Airbus as work of art...

Is it poetry, or romance? I love this sort of connection between our hearts and our tools.

"I reached up and tentatively curled my fingers over the metal. "Now pull down," he said.

The A380 wing is one of the mightiest structures ever created—9,100 square feet of ribs, spars, and skin able to thrust itself out 147 feet into nothingness and give lift to its half of 1.235 million pounds. I pulled, and this great formation bowed to my eye level, supple as a living thing.

With the whole wing flexing at my light grasp, all the poetic, fanciful wonder of living in 2005 came back to me. I'd outdone Keats and Shelley in matters of the sublime. It touched them. I touched it. "

Oikophobia is your new word for the day...

Tears of the white man is rather unwieldy, so Mr. Scruton's new creation is welcome.

" National history is taught as a tale of shame and degradation. The art, literature and religion of our nation have been more or less excised from the curriculum, and folkways, local traditions and national ceremonies are routinely rubbished.
This repudiation of the national idea is the result of a peculiar frame of mind that has arisen throughout the Western world since the Second World War, and which is particularly prevalent among the intellectual and political elites. No adequate word exists for this attitude, though its symptoms are instantly recognized: namely, the disposition, in any conflict, to side with ‘them’ against ‘us’, and the felt need to denigrate the customs, culture and institutions that are identifiably ‘ours’. I call the attitude oikophobia – the aversion to home – by way of emphasizing its deep relation to xenophobia, of which it is the mirror image. Oikophobia is a stage through which the adolescent mind normally passes. But it is a stage in which intellectuals tend to become arrested."

"And one of the weapons that the élite has used, in order to ensure that it is never troubled by the truths that it denies, is to accuse those who wish to discuss the problem of ‘racism and xenophobia’. People of my generation have been brought up in fear of this charge, just as the people of Salem were brought up in the fear of being denounced as witches. "

" "All whites are racist, whether or not knowingly’. There you have it, endorsed by a prestigious academic and professional body: all whites are racist, whether or not knowingly.That, to my mind, is a racist remark of the lowest kind, one that attributes to people of a certain skin-colour an enormous moral fault, and one which they can do nothing to overcome, since they possess it unknowingly. "

Now THIS is a case report...

My new colleague is the BEST. I asked how a case went, and I got this report.

Wee Willie Something
Went for a ride.
As it turned out,he
should have stayed inside.

It was Wee Willie's cousin
who led him astray,
He said, " I will steal me
a nice car today."

And wouldn't you know it
there sat the Crown Vic,
keys in it, still running,
just ripe to be picked.

So in it they jumped
and took off down the screet.
If the man hadn't seen them
it would have been sweet.

Then Wee Willie's cousin
let Wee Willie out.
And there stood the owner,
who said with a shout,

"Who is that sitting
behind my Vic's wheel?"
But loyal Wee Willie
wouldn't dare squeal.

That's how Willie wound up
under arrest.
He'd have been better off
If he had just confessed.

When the police came to get him
they sure didn't smile.
Wee Willie's seventeen,
a mere juvenile.

Will dealt with his charge
in the very worst way.
He said,
"I just won't go to court today!"

Wee Willie's eighteen now-
when they see him around
the cops will arrest him
and take him DOWNTOWN.

With Wee Willie's luck
they will add to the docket
a charge for the drugs
that he'll have in his pocket.

Watch out, Judge Kosinski!

Where is God?

I know strong faith should prevent asking the question, but mine is weak and I struggle with reason. This is not for the faint of heart.

Click here to see the Fusco Chernobyl slide show.