Liadnan

I've been arguing about the cretinous description of three Guantanamo detainees killing themselves as "assymetrical warfare" elsewhere rather than here: the Fafblog engages with the notion as only it can...

they only committed suicide as part of a diabolical ruse to trick the world into thinking our secret torture camp is the kind of secret torture camp that drives its prisoners to commit suicide! This fiendish attempt to slander the great American institution of the gulag is nothing less than an act of asymmetrical warfare against the United States - a noose is just a suicide bomb with a very small blast radius, people! - and when faced with a terrorist attack, America must respond. Giblets demands immediate retaliatory airstrikes on depressed Muslim torture victims throughout the mideast!

Quite.

The more computer-geeky among you almost certainly know a great deal more about the ongoing SCO v. IBM litigation on alleged IP infringements in linux than I do. Personally, given I know next to nothing about computers and not a great deal about English IP law, let alone that of the US and specifically the state of Utah, I have nothing worth saying about that itself, though I do find myself raising my eyebrows when I learn that SCO have taken two and a half years from issue to file what they say is their full particularisation of what IBM actually did, and then done so under court seal. I'd hate to have to defend that one on a wet Wednesday afternoon interim application in the commercial court or the TCC. As is often the case with legal stories (and also history) I'm in that comfortable position of knowing enough to know I know nothing...

What struck me about the story when reading about the latest developments yesterday was a separate point: 'SCO said, "The numerosity and substantiality of the disclosures reflects the pervasive extent and sustained degree as to which IBM disclosed methods, concepts, and in many places, literal code"'.

.. while I thnk about my own responses and so anyone else can go play:

Joff asks about laziness, morality, and class as matters arising from yesterday's "Chav" thread.

Frankie writes about style.

(via Unfogged who had it from Matthew Yglesias).

Calling a spade a bike

On the evening of May 29, 2003, Hayden was smoking crack with three other folks at a trailer park home on Chain of Rocks Road in Granite City, Illinois. Murphy, Sr., who had sold drugs to Hayden several years earlier, showed up later that night. He was friendly at first, but he soon called Hayden a snitch bitch hoe [1] and hit her in the head with the back of his hand. He said he saw her name in discovery materials from his son's criminal case and that she was [...]

[1] The trial transcript quotes Ms. Hayden as saying Murphy called her a snitch bitch hoe. A hoe, of course, is a tool used for weeding and gardening. We think the court reporter, unfamiliar with rap music (perhaps thankfully so), misunderstood Hayden s response. We have taken the liberty of changing hoe to ho, a staple of rap music vernacular as, for example, when Ludacris raps You doin ho activities with ho tendencies.

I suppose it's an intensely parochial issue, limited in interest to any but the handful of you who live in or have some connection with Hampstead, Highgate, or Camden Town, that the Hampstead Ponds may be closing. But I think it goes beyond the loss we're facing: if the Corporation of London* can't find a measly £200,000 in its petty cash drawer then the economy of this country is in deep, deep shit.

Heard from a politician on Radio 4 this morning: "a quicker and faster response" (by the police). Quicker and faster, my word.

And some of those in favour of a law to ban incitement to religious hatred are arguing that it should, for instance, be useable against another Salman Rushdie. Which makes me fairly fundamentally opposed.

*note for those who don't know about the insane complexities of London government, the Corporation is the local authority for the City of London -the Square Mile, not the metropolis of Greater London-, is the richest local authority in the country, dates its privileges back to before the conquest (you'll occasionally find the rather dubious claim that it wasn't conquered by William, it made a peace treaty with him) and tends to manage to get into any statute dealing with land law or local authority powers some clause along the lines of "but not in the City of London". Which is why it's the only feudal tenant-in-chief left where that status actually has some meaning, I think.

Looking for the source of the word "chav" brought me (as some of you are aware) to this site. Hours of time-wasting fun to be had.

This, for example.

For the benefit of those not subscribed to the Other Place, Chav is, as I thought, believed to be a Romany word meaning child.. The same article ascribes "pikey" to "turnpike [traveller]" which rather puts a spike in the wheels of the argument that unlike abuse against mere "travellers" (not an ethnic group) it could give rise to legal action on race relations grounds. The idea was that it was thought to refer to Irish tinkers specifically (see a row around this time last year about a particularly appalling Sussex bonfire where a caravan containing effigies and with the numberplate P1KEY was ceremonially burnt - lovely quaint traditions).

There are things that I know.

They include but are not limited to the following:-

1. Budapest is a very pleasant city in which to spend a weekend, changed only for the better since I interrailed through there about 14 years ago;
2. Unicum is possibly the most poisonous and unpleasant excuse for alcohol ever invented;
3. Fortunately there are many more pleasant things to drink and they don't seem to believe in taxing them
4. Hungarian women are, almost without exception, stunning
5. [Corollary to (4)] I am very shallow;
6. Men who still have Mohicans when the eighties have been over for 15 years are not to be trusted;
7. Lynne Truss is not working for London Underground*
8. I am extremely hungover and tired and I smell.

More sometime,
Mx

*In case you haven't seen it: "If you see a suspicious package, do not touch it, check with other passengers, inform station staff, or call 999." That's the British way: just pretend it isn't happening.