Various Things

[poliphilo]

1. I think that may have been a swallow perched on the wire. By the time I'd grabbed my glasses to make sure it had flown. 

2. The sun came out yesterday. I had planned to walk from the hospital to my old church and take pictures of it- brightly lit with interesting clouds behind- but the doctor was late in keeping the appointment we'd booked with him and it left me pressed for time, so instead I sat with Ailz and Dot and watched Eric sleep.

The doctor said the same things he said a week ago. The only new development is the c difficile.  Dot thinks Eric is angry with her for not taking him home. 

3. The rain came back in the night. A week ago we were talking about hose-pipe bans. Now we're talking about floods. Down in the West Country a man has drowned in his car. 

4. The government is flailing about.  Polly Toynbee says it's the worst in living memory (she would.)  "Brutal" and "blundering" are the adjectives she favours. We're back in recession (That is, if we ever left it.) Cameron was ordered back to the Commons to account for his leniency to Jeremy Hunt and got very red-faced and shouty. 

5. Surface to air missiles are going to be positioned around London to protect the Olympics. At least one battery will be sited on top of a high rise apartment building. The first the residents knew of this was when they got a slip of paper slipped under their doors. One of them is looking into suing the MOD. 

If there's wide-spread popular excitement about our militarized Games I'm not sensing it. The only British athlete I can name without having to rack my brains is Dwain Chambers, who will be allowed to compete in spite of having been handed a life-long ban for being a drugs cheat.

6. Scholars have known for a while that the source documents of Islam are a bit dodgy, but haven't been in the business of sharing the information with those of us who don't read German. Now Tom Holland is putting it about. I always thought Mohammed was a solidly attested historical figure but I was wrong. There are no contemporary references to him, the earliest "biography" was written two hundred years after his death and the hadith are spurious:  all of which makes the founder of Islam as legendary as his near-contemporary King Arthur.

Comments

[ron-broxted.livejournal.com]

No swallows in Northern Ireland or Irish republic either!

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

I'm not sure there are any here either. I only got a glimpse and I'm very short-sighted.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

London is going to be turned into an armed camp for the Olympic fortnight. I'm glad I live elsewhere.

[ooxc.livejournal.com]

I thought that a swallow swooped low over the garden two days ago, but I've seen no sign since - but we git far fewer than usual last year. I don't know if I imagined the forked tail that I thought I saw another day, from the bus -

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

I'm not sure what I saw. Maybe it was wishful thinking. I'd love for there to be swallows.

[ideealisme.livejournal.com]

If I were a swallow and got here, with the April we've been having? I'd take a quick breather and turn right back around to Africa.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

The more I think about it the more it seems unlikely to have been a swallow. "Sigh".

[michaleen.livejournal.com]

Rather shocking about Mohammed -- peace be upon him. Like you, I'd thought he was solidly historical.

I saw someone suggest that, were they an ambitious 'terrorist', they would get a model aircraft, attach something like a signal flair to its tail, and launch it out of the back of a lorry at the height of the Olympics, like the IRA used to launch mortar attacks. Among other things, when those missiles launch, they'll shower residential neighborhoods with shards of white-hot metal at super-sonic speeds.

The ensuing chaos would be awesome and all the damage self-inflicted. As I've said before, Cameron is a remarkably stupid man leading remarkably stupid men. He is no more capable of understanding the consequences of his decisions here than he is when it comes to his childishly sadistic economic policies, but we may rest assured that, however undesirable those consequences might be, no one could have foreseen them and they won't be his fault.

[ooxc.livejournal.com]

At my last home, I had a whole family of young swallows in the bedroom! I was living in a converted barn, with balcony-style bedrooms set high up in the roof - and one day I saw four or five birds swooping around - my landlady had taken down the stables for re-erection elsewhere, and the swallows had adapted fairly happily to the new premises - then, it seems, got confused on the way home from a training flight!(My home was about halfway between the old site and the new.)
We even wondered if it was a memory - perhaps the barn had been a nesting place before it was converted - that had only happened three or four years previously

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

There was a chap in a beret on the News the other day assuring us that we shouldn't worry about his guys shooting down planes over central London because it was all in the interests of keeping us "safe".

[michaleen.livejournal.com]

How, exactly, does dropping airplanes on the citizens of London keep them safe? The mind boggles.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

Exactly. It reminds me of the the US military destroying Vietnamese villages in order to save them.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

Swallows move so quickly. If they came indoors I'd be (a) delighted and (b) afraid of them getting entangled in my hair.

[michaleen.livejournal.com]

Indeed, though not just the villages, since we were nominally there to save the Vietnamese from themselves and their willful descent into Communism. The Iraqis, in turn, were supposed to welcome the conquest liberation of their country with candy and flowers, an idiocy sincerely believed by the same idiots that blamed a Dolchstoß for our defeat in Vietnam.