Category: General

Spring has arrived in Wuhan, we already did the Peach Blossom thing, now we are getting an occasional warm day with clear skies slotted in between three of four days of torrential rain, and winter coats are being shed in favour of more flimsy attire. And another indicatior of where things stand in the seasons cycle is the number of randy dogs roaming the streets.
Continue reading “Woof Woof”

A disaffected young man four days away from his 27th birthday detonated a 7,000 lb bomb in front of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Government building in Oklahoma City.

168 people aged from 3 months to 73 years of age died. Most of the 19 children killed were attending the day care facility in the building.

The perpetrator was captured, tried and executed by lethal injection on June 11, 2001.

On the 19th of April 2005, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger was elected as the 256th Pope,  head of the world’s 1.1 billion Roman Catholics. Although there have been eight German Popes, only three have been from the territory of present day Germany. The last German Pope was Pope Victor II (1055 – 1057).  Ratzinger was the oldest Pope to have been elected since Clement XII in 1730. He took the name Benedict, meaning ‘Blessing’.

For more than 20 years Ratzinger was head of the congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith in the Vatican – the Vatican’s guardian of orthodoxy, that was once called the Inquisition.  It has been suggested that his denunciation of all deviations from traditional church teachings as ‘trickery and error’ may have been the decisive factor in his winning the Papacy.

Continue reading “On This Day – 19th April 2005”

I married my good lady wife on the 12th of July in 1974.

Being a Scot and a true romantic,  I pledged that I would give her one red rose for every year of said marriage on our anniversary. Being a Scot and a   torn-faced  cheapskate, I renegotiated said pledge in or about Year 12 and offered one red rose for every five years of marriage. Being a half-Scot and a realist, she accepted my offer. Continue reading “Absent Friends”

Would any of you object to my friend Paul joining the site??  He reads my blogs as a way of knowing what is going on in my life and now I have moved over here, he would like to continue to do so.   I doubt very much he would contribute, just use the site to come on to see what I am up to.

No worries if you would object, thought it best to ask before inviting him.

xxx

I learned about the Site that Must Not Be Named while reviewing a talk that Alexander McCall Smith gave at the University of California Berkeley, a couple of years ago, when the Daily Telegraph started publishing his first online novel. Continue reading “On the plus side”

I’m no big fan of Jonathan Ross but Friday night’s show was an unexpected goody.

For me, it was one of those moments of synergy, when the sum of two parts is so much greater than the whole.

There in the green room, side by side on the sofa were two of my big TV character heroes; Jack Bauer and Stringer Bell.

Stringer (Idris Alba) had dressed down for the occasion. In The Wire (a multi-stranded, brilliant, award-winning series about the dark under-belly of  Baltimore) he is tall, built, groomed and sleek, the elegant, ruthless, thinking face of a brutal drug-dealing empire. Continue reading “Bell and Bauer”

[Page references here are to Psychology of Terrorism, edited by Victoroff & Kruglanski.]

Yesterday Bravo22c posted a lengthy diatribe based partly on (assumptions he made about) a question I asked him some weeks ago: the question (as I recall it; he immediately deleted it) was ‘In your opinion, has the Russian state committed acts of terrorism against Chechen civilians?’

Continue reading “Can a state commit acts of terrorism?”