Bush more singable than Rumsfeld

That’s what I reckon on comparing Mark Liberman’s transcription of Bush’s 7/7 remarks and Rummy here. I’m not an expert on these things, but my distinct impression is that Bush’s West Texabonics work best as 30s blues from the region.

Victorian Albert

Arcadi Espada’s “Victorian Albert” museum conjures a delightful vision of an old building full of cuddly Alberts rather than the Touch Me trendiness that I so adore. (No Berts in the V&A: as the Queen said, “This will not change our way of life.”))

“Blair’s hiding something from us”

La Vanguardia invests a lot more in foreign coverage than some other Spanish newspapers but still ends up getting a lot of things wrong, sometimes intentionally. Here, however, is an absolute pearl of paranoid ludicricity from its even more downmarket colleague, El PeriĆ³dico: Tony Blair’s government has imposed on its fellow citizens a policy of…

Beacons

David de Ugarte writes that “Al-Qaeda is the first distributed armed organisation that is open and based on open-access technology, ideology and gear.” The rest is debatable, but the word “first” is wrong. What about all those networks of early-warning hill-top beacons in Scandinavia 1000 years ago, used to rouse people with home-made weapons and…