This week's cliché is: "Good luck with that."

Reform Islam? Good luck with that. World peace? Good luck with that.

It was sardonic and pithy, but its time has passed.

I like to catch such expressions at their peak, and replace them with something new and fresh. My ultimate goal is to eradicate clichés from the English language.

Yes, I know what you're going to say. Well don't. Help me out here.

In my article Dozy Bints – Western Handmaids of Allah, I make much of the "swooner". A swooner is a Western woman whose heart goes pitter-patter and whose knees – and brain - go weak at the sight of a Son of Allah. This is nothing new – those liquid brown eyes, those sensuous yet cruel mouths have been mesmerising the English rose for at least a century. The BBC reports on Sheikhs’ appeal:

It is the stuff of escapist fantasy. A tall, dark and handsome type sweeps a cream-and-roses Home Counties heroine off her feet. In its 100 years of publishing, the exotic alpha male has been a staple of the Mills and Boon romance.

The tale of the passionate desert sheikh who sweeps secretary Janna Smith off her feet in Violet Winspear's 1970 romance Tawny Sands is perhaps the quintessential Mills and Boon story.

Violet Winspear? Not Violet Sheikhspeare?

"His tone of voice was softly mocking, but she knew he didn't really jest. He was Raul Cesar Bey and the further they travelled into the desert the more aware she was of his affinity with the savage sun and tawny sands." 

Shocking, suggestive, the tale of their love was wildly popular with a generation of romance readers. 

It is also typical of a taste for foreign pleasures when it comes to romantic fiction.

It's 100 years since Mills and Boon published their first book. Sold in 109 countries and translated into 26 different languages, it is arguably Britain's best-known publishing house worldwide. 

From early in the company's history, its winsome heroines have looked beyond Britain's shores to find love.  

Nobody can quite identify the very first Mills and Boon romance to feature an exotic hero or location. But Dr Joseph McAleer, author of Passion's Fortune: The Story of Mills and Boon, says it was probably in the 1910s, following the lead of Hollywood cinema and its preoccupation with desert sheikhs and jungle escapades. 

The fascination still exists today with the best-selling title of the June 2008 Modern Romance series being Desert King, Pregnant Mistress by Susan Stephens.

"Exotic locations gave great scope to authors to be a bit racier. It is usually an English person going into the tropics to experience this different culture," Dr McAleer says.  

"But they never lose their moral foundation. The heroines normally wind up reforming the sheikh."

Good luck with that. Ooops.

The Times runs an advice column for readers with a moral dilemma. Last year, a reader wrote to say that he was unsure whether it was ethical to cheat on his CV and claim to have three Grade As at A-Level. Twenty years ago he got three Grade Cs, but in today’s coinage that is worth three As. I can see his point.

The reader was advised not to cheat, because employers know the difference. Older employers perhaps, but does a twenty-five-year-old, told from an early age that he has an A-Grade intellect, know that he is really a C-Grade? In fact those who lose out are the people who got real A-Grades twenty or more years ago. They are now lumped in with the inflated A-Grades of today.

The annual A-Level farce is with us once again. The Telegraph, whose leader-writers are old enough to have passed A-Levels when they were rigorous, points out the obvious:

Without wishing to diminish the hard-earned successes of those who have done well, it nevertheless beggars belief that - for the 28th year in a row - there has been a rise in standards, with a 97 per cent pass rate and the highest ever number of A grades.

Even to whisper that this might be the result of "grade inflation" is to risk the wrath of ministers, who maintain that the improvements can be ascribed entirely to better teaching and cleverer pupils.

Yet the evidence is difficult to dispute. Over the past 40 years, the percentage of A-level entries awarded a pass grade has risen by 40 per cent. Since the mid-1980s, the proportion awarded an A grade has risen from nine per cent to more than 25 per cent.

Research published this week suggested that an A grade today is the equivalent of a C 20 years ago. This is unfair both to those who are exceptional students and would have secured a top grade in any generation, and to those awarded a mark beyond their capabilities.

It is also unfair to universities, which find it impossible to differentiate between the very bright and the mediocre.

While promoting its new vocational diplomas, the Government has realised it must also restore the academic rigour of an exam once considered the gold standard of the education system. From 2010, the best pupils will be able to obtain an A* and changes to the modular structure will help underpin the exam's integrity.

It is crucial for the survival of the A-level that these reforms are not undermined, otherwise alternatives such as the International Baccalaureate and the Pre-U will look increasingly attractive to the best schools, top universities and parents.

Ann Treneman writes:

Why does homesickness always strike when you least expect it? There I was, in the middle of the Yorkshire Dales, minding my own business. We were staying at the Stone House (please don't book, it's my secret) near Hawes at the same time as a gaggle of Americans. Most of the time I find random Americans irritating and pretend to be English but this group were classier and a bit intriguing and so I admitted to having grown up in the States.

We then embarked on the game of finding a common geographical link. This turned out to be Iowa, my birthplace and their former home. Plus they were now at a retirement community in Texas, a state where I have also lived. I beamed. Why is it so satisfying that this game is completed successfully? I have no idea. I fell to talking to one of the men who said they were off to the Lake District for another week of walking. “After that,” he chuckled, “we won't be walking anywhere. We'll be all tuckered out.”

All tuckered out. Just three words but, the moment he said them, they wrapped around me. In general, or so I believe from my current comfortable position of great distance, I remember American English as a gentler and more understated form of the language. The words “all tuckered out” unlocked something inside that brought back entire scenes from childhood: riding my bike, without hands, down the silent roads of America's suburbia, picnicking beneath the huge mossy oaks, spending a whole day, back against the roots of a huge fir, reading a book.

"All tuckered out" is much pleasanter - and less coarse - than the British "knackered". I think we should adopt it. But why do the best Americanisms seem to have "-uck" in them?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bDYRjuzE1vI

"While I don’t have much truck with her last generalization..." (Hugh)

I suppose the English version of this should be "have no lorry with..."

Many people have no truck with things. Hugh hasn't much truck with one thing. Has there ever been someone who has had a bit of truck with something? Or a lot of truck?

Is anyone, in other words, plumb truckered out?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GG-wjkB7gXM

Walid Phares writes in The American thinker (with thanks to Andrew Bostom):

British tongue twister: red lorry, yellow lorry.

American tongue twister: red truck, yellow truck.

DENVER -- Police confirmed Wednesday that they found about a pound of sodium cyanide in a Denver hotel room where the body of a Canadian man was discovered earlier this week.

Police spokesman John White identified the white powder as sodium cyanide, the crystal form of cyanide. Fire officials say they found a bottle containing about a pound of the white powder, or between a pint and a quart by volume.

An expert told the Denver Post that the amount of cyanide is enough to kill hundreds of people.

The medical examiner's office said it is awaiting test results to determine whether cyanide killed 29-year-old Saleman Abdirahman Dirie, of Ottawa, Canada.

His body was found Monday inside Room 408 at The Burnsley Hotel, which is about four blocks from the state Capitol. White said Dirie had been dead for several days. Friends told The Ottawa Sun that he was dead six days before he was discovered.

Foul play is not suspected and his death appears to be an isolated incident, White said.

The FBI's Joint Terrorism Task Force is assisting in the investigation but FBI spokeswoman Kathy Wright said the incident has no apparent connection to terrorism.

The usual statement - the perpetrator had no known connections to Al-Qaeda and a history of mental troubles (the latter part will come up later). They probably use a form letter.

"You have a suspicious substance that was found in a hotel room in conjunction with person being a foreign national, and we have a lot of questions and that is why we are assisting," Wright told the Post.

An online threat posted in July by a man with a similar name warned of death.

"Having the bible in one hand, and a bread in the other hand, is not a correct thing! Kill Them , Kill them, Kill them, that is my massage (sic),!" read the posting by Abdirahman Dirie on the 'Solmali's for Jesus' Blog....

Ken Timmerman has it exactly right in this NewsMax.com article about what Putin’s KGB thugocracy is doing in the ‘great game’ of the 21st Century by attacking Georgia and its strategic Baku-Tblisi-Ceyhan pipeline. Witness these comments:

Sources in Tehran with close ties to senior regime officials tell me that Iran’s leaders are “looking and laughing” at the slaughter in Georgia, because they feel they will benefit from the closure of the Baku-Ceyhan pipeline, as well as from Russia’s Cold-War style confrontation with the West.

Iran derived an added, and possibly unsuspected, benefit from the recent fighting when Georgian president Saakashvili ordered the 2000 Georgian troops on duty with the U.S.-led coalition in Iraq to return home to guard their nation’s capital.

“The Georgian soldiers had been guarding Iran’s border with Iraq,” my sources in Tehran say. “This will put new pressure on the United States and Iraq, and in the meantime make it easier for the people who want to cross the border from Iran” to carry out terrorist attacks against the U.S. and our Iraqi allies.

The timing of the current conflict in Georgia has not been lost on Iran’s leaders. “They are convinced that Russia will not help the United States at the U.N. Security Council in getting a new sanctions resolution,” my sources say.

The Putin Georgia attack is also aimed at Israel, a potential partner in the BTC pipeline deal. Israel was to get oil for local energy use and to transship via a pipeline from Ashdod to Eilat and hence to tankers plying the Asian oil trades. Looks like the Russians and the Iranian Islamic Republic are in cahoots on this caper in Georgia So, why are the corrupt Olmert and the Bushites dithering, when these are the geo - political realities of the energy ‘great game’, eh?

by Kenneth Timmerman, NewsMax.com, August 14, 2008

A senior White House official confirmed on Monday what reporters on the ground in Georgia have known since their first glimpse of the ongoing hostilities: Russia’s invasion of Georgia was not a hastily-improvised event, in response to provocation, but had been planned well in advance.

Russia moved the equivalent of two heavy divisions into the mountainous terrain of northern Georgia, in addition to mobilizing its navy to blockade the Georgian coast and its air force to launch hundreds of bombing raids. These are not the type of things any modern nation can do overnight. Russia’s planning shows foresight, and intent.

So besides reasserting Russia’s control over its “near abroad,” and opposing the expansion of NATO into Georgia, what is czar Vladimir Putin’s game?

Georgian president Mikheil Saakashvili has accused Russia of seeking to control energy routes from the Caspian. Georgian officials have told reporters that Russian aircraft have bombed portions of the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan oil and gas pipeline dozens of times since hostilities began. Russia has denied the attacks. So has pipeline operator, British Petroleum.

But a reporter from the London Daily Telegraph witnessed the damage from one Russian air strike over the weekend, during which “over 50 missiles” were fired against a stretch of the pipeline on the outskirts of Tbilisi.

“I have no doubt they wanted to target the pipeline, there is nothing else here,” a policeman who witnessed the attack told The Telegraph’s reporter.

Why would the Russians attempt to take out the recently-built pipeline, which carries energy resources from Azerbaijan and Kazakhstan to Western Europe?

Because the Russians and their strategic partner, the Islamic Republic of Iran, have been opposed to the pipeline since it was first planned in the mid-1990s. Through terrorist proxies in Turkey, where the pipeline feeds into the Ceyhan terminal on the Mediterranean, they have repeatedly sabotaged it....

New Duranty: ISLAMABAD, Pakistan — Faced with desertions by his political supporters and the neutrality of the Pakistani military, President Pervez Musharraf of Pakistan, an important ally of the United States, is expected to resign in the next few days rather than face impeachment charges, Pakistani politicians and Western diplomats said Thursday.

His departure from office would be likely to unleash new instability in the country as the two main parties in the civilian government jockeyed for the division of power.

The details of how Mr. Musharraf would exit, and whether he would be able to stay in Pakistan — apparently his strong preference — or would seek residency abroad were now under discussion, the politicians said.

Mr. Musharraf was expected to resign before the governing coalition presented charges for impeachment to the Parliament early next week, said Nisar Ali Khan, a senior official in the Pakistani Muslim League-N, the minority partner in the coalition government.

(...)

“The United States is now accepting Musharraf’s removal as a fait accompli,” Mr. Khan said.

“They just want that he should not be humiliated. We don’t want his humiliation either.” ...

Paul in the comments to this piece:

Babies should be deep-frozen at birth, and allowed to gradually defrost around the age of 35.

From an earlier post:

When Baby’s cries grew hard to bear
I popped him in the Frigidaire
I never would have done it if
I’d known that he’d be frozen stiff
My wife said, “George, I’m so unhappé
Our darling is completely frappé!”

From a news story about Aafia Siddique: 

"Long before Aafia Siddique was arrested in Afghanistan last month, allegedly in possession of a list of New York targets and chem-bio weapons information, she had allegedly developed a plot, however improbable or amateurish, to kill Presidents Jimmy Carter and George H.W. Bush and to attack the White House. Siddique plotted to use weapons that included biological agents to contaminate former president Carter's water, according to multiple federal sources.

Those allegations, some contained in the federal complaint filed on July 31st by the US Attorney in Manhattan, the details expanded on by sources spoken to by ABC News, paint Siddique, 36, as a committed Al Qaeda operative, and one whose capture could hold the key to identifying other operatives and supporters both in the US and overseas.

But her lawyer, activist attorney Elizabeth Fink, says the entire government case against Siddique is a lie.

"They used the same stuff 40 years ago...against the Black Panthers, against the Attica Brothers...a list of targets in their possession...why would anyone be in Ghanzi, Afghanistan walking around with a list of landmarks of New York?," Fink asked. "These people are nuts and don't even know how to lie."

Fink, a protégé of now deceased firebrand William H. Kunstler, says that everything in Siddique's past points to a life completely different than the government has alleged in its criminal complaint.

"She graduates MIT summa cum laude. She gets her MS and her PhD from Brandeis -- Brandeis! Eating Kosher and living with the Jews; all of a sudden she turns into an Al Qaeda operative? If that's true this country is doomed. Doomed," said Fink.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_9hMdjnNBVQ