Banditry

From Poland, an excellent piece of life imitating art.

I’ve got a new piece up on the otherwise increasingly moribund Sharpener, about the terrifying public and press reaction - both in the UK and in Iran - that risks escalating a minor diplomatic incident into a casus belli. Hopefully sanity will prevail: ideally on both sides, but at the very least on ours…

I’ve just had a fabulous holiday in ex-Yugoslavia; I’d recommend a trip to Croatia and Slovenia to anyone, with the possible exception of people I dislike.

The new-found prosperity in both countries is amazing, given their past of communist stagnation and civil war - even in Slovenia, albeit briefly - as is the scenery. And the mountainous railway journey from Split to Zagreb is simply fabulous, except for people who suffer from motion sickness (such as my girlfriend, who enjoyed the view rather less than I did).

Vaguely relatedly, given that Slovenia is planning to replace its currency with the Euro in January 2007, I’ve written a piece at The Sharpener using economic data to address a couple of bizarre anti-Euro myths.

“Daggy music is one way to make the hoons leave an area”, apparently. No word so far on whether this also deters the hoons from rorting.

I’m aware of most of the differences between British English (yuck, but it’s the least ambiguous term I can think of) and US English, and I’m pretty aware of what’s going on in US politics, at least on a national level. Australian English and politics can still leave me baffled, however:

PM: I suspected Iraq wheat rort

My comprehension wasn’t helped by the fact that Google News UK listed this as a story, and sourced it to the ‘Daily Telegraph’. I was left wondering what on Earth Tony Blair had actually suspected, and what kind of bizarre mangle his words had been through…

To my surprise, I find something amusing in Harry’s comments about the collapse of Soviet communism and, relatedly, Russian society:

Yeltsin’s Government made a deal with the population: the first part was, yes, life would be worse now. But, on the other hand, to be kind, it would be shorter too.