Good Ole BBC

Kudos to Jon Kelly of the BBC for writing the essay I have always wanted to craft to issue to any of my fellow Britons planning to visit the US for the first time:

End of the road

I think it takes a transient outsider to get the message across: whenever I try I think I sound too defensive. Nice work, Jon.

It Tells a Pilot if He Can Fit Through a Gap

From the BBC: RAF pilot wins moustache battle
"An RAF fighter pilot has won his battle with the United States Air Force over the size of his handlebar moustache.

Flight Lieutenant Chris Ball, who is on an exchange posting with the USAF in Afghanistan was told to trim his distinctive moustache.

The pilot, who is usually based at RAF Lossiemouth, turned to the Queen's Regulations and found the moustache's width did not breach RAF guidelines...."

Quite right. Someone had to stand firm in the face of USAF inflexibility or else the Australian exchange pilots would no longer be allowed to fly drunk and the Dutch exchange pilots would have had to remove their nipple rings.

All this handlelarbra lead inexorably to this bunch. Enjoy.

Oh Joy Unbounded!

Newsnight has arrived on BBC America!
For those who are unaware how enjoyably, face-punchingly, intellectually-elitist sneer-wearing* a programme this is, please enjoy a little amuse bouche:



(*Which is a good thing in my mind, which is why I'm a bit of a friendless hermit)

Hooray for the Beeb!

My affection towards BBC America ebbs and flows dependent on what recycled tripe they have managed to throw up on the telly for expats and septics to gurn at. When they are on top form and running only slightly stale episodes of Little Britain or Dr. Who I'm quite pleased with them. When it is nothing but My Family marathons and pretend documentaries about the royals then I am less impressed.

As the channel has aged the programmers seem to have settled on more of the latter than the former, so I only keep it around for the news- 3 hours of honest-to-goodness, full-on BBC World sat feed in the morning, and half an hour of less useful bid'ness at 7 eastern.

Until last week, that is. The morning stuff is still there but the 7pm broadcast has been replaced by possibly the most fantastic news broadcast I have ever seen. The new BBC America news at 7 is an hour long, and combines the good old fashioned BBC reportage with great chunks of Newsnight style inquisition. Frankly, I love it and consider it worth the price of cable alone. It's like a nightly hour of The Economist.

Hymn of praise over. I'm sure it won't last and will end up being replaced by The Green, Green Grass- quite possibly the worst thing I have ever had the misfortune to be forced to sit through on a visit to the grandparents, ever.

Feeling a Little Chippy

A sign from Waldo County as seen this weekend, courtesy of Rock-around-the-clock-land's own Canada Dry groove armada Mike:


Nothing to add, really.

Thousands Are Sailing

My dear friend Mondale and his family (pictured above) are departing the United States for a new life in the wilds of eastern England tomorrow. It will be a harrowing, arduous 7 hour flight (with movie and meals) followed by a bit of a drive at the other end, but the price of a life of freedom, smaller houses, and access to Subbuteo is worth every metaphorical penny.

The life of a reimmigrant to the UK is hard- one runs the risk of being labelled an asylum seeker, of being firebombed from one's home, and of being hopelessly behind in the plot of Eastenders- but I know Mondale et al will thrive. As the man himself says,

"Tomorrow we fly to England. Forever."

I expect to see them back on vacation, July 2008, forever being a relative term.

Fare thee well, old chum!

Questions

Amidst all the hoopla on both sides of the Atlantic over the attack by the Islamic Non-Sequitur League* on Glasgow Airport I want to ask a two-parter. After every incident or thwarted incident the level of airport security in the United States is raised. Does this mean:

a) That the terrorist types are fiendishly clever and are constantly out-thinking our best security minds? On Saturday afternoon was a TSA or FBI person thinking "A car that explodes- a car bomb, if you will; that's so out of left field we never would have anticipated that in a million gazillion years. Now we know about that, lets raise the security level"?

Or:

b) That these tightened security measures are a pointless attempt to mollify the great travelling herd of egotistical idiots who won't go near a 25 year-old Boeing 737 crewed by surly failed models and crop-duster rejects in case Osama bin Laden has personally poisoned the complimentary nuts unless some cro-magnon git with a plastic sheriff-type badge confiscates their shampoo?

"We get what we deserve" is a way better battle cry for this Globule War on Turr than "They hate us for our freedoms" or "you are either with us or against us". I wish they'd set up an airline and a security check-in for those of us prepared to weigh the risk and travel the old way anyway.


(*"Knight Salman Rushdie, will ya? Well we'll try to blow up the Ryan Air desk at Glasgow Prestwick in retaliation. Allah Admiral Akbar!")

Gawd Bless 'Er

Elizabeth the Second, by the Grace of God, of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland and of Her other Realms and Territories Queen, Head of the Commonwealth, Defender of the Faith photographed arriving at Dulles Airport.
Her Majestink the Quink, good old Brenda the 2, is visiting Virginia in celebration of the 400th anniversary of the arrival of the English at Jamestown. As we all know, that hardy band of settlers set the tone for all future British overseas excursions by getting drunk a lot, refusing to work, and fighting with the locals. So it is quite appropriate that Mrs. Queen is in the States, even if the people she meets either think she looked younger and prettier in her recent film or are sad that she didn't bring that nice deceased Princess Lady Di with her.

While the official reason for the visit is the recognition of the long historical ties between Great Britain and the United States, there are some who feel the Queen is hedging her bets should the Scottish elections turn in favour of the SNP. After all, the monarchy is probably regarded more fondly along the Banks of the James River than it is along the banks of the Tay.And Virginia does describe itself as a commonwealth (see Her Maj's title).

The one potential fly in the ointment is the presence of her husband and consort Phil the Greek, Duke of Edinburgh. Given his reputation as a well-known firearms enthusiast and anti-Asian bigot, officials from the Royal Household are praying that nobody brings up the Virginia Tech killings to him for comment.

Broken Hearts in Madrid, Broken Metatarsal by Late July

Posh and Becks. Or not.
David Beckham is due to join up with his LA Galaxy teammates at the end of June at the conclusion of his contract with Real Madrid. $10 says he will be out injured within a month of playing his first game in the States, clobbered by some long-in-the-tooth South American or cynically hacked by some ex-collegiate thug who couldn't crack the reserves at Accrington Stanley. Any takers?

Aliens Attack

A typical Briton preparing to unleash himself on the flower of American womanhood.
There were a couple of related stories on the BBC website late last week that had a fair amount of resonance for me. First up was actor, wit, and Mondale's role model* Stephen Fry, who caused a stir by suggesting that the continued success of British actors in Hollywood had less to do with their stage chops and more to do with their elongated vowels:

Brit actors 'judged on accents'

And then the BBC's own pontificators had a bit of a ramble over the subject of British accents in America in general:

Gee, I just love your accent

As my accent and myself having lived in the US for 12 years I'm somewhat of an expert on this phenomenon. I can't speak for my female counterparts, but I've found as a chap that a little drop of one's Gordon's gin accent often will smooth the path in professional or personal encounters. Much of what is said in the two BBC articles is undeniably yet superficially true, but let me offer my fellow British men a word of caution. Accent adoration has a half-life formula, which I'll try to lay out below:

Accent adorability = Degree of resemblance to Hugh Grant + hair floopiness + general bashful loveliness / amount of time someone actually spends with you after realizing that you are as obsessed with sport as much as American men + potency of your farts + first time you are observed out of your nut on Theakston's Old Peculier

Its a slightly different formula for the workplace, but not much.


(*Except for the celibate homosexuality)

A Letter to National Public Radio

I don't know if they will read it on air or not, but I had to write it or my blood pressure would have gone off the charts:

To the Editor;

I am surprised, to say the least, that you chose to follow a report on the inquest into the friendly fire death of British Lance Corporal-of-Horse Matty Hull with a general exculpatory commentary by former US Navy pilot Ken Harbaugh on the fog of war as seen from the cockpit.

Harbaugh began his remarks by disclaiming any deep knowledge of the incident in question and then went on to offer a general "accidents do happen" explanation for the tragedies of airborne fracticide, implicity excusing the A-10 pilots who killed Hull in direct contradiction to the extensively argued conclusions of the British coroner.

Without a doubt, confusion in battle does arise, and it is not always easy to distinguish ground targets from a fast moving jet platform. However, unlike the senarios described by Harbaugh, the pilots who killed Hull were not under ground fire and were not operating at the extremes of their endurance (they circled the British convoy for many, many minutes before attacking). They did however decide to attack their allies despite instructions from their ground controller to check with him before engaging any targets and after amazingly misidentifying the large orange panels identifying an ally as rocket launchers.

The cockpit video, easily tracked down via a few seconds of web searching, makes all of this apparent and for the conspiracy-minded offers ample reasons for why the US military initially refused to release it and why the British military refused to acknowledge it existed. While it is obvious that the A-10 pilots did not maliciously attack an ally, they were at the very least reckless, and this fact needs to be acknowledged publicly. The public radio audience is hardly well served by "yes, but" pieces by commentators seeking to lessen the impact of the actions of their former compatriots.

Death by friendly fire is hardly a new phenomenon. No less a light than General Patton once threatened to turn his guns on the 8th Air Force unless they stopped mistakenly attacking his positions. However, in this time of official reasurances about the accuracy of our smart weapons and the professionalism of our armed forces, NPR should perhaps be asking questions about why we still kill our own troops and those of our allies with such depressing frequency rather than offering airtime for those inclined to blame anything and anyone but those who actually pull the trigger.

The cockpit video:


The story:
Friendly Fire Killing 'Unlawful'

The pilots who did this were promoted.

Happy/Sad

I'm sad that the members of The Jam are so short on cash that they are allowing Cadillac to use Start to advertise ugly repub-mobiles driven by self-satisfied tosspots, and that they let them use the song without lyrics apart from the chorus.

I'm happy that my father-in-law, who came to visit Friday, gave me a great line for future use. We were discussing both the iminent arrival of David Beckham and the post-Downing Street US lecture circuit possibilities for Tony Blair. I mentioned how funny it would be if they teamed up to do a speech together, at which point father-in-law observed that the poster tagline should read "One has balls, one doesn't".

That is all.

Blockbuster

From a show called Monkey Dust, well known to hipster members of the "British Reeesch" but alas unlikely to penetrate these shores, I offer up an imagining of a film adaptation of "The Diary of Anne Frank" in the same vein as Hollywood blockbusters like The Patriot, Braveheart, U-571, and Michael Collins:



Also, Rick of Arguably So has his toboggan championship photos up...

Grand Atlanticism

Following last night's announcement by Mr. Bush of the "surge" in US troop numbers in Iraq, my father (who works for Britain's EmOhDee) sent along the following that had been doing the rounds of Whitehall:

The Pentagon announced TODAY the formation of a new 500-man elite fighting unit called the United States Redneck Special Forces (USRSF)

These mostly Southern boys will be dropped off into Iraq and will be given only the following facts about terrorists :

1. Open Season starts today.

2. There is no limit.

3. They taste just like chicken.

4. They don't like beer, pickups, country music, or Jesus.

5. They are directly responsible for the death of Johnny Cash.

The Pentagon expects the problem in Iraq to be over by Friday.



To which I replied:

One assumes that the British will be forced to thumb a lift in the bed of their pick-up trucks due to lack of sufficient independent transport. I understand the yet another procurement mistake at the emohdee saw Challenger commanders in the RTR handed fishing waistcoats, as someone had mistakenly ordered "mullet-proof vests".

I also found this excellent photo of a Coldstream Guards officer going undercover in civvies in Basra, armed with the latest British LSW*:



What a frigging war, eh? It's the bland leading the Blair, and both are apparently complete arseheads who haven't even read a single war comic between them. An eleven year old with an active imagination would have come up with a better strategy.

(*Light support weapon)

Not Surprised, Just Disappointed

After leaving work early today with a strained back I was beavering away on the internet when I stumbled across the comments thread on a well considered post about the probable official/press lackey US reaction to comments made by State Department official Alberto Fernandez on Al Jazeera this past weekend. One of the first unofficial defenders of the Bushites was linked to in the post, a blog that featured this quote on it's masthead from the BBC's Washington correspondent Justin Webb:

"America is often portrayed as an ignorant, unsophisticated sort of place, full of bible bashers and ruled to a dangerous extent by trashy television, superstition and religious bigotry, a place lacking in respect for evidence based knowledge. I know that is how it is portrayed because I have done my bit to paint that picture, and that picture is in many respects a true one."

Webb's quote comes from the transcript of a broadcast he made for BBC radio at the time of the Terri Schaivo case (the full transcript is here). Setting aside the fact that Webb was offering a mea culpa and explaining that the United States isn't always as simple as he tries to portray and is therefore being taken out of context, it was interesting to note that one of the commenters on the Fernandez post saw the Webb quote on the offending Bushie's blog and wrote:

"Justin Webb got the US right, methinks."

Sigh. There they go again.

Regular visitors here will know that I love my BBC. I have however long been pained by Justin Webb's reporting, not because it doesn't reflect aspects of the truth (there are religious nuts and all manner of kooks here in the States after all- American TV thrives on pointing out how mad many of its potential viewers are) but because he only covers a tiny portion of this country and presents it as the blanket truth. I'm a lefty who dispairs of religion and much of US foreign policy and it still drives me up the wall. I suppose it must be the amateurish smuggness of it all; the way Webb prefers to feed prejudices than tell an interesting and nuanced story without tidy villains dotted throughout.

But Webb isn't the cause; just a symptom. In what might be the longest example in history of having a chip on one's shoulder (unless the Greeks are still angry at the residents of Rome for eclipsing their moment of power) there is a sizable- and relatively educated yet intellectually lazy- segement of British society that revels in asserting its anti-American attitude before all the facts of a story are in. Encompassing everything from fast food (they don't seem to know that Burger King was owned by a British company until 2002) to religious fervour (ignoring the fact that the world's oldest organisation for evangelicals is the British Evangelical Alliance: keeping going for 160 years in an avowedly secular culture is quite impressive) all aspects of low brow culture are extrapolated to blanket this massive and hugely diverse country under a calumny of epic proportions.

It's obvious that I'm not going to change their minds. Like the American creationists they so abhor, these British happy generalisers prefer to think within their self-imposed intellectual strictures. They will never be comfortable admitting that their view of the United States is as infantile and useless a model as the one put about by the Daily Mail on asylum seekers. Therefore I have decided that if I can't beat them, I can at least play their game, and will attempt to use their framework for describing Great Britain:

London: 22nd October, 2006:
One of the first things that will strike a visitor to these shores is the overwhelming presence of the police. The main streets of not just the major population centers but even the smallest village are swarmed with police vans come 11pm (when the majority of the country's pubs shut) in order to deal with the vast armies of drunks spilling from their doors looking for a fight. Ordinary citizens are afraid to walk the streets after dark, lest they be targeted by roaming bands of boozers. Although Britain's booze culture is not the only cause for the deserted streets: a generalized fear of the young and vicious continues even when the bars are closed or the potential assailants are under age.

Yet despite the heavy presence of the law nowhere in Britain do people feel safe, as perverts and hoodlums lurk in every dark corner. Not even schools are free from the menace of stranger danger. And forget about having a pleasant commute; between the phantom train defecators and the happy slapping the chances of you arriving at work unmolested appear slim. Such is the danger Britain's citizens present to each other that wearing a hooded sweatshirt, such a common and unremarkable garment here in the United States, is regarded as such a threat to civil society that even Prime Minister Tony Blair thinks they should be banned in public.

But lest you get the impression that you would be immediately knifed upon arriving at Heathrow airport, I'd like to offer a few grains of reassurance. You are far more likely to be killed by a home grown muslim terrorist than by a hoodie wearing drunken happy slapper covered in poo. The feral youngsters who make Britain such a living hell are too fat to chase you, and in the unfortunate event that you do find yourself cornered by a terrorist, drunk, or young tearaway don't be afraid should they ask where you are from. Even with the endemic anti-Americanism rife in British society, many Britons are so thick that if you told them Minneapolis was just up the road from Windsor Castle they would have to take your word for it as they would lack the means to find out for themselves.

Now could you ask for a more fair and sourced picture of the United Kingdom?