COLLATERAL DAMAGE
The squib that exploded: Address all remonstrations,
death threats, etc, to the email address below
After the editorial staff of the New York Press
resigned in protest against their publisher's craven
refusal to publish the Danish
cartoons, my friend Jeremy
Lott lost his perch there. But as they say,
when Allah closes a door, he starts a blog. So Jeremy and Joel
Miller have started 4Pundits.com,
to which I draw your attention.
But wait, that's only 2Pundits. Who are the others?
According to this
site, they are Doug
Bandow, of whom you might have read about
lately, and someone called James W Antle III. Actually,
he's called W
James Antle III. Well, actually, and
this is a closely held secret, his full name is William
James Brian Peter George St Jean le Baptiste de la Salle
Antle III.
Tune in tomorrow when I reveal Holiday
Dmitri's given name. Actually, it's Judy
Chen. Or something like that. And my real name is actually
Stupor W Mundi IV. So that leaves only one mystery
unexplained. Eve
Tushnet? Pull the other one.
Kevin Michael Grace,
10.34 pm, 15 February
2006►
POETRY CORNER (SPECIAL
'INSENSITIVE' EDITION)
|
Ob Der Koran Von Ewigkeit
Sei?
Ob der
Koran von Ewigkeit sei?
Darnach frag' ich nicht!
Ob der Koran geschaffen sei?
Das weiss ich nicht!
Dass er das Buch der Bücher sei,
glaub' ich aus Mosleminen-Pflicht.
Dass aber der Wein von Ewigkeit sei,
daran zweifl' ich nicht;
oder dass er von den Engeln geschaffen sei,
ist vielleicht auch kein Gedicht.
Der Trinkende, wie es auch immer sei,
blickt Gott frischer ins Angesicht.
-- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe |
Has The Koran Existed From
Eternity?
Has the
Koran existed from eternity?
I do not seek to know.
Was the Koran created?
How can I tell?
Yet that it is the book of books
it is my duty, as a Moslem, to believe.
But that wine has always existed
I have no doubt;
or perhaps it is no fable
that it was created by the angels.
However that may be, the drinker
can look God boldly in the face.
--
Translated by Lionel Salter
|
This and several other "blasphemous" poems
from Goethe's Westöstlicher Divan were set to
music by my beloved Hugo Wolf. My favourite version is by Dietrich
Fischer-Dieskau and Daniel Barenboim (uh
oh). How is it, I wonder, that these intolerable
provocations did not result in the burning of embassies
and other manifestations of Muslim sporting spirit? It's
not too late, I suppose, for Deutsche Grammophon to
apologize for its monstrous insensitivity.
Goethe, Wolf: Saying the unsayable
Kevin Michael Grace, 5.29 pm, 10 February
2006►
THOUGHT
FOR THE DAY (SPECIAL 'DAVID
EMERSON'S CHILDREN ARE UPSET'
EDITION)
It was
Clive James who first put forward the danger of children
crying on the way home from school as a good reason for
not abusing the famous and the powerful...The answer is,
of course: let them cry. Anybody who has had anything to
do with children knows perfectly well that they cry and
then they stop crying. It is an incident of no importance.
Convicts in prison may be excused such nauseating
sentimentality about children as we read every day in the
gutter press, but the suggestion that nobody in public
life may be criticized or tormented for fear of his
children being upset is an absurdity.
-- Auberon Waugh, Will
This Do?
Kevin
Michael Grace, 3.26 pm, 8 February 2006►
POETRY
CORNER
Allegory Of The Battle Of Lepanto, Veronese
Lepanto
White founts falling in the courts of
the sun,
And the Soldan of Byzantium is smiling as they run;
There is laughter like the fountains in that face of all
men feared,
It stirs the forest darkness, the darkness of his beard,
It curls the blood-red crescent, the crescent of his lips,
For the inmost sea of all the earth is shaken with his
ships.
They have dared the white republics up the capes of Italy,
They have dashed the Adriatic round the Lion of the Sea,
And the Pope has cast his arms abroad for agony and loss,
And called the kings of Christendom for swords about the
Cross,
The cold queen of England is looking in the glass;
The shadow of the Valois is yawning at the Mass;
From evening isles fantastical rings faint the Spanish
gun,
And the Lord upon the Golden Horn is laughing in the sun.
Dim drums throbbing, in the hills half
heard,
Where only on a nameless throne a crownless prince has
stirred,
Where, risen from a doubtful seat and half attainted
stall,
The last knight of Europe takes weapons from the wall,
The last and lingering troubadour to whom the bird has
sung,
That once went singing southward when all the world was
young,
In that enormous silence, tiny and unafraid,
Comes up along the winding road the noise of the Crusade.
Strong gongs groaning as the guns boom far,
Don John of Austria is going to the war,
Stiff flags straining in the night-blasts cold
In the gloom black-purple, in the glint old-gold.
Torchlight crimson on the copper
kettle-drums,
Then the tuckets, then the trumpets, then the cannon, and
he comes.
Don John laughing in the brave beard curled,
Spurning of his stirrups like the throne of all the world,
Holding his head up for a flag of all the free.
Love-light of Spain -- hurrah!
Death-light of Africa!
Don John of Austria
Is riding to the sea.
Mahound is in his paradise above the
evening star,
(Don John of Austria is going to the war.)
He moves a mighty turban on the timeless houri's knees,
His turban that is woven of the sunset and the seas.
He shakes the peacock gardens as he rises from his ease,
And he strides among the tree-tops and is taller than the
trees,
And his voice through all the garden is a thunder sent to
bring
Black Azrael and Ariel and Ammon on the wing.
Giants and the Genii,
Multiple of wing and eye,
Whose strong obedience broke the sky
When Solomon was king.
They rush in red and purple from the red
clouds of the morn,
From temples where the yellow gods shut up their eyes in
scorn;
They rise in green robes roaring from the green hells of
the sea
Where fallen skies and evil hues and eyeless creatures be;
On them the sea-valves cluster and the grey sea-forests
curl,
Splashed with a splendid sickness, the sickness of the
pearl;
They swell in sapphire smoke out of the blue cracks of the
ground, --
They gather and they wonder and give worship to Mahound.
And he saith, "Break up the mountains where the
hermit-folk can hide,
And sift the red and silver sands lest bone of saint
abide,
And chase the Giaours flying night and day, not giving
rest,
For that which was our trouble comes again out of the
west.
We have set the seal of Solomon on all things under sun,
Of knowledge and of sorrow and endurance of things done,
But noise is in the mountains, in the mountains, and I
know
The voice that shook our palaces -- four hundred years
ago:
It is he that saith not 'Kismet'; it is he that knows not
Fate;
It is Richard, it is Raymond, it is Godfrey at the gate!
It is he whose loss is laughter when he counts the wager
worth,
Put down your feet upon him, that our peace be on the
earth."
For he heard drums groaning and he heard guns jar,
(Don John of Austria is going to the war.)
Sudden and still -- hurrah!
Bolt from Iberia!
Don John of Austria
Is gone by Alcalar.
St Michael's on his mountain in the
sea-roads of the north
(Don John of Austria is girt and going forth.)
Where the grey seas glitter and the sharp tides shift
And the sea folk labour and the red sails lift.
He shakes his lance of iron and he claps his wings of
stone;
The noise is gone through Normandy; the noise is gone
alone;
The North is full of tangled things and texts and aching
eyes
And dead is all the innocence of anger and surprise,
And Christian killeth Christian in a narrow dusty room
And Christian dreadeth Christ that hath a newer face of
doom,
And Christian hateth Mary that God kissed in Galilee,
But Don John of Austria is riding to the sea.
Don John calling through the blast and the eclipse
Crying with the trumpet, with the trumpet of his lips,
Trumpet that sayeth ha!
Domino gloria!
Don John of Austria
Is shouting to the ships.
King Philip's in his closet with the
Fleece about his neck
(Don Juan of Austria is armed upon the deck.)
The walls are hung with velvet that is black and soft as
sin,
And little dwarfs creep out of it and little dwarfs creep
in.
He holds a crystal phial that has colours like the moon,
He touches, and it tingles, and he trembles very soon,
And his face is as a fungus of a leprous white and grey
Like plants in the high houses that are shuttered from the
day,
And death is in the phial; and the end of noble work,
But Don John of Austria has fired upon the Turk.
Don John’s hunting, and his hounds have bayed --
Booms away past Italy the rumour of his raid
Gun upon gun, ha! ha!
Gun upon gun, hurrah!
Don John of Austria
Has loosed the cannonade.
The Pope was in his chapel before day or
battle broke,
(Don John of Austria is hidden in the smoke.)
The hidden room in man's house where God sits all the
year,
The secret window whence the world looks small and very
dear.
He sees as in a mirror on the monstrous twilight sea
The crescent of his cruel ships whose name is mystery;
They fling great shadows foe-wards, making Cross and
Castle dark,
They veil the plumèd lions on the galleys of St. Mark;
And above the ships are palaces of brown, black-bearded
chiefs,
And below the ships are prisons, where with multitudinous
griefs,
Christian captives sick and sunless, all a labouring race
repines
Like a race in sunken cities, like a nation in the mines.
They are lost like slaves that swat, and in the skies of
morning hung
The stair-ways of the tallest gods when tyranny was young.
They are countless, voiceless, hopeless as those fallen or
fleeing on
Before the high Kings' horses in the granite of Babylon.
And many a one grows witless in his quiet room in hell
Where a yellow face looks inward through the lattice of
his cell,
And he finds his God forgotten, and he seeks no more a
sign --
(But Don John of Austria has burst the battle-line!)
Don John pounding from the slaughter-painted poop,
Purpling all the ocean like a bloody pirate's sloop,
Scarlet running over on the silvers and the golds,
Breaking of the hatches up and bursting of the holds,
Thronging of the thousands up that labour under sea
White for bliss and blind for sun and stunned for liberty.
Vivat Hispania!
Domino Gloria!
Don John of Austria
Has set his people free!
Cervantes on his galley sets the sword
back in the sheath
(Don John of Austria rides homeward with a wreath.)
And he sees across a weary land a straggling road in
Spain,
Upon which a lean and foolish knight forever rides in
vain,
And he smiles, but not as Sultans smile, and settles back
the blade …
(But Don John of Austria rides home from the Crusade.)
-- GK Chesterton
Kevin
Michael Grace, 10.43 pm, 7 February 2006►
THOUGHT
FOR THE DAY (SPECIAL DANISH CARTOONS EDITION)
Talking on
the subject of toleration, one day when some friends were
with him in his study, he made his usual remark, that the
State has a right to regulate the religion of the people,
who are the children of the State. A clergyman having
readily acquiesced in this, Johnson, who loved discussion,
observed, "But, Sir, you must go round to other
States than our own. You do not know what a Brahmin has to
say for himself. In short, Sir, I have got no further than
this: Every man has a right to utter what he thinks truth,
and every other man has a right to knock him down for it.
Martyrdom is the test."
-- James Boswell, The
Life Of Samuel Johnson
Kevin
Michael Grace, 4.02 pm, 6 February 2006►
WHEELS
WITHIN WHEELS
Cornfield: Amber waves of subsidy
One of the
many joys of the Child's Letter to God formerly known as
the State
of the Union Address was Dubya's conversion
to the cause of energy conservation.
Keeping America competitive
requires affordable energy. And here we have a serious
problem: America is addicted to oil, which is often
imported from unstable parts of the world. The best way to
break this addiction is through technology. Since 2001, we
have spent nearly $10 billion to develop cleaner, cheaper,
and more reliable alternative energy sources -- and we are
on the threshold of incredible advances.
So tonight, I announce the
Advanced Energy Initiative -- a 22-percent increase in
clean-energy research -- at the Department of Energy, to
push for breakthroughs in two vital areas. To change how
we power our homes and offices, we will invest more in
zero-emission coal-fired plants, revolutionary solar and
wind technologies, and clean, safe nuclear energy.
(Applause.)
We must also change how we
power our automobiles. We will increase our research in
better batteries for hybrid and electric cars, and in
pollution-free cars that run on hydrogen. We'll also fund
additional research in cutting-edge methods of producing
ethanol, not just from corn, but from wood chips and
stalks, or switch grass. Our goal is to make this new kind
of ethanol practical and competitive within six years.
(Applause.)
"Incredible
advances," eh? I haven't heard such
enthusiasm since the heyday of Corncob
Bob Dole, the erstwhile Senator
from Archer
Daniels Midland. Cleaner, cheaper and more
reliable energy is a simple matter of finding the
Philosopher's Stone. I hear that Bush has tasked Rumsfeld
with this, and he's got Delta Force on the case. Hey, they
found Osama, right? Take that, Johnnie Muslim!
Canada's
own Matt Drudge, Pierre Bourque, must have been over the
moon after the SOTUA, as it gave him the excuse to run
another headline touting ethanol, his
third in the last couple of weeks. I'm sure
it's purely coincidental that Bourque's devotion to the
miracle fuel followed the placement on his site of banner
ads from the Canadian
Renewable Fuels Association.
The
executive director of the CRFA is a fellow called Kory
Teneycke, who happens to be an old pal of
my old pal Ersatz Levant, the two-fisted free marketeer
and publisher. I'm sure that it was only as a favour to an
old pal that Ezsatz allowed the CRFA to pay for the Western
Standard's "amazing
hospitality suite" -- overflowing with
"delicious cocktails" -- at the Conservative
Party policy convention in Montreal last year. To suggest
otherwise would be to imply that Ezra's opposition to
"corporate welfare" is anything less than
entirely sincere and totally unsituational. And you won't
catch me playing that mug's game.
You might
just check out a book put together by Canada's most ornery
waste-busters, the National Citizens' Coalition. The
Coalition has published a whole booklet called Tales
from the Tax Trough that is now in its third edition.
Like the Canadian Taxpayers Federation, these citizens sat
down with a calculator and added up just how much money is
spent on people who didn't earn it. They found that, from
1993 to 1996, ACOA alone "handed out a staggering
$974,495,000! That means 201,342 taxpayers worked and paid
taxes all year to fund these shameful examples of
corporate welfare" Tales from the Tax Trough III,
published by the National Citizens' Coalition, Toronto,
1995, p. 19. Note They proceed to give such examples as
$139,035 spent "to construct a replica Viking
ship," and $500,000 for the "completion of a
9-hole golf course in Newfoundland." Or how about
$13,842 for "additional wax figures for the Royal
Atlantic Wax Museum"?
WED gave
out more than $1 billion over the same period of time,
barely edging out FORD-Q. FORD-Q, however, had the
distinction of spending $3.5 million on an industrial
interpretive centre in Shawinigan, Quebec, the home town
of our Prime Minister.
Enough,
already! Stop the great giveaway. Sell the Post Office.
Sell the CBC. Sell the railways, including VIA. Because by
subsidizing these white elephants, we're selling something
else -- our future.
-- Ersatz Levant, Youthquake,
Fraser Institute, 1996
Kevin
Michael Grace, 3.27 am, 4 February 2006►
THOUGHT
FOR THE DAY
Until
getting into bed with Persy it had never occurred to me
that any intelligent person could believe in Catholicism.
In fact, this central teaching of Catholicism, that the
Church can know and teach God's will, even in quite
specific matters of sexual conduct, was something which I
had never directly encountered, although one had heard
quarrels about it in pubs.
Why Persy
believed in it, beyond the fact that it was in her blood,
and she had been taught to believe it, I could not fathom
then, and I have never understood since. I remain the most
invincibly
ignorant of Protestants. But believe it she
... most indubitably did. I think I can understand the
religious point of view. Nor do I wish to cut myself off
from the imaginative experiences of my ancestors who
built, and worshipped in, the parish churches of England
and who punctuated their lives with the liturgy of The
Book Of Common Prayer. Since I grew up, I have been
perfectly at ease with this position, being neither clever
nor curious enough to map out my own metaphysical opinions
but feeling no embarrassment at occasional attendance at
Anglican worship.
For the
Catholics, however, this is pure heresy and isn't a
religious point of view at all ...
-- AN Wilson, Hearing
Voices
Kevin
Michael Grace, 1.16 am, 4 February 2006►
THOUGHT
FOR THE DAY
There is a
certain fascination about making the very worst of a bad
job. Achilles knew his business when he sat in his tent.
-- PG Wodehouse, Mike
And Psmith
Kevin
Michael Grace, 6.35 pm, 3 February 2006►
BIT
THIN ON THE COPY DESK, ARE WE?
So John
Roberts, in a previous life and country an
amusing and literate MuchMusic
VJ, leaves what was known in a previous life as the
Columbia Broadcasting System for the Cable News Network.
So how does the National Post headline this
development in the life of a prominent Canadian?
Watch
out Aaron Brown, J.D. has joined CNN
Uh, Aaron
Brown left
CNN three months ago. You might have read
about it. In the National Post, for instance. And
it was on TV and everything.
JD with 'über'-perky Erica Ehm, 1985: Halcyon days
Kevin
Michael Grace, 1.23 pm, 2 February 2006►
THANK
YOU, STEPHEN HARPER
The
Ambler enjoyed a record number of visitors last month,
and Stephen Harper gets much of the credit (or blame).
About 1,400 came here from Google searches of his name and
an astounding 8,000 more were looking for pictures of him.
Don't really understand the latter, but traffic's
traffic.
According
to the increasingly unreliable Site Meter, this site had
15,000 unique visits in January (old record, 11,700). But
according to Webalizer, which gets its data directly from
the server, visits reached 23,576 (old record, 16,411). So
the 37% undercount mentioned
in July 2005 has now reached 57%.
About 60% of my
traffic comes from text/picture searches and links. Here
are the Top 10 search engine text strings for January
2006:
| 1. |
1439 |
35.82% |
stephen harper |
| 2. |
665 |
16.55% |
drag queen |
| 3. |
122 |
3.04% |
lipstick lesbian |
| 4. |
104 |
2.59% |
nosferatu |
| 5. |
92 |
2.29% |
diana rigg |
| 6. |
77 |
1.92% |
drag queen pictures |
| 7. |
64 |
1.59% |
kuato |
| 8. |
40 |
1.00% |
jessicasimpson |
| 9. |
35 |
0.87% |
jimmy carter |
| 10. |
32 |
0.80% |
"stephen harper" |
Diana Rigg is big leggy
Leaving aside the lookieloos and link-by-nighters,
about 40% of my visitors are those who've made a habit of
this site. And it is to the latter group I now appeal. It
is my intention to make The Ambler my primary
activity. (Yes, you've heard this before, but this time I
really, really mean it. Honest.)
So, February is going to be The Ambler
Preservation Month. Please direct your attention to
the PayPal donation button at the top left. If you enjoy
this space, I'd be ever so chuffed if you sent a
contribution. NB: The button does not work if you
are not using Internet Explorer. And if you don't trust
the Intranode, send me an email, and I'll send you my
address.
I have big plans for The Ambler,
including podcasts, syndication, trackbacking, the
long-delayed migration from FrontPage -- and much more
posting. I'd like your help to bring them to
fruition.
Kevin
Michael Grace, 11.43 pm, 1 February 2006►
