Ah, to have been at Churchill Downs for yesterday's thoroughly delightful running of the 133rd Kentucky Derby.

Ed Fountaine reports what turned out to be an exciting race:

Next to last down the backstretch in the full field of 20, saving ground under jockey Calvin Borel as Hard Spun cut out the pace, Street Sense rallied up the rail on the far turn, swung off the fence to split horses at the top of the stretch, then ran past Hard Spun in the final furlong.

Borel's joy was volcanic and infectious, something worth viewing whether or not one gives a hoot for horse racing.  After a year that saw last year's heart-wrenching Barbaro saga, thoroughbred lovers, it seems to me, earned a piece of that joy.

(Later last night, NBC ran its fitting and understated tribute to last year's Derby winner, Barbaro: A Nation's Horse.  It's a two-hanky one-hour video, but it is not in any way melodramatic or saccharine.  Sometimes even the networks get it right.)

In this New Duranty Times article on Darwinism and Conservatism:

As for Mr. Derbyshire, he would not say whether he thought evolutionary theory was good or bad for conservatism; the only thing that mattered was whether it was true. And, he said, if that turns out to be “bad for conservatives, then so much the worse for conservatism.”

Blair Worden of The Spectator reviews Ben Wilson's Decency and Disorder: The Age of Cant, 1789 - 1837:

‘Political correctness’, which divides and galls our society, is a modern manifestation of an old impulse which periodically demands, in the cause of social improvement, the curtailment of pleasure and the inhibition of language and thought. It happened with the rise of Puritanism midway through the reign of Elizabeth I, when stage-plays and popular enjoyments came under fire. Something like it occurred a century or so later, in the wake of the Glorious Revolution, with the cult of ‘politeness’. Ben Wilson’s subject is the emergence of what contemporaries called ‘cant’ over (roughly) the first three decades of the 19th century, when the preconditions of Victorian propriety and conformity were established. ‘The truth is’, declared Byron in 1821, ‘the grand “primum mobile” of England is cant; cant political, cant poetical, cant religious; but always cant, multiplied through all the varieties of life.’

The bold emphasis is mine. There is plenty of cant around these days, much of it regularly pilloried at this website.  However, "curtailment of pleasure" is less evident in modern society than is "inhibition of language and thought". It is increasingly difficult to find language used boldly and directly to mean what it says.

This is a vast subject, so I will confine myself to two contrasting examples. Leo Hindery's comment, quoted here by Hugh, is an example of cant, but one which seems to find general acceptance:

'The media industry has never needed more diversity than it does now, of every characteristic--ethnicity, gender, race, orientation, and nationality.'

My second example, from Will Cummins, caused outrage:

It is the black heart of Islam, not its black face, to which millions object.

Which of these two comments is racist? If you asked most brainwashed college students, politicians and people in "the media industry", they would say the second. Yet the second comment explicitly puts content of character before colour of skin, and the first -insofar as it means anything at all - does the opposite.

It is the simplicity of Cummins' words that shocks. They mean exactly what they say; not even a syllable is wasted.

Cummins - his articles and what happened to him - deserves a post of his own, and, since it is nearly three years since he spoke out, he will get one. (I wish I knew who he was so he could write for us.)

For now, let's savour his words: "the black heart of Islam, not its black face". Hardly anyone writes like this anymore. They should.

"Es ist nicht Derby Day, sondern das Bidet."

Like just about any German pun you can think of - that didn't take long did it? - this involves a loan word. Other German puns, all with loan words, include:

"Western von Gestern" - see my post here.

"Unsicht-bar" - see my post here.

"Ostalgie" - see my post here.

If any readers know of other German puns, please send them in. Bear in mind, however, that our bandwidth is not infinitely elastic.

The Sunday Times:

DISILLUSIONED supporters of President George W Bush are defecting to Barack Obama, the Democratic senator for Illinois, as the White House candidate with the best chance of uniting a divided nation.

Tom Bernstein went to Yale University with Bush and co-owned the Texas Rangers baseball team with him. In 2004 he donated the maximum $2,000 to the president’s reelection campaign and gave $50,000 to the Republican National Committee. This year he is switching his support to Obama. He is one of many former Bush admirers who find the Democrat newcomer appealing.

Matthew Dowd, Bush’s chief campaign strategist in 2004, announced last month that he was disillusioned with the war in Iraq and the president’s “my way or the highway” style of leadership – the first member of Bush’s inner circle to denounce the leader’s performance in office.

Although Dowd has yet to endorse a candidate, he said the only one he liked was Obama. “I think we should design campaigns that appeal, not to 51% of the people, but bring the country together as a whole,” Dowd said...

For some unknown reason, people googling "bird-eating spider" are coming to New English Review. So, in the interest of providing service for you spider-lovers out there (or bird-haters as the case may be), here it is. The Goliath bird-eating spider.

The Goliath Bird-eating Spider, is one of the world’s largest species of spider. Its impressive size makes it a popular species in most collections. Unfortunately, it is rarely bred. Most specimens that are available are imported from the wild.

   This hairy coffee-colored beast is unmistakable. The sheer size of this spider definitely attracts attention but it is not the friendliest critter. The Goliath Bird-eating Spider is aggressive and will attack.

   It is a solitary animal and needs to be housed alone. Being a big bulky burrow-dweller, it should be offered a large enclosure with deep, damp substrate. Although this setup allows minimal interaction by the keeper, it does provide the proper conditions for keeping this giant of the spider world healthy. They can be observed at night under a red light as they explore their enclosure for food.

As Rebecca points out, people are googling "bird-eating spider" and coming to New English Review. And how. Our readers are obsessed with bird-eating spiders. Popular search strings are as follows:

Bird-eating spider

Bird-eating spiders

Bird eating spider (No hyphen - spider's eaten it - M.J.)

Bird spider

Bird spiders

Enough bird spiders, already - get a life - M. J.

Camel spiders (Stop the world - I want to get off)

Theodore Dalrymple (Phew!)

Hitler (Hmm)

Firefly (?)

Earl of Essex

Fred Astaire

Serenity

Serenity again. Orange Kitten hasn't made it this time, nor has Old Peculier Mary, whom I always like to see in there.

Francis Fukuyama in the LA Times comes round (almost):

An intensifying civil war will be a tragedy for Iraq, but it is not the worst outcome from a U.S. standpoint to have a number of bitterly anti-American groups duking it out among themselves.

Civil wars eventually come to an end when one side wins (unlikely, in this case) or when the parties exhaust themselves and drop their maximalist aims.

The war is not lost, despite the assertions to that effect by Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.). But victory is not around the corner either. We need to start figuring out how to leave this zombie-like zone now.

And I would like to remind Victor Hanson and Derb that Hugh Fitzgerald was the first to articulate this position no later than Feb. 2004.

I once enrolled in a Spanish course at the Instituto Mangold on the Gran Via (Jose Antonio) in Madrid, while Franco was still alive and annual masses for Hitler being held.  Among my fellow students was a German, who after class one day, got to talking to me about words and informed me that "in German you can do things that you cannot do in any other language. We have words that sound alike but mean different things, and we make jokes by using one for the other. It is very funny. You can do this only in German."

I didn't have the heart to enlighten him. But I took his comment, and what it told me about him,t and I think it not unfair to add, given the history of the unappetizing last century, to heart. It spoke volumes, in both senses of that last word. Apparently we English speakers, too, can do things with words.