Salon’s War Room says:
Londoners […] are suddenly feeling the kind of shock and vulnerability that the residents of New York and Madrid know all too well.
Well, up to a point. I’m certainly not feeling some completely new and terrifying vulnerability, like New Yorkers seem to have after September 11th. As people have been saying on the news, we survived the IRA, we can survive this. The Guardian
has a list of terrorist attacks on the UK mainland.
Paul Skidmore from Demos points out the benefits of hierarchy and Government at times like this.
The handling of the London bombings so far seems to be admirable. Truly disgusting, however, are some of the comments on Free Republic. I knew it was a right-wing site, I didn’t appreciate how much.
The eminent journalist R. W. Apple Jr. writes in the New York Times about the gardens of the Weald, my neck of the woods.
On a cash machine outside Tunbridge Wells station:
Alliance & Leicester customers will not be charged to use this cash machine. Other users will be charged a convenience fee.
CONVENIENCE FEE! ARGH!
Alliance and Leicester – taking your hard-earned money, for your convenience.
Deep Impact hit comet Tempel-1 today, with good results and a huge plume of debris, brightening the comet by a factor of 11. One excited scientist quoted by the Register said:
“We’ll really be able to constrain our models with the new data.”
Yeah, baby! I shouldn’t be sarcastic. It sounds dull – but it may actually be quite exciting.
In a piece of excellent news, Jackanory – the children’s programme where people read stories – is returning to TV. It’s such a simple format, but so effective. Almost Reithian in theory, I remember it from my childhood as a fun, involving programme. Long may it continue!
It’s going to be really interesting to see how this turns out.
David Crystal’s The Stories of English
The book tells the unexpurgated story of English, including its dialects and non-standard forms. Mr Crystal, rightly, puts just as much weight on ‘dialect’ English as on the RP/standard forms, and the book tells a story of a lively language that the 18th century tried to put in corsets. But now with the rise of the Internet & othr cmnctn techs, the lngge is brkng 3 agn.
The story of how English was standardised was a surprise to traditionally-educated me. Mr Crystal’s case that rules don’t really matter, and only comprehension does is very persusive, and I for one pledge to not even slightly worry about split infinitives any more.
****
Much artificial outrage in the tabs today at a train driver who asked his passengers for sticky tape to fix his train. What is the world coming to, is the Mail’s view.
Of course, aficionados of the Thomas the Tank Engine oeuvre, as my son and I are, will remember that James’s driver used one Mr Jobling’s bootlace to repair a brake pipe after James had treated his carriages roughly one day. “The passengers told the Driver, the Fireman and the Guard what a Bad Railway it was,” wrote W. Awdry in 1948.
Well, indeed. Even now.