Off the top of my head, I can think of ten book titles that irritate the hell out of me and scream "twaddle". Some of the authors also have annoying names – if so, I put the annoying name beside the annoying title. Here goes:

Leaf By Niggle. It niggles.

A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius. What a prat.

The Unbearable Lightness of Being. Unbearable.

White Teeth. Zadie Smith. Annoying title, overrated (because black) author, cutesy name.

The Autograph Man. Zadie Smith. As above. The hero is called Alex-Li Tandem. On yer bike!

On Beauty. Zadie Smith. As above. Haven’t read it, but achingly pretentious title.

The Bluest Eye. Toni Morrison. Silly title. Overrated (because black) author. Twee first name.

Saint Maybe. Annoying title, difficult to say properly because the rhythm is wrong. Anne Tyler is a no-nonsense name, so she ought to know better.

A Slipping-down Life. Ditto. Actually, I read this (on recommendation) and it was quite good, but the title nearly put me right off.

The Hobbit.  I don’t get this. Is “hobbit” supposed to be a funny word? Is Bilbo Baggins supposed to be a funny name? He should have stayed in his hole.

With some exceptions, the best book titles consist of a name or a place. What more do you need? 

More in-depth, scrupulously fair literary criticism next week.

You will need to follow this link and watch the video which is in English or has English sub-titles. It is from the Israeli news source Haaretz.

Saudi Arabia's MBC TV began its Sunday night news edition not with Syrian President Bashar Assad's trip to Iran, nor with Palestinian infighting in Gaza - but with an outraged report on an Israeli TV commercial.
The advertisement shows wealthy Arab oil barons enraged that a Nissan car is so fuel efficient.
MBC proceeded to interview a Saudi representative, who was asked why he thought Israel would broadcast the commercial. He warned of a boycott of Nissan by Persian Gulf states, and demanded the company apologize.

If you can’t get the video to work then as stated above the highly comical advert shows a group of Arab oil barons enraged at the sight of a Nissan car. Their leader flies into a rage and starts banging the bonnet of his own stretch limo. He bellows (this is one of the sub-titled bits) “My God destroy your home! Hawks should peck at you day and night. . be cursed”.
Then the MBC news presenter, a young woman with dyed blond hair a fetching low top and white trouser suit interviews a real Saudi Representative who declares that Nissan must be punished and boycotted and demands an apology. Israel is also condemned for "igniting racist instincts"
Remember, you can in a Nissan.
Because I have my manners I will give a hat tip to where I spotted this. A Telegraph blog by one dozy bint Urmee Khan, who is also outraged and who I doubt will last long at the DT. I keep hoping that she is being ironic, but I fear she is for real.

From The Times
The trial (at the Central Criminal Court Old Bailey) of two men accused of helping to hide the body of an “honour-killing” victim in their back garden has collapsed because of a lack of evidence. Dashti Babaker, the cousin of the victim Banaz Mahmod, and his friend, Amir Abbas, were alleged to have joined the plot to please community elders.
Mr Babaker, 21, of Camberwell, southeast London, and Mr Abbas, 31, of no fixed address, both denied perverting the course of justice and a separate count of preventing the lawful and decent burial of a corpse.
The body of Ms Banaz, 20, was found buried in a suitcase at a Birmingham house in 2006. She had been strangled because she fell in love with “the wrong man” and was seen to have shamed the family.
Her father, Mahmod Mahmod, her uncle, Ari Mahmod, and a third man, Mohamad Hama, are serving life sentences for her murder. Two other men, Mohammed Ali and Omar Hussein, are still wanted by police.

The Telegraph blogs vary in quality. Urmee Khan’s, linked in Esmerelda’s post here, is abysmal – she is a taqiyya-toting Muslimah who can’t write. At the top end, there is Holy Smoke, the blog of Damian Thompson, Telegraph leader-writer and editor-in-chief of the Catholic Herald.

Thompson might be expected to be critical of the Anglican Church. He does play for the opposition, after all. But his criticisms are justified. Three stories show that the Archbishop of Canterbury has got his priorities wrong.

Here is the first:

In their "Reflections" on the Lambeth Conference, the 650 Anglican bishops attending have expressed solidarity with the plight of Australian Aborigines but made no direct mention of the current vicious persecution of Christians by Muslims.

[...]

No doubt the bishops would explain that they might make things worse for Christians being daily beaten up, imprisoned and forcibly converted in Islamic countries if they were to draw attention to the fact. I think that's baloney. If the bishops of Nigeria were present, I bet the "Reflections" would mention the fact that Christians are treated like dirt in Islamic provinces of the country. I also suspect that the Pakistani-born Bishop Michael Nazir-Ali of Rochester might have had something to say if he weren't boycotting the conference.

Anyone would think that the Anglican Communion was headed by a man who actually favoured the extension of Sharia law in Britain. Oh, hang on, it is. 

And the second:

The revelation that Rowan Williams thinks gay relationships are "comparable to marriage" will have devastating consequences for his attempts to hold together the Anglican Communion. American Episcopalians will seize on his leaked letters as the perfect excuse to ignore the ban on same-sex blessings that Dr Williams supported at Lambeth.

Whatever Williams’ private views on gays and gay marriage, should this be a priority at the moment, when Christians are being persecuted all over the Islamic world? Anyone who cares about gay rights – not to mention Christianity - should be speaking out against Islam. As for the Australian Aborigines, isn’t some of their “plight”, like the “plight” of the “Palestinians”, self-inflicted?

Tariq Ramadan, that is. From the London Evening Standard (h/t Islamophobia Watch):

Ken Livingstone has told his Leftwing supporters in City Hall to hang on in there, however unpleasant it may be working for a Tory Mayor such as Boris Johnson, because he intends to be back in 2012. Among those who probably will not be able to survive the regime change at City Hall is the Lokahi Foundation, an outfit with extremist Islamist links that boasts academic Tariq Ramadan as a leading light.

Almost half a million pounds of council taxpayers' money was handed over to its coffers under Ken. "The funding agreement ran out in July 2008 and I understand that all payments have been made," says a City Hall spokesman.

Ramadan, Lokahi's "Senior Research Fellow", sparked controversy in the mayoral elections by signing a letter urging Muslims to vote for Livingstone without declaring the £450,000 his organisation had been paid by the then Mayor.

He has been denied entry to the United States in the past because of allegations concerning his terrorist sympathies. "Our funding has run out from the Greater London Authority," Lokahi's director, Gwen Griffith-Dickson, tells me.

"There might be a problem about Tariq Ramadan's personal letter urging people to vote for Ken Livingstone and the tug of war over some of his comments but he is one of a team."

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C8DNec26iHY&feature=related

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o7kzsZreG0o&feature=related

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

Moby Dick isn't a person or a place. It's a whale. 

It could also be disease, perhaps something you get if you bend sinister.

On this day, August 7th, in 1915, the Battle of Chunuk Bair began.  This was the only success the Allies had against the Ottoman Turks in the disastrous Gallipoli campaign in WWI.

The Allies had been pinned down in trench warfare by the Turks on the Gallipoli peninsula since April 1915.  Amidst extremely heavy losses on both sides, the Australian and New Zealand ANZAC troops, and British troops, desperately tried to break out and move up the peninsula.

Their initial attempt in this battle was successful, and the ANZAC's took Chunuk Bair during the night following a day of heavy artillery bombardment.  But it was a pyrrhic victory, as 711 of the 760 men who reached the summit were killed or wounded in the fighting.  The Turks, under Lieutenant Colonel Kemal Ataturk, counter-attacked, and pushed the Allies back to their original trenches.  In this one small battle, in four days of fighting, over 5,000 Allied soldiers were killed or wounded.  Over the course of the Gallipoli campaign, over 130,000 Allied soldiers were killed.   Turkish losses were even higher.

The Gallipoli pensinula was by no means of central import in WWI, just as Iraq is not of central import in the jihad today.  But the political and military leaders stubbornly insisted that the campaign continue no matter the cost, in order to protect British prestige.  In the end, the Allies were forced to make a maritime retreat in January 1916.  Although the land campaign had been a disaster, the evacuation was well planned and well executed, and the Allies took zero casualties, despite predictions of a 50% casualty rate.  By extracting herself from the distracting tar-pit of Gallipoli, the British managed to survive the slight blemish to her prestige, and the Allies went on to win the larger war and defeat Germany and the Ottoman Empire.

Some might think that religious jihad played no part in WWI.  Certainly, Westerners would not think of WWI in terms of religious war.  But the Ottoman Caliphate, the last Islamic caliphate, disagreed.  In November 1914, Sultan Mehmed V, in the role of Caliph, pronounced a fatwa declaring jihad against the Christians infidels who were invading Muslim-controlled lands, lands in Eastern Europe that the Ottomans had conquered during their six centuries of offensive warfare against the Christians.  They appealed to Islamic concepts (that it is fard eyn for all Muslims to resist infidels who invade Dar al-Islam) to muster and motivate their troops.  The Turks cast the war as a religious struggle between Believer and Infidel.  They unapologetically described it as jihad, and they were not referring to a peaceful internal struggle.

At the end of WWI, the Ottoman Empire was dissolved, the caliphate was abolished, and Kemal Ataturk took over the country and created a modern, secular Turkey.  Today, the changes he made are being rolled back by Islamic forces in Turkey;  they would like nothing more than to reinstate the caliphate.

Previous Days in the "Religion of Peace™":

Aug 6: Benazir Bhutto Resigns

Aug 5: Iran Rejects Nuclear Offer

Aug 4: Uganda Expels Asians

Aug 3: John Garang

Aug 2: Iraq Invades Kuwait

(hat tip: Jihadwatch)

Islamization is proceeding apace in the Balkans.

Sarajevo, 6 August (AKI) – The Bosnian capital of Sarajevo, once a symbol of ethnic diversity, has become an entirely Muslim city, a Croat deputy in the Bosnian Parliament, Branko Zrno, said on Wednesday.

“Sarajevo definitely isn’t a multi-ethnic city, but the city of one group, the Bosniacs (Muslims), " Zrno told local media.

He pointed out that Serbs and Croats in Sarajevo have no institutional protection, and continue to leave the capital.

Zrno echoed allegations from Bosnian Serb leaders, including Serb entity Prime Minister Milorad Dodik, that non-Muslims in Sarajevo suffered discrimination and were denied their rights.

Zrno said that the Croatian presence in the city had been halved and that neither Croats nor Serbs held any important posts in local government.  

Serbs claim that in the city of 400,000 only 7,000 Serbs have remained, compared to 160,000 before the 1992-1995 civil war...

The Nissan advertisement, for the new energy-saving car being developed in Israel (and elsewhere), "shows a group of Arab oil barons enraged at the sight of a Nissan car. Their leader flies into a rage and starts banging the bonnet of his own stretch limo. He bellows (this is one of the sub-titled bits) 'My God destroy your home! Hawks should peck at you day and night. . be cursed.'"

Not part of the ad, but now a part of history, is this: 

"Then the MBC news presenter, a young woman with dyed blond hair a fetching low top and white trouser suit interviews a real Saudi Representative who declares that Nissan must be punished and boycotted and demands an apology."

The ad that should run all over the United States, once the car is on the market, and that will have fantastic appeal, would combine the original ad, and then the tape of the "Saudi Representative who declares that Nisson must be punished and boycotted and demands an apology."

If I had money, I would start buying stock in Nissan right now. With that advertisement, and with that promised car -- to be sold first in Denmark and Israel, so for god's sake hurry up -- it will be irresistible to Western consumers.

And so will all other ads that are based on an intelligent recognition that the the Saudis and other rich Arabs of the Gulf, who are raking in their ill-gotten (not gotten at all, merely acquired, through an accident of geology, this fantastic soaking up, and then piling up, and then sinisterly deploying part of) trillions, have become the object of growing fury all over the Westen world. And that energetic fury should be the fuel of a campaign to lessen the use of oil, one based not exclusively on environmental concerns, but also on the widespread recognition of how unpleasant, undeserving and dangerous those Muslim sellers of oil really are.

That kind of fury, that mounting and justified hostility, should not be tamped down. Nor should it be ignored.  These are feelings to be exploited, the way all popular passions can be exploited, for the greater good, in wartime. This is wartime. If Nissan, and other manufacturers of oil-avoiding cars, increase their sales and their market share by the use of such advertisements, and of course they will, all the better.

Even someone indifferent to or ignorant of the meaning and menace of Islam, someone perhaps concerned exclusively about what is now undeniable -- anthropogenic climate change, proceeding at a rate unheard of in millions of years -- should welcome any and all efforts to exploit popular passions for the sake of the greater good, that of getting off oil.

Besides, there is nothing good to say about the Saudis or the other rich Arabs. Their lands are cultural wastelands, and will remain so, even if a "branch" of the Louvre is put up in Dubai, with succursales of assorted well-compensated Western universities also arriving by the day, but to teach what subjects, and in what spirit, and with what reception by Muslim students, if they remain true to Islam? The point of all this branchifying and succursaling is unclear. Few Muslims can add to the store of Western or indeed to the rich store of world art, save in the most limited of ways - some archtiecture, some Arabic calligraphy, and possibly a landscape or two, or abstract curlicues, that is if they are to remain true to what Islam commands, and what Islam prohibits. That's about it.

From The Times
The woman who had her pet dog cloned by South Korean scientists flatly denied early today that she was a bail abscondee accused of sexually assaulting and kidnapping a male Mormon missionary more than 30 years ago in Surrey.
Rumours have been circulating about the true identity of Bernann McKinney, who this week appeared in Seoul with her five cloned pit bull puppies. She and her dogs have featured in publications around the world since the ground-breaking procedure.
Ms McKinney, who said that she lived in Hollywood, California, denied to The Times this morning that she was actually Joyce McKinney, who was charged at Epsom Magistrates’ Court in 1977 with false imprisonment.
The story of Joyce McKinney is nothing if it is not larger than life. I remember it well. She was accused of kidnapping and sexually assaulting the 17-stone Kirk Anderson, a Mormon missionary, who had become the object of her passionate affections.
Joyce McKinney, then 28 . . .  tracked Mr Anderson, then 19, to Ewell in Surrey, where he had been posted for two years as a door-to-door Mormon missionary.
With the help of a friend she is alleged to have kidnapped him and chained him to a bed in a remote cottage. After apparently failing to persuade him to marry her and father her children she then seems to have forced him to have sex with her. He finally escaped and she was arrested.
During a subsequent court appearance Joyce McKinney, is reputed to have said: “I loved him so much that I would ski naked down Mount Everest with a carnation up my nose if he asked me to.”
After three months on remand in Holloway Prison she was released on bail because of failing mental health. She then fled the country using a false passport. True to fashion or the hyperbole of a remarkable story she seems to have disguised herself as a nun for several months and disappeared into the Appalachian Mountains.
During the 1977-78 court case it was claimed that Joyce McKinney had, with the help of her friend, confronted Mr Anderson on the steps of Ewell’s Church of the Latter Day Saints and frogmarched him to a car where he was subdued with chloroform. They then appear to have driven him 200 miles to a rented 17th century cottage in Okehampton, Devon.
To add further mystery and zing to the whole story, Mr Anderson was said to have been wearing a Mormon chastity belt at the time. In her defence, she claimed that it was a bondage game played with his full consent. Legend has it that after he eventually promised to marry her she loosened his chains and he then escaped.
As you can see from the photos (top left) Bernann is a dead ringer for Joyce, allowing for the passage of 30 years. Perhaps she is her own long lost twin sister. Whatever the truth there is only one thing I say say. Here is Puppy Love by Mormon teen sweetheart Donny Osmond. All together now . . .

We still don't know whether the beheader was a Chinese Muslim or not. Perhaps it's just a case of "everybody's doing it."  Mexican drug gangs are taking increasingly to beheading too, supposedly for the terrorizing effect.

From the August 4 Sydney Morning Herald:

“THE vast Arctic sea ice which spreads across the North Pole could disappear during the summer within a decade or two - or even by 2013 - leading scientists are warning.

From the obituary that appeared in The Independent: 

"Among the litany of failures enumerated by James Bill in The Eagle and the Lion: the tragedy of American-Iranian relations (1988) was the fact that only 10 per cent of American diplomats posted to Iran in the 1970s spoke and read fluent Persian, compared to almost 45 per cent of the British. Bill attributed this latter figure to the "stiff exams" of Ann Lambton, one of "the West's leading Iran specialists", and that all the senior diplomats had been taught by her at the School of Oriental and African Studies.

Lambton, unsurprisingly, in a Foreign Office brief during the 1951 oil crisis, concluded that Americans "lack our experience or the psychological insight" of Iran. Whitehall's mostly male mandarins routinely sought her scrutiny of bilingual treaties in recognition of her "knowing the language and mentality of its people better than anyone else". She acquired, as even Freya Stark noted, an intimate knowledge of the East that only a female could acquire.

More embarrassed than even the Shah's Western allies were those social scientists observing Iran implode in 1978-79. Only Lambton, an Orientalist thoroughly grounded in Persian culture and Islamic thought, had adumbrated in a seminal essay on spiritual authority in Twelver Shi'ism, the state religion, "the tendency to look for the establishment of the kingdom of God upon earth, which, if pressed to its conclusion, is likely to lead either to political quietism or violent revolution".

Published in the journal Studia Islamica in 1964, the year Ruhollah Khomeini was exiled to Turkey, its oracular import cannot be gainsaid. A troublemaker under surveillance for instigating clashes the previous year, Khomeini now came into his own with the fiercest denunciation of the government for acquiescing to an immunity agreement covering US military forces and dependants in Iran. When ejected to Iraq, he expounded his 1970 "Guardianship of the Jurist" ("Velayat-e faqih") lectures, inveighing against monarchy as un-Islamic, hence illegitimate. Khomeini envisaged in lieu a learned divine or "Supreme Leader" (rahbar), an office he assumed after 1979, and which is now occupied by Ali Khamenei.

Lambton was unrivalled in the breadth of her scholarship, covering Persian grammar and dialectology; medieval and early modern Islamic political thought; Seljuq, Mongol, Safavid, Qajar and Pahlavi administration; tribal and local history; and land tenure and agriculture. Her association with Soas in London, which lasted from her time as an undergraduate in 1930 until her death as Professor Emerita, aged 96, was one of the longest and most illustrious, and Lambton became acknowledged as the dean of Persian studies in the West. Without hyperbole, an era has passed in Middle Eastern studies.

"Nancy" to friends, Ann Lambton was born in Newmarket in 1912, the granddaughter of the second earl of Durham, George Frederick d'Arcy Lambton, by his fifth son, George Lambton, and Cecily Horner. The Lambtons were a landed family with coal-mining interests and estates in Co Durham and Fenton, Northumberland. Lambton Castle was one of the earliest homes to be lit by gas in Britain. George Lambton, private trainer to the earl of Derby, was a distinguished racehorse trainer and breeder of his day. Nancy's middle name, Swynford, commemorated her father's 1910 St Leger winner, and she herself won acclaim for her skill in the saddle. She roller-skated in her teens and commuted by bicycle to teach and to thrash varsity squash opponents.

Upon matriculation with a certificate in Persian (1930-32) from the then School of Oriental Studies, Lambton began her Persian honours, with a subsidiary in classical Arabic, plus German, Geology and Latin at neighbouring King's. Her teachers were the school's first director, Sir Denison Ross, and Professors Hamilton Gibb, Arthur Tritton, Vladimir Minorsky and Hasan Taqizadeh; the last two also taught the renowned Iranist Mary Boyce. Lambton won the Ouseley Memorial Scholarship in Persian (1934) and gained her BA in 1935, as well as the Aga Khan Travelling Scholarship.

She commenced her doctorate in 1935 on the Seljuqs of pre-Ottoman Anatolia and submitted it in 1939 despite spending 13 months in Tehran and major provincial centres recording dialects (published as Three Persian Dialects, 1938); studying craft guilds and history in Persian in a girls' school in Isfahan; and further Persian and Arabic with such local scholars as Fazili Tuni and Rashid.

Lambton returned to Persia in July 1939 for further research when war broke out. Appointed Press Attaché to Sir Reader Bullard at the British Legation (later Embassy), she made her mark interpreting at press conferences, summarising local papers for a weekly digest, and editing news commentaries on Allied efforts. She was appointed OBE in 1942. Her links with Persians across all classes afforded her an extraordinary insight into local life, and this was to be reflected in her outstanding œuvre.

The Ministry of Information reluctantly released her to accept an offer from Arthur Arberry, Soas chair of Persian. London University could not afford the proposed Readership and Lambton came after VJ Day as Senior Lecturer, in October 1945. A Readership, three years later, was swiftly followed by the Professorship in 1953, a signal year when her landmark books Landlord and Peasant in Persia: a study of land tenure and land revenue administration and Persian Grammar appeared. They remain standard works, even today. A sequel, The Persian Land Reform: 1962-66 (1969) incisively analysed the mixed results of the Shah's "White Revolution".

Austere and patrician, Lambton garnered immense respect from colleagues, students and the administration at Soas. She headed the Near and Middle East department, 1972-78, even as articles and profoundly meticulous studies appeared in The Cambridge History of Islam (co-edited with another Gibb protégé, Bernard Lewis), The Cambridge History of Iran, Encyclopaedia of Islam and Encyclopaedia Iranica. Her Theory and Practice in Medieval Persian Government (1980) and State and Government in Medieval Islam (1981) are indispensable for comprehending Muslim statecraft. Her Columbia University lectures, Continuity and Change in Medieval Persia: aspects of administrative, economic and social history, 11th-14th century (1988) crowned her output.

Accolades assuredly arrived: fellowship of the British Academy (1964); and honorary doctorates from London (1954), Durham (1971) and Cambridge (New Hall, 1973); honorary membership of Soas (1983); and honorary fellowship of the Middle East Studies Association of North America. An annual A.K.S. Lambton Honorary Lecture series was established at Durham University in 2001. The British Institute of Persian Studies, of which she was an honorary vice-president, hosted her 90th birthday reception at Carlton House Terrace in 2002. In 2004 the British Society for Middle Eastern Studies' outstanding service award was conferred upon her, as well as the Cross of St Augustine, by the Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams."

Burzine K. Waghmar

Ann Lambton was not only a celebrated Persianist, but also the niece of Harold Macmillan's wife, which gave her an entree denied others who might have been, should have been, listened to, such as Bernard Lewis.

She was appalled at the misperception and misrepresentation of Islam as a "religion of peace" by Bush, as she told a fellow scholar of the area. They both agreed that the essence of Islam, as a belief-system constructed in direct opposition to the claims of the two prior monotheisms, and would always be permanently hostile to the West, and she found foolish (A. K. S. Lambton did not suffer fools), any attempt to avoid recognizing that essence of Islam.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W7pYQLj9mhg&feature=related