(no subject)

Happy birthday, valborg and vito_excalibur!

Goodness knows these daily LJ questions are often bogglesome

But, really:

How do you celebrate Independence Day in your country?

UM.

I will do the person who posed this the favour of supposing that they mean 'your country's independence day' rather than 4th of July in particular (because, honestly, most other countries do not take to dancing in the streets and letting off fireworks to commemorate USA throwing off the tyrannical yoke of Mad King George).

Even so.

Being a citizen of the nation from which a large number of countries now celebrate their independence (right on!);

And recognising that there are quite a number of nations that never needed to gain their independence from foreign over-rule in the first place*;

Is this not a terribly naive question?

*And in a not insignificant number of cases at least among the nations of Europe, were the ones independence was being gained from.

A morselette of Monday linkspam

Errrr: wrong way round there, surely? Strauss-Kahn attempted rape case investigators examine claims: a law professor opines

[T]he number of lies she had told prosecutors would make it hard to convince the jury that she is a credible witness.... My hunch is that if he wasn't such a high-profile figure, these charges would have been dropped already."

Um: if he wasn't such a high-profile figure, would there have been anything like such delving into the background of the woman to find evidence to contest her veracity?

I don't even: Italian police break up bear-meat banquet laid on by Berlusconi allies. Meal was a protest against reintroduction of bears to Dolomites, says Northern League.

The end of zero risk in childhood? I think it could be emphasised more strongly that a lot of the media wowsing about Health and Safety run mad are constantly being nailed by the actual Health and Safety Executive as myth.

As the Old Vic takes on Shakespeare's Richard could there not be a flicker of the thoughtful, intelligent man he really was?. Well, no, not really. However admirable the actual Richard III was, I don't think the play could sustain that reading, srsly.

From today's obits:

A clear warning about 'never apologise, never explain':

[H]e had suffered a long- running legal action over his 1970 novel A Domestic Animal, about unreciprocated homosexual love, which, although it never reached court, was to land him with substantial costs. King was living in Brighton where a neighbour, the former Labour MP Tom Skeffington-Lodge, read a pre-publication copy of the novel and took exception to a politician that King included. King called her Dame Winifred Harcourt, but Skeffington-Lodge considered that King had created a thinly disguised portrait of him. King included a scene lifted directly from Skeffington-Lodge's life and thought that by changing the character into a woman he was legally safe.

The streak of naivety that marked King's career surfaced when he wrote an apology to Skeffington-Lodge, who had sought an opinion from Lord Hailsham, then a practising barrister. With this admission, King was advised to settle the case out of court and the novel was withdrawn days before it was due to be published.

He should have taken a leaf out of Howard Spring's famous disclaimer 'There is no such city as Manchester'.

These boots were made for walking: I have previously posted apropos of the Clark family of Street, Somerset, famous for sandals and social activism. Today there is obituary of Great-grandson of the founder of Clarks, [who] created the bestselling desert boot in 1947. Okay, I am sure his 'his wardrobe of classic boots' was purely a matter of professional interest (no, sorry, there is a bit of a snigger going on at the back of the class here).