Most regular readers of this site are familiar with the immortal line from The Inimitable Jeeves: when Aunt is calling Aunt like mastodons bellowing across primaeval swamps…
Anyway, that’s what it’s been like behind the scenes of Britblog Roundup this week – the various hosts and hostesses bellowing primaevally among themselves about what and how the Roundup should round up. Only one death so far…
BBRU hosts are supposed to track down lively examples of the blogging genre. But there is a lot of blogging out there to choose from, not least corners of the Internet teeming with allegedly English nationalism which spirals off into anti-semitism, ‘islamophobia’, xenophobia and strident intolerance of pretty much everything.
BBRU’s policy is to give all that a wide berth and focus instead on other stuff.
So, getting on with it…
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Let’s start with Climate Change (Or Not). A good week for so-called Sceptics as the mainstream media finally have started to look at bad science, exaggerations and conflicts of interest which all have infiltrated governments' environmental/climate policies in recent years.
Whatever one thinks about climate issues (which are fiendishly complex), a small but unrelenting part of the blogosphere has used spontaneous mass networking to look hard at tough technical questions and leap ahead of the mainstream media, shooting yawning holes in the credibility of British/EU/US and wider climate policy. This profoundly democratic development exemplifies the waning power of governments and legacy media to shape public opinion.
EU Referendum has done a startling job in rummaging around in the myriad commercial and other activities of IPCC leader Dr Rajendra Pachauri, to the point of making it on to TV in
In the free (and rapid) exchange of information and ideas (and mutual criticism), it is us working as a loose community who most closely approach the scientific ideal. This is, of course, why we are winning the intellectual argument. The political battle, though, has yet to come.
Devil’s Kitchen hammers away at this subject from a libertarian angle. He lambasts those who such as Sunny Hundal who still defend the core Climate Change/IPCC position:
What Sunny hasn't grasped—or, rather, wilfully refuses to grasp—is that if one or more claims are suspect, then they are all suspect.
Quite. And it’s having results. Talking Clock points out that
Bishop Hill likewise has achieved planetary reknown by hitting plenty of fat lazy climate targets. Here he is again, drilling down into the data.
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From one wise Prelate effortlessly to another, and the realms of ‘religio-political’ agendas.
Archbishop Cranmer gives us a Conservative Creed.
Wantage Pastor Neil Townsend loves to blog about the excitement of his faith! And he uses exclamation marks! Lots of them!
The Heresiarch pores over Mrs Blair, religion and a punch in the mouth.
Penny Red rails against Simon Jenkins’s views about the Pope from her exciting socialist, feminist, deviant, reprobate, queer, journalist, tea-drinking, smoking, toast-eating perspective, helpfully giving her work a coarse title to make sure we won’t want to read it: Does Simon Jenkins shit in the woods?
Over in central Europe Odessablog is doing his best to explain to us
Nourishing Obscurity boasts of his Russian and Serbian (Боже Боже) and French girlfriends. Having wallowed in some of the deepest, lushest European integration on offer, he remains pro-Europe but anti-EU: down with Euro-Quislings, down.
Witterings from Witney laments the fact that
Up in Stroud Green ward (no relation) in Haringey, Green Party candidate Sarah Cope is being driven witless by local housing socialism:
As a council flat resident, I have long battled with the powers that be to get even the simplest repair job done – and had to suffer a lot of ill-will and sometimes staggering levels of rudeness from staff…
… A resident in a council block is terrified of the mice that run amok in her abode. She cannot sleep and is having to stay with friends. Other residents complain but the Housing Manager says that unless EVERY resident in the large block complains, the interior of the flats cannot be treated. (I checked whether this is in fact the council’s rule, and it isn’t).
Two Conservative parliamentary candidates are blogging furiously. Dominic Raab is down the boozer in Stoke D’Abernon. Robert Buckland has some very brainy stuff about Legal Aid – is that really going to wow voters in Swindon South?
Labour Party stalwart Brian Barder has made it his life’s work painstakingly to damn Tony Blair for war crimes. Hey, Brian, how many times (if any) did you vote for him?
Two (Green) Doctors look at scandalous SNP abuses of Scottish parliamentary hospitality but make a wise suggestion:
… please let's not give it a "-gate" suffix. They're a dead horse in general, but Parliament's already had Piegate and Burgergate. We couldn't handle "blade of Scottish beef with roast onion mash and winter greens-gate".
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And on to Writing. Good. And Bad.
Samuel Pepys reminds us how he helped invent elegant English.
The Top 100 Scottish Blogs are proclaimed. The winner is SNP Tactical Voting.
But who would want to miss No 97, namely Hythlodaeus who is another one looking closely at what Scottish politicians eat – and how mere mortals can pay to sit next to them at the trough?
Call me old fashioned, but I can’t take seriously blogs riddled with spelling errors. Such as plane stupid moaning about BAA’s role in Scottish tourism. Just embarassing.
Here by contrast is Paul Cornell with elegant writing and top-end sci-fi comic design – Indomitable Iron Man.
If by now you have not died of boredom, here is a beautiful piece by James Hamilton about the psychology of Brian Clough. Check out the video of Clough sternly gaslighting a fashion challenged youthful John Motson
And Kaite Welsh looking at early palaeontologist Mary Anning - who discovered the first Icthyosaur:
… it was Mary’s lengthy career that inspired the nursery rhyme “She sells sea-shells on the sea shore”, but it was not until recently that this oddly-dressed woman from Lyme Regis has been given her due… Anning stumbled across the fossil of a strange monster with “flippers like a dolphin, a mouth like a crocodile, and a pointed snout like a swordfish.”
Phil Walker deftly helps Michael Moore identify a new, just economic order.
Phil’s blog is called The Melangerie. No relation to MyLingerie, aka knows as KnickersBlog. Get all your Valentine’s Day underpants here.
Any self-respecting blogger keeps a close eye on Search Engine Optimisation (the things you do on your site to soar from the utter obscurity of page 52 on Google to the utter obscurity of (say) page 2. And nothing being sacred, there are even Dirty Tricks here too, as David Naylor explains to the microscopic number of people able to follow him.
With your SEO neat and tidy, read The Conservative Blog’s Ten Blogging Commandments. I liked No 9: Clean your Teeth (Or your Blog will Lack Bite).
Alas some bloggers, even cool libertarian ones, just run out of road. So, farewell then, Charlotte Gore…
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Very finally, two utterly beyond awesome things.
First, peezedtee laments the absence of schwung in today’s advertising, reminding us how toothpaste ads used to look and sound.
Second, many of you people out there are full of declinist ennui and looking for something to do with your empty lives.
So, here’s an idea. Reacquire Purpose and Meaning.
Dig out old video clips of Sid James. Then sit there for many long hours cutting out individual words by him, which you can then arrange painstakingly with electronic music to give us Sid James singing an obscure Pink Floyd song.
Aaargh. Dust On the Stylus tells us that it’s been done already – back in 1991, by Fortran 5. Who also got Derek Nimmo into a studio to sing Layla by Derek and The Dominoes.
How cool is that?
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Next week’s BBRU is hosted by Trixy.
Make her life easy, readers. Send her a few lively links, via britblog @ gmail.com
