What ho, old chap!

P.G. Wodehouse, creator of many a memorable character (among them Hildebrand Spencer Poyns de Burgh John Hanneyside Coombe-Crombie, 12th Earl of Dreever, and of course the immortal Bertie Wooster), remains enduringly popular in India.

England has been cool to him ever since he agreed to make several "non-political" broadcasts on German radio. The Germans had captured him during their advance through Belgium and France in 1940, finding him still bunging about in his seaside villa at Le Touquet. He was held captive for about a year, and upon his release in June 1941, took up residence at the Hotel Adlon in Berlin.

After the war, George Orwell defended "the wretched Wodehouse" and his work with typical perspicacity:

In the desperate circumstances of the time, it was excusable to be angry at what Wodehouse did, but to go on denouncing him three or four years later -- and more, to let an impression remain that he acted with conscious treachery -- is not excusable. Few things in this war have been more morally disgusting than the present hunt after traitors and Quislings. At best it is largely the punishment of the guilty by the guilty. In France, all kinds of petty rats -- police officials, penny-a-lining journalists, women who have slept with German soldiers -- are hunted down while almost without exception the big rats escape. In England the fiercest tirades against Quislings are uttered by Conservatives who were practising appeasement in 1938 and Communists who were advocating it in 1940. I have striven to show how the wretched Wodehouse -- just because success and expatriation had allowed him to remain mentally in the Edwardian age -- became the corpus vile in a propaganda experiment, and I suggest that it is now time to regard the incident as closed. If Ezra Pound is caught and shot by the American authorities, it will have the effect of establishing his reputation as a poet for hundreds of years; and even in the case of Wodehouse, if we drive him to retire to the United States and renounce his British citizenship, we shall end by being horribly ashamed of ourselves. Meanwhile, if we really want to punish the people who weakened national morale at critical moments, there are other culprits who are nearer home and better worth chasing.

May the Force of Love be with you.

Of the Star Wars valentines, this is probably my favorite:


This one, though, is a close second:



(Thanks, Something Awful via BoingBoing.)

I married a supermodal.

Voltaire wrote, "Le mieux est l'ennemi du bien," which is to say that if you're waiting to marry the perfect spouse, you may be ruining your chances to marry a reasonably satisfactory person instead. Further musings here. My solution was to meet the perfect person as soon as possible.

Get a human. Now.

Most valuable page on the whole internet? Quite possibly.

(Thanks, Lagniappe.)

Lord, he was born a ramblin' man.

The hobo traveler is a little chary with personal details, but his sprawling web site is a treat.

Mexico (Sim) City

Housing developments in Mexico City. Photographs taken by a helicopter pilot. He has other good ones, too.

Thanks, BLDGBLOG.

OMG u noob!

This is one of the funniest things I have ever read on the internets. The only thing missing is a "w00t!" or two.

If World War Two had been an online Real Time Strategy game, the chat room traffic would have gone something like this . . .

Unrar?

I started reading this page with some interest, as it tells you how to make your DVD-ROM drive region-free, meaning that it can play DVDs from not only Region 1 (the U.S. and Canada), but also Region 2 (Europe and I guess the rest of the world). Anyway, I stopped when I came across this sentence: "Unrar the forceaspi archive, then run instaspi.bat."

Uh, "unrar"? Who wrote these instructions, Chewbacca?

Amazin' statistic of the day.

In the middle of a compelling article by Malcolm Gladwell on racial profiling and the uses of generalizing, uh, more generally, he drops the following stunning statistic:

One of the puzzling things about New York City is that, after the enormous and well-publicized reductions in crime in the mid-nineteen-nineties, the crime rate has continued to fall. In the past two years, for instance, murder in New York has declined by almost ten per cent, rape by twelve per cent, and burglary by more than eighteen per cent. Just in the last year, auto theft went down 11.8 per cent. On a list of two hundred and forty cities in the United States with a population of a hundred thousand or more, New York City now ranks two hundred-and-twenty-second in crime, down near the bottom with Fontana, California, and Port St. Lucie, Florida.

Wow.

Stepwise live-blogs the SOTU from the POTUS.

9:00 p.m. POTUS walks into the House of Representatives, to great cheering and applause. I have this on good authority that this happened, based on the newspaper accounts that I've read. Um, actually I missed seeing this myself. OK, OK, in fact my television was turned off at the moment. Well, Gilmore Girls had just ended so I figured, what was the point, really?

9:35 p.m. "America is addicted to oil." I totally agree. But regardless of your position on this important issue, I think we can all agree - because you know it, I know it, and the American people know it - that what the president really meant to say was: "America, you might as well face it, you're addicted to love [noise of bullet ricocheting off metal]." First allusion to a Robert Palmer song in a State of the Union? Quite possibly so, but my crack research department is going to have to examine Bill Clinton's speeches before I reach any final conclusions.

I will say this, though: If the president is going to start borrowing from Robert Palmer, then may I suggest starting with the most obvious move: surrounding himself with half-a-dozen or so icy, statuesque beauties. Not doing anything, to be sure - just standing there. Possible pretending to play musical instruments. Now, personally, I never found the women in Robert Palmer videos that attractive - just scary - but I'm sure that this would help a great deal to cure the languishing TV ratings for State of the Union addresses.

9:40 p.m. At this point of the speech that I did not watch, I was already in bed. To be precise, I was reading The Perfectionist, which tells the story of Bernard Loiseau, celebrated chef of La Cote d'Or, a restaurant with three Michelin stars in the small town of Saulieu, in Bourgogne. I'm practically at the end, and I don't expect that anything the author says is going to change my mind, so here's a brief review.

The author, Rudolph Chelminski, who apparently is a knowledgable and widely read food critic/writer (which I have no reason to doubt), violated three basic rules of writing. First, give yourself time to write a crappy first draft. Actually, he wrote a pretty decent first draft. Unfortunately, it appears that he didn't spend any time revising it, which was enough to make it into a lousy last draft. Or where was his editor? Whatever. Put simply, this book is a large loose baggy monster. Second, never use two words where one will do. A sin more likely to be committed when breaking Rule the First. Third, avoid breeziness. A sin compounded when breaking Rules the First and the Second.

Now, there was plenty that I liked about this book. I learned a lot about French gastronomy and changing fashions is haute cuisine from the 1940s to the present. And the author had a real affection for Loiseau, based on years of long acquaintance. That was sweet. Unfortunately, that good stuff was wrapped in a lot of wasted tasteless verbiage, much the literary equivalent of stuffing a delectable morsel of foie gras inside a Super Bean Burrito from Taco Bell.

1:35 p.m., the following day, when I am in fact writing this post. Hmm. It has just occurred to me that I can't even pretend to be live-blogging, considering that it's almost a full day after the speech. Well, whatever. Live-blogging is so 2005. I'm past that. I'm post-live-blogging. Post-live-blogging: catch the past as it happens - tomorrow!