Liadnan

By Popular Request: Gratuitous Cat Blogging

Wed, 23 Jul 2008 16:28:48 GMT

Campion has Important Business In His Tree and cannot presently attend to you.

(See also the next one.) Coming soon: Campion Is Sulking In His Tent.

Lambeth Watching

Tue, 22 Jul 2008 15:18:03 GMT

I'm not an Anglican but nevertheless -or perhaps because of that- have been following what is going on there with a certain amount of detatched interest. So far as I can make out from this perspective the best commentary is from Ruth Gledhill's Times blog* (alongside her ordinary reporting for the main paper). One of her points throughout has been the way the media are being kept at arms length. Today's comment an absolute gem:

Even the totally harmless and innocuous Church Press here are being denied access to the evening Eucharists. As for me, I was told yesterday that it was worth applying to attend the afternoon indaba groups. Today there is one called 'Never say No to Media', led by Rev Dr Joshva Raha, tutor at the Centre for Mission Studies at Queen's, Birmingham. I applied and they said no.

*By contrast Damian Thompson in the Telegraph continues to make me embarrassed he's on my side of the Tiber. Not so much about whether he's wrong or right or either or neither, just his obnoxious smugness.

Boggle

Wed, 02 Jul 2008 23:04:32 GMT

Channel hopping this evening we came across a programme about this. Really quite, quite staggeringly full of Wrongness.

At some point I shall have enough round tuits to write a post about Pashazade and my travels, promise. In the meantime an unedited, uncommented collection of photos is here. for incurable masochists. Be warned, quite a large proportion of them is "pretty scenes out the window of a 35 hour train journey across Turkey and Syria".

They Call The One Ship That Sails AG.ON

Mon, 16 Jun 2008 06:35:51 GMT

I write from the usual extortionately expensive cafe at Piraeus, having wended my way here, with Pashazade via Istanbul, 35 hours on the Taurus Railway, once the continuation of the Orient Express, the legendary Hotel Baron in Aleppo, Krak des Chevaliers, Damascus, Beirut (courtesy of Itinerantsphinx) and an overnight flight. Unsurprisingly a bit knackered but all well. Time for a few days sleeping on the beach now. Toodle pip.

Travelling...

Tue, 03 Jun 2008 21:54:39 GMT

Off to Heathrow terminal 5 and thence, godwilling, to Istanbul, in about half an hour. Packing finally completed, notwithstanding Campion's enthusiastic assistance.

Not bisy. Bakson.

Oh Lor'

Fri, 09 May 2008 16:11:55 GMT

Pictures of Lebanon at the moment, via Itinerantsphinx, who has wisely headed out of Beirut.

Yes, I have booked flights out of Beirut to Athens next month, that's the way we're coming back from Syria. Splendid

Amused by the last photo on that page though.

Boris

Sun, 04 May 2008 19:06:08 GMT

Almost everyone I read, most of my friends, and my fiancée, appear to see Boris Johnson as something akin to the antichrist. Me, I'm with Nosemonkey.

Someone else (I've lost the link*) said that Choosing between Ken Livingstone and Boris Johnson is a bit like choosing between shit and shite, which admirably sums up how I felt. Rather Paddick than either, certainly, but that was never a real prospect, and personally I thought, and continue to think, that the shite is just marginally preferable to the shit. The heavens have not collapsed in on us, nor has the Thames risen in protest, and I rather suspect that they won't.

*ETA: via Purplecthulhu I see it was DoctorVee, who now has a followup post.

Summer..

Thu, 01 May 2008 08:07:05 GMT

is going to involve this, all being well and there being no drastic political developments. Despite the news this morning that Bradt has republished the travel guide to Iraq, it will not involve the continuation of the Taurus railway on to Baghdad and/or Tehran. Maybe another year. Still trying to work out if coming home via Greece is remotely sensible. Probably not since I can't find any detailed information about whether the Latakia-Piraeus ferry is happening at the moment.

For the first time since about 1991, I didn't even attempt to make summer involve sitting in a muddy field in Somerset. Heigh ho. Last year was too grim and I'd rather quit while most of my memories are happy ones.

Gertrude's Glorious Victory, Or, Basil meets His Match

Thu, 10 Apr 2008 09:48:27 GMT

This is entirely blatant cat-blogging. You have fair warning

We started, tentatively, letting the cats out recently. Frankly, they're still a little nervous: .

Meeting Startled Cat went reasonably well, though it did elicit a noise vaguely remiscent of a Clanger from one of them (I'm not sure who: ours tend to make bizarre sounds, but more like budgies most of the time). Basil, on the other hand, was somewhat more diffident:

Well, I've been "working at home" this morning. (Waiting for Majestic to deliver the mixed case I was suckered into ordering the other day on doubtless false grounds of economy, actually.) So I thought I would open the windows. Cue, first, Campion leaping from the upper window and entering into a staring match with Basil. Once he had made his way back in through the kitchen window and the unlatched security gate, Basil decided to follow, and saunter upstairs, which is the place Campion and Gertrude regard as theirs above all, Campion choosing to slumber on top of the sofabed while Gertrude lurks beneath. (When not sitting on the bookcase and impersonating Ceiling Cat that is: )

This started a new staring match, and somewhat pitiful sounds from Basil (who weighs in at about as much as our two put together). Eventually I decided it was time to evict His Gingerness, and got a swipe for my pains. As I was wearing only a t shirt and nothing on my feet they were indeed pains.

Campion boldly squeaked at him and both he and I received another swipe. And that was when all hell broke loose. Gertrude had retreated far, far under her sofa while all this was in progress, but this was too much: she does have some maternal instincts after all, and the air became full of screeching hellcat.

Basil, who has read about discretion and valour, decided that on balance he really didn't want to lower himself to this and fled to the stairs. That, however, was not enough for Gertrude who launched herself onto him and took them both bumping and scratching down the stairs. At the foot Basil extricated himself and moved swiftly for the other stairs to the kitchen and the way out.

Unfortunately the security gate was not held open, just swinging freely, and he swiftly discovered he couldn't actually fit his head through. The end result was a large ginger cat hanging on to the top of a gate and swinging sadly back and forth until he ungraciously accepted my assistance. I think he's feeling a little chastened.

On The Offchance

Fri, 07 Mar 2008 17:42:17 GMT

Have I lent my Firefly DVDs to any of you lot?

Lunatic Comments on the Today Programme

Wed, 27 Feb 2008 06:55:40 GMT

One in an ongoing series

[Discussing the 80th birthday of Ariel Sharon, who has now been in a coma for two years] Interviewer: "So, does he still exert any influence in Israel?"

++Rowan

Sun, 10 Feb 2008 14:14:07 GMT

Since I have vast amounts of actual work to do, I thought I would write something about Rowan. It's that or clean the windows. Much of it has already been said, in the press and in comments threads - I've been following Legionseagle's in particular- (ETA: Head of Legal also has a strong post on the subject) but perhaps it's worth adding my own rambling thoughts.

A minor point worth making at the outset is that there are two separate sources: The Archbishop was down to give a lecture (one of a series) in the RCJ on Thursday night. The text of that is here. I was supposed to be going (though for some reason I was under the impression it was to be in the Temple Church) but decided instead that a party in Chambers trumped an hour or so's CPD, even though it sounded marginally more interesting than most such lectures. A colleague did go, and came on afterwards: he tells me the interesting bit must have been while he nodded off briefly. Probably many others also nodded off, well, it's the end of a long working day and frankly the speech is not a model of clarity. Before the speech, however, he had trailed it in an interview on BBC Radio's World at One: the transcript of that is here. Unsurprisingly it's a little less abstruse, being intended for the fairly awake general population rather than half asleep lawyers. The difference seems obvious, but as Legionseagle pointed out Geoffrey K. Pullum at Language Log rather carelessly failed to spot the point, allowing him to claim that the Archbishop "did not say Sharia law was unavoidable". He did ([Interviewer]"your words are that the application of Sharia in certain circumstances if we want to achieve this cohesion and take seriously peoples' religion seems unavoidable?" RW "It seem unavoidable and indeed as a matter of fact certain provision of Sharia are already recognised in our society and under our law"), just in the BBC interview rather than in the lecture Pullum was looking at.

Whichever text you take, the ideas put forward by the Archbishop seem flatly wrong. What he seems to be calling for is the recognition of supplementary, opt in jurisdictions. He says: "the criterion for recognising and collaborating with communal religious discipline should be connected with whether a communal jurisdiction actively interfered with liberties guaranteed by the wider society in such a way as definitively to block access to the exercise of those liberties". Fine. But he gives no indication about how this might work in practice and I am unable to conceive of one myself, beyond the existing possibility of arbitration by contractually binding consent. Unfortunately, the ultimate purpose of law is to resolve the real disputes of real people, and the practical answer is all that matters in the end.

There is, of course, no reason why parties cannot agree to take a civil dispute to binding arbitration before a sharia court. You can put into a commercial contract something along the lines that "any dispute will be subject to binding arbitration before such and such" and so long as you do everything in accordance with what is presently the Arbitration Act 1996 that agreement, and the result of the arbitration, will be binding and, crucially, the award of the Arbitrator will be enforceable in the Civil courts. All well and good. Equally you can decide to take any straightforward civil dispute to arbitration (or mediation, or a variety of other things) after the dispute has arisen. I wouldn't see an enormous problem with a choice of law clause (ie choosing the legal code that will govern the interpretation of the contract, whatever the forum) that dictated sharia law either. (ETA: so far as express choice of law, as opposed to an arbitration clause, it would appear not: see [1].)

All of that is not only permissible but happens all the time. Jewish businessmen have long taken their disputes to the Beth Din. The problem is, you have to agree to do so.

But clearly the Archbishop is on about something more than what is presently available. (Though perhaps one improvement that could easily be made is for the MCB or some such body to establish a more formal network of sharia courts than presently exists). How exactly does he propose this working? The lecture is full of woolly phrases, but I have no idea how this could be made to work for the real problems of the real clients I see. Take inheritance law. Subject to a major exception, to which I shall return, there is no reason why, let us say, a wealthy Muslim gentleman should not make a will which results in his estate being divided in precisely the same way as it would under sharia law (I have no idea what that would be, and no intention of looking it up). We have testamentary freedom in this country. I suppose he could also leave it to his executors on trust to distribute it "to such persons and charitable purposes as should benefit in accordance with the principles of sharia law" but there could be certainty problems with that, I haven't considered it too carefully. If he doesn't make a will it goes under the intestacy rules, but whose fault is that?

The major exception lies in the Inheritance (Provision for Family and Dependants) Act 1975 which (very broadly) allows spouses and dependants to apply to the court on the basis that (typically) Dad cut his wife out and left it all to the mistress and her children. Or, actually, cut out the mistress and the second household he had been maintaining: it's a "what's sauce for the goose &c" jurisdiction though the test for spouses is less onerous: a spouse's claim is for "reasonable provision", otherwise it is "reasonable provision for maintenance"

That's a law successive governments introduced, amended, repeated and so on as a matter of social policy, to answer a perceived (and real) common wrong. At least, they, and I, saw and see it as a wrong. So what if our deceased Muslim gentleman decides to leave his widow his second best bed and a used turnip. There are only two possible approaches. Either she gets to apply under the Act, regardless of what sharia says, or she is bound to go to a sharia court which will apply sharia law. If the latter, well, she's not getting the benefit of something others are: the right to apply to the civil courts for an order which will almost undoubtedly give her fairly generous provision under the Act. Why not? When does she get to make a choice about it?

The choice I made to make the Deceased a man, and his spouse left with nothing a woman was not unconsidered. Yes, there are cases going the other way, there have also been cases between cohabiting men and will doubtless be cases between civil partners. But the main consequence of this law, when first introduced in the 1930s, was to put women in a better position. Typically, women remain the economically weaker partners in marriages, not to mention being often physically weaker and more susceptible to actual duress. Even if the debate is in terms of people making an express agreement to go to sharia law, can we be confident such agreement is genuine and free when the areas at issue are matrimonial and inheritance matters within the context of strongly patriarchal social structures? If not express agreement, well, what exactly is to be considered? The fact that a woman is deemed (how, why?) to be muslim means she has to take her claim to sharia? This is clearly ludicrous. If she is happy with accepting the will, or with what some sharia tribunal says, well, she just doesn't bring her claim. No one can make her, the question is whether someone can make her not do so.

Take divorce. Orthodox Jews have, I believe, to have themselves divorced in the Beth Din if they are to be remarried in the faith, and I recollect that this has given rise to problems in recent years, with some women being refused the "get" by their former husbands. But this has no bearing at all on whether or not they are divorced in English civil law: they have to trot off to the Family Division in any event: it's an area that is not susceptible to resolution under the Arbitration Act. Similarly a decision of a Catholic Diocesan Rota granting an annullment has no legal effect in English law. (Typically, at least nowadays and in England, the latter requires as a matter or practice that the civil side be sorted out first, though I doubt they care whether the couple goes for a civil annullment or the probably swifter route of a civil divorce.) Is the divorced or divorcing Muslim woman to be deprived of the benefits of the Matrimonial Causes Act (which actually has a close drafting relationship with the Inheritance Act I mention above). Again, if she doesn't want them, she doesn't have to make an ancillary relief application. Much the same applies to obtaining the divorce itself: is she to be forced to obtain her divorce in a sharia court -if she can- rather than being entitled to go to the Family Division?

I shan't even bother to get into the realm of criminal law and penalties for breaches of such. The whole debate seems utterly ludicrous to me: I can conceive of no way in which the ideas Rowan seems to be espousing could actually work and I don't really understand why anyone is taking this debate seriously.

So the second objection to an increased legal recognition of communal religious identities can be met if we are prepared to think about the basic ground rules that might organise the relationship between jurisdictions, making sure that we do not collude with unexamined systems that have oppressive effect or allow shared public liberties to be decisively taken away by a supplementary jurisdiction.

But law is largely about balancing the rights and liberties of one individual with another in a given set of facts. If the supplementary system is not to be allowed to decisively take away rights, what exactly are you on about?

The rule of law is thus not the enshrining of priority for the universal/abstract dimension of social existence but the establishing of a space accessible to everyone in which it is possible to affirm and defend a commitment to human dignity as such, independent of membership in any specific human community or tradition, so that when specific communities or traditions are in danger of claiming finality for their own boundaries of practice and understanding, they are reminded that they have to come to terms with the actuality of human diversity - and that the only way of doing this is to acknowledge the category of 'human dignity as such' – a non-negotiable assumption that each agent (with his or her historical and social affiliations) could be expected to have a voice in the shaping of some common project for the well-being and order of a human group.

I have no idea what this is supposed to mean. Does this mean my Muslim widow will have the right to apply under the 1975 Act or not? How do you see this working in practice?

I'd be interested to hear what anyone knows about the Canadian experiments with North American Indian supplementary jurisdictions to which the Archbishop refers.

ETA: [1] On choice of law a friend and reader points me to the Beximco Pharmaceutials case where the clause "Subject to the principles of the Glorious Sharia'a, this Agreement shall be governed by and construed in accordance with the laws of England." was found not to work:

[40]First, it was common ground by concession that there could not be two separate systems of law governing the contract (paragraph 43). Yet, by contending that Sharia law and not English law would determine the enforceability of the agreement, the appellants were in substance contending that the agreements were governed both by English and Sharia law (paragraph 48). The judge declined to construe the wording of the clause as a choice of Sharia law as the governing law for the following reasons. First, Article 3.1 of the Rome Convention (which by s.2(1) of the Contracts (Applicable Law) Act 1990 has the force of law in the United Kingdom) contemplates that a contract "shall be governed by the law chosen by the parties" and Article 1.1 of the Rome Convention makes it clear that the reference to the parties' choice of the law to govern a contract is a reference to the law of a country. There is no provision for the choice or application of a non-national system of law such as Sharia law

[52]The general reference to principles of Sharia in this case affords no reference to, or identification of, those aspects of Sharia law which are intended to be incorporated into the contract, let alone the terms in which they are framed. It is plainly insufficient for the defendants to contend that the basic rules of the Sharia applicable in this case are not controversial. Such 'basic rules' are neither referred to nor identified. Thus the reference to the "principles of … Sharia" stand unqualified as a reference to the body of Sharia law generally. As such, they are inevitably repugnant to the choice of English law as the law of the contract and render the clause self-contradictory and therefore meaningless.

But what if had simply said that the Agreement "should be subject to arbitration by [a sharia'a court'] in accordance with the principles of the Glorious Sharia'a", or if they had nailed down that they were talking about sharia'a rules on interest? The case is worth a read.

ETFA: The Archbishop's site says "The Archbishop made no proposals for sharia in either the lecture or the interview, and certainly did not call for its introduction as some kind of parallel jurisdiction to the civil law." So what exactly does he mean when he says "I have been arguing that a defence of an unqualified secular legal monopoly in terms of the need for a universalist doctrine of human right or dignity is to misunderstand the circumstances in which that doctrine emerged, and that the essential liberating (and religiously informed) vision it represents is not imperilled by a loosening of the monopolistic framework."? What is it, that thing that happens when you loosen a monopolistic framework and create a "supplementary jurisdiction"?

Arrivals

Sun, 10 Feb 2008 12:51:58 GMT

I had vaguely intended to return to writing stuff here, but once the tax return was complete and in, the computer decided to finally fall over and die. Not unexpected: the day I filed the return online I was feverishly praying that she would cling to life at least just long enough to submit. Which she did, just. RIP Theodora II, tolerably good and faithful servant.

I'm about to start prep for trial in a fairly significant case, so it will probably be a while before I'm properly back. However, it seems right to record that in addition to the new machine on which I am writing now (presently named "[pashazade]-laptop" in a startling fit of originality) and Theodora III and Justinian I, two Ubuntu Dell desktop machines that will be arriving in the near future, there are two rather shy new additions to this household: Campion (after Edmund, but Margery Allingham fans have liberty to believe otherwise) and his mother Gertrude . At least I think that's Gertrude but it's difficult to tell as she presently spends most of her time hiding behind things, in particular the monitor in the photograph (Campion meanwhile seems to be emulating his namesake* and building a priest's hole in the attic, possibly also a printing press judging from the noises). They were warming to us but we took them to the vet for a check on Saturday and we were promptly put back into disgrace...

*Though I don't think Blessed Edmund actually built any priest's holes himself, Nicholas Owen did most of that.

The Taxman's Taken All My Dough...

Thu, 31 Jan 2008 21:42:58 GMT

And that's all I have to say about that. Now, time to think about the summer. Oh, and buy a ring for some reason or other.

Grand Designs: Cheltenham Underground House

Wed, 16 Jan 2008 21:09:37 GMT

Another year, another series. And less than five minutes in, the plan to become mortgage-free starts with them mortgaging themselves to the hilt (3.5k interest/month), no one working on the build has "worked with this material before", and they've sacked the architect. Splendid.

Not A Bad Start To 2008

Tue, 08 Jan 2008 18:23:54 GMT

For the benefit of those who don't know yet, at the weekend I decided it would be a jolly fine idea to ask Pashazade to marry me, and the poor fool said yes.

Out of Here

Sun, 23 Dec 2007 16:26:22 GMT

Annual jaunt down to Winchester Friday, back for Frankie and Coughingbear's party last night, and now off back to Hampshire and the gathering family hordes, via mass at Westminster Cathedral. I shall be effectively interwebless until New Year, so a very Happy Christmas to everyone who reads this, whatever that may mean to you. See you on the other side, literally or metaphorically.

TFL

Tue, 27 Nov 2007 15:05:09 GMT

Transport for London apparently has no sense of humour whatsoever. Tedious twats.

Fuck

Sun, 11 Nov 2007 19:43:28 GMT

Obviously my wallet and all my cards -including my oystercard- would be stolen just when I'm suffering a little financial embarrassment courtesy of paying Her Majesty's Revenue and Customs their quarterly due in respect of VAT and having to rely on the credit cards until some cheques clear. It was only because I had Pashazade's Oyster card in my pocket for some reason that I didn't end up walking home from Victoria.

Classic: crossing a pedestrian crossing and fail to avoid guy staggering his way across seemingly blind drunk who abuses me for getting in his way. Get to the other side and realise my pocket was light: by that time the lights have changed, there's a stream of traffic, and he's vanished.

No BTP apparent on Victoria, and granted it wasn't their problem anyway as it wasn't on the station, but I did eventually find a phone that connected me to their ops room and they put me through to Scotland Yard. They seem to think there might be some useful CCTV cameras around but I hold out little hope. Lloyds very quick to stop cards on, as were Barclays (though their cretinous new card sentinel idea means that I can no longer use online banking either, as I need the card) but MBNA are a nightmare.

Balls. This is the second wallet I've lost this year, though the first (in Lebanon) was entirely my fault.

Godawful Recruiters

Fri, 19 Oct 2007 23:03:49 GMT

Pashazade is currently pissing herself with laughter at this godawful rubbish from Eversheds (RollOnFriday link but you can follow it through to the Eversheds site itself). I’m undecided whether A&O’s incredibly tedious video is worse, but someone on the board then pointed out this from Ernst and Young. People are paid to produce this shite?

Bah Humbug

Tue, 02 Oct 2007 09:15:48 GMT

I was just pootling around the Barbican website looking to see what’s on, when I came upon a listing for The Singing Ringing Tree. Sadly adults unaccompanied by a child are not allowed to attend, and I don’t think Pashazade counts. Most of the time. Blatant bloody ageism, that’s what it is. Not to mention discrimatory against those of us not blessed with children. I would write to my MP but he’s a notorious arse.

More Nuns In The News

Tue, 02 Oct 2007 08:39:35 GMT

Via Liberal England:

[BBC]: A convent in Italy is being shut down after a fight between its last three remaining nuns.

So badly did relations deteriorate between the sisters of Santa Clara in Bari that the Mother Superior ended up in hospital with scratches to her face. [cont]

Somehow neither these nuns nor the ones convinced their Mother Superior is possessed by the BVM seem to fit with my memories of those I knew as a child. Though come to think of it, in most fights I’d have put my money on the Poor Clare known affectionately (and, frankly, accurately) as The Fat Nun*.

*It was a closed order but she was her convent’s external nun, charged with being its link to the outside world. Which meant she was to be found at almost every social event, enthusiastically collecting gossip.

Marple

Sun, 30 Sep 2007 21:57:57 GMT

Can anyone who has read much Agatha Christie bring themselves to believe that Miss Marple would ever allow the phrase "you were in a relationship" to pass her lips? Honestly, this series is descending to utter drivel.

Books Again

Sun, 30 Sep 2007 21:36:40 GMT

Via Oursin, Legionseagle, and Nhw, one of they "things what I have read" posts. Curious one, in that it's the 106 books currently most tagged as unread on Librarything. I'm a bit sceptical about this, as it reflects the reading experience only of "librarything users who tag things as unread and (presumably) read, to the extent of that part of their libraries they have both entered and tagged". I suspect that adds up to a fairly small sample, possibly of people with similar reading habits, but that's just a guess. (My occasional fits of enthusiasm (plus a Cuecat) have resulted in about 1/8 of my books, chosen fairly randomly as they came off the unorganised bookshelves, being entered (same name as this account if anyone cares) and about ten books in total being tagged at all...)... Bold is read, italic is started but unfinished, struckthrough is couldn't stand and underlined is no intention of reading. I rarely fail to finish books, even if I loathe them, Lord alone knows why...

Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell (149)
Anna Karenina (132)
Crime and punishment (121)
Catch-22 (117)
One hundred years of solitude (115)
Wuthering Heights (110)
The Silmarillion (104)
~~Life of Pi : a novel~~ (94)
The name of the rose (91)
Don Quixote (91)
Moby Dick (86)
Ulysses (84) (I read lots of Joyce at A-level: Ulysses wasn't on the syllabus of course but I caught the bug)
Madame Bovary (83)
The Odyssey (83)
Pride and prejudice (83)
Jane Eyre (80)
A tale of two cities (80)
The brothers Karamazov (80)
Guns, Germs, and Steel: the fates of human societies (79)
War and peace (78)
Vanity fair (74)
The time traveler’s wife The Iliad (73)
Emma (73)
The Blind Assassin (73)
The kite runner (71)
Mrs. Dalloway (70)
Great expectations (70)
American gods (68)
A heartbreaking work of staggering genius (67)
~~Atlas shrugged~~ (67)
Reading Lolita in Tehran : a memoir in books (66)
Memoirs of a Geisha (66)
Middlesex (66)
Quicksilver (66)
Wicked : the life and times of the wicked witch of the West (65)
The Canterbury tales (64)
The historian : a novel (63)
A portrait of the artist as a young man (63)
Love in the time of cholera (62)
Brave new world (61)
The Fountainhead (61)
Foucault’s pendulum (61)
Middlemarch (61)
Frankenstein (59)
The Count of Monte Cristo (59) (so far as I can remember I've only read an abridged version)
Dracula (59)
A clockwork orange (59)
Anansi boys (58)
The once and future king (57)
The grapes of wrath (57)
The Poisonwood Bible : a novel (57)
1984(57)
Angels & demons (56)
The inferno (56) (not finished Purgatorio or Paradiso though)
The satanic verses (55)
Sense and sensibility (55)
The picture of Dorian Gray (55)
Mansfield Park (55)
One flew over the cuckoo’s nest (54)
To the lighthouse (54)
Tess of the D’Urbervilles (54)
Oliver Twist (54)
Gulliver’s travels (53)
Les misérables (53)
The corrections (53)
The amazing adventures of Kavalier and Clay (52)
The curious incident of the dog in the night-time(52)
Dune (51)
The prince (51)
The sound and the fury (51)
Angela’s ashes : a memoir (51)
The god of small things (51)
A people’s history of the United States : 1492-present (51)
Cryptonomicon (50)
Neverwhere (50)
A confederacy of dunces (50)
A short history of nearly everything (50)
Dubliners (50)
The unbearable lightness of being (49)
Beloved (49)
Slaughterhouse-five (49)
The scarlet letter (48)
Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation (48)
~~The mists of Avalon~~ (47)
Oryx and Crake : a novel (47)
Collapse : how societies choose to fail or succeed (47)
Cloud atlas(47)
The confusion (46)
Lolita (46)
Persuasion (46)
Northanger abbey (46)
The catcher in the rye (46)
On the road (46)
The hunchback of Notre Dame (45)
Freakonomics : a rogue economist explores the hidden side of everything (45)
Zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance : an inquiry into values (45)
The Aeneid (45)
Watership Down (44)
Gravity’s rainbow (44)
The Hobbit (44)
In cold blood : a true account of a multiple murder and its consequences (44)
White teeth (44)
Treasure Island (44)
David Copperfield(44)
The three musketeers (44)

ETA: Oops, just realised I misread Angels and Demons as Angels and Insects Wondered why people were being so harsh about an A.S. Byatt novel I quite like...

Found On The Internet...

Thu, 27 Sep 2007 09:48:28 GMT

While impatiently drumming my fingers waiting for a solicitor to turn up to a con that was supposed to start half an hour ago and must finish in half an hour so I can go and catch a train to Swindon for a CMC...

Six Catholic nuns have been excommunicated for heresy after refusing to leave a sect whose founder claims to be possessed by the Virgin Mary, a US diocese has announced.

Reverend Gaston Hebert, the Little Rock, Arkansas diocese administrator, said he notified the nuns of the decision on Tuesday night after they refused to recant the teachings of the Community of the Lady of All Nations, also known as the Army of Mary.

The Vatican has declared all members of the Canadian-based Army of Mary excommunicated.

There has to be at least a short story in this...

Apropos of something mostly but not completely different, I discovered yesterday, via a footnote in a paper about the text of the bible, that there are still Samaritans. 701 of them to be precise, in four families. Half of them live in a town in Israel and the other half on Mount Gezirim in the West Bank (they used to live in Nablus but moved up the mountain at the start of the first Intifada, their attitude to Israeli-Palestinian conflict being to keep their heads down, though they have passports from both the PA and Israel, and Jordan too). It seems to be a matter of some debate in Israel whether they should be counted as just another odd little sub-group of Jews, like the Falashas for instance, or as Something Else. They are, unsurprisingly, rather inbred, so all their marriages have to be approved by a genetic consultant, though they have recently decided to allow marriage out. I dislike citing wikipedia but there isn't a great deal else, beyond the links cited there.

Sorry, I'm just fascinated by tiny remnants of cultures and peoples like this, and I had no idea at all that this one still existed.