The · Adventure · of · the · Enigmatic · Journal · (or · the · Strange · Cases · of · Hyperreality)

Doesn't Bing Crosby sing this so much better than Sinatra does?

How wonderful Youtube is, I've been looking for Crosby's version for a long time. Of course, one has to put up with people inserting utterly random footage into the clip.

Now, I didn't care much for the proclamations of the feeble-minded Christians that Obama was the Antichrist. I just gave them that faux-sympathetic smile now and then.

Because so many Antichrists have come and gone, and they've all proven rather disappointing. Napoleon, the short ugly Frog who gets poisoned in a god-forsaken island at the end of the world. Hitler, the short ugly Kraut who shoots himself (though there is something biblically poetic about this Judas-like death). Obama? He doesn't even come close. He's more like a Frankensteinian combination of Kennedy, Carter, and Clinton - a recipe that would put any self-respecting Antichrist to shame.

But today with OBAMA WINS NOBEL PRIZE I take that back.

Repent!!!!! The Kingdom of Heaven is at hand!!!!!!!!!!

Remember what I said a while ago about a cyclical pattern to the way man uses armour over the long duree of history? I'm now wondering whether we will see something similar in the realm of aerial combat.

It's quite simple. Guided missiles are now incredibly sophisticated. Radar-guided missiles can be rapidly fired off at multiple targets beyond visual range, and each projectile independently steer itself to the kill. Heat-seekers no longer have to be locked directly on to an enemy's exhaust, requiring the pilot to maneouvre his plan into the 12 o'clock position; heat-seekers can now pick up a heat signature over a wide sensory arc, construct an image of the enemy aircraft based on the heat plume, and then launched up to 90-degrees off boresight to strike at any area of the enemy plane, even 'cold' ones. Not surprising that this high degree of lethality spawns intense counter-measures. Electronic jamming, AESA radar, flares and chaff, and most importantly, stealth capability, can all come together to negate the advantages of guided weapons.

So what becomes the best way to achieve an air-to-air kill? I suspect it will be this: close in and go for the gun kill. Just the way it was in the skies above the trenches.

This is beautiful. Wait for Last Post combined with 'Lead Kindly Light' - not a dry eye in the house.

And one can't help thinking that Hobsbawm was right. Ceremonial grows stronger the more distant the reality of power becomes. Save for the episode of The Unknown Soldier, I don't think the British Empire at its height had much to match this. Just like Byzantium a thousand years after Rome, isolated and decaying and falling to dust, probably outdid the Caesars in pomp and circumstance.

This chap is awesome! Now this is the Joker we all know and love!














The last bit is excellent.

From the Telegraph's Obituaries

Keith Floyd, who died on September 14 aged 65, was a flamboyant TV chef who tore up the old formalities of television cookery and spawned a generation of imitators; hugely popular during the 1980s and 1990s both for his programmes and his cook books, he was relentlessly unsuccessful in his numerous restaurant ventures.

When it first appeared on a regional strand of the BBC in 1985, Keith Floyd's 10-minute cooking slot attracted 10,000 viewers' calls asking for recipes and greater exposure for the genial chef, mainly from female viewers. Over the next 15 years Floyd produced 19 series for the BBC and Channel 5 from every corner of the globe, and wrote more than 20 cookbooks to accompany his programmes.

Long after he was effectively retired from British television screens the BBC continued to syndicate his shows to foreign audiences where they proved enduringly popular.

Combining raffish charm and contagious enthusiasm on screen, Floyd's programmes dispensed with the static formality that had defined the television cookery of his forerunners, such as Fanny Cradock. Indeed they rarely took place in anything that could be defined as a studio. Instead he was likely to be found braced over a camping stove on the heaving deck of a North Sea trawler, rhapsodising over a sea bass. At the time it was revolutionary.

So too was his penchant for ad libbing jocular instructions to his film crew. A generation of viewers became familiar with Clive and various other long suffering cameramen, who were forever being ordered to get in close for a look at a fish gill or the marbling on a steak. "Back to me Clive," was a familiar refrain. Most popular with his viewers was Floyd's habit of never cooking without a glass of some local vintage to hand. This he owed to his long-standing BBC producer David Pritchard, who advised him to fill in the boring bits with "a quick slurp". Retakes required refills. A committed drinker, Floyd slurped more than any television chef before or since.

With craggy good looks, slightly askew bow tie and upper class tones gravelled by a prodigious smoking habit, Floyd had something of the roguish charm of a 1950s chancer about him. This was not an altogether misleading image as his four wives, most several decades his junior, might attest.

Keith Floyd was born on December 28 1943 and grew up in Somerset, the son of a meter repairman for the electricity board. It was, he recorded, a very happy rural childhood during which he learned his mother's great love of cookery. By diligent saving, his parents managed to pay for him to attend the local public school – Wellington College, though it had no connection to its more famous Berkshire namesake. His head boy was Jeffrey Archer. Floyd was both popular and a good rugby player, but a lack of money forced him to leave at 16. He was mortified by this abrupt curtailment of his youth.

Thereafter he worked first as a clerk, then as a cub reporter for the Bristol Evening Post alongside Tom Stoppard, whose leather jacket, dark glasses and impenetrable jokes he found rather intimidating. Floyd had writing talent and, determined to make it as a hack, worked nights on the Western Morning News as well. A local cinema showing of the Michael Caine epic Zulu, he said, then convinced him that his future lay in the armed forces - though the story may have blurred in the retelling as he was already in uniform by the time the film was released.

He turned down the 11th Hussars to take a commission in the less snooty 3rd Royal Tank Regiment, but found the stirring cinematic vision of Rorke's Drift bore little resemblance to his dreary Cold War billet in Germany. To alleviate the boredom he played rugby for the Royal Tank rugby team (whose approach was summed up in the regimental motto: Fear Naught) and took over the running of the officers' mess.

In 1971 he left the Army and, taking as his templates George Perry-Smith, chef patron of the Hole in the Wall restaurant in Bath, and Kenneth Bell's restaurant at Thorny Castle in Gloucestershire, set up his first restaurant in Bristol. The eponymous Floyd's Bistro proved popular, and his empire expanded to three restaurants. However, in what was to prove a perennial feature of his career, popularity stubbornly failed to translate into profitability. Faced with a looming financial crisis, he sold up, divorced his first wife, and brought a yacht called Flirty.

For the next five years he pursued a peripatetic existence in France and Spain, indulging a passion for the local cuisine that he had learned from Elizabeth David's French Provincial Cooking.

As he ran out of money he sold pieces of the yacht until, without a compass or an outboard motor, he settled in Provence and opened a restaurant in Isle-sur-la-Sorgue near Avignon, where he also played for the local rugby club.

In 1979 he returned to England and set up a new fish restaurant in Bristol with money borrowed from friends. It was here, with the bailiffs already circling the struggling venture, that he had his fateful meeting with David Pritchard, a producer with BBC Plymouth with whom Floyd developed the style of cookery programme that made him a celebrity at 42.

With success came money, but not unbridled happiness. Floyd was prone to depression and grumbled incessantly about the burden of fame. Inebriated barristers were forever waking him up on trains, he complained, with dull questions about how to cook goose.

He frequently berated the press for their intrusive interest in him, but found it impossible to resist the temptation to tell all, particularly about his romantic assignations, when offered the opportunity. When he met and proposed to his 26-year-old third wife after meeting her in his pub, the gory details were relayed in full to readers of the News of the World.

The off-the-cuff style pioneered by his cookery programmes involved tremendous hard work for both crew and presenter, usually in primitive conditions. There was little in the way of script, Floyd and his producer simply made it up as they went along. Cooking equipment was often borrowed from local hotels. On one occasion Floyd was nearly drowned filming a sequence on the Great Barrier Reef. On another he ran into trouble with the Norwegian government for flambéing two protected puffins.

Such was his household recognition at the height of his fame in the late 1980s that the BBC even considered him as a potential frontman for a topical chat show in the Clive James mould. The result – Floyd on TV – was not a hit. With typical candour he described it subsequently as "a heap of shit. It had too many knickers and tits and Japanese people in it".

Despite his charisma, wit, charm and frequent generosity, Floyd was also known for his temper tantrums, towering immodesty and bouts of maudlin despair. He fell out with BBC producer David Pritchard, though the two continued a fraught working relationship until 1994. His third marriage ended when he accused his wife of forgetting his 49th birthday. In a rage he destroyed much of his own restaurant bar and threw out his wife and 50 diners before retiring to a nearby hostelry to drown his sorrows.

He railed constantly against his image as a heavy drinker, particularly one critic's suggestion that he was the "Ollie Reed of TV chefs", claiming that he had been properly drunk on television only once. This was an occasion when, during an interview on an Australian chat show, he objected to the quality of the studio coffee and poured his cupful over the carpet.

In 1989 Floyd put some of his television millions into buying the Malster's Arms at Tuckenhay, Devon. He aimed to turn it into a gastropub that would serve the sort of unpretentious fare he had learned at his mother's knee. Renamed Floyd's Inn (Sometimes), the pub was enthusiastically received, not least because of Floyd's astute judgment in hiring a soon-to-be-famous chef, Jean-Christophe Novelli.

But he grew to regard his diners with ill-disguised contempt, dismissing them as celebrity-obsessed and snobbish. On one occasion he gleefully recalled serving a serially ungrateful diner a carefully cooked beer mat disguised as a breaded escalope of veal. The man ate it without comment but criticised the topping on his crème brûlée.

When Novelli left for greater things, the perfectionist Floyd hired and fired chefs with such rapidity that he became known locally as the "Butcher of Tuckenhay". As with his other ventures the pub eventually failed, going under with considerable debts in 1996. Floyd blamed television for the disaster.

Many of the stars of television cookery who came after him owed an obvious debt to Keith Floyd. Several, including Rick Stein and Gary Rhodes, made their first television appearances on his shows. Floyd did not regard such imitation as a form of flattery. "We've become a nation of voyeurs," he grumbled in 2001. "We don't cook anymore, we just watch TV programmes about cookery. Nobody takes cookery seriously now, it's just cheap entertainment. I'm totally to blame. I started it all and now I'm going to go down in history for having started a series of culinary game shows. It makes me terribly sad."

In 1995 he married for the fourth time and moved to Marbella in Spain, where he professed himself content domestically, and was well placed to enjoy his favourite Mediterranean cuisine. Continued financial difficulties prevented him from retiring, and he struggled on with a number of cookery series for Channel 5.

In November 2004 he was banned from driving for two-and-a-half years and fined £1,500 after crashing his car into another vehicle while three-and-a-half times over the limit. This year he completed his autobiography, Stirred but not Shaken, currently being serialised in a national newspaper ahead of its official launch next month at Frankie's restaurant, run by fellow chef Marco Pierre White. Following Floyd's death, White described him as a "very special talent". "A little piece of Britain died yesterday which will never be replaced," he said. The book launch was scheduled to go ahead as planned.

Keith Floyd, whose fourth marriage also ended in divorce, is survived by his partner, with whom he was living at the time of his death, all his wives, and by a son and a daughter.

From the Daily Telegraph

Thousands of 'tea party' protesters march against Barack Obama in Washington

'Tens of thousands of conservative 'tea party' protesters have staged the biggest demonstration of Barack Obama's presidency, thronging Capitol Hill to denounce runaway government spending.

The protest on Saturday demonstrated the potency of grassroots opposition to Mr Obama despite a landmark speech to Congress last week that attempted to quell opposition to his overhaul of the health-care system.

Saturday's march marked the end of a summer in which angry scenes at "town hall" meetings caught the White House off guard and damaged the campaign for Mr Obama's health-care proposals.

The rally was the high point of the anti-Obama "tea party" movement, which came together in April amid outrage over the $787 billion economic stimulus package.

But the discontent ranged widely with signs proclaiming "Obamacare makes me sick" and "Bury Obamacare with Kennedy" - a reference to Senator Ted Kennedy, a staunch Obama ally who championed health-care and died of brain cancer last month.

Home-made placards declared: "Born free, taxed to death", "King George Didn't Listen Either!" and "Vote Out All Incumbent Crooks".

One teenager carried a scrawled sign that read: "Do I 'look' like I want to 'serve' in Obama's Nazi Youth militia? Arrest our Communist, Fascist, Racist, Lying, President NOW for Treason!!"

Organisers included FreedomWorks, led by Dick Armey, a former Republican leader on Capitol Hill who helped bring down President Bill Clinton's health-care bill in 1994. Senator Jim DeMint of South Carolina, also a conservative Republican, demanded a return to "constitutional government" and insisted that it was "time that the president started listening to us".

There was no official crowd count. Organisers, who had expected between 25,000 and 50,000, put the total at 75,000 but many estimated that it was much higher.

The demonstration dwarfed a rally held by Mr Obama in Minneapolis, Minnesota at which he promised to drive through reform with or without Republican support. "I will not accept the status quo," he declared.

"Not this time. Not now."

One of the heroes of the Washington demonstration was Representative Joe Wilson, who shouted out "You Lie!" at Mr Obama last Wednesday after the President stated that it was false that illegal immigrants could benefit from health insurance under the terms of his plan.

When Mr Armey stated that Mr Obama had "pledged a commitment of fidelity to the United States Constitution" there were shouts of "Liar! Liar!

While Mr Wilson promptly apologised, the once obscure South Carolina congressman became a conservative icon overnight. He has raised more than a million dollars (£600,000) for his re-election campaign - though his opponent, in a stark example of the polarisation of American politics - has pulled in a similar amount.

Liberals, however, have denounced him as a racist. Maureen Down, the prominent New York Times columnist, wrote that behind Mr Wilson's "shocking disrespect for the office of the president" was the fact that: "Some people just can't believe a black man is president and will never accept it."

An emboldened Mr Wilson said yesterday that he would not say sorry again from the floor of the House of Representatives - as Democrats have demanded - because one apology was enough and it had been accepted by Mr Obama.

"People know my civility, they know that this was a one-time event and was out of frustration," he said. "It's politics. This is exactly what the American people do not want to see, do not want to hear. As the White House advised, let's get to the issues."

But repeated his claim that Mr Obama was a liar: "I believe in the truth. What I heard was not true." '

Well, well, well. When will you learn, Barry, that there is nothing tackier than al-Taqiyya.

From the Sunday Telegraph

Lieutenant James Adamson was awarded the Military Cross after killing two insurgents during close quarter combat in Helmand's notorious "Green Zone".

The 24-year-old officer, a member of the 5th battalion The Royal Regiment of Scotland, revealed that he shouted "have some of this" before shooting dead a gunman who had just emerged from a maize field.

Seconds later and out of ammunition, the lieutenant leapt over a river bank and killed a second insurgent machine-gunner with a single thrust of his bayonet in the man's chest.

The officer was one of 145 members of the armed services who last week received awards in the latest Operational Honours list.

In a graphic description of the intense fighting in Helmand, the officer told of the moment killed the second fighter. He said: "It was a split second decision.

"I either wasted vital seconds changing the magazine on my rifle or went over the top and did it more quickly with the bayonet.

I took the second option. I jumped up over the bank of the river. He was just over the other side, almost touching distance.

"We caught each other's eye as I went towards him but by then, for him, it was too late. There was no inner monologue going on in my head I was just reacting in the way that I was trained.

"He was alive when it went in – he wasn't alive when it came out – it was that simple."

Recalling his feelings in the moments afterwards Lt Adamson, said: "He was young, with dark hair. He only had kind of whispy hair on his chin, not a proper beard, so he wasn't that old, maybe a teenager.

"Afterwards, when he was dead, I picked up his PKM (Russian-made belt-fed machine gun) machine gun and slung it over my back.

"We then had to wait for more of my men to join us. We thought there could be more Taliban about and we were just watching our arcs of fire, waiting for more to come out of a big field of maize which came right up to the river we had been wading through.

"One of my men, Corporal Billy Carnegie, reached us, looked at the two dead Taliban on the ground and then saw the blood on my bayonet and said "boss what the **** have you been doing?"

The firefight, in July 2008, began during the middle an operation to push the Taliban out of an area close to the town of Musa Qala in northern Helmand.

Lt Adamson's platoon of 25-men, which was leading the assault, had just halted their advance when they were attacked.

Lt Adamson, who is single and comes from the Isle of Man, was moving between two eight man sections when a group of Taliban fighters attempted a flanking attack.

He continued: "The Taliban kept on probing us – sending in fighters to attack, first in twos then in fours.

"There was a gap between the two sections and the Taliban realised this and were sending in men to get between the two groups so they could split us up and isolate us.

"Myself and Corporal Fraser 'Hammy' Hamilton were wading nipple deep down a river which connected the two positions. Hammy was ahead when the Taliban fighter with the PKM (Russian machine gun) appeared from a maize field.

"There was an exchange of fire and 'Hammy' fired off his ammunition and then the weight of fire coming from the Taliban forced him under the water.

"The machine-gunner had also gone to ground but was still firing in our direction periodically. I had just caught up when 'Hammy' came up out of the water like a monster of the deep.

"Then another Taliban man came through the maize carrying an AK47. He was only three to four metres away.

"I immediately shot him with a burst from my rifle which was already set on automatic. He went down straight away and I knew I had hit him.

"Hammy said I shouted: 'have some of this' as I shot him but I can't remember that. I fired another burst at the PKM gunner and then that was me out of ammunition as well.

"That was when I decided to use the bayonet on him. It was a case of one second to bayonet him or two seconds to put on a fresh magazine.

"Nothing was really going through my mind but briefly I did think 'if this works out the boys will love it' – as in the rest of the platoon that I commanded.

"The undergrowth is so dense in the 'Green zone' that I often ordered bayonets fixed because you knew the distances between you and the Taliban could be very short. It is also good for morale."

His Military Cross citation read: "Adamson's supreme physical courage, combined with the calm leadership he continued to display after a very close encounter with the Taliban, were of the very highest order.

"His actions also neutralised an enemy flanking attack which could have resulted in casualties for his platoon."

Two weeks earlier Lt Adamson had won a Mention in Dispatches (MID) by leading his men in an ambush against the Taliban in the same area.

It is understood that the young lieutenant is the first member of the armed forces to receive two awards for gallantry during the same operational tour.

More from the Baroness:

You would like Beijing, one thinks. It is an imperial city after all. The streets are unbearably busy and the air choking – but so too, after all, was Victorian London. There is a sense of power, the palpable feeling that one stands amidst the heart of a vast empire, however one might define that term. An empire, perhaps of the older form: the great landward multi-cultural entities like the Ottoman Near East, Russia, the Holy Roman Empire.

And just as the Soviet Union and Post-Soviet Russia inherited the imperium of Tsarist Russia, does not the People’s Republic, despite its name, assume the mantle of the Qing? One wonders about the congruence of its outlook, aspirations, circumstances – of broad form, if not of extent.

Perhaps ironies are the lot of all imperial cities. Any city at the centre of so complex an entity must necessarily be riddled with contradictions. The parallel existence of the modern and the ancient; the headlong rush of state capitalism amidst Maoist relics; the uncertain identity of a nation that prides itself on its timelessness.

But perhaps the greatest irony is this: that the daughter of a Guards officer at last finds herself in the court of the great revolutionary.

These days I live vicariously through people like the Baroness, so I’ll let her take up the story today:

The elevated landscape of Yunnan is not dissimilar from that of James Mitchell’s fantasies: cool, mist-wrapped, and the ancient crags that stretched beneath a clouded horizon had a faint air of primordial mystery and grotesque. It is, if one remembers one’s first form geography, classic karst country, limestone blocks worn sharp and sheer through the years; foggy gorges with romantic names bisected by fast brown currents.

Lijiang Old Town lies amidst these lofty heights. Bright coloured flags flutter in the breeze. Old women and children gather in market squares. Pagodas and temples outline themselves against the swirling blue and grey of the sky. Their doorways are shadowed and smoky with the scent of dreams and capricious gods. One suddenly becomes aware that this is a world removed from the lush green banks of the Pearl River, the shining cities of the eastern littoral, or the rolling plains of Manchuria. This is not quite China anymore. Here, just a ragged range away from Tibet, is a world of mountains and alpine peoples and dreadful mysticism.

Landscape has a curious effect on the mind. Standing amidst the sloping streets and peering down from medieval ramparts, one recalls that mythical trope common to every culture in the northern hemisphere which speaks of hidden valleys and lost kings. Growing up by the gentle banks of the Stour, with the smell of open Normandy fields brought across the Channel by strong summer winds, one never truly understood such a belief. Now, watching the moving cloud banks create strange impressions of light and shadow across the pitiless terrain, one is not so sure. And one shivers slightly in spite of the sun.

The day grows old now, and the lengthening shades make the scenery – man-made and natural – almost unbearable. The flags, the cheerful human noises, the sweet produce on display in the streets, cannot dispel the singular melancholy induced by emotions that predate the Vedas, Buddha, Chairmen Mao and Deng. The shadows cast by the roiling clouds seem immense – prehistoric even.

And yet, no matter: for how can one be truly bleak in a place where one can catch a bus – that runs, so reliable sources have it, on a regular schedule – to Shangri-La?

The other day I was complaining to a couple of friends that what I really wanted to see in cinema was some solid Victoriana. Not a period piece, not an epic, not a well-thought examination of human foibles.

What I wanted to see on screen was a solid fin-de-siecle adventure, mystery, intrigue, horror, thriller, action piece, science fiction piece. Something titled Lord Strathmore's Flying Worm Dragoons of Mars would not be inappropriate.

I had given up all hope, until the trailer for next year's remake of The Wolfman was released.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6N2lZwOQdMI

Looks promising, don't you think? That scene of Hugo Weaving stepping through fallen leaves beneath the ruined Gothic arches is exquisite.

From the Daily Telegraph

Mystery has surrounded the ship, officially carrying a cargo of timber worth £1.3 million from Finland to Algeria, since its crew first reported a boarding in Swedish waters on July 24 after a raid by 10 armed English-speaking men posing as anti-narcotics police officers.

It was eventually recovered off the coast of west Africa on August 17. Russia has since charged eight men from Estonia, Latvia and Russia with kidnapping and piracy.

Russian officials have said the alleged pirates demanded a $1.5 million ransom but speculation has grown that the freighter was carrying contraband cargo.

Israeli and Russian security sources have questioned The Kremlin's official explanation, instead arguing that the ship was carrying S-300 missiles, Russia's most advanced anti-aircraft weapon, while undergoing repairs in the Russian port of Kaliningrad, a notorious Baltic smuggling base.

According to reports, Mossad is said to have briefed the Russian government that the shipment had been sold by former military officers linked to the black market, and Russia then dispatched a naval rescue mission. Those who believe Mossad was involved point to a visit to Moscow by Shimon Peres, Israel's president, the day after the Arctic Sea was recovered.

Crew members of the Arctic Sea have since told Russian news reporters that they have been told not to disclose "state secrets" further fuelling the speculation.

A Russian military source told The Sunday Times: “The official version is ridiculous and was given to allow the Kremlin to save face.

“I’ve spoken to people close to the investigation and they’ve pretty much confirmed Mossad’s involvement. It’s laughable to believe all this fuss was over a load of timber. I’m not alone in believing that it was carrying weapons to Iran.”

Another theory is that Mossad concocted the alleged hijacking by setting up a criminal gang, who were unlikely to have known anything about a secret cargo, instead blocking the route to Iran by the mounting media interest.

“Once the news of the hijack broke, the game was up for the arms dealers. The Russians had to act," said a former Russian army officer. "That’s why I don’t rule out Mossad being behind the hijacking. It stopped the shipment and gave the Kremlin a way out so that it can now claim it mounted a brilliant rescue mission.”

As well as Russia facing potential embarrassment, had the missiles reached Iran, it would have significantly strengthened the Islamic republic's air defences. Israeli defence sources told the newspaper that in the event of an attack on Iran's nuclear installations, S-300 missiles would increase Israeli casualties by 50 per cent.

Earlier this week Mikhail Voitenjo, editor of Russia's online Maritime Bulletin, told The Sunday Telegraph he feared for his life after a warning call from a "cold official voice" thought to be an intelligence agent after he speculated the Arctic Sea was smuggling weapons.

Mr Voitenjo, who has since fled the country, said: "Very important government people got involved in this business.

"I ran away because I was afraid."

Here are some beauties from the Telegraph's Summer Photos competition.

Mudeford Beach, Christchurch, Dorset

Brancaster Beach, Norfolk

A typical summer afternoon somewhere in the Home Counties

A meadow on Glastonbury Hill

Straw Bales in the Pewsey Vale, Wiltshire

Goodmanham

A breakfast table, Chinon, France

'sights and sounds; dreams happy as her day;
And laughter, learnt of friends; and gentleness,
In hearts at peace, under an English heaven.'