated today. But we didn't, and he wasn't.

Maybe we're reading this all wrong and the Tory party wants to go more 'hard line'.

Read all about it at The Times.

Tags: Tories UK politics

Volunteer warning to Jack Straw

Well, there might have been any number of things I could have written British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw about over the years, but what prompted me? The Tennessee-Alabama game.

Yes, Jack Straw is going to be touring around Alabama this weekend with Dr Condaleeza Rice. No doubt the eeevil Dr Rice will be trying to put bad ideas in head (e.g. invade Iran), but she will probably also try to convince him of something worse – supporting the Alabama team. She may well try to get him to wear an Alabama sweatshirt (or at least a crimson tie), and she’ll probably encourage him to say evil things - R*ll T!d@ and such like.

I wrote to Jack Straw today (sadly he’s not my own MP) with a real letter (it's been so long) to warn him of these nefarious plans and advise him to wear orange. I just hope it reaches him in time.

Hat Tip: St Caffeine with this link and The High Country Conservative
*Also check out the VOLuminous poll in advance of the big game, which wouldn't be a big game if they hadn't got better and we weren't just a teeny bit lame this year.

Granddad blogging: On the move

Last week in Granddad blogging, they came under fire, this week my grandfather describes how he gets some new boots, some target practice (sort of) and a big meal.

But this goes on for a while, they finally bring us back to our rest area and let us rest a while and get us some new clothes and stuff. And up to that time I had nothing but leather shoes, and your feet got wet and cold just all the time and there weren’t enough mountain packs, which were rubber on the bottom and leather on top to go around. So another old boy and I went round where the medics were and as the injured and killed came in to where the medics were they threw the boots out the window and we went by and got to looking at those boots and picked us out a pair of boots that would fit us and we put ‘em on and wore em from then on.

And those things would sweat your feet when you got hot, so you learned that, they all had a pair of felt pads in the bottom and you wore white socks like athletic socks and you learned that you had to change those socks and pads or your feet would really get in a bad shape – you’d have trench foot. So, I carried a pair of socks tucked down in my chest and a pair of pads stuck down in my back. And body heat would dry those out in about 24 hours, so every night about midnight I’d take those dry socks and pads out and put ‘em in my boots and put the wet ones back down under my clothes so I could dry them out.

Well, we went along down through there runnin, running, running, running, trying to catch up with the Germans and we were getting close to Strausberg and I remember one day we were way up on a hillside and we were in those World War One trenches and we were laying there in those trenches. I don’t know what we were gonna do, but we were there.

[How big were the trenches.]

They must have been ten foot deep and they were filled in a lot now. I remember where I was there was a cedar tree, probably twenty foot high growing right up and I was laying right under that cedar tree and had my rifle laying on top of the trench under that cedar tree waiting to do something. I don’t know what we were doing. We were just there.

We’d joined up with another company of people there was a whole lot of us there and I looked up from where I was and there was two Germans coming up a pretty steep hill. And they were reminding me of turkeys the way they were sticking their heads out looking this way and that way and looking the other way. One of em was right in my rifle sights and I thought “Well, I don’t care anything about shooting him. There are just two of ‘em”

And I didn’t, but directly somebody else saw and you never heard as much shooting going on in your life. And they hit one of the scouts for the Germans and knocked him up against a tree and the other one took off down that hill and I bet they shot ten thousand rounds of ammunition at him and never did touch him. That other one was laying over there under the tree and this old boy got up and walked over there – he was crying and moaning and carrying on. He walked over there and just took his gun and shot him.

We went through a place and I didn’t know what in the world it was, but it had posts all down one side and wire all down those posts and I couldn’t figure out what in the world it was for. But it was either where they had had or were building a place for a concentration camp. I’d never heard of a concentration camp and there weren’t any buildings there, just the wires and the posts. We just went on through that thing, still not paying any attention.

And we finally get somewhere that night and go in a German warehouse. We were gonna spend the night there. They warned us not to take our boots off, because some of em had trench foot and if you ever took your boots off your feet would swell up so that you couldn’t get your boots back on. And then we ran out of rations, we didn’t have anything to eat and we looked around in there and we found great big rolls of Swiss cheese – great big ones, I guess they must have weighed two or three hundred pounds a piece. And case after case of Portugese sardines put up in mustard. And we were all pretty hungry. And I ate so much Portugese sardines and Swiss cheese that it was years before I could even think about eating any more because it made me so sick.


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Technorati tags: oral history, WWII

Don't y'all have some assets to seize?

I love the old web stat checker. I'm a big fan of graphs and stuff, but what I like best are the keywords people use to get to my site.

For example, today someone in Holland landed on my blog looking for "DVLA replacement license expat abroad". I don't think they'll find much encouragement from that post.

But the best... the very best search was someone from the US Treasury, in its Executive Office of Asset Forfeiture (did anybody know there was such an office?) ended up at the home of The Vol Abroad by using this search term:

ugly UT vol fan photos

No way! I'm really hurt. This administration is even suckier than I thought if that's the Federal outlook. We're all beautiful. Orange is so flattering.

Here's what you get on Google images with that search string. Ha! Perhaps he/she should have checked out Preston's post from last Monday at Six Meat Buffet, Kenny seems a little rough, but all the fans are good lookin'.

Supertasters

In today's Times (which I found on the train) there's an article about people who have extra sensitive taste buds - the Supertasters, aka picky eaters.

Apparently, Supertasters taste things more vibrantly so more things taste yucky, especially more bitter foods like cruciferous vegetables (broccoli, brussels sprouts, etc). There's even a scientific test for Supertasterness (read the Times article to find out more)

I myself can't stand melon. Not melon of any kind, not honeydew, nor canteloupe or watermelon. I hate the very smell of it.

I can't even begin to choke it down out of politeness. I wish I did like it, cause I can't even eat food that has touched melon. I can't even pick it out of a fruit salad, cause the whole thing becomes melony.

I never lie about it, saying I'm allergic or anything. I just say "No thank you I just don't like it."

Then come the questions and that's what I hate even more.

Questions like: "How can you not like melon?" "Won't you try this one, it's a good melon?" Or worse "What kind of Southerner doesn't like watermelon?"

The answer is "This one, and if you don't get that stinky melon out of my face, you're gonna find it going in the way it should go out".

Of course, I'm not alone in having a strong dislike of certain foods.

In a sidebar to the Times article there's a list of Top 10 food hates from a BBC Good Food magazine (interestingly it's a 20 item list.)

1 Tripe (will eat it if it's hidden in something else)
2 Snails (they're pretty good)
3 oysters (can't be doing with them raw, otherwise OK)
4 Black pudding (it tastes a bit like dirt, but it's not that bad)
5 Squid (love squid!)
6 Crab sticks (I like these)
7 Sago (what is this?) Update: apparently another icky custardy thing - see junket below
8 Junket (again, never heard of it beyond a freebie trip for Senators)
Update: I've looked up junket, and it's a rennet custard dish, check out the revolting "serving suggestions" on the website. I'm afraid to look up rennet, but I'm guessing it's made out of hooves or something.
9 Kidney (nope, don't eat that)
10 Tapioca (boring and slimy)
11 Haggis (I know the rep, but it's yummy)
12 Mussels (I've been a bit suspicious of these since the Vol-in-Law's food poisoning incident in Amsterdam)
13 Tofu (could take it or leave it)
14 Spam (not a big fan, would rather eat tofu)
15 Aspic (I've seen it in pictures, never looked appetising)
16 Oxtail (doesn't sound good, maybe it's fine)
17 Rabbit (done properly, v good)
18 Semolina (less slimy, but just as boring as tapioca)
19 Peanut butter (who hates that? Course who hates melon?)
20 Anchovies (they're ok, but I don't ever order them)

Many of these food items look like they could usefully be served up as part of the 70s Weight Watcher recipe cards (if you haven't checked this out, you really must)

Blow, pain and the Conservative leadership contest

If you’re interested in the complexities of the UK Conservative party leadership contest, it’s been quite a weekend. A weekend fuelled by drugs.

David Cameron, one of the Tory leadership contenders, (the youngish good-looking one) has decided that he won’t tell anyone if he’s ever done any drugs. But he has told the press that he had a “normal University life.” We can only guess what that means – and I think Mr Cameron would like us to spend time guessing about him. I reckon it means he smoked a little pot (commonly called cannabis here). If one wants to speculate even more wildly, perhaps he did some other ‘recreational’ drugs. (Mushrooms, Ecstasy, Acid were all pretty popular at the University of Tennessee. I don’t know what they did at Oxford University, perhaps the Vol-in-Law could fill us in.)

The other David running for the Tory top spot, David Davis has said that anyone who has done hard drugs “recently” shouldn’t be considered for a leadership position. I guess I would agree. Anyone who’s in their 40s or over and doesn’t have the sense to stay off cocaine or heroin shouldn’t be party leader or prime minister. I don’t think anyone seriously thinks that David Cameron has done blow recently, though. But David Davis has kept up the pressure (see Times Online story) on Mr Cameron. And now there’s a new twist, and it should be beneath me to repeat it, but a) it’s not and b) one of the key actors in the drama has the ‘professional name’ of Mistress Pain which is just so darn colorful.

There’s been much commentary about whether Mr Cameron should or shouldn’t tell all, and if anyone has the right to ask him these questions in the first place. I’m in the camp that thinks what he did at University isn’t terribly relevant (but I would). It’s certainly less relevant than his lack of parliamentary experience (he's served very few years as an MP, but is currently the Shadow Minister for Education).

Tomorrow Conservative MPs start the process of whittling down a leadership candidate list (David Davis, David Cameron, Ken Clarke and Liam Fox) from four to two before it’s put to the Conservative Membership vote. So we’ll see if the drugs debate and/or Mistress Pain affect Mr Cameron’s chances.

Tags: Tories UK politics

Charlie Daniels and more pig nonsense

For goodness sakes, let’s stop being so uptight. Via The Monroe Doctrine – I see that someone has complained about a high school band playing the song “The Devil Went Down to Georgia” because it might violate the separation between church and state. Read more at the Washington Post.

I happen to like that song, somewhat, and my mind is just boggling at a high school band interpretation of the piece. (Do they do a little skit? Do the majorettes use their batons and saw away at imaginary fiddles? What on earth would it sound like?) And I’m all for the separation of church and state, but I don’t see how playing the Charlie Daniel’s Band classic would encourage anything more than chewing on a straw.

And today one of my colleagues suggested that I remove the little squeezy pink pig that sits atop my PC during the period of Ramadan. Lots of people have these squeezy pigs on their PCs, they were handed out by a company advertising www.pigsback.com (see now I’ve helped them out). She was inspired to put her own little piggy in her desk drawer during by the recent dictat by Dudley Council to remove all the porcine paraphernalia from their desks (e.g. Piglet tissue boxes and calendars).

Of course, my devout Muslim colleague, who sits right across from me, thinks the Dudley ban is insane. "That's over the top," she said. And she doesn’t think I need to remove my pig. So I won’t.

I'd be tempted to keep the pig regardless in solidarity with the Piglet fans of Dudley. But the truth is, although I’m not a big fan of Islam (or religion generally), I actually like my colleague personally and I have to work with her and I wouldn’t want to offend her. And if I really were offending her, then I would remove the pig. But I’m not about to presume that I’m causing offense to my colleague nor am I going to change anything about the way I do because it violates the tenets of a religion I don’t even value.

Tags: Political correctness Pigs