What more can you say?

Yesterday afternoon I was amazed in our local park and left Ohna a whispered voicemail message:

I'm standing about 10 yards away from a heron. I've never been this close to one in the wild before. It doesn't seem bothered by people at all. Even kids aren't scaring it away.

A bit later, Ohna left me a message saying she couldn't make out what I'd said. What was I near? A CLOWN?

I prefer what Ohna thought I'd said. Who knows, maybe one day I will see a clown in the wild?

B-)

According to this analyst

B-)

Wow, this feels a bit weird after having been neglectful for so long. The amazing news in our family is that Kiloh has not (so far as we know) sucked her thumb since last Thursday (that's 5 days). We've tried many things to persuade her to stop including that horrible-tasting stuff you put on your thumb. Even that didn't work but it did make her food taste terrible.

The breakthrough was when the dentist said that not only was a brace inevitable but that she was on course for an operation involving breaking her jaw and reassembling her face.

She's been backing up her resolve using a chart which she made and keeps up to date on her own. Every morning everyone in the family is asked whether they saw her suck her thumb yesterday and then she enters the record on the chart.

B-)

Well, I think I've decided to start blogging again. Here's one of many issues on which side with regard to I don't know where I stand (sorry, it's deliberately-weird-utterance day, translations on request):

———- Forwarded message follows ———-

Hi all,

The London Cycling Campaign, in conjunction with the CTC (I've forgotten what this stands for), has produced a briefing document on why the current Private Members Bill seeking the compulsory use of cycle helmets for under sixteens should be opposed.

I have uploaded the document to our e-mail group...If anyone has difficulty accessing the document would like a copy, let me know and I will e-mail it to you direct.

I know that there has been some discussion on this list about the pros and cons of helmet wearing so I thought this document would help inform the debate.

The main reasons given for opposing the proposed law are:

The principal threats to children's lives are obesity, heart disease and other illnesses resulting in large part from inactivity. Cycling has a key role to play in preventing these illnesses. Less cycling through a helmet law would aggravate the situation.

- Cycling is a healthy activity, and the likelihood of serious head injury is widely exaggerated.

- Cycling becomes safer the more people who do it. Encouraging cycling is by far the most effective way of reducing risk of injury.

- Helmet promotion deters cycling and leads to poorer health.

- The benefits of helmets are greatly over-stated.

- Many other everyday activities could benefit more from helmets than cycling

- A helmet law would make it a crime for children to take part in a health-giving activity.

Best wishes

Stephen

I've been thinking that I might have to abandon this blog, but I thought I could afford 30 seconds to forward this on.

B-)

The Wrap: A worm's eye view

18 March 2004

Terrorists declare war on evil, writes Andrew Brown. We should know better

Should terrorists be able to influence the outcome of elections? In one sense - and contrary to the impression you may have received this week - the right believes fervently that they should. Every advertisement suggesting that Mr Bush should be re-elected because of September 11 is based on the premise that terrorist crime should influence American voters. It just mustn't influence them to vote for his enemies, as appears to have happened in Spain.

Assume, for the sake of argument, that the election of a Socialist government is exactly what the bombers of Madrid intended. Should this have stopped the Spanish from voting as they did?

The first point to make is that if this is what they wanted, we are not dealing, in the words of one favourite cliche, with mindless terrorism. We are dealing with people much more effective at manipulating foreign electorates than the Bush government, which never managed to persuade more than a small minority of the Spanish people that the invasion of Iraq was wise and justified.

Fair enough. We are dealing with a subtle and determined enemy. Is it still wrong to do anything they want us to do? If it is, we're in dead trouble, because it would make them subtle, determined, and omniscient as well, since they would never want us to do anything which might in fact benefit us. Such terrorists would be figures of superhumanly gifted malevolence.

A worrying number of Bushies do write and behave as if their "War on Terror" were fought against supernatural powers. Barbara Amiel, for example, had an extraordinary rant in Monday's Telegraph: "Eta, Hezbollah and their many lookalikes have one thing in common. They all partake of the satanic nature of the terrorist culture ... a Satan that is evil incarnate, who can seize men's souls and turn them into his subordinates on earth."

She then goes on to compare Islamist terrorists unfavourably with the Nazis and the Stalinists, under whom "certain moral notions such as loyalty, conscience, support of the downtrodden or the innocence of the young, were never entirely dead even in that part of Satan's empire... such pinpricks in the darkness are missing from today's Satanists. No compunction mitigates or limits their murder. Only our actions on earth can stop them but their deeds are so transcendentally satanic that it genuinely leads to the invocation 'deliver us from evil'. One feels impelled to invoke the moral force of a deity against them."

Hang on. Let's take a few deep breaths here, Barbara. Al-Qaida has killed perhaps 10,000 people in the last ten years. Hitler and Stalin counted their victims in tens of millions. It is true that they appealed to some virtues to strengthen their vicious regimes, but so do the Islamists. "Loyalty, conscience, and the support of the downtrodden" are not confined to Nazis. They are some of the emotions appealed to by the jihadis and the recruiters of the suicide bombers.

The 21-year-old British suicide bomber Asif Mohammad Hanif said in the video released after his death, which was meant to justify his murders, "You spend the whole day in fields and then some dude comes with his truck and runs over it. How would you feel? You feel like standing him up, shooting him ... because you have worked for a whole day like that." This is hardly an appeal to an arcane religious principle. What Islam did was to persuade him, despite his British passport and education, that he had more in common with the wretched victims of the Gaza strip than with the free and democratic young people he blew up and mutilated.

Such people make a terrible weapon. But they are not forged in hell. They are made from recognisable human beings, with whom we were probably at school. Soldiering against injustice does seem more popular among young men than being a medical missionary. Our own culture glorifies the rebel, the misfit and the lone fighter against injustice. Jihadi Islam works with those materials. Suicide bombers are as often made in teenagers' bedrooms as in a mosque.

I hope and believe that Islam may be subverted by liberal capitalism, just as Christianity has been. But that happened by a change of hearts and minds, not a surrender to a head-on assault. No religion that has lasted 1,400 years can be exterminated by persecution: it can only be made more brutal and ignorant.

With all that said, I still think the new Spanish government should keep its troops in Iraq. We're all committed to imperialism now. Perhaps we shouldn't have conquered Iraq; I certainly wish we hadn't. But we did, and we must now help to run it as well as can be done. Throwing out Aznar, and Bush, and Blair, is not surrendering to the terrorists. It's an essential defence of democracy, by showing that in a democracy, people who lie their way into war will be punished. But pretending afterwards that the Iraq war didn't happen and that we can make it go away by withdrawing our troops is simply infantile.

• Andrew Brown, whose column normally appears on Fridays, is an English author and journalist and the author of The Darwin Wars: The Scientific War for the Soul of Man and In the Beginning Was the Worm: Finding the Secrets of Life in a Tiny Hermaphrodite. He also maintains a weblog, the Helmintholog (http://www.thewormbook.com/helmintholog/).

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Well, this blog looks like it might be in trouble. I'm afraid too many other things are competing at the top of the priority list just now. Which means, of course, that there have been lots of bloggable things but no time to blog them. Oh well.

Seeing as I posted messages about Apoa's school things, I think I really have to say something about it now that the letters are arriving. Apoa got into both the schools she sat exams for, although only one of the letters arrived on Saturday. The other one still hasn't come but we found out by phoning the school. They said it should come soon but suggested we ask our primary school who are told about all the decisions and they passed on the news.

Now we have to decide which one to go for, the main issue being that the school Apoa originally preferred is not the one all her friends will be going to. This meant that she changed her mind in a tenth of a nanosecond but now we're trying to encourage her to spend a bit of time thinking about it before coming to a final decision and also reminding her that it's a decision for the family as a whole and not just her. I'm sure that we'll end up by agreeing with her so it feels (to her) like we're torturing her pointlessly. Kiloh is quite interested as she realises that in a couple of years she'll be at this stage and she really wants to go to the same school as her sister. Neither of these schools have a significant sibling policy so they could well end up heading off in different directions every morning in a couple of years. There's a real temptation to go back to the original plan which was to go to the borough school over the hill where siblings are guaranteed a place.Still, it's good to know that this will all have been decided by the end of the week.

It's a serious rites of passage week for Apoa who had her ears pierced on Saturday and will be having her 11th birthday disco on Saturday.

B-)