Obligatory:

Be nice to America. Or we'll bring democracy to your country.

Are you itching for a new pancake war? :-)

Stuffed French Toast? I must apologize to the French persons among us for what American entrepreneurs are doing to the great French cuisine. Still, I must also take a portion of that apology back.

In America, if you want real French cuisine, you need to be wealthy. I'm not talking about French fries or morning cruisants. I'm talking about the real thing. What we need over here is a "slow food" French franchise that would allow everyone to participate in the tastes of France. So where are you? Come and make a million with a "slow food" French food chain so that we can all enjoy its fruits.

If you are a poor man today in America, all you have going for you is McDonalds. We need help.

Is summer over where you are?

Over here, with temperatures around and above 35°C, both the Budapest and country-wide heat records for 6 September look to have been broken, tomorrow is to be worse, THEN autumn will arrive with a cold front.

*Traitor*, n.
A benighted individual who perceives an illusory distinction between serving his nation and abetting the criminals who govern it.

Yes, large parts of my country seem like a foreign land to me.

It just dawned upon me ...

Both political conventions have come and gone; I can't claim to have watched much of either.

Those poor patriotic shits who went to Iraq, Afghanistan, wherever, got a limb or two blown off and then came back to hospitals with mold, mice, roaches, etc.

Question:  Were they mentioned at all in the last 2 weeks, anywhere?

I love the smell of roast chicken in the morning!

Is xkcd an ET insider? ?

and after the Joke discussion of McCain being a furry the other day, xkcd had a strip on Furries yesturday. i'm thinking i'm convinced.

If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the precipitate.

A couple of articles in the Independent caught my eye;-

Independent - Lead article

Back in 1950 in his essay on the British pub, George Orwell listed his reasons for visiting his favourite local. They included such things as a good fire burning; it must be quiet enough to talk; pub games only in the public bar; barmaid knows most customers by name; besides cigarettes and pipe tobacco, the pub sells stamps and aspirin; draught stout on tap; beer served in glass or pewter tankards.
The aspirin and stamps may be a little excessive. But apart from that, pub owners could do worse than study Orwell's list. With news that four pubs a day are closing nationally, and of an increasing number of villages without a pub, it is too simplistic to point to the smoking ban as the main reason why more and more people are losing the pub-going habit. The causes for this worrying decline are surely more "Orwellian".

Independent - Business - Wetherspoon turns to food to counter decline in beer sales

JD Wetherspoon's profits before tax fell by 11 per cent in the past year because of the smoking ban. But the chain's sales - which were down by 1.1 per cent for the year as a whole - crept back up to 1.1 per cent year-on-year growth in the five weeks to the end of August, thanks to a growing emphasis on food sales.

"Sales were down a little, but we expected that in the first year of non-smoking, and we have had good growth in food sales," John Hutson, chief executive, said yesterday.
[....]
Pub chains are increasingly looking beyond beer for their profits. Punch Taverns, which reported annual sales down nearly 3.5 per cent last week, is also betting on food

what they don't mention is that the beer sold in most chain pubs is bland and uninteresting. I have in the past described a lot of people as just wanting a bland social drinking liquid. which is fine and I'm not going to compalin about that. But the beers now avialbe across a broad swathe of the coutnry are falling beyond bland into tasteless and unpleasant. It's no surprise that people don't want ot go to pubs when they know that what they'll be served when they get there is a regrettable soup of diminshed ambitions.

Weatherspoons used to have good beers in their pubs, I'd seek them out. But increasingly they fell back on a restricted range of awful beers. I now avoid their pubs. Most chain pubs are the same, they get in the cheapest most tasteless nonsense and sell it as expensively as the market will bear.

And they wonder why people don't drink as much as they used to. Back when I used to venture around more than I do now I used to suggest that there weren't 50 pubs worth going to inside the M25 ring motorway around london. I no longer think that's true, but its way less than 100. And certainly not the 200+ CAMRA puts in london alone.

But management companies don't know anything about pubs, all they know is profit and loss, they only bought the pubs cos they were cheap in a rising property market. The idea of what a pub means is lost on them, the idea of identity sounds expensive. The idea of quality repels them.

good pubs always survive. I don't know a single pub in London that serves good beer that is struggling. but I know a lot that don't which are. Can you tell that to faceless business dorks ?? apparently not.


keep to the Fen Causeway

(not, not "someone", 'someone')

Magazine: Russia's Putin sexy, but not that sexy

MOSCOW (AP) -- He single-handedly saved a TV crew from the jaws of a tiger. He flexed his muscles in front of the cameras in Siberia. He cuts a dash on the ski slopes.

A former president, he is Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, but not quite Russia's sexiest politician. At least, that is, according to Russia's Sex & the City magazine.

In its September "Sexy Rating" list, the glamor magazine ranks who it considers the 20 sexiest Russian politicians. At the top is Boris Nemtsov, a former leader of opposition party Union of the Right Forces now viewed by many as a spent force.

It is rare that Putin loses out at home. A winner abroad -- selected as Time's person of the year in 2007, and Vanity Fair's most powerful and influential figure of the year this month -- Putin courts widespread popularity at home, having restored a sense of national pride and stability after the difficult post-Soviet years of Boris Yeltsin's rule.

(sadly, no picture of Boris Nemtsov beyond a mugshot in the article)

In the long run, we're all dead. John Maynard Keynes

While traveling through rural Missouri on Thursday I came upon a radio station featuring, (surprise!) a fundamentalist talk show.  What intrigued me was the host's description of a new evangelical viral e-mail describing a New Black Angel who had come to watch over the USA.  She was reporting her in-box and that of acquaintances and colleagues being full of first hand accounts of apparitions, appearances and testimonials!  She started de-bunking this and her co-host laughed at the reports.  Seems as she is well to the right politically.

I could not but smile and remember Carl Jung's book on UFOs.  May this New Black Angel spread his blessings on the right wing members of the evangelical movement!  

As the Dutch said while fighting the Spanish: "It is not necessary to have hope in order to persevere."

Good thing we have two entrances to the apartment complex, because one of them is under about half a foot to a foot of water.  Nobody's stalled out in it yet, presumably because nobody in anything smaller than a mid-sized SUV has been willing to try.  (Having seen how high up the water went on those, the rest of us in our cars stayed the hell away.)

Someone will eventually try, stall out, and have the cops out to help them deal with it.

Be nice to America. Or we'll bring democracy to your country.

Who has seen Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day?

Great little comedy with a dark atmospehere and some social themes set in 1939 London. There is some awkward acting, but definitely not from Frances McDormand in the title role. She transformed perfectly into a look-alike of Mable from You Rang, M'Lord?.

*Traitor*, n.
A benighted individual who perceives an illusory distinction between serving his nation and abetting the criminals who govern it.

I followed this madness to get out of hand for days.

Two weeks ago, for the first time in the history of the Sumo association, a top-division player was banned, permanently. His crime? Smoking marihuana...

The offender, ring name Wakanoho, was Russian. Then a few days ago, an  internal test found both other high-ranked Russian players positive for marihuana, but now a real test is on-going, because both deny steadfastly.

However, over this minor sillyness, a ministry official called for the resignation of the head of the Sumo Association, others called for the cancellation of the upcoming September Grand Tournament...

*Traitor*, n.
A benighted individual who perceives an illusory distinction between serving his nation and abetting the criminals who govern it.

A story about baltimore from the creator of The Wire

Guardian - David Simon - The escalating breakdown of urban society across the US

It seems that in Baltimore, one of the most violent cities in America, jurors are far more reluctant to convict criminal defendants than in the suburban enclaves that ring the city.

The report upset the city's chief prosecutor; she thought its conclusions "politically divisive" and asked the foundation to either amend the draft study or kill it entirely. The press mocked her for this, of course, and rightly so, while on the radio here, white talk-show hosts had fun speculating about why city jurors - read "black people" - won't do their civic duty when it is, in fact, their communities that are so overwhelmed by crime.

[....]

And now, this week, no one asks why men and women from Baltimore, upon being given a chance to strike a blow against disorder and mayhem by convicting those charged criminally, would shirk their responsibility

In order to elect Baltimore's mayor as Maryland's governor, crime had to go down. And when that mayor was unable to do so legitimately, through a meaningful deterrent, his police officials did not merely go about cooking their statistics, making robberies and assaults disappear by corrupting the reporting of such incidents, they resorted to something far more disturbing.

For the last years of his administration, Mayor Martin O'Malley ordered the mass arrests of citizens in every struggling Baltimore neighbourhood, from eastside to west. More than 100,000 bodies were dragged to Central Booking in a single year - record rates of arrest for a city with fewer than 700,000 residents. Corner boys, touts, drug slingers, petty criminals - yes, they went in the wagons.

But school teachers, city workers, shopkeepers, delivery boys - they too were jacked up, cuffed and hauled down to Eager Street - hundreds of them a night on the weekends. Some were charged, but few were prosecuted. And in 25,000 such cases, they were later freed from the detention facility without ever going to court; no charges were proffered because, well, no crime had been committed.

I wasn't arrested. Nor was Ed Burns or Dominic West or Aidan Gillen. Nor were my neighbours or the Baltimore Sun's editors or the members of the Maryland Club. But then, we're all white. Among the black members of my cast and crew, it was often impossible to drive from the film set to home at night without being stopped - and in some cases detained or arrested - on nonexistent probable cause and nonexistent charges. The crackdown came wholly in black neighbourhoods and it landed wholly on the backs of black citizens.

And now, just a few years later, comes this document that causes the state's attorney to deny the obvious and leaves everyone else wondering weakly and vaguely as to the why of it. Is it so hard to understand that the same people who had their civil rights cleanly dispatched, who spent nights in jail because police officers lied on them and dragged them off without charge - that these people might be inclined to disbelieve the word of law enforcement in any future criminal case?

In places like West Baltimore, the drug war destroyed every last thing that the drugs themselves left standing - including the credibility of the police deterrent. To elect one man to higher office, an entire city alienated its citizenry and destroyed its juror pool.

keep to the Fen Causeway

In the long run, we're all dead. John Maynard Keynes