"I lost him to a jukebox and a pinball machine"

So Norm missed Emmylou's birthday. Seems the right time to remind folks that there's only one song about Amarillo. I used to play a mean game of pinball, too.

If we only hadn't stopped in there for coffee
If someone hadn't played the Window Up Above
He'd still be mine today but he heard those fiddles play
One look and then I knew this must be love
Oh that pinball machine was in the corner
Well he saw the lights and he had to hear 'em ring
And he never was the same after he won his first free game
Oh I lost him to a jukebox and a pinball machine

Oh Amarillo what'd you want my baby for
Oh Amarillo now he won't come home no more
You done played a trick on me hooked him in the first degree
While he put another quarter push Dolly and then Porter
While he racks up fifty thousand on the pinball machine

Pinball photo from this excellent site.

New Progressive Anglican Theology

Thinking about it, I'm surprised we didn't see this coming.

The Jewish Tribe of India

Via Mirabilis, this from Haaretz :

Chief Rabbi Shlomo Amar decided on Wednesday to recognize the members of India's Bnei Menashe community as descendants of the ancient Israelites. Amar also decided to dispatch a team of rabbinical judges to India to convert the community members to Orthodox Jews. The Bnei Menashe community consists of close to 7,000 members of the Kuki-Chin-Mizo tribe, which lives in northeast India near the border of Myanmar (formally Burma). For generations they kept Jewish traditions, claiming to be descended from the tribe of Menashe, one of the ten lost Israeli tribes that were exiled by the Assyrians in the eighth century B.C.E. and have since disappeared.

Jeet at Way Of The Intercepting Fisk discussed the possible Israelite provenance of the South African Lemba tribe a while ago.

"A perfect and consistent image of the modern world"

Aaro on the evil Right and their evil thoughts :

"There are too many immigrants. Criminality goes unpunished while law-abiding citizens are victimised. Hard-working people are penalised by high taxes that go to pay for no-hopers to study Mickey Mouse courses at former polytechnics. It's all going to the dogs."

Yay ! He broke the code ! Nick Cohen's on message too :

"Liberal Democrats are so soft on crime they would tear down the jails and let murderers roam the streets; Labour is sending paedophiles to rape your daughters, while it puts up your taxes, dumps gypsies in your backyard and calls you a 'racist' if you complain. "

Tell it like it is, Nick !


From the Observer editorial :

"Britain is the well man of Europe."

But from Mary Riddell :

"our fractured society ... suddenly I am afraid ... I am scared by the statistic that three-quarters of boys excluded from school, as he was, have used a weapon. I am disturbed that a teaching union has reported a surge in classroom violence .... most of all, I am alarmed that, despite the overall fall in crime, a new mood of casual cruelty is fermenting in cities ... why the knives and the gangs of teenagers practising the elastic-hipped swagger of the pretend assassin? Why the wave of rapes and murders combining adult savagery and the capricious pointlessness of childish rage?"

Cheer up, Mary ! Everything's wonderful. I'm afraid you've been listening to that nasty Mr Howard again. Talk to Nick and David - they'll set you right.

John Paul II

Goalkeeper, skier, climber, national liberator, a brave man and a great Christian who resisted all temptations for compromise with a secular world and the death culture. Not to mention forgiving, and visiting in prison, someone who'd put three bullets into him. He walked it like he talked it. Where shall we find such another ? Certainly not in England.

"We see you welcomed by all the Saints you have recognized, cupping the face of that tiny nun once again in your great strong hands, and hearing the “Well done” that is the true crown of a Christian."

Marcus has the words, as does the (Anglican) Gray Monk.

I won't even bother reading the Guardian obit. I could write it myself.

" ... abortion ... right to choose ... women ... contraception ... HIV ... developing world ... Africa ... condoms ... death ..."

On the credit side " ... criticised death penalty in US ... disagreed with Bush over Iraq ..."

UPDATE - complete links to comment and obituaries at Thinking Anglicans.

Fight Of The Day ...

Bowyer vs Dyer. The video here.

The inside story here.

"... just before the incident, Bowyer spotted that Dyer was wearing his mascara. Lee had told him that he could not borrow it but Dyer just used it. Well, can you blame Lee for trying to claw his eyes out, what's a boy to do? Apparently the incident continued in the dressing room and Dyer has a nasty cut where the clasp on Lee's Louis Vuitton handbag caught him just above the left eye ..."

UPDATE - Jonny B is in sombre mood.

The past weekend's events made me question our values as a society.

Acres of newspaper coverage in tabloid and broadsheet. Photographs. Background. Commentary. People going on and on about it on the telly.

But what I'd like to know is:

What, precisely, is so wrong about punching Keiron Dyer in the face?

UPDATE - Tony Cascarino :

"I have never met Lee Bowyer but everyone I have spoken to about him says that he is a toerag"

Monocultural Blogging

Remember the free blogosphere ? Via Volokh, the news that the diversity police are awake. The old problem - no sooner are those hideously white males chased out of their old haunts, than they find new areas to dominate.

So in the true spirit of tokenism (the trouble with irony is that people miss it) a hastily-assembled link to LaShawn's Terri Schiavo links, Ambra Nykol likewise, and Debra Dickerson's powerful essay on the random shooting of her nephew (not quite random - he waved to a car which he thought contained his friends. The occupant got out and shot him, paralysing him).

Oh, and Mulatto Advocate - excellent stuff. And the blog links here.

I've no idea of Tom Smith's ethnicity - he could be this Tom Smith for all I know. Here's his short play on Michael Schiavo In Hell.

Uh ?

Tony Sewell (who now has a website) in a bizarre piece on Condoleezza and sexual politics.

Some black commentators have described the relationship between her and George Bush as slave master and his mistress.

Perversely, these commentators think that because they would never want to sleep with her, then their male competitor with a small penis – the white man – would show interest. It tells us more about the teller than the tale.

Condi sneers at the typical Caucasian todger.

Black men may well feel that the people who seem to have power over them are white men and black women. Not only do they have more autonomy but are they conspiring together against the black man?

You what ?

It isn’t surprising that most African American men do not like Condoleezza Rice, not because of her politics but because of her asexual coldness.

I see. Nothing like judging a top State functionary by their sexual warmth. J-Lo for the State Department ?

There is no sex from Condoleezza. She is somewhere between Bush’s nanny and another one of his drinking chums with a skirt.

For ***** sake ! She can't win, can she ? If Paul Wolfovitz or Jeb Bush was 'on the nest' (as we say in the Black Country) imagine the stick she'd get.

It would be easier to deal with Ms Rice as a helpless victim oppressed by a bunch of white bigots. The problem is that she’s just as bigoted as her boss. She isn’t someone’s lackey but was driving foreign policy from the front.

At least he acknowledges that she's nobody's puppet. And for the record, I think she's delightful. If she's not partnered I'm sure it's not for want of offers. Perhaps she's choosy. What do you think ? Hot or not ?


Tony Sewell takes as his primary area of concern the issues facing black schoolboys and young men. He frequently bemoans the absence of suitable role models for them.

On the other hand, black (and Indian) women in the UK already earn more than their white counterparts. Condi is a fantastic role model, of the sort we just don't have in the UK. No Colin Powells either. You don't help black boys by knocking black girls.


Hat-tip to the usual site, to whom I'm also grateful for this story.

AL Kennedy - "Razor blades in the bathtub"

Subject : a handgun-waving, foetus-hugging agenda.
Madness rating : moderate to good, rain later
Phase of Moon : two-thirds full (is a pattern starting to emerge ?)

Mentions of
Depleted Uranium : No
Reality TV : Yes
Christians : No
Porn : No
Blood : Yes
Celebrities : No
Bush'n'Blair : Blair
Swearing : Yes ('buggering' is used correctly but 'buggered' isn't)

"One of the worst crimes a man can commit against his family"

Africans (and others) on absent fathers. RTWT.

Dear BBC News ....

If someone deliberately starved to death has been 'allowed to die', as in your news bulletins and this report among others, could you extend this phrase to cover parents who deliberately deprive their babies of food and water, or the victims of famine ?

After all, 'starving to death' is currently the preferred phrase when you're speaking of baby seals or human infants.

How To Reduce STDs

HIV is going up. Other STDs at record levels. That old favourite syphilis is back. An interesting new disease arises - a sort of chlamydia of the bot.

What should we do ?

Obvious - more sex education.

UPDATE - this report clearly shows the effect of sex education on STDs (or STIs as the Telegraph calls them). The low number of STIs among Pakistani and Indian men and women is clearly a reflection of the much greater amount of sex education in the Muslim and Hindu communities. Isn't it ?

He also points out the role of cultural norms regarding issues such as multiple partners and the age of losing one's virginity, with the substantially older age of first intercourse and lower number of partners among Indians and Pakistanis coinciding with low STI rates.

When men were asked about whether they had ever been diagnosed with a STI, 10.9 per cent of whites, 19.7 cent of black Caribbeans and 16.2 per cent of black Africans said they had. The figures for Indian and Pakistani males were 3.4 and 3.2 per cent.

"The longest public execution in American history"

Nat Hentoff in the Village Voice :

For all the world to see, a 41-year-old woman, who has committed no crime, will die of dehydration and starvation in the longest public execution in American history.
She is not brain-dead or comatose, and breathes naturally on her own. Although brain-damaged, she is not in a persistent vegetative state, according to an increasing number of radiologists and neurologists.

Among many other violations of her due process rights, Terri Schiavo has never been allowed by the primary judge in her case—Florida Circuit Judge George Greer, whose conclusions have been robotically upheld by all the courts above him—to have her own lawyer represent her.

Greer has declared Terri Schiavo to be in a persistent vegetative state, but he has never gone to see her. His eyesight is very poor, but surely he could have visited her along with another member of his staff. Unlike people in a persistent vegetative state, Terri Schiavo is indeed responsive beyond mere reflexes.

While lawyers and judges have engaged in a minuet of death, the American Civil Liberties Union, which would be passionately criticizing state court decisions and demanding due process if Terri were a convict on death row, has shamefully served as co-counsel for her husband, Michael Schiavo, in his insistent desire to have her die.

Ann Coulter finds good in the few on the left who had problems with killing a diabled woman because her estranged husband wanted it - Nader and Jesse Jackson among them.

Liberal Larry gives the perspective of the caring Left.

And NRO sum it up pretty well.

" ... we saw euphemism after euphemism deployed to cloud the issues.

Perhaps chief among these was the fiction that we were "letting her die." On March 18, Schiavo was in no medical danger of death. She was profoundly brain-damaged (although just how profoundly remains unknown), but she was not in a coma or on a respirator. She was not being kept alive by artificial means, any more than small children are kept alive by artificial means when their parents feed them. Her body was functioning, there is some reason to believe she was minimally conscious, and she was responsive to stimuli (it's been reported she was actually being administered pain medication). She had devoted parents and siblings who were willing to care for her. She could easily have gone on in these conditions for many years. She was not close to dying. For death to arrive, she would have to be killed.

And for that to happen, the use of words like "starvation" and "dehydration" would have to be discouraged. Those words might, after all, have reminded us that what was done to Schiavo would be criminal if done to an animal and provoke cries of "torture" and "cruel and unusual punishment" if done to a convicted capital murderer. And "killed," of course, was totally verboten."

Poor Terri just didn't kill enough people to get Clive Stafford-Smith's juices flowing, did she ?

Late Daffodils From The Curates Garden

In Manchester a special needs teacher with no previous convictions is jailed for six months for firing an air pistol at the pavement near a group of teenagers she believed had vandalised her son's car. She had been the victim of a sustained campaign of harassment and vandalism.

Interesting contrast in views between the BBC 'Have Your Say' page ('in a civilised society ..) and Manchester Online ('the current justice system is a joke').


On the left, blogger Dead Men Left is concerned at Tariq Ali's current political stance.

"Ali has arrived upon a formulation perhaps unique in British politics: support the Iraqi resistance, vote Liberal Democrat."

Of course it's not Ali's support for 'the resistance', the cheerful catch-all for the Saddamite fascists, the mosque-bombers, trade unionist torturers and the head-choppers, which is the problem. It's the thought of voting Lib Dem.

(Ali's 1970s phrase 'Let It Bleed' was a hip restatement of the old (Tsarist) Russian revolutionary slogan 'The Worse, The Better !" - implying that the greater the suffering of the working class, the nearer the revolution. Didn't seem to work in Thatcher's time - nor now, come to think of it.)



And all praise and honour is due to two brave living Catholics - Il Papa and Archbishop Pius Ncube, one of the few holy men with a name resembling a games console (the others being Cardinal Xbox of Vietnam and the Most Reverend Giles Sinclair-Spectrum of Oxford) - as well as the late Archbishop Oscar Romero, martyred twenty-five years ago.

Il Papa for his wonderful bravery and devotion to his flock, Ncube for the same.

The Zimbabwe elections are going to be even more of a farce than the last ones, if this report is correct. Note the name of the MDC secretary general - the even more wonderfully named Welshman Ncube.

Ncube further alleged that while the delegation representing the polling officers was meeting with the DA, the Zanu PF candidate for Mudzi East and provincial chairperson, Ray Kaukonde came to the centre. He was in the company of other local Zanu PF leaders, who told the polling officers they were not wanted in Mudzi because they were MDC supporters and sympathisers.

I see from the Indie that Mugabe is arming his youth militia with weaponry from China and Iran. Not good news. "Youth militia" and "Africa" generally seem to make for "dead people".

Doubtless we'll hear an outcry in the Guardian and Indie over this ...




And finally ... anyone still feeling cheerful ? If so can I recommend a quick read of Schopenhauer ?

The pleasure in this world, it has been said, outweighs the pain; or, at any rate, there is an even balance between the two. If the reader wishes to see shortly whether this statement is true, let him compare the respective feelings of two animals, one of which is engaged in eating the other.

Generating Genius

"No one, however, is going to fund you if you talk about developing the talented tenth in school."

Thus spake the great Tony Sewell only a month ago.

I'm not sure what (say) the Guardian and BBC would say about a scheme for which only white males qualified, but let it pass. Tony Sewell has found funding to send talented twelve year olds off to university in Jamaica for a month each summer. I'm presuming the idea is to catch the bright ones before street culture hath them in thrall.

Sewell believes that by identifying bright children when they are young and supporting them for more than three years, he has found a way of turning round the trend of underachievement.

Asked why he chose Jamaica: “In Jamaica they will see that every person in a position of authority looks like them. That fact alone is very important. Those boys will never be the same again and it’s all positive.”

During the course the boys will study various sciences and will work in some top laboratories in Kingston and undertake real experiments. The boys will return to Britain able to do demonstration lectures in medicine and research science.

When the boys come back from their summer residency they will be supported by a number of English universities.

Tam-tip - the indispensible Booker Rising (again)

Whipping Up A Storm

At Black Triangle, Anthony reports on a radical new Russian therapy for depression :

“The whipping therapy becomes much more efficient when a patient receives the punishment from a person of the opposite sex. The effect is astounding: the patient starts seeing only bright colors in the surrounding world, the heartache disappears, although it will take a certain time for the buttocks to heal, of course.”

While mirabilis covers traditional Czech Easter whipping :

"It is only the women who are given a good spanking with whips made of willow twigs, decorated with colourful ribbons ... It is mainly younger boys who go from door to door, hoping to thrash a few girls ... while singing traditional Easter carols.

The whipping or "pomlazka" is to get rid of all the bad things that had accumulated during the winter and bring the vitality back in the ladies, as well as ensure beauty and, of course, fertility."

They'll be bringing back the Flagellants next.

Ply well the scourge for Jesus' sake
And God through Christ your sins shall take ...
Had it not been for our contrition
All Christendom had met perdition ...

ASBO News

Remember ASBOs ? Brought in to deal with neighbours from hell and unruly youth gangs ?

"A man who was made subject to an Anti-Social Behaviour Order for putting up a sign saying “porking yard” in his pub car park, because it was offensive to Muslims, today described the court action as “a joke”.

Leroy Trought, 42, was given a two-year Asbo at a hearing at Bristol Magistrates’ Court on Monday.


Magistrates ordered him to change the wording of the “porking yard” sign at The Swan With Two Necks in St Judes, Bristol, to “parking yard”.

He was ordered not to display any signs that may be threatening, abusive or insulting at the pub, which is next to a Somali mosque."

Now such a sign may be pretty tasteless, presumably referring to the kind of activity which is not unknown in pub car parks, but were Christians to protest against it they'd be laughed out of court. Under multiculturalism all cultures are equal, some are just more equal than others.

Hat-tip - TP.

Dalrymple on the Shabina Begum case

In the long annals of judicial stupidity, there can rarely have been a more idiotic judgment than that recently given by Lord Justice Brooke of the British Court of Appeal. It reads like the suicide note not of a country alone, but of an entire civilization.

Read the whole thing.

Whisky-Drinking Cats Catch More Mice

The Glenturret Distillery is looking for a replacement for the departed Towser, who killed 30,000 mice in single combat over a 24-year career.



"The story goes that Towser's incredible mousing prowess was the result of a tiny nip being added to his milk each night, but we don't have any scientific proof to back this up and we certainly wouldn't advise this to anyone whose cat is under-performing in terms of vermin control".

In a press release, the Mouse Liberation Front described Towser as 'a mass murderer' and said 'we had hoped to see him stand trial at the International Criminal Court, along with the inventor of the 'humane' mousetrap. You know, the one that starves mice to death slowly, like Terri Schiavo'.

Glengarry-tip - Freedom and Whisky

Bring Back The Brit Imperialists

Last week's "From Our Own Correspondent" on Radio 4 contained among its primeval liberal slime this uncut gem :

Sierra Leone today is one of the poorest countries on the planet.

The last time I was there, veterans of the liberation generation - men and women who had risked imprisonment and death in the last years of British rule in the fight for independence - were earnestly making the case for a return to colonialism.

I guess the place has been a bit of a shambles since we left. And a few hundred Brit troops have at least stopped a few more people having their limbs hacked off. Imagine what could be done with a few thousand troops, a Governor and some District Commissioners ?

Couldn't be done of course. Brits are incapable of that sort of thing nowadays. The Guardian, Indie and BBC would have teams of reporters in Freetown looking for evidence of corruption or Brit brutality (and there would be some). Half the nations of Africa would send arms to whatever 'rebels' were currently active. And the educational factories which could turn out Hilary Hooks by the dozen sixty years ago are now producing bond dealers and futures brokers.