Technology, Books and Other Neat Stuff

We're currently staying in a friend's clifftop house on San Juan Island, in the narrow gap between Canada and the USA. I'm on US soil, but my phone signal is Canadian, and at night I can see the lights of Victoria on Vancouver Island over across the Haro Strait.

It's here that I've learnt about what must have been the longest running, and possibly least known, conflict between British and American forces. Starting in 1859, with the shooting of an interloping pig and a bill for compensation, the border dispute that became known as The Pig War lasted twelve years. Over that period the island was split in two, with American forces on the south tip, and British on the north. During that time very few shots were fired (and most of those were on joint hunting trips), both armies held weekly dances attended by both sides, and the only lives lost were drunken swimmers (after the dances).

The war was finally ended when a third party arbitration resolved the border dispute. The British packed up and went home, and the Americans got the islands with a border that ran up the middle of the strait I'm looking across.

As far as I can tell the only people left discomfited by the result were the Canadians who felt the British should have been a little more martial about things and a dead pig. The British and American forces seemed quite happy to both sit out rather nasty wars that were happening elsewhere in what is one of the most beautiful places on the planet.

A most civilised conflict. If only more where held that way.

I'm intrigued as to what version of British history they teach at Eton, if David Cameron feels that multiculturalism has failed. In which case, he'd get a quick lesson in the true nature of English culture from that muscular liberal Billy Bragg and his Blokes with their song "England, Half English"

So I did a quick search for the lyrics and a video.

(Oddly those lyrics and the video are missing a verse, "Gilbert and George are taking the piss. What's more English than a picture of me bum?")

England, Half English

My mother was half English and I’m half English too
I’m a great big bundle of culture tied up in the red white and blue
I’m a fine example of your Essex man
And I’m well familiar with the Hindustan
Cos my neighbours are half English and I’m half English too

My breakfast was half English and so am I you know
I had a plate of Marmite soldiers washed down with a cappuccino
And I have a veggie curry about once a week
The next day I fry it up as bubble and squeak
Cos my appetites half English and I’m half English too

Dance with me to this very English melody
From morris dancing to Morrissey,
all that stuff came from across the sea

Britannia, she’s half English, she speaks Latin at home
St George was born in the Lebanon, how he got here I don’t know
And those three lions on your shirt,
They never sprang from England’s dirt
Them lions are half English and I’m half English too

Le-li Umma le-li-ya, le-li Umma le-li-ya,
Le-li Umma le-li-ya, bledi g’desh akh! le-li-ya

Oh my country, what a beautiful country you are

Here's the official video:


Billy Bragg - England, Half English

Here he is, singing the song at an anti-racism event in Leicester, a rather delightfully folky live version of the song, mashing it up with (I think) John Barleycorn.



A little bit of politics. My name's Simon Bisson, goodnight.

A comment in another place notes that the Gilbert and George line is from "Take Down The Union Jack". I plead guilty, while noting that it's another song about the same theme from the same album.

UTC 20:17:40 + 40Y "Tranquillity Base here. The Eagle has landed"

A few years back I touched the moon.

Or at least a piece that had been brought back by one of the Apollo missions. It was smoothed by all the fingers that touched it over the last few decades. Everyone who touched it has a few molecules of the moon.



The same day I stood under the rockets of a Saturn V. Nothing quite prepares you for the size of the rockets that lofted the Apollo ships - and how little of it actually reached orbit.



KSC, Florida
July 2000

I get a lot of press releases in my email. And by "a lot", I mean "A LOT".

That's not a bad thing. I'm a journalist, and they're one of the tools of my trade. If I didn't get them I wouldn't get some of the ideas I use for stories and features.

However (and it's a big HOWEVER), sometimes I get press releases that are, well, annoying and wrong. They're usually trying to shoehorn something completely unrelated into an anniversary of sorts, and they're certainly trying.

Today is one of those anniversaries. It's the day that CERN has chosen to celebrate 20 years since Tim Berners-Lee persuaded his managers to give him the time and funding he needed to explore some little hypertext ideas he'd had. It's an important day for all of us who read and write on the web, as it's the foundation of everything we do.

It's a pity then that I've been receiving a string of press releases proclaiming that today is "The 20^th Birthday Of The Internet". Now that's one thing I'm pretty sure it isn't. I sent my first email message in 1984, and my first USENET message in 1987, and I'm a relative newcomer to the nets.

If we're going to have a birthday for the Internet, it's got to be October 1^st 1969, when the first two routers were finally in place, one at UCLA and the other at Stanford. This year is not the Internet's 20^th birthday, it is its 40^th.

So, as an educational tool, here are some historical photographs:

This is a BBN Interface Message Processor. It was one of the first routers, that hooked up the first few sites on the ARPANET, the predecessor to today's Internet.



It is substantially older than this NeXT Cube, which was Tim Berners-Lee's machine at CERN. It's the machine that ran the first web server, which itself was built on protocols that evolved from those used by the IMP.



Still, Happy Birthday Web!

A 1927 navigation device. Scroll the map through the viewer to guide you on any of 20 or so pre-set routes.

Yes, I know, it's a link to the Daily Mail. And from a Guardianista like me, too. Sorry...

Cat on the Colosseum



Cat in the Forum

It's about time to cross the streams, and merge three recurring interests across my friends list: ancient history, travel and cats. So here are a couple of old photos that I recently added to Flickr, of some of Rome's famous feral cats lazing about on some of Rome's most famous ruins...

Rome, Italy
September 2000

Here's a link to a scan of Bryan Talbot's short history of the British comic, originally published in the Guardian's Guide supplement.

Of course, if you want a longer history of the form (with a lot more thrown in besides), you couldn't do much worse than read Bryan's Alice In Sunderland...

Yes, there is still a Veronica^*, Santa Claus^**...

...which means there are still people using Gopher! There also appear to be a bunch of Jughead servers out there, too.

Now, I wonder what happened to WAIS?

^*I suspect the link will only work in Mozilla browsers, as they're pretty much the only ones that still support the gopher:// protocol.

^**And yes, I know the original quote was “Yes Virginia, There is a Santa Claus”...

According to this (and other) news articles it appears that Sky is looking at buying Easynet, who bought UK Online, the national ISP I helped start in an old brewery in Shepton Mallet.

The chain goes on.

I wonder if the ducks are still there...