Fun and Frolics

Today's Gaurdian is full of fun and frolics, more so even than usual, and that's before going into the magazine section.

So Dan Brown has won his case. Or I suppose more accurately, Baigent and Leigh have lost, and now owe £1 million for that little frolic. I wonder if someone could now take Brown to court over the poor quality of his writing and characterisation. No, I think probably not since so many people, including myself, bought the book and read it - albeit wincing - in virtually one sitting. OK, I exaggerate slightly, but I found it difficult to put the book down. I really can't imagine what Baigent and Leigh hoped to achieve, so someone took their research and ideas and turned it into a best-seller. I can see they might be bitter, especially since the character whose name was so obviously some kind of play on words and turns out to be an anagram of their own names, was so horribly written. But they surely, surely must have known they were on a hiding to nothing. I guess they're going to have to get their own wheels turning again and write something even bigger to pay their legal fees. My one little smile about the whole thing is that it turns out that Dan's missus does all the work - how unusual - and should she ever decide to dump him, well that has been acknowledged very publicly.

A piece that had me laughing like a drain, was the article about the BNP having selected a Greek-Armenian candidate and now being up in arms about it. D'oh! The BNP is basically the British Nazi Party and their very existence is based on racism. They are kind of a joke in Britain, like the very real Monster Raving Loony Party, but there is always the worry that maybe they might get a few votes. The Labour party appear to be especially worried because it no longer represents old fashioned socialism and the British National Party are trying to exploit this. But you've got to wonder how they managed to actually allow, in their own words, 'an ethnic' to be adopted as a candidate before anyone noticed and even more to the point, why tf does Sharif Gawad want to cosy up to a bunch of white supremacists? Unless he is the ultimate agent provocateur. I hope they rip their own entrails out trying to work that one out.

Finally, my own diodes exploded trying to get my head around this one, I'm going to quote directly from Martin Kettle's article.

"During the Falklands conflict in April 1982, a call came through to the Whitehall office of John Nott, Margaret Thatcher's defence secretary. At that time the British military task force was still steaming southwards through the Atlantic and the eventual outcome of the hostilities could not be predicted. But this call came directly from the Argentine-occupied islands themselves, from an SAS unit secretly at work close to Port Stanley. "We are looking straight at General Menendez in the cross hairs of our rifles," the SAS caller whispered. "Do you want us to take him out?"

Back in London there was a hasty high-level discussion about what to do with this opportunity to remove the head of the Argentine forces on the Falklands. But the response was unanimous and quick. Don't kill him, the SAS were told. We don't do assassination."

I don't really have anything to say that Martin doesn't say more than adequately in his article, though I did whinge at him about using the term '9/11'.
It's odd, in old fashioned war, hand-to-hand, on the field of battle, the aim was always to get to the leader take him or her out, because once you did, the battle was won. So does that tell us that the rules have changed or that we don't want to be done out of a bit of a skirmish? I think the rules of war have changed. In the days of hand-to-hand, mostly you were taking out a soldier. Now you would be taking out someone who sat at a desk and ordered genocide, and people must see that one being taken down.