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TALLRITE BLOG
You can write to me at blog2-at-tallrite-dot-com |
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| October 2004 | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Issue #87 : Miscellaneous Posts During October 2004 [650]
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Bin Laden Springs Back to Life I can only express my astonishment.
Well, regrettably, it seems he is not dead. He was perhaps badly injured, but if so has made an excellent recovery over the intervening three years. Though the video looks convincing to a non-expert like me, there are nevertheless others who advance reasons for believing that the video is fake. For example,
Coming as it does just ahead of the US Presidential election, the video's purpose is clearly to influence the vote (just as Al Qaeda's Madrid bombings did). But how? Whilst claiming glory for 9/11, OBL is trying - according to Islamic expert
Fahmy Howeidi - to convince people that, if
they do not vote for President Bush, they will be more
safe, more secure. In other words, OBL, like Mr Moore, is endorsing Senator Kerry! What wonderful, vote-catching news for the Republicans. The world's most notorious terrorist is afraid of Mr Bush. The indomitable Mark Humphrys dug up this apposite slogan some weeks ago, which says it all. So Mr bin Laden is alive and well, but not quite as sharp as he once was and as he still thinks he is. He's a bit like England soccer captain David Beckham bragging about his cleverness in deliberately earning a yellow card, not realising his stupidity in announcing his cleverness. George Bush can thank, at least in part, OBL's latest video for the victory he will earn on Tuesday.
Democracy Challenge to Irish Left I had another ding-dong earlier in October in the letters page of the subscription-only Irish Times with Raymond Deane, the accomplished professional musician who is also Chair (musical chair?) of the left-wing Ireland Palestine Solidarity Campaign. Mr Dean had complained about Israel's incursions into Gaza in response to Palestinian rocket attacks from Gaza aimed at (as usual) civilians in Israel. Apologists for those who consistently target civilians consider the correct Israeli response is, well, to do nothing. But his assertion, not for the first time, that Israel only “purports” to be democratic prompted me to hurl at him a challenge. I had plagiarised it from Mark Humphrys in his exchange early this year with the Irish Peace Society, another left-wing organisation which despite its name avidly supports Palestinian terrorism.
He replied a week later to my defence of Israel's actions in Gaza but dodged the challenge, understandably because he can't counter it. So the next day, the editor published a reiteration of my challenge. Simultaneously, Mark Humphys picked this up and restated the challenge (which is originally his) at the end of his own lengthy exchange with the Irish Peace Society. We're both still waiting. The Left has no answer, other than further defense of murderous tyrannical regimes, such as that of the Palestinian Authority. The imminent demise of Yasser Arafat at least now affords the long-suffering Palestinians some chance for the future. A promising sign is that former PA Prime Minister Abu Mazen, whom I once described as a great hope for the Palestinians, and whom Mr Arafat would like to kill, is now apparently chairing PA meetings in Mr Arafat's absence.
Giancarlo Casale explains
The next day I mentioned my musings to my landlord, whose wife is from Brazil. “That’s funny,” he said, “In Portuguese the word for turkey is ‘peru.’ Same bird, different country.” Hmm. With my curiosity piqued, I decided to go straight to the source. That very afternoon I found myself a Turk and asked him how to say turkey in Turkish. “Turkey?” he said. “Well, we call turkeys ‘hindi,’ which means, you know, from India.” India? This was getting weird. I spent the next few days finding out the word for turkey in as many languages as I could think of, and the more I found out, the weirder things got. In Arabic, for instance, the word for turkey is “Ethiopian bird,” while in Greek it is “gallapoula” or “French girl.” The Persians, meanwhile, call them “buchalamun” which means, appropriately enough, “chameleon.” In Italian, on the other hand, the word for turkey is “tacchino” which, my Italian relatives assured me, means nothing but the bird. “tacchino” also means “peacock”; moreover turkey also translates as “pollo d'India”, or “Indian chicken”.] “But,” they added still on matters Italian, “it reminds us of something else. In Italy we call corn, which as everybody knows comes from America, ‘grano turco’Turkish grain’”. So here we were back to Turkey again! And as if things weren’t already confusing enough, a further consultation with my Turkish informant revealed that the Turks call corn “misir” which is also their word for Egypt! By this point, things were clearly getting out of hand. But I persevered nonetheless, and just as I was about to give up hope, a pattern finally seemed to emerge from this bewildering labyrinth. In French, it turns out, the word for turkey is “dinde,” meaning “from India,” just like in Turkish. The words in both German and Russian had similar meanings, so I was clearly on to something. The key, I reasoned, was to find out what turkeys are called in India, so I called up my high school friend’s wife, who is from an old Bengali family, and popped her the question. “Oh,” she said, “We don’t have turkeys in India. They come from America. Everybody knows that.” “Yes,” I insisted, “but what do you call them?” “Well, we don’t have them!” she said. She wasn’t being very helpful. Still, I persisted: “Look, you must have a word for them. Say you were watching an American movie translated from English and the actors were all talking about turkeys. What would they say?” “Well ... I suppose in that case they would just say the American word, ‘turkey.’ Like I said, we don’t have them.” So there I was, at a dead end. I began to realize only too late that I had unwittingly stumbled upon a problem whose solution lay far beyond the capacity of my own limited resources. Obviously I needed serious professional assistance. So the next morning I scheduled an appointment with Prof. Şinasi Tekin of Harvard University, a world-renowned philologist and expert on Turkic languages. If anyone could help me, I figured it would be Professor Tekin. As I walked into his office on the following Tuesday, I knew I would not be disappointed. Prof. Tekin had a wizened, grandfatherly face, a white, bushy, knowledgeable beard, and was surrounded by stack upon stack of just the sort of hefty, authoritative books which were sure to contain a solution to my vexing Turkish mystery. I introduced myself, sat down, and eagerly awaited a dose of Prof. Tekin’s erudition. “You see,” he said, “In the Turkish countryside there is a kind of bird, which is called a çulluk. It looks like a turkey but it is much smaller, and its meat is very delicious. Long before the discovery of America, English merchants had already discovered the delicious çulluk, and began exporting it back to England, where it became very popular, and was known as a ‘Turkey bird’ or simply a ‘turkey’. Then, when the English came to America, they mistook the birds here for çulluks, and so they began calling them ‘turkey’ also. But other peoples weren’t so easily fooled. They knew that these new birds came from America, and so they called them things like ‘India birds,’ ‘Peruvian birds,’ or ‘Ethiopian birds.’ You see, ‘India,’ ‘Peru’ and ‘Ethiopia’ were all common names for the New World in the early centuries, both because people had a hazier understanding of geography, and because it took a while for the name ‘America’ to catch on. “Anyway, since that time Americans have begun exporting their birds everywhere, and even in Turkey people have started eating them, and have forgotten all about their delicious çulluk. This is a shame, because çulluk meat is really much, much tastier.” Prof Tekin seemed genuinely sad as he explained all this to me. I did my best to comfort him, and tried to express my regret at hearing of the unfairly cruel fate of the delicious çulluk. Deep down, however, I was ecstatic. I finally had a solution to this holiday problem, and knew I would be able once again to enjoy the main course of my traditional Thanksgiving dinner without reservation. Now if I could just figure out why they call those little teeny dogs Chihuahuas.... To summarise ...
All EU member states, and the rest of Britain, are accurately represented on the cover. But Wales has disappeared and been replaced by water. (Few are shedding tears.) Wales has been sliced off along a line from Chester to the Severn Estuary, roughly along the English border, which is now just a beach, with to the west nothing but sea until you reach Ireland. The Daily Mail understands perfectly ...
It's supposed to be here, or in French here, but it isn't. Internet Commentator points out that the Welsh don't care if their country disappears provided other EU citizens' tax money continues to flow into their coffers.
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After
disappearing from view and sound since December 2001, Osama bin Laden (OBL) has
apparently sprung back into life with an authentic 
OBL
accuses Mr Bush of telling lies, and mocks him for reading 
How did the turkey get its name?
A
bureaucratic blunder has left Wales off a map of Europe on the cover of
the 2004 edition of the prestigious Eurostat Statistical Compendium (price
€50), which contains all the facts and figures on Europe.
Meanwhile, those negligent EUrocrats seem to be so
emb- arrassed that they've taken down the report from their web page.
Now, for a little [Light Relief]
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Gift Idea |
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BLOGROLL
Blog-Irish (defunct)
Jihad
Religion
Iona Institute
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Blog Directory
Irish Times
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What I'm
N E W ! The book is meticulously researched, magnificently structured, beautifully written - and drips innocent Chinese blood from almost every one of its 971 riveting pages. Moa Tse Tung was obsessed with simply killing as many of his countrymen as he could by whatever means in order to maintain the remainder in such a permanent state of terror that the idea of turning on him would never even cross their wretched minds. He also starved peasants in their hundreds of millions in order to confiscate the food they grew to pay the Soviets for a gargantuan armaments infrastructure. Most terribly, Mao was absolutely right. He proved that terror is the most effective way of retaining power. Too many despots have tried to emulate him, but none with the same single-minded ferocity. Disgustingly, people name restaurants in his honour +++++
In that role, as Hitler's trusted operative, he recounts much derring-do, such as rescuing Mussolini from mountain top captivity, bluffing the then Hungarian strongman into surrendering, wreaking covert havoc on the Allied invasion of France.
Particularly moving is his account, from the German viewpoint, This page-turner of a book concludes with a forecast of the role of Special Forces in future conflicts, which has turned out to be surprisingly prescient. It was written in 1954.
The purpose of this
It
does so, But the book is spoilt by the introduction of a storyline which is sentimental and distracting. Much of it is frankly boring. You might enjoy the sex which is detailed and graphic, but it's unnecessary.
Also, the interminable, repetitive description, going on for over 40
pages, of being About 200 pages should have been edited out. +++++ Other books here |
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After
48
crackling, compelling, captivating games, the new World Champions are,
deservedly,
England get the Silver,
No-one can argue with
Over the competition, |
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