No, this isn’t an advertisement as such.  Both the US and UK versions of Amazon are running DVD sales, and I’m listing out my ooh-that-would-be-interesting list for my purposes (and your edification, in case you have similar interests).

Note that I have multi-region / NTSC and PAL reading DVD players in the house, and that the UK PAL stuff won’t be readable on normal US systems, and vice versa.  Personally, I hate the regions system.

UK:

• Complete Jeeves and Wooster (Fry and Laurie; I have only seen bits of this)
• The Palace (ITV drama series about an alternate royal family; we loved it and I wouldn’t mind having a cheap copy of this)
• The Chinese Detective (sounds interesting, but I really don’t know beans about it)
• Complete Gilbert and Sullivan (1982 series, I think this was done over here for PBS, and this puts back in stuff that was edited from the VHS version, which I had at one time; it was ruined in a flood – need to see if there’s a US version of this)
• Angus, Thongs and Perfect Snogging (not for me, guys, but for future material for Mere, considering how much she loves British/Australian kids stuff)
• The Devil’s Whore (pay no attention to the title; historical fiction drama set during the English Civil War of the 1650s)
• Einstein and Eddington (historical drama around the time of WW1, and yes, that’s Albert Einstein and yes, this has Physics in it, and it looks cool.)

…the idea of torturing people for information is a very very horrible, slippery slope: London cops accused of waterboarding suspects.

From The Times report:

The torture claims are part of a wide-ranging investigation which also includes accusations that officers fabricated evidence and stole suspects’ property.

Oh, it’s all very well to not say anything when some ay-rab schmoe is taken off the street, with vague stories of possibly maybe terrorism.  But when it gets to be the cops taking you off the street because they just don’t like you or want a bust…or you’re in the way of the powerful.

But that, that’s different, innit?

Apparently, the BNP didn’t do that much better in votes; the real problem was that Labour voters stayed home in droves, too uninspired to vote.

In my hospital bed, watching the political ruckus in Europe and especially the UK; the Pirate Party of Sweden is picking up a seat, and I’m waiting for the Monster Raving Loony Party to be not far behind (sound file).

The UK stuff is crazy because there’s this little dance that is going on in the Labour Party (or seems to be) of a lot of people in the party thinking that Brown as PM is uninspiring at best and a dead loss at the worst, but few are willing to come out in public and demand a new leader.

The discussion really doesn’t seem to center on political programs so much as personalities and the eptness of Brown and his top people at Getting Things Done Properly.

Part of the problem is just sheer lack of  guts of the MPs involved to force the issue and demand Brown go before Labour gets wiped out in a sometime-soon new election that has to be called in the next year or so.   This, of course, doesn’t speak well of their ability to fight the go0d fight in a clear and convincing way when that election does show up.

Part of it is that the Brown seekrit message under the public eye to the MPs in his party is that a leadership struggle at this point that calls for Brown To Go will end up with Brown gone - followed by demands from the pundits and public for new  elections right NOW that Labour would lose badly and those same MPs would probably lose most of their seats.   Most MPs don’t want to lose their seats (well padded) now or later, and are at the present willing to be unwilling to risk them Right Now versus ‘maybe the horse will learn to sing‘ later where Brown might yet turn something aroundbefore an election HAS to be called.

And the lack of an alternative charismatic leader doesn’t help, as in ‘if we got rid of Aunt Nellie and got a Real Leader in, then we’d do better’ doesn’t hold when nobody looks all that Real-leaderish to replace Aunt Nellie.

The mood of the public across Europe seems to be a mix of apathy that something can be done to fix things and anger against the PC ‘world-and-Europa’ model of progressive oneness, irregardless of who was actually responsible for screwing up.

My European readers have a perfect right and duty to tell me that I’m talking through my hat, but that’s what it looks like from here!

Horrible story (with the names blanked out) from a divorce court in Britain about an effort by the husband to get a L500000 settlement from his ex, which the judge shot down - because the husband had been a terrible pedophilic monster, preying on the wife’s grandchildren.

Describing the man as “manipulative”, Mr Justice Moylan ordered him be paid £100,000 from the sale of a jointly-owned overseas property. However, he also ordered him to pay £50,000 towards his ex-wife’s £250,000 legal costs.

• I will freely admit that I’m astonished at the about-face in the attitudes of the US public about gay marriage.   A couple of years ago, we had several states stomping on the idea via pumped-up public referenda; now we have far greater acceptance of the idea and state after state legalizing it.
• The greed of the big hedge funds for More Money From The Feds to cover Chrysler’s bonds apparently didn’t do them any good, as the company is going to bankruptcy, which will be giving their bondholders a bigger haircut.  I guess they bet on the feds to wimp out and hand them more on the dollar….
• Frightening the horses and forcing Japanese tourists to compare their videos after the fact,  a couple of tourists at Windsor Castle suddenly drop everything on a sunny day, jump into the grass, strip and…

The tax program choked and died on me on install; had to clean everything out and reinstall.  Had to also dig up our old tax files for the program, so that it could pull forward old information for multi-year stuff affecting our taxes, and those had gotten stuck away somewhere and were more of a bear to find than I figured.

I’m reviewing a friend’s book draft; AH stuff, and pretty good.  I decided to convert it from a DOC Word file to a Mobipocket Kindle file, and it’s doing me a lot of good to have it there vis-a-vis Getting The Thing Read.

Susan and Connie got a lot of cleaning upstairs done, considering their energy levels, which still suck.  On Friday night, Connie and I went off to eat at a local Chinese restaurant, and she had a terrible reaction from the shrimp she ate; we’ve seen stuff like this is a lesser degree from Mere when the shrimp was turning, and I noticed other uh-oh trends to make me think that the restaurant is hurting for quality.   Susan was worried that she’d have to take her mom off to the ER for anaphylactic shock, considering the severity of the reaction, and it really knocked the stuffing out of poor Connie.

Mere spent the bulk of the day over on a playdate; she shot down going off with me to see CORALINE in order to play longer.   At night, we got back to reading THE HOBBIT together; she likes Tolkien’s verse, and lets me do the actual reading of everything else.  Part is that I’m good with drama and voices, and I also can help translate British slang (Knock me up in the morning and give me a fag) to something she can understand.   Right now, the dwarves and Bilbo are trying to recover from the spiders in Mirkwood, and Thorin has been captured by the Elvenking - and she is seriously grooving on the book.

Bristol Palin has decided that she’s had enough of Levi Strauss Johnston and chased him off to the Alaskan bush.  Details in the 10 o’clock news.

Hedge funds, no longer magically able to make money from thin air, are laying off tens of thousands of employees.   Give them bonuses!

The UK economy is looking at it’s worst year since 1931.   I assume that includes the war years as well…cripes!

Bernie Madoff may be pleading guilty, but the trust level in the economic wise guys is dropping faster than the Dow Industrial.

Norm Coleman’s entire donor list just had their credit cards hacked, which is always a good way to get more contributions because they trust that you know what you’re doing.

People were asking about the Ted Kennedy story; here’s the link.    The article mentions other Americans who have recieved honorary knighthoods; US Citizens can’t accept titles and whatnot from abroad - it’s in the US Constitution (last para).  The way this is handled is to make them ‘honorary knights’ for something they’ve done, and that’s part of the British Honours System (sic).  See also http://www.honours.gov.uk/ for more details.

Yes, you can decline an ‘honour’ or a knighthood or whatever; once granted, however, there’s no way to change your mind and give it back.  You can send them the actual medal, but that’s a trinket and easily replaced.  Honours can be pulled from someone that is a criminal or some such, and have been - except if it’s a peerage (barons and above) - those are lifetime things.  And exceptionally rare.

There’s also a site to show the stuff that goes with a peerage or knighthood, as well as judges and whatnot.   Enjoy!

Is it just me, or is all this talk about Ted Kennedy getting an honorary knighthood from an British Queen weird on a stick?  I don’t mean to say that he shouldn’t get any honors he’s due or that I’m no longer an Anglophile,  but that after hanging out with a bunch of hardshell Irish-Americans for a long time, it’s odd that one who is as steeped in the Erin-Go-Bragh traditions would *accept* such a thing.  Your comments welcome to help me puzzle this one out.

Talk in the EU about a bailout of the Eastern European states that are having a really rough time because of the recession, as in ‘avoid public rioting with E170 billion of bailout’.

He warned that if EU member states in Central and Eastern Europe faced a severe downturn, then other European countries would feel the knock-on effect of social unrest and an influx of millions of migrants.

Er, maybe that’s ‘avoid having us swamp you with our poorer citizens. Along with that, the New Labor government of Britain is looking at partially privatizing the Royal Mail to help with expenses.  This is, of course, not going over with the more old-line Socialist backbenchers… who could withdraw their support for the Government.

For a while, the inrush of capital created the illusion of wealth in these countries, just as it did for American homeowners: asset prices were rising, currencies were strong, and everything looked fine. But bubbles always burst sooner or later, and yesterday’s miracle economies have become today’s basket cases, nations whose assets have evaporated but whose debts remain all too real. And these debts are an especially heavy burden because most of the loans were denominated in other countries’ currencies.

Nor is the damage confined to the original borrowers. In America, the housing bubble mainly took place along the coasts, but when the bubble burst, demand for manufactured goods, especially cars, collapsed — and that has taken a terrible toll on the industrial heartland. Similarly, Europe’s bubbles were mainly around the continent’s periphery, yet industrial production in Germany — which never had a financial bubble but is Europe’s manufacturing core — is falling rapidly, thanks to a plunge in exports.

British discount airline mulls making their planes’ toilets PAY toilets, assume people have pound coins in their pocket. I assure you, I don’t carry major change in my pockets in US airliners - the metal detectors would go nuts.

UK bankers have a fit over cuts in bonuses and whatnot; some say they’ll look for overseas jobs (good luck finding them), some demand their million-dollar pensions for driving the bank into collapse are sacrosanct, and some are going back to divorce courts to demand that their lavish spousal settlements be reduced because they aren’t going to keep getting zillions in bonuses.

Lesson #1: Don’t make public statements about dramatic events in your life unless they’re something that won’t fall apart the next day.  Bobby Jindal’s bureaucrat-fighting story during Katrina sounded bogus at the time, and it turns out that it was. So on top of everything else, he makes up fake stuff on national TV - hey, this guy is seriously dumb, folks!

And lastly, John Bolton makes a funny about terrorists nuking Chicago ( a real thigh-slapper to me), Joe the Plumber suggesting Congresscritters who don’t like the war should be shot,  and Tom DeLay suggesting that Limbaugh is right, and that he too wants Obama to fail and the country to go into a depression.

• Senator Schumer is saying that if a state government doesn’t want any of the stimulus money, they shouldn’t be forced to take it; however, you can’t pick what parts you will or won’t take.  Sounds good to me.   And Governor Sanford of South Carolina says that he’ll pray for you if you’re down and out, but horrors, can’t take that stimulus money. I want to see him do that and see what happens to his party in the next election with those people he prayed for.
• Robert Reich on deficit cutting and stimulus and the recession.  Short version:  #3 is the real worry.
• British bankers don’t like all this no-bonuses talk and demand more goodies.  The reason is simple; the world they live in has purple paisley skies and endless bonuses for just showing up at the office.
• McCain: your new helicopter costs too much.  Obama: I didn’t order it, your buddy Bush did, I’m happy with what I’ve got, and I’ve told the people involved to suss this all out and figure out if we really need this.
• New idea: an infrastructure bank.
• As the Philadelphia papers were tanking,  their run-them-into-the-ground CEO was getting massive pay raises.

Even though Tierney in January 2008 demanded a 10% cost concession from workers, his own pay was bumped up 3% in May 2008 to $618,000. Then came the big boost around Christmas.The Inquirer and Daily News join a growing list of newspapers forced into bankruptcy after sharp declines in advertising destroyed their ability to service big debts taken on when they changed hands…It also raises the prospect of big losses by the lenders that provided the balance of more than $400 million in debt financing. The list of largest unsecured creditors was topped by Royal Bank of Scotland, which is owed $22 million. As of Jan. 31, the company said it still owed $395 million to lenders.

If you’re going to a Scottish Rent-A-Kilt place, you have to swear to wear underwear with it.

“Though Scots like to prance/About in their kilts wearing nae pants/Fir the next punter make it fair/Dinnae firgit to wear a pair.”

and this gem:

During the First World War, some Sergeant Majors reportedly used mirrors tied to the end of golf clubs to look up and under the kilt during inspections.

or this from the comments:

Part of the problem is that said customers are quite willing to return the garments with a large deposit.

• Miep Gies, the last of the group who hid Anne Frank from the Nazis, turns 100 today (hat tip to aisb23).
• Weekend news anchors at a local TV station have a ritual they do during a commercial break - get up and DANCE! (h/t andrewducker)
• Jabba and other beach huts on the Lincolnshire (UK) coast - just in time for our bathing suit competition.
• Batman as Raskolnikov in CRIME AND PUNISHMENT; well, it’s funny, anyway, in a Pythonesque manner. POW! BAM!
• A new US Senator with some proficiency in Mandarin Chinese.   Most of these guys have problems in English, so this is an improvement!  (Bonus question: which US President had some proficiency in Chinese?  The answer may surprise you…)

Alfie (12) and Chantelle (15) discovering parenthood. Igh.

[the new grandfather]said: “Everyone is telling him things and it’s going round in his head. It hasn’t really dawned on him. He hasn’t got a clue of what the baby means and can’t explain how he feels. All he knows is mum and dad will help.

“When you mention money his eyes look away. And she is reliant on her mum and dad. It’s crazy. They have no idea what lies ahead.”

No doubt.  Good god.

Took this political-spectrum test that’s been floating around on Live Journal; it marked me down and a moderate-liberal sort.  Or as they put it: left moderate social authoritarian.  Only VERY minorly authoritarian, but I certainly don’t think that way.  I mean, I’d probably be a Liberal Democrat in the UK, but that’s a way different sort of alignment there.   I see myself as more of a hard-civics get-involved-for-the-right-reasons good-government sort who is leaning to the liberal side more as a reaction against raging pseudo-conservatives / Republicans.

political-spectrum-quiz-result-jim (PDF, 2pp, 52k)

The Brits are getting into eating squirrel; especially those darn Yankee Grey Squirrels.

Mr. Griffiths is a fan of the meat, likening it to a slightly oily rabbit. “We started selling squirrel a few years ago, after the owner of our local pub bragged about winning a squirrel-eating contest,” he said. Then, he said, the owner “caught a squirrel, casseroled it up, and we liked it so much Griffiths has been selling it ever since.”

Zimbabwe is a complex subject, and the complexities have gotten a whole lot rougher on the inhabitants as time passes by.   Europeans under Cecil Rhodes marched in in the ned of the 1800s and took control of the land from the local chiefs, and passed out all sorts of claims to white settlers, who set up solid and profitable ranches and farms all over the colony.  (It was one of the areas of Africa that Europeans could deal with the local bug population, let alone the climate, Kenya and South Africa being others, to a point where they’d be interested in settling down there in numbers. )

Eventually, Britain wanted to join the two (Northern and Southern) Rhodesias with Nyasaland into One Big Colony in the 1950s to create a new colonial nation-state under a white-minority rule, but the African nationalist groups that were on the rise didn’t want that at all.  (In most of Africa, the Europeans were the creators of national/colonial boundaries, and those had zero to do with ethnic and cultural groups that were present before The White Guys came.)   Eventually, the ‘federation’ broke up, and the three states were all slated for black-majority rule statues in the early 1960s.

Southern Rhodesia, however, wasn’t interested.   The number of white settlers there were MUCH higher than the other states, and more were rolling in all the time.  In 1927, the white/black numbers were roughly 40k/920k; in 1947 80k/1640k, and then the white numbers really jumped, to around 330k at the highest, but never exceeded 6% of the total population.

The Whites ran the show, and had a good life with about 50% of the land of the colony in their hands, and the colony prospered - most especially the white colonists.  Finally, they declared themselves Independent of Britain in 1965, and intended to run their semi-apartheid state by themselves forever.

Yes, there’s a lot of similarities with South Africa.  There’s a reason.  The blacks in the majority never were allowed to have any political power, and about at the same time, the black nationalists went to the bush as guerrillas to armed battle with the government.  In Rhodesia, the battle was aimed at the settlers on the farms and the raids and international shunning finally led to the white-led government handing over power to a new black-majority government in 1980.

The problem since then can be cut down to have / have not problems with the economy, and political power issues.  Simply put, the people who have held power in Zimbabwe since the early 1980s were the black guerrilla leaders of the past who originally had (at least on the surface) Marxist leanings and saw the whites as the Oppressor Class.  Problem was that the whites also had the capital, the education and the know-how to keep the economy humming, and after Zimbabwe became a black-majority state, the external sanctions came down and the country boomed.

Land ownership in particular was a sore spot, and land reform started after 1980 to return white settler lands to black ownership - with an aim to get small landowners set up on their own to make a good go of it.  The problem was that not that many whites wanted to sell out, and that even after the whites were politically forced (including at gunpoint) to start selling out, the land didn’t go to the poor farmers-in-waiting - most went to big shots in the Single Party Revolutionary Fighters government and army.

The result was that the remaining whites fled with whatever they could take with them, and the One Big Party under Robert Mugabe, the surviving guerilla leader, ran the country as a brutal kleptocracy.  And the result was that the business and farming that kept the country going went to pieces - cutting open the golden goose doesn’t get you any golden eggs and all that.   The value of the currency has gone to nothing.  Nobody has money to buy food or keep up sanitation, or get clean water, and a cholera epidemic is running wild in Zimbabwe, and businesses, schools and hospitals have collapsed.

The situation has deteriorated to such a degree that soldiers — Mr. Mugabe’s enduring muscle — rioted last week on the streets of the capital, breaking windows and looting stores, after waiting days in bank lines without being able to withdraw their meager salaries from cash-short tellers. A midlevel officer who participated in the mayhem, but spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of prosecution, said troops were enraged that they could no longer afford to buy food or send their children to school.

The response to this is - more brutality, and statements about how either there is no cholera, or it’s really a British chemical bioweapon aimed at bringing the state to its knees, or it’s some other type of invasion plot by foreigners.  And regardless of the beatings and the rhetoric, the people suffer and die.