I didn’t expect to find myself agreeing with Labour’s Shadow Education Secretary Tristram Hunt. But take a look at his Great War article “Bashing History,” and see what you think.
We’re going to be reading a lot of silly nonsense about the Great War in the next year or two, and Hunt’s preemptive strike is a salutary warning.
His piece recalls a poetic answer to Eric Bogle’s famous poem “Willie McBride,” written by Stephen Suffet in 1997:
Ask the people of Belgium or Alsace-Lorraine,
If my life was wasted, if I died in vain.…
Detroit, 2013— A correspondent sends “25 Facts about the Fall of Detroit That Will Leave You Shaking Your Head,” by Michael Snyder of the Economic Collapse Blog:
Once upon a time, the city of Detroit was a teeming metropolis of 1.8 million people and it had the highest per capita income in the United States. Now it is a rotting, decaying hellhole of about 700,000 people that the rest of the world makes jokes about.
When in July 2013 Detroit announced that it would file for Chapter 9 bankruptcy, the move was stopped at least temporarily by an Ingham County judge:
She ruled that Detroit’s bankruptcy filing violates the Michigan Constitution because it would result in reduced pension payments for retired workers [and that] bankruptcy filing was “also not honoring the president, who took [Detroit’s auto companies] out of bankruptcy”….How…
Concluded from Part 2…
Staniel Cay is an active stopover for sailing yachts with an affable yacht club for lunch. We spent an hour meandering its winding lanes and admiring the colorful cottages. On the way back we stopped at Compass Cay to “swim with the sharks”—big, friendly nurse sharks which behave like aquatic dogs, nosing up to a water-level dock to be fed bits of conch and allowing their sandpaper backs to be scratched.
These nurses are quite different from your image from “Jaws” (and as veteran Bahamian divers know, we have nothing that threatening in local waters anyway).…
Once reached, the gemstone islets of Exuma invite you to meander at a deliberate pace in placid, gin-clear waters. There were sailboats and cruising lots galore along the islets, and you can see why. Sailing from one to another, dropping anchor by whim or fancy, is an experience that will wash the world away.
Every islet is different and has its own attractions. At Warderick Wells Cay is the Exuma Cays National Land and Sea Park—a good first stop after crossing over from Eleuthera. A marine fishery and native plant preserve, it occupies 176 acres.…
EXUMA, BAHAMAS, FEBRUARY 5TH— Getting from our home island of Eleuthera to other Bahamian Family islands is complicated, usually requiring air travel via Nassau. But the nearest of the Exuma Cays is only about 40 miles from Cape Eleuthera, or 65 miles from Governor’s Harbour, and you can do that in under two hours in a fast boat. So off we went from Cupid’s Cay aboard Capt. Paul Petty’s immaculate Marlin 35 skiff, Martinis & Bikinis.
The date was our anniversary, so it couldn’t have been better timed. Paul and his affable mate Dwayne had six passengers, including three residents of Rainbow Bay and three Canadian ladies, one of whom organized the expedition.…
Churchillian Drift is just the ticket. I have been looking for a term to describe the numerous potted, inaccurate Churchill quotes. “A lie gets halfway around the world before the truth puts its trousers on.” That is big right now on Twitter. “Success is not final, failure is not fatal: it is the courage to continue that counts.” Everybody uses that one repeatedly.
“If you’e going through hell, keep going.” No one knows who said that, but it wasn’t Churchill. Then there is: “If I were your husband, I’d drink it.”…
