A new personal best

Today I produced over 8,000 words for my latest book - about two thousand more than my previous personal daily 'best'.  It's flowing really well (70,000 words so far), and I'm very pleased with progress.  (Of course, whether it's good enough to be pleased about is a judgment that will be rendered by my readers!)  At this rate I'll be finished the book by the end of May.  Editing has already commenced. I've had half a dozen alpha and beta readers looking at it, identifying areas needing improvement and helping me to get a better overall view of it.  As a result of their comments I've already ripped out about 20,000 words from the first half and added another 30,000, incorporating more action and changing several of the characters and sub-plots.

It's amazing to realize how my writing skills have developed over time.  If I'd tried working this fast with my first book, it would have been a disaster.  When an alpha or beta reader would offer a criticism of it, my first reactions were often frustration and despair - "I've already put so much effort into this!  How can I change it?  I don't even know what to fix!"  Now the reaction is more, "Oh, yes - I see what they mean - no problem - I can handle this."  There's a confidence that comes with experience, and I'm very pleased to be developing it.

I've already talked with Oleg Volk about the cover, and we've identified a suitable image (although I still have to improve on my working title). Miss D. and I will work on the blurb to have it ready by early June, when we'll see Oleg again to finalize the cover. Who knows?  The book might be released in time for LibertyCon, if all goes well.

Peter

Politics, defined visually

Courtesy of CenTexTim, from whom I shamelessly stole borrowed this image:

Yep.  That just about says it all.  However, with Disney - Disney!!! - making a seventh Star Wars movie, it might get even worse . . .




Peter

"A terrorist storm is heading for the West"

That's the alarming headline in the Telegraph, which reports:

At the Daily Beast, Eli Lake is reporting that more than 100 Americans are fighting in Syria.

This US assessment chimes with the belief of EU intelligence services that hundreds of Europeans are also in Syria. Indeed, "terrorist-tourism" is an increasingly acute concern of British Intelligence.

The growing fear? That these "tourists" will soon return home with the means and intention to conduct atrocities.

. . .

Imagine, for example, that a group of British or French citizens attacked an American target. The fallout would almost certainly involve aggressive unilateral US Intelligence operations in Europe, new visa restrictions and further politicisation of productive Intelligence relationships (too-often ignored). In human, economic and political terms, an attack would be disastrous.

Unfortunately, the challenges posed by ISIS only reflect broader trends in Sunni-Islamist terrorism. Pushed by al Qaeda core leader, Ayman al-Zawahiri, and lead by ambitious terrorists, Salafi-Jihadist groups have diversified. Whether it’s ISIS and Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, or AQAP and al-Wuhayshi, or al-Shabaab and Godane, or Boko Haram and Shekau, we see independent groups that ally where it suits them. This is forcing western Intelligence services to stretch their finite collection and analysis capabilities in hard choices of priority. Incidentally, this is one reason Obama is increasing CIA weapons supplies to rebel groups that oppose ISIS. Things are so bad that he must gamble.

Ultimately, successful Intelligence work is as much the product of luck as anything else. This explains why officials on both sides of the Atlantic are adopting an increasingly alarmist tone. They see the rising storm and they expect mayhem in its wake.

There's more at the link.  Highly recommended reading.

To illustrate the mindset that's given rise to such fears, here's an extended BBC interview with a British man who's joined an Al Qaeda-affiliated group in Syria.

I've run into this problem myself.  In a blog post some years ago, I wrote of my experience with returned Islamic insurgents in South Africa.

During the late 1980's, we encountered Mujahedin who'd returned to South Africa after fighting the Soviets in Afghanistan, and who were now trying to establish a fundamentalist Muslim society. They founded an organization known as Qibla, which later spawned PAGAD (People Against Gangsterism And Drugs). In time, the latter became a pseudo-terrorist and criminal organization in its own right. On more than a few occasions, members of Qibla tried to force my colleagues and I to channel our aid to the victims of violence through them, in areas where they were active. (They would have distributed the aid "with strings attached", and used it to boost their image in the community, ignoring us.) When we refused, they turned nasty - sometimes violent. (Such incidents confirmed for me, the hard way, the truth of Clint Smith's maxim: "You can say 'stop' or 'alto' or use any other word you think will work, but I’ve found that a large bore muzzle pointed at someone’s head is pretty much the universal language.")

It looks as if such people are still up to their tricks in South Africa, as I noted last year.

I think this is going to be a very real problem in the future.  The trouble is, the 'security state' uses this threat as an excuse to further degrade - if not completely eliminate - our right to privacy.  To me, that's absolutely unacceptable.  It's a classic example of the cure being worse than the disease.  On the other hand, there are many 'sheep' in today's world who demand that the government protect them from any and all such threats, no matter what rights, liberties and privileges they may have to surrender in the process.  They forget Benjamin Franklin's prophetic warning, and ignore the reality that there is no such thing as foolproof security.  Terrorists will always succeed in inflicting casualties, just as criminals will always succeed in committing crimes.  If they're thwarted by security measures in one area, they'll simply change tactics and/or select different targets, and try again.  Sooner or later they'll succeed.

I think it's going to be very difficult to retain our constitutional rights and freedoms and our civil liberties in the face of this threat - even more difficult than it's been so far in the face of past threats.  We'd better prepare now for the fight of our lives . . . on multiple fronts.

Peter

A piece of aviation history I've actually seen

C. W. Swanson put up a picture on his blog of a heavy-lift helicopter recovering the fuselage of a Canadian-built Catalina flying-boat.  Curious, I tried to find out more about it.

The aircraft in question was based in Anchorage, Alaska.  It crashed in 1947 at Dago Lake, where it was deemed unrecoverable.

It was sold to a local family for a pittance, stripped of usable parts, then abandoned.  With the assistance of the Air National Guard, the wreck was recovered between 1984 and 1987.  The picture on C. W.'s blog (originally sourced from Wikimedia Commons, and reproduced below in a much smaller size) shows part of that recovery.

The wreck was transferred to the Alaska Aviation Museum, where it's very slowly being restored as time, money and manpower permit.  It's currently standing on its own undercarriage for the first time since it crashed:  definitely progress, even if there's still a very long way to go.

I saw it there when I was courting Miss D. in 2009.  She took me to the Museum to show me something of the aircraft and pioneers that had made Alaska the most aviation-reliant state in the Union (and inspired her to learn to fly soon after she moved there).  It was a very interesting visit, and I wondered about the background to the decrepit flying-boat standing outside the main building.  Thanks to C. W. and a bit of Internet searching, I now know much more about it!

Here's a video clip about the plane, with a close-up look at its current condition.

Peter

Quote of the day

From bestselling indie author Joe Konrath:

The only one who can make you feel bad about yourself is you. So get over yourself. One of life's greatest journeys is overcoming insecurity and learning to truly not give a s***.

Peter

Go bulls!

I've never been able to reconcile bullfighting with the notion of 'sport' - just as, for that matter, boxing, wrestling and other martial arts are more primitive fight reflex than they are a sport.  There's a place for them in training people to fight . . . but to entertain???  Sorry, deliberately inflicting pain and suffering, whether on a human being or an animal, doesn't come under the heading of 'entertainment' in my book.

That being the case, I couldn't help feeling sympathy for the bulls when I read this report.

Three matadors were gored in Madrid on Tuesday evening causing a bullfight to be called off early for the first time in 35 years.

David Mora was gored repeatedly when the first bull of the evening entered Las Ventas bullring during Tuesday's San Isidro festival.

The 33-year-old torero was tossed on the horns of Deslio, a fighting bull weighing 532 kgs – just over half a tonne – before being pummeled into the ground by the enraged animal.  (Shown below.)

Minutes later, the evening's second matador, Antonio Nazare, 29, was caught on the horns of the evening's second bull, causing "injuries to his right knee with probable ligament damage," the medical team at Las Ventas reported.

Shortly after he was carried from the ring, the third matador, Saul Jimenez Fortes, 24, bravely faced the same bull – only to be similarly gored.

The young bullfighter suffered two serious injuries when the horns pierced his thigh and hip.

There's more at the link.

Since the bulls' fate in the arena is assured, in this case they got their blow in first.  I can't say I sympathize with the matadors.  They were quite content to make the bulls suffer a prolonged, painful death.  For once the shoe was on the other foot (or hoof).

Peter

The Ukraine: ancient history redux

I've been watching ongoing developments in Ukraine with considerable interest.  One of my long-standing interests has been the development of civilization in that part of the world, which goes way, way back.  For a start, the modern city of Kiev was once the heart of the Kievan Rus' tribal federation a millennium ago.  It had widespread influence in a number of other European nations, and from it sprang, in due course, the Russian nation.

Ukraine and the south-western parts of Russia were involved in some of the most dramatic and tragic events of the 20th century.  Three of the most noteworthy include the Holodomor in 1932-33, the deliberate genocide through starvation of Ukrainian peasants by Stalin; the Battle of Stalingrad in 1942-43, one of the most decisive turning-points of World War II;  and the Battle of Kursk in 1943, which was the first defeat of a German strategic offensive.  All are remembered to this day by those living there.  Stephen Hunter, whose latest Bob Lee Swagger novel 'Sniper's Honor' is set in the region, traveled through the area as part of his research, and noted:

The true story of the war in the east is too vast for any one writer, or any ten writers, but in bringing it to a western audience, I aspire to be part of the process of remembering that which must be remembered.

. . .

I wrote the book, becoming enmeshed in an epic all but unknown in the west today, that is, the endgame as the Panzers and Tigers retreated in their thousands while the T-34s advanced in their ten thousands. Hundreds of thousands soldiers and citizens perished in huge fights never featured in western histories of the conflict, battles without names, towns with so many vowels vodka was again called for. In certain zones, I became convinced, I could hear the moans of the dead–unbelievable numbers–in the creaking of the trees, and hoped that with my modest talent I could do them justice.

. . .

I found the Carpathian segments of Ukraine to be a kind of Wisconsin Dells in the ’50s (which I actually remember), a rustic empire struggling to upgrade as it attempts to build an appeal for western tourism. The Ukraines, one learns, desperately want to be of the West, not of the East, and anyone who tells you different hasn’t been there.

I have to see places to write about them, so I believe my immersion into the actual landscapes where the great armies clashed provoked my imagination in ways more powerful than mere reading can ever do. When you see that 70 years later, the Ukrainians still put fresh flowers on the graves and the monuments, you realize that the war visited this part of the world with unrelenting violence and tragedy, and inflicted a wound that even decades later is still as raw as if it had happened two weeks ago.

There's more at the link.

The Russians, too, have bitter memories of World War II and the rivers of blood shed by Soviet troops to retake this area from the Germans.  It's certain that if the Soviet Union hadn't bled the Nazi armies dry, the Western Allies would never have been able to land in and retake Western Europe.  The military equation is very simple.  In many ways it's those memories, in both Ukraine and Russia, that are behind the nationalism and jingoism that are driving regional politics.

If you'd like to read more about the enormous suffering there during World War II, which is still the single most important influence on both nations, I recommend the following books.

• 'Russia's War' by Richard Overy - a good (although not perfect) attempt to summarize the political, social, economic and military aspects of the war on the Eastern Front.
• 'When Titans Clashed: How the Red Army Stopped Hitler' by David Glantz and Jonathan House - focusing more on the military clash between Communism and Nazism.
• 'Stalingrad: The Fateful Siege 1942-1943' by Antony Beevor - the finest account of this critical turning-point in the Second World War that I've ever read.  Superb.
• Two books by ordinary soldiers of the Wehrmacht, describing the conditions they endured on the Eastern Front:  'The Forgotten Soldier' by Guy Sajer and 'Blood Red Snow: The Memoirs of a German Soldier on the Eastern Front' by Günter Koschorrek.  Both are translations;  both have their flaws and faults;  but both give an unforgettable impression of the savagery, deprivation and plain downright evil of that long-drawn-out conflict.  I wish there were a book from the Soviet side of similar power and impact, but if there is one I haven't come across it yet.  Do any of my readers know of one?  If so, please tell us in Comments.

The conflict described in those books gave rise and/or new impetus to the regional and nationalistic aspirations we see at work in the region today.  You can't understand modern Ukraine, or the intensity of Russian involvement in it, without understanding that historical reality.  As Stratfor pointed out recently:

The impersonal forces of geopolitics are driving Russia to try to retake its critical borderland. Having done that, the nations bordering Russian power will not know how far the Russians will try to go. For Russia, the deeper the buffer, the better. But the deeper the buffer, the higher the cost of maintaining it. The Russians are not ready for any such move. But over time, as their strength and confidence grow, their actions become less predictable. When facing a potential existential threat, the prudent action is to overreact ... The forces are beginning to gather, and if they do, they will not be controlled by good will.

Peter

Doofus Of The Day #773

Today's award goes to whoever loaded this AR-15 magazine:

The comment thread at the picture's Imgur page is worth reading, too.




Peter

The perils of interplanetary parcel delivery

Here's a fun video animation about an interplanetary parcel delivery man.  Having seen some seriously wacky delivery drivers, all I can say is that it rang a bell . . .  I recommend watching it in full-screen mode.

Peter

My LibertyCon schedule is up

For those who'll be attending LibertyCon in Chattanooga, TN over the last weekend in June, the schedule has just been announced.  It's still subject to last-minute changes, but it looks as if I'll be doing two sessions on Friday 6/27, three on Saturday 6/28 and one on Sunday 6/29.  I'll be part of some very interesting panels - at least, I think they'll be interesting!  YMMV, of course.

My schedule currently looks like this (if you need a larger image, click here to go to my author page for the convention):

I don't mind admitting that I emitted a fanboi-like Squeeee! when I saw some of the names of other authors with whom I'll be on panels.  I've read the books of authors such as David Drake, John Ringo, Jody Lynn Nye and Sarah Hoyt for years.  Now, not only will I get to meet many of them for the first time, but I'll be sharing a stage with them!  That's way over the top for this newbie author.  Squeeee! again!

If any of you will be attending LibertyCon this year, stop by and say 'Hi'.  It'll be great to meet you.

Peter

King of the swamp!

Some cats just don't have much give-up in them.

Peter

A sorry state of academic affairs

If you want to know why US undergraduate (and even some graduate) degrees are increasingly regarded with scorn by overseas universities, look no further than this article in Slate by a professor who's simply given up on 'grade inflation'.

Each course I teach has a meticulous assessment breakdown, taking into account participation, homework, quizzes, and essays—and for the latter, I grade with a rubric, which both minimizes griping and allows me to be slightly fair. But even with all of these “hard-ass” measures, the ugly truth is that to get below a B+ in my class, you have to be a total screw-up. I’m still strict with my scale—it’s just that said scale now goes from “great” to “awesome.” It’s pathetic, I know. But when you see what professors today are up against, maybe you’ll understand.

If I graded truly fairly—as in, a C means actual average work—the “customers” would do their level best to ruin my life.

. . .

Where did students get the gumption to treat a grade as the opening move in a set of negotiations? As a professor, there is little worse than spending an entire semester attempting to connect about a subject you find both interesting and important, only to have them ignore everything you do until the moment their GPA is affected. And then, of course, it’s war.

. . .

But it doesn’t start in college. Thanks to American K-12’s relentless culture of assessment and testing, everything our students have done since the age of 5 has been graded—but almost all of those grades have been “exceptional,” so the exception is now the norm. Now we’ve got high schools with 34 co-valedictorians—hell, why not just make everyone valedictorian, just for being alive?—et voila, students enter college having never gotten anything but an A for their entire lives.

. . .

Although exceptions exist, the trend in U.S. higher ed at the moment is precarious faculty, hired semester to semester or at best year to year, and rehired based almost solely on student evaluations—which, alas, are themselves often based on how “well” the student is doing in class. Adjuncts like me regularly admit to grade inflating, simply as a survival measure, but the consistency of nationwide trends means that even tenured and tenure-track faculty must be inflating grades, too. After all, a pissed-off student who goes all the way to the dean can impact their careers as well.

There's more at the link.

Frankly, I find this not only incomprehensible, but disgusting.  Of course, I come out of a very different academic background.  I did my university qualifications (two undergraduate and two post-graduate) in South Africa, under a much more rigorous grading system.  I graduated my last degree cum laude, having achieved an average score of over 75% in the final examinations - and that was considered so exceptional that fewer than 5% of graduates received that accolade.  Here in the USA, 75% would be considered a pretty poor grade.  I wonder what mark my papers would have received from a US professor?  Probably close to 100%, if the article is anything to go by . . .

I've known for a long time that many US degrees are regarded with skepticism by overseas universities.  Some of my former colleagues in the ministry were a bit incensed (you should pardon the expression) to learn that I would be admitted to a Licentiate (post-graduate) degree in Europe on the strength of my South African Bachelor's qualification, while they needed a US Master's degree to be admitted to the same course of study.  It's a graphic illustration of how US tertiary education standards have slipped - and the same applies in many (although not all) fields.

The question is, what can be done about it?  I suspect that only the rise of online education, where the Internet levels the playing-field and exposes everyone, student and professor alike, to a uniform standard of excellence to which they must aspire, will finally destroy many of the 'old guard' bastions and let fresh air into the stultifying halls of academia.

Peter

OK, I need these!

Through a link at the Lonely Libertarian, I was introduced to 'Get The Hint' tags.  They're mostly rude, crude and Not Safe For Work, but I have to admit, the concept is a hoot.  They come in several varieties.  The one pictured below is probably the only (mostly) work-safe collection of them all.

Idly scrolling through Amazon's 'Also Bought' lists below the listing, I found several similar items:

• 'Gentle Reminders' tags;
• 'Breaking News' tags;
• 'Dirty Roommate' tags;
• 'Honest Acronyms' sticky notes;
• and my personal favorite of them all, a form with dozens of rude instructions to a recalcitrant teenager/roommate/friend to shape up - or else!  It's definitely Not Safe For Work, but I laughed out loud at some of its selections.

Good for a laugh, and they should make some of my friends laugh too.  That's a win in my book.

Peter

Coral reefs as you've never seen them before

Here's a fascinating time-lapse video of the slowest underwater life, speeded up to show its movement and activities.

The author says of it:

"Slow" marine life is particularly mysterious. As colorful, bizarre-looking, and environmentally important as we know corals and sponges are, their simple day-to-day life is hidden.  We know some bits about their biochemistry, corals’ interaction with zooxanthella algae, their life cycles, and systematics. Unfortunately, it’s hard to tell what we don’t know about the rest, and particularly when it comes to interaction with other organisms happening over long periods of time.

Time lapse cinematography reveals a whole different world full of hypnotic motion and my idea was to make coral reef life more spectacular and thus closer to our awareness. I had a bigger picture in my mind for my clip. But after many months of processing hundreds of thousands of photos and trying to capture various elements of coral and sponge behavior I realized that I have to take it one step at a time. For now, the clip just focuses on beauty of microscopic reef “landscapes.” The close-up patterns and colors of this type of fauna hardly resemble anything from the terrestrial environments.

There's more at the link.  It's very interesting reading if, like me, you don't know much about the field.

Peter

Around The Blogs 2014-05-18

Still working my trousers to the bone writing the new novel, but I had some time to browse the blogosphere now and then.  Here's this week's harvest.

# # #

The anthropogenic climate change crowd come in for their fair (and thoroughly deserved) share of scorn and derision from those who know better.  First, Eric S. Raymond has some interesting thoughts on 'why cult-like groups often respond to strong evidence against their core beliefs by becoming more fanatical'.

Borepatch riffs on the same theme, asking:

What will be the easily foreseeable reaction to an increasingly despotic and increasingly unpopular - and, dare I say it, an increasingly foreign - ideology?

. . .

If Progressives use the only remaining tool in their toolbox (the Organs of the State) to impose their will on a resistant country, then that road leads straight to secession.  There isn't any question where it ends, only whether one or the other party turns aside before the destination.

Evaporative cooling theory suggests that Progressives won't.  As they increasingly (and rightly) feel under counterattack, they will double down.

This will not end well.

There's more at the link.

Firehand links to a blog post by Brandon Shollenberger, who's in the invidious position of having legitimately obtained information that thoroughly discredits certain participants in the climate change debate, but who's now being threatened with legal action if he uses it by the university from which he (legally) obtained it. They're even trying to prevent him quoting from their letter threatening to sue him!  Talk about desperation . . .


All the above articles are well worth reading.  They illustrate the desperation of those whose ideology is increasingly irrelevant and has increasingly been disproved, but who are striving with might and main to perpetuate it - because it's all they've got.

# # #

The Silicon Graybeard illustrates why everyone should be able to keep a lawyer - caged.  Based on my experience with the 'clientele' concerned (after they'd been convicted and imprisoned), I can only classify the lawyer he quotes as wearing blinkers so heavy and obscuring that it's a wonder he can see straight at all!

CAUTION:  NOT SAFE FOR WORK!  While on the subject of lawyers, Clark at Popehat links to a wonderfully amusing response to a lawyer's letter threatening to sue for damages on behalf of a porn star who CONSENTED to be thrown off a roof by a playboy holding on to an intimate portion of her anatomy, and who disobeyed explicit instructions as to how to conduct herself so as to avoid injury.  Guess what?  She got hurt.  I suspect the playboy's lawyer's reply to her lawyer's letter is going to hurt a more fundamental portion of her anatomy . . .

# # #

Courtesy of a link from XBradTC, we read Lumberjack In A Desert's response to the scandal at the Veterans Administration.  An amputee from the Gulf, he knows whereof he speaks - and knows what needs to be done to fix the problem.

# # #

There's lots of humor this week too.  Here's a selection.

• Ammoland brings the skinny on what your carry ammunition says about you.
• Uncle Jay reminds us that "There is a reason semis are prohibited from driving on New York State parkways..."
• Jeff Soyer illustrates a gun store's answer to Obamacare.
• The Lonely Libertarian portrays both redneck car-pooling and bikini season.
• El Capitan asks "Who's the patron saint of shin splints?"
• Finally, Blue relates a medical tale concerning a problem with a portion of male anatomy. I laughed out loud.

# # #

Francis W. Porretto points out that "It's long past time we stopped awaiting the arrival of a superhero, whether four-colored or political, who'll save us from ourselves".  Food for thought.

# # #

There are two useful articles for preppers.  EagleSpeak reminds us of the importance of prearranged meeting-places or rendezvous locations where families can gather after an emergency, so they can be together again.  Blue Collar Prepping looks at difficulties connected with menstruation and feminine body functions during emergencies.  These are areas where men may not have the right insight or mindset without some help.  Both articles are very useful.

# # #

Finally, The Silicon Graybeard brings us a cuteness overload.  It's a good way to end this roundup from the blogosphere.  More next week.

Peter

I hate Mondays . . .

. . . especially when they include things like this.

Peter

Another Japanese game show

I posed a number of clips from weird Japanese game shows in years past, although I haven't done so recently.  I came across this one today, titled 'Human Tetris', similar to one I put up way back in 2008.  It made me chuckle, so I thought you might enjoy it too.  The premise is that contestants have to contort themselves into the right shape to pass through a hole in an advancing wall.  If they fail, they get knocked into a tank of water.  Some of their antics as they try to stay dry are certainly entertaining.

Peter

Just when you thought it was safe to be a vegetarian . . .

Reader J. M. sent me these two photographs.  Their origin is unknown, but he says that some years ago an artist created an image of the 'Alien' from the film of the same name using vegetables instead of paint or other materials.  Here are two photographs of it.  Click each image to view it in a much larger size.

Very cool!  To make it drool, I suppose you'd just add salad dressing . . .




Peter

Sales pitch of the day

Overheard this morning at the Tennessee Renaissance Festival, a loud call from a jewelry stallholder to a passing couple:

"My Lord!  I have a necklace for your fair wife that would go perfectly with your credit card!"

Miss D. and I couldn't help giggling.  She was trying on a different necklace at the time.  (Yes, we bought it.  After that inspired humor, how could we not?)




Peter

A five-year-long suspended joke?

This made me laugh.

Fans of the cult classic The Rocky Horror Picture Show got a treat when a Twitter user pulled off a joke especially for their amusement. Over 48,000 people showed their appreciation by retweeting the gag, after they had been made to wait an impressive five years for the punchline.

. . .

If you have partaken in these cult-like rituals, or just watched the film in the safety of your own home, you will be able to appreciate Twitter user ‘Frank Furter's' little prank. The anonymous user, named after the character Dr Frank N’ Furter played by Tim Curry, posted three tweets as long ago as 2009. All three tweets were lyrics from the much-loved song Sweet Transvestite:

    So, come up to the lab,
    - Frank Furter (@DrFNFurter) May 8, 2009

    and see what's on the slab!
    - Frank Furter (@DrFNFurter) May 8, 2009

    I see you shiver with antici ...
    - Frank Furter (@DrFNFurter) May 8, 2009

Then 'Frank Furter' was silent. For five years. Until finally....

    ... pation.
    - Frank Furter (@DrFNFurter) May 8, 2014

A simple stunt, but it deserves a giggle. According to Stephen Fry, it's "the greatest Twitter joke of all time."

There's more at the link.

After that, what else can I do but embed this?

Peter