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Algeria … Gladwell … Boarding schools 6th of March, 2006 ANTE·MERIDIEM 12:10

The Poor Man linked yesterday to a piece on « l’Algérie française », http://​www.​algeria-watch.​org/​farticle/​analyse/​shatz_torture.​htm . It’s horrifying, and shocking; I’d been aware that France did terrible things in Algeria, but I hadn’t ever read up on the details. Northrup draws the parallel with the US in Iraq: Personally, while that’s interesting, my world view isn’t US-centric to a level necessary for that to be the main draw. Something it makes incidentally clearer to me, a decade and a bit later, is the plot of Frederick Forsyth’s The Day of the Jackal.  The OAS members plotting to kill de Gaulle in that were Algeria veterans, and, probably, as inhumane as one can imagine; not the sort of people you want to find yourself sympathising with.

In case you’ve missed it, you should be aware that Malcolm Gladwell of Blink and an archive of excellent New Yorker articles has a blog: http://​gladwell.​typepad.​com/​ . On his front page at the moment is a link to an interview he does with a sports writer from Boston, and speaking as someone who has no knowledge of or real interest in US sports, it’s great. Read him!

Word of the day: el internado  means “boarding school” in Spanish, интернат is the same thing in Tajik.

From Emma on the 6th of March at 17:15

Wow, fun new format and super frequent updates! Not to mention a nod to me, which will now prompt me to tell all my friends so that they can see that yes, I am link-worthy and yes, they should read my blog, too. I would make this comment much more substantial and less me-centric, but I've got some sort of sticky thing on my fingers (I think it's sugar from my tea), and now it's getting everywhere. By the way, I'm noticing that the text box is on continuo-mode and not wrap-mode, which I suppose passively prevents againts any massively epic comments.
From Aidan Kehoe on the 6th of March at 19:37

Heh, thanks. The code’s been on my hard disk for three years or so; but today I am finally at the point where I’m doing so little web development professionally that doing it to amuse myself seems attractive. There remain a few tweaks I need to do to get it to the point where I’m happy with it, that wrapping-comments-box thing among them—thank you for the reminder! :-) And I need to make time to comment on your site more; you’re in my RSS reader, I read entries, I go to myself ‘ah, good for Emma’ or ‘hahah! The Daily Trojan!,’ and still I don’t say anything.
From Aidan Kehoe on the 7th of March at 1:18

Okay, I’ve looked into that particular issue, and I haven’t managed to resolve it just yet. (For the bored and interested; with the "strict" doctype, textareas don’t wrap. So, I considered accepting that, and saying "Type Enter to end a line." That doesn’t work, and Javascript refuses to trap the key. So. No solution yet. Also, the cookie is broken—as a commentator, your username and passport should be available again, but it isn’t necessarily. Tomorrow! :-)

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