Monthly Archives: April 2010

Unsure of how to vote?

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Let Vote Match take the strain. You answer a series of policy questions and it matches your responses against the stated policies of the national parties. I wasn’t that surprised to find that I agree with:

  • Conservatives 42%
  • Lib Dem 40%
  • Greens 39%
  • Labour 33%
  • UKIP 28%

You can choose which parties you would and would not like to be associated with and I asked for BNP to be excluded from the final reckoning. Then, out of morbid curiosity, I asked for them to be included. This gives a rather worrying:

  • Conservatives 42%
  • Greens 39%
  • Lib Dem 38%
  • BNP 36%
  • Labour 32%
  • UKIP 27%

Hmm. Where did that 36% come from? I always thought the only difference between BNP and UKIP was the rapid [EDIT: or even rabid] xenophobia. I didn’t think I was remotely xenophobic, even though you will have to pluck my right to make jokes about the French, Germans and Americans out of my cold dead hands. Is it because my answers suggest I would have no problem with the idea of repatriating an immigrant who breaks the law? That of course would refer to a persistent recidivist, not someone who, say, gets caught doing 32mph in a 30mph zone. This is not entirely facetious: I recently read of a Mexican woman in the US, who has lived and worked legally there for 40 years, and whose children and grandchildren are US citizens, who has had her green card revoked because she walked across a neighbour’s lawn and got sued for trespass. That is silly (or to give it its fuller name, mindless petty spite). However, at the other end of the scale, someone who enters the country as an immigrant, gets the right to reside and sets themselves up as a crime lord running a drugs and prostitution ring should lose the right to residence. Is that a problem?

Therein lies the problem with any site like this: you can give general answers to general questions of policy, but that always assumes the legislation would emerge from the Parliamentary process framed and phrased in a reasonable way. Nothing I’ve seen in the last 13 years, and very little in the last 31, convinces me this would be the case.

I will now save this post, if I can get my right hand down from its 45 degree angle to move the mouse.

The boy stood on the burning deck

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For many years I genuinely believed the poem began:

The boy stood on the burning deck
The ship was sinking fast.
And as he stood there sinking too
His captain floated past.

In fact it’s a little more Poetic than that. The poem – which, face it, just asks to be parodied – is “Casabianca” (not to be confused with the Bogart movie with a very similar but not quite identical name). The boy is the son of Captain Casabianca, captain of the French flagship Orient. The deck is burning because it’s the Battle of the Nile, and in a few short minutes the flames will reach Orient’s gunpowder stores and the ship will blow up quite spectacularly, killing the captain, the boy and most of the rest of the crew. True fact.

(The French fleet had moored bow-to-stern parallel to the shore, so that any enemy attack would have to be along one side only and they would have a reasonable chance of fighting off any aggressors. Nelson disgracefully worked out that there was space for some of his ships to sail between the line and the shore, so the French ships were attacked from both sides at once. Of such base, deceitful, unsporting treachery is one of the Royal Navy’s greatest victories made.)

The boy cries out during the poem to his father, asking to be relieved of his station, but his father is either already dead or at least unconscious. No order comes, the boy holds his station to the bitter end and *BOOM*. With a choke in its voice and a catch in its throat, the poem concludes:

There came a burst of thunder sound–
The boy–oh! where was he?
Ask of the winds that far around
With fragments strewed the sea!–

With mast, and helm, and pennon fair,
That well had borne their part–
But the noblest thing which perished there
Was that young faithful heart.

Hmm. Let us leave aside such unPoetic questions as: how does the poet, who wasn’t even there, know what the boy was doing? And, is that penultimate verse really meant to make you giggle?

Wikipedia tells me two useful things. One is Samuel Butler’s thoughts on the poem:

“the moral of the poem was that young people cannot begin too soon to exercise discretion in the obedience they pay to their papa and mamma.”

The other is that, during the action, the boy’s leg was apparently blown off. All of a sudden another possible explanation for his immobility becomes apparent.

The boy lay on the burning deck
His other leg lay near …

I’m probably missing the point entirely.

Fancy the contents of a Swedish farmhouse?

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With my father-in-law safely installed in a home for retired Vikings, the contents of the farm are being auctioned off. If you have a krona or two to spare (exchange rate 10.44 to the pound, according to the Post Office a fortnight ago) and are so inclined, the goods are available to view.

Some particular items to draw your attention to:

How much do I have to pay for this not to be delivered to my front door?

Handy for the shopping

Those were the days

Want!