Miscellaneous Blog

The BBC have been running a series called Great Britons, with the aim of choosing the greatest Briton of all time. The original 100 names, chosen by 30,000 of the great British public, had some bizarre choices and some noteable omissions. There were far too many flavour-of-the-month celebrities like Robbie Williams, David Beckham, and, for Cthulhu’s sake, Boy George(!), which goes to show the shallowness of a lot of people’s educations. (Yes I know Andrew Ian Dodge thought Aleister Crowley, possibly the wierdest choice, was a valid inclusion, which perhaps explains why some people think he’s ‘creepy’!)

The BBC whittled this down to a shortlist of 10, each of whom were given a program in which their champion discussed their merits. The ten finalists were:

• Winston Churchill
• Isambad Kingdom Brunel
• Princess Diana
• Isaac Newton
• Charles Darwin
• John Lennon
• William Shakespeare
• Queen Elizabeth I
• Horatio Nelson
• Oliver Cromwell

We’d lost most of the stupid ones, but we still had the Bimbo of Wales, championed by newspaper editor Rosie Boycott. Some people are supposed to have said they would leave the country if she won. Fortunately for the nation’s honour, voters went for Winston Churchill.

After the program my brother-in-law and I speculated as to the 10 greatest of other nations, in the same spirit as the 10 Brits (including some Diana-alikes) – these are some of the suggestions we came up with.

America

• George Washington
• Abraham Lincoln
• Henry Ford
• Walt Disney
• Marilyn Monroe (taking the Diana spot?)
• Elvis Presley (taking the Lennon spot?)

France

• Napoleon
• Charlemagne
• Charles de Gaulle
• Jeanne D’Arc

Italy

• Julius Caesar
• Leonardo de Vinci
• Verdi
• Michaelangelo
• Machiavelli

Germany

• Martin Luther
• Albert Einstein
• J S Bach

American, French, Italian or German readers are invited to complete their country’s lists, and/or throw out any of our suggestions you feel insulting or stupid. If you come from another country entirely you will have to come up with all ten on your own, and I invite you to do so.

Watch out if you ever try and board a bus owned by Patrick Crozier!

CrozierBus, for instance, will turn away anyone wearing shell suits, hoods, Nike trainers or bad haircuts. I wouldn’t want to be a man with a pierced ear, lip, eyebrow or tongue either.

The ninth Carnival of the Vanities is up on Silflay Hraka!

Samizdata.net shows what a politically-correct, environmentally-friendly James Bond might look like.

Anyone going to the Blog Meetup in London this coming Wednesday? Time and place is 7:00PM at Freuds, 198 Shaftesbury Avenue, London. Last time there were six people there (eventually), although I was the only one there at 7pm – nobody else arrived until about 7.30!

Different venue this time. Not a place I know – but the last place was too noisy for a decent conversation. Hope this venue is more appropriate.

Gimlé isn’t at all sure if “A tech blog with some SF thrown in for good measure” is really an appropriate description for his blog. Reading some of his more recent entries, it’s a lot more diverse than that; pretty much no techie stuff on the front page at all. My apologies for any misclassification.

I wonder what anyone would describe this blog as?

Dodgeblogium is no more. Presumably they performed one vile Cthulhoid ritual too many and summoned some eldritch horror that consumed them all. Pity, because it was one of the few sites to blogroll me.

Andrew Ian Dodge’s postings can now be found on Sasha Castel’s blog, as well as on BlogCritics.

The latest Carnival of the Vanities is up on Silflay Hraka.

I’ve added a few more blogs to my blogroll recently – one is Gimlé, who hails from Bristol, has a nice picture of a cat as his page header, and has this to say about Eric Raymond’s ridiculous Anti-Idiotarian Manifesto:

That villainous pillaging of the English language has already inspired one decent rebuttal, although any document that pretends to put the “words” ‘idiotarian’ and ‘islamofascist’ to serious use deserves about as much attention as an essay scrawled in crayon. If you write in english and want to be taken seriously then please write in English.

Gimlé is a new blogger on the block. Despite the rant above he’s not really a political blogger, it’s more of a tech-blog with some SF thrown in for good measure. I found him from a posting in Caveat Lector.

I’ve mentioned The Gline before; I found his blog by accident from the ‘recently updated blogs’ on blogger when I recognised his on-line handle from the old RPGAMES forum on CompuServe. I’ve never seen his name come up on anyone else’s blogrolls, which is a pity. This is an example of why he’s worth reading.

If anyone’s waiting for a reply to an email they sent me the last couple of days, it looks like a spammer is to blame!

It appears that a very near neighbour of kalyr.co.uk’s IP address either hosts a spammer or an insecure relay and has ended up on Spamcop‘s RBL list. Since I’ve configured my email client to filter on the header line X-RBL-Blocked, all the email forwarded from my domain name email ended up in the junk mail bin.

Can we class spamming as terrorism?