The View from the Spaghetti Factory

UK tourists stage mutiny over Asian passengers

Even after all the talk of ID cards, CIA “rendition” flights, Guantánamo and the like, this is one of the most frightening domestic news stories I’ve heard in a long time. When even the Daily Mail reports the story without a hint of anti-Muslim spin, you know something is very wrong. It’s one thing for a government to create policies that marginalise and oppress minority groups, but when members of the general public conspire, of their own volition, to act upon this ridiculous paranoia… well, we’re one step closer to Kristallnacht.

From the Independent’s report…

*Thought* to be Arabic. It might have been Turkish. It might have been Maltese. It might have been Farsi, Urdu or Sylheti. To particularly untrained ears (which seems likely in this case, given the brains involved) even Hebrew could potentially be mistaken for Arabic. Mr British Bulldog Bigot is not a discerning customer, as Jyoti Mishra points out…

Or, for that matter, any number of peoples who might have dark skin and black beards… Brazilian, perhaps?

[EDIT: Another good response from Chris at qwghlm]

I don’t know whether it’s a sign of new-found confidence after discovering his inner cowboy, but John Prescott seems to be talking a lot of sense today.

Or is it the monkey/typewriter thing? Record his random burblings for long enough and there’s a statistical certainty that he’ll eventually say “Look Tony, everyone in the cabinet thinks your special friend George is a complete moron”.

I’d always seen Prescott as northern club comedian, trapped in the body of a fake politician. I was convinced that it was only a matter of time before we’d see him at a press conference, looking oddly confused before blurting out: “Now, my mother-in-law… she’s SO FAT”. But with lines like this, maybe he’s actually a mid-80s alternative comedian trapped in the body of a fake politician. “I tell you, my live-in partner’s mother is SO THIN, because she’s a cruelly exploited member of Thatcher’s disenfranchised working class”…

More sensible stuff from Henry Porter in yesterday’s Observer…

The land of the free - but free speech is still a rare commodity

“… we should think of free speech as an article of faith, as one of the ways that we define our civilisation against the forces that were to be unleashed on us this week, as well as the influences that stifle criticism of Israel and so enable the disgraceful actions in south Lebanon.”

The most recent task over at the Guitar Collective involved composing a piece around a set melody. Now, while it would have been easy to make assumptions about the most appropriate context for this melody (it was written by our Argentinian member, Leandro) I tried to clear my head of any stylistic preconceptions. As it turned out, I started thinking there was something jazzy about it and wrote a chord progression to work in a slow ballad setting, but then started to hear something Balkan/Klezmer about it. Refusing to be frozen by indecision for once in my life, I decided to do both versions and, er… glue them together. ;-)

Dreams of the Old Country (3.3MB mp3)