Memnison Journal

The Brits are getting into eating squirrel; especially those darn Yankee Grey Squirrels.
Mr. Griffiths is a fan of the meat, likening it to a slightly oily rabbit. “We started selling squirrel a few years ago, after the owner of our local pub bragged about winning a squirrel-eating contest,” he said. Then, he said, the [...]

Zimbabwe is a complex subject, and the complexities have gotten a whole lot rougher on the inhabitants as time passes by.   Europeans under Cecil Rhodes marched in in the ned of the 1800s and took control of the land from the local chiefs, and passed out all sorts of claims to white settlers, who set [...]

Uniformed officers burst into Lulu Matheson’s house in the village of Shieldaig, Wester Ross, kept her son Gus in his bedroom for two hours, handcuffed her grandson Stephen, and turned the house upside down.
The high-profile afternoon raid involved three squad cars, seven officers and sniffer dogs. They told the family they were looking for cannabis, [...]

Black mutant squirrels are taking over Britain, comic book denizens are aging, setting sheep on fire when you’re drunk will cause extra problems when they turn out to be people, and kids stealing parental credit cards and ordering up hookers - to play X-box games with them in hotel rooms.

A sequel to THE NAKED CIVIL SERVANT is in production for UK’s ITV in New York.  I loved the original, and with John Hurt reprising the role of Quentin Crisp, this should be pretty good.

It takes a man to suffer ignorance and smile,
Be yourself no matter what they say.

BBC story about a man who was seen on the TV by his family years after he was supposedly found dead and cremated.  Turns out that when he went missing in 2000, he ended up in a rest home, too out of it to remember much, and he’s been there since, and the cops screwed [...]

Wikipedia article here, and discussion on LiveJournal here and here about this shortlived British dependancy in what is now Greece - where some outer islands sought British protection after freeing themselves from the Ottoman Empire. When Greece became a nation, they joined up and the British left.

The interesting part of the last week, of course, was to watch McCain be seriously stupid in the face of Obama’s trip to the Middle East and Europe. The whole thing started off with McCain double-dast-daring that gormless Obama guy to be a real man and walk down a Baghdad street like he did, [...]

Neat piece from the BBC about a trainer in London who helps actors with their American accents. My everyday speech is a standard US Midwestern one, but my real base accent is a Southwestern Ohio (oh-hi-yuh) one. I beat it out of me in college by aiming at a cultured Canadian [...]

Indian ‘untouchables’ in mass conversion to Buddhism to escape the caste system.
Semi-Hindu / Semi-Muslim groups in India and how they’re coping with inter-religious problems.
Orange Order in Northern Ireland decides that they’re going to make their group more ‘friendly’, setting up ‘Orangefest’ to celebrate the Battle of the Boyne and a cartoon superhero named Diamond [...]

At various times, I get into research projects; some simmer on for decades in various forms, and some break off and pick up speed because I happen to run into something that really fuels the fire, so to speak.
My library here is largely one that I use for reference. I have a huge amount [...]

Is there a real difference you can see between Gordon Brown and Tony Blair as Prime Minister?  Just got done watching The Deal (which was very good) and was wondering…

Bob Barr’s run as a Libertarian candidate for President is feeling attractive to the left-out ends of the political compass; polls are showing him running at 8% in Georgia and 6% in North Carolina, making those states possibles for Obama in November.
Tom DeLay says that unless Obama can ‘prove him wrong’, he’s calling Obama a [...]

Article from the Sunday Times just before the UK election in 1987 that views an alternate-history scenario leading to the scrapping of the Polaris missile submarines in the Royal Navy.
uk_times_1987_scrapping_polaris (PDF, 1.4M)

From the UK Daily Telegraph:  1950’s contingency planners for the UK government in case of nuclear war noting that is that it would cut off outside supplies, and one could not get a good cup of hot tea.

A paper drawn up in April 1955 observed: “The advent of thermonuclear weapons…has presented us with a new [...]