Where Worlds Collide

I suspect Bigwig might be going to go to Hell for this.

Nobody Expects the Carnival of the Vanities!! Bring up the Comfy Chair and read!

Now the dust has settled and we finally know something approaching the truth of what happened. David Aaronovich in The Guardian writes on how the director of the museum himself exaggerated and lied to the much of the world’s media, and was widely believed. Not just by us outraged liberals, but by the philistine freeperoids too.

The right wing of the Blogosphere will probably use this as an excuse to crow, and indulge in yet another spiteful orgy of liberal bashing. But the right wing of the Blogosphere doesn’t really come out of this with any credit. After all, they too fell for exactly the same lies.

In their posts and and-hominem attacks in the comments sections on some liberal blogs they showed us just how philistine, viscious and mean-spirited some of these guys really are.

Update: Making Light has plenty more to say, and says it much better than I even could.

I didn’t think Boy Scouts were allowed to use words like this.

Photo from the Internation Scout Centre, Kandersteg, Switzerland.

Following on from their Great Britons a few months back, The BBC are conducting a poll for the greatest American of all time.

Who do you think was the most important and influential American throughout history?

Who did more to shape America’s destiny or spread the US’s influence across the globe?

Your nominees can be from the distant past or a living legend. This is a public nomination and it’s up to you who makes it to the final shortlist, so tell us who you think deserves to win.

The British equivalent ended up with the final three of Winston Churchill, Isambard Kingdom Brunel and (cough!) Princess Diana.

You can vote for your nomination by following the BBC link. Who do you think is the greatest American?

Abraham Lincoln?
Thomas Edison?
Henry Ford?
Walt Disney?
Elvis?
Bill Gates?
Whoever it was that designed the EMD F-Unit?
Emperor Norton?
E Gary Gygax?

(Link from Lawrence Simon)

Virgin Trains weren’t quick enough. Looks like he’s working for the American railroad CSX.

Ginger has another a good post on the politics of transport in Houston, Texas.

On my Royal Mail post, I talked about the road haulage industry externalising it’s costs. But there’s no “business” that externalises costs more than email spamming. And spam seems to be getting worse and worse, with the volume of spam increasing month by month. It’s all bottom-feeding garbage, mostly of dubious legality.

Dorothea Salo and Lawrence Simon both have things to say on the subject, Dorothea in particular points out one of the external costs of spam.

I send just about every spam I get sent to spamcop.net, which deciphers the headers, does lookups on the spamvertised websites, and sends automatic complaint letters. But even this feels like bailing water out of a sinking ship with a saucepan. There has to be a better way.

I don’t think sending complaints, or more aggressive filtering on their own are going to solve the problem. Seems to me that spam won’t be stopped (or at least reduced to manageable proportions) until the spammers are forced to pay the costs that spam imposes on the rest of us.

Perhaps what we need is some kind of law allowing individuals, companies and ISPs to sue both spammers and the rogue ISPs that host them to recover the costs imposed. Given the international nature of spam (much of mine seems to come from China), it would either need similar laws in many countries, and probably international treaties as well. Is such a thing feasible? I don’t know.

If you love music, and think commercial radio plays far too much formulaic sludge and not nearly enough good stuff, you must read this. It’s a longish post, but well worth the time it takes to read it. (Link from the road to surfdom)

I’ve now got the ten rolls of film from Switzerland back, all scanned onto CDRoms; time to put a few of them up on the web. These are from my first day there, taken in and around Kandersteg, a holiday resort at the top of the Kandertal, and the top of the north ramp of the Lötchberg railway. A mile south of Kandersteg station the line plunges into the 9 mile Lötchberg tunnel, to emerge south of the Bernese Oberland into canton Wallis.

An SBB Re460 heads one of the hourly Basel-Brig Inter City trains out of Kandersteg, formed of a push-pull set of EWiv coaches, with an ex-SNCF “Corail” baggage car behind the locomotive.

The Re460s are the most modern locomotives in the SBB fleet. They dominate inter-city and international passenger trains throughout the country, and also haul a high percentage of freight trains over the steep trans-alpine routes. The stylish design is the work of Italian designer Pininfarina.
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